Terribly Happy | Bloggystyle

Carolina discovers that cracking cascarones on herself eliminates the middle-man.

Just a little gallery of images from last weekend’s Easter festivities. Click on any of the images to enter the gallery.

Today, Spotify rolled out a Play Button, which allows for embeddable songs, albums and playlists on blogs (like this one!). Back in the day, I used to do an annual CD for the site (the last one went out in 2007), and though I definitely don’t have the time for a project like that anymore, I do miss sharing music in an easy, fun way on the site.

So, here’s two playlists that I’ve been curating the last few months on Spotify, each with about 30 songs. The first is “MOVE, SUCKA!” which is just songs with a good beat that are appropriate for moving your ass around. The second is just random songs I like that I add to the playlist when I hear them. You can scroll down each of the playlists for more songs.

Enjoy! If you have your own playlists you’d like to share, please post a link to them in the comments. Spotify is free (it does have ads unless you upgrade to a premium account) and I really enjoy using it.

I’m also including an album I just started listening to from Wild Flag (featuring Carrie Brownstein of Portlandia and Sleater-Kinney fame) and a song from my favorite band of the moment, Wild Child.

(via Instagram). It’s so rare to get a decent picture of the girls sitting together and not moving so much the picture is all blurry.

We found out this week that registration is opening up for Lilly’s kindergarten class in August. TOO SOON!

Where to begin? Crazy season in my life starts around mid-February and doesn’t let up until mid-March. For about a month, my life revolves around South by Southwest Interactive and somewhere in there I’m also celebrating my brother and mom’s birthdays and trying to enjoy the suddenly awesome spring weather that only lasts a few weeks before the crushing summer heat returns.

I start thinking about how I’ll handle my DVR duties (MUST. WATCH!) when I’ll be gone for five or six days, how we’ll juggle the kids’ daycare and my middle-of-the-night commuting and even what I’ll be packing in my work bag, which became the subject of last week’s Digital Savant column.

(No column this week due to the Oscars).

I haven’t followed my own advice and purchased a little power strip yet, but I plan to do that tonight. The other thing I plan to do differently this year is to take my bike. The one I never ride that’s been sitting in the garage forever. I bought a fancy bike lock and checked to make sure the tires aren’t flat. I plan to dust it off, lube it up and ride (we’re still talking about the bike here). So if you see someone in downtown Austin in two weeks swinging wildly on a bike with a heavy work bag causing imbalance, that’s probably me. Say hi.

I had two other pieces run in the paper last week, reverse-publishes of a post I did about Code for Austin’s Saturday Hackathon and a guide to finding (and RSVP’ing to) parties at SXSW Interactive.

Also, I’m writing about the official app, the guy from Stratfor who’s speaking at the fest and the co-founder of Pinterest. (Oh, I’m on Pinterest, by the way. Come watch me pin things.)

Have a lot more pieces about the fest in the works including some stuff for CNN.com.

I’m trying to spend as much time as possible at home with the kids because I know I won’t be seeing them a lot in mid-March. When I wasn’t looking, Carolina went from the pre-verbal baby to a kid who can repeat pretty much any word and who’s talking nonstop and grabbing EVERYTHING. Grab grab grab, baby STOP! OK, not a baby, but STILL. Toddler, QUIT!

Here she is. We dig her crazy style.

And one of Lilly for good measure:

A few days before Christmas, I took over a carload of gifts to my parents’ house. We weren’t going to be traveling to South Texas for the holiday — we haven’t gone the last few years, since Carolina was born as we’ve resisted long road trips with both kids — and my parents were going to deliver our gifts to members of the immediate family.

It was a weeknight, it was late and I had unloaded the gifts and was eager to get back home and get to bed.

My dad took me aside for a minute and asked me to think about something. He said he knew we weren’t planning to travel down this year, but that we should consider a trip sometime soon. He told me my grandmother, of course, wasn’t getting any younger and that she wasn’t always going to be around for us to see. Last year, she had traveled through town with my aunt, uncle and cousin and we got to see her right around the holidays. But, he said, she’d been a lot less mobile lately and was starting to have trouble remembering things and sometimes even recognizing people.

I knew it was true that we should make more of an effort to see her soon, but I also knew we weren’t changing our travel plans. I told him I’d think about it and I did.

I thought about it a lot more over the next two weeks when everything began to change.

Saturday was the trip down after two days of should-I/shouldn’t-I travel decision-making. Sunday was the trip back with my brother, but by then everything had deteriorated. In 24 hours, we went from watching warily, but hopefully, as my grandmother lay face-down on a hospital bed battling double-pneumonia and other ailments to holding out hope only that she would last a few more hours while her brother from Mexico traveled by bus to see her and say goodbye.

We said goodbye, too, knowing pretty well what was coming and how soon it might come. My brother cried. I cried. My whole family cried. I held her hand, which had gotten colder over that 24 hours. Her fingers and her face had puffed up from all the blood pressure medications they’d given her in an attempt to raise it. But it was still my grandmother. Her chest rose and fell as if she was only sleeping, as if it was her own breath and not air from tubes attached to a machine. We didn’t know if she could hear us, but we assumed that she could. I leaned in close, touched her back and said, “Goodbye grandma.”

She died that evening. Tuesday, we drove down, kids in tow, and we came back Wednesday. It was the first funeral I had been to in a really long time.

I loved both of my grandmothers. My grandfathers both died before I was born (my grandmother on my mom’s side remarried when I was little and that’s been my grandpa for as long as I can remember). She took care of me a lot when both my parents worked and we lived in South Texas, but my other grandmother, Diamantina, typically watched me on weekends. She didn’t live that much farther out, but we didn’t see her as often.

I usually had the run of the small house when I was there. I was the only grandchild and I remember running up and down the narrow main hallway, jumping on beds, probably driving everybody nuts.

My grandmother’s house in Mercedes, Texas, is small and cramped and there’s a lot of stuff in it. It was never Hoarders, but in such a tiny space, even a small amount of clothes, photos, mementos, a TV and DVDs would begin to fill up the area pretty quickly. Sometimes my grandma had dogs, at one point she had chickens in the backyard, there always seemed to be cats outside wandering around. She loved animals.

When I was there, I wouldn’t want to leave when my parents picked me up. I just wanted to stay there and live an unstructured life in this tiny, stuffed house which was filled with old mementos of people I didn’t know (my dead grandfather, especially). There were always snapshots on the paneled living room wall. Pictures of my aunt and uncle, my dad, assorted Mormons in their crisp white short-sleeved shirts, nearly all of them taken right out there on the front yard, the metal rails or the pink of the brick visible.

Also in the living room: stuff I imagine my dad sent when he joined the Air Force including a pillow I would always see. It always made me imagine where he bought it and how he sent it home. Was it from basic training in San Antonio? Probably.

Diamantina rarely spoke English, unless it was in little phrases, a word here or there. When I was little, living in South Texas, I spoke Spanish about as well as most other little kids living there, but once I hit school, I know that started to go away. I’d get embarrassed and not want to speak it, even though that was really the only way to communicate with her. So she spoke a lot, and I spoke very little and I think my aunt and uncle, who always seemed to be around, helped fill in the gaps.

Like most grandmas, she was always trying to get me to eat, always telling me she loved me. She called me “Omarsito” and blessed me all the time. Even when I was very little, she seemed impossibly old, not terribly mobile, with glasses and crispy orange hair and some illness that was always bothering her. (It was diabetes for years and years; I never imagined when I was growing up that in the distant year of 2012 that she would still be relatively healthy as an 84-year-old woman).

I think a lot now about what it is to be loved from the moment you’re born by someone and for that love to never ever stop until that person stops living.

How many people have loved me that way? A handful?

She did.

We moved around a lot with my dad in the Air Force. At one time, we lived overseas for three years. We probably saw her twice in that whole time (we took a long trip about midway through that assignment, I believe). I didn’t think about it at the time probably at all, but I wonder now what that must have been like for her, to have her son and her grandkids on the other side of the world. There was no Skype, no online chat. We were just away, for a really long time. She was in that small house and when we returned, there she was, still unconditionally loving us.

But that’s just one perspective.

When I got to the hospital that Saturday, my grandmother was already face down on the sports hospital bed, one that could be easily adjusted into a bunch of different positions. She was already unconscious, having been sedated to conserve her energy. She was on a respirator and my family was already skilled at reading the heart rate, the blood pressure, the respirator percentage and asking lots of questions. There were lots of tubes going all over the place, several drips, just a lot of machinery breathing for her, listening and recording.

I brought a book because I expected to be in the waiting room for hours, but that didn’t happen.

Instead, I spent more time than I expected in the hospital room itself, sometimes with my dad, or with my aunt and uncle or with my brother.

One of those times, a male nurse came in and began changing out the drips. He read the situation instantly, asking if she was our grandmother. We said yes.

“We all love our grandmas,” he said and told us in an economical few sentences about his grandmother, whom he’d grown up with. He said she was in her mid-90s when she finally got sick enough that she could no longer speak. But when she saw her grandson, he said, a tear fell down her cheek for him.

He said a little prayer for us and that was when I lost it. And when my brother lost it. We sat in our chairs on opposite sides of the room, our grandmother lying between us.

When we left the next day, my brother and I, we knew the hours were short and that there was nothing more the doctors or the family could do. My family was waiting for my great uncle, my grandmother’s brother Juan, to arrive via bus from Mexico. At that point, everyone just wanted him to make it to the hospital and for my grandmother to hang on for at least that long.

My aunt and uncle, who both work in medical professions, knew what was happening and nobody wanted my grandmother to suffer. She was shutting down, her medicines to keep her blood pressure going were maxed out and ineffective and it was going to get worse.

We all cried together in that room harder than we had since I arrived.

It felt strange leaving before it was over, but I had to get back to my family knowing that we were going to turn right back around and drive back to attend a funeral soon with our girls. My brother needed to get back for some work, too.

We drove back and I played the funniest podcasts I could find to take our minds off what was happening. We laughed a lot on the road trip back, my brother and I. I had driven down by myself and as much as I like quiet time, it felt so much better to have someone in the car with me.

I remembered when I was very small and a great grandmother of mine had died, that there had seemed to be rules about not listening to music or telling jokes or carrying on for a period of time after it happened. I think those rules have always been in my head for some reason and I asked my brother later if he had ever heard that. He hadn’t. Maybe someone had mentioned that in my 4-year-old presence and I misunderstood. But it felt good to laugh on that trip and forget about the horrible thing that was happening. I’m pretty sure my grandmother, who loved music and jokes and pop culture, would not have wanted us to be miserable because of her.

After I got home, she was still holding on.

But not that much longer. She was gone in a few hours by that evening.

As the viewing and the funeral the next morning, I learned that my grandmother had a much larger community of people who cared about her than I had imagined. She had participated in choir, traveled, worked several jobs that I’d never heard about, had helped found a local church and had been a mom/grandma figure to lots of people in her town.

I’m filled with the usual regrets. I should have asked more questions, should have listened more, should have been more curious more often.

What hurt most was that we didn’t see her one last time over the holidays. It would have been very difficult to make that trip given what we had going on, but it wouldn’t have been impossible. We thought there was more time.

But my uncle mentioned that she got to see our girls over Skype in December and that made me feel a lot better. She’d seen the girls in person last year, too.

Every time I think of her now, I still imagine her in that house in that town that I saw less and less often over the years and I wonder how it was I thought that she would be there forever, always waiting, always ready to bless me, to call me “Omarsito,” to be my grandmother, someone I loved.

Illustration by Don Tate II / Austin American-Statesman

Today, I’m at home on the first day of a week-long vacation. It starts with Halloween and ends with the first day of Wurstfest, which seems to me to be some kind of divine calendarification, evidence that sausage and ghosts and perhaps God are all working together in some way. Maybe two out of three of those, at least.

The work trip I wrote about last time went fine. The kids were well-behaved and went to bed on time and there was even sleep to be had. That ended a week later when the weather changed, some allergens blew in and Carolina developed a bad, phlegmy cough (which sometimes leads to middle-of-the-night vomiting) that we’re still dealing with. Still, she just gets up and starts bouncing around when she wakes up, as if the psychic and also goopy wreckage of the night before never happened. She’s going to be one of those annoying people who never gets a hangover, I can feel it.

The vacation was… very necessary. We got more bad news at work last week. This was news that was scheduled. There was a meeting and a date and time for that meeting set and months of anticipation as to the things that would be announced at that meeting. All that was left were the details.

And yet, we’re all still devastated. We’re hurt and frustrated and knowing it was coming doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. This was the day before my last day at the office (which I ended up spending working from home). The last few weeks in general were really tough at work and I just bore down and tried to knock every single thing off my to-do list so that I wouldn’t have any loose ends or things to worry about when I was gone.

So here I am, first day of vacation, writing about work.

I wrote so much the last two weeks, a lot of it stories and blog posts scheduled to run later, that it’s going to look like I’m not even gone.

Last week, I did a Tech Monday column about Siri in which I asked her a bunch of questions about Texas and the lady of the iPhone 4S proved pretty convincingly that she’s no Texas belle.

This week’s Digital Savant column was a bigger piece, a lead story in Life & Arts in which I ask whether we might not all have a little bit of the online troll/griefer within us. This was part of the online identity series and as of right now, it’s the last officially scheduled piece of that series, but I’m sure we’re continue returning to the topic because there’s so many ideas that my editor and I have that deal with those ideas. I love the illustration that ran with it (it’s at the top of this blog entry) and the story, which I guess is half-essay, half-reported tech trend article, seemed to have worked out pretty well.

Also in today’s paper was a short story about SXSW Interactive’s ScreenBurn and I have a few more things in the pipeline for the rest of this week and next. The blog’s been busy with lots of tech reviews that’ll run as an upcoming roundup column and lots of stuff about Apple’s iOS 5.

We’re taking the kids trick-or-treating tonight. My wife and I went to our first Halloween party in probably about six or seven years and we even worse costumes. Mine was not so well-received and I blame it on the party being in San Antonio where, apparently, “Breaking Bad” is not a thing people watch at all. I went as Walter White, meth cook extraordinaire:

We haven’t taken any photos of the kids in their costumes, but Lilly did get in some carving time yesterday:

Also on tap this week: new Trailers Without Pity season starts with The Muppets! That should be up in the next day or two.

Busy vacation! Hoping to do lots of writing, TV watching, de-cluttering, gym-going and Halloween candy eating.

As I write this, the kids are asleep, one of them in the bed I share with my wife, the other in her crib.

Normally, we’d try to keep Lilly in her own bed, and in a little while I’ll carry her back over, but for now I’m just thrilled and a little surprised that they’re asleep and that there’s a little window of free time for me. It’s weird. It’s unusual.

My wife’s on a work trip, the first one she’s ever taken for any job. We knew about it weeks and weeks ago and have been planning for it ever since, but in the end it turns out not a lot had to be done. My parents came over last night to help and my in-laws will be here tomorrow night. (It’s a blessing, always, that they all live so close. We’re beyond lucky in that sense.) Tonight was the only night I’d be spending alone with the kids and even that turned out not to be true; my parents swung by to pick up something before a trip they’re taking out of town and got to visit with the girls again for a little while.

It’s been a lot easier than I was expecting. The girls haven’t been wailing for their Momma. Tonight, as we were reading books, Lilly said matter-of-factly, “I miss Momma.” But she didn’t whine or cry or get bent out of shape. She whines more when she wants apple juice or a snack after she’s brushed her teeth. I told her Momma would be back in two days and she asked if we could bake her some cupcakes.

And that was it.

We’ve got them on such a set routine, even if some nights (with my wife here) it can feel chaotic and unstructured, that the girls are kind of on autopilot with dinner, bath, medicine, stories, bed. Tonight, there was even time to take a walk around the neighborhood, wagon and tricycle ridden. They’re in daycare during the day and I don’t know if they’ve been wearing them out with laps or mini Hula Hoop marathons or what, but whatever they’re doing is working.

This was going to be this incredible strain; we talked about me taking days off from work or at least a sleep day since they’d surely be keeping me up all night. But, as happened when we went to Vegas, the girls have been on what passes for their best behavior. It’s almost spooky.

One friend on Facebook suggested I shut up and suck it up as I’m the dad, not a babysitter. First of all, shut up. Second, my wife would be just as freaked out if I was going on a three-day business trip. I’ve taken a two-night business trip, but that was when Lilly was still an infant and before Carolina was born. It’s a little different when they outnumber you. They’re little unpredictable monsters sometimes; even with both of us here, we sometimes get overwhelmed.

I’m going to chalk the way this week has gone so far to some major luck.

The other thing we did this week was take the girls to the San Antonio Zoo. We got rained out the week before when a freak thunderstorm (in a year when we’ve had hardly any rain at all) kept us away. This last Sunday, it was warm and sunny and the girls got to see some elephants, monkeys, sea turtles and butterflies. They only lasted about two hours before they were overheated and worn out, but that was still a good time.

I took photos with my new phone and with the trusty SLR. I got a shot of Carolina that I love because it reminds me of another lucky photo we got at a wedding. She’s tough to photograph because she never stops moving and when we pose her for photos, her tornado personality goes away. I always think of her as dancing or chattering or throwing something. She’s that kind of kid. The photos below capture her best. She’s always yelling or dancing or laughing or having a little party of her own.

The only other real new stuff this week is that I had a Digital Savant column that ran about Aunt Bertha, a website that tries to simplify finding and applying for need-based assistance. Every once in a while I get to write about people who are out there doing legitimate Good Things for other people. Maybe they’re making money at it, but their goals and their mission are pretty altruistic and it’s often clear from what they’re putting out into the world that they’re doing something that’s, for lack of a better word, right.

I also did some crude drawings on the Digital Savant blog about the iPhone 4S (yes, I bought one; I’ll be writing more about that soon).
I always feel honored when I get to be the person who tells others about it. And I drew a zombie this week, so that was noteworthy, I guess.

Things have calmed down a bit at work since my last post, but like I said last time, I can’t wait for my upcoming vacation. I have a to-do list of stories that need to be done before I go and I’m knocking them down one by one, as they’re what stands between me and that time off.

Photo via Computer Chess, LLC

We had layoffs this week. They didn’t affect the newsroom directly (but, boy, indirectly… you could say we’re rattled, to say the least). I found out about it late; I was out of the office when word got around and I missed it in the paper the next morning.

So that’s been rolling around my head yesterday and today and frankly, I look around my desk and think, “Should I start taking a few personal things home so they don’t all have to be taken out at once in a big box some day down the road?” We’re not at that point, I hope, but it doesn’t mean I can’t worry a little.

It’s very hard to work in an environment where things are changing so quickly around you, when people you’ve gotten used to for literally more than a decade are out the door every few months. You start kind of laying low and just plowing through your work and wondering if there’ll be a day when the luck runs out. One day you go to work, a little grudgingly but pleased with what you do, and then next, that whole idea (you:work) just stops existing. You are shown the door. It’s not good thoughts. You hear the clock and you’re thinking Hemingway titles and the fun just seeps out of your day.

But time rolls on. On Monday, I had a story run in the paper about retro computing. There’s an Austin movie that’s been shot called Computer Chess that I’m really looking forward to seeing. The film folks were a pleasure to deal with.

I don’t think I’ve written much about it here, but my life from about 8 till high school had a lot of computers in it. My dad got me into it and I fondly remember those glasses-wearing geek days. The best part of the story was getting to visit Goodwill Computer Works and seeing my story up there. It made me feel really, really warm.

I also had a Tech Monday column the same day about this week’s Game Developers Conference Online. I wish I had more time to see more panels over there, but they’re a lot more inside-baseball than we’d typically write about for our readers. Still, if you love video games, it’s fascinating stuff to see what developers talk about when they get together.

I got to see author Neal Stephenson speak and hear Atari founder (and Steve Jobs’ former boss) Nolan Bushnell entertain a room with his typical bombastic silliness. (He IS smart and knowledgeable, though. To a scary degree.).

Then on Wednesday, we broke a little news about Austin game studio Twisted Pixel being acquired by Microsoft Studios. Right after I wrote that story, I got to go to GDC one more time to hear some writers from Valve talk about their work on games like Portal 2 and Team Fortress 2. It was awesome. They were funny and inspiring and clearly work very hard at what they do to get it right. I didn’t write about that panel so I’m so pleased I got to attend.

I don’t really know what else to talk about, but you can probably tell I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. We’re starting up new Trailers Without Pity videos soon (first new one should be up around Halloween) and I’ve got vacation in early November. I’ve been keeping myself distracted upgrading to iOS 5 on our various Apple devices and waiting for my iPhone 4S to come in the mail. (My 3GS, seriously.. it’s so close to death. Cracked, missing volume buttons, wheezing, practically.) The death of Steve Jobs hit me a little harder than I was expecting last week. I wasn’t an early Apple user, but boy did I learn to love the hardware in college when we used those machines exclusively to put out a daily newspaper.

Now, my wife and I both use iPhones, my daughter uses an iPad almost every day and I do most of my writing on a MacBook Pro now when I’m not at work. (Sometimes even at work.) I was bummed when Jobs’ death got turned into a globalization debate, but I’m sure Steve himself would not have been surprised. He was used to being polarizing. I think he liked that on some level.

We gave up Macs at work a while back and switched to PCs, right around the time all these huge changes started happening. Most of our workplace got a new version Microsoft Office installed the same day the layoffs happened. It’s probably not a great mental association to create, but I’m sure it was a coincidence.

But, seriously, that vacation can’t get here soon enough, y’all.