And suddenly, everything went back to normal

Long story short: the contract situation resolved itself and my job isn't going anywhere, at least for a while. Whew.

Long story long: quite a week last week. Of course no sooner did I post the latest update about how everything was hurtling towards the abyss than new and positive developments finally began to emerge. My government boss gathered the department together at about 3 p.m. last Monday for cake to celebrate the birthday of one of our co-workers. Towards the end of that informal get-together, she also mentioned that for those of us waiting to hear about the extension beyond the last day of the current bridge contract (Friday), she was fairly certain the extension would be finalized that day. Furthermore, she alluded to the fact that she expected the real contract award to be announced soon, once the money for funding the contract was officially allocated.

I just want to take a moment to emphasize a couple things, there. All of these little pertinent details were not things which were deemed important enough to be conveyed via official communications. If my government boss hadn't thought to air them in a very casual, off-hand way, I wouldn't have known a thing. Also, these comments about the budgetary aspect of the contract delays was the first I had heard about specific reasons why it was taking so long; up until then I really thought the government was dragging their feet about deciding at all, not that they were keeping the decision under wraps because they couldn't officially announce anything until all the money was sorted.

Anyway, so very early Tuesday morning my contracting boss sent out an e-mail saying that the 30-day extension had been granted, and we would be covered by it until May 1st. The e-mail was waiting for me when I got in on Tuesday, and had a couple of attachments I had to fill out and sign for the expedited processing of my new badge and access card to replace the ones about to expire on Friday. As you can imagine I took care of that paperwork immediately. Then, literally three hours later, we got the official word that we had won the re-compete and been awarded the new five-year contract, which would begin May 4th (the 2nd and 3rd are a weekend). Why not have the new long-term contract go into effect on March 30th and just forget about the 30-day extension which was now apparently no longer needed? Who knows? Ours is not to wonder why and so forth.

So by Wednesday all of our paperwork had been processed and returned to us so that we could take it to the Pentagon and get it countersigned and drop it off at the badge office and get new badges. I ran that particular errand on Thursday morning. Thursday afternoon I picked up my replacement access card. Friday was relatively uneventful. In about a month we're going to have to go through all the same steps all over again (paperwork completed and turned in for processing, returned to us, taken to the Pentagon for countersignature, waiting in line for new badge/card) but then I won't have to do it again for a whole year (if ever) and at least they're usually on the ball enough to get these things done before the expiration deadlines so we don't end up locked out of anything. As transitions go, certainly it's annoying but at least it's fairly smooth.

And as far as the whole "if ever" sentiment goes ... it's nice to know that my job is reasonably stable for the foreseeable future, but my job search will continue. I now feel like I can afford to be somewhat selective, and not that I have to jump from a sinking ship into the first opportunity that presents itself. Granted, given that my security clearance for government work is one of my more marketable assets, there's a high probability that I end up changing from one contractor employer to another, if another is willing to pay me more or let me develop new skills or show me more opportunity for growth or other upsides. So abandoning the merry-go-round of contract re-bids and facility identification and network access tokens and all that is far from a sure thing. One never knows, though.

In case you were wondering

So, one week from today the bino will be exactly 21 months old. His language acquisition continues apace; just yesterday he apparently learned and definitely began putting to good use the word "wheel" (he's firmly in the obsessed-with-trucks phase by now). He also persists in demonstrating that he understands most of what everyone else around him is saying, e.g. the other evening when I told his older siblings I needed to go into the den and check on the fire, and the bino immediately started going "wheee-ooo-wheee-ooo" in his best fire engine siren interpretation.

His big sister, as it happens, is exactly 3 and 2/3 as of tomorrow. She is whipsmart and opinionated but also fairly shy, so her natural tendency to speak out in complete sentences that demonstrate a capability for logical abstract thinking still feels like a recent development, as her confidence in her own voice has gradually caught up with her interior thoughts. The upshot of this is that she and her big brother can now engage in long conversations which involve actual give and take and the exchange of ideas, and not just the little guy in dominating monologue and the little girl parroting every third thing he says (when he lets her get a word in edgewise). So there's a newly emergent dynamic, because like any set of siblings sometimes they agree and sometimes they pugnaciously do not, but they are making progress in figuring out how to navigate those particular waters without too much crying and screaming. I mean, sure, there's some crying and screaming. But not too much.

The little guy is 6-and-change, a first grader, and by my reckoning is in a very tricky transitional area of childhood. These days (at least for my UMC cohort with the helicopter parents and the ultra-competitive overscheduled kids and whatnot) high school might as well be college, middle school might as well be high school, and fourth grade might as well be middle school, and it's hard to wrap my head around the fact that fourth grade is less than three years away. I'm expecting any day now for my oldest child to cross a boundary between being a "little kid" and just a regular "kid". Arguably, one of the signposts for that threshold would be whether or not he still believes in Santa Claus.

Self-deprecating jokes about helicoptering aside, I try to take a hands-off approach, at least somewhat, to when and how my children deal with the gradual diminishment of innocence. Santa is a case in point. I do not have a plan per se for making sure that my children believe in Santa for as long as humanly possible, nor do I have a deadline in mind by which they need to have gotten over said belief. It will happen when it happens. If a kid on the school bus gives away the game tomorrow, I'll be a little bummed but life will go on. If the little guy is still writing letters to the North Pole at age eleven, I won't really have a problem with it. I admit the stakes here are pretty low, for me to be patting myself on the back for being supremely chill about it, but there it is.

Still, the truly bedeviling considerations arise not from when exactly the little guy stops believing, but when the little girl does, or the bino. As I mentioned, my two older children carry on their own dialogue pretty freely, and the bino hears and understands more often than not. All well and good to say, "Well, he had a good run, but first/second/____ grade is probably about the right time to realize how it really works," but if that in turn spills over onto the younger ones, that seems to be a shame. If I worry over anything, it's whether or not I should take the little guy aside and say "I'm going to tell you something because you're the oldest, and you can't tell your sister or brother." Is it worth it to shield the other two, if that means being the one to personally disillusion the eldest?

But it's looking like I won't necessarily have to worry about that this year, at least. A few nights ago the kids were all sitting at the dinner table waiting for me to fix their plates, and the little guy opened a conversation with his sister with a question: "Did you know there are some people who think Santa isn't real?" He said this with the same scoffing bemusement that I would employ to convey my discovery of a real live person who thinks the moon landing was faked by the reptilian shapeshifters who secretly run the One World Government. The little girl, for her part, didn't really know what to make of anyone not believing in Santa, and had no follow-up questions along the lines of why they might doubt his existence, just a determined "Of course he's real!" Duh.

So that's how it is in our house this Christmas. And I'd be a great big coal-deserving liar if I said it didn't make me distinctly happy deep in my heart.

Happy returns

While Thursday around the old blogstead is usually the time when I focus on my own little ones, today I just wanted to say a bit about a baby who is not mine, but maybe the next closest thing: my Little Bro’s baby daughter. There’s been a bit of an elephant-in-the-room vibe of late (again, as with so many things, obscured by the whole Halloween thing) and I’ve been putting off saying much of anything, but now is a good time to finally get to it. (In other words, this story starts out sounding pretty dire but I assure you all up front it has a happy ending.)

My niece arrived back in July and had a reasonably uneventful first few months of life, going to the pediatrician every month or so for newborn well visits, as you do. The pattern repeated in October, which you might recall kicked off in my neck of the woods with my wife having a minor, alarming but fortunately non-disastrous cardiac episode and hospitalization. After my wife had been home again for a few days, my Little Bro called me to see how we were all doing and sound out whether or not we were still planning on roadtripping from Virginia up to New York to meet our niece over Columbus Day weekend. That segment of the conversation went a little something like this:

Me: “Oh, sure, we’re still coming, we’re looking forward to it and my wife feels 100% better. I mean, we think there’s some connection between her job and the stress she’s been under there and the coronary vasospasm, so she needs to look for a new gig, probably, but she’ll get to that. It’s a drag but what can you do, blah blah blah, it’s always some damn thing, blah blah petty discontent, blah.”

Little Bro: “Yeah, OK.” (pause) “So, um, we took our daughter to the doctor the other day and they think she might have spina bifida …”

Me: (dropping dead of mortification)

I immediately began to backpedal and volunteered to cancel/reschedule our visit, because at the time they didn’t know for sure if the baby had spina bifida (handy Wikipedia link if you don’t know what that is), although it seemed more likely than not, and they also didn’t know the extent or severity of it, although it seemed on the mild side given how happy and healthy and normal the baby had seemed the first few months of her life. Still, there were going to be second opinions and consultations and plans of action rolling along at a steady clip in the coming days, and if at any point someone had said “this infant needs surgery NOW” and that happened to be Friday of Columbus Day weekend, we didn’t want our brood (and all their floating daycare germ colonies!) to be underfoot.

As it turned out, surgery was the recommended course of action but it was put off until mid-November. So there was a month there, as I alluded to, where it was just kind of out there and often impossible not to think about, but there was nothing to be done about it except wait it out. Then the day of the surgery came and went, and with great gladness we learned that it went well and the baby pulled through like a champ. A couple of days later my whole household was roadtripping, not to New York but to Delaware, where we have extended family, very conveniently because the surgery was performed at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. And my wife and I got to visit Little Bro and Sister-in-Law and finally meet our niece, who looked amazing. All in all it was kind of like letting out a big breath I had been holding since early October.

The word from the surgeon was that he was very glad they had agreed to the operation, because things were even more complicated once they opened everything up than had been suspected. But, not so complicated that it couldn’t all be addressed, and the prognosis for my niece is now pretty good. Her recovery has been remarkably speedy, and while they had warned my Little Bro the hospital stay could be as long as 10 days, they ended up discharging the baby 72 hours after the conclusion of the surgical procedure. My brother sent out word today that the trip home had not been as bad as they’d feared, either, and they are all three now home sweet home. Good times.

I try (no guarantee about success, just the trying) to leaven most of my complaining on the blog with frequent acknowledgements of how, at the end of the day, I know I lead a pretty charmed life. Just like I may grumble about the absurdities of my job on one hand while being sincerely grateful to have a reliable means of bill-paying on the other, I get pretty cranky about losing sleep when a toddler has a mystery bug that wakes them up inconsolably at 1:30 a.m. (hey, it literally happened just last night!) BUT I do feel immensely fortunate to have never had to deal with any health crisis involving any of my children that was more serious than jaundice or an ear infection. It’s humbling to have even second-hand contact with a series of events like what my Little Bro, his wife and their daughter have been through of late.

Little Bro referred to the ultimately good outcome of the whole process as a “miracle of science” and I think that’s an incredibly apt turn of phrase. I’m thankful for all the health professionals who noticed something was up with my niece, got the diagnosis right, and did something about it to put things right. There really is no other proper response to a miracle other than gratitude, unless it’s a little extra thanks for not needing those extraordinary interventions more than we do.

29 Days 'Til Halloween: Fun-Scary versus Not

I've ruminated about aspects of this before, but here's a fundamental truth: there's two kinds of scary. Some terrifying things, from roller coasters to horror movies, qualify as entertainment even while they evoke the same kind of primitive fight-or-flight response to fear that is intrinsic to our evolutionary survival. They wind up as a mixed bag somewhere between unpleasant and thrilling, and I suspect that's because of their layered and regulated nature. We tell ourselves the roller coaster is perfectly safe even as it tricks our vestibular system in feeling like everything's dangerously out of control, or that the movie is all make-believe while we get emotionally wrapped up in it all the same.

But of course even the most die hard mayhem-junkie is capable of feeling genuine, uncut fear, with no upside. Nobody (or some very near-zero value) likes it when things really are out of control, and nobody gets a charge out of legitimate mortal danger, no matter how big a fan of the tropes of a given genre they may be.

I bring all this up because of course this Halloween Countdown was and is intended to be a celebration of the fun-scary kinds of scary, and no sooner did it get underway than I had to confront a decidedly not-fun situation in terms of a health scare for my wife. The good news is that she's fine now, resting at home and assured by a team of doctors that there's nothing more to worry about, though of course in an abundance of caution there will be follow-ups and plans of long-term treatment and so on. Still, it was a brutal stretch there from Wednesday afternoon until about mid-day Thursday, not knowing what was going to happen, not really able to control anything, and not knowing when (if) things were going to start getting better.

I appreciate a good haunted hospital motif, but really hadn't anticipated kicking off October by spending so much time in one. (The hospital was not actually haunted, it was in fact modern and pleasant. It's where the little guy was born, in fact. Strange to be back there and not in the maternity ward. Strange overall, really.)

So this post was late but all's well that ends well? Here's very much hoping the rest of the month is uneventful by comparison, and that all future chaos is confined to fictional formats.

Monday (Non-)Madness

There are two major concerns which I assume loom for just about every mid-level white collar office drone when they return from a long vacation, and which I know for a fact loom large for me in said situation:

1 - Did anything at work go completely mad while I was away?

2 - Did I go completely mad while I was away?

To cut through the (probably low-to-non-existent) tension right off the bat, I’ve been in the office for about two hours now as I type this and the answer seems to be “no” on both counts. Things did not completely fall apart when I turned my back a week and a half ago.

In fact there was a smidge of good news waiting for me in my Inbox this morning: official confirmation that my employer is going to be granted a six-month contract extension while the government makes up for lost time and blown deadlines and finally gets the re-compete process underway. So, in theory, I have stable employment from now until late March 2015 or so, and I am grateful for that.

Otherwise, I was relieved to see that nothing went horribly wrong while I was beaching it. Apparently there was a slight server responsiveness problem on Thursday that I got one e-mail about, but just as apparently it resolved itself quickly enough that Friday, at least, was a normal day for my users (if the auto-logs are to be believed). I tried to tell myself, as I commuted in this morning, that if anything had gone well and truly kablooie that somebody would have called me, approved vacation time or no. And since I had my cell phone at hand, charged and working, the entire time I was gone, and no one called, everything must have been fine enough. But those rational thoughts did not entirely appease the fear and dread (though to be fair, some portion of that was not so much dreading the messes I would find and need to belatedly clean up, but just the dread of the Big gray in general). It was a relief to log in and discover the absence of any panicked PLEASE OPEN THIS AS SOON AS YOU RETURN e-mails, or for that matter the dearth of frantic voicemails or hastily scribbled Post-its stuck to my desk.

And speaking of logging in, I know that I did not completely lose my mind, either, because I managed to get to work on time and with all of my badges and access cards and whatnot, and without forgetting any of my various system passwords. I did have a moment of self-flagellation on Saturday morning, two days ago, when I woke up feeling like I had forgotten something, and realized I had intended to fill out and submit my electronic timesheet on Friday by 9:30 a.m. as per company policy and then of course had completely lost track of the days until that moment had come and long since gone. I logged in to the network later and saw that my boss had done a provisional timesheet on my behalf that I had to approve, and I did, all of which is a tiny drop in the compliance bucket but bummed me out nonetheless. Still, as I said, for getting out of all my habits for a solid week, I made a relatively non-bumpy transition back today. And I’m well ahead of not one but two of my co-workers, one a fellow contractor and one a DoD employee, both of whom are having bouts of the Mondays and forgot their network access cards at home, as I overheard them both tell our government boss with much chagrin.

Vacation was pretty wonderful on the whole and I will relate various high points as we go through the week. But for now, yes, things are back to near-normal. Let the countdown to the long Labor Day weekend begin!

Making lemons out of lemonade

Must be time to update the blog, since I haven’t posted in a couple-few days, like … hmmm … twelve? Almost two weeks since my last post, which was technically sometime before the calendar flipped months. Huh.

Well, every once in a while it’s good to let the blog sit idle for a bit, to recharge my batteries and avoid scraping the bottom of the barrel and make sure that keeping the blog up and running close to daily is something I’m still invested in, not just doing as a chore out of force of habit. Today, at least, it feels like something I want to continue plugging away at. So here I am.

It would be nice if that were the full extent of my explanation for suddenly falling silent (although that would also make this a pretty low-content post) but of course there’s a smidge more to it than that. The first few quiet days might have been covered by the anti-burnout clause, particularly the very first: Thursday is in effect My Crazy Kids day around here the vast majority of the time, and lately I haven’t had much to say on that front. Or, rather: the little guy continues to be bored and frustrated and apathetic about kindergarten, which I’ve talked about before, and the best that can be said now is that the school year is very nearly over, and that will be a relief. The bino is walking and climbing like a champ and trying to get into everything, and even becoming adept at pointing and grunting and shaking his head to communicate what he wants (or doesn’t want, the child seriously makes a NO gesture that incorporates the entire half of his body from the waist up), but he’s also at that stage where he wants a lot of things he shouldn’t have and doesn’t understand why his desires keep getting thwarted, so he yells and screams and cries in pint-sized fury on-and-off round-the-clock (also he’s teething AGAIN, canines coming in now). And the little girl is potty training, which I’ve also mentioned before when her older brother was going through it, at least mentioned in the abstract insofar as avowing that the trials and tribulations of teaching a toddler to control their bodily eliminations is not something I’m interested in blogging about, nor do I really believe anyone wants to read about.

So, frustration upon frustration, to tell it like it is, and some of it not even particularly post-friendly material at that. Plus at the same time, I recently (finally, many of my friends were quick to point out) got on Facebook. And on the one hand, the feeling of plugged-in-ness, however illusory, afforded by that outlet has lessened somewhat the compulsion to blog. I’ve probably only posted a half-dozen or so status updates in the month(ish) since I created my account, and I know at least two of them have been semi-ironic grumblings about what a collective handful my kids are. And I know I’m only human and I’m allowed to get aggravated now and then but, you know, tossing off zingers on FB and then posting longer screeds on Blogspot, that’s not how I want to bracket my mindset about my own children. So I let it lie.

Skip a Thursday, then it’s Friday and if I don’t have a really good random anecdote at the ready, that’s just as likely to be a silent day as well, as are weekends devoted to errands and housework and family obligations (happy retirement to my father-in-law!), but it was last Monday that things really went off the rails. I took the day off in order to go to yet another interview for the new gig that I’ve been working the angles on in one form or another since last fall. As we all know, days where I’m not confined to my cubicle are not always highly conducive to blogging. But I had a relatively laid-back morning, got to walk the little guy to the school bus stop and everything, and went to my afternoon interview, and thought it went well.

Then on Monday evening I got an e-mail from a small press publisher I had submitted a story to. They are putting together an anthology about superheroes and monsters, and if there is subject matter more zeroed in on my personal bailiwicks, I have a hard time imagining what that might be. So I had written a story specifically along the parameters of their call for submissions, and I was pretty pleased with how it turned out, and I had gotten some feedback from another comics/horror loving friend who helped me make it even better, and I was looking forward to seeing it in print. But Monday’s e-mail was actually of the “thanks but no thanks” variety, and that was a bit of a bummer.

Tuesday I got back to work and straightaway e-mailed the HR folks who had set up my interview the day before, and asked if they had any idea what the timeframe looked like for any decision on me. And then went about a normal day at my current gig, and headed home at the usual time, and right as I was getting off the train I got an e-mail back from HR at the prospective employer: “thanks but no thanks”. So that too was a bummer, and more than a little bit. Clearly that crap start to the week left me in no mood for trifles like the blog, and I’m just now getting over it enough (not completely, but enough) to extricate myself from the spiral of rejection shame and anger.

I was so high on the potential of both of those opportunities, and really confident that they were coming my way, so the fact that they both went as sour as possible in rapid succession was rough. Clearly, though, the lesson to be learned here is one of humility. There’s a touch of the tragicomic in all of it, and I feel a bit like a classic character brought low by his own hubris.

The small press publisher, in my initial estimation, did not have a lot going for it other than assembling an anthology that seemed custom-tailored to my interests. Their website is a bit of a mess. Their Facebook page does not have a particularly high number of Likes. They released another anthology e-book a couple weeks ago, and I checked out the listing on Amazon, and I’m pretty sure there’s a huge typo in the blurb. (Something about spreading a “hind” inside a creature’s tracks and marveling at the size, pretty sure they meant “hand”.) So basically I thought of the publisher as low-hanging fruit, a rinky-dink operation that would be thrilled to receive my dazzling prose stylings replete with deep understanding of the tropes of superheroes and supernatural beasties. And that turned out to be a demonstrably faulty assumption. And just to add another layer of ugh, the rejection e-mail was of course generic and unhelpful. If I fail at something, I like to at least know why, so that I can improve and better myself and do better in the future. But no such helpful insight was forthcoming from the publisher, so all I can do is wonder why I didn’t push their buttons.

The gig I interviewed for obviously wasn’t meant to be, and I probably could have rolled with that if it had been a standard situation where I heard about the job, applied, got an interview, went in, did the best I could, and got the brushoff. That happens to people all the time (including me) and while I harbor some delusions of being a good writer who knows a thing or two about certain geeky genres, I don’t think of myself as a superstar at my day job. And in fact, the new job was my attempt at bending the direction of my career a bit by going after something on a different track than I’ve been following. What really stung about the process and its abrupt ending was, first of all, the sheer timesink involved. As I said, it started last fall when my buddy who works at the company in question suggested I take a shot at it. He helped me rework my resume stem to stern, which was an exhausting process. Then I applied and waited beyond the limits of average human patience, finally got the right person’s attention, scheduled an interview, it got rescheduled because of snow, and then went in on a second attempt and ended up meeting with last-minute replacements because the people who were supposed to interview me had family emergencies. I thought the interview went well, although I knew there were moments along the way that weren’t optimal, again mostly having to do with the disconnect between what I want to do and feel (with not unreasonable evidence in my background) that I could do, and what I actually have deep experience in doing.

Then weeks dragged into months and I heard nothing and assumed the window had closed, only to get word via my buddy that the hiring manager liked me and wanted me on board, but thought I was underqualified for the position. But thought I might be a good fit for a different position! But that other position paid less and the hiring manager didn’t know if I would accept that. So my buddy and I talked nuts-and-bolts numbers and I sunk more time into figuring and refiguring the family budget, and I came up with my must-be-at-least salary figure. (Numerous benefits at the job I was angling for were just too insanely good to pass up, paycut notwithstanding.) And I got in touch with the manager and waited to see what the offer on the table might be. And waited. And waited. And finally heard, not from the hiring manager but from HR, that they wanted me to come in for another interview, which I happily agreed to, assuming it was kind of a formality. If the manager liked me and thought I’d be a good fit, maybe they needed to go through the process of interviewing me for this better-fitting position before getting down to brass tacks and making an offer in writing for me to consider.

Except, apparently not. I admit I’m still baffled and a little angry about the way it all inexplicably unravelled. I was honest from the very beginning of the process that I had no experience in the job title I was seeking, but lots of solid experience doing the job duties as part and parcel of other positions I had held through the years. I came with a personal recommendation from someone who already worked there and I brought my A game to the interviews in terms of personality: happy, friendly, positive, team-oriented, deeply interested in the work the company does and sincerely excited at the thought of being a part of that. And I put up with twisting in the wind for months. In the end, I was told that they didn’t think I was right for the job because they wanted someone with more direct relevant experience. And it’s not that I don’t understand what that means or why that would be the right call for them, but it should have been the right call four, five, six months ago, too. If the experience they wanted wasn’t on my resume, and didn’t come up in initial phone interviews or the first in-person interview, was it terribly likely that the deep experience would surprisingly be revealed in a second interview? I don’t understand in the slightest how I went from “manager liked me in the interview and thinks I’d be a good fit for a slightly different opening they also need to fill” to “don’t let the door hit you on the way out”. It doesn’t seem terribly likely that my buddy completely misinterpreted what his colleague said and conveyed a scenario to me with no basis in reality. But it also doesn’t seem terribly likely that I tanked the second interview so hard that it turned everything upside-down instantly. All I know is I feel strung along only to have everything reveal itself as a colossal waste of time. (Like I said, I’m still working on getting over this.)

Oh and also, just to kick sand in my ego’s face, the HR e-mail told me that it was the end of the road for me as they were going to look for other more qualified candidates. Note that it did not indicate that they had other candidates in mind, or that they didn’t have an up-or-down answer for me yet because they had other people on the line to interview so they’d be in touch. There may not be any other more qualified candidates out there, or they may find someone and make an offer but not be able to come to terms and have that candidate walk away. But they’ve already cut me loose from consideration. Basically, they would rather leave the position unfilled indefinitely, rather hire no one than hire me. Oof.

But of course, again, I had gotten kind of cocky over the course of six or eight months or so, especially in light of the mid-point revelation about doing well enough in my first interview to be in contention for a different position if I were open to it. Surely given my in with my friend, my impressively diverse resume, and my top-notch people skills, the employer and I would come to some mutually beneficial arrangement, and the fortitude of spirit I demonstrated in hanging in there since the process began last year was, if nothing else, earning me the good karma points I could cash in to make the leap. And for most of this year I’ve been disengaging at my current job, blowing things off or kicking them down the road to the day when they would no longer be my problem. I’ve been carrying on with one foot out the door, and now I need to get all ten toes back to the line here at the Big Gray. Fortunately, I didn’t burn any bridges in really overt ways, so with relative seamlessness I can go back to behaving as if I need this job, which of course I do.

OK, hopefully this post represents the absolute last of the things I needed to do to exorcise the hobgoblins that last week gave birth to. I’m trying not to feel too sorry for myself, so please don’t feel too bad for me. In the 9-to-5 grind, there are some bright sides: yes I’m bitter that I blew a vacation day on a pointless second interview, but I do still have a good amount of vacation saved up, and I have a week at the beach coming in mid-August. I don’t have to worry about juggling the awkwardness of starting a new job in late June or early July and going on vacation almost immediately after on-boarding. I don’t have to second-guess the wisdom of taking a paycut. Maybe there should have been some red flags raised by how long the multiple-interview process took and how unresponsive the hiring manager always was, maybe the new gig wouldn’t have been so dreamy after all. (Is that a silver lining or sour grapes? Is there a difference?)

And as far as my superhero monster story goes, the upside is that I can submit it elsewhere pretty painlessly. (Granted, that fact and much of the elaboration on it I’m about to undertake apply as well to taking my newly spiffy resume and applying for other jobs, but that initiative is on hold for the summer as far as I’m concerned.) I don’t even have to re-type it or even re-print it since everything’s done electronically online these days. I’ve already shot it off to two other magazines to see if either wants to buy it, plus I’ve got a completely different story submitted for consideration at yet another publisher. All of those may come to naught, but that’s not really the point, either. I’m still writing more and more stories, and that’s closer to the point. A big part of writing and trying to sell what you write is learning to deal with the unpleasantness of rejection. (My wife and I had a conversation Saturday night about the various anecdotes we’ve heard our favorite authors relate about early rejections, from James Herriot to Stephen King. It’s nice to feel as if one is in good company.) Sooner or later something will get through, whether through sheer determination or because rejections are (usually) learning opportunities for improvement.

So, that’s where I’ve been, and where I’m at, and everybody up to speed now? Yes? We good? Next couple of days I’ll get back into obsessively overthought reviews of geeky popcult ephemera, promise!

(Pre-) April (snow) showers

It is in fact snowing as I type this, not just snowing somewhere in the world above the Arctic Circle but snowing right outside the windows of my cubefarm, and it feels like the first time in a long time that a serious winter(-in-the-spring) storm has come through and yet both the government offices and the school systems have gone ahead and opened on their regular schedule. I might be disappointed that it’s a snowy day without being an actual stay-at-home snow day if not for the aforementioned fact that we’ve really had more than our fair share of those over the past three months. And supposedly this is the last gasp of winter, by this time next week the daily highs will be in the upper 60’s or lower 70’s, so it only makes sense that it’s a touch too warm for the snow to stick and shut down the region like it did back in the colder season (you know, eight days ago).

The cognitive dissonance is only enhanced by the fact that this past Saturday the weather was conveniently gorgeous for the baby’s first birthday party. My wife and I had planned the party to be hostable under our roof in case of inclement atmospheric conditions, but as it went we were able to make full use of the back deck, let the older kids play in the front yard, and generally enjoy a milder clime. Sunday was a bit chillier, but nevertheless the day was put to good use for undertaking a project that had been put off for too long: I rented a pickup truck and carted a ton of stuff away to the dump. When we moved to the house we now live in, the previous owners left some firewood under the back deck, which we never used. We burn fires all the time during the winter, but the wood under the deck hadn’t been sheltered well enough to avoid being soaked by the elements over who knows how much time, so we went about procuring our own logs every year. Then a couple of years ago we had a tree fall into our back yard and knock down the split-rail fence; homeowner’s insurance paid for the new replacement fence but the city was supposed to clear away the debris from the damaged fence. I think? Possibly the matter was in some dispute, possibly it was just a matter of not wanting to wait around while the city ever-so-slowly worked its way through the unbelievable number of recovery jobs that were backlogged after that derecho. Either way, I ended up dragging all the fence rails and posts under the deck, to at least get them out of sight. Then this winter we had one of our regularly scheduled pest control inspections and we were advised that all the loose wood, logs and fence parts needed to be cleared out before our entire deck, yard and house became overrun with carpenter ants.

The trick of course was to find a free weekend day when my wife could keep the kids away from the dirty work I would need to engage in, and for said weekend day to come when it was not too freezing cold and the ground was not too covered with snow and ice, yet also before it got too warm and any Camponotus americanus already nesting would have woken up to wreak their havoc. So it was clearly a stroke of good fortune that this past Sunday more or less met all of those requirements, and it was a weight off my shoulders to cross that particular task off the to-do list.

Granted, spending all that time going back and forth and back and forth from the piles of rotting wood at the rear of the house to the truck in the driveway gave me perhaps a little too much time to contemplate all of the other things that need doing around the house, the deck repairs and staining and fence re-staining and weeding and seeding, and that’s just in the little C-shape I repeatedly traced as I transferred junk. I could come up with just as many outstanding items from the opposite side of the house, or inside the house, or probably in some other abstract life-dimension if I really put my mind to it. The work never ends, which is not exactly earth-shattering news but is something I’m acutely aware of, however incongruous obsessing over spring cleaning while it’s snowing like mad out there may seem.

Home for the holidays

This year, we seem to have (so far) circumvented a lot of the traditional Christmas traumas associated with our pets. Because the baby is crawling, climbing and grabbing like mad, we bought a small tabletop tree rather than a full-sized floor-based one, and as a side benefit to being out of the nine-month-old's reach, it's also out of reach of the cats and dogs. It hasn't been toppled over once! (Knock on tannenbaum) Also, as of yet no one has sent us foodstuffs in the mail or plied us with leftovers at a party, so there haven't been any latenight discoveries of shredded red cellophane and cookie crumbs or the like. (The other day, my wife made lunch to take to work and forgot it at home and the dogs made short work of it, but that's not really a seasonal thing, it could happen any time of year.)

So there hasn't been much cause to focus on the animals hereabouts lately, and in fact I had been more or less avoiding the topic for a few months, because one of our cats had run away. Sort of. Our felines in residence, as of this year, have included one very old female (whom my wife has had for longer than she and I have been romantically involved) and a pair of male and female littermates who were stray kittens not terribly long ago. The male quickly made it abundantly clear he wished to be an indoor/outdoor cat, and established a very reliable pattern of gallivanting about the neighborhood most of the time (so long as the weather was nice) and regularly checking in at home for mealtimes. His (half-)sister, on the other hand, was incredibly skittish and generally spent most of her time hiding in the basement or behind furniture. Eventually she would come into view in the main living areas as long as only the immediate family was home, but strangers frightened her back to her safe spaces. The elder cat, for what it's worth, split the difference between the two: sometimes she would slip outside for some fresh air, but she could go days on end lounging around the house, as well. (Needless to say she was also unafraid of/unimpressed by anything.)

And then one day in October or so we suddenly realized we hadn't seen the younger female in a day or so, not even at feeding times (which, granted, can be chaotic around our house for the two-legged residents alone) and it slowly dawned on us that the cat had gotten out of the house. And this was confirmed some days later with a sighting of her on the front lawn late at night, and a few days after that when, as I was walking the dogs down our street, she crossed my path and then disappeared down the creekbed. In the beginning my wife and I told ourselves that she must be mortally terrified to be out and about and she would come home soon enough, particularly when she started to get good and hungry. But weeks stretched into months and she never came scratching at the door. My wife had the idea to set out small animal traps, but we only succeeded in capturing the two cats who hadn't run away (plus one raccoon!). And every time we were about ready to give up the kitty as so much coyote chow, she would flit ninja-like through the yard and prove she was still with us, or at least in our general vicinity.

Bless my wife's animal-loving heart, she grew extremely distraught about our poor lost skitty-kat, but she never completely lost faith. She repaired the damage to the cage-trap that the raccoon had wreaked, and set it out one more time a week or so ago, in a new spot. And lo and behold, it finally worked as intended, and our wayward cat tripped the spring and then waited patiently for someone to come and let her out.

She was skinnier than we remembered, but otherwise unharmed. My wife was going to set up a little cat recovery suite in my dork room in the basement for as long as it took the cat to readjust to living inside (and around the noises of other cats, dogs, small children, &c.) but the cat got out of the room after just a day or so and seemed perfectly content to have the run of the house. She hasn't tried to run out through any open doors, either, which I point out merely to underline the fact that I apparently understand doodly-squat about animals. When the cat first disappeared I assured my wife that she'd be back very soon, as soon as she calmed down and missed her twice-daily feedings. I was wrong about that. Then, as the absence continued, I consoled my wife that there was nothing we could have done differently, that clearly the cat did not want to live with us, despite our best efforts to create an accommodating living situation for her. She had been a wild kitten and clearly preferred living in the (suburban) wild. I was wrong about that too, apparently, as she seems content to be under our roof once again.

And that's the important thing, really. My wife sighed wistfully more than a few times that all she really wanted for Christmas was for our lost kitty to come home, and miraculously enough, she got exactly what she wanted. Clearly that's an indicator that for all the sleep destroyed by fussy babies and patience wrecked by tantrum-y two-year-olds and stress created by the turbulence of a child starting kindergarten, the only thing really worth wishing for is the recovery of a runaway pet. Life is pretty good.

Music to my ears

While my mom was staying with us for the Tuesday-to-Tuesday week encompassing the Columbus Day weekend, she had plenty of opportunity to witness our various daily routines, e.g. the little girl’s naptime rituals. On the Monday holiday, I had taken the day off from work and so I got my daughter settled down for her midday siesta, turned on her fan and radio, went downstairs and turned on the baby monitor in the kitchen and started to make myself some lunch. My mom was also in the kitchen and she asked me what radio station it was coming through the very-lo-fi speaker; of course the call letters and whatnot would be meaningless to her, and what she really wanted to do was simply comment that she liked the hour’s worth of music that had been playing every naptime and bedtime.

Longtime readers may recall that the radio station in question is the local dinosaur rock Clear Channel affiliate, which I generally regard with a mixture of bemused gratitude and dispirited resignation. I’m thankful that there is a commercial FM station in this market which has a playlist which is mostly stuff I like and not unbearably repetitive and makes excellent mindless background noise, but at the same time it’s still a little bit repetitive, both in its own self-reflexive way and in the sense that it’s all the music I grew up listening to in my parents’ house, and it’s not an avenue for discovery of either forgotten classics or (obviously) anything new and up and coming.

Still, it was slightly surprising for me to hear my mother expressing any kind of interest in the music format, because my mother is not known for having very strong opinions about much of anything. I think of dinosaur rock as the music I heard “in my parents’ house” but I might as well say “at my father’s knee” because he’s the one I tend to associate with tuning the dial on the stereo or bringing home new 45s (well into the late 80’s). Nevertheless, I didn’t out and out challenge my mom or anything, and if she stakes a claim on something I’ll simply take her at her word, which is what I did. My mother then further elaborated that, as far as she knew, there weren’t any similar radio stations out where she lives (near Albuquerque). Country/western, latino, top 40 and talk, sure, but no dinosaur (I’m sure she’d prefer “classic” or somesuch) rock.

Arguably that marked my mother rendering not one but two heartfelt aesthetic judgments in the same conversation: pro-rock and anti-country, which would have been remarkable in and of itself. It also might have been utterly infuriating to me, as yet another exhibit in the ever-growing pile of evidence that my mom Really Isn’t Happy in New Mexico. I can’t recall how much detail I’ve gone into around here, but the shortest version I can possibly give goes something like this: around the time my Very Little Bro was finishing high school (the mid-aughties), my step-father became obsessed with the idea of flipping houses in the booming southwest U.S. housing market. So when Very Little Bro graduated, my mom retired from her job at the bank, collected her pension as a lump sum, and invested it in real estate. She and my step-father bought cheap, lived in a house as they fixed it up, then sold it for profit and started the cycle again (as you do). Over the next few years, a couple of things happened: my mom became a grandmother, and the housing bubble burst. So the original plan connecting them to New Mexico was no longer operative, and there was that much stronger pull back to the east coast in the form of adorable babies. Mom and step-dad did actually come back home a couple years ago, but the transitional plan they had for finding jobs and a place of their own to live was derailed by various natural and family disasters. And they wound up back out in Albuquerque again, for … reasons? The whole situation put a strain on my relationship with my mother, which meant I never talked to her enough to get a sense of why they would head out west for a second go, which meant I found the whole arrangement frustrating and so on and so on.

All the time (both times) that my mom and step-dad have been out west, my mom has compiled a list of things that bring her down about hanging her hat there, from the profound (she misses her family, her brothers and her kids, all of whom live on the east coast; she never really made any new friends out there) to the trivial (the bread isn’t as good!), towards which I’ve been sympathetic when she’s been in the process of correcting course and coming east, and less so when she’s been (dis)content to stay put. The east coast and the southwest really are very different cultures, and although they both count as genuine flavors of America, and I’m not saying one is inherently, objectively better than the other, I know which one I prefer and I’ve gotten the message loud and clear which one my mom prefers. Not a big fan of slide guitar and fiddle? Hey, I hear ya. There are places where the airwaves are less saturated with those vibes. Feel free to relocate accordingly.

However, my mom’s general pattern is to open up and come out of her shell little by little over the course of a visit, so clearly this conversation about radio station diversity or lack thereof came near the end of the weeklong visit. And by that time, it was a day or so past the point at which she casually mentioned that her husband was going to work his job in Albuquerque for another year or two until he hits the minimum age to collect Social Security, during which they’ll save as much cushion as they can, and then they’ll pack up and move back east again (permanently this time, one hopes!) to be closer to the family. My Little Bro lives in upstate New York and my Very Little Bro lives on the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border, so with my brood in Virginia it seems likely that my mom and step-dad will wind up somewhere central to all of us, like rural Pennsylvania. This is welcome, happy news. A lot could go wrong (or just go weirdly, unexpectedly different) in these two-ish years that need to elapse before the plan goes into motion, but I’m optimistic. At the very least I’m willing to listen understandingly to my mom’s venting about New Mexico knowing that she’s willing to do something about it, eventually.

Come on, get happy

When our first child was born, my wife and I could scarcely believe that we were parents to a healthy baby boy. Actually, for a little while there we were on the verge of believing he was not so healthy because one of his newborn bloodtests came back positive for a rare, debilitating disorder, but they re-tested and found it had been a false positive, to our palpable relief. Maybe it was that initial experience (along with the little guy’s touch of jaundice), or maybe it was that plus a combination of other factors (my wife and I being each other’s second chance at marriage, our late start on having kids, the long and winding road from deciding to procreate to actually managing it, the pregnancy complications for which the OB recommended bedrest, &c.) that all made the sensation of holding our baby in our arms feel too good to be true.

All parents want their kids to be healthy and happy, and in our case we were lucky enough to have dodged a whole bunch of things we wouldn’t have been able to control, and our son was pronounced healthy at every turn past that first false alarm. So perhaps we doubled down on the happy part. We were resolute in our commitment to the little guy never knowing a moment of unhappiness, and since he bawled when we put him down (as most/all babies do) we therefore rarely (if ever) put him down. We were not conscious followers of or evangelizers for the philosophy of baby-wearing, but we practiced our own modified homegrown version of it nonetheless. It was exhausting, but still easier to bear than listening to our baby cry.

Eventually we all got over it. The little guy wanted to explore his surroundings on his own and didn’t want to be held constantly, and we were concurrently ready to let go a little, so that all worked out. At this point, one of my number one pieces of advice for new parents would be that babies do cry and there’s nothing wrong with that, and it is in fact perfectly all right to let them cry sometimes. If you can be there for them and meet their (perceived) needs the vast majority of the time, then every once in a while letting them fuss on the floor while you take care of some other pressing demand for your attention will do them no lasting harm. In fact, it will toughen you up to the sound and toughen the baby up to a reality that does not revolve around them. Win-win. I speak from learning this in a roundabout way, but there you go.

At any rate, the point being that the early going of the little guy’s life was suffused with a certain nervous tension, and keeping him constantly soothed and content was one manifestation of that. And he did not evaporate! Despite the irrational yet insistent undercurrent of “hard come, easy go” nagging in our new-parent brains that because we had wanted him so much for so long that he would disappear if we blinked, those fears were never realized. So when our daughter was born, we were once again resolute, but this time in a different direction: we would relax more. We would have faith that healthy babies do not vanish in a puff of smoke if sufficient willpower is not focused on them at all times. We would similarly have faith that her occasional crying would not lay the groundwork for her bitterly resenting her parents later in life. We would, in short, enjoy the ride a lot more the second time.

And then, of course, when the little girl was losing her birth weight and then some as a newborn at home my wife and I reminded each other not to panic, to chill and let nature take its course. So that when we went to the next regularly scheduled pediatrician’s visit, we were promptly scolded for not bringing our new baby in sooner because she had in fact lost too much weight. Suddenly we had to take aggressive corrective action to get things back on track. We did, she was fine again shortly thereafter, but it was a disorienting experience, throwing out of balance the been-there-done-that certitude we had recently summoned up.

None of which is to say that we didn’t end up enjoying the ride with our daughter, or that we didn’t enjoy it at all with her older brother. We are in fact still enjoying said rides. There were ups and downs, but in some ways those tend to obscure my memories of the kids’ babyhoods somewhat. I remember feeling anxious, or guilty, or overwhelmed (along with feeling overjoyed and grateful and delighted and any number of other things on any given day) and that makes it hard for me to remember clearly what their emotional dispositions were like. I seem to remember the little guy having a certain wary, observational attitude most of the time before he could walk and talk. My wife and I have always attached the descriptor “intense” to our daughter. How much of that is genuinely accurate, and how much is projection? I really don’t know how to answer that.

But I do know we’re on baby number three. And, as you would surely hope, we’ve arrived at a good balance point between abject terror and overconfident nonchalance. Although that may be a default position that we’ve backed into; with three kids under age five to supervise, often with no backup as only one parent is at home with them while the other one is at work, neither my wife nor I have the energy or cognitive capacity to be particularly resolute about anything one way or the other. Everything is a nice happy medium because there isn’t any other feasible choice.

But speaking of happy, man oh man does the baby seem to be the happiest kid so far. I just copped to the faulty unreliability of my own recollections, but still, I do not remember his older siblings being quite as jovial as he has proven to be. He smiles a lot, he laughs a lot, and he’s just generally pleasant. Not that the other two never giggled or grinned, it’s not night and day, simply a question of degree, but it is strikingly noticeable (and, for what it’s worth, my wife doesn’t disagree with the assessment).

As always, this could all be a perceptual illusion, or it could be due to a myriad of minor factors. This is our first child who’s never spent a moment in daycare, since we now have a full-time sitter who comes to our house. My wife and I believe (and are asking exactly no one to disabuse us of this notion, thanks) that daycare was on balance good for our two older children, building up everything from their pro-social tendencies to their immune systems, but we’ve always acknowledged that elements of it were stressful. Probably stressful for the kids, too! (Rim shot.) So maybe the baby loves being a homebody. Or maybe a certain amount of natural inclination toward a happy outlook is written into every human being’s DNA, and the baby hit the jackpot there. Or maybe his parents are legitimately happier now than we’ve ever been before, and it rubs off. Or maybe there’s no reason! Sometimes things just are the way they are, and it’s not as though a chubby five-month-old who positively beams when you make eye contact with him is an enigma that demands explication.

Now I see

Attention, wagerers: all those who had “this week” in the betting pool for “when will the little girl figure out that if she doesn’t want to go to bed she can let herself out of her room”, and all those who had “two days” in the “how long before the little guy loses his glasses” betting pool, please form a line to my left to collect your winnings.

The glasses were eventually found, let me just jump right to the end of that story and then fill in the middle at length. So my wife picked them up last Friday and the little guy wore them for the rest of that afternoon, although he fussed with them quite a bit and frequently lifted them up and out of his line of sight to look at various things, which of course defeats the purpose. Then he got a break overnight and Saturday was going to be the first full day he would be wearing the glasses. It was also a day on which we had planned on going to a cookout at the house of some friends, which was scheduled just late enough in the afternoon-into-evening that bringing pajamas for the kids seemed like the wisest course. So as the cookout was winding down we got the kids changed and loaded them up in the car. At this point (a) the little guy was dressed for bed and (b) it was getting dark out and there wouldn’t be much to look at in or out of the car, so we figured it would be a good idea to put away his glasses for the night.

But no! The little guy wanted to wear his glasses for the ride home, and since he’s still getting used to them and could use all the practice he can get at becoming desensitized to how they weigh on the bridge of his nose, we acquiesced.

Things did not go exactly according to plan, since the plan was for the kids to fall asleep on the way home and be transferred gently to their respective beds, and exactly none of them went along with that. So as we pulled into the garage we had to quickly figure out that my wife would take the baby in, I would carry our daughter up to her bed and get her settled first, and the little guy would follow me in under his own power and get tucked in last. We also had some leftover food that needed to get into the fridge and the pets hadn’t been fed since we’d been gone most of the day. It all became a bit of a blur, but eventually everyone was bedded down for the night.

On Sunday morning, the little guy came down for breakfast and once he was finished we told him it was time to put his glasses on for the day. But they weren’t in his room. I remembered seeing him wearing them in the rear view mirror as we drove home, so we knew we didn’t leave them at our friends’ house. Had he taken them off and left them in the car? (No.) Had they wound up on the floor of his room somewhere? (Maybe, his room was pretty messy, but after hours of cleaning it up and going through every inch of it, no.) Had he hidden them somewhere, hoping with unassailable kid logic that he wouldn’t have to wear them if we couldn’t find them? (At first he confessed to this when I suggested it, but ultimately, no, I had only succeeded in leading the witness.) The whole morning was a total loss as my wife and I alternated looking for the glasses and taking care of the baby, and also isolating the little guy and begging him to think hard about where he had put his glasses the night before, or even where he had seen them last. (Fortunately, the little girl decided to have one of her more angelic days, playing quietly by herself. Maybe on some level she sensed all was not well and elected not to pile on.) Eventually my wife had to leave for work and I got the littlest one down for a nap, and as soon as the baby was in his bassinet I did a quick sweep of our master bedroom and, lo and behold, the glasses were in their case under the foot of our bed. In the chaos and confusion when my wife was putting the baby down and I was saying good night to the little girl, the little guy had put the glasses away and either put the case on our bed, after which it fell off the edge, or for some reason put it on the floor and it got kicked under. But man, it was a rough few hours there wondering if we were already going to have to shell out for another pair.

Since Sunday, it’s been much smoother sailing. The little guy is in fact getting used to wearing the glasses and doesn’t readjust them constantly or even touch them all that much. Quite the object lesson in keeping track of things, though. My wife has been half-joking for a while now that whenever she starts the car she does a quick headcount to make sure she has all three kids; we have now amended that to “all three kids and the little guy has his glasses”.

The little girl, as mentioned, has been having some rough bedtimes this week. I think Tuesday was the first time she boldly stepped out into the hallway after having been laid in bed. Unfortunately for her, she is going to have a much harder time with this than her big brother ever did, unless she learns some patience. My wife and I used to say good night to the little guy, close the door to his room, and head downstairs to watch tv or have a late dinner or something like that. And then the little guy could slip out of his room a few seconds after we were gone and be out and about until we noticed him (not that he was terribly subtle). These days we say good night to the little girl, close her door, and then we’re still upstairs for a while because the end of her bedtime ritual transitions directly into the beginning of the little guy’s ritual. So she sets one foot out of her room, and one or the other parent is right there waiting in the hallway, directing traffic to send the little guy to his hamper, the bathtub, &c. The escape attempt becomes a quick u-turn across the threshold of her room. The little girl is never terribly happy about this, but hopefully she will get the hint soon. (Or, you know, in the next twelve months. I’ll say it again and again: two year olds are not supposed to be easy. They keep us humble.)

The baby had his four month checkup this week and he remains huge! 90th percentile height (or length? he’s not standing/walking/scaling the bathroom fixtures quite yet) and weight and healthy and happy … or he was, but he got four vaccines this visit. None of the injections made him especially giddy, nor did the fact that the sites hurt for a good while afterwards, plus the rotavirus gave him his first ever cold with fever, which sucks. As you can imagine, he’s still not sleeping in with his sister, and in point of fact he’s not sleeping great at all. Vaccines are good and important and socially responsible! I cannot emphasize that enough. And the baby will soon get over the less pleasant side effects of his most recent boosters. But good, important, socially responsible drags are still drags nonetheless. Wasn’t it just a couple weeks ago I was cooing over how precious and delightful all three children are? Ups and downs, people. Ups and downs.

One of these days I’ll learn

Last week was consumed, in a good a rightly way, by my wife’s birthday, what with planning for it in the days leading up to it (because with three small children, even something fairly low-key requires a certain amount of logistical awareness to avoid completely falling apart) and of course dealing with the scrounging pet-related after-effects. But there were actually some fairly momentous developments last week which I will now bring everyone up to speed on.

Big haps number one: my all-consuming project at work actually rumbled into an almost lifelike approximation of forward progress. The advantage of only posting about work stuff on Mondays is that I have had a whole weekend away from the cube farm and am not sick of talking and/or thinking about the indignities thereof. The slight drawback to only posting about work stuff on Mondays is that sometimes there’s noteworthy goings-down on Tuesday and I just don’t get around to talking about it for a week, and that is in fact a fair description of last week’s turn of events. I got a hookup with the hardware support I needed this past Tuesday and since then I have been doing my level best to get a bunch of data transferred from the network to a movable storage drive. That will be about half the battle when its done, and then I’ll need support again in uninstalling the movable drive and reinstalling it on my workstation on the classified network so I can do the whole transfer again in reverse. Wheee.

Not everything is skittles and beer (of course not, it never is) because now I am at the mercy of our network speeds to transfer this ungodly amount of data, and those speeds are non-optimal. It is a painstakingly slow process, and there’s not a lot I can do to speed it up, and every time I calculate exactly how long the whole transfer is going to take I get very depressed (and also have visions of the people waiting for me to finish this project completely freaking out). I’m still trying to figure out what, if anything, I can do to work around that which I cannot change, but I haven’t had any breakthroughs as of yet.

Big haps number two: we finalized a closing date for the sale of the old townhouse, and that date is today. I know, I know, I KNOW, the short sale of that property dragged on for close to forever but everything has been sorted out and all that remains is the signing of a spotted owl’s habitat worth of papers, and that’s on tap for this afternoon.

As I may have mentioned, I’ve never been through a closing from the seller’s side before. The townhouse was the first patch of real estate I ever bought, and then my wife and I bought our current house together and rented out the townhouse because it would have been impossible to sell at the time, and so for the past few years I was two purchases up on zero re-sales, and now I’m closing half of that gap. (Some day in the not-too-distant future I will finally probably have the experience of buying a new house and selling an old one and closing on both all around the same time, which should be interesting, but neither here nor there.) I bring this up again as a point of emphasis for my own lack of experience as the grantor in the transaction, because that goes a long way towards explaining how this past Friday unfolded.

Basically I found out on Thursday that Monday the 15th was the appointed day of reckoning, and the lawyer (whom I was required to retain the services of for navigating the arcane requirements of the short sale) sent along some paperwork for me to complete in advance of the closing. I honestly didn’t even look at the paperwork until Friday morning, at which point I realized various documents needed to be not only signed but notarized. Undaunted, I printed everything off, filled everything out, loaded everything into a file folder and set out for the branch of my bank closest to my office. It’s a bit of a hike, but notary services are provided free to account holders so I felt the long walk was effort well expended.

I got to the bank and waited in line for a teller; my mom used to be a bank teller and in fact for a time she worked for the bank I use (coincidence, because I chose that bank and then after the fact they acquired my mom’s much smaller bank) and my mom was required by the bank to become a notary public so I figured there was at least a chance that this could be a teller window piece of business. But no, the teller asked me to have a seat on the waiting couch while he went and got the notary. I did, and after a couple of minutes the teller came back and told me, sorry, they only have one notary and he had just gone home for the day. (This was about 1:05 p.m.) I was annoyed, but I’ve apparently reached the point in my personal maturation where I primarily blame myself when something like this happens, e.g., I should have called the bank and made sure they were going to be able to accommodate me before I burned shoe leather in that direction.

The teller suggested that I go to another bank branch but I patiently explained that I needed someplace within walking distance because I had to get back to work. The teller offered to take my documents and have the notary take care of them in the morning and then I could pick them up. I explained I don’t live anywhere near where I work and it would not be convenient for me to come back on a Saturday morning. The teller offered to have the notary fax the documents to me, and at that point I stopped explaining myself because obviously the teller had no idea what getting a notarized signature entails (specifically me and the notary being in the same place at the same time). I just shrugged and walked out.

On the sidewalk, I pulled out my phone and googled “notary public” in the neighborhood of my office and the very first result was the Kinko’s office center within a couple blocks of my bank, so I beat feet in that direction. Walked in, went to the counter, asked the woman behind the counter if it was true that they could notarize something for me. And she apologized and said no, they no longer offered that service, BUT the very next words out of her mouth were “but there are three places nearby where you can have it done” and she rattled them off.

See, now, that’s customer service. I can’t get too mad at the teller at my bank because I know he was a young kid just doing his job as it’s been drilled into his head by his corporate training. (In fact, again because my mom worked for them too, I recognized some of the exact phrases he parroted at me as things my mom had rolled her eyes at when she went through the post-acquisition training, such as “What can I do to help solve this problem for you?”) But my bank is lame, and in reflection of that the teller was entirely focused on ways that the bank could notarize stuff for me, in the morning or at another branch or whathaveyou, even though I had already expressed the urgency of getting stuff done right then because I had to return the paperwork for a Monday closing. So if the bank couldn’t do it right then, then I needed to know who else could do it right then. And at least the Kinko’s lady realized that. She mentioned another bank up the road, the hotel concierge down the road, and (randomly enough) a framing shop right around the corner inside the shopping center. I opted for the closest destination, the framing shop.

When I got there, I asked the proprietor if he notarized, and he just laughed at me and said no, he doesn’t, and he has no idea why people keep coming in and asking him that. I told him the people at Kinko’s apparently thought he did, and he shook his head and said he never told them that and it’s a great source of confusion to him.

At that point I had already killed so much time I figured I might as well indulge in getting some good karma for myself by going back to Kinko’s and informing the lady at the counter that she was misinformed about the framing shop, and maybe prevent her from misdirecting other people in the future. So I retraced my steps and told the lady of my recent experience, and this time the first words out of her mouth were “Wait, which framing shop did you go to?” Because apparently I work within walking distance of a shopping center with more than one framing shop in it. I guess there’s enough office towers where executives need to hang art on their walls to support that kind of thing in mass profusion. At any rate, the Kinko’s lady gave me better directions to the framing store she had actually been referring to, slightly farther into the shopping center than the one I had made a beeline for originally, and I set off once again.

At framing store number two I finally found success and got my documents all signed and stamped with seals and whatnot. It cost me 20 bucks (cash only, so I had to jog up to an ATM and back) but at that point, and in fact in this point of the whole overall seven-or-eight-month short sale process, there is literally almost no hoop I wouldn’t jump through to get things done. And with docs in hand I trudged back to the office to get the papers back to the lawyer.

The scanner was down at the office so I had to fax the papers back to the lawyer, and then I e-mailed him to let him know they were coming that way. He e-mailed me back to say that he had only provided me with the paperwork because the title company handling the closing needed them before we sat down at the table. So I printed off another cover sheet addressed to the title company and faxed the paperwork to them, and e-mailed the lawyer to let him know I had taken care of that. He e-mailed me again to inform me that the title company needed the original documents inked by me and the notary before closing. Which did not quite sound right to me, so I called the title company myself. And I spoke to the woman preparing everything for my closing, and told her what I had been told and asked her what exactly she needed from me. And, as nicely as you can possibly imagine, she said that she already had everything she needed and she certainly hadn’t been expecting me to get anything pre-notarized. It would have been fine if I had just showed up on Monday afternoon to complete and sign the paperwork, and of course someone in her office would have notarized it then. Of course. (Sad trombone.)

Well, what’s done is done! And by this time tomorrow I’ll be done with the old townhouse. It’s been a bit of a trip, but I’m more or less used to those by now.

Non-random non-anecdote

This is actually a somewhat boring tidbit of information, but it’s significant and important (to me). After about six months of waiting, endless paperwork, and no small amount of simply wishing I had been born, raised and lived out my life on an anarcho-syndicalist commune, my request to short-sell my townhouse has finally been officially approved. Just before I turned 30 (which coincided with the swollest part of the housing bubble, wheeee) I bought a skinny little three-floor two-bedroom unit of my very own, my first foray into property ownership. Since then the following things have happened, approximately in this order:

- my wife and I started dating
- she moved in
- we got engaged
- she changed jobs
- we got married
- I changed jobs
- she changed jobs again
- we had a baby
- I changed contracts at my job
- we bought a much bigger house together
- I became a landlord by renting out the townhouse
- we had another baby
- she changed jobs again
(- and again)
- I stopped renting out the townhouse and put it on the market
- we had yet another baby

And now, finally, for the first time ever I am going to go through the closing process on the seller’s side, some time in the next six weeks. And lucky me, I don’t have to bother with any of the messy complications of actually making any money from the sale. Seriously, though, even when we were renting the townhouse we were losing money on it every month, between the gap between rent and the mortgage, the condo association fees, and while it’s been on the market, the power and water bills. At this point I could not care less about the absence of capital gains in the transaction. (It’s not like I need to roll the equity into a new house, not this year anyway.) I will be quite happy to be rid of the albatross around my neck.

No offense.

I wore the wrong shoes

Tuesday was a bit of a concentrated madness as I had scheduled my certification exam for the mid-afternoon. When I made the appointment last week this seemed like reasonable timing: the testing facility wasn’t open on the weekend or the Monday holiday, and this whole process (both obtaining the certification and the larger project it has been the most recent stumbling block within) has dragged on long enough, so the soonest available moment on the other side of Memorial Day was really optimal. And that gave me plenty of time to review the study materials and brush up on the concepts and whatnot.

Although, that in itself was easier said than done. The long, dense (and did I mention boring?) book had been hard enough to slog through the first time, and skimming over it again seemed unlikely to yield any more insight into the subject matter. Plus, I like to relax on long weekends, and double-plus we had guests in from out of town (about which more later) so the extra studying did not exactly happen. Despite the fact that the knowledge of the exam appointment was constantly near, dark and looming and more than a little intimidating.

I had recently managed to suss out that my contracting boss did in fact consider the exam prep a real job duty for me, so I felt justified in hauling out the textbook once I got to work on Tuesday morning and just sitting in my cubicle studying for the better part of four hours. After that, I had to pack up and head to the testing facility. This entailed walking back up the main drag to the Metro station, riding a few stops down the Blue/Yellow line, and walking nine or ten more blocks to the office park destination. I got there reasonably early and was able to cram in a little more studying, and then it was time to give the exam a go.

So the study book I had obtained, which is ostensibly published under the auspices of the certification board, contained nothing but multiple choice questions. The computerized exam, on the other hand, led off with several questions which were practical exercises in which there was a simulated network that needed its settings configured for certain security-specific scenarios. Since I don’t really have any hands-on experience with network set-up and was only pursuing the certification in order to be compliant with the onerous requirements of the administrators at my gig, I was ill-prepared for the first few questions on the test and as a result had a bad, bad feeling about my chances. I gritted my teeth and struggled through the practicals as best I could, and eventually they gave way to more straightforward multiple choice questions. I felt better about my grasp of the information in those, but I was still mentally calculating how and when I could re-take the exam, and for that matter how I was going to get familiar with the workaday questions which were over my head. (Also how I was going to deal with the crippling depression resulting from still being shackled to this whole boondoggle.)

I finished the exam and submitted it and held my breath and … got a little screen saying I had passed. BARELY. I did the math later and I’m pretty sure the margin above failure was half-credit on a single question. But pretty or ugly, a win is a win! I tried to keep it together and not turn cartwheels through the halls of the testing facility, and I was helped a bit in that regard by the young lady who was working as the proctor, who took the print-out of my results from the printer and handed it to me with the most uninflected and perfunctory “congratulations” the human voice is capable of producing. I understood, I’m sure her job is crushingly boring, but it did make me laugh on the inside. I was high as a kite at having escaped the terrifying jaws of defeat, but to the girl who administers dozens of tests a day, a passing score was a big whoop-de-doo.

So in the end my biggest regret was not wearing my BizCasFri shoes which are better for walking; my dress shoes ended up giving me a blister as I hiked back to the Metro after the exam. But all in all it was worth it, or so it feels today. Tomorrow I’m sure the powers that be at work will find some other reason to be unhelpful and obstructionist about my big project, now that I’ve jumped through this latest hoop for them. And so it goes and goes and goes.

No redshirting

Yesterday, our oldest child was scheduled to be tested for kindergarten readiness, which has actually been a subject of intense discussion around our house for months. The little guy is (if I do say so myself) really bright and precocious and outgoing so there was never any question in my mind that the September he turned five would be the optimal time for him to start real school, and I never gave much (any) serious consideration to holding him back a year for any reason. However, the flipside of his high intelligence and big personality is that he can be incredibly stubborn and willful, and easily frustrated and emotionally volatile over the gap between his reach and his grasp. So it was at least theoretically possible that while I knew he was ready for kindergarten, an outsider assessor might disagree.

The little guy’s daycare pre-school program is somewhat oriented toward preparing the tykes for school, e.g. every kid has a journal notebook in which they practiced writing, first by tracing words written in highlighter, then by copying them freehand. They started with their own names and when they mastered that, they moved on to other vocabulary words. The little guy, however, stalled out a bit on that front, which ended up being a purely motivational issue. His handwriting was small child sloppy, and his teacher wouldn’t let him move on from writing his name to writing other words until his handwriting improved, but that meant he just got insanely bored writing his name over and over again, so he lost interest in the whole deal. (I believe this is a very low stakes and small scale version of what happens to sub-median kids in public education all the time, which basically sucks.)

Personally, I didn’t care if the little guy was all in on the journal-based lesson plans or not, until my wife pointed out that if he stopped trying and never mastered writing his own name legibly, then they might not let him go to kindergarten this year. Which was a bit of a shock to me. I could understand the school asking the parents to hold back a child who was seriously developmentally delayed, whether socially or intellectually or whatever, like if they’re not potty trained or don’t speak in complete sentences or whathaveyou. But how could a publicly funded school system put arbitrary achievement benchmarks up in front of kindergarten admission? What about the kids whose parents can’t afford pre-school, how are they supposed to have pre-learned anything? Apparently, though, this is the world we live in now, and we’re lucky to have had our little guy enrolled somewhere with a Montessori program, if only we could get him to actually take advantage of it. And he did, eventually, of his own accord, so that was good.

Still! The requirement for kindergarten was not that we turn in the little guy’s Montessori journal, but rather that he demonstrate his own readiness by meeting with one of the teachers and going through some basic tests. And I gotta be honest, I was a little nervous yesterday because of the timing and the circumstances. Eight weeks in, we’re still dealing with some minor regression behavior and acting out thanks to the newest arrival in our family, which I am trying (not always successfully) to unconcernedly allow to run their natural course. But I could foresee the little guy having a freakout at kindergarten testing, for any number of reasons: he could go into shy mode and refuse to talk to the teacher, or succumb to a complete meltdown and refuse to separate from his mother, or just decide to be a crankypants who huffs and sighs about how he doesn’t want to do any of the tests. And the teacher would have no choice but to make some notes in her file about emotional unreadiness and give my wife a sympathetic smile and a “maybe next year”.

The fretting was for naught, as it turned out. The little guy is excited about the prospect of kindergarten and was eager not only to visit his future school but to follow the teacher with good-spirited willingness. There was no self-defeating behavior impeding his ability to demonstrate that he does, in fact, have the goods. The little guy does like to show off, and he usually will given the opportunity assuming no other cognitive interference (like anxiety or the irrepressible urge to pitch a fit). The teacher was duly impressed with his ability to recognize sight words, so it’s possible that my wife and I might have pushed him a bit farther in areas like reading than we absolutely had to. I suppose, come this fall, we shall see!

Not fade away

I have been spending the past couple of weeks catching up on various things that fell by the wayside during the four weeks or so before that when the baby's arrival became the gravity well around which my entire life was orbiting. A lot of those things (as is often the case in my life) are fairly trivial and slight, but it did occur to me that the last time I mentioned anything about my mother was some time in the end of February, when she was still in the hospital. Granted, the major thrust of that very mention was to point out that I was not going to provide daily updates on (what at the time seemed like) the long, slow recovery process, so I've stuck to that intention pretty well.

Also, it would have been altogether fair for any curious reader to assume that no news is good news, and that if my mom had taken a turn for the worse I would have said something post-worthy about it. In fact, my mom got better a lot faster than I or anyone else expected. Despite the fact that around the time I was acknowledging she was on my mind but I didn't deem it particularly productive to dwell on it blog-wise, she was on a ventilator and heavily sedated, shortly after that she was weaned off the meds and the vent, and from there it was a short hop to being discharged from ICU. Some combination of her doctors and her insurance decided that she would be better off going home from the ICU and having a nurse come to her condo regularly, rather than moving her from ICU to a rehab hospital, and so it went. Her initial admission into the hospital was the last weekend in February; I don't remember exactly when she went home but I remember talking to her on the phone shortly after her discharge, assuring her that she had not missed the birth of her third grandchild. And he ended up coming into the world less than three weeks into March, so while that may not be specific enough to do math, it at least sets up a rough window. I honestly at the time interpreted my mother's health scare as a debilitating point-of-no-return, with normalcy an impossibly long way off. But it turned out she was only in the hospital for a couple of weeks, and then back home as if nothing had happened (with a few exceptions).

Of course, my mother and I have never been the best at communicating with each other because of all the hang-ups of the parent-child relationship, and the gradual role reversal as I become more and more the one who has his life in some semblance of togetherness while she/my step-dad are less and less able to take care of themselves is not exactly a smooth transition. My mother has always been the type to insist that she's completely fine even if that's not the case (the day she went into the hospital she assumed it was only overnight for precautionary monitoring and she forbade my step-dad from calling any of her kids and worrying us needlessly). I can push a little bit in pointing out that she now has permanent prescriptions and might want to make some lifestyle adjustments as well, but I have no way of knowing if she actually will adopt any changes or even if she has fully internalized that what I'm saying is right. I can call her, and ask how she's doing, and she'll say that she's fine, but I don't necessarily believe her and I don't have any other way of getting an answer to that question. (My step-dad, unfortunately, tends to be shoulder-to-shoulder with her as a united front. It's nice for them, but annoying when they're both in denial.)

Still. Leaving aside the subjective stuff, I can only rely on the objective facts, and the fact is that she was released from the hospital and settled back in at home and hasn't had the need for an ambulance ride since. I can at least be thankful for that, and for the fact that all the getting-better happened so fast and so in the middle of a bunch of other stuff that I haven't even remarked on it until now. But I hate to leave loose ends, and since I introduced the subject of the Health Crisis in New Mexico I figured it was only fair to offer some closure, such as it is, as well.