I set my cell phone on the roof of Susan’s car while strapping Brady into his child seat a couple of weeks ago, making a mental note not to forget that I’d done so. Which I promptly forgot. Driving down the road a mile or two later I suddenly realized where my phone was and shouted for Susan to pull over. She thought something was wrong with Brady and pulled into a parking lot. I jumped out of the car and found my phone perched on the roof, right where I’d left it. That little bit of luck saved me ~$600!
Category: Vignettes
Recipe for anxiety
Ingredients:
one web geek paranoid about data privacy issues that shares a name with a famous photographer
Steps:
- Visit facebook.com for the first time in months to check privacy settings, after a weekend full of old college friend facebook messages leaves you wondering what’s happened.
- Note that profile is still configured to show info in public (google, etc) searches. Decide to investigate.
- Search on name.
- Note that David Hamilton the photographer is still consuming all the top results for your name.
- Idly click on one of the David Hamilton the photographer google links
- Find oneself on a page that looks a lot like child porno (the kids arent naked, they’re scantily clad, but it’s pretty scant, and the site name has lolita in the title), freak out, and close the browser tab.
- Realize you never logged out of facebook when the facebook tab is revealed.
- Curse and fret.
Fscking facebook man.
Debt free at last
You always hear about how when you buy a house you need a ton of cash on hand to take care of all the unexpected expenses. Susan and I had planned ahead, but nonetheless we ended up more than 10k in the hole after the sale, mostly via the purchase of a spendy yard tractor and $6k+ in new appliances. Both were mostly necessary expenses. We definitely could have gotten by with cheaper appliances, but we figured ehh, we’re likely only going to do this once so we might as well splurge, so we bought top of the line appliances. On the tractor end of things, we could have spent at least $1500 less, but I was adamant that we should get something good and mobile. Good because all you read about is how the medium to low end ride on mowers wear out after 3-5 seasons, and we have 3 acres to mow. Mobile because the property has a lot of trees on it. I’m convinced I save an hour a week with our 4 wheel steering model.
We were smart about things – we don’t normally carry debt outside of car loans and mortgage. We research purchases using consumer reports and my endless googling. We talked through everything in the months leading up to the move. In the end though, we lucked out in terms of timing and got 0% financing from Sears on the appliances, along with a bunch of savings tied to a state program that was in play during the week we purchased, and similarly got a 0% finance plus accoutrements deal on the tractor. The downside to the finance deal was, we had a year to pay it all off. We just finished.
So that’s the good news, right? This should mean tons of free capital in the family budget. A Big screen tv, a new ipad 2, and a replacement for my blown up xbox 360, all on the menu this summer? It’s a no brainer! Err, except for two nefariously expensive words which I’ll close with:
Infant daycare ;-(
The ectasy and the agony
So let me just get this out of the way – my golden retriever Soolin is the greatest dog ever. Today’s proof is here:
my dog Soolin leaping into the pool
this despite the fact that she’s got arthritic hips so creaky she sometimes has trouble making it up stairs, and a fat deposit under her front right armpit that causes her gait to be way out of whack*. So you get the full picture, here’s her sticking the landing:
spalasssh!
and paddling immediately on over to retrieve the tennis ball:
paddling over to her ball
so, that’s the good news. My dog is fricking cool and possessed of an indomitable will to enjoy herself. The bad news? She pays the price:
This is after it had healed a bit. It got her on both sides, her neck, and her back.
She got hotspots so badly on her cheeks that we had to pay the vet to shave her for us – she wouldn’t let us near them because they were so uncomfortable. She was diagnosed with a yeast infection in both ears at the same time. All told she’s on two oral medications, some goop that goes in her ears twice a day, and a topical spray that goes on the wounds 3 times a day.
My poor, fabulous, glorious Soolin. There’s no stopping her no matter the consequences.
*(she’s going in for surgery to have that removed sometime in the next month or so)
Strange, angsty day
Had a moment of real parental anxiety yesterday. We had a wave of powerful supercell thunderstorms blow through yesterday afternoon right as I was supposed to leave work. Amherst’s town alert system went off and our campus police told everyone to take shelter. I ended up with a bunch of my coworkers in the basement of my building. My house is about 15 minutes away to the SE of our campus. The storms hitting us then would reach my house in 10-15 minutes, and I sat there wondering whether I should rush home trying to outrun the storms in order to be home with my infant son, or to stick it out and hope for the best. I was really conflicted. Brady was home with my mother in law, and given my druthers I’d rather have been there, but I ended up concluding sticking tight was the safest thing. I wouldn’t have been much help to him if I’d gotten stuck or worse on my way home.
In the end everything worked out fine. My mother in law took him down into the basement and they waited things out. Later that night we had to grab him out of bed and head down into the basement again when another line of supercells passed through, but no tornadoes touched down either at home or work. We do have friends whose neighborhoods and possibly houses have been damaged though, so today I’ve got my fingers crossed for them. All told 7 tornadoes touched down in our region, and so far 4 people are reported dead. Scary stuff when it hits this close to home.
Scene of a poultry murder
scene of the crime
One of our chickens was killed early this winter, and while some of the details of what happened are clear to us, some of it’s a bit mysterious as well. I’ve been sitting on a draft of this story for literally months. I’ve finally found time to post it.
We have a habit of checking in on our chickens in the late afternoon, dropping a bit of cracked corn into their coop and making sure all is well. Susan and I had just returned from a Doctor appointment for our son Brady last week, and after letting our dog Soolin out I headed back to the coop. As I approached Soolin rushed off barking – she had detected a large raptor in our garden, hunched over the carcass of one of our chickens. This fantastic little scene evolved as Soolin chased the raptor back towards our property line, her barking and snapping and it flapping furiously, trying to gain altitude. Ultimately it escaped, but I commend Soolin for her effort. It reminded me of an old warner brother cartoon.
As to what happened, well, I’m not really sure. As you can see in the second photo, something pulled the screws to the coop door latch out of the coop frame. They’re tiny screws, but still it would require a fair amount of strength to manage this. Plus there were no signs of something grasping or gnawing at the coop or coop wire, something you’d expect to find if a predator was trying to work out how to bust into the coop. Our best guess is it was a bear or racoon. Our neighbor watched a black bear pull down his birdfeeder to get at the birdseed this winter, which lead to our operating theory: a bear showed up and tried to get at the chicken feed pellets, freeing the chickens, one of which was subsequently killed by the raptor. There were large bundles of both black and yellow chicken feathers in piles outside the coop, suggesting some or all of the chickens were outside the coop at some point, and several of the other chickens had wounds.
How the criminal broke into the coop
In terms of fallout, the chickens were traumatized, and would not come down from the loft of their coop for two days. After the second day, I opened the top and chased them out of it, figuring they had to eat so I would force the issue. They pretty quickly returned to their old behaviors, sans their sibling.
If you click on the last photo to enlarge it, you’ll see the raptor perched in the tree in the center background (the far tree) of the photo. He spent the 30 minutes it took me to clean up the coop and repair the busted door circling the yard and doing low passes over the coop, with me occasionally shaking my fist at him. After the chicken carcass was no longer visible to him he settled into the tree in the photo to watch me, and was still there when I headed in.
We did lose another chicken over the winter, but I have no photos of it because I discovered the murder scene in the dark. Our best guess on that one was it was a coyote or fox based on the scat it left behind.
All of this has us concluding we need to build a better coop – the current one isn’t adequate in terms of protection for the birds. I did reinforce the chicken wire and apply a layer of metal cloth to it in response to all this though, and we haven’t lost a bird since then. We’ll see if Susan and I find time to work on another coop before the seasons change again.
The perpetrator
Just my luck: no functioning consoles
So my primary hobby is gaming, and I spend a fair amount of time and money on it. What are the odds that in the same timeframe Sony Playstation’s PSN service would go down for a month+ due to being hacked, and my just over 3 year old (read: just out of warranty) xbox 360 would Red Ring of Death? 100% likely as it turns out. Just a couple of days after the PSN network blew up, my Xbox died as I sat down to watch a movie on it. I’m especially pissed about the xbox because I intentionally held off buying one for several years because the RROD issue became well known and I decided to hold off for a hardware revision, assuming Microsoft would address the issue. They didn’t. Supposedly it’s addressed in the newest ‘slim’ models (I bought an Elite shortly after they came out), but at this point, having had my first generation xbox die and now my 360 die, I’m not so sure I want to buy back into the platform. It’s a real dilemma though, because I have literally dozens of games for the thing, as well as many peripherals (the controllers alone go for $50/pop and I have 4 of them), and selling everything off will earn me pennies on the dollar. Plus, I’m figuring my soon-to-be toddler would enjoy the Kinect motion control stuff MS is pushing these days.
So…what to do. I can’t decide. I’m sitting pat for now. E3, the biggest gaming industry trade show, is next month, and I’m going to see what comes out of that before doing anything. I should note that while the PS3 still works, mostly, aside from multiplayer, I’m worried trophies won’t sync correctly when the network comes back up, so I’ve been staying off of it. Meantime, it’s back to gaming on the PC primarily.
My life the past 3 weeks:
Imagine alternating between the two states illustrated in the following photographs every 2-3 hours for most of the last 3 weeks, and you have my life in a nutshell:
Me feeding my son Brady
Brady and me sleeping
Not that I’m complaining, mind – it’s been fabulous, but also super exhausting. I’ve had to hand feed him because of some difficulties he’s had which we think we’re finally close to resolving. We’ve recently switched to Susan helping with the feeding as well, not that this had been easy for her before we did that – she’s had to use her breast pump every two hours for this entire time.
Credit to Susan for both the photos, which I love.
Brady and Susan
First picture of our newborn
Brady Kimball Hamilton
Our son Brady Kimball Hamilton was born at 4pm today at Holyoke Medical Center in Holyoke MA. He’s 6.2 pounds and 22″ long. Brady’s just eating his first meal and he and Susan are both doing well. I’ll post a bit more with some pictures sometime in the next day or so.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 