Soft Scrub Saves the Day

Now the bath can be clean and white. It was tormenting me. I was not enjoying my time in there. Neither Nathan nor I wants to scrub the bathroom, but I suppose I can make myself do it now with the discovery of this modern-day miracle product. God bless the women who went before, scrubbing, cleaning, cooking…without questioning the duties.

The next thing to conquer is The Wanda’s litter box. The Litter Robot looks like another miracle of m odern invention…. it is about the same cost as my citizenship application. Now, which is more valuable?

That Collection of Dishes

It is the weekend and that means that we relax and hang out. It also lately means that I am not doing the dishes, which causes a huge pile of them in the sink. Especially if Steph makes a disn of lasagna, which she did this week. So, tomorrow morning, I’ll have a busy day like everyone else on Monday morning. The house will get picked up and the dishes washed and the baby dropped off at the laundromat for cleaning. It will be quite a blustery day. Unlike today.

Today, I went to meet some people from a theatre company about making a web site for them. I also ran into a friend in the mall. Then afterwards I walked down Broadway and had a nice fall afternoon stroll through the forest of tourists. Once I made it to Union Square I had a Chicken Kabob and took the train home.

Our Lil Bug has been playing with blocks lately. Well, we have been playing with her blocks and she has been knocking down our creations. She’ll take one of the blocks and use it to hit the other ones, it’s quite hilarious. Tonight, I had one of the cat toys, the purple feather on a stick, and was dusting her face, when Wanda realized she needed to get in on the action. It didn’t take long for us to change it up so that EJ was holding the stick and waving it about and Wanda was cahsing the feather. we’re not certain that EJ knew she was playing with the cat, but Wanda was most certainly did n=know taht she was playing with the The Bub.

The last two nights, El Squeako has been rather reticent to sleep alone. We have been wondering what the impact on her development sleeping with us still will have. well , sleeping with us is so relative to when I come to bed, and usually I put her in her crib before I get in bed. I’m still falling asleep most nights around two o’clock in the morning. I know that there is a firm line in the sand where she must learn to fall asleep in her own bed, but for now, she is only six months old.

Difficult thing this is

My moods and schedule have been swinging all over the map this week. Maybe it’ss the change in season and maybe it’s the prospect of no new trips for nearly six months as we dig and dig our hole deeper and cosier. I really don’t know what it is, but I have been trying to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier this week and I have only been successful with the earlier to bed so far. I still get up around ten o’clock and EJ still doesn’t really seem to mind too badly that she spends her mornings in bed. She has been thrilled to play with her new blocks on the floor when I do get up. She’s really good at knocking them over. She even picks up a block to knock other blocks over!

The Lil Bug has also increased her mobility by having a forward gear. She still doesn’t actually crawl persay, but her slithering is in the forward direction now. Occaisionally she still has the stalled hip thrust happening, but she is now beginning to become quite mobile. Yesterday afternoon, she took an hour to go from the base of my chair to the parlor door, which if i measure out the straight line distance is nearly eight feet. At that rate, she is now moving at twenty-four times the speed of a glacier.

I know you all are just dying to hear the lastest computer news from the Natural Geek, but right now there is really little to report. I have gotten some more books and begun to dig a bit deeper into the realm than before, but no big breakthroughs in the last couple days. Still though, I am quite surprised to be at the poin taht I am now at, and that I have gotten myself into this pretty far. Anyways that’s the news on this front.

Duh, you call that a Discover?!

So, if I wake up and get out of bed at seven o’clock, then Squeaky will have a very excitiing morning and then she’ll have naps during the course of the day, and she’ll even go to bed at a reasonable hour at night and then sleep longer at night!! And if she sees me eating then she’ll eat and then we won’t have sucha fussy baby on our hands and the cycle of crying will cease!?! OMIGOD! What a revelation! Quick someone get me a book deal, I have the secret to great parenting!!

Yes, I suckle

An evening with Neil French was a $125 per plate event. Mr. French is a creative legend, and the head of WPP (one of the two advertising conglomerates in existence). As such, he is my big big big boss. He said, in answer to a question as to why there are not more high-ranking women in creative agency positions:

“…they don’t work hard enough…Women don’t make it to the top because they don’t deserve to. They are crap…they are always going to go suckle something.”

(There has been no transcript released, so that is the best I can do to put it together from the New York Times and AdAge.)

So.

The struggle continues.

I wrote to the CEO of my company and requested that an area be set aside for breast-feeding women to pump milk for their babies. I included statistics in support of the claim that it is indeed cost-effective. I submitted the proposal in March: the answer was that there was no space. I submitted it again in light of these comments by Mr. French.

Let’s see what happens.

Driven, but not too far

It’s really amazing how things work. One minute we can be living our life, just walking around being happy and the very next, we can be gripped with fear. Not even fear of anything really dangerous or scary, just plain ordinary fear. Like today, Squeaky and I saddled up and rode over to the supermarket. On the way we dropped off the family’s laundry at the laudromat.

When we get to the supermarket, we run into a bit of a traffic jam getting in the door. There are two old ladies at the front of the queue up, one pushing a cart and the other holding onto the cart, sort of a walker on wheels for two if you will. They had stopped to get one of the little baskets that the supermarket supplies to do your shopping, and there was a woman behind them with her SUV of laudry carts who was completely unable to get around them. This forced El Squeakazoid and I to stand outside and wait for the two hundred and forty years of human ingenuity standing in our way, to move.

Once we got into the grocery store, I whipped out my trusty Hipster PDA (the one with the wallet extension) and began a search and destroy mission to fill our cart in reverse order. We were thinking about how we were going to pack the cart after the checkout, so the things we found first were the things we wanted on top when we left. This meant that we were not following the ‘normal’ shopping path of the floor plan (starting in produce and weaving up and down the aisles until yo arrive in the dairy section.) This also meant that we were in some aisles more than once.

[[***NOTE: There is no choice paper or plastic in New York, it's all plastic, and plastic bags reproduce faster than rabbits in Australia, because they have no natural predators. So, I do this to prevent having to use any bags whatsoever, and thereby saving space for us to live in our apartment]]

It was after happily singing along to some obscure hit from the ’70s and passing the old lady couple for teh second time, that I got gripped with fear. Fear taht I was going to get unsoliciated advice. That is something that New Yorkers really do not mind giving away, they seem to have an overabundance of it. So I was preparing myself to respond to anything that came my way; comments about “how nice it was that I was able to shop for things on a list my wife made for me” or “how nice it is that I give the mother a break on my day off” or something else of this sort of nature. Nothing that I could think of responding with was nice. Fortunately no one said anything to me besides “Aw, how cute.”

EJ was cranky in the afternoon because her second tooth broke skin today.

Monkey see

So we had a wonderful lazy fall day. The weather was beautiful. Overcast skies, windy and slightly chilly, it rained here and there but mostly it was just gray and mellow. You might call it dreary or bleak, but that is months ahead of us, late February early March, in October it is a very welcome relief from the terrible heat (>70F) and blistering sun. Eliza-Jane is quite particular about the wind, the faster the better.

Everyone seemed to need a large amount of time in bed today, only in typical EckenrodeHouse fashion, not all at the same time. There were times when we all intersected in the bed and when that happened there were some great family powwows. EJ really likes to laugh and “geting her nose” or pulling her chin will sometimes do the trick. If she is feeling cheeky, she’ll grab your nose or chin in response. It is quite amazing to see the beginnings of her personality unfold.

Other than the busy family life today, I worked with a buddy on his website, and continued making progress on the alignment of my computer array. My goal is to network all the machines together and to be able to file share between them. As I am doing this, I am learning immense amounts of background information on computers and the integration of their particular science. Ultimately, I want to create an art project that is a blend of computers, light and sculpture. This will result in an environment where the viewer is the user is the data is part of the process. No clue yet as to how I will create such a monster of work, but little by little pieces come.

I GOT THE TOSHIBA TO DISPLAY THE GUI IN UBUNTU LINUX!!!! It only took two months of research and learning, hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing, command line bash-ing and whatnot, but at last! I got it to run proper! It’s slooooow right now, but hey, I’m getting it squared away!~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~

Geeking out, Growing up

Today must have been a bad day, or perhaps it was a lesson learned day. Everytime I put EJ down, every single time I put her down to rest or to play or whatnot, she burst into tears. I got her to nap in the middle of the day, she was out no more than fifteen minutes when I started to vacuum the livingroom rug, and she woke up screaming like a monkey. The rest of the day, I had to hold her. So it was really, really hard for me to be able to re-write the installation Makefile for the new Ethernet Card’s driver; to insure compatibility with the Linux 2.6 kernel, naturally.

Instead, I was able to work on some new web designs and practice and fine tune some of my techniques, that’s all one arm, half a brain sort of stuff. Programming on Command Line Level is not something that I can get away with thinking while partially distracted by a Screaming Monkey in my lap. Especially not when keeping that Screaming Monkey happy is why I am able to sit in front of this array of computers in the first place.

After we had come to an agreement on how the afternoon was to progress, I was able to get my exercises done. Since I dropped off the soccer squad, I have had to make a very strong decision to give myself exercise on a daily basis. I could end up being in better shape this way. So far, it has been quite instrumental in helping me to hack this sleep schedule into a more workable routine. Lil Bug is quite the water worm, she just loves the water. Not long after the bath, she settled down and was able to get a good hour and a half long nap in.

BTW, my phone is back and connected, in case you wanted to call me.

I got new glasses today

…just an excuse to put another great photo up

Minor Changes Observed

Since I have shifted my sleeping schedule this week, Eliza-Jane has been much more agreeable. Amazing, she now wakes up a little earlier and we stay awake together longer and she is much happier. Just so that I am able to make the transistion, I turn all the lights on early in the morning, so that we get lots and lots of light. Then in the afternoon the sun come streaming into the front windows, so I turn off the big overheads. By the time the evening comes and that glowing orb has slipped into Kansas, the lamps are just what we need to set the mood for getting ready for bed. We even run the music to fit the day; fast and upbeat in the morning, with the moody ambient sounds reserved for nighttime. Seems to be working so far.

EJ is also taking the bottle much better now. In fact, she seems to prefer if I just give it to her and let her use the handles to put it in her mouth when she is ready for more. Ok! I’m not gonna stop anybody from developing some self-sufficiency. We are also eating lots of the solids during the day time, it’s very nice to have a cooperative and happy baby.

The other minor changes which I feel like reporting are inthe structure of this page. As you may see the links in the sidebar have a new color, hopefully they are easier to read. And also in the sidebar, I had added a space which displays the fifteen latest websites which I have bookmarked on del.icio.us. In the future, I am looking to be able to add my netflicks queue to the sidebar, and maybe a list of books I am currently reading. Just in case you were wondering what I have planned for my reporting.