The Aerie
My friends and family, who care about me very deeply, frequently express concern with my lifestyle and stress levels. "Take a break," they tell me, "have some fun." So here I am again in Ann Arbor, Michigan for the U-Con Gaming conference, which has inexplicably become the focus of my roleplaying acquaintances' annual hajj.
But in order to get here, in order to "take a break," and "have some fun," I had to just about kill myself. It's hard for me to have fun on a vacation because I could get the bends if I tried to decompress too quickly. Let's take a look at the last week, a typical week in my life...
FRIDAY
Let's start with last weekend, which is about as far back as my memory extends. Take for granted that last week was a "normal" week: I billed 40 hours of time, and spent most evenings engaged in some kind of activity that kept me out of the house.
On Friday afternoon I approached the weekend with ridiculous expectations: namely that in the face of my youngest's 10th birthday party on Sunday, I might nonetheless get some of my own stuff done.
Silly, silly old man.
Friday evening my spouse and I sat down and listed everything that I needed to do before the party. If I got my part of the family chores accomplished, I understood that what time remained would be my own. Sweep and mop the kitchen, clean the bathroom, make and decorate the birthday cake. No problem, thought I. I would do some of the cleaning immediately, Friday night, and the rest on Saturday morning, leaving Saturday afternoon free and clear. Then I passed out at 8:00 p.m. and woke up 11 hours later.
SATURDAY
Cleaning, cleaning, chores, cleaning and chores. Collapsed in front of Saturday Night Live, I think, but I can't clearly remember.
SUNDAY
The our families arrived at 4:00 on Sunday afternoon, and were greeted by the wasted apparition that had once been me. In addition to my stated duties, I had washed a mattress, beaten rugs, vacuumed the living room, shopped for groceries, etcetera, etcetera. I was wiped. You could have knocked me over with a dirty look, and I would out of habit have tried to clean it before hitting the floor.
I summoned up what good spirits I could and made my way through the party to its frosting-covered conclusion, at which time our friend Debbie absconded with my wife to see a showing of "Ray." In their absence I decided to watch two videos due back the next day, re-visiting the grandfather of "The Matrix," "Dark City" (of which I remembered little) and watching Frida. I thought Salma Hayek portrayed the iconoclastic Mexican painter with great emotive skill and thespian artistry, and a delightful lack of clothing.
Between movies I finished cleaning up from the party, putting the kids to bed, and watching the end of "Frida" with my wife, who returned from "Ray" and fell sleep on the living room couch. I finally hit the sack about 12:30 a.m., exhausted.
MONDAY
Monday I got to work at 7:00 a.m. because I had a noon report due. I planned to leave at 3:00 but was trapped at work until 4:00. In a happy development, my book "Mitlanyal" was back from the printers two days early. I drove from work to pick up my copies of the book and have a beer with my publisher, then went home for dinner. I think I managed to get a toe in the water on my UK project, and got a decent night's sleep.
TUESDAY
Tuesday I was in at 7:00 a.m. again, to prep for an overnight implementation job that I wanted to be successful, and also because I had to leave work early. At 3:30 I met my family at the Children's Theater to see my dear daughter in a marvelous little play that she and her colleagues wrote as part of her CTC class. It was a delightfully subversive play called "Jericho and the Land of Lies." It featured a tyrannical "King George" who forced everyone to speak in opposite terms, and renamed muffins "pencils," until overthrown by the populace and his own disaffected advisors. Hopefully my pride and pleasure managed to shine through the cloud of stress and tension hovering about me.
Following her play the family made a quick visit to Famous Dave's for a dinner of greasy mutilated pre-cooked cow- and pig-flesh, and then returned to the CTC where by coincidence we had tickets for that evening's performance of "Frog and Toad." A marvelous confection which I would have enjoyed more if I hadn't been watching the clock with one eye, because I was due back at work to start the overnight implementation at 9:00 p.m.
The play finished just in time, and I parted with my family in the lobby and drove back to work, arrving at 8:58.
WEDNESDAY
Despite my preparations, the implementation was not successful, meaning I worked from 9:00 p.m. until 3:30 a.m. and got to bed at 4:30 a.m. feeling frustrated and stressed. I got back to work at noon, and spent the afternoon desperately trying to figure out what was wrong with the prior two attempts to implement the project.
Unfortunately I had Writing Group on Wednesday night. While I was happy to have the group over, especially to show off my books, I was distracted and tense about the final attempt to implement the change. I was scheduled to leave the next morning at 5:30 a.m., and had hoped to get a good night's sleep. At 8:55 p.m. I excused myself from writing group and went to the basement, where I phoned into the conference call and logged in remotely to try once again to implement the project.
Remote implementation was risky because it would be very slow and cumbersome - if stuff went awry, I would have to drive in to work. Since I was slated to leave on my trip at 5:30 a.m., driving downtown would trim precious minutes off my sleep schedule.
When the time came to implement the project, everything went suspiciously well. By 10:30 I had made the necessary changes, and preliminary tests showed they worked.
Then I got the cell-phone call from the disgruntled system administrator of a totally unrelated business unit. Apparently during the Tuesday night implementation attempt, something that they needed had gotten stomped. Since I'd broken a working system, I was obligated to fix it.
Cell phone signal in my basement office is weak enough that I have to put the cell in the transom window and sit hunched forward in order for the headset cable to reach my ears. My main implementation was already occupying my home phone line. So at one point I sat there with a phone on each ear, trying to modify two things at the same time. Stress? What stress?
Fortunately my project lead chose that moment to log in and check my status, and I gratefully accepted his offer to fix the thing I'd broken Tuesday night. By 11:30 he'd fixed it, and one worry was put aside.
THURSDAY
But now another reared its ugly head - despite initial good results, my main implementation was having problems. The "expert" who was supposed to test the changes, a fellow who brough a quiet voice and a thick Italian accent to the scratchy conference call, couldn't get his program to work. As far as I could tell, everything that I was responsible for was functioning, and the problems were due to his own incompetence. But that same incompentence prevented him from recognizing the situation and letting me go, so I was obliged to sit and wait while he brought in a tech support consultant from England.
A two-hour wait ensued, during which I had to remain available for the moment the tech support guy arrived.
This jolly fellow logged in, looked around, and then said, "Oh, sorry, my shift is up and I'm off for home, so I'll hand you off to someone else." And back into the waiting queue we went.
Now, during these hours I was not idle, but neither was I sleeping. I washed laundry for my trip and dried it, packed my bags in a desultory, sleep-addled fashion, and watched a truly awful episode of Farscape Season 1. (I've been assured that subsequent seasons and episodes improve dramatically - meanwhile I'm learning to appreciate the statuesque blue Virginia Hey.)
Finally at 3:00 a.m. the second tech support consultant logged in, corrected the Italian fellow's misconfiguration, and my implementation was acknowledged a success.
VACATION!
After some consideration over the merits of sleeping versus remaining awake, I decided to grab what shuteye that I could. Two hours later I was up, taking a bleary shower, and an hour later I was on the road for Michigan.
My voluntary turn at the wheel took us from Rockford to the Michigan border, and I slept much of the rest of the time. We arrived at dinnertime, and had a nice long sit-and-chat at the nearby Bennigan's. Finally we retired to the motel and here I finally am.
I'm so tired I'm twitching. The hands on my internal clock are bobbing uselessly at the end of long springs jutting out its face. And anyone who actually read all the way down to here seriously needs more to do with their life.
FRIDAY 1:00 A.M.
But that's the story. That's how I got 40 hours of billable work done in three days, and why I am here in Ann Arbor, exhausted, tense, ringing with fatigue, insomniac, and ready to attempt to calm down and enjoy myself for the weekend. To do so I will have to put aside my displeasure at missing my son's actually birth-date (this Sunday), missing my family, and missing out on the annual Calhoun Square Coffee Festival once again. But on the upside I will have my books to console me, and of course the adoration of the scores of role-playing-game-supplement groupies sure to throng around me when I arrive.
I gotta get some sleep. Then I gotta have some fun. That's going to be a lotta work.
Ha! Take that, spamming scum!
For weeks now the problem of automated comment spam has been getting worse and worse. Since I'm planning on replacing this whole system soon with a new one, I was reluctant to spend a lot of time messing with this one, particularly since I never have any time anyway.
However, the recent addition of one hundred spam comments in a single hour told me that I was going to have to take steps. Fortunately I had already located Jay Allen's excellent MT addon, I just had to steal the time from other projects in order to install it. So housecleaning waited an extra hour while I downloaded it and distributed its files appropriately.
When I was done, 111 comments had been deleted, and all of 19 remained...
IN YOUR FACE, LOUSY COMMENT-SPAMMERS!
(Now if only I could get over the suspicion that my system has been rootkitted... )
I was surprised that the wasp's nest was already vacant. For the past several weeks I've been pitching twigs at it from a great distance, trying to confirm that no winged sentinels waited to swarm on trespassers, but my intent was halfhearted and my aim never quite true. From the distance of the sidewalk I could manage to hit near the great gray football lodged beneath the eaves, but never quite on target. None of my throws, however close they came, elicited a response.
But what do I know about wasps? Not much. So I kept my distance, mindful of that day several years ago when my spouse came running into the kitchen, hornets clutching her like tiny, vicious infants that wanted nursing. If I recall correctly there were nearly 20 hornets on or about her person, and nearly 40 total that got into the house with her.
Earlier this summer I had used the long handle of the roof-rake to poke the softball-sized nest from a distance, knocking most of it loose. I wasn't stung, but that was only luck - one angry wasp instantly bulleted out of the nest to ricochet off my forehead, and I practically teleported into the back yard.
Now with the nest so much larger, I was taking no chances. However I was pretty convinced that it was empty, and from a somewhat nearer distance I managed to strike it with a small stone. No reaction.
Taking an old spatula I carefully scraped the nest out of the corner under the eaves and into a paper bag. It was quite fascinating - layer after layer of subtly-colored paper, gray and pale yellow and light blue. In the middle were the combs, like five small sunflower-heads, each hanging one from the other. Kind of amazing that wasps invented paper several million years before people did, and yet over all those years they managed not to clearcut the forests.
I left the hornet's nest for the kids to inspect, and went to clean off the siding. The nest had left a fingerprint of paper rings where it had adhered, which I scrubbed clean with soapy water.
Then it was on to the winter preparations. The weather was fine, sunny and not too warm, but not cool at all - hardly November weather. Many of the neighbors were out, cleaning gutters as I was, raking leaves as were my kids, or cleaning the garage just as was my spouse. It was such a nice day that slopping out the gutter mud was not as onerous a task as it could have been, as it has been in ears past. Icy cold mudwater and freezing winds make the chore miserable many years, but this time the work went quickly. I even re-mounted most of the heating coils that we use to prevent ice dams, coils which over the years have become dislodged by snow and rain.
By the time I finished, the family had finished much of the rest of the yard work. I looked on, satisfied. Years ago when the twins were born I had said, "Ten more years and I'll never have to mow the lawn again!" And thirteen years later, it's true! I don't have to mow, I don't have to rake, and this year I barely had to help clean the garage.
I love it when a plan comes together.
Hive removed, gutters cleaned, heating coils in place and the van parked in the garage for the first time in months, we're as ready as we can be for whatever winter might hurl our way. Global warming seems to be making our winters much more mild, but you never know - climate change leads to greater extremes, not a gentle overall increase. One of these days we could get another blast of bone-chilling cold like we haven't seen in years, or snow like the blizzards of 1991.
Those blizzards I shoveled out myself while the wife tended the infants. Nowadays I'd have company: two strapping thirteen year olds, my son in particular becoming tall, broad shouldered and powerful. He hung bikes in the garage today, not because he was asked to, just because he saw it needed doing and he realized that he could. I remember holding his body in one hand, pulling a teacup-sized stocking cap onto his preemie head through the sides of the incubator.
It's hard to contain oneself at times like that. It's hard not to shout for joy or start singing for sheer pleasure. This has to be one of the incommunicable secrets of parenthood, one of the things that cannot be explained but must be experienced. You can't TELL someone what it feels like to see the boy become a young man, to watch the squalling infant become a girl who turns up her nose at the notion of a high school that separates the concepts of computer technology and art.
When you're a kid the big secret seems to be sex - everyone's always talking about it, and it seems like it's supposed to be some great phenomenal thing for adults. But even the best sexual experience you ever had doesn't redeem your whole life the way watching your kids bloom does. If sex is the secret everyone talks about, it's also the most underwhelming. Most people's first time seems to end with "Is that it?" But parenthood, that's the secret nobody talks about, and the most overwhelming. It takes some practice, too - certainly when you've got a sqalling, pooping, puking infant on your shoulder, the same phrase comes to mind, "Is that it?"
It's not. It just keeps getting better and better from there. And then one day you're cleaning the yard for the winter, and your son casually hefts a bicycle onto its hook with a swiftness that makes your back twinge, and you realize that you're being replaced in the hierarchy of capable creatures, and it's alright, and it's more than alright, it's great, and it's right, and it's proper, and it really does kind of say that everything you've done, and every mistake, and every choice, and every effort you've exerted to get here, they were all right. They were all proper. They were all okay. They had meaning, because they brought you to this place, where youth becomes beauty and a chore becomes an opportunity to witness such a marvelous, humbling thing.
Disgruntled Democrats have been passing around links to the Daily Mirror cover article regarding the re-election of President Bush, and some people, particularly Boston Globe columnist Hiawatha Bray
, have had enough of it.
In a message to those who opposed Bush's re-election, Bray said, "So suck it up, you guys. You lost...I know some victorious Republicans are gloating. Ignore them. Their day will come, as it does for all of us. So relax. Rent a video. Go to a movie. Play with your kids. This too will pass away."
I found his attitude a bit more patronizing than conciliatory, and felt I had to reply.
Mr. Bray,
The fact that you can not fathom our despair or that of our neighbors overseas illustrates part, but just a part, of what's wrong with this country.
We progressives are not depressed because we lost an ELECTION, we are depressed because we seem to be losing the American Dream. I realize that from YOUR point of view the American Dream has been secured, but from our point of view the American Dream has been perverted and you have been sold a bill of goods. You may not all be "dumb," but you sure seem to be deliberately blind to some things.
Get over it? Suck it up? Yes, I suppose we should, and I suppose we will. But for how long? I will try to avoid the litany of complaints that progressives have with this Administration - I'm sure you've heard them all before and have ready rebuttals at hand. Suffice to say that progressives of all stripes are concerned that by the time we "suck up" four more years of this Administration, it will so damage this nation that repairs may be impossible. Some wounds heal, some leave permanent scars, others kill.
Progressives believe that this Administration is vandalizing this nation, and that the 59 million people who voted for President Bush are in denial about that for various reasons ranging from fear of terrorism to a desire to respect the office of the President during war.
My friend James Lileks, one of your conservative bloggers, likes to point to the rights that we retain as evidence that our rights are not being eroded. By his logic, one shouldn't worry about the boot until it is actually planted in one's face. Telling us to 'suck it up' seems like a similar argument: yes, conservatism will inevitably wane, but will it take the American dream with it? Those of us concerned with civil liberties, the environment, public education, public discourse, freedom of speech and faith, and the rights of oppressed groups fear that what eventually replaces waning conservatism may not be waxing liberalism, but simple fascism.
So I'll tell you what - I'll try "sucking it up" if you'll try, just try, to look critically at this Administration and at the things it's doing that harm our nation. And if you can't do that - if you can't find any validity in any of the litany of complaints levelled against the Bush Administration by your progressive brethren - then you might want to ask yourself if you're seeing clearly.
Because if 59 million of you can't be dumb, than neither can 55 million of us.