Family Matters, Week of 5-2-05

As promised, I bring you hot, fresh news about my family. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, I think you’ll be quite pleased today.

Annie

Some big news here: The girl is potty training herself bigtime. You’d think that sentence would say “We’re potty training Annie,” but no, alas, the girl has taken The Initiative and surprises just about everyone with her ability to pee-pee and poop in the potty.

This of course leads to those “Wow, you did great!” situations, immediately followed by strained faces and breath-holding while you dispose of the feces. Urine isn’t so bad, but with #2 you must wipe. Ie, she wipes to make herself feel like a Big Girl, then I go get a wet-wipe and get the rest of it. But here is the weirdest/hardest part: How do you teach a kid to correctly wipe his/her own ass?

If that’s as hilarious to you as it sounds to me, just try doing that sometime. I’ve never asked Ericka’s thoughts on this, but to me it remains a mystery of the highest order.

Abby

Abby has attained the bad habit of hitting people. I think this is because Annie secretly swipes her and pushes her off any toy she is remotely interested in, but regardless it is a bad habit we have tried our best to curtail. Of course, the lack of language is a barrier not unlike the Hoover Dam, but as I said last week, and as many 2nd-time parents know: The kids know what they’re doing, and they will test you over and over regarding it.

Nevertheless, she remains the sweet, chub-tastic giggler we know and love. She can say “da da” with regularity now, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

Ericka (her blog)

Ericka, my loving and wonderfully devoted wife went to her first baking class at Sugarbakers last night and she loved it. She also communicated to me in cryptic Marriage Code (think swat over the head) that she would like a stand-up mixer for Mother’s Day. I try to explain to her that not only do those things cost a Crapton Of Cash(tm), but that I’m also going to be leaving Thursday morning for BlogNashville and that any potential stand up mixers will probably not be in attendance.

Cut to more Marriage Code. You know the drill.

Etc

As for myself, I’m getting the harsh truth about winning cash in Magic events: The check takes 6–8 weeks to arrive. This wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it could be unfortunate as I was counting on getting the check in 1–2 weeks.

This makes the fam budget do a paradigm shift, and I just hope/pray I get the check before the Saviors of Kamigawa pre-release, happening two weeks from Friday, as nothing eats cash like a bunch of CCG fanboys and day-long tournament events.

Lastly, Carbon Copy Cloner is an awesome free OSX backup/restore/clone program and it saved my ass today.

I had this situation: Powerbook A had been dropped (the horror!) and the screen brightness disappeared/shorted/whatever. Otherwise it was fine. I had an identical Powerbook (let’s call it George) and using this program I formatted George and copied over the entire Powerbook A system en-masse in one swipe. After bootup George had a few little problems (shortcuts mainly), but those were quickly worked out and George is currently enjoying production use. Yummy.

Tomorrow I’ll be updating from, where else, the BlogNashville conference. Woohoo!

I join the queue on your answer phone
And all I am is holding breath

Tags: Family, Story, Erwin, Annie, Abby, Ericka