the fun surprises of parenthood.

Quinn woke up this morning at 6AM, crying up a storm.  I went to check on him, and he had gotten sick from the seafood lasagna last night, vomiting all over his bed and the floor.

Then he got up to meet me at the door, covered in puke and all, wanting to be comforted.  (I challenge anyone to not give your kid a hug when he desperately wants one, even if he does have barf on his jammies.)

So, it was early shower and bubble bath time.  Now we might as well stay up, since his sheets are in the wash anyway.

crossing the border.

I drove my brother down to Boston yesterday for his return flight to Germany. It was kind of odd to come back to Boston after ten years--I didn't have any problem at all finding my way around, but some features were definitely not there in 1997. The Mystic River bridge was a new one to me, for example.

Apparently, MA passed some new and (more) draconian gun law that stipulates a mandatory year in jail for anyone caught with an unlicensed pistol there, loaded or unloaded, in your person or in the vehicle. "Unlicensed" means "not accompanied by both a Massachusetts FOID and a home state permit, and not locked in a triple-locked safe at least two zip codes away from its ammunition." They don't recognize NH Pistol Permits, of course.

This may seem a cowardly cop-out from the guy who once wrote an essay called "A Declaration of Civil Disobedience", but we can't currently afford for me to take an unpaid year-long hiatus, so I grudgingly disarmed before driving into MA.

I don't know that the justice system of a state deserves that kind of title when they are perfectly willing to take a year of someone's life for the offense of having the wrong piece of steel in our possession. Then again, all the states have even higher penalties for possessing the botanical equivalent of a bottle of vodka, so we're already a very long way down the slippery slope of victimless crime enforcement. Sadly enough, part of the reason for that is the cheerful consent of people who defend their gun rights tooth and nail, yet don't bat an eyelash when their neighbor gets hauled in and locked up for ten years because he grew some funny tobacco in his basement.

I hate to be a pessimist, but I look at the way things are going, and I have to concur with Tam. A storm is coming, and it's going to catch a lot of folks in the open.

catch of the day.

Cheddar Bunnies: They're To Die For!

i have made snow my bitch.

We got more snow yesterday and the day before that. It seems that this past December was the snowiest on record in NH since 1880-something.

The good news is that keeping the ice and snow off the trouble spot (and a few tubes of silicone on the backed-out roofing screws) seems to have stopped the leakage. If we're still drippage-free by the weekend, Quinn can move back into his room.

After paying the snow plow guy a nice chunk of beer money for his repeated services, we went out to Sears in West Lebanon today. We got a 28" two-stage self-propelled snow blower, and I've been trying it out for the last hour or so. That puppy throws the hell out of some snow, that's for sure. It only slows down when you try to clear more than a foot of packed snow, but on new snow, it roars through a foot of the stuff like it's not even there.

Another nine hundred dollars...but I'm thinking it'll pay for itself after the thirtieth time I clear my own driveway, instead of paying Mr. Plow $30 to do it each time.

such frailty.

Every two years or so, I get a visit from the Sciatica fairy, who sneaks up behind me and gives my sciatic nerve a good twist. It always manifests itself the same way: back pain that gradually increases in severity until it reaches "debilitating" on the pain scale, where it then remains for a few days.

Right now I'm in bed, as sitting, standing, walking, or bending over all cause pain that makes me want to turn into AD's Gollum ("It needs the Vicodin! It is in pain!"). Luckily, my brother is still here, so somebody can watch the kids while I'm out of commission. Right now, Lyra is keeping me company on the bed, and I just popped 800mg of Motrin, so things are somewhat tolerable.

What frail and easily broken things we are...

it's a van! it's a snow plow!

So I leave the driveway in the War Wagon to meet the wife at the potential new pediatrician's office.

Take a left turn onto the road, fiddle with the heaters and radio for a second, look up...and notice a pickup truck with a plowing attachment barreling out of the driveway of one of our neighbors.

I'm twenty-five yards way, doing thirty or so on what looks like a plowed and sanded road, only to hit the brakes and find out that the hard-packed snow underneath the plowed part does not support my current speed in my current vehicle configuration (front wheel drive, albeit with brand new snow tires.)  Even with the old "lock the wheels, release, steer, repeat" technique, I can see that I'm headed for the passenger-side door of the plow truck, and that a bumper-to-door interface is imminent.

So I turn the wheel, aim for the snow bank at the side of the road, and slice into it, bringing the minivan to a cushioned stop.  Problem is, now I'm stuck in a ditch, and the plow driver has naught to offer but a shrug and a spit of tobacco juice.  (In all fairness, it was pretty much my fault for going faster than road conditions allowed.)

An hour and a c-note later, the friendly neighborhood wrecker has pulled me out of the ditch, and the Grand Caravan's front doesn't have a scratch on it.  Snow banks are great decelerators when you hit them at an angle.

*sigh*

All things considered, it was better than t-boning the plow truck, since all that got dented was my pride.  Still, that $100 could have bought a nice big bag of Happy Juice at the NH Liquor Outlet over by the grocery store.  Chalk it up to the learning curve, I suppose.

high-speed (sort of) internets.

Well, we have satellite Internet now, after having to pay the installer $225 extra for a custom install (digging a hole by the tree line and putting a hundred pounds of concrete and a pole into it). 

The good thing is that the speed beats dial-up by a fair margin, and pulling web pages no longer feels like a masochistic exercise in patience. 

The bad things are:

• Cost.  $60 a month, plus $300 for the standard install, plus the aforementioned $225 for the custom install because the line of sight to the satellite is poor from the side of the house.
• Latency.  Because the signal has to travel up into low-earth orbit twice, there's a built in latency that makes it impossible to play, say, first-person shooters online.  Scratch anything that requires fast reaction times, in fact.  World of Warcraft is playable, but only just so--last night, I initially got 8000ms (!) latency, but it slowly improves after a few minutes to where your actions and spells only have a lag of a second or two.
• Bandwidth restrictions.  This one's a biggie.  Hughesnet has a "Fair Access Policy" that limits the amount of data you can download within any given 24-hour period.  For our price plan, that's 200MB.  Exceed the quota, and they switch you to a speed that makes dial-up feel like broadband, and you stay there for 24 hours.  We maxed that out just testing stuff and downloading one lousy video card driver package from ATI yesterday afternoon.  I have no idea how much bandwidth World of Warcraft uses with two clients running, but we'll find out tonight.  I may have to upgrade our plan from Basic to "Pro Plus", which bumps the download threshold to 425MB, and the download speed to 1.5Mbps.  For big downloads, they have you use the 3-6AM timeslot, when the data moved doesn't count towards your quota.  The FAP is teh suck, but unfortunately, they're the only broadband game in town.  Being out in the sticks does carry some sacrifices with it, I suppose, but we do miss our old, fast, reliable DSL line.  Alas, it may have the unintended positive side effect of forcing me to use the Internet for essential stuff only, rather than waste a morning playing Wikipedia Safari.

The roof may not be as expensive as originally quoted.  I'm having a few more roofing companies come out to look at the repairs needed, to get some different opinions.  Asking a roofer whether you need a new roof is like asking a barber whether you need a haircut, so I want to follow some of the excellent advice you folks in Blogland have tossed out, and make sure I'm not being taken.  The good news is that keeping the roof clear of ice dams has stopped all the leaks save the one in Quinn's room, which is rather substantial.

The really good news: booze is cheaper in NH than in TN, and the NH state liquor stores are open on Sundays.

about that roof.

So we had the builders out here yesterday to evaluate the roof and find the source of the water leak.

It turns out the roof was put onto this house by intoxicated simians with no knowledge of physics and/or static design. Our roof pitch is insufficient for the snow to slide off (the builder said it's such a low pitch that it might as well be a flat roof), and there's so little insulation under the roof that the bottom layer of snow melts very quickly. We had 20-degree weather yesterday, and there was a layer of running water under the snow. It melts merrily, flows to the edge of the roof, freezes into a nice crust of ice, and the water running up behind it just sort of pools behind the ice and then finds nooks and crannies to yield to gravity and come down into the house.

The source of the troubles is one spot on the roof where the roofing nails have popped up due to ice pressure, and the pooling water goes right down the nail holes and into the plywood of the wall below.

I asked the roofer what he'd do if it was his place, and he said, "build a roof on top of the old one with sufficient and uniform pitch to it." They measured out the roof, talked the details out with me, and gave me an estimate for the work that would be required.

Sixteen thousand dollars, give or take.

They're planning to extend the peak of the roof by about six feet, build a new shingled roof on top of the new structure, and insulate the old roof below. Work can start in January, since they don't need to take the old roof down, and nothing will be exposed to the elements.

We could have the old roof repaired for quite a bit less than that, but the problem would only resurface, since the issue with the roof is basically built-in, and I want to only spend the money once for doing it right, instead of spending less more often for half-assed work.

So, that's basically it. The two minor leaks at least have stopped, but Quinn's room has water dripping down in two more spots, and is basically uninhabitable for a toddler. His room is right below the junction of the upper and lower roofs, the spot where the water comes into the plywood, so it's taking the brunt of the damage. Today, I'll be relocating him into Lyra's room temporarily, and she'll have her crib in our bedroom again until that room has a proper roof over it once more.

I'm trying not to get too awfully cranked up about it. We can pursue action against the inspector who signed off on the sale, and the seller who almost certainly failed to disclose the water problems (the roof has signs of being repaired before in the troublesome spot), but I'm not holding my breath waiting for a stream of dollars.

On the plus side, the house is warm and dry except for one room, the fridge is full, and the holidays are around the corner, so all is well. When I used to go to Barnes and Noble in Knoxville with Quinn, I couldn't pry him away from the wooden train tracks in the kiddie book section, so this Christmas, he's getting a train play table of his own. I'll have to put it together clandestinely, and the size of it doesn't lend itself to wrapping, but I'm looking forward to seeing his face when he sees what Santa crammed down the chimney for him.

(some) trouble in paradise.

So we bought a nice place. 

Trouble is, we have water dripping in three different rooms.  Two water leaks are in the kitchen and living room, respectively, and one is in Quinn's room.  That one's fairly major...paint coming off the ceiling in a nice dangling stripe, and water dripping down at a steady rate from the crack visible through the putty.

Now, one unknown roof leak could be coincidence.  Two unknown roof leaks are more in the realm of the unlikely.  Three different ones, however, are firmly in "Failure to Disclose" territory.  We're currently getting an estimate from a roofing company for roof repair or replacement, and after that it's time to get a lawyer, I'm afraid.  It's a metal roof, and I haven't the faintest clue as to replacement cost for the entire building.  The same company is going to slap a new roof onto our garage for $2700-ish, so extrapolating from that, I'd guess it would cost ten grand to redo the whole house.  Let's hope they can patch what's leaking, so we can delay the big cash outlay for a little while.

Nothing gives me the warm and fuzzies like spending close to two hundred grand on a house, burning up a few more grand to move the entire kit 'n kaboodle, and then having to look at a roof replacement not three weeks after move-in date.

The house itself is everything we wanted--spacious, on a good plot, and lots of big rooms.  The roof issue, however, is knocking a bit off the gilding. 

Ah, well...gotta roll with the punches at this point.  We still own the place in Knoxville, but moving everything back to the way it was is not an option. 

We had a Nor'Easter yesterday, and the snow in the yard is still two feet in some spots.  The doggies flat refuse to go outside into the cold, even though the driveway is plowed.  They stealthily try to find spots in the house for their business, so I had to physically throw them out of the house this morning and leave them in the snow for a little while.

I'm sure I'll look back onto this with a laugh come summer...but right now, I feel like washing down a large valium with some bourbon.

winter wonderland.

Here are some pictures of the new Munchkin Wrangler Central, as it appeared this morning.

This is the front of the house:

Here's one side, by the hot tub room:

This is another shot of the side, looking past the hot tub room towards the forward edge of the property. There are fifty yards of trees between the edge of the house and the dirt road that leads past the property.

Here's the back of it. The hot tub room is slightly to the right of center, and the structure all the way to the right is a storage shed for tools and firewood.

Lots of floor and storage space, two independent propane furnaces, two big cast-iron wood stoves, a garage and tool shop, and ten-point-something acres around it (mostly stretching out behind the house.)

Oh, yeah...here's our driveway in its current state. Guess I ought to get off the computer and shovel some snow.

alas, no (fast) intarwebz yet.

The installer for Hughesnet showed up last night for a site survey, but he won't be able to do the install until Wednesday morning.  In the meantime, there's dial-up.

Strangely enough, I've discovered that I really don't need to spend a ton of time online.  I download my email and then read and reply to it offline, and my blogroll check via Google Reader takes all of five minutes.  My blog posts are done offline through Windows Live Writer, which is a pretty handy program.  All in all, I really only need to connect whenever I want to look up something specific (like movie times for our date night tonight--we're going out to dinner and to see "The Golden Compass"), so there's really no pressing need to be connected all the time.

That, of course, makes me wonder as to how I have managed to waste away entire mornings on the Internet with the old DSL connection before...

The windshield on the Munchkin Mover has a three-foot crack in it.  It took some damage from debris on the way up to NH, a little star-shaped crack in the lower right corner.  When I went out for some odds and ends yesterday, the temperature difference (12 degrees outside, heater at full blast inside) must have encouraged that crack to expand violently.  I looked down for a moment to fiddle with the heater or radio, and when I looked up again, the crack had suddenly expanded clean across the lower half of the windshield, right to left, roughly following the temperature line of the front defrosting vent.  It'll be replaced on Monday morning, to the tune of $210...just another item on the "Holy Shit, That Was Expensive" list that has been this move.

teh intarwebz are coming.

Not until Thursday afternoon, unfortunately.  Until then, we continue to suck watermelons through straws via dial-up.

My personal web page is now defunct, since we canceled our DSL service in K-town.  I have the whole thing backed up locally, so as soon as we have our new service up and running, I'll transfer it over.

Walked into L.L. Bean yesterday, saw that the cheapest jacket I liked was $199, walked right back out, and went to WallyWorld.  Got two new winter jackets (including a kick-ass canvas jacket that looks very Firefly) for a little over $50.  Hooray for Asian clothing sweatshops, I say.  We need full sets of winter tires on both our vehicles, which is just going to be another item on the long list of expenses for this move, so I don't need to be spending two bills on a jacket when I can get two perfectly adequate ones right down the street for a quarter of that.

So I hear that somewhere in the U.S. of A., a guy walked into a mall and offed eight people before eating his gun.  Somewhere else, a guy shot some folks in a church, and then got center-punched by a member of the congregation at church #2 before making it more than fifty feet into the building.  Hmmm....I wonder if there's a lesson there somewhere.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: the only thing that will stop an armed attacker on the spot is a person with a gun of their own.  Gun haters realize this as well, which is why they rarely ever suggest disarming the police.  They, too, rely on the gun to protect themselves from harm--they just feel all high and mighty because they outsource the task.

The number of casualties at the site of an attempted mass shooting is usually determined by whether the gun used to stop the killer is already at the site, or whether it must be carried there in the holster of a police officer.

this planet is defective.

This white glop covers us and freezes our innards! You didn't tell us this planet's axis tilts away from the sun!  We demand you bring this planet up to standards!

(Kudos to Navigator Neb...err, anyone who can identify the reference.)

Everything's going fine.  The house is coming together, and looks almost like an inhabitable dwelling now.  Dogs are still somewhat confused by the snow, which spawned the above reference.

Oh, for those of you who know the area--we're in Enfield, close to Lebanon in the Upper Valley.  When everything's squared away, I might even throw a little shindig for anyone within driving range who's interested in a meet-and-greet.  With beer.  And bourbon.

loading up the iron pig.

I picked up the U-Haul moving truck yesterday evening. 

It's a freaking pig.  Huge, scuffed, with 150,000 miles on the odometer, and the handling characteristics of a dead sperm whale on a pair of roller skates.  The cargo box is 24 feet long, but it looks bigger, like we could park Robin's Neon in there and still get all the furniture in behind it.  Right now, that monster is parked on our two-car slab in front of the house, with the trailer hitch about four feet from our front door, and the nose of the truck sticks out into the street a good three feet.  With all our junk in it, and Robin's car hitched to the back, I'll be shocked if we get more than eight miles to the gallon or go faster than 55 miles per hour.

Today, we'll be packing up the rest of the house, minus the bare essentials for the last night in our old abode.  I have to return the DSL equipment to the Frontiernet office, so at some point today I'll have to pull the plug on Munchkin Wrangler Central, and box up the computers.  We'll be offline for at least a week, since that's how long it'll take to have new service established at the new place. 

The good news is that I've been in touch with an ISP up there that does wireless Ethernet, and it looks like we'll be able to tap into their network.  All the bandwidth of DSL, and none of the latency or expense of satellite...that'd be the best of both worlds.

So, this thing is going offline for the big move as of today.  If all goes well, I'll be posting again from the new place within a week.

(Oh, and CrankyProf?  Damn you all to hell...I've had an endless loop of the Ballad of the Green Berets with your alternate "Flying Baby" lyrics playing in my head since yesterday.)

t-5 days.

I'll be picking up the moving truck on Friday, and then we're rolling north on Saturday and Sunday. There's much packing to be done yet, but my brother is flying in for unpaid slave labor...err, a family visit on Wednesday, and he'll be a big help.

One fly in the ointment for us is the limited availability of high-speed Internet. We're used to our DSL connection, and out at our new place, the only options are dial-up or satellite Internet. I do have some dusty old 56k modems around, but I'd rather not revert to the computing Pleistocene. Satellite is fine and dandy for bandwidth, but it sucks for latency (big deal for World of Warcraft and Battlefield 2), and it comes with installation fees and monthly plans that are measured in "buckets of precious metals".

I was already resigned to having to dial into the Internets again like it's the frakkin' 1990s, but apparently there's a startup company in the area that provides wireless ethernet. The current owner of the place says that his neighbor has it (described as mysterious "waves from the sky" that are "not satellite"), so chances are good that we'll be able to tap into it as well. I dashed off an inquiry to the company in question, and their rate plans do not require metric tons of cash. We'll see.

Push comes to shove, we'll be back on dial-up, and chalk it up as a sacrifice in exchange for privacy, living space, and ten acres of Ours.

notes from a weekday.

I didn't want to leave the house today, but Quinn kept bugging me to "go to the store, daddy?" all morning, so I finally caved in and saddled up the War Wagon just before lunch.

We went to the neighborhood grocery store, where I picked up some alibi Diet Rite, and some sandwich components. In the cheese aisle, where I was browsing for sliced Muenster, Quinn gazed at the variety of cheeses of all kinds, and kept repeating "Cheese!" in a hushed, reverent sort of tone.

After the tenth awed "Cheese!", I nodded and said, "Yeah. What a friend we have in cheeses!"

The older lady over by the yogurt section shot me a scandalized glance, but I think I heard her chuckle as we moved off with our sliced Muenster.

Other activities for the day: keeping the kids fed and content, making lunch for Quinn and myself, cleaning up the kitchen, and using the brief hour of "I can't believe they're both napping at the same time!" to practice ILS approaches with the Baron 58 in "pea soup" meteorological conditions. That's about a typical weekday for me.

new hampshire bound.

I've been sitting on some news for a while. Until today, I couldn't make it public, but Robin finally gave her notice at work today, so now I can blab.

In a few weeks, we'll load up a moving truck, and drive about a thousand miles north. Robin accepted a position in New Hampshire, and we purchased a new house there.

There are many reasons for the move--much better pay for Robin, more agreeable climate (yes, we both like our winters cold and snowy), and a much more convenient location for trips to and from Germany. The main reason, however, is our living situation.

We have a little two-bedroom starter home in the 'burbs of K-town. When I moved into this place with Robin five years ago, it was just the two of us and two dachsies, and the space was sufficient--not opulent, but workable. Since then, the family has grown in size by 100%, and the same two bedrooms and 1300 square feet are shared by two adults, two kids, and four dachshunds. Add all the stuff a couple accumulates over the years, consider the room required for kids to play, and the little brick house in the 'burbs is popping at the seams. We're at least one bedroom short, and that extra bedroom would just cover the adults and kids, with no room for guests or an office.

In addition, we're on a street where the houses are built elbow-to-elbow, with just enough space between the units for a tall guy to stretch his arms and just barely miss touching brick with his fingertips. The backyard is fenced, but with the neighbors right on top of us, there's really no privacy to speak of, unless we have the doors closed and the blinds drawn.

So, when Robin got a job offer in New Hampshire, we went house shopping, and she took a few days to see some places in person. We found a house we really liked, and made an offer on it. They accepted, the bank gave us the thumbs-up, and everything's signed. Barring any last-minute issues, we'll be taking possession of our new house shortly after Thanksgiving.

The new house has more than twice the square footage of our current one, close to 3,000 square feet, and it comes with over ten acres of land, on the outskirts of a village of 4,000 or so. It's close enough to work for Robin (a thirty-minute commute), and far enough away from everything else for us to not bother (or be bothered by) anyone. We'll have enough space for kids, dogs, and guests, and I can finally set up my own backyard shooting range. There's even a trail and a little campsite on the property, which will be nice in the summer and fall. Robin can finally have her vegetable patch, and we may even start keeping a chicken coop.

I'm not looking forward to the move. Hauling furniture is not my favorite thing in the world, and the two kids and four dogs will require numerous potty and feeding breaks along the way. We're both looking forward to the new place, however, and that'll serve as a good motivator for the journey. In addition, Robin's mom and my brother will be riding with us to help with the move, which will make things easier on us.

So, yeah, we're excited. The best thing about the place--other than the whole backyard range thing--is the fact that I'll be able to step out onto the front porch in my boxer briefs with a gun in one hand, and a glass of bourbon in the other, and nobody will be around to care...or call the SWAT team on me.

Not that I would ever do such thing, mind you. (Well, maybe once, just to celebrate our new solitude.)

breakfast blogging.

Our toaster oven has a warning on the glass door that says IF CONTENTS IGNITE, LEAVE DOOR CLOSED AND UNPLUG OVEN.

I wonder what kind of incident prompted the manufacturer to cover themselves against that particular lawsuit direction. When I took out my breakfast roll and read that warning for the umpteenth time, I suddenly pictured a Homer Simpson-esque guy trying to fish his flaming breakfast out of the oven with bare hands.

"Oh, no! The Pop-Tarts! Gotta save the Pop-Tarts!"

quiet day.

I took the kids over to our weekly play date at a friend's house. We usually alternate between indoor playtime and trips to the zoo or the park.

When Quinn was sitting down for lunch with his little pal Greta, they started squealing at each other in turn. One of them started, and then the other responded, and for a few minutes, they had a great time having a squeal conversation and laughing their little heads off at each other.

It's kind of hard to have a bad day after watching a three-and-a-half year old and a two-and-a-half-year old conversing in high-pitched sounds and then sharing belly laughs.

In other news, the magic elf box under my desk is now a Core2Duo system, thanks to the humbling and amazing generosity of my friend Mark. Those new Intel Core 2 chips are something else...half the heat and two thirds the power consumption of the Pentium 4 line, and twice the performance. My old Pentium 4 runs at 2.8GHz, and the new C2D is clocked at 1.86GHz, but the C2D canes the P4 in every conceivable category by a very wide margin, despite running at a gigahertz less. I need to wait a few more days for the new video card to get here, but once that spare PCI-E slot holds some nVidia goodness, I'll be making MS Flight Simulator X my bitch.

(If you didn't understand half of the previous paragraph, you're probably not a computer geek, and you may safely disregard everything past "belly laughs".)

the war on terrah, again.

When I have something to mail, I usually weigh the item on our digital kitchen scale, and then calculate the postage on the USPS website. Then I either use whatever stamps we have around the house, or I tuck a check into the mailbox along with the item to be mailed.

Yesterday, I left a padded envelope for the mailman. It contained a little gift box of baby clothes for my brother's newest sprog. Total weight: fifteen ounces. The postage for First-Class Mail was $10.40, and I just happened to have a book of ninety-cent stamps around, so I plastered the front of the envelope with little pictures adding up to the required amount.

Today, the mailman brought the whole thing back. It wasn't because of a lack of postage, but rather because of a new directive from the Heimatsicherheit Ministry. Apparently, there's a new rule in place that requires anyone mailing a stamped overseas package weighing more than ten ounces to drop it off personally at the post office. This will presumably keep terrorists from sending Semtex through the mail anonymously, although the nice (and apologetic) postal employee was unable to tell me how exactly this is going to be accomplished. Mind you, the rule applies only to stamped mail, not metered.

So now I have to keep my gift packages under ten ounces, lest I have to saddle up the battle wagon and drag both kids to the post office with me, requiring a complex logistical ballet and an hour of my time to mail a frakkin' box of baby clothes.