Doctor’s Orders

Mom, you need read no further. This post is all about science  fiction programs with jokes about computers thrown in for good measure.  A Lily post should follow before too long.

We're catching up on our Doctor Who. We caught the Sontaran two-parter over the weekend and the Doctor's Daughter last night.  There was nothing I didn't like about the Sontaran episodes. (Well, nothing Catherine Tate related that I didn't like.) There was something undeniably appealing about seeing the Doctor go "Don't engage the Sontarans, don't engage the Sontarans" and the UNIT Commander eventually going, "You know what? Fuck that" and just kicking their alien asses.

Lots of nice continuity porn, what with UNIT, the probic vent, the nod to the Brigadier, the throwaway reference to the Rutans. The Sontarans looked updated, but not to the extent that they became unrecognizable. I remember something from an old episode in the original series about a defense mechanism inside the TARDIS that negated gunpowder and the Sontaran gimmick seemed a take off on that.

It was a good episode that could have been great.  For a change, the problem wasn't with Donna, either. They seem to be contradicting three years of continuity to paint the Doctor as a smug pacifist who automatically judges and dismisses anyone who uses a gun. I mean, it's not like the Doctor went around packing heat, but he was never self-righteous about it either. He reminded of a character I hated in the 1988 series, War of the Worlds, who refused to carry a gun, but spent every episode setting up some elaborate Rube Goldberg strategy to kill the aliens. It drove me nuts. Apparently, since the Time War, the Eye of Harmony is now defunct, so the TARDIS is now powered by his own smugness.

Then there is the scene where the Doctor points the gun at the head of the man who murdered his daughter, before throwing it aware and declaring "I would never do that!" Yeah, tell it to the Vervoids.

And I guess that Gallifreyan hearts are RAID 0. Here I thought they were RAID 1.  

6:46 AM - 2 Comments - 1 Kudos - Add Comment

Petty Theft Auto
Current mood: annoyed

I'm not really much of a car person, but I like my car well enough. It's a 1995 Ford Escort. I recently hit 200,000 miles on it, which is about the distance from here to the moon.  It came out of the factory with a green coat of paint, but it's been bleached by 13 years in the sun until it became a kind of faded teal. It's generally reliable and it gets me from point A to point B. It's not pretty,  (on Thursday afternoon, I was walking back to the building after lunch with a couple of friends, and I observed that I probably had the crappiest car on the lot), but it's functional.

I'm very good about locking up my car at night. Jen is not. This is a cause of concern because she'll frequently leave her purse in the car.  We each have a copy of her key-less entry systems on our respective keychains. If you hut the lock button when the doors are already locked, it flashes the blinkers at you and gives a really annoying beep, so I try not to lock it unless I'm sure the doors are already unlocked. I usually get home later than Jen does, and one of my rituals between leaving my car and walking to the house is to lock her car doors. She leaves it unlocked so consistently that I don't even dread the already-locked sound. I can just hit the button, and I'll be sure that I'll hear the doors clicking shut rather than the warning beep.

So, of course, it's my car that somebody breaks into, for the second time in eight months. Grrr...so annoying. They smashed the driver side window, took the radio and went on their way. I found it when I was getting ready to take Lily to the sitter's. I was dragging the garbage can to the curb, she was puttering along behind me when I noticed that I had left the window open. "Wow, that was kind of stupid of me," I thought, and a moment later I noticed all the glass all over the place. I suppose it says something about me that I was actually a little relieved to see that I hadn't invited this by leaving the window open.

I poked my head in and saw that the radio was gone. My collection of Dune audiobooks and NPR programs burned to disc had not been taken. Their loss, I suppose.

I picked up Lily and took her into the house with me, and called the police. The responding officer showed up after a short wait, and told me somebody had hit a whole bunch of cars last night. Lily told the officer, "Car broke!" a couple times, which made me smile.

In addition to the radio, they grabbed an old copy of the car key that was warped into uselessness, but I never threw out. It's too worn down to open anything, but that wouldn't be immediately apparent, so I'm probably going to be better off just getting a new car at this point rather than changing the locks or waiting for someone to come back with the key, finding they can't use it and smashing my window again.

We're not going to let us get us down though. The car is at a repair place now (I'm using my Grammy's 1991 Oldsmobile. Sexy!) and we're continuing with our plans to visit New Hampshire this weekend. We're going camping while we're up there, and it promises to be our second most memorable July 4th camping trip. (Hi Greg!)

5:44 AM - 3 Comments - 5 Kudos - Add Comment

The All Lily edition

Lily plays with her toys in the most interesting ways. She has a set of building blocks that she really enjoys.  They're just the usual wooden blocks with letters or numbers or animals on each side, and she love naming those things or just stacking the blocks.

The other day, she was in her nursery playing with her blocks, stacking them one on top of each other. She grabbed two in her chubby little fist and went to place them side by side, balancing two side-by-side on one block, and Jen saw what she was doing, and said "Oh, no, honey. They'll fall over that way. You can't stack them like that…unless you can," for the blocks had balanced rather miraculously. Now she tries to stack them like that all the time.

Yesterday, Boots the Monkey and Ariel the Mermaid got married. Dora the Explorer officiated. At least that's what I'm guessing happened, based on how she was playing with her toys.

We were looking at photos taped to the cabinent, a good idea I stole from my mom, and Lily was naming all the people in the pictures. She named mommy and daddy, and pappy and nana and grammy and baby. If she came across an adult she didn't know, she would say "lady" or "man". This led to the following exchange.

Lily: Man!

Me:  No, that's Greg. But close.

We took her to a spaghetti dinner at the senior center where my Grammy volunteers. She was hanging out, being cute, when a blue haired old lady came up to tell her how adorable she was. Of course Lily freaked the hell out and shouted "NO! MY BOOK!!" as loud as she possibly could, while clutching her little book. Ugh. This followed Saturday's 90 minute tantrum.

Dave Barry wrote "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.", and I think that's very true, and it's something that we're trying to teach Lily. My favorite line from C.S. Lewis is from "A Horse and his Boy", where the prince is taunting the captured Tisroc, and the king tells him not to. ("Shame, Corin," said the King. "Never taunt a man save when he is stronger than you: then, as you please.")

Lily loves me, you see. Right now she's going through a stage when I'm the only one she wants to be around. And I can't really blame her. Though I do fear for her, because my awesomeness, like the sun, can be blinding.

And we're trying to transition her from being nice to just me, to being nice to everyone. Because she'll sit on my lap and share with me, and then she'll turn around and smack a cookie away from another baby before picking it up and offering it to me. And that's not really something we want to encourage.

2:01 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

I come fresh from the street, fast on my feet, kind a lean and lazy

Ok, name that tune in the subject line!


Inexplicably, I seem to be developing a reputation as a really hard worker. As a kid, I was smart, but lazy. As a young adult, I was smart but lazy. And I'm still smart but lazy. But I'm more interested in avoiding hassle that I am in avoiding work. So I come in early so that I won't get stuck behind a school bus. And I might as well get a head start on the day as long as I'm there. It's like I've become industrious in spite of myself.

And I never really thought of this until I was taking a laptop home to finish work on a project, and my boss cautioned me not to spend more than an hour. And I was thinking, am I going to be the guy who claims during a job interview that his weakness is that he works too hard?

Ok, lest you all think I've sold out and become another suit, I will turn the topic of conversation to Sci-fi movies.

I hear that they may be remaking Robocop. A friend on a message board summed up my feelings nicely with the following quip: Bitches leave.... that movie alone.

So, I'm spending my lunch break quickly scarfing down my lunch and then taking a couple laps around the lakes on the property. Mostly for fresh air and time to think, but also as a supplement to the reduced caloric intake in order to increase the weight loss (37 pounds and counting!)

Anyways, I was listening to my mp3 player when I heard something that at first I took for a fire alarm at the BASF building. I rounded the hill and saw that the sound was coming from a woman practicing her bagpipes in the parking lot.

You know, they kind of get a bad rap. I don't think I've ever seen or heard them outside of a Celtic festival or otherwise referenced except as a punchline.

8:05 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Father’s Day
Current mood: amused

Gee, Brain, what are we going to do tonight?

The same thing we do every night, Pinky - make fun of Greg.

Greg: That blurb reminded me of AFMBE, but that's probably because the word flesh appears in it. Anyhoo, I kind of like using miniatures to play (not that I get to), but I definitely see your point. It's kind of weird to me that, when Gygax first invented the game, it took about three hours to properly fill out a character sheet. It was frustrating to spend the better part of an afternoon filling in charts for weapons and what have you, only to have your sadistic DM kill off the party within about the first ten minutes of the adventure and justify it with "monsters are people, too." It seems that the game has gone from one extreme to another to another to another over the last 30 years.

Dude, take the hint. Here's what probably happened.

Greg: Hi guys! Sorry I'm late. You accidentally gave me the wrong address and I had trouble finding your house.
Greg's DM: Fuck.
Greg: So, do I have time to get in the game?
Greg's DM: Sure...you just need to fill out this "special" 20 page character sheet. Shouldn't take more than three hours.
Greg: Okily dokily.
(Three hours later)
Greg: Done!
Greg's DM: (Rolls some dice, doesn't look at them) Uh oh, looks like the monster got you.
Greg: Yeah, I couldn't even touch that owlbear with all the nukes it was firing.
Greg's DM: Uh huh, whatever. See you in another three hours, Molchan.

Heh heh.

Father's day was on Sunday. I got a check for twenty dollars, a couple bucks, a shirt, some pants, a twenty dollar Dunkin Donuts gift card, and a nice book from Lily. You non-fathers out there are missing out on a pretty sweet deal. The book also led to a very cute moment. Let me lead into it with a meandering digression.

I was really looking forward to King Kong. I posted the review on a message board that I frequented, and I almost wound up getting banned when I asked a board moderator:  "I would use smaller words, but I can't get them down to less than one syllable."

Josh's King of Kong review

12:42 AM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Escape Velocity

So Lily climbed out of the crib for the first time on Friday. Jen got a phone call and Lily started getting upset, so Jen put her in the crib so that she could hear what the caller was saying. She checked on Lily just a few moments later to discover that she had climbed out of the crib, slipped through the open door and was about to try to make her way down the stairs. Yikes!

She surprised me at breakfast the morning before. I had been putting a band aid on a blister and she looked at it and very clearly said "Doctor," which isn't an association I would have expected her to make.

Speaking of Doctors, Christopher Eccelston is going to be Destro in the GI Joe movie!! This is going to be awesome!

And speaking of awesome, I love living in 2008. I used to go to the Imagination Workshop. It was between a Bagelsmith and a Chinese restaurant and it always smelled wonderful. The first game I ever bought from the Imagination Workshop was called Rivets. It must have been in the early 80s when I picked it up. Figure I was 10, or thereabouts. It was one of those self-contained mini-wargames that came in the plastic case with a map, a rulebook and a million little punch out counters. I couldn't remember anything else about the game except for part of a line on back of the box that made me laugh.  "...ruled the battlefield...they were the only things stupid enough to be on it."

And googling those phrase in conjunction with wargame led me to Rivets. I actually picked that up a couple months before I bought my first D&D books. (Players Handbook, DMG, Isle of Dread and some dice.)

Here's the blurb: The Boppers were robotic war machines.  When the war ended and everyone was dead, the Boppers kept on fighting.  But what else could you expect from robots with the average intelligence of a can opener?  Rivets is a tactical level science fiction game of robotic warfare in the 22nd Century.  Players choose their robot armies, program them, and maneuver them to destroy the computer complex that controls the enemy's robots.  Boppers ruled the battlefield - though of course they were the only things stupid enough to be on it.

Anyways, why am I bringing that up now? Because my 4th edition books came in the mail and and they read just like a wargame. I like to tell Eric that I die a little inside whenever he breaks out the battle mat for our 3rd edition games, but when a fight between six PCs and ten enemies takes almost 90 minutes out of my Saturday night, I think the emphasis on tactical combat has gone too far. And it looks like 4th edition only continues the pattern. I don't think the game can be played without miniatures without extensive modification.

On the other hand it looks really nice. The art is beautiful and the layout and organization are really nice.

A friend sent me a copy of a post he had seen that showed how someone else felt about the game. Keep in mind that quickness of play was the big feature that they were promoting.


 "I remember when D&D 3rd Ed came out and I experienced this great
 liberating joy at the sight of it. It was like my hands were untied;
 with all these skills and feats and classes and such, it was possible
 to fine-tune your character into exactly the sort of *person* you
 wanted him to be. It was wondrous.

 And then 4th ed. came out. And it was like having my hands tied again.
 And then having the rope between my hands tied to the trailer hitch of
 a pickup truck. Then that pickup truck took off down the road at
 80mph. And as I was dragged, with no control and no options whatsoever
 down the highway my flesh being flayed from my body with each passing
 second, WotC leaned out of the driver's seat window and shouted "Look
 at how fast we're going! IT's so much quicker now!!!"

Heh.

3:16 AM - 1 Comments - 1 Kudos - Add Comment

Upbeat post
Current mood: optimistic

Okay, going to try for a post that's less relentlessly grim than my most recent offerings.

As I mentioned earlier, we caught 13 going on 30 last Saturday.

Jennifer Garner, man. I really don't understand her appeal. She looks like she should be in Snake Mountain, plotting the downfall of He-Man. Seriously! If I wanted to watch a movie about a robot from the 80s, I'd slap Short Circuit into my Betamax.

I'm not sure if the movie reinforces my point about Juno or not. One of the critiques I've seen leveled at Juno was that her friend spoke "like a teenager designed by a committee of adults that have researched youth by watching MTV around the clock."

But now that my generation is coming of age and making movies, we make them about things that were marketed to us in the 80s.  Oooh, the Transformers. Is Michael Bay "keepin' it real"?

(Speaking ofTransformers, Transformers 2 just finished up filming in Bethlehem, PA.) Here I was hoping that Michael Bay would stay as far away as possible from it, but it would seem that his infusion of backbone was short-lived.

In other news, I found this quote in an article about bowling.

"Over the past 20 years, the technological advancements in bowling...[have] jeopardized the credibility of the sport of bowling," reads the introduction to the 16 page-long USBC report.

For fuck's sake. It's the official sport of Wisconsin retirees. It's a sport like beating up Kazuya in Tekken 5 is a sport. Sure, I like bowling. It's an excuse to do something different with my friends. But it's not an activity I look forward to by itself.

My car hit 200,000 miles last week. It's a 1995 Ford Escort that still runs fairly well. We bought it around 2000, shortly before we moved back from New Hampshire.
 
Lily asked for for privacy before going to the bathroom, which is a step in the right direction ("Go away, daddy"). However, since she did it on the kitchen floor, we're going to need to iron out a few details.

This past Saturday, we were watching Winnie the Pooh, and she kept telling me "Eeyore sad, daddy. Eeyore sad", and her usual remedy for someone who is sad is to give them a hug, but since Eeyore was on the TV, this wasn't an option. So I just gave her an ice pop. Ice pops make everything better.

2:12 PM - 3 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

The Funeral

The funeral was rougher than I'd been expecting. When I got to the funeral parlor, I got a choked up when I saw that someone had put a photo of Lily in with him. One of his nieces or nephews had drawn him a picture and that was in the coffin too. It made me think of a little baby, with all these toys packed around him. I guess death does that. It takes everything away. We're never more helpless than we are in that box.

He was buried in a Cabela's sweatshirt, which he would have liked. The readings were the usual funeral scriptures, the 23rd Psalm, Ecclesiastes, the same stuff you get at every funeral. That bothered me a little bit. There was nothing there to show that a unique human being had died. After the scripture, the minister related some stories about Barry, but I find it more personal when loved ones have the opportunity to do it themselves. On the other hand, it's not always easy to get up and talk under the best circumstances, and this way is easier.

But all you people reading this better outlive me, because I want each and every one of you to go up there and tell the audience how awesome I was.

After that, we drove out to the cemetery for the burial. Then it was on to the wake. Jen's mom is still using the present tense to talk about Barry, and I think it's going to be tough for her. Their anniversary is the 18th, I think, and that's going to be really hard.

We were up at her house after the wake, and I saw a copy of one of Kevin Trudeau's latest book. If you're not familiar with him, he's a con man and convicted felon who claims that there are natural cures for cancer, diabetes and other serious illnesses, but they're being suppressed by the government. Nothing like bilking the terminally ill for a few more bucks. He's really a vile, vile man.

One final thing. Let's end on a happy note. I dropped Lily off at Lori's before we went up to the funeral. Lily was running around like a spaz right before I took off, and she fell and bumped her tummy on a little baby stool. She started crying like the world was ending. I picked her up and kissed her tummy and she stopped crying immediately and said "Okay, daddy!"

If only it were that easy for us grown ups.

11:57 AM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Weight of the Wait
Current mood: melancholy

"Of troubles I considered myself amply possessed. But those who have do seem to get. Some spiritual form of compound interest, I suppose."

- Sign of the Unicorm

As an added bonus, Jen's mom fractured her wrist. I guess it had happened before Barry passed away, but she thought it was a sprain and didn't have it looked at until now. So now she can't drive either. I was trying to find a picture of Lily and Barry, and I'm sure there must be a few, but for the life of me, I couldn't find them. It's not surprising that there aren't a lot of pictures of them, since Barry was sick for pretty much all of Lily's life, and he was never able to pick her up and scoot around like healthier adults, so there weren't a lot of opportunities. But now that he's gone, I regret not having taken them when I had the chance.

The viewing was tonight. The funeral will be tomorrow. Everything that Barry ever was or ever hoped to be is going to get put into a box and that box is going to be put into the ground and then we're going to walk away, and that's when it's going to be hardest. That's when it will seem really final. There will be bills to pay and assorted affairs to take care of, but the immediate concerns will be over, and there will be nothing left but years stretching forward without him. Nothing left but the overwhelming weight of the wait.

And we go on. We always do. And we keep our loved ones alive by remembering them. 

6:22 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

And that’s that

And he died this morning. I got the news right after Jen left for work. She had her cell tuned off and she was teaching at a place without a phone. I eventually found a coworker who radioed a ranger who ran her down. She called me and I told her.

I didn't even know they had given the order to discontinue dialysis. We knew he didn't have long, but I thought he had longer than this.

Lily was going to stay with her Nana at my father's house, but I decided to keep her with me so we'd be able to head up to Sue's house more quickly. We had breakfast at a Perkins with Nana and Grammy and then Lily and I went home. I called Jen's mom after we got back from Perkins, and she said that she was okay, and she was just paying some bills that has come in the mail. Life goes on, I suppose, no matter how much we wish it wouldn't.We hung out and waited for Jen to get off of work. When she did, we all headed up to her mom's house.

I think she was very happy to see Lily, and just having her there cheered her up immensely . We looked at pictures, and watched 13 going on 30, something I'll blog about when I'm in a better mood.

10:20 PM - 2 Comments - 3 Kudos - Add Comment