A good day, overall

I had not known they were close. This past Saturday our microwave crossed over the silicon Jordan to be with our TV. One appliance crash is a tragedy, two is a . . . well, a double tragedy, to be honest.

It was the only unpleasantly chaotic event in an otherwise joyfully chaotic day. We had a friend's birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's in the morning. It was the same one I had gone to when I was a kid, which blew the boys' minds. I hadn't been to visit Mr. Cheese in about 5 years or so, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well the place had rebounded sine my last unpleasant vist.

For a place filled with screaming kids playing ear-splitting games, it was clean, had friendly and helpful staff, and simple yet effective security measures to ensure that your kids leave with you; the food was better than I had remembered, and all the games were one token each. We'll certainly come back, mostly due to the helpfulness of the staff and the single-tokenness of the games.

As soon as I realized they couldn't leave without me and had let go of their hands, the boys ran off in 4 different directions. My main fears were that Sam would get lost and that Jonah would get into some kind of scrap with another kid (or parent). Neither proved true.

Sam's favorite thing to do was to put tokens into the slot of his games. It was some work, because no two games had the same slot. I counted 3 main types: vertical flush metal slot, horizontal angled metal slot, vertical plastic slot & change return combo. Sam mastered them all. As for the games themselves, his favorites let him drive. There was the simple scrolling one with flags, a high-tech 2 Fast 2 Furious street racing game (he sat in my lap & steered while I pushed the accelerator; we came in 7th), several rocking cars of the type seen outside grocery stores, including one that took your picture, and a truck driver game. If it had a steering wheel and a token slot, Sam was on it.

Jonah was all over the place. Climbing, running, mugging for TV cameras, playing "big-boy games", like the Mechwarrior one with a moving cockpit ("Dad, look! I'm inside a ROBOT! With GUNS!"). He played enough games to get 16 tickets, but the lizard prize he wanted ("He's blue and sparkly!") was 100 tickets. I talked him down to a slightly smaller sparkly blue lizard, which was 50 tickets, and then I had to talk Timothy into handing over 34 tickets, which he did with more graciousness and patience than I've normally seen in oldest children. I think the promise of his own room in the new house (a someday-coming sanctuary) has softened him up a bit.

Most surprising to me was that Jonah had completely figured out the ticket-reading machine, into which you feed your tickets and then receive a reciept to hand in at the ticket-redeeming counter. Clever machine, clever boy.

Stephen was a man on a mission. He stopped to eat just one slice of pizza and was then back out, working the room for tickets. He made over 50 on his own, which seemed like a lot to me. Following Sam, I would see Stephen at various games, concentrating. He smiled when he showed me the tickets in his cup; otherwise, he was on the hunt.

Timothy, though, amassed over 200 tickets through the day. A couple of lucky hits on the Sponge-Bob game (50 tickets apiece), he was generous with his winnings. He seemed to enjoy the games themselves as much as winning the tickets.

All in all, a good time. No fights, no breakdowns, no 911 calls.

While we were at Chuck E. Cheese's, my wife was at home cleaning. We're still selling our house (4br, 2.5ba, at end of street, etc.) and she was giving it a thorough going over in anticipation of weekend visits from realtors et al.

When the boys and I got home, we were instructed to stay in the TV room and not to leave upon pain of death. I opted to go outside and blow the last of the leaves out of what we euphamistically refer to as "the grass." This was a nice hour of semi-manual labor that allowed me to listen to a couple of lectures of my China history course. Art & intellectual history, though. No wars or funny stories in that hour, oh well.

I did manage to get the boys outside to help in the yardwork. I had blown the leaves into the street, but since we had returned The Sucker, we had to manually collect them and move them to the woods. The boys did surprisingly well, given that we don't do yardwork often. Timothy, as usual, was trying to think of different ways to make it easier. Stephen needed convincing that this was worth doing. Jonah needed reminding that this was what we were doing, and Sam kept picking up leaves and putting where they belonged.

We finished and packed up to leave for the final event of the day: picnic with friends. Nice day, new park, time to get out and let the kids run around like the wild things they are. I've noticed an odd difference between older parks and newer ones: there are few places to sit down in new parks. No benches, seats, logs, etc. This appeared to be okay at Brook Run, because there were very few sitting parents. Most were walking along, both closely following behind their Most Precious Lifestyle Accessory (okay, that's not fair; most were just first-timers, at whom we must quietly laugh, and upon whom we should not heap scorn).

I, on the other hand, have learned the fine art of Paying Attention Elsewhere (TM), and wanted to sit down. My buddy found a good seat, and we commenced to talking while our wives watched the youngest two and the older kids played like crazy. It was a fantastically good time, ending only when the security guard (?) came over and announced that he was closing in 40 minutes.

Apparently the park closes at sundown, which makes sense, but it was odd nonetheless. Timothy & I went to throw the football in a game of 350. Jonah joined us (20 minute warning). We headed back and watched the 2-year-olds playing together in the sandbox (5 minute warning). We cleaned up our table (please leave now) and gathered up the children (I'm closing the gate now). As we left, the guard was leaning over the gate, waiting. We waved good-bye and headed home, the sun just dipping below Atlanta's ubiquitous tree cover. Oh well.

As for the microwave? Well, it turns out that a microwave oven is one of those odd appliances that almost everyone has, and that a few lucky souls have more than one. We had received the recently departed one from my grandmother when we were married. But our first & second apartments and first house had all had one built-in, so our gift stayed in its box.

My sister and her husband, always generous, were now in the same boat, with an extraneous microwave. So they gave us theirs. My parents even dropped it off on their way home, while we were at my wife's parent's house celebrating 5 birthdays. Big families are good. Nice familes are good, too.

3 Hours

Afternoons at work are always at least a little crazy. It could be busy, it could be slow, but I'm always aware of the time, and of how much is left until the day is over. If nobody calls, the time drags by. All the morning's emails are done, nothing much is gonna come in that way. The seconds drop in slow motion, like the flappy clock number in Groundhog Day.

Some days my wife even stands outside my office door for the last 15 minutes of the day, yelling, "Don't answer that!" if the phone rings. But I've gotta.

And so each phone call after 4:00 carries with it the pressing question, "How long is this gonna take?" I had a lady call the other day, for example, at about 4:10. Safe zone, right? Wrong. She talked for over an hour, asking the same questions over and over again, and then arguing with me about my answers.

Every day is an adventure, if you define adventure as, "Will I be able to get off the phone before my wife starts yelling up the stairs?"

The other day, in the middle of this afternoon craziness, I got this email:

Come down when you can. I think the TV is burned out or something.

Great. Sure enough, as soon as I opened my door, I smelled something awful. Nobody was running around screaming, so there was (probably) no active fire, but it was obvious that all was not well, electronics-wise, in the 4boy house.

It smelled worst in the TV room (which we used to try to call the Family room, but who are we kidding?), so the first thing we did was open some windows. Next came The Test. Being cautions in a kind of weird way that doesn't' actually pay off, I asked my wife to get the fire extinguisher, just in case.

After showing her how to use it, I turned on the TV. Nothing exploded, which I took as a good sign. When the picture came up , it was static-y and weird and confined to the upper third of the screen. Dead TV.

"Can you fix it?" asked my wife.

"No."

"Can we get it fixed?"

Now, I get this question all day long at work. Some of the stuff we sell and support comes with electronic parts. And they break after a few years of hard use. People call me all the time and ask if we will fix them. We don't make these things, and fixing them would probably involve sending them back to the slave labor prisoner camps in the far east where they were made, so our usual response is that it costs more to fix it than to buy a new one.

Most people are okay with this, but some aren't, and I have to explain the costs involved of shipping stuff to us, us shipping it to a repair person, having the repair person look at it, possibly fix it (possibly not), and then shipping it back. Lots of money involved, especially considering the repair person charges by the hour whether it's fixed or not. And it might not even work, etc.

Long story short, I've got some experience in this argument.

"No."

Silence.

I could see gears whirring over there. This is a hard decision, and yet it's a fight in which I have no dog. What few shows I watch can be bought on iTunes. My wife, on the other hand . . . to put it bluntly, it's her TV. I only have to make viewing decisions when she's not home, and I'm usually doing something else anyway. If the electronic mind-beast has died, I will weep and move on. But we were only 30 minutes into TV-lessness, and she was already twitching.

This was taking a while. I tried a different tack. "We can either get a new TV, try to fix this one, or go without. With either of the last two, you're going to miss your shows tonight." I didn't know what was on that night, but odds on there was something she wanted to see.

Bingo. She picked up the phone and called a friend. "Can you tape House for me? Ok, thanks."

Before we resume our conversation, let me note what was not happening. None of the kids were weeping, mourning the loss of the box. They were happily playing elsewhere in the house. Now, I may not be what you'd call a good parent, but my children weren't hurling themselves at the entertainment center to appease the electron gods to return their life's joy. So I felt a little better.

One more time. "I can check prices and see what we're looking at to replace it."

"Ok," she said, and we went our separate ways.

Now I was stuck. I had never, ever bought a TV in my whole life. When I went away to college there were always roommates' TV's, and then I inherited a pretty nice one from my grandmother. That one got replaced when my parents bought one for us the Christmas after Timothy was born. And that was the TV that had just died. Clueless, I checked Amazon. No good. Shipping on TV's is crazy expensive.

I emailed some friends and asked for help. One suggested Costco, but they only sold uber-TV's. Another said Best Buy might be good. Both said to avoid Wal-Mart. That had been first on my list, so I scratched it off.

A few more work calls interrupted my searching, and then it was 5:00. Go-time. There was some spirited discussion of which kids were going to karate and which ones were going to join me in my quest. When the dust settled, the Fellowship of the Whatever included Timothy and Jonah.

By this time, it had become common knowledge that the TV was dead. Jonah could not have cared less. He had gotten a Chicken Little fleece hat that day from a Pop Tarts mail-in (see, a benefit to having square cookies for breakfast), and all he wanted to do was wear it and run around. Timothy was another matter.

"Will we be able to watch our shows?" he asked with a concerned look. "Yes," I said, "as soon as we get another TV we will be able to watch it again." "But will it have our shows?" Ah. I had misunderstood the question. I tried to explain that the TV didn't have anything to do with which shows we got, but I must not have done a good job, because he repeated the same question several more times that night.

With wisdom steering us clear of Wal-Mart, our quest had to begin with the perilous, undercity of the Sears scratch-n-dent store (okay, I'll stop). We love the S&D. It's just down the street and has great stuff. We've bought a dishwasher and a refrigerator there. So in we went.

Timothy, my little nerdling, immediately went to the most expensive TV there: a plasma HD thingamabob that hung on the wall. "Can we get this?" No. "What about for my room?" No. "What about this one?" he asked, crossing the room to what turned out to be the second most expensive one in the whole store. The boy has instincts.

Jonah wanted to touch everything. TV's, fridges, stoves, dishwashers, all received the loving hand of the thirdborn. I had to pull him out of a dryer at one point.

My limit was $250, haggled up from an initial cap of $200 after research proved that the only things under that price were either smaller than 20" or powered by hamsters. Nothing in the S&D was under $600. Before trekking back out in the rain, I meekly asked if they had anything . . . well, smaller. After informing me that Jonah had put his new hat into a microwave oven (it wasn't plugged in), she pointed me to a little repair shop at the other end of the building. We thanked her, retrieved the hat, and walked through the Easter Island landscape of hundreds of brushed nickel appliances.

The "repair shop" turned out to be a miniature Sears store, sans clothing. Lots of refurbished tools, including chainsaws and lawnmowers (which may come in handy the next time Entropy rears its ugly but inevitable head; it's the law, after all). Lots of "normal" sized TV's, including one that matched our criteria: known brand (unknowns tend to be fronts for sweatshops run by power mad generals who smoke too much, laugh evilly and keep harems of not-quite attractive women, or so one of my electronics advisors told me; the TV's also tend to break sooner), similar size (in this case, 27"), and under our cap.

The picture was fuzzy, and when Timothy found out that this was the prime candidate, he tried to direct me to the nicest (and most expensive) TV in this end of the store. The salesman, and later a manager, assured me that the picture fuzzyness was due to the way they had spliced the cable, etc. I was satisfied; Timothy wasn't. Then I showed him a lathe, and he was happy.

It turned out that the floor model was the only one left, and there was no box. They did have the manual and remote, and they would be happy to bubble-wrap it. For $180, I said that would be just fine. Timothy was not amused. "Will it have our shows in it?" Yes.

In spite of the urgings by an impressive customer service manager, it took 3 Sears S&D employees about 15 minutes to wrap the TV. Miraculously, it fit into the front seat of my car, and we were on our way home. "Will it play our shows?" Yes, I explained, the shows come from the satellite box, not from the TV itself. This got suspicious looks from my eldest son.

We got it home, removed Old Stinky to the garage, plugged the new one in, and showed Mr. Empirical that his shows were, indeed, "in there." He was happy. My wife was happy with the price, I'm happy with the size and the picture quality. All this by 7:30. Total TV down time: 3 hours.

P.S.
A friend (hi Mark!) came over last night and we played PS2 games on it. He brought over a S-cable connector, and it looks fantastic like that. The Incredibles look even more incredible, and Timesplitters 3 is just super amazing. I'm getting one of those.

105

As usual, I wasn't paying attention, and I missed celebrating/hawking/patting my own back on my 100th post. That honor goes to Tis the season to give . . ..

This is post # 105. [Pats own back.] Yay 105!

Now I'll go celebrate with a Coca-cola.

Just reward

An almost-actual* conversation.

[4boydad opens door, carrying groceries.]

4boymom: You didn't call. You were supposed to call as you left the store so that I could put the pasta on to boil.

4boydad: Sorry, I was busy with opening . . . uh . . . things. [Tries to quickly and unobtrusively throw M&M Mini's pack onto counter. Fails.]

4bmom: Why did you get them candy right before dinner?

4bdad: Jonah was very quiet when I got a phone call in the car on the way there. I told him he could pick out some candy and this is what he chose.

4bmom: What about Sam? Was he quiet?

4bdad: He slept, so yes.

4bmom: Did he get candy?

4bdad: You've met Sam, right? Do you think I could get Jonah M&M's without Sam getting the same thing?

[4bmom uses Mom Stare (TM).]

4bdad: Yes, Sam got candy, but I only gave him half.

4bmom: What about the other half?

[4bdad attempts to use Passive Doe Eyes (TM). 4bmom is immune.]

4bdad: I took one for the team. Actually, I took about 30 for the team, but they're small. And semi-sweet, did you know that?

*this is how I remember it, which usually means that I've inserted whatever parts make me look good.

Gang aft agley

We were in the car the other day, when Timothy, now 8, pipes up from the back.

"When I grow up, I want to be one of three things: a scientist, an artist, or a writer." Okay, those first two were expected. He's been animal crazy for years now. Other sciences get slightly shorter shrift, although there has been an uptick in the physical sciences and engineering recently that can only be blamed on intensive parental goading. Just kidding.

I don't know where the writer thing comes from. It certainly isn't hereditary, since he doesn't even know what a blog is, and he doesn't ever come here. He has inherited a love of books from his mother and me, and he's reading Inkheart, which is about magical writers, so that may be it.

While my wife was discussing, in true parental fashion, the fact that he could do two or even all three of those things, I got all starry-eyed and tilty-headed and thought of a great new meme. Luckily, my eyes and head returned to normal pretty quickly, since I was driving at the time.

Now, I'm sure this one has already been done before -- and better -- by someone else somewhere else. But hey, that never stopped Microsoft. So here we go.

Rules

1. What did you want to be when you grew up (WYGU) while you were a kid?
2. What did you want to be WYGU when you graduated from High School?
3. What (if anything) is your college degree in? (overachievers: feel free to add Graduate degrees)
4. What do you do for a living now?

Feel free to post this on your own blogs, or post as a comment here. If you do post this in your blog, please put a link in a comment here, since I'm really curious about this one.

Tone
Please note, this is not cynical. The purpose of this is not to disabuse youthful dreamers of said dreams. It is merely to celebrate the hilarious ways in which God steers us.

My Turn

1. I'm sure my Mom can list many, but what I remember is wanting to be a judge. That godlike power ("Is that a yellow tie? Two days in the hooskow, counselor."). When I found out you had to be a lawyer first, I gave it up. Yuck.
2. All through high school, I wanted to be a teacher. I have no idea why. Then, when I took Physics, I had such a good time (while making C's), that I decided to be a Physics teacher. Nobody at my school took me seriously, which cemented it in my mind.
3. Lo and behold! I got a Physics degree (my grades got better in college, who could have known?). Because my parents were paying for it, I tacked on another full year to get a teaching certificate.
4. I work with computers. Technical support and sales. I tried teaching, but found out (in the now-famous words of that great sage Gary) that I liked science more than I liked teenagers. A lot more. Actually, on a straight-line spectrum of affinity, science and teenagers are at opposite ends. They make the end points, to be honest (dots, not circles, you nerd). Wait, I take that back. I hate cockroaches more than teenagers. Well . . . yeah, that's right.

Have at it.

. . . a few of my favorite things.

Having just ended 2005, and especially in light of the recent Christmas season, which was spent in the semi-futile yet wholly necessary attempt to teach the boys that Advent is not at time to focus on getting stuff, I have had in mind for the past few days a list of the things I appreciated so much in the past year.

So here, in no particular order, is the list:

Books
Oh man, I love to read. And this was a good year for it. Harry Potter 6, Durant's Caesar and Christ (finally finished, yay). I'm surprised I left the house. Come to think of it, I didn't really.

The Teaching Company
Even better than books are lecture series on CD. Everything I know about the history of music, St. Augustine (the guy, not the city), Dante's Inferno, argumentation (yawn), and now the history of China, I learned from these guys. Does it make me a better person? No. Does it make mowing the lawn and blowing leaves easier? You betcha.

iTunes & iPod
Of course, if you're gonna nerd out while doing man's work, you're gonna need some equipment. The iPod is nice and easy to use (my wife can use it, and she's not a technophile in any way), and iTunes is ridiculously simple and intuitive.

Yard Vacuum
A.k.a., the Sucker. My parents have one of these for use at the office, and I borrow it a few times a year to suck up and mulch the leaves. Way easier than raking, albeit disturbingly similar to mowing the lawn. Front & side yard = 1 lecture. Back yard = 1 more.

Coca-cola
Cold, in glass bottles, if you can get it. Cans next, then a good fountain, then plastic bottles, then a bad fountain. Then good sweet tea. Then Pepsi. Then water. I don't drink a lot of water.

The Incredibles
Or, as Sam calls it, "Kebuls." Very seldom will I have the time or the inclination sit down to watch whatever the kids are watching. But Sam has taken a liking to this movie, and I'll find myself standing there whenever it's on. It just doesn't get old.

World of Warcraft
Six months. I can't believe I've been playing this game for 6 months. I'll talk with friends about it, and they won't even touch the box, they're so afraid of getting sucked in. The best, easiest, most intuitive user interface I've seen in any software, much less in any game; and it looks gorgeous, with a varied and beautiful environment (I spent about 10 minutes the other day walking around in one city looking at the ceilings).

It's hideously addictive, and for good reason. Blizzard, the developer, has put in attractive and attainable short-, medium-, long- and superlong-term goals. There's even an in-game economy that's so rich that I found myself thinking of it while reading a Thomas Sowell essay. I'm quitting for good this month, I promise. And I have a free 10-day trial if anyone wants it.

Good TV
I don't watch TV that much. I'll read or play or write. But every year there are one or two shows I'll make time for. Firefly (on DVD), Arrested Development, and Battlestar Galactica (the new one) all made this year's list. And it's still fun to watch Buffy or Angel on DVD whenever I get roped into folding laundry.

Moe's
Couldn't live without it. I love it, my wife loves it, the kids actually eat when we go there. And no matter which of the 3 "local" Moe's we go to, some of our friends are already there.

So that's it. My favorite things of 2005. Here's to 2006 . . .