Child Abuse
Violence, especially when involving a child, is an ugly thing. I can vouch for that first-hand. My children have been abusing me a fair amount lately.
The trend started when Ethan and I were wrestling one morning. I guess it had been a while since we had clipped his fingernails (that would be a whole different wrestling match), because he recognized them for their apparent combat potential. He dragged a fingernail from the base of my neck to the middle of my sternum. Without exaggeration, a strip of my skin dangled from the end of his finger.
Something in my face inspired him to an immediate sincere apology. The shower sure stung that morning, and I looked like I was recovering from surgery for a few days.
Gerrit, not one to be upstaged, pretty much took over from there. Aside from being the general King of Destruction in our home, he also does his share of harm.
Not long ago, while Shannon was holding him to me for a kiss goodnight, he thought a head-butt-to-the-eye goodnight would be much more fun.
But his magnum opus so far was a time when I was asleep. It’s not often that I’m asleep when he’s out of his crib, but for some reason, that was the situation. He climbed up on the bed, and I groggily noticed something cold and metallic rubbing on my upper arm. I thought, Oh, Gerrit is driving one of his little cars on my arm, and I just tried to keep sleeping.
When he went over to visit Shannon (also sleeping), she woke with a start to find Gerrit with a razor in his hand. The connection still didn’t quite make it through my head, until I got up later to find a raw patch on my arm that had bled in a few places.
I do have to say, though, that in Gerrit’s case he distributes the beatings evenly. We’ve all learned that when you sword fight with Gerrit, it’s a very practical exercise in self-defense. He even gets himself sometimes. Just yesterday he stepped off a mattress and in a stumbling, running attempt to regain his balance, smacked right into a wall. That’s one of those dichotomous experiences where you try to show sufficient comforting sympathy while stifling a giggle.
Game Over
A very sad e-mail hit my inbox a couple of weeks ago. Seeing the subject line, “Game over for Gamecenter,” my heart sank a little.
Gamecenter is one of the web sites I visited most regularly. Their “Dispatch” that shows up in my work inbox brought a bit of stolen pleasure each week as I peeked at the computer game reviews. The best reviews are for games that I’ve greatly anticipated (knowing about them from previous Gamecenter previews), and for games that really stink. The latter are always good for a laugh. In fact, I doubt I’ve played any games over the past few years that I didn’t first get a good recommendation for from Gamecenter.
And now they’re gone. The dot com shakeout finally impacted me in a personal way. Sure, several of the free ISPs I’ve used have dropped like flies as I kept changing from one to the next (though NetZero remains in business; they just take their fee in blood instead of dollars — they get more obnoxious every week). I’ve also gotten e-mails from several other free services as they crashed and burned. But this was the first one to hurt a little.
It turns out that Gamecenter didn’t go bust — their parent company, through acquisitions, ended up with two gaming web sites. One of them had to go, and pink slips to the Gamecenter staff announced which one.
Their last feature on the site was a list of bios for all the writers and editors. Each name was followed by a sadly ironic little button: “add to cart”.
It’s Home Now
Every now and then, someone will ask us, “So, are you all settled in your new house?” I usually respond, “Yeah, pretty much,” which is the socially expected “I’m fine, thanks”.
But really I wanted to say, “It’s never home until I’ve got a place for my computer.” Of course, you can’t say that for fear of being considered not only a total geek, but ungrateful for such a nice new house.
When we bought the house, the “no place for an office” flaw was immediately apparent, but there was a whole lot of space in the basement to remedy that.
We started the remedy in January, and hoped to be done near the end of February. Unfortunately, it was the classic over-schedule, over-cost project. It caused lost sleep, tough choices and was highly educational. The adage comes to mind that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
Anyway, after all that, I was finally able to resurrect my desk from its dusty and partially disassembled/destroyed state last week. Over the past few days, I got my computer set up. I was especially anxious to do this since I had gotten a high-speed internet connection hooked up about a month ago, and hadn’t been able to use it.
Unfortunately, when I finally got all the hardware hooked up, I couldn’t get a connection. I went through hours of technical support music, with lots of suggested tweaks, apologies about hardware incompatibilities and finally stumped support people. I was starting to suspect software rot — my OS had stopped shutting down cleanly a while back, and was getting a bit cluttered with junk.
On a gamble, I installed a clean version of Windows XP, which I have been beta testing at work. I knew that no support technician would touch me with a ten foot pole after that, but hey, I figured I had exhausted their expertise anyway. Besides, I’d grown to like XP from using it at work. So, I installed it, and everything just worked! I felt like a Mac user for a moment, though not quite so “artsy”.
So here I type in a new office, on a new operating system, with a new high-speed link to the ‘net. And if all goes well, this issue will even be published on an advertisement free new host.
And even though my office isn’t totally finished, I’m starting to think, “Yeah, this is feeling like home.”
New Office in Progress
April 22, 2001