Tikkabik

I'm having a hard time reconciling today's date with what it should be in my head, anyway. Somehow the month of May has totally disappeared in a blur, and it has, for the most part, been spent remarkably unproductively.

I don't know why that bothers me, but it does. I want to be able to account for my time more effectively than I am able to. More often than not I get the sense that I'm spending most of my time treading water, basically managing from crisis to crisis without really being able to focus on long-term goals and objectives.

Part of it is just the overwhelming responsibility of having three kids. Part of it is having a very involved job. And part of it, I admit, is being less well-organized than I'd really like to be. Whatever the reasons or excuses, it's still incredibly frustrating.

Posted by flargh at 06:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is the stupidest. Controversy. Ever.

Posted by flargh at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I made peace with my male pattern baldness years ago; it was patently obvious from the time that I was in my early 20s that I was destined to lose my hair.

At 38 I'm starting to feel my age, and more to the point, look it. I now have a big patch of grey/white hair in my beard and when I let my hair grown in, it's noticeably ashen and grey on the temples, too.

Posted by flargh at 06:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

James: "If you're having trouble beating a level in your game, you should just use the living cheat code. We call it Robert."

Posted by flargh at 06:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As useful as I find Twitter as a means of staying in touch with friends and colleagues, its constant service interruptions are pissing me off. I'm quickly approaching the "not worth the trouble" point.

Posted by flargh at 06:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

James: "I wish cars could run on ham. That way if you got somewhere and there was some left over you could eat once you got there."

Posted by flargh at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Memorial Day weekend is upon us once again. The first (albeit unofficial) weekend of summer, this marks the time on any year-round Cape Codder's calendar when we pull the blankets over our head and pray for autumn.

By now all of the seasonal businesses on Cape Cod are open and expecting an influx of visitors; Chambers of Commerce are greedily rubbing their hands together in glee at the thought of hundreds of thousands of tourists buying t-shirts, lobster toys and expensive meals at area restaurants, and those of us who live here simply hope for the best as we plan to double our commute times to get anywhere, rely on our knowledge of back roads and understand that no matter what we do, we're going to end up waiting.

Some people say that we should be grateful that the Cape economy is as robust as it is in the summertime. Me, I don't give a shit. Nothing about my life is dependent at all on vacationers coming to the beach -- it's only a matter of circumstance that I live on the Cape to begin with.

So I'm not particularly thankful for their presence or grateful for how tourist incomes might affect the local economy, and I largely regard their presence here as an unwelcome reminder of why I don't live in a more densely populated suburban or urban area.

In fact, I wish more Chambers of Commerce across the Cape would get their heads out of their asses and try to figure out ways to make this economy distinctly less dependent on tourism as a way to balance the budget.

At least the weather will be mild this weekend -- it's been an oddly mild spring, and this weekend calls for temperatures in the upper 60s, though pretty much unbroken sunshine until for the next several days. We're going to be taking it easy for the next few days, though we plan to drive off-Cape on Monday to spend some time with friends who are having a cookout.

Posted by flargh at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been banging on doors for the past few days as head of the Mashpee SEPAC to try to make some sense of the school committee and how they're managing a decision to outsource special ed van transportation.

What I've learned, and what shocks me the most, is that the school committee is answerable to no one in town. The board of selectmen, outside of giving them a number to work with for their total budget, has absolutely no authority over how the school committee operates our how they use their budget whatsoever. The school committee is basically only answerable to the Department of Education.

It's a bizarre system, and to my thinking, it's undemocratic. It's also unfortunate that despite repeated attempts, no one on the committee seems interested in talking with the SEPAC about this issue. It's frustrating as hell.

Posted by flargh at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My rotten luck with lawn mowers continues. Last year we got a wonderful push mower on sale at Sears, and really, since it came home, it's performed admirably. A key start ignition, reliable operation and fine cutting with a 22-inch radius. It was the first new mower and only reliable one I'd gotten after years of suffering with lousy used models that would fall apart or fail with spectacular regularity.

Unfortunately that run of good luck ended on Saturday.

The mower started leaking prodigious amounts of fuel, and at first I thought something must have nicked a fuel line. Gas was dripping off one corner of the sideways-mounted air filter. That's a user-serviceable part, so I pulled the cover off the filter and checked underneath, and saw that the gas was pouring out of the carburetor.

The throttle and choke are factory-set on this model, and I think something must have gotten stuck in an open position enough that the carburetor is just dumping gas out now.

So off the mower went to Sears this morning for some (thankfully, warranty) service, hopefully back in time for the weekend, before the back lawn is two feet tall.

Posted by flargh at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday Bonnie and I had a rare treat: The ability to go over to a friends' house and relax without the kids! Our friends Heather and John had an impromptu cookout at their house, and invited us to come over shortly before my mom took all three kids to an afternoon activity she had planned some weeks before. We rarely get time to ourselves and even more rarely get to spend that time in the company of other adults, so it was a treat.

The clouds rolled in, the temperature dropped, and while it threatened rain, it really didn't do more than just spit a bit -- enough to be offset by a fire that John set up in part of the yard. Eventually Mom brought the kids home and I recovered James -- neither Emme nor Robert were feeling up to socializing -- and he had a good time playing with their kids and with some of the other guests' kids as well.

All told, it was a nice relaxing way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Posted by flargh at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some recent bookkeeping at the office has reiterated to me that I'm losing vacation from month to month because I simply don't take any. We have a cap on the number of vacation days our company will allow us to "roll over," and mine hit that limit some time ago. Which means that for every month I don't take vacation, 1.67 days of vacation time flies out the window, never to be seen again.

Right now I have something like 30 days of vacation stacked, ready to use. Yes, I could take the whole month of June off and get paid for it. Well, theoretically -- I doubt that my boss would let me do that.

So I've cleared it to take a week off next week and help bump that cap down; obviously I'll need to continue to ratchet it down throughout the year, which I plan to do. This isn't a new problem; it's just sadly very easy not to take time off when you work from home.

I'm not actually planning to go anywhere next week. Bonnie's working and the kids are in school through most of June, so we're not taking off on a trip or anything. I'm just going to be puttering around the house, taking care of a few things I've been meaning to find the time to do but haven't.

First thing on my list was to assemble some new kitchen furniture we recently got. We now have a very nice new pub-height kitchen table and six high-backed padded stools instead of the makeshift dining room table and scrap chairs we've been using for most of the past decade.

Posted by flargh at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Robert, clip your fingernails. You look like Nosferatu," said Bonnie.

James: "What's Nostrataco?"

Posted by flargh at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Daddy, what's tax?" James asked.

So I tried to explain tax. I explained sales tax. Income tax. Property tax. About how sometimes the government charges people tax, and charges business tax. About how you have to calculate tax. About how the state and the federal government each takes tax.

"Tax is stupid," said James.

From your mouth to God's ears, kid.

Posted by flargh at 07:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't know what it is that makes some parents think it's okay to put their children on TV without a good reason. Bernie & Phyl's, a local chain of furniture stores, has tapped into whatever this need is, however.

Bernie & Phyl's, like most furniture stores, has long polluted local television stations with idiotic ads, usually featuring the eponymous founders, who are now doddering well into their final years. The ads are always punctuated with the store's jingle, a doggerel rhyme. ("Quality, comfort and price, that's nice!")

A while back the store's advertisers figured out that if they put up a camera in public spots in and around Boston they could get the local populace to do their advertising for them, so we've been subjected for months to townies barking "Quality, com-faht an' price, dat's nice!" in their thickest Beantown brogue, which in itself was enough to set my teeth on edge.

Recently they began advertising "casting calls" for kids to come into their stores and do the jingle on camera, so now we have a new slew of television ads featuring grade-schools parroting the jingle, over and over again in 30-second increments. Off-key, off-tempo. But awwww. They're kids! They're so adorable! It's so endearing!

Not.

Posted by flargh at 06:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So for the past few months I find myself using the Twitter microblogging service more and more. Maybe you've noticed, as I keep a Twitter widget embedded on Tikkabik.

Twitter, if you're unfamiliar, is a service that lets you post your thoughts in 140 characters or less. Users subscribe to each other's Twitter feeds (called "Tweets") and often use Twitter as a somewhat less-than-realtime chat client.

Twitter is appealing for a variety of reasons. For me, it's because the 140 character limit -- a somewhat arbitrary number that, if I understand correctly, is grounded in Twitter's original roots as an SMS-based service for cell phone users -- enforces an economy of thought and expression that's utterly the opposite of the average blogorrhea you're likely to find.

Having said that, Twitter isn't the be-all end-all of communication. There's still a healthy place for blogs, for longer posts. But for more and more things -- off the cuff observations, anecdotes, humorous comments -- Twitter's becoming the go-to place these days.

Posted by flargh at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hillary, you ran a good race. You ran a hell of a long one, too. But at this point, it's a war of attrition, and you're exhausting the voters. Pack it in. Give it up.

Posted by flargh at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I can't quite figure out why, but my interest in electronics never translated into any aptitude to tweak home appliances or automobiles, unlike some of my friends. I was never one of those kids who tore apart the toaster to figure out how it worked. It was enough for me that it heated up the bread.

Anyway, our dishwasher stopped working a couple of days ago and a tech came out today to take a look at it. Turned out there was a power surge of some type and the controller board that manages all the system's on-board diagnostics froze up, sticking the dishwasher in an endless loop that I, as a hapless operator, couldn't escape from.

Fortunately, he knew the Vulcan nerve-pinch to reset the system back to its baseline, so he had the machine up and running about ten minutes after he arrived.

I suppose I'm glad it wasn't anything more serious.

Posted by flargh at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

James had his first holy communion on Sunday, which went off without a hitch. He was well-behaved, did what he was supposed to, and although the weather didn't cooperate, everyone did well. I think one of the reasons he cooperated was because I promised that afterwards we'd go to the movies to see Iron Man, which opened on Friday.

Iron Man didn't disappoint. In fact, it's one of the best superhero movies I can remember in the past few years. They didn't rush the story for the sake of the action, and did a solid job of fleshing out Tony Stark's motivation for creating his superhero alter ego. The special effects were stupendous, the cast was great, and they've certainly paved the way for a sequel, as anyone who stayed through the credits can tell you.

Posted by flargh at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not that this should be any surprise to anyone with a pulse and two brain cells to rub together, but a new poll published Thursday shows that George Bush is the most unpopular president ever.

He's managed to crack 71 percent -- a higher rating than even Harry Truman and -- almost unbelievably -- Richard Nixon got during the nadirs of their administrations.

Then again, why shouldn't he be? In seven years he and his cronies have devastated the economy, blown billions upon billions of dollars on an unpopular war, done more than any administration in modern history to destroy our citizens' civil rights, turned the executive branch of the government into some monster that's one step away from a dictatorship, turned us into a hated bully on the global stage rather than a shining beacon of hope to the oppressed...it just goes on and on and on.

Posted by flargh at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)