Yes, we’ve finally done it. Geralyn took Sammy to a friend who is also a hair stylist (cutter, cosmotician, whatever) and had Sam’s bangs trimmed. No more reverse mullett.
Bang, bangs!
Month: March 2005
Star Wars Republic Commando Review
My review of Star Wars Republic Commando for the PC is up at GameSpy.com today. It’s a great game with amazingly high production values, but it’s short and the multiplayer component is barely worth a derisive snort.
But still, Republic Commando is a very good game I’d recommend whether you like Star Wars or not. The multiplayer game is subpar and under populated, but the single-player game is slick, polished, frantic, and exciting. The squad-based nature isn’t revolutionary, nor is it as deep as “real” tactical games, but it’s clean, easy to use, and doesn’t slow things down. Add to that all the delicious details that LucasArts has crammed into every corner and you don’t have many excuses not to enjoy it.
Also, I love it when I get paid to write three articles for one game –a preview, a “first impressions” piece, and a full review. It makes up for the times I had to review those less than awesome games.
And finally, props to whoever at GameSpy (and I’ll bet it was Sluggo) decided to use “SEND IN THE CLONES!” as the tagline for this article. That made me laugh, because a few years at QuakeCon Sluggo and I spent the whole weekend screaming that at each other at random intervals for no other reason that its striking us as funny.
Sam’s Story: Week 58
I talked last week about how some “people” would ignore Sam when she waved to them. It occured to me this week that problems lie on the other end of this specturm as well. While some people blithely ignore babies, others seem drawn to them and will do things that would be completely inappropriate for any other age bracket. Most of the time it’s benign, like the guy at the booth next to ours at dinner last Saturday night who got a kick out of using his napkin to play “peek-a-boo” with Sam. This seemed to entertain both of them, so we were happy to let this game go on. Geralyn tells me about other times, though, when she’ll be out in public and people will come right up to Sam and start touching her or giving her foodstuffs –all the while utterly ignoring Geralyn. It’s like babies are some kind of communal property that people can just pick up and play with as they like.
Not much on the developmental front to report on. Sam still isn’t walking per se, but I think we can safely say that she has taken her first steps. If I’m sitting on the floor a few feet away, Sam will pull herself up on the couch, turn, and then take two or three stumbling steps over to me before going into a kind of controlled nose-dive into my side or lap. Several times I’ve caught her standing up on her own, but when I start to clap and yell, it’s like she suddenly realizes just what the heck she’s doing and that it’s totally insane and totally unnecessary when other people are apparently willing to carry her everywhere she needs to go.
Napping continues to be a hit-and-miss affair. Some days Sam takes two naps, some days one. Last night we installed these new heavy duty corderouy drapes with dense light blocking technology in hopes that we’d turn her bedroom into a black, lightless hole no happy sunbeams would prematurely wake her from her slumber. The result? She woke up like 45 minutes earlier than usual this morning. When I got up at 6:00 and went in to close her door as I usually do she was standing straight up in her crib, looking right at me through the gloom. It was kind of creepy in an Alfred Hitchcock kind of way.
Pictures!
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Ger took some good ones this week. The way Sam is sleeping in this one kind of cracks me up, but I guess she was comfortable. I also like how this one turned out.
Lastly, sorry this update is a bit late. I have my reasons, though.
Blue
Playing under the tarp.
Out of the box
She still has that new baby smell.
I have defeated the toilet. Sorta.
I consider myself a modest number of talented things, but a handyman is not among them. This is somewhat odd given that I apparently possess enough mechanical know-how to score around the 90th percentile on the Bennett Mechanical Aptitude test whenever I take it. But while I know which direction a given gear will turn and how best to position a fulcrum, I’m largely worthless around the house. Whenever something breaks, my first response is to (1) take it apart, (2) hose it down with WD-40, and (3) bang the hell out of something with a hammer. That works in a surprising number of cases, but when it doesn’t my next step is usually to call a plumber, electrician, or contractor.
A few days ago, though, our toilet started running. Upon taking it apart (see step #1 above) I saw that one of the rubber seals had partially disintegrated. This is where I could have called a plummer, but rather than spending $150 on a $7 problem, I went to Home Depot and bought a toilet repair kit. When I got home, I searched for “Toilet Repair” on Google and found this:
 |
Pfft. Simple. I mean, I have a Ph.D. I can figure this out, right?
So I got my tool box and started taking things apart. Here’s something handy I learned: Turn OFF the water source before you get started. After I learned that lesson, things …um, escalated. I quickly found that to get to the one thing I wanted to replace, I’d have to take three other things apart so I could disassemble another thing so that I could reach the first thing. About 10 minutes later, this is what my toilet looked like:
 |
Yeah, this was a deeper foray into the realm of home repair than I expected, and at this point Ger was getting kind of worried. I think she had images of my banging on things with hammers and getting a torrent of water in the face while Lucy and Ethel ran around in the background stuffing chocolates down their shirts. I eventually had every piece of the toilet separated from every other possible piece, creating a porcelain jigsaw puzzle that I quickly lost track of.
Finally, though, I replaced the parts that needed it, including the one for which I had substituted a trash bag zip-tie a few weeks earlier. I reassembled the toilet, filled the tank, and flushed it.
You can probably guess what happened. Water. Everywhere. Squirting out of the toilet from some unknown orifice. I’m just glad I didn’t decide to go with a more shall we say “realistic” test of the toilet’s functions.
After a bit of mopping up and disassembling and refitting seals and reassembling, things were finally set right. It flushed with no leakage and I marched into the other room so I could announce to Geralyn that she was now able to flush her bodily waste with confidence. She just kind of rolled her eyes as she often does, but I was too high on my own handy self and came in here to write this post.
A few minutes after I started, Geralyn came in, a kind of “gee I hate to tell you this” look on her face. The toilet wasn’t leaking, but it was still running. It was, in other words, still doing that little annoying thing that had set me down this soggy path in the first place.
So, anyway. Anyone know a good plumber?
Are we there yet?
More of Sam riding in the car.