avablog

Ava slept late this morning.  She was in our bed (which is where she often ends up after waking up in a fuss sometime during the night), and as I was getting ready for work, I stopped for a second to watch her breathe all stretched out on the rumpled sheets.

I often wonder if she’s going to grow up to be like either Leah or me.  Not just in her personality or some physical quirk, but as a whole person.  Will she be ambitious?  Gentle?  Thoughtful?  Funny?  Caring?

We all know plenty of people whose adult children are nothing like them (we may even be some of those adult children).  And then there are those who have kids who’re like carbon copies of their parents (get it?  Carbon copies?!)  I wonder how this happens.  Given the overwhelming genetic inheritance and the amount of time a typical child spends with its parents as it grows, it’s a wonder we’re not all exactly like our folks.

Life must be full of these opportunities to form an independant personality.  We’re really starting to see it in Ava even now.  If we do something she doesn’t like, she’ll say, “No!” or push us away and say, “Back!”  For the last couple months I’d been putting Ava down to sleep at night, but in the last week she’s started saying, “Mommy do it.”  Which is fine with me; it’s just so amazing to see and hear her express herself this way.

It’s cute now, but I’m certain I’ll find it much less so by the time she’s 13.

I was at home with Ava on Tuesday while she got over a little rough patch. We think she’s been teething. In any case, she seems much happier now.

It was a gorgeous day, so I’d planned to make some headway on a project I’d come up with for the yard. I bought a new clematis for Leah at Hy Vee last weekend, but Hy Vee wanted $22 (US) for a wooden trellis. I don’t think so. I gave my old man a call to see if he could raid his scrap wood pile for a nice long board we could rip to make strips for a trellis, and amazingly enough, he found a great piece of redwood. Perfect.

I had to wait until Ava went down for her nap to begin the build, but I sprang into action as soon as she drifted off. Rather than nail all the strips together, I bound them with some old bailing wire I had lying around. It’ll make a much neater effect against the wood as it rusts and changes color. Wrapping wire around the joints also proved much quieter than hammering a bunch of nails, which may have awakened Ava.

I think the final product turned out pretty nicely. I screwed it to a redwood stake I had in the basement and then planted the clematis at its base, adding a little mulch to help keep the roots cool and moist. I’ve already seen our wrens sitting on top of the trellis and singing away, so it looks like it’s going to get the back yard seal of approval.

I’m figuring out (over and over) that parenting can probably best be defined as a state of perpetual inadequacy punctuated by brief episodes of competence.  Some people are more inadequate than others, of course.  Thankfully, despite all my shortcomings, Ava appears to be growing up to be pretty bright.  She’s certainly vivacious, and she knows how to work a crowd.

For the past couple weeks she’s been into singing her ABCs and counting from 1 to as high as 14.  In each case, there are some missed or mangled letters or numbers (she always skips 8, for some reason, and “l m n o p” is a tricky patch of the alphabet for her tiny tongue and lips), but she definitely gets the gist.  It’s a ball to watch how she learns.  The ABCs are little more than a song to her at this point.  When we pull out a letter A or B or C and show it to her, she can only guess at what we’re holding.  And when I hold up three fingers and ask her how many that is, she’ll as likely say, “one!” as the correct answer.  But you can see her little mind working away, and it’s beautiful.

I was giving Ava a bath the other night, and we were looking at her floatie letters to try to guess which colors they were.  I’d reach into the wicker basket next to the tub, pull out a letter, then put it on the side of the tub and ask Ava what color it was.  She has this hilarious process she goes through now where she’ll guess a color, like red, and then when I say, “nooo,” she says, “No.  Hmmm.” then she purses her lips and makes a little sucking noise like she’s really going for the right answer before she guesses again.  “Blue!”  “Noooo,” I say.  “No.  Hmmm.  Red!”  “Nooo.”  And on and on until she guesses right.

Oddly enough, the one color she seems to be able to nail every time is pink.  Go figure.

So, I put our Volvo up on autotrader.com. Yesterday morning I got an e-mail from a gentleman claiming he’s working on behalf of a client who is interested in buying the car. The client — who thus far has remained nameless during our e-mail exchanges — is a diplomat representing Canada at NATO. Fine with me. [Read more →]

I spent a fair amount of time (and sacrificed one or two skin cells in the process) finishing up our vegetable garden this past weekend.  The official roster now stands at tomatoes, jalapenos, green and red peppers, basil, snap peas, beans, “regular” peas, carrots, cukes, and onions.  I think I’ve got four or five different varieties of tomato planted, which should be very interesting once things start to grow.  As you might guess after reading this list, I’m hoping to find a good salsa recipe and get some canned for the long, cold winter.

Ava was generous enough to carve some time out of her busy schedule to give me a hand.  She toddled around the garden and picked up handfuls of dirt, then yelled, “Dad!  Dad!” until I looked at her, at which point she’d say, “dirt!” and then dump the soil back into the garden and brush off her hands.  She even put in some of the snap pea seeds for me.  I think it’ll be exciting for her to see how these plants grow and bear fruit.

You can’t see much yet, but my Webcam is pointed directly at the garden.  If only I had zoom capability on the thing….   You should be able to make out the tomato cages there just to the right of the pagoda dogwood tree.

I was out of town at a conference yesterday and without e-mail access for an entire day.  There were a couple new Dells in various locations where we were conferring, but I wasn’t that desperate to check my spam e-mail.

The conference site was the Hotel Pattee in delightful Perry, IA.  I’d actually been here before when I took Leah for an overnight on her birthday when she was pregnant with Ava.  It’s a really, really neat location.  The hotel is right across the street from one of Iowa’s 101 Carnegie libraries, and Perry’s has been restored in magnificent fashion by the Ahmanson family of California, who made a fortune in insurance.  The Ahmansons also restored the hotel and provided funds for other improvement projects in downtown Perry.

Perry has a Tyson meat packing plant that “processes” 8,000 hogs daily, which means there are plenty of Mexican restaurants in town, if that’s your thing (it’s one of my things, but we had to eat conference food yesterday–it wasn’t too bad, thankfully).

I ended up winning a big coffee mug in the drawing at the end of the day.  It says “Research King” on it, which is cool.  Too bad I don’t drink coffee.

On the way to the conference, we saw an SUV lose its front left wheel on the interstate just as we were driving through Des Moines.  The wheel took off and bounced over the barrier into the oncoming lanes, but I couldn’t see if it hit anyone.  Somehow, the driver managed to maneuver though traffic and get over to the median without causing an accident.  Amazing.  I was about 400 yards and a couple lanes away, so we weren’t in any great danger, but it took a little driving to get away from the guy.  So, the last three times I’ve been on Interstate 80 I’ve seen accidents.  One motor home on fire; one semi crashed and ablaze; and now this SUV with the frisky wheel.  It’s enough to keep a fella at home.

What do you get when you put up to 2GHz of pure Intel Core Duo power, an iSight camera, Front Row, iLife ’06, and a 13-inch glossy widescreen display into a sleek case? More than you thought possible for less than you thought possible. Meet MacBook, starting at $1099.

1998 Volvo V70 Cross Country, 81,000 miles, AWD turbo.  Tell your friends.  More pics here.

on the list of the greatest things about an iPod is the fact that it can drop a song through your earholes completely out of the blue that courses through your body like a bad case of Dengue fever.  But in a good way.  I don’t claim any understanding of the algorithm that runs the iPod’s shuffle feature, but I do know that it keeps me on my toes (Rush’s “New World Man” followed by “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music soundtrack followed by Ella’s “Blue Moon,” etc., etc.).

The latest gem is David Bowie‘s “Life On Mars,” which first appeared on the album Hunky Dory in 1971.  Bowie recorded this song at the height of his artistic powers (unless you consider “Let’s Dance” the height of Bowie’s artistic powers, in which case, there’s no help for you).  This was before David came to the U.S. and got all whacked out on the cocaina and yellow zoot suits.

The song is something of a mini epic, with a gentle, lilting piano intro building slowly into a full orchestral crescendo.  The writing’s great, too, and the combination of the bare bones kit work with the orchestra and Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust-era vocal stylings create a thing of true beauty.

One of the most recent covers of this song appeared on the soundtrack for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and was performed by Brazilian folk guitar virtuoso Seu Jorge.  I’ve been trying to order this album off Amazon, but I’ve been getting a shopping cart error for the past 24 hours.  Frustrating.  If anyone has a copy of this album and feels like sharing, let me know.

One well-known method of psychological torture is to slowly build a captive’s expectations of a particular outcome through repeated, similar actions, then to subvert those expections suddenly and without notice.  When coupled with the stress of physical abuse, this process causes a deep mental destabilization that tends to make the subject more reliant on his captor and therefore pliable.

The parallels between the process described above and our relationship with Ava are striking, albeit subtle.  Fortunately, her methods result mostly in new levels of cuteness instead of pain or confusion.  The latest weapon in her arsenal was given to her by her mother, who cajoled Ava one morning into trying to wake me up by saying, “wake up, papa snuggles!”  OK, so it’s moderately cute to hear Leah say this, but when it’s run through Ava’s special cuteness magnifier, its effects are increased tenfold.  I tried to keep my back to Ava and not move when she crawled across the bed to me, patted my shoulder, and said in her tiny morning voice, “way up, papa nug-gles,” but I broke immediately.  I have to figure out a way to get a sound recording of this.

I love a good hamburger as much as the next guy. Always have. Almost since I can remember, I’d watch my dad pan fry or grill burgers — depending on the season — to share with all of the friends my brother and I would have over at our house. Dill pickle slices, onion, relish, mustard, ketchup. These weren’t fancy bleu cheese and caramelized onion burgers, oh no. This was Burgers 101.

I can’t recall an occasion on which I’ve turned a burger away. I’ve had some that weren’t so great, but I’ve never met a burger I wouldn’t eat. It appears, though, that the time to shun a burger may now be upon me. You may have noticed the ad campaigns put on by Burger King and Hardee’s aimed at guilting young men everywhere into stepping up to the counter and ordering a burger made from the ground-up remains of one whole half of the Iowa State Fair’s award winner for largest bull. And it doesn’t just stop at the patty anymore. You gotta have all sorts of stuff slathered under the bun. I love to be adventurous with food, in general, but when it comes to burgers, I like ’em basic. I can get by with ketchup, mustard, a couple dill slices, and a nice thick slice of onion.

And this is why Hardee’s is losing me. Their new Philly Cheesesteak Thickburger is everything a burger shouldn’t be: It’s a burger and another sandwich rolled into one, which is the cardinal sin of fast food (see: Taco Bell). Who thought this was a good idea? Didn’t Hardee’s get the industry-wide memo stating that the money to be made in burgers comes from the $.99 menu (see: Wendy’s). I like Philly cheesesteaks. And I (obviously) like burgers. But this ain’t like a peanut butter cup, where two great tastes taste great together. Adios, Hardee’s. I used to be a fan.

Last night our neighbor Q came over with some good news (his name isn’t really Q; it’s shorthand for his last name, which is Cusick. Get it?). He and his girlfriend Shannon are our backyard neighbors. There’s another neighbor whose yard is adjacent to both of ours, and she’s almost never, ever out in her yard. So a couple weeks ago we hatched a plan to ask our neighbor if we could use part of her yard for a vegetable garden. Q’s good tidings last night were that he’d run into Susan (the neighbor), and she said we could use her yard! Excellent! If I’m not off in Elmhurst buying a car this Saturday, I’ll be weeding and digging bulbs in preparation for the One Call people to come and mark the area for cables on Monday. After that, we’ll do some tilling and composting to prepare our plot for growing.

I’m still not exactly sure what we’ll grow. I’d like tomato, for sure. And onions. And green peppers (maybe some hot peppers, too). Leah and my mom think beans would be a neat thing for Ava to see grow, and I’m beginning to agree. We won’t need to plant a ton of stuff, since we’ve signed up for a CSA share with my mom and some other neighbors that’ll give us lots and lots of veggies over the course of the summer.

Hmm…I think I even saw some old tomato cages over in my mom’s garage….  Fresh tomatoes!  I can’t wait!

It irritates me when it rings, and at our house, it rings a lot. Leah’s a phone person, which is fine. She likes to talk, period, but she’s also very close to her family and friends, most of whom live out of town, so she’s frequently on the phone.

I prefer e-mail or even IM. I’m not typically someone who pays much attention to the substance of television ads, but I saw a couple recently that got me thinking. The first was an ad for…I think it was Cingular wireless (in a cruel twist of Heisenbergian fate, I can either pay attention to the name of the advertiser or the substance of the ad, not both), which has a neat feature whereby you can look at your celly’s display and see which of your contacts is online and available. It’s a marriage of IM and the phone, and it’s a feature that gets me one step closer to owning a cellular phone.

The other ad was for Mediacom, which is the company that provides my cable TV and Internet services. They’re running a special now where people who have cable and Internet service through them can get local and long distance phone service for $30/mo. That’s half what we’re now paying Qwest and AT&T. Best part is, all I had to do is call Mediacom, and they’ll contact Qwest and AT&T to let them know that I’ll no long require their services (it’s like having an agent). We get to keep our phone number. And we still get caller ID, voicemail, and call waiting. All for the $30 monthly fee. Until I can get Leah used to the idea of using a VoIP setup at home, this’ll save us a couple bucks a month.

…there’s always someone who has it worse.

I was trying to find some time between rain showers this past weekend to put in some plantings that Leah and I bought on Saturday.  Just as I’d get ready to head out the door, another monsoon would hit, complete with strong wind gusts.  Then I’d get involved in something else in the house, and the weather would break.  I’d get ready to go outside again, and more rain. And so on, and so on.

I was getting more and more frustrated and started feeling sorry for myself when I remembered that there were people out there who were having a much harder time dealing with the weather.

Some days are worse than others, and today’s one of the bad ones.

Honsetly, I don’t always miss her that much when I come to work.  Most days, after I give her a squeeze and a kiss and leave the house for work, my thoughts of her throughout the day are simply musings about what kinds of activities she’s doing at daycare:  What she’s eating; if she’s running around outside; what she’s having for lunch.  Ava’s still in my thoughts, but there’s not that longing to hold her and see her face.

But on days like today, even though I gave her the usual farewell this morning, I really miss seeing her.  I miss being there when she does her little wave goodbye and says, “bye bye!”  I miss the way she runs up and down the sidewalk in her stilted gait as she smiles and squeaks and throws her hands in the air.  I miss the way she squats down real low and points to a bug on the driveway, or how she says, “Hi, dog!” to every dog that walks past the house.  I miss the way she earnestly and very deliberately grabs her drinking glass to take a sip of juice.

I wonder if Ava’s sitting at home right now wondering what I’m doing and missing me as much as I miss her.

I do love biking to work. Sure, it’s a bit of a hassle to pack and unpack my work clothes, and dealing with the traffic can be a pain, but the benefits of the ride far outweigh those minor inconveniences. I love showing up at the office with my lungs full of fragrant spring air. And it’s great to get through town in the morning to see what’s going on.

The absolute worst part about biking to work on a day like this (cool, gentle breeze, plenty of glorious sunshine) is getting off the bike. I just want to keep on riding past the office and give it a smug wave as I head on out to Amana for a bratwurst lunch and a fishbowl of that fine Millstream beer. Some morning I’m going to do it…you just watch.

Today Ava rode in her Burley bike trailer to daycare. She had a great time. I was a little worried about the bumps in the road irritating her as we rode, but she just sat back there and chatted away to herself, granola bar in hand.

I need to make some minor adjustments to the seat so that she can sit up a bit straighter, but that won’t take long. I had the plastic cover down over the front of the trailer this morning, owing to the chilly air; on the ride home I think we’ll roll the top back and let her enjoy this wonderful spring breeze.

Google Adwords code sure does produce some funny mashups now and again.  This from a site I came across today:

I don’t know why I think being the parent of one 19-month-old child qualifies me to dispense any wisdom on raising kids, but sometimes (after seeing it over and over and not recognizing it), a pattern reveals itself that begins to take the shape of truth.

I was thinking yesterday that the only reliable thing about having kids is that you can’t rely on anything other than unreliability. Just when your child starts sleeping through the night, she’ll wake up at 1:30 a.m. for a week straight. When she starts eating well, she’ll suddenly become finicky again and won’t touch anything but chocolate pudding and ham.

Adults are used to routine. We go to bed when we’re tired and eat when we’re hungry and go to work every day even if we’re a little sick. It can be really tiring to try to adjust to each new stage in a baby’s life, and no matter how aware you become of the constant changeability of her schedule, you still embrace anything that looks like a new trend. The minute you think you can count on her 90-minute nap from noon to 1:30 (which she’s done every day for two weeks), you plan a lunch date out somewhere on the day she decides to stop taking naps at all.

If you’re not a flexible person already, you get flexible in a big hurry (usually after about the second night home from the hospital). And of course all this mayhem and sleeplessness and instability is smoothed over by one little smile or hug or giggle, somehow, which always seems to come just when you’re getting to the end of your rope.

What a ride.