There’s really no reason why the typical portrayal of technology by television shows should be any more accurate than portrayals of, say, relationships, house renovation, or wilderness survival. Still, I always get a kick out of the funny things I see.
Like last night. Thanks to our HDTV set and its internal ClearQAM tuner, we sometimes get (free) unencrypted television signals from HBO, Starz, Showtime, and some channel that broadcasts lots and lots of hard core porn. So we’re sitting in front of the set, taking in an episode of Tell Me You Love Me, when one of the wives in the show goes to the family computer and tries to look up her husband’s browsing history. To her relief, she doesn’t find the midget porn URLs she was dreading she’d find.
The idea in the lead-in to this scene is that the woman had no idea she could check up on her husband this way. So of course it’s even further beyond her understanding that her husband could simply be dumping his browser cache after every surfing session. A narrative quibble, perhaps, but the scene did make me look at this character in a different light.
I pointed out to Leah that the couple should simply make different user accounts. I could tell she wasn’t keen on hearing my suggestions for technical continuity, but I felt I had to comment. Don’t even get me started on Law & Order: SVU….
The instructions for my WordPress software upgrade suggest that I write a post about the upgrade after I’m done. Well, I did the upgrade last night, and all seems well. I think I might come to love the tags support.
This morning Ava was pretending to be a baby elephant. She got a Babar book at the library the other day, and I think it’s gone to her head. She walked around making tiny little elephant noises and hiding from me when I pretended to be a hungry lion.
And speaking of Babar, have you ever read the original book in that series? Sheesh. It’s a real downer at the beginning. If you can somehow manage to get past the part where Babar’s mother is gunned down by a hunter, the rest of the story isn’t so bad. All the other Babar books I’ve seen have been quite uplifting, as if they’re trying to make up for that first book.
When Ava and I were first waking up this morning, and she was deciding to be a baby elephant, she told me that her daddy elephant was dead. Then she reconsidered and asserted instead that he was actually lost, but that he was going to be back. I’m not sure if she’ll still be an elephant when Leah and G.G. pick her up from daycare this afternoon. Probably not.
This past Saturday we attended the long-awaited Ralph’s World concert at Englert Theater here in Iowa City. It was a lot of fun. In the middle of the first tune, Ava declared she wanted to go back to the car. Leah and I were a bit taken aback, but by the third song, all the kids in the audience had come to the front of the seating area to jump and dance, and Ava was right there in the mix (with her monkey Butterfly in tow). By the end of the show, she was up on stage with the band (and a hundred or so kids and parents). So, she came around.
It seems like I should make some note of the amazing changes lately in the online music world, since I enjoy music, and particularly music that I can research and buy without prying my big arse off the sofa.
Amazon.com recently announced the beta of their online music download store, which offers a million or so songs with no DRM. That last bit is the important part. I’ve not been a buyer at Apple’s online store, which itself added some DRM-free tracks from select companies a couple months ago. Then, this week, Microsoft *blink, blink* announces that it’s going to start selling DRM-free music, too, for all those lucky Zune owners out there.
I know there have been places out there that’ve been selling DRM-free music for years now. But Amazon and MSFT coming around marks a real change in the landscape, I think. If not a death knell for the traditional music industry, at least a serious illness knell (but then we all know the music industry has been seriously ill for decades, in one way or another).
Ava knows what CDs are, but I doubt she’ll ever buy one. I certainly won’t encourage her to buy any. In the time it takes to rip the layers of plastic wrap off a new disc, she could be halfway through listening to whatever album she’s interested in. Then again, maybe she won’t be interested in music at all. Man, that would be sad.
So I may have mentioned we’re going to Mexico at the end of the year. Leah’s parents are generously footing the bill. I haven’t given the trip much thought (the day-to-day mental challenges of raising a kid have a way of blocking out everything else), but I decided today that I’m going to try to pack as little as I possibly can for the trip. For a couple reasons. First, Leah will pack a lot. And Ava’s coming along, so she’ll need a few things, too. Second, I don’t need a lot of stuff. One pair of shorts. A t-shirt for each day. Underwear (still undecided). Toothbrush, toothpaste, and floss. Pair of walking shoes. Flip flops. Maybe a pair of socks. I don’t think I’ll bring my laptop this time, but I will bring my new camera, my old A620, and a smallish camera bag. I think there’s a very real chance I can get all this into my backpack. Or maybe I’ll check the backpack and carry on my camera bag. Can I carry on my camera bag? I guess I’d better look into that.
Hopefully there won’t be any hurricanes or other inclement weather while we’re there.
*I’m dying to see if anyone knows which Univision show theme this line is from. Hint: The woman who performed it has the same last name as a cigar-smoking dictator.
I’ve been taking lots of pictures the last couple days. My Flickr photostream is flowing pretty fast. I love running around and capturing as many different images of the same scene as I can. What did people do before the advent of CF cards? I remember flipping through the envelopes of photos my grandmother would bring with her when she came to visit us. She was big into photography. Well, she liked to take pictures, at least. I wish she were still around to experience this digital photography stuff. Man, she would’ve loved it.
We had some nasty weather blow through our area last night just as Ava was getting ready for bed. All the excitement was pretty much over by 7:45 or so, and as the storm system was leaving the area, the sky was patchy with these soft orange clouds that were really, really moving quickly across the backdrop of the starry sky. We all rushed out to the front lawn to watch, and I held Ava as she pointed out the stars she could see. It was a nice moment, but not one well-suited to catching on “film.”
I also brought home a habanero pepper from work yesterday. Someone had brought in a whole bowl full and put them out for the taking in the coffee room. My only intention was to photograph it, as its color was really striking. It never occurred to me at the time I grabbed it that it would look so cool up against the orange walls in the kitchen.
Meredith Willson would’ve been proud. Between the UI’s homecoming parade on Friday night and the high school marching band competition that took place one block from our house on Saturday, Ava had her fill of drums, tubas, and flutes over the weekend. What’s more, the girls in the flag corps gave me a great opportunity to test out the 75-300 lens I borrowed from my neighbor.
Ava danced around on the school lawn while I took photographs. It was a gorgeous day to be out, but it was windy, and the gusts were really giving the flag girls a hard time. The flags would go up all right, but where they’d come down was anyone’s guess. I don’t know how this came out during the competition; maybe the wind wasn’t as strong down in the football stadium.
We were all getting ready to go this morning when Ava went into the bathroom and asked for some privacy (as she always does when there’s a #2 on deck). After a couple minutes I peeked in to see how she was doing, and she was standing next to the toilet, peering into the bowl. As I walked up to see if she needed help wiping, I glanced down and noticed an unbelievably large turd dump floating just under the surface of the water. “Holy cow!” I exclaimed. “Mom, come take a look at this!” Leah came down the hall and into the bathroom, where she uttered similar exclamations. Ava picked up on our reactions, and she said (in her overly-loud excited voice), “It has a tail, and a head like a snake. It’s a poop snake!” Whatever works for ya, kid.
Ava and I walked up the the nearby high school last evening to play with her ball. I used the opportunity to get some shots with the 75-300mm lens my friend Q loaned me. It’s a beauty. Not only did we have fun tossing the ball around, but I got some cool pictures, too.
Here, she’s throwing her ball up over her head. I like how her body is completely off the ground. Sure, the picture could be in focus and a bit brighter, but sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.
Leah called at noon today and got the results of our recent tests. Drum roll, please….
Leah’s blood work came back all normal. So that’s good. Most of my sperm analysis came back fine. My pH was a little high. Normal range tops out at 8, and I was an 8.2. Always overachieving. Doc doesn’t think that’s any problem. Sperm count was good. I had 134 million sperm/milliliter, and normal is 20 million and over. The kicker: My “morphology” was not good. I.e., only 8% of the sperm in my sample had a normal shape. Quick online search reveals possible causes, which include varicocele (abnormal enlargement of the veins in the scrotum draining the testicles), drugs, heat, infrequent ejaculation, infection, and smoking. A fast assessment of my current lifestyle whittles those suspects down a bit. I don’t have any idea about the varicocele, and the drugs, infection, and smoking are out. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Ava was conceived in December? The heat thing can be addressed, and Leah’s already offered a hand in the infrequency matter. According to the doctor, morphology is subject to change over time, so a subsequent test could come back normal (or at least more normal). I guess Leah didn’t think to ask what would happen if one of these abnormal sperm managed to run the gauntlet and impregnate her.
I’m sure I’d be not so cavalier about all this if I couldn’t sit here and think about my beautiful daughter running around in the sunshine right now at daycare (actually, she’d better be napping). We’ll go back in a month to retest my semen, and we’ll keep “trying” in the meantime. Another date with my little brown lover…fantastic. I just knew I’d see her again, somehow, someday.
Here’s “an artist’s” representation of a normal sperm compared to what the vast majority of my sperm look like.
I rarely think about age and getting older. Well, actually, I think all the time about age, thanks to Ava, but I don’t usually sit around in wistful remembrance of my youth. But today I saw something that made me feel old. Meat Loaf is 60. Meat Loaf! It hardly seems possible, but then he wasn’t the youngest star in the world when Paradise by the Dashboard Light was big on the charts. Sixty years old. Man. In honor of the Loaf, I present here a video of his masterwork, one of the seminal performances of the music video age:
This was back when the Loaf was the Loaf. Brother looks like he’s smuggling Oompa Loompas in that pirate shirt of his. And could his singing partner have been any hotter? It’s like she walked onto the stage straight from her victory in the World’s Tightest White Jeans contest.
I wonder often about the physiological changes a person undergoes when they have a child. I’ve noticed that I occasionally get this weird feeling like I’m expressing some unconscious trait that I didn’t know I had. Is it too far out there to think that my body has undergone some of the same — or similar — biochemical changes that Leah’s has? I try to think of myself sometimes as the very end of a long, long line of evolutionary development, only the latest occurrence in an innumerable chain of fathers who’ve come to understand (vaguely) that somewhere deep down in their mitochondria there’s a signal telling them that their child must be protected and nurtured, maybe even at all costs.
What I need is a graph that shows the number of pictures I’ve taken over the last three years. I wonder if it will spike now that I have the new camera. Probably. Just as it did each time I’ve had a new camera. I think Flickr can do something like that. Too bad there’s not an OSX app that’ll count the number of files in a directory and return that information plotted on a graph. I could set it loose on my /Images directory.
I know I’ve already taken a lot more pictures of Ava over the last three days than I have for a long time. And I’ve actually been happy with most of them. Leah always complained that the old camera made Ava’s face look funny or that it wasn’t very clear or sharp. I always dismissed her criticism, but I have to say that the new camera does take some sweet pictures.
Even though this shot isn’t as crisp as it could be, the colors are really nice. It’s a tad overexposed, too, but I like the way it looks. More importantly, Leah likes the way it looks.
I’m waiting to take delivery of a new Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens. Amazon says they’re going to deliver it October 4-10 sometime. Sheesh. That’s what I get for choosing Super Saver shipping. Why, oh why did I ever let my Prime membership lapse?
Thank you, Site5! I would complain about the RAID array failure at my host, which led to a three day outage here at avablog, but I’m piggybacking on my friend Greg’s account, so…. You didn’t miss much, anyway. We’ve been up in Decorah since Friday afternoon for the annual apple cider weekend. This event revolves around the collection and pressing of a couple bushels of apples into apple cider. Ava had a great time, and I got plenty of pictures out at the orchard and around the apple press:
And speaking of pictures, Leah and her family got me a spiff birthday present this year. There was no lens, but I’ve already ordered a simple one from Amazon. Now all I have to do is find a nice macro lens with a little range to it. If anyone has any recommendations…. Kevin’s let me borrow his nice Sigma 50mm EX macro this weekend, and it takes some nice shots. I’m hoping I can rent some lenses I’m interested in buying before I purchase them. And perhaps impose on the generosity of friends who’re already shooting with Canon lenses (or Sigma, or Tamron, or whatever). My first shots with the new rig are up — of course – on Flickr.
I accompanied Leah to an Ob/Gyn appointment yesterday to see if her doctor had any words of advice about getting pregnant (aside: As I was writing that sentence, I first wrote appt. instead of appointment. I wonder why we bother to write out that word anymore. Is there anyone who doesn’t know what appt. is the abbreviation of? I guess I can see using the full word for an audience that isn’t familiar with English, but otherwise…gosh, appt. sure is a time saver when typing). She didn’t have much new to say, really, other than to tell Leah to throw away all her calendars and charts and thermometers and everything else and just have sex whenever she feels like it. I think Leah understood. The main message was just to relax. The average time to conception for couples actively trying to conceive is six months. I figure since we got pregnant with Ava the first month we tried, that means we won’t be on the far side of the average until 12 months this time, which is three months away.
The doctor sent us away with orders for some blood work (for Leah) and a semen analysis kit (for me). I’m glad it’s an at-home kit, though I don’t suppose it would’ve been any problem to “produce a sample” at the office (wow, that’s one sexy euphemism, eh?). The sample has to be produced at least three and not more than seven days since I last ejaculated, and then it has to be kept at body temperature and rushed to the lab within 30 minutes. Without even trying, I can imagine 13 scenarios from which hilarity could ensue in this process. Of course 12 of them involve being pulled over for speeding and having to explain why I have a black plastic cup full of semen under my arm.
So, we’ll get the semen analyzed early next week sometime. I’m almost hoping they find something wrong with me. It would give us an answer one way or another, and it would take the pressure off Leah. That said, I’m pretty sure the answer to all this is just to calm down and proceed as normal (stay tuned next week to see just how wrong I can be!). Time always seems to stretch to infinity when it stands between you and something you want very, very much.
I really should create a TMI category…. It’s never too early to read the words “semen” and “ejaculated,” is it? I don’t think so.
So I’m finishing up Ava’s bath a couple minutes ago, and she’s playing “The Coffee Game.” It involves me placing an order for coffee, and Ava takes her two plastic cups and makes up a piping hot cup of brew for me.
I order. “Skinny decaf latte, please, one pump of vanilla.”
“You aren’t a girl,” Ava replies, nailing the disaffected, slightly disdainful demeanor of the workers at our local coffee house.
“Just take my order, please: Skinny decaf latte, one pump of vanilla.”
Things weren’t looking up for my birthday this year when my first snail mail card arrived postage due yesterday. But I knew the WWW wouldn’t let me down, and this morning I received an e-card that included the image below, which makes everything all right.
Ava made me a gorgeous card, too, which I’ll get scanned and uploaded to Flickr just as soon as I can. And to top everything off (at least this morning), my colleagues treated me to two Hardee’s monster biscuits for breakfast. I love these guys.
This is why. Someone went out and trademarked this phrase, drew up a design, and had it on a clothing line less than 48 hours after the words were uttered (screamed). I love it.
