Category: The World

Temporarily Single Dad

SilentBen2 Comments

For the past 5 days, I’ve been Mr. Mom.  My wife went away to a blogging conference in Asheville, NC and left me in charge of managing our 2 kids.  Being actively involved with my kids on a regular basis, this was not a daunting task, per se.  The hard part was not paying attention to work for that period of time – especially since my shine, new iPhone would chirp every few minutes telling me I have some new email to read.  But eventually I turned off that notification and got to the serious business of responsibly entertaining my posse.

First priority – getting them to school on time.  Grasshopper only just started going to daycare (2 days a week) and already being without his Mommy, he was very reluctant to go (though apparently his tears ended within minutes of Cricket and I leaving him there).  Cricket just started Kindergarten this year and has been loving every minute of it, but with the possibility of being able to stay home and play Lego Star Wars with Daddy she suddenly was on the fence about going as well.  But I got them there, they did there time, and got them safely home (all perfectly according to schedule).  But outside of that, it was play time – we went to the park almost every day, we went to a play place for the better part of one cloudy afternoon, and we spent a fair share of time watching a couple of movies and playing Lego Star Wars.

By the end of the long weekend, I was ready for reinforcements.  I love my kids, but I can only be jumped on so many times before needing to tag out.  I only took advantage of the in-laws once for a break (which I spent cleaning).  And I actually made semi-nutritious meals for them for all but 2 meals (pancakes are good for you, right?).  So all in all I think I did okay.  And today it was back to work … to deal with my other batch of kids.  Maybe I should go to a conference.

P.S. – Mywife (who now has 2 blogs) went to a blogging conference, but didn’t post anything the entire time.  Ironic.

Applefication – Part Deux

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The teeth are in the flesh. The poison is coursing through my veins. I’m hoping this will act as a vaccination – an exposure I can coast through and move on – rather than a first step towards the downward spiral of the disease. I’ve taken on at least one stripe of the Apple (two if you count iTunes).

You see, this week I traded in my company-issue BlackBerry for an iPhone. As I write this, its glossy touch screen is giving me its come-hither look, occasionally shivering with the arrival of new emails (a definitively more feminine form of vibration than the BlackBerry ever seemed to give off). I’m doing my best not to invest more into it than necessary. Sure I’ve downloaded my iTunes music library into it as well as all of the Ask a Ninja podcasts I have yet to watch. And I’ll admit that I’ve acquired a good number of apps to help me with various things such as finding restaurants, keeping up with Facebook, listening to Pandora, and watching the various Woot sites. But so far I’ve avoided purchasing anything for it – all my apps are free and the rubber sheath I have was lent to me by a c-worker (thanks, Ray).

But I have to admit, I understand the draw and I will likely get drawn further into it. I already had an unhealthy attachment to my BlackBerry and that barely had anything on it. Now I can access all of the same things, but better, faster and more. So it is inevitable that I will become enthralled and entangled with this device in no time (assuming I haven’t already). The only defense I have in my favor is that it doesn’t seem to have much staying power. While I found myself charging my BlackBerry once every other day, this iPhone needs to be charged at least once a day and occasionally needs a midday boost (it was previously used, so perhaps its battery isn’t what it used to be). That is enough to keep me from being completely enamored with it.

So the conversion that I previously foreshadowed has taken hold. Hopefully I can avoid it spreading deeper. After all, I have a desktop and laptop at home that could stand to be upgraded and those MacBooks and Mac Minis are very tempting … NO! I can resist. I WILL resist. I have no choice (after all, they are pretty damn expensive).

Faded Colors

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I’m going to start off with an analogy regarding birthdays.  As children, birthdays are absolutely great days – days of celebration of a milestone, days of cake and presents and family and friends.  Every child looks forward to celebrating birthdays – their own or even those of people to whom they are close.  But as we grow older what birthdays symbolize changes – they become reminders of our mortality and moments of introspection.  In some cases we may even opt out of celebrating all of them – a choice that may seem unfathomable to our younger selves.  Wow – that analogy went deeper than I expected.  The real topic I want to discuss for which I drew such an analogy is patriotism.

As I was watching the Eagles game the other night, I became aware that at one point in NFL history the Eagles and the Steelers had merged (a team-up informally known as the Steagles).  Upon looking up this event in history, I came to find that this corresponded to World War II and was due to many of the players volunteering to join the service and fight instead of stick around and play games.  Such patriotic actions also greatly impacted baseball – a much more prominently appreciated sport at the time.  And players who couldn’t serve for medical reasons were often looked down upon.  Yet today such uniform patriotism no longer seems prevalent and few are judged as being un-American for not wanting to serve in the armed forces – wartime or not.

Perhaps it was the questionable engagements of the 60’s and 70’s that lead us to our loss of innocence.  Maybe the war games of the 80’s made us more skeptical and cynical regarding our government’s military decision-making.  Surely the recent series of questionable maneuvers have subdued our appetite to join the fray.  But I have doubts that one or several changes in administration will wash away this new mentality.  I think that the American people may have grown up, and the zeal we once had to be all we could be may be, at least as a collective mindset, an experience that is permanently in our past.  We know that struggles will continue and we still have respect for our great nation, but we may never again look forward to taking on the evils of the world in the name of God and country.

This is not to say that American patriotism is dead, but rather that it has evolved.  Much like we grow past the cake and party favors we clung to as children, we are learning that loving our nation isn’t so black and white.  We can show our respect without being compelled to be on the front lines.

Perhaps I’m wrong – perhaps my own cynicism is too deep for me to see the forest through the trees.  Maybe a time WILL come when we, as a nation, will face a struggle that will compels us to a greater unified purpose.  But it isn’t where we are today … which seems perfectly fine to me – hell, I think it makes me love this country even more.

Where Do Bad Folks Go When They Die?…

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I don’t plan to die (at least if I can help it).  Don’t get me wrong – I know that odds are strongly in favor of me eventually kicking the bucket.  But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.  Plus I think science may someday have my back on this one.  This may seem an odd assertion and indeed an odd topic, but it is an issue that came up recently in a conversation of hypotheticals that apparently left my wife wondering at my sanity.

So there was this quiz.  And in this quiz, one of the questions was if you had the choice, how would you die and why.  Giving the matter some thought, I decided that if all other things being equal – my death being unavoidable but having complete control over how it would happen – it might be interesting to indulge my own sense of curiosity in the process.  Sure there are lots of quick and painless ways to die and truly I would be happiest not having to suffer when my time comes, but I felt to choose something so mundane was a disservice to the question at hand.  Thus, I answered that I’d prefer to be beheaded so that I could personally find an answer to the mystery of how long one could remain conscious and cognizant after such an event.  Okay, I’ll admit that it sounds pretty crazy.  But I’m a curious person – I am interested in the mysteries of the universe.

Anyway, death is a strange and touchy subject.  Everyone has their own ideas about what death means and when death is appropriate.  Personally I’ve decided that I’m not a fan of the death penalty but I am a fan of euthanasia.  I figure that if an upstanding citizen is suffering and death is inevitable yet slightly out of reach, a little help is not too much to ask.  But killing a serial rapist is not justice – the punishment doesn’t nearly fit the crime (though some time in the right prisons on the wrong rung of that social ladder might be fitting punishment).  Is that too “an eye for an eye”?  Maybe.

Perhaps it is my beliefs that have me such at odds with common views of death (taking heaven and hell out of the picture certainly can lead to that).  In general I think that we place too much importance on death (or more pointedly on life) – whether our lives have a deeper meaning or not, they are gifts to be cherished or squandered as we each choose.  None of us will every truly get it perfectly right.  I say live and let live or die, make the most of the time we have, and don’t waste our time worrying so much about whose unprovable ideas are most right.  We will all get proven right or wrong in the end … well except me – I’m not planning to die.  There is too much of the world to experience to fit it in a century or less.

Verbal Abuse (and Nounal)

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A colleague of mine has been using his whiteboard to catalog a number of improperly formed turns of phases.  Several are common mistakes (e.g., moot/mute, tack/tact), but others are legitimate faux pas’s (can you pluralize that?).  Here are five of my favorites:

  1. Hedge Case:  This one I have to admit is my own (edge case being the valid phrase referring to scenarios that would happen very infrequently).  In my defense, I think it makes sense on its own – such rare happenstances make up the periphery of the majority (much like a hedge around the yard).  Maybe not.
  2. Defiantly:  Granted this is a real word and has its place … but not as a substitute for the word definitely.  My suspicion is that the co-worker who often uses this in his emails has been getting screwed by his own spell checker.  I think he is likely typing definately which Outlook decidedly thinks is more similar to the topical misnomer than the intended adverb.
  3. Gambit:  Working in a development department, testing is inevitable.  But not matter how many times it comes up, ‘I’ll run it through the whole gamut of test cases’ is never what seems to come out of people’s mouths.
  4. Raft/Rash of Shit:  To be honest, I don’t even know which of these is right – I’ve heard it both ways and I’ve attempted to research it to declare a clear winner, but to know avail.  I cannot find a reliable source and either argument is an equally supportable.
  5. For All Intensive Purposes:  This also is a phrase that I know I’ve used but have since learned otherwise (in case you were not aware, it should be ‘for all intents and purposes’).  But it is hard not to say it the wrong way – it rolls off the tongue more easily and few people fault you for the error.

Feel free to share your favorite misuses of words or phrases.  And for additional fun, check out this old FedEx commercial (this topic always reminds me of this):