Entry 775: Only Halfway Back To School

We've got one kid back in school this past week, but what I've found is that having one kid back in school isn't that great when you have two kids total. Lil' S1's school doesn't start until after Labor Day because for some reason they can't just follow the public school schedule and make life easier on everybody. I find myself growing more and more resentful towards Lil' S1's school the longer he goes there and the more I learn about it. We pay a lot of money to send him there, and yet we have almost all the same hassles of public school. In some ways we have more because public transportation isn't as easy and because of this staggered schedule with his brother. His school is not even that great academically. I could say plenty more on the subject, but I'll stop there. It's not a great look for a parent to rag on his son's school in a (kinda) public forum. I'll just wrap it up by saying he likes it there and wanted to return this year, so we enrolled him again. It was his choice. That's what I tell myself to not get too irritated. Also, I don't look at our bank account when tuition is due, and every now and then I say a little prayer that he will want to go back to public school for high school.

But Lil' S1's school really needs to start again. He's been off the past week with no camp or anything, and it's been rough. He's not the type to run around with the neighborhood kids like his brother (plus, there aren't any boys in the neighborhood his age; plus, plus, even if there were, they probably would have been in school this past week, anyway), so he just putzes around the house all day, which is distracting when I'm working from home, and it means he gets way too much screen time. S and I have to come up with things for him to do, or else he's just doing to play on his devices, and it's hard for S and I to come up with things for him to do when we have to do our jobs to make money to afford his private school. He does like to bake/cook, which is great, but it's almost never healthy foods, and he always leaves a massive mess in the kitchen when he's finished. He can make a pretty good pizza from scratch, but he can't clean off the hook attachments he uses to mix the dough. Even when we get him to "clean up" after himself, I still have to go in after him and do the job for real. If I didn't, we would continuously have oil drips and flour dustings all over the counters and all our appliances would be caked in gunk.

I just need to get through this weekend, but it's a long weekend, literally, and possibly figuratively -- we will see how it goes. S is out of town on a combination business/social trip, so it's just me for the next few days. Last night went okay (other than the Mariners blowing a big lead and losing). Lil' S2 spent the night at a friend's house up the street, and Lil' S1 had some buddies over to play D & D. It's a regular campaign he does, with the location rotating between the participants' houses. I guess it was our turn because S told me right before she left that she set it up at our house. I didn't mind, but for the fact that one of the dad's was over an hour late getting his kid. Pickup time is 6:00 pm-6:30 pm, and dude arrived at 7:45 pm. I got increasingly annoyed as the lateness waxed because I wanted to shower and eat dinner and relax for the night, and I couldn't get in a relaxing mindset until all the kids (other than mine) were out of the house. Also, I didn't want to start doing those things and then get interrupted. I hate that.

When the dad finally showed up he apologized, but I found his excuse to be quite weak. He said that he had to pick up his daughter at her friend's house, and her friend's mother "put a giant plate of food in [his] face". So, in other words, he hung out and ate dinner with somebody instead of picking up his son. Here's what he could have done instead: not that. He could have said, "thanks, but I don't have time to eat right now, because I have to get my son." That is, in fact, what I would have done. Also, the story doesn't hold water, regardless. For one thing, when picking a kid up at a friend's house, you often don't even go inside and when you do, you rarely get beyond the entryway. I doubt this friend's mom answered the door with a plate of food in her hand and literally foisted it upon her guest without his consent. She almost certainly invited him, and he accepted, despite the fact that it would make him late to pick up his son. Then there is the fact that he was an hour and a half late, and eating a plate of food takes--what?--twenty-five minutes? The math doesn't come close to adding up.

The thing is, this guy just went through (is still going through?) a pretty contentious divorce, so I'm inclined to cut him a lot of slack. I don't think life is going great for him at the moment. However, a huge pet peeve of mine is when people behave as if their time and their life are more important than yours. So, in interacting with him, I tried to strike a balance between showing I was mildly annoyed without acting like it was the biggest injustice of the 2025. We actually ended up talking quite a bit (in our entryway), because his son was super slow getting his shoes on and gathering his stuff, and by the end of it, I was mostly over it. The kids were trying to talk us into having an impromptu sleepover at our house, but I said no, because I just didn't want to deal with it anymore. However, in order to placate Lil' S1, I basically said he could do it tonight, and I think he's going to hold me to that. That's okay--if I'm in a sleepover mindset in advance, it's not that bad.

Alright, time to go because I gotta get some lunch. I'm super hungry because I'm back on my 16/8 fasting diet. I listened to this doctor on a podcast talk about the adverse health effects caused by visceral adiposity (inner fat that surrounds your organs), and one possible sign of having too much visceral adiposity for men is having a big belly, and I have a pretty big belly, especially in relation to the rest of my body (I have very little noticeable fat elsewhere). The rule of thumb I found online, from a seemingly reputable source, is a 40-inch threshold. I measured my stomach from middle of the bellybutton to middle of the bellybutton, and it's about 41 inches. So, now my goal is get it below 40 and keep it there. Now, all the usually caveats with this apply -- you can't precisely assess overall health with a single number, the human body is complex, everybody is different, etc., etc. But there is very little downside to me trying to shrink my belly a bit (through hopefully there will be a downsize), and the potential upside, being healthier, living longer, being healthier longer, etc. is huge. It seems like a no-brainer to me. Also, I like the idea of using stomach size instead of weight as a metric, as more muscle mass (which is a good thing) can lead to a higher weight. Plus, when I look at myself in the mirror with my shirt off, I don't think Look at all that excess weight, but I do think, My belly is way too big, given how much I exercise. Might as well deal with the problem directly.

Until next time... 

  

Entry 774: Octogenarian Mom

We went back to the South Puget Sound region a week and a half ago for a relatively short trip to celebrate my mom's 80th birthday, and it was wonderful right up until the very end. The afternoon before we flew out, my 12-year-old nephew broke both of his ankles, and he and his father (my brother) spent the night in the emergency room. He was at one of those trampoline/foam pit/fun-zone places, and he apparently landed awkwardly and hit the ground too hard and got a hairline fracture in each ankle. It sounds like it was pretty fluky. He had already fallen into the pit like a dozen times (it was an American Gladiators style joust setup) before he got hurt. He's a very tall kid for his age, and it sounds like he unluckily found a crevice in the foam and hit the bottom with his feet. He literally slid through the cracks. It was a total bummer to end what was otherwise a fun and festive vacation.

But the good news is that my brother and his wife just bought a van, so they are decently equipped to transport a child in a wheelchair. Also, kids heal quickly. In a few months, my nephew will likely be back on his feet, running around, and it will be a "remember when that happened" topic of conversation. By contrast, if something like that happened to me, I would probably walk with a limp for the next half-decade. I mean, a few years ago my father fell off a small ladder and broke his foot, and he was laid up for many months and needed multiple surgeries just to get back to semi-normal.

Before all this went down, however, it was a good trip of seeing people I hadn't seen in a long time. I saw a handful of family members I hadn't seen since July 2017, a few more I hadn't seen since January 2017, and yet one more I hadn't seen since summer of 2007. I also randomly ran into two friends from high school I had mostly lost touch with. It's funny, when we came out to visit my family for a month a few summers ago, I didn't have a single chance encounter like this with anybody, and then I come back for just a week and have two of them.

Everybody came out for my mom's 80 birthday celebration. It was really a great event -- a lot of fun and the right amount of sentimentality. I feel so fortunate to have such a great family and friends (a few of my best buddies came down from Seattle with their families for the party) and that we are in a position financially/PTO-wise to fully take advantage of it. It really is a blessing, and not everybody is going to be around forever, so it's ultra important to take it all in now while it's still possible.

There were two big surprises for me this trip. One, which is not so great, is that my uncle has Parkinson's disease. He's in his late 60s, I believe, and he's always been quite healthy and spry for his age, so it was a total trip to see him at my parents' house shaking uncontrollably. He's still quite fit -- he says he runs or hikes almost everyday -- but he's much less outgoing and communicative, understandably so. His jaw quivers a lot, which, I can only assume, makes talking much less fun than it used to be. There is a genetic component to Parkinson's, which, being that my uncle and I share a direct ancestor (my great-grandfather, his grandfather also had it), isn't the most comforting thought for me, but I'll cross that bridge if/when I come to it. I'm not the type to go out and search for early warning signs. Yes, I might catch something sooner than I would otherwise, which would help with treatment, but I also might not and think I did, and then I will be living with that undo mental stress. I'll keep it in the back of my head, but that's where it's staying unless circumstances change.

The other surprise is that one of my longtime childhood friends has transitioned (is in the process of transitioning?) into a woman. This definitely threw me for a bit of a loop at first -- I had no idea she had any sort of gender dysphoria or anything like that -- but it's cool. She seems happy, and if that's the case, then I'm happy for her. To each their own, live and let live, and all that. It's trite but true. Also, I think I adapted to my new-old friend pretty quickly. I only misgendered her once (and she was cool about it), and after a little while talking to her it was like, Wow, you're a woman now! ... So, what else is new?

Alright, gotta go. But first, obligatory pic of Chambers Bay.

Until next time...  

Entry 773: Rabbit, Run... Please

I had the rudest of awakenings Friday morning. Well, technically, I was already awake but barely. My alarm had sounded, and I had arisen, but was not yet fully dressed, when S barged into the room in a panic. 

"Lil' S2 left his bike out and a bunny is stuck in the wheel!"

"Wait... what?"

"It's just stuck! It's bleeding! I think it's dead!"

"Uh... okay."

"Just put some pants on and get it out! I don't want to touch it!"

"There's a dead rabbit in Lil' S2's bike wheel? And I have to get it out?"

"Yes... I'm going to a Solid Core class. Bye!"

"Okay, bye... thanks for leaving this for me."

"Sorry!"

Then she was gone.

I peeked out the window, and S's description was accurate. A rabbit had somehow gotten its head stuck in the spokes of Lil' S2's bike* and was lying there bloody and lifeless. Now, just the sight of roadkill squigs me out a little bit, so I was dreading the idea of touching a dead animal and then doing... something with it. But the thought of it just sitting there on our walkway was worse, so I got dressed, grabbed a paper sack, found some old gloves we bought for a ropes course, and went out the door to get this thing over with as quickly as possible.

*It should have been stored in our shed. Lil' S2 forgot to put it away (because he's 9), and neither S nor I noticed it to remind him. When I told him later that a bunny had gotten stuck in it because he left he out, he replied indignantly, "That's the bunny's fault!" which I found morbidly humorous for some reason.

I was pondering what to do with a dead rabbit -- burying it near the creek seemed like the best option -- but as soon as I touched it, I realized it was a moot point. I could feel warmth and life still inside of it. So, then my mind turned to the question of what to do with a badly injured rabbit, but first I had to get it unstuck from the spokes without injuring it further.

And I'm not sure I succeeded in that regard. It's head was really wedged in there, so much so that a spoke had cut into its eye, which was causing the bleeding. I had to really pry to get it free. Once I did, I was hoping it would up and run away, but no such luck. It just laid there, staring at me with its haunting, bloody eye. I picked it up and put it in the paper bag, and it did fight me but very feebly. Once in the sack, it made no attempt to get out. This poor thing was not doing well.

As I saw it, I had four options: 1) Find an animal hospital that will take it (or do the equivalent of dropping it on the porch, ringing the doorbell, and running); 2) build it a habitat in a cardboard box and nurse it back to health, kids'-book-style; 3) go old-school, conk it with a shovel and bury it near the creek, using the justification that I would be "putting it out of its misery"; 4) release it near the creek and walk away, telling myself that that's just nature, but also feeling a bit guilty that I was too lazy and uncaring to do option 1 or 2.

I went with option 4. I'm mostly okay with it. I mean, it could move a little bit, so it's possible that it found a safe place to rest and gather enough strength to survive, and if it didn’t, well, Mother Nature is an evil hag, isn't she? Billions of living things die every second -- that's just way it goes. Also, I had a bunch of work to do and just wanted to get on with my day ASAP.

So, that was that. I'm still trying to figure out how it got stuck in the first place. Obviously, it didn't know any better, but something drastic had to have happened for it to wedge its head into such a tight area, especially since there was seemingly nothing there of interest to a rabbit. It's not like there was a carrot on the other inside it was trying to get to, and even if there was, a rabbit would have good enough instincts to go around, I think. My best guess is that it got spooked and ran full-speed ahead into the bike wheel without even seeing it, hitting it in the perfectly right-wrong way to get its little head stuck. It doesn't seem very likely, but it's the best I got.

The whole ordeal put me in a weird mood for the day. It's not like I was totally bummed out, and I didn't even think about it that much, but every now and then I'd get a tinge of -- I don't even know what to call it -- unease, I guess, and would think to myself, Why am I feeling this?, and then I'd remember, Oh, yeah, that's right: maimed rabbit. It did get me out of an errand at least. We ordered carryout, and S wanted me to go pick it up, but I was in the middle of a workout, so I balked at it a little bit, and so she started into a whole soliloquy, "I have to go to two different places, and I'm tired of driving kids around all day..."

"Sorry to cut you off, babe, but I had to pull a half-dead rabbit out of our kid's bike spokes this morning, doesn't that buy me anything?"

"Actually, it does. I'll get the food."

Nice.

In general, I feel like these types of things I do go underappreciated. Whenever there is something gross or physically taxing or technical that needs to be done, it's just assumed that I'm the one who has to do it. S will sometimes feel put out that she's doing "all the work" with the kids because she does most of the registration and appointments and stuff like that (although now that Lil' S2 does so many sports leagues and camps, which I almost always sign him up for, it's not that lopsided), but my response is always that that's not the only work that needs to be done. I mean, I could give a whole list of things that I do fairly regularly that S has never done -- clean the gutters, sweep debris off the roof and pick up the yard after a storm, clean the maggots out of the compost bin, put air in the tires, unclog a toilet or clear a drain, change a lock, carry bulk trash to the curb, reset the router, resync the controllers with the PlayStation -- but I won't because that would be petty of me.

Alright, that's all I got. Until next time...

Entry 772: Work Trip

I mentioned in my previous entry that I had a work trip on the horizon that I wasn't exactly jumping for joy over. Well, said trip has come and gone now, and other than some bullshit delays on my return flight (or deplaning, rather), it went well. When it comes to travel, I'm usually glad I did it in retrospect. I don't really like traveling, particularly when it comes to flight, but I'm very tolerant of it because I like going places, and you can't go places without traveling there. Transporter/wormhole technology still seems millennia away (if it's possible at all), and despite advances in AI and bioengineering, Total Recall-style memory implants are not a thing yet either (and even if they were, I'm not sure I'd be up for conspiring with a creature living in a man's stomach to save the martian race). We are still just using big old jet airliners like it's 1977. And somehow air travel has actually gotten worse over the years--at least in terms of comfort. It's much cheaper now than it used be, and the inverse relationship of price to comfort is not just incidental.

The purpose of the trip was to attend a big industry summit hosted by my new parent company. My team was invited to present something, so a colleague and I gave a talk. As far as I can tell it was successful. We got a lot of engagement during Q & A, which is usually a good thing. Also, my colleagues in the audience told me it went well, and it didn't seem like perfunctory politeness. I don't mind public speaking, except for this thing that has started happening to me relatively recently, where immediately before I open my mouth, I feel like I'm not going to be able to get the words out. It's like that can't-move, stuck-in-mud bad-dream feeling. Thankfully, the words do come out, but it's like I'm speaking with a knot in my throat for the first half of the talk. I don't think it's super noticeable, and I'm able to power through it, but it's pretty annoying. I guess it's nerves, but it's weird because I don't feel anxious in any other way. Maybe it's a good thing, as my martial arts instructor said once before a test to level-up: "If you are nervous, good. That means you care."

I was also hopped up on acetaminophen, dextromethorphan, and phenylephrine, although I don't know if that mattered or not to the quality of the presentation. I caught a cold last weekend and by the day of the talk (Tuesday), I was in the snotting uncontrollably stage of my ailment. I typically do not take cold medicine. It's expensive and doesn't actually do anything to cure your ailment. But I do think it can help to temporarily suppress some of your symptoms -- even if it's just through the placebo effect -- and when you are blowing your nose and sneezing every ten seconds and have to speak to an auditorium of a hundred people, you take all the relief you can get.

It sucked at the time, but in retrospect it wasn't the worst time to be ill. I mean, it's never good to be sick, but I'd rather be sick away from home at a conference than be sick when I get back. I fought through it, and now I'm better, and I get to sit here in good health and blog, while I look outside at a beautiful day in the neighborhood. I'd much rather have it this way than have been healthy a few days ago and sick now.

Anyway, the fact that it's a beautiful day is notable, as we've been short on those in DC this summer. It's either been insanely hot or storming or both. Heavy rains and thunderstorms are in the forecast seemingly every other day. I get so many flood warnings on my phone, they've become meaningless (which is a legitimate problem; it's part of why so many people in Texas were caught off guard). The t-storms came on Thursday during my return flight, but we got in at the perfect time... almost. We landed safely -- there wasn't even much turbulence -- but they wouldn't let us out of the plane for three hours. Yes, that's right, we sat on the tarmac after landing for thee hours. That's an hour longer than the actual flight time.

The issue, as kinda explained to us and kinda inferred by me, was that due to lightning in the area, it was unsafe for the airport staff to set up the ramp needed for deplaning. (We were on one of those smaller commuter jets that don't pull right to the jetway.) So, we had to wait for the storm to subside. The problem with this is that the storm had already mostly subsided by the time we arrived and was only forecast to get worse again later. I kept looking outside at the concrete, watching it get dryer, because the rain had stopped, and thinking to myself If it's not safe enough to deplane now, when will it be? My phone app said a storm warning was in effect until 10 pm. We arrived around 2 pm. Are they going to keep us here for eight hours?

No, they were not, thankfully. Around 5 pm, they taxied us to different part of the airport, and we all just walked down the stairs and off the plane and that was that. Why we could not have done that when we first arrived, I have no idea. I also do not understand why they could not have set up the ramp. Yes, I'm sure it's less than ideal to wield around a giant metal object when lightning is nearby, but sometimes people have to do (slightly) unsafe jobs. That's what hazard pay is for. Give workers a big enough bump, and you will have a line of candidates. You could even charge the passengers for it. Put a $10.00 hazard pay deposit on the tab. If you have a normal flight, you get it back. If workers have to work in hazardous conditions, you use this money to pay them extra. I would gladly go for that.

I mean, when we deplaned, they brought the fire department out to help us down the stairs -- the fire department! How is that a better use of resources than finding somebody to set up a ramp? It's utter silliness. I'm sure it's part CYA, but it's also part "zero COVID" mentally, where decision-makers become overly focused on preventing one bad thing (in this case lightning hitting somebody) and create a more hazardous situation in the process. Is taking first responders away from their other duties to help some airline passengers down some stairs actually a net safety plus for society? Also, by waiting so long to let us off, I, and presumably many other passengers, had to travel from the airport while the storm was particularly bad. That's more cars on the road; more people not in their homes. Not to mention the physical and mental stress passengers are under, sitting in the plane, not knowing when they will be let off, feeling kidnapped. Like I said, it's completely baffling, and I have half a mind to write a sternly worded letter to somebody about it. But I have another half to not do that. They've already taken three hours of my life -- three and a half if you count the time it's taken me to write this screed -- they don't need anymore.

Until next time...