With a capital T

Holy crap you guys it just occurred to me: you know how in the U.S. the national drinking age is 21 and most bars are open until at least 2 a.m. and so college kids will often go out on the night before their actual 21st birthday and the bouncer will usually let them in because as soon as it hits midnight they can legally buy alcohol and indulge in their first couple of hours of state-sanctioned drinking? Right?

Today is St. Patrick's Day, or as those of us who know our way around an ale or two call it, "Amateur Night".

Tomorrow is the bino's birthday.

Birthdays and St. Paddy's are fixed dates. They don't move around on the calendar based on lunar cycles or the desire for federal holiday three day weekends. My little girl, for example, has had her birthday fall near and far from Easter, including right on it once, but I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, for example, when the next time the conjunction will be.

BUT I can say with absolute certainty that if the bino's friends take him out the night before his 21st birthday in order to do shots at midnight, they will be attempting such a maneuver ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY. Which, by the by, in that year will fall ON A FRIDAY NIGHT.

Holy. Crap. You. Guys.

One reason why this fact has eluded me so far may have something to do with an ironic recent development: the bino, at the ripe old age of 8, has taken a pretty strong anti-alcohol stance. He hates it, and will declaim as much loudly and often. He does not find Homer Simpson funny in the slightest. And he gives me and my wife a lot of guff about our own imbibing.

Of course this can and probably will change over the next decade or so. I don't remember feeling the way he did at his age, my parents drank and I just accepted it as the way things were, but he is his own person and has to chart his own course. Maybe his 21st birthday's adjacency to Amateur Night will end up mattering on some level, and maybe it won't. Time will tell, we shall see, too ra loo ra.

Another layer of irony here is that his hardcore teetotaler stance has really solidified over the past year. As in, 375 days and counting of Pandemic Life. So, yeah, full disclosure, we've been doing a fair bit more drinking at home over the past year than any time earlier. It's been a year in which my wife got me a beer box subscription for my birthday AND my dad got me a completely different beer box gift card for Christmas. It's been a year of staying in on the weekends instead of getting a sitter and going out, but still enjoying a glass or two of wine or some bourbon or dark rum based cocktail or other while we watch a streaming movie and order in pizza. It's been, in short, a bit of a year.

It's also been a year in which my wife has still had to go to campus to run lab sessions for her job, which both increases the need for relaxation rituals and makes the schedule a bit odd, to boot. This semester, for instance, my wife is on campus for early morning labs Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Fridays she works from home, but for all intents and purposes she considers Thursday her personal Friday night for unwinding with a choice beverage or two. I bring this up only to point out yet another ironic convergence, as tomorrow happens to be a Thursday and, as mentioned above, is also the teetotalling bino's birthday. So! We have settled on a compromise: my wife and I will be enjoying some fine Irish beers together tonight, in honor of the holy man Padraig, and on Friday my wife likely has plans with a small COVID bubble of her friends which will also involve libations. But on Thursday, on the bino's birthday, there will be no drinking. We can be abstemious for the one day that's supposed to be all about him. At least, that's the compromise my wife and I came up with, we haven't exactly submitted it to the bino for approval as such, but I'm sure he'll be on board with minimal amounts of guff.

232

Two hundred and thirty-two days is not nothing. The U.S. has been dealing with all of the primary, secondary, etc. effects of a pandemic for seven or eight or nine months, and some things we've gotten accustomed to (some of which might even weirdly be changes for the better) and some things we haven't. Most things that were going to happen have happened, all at once in a confusing jumble at the beginning, and the passage and repetitions of time merely allow realizations to come clear. But every once in a while there's a new first, and yesterday, I had one.

I am in no way shape or form a fashion-forward individual. I tend to conform to expectations, and am quite content to clear the lowest possible bar of socially acceptable attire for a given situation. I can get dressed up for a wedding or a job interview and know what I'm about. I can do casual-but-nice for family gatherings where there might be photos taken. But left to my own devices I go for comfort over all. I am 100% that guy with a vast t-shirt collection who wears cargo shorts for 2/3 of the year and blue jeans the other 1/3.

Recently it has been brought to my attention that some people do not find blue jeans comfortable, as they are too restrictive. Compared to pajama bottoms or yoga pants, I agree they are certainly more restrictive (and, Gender Injustice Alert, it goes without saying that women are instructed by society to wear jeans that flatter and accentuate their curve, as opposed to the baggy-ass broken-in denim I prefer). But whether it's hardwired into my proprioceptors or just the result of years of habituation to my go-to pants, jeans are in my maximum comfort zone.

After the first few months of my office being closed for social distancing, I hit upon a pretty standard routine: I wake up in the morning and get things rolling in my pajamas. I help the kids with their breakfast and start my workday, unshowered and not yet dressed. If I have any meetings, I leave my camera off. Around lunchtime I exercise (the treadmill in the basement feel more and more like one of the best investments my wife and I ever made) and then, finally, take a shower and put on grown-up clothes. Which, again, means cargo shorts and a t-shirt, or maybe a polo shirt if I have any afternoon meetings with people I want to project bare-minimum professionalism at. This worked pretty well through the summer and early fall, and I certainly had plenty of pairs of cargo shorts to rotate through (tbh, I rotated them on a weekly or fortnightly basis, not daily, but still).

Yesterday was pretty chilly, which would normally be my cue for the switch from cargo shorts to blue jeans. But for the first time in longer than I can remember, I just didn't want to put on jeans. Didn't have it in me to deal with a zipper, I guess? Instead, after my midday ablutions, I put on a gray polo shirt and black sweatpants. Because why not, right? Comfy, cozy, and no one is going to see my from the waist down anyways, right?

What I had forgotten was that I do not wear sweatpants in public, unless there is some kind of medical reason, and have not done so since probably fifth grade. OK, no, I hadn't forgotten that, but I had forgotten that on Monday nights my boys have martial arts class and I drive them and sit in the school while they train, which meant I was going to either wear sweatpants in public (which, again, I Do Not Do) or else change out of the sweatpants after dinner (which, ugh). A strange situation in which to find myself, but then again, this is a strange year, an unending string of stranger and stranger days.

So yeah, yesterday, I had a personal COVID first: I left the house and spent time in a public place while wearing sweatpants. And lived to tell the tale! Who knows what other uncharted territories I may explore before this whole thing goes away?

77

I was berating myself the other day for not blogging regularly throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, because someday a quarantine journal might be interesting (to me and mine, at least). Today it hit me again, mainly because it is Memorial Day. My kids have the day off from school, but then again, they haven't been to school in two and a half months. My wife has the day off, but then again, her semester ended a couple of weeks ago. I am working, albeit working from home, but then again, all I do anymore is work from home. Although I used to work from home now and then in the Before Time. Although I used to get holidays off. And the reason why there is so much work for me to do is directly because of Covid-19, and school closures, and so on. It is a strange national long weekend, to be sure, and almost certainly moreso for other people than me, but as far as chronological markers to finally jump in with my usual better-late-than-never verve? Sure, why not?

So clearly this is a multi-post project, wherein I can both report in real time on Life in Historic Times, and also belatedly fill in the backstory as best I can reconstruct it. The subject of this post refers to the fact that, for me personally, it's the 77th day of lockdown. Eleven weeks. I'll take a stab now at sketching out how it all started.

Which of course means I have to provide some current context, because this here blog has lain in disuse for so long. I have been working for an education non-profit for a little over four years now. My wife has been teaching full-time at the local community college for two years. The little guy is in sixth grade, the little girl is in third grade, and the 'bino is in first grade. We still live in the same house we have for almost the entire existence of the blog. And lots of life stuff has happened but that probably gives you enough for now!

So my actual quarantine experience began on Tuesday, March 10, 2020. I remember that the week before, coronavirus was very big in the news. My company does work internationally and the novel coronavirus outbreak in China was impacting some of our projects. My boss said, "What's going to be crazy is if we get a similar outbreak here in the U.S." and I ... scoffed? I really did, I admit it. I thought it wouldn't happen. Not that it couldn't, just that it wouldn't. I don't know why I was so convinced of that, other than my usual cock-eyed optimistic belief that everything will work out fine, but I was very wrong, and I admit it.

On Monday the 9th, there was one reported case of Covid-19 in the NYC skyscraper where my company has its home office. Not in my company's office, not anyone who works for my company, but someone else at a different company on a different floor. Still, in an abundance of caution, my company closed our office, sending everyone to work at home. Including everyone at all the other satellite offices, which of course included me. So we packed up on a Monday, and on Tuesday, I was working from home, while my kids went to school, and my wife happened to be on spring break. Things escalated quickly that week, as my company announced we would stay closed for at least a month, my wife's campus decided not to re-open after spring break, and my kids ... continued to go to school, through Friday, which was a half-day for them anyway. By then, at least, the governor had closed schools state-wide. So I worked from home for four days in a row, and as I mentioned above, working from home was nothing new for me. I did it one day a week with regularity, and sometimes twice a week if the need arose. Four straight days was a bit of a novelty, but then it became apparent that it was going to be five days in a row the following week, and the week after that, and ... question mark? Of course at the beginning no one knew how or when it would all end, and two and a half, nearly three months later, we still don't know.

So that's the intro! I will add to this as often as I can, hopefully. Stay safe and well.

Earth Days of Future Past

Happy Earth Day! In honor of the green occasion, I'm going to RECYCLE! By which I mean I am going to take a post I made in a Facebook group this week and reproduce it here:

I'm a bourbon drinker, and I went to college in the U.S. south, so I've had my share of mint juleps. I quite enjoy them, honestly. My dad briefly spent time working in London, opening a UK office for his then employer, and I happened to visit him there when his co-workers, all of whom were Englishmen or Scots or Irish, threw a picnic and made sure to have mint juleps in real julep cups because, to them, that was a quintessentially American thing. And that further entrenched the beverage in my heart.

I love all things sci-fi and fantasy and I'm particularly fond of imaginary vegetation, from Ents to Audrey II. It's not for nothing that of all the mythic/folkloric traditions I could have based my Kellan Oakes character on, I gave him a druid background and a dryad receptionist. Tree-people are kind of my jam.

HOW DID I NEVER KNOW BEFORE THAT MARVEL'S KILLRAVEN SERIES HAD A PLANT-HUMAN HYBRID CHARACTER NAMED MINT JULEP??? I gots me some backreading to do.

It was one of those revelations where I craved instant feedback gratification, hence turning it into a Facebook post. And sure enough, other members of the group were quick to assure me that, oh yes, the Killraven series was a hidden gem with loads of wild supporting characters and I should definitely track it down and read it, and once I did I was in for a treat, and so forth.

I really wish I could remember the exact sequence of events that got me there, but basically I was just messing around on teh interwebs and found myself on the Wikipedia page for Killraven, which is where I made the quite accidental discovery of the character above. I think it was something like going through my usual daily comics blog consumption, wherein one writer made an offhand reference to Logan's Run, which at one point was adapted as a comic book, which got me thinking about other 1970's science fiction comics which might be ripe for a reboot, which led me down the wormhole to Killraven, a series I've always been peripherally aware of (it was a bit before my time, and back in the day if comics were before your time they had likely vanished into inaccessibility by the time you tried to hunt them down) but had never read. Hence the capacity for surprise and wonder upon digging into its details.

So here's the interesting thing about Killraven: he was an original character who debuted in the Marvel-published Amazing Adventures comics, in May of 1973. But he was created as the protagonist of a kind of loose sequel to The War of the Worlds. I say loose because the premise for the comic series is that the H.G. Wells novel ended quite differently, and the Martians successfully conquered Earth. The human race is totally subjugated, Killraven himself is a former gladiator turned freedom fighter, about a hundred years after the source material was set. Between the alternate outcome of the backstory and the future setting, numerous other embellishments ensued, but it was very much intended to be Wells's aliens as the bad guys, including prominent use of the iconic imagery of giant mechanical tripods shooting death rays. Which, honestly, is pretty shrewd considering that the Martian tripods are (1) so famous that they have evocative power with near total cultural awareness saturation, regardless of whether or not a person has read the novel, and (2) totally rad looking. So it's a real best-of-breed approach, combining a recognizable IP touchstone (which just happens to be free and clear in the public domain) with something fresh and imaginative.

It's interesting to me because I spend a lot of time thinking about the creative process as both pure art and a commercial enterprise, trying to understand both sides of the equation. I'm well aware of general sentiments along the lines of there being no new ideas these days. Everything is a reboot, or a continuation of an existing megafranchise. And on the one hand, if someone were to make a KILLRAVEN movie, how would you classify it along those lines? Would it be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, since its origins go back to that publisher? (Killraven did meet Spider-Man at one point, but that involved some interdimensional time travel shenanigans, because clearly Martians did not conquer the Earth Spider-Man calls home in 1897. This is not a dealbreaker, though. The MCU Doctor Strange movie also introduced at least the concept of interdimensional time travel shenanigans.) Or would it be considered part of the overall War of the Worlds franchise, however you might define the parameters of such a creative entity? You'd be hard pressed to convince me that it should be considered a reboot, since it's one of the few War of the Worlds stories that doesn't take the events of the novel and transpose them to a different setting in time and place. A spin-off, then? Well, the comics were a spin-off of the novel. The movie adaptation would probably change some things (I've said this before, it's basically mandatory that you change source material when moving into a different medium) to make it more resonant to modern audiences.

And there's the additional point I wanted to make: sometimes the blanket dismissal of all current entertainments as nothing but reboots and sequels seems to indict adaptations as well, but that's certainly not a new phenomenon by any stretch. War of the Worlds was written in the nineteenth century and turned into a radio drama in 1938. Hollywood has been putting books on film for movies' entire existence. Shoot, Shakespeare was riffing on old stories everyone knew, and Homer was formalizing oral history. Killraven, with its weird remix of elements from a Victorian invasion novel and later sci-fi dystopian ideas and comic book tropes, came out almost half a decade before Star Wars ushered in the modern Death of Originality, or however it's supposed to work. So, if someone were in fact to option Killraven as movie material, I would not find it distressing or indicative of a general dearth of imagination in current entertainment. I would consider it part of a long and glorious tradition, albeit a weird obscure outlier part, and I'd be grateful to live in a time where those kinds of things could have a $100MM budget tossed their way. I can dream.

Anyway, as you may or may not have noticed in the artwork up above, there's a reference to the year 2015 in Mint Julep's backstory. According to Wikipedia, the adventures of Killraven as depicted in the 70's comics were supposed to take place during the impossibly far-off years of 2018 to 2020. What was future to the various Marvel bullpen talents who brought Killraven into being is rapidly becoming the past. Marvel is of course also the home of the X-Men, the mutant superheroes who battled their destinies in a classic storyline entitled "Days of Future Past" which became both a recurring reference in the X-comics and also the subtitle of a film adaptation in 2014. The fact that I was able to combine a mainstream Marvel reference with today's holiday to set up a relevant discussion of a far more obscure Marvel comics vegetable transhuman character pretty much makes the title of this post one of my bar-none proudest blogging moments EVAR.

Josephology

My kids are eight, six and four now (he said, because it's been so long since this blog was updated on anything close to a regular basis that he has absolutely no expectation that anyone would remember) and those really are some fun ages. All of them are too old for diapers, naps, and other such signifiers of babyhood, which gives us on the whole a lot more flexibility of scheduling and freedom of movement and whatnot. The eldest reads at a fairly advanced level (Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and Star Wars novelizations &c.) and the six-year-old is coming up fast behind him; the 'bino still needs to be read to but he enjoys it and will pick books out for himself to listen to. But at the same time, they're all still little enough to have wild, unfettered imaginations, and to enjoy flagrant displays of affection with their parents, and various good innocent fun stuff like that. If it were in fact possible to pause time and keep things exactly the same, now would be as good a time as any to hit the button.

So yesterday was Father's Day and serves well as a micro-case-in-point. All three kids made little craft projects for me at their daycare, and all three involved self-expression. For the four-year-old, the pre-school teacher asked him why he loves his dad and faithfully transcribed the answer onto a keyhook plaque that the 'bino had painted. His answer, for the record, was because I read to him at bedtime. The other two kids are n the same before-and-after elementary school program, so they made popsicle-stick-and-ribbon wall hangings, with a different reason why they love their dad written on each stick. The scion wrote three reasons, leaving the last two sticks blank, though as I unwrapped the gift he promised he would get around to finishing it. (He has some low-grade ADHD issues, so again, this is perfectly illustrative.) And my darling little girl provided her own four reasons for filial devotion, and the number one on her list was: "Because he has a mustache."

Fair enough! That is certainly something that has been true her entire life (and much longer, to be honest). And the mustache also has a pretty good historical track record of symbolically indicating the father figure. In fact, let's just go ahead and acknowledge that American Father's Day is for all intents a repurposing of St. Joseph's Day, the Feast of the Holy Father. I can't recall ever seeing any religious iconography of Joseph of Nazareth where the dude doesn't have a full complement of handsome facial hair. I'm not saying being clean-shaven rules out the possibility that you can be a good dad, but apparently, in my daughter's book at least, the fuzzy-faced look is a big plus.

I'm also reminded of the fact that at some point in my youth (i.e. my early teens, when my own father was in his late thirties), my father shaved the mustache he had been growing since college. He got a fair number of complements, no negative feedback to speak of, and life continued more or less as normal for our family unit (for a little while longer, anyway). His childhood best friend, with whom he was still in regular contact and who also had sported whiskers for close to two decades, observed all of this and decided to un-mustache. His act of radical grooming had for more consequential repercussions! That guy's wife simply refused to accept his naked upper lip, and not only gave him the silent treatment for a few days but convinced his two sons (who were, like, ten and eight or something) to do the same, until the guy relented and began regrowing his mustache. These days we're all still in touch, and while my father has gone several rounds over the past two and a half decades of clean-shaven to fully bearded and back again, his old chum has stuck with the 'stache ever since. So, you know, to each his own.

Decembrion In Excelsis

As the end of every year draws near (well, ends of 2013 and 2014 and 2015, at least) I compile a very eclectic and personal list of pop culture superlatives. Often this has more to do with my experience with the entertainment in question than the objective quality of same, but that is kind of the whole raison de blog 'round here. So without further ado, the 2016 Year-End Countdown Something Or Other!

1. Best visual pun Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. OK, stay with me on this one. This summer I picked up the first collection of a newish comic book series, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. It is a dark reimagining of the beloved Archie character Sabrina the Teenage Witch, done as overt horror assuming that Sabrina's family heritage of witchcraft involves actual demon worship and ritual human sacrifice and whatnot. It is a HOOT. It's not played for laughs, it's legitimately creepy and pretty far from camp. But there's still an inherent humor to it simply by nature of the premise, taking this innocuous character orginially presented in bright colors with rounded edges and pushing it into nightmare territory, and incongruous juxtaposition which can certainly produce a chuckle or two when things go really over the top. And furthermore, it's all done as a period piece, which allows for certain amusing, historically 20/20 social commentary as well. Quite a bit of the art is at least photo-referenced, using celebrity archetypes from the late 50's and early 60's to drive the point home. So ultimately this leads to a great joke when the characters of Betty and Veronica show up.

And, see, Veronica is a brunette so she gets modeled after a very famous brunette pin-up, with her square cut bangs as a dead giveaway: Bettie Page. Whereas Betty, with the waves in her blonde hair, looks like she's being drawn as an homage to ... Veronica Lake. So Betty is Veronica and Veronica is Bettie! OK, I thought it was funny.

2. Best late bandwagoning (second annual!) Orange Is the New Black. Right about the time that Orange Is the New Black was releasing its most recent season my wife and I decided to finally give it a try. And at this point, really, what is there to say? It's pretty great! We did our version of binge-watching, which means we would watch one episode per night every night, as long as we were home and neither of us was too exhausted and there wasn't something else, like a live sporting event, that we needed to watch more urgently. Some nights we would watch two episodes back-to-back, if we were feeling particularly wild.

We paused after the third season, in an effort to savor the fourth. I know that there are three additional seasons more or less guaranteed, which is great, but of course what will probably happen is that Season 5 will be released right on top of the premiere of Game of Thrones Season 7, #firstworldproblems. (In fact, one reason why we paused OINTB was to re-watch GoT Season 6 when our Blu-ray copy was delivered. Now as we wait to get back to Westeros, we can amble back to Litchfield for a spell, #fantasyworldproblems.)

3. Most problematic recommendation Jessica Jones. See the post from earlier this week for the full explanation as to why I really dug Jessica Jones but find it hard to impress upon other people that they should watch it.

4. Most depressing thing I read The Sun and the Moon. OK, as long as I've re-opened the unhappy box, let me go ahead and get this one out of the way, too. The Sun and the Moon is a fantastic book! It covers a specific moment in American history, basically the summer of 1835 (although it does provide quite a bit of backstory as well), to tell the tale of the rise of city newspapers as a truly populist mass medium, as opposed to a luxury for the upper merchant class. It delves into early 19th century sensationalism, scandals and crime reporting and whatnot, but ultimately explores the production and reception of a series of articles purporting to be authentic scientific discoveries of lifeforms and civilizations on the moon observed by new telescopes. This, of course, was pure science fiction, but well-crafted and presented to stand on its own in such a way that many people believed the hoax until it was revealed to be just that. Along the way the story loops in various American luminaries, several of whom are near and dear to my heart, including P.T. Barnum and Edgar Allen Poe.

So is it depressing to read about people's gullibility? Not really, no, at least not with respect to whether or not winged furry humanoids called Lunarians really exist. What gave me the blues was the fact that the book identified another facet of the ascent of daily newspapers, which served as political mouthpieces often with unapologetically brazen agendas. And in 1835, one of the hot-button political issues in the U.S. was slavery. What was depressing was reading some of the arguments for and against slavery which went back and forth in the pages of the papers. Pro-slavery voices often fell back on the Bible to justify the practice. Abolitionists often pointed out that there are lots of things in the Bible which weren't done anymore, and cherry picking chapters and verses to rationalize crimes against humanity is really not a particularly satisfying answer. This of course went round and round and changed very few minds and accomplished very little, and then we had a bloody war about it to settle things. It's my own fault, really, that like many modern people I think any given phenomenon is something new and unique to our slice of history. And so I was blindsided by this idea that people holding up the Bible to justify trampling others' rights, and people pointing out how inconsistent and hypocritical that was, and people continuing to trample while jamming Bibles in their ears and chanting "Bible! Bible! Bible!" was actually a good hundred and eighty years old. I like to believe things do get better as life goes on, but sometimes I wonder.

5. Biggest missed opportunity Charles Dance as the big bad of the Monsterverse. Right, now, let's talk about stupid monster movies! We added HBO to our cable package some time ago (2014, maybe?) and I often find myself comparing the experience of having it now as a middle-aged parent, after a long stretch where I didn't have it, to back when I was a kid and HBO was one of many perks of living in my parents' house. One of the biggest differences is that, as a child, I often would be flipping around the tv channels, bored, hit HBO to find that a movie had just started, and wind up watching the whole thing. This almost never happens as an adult, for reasons which I assume should be obvious. But it did happen once this past year. My wife and I settled onto the couch after getting the kids to bed, there was nothing we were in the midst of slow-bingeing (see above), and my wife only wanted the tv on as background noise anyway (she had paperwork to do). So I stumbled upon Dracula Untold on HBO and gave it a few minutes; I remembered it had more or less flopped but I wanted to see if it was "so bad it's good" or merely sub-mediocre.

I ended up watching most of it, and I have to say, it might not be much above mediocre, but it's certainly not sub. I admire the ambition of the filmmakers, turning Vlad into this scary-yet-sympathetic-yet-still-really-evil tragic protagonist. They Batmanned the hell out of him, and Luke Evans works with what he's given. Moreover, you might (read: you probably don't) recall that Universal was trying to breed their own cash cow mega-franchise, wherein they would do origin stories for the classic monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein and the Wolfman and the mummy, and then bring them together MCU Avengers-style for a billion dollar blockbuster. Batmanization notwithstanding, turning monsters into superheroes is a bit of a stretch, and announcing the intent ahead of time just seemed like hubris and probably had people rooting for them to fail, but for what it's worth, again, I will not personally crap on someone for aiming too high.

And then there's Undead Tywin Lannister! I had a vague recollection that Charles Dance was in Dracula Untold, and indeed he is, as the ancient vampire who transforms Vlad Tepes, a perfectly good use of Dance's ice cold bastard persona. What I did not know, until I got sucked into the flick and suddenly two hours later found myself watching the epilogue which apparently woudl have set up the modern day crossover, was that Dance was going to be the primary antagonist, being just as immortal as Dracula and having followed him into the present ready to make his life hell. That would have been great! A movie where Dracula, the ghost of Frankenstein, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon have to save the world that fears and despises them might have been dumb as all get-out, but if it had included sufficient supervillain scenery chewing by Charles Dance, I would have been there full price on opening night! Alas, it seems this potential was squandered by middling box office returns. Oh, what could have been.

6. Most surprising use of Netflix stand-up specials. For a long, looooooooong time, way past the period when everyone else shifted over to the streaming model, my Netflix account was used to rent physical DVDs by mail. If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that's because for years I rode the train and often watched movies or tv shows on the commute, using a portable DVD player and discs, because the rails went through some terrain that didn't have reliable cell coverage and the train didn't have WiFi and blah blah blah. I have since come around and gotten the streaming version myself. But if you had told me, back in 2010 or so, that one of the best uses I would get out of the in-home streaming service was the ability to order up a stand-up comedy special any time I wanted, particularly when my wife and I needed a break from scripted dramas and such, I would have found that pronouncement ... odd. Not unbelievable, I've always really liked stand-up comedy, just not the knee-jerk assumption I would have made. Nevertheless, here we are, and after watching a few online series (in addition to OINTB, we loved Kimmy Schmidt and Stranger Things) and several on-demand movies, the fact that we streamed Aziz Ansari and Ali Wong and Bo Burnham and Jen Kirkman and Donald Glover doing killer comedy is like this crazy bonus jar of funny cherries on top.

7. Best new media audio books of memoirs written by comedians and read by the comedians themselves. Speaking of comedy, 2016 was also the year that I finally gave in to the recorded siren call of audiobooks. I had been of the firm opinion that audiobooks simply don't count, by which I mean of course that everything in my life is some kind of running tally which translates quantifiably into a sense of accomplishment: how many blog posts I make, how many hits my blog gets (obviously I got over both of those this year, too), how many classic movies I've seen (hence my 1001 Movie Blog Club experiment), how many books I've read in a given year (thank you, GoodReads). Reading, to me, feels like an active mental undertaking, while listening to an audiobook seems like more of a passive thing which I wouldn't deserve too much (if any) credit for .

But things change. I don't take a train to work anymore, I drive, and the state police really frown on people reading books while operating a motor vehicle, even in the stop-and-go bumper-to-bumper traffic of peak rush hour I-66! I even went on a few work-related trips this year, and had to drive myself from Virginia to New Jersey and back one weekend. It was on that trip that I decided to finally make use of this Audible membership with monthly free credits I apparently get with my Amazon Prime account. So I downloaded Patton Oswalt's Silver Screen Fiend to my phone and listened to it while driving the leg home, and it was enjoyable enough that it unleashed a flood. (It helps that the radio in my car is totally dead, so it's the apps on my phone or dead silence for those two hours out of every day I'm behind the wheel.) I figured if I'm going to start listening to audiobooks regularly I ought to impose totally arbitrary limits on my consumption! Okay, not really, but I did like that Patton recorded himself reading his own book, because it guaranteed that all the jokes would at least be delivered as intended, and it was kind of like listening to a comedy album, something I assuredly have never had a problem with. I tried, and am still trying, to break things up with an audio novel read by a professional vocal narrator artist type every so often, but mostly I gorged on comedians performing their memoirs: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman, Aisha Tyler, Jenny Lawson. Really I've found that it's kind of like going on a road trip with someone cool and funny riding shotgun, where the agreed upon division of labor is that I'll do all the driving if they just tell me entertaining stories from their life.

8. Most exciting yet unsettling development the little guy getting ahead of me on Clone Wars. Star Wars has gotten its clutches into my kids in a big way, most especially the little guy, who is now eight years old and absolutely the prime age for it. And of course I am thrilled about this development. I've found myself softening quite a bit on the prequels, because my kids really dig them. The bino (he's three) thinks Jar Jar Binks is funny, thus settling the age-old question as to whether Jar Jar is in fact designed to appeal to children or fails at that and is simply universally reviled, and the little guy really likes the whole Jedi Order and seeing them at the center of the story rather than as abstract background information.

It is strange, in its way, that the little guy is growing up with a different version of what is canon than I had. I had the original trilogy all on its own for a while, although that was fleshed out in little bits here and there by Star Wars comics, novels, role-playing games, video games, and the like. Then came the prequels, which were a mixed bag to adult sensibilities, and then a ton more comics and games and novels and Wookieepedia ... and then Disney bought Lucasfilm and said a lot of that Expanded Universe stuff no longer counted, but also gave us the very good Force Awakens. But before that, I had really kind of drifted away from trying to experience and understand everything about Star Wars. It felt like diminishing returns; the let-down of Episodes I through III predisposed me to think that any further attempts to wring more story out of that particular galaxy was not worth the effort.

Case in point: years ago my sister gave me a DVD for Christmas which was the pilot movie of the Clone Wars tv series. And every year I told myself I should make time to watch it, and every year I failed to do so, and it just sat on my bookshelf, still shrinkwrapped and collecting dust. Then my kids watched all six Star Wars movies and were still hungry for more and I figured, why not let them watch Clone Wars? At that point I had heard good things about Clone Wars, that out of all the ancilliary tie-ins it was definitely at the top end, quality-wise. My own reasons for never breaking the seal had shifted from "eh, I've got better things to do than be disappointed in Star Wars some more" to "I just don't have the free time to invest in this no matter how good it is" but that's not a problem my kids share. Sure enough, they liked the movie and so started watching the series (which, cybersaints be praised, is available in its entirety on Netflix). This is all well and good, except that at this point the little guy has watched something like 38 episodes of the show and I've never seen a single one. He now considers Ziro the Hutt and Captain Rex and Luminara Unduli and Cad Bane big parts of the canon. Technically he knows more about Star Wars than I do! Which makes me happy and proud but also the slightest bit wistful. Passing torches is good, but my torch-hand now feels conspicuously empty. I suppose it's all just part of the whole parenting gig.

9. Best movie-going experience Keanu. When I started compiling notes for this post (months ago, obvs.) I had more or less assumed that this slot would be dedicated to taking the little guy to see Rogue One in the theater. Not only does it tie in nicely to the previous entry, but it raises an interesting tidbit: the little guy has never seen any Star Wars movie on the big screen! He turned down an invitation to see Force Awakens at a theater, but he's a year older now and I do believe he's ready. Or, I did believe. Here's the current logistical considerations: I personally haven't gotten to see Rogue One yet. And since Christmas is about two and half days away, I probably won't until next week. At which point I will see it with my wife, while the kids are at daycare, because Rogue One is rated PG-13 and that at a minimum calls for a pre-screening by both parents to ascertain whether or not we are comfortable with the eight-year-old seeing it. Assuming it passes that test, I can then think about scheduling a father-son outing, but for all I know that might not come together until some time in early January, and this list is supposed to be all about 2016, soooo ...

Keanu was really good! I went into it with fairly low expectations, just bound and determined to support Key and Peele because I loved their sketch show so much. My wife did, too, so it was an ideal date movie (except that it didn't feature any sandal-wearing emo heroes with ripped abs - I'm not going to link to the old posts explaining why that's a running joke, just trust me, I'm hilarious). And we continue to love the local Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, so here, take my money, give some of it to Jordan and Keegan-Michael, and bring me your finest beer and chicken wings. The fact that the movie was LOL-funny was a welcome addition to the overall enjoyment.

10. Mea Culpas I can't think of any other highlights in my year of pop culture, so I'll close with the other things, like Rogue One, which were never in contention for this list because I just didn't get around to them. This year I got into Breaking Bad, but only through Season 1 and a little bit into Season 2, so I understand I still have the best parts ahead of me. I failed to catch Season 2 of Agent Carter, or Season 1 of Preacher, and I gave up on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I DVR'ed Thor: The Dark World, watched half of it, but have yet to finish it, so that remains the one flick in the MCU I've never seen. I really wanted to see Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden in the theater, but it got a very limited release and never came to my local Alamo, so I'll have to VOD it at some point. I started reading Justin Cronin's The Twelve about six months ago but never finished it, because I designated it my "read while I'm working out on the elliptical or treadmill" book and, oh man, have I been bad about working out lately. That's a whole 'nother story. (It's a short one, though: I'm lazy AF.) There remains to this day a tiny part of me that longs for an injury or illness which would force me to be on bedrest for three or four weeks, during which time I could read and write and watch tv and movies and just generally have minimal responsibilities and maximal free time. I know that's ridiculous, both because I clearly have a lot of free time to enjoy a lot of things I like, as this post demonstrates, and there are countless scads of people less fortunate than I am in that regard, not to mention the fact that the very responsibilities to which I refer are primarily my wife, my kids, and my cool new job, all of which by an honest accounting make me very happy!

So instead I will simply content myself with having made it to the end of another year, knowing that I have a whole brand new year to look forward to. I will doubtless read more books, see more shows, go to more movies, and do lots of other stimulating, worthwhile things, and I am truly grateful for that. It may not come all at once, and it may in fact come in tiny fits and spurts around the edges of a very full life, but I will never actively complain about that, either.

Don't wanna be right

Poe's law strikes again:

I honestly cannot tell if the above graphic (found in a Google image search which somehow conflated my search terms - what should I be for halloween - with other tangential interrogatives - should I celebrate halloween at all and thereby risk my immortal soul - as algorithms are, I suppose, wont to do) is completely and utterly (and cluelessly) earnest in its admonitions, or a smirking parody of that way of thinking (or the outsider perception thereof).

On the side of sincerity, there's the fact that the text is deeply hokey in a way that seems utterly unironic.

On the side of satire, I mean ... if you want to put people off of something, why would you superimpose your message over an image that is so wicked awesome? Did you see that jack-o-lantern? That thing is rad as hell.

Ah well. Happy Halloween, anyway! And hey, remember a couple years ago when I used to talk about the How the West Was Weird anthologies I contributed stories to? Well, the fine folks at that publishing house, PulpWork Press, have an annual holiday anthology, too. And this year the holiday in question is Halloween. Hie thee to Amazon and you can buy a paperback copy or download a copy on your Kindle - and if you happen to be reading this on the intended posting date, today is the last day you can snag that Kindle edition FOR FREE!

Get us out from under

Today, according to no less an authority than the United Nations (which we all know will go down in history as the seemingly benign yet ultimately malevolent precursor of the One World Government run by the cabal of Lizard People who drink human blood and fill the atmosphere with mind-control gas) is ... WONDER WOMAN DAY!!!

2016 is in fact the 75th anniversary of Wonder Woman's debut, and from here on out I will resist the urge to provide detailed historical context because, honestly, I deem it neither necessary nor advisable. I mean, it's Wonder Woman. Everyone knows her, she has instant name and visual recognition, and yet ... once you get past the stuff everyone knows (Amazon princess, invisible jet, bracelets, lasso) there is an almost immediate drop-off into extremely deep esoterica which is arcane and convoluted and more often than not self-contradictory (and that includes the behind the scenes stuff about her creation and stewardship by various writers and artists every bit as much as her labyrinthine fictional biography). Suffice it to say that however impressive you may find it that a fictional character would achieve popularity with the public and hold onto it for seven and a half decades and counting, it's orders of magnitude more amazing when you consider how many variations, re-inventions and utterly bananas developments Wonder Woman has endured in all that time.

When I was a senior in college my friends and I played a lot of Justice League Task Force, which despite the bureaucratically tinged name was actually just a classic (dumb) button-masher fighting game for the Super Nintendo. I remember Wonder Woman being a particularly fun character to play. Here is a screenshot from that game featuring the Themysciran champion kicking Aquaman in the head. Good times.

Happy anniversary, Wonder Woman. Assuming the Lizard People allow any human literature to survive the Great Epochal Molting, I look forward to enjoying your centennial by re-reading old Justice League comics via my cerebral implants.

Just a bit excessive

If you look at each year as a progression from one Big Event to the next, with varying uneventful stretches in between, then for my family in particular you could see how the year progresses from New Years through relatively quiet winter before hitting the bino's birthday in mid-March followed soon after by the little girl's birthday three and a half weeks later in April. Then there's another few months of lull, then my wife's birthday in July, then usually (and getting more predictably consistent now that we're done having children) a family beach vacation in August, with the little guy's birthday hot on the heels of that at the beginning of September. My birthday is almost exactly four weeks after the little guy's, and then it's time to get ready for the big three of Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. (I'm eliding over some stuff like Valentine's Day, our wedding anniversary, and so on, because those tend not to be all five of us celebrating all together.)

My point, here, is that due to the accidents of birthdates, our two youngest children don't quite share their annual special day but do have them one on top of the other, big picture-wise. Whereas their older brother gets his birthday all to himself almost six months after the bino's. We haven't (yet) sunken to combining the littler ones' birthdays into one catch-all jubilee or anything, but this does mean that when the little guy's birthday rolls around and he is both the center of attention and practically swimming in new loot, it's hard to offer any of the standard consolations to the little girl and bino. No "well you just had a birthday, too, remember?" because it was basically an eternity ago from their perspective; likewise no "your birthday is coming soon" for the same reason. Even invoking Christmas is a dicey proposition since it's well over a full season away at that point. So far we've managed to get through the past few Septembers without too many gigantic freakout blowouts, but then again, this year, with a two and a half year old bino, is the first one where both younger sibs are fully aware of what's going on and capable of jealousy. Next year could be catclysmic.

And yet, maybe this year we're more or less innoculating them against such future traumas, because we seem to have inadvertently turned one planetary orbit anniversary into an entire month of festive feting. Previously we've had a birthday party for the little guy on or close to his actual birthday, which conveniently tends to be Labor Day Weekend-adjacent. We've invited a few of his little friends from the neighborhood, from school, and from hanging-out-with-our-parent-friends-who-have-similarly-aged-children, plus the local grandparents and aunt and uncle. All well and good. But now the little guy is a second grader, and he identifies his classmates as his closest friends, which means they get birthday invites (and rightly so!); the complication there is that his birthday tends to fall in the first week of school, so the whole notion of bringing invitations to pass out in the classroom doesn't leave those kids' parents much time to plan or even RSVP. Thus we hit upon the idea this year of having a family party at the beginning of the month and also having a friends party at the end of the month. That is perhaps double the amount of parties a child arguably needs, but in our defense I think we'll always on some level be trying to make up to the little guy the fact that he had to go to his very first day of kindergarten right on his actual fifth birthday. So there's that.

The plan went slightly askew when the bino fell ill with some undefined bug right before the scheduled family party, so in deference to our little seven-month-old niece we rescheduled for the following weekend. But of course we still cooked a special dinner for the little guy on his actual birthday, and he got his presents from mom and dad. So at that point he was due for three parties (or semi-parties): nuclear family, extended family a week later, and friends two weeks after that. His birthday effectively took over the entire month.

And let us not forget that he's still the only one of our three kids who goes to five-day-a-week school. That debatably could be put forth as something the littler ones have to be happy about in contrast to their brother, but sometimes ... Last year, the behavior of everyone in the first grade class was monitored daily via a system of electronic bonuses and demerits and the deal was that at the end of each week, every kid who had maintained a high ratio of good points versus bad was entitled to select a prize from the teacher's treasure chest. That system is gone this year, replaced by something else, I'm still not entirely clear on the details because this time there's no online component to give the parents granular insight (Which in itself is a mixed bag, maybe meriting its own post some other time) but basically every day the kids have a status which can go up or down depending on their behavior and the top of the scale is "role model" (not sure what the bottom rung is, "agitator" or "persona non grata", maybe?) and now the reward is that the kids can pick a prize from the treasure chest at the end of the day any time they finish the day at the "role model" level. This is, from my perspective, better than the weeklong tally for all-or-nothing, because many was the time last year where the little guy would string together several great days of being on task and well-mannered, only to have one bad day throw off his weekly average beyond recovery.

However, as humorous coincidence would have it, the little guy was a role model of classroom conduct yesterday. So when I picked him and his siblings up from daycare, he had his brand new prize from the treasure chest, which actually was a really nice Beanie Baby ox (which the little guy christened "Biceratops" because he's back into dinosaurs again and also he's clever and hilarious) and of course he couldn't wait to show it off to his brother and sister. This put me in the precarious position of wanting to praise the little guy and be happy for him and encourage him to continue striving for role model status at all times, while also not wanting him to rub too much into the little ones' collective faces the fact that, after two separate gift-unwrapping extravaganza's with one more still to go, he got yet another cool new toy just for going to the school that they're not big enough for yet.

Sometimes it all gets a tad exhausting, is what I'm saying.

Enforcement t.b.d.

It's been a while since I've talked at all about the local train station where my rail commute begins and ends each day, and that's probably because there's never that much to say about it. I've got my system for finding a parking space figured out, I know what time I absolutely must leave the house by in order to catch my regular train, and other than a brief period at the beginning of the summer when a newly opened barbecue joint was rolling a little cart down to the platform every afternoon in an effort to hawk pulled pork sandwiches to detraining workforce participants, really nothing ever changes.

Obviously this is one of my classic stem-winders where I establish the as-you-already-know exposition just so that I can drop the bombshell that SOMETHING HAS CHANGED. Indeed. And I'm fairly curious to see how this one is going to play out.

I'm generally on autopilot in the morning, from the time I back out of my driveway to the time I get to my parking space. I always go to the same parking space, and it's more or less always open and waiting for me, a feat I manage by virtue of the fact that it's not one of the more desirable spaces in the parking garage. The entrance/exit to the garage is level 1, which doesn't have very many spaces to begin with. By making almost a full circuit around level 1, you come to a ramp which leads to level 2. Level 2 is basically prime parking, because (stay with me here) level 1 is half underground, the two streets on either side of the garage running slightly uphill to where they meet the railroad tracks. So the platform is actually accessible from doors on level 2. If your main goal is to avoid stairs and elevators altogether, level 2 is where you want to park. So I usually drive a half-lap around level 2 without slowing down, to get to the ramp that goes up to level 3. And then I do almost a full lap (because it's one-way traffic inside the garage) to get around to the side of level 3 where the stairs are, and that's where I park. Not always the exact same spot every day, but out of those half dozen or so spots closest to the stairs there's usually at least one spot open. I get out of my car, go down the stairs, and out to the platform. I don't have to think about it first thing in the morning, and I don't have to strain my brain remembering where I parked in the afternoon. That's the way I like it.

This morning, despite being on auto-pilot (perhaps even moreso than usual, still half-asleep in mourning for the passage of the three-day weekend), I noticed an official-looking sign right at the street entrance of the parking garage. I skimmed it as I drove past it, and noticed that it said level 2 would now be reserved for mid-day hourly pay parking. I didn't notice if it said effective immediately or starting on such-and-such a date, although as of Labor Day is probably not an unreasonable guess. Anyway, it used to be that level 4 was for mid-day hourly parking, with the lower 3 levels intended for residents who display yearly parking permits obtained from the city. On days when I ran late and caught a different train, the three levels for permit-holders would often be full and I would have to pay to park in one of the spots on level 4, so I was certainly aware that such dual-use of the parking garage existed. And I thought the system made a pretty good amount of sense: in the morning, a bunch of commuters are just trying to get a spot and catch the train, some of them potentially cutting the timetable a bit close (ahem) and so they parked closer to the entrance-exit. Anyone who drove down to oldtown for lunch or shopping in the late morning or early afternoon could probably spare a few minutes to drive all the way up to level 4 and then ride the elevator or take the stairs back down.

But apparently that is no longer the case! I have no idea what kind of city council lobbying was required to convince the authorities that it's the midday patrons of oldtown eateries and boutiques who deserve the primo parking spaces directly adjacent to the doors leading to the sidewalk and the platform, and that the VRE riders can park all day a level or two above them, thanks. But that seems to be where we are now. All right, then.

As I outlined above, this really doesn't affect me, because I never used to park on level 2 anyway. Or, I should say, it didn't affect me today. My regular parking space was waiting for me, same as always. I also passed a lot of cars on level 2. Really it looked like any other Tuesday morning at the parking garage. So maybe the new rules haven't gone into effect yet. Or maybe they have, as of today, but not a lot of people noticed or bothered to read the sign at the entrance. If it's the latter case, then there are going to be several dozen really peeved commuters who get off the train late this afternoon and find parking violation citations tucked under their windshield wipers. And that in turn will no doubt lead to those several dozen people definitely being sure to park up on level 3 tomorrow, once ticketed twice shy and all that. Or, heck, maybe every one who gets a ticket today will stand together in solidarity and civil disobedience and keep parking on level 2 because change is bad and they won't be pushed around! Time will tell, I suppose. I may be parking on the roof of the garage before the year is out. I will report back with updates as warranted.

Making myself go hmmmm

Happy Force Friday, everyone. I'm a lifelong, unapologetic, huge Star Wars fan. A New Hope has always been one of my desert island movies. I remember playing outside with neighborhood kids, reenacting scenes from the movie. Sometimes we'd fight over who got to be Luke and who got to be Han, based solely on the fact that when we did the trash compactor scene, whoever was Luke got to totally flip out and flail around like a maniac pretending to be in the clutches of the dianoga's tentacle. Not that I knew it was called a dianoga back then, of course, it was just the trash compacter monster. I only learned its proper name sometime in the post-Internet, weak otaku age.

But anyway. The dianoga. Fascinatingly weird little world-building detail. Arguably just a fantasy trope that Lucas couldn't get enough of - between it, and whatever sucks Artoo underwater and then forcibly expectorates him on Dagobah, and the Sarlacc, you get a creepy tentacled submerged/subterranean monster in all three installments of the original trilogy. But the swamp monster and the Sarlacc make a vague kind of ecological sense, and the dianoga ... I mean, come on, you don't have to be that much of a nitpicking killjoy to wonder how the heck a free-floating military installation could have unruly creatures living in its waste management system, right? And being puzzled by that weirdness doesn't make me love Star Wars any less. But it's odd all the same.

You can find some more information about the dianoga on starwars.com and even more on Wookieepedia, some of which goes a little ways toward explaining things. Beyond Episode IV, dianogas have appeared in tie-in novels and video games and comic books, because everybody likes a good callback to the source material and everyone loves a good random fight scene with a tentacled horror. At some point someone exposition-dumped that dianoga's can grow to 10 meters in diameter but start out as microscopic larvae, and someone else established that they are hermaphrodites that can produce offspring in isolation. Which is all well and good, and basically along the lines of what I would expect form one of the largest, dorkiest, most meticulously detail-oriented fandoms around.

See, here's the thing: I get that Star Wars is "just a movie" and a fairy tale at that. I get that almost every piece of speculative fiction ever created will have its "fridge logic" moments. Lucas wanted to have a creepy sewage squid in his escape through the garbage chute sequence, and he made it happen, because wanting it was all the justification he needed and it's not like it's some egregious deus ex machina that resolves the overarching plot or anything. But what I find genuinely surprising is that no one has ever gone back and justified it retroactively, and it's still just sitting there, imponderably, all these decades later.

I mean, microscopic larvae and asexual reproduction and some other stuff about stowing away on garbage ships kinda sorta handwaves away objections to how a non-sentient species could become an invasive pest across multiple planets. So there can be dianogas lurking in the aqueducts running under Coruscant, and also in the sewers on Anoat in the Outer Rim, and also swimming wild and free in the jungles of Vodran. But,specifically, inside the Death Star? With post-ROTJ hindsight we know that a Death Star would be built in space, and in secret. Dianoga larvae spread through organic waste. Why was anyone importing organic waste into the Death Star-in-progress?

It's not completely inconceivable, of course, but that's my point: there's a story there. I've read prose stories about Greedo's childhood, and I've read comics stories about one particular Stormtrooper from the boarding party attacking the Tantive IV (not the first one through the hole cut in the hull, but the one behind him who had the misfortune of being the first Stormtrooper we see killed by a single well-aimed blaster shot). The Expanded Universe canon/fanon is vast and yet, as far as I've been able to tell with some cursory research, no one has ever explained the presence of a scavenger pest on the ultimate orbiting battle station as anything particularly noteworthy. I don't feel I'm owed an explanation, by anyone. I don't think Lucas negligently wrecked the suspension of disbelief in his world. I'm just surprised that my fellow geeks haven't addressed it already.

(Yeah, yeah, this is a classic example of "If you see a story begging to be told and fancy yourself a writer, and no stranger to fanfic at that, why not write the story yourself?" I hear you. Even if I were halfway through a first draft in that very vein, I would still be wondering how I was the first person to get there.)

(UPDATE: I just realized that this is basically the flip side of what I wrote about a couple weeks ago: then I thought of a geeky joke, Googled it, and found someone else had already executed it delightfully; and now I'm thinking about something equally geeky, Googling it, and vaguely disturbed by the lack of of pre-existing similar thoughts. Make of that what you will.)

Portrait of the Escape Artist as a Young Man

Still alive! Bit of a crazy stretch there with the holiday weekend being the last chance to cross off a lot of major projects before the birthday weekend, and then of course a million little things to do in the spare moments of the week leading up. The good news is that my wife was properly feted and a good time was had by all, bad news, it apparently takes about six days to recover from one of those all-out blow-outs these days. So I'm just barely returning to something like baseline equilibrium as I type this. Not a complaint, per se, just yet another in a long line of it-is-what-it-is as an explanation for the recent silence. My wife is amazing 365 days a year and I am happy to make any given day all about celebrating her and then just take the associated time delay of regaining my balance in stride.

Yet another thing which has contributed to the overall feeling of being utterly spent, though, is the trial that the kids' bedtime has become of late. For a while we had a decent system going, where the little girl and the bino were sharing a room and would go to bed at the same time, and the little girl was remarkably patient about just getting in bed and lying quietly while the bino was coaxed (much against his will) into sleep-readiness with various cuddling, rocking, lullaby singing and whatnot. Then we switched the sleeping arrangements so that the two boys shared a room, and since the little guy is significantly older we were all right with putting the bino to bed alone, letting the little guy do some extra reading or video watching, and then quietly, sneakily tucking in the little guy after the bino had (hopefully) drifted off. Somewhere in between those two stages, the little girl would get put to bed in her own room. Like I said, it worked decently enough.

Then at some point (and I admit I may have the timeline all messed up in my brain, which is mushier than ever) the bino was fighting sleep so much he'd still be awake when it was time for the little guy to get to bed. And since the little guy's bedroom entrance did not go unnoticed, we had to let the bino climb into the bigger bed with his brother or else he'd have a hissyfit. Of course sometimes that meant they were both quickly asleep, and sometimes it meant they kept each other awake talking, playing, or fighting (or all three). But eventually the bino rejected the toddler bed altogether and would only be put down in the little guy's big bed, and even then it took a ridiculously long time. So we started letting the little guy just hang out and fall asleep in our bed in the master suite, while his baby brother took over his bed. Again, the little girl was kind of isolated from it all, for better or worse. When my wife and I were ready for bed, we'd either transfer the bino from big bed to toddler bed and transfer the little guy from our bed to his own, or we'd transfer only the little guy, tucking him in next to the bino.

Of course that state of affairs could never last, and now it's gotten to the point where the bino (who is fully in the thrall of the terrible twos, it seems) doesn't really want to go to bed at bedtime at all, and even getting to fall asleep in his big brother's bed doesn't do the trick. Now the bino wants to be in the master suite bad with his big brother, which again only works if they both actually stay quiet and calm, which is hardly guaranteed. And throw on top of that the fact that the little girl has started to feel a little bit of jealousy over these slumber parties in mommy and daddy's bed, and sometimes (but not always!) she wants to be part of them, too. An almost-seven-year-old, a four-year-old and a two-year-old all physically fit in our queen-sized bed, that's not the issue. It's one of them kicking the other, or talking too much, or whathaveyou. It can escalate into all-out chaos pretty quickly.

Of course my wife and I just want to get everyone to remain in a bed and stay relatively quiet, so that we can have a goshdarn half an hour to ourselves to sit on the couch and have an adult conversation while we watch a DVR'ed sitcom or something. Actual sleep is utterly beside the point, honestly. But even the staying put/staying quiet is too much to ask. And mainly it's the two-year-old causing all the problems. Not only does he not want to go to sleep, and not want to do it where we want him to do it, but he's only sleeping fitfully these days, randomly waking up in the middle of the night more often than not. The upside is that he can, generally, manage these wakings on his own and get himself back to sleep. The downside is that he does it by changing where he's sleeping. So, we make concessions about where he falls asleep, assuming that once he and his siblings are asleep we can rearrange bodies as we please. And, to be fair, once the little guy is down for the night, wherever we put him, he stays there. Ditto the little girl. But moving the bino while he's asleep has virtually zero impact on where we're going to find him once we all wake up.]

Case in point, last night: the bino wanted to fall asleep in the master suite with his brother. I caved immediately, but was later overruled (and rightly so) by my wife because the little guy was unable to fall asleep due to the spazzy toddler on the other side of the mattress. So my wife put the bino in the big bed in the boys' room and said goodnight. Moments later the bino was up and about in the hallway looking to appeal the decision. I scooped him up and laid down with him in the boys' room, explaining that he'd had his chance trying to sleep with his brother and since he couldn't be quiet and still he'd have to sleep in here alone. He rejected my every suggestion of bedtime singalongs and such, but he was at least horizontal and calm, so I left. He didn't do anything else noisy enough to draw attention from his parents, but sure enough when our night was drawing to a close and I went up to transfer the little guy, I found the bino right there in our bed beside him. So I transferred both boys, and my wife and I went to bed. Woke up this morning and sonofagun the little squirt was in our bed again, and I hadn't noticed at what point during the night he had even come in. I thought to myself he's like a little freaking Houdini, except in blue pajamas, so inevitably ...

... I've had this image stuck in my head all morning.

It's a phase! That's what we keep telling ourselves, and it's true. It's just a phase, a relatively benign one in the grand scheme of things. He's going through rapid cognitive development, talking a blue streak these days and learning things at pre-school and no doubt growth-spurting like mad, all of which makes his brain feel like the inside of a Magic Bullet on frappe. He prioritizes stimulation over sleep, and it shows at both ends. He'll settle down at some point, and we'll catch up on regular, full nights of rest. Maybe some time around the next Olympics.

Let Freedom Ring

We Americans argue a lot amongst ourselves. We disagree about the role of our government, the shared values of our culture, the extent of our responsibilities and the limits of our rights. Sometimes we celebrate the rugged individualist and sometimes we insist that everyone play by the same rules. It's complicated and confusing and probably rightly so, but the truth is we do enjoy the liberty to think what we want, say what we believe, and keep trying every day to figure out how it all fits together. It's a continual process where very little stays settled indefinitely, which seems like a crazy way to live, but those of us who appreciate and take pride in our national ideals (however close or far we seem to be from realizing them at any given time) really wouldn't have it any other way.

Happy birthday, America. I still think you're the best.

Problem solving

My Father's Day gift this year was a new cell phone. Well, that was one of the gifts. Another gift was that I got to sleep in until the positively decadent hour of 8:04 a.m. Granted, I woke up with two out of three children in bed with me, the little guy and the bino, and what actually roused me was the voice of the little guy urging me to get up. But as I was about to inform my beloved scion that it was Father's Day and I should be permitted to sleep a bit past whatever time it was, and I looked at the clock to see what time it in fact was, I became aware that I had already gotten basically two extra hours of shut-eye, which was more than enough. So we all got up, and I went downstairs to find my wife, who had been up since about 5:45 through no one's fault but her own insomnia. But the good news there was that she had made good use of the quiet time to herself, doing some yoga and prepping for the class she's teaching and so forth. We had some coffee together, and then a little later I worked out, and on my way to the shower after that I wondered aloud to whom I needed to speak in order to make that kind of morning a regular thing. My wife helpfully suggested the lottery commission.

Anyway, sleeping in is a rare and precious gift and can't even particularly be controlled because you never know when some dependent creature is going to wake up yowlingly sick just before dawn, so it was pure luck but appreciated all the same (if not all the more). But the more deliberate gift from my wife was the new phone. I'm the type of person who pays no mind to the annual upgrade milestones on the wireless contract, and basically keeps the same phone out of habit and inertia until its last electronic gasps. Which basically describes last week, as my phone's screen would stay dark unless I jiggled it, or unless I smacked it, or unless I hard rebooted the phone, and then finally stayed dark all the time. So off I went on Sunday as soon as the store opened to get a new phone. Basically I got this year's model of the phone I had, because I liked it just fine except for the part where it crapped out well past its planned obsolescence date.

I've been a loyal company of my provider (ok, it's Verizon) for over a decade so I usually get a pretty good deal with every infrequent upgrade, and this time that included a bunch of free accessories. One of those accessories was a self-contained portable charger, and I was extremely excited about that.

I reckon it's been a while since I focused on any of the goings-on at work around here, so let me back up a bit and explain the ever-changing cell phone policy here in my office. My office is, as I have mentioned in the past, part of the DoD and there is some classified work that gets done here which requires me to have a security clearance and so on. We also have various rules about maintaining a secure environment. For a while, the only official rule about cell phones was that you couldn't plug them directly into a USB port of any government standard equipment (i.e. your desktop computer). Fair enough. It was also considered somewhat bad form to sit at your cubicle making personal calls on your cell phone, so for the most part people didn't do that, though every once in a while someone might. Then it was explicitly forbidden to use your cell phone inside the office. Then it was explicitly forbidden for your cell phone to even be turned on at work, whether or not it ever was being actively used. So I would use my phone on the train, get to work, turn it off, go to my desk, plug my phone into an outlet to recharge, and turn it on again when I left in the evening. That was all fine by me.

Recently, like within the past two or three weeks, they instituted a new policy, because apparently too many people "forgot" the rules about cell phones. They installed cubbyhole lockers at the front of the office and issued everyone keys, and now it is required to lock up all electronics upon arrival. Cell phones, Kindles, &c. Violators to receive disciplinary measures blah blah blah. So that's what I've been contending with, right at the end of my cell phone's life span, when even powering it down does nothing to conserve the dwindling battery strength. So even if I left the house with 100% charge, after riding the train, walking to the office, and leaving the turned off phone in a locker for 8 hours, it would be down to about 10% when I headed home. This was supremely annoying, but I didn't see any way around it.

But I hadn't considered the portable power source! So now, I will be able to charge my cell phone if it needs it by plugging it into the portable and placing both phone and power brick into the locker (they are small but there should be just enough room for them side by side). Of course, the brand new phone is super-buff and doesn't desperately need to be recharged again an hour and a half after I hit the road in the morning. So there's no urgent rush to start implementing this protocol. A couple-few years from now, though, when the phone is decrepit, I'll be glad to be able to take advantage of the new gadget. Assuming it still works then. Also assuming I still work here.

Friday Grab Bag

A surprising amount of stuff tweaked my “oughta blog about this” sensors this morning, all before I even got to my desk. And since I’ve been bad about posting this week, I figured I might as well try to get them all in before another crazy whirlwind weekend comes and goes.

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Pay no mind to what the date on the calendar says, it is officially summer here in the nation’s capital. The way I can tell, as always, is because the trains on Friday mornings are virtually empty. As soon as summer begins, loads of people (mostly government civilian employees) start taking Fridays off, either using vacation time or switching to a modified schedule for Monday through Thursday. Not me, though. I’m still stuck going to work every day between now and the next holiday (July 3rd).

I swore at one point this morning, though, that the train was literally going to fly off the tracks as it rounded a curve. I think the engineer usually hits the turn at a certain speed which takes into account the ballast of every seat being filled with a two hundred pound adult rider. That was not the case today, though, and yet the velocity was undiminished and the train definitely tilted a bit more than I was a hundred percent comfortable with. Obviously we didn’t crash. I’m hoping the engineer took note, though.

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It was drizzly and chilly when I got off the train, fairly borderline in terms of whether or not I would choose to walk through the underground rather than straight down the sidewalk. But I didn’t hesitate to cross the street and enter the retail catacombs, mostly because that underground route would take me past a Dunkin Donuts and I wanted to rubberneck at how long the lines were for Free Donut Day. Much to my surprise, the lines were almost non-existent. The lack of Friday commuters far outweighed the promotion. Is it possible that some people aren’t glued to social media at all times and didn’t even know that it was Free Donut Day? (NB: Yes. Yes, this is entirely probable, and it always does well to remind oneself that not everyone is focused on the same distractions from first world problems.)

I didn’t jump in line, myself. I just wanted to get to work on time so I can leave on time.

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So I got to work and as you should know if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, I work in a secure government facility and have to flash my badge at a guard as I walk in. Usually this is a pretty pro forma exchange every morning where I hold up the badge and watch the guard’s face to make sure he or she nods or waves me in or otherwise acknowledges that we’re cool, all without me having to slow my gait. That was true today, as well, for me at least. For another gentleman trying to get into the building it was a bit more involved. He had a badge, that wasn’t the issue. He just also happened to be carrying a very large kayak paddle.

So as I walked in the guard on duty was multitasking, scrutinizing my badge and nodding at me while also talking on his walkie-talkie to someone higher up the chain of command about the fact that there was someone trying to enter the building with a kayak paddle; said individual cooling his heels leaning against the far wall. With his kayak paddle. So many questions! Where was his kayak? Was he loaning the paddle to a co-worker? What other items are on the list of Unusual Non-Weaponized But Still Slightly Alarming objects which get you detained at the security checkpoint? And was the guy going to eventually be waved in or not? I didn’t stick around to observe any of the potential answers. I had already passed up free donuts and wasn’t going to be late to work to satisfy a curiosity.

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It’s tough to top the kayak paddle, but I would be remiss if I didn’t note that once I made it to the elevator I got on a car with four other people. Between the four of us we hit the buttons for the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 11th floors, lighting up all the buttons on the left side and only the buttons on the left. The mildly OCD part of my brain was very pleased.

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And somehow it took me most of the day to jot all that down and post it! But having done that I feel justified in calling it a week.

Said it before, say it again

The only thing worse than blogging about how I haven't been blogging lately because I've been too busy is blogging about how I haven't been blogging lately because I've been sick. And yet, here we are.

My wife and I took the kids on an epic roadtrip over Memorial Day weekend, all the way to the northern wilds of New York state to visit Little Bro and his wife and daughter, see their new house and introduce the cousins. A good time was had by all. The kids are very eager for a repeat visit, and in fact have already begun openly questioning why we can't do it all again in June.

We left Friday night and drove a few hours to a hotel where we did nothing but check in and crawl into bed. The next morning we availed ourselves of the continental breakfast and then drove a few more hours to arrive at Little Bro's. We got the tour of the house, walked to the local playground, met his neighbor on the way back and got to see the airplane under construction in the neighbor's garage. We had tacos for dinner and everybody went to bed. Sunday morning we visited Little Bro's other neighbor, who has not an airplane but several vintage cars in his garage, went to the playground yet again, had a burgers-n-dogs-n-smores cookout for dinner, and let the kids run around the backyard after dark with glow sticks and flashlights. My brother and sister-in-law also set up a tent for the kids, and they were basically in heaven. One more good night's sleep at Little Bro's and then on Monday we got up, had breakfast, got packed, and hit the road to drive all day and wind up back in Virginia with just enough time to feed the kids and send them off to bed.

All well and good until some time on Tuesday when my immune system finally crashed and I broke out in nine different kinds of cold symptoms which may have been due to an actual rhinovirus or may have just been a manifestation of sheer exhaustion. Apparently I am getting a little too old for these kinds of adventures, or at least to enjoy them without repercussions.

So today is Thursday and I am barely turning the corner to feeling like my usual self. Meanwhile all my best intentions about paying more attention to the blog have been scattered to the winds. The fact that being out of town for an entire weekend throws off our entire routine of housework and food shopping and so on certainly hasn't helped.

TL;DR: been playing catch-up and under the weather. More later, whenever things get back to normal.