Posted by nathan on May 31, 2007 in Uncategorized
As soon as I arrived home yesterday, Nathan fell asleep. So EJ and I set off for the supermarket to get some cat litter and ice cream. As soon as we came out of the elevator, the chorus of “Hi EJ!” started. It seems as though everybody in the neighborhood knows her. On the way back we stopped to watch the men play checkers and say hello to the carribean ladies in their colorful mumus. One of them gave her an ice cream sandwich, so now someone else knows her, too.
Posted by nathan on May 26, 2007 in
Father EJ decided tot take things into her own hands today. I apparently brought back the wrong kind of thing from the snack bar. I had chosen a burger because it had a few choices in it: meat, lettuce, tomato, bread; all things she has liked before. She was singularly unimpressed. She took the paper it was wrapped in, screwed it up, and threw it away. Then she put her shoes on all by herself and proceeded to walk resolutely off toward the boardwalk. Nathan and I were so astonished that we didn’t follow her for quite a while. She stopped to talk to a woman sunbathing - she must have said “I’m off to get my own lunch because my mother just doesn’t understand me.”
She wasn’t quite so headstrong when it came to the frigid Atlantic Ocean. She took quite a bit of convincing. We put an end to her just getting her tiny toes wet by grabbing her and dunking ourselves all in together. After that, of course, we couldn’t get her out. Squealing, splashing, smiling little girl.
I have developed an effective tantrum-hold which comprises me putting one arm through her legs and the other over her lower shoulder, clasping my hands, and carrying her horizontally facing outward. After her tantrum, she was really worn out and fell asleep for the subway ride home.
Posted by nathan on May 24, 2007 in
Father i just finished spending nearly a month and a half with Neal Stephenson’s massive novel, [[The Baroque Cycle]]. its quite tome that is best described as period-science fiction. period because its set during the span of time that involves Sir Isaac Newton, and sci-fi because he deals with some stuff that was just a little beyond the era.
mr. stephenson is an astonishingly adept builder of characters and i found myself falling deeply into involvement with all of the main creations and even for the presentations of the truly historical characters ( it is not often that a work of fiction inspires me to run off to wikipedia and look up new stuff from history, just to learn about the way it really was!)
now that i have burned through 3000 pages of splendid story, i will have to find something else to entertain me during the wee hours where i should be dreaming. maybe i’ll try sleeping for a change.
Technorati Tags: baroque cycle, novel, awesome, history, scifi
Posted by nathan on May 21, 2007 in
Father so, yesterday morning i was innocently lying in my bed, sleeping actually, when i got ambushed by the giggle monster. i was tormented and tickled for nearly an hour, which kept me from returning to the land of much needed slumber. if you must know, i was awake until 3 AM experimenting with a script that enables a local calendar file to be synchronized with a google calendar more on that later.
i wanted to be mad and upset and jump up and down and rage and roar, but then again i didn’t really want to do that, as i wanted to just go back to sleep. however, despite all my intentions and feelings my daughter reminded me that it was my birthday and it was her duty on my birthday to give me the morning wake up attack. that has to be the best present i ever had on my birthday.
i played football in the park with some other people- just a pick up match. i still have a pretty devastating right foot cross out of the corner; pretty much a blind strike on the ball turns it back to a target six yards in front of the goal- too bad we were not playing on a full-sized pitch!! heehee. my legs hurt pretty bad and the heat and lack of any running for the past six months really was felt after an hour and a half so i went home to work on my homework.
i ate a steak for dinner- just the way i like it, charred on the outside whilst being cold and raw in the center ( when i say cold, i mean nearly frozen) this coupled with the dinner steph and i had the night before at a french bistro ( my plate, steak tartarre naturally!) meant that i had a good fill of raw red meat. hooray for me!
Posted by nathan on May 17, 2007 in
Father this morning ej was in such a great mode- she was bright and cheery, playing with her legos, driving her cars over the slumbering volcano of mt. daddy, and just being the happiest little girl in the world. then her pull-up started to sag, and i asked her to take it off and she did. then i asked her to throw it away, and she did. then i asked her to go get another one from her mommy, and she did! then i asked her to put it on, and she did!! all by herself!
then she got her hair stuff down and wanted her hair fixed- unlike yesterday’s battle royale about the comb and finally she put her shoes on the right feet and insisted on doing it herself, no help from me.
so i take this as a sign that i can roll over and return to sleep.
Posted by nathan on May 13, 2007 in
Father I totally blame steph. she is the one who started watching this show, but then i got hooked. i’ve heard about it from so many people already- my friend in japan is hooked, etc, etc. so here we are joining the craze. we are such joiners.
we had a lovely mother’s day, hope all you baby’s mama’s out there did too!
Posted by nathan on May 10, 2007 in
Father
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as i am beginning to do more programming, and using various different machines, it’ll be so much easier to keep everything within a subversion control system, rather than trying to sync various directories over the network.
Posted by nathan on May 9, 2007 in
Father ej and steph were both home sick today. i had to do some housecleaning and stuff. part of that involved ripping a stack of cds into the music player- i had damaged the music library a couple of months ago and am just now getting around to replacing everything on the hard drive. i turned it into a trading game where ej would get the cd that was ejected from the hard drive and bring it to me. then we would trade cds and she would put the new one into the drive and the computer would rip it automatically. then when it was done, steph, who was looking at real estate on the internet would eject the cd so ej and i could continue our commerce.
ej and i also went out to the store and bought a shredder today. she was fascinated with helping me feed mommy’s special papers that can now finally be destroyed into the shredder.
we also went for a little walk in the hallway and met all of our neighbors. ej is so friendly and personable to total strangers. recently she has taken to being very friendly to other little girl’s daddy’s. it sort of freaks me out, hopefully that’s the sort of thing that kids grow out of, in a way, or something. any ways.
Posted by nathan on May 8, 2007 in
Father
Posted by nathan on May 7, 2007 in
Father it’s just been so busy here, and i have not been able to write a single thing in the blog. yup! that is an official start to so many blog postings in the blogosphere that it is nearly an post of its own.
so, on with the catch up. really, what i have been doing is lots of code monkeying for my java programming course. the hardest part of the whole thing is my tendency to overengineer everything i do. so i tend to get myself lost and confused in the (imaginary) scope of what i am trying to do. it’s an academic class so i have a hard time letting the problems not be reflective of real world solutions and just about learning the tools of the language. unfortunately, that means that i get slammed for time as i have to wade through tons and tons of my own mental faults.
other news, ej has a cold again. when we went away she took an ear infection with her, and got better almost right away. she hardly had a runny nose at all in South Carolina and upon the immediate return to NYC she started with the nose and the coughing and the hacking- i am starting to believe that there is something in the air that she and i are reacting to. i get lots and lots of snot that i spit up all over the place, just from walking around.
over the weekend, i got my birthday present, a 17″ LCD monitor for the new computer that dad recently gave me. now my desktop has three different monitors being powered by three different computers and i finally feel like i have sufficient computational power at my fingertips!
my other project is providing tech support to mom as she transitions to her System76 computer running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. there are some issues that we are identifying that need to be addressed during this time period, some of which may not be directly overcome, but i am hopeful that this can be done successfully.
Tags: Ubuntu
