Zeigen

…and it was the cat.

I dropped the word “robbery” in my last update, and a number of concerned friends and family members contacted me. Thank you, concerned friends! Your concern is touching.

And, in this case, fortunately it’s unneeded as well. Here’s the story.

The other week, at work, I got a call from my neighbor, Corey. Corey lives a dozen houses down the street, is a mechanic and tow truck driver, has a fun family (including a daughter, Caitlin, who is 2 and plays with Sammy sometimes), and is a hell of a nice guy. But he called me and said, “Um, Steve, did you ask for someone to haul stuff out of your POD?”

“Um, no,” says I. “Wait, maybe Kimi did. Why?”

“Two people are loading boxes from your POD into their car.”

I called Kimi and confirmed she didn’t pay for any hauling, and then I called Corey back. (I should have called the police at that point.) Corey said the two thieves had noticed him watching them and took off. He was currently chasing them in his pick-up truck, but had Caitlin in the back, so nothing too crazy was gonna happen. He lost them when they ran a red light across Middlefield.

I rushed home, and at that point I was imagining a worse-case scenario: The house robbed, computer and stereos taken, Kimi’s jewelry gone — but nope, the house was untouched.

After opening the POD, it was clear that some things had been rifled through. Turns out an old video camera, my old Nintendo 64 (oh no! No more Goldeneye!) and maybe a few other things were taken. But everything really valuable had already been unpacked — mostly what was left inside were books and Kimi’s crafting materials and office supplies.

A police officer arrived quickly, took my statement, and then tried to dust for prints. Remember on CSI when they can extract partial prints from bullets and the throats of corpses or other random stuff? Here a perfectly ordinary handle and bolt — with plenty of surfaces for prints — didn’t prove to be a sufficient surface for the officer to find anything. (”By the way,” he says, “that dust is toxic so wash really well.”)

In the past when something’s been stolen, I’ve felt really violated. After this incident, all I felt was that we had gotten lucky. It was also entirely our fault for leaving the POD unlocked. As a wake up call, it reminds us to be more diligent — and that we should finally finish unpacking.

Kimi and I each signed a last will and testament today.

Each year, a significant number of people die “intestate” — without a will. This is a terrible condition to end up in, especially if you have children, because the probate costs on your estate will be significant (meaning attorneys and the state will take a huge chunk), the process will drag on forever, and result in hard feelings or problems, because each state has default assumptions that probably don’t match your wishes (such as, depending on where you live, your parents getting a bigger share of your estate than your children).

I feel fortunate that TiVo has a good legal benefit available: For a small monthly paycheck deduction, I have access to a range of legal services at no charge. One of those services is estate planning — which was really a relatively simple process of calling up a local attorney, going through an interview, and then signing the documents as we did today, just a few weeks after we started the process.

It’s never pleasant to think about all the different scenarios that come up during the estate planning (such as what happens if you’re on life support, or whether you want to be buried or cremated), but I do feel immense relief that if the horrible happens, Sophie and Sammy will be well cared for.

So, are you set? If you’re single and don’t have a lot of assets, probably not a big deal. But if you’re married or have children or have a house, it’s something you really should take care of. And eat your broccoli while you’re at it.

Steve Lacy, a friend and former co-worker, has created BayDad, a blog by, for, and about dads in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ll be blogging there a bit, and I just wrote my first post there, about The Baylands park in Palo Alto.

If you’re interested in parks, parenting, kids activities, tech useful for parents, and/or you happen to live in the area, please give BayDad a read — and if you’re interested in contributing, let me know.

BOOM.

Saturday afternoon, there’s an explosion up the street (although we didn’t hear it), and the power goes out. A transformer has blown out a block away from us.

No harm done, or so I thought (other than interrupting the Olympics I was watching; now I’ll never see that handball match between Sweden and Denmark). I took the kids up to the tot lot to play in the sand, and later Kimi picked us up to go out for sushi boats. A power cut is certainly one way to get me out of the house.

But Sunday, when I called home, the phone just kept on ringing. Turned out our home phone system (a Uniden three-handset system I had picked up several years ago at Costco) got fried when the power came back on Saturday evening, and was stuck in a permanent reboot loop.

This morning when I called Uniden for support, they walked me through a hard reset, but no luck. They had no alternatives for me — they don’t even have a repair facility at all. It was out of warranty, so toss it and buy a new one. What a waste.

Time to go back to Costco and buy a new one, right?

Well, hold on a second. The nationwide trend is towards ditching home phone service. The National Center for Health Statistics has a very interesting article and graph showing the wireless-only trend (totally random federal agency research for the win): Wireless-only households went up from 12.6% during the first six months of 2007 to 14.5% in the last six months. So, about one out of seven U.S. homes no longer have a landline.

Meanwhile, AT&T lost a million landline subscribers in their last quarter (per gigaom).

I was all set to cancel my home phone number today (despite my geeky attachment to the phone number, which ends in 8486 — spelling out TIVO as a mnemonic).

There are certainly some advantages to a home phone:

• Unlimited local minutes. Unless you’re paying a huge amount for an unlimited cell phone plan, chances are you’re paying attention to how many minutes you spend on your cell. Families with gabby teenagers need the cost convenience of a home phone with unlimited usage.
• 911 ease of mind. Despite improvements, 911 calls from a cell are not as reliable: You’re usually calling a very remote emergency center, which has more limited ability to learn your location. Additionally, cell phones can more easily run out of battery or otherwise be unavailable for use.
• Disaster/power loss ease of mind. Assuming you have a handset that doesn’t require being plugged in, when there’s a local disaster such as an earthquake, the landline is more likely to work than the cell phone.
• Archaic requirements. Some companies that you do business with really want you to have a home phone, and don’t know how to deal with you if you don’t have one. I’ve heard that one contributor to your credit score is how long you’ve had the same landline phone number.
• Inconvenience of updating all your friends and database entries: What a pain to tell everyone you know that you no longer have a home phone.
• “Home” sense: My cell phone number is only for me, and it’s usually in my pocket. My wife’s cell phone number is hers, and it’s usually in her purse. But my kids don’t have cells (too young), and what if someone wants to reach any of us but only if we happen to be at home? (Not that my kids are old enough to answer the phone yet.) But that’s what a home phone number “means”: Anyone who’s home. A cell phone doesn’t mean the same thing — it’s for a specific person, and even today a cell phone call seems more “urgent” than a call to a home phone number.

The downside of a home phone is primarily the cost (and the cost of ownership of those power-spike-vulnerable handsets): I was paying over $30 a month for unlimited local and a certain amount of included long distance.

We certainly didn’t miss having a home phone during the four months of the remodel where we weren’t home anyway. So, like I said, I was all set to ditch the home phone number. But when I can called to cancel, not surprisingly, AT&T was very willing to make me a deal to keep me as a customer. So, sucker that I am, as an experiment, before ditching our home phone service completely, I have decided to give the home phone number an extension (hah!). I’ve reduced the cost to $6 a month (plus tax) by removing call waiting, switched to a measured rate, and removed long distance.

We can still receive unlimited calls, and we pay $0.02 per outgoing call. My estimate is we make very few outgoing calls, so that it’s not worth paying $4 a month more for unlimited local calling. If I’m wrong, I can switch back to unlimited, and still save $20 a month from what we were paying.

After several months, I’ll evaluate the bills and the usage. If we no longer need the home number, I’ll join those one out of seven households that have cut the cord.

In the meantime, I have three perfectly functioning Uniden handsets, but no base station and no answering machine. If I can find a cheap replacement for the busted base station, I may replace it. If not, well, now you know why our home phone number just rings and rings when we’re not home.

Today we move back in to our house, after nearly four months of living with friends.

As is typical for a remodel, the work took twice as long and cost twice as much, although we definitely added many more items as we went along.

Our house was built in 1950, in a hurry, and previous generations of owners had done their own work, badly, and without permits. It’s a very small house, with a number of issues. Things were fine when it was just me and my brother, less fine after I married Kimi and my brother moved out, quite a bit less fine when Sammy was born, and really unacceptable after Sophie was born.

We grappled with selling it and moving (bad timing for that, though), with renting it out and living in a rental somewhere else, with knocking it down and starting over, and with torching the place to collect insurance money. Between the market, our desire to obey the law, and not wanting to be out of the house too long, we decided to remodel instead. (We do love the neighborhood and the yard.)

Ultimately, for the remodel, we:

• replaced extensive dry rot damage, especially in the master bath’s shower
• retiled that shower, and added a pocket door to the master bath (it didn’t have a door previously)
• tented for termites, sealed many open beams, and repaired lots of termite damage
• did what we could to level the floor and deal with the cracked slab foundation
• ripped out disgusting carpet and put in a hardwood-like floor
• took down some walls between the living room and kitchen and a useless corridor to open up the place
• moved the kitchen to the back of the house
• took out some awkwardly-placed side windows, put in smaller ones
• ripped out some dangerous wiring and had the electrical redone (our contractors wondered why the electrical hadn’t shorted out)
• ripped out some disastrous plumbing that was like an octopus junction; at one point, someone had snaked it, the snake had snapped off in the pipes, and they just left it there — no wonder we had always dealt with uneven draining
• took out our badly water-damaged cabinets and replaced them
• took out a load-bearing wall made out of multiple pieces of scrap wood (our contractors wondered why the house hadn’t falled down) and replaced it with a safe support column in the middle of the now large living/kitchen/dining room
• replaced our antique and difficult-to-use oven with a modern one
• added a trash compactor
• moved the microwave to an under-the-cabinet model
• replaced some clumsy French doors to the back with compact sliding doors
• removed a chimney/fireplace that took up too much space and had unsafe masonry
• replaced the fifty year old furnace (the wood above it was so charred our contractors wondered why the place hadn’t burned down)
• added a closet to what is now Sammy’s room and had previously been an office
• added a coat room near the front door (taking up the space where the fireplace had been)
• replaced a door that banged into the front door with a pocket door
• deepened a linen closet that previously had been too shallow to place a towel in, by taking up space where the master shower had been unnecessarily wide
• previously, we had ripped out a termite-ridden back deck (with wooden boards we couldn’t keep from being unsafe) and removed the 60s-era hot tub and deck area with concrete, and turned the back yard into an open lawn
• replaced some inefficient 1950s front windows with larger, modern, insulated windows
• put in new light fixtures and evened out the ceiling textures of the big room (previously, some parts were exposed beams, some parts were sheet rock, some parts were wood planks)
• repainted and added new trim/molding inside and out
• probably a dozen more things I’m forgetting

This morning we walk through it all, and start the move-in process. I’d take pictures but our cameras are packed away…

Many thanks to Bob for letting us stay in his place for 3 months, Garry & Marilyn for putting us up for a week when things ran long and Bob’s relatives came to stay, Rob & Kelly for hosting us the last week and a half, Kyrie for numerous consultations on the design and plan, and support with the kids. and most of all to my darling wife who managed the whole project.

Done! (Except for the unpacking part. That’ll take a good two months, I’m sure.)

Now that I’ve updated this blog to the latest software and ironed out all the wrinkles, it’s very apparent how little I posted in July: Just six articles prior to today, and five of them work-related and one blog-software-related.

Partly, work has been very busy and we accomplished quite a bit in the last couple of weeks

• YouTube
• Product Purchase
• Launched in Australia
• Major web site update
• New software release for Series3 and HD units
• A bunch of other internal stuff that I can’t put here

I’ve been using FriendFeed quite a bit, sharing a few articles and comments there, and that’s the other part of why I haven’t posted here as much.

That means I didn’t write up anything at all about our trip to Pine Mountain Lake for the Fourth of July, or about Sammy’s and Sophie’s battles with impetigo (warning: Wikipeida always chooses horrific photos to accompany their disease articles; that link is not for the weak-stomached), or about our staying with three different families during our house remodeling, which is now stretching into the fifteenth week. Or even about having sushi on Friday with Steve and Andrea and Isaac, and learning their exciting news.

We’re definitely grateful to the Vallone family and to Garry & Marilyn’s family and now to my brother Rob and sister-in-law Kelly. Their hospitality is very generous, and we endlessly appreciate not having to stay in a hotel. But we’re so homesick it’s driving us all crazy.

So today we’re hoping to verify that Wednesday is our move-back-in day (when the chaos REALLY begins). And lo and behold, I’m posting here again.

The theme of my posts here this week will be “changing gears.” More on that idea to come.

1. Sunday is less crowded than Saturday (and at 10am the traffic was practically nothing), but next year I hope take a vacation day from work and visit it on Friday instead.
2. Mild weather trumps crowds: If the forecast shows one of the three days is much less hot than the other three, choose that day.
3. Parent to young-child ratio of 1:1 too demanding. Strollers on the dusty ground pose challenges. (Friday & daycare may be the solution.)
4. No matter how much your two-year-old says he wants to ride the carnival ride in the kids area with the Jeep 4×4s going up and down and round and round, he really won’t like it.
5. Not all garlic corn is created equal. The high school fundraising booth with $3 corn isn’t bad, but the other place has better corn.
6. Get to the free vanilla garlic ice cream both early, to avoid it being sold out and also because the more garlic-infused regular food you eat, the less your tangue can really appreciate the nuance of garlic ice cream.
7. The shade structure with the karaoke has plusses and minuses. The plusses include the shade, and available seating. The minuses include the karaoke.
8. The best spot in the whole place is the rain room.

Yvonne and baby Logan joined Kimi, Sammy, Sophie and me for the Gilroy Garlic Festival again yesterday. While I had a great time, and I feel like Sammy and Sophie loved it too, Yvonne and Kimi thought it all a bit too much with little kids. I already can’t wait for next year, though.

Sophie has, thankfully, been sleeping through the night for the past few weeks — in fact becoming a champion sleeper, sometimes sleeping as long as twelve hours. The pitfall of having two kids is that Sammy, in contrast, has been really fighting his bedtime. This is due to the increased daylight hours (bedtime is 8, but darkness is more like 9:30), plus he’s used to having his own room. (We’re still camped out in the temporary house while the remodeling work is done.)

Sophie has become a much more vocal (and strident!) babbler. In the last couple of weeks she’s learned how to sit up by herself, and she can roll over adeptly now, but still no crawling. She’s moved from baby food level 1 to 2 to 3 to real solid food quickly, and in just two days went from being unable to pick up a piece of cereal to mastering the pincer movement pretty much right on.

The other night as Kimi gave her a bath, she started splashing the water and cracking herself up. Over and over and over.

This last weekend for Father’s Day we joined up with Kyrie, Jack and Andy and headed up to Pier 39 for lunch at a crab place and a visit to the Aquarium of the Bay. A better father’s day I can’t imagine.

I learned something this week. When your child develops a condition where little bits of white ooky stuff comes out of his or her eye, that’s pink eye (aka conjunctivitis) — even if the eye in question is not actually pink.

First Sophie got pink eye on Monday; the school called us to say come get that infectious condition out of their classroom if you please. She cleared up after some drops, but then Friday it was Sammy the school called us about.

So, says Kimi to me and me to Kimi, extra washing of hands and whatever you do, don’t touch your eyes.

You know how hard it is to not touch your eyes? I just did it even though I was literally typing up how I shouldn’t do it.

To celebrate pink eye week, we went down to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, enjoying sand and surf and garlic fries and ice cream and lost car keys. Thankfully someone found them and turned them into the lifeguards. One of the scariest 10 minutes of my life though.

Right before the scene where both kids were conked out on the sidewalk with Kimi while I ran to find the keys, Sammy enjoyed a dragon ride, a truck ride and a boat ride. Most other rides required 48″ of height, which is disappointing if you can only muster 36″. All in all, though, a very relaxing day.

Today I attended Jack and Andy’s fifth birthday party at Hoover park, and watched Bob get pelted by water balloons and shaving-cream-filled sponges by ten ecstatic kids. (How I escaped that fate, given I’m a co-godparent? Dunno! But I am oh so grateful.) Aunt Beth made two cakes, one a race car, and the other a chocolate volcano with lava made from melted orange lifesavers. Amazingly beautiful cakes.

* * *

While I was feting twins, Kimi took Sammy and Sophie to the Hiller Airplane Museum, which never gets old for Sammy.

Me: Sammy, what did you see at the airplane museum today?
Sammy: Airplanes.
Me: What kind of airplanes?
Sammy: Old airplanes. With wings!

* * *

Yesterday was Sophie’s eight month birthday. She babbles incessantly now, has the tiniest of teeth buds coming in, gives a smile to everyone, likes to wave somewhat erratically at people, and can roll over, but seems to show no interest in crawling. We’ve started the ferberizing to break her of her 3 a.m. feedings, and so far so good; she slept through the night for the last two nights.

* * *

Yesterday was also photo day at Sammy and Sophie’s school, and in addition, teachers’ lunch out for Sophie’s class. This semi-annual event asks the parents to donate their time and a little money for the teachers to get an escape, while parents come in during the lunch hour to watch the kids. There are eight kids in Sophie’s class, ranging from four months to almost a year old. For the noon to 1 shift where I helped out, we had five parents. When we first started our shift, the teachers had left us well-fed, happy, clean-diapered kids. Within about, oh, ten minutes, half of the kids were bawling, and most had dirty diapers. We parents just looked at each other and laughed. What a profoundly difficult job. The two teachers handle four infants each, with aplomb. We parents were having difficulty with less than two each. Things soon settled down though, and the hour ended up flying by.

* * *

While the photographers set up outside the school and we lined the kids up to have their individual and class photos taken, smoke and haze filled the sky from the nearby Santa Cruz mountains fire. Yesterday morning over 3,400 acres had burned, dozens of homes were destroyed, and the fire was less than 1% contained. Even though we were fifty miles away, kids rubbed their eyes and coughed; and the strange air reminded me of a smell from my childhood, in London: walking down the street in winter evenings, with seemingly every house having a fireplace with a blazing wood fire, smoke pouring out of chimneys, getting on your clothes.

Chim chimminee, chim chiminee, chim chim cheroo.

I was very glad to see the unexpected and unseasonable light rain today, giving the firefighters the break they needed to control the mountain blaze. The dull weather was not so much fun for five-year-olds attending a birthday party, but everything in life is a trade-off.

* * *

Earlier in the week, I caught Speed Racer and then snuck in to a showing of Prince Caspian. It took me about thirty minutes to catch on to Speed Racer’s vibe, but once I did, I loved it. I think this is a vastly underrated movie. The critical smackdown is somewhat intense; I guess most of the critics never watched the original cartoon, because I think the movie catches the goofy tone of the movie pretty much perfectly. And the visuals do not disappoint, exceeding even the hype.

Prince Caspian, on the other hand, is a dreadful bore, missing all spark of charm and whimsy of the first Narnia movie, laying the religious theme on over-thick, and really missing the point of the book (which I read probably twenty times before I was 12).

Speed Racer is over two hours but feels like 60 minutes. Prince Caspian is over two hours but feels like three or four.

* * *

Rob and I have been playing a new card game, Race for the Galaxy (which Steve and Larry introduced me to when they visited a couple of months ago). We play whenever we get a chance. I love this game. It’s a bit fiddly to learn, and the fact that you’re not directly interacting with your opponents takes a few plays before you understand how you can actually have a huge effect on your opponents’ play — but it’s such a short and intense game, I find myself even dreaming about it. Get this game!

* * *

Kimi gave me the new Flight of the Conchords CD for my birthday (among a lot of other CDs, thanks sweetie!). Although I loved the first season of the HBO show, I had thought some of the songs were hit or miss. But I was able to really listen to the lyrics (thanks to the iPhone making it easier for me to carry around music), and now I love all the songs. Buy this CD. Please mister, you won’t regret it.

* * *

There’s a friends-and-family deal at TiVo right now for a TiVo HD. If you’re a friend or family and want a new HD DVR, drop me an e-mail.

* * *

While I do aim to generate content, rather than pass along content from elsewhere, here’s a link. I have to say I applaud these two for their convictions and avocation.
* * *

Kimi: “Your blog is so random. No one likes all the content. No one!”

Guilty — variegated miscellany is what this is. I do tend to be all over the place. Everything’s connected, somehow. Just think though — there are half of the categories listed on the right not even touched by this post. But comments are what I like best, so let me know what you’d like to see more of, and less of.

Friday was a teacher in-service day, so I took the day off work and our family escaped the unseasonal heat wave and made our way across the Santa Cruz mountains (stopping in Moss Landing for a 100% deep-fried seafood lunch) to Monterey, where we stayed for an Aquarium weekend. After checking into our hotel and heading out for a drive, the kids promptly fell asleep for their naps. (We could have timed it better.) So Kimi and I enjoyed the 17-Mile Drive in nearby Pebble Beach. They woke up just in time to see the lone cypress, and then we picked up overpriced sandwiches from the Lodge market and ate on the beach as the sun started to set. (In turn, the mosquitoes had their own dinner.)

The kids adjusted to the hotel room pretty well , and we enjoyed the aquarium on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Sammy was particularly impressed by the hammerhead sharks of the Outer Bay exhibit, but also enjoyed watching the otters play, touching bat stars, walking through the giant wave room, gazing at the jellies, peeking in on hermit crabs, and much more.

I can’t say the weekend was without stress (particularly on Saturday trying to find a good lunch spot, and Saturday night, when a loud neighbor kept us awake), but it was great to get away. The hotel pool was fun too.

Crappy iPhone pictures from Pebble Beach follow (as a placeholder until I have some time to see if any of the real camera’s pictures from the aquarium came out).

Well, I thought everything was back to normal on Thursday morning. Sophie and Sammy slept through the night (more or less), no undue bodily fluids appeared, and everything and everyone seemed happy and well.

Until: Thursday afternoon at work, the school called to tell me Sophie wasn’t keeping her food down. So I picked her up and Kimi and I took turns looking after her; she was in a great mood, but with a very touchy tummy. (That’s the scientific medical term.)

Today she’s “excluded” from school, but still very happy. We’re giving her juice and very simple foods instead of milk, and Kimi’s watching her today while I try to catch up at work. (A friend who is a father of twins told me that he was useless at work for the first year after his twins were born. I don’t feel “useless” but it’s definitely harder to balance life and work.) Hopefully Sophie’s back to normal after today — just in time for her teething pain to start.

In better news, Kimi had her two week follow-up appointment after her back surgery of April 22; they declared her to be healing well, and gave her the green light to drive (which she took advantage of by slipping off to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall last night, and seeing Baby Mama with Yvonne Wednesday). However, they extended the ban on her lifting/bending/twisting by another two weeks, so it’ll be six weeks more before she can carry her children.

Tough weekend.

On Thursday last week, one of Sammy’s teacher’s reported that Sammy had a condition that I will not describe in detail (this being a family blog). Friday it continued, even causing an accident on the floor at one point. But then he was better. Friday night, Kimi gave me a break and I snuck off to see Iron Man (thoughts on that later). Saturday morning, Sammy woke me up at 5:45 and I felt miserable, my stomach in knots, weak, in pain. I soon discovered I was suffering from that same unmentionable condition as Sammy.

Now, previously, Kimi had worried that handling the burden of watching the kids mostly solo (while she recovered from the back surgery of two weeks ago) was too much for me, but I dismissed her concerns. After all, I had handled the first weekend all right, right?

(I had taken Sammy and Sophie to Happy Hollow on Saturday, and we went out all day Sunday as well. For once, work on Monday felt more relaxing than the weekend…)

But now Kimi was right, the lack of sleep and Sammy’s bug had caught up with me, and I hadn’t arranged any backup. I was too exhausted to call around much, but our usual fallbacks for help with kid care were either out of town or dealing with their own kids. So, Kimi, despite recovering from back surgery, stepped up while I recuperated, and John and Yvonne helped by taking Kimi and Sophie out to a rummage sale in the morning while Sophie and I slept. Then Kimi took Sophie in the afternoon while Sammy and I napped. By the late afternoon, I finally had started to feel better. I didn’t eat a thing all day. On Sunday, I was still a bit weak, and still dealing with the condition, but was mostly better. (The only thing I ate on Sunday was half a rice cracker.)

Kimi was now exhausted, however; still, she kept Sophie while I took Sammy for an abbreviated version of our usual morning cafe-and-Farmer’s-Market routine, picking up some food for a barbecue with Rob and Kelly at noon. (Which was fun.) We all took it easy that afternoon.

Alas, the bug that had bit Sammy and me then got to Kimi at around four in the morning on Monday. Only she got it much worse than either of us. After I dropped the kids off at daycare Monday morning, her condition had got much worse. She was alternating between being unable to get warm from chills and unable to cool down from hot flashes. She wasn’t able to keep food or even water down, and was in so much pain that Urgent Care was the only option. They saw us right away, which gave me hope, but then it was so inefficient: First a nurse took her vitals. Then wait 20 minutes in the room. Then another nurse for more vitals. Wait 20 more minutes. Doctor finally comes in, asks all the same questions. He gets called away (it is an emergency room after all). Wait 20 more minutes. He comes back, resumes exam. Decides it’s the same stomach bug. Writes an order for anti-nausea shot. Wait 20 minutes. Nurse comes in to give shot. Wait 20 more minutes. Doctor comes back to re-examine. Writes a prescription for anti-cramping. Kimi convinces him she needs a pain-killer, so he grudgingly orders some vicodin. Wait 20 minutes. Wait 20 more minutes. Meanwhile Kimi is moaning and shivering from the pain (although no longer nauseous). I go looking for a nurse for the pain. Finally she arrives, Kimi takes the pill, we get a wheelchair, off to the pharmacy, then finally to the temporary home so she can sleep. I’m still a bit weak (plus it’s been weeks since the kids have slept through the night — the 3am and 4am back-to-back wakeups are really getting to me), so I grab a couple of hours before it’s time to get the kids. So much for work on Monday.

Today we’re all better, finally, so that’s a relief. And both kids slept through the night last night (well, at least they did after 10pm — before that, not so much). And even better, Sophie slept in until 6:30am and Sammy until 7am, so everyone had eight hours.

Twenty-four hour stomach flu bugs — put them on your list of things to avoid.

* * *

This next part I wrote a week ago but never got around to publishing.

* * *

Last Wednesday, Kimi and I checked in with our contractor to see how the house reconstruction was going. They’ve been at work for a week, and in that time have removed all the carpet and old flooring down to the foundation (revealing far more cracks and patchwork than we had imagined even pessimistically), knocked open the walls we’re removing, and removed the shower in the master bath where they was extensive dry rot and termite damage.

Sammy was with us, because he was in a weepy mood and didn’t want to be left with the sitter; he seemed to take it all in stride, asking (as he frequently does these days), “What’s that!?” with great interest as each barely-recognizable-room was explored.

It’s been a bit challenging to live in one big room for the past few weeks as Kimi recovers from her back surgery on April 22. The good news is that Kimi’s back pain is gone, and she’s recovering from the surgery well (after being initially underprescribed for painkillers). She’s still supposed to be taking far more bed rest than she actually does, and for another week she’s not allowed to drive, and for five more weeks no bending, twisting, or lifting anything more than 8 pounds.

* * *

I took a fair number of pictures from the Happy Hollow expedition on Saturday, April 26. It’s conceivable I might actually load them and publish a couple. Suffice to say a great variety of happy experiences were enjoined. Except for me keeping him out long past his normal nap time, which caused quite a host of difficulties for the rest of the day.

* * *

Kimi: [reading from a new book about Africa, picked up at Sunday's rummage sale]: This is a picture of a pygmy hippopotamus. Can you believe there used to be hippos that small? There used to be a lot of them in Madagascar, but now they’re all gone.

Sammy: Now they’re pretend.

* * *

Update, 12:40am Wednesday: Sophie’s turn. She just went through three cycles of throw-up/clean-up and is now out of clean pajamas. She seems to be in good spirits, despite all the vomit. She is now on my lap wrapped in a towel, while I wait to see if she throws up a fourth time, babbling happy noises that sound suspiciously like “uh-oh.”

I took a personal day today as Kimi recovered from the surgery. She was in good spirits and only a little dazed from the morphine, and came home today around 11:30. She was in pain from the surgery but for the first time in years didn’t seem to have back pain. Apparently the nerve was gigantic and inflamed, and the surgeon said she was surprised by the extent of the damage. But preliminarily at least, all seems to be better.

The kids are both in good spirits (although Sophie’s falling asleep too soon to get a good dinner) and glad to see their mom again.

I’ll keep you updated, but so far we’re both optimistic that the surgery was a success.

From here, she’s got six weeks of no lifting anything more than 8 pounds, no bending at the waist, and two weeks of no driving.

Kimi and I would normally celebrate my birthday by going out tonight, but she won’t be home; instead, her back surgery is today (right now, in fact), and she’ll be at El Camino Hospital tonight.

We had a nice pre-birthday dinner last night instead (with John, Yvonne, and Logan as our guests) where she made all of my favorites: Artichokes, garlic new potatoes, baked brie, chilled cracked crab (a little late in the season but still nice), plus some salad and chicken for Sammy. Thanks sweetie!

She then fretted all night instead of sleeping, and prepared weeks of meals for Sophie and organized everything she could get her hands on. A little nervous about the surgery? I think so.

Tonight it’s just me and the kids, but I’m thinking about taking us all out for sushi. I’m distracted by Kimi’s surgery and hoping she gets through it and the recovery okay (six weeks of no lifting).

In other news, the kids are settling in well (getting up nice and early in the morning, making it easier to get them dropped off at school and me to work on time), and in even better news, my back is no longer sore from moving.

My brother Rob was just chatting with me:

Robert: How old are you now? I can’t keep track, it keeps changing each year

Stephen: heh
41

Robert: Stop it

Stephen: Er
38?

Robert: Each time you get older, you drag me with you

Stephen: I’ll put it in reverse then

Robert: I don’t want to follow you down this path
thank you, yes reverse will work quite nicely

Stephen: Or just kill yourself now and stop the wrinkles before they begin

Done.

Tomorrow morning the house gets tented and (we hope) the termites are exterminated. Then construction begins Thursday.

Done. 

To get to this point, we’ve spent the last two weeks packing and moving and relocating, but now we’re done. Done.

We ended up filling up the POD we rented with about 30 boxes and items to go, so I had to grab some more storage space yesterday. While Kimi watched the kids yesterday (with help from Bob and Kyrie towards the end of the day), I got the last of the stuff out and stored.

Done.

Since we basically finished yesterday, we were able to take a trip (with John, Yvonne, their new baby Logan, and Yvonne’s parents) down to Hakone Gardens in Saratoga for a picnic and koi-watching escape, which was very relaxing. And needed.

Kimi did the final pass this evening, and we’re both sore and exhausted.

Done.

Moving is horrendous.

That was quick — a whole week without a blog post.

As is traditional in the blogosphere, here’s my long-winded excuse for not having updated this blog:

• The dog ate my homework, along with my left tibula.
• I was too busy doing my taxes and the check is in the mail, taped to a brick.
• I was sick with a case of temporary sickle-cell anemia.
• We were kidnapped by Libyan terrorists, developed Stockholm syndrome, ate French fries and Belgian waffles, and then were stranded when our American Airlines flight was canceled, so we had to swim home (uphill both ways).

The truth is that we’ve been spending our time moving out. Packing up. Hauling boxes. So so so many boxes.

The floors of our house are in a terrible condition (thanks to the cracked foundation of our 1950s era house), and the bathroom and the kitchen both need work. I’m not the kind of man’s man who can just fix all that solo, so we’re having some work done. It’ll take about two months, and in the meantime we’re living in a guest cottage in the back of Bob V.’s house. For two months. Eight weeks. Two months. Did I mention we’re all sharing a room for two months?

Last week we got almost everything packed (and I took off Friday from work to help get it all done). Monday the PODS people (hah!) arrived. Thanks to Kyrie taking the kids Saturday morning and Sunday evening, we’re now in pretty good shape. Last night, we moved into the cottage.

It was a pretty rough night. Both Kimi and I are sore from lifting boxes, and Sammy and Sophie naturally were a bit disoriented by the new location, so woke up several times. Each at different times, naturally.

Sammy and Sophie are both used to sleeping in their own rooms, and even though they get the upstairs while Kimi and I are downstairs, it’s all one big room.

Our house is pretty small, but to really appreciate how nice it is to have a house, all you have to do is try to squeeze stuff for a toddler and an infant into 600 square feet. Still, it’s a great space, and we’re very appreciative of Bob and family for letting us camp out.

It’ll be very nice to have new floors and a remodeled kitchen, but in the meantime, I repeat: We’re insane.

We did take a couple of breaks from moving: Wednesday we had Kevin and Rachel over for Uncle Frank’s BBQ and a game of Race for the Galaxy (my new obsession, a board game I’ll review here sooner or later), and Saturday night we took in Yuri’s Night at NASA Moffett Field, about which I have several more thoughts that may actually appear here as well.

Three years ago today…

Love you always.

This morning, the kids and I had a leisurely breakfast before I took them to pre-school. No rushing or hurrying. Then I stopped in at a local coffee store and read just about every page of today’s paper — something I haven’t done in months. Right now I’m relaxing at home and will probably play some video games. Later today, Kimi and I will go and check out mini-vans.

Slacker much? It’s Friday! Why aren’t I working?

Today is the National TiVo Holiday known as “Blue Moon,” which I’ve written about in some detail before. I’ve now been at TiVo for nine years (nearly a quarter of my life), and this is my tenth Blue Moon. There were 90 employees when I started, and 15 of those 90 (one in six) are still at TiVo after nine years. I think that’s impressive, and speaks to what a great company TiVo is to work for.

Pony’s got a post up at the TiVo Community forum with his version of the story.

In other news, Sophie is now six months old, and we just started her on solid food this week. She didn’t seem to care for it, actually. But she’s doing well, and has started sleeping through the night every now and then, just to taunt us by showing us that she can do it, if and only if she wants to. On the plus side, I’ve managed to see some amazing sunrises.

Sammy, now two-and-a-half, has taken to saying, “I don’t know” when I ask him questions about things he knows very well. He’s also in the “what’s that?” phase, pointing at things he fully understands (like grass and trees) just to get me to talk; I think he’s reveling in the ability to be able to hold a conversation and make me answer questions.

When I picked him up from school yesterday, he told me he wanted to eat out. What do you want to eat, Sammy? “Shushi.” He’s on a sushi kick. His favorites are California roll, shrimp tempura, tuna, and hamachi. He also devours the pickled ginger.

Last Friday, while Kimi went to spend time with John and Yvonne and newborn Logan at the hospital, I took Sammy and Sophie to sushi at the local place near Safeway, which I picked because it’s usually empty. Instead it was crowded (even some TiVo co-workers), and Sammy now loves to point to things (like artwork or calligraphy) and say, “That’s Japanese!”

To celebrate Blue Moon and a small raise, all of us went to Sono Sushi (sushi boats) on Castro last night. For once Sammy seemed a bit more interested in the lollipops on the sushi boats than the actual sushi, but he still devoured some raw fish and declared it to be his favorite. I love this kid. He’s definitely his father’s son.

I know I owe some pictures. I have some free time today, so watch for them later…