My families annual near the end of the year greeting card is always full of gratuitous toddler photos. My wife made the card and I personally butchered the greeting to anonymize our names. Little man just stayed as cute as ever.
Huzaa to snowy Decembers!
The following is based on my experiences in gifting to others and what I've observed from other's gifts. All the gifts I have received rock!
Don`t buy your loved one:
- anything that requires work on their part like pottery kits or unmixed cookie ingredients guess what stays in the back of the cabinet for years, just give them the cookies instead
- anything that requires further expenditures of money like a collector`s starter pack, a printer requiring ink, or a humidifier requiring replacement filters. Don't do this to them!
- a book about something they would rather want instead: let's face it, bookstores are the chincy last minute gift givers favorite haven
a donation to a charity they never heard of or don`t care about (quite different for charities they do care about)Ahhh, whocares what they think, charity is charity- productivity software I admit it. I once gave a girlfriend PrintShop Pro. She later dumped me
- cheap art it will end up in the dumpster when better art comes along
- cheap jewelry how tiny can a diamond get? Best to save up for a bigger one next year
- anything more than 1/2 off if its marked down that much, it must be crap
- anything that looks cute and fun in the store it will soon become tired and boring in their house, dusty in their storage box, and completely disgusting in the landfill
- anything you already own even if they didn’t know you owned it they will figure it out
So what does this leave? Cash. The best gift is cash money. Second bests are tools for guys and Lucinda Williams CDs for girls, but girls also like tools (the ones at Sears, not the ones at bars)
Happy holidays!
Going through some good REM sleep around 4:00a.m. this morning. I dream that a cement truck backs up to my house, and bumps the house. I grab a crow bar to help smash up some concrete. Then my wife calls, "someone is making a lot of noise, can they do that". I replay, "sure they can". Now I was awake. There was a lot of noise outside. I look out, and see a half dozen city vehicles outside my house and a back hoe parked in front of my driveway. A crew member is cutting away the sidewalk with one of those big circular saws. Pretty odd before 5:00a.m. on a Sunday.
They were congregating around the manhole in the sidewalk between our house and our neighbor's house. Then a horrific discovery. We had no water.
My wife and I figured that the occurrence must have been an emergency, because no one would voluntarily work at 5:00a.m. on a Sunday, after a holiday, unless it was absolutely necessary. Also, there was no warning like a flier or notice in the city newsletter. Still in my bathrobe, I wasn't about to walk down and ask. I yelled out to the crewmen, but they couldn't hear me over they deafening sounds of their equipment.
My wife was a super trooper. We conserved what water we had left in our Brita filtration pitcher and Powerade bottles we picked up as a free promo. When your city sends your plumbing back to the 1900s, you do what you have to. My wife's car was blocked in the driveway, but my car was out on the street. Later in the morning I managed to drive around the big trucks and buy some water. My shoes were caked in mud that covered the entire street. I only bought the essentials: water, pre-moistened wipes, and donuts.
Little man woke up a lot of excitement and curiosity. He refused to go outside because of all of the noise but stood by the window saying "very big backhoe . . . dirty backhoe . . . butaa"
Around 11a.m., my wife got the scoop from one of our neighbors. She was coming home at 1:00a.m. and saw a huge wall of steam over the street. Then she drove through about 5inches of water to get into her driveway. The whole street was flooded. She called in to the city and reported the problem. The city crew had actually been working for hours before their noise woke us up. Another neighbor and the neighborhood's oldest living resident told my wife that the water main was original to 1937. That big grey pile of concrete to the left of the backhoe is the old water main. Fun stuff.
Around 3:00pm, the trucks all started driving away. I had been napping to make up for lost sleep (and that nap felt awesome!), and awoke to the sound of water refilling our toilet tanks. Hooray, hoorah. Once again, my wife got the scoop. The backhoe driver told her that the water main broke drained nearly all the water from one of the city's water towers. It was likely the worst water main break he had ever seen. Imagine cars trapped in ice, flooded basement, and a city's water supply in danger. All avoided by one woman with a night life.
Huzaa to our neighbor and special props to my wife for her investigative reporting.
Little man is learning new words faster than my wife and I can record them. He can repeat almost anything we tell him. After Thanksgiving dinner, he could say goodbye to eight people by name (with some coaxing of course). Every day he wows us with new words and more complex sentences.
At 22 months old, little man's top 10 phrases are:
- (mommy/daddy) carry you
- watch a movie?
- just one more cookie?
- (little man) go sleepy-bye
- (little man) awake!
- Go outside!
- (daddy/mommy) read book
- Christmas tree (sounds to me like "comedy")
- Line-up cars and butaas
"Butaa" is little man's word for "truck". This is the last word from little man`s baby talk and he will not change his vocabulary no matter how hard we try. For a firetruck, he makes a siren noise before "butaa". We once saw Santa riding on the back of a firetuck, and now when little man sees a Santa, he says "Santa ree-raa ree-raa butaa".
Most of what little man says relates to things often forbidden but that he pretty much wants all the time.
Huzaa to little man!
12 weeks ago, I started a Dale Carnegie course on effective human relations. I had always assumed that I had trouble communicating with people. Way back in college when I took Social Psychology I first learned how different I was from others. It seems that when people walk past others and start to say "hello", they instinctively stop walking or at least slow down. One experimenter noted the dismay of others as he quickly walked by while talking. Apparently I had been noting that dismay my whole life, because that is exactly how I would say "hi" to folks as I sped past them. It seemed to me that developing relationships and winning the confidence of others was an uphill battle (which, apparently is a bad way to battle). I know that I do have family, friends, and the most wonderful wife in the world who all love me, but I have had time to grow on them.
The last 12 weeks have taught me that I am not alone in my struggles to relate to others. For some, just getting up the courage to talk to coworkers is a challenge. For others, talking with authority and confidence seems impossible. Most everyone feels that they cannot truly influence others. Even the people who I would consider social butterflies felt the need to work on their people skills. Each Tuesday night I was in a supportive environment of people that had more in common with me than I would have ever dreamed, and not just because my dreams usually involve me ending up at work in my underwear.
I have such respect for my Dale Carnegie classmates and instructors, that I was truly honored to be selected the top honor in the class, the award for the class member who best epitomizes the Dale Carnegie principles. I was stunned. Most of my classmates assumed that I knew I would win. While I always like the idea of winning, there were class members who I thought were truly stellar people who really grew during the last 12 weeks to become truly outstanding. So I am double honored to be chosen over may very deserving people.
So now I know that I can relate to others, influence them (for good, never evil), and perhaps be a leader. And I have the plaque to prove it.
Huzaa to my Dale Carnegie classmates!
Little man was playing with our hamper and busted one of the rods that holds up the basket. My first thought was, "Awesome, he must be really strong!" My wife thought the hamper must have been made of weak parts. Yeah right, I know my boy is going to be a star athlete someday.
What little man breaks daddy shall fix. The broken piece is a long cylinder with notches that fit into the hamper. I start by finding a similar sized dowel, a.k.a. a round piece of wood. Next, I must mill the dowel into the same shape using my crude tools. I chose to use my Craftsman table saw.
Step 1: Watch the movie about Johnny Cash. Table saws are deadly! I employed almost all of my safety gear. Fortunately my garage also includes a GFI outlet so no electric sparks will every emanate from my hands.
Huzaa to woodworking!
Apparently, TV and movie writers are on strike. I offer no comment on the value of their work or the justness of their cause. I do, however, feel a sense of release that their product will not be around for a while. For far too long humankind has been shacked to the out-dated format of the 30 minute sitcom and 1hour drama. This strike period will give us all a chance to see what we are missing. Personally, I have already explored other options.
My average media consumption in any given day is something like this:
10-20 min - newspapers/magazines20-30 min - radio60-90 min - internet stuff20-30 min - scripted tv shows15-20 min - reality shows25-30 min - movies45-60 min - Halo 35-10min - games other than Halo 3
This is average time per day but instead an average over a week. I might watch a movie over a couple of days and then fill in two episodes of "The Office" on another day. Halo 3 is pretty much an everyday thing as it will be until I become bored with it sometime around the middle of December.
Most of my media viewing is done while I'm doing something else. The radio is listened to most while driving. The newspaper is a read while I eat cereal and stave off attacks from little man, "more daddy cereal?". Internet stuff is blasted to my eyes every time my browser loads up iGoogle. Movies and TV help me forget I'm riding a bicycle to nowhere in my unfinished basement. In fact, the only time I watch TV for the sake of TV is when my wife and I cuddle on the couch at the end of a long day. We could just as easily play Halo 3 in co-op mode instead, buy my wife keeps asking what is fun about shooting and killing aliens. (I respond, there is also jumping, throwing grenades, driving Warthogs, etc.).
You can see from the chart that the internet is a big winner for me. If I'm not checking out endgadget.com then I'm probably looking at a video my wife sent me. The internet is now so vast and full of original content that one could entertain themselves forever. Halo 3 is also a playable on-line, and could thus be played forever. Dare not software engineers combine a browser with Halo or all of civilization would crumble as its best and brightest forsake their birthright to defeat the Flood on legendary and then instantly blog about it and enter into an endless loop of comments and impromptu death matches. Ironically, the TV and movie writers are striking over the bad deal they get from use of their product on the internet. Silly writers, don't they know the best stuff on the internet is free?
So goodbye scripted television and movies. I have my internet and my precious Halo 3 to keep me warm while you are gone.
Oh, the damage that video games have done to cinema. Every since I satiated my bloodlust with cultural tour de force "Halo 3", I have forsaken all other media. But too much of a good thing is somehow bad, in theory, so I took a break from saving the galaxy to watching the X-men save the world in "X-men 3: Last Stand"
"X-men 3" seemed exciting almost a year and a half ago, when it was released in theaters. For some reason, I never made it out to see it, and my excitement has since waned. There are no crowds, no long lines, and no fanboy talk before watching an untimely movie. Maybe this is how movie critics feel at their special screenings: "ho-hum, there's work to be done, wait, which movie is this again?"
I recommend Roger Ebert's review of the first "X-men" movie (watchable on-line). He wondered why the movie wasn't all about a character named "Storm". She can control the weather, and is in Ebert's view, the most powerful and interesting of the "X-men". The movies instead centers on a character named "Wolverine", who has metal forks in his hands and looks like he smells bad. Not that Wolverine isn't interesting, but when other characters can fly, levitate objects, and shoot lasers out of their eyes, he seems a bit boring. Regardless, Wolverine is one of the most popular comic book characters of all time. He just isn't very exciting in movies.
The rest of the movie is about the really powerful mutants. The movie sets forth a scale of mutant powers, with class 1 being the weakest and class 5 the strongest. It is like the Fujita scale for mutations. Most of the mutants in the movie are only class 1 and 2 and dress accordingly: boring blacks, browns, and greys. Near the end the movie, there is a delightful scene where one of the younger and presumably weaker X-men tricks a powerful villain into defeating himself. This type of scene is gold for me. I love it when superheros dig deep and defeat the forces of evil with their cunning and courage. This movie could have used more moments like that.
I will give props to "X-men 3" for its complicated theme of tolerance and understanding. The fictional President makes a powerful argument that mutants cannot go unchecked, for one powerful mutant could subvert democracy. Hence the conflict between mutant rights and the right to vote. "X-men 3' thus breaks through the simple premise of using mutants as a metaphor for discrimination and gives us a more cerebral experience than "X-men" and "X2: X-men United".
So I actually recommend "X-men 3". Wolverine may not be as interesting as to play Master Chief, but he beats the pants off of "Greatest American Hero". As an extra bonus, "X-men 3" turns Frazier into a blue man-ape. If anything, you can discuss with your friends what you would want your mutant power to be or whether it is worth losing your power to fornicate.
Some memories are just too good to be left in the past. Back in the mid 1990s I was in college studying to be a chemist or biochemist or something like that. I kept changing majors, but that is beside the point. To ease the pressure of studentdom, My girlfriend gave me a "stress" ball. It was a squishy ball that supposedly relieves stress through abuse. While studying for organic chemistry, I was putting that stress ball into action, squeezing and squishing it for hours. Then it literally exploded. My desk, chemistry book, notes, keyboard, and all were evenly coated with soybeans and rubbery bits. Not only was the stress ball faulty, it was also eco-friendly. How forward thinking. Ironically, I found the whole explosion and cleanup to be quite cathartic.
After years of waiting and hundreds of precious dollars spent, I finally "finished the fight" and completed "Halo 3". As I reflect upon my victory over alien hoards, I feel pleased. However, my life has not changed, save for the Xbox 360 on my desktop and a smaller bank account. This was not an event like graduating college, passing the bar exam, marrying, the birth of a child, etc. Yet, despite the meager sense of accomplishment I get from video games, I keep playing Master Chief and saving the universe.
I believe that games are fun because they simulate accomplishment. Any good parent can discern the benefits of positive reinforcement over negative reinforcement. Punish me for laziness but not praise me for effort and I will conclude that laziness is its own reward. Reward me for my hard work, no matter how inconsequential, and I will keep trying time and time again. The best games ooze rewards.
Research shows that video games are not addictive. I agree. In fact, I personally find too much video gaming leads to aversion. See if that happens with heroin. During college, I played "Civilization" in 24 hour spurts once every other month or so. What always started as an exercise in discovery and strategy would end in tedium. Put another way, the work eventually outweighed the reward.
Maybe games can provide us with insight into enlivening the real world. Many things start out interesting and rewarding only to become mundane and meritless. If I were to redesign life as a game I would add more rewards, like when I used to run 5Ks and get a "free" t-shirt. Things like baking cookies provides a great reward - cookies! My wife and I also high five each other after accomplishing tasks like navigating around heavy traffic or getting little guy to sleep. The compliments must be constant or else the work will overcome our sense of satisfaction.
In the case of "Halo 3", the game itself is a reward for my frugalness and many items recently sold on Craigslist. Thanks dear wife!
Huzaa to rewards!
