The [Birthday] Boy

Today is an exciting day in our household. Seth, aka The Boy, is one year old today. Fortunately, he's mostly over his illness and back to himself.

It's amazing how much has happened in the past year. From the first smile to the first giggle to full-out belly laughs, from sitting to crawling to walking, from the first "Ga" to his current (and growing) vocabulary.

People often ask if the changes and milestones are perceptible to us, since we seem him every day and they occur so gradually. Today, the answer is "absolutely" - in retrospect, it's been so exciting and fulfilling to watch each new stage and each new achievement.

We're having a ton of fun, and it's awesome to see him appreciating more of the fun himself. He's a kid now, not a baby. Sure, he still needs his diapers changed and meals prepared. But he's become such an integral part of our family that Rachel and I wouldn't know what to do without him.

"Mmmm, cake..."

"Handle with Care" Hampton

This probably flew under your radar. Why? Maybe it's because it's football season, and everybody's thinking about BCS and NFL. Maybe because you aren't all rabid Braves fans. Or maybe, it's because this has become an annual occurrence, as newsworthy as leaves falling off of trees each autumn.

Yep - Mike Hampton is injured again. Pulled a hammy after pitching less than an inning of winter ball in Mexico.

The same Mike Hampton who is due to earn $15 Million in the final year (FINALLY) of the ridiculous (hindsight is 20/20, isn't it) $121 Million, eight-year contract that the Braves acquired from Colorado (via Florida). The same Mike Hampton who hasn't pitched in the majors since August of 2005.

Given, this looks to be just a minor injury. And I'd be thrilled to see vintage 2003-2004 Hampton come back next year and rack up the innings. But let's face it: He hasn't exceeded 200 innings since 2001, he's untested in the post-Mazzone era in Atlanta, and he's the most fragile pitcher in baseball. I'm not holding my breath.

Art in the eye of the keyboard

Some art is remarkable for its appearance, some for its ability to inspire. Still other art is noted for its craftsmanship.

It is into that latter category that Paul Smith's works would fall. Smith's works appear, at first, to be very attractive pencil or charcoal sketches. But Smith, who suffered from Cerebral Palsy, eschewed those media for the high-tech instrument of his day: All of his works were created on a typewriter.

Including this one:
For detail of the keystrokes that make up this particular work, see here, here, here and here.

Better yet, see his whole portfolio. Kinda makes those emoticons 8^D seem pretty lame, huh? [via BoingBoing]

Sharing is caring

This holiday season, share the rice.

From the people who brought you thehungersite.org, which donated food via the UN World Food Program in return for impressions of advertisers' banner ads, comes the improved, more interactive version: FreeRice.org.

It's very simple: Work on your vocabulary skills, while providing food to the world's hungry. A very clever and elegant interface make it a simple joy to use the site. And even though some of my readers may not have as much free time as, say, the unemployed (cough!), who among us couldn't use a little vocabulary work-out from time to time?

Illness...

With his first birthday only a week away, Seth decided to celebrate by getting sick.

I've often said that I feel like we won the baby lottery - not only is he an easy, happy kid, but he's managed to avoid most of the dreaded baby sickness that you'd expect from a day-care kid. Well, he made it a long time, anyway...

On Tuesday, Rachel picked him up at day care and received the report that he hadn't been himself - lethargic instead of his usual constant-motion, and mildly feverish. At home, we administered some baby Tylenol and he went to the doctor Wednesday morning, after a rough night.

Diagnosis? The dreaded ear infection. The doc prescribed a penicillin-type antibiotic, which we started immediately -- twice a day. Administering it is an exercise in baby torture, involving either a medicine dropper or a syringe, and physical restraining.

For the next few days, Seth wasn't himself. At times he was playful, but he was frequently upset and/or listless. Fortunatly, he mustered the energy to play at bit with his aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. His fever broke after a couple of days. But there were no uninterrupted nights of sleep for him, or us.

Then, on Saturday, he woke up with an obvious rash over most of his torso. Another trip to the doctor, and they decided he was having a reaction to the antibiotic, so they switched him to a different one. The rash spread from his torso to his legs, arms and face, but dissipated within a couple of days.

This morning was the first time in almost a week that he was acting normal. We still have to give him antibiotics, and it's not fun for anybody... but there's only a few more days of it. And last night, he woke up twice (11-midnight and 3:30-4), which wasn't bad by the standard of the past week.

I guess if there's any upside, it's that this came while he was home anyway - day care wouldn't have let him stay there while sick, but it wasn't an issue since we had him home for the holiday week.

So much to share!

Here's the laundry list of stuff I should write about for the blog. I'll try to cover each topic with its own post, but you can hold me to this list if I forget any.

• Job Search update - Connecticut is out of the running! But local options are looking good.
  
• Seth turns 1 tomorrow!
• Everyone in town for Thanksgiving, lots of family, lots of fun, lots of food.
• Seth came within a week of getting through his first year of life without significant illness, but then...

You can also use the comments on this post to request updates on anything else I haven't covered in a while.

And just for fun, here's a list of the sugary items that have entered our house in the last month:
1. Several pounds of remaining Halloween candy
2. Homemade pumpkin and pecan pies (now finished)
3. 2 Way-too-big fruit platters, leftovers of which are in the fridge
4. A famous chocolate shavings cake from New Jersey
5. Assorted cookies and rugelach that also made the trip from New Jersey
6. A lot of extra birthday cake
7. Several cans and bottles of soda, leftover from the week's events
Having a sweet tooth, I can honestly say I'm probably more at risk of Type 2 Diabetes now than at any previous time in my life.

Lawn Care Woes

Had I been blogging at this time last year, I certainly would have complained about autumn lawn-care responsibilities. But since I launched Flippish in April, this is my first chance to kvetch endlessly about this issue.

You see, we live in a magical house. Beneath our front yard, several feet below the surface, lies an enormous leaf-magnet. That's the only explanation I can find as to why our yard accumulates roughly ten times the volume of autumn leaves as most of our neighbors. Incidentally, I think the leaf magnet also attracts rodents, which dig various holes and caves in and around our yard. This in itself really isn't as upsetting as the residents that usually take over those holes once the rodents move on to trendier residences: Swarming, stinging yellow jackets.

But I digress. The problem this time of year is the sheer speed and volume with which our yard fills with leaves. Clearing it is both exhausting and relatively futile, with a new load arriving hourly, borne upon the wind.

This morning, I attempted to clear the yard in preparation for the onslaught of family coming in for Thanksgiving. (This, despite the fact that the leaves would doubtlessly reappear by Thursday.) First, I used our electric leafblower, which also converts to vaccuum up the leaves, mulching them in the process. A brilliant yard tool this is, at least in design. I should mention that this is our second one, the first having given out after a few weeks' use. The one I used this morning was given to us by the gracious B-dot and Mrs. B-dot, after they decided old-skool raking was more to their liking.

Suffice it to say, I discontinued use of the leafblower this morning when smoke began pouring out the side of it. I quickly unplugged it and moved on to other yard care tools.

Having cleared the areas with the heaviest saturation of leaves, I decided to try the lawnmower. The grass is long and in need of a trim, and the mower mulches - perfect for removing/reducing the leaves in the process. However, our lawnmower - cheap and underpowered, but fairly reliable for the past 2+ years - has, sadly, lost its will to live. I believe that a mechanical link in the throttle line somewhere has failed.

I resorted to raking a bit, but took a break to share these tribulations with you, dear reader. I'm now debating whether to spend hours raking, only to still have long grass, or to call a lawn service for a one-time maintenance.

Write your senator! Take action!

Folks, a terrible injustice is about to occur in our great land. An innocent party could be ruthlessly destroyed, flushed out of the system, if you will, never to be heard from again.

And this isn't just one innocent individual. There are quite a few involved, and several of them are stunningly extraordinary. Some are very elderly. It just so happens that they are all named Jack.

If we don't act fast, here's what could happen... in the words of the Associated Press:

Hundreds of bottles of Jack Daniel's whiskey, some of it almost 100 years old, may be unceremoniously poured down a drain because authorities suspect it was being sold by someone without a license.

Read the full article here.

Then write to your government officials, especially if you live in Tennessee. Prevent this travesty of justice. Our legal system is based in a philosophy of innocence until guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt, not "guilt by association". The whiskey has done nothing wrong. It belongs in the custody of upright, law-abiding citizens who will appreciate what it has to offer. Or a bunch of drunk rednecks. Either way.

All those bad drivers? You're not imagining it...

According to a new report by GMAC Insurance, nearly 20% of US drivers would flunk the driver's license test if they had to take it today.

To anyone who's ever driven (well, 80-odd percent of us, anyway), this probably comes as no surprise. All those horrible drivers out there? You're right! They don't deserve to have a license!

I've long wondered why on earth we give out driver's licenses as a rite of passage. I guess the only answer is that parents are willing to make roads collectively unsafe in order to gain some convenience by not having to drive their teenagers around anymore.

Imagine that we've moved beyond cars, and aircraft become the standard for personal transportation. Would we give every teenager a pilot's license, after a pathetically simple test which requires about 2 hours' worth of preparation? No, we wouldn't, because when airplanes crash, they hit things like houses and office buildings. However, since cars can only kill a few people at a time, we accept the risk and entitle our high schoolers to operate these deadly weapons.

It makes no sense... I'm all for the American way of life, and I know how central the automobile has become to our feelings of independence. But for God's sake, shouldn't the test for a driver's license actually measure whether or not one is prepared for the responsibility of operating a vehicle on public roads? A driver's license shouldn't be a rite of passage. It should be a permit issued to those people who've thoroughly demonstrated an ability to safely handle an automobile.

Apologies

Dear readers,

I apologize for the weak quality of yesterday's blog entries. There are several possible explanations for yesterday's crap:

• I might have been feeling a little stressed and un-creative, pending a job interview in the afternoon
• Somebody much less clever than myself might have stolen my password and blogged as me
• Perhaps I was just supporting the WGA strike by showing what my blog would look like without clever, professional-quality writing
• I'm working on a theory that getting loaded up on Halloween candy puts one into a state of braindead giddyness (which I hopefully overcame before the aforementioned interview)

In any event, you have my sincere apologies. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Candy-coated chocolate

My favorite varieties of M&Ms, in descending order:

Crispy (blue package)
Peanut Butter (red package)
Mint (holiday season)

However, Halloween has made me nostalgic for a candy that used to make its annual appearance around this time: Sixlets. I loved these things. It's been years, but I really think they were better than M&Ms. Candy Direct still sells them, along with thousands of other hard-to-find items.

See if you can find any lost candies from your childhood on their site. Might make you hungry.

It's true: Wikipedia has EVERYTHING!

What do the following four items have in common?

• Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
• Beijing Opera
• GameFAQs
• 1880 Republican National Convention

They're the last four consecutive featured articles on Wikipedia!

Where else would those four concepts be found together? Nowheres, I tells ya! That's where!

Wikipedia is the best.

Cell Phone dilemma

I have the oldest cell phone in the Eastern United States. Okay, maybe it's not the oldest, but it's got to be close. It's a Verizon LG, and it's about 4 years old. In fact, I've had several people tell me "I had that phone three phones ago!"

I'm not crazy about it, either. It works fine, save for two major complaints:
1. There's an external button that cycles the phone between Normal, Vibrate, and Silent. On a daily basis, the phone squeezes against my keys or something in my pocket and turns itself silent, so that I'll miss all future calls.
2. The ringer doesn't get very loud. I've missed dozens of calls simply because I didn't hear it. In addition, "ring+vibrate" mode has never worked, so at all times I have to risk either not hearing it ring, or not feeling it vibrate.

On the other hand, it does everything I need it to. It's tri-band, so I'm rarely without signal -- although our house is in a signal-weak spot, so it's hard to use at home. I set up the one-touch favorite button to open up the calculator, which I use frequently. And although it's been through a lot over four years, including several drops, it still works. It's also my primary phone book (I know it's a bad idea not to have a backup...)

So here's my dilemma: I'm ready for a new phone. Verizon would be happy to give me a free phone, in return for re-upping my contract. However, it appears that they've discontinued our 500-minute family plan, so we'd probably have to move up to their current "base" plan, $10 more per month. This, even though we've never once exceeded our 500 minute monthly allowance.

I have no particular loyalty to Verizon, and I'm thoroughly won over by the iPhone, which is only available through AT&T. With wireless number portability, I could keep my number and move to any other issuer.

But here's the catch: There's a reasonable possibility that my next employer will require me to carry a company cell phone, blackberry, etc. Rather than carry two phones (been there, done that), I'd much rather have them pick up the bill for my existing wireless number. But not knowing who my next employer will be, I also don't know which wireless carrier they will use. I don't want to sign a 2-year contract with AT&T, and within a few weeks (or months) be told that I need to carry a company phone that's on the Verizon network. That would leave me the choices of (a) swallow an exorbitant cancellation fee to get out of my contract, or (b) go back to carrying two cell phones - my own, and the company's.

This is all to say: In addition to everything else, getting a new wireless phone is one of the many things that are dependent upon finding a job. Until then, old LG, please hold out!

Poor Man's Mocha

1 cup fresh brewed coffee, in an oversized mug
3-4 second squirt of chocolate syrup
1-2 ounces milk
Sugar or Splenda to taste

This probably would have cost me $4 at Starbucks. I can't imagine that the sum of ingredients used in the home version exceeds $0.30. Given, a coffee aficionado would probably take one sip and barf, but it's good enough for me.