Tag: Daily Life Stuff

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Sigh….

I’ve started experimenting lately with the writing of poetry. I’m not willing — yet — to post any of those efforts here, for two reasons: first, I’m not sure what I’m doing, and thus am not at all sure that I’m not producing total crap; and second, the subjects I am committing poetry about are more personal than I usually get in this space. I’m just noting a bit of conflict in my head about my desire to commit poetry. Part of me is thinking, “Cool, another way to write!”, while another part is thinking, “Isn’t there another way to deal with this stuff? Something involving a bottle made of brown glass, or perhaps a frontal lobotomy?”

On a parallel note, thank God for Youtube. I figured that by now, someone would have uploaded the greatest single scene in the entire run of The West Wing, and sure enough, someone finally did.

Wow, I miss Toby Ziegler.

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Just let ’em work until their heads thud against their desks

Kevin Drum on the American unwillingness to take vacations:

Of course, I’m hardly one to talk. In theory, I agree with Ezra [Klein, who has a LA Times op-ed about this], and I would have preferred a job that paid 10% less but provided 10% more vacation. In reality, I rarely even used the two weeks of vacation I got. Partly this was because I was caught up in the work ethic feedback loop that’s spiralled almost insanely out of control in America, but also, ironically enough, because I only got two weeks of vacation. So I hoarded it. You never know when you might need it, after all! Maybe if I’d gotten six weeks of vacation time I would have actually used more of it.

But I was hardly the worst. The really disheartening cases were the people I’d call into my office and practically order to go on vacation. They had accumulated, say, 300 hours of vacation time and weren’t allowed to accumulate any more. Take a couple of weeks off, I’d urge. If you don’t, you’ll be working for free, burning through vacation hours you’re no longer earning. Sometimes my exhortations worked, sometimes they didn’t. Very sad.

Maybe I’m lazy, but I’m continually baffled by the American obsession with working freakish numbers of hours at the job, and the fact that we’re so reluctant to take vacations (or to grant them to our workers). I’ve never seen the virtue in doing that much work. I even remember reading with some astonishment an article a few years back in the Buffalo News advising workers to take their laptops and cell phones with them on their vacations, so they could spend three or four hours a day making calls and answering e-mails and servicing accounts. What the hell’s a vacation for, anyway?

I somehow suspect that there’s some connection between our attitude toward vacation in this country and our tendency to take mental illness less seriously than physical illness. I’d try to do some connecting of the dots thereof, but I’m kind of tired right now. Maybe I need a vacation.

(Actually, that may not be a bad idea. Now that I think of it, aside from my sister-in-law’s wedding back in July ’05, over the last three years I haven’t taken any significant time off from work that wasn’t somehow related to the health problems and deaths of our attempts to increase our family size beyond three.)

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Where there’s swill, there’s a way

That may be the worst pun I’ve ever used in a blog post title, but anyway, I just happened across a website called Swillparty.com, which turns out to be a Buffalo/WNY site devoted to social wine tasting. Apparently SWILL is an acronym, standing for “Several Wine Imbibers Liking Libations”.

They’ve got a wine blog (already bookmarked for the next update of the blogroll), and they’ve even come up with a nifty-looking kit for getting your own wine-tasting parties together, along with several other items of merchandise. So, if you’re local and you’re looking for wine-tasting stuff, keep your money local and buy from them. And if you’re not local, buy from them anyway, because your locality doesn’t need the money as much as Western New York does! I’m not quite the wine drinker I used to be — beer, rum (Spum! Vrum!), and Southern Comfort are my poisons of choice these days, although I do enjoy wine and I’ve got a half-bottle (or whatever the technical term is for a 375-ml bottle) of Sauternes that I’m keeping for consumption when I make my first professional fiction sale. (Although at the rate I’m going, that bottle will be too valuable to drink when that day comes….)

I found this site, incidentally, by exercising an old online pseudo-hobby of mine, namely, Googling names of people I’ve gone to school with. Turns out that the founding SWILLer, Anne Conroy-Baiter, is one of those old friends with whom I lost touch years ago. (It also turns out that she’s apparently quite the watercolorist, which is something I don’t recall knowing about her at all from high school. I could really learn to like this Interweb thingie!

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But for the Grace of God….

On a whim I bought a copy of the Buffalo News this morning — usually I just skim through the website — and found a story that hit me right in the gut, about a family that is currently undergoing struggles with their newborn child that are eerily similar to those that we endured with Little Quinn, only their struggles are even harder since their boy has a tracheostomy to go along with his G-tube, where Little Quinn (in about the only time in his life that his medical problems broke in his favor) was able to avoid the trache.

They’re blogging his life’s struggle as well, at Mikey’s Love. Love, it turns out, doesn’t conquer everything — but dammit, you’d think a force that powerful would, you know?

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An Update.

Two weeks ago today, The Wife entered the hospital as described here. She is still there, despite the initial prognosis that she would lose the baby within 24 hours of her admission. We are now about seventeen days shy of the 24-week mark, which is the magic line delineating “viability”. That seemed like an impossible stretch when it was 31 days, but 17’s a lot more do-able.

I continue to be thankful and in more than a little awe over the good will extended our way through all this, by denizens Blogistan from the Buffalo Prefecture and beyond.

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Tools I want, and tools I don’t (and a bleg)

UPDATED BELOW

UPDATED AGAIN

(I’m keeping this post at the top of the blog’s main page until Monday; after that, I’ll let it slide down and put up new posts on this subject as events warrant. Newer content appears below this post until then.)

In the course of learning various maintenance-related skills at The Day Job, I’ve learned that it’s better to have more tools than fewer. You’re pretty limited if all you have is two kinds of screwdrivers, a single size pair of pliers, one hammer, and maybe an allan wrench.

Likewise, as a proto-writer, I’ve long known that since words are my tools, the more words I know, the more tools I have. However, real life in the last couple of years has forced certain words upon me, words that I suppose are useful but I frankly could have lived long and happy without knowing, tools or no. Such words include G-tube, fundoplication, cerebral palsy. And now the last few days have added some more words and phrases in that unwelcome category: incompetent cervix, premature dilation, viability.

For those wondering where on Earth I’ve been, the answer is that I’ve been spending most of my time at The Wife’s side as she reclines in a hospital bed where she is confined for the time being. There she rests because right now, only gravity and luck are keeping what we had hoped would be our second healthy child inside her womb. The strangest thing about this scenario is the reversal of the standard hopes: the longer she is in the hospital, the better it is for the child’s ultimate chance of survival. The odds we are facing are very long, but we’re going to face them anyway. What else is there?

Posting here will be sporadic for the time being. Oddly, this is mainly because I’m not at the computer much; I’m finding that I still have the same amount of stuff to babble about, and just not as much time to babble about it. (Maybe someone should do a study of blogging as psychological defense mechanism.) Also, I again note the reversal of the typical medical hospitalization scenario: we are hoping for as long a hospital stay as possible, as we are some weeks away from “viability” (what an awful word). However, hospital stays are expensive, and if by some miracle we do not lose this child before she comes to full term, The Wife will have endured a hospital stay of four months.

So what I’m saying here is that if anyone out there has any inclination to hit the tip jars in the sidebar — Amazon or PayPal available — now would be the time, and it would be greatly appreciated. Believe me, this is not the way I’d wanted to announce to Blogistan that we were expecting; fact is, I didn’t want to announce to Blogistan that we were expecting at all. What I wanted to do was post a photo of our new daughter just after her late-September birth. Her name, though, is decided, no matter when she comes. She will be Fiona Quinn.

That is all. Further bulletins will be made as events warrant.

(I will also be keeping this post at the top of the blog for a few days, so any newer content I manage to post will appear beneath this one probably until at least Monday, unless disaster strikes and The Wife is able to come home before then.)

UPDATE 5-11-07: Well, this is a strange kind of update: one in which I have nothing new to report. But in this current version of We Do Stuff the Hard Way at Casa Jaquandor!, having nothing to report is actually desirable. For now, Little Fiona is right where she should be.

Thanks to those who have offered and continue to offer kind words, thoughts, and deeds. All are welcome — especially the monetary donations, for which I hate to ask but for which I also need to ask. Every little bit helps.

UPDATE II, 5-13-07: Nothing’s changed, thank goodness. Fiona still in her gestation chamber. Me going through money like Grant went through Richmond. And so it goes.

Thanks again for the continued well-wishes and the shekels tossed in our direction!

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Following hockey, the minimalist way

In our home we don’t have cable, so unless the hockey games are on one of the national networks or I’m someplace that does have cable, I can’t watch the games. Thus, a lot of times when the Sabres are playing an important game, my general way of following the game is to go to the individual page for that particular game and hit “refresh” every minute or so. (Yeah, the individual game pages have automatic refresh, but where’s the fun in that?)

So last night I’m doing this, and I had added incentive as I was attending the 10:45 showing of Spiderman 3 with a friend from work who was actually at the game itself. And I’m hitting “refresh” all throughout, and the game is in a 0-0 tie through all the first period, all the second period, and just about all of the third period. Now, we’d already been hoping that the game would end in regulation so they’d be able to get from the arena to the Regal Cinemas in my neck o’ the woods, so the prospect of a scoreless tie in regulation was a clear complication to our plans.

At about 9:30 or so, I again refreshed and saw that with about twenty seconds or so to go, the score was now 1-0. Yay, they might get out of there on time for the movie! But wait — it wasn’t 1-0 Sabres, it was 1-0 Rangers with less than twenty seconds to go. Boo! And then I hit refresh less than a minute later, and it’s 1-1 with about five seconds left! Yay Sabres! But now we’re going to overtime, screwing up the movie plan! Boo!

Luckily, the game ended fairly quickly in OT when Maxim Affinnegennoff (pretty sure I spelled that wrong) scored the game-winner, and then it was off to the theater, where I awaited the arrival of the friend from work and his friend who apparently drove at point five past light speed to get there while the previews were still scrolling.

Funny tales from the game, via my co-worker:

:: When the Rangers scored to take the 1-0 lead with less than twenty seconds to go, apparently a bunch of people in the row in front of him got up and made their hasty exit from the arena. Oops.

:: Apparently the Sabres run a scroll of names on their Jumbotron scoreboard during games congratulating people on birthdays, and apparently one of the names submitted — and run — at last night’s game was “Jacques Strape”. Oops. Shades of Heywood Jablome.

Anyhow, Go Sabres!

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Always scout first. Always scout first. Always scout first.

Folks, when you’re engaging in any kind of outdoor activity, always scout your route before you commit to anything. This is a cardinal rule of whitewater boating, rock climbing, anything. This is why: it seems that a couple of teenagers in the Syracuse area went offroading near a rock quarry in that area, whereupon they climbed a steep embankment that they had likely scaled in previous trips to the quarry. However, it turned out that a recent excavation at the quarry had created a cliff on the other side of that embankment that the boys did not know now existed, and when their vehicle plummeted down the cliff, both boys were killed.

Always scout your route.

(Link fixed.)

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Easter follies

I was charged with the task of acquiring candy for The Daughter’s Easter basket, which was easy enough — a box of those awful Peeps things, an egg-shaped plastic doodad filled with Hershey Kisses, and some jelly beans.

But not just any jelly beans, mind you. No, I had to indulge her enjoyment of All Things Harry Potter and get her the box of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, which according to the box contain beans of flavors like grass, soap, bacon, rotten egg, vomit, and booger. “Never fear!” thought I. “I’m sure those are fake names for beans that taste like normal old jelly beans.”

Not so.

“Alas, ear wax!” Dumbledore said once when trying a bean. Alas, ear wax, indeed.

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