Two more things

1) Pamela got back from her scrapbooking retreat tired but happy. And she passed out around 8pm. ZZZzzzzzz.

2) Bella spend a lot of the day out on the front porch with Isaac, Zinsser, and her friend Carly: They had their Littlest Pet Shop animals, a bag of fabric, and a sewing kit, and Bella was making outfits for them. She was sewing capes and coveralls for them. For one, she made a cape and a headband - they called it "The Sweaty Kitty", and had a glass of water they kept dunking her into, to make sure that the headband was properly perspiration drenched.

In the end, there were 7 different animals that were turned into super heroes, including a small skunk with a cape that was 4x the length of her ("Trippy Skunk" was the name given - she uses her long cape to trip bad guys).

Bella, Harry, and Buffy

So ends another great weekend. This time, Pamela was out of town again at a scrapbooking retreat, and it was 3 solid days with the kiddos. We had a wonderful time together. We ate well, we played well, we slept well. We had our block party last night, which was interrupted by two storms and a tornado warning, plus the fire truck was a no-show, but we all had a great time anyway... and the kids were in the moonwalk for a good percentage of the day, and again this morning - they usually come pick it up around 11 the day after, so Sunday AM is a traditional jump fest. And just like last year, the kids got their jumping done and DONE, so that by the time the jumper had to go, everyone was good and ready to see it go, even the kids.

Isaac and I also tossed a football, kicked a soccer ball, and hit some wiffleballs off of a t-ball stand that Grampette gave us. I was doing my best to encourage his sportiness. We also had an epic 45 minute wrassling match which left his energized and me completely exhausted.

Bella and I are reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: I'm reading, she's listening, and we're going through it slowly, recapping frequently to make sure she's getting all of the nuances. She's to the point now where she's starting to come up with her own "guesses" about what might have been in the package Hagrid took from Gringott's. Her current theory: Since Hagrid was kicked out of Hogwarts and doesn't have his own wand anymore, he actually got a Nimbus 2000 WAND and is hoping to train to become a wizard again, and Dumbledore is helping him in secret, which is why it's a secret.

It is fun to go through it slowly - I'm picking up so many details I must have blown past before: Rowling really did lay out so much of this story right in the first few chapters - things she mentions in passing right in the beginning are major plot points later on. Also, I like slowing down at some of the magic moments: At Christmas, one of the wizards decorated a tree by waving his wand and gold bubbles came out and turned into balls on the tree. Bella marveled at that, waving her hand in the air as if conjuring the bubbles herself.

Bella did tell me that there is "some scary stuff" in there, but it's not worrying her or keeping her awake. She wanted me to know that. And also, can I please read just ONE more chapter?

Speaking of chapters: You know I'm watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I just finished Season 5 last night, and I'm quite impressed. 100 episodes, and you really get to know these characters. The stories just keep getting better. And I have to say that there has never been a show that I had so severely misjudged as this one. I really thought it was brainless fluff back when it was on, no matter what Entertainment Weekly was telling me. But dang it, Joss Whedon knew what the heck he was doing. Of course there are off episodes (and some seasons have held together better than others), but as a whole, this story is truly incredible.

There are standalone episodes that I can't get out of my mind - one is "Hush" where sinister visitors to the town steal everyone's voices - 2/3 of the episode is completely without dialogue - just sound effects and music. Then there's "The Body" where the sudden death of a key character is reacted to - and it's not played for shock or learning, just a study of all of the ways the death hits us - how time dilates, how tiny details get focused on... There's "The Zeppo" - in which Xander (a character without any powers at all) has a mini-adventure around the periphery of what may have been the greatest crisis ever to hit the series - a hilarious "outside looking in" episode. Plus just fun stuff like Doppelgangerland where an evil twin is on the loose....

But better has been the continual evolution of the characters - By season 5 nobody is even remotely who they were when the show started, but they all got there in a logical progression.

So here's my take:
Season 1: It's short, it's mostly "thing of the week", and low production values, but it has heart. Buffy fights The Master, who plans apocalypse.
Season 2: Character development kicks into overdrive - you really start caring for everyone... plus a really good mid-season twist to shock you out of your seats.
Season 3: Often referred to as the best of the series - A season long arc about The Mayor and another Slayer, leading to a great climax about the end of high school. Everyone leaves the season totally changed.
Season 4: A tough transitional season - Trying to cover College, plus the Military, it was sort of muddled, but we did get to see Willow start on her epic Arc.
Season 5: Much maligned in fan-dom because it basically added a completely random element into the mix - Buffy starts the season with a little sister nobody had EVER mentioned before, and it's all treated as normal. And yet, it was a 22 episode story that was completely linear with everyone deepening their journeys.

One thing I absolutely loved about Season 5: Everybody's been watching Buffy this whole time, tracking her growth. And yet all through the seasons, Willow has been growing in strength, and by the end of Season 5, it's clear that not only is she stronger than anyone had any idea, she's also got a lot stronger opinions about what should be going on than anyone suspected. This sets up the season 6 story with her as the focus. And it's so cool because Joss and company had been putting these pieces into place for 3 years - little things she's done in the periphery of every story.

I'm probably writing this for nobody but myself, because hey, it's a show that went off the air 8 years ago and most everybody I know treated it the way I did. But if there's someone out there looking for something fun to Netflix, I gotta say it's an absolute blast.

And now I'm going to watch the start of Season 6 before heading to bed. Back to Cleveland tomorrow!

Another great weekend

This weekend it was the annual family reunion up near Madison WI. The family is actually old St Paul, and we do celebrate in the winter as a gang in St Paul, but in the summertime, we cluster around the arm of the family who had the good sense to move away and pursue lakefront property. Three wonderful days of cousins, laughter, swimming, tubing, and a pontoon boat.

Last year somebody brought a water balloon slingshot, and there was a pretty major war. This year, it escalated as the older cousins had it in for one of the uncles (surprisingly not me). And there was a lot of collateral water balloon damage. A guy couldn't catch a nap on a hammock without incoming fire. It got so the napping needed to be indoors.

Isaac is old enough now that he was in full "play" mode from the moment he woke till he shut his eyes. I feel like I barely saw him except for some extended underdog sessions on the rope swing. Bella was also in with the cousins, but was also spending a lot of time on boats - Canoes with Grandma, Paddle Boats with Dad and her cousins, and a lot of time spotting on the speedboat, watching her more daring cousins bounce along on tubes.

I stayed offline for most of the weekend - and left the ipad and kindle behind too. I needed to zone out and veg, and I did. I felt perhaps a bit like a zombie, but sitting out in nature, staring at the sky, feeling my own heartbeat was really good medicine for me. I left the 3 days a very relaxed person.

We left Zinsser with a neighbor who has two other dogs: Zinsser was happy in his pack, but was even happier to see us back. After extended jumpycuddles, he promptly went upstairs and passed out on our bed, happy to be home. It was a nice time with Pamela too, though so much of our time was shared with others... plus the inflatable bed we brought was saggy baggy so we were compressed in it like taco fillings. But it was good, and I liked our wind down time on Sunday night as I readied to go.

So yes, I'm back in Cleveland, and it's a busy week. I'm staffing up for the next phase of the project and am making my way through 40 resumes for 11 positions. Plus I'm starting work on my transition plan... I really really really hope to be done soon, and am dragging my replacement forward. He WILL take over. I don't want to have to pull out the "start dropping the ball so they won't miss me" gambit, but at this point, I'm not above it either.

Of course sometimes I do have fun: In a big meeting today there was a lot of circular talk about a new workflow: Apparently even though they just spent $130m on new software, two departments didn't get the memo and are rapidly putting in two OTHER pieces of software in the hopes that their shiny new tool will be in place as precedent and we'll have to interface our stuff with theirs. So in a room with 50 people, we were all dancing around this little detail until I stood up and laid it out - Is this want you're expecting? Yes? Then let's write that down and get it in front of the sponsors. Ok. Thank you.

So does that sound bold? It really shouldn't. Yet I got several texts immediately afterward applauding my cheek... which is sort of sad because all I was doing was asking the basic questions we need to ask to get this project working... but the politics are just so crazy nobody wants to stir anything up.

Crazy people.

Karaoke Dream

I had a dream last night of the standard "not prepared for something" variety, but the details were pretty good.

I was at a rustic lodge (Ruttger's in name, but actually closer to a Y Camp I went to as a kid), and was led by a friend to a stage in the middle of the room: Could I run the Karaoke night for everybody? I'm techie, right? Sure, no problem I said.

The moment I step on stage, people are cheering, excited to get started with Karaoke night! I grab a mic and say "we'll get under way in just a minute". I survey the stage:

Speakers are set up. Mic is available. But the Karaoke unit is on a rolling cart next to the stage and isn't plugged in. I start looking at it and realize on my gosh, it's based on un labeled cassette tapes? And there's no master list? We're just supposed to put in a tape and go? I look around the back and find that the tape unit isn't even plugged into the master unit.

But around back, I find a shoebox filled with CDs - AH, this must be it. But these CDs aren't labeled either... and all of the songs are written on a roll of cash register tape in faded pencil. In cursive. I'm scrolling through this list, and the song names aren't legible, and the very act of reading it is smudging them further. I turn around, and the room is full of annoyed people who just want to Karaoke DAMN IT.

I was very happy to have the alarm go off and spare me further.

Wistful

Yesterday we were cleaning up the house a bit and I went to the iMac to find some music. Scrolling down the list, I found "Missing" by Everything but the Girl - this was their breakout house hit that transformed them from a moody acoustic guitar outfit to a drum and bass experimental duo - Listening to their work from the mid 1980s, and this electronic rebirth in the mid 1990s was something incredible back then.

So I queued up Missing, along with their Walking Wounded album and got cleaning. And a few songs into it, I slowed down and just stopped moving. I started listening to the words, and they are all very sad and about longing - breakup songs, being hurt by someone songs... and yes, I always knew that they were that way - the album is called Walking Wounded for crying out loud. But then it hit me.

This was an album that I listened to a whole lot with Mark Loesch. We both discovered it around the same time in 1996/97, and it was playing in the car when we would drive, and it would be in the cd changer whenever we had an evening together. Listening to this music made me remember evenings at Mark's new house, having wine or martinis, just the four of us (Pamela and Samantha too) with his kids asleep in upstairs, and Isaac and Bella not even ideas yet (come to think of it - Isaac's birthmom must have been as old as Bella is now when we were sitting in that living room in 1997... strange to think of).

The combination of those lyrics of loss with the memory of sharing that music with a man who I still miss every day was a bit too much for me, and I had to turn it off. But the songs still play through my head - "I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain".

It's MAGIC!

The other day, the kids did an amazing magic trick with the help of a very patient Zinsser the schnoodle.

The set up: Zinsser's kennel in the middle of the floor. Zinsser in the kennel sitting patiently. Bella and Isaac drape a blanket over the kennel, and then tell me to go into the other room "for a minute".

2 minutes later and a whole lot of scuffling noise... I'm invited back into the room. The kennel is still there with blanket over it, and bella pulls off the blanket with a flourish - TA DA!!! NO DOG INSIDE! She puts the blanket back on, and tells me to go back into the other room for another minute.

Again with the scuffling noises... And TA DA!!! She removes the blanket and Zinsser is sitting there, just like before.

What's amazing about this is that Zinsser really didn't make any fuss during this - I never heard HIM in the process. He's a good magician's assistant.

Some Kid Quotes, plus nightmares.

1) Driving up the block, there's a bright blue Late 1970s-era Pontiac Trans-Am parked. Bella says:
"That car is AWESOME. The Color is AWESOME, and the LOOK of the car is AWESOME".

In case you were wondering, yes, she fell through a time portal. She was supposed to have been born in 1967. She's the hippie kid I never was.

2) Isaac woke us up early Friday morning demanding I crack open the container of powdered sugar donut holes. I gave him one and went back to sleep... an hour later I was up and making breakfast for real and asked Isaac if he wanted another donut hole. He said "No thanks, but they sure are tasty!"

3) Night of horror: Friday afternoon, Isaac was looking a little pale and said his stomach hurt a little. He still had dinner, but by 6pm, he had crawled into Pamela's arms for a cuddle and passed out cold. We put him up into bed. Around 11, when we went to bed ourselves, we changed his pull-up (still refusing the potty, that goat). At 1, he climbed into our bed, and by 1:15 I had been pushed out, so I went to his bed, and lay down.... in puke. IT WAS HORRIBLE. So I cleaned everything up and checked him out - it was cold and dry in some places, so I suspect it happened around midnight. Anyway, I cleaned it up. And will never forget the horror.

4) After my week away, it was hard to be back in Cleveland, though the new offices are very nice. I have a large office with a door and a window that looks out into trees. It's in a nice neighborhood with walking distance to a Starbucks and a great Mediterranean place too. Plus, our team had been split between two sites, and were all together finally... it felt like things were finally going to get done.

Could this be a turning point for my attitude there? Would I feel better about things?

Alas, no. Being out of our depressing place in the bad part of town, I could no longer distract myself with that misery... and the full focus of just how messed up the environment and project are came into sharper focus. I gotta get out of Cleveland.

As I was telling Pamela about all of this, she threw up her hands - "Why are you being so nice to them about your transition plan? They're messing everything up! You shouldn't feel ANY guilt about wanting out". That is so true. My wife is wise. Also, she's rightfully weary of me not being happy. I'm a much happier person than this.

That's the update for right now.... more later!

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