Weasel Of Doom

Not in the mood for a funny light-hearted post about my mis-adventures with car maintenance. In the mood for ranting and raving and getting a divorce and going back to Russia, but don’t want to blog about it. So my NaBloPoMo adventure is going to end with a whimper. Oh well.

Not sure how long the game will go, so here’s a short post, just in case we won’t get home until after midnight….

Well, so far this week is sucking. Every night for the past week, Squeeker has been waking up and screaming at two-hour intervals. I am drinking two pots of coffee a day at work (8 cups) just to keep my eyes open. He is still congested, but thankfully he does not have a fever anymore.

I had a very very frustrating meeting at work on Tuesday. The kind of frustrating that makes you want to quit. I hate it when people treat you nice in person-to-person conversations but screw you over in work situations. I also hate it when people use words like “best practices,” “work flow,” and “understanding the process” when the process in question involves only two people. And for the last time, our problem is not the process, it’s the fact that nobody gives a damn and wants to give us information.

Today I spent over an hour trying to convince my boss that the best way to be proactive is to ask people what they want, instead of suggesting the many ways in which they can do their jobs better. I wish I was sure he got the message.

BelovedSpouse is putting the kids in the car, so I better finish this. Coming tomorrow: Changing (car) light bulbs for dummies :-)

Amazon.com’s Best Books of 2007
I have read exactly ONE book on that list – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Downright depressing.

NY Times 100 Notable Books of 2007
You guessed it. Just one. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, again.

Oooh, and the Times have lists going back to 1981! I suspect I have found the holy grail of “hmmm, what shall I write about tonight” order :-) Without further ado:

Nothing from 2006. Unsurprisingly, only Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from 2005. 2004 – nothing. 2003 – Jennifer Government by Max Barry, Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul Krugman. 2002 – The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, Q is for Quarry by Sue Grafton. 2001 – Not a damn thing. 2000 – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Coming soon – the many ways I can say “never heard of these books” from 1981 to 1999!

DemonChild, the child who for almost three years never complained about clothes we put him in, the child who demands pajamas to be put on,who insists on his coat being zipped up and his hat being on, lately developed an aversion to pants.

Almost every morning, he either protests the appearance of pants loudly, or scream “pants off, pants off” as the trousers of doom are being forced onto his skinny legs and non-existent butt. Recently I switched him to 2T pants, because 18 mo ones were getting too short in the leg and the waist. The 2Ts fit better, except when they fall off DemonChild if left belt-less, or are so baggy that both his legs fit into one pant leg, thus opening exciting possibilities of stuffing two children at once into a single pair of pants. Fortunately for all involved, Squeeker is way too short and squirmy for me to actually try the experiment.

BelovedSpouse, sucker that he is, actually lets DemonChild pick out clothes in the morning. DemonChild, however, is truly my child in that if confronted with more than one choice, he freaks out and either (a) keeps rejecting everything or (b) wants everything at once. So it is not uncommon for the brown pants that were the only ones he would consider when Daddy dressed him to become the anathema of the trouser world five minutes later. To avoid these problems, I don’t give DemonChild a choice, unless he is well and truly freaked out by an item of clothing (such as an unexplainable aversion to a very nice Hawaiian button down short-sleeved shirt, or truly cute shorts overalls with a handyman theme, two only such cases before the current pants hate). It’s a good thing we don’t have any 2T skirts around, because I am sure he WOULD wear those to daycare without complaint :-)

Today is one of those “feather that broke the camel’s back” days.

• Squeeker is sick. We are taking him to see the doctor today, and if MIL cannot watch him tomorrow, I will have to stay home.

• BelovedSpouse and I are both not feeling well, and haven’t all weekend.

• Work is making me want to scream in frustration:

  • Boss growing a spine and some balls? Not happening.
  • Expectations? We like those targets to be moving, preferably without warning.
  • Try to do a good turn to somebody? It will turn around and bite you in the ass. Guaranteed.
  • Communication? We don’t to it here. We would rather ambush people and stab them in the back. So much more Christian that way.
  • Taking responsibility? Is that a word? Not in our dictionary.
  • Clusterfuck? Yeah, that sounds right.

• And there is still nine hours to go in the day. Can’t wait to see what other shit is going to happen.

Squeeker now says “mi mi mi!” while pointing at the fridge when he wants milk, and “boo boo boo!” as he picks up a book and carries it to us so that we can read it to him. He also repeats sounds on command, like ba-ba, da-da, ma-ma, etc. Sometimes we think we hear him say “thankyou” and “cracker” and “hurray” but those could be auditory hallucinations, since they usually don’t repeat. No doubt at all about “mi mi” and “boo boo,” though. Go Squeek!

Last night, both Squeeker and DemonChild ended up in our bed. We are so sleep deprived that we can’t even remember how DemonChild got there. I do recall telling BelovedSpouse to just bring the screaming Squeeker in around 11:20 pm (15 minutes after I had gone to bed. The timing, it’s exquisite.) Between the first-born doing his level best to be the short horizontal line in the letter “H” in our bed, and the second-born alternately sleeping, screaming, head-butting, and trying to escape, it was yet another restless night.

At 6:15 am we returned the bundles of joy to their room. DemonChild slept on. Squeeker shrieked his indignation for at least fifteen minutes, but at that point we just told him to deal. Eventually, he fell back asleep, only to be woken up around 7 am by DemonChild, who was feeling well-rested and ready to boogie. We ignored them for another half-hour or so, and then BelovedSpouse got up while I stayed in bed trying to convince my eyes it was time to stay open for more than a second for another hour.

After I dragged my butt downstairs and joined the kids in selectively paying attention to Saturday morning cartoons, BelovedSpouse took apart the crib. Tonight, Squeeker is sleeping on a mattress on the floor. We’ll see how that goes. The hope is that if he is free from the baby cage, he will feel more empowered and actually spend the night in his own bed.

When we turned the lights off tonight, the kids were not too happy. Squeeker reminded us how well and how long he can scream. So be it. After ten or so Russian songs, he had fallen asleep (in self-defense, I am sure; my singing is spectacularly bad). DemonChild shunned his bed and opted to camp out on the chair. Fine. At that point, if he wanted to sleep hanging from the rafters like a bat, I would have put a pillow under him and said, “Carry on, but be quiet about it.”

We’ll see what tonight will bring. Somehow, I don’t think restful sleep is on the agenda. I would LOVE to be proven wrong, but I am not holding my breath.

Today feels like Sunday, calendar evidence to the contrary.

Squeeker decided that the best way to spend Friday at home is to scream early and often. We have 3.5 more hours of his screaming at random intervals for no apparent reason to look forward to. Of course, this assumes he will actually go down at 9 pm.

DemonChild is trying out the path of passive disobedience. So far, he has mastered going totally limp while having his hands washed, and leading us on a merry chase when it is time to change his diaper.

I think BelovedSpouse and I are both wish we could go to work tomorrow. There we can at least get some rest :P

As part of the “bring a dish to pass this Thanksgiving, because nobody wants to cook the whole meal by themselves, thank you very much,” we were assigned mashed potatoes. I decided to break tradition and make the damn things myself. Called Mom, got detailed instructions. Talked to coworkers, got detailed instructions. Decided that consulting the internet for yet more detailed instructions was at that point an overkill.

While the second half of the Packer game went on, I peeled a shitload of potatoes, cut the larger ones down to size, and put them to boil in the biggest pot we own. Alas, the potatoes cooked too long, aided unbeknownst to me by BelovedSpouse breaking some of them in half when they were almost all cooked. So instead of having nice potato-shaped potatoes I got basically “almost-mashed” puree-consistency potatoes. Using the potato masher on them was an insult, really. And adding milk to what already was a rather runny mess felt decidedly counter-intuitive.

Quick consult with the internet revealed a couple ways to remedy the problem. Solution 1, “add potato flakes from mashed-potatoes-in-a-box” was unacceptable due to lack of the aforementioned potato flakes. Solution 2, “cook on low-to-medium heat for 10 minutes with lid open” was duly implemented. After 20 minutes, our mashed potatoes were somewhat less runny but, in my opinion, you could still taste their sorry history.

Oddly, people took seconds of the potatoes at dinner. Needed something to help that turkey go down smoother, I guess.

I overslept and did not get in until almost noon today. But that’s OK, because I did not get to leave until almost 9 pm (and that’s with skipping lunch). Got home to a very annoyed BelovedSpouse who was stuck with the kids all evening with no warning. Kids who, incidentally, are still awake at the time of this writing, and protesting loudly against the unfairness of being forced to go to bed. It is now 45 minutes AFTER their bedtime, but they don’t let small details like that stop them.

My day at work sucked. I got one application acting like I wanted it to, then accidentally deleted if off the server. No backup, of course, and an empty recycle bin. Spent the next hour and a half re-creating that particular wheel. Then I tried to fix an issue with the way forms are being emailed to people. Gotta love it when after an hour of making incremental changes things SUDDENLY totally stop working, and no amount of “undo” fixes the problem. Am beginning to think there is a random server-side delay when changes to xslt files are made.

Oh, and when I left work, it was snowing. Perfect ending to a crappy day.

Ever had one of those days, when EVERYTHING annoys you? You spend a meeting restraining yourself from being rude to the coworker with a perpetually sour face. The contractors seem determined that YOU should do all the work, not them. No matter how clearly you express what it is you need, it might as well be in Mandarin Chinese for all the good it does you. You spend another meeting biting down sarcastic remarks because your boss looks like a maiden aunt confronted by a forest of waving penises [can't believe I misspelled that, what is the world coming to?] whenever you open your mouth and tell it like it is (your teammates laugh their asses off, though, so it’s worth it). Your friend comes over to help watch the kids, and spends the evening contradicting your parental authority, or so it seems.

Such days are perfect for having a cigarette (or ten). Of course, I am shit out of luck, because I quit three years ago.

Squeeker is going through the sucky sleep stage when he wakes up screaming in his crib and does not calm down until he is in bed with us. (Amazingly, DemonChild sleeps through all the shrieking. I guess he has developed an immunity after going through the same thing himself a while back.) The suckiness is compounded by the fact that Shriektar has a cold (but not, as daycare thought, a case of pink eye as well. So he is going back tomorrow, with a note that says he is pink-eye-free. At the pediatricians office, the nurse joked about him possibly having a case of pink nose, and put “daycare” as reason for the visit, because certainly BelovedSpouse and I would not have taken him in otherwise. Love our daycare, even though they are occasionally a bit paranoid. Love our pediatrician’s office, too, for their nice doctors and extended hours on week nights.) and so he coughs himself awake and it sounds like he is trying to cough up a hairball, or possibly throw up. So far so good, though, we’ve been only getting the sound effects, and not the actual throwing-up.

At any rate, for the last week or so Squeeker has been sleeping with us. Wouldn’t be a bad thing, except he keeps trying to crawl away and explore in the middle of the night, necessitating very light sleep from me, so that I can catch him before he makes a head-first dive off the bed. Also, when he is awake and ready to play, he head-butts unsuspecting sleeping us in the face, which is extremely painful, and not conducive to being loving parents.

Because we often don’t latch the gate after screaming Squeeker removal, sometimes DemonChild wanders in to join us. The other night, I was dreaming we had a dog who was touching me on the hand with its wet nose, only to wake up and realize it was DemonChild’s cold nose. He was snuggling to my hand in preparation to climbing in. Good thing we have a king-size bed, I guess ;P

On Saturday, we made the mistake of letting the cordless phone headset out of our sight, and into Squeeker’s. To make up for the subsequent cruelty of separating Squeektar from his new amazing toy, I gave him my cellphone to play with. Disaster averted.

Now, I have been letting my kids play with my cellphone (keypad locked) whenever they want to. Usually, DemonChild would pretend-talk to it, and Squeektar would do a taste-test, an impact-test, possibly a blunt-weapon test, and then lose interest. The cellphone, a Nokia “brick” that came free with our calling plan, survived the attentions of my children for two years now, and have come in handy as an emergency toy a number of times. One might go as far as call it “kid tested, Mom approved.”

What I neglected to take into account is that Squeektar is currently going through a drool-monster stage. The amount of drool the kid generates is amazing. (He also has a cold; nothing like a snot-drool-tears mixture being wiped all over your face to test that unconditional love parents are supposed to have for their children, I am telling you.)

But back to my cellphone. When I tried to locate it a couple of hours later it was not, surprisingly, hard to find. In hindsight, that should have been the first sign that things were not going according to plan. Instead of hiding among toys or stuck into a shoe, the phone was on the kids table, in plain view. When I picked it up, it was damp. I wiped it with my sleeve a few times, but instead of diminishing, the dampness increased. The phone was literally oozing drool. Hmmm. It was also saying “battery low,” so I went upstairs, plugged it in, and forgot all about it.

Fast forward to Saturday evening. I heard odd noises coming from our bedroom. Investigation revealed the sources off the odd noises to be my cellphone, boasting condensation on the inside of its screen. Not good. When BelovedSpouse stopped laughing at the water-drops where no water-drops ought to be, he took the cellphone apart, and discovered that the battery was soaked, too. We left it to air-dry for the night, and hoped for the best.

Sunday morning. The parts were all dry, so I put the phone back together. And it seemed to work. Until I noticed that it kept dialing 7 all the time. And refused to respond to buttons being pushed. And randomly switched profiles. And attempted to connect to the internet. You get the idea.

On the plus side, it still rings. On the minus side, that’s about the only thing it does. My attempts to answer the phone have so far been a spectacular failure. I think my phone now things it is an alarm clock.

For those of you keeping score at home:
Squeektar: 1. Cellular technology: 0.

Last night around 10 pm I was driving the Jetta home from Jason and Jen’s. Squeektar clonked out minutes after I left; DemonChild valiantly fought sleep for 20 minutes or so, mainly by loudly singing along with the “Songs and Fingerplays” CD, but finally he, too, succumbed.

So I am cruising along at 5 miles or so over the speed limit, enjoying the total lack of traffic and the fact that I actually know where the hell I am going, for once. As I am driving through Lannon, I remember how BelovedSpouse got a “warning ticket” there a few months ago, because the front AND the back headlights on the Jetta were burned out, and how it cost me $80 to get them replaced at the dealership. Then I remember that the OTHER back headlight is burned out now. No sooner does that thought cross my mind that I see flashing blue lights in my rearview mirror. Thank god I have a valid (probationary) drivers license now. 20 minutes later, I too have a “warning ticket.” 15 days to get the rear light fixed. It would be a lot easier if my car manual actual told me how to do it, instead of “helpfully” suggesting I take the car to the dealership for that. Time to ask the handy DBA at work how much he charges for “light replacement” lessons.

Moral of the story: if you have burned out lights on your car, stay away from Lannon after dark. BelovedSpouse took the freeway home that night because the license plate light on the Saturn is burned out, and he did not think he could get that past the vigilant Lannon police force.

So, I did pretty well on the “fantasy”-tagged books on Library things. Not so good on the books most frequently tagged “unread” – out of 200, I remember reading less than 40, listed below for your perusal (I was honest and did not include the books I never finished reading). Those marked with an asterix I read translated into Russian, or in the original Russian. Go Russia!

1. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
2. * Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. * Beowulf
4. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
5. * Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6. * Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
7. * Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. * Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
9. * Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
10. * Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
11. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
12. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
13. * Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
14. Stardust by Neil Gaiman
15. * The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
16. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
17. * The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
18. * The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
19. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
20. * The Iliad by Homer
21. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
22. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
23. * The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
24. * The Odyssey by Homer
25. The Once and Future King by T. H. White
26. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
27. * The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
28. * The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
29. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
30. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
31. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
32. * The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
33. * The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
34. * Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
35. * Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
36. * Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
37. * War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
38. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
39. * Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte