Trippin' with baby, or The Nightmare That Didn't Happen

Well, almost. Exhibit A:

This was us (well, me behind the camera) at the Denver airport while waiting for our plane to Chicago to take off.

Which happened after the Santa Barbara washroom incident. But let me back up: So, we're at the Santa Barbara municipal airport, right? Municipal being the keyword here, meaning "small, cozy, and everything's close together, so you don't have to walk or run for MILES on end)--when we discover that, hey, they've ripped up half the parking lot and, oops, the overflow is, uh, where? On the other side of town? Fine, then. It's not like, thanks to yours truly's anal project-manageriness, we haven't built half an hour of slack into our schedule. And the van back across town? Not a problem, other than the fact that we couldn't really fit TBIK's 60-pound suitcase through the door. We thought about maybe ripping up the roof but then settled for hiring one of the local migrant workers to shlep the hardcase metal contraption directly to the terminal. With his teeth only, of course. Because that's the kind of thrillseekers we are.

So, the Santa Barbara municipal airport. It has a ladies' room. ONE ladies' room, to be exact, with about 5 stalls. The counter to set things down is on the opposite side of the room from the changing table. Which also means: NEVER SET DOWN YOUR DIAPER BAG ON THE SINK NEXT TO THE CHANGING TABLE! Unless, of course, you want to fish your wipes out of the torrents that the automatic faucet will unleash upon your bag. I swear we had a whole aquarium going on in there. The dolphins balanced our Desitin tube on their noses as if it were a circus ball. But I digress.

Remember that 60-pound hardcase suitcase? I wasn't lying, folks. 60 pounds. $125 later, that was checked in. With a grim nod on our part. Ugh.

As we dripped our way to the plane, Little Miss Kickboxer charmed the pants off everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY. She smiled, giggled, manipulated her binkie and her razzberry expertly, and put our $125-stricken mood to shame. Which continued throughout the entire trip. This child is either the new Buddha or maybe got switched in the hospital. I'm sure someone else in Santa Barbara now has a spikey-red-haired screamer of German descent. And no, we're keeping ours, thankyouverymuch.

Here's what I've learned so far: Hotel cribs can be scary, especially during the first night when everybody's getting used to the room. That's when it's best to have your baby sleeping in your bed. The second night? Not a problem. Also, a sling is indispensable for carrying a child through the airport because the stroller will shuttle heavy carryons perfectly between gates. I took my Hotsling and Over-The-Shoulder Baby Holder and ended up using the latter more because it's easier to get baby in and out quickly (even though it looks more bulky).

And we're in Chicago. In the city. My heart blew into a gazillion smithereens just looking at the skyline and smelling the city smells. Not to mention that there's a Children's Place, an ULTA, and a lovely little bakery with outdoor seating right around the corner from our hotel. And yeah, my Mom's here, too. But that's a separate post, with separate photos.

What I owe you ...

Well, turns out that I *am*, indeed, a software genius. Who would have known to look at the computer case to find the serial number of the operating system installed on said box? In my defense, I am a software engineer. The case, that's hardware. Hardware is not what I studied in grad school.

Since I was up until 2 last night stuffing our entire household into two suitcases for this 10-day-trip (or at least Little Miss Kickboxer's entire household, which means diapers, formula, diapers, wipes, diapers, bedding, a thousand little outfits and dresses to make sure she's always dressed for the occassion, and a thousand old and new toys to make sure she's properly entertained (which might or might not include a supersize bottle of Grey Goose)), I am now officially ready for my nap. From which I plan to wake up in, oh, ten days, in the plane on the way home from first Chicago and then Cowtown, Illinois. If you want to follow The Trip to Little Miss Kickboxer's baptism ceremony live, I'll be twittering from my wannabe iPhone.

Also, remember how I promised you pictures from our first trip to the playground with SWINGS! ?







Oh, and then, there was the Fourth of July, right?



And yes, those are Baby Banz. Because we're nothing if not stylish:



See you on the other side of the airport!

Why I'm a software genius

There's this old desktop taking up space in our house, and if you've ever seen our house, you'll know that we have anything BUT enough space. It's an old DELL tower, dark grey, dusty, unused but not unloved, occupying premium toy storage realty, and *gasp* running Windows Me (as in Millennium Edition). I know, I know. You just fell off your chair laughing.

A while ago, TBIK decided to let go of this trusty friend, who, like Old Yeller, had served him well through years of surfing the internet for good porn professional news and dragon games. "Time to say goodbye," he sighed, patting the old workhorse sadly on its screen, "time to ..." He turned around. "HONEY!? HOOOOOOOOOONEYYYYY! Can you erase the computer before we give it away?"

Come on, you know I'm a genius, especially when it comes to computers. After all, I have an engineering degree, right? So, I backed all of his personal files up, including his ex-girlfriend's 2003 tax return (ahem!), on a CD, verified that said CD works in our laptop drives, and proceeded to what I know how to do: Deep format harddrives, installing shiny new operating systems, making sure everything works in a network and holds software that can launch rockets. Only that I've never worked with Windows Me before.

After a few tries, I pull up the command menu, for which you have to type "command" instead of the "cmd" I'm used to (aha!). I figure I'll try "format c:" and see what happens. Hey, it worked in middle school some *cough* twenty-ish *cough* years ago, right? After hammering the same command over and over again and getting the same error message over and over again, I decide it's time to--no, not consult the DELL manual, which is the uselessest case of useless, anyway--type "man" just because, hey, I dimly remember my old Windows 98 laptop, and that worked there. Ahem. Only that, after hammering the same command over and over again and getting the same error message over and over again, I remembered that, oops, I actually had a Unix emulator (Cygwin, for the geekier ones among you) installed on that old laptop. Ahem. So far, I've done pretty well in the idiocy department.

So, I decide to work it through the BIOS, you know, the "raw command line brute force" stuff. I restart and push F2 to bring up the setup menu. The screen mocks me with beeps, blackness, and the words "KEYBOARD FAILURE" in tiny white letters. I restart again and discover that I have a window of about 3 seconds to push F2 (not before that and certainly not after) in order to bring up the setup menu. Hm. Looks different from what I'm used to. "Let's look around a bit," I think and, "oh, primary harddrive, secondary harddrive ... hmmmm ..." The computer has one harddrive, so I decide to set a couple of these parameters to "AUTO" and then reboot.

White cursor. Black screen.

I reboot again.

White cursor. Black screen.

I reboot and hit F2.

"KEYBOARD FAILURE."

At which point, incredible geek that I am, I figure, fine, we'll start this sucker from the OS disk. After all, this is how it used to work in the company lab. I insert the OS disk and, oh hai! a command line option! It lands me on drive A:, sooooooo ... "format C: /s /v"

And another error message. The machine is clearly toying with my feelings.

But I'm the bigger geek, I think. I can do this. So, I pull out my strongest weapon: My self-contained Linux boot CD, also known as Knoppix. The computer restarts, and, aaaaaahhhh! The beauty of a colorful Linux startup! Who needs DOS anyway when you can have something unixier, right?

Only that the disk hangs. At the same point. All twenty-three times that I try booting it.

Ahem.

"You can't take me!" I hiss, wiping the sweat pearls off my brow. I resign myself to the forces of the internet and google "harddrive 1 not found."

Ahem.

Do you remember from, say, highschool science class, that computer arrays start with zero, as in ZERO? And that any harddrive numbered 1 would be a second, in this case, nonexistent, harddrive?

With the help of the Windows installer CD, I manage to pull the F2 menu back up and turn harddrive 1 off. Hellooooo Windows Millennium! I hate you, too! And where the h*ll is the "format" command, anyway? Oh, fdisk, huh? Fine, I'll make a new partition and then format you. Whatever.

Only that, even with a shiny new partition, there's no "format" command anywhere to be found.

"> format C: /s /v"

White cursor. Black screen.

My chest heaves with a quiet sob. I'm nothing if not determined, and google tells me to type that dang command just so. Seventeen times later, I decide, "Hm. What if I just stick the Windows CD back in?"

"Whomp whomp whomp," the CD drive starts up. "Whomp whomp whomp. Your harddrive is not formatted. Before installing Windows Millennium, it is recommended to format the harddrive. Format now [Y] [N]?"

It's almost two in the morning at this point, and when the installer finally pops up, I yawn. "Home free!" I think. "Home free!"

Only that, ten minutes later, I have to enter a serial number. Those Microsoft people are so protective of their software. So, I wade through the meticulously preserved paperwork to find the rainbow-colored sheet with the serial number sticker (aka COA sticker). I wade again. Where's the sticker? Where's the sheet? After half an hour of sifting, I give up. WTF. This operating system is about 10 years old, so someone might have posted the serial number on the internet listed a copy of this software for sale somewhere. I google, I find, I'm bleary-eyed. I type serial number after serial number into the little boxes. Error message this time? "Wrong serial number!" Of course I'm nothing if not ethical and decide it's time to consider installing Windows 95/98 onto the machine instead--yeah, I still have those CDs *and* the sticker. After I get my much-deserved three hours of sleep.

I'm nothing if not persistent. So, this morning, I google "lost Windows Me OEM serial number DELL 8100" and what do I find? A page that says "For earlier Windows OEM versions, most COA stickers are located ..."

[We now switch to a commercial break, folks! See you on the other side!]

"For earlier Windows OEM version, most COA stickers are located on the side of, or underneath, the original computer case." I shlep my weary body into the hallway, where the harddrive still hums like an angry bumble bee. My eyes wander down the side of the dark grey tower.

Joyful tears fill my eyes at the sight of a small rainbow-colored sticker.

I *am* a genius, dammit.

... to be continued ...

Weekend moments

Did you all have a good weekend? Seriously, we did. It started with the news that Sarah Palin has started to nip her career in the overdue butt and devote herself to full-time moose-dressing. Or the raising of her children. And if God does, indeed, love ll His chilluns, she'll run as the 2012 Republican candidate--which will guarantee another big fat win for Obama. And that's nothing if not patriotic, especially on a July 4th weekend.

I have to confess: Ever since I became a citizen, I've been kind of a sucker for the patriotic thing this once a year. There's always been a flag on my apartment patio/ lawn, and yeah, I've been known to hum "God Save America" or "America the Beautiful" at least once on that day. I also love me a good parade, so last year, TBIK and I watched the samesuch in Boulder City, near Lake Mead (where it's waaaaay too hot around this time of year), and the year before that, I think we spent the day in Santa Barbara, cheering on the librul commie brigades marching down State Street and then listening to the free concert at the Courthouse.

That was when we were still oh-so unencumbered and fancy free.

This year was, ahem, different. We kicked off the weekend celebrations early, on Thursday, with Little Miss Kickboxer's first trip to the city park where they have *gasp* A REAL. BABY. SWING. And a REAL. BABY. SLIDE. I kid you not. For this girl, it's "the higher the better," or rather, "the higher the SQUEEEEEAL." Which, of course, the other toddlers in attendance noticed and volunteered to push her gently in her swing. And all of a sudden, yours truly became the babysitter of the park, or, as one of the other mothers yelled over to her 2-year-old who was staring longingly at the second swing, "We'll put you on there when we're done smoking." Does it surprise you that the three-year-old girl in a bare midriff shirt towering over me on top of the slide told me all about her "boyfriend" at home? Southern California smalltown life, it can break your heart.

After debating back and forth the benefits of attending the Santa Barbara parade with Little Miss Kickboxer in tow--who, by the way, loves a good parade more than anything, especially when it comes with marching bands, in-the-air twirly things, and animals of every kind--we settled for cutting the drive in half and instead spending the day in a little tourist town with a big Danish heritage nearby. And because we're not only corny, but also cool and of the flower-power hippie persuasion, we spent most of the day rummaging through independent bookstores and toystores and sneaking free chocolate-mint fudge samples from one of the overpriced tourist ice-cream traps. After the obligatory barefoot dancing to an Eagles cover band, of course, and the hot dog nutritious lunch at the Rotary Club's BBQ wholesome food stall. Most heartfelt moment of the day: Revisiting the coffeehouse at which we had our third date and whispering naughty things to each other across iced lattes while baby looked adorable sleeping in her stroller.

Did we take pictures? Heck yeah. Did I download them this morning? Heck no. Come back tomorrow for the photo edition! In the meantime, for your edutainment:





Preview of things to come: Packing our entire household up for the Big Trip to Illinois this Thursday. I wonder if the dishwasher will fit into baby's suitcase, in between the diapers and the organic Spinach and Potatoes.

Blip

I can't help it; I'm shocked. No, really. Not the Michael Jackson thing, especially after the suspicion is slowly emerging that he might have OD'd on Diprivan, a prescription-only intravenous sleeping aid that his RN-cum-nutritionist had warned him not to take (is anyone still wondering why his personal doctor's car was impounded?). It's also not really the Farrah Fawcett thing because, while she stood on the frontlines of battling this horrible cancer, and while her love story--THE quintessential real-life Love Story--with Ryan O'Neal ended so tragically with plans for a wedding that wasn't to be, her death didn't come unexpected.

No, what shocked me today was the death of Karl Malden. Malden was an institution, and with him died a part of my early childhood. I remember first seeing him in "The Streets of San Francisco," dubbed in German, of course, when I was, oh, tiny. Which didn't stop me from developing my first-ever serious crush on Michael Douglas, and we know these crushes last a lifetime. In fact, watching "The Streets of San Francisco" was a family event. I remember hurried dinners because the show came on, of our little broken family hightailing it into the living room, Grandpa with his beer and Grandma and I with a bowl of pretzels, anticipating this week's most exciting car chase up and down Lombard Street, and Grandma, oh my gosh, how she loved the nubby-nosed Detective Mike Stone! Later on, I, too, fell for that nose--in a thoroughly platonic way, of course, because I'd never cheat on Michael aka Steve Keller--sensing the bond among us, the rhinally-nubbily challenged. In fact, in my twisted little-girl fantasies, I slipped into his role, his nose became mine, and I, I became Steve's sidekick. Karl, I used you. Please forgive me.

Later on, in my teens, I discovered classic movies and with them "A Streetcar Named Desire." And wouldn't you know it, I never had a thing for the young Marlon Brando. But the young Karl Malden ... he joined Jason Robards on my list of favorite actors. And he's never left that list.

When I close my eyes to remember Grandma, I see a woman in her sixties, elegant, made-up, and not a hair out of place. When I close my eyes to remember Karl Malden, I see a man in his mid-forties with a slightly squished fedora and the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. Grandma was 86 when she died, Karl 97--about as unexpectedly as Farrah Fawcett. But how, in contrast to Farrah, did they become so old in the blink of an eye? And what does that say about me and the fact that those pretzel-crunching childhood moments in front of the TV are sometimes more real to me now than the desk from which I'm writing this post? Have I become a walking anachronism like the dude on the bus who listens to The Eagles and flashes the peace sign to everybody? Or like my Tetris-playing colleague who is still trying to perfect his Moonwalk?

I could wax philosophical now and talk about how time is really a matter of experience, and how understanding it as a sequential arrangement of minutes is simply a "social contract" issue that allows us to communicate schedules. I could warm over Bergson's stale concepts of "temps" and "duree" and grad school blah blah blah episteme blah blah performance blah body blah blah. Or I could ruminate on some sort of universal shift, one that began with the election of President Obama and that plays itself out now, where fate (or insert the deity of your choice), in the blip of a cosmic second, decides to end an era and start another one. Whatever. Instead, I think I'll spend some more time bewildered about this time warp, the black hole which my life seems to have disappeared.

From the department of treehugging ...

I've always been somewhat of a tree hugger. In Germany, I used public transportation despite owning a car (an admittedly crappy one that I had to park on a slope because it would only pushstart); in Toadtunnel Toontown, I'd do the same or bicycle almost everywhere. In Prisontown and Strip Mallorama ... well, at least my car gets 30+ miles to the gallon. I research the cosmetics I use on anti-vivisection sites to make sure they're not tested on animals, buy as many American-made products and locally-grown produce as I can, and yeah, there are free-range non-hormonal eggs in our fridge (in contrast to my ovaries, I might add).

With all this holier-than-thou-ness to my credit, I've been wondering when we can stop talking about Michael Jackson and focus on the important things again, like, you know, there's still a war going on, there's a revolutionary climate change bill on its way to the Senate, and my Prozac consumption will triple if I find out that this Monster Bowling Set, which will turn Little Miss Kickboxer into Marie Curie by Friday, is made by child slaves in China and contains toxic filling, lead paint, and a pod of Black Widow babies about to hatch.

Seriously, though: H.R. 2454, also known as the Waxman-Markley comprehensive energy bill, or "ACES." This is the bill that includes a cap-and-trade global warming reduction plan designed to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020. "Because you're worth it," I'd like to tell Little Miss Kickboxer on the way to her senior prom, "That's why we elected a President and a Congress who'd make sure you'll have more clean air to breathe and more clean water to use. And pack the big box of Trojans, you hear?" I'm nothing if not a concerned mother hen, and I'd like to make sure that, when I'm not around any more, she won't have to worry about the polar icecaps in the same way we do now (you know you do, too). So, why did this bill pass in the House with only seven votes? Even more interesting, if, as the Rushites allege, everything goes down party lines, why did 44 forty-four Democrats vote against it, with only eight Republican representatives breaking rank?

In other words, what do people have to lose? Other than, of course, their investment in future generations?

Oh right, cap and trade, "cap" meaning, of course, someone's earnings are being capped by the limits set for consumer price increases for this new energy. Which also means that the poor energy companies will have to absorb the cost of cleaning their act up (aka modernizing their outdated technologies), which, in turn, means less margin and therefore fewer profits. And because, in contrast to TBIK who'll have to take a paycut because our dear governor chose to slash education funding, the big energy bosses can't do without their million-dollar salaries. Especially since the reduction in margins will cut right into the campaign contribution or 527 PAC funds--and that in a pre-midterm-election year! Want to comb through the naysayer's big-donor records? Yeah, I thought so, too.

This bill does all sorts of cool things--it requires energy-efficient civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering, reduces the toxic output from coal-burning plants, and takes first steps towards reducing rainforest logging; it acknowledges, indeed, the global responsibility we all have in securing safe and lasting future energy supplies. So yes, this will obviously come with a shakeout in the energy industry, where some companies will fail and other succeed (Tesla, anyone?), and American conservatives are about as nimble as a herd of rhinos when it comes to changing intellectual direction (oxymoron or tautology? You decide. But make sure to google Michael Savage's statements on Global Warming beforehand, will ya? No, you're not getting a link.). But when have shakeouts made things worse in the long run? Especially if you're a conservative, you should believe in the "survival of the fittest," so there. You should also be driving an American car and ditch your Mercedes. Just sayin'.

Seriously, go read this bill or at least its summary. And then please write your Senator and urge her or him to vote for this, even if you don't have kids or nieces or nephews or friends or have chosen to live out the rest of your life in a nuclear-hazard-safe bunker. Future generations all over the world will thank you. AND maybe I'll come do your windows.

Mom, the computer ate my blog post!

On Friday, before my computer ate my files, I had started writing up a post about Michael Jackson. Or rather, about how he wasn't ever a big part of my life. You see, while I did do a lot of my growing up in the Eighties (legwarmers? I haz them!), I did so safely ensconced in classical piano lessons, church youth group activities (including learning new guitar picking styles), and, uh, the reading of anatomy books. Nerd, geek, strangely secluded hermit--I was all of these, with a short bout of disco-dance mania and hot-heaviness for John Travolta thrown in for good measure, when I was, oh, 15 or so and got my first kiss from a boy. Who, by the way, looked nothing like John Travolta.

So yeah. Pop music eluded me. Not just that, though. I was too arrogant to care about it. Instead, I listened to my Mom's old 45's from the Sixties and dreamed of goin' to San Francisco and becoming a flower child. In the Eighties. Needless to say that, in the late Nineties, I finally started listening to Phil Collins. Ahem.

That didn't really change, even when I moved out here six years ago, to the California Central Coast, about half an hour (if you drive like Germans do) from the Neverland Ranch. Fine, we toured the area, took photos at the front gate of the ranch, and then proceeded to be snubbed at the pretentiously low-brow Cafe Los Olivos because we weren't wearing the right brand of clothes (Walmart jeans! WALMART JEANS???). It's miracle we didn't get arrested for starting into the windows of Sotheby's Realty.

Aaaaanyway, so the only moment I remember of Michael Jackson was, ironically, when I filed my divorce papers in March '06, in the Santa Maria courthouse, and couldn't find any parking because all those newsstations had permanently camped out there to catch the smallest glimpse of the King of Pop jumping on the roof of one of his armored SUVs and blowing kisses to the crowd. The whole town, small and backwardly Republican as it is, fought its judgmental battles in the local newspapers' opinion pages, and you should have heard the hushed discussions between the cubicle walls here. "The Freak" or "Whacko Jacko," in other words, got a lot of coverage; the human being, though? You'd think that that never existed. Out here, Michael Jackson remained the Other, the perv, and everybody's cultural whipping boy. I was surprised that he didn't hightail it out of the area much earlier.

Now, Farrah, that's a whole other story. I was addicted to Farrah Fawcett and "Charlie's Angels" from the first time I laid eyes on them--when I was still very little and the program ran, dubbed in German, on my Grandma's TV. My friends and I watched all the episodes, then recapped them in the playground, jumping off tree stumps and pulling our imaginary guns while crouching and crawling through stubble fields. Frankly, I always wanted to be Kate Jackson, despite the fact that I would have given everything to have that blond, feathered mane and those perfectly straight teeth. Hey, I even tried (and, given my naturally curly hair, spectacularly failed at) the feathering, with scissors, a blow-dryer and comb, and a lot of Grandma's expensive hairspray. She later changed the brand because, strangely, it wouldn't hold so well--probably because, you know, the amount of water in the bottle had, ahem, increased, ahem, dramatically. Not that Grandma ever knew that.

But Farrah, yeah. Her role in Charlie's Angels was, for me, the introduction to the fact that women could have actual jobs. I mean, jobs that weren't predicated on traditionally female roles, or so I thought, such as homemaker, ballerina, or princess. Needless to say, I was very little at that time and didn't think much about all the bikini-wearing in the show. And about cancer.

Only a while ago, when Grandma, a breast cancer survivor of 20some years, lay dying, I pulled up "Farrah's Story" on Hulu and watched the program in its entirety. I learned that she had gone to Germany for experimental treatments, but that, in the end, the cancer had won and everyone was now awaiting her passing. When, in the film, her son comes home from prison and lays down by her bedside to talk to her, I lost it. I imagined Grandma dying at that point. Which she did. And of course, Farrah died, too. Grandma had always loved Farrah.

So, that's what I was going to post on Friday, and then I realized that everyone's going gaga over Michael Jackson, over how sudden his death was and how unexpected. And how this event kinda stole the limelight from Farrah, whose exemplary battle against cancer, should have gotten more airtime--despite her death, I still think her stoic hanging on makes for the more inspiring, albeit quieter, story.