Gecko Bloggle

Cold Stares Gold stars for parenting, in which our hero wrangles a pound and a half of pot roast into an edible (and even non-life-threatening) meal, and my old job cans a few more peaches.

So, after the time change, and the kids of course not realizing the sheer joy of being able to curl up under the covers for that extra hour, we were up and at ’em.  Some coffee and scones later, and we were booked for a CanCar (the Prius, for the discerning putting-around-towner).

Off to MEC, which wasn’t open yet, so we schlepped the four or so blocks up Broadway to Main, went to some non-Googleable place for caffeine and muffins, and then meandered our way down 10th again.  Freakishly beautiful houses (many heritage ones) along 10th here.  Like crazy-awesome places that are solid stone and giant beams with yards and old trees and just plain, like, HOMES, man.  Who knew Vancouver still had ’em.  Of course, in our bubble’s-a-poppin‘ Vancouver financial venue, these places are all probably pegging in at roughly the annual salary (plus unlisted bonus) of certain executives at my last job.

So, no, we’re not buying in the area quite yet.  Ahee.  Still, nice to see that they’re not all turned into quadruplexes and condo-wanna-bes.

Beautiful little place on the North side of the street with heritage plaque out front, and a larger brighter sign stating (roughly) “This home was restored entirely with personal finances, and not at all by any government body.”  I guess they got tired of politicos posing in front of their place, and non-politicos telling them “I paid for this with my tax dollars, I’d like to have a look around.”

Seriously, that happened here once, this old oddly-dressed crazy decided to have a sit on our porch and wait for the tour to start, ’cause “These houses are public, and they do tours.”

He got a lovely tour of the stairs.  Not rushed.  Just moved along.  Not like the drunk guy who dropped his pants half-way up the stairs on his way to come talk to Arwen, Liz, and maybe Deb?  I told him he had sixty seconds to get off the stairs and get outta the yard before I called the cops, and when he replied “Go for it,” I responded with “Go for it?  Oh, okay, we’ll go for it,” and I went back into the house and came back out with what was either Ripley’s solid wood walking stick, or maybe a crowbar.  He was across the street, before the door closed, and was running in his foam flipflops across the parking lot before I made it to bottom of the stairs.

That was a summer to remember.  Doesn’t happen nearly as much now, partly because we’re not out there on the porch as much during the summer (we don’t smoke any more), and partly because I’m pretty sure word got out that you don’t dick around with the folks on Thurlow, ’cause one of them’s psychotic about his car (that’s a whole other post), one likes to think he’s a beserker, and the blonde hippy chick lady goes all momma bear when people get too close to the cave.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, right.  Going to MEC.  So we went in and Ripley and I meandered off to find me a front light for my bike.  With the days getting shorter, I’ll have to make sure I have a front light other than the little blinky alien one strung to my helmet.  Picked up something for $12 that had “Hello, I’m a front light” mode, and a “WOOT-WOOT!  I enjoy causing epileptic seizures” mode.  I swear sometimes I’m trying to make myself as annoying/dazzling as possible in ORDER to get hit by some poor driver who’s drawn into the strobiscopic clusterfuck noodling along at the curb lane.

“I swear officer, I thought it was a giant freaking Tinkerbell or something, and so of course I started clapping, and then I think I smelled burnt toast, and then there was this gawdawful crunching sound.”

So yeah, I looked at some $30 pants that I could actually wear to work and look like I HAVE A JOB (slighlty bland, dark beigey-grey, an extra pocket, probably make my butt look okaaay), but they were the wrong size (42/32) because I’m a bit of a centaur.  I’m 5’11”, but it’s mostly torso.  Very short legs, y’see.  Must be the Scottish side of things.  Great for kilting, not so much when it comes to pants.  But yeah, too big in the waist.  I’m not as big as I seem to think I am.  I was heading out to try a 38 or 40, but Arwen and the kids were waiting (and Tate was starting to go all KMart Antichrist on us) so we bolted for the checkouts.

So then we… what… Oh, drove down to Pacific Center to see what’s been turned into what lately, and went through the somewhat stunned-seeming foodcourt to get somewhat rubbery sushi for the kids, some TacoTime for me (it’s like drinking: I always pay for it the next day, but every time I see those stupid beefito gargantuato combo extravaganito, I’m all “this time will be different”), and Arwen got something that actually looked like food.  Like a salad I’d go all Ginsu on, only with more protein.  I’ll have to find out where it wa-… oh, right.  It was $8 for a little bowl thingie.  Aheee…  We’ll leave that for the power-executive assistants out there.

So, yeah, the kids started going buggy again right around the time I started thinking “Man, that was too much food,” so we bailed out and went to the Bay to see if there was anything sweater-like for Arwen that wasn’t designed by paranoid schizophrenics with their rods & cones flipped.

Not so much.

Oh, but we did get to march outta there with two young kids both looking like they’d just been arrested by the Very Most Meanest Parents in the Whole World.  As we were leaving, and Ripley was trying to negotiate into just holding HANDS instead of me clamping his WRIST, I was thinking about the term “Frog-Marched” and realized I couldn’t actually picture what that looks like.  Turns out I can totally picture it, but didn’t know about the public bit.  Interesting.  Of course, if I had just turned to Ripley and said “Do you know what frog-marching is?” we probably would have had a great rest of the day.

Yeah, but no.  We piled into the car with me still feeling like a bad parent, and drove out around UBC to lull Tate to sleep, and give Ripley something to look at outside so he wouldn’t get car sick.  By the time we were done, and coming back down Dunbar (both my parents’ families’ stomping grounds), Arwen’s flu was getting her down again, and so we hauled back home.  First we dropped in at the site of the old Mac’s Milk at 36th or so, where I had a wicked flashback of being 11 or so, and drinking root beer Slushies (but not like any normal root beer I’ve ever had) and playing Xevious until the quarters ran out.  I think that was the summer I got to go to Computer Camp (where I learned to program in Pascal, I think) and got Mono.  So I was, maybe… 12?  Pascal and Mono, the two states that go great together.

To try to make Arwen forget that her spine was attempting to exit her body via her sinuses, we talked about why the stores along upper Dunbar weren’t all THAT trendy, and muttered and purred to each other until we got home.  Sent Arwen and Tate to bed while Ripley played with the Honey Bees game (think Kerplunk with bees that like to roll under the couch).  I don’t know what I was doing.  Idle.  I think I was idle.  We sorta kinda watched How It’s Made and then Mythbusters, but I might have slept for a moment there.

I woke up and remembered that Arwen had mentioned putting the potroast in around 3:00, and it was certainly about that time, so I turned the oven up to 400, threw the meat stump in there, and then thought “There’s gotta be more to it than that.”  A quick trip to Epicurious pointed me in the right direction (otherwise anything I try to season becomes either spaghetti sauce, waffles, or steak).

Note to self some night when it’s just me cooking – Steak Waffles.  Shut up, you want some.

Not that I followed that recipe, mind you.  It was more like I looked at it for things that would be missing.  Like DON’T add beer or basil, but DO add red wine and pepper.  I faked the funk for the most part until the little bit of wine in the measuring cup started to smell like something you put on focaccia, and then got into the ground cloves.  I was following my nose, I guess.  Tasted pretty good, and when I found the meat thermometer and rammed it into the center of the roast, it went up past “ham” to “rare beef,” so I figured nobody was gonna die.

It went over pretty well.  Some small potatoes and little carrots to give the impression of vegetables, and boom.  Dinner.  Well, a two-hour boom.  Still, food.

Tate tried to swallow too much and choked (I remember doing that when I was little too) shortly after yelling into the kitchen “This ham is wheewy good!” which is about as good as you get with Tate.  He’s a big fan of “I don’t yike dat” with just about anything you put in front of him, so if he’s eating it at all, it must be pretty tasty.

Seriously: I’ve seen the kid eat half a piece of chocolate cake, and then push the bowl away – even if there’s still icing.  Ice cream?  Yeah, he’ll have *some* and then he’s done.  There’s not much he’ll eat a lot of.  Ripley?  Will actively overdo it, even as you’re telling him to slow down.  Maybe because you’re telling him to slow down.  I remember once an old friend saying that her parents made her brother eat everything with chopsticks to slow him down.  Must’ve been fun at the local diners in Winnipeg.

Yeah, all done there.  Released the kids into their bedroom to crash and yell and try to kill each other (but they were having fun most of the time, I gotta say), but then it all just started to spiral in on itself.  I found myself picking fights with Ripley, which I hate doing, but keep getting into.  I just get to this place where I want him to slow down and mellow out before someone gets hurt, ’cause I know they’re supposed to be going to bed soon, and don’t want to have to be the Bill Cosby dad with the “Go to BED!” twenty times before they finally get bored of messing with me, and go to sleep.

Without going into too much detail, lemme just say this:

Parenting is hard.  Even with a partner around to help, it’s still hard.  Good parenting, doubly so.  Happy AND good parenting of kids with more brains than common sense is especially difficult.  The part that makes me really hurt is knowing that everyone who’s ever tried to parent me, or tutor me, or date me, or be my boss has, probably, at one time or another wanted to pick me up by the armpits, hold me up in the air, and yell “Why don’t you just do what I TELL you WHEN I tell you, instead of constantly screwing around?”

And then put me down fast enough that I land pretty hard on my own butt.

Brains or no, charisma or no, “military presence” or no, I can still be a total asshat sometimes.  I see where Ripley gets it.  Doesn’t make me like it any more, though.

So yeah, parenting can be hard.

Anyone who says different is selling something.  Maybe their kids.  Maybe parenting books.

Some kinda shout out goes to the two guys from my old department who got the bronze handshake last week.  It didn’t help me much to hear it at the time, but it was true in the long run: Not working there any more was the best thing to happen to me in a long time.  I hope the HR rep didn’t try to pull that “You probably saw this coming” bullshit with you like they did with me.  Don’t they teach HR reps what to say immediately after someone’s been they’re being let go?  ‘Cause you suck at it…

…and I hope the desktop folks left on the front lines at EAC & Blackbox hold the line, and don’t turn their fear on each other, or themselves.  If the thought of going to work on Monday makes you wanna barf, start looking for work now.  At the very least, touch base with people “on the outside.”  There’s good jobs out there.  Good companies.  Good people.  You’ve made lots of connections in the industry, use them.  People you were friends and co-workers with in the past will be happy to help you out where they can.  Vancouver’s high-tech community is small (as in Disney’s Small Small World), but deep (as in cover).

Oh, and how do you know your IT department is a well-oiled nerd machine?  The following conversation happens without any mention beforehand (or high-fives afterwards).

MGB: “So now we know.”

AB: “And knowing is half the battle.”

Me: “G-I-JOE!”

MGB: “…Woot…” {snicker}