Hiatus

I was looking back at my few blog posts, and really enjoyed reading them. Considering I am one of two consistent readers, that is a pretty secure percentage of satisfied readers. I think I also remember that I enjoyed writing them. As part of my New Year’s resolution I will try to return to writing periodically.

I am not going to spend any time making excuses for disappearing. One reason is that returning to this blog is part of a resolution. If the lack of lake front property, my abundant waistline, and my general anonymity in the photography world is any indication, my second disappearance may be in another two months. ( That seems to be when the glitter starts wearing off of bold champagne fueled proclamations. )

Instead of excuses, let me take this chance to do a brief recap:

1) I am still not your superhero.
2) The world still needs someone to be a superhero.
3) My boys are still growing at an exponential rate.

Examples, please.

I gave up on my last position at work before 12 months. It’s an all time record, and one that I hope never to repeat. Why did I leave? I was doing well, outperforming my peers, breaking new ground, and just starting to impress people outside of my management chain. I think my inner monologue during a brief interchange between my manager and I explains it best:

Manager: Thank you so much for going so far to resolve this problem, the amount of detail in this record is amazing.
Me: You are welcome. It’s …well …it’s just what I do.

Inner Monologue: Your consistently low expectations for everyone on your team is why I have to leave.

Clark Kent would have just kept on banging away at the keyboard, saving people in his off time, not worrying about advancements or promotion.
Maybe a smarter man would have stayed, and found a way to get promoted by being the one eyed man on the island of the blind.
A true Taoist might have just done the job set before them, expecting no praise, or differentiation between them and their moronic peers.

I took a position within the same large company in another group. One good thing about a large company is that there are opportunities for changing your destiny. Unfortunately they are usually tied up with too much bureaucracy. What I am left with is a temporary arrangement where I don’t really have a job, but they are doing some accounting magic to get me paid for the next month with the hope that we can work some Human Resources magic by the end of that time. Can I get a Whiskey?

Number 2 doesn’t have any short examples. I am sure I can find something going pear shaped to write a whole post about in the next week.

Which leaves… My family.

I haven’t really written about my wife. Primarily because she is the other consistent reader of the blog. It seems a little weird to write about her when she is right here. Well, not right here, she is starting off the New Year with a wicked sinus headache/migraine/hangover. Hopefully starting off the New Year at a low point will allow her to rise to unprecedented new heights in the coming year, although that will be hard. She has just wrote her 11 in 11. The 11 amazing things that have happened in 2011. Although some of them are the normal amazing that comes with the growth of our kids, a good number of them are truly amazing things that she has made happen. Maybe I will have to add “compliment my wife more” as one of my resolutions.

Dump Truck, my 2 and a half year old is still ginormous. Two days before Christmas he had a lymph node that was large enough to be goiter, a red eye, and the start of an ear infection.. Luckily it was just a normal infection, and didn’t appear to be something terribly bad. It was even possibly a virus. To be on the safe side, the doctor prescribed antibiotics anyway.

I am against needlessly feeding children antibiotics, but we had given the lymph nodes a few days to shrink before taking him to the doctor, and the red eye worried me. Thirdly, my children are ones that don’t complain about ear infections until the pain is at 11. Given that this was two days before Christmas, it didn’t take a crystal ball to see that if it was bacterial, we had a good chance of caroling in the emergency room.

How does this show his immensitude? Well, our insurance company put a hold on the antibiotics. They are done by weight, and some automatic computer system compared 36 lbs, and 2.5 years and said “ErrorErrorBleepBlorpError.” So we had to manually confirm his weight before getting the medicine. ( I am not sure why our insurance was checking it, instead of our pharmacist, and why the pharmacist trusted my memory instead of calling the doctor. Too many questions, not enough answers for a parenthetical aside.)
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As we shared this anecdote to my wife’s social network, we had people coming out of the electronic woodwork to mumble “football.” Give me a break. I have been spending the last 2.5 years trying to teach him to not hit his brother. I think it will be unfair to ask him to transition in the future to butting heads and tackling people. Besides, being a nerd, I have always been nervous about the danger of instilling team think into a child. I am sure that there are great coaches out there, ones that encourage fair play and personal achievement through shared effort.

My worry is that the very nature of coaching is to remove some choice from the child. You run the play the coach wants you to run. It’s too easy for people in that position to abuse that authority. Even without abuse, it still is another institution teaching a child to follow orders.

Speaking of institutions, The Artist, my oldest, has started kindergarten. What an education that has been. Mainly for me, but in some ways for my son. Not really in the classroom sense, as he can read quite well, and already has a very inquisitive mind. But it is an exercise in social interaction. His last pre-school was a very small class. Two boys ( including him ) and three or four girls. It was small enough that everyone could take time to listen to each other’s rambling 4 year old stories. There was also enough teacher interaction that any conflicts were easily resolvable before they really started.

Neither of those is true in his new school. His favourite response to all of my questions about his day are “Nothing.” So, I have had to try and glean what has been happening with him from short discussions after picking him up from school. It is painful to listen to a story, realize that there is probably a few bad decisions and try to gently prod him to make right decisions, without trying to be too controlling. It doesn’t matter if Dad says that “Catch the Girls ( and put them in Jail)” is a game that encourages hurtful differentiation between sexes at an age when there is really no need…Or that using karate chops is not a good way to stop a fight between two other people…Or that being kicked and pushed to the ground does not seem like the best way to “learn” karate ( or kung fu ) … etc.

It doesn’t really matter what Dad says, because Dad is not there. So, I try my best to do more listening than correcting. My hope is that if I don’t condemn “catch the girls” too harshly than maybe it will encourage him to say “Nothing” less often and that will allow me to intervene when he appears to be heading towards a really life altering decision in the future.

I didn’t realize that Kindergarten would be so much of a new world for both of us.