High time for fun

It's been a while since we've out for just us. Probably since December? Man, I hope that it's not been that long. So, in a effort to combine our anniversary, Laura's birthday, random missed date nights, etc into an uber date night day. We saw The Book of Mormon followed by high tea at Chateau Laurier. Super awesome. We even had some time between to walk along the locks for a bit and enjoy the threatening sky with other tourists.

Do I miss times like this where we just hang out and have a good time eating ridiculous sandwiches and expensive tea? Yes, yes I do. I think that there would be something wrong with me if I said that I didn't. But that doesn't mean that I don't feel pangs for our kids while we're out. Especially when I see other people with their young kids out too. It's not rational, it's just how I'd feel. Then I'd go back to eating my tiny piece of a sandwich.

A good, good day.

Got stuck behind a behind a group that made noise the entire show. Stupid people and their instruments.

This walk was brought to you by the hottie in the blue dress

Great, now she expects all food to be brought out in a tiny tower...

Out of the mouth's of babes

As Alice gets older, her communication skills get better and better. Tonight at dinner she turned to me and said something along the lines of "Thank you daddy for a delicious dinner. It was lovely." I laughed - how often will you hear something like that out of the mouth of a 2.5 year old? It makes the moments of screeching earlier in the day a bit easier to deal with.

She's lots of fun and takes good care of us, including her little brother. It helps that she can express herself so... eloquently. She has always worked at communication from when she started to use sign language (she stopped later and we've all forgotten it all). Today she insisted that the toy tractor at the farm's playground is a train because of it's "puffer" in front. Well, it kinda looks like the trains that we see at the science and tech museum, so I'm not going to argue with her too much.

Most days we ask each other if we had a good day. The answer is almost always yes, yes we had a good day. I feel so lucky right now. I'm just trying to document the good moments (and selectively leave out the bad - who needs that?).

Life is good.

We're on a train!!!

Starting to get interesting

We're through the 4th trimester now and things are going well. Alice continues to remind us that she's 2 and a half, both verbally and with her behaviour. Isaac is getting more interesting, or at least interactive. He will smile at us, and the other day laughed. Man, my heart soared to hear his first laugh.

It's so nice to have that interaction, even if he's not following my whole standup routine. That will come later. Life is good.

Adventure is out there! (slightly to the left)

Unexpected Adventure

The other day we had all kinds unexpected adventures. We went to a new park, then the library (planned), followed up by unplanned visit to the coffee shop followed by a brief stop at the grounds of the museum. On that day, not only did they have the train running (which is super awesome to be able to do), but they had tours to the top of the light house. Super awesome. I think that the key to having all these amazing adventures is wearing our adventure hats. Also being ready to change our plans at any point helps too, but it's clearly the hats. Most people discount the hats. Never discount the adventure hats.

Two of my favourite people ever

At the top of the lighthouse, looking at the tiny light bulb they have. Note the hats.

Cost of magic

I don't often read fantasy, but some of the books that I got through the Hugo voter packet are. So I decided to read them. Some of them are good, others I have ditched part way though. Some I finished but felt like I shouldn't have. Such is life.

One thing that I guess is fairly common to fantasy stories is that there is a cost of doing magic. Energy, soul, something. With that in mind, that's something that seems to be missing from the Harry Potter universe. With seemly zero cost of doing magic (other than being able to follow recipe books or be able to enunciate properly), shouldn't pretty much everyone be uber wizard?

Then I looked around what we do every day and how it would look like magic / witchcraft to someone a couple of hundred years ago. How much effort / cost would have have expended to have light in their home? Warmth or coolness? Communication? Food? Clean water / sanitation? To an outside observer we get this for "free". Of course it isn't actually free, but the act of me working and being able to pay for being able to have electricity to the home to be able to turn on the kettle is so removed and abstract, it would be difficult to explain. Which, like all tech, always seems to follow Clarke's 3rd law.

Tech is magic is something that I think of almost every night when Laura comes into the darkened bedroom using her phone's flash as light. Every single time I think of the Phial of Galadriel and Frodo using it in Shelob's cave. How does a black piece of glass light up like the brightest star with a mere touch of the hand? Magic.

Never going to grow up

First a story.

At the park the other day Laura was talking in French (which I don't speak) with another mother. The lady asked how old Laura's kids are. She said 2.5, 2 months and her husband is 12. Just at that moment I went down the slide saying "weeee!" They both laughed. I had no idea why...

Second off, I'm the luckiest guy ever. I have a wife that loves me and she permits allows encourages me to be me - to be a kid trapped in a tall fuzzy body. It's not my fault that the fun things from my childhood are still fun.

A swinging good time

Nightmare Scenarios

One of the things that I find different now that I'm a parent is that I have nightmare scenarios running through my head a lot of the time. I can only assume that this is "normal". Things like: if Alice gets out of the house and I back the car up without seeing her; passing out while holding Isaac and dropping him down the stairs; etc. It's exhausting sometimes, but I figure that's just the way that things are going to be. Laura tells me that it's healthy so that I can anticipate these possible nightmares and be able to prevent them from happening. Maybe.

In some ways it also feels like I've lost my babies a dozen times a day too. Maybe I just need to use this as an excuse to hug them more. I can live with that.

Just watching the light dance

It's pretty amazing to just hang out with Isaac in the mottled light under the maple tree. He's lying in the peapod watching the light dance on the roof, sucking his hand. It's amazing that I was part of creating this little person. I also have to meantally archive these moments because I know it won't always be like this. His sister is proof of that. 

These are moments that I cherish. It might not always look like that as I hold my phone, but I've got to type it out while it's fresh. 

Distracting text makes a poor drm / fingerprinting

I'm reading some of the works as part of the Hugo voter packet and some of them have what at first appears to be poor editing. Something that looks like an artifact of badly done OCR. Mostly missing spaces between words or a missing hyphen. But these are digital works, presumably straight from the publisher. Not something that should have any errors like this.

It got me thinking that this must be some form of text based watermarking to uniquely identify me, or perhaps any works that are pirated from the voter packet. I know that they've done similar things to digital music / videos, but usually in places where people wouldn't notice. I think in theaters they are disguised as those old dust spots that you might see on a frame of film, but since there are no frames of film from the digital projector, it couldn't be those. It's something that people are used to, so their brains probably just skip right over it.

It's distracting. It's like someone lightly slapping you every once and a while. It wrecks the flow of the work and makes the work feel like a poorer quality than I think that it really is. Along those lines, it's disappointing.

I hate drm. I hate this type of fingerprinting. And I hate being made to feel like a criminal when I enter into a agreement in good faith. It's that kind of shit that turns customers into pirates.

I'm proud of... me!

Sometimes dealing with Alice can be quite challenging. Other times she surprises me in the most delightful way. The other day she "read" her Disney story book (which she remembers a significant amount of) and then when she was finished informed me that she had read "all four 'torirs by 'er telf". She was quite proud of the fact. I was too. Here was this 2.5 year old going through 4 stories, reading them aloud, quietly, calmly. She really does amaze me most if the time. We are pretty lucky.