Tikkabik

Since July 4th, 2007 the newer Frickin' Van -- our full-sized '96 Chevy van (a Glaval Gladiator conversion) -- has been mouldering in the driveway. After more than 180,000 miles the engine blew, and fixing it was well beyond our means.

We replaced it last summer with a 2004 Kia Sedona LX minivan, which has served us well, but circumstances have required us to consider getting a second vehicle -- doctor's appointments, after school commitments and other things, including a rather frantic summer schedule, have necessitated the purchase of another car.

Trying to jockey for the van with Bonnie, who now works out of the house four days a week, required me either to stay house-bound until she got home at 6:30 or so, or to drive her to work and pick her up, thus losing two hours of productive work time in the process.

I considered putting the Frickin' Van back on the road again using a rebuilt engine, but ultimately decided that was throwing good money after bad. The high mileage, wretched fuel economy (the vehicle has the aerodynamic quality of a brick wall), and 13 years of abuse from two families have left the Frickin Van in sorry shape. It's also ungainly huge -- parallel parking the beast is a futile effort, and finding a parking garage that will let me fit its 7 foot 6 inch tall frame in is very difficult.

I really didn't want to be saddled with another set of car payments, and I doubt very much we can afford a second car payment anyway, which left me searching for a good used car that I could pay cash for. And I found one at a local small auto dealer -- a 1999 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo.

It's certainly no econobox -- it's a luxury SUV -- but it's also in fine condition for its age and mileage, in my price range, and suitable as a second vehicle for us when we can't be in two places at once.

I'm actually surprised, given my relatively limited means, at what I was able to afford -- a comfortable five-passenger car with a leather interior, sunroof, wood trim, a premium sound system, a comparatively economical six-cylinder engine, automatic transmission and air conditioning. I'm not suggesting the Jeep doesn't have wear and tear on it -- it certainly does, and will need some parts and servicing as time goes on -- but it's paid for and insured at this point, so I won't have to fork over a few hundred to a bank every month for the next few years to keep this thing on the road.

Posted by flargh at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've spent a good deal of time running around like a chicken with my head cut off for the past week, due to a series of circumstances beyond my control. I'm happy that by the end of the day today the end of that craziness was finally in sight.

There are few things more frustrating that being really busy without being productive or having much to show for your effort, but I guess that's the cross one has to bear when you've got kids and other family members depending on you to do things they need you to do. Fortunately, Bonnie and I have taken the steps we needed to get those problems under control before they totally spun out of hand.

In other family news, James seems to be enjoying this science class he's involved in very much. He goes to Woods Hole -- a village in Falmouth that's about a half hour's drive from our house -- and learns all about woods, ponds and wildlife. He's picking up some science, having fun playing outside, and making some friends. Every time I've picked him up, he's been playing outside with the rest of the kids, taking turns shooting baskets on the basketball court or playing tag. It's good to see him doing "kid" things while his brain is working, too.

Emmeline and Robert are continuing their puppeteering workshop at the Sandwich library, and will soon have to perform for an audience. They're doing well, from what I can tell, though Bonnie has thankfully arranged her work schedule to pick them up and drop them off from the library as need be.

August starts in just a few minutes and by the end of the month it'll be time to put the kids back in school. That means summer vacation is more than half over, and while it may make the kids a bit glum, I'm looking forward to it, for all the same reasons they're not.

Posted by flargh at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, some bad news on the work front today -- Bonnie has had to leave her second job.

Bonnie did "parent support" for the Parent Information Network, which has been immensely helpful to us over the years. That meant that among other things, she called parents of children with issues similar to our kids and offered them help and advice. She also coordinated monthly meetings in our area.

She was what they call a "casual employee," and they didn't provide her with fixed hours. Due to some recent personnel changes, they unfortunately took away her one consistent responsibility -- coordinating the Falmouth parent group we've been participating in -- and gave that job to a new hire.

In an extended telephone conversation on Tuesday, the manager Bonnie works for couldn't guarantee her either what sort of work or how much work she'd get when they start to pick up again in the fall. All she could do is make a sort of vague reassurance that there would be things she'd need to do.

Unfortunately, we have bills to pay and more to the point, a family schedule to maintain, with three kids all with different interests and different after-school responsibilities. And I work full-time. So having Bonnie on the hook to drop everything at a moment's notice and help parents at PIN's beck and call just won't work for us logistically. It also doesn't seem to make a lot of sense organizationally for Bonnie, for a lot of reasons not worth digressing upon here.

Bonnie decided at that point that parting ways with PIN was the right decision. She's not happy about it, and I don't think she should be. She put her heart into that job and had hoped that the effort she made would be recognized and rewarded by PIN, and I don't think they ever did. I can totally understand her position, too -- it's a lousy situation to feel a responsibility to a job that's offered by an employer who feels absolutely no responsibility to you.

I'm hoping that Bonnie can fill the gap either with more hours at her other job -- working in a doctor's office in Hyannis -- or with another part time job. But she's going to need a bit of time to figure out what she wants to do and how she wants to do it before she makes a decision.

Posted by flargh at 01:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just finished watching Tom Brokaw interview Barack Obama for Meet the Press on NBC, and I have to say that I'm impressed -- not only with a seasoned journalist who asked some tough questions, but also with a presidential candidate who's 180 degrees different from the buffoon we've been dealing with for the past eight years.

Unlike Bush, Obama is articulate, erudite and doesn't demonstrate any of the same bullheaded arrogance that Bush does. He had good answers for many of Brokaw's questions. And more to the point, Obama explained how he's trying to build consensus and develop some political capital that our NATO allies can use when it comes to figuring out what to do with the mess in Afghanistan. That's a lot better than the "You're with us or against us" bravado from Bush, that's for damn sure.

Meantime, McCain's campaign seems more intent on complaining about how Obama didn't spend time with injured troops in a military hospital, which shows you just how far off point, off base and out of touch McCain is. All I've heard from McCain while Obama's been on this trip is him whining about how Obama hasn't been to these areas sooner.

It's sad. And I'm sure it plays well with flag-waving patriotic assholes, but not with anyone who's actually paying attention to foreign policy or what a mess we've managed to make of the Middle East over the past decade.

Posted by flargh at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So there's this local place called Harmony Hut that I have, in the past, gotten a kick out of. They repair and sell A/V equipment, and they also have a treasure trove of vintage video games and cartridges for sale. They also repair computer printers, and I've been having problems with one of mine so I brought it in for service -- it's an HP 4050N, an industrial-strength network printer.

I talked with them this morning, and the guy who I spoke to on the phone -- whose name I fail to remember -- was unbelievably arrogant and rude. He had the audacity to tell me that the printer shouldn't be used with multiple computers. First of all, that's foolish -- the "N" in 4050N is short for "Network," something even my eight year old son knows -- secondly, it's been used for several years on a network with no problems whatsoever.

The problem with the printer had nothing to do with networking, by the way. It had to do with paper feed -- specifically the printer was jamming up and making noise whenever it tried to roll paper through it.

I began to explain to him that the problem I brought in for diagnosis had nothing to do with networking.

"You can argue with me all you want, but as far as we can tell, this problem is operator error," he said. A not so nice way of saying "it's your fault."

Last time I give them *any* business.

Posted by flargh at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have to hand it to my wife, she's got a strong work ethic.

For about the past year Bonnie's been juggling two jobs -- she does parent support for a local non-profit that focuses on parents of children with social/emotional disabilities like ours, and she also works as a clerk in a doctor's office.

I think she's exceptional at the first job -- she's made some close friends and helped out some families in crisis. Unfortunately, the hours are irregular at best, because they're a state-funded organization and seem to be in constant flux. Frankly, we need more stability than that, which is why Bonnie sought the second job. It doesn't pay as well and I don't get the sense from her that the work is as rewarding, but the hours are steadier. Between the two, Bonnie works pretty much every day during the week.

She's really built a niche for herself at the doctor's office. Although they use Windows PCs, she's more technically adept than some of the more senior office staff, so Bonnie can often muddle through technical problems they're having or solve dilemmas involving how applications work that they can't make heads or tails of. She's got a reputation for being the go-to person for tech support as a result.

Anyway, I'm proud of her. After a while away from the workforce raising our kids, I'm glad she's jumped back in with both feet and is going strong.

Posted by flargh at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So earlier this week I had two bad teeth pulled, and yesterday my father had cataract surgery on one eye. He reports that he's seeing better today, and joked about changing his name to "Seemore Buffalo." As you can see, the painful abuse of language is apparently a family trait.

Posted by flargh at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went to the oral surgeon's today to have a bad tooth pulled -- a molar on my upper left jaw that had developed a very deep crack and was beyond mending, unfortunately. It started causing me excrutiating pain around July 4th, so I was quite happy to see it pulled.

While I was there, the doctor offered to take the root of another tooth that had broken a couple of years ago which I'd been ignoring. So this afternoon I've got a face full of novacaine and a head full of vicodin to make the rest of the day tolerable.

Hopefully these are the last extractions I'll have to deal with for quite some time.

I'm unclear exactly on why I've been having such extreme tooth problems, as I brush regularly and don't eat a lot of crap that would rot your teeth. Though I suspect leaving my diabetes untreated for as long as I did probably affected my dental health quite severely.

Anyway, I should be seeing my dentist again in a few weeks, when we're going to do a more thorough checkup and make sure I have a decent plan of attack plotted out for the future.

Posted by flargh at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For most of my Mac-related purchases I end up giving my local merchant business, an independent reseller in Falmouth, right next door, called Cape Mac. They have a second location in Harwich, which is a fair distance away, but between the two locations they do an effective job of covering much of Cape Cod.

Yesterday we visited a new shopping development in Wareham -- right over the Bourne bridge from us, in the same town as my in-laws, about 30 minutes distant. It's a nice open air lifestyle mall type location with a number of large anchors like Target, Lowe's and (soon) JC Penney. There are a number of small boutique stores, including a Mac reseller called The Mac Express. They used to be called Main Street Mac, located in nearby Buzzard's Bay.

The location opened in June, and the owner decided to invoke Apple's own retail stores as much as possible. The walls are white and the tables and floors are wood -- the presentation is austere but perfect for the Macs, with black cabinetry for accessories. The staff even wears baseball jerseys with Apple logos on them. In short, if you were a casual observer, you might think that it was a real Apple store. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but it seems to be working out okay for them so far.

The one big benefit of the Mac Express over Cape Mac is that they keep Sunday hours. This has long been a thorn in my side of Cape Mac -- they choose, rightly or wrongly, to stay closed on Sundays, as some Cape businesses do -- a conceit of living in this sleepy community that I have, frankly, never understood, especially for a business that is, presumably, retail-based.

Anyway, The Mac Express's location is good -- really, better than Cape Mac's in some ways. While it has no visibility from the main road that services the shopping plaza, unfortunately, it's steps away from a Qdoba Mexican Grill, right across the parking lot from a GameStop and around the corner from a huge Borders bookstore on one side and a Best Buy on the other. As I told Bonnie, it's a pretty dangerous spot for me -- too many distractions, way too many places to spend money. Thank goodness there isn't an ice cream shop nearby or I might be doomed.

Hopefully these two independent dealers can service this region, since Apple doesn't appear ready to. Their closest retail store is an hour north, in Hingham, Mass -- a long haul up Route 3.

Posted by flargh at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Things are looking up for the kids this summer activity-wise, thanks in part to my mother's good, or bad, fortune, depending on how you want to look at it.

Mom has gone back to contract work -- and I'm hoping it's for the final time. As I told her after her last full-time job ended, I've been watching her bounce from "bad marriage" to bad marriage for the past 23 years, and I'm rather tired of seeing the same pattern repeat. I'm hoping that she'll just stick with being her own boss from her on out.

Anyway, this has opened up some flexibility in her schedule, and she's decided to make the most of it by volunteering to do some things with the kids that Bonnie and I just couldn't do because of our work schedules. Robert's taken up a weekly sailing class, and James is doing a science workshop for the next few weeks, and Mom is carting them to both activities.

Emme's the odd man (or girl) out in this equation, but that seems to suit her just fine. Emme spent all of the past two summers at camp, every day, and she really wanted some down time this summer. Besides, she's not spending all her time shut up in her room -- she is getting out for a puppeteering workshop that Robert's also involved in.

There have also been some other activities Mom's taken them to. Last night, for example, was a bonfire at a nearby beach. Bonnie and I were both exhausted from a busy workweek, so Mom took the three kids, and all of them had a good time toasting marshmallows and such.

I realize that none of this is as glamorous as a summer vacation to a far-off place, but quite frankly, I don't have nearly as many or as vivid memories of those sorts of activities when I was a kid, versus just hanging out with my friends and family and enjoying the warm weather. I'm also rather antithetically opposed to "overscheduling" the kids to make sure they have activities every day -- I don't think they need it and I don't think it'd be healthy for them if they did.

Besides, we live on Cape Cod, for goodness' sake. There's quite enough going on around here that we don't need to travel *that* far to have fun.

Posted by flargh at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since around Independence Day, the weather in our area has been warm and humid. Not exceptionally so, at least not all the time, but just enough to make it uncomfortable to sleep and -- in my case, since I work at home -- uncomfortable to work. So we've been running my poor three window AC units pretty much full time, around the clock, for weeks.

I'm terrified of what my electric bill is going to look like at the end of this month, but every time I step outside, I'm relieved that the electricity is on and working.

Posted by flargh at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Quit screwing around with endless Sudoku and Mahjong clones. I smell opportunity!

Posted by flargh at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

newsobserver.com | He quit rather than lower flag for Helms: "L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he'd ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms."

(Via Gawker.)

Posted by flargh at 05:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Commentary: Don't sanitize Helms' racist past - CNN.com: "...to recognize Helms properly in his totality, it's important to add to the list of words and phrases to describe the unapologetic conservative Republican: unabashedly racist."

Posted by flargh at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stop saying "kudos" in your praise of things you like or agree with. It sounds pretentious. Also, it's not friggin' plural.

Posted by flargh at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Time surprised me with this one. They're usually a bit more clued in than this.

"It's probably been a while since you bought new software. That's because so many tech firms — buoyed by ads placed in Web-based applications like the Google Docs word processor and the thousands of apps on Facebook — can now afford to give their programs away for free," says Anita Hamilton.

Actually, that's far from true. I buy software all the time. Most of the free stuff that's out there is crap. And I can't stand using Web-based applications most of the time.

"So why can't all iPhone apps be free? Well, quite simply, because people are still willing to pay for them," she adds.

No shit, Sherlock. Because, even though Richard Stallman and his furry unwashed minions would love to live in some socialist utopia where software is free, shit ain't like that in the real world. Here on Planet Earth, developers who create something of value get paid for their effort.

Posted by flargh at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My father in law throws his big party of the year on the 4th of July. It makes sense -- he and my mother in law live on the water and share a huge house with my sister in law and her family, so there's plenty of room to gather. And the water view gives us an excellent venue for fireworks later in the evening.

This year was no exception -- we got there around 2PM, when the party was in full swing, and left around 9:30 or so, after some of the relatives fired off an impressive barrage of fireworks.

This was the first year I can remember where the kids really didn't need much supervision, with a couple of exceptions (mainly involving a fire pit and one unfortunate altercation that involved a foot to the face). It was a nice change of pace, especially since I got to contrast it with my wife's cousins and brother, both of whom have younger kids, get run ragged as they chased their pre-schoolers around.

The only tough thing was that the kids were pretty exhausted by the time we got home -- James was in tears he was so tired, so it was a bit of an effort to put everyone to bed.

Posted by flargh at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't pretend to be a graphic designer either by vocation or talent; I'm definitely more comfortable on the operational end of a keyboard putting words on paper or on the screen.

Still, I worked for a damned good graphic design firm for a couple of years, and have spent virtually my entire adult life and professional career with Macintosh computers. So it was inevitable that I would develop a real interest in and love for various aspects of design, typography, and that some of those tools and vocabulary that designers use would eventually find their way into my arsenal.

Netflix recently delivered Helvetica, a charming documentary by Gary Hustwit about the most ubiquitous typeface in use today. It tracks the story of how Helvetica was made, what designers think about it, and how it's used in modern life. On the surface it seems like a dry topic, and I guess to some it is. But I highly recommend it to anyone who may have any interest in type or design.

What makes Helvetica (the documentary) so interesting is that the designers don't uniformly rhapsodize Helvetica as the ultimate expression of typographic design. If they had, it'd be an hour-long ad for Helvetica, and that would be boring. In point of fact, some are quick to point out that Helvetica does represent the ultimate expression of a particular theory of Swiss modernist design philosophy that, 50 years later, is quite unlikely to evolve or change.

Some love it. Massimo Vignelli, who counts the New York Subway and American Airlines among his successes (both of which use Helvetica), is a practical example (Vignelli says in the course of his interview that if he's being generous, he counts maybe 12 useable typefaces, period). Lars Müller refers to Helvetica -- without any sarcasm -- as "the perfume of the city." An oddly apt albeit strange metaphor (considering the perfume of some major cities seems to be more similar to urine and rotting garbage).

Others absolutely loathe it, such as Erik Spiekermann, the German typographer who created FF Meta and ITC Officina, who rather derisively refers to Helvetica as "air," and says "there's no choice, you have to breathe, so you have to use Helvetica."

Paula Scher, a product of 60's counterculture who made her bones designing record covers for Atlantic and CBS Records in the 70s, decries Helvetica (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) as the ultimate expression of bland corporate fascism, and blames both the Vietnam and the Iraq War on it.

I admit that some of this comes off as rather navel-contemplative, and I know it's not everyone's cup of tea. But I think that if you watch it, you may be surprised at just how ubiquitous Helvetica is, how powerfully it can be used, and how polarizing it can be.

Posted by flargh at 06:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There are times when I feel like I've completely failed as a father. Such as:

When the phone rings and no one, including my eldest, who has a phone in his room, on his desk, within easy reach, bothers to pick it up, despite my having pled and begged them to answer it if their mother and I are not available;

When I wake up in the morning and find the kitchen table littered with the detritus of breakfast -- empty cereal boxes, half-filled bowls, bottles of milk and orange juice left to fester in the open air, despite my constant reminders for them to put that stuff away after they're done;

When I find they've dropped food on the kitchen floor/toys in the hallway/any manner of crap in the living room/the piles of shit that litter their rooms and not bothered to clean it up, preferring instead to let Mom and Dad's maid service take care of it;

When the dishes in the sink pile up to the point of not being able to operate the faucet anymore because the dishwasher needs to be emptied, and no one will do it until Bonnie or I raise our voices.

Honestly, I don't overindulge my children. I don't helicopter over them every moment of the day and I don't think they're totally precious, exceptionally gifted little wonders who shouldn't lift a finger for manual labor.

I think I've given them some reasonable guidelines to go with, some basic age-appropriate responsibilities to maintain. And I've tried to instill some sense of fraternal responsibility to each other and filial responsibility to us. I guess at the end of the day I've just done a lousy job.

Posted by flargh at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)