Experiences of an Inland Empire Dad

Happy New Year 2009

Timothy — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:41:52 +0000

Well, after being away from the blog for 3 months (No coincidence that my last post was about the iTouch – talk about a time sucker) I’m back.

It’s been some interesting times and I’ve got a lot of projects to post about in 2009.

Why yes, I Did Buy a new iTouch

Timothy — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:45:02 +0000

Ok, it may be hype. It may be just a toy. But yes, I do have an an iTouch. I’m still learning the interface but it seems pretty slick. The keyboard takes a bit getting used to and I’m using the backspace a LOT.

Where does the time go?

Timothy — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:03:06 +0000

That seems like a question I ask myself often enough. I’ve got a lot of plans, things to do, places to see, people to meet, blogs to write. And then I have reality. Work life flows into home life (especially with my job in IT where I have a Blackberry which means getting calls and e-mails at odd hours). Balance can quickly turn into imbalance and one might just end up looking back and wondering how all those dreams and goals got relegated to the back of the closet.

So, I’m working on learning and implementing a new time management system and using my Microsoft Outlook a bit more efficiently in conjunction with my blackberry.

I’m keeping it simple. The 4-d’s

If it isn’t important, delete it.
If it can be done in 2 minutes or less, do it.
If it isn’t for you or if you can, delegate it.
If you need to do it, but it takes longer than 2 minutes (including reading), defer it.

There’s a pretty good article on Microsoft’s website here that talks about taking control of the inbox.

But, more important than what is in the article – part of organizing that to-do list should really get down to priorities. It may seem silly to schedule time in my calendar with things like “Call wife and tell her I love her” – but really, is there anything more important? There will always be more things to do than time to do them in, it’s just a matter or remembering those priorities about what is most important in my life and doing those things first.

Happy Birthday Ray Bradbury

Timothy — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:30:27 +0000

For those of you not familiar with this man’s works, where have you been? My favorites from this author include

And the man is just a creative whirlwind. When he was 80 he said the following:

“The feeling I have every day is very much the same as it was when I was twelve. In any event, here I am, eighty years old, feeling no different, full of a great sense of joy, and glad for the long life that has been allowed me. I have good plans for the next ten or twenty years, and I hope you’ll come along.”

At the same time, he’s like the original punk, out to do his own thing and comfortable with having that outsider status.

I don’t need to be vindicated, and I don’t want attention. I never question. I never ask anyone else’s opinion. They don’t count.

Rock on Mr. Bradbury! And congratulations on you newly published book Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band is Playing & Leviathan ‘99 (July 2008).

Why you should never let your kids out of your sight.

Timothy — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:46:40 +0000

Ok, maybe a bit extreme, but I just saw this article on FOX. It’s extremely tragic and ends in a kid at a party drinking and then being beaten to death.

Sarasota County deputies say Max and Beverly Herrera hosted an underage house party at their home in the 4000 block of Teakwood Lane on July 29.
Gregory Kennedy, 18, died during a brawl at the house party.

Who the hell holds a party with underage drinking? Who lets their kids go to a party like that? This is the part that really gets me.

His son would have been a senior at Sarasota High School this year. Kennedy says he wants justice.
“We repeatedly asked Gregory, ‘are the parents going to be there? This is a birthday party, are you sure the parents are holding it?’ Yeah, you guys worry too much. He was right. He never lied to us about that kind of stuff,” Kennedy said. We just didn’t know what kind of parents. Now we know.”

As a parent, it’s not enough to know that the kids will be under adult supervision, because guess what; There are some pretty stupid adults out there.

Now, I’m not going to be naive and say kids won’t drink – it does happen. And I’m sure you can put some of the blame on the kids, after all nobody forced them to drink. But these parents have ruined a lot of people’s lives by allowing alcohol at an underage party. The family of the victim is devastated, the kid is dead, and two of the kids are up on murder charges – not what I’d call a successful party.

For all you parents out there, get to know the parents of your child’s friends really, really well before letting them have any sort of supervision over your kids. Remember that nobody needs a license to become a parent.

What do you do with a Pecking Chicken?

Timothy — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:43:28 +0000

Last week, I found out one of my chickens, Katie, is a pecker. She bullies my other little chicks, and in one case stripped off the back feathers of Isabella (another little chick). Can chickens be evil? This one is probably borderline.

She’s had a rough life. I tried introducing her and another chick to the flock too early – they seemed fine for the week where I’d let them mingle in the yard together, but when I tried that trick about sneaking them into the coop during the evening so the chickens wake up and go “Look, another chicken! Must have always been here.” what I ended up with was one dead chicken and Katie cowering in the corner the next morning.

I took her back out and tried it again a month later and she took to the flock, but now I’m finding her continually pecking at the other chickens in the yard, driving them away from the food, and in general being a big bully.

I’ve scoured the Internet about how to treat psychologically damaged chickens…Do I take her to chicken therapy? Maybe she needs an intervention with her other chicken friends. I wonder if the feed store has drugs to keep my chicken from being a pecker? It seems like there is a lot of work involved with helping a chicken with a pecking problem become less evil.

So it could be that I’m just lazy, or due to my already high body count as I’ve worked out the care and feeding of chickens in my backyard that I’m desensitized to further chicken death, but it seems that Katie is doomed for the stew pot. I just have to figure out a way to get it past my daughter that we’re going to eat her little Katie.

Maybe we’ll have a special dinner on Sunday… “Evil Chicken Surprise”.

Camping/Biking at El Capitan State Beach

Timothy — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:44:16 +0000

Spent the weekend camping with the family. Relaxing and challenging at the same time as we had our a 9 month old and a 4 year old. Ah, the great outdoors!

Well, at least it wasn’t really camping – it was car camping, which means schlep all your gear up to the campsite and unload the portable stove, tents and bikes and spend the weekend enjoying the fresh air. Here’s an aerial view of the campsite and as you can see we’ve got plenty of neighbors.

The trek was about 4 hours and we left around noon – perfect timing as the drool machine was busy napping in his car seat.

Every camping trip is a learning experience and this trip, I learned that having extra space to pack things is great. We purchased the Sherpak Go! 15 Roof Bag for the trip, and what a difference it made. With the extra space I didn’t have to break out the Tetris skills of packing and we were able to take along our chariot bike trailer to tow the kids around as we visited our friend’s campsites.

My wife and I also purchased bikes for the trip. I got a Marin Bobcat, and she got a Marin as well, but hers was more geared towards the street ride, and even had a little shock absorber in the seat post.

There used to be a time when I went camping by tossing a backpack full of clothes and an external frame backpack with a sleeping bag strapped to it into the trunk of my car and headed for the wilderness. Welcome to family life!

My Daughter’s Adventurous Spirit

Timothy — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:35:53 +0000

There is a timely post over at Discovering Dad called “Do It Because I Said So!”

Timely, because I find myself guilty of using the “because I said so” to the questions of “Why?”. Oh, I try to explain it, but after about the fifth or sixth why, I fall back on the old standby, maybe it’s because I can’t stand up to my daughter’s superpower, the mind bending power of 4 year old logic.

We have trees in our backyard. Beautiful plum and fig and apple trees. They make for excellent climbing, and she often uses them for these purposes. As I used to climb trees as a kid, I let her indulge herself for about 5 or 6 feet before I start to get the nervous pit in my stomach and then out comes parental mode!

ME: Don’t climb any higher please <parental concern>
HER: Why?
ME: I don’t want you to fall. <describe consequences of actions>
HER: It’s ok daddy, I won’t fall!
ME: You might climb too high and the break a branch. <property damage>
HER: I’ll be careful
ME: If you fall, you’ll hurt yourself <personal harm to herself>
HER: I’m not going to fall daddy!
ME: The tree won’t be able to support you if you go higher <limiting factor>
HER: I can see really far!
ME: OK honey, time to come down now. <ending the activity>
HER: Why?
ME: Because I said so. <Doh!>

So, looks like I’m off to the library to go check out the book Mike recommends on his site:

How to Work a Room, Revised Edition: Your Essential Guide to Savvy Socializing
by Susan Roane

Midnight Buffet for the Creepy-crawlies in the Garden

Timothy — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:20:43 +0000

I’ve got some very tasty sunflowers in my garden. I know this because over the weekend something came by and ate pretty much every single leaf on the stalk of my last good sunflower. Boy are my chickens going to be disappointed. I was growing these sunflowers as a special treat for them. It seems that sunflowers are one of those plants that will just never make it all the way to maturity in my garden no matter how hard I try to coax them along. It’s not as though they don’t start off growing well in the garden, they just never seem to survive until I can harvest the seeds.

Even my daughter got into the act a few weeks ago. I came out to the garden and found the other sunflowers had been decapitated. My daughter thought the flowers were pretty and had picked them.

It’s hard to teach her about patience at times when she’s in the garden and wants to pick everything in sight. I always lose a few green tomatoes due to my daughter’s exuberance, and I can recall last year when my little apple tree was just starting to grow a few apples on a branch, only to come home one evening to my daughter showing me how she had reached up and broken the branch off the tree so she could eat the apples.

“And your apples were really good daddy!”

I’m guessing they would have been even better if the were bigger than two inches in diameter. On the positive side though, she’s loving the garden and yesterday we stopped by Lowes and picked up a 6 pack of pink impatiens. She planted two of them in the flower box of her playhouse, and we planted the other four around our garden gnomes who have had heaps of abuse piled on them by our chickens.

It’s hard to tell from the picture above, but right behind them is where I filled in a big hole the chickens had dug out to use for their daily dust baths. I’ve been using poultry netting to keep them out of the gardens, but they still seem to be able to find a few chinks in the armor. However, I’ve refused to let a chicken outsmart me and I will keep at it through trial and error until my garden is chicken-proof. That being said, I’ve pretty much resigned myself to just spending this year defending the garden and anything I actually get out of it is just a bonus.

At least the solar chicken coop seems to be harvesting power, and it should be rather difficult for the chickens, bugs, or pink tornado to mess that up once it’s fully operational. I’m testing the best placement for the solar panel and the battery, so I was out there at various times of the day this weekend with my multimeter checking out the amps and volts being generated from the panel and what was being stored in the battery.

I’m hoping that when it’s all set up, I’ll be able to run not only my cooling fans and the extra 120V outlet, but some floodlights as well for when I want to go out there and find out just what the heck has been eating my sunflowers at midnight.

Baby Boom!

Timothy — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:04:07 +0000

USA Today ran an interesting story on signs of an impending baby boom: Is this the next baby boom?

“A record number of babies were born in the USA in 2007, according to early federal data released Wednesday that some demographers say could signal an impending baby “boomlet.
…
The last time the number was this high was in 1957, in the middle of the baby boom years; about 78 million Americans were born from 1946 to 1964. Demographers have been monitoring gradual increases in recent years; data for 2006, which won’t be made final until September, show a 3% increase over 2005. That’s the largest single-year increase since 1989. — USA Today, July 16, 2008

I’m proud to say that I added to that statistic in November with a baby boy. Within my office, there are three other new dads in the last 6 months who work in my department. We give each other the the bleary eyed nod passing in the hallways.

My wife has been pretty fabulous taking care of the little drool machine, and the pink tornado that is my daughter has really warmed up to the newest competition for our attention so I’ve probably managed to get a lot more sleep that most new dads. That being said, I still need my morning cup of coffee before starting the day. Maybe Starbucks won’t need to close those 600 stores after all, they just need to add an express lane for new parents.