July 2006 Archives
So tonight after Julie went to bed, I hooked up our newly-repaired mac mini back to the media station (it had a motherboard go -- thank god for applecare!), and one of the items I've recently picked up but just finally installed is an eyeTV 250 from elgato, that among other things allows me to record digitally from external analog sources, such as our VCR. One of the great projects I am going to endeavor on is to tape off and record all of our video tapes that we wish to keep before the media degrades too far. Of all the video tapes we have, the most precious and also arguably one of the oldest is our wedding video from 1995. It's amazing what a difference 11 years can make on video technology. The sound is thin, the tape is already starting to look faded, but there's probably some work I can do in order to restore some quality. We'll see.
Other than quality of the technology, it's really fascinating to see the difference in ages of all those in attendance. Those in our twenties are now in our thirties; our parents in their fifties are now in their sixties; grandparents and relatives are now gone that used to be here. Friends have moved out of our lives, couples have split and reformed in different configurations. Our bodies have all changed shapes, and hairlines have receded or even disappeared. And yet, here we are, still moving forward. The love that we felt back then I still feel today. The blessings we received on that day have all come true, and continue to do so. And yet, it's so wonderful... such a blessing.. to have a window back on that day, a 2-hour snapshot of time from a day eleven years ago.
I think it really helps to every once in a while take a step backward in time to remember what's really important, and what this is all about. In the face of freaky five year olds, screaming toddlers, business trips and tired parents cranking out at one another, there is a core that comes from that moment in time -- a seed of love and joy and innocence that still feeds our souls, and allows us to smile at and with one another.
I love you, Julie, and in Bert's words "Forever is not an unreasonable amount of time".
Oh blessed blessed hangover, I knew you wouldn't forsake me.
Yesterday after the conference (which I will be blogging about later on my work blog) Jay and I headed out to see Panic! At The Disco out at the Expo center here in Portland, for a strangely early 7:30 show. I had never seen Panic! but The Dresden Dolls opened up for them who I have never seen live, but I absolutely love their music. So I bought tickets a few weeks ago, and drug Jay along for the ride. Jay told a friend from work, Mark, about the event, and he decided to join us for the concert. When we got there, it turned out to be completely sold out, but Mark managed to grab a ticket from a scalper nonetheless.
Once we got in, it became readily apparent that a) there was no booze, b) the room was full of underage kids ranging from high school to literally a few grade-school aged kids, and c) there was no booze. It was totally a 'smells like teen spirit' scene, and we did our best to acclimatize. After paying for a $3.00 water, we moved closer to the stage and the Dresden Dolls came on shortly thereafter. We missed the opening band, whomever they were, but we really didn't care. The Dolls were freakin' awesome, and I was quite pleased to go. We could have left at that point and I would have been completely happy. The show was incredible, with their classical meets punk meets goth meets all-the-things-love style. A few times, they asked the crowd to back up -- evidently people were getting seriously trampled near the stage, so much so that some kids got hauled off to the hospital. Damn. I don't remember getting trampled at the concerts i went to as a kid. Then again, I tended to go see bands like Depeche Mode. DM fans don't trample.
The set was shorter than I wanted, but they did have a new band to put on. I'm completely pleased that we stayed. Panic! At the Disco is a phenomenal band of the new generation that I can only compare to Duran Duran as far as style and presentation, but with a mix of The Residents and Cirque du Soleil. Their sound was high-energy, almost vapor-esque (I'm liking 'esque' today), but with some serious Jellyfish and Red Cross influences. They did an awesome cover of Radiohead and another of Smashing Pumpkins. What was particularly interesting about the band was their outfits which were very much 1980's emo / Duran Duran / Adam Ant (the guitarist raided Adam's wardrobe), and... the dancers. They had a three person dance team (one man, two women) who did costume changes, burlesque & cabaret throughout the entire show, and with ever-increasing band participation. I was quite impressed. I'd see them again. They were much better than Cats.
After the show, the three of us realized we were entirely too sober and it was entirely too early to go back home. The Dresden Dolls were doing a post-show at a bar called 'The Mission', but we had no idea where it was. We met someone on the train (Missy) who became our guide for the evening, and we ended up at a local dive bar called 'The Matador', which spun a great combo of punk, hip-hip and 80's tunes, and the crowd was cool. There, we proceeded to get hammered. I played a game of pool, and met a cute doggie that gave me lots of kisses. Much fun was had by all. We grabbed a cab at 2am and then collapsed back into our respective rooms.
That's it, that was my evening. Good times.
It's 10:13 PM, all my drinking buddies are gone to sleep early, all the local places are closed... except Denny's, so in my inability to just go back to my room and go to sleep, I'm in Denny's drinking bad coffee and eating bad food, but I'm right across the street from my hotel and I can somehow get the wireless network here, but not in my room. [correction -- I've lost connectivity.] God, I am in such the teen hang-out. Is this the way we used to look? Yep, I bet it was.
I just got back from a long day at the convention, and all-in-all I had a pretty good day. I went to some good sessions on development build environments and testing suites, and that's pretty much how much of a big fat nerd that I am. This evening was the opening kick-off, with Larry Wahl doing his State of the Onion gig, comparing Perl 6 to an adolescent becoming an adult with typically excellent allegory and metaphor, and Damian Conway doing his usual wow-the-audience talk casting himself in the lead role of 'The Divinci Codebase', in which we discover the RIAA is guilty of murder. I'll give a greater amount of detail in my Work Blog.
While I am in town I was hoping to visit old friends, but unfortunately my new cellphone does not have any of my old numbers (they said switching the simcard would bring my numbers over, but it didn't, dammit) and they don't have valid numbers on google, so that is the end of that. It seems kinda weird, but all the usual OSCON crew seem to be missing this year -- no O'Reilly partiers, no folks from my favorite open source companies... I'm at a loss. I do have some buddies from the CSU here, but they've all headed back to their respective hotels. Ah well, perhaps I need to just take the message from the universe and take it easy, after all I have just passed a kidney stone.
In positive news, I feel much better today than I did yesterday, and the storm of stones seems to have passed. I am not sleepy, but I don't have the energy to go out by myself into downtown, and I'm not smart enough to sleep yet. So, I'll blog all my day's experiences, and by then it'll be late enough to crash or read myself to sleep.
I miss my family -- it's been nice spending so much time with Julie last week, and now I'm having withdrawls, not to mention totally missing my boys. At least I'm learning great things (Selenium rocks, and I don't mean the element -- google it!), and tomorrow looks to be pretty cool as well.
I can't believe I am in Denny's
The resolution is kinda crappy, but that's because my camera doesn't have a macro function that I can figure out how to use. That little spec next to the nickel is a kidney stone that my body decided to pass this morning. As if getting to bed at 2:30 am isn't bad enough, at 5 am I was woken up by an intense ache/pain in my lower left back that wouldn't go away. It would increase and decrease slightly in intensity, but nothing would make it go away. I tried a hot bath, drinking water, but to no avail. Having had gall stones before, I knew this felt pretty familiar and was prepared for some sort of news about kidney disfunction. At about 7am I walked over to the registration table to register for my sessions, hoping I could just muscle through the pain until it passed (and thanks, Suzanne for the advil!), but at about 7:30 I knew I just wasn't going to be able to make it.
I walked back over to the reg table and said in a calm voice:
"Excuse me, I don't want to panic you, but I think I might need medical attention."
LOL -- what a freakin' nerd. In any case, the security guard on duty gave me a lift over to the hospital where I checked myself in to emergency. It pretty much sucks to have to go to the hospital in a strange town with no one there with you to comfort you or to take care of the details of checking in, etc., but there I was. The nursing staff were totally awesome, and I felt much better just being in their hands. I got a CAT scan today (enter the doughnut, my son!) which was a trippy experience, but I didn't actually get to see the results of the scan (darn!). All they could really do for me in the end is a) tell me it's a kidney stone (which helps a lot, when you are worried you might ahve something seriously wrong with you), b) give me pain meds (I refused the morphine in favor of ibuprofen -- what was I thinking? But it still helped a lot), and c) let me lay down in a safe place while my body went to work. At around 10 am or so, I passed the stone. What you can't see due to lack of detail is that the little bugger has sharp crystal points on it. I'll see if I can track down a macro from someone or a magnifying glass at the very least to show you later. I felt remarkably better after that, and was discharged at around 10:30 am or so. I walked back to the convention center and managed to get into my session around 11:30 am for the last thirty minutes.
I attended the afternoon session, but to be perfectly honest, I was running (and am running) on 2 1/2 hours of sleep, and I wasn't at my best. I'm gonna crash out now I think and get an early start of it tomorrow morning.
I'm telling you, the only good thing about having a kidney stone attack on the morning of the first day of the conference is that things can only get better from here. :)
It's Sunday and I'm waiting in the airport for my flight out to Portland that's been delayed until after 10pm. As if the red eye wasn't late enough, I likely won't be laying head on pillow until around 1 am or later. I guess all of my lack-of-sleep cross training will pay off. I've got to be up bright and early tomorrow morning for OSCON 2006, and at the con by 7:30 am. Wheee!
So yeah, the last week's been a bit of a whirlwind. Starting on Wednesday through yesterday Julie and I went on a fantastic vacation in wine country, spending two nights in Glenn Ellen, and one night in Healdsburg. I'll let you read her blog for details of the time we had -- it was fun, but was tempered first by record-breaking temperatures that still have not let up (today I was in the van driving Isaac around to escape the heat, and the outside temp got as high as 111F), and also reading my email on my return was a big fat bummer as it became readily apparent that the instance of Pachyderm I set up for NMC to do their Marcus training crashed and burned hard during their entire experience. I have no idea just how salvageable the event was for them, or what sort of political ramifications it's had, but this has to be a lesson in not running development code for mission critical events. Blearg. So there are tons and tons of errors to investigate, and while email went out to the pachyderm development list, there has been silence from everyone on any potential answers to their problems -- it will all fall on my shoulders to work out, and of course I'm at OSCON all week long. I sense I'm not going to get a lot of sleep while I'm away.
I haven't heard back from the other CSU attendees of OSCON, so I have no idea if they are going to contribute to our CATS blog about their experiences. I haven't even announced it to the list, so I have work to do between tonight and tomorrow. Fphfht.
I thought vacations were supposed to leave you feeling refreshed and happy, and somehow I'm just more stressed out because I missed these days of work. Well, I'll rise above and have a good time at the con this week -- this is my favorite conference of the year and I always come home energized. Maybe I'll find others that are interested in joining the Pachyderm team. Maybe I'll find new technologies to save our cheese and make our experience with Pachyderm less painful. Maybe I'll just attend another Ruby on Rails session and then forget it all at the end of the week. Actually, this year I'm going to try to make an attempt to be nerdy and actually put in time on the computer to practice the lessons I learn and to really try to embed the knowledge into my brain.
Yeah. Right.
And to top it off, I'm not even escaping the heat by going north. Portland is scheduled to have record-breaking heat this week as well. tomorrow the high will be 98F, and it won't drop below 85 until Thursday. Glad I packed shorts. I won't be needing this leather jacket.
I'll be blogging here and on my work blog all this week, as I am able, so I'll be seeing you in cyberland.
Last week, on Tuesday, our little cookie Oreo Kitty died after eighteen years of glorious life. Right after the event I spent time writing up a detailed account of what happened, and after sitting on it for a while, I realized that no one really wants to read about how she died, least of all myself. So instead, I will tell you how she lived, and what she meant to us as a family, and to me personally.
Oreo has been with our family for as long as we've lived in in this house (1996) -- in fact, you could say she came with the house. Julie and I moved up from Santa Barbara with our one and only dependent, our grey kitty Maxi, who has always been somewhat of a prissy princess, and while amorous from time to time, was not really what you would call a lap cat. We had been considering getting a new cat so that Maxi would have a playmate, but we knew we should wait until we moved before making such a decision. We were here perhaps a total of 3 or 4 nights, when out of the blue there was this mangy scraggly black and white cat meowing at the back sliding glass doors as if she wanted to be let in. Maxi, of course, wasn't having anything to do with this and would hiss at the window, but the cat kept coming back. On the second or third night, we decided to go say hello to this cat in earnest, and while she was totally scabby from her butt through her back, and thin as a rail, she was very affectionate and very happy to see us. We had no idea who this cat belonged to, if anyone, so we asked around our neighbors. It turns out Oreo was left behind by the previous owners of the house due to the sloppy keeping of details after a messy divorce. The long and the short was, she was abandoned and was fed by our neighbors as a part-time stray. We decided that it was fate, and took her in to the vet to get treated for whatever skin issue she was having and to get her up on her shots. After a few weeks, her skin cleared up nicely, and she started putting on weight. We had to deal with months of kitty battles as Maxi was completely unhappy with our new family addition, but eventually they warmed to each other very nicely to the point of them sleeping together and cleaning one another. Within no time, Oreo put on a huge amount of weight, eating like it was her first meal in weeks every single time. It's hard to remember those days, sometimes.
From the start, Oreo stole my heart. She was more affectionate than any cat I had ever seen or owned, and adopted me immediately as her alpha male. She would purr just because she was in the same room, and whenever I sat down, she'd hop right up in my lap. As it turned out, she had love to give to everyone. I don't think there was a person to enter our house that didn't leave just loving our little love slut. She would snuggle up with you on the couch and purr so loud that everyone else in the room could hear it, and she had this thing she'd do whenever you scratched her on her butt right above her tail -- she'd become the insane licking machine, unable to stop licking anything within reach. At night, she'd crawl up and sleep by my head or snuggle up with me near my back. Many nights I'd boot her because she was just always on top of me, but that never decreased her will. She'd be back again in minutes.
My little love cookie really hasn't been the same over the last few years -- her health started to take a sharp spike downward after she suffered a wound to her face, the cause of which we never discovered, but it required stitches and a shave to the side of her face that never grew back right. After that, she became more frail, weaker, lighter and not long after that, she developed hyperthyroidism and reduced kidney function, and for the last eight months she's been needing iv fluids twice a day which Julie's been administering like a saint every single day. Oreo lived the last few months of her life mostly in our bathroom, because she had lost so much ability to know where she was or where to pee, poop, etc., but even at her reduced capacity, she was happy to eat and be petted and purred when she was happy, so I'm glad she had that time, even if it was rough for Julie mostly, and while I was not always fully supportive of the expense and the energy and time put in to keeping her alive, I was glad to have her there. I feel bad that with the birth of Isaac, the time I've had to give to our pets has been severely limited, and with Oreo's decline, she's received the least attention of all.
I hope she felt our love and concern for her in her last day, as we tried so desperately to help her through her pain, and I know she'll remain in our memories forever. I miss my little black and white kitty. You'll never be here again to snuggle me or purr so loud, but I'll always remember you.
We buried her in the side yard, near one of the windows in the living room, and planted a beautiful flowering sage over her grave. It's so odd, I've never actually had a pet that I've cared about so much for so long, and then have to deal with their passing. The whole event's brought up other issues of other losses both recently and distant, and it's hard to focus on too much other than to say, life must move on and I'll keep yet another life in my heart and mind that has passed this mortal coil.
"Search in Google"...
Wow, that's cool.
I've been struggling for weeks now on what I could possibly say to express what I've been feeling in the wake of Jesse's passing. This morning, she gave me an answer in the form of a dream. I came into a room with a large segmented window looking out from a height onto a scene of the sky, in which birds were flying. I couldn't identify them at first, but they became obvious soon enough. Jesse was there and she was watching the birds with joy.
"Aren't they beautiful?" She asks as she turns to face me for a moment and look me in the eyes. I want to reply "Yes", but I also want to say "What are you doing here? I thought you were gone? I miss you, are you here to stay?", but I don't. I hold my tongue, and as I look over, I see Serena and Eric standing there too, looking over at me and letting me know I shouldn't speak, confirming my feelings. Don't break the spell. Allow the moment to just be what it is. And so, I turn back and smile, and look to Jesse and look to the birds. They are ravens. I know that soon Jesse is going to return to them, but for now here she is and here we are and there is joy tinged with sorrow.
There's more to the dream, and it dissolves quickly into other topics, but that's the part that stands out in sharp relief against the background.
We have a murder of crows (or ravens) that live in the trees that surround the school over our back fence, and they often choose our house to roost at, making their obnoxious calls in the early morning, waking the house up (usually Isaac is the first to rouse), and forcing the family into action far sooner than we would normally choose to wake. Today I realized that the crows haven't been around for several weeks. I've realized this today, because this morning they were back. They were flitting about on the roof, and I heard them cawing in the distance, but they respectfully let us sleep this morning. When I finally got up, I saw one in the back yard hopping the lawn like they so often do, looking for worms. I took a moment to really enjoy their presence in my life, and not just as an unwelcome alarm clock. Big, beautiful, strong birds they are, with a confident call that is not a melodious song, but instead is a clarion speaking their will to live and to be free. Now, they are a reminder of one who has come and has left us, to be free in her own way. I'm so glad she came to visit this morning, to give me that smile one last time.
I've been walking around in my mind these last weeks in a silent meditation, much like walking the labyrinth outside the hospital waiting room several years ago, as I could find nothing practical that I could do to help her heal her body. Now, I find nothing practical I can do to heal her soul - I walk the labyrinth of my own experience. One path in, one path out -- that is comfort, and allows me to keep pace with myself. I feel like this morning, I reached the center, and I can see the vistas of all that is around me. I can see the birds fly, and I know she's happy. We love you honey, and we miss you, but I'm ready to let you go now.
"Aren't they beautiful?"
Yes they are, and so are you. So are you.
