Steps in the right direction

We live in a challenging house for someone learning to go up and down stairs: a bungalow. With the winter up to now, it was spent outside in snow pants which aren't the easiest to walk in, and surely no stairs. Now it's warmer we are going up and down and up steps all the time. It's the newest game - almost as fun as a game of "sit". She's getting better at stairs and I'm slowly starting to learn that she's probably not going to run off the end.

It's tiring though trying to be "right there, just in case". It's also wonderful when she gets to the edge, pauses, looks back and lifts her hand for assistance. I admit my heart melts a bit each time her hand clasps my finger. I'm not sure if that will ever stop being a thrill. I'm sure that she will be less than thrilled when she discovers what happens when she pulls my finger...

TL;DR Things are good. She's becoming more of a little girl each day. I am happy. That is enough.

Zombies

We are freshly back from Playa Pesquero in Holguin Cuba. Night after night I kept on having zombie dreams - not nightmares, but disturbing none the less. On the second last day I figured out why I was having these ever night: I was living it.

Each morning the guests would emerge from their rooms groaning and mumbling something that vaguely sounded like "coffee... food..." as they shuffled to the breakfast buffet. After they were full they'd start to moan about "beach... pool..." and shuffle towards whatever shade they had staked out in the pre-dawn hours (that's another story). Then around high noon they would descend on the lunch places in yet another feeding frenzy. Shuffle back to the beach or pool, then back to food for dinner, then the bar, all the time in their ghoulish bright pinks and purple sunburns that would make them look like a bunch of burn victims. Day after day. It was like a strange mashup between Groundhog Day and a zombie flick.

People are so strange. Last night I didn't have a zombie dream. The lack of dream was lovely.

For the love of chair!

We all have our quirks. That's just how people are. Some quirks might develop late in life. Some might last decades. Some might pop up early and only hang around for a little bit. At the start of the quirk you really can't tell how long it might last.

Currently Alice's quirk is that she likes chairs. A lot. We take her to the museum of science and tech and all she wants to do is sit on the chairs. And how about those other chairs over there? Oh, happy day! They have another room with more chairs!!

Needless to say that at this point I feel we're raising a professional sitter.

The other day we took her to the experimental farm. After seeing the sheep and pigs - all of which are "doggie" - we went to the playground. Their awesome playground where a child can run and be free. What does she want to do? Sit on the bench. And you know what? She's ecstatic about sitting on a bench.

Maybe it's a phase. Maybe it's a lifelong love affair of sitting. Only time will tell.

Now at the big table

Alice has moved up to the big leagues - eating at the table and no longer in a highchair. Such a big girl. She's also entered that phase I was very much looking forward to: walking around dragging her stuffed animals. That's something that I need to take a good picture of, but haven't yet.

I'm having fun.

That and 2 dollars...

When I was a younger teen (yes, eons ago), I was at the local fair with all the younger kids because that's why you do. The local weather man J.J. Clarke was there doing the normal "reporting from the current event" routine. Between broadcast I went up to him to say hello. He was instantly cautious - I would assume that he's taken a lot of crap from random teenagers that walk up to him. I told him that I just wanted to be able to say that "I met J. J. Clarke". He instantly relaxed, laughed, and replied "Ya, that and two dollars will get you a cup of coffee".

That's really stuck with me - "... that and two dollars will get you a cup of coffee".

It feels like a good way to put into perspective just how important something is. That's a difficult thing to be able to do "in the moment". It can't be too important if it doesn't at least earn you a free coffee. And if you ever want a humbling experience, think about the stuff you do over the course of a week and ask yourself if someone would have bought you a coffee for that.

The simplest things

Alice is starting to feel better, and that makes me happier. I'm starting to get over my cold too. It's nice that she is more herself and not just freaking out when the smallest thing happens and she's unable to deal with it. It's like we've got our girl back - she got rid of her evil twin Malice.

It doesn't mean that she's not testing me, that she's not pissing me off at dinner time. She takes food... holds it over the floor... looks me in the eye and holds it for a good minute, then drops the food. The faintest hint of a smile curls her mouth.

It's all that I can do to hid my smile.

I'm both pissed off and entertained. I hate wasting food and I hate it when someone else does it. Especially by dropping it on the floor that I now have to clean. When she's older I'll make her scrub the floor, Cinderella style. (She can have a fancy dress made by the best mice tailors.)

A relative on facebook has commented that whenever their little girl does something bad, her first response is "I love you Daddy!". How are you supposed to deal with that? That's not fighting fair at all and I can so see our little one pulling that kind of crap on me. But I'll get her. I'll make her endure the pain and suffering that parents have been inflicting on their kids for eons: I won't let her leave the table until she's eaten her veggies. Bwahahahahaha!!!

Her leading me on. And it starts...

Earning your spots

We've been pretty lucky so far with Alice. No super gross sicknesses, no huge messes to scrub off the walls. I'm sure that those are coming, but not so far. This last week has been a bit rougher than normal. She's had a bit of a cold for a while, and then it seems like she got roseola which caused a very unhappy child. I wasn't making party cakes either if you know what I mean. Irritability, anything would set her off screaming for 5 minutes. Then she'd be good for 2 minutes and then something else would set her off. Repeat. *sigh*

In a way it takes me back to when she was just a baby-baby: she'd be crying and I had tried everything that I could think of to fix it, be I couldn't. So I'd just hold her and walk back and forth in the room saying "sshhh" or singing. You know, something comforting like ol' man river. I wouldn't have thought that at 15 months I'd be nostalgic about something that was like a year ago, but it seems like so much has changed. Maybe mostly her, but me as well.

I've gotten grayer.

I can fathom the despair and helplessness that people can feel when their kids are seriously sick. I hope that I never have to experience that.

Ah well. She seems that she's getting better and the cold's that she gave to Laura and me seem to be fading. It's a nice change as the weather warms up that the colds seem to be melting away with the ice and snow.

Just one thing

For me to feel good about my work I try to set the bar low. Pretty low. Each day I set out to get one thing done. Just one. I pick it, and I hope to get it done. On a really good day I might get two things that I've set aside for myself done. I think that there was one day a couple of years ago that I was able to get three things done, but my memory is fuzzy on the details.

Now, this isn't to say that I just do a single thing. I get lots of things done in any given day, just different things than I planned to get done. That's frustrating, but somewhat necessarily. I find myself in the afternoon saying something like "Now I can start the thing that I planned to do yesterday (or 3 days ago)".

Today was a good day. I think that I got 3 things done, and one was a tricky issue.

Part of my slow downs are due to the shit underpowered hardware we use and using a 32bit OS that limits that amount of RAM we can toss at a problem. RAM is so cheap now, but we're stuck watching the processes and trying to scale back things. The other causes include interruptions and genuine issues that come up during the day that need to get done "now". My patience varies with the issues and who presents them. Like when someone tells me that X doesn't work at all in Y and I need to fix Z, depending on the person, I carefully check if X does in fact work on Y before even considering Z. Some people have a trouble correctly identifying X. Or Y. Or even Z for that matter.

But in spite of the hardware issues, large organization nonsense, and confused people, some days I can actually get something done and that's all I need. Just one thing.

First world problems

I don't get people. I really don't. Only where people don't ever see the causes of diseases do they refuse vaccines that are freely available. It drives me nuts.

Someone that I work with posted something to facebook where it drew a direct line between number of vaccines given and number of autistic cases reported per x population. Never mind that the issue could be more complex than that. Never mind that what is considered "autistic" has changed over the last 30 years. Never mind that it's possible that awareness and identification techniques might have improved. Never mind that there has been no proven link between the two, time and time again. No, it's a simple A causes B. I was mad, but I didn't trust myself to actually write anything, so I simply posted a link to the anti-vaccine body count page. If people from her post are interested, they can go there. She thanked me for the link and said that they had chosen not to vaccinate their kids (10 and 8?) but she's always interested in information on the subject.

Have I suddenly changed her mind? Opened up a new avenue of discussion? No, I doubt it.

Have I actually met someone with polio, measles, mumps, rubella or any of the other things vaccines fight against in order to feel I should take the vaccine? No. Do I have to? No. I also don't need to meet someone that's flow through the windshield of their car to know that seat belts are a good thing.

Angry.

How to quickly create a book for your kindle in mobi format

Kids books are great, but when doing an outing I don't want to take 30 lbs of board books just to make the little one happy. So by quickly taking some pictures with my cell phone and doing some research, I've got a favourite book with me on the kindle in mobi format.

After getting the pictures to my computer using Image Capture, doing a quick crop using Previewer I was able to get all the images saved to the drive. Then I created a text file like the following:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>My Book Title</title>
<meta name="cover" content="cover.jpg">
<meta name="Author" content="Lastname, Firstname" />
</head>
<body>

<mbp:pagebreak/>
<p><img src="page1.jpg"/></p>
<p>Text for the first page</p>

<mbp:pagebreak/>
<p><img src="page2.jpg"/></p>
<p>Text for the second page.</p>

</body>
</html>

After that I downloaded and used the simple amazon app kindlegen using a command like
path/to/kindlegen my-book-title.html

In the same directory as the html file it created a file with a .mobi extension. You can either plug in your kindle and copy the file into the documents directory or just use something like calibre. And that's all there was to it.

I was a bit frustrated because I couldn't find any docs that said what metadata the kindlegen app was looking for, so I had a bit of trial and error trying to figure it out. But I figured it out and now I've got kids books on the go.

Being an adult

"Being an adult is eating cookies and milk in bed past bedtime and not getting in trouble for it."
- L

When did that happen?

It's funny. Now interacting with Alice she understands me, takes action, and figures stuff out all on her own. For instance, I can say "go get your rabbit story off the table, bring it to me and I'll read it to you". Boom, she gets her book and we read a story. She knows. Then I see on the digital frame a picture of her being all tiny and just a baby-baby. Our baby-baby. But now she's a big girl. When did that happen? You would have thought that someone would have sent me a memo or at least a left me a post-it note.

And we're not even half way through year two.

I feel like I've started a long journey and I'm standing here at the end of the driveway wondering just how I got here and how much has changed since I've left the front door.

Reading "I am a bunny"