faulty vision

I was watching old NewsRadio episodes in bed. My laptop has wireless and — gosh, I love Netflix.

“Bill McNeal’s such a wally,” the Guy said.

“What’s a wally?”

“It’s like a plonk.”

I glanced over at him. “What’s a plonk?”

There was a split second where I thought he was actually going to give me an intelligent answer. You know — his eyes got a little squinty and his eyebrows lowered just a fraction. It was his serious face.

“It’s like a wally,” he said.

The Guy has learned his parent skills from the oddest places.

Austin Powers, for instance.

“Waaaa–”

“Shht.”

I could hear them in the other room. Hobbes woke up at 1:10, and after almost an hour of rocking and feeding, showed absolutely no interest in going back to sleep. I crawled back into bed and buried my face in the pillows while he cried.

“Mmft,” said the Guy. “What?”

“Let him go for a few minutes,” I said. I was feeling, I admit it, a bit vengeful.

The Guy lasted for all of a minute before he rose from the bed like a disgruntled bear and trundled off to the nursery.

“Waaaaaa–!”

“Shhhht.”

I could hear the bafflement in Hobbes’s silence. His next attempt was almost tentative.

“Waaaa–”

“Shhht.”

He fell silent again. This was a quandary, he was plainly thinking. How was one supposed to deal with this?

“Waaaa–?”

“Shht.”

He gave it up as a lost cause. I strained my ears to listen to what came next. There was the creak of the rocking chair; then quiet murmurs and chuckles from baby and dad. They have a happy little lovefest of a relationship.

Me, I’m going back to sleep.

2:08 AM.

Quoth Baby Talk:

“Rolling over, a milestone that typically occurs between 4 and 6 months, signifies the first time your baby is able to coordinate multiple muscles to achieve a common goal, says Kathryn Barnard, Ph.D., an infant mental health expert in Seattle.”

“So?” I demanded.

Hobbes, lying on his blanket and busily attempting to shove most of his favorite toy in his mouth with both hands, paid no attention.

“I don’t mean to rush you or anything.”

He closed an eye. Then he closed the other one. Then he closed them both at the same time.

“Very nice,” I said, “but that’s not rolling over.”

He punched himself in the nose and squawked.

“How to help him: There’s no need to rush this first achievement, but you can encourage your 4-month-old during playtime.”

“You’re five months old now, as of yesterday,” I said severely.

“Aaaaaaaaa pfffft,” he said, and waved his legs in the air.

“I realize that you’ve got the Guy’s genes, so you’re genetically predisposed to setting low expectations,” I said, “but you’ve also got my genes, so you’re supposed to be a competitive overachiever. The two should balance each other out, more or less. Except more towards my end of the scale because, you know, they’re overachieving genes.”

He tossed his toy in the air. It banged to earth about half a foot away. “Ooo,” he said, and the corners of his mouth turned down.

“Do you want it back?”

His mouth turned down even further.

“Roll for it! C’mon!”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” he said sadly.

I retrieved the toy for him.

“…When he’s on his back, hold his hands and gently pull him up to strengthen core muscles. Or take both of his legs and roll him over from stomach to back and vice versa.”

Hobbes grunted around a mouth full of rubber; the toy was thwarting him, but as usual, he was confident of eventual victory. His short-term memory makes him forget that he failed the last two hundred times, not to mention he lacks spatial relations skills. The toy is about half the size of his head.

I took each of his feet in a hand and rolled him gently onto his side. “Purrb,” he said, and blew a few bubbles.

“Roll over,” I ordered.

He yawned and flipped himself over onto his back again. “Bah,” he said.

“No.” You have to be firm with babies. I rolled him onto his side again. “Come on, you can do it,” I encouraged. “Go a little further.”

He blinked up at me, hummed through a bubble of drool, and flopped onto his back again.

“Other way,” I said reproachfully.

“Fft,” he said.

“….Rolling over is easier from belly to back, so give your baby plenty of tummy time when he’s awake to practice.”

“Do you want more tummy time?” From my lazy vantage point on the floor, he was a pair of flopping legs and colorful toy.

His toes curled and clasped each other like little monkey feet.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m going to turn you over and then you’ll be–”

His arm jerked, sending the toy flying again. Bonk, it went. “Mafp,” he said, and turned his head to look after it. Then he looked the other way. Since I was below him, he didn’t see me. No witnesses. He rolled over onto his stomach and stretched for the toy.

“Oh my God,” I said. He stopped and pushed himself up to look around, puzzled. Who said that? “You little twerp. You could do it all along, couldn’t you?” I dragged myself up and tipped my head over the top of his to stare at him upside-down.

He went cross-eyed. “Fissshhhttthpt.” He faceplanted. “Wack,” he said morosely through a mouthful of yellow duckie blanket.

I’m pretty sure that’s baby talk for: Crap. She caught me.

The Guy has often complained about his representation on my blog. Unreasonably, I think — I personally feel I give him fair representation, and that’s all anybody can really hope for, really: equable treatment from a just and truthful source — but that’s men for you. They have such odd notions in their heads, and you can’t really do much about that. It’s the way they’re wired.

In the name of marital harmony (and to be honest, flat-out curiosity) I’ve given into his repeated objections over his portrayal on my blog by giving him the right to post as he likes, under his own username: theGuy. Whether he chooses to exercise this right is, of course, entirely up to him. I certainly hope he does. Part of the reason we got together at all was because he’s hilarious in real life, and our email exchanges after our first, unproductive meeting went a long way towards reconciling me, at least, towards the idea of facing someone that my friends had actually set me up with. Seven years into our relationship, he’s still making me laugh, which bodes well for the next seven — and then the next seven after that, but who’s counting?

I present you with a wholly gratuitous picture post.

And if you happen to be wondering why, well. Please refer to the post title. Any questions?

I got my hairstyle from Emperor Nero.

Not the face! Don't touch the face!

I haven’t been posting my thing-a-day projects because — well, I’m just lazy is all. Also, I have the attention span of a squirrel and forget to take pictures before I dismantle and recycle the end product. Still, for those of you who are wondering, I am still doing it!

I did happen to take pictures of my thing-a-day from a few days ago. The photos below are from my attempt at St. Paul’s Cathedral, done in paper with a razor. It is not my pattern, I regret to say — I’ve spent a few nights trying to design my own, and let’s just say that’s an activity better suited or someone with an organized mind. For those of you who are interested in trying it out, the pattern (and lots of other cool kirigami architecture patterns) are located at Origami Architecture Models. Some of these patterns defy belief. I’m currently working my way through them, one by one.

What can I say? It’s entertainment.

St. Paul's Cathedral - click to enlarge.

St. Paul's Cathedral - front view

Belatedly, clicking the publish button when one’s done with writing is a good idea ….

I had a doctor’s appointment this morning, the first well check that I’ve had in a while. (”Well Check,” also known as “Well Visit,” for those of you who aren’t up-to-date on medical billing lingo, is basically your regularly scheduled physical where they get a baseline for comparison and establish your routine health care.) I have a new doctor that I really like, for all that she was assigned to me mostly by chance; when I threw out my back in December, the local clinic assigned me to the first available doctor. She was charming, funny, and extremely likable.

“Am I going to be your regular doctor?” she asked when she was on her way out the door.

“I hope so,” I said fervently, and she laughed.

I always mean to ask my doctor friends how many patients they actually have, and somehow I always forget. Looking at the racks and racks of medical records they’re forced to maintain, I suspect it’s a lot more than ten. The clinic I go to supplies pretty much all my family’s needs: Hobbes’s pediatrician, my ob/gyn, my endocrinologist, the Guy’s primary care physician, and now mine. In the old days of (literally) yesterday, clinics of this sort ran solely on paper charts, which were basically file folders stuffed full of haphazardly organized notes that might or might not have been complete. These were pulled every day before the patient came in for a scheduled appointment; then they were refiled afterwards. When the doctor finished writing up his visit, that note would go down to the filing room, which would then stick it in the appropriate file.

Eventually. Or maybe that should read: hopefully.

I spent a lot of time working with clinics and their files, what with one thing or another. Nowadays, larger clinics tend to use software for their charting and record-keeping, which certainly cuts down on not being able to get a hold of a patient’s chart because it’s lost in a “pending” pile somewhere. Unfortunately, the human factor — overworked doctors, stupid patients — remains the same.

Which brings us to how I ended up with my third tetanus shot of the year today.

“Is there anything else?” the doctor asked, as she was preparing to leave. This is the point where I usually get into trouble; I inevitably say things that end up putting me into a bad place. Things like: “Just wondering if my toe should be that color,” or, “Does the third nipple on my face look like it’s growing to you?” A few days later when I’m going under the knife in surgery, I start to think that maybe I would have been better off keeping my mouth shut.

This time I decided to be smart. This time, I said to myself, I will think about what I say before I say it. I said, “Noooooooo, I think I’m good.”

“Great,” said the doctor. “I can tell you’re going to be an easy patient,” she said. And: “Have you had a tetanus shot lately?” She checked the computer. If the records had been updated with information from the hospital, it would have told her that I had. It didn’t. Our fallback position was my memory.

Always a bad choice.

“Noooooo–” I began.

“Then let’s get you one,” she said brightly, and made a little note as she headed out the door. “They cover you for ten years, so we might as well, just to be safe.”

The door closed behind her, leaving me all alone in the exam room.

“–come to thiiiiiiiiiiiiiink of it–” I said.

While I was working through my time-warped brain, the nurse came in with a syringe. “Roll up your sleeve, please!” she said.

“–I thiiiiiiiiink I diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid,” I said.

She looked at my arm, which was fully covered. I meekly rolled it up. “This will probably be sore–” she said as she sterilized the injection site and prepared to jab. “–for up to two weeks.”

“Buuuuuuuuuuut,” I said.

Jab.

“Ow,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said, and slapped a little bandaid on my arm. “All done. Have a brochure.”

I looked down at it. Information on the Tdap, DTaP, and Td Vaccines. I recognized two of them as injections I’d already had within the past 12 months, one of them in the hospital right after I gave birth to Hobbes. “This one,” the nurse told me, and pointed at the third one.

I sighed. “Thaaaaaaaaaaanks,” I said.

“You’re weeeeeeelcome,” she said, and skipped out.

Seeing as how thinking about what I said didn’t do much for me, I’ve been spending the rest of the day saying everything I thought, as I was thinking it.

I think I just saw an email from Human Resources pop into my inbox.

“Before I started here, I worked at Bethesda Naval Hospital,” my new doctor told me. “My patients were mostly high-level, ranking officers or government officials on their way to really important meetings or working on really vital projects. Here, almost everybody is in software.”

“Well, Silicon Valley,” I said deprecatingly. “Do you find a big difference between them?”

She laughed. “At Bethesda, everybody just wanted to be fixed. They didn’t want to know why they were sick, or what was wrong — they didn’t want the explanation. They just wanted whatever would patch them up for the moment and let them get back to work. ‘Give me the pill,’ that sort of thing. Here, people come in with pages of stuff they’ve researched on Google, and all sorts of questions about the pathophysiology or the epidemiology–”

“Geeks,” I said.

It’s a fact of life here in Silicon Valley. There’s a certain mindset you just get accustomed to. The other day when I wondered aloud whether noon was 12 PM or 12 AM, three engineers promptly started to explain to me why it was PM, while a fourth headed straight for google to research. They want to know these kinds of things, and so they actively seek the information out so they can dispense it at will.

For the record, it’s PM.

The Guy is convinced he’s getting sick again.

“I would take Nyquil,” he said as I groveled under the bed, looking for my glasses, “but then I wouldn’t be helpful to you.”

I excavated myself from layers of dust and popped my head over the bed’s edge to stare at him. “Helpful with what?” I demanded.

“With Hobbes in case he woke up during the night.”

I stared harder. “You’re — not usually helpful during the night anyway,” I said.

“True,” he said.

“I mean, with the rare exception when you are–”

“True,” he said again, and brightened.

“Okay then,” I said.

He took some Nyquil.

We are experiencing a lull at work — I love that word. Lull. It sounds so … lully (and this is totally unrelated, but there was actually a composer named Lully. Except his name was pronounced “Loo-lee,” which isn’t soothing at all) — which means I have a lot of downtime. I actually have a full roster of projects on my plate, all of them big, with the prospect of adding another major one to that slate in the near future. The thing is, all of them are just past kick-off and smack dab in the middle of design or requirements gathering.

For the uninitiated out there, requirements gathering is the part where the hapless product manager runs around and finds out what the software “could” do. This is eventually sieved through common sense, the constraints of available time, money, and resources, market demand and feedback, etc., and turned into a design: i.e. what the software “should” do.

Eventually, engineering and QA turn around and inform the product manager what the software “will” do, and then there’s a big fight and the project manager, who is sort of in the position of the UN negotiator assigned to the Palestine-Israel conflict and responsible for giving bad news to everybody she works with, loses a lot of hair and starts stress eating whenever her phone rings — but as I say, that’s later on down the line.

Right now we’re in the quiet, beginning part of all of my projects, where the product managers are happily and optimistically collecting a basket full of hopes and dreams, and as I say, this means a lull for me. I’ve been spending a lot of time online, reading articles that are all totally work-related, yes, even the one about Jeremy Piven getting mercury poisoning from eating too much sushi.

“Dumb,” I said to one of the engineers, who was hanging out in the QA corner of the building. “I mean, who eats sushi that often?”

The engineer looked guilty.

“Every meal,” I said. “I mean, seriously?”

“I eat a lot of sushi,” he said, and then wondered, “Can you get mercury from fish?”

“Yes,” said three voices at once. Most of QA was involved in the conversation now.

“Even salmon?”

“Especially salmon,” I said. I have no idea if this is true. “More from farm-raised than wild,” I added. I know this is true. I read it in on the internet, so it must be.

“Oh,” the engineer said, and started to look a little concerned. “What are the symptoms?”

This particular engineer is one of the sweetest men I’ve ever known, but he is the very antithesis of the typical scrawny, long-limbed, awkward engineer. In short, he is a bodybuilder. Most hard-core bouncers would hesitate before taking him on. He is the picture of health and is possessed of a sharp, creative mind. Unfortunately, he is possessed of one fatal flaw.

He actually listens to me.

“Hair loss,” I guessed vaguely.

The engineer happens to have a shaved head. He ran a considering hand over his scalp.

“Fatigue,” I tacked on, because that seemed like a safe bet. “Muscular and nerve problems, disorientation, dizziness, nausea, mental imbalance–” I figured at least some of those had to be on target.

He blinked at me. “You know what,” he said, “I’ve started to feel kind of sick lately. I was thinking I was coming down with something, you know? But maybe I have mercury poisoning.”

“Maybe,” I said helpfully, because giving people options is part of my job. Option 1: you could be coming down with a cold or the flu. Option 2: you could be suffering from an unusual environmental poison that will cause severe brain damage if left untreated. “This is why pregnant women aren’t supposed to eat too much fish.”

He looked bewildered. “Oh, really?”

“Really,” said one of the QA engineers. “Only one serving of fish a week, isn’t it?”

“A month, I think,” I said.

“So-and-so told me I was pregnant,” he said. “Would it make a difference?”

“If you’re pregnant, then mercury poisoning is probably pretty low on your list of concerns,” I said.

“Sushi, huh?”

“You might want to get checked out,” I said kindly, and headed back to my cube.

Sowing doom and gloom among my coworkers: that is what I do best. That is what I am meant to do. One has to keep one’s skills honed, even when one is in a lull. To do otherwise would be unprofessional.

The Guy finished scrolling through my entry and peered up at me. “Am I sort of like your tiger?” he asked.

“My what?”

“Your Hobbes. Your imaginary tiger. Am I the imaginary tiger in this relationship?”

I thought about it for a second. “You kind of are.”

He grinned proudly and rolled over to go to sleep.

I was sitting in the executive meeting that I run on Thursdays when I realized I couldn’t remember where I’d put my pencil. I fished about in my jacket pocket and came up with the following:

1. Receipt from the library for overdues. $9 for Horatio Hornblower, which I didn’t even like.
   
2. A check for $10.90 from my doctor’s office for overpaid deductibles. Irony abounds.
   
3. An eraser, no pencil attached.
   
4. A safety pin.
   
5. Two paper clips.
   
6. My Blackberry.
   
7. Four sheets of origami in assorted colors.
   
8. A baby rattle.
   
9. A digital recorder.
   
10. My pencil.
    

I laid them out on the table in front of me while the executives gossiped and chatted and got their lunches and took their seats — and then continued to gossip and chat. At least they had the courtesy to shut their laptops. It’s a hard rule of mine: no laptops in my meeting.

“Let’s get started,” I said loudly.

The din was too loud; they didn’t hear me, or chose not to. More gossip and chatting and laughing. “Hey,” I said, even louder. And then, “Hey!”

A couple of VPs sitting by me stopped talking and regarded me expectantly. The rest, still happily engaged in some kind of conversation, ignored me.

My boss raised his voice to help. “Yuhri says–” It’s like being in grade school sometimes, I swear, “–it’s time to get started. Attention!” A couple more people trailed off into silence, but the entire other half of the conference room continued their garrulous free-for-all.

I took my gavel. Yes, I have a gavel. I pounded it hard on the table. This usually produces results, and this time was no exception; the rest of the table fell sharply silent and turned their obligingly attentive faces towards me.

All except for one. One solitary vice president, still determined to finish her story. Chatter. Chatter. Chatter.

Little Bear baby rattle

Dead silence.

“Wow,” I said. “It works.”

Back when I was childless, I used to joke with my friend Amanda that she should write a book: “Everything I learned about management, I learned from my 2-year old.”

It’s not a joke anymore. If she’s not going to write it, I will.

The Engineering planning meeting was getting a little dragged down in discussion about — something, I don’t remember what. The details of a project that I don’t really remember; regardless, it wasn’t necessarily something that needed to be discussed right there and then. “Off-line,” someone said, which means “in another meeting that is not this one.” But the conversation continued, regardless.

I sat in my seat and twiddled my thumbs. Then I looked up humidifiers on Amazon. Then I looked up humidifiers on Target.com. Then I sat back again and twiddled my thumbs.

Then I took out the baby rattle, which was now looped around the ID lariat around my neck, and shook it. It’s a fairly quiet rattle. The conversation continued; I, likewise, continued. Rattle rattle rattle. I have to admit, it was pretty soothing — and it wasn’t as though I was paying attention to the conversation anyway. Rattle rattle rattle rattle. I was really getting into it.

Rattle!

Right about then, I realized that there was a silence around the table. I looked up to find all eyes on me. “Don’t worry,” the VP of Engineering said. “She has a kid.”

There was laughter. I waved my rattle at them. The conversation having been derailed, they moved onto the next subject.

I was originally going to take the rattle back home to Hobbes, but I think I’m going to be keeping it at work. Next time I file an expense report, it’ll be on there.

Management tool: $3.50.

Hobbes was sulking about something.

“You’re tired,” I informed him, removing his diaper. He glowered at me. “You need to go to bed.” I lifted up his legs to slide his dirty diaper out from beneath him, and heard a prrrrrrrrpt! sound. Warm, stinky air puffed into my face. He’d farted on me.

“Charming,” I said.

He puffed out his cheeks and sniffed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Not funny. Time for your bath.”

He growled.

I finished stripping him down while he tried to eat my Medic Alert bracelet. In the bathroom, the Guy was filling his little bathtub; I picked naked Hobbes up and trundled him to the bathroom. “Yay, naked Hobbes!” I caroled, attempting to cheer him up with a bounce. “Do you want to have your bath now?”

He hiccuped and I suddenly felt warmth on my chest. He’d puked on me.

“Thanks,” I said to him while the Guy snickered. I lifted him to stare eye-to-eye with him; he turned the corners of his mouth down and looked sad and pitiful. “It’s a good thing you’re getting bathed.”

I passed him off to the Guy, who was still snickering. He gently started to lower him into the bath; I turned to get the towel when I heard a sudden splash.

“Did you just pee in the tub?” the Guy said. I turned and squint at Hobbes, who was regarding his father dolefully. He was still dangling several inches above the water; his tiny feet wrapped around each other, and with a look of sudden satisfaction, he made a supreme effort. A little stream of liquid arced down into the tub.

And this, see, is what I like about babies. They make their feelings clear. There is no deception or passive-aggressive lying about one’s feelings. If they are happy, they are happy. If they are not, they are not.

We gave Hobbes his bath anyway.

I’m working on something else but it was taking too long … and I need to wash bottles.

So.

photoshop CS3 and Wacom: click to expand

I am very Japanese sometimes, ya?

Kusudama

The little origami flowers from day 2? I made more of them. This is a combination of a circle of 5 and a circle of 6 in the middle and then a circle of 5. I joined them all together with a needle and thread, and this is the result.

There are easier ways to assemble them than the way I chose, but I got in just under the wire. Day 4!

Kirigami experiment

I spared very little time and thought for what I’d do tonight, due to a dinner party that is currently going on in the kitchen while I sit holed up in the bedroom.

As a result, this is what I came up with. Reverse engineering is about all I can do at this point; the original, far cooler, is a German book on Amazon. “Kirigami” translates literally to “cut paper,” and there are far cooler examples out there. Tomorrow maybe I’ll try one of those instead.

Tonight, I’ll consider this a victory. At least I didn’t miss a day.

It is not easy to find time to do crafty things when you are kept up most of the night by an anxious baby, work a full day, then come home and have to clean the house before a dinner party on the morrow.

For the record, I never got around to cleaning the house.

little origami flowers

Discovery #1:

I am not an artist.

Hobbes in Photoshop C3