Enoch

But can he armfart yet? A father's job is never done! His armpits are used primarily for the manufacture of a rather gooey mixture of sweat, lint, and spat-up food.

With a new baby in the house, I needed a game that could be paused at any time and played one-handed if need be. And, hey, there's a new Crusader Kings 2 expansion out... (Other suggestions that fit these two criteria are welcome, particularly if they'll run on the Haswell i5 NUC I've got in the living room. CK2 involves a lot of squinting at the screen from the couch, and it's still a bit cold in the basement to bring Junior to hang out with me down there while I play games.)

I think my son can already fart louder than I can.

Music for an early-AM baby feeding. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma8IgxHcAoE

I have difficulty listening to Station to Station anymore because I know that it'll get that song stuck in my head for about a week and a half.

Ridiculous thought of the day: If there isn't a Yes tribute band called "Maybe," there really should be. Hell, I'd start one if there were a place in it for a mediocre alto saxophonist. But that would probably just make it a Traffic tribute band. Oh well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRe42BDK_R4

I feel like we're starting to get the hang of this whole "caring for a baby" thing. He generally gets fed every 2.5-3 hours, and roughly two-thirds of the time he's content to nap between feedings. So we manage to get a respectable amount of sleep. Also, today he got a bath and a walk around the neighborhood. (This was the first day that the weather really cooperated with the latter goal.) And I managed to make a fantastic roast chicken dinner. Of course, this is with 2 adults around. Things are going to change when I go back to work, which I'm thinking about doing on April 1. I've got the leave time to spend, and the wife could use a little more confidence-boosting before she has him all day by herself, but we've got to transition at some point and I do miss doing some of the work-type stuff.

A thing that I said that illustrates where my life is right now: "I'm really glad we got that bar sink added when we remodeled the kitchen-- it's great for washing baby bottles!" I really should be taking advantage of this period of inactivity and sleeping. Mind too active. Time to play something dumb for a little while.

Listening to Birth of the Cool while the little one sleeps and the wife talks to her mom on the phone. Peaceful. And it won't last much longer-- soon Junior is going to realize that he's due for a feeding...

He is now home, and we"re listening to some Thelonious Monk

Neat idea, and I'll keep it in mind, but I'm going to wait to gain some assurance that he won't choke to death trying to eat the dice before getting him started on the arrpeegees. Maybe when he turns 25.

In honor of Fat Tuesday, I am enjoying a Sazerac, the official c0cktail of the city of New Orleans. It is lovely. The youngin' is a week old and doing well. He's off all IV and temperature support (apart from clothing/blankets), and has been sustaining good blood-sugar levels with only nutritional support (i.e., stuff added to the milk he gets to boost its caloric content). The great thing about that is that the hospital folks aren't doing anything we can't do at home. So, if he can sustain this for a little while longer, they've told us that they want to let us take him home Thursday morning. Meanwhile, what semblance of order we had around the house has fallen to ****, with the wife still recovering from the c-section and both of us exhausted from getting up to pump milk every few hours. (And with me still spending time making interesting c0cktails and updating silly internet forums.)

Nope, they've been conditioned to believe that "girls aren't good at math", which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many also had their choices constrained earlier in their education, even if they showed an interest. This is less the case recently, but there are still a lot of women in the workforce for whom the decision was binary: A girl who does well in school can be whatever she wants, just as long as she wants to be a nurse or a teacher. (I know at least one woman who was explicitly asked this question by her high school guidance counselor, as recently as the 1980s.)

Thanks, folks. We have no reason to believe that the end result will be anything other than a healthy baby. He hasn't been immune to the occasional setback, but he's making progress. We're trying not to get our hopes set on a particular date, but the last doc my wife spoke with didn't disagree when she asked if another week or two would be a reasonable estimate. Intellectually, we know this is what's right for him, and we know that going home and commuting to the hospital to bond, to learn all we can from the NICU nurses, and to deliver pumped breastmilk (and holy **** is pumping a pain in the ass!) is the best thing for us to do. Still doesn't make it easy to leave him behind. And there's supposedly a snowstorm coming tomorrow evening, so we've got to decide whether we'd rather be stranded at home or stranded at the hospital.

Surreal week. Wife had an early morning checkup on Monday. They didn't let us leave. 3AM Tuesday, she's having a caesarian and delivering our son 8 days before his due date. The boy looks good, but he's smaller than expected-- a hair under 5 lbs. They find that his blood sugar is low, and feeding doesn't correct it, so he goes off to the NICU. Everything else about the little guy seems fine (and adorable), but it's probably going to take at least a couple more days of feeding and IV support to build up the glycogen levels that he needs to regulate this himself. And, 4 days being the limit of what insurance companies will cover after a caesarian without complications, we have to go home without him tomorrow. We have every reason to believe that he'll be fine eventually, but it's impossible to guess just how long he'll have to stay at the hospital. He's an awesome little guy, but it's hard to feel too happy while the hospital is keeping him.

Mask of the Betrayer was not particularly fun or interesting, and I had to force myself to finish it. This had nothing to do with the spirit-eater mechanic, which didn't bother me much. Forcing yourself to finish a game is a dumb thing to do. Troika's games were all rather bad. IWD2 was more fun than IWD1.

Yeah, poison is unpleasant. Not least because you never know where they're going to die, which poses cleanup problems. Glue traps are also disconcerting to use-- you either end up having to execute a helpless animal, or they die slowly of dehydration before you get the chance to give them a clean end. That said, I didn't hesitate here. I saw it moving after I turned the light on, decided that it had to die, grabbed something that could be used as an effective bludgeon (I had already changed into pajamas and slippers, so a stomping was out), and got to work.

I came home from our gaming session this evening, and went to the basement fridge to get a drink while the wife was taking a shower. Saw a mouse right in the middle of the floor of the unfinished portion of the basement. It started running away from me, but this mouse was not particularly fast. I picked up a half-empty can of housepaint and was able to smash the beastie before it could scurry under the dryer. Feeling appropriately macho, I bagged the idea of a drink from the fridge, and just got some whiskey. Am now drinking it, while glaring disparagingly at the cat.

I did that too, but I had an excuse: I was 9. Consistent shaving is high-upkeep. I would totally rock the "balding guy crew cut" look, were baldness to be my fate. But my hairline is holding up pretty well a few weeks shy of my 35th birthday, so a buzzcut would basically make me look like the doughy enlistee who everybody knows is going to cry for his mama every night and wash out of basic training within a week. I appear to have inherited the hair of my maternal grandfather-- I'll have the scalp of a 20-something well into my 40s, after which it will all turn white. My maternal grandfather, by the way, my not be a wuss (except in successfully dodging the draft during the Korean War), but is a reprehensible character in other respects. (As my grandmother would happily tell you, were she alive.)

I have never perceived cliquiness or humorous criticism as particularly feminine. That's just human nature. (But maybe I'm tainted because I was born in 1979?)

So in a way it's their fault then ? They set the bar too high. It would take another World War or similar catastrophe to see a similar generation. We have it way too easy now. Must we keep enduring Tom Brokaw's sloppy kisses directly to the **** of his target audience? That such a horrifyingly crass appeal was so widely successful (and widely profitable) mystifies and infuriates me to this day. Okay, I get it-- they were young adults during the last war that we can still make purely heroic movies about. But people are people. And people born in the '20s were just as venal, cowardly, and flawed as people have always been. Gauzy portraits in courage don't change that. (But they sure do get people to tune in to the evening news!)

Both of these statements can be true. But I'd be that the one that is specific to a single individual is more true than the one that attemts to generalize a population. A large part of the divide MC is talking about is less generational and more cultural. Smarm is hardly exclusive to the young. I'd also submit that being more censorious than one's parents could easily be a result of increased educational expectations and class mobility. That is, in right-thinking middle class households, it is clearly communicated to children that the way to have a productive successful life is to follow the "high educational achievement" track. That has probably only been true across as a general matter since the '70s or so. Back when one could have a happily middle-class household on a salary brought home by an auto mechanic or somebody working on an assembly line, the messages kids got weren't so uniform.

Well, it's a matter of which risks you want to face. "Regular" sodas have the clear, well-established risks of highly concentrated caloric energy delivered in a way that does not satiate hunger. "Diet" sodas have the largely speculative risks associated with certain artificial sweeteners. IMO, the diet stuff has been freely available for decades, and I am aware of no solid consensus that they're any more dangerous than a thousand other environmental factors that would drive a person crazy to pay special attention to. There could be some connection to very slow developing cancers, but the same can be said for eating grilled meat or having a beer.

Shaved. Already starting to regret it. I look younger and rounder of face without the beard. (Also, it makes it clear that I really need a haircut.) I guess paternity leave will be a good opportunity to grow it back, if I want to. Which, by the way, should begin next week-- the doc wants to induce labor a week ahead of the estimated "due" date.

I don't suppose there's any way to use this on ME3 DLC, is there? Indirectly, you have to buy the bioware points from origin first using the love promo code, then use those to buy the ME3 dlc. Are you sure that works? It did not let me input any codes during the checkout—it seems buying fake internet currency is handled differently as purchasing actual games. I was able to input the code, but it didn't do anything. "Vitural currencies" are listed as excluded from the promotion.