…one is a baby, the other’s insane.
Everyone have a good Friday, and may you be watched over in your sleep by a loyal furball who likes to play with your flyin’ teddy bears while you snooze.… Read more
I really should be asleep, but a stray muse got hold of me, held me at gunpoint, and forced me to cook this up:
It’s the same basic piece that you can find here free of charge; the giant pixellated graphics are the same basic ones I used in a menu on theLogBook in early October. The photos are all mine, either from my own collection (the tabletop) or from various and sundry run-ins with various machines at various venues (CGE, OVGE, 1984, etc.). Why I have it laid out for an ink-eating print/e-book layout, I have no idea. Really. It’s not like I’m suddenly jonesing to turn Phosphor Dot Fossils into a book. (Not that it’s a completely bad idea, mind you.) It’s not like I don’t have a zillion other projects I need to be working on, not least of which is being Mr. Mom.
Like I said, stray muse. Hey, at least she didn’t drag me into a craptastic movie (with a fantastic soundtrack) about opening a roller disco rink.… Read more
I was trying to explain my A/V setup to someone, and finally gave up and came up with this diagram. It’s pretty self-explanatory.
Man, I’m getting domestic in my old age. Not only did I feed Evan and change him all day, and not sleep a lot, but I whipped up some dinner for Jan before she got home (a rather tasty white cheddar rotini with broccoli and chicken thingie that I kinda hammered together) and some dessert (extreme chocolate brownies for her, chocolate-peanut-butter brownies for me). For my dinner, I finished off a pasta salad concoction that I threw together around lunchtime. Nobody’s starving in this house on my watch.
In the past 24 hours, Jan’s only had to worry about one feeding and one diaper change while I napped at around 9:30 tonight. I got up at about half past midnight to find that Evan’s mom had snuck off to her bed with him, but when he woke up for a bottle, she was strangely happy to hand him back over to me. 😆 He’s back in his crib now, with an Obi cat keeping his feet warm. The roaring winds have cooled things off drastically, so I have the little guy under a couple of layers of blankets, which he kept kicking off until Obi helpfully laid a single arm across his feet. (I tried to get a picture of this with the night vision setting on my camera, but it just didn’t turn out.) News flash: Evan smiles for daddy, and smiles for mommy, and smiles really big for Obi. He wuvs his kitty. I’d bet a substantial amount of money that his first word will be “Obi”.
I’m not sure what to do about Xena’s adopted kitten. I didn’t see that coming at all. We’re expecting a hard freeze tomorrow night, so I’m not sure how this is going to work out…Xena may like the little white and grey kitty, but the supreme council of housecats hasn’t signed off on the interloper.
The talk shows have hushed up with the advent of the WGA strike; soaps’ll be next, and then weekly shows. For those wondering what the writers are really demanding, J. Michael Straczynski explains it all for you. Granted, he simplifies things a great deal, but it’s about eight cents, folks. Not eight cents on the dollar, but eight cents per unit, which is a much smaller figure in the end. His post doesn’t address the internet/new media end of things, but I’m hoping he’ll tackle that one soon.
Hopefully no one’s put off by this week’s truncated update to the site; we may have to figure out “something else” with the episode guides, which are normally weekly bread and butter, if I can’t do better than this. One thought that has occurred to me is to present episode guides like not-every-week features – present them only when the season is completed. I’m not too sure about that though. theLogBook isn’t grinding to a halt just because I’ve got a giggling bundle of joy, but obviously there’s going to be a little bit of rearrangement of priorities here and there, and him keeping me up with hours and hours of binky blasts – which, by the great big grin on his face I see when I go to fix it, I’m convinced are absolutely intentional – instead of sleeping sure doesn’t help. 😆 … Read more
Just how much love is there in our little family of two and four legged folks, you ask? You picked a good night to ask – a windy, icky night which is once again making the wind whistle and howl through the not-quite-airtight windows and doors. And outside, in the doghouse, is a white-and-grey splotchy kitten, smaller than Olivia. I saw this cat the other day in our pasture, but it wouldn’t let me get too close.
Why is this kitty in the doghouse? Because it’s moved in there for shelter…and Xena has adopted her. 😯 … Read more
My wife, bless her heart, became a lot less picky in her viewing habits while she was pregnant and in the first six weeks after our son was born, while she was at home recovering. I’ve already mentioned her propensity for watching E!, but another viewing habit she’s picked up that drives me up the wall is Nancy Grace. Oh. My. God. I can’t stand Nancy Grace. I know she’s got a fan base that would no doubt argue that she’s just dealing with the issues in a straight-talk, shoot-from-the-hip style (which seems to be the defense of any ultra-conservative or ultra-liberal media figures these day – “you just don’t like it because I’m telling it like it is!”). I’m not saying that any of the cases she discusses on her show deal with completely innocent, blameless people, but whatever happened to assuming that innocence until guilt is proven? Some of the topics discussed tonight dealt with folks who seem pretty reprehensible, but all the same, they’re still awaiting trial, and there’s Nancy, going off with little gems like “Who knows what else this guy has done?” Who knows indeed, Nancy? Nobody on your show does. But in the meantime you, a TV host who supposedly has a legal background, are speculating wildly in a nationally broadcast forum in a way that’d get your butt chucked out of any court in the land. (I was about to say that she ought to know better, but oh, look, maybe she doesn’t.) What all of that worst-possible-case-scenario gossipmongering is doing to the jury pool, I have no idea….but apparently there’s nothing to stop us from speculating a bit, is there, Nancy?
I know she’s all about victims’ rights, and that’s fine. Let’s not forget that until a jury hands down a verdict, the accused have rights too. And once again – and this is a fight I had to fight numerous producers, reporters and even news directors on during my years in the teevee news biz – it’s not the media’s place to do the prosecuting. Someone please yank this appeal-to-the-lowest-denominator lunatic off the air, and don’t let her go back to trying to pass herself off as some kind of journalist without reminding her that her job in that role is not to throw people to the lions and wait for the faithful to send up a cheer.… Read more
Exciting pictures of Doctor Who’s new Sontarans from the BBC. (Hey, they said it, not me.) Apparently the main Sontaran is played by Christopher Ryan of The Young Ones fame, who also played a different critter in The Trail Of A Time Lord in 1986. I just dunno, for the first time a new series “update” of an original series creature has me kinda scratching my head and wondering if they’ve missed the mark. We’ll see how he looks on the screen.… Read more
Today my wife went back to work, and I stayed home with the little guy. It seemed to go well on all fronts, though there were one point during the day where he was crying his little head off because, for the first time, his mom left him home with me for a significent length of time. (I’m pretty confident that was the cause – I changed him, bathed him, fed him, tried to play with him and get him to calm down, gave him some tummy time, sang to him*, played him some new music, sat him in his bouncy chair, laid him in his crib and every bed in the house, you name it. Inconsolable.) I felt like I’d struck out on my first daddy day because I pretty much had to let him cry that one out. On those occasions, a couple of times a week, where he gets like that – usually at bed time – I wind up ushering any and all cats out of his room like Geordi La Forge evacuating a bunch of non-speaking-but-clearly-panicked extras away from a warp drive that’s about to explode on Star Trek, and closing the door as the last one out. Then I go and turn on the baby monitor and listen to him cry anyway. But today, since he’d resisted any attempts to sleep all day long, I set my alarm to get me up in an hour and then went to take a nap in the next room. There was nothing I could do for him, and I was exhausted.
Of course, his mom came home and he was a perfectly behaved little angel. 😛 (He had actually calmed down before then.)
But overall, it was a good day. I’ve got to do some serious work on his sleeping patterns, but I thought that today was a good start. The only time I got frazzled was with the crying fit, but that was more a case of being worried about him than being upset or exasperated with him. Even when he was waking me up every 20 minutes or so, I’d go and look at him and he’d flash me that little smile (which he has clearly learned to use to his best advantage) as if to say “Yeah, dad, I gotcha. I just blasted my binky and made you come and give it back to me. Ain’t I just a stinker?”
I’m disappointed that I’ve had no bites in the O2 community on helping me with the Binky Blast! game, by the way. I know that, in execution, it looks like an average O2 game, not a trendsetting, flashy G7400+ game that pushes the bounds of what the system can do, so I suppose it’s failed to capture the imagination. Maybe someday I can figure out how to program it myself.
Anyway, back on track: infinite respect to the stay-at-home moms and dads out there. Today was my trial by fire, and I know there’ll be days both better and worse than this ahead. But one look at that little face is more than enough to know it’s worth it. And my reward for today? Evan’s mom came home and cuddled him all night and then went off to snooze with the little guy.
I guess she missed him too.… Read more
…because that’s probably all you’ll be seeing after Thanksgiving and well into next year at this rate.
It’s kinda funny, everyone who’s still trapped in teevee land is going into November sweeps, and here the Writer’s Guild of America is, going on strike for the first time since 1988. I remember that year, and I was “into” the behind-the-scenes machinations of TV enough at the time to be aware of the strike. That probably says more about the state of my life at that point than it does about the state of TV, but I remember the glut of oddball specials and dismal variety shows that the networks had to fall back on during that summer, and it was a mess. We didn’t have “reality TV” as such back then (and with a few shining exceptions, I think our cultural lives were richer for it; this was back before more people were interested in voting on the next American Idol than there were interested in voting for the next President of the United States).
The thing is, my wife and I were talking tonight, and we were really able to count on one hand the number of scripted shows we follow that will be affected by this strike. Now, let me say this – in principle, I’m behind the WGA on this one. The studios are putting the screws to union writers any way they can, whether it’s in the area of new media (i.e. webisodes), residuals for DVD and paid download (i.e. iTunes) usage of scripted shows, or just forgoing scripted shows altogether, even when the “non-scripted” stuff is just as scripted (just not by folks whose paychecks have to cover residuals and pension). But the number of shows we follow that would actually be affected by the strike is pretty small – Heroes, Lost, The 4400, Dead Zone…maybe Stargate Atlantis (though my enthusiasm for that show hasn’t just bottomed out, it’s hit rock bottom hard enough to leave a crater)…and then…after that…oh, wait. We’re already in the process of getting over network TV as we know it. … Read more
Is Evan smiling from ear to ear because he’s in his bouncy chair? Or is it because… … Read more
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