Blogrilla

who knew?

I was working with a lovely young thing trying to research her problem.  She was perusing the effluvia on my desk and noticed some photos of my kids.  She’s nice and everything and in an effort to make conversation she asked if they were my kids.

“uh.. yeah.  They’re #2 and #4″ I responded.

I was still focusing on the tracefile I was examining so I wasn’t making much of an effort to engage with her.

“Oh my!  You have four kids?!”

“Uh… yeah.  They’re … “

I paused when something looked interesting.

“… all grown up?”

WHAT?!

“no, ha-ha!  The oldest is only 12 years old”.

How old does she think I am?!?!  I think I must have aged terribly.  Or she’s maybe an idiot.

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Yes, the weather has been hot and rainy lately.  But that’s not surprising, is it?

The weekend went by quickly.  On Saturday I wound up accompanying Liz to the mall.  She had a couple of hours of shopping to do and I tried to talk her in to leaving me out of it, but still got talked in to driving over there and then taking two kids (Gabe and Grace) for 90 minutes while she and Chloe went shopping.  I tried whining that there was nothing at the mall for me and we would be bored silly, but it didn’t work out that way.  I spent about 20 minutes sorting out my choices in a new lawnmower.  I think I mentioned that i hate my current  mower.  Nonetheless, when it came time to buy I couldn’t find anyone at Sears to wait on me, so we decided to do it some other time.

Me and the two kids dorked around the mall and had a fine time.  We looked at Legos at the Lego store.  I let them peruse KB Toys for 20 minutes before we went to the Apple store.  I have my eye on a 32GB iTouch iPod, but didn’t buy it.  We found some books in Waldenbooks.  It turned out 90 minutes was easy.  And that my kids are a lot of fun to have around.

Sunday was another story.  I had stuff to do for work at 7am but it turned in to a fiasco that swallowed virtually the whole day.

Otherwise life continues down the usual path.

I’m thinking of taking some of the kids for a bike ride through the middlesex fells - a large nature preserve north of boston.  Somehow the idea of taking four kids for a bike ride is a little daunting. 

All the best!

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This week its all about Joe Satriani.  I downloaded his most recent album from iTunes: “Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock”.  I admit it: I couldn’t resist the name.  Its good too.  I’m digging it.  I also found some podcasts he did where he talks about the motivation behind each of the tracks.  The instrumental nature of most of his recordings is good for work - I find that I get distracted by too much talking or singing.

Its a quiet day here at the Solomon Command Center Bunker.  Its really just a cubicle at work.  I’m doing some work on Sunday, so I will plan on doing yardwork and miscellaneous chores on that day.  I may put the new mower up on craigslist.  Liz asked me to mow the yard the other night and it took me two hours.  Its about 25% more narrow than my old one and that means I have to make 25% more passes.  I also don’t think the blade spins because it seems to leave chunks of grass sticking up.  I’m not at all happy with it, yet I have trouble walking away from a perfectly useful (hateful) piece of equipment.

So maybe I’ll see about getting some thing with a gas engine and a wider deck with the proceeds from the sale.

Liz and Grace are both sick.  Grace had to stay home from camp today and is lying on the couch watching “Goodnight Gorilla” - a collection of insipid toddler stories. I’ve never understood what she sees in it, but she adores the video and when she’s feeling sick and needs some comfort, she reaches for that particular DVD.  Its adorable, really.

Ok, I had better get back to work.  I hope the weekend treats you better than a baby treats a diaper.

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This week has been pretty quiet.  I’ve actually been pretty good about taking the dogs out for walks and training every day.  They get better all the time and its nice to see the good progress they’re making.  Last night wasn’t one of their better days though.  Grace was “helping” me.  She’s only six and doesn’t command a great deal of respect from the dogs. 

So we just wound up walking and ignoring the training aspect.  The trouble was that we ran in to a number of other dogs, which makes mine crazy.  They whine and shriek and lose their teeny little doggy minds.  They’re not being aggressive.  Its more out of joy, I think.  But it comes off sounding horrible. And its something they’ve been getting better about.  But because Grace was walking one of them, they didn’t feel the same need to obey as when I walk them.  So I had to take the leash back from her until we got home.

I guess they still need work.  In truth, my primary goal in this training endeavor is to make them to be better companions for walking.  I want the kids to be able to walk them easily and I don’t want to be embarrassed by them.  If they could also catch some frisbees, heck that would just be icing on the cake.

The kids continue to have a good time at camp.

Its raining like CRAZY here.  Every afternoon for the last few days we’ve had storms at the end of the day.  But yesterday there was a tornado warning just a little ways south of here.  I understand there was even a waterspout.  Sure, its no hurricane, but its an awful lot of rain.  The clouds turn so dark its like night!  And its supposed to go on all day.  Sometimes I hate working in a cube.  Other days, its nice to know I don’t make my living outside.

I had a busy lunch yesterday.  I donated blood first, then found a new place to get my car’s oil changed and inspected.  Finally I got an excellent roast beef sandwich.  Sometimes you have to focus on the little successes.

On Saturday I have some work to do off and on for much of the day.  I’ll see about taking care of yard work and chores that day and save playtime for sunday.

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The weekend went well.  I managed to finish the book I was reading. In installed some kind of new “chlorinator” on our funny-little-pool.  I dumped about 50lbs of salt in to the pool and then sort of stirred the whole thing up.  The filter ran for 24 hours to thoroughly mix everything.  Then I turned on the chlorinator.  It takes the salt (Sodium Chloride) and splits the chlorine from the sodium producing chlorine.  So that ran for three hours and I guess the pool is all chlorinated now.

The kids seem to continue to like it, which is key.

Speaking of which, they went to their first day of their summer “camp” - a three hour day-camp thing at the local vo-tech school.  They get

• One hour of computer time
• One hour of swimming time
• One hour of sport (indoor or outdoor)

They had a great time, Liz said.  They get swimming lessons for half the time and then play time for the remainder.  I think my kids are spending virtually the whole summer in some piece of water or another.  That’s ok, its good for them, right?

I continue to work with the dogs on training.  I have completely given up on the “Koehler Method” of training.  I have no doubt that it works, but I’m concerned that its really too harsh.  However, I think he has a lot of good things to teach, so I plan on taking some of his principles and leaving others behind.  I still can’t get behind an all-positive-reinforcement regimen.  I think there has to be a carrot and a stick.  Koehler seemed to advocate mostly using the stick.  Clicker training seems to advocate using only a carrot.  I think there must be somewhere in between that should work for me.

Buckaroo appears to be a quicker study than Peterman.  Bucky is getting the hang of “stay” better than Pete and also seems fond of playing frisbee!  Which is cool.  I’ve always admired the dogs who could play frisbee and I think it would be great if I could teach them to catch a frisbee.

Ben went to the beach on Saturday when it was miserably hot.  A buddy  invited him to the beach.  They stayed all day and then he got to stay over at their house that night.  He had a great time and didn’t get sunburned or anything.   I think the other kids were a little jealous.  I know Chloe was.  In fact, the following day they all asked if they could go to the beach too.

Sadly, I’m not a fan of the beach and will not go out of my way to go there.  The last time we went I set up some kind of dopey shelter because the thought of sitting in the sun all day … well, I hated it.  Liz just looked at me like I was nuts for setting it up.  I’m still not sure how I feel about it.  Sure, its dopey - I don’t care about that, though.  I dunno, maybe I’ll try it again.

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Last night I took the whole family to see the Lowell Spinners - a minor league baseball team.  It was a lot more fun than I expected it to be!  The place was clean.  Most of the people there were families.  I don’t think I heard a single curse-word the whole time I was there.  There were a number of things for the kids to do if they got bored with watching the game.  In between each inning they would have the goofiest, campiest events.  There was a

• sub-sandwich eating contest.
• two people in sumo wrestler getups wrestling each other
• two mascots raced an eight-year-old child around the bases
• t-shirt give-aways

They gave away free baseballs before the game.  We were a little too late to receive one.  Science Diet was there giving away free 11lb bags of dog food.  Why?  Dunno.  I never could figure out the connection between dog-food and baseball.  Nonetheless they gave me five bags of the stuff!  Each of the younger kids got a foam finger.  Stupid useless things will clutter up the house for the next 10 years I am sure.

It was relaxed and goofy.  Nobody I saw really cared much about the game, but it was a nice diversion.  The tickets were $7. The premium box-seats were still only $8.

The kids all loved it.  Even Liz liked it.  So I think we’ll go back sometime.

This weekend?  I don’t have any plans.  I think it will be nice to have a little quiet time.  I’ll probably work with the dogs some.  Maybe take the kids to a proper swimming pool.  The beach?  mmm… maybe.  I’m not a big fan of the beach.  I’ve also been meaning to go to the Ipswich River Conservancy in Topsfield.  But the weather is supposed to be pretty hot.

So staying inside and reading is looking pretty good.

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one of my colleagues screwed up royally yesterday afternoon and called me in a panic about it last night at 10pm asking me to help him fix what he had damaged.  I was up until 1:30am repairing our systems.  I was livid about it.

Now I’m just tired.  I got to work around 7:30am so I didn’t get a lot of sleep.

The whole day has been spent dealing with the fallout from yesterday.

I am taking the kids to a baseball game this evening.  That should be fun.  I hope its fun.  a couple of years ago I would have gotten really bent out of shape about an event like this.  I would have had to deal with a toddler (or two) who would have spent the  whole time trying to get away or otherwise dragging me away from the game.  Now at least they all understand English and are well-behaved enough to follow instructions.

I understand the kids have spent the day in the pool, which sounds like a great way to pass the time.

What’s happening this weekend?  Nada, I think.  It should be pretty quiet.  Which would be nice.

I have an opportunity to pick up a bunch of extra hours doing some programing work for my client, but its some challenging work which means it will take me a lot longer than I would prefer.  It could easily suck up every last spare moment of this unallocated weekend and the following week too.  So I have mixed feelings about it.

I bet the fat check would help me feel better about it, though.

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The Lowell Spinners is a local-ish minor league baseball team out of Lowell, MA on the border with NH.  Their games are supposed to be a lot of fun.  I have tickets for us to go on Thursday to see them play “The Scappers” from Cleveland, OH.  I guess they have give-aways every night and play-time for kids and all kinds of stuff.

The girls said they wanted me to take them to see The Red Sox.  But honestly, I think tickets are $35 per person and I don’t think the girls will like it all that much.  THESE tickets are only $7.  And if they end up hating it we can go home at any time without feeling too bad about it.  If it turns out they like baseball games then maybe we can go to the big leagues some other time.

Last night I spent some time training the dogs down at the local park.  I had a 15′ long leash that allowed the dogs to get quite a bit of space between me and them but if they didn’t stay right with me they wouldn’t notice that i had taken off in a completely unexpected direction.  I had Grace go zooming by to distract them.  It worked ok.  but I did it without a slip collar and it left me feeling frustrated.  Their regular collars don’t constrict when I pull up on the leash.  Anyway, I spent about 30 minutes with each of them and the girls came along and helped.

On the way home I will pick up a choke-chain/slip collar and see if that gives me better results.

I also picked up a video from the library on dog training.  I’ve done some reading on the matter and have grown up with dogs so I think I have a good feel for what I want out of them, but it would be nice to have some graphic examples of some solutions to some problems I’m having.

For example, I am trying to get Bucky to “stay”.  He’ll be walking next to me (on my left) and we stop.  Then I put my hand 6″ - 12″ in front of his face and take one step in front of him and tell him “bucky, stay”.  This seems to be Dogglish for “crawl between my feet”.  Following the Koehler Method’s suggestions I pull straight up on the leash but that doesn’t seem to do much except panic him a little.  The slip collar might produce better results in this regard, but I don’t think so.

I think the Monks of New Skete had some similar suggestions, but there’s got to be something I’m missing.  I have to go back and see what they had to say about some of the basics.

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Liz recently bought one of these “easy set” swimming pools.  I have to give her credit where credit is due: she decided to set it up by herself last week and I guess she didn’t do a bad job.  The trouble is that the pool requires a very level location.

Super level.  So level, that there’s nowhere in my yard that is level enough to prevent it from collapsing.  And that’s what happened last week.  I think she got maybe 18″ of water in it when the side gave way and all of our very expensive water flooded the backyard.

So on Saturday morning i got out there with my helpers and started leveling enough ground for a 15′ pool.  It turned out to be a lot more work than I expected.  I had to turn over and loosen several inches of soil so I could remove the sod and then using a steel rake - with the short tines - I could move the dirt around enough to make a level spot.

Whew!  What a day! I think I spent from 8:30am until about 2pm at it.  By the time I finished it looked pretty good and I couldn’t figure out any more ways to make it level.  We filled it up for a couple of hours and I got a desperately needed shower so I would be presentable at the 4:45pm showing of Hellboy II: The Golden Army.  It was better than I expected.  Plus, we brought Ben’s buddy, Spencer.

We ran the hose for another hour after we got home.  Liz and I sat outside and babysat it to make sure nothing went wrong with it.  Another 90 minutes in the morning completed the filling process.  I was relieved to see that we got within about six inches of the max-fill-level of 36″.  That’s close enough for me and the kids seemed to have fun with it.

Wow, would I have been pissed if it STILL wasn’t level enough.

I think we spent the rest of Sunday running errands to the pet store, the book store and a restaurant for lunch.

I am re-devoting myself to getting the dogs trained.  They’re pretty good now, but could be so much better.  Me and the girls saw the dogs running those agility courses on TV and I think it would be great if they could do SOME of that stuff.  Or maybe just not loose their s&!t when they see another dog on the street.  So to that end, I need to take them for walks EVERY day when we can practice having them pay attention to me, as “handler”.

My father used a method of training our dogs from a guy named Koehler.  I got the book a few years ago and I sat down to read it again.  Mostly I’m hip to the program but I have to admit that it can be a little rough by today’s standards.  So far the dogs have been cooperative enough that I haven’t had to do much to get their attention.  A lot of the practice of his method is to make the dog so uncomfortable that it has no choice but to do what the handler wants.  I’m not sure how far down that path I can go, though. 

If it doesn’t pan out there’s a dog training place not far.

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