I never went to work today, not in the physical sense. After a day spent assisting my boss with some planning charts, a day in which none of my normal tasks were accomplished, it was my decision to stay home until the work was caught up - and that moment never arrived.
It is discomfiting to sit at a desk all day and review documents and spreadsheets and answer emails, then look up at the clock and suddenly realize that the entire day is gone. There is no sense of 'a job well done' in those circumstances; there is only the sad realization that another day has gone by, and it is impossible to think of a single thing of any import which was finished.
At three o'clock the children started to arrive from school, and by four o'clock they were all home. We opened presents and ate our cake, then it was time for Dad to run off to attend an Engineering Open House while the rest of the family played it cool for awhile.
Afterward, we had dinner at a local restaurant (where the Birthday Girl could have her beloved grilled cheese sandwich); then, for some it was time for a Scout meeting while others went home to watch 'Enchanted'. Always nice to have a Happy Ending kind of fantasy flick for the Birthday Girl.
One hopes we all have happy endings to this week.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Nearly Nine
I watched her prance in this evening after her piano lesson, and had to take a second look to make sure that my eyes were not deceiving me.
She's nearly nine.
Her head bounces as she walks - and she talks - and she prattles on about this and that and all the wonderful things that fill her head with fanciful visions; mostly of faeries, cute little winged creatures of the woods and streams and glades, sketches of whom she fills the pages of her notebooks (and, indeed, any spare scrap of paper she can find). Her hair is cut short so that it bobs up and down as she whirls around the room, dancing to an unheard tune and carrying on a monologue to an unseen audience, often without taking a breath; she has always had the uncanny ability to speak while inhaling, the origin of which is unknown.
She's nearly nine, and her legs have grown long and her feet have outgrown all her shoes and she's taken notice of fashion and color and beauty and all the things that herald the end of the age of innocence and the beginning of the parents' long slide into worry and despair. She has a most winning smile, and when all the work of the orthodontist is done, she will have a perfect set of teeth.
She's funny and silly and giddy and bubbly and far too excitable to ever finalize her plans for the upcoming celebration, with the consequence that we still have no idea what we are going to do with her tomorrow. There is so much going on anyway. Whatever we do, it will doubtless be rushed. But it is her choice to go out somewhere to celebrate, and celebrate we shall! For it isn't every day that a little girl turns nine years old, and her parents still have sufficient sanity to enjoy the occasion.
She's nearly nine!
She's nearly nine.
Her head bounces as she walks - and she talks - and she prattles on about this and that and all the wonderful things that fill her head with fanciful visions; mostly of faeries, cute little winged creatures of the woods and streams and glades, sketches of whom she fills the pages of her notebooks (and, indeed, any spare scrap of paper she can find). Her hair is cut short so that it bobs up and down as she whirls around the room, dancing to an unheard tune and carrying on a monologue to an unseen audience, often without taking a breath; she has always had the uncanny ability to speak while inhaling, the origin of which is unknown.
She's nearly nine, and her legs have grown long and her feet have outgrown all her shoes and she's taken notice of fashion and color and beauty and all the things that herald the end of the age of innocence and the beginning of the parents' long slide into worry and despair. She has a most winning smile, and when all the work of the orthodontist is done, she will have a perfect set of teeth.
She's funny and silly and giddy and bubbly and far too excitable to ever finalize her plans for the upcoming celebration, with the consequence that we still have no idea what we are going to do with her tomorrow. There is so much going on anyway. Whatever we do, it will doubtless be rushed. But it is her choice to go out somewhere to celebrate, and celebrate we shall! For it isn't every day that a little girl turns nine years old, and her parents still have sufficient sanity to enjoy the occasion.
She's nearly nine!
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Rainy Days and Saturdays
It was a dream come true. For three days last week, the boss was gone, and the constant bombardment of requests for pointless metrics had ceased. Finally, it was possible to get work done.
Until he returned early on Friday.
* *
Have you ever had that feeling of total relief? When the long, cross-country trip is over and you walk into the house and drop your bags on the floor and head up to the bedroom and flop down on the bed and close your eyes and you don't even care if your clothes are still on or you haven't shaved or brushed your teeth, you just want to fade into oblivion.
Or the end of the work-week has finally come and the day is over and the kids have all gone to bed and the house is quiet and you don't have anything planned for Saturday and all you want to do is to climb into bed and not get out until after nine in the morning so you close your eyes knowing you won't have to open them again for hours and hours and hours.
That's what it felt like when he (and all the rest of the management team) took off on that airplane and went somewhere else to spend a few days being yelled at by the Customer while we, we lucky few, stayed behind and got real work done, unhindered by the constant plague of whiny requests for statistics and status and meaningless metrics. Relief, total relief. Quiet, peaceful days. Crossing items off our checklists. Talking in normal tones of voice. Focusing. Concentrating. Working through the backlog of emails. Whittling down the stack of documents to review. Ignoring the charts with the pretty lines which were all going in the wrong direction (Progress should go UP! not DOWN!), ignoring the reminder emails of the meetings we didn't want to attend, ignoring the empty offices where we were used to being called in to hear our names being used in vain.
It all came to an end on Friday when they all returned.
"Where are my charts? Where are my metrics? Where is the new schedule? What have you been doing the whole time I've been gone?"
Work, man. Been doing work.
Lean back in my chair, close my eyes, remind myself for the umpteenth time They can't kill you.
Yeah, they can't kill you, but they can crush your soul if you let 'em.
I gotta get a real job.
* *
Got a bit of leftover Ike here, lots of rain coming down, filling the streets, washing away the heat of summer. It's still warm outside, but not as warm as it had been. Not much of a summer, really. Only got up to ninety or so a couple times. Even then, it wasn't humid enough to be a problem. So now we have a nice, warm rain.
It would be nice to stand in the nice, warm rain and let it wash over me like a nice, warm shower. Rinse away all the tiredness, the frustration.
Why does winter look so inviting?
Winter is the time when the snow comes and encases the land in an insulating layer of white, underneath which one can hide away from everything. If the pantry is full and the refrigerator is still humming, we can survive all alone in our little house, reading books and drawing pictures and watching the glow of the fireplace.
Reminds me of those wonderful days spent at Ron and Eileen's house, many, many years ago, sitting in their living room late at night with everyone asleep but me, watching the glow of the woodstove with the wind and the rain and the winter outside, feeling warm and safe and cozy and happy, wishing the night could just go on forever.
Wishful thinking again, returning to the times when there were fewer worries, fewer concerns, fewer responsibilities (fewer does not, of course, imply none). It is in my nature, this wistful wandering among the memories of yore. Someday it might be these days that fill my yearning, back in the days when the kids were young and our lives were so simple and the world was a much nicer place.
It is difficult to live in the present when all the past's troubles have been resolved by the passage of time, and the present's are yet to be faced.
Meanwhile the rain keeps falling and the river of water rolls on down the gutter to the drain. If only it would take my troubles with it...
Until he returned early on Friday.
Have you ever had that feeling of total relief? When the long, cross-country trip is over and you walk into the house and drop your bags on the floor and head up to the bedroom and flop down on the bed and close your eyes and you don't even care if your clothes are still on or you haven't shaved or brushed your teeth, you just want to fade into oblivion.
Or the end of the work-week has finally come and the day is over and the kids have all gone to bed and the house is quiet and you don't have anything planned for Saturday and all you want to do is to climb into bed and not get out until after nine in the morning so you close your eyes knowing you won't have to open them again for hours and hours and hours.
That's what it felt like when he (and all the rest of the management team) took off on that airplane and went somewhere else to spend a few days being yelled at by the Customer while we, we lucky few, stayed behind and got real work done, unhindered by the constant plague of whiny requests for statistics and status and meaningless metrics. Relief, total relief. Quiet, peaceful days. Crossing items off our checklists. Talking in normal tones of voice. Focusing. Concentrating. Working through the backlog of emails. Whittling down the stack of documents to review. Ignoring the charts with the pretty lines which were all going in the wrong direction (Progress should go UP! not DOWN!), ignoring the reminder emails of the meetings we didn't want to attend, ignoring the empty offices where we were used to being called in to hear our names being used in vain.
It all came to an end on Friday when they all returned.
"Where are my charts? Where are my metrics? Where is the new schedule? What have you been doing the whole time I've been gone?"
Work, man. Been doing work.
Lean back in my chair, close my eyes, remind myself for the umpteenth time They can't kill you.
Yeah, they can't kill you, but they can crush your soul if you let 'em.
I gotta get a real job.
Got a bit of leftover Ike here, lots of rain coming down, filling the streets, washing away the heat of summer. It's still warm outside, but not as warm as it had been. Not much of a summer, really. Only got up to ninety or so a couple times. Even then, it wasn't humid enough to be a problem. So now we have a nice, warm rain.
It would be nice to stand in the nice, warm rain and let it wash over me like a nice, warm shower. Rinse away all the tiredness, the frustration.
Why does winter look so inviting?
Winter is the time when the snow comes and encases the land in an insulating layer of white, underneath which one can hide away from everything. If the pantry is full and the refrigerator is still humming, we can survive all alone in our little house, reading books and drawing pictures and watching the glow of the fireplace.
Reminds me of those wonderful days spent at Ron and Eileen's house, many, many years ago, sitting in their living room late at night with everyone asleep but me, watching the glow of the woodstove with the wind and the rain and the winter outside, feeling warm and safe and cozy and happy, wishing the night could just go on forever.
Wishful thinking again, returning to the times when there were fewer worries, fewer concerns, fewer responsibilities (fewer does not, of course, imply none). It is in my nature, this wistful wandering among the memories of yore. Someday it might be these days that fill my yearning, back in the days when the kids were young and our lives were so simple and the world was a much nicer place.
It is difficult to live in the present when all the past's troubles have been resolved by the passage of time, and the present's are yet to be faced.
Meanwhile the rain keeps falling and the river of water rolls on down the gutter to the drain. If only it would take my troubles with it...
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Back to School
The children are back in school again and so happy to be there. The endless boredom of summer has given way to the flurry of activity which is school, every afternoon jam-packed with homework and every evening packed with extracurricular activities.
And during the day, Cheryl has a quiet house at last.
I still can't grasp how quickly they are growing up. In just a few years, they'll be all grown up and we'll be downsizing to a smaller house and it will be just the two of us again. It's a strange thought, looking into the near future and realizing that everything will be changing.
In the meantime, they constantly amaze me with the subtle, incremental changes in behavior and attitude and physical appearance which signal maturity. Even the way they manage to spring out of bed at six in the morning to prepare for school surprises me. How can they be so excited about it? Is it the thought of seeing their friends again? The thrill of new books, new pencils, new ideas? Is it release from the endless, boring fun of summer? Or is it just the joy of change?
Would that I could face each day with such excitement. There is nothing in my day to look forward to with such anticipation - except the people. I truly enjoy being with the people at work, some of whom are clinically insane and others who appear to be refugees from a Marx Brothers film. Most days, I accomplish practically nothing, but have interesting conversations.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Laundry List
Gustav is about to make landfall, and even though it has nothing in the world to do with me, I'm keeping a tab open to watch for it because, in a very morbid way, it fascinates me. We almost lost New Orleans last time, and I'm curious to see if it's finally going to get blown away.
I'd never thought much about New Orleans before Katrina hit, and when it did, my thoughts were shaped by reading the endless on-line arguments over whether the city had a right to exist in the face of natural environmental changes. It seemed pointless (and even offensive) to keep repairing the dikes when it was obviously stupid to build a coastal city below sea-level.
I like to pretend that I'm a logical thinker, intelligent enough to make the correct conclusions given sufficient evidence. But there is also a deep well of reactionary cynicism buried in my soul that boils over when bad decisions are repeated ad nauseum. This is most evident at the office, where the current state of affairs is best summarized by the phrase, "Waiting for the next crisis to occur." It has been a long, stressful road from one disaster to the next, not unlike the situation in Louisiana, with the walls being patched every few weeks to survive the current storm and then a period of frantic effort to prepare for the next. Meanwhile the storm waters are rising ever higher.
At some point, someone has to put down their foot and say, "Enough!" If the evidence points to the fact that the city is built on the wrong site, it's time to abandon the city and go elsewhere. That's just common sense. No amount of lingering historical significance is warrant enough to waste the time and money to attempt a rescue, not in the face of seasonal storms that make kindling of our best efforts to forestall the inevitable.
But cynicism says that these people will never make the intelligent decision, not when their emotions are involved. People are remarkable in their ability to disregard the obvious in their search for the sublime. Our whole political history is evidence of this. People will continue to place their faith in hearsay and gossip and anecdote and wishful-thinking and miracle cures and political pandering so long as it coincides with their dreams and wishes and prejudices.
I wait for the leaders at the office to make the intelligent decisions, and am unsurprised when they do not. When logic dictates that they spend the time and money and resources on one project to get it done, they farm out all the engineers to other projects and outsource all the real work to offshore temps who have neither the training nor the experience for the task. When we are over our heads with too much work and not enough people to do it, they trim the workforce to "cut costs". When we are behind schedule and understaffed, their solution is to harangue the employees to work longer hours rather than admitting that the deadlines can't be met, and make appropriate adjustments.
It's wearying to the bones, and numbing to the mind, making cynics of us all. In this we are made useless for the next (inevitable) project because we have grown so callous through mismanagement and mistreatment that we enter into the unspoiled land with an eye toward finding fault, and thus poison the waters before we have even taken a drink.
* * *
My back is aching and my sinuses are on fire.
A few weeks ago, the door of Cheryl's closet fell apart. It is a mirrored pocket door - with mirrors on both sides - which means that not only is it difficult to gain access to it in order to perform repairs, there is also the added thrill of dealing with the possibility of broken glass regardless of which side the door is gripped. This promised to be one of the more fun home projects (in the "thrill of victory, agony of defeat" vein).
Complicating the joy of working on the home project was the presence of billions upon billions of microscopic elements commonly known as "ragweed" which are currently jabbing my mucusoidal tissues and causing various violent reactions throughout my body, including sneezing, wheezing, dripping, itching, aching, swelling, and the inevitable closing off of the airways. This is, of course, merely icing on the cake, a spice of life, an extra element of fun to add to the mix.
Being unfamiliar with the door mechanism, I did the obvious thing and took the trim apart so I could access the stops and other items which required removal (according to the on-line references). Then it was a simple matter of pressing the appropriate plastic locking mechanism in the proper sequence to disconnect the door from the rollers, thus allowing it to drop to the floor (but not on my foot!) so that it could be swung inward and removed from the slot proper.
The next step was to remove one side of the door (which was entirely mirrored glass, mind you) very, very carefully with a putty knife so that the inner mechanism could be revealed. And what it revealed was quite interesting. The aluminum frame was not joined, as one might think, by screwing the four pieces (top, bottom, left, right) to one another, metal to metal. No, this was a clever design! The corners were all joined together with plastic! That is, behind each corner was a square of plastic, and the screws were inserted through the holes in the aluminum into the plastic. And we all know how well metal screws in plastic work!
As if to buck the trend, though, the immediate cause of failure was determined to be an inability on the part of one of the screws to maintain its hold on the beveled edge of the aluminum. Evidently the plastic hole didn't line up well with the hole in the aluminum so that the screw was inserted at an angle; consequently, over time the head of the screw was able to circumvent the edge of the hole and fall through, thus invalidating any support it was providing. The sudden release of this support, coupled with the weight of the door, broke the plastic, and the door sagged on one side.
It might be possible to replace the plastic piece and thus repair the door, but I'm not thrilled with the idea of searching for the plastic piece on-line and having it shipped from wherever it is manufactured (they don't stock those kind of parts at Home Depot or Lowes) and then trying to put the frame back together and re-glue the glass to the frame, when I can just purchase a new pocket door (with glass on one side only) and re-hang it in an hour or so. I'm basically lazy. Plus I don't have much faith in the design.
So we went to Home Depot and ordered a new door. Can't wait til it gets here. In the meantime, I'm going to pull the other glass panel off the aluminum door frame and hang one of the mirrors in the girls' room, then play around with the door frame to determine the optimum method for securing the pieces to one another.
In my copious spare time.
* * *
Meanwhile, the Toyota was driving me crazy. Those guys that installed the used engine in evidently didn't bother to check out the thermostat; the car is running way too cool. Being too cool is not necessarily a good thing in a car engine because it is designed to run at a specific optimum temperature, and unless this temperature is maintained, the combustion is not as efficient as it is supposed to be. I don't have any specific mileage numbers, but it was obvious from anecdotal evidence that it wasn't getting the 35 - 40 mpg I was expecting.
The needle on the temperature gauge barely hovered above the minimum. My guess was that either they hadn't bothered to install the thermostat, or it was defective. Either way, the engine was never warming up.
So I rigged up a drill-powered pump with some 1/4-inch tubing to speedily drain the radiator into waiting (clean) gallon milk jugs (so I could recycle it easier), pulled apart the casing and removed the old thermostat. Couldn't see anything obviously wrong with it (I'd have to test it at precise temperatures to determine if it was really broken), but I'd already bought a new one, so put the new one in and sealed it up again. Then put the fluid back in and sealed up the system and ...
The gauge now reads nearly normal, just a tad lower than I'd hoped. Took it around the neighborhood for a test spin (no leaks!) and it drove OK. Then drove to the store and back to let it warm up properly. Felt a bit smoother.
Carburetor still needs some adjustment, though. It still races momentarily when letting off the accelerator. I did some on-line searches for that symptom but didn't find anything, so I might just take it down to the Toyota dealer and see if anyone around here remembers how to tune up carburetors.
These days they all seem to rely on the computers to do the work for them.
* * *
By the way, I put some more photos up on Flickr.
I'd never thought much about New Orleans before Katrina hit, and when it did, my thoughts were shaped by reading the endless on-line arguments over whether the city had a right to exist in the face of natural environmental changes. It seemed pointless (and even offensive) to keep repairing the dikes when it was obviously stupid to build a coastal city below sea-level.
I like to pretend that I'm a logical thinker, intelligent enough to make the correct conclusions given sufficient evidence. But there is also a deep well of reactionary cynicism buried in my soul that boils over when bad decisions are repeated ad nauseum. This is most evident at the office, where the current state of affairs is best summarized by the phrase, "Waiting for the next crisis to occur." It has been a long, stressful road from one disaster to the next, not unlike the situation in Louisiana, with the walls being patched every few weeks to survive the current storm and then a period of frantic effort to prepare for the next. Meanwhile the storm waters are rising ever higher.
At some point, someone has to put down their foot and say, "Enough!" If the evidence points to the fact that the city is built on the wrong site, it's time to abandon the city and go elsewhere. That's just common sense. No amount of lingering historical significance is warrant enough to waste the time and money to attempt a rescue, not in the face of seasonal storms that make kindling of our best efforts to forestall the inevitable.
But cynicism says that these people will never make the intelligent decision, not when their emotions are involved. People are remarkable in their ability to disregard the obvious in their search for the sublime. Our whole political history is evidence of this. People will continue to place their faith in hearsay and gossip and anecdote and wishful-thinking and miracle cures and political pandering so long as it coincides with their dreams and wishes and prejudices.
I wait for the leaders at the office to make the intelligent decisions, and am unsurprised when they do not. When logic dictates that they spend the time and money and resources on one project to get it done, they farm out all the engineers to other projects and outsource all the real work to offshore temps who have neither the training nor the experience for the task. When we are over our heads with too much work and not enough people to do it, they trim the workforce to "cut costs". When we are behind schedule and understaffed, their solution is to harangue the employees to work longer hours rather than admitting that the deadlines can't be met, and make appropriate adjustments.
It's wearying to the bones, and numbing to the mind, making cynics of us all. In this we are made useless for the next (inevitable) project because we have grown so callous through mismanagement and mistreatment that we enter into the unspoiled land with an eye toward finding fault, and thus poison the waters before we have even taken a drink.
* * *
My back is aching and my sinuses are on fire.
A few weeks ago, the door of Cheryl's closet fell apart. It is a mirrored pocket door - with mirrors on both sides - which means that not only is it difficult to gain access to it in order to perform repairs, there is also the added thrill of dealing with the possibility of broken glass regardless of which side the door is gripped. This promised to be one of the more fun home projects (in the "thrill of victory, agony of defeat" vein).
Complicating the joy of working on the home project was the presence of billions upon billions of microscopic elements commonly known as "ragweed" which are currently jabbing my mucusoidal tissues and causing various violent reactions throughout my body, including sneezing, wheezing, dripping, itching, aching, swelling, and the inevitable closing off of the airways. This is, of course, merely icing on the cake, a spice of life, an extra element of fun to add to the mix.
Being unfamiliar with the door mechanism, I did the obvious thing and took the trim apart so I could access the stops and other items which required removal (according to the on-line references). Then it was a simple matter of pressing the appropriate plastic locking mechanism in the proper sequence to disconnect the door from the rollers, thus allowing it to drop to the floor (but not on my foot!) so that it could be swung inward and removed from the slot proper.
The next step was to remove one side of the door (which was entirely mirrored glass, mind you) very, very carefully with a putty knife so that the inner mechanism could be revealed. And what it revealed was quite interesting. The aluminum frame was not joined, as one might think, by screwing the four pieces (top, bottom, left, right) to one another, metal to metal. No, this was a clever design! The corners were all joined together with plastic! That is, behind each corner was a square of plastic, and the screws were inserted through the holes in the aluminum into the plastic. And we all know how well metal screws in plastic work!
As if to buck the trend, though, the immediate cause of failure was determined to be an inability on the part of one of the screws to maintain its hold on the beveled edge of the aluminum. Evidently the plastic hole didn't line up well with the hole in the aluminum so that the screw was inserted at an angle; consequently, over time the head of the screw was able to circumvent the edge of the hole and fall through, thus invalidating any support it was providing. The sudden release of this support, coupled with the weight of the door, broke the plastic, and the door sagged on one side.
It might be possible to replace the plastic piece and thus repair the door, but I'm not thrilled with the idea of searching for the plastic piece on-line and having it shipped from wherever it is manufactured (they don't stock those kind of parts at Home Depot or Lowes) and then trying to put the frame back together and re-glue the glass to the frame, when I can just purchase a new pocket door (with glass on one side only) and re-hang it in an hour or so. I'm basically lazy. Plus I don't have much faith in the design.
So we went to Home Depot and ordered a new door. Can't wait til it gets here. In the meantime, I'm going to pull the other glass panel off the aluminum door frame and hang one of the mirrors in the girls' room, then play around with the door frame to determine the optimum method for securing the pieces to one another.
In my copious spare time.
* * *
Meanwhile, the Toyota was driving me crazy. Those guys that installed the used engine in evidently didn't bother to check out the thermostat; the car is running way too cool. Being too cool is not necessarily a good thing in a car engine because it is designed to run at a specific optimum temperature, and unless this temperature is maintained, the combustion is not as efficient as it is supposed to be. I don't have any specific mileage numbers, but it was obvious from anecdotal evidence that it wasn't getting the 35 - 40 mpg I was expecting.
The needle on the temperature gauge barely hovered above the minimum. My guess was that either they hadn't bothered to install the thermostat, or it was defective. Either way, the engine was never warming up.
So I rigged up a drill-powered pump with some 1/4-inch tubing to speedily drain the radiator into waiting (clean) gallon milk jugs (so I could recycle it easier), pulled apart the casing and removed the old thermostat. Couldn't see anything obviously wrong with it (I'd have to test it at precise temperatures to determine if it was really broken), but I'd already bought a new one, so put the new one in and sealed it up again. Then put the fluid back in and sealed up the system and ...
The gauge now reads nearly normal, just a tad lower than I'd hoped. Took it around the neighborhood for a test spin (no leaks!) and it drove OK. Then drove to the store and back to let it warm up properly. Felt a bit smoother.
Carburetor still needs some adjustment, though. It still races momentarily when letting off the accelerator. I did some on-line searches for that symptom but didn't find anything, so I might just take it down to the Toyota dealer and see if anyone around here remembers how to tune up carburetors.
These days they all seem to rely on the computers to do the work for them.
* * *
By the way, I put some more photos up on Flickr.
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