Thanks, Sis!

About 25 years ago I was sitting in study hall. Bored, I picked up a pen and doodled on some notebook paper until the bell rang.

It meant nothing.

Later that year, one of my sisters saw the doodle and decided to turn it into this remarkably faithful painting, which she then held on to.  I got it in the mail a couple of hours ago.

And that, my friends, means more to me than words could possibly say.

Thanks, sis!  You rock!

What a Drag It Is Getting Old (Tee-Hee)

I was making my son’s lunch the other day after I made mine and all of a sudden I had to sit and laugh at the absolute comical absurdity of “it all”.  I giggled about this on and off all day so I figured I would set this up tonight and share it with you all (I am still smiling a little about it, as a matter of fact).

His lunch and two school-time snacks are on the right.  In the center is a PB&J on wheat.  Clockwise from the 12 o’clock position are two juice boxes, green beans, pineapple, Cheez-Its, and a banana.  Not shown are his breakfast (typically one or more of the following: pancakes, eggs, sausage, dry cereal, fruit) or his morning or afternoon milk.

My “food” supply until dinner is shown on the left.  In the center is a literally-randomly-chosen Lean Cuisine. Clockwise from the 12 o’clock position are a protein bar, a Monster zero-calorie energy drink, a diet Pepsi, a generic knockoff 5-hour energy drink, an orange, two Advil, two fish oil pills, a Centrum Silver multi-vitamin, and a coffee.

The shocking contrast between someone who is accustomed to constantly traveling at Warp 5 (meal on the right) and someone whose ship is having trouble maintaining even minimal life support and is listing slightly to one side (meal on the left) that is showcased here is what got me to laughing.

I mean, what a difference a few decades makes, you know? Why don’t I just shove a damn defibrillator in my lunch bag while I’m at it?  

LOL...

On a completely unrelated note,  does anyone know if there is a DIY site that shows how to to build that contraption the Skeksis used to extract Gelfling essence in The Dark Crystal?  A guy I know was interested...

Perfection Through Incompetence (Part IV)

Go to: Part I   Part II   Part III

As I mentioned, I was my company’s coordinator for the Angel Tree program this year - a job I cheerfully took when it was offered to me after the 2010 holiday season was over.  Last year’s coordinator has a nearly superhuman number of irons in the fire at all times, see, so when she asked if I would take over obtaining the Angel Tree tags and returning the gifts to the Salvation Army for the 2011 season I gladly said “yes”.

At first blush it sounds easy, and, for the most part it is.  A number of tags (usually 15) is reserved under the company’s name.  The tags are then picked up and passed to sub-coordinators  in different departments who then distribute them to people who are interested in buying gifts for the needy recipients.  Later, the donors come back with the gifts and the coordinator (me) takes the stuff the the SA when the time comes.

It is at this time I really need to say that the sub-coordinators for this year’s effort were the most motivated, helpful, and organized team I have ever had the pleasure to be a part of.  My part in this phase was basically limited to doing administrative stuff on the periphery.  Any successes our involvement in the program had this year was due solely to their hustle and hard work, and not by me making photocopies and maintaining an Excel spreadsheet or some other nonsense.  I cannot overstate this and I have no illusions to the contrary.  

You may recall from Part III that I was shocked to discover that no computers were being used to track the applicant’s paperwork as the interviews were being done, and that I thought that this opened the door to a slew of potential problems.  I had no idea how right that guess would be.

As the day the tags were to be ready for pickup approached without notification, I became concerned - the window between interviewing the applicants and the final delivery of the gifts to the SA was narrow enough as it was, after all.  

Repeated calls and emails to the SA to find out what was going on were not returned.  On the phone I would usually only get a “I don’t know anything about the Angel Tree program, and [name withheld] isn’t here right now”.  True enough.  But to imply there is only one person around who can clear up any sort of issue or answer any question is insulting and borderline lying by omission. There are, in fact, many other people around that could answer questions - it is literally impossible that a single person could run every aspect of this huge, widespread, and multifaceted program.   

Only by showing up in person was I able to eventually get answers to questions that needed answering (this would later show itself to be a rule rather than an exception).  I was told that when the tags were sent out to be printed with the children’s data (first name, shirt size, etc.) the first batch came back blank.  Once that issue was identified a second group was printed up.  Every card in the second batch came back all with the same child’s name and information - that is, all the cards were identical.  Apparently, it took a week to get these problems “corrected” and have new cards re-issued with a whole new suite of problems (more on that in Part V of this post).

I picked up the first set of 15 cards and, without really looking them over, handed photocopies of them out to the subs and asked them to tell people that the due date was one day earlier than it really was.  

My thinking was that this one-day buffer would be useful in the event that someone picked up a card, waited until the last minute to do shopping, and then got sick or had car trouble and couldn’t make it in that day or whatever. The photocopies were used instead of the real thing in case someone lost their tag - I locked the originals away after transcribing the info on them into a spreadsheet. 

The one-day buffer ended up being useful in two instances and one person managed to lose their tag the sub gave them and needed another copy. 

A quick rant on this sub-topic.

There is no functional difference between forgetting to buy gifts for the recipients or losing their tag or something and simply taking their tag and throwing it straight into the nearest trash can. It is not the same as never taking a tag in the first place.  Even though the odds that any one person will be helped are long to begin with, you make the decision to penalize them by taking their card out of this “lottery” entirely through abject negligence. 

It is not “the thought that counts”, here.  Only results.

(To be continued...)

Transformer

The words in quotes are from my three-year-old, although I shortened his explanations up quite a bit.  For example "there are guns on the back for shooting all the mad submarines so they get all exploded with big explosions with fire then the pieces go floating up then you can fly away..." is all I can remember of the minutes-long answer to my question "What are these for?"

I think his inspiration for this one is from the opening scenes of Cars 2, but I am really just guessing here. It's not like he drew up blueprints...  Sometimes you just feel like building, you know?

He calls it a Transformer because the wheels can be pivoted back and forth about 45 degrees.  The wheel-mounts each rest on one of those small round button Legos he used for "batteries". He was very pleased when he stumbled into that trick, but not nearly as pleased as I was when he showed it off to me.

Oh, Good. Another Guitar Post.

Ow.  Owowowow no... nonononono dammit! (Sound of guitar pick clattering to floor).

Sigh...

You know, my wife tells me that she enjoys listening to me play at night. She finds it relaxing, she says.  That poor woman.  I mean, what the hell is her job like where hearing me blunder my way through "Spider and the Fly" or some other song a million times in a row while I yell obscenities at my fingers is through any relative measure "relaxing"?  Is she under constant sniper fire while she sits at her desk at work or something?

As bad as that is, at least from her point of view there on the sofa she knows what is going on and why.  She can see the whole picture.  She has context.  I can only imagine what my three-year-old son thinks as he's drifting off to sleep.

I can picture my boy years from now relating the following story to his psychologist at the "Prison for Cartoon Supervillians":  "My father?  Well, I really don't remember too much of him from when I was little, but every single night he would read me a book, tuck me in, and tell me he loved me.  He would then go out in the living room and violently and relentlessly curse while beating cats into each other for an hour and a half. (shakes) Can... can I get one of those smokes offa yeh?"

Pfft...  "Relaxing", indeed...

Hell, it's not even relaxing for me, and I am a willing and eager participant in this thing.  I blame Rocksmith's auto-adjust feature on that.  I will be standing there oh-so-pleased with myself that I can finally plink out every fourth note to some small section of some Tom Petty song without crying (for once).  Then, like a jealous god punishing a mortal for his hubris, the software decides to reward me by increasing the difficulty level and all of a sudden the screen turns into a Technicolor explosion like something out of the "Beyond the Infinite" scene from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Notes all up and down the rendered guitar neck and never-before-seen chords of every type pop into existence as suddenly as if someone stuffed Coldplay's piano full of Lego bricks then hit it with a grenade.  It's all I can do not to dive behind the sofa with my hands over my head and rock back and forth in fetal position until it goes away...

Oh, and it does go away... which is worse.  You screw up a musical phrase badly enough and Rocksmith will cheerfully ramp down the difficulty level until it matches your skill level - that is, until you aren't embarrassing yourself too much.  This is the emotional equivalent of going up to the plate at a slow-pitch softball game and the noticeably bored pitcher starts waving in the outfielders yelling "This guy again...No hitter... Everybody move on up". 

Seeing the screen gradually morph before your eyes from what looks like a flock of crazed birds-of-paradise into some abandoned ghost town with the occasional note lazily tumbleweeding through is one of the saddest things ever. "But that's not fair," you weep.  Except it is.  You know in your heart of hearts that it is 100% totally, objectively fair...

It's just not very relaxing.

After one of my more spectacular failures Rocksmith came back with the heart-sinking recommendation that I practice my A chord.  Not the A5 power chord. Not Am7.  Just straight up "A". Literally one finger.  To those of you that don’t see what the big deal is here maybe an analogy will help.  

Imagine someone comes over to your house to visit.  While they are there, you decide you need to use the restroom.  When you enter, you reach in to turn on the light but, instead, you accidentally turn on the fan.  You grumble, turn off the fan, turn on the light, do your business, and return.  Your guest then says “Yeah, uh, I couldn’t help but notice you had some trouble in there with finding the light switch in your bathroom.  Why don’t you head back in there and flick the lights on and off for half an hour or so until you feel you’ve got it down pat?  I’ll wait here, ok, genius?”

Well, enough whining for now.  My right wrist has nearly recovered from my pathetic old-guy attempts at hitting enough notes of Song 2 by Blur to qualify for my gig, and, since I apparently have some sort of musical version of Stockholm Syndrome, I think I will give it another shot.  

Or twelve.

Man, I love this game...

New Site Stuff

I ran/walked the 5K track around a local golf course on Saturday.  This is my first outdoor effort toward my “run two 5Ks” goal for this year.  My time was 34:45.  Not as abysmal as I thought it would be, but I need to lose nearly five minutes off that before I feel I am ready to run an official race.  I am sore, but not as sore as I thought I would be, and it was nice to be outside doing this instead of being tied to a treadmill.  The sidebar has been appropriately updated.

Speaking of sidebar, I am going to start putting my Rocksmith status there.  I think just level and the current setlist for now.  I will just post non-DLC score update after every gig rather than trying to commit to updating the blog every single time I manage to goose my score by some minuscule amount. 

Finally, my wife went back and was reading some of the old posts I had written and ran across one called “Noah’s Sportscar”.  She reminded me that in the comments someone said “I can't wait to see your posts when he's doing his own artwork” so that is the inspiration for the new site category called “The Fridge”.  Sometimes drawings will be featured, sometimes crafts, sometimes Lego stuff, but, whatever it is it will be 100% the work of the boy.  If needed, I will provide explanations as they are given to me by him. The first one’s below - enjoy!

Si, Si, Si! It's Post CCC!

My 300th post as SnowUrchin!  Let’s celebrate with an appropriately themed write-up.  Hmmm... I don’t seem to have the abs yet for a scrap with the Persians, so that’s out... Hey!  300 is also a perfect game in bowling and I do kinda have the right sort of abs for that so let’s make that our theme.  

Bowling.  Not abs.

Wikipedia lists the loudest sound in modern times as the explosion of the island of Krakatoa in 1883.  This is wrong.  We took our son bowling for the first time and we can tell you that the loudest sound in the whole wide world is, in fact, produced when a three-year-old chucks a six-pound bowling ball from shoulder height 18 inches down the alley.

My fault.  My fault.  I gave him the ball to see if it was an OK weight for him, and, since it was, I said “Now go up to the line and throw it”.  He immediately did both those things.  Look, in my defense I thought he was gonna sort of side-arm it like the five-year-old girl a couple of lanes down was doing, not gleefully shot-put it onto the foul line.

If that BOOOOOOM wasn’t attention-getting enough the 30 or 40 seconds of sloooooowwww wobbly “ka-THUBBA... ka-THUBBA... ka-THUBBA” that followed as the ball meandered its way from bumper to bumper sure was.  I would say that never-ending over-the-finger-holes moseying “ka-THUBBA” noise is pretty much the equivalent to stripping off all your clothes, yodeling “PAY ATTENTION TO ME! PAY ATTENTION TO ME! LOOK WHAT I CAN DO!” then pooping a three-foot-high pile of Krugerrands.

I am serious when I say the boy had enough time to whine three times before the ball got to the end of the lane “It’s never gonna make it.”  I assured him it would the first two times.  I nearly agreed with him the third time.  With its very last ka-THUBBA it hit the pins and managed to gently push a few down then stop dead without falling off the end of the alley.  I didn’t think that was possible.  Now I know.

Since I didn’t want to make the lane look like the surface of the moon by the time we were done, I helped him with the rest of his (now between-the-legs) throws. He did great and had a blast.

So... lesson learned.  

Oh, btw, I also learned that left-handed occasional bowlers should really remember to take off their wedding bands before playing instead of nursing a plum-colored and plum-shaped ring-finger back to health after. 

Perfection Through Incompetence (Part III)

(Go to Part I - Part II)

According to local news outlets, the Angel Tree program helped between 9,000 and 30,000 children in the area this year - the wide spread in reported numbers depends on where you look.  It is possible the article that quoted the 9,000 number meant “families” instead of “children” but that doesn’t really match up too well with the average number of kids-per-household I saw listed on the applications.  I would say closer to two kids per family in the eligible age group rather than three or more.  It is also possible that 30,000 tags were printed and 9,000 kids were actually helped.  Maybe there is some confusion between the Angel Tree program and the closely related Toys for Tots program.  Maybe the numbers were pulled out of thin air.

Regardless of the reasoning behind the huge difference in reported numbers, this is largely a paperwork-driven process. 

Assuming each family had two kids in need that’s between 4,500 and 15,000 paper applications to be processed.  From what I saw no computers were used during the interview procedure (although during the tag fabrication process they are - more on that later). Once a person was approved for aid their name was sloppily hand-copied from what could be deciphered from the handwritten application onto a piece of paper and a receipt of sorts was given to them.  The receipt would later be presented to the SA when it came time to pick up their items from the distribution center.

The distribution center location was not confirmed until many of the interviews (a week’s worth, I believe) had already been completed.  The best that could be done was to tell each of the applicants after their approval was to visit a certain website (printed on the back of their receipt) every day to see where they needed to show up.  

Based on the level of need I saw in some of these folks and the deer-in-the-headlights looks I occasionally got when I mentioned that they would need to check an online address on the back of the receipt for the pickup location, I wondered how many of them actually had the ability (access- or knowledge-wise) to “simply go to a website” to find that information. On the other hand, they somehow found out where and when to be and what paperwork to bring with them in order to fill out these forms in the first place, so perhaps that same mechanism alerts these folks to where they need to go to pick up their stuff. In any case, many just nodded, thanked me (or grunted), and left.

Given the huge volume of paperwork that needs to be processed each year, I would have thought that computers or at least photocopiers would be used to streamline the process or make this critical yet extremely error-prone stage of the process more trackable. You could argue that computers and copiers are expensive to buy, expensive to upkeep, prone to failure, impersonal, and require at least some training to use while a pencil and paper are pretty much the opposite of those things and gets the job done well enough... and you would be right.  

In fact, I would say the existence of this paperwork nightmare is one of the keys to getting this job done “precisely well enough”.

(To be continued...)

Three Awesome Gifts

Gold?  Frankincense? Myrrh?  Are you nuts!?!  Have you seen the price of gold lately?  Don’t you know the danger the Boswellia sacra tree is in, uh... apparently?  And don’t even get me started on that scumbag back-alley religious goods dealer I usually go to.  That guy has cut my dime-bags with baking soda and bdellium for the last time, yo.

What?  Oh, bdellium?  Surely, you know...  Silent ‘b’? It’s a common adulterant for myrrh.  Harumph!  I say, thought everyone knew that, Dear Boy.  Don’t they teach the ABC’s in school anymore? My word...

I... I’m sorry for the last paragraph.  I don’t know what came over me.  I am usually at least 25% less pretentious than that in real life.  It’s just that a friend of mine got me this monocle for Christmas and I fall under its spell every once in a while when I get too close to it and then I’m all like “Egad!” this and “Your cannonball, sir” that...  There it is up there in the pic next to the number one.  

Why did he get me this?  It’s sort of a running joke that I think started when he was saddled with some very vocal silver-spoon interns to babysit for some sort of summer program.  They whined about the most ridiculous stuff and the gag between us became one of “boo-hoo, my office barely accommodates my polo pony and it doesn’t even have it’s own closet for my opera cloak”.  It has sort of morphed into him mocking me for owning an Apple product, although I am not really sure how that came to be...

In any case, it is shockingly comfortable to wear, but, sadly, it is not my prescription, so I will just use it for attending church services, picking my kid up from school, and job interviews.

He also got me thing number two called the Eviltron.  It, too, is awesome, and a lot more twisted.  When you press the button on the back it periodically makes noises (scratches, whispers, giggles, etc.) separated by long stretches of silence. It has a magnet for easily hiding it, say, on the back of a file cabinet or the underside of a metal desk drawer.  I won’t go into any more detail other than to say whoever did the audio for the “Hey, can you hear me?” sound needs to win some sort of prize for Creepiest Vocals in a Toy Ever.  Man, that dude really nailed it.

By definition, it is meant to be re-gifted.  Think about it.  Are you going to put this in your own office?  No.  When the person you are torturing with it finds it (always a possibility) are you likely to get it back?  No (well, maybe in pieces).  Also, is it possible that the DHS would unintentionally get involved if a particularly paranoid person found this “unidentified electronic device” mounted to the underside of their office chair?  You betcha.

Number three is a custom deck of cards my wife had made from one of my three-year-old’s drawings he called “Oh, It’s Just a Monster Party”.  It is one of my favorites and I will cherish these cards always. She had it done through Snapfish and I guess they can do all sorts of custom stuff fairly cheaply, even for small lots, so check it out.

Thanks again for the touching Christmas swag guys! 

I Said Pencils Down!

[Editor's Note: Sorry if you see any font and/or spacing weirdness in this post.  It appears that Blogger is hungover from last night's festivities as well...]

Okay.  We have officially burned through another year so let’s see how we did with the New Year’s Resolutions for 2011.  If you recall, my goals were to 1) Run two 5Ks 2) Try out for a play 3) Catch a fish and 4) Qualify with a handgun.  You can see the justifications for each of these here.

The results:

1. Run two 5Ks - FAIL.  This did not happen.  I was hopeful early in the year to knock this out by Easter but it did not turn out that way.  A semi-serious back issue and a more serious joint issue stopped the effort in its tracks, although I am pretty much back in business now.  My best indoor time was 30:04, so that’s something, I guess.
2. Try out for a play - PASS.  I was asked to play Jesus for the Easter thingy at church and I accepted.  Two shows, speaking parts, costume changes, the whole shebang.  I was terrified the whole time but I am told I did well and not even once did I scream “Stop looking at me!” and run off to curl up in fetal position somewhere. 
3. Catch a fish - FAIL.  I frittered away most of the year not focusing on getting this done.  Three opportunities that required little effort on my part fell through (Halloween camping trip - other couple had to cancel, Thanksgiving party - low tide, Christmas vacation at cabin - no one felt like fishing in the cold and the dark).
4. Qualify with a handgun - FAIL.  Unless “Completing Mafia II on the Xbox” counts, I did absolutely nothing to push this forward.  Well, actually, that’s not true.  Each time I would go to get a haircut I would check out the gun store next door to the stylist’s.  Since I like to knock my haircuts out early in the day the gun place was never open when I was in the area.  The one time I was getting my haircut during the hours the gun place was supposed to be open, they were closed for inventory.

So, the world being the unfair, cruel place that it is, I was rewarded with exactly as much success as the level of effort I put into meeting these goals.  Frankly, I blame society.

It is now January 1st, so it is too late to eke out a success for these items.  When I started writing this article on the afternoon of December 31st, though, I did briefly consider knocking out all three at once by driving to a friend’s house, borrowing his gun, jogging six point two miles, then shooting a fish.  That was doomed to fail for a number of reasons, the first of which is that my friend probably doesn’t have a “no questions asked” policy when it comes to loaning out his handgun, especially when I show up nervously looking at my watch and exclaiming “Quick! I need your gun and the aquarium closes in an hour!”.

But, because I think they are important, I will renew the failed goals above for 2012 but I need to add another to take the place of the “try out for a play” one.  I am thinking either “ride a horse” or “attempt to publish a short story” would be cool, but I would like to know what you think.  Leave a comment if you have any ideas.

Although the goals I set for myself were not met, the year was far from being a string of one demoralizing failure after the next.  For example:

• I bought an electric guitar and I am actually learning how to play in a fairly dedicated fashion.  I am terrible, but the calluses on the fingertips of my left hand show I am working on it, and that’s a start.  I hope I keep up with it.
• I lost two inches on my waist and put it on my chest and arms.  My BMI is no longer an important number to me, since my height to weight ratio is now closer to that of a professional hockey player (yep, I looked it up) than that of an amateur bowler.  I think I can lose another inch off my waist but that will happen just by “keepin’ on keepin’ on” with my workouts.
• I read a lot of books, and I posted 103 times. I wrote most of a short story (no, not the Big Dumb Book in the sidebar) and I am just looking for an ending to tie it together.
• My patent was officially approved.
• I attended my first parent-teacher conference, I watched my kid get his first award certificate, and I listened to him sing in three school and church pageants.  I took him bowling, built a wooden treasure chest with him, took him on first boat ride, and showed him how to fly a kite.  I took him to his first circus, and to his first sleepover, too. We went on a log flume ride and we went swimming without floaties. We put together his first Lego kit and he fired his first Nerf gun.  I witnessed his first unsolicited attempt at writing something other than his name - “Best Daddy”.

Yeah. It’s been a pretty good year.

Anyway, from my family to all of you and yours, we hope everyone out there has an awesome 2012!  Happy New Year!