Terribly Happy

This was a really big week for us. Carolina turned one, Lilly had her first dance recital and then, oh yeah, Christmas and a lengthy, much-needed vacation for me. I’m not back at work until Jan. 3.

Lilly’s dance thing was the culmination of several months of classes at her daycare. We went to San Antonio and the whole thing took place in a big workout room. The kids were adorable and, of course, we thought ours was the absolute best. She got flowers and we went out for a nice dinner to also celebrate Carolina’s first birthday.

Their personalities are so different that even people who don’t spend much time with them both pick up on it right away. Lilly is methodical and demanding, a Type A toddler who is used to having things a certain way, but is also sweet and organized and generous. Carolina, on the other hand, is hilarious and destructive and just wants to get her hands on everything and/or put everything in her mouth, even things that might choke her. The dynamic between the two of them is already developing nicely.

We’ve been having a lot of fun this week with Lilly and Santa. This is the first year she’s really grasped the concept and we did the whole bit with the cookies and the milk, the stockings, the whispers before bed about making sure not to get up and surprise him because he has a heart condition. It’s been surprisingly satisfying and fun being on this end of the Santa equation.

The vacation caps off a year of really just a damn lot of work. I thought things would slow down as things began to cycle down on the NPR front, but just as that was happening, I got approached by Kirkus Reviews to start doing app reviews of children’s story books for the iPad.

Kirkus has been doing book reviews since the 1930s. I mean, I remember seeing the Kirkus review blurbs in the Stephen King paperbacks I read as a teenager and authors I know have told tale of getting their first review from Kirkus.

This project is a fairly large shift for them. They moved their headquarters to Austin and are planning to push hard into new kinds of reviews and digital content. So I’ve been quietly spending the last two months downloading iPad apps, reading them with Lilly at night and working up reviews in the short, extremely refined way that Kirkus does things. I’ve been lucky enough to be paired with an amazing children’s books editor who is also learning about the app world along with me. It’s been a very cool experience. All told, I’ve agreed to write 50 reviews, through the end of January. Just last week I hit the halfway mark.

The first batch of them appears in the Statesman tomorrow, Christmas Day, a bit of a partnership between Kirkus and my newspaper. The reviews will also be appearing on the Kirkus website. It’s been a really fun, cool project.

On the Statesman front, I also recently wrote an update on the Season for Caring project and the Gomez family.

Photo by Mark Matson, for the American-Statesman

And, lastly, I did an app feature recently in the Statesman on a family that creates apps under the name IMAK Creations for There’s a Creator for That. Their app is called “Who Is the Smartest?”

During my downtime, I plan to watch a ton of movies I haven’t had time to see, get the upstairs office organized and de-cluttered and work on my Christmas cards, which have somehow turned into New Year’s cards as I lost track of time.

I’ve had two days off already before Christmas to chill out, stop racing to the next deadline and to just think about how great things have been this year (with only one or two speed bumps), and how lucky I’ve been to have so many wonderful people in my life who aren’t just watching out for me, but for my girls as well.

Thank you, everybody, for reading and for being in our lives.

A few months ago, I wrote a foreword for a book by two men I don’t know. As people I don’t know go, they’ve been great to deal with. They wrote a book about a frankly fascinating topic (what happens to all your digital schtuff after you shuffle off this analog coil) and, based on the premise alone (and a sample chapter or two), I was thrilled to contribute. It was all done over e-mail and couldn’t have been a more pleasant experience, especially for something so firmly rooted in the discussion of death.

The book is out and you can find it here and here, among other places. In fact, on Amazon, you can read the entire two-page foreword in their book preview. But if you go and do that, you owe it to the hardworking authors to at least buy the book, so please do if you can.

This morning:

(At the breakfast table)

Lilly: Knock knock.

Omar: Who’s there?

Lilly: Daddy.

Omar: Daddy who?

Lilly: No. Daddy you.

The End

Aaron Sorkin. Photo by Ralph Barrera, American-Statesman

I also did separate interviews with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the movie, and actor Armie Hammer.

A condensed version of the interviews ran as one piece in today’s paper, along with the review.

I loved the movie, but had a problem with how Zuckerberg was portrayed. Making him meaner and colder than he is in real life makes for a much more entertaining movie and certainly a more dramatic one, but I was still bothered a little, enough to point it out in the review and to bring it up in different ways to Sorkin and Eisenberg, who both had very good reasons for approaching the story the way they did. But, having met Zuckerberg briefly and having seen him speak live several times, I’m pretty confident that a large swatch of his personality and his goals simply don’t come across in the movie. Not to take anything away from Eisenberg. I think he does a great job playing a character. It’s just that the character is not exactly Zuckerberg, at least not the Zuckerberg of the last few years. I think the movie also betrays Sorkin’s inability to see much that’s positive in what Facebook has become.

That’s his prerogative. Facebook is gigantic and growing and scary.

This was the first movie review I’ve written in a long time and I really enjoyed getting back to it, if only briefly. I worked very hard on making it well-written and I hope it comes from a slightly different point of view than most of the ones I’ve seen.

The other thing that ran in the paper today was a short story that’s been prompting some discussion on Twitter and might only be of interest if you’re in Texas and into politics. It’s about Twitter and the gubernatorial election.

It’s a walk-up to a much longer, more detailed piece about how Texas Governor Rick Perry and his November challenger, former Houston mayor Bill White, are using social media in their campaigns. That story, which I’ve been working on for weeks, is scheduled to run in Saturday’s paper (whups, it moved to Monday), hopefully on the front page (fingers crossed). I’ll link to it when it hits the Web.

Other updates: Lilly has started dance classes at her daycare. Carolina is driving us nuts because she wants to crawl everywhere, grab everything and put all foreign objects in her mouth. Not much else to report. Keeping busy, trying to get enough sleep at night, still missing summer, looking forward to the holidays.

Photo by Mark Matson, for Austin American-Statesman

I looked up from my computer screen and summer was over. This makes me sad every year because even though we spent lots of weekends at Schlitterbahn and I even went tubing for the first time in years (with Glark and his nephew on the Colorado River), I always react with shock when it gets to be September and I realize I didn’t spend as much time as I wanted in water, on a beach (we didn’t go to any beach at all this year) or doing other outdoorsy stuff.

It’s happened every year since we moved to New Braunfels in late 2004. I always imagine the summer will involve me working from home every day and typing from next to the water at Landa Park and taking afternoon dips in the Comal and then spending my evenings at Schlitterbahn. It never quite works out that way for myriad reasons.

I’ve noticed that I tend to be a lot busier at my day job in the summer. Maybe it’s because lots of other people go on vacations and we’re often short-staffed in these months or maybe I just work better under harsh sunlight. But it’s when I tend to do a lot more stories for the front page and when I came back roaring after my annual post-SXSW Interactive exhaustion.

I did a column for this week’s Tech Monday about an upcoming Clean Energy Venture Summit and in yesterday’s paper was a pretty length piece about Fantastic Arcade, a new indie video game festival in Austin spinning off from the very famous Fantastic Fest for films.

Haven’t done NPR lately and the CNN articles I did early in the summer are the only ones I’ve worked on. Yet the despite of extracurricular work, it feels like I’m busier than ever and at night, after the girls are in bed, I just slump on the couch with exhaustion, unable to get myself to the computer to do my own blogging or to update other sites or do much of anything but trying to catch up with the overfull DVR or to try to avoid snacking into the wee hours.

Speaking of the girls, Carolina is now crawling and seems much more adventurous and prone to grab things and put them in her mouth than her older sister did. Lilly turned 3 last month and is taking a dance class at her daycare that she loves.

I’m trying to get my energy level back up so I can think about what I want to do next, especially if we stop doing Trailers Without Pity, like I mentioned in the last blog post. Pablo and I really want to start doing our comic again, but even that is a time commitment that might be difficult for us to coordinate. He’s got his own set of projects he’s working on (like doing recaps of Undercovers for TWOP) and his own social life to keep up with.

If it sounds like I’m bitching about being tired and having no time, I’m really not. I’m thrilled that things are busy at work (as opposed to being boring), my daughters are happy and healthy, and I’ve actually had time over the summer to read books, catch up on TV shows I’d been meaning to watch and to do things like take walks outside every evening and pay my bills, which is always nice.

I just wish summer had lasted a little longer and that I’d gotten myself into deep pools of water a little more often.

This was my arm, just one of the places the rash spread. WTF?

Let me just say that I must be getting old enough not to care or mature enough to be comfortable in my own (fucking itchy) skin because 10 years ago when I started this site, I would never have started a journal entry admitting to a rash I had. I wasn’t married and that’s not the kind of thing you say when you want the ladies to think you are disease-free and ready to party. (These days I am disease-free, but not at all ready or able to party.)

We’ve come a long way, you and I, so I know that when I tell you that I developed a terrible, itchy rash all over my body, that you won’t automatically assume it involved venereal parts and naughty fluid exchanges. Not that kind of rash.

Of course, that makes it much harder to diagnose. What happened was that on Monday of last week, I got home and noticed a pretty raw, itchy rash on both sides of my neck and along my waistline where you sometimes get those lines if your belt is on too tight. I was wearing a fairly new shirt. It had been washed and worn before, but I figured since we’ve hit triple-degree heat in Austin, it was no big deal.

That night, the rash spread to my stomach, my arms and the tops of my feet and got crazy, stupid itchy. I was scratching all night. I didn’t sleep and kept shuffling to the bathroom to see where it was going. It was like watching those Wargames computers show where all the missiles would hit in a global thermonuclear war. Except all the hot spots were on my person and it sucked.

The next day I worked from home and saw a doctor. They gave me a shot on my ass (yes, bent me over the exam table and put it right on my ass. Not the hip. Not the thigh. Right on my ass.) and prescribed steroids and a cream. They told me it could be a mite (might it?) or an allergic reaction to something, but had no real way of knowing for sure, so the doctor said we should treat both. The medications seemed to do the trick, after I slathered myself in cream and slept in the guest room that night.

By this point, Rebecca hadn’t gotten any rash and Lilly hadn’t either, even though she often sleeps in our bed with us. I hadn’t eaten anything unusual in the days leading to the rash and hadn’t been outside anywhere that I’d be exposed to any weird weeds or plants.

I went to work that Wednesday with the rash fading and the itching going away. I noticed a moldy mug of tea on my desk and got rid of it, wondering if that might have triggered an allergic reaction. Everything seemed fine until I got home and the rash came back full force, and in different areas. It never went near my tenders and biscuits, but it was now on my thighs, the backs of my legs, all around my armpits and, most alarmingly, around the edges of my face. I spent another shitty, sleepless night scratching and being miserable in the guest bed.

I called in sick Thursday and went straight back to the doctor. This time, they prescribed a different cream and a different steroid treatment, but also set me up for a blood test to rule out anything more serious. That was fun, especially when I found out I was being tested for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, presumably the most itchy and spotted of the Rocky Mountain fevers.

Again, it went away. By Friday it was faded and by the weekend it was completely gone. What happened?

The initial round of blood tests came back negative for anything bacterial. A week later, I got a call that the doctor wanted to see me in person to discuss the results of the rest of my blood tests. I tried not to worry or think too much about it, but when you get a phone call like that it’s hard not to imagine the horrible scenarios that could happen in that tiny exam room.

I wondered how I’d react if I found it was something life-threatening or even if I was told, “It’s cholesterol poisoning. You have to never eat a Dorito again.”

After waiting two days to get to an appointment and another hour in the exam room, I was told, cheerily, “You tested negative for syphilis.”

I didn’t know I’d been tested for that. “That’s… good!” I said.

I also tested negative for the Rocky Mountain stuff and for everything else they screened. My white blood cell count wasn’t elevated and everything else was normal. No answers.

Of course, that didn’t stop the Internet, via Twitter and Facebook, from instantly diagnosing me the moment I posted the photo above and said I had a rash. Several said it was a contact allergy, probably poison ivy. Others said it could be a gluten allergy (never mind that I eat wheat bread, rice, pizza and every other starch in the world on a daily basis with no reaction). One person offered (and actually did) send me magic Bentonite clay that is supposed to draw out the ions. Of course. Fucking IONS! The clay got here after the rash was gone, so I didn’t get to test it out for that, unfortunately.

It’s a mystery still and I feel fine now. The rash hasn’t returned. But it made me very aware suddenly of how quickly an unexpected health problem could completely upturn my life. I missed a full day of work and had to work from home a second day so people at my office wouldn’t see my hideous skin-of-fire. I paid about four separate co-pays, which were all cheap, but would have been crazy if I didn’t have decent insurance. And thank goodness it was nothing contagious that the kids might catch. We’re a very healthy family; we hardly ever get sick, but this was a reminder that we often take it for granted that we’re not constantly suffering from some ailment or another.

I mean, it was just a rash. It was itchy and uncomfortable and unsightly and it nearly drove me insane when it spread at one point to the damn palms of my hands to the point where even typing felt horrible.

But it could have been a lot worse.

I mean, damn. Genital warts, you know? Imagine that.

Or don’t. It’s all right. You don’t have to.