Terribly Happy

“Why are you playing so many videogames all of a sudden?”

— my wife, two weeks ago

Every year around this time, I end up playing a lot more videogames than usual as the usual holiday pileup of titles begins to pile up. In truth, I’ll only get through maybe 3-5 percent of what comes across my desk, so it becomes a matter of being really picky and choosy about what I want to spend my time with and what’s worth reviewing (if, indeed, there’s even time to write full reviews for work).

I always try to give priority to games developed locally, and it was this kind of thinking <a href="http://www achat viagra pharmacie.statesman.com/life/the-year-in-austin-gaming-1997711.html”>that led to a Digital Savant column that ran Monday about the year of Austin gaming. Everybody’s sort of holding their breath for the release of Star Wars: the Old Republic, a huge Austin-developed MMO that is the biggest game ever created here. I’m working on a larger piece about that game to run in mid-December.

I got to talk to a few Austin game studios for a separate Tech Monday column about how companies that run online games deal with trolls and bullies. It was an offshoot of a previous story I did on trolling; we had to cut a big chunk out of it about online gaming and I ended up spinning that information off into its own article.

And completely separate of all that, I played with and reviewed a fitness gadget called Striiv that also has its own gaming components (racking up points and using them in a Farmville-like virtual game.) A version of that review ran in the paper, too, as did a short interview I did with Trey Ratcliff about his new iPad app, “Stuck on Earth.”

(I just realized I didn’t mention what I’m actually playing right now. It’s Uncharted 3, Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7 and the Star Wars: Old Republic beta. At some point I’ll go back and play Call of Duty: MW3 and Batman: Arkham City, which I’ve beed sad to miss.)

We had a pretty great Thanksgiving, really restful, little bit of shopping, lots of eating, some exercise to make up for the eating, more eating because the exercise made us hungry and wanting to do more shopping.

Work is still work. I haven’t been doing much freelance at all lately, but a separate writing project I’ve been working on for a while is coming along really, really well. I’ve been devoting a little bit of time on it nearly every night and as much as I dread and fear screwing it up, when I sit down and slip into that little portal, it’s always a good feeling, one that gets more comfortable and enjoyable the longer I stick with it. If all goes well, I hope to have a lot more to say about it as the year comes to a close.

Every year around this time I usually put together a holiday tech gift guide for the Statesman and a separate one for Television Without Pity, working off a big master list and then deciding which items should go where (with a little bit of overlap).

This year the gift guides diverged a little more than usual because we decided to make the Statesman one more locally focused with products produced by Austin companies or powered by Austin technology (or, in a few cases, just stuff that would appeal to Central Texans). So the TWOP gift guide ends up being a lot more general and TV-focused while the Statesman one has a more local feel.

This is probably way more information than you care to have.

Which is all to say that while these packages often look really easy: just a bunch of product images with really short descriptions, they’re a huge challenge to put together. I save email pitches all year in a folder called “Gift Guide Tech” and I literally go through those emails one by one when it’s time to put these stories together. This year there were about 170+ emails and more kept coming in as I was working on it. Some of those emails included information for 10 to 20 products each. I used to put all my picks in one big Excel spreadsheet and work from that, but this year I ditched the spreadsheet and just made a simple list and that saved me a little bit of time.

I’ve been trying in general to save time on the things I do and not waste it, especially at work where it feels like deadlines are closing in and the year is already drawing to a close.

Like most of you, I’m just hanging on for Turkey Day, looking forward to just relaxing for a day or two and not thinking too hard about what’s left to do in 2011, which has proven to be a challenging, very weird year for me that I’m still trying to figure out.

Sometime in my early-early 30s, I went from flying by the seat of my pants on assignments and tasks to being a full-on productivity nerd. I’ve written about GTD a few times and at least once or twice a year I end up reassessing whether the software/apps I’m using are really working for me or if I should try something new.

(It helps a lot that my editor is also into GTD and is very organized; you should see her desk. There aren’t huge piles of papers and junk on it like everybody else in the newsroom. It’s kind of amazing.)

That’s enough preamble to say that I <a href="http://www.statesman.com/life/whats-next-on-the-to-do-list-make-1966882 viagra pour acheter.html”>wrote a story for the Statesman about to-do list apps, websites and tips. I finished working on it last week and didn’t read it again until today and I was pleased with how it turned out. The print version ran with really huge artwork and the whole package works well, I think. Some of the artwork was of my actual real-life to-do list and it ran so large you could actually see what I was doing last week (and what deadlines I had missed). I’d be embarrassed, but I think I lost the capacity for that when they started running my photo with the column every week.

The other thing I wrote this week that ended up in print was about the night that Rick Perry made a mistake in a debate, Joe Paterno was fired and Ashton Kutcher mis-Tweeted something and the Internet got really mad.

We went to Wurstfest a few times, which the kids are getting old enough to appreciate on a whole other level. They are now aware that this is a place that has not only sausage and music they dig but also rides and booths that give you prizes if you give a grownup enough tokens that you get from your dad.

The holidays are getting here too quickly, but I’m enjoying the ride. So is Carolina:

Vacation ended much too quickly, but I knew it would, so at least that wasn’t a surprise.

In between pediatrician visits and Halloween and the start of Wurstfest (oh, my favorite time of year), I cleared out all the clutter and junk on the floor of our home office, making it a sane, walkable place again. That alone was worth the price of burning up a week of vacation.

I bought a printer (and oh man does it work so much better than our last one; I think I’m swearing off HP printers forever), hired someone to fix a few behind-the-scenes WordPress issues I was having (the fonts are a little different, but now I can actually use apostrophes in the titles of blog posts; it was a weird issue that was driving me nuts. I can also now post here using the iPad/iPhone app, which was a problem before), did some Trailers Without Pity work, wrote the first significant chunk of a major writing project I’m really trying to devote more time to and just spent lots of time with the kids. I also did a solo day where I drove to Austin, worked out with a trainer, had a nice big salad for lunch then went and got a massage. That was my day of luxury and pampering. The rest of the vacation felt like errand, work and running things to Goodwill time.

It was a really, really good week. Now I’m back at work and all the things I’d put on pause in my head, all the emails I tried to ignore and Tweets I promised to follow up on are back on the front burner, but at least I have a little bit better attitude about it than when I left.

The Digital Savant column this week was a roundup of three tech product reviews I wrote, for the great Kinect game “Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster,” the MiCommand Control it All Remote for iOS and the ThinkGeek iCade Arcade Cabinet for the iPad.

While I was on vacation, I had a “Coffee With…” feature I did for our Thursday Life & Style section run about an online service for couples who are dealing with infidelity. It was not a lot of fun having a press folder with the words “AFFAIR RECOVERY” lying on my desk, but damned if I was going to bring it home viagra mg.

Now I’m working on some holiday gift guide stuff and a few other stories leading up to another vacation around Christmas. There are a few things on the horizon for next year that I’m excited about, but right now I’m just trying to keep up, not get sick and maintain my energy.

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 commande viagra en ligne.

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.