we upgraded to directv today. we got the fancy integrated directv receiver with built-in tivo functionality. it’s very nice, and the picture quality is much better than our old cable box + standalone tivo setup. which makes sense, it was compressing and uncompressing and compressing and uncompressing, and now it’s just compressing anduncompressing once. also, it can record two shows at once, which was exciting to see the first time it did it, in the sort of way that it’s exciting the first time you see, i don’t know, caller id integrated on a cell phone. it’s so obvious that it’s supposed to work like this, because working like this is so obviously better than not working like this, but the first time you see it it freaks you out because you never had that before and now you realize looking at this now that you’ll never be able to live without it. standalone tivo was like that, and now directivo doubly so.
we upgraded to dsl about a week ago. not much of an upgrade actually, more of a lateral move. we had cable modem service through time warner, who shall hereby be referred to as “timeout warner”, since we’ve had so many problems with our internet service recently. this is more of a problem that you might think. i work at home, and workon complex ecommerce web sites that can not be duplicated locally, so downtime is real downtime. and it’s gotten so much worse since the worms. the last straw was when my internet service went out for several hours, and i called timeout warner’s customer service number, and it was actually busy. not “due to known service interruptions in your area, we are experiencing extremely high call volumes, please wait for the next available customer service representative to assist you”. i mean actually busy.
i can’t remember the last time i heard a busy signal. everybody has call waiting, voicemail, automated call routing systems. did you know that when you dial a number and get a busy signal these days, an automated voice from the phone company cuts onto the line and says “this line is busy, we can continue trying the number for you for a charge of 75 cents”. this is not one of those features that makes me do a doubletake and wonder how my life was ever complete without it. this is one of those features that makes me think of the term “nickel and dime you to death”.
incidentally, i used to say that that phrase was the single biggest argument against micropayments. nobody wants to be nickeled and dimed to death. and yet people pay millions of dollars a year for ring tones, 50 cents at a time. that’s completely nuts. when i finally broke down last year and got a cell phone (which, incidentally, *is* one of the things i can no longer live without), the salesman made a big deal about the different ring tones. i asked “is there one that sounds like a phone ringing?” he assured me there was, then went behind the counter and rolled his eyes when he thought i wasn’t looking. i didn’t even buy a model that can have faceplates. faceplates! another incredible scam. no, that’s the wrong word. people know exactly what they’re getting, and they buy them willingly, in bulk it seems, and they love them. that’s not a scam, that’s capitalism.
i taught in dc last week. today i got an email from a student saying he went to take the associated certification test, and he passed, and he was very thankful for the wonderful class, and he couldn’t have done it without me. this is why i teach, no other reason.
we’re still building the nursery. it happens in dribs and drabs. the biggest step so far was breaking down the furniture that used to be in the room, which used to serve as a guest room for the guests we never had. all the furniture either went to other rooms, or to storage, or given away, or thrown out. and then joe and i put together the crib, which gave me horrible flashbacks of assembling crappy scandanavian furniture in my first apartment, but was actually quite straightforward and relatively painless. it helps to have friends who are good at hardware. hardware has never been my strong point. and we only had a few unidentified pieces left over at the end, which we quietly put in the back of the closet in the hopes that no one would notice.
and we got the pooh bedding, classic pooh of course because we’re That Sort Of Snob, or at least i am, because i actually grew up with the original pooh stories by a.a. milne, long before the whole pooh estate got bought out by disney and turned into a franchise and some mindless executive drone came along and said “you know what we really need here? clothes. it’s just completely unbelieveable that all these make-believe animals are frolicking around in a forest with no visible means of economic support, talking and carrying on and writing bad poetry and generally displaying signs of higher-order intelligence, but none of them are wearing any clothes.” and then a bunch of people like me complained, although not me personally, and then disney did a new-coke-classic-coke thing and came out with classic pooh, although these days most of the classic pooh you see in stores isn’t really classic pooh, it’s just in the style of classic pooh, since there really weren’t that many illustrations that e.h. shepherd did in the original pooh, and disney needs more designs than that. that’s capitalism for you. so people sigh, and wink, and nudge, and feel superior for knowing better, and then buy them anyway, and put them in cribs so their babies can grow up surrounded by fake recreations of the characters they grew up with. no doubt there’s a power law at work here. “oh bother,” said pooh, as he looked down at the millions of unloved characters on the long tail of the power law. “oh help and bother.”
one good thing that has come out of building the nursery and shifting furniture all over the second floor and kicking up a lot of dust and sneezing a lot, is that we’ve managed to do a really deep spring cleaning. in august, but who’s counting? time management has never been my strong point. the storage room behind the laundry room, which used to be literally filled from floor to ceiling with bags of bubble wrap and empty boxes and other random crap, is now neat and orderly and navigable. we can even see the floor. it’s very exciting. ditto the attic with the pull-down stairs. ditto my office closet. ditto dora’s entire office, which is now doubling as the guest room for the guests we never have. next weekend we’re going to clean out the garage.
two years. it’s only been two years. some people live in the same place for twenty and never do this. my very best friend in the whole world has parents who live like that, they’ve lived in their house for twenty years and still have unopened boxes from the old house sitting in the attic. in fact, they still refer to their house as “the new house”. they have a basement too. people like this should not have basements. people like this should not be given any storage space whatsoever. they should be forced to throw away all their belongings at the end of the day, and buy all new stuff in the morning.
i met my father at the ymca today. he joined as soon as he moved here last winter. we finally joined after dora got pregnant and couldn’t go to her hot yoga classes anymore. she goes swimming, and my father and i go work out inside and i tell him about soap and rest and wsdl files over the pat-pat-pat of a dozen treadmills. “the body part of the body is the body, and the headers part of the body is the headers. but not all of the headers can go in the body. just the authentication headers.” and he nods appreciatively and feels proud in a vague general sort of way that fathers feel about their sons even though they have no idea what they’re talking about.
babyproofing. i’m told we need to start babyproofing. i have no idea what this involves, beyond crawling around on my stomach and banging into things as hard as possible, and throwing away anything that breaks or falls on me. and later we need child-proof cabinet locks, so that only our child can open our cabinets. these days there are specialized baby stores that offer a dizzying array of babyproofing items, designed specifically to strike fear in your heart and empty your wallet. you can’t scare me, i’ve jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. of course that only lasted five minutes, so it’s a little different.
also, we have trees now. i am writing this now to serve as a reminder to myself when i read this in the morning, to remember to take pictures of our trees and post them. they came while i was in dc. i left, and we had no trees. i came back, and suddenly we have all these trees. it’s like a flashmob, only with trees. and spread over the course of several days, so it’s a little different. and i have to water them every day, so that’s different too. if you take a hose to a flashmob, they get angry, and, i don’t know, maybe stick around for an extra five minutes in protest. ok, it’s nothing like a flashmob. bad analogy. let’s start over.
so anyway, we have trees now. five of them. crape myrtles, which are very popular in this region, mostly due to the fact that they are very pretty and very difficult to kill. so we’re like the last on our block to get crape myrtles, which is fine, because we’re the last on our block to get pretty much everything. we were the last on our block to get married. when we moved into the house two years ago, we were not even engaged. i think it was a minor scandal at the time, but people have never been my strong point, so i didn’t pay that much attention. and anyway, screw them, we had money and opportunity and the will to force our personalities on each other 24 hours a day, so we bought a house together. a very nice house, i might add, on the corner, with a big dead crappy lawn and a clear line of sight to 110 degrees and a sign on the street corner that misspells our street name. and now these days we’re married, with a kid on the way, and dsl, and directv, and built-in tivo, and the ymca, and friends, and parents, and trees.
these days, these are the days. did you ever wonder which days you’d look back on someday and say “those were the days”? these are those days.
![[freshly planted crape myrtle tree]](http://diveintomark.org/public/2003/09/crape_myrtle.jpg)
re childproofing: I recently included, in a party invitation, “My house is not adult-proof, let alone childproof.” Sure enough, a toddler got loose in the kitchen and immediately found the battery powered circsaw. (The parents were suitably attentive, so this was not, in practice, a problem…)
Comment by Mark Eichin — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 1:09 am
it seems you are not using the shift key much these days either.
Comment by Don Park — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 1:19 am
wow, that was wonderful
Comment by Spencer — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 1:53 am
Heh… My DirecTV w/ Tivo arrives tomorrow. It’s the only way to watch something and tape something else at the same time, or program to tape something when we aren’t home.
Re: childproofing. Realize that you will have awhile before the child is mobile, and it will quickly become clear once the baby is actually there. I had to remind my wife of this when she was about 4 months pregnant and put safety caps on the knobs for our stove. Of course Ethan[1] is now 15 months and he still can’t quite reach the stove knobs, and oh, by the way, we MOVED before he was really getting into too much danger. Glad we didn’t hang the cabinet locks.
Moving into a new house let us think about storing dangerous stuff well out of reach, so the stuff under the cabinets is stuff he can get into and while he might make a mess (and often does) and while the process of making a mess may be loud (it often is), it isn’t dangerous.
The real fun will be this winter, if we try to use the wood-burning stove and/or fireplace.
BTW Mark, when are you going to start the baby pool? (I assume you’ve announced the due date, but can’t remember)
[1] Daily dose of Ethan: http://tntluoma.com/ddoe
Comment by TjL — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 2:28 am
I love when you post stuff like this. I need the occasional heart-felt, meaningfull post among the rest of the drivel I read on a daily basis. Thank you.
Comment by Brock — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 3:09 am
As far as childproofing goes, bear in mind that for the first six months, when you put the kid down and go do something and come back, well there it still is. Having said that, there are these way-cool magnetic doohickeys that you can install in your kitchen cupboards so they only open when you get the little magnetic doodad and hold it against the cupboard door in just the right place. We decided the little magnetic totem needed a name so we called it Percy for Percival because Galahad would’ve been coming it a bit high.
Comment by Tim Bray — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 3:19 am
Babyproofing is overdone. Teaching babies which things are dangerous is a better strategy. They have a good evolutionary history of heeding parental warnings to draw on.
Comment by Kevin Marks — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 4:54 am
Don’t get too worked up over the childproofing thing just yet. Like Tim said, you’ll have many months of immobility and then they start moving about very, very gradually and slowly at first. If you’re attentive and reasonably responsible parent (and I know you are) then you’ll have no problem figuring out what needs to be childproofed as you go along. (your kid’s personality and your parenting-style combined will largely determine what needs to be childproofed in your home.)
Comment by Már Örlygsson — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 4:54 am
Loved the post. Very, cynical-but-pleasant.
Again, regarding baby-proofing: We didn’t do too much, dangerous things like bleach got moved out of the way, but if it was just a case of breaking things, then Jack was expected to learn not to.
He’s 4 now, and I’m still hoping :)
He did flood the entire kitchen / dining room once (from the bathroom above it, oy).
Get accidental damage insurance, and ‘Good luck!’.
Comment by Aaron Brady — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 6:43 am
Nursery decorations are a racket unto themselves. We did the “Hey Diddle Diddle” nursery rhyme and spent FAR too much time and money on it, even going so far as to have my wife’s best friend come in and paint the characters from the nursery rhyme on the wall. FWIW, it turned out very nicely, and our son does seem to like what he sees, even at 4 months old. We haven’t dealt with baby-proofing yet, and the visit of a 2 year old several weeks ago reinforced the need for that Real Soon Now. There can be 100 objects within their reach in a given room, but they will immediately find that pocket knife that you left out (or hand grenade, rocket launcher, etc.). On the plus side, kids are great :) Life will never be the same, but you’ll wonder how you got along without them…
Comment by Larry — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 6:52 am
My parents had to put locks in the windows and disable all electric sockets (except for some privileged few that were out of my reach and were needed for stuff like the TV or the iron).
I eventually learned that the windows wouldn’t open and that the sockets wouldn’t give me electric shocks so I ended leaving them alone.
Comment by Jacobo — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 7:21 am
When your child arrives, “these days” will take on a whole different meaning. Enjoy “these days” now and “those days” then! And try to make “most days” “good days”.
Comment by Bob Monsour — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 8:00 am
Re: Baby proofing the home (As if you didn’t have enough advice already, but in this area, every comment can add value).
1. Baby-proofing is not necessarily for the baby’s direct protection, but it can be to protect them from you. There’s no need for, “Ah! Stay out of the upstairs bathroom, BABY!” if they can’t open the door.
2. … which, has been mentioned, will not be a problem for several months (almost a year, depending on the child).
3. To get an example of what needs to be done, invite some friends with a small child over to your house (between 1 1/2 to 3 years), and watch the child and their parents. You’ll start to get the idea with a lot fewer headaches than banging your head.
4. Baby proofing is a racket unto itself, mostly aimed at the day care industry, which must baby/child proof everything that an adult finds essential in such a way that the adult doesn’t want to use it any more either. I personally am tired of electrical outlet covers which have to be removed (and can’t be) to plug anything in, when I have yet to see a child interested enough to stick something into an outlet. “Who wants to play with a silly white piece of plastic on the wall with this knife when I can bang on top of this cabinet or cut stuffing out of the couch?”
Final note: I have yet to figure out how a family can start with valuable, breakable items - china, crystals, pictures, electronics, etc. - have a child, and continue to use them. The child will break it. It isn’t a matter of if but when. If you love your child, you put away your adult toys until the child is old enough to know better - somewhere around the age of 22 ;).
Comment by David — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 8:58 am
“pregant”? Also what is “wsdl”? I need an acronym title. :)
Great piece. If coding for money fails you can always take up writing. Reminded me of this similar tale on Zeldman’s site:
http://www.zeldman.com/glamorous/80.shtml
Comment by Chris Hester — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 9:22 am
“which gave me horrible flashbacks of assembling crappy scandanavian furniture in my first apartment”
Um… There is no crappy scandinavian furniture! These are not the druids you are looking for! Crap, it’s not working.
“she goes swimming, and my father and i go work out inside and i tell him about soap and rest and wsdl files over the pat-pat-pat of a dozen treadmills. “the body part of the body is the body, and the headers part of the body is the headers. but not all of the headers can go in the body. just the authentication headers.” and he nods appreciatively and feels proud in a vague general sort of way that fathers feel about their sons even though they have no idea what they’re talking about.”
Precisely.
“babyproofing. i’m told we need to start babyproofing. i have no idea what this involves, beyond crawling around on my stomach and banging into things as hard as possible, and throwing away anything that breaks or falls on me.”
It’s also about making sure he can’t jump into a pan. Or the mixer.
“these days there are specialized baby stores that offer a dizzying array of babyproofing items, designed specifically to strike fear in your heart and empty your wallet. you can’t scare me, i’ve jumped out of a perfectly good airplane.”
LOL.
“incidentally, i used to say that that phrase was the single biggest argument against micropayments. nobody wants to be nickeled and dimed to death.”
I can’t fathom why people pay about $30 a month in Japan to get new crappy ringtones to scare and/or impress other people with. But they do.
People are dumb.
Comment by Jesper — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 10:09 am
My parents moved, err, 17 years ago. They still call the new house “the new house” and so do I. They still have unpacked boxes of stuff in the attic, such as Life magazines from before I was born. Why would they unpack them?
Re: babyproofing. I have no kids. But I have a friend whose home is one of the most amazing collections of niknaks and junk you can imagine. Someday it’ll be in a coffee-table book of eccentric homes. When he found himself with a baby, people asked him about babyproofing. He said “we’ll slide the fridge magnets up out of her reach, but other than that, she’ll just need to adapt.” So far, she’s adapted fine, despite all those scary electrical outlets openable cabinets, tchatchkes, unpadded table legs, etc.
Comment by Adam Rice — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 10:36 am
A word of warning on bedding. We bought our daughter (what we thought was) an innocuous pillow and blanket to go in her crib when she was born. That was 12 years ago. She still carries them arround like they are her treasures. Even though they are so threadbare that I’m sure they will fall apart any day. So before you buy anything try to imagine how you might feel about it in 10, 20, and 30 years in the future.
Comment by Will Leshner — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 11:07 am
Being an import to southern Arizona, I naturally snarl at other imports inappropriate for a desert, such as “grass” and “deciduous trees.” But I’m somewhat fond of the crepe myrtle outside our bedroom door—a cheerful thing, when we manage to give it enough water to bloom—and value its hardiness.
—L.
Comment by lnh — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 11:37 am
this is why I read your site mark. (and maybe the ww)
also, I’m think of switching the directv mostly because of the suckiness of our cable. How’s the channel changing with DTV. Our cable box i s s o s l o w i t h u r t s . If I can’t channel surf what’s the point?
Comment by Ryan Schroeder — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 11:49 am
Re: #15, I must differ with David. Our kid DID try to penetrate various outlets, simply because the first time he tried he got the reaction he treasures above all others: shouting, running parents.
And the argument that other dangers are more appealing don’t really hold water: a 14-month old has enough excess energy to power a large subdivision, and he will certainly find the time and willpower to bang on a cabinet, cut stuffing out of a couch, jump on top of the coffee table, open the pellet stove, throw Daddy’s glasses in the toilet, pull the kitchen rug into the bathroom, empty the toy chest on the floor, hide the mailbox key, stuff toilet paper in the diaper pail AND poke at the electrical outlets, all in a 1/2 hour period.
I know you won’t believe me when I say it’s all worth it, but…
Comment by SvenByGolly — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 11:50 am
what a cool story -r
Comment by reinhard — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 11:53 am
About babyproofing: Try to open everything. If you succeed, shut it again and seal it shut. Try to pry up everything. If you can, either glue it down, move it higher, or throw it away. Grab anything you can reach from ground level, and see if it fits in the neck of a 2-liter bottle of soda. If so, get rid of it; it’s a choking hazard. Stick your fingers into everything, and after you’ve gotten over the shock, plug them up. Try to unplug everything. Then find a way not to. Find every sharp item in the house, and put them in a bag, in a box, in a locker, in the basement of someone else’s house. Then go back and get all the ones you missed. Then have Dora do all this, to get all the stuff you missed the second time around. (Don’t worry about the stuff she misses; the baby will find it for you.) Despite the fact that the baby won’t be mobile for awhile, start now, because you never will once it comes. Oh yeah, and don’t forget to crawl around on your stomach, banging into things as hard as possible, and throwing away anything that breaks or falls on you.
And you’re absolutely right about my parents. May I not inherit that trait from them. (Too late?)
Comment by Michael A. Strieb — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 12:46 pm
“we were the last on our block to get married. when we moved into the house two years ago, we were not even engaged. i think it was a minor scandal at the time, but …”
Yep. I generally pass it off as “I’m a California native” and smile. My wife and I had a kid, then bought a house, *then* got married. :-)
-jjh
Comment by Jeff — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 12:51 pm
Hey, what the hell is this? Can we get back to the meaningless caterwauling syndication format squabbles or what?! Oh, I kid folks.
I’d love to TiVo (tiVo? TiVO? TIVO?!), but they have yet to come out with the high def tivO. To me, that will be the much-heralded Cat’s Ass. Until then I will chain myself to rigid, corporate time schedules like a good little minion and connsumer. I will watch each and every commercial — including that shmarmiest of schmarmy assholes Tom Whosiwhatsit from Crossroads Ford… if there’s ever a revolution, I’m driving straight to Buck Jones Road and dragging his ass outside to line up first — and timeshift not one iota.
The chitlin will be around 4 months old before it has reliable use of its arms, much less anything approaching mobility, so (like everyone else said) put off the childproofing. Though the advice to invite other children to troubleshoot the safety of the house is sound… I’ve since discovered that our utterly unblocked stairs are toddler magnets and veritable deathtraps. It’s never too early though to stock up on sleep and baby wipes. Seriously. Go to Sam’s and buy like 10 boxes of the things. I thought my mother-in-law went through Kleenex when she visits, but DAMN, my 4 month-old creates waste from all holes at such a rate as to deplete the little wipes within a week. A week!
Comment by ColdForged — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 1:18 pm
this was just terrific for a number of reasons .. 1) the writing was lovely 2)no caps. i’m all over the no caps thing and 3)I actually understood it all! hey, i’m a non-techy. some of your posts, while i’m sure are greatly appreciated by many, are sooo above my head sometimes that i probably could pass for your dad on a day he’s not up for going to the gym with you. i can nod with the best of them.
the salesman trying to sell you ring tones for some reason reminded me of the salesman who sold me my first car. he opened up the trunk of the ford escort and proudly announced, “it can hold 3 dead bodies!” yeah, cuz i looked like i worked for the mob at the young age of 18. whatever. :)
Comment by patricia — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 4:05 pm
It is much easier to teach a child to use the stairs than it is to teach them not to use them.
Comment by Tyrell — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 6:44 pm
Just when I think I’m going to have to stop reading your blog because it makes me so depressed that you’re so amazingly good at programming (and I’m not), you write one of these extraordinary posts that show you’re even more amazingly good at writing about your life and I realize that I really can’t stop reading without greatly diminishing the quality of my online experience.
Thanks.
Are the little graphics along the bottom of the page new? I don’t remember those. But maybe I just haven’t been scrolling down the comments field in a while…
Comment by Liz Lawley — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 7:11 pm
Hey, neato… teach me to not scroll to the bottom of the page, won’t it. It’s even sexier that they aren’t the same every time you load the page. Mark have static puzzles at the bottom of _his_ page? Hah, never happen.
Sweet. /me digs. Like that matters.
Comment by ColdForged — Tuesday, September 9, 2003 @ 9:44 pm
Two cover versions of ‘These Days’, by the otherwise unremarkable Jackson Browne, are worth seeking out:
- by Nico, on the album Chelsea Girl, and I believe it also appears on the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack
- by Fountains of Wayne, on the CD single for Troubled Times
Comment by Dean Allen — Wednesday, September 10, 2003 @ 8:32 am
The only childproofing I think my brother’s family did for their kids was a gate at the bottom of the stairs.
Beware hot appliances! My boss’s kid burnt his fingers badly on a hot oven. I think he might have been at someone else’s house though. What can you do when the kid goes visiting? Despite all good intentions, I don’t think it’s possible to watch them 24/7. Especially when they get mobile. :-)
Comment by Chris Hester — Wednesday, September 10, 2003 @ 10:22 am
“…and he nods appreciatively and feels proud in a vague general sort of way that fathers feel about their sons even though they have no idea what they’re talking about.”
Almost made me cry, I know exactly what this is like. Touching, man. Very cool.
Comment by Isaac Raway — Wednesday, September 10, 2003 @ 12:41 pm
Throwing my $.02 about babyproofing.
Yes, as people mentioned, babyproofing is a crock. Watching your baby is the best babyproofing you can do. People want to stop being attentive to their baby after a while and that’s wrong.
For the first 2 years of my sons life, when he visited me on weekends from his mother, I never let him out of my site unless he was asleep or in a playpen.
Also, for the love of mike, pete, and jane, don’t buy any more expensive breakable things for about six years. Things can break even before your eyes before you can jump up and stop your kid. Before I could stop him, next thing you know one of my mother’s favorite lead crystal vases was broken. At that age he was careless and quick, a bad combination.
Also a question Mark, and its about damn time you answered. Why are you writing in the style of e.e. cummings? :)
Comment by Adrian — Wednesday, September 10, 2003 @ 4:09 pm