Terribly Happy | Bloggystyle

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.

A few weeks ago, I was making jokes on Twitter about a ridiculous $600 vacuum cleaner from Dyson that they sent me a press release about. Then they saw the Tweets. Then they sent me the vacuum. Then I used. Then I wrote this Digital Savant column about my experiences which were… suckily illuminating.

A few interesting things that came out of it: our house and my car are much cleaner now, thanks. Also, I got a lot of emails and several voice mails and Tweets today after the column appeared, plus lots of Tweets and Facebook and Google+ comments when I mentioned I was working on the piece. Not one negative word about Dyson from the two or three dozen or so responses I got, not even a, “$600 is crazy for a vacuum!” No one told me a horror story about their faulty Dyson vacuum not working or anything like that. If the products are overhyped or overpriced, you wouldn’t know it from the people who told me they own one and would never go back to another brand.

We ended up buying one of our own (the Animal was just a loaner and will soon be shipped back). Woot had an earlier, cheaper model on sale for $179 and we went ahead and snagged it. We’ll see how that goes and if it’s much different with our experiences using what amounts to cleanliness overkill for us. If we had large pets we kept indoors, we’d probably spring for one of the newer Dysons.

Here’s some dirt I took a photo of after we cleaned our house. You’re welcome!

I mentioned in the last post that we went to Austin City Limits Fest. I didn’t really talk about how it went. The first day, I was doing some work at the fest, but I got to stick around in the evening to see some music.

I love going to ACL with a group of friends or family, but I also really love, it turns out, just wandering out among the masses on my own and sitting in the grass checking out music by myself. I saw Bright Eyes, which sounded really great. They played a surprising amount of older stuff from one of my favorite albums and from where I was sitting, everything sounded great. I missed Christian Bale, though. I must have been jotting some notes down or not paying attention when that happened.

Internet was spotty at the fest, but I had just enough connectivity to see some Tweets about Santigold’s set, so I rushed over to that side of the park and caught the last half of her set. Holy crap, she was fantastic. I’d never really heard much of her music before, but the booming bass, the dancing, the great sound, everybody in the crowd dancing as the sun set. It was magical and I became a fan right there. I was really impressed.

Then it was time for Kanye. I stopped listening to him for a while when I got fed up with his antics and was less and less impressed with his music. But I thought last year’s My Beautiful Twisted Dark Fantasy was a complete revelation and the new album with Jay-Z isn’t too shabby, either. Well, he was pretty amazing. Everybody was expecting guests, but nobody showed up. It was all Kanye, his dancers and DJs. It was still harrowing, dramatic, energetic, veering on cringeworthy drama at a few moments, but pretty spellbinding. I think Kanye has all kinds of personal issues and I’m worried he’s going to flame out. That’s one reason I was so determined to see him live; I wonder how long he’ll keep touring and putting together music as well as he’s doing right now. I’m so glad I went even if the middle of the set, with a bunch of songs from his Autotuned heartbreak period, weren’t my cup of tea. The opening salvo of songs more than made up for that.

We saw Cee-Lo the next night, but were so far away it felt like we were watching him on a tiny TV. Then we scooted up for Stevie Wonder, which was pretty fantastic. It’s hard to describe, but it was just great song after great song on a perfect, not-too-hot night. We got separated when my wife went to the bathroom and never came back, but we had a meeting spot and found each other there. There were just so many people it was tough to get through the crowd. But it was worth all the trouble. Stevie sounded and looked better than I could have expected and he was clearly into it.

The weather cooperated and I got to spend more time at ACL than I expected to this year. It sucked to miss Arcade Fire, but getting to be outside when it’s not 105 degrees and getting to eat ACL fest food took the sting off that. Great time this year.

Last thing: we took the girls to the Comal Count Fair on Saturday. It was a great time; I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I do have some photos.

And one more pic we took at home this weekend:

It was a good week.

Nook Color, one of the e-readers we mention in the guide

Not that the Digital Savant print column is a month into its life, it’s starting to feel more routine and I’m figuring out how to balance other larger-sized stories along with that deadline and the daily blog posts and other stuff that comes along from day to day.

On Sunday, I had a big back-to-school tech gift guide in the paper, this year focused on e-book readers and tablets for college students.

On Monday, the Digital Savant column is about the South by Southwest Interactive PanelPicker, which allows the public to vote on panels for the fest. As far as I’ve been able to tell, it’s the largest tech conference to do anything like that except for maybe BarCamp-style events where the programming is organized after the event starts.

The story I have due tomorrow should run next Sunday. I’ll write about it when it’s published, but it’s another part of the online identity series I’ve been working on.

Lilly turned four years old this weekend. It was not entirely unexpected. I mean, we had about four years to prepare for it (and some months more than that, even). Three-to-four is a bigger transition than two-to-three was; at least it feels that way in my life. She’s no longer a toddler and next year she’ll be in kindergarten. She left being a baby long behind her, I just hadn’t quite accepted it. Having an almost-two-year-old in the house does make it seem a little less like the end of an era, at least.

We had a pizza party for Lilly. She remembered last year’s and raved about it long enough that we figured we should do it again. She can sometimes be cranky and she’s very demanding, as I imagine most 3-4-year-olds are, but this weekend she really turned on the charm and was on her best behavior for almost the whole weekend.

She asked for specific things this year without prompting, based on trips she’s made to the store recently and, more disturbingly, things she’s started to notice her friends have at her school. That’s how she ended up with a purple unicorn Pillow Pet that, I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty jealous about.

I didn’t have any real work or writing projects or plans and we were able to spend more time than usual just hanging out with the kids all weekend. It was wonderful and brief, but it’s nice that we get to do it all over again next weekend and the weekend after that.

Photo by Alberto Martinez, AMERICAN-STATESMAN

I rode the shuttle! On Saturday, a story I wrote about San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting, Inc. and its employee shuttle to from Austin. I’d been meaning to visit Rackspace for a long time, but since we typically focus on Austin-based companies, it got to be one of those back-burner things for a while. But their Austin presence is growing dramatically and this ended up being more about commuter culture and how Austin and San Antonio are getting ever closer.

Reporting the story, though, involved getting up one morning, driving to Austin from New Braunfels, taking the shuttle down to San Antonio, taking it back to Austin, then driving back home to New Braunfels at the end of the day. Then I visited the Austin Rackspace office the following week. And I did a lot of my interviews on the shuttle itself as it was moving, so my handwritten notes were all jangly and messy, even more so than normal.

In Tech Monday, a column I wrote about Austin-based non-profit CLOUD, Inc., continues a series we started this month about online identity. This was material that was originally slated to be part of the Online Reputation story, but it just didn’t fit and it ended up being smart to cut it and spin it off into its own article. It takes a little bit of a running start to explain what CLOUD is trying to do and I’m not exaggerating when I say it took me months to figure out how to write about some of these concepts.

And finally, today is the debut of Digital Savant as a print column in the Austin American-Statesman. The debut column, about Craigslist, is similar to what we ran on the blog last week.

I’m a little scared having a weekly column deadline, but it helps that a lot of the stuff I already do for Digital Savant makes for good column material. The column run Mondays in Life & Arts.

On Saturday, we went to a going-away work party for our former business editor Kathy Warbelow, who accepted a voluntary retirement offer. She was one of the people who hired me when I started at the paper 14 years ago and she always felt to me like a guardian angel, always watching out for me, always happy to have something I wrote in her section and always excited about a juicy bit of industry news she heard about.

We had lots and lots of great conversations over the years and she was the reason I bought my first house. She’d lived in Detroit during the height of housing interest rates and assured me, in late 2001, that I was never going to have a better opportunity to stop being a renter. She was right.

On Sunday, we took the girls to a birthday party for one of Lilly’s classmates at a place of much jumping and bouncy-castle’ing.

It’s impossible to get a phone photo of Carolina that’s not blurry; she’s moving constantly, all over the place, impervious to fatigue or falling on her face against bounce castle encased air.

It was exhausting, great fun.

On the way there and back, I put on Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black album and I wondered if my kids would know her music someday and regard her the way we look back on Hendrix and Joplin or, I guess, Cobain. It’s tough to listen to the album this soon, even beyond the obvious jarring bits like “I died a hundred times” in the lyrics. You can’t really listen to it anymore and just enjoy the music. It’s got bagged-on tragic context now and won’t ever sound the same.

It reminds me of how listening to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill feels to me now. It used to be one of my favorite albums. Now when I hear it, I just think about the follow-up album that never happened and all the years of music we missed while Ms. Hill has been raising kids and figuring her stuff out.

I wonder if I should just be happy with the music and the moments and the memories that do exist and not dwell on what never was.

It’s easy not to dwell at a giant warehouse with five big indoor bounce castles.

Lilly at Schlitterbahn.

I was very skeptical about the hipster photo toolbox app Instagram until I actually started using it. It’s very easy to use, doesn’t have too many options to overwhelm you and the filters, if you like the old-school look like my wife does, are very good. There are lots of filters for computer software like iPhoto/Aperture, etc. that do the same thing, but it’s amazing to be able to do it on your phone and be able to upload it instantly.

Anyway, here’s some pics of the girls I’ve been posting recently.

Apart from the usual busyness that bloggers who aren’t blogging (or, as we used to call them, online diarists who aren’t writing diary entries) experience — and there’s been plenty of that lately — the reason there hasn’t been a real update around here in a while is that I had a little nervous breakdown.

A really small one. Itty-bitty. I didn’t even notice it myself when it was happening. It didn’t involve depression or erratic actions or walking outside in my underwear and peeing in the yard or anything strange like that.

What did happen was that right after South by Southwest Interactive, which is about the busiest time of the year for me, I took some time off from work. Then I took some more time off. For about a month and a half (just concluding, really), I’ve been in and out of the office and haven’t really settled back into a real rhythm of work. But that’s not where the problem was.

The problem was that right after the festival, I was so mentally exhausted and bored with the area that I cover (technology) that I was seriously considering whether I wanted to continue. Then that led to, “Well, what would I do instead?” and all the panic and reflection you have when you think you might need a big life change.

It turns out I didn’t. It turns out I was kind of panicking for nothing and losing focus and doing all the things you do when you’re worn out and decide to throw yourself into more activity instead of just letting yourself rest. Once I figured that part out, I did rest. I played a ton of video games. Watched a lot of TV. Saw some movies, which is a luxury I rarely get to enjoy these days. Spent lots of time with my girls and started taking more photos and videos of them.

What I didn’t do was spend a lot of time writing blog entries here or seeking out new freelance work or other extracurricular activities. I kind of just let myself settle down for a little while and see what that’s like. Of course, that leads to a whole path where you begin to think maybe you’ve forgotten how to write or how to do your job if your job is to write. The only cure for that, really, is to just start doing it again and see how it goes.

So that was the extent of that. It was a really tiny, super-self-contained little crisis of faith.

One thing that actually really helped get over this weird life-hovering I was doing was going to Las Vegas. My wife and I went with Jessica, a friend I’ve had since I was 13.

Our excuse for going to Vegas was that Jessica was going to an all-classes reunion for the school we both attended in Germany as teenagers. The real reason we went was that we don’t get to hang out with Jessica (who is also Lilly’s godmother) nearly enough and that we just needed to get the Hell out of town and take a vacation. It was the first trip we’ve taken anywhere since before Carolina was born when we went to New York for a vacation we knew would be our last for a long while.

The calamities started early. I broke the zipper on my laptop bag before we even got on the plane causing my wife to wonder if all my stuff was going to sail down the aisles of the plane if we hit any turbulence. (That didn’t happen.)

Right after we arrived at New York, New York, the official reunion hotel where we were staying, we were standing in line for registration. My wife and I were sharing a bag of Gummi watermelon sours (we are classy like that) and I felt something crunchy in mouth suddenly. The damned sticky confection had pulled off a goddamned cap (or crown; I don’t know from molar dentistry) off my rear right lower tooth. I fished it out of my mouth, a gross, smelly little intact bit of porcelain.

I was like Ben Stiller in that “There’s Something About Mary” scene with the zipper and Cameron Diaz outside the bathroom door. I was saying things like, “It’s OK! I can still gamble! Look, I’ll pop it right back in!”

Instead, we went upstairs and started calling dentists in town at about 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, with predictable results. It does turn out that lots of Vegas hotels have in-house dental offices (because they are the size of small cities). But none of the ones I called had anyone who could see me on such short notice… except… one of the in-house dental businesses referred me to a place that kept early Saturday hours. It was way across town. The cab would be incredibly expensive. But they could get it done early and permanently. My home dentist in Austin called me back shortly after and agreed that it would be better to have it taken care of sooner rather than later. He did advise I put some toothpaste in it and stick it back in. I did that and it worked! Totally! But I went to the dentist anyway.

It was weird.

First of all, there were tons of framed posters on the waiting room and exam room walls featuring Las Vegas talent. And when I say “Talent” I mean dudes with no shirts on and ladies with their boobs pushed up about an inch from their noses. I couldn’t tell if they were strippers or dancers or cheerleaders or what, but there were lots of them and they all had great death. (Go, dentist!)

Now, I’m not trying to stereotype here, but I’m used to dentists who are a lot older than me and who still seem like authoritarians when it comes to subjects like plaque and flossing. Both the dentist and the dental hygienist were straight-up dudes, guys with gelled hair who looked like bartenders. One of them asked me, after mishearing an answer of mine about how long I was staying in town (in my defense, I had someone else’s fingers in my mouth) and asked, “So, you a truck driver?”

But they get the job done, bless those dudes. The cap was glued back on and they wished me good luck on my gambling. At least they didn’t make a “Hangover” joke.

The rest of the trip we spent walking through casinos, gambling a bit (I ended up ahead about $50-$100, though I make it a point not to keep exact track so I don’t feel bad if I lose a bit), eating everything in sight (two buffets and the excellent Firefly tapas grill on Paradise at the suggestion of Kerissa) and seeing “The Beatles: Love” at The Mirage. That part was fantastic. We had some of the worst seats in the house and it didn’t matter because every seat is good and the design is insanely good. I don’t know that I’ll ever hear the Beatles catalog sound so good on any other sound system in my life.

By complete luck, we caught the second half of Donald Glover’s concert at the Hard Rock. We missed the stand-up comedy set, but we caught a lot of the music and he was fantastic. I posted a video I shot on the blog last week.

Really, the only problem was that I had this weird feeling, especially at night when I slept, that my old pal David Copperfield was watching me.

I’m sure it was probably just my imagination.

We really needed Vegas and the timing was good. We had a much better time than we were expecting.

In fact, you could say it was kind of magical. There were Pegasuses and everything.

And what of the reunion itself? That part, unfortunately, was kind of a bust. We didn’t know a lot of people at the two reunion dinners (and the people I did recognize was mostly because we’ve subsequently become friends on Facebook, the new nexus of maintaining thin bonds online).

It was a little awkward and the attendance was a lot lower than what we were expecting (we were told later it was less than what the organizers themselves had expected, too) and even though there was some fun memories we got to relive, it reminded me how much I’ve come to appreciate the present and the future instead of dwelling on what’s been left in the past. It was kind of an expensive lesson to learn, but luckily Vegas had lots of other things on offer to lift our spirits.

I miss a few things about those high school years now and then, but I’ve lost any desire I might have once had to move backward in time, even for just a peek.

Photo by Ralph Barrera, Austin American-Statesman

Even though I had such a strange time getting back on the writing horse, I have had stuff run in the paper. I had an app feature about one called “Coaching Assistant” run a few weeks ago, had a review of the video game “Bulletstorm” in the paper, a review of the new MacBook Pros and a Tech Monday column about AT&T’s recent home broadband caps.

And of course, the Digital Savant blog keeps me busy. I started a Digital Savant podcast before SXSW that I mentioned before and have posted three episodes so far. It’s short format (less than 20 minutes per episode) with one guest per episode. I like that format and will probably keep it that way for a while and try to increase the frequency to a new podcast every week or two.

It should be up on iTunes soon with an updated link/feed. I’ll post once it’s there.

And, lastly, after we got back from Vegas, I got a vasectomy. (I’m not sure if that counts as unlucky; what say you, Vegas experts?)

But that’s not a story I’m ready to tell you today. I’ll post about it soon, promise.