Day 2000...or so

 You may recall our wedding counter:  a gift from Jay, it started counting, day by day, at 5 PM CET, oh, about 2000 days ago, and is guaranteed to run as long as we do.  (Back of same shown above, for reasons that will soon become apparent.)  You may also recall that on previous big round number days we have seized the chance to throw a party.  This time, 2000 that is, we chose instead to commemorate the day by going to a photo studio for a family portrait.

Oh the preparations.  Got sick last week, we all did, and I've been limiting my intake of palliatives on the theory that the worse I felt the sooner it would be over.  Then yesterday, still fighting the cold bare-handed, a rainy gray day out, I took the boy to get his haircut, a 15 minute walk each way, loaded with foul weather gear that, I suppose happily, wasn't needed.  Did get a shot of the ultimate sumo battle--

--at the studio, and the haircut turned out pretty nicely, too, but it was a drag.  The last several days on hyper-alert to ensure the newly-crawling GM didn't bruise his head against something, dog or otherwise, were especially wearing as well.  And all this so we'd be in the studio right when our counter showed the magic 2-0-0-0, rather than, say, after we get back from Hawaii, tan and presumably cheerful, @ day 2020.

Then this morning.  What to wear, rush to prepare, the baby thankfully napping on time but Felix at his most cheerful and obstructive self.  Finally, elder son gives us a break, disappears into the living room and falls silent.  Silent.  Never good.  This time very bad.

Our counter
Placed next to the door so we wouldn't forget it on our way to the studio
Our counter, reading 2000, ready to go
Our counter now reads zero zero zero zero

We got to the studio, we did the shoot, we'll Photoshop in the correct digits.  We've already figured out how to make the counter climb, too, though we don't know the correct dip switch setting to make it a day counter again, rather than a simple timer, which is what it is currently pretending to be.  And we still don't know how Felix zero'd it, though we're pretty sure he won't do it again.  Ever.

I can't say this has been the worst day of our marriage, but at the moment I can't think of a worse one, either.  Here, though, is the one authentic day 2000 shot we got, and kudos to T for insisting we do it while we had the chance.

 Counted or not, tomorrow's another day with the woman I love.

What I do now

I mentioned recently that, having publicly trashed my previous career, I'd be posting soon about what I do do for work.  The short answer is:  I take care of our second-born.  It is the hardest work I have ever done, I don't get sick days, and no, I'm not made of castiron [sic]:

"What has happened?" the Scarecrow asked a sad-looking man with a bushy beard, who wore an apron and was wheeling a baby-carriage along the sidewalk.

"Why, we've had a revolution, your Majesty -- as you ought to know very well," replied the man; "and since you went away the women have been running things to suit themselves. I'm glad you have decided to come back and restore order, for doing housework and minding the children is wearing out the strength of every man in the Emerald City."

"Hm!" said the Scarecrow, thoughtfully. "If it is such hard work as you say, how did the women manage it so easily?"

"I really do not know" replied the man, with a deep sigh. "Perhaps the women are made of castiron."

- L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz

Deep sigh indeed.  (Not that taking care of GM is without its rewards:  I had a decent nap and a more than decent lunch today, neither of which most offices afford.)  But that's only the short answer.

Since returning to the US I've had at best two days per week to do "other" work.  Previous to GM's birth and for some time thereafter I used these precious hours mostly to think about what it was I might like to do for work.  My goal was, and remains, to settle upon something that holds my attention but which does not drag me out of town on a regular, or at least not a frequent, basis.  Along the way I developed what feels like a sincere and sustained interest in "self tracking," as previously blogged.

Since then I've toyed with a variety of approaches to the self tracking question, none of which shows much promise of becoming a profitable endeavor anytime soon.  And since my interest in these matters, however strong, does not equal my dislike of being involved in commercially focused startups (my last one having ended, in my opinion, unhappily, though not unprofitably, earlier this year--yes, I confess I was effectively employed for part of this year, despite what I said above), I've had to put some thought into what else I might like to do along the way.

I was advised, soon after leaving my former consulting career, not to throw the baby out with the bankwater, and there were things I liked about working with those big dumb FIs, and about the sorts of problems those clients offered (even if they didn't care about the solutions).  This, combined with the paucity of actual jobs (as opposed to consulting gigs) available within a reasonable (by my definition) commute of my home, has turned my attention back in that direction, and I believe I have found a niche that retains most of the interest without (hope hope hope) quite so much of the BS of my previous career, namely "big data" consulting.

Big data.  Sounds kind of cool, doesn't it?  It isn't, very, but it could be one day.  In the proverbial and, I recognize, for me hackneyed nutshell, big data refers to the enormous warehouses full of data that many organizations are and have been collecting for years now.  It refers, too, to the potential insights it is believed those warehoused piles could reveal, if only the data could be massaged correctly, if only we knew how and what to ask.  We don't, but perhaps big data consultants do?  Of course we do.

So I've signed a consulting agreement with a shop that specializes in this sort of work and am pleased to report that I have my first project, an actual paying gig, assisting a software company that, happily enough, is located in Central Europe.  No commuting, good rates, interesting work, and a content area I am intent on exploring anyway (since, after all, self tracking boils down to making big data out of small).  I suppose I shouldn't rush to retitle myself, not until I've seen if this sticks, but it's a good start.  Good, but small:  not full time work this, which leaves some days still for the heavy lifting that raising GM entails.

P.S.  Thanks to Reader #2 for making me promise to include pictures with my posts.

The secret formula

We're weaning our youngest, an event, or rather series of events, I welcome, for though it now adds feeding duties to my roster it also means I get my wife back.  Well, it's a step in the right direction, anyway.

It also means it's time for research.  I don't recall how deeply we delved into the question of which baby formula to use for FM, but at the time we were living in the Netherlands, and I have a lot more respect for European food safety laws than I do for American ones (we're only just now updating ours--keep your fingers crossed--having apparently been happy to let industry find new ways of poisoning us in the pursuit of profits since the last regulatory clawback in 1938) so I think we probably did without an exhaustive review back then.  And, too, I'm sure whatever we used there we can't get here.  So, GM, what will it be?

[READER ALERT:  The rest of this post is probably pretty boring (but check the photo of The Gid at the bottom regardless) unless you're trying to make the same decision we are.  Even then it's probably pretty boring, but may save you doing even more boring research yourself.  The bottom line is, it's tough to know what you're eating.  It's tough to know what your kid's eating.  It shouldn't be.]

The general points of concern to my mind are:

1. Source of the ingredients:  Obviously not interested in having foreign, and in particular Chinese-supplied, ingredients if avoidable.  (Perhaps not so obvious if you missed the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, and if you did miss it then I recommend staying innocent, it was a particularly nauseating example of its kind.)  FDA review of foreign-sourced ingredients is even more scanty than that of domestically-sourced ones.  As of 2008, all US companies manufacturing baby formula in the US claimed that they were not using Chinese-sourced ingredients.  I don't believe that was true then--none of the ingredients or precursors came from China, when China is the source of XX?--and it is even less likely to be true now.
2. Sugar:  Don't want an unnecessarily sweet formula.  The EU--ahead of the curve again--has banned sucrose as an ingredient in formula due to associations with childhood obesity.  (Only a true cynic would not be surprised to learn that the EU is more activist on this particular point than we are.)  Probably a good idea.
3. DHA & ARA:  These additives, which are in most cases produced using a petroleum-based solvent, are being pushed as the latest booster for infant development.  As best I can tell, the jury is still out, and frankly I'd rather not have GM be on the test line for this:  history shows that these sorts of enthusiasms are not infrequently regretted.
4. Complexity:  Even more than usual I want to be able to understand the ingredients list.
5. Buyer beware:  FDA review in this area is weak, relying as it does on manufacturer-provided "assurances" as to nutritional quality, and mandates no review of manufacturing processes aside from an annual walk-through.  (Having worked in big companies and been on both sides of a variety of audits, I can tell you an annual walk-through is not enough.)
   

Point three eliminates every organic formula except for Baby's Only.  If only it were that simple:  we have a very tempting offer from an insider for half-price Similac.  Given the amount of this stuff GM already consumes this is very tempting indeed.  So it looks like we'll have to compare ingredients after all.  Apologies, but....

Here are the bulk ingredients, Similac vs. Baby's Only:

Organic Nonfat Milk, Organic Maltodextrin, Organic Sugar (Sucrose), Organic High Oleic Sunflower Oil, Organic Soy Oil, Organic Coconut Oil

Organic Brown Rice Syrup, Organic Non-Fat Dry Milk, Organic High Oleic Sunflower Oil, Organic Soybean Oil, Organic Coconut Oil

Note that Similac uses two sweeteners (one of which is the banned sucrose; for more on that see this article), but that Baby's Only's sweetener is listed as its first ingredient:  which is sweeter, or more likely to make GM even fatter than he already is?  Resort to nutritional comparison can only tell us that they are equivalent from caloric and carb points of view.

The rest of the ingredients are, Similac vs. Baby's Only:

Less than 2% of the Following: C. Cohnii Oil^*, M. Alpina Oil^†, Potassium Citrate, Calcium Carbonate, Ascorbic Acid, Soy Lecithin, Ascorbyl Palmitate, Ferrous Sulfate, Sodium Chloride, Choline Chloride, Choline Bitartrate, Taurine, m-Inositol, Magnesium Chloride, Zinc Sulfate, Mixed Tocopherols, d-Alpha-Tocopheryl Acetate, Niacinamide, Calcium Pantothenate, L-Carnitine, Vitamin A Palmitate, Cupric Sulfate, Thiamine Chloride Hydrochloride, Riboflavin, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Folic Acid, Manganese Sulfate, Phylloquinone, Biotin, Beta-Carotene, Sodium Selenate, Vitamin D3, Cyanocobalamin, Potassium Iodide, Potassium Hydroxide, and Nucleotides (Cytidine 5’-Monophosphate, Disodium Guanosine 5’-Monophosphate, Disodium Uridine 5’-Monophosphate, Adenosine 5’-Monophosphate).

Calcium Phosphate, Calcium Ascorbate (Vit. C), Organic Soy Lecithin, Calcium Citrate, Choline Bitartrate, Organic Vanilla, Taurine, Ferrous Sulfate, Inositol, Natural Vitamin E Acetate, Zinc Sulfate, Niacinamide, Vitamin A Palmitate, Calcium Pantothenate, Thiamin Hydrochloride (Vit. B1), Copper Sulfate, Riboflavin (Vit. B2), Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vit. B6), Folic Acid, Phylloquinone (Vit. K1), Potassium Iodide, Sodium Selenate, Biotin, Vitamin D3, Cyanocobalamin (Vit. B12).

Italicized ingredients are those they share, and even without picking them out it's obvious that Similac has a bunch of stuff Baby's Only does not, which means the latter does better in terms of simplicity.  This is important:  each ingredient offers an opportunity for someone to cut some corners, another chance, in sourcing, in handling, in production, for things to go wrong.

I don't wish to sound paranoid (though I know I do), but given that this will represent the majority of GM's input for the next six months or more, doesn't excessive caution seem about right?

*******

ADDENDUM, @ August 2011:

What I used to do and why I don't do it anymore

It happened again the other day, someone asked what I do for work, which led to an explanation of what I used to do for work, which led to an explanation of why I don't do that anymore.  For those of you who never did understand what I did, or why, and for the blecord generally, here's that story. And for those of you who don't care, I do promise a word or two about what I do for work now in a post soon to follow.  (And if you don't care about that may I invite you to go back to the entry on garages, or ham, or some such?)

I used to work as a consultant on banking compliance projects.  I chose this area because it promised to be complex and therefore interesting, and because projects of this sort were unlikely to be canceled:  the banks were required to do this work.  Unfortunately, they were not required to do it well:  in pre-crisis days, so long as they were doing it with some show of sincerity (i.e., so long as they were throwing a lot of money at the problem) actual progress toward the goal of measuring accurately the risks they faced, actual progress I say, was not necessary. The banks were fantastically profitable and politically powerful, accounting as they did for an undue proportion of employment and prosperity generally. The ability of those charged with "regulating" the banks to punish or even persuade was very limited (shown below, the view from my office window with De Nederlandsche Bank--the Dutch regulator--off in the distance, near the tip of the rainbow, as though it existed in some fantasy world). However, by international agreement, it had been decided that most of the world's more important banks would start measuring their risks in roughly similar ways, and that eventually they would report publicly on those measurements. Hence these projects.

"Measuring the risks," that was the key to the whole thing.  Banks, like casinos, are machines for generating profits.  They do this by borrowing money at a low rate of interest (for example, from the government, or from you in the form of a savings account) and by lending it out again at a higher rate (casinos, of course, just take your money, while making a few falsely suggestive pay-outs). This simple model works so long as two important things hold true: first, the general structure of interest rates must hold relatively steady such that what is "low" stays "low" and what is "high" stays "high," and second, borrowers must pay back what they have borrowed, or most of it anyway.  (There are lots of less important things that need to hold true, too--for example, the bank's employees must not steal all the money--but these two are the real keys.) Everything the bank does involves risk--"interest rate risk" (low is low, high is high), "operational risk" (the bit about employees stealing), and many other kinds--but how a bank manages credit risk (i.e., the risk associated with repayment) is probably the one thing that most clearly differentiates the good banks from the bad.

It was in credit risk that I did most of my work.  It was the most interesting area, to my mind, and it was the most active one, too, because the regulations that require banks to sit on some of their money weight the threat of defaulting counterparties more heavily than any other risk the bank faces.  One effect of this is that some banks have come to view credit risk reduction primarily as a means of reducing the amount of money they are forced to keep on the sidelines.  Credit risk can be controlled by being more selective in your choice of counterparty, by investing in research, by making conservative decisions, by sticking to markets and products with which you have long experience, by being what most people still think of as a "good banker."  But the credit risk figures can be reduced much more easily than that.  They can, in a word, be fiddled.

Fiddling your figures--that is to say editing the numbers you report by inserting adjustments of one sort or another into the stream of calculation--is a very much more efficient means to this end. Not only is it pretty easy to do, but, most important of all, it doesn't require you to change the way you do business.  (Hey hey, don't you get all judgmental here:  if the way you did business was earning you a billion bucks a quarter, you wouldn't want want to change it either!)  And that's what some banks did:  they fiddled their figures, more or less with the collusion of the regulators (OK, now you should get judgmental), while claiming to be improving their calculation systems such that those systems would soon report the "truth," which truth, they claimed, would turn out to be the same as that shown by the "corrected" figures.

Now I'm not saying the banks I worked for did this.  No, no, I'm not saying that.  And even if I were it would be kind of a nonsensical thing to say, because the banks I worked for were enormous multi-faceted organizations that were often internally conflicted and where they weren't were as like as not in a situation where the one hand knew not what the other was doing, so to tell it as if "the" bank behaved in a consciously fraudulent way is just not quite right.

All I'm prepared to say in this forum is that because of the way things were set up--because regulators were weak and banks strong, because everyone was high on the pipe dream of infinite profits, because most of us despite it all still did and do respect and trust financial "institutions"--there was so much of this going on in the world of compliance that if you actually cared about getting these calculation systems to work correctly you would probably feel rather out of place a lot of the time. You would repeatedly find yourself much more concerned about the dysfunctionality of the process of development than were those ultimately responsible for that development.  You would find it increasingly difficult to support the goal of being declared on a sound footing when the steps you witnessed day to day were downright drunken.  You would, much to your surprise and as testament to your immaturity, discover that you were an idealist, and that this was no business for idealists.

Lost in translation

Have you ever lost a little piece of your mind?  Not the whole thing, but a small piece which, being small, is both easily misplaced and difficult to find again?  I have, though not often, as best I can recall.

The first such loss I note was that part responsible for reminding a man to zip it up.  At the risk of inviting unwelcome scrutiny, let me confess that I almost never remember this tiny but socially impactful chore.  I used to, but somewhere in the course of the extended period of concentration required to write my college thesis I misplaced this habit.  That is to say early in the year 1990 I suddenly stopped zipping, and while I cared and still do care as much as the next guy about the state of my fly, that state has not been what it should be on most of the many days since then.

The fly example is, I think, a matter of pushing the machinery too hard and thereby breaking some piece of it--I imagine a fragment of mental metal now resting on the floor of my brain case.  Since returning from the Netherlands I have unfortunately discovered another way to lose mental ability:  in attempting to adapt to an alternate system of thought one can, it seems, bend even flexible neuronal strands too far, whereupon it becomes impossible to force that mental plastic back into its original shape.

Should I have been disturbed, upon my return, to find myself uncertain of whether decimal points or commas apply, or the correct order of street name and number?  All of us, you assure me, have occasionally written the wrong year on a check sometime in January, so no surprise that there should be some lag while Dutch habits wear off.  Unfortunately, I reply, they show no sign of doing so, and here it is, almost a year since I've been back.  What's more, they were never habits, and that's the bit that worries me.

The entire time I lived in the Netherlands I had to take great care to date documents correctly, that is to say with day before month, rather than, as we do here, month before day.  I never got used to it, I always found myself thinking "not-month-day," rather than the more direct and natural "day-month."  What a relief, you might expect, to be back in the land of month-day.  And yet, for me, it now feels like "not-not-month-day."  Same thing with the decimal comma/point and with street addresses too.  As for elevators, I actually found myself so confused the other day that only the presence of a big brass star next to the number "1" saved me from giving up and pressing at random.  (And if the star is to be believed I'm not the only one.)

I suppose it doesn't much matter if I detour occasionally to the first floor on my way to ground, and in a reasonable percentage of cases the intended date is unambiguous despite being reversed, but there are other symptoms and one of them bothers me more than a little.  While in the Netherlands I, perhaps foolishly, learned the language.  One effect of this--and I would be curious to hear if this has happened to others--is that I misplaced part of my English vocabulary.  One of the things I had been looking forward to in returning to an English land was regaining those words, and adding some new ones, too.  I can tell you it hasn't happened.  I'm not saying it won't, I'm just saying it hasn't, and, as I said, it's been a year now.  Nonetheless, I'm glad to be back.

"I Lose," a very short play in one act

Felix:  "Hey mama?"
Felix:  "Hey dada?"
Me:  "Why'd you say 'mama'?"
Felix:  "Don't say 'why'!"
Me:  "OK.  What?"
Felix:  "What?"
Me:  "Yes, what?"
Felix:  "Why did you say 'what'?"
Me: "You said, 'Hey dada.'"
Felix:  "No I didn't, I said 'Hey mama.'"

I lose.

Corn maze

No news, I love corn mazes! Mazes in general, spent a good deal of time as a kid drawing them and such, but corn mazes in particular.  And this weekend I found myself in the maze of a lifetime.  This maze was so large and intricate that a map and an associated coordinate system within the maze itself were required for escape.  And I do mean required:  without it you would likely be lost forever.  Scoffers may check it, below:

One enters at the lower of the two white strips on the left. By coordinate point G20 we were already nervously consulting the map.  We took our first shortcut before "Starbucks Station" (which did not have a Starbucks, by the way).  At Z29 we stopped for a nursing break, a very lucky thing, as before the break we were planning to head off towards the upper right hand of the maze, whereas by the end of the break we'd realized the correct route lay quite in another direction.  This proves that in addition to being an amazing maze on the ground, it was a very good one even just on paper.  Here are the pics:



Miraculously, despite carrying a 20 pound baby and a 2 pound pumpkin, we made it out in less than an hour.  Highly recommended.

The Good Ear

You cry while laughing much?  I don't, but I am, even as I type.  My cold has driven me to bed, and keeps me here, but Felix is sitting outside my bedroom door, singing to himself, loudly.  Every time I get ready to yell at him I start laughing, and crying.  And if I shout with laughter in my voice he hears only the merriment and takes it as encouragement; in trying to turn him off I've so far only succeeded in ratcheting up the volume.  No nap for me.

OK, I've finally managed to call him into the room, and by pretending to be angry and threatening not to give him any more snacks today, I've silenced him...temporarily.  Sounds cruel, I'm sure, stomping on my boy's creative instincts so.  Unless you're a parent, in which case I'm sure you understand completely.

This inclination to sing is a mixed blessing.  I have a good ear, Talia too, and Felix, it seems, has inherited these abilities.  He loves to sing, does it all the time, usually in tune, and often with lyrics of his own devising.  How amusing!  How creative!  Ultimately, how annoying!

How much of this am I supposed to put up with?  How much of it can I stand?  I don't know if I'm peculiarly prone to getting bits of music trapped in my head, but for sure it's a vulnerability of mine, and a devastating one.  The wrong sample can easily ruin a day, driving me to distraction or worse, and apt not to poison just one but to pop up again every few days for a week or two before finally disappearing...until the next time.

I am used to Felix infecting our household with the disease of the week, acquired in the pathogenic scrum that is a gregarious child's milieu.  He picks up as well a large variety of memes, some--superheroes, "Star War"--more commercial than--chasing people with sticks--others, at school and on the playground.  And then there are the songs.  We have been careful to steer him towards Elizabeth Mitchell and away from Rafi, that is to say to expose him to the less virulent of the childrens' corpus.  Our defense, I realize, is incomplete, as he bursts into a rousing round of "Bob the Builder, can we do it? YES WE CAN!"  Where did you learn that?  I DON'T KNOW!

Now he is being totally quiet, and that is the worst sound of all.

Find Yourself

"California," exhorts the California Travel & Tourism Commission, "Find Yourself Here."  Certainly I have been trying, and some of that finding, or looking at any rate, has been, well, very Californian.  Most especially this:  I meditate.  As with all self-help regimes and most people, I don't do it as often as I would like, nor as regularly, but I have certainly never done it before and now, I think I can honestly report, I do.  By great good fortune a near--close by, close to our hearts--friend of ours is an adept in these matters and was thinking of organizing a weekly "sit" even before I mentioned the matter to him.  The result is that I and a small handful of co-seekers get together each Wednesday for an hours' talk and half an hour or so of sitting with our eyes closed.

I'm not sure how to describe it less literally. I have no expectations, no demands, and no justification.  I just sit, pretty much every Wednesday, and I try to sit for a bit every other day, too (it is there, despite sitting, that I typically fall down).  I have abandoned any expectation that in sitting I would find myself in a state of non-thought, but tend instead to abstract myself somewhat from the thoughts that do arise.  This allows me, to the limited extent I am able, to view the flow of my thoughts, most often turbulent, sometimes reasonably measured, variable in any case.

And what does this view afford?  Certainly no great insights, no especial wisdom, and yet I do feel I profit from it.  Boredom, my great bugbear in life, has for some months been banished by the ever-present possibility (or perhaps threat is the correct term?) of my entering a meditative state.  I ask myself more frequently, if not frequently enough, why I am allowing myself to run away with a particular thought or feeling (typically my other great bugbear, annoyance).  And, with enough concentration, and more and more often, I am able to disassociate myself from my physical sensations just enough to lose a clear sense of my own physical dimensions, which is to say that sometimes, while meditating, my head, starting with my teeth and spreading outwards from there, starts to feel really, really big.  It's neat.

Felix has my number.  He asked Talia the other evening where I was.  Upon hearing I was at my meditation class he said "Oh, that's where dada sits and waits for something to happen."  Still waiting, boy, still waiting.

(For Felix's own meditation practice see this link.)

Schjeldahl and my Andy

I have few heroes aside from Abraham Lincoln. One of those, as you may know, is Andy Warhol. Another is Peter Schjeldahl, among other things the art critic for the New Yorker and, above all, a truly superior writer. I was very pleased, therefore, to see Mr. Schjeldahl write the following about Mr. Warhol:

Series like “Shadows” (enigmatic images from an illegible photo), “Oxidation Paintings” (Apollonian beauty achieved with piss on copper emulsion), “Camouflage” pictures (marvels of color), dashing collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and sombre self-portraits stand up to the strongest art made by anyone else, anywhere, at the time. See it. Admit it.

I do, I do, and that joyfully!

It had never occurred to me to check out what Schjeldahl (hey, can I call you Peter? No? Oh.) had to say about Warhol, but inspired by this clip I searched the New Yorker archive. In it I found another article, from 2002, this about a Warhol show at the Tate which I myself saw.  (Since I have no idea what Schjeldahl looks like, it is possible that he and I were in the same room at the same time and in subsequent versions of this story I plan to state this as flat fact.) His comments on Warhol therein prove to me that our thinking is in close accord ("Like the Beatles—his nearest equivalent in another field—Warhol invested vernacular idioms with a timeless eloquence." Yes!). But then he says this:

The show ends with striking installations of his later works—vast camouflage patterns, monumental Rorschach blots, gloomy "Shadows," sparkling with diamond dust, rusty spatters of urine on copper emulsion, and silk screens of da Vinci's "Last Supper," as well as zesty collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat. But these pieces strike me more as ingenious ideas for painting than as satisfying works of art. They feel phoned in.

Uh, wait a minute, these are the same late works you praise so highly eight years later! Ah well, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" they say (attributed to Emerson here and there):  I love you still, Peter.

We have a winner!

As the red text above suggests, my Photo ID project hasn't been attracting a great many entrants. In fact, until yesterday's mail, it hadn't attracted any. But now we have an entrant, and not just an entrant:  a family of four contributing no fewer than 6 ID photos, plus, yes plus, a fantastic blowup of the kids.  Likely you will recognize them (posted with permission):

FANTASTIC PHOTO. And the first ID photo that fell out, enlarged for your delectation below, is simply priceless, worth a hundred entries on its own.

What a dreamboat!  I hereby declare this project a success.  Now everyone else, please send me an ID photo anyway!

Words of Comfort

Pictured below, the perfect serving of frites. Look long and hard, friend, for you will not see its like again:  Holland-België is closing.

When I first started visiting Amsterdam back in the early '90s I was introduced to two people who would prove to be life-long friends, and to whom goes much of the credit (if that's the word) for bringing me to Amsterdam in the end.  Babette and Michiel were and are their names, and at that time they were a couple, which made it all the nicer.  It was they who first took me to Holland-België, a convenience store (as we would call such a thing in America) that served fresh fries, as do many such stores in the Netherlands.  Their lives, full of bikes and parties and fun of all kinds, seemed nothing short of miraculous to me, but most miraculous of all was that the finest fries I had ever eaten--then and now--were to be had at a little shop that was literally half-a-dozen doors down from Michiel's apartment.  Many years later I moved to Amsterdam, and for part of that time I actually lived in Michiel's apartment, along with Talia, and it was during this period that I took the photo above.  You will understand, therefore, that the passing of this institution marks for me the end of a phase of my life.  Marks it in a way that actually leaving Amsterdam did not, because though leaving I could always go back.  I will never be able to go back to Holland-België again.

My life is largely free of regret, but the main exceptions are these:  that I did not eat more of those fries while I had the chance, that I did not eat more Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookie Dough ice cream while I had the chance, that I did not eat more Utz Kettle-Cooked Mesquite BBQ Potato Chips while I had the chance.  I ate a lot of all these things, but not enough, not enough.  Please, all of you, look around at the things you love to eat, and eat them now.

Have you ever noticed how words of comfort generally don't? I have, but you're welcome to try anyway.

Road Trip! (Central Valley, Tahoe)

Just back from a lovely few days driving through the Central Valley and playing on the shores of Lake Tahoe.  To be recommended.

"Baby Sleeps On," a short play in two acts

The scene:  a table in a restaurant, it could be any restaurant at all, anywhere in the world (but as it happens it was a pub in Tahoe); dinnertime

The actors:  wife, three-year-old, blessedly inert baby, and me; also a waitress

Act 1:

ME:  Please don't take the ice out of your glass.
WIFE:  Please don't play with your straw.
ME:  Stop blowing bubbles in your water, you're going to spill it.
WIFE:   Don't play with your straw.
ME:  Will you stop messing with your glass?

THREE-YEAR-OLD spills entire glass of water all over table, himself, and ME

ME and THREE-YEAR-OLD exit rapidly, stage left

Act 2:

ME and tearful THREE-YEAR-OLD enter, stage left, sit down at table; table is now dry but our clothing is still wet
WAITRESS arrives with plates of hamburgers and fried things
WIFE starts to share out helpings for THREE-YEAR-OLD

THREE-YEAR-OLD:  Can I have some ketchup?
THREE-YEAR-OLD:  Can I have some ketchup?
THREE-YEAR-OLD:  Can I have some ketchup?
THREE-YEAR-OLD:  Can I have some ketchup?
WIFE:  ALRIGHT ALREADY CALM DOWN!
THREE-YEAR-OLD:  Why do I have to ask you five times?

ME strikes forehead with open palm, repeatedly

THREE-YEAR-OLD:  You shouldn't hit your head.

ME and WIFE clench edge of table, laugh, cry

BABY sleeps on

Fin.

Out of touch (JoCo)

The fact that I am still out of touch with current American politics does not concern me, but the fact that I only just learned that Job Cohen is no longer mayor of Amsterdam makes me feel positively out of it.  (And that I only did learn about it by reading an article in the New York Times makes me feel a bit like a dinosaur.)  We didn't often drink champagne with JoCo (as we liked to call him) but when we did, well, it somehow tasted even better.  I would love to see him become the premier of the Netherlands.

I would also love to see articles about the Dutch/European immigration problem stop making statements like this:

There is certainly some truth to the conventional wisdom about the immigration debate: that Europe lags far behind the United States in its ability to craft a truly multiethnic society, to turn newcomers into citizens.

What so bothers me (and a lot of other people) about this is the bit about the US having crafted a "truly multiethnic society," and being proficient in turning "newcomers into citizens."  Really?  But, uh, your own newspaper points out that there are more illegal than legal immigrants in this country, that there are enormous and painful divisions of opinion on what to do about that, and that years of political effort have produced no consensus and little progress in this area.  And let's not even get into recent US policy vis a vis Islamic radicalization, here and abroad.

No, no, we aren't the model, and even if we were it wouldn't translate, these things never do.  (And let's not forget how much trouble you got into following our free market lead!)  The Dutch will solve this, as they always do, by being Dutch.  In the meanwhile, let's hope Amsterdam can find a good replacement.

Pizza

Pizza.  God, I love it.  We all do.  I missed nothing so much as this, this pizza, this very pie, all those years in Europe.  It's a relief I tell you, an enormous relief, to eat this, as we do, once a week.  Whatever else may happen, this is right.

Baby once more

I'm almost as surprised as you are, kid:  being a dada for the second time is so much easier.  Kid 1 was hard.  Much sleeplessness, lots of adrenalin, I had a job.  And, of course, we lacked experience.  Breast feeding, for example, took two of us as docking him was tricky (as it is if you haven't done it before).  We had to ask neighbors for bottle parts in the middle of the night.  Changing a diaper required thought.  Amateurs.

But I think the thing that made it most difficult was that Kid 1 changed our lives.  Obvious, expected, shocking nonetheless.  And Kid 2?  More of the same.  So it's going just fine here, a very mellow time for all, and thank goodness for that.

Someone else's words

I read.  I read a lot.  And now that I'm up at night somewhat more than usual, I'm reading more than ever, albeit sometimes a bit blearily.  Bleary or not, when I read I note the good bits, some of which I later copy out.  The result is my "quotes" file which, with the years, has gotten a bit bulky (220 pp., >1200 individual items at last count).  Shan't burden you with it here, but, since the purpose of this blog is to let you keep up with me and my thoughts, I will start sharing those quotes as I find them.  That's what the new text box to the right is for.

These first two quotes are from Hunter S. Thompson's first novel, The Rum Diary, which I finished last night.  It's not very good, not very good at all, but like all of his writing it's an easy read and it bears his distinctly desperate mark as clearly as any of his stuff.  I've read him for years, always searching for a book as tremendously entertaining as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Always searching, never finding.  Few of even those who do write have more than one really good book in 'em, and since Hunter's gone now I don't suppose we'll ever see Fear and Loathing's like.

By the way, my quoting should not be construed as my endorsement:  I note things that strike me for whatever reason, and often because they strike me as wrong.  But each of these quotes can certainly be taken as something I'd be happy to think about more, and even talk about, should it strike you the same way.

Fairfax Provides

Talia this morning asked why we didn't yet have a proper stereo.  I've been thinking, too, it's a pity we don't because we'll soon be spending a lot of time sitting around the place, and we'll need it.  The reason is "no amplifier," an age-old story with us, as some of our friends can well attest.  I have one, you know, a very old Scott 299c, but it's in my mother's storage shed; I hope to pick it up this summer sometime.  While at the coffeeshop today I did check on eBay to see if there were any of the same nearby for a reasonable price, but no luck.  Also talked some with my dad, who built this amplifier, which both he and I used for many years.

And then I found one on the sidewalk while biking home with Felix today.  A nice integrated amp, a Sony STD-D615.  Even the remote control works.  So now we have music.  Happiness seems to come easy here, even if babies don't.

Six of Swords

Yesterday was the first Fairfax Farmer’s Market of the season, an event we had hoped not to be able to attend.  The baby being late, however, we went and we had a good time.  While sitting on a log eating pizza we saw the local Seeress pass by.  A woman dressed all in white with a white peaked cap, she wanders around these sorts of events dispensing advice and, presumably, magic.  We beckoned to her and graciously she floated over, then asked Talia if she had any questions.  Talia said Yes, and asked the obvious:  When would the baby arrive?  Disconcertingly, the Seeress asked if we were expecting, a question that did little to elevate our opinion of her knowledge of matters temporal.  The belly having been pointed out to her (and in her defense it should be noted that Talia was, as usual these days, dressed all in black), she spent a minute studying the bulge then asked Talia to draw a card from a Tarot deck she was holding.  Talia did so, pulling the Six of Swords, which card showed a picture of a cloaked woman and child sitting in a skiff being poled across a stream by a man.  I can't deny feeling a frisson upon seeing it.

The card, the Seeress pointed out, represented Talia being taken on a journey.  Talia, like the woman in the boat, was making her way across the water, but while she could see the land, she was not there yet and could do nothing at this time but sit and wait.  (She said nothing about Felix or myself, though we are both quite clearly depicted on the same card.  Hmph.)  She did suggest a couple of things by way of practical help, however:  that Talia sit next to the ocean on a receding tide with her legs splayed, and that we assure the baby that we were really ready for it to arrive and that it had no need to fear the birth therefore.  Having already gone to the beach that day we acted on only her second suggestion, speaking to the baby in what I hope seemed like confident tones.  I pointedly did not mention my earlier, confessional blog entry on the topic of baby readiness or lack thereof.

We crossed the water today, Talia and I, but they sent us back.  It may be we'll have to sit on the beach after all.

Waiting

The Flowers of Spring

And when I'm not thinking about all that, I think about flowers:

At work

Making and drinking coffee was just about my favorite part of my old job.  Most of the things I didn't like about that job are gone, and the coffee part's gotten a lot better, too.  Certainly it doesn't get much fresher than this:



I've made of this coffeeshop my office, and spend half a day here whenever Felix is in school:

But what, you ask, am I doing here?  I'm working on an idea.  I am trying to figure out what might sit at the juncture of two burgeoning fields, self-measurement and participatory sensing.  And, having done so, I want to figure out how to make of that my work.

But what, you ask, the heck am I talking about?  This article in the New York Times, just out, explains the first term nicely.  In a nutshell, the superphones we're all carrying in our pockets are capable of measuring in excruciating detail our second-by-second movements, as well as recording a great deal about our activities and environments.  With their help, or that of more specialized instruments, it has become at least theoretically practical (and, to some at least, it is already desirable) to harvest and analyze a lot of hard data about ourselves with the avowed purpose of understanding and perhaps even improving our beings and lives.  Then there's participatory sensing, whereby those affected by a phenomenon are involved in measuring it, the idea being that better, more relevant, and more fine-grained data about that phenomenon may thereby be obtained.  Related.  Important.  Wide open.

But where, you ask, did this all come from?  It started in Amsterdam, soon after I moved to the Saxenburgerstraat, when I realized that me and all of the rest of the yuppies who were rapidly gentrifying that area of Oud-West between the Vondelpark and the Overtoom were allowing the presence of the one to blind us to the effects of the other:  while enjoying our views of that strip of green, we were all breathing the pollution coming from the strip of gray on the other side.  But how much pollution?  And how to make it clear to all of those yuppies, child-toting potential activists every one, that they were paying hundreds of thousands of euros to raise their offspring next to the air pollution equivalent of the A10?

Air pollution measurement, like much centralized data gathering, is typically done using a limited set of high-quality but expensive sensors placed at a limited number of locations for a limited period of time.  The data so generated is of high quality, but for a wide-spread, continuously variable phenomenon such as air pollution it is laughably incomplete:  we don't know in detail, in real-time, over the entire area of concern, and for an indefinite period, the pollution levels we are trying to measure.  And we certainly don't know exactly how polluted is the air going into each of our lungs.  I don't, and you don't, and because we don't it is altogether too easy to treat this as a non-localized problem in aggregate--in this area average life expectancy is diminished by so and so years, overall incidence of lung cancer is increased by X%--rather than my problem--where I live and work and play I encounter air pollution that results in my life being cut short by so and so many years, my chance of developing lung cancer being increased by X%.  And so we sit on our dakterras (that is, if we ever get it built) enjoying our view of the Vondelpark and giving nary a thought to the noxious air blowing over us from the traffic-snarled Overtoom, when we should be downstairs writing infuriated letters to our stadsdeel, or picketing Nuon, or otherwise being activists and protecting ourselves, our children, and our investments.

I want to motivate people appropriately.  I want to do this by enabling them in learning what their personal micro-environments are made up of.  I want to remind them that the aggregate issue is always composed of individuals, one of whom is you.  It's not enough to know that you are part of the problem/solution, you need to know exactly which part.  And with current technology you can.  And, using this same technology and at the same time, you can also help those who are already working on these problems by providing them with a lot of extra data of a type they are not otherwise in a position to collect.

That's what I think about here, at work, as I drink my coffee.  That, and how to make of this paying work that let's me stay here, drinking this coffee, forever.  Your input--criticism, ideas, consulting contracts--is, as always, very welcome.

Tomatoes

"Try, try again," that was our motto in growing tomatoes at Ons Buiten.  Every year the same story:  plant the seedlings, stake them, give them our best compost, rejoice in their growth, water them through the occasional dry stretch, watch them swell up like balloons when the monsoon arrived--July one year, August the next--swell up, split, fall, and rot.

Depressing.

But now we face a waterless summer, all but guaranteed.  And so:  try, try again.

Felix's first regular chore:  watering the tomatoes.  Wish us luck.

More Mooi

Stop me if you're getting bored.

I thought not.  Taken on (or on our way to) Kehoe Beach this past weekend, one of many such stretches on the coastline near our house.  Last shot is of a whale vertebra the size of Felix's entire body.

ID Photo Project

If you're reading this then you should probably be a part of our ID Photo Project.  We've been doing this for years, namely collecting official ID photos from all of our friends and relations, gluing them to magnets, and sticking them on our refrigerator.  We also take official ID photos of ourselves each year (had to, for our Dutch visas, continue to do so now, for the Project), and post them likewise.

I'm tempted to show the ID photos we now have here, but you never know how these things might get used, so I'll resist.  But trust me, it's neato, and besides, you always get more ID photos from a session than you need for whatever application drove you to get them in the first place.  So:  please find an ID photo of yourself--old, new, doesn't matter--and send it to us.  If nothing else it'll let me know you're reading....

Camping

'Tis the season, which is to say the rain has mostly stopped, so we've been camping, or rather I have:  one does not sleep on an air mattress in Talia's condition.

First trip, two weekends ago, was with Dan.  We camped at Stillwater Cove on the coast north of Fort Ross.  Fantastic.



We snuck off again the following Friday, but this time the kids came with.  Camped at Dillon Beach, much closer to home, in Marin.  Just as fun, though the food--chicken dogs and marshmallows for dinner, pancakes wrapped around marshmallows for breakfast--left something to be desired.  Kids loved it all of course.

Bearing up with Baby

Talia, right before Felix's birth:

 

Me, likewise:

Whoo hoo!  Were we ready then? More urgently, are we ready now?

And urgent it is:  Talia, at her penultimate doctor's visit a few days ago, was informed that the baby is now predicted to arrive a week early, namely 24 April. I wouldn't have put much stock in this had Talia herself not also commented that "the baby is ready."  She said this in the exact tones of the possessed child in "Poltergeist," as though channeling the baby--or rather, "The Baby"--itself.

Although I don't think she meant to scare me, I nevertheless leaped into action and immediately start turning the house upside down in search of her Camelbak water system, the one absolute requirement for intensive work of this kind (or so I am instructed).  So far it eludes me, and neither you nor Talia are surprised, though you, at least, have not sweetly threatened to go out and buy another one if it doesn't turn up very soon, and I thank you for your confidence in me.

More successfully, we have sorted through four giant boxes of baby clothes which, if nothing else, served as a helpful, even exciting, reminder of just how tiny, and soft, newborns are.  We have located all of the pram parts, disinfected them where necessary, and aside from inflating the tires we are ready to roll.  This week:  further preparation of hospital bags (now resident in the station wagon) and start to get more specific with Felix about our plan to suddenly abandon him--possibly while he's at school, possibly while he's asleep, possibly in the middle of the day--while we go get the baby out; as you may imagine, it's not an altogether easy thing to explain.

The crib to be borrowed should arrive tomorrow and I made room for it today.  We are discussing announcements with printers.  And yes, we have chosen names.

Ready?  You bet we're not.

Big Fruit

It may have struck you as odd that I have blogged so little about food.  (If you are wondering why this might be odd then you probably don't know me well enough to be reading this, and besides, The Gallery of Transport Loss is much more enjoyable.)  It has not been for lack of things to say.  I am back in America, and have wasted no time in gorging on all that I have missed in my years abroad:  ham, as you may recall, but also Reubens, burritos, sushi, BBQ chips, proper Chinese food, and above all pizza, about which more another time.

But today I write about none of these things, but rather about an apple.  Oddly enough, this apple I have never before seen in America, nor anywhere else except, once, in Japan.  Odd, too, because apples are not a type of fruit that typically interests me (having grown up in an orchard I've had my fill).  But this apple, this apple I say, is really special.  It is the Pacific Rose, a New Zealand variant grown under tightly restricted (commercially speaking) conditions in Washington State, and now, though perhaps only temporarily, available.  We love it, for its crispness, its wonderfully fine grain, its delicious flavor, and, not least, because it is as big as Felix's head (not that that stops him):

Nor should it stop you:  if you are in America then search them out.  If in Europe you may be out of luck, though I am very curious to hear if anyone can find it over there.

And while we are on the topic of oversize fruit, how about these:

Texas beauties, available continuously thanks to the miracle of refrigeration and the Costco distribution system.

Still more Mooi Marin

It's pretty clear there's no end to the mooi in Marin, but I'll keep blogging about it anyway.  So:  Took another hike this weekend, this time a total of about 8 miles round trip (couldn't have done it without Felix's trusty loopfiets, or Talia's trusty legs), each mile more gorgeous than the last.

Go West young man!

Wildflowers were everywhere.

 The ring on the surface of the water is what appears after a gray whale does a quick sounding.

Stopped for a quick picnic lunch.

Gorgeous land, sea, sky.

The beach in the distance is on the other side of Bodega Bay. Might be wadeable at low tide.  We'll go camping there this summer.

Elk!

At this point the sand got too soft for the bike, and soon after we decided to turn back, about a mile from the point itself.

This photo was taken about 5 hours into the hike.  The stamina of both subjects is amazing.  Felix and I had spent the last mile or so playing "run over Dada's shadow," a game that he found endlessly amusing and which gave me a blister.

 I don't know how one gets to this beach down below, but one day I will.

Finally, we arrived back at the ranch from which we'd departed. Still functional in some sense, though I think the buildings are used to tend to the elk, not cattle.

Golden Gate Bridge, part 2

Happened to have been next to and under the bridge yesterday:  beautiful from that vantage point, too, and even more interesting.  Turns out there are tons of surfers, windsurfers, kitesurfers (see the second picture, below), and the like playing in the currents underneath the bridge.  Also turns out the entire thing was built right over an old (Civil War) fort.

Never been here, probably never would have been, but was meeting a friend from out of town.  Tourists are sometimes quite worth following.