Where She Resides

It was one year ago today that our second daughter, Fiona Quinn, was born. Her life spanned little more than two hours. How I wish she could have lived the way she was supposed to have lived; she would have had a wonderful big sister to show her the way. I wonder what gifts she would have had and what loves would have been hers. Alas, now she only resides with us as memories of two hours of life in a hospital room, of memories of dreams, and as precious ashes we keep in a music box.

“On My First Son”, by Ben Jonson

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy ;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
Oh, could I lose all father now ! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ‘scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,
And if no other misery, yet age !
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.

Happy Birthday, Fiona Quinn.

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No matter what else, I had a good day.

And how do I know that I had a good day? Because I helped out a family today.

All those babies couldn’t get themselves up onto that curb; they’d jump up but fall back down. A minute or two later, with me standing to one side to keep cars from coming along and taking them all out, the mama came back down and led her young to the water down over the rise.

So yeah, I helped out a family. I’m happy.

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AMPERSAND DOLLARSIGN BACKSLASH ASTERISK EXCLAMATION POINT !!!!!

Last night something went haywire with the main computer here at Casa Jaquandor, so for the second time in six months I had to re-format everything and start from scratch. Grrrrr. So, once again, all of my Firefox bookmarks are gone. I had a lot of blogs I was following in a bookmarks folder; they’re all gone. I can remember some of them, but not all, so if yours is a blog I may or may not have been reading before this happened and now I won’t be reading at all, sorry about that. (But hey, feel free to leave recommendations in comments.)

I have no idea what happened this time. Last time, a series of rapid-fire power outages in the middle of a thunderstorm were the culprit, but this time, something just went belly-up in the course of a restart. Luckily, in March I had to renew my subscription to Norton Security, which at the time meant upgrading to the most recent version. The current version includes automatic backing up of files to their servers (you get 2GB to start and can buy more; so far, the 2GB is fine but I may buy more later). I’ve been re-downloading my own files for about four hours now, as of this writing. It’s about 93.1% finished now, so hopefully after that I’ll have all of my old files back, except for the music and video stuff that I can just re-download anyway. (I don’t keep much music at all on the main computer, since I don’t use it for listening. That stuff is all on the laptop, which is working just fine.)

My next major electronics purchase, though, is almost certainly to be a portable hard drive. Then I won’t have to worry about this kind of thing much at all.

(Also, I’m in the first day of a rare four-day weekend for me, so posting will be light until Sunday.)

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Bloggus Domesticus

Sorry about the recent silence, folks, but real life has been hectic of late and not terribly conducive to blogging, for many reasons. This may continue for a few more days, or it may not. With me, you never know. Heh heh heh. Anyhow, here’s a bit of what’s been going on:

:: We, the Family and I, spent a few hours last weekend at Knox Farm State Park in East Aurora. If you’re looking for a great place to have a picnic lunch and then a nice walk with your clan and/or loved ones, this is yet another of the Buffalo area’s great places to do it, and it’s free to get in. I can’t recommend this place highly enough. Add it to the list of great places in this area that you don’t have to pay to get into. I put some photos up on Flickr, but here’s one that The Daughter took of The Wife and I. My hair’s all messed up there, but note that I’m not wearing overalls. It was pretty hot that day.

:: I’ve been going through the archives of xkcd, one comic at a time, and bookmarking all of the ones that I particularly enjoy in a special folder. Why? Because xkcd rocks, that’s why.

I’m especially tickled that I get the joke on this one:

Hee hee!

:: I’m slowly converting Casa Jaquandor into a home completely illuminated by compact fluorescent light bulbs. I bought my first CFL bulb way back in 1992, for my main lamp in my college room, and I remember that one being fairly harsh in tone, but they’ve improved immensely since then, and aside from the waiting for them to warm up to full brightness, I don’t miss the incandescents one bit (except for the two lamps we have that can’t be converted, due to the types of bulbs they require). And really, that wait for full brightness can be a nice thing, actually; a good example thereof is when one uses the bathroom in the middle of the night. At that point it’s nice that one can turn on the lights without becoming blinded.

:: Jesse L. Martin’s off Law and Order. I don’t really care about L&O, but I like Martin a lot. For me, his most memorable turn is in the X-Files episode “The Unnatural”, where he plays a baseball player in 1947 who turns out to be an alien. I tried finding my favorite clip from that episode on YouTube, but no luck. (It’s a nice dialogue scene that takes place on the team bus, and ends with Martin’s character, Exley, singing a spiritual with some of his teammates. I love that episode.)

:: Does anybody know of any online musical notation applications? I just want to plunk down some notes on a stave and save the results.

:: Mary Kunz Goldman, classical music critic for The Buffalo News, has a blog. I’m not the biggest fan of hers; her writing style is, shall we say, a tad mockable — but hey, it’s a new voice in the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan, and I’ve always found MKG at her best when she’s writing about classical music.

:: Shakespeare’s birthday was the other day. In a couple of hundred years, this will be a major holiday in the Klingon Empire.

:: Hey! Wanna see a hilarious photo? Here you go. Whoopsies!

:: In a boring note from mundane existence that nobody will care about, I have now decided that I like cottage cheese. Yes, this was a lame attempt to pad out an already boring post, so I’ll leave off there. Posting will probably be light for another few days, but you never know.

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Go away, or I shall quiz you a second time!

I saw this at Paul’s place, and of course I made no effort to resist it. Because resistance is futile.

Your best friend tells you she is pregnant. What is your reaction?

“Congratulations”, I suppose, although I’d have to work hard to conceal my astonishment, given what I know of her life situation. Actually, it would take me a few minutes to get to “Congratulations”. My immediate reaction would more likely be, “Gwaaahhh?!”

When is the last time you wanted to punch someone in their face?

With my fists? Not in a great long while, years, in fact; I don’t like fighting. With something else, though? and not in anger? Well, I’m always open to possibilities.

What is the last thing you spent money on?

My lunch today [Explanatory aside: I wrote this post on Thursday night and saved it until today.]: a piece of pizza, a couple of chicken fritters, and a medium Sierra Mist. I almost always drink water with my meals, but for some reason I was in the mood for some sweet, sweet carbonation today.

Do you think you gained or lost weight this past month?

I lost, you’d better believe it. I haven’t checked the overalls straps lately, but I discovered the other day that I have officially dropped a pants size.

Crunchy or Puffy Cheetos?

Puffy, although I do like the Crunchy once in a while. One of my great, great vices is Cheetos. Hand me a bag, and you won’t get the bag back until it contains naught but a few grains of Cheeto dust.

(BTW, it will forever break my heart that Planters Cheez Balls no longer exist. My God, I loved those things.)

Congratulations! You just had a son. What’s his name?

Quinn Jacob.

Congratulations! You just had a daughter. What’s her name?

Fiona Quinn. (Our plan was always to have Fiona carry her lost older brother’s name with her. Little did we know what her own destiny would turn out to be.)

What are you craving right now?

Pie.

What was the last thing you cried about?

The end of Juno. I’m not sure why.

When you buy something and your change is 2 cents, do you keep it or tell the cashier to keep it?

I almost always take my change. When I get home it goes into a jar, and when the jar gets to be a certain degree of fullness, I empty the change into the CoinStar machine at The Store. (I know, CoinStar keeps a small percentage of my money, but to me that’s worth it to avoid the drudgery of rolling my own change. I hate rolling change.)

What color is your tissue box?

Umm…er…it’s a Pirates of the Caribbean tie-in box of Kleenex, with photos of the lead characters.

Do you have a ceiling fan in your room, and if so, is there dust on that fan?

No ceiling fans in the current incarnation of Casa Jaquandor, which I find a bummer. I love ceiling fans.

Scariest thing you’ve experienced in the last year?

The Wife’s hospitalization, the loss of Baby Fiona, and the aftermath of all that, which went far longer and deeper than I had thought possible even at the time. In fact, it’s still going on.

Do you wear a name tag at work?

Yes, and it has my name on it. Cool, eh? (I tend to be pretty bad with names, and I’m constantly forgetting the names of people who introduce themselves to me. It’s really for the best that I work in a place where nametags are worn.)

Have you ever had a garage sale?

When I was living with my parents, yes. Since then, no, although I’ve moved some old stuff of mine on eBay, which is nothing more than a garage sale writ large.

What color is your iPod?

Clear, so I can’t find the damn thing. Oh wait, I can’t find it because I don’t own one. Crud. (I would like to get some kind of digital music player sometime, obviously; it doesn’t necessarily have to be an iPod.)

What is the last alcoholic beverage you had?

Caffeine-free Pepsi with Southern Comfort. [Updating note: I bought a case of Labatt’s yesterday. I haven’t sipped a Labatt’s in years, but for a long time it was my favorite beer.]

Are you happy right now?

I’m sitting in my armchair (which is quite old and in need of replacing, but still, it’s my armchair), writing answers to a blog quiz on my laptop while watching The Celebrity Apprentice (yeah, I’m still hooked on this show). I’m decked out in overalls and a favorite old sweatshirt, I’ve had a yummy salad for dinner with a glass of red wine, and I’ve just finished the afore-mentioned Pepsi and Southern Comfort. So yeah, right now I’m happy.

Who came over last?

Well, my sister visited last week, although we just met for dinner and she didn’t see Casa Jaquandor, but that’s who. At that time I gave her her much-belated Christmas presents (books by Guy Gavriel Kay and Christopher Moore, copies of the LOTR complete scores, and a few other knickknacks).

Do you drink beer?

Certainly. Beer is a wonderful thing. (When it comes to drinking, I’m pretty much of a lightweight. An eighteen year old girl in October of her freshman year at Ohio State could drink me under the table within an hour.)

Have your brothers or sisters ever told you that you were adopted?

I’m sure that something of that nature was said at one point or another; we expended the typical amount of energy that siblings expend in saying mean stuff to one another over the years. I don’t remember it specifically, though.

What is your favorite key on your key chain?

My favorite key? Huh? That’s pretty odd, innit?

What was the last movie you watched at home?

We all watched The Living Daylights.

What is in your pocket?

Right now? Nothing. But I had my cell phone in my pocket a while back.

(Not that anyone asked or anything, but here’s something a bit odd: Despite my love of overalls, I never carry stuff in the bib pocket. I hate having stuff up there. Makes me feel top-heavy.)

Where do you hurt?

My feet are always a bit sore toward the end of my work week.

Has someone ever made you a Build-A-Bear?

For me? No, but we took The Daughter there once. She didn’t quite grasp the concept at first, and became freaked out when she picked up the unstuffed carcass of a unicorn.

What’s something fun you did today?

I read some of Alice in Sunderland (review forthcoming after I finish it, but if the remaining three-fourths of the book are as brilliant as the first quarter, wow). I went with The Family to the library and to 7-11 for drinks (where I also sprang for a SlimJim for each of us). And then I read some of my favorite blogs.

What is your favorite aisle at Wal-Mart?

I never shop at Wal-Mart unless I am looking for something I literally can’t find anyplace else, and that never happens. I can’t stand Wal-Mart. I don’t like them as a company to begin with, and the Wal-Marts in this area (except two that are too far away to be of any use on a regular basis) are too dirty for pleasant shopping.

When is your birthday?

September. I share my birthday with George Gershwin, which makes me happy. You may all start saving for my presents now. I’ll be 37 this year.

Is there anything hanging from your rear view mirror?

No.

What kind of milk do you drink?

Skim, which I rarely drink anymore, since I prefer water. I put milk on my cereal every morning, though. My current cereal obsession? Berry Burst Cheerios. Those are good, and I say that as someone who has never much liked Cheerios.

(Speaking of Cheerios, the silliest bit of product placement I have ever seen in a movie involved that cereal. In Superman, after Pa Kent’s funeral and Clark has found the green crystal, we cut to the kitchen table of the Kent farmhouse at sunrise, and Ma Kent’s arm swoops in and plunks a big old box of Cheerios on the table, right in the middle of the sunbeam that is streaming through the window. And if one sits through the film’s end credits all the way to the end, one will see the following: “Cheerios by General Mills”. That has always made me laugh.)

What is something you need to go shopping for?

Pie. That craving just isn’t going away, darn it all.

But this is the point in the week when we start putting together the weekly shopping list for my Saturday excursion to The Store. This week’s items include sandwich bags, a jug of spring water, milk, ice cream, some lunchmeat, bread, crackers, Colbyjack cheese, eggs, apples, bananas, a jar of garlic (I think), some pistachio nuts (how I love me some pistachio nuts!), and maybe some red wine. (There’s other stuff, but I can’t remember offhand, and the pad with the list is on the fridge door.)

On the “frivolous item” front, a couple of recent film music CD releases have tripped my “Gotta get that!” circuit breaker: the FilmScoreMonthly label has come up with an official re-issue of the wonderful music Elmer Bernstein wrote for the classically goofy animated flick Heavy Metal (Oh Taarna!), so now I can stop listening to the bootleg CD I have with its crappy sound quality, and Intrada has re-issued the campy, but fun, Stu Philips score to the 1979 movie Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. I know, I know, but I had the LP as a kid and played it to death, and there’s some powerful nostalgia at work for me with this one.

As usual, this quiz has no provisions for tagging people, so here it is if you want it.

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Moments that depress the hell out of me

A few nights ago I’m working out at the Y, when 97-Rock, a “classic rock” station in Buffalo, comes over the speakers with a song that sends a teenage girl on the machine next to me into a certain level of excitement. She begins babbling to the friend with her: “Oh wow, I know this song! My dad loves this song! He said they played it at my parents’ wedding!”

The song? “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”, by Poison. Which came out in 1988. When I was already older than that girl is now.

Ugh.

(Apropos of nothing, despite my love of 80s hair-band metal music, I never liked Poison. They were pretty much the Wonder Bread of 80s hair-bands, which is probably why crap like “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” still gets airplay.)

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An Easter Tale

I suspect this isn’t uncommon, but we have a logistical problem here at Casa Jaquandor on holidays which involve the visitation of our home by, shall we say, mythical beings who impart gifts and/or sweet edible items upon The Daughter. The problem is this: on such holidays, The Daughter tends to get up ridiculously early, which means that she inevitably discovers what Santa or the Easter Bunny have been up to.

Now, on Christmas morning, this isn’t that big a deal, since we get the gifts out on Christmas Eve after she has finally fallen asleep. But our Easter ritual is a bit more involved, owing to the existence of the Easter eggs. See, in addition to leaving a basket of goodies and a gift or two (this year, a stuffed animal and a jigsaw puzzle of Captain Jack Sparrow), our Easter bunny takes our colored eggs out of the fridge and hides them throughout Casa Jaquandor, requiring The Daughter to hide them.

Obviously we can’t hide eggs at night, because you can’t leave food out at non-refrigerated temperatures for that many consecutive hours. So the plan is always for us to get up before The Daughter gets up, and hide the eggs before she rises. Clearly, this plan tends to usually result in failure because she’s always up first, so our notion has been to posit that our Easter bunny comes while we’re attending our Easter morning church services. How does this work? Well, The Wife comes up with a rationale for lollygagging behind while The Daughter and I head out to the car: usually something like “Oh, I forgot that bag of stuff we’re donating, I’ll be right down.” Leaving the eggs out for two hours isn’t disastrous, even if it’s not the best food handling practice under the sun. OK then…

…except that this morning, I had forgotten to re-hide the jigsaw puzzle, so The Daughter found it and realized that the Easter bunny had been here, but also had not hidden the eggs as he was supposed to do. After a hasty conference with The Wife, we decided that our cover story would be that The Daughter had, in getting up early, startled the Easter Bunny before he could complete his task of hiding the eggs. Luckily, she bought this idea, and we executed things as we usually do: The Daughter and I headed for the car while The Wife lagged behind because she’d forgotten something. The Daughter never suspected. Heh, heh heh! And thus we went off to church, leaving the eggs safely scattered ’round the apartment for searching two hours later.

But.

On the way to church, The Wife whispered something fateful in my ear: “I hope the cats don’t play with the eggs.”

Uh-oh.

“You mean,” whispers I in return, “you didn’t place the eggs in such a way that they couldn’t get at them?”

“We colored twenty-eight eggs, dear!”

“You hid all of them?!”

“I only had three minutes to think this whole thing through!”

“Crap.”

So, two hours later, we get home, and show The Daughter that the Easter Bunny has, in fact, come back and hid eggs all over the place. She gleefully starts searching them out. At one point, she’s in another room, when The Wife, standing over the recliner, mutters, “Yeah…there was an egg here.”

That egg turned up on the floor by the computer table, intact but clearly not in its original spot. Now, not every egg fell beneath the claws of the mischievous felines, but about eight or nine of them were a bit harder to find than they should have been, and one of them almost completely eluded us. We couldn’t find that one egg anywhere. The Daughter looked everywhere, and we even used this as an excuse to get her to clean up a large pile of Daughter-related detritus that occupies a semi-permanent spot in our apartment, under the guise of “searching for the lost egg”. But still, no egg.

Until, half an hour later, The Daughter spots the egg, right here:

That’s the garbage can and the big bag of charcoal in our kitchen; note the blue egg on the floor. And upon picking up the egg, we discover that it’s not nicely intact as were its brethren. No, this egg was wickedly cracked, and covered with cat hair and dust. Clearly this egg bore the brunt of the kitties’ hours of fun. Here’s the poor egg, at the end of its eggly journey:

The moral of the story is clear: Cats are the embodiment of destructive evil.

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