by steelie -

Three doors down…

Ok… So this marks the first time I’ve written started an entry on my Palm (an old one) on the way to work (I take the public transit ferry). I was going to wait but I wanted to start this post right away…

We had a “Happy Belated Birthday” party for Little “L” yesterday. It went really well… Probably 25 people total, including adults and kids. Little “L” got all kinds of cool stuff and he seemed to have a really great time… Family, friends, food, presents, fun. Yeah, it was a good time. Hectic. But good.

So, around seven o’clock (or at least I think it was seven o’clock… maybe a bit earlier) the last wave of our guests had left for the comforts of their homes, full bellies and tottlers in tow. At this point we had a lot of clean-up to do… there was wrapping paper and gift bags all over the place. Baby “X” was a tad “emotional” from the event. He’s pretty sensitive to (over-) stimulation but did way better than we expected… we think all of the noise and yelling had eventually became a “white-noise” blanket because he fell asleep for most of the time. Thanks, little guy… but now it was time for bed.

Eventually, “T” got Baby “X” settle down, asleep, and came downstairs to where Little “X” (still a bit hopped-up on sugar) and I, were playing with some new trains he got as gifts. All was well and quiet… which was nice because peace and quiet seems rare these days…

Then we hear a loud noise outside… “T” and I looked at each other… I said, “Sound like something got hit [by a car or something] or like a [full] moving truck hit a bump.” “T” thought it sounded more like a car pulling a trailer with a bunch of loose “stuff” in it had hit a bump… either way, I got up and looked out of the window, as far as I could see in either direction, but could see nothing. I just assumed it was that noisy trailer… “T” decided to go outside and look…

A mini-van had plowed into the front of the house four doors down.

Little “L” was still awake so I went out just onto my front porch with him. We could only see a part of the van from where we stood. We were only out for a short while because it was pretty cold and I decided I didn’t want Little “L” too get to distracted and wound-up before bed. So, we went back inside to play with his trains and the police cruisers started to arrive.

After about an hour, it was Little “L’s” turn to be off to bed… we let him stay up a bit later for his belated Big Day… All was calm and quiet inside the house… Curiosity got the better of me. I had to take some garbage out anyway, so to go down a few houses and get the scoop was no real extra effort. My across-the-street-neighbours were among the first on the scene and actually helped get the driver out of the van so they seemed to be the best ones to get the story from…

The driver was INTOXICATED (upper-case as in VERY). He came zooming by our house and crashed into / along-the-side-of the car in front of the house immediately to the right of ours, which had caused the driver’s van to veer off to the right but slowing it very little. From here, the van drove through the front steps of and crashed into the front porch of house four doors down.

Nobody was injured… other than the driver who reportedly hit his head on the windshield (there was a crack in the glass) but seemed — health-wise — no worse for wear. The woman who lived at the “drive-in” house (a man and two children also lived there) was sitting by the window right next to where the van impacted. The base of the front porch was shifted a foot to a foot-and-a-half, skewing the structure. Apparently the plaster walls inside have cracks all the way up to the roof. A local radio station  reported that there was $5,000 worth of damage done to the house… that estimate seems low… not from what I could see from the outside, more from the fact that I’m pretty sure that the house is from the same era mine is (1917) and that the internal damage is probably way worse.

The driver of the van didn’t have any vehicle insurance… I’ll let you know how that plays out.

This whole thing seems eery to me… selfishly speaking, if this catastrophe had to happen at all, the timing couldn’t be better… an hour earlier, this driver and his “deadly” van would have struck (and likely killed) numerous children between the ages of six months and 2 1/2 years, and their parents, who had all left Little “L’s” party at the same time.

Part of me feels like crying.
—
steelie

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by steelie -

My two-cents on “Heroes”…

Okay, this is where those who would hate me can hate me for not being able to “let go of reality" when watching certain shows or movies that would be otherwise excellent… There are just some things that consistently bug me with TV/Movie writing… time-travelling follies are one of them.

GEEK ALERT.

In the last two episodes of NBC’s Heroes, one of the main characters Hiro decided to travel back in time to save a woman, Charlie, whom with he’d become recently smitten. Hiro’s friend, Ando, left back in the diner would/could NEVER have seen a past picture of Hiro and Charlie together at her Birthday party six month ago. If Hiro did go back and save Charlie then she would never of died in Ando’s time… which means he would never be sitting around waiting for Hiro to return or to give his statement to the police. Plus, Charlie would have known Hiro for six months before he “first arrived” at the diner.

Either way… Heroes is an AWESOME show… some things just rub me the wrong way and I don’t seems to be able to let go…

Can’t wait ’til next week.
—
steelie

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by steelie -

My manager dropped my coat on the floor… on purpose…

Okay… so I don’t realistically have enough time to write an entry [working late] but this was too good to pass up…

MINI-PREAMBLE
I get along with my manager quite well. We joke back and forth. I completely respect him as a designer and respect his ability to manage our design team. He has a great sense of humour but an even better poker face… this makes it difficult to tell whether he’s joking or not… Either way, I get his humour… well, I’ll leave it at that for now…

On to the story…

So, my manager walked into my office cubicle today, while eating an apple, to ask me a couple of questions about our department’s FTP site. In mid sentence, he noticed my new winter coat [bought it last weekend] hanging by its hood on the entrance way opening to my cubicle. He placed his apple in his mouth and proceed to unzip the hood from the coat [removable], let the coat fall to the floor and said, “Well that’s a drag… the hood. Came off.”

He smiled, then continued to ask me questions about the FTP site… This made me laugh out loud… I couldn’t help it. He laughed too and then picked up my coat and place on the back of a second chair at my desk leaving the hood where it was, “Can you believe that hood?”. I thought this was pretty funny coming from him… but I wasn’t sure if I should just leave it at that or see how far I could take/push his joke. He did, after all, drop my coat on the floor on purpose, essentially making it so I would have to take time to undo his gag.

So as he continued on about FTP access and such, I picked up my coat from the back of the chair and smile at him as I reached past to grab my hood. I sort of cut him off in mid senence by holding out my coat and hood in a way that implied I wanted him to zip them back together. He laughed and said, “Oh, you don’t want me to do that… I’ll get apple stuff all over your nice new coat.” To which I replied, “Actually… I really think I’d like to see you zip it back together.” We both laughed at this… him probably because he thought the whole thing was funny and didn’t think I was serious… me beacuse I thought this whole thing was hilarious, because I was actually serious and because I was kind of nervous about pretty much telling my manager to zip my coat back together.

This banter continued for a bit until he realised that I wasn’t kidding… this made him smile even more. So he took the coat and the hood and tried to manouver them while still holding the apple. I offered to hold it for him. He laughed a sort of, “No, I don’t think so” and stuck it in his mouth. He zipped my hood back onto my coat and placed it back where it was when first came to visit.

“So… you were asking about the FTP site,” I continued. He smiled and the day went on…

A nice break from the norm…
—
steelie

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by steelie -

My lonely office space…

Well, Julé literally just left the office… her work term here is done… I miss her already.

[sigh]

Now that Julé is gone, it’s sinking in even more that Jared doesn’t work here anymore either. I know that he’s been gone for quite some time now but they both worked right next to me and when Jared left, Julé was still here. Now that they’re both gone, I am going to miss them both considerably.

I love good genuine people… good genuine people like Julé and Jared.
They’re awesome.

It’s very quiet here suddenly.
—
steelie

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by steelie -

First post-newborn father-toddler story…

Well, it was bound to happen eventually… here is a funny little anecdote about the first morning after Little “X” (our new addition to the famiy) came home. This story, however, is about myself and our two-year-old, Little “L”… who is have some slight lifestyle adjustment issues…

Little “X” and Mommy finally came home from the hospital last Friday which turned Little “L’s” little world on its head…

SIDE NOTE: I’ve just started to confuse myself with Little “L” and Little “X” already. So, from now on, I’ll refer to our new guy as Baby “X” and our older boy as Little “L”.

Little “L” decided to wake up at 5:15 AM Saturday morning — not at all his normal scheduled waking time. Okay, so I’m in charge of Little “L” right now because Mommy/Wife “T” had that C-section which means she can’t really pick him up for five more weeks (which really breaks Mommy’s heart)… which also means that I have to get up with him if he gets up early. So at 5:15 AM, Saturday morning, we are up and ready for milk and cereal, and playtime… or at least Little “L” was…

After Little “L” finished his cereal he wanted to play… with all the noisy toys, of course. Trying to clam/quiet him down didn’t work and only frustrated the poor little guy. I’m sure it didn’t help that I was pretty much asleep on my feet while trying to interact with him. So, I had to resort to what every “good” parent and self-righteous-would-be-parent (you’d be surprised how many would-bes there are) “tisk-tisk” and frown upon… the television. Little “L” is already quite the TV-junkie… zones out completely.

So the TV (parent-of the-year-award killer) acted as a welcomed distraction for a rambunctious Little “L” and a very tired Daddy… actually, I fell asleep on the floor next to him. Don’t worry I have a method of knowing where he is… I take my finger and twist it into his shirt or pantleg, so to move he has to yank my finger free which wakes me up… except for this day…

Well, it did wake me up but I didn’t actually get up (character flaw) and just drifted somewhere between the land of the dreaming and the land where I wish I were dreaming… I could hear Little “L” go out into the kitchen and start digging through one of the drawers. I pseudo-incoherently asked him to stop playing in the drawer and to come out of the kitchen… I dozed off again… Little “L” proceeded to listen to the requests of his apparently-not-so-great-role-model-of-a father and came out of the kitchen like a good little boy… with a surprise…

Little “L” came over to sleeping-me and dumped an entire Ziplock bag of his old metal baby utensils on me to wake me up. This worked briefly but I was honestly so exhausted that I just dozed off again. So, Little “L” decided that he did not like me pretending I was a Sleeping Beauty Beast and started jabbing me with the only fork that was in the Ziplock bag… Naturally, I wake up, a bit stunned from this rude but appropriately-timed awakening. I ask Little “L”, “What are you doing?” And he just looked at me with wide eyes and a smile and said, “Fork!”, and went right back to jabbing me until I got up off the floor to play with him.

So, I was up for the day quite early that Saturday… and now I am no longer actively avoiding caffeine. Infact, later that same day I went to the grocery store to buy some really strong coffee and filters.
—
steelie

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