Other Finger Exercises

One of the main reasons I haven't been blogging as much is that whenever I get a free 15 minutes or so, I've actually been indulging in a new, different hobby. I'm learning the piano. Again.

I don't have much of a recollection of playing the piano before. I can't have been that good at it, but my body clearly remembers a few of the tricks. I still remember 'doggy D', and whenever I put my hands on the keyboard, my first, third, and fifth fingers are always ready to hit the C Major chord. So far my strategy of 'make sure you practice every day, preferably before you play videogames' has been paying off. I picked up a book of instructional songs for adults to teach themselves, and it's been a great help in just lining up songs that push my dexterity a little bit at a time. I should put up some video (or maybe just audio?) later, but Jessie says she likes listening to me, so that's pretty good to hear. I keep thinking that if I still am doing this after a year I'll reward myself by getting a real piano. Probably an electric piano, or just a better keyboard. An upright at best. We technically could fit a grand somewhere in the house, but I'll save that until after I become a world-famous performer.

The idea that we should have Thanksgiving in Seattle catalyzed yesterday, and has quickly run away as a fantastic idea. It'll be neat to see the family again, of course, but I haven't really gotten to see much of the city, and I'm told it's a pretty cool place in spots. Also, Tyler did quite well on his last flight, so we're up to trying it again. Getting him his own seat is a real boon to his comfort, as well as ours and all those around us. It's an investment, but it's been a good one so far.

Jess played hookey today to go riding down the river on inner tubes with work-mates, drinking and generally having a relaxing time. I took over baby-caring-for duty, and Jess has been taking every opportunity to tell people how nice I am being to her, which is a kindness that I definitely appreciate.

Tyler's latest trick is that he really likes noticing when things are the same. If you're reading a book, and the picture on the front of the book is the same as the picture on one of the pages, he'll get really excited (if he remembers) and make you flip back to the cover to make sure they are the same. He also got really excited when he noticed that the cat on my 'darth vader kitty' t-shirt was the same as the cats running around the house. Both dee-dees.

My sparring (they call it shi-ai) in judo has never been very good. I'd mostly quantify it as 'really bad', and I've decided I have to face my fear of sucking at judo and just practice it more. After all, that's pretty much how you get better at anything. I get myself pumped up by listening to energetic music on the way in, and I'm trying to convince myself that, much like the piano, I just have to do it every day. Not a lot, necessarily, but every time needs a little more practice. I'll get there eventually if I put in the time.

-N

Things change

By now you've all heard that Nana had a little spill and will be wearing a brace until her back heals.  For a couple hours on Tuesday, this was really scary, and I am glad I got to be with her while we figured out what was going on.  Now though, now it seems like an inconvenience.  But that's Nana for you- no wallowing, just determined to do what she needs to get better.  If that is wearing a kind of inconvenient brace right now, so be it. I think she's gotten most of you on the phone, so you can hear that she isn't suffering unduly.

The rest of us are striving to take good care of her in anyway she will let us.  I say "the rest of us" because my Mom did that cool, retired person thing of just showing up where the action is.  She came in Tuesday night and is going to be staying with Nana for a bit.  (Someone has to remind her to use her walker, ahem.)  This is good, because someone is going to have to help manage the steady stream of visitors while Matt and I are working.  It sounds as if there is going to be quite a parade of visitors today and possibly through the weekend.  I mention this in case you try to call and she puts you off- Nothing personal, but Queen Martha (as we've taken to calling her with this princess perfect posture the brace forces) has many duties to attend to.

There are lots of reasons that this doesn't really seem like a major life changing event in the same way you might expect.  Partly, being close at hand makes it easy. Being at the Chateau has been awesome.  For one, they just trip over themselves to be accommodating (I imagine they are like this for everyone, but they all really like Nana). It's a huge relief to me, and everyone else I am sure.

In related news, I've been seeing my Mom everyday, which is cool.  It's been good to have a little help with some of my database questions.  And we've been starting to gel around some ideas for the holidays (spoiler: they will be awesome). One of these days, she is going to get me to help her with her Portuguese lessons.  Matt and I might be able to rope the two of them into judging our Waffle-Off, a completely objective comparison between our two waffle makers. 

Another weekend of visitors!

The other day Shaoshu actually asked if it is "Parent's Season."  Well, we are taking a lot of visitors these days.  My in-laws came up from California to partake in one of these magically beautiful Seattle weekends before going to visit Victoria and BC.  It was so nice to get to have them around- I love an excuse to play tourist, and being with your parents is good for the soul.  We mostly took them across the lake to real Seattle, but Matt's Dad got to watch him take second in a 5K Saturday morning (we all hung out for the awards), and we got to have dinner with Jeffery's family.  They have known Jeffery since he was a toddler- which makes those discussions about parenting and careers so much more family like. 

Even though we feel crazy busy all the time (how have we not had time to see the Batman movie yet??), I am really digging this family-being-around-ness we are working on.

The strange diet is still in effect.  I am trying not to be in the habit of eating only melons and cheeze-its, but those are both gentle on my tummy.  Unlike green tea, or strawberry ice cream, which are both things I have regretted recently.

Minor movement on the professional front, I am going to meet the rest of the people at the company where I intern tomorrow.  It's a testament to my blank-faced confidence that I convinced them I could take this role while working at home, but obviously, the benefit of interning is getting to meet people.  I am going to their group meeting (all 4 of them will be there!) to talk about the business development stuff I have been working on, and work on my good reputation with them.

Salesmanship

Jess and I have been thinking about replacing the windows in our house...essentially since we bought the house. We loved the house itself, but the windows are all single-pane, aluminum frame and a little hard to open and close in some places. We played around with a contractor before Tyler was born, but then decided to put it on hold until, you know, the whole baby situation got more stable.

Well since then I've noticed a couple of drips sneaking in around the windows, so we hit up consumer reports again to get some window recommendations and decided to go with Anderson windows. They do pretty darn high-end windows, but you do often get what you pay for, and they convinced us of the quality of their windows...mostly.

So when you call the Anderson guys up, they send out a guy to your house who does some rough measurements, computes a quote, and then, and this is properly obnoxious, gives you an HOUR LONG explanation on how awesome their windows are in your house. It's really over the top, and a little off-putting, but they do have really nice windows.

All of this is background so I can tell you this story:

The guy was out late, and Tyler was already in bed, and the demo had reached the point where he brought in little sample windows and proceeded to explain (in stupidly excruciating detail) every neat aspect of the windows. He had reached the part where he wanted to talk about how secure the windows were. He said: “One of the main reasons people buy Anderson windows is for security...” and then he reached down and with a single punch shattered one of the windows with his bare hands.

For an instant, I was incredibly impressed. “They are so confident of the safety of their glass, that they will break it with their bare hands, and so confident that you will buy their windows that they will replace that pane of glass after each demonstration. Astounding!” Then I looked at the guys face and realized that this wasn't really part of the demo, and he had just shattered a window in our library. And his hand was bleeding.

After we had sorted out that, no, that wasn't actually supposed to happen, Jess ran off with the sales guy to the bathroom to patch his hand up. We had just gotten some really festive band-aids for Tyler, and Jess was rather keen to use them. I vacuumed very thorougly and then walked around in my bare feet. If I missed a shard, I wanted it under my toes, not Tylers.

Anyway, we went with their windows, but if anyone who reads this ever feels like doing the same, you may want to stand back when they get to that part of the presentation.

I also got to travel to Charleston last week. It all went startlingly well, except for some paperwork shenanigans that nearly got me sent back home early. We got it all sorted out, though, and the tasks that we set out to do went off without a hitch. Which meant that there wasn't a lot of drama or excitement, at least not at work, but that's a pretty good tradeoff for success.

As for the rest of the city, it was pretty nice, in places. I got to have some fried chicken and grits several times. You know, like they do in the south. Also lots of fish, because Jessie wasn't there to help us pick restaurants. Charleston is really pretty and old in the places where it has been well maintained, and a condemnable bio hazard in the places where it hasn't. Stick to the nice places and you'll have a great time. We took some walks to go get some food a couple of times, and the City really looks nice, on foot. I'm sad we left before Saturday, there was a farmers market right across from our hotel, evidently. That would have been fun to see and eat my way through.

Tyler is getting better and better at being a toddler. He can run now, and get up to a fair clip for a guy whose legs are so short. He's becoming less and less fussy every time we drop him off at school, and he always seems fully engaged whenever we come to pick him up. He's becoming a little more of a picky eater, but that was bound to happen eventually. I'm sure we weren't going to just be able to feed him broccoli for dinner until he turned 18. He's also working a lot on copying our words, and rather a lot of them, though it's rare that these early attempts at language make repeat performances. We often quiz him on “who that is”, and he's pretty good at Mama and Dada at this point, but the real comedy comes in when he confuses the two. “Who is that?” “Mama—Dada!” He even shakes his head like, 'Wait, no, that's not right. It's the other one...Dada! That's right.” Those of you that have been lucky enough to skype with us may have seen him working on the splits. We'll make a martial artist out of him yet. He has also decided that the best use of the letter and number flash cards we got him is to take them out of our hands and throw them through the air and laugh uproariously, which is more interaction that he has done with those cards before, so I consider it progress.

-N  

Mom and Dad visit!

Like a good retired person, Mom had gotten right to the business of visiting her family.  Mom and Dad came down this weekend for a "retirement kickoff/house hunting vacation."  I'll let them comment more on the second part of the trip (spoiler alert: they haven't bought a house yet), but we had a nice time having them around.  They had Nana with them almost every minute, so it was great to see her even more (we were hardly around in July, so I was missing her!). 

We ate out a lot- which was as much an indulgence as in deference to my new "diet" prescribed to deal with major tummy pain.  Basically, I can only eat sweets and salty food (not fatty, spicy or tart food)(or coffee or chocolate or Italian food or mojitos, so I am basically losing my mind), and given Mom's limitations on salt, it was a LOT easier to just let someone else handle the cooking.  Or I guess we could have all eaten bananas and rock candy all weekend.  Anyway, this served as a nice excuse to see cousin Lisa at her restaurant.  (See what happens when you live in WA? you just run into family, all the time!)  And I never had to do dishes.  Come back and visit anytime, Mom and Dad!

AND Matt and I celebrated our wedding anniversary (6 years!) on Sunday by going to play frisbee golf in the beautifully hot weather and wading in some river.  I was thinking that thanks to a Juneau wedding, we ALWAYS have better weather on our anniversary than we did for our wedding day.  It was nice to have some time together just playing in the woods, since we've been oppositely busy a lot lately.  Once those ironpants house shoppers were done with their marathon visitations, we all got to enjoy a sunset dinner on the bay. Even though I am supposed to be very strict with this stupid diet, Matt heroically ordered a cheesecake that I shared a forbidden (few) bites to remember our wedding day. How romantic!

And then I'm back to work.  I supposed if I had planned my time better, I would have been contracting while the parent were house hunting (over the weekend), and not working when they were free to dink around.  After this last trip, I'm having a hard time keeping my focus up, and the prospect of alternate scheduling seemed like a bad idea all around.  This is the weird thing I've found about contracting.  Sure, I can work anytime or anywhere I feel like, but I mostly want to work about 8 hours straight from my own office during the middle of the week.  Yes, I could take an afternoon off and finish my work after dinner- but who wants to be working before going to bed?  And isn't it a joy to string two (mostly) non-work days together?  For all that flexibility, the main way I take advantage is by working the first half the day in my PJs and showering at lunch time. 

Getting Ready to Travel

So tomorrow I get to travel for work. Nothing as exotic as England, but Charleston, SC isn't a bad place if you gotta do some work. It's supposed to be pretty rainy there all week, so I'm glad I have a raincoat to bring. Thanks, Switzerland! Jess is going to be a dear and watch Tyler for the week, which actually means that he will have to have is first babysitter this week, as Jess has a couple of hockey games to go play. Fortunately, they're after Tyler goes to sleep, so it'll be an easy job, but it's still worth noting. First babysitting job, yowza. We got a recommendation from someone at work (a neice) and she will be coming over Monday evening to...well, essentially just make sure the house doesn't catch fire. A neighbor will be coming by for the Wednesday evening game. But in both cases, Tyler should sleep right through the event. Well, at least that's the hope. If he doesn't...well, that's what babysitters are for.

I, on the other hand, am doing important work stuff. The transition from the R&D group to the Test group has been a pretty fantastic one. I've already gotten a spot award and am sitting in on interviews and getting commended for doing good stuff. I even get to travel for test already. Neat, eh? We've been testing our software re: its interface with some other software, and are pretty confident in our ability to go out there and demonstrate our stuff working as intended. We have, in fact, been mostly finding bugs with their software. And also with the hardware we're using to test everything. I'm getting pretty good at reading debug logs and am slowly improving at Linux at the same time. People appreciate what I'm doing, and I've got interesting stuff to do. Exactly what I was looking for.

I got a new toy for myself a few weeks ago. An Ipad! I thought it was way too expensive, but most high-end tablets sell for around the same $$$, and the smooth, pretty display really sold me. So now I finally get to play a lot of those Ipad-only games that I've been reading about for so long. It's nice. I'm also going to attempt to travel without a laptop for the first time in quite a while, just bringing the new tablet with me. Considering I'm pretty much only going to be using it for goofing-off purposes, I think it will handle just fine.

Speaking of games, I've been spending less and less time playing games on the TV, and more time playing them on my laptop or on the tablet. The game that's been taking up residence in the Xbox is actually our exercise game. Good for a workout, but in addition to my usual Judo, I've actually been taking out my bike for a spin in the evenings (I wear one of those glowy vests and have lights and stuff, so I'm safe.) I definitely need to hit up Uncle Matt for biking tips.

Did you guys catch the Olympics? We watched the opening ceremony (until we got tired and went to bed) and have been having it on and off as the mood strikes us. It's probably the most TV Tyler has ever seen. I'm not sure he has any idea what it is showing, unless he's been watching Water Polo at day care.

Additions to Tyler's Dictionary:

Bapple: Apple

Wa-Wa: Water

Moo: Answer to “What does a cow say?”

Baa: Answer to “What does a a sheep say?”

Bee-Bee-Bee-Bee: This is actually the sound Daddy makes when tickling Tyler with his face.

Tuck: Stuck. For things that don't move.

He doesn't always remember the right word for any given situation: you often have to remind him what word to use, but the words are all in there. Very cute.

We also went to watch mommy play ice hockey yesterday. Tyler was very intrigued by the game, though he kept losing track of which one Mommy was. Whenever she skated over to give him a smile in between plays, though, he would get really excited. The rest of the time was spent running around the outside of the rink, watching the Zamboni and doing his other new favorite activity: spinning around in a circle until he falls over. He nearly had to sub in for their center: they were short a lot of players, but they managed to scrape together enough players to form a couple of lines and won their game. Yay!

I'll try to write updates from Charleston if I have time.

-N

The house is empty....

22 years ago we bought the Glacier Highway House from a family that had a second home in Arizona which they were planning to make their full-time residence. The mother had MS, Dad was well retired in his 70's, and their family gone. They decided to leave everything behind as part of the sale. We were a young, just out of the military family and could use lots of help filling the big space. None of our furnishings were much to speak of, so we were delighted to settle into their shadow and slowly convert the place to our own. We still have some of the things they left behind, never having completely removed their presence from the home. The point is, the house has never been empty in our memory. It is now. The crew of locust-like movers and packers stripped the place to the walls, wrapped it, boxed it, and packed it away, a relatively modest 10,000 pounds that now sits in storage at the World Wide Movers warehouse near the Empire Building. The house looks both bigger and smaller to me. Empty and a bit forlorn actually. You see all the little dings I always meant to fix up but really didn't notice in the background of daily living. It echoes a bit. I know I sound a bit maudlin in leaving it but I'm actually quite relieved. Selling the house was a big step in being able to move on. We are more than ready to say goodbye to snow removal, excited to begin a visit to family without a thousand dollar minimum plane ticket to start, thrilled to think we will be in perhaps the same area code with many of our most beloved family. But just for a bit, there is the twinge of memory for all that made our family life special on the water, in Alaska, in that house, now all put away for the next step in our lives.