Coachin', season 2

It's soccer time again, however it isn't soccer weather yet.  Hopefully next week will give us warmer weather, as I start running a gaggle of 12 year olds through some soccer training.  After talking it over with Stacey, I signed up to coach her team again.

I'm pumped about having a go at coaching again.  Last season we were 5-3-2, acceptable, but a let down considering we started out 4-0-2 and hit the top of the standings for our division.  I enjoyed being around the kids, all full of energy, spirited, and impossible to control.  I thought my attempts to remain positive and supportive through the season were going to become a Herculean effort, but I enjoyed being where I was so much that staying upbeat was natural.  I'm hoping for the same experience this season, too.

We have 8 of the 11 girls from last season, losing Anna, Milly, and Taiylor, and I'll miss all three of them.  Without going into detail about other people's kids, Anna brought speed and a permanent smile to the team, Milly wild ferocity and confidence, and Taiylor instinct and wit.  What a great combination the three of them were.  So to replace them we have three new girls, and from what I can tell at least two of them are new to the area and just getting back into soccer.  This means practices will be a skills refresher course, which will be good for everyone.  The basics never change, and keeping them in your thoughts always improves your play.  Move the ball upfield, pass to the open player, etc.  It's always good for your game.

I'm going to schedule some practices for next week, and maybe a get-together of some sort... ice cream, laser tag at Magic Mountain, something cool.  Lots of plusses to look forward to.  A big minus, on the other hand, is my recent bought with back pain.  I stopped exercising as consistently as I had over the prior couple of years, and I softened up a little.  My back was the first thing to weaken, and I pulled it about a month ago carrying Scout to bed.  After giving it a few days to heal up, I began a new regimen of stretching and core exercises, but it hasn't been the same.

My back pain stems originally from an old injury that crops up every once in a while.  Ironically, the injury came from playing soccer back in the 1980s, when I was young, in perfect health, and at the top of my game mentally and physically.  I was The Stork, the defender no one could get around 1 on 1 (except that Brazilian exchange student... thorn in my side).  In one game a forward led the ball slightly too far, and I pounced on it, unable to resist what I later saw as obvious bait.  As I focused on the ball, he tucked his head down and charged at me, and scooped me out of the way with a basic football tackle.  I flipped forward in the air, and landed flat on my back, and had to come out of the game.  I never saw the move as a personal assault, just some dirty play which you have to watch out for in pick-up games with high-schoolers.

I ended up working with a physical therapist after I kept re-aggravating the injury, and eventually strengthened the affected area, and settled the nerve down that kept getting rubbed.  Still, once in a blue moon I'll feel it again, a subtle reminder that I'm not impervious to all harm, despite being able to take a hit or two during soccer games with the crazy over-30 crowd I play with now.  Half of those guys are totally far gone crazy, struggling to retain some manhood after not becoming the professional athlete they wanted to be.  Some of the women are like that, too; don't turn your back on 'em, 'cause they'll cut ya'.

Anyway, so I'm hoping for a speedy recovery so I can participate in some drills with my girls, but if not I'll direct from the sidelines, and leave the muscle work to Jim, the assistant coach.  He's also the captain of the over-30 team I play on... or played on, depending on how I feel in a few weeks when our season starts.

Life is good all around.  I hooked up recently with my buddy who adopted a couple girls from China, both of whom enjoyed Stacey's attempt to entertain them.  I'm actually getting a bonus this year, despite fears to the contrary.  AEP has been tightening its belt with the global financial meltdown of last year, and we thought our bonuses were at risk.  As it turns out, I'll be getting enough to take the wife on a nice anniversary trip, and will be able to come back with the new bed she wanted (which will be better for both our backs).

Lastly, the book fair is this week, and I'm taking the day off on Friday to go volunteer.  I don't get over to Stacey's school much, and I like to take advantage of chances to be there so the staff gets familiar with me, which has a nice trickle-down effect on Stacey's life at school.  Plus I get to scare off kids who try to steal books.

Being a former master shoplifter, I know how to spot a kid who's thinking about stealing something.  Last book fair it was all a game of subtleties; I just tracked a couple kids with my eyes until they backed down, and stood up and meandered toward the stacks for a few who were more persistent.  I never had to embarrass anyone, never escalated anyone's mischievous thoughts into being nabbed for stealing.  It's best to avoid that and let the kid come to terms with those instincts on his own, rather than be punished and labeled, which always makes the kid worse off.  Sow your oats, get it out of your system.  That's why the Amish have Rumspringa.

A few tidbits

I asked for comments on my previous post to try to gain insight into any readers I may have accumulated over the years, but received no replies.  From this I can determine that either no one reads this, no one comments on what they read when prompted, or it is viewed infrequently and pending comments will arrive shortly.  Gardan's Steelyard suggests my first conjecture, no one reads this, is the correct one.  I could feel that as a blow to my ego, but it is helpful in that I don't feel I have to write to a specific audience, and can continue on as before, writing whatever comes to mind in a voice that pleases me.

I've been listening to the Neal Stephenson audiobook "Anathem", and find it very enjoyable.  In fact, I haven't been this happy with speculative fiction since my first reading of Asimov's "Foundation".  It also fits with my current level of patience; Foundation was much shorter, written when sci-fi books were sold in grocery stores on little metal racks, and the push was for thin books so more of them could be crammed in.  Anathem, by contrast, is a giant tome, whose audiobook weighs in at 28 CDs!  Fortunately, it isn't in high demand at the library, so I was able to renew it for a second two-week checkout period, and may have to do that once more... or just dump the remaining discs to mp3 and listen to them on my Shuffle.

I have succeeded in experimenting with alcohol without much fanfare, and without a quick downward spiral into vice or skid row.  The few people to whom I've mentioned that I started drinking have seemed disinterested, none of them crying "No! Not you! You were humanity's last hope of sanity and fidelity, truly the best of us all," or anything similar.  My daughter was the sole dissenter, but quickly accepted the occasional bottle of wine in the pantry.  She frowned the first time she saw me sip from a wine glass, and then showed no further concern.

I can't drink anything "dry" yet, or anything that has a lot of alcohol.  Sweeter wines are OK, although I quickly learned that Wild Vines and the like are cheap fare.  Chardonnay and White Zin are enjoyable, Reisling seems a safe type to get when you're eating out, so you don't get stuck with something too bitter to finish, plus waitresses don't expect you to pretend to be cultured when you order it, and can easily be convinced to dispense with the tasting ritual.

My girls are doing well.  Stacey and Scout recently did some art together in the form of drawings on posterboard, and presented myself, Liberty, and Stacey's mom with personalized drawings and messages.  Liberty has been doing a lot of cooking recently, including some of her stand-bys like pesto and jambalaya, and dishes she hasn't made for me before like stir fry and curry with naan - delicious all.

Lastly, I had an odd thing happen to me during my normal lunch walk.  Since I started taking my weight, fitness, and diet seriously in 2007, I've been taking walks during my lunch hour pretty regularly.  One of my routes takes me through the AEP garage, onto street level for about 100 yards and into the Nationwide garage, up to the 4th floor where it connects to the skyway leading to the Hyatt, and through the Hyatt to where it connects to the Columbus Convention Center, to the opposite end of the convention center, and back the way I came.  All told the round trip is about a mile and a half, and even meandering and with the hallways choked with traffic I can still get there and back in 30 - 40 minutes.  I don't do this as a substitute for a good cardio workout, I do it as a substitute to the overeating I tend to do at lunch, to stretch my leg muscles midday and get away from my desk, and an excuse to listen to podcasts.

The area leading from the Hyatt to the Convention Center is being remodeled right now, and is detoured into what looks like an enclosed terminal ramp at an airport.  The ramp itself was replaced recently as one leg of the construction was finished, and today I noticed the odd piping running along the top of the new ramp.  The piping winds strangely, and is connected with pvc joints that seem too big for the job.  So I was walking up the ramp today trying to come up with a theory of what the pipe was for.  I had my head cocked to the left and raised up looking at the pipe, holding a can of pop, mouth still slightly agape after finishing a drink when I heard a *click* from the top of the ramp.

The click came from the camera of what looked like a 1970s reporter - something of a Mr. McGee from the Lou Ferrigno Hulk TV show, or Peter Parker from the live action made for TV Spiderman movies.  He had a brown suade jacket, midlength dirty-blonde hair with bangs combed straight down, a satchel slung from his shoulder, across his chest, and down to the opposite hip, and of course the big newsman's camera.  He calmly clicked his picture from the top of the ramp, and walked off to join the other men he was with.

I imagine my picture looks very odd, possibly good filler for religious propaganda, like I'm looking desperately up at God, hoping he'll intervene in whatever my little crisis is.  Coincidentally, there were tables being set up in the convention center for the meeting this weekend of some local chapter of the ACJP (Amalgamation of Crazy Jesus People) or something similar, with stacks of books like "The Case for Christ", so there's a possibility that's exactly what the picture will be used for.  More probable is he was getting a shot of the the way the ramp opened to the Hyatt behind me as some sort of attempt at an art shot, and I was extraneous.

That's the news from Lake Autery, where the woman is strong, the man is good looking, and both the kids are above average.

Overanalysis redux

There is a question at the bottom of this post. Please leave a comment with your answer. It's important. It may change the nature of this blog significantly.

So there's this web comic I like from a young-ish fellow Linux/perl geek called xkcd. The format is mainly stick figure drawings, although some panels are more realistic and show some skill and art training. I came across the following one recently, about the definition of "first base", "second base", etc. in relationships, which was a hoot:

http://xkcd.com/540/

I found it again today and noticed something I missed before. To the right of the first base foul line is the following sequence of numbers:

0110 0010 0110 0001
0111 0011 0110 0101
0010 0000 0011 0010

Knowing geeks like I do, I knew this was a binary sequence to represent ASCII, so I went about decoding it. First, set everything into groups of 8 instead of four:

01100010
01100001
01110011
01100101
00100000
00110010

Then apply a little math to convert them to base 10:

64 + 32 + 2 = 98
64 + 32 + 1 = 97
64 + 32 + 16 + 2 + 1 = 115
64 + 32 + 4 + 1 = 101
32... = 32
32 + 16 + 2 = 50

Then find them on an ASCII chart:

 98 = b
 97 = a
115 = s
101 = e
 32 = [space]
 50 = 2

Ah! Cute joke. I was a little upset that I didn't have a quick way to do this handy, maybe an Excel macro or a perl one-liner. Developing something to decode this programmatically would have been straightforward, but would also have taken longer than doing the 5 characters by hand (I knew the space on sight, which most geeks who have programmed in BASIC know from CHR/ASC commands).

I noticed a couple new things during the decoding, cutting the bitterness a bit: Numbers all start with 0011, and the first 15 lower case letters start with 0110. If I had known that ahead of time, I could have decoded that by sight based on the way he laid the numbers out, lacking only the "s".

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My question: At what point did you stop reading and skip to the question?

Bonus question: Did the above question make you think of the word "recursive"?

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Booze

First, here's my phrase of the day: Speculation is not a best practice.

Snooty, subtle, widely applicable, and something I will have forgotten about a week from now. I like it. Just like a good bottle of wine.

Anyone who has known me well between the years 1991 and 2008 has known that I don't drink. For a full 17 years in my adult life, the only alcohol to touch my lips was in the two or three cap-fulls of NyQuil to help me with winter flus. With the help of an annual flu shot, even NyQuil had become a rarity for me. No booze, period.

I have never been drunk, and being around people who have had too much always made me uncomfortable. The social drinkers who like scotch with their conversation, the regular guys who grab a couple beers for the ballgame, the cultured families who like a glass of wine with dinner (or the church groups who like a box of wine after a prayer meeting), those I've always been OK with, and I made efforts to not seem judgmental.

I'm pretty good with words. I can be convincing, have on occasion talked my way into places I have no business being, and when I'm fishing for information I'm good at eliciting much more out of people than I give them back. Without meaning to sound like a braggart, I'd make a good spy. Sometimes I imagine myself like Hannibal Heyes from Alias Smith and Jones... Anyway, no matter how eloquent I can phrase something, no matter how quick I am with words or how convincing I can be when I try, I always make "No, I don't drink... don't mind me, I'll just hang out and watch." sound a lot like "you are a bunch of losers and I wish I wasn't here." Something about the inflection or cadence, I don't know.

To be frank, this little faux pas, emotional blind spot, this inability to sell a feeling confidently, has cost me friends. It has kept me off invite lists, and it has probably cost me promotions in a time when I seemed to be making inroads to the "good old boy" network of my last job, but was then benched and given a fixed salary.

I seem to judge when I don't intend to. By not joining in the drinking game, I create a rift between me and other people. If it were cocaine and crazed drug users, I'd be happy about creating that rift, but the people I know who drink are cool, and most don't get falling down drunk or fondly tell their drinking anecdotes. You know, the ones that end with "And when I came to..." and involve things like checking your car for damage, or not knowing where you are or who the chick wearing your shirt is. That's the kind of boozin' I don't want to be associated with. The tray full of shooters, people shouting a lot and trying to be rowdy, the throw-the-table-tennis-ball-into-a-cup and other get drunk games, the things stupid college kids do when they first taste freedom. People being stupid while drunk at parties - I'm against it.

But most of the people I know don't let themselves go that far. They drink, they relax, they're happy and open. Inversely, I don't drink, I don't relax, and I'm seldom happy. Open? I see myself as open, but a lifetime of being an outlier has built up some bad habits. I've got more work to do there, but one problem at a time.

I'd like to relax, and it was this thought that stuck in my head, and encouraged me to take the plunge. After years of being dry, I just decided to give it a go and see what I thought. I went to a grocery store with my wife and bought a random bottle of red wine, a Pinot Noir, that declared itself flavorful and fruity. We took it home, and I poured myself a little swig in my only wine glass, swirled it around like the city-folk do, took a sniff, had no context to put the aroma in so banked it for future reference, and drank it. It was nasty and bitter. Possibly it was corked, or just a shitty vintage, I still don't have enough context.

Since then my wife and I have gone through a few different bottles, and I think I'm learning the flavor a little. It's interesting, and I don't feel like I'm on my way to ruin financially or in danger of becoming a daytime lush - a glass or two at night, and not every night, seems to suffice to help me relax in the evening. That's a good thing.

Plus, now I get to experiment in other ways, like getting a bottle of champagne with the hotel room on Valentine's day, which was OK but we probably should have chilled it, and trying a screwdriver and then a little rum at The Thirsty Ear when we met up with some friends to listen to some live music. (Yes on the screwdriver, no on the rum.) Fun. Turns out bars aren't like they're portrayed in movies. No one tried to pick up anyone else's girl, there weren't any thrown chairs or fist-fights, nor did I see any cloak and dagger meetings with code phrases... "I hear the ducks are wandering this June.", "Yes, but only when it's sunny." Nothing like that at all. Just people chillin', and the more adventurous/wasted dancing a little to the music.

More on this new development as it progresses. Until then, I recommend Vino100 on Polaris to anyone just starting out with wine. Nice ladies, those.

Alarming

I found the following weirdness in an old script of mine at work:

for (@purge_array) {
        print "Running command $_\n";
        eval {
                local $SIG{ALRM} = sub {
                        my $mod_time = time - (stat($logfile))[9];
                        if ( $mod_time > 180 ) {
                                die "alarm\n";
                        }
                        else {
                                alarm 0;
                                alarm $timeout;
                        }
                };
                alarm $timeout;
                system($_);
                alarm 0;
        };
}

It took me a minute to figure out what I was thinking. Basically there is this list of commands (@purge_array) that I have to run through a third-party program that sometimes just dies without exiting. It doesn't take up CPU when it dies, and it doesn't hold file handles open, it just dies, but still shows up in the process list.

Originally all the commands were part of our nightly maintenance scripts, and once in a while the maintenance script would still be running when everyone got into the office the next day. This was my approach to fix it. We decided that if the logfile hadn't been updated in three minutes, that the command had failed. The command may take more than three minutes to run, but it would log periodically, and never longer than a minute between log entries, so we picked three minutes as the worst-case scenario.

Perl has this neat alarm function. You call alarm with a number of seconds until the script exits with an error, and then call whatever expensive function, then you set call alarm again and pass it "0", to turn off the alarm. If the expensive function completes in time, everything's cool and the script continues, but if the expensive function takes longer than the number of seconds you passed to alarm, the script exits.

Perl also has a way to interrupt system calls, such as the alarm signal ($SIG{ALRM}). I wrote my own subroutine for alarms that took the current time, and subtracted it from the time the logfile was last modified. If it was greater than 3 minutes, go ahead and exit, otherwise reset the alarm and let the script wait some more. This is, in theory, happening in the background while the third-party program is still running, and can continue to reset the alarm as long as logfile entries keep coming.

The final perk of all this is I'm doing it through "eval", a sort of virtual machine, which makes purists cringe for reasons that aren't clear to me. The only thing that exits if the alarm goes off is the eval statement, and the next item in @purge_array can be processed without the whole script failing.

It was "eval", in fact, that led to my fight Randal Schwartz and my eventual apostasy from the church of Perlmonks.org. You can read more about that here, if you like. I promise there is hardly any real code discussed.

Snow Drivers of Dune

There's no point in being humble about it at this point: When it comes to driving in bad weather, I have super-powers.

Honesty, not vanity. I built them up slowly, from starting driving with an 81 Dodge Challenger whose favorite activity was to throw me at guardrails if there was weather, to my insane road acrobatics as a young man, to driving pizza for 4 years in a series of perpetually ailing vehicles. Over the years I developed a nice touch with cars in bad road conditions. It grew on me, got in my head, and, well... I became superhuman. There, I've said it. Superhuman.

In my current car, I'm pushing 50,000 miles on all my tires, and if there is weather, they slide if I break hard, and have trouble getting traction from a dead stop, despite the Vue's traction-control system. Regardless, during this Tuesday's snow, I trekked from Ohio to Virginia to attend my grandmother's funeral, coming back late Wednesday through conditions that had gotten marginally better in some places, and significantly worse in others.

If you're wondering, I'm not bent out of shape about my grandmother because I didn't know her as a child, and never thought of her as a grandmother. Her sister was my grandmother by virtue of adopting my mother as an infant. I don't know the whole story, but the funeral illuminated some pieces of it for me, like she was so guilt-ridden about giving up my mother that she adopted two other kids later in life, was involved in foster care, and worked in a nursery. In my family's typical style, she spent a lifetime of atonement and martyrdom trying to undo one mistake - to regain the family's love, perhaps, or maybe to buy her way back into heaven. Don't know the whole story, or her reasons, but it's the kind of thing you see in my family. It was familiar, and, hearing the stories, I felt that I knew her.

For example, I felt that it was my duty to brave the weather to be with my family through this, whether or not I got killed on the road in the process. That kind of foolishness is just the thing someone in my family would do.

I had confidence enough in my road-mojo to believe I could handle the trip, and so I handled it, with nary a slide or near-collision along the way. I was stuck at about 40, sometimes a little less, for about a third of the trip, feeling my tires start to show early signs of slippage if I went any faster. There was no one else in the car, so I had no distractions, and didn't fall into the trap of second-guessing myself for the safety of loved ones. The only problem with the trip was that the extra concentration needed to feel the tires caused me to lose focus on the audiobook I was listening to, I had to keep rewinding it back a minute or two to hear what I missed. It makes the story much less enchanting if you have to do that too much.

Plus the story is part of a series of letdowns I'm slogging my way through: Sandworms of Dune. I am a huge Dune fan, and I typically list "Heretics of Dune" as my favorite book. Heretics describes the encroaching insanity of the Bene Gesserit, their struggle to deal with returning peoples from The Scattering, updated Face Dancers, Sheeana (the girl who controls sandworms), and a description of what an Axlotl tank actually is -- hee hee.

Anyway, Frank Herbert's son discovered some notes his dad left about continuing the series, and got together with another sci-fi author and wrote a bunch of prequel novels and post-Chapterhouse novels. I didn't like them, but I kept reading them anyway, struggling to keep an open mind... this reminds me of an anecdote:

Back when I gave blood to the Red Cross regularly, before a series of poorly trained nurses butchered my veins too much to give without getting ill or having several days worth of pain, I kept an appointment and noticed a scared girl sitting across from me with some of her friends. She had intended to donate, but was squeemish about it, came close to feinting (which a few people do when they see or think about blood). I staged a subtle intervention to help her out. I saw that she had one of the Dune prequel novels with her (House Atreides, perhaps), and as the nurse was having her ball her fist be squeezing a rubber toy, I struck up a conversation with about Dune.

She had been roped into reading it by one of the friends she was with. Said friend was adamant that the writing of Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson were *exactly* like Frank's work, and had a little geeky fit about it right then and there. It's nothing of the kind, of course, but I kept my opinion to myself and kept talking to her in a calm voice, eliciting both opinions and flirtiness out of her. When we were done talking, her bag of blood was half full, and she didn't remember the nurse inserting the needle. That was possibly my best work at distraction.

Point being there are fanboys (and girls) that get fooled into believing they're reading something outstanding when they are not. In the case of the new Dune novels, some elements are interesting, but the way Bene Gesserit speak is wrong, there is less and less intelligent reflecting by the characters, and it strays towards space opera. Yet, I've managed to read through five of the new novels, mostly out of nostalgia and to see Frank's outline of the story's continuation. I don't really hate any of it, it's just not Dune.

So Sandworms of Dune was my company on the way down and back, with many short rewinds. I didn't wreck by virtue of my superpowers, and I paid my respects to a very familiar woman who I never knew.

Facebook

Here's my theory about Facebook: The top memes are alcohol and ass-kissing, and the unspoken magnet is fantasizing about people you can't have. For example, there is a high instance of replies to one of my friends by the same married woman, full of standard sycophant language. There are large numbers of pics of friends I have since deleted where they are drunk at parties, and hamming it up for the camera by stressing their faces into various inhuman emotions meant to look cool, or to look like they are having fun.

It started bugging me, and I decided to be petty. I went on a rampage deleting apps, quiz results, my comments on people's walls, pictures and videos I had posted, and removing people from my friends list that were not truly friends. This included people I had vague curiosity about and was stalking, people I had only met a couple times, and, sadly, people I was acquainted with in school and had no animosity towards, many of them interesting and world-travelers, posting pics and commentary about their journeys. They were the exceptions to the madness.

Maybe it was wrong of me to unfriend you, Terry, Ann, Bert, JJ, Seth, Andrea, as you had interesting stuff to say that I enjoyed looking at. But honestly, were we friends? You are Bill's friends, and he, and the AP, are our only connection. Our relationships probably wouldn't have deepened into something meaningful by virtue of Facebook. You were "interesting people I know", which maybe should have it's own category, maybe not. Is there such a thing as "cool by proxy"? Does knowing cool people make me cool? Finally, am I online to try to look cool? Don't know. I know I like to write, and I know I like to write about people I love. If that gets me a circle of sycophants, but experience tells me it won't.

So, hey, I wouldn't go delete everything (and everybody) again, but I have no regrets. And if any of you are interested in real friendship and not just "oh, hey Curtis, um.. how's it going? Good...good... Is Bill there?" then friend me, or better yet, send me an email. Or call. Or just come over. My door is always open, and my dog doesn't bite. Come on in and make yourself at home. And if you cook my food, make enough for everyone, and leave a note explaining what the hell happened if you leave before I get home, that'd be nice, too.

Anyway, so I purged, and then started over slowly by posting a single picture of Scout, and I turned the description into a small blog entry, as the UI just let me keep typing. The result appealed to me, people could stumble across a big story where they expect a quick description to be. So I uploaded a few more pictures, and went on at length about each of them, all about Stacey, and Scout, and Liberty, and how much I love all three of them. I re-added basic info to my purged profile, replied to some of my friends' notes, posted a couple status changes.

Not much action on any of it, except from the people I'm already close to... the way it should be. I don't expect much commentary on me doting on my family - in fact, 9 years of writing this blog (and it's predecessor) has taught me that family diaries don't attract fanfare. And yet, I feel good writing about the people I love, so I'll keep doing that.

Fool marketers and how they misrepresent me.

Check out these links:
http://www.synchrondata.com/pheaven2/www/area11.htm
http://www.spoke.com/info/pCgxMyh/CurtisAutery

The first link is from a small piece of JavaScript I wrote and published around 1997 called the "remote control search engine interface". This was pre-google, when search engines had wildly differing results, and Netscape 3 had some hot new features like browser windows being able to talk to each other through script. I searched for a way to choose a search engine through a pull-down menu, and if I didn't like the results I could just pick another engine and hit the button again for a new search. The scripts I found to do this all had giant warning on them about property, copyright, I'll track you down I swear it, etc. The code was all obfuscated and crazy, and I thought "hey, I'm a budding programmer, and there's no reason why something so simple shouldn't be free for anyone to use"... and this was before I stumbled across the open source movement, gnu, linux, or anything like that. So off I went to make my own.

The result was passable. It had a pop-up window that listed Webcrawler, Yahoo, Hotbot, Lycos, AltaVista, maybe a couple others. You choose your engine, hit the button, and the main window changed to the results, but the pop-up window stayed so you could do more searches. Nice enough, and I had this giant disclaimer in the code:

There are a number of items like this on the web, all of them copyrighted with huge disclaimers about legal rights. This will be probably the first public-domain interface for this type of function. I only ask that you leave the top "note" comments in tact when copying this file, or editing it. Perhaps you can add an additional comment stating the original file has been modified.

Cute. So I published it to CompuServe's "PC File Finder", which was a big place back then to put programs you had written, as was ftp.cdrom.com, but none of my buddies were as familiar with popular FTP sites as they were CompuServe, so I just posted it there. Since I said anyone could use it, and it was usable and served a niche, it wound up a little later on a collection of freeware utilities. You know, the CDs at MicroCenter, et. al. that have 500 programs for $7.50. The top link is the last reference I can find to the existence of the CD, and, alas, the code seems to be lost for good now. Not that it matters, I could write a better one faster now using Ajax tools. And plus some of the object model loopholes I was exploiting back then to have browser windows talk to each other have long since been plugged.

The funny thing about all this is how they labeled the program: "Curtis Autery's Remote Control Search Engine Interface. (JAVA)" It wasn't Java, and I certainly never claimed that it was. Making it Java back then would have made it slower than dirt starting up, defeating the whole point. So they misrepresented me by either going too fast and not paying attention, or not understanding JavaScript != Java. Fly-by-night marketers trying to make a quick buck. Shame.

The second link above is my profile on spoke.com. Until a few days ago, I had never head of spoke.com, and certainly didn't go out there to make a profile. They must have collected my name and company from some document on the net... I had my résumé out there for a while, back before I knew how to write a good one, and was using it as some sort of social networking attempt. Maybe they found that and matched the company. My spoke profile doesn't mention any jobs other than Sterling, where I stopped working at in 2003, and clicking on the "full job history" link brings you to a page prompting to sign up and give them money. Doesn't LinkedIn offer the same stuff for free and give you full control over it?

Lastly, the only info they have on Sterling Commerce is that they make software, and that there address is:

Sterling Commerce
24 Frank Lloyd Wright Drive
Ann Arbor, MI 48105-9755

I didn't work in Michigan, I worked at the Columbus office. Bunch of monkeys. Shame.

How is it that these fools manage to stay in business? Are they turning a profit while legit tech companies are struggling? I'd like to think not. Anyway, the moral of the story is don't believe everything you read about yourself on the Internet. If you want better info about me that isn't on this blog, check out:

http://atengine.sourceforge.net/ (although this is very dated and I stopped working on it when I realized better blogging/photo solutions were available for free... blogger, picasa, etc.)
http://www.osix.net/modules/viewprofile/?name=cautery (Sign up if you're into geeky puzzles, and you can see people's comments on my solutions.)
http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=134983 (Sadly, I am as cool as Captain Marvel only in the world of Perl)

Goings On

I haven't updated this for a while, which is good for the reader as most of what I had to say would have been crazy sounding. Why? I've been struggling with the tail end of the emotional upheaval that comes with winter's low light levels. I was a mess for the last month, and struggled to not let sadness and paranoia prevent me from being a loving and interested husband and father. Fate's ironic hand makes this have an inverse effect on my programming job.

Work was busy with end of the year craziness while most of my colleagues were on vacation. Emotional turmoil is actually a boon to coders, especially my particular breed of it, which focuses my attention on bottlenecks, bad planning, faults in design and implementation, and fine details, as angst causes me to search for ways to improve my condition. At home this makes you see everything as tainted and hopeless... what's the opposite of rose-colored glasses? In front of a computer this freakish focus on all things bad draws my eyes right to code flaws, and I draw from an overflowing fountain of creativity to produce patches, new system designs, and rough drafts of new programs to address what ails us. Smiles from the boss, and fewer interfering co-workers to prevent me from attacking our servers willy-nilly. Ideal, except for the impetus.

Unfortunately, my successes at work result in blank stares at home as I attempt to explain them. Each proud accomplishment takes 10 or so minutes of setup before it makes sense, and my punchlines involve the arcane. These things are important to me, and at times I feel as though I have created works of subtlety and simple beauty, but I can't describe it well to those I love the most. "I'm proud of what I do, and there's art in my soul," says I, without being able to qualitatively express why what I'm doing is different than the tech support guy with a cubicle full of Dilbert strips and Sci-Fi memorabilia. It's upsetting.

Christmas

This was the first year since Stacey's mom and I broke up that we didn't put up a tree. There were a few reasons: money, Liberty's decor is overtaking the house and I don't want to ruin it with fallen needles, Stacey has been home less with basketball and wanting to spend more time with her mom, and I was tapped out on energy and enthusiasm. I didn't feel too bad about it, and Christmas was fine anyway, but Scout is entering the golden holiday years, and I'm going to try to do my part to make her holidays as fun and fulfilling as I can, just like I did for Stacey.

Stacey was less interested this year in getting loads of goodies, and instead wanted a trip to the mall to buy clothes and beauty supplies. I ended up getting her a couple token presents to unwrap with the family, both DVDs of TV shows - one she likes now, and one she liked when she was younger.

We spent Christmas Day over at Liberty's sister's place, where she lives with her fiancé. We did normal Christmas stuff, and it was relaxing and fun, but there was one sad event that left a deep impression on me: The aforementioned show she liked as a kid that I gave her a DVD of - she didn't remember it. At all. The show was "Eerie Indiana", and showed in reruns when Stacey was in the first grade. Back then I had a TV and Tivo in my room, and Stacey would snuggle up next to me in bed and watch a show or two a couple times a week, to be followed by us going out and rounding up some neighborhood kids to go play at a park, or maybe just her and me heading off to the mall or a craft store, or out to eat. Just us. Just doing lighthearted, hang out with someone you love stuff. And it's faded from her memory. So has her preschool years at the Loving Care childcare center, where she would greet me with wide arms and a full sprint singing "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!!".

Gone.

How soon before her earliest memories of me are not of our happiest time together, but are when we started to fight with each other, struggling over being responsible and independent? How soon before she forgets falling asleep in my lap, content that Daddy is all it takes to fix the ills of the world? How long before the sky loses its medicine? Upsetting.

Basketball

Stacey's 7th grade basketball team is more than halfway through the season, and it's been an interesting experience. Most of the team was from Stacey's Girl Scouts troop, and have spent years learning the habit of ignoring the adult in charge. Years of not taking anything seriously. Years of playing social dominance and pack order games. Years of Lord of the Flies. The coach at the beginning of the season met with the parents, and gave a speech containing the following points:

- My team went 14 and 0 when I was at this school, so I know some stuff to help us win
- I won't let the girls bring their social problems to the court. The team is one clique.
- I'll make sure everyone stays positive, there's no room for negativity on the team.

Yesterday marked the team's 7th loss in a row. The games I've watched have shown that the team is divided into cliques, where the girls prefer ill-advised passes across the court to their friends rather than good tactical passes to nearby open teammates. Despite practicing several times per week for the last two months, most of the girls still shoot two-handed. Lastly, Stacey reports that after the last game, the coach, after perceiving her post-game critique was being ignored, got angry and stormed out of the locker room. This, while not intentional, and not entirely the coach's fault, negates all that she intended to do at the beginning of the season.

It hasn't all been bad, though. A few of the girls are learning tactics, and a couple can shoot moderately well at this point. Stacey took advantage of some extra playing time she got when a teammate got injured, and made a good steal, which earned her extra playing time the next game, where she made another steal and a couple good blocked shots. So the coach can now see her as a fair player (who, based on the practices I've seen, is on par skill-wise with the rest of the team), despite her low social position in the group. Stacey has been benched most of the season, until her last little opportunistic feat, due mainly to social issues rather than skill. The coach was snowed by the low opinion other players had of her, and it took another player getting injured to correct that. Upsetting.

Illness

I thought I was hospital-bound last Friday. I woke up with stomach cramps, and in the bathroom I suffered what felt like a panic attack, becoming feverish, nauseous, and sweating copiously. After that settled down I took a shower to clean up, and got hit with shaking, and then couldn't will myself to stand. I was laying partially prone, partially propped up on my elbows, wondering if I'd be able to make it to shut off the water, wondering if Liberty would hear me if I called her for help.

Once I regained control of my muscles and the sweats stopped, I showered properly, and then like an idiot decided to get ready for work like nothing was wrong. My boss quickly identified my near-death state and suggested I leave and go see my doctor, which I did. My doctor diagnosed a viral infection, saying the worst of it was probably over, but to take some token anti-nausea pills to help feel better.

After a day my appetite came back, and there were no recurrences of waking up with a body on strike. A quick recovery, but the experience was... upsetting.

Conclusion

I could go on about other upsetting things: money woes, marital and paternal ups and downs, lukewarm, begrudging tolerance from the people I try to open up to. But I'll say this instead:

Maya, maya, maya. All is illusion. The light is returning, and I feel good. I love my wife, and I love my daughters. My house is standing, and my bills are paid. My body is strong (again), and my mind is sharp. I am good at my job, and my co-workers respect my skill and come to me for help, regardless of their personal opinion of me.

The temptation is to demand that people love and adore you, and be embittered when they don't. As Randy Pees once said, people's opinion of me is none of my business. And as I say now, feeling important and adored is the biggest illusion of all. People are fickle in their opinions, and chasing down affection from them will always suck the life out of you and leave you dried up and unhappy.

I've got my girls. I've got my brain. The rest can go hang.

This American Life vs. the MP3-CD

There is this show on NPR called "This American Life" that I have been listening to for years. I have 104 podcasts of the show saved in various places, and it is one of the weekly shows I put on my iPod Shuffle for listening to during commutes to and from work (through my radio's auxiliary input, mind you, not headphones), and during my daily walks at lunchtime. I enjoy Ira Glass' interview style, the topics of the show, and the recurring guest speakers such as Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris. The show is more refreshing than Terry Gross' interviews on "Fresh Air", and more substantive (and sometimes almost as funny) as "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" with Peter Sagal, Carl Kasell, and various panelists. There are interesting and bizarre things I never would have heard of without this show, La Pulcina Piccola, a finger puppet opera about Chicken Little (pulcina.org, check it out), and summer camps run by the Israeli military that let young girls fire live ammo (here), to name a couple.

So I have these in-laws now that are pretty cool. They, like all the girls in their family, are artsy, and I heard a story about the dad, Steve, giving one of the girls a present of a book or CD that had to do with Garrison Keillor of "A Prairie Home Companion" fame, so they're familiar with things NPR already. With Christmas coming up, I thought hey, how cool would it be to give them a present of a bunch of This American Life burned to CD? The only problem is, they don't have a computer to speak of to play mp3s, and their home audio system is older, and hence probably can't play mp3s burned to CD. My 104 hour-long shows burned in audio disk format would take around 78 CDs... and may still not play in their home system if it is only compatible with Red Book CDs and not CD-R. That's a bad plan. "Here, Mom and Dad Allerding, here's a crate full of CDs, and some cork and glue in case you need to just turn them into coasters." No, what I needed was something as an accessory that was reasonably priced, portable, and could play MP3 CDs.

What's in fashion now in portable audio are boomboxes you can plug an iPod into, or mp3 players that require interfacing to a computer to load up on files. Since most people have computers with net access these days, or cell phones that you can download songs over the cell network, there is a very small market for CD players that can read mp3 files off of the disk. I managed to find one that was inexpensive and had good reviews on Amazon, but with one reviewer saying the following about it, which was relevant:

Not great for podcasts, otherwise fine

I picked this product up specifically for playing MP3 podcasts burnt to a CD. The podcasts play, but are cut off part of the way through. They are usually an hour long each and seem to cut short about halfway through. I'm wondering if it has a max length it can play for a single mp3 before it freaks and skips to the next one.

Anyway, since that was the primary reason I purchased it, I'm a bit disappointed. Otherwise it seems like a good product.

OK, so I won't order that off of Amazon. I shelved the idea for a few days, and this Saturday I went out doing my final round of Christmas shopping and stopped by Target. In the electronics department, I immediately found a boombox for $40 that said it could play MP3-CDs, the Memorex MP-4047. "Hot damn!" thought I, and I bought it along with some blank CDs, and went home to burn some podcasts.

Along the way, I got nervous about the one Amazon review, and looked it back up to see what product he was reviewing. Unsurprisingly, it was the Memorex MP-4047. So before I gave a well meaning but utterly useless gift, I decided to check one of the CDs I had just burned to see if it had the problem the Amazon guy spoke of. Sadly, it did. There were some files that had some clips in them, and they skipped to the next track after about 20 minutes. One file clipped less frequently, and skipped to the next track after about 30 minutes, and a few played through all the way without any problems.

I did an Internet search on the player, finding lots of retail outlets selling it, the Amazon reviews copied across multiple sites verbatim, and nothing else. The thriving community of Linux geeks were no help, since, again, there is no market for this type of device. I downloaded the manual from memorex.com (so I didn't have to break the seal on the printed manual, and I could still make the player look the the box had never been opened), and went to its troubleshooting section. There was no mention of limitations on mp3 files, no max or min bitrate, max song length, nothing.

Left to my own devices, and thinking like a programmer being rushed to get a product out the door that no one will ever use, I conjectured that each time there was an audible clip in the file the boombox was playing, it incremented an error counter. Once the error counter reached a given number, the file was aborted. This makes sense on 5 minute songs, as they would sound like crap if, say, 25 clips were encountered before the song ended. An hour-long podcast with a chirp every minute or two is a different animal, though; you can ignore the anomalies, and be really interested in the conclusion of the discussion. Having the player abort before you got to the punchline of an hour long show... that would really suck.

There were a number of approaches I could have taken at this point. I could have split each mp3 file into 10 minute chunks, assuming that no 10-minute file would contain enough errors to cause an abort. I could convert the files into the other file format the MP-4047 supports, WMA files. Lastly, I could re-sample the mp3s with something that had good bitrate and sound level control. I did the latter, since there was less file manipulation and research involved, using the "lame" application (an anagram that stands for "Lame Ain't an Mp3 Encoder") on my Linux box, forcing the files to mono and 44.1 kHz using the following command line:

for x in *.mp3; do lame --mp3input -m m --resample 44.1 $x /home/curtis/Desktop/resamples/$x; done

Having 100 files to go through, and each hour-long file taking roughly 3 minutes to resample, I had some time on my hands, so I went to the store to buy some more baking materials for Liberty's project to bake two complete iterations of Amish Friendship Bread in one day -- 16 loaves -- so that she can give them out as presents and bring some to potlucks.

I spent a grand total of 4 hours listening to the first disk I burned with the new files. There were no audible clips in the podcasts, and all of them played to completion. Success!

So I did two things this weekend of note: I crossed my in-laws off of my Christmas shopping list, and applied my universal problem solving algorithm to a problem that had previously flown under the radar of my geek brethren. Plus I've been chowin' on friendship bread all day. All-around good weekend. And to the Allerding family and friends who stumble across this prior to Christmas... Shhhh!

Gifts for Stacey

Stacey is 12 now, playing on her school's basketball team, looking grown-up and acting independent. She has a circle of acquaintances that I have never met; I see her talking to some of them when I have reason to be in her school -- when I volunteered at the book fair, or when I attend an orchestra or choir concert, or a basketball game. She is not at the top tier in the school's pecking order, and doesn't strive to be. The girls she fought with for dominance for so many years have gone their separate ways, and Stacey is at a point where she has a lot of opportunity, and few things weighing her down.

She can sing. She can dance. She can play various sports. She can argue... boy, can she argue. She is not afraid of math, or contributing in class, or of social shunning for being smart. Stacey is tall, and beautiful, and is becoming more classy and discerning every month now. And though she has grown away from total dependence on me, doesn't base her self-worth on my opinions, and is likely to say "no, I don't want to go with you dad, go by yourself" for whatever event, we have managed to find our bond again and love and support each other the way only a father and daughter can. Our relationship went through a rocky period this year, but we had a strong foundation to weather the storm.

I'm so proud of her and her growth that I have a hard time writing about her, as I get too emotional and stop making sense. In her childhood, I did my best to support Stacey in her efforts to explore all life has to offer, friendships, the arts, sports, the sciences. I believed in her, believed that her brilliant mind and her love of life and people would win out over the challenges she faced -- when in school the answers stopped leaping off the page at her, when her longtime classmates stopped inviting her to their parties, when the other soccer players started to get better field awareness and stronger shots than she did, when she started to be less eager to go to voice lessons or dance class.

I knew she was strong enough to get through all the challenges and setbacks, to find her voice, to deny apathy a foothold in her heart, to remember how interesting the world is and how much it wants her to explore. But during the worst of it, I was afraid. She and I had grown cool towards each other, her schoolwork started to slip, the TV was on more and more. The shining dream she had of being the pediatric cardio-specialist, confident, dependable, loved and respected by all, started to fade. I felt helpless, and my efforts to encourage her to keep trying were rebuked.

In the end, our love for each other stayed stronger than the problems. She turned the corner academically, socially, and physically. Best of all, she did it herself, on her own terms, at her own pace, when she decided her wounds had healed enough, and it was time to get back in the game. So, I guess it's not my job any more to kiss her skinned knees and tell her to watch out for the mean kids [figuratively -- I never did either of those things literally], but to let her know that I still believe in her, and that I'll love her no matter how the endgame plays out.

I recently went to Amazon's "gift organizer" and identified who all my purchases over the last decade were for. The process took me from the current date backwards to 1999, one purchase at a time, and it got me feeling pretty nostalgic. Over the last few years, there were plenty of items going to extended family and friends... Liberty has some stuff, little Scout, Uncle Bill, my mentee Dave, some members of the old church group I was in, extended family. The further back I went, the more I found that everything was for either me or Stacey. During the time my life consisted of only Stacey, work, and emptiness, I bought a lot of books for myself to keep sane. And for Stacey, a few trinkets here and there, and mainly books. Amazingly, there were only ten dates that I purchased items for Stacey from Amazon. I thought I used them a lot more, but I guess online shopping never quite replaced the instinct to go out to a real store and handle the wares you want before you buy them.

Here are all of the items I have ever bought for Stacey from Amazon.com, and the dates I bought them:

Nov 27, 1999, "And if the Moon Could Talk" (book). This is the first bedtime story I ever bought Stacey. She was 3 years and 3 months old. Her mother and I were still together, but it was clear that our marriage was on its last leg. She and I broke up 2 months later. I first read the book to Stacey at the apartment I moved into. She and I shared a bedroom for about a year, with her bed immediately beside mine. It faced a kid's bookshelf that I bought for her, and filled with lots of Doctor Seuss and Madeleine books, her favorites. At bedtime, she would get under the covers, examine the bookshelf carefully, then throw off her blankets, run and grab the book she wanted, and get in bed with me and snuggle up to listen to me read it. After that I would put her back in her own bed and tuck her in, where she would contentedly fall asleep. For the first few months at the new place, more often than not I would wake up with her back in my bed.

Sep 23, 2000, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (book). There was a large gap in time, close to a year, between the first and second purchases for Stacey, but I still preferred to look for things in stores back then, and if I was getting something out of the blue for Stacey, I made sure she was with me to help pick it out. She liked the Grinch story from the animated version we had on VHS (still a popular format in 2000) that had Boris Karloff as the Grinch, however we couldn't find the book version of this story in the local bookstores, so I gave buying from the Internet another whirl... Along with watching various VHS tapes with Stacey, I was also going nuts with my new Tivo then, recording lots of Blue's Clues, Rolie Polie Olie, Bear in the Big Blue House, Rugrats (pre "All Grown Up!"), Wild Thornberrys, As Told By Ginger (my favorite), and Madeleine (her favorite) TV shows. We spent a lot of afternoons out doing stuff, playing at the park down the street, buying craft gear to make bead animals and felt art projects, playing at the local mall's play area, and then we spent a lot of nights after we got home with her sitting in my lap watching whatever had recorded that day on the Tivo. The Grinch book made it to our bedtime story shelf, and got read a few times, but didn't displace the favorites for little 4 year old Stacey: Sneetches, and Madeleine's Rescue.

Nov 11, 2000, "Measuring Penny" (book). Stacey was still in a play-based daycare at age 4, and never went to a true pre-school. I had no intention of pushing her to be a focused, driven, and crazy student at a high-class multi-thousand dollar tuition primary school, either. However, we enjoyed playing brain games. At age 4, I had taught her, using circles drawn on a whiteboard at my work, how fractions work... divide a circle into 4 parts, and shade in two of them, and you've filled up one half of the circle... 1/2 = 2/4. She also played a lot of preschool computer games, solved puzzles on nickjr.com (back before they got weird and started charging money to play), and we used to love this card game that was basically nouns that you would deal out a few of and tell a story based on. She quickly changed from making up stories like "There was a carrot, and it turned into a car, and it turned into ice cream" to "After I ate my CARROT, I was still hungry, so I got in my CAR and went to the store to buy ICE CREAM." "Measuring Penny" is a book about a girl who measures her dog as a homework assignment in about a dozen ways, how fast it runs, how much it weighs, how long the nose and tail are, etc. It taught concepts like standard and nonstandard units (Penny's tail is one biscuit long, for example) and that there are many properties things have that can have numbers assigned to them. It was not part of my master plan to put Stacey in front of lots of things like this that have "educational value", whatever that means. I specifically avoided exposing her to a lot of things that had a claim of educational greatness... Dora, for example, which is crap. If it's crap, you won't learn anything. Measuring Penny was not crap, it was fun. For us, learning about the world and about numbers was always spontaneous, natural, and unplanned. Because I never forced things like this on her, letting her choose what book to read or what game to play, she never resisted them, and never grew to think of learning or using your brain as a chore.

Jun 4, 2001, "Angelina Ballerina" (book). I got this for Stacey after we saw a stuffed Angelina doll in a store at the mall, and I explained that the character came from a popular kids book... which was naturally not at the bookstore. Stacey, nearing her fifth birthday, had been in a ballet class I enrolled her in for a few months, and was having a great time. I wanted Stacey to have the same experience in classes like this that kids from non-broken homes had, kids who had moms who had taken dance before, who knew where to go to get dance clothes, who knew the unwritten rules of suburban elitism. As a single dad, I knew none of this, so I went out and researched what some basic ballet positions were, what dance clothes were needed, what the different shoes were, and how to do hair. I could already do a simple braid with Stacey's hair, and had experimented with pigtails, and many small braids, but that was about it. I couldn't french-braid or do a ballet bun, so I learned both of those. I had always been antisocial, so I learned how to talk to people during this time. There was some confusion and anxiety when the other parents didn't know what to make of me, and I wasn't sure if I was "doing it right" as far as smalltalk and when to compliment or acknowledge someone else's kid. I felt, as I have often in life, like an autistic trying to mimic strange behavior and emotions that I didn't understand. I got better at it, and later in life become almost natural about talking to people. I got invited to some suburban parties, joined and participated in a church group, started inviting the neighbors over to dinner, and felt good about myself and how I handled myself socially. Being a better people person, I was able to leverage my new likeable self and my geek skills into a steady series of promotions and job offers, ending in the present day with double the salary I was making when Stacey and I bought this book. The spark was wanting her to have an enriched childhood. I wanted that bad enough to fight against my social anxieties. I struggled against them, and made myself a better man, and it was the love that Stacey invokes in me that set it all in motion. My princess. I hope I never let you down.

Jul 8, 2001, "The Great Kapok Tree" and "The Shaman's Apprentice" (books). Stacey and I went on a little hippie kick shortly before her fifth birthday. These are both picture books written by the same author, Lynne Cherry, that are set in the Amazon rainforest. The Great Kapok Tree is about all the life that is dependent on Kapoks (giant trees comparable in size to a football field), how fragile the ecosystem is, and a plea for conservationism. In the story, a sleepy logger takes a nap and dreams about all the animals who will have no homes if he cuts down the tree he is working on. The Shaman's Apprentice is about the real medicinal properties of plants, and how Amazon Shamans have been using them successfully to treat various ailments common to local villagers, and how a certain Western doctor went back to plants to help fight a disease. Good reads, both.

Nov 11, 2001, "Buddy" and "Fly Away Home" (VHS). I bought these on behalf of my computer-illiterate mother so that she could give them to Stacey for Christmas presents. They are both loosely based on true stories. "Buddy" is based on the life of Gertrude Lintz and the Gorillas she tried to raise as her children, clothed and eating at the table with forks and knives. The part about her selling Buddy to the circus where he was marketed as ferocious and hating humans, and his painful last years with untreated skin conditions, rotting teeth, and death from double pneumonia were conspicuously absent from the movie. "Fly Away Home" is based on Bill Lishman teaching a flock of geese a new migration pattern by leading them with his ultralight plane. Fantastic story, really. In the movie, however, he was given a moderately attractive and precocious daughter, Amy, who had raised the geese from birth, and it was she herself who flew the ultralight on the multi-legged migration from Canada to North Carolina. The movie was also completely Disnified, with a backstory of Amy's mother having died, her moving to live with her estranged father, the evil game warden who wants to pinion the geese's wings, etc., etc. My opinion is that entertainment shouldn't butcher a true story. But these weren't my presents, they were my mom's, and Stacey enjoyed watching them with her. Stacey and she have always been close, and they look so happy together that I'm only mildy annoyed at all the hillbilly that my mom exposes Stacey to, and I mostly don't think about the fact that mom really wanted a girl.

Dec 7, 2002, "Pretty Pretty Princess Dress-Up Board Game". This was a Christmas present that was geared towards Stacey bringing out at sleepovers. She was 6, having a great time in the first grade, and I was integrating myself into the inner circle of her elementary school by volunteering to teach computer classes to 4th and 5th graders, chatting with the office staff whenever I could, cooking for school parties, and volunteering as much as a man could for Stacey's Brownie troop. I had just moved back into the house that May after my ex-wife moved out of it. I reacquainted myself with my neighbors, relearned how to mow, found the appliance manuals, a roofer, a plumber, and a painter, and went about making the house livable again. Life was good. Stacey had lots of little friends, went to a lot of birthday parties, and the other parents liked Stacey, and accepted me as an involved parent. The kids thought of me as the cool dad, and lots of neighbor kids were always over playing with Stacey in her play room. And, we began to host sleepovers where around 4 - 6 kids would show up. We all went out to see movies, or out for pizza, and I always had a giant breakfast waiting for the kids when they woke up. "Pretty Pretty Princess," however, went mainly unused.

Nov 20, 2003, "OshKosh Multi-Color Stripe Turtleneck". Predictably, this item is no longer for sale, being 5 years out of fashion, and I was not even able to find a picture of it anywhere. Such is the nature of kids' clothes. My sense of style is very plain. Most of my clothes for most of my life have been solid color blues and greys, few logos, few flourishes. When I look back at some of my earlier attempts at business clothes, I'm thoroughly embarrassed: short-sleeved button down shirts, a thin solid-colored tie with a four-in-hand knot, no blazer, cheap Dockers, and Florsheims with the bottom scuffed up because they were too expensive to replace. Look ma! I'm a businessman!!1! Seven years old is where it started to be difficult for me to get good clothes for Stacey. Prior to that, JC Penney, Lands End, and Children's Place, and anything that didn't look completely stupid to me was well received by Stacey and her peers. At seven was where styles started to form, and where it was clear who's parents were willing to shell out cheddar to dress their kids as future high-society socialites, who wanted their girls to grow up to drive trucks or join the roller derby, who weren't going to stop their girls from the path to teen pregnancy and dancing a pole, and who wanted their girl to feel pretty without looking pretentious. I was the latter category, naturally. Stacey didn't have strong preferences, and was basically willing to try whatever I thought looked nice. As the years went on, my opinion on clothes (and any other topic) carried less weight, and Stacey developed her own style. It was, thankfully, conservative. Another thing to be thankful for is the relationship Stacey has with Liberty now. She is the hip, younger influence who knows fashion inside and out. She helps Stacey navigate the tween girls clothing landscape, to avoid the trashy, the whoreish, the pastel, the boy band worship, and other ill-conceived outfits and accessories. Not that my input would be bad, just that Liberty's is an order of magnitude better. And better received. In 2003 it was just me and her, though, and we didn't do so bad.

Feb 16, 2006, "The Boy Who Reversed Himself" (book). Stacey was ten when I bought this, and a few months away from finishing the fifth grade. A geek message board I hang out in was having a discussion about science fiction books for kids, and a lot of people reporting liking William Sleator books a lot. The summary of "The Boy Who Reversed Himself" sounded a lot like a couple TV show Stacey and I watched a few years earlier, Strange Days at Blake Holsey High, and Eerie Indiana. So I bought it, and Stacey thought it sounded neat, but never read it. I still see it once in a while on a bookshelf or laying on the floor in a pile of stuff. I even read a couple chapters myself... basically there's a kid who can move into the fourth dimension, which causes him to re-emerge in normal space reversed, and he gets into some shenanigans. This year Stacey was having a hard time all around. I was a bear to live with, having been without a true mate for six years, her peers in extracurriculars were specializing and developing strong skills, and she was muddled down with viola, voice, soccer, dance, girl scouts, the "Able and Talented" special math program, adjusting to life with braces, struggling with increasingly difficult schoolwork and increasingly apathetic teachers, and watching me be disowned by all the friends I asked to testify on my behalf in my divorce. The miracle is that she didn't crack, with all the pressure she was under. She lost some friends, and dropped out of scouts, the divorce ended and her mom and I manage to work together quite well now, and her mom stepped up and gave Stacey an extra level of love and support. She got through it, and because she did I now believe she can do anything. Ten years old and dealing with all that shit at once. Think about it. There wasn't any energy left for her in '06 year for casual reading of kids' sci-fi books, thereby preventing her from falling down the rabbit hole of geeky subculture for a little longer.

Dec 3, 2007, "Super Mario Galaxy" (Wii game), "Brain Age", "Imagine:Babyz", and "American Girl: Julie Finds a Way" (DS games), and "The Settlers of Catan" (board game). This was Stacey's entire Christmas gift list last year, minus a couple gift cards. I was consumed with woo-ing Liberty last December, and she married me a few months later. I did spend some effort on the gift list, though. My mentee, Dave, who is active in the video game subculture, identified Super Mario Galaxy as the coolest Wii game out that season, and I think he was right. It deliberately plays with your sense of orientation and perspective, much the way Dragon Hunters does (click the link and watch the video on the bottom... it's wild). She got a DS the year before, and had specifically requested the Babyz game when we visited a Game Stop one Saturday. She had received an American Girl present each Christmas or Birthday for the last several years, and I found an American Girl DS game that didn't seem like complete crap. Brain Age was popular then, Dave showed it to me on his DS and I liked it, and thought Stacey would, too. Lastly, Settlers of Catan, a German-style board game. It has the potential to be fun, and Stacey, Liberty, and I sat down to play it once and enjoyed it. Now all we need is time where Stacey isn't at some extracurricular, Liberty isn't at work, school, or preoccupied with Scout (and I love Scout, at close to four years old, she's just not board-game friendly yet), and all of us have the urge to sit down and talk to each other. It happens, but not every week. Stacey was into Babyz for a while, and I got into Galaxy a little bit myself, and it still occasionally comes out when there are guests over.

So that was last Christmas, the beginning of the modern era in my life with Stacey, she and I both adjusting to living with Liberty and Scout, she learning the ropes of middle school, noticing that boys notice her, being asked to dances, remembering that she's smart and capable, remembering that she's loved and wanted, building new skills (such as basketball -- who knew? I'll have to write more on that as the season progresses this year), and, as I mentioned at the beginning, making new friends that I've never met, whose parents I've never met. She's growing up, and continuing to amaze and delight me, and I'm so, so glad that I'm there to watch it happen.

So thanks, Amazon, for the trip down memory lane. It helped me remember how awesome my kid is, and how much we've been through together. It didn't help me remember how much I love her, though, that's something I never forget.

How to speak in public, heart attack free

For me, the answer was look at your notes and speak slowly, imagining a toddler curled up beside you listening to her bedtime story instead of the room full of sharply dressed financial decision makers expecting an eloquent epilogue before they pull out their checkbooks.

Allow me to explain.

I have been working with Northwest Counseling and the Mentoring Center of Central Ohio for the last 5 years, volunteering as a mentor, speaking at new mentor orientations, and attempting to recruit new volunteers.  Over the years, I've received a "Commended Mentor" award at a ritzy dinner at the capital building (which included meeting Archie Griffin, and also receiving an award by proxy for AEP and posing for a publicity photo with a group of financial contributors, since the scheduled representative for AEP was double booked), attended events such as "family fun day" at the RPAC rec center at OSU, participated with my mentee, Dave, in building houses with Habitat for Humanity and attended their celebration events, received free tickets to museums and sporting events... it's been a lot of fun.  My visibility in the organization has increased over time, and they turn to me and Dave more now for an example of what a good mentoring relationship looks like, the effect on the life of an at-risk child a mentor can have, and, recently, as a spokesman.

I have never prided myself on public speaking.  I can read stories to kids, teach classes to groups of 20 or less on subjects I have expertise in, participate in group discussions of the book club/church group variety, and lately I've expanded to conducting an awards ceremony for 11 girls and their families on the soccer team I coached this fall season.  But that's it as far as speaking in public goes, and the last one nearly gave me a panic attack.  What I was subjected to last month, however, nearly had me give up the ghost.

A couple months ago, I got a phone call from my contact at Northwest Counseling asking if I would be interested in speaking at Columbus State Community College at a breakfast to talk about my work with Dave over the years.  "Yeah, sure," says I.  Over the next month, I interacted with a couple other people from the Mentoring Center to go over what I would say.  I submitted a rough draft of my talking points to them, and they turned that into vaguely corny prose that I planned to clean up ad lib at the podium.  Everything was swell, and I thought it odd that they went through this much trouble instead of just asking me to show up and speak off the cuff, like I do at new mentor orientations.

In reality, I had not received a crucial piece of information that would have put everything in perspective, possibly changing my original "yeah, sure" answer to something else: the target audience.  My assumption was that I would be speaking to students at Columbus State at a recruiting drive.  They would be disinterested, eating their food, texting, looking at their watches, and bolting for the door when the event was over.

The event was nothing like that.  No, it was a fundraiser with various local businesses with big philanthropy budgets.

Dave and I showed up wearing what we normally do on days we go out, jeans, sneakers, what have you, and when we got to the building we noticed that there were no college students milling about, but lots of people in business wear.  Very nice, tailored business wear.  Ties with perfect Windsors with a nice dimple in the middle, nothing that looked off the rack, polished shoes, the whole 9 yards.  All told there were around 50 - 75 people in the room.

So we start out looking like we don't fit in, and then I find out that Dave and I are the last speakers before the closer, meaning whatever we have to say will be ringing fresh in all the CFO ears in the room when they decide how much they want to contribute to mentoring in Columbus.  I was nervous.  Not nervous like my car is sliding on the ice nervous, or asking for a raise nervous, or the first time the wife sees you nekkid nervous, or even the choking on stage nervous.  This was a recurrence of the deep inner conflict that I struggle with on occasion:  Am I one of them?  Am I in their league?  My being dressed casual to the counterpoint of their business dress only added fuel to the fire.  Who am I trying to fool?  These people can see that I'm a big flake, putting on airs like I think I'm worth some kind of respect instead of fetching their water.

So I got up to the microphone, and most of the panic came over me in a wave, and I had to close my eyes and breathe for a few seconds.  I didn't recite the litany against fear from Dune, and I didn't have a magical hallucination of Stacey smiling at me and saying "I believe in you, daddy," or anything like that.  I just calmed myself down a little, tried not to think about the large crowd staring at me, and stuck mainly to the notes.  I spoke, I got through it without choking, and I received a smattering of polite applause.

Dave, being younger and not having self-worth tied to his performance at the breakfast, did much better... "Um, yeah, I'm Dave, I've been hangin' with Curtis for a long time now, he's cool...." He helped me relax, and we had some comic banter during his speech.  "Curtis, how come you didn't invite me to your wedding?"  Me with a shocked look, "Hey!  We eloped!  It was just the two of us," to much laughter and nice round of applause when he finished and we took our seats again.  The confidence of youth for the win.

I still don't know if I'm "one of them", and I took a lesson from Dave in his brazenly being true to himself, "and if that ain't good enough for you, sit on it" approach to life.  That's who I was at his age, and my trying to conform and be accepted, the very thing I railed against in my own youth, managed to creep its way deep into my soul.  Thanks for helping me understand that, man, and for the reminder of who I'm really supposed to be.  Sure, I'll speak again if I'm asked to, I'll even ask who the audience is and dress appropriately, but I'll stick to just telling my story in a way that's good enough for me, not for them.  They'll either like it or they won't.  They'll either accept me or not, and I'll still love myself the same way regardless of the outcome.

The final result?  After the breakfast was winding down, I went around and said my goodbyes to the people in the room I knew, and several people in the audience went out of their way to grab me and Dave and shake our hands, and tell us how much our story meant to them.  A few weeks later, I received a letter from a Mentoring Center contact on their official letterhead saying how happy they were with what I did, and the effect the story had on everyone, and at least one of the attendees saying it was her favorite part of the event.  The letter came with a nice gift card to a local restaurant, where Dave and I will be hanging out this weekend.

Moral of the story?  Being yourself wins the day.  Dave's apathy to the audience, and them seeing us interact in a way that was honest, natural, and funny, was the sell.  He mentioned casually that he wouldn't be in as good shape as he is now without a mentor who stuck with him.  Nothing I could have said, no amount of rehearsing, getting clothes pressed, relaxation exercises, practice in front of large crowds, triumphing over inner demons, none of that would have trumped this one simple idea.  "Here I am, happy and alive, and here is a big part of why."

Right back at you, Dave.

Rested and healed... just in time for the upcoming apocalypse

It's amazing what a couple weeks off from soccer and a few good nights' sleep will do for you. My attitude towards life in general has improved, so has my energy level, and the aches and pains are abating, the abrasions healing, and the pumpkins are carved for Samhain.

I've been listening to a lot of NPR coverage of the crazy financial crisis (including the great shows Fresh Air, and This American Life), and reading through towers of information on Wikipedia, starting here. Through my intensive research and analysis, I have come up with a completely random, unbacked guess as to the underlying issue and it's direct, tragic, consequence:

The U.S. has too much debt. A crisis of some sort would have manifested soon, regardless. If 9/11 didn't happen, if sub-prime lending didn't happen, if credit default swaps were correctly classified as insurance and regulated, if short selling were banned, if the commercial paper market hadn't run dry, if several banks hadn't gone bankrupt, if the stock market hadn't crashed... if none of that happened, the crisis would still have manifested itself in other ways. In other ways just as shocking and destructive. Too much debt. Too many games with money and no real product. For example:

I have a lot of Wachovia bonds, a billion dollars worth, in fact. Wachovia has been in the news a little, and I'm worried that maybe, some time down the line, they won't be able to pay me the interest on my bonds. To hedge that risk, I want to buy a credit default swap (hereafter CDS). I go down to Jane's CDS shop and say "Give me $1 billion if AIG goes under". Jane says "Sure, that will be $2 million per month." Since that's less than the interest I'm making on my Wachovia bonds, I say "Deal", and sign the papers... and watch the market.

Wachovia has a bad quarter, and people are worried that they might go under, including my buddy Bob, who has the same amount of Wachovia bonds as I do. After a tearful, panicked lunch with Bob, I offer to sell him a CDS for his Wachovia bonds. "I'll guarantee you $1 billion if Wachovia defaults on your bonds, for the low cost of $3 million per month". He thinks it over, and says "Deal".

At this point, I'm spending $2 million per month, but bringing in $3 million, and the $1 billion I'd have to pay Bob will be coming from Jane, I'd just have to countersign the check. So now I sell my Wachovia bonds for their current market value, quit my job, and go stock up my bomb shelter with the assets I just liquidated. I'm making $1 million monthly, and have no assets at risk, and no government oversight. Except, I'll owe Bob $1 billion if Wachovia goes under, and I can only afford to pay him that if Jane makes good on her end of the deal.

Things can get more complicated than that, Bob can become an insurer if things get worse, and Jane may have bought a CDS on the cheap from another insurer when Wachovia was making money hand over fist. And it's possible that the point of entry to all this, the source of the $1 billion, should it ever be needed, won't have it. Maybe they've made a lot of bad loans to risky homebuyers who have a history of not paying their credit cards on time, or have rotated minimum wage jobs 5 times in the last year. If Wachovia ever can't pay their bond holders, that could be, like the bullet that killed Franz Ferdinand, the shot heard 'round the world, collapsing all the intermediate companies that will owe their $1 billion to someone.

Ever play Jenga? It's like that. In my opinion, which is worth about nothing since I'm a computer programmer, not a market analyst or financial wizard of any sort, is that something was going to happen now, regardless of whether these specific tragedies were in play, because of all the debt and crazy interdependencies.

Oh, and my 401k is in the shitter, and possibly my dream of early retirement. But since I make my money with my brain and not my back, I can stay employed as long as my brain holds out... or as long as I can fake it, so I'm not worried about survival, just disappointed at all the world traveling I won't be doing.

In closing, it's a good thing I'm all healed up, in case the end times come, and I need to be a little more medieval in my survival strategy. Plus, that should make it a piece of cake to finally lose that pesky last 5 pounds.

Last games of the season

Stacey's soccer team ended the season on sort of a sour note, we lost our last game, making our record 5 - 3 - 2, losing 3 out of our last 4 games. I'm not sure what happened, but we still ended up with a winning record, and the girls had a blast at the end of the season pizza party.

We met at Donatos Westerville (a store I managed back in the day), where Jim treated the girls to a few pizzas, and I passed out the participation trophies, WASA 30th anniversary pennants, and my own creation: personalized acrylic plaques, made by the same guy who did my custom Christmas ornaments last year.

The plaques sit in a base that has blue LEDs, and the light illuminates the plaque, making the frosted areas appear blue. Each girl's plaque had her name on it, a nickname, and something positive that they contributed to the team... "Best passing", "Leading scorer", "Fastest reactions", etc. Here's an example of the template I used for Stacey's:

From U12 Playbook

The girls found it pretty cool, I think, as I went around the table handing out the items and saying something about each player and why I was happy she was on the team. The only sour note about the affair was my inability to keep calm, and still my hands from shaking. I did some breathing exercises to calm my voice, but my body betrayed my nervousness. Oh well, should be easier next time.

The soccer team I play on, the Raiderz, finished the season with a win. I played while still chasing a cold, and struggled to catch my breath for the entirety of my field time. I made no good plays, and half of my touches on the ball ended up going right back towards the opponent I tried to steal from. One of the defense subs injured his leg during the game, so I tried to stay in, even though I was underperforming. Horrible, but we pulled off a 3-2 win without much difficulty.

After the game the players camped out under a shelter, drank some brew, and chatted for about an hour. I had an energy drink in lieu of beer, and enjoyed the banter, contributing a little here and there. I guess I'm mellowing in my old age, because those situations usually get under my skin for some reason. Either I don't like watching everyone drink, or I find their conversation predictable and ignorant. Not so, this time, or the last few parties I've been to with Liberty's family and friends. Just people talking about whatever comes to mind, relaxing, playing party games, with no one to impress. Things don't need to be fantastical to hold my interest these days, which I'm thankful for. In the long run, that will make me seem like less of a pretentious ass.

This winter, neither I nor Stacey will participate in any indoor soccer. I need to heal from being banged up the last few months, and I couldn't drum up enough interest from the other girls' parents to form a complete U-12 team. Just as well, a little less activity will help as Stacey's schoolwork gets harder, and I can return to a regular training program instead of healing during the week from Sunday's injuries.

In other news, I'm in a lot of pain right now. My legs hurt when I walk (soccer induced, no doubt), my back is growing some sort of painful red mark, and I've only been sleeping about 4 hours a night for the past couple of weeks. I've been unsupportive of my girls at home, disinterested, abrupt. In the mirror I look old, and I have a hard time mustering a smile most of the time. I need to rest and heal, and have the support of my immediate family to pull me back up to my feet. Hopefully things will get better soon.

Navratri, Dancing, and Time Travel

So I had this dream the other night that was in the vein of the enjoyable, and predictably cancelled TV show, Journeyman, and the very similar book, "The Time Traveler's Wife". The dream was as follows:

I was driving my car over to my science mentor, who has helped me research and deal with my curse of spontaneous time travel. At some point during the drive, I time traveled back to a time before he and I had ever met, and only realized this as I pulled into his driveway.

When I knocked on his door, he answered, but didn't recognize me, and quickly became agitated. He chased me away, and I ran off of his property (what happened to my car isn't clear) only to have my roommate, Bill, show up suddenly in his car. I hopped in, and the two of us beat a hasty retreat. I was confused, as Bill not only knew to be there, and as far as I knew he wasn't one of my circle of confidants about my "condition", and additionally he was driving the car he owns in the present.

"How did you know to be here? What's going on?"

"I can't tell you yet, I'm involved in the plot," was his reply. Freaky. A dream that breaks the fourth wall with a wink to the audience.

So off we drove, to my old apartment down on Proprietors Road in Worthington, where my self from that time lived. This led me to believe that the year the action was taking place was between 1985 and 1989. As we got closer to the apartment, it became increasingly clear that something was amiss in the timeline. The city had a very third world feel to it, there were police checkpoints everywhere, and an auspicious barricade manned with officers at the entrance to the apartment complex my self from the time of action lived.

At that point, I theorized that a small change had taken place much earlier that caused the timeline to get this distorted, and led to the police actively searching for me in the late 80's. I intuited that the small change probably happened 15 years earlier, say, around the time of my birth!

Sadly, I woke up at this point, right when the plot was thickening. What event transpired at my birth that needed to be corrected didn't reveal itself. Perhaps my own existence needed to be wiped out to normalize things, like the director's cut of "The Butterfly Effect". Perhaps an evil time traveler, my counterpart, the Master to my Doctor, was born at the same time.

So, on to Navratri. A festival celebrating an Indian goddess defeating an evil demi-god was going on over the weekend, and I managed to weasel an invitation from a buddy I work with, and my wife and I decided to make a night of it. The event took place at a high school, and there were possibly 300 people, mostly Indian, mostly dressed in traditional clothes, Saris, long scarves, flashy colors. The event consisted of some food and trinkets for sale in the cafeteria, and dancing around a shrine to the goddess in the gymnasium.

The dances were twofold, first the Garba, a dance in multiple concentric circles around the shrine, everyone moving counterclockwise, dancing in many varied combinations and fills. Liberty and I tried as best as we could to get the basics down, I following the man who invited us, she following his wife. We quickly felt outmatched, and after a few revolutions around the shrine, decided to bow out and observe, trying again to learn the moves. It was fantastic, in the proper sense of the word. Lines of several teenaged girls, all dressed to the nines, all graceful and beautiful, danced lockstep, in perfect synchronicity, with grand, sweeping arm movements and spins. Men dancing out of elation and joy, not out of courtship or coolness, accompanied them. Adult women showed a more conservative femininity, with moves equally as fluid and attention grabbing, without needing the extra flourishes and energy of their youthful counterparts.

A thing of beauty, really. By my count, Liberty and I were 40% of the white people in the room, and neither of us was comfortable looking like the clumsy Americans, and didn't want to give the impression that we came to see how cute all the funny Indians were, so out of respect, we pulled ourselves out of the line when it was clear we weren't getting it on the first pass. Over the years working side by side with people from India, my respect for them as a people with insight and a good work ethic has grown. After seeing them dance one time, my eyes were opened to how full of energy their culture and traditions are. And even though we were the clumsy Americans who didn't know the dance, the couple we came with and their friends gave us nothing but encouragement, showing us steps and asking us to join in, and none of the rest of the crowd gave us any disparagement. Not any. I have never been in a crowd of that many white people and not felt that someone was trying to marginalize or exclude me. Not so here. I felt included to the point that, by the end of the evening, and after the second dance that was much more successful for us, I started thinking of "them" as "my people".

The second dance was the Dandiya, a 5 beat dance where pairs of people hit sticks together in a certain pattern. The pattern we settled on, and there were many variations from the different dancers, was beat 1 bang your own sticks together, then beats 2 and 3 bang one stick, then the other, against your parter's, beat 4 bang yours together again, beat 5 hit both of your sticks against both of your partners. Finally, the next beat 1 you also rotate partners. Seems simple, but keeping a good rhythm was hard at first, and there are several flourishes thrown in. Some people spin when they change partners, some do something else on beats 1 and 4 other than beat their own sticks together (I needed to keep doing that for about 75% of the dance to help me keep the beat). Also, the music (which was live) slowly sped up, and finally, other dancers got added to popular lines. Our line got pretty popular, and we were up to about 16 people at one point. When the music would speed up, some people called out elated chants, and by the end of the dance most people had abandoned the lines and the sticks, and started dancing solo, throwing their hands in the air, spinning, singing out. It was way cool, and Liberty and I managed to keep up with everyone for a long time.

I've since searched for this type of dance on Youtube, and have found either shaky cellphone accounts, or flashy, stylized hollywood-eqsue adaptations. I found nothing that was as folksy or... spiritual, I guess is the word, as the dancing of the people who showed up Friday. I'm glad Liberty and I got to take part.

It was also the first time I had taken Liberty out dancing. As far as good nights out go, we hit the mark, but I'm afraid I may have set the bar a little high for our next dancing night.

More than survival

My wife and I have now been together, as a couple, for over a year. Our love is deeper and our affection stronger than it was during the most exciting part of our courtship. Joseph Campbell recommends that one follow his bliss. Liberty = bliss. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Scout just got back from a week of vacation with her father, and Liberty and she were very happy to see each other. It was clear that she had been coached on who Daddy is during the trip. "You are Curtis," she said to me shortly after she got back, "you are my step-father." And for a while I was Curtis, and no one said Daddy in the house, pointedly, to see what would happen. An hour later, though, I was Daddy more often than not, and I try not to attribute too much meaning to that, as I'm sure it flips the other way when she's with him. He's Daddy, I'm Curtis. Plus, I don't think I'm in the running for favorite man in her life, that was settled shortly after she was born.

The Daddy issue can be pretty touchy for parents (especially when you're younger and age hasn't softened your rage or boosted your confidence yet), but it's been my experience that the word itself has no special meaning for children, despite all our assumptions, and the perceived correlation between petnames and love. The love a child has for a parent doesn't change with the name. For example, we took Scout to our family reunion back in early August, and she met lots of doting aunts and grandmas who held her on their lap, swung with her on the porch swing, etc. To each of them, she recounted something great she had done at "David's house." "I saw Kung-Fu Panda at David's house." "I have new shoes at David's house." So, clearly, he's the first man in her life, and I accept my position as second fiddle.

Stacey's second soccer game was on Monday, and we had a resounding 2 - 0 victory against a skilled opponent. She played goalie again in the first half, and found some relief from her anxiety about being scored on in the first game. We talked ahead of time about staying between the goal posts and the 6 yard box, and sprinting out to the 18 only when she needed to. During Monday's game, she needed to a lot, thwarting many drives, stubbing her fingers once in the process when she grabbed at a ball that was being kicked. She sprinted out and grabbed about four or five balls, once in a bizarre three on one situation, where the opponents were seriously offside and the ref didn't seem to notice. Without hesitating, she ran out to meet the group of three, and grabbed the ball away from the dribbler before she could take the shot. Risky, done with full commitment. Beautiful. As Billie Jean King says: "Be bold. If you're going to make an error, make a doozey." Her ten teammates were singing her praises, and I was a proud father.

We're 2 and 0 now, and I don't know if our luck will hold for the remainder of the season, or exactly what has led us to win both our scrimmages and our first two games. However, I have noticed some differences between me and the other coaches, and between my girls and the other teams. First, we don't do team-building rituals with chants or callbacks... "be aggressive, be aggressive, be aggressive", (coach)"Are we tired?!" (team)"NO!", or even the pre-game circle with hands in the middle "Go (mascot)!" Second, I have them practice getting around a defender during warm-up, not just taking a shot on goal. I go out and play fullback, and they have to get around me to take a shot... and I'm a pretty good fullback. Third, I don't bitch at them from the sidelines all game, and in fact I jumped on the assistant coach the one time he started to sound harsh and frustrated. Long on positive, short on negative. And like Stargirl, I clap for the other team. Does all that help, or would we be doing even better if I were a drill sergeant and a micromanager, giving no quarter to the enemy, that sort of thing? I don't know, but I like it my way, and it seems to be working out ok so far.

For the time being, in all aspects of life, my family and I are not just surviving, we're thriving. Stacey still tests off the charts at school, and is becoming a better athlete and dancer every year. Scout's love for Stacey and me has grown, as has her vocabulary and coordination. We're working on a bike with training wheels, "om my up" has been replaced with "could you pick me up?", and she now stays with us two thirds of the time while dad is off at college in another city. Liberty is happy with more time with her girl, and has enjoyed the freedom of having disposable income again, not being forced to pinch pennies as a single mom/college student. She's been redecorating the house, playing in the kitchen (homemade granola bars -- kick ass), and looking more and more like she's happy to stick around.

All thirteen of my girls are happy, and thus, I am happy. Life is good.