Terribly Happy

This is what is happening, in bite-sized updates:

That whole selling our Austin rental house thing

Sold! We got three offers the first day and one the second day and then no more offers. We were told by our fantastic realtor that this is common in this market and the good news was that two of the first three offers were serious and we got into a little bidding war situation. We came out about 5 percent above asking price and we closed on Friday, so a combination of a scorching hot Austin seller’s market and good timing means we came out pretty well ahead.

That wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t put a big, scary amount of money into fixing the house up for sale, but the investment and the worry paid off.

Now I need some margaritas to celebrate.

Travel!

Because of kids, we rarely go anywhere, but this year has suddenly been full of travel. We did Disney World and shortly after that, I went to my 20-year reunion in Oklahoma. We ended up going on a shorter second vacation two weeks ago to sunny S. Padre Island which the girls enjoyed almost as much as Disney.

On that trip, I got to really relax and enjoy myself, eat a lot of seafood and see some rescued sea turtles (above), which I immediately chose as my new spirit animals. As opposed to a cranky crab, which I can be when I’m not at the beach (below).

My wife took a just-concluded work trip, so I’ve been juggling taking care of the kids with work, which has left me exhausted. But the kids behaved, which they always seem to do when one of us is away (do they think they’re in trouble or something?), so it went well. My wife will be taking her turn going solo when I go cover SXSW V2V next month in Las Vegas. I like Vegas, but it’s a work trip and it’s no fun going there alone. Hope the conference is exciting and has good energy.

Novel

I feel weird saying much about this because like all superstitious writers, I fear the jinx, but the quick status update is that I took a few days away from the material and have since spent the last week and a half just reading back through it without trying to edit as I go. I was expecting to be horrified and to want to rewrite huge swaths, but instead I’ve been surprised by stuff I don’t even remember writing and pleased with a lot of it. Next step will be to give it a hard 2nd-draft edit/revision and to get some feedback from a very tiny group of people I asked to read the first draft. Not sure what’ll happen after that, to be perfectly honest but I’m definitely not going to just put it away. This year for me has been primarily about this project and very little else.

Things that have brought me joy lately

This video (which I was very late to seeing), this song, this blog post, this Tumblr, this T-shirt, the photo below.

Don’t worry, we were able to reclaim her arm from the seaweed virus before she ate Megatokyo.

Stuff I wrote

My Digital Savant column last week was a roundup of reviews: the video games The Last of Us (depressing!) and Gunpoint (clever and funny!), as well as the Nikon D5200 SLR camera.

This week’s column was about the nonprofit Austin Free-Net, which has been around since 1995 and has been doing great work in the Austin community to bring Internet access and computer services to those who wouldn’t otherwise get it.

I also did some Digital Savant Micro stories about clickjacking and about Google’s just-announced Chromecast dongle.

One new thing at work is that it looks like I’ll be doing more video stuff soon. More on that as it happens.

Monkeys who hump and more

The Space Monkeys! really liked the movie Pacific Rim(which I still need to see) and this week did a whole lot of sexing in honor of “Hump Day.”

Give them a Facebook Like, won’t you?

I made some tacos and they ended up in a book

Through one of those random Austin things that happens from time to time, a friend of mine found himself working on a book about breakfast tacos and he asked if I’d like to be included. This involved me making some tacos and taking them to a photo shoot and writing up a little bit about my love for and history with the humble breakfast taco.

The book turned out beautifully and a launch party for it drew a huge crowd.

Buy a copy. I promise it’s worth your money and time.

On Twitter

Two out-of-the ordinary things that happened on Twitter recently.

The night of the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman verdict, I tweeted something I thought was very vague and of course that’s the thing that people latch on to retweet hundreds of times.

This has been a pretty rough week for anybody who cares about human beings.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) July 14, 2013

You can’t really see the responses or how some people reposted it anymore, but what was interested was the responses said way more about the person than the original Tweet did about me, I think.  It was a very weird, bad week on multiple fronts and in some ways it just summed up the bummer that was in the air that night.

The other Tweet was much more recent and came from my daughter. I think it may have had something to do with a dinosaur exhibit she just saw, which must mean she thinks her father is about to become extinct:

I swear this happened tonight – Me: You're both growing up. I miss having babies! Lilly: You. Are. Going. To. Die. You're old.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) July 27, 2013

I wish I’d had a good response to that other than, “Damn. You got me. Well done.”

We bought hats and the girls made faces. Yup, those are my kids, all right. (All photos in this post by me, my wife or Disney PhotoPass.)

I loved Disney World. It would be easy to complain about individual parts of the experience. I’d never been before, not even as a child, and I could have chosen to be disappointed that because we were toting two kids and fulfilling their dreams (a common parenting thing), my wife and I didn’t really get to go on any boss grownup rides.

I could complain about the heat which, when it wasn’t raining, was a stifling, exhausting omnipresence. I could complain that it was so corporate in that sneaky ingratiating way that makes you forget that you are basically going broke trying to have a good time and I could complain that traveling on a plane with a 3-year-old who decides to completely lose her shit was in my top 10 horrible nightmares list and that this item on the list came absolutely true and was just as horrific as I’d dared to bad-dream.

But fuck all that. I loved the experience. I loved the traveling and I loved the resort where we stayed and I loved the damn refillable plastic cups they gave us that we filled with water or fruit punch or sweet tea. I loved the pool, I loved the boats, even the ones that took forever to arrive to take us two minutes away across the water. I loved all four parks, even poor, divisive Animal Kingdom and Epcot, which could be a complete drag if you’re in the wrong frame of mind for them. Come to think of it, that could all of Disney World. All of Florida, in fact.

Just one example of the insanely awesome overkill of a Disney resort hotel.

But perhaps it was that it had been so long since I’d taken a proper no-work vacation (about two years, honestly) and that our kids had wanted this for so long and that my parents came along, too, and offered some much-needed help. But I had a great, no-lie awesome time. Instead of getting more worn out as the vacation went on and wishing we were home, we settled into a groove where we got used to our surroundings, figured out the best ways to navigate and got into the perfect cocoon of comfort and relaxation.

Of course, if you are a parent, you know that I’m talking about a cocoon where kids still lose their shit fighting over a seat at the dinner table and where you have to have lights out in the hotel room by 9 p.m. even though you want to stay up and drink or watch TV until 2 a.m. But within those boundaries, I found so much to love about the parks and Florida’s general weirdness and the uninterrupted time we got to spend with the kids.

It was expensive. It was a lot of work to keep the kids entertained and fed and content for a full six nights + travel days. But we’re still, nearly three weeks later, talking about things that happened on the trip, looking at the photos we have and talking about it to anyone who’ll listen.

Disney has got this stuff down. They know what they’re doing and even when things don’t work like they’re supposed to (the transportation breaks down or the heat is unbearable amid way too many people), Disney finds a way to distract you. Too hot? Here’s a parade for you right down the damn street! Monorail broken? Here, take a free boat or a bus. Don’t like the food at this restaurant? There are 15 other restaurants in your vicinity and they all serve stuff your kids will actually eat.

An editor friend of mine told me that at Disney World they really take care of you and it was reassuring to be at a place where everyone, from the workers to other parents, understood how kids can be in unfamiliar surrounding and all the little things it takes to put them, and you, at ease.

We could see the monorail from our room.

So here are the things I loved and the things I did not love about Disney World. I imagine we’ll go back in a few years when the kids are older, especially since Carolina at 3 seemed about a year or two too young to really experience it (and who knows how much she’ll remember).

Loved it:

• Pretty much all the Pixar-themed rides and shows. The 40-minute Finding Nemo stage musical was fantastic, the Buzz Lightyear shooting ride was fun for every single person in our party (ages 3 to my parents) and the Monsters Inc. stand-up comedy show was surprisingly hilarious and not cheesy like I was expecting. It was actually more enjoyable for me than Monsters University.  If you find yourself at Disney World and don’t know what to do, hit the Pixar stuff first.
• The food was something we were expecting to struggle with. We were on a meal plan and based on the description, we thought the “Quick service” restaurants were going to be a bunch of small snacks or junk food. Turns out they serve quite good food and, most importantly, stuff the kids enjoyed. And there are tons of them, so after you feel like you’re eating the same stuff for two or three days, you can switch it up and try other places at the parks. We fell in love with the quick-service place at our resort.
• Our resort was amazing. Gorgeous buildings, great service, super entertaining lobby with live music every night, shops, good restaurants and beautiful pools. We would stay there again for sure.
• I don’t get to travel much anymore, so going country-by-country at Epcot was probably way more fun for me than for the kids. We completely fell in love with the giant Japan store and the Germany stuff took me back to my days living overseas. Mexico completely sucked for me, but probably only because all the stuff you could buy in that area was stuff you can get much cheaper in San Antonio.
• I haven’t been to Florida much and I guess I was expecting it to be a lot more urban and paved, but there is so much empty land and swamp and water that it really feels like you’re cut off from all the sprawl of a state like Texas. That’s a weird thing to enjoy on vacation, but I liked in some ways the feeling of being a little bit isolated from the rest of the country geographically.

Hated it:

• That cuts both ways, actually. I felt isolated in a nice way for a vacation, but also in a way that made me twitchy as someone who likes to keep up with the news and know what’s going on. More on that below where I talk about what happened when I got back home.
• It takes chutzpah for someone from Texas to complain about Florida heat, but seriously, in a park with so many people and without much shade, Magic Kingdom just felt like an oven both days we went. Other parks with more shade and less people like Animal Kingdom and Epcot were much better. The unpredictable weather goes without saying.
• Transportation was a problem a few times for us with much-delayed boat rides or a monorail that wasn’t working. The buses for the parks not near our hotel were fine, but the stroller we rented was huge and had to be broken down for the bus, which was always stressful for me, the one who had to deal with stroller wrangling.
• It was great that there was Wi-Fi everywhere, from the resorts to all the parks, but man was the Wi-Fi spotty at the hotel, especially late at night when I was trying to get some writing and news-surfing done in the lobby of our building. Is that when everybody’s in their room jamming up the network downloading porn after their kids go to bed? I imagine so.
• That’s pretty much it, which should tell you how much we liked the trip. All the hotel and park people we dealt with were super-curteous. As parents, we never felt like we were getting stares or being shamed when our kids occasionally acted up (OK, on the plane ride that happened, but we deserved it). Other parents seemed to take it in stride and staff at the hotel and parks made it a priority to make our kids feel special and welcomed. So, I guess that’s not a “hate” item… I hate that I don’t have more to complain about!

Rebecca insisted that getting a monogrammed hat at Disney is a tradition. So I did. “Where’s yours?” I asked. She said, “I already have one at home.”

Here are a few more photos:

They loved the airport.

This image ran in the paper with my column because we couldn’t find an image where my wife and I didn’t look all sweaty and/or bloated from Disney meals.

Ariel was all by herself in the grotto for hours at a time, which is not at all creepy.

The first part of a crazy Princess lunch as the Cinderella castle.

My daughters couldn’t understand why Pocahontas and Governor Ratcliffe are just hanging out like it’s no big deal.

At a character breakfast in our hotel.

Father’s Day landed on the day of our trip after we left, so we had to gather for that way later. This was my message to my dad on that Sunday.

So, here’s what happened when I got back.  I was still Tweeting and commenting on stuff like the Apple product announcement while on my trip (there are some long lines at Disney and I had my phone).  My co-worker Addie Broyles, who writes about food for the Statesman, emailed me suggested we do something together about whether it’s a good idea to unplug from technology on vacation.

She was going to be taking a trip to Florida with her son and was planning to disconnect herself from social media, unlike my Instagramming ass.

It turned out to be a great idea. We wrote dual columns for Digital Savant that ran this past week. Mine was about staying plugged in on vacation and hers was about her experience doing the opposite. (MyStatesman subscription required for those two columns.)

They ran in print with this great Don Tate illustration:

By Don Tate / American-Statesman

We also did a public Google Hangout you can watch below talking about the topic in more detail with special guest(s).

 Work, monkeys and more

A new Digital Savant Micro ran in print and online explaining “Virtual machines.”

I also got to attend the first day of the huge RTX 2013 (Rooster Teeth Expo) and posted a short blog and some photos I shot at the event. I met some really great people and had a fun time.

I keep forgetting to post this here, but I was on NPR’s “Marketplace” for about five seconds talking about Rolodexes. A Don Draper reference was employed.

In the world of our monkey friends from space, their recent adventures include a forced visit to The Friend Zone and an unintentional drug brownie trip.

We took a much shorter family vacation to the beach this last weekend and because my vacations still involve staying up late and working, I was able to finish something I’ve been working on since around December.

I Tweeted this from the hotel lobby of the Hilton Garden Inn at South Padre Island around 1:30 a.m.:

Just wrote the last words of the first novel I've ever successfully completed. 1st draft, 358 pages! Now the work begins to get it to you.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) July 13, 2013

I hope to have a lot more to share about that soon but the first big step, just finishing the thing, is done and now I’m starting on editing and next-drafting and moving it forward.

10 years ago, I went to my 10-year reunion and it never even occurred to me that I was already writing on this site at the time and that of course I documented it. I sometimes forget I have this whole diary thing that dates back to 2000.

But in a way, I’m glad I didn’t read what I wrote before I flew to Oklahoma City on Saturday for a super-quick round-trip 20-year reunion. I’m glad that the fog of parent brain and 10 years passed made me go into it with no expectations other than that at least two good friends of mine would be there and that I really wanted to see them.

Because it turned out to be a weird night in a lot of little, wonderful ways.

I can’t imagine there is anyone who goes to a 1o- or 20-year reunion and doesn’t find it a little strange, unless you live in the place you went to school and are in close contact with all the people who came up with you. I imagine reunions have always been a little weird, a mix of the people you remember clearly, the people you remember but never really spent much time with even when you were in close daily proximity and then the people who unfortunately completely left your brain and don’t return in memory even when the older version of them is standing right there in front of you.

And then there’s the Facebook effect. I’m pretty sure a lot of people didn’t come to the reunion specifically because they feel they already get the nostalgia/curiosity hit they need from The Social Network and that a $400 plane ticket and accommodations aren’t going to add much to their mental picture of how their peers ended up.

I went alone. My wife has no interest in going to her reunion and had much, much less interest in going to mine and I completely agree with that decision. Unless you’re into people-watching and hearing second-hand stories of glorious old inside jokes, it’s just an uncomfortable thing to be the spouse at these things unless your relationship is new and you’re still in the figuring-out-your-mate stage where everything is a window into their past and personality. If you’ve been with something for 15+ years, it becomes more of the same shit that you’ve heard hundreds of times, more like.

The reunion did make me more aware than ever of the strange things constant online contact (again, mostly Facebook) have done to us. There were people at the reunion who spoke as if they interest nearly every day and the people that I do actually talk to on Facebook seemed like people I’d seen around within the last few months, not 10 whole years. When the night was winding down and people were saying their goodbyes, it wasn’t, “I’ll see you in 5 or 10 years,” it was, “I’ll post some pics and tag you” or “I’ll let you know on Monday what I find out.”

The people who want to stay in touch are still in touch. Even the people we didn’t really want to be in touch with necessarily all the time we’re still talking to.

Me, Marcus, Candace and Jeremy

I’m not saying that’s good or bad; for me it’s nice in a lot of ways and only negative once in a blue moon. But it is different, it is weird and I’m not sure that my generation has figured out what to do with it beyond simply ignoring it and moving on.

I did have a good time, though. It took place in a strange and awesome building in downtown Oklahoma City (I went to school in nearby Midwest City) at some eccentric rich person’s house. I mean rich like having the kind of money where you say, “Screw it, I’m putting cars in the living room and getting poker playing dog throw pillows. And putting a DJ on the rooftop!” It completely blew away our 10-year reunion, which was in a boring ballroom that nobody remembers.

I’m glad I went, the expense was worth it and at the end of the night, I had gotten to spend (not enough) time with some very close friends I never get to see. Sometimes just a few minutes of that is worth the money and the trouble.

Some photos and Tweets from that night:

This was, no joke, the entrance to my 20-year reunion. It turns out it’s a freight elevator to an amazingly eccentric rich person’s house. Bruce Wayne, maybe.

Marcus and dog mentioned in Tweet below

Nope, nothing weird about this!

What do I tell people at my reunion? "I'm now a pirate / scissor maker / foot specialist / Druid / Pawn Star / billionaire / mixologist?"

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 22, 2013

Me at the reunion entrance: "As you can see by my Versa rental car, I exceeded all expectations."

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

Me at the reunion a dozen times tonight, I bet: "Yes, I had long hair. Yes, I cut it after high school. No, I didn't keep it. Who are you?"

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

"Didn't you used to be a lot younger?" #reunionquestions

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

The entrance to my high school reunion. Not even joking. http://t.co/Zc70x0YImR

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

Look at that handsome devil! Not yet beaten down by life #reunion http://t.co/DfPh3SBfBl

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

This reunion's got everything. Vintage cars. My friend Marcus. A dog statue… http://t.co/TkRXrwrB9k

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

I swear I'm not making this #reunion up. http://t.co/1c5F0HDwG9

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

"You look exactly the same!" "You totally don't!" #reunion

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

If you have the chance to have your next #reunion at an eccentric rich person's house and have lots of booze there, YOU SHOULD DO THAT.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

My 20-year reunion was so nostalgic that when I woke up this morning, I was in a band called Ace of Bass.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

Work stuff and monkey stuff

I was on vacation for a week when the Digital Savant column and Micro didn’t run, but it’s been nearly a full month since I’ve updated, so here’s what I’ve had in the paper in the interim:

Colin Anawaty, left, and Jason Bornhorst are co-founders of Filament Labs. Photo by Mark Matson for the American-Statesman

I wrote a column about how complaining on social media about a product or service doesn’t always reward you with a happy ending (though it does work for some people). Last week’s column was about whether health- and fitness-related apps can really change your habits and make you a better, happier person. A MyStatesman account is required to view that article, but I also wrote a free blog post with supplemental information on the topic.

This week’s column was about civic hackathons and the impact they’re making on the Austin community. Like the last one, it’s on MyStatesman, but I’ve been told a few times via Twitter by readers that it’s also available elsewhere on the web. I have nothing to do with that if that’s the case.

The Micros recently were about movie-related apps Anything After and RunPee, a definition of the digital locker concept UltraViolet, what to do with old VHS movie tapes  and an explainer of Google+ Hangouts. We’ll be doing a Hangout on Tuesday to coincide with a column that runs that day in the paper. (Info on that in the Hangouts Micro.)

I kept busy with a few other stories and blog posts: there was a story about Austin tech guy Whurley and his UnGrounded innovation flight to London; a story about the Win8 version of the ACL Access app and Dell’s involvement with that; a post about coping with the end of Google Reader; a post about an Austin-made orthodontics app called Mighty Brace (which will run next week as a “Raising Austin” column in expanded form); and a short story about family mobile company Famigo.

Space Monkeys! has rolled along with a new comic about parking problems and, because Pablo and I were both traveling, two vacation-themed sketches over the last two weeks, one themed to Costa Rica, the other themed to my Disney World trip.

A bit’a meta 

Wow, that’s a lot for having been on vacation. Speaking of which, I wrote a huge chunk of blog about my Disney World trip, which happened before my reunion, but this blog post is already far too long so I’m splitting it into two blog entries.

The good news is that it’s already written, but I’m saving it for next week to time it to my next column, which ties directly in with that trip.

Sorry for the long break. It’s just been busy-as-crazy around here and I’m excited that I’m very close (days close) to finishing up a huge writing project that I’ve been working on since December. It’s been a lot of that and very little blogging here, but that ratio should change soon as I get done. Hope to tell you more about that in just a bit.

In 2001, I bought a house. It was a crazy time. 9/11 had just happened and we were all exposed tooth nerves walking around trying to Make Sense of It All with no idea of what the future might be. We did strange things.

I was only 26. I had a very great editor who told me, “The interest rates are insane. It’s never going to be like this again. You need to buy a house.”

A very tiny picture taken a very long time ago.

So I did. I’m really impressionable that way.

The house was not very large and it was not very new, but I didn’t know that then, I just knew that this incredible home with a gigantic backyard perfect for parties was suddenly mine and all I had to do was not go totally broke paying to move in. After that, things would be fine. And then they were.

I didn’t stay long in that house. Just a few years later, I got married and we moved further south and we kept the house as a rental property, managed by a company that made sure all we had to do was stay paid up. It got stressful when we’d lose tenants, but things always worked out and I always maintained that all the expenses helped us on our income taxes. (We found out later that it really didn’t, but it was nice to have that illusion for so long as we were losing money.)

We thought about selling the house. Many, many times. There were times when we were paying double mortgage and had fetuses growing in bellies (OK, just the one belly) and my wife was all, “WHY DO WE STILL HAVE THIS MONEY PIT!?” and I would remind her that the actual movie The Money Pit had a happy ending and she wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the night.

Good times.

Then the housing crash hit. I don’t know if you heard about it. Fucking dire wolves attacked the housing market and chewed it up, ruining it for everyone! Yes, they were supposed to be extinct. That’s why everyone was so surprised. Well, except for economists who predicted the housing collapse in books like, The Fucking Dire Wolves Are Coming! and Paradise Lost: The Housing Market is About to Be Chewed Up BY FUCKING DIRE WOLVES, WHY WON’T YOU LISTEN?!

Every time the subject of selling the house came up, I would raise my hands diagonally at about a 45-degree angle and say, “The housing market. What are you gonna do? It’s a terrible time to sell. Dire wolves.”

Part of my reluctance to sell it was that I had always fantasized about moving back to Austin and maybe expanding the house. The yard is so enormous that wouldn’t be impossible. But the neighborhood we lived in never really got into renovation and expansion projects and at some point in our stay in New Braunfels, my wife decided we should die here.

Usually when your wife tells you you’re going to die somewhere, it’s pretty ominous and you should probably not be anywhere near that spot from then on. But the conversation was actually quite pleasant. It went like so:

Rebecca: After this, we should build one more house in New Braunfels and then that’s it.

Omar: What do you mean “That’s it?”

Rebecca: That would be our last house. That’s where we’d retire.

Omar: You mean that’s where we’ll die?

Rebecca: You first.

The thing is, I actually found all that comforting. We have a plan. That’s a little story I trot out whenever someone asks me why I’m not trying to get a job in New York or D.C.. I tell them it’s because I already know where I’m growing old and they back away slowly and then go subtweet about it.

Did I mention we are selling a house?

I took you on that detour to get you to here, where I am in the middle of trying to fix up a house to sell right before we take a big family trip, which is like trying to ride a roller coaster while painting a house, which incidentally is something that costs close to $3,000, I just learned.

I was never a big DIYer when I lived in that house. I’m still not. I barely have time to write my own blog posts. So it was with dismay that we saw how dated the fixtures and ceiling fans look and other bits of wear and tear that accumulated in the time since I lived there.

The yard is still spectacular. The back patio, with its Saltillo tile and tin roof, is still wonderful and I miss it a lot. The backyard has so many trees and so much shade that it was always 10 to 20 degrees cooler than everywhere else in the summer. We visited the house recently in the middle of a rainstorm and I imagined myself sitting there with my cup of coffee in the morning using my laptop back when Wi-Fi was a new and wondrous thing of no wires.

I am buying ceiling fans at Lowe’s and talking about paint swatches and remodeling bathrooms (by proxy; we have people) and fixing fences and yards. We’re making a house beautiful for people we don’t know yet, picking out items for a place we’ll never live, trying to make it nice but not so nice that it’ll impose our style on someone who might find it crappy. It’s a weird, tricky balance, trying to spend enough to make the house desirable but not spending so much that we defeat the purpose of selling.

So that’s what’s been on my mind. I miss the house but I’m also eager to be rid of it. In the years since we moved out, we’ve replaced a roof and a furnace, put in new carpet, made endless small plumbing repairs and gotten stressed about house issues for a place we don’t even live. We don’t need it anymore and we haven’t needed it for a while. But letting go of something you love that you think you could love again is never easy. Now I just hope someone loves it just as much as I once did.

Other new things happening

I have a new editor at work, which is exciting and fun.

I mentioned a family vacation. I’ll have a lot more to say about that soon. It involves a whole world of Disney stuff. You can probably guess.

I’m still painting miniatures, this time a set for my brother while I await my Zombicide stuff to arrive in the fall.

I am so cool.

Also, I am now buying comic books on eBay, so instead of having a midlife crisis where I buy sports cars and unsuccessfully solicit blowjobs from waitresses, I seem to be going the other way, continuing to do things I stopped doing as a teenager before there was such a bay as eBay.

And lastly, my older daughter finished kindergarten, which seems unreal and far too soon, but then again, she’s worked really hard this year and come a long way and is thrilled to be going to first grade. She did great.

Work stuff and monkeys

Of course, I have articles to share.

I wrote a meditative column about whether our use of technology is making us speak less. I’m not sure there’s a definitive conclusion there, but certainly the ways we use our voices is changing, at least.

And this week’s column was about our changing TV viewing habits, a column prompted by the debut of Arrested Development’s fourth season on Netflix. I also did a bonus blog with a few more thoughts on the subject.

There were also new Digital Savant Micro features on the Xbox One and on Gmail’s new tab-focused design changes.

A note on some of those MyStatesman.com stories. Our paywall goes up soon for reals as our free preview ends. That means links I post here to articles will often require a subscription to read. Blog posts won’t be affected, but most of my weekly stuff that runs in the newspaper will.

Separately on the blog, I wrote about a cool civic tech expo, a plastic surgeon live Tweeting a procedure, and an Austin-made app for the website A Beautiful Mess.

Our favorite monkeys in space were mystified by “Shelfies,” panicking at the disco, and engaged in a discussion about TV binge-viewing.

Give our monkeys a Facebook like or a Twitter follow, would you?

And that’s it! Please hope for me that the house sells so I can stop buying hardware and embarrassing myself.

This seems like a good transition time, what with all the graduations and weddings and new jobs and people up and moving across the country that I’m seeing.

Add to that the birthdays and the births, the deaths and the cancers; right now feels like the opposite of those increasingly few times when you go a few days wondering if anything’s happening. Boredom doesn’t really feel like an option anymore if I’m paying attention. It’s just this incoming stream of stuff, stuff, stuff and it’s sometimes tough to allocate the appropriate amount of attention and care and congrats +/- sympathy when it’s so much at once. The extreme emotions can cancel each other out and you’re just left with a feeling where you’re not sure in which direction to aim your being and be present. Sometimes, unfortunately, it ends up being not in any one in particular.

I haven’t had any of those things listed above except a birthday last month. The only real transitions for me have been some relocating at work. We’re all changing desk locations due to a large-scale building renovation, not just me. I posted something about it online when I was moving my stuff into boxes to transport a few dozen feet and someone on Google+ assumed I’d lost my job. Funny thing, Google+ always feels a little disconnected like that.

The desk move wasn’t bad at all. We have new carpet, I purged a bunch of stuff and have a neat desk again (but for how long!?) and my new spot is a lot less isolated than my against-the-wall former work home.

The other move at work was more recent; we’re switching blog software, which was a big dreaded thing many of us were worried about that not seems like much less of a big deal in that it works and it not that difficult to use. The old blog and archives are up and we’re hoping there’ll be a solution to moving them over, but for now, the new blog home looks nicer and solves some of the quirky problems we had before (like not being able to use Chrome to blog with or our links showing up as garbled teases on Facebook) while introducing some new quirky problems that are not as visible to readers.

I wish I had some stories to tell you about the last few weeks, but they have been boring in the most happy way. I’ve been spending more time than usual at home with the kids and as frustrating as that can be in small moments (“No, Carolina, no, put the pen down, no, don’t write on the cabinets, stop, please, no, put down the pen, give me the pen, HERE, THE PEN, HAND ME THE PEN, STOP WRITING, OK, why are you crying, I’m sorry, here’s the pen back, NO STOP WRITING ON THE CABINETS!”) it is also kind of wonderful in hundreds of completely boring ways that amount to me watching my kids do their thing and just charm me and warm my heart.

Sometimes I post videos or photos when they do something particularly visual, but it doesn’t come close to capturing what it’s like when they really turn on the magic. Maybe they’re singing along to a song or making a little gesture I’ve never seen before or saying something random and hilarious (My wife: “Omar, get the stuff out of the car.” Lilly: “Yeah, OMAR, get the stuff out of the car!”).

There’s a trade-off, of course, there always is. I don’t think about moving my family to another city because that’s off the table. That’s something we decided pretty firmly once the kids were born. I don’t travel much away from the kids, maybe only once or twice a year. My going off to do stuff like working on videos or attending conferences (especially on weekends) or taking advantage of attending really cool stuff in Austin just doesn’t happen as much anymore. I miss an awful lot. I turn down a lot of things and beg off a lot on things that are not entirely unreasonable.

When they were much smaller, it was a lot harder to do that. I really did feel like I was exchanging my youth and Good Times for boring, frustrating babysitting. Now it’s really not hard to make those decisions. I think about what it’ll mean not to be able to tell them goodnight myself or how being away for an entire weekend means I can’t take them to the park or the zoo or Schlitterbahn, or the Jumpy Place or even just the Donut Palace on a Saturday morning (their new favorite hangout) and how I would feel if my dad was always gone.

Wanting to be here and having to be here can be two very different things, but sometimes they go together and you feel like you’re spending your time well.

Work and other stuff

I mentioned earlier that I moved to a new blog for Digital Savant. Here’s the link for the new blog and the address for the old blog where the archives are still housed for anything older than last week.

Last week’s column was a big review piece featuring four smart phones, the BlackBerry Z10 (the one without the physical keyboard), the HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Nokia Lumia 920.

It was a little crazy having four extra cell phones in the house. If I had them turned on at the same time, one Twitter reply or email would set them all chiming at once, which begins to make you feel like a hamster responding to the ring of a bell.

This week’s column was a roundup of travel apps. I don’t travel a lot, so I relied on the wisdom of my friends and co-workers who do. It turns out they had great suggestions and I plan to use some of these apps when we go on a big family trip this summer.

The Digital Savant Micro for the last two weeks included one about Adobe’s Creative Cloud (their subscription service) and “Rougelike,” a genre of computer role-playing games I’d only heard about recently even though they’ve been around a while. I also did one recently about gesture recognition, like the air swiping you find (but which doesn’t work very well) on the Galaxy S4 phone.

Lastly, this has nothing to do with me, but my former wonderful bosses who founded Television Without Pity have gotten back together to launch a brand-new TV site, Previously.TV. Just a week after it went live, it’s already got some must-read regular features and if you know what the original TWOP was like, you won’t be surprised by the sharp writing and the gorgeous site design.

Postscript

This seems to keep happening: I write a blog post (like the one above), sit on it a day to add images and fine tune it, and then something happens that seems to render everything I wrote less important (or beside the point, at least).

Tonight, it’s the horrifying tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma, a place where I still have friends and just up the road from where I lived for years in Norman and in Midwest City. I watched the awful dark clouds churn at work on a live video feed and when I saw what it looked like, I knew it was going to be bad.  Even without seeing where it was touching ground and what damage it was doing, it looked like the end of the world. It wasn’t going to be anything but devastating.

This happened before after I’d moved away, in 1999, and for months I heard stories about the devastation and the loss. The 1999 tornado apparently passed less than a half mile from where my family lived when we were there.

Tonight, the death toll in Oklahoma is at 51 and many of those are children. There’s nothing I can say or offer. As with the 1999 storm and even further back to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, I feel the same helpless sorrow.  It somehow makes it a little better to know that Oklahomans will respond the way they always have to these horrible events. They will respond with strength and grace and they will rebuild. It’s also a little worse to know that. Why should the people of Oklahoma, some of the finest people I’ve ever met, have to suffer through this again.

If I think about it too much, it just makes me hurt and hurt. Right now, it’s just heartbreak. I’m waiting and hoping they find more of those kids.

Please help if you can.

This week, I’ve been thinking about audiences. What it means to have one, what it’s like to not have one at all and whether it should matter either way when you’re writing.

For a long time, when I was working with LCP, I was writing and performing. Sometimes I was performing in things I didn’t write, but a lot of times, I was writing stuff for myself that I knew nobody would bother with if I didn’t do it myself and push to get it in a show.

I don’t really miss performing. I mean, I do, but not the being on stage in front of a bunch of strangers part. If I really wanted to do that more, I would agree to more speaking engagements or make an effort to hit some open-mic comedy nights. The performing part, though, the feeling of connecting with an audience and being heard — honestly, I get that from writing for the paper, from posting here and over at Space Monkeys! (where the audience since we relaunched this year is tiny, but suddenly growing and gaining traction). I never wanted to do stand-up comedy (the touring, the empty rooms, the clawing your way up always struck me as sad). But I’ve always had a need to connect with people with words, no matter the medium.

And, not to sound ridiculous, but I get the same Dopamine hit from social media, specifically Tweeting. The few times that I’ve gotten retweeted 50 or 100+ times just for tapping out something fleeting that crossed my brain has often felt as good as when I used to put on ridiculous costumes and project the shit out of some jokes on stage on a Saturday night. That probably sounds silly but I would have probably given up on Twitter ages ago if there weren’t some truth to that. It’s less risky physically; I don’t have to worry that I’m going to walk on stage with the wrong hat on or flub a line. On the other hand, Tweeting something stupid could get me fired. So it’s not without a similar element of danger.

I’ve been writing a couple of things for a while now that have not seen an audience yet and it requires so much more motivation to keep the energy going when you know that what you’re writing it’s not going to get read for a really long time, if at all. You have to believe in some way that somebody’s going to see it even if it’s just a future version of yourself.  Sometimes the idea that it needs to get out there and reach someone in some form is enough motivation to knock another three or four pages out late at night when I just want to go to sleep.

Recently, a creative person I greatly admire showed me a piece of art they worked on that, for dumb reasons that are specific to their industry, will probably not be seen by anyone outside of the very small group of people who worked on it and a few close friends.  Maybe forever. What I saw was complete. It was fantastic. It was something I’d post on Twitter and share with the world if I could. But it’s not out there and, realistically, might never be.

If I made something really good, something I believed in and poured my heart into and I couldn’t share it… that would really break my heart, I think. It’s happened to me before, but not really with anything as big and complete and audience-ready.

I didn’t know whether to feel lucky to be one of the few people who got to enjoy this wonderful little thing or to be sad for everyone who won’t.

I thought about all that a lot over the weekend as I helped cover the Moontower Comedy Festival. It brought back all of those years in the sketch troupe trying to build an audience, touring around the country, worrying constantly about whether the stuff we thought was funny was going to work for an audience and stressing over reviews and box office. Sometimes that audience was small but made up for it in big laughs. Other times the size of the audience was huge and scary and organic; it made the nerves sharper and the performances bigger. I don’t know how long we would have stuck it out if there had been no laughs and no people to see us. It wouldn’t have been 10-15 years, that’s for sure.  Now I’m in it again, on a much different scale, but it’s exciting to see a new group of people (much younger people for the most part) learning those ropes. It makes me happy seeing that.

It’s a little weird to be a writer who has different-sized audiences for different things I work on. I know when I write a comic that there’s a sliver of people who will see it. I know when I write for the paper that the print and online audience is made up of a lot of people I’ll never see or hear from. We know they’re there, but in terms of feedback, they’re invisible to me. And then there’s the social media audience where you get more immediate feedback, but that’s not always how it happens. Sometimes I’ll run into someone who follows me on Twitter or is a Facebook friend and they’ll mention something I wrote months ago, a quick 140 characters that I forgot about five minutes after it was posted. And it reminds me that we can’t really know where our words go, how far they travel, who absorbed them.

Maybe in the future we’ll know exactly that information. It’ll all be quantifiable and you’ll never have to wonder if you touched or made laugh more people than you imagined. That idea is amazing, terrifying and a little sad all at the same time.

Here are the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Festival reviews I wrote in my wild week of going out and seeing comedy stuff. (Actually, it was only two nights, but it feels like a wild and crazy time any time I get out of the house past 8 p.m.)

The fantastic: Dana Carvey made me all nostalgic and warm; Godfrey completely blew me away and Chris Hardwick showed me he’s just as great a stand-up comic as he is a TV host and podcast nerd.

The pretty good: Amy Schumer did not blow the doors off the joint but she was appropriately filthy for a midnight slot; Fortune Feimster was new to me and totally charming.

The bad: I didn’t review this one, but it sounds like Janeane Garofalo was just not funny, which if you’ve listened to her on any podcasts in the last year or two sounds about right.

As an unexpected bonus to the festival, two days after it was over I got to see a live recording of one of my favorite podcasts, Professor Blastoff. Tig Notaro and Kyle Dunnigan are two of my most-adored comedians right now (they’re writing for Amy Schumer’s show on Comedy Central) and their guest was Doug Benson, who brought a mean streak to the usually jovial, light-hearted podcast. Something about the chemistry worked and it was just an incredibly fun time, especially for a Monday night. I bought a T-shirt.

Here are the recent work things I’ve been working on:

Two of the students I interviewed for my story, Laura Plascencio (left) and Michael Alvarez. Photo by Mark Matson for the American-Statesman

I wrote a Digital Savant column about the Globaloria video game design program, which has some future stars in the East Austin High School Prep program. Really enjoyed meeting those kids, talking to the teacher in the story and learning more about how the program works.

My column this week was a big wrap-up review story on Microsoft’s consumer products like the Surface tablets, Office 2013 and Office 365 plus their Windows Phone 8 software and Windows 8 itself. It was a lot of ground to cover, but I’ve been using these products for a while now and I think I got a good sense of what’s working and what needs work.

The recent Micro features were about paywalls (intentionally timed; it’s now behind a paywall) and a Micro defining “Oculus Rift,” basically a VR headset for gaming.

My next column is about my crippling Kickstarter addiction. You can read a preview/blog version here.

You may notice that the stories I’m linking to now take you “stubs,” incomplete versions of the stories that you can read in full on the new MyStatesman.com website. Here’s more info about that.

For now the site is free, you just have to register.

Since last we talked, our Space Monkeys! dealt with email overload (or did the opposite, actually), were horrified by sorority email profanity and played with Google Glass (now with time travel!).

Please check them out and if you have a sec, vote for the comic on TopWebComics if you would or at least throw us a Like on our Facebook page.

In case you’re wondering, my back feels a lot better, but that awful fiery spot still flares up once in a while (today, for instance). I’ve been using a heating pad and I still have some muscle relaxer left. It may be another trip to the doctor or at least a massage therapist soon.

A bigger pain in my back this week was that my WordPress theme somehow got corrupted so instead of finishing this blog entry last night, I was playing around with custom.css and function-what-have-you and other messy, bloody innards of this site trying to get it to look the way it did before with the theme re-installed.

It’s most of the way there, but menus/navigation are still missing and I haven’t cracked those weird WordPress nuts yet. If you’re a WordPress genius and want to help, let me know. I don’t want to stay up late again tinkering tonight.