Month: December 2004

Sam’s Story: Week 47

Ug, sick again. I’m not sure if this is the same thing Sam has had for the last week or so, or if she just smoothly transitioned from one malady to another, lubricated as she was with phlegm. And I’m sick too, so I have to say that the guy from Trixie Update had the right of it, though, when he identified Baby-related Immune Deficiency Syndrome (BIDS) as the reason why. Kids make you sick and then don’t let you rest to get better. They’re like little breeding grounds for germs, and I’m pretty sure that Sam crawls downstairs in the middle of the night to cough in all our drinking glasses.

The thing is, Sam isn’t acting sick. She’s generally happy and has learned a few new tricks this week. Sam is a long-time fan of taking things out of other things and then complaining that there’s nothing left to take out of anything. She’ll sit in front of her basket of toys and take them out one by one until it was empty and then look at us as if to say “Hey, I’m out of stuff. fix this!”. This week she actually learned the joys of putting them back in the basket, which excites us because it’s a prelude to cleaning up after herself. And the next step after that is getting a job. The really cute thing, though, is that she’s learned to take the shapes out of her shape sorter bucket and hand them to us. She’ll do this for up to ten minutes at a time, just pulling the shapes out, handing them to us, and making a sound like “dis!” each time she gives us one. As in “Take dis! And be happy with my cast-offs.”

Speaking of words, one of the big milestones everyone wants to know about is her first word. I think it’s pretty safe to say that Sam now has a few words in her vocabulary if you know how to listen for them. She says “Ma-ma-ma” when she wants Ger, and “Dad” for me. She’ll point at the cat and say “gat!” pretty consistently, and the bathtub is “bed,” probably because every night we say “Okay, time for bed” and promptly place her in the tub. I’m pretty sure she’ll miss that one on the Vocabulary section of the SATs. Finally, she often points northeast and says “Quebec!” even though she’s really pointing more at Manitoba.

Cruising is her other big milestone for the week. For the baby illiterate among you, cruising is when babies walk around by leaning on something (furniture, the wall, the cat) for support. She will also take little steps if I hold her up and gibber like an idiot right in her face. So the mobility is ever increasing, as are my fears that she’s going to drink a bottle of flaming bleach the second I turn my back.

So yeah, pictures:

One day last week Ger gave Sam a little cookie biscuit thing. As a special bonus, I present you with “Destruction of a Cookie” below:



Dramatic, wasn’t it? You can really smell the pathos. We’re heading to St. Louis for Christmas this week, so Sam’s update will probably be delayed a day or two. Have a Merry one yourself.

Jamie2 Comments

Advent calendar

Ger’s parents gave us this nice advent calendar. It’s got 25 places for 25 little porcalin ornaments, and the idea is that you put one up each day of December until you get to Christmas. Each night we’ve been placing the tray of ornaments in front of Sam and letting her pick one to hang up. She seems to take this job very seriously.

Jamie

In the big tub

We used to bathe Sam in one of those little plastic tubs that you placed inside the bath tub. She has recently outgrown it, though, so we graduated her up. It takes more water and we have to watch her more closely, butshe can now fit ALL her toys in with her.

Jamie

Pink!

“Oh, hello. I didn’t see you there. I was just standing here looking fashionable in my pink overalls and pink leather slippers from Aunt Shawn. Please, come in and make yourself comfortable.”

Jamie2 Comments

I just wanted some Doritos…

I had a light lunch, so around mid-afternoon today I wanted a snack. Specifically, I wanted a bag of Doritos. Mmmm… Crunchy, salty, fake-cheese smelling, and covered in that orange powder. Just so. With this in mind, I embarked on a quest that turned out to be more epic and tragic than I expected.

I went to the downstairs break room and looked at the vending machine. There were no Doritos. Ruffles, Cheese-its, and Fritos, but no Doritos. So I walked back down the length of the building, up the stairs, and back down the length of the building to the upstairs vending machines. Here in the vending machine was an embarrassment of Doritos riches. Both Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch! Multiple bags! I whipped out my wallet and …found only a ten dollar bill. The vending machine would not take a ten dollar bill. Groaning, I walked back down the length of the building, down the stairs, and back to my desk.

Once there, I fished around in my desk, my drawers, my pockets, and that old GameSpy coffee cup where I keep my spare change. And by “spare change” I mean “about a billion pennies.” The vending machine, however, doesn’t take pennies any more than it takes ten dollar bills. I think that’s ironic or something. At any rate, I managed to scrounge up 75 cents in the form of six nickels, two dimes, and a quarter half covered in a mysterious green crust. So armed, I walked back down the length of the building, up the stairs, and back down the length of the building to the upstairs break room again.

Once there, I inserted the coins, listening to the satisfying KA-CHUNK! as they went in and watching the red numbers on the vending machine’s display count up towards the price of my snacktastic prize. When I tried to put in the crusty green quarter, however, there was a different KA-CHUNK! sound, one immediately followed by the shrill CHING! sound of my coin being returned to me in the return coin slot. I tried again and again, but the machine apparently didn’t like the mystery crust attached to my legal tender. Worse, the return change button responded to neither my pounding nor my cursing.

Normal men may have given up at this point, but I’m abnormal. I stomped down the length of the building, down the stairs, and back down the length of the building to the front door. I walked over to the cafeteria and demanded change for my ten dollar bill. I know I could have just bought Doritos from the cafeteria, but at this point is was a matter of principle. Plus the dang vending machine already had $.50 of my money it wasn’t giving back. So I got my change, marched back to my building, went through the front door, walked up the length of the building to the stairs, went up the stairs, and walked down the length of the building to the vending machine. I inserted my change, decided on the Cool Ranch flavor, and triumphantly jabbed “B-6” into the keypad to select my snack.

No! Wait! A-6, not B-6. A-6! No! Not the Rolled Gold Pretzels! NO! NOOOO!

Clunk.

So now I sit here writing this, a half-eaten bag of pretzels testament to my hubris or something. Actually, they’re not all that bad. I just need a Diet Coke to wash them down…

Jamie4 Comments

Chronicles of Riddick Review

My review of The Chronicles of Riddick – Escape from Butcher Bay went up today at GameSpy.com. Said the quote monkey:

Wait, wait. I know what you’re probably thinking about The Chronicles of Riddick – Escape from Butcher Bay, especially if you didn’t pay attention to the Xbox version released earlier this year. Games based on movie licenses are safely ignored by discriminating gamers, I know. That’s a good instinct you should go with most of the time, but The Chronicles of Riddick is a rare exception. The folks at Starbreeze Studios based a first-person shooter around a character from a summer popcorn flick, but they also made it a really fun, really polished amalgam of action, RPG, and adventure genres.

It was a suprisingly good game, even if it was a bit short and had only a limited palate of weapons and environments. The stealth game was fun if you suspended disbelief about a few things. Namely, if I ever build a futuristic penal planet, I’m either going to leave out the ventilation ducts or fill them chin deep with scorpions.

Jamie

Sam’s Story: Week 46

Sammy’s still a bit sick. I’m not sure if this is the same malady as last week or if she just smoothly transitioned from one to another, but either way it’s not as severe. She actually doesn’t appear to feel ill most of the time, but her head is full of snot. A few times a day we pin her down, spray saline up each nostril, and suck out three cups of mucus with one of those rubber ball sucker thingies. The gunk is really unlike anything I’ve ever seen, it’s so viscous. It hangs together in thick white ropes, and once when Sammy rubbed the back of her hand across some before I could wipe it away she strung it all over herself like tinsel on a tree. ‘Tis the season.

Speaking of which, with the addition of Sam to our little cabal, Ger and I have decided to become one of those couples that sends out Christmas cards with pictures of our baby on them. As one of Ger’s friends once said of receiving pictures of babies in the mail, this presents people with a conundrum –what do you do with it? It’s a picture of a baby. You can’t throw it out with the Penny Saver and the J.Crew catalogs. That would be cruel and you’d feel guilty forever. So you put it on your shelf or attach it to the refridgerator with magnets, where it sits for months until you finally say okay I barely know this kid and I haven’t seen the Madigans since college I’m going to throw the baby in the trash. But you can’t. So it sits there for a few more weeks while you work up the last of the inhumanity required for the deed. I take perverted pleasure in all this, so look for your card soon.

In fact, here’s a scan of the cards that we came up with:



Oh, relax, people. She’s fine, see? Also, that’s not really our card. The real one features more mucus.

On the development front, Sam has spent another week of perfecting her current tricks rather than breaking into new material. She stands up all the time now, and has gotten tall enough to reach things on the edge of the kitchen table. She has also graduated to a bigger sippy cup that she only throws on the floor half the time. Geralyn also took Sam to the park and put her in one of those swings for the first time. I’m glad she was the one to do it, because those things kind of freak me out. I have this image of my gently placing Sam in one, tapping her on the back, and watching in horror as she sails over the horizon.

Other pictures from this week:



This picture may kind of weird you out, but don’t worry she’s not dead. Sam is just demonstrating that even babies don’t look cute when photographed at the exact instant they wake up. To compensate for that, here’s a picture of Sammy and Daddy under the mistletoe.

I’ll end this week’s update by telling you a story. There have been in my life a handful of perfect moments. These are the instants that are frozen in my mind with immaculate clarity, moments that boldly testify to why life is good. I had one, for example, when I was leaning against to Geralyn on a cold winter night and thinking about the acceptance letter to a graduate school that would allow me to keep dating her in St. Louis. I had another perfect moment last night. As I said, Sam was a little stuffy and kept waking up, crying. I went in to her and held her against my chest, her head on my shoulder and my chin on hers. I stood there in the dark, shusshing her and rocking my weight from one foot to the other. Sniffle by sniffle, her crying trailed off and she slowly relaxed in my arms. Her muscles unclenched and she let her head rest fully on my shoulder as she went quiet. She was asleep after about five minutes, breathing deeply despite the little whistles coming out of her congested nose. But I couldn’t put her down, paralyzed as I was with love and comfort. So I stayed a while longer, rocking her back and forth in the dark. Finally, I lay her back down in her crib and slowly backed away.

And of course, she started crying again. But before that, yeah, it was a perfect moment. She’s fricking awesome.

Jamie

More babies! YEAH! MORE!

Congratulations to friends David and Michelle, who just had their first kid over the weekend! Baby Gabriel was born 6 pounds, 11 ounces and 18.5 inches long. He also came out wearing a jaunty Christmas hat.

Jamie

David & Sammy

Last weekend we drove up near Temecula to visit friends David and Michelle, who I used to work with. They’re expecting their first kid soon, so Sam was kind enuogh to demonstrate all the knocking things over that they could look forward to.

Jamie

Fun with frogs and Photoshop

Whee! I had a bit of fun today over my lunch break with a picture of Sam in her frog outfit from Halloween. Click on it for a larger version.



A version of this is now my new computer desktop wallpaper. If you’re a Sam fan I can send you a copy.

Jamie

Yay on me

I’m going to break my arm patting myself on the back so hard, but I thought I’d share two pieces of good news on the professional front. First, I got two –two!– submissions accepted to next year’s annual Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology conference. One, entitled “The Importance of Test Administration Characteristics in Forming Applicant Reactions,” examines what about pre-employment testing can tick people off when they have to go through it to apply for a job. The second presentation, entitled “Developing an Offline Testing System That Still Benefits from Information Technology,” is part of a practitioner forum looking at how information technology has spurred changes in I/O practice, particularly selection. My piece looks at the employment testing infrastructure we designed and use at my current employer. Gripping stuff, eh?

The second piece of news is that I was recently elected to the office of “Vice President – Web Publications” for The Personnel Testing Council of Southern California, a local professional organization for I/O psychologists. And by “elected” I mean “nominated myself and ran unopposed.” The position is essentially that of webmaster for their site, but it’s managable and should be a great way to meet folks and network.

So, you know. Yay.

Jamie4 Comments