Best laid plans and all

There are still some adjustments to be made and rough spots to be smoothed over, as far as the complete integration of the new dog into the household goes. Housebreaking (housebrokenness?) remains an issue, but that’s kind of expected given that:

1. New dog is youngish
2. New dog is a rescue who previously was chained up outside all day, every day, which is not at all conducive to learning NOT to pee wherever one pleases
3. New dog is a bit of a spaz anyway, 1 and 2 notwithstanding

So, you know, accidents happen. They get cleaned up and we all move on. New dog also barks a lot (I’m not quite so peevish as to refer to it as either “yipping” or “yapping” … yet) whether it be for attention or for food or just because he doesn’t quite trust the way that reflected bit of sunlight is just floating there on the wall. (For reals.) And new dog follows us around everywhere in the house, occasionally trotting right between one’s feet and risking inadvertent kicks to the head. Yet I’m reasonably sure a lot of that will be a distant memory some day.

And there are cute, non-annoying things, like the way he will lead the way from the closet where the dog food is kept to his bowl when it’s chow time, running in what amounts to a corkscrew pattern, towards the bowl, then back towards me to make sure I’m still bringing the grub, then back towards the bowl, then back towards me, in tight little spazzy circles.

Of course new dog was my wife’s idea and is her dream pet, the Cavalier King Charles being a breed she has dreamed of owning for years. So, in theory, he’s her dog.

In terms of dog ownership (aka dog accountability) we’ve often joked about our original, main dog being either hers or mine, whose idea it was to keep him, depending largely on how well-behaved the dog has been lately. I accepted that the dog ended up mostly mine, but the arrival of our little guy seemed to settle the issue because we simply entered countdown mode, figuring as soon as the little guy was old enough to take on even token responsibilities, the dog would be his.

So my wife gets the little bitty dog and my son gets the medium mutt, sounds like a great plan, right?

You see where this is headed.

New, little bitty dog is reasonably tolerant of the toddler’s attention, but oh, MAN, you guys: the little guy loooOOOOoooves the new dog. Can’t get enough of him. Has the dog’s name on his lips when he wakes up in the morning, needs to say goodnight to the dog before going to bed each evening. Hugs him all the time. It is pretty precious. I guess they’ve bonded over being the smallest of their species in the house, respectively. You just never know who exactly is going to find common ground or lifelong friendship with whom when you start collecting a whole mess of small dependent creatures under your roof.

Projects 2

So, I believe I was talking at one point about how Everything In My Life Is Some Big Project Or Another and I had only given one single solitary example so far. Easily remedied; prepare yourself for instance the second.

You might remember that one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2010 was to read 50 books, and to a certain extent you could probably consider that a project in and of itself. And it does require a certain time commitment, which is largely allotted to mass transit commute time. It also has a certain obsessiveness, even competitiveness (if only in that I compete with myself) built in, which might be what elevates it to a capital-P Project, because in my mind I am constantly calculating how many books I have lined up to read (no downtime is allowed, none at all; if I’m getting close to the end of one book I start carrying another book as well so that I can transition seamlessly and not waste five minutes on the Metro) and how long the current book I’m reading is and at what pages-per-day pace I’m getting through the current book and what books-per-month pace I’m setting for the year. And really hammering the point home (if the point is “what is WRONG with you?”) is the fact that reading books is something I love and passing time pleasantly when I’m stuck on the Metro is something I need, but the 50 Books A Year Project causes me no small amount of stress and grief, because to tell the truth I started the year off the pace by a good margin and I’m only now close to closing the gap. I’ve read fifteen books since January 1, and I’ll most likely finish the sixteenth today. I should be reading four or five each month, so at this point, 1/3 of the way through May, I should be finishing my nineteenth or twentieth. Part of the problem lies in some of my early choices: dense classics like Sons and Lovers in January and thousand-page epics like The Terror in February. So at this point I am actively selecting books that are a little on the slim side so that I can crank through them and pump up the bottom line tally. Which is kind of not in the spirit of the Resolution or the Project and is also more than a little insane in the membrane. But, I gotta be me.

And, to that point, it wouldn’t be me if I weren’t prone to inventing Projects within Projects. Which brings us to Beach Books on a Bus (henceforward known simply as BBB).

BBB started in July of 2008 when it became apparent that, because the little guy’s birth was imminent and I was saving all my paid time off for paternity leave, I was not going to get a week’s vacation at the beach. (To be fair, neither was my wife. To be fair, lots of people are working poor and never get paid vacations at all. I know. This is not their blog.) One of the most gratifying pleasures I have found in life is sitting on the beach and reading a book that is just trashy and fluffy enough to be perfect vacation entertainment, and that was the element of the not-in-the-cards beach trip I was going to miss the most.

As if to mock me, the Washington Post ran an article early that summer about the Ultimate Beach Books, as determined by some kind of poll. That helped me make up my mind to indulge in the reading material usually reserved for the vacation while slogging through my commute. Hence, Beach Books on a Bus. That year I read The Thorn Birds, Rosemary’s Baby, Devil in a Blue Dress, and Riders of the Purple Sage off the Post list, and I threw in Endymion, which is high sci-fi and the third part of a four-volume cycle I was into at the time. Riders of the Purple Sage was a bit creaky, but the rest were great, deserving Beach Reading Classics, and the whole BBB notion helped get me through the hazy, humid days of riding the bus lines and the rails in July and August.

The first year or so of his life, Little Guy was plagued with ear infections and I blew through a lot of paid time off on his sick days home from day care, so there was no proper summer vacation in 2009 either, and BBB 2 went into effect for two solid months. I read, in rapid succession: The Name of the Rose, Sick Puppy, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Fool Moon, The Count of Monte Cristo, A Feast for Crows, The Pillars of the Earth and The Clan of the Cave Bear. Some of those were leftovers from the Post article of the year before, and some were modern urban fantasy or sword-n-sorcery of my own discovery, but again, it was a nice way to commemorate summer while I was stuck at work.


Will there be a BBB 3 this year? Need you even ask? It will be inaptly named, since I no longer take the bus to work, but ah well. The centerpiece this year will most likely be Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic pulp trilogy about John Carter of Mars - which inspires the picture above - because not too long ago there was a sweet hardcover collection on the discount table at Barnes & Noble and you best believe I snatched that right up. I’ve also got some Douglas Adams lined up (I’ve read the Hitchhiker’s books many times but never cracked the Dirk Gently books, which I plan to rectify) and a few other dimestore paperbacks I got at the used bookstore. Oh, and A Year in Provence, which my wife recommended and which struck me as vacation-appropriate. They are all sitting on my bedside table, intermixed with a few other books I will read in the near-term, while those all wait their turn in July.

Of course the punchline here is that this year we have a healthy little toddler, no imminent childbirth leave to save up PTO for, and ample time and resources to take a weeklong holiday at the beach. And we’re totally planning to do just that. So BBB 3 will either be interrupted by, or segue nicely into, a pleasant vacation at the actual beach. However, odds are I won’t be able to finish a single book at the beach, as I will be spending the vast majority of my time keeping my progeny from being carried off by feral hermit crabs or otherwise getting into enormous amounts of trouble in a strange, new place. Is that irony? I think it might be.

Hammer and Tongs

Last Friday I didn’t really have time to blog from work because of two completely unrelated factors:

The Hammer: After enough-weeks-to-lose-track, the hammer finally fell and I was informed right around mid-morning that I needed to clear out of my cubicle. A new hire was starting work in the government office on Monday (today) and was going to be assigned the workspace where I had been squatting. I assume I’ve mentioned this situation and this possible resolution thereof enough times that everyone reading this will realize it was not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. It did not fill me with exquisite fear about the future of my position and/or paycheck, as I’ve always known that I’m an integral part of the contract who simply has the misfortune of being listed as an off-site team member but who finds his job much easier to accomplish on-site and has just been kind of winging it.

Interestingly enough, my contractor-manager did not so much as breathe a word this time around about relocating me off-site to a corporate HQ desk/cube/office/crawlspace/whathaveyou. He just showed up in my govt. cubicle and asked me to follow him down the hall to a separate room where up to three people can work at once at temporary workstations, and asked me if I would mind working there as of Monday until we figure something else out. Considering that there are technically only about four and a half months left on the current contract, I no longer consider it outside the realm of possibility that they might simply re-write the next contract for FY11 in order to convert my role from off-site to on-site, rather than actually figure out a permanent off-site home for me, because that apparently is a task of mythological-labor levels of difficulty.


But as always, I am a team player and not a complainer so I assured my manager I was fine with relocating. Still, it cut into my valuable slacking-off-at-work time, since I had to clear all my files off the cubicle computer (deleting some and copying others to the office network so I could access them elsewhere), and gather up all my paper files and such (though thankfully I hadn’t accumulated much along those lines), and set up the temp workstation computer and put in a Help Desk request for the one piece of software I use semi-regularly which needs to be custom installed wherever I go. But in the end, I daresay it was worth it, because even though I am now (this is NOT a joke) sitting a small windowless room which is also being used for storage and therefore contains a small flock of broken chairs as well as many boxes of random computer components, it is an out-of-the-way small windowless storage room and I feel a little less like people are constantly passing behind me and looking over my shoulder and judging me. So that’s decidedly more pleasant, and well worth sacrificing my view of the monuments across the river. Also I think the computer here at my new digs is actually newer and faster than in the old cubicle, although I'm trying to play that relatively cool so that I.T. doesn't come and re-appropriate it.

The Tongs: The other impingement on my time on Friday was the fact that my government supervisor decided to re-institute an old departmental tradition, namely Random Wine and Cheese Fridays. The technical term for my response parameters in those types of situations is HELL YEAH. So after shuttling stuff physically from one office desk to another and electronically from one drive to another I was more than ready for some crackers and Jarlsberg and cheap merlot. The spread of both foodstuffs and wines was actually impressively generous, well worth the hat-passing for 3 bucks a person that (partially) underwrote it. I stayed for about an hour and got my fill, and since by then it was close enough to quitting time and I had long since finished my workweek quota, I slipped out before the event officially ended. But I assume, having returned to a still-standing office today, that no fistfights broke out over the crudités (the tongs-necessitating munchies, in case you were wondering about my ever-tenuous connection making) so I also assume that our supervisor will be bringing Wine and Cheese Fridays back semi-regularly, and I for one have no problem allowing my morale to be manipulated and pandered to in such fashion.

Filter Thaw?

Quick Work Network Filter Update: Yeah, apparently that was a false alarm. Late yesterday afternoon I was able to get straight to Blogger without having to click any buttons acknowledging “quota time” or anything like that, and today that return to normalcy still prevails, so apparently it was a brief interlude of heavy-handedness. On the one hand, that’s a bit of a relief, especially once I realized that because Blogger uses a pop-up window for the uploading of pictures, which counts as a separate window and requires the use of ten more quota minutes to do one minute of work, I would be burning through a lot of this quota time for a once-a-day post. But then again, from the Blogger dashboard, which I use for following other blogs, I was able to launch new tabs viewing all of those blogs with no filter warnings whatsoever. So it wouldn’t have been that big a hardship (and please be aware I use that term as ironically as possible without completely obliterating its meaning) in any case. It does all beg the question, though, of what was going on yesterday. My two leading theories:

1 – It was an inadvertent dry-run. The Pentagon is eventually going to block access to Blogger et al, and they activated the filter before they intended to, and took it back down, but eventually will put it back in place when originally scheduled. That may sound a bit improbably inept, but trust me, it’s not that far-fetched.

2 – It was an intentional move which was immediately met with howling cries of protest from users who have legitimate, DoD-business reasons to stay abreast of various blogs for more than 50 minutes a day. Also not that far-fetched in theory, but this is my number two hypothesis because of what I said above: I was able to get to all the blogs linked off of my Blogger dashboard, just not the main Blogger site itself. So how much hutesium et clamor could there have been?

As always, I will keep you all posted of further developments, if any.

Cold Filtered!

(Parenthetical Asides interrupts the detailed dissection of How Everything In My Life Is Some Big Project Parts One Through Forty-Seven in order to bring you some breaking news. In a long-winded, roundabout way of course.)

Way, way back when I started this blog I ranted a bit about the seemingly capricious nature of my company’s internet firewall and the fact that I could reach some sites and not others, and two sites that seemed to have equally high futz-factor scores might fall on opposite sides of the divide, and how I was just sort of learning to live with it and regard it as sort of a challenge to map out teh interwebs both off-limits and on-.

But that was August, and this is May, and since then I’ve gone from working at my corporate HQ to working in a government office on government equipment attached to a government network, which means it’s not my employer’s IT policy I have to reckon with, it’s Pentagon IT policy. I don’t believe I’ve talked much about that, because it’s pretty boring: slightly more restrictive than my employer, but at least logical and consistent.

Here’s the thing, though, about IT policies (good ones, at any rate): they are constantly evolving, to reflect teh interwebs themselves. Maybe not rapidly evolving, certainly not as fast as the online universe itself, and much slower if the institution owning the policy is large and encumbered (like, oh, say, just for instance, random example, the Department of Defense), but if a huge trend emerges and persists, eventually the policy will catch up.

So today I tried to get to the Blogger home page and was informed that “Blogs and Personal Sites” are being filtered. Of course this information was presented as flatly and unsympathetically as if it had been the Law of the Landlines for as long as anyone can remember, but I got to the Blogger home page yesterday without a blip of protest from the Pentagon routers. This is a brand new development.

I am absolutely incapable of getting bent out of shape about this. Yes, I blog from work, but I know quite well that I shouldn’t. I can rationalize it in the context of the fact that the nature of my position gives me a lot of free time, and I never neglect the duties of my contract in favor of blogging, but bottom line I know that it’s personal use of taxpayer-funded resources and a pretty straightforward no-no. Apparently some time overnight it went from a discouraged, frowned-upon no-no to an outright banned no-no.


Well, maybe not so outright after all. The page in my browser telling me that blogs are verboten under acceptable use policies also features a button which I can click in order to start ten minutes of “quota time” during which, I guess, I can get to Blogger and its kin? Apparently I’m allotted 50 minutes which I can use in 10-minute increments, and I presume those 10-minutes need to be an hour apart or something. I guess I’ll find out, because of course I’m going to play with this quota functionality and see what it’s all about. It feels like it has a vague Orwellian creepiness about it, but that just means I won’t be visiting The Blog of Provocative Whalebone Corset Advertisements at work anymore, I suppose.

So I’ve written this whole post in Word and now I’m going to try to use quota time to connect to Blogger and post it, which means if you’re reading this I’ve succeeded, and later I’ll report further on how the whole thing works out.

Projects

Maybe it’s spillover from my workaday mindset as a white-collar drone, but lately it seems like I cannot get away from the concept of projects in all the other non-office areas of my life. I don’t have to-do lists comprised of various small and discrete tasks; I have a collection of (arguably) ambitious and (absolutely) time-consuming undertakings that I need to figure out how to fit into my life schedule on a recurring basis. And it’s a bit of unearned victim-playing to say that I can’t get away from it, because truthfully I am doing this to myself, completely by choice.

There is, of course, the ongoing Get The New House In Order Project, which is perilously close to being inaptly named because the house is not so much new to us anymore. (Surely we lose all rights to that label around six months after the move, which would be June 19 as it happens.) The garage still needs to be emptied and the den still needs to be painted and furniture needs to be acquired and so on, all of which swells up to project-nebula size because of all the cascading dependencies involved: I seem to have mislaid the key to the shed, which is where I wanted to move the firewood that’s stacked in the garage; and the furniture is going to be purchased out of our federal tax refund, which has not yet been routed to the bank account; and the walls can’t be painted until they’re primed, and can’t be primed until the floor moldings and ceiling corners are taped, and can’t be taped &c. (I’m actually not sure where that last &c. goes. Maybe that’s the entrance point I need to focus on.) For a while the GTNHIO Project was going full swing, but it inevitably tapered off and became more of a “well, when I have a free moment” thing and now it seems free moments are so rare that a more aggressive approach is called for. Which, you know, fair enough.

But still, all work and no play and all that. The really rueful aspect is the extent to which I’ve begun organizing my leisuretime activities into capital-P Projects of varying scopes. Allow me to overshare:

Thursday is the big tv night in my house, as I’ve detailed on more than one occasion. However, the tv season for those shows officially ends on May 20, and since my wife and I have been such devoted followers this year we really have no reason to sit through the summer re-runs. But we have a plan! Oddly enough, it mainly involves … um … watching re-runs? Kind of, sort of, in the sense that we will be watching episodes of two tv shows that have all aired before and are now preserved forever on DVD. Also, we’ve seen every episode of one of the shows before.


When my wife and I started dating we watched every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in order on DVD; she had seen most of them before on tv, whereas I had never jumped on the broadcast incarnation of the show, but she thought they were worth re-watching and she knew I would love the show (and she was right). So now we’ve both seen the whole seven-season epic but I am as interested in re-watching every episode as my wife was five years ago, especially since I remember how much she enjoyed picking up the recurring motifs and foreshadowing and whatnot on her secondary viewings. Additionally, when we watched BTVS the first time we made a half-hearted effort to also watch the Angel spin-off, but quickly faltered. By the time the completist uber-geek in me was regretting not having full crossover knowledge of the Angelverse as it impacted the BTVS series finale, it was of course too late to rectify. Until now! Hence the Buffy/Angel Project. Starting on May 27, Thursday nights will be Thurs-slay nights! Amirite? Guys? Ahem. Given that an average episode is about 44 minutes long, we should be able to get in two or three per week between the little guy’s bedtime and our own. So for starters that will mean back-to-back-to-back Buffy, but once we hit season 4 we will alternate episodes of Buffy and Angel to watch them more or less concurrently like the network showrunners intended. The only flaw in this plan is that even if we cram in three episodes every single Thursday, we will be nowhere near done with the project by the new fall tv season. I’m not quite sure what we will do at that point, whether the Buffy/Angel Project will go on hiatus, or move to a different night of the week, or what, but that is the kind of far-off logistical challenge that does absolutely nothing to diminish my faintly ridiculous excitement for the Project itself.

And that really gets at the heart of the whole thing, I suppose. Part of my brain thinks that it’s weird to have a regimented structure for recreational DVD-viewing that involves working through a massive pile of hundreds of episodes of tv in very specific order. But most of my brain thinks it’s AWESOME. This is not something I’m doing because I feel guilty about not having done it already or because I’m tired of being left out when other people talk about it (though I can of course think of many Projects past and future which probably would be well described in those terms), it’s something I want to do, period (except to add: so much so that I’m willing to put in the mental effort of planning around it and implementing said plan and not just letting it rot in the bin of “oh, one of these days that would be cool …” Also so much so that I bought the mega box set of every BTVS episode ever, but in my defense I bought it at Costco where it was approximately 67% off the usual retail price.)

But I believe I mentioned that the Buffy/Angel project was only one of many which currently loom large over my mental landscape? Perhaps I will detail the others later on this week. I’m pretty sure by Friday I can have everyone wondering how I even manage a passable imitation of normal functioning human being.

And the livin' is easy

I did in fact make it to my blood draw on Friday afternoon more or less on time (really ten minutes late, not because I failed to leave the office on schedule but because I spent several minutes driving slowly around the small office park where I assumed the lab would be before cruising along the adjacent strip mall and discovering the lab was, in fact, situated between a dry cleaner and a Quizno’s) and afterwards found myself with about an hour and a half to dispose of before picking the little guy up from day care. I could have picked him up early, but then he would have missed his scheduled singing/dancing/cooperation reinforcing as well as his late afternoon snack, and one of the more prominent lessons of the past twenty months has been that he really is at his best when his days are predictably on-pattern. I also could have gone home and kicked back on the couch for ninety minutes, but that seemed like more trouble than it was worth. The new dog, still somewhat accident-prone, gets crated when no one is home and if I stopped at the house only to leave again shortly thereafter, I would be forced to tease the dog with a brief furlough before tossing him back in the doggie clink, so it struck me as less cruel to simply let him out once and for good when I got home post daycare pick-up. All of which is a long way of saying that’s how I found myself at the used bookstore on a Friday afternoon.

I had been driving around with a box of old CD’s in my trunk that I intended to sell, and I managed to accomplish that objective and picked up a half-dozen books for myself as well. All six books, unsurprisingly, are sci-fi/fantasy genre ghettotastic fare. Those kind of books tend to be printed as cheap paperbacks to begin with, and therefore people are probably more likely to sell those to a used book store than to hold on to them for any reason (from sentimentalism to shelf-dressing), not to mention that the used book stores in turn know they can’t really re-sell cheap genre paperbacks for more than a buck or two, so if that’s what you load up on you get more bang for your buck, and of course I revel in the pleasures of cheap genre fiction so I tend to think of used book stores as SF/F Emporiums anyway … as I said, unsurprising.

Stocking up on pocket-sized paperbacks promising overwrought pulpy goodness generally makes me feel like I’m going to the beach, because those are the perfect reading material for time whiled away on a blanket under the sun. (Or, again, so I tell myself because that’s my own personal preference and viewpoint-validating experience.) We do have a family beach trip planned for the end of the season, but if I’m already stocking up reading materials for it then the season must be starting, right?

Summer is without a doubt my favorite season of the year so I’m happy to define it as being over four months long, from May 1 until Labor Day or so. Setting aside obvious actual sidereal considerations like the solstice and whatnot, a more mainstream opinion might hold that summer begins around Memorial Day, but I have found that date steadily creeping earlier and earlier for me. The college years, and the end of the semester and completion of finals by the first or second week of May did a lot to unseat Memorial Day for me, and the ad campaigns from our friends at Corona and Dos Equis have pushed Cinco de Mayo out in front in terms of warm-weather holidays, too. Might as well round it off and say that if summer starts sometime (any time) in May, then when May starts, summer does too.

And in fact we found ourselves hopping this past weekend from a birthday party to a pig roast to an actual Cinco de Mayo celebration, and the weather was obligingly summery (which in Virginia means warm and humid, oh goodness yes was it humid) and the ice cream van managed to serendipitously show up at the pig roast. I also mowed the entire lawn on Saturday, including the entirely-too-steep-for-safety-but-what-can-you-do side yard. And my dear wife, alarmed by my blog-kvetching about the dearth of new music in my orbit, made sure that the satellite radio was tuned to the new alt-rock station at every available moment (defined as moments when we weren’t trying to catch the scores of what ended up being an O’s sweep of the Red Sox, to which I add: BWAAHAHAHAHA!)

So, just to serve general notice, as far as I (and therefore this here blog) care to consider it, summer has officially arrived. Dress accordingly.