i’m going to have to re-read my advice. Could be a looooong weekend since I’ve turned my back on the Eagles.
Month: October 2008
Fast Hands, Large Gut, Big Mouth
My hands are still really fast, which is very cool. I enjoy surprising myself when G throws something and I snatch it out of the air, or i catch a slippery jar of hair product when it comes somersaulting out of the shower caddy. I think my hands got faster after I got over 30, and realized that my mark and point blocks were areas I could still improve in my Ultimate game. My hands didn’t actually get faster, but my skill at focusing immediately on the disc and making a point of putting my hands right on it got better. Its easy to say things like “Watch the disc into your hands” but actually zeroing in on the target and making a concerted effort to grab it, not just wave your mitts near it, takes a lot of discipline and practice.
Of course, this skill is mostly useless in biking. And all too much recently, my talents have been used catching cartons of ice cream tumbling out of the freezer. I’ve been hanging around 155 for about 2 years, and I’m kinda not happy about it. In ’03, my last year with Ironwood, I went into the season at 146. Since then I’ve put on 1-2 lbs of muscle in the chest, and 1-2 in the legs, so that still means I’m 3-5 heavier than I’d like to be, ought to be, or have been since about 1992. I’ve been carrying this weight like a guilty pleasure, and it needs to change.
Its caused by nothing specific, but a little too much indulgence in too many places. A few too many beers, a few too many snacks, a few too many kung pao chicken chunks, a few too many hits…and the weight hangs around. My drift toward excess has been multi-faceted, and includes faster driving, bricked workouts followed by binging, long nights working and late mornings into work, dominant and aggressive behavior, corners cut or too rigorously not cut at all, opinions provided too bluntly, tantrums thrown. Its a pattern of lacking restraint. Is it biking not providing an outlet for my need for conflict, isolation from spending so much time on the computer and the internet, schedules with beckie so disparate that I am alone too much, a reaction to the responsibility of parenthood, the “dad principle” making me a solipsistic king of my narrow domain, an overdose of stress and agitation, or a simple obligation to drink for 3? I respond by over-responding, under-inhibiting.
I need to restore balance, but it is hard when the balance is tipped just a little but not fundamentally off in any one thing. And when most of what is out of balance are, by themselves, harmless and things I enjoy and want to do. Seemingly insignificant changes are the hardest. But also the easiest. They can be made simply, one at time, if i have the discipline to focus on grabbing the moments of choice when they spin towards me, and not just waving my hands up near them.
Sisters and Daughters
So we got the final green light from the doctors on the baby…no amnio this time, so we aren’t 100% sure that all is well, but with the testing that was done, we have pretty good odds (1:3,000 or so) that she is normal.
I was also amazed at how much ultrasound technology has improved in the last three years. When I was having G, 3D ultrasounds were fairly new, and I didn’t have one. I got to see some shots of this baby, and they are amazing. Here’s a very cool shot of her butt and foot…
And her face (snuggled up against the uterine wall)…
and another profile…
Looks like we have another thumb-sucker on our hands. Think of the money we are saving on pacifiers.
These pics really make you think about abortion…the whole point of the 2nd trimester screen is that 20 weeks or so is about the latest you can terminate a pregnancy if there is an abnormality. It is hard to look at pictures like these and not see that the right-to-lifers have a point. There is most definitely a baby in there (albeit still very much a helpless, half-developed parasitic creature, IMO). Let’s just say I am very glad I didn’t get bad news at this appointment. My heart goes out to those who do.
Looking at these and knowing a sex definitely makes it harder to ignore. Even G recognizes these pics as a person…she keeps asking “Who is that?” and I say, “it’s your sister!”…and that is as far as we have gotten so far.
Dressing Like a Girl
G is so close to dressing herself! This would complete the trifecta of autonomy from babyhood to toddlerism: eating, pooping, and dressing! She certainly can undress herself, as I regularly find a happy naked baby running around the house at the mere mention of a bubble bath, or a happy pantless baby running around the house after the sweet relief of a good trip to the potty. Taking off socks is old news, putting them almost-on is quite novel. They usually end up on her hands where she plays with them because it more fun than being frustrated at not being able to pull socks over all 5 toes. Yesterday at the park, she decided to wear them on her hands all the way back the car. It was kinda cute, and kinda icky, cause she wanted to hold my hand while we were walking in the dark. So I had to touch her nasty-feet socks and get her nasty-feet sweat all over my hands. Then she got bored and stuffed the socks in my pocket. Nothing a bath couldn’t cure — see above for the rapidly undressing baby.
The other day I was lollygagging in bed, and at one point she had on jammies. Then at one point she was naked. Then at one point she had on a new fall dress. This all occurred while I was somewhat dreamy at finally getting some sleep without getting kicked, but I am fairly certain that it actually occurred. In fact, I’m sure, as I had to take the dress off her so she could get in the bath…she tried to strip, but got caught up in the long sleeves.
Like all things with G, dressing is evolving into a hobby of its own. And like all her hobbies, its another distraction to delay things that I actually need to get done. Yesterday, trying to get her dressed for school, she managed to avoid me putting on her shirt by attempting to put it on her toy pony for at least 10 minutes. She knew I saw through her bullshit too, cause when i finally got tired of cajoling her she scampered to the far side of bed and hid under her stuffed animals.
Every step forward is met by many steps sideways.
More Blog Work
When I was editing the post for our CO Trip, I saw the size of my backup file grow by over 50 MB! This was f’d up, since I posted about 30 pictures but they were all streamlined for the web. Some digging revealed that a plugin I was using to resize images for presentation to 480×640 was actually making a new copy of the image every time the post was saved. Moreover, the new imaging features in WordPress 2.5 made this plugin redundant. I found that they plugin directory was housing almost 200MB in jpgs – half the size of my entire website! Deactivating the plugin and not using it moving forward was easy, but before I could delete its directory I had to cycle back through my entire blog and remove all the code that called it. This meant removing\readding hundreds of images over about 400 posts. 
I’m currently upto December ’07, and cause I got bored, started working backwards to July ’08. The pluses out of all this are that I’m also moving all video off my site and upto Vimeo, fixing some creeping DB errors, shrinking the size of the whole site way way way down, making pageloads faster, and getting to re-read all my old shit.
Hollow comfort for the hours this is taking me. The task reminds me of a few years ago when I made the massive effort to accurately tag and rip our entire MP3 collection from the mishmash of files we had accumulated over the years.
In the course of updating all this, I found that the imagescalar plugin was also affecting some of my smilies, which meant I had to redo several dozen for one post or lose them when i slayed the plugin’s directory. The smiley panel I added to the WYSIWYG editor had this annoying habit of closing after each click, in addition to being too small and forcing me to scroll all over to see all my smilies. Sooooo…I revisted that code as well. WordPress 2.5 bundled TinyMCE, where previously I was using a crappy hacky plugin to get the smilies into my editor. When I updated to 2.5, I skipped the plugin and installed the code directly from the TinyMCE website. Of course I did not write down what I did, and TinyMCE has since evolved. It seems I used only 1 file to do the core of the work — emotions.htm, and added some javascript methods from some utility files directly into it to initialize and launch the plugin. Every version of TinyMCE does this a little differently, but the code works in a variety of configurations. I got the button to appear in my editor by tweaking tiny_mce_config.php. Yesterday I figured out how to dictate the size of the popup-window by adding my own resize method to tiny_mce_popup.js. It probably should have been local to emtions.htm, but whatever it worked. Finally I commented out the automatic window closing which lets me add multiple images with many fewer clicks.
All this made possible by my servers at work locking up and our systems group taking a long time to get em working. 
I’ve thought a lot about the benefits of a product like WordPress which is open-source, and all the fiddling I need to do to get things working, and constantly reworking it as the codebase evolves. However, I don’t think it’d be much better to go with a “commercial” product that has periodic releases – its the Web, you will still be customizing whatever you have. The issue really is the webmaster, not the codebase.