Les Bonnes Choses

Not long ago, I wrote about how Rebecca and I went out on a date that began with a visit to the Art Institvte of Chicago (the 'v' is not a typo - that's how they spell it in their logo. It must be a remnant of the Roman empire). I only briefly mentioned the dinner at a Japanese restaurant, which was sublime. The layout of the restaurant was a bit odd though, as it was basically just one area with a grid of tables set up much like I remember our desks were arranged in grade school (row game, anyone?).

Of course, that particular arrangement might have just been the best way to maximize seating capacity, as they combined and detached individual tables as required, depending on the size of the arriving groups. At one point, however, they must have had a run of single women (or, more precisely, women dining singly), because I looked around to see Rebecca and I were together in a sea of single tables, each seating only one female diner. If there were to be anything gained from doing so, I thought it would have been a funny prank to go to each of the tables and sit down and act like it was a speed dating event.

I'm not going to do anything with these ideas, so I thought I might as well put them out there so I can potentially expose myself to mockery. Or at least give my friends some idea of what the hell might be going on in my head when they start talking about their picks for the fantasy football pool, because I don't follow sports as it generally doesn't impact my life in any way (except, now that Chicago is going to the Stanley Cup, it is somewhat relevant). I'm used to doing research, so I could put in some effort to go back and actually study who won what tournament in what year, but what's the incentive? I mean, can I put money on any of these games?

I digressed. So I had idea number one this morning, when I put an egg-yolk covered plate into the dishwasher, resigned to the fact that it is almost certainly going to have to be hand-washed after the wash cycle has completed. Egg yolk is in the class of food items that either doesn't come out in the dishwasher, or else disperses throughout the entire machine to make some dishes actually come out dirtier than when they went in -- like salsa: that stuff pisses me off. You put a bowl that had salsa in it into the dishwasher, and all of your glasses will come out with flecks of red tomato and onion bits. Now, if the egg yolk was on a shirt, it would be a different story: you could spray some pre-treater like Shout. But there isn't any pre-treater for dishes. Why not? The only reason people buy Jet Dry is because there's a reservoir for it, so you can bet they'll buy a quarter of a million units of dish pretreater at $4 a pop. There's million dollar idea number one.

Idea number two -- actually, I'll save that for later. In the meantime, I'll wait for someone to read this, do something with it, and send me a postcard telling me how much they are enjoying sipping mojitos on the mayan riviera.

Okay, okay, I had better bump that last entry off the top before the natives get restless. To do this, I'm going to have to reach into my bag of old dependable blog topics, which is something I don't like to do too often for fear of running out of material. Actually, I just blog about stuff that happens to me, so I suppose the only way I am going to run out of material is to go into a coma. But whatever. Anyways, on to the entry:

So Le P'tit Monsieur has recently joined the ranks of the bipeds. At about the same time, he also learned how to throw things. And not just in the style of dropping things from the high chair. I mean real, honest-to-god throwing. I think he picked it up watching Jude play a baseball variant with a mini beach-ball and a foam sabre. From this, he figured out that balls make excellent projectiles. So a ball on the floor is most likely to be kicked, and a ball in hand is likely to be thrown. It's also worth two in the bush, I hear. It wasn't long before this learning was over-generalized to just about anything that he can easily grasp: blocks, remote controls. I'd like to get him to a big fat greek wedding, because he'd be in heaven when the dishes started flying.

Warning: geekout ahead. That means you Carolyn. If you continue to read this and then complain that my post was boring, I'll retaliate in a way that only a big brother can. Or worse: in a way that only uncle Dave can.

I've got this old laptop, which served me well for much of my PhD, and a few months into my postdoc before it started to act kind of wonky and was then dropped on to a hard tile floor. I then bricked it when I tried to reset it to the factory default state because something was amiss with my restore CDs. My attempt at installing Windows XP and drivers from the Lenovo site, and then pretending that nothing was amiss worked for a short while, but it became apparent that the jig was up when it stopped booting. With nothing to lose, I decided to install the latest iteration of Ubuntu. Real slick. In fact, since installing it on this computer -- which had become unusable with Windows XP -- I have been using my old notebook to the exclusion of my newer, fancier notebook.

And what have I been doing on my testdrive of Ubuntu 10.04? Trying to get one of my old webcams to work, because ultimately, I wanted to be able to use this computer primarily as a Skype terminal (with video). Unfortunately, the only two webcams I own (Creative Labs VF0400 and Microsoft Lifecam VX3000) do not work out of the box with Linux, and this version that I'm using appears to be too new for any of the solutions posted for earlier versions to apply. So if you consider that it appears that I could just go find a cheap webcam off a list of cameras that do work out of the box, then by saving the $18 that I would have spent means that I value my time at about $3/hr. And that's why my degree is not in economics.

Rebecca and I went out on a date last night. It was all snooty-like too, because we went to the Chicago Art Institute, where they have really famous paintings like this one:

However, we eventually wandered into the contemporary art wing, where things degenerated pretty quickly. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched a woman nod approvingly while contemplating the meaning behind an 8' square canvas painted black, and I realized a couple things: first, some people need a good smack in the head with a rolled up newspaper, and second, anything qualifies as modern art if you just make it really big. So don't be too hasty when emptying out your cat's litterbox. I am reasonably sure that if you waited a few months and sprayed the pile with shellac, it would eventually be found on display somewhere.
Sushi dinner was good too. In fact the only black spot in the evening (aside from the aforementioned artwork) was that we came home to find Amy and Gill had gotten Jude and Asher both to sleep by 9, which is something that we, as parents, have so far been unsuccessful at. Punks.

One of our routines for getting Asher settled down is to host a mini dance party. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, P'tit Monsieur is familiar with the Safety Dance (thanks to my recent earworm), All the Single Ladies (thanks to Amy), and the opening theme of Fraggle Rock (thanks to Miranda, by way of Jude, who is now hooked on Fraggle Rock). Each of these songs has an associated dance from the video, and I hope to post the video I took a couple weeks back of Asher dancing along to the video, though since I don't know the first thing about video editing, I wouldn't hold your breath.



And who participates in our dance parties? So far, they've been pretty small: just the four of us. Jude is a big fan of the safety dance; of the Single Ladies, not so much, though this evening he did say that Beyonce was "delicious". Rebecca asked him where he got that idea, looking at me as she did so. I honestly do not recall ever saying such a thing, so my defense was that Beyonce's deliciousness must be self-evident.



Now that you have our playlist, I encourage you to dance along with us tomorrow evening. Bring your ferret. Send videos. I'll post them. Maybe.

I don't know about you, but if I'm the sole survivor of a plane crash, I'm going home by train.

Another manifestation of my need for orderliness (or perhaps more aptly described as a desire to become one who is more orderly, as a glance at my desk shows me to be anything but orderly) is my recent compulsion to bundle up cords. My particular flavour of geekiness is one that entails electronic gadgets (as opposed to a geekiness that entails boxes of comic books or baseball cards, or one that entails a display case for manga robot models). Most of these gadgets have at least a power cord, and most have other cords that allow them to connect to other gadgets. That's alot of cords. I have a rubbermaid container full of cords, many of them from gadgets that have since died, or superfluous cords that I keep "just in case" (I have, from time-to-time raided this collection, so it's not exactly pathological hoarding). I one day found myself in the local ACE Hardware shop, looking for lightbulbs, when I found a roll of velcro cord ties. My laptop power adapter cord came with one, and it's brilliant, so I bought a package (not the $70 package to which I linked -- I think that's for a bulk order).


I have since been going around the house, putting the damn things on anything that's flexible, and longer than it is wide. Our appliances and electronics are now neatly stowed, but if you come and visit, make sure you don't have anything hanging out, because I've still got three-quarters of a roll of these things left.

I did well in school, mostly getting by on my really good memory. I wouldn't call it photographic, exactly, except for that one time when I wrote a marketing final exam and swore I was able to answer a question by reading a recollection of a page from the textbook (though I may have also gotten the question wrong, because my recollection was almost certainly a fabrication). Regardless, my memory used to be quite good. Now, not so much - or at least that's what I thought until today. It's not that I think my memory has improved. Rather, it occurred to me today that there's a really good reason behind my constantly misplacing things. No, it's not lack of sleep, though that's probably a contributing factor. Today I couldn't find the tomato paste, while I was making dinner. I remembered taking it out of the pantry, but somewhere between the pantry and the kitchen (8 linear feet) I misplaced it. When I finally did find the can of tomato paste, on top of the television, I had a flash of insight about my apparent memory deficit, which, by all appearances, was starting to look like early onset Alzheimer's dementia: I've been leaving items all over the bloody place because I am always having to drop what I am doing (sometimes literally) because my youngest child has absolutely no sense of self-preservation. And as for the tomato paste on top of the television? Asher was standing up in the bed of a Tonka dump truck.

I've descended into a kind of madness. My compulsive desire for imposing order on things -- the same one that has been an asset in the academic domain -- can be a liability in my personal life. Take, for example, my mp3 collection: a completist, and also carrying an inordinate amount of nostalgia for the 80s, I long ago made it a goal to have a copy of every song that might have been broadcast on AM radio on American Top 40 during the 80s - often without any regard to whether I like the song.

Of course, as my library expanded, so did the task of making sure that the ID3 tags on my collection were correct and complete. My compulsion has lead me to spend a shameful amount of time on Amazon, looking up release dates for albums, or finding the album on which a single first appeared (it annoys me to have the album entry for half my library listed as permutations of the words "80s", "hits" and "greatest").

Before this week, I would have balked at the idea of going to the trouble of obtaining album art. After all, embedding the images makes the files bigger. And anyways, I don't use an iPod, and if I did, I wouldn't be staring at it while listening to my music. That was before I used Windows Media Player to transfer some of my files to my Sansa mp3 player, a process that mysteriously and automatically found and embedded the correct album art for about a fifth of my files, and set the album art for anything released before 1985 to the cover of Styx's Greatest Hits album.


That's really weird. I don't even have anything in my collection from that album. I guess that speaks to what's going on in the minds of Microsoft developers: the only thing worth listening to prior to '86 was Styx. I wonder what Apple would have done?



So anyways, seeing that album art come up in my media player was starting to give me an eye tic. So whereas other, more better adjusted people might be spending their time on the internet surfing for porn (link does not go to porn, but if you're at work, wear headphones), I have instead been using various tools to surf for album covers.