Work could be going better, so it's probably good that the work week is over. :)

In the meantime, bedlamhouse and ladyat are on their way up here to catch a Cubs game tomorrow. That should be fun!

I'm sitting staring at some test code that I'm working on. For some reason that I don't understand, I can't select a cell on my nice shiny new grid view. The old grid view class works just fine. I keep comparing them and matching up the initialization code, but so far, no joy.

I wonder what I've missed.

As promised, here are some pictures from Julie's christening. It was a lovely ceremony.
( Pictures inside... )

Afterwards, I grilled burgers and Polish sausage. And, of course, there was cake. :)

Katie has books. A great many books. At any given moment, any one of these can be her favorite, but there are a few that drift frequently to the top of the list: the Clorinda books; Boynton's Pajama Time, Barnyard Dance, and several others; and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. We have large chunks of these books memorized. Apparently, so does Katie.

The other night, I was reading to her from One Fish and got to the two page spread with Joe. Joe's feeling rather unpleasant about his phone. I find him reminiscent of Ned. And when I finished the text on the page, I continued:

"I think Joe is a friend of Ned.
You remember Ned and his little bed?
They're both in quite a foul mood
And each is being rather rude."

Katie turned around and gave me this dirty look that I roughly translated as "And this appears in this book exactly where?"

Of course, that's nothing compared to when daisy_knotwise picks up the second Clorinda book and proceeds to quote the now-memorized text from the first book. That gets the book forcibly ripped out of Mommy's hands...

Katie has, of late, taken to demanding that I open up the guitar case upstairs, pull out the guitar, and play for her before she goes to bed. She then says, "Up!" So I assist her way onto the bed where she strums at the guitar and then starts dancing all over the bed while I play Midnight Girl for her. This is occasionally a hazard for Julie, but daisy_knotwise does a pretty good job of protecting her from her older sister.

This is all the more entertaining, because my expectation is that I will someday give that guitar to Katie. It's my first Taylor that I bought with some of the money that we inherited from Gretchen's mom.

Giving that guitar to Katie leaves open the question of what I intend to do for Julie about getting her a guitar. Of course, neither girl will be getting a guitar at that level for some years. In fact, by the time that I get around to passing along the first Taylor, good guitar wood will be getting quite scarce.

"The best thing for me to do", I remarked idly to Gretchen, "would be for me to go buy another appropriate Taylor for Julie while it's still possible to buy a fine wooden guitar for a reasonable sum."

This got me The Look^TM.

Well, I was only kidding, as I explained to Gretchen.

Mostly.

We spend much of our time trying to figure out what Katie is likely to eat at any given moment. Chicken nuggets are one of her favorite foods -- if she's in her car seat. Otherwise, she's as likely to snub them as to eat them. French fries are pretty much always good, but not very proteinaceous. Hot dogs (minus the bun) are sometimes good, sometimes not.

It was to my surprise at dinner tonight when Katie ate all of her grilled smoked bratwurst and then agitated for more. I ran out and threw another one on the grill, which she eventually ate most of.

Tomorrow, who knows?

Picnicon was lightly attended (between 20 and 25 people), partly I suspect due to the threat of lousy weather (that didn't materialize), partly due to being in July, which is fairly far from the bit of publicity we give it at DucKon. But folks seemed to have a good time.

Yesterday's christening also went well. jeff_duntemann posted a write up and pictures -- I'll post more later.

Today is Julie's christening. Of course, we're not quite ready for everyone to show up, but jeff_duntemann and Carol are coming over shortly and will help cure that problem.

My job right now is to take Katie off to lunch so that she can't take things out of boxes faster than everyone else is trying to put them into the boxes.

Lenny came by and looked at our air conditioner this morning. No freon, so he's refilled it as a temporary solution to the problem. Since he also refilled it last year, there's either a leak or someone managed to hit the valve and blow out the freon. If the air conditioning holds up, it was the latter.

In the meantime, he's going to research replacement units for us and get us some proposals and pricing. One possibility would put in a separate unit for our upstairs, which might be a big improvement as far as our cooling bills go. We'll see.

He's also going to look in the attic and see if the cooling situation can be improved with an attic fan to vent the hot air out. But he'll do that on a cooler day than today. :)

I got home from work for dinner with daisy_knotwise, jeff_duntemann, Carol, Katie, and Julie and I noticed that the house was a bit warm. Apparently, the air conditioner was doing a fine job of running, but no job at all of cooling.

Since the fan was running and no cold air was coming out, the conclusion is that the compressor is not a happy beastie. We've called our heating and cooling guy -- the husband of one of Gretchen's former co-workers -- and he'll come by in the morning and look at it.

In the meantime, it's going to be a long, hot night.

I just sent two pages of bullet points to the Vice President in charge of our group that outline what I think needs to be done in our development effort across the next 18 months to two years. It pretty much says, "I can give you what you asked for -- here's how. And you get these things too."

Our Product Manager is going to hate it, I suspect.

And we'll see what happens next.

Katie has a new word: pie.

I suggested going to Sweet Baby Ray's for dinner with the objective of Key Lime Pie for dessert. And when I said Key Lime Pie, Katie started bouncing.

"Pie! Pie! Pie!"

And she was actually remarkably well-behaved during dinner when we explained to her that if she didn't behave, there would be no pie. :)

The All-Star Game has now moved into the 15th inning. daisy_knotwise has put the kids to bed and has, I think, gone to bed herself, as the exterior painters are arriving early tomorrow morning and she promised to get up to meet them.

I'd really like to see the National League win this. But first, they're going to have to score again.

And Buck and McCarver are talking about the possibility of another tie.

Yeek!

Update: Yuck! Lidge walked J.D. Drew to load the bases and move the winning run to third base, then gave up a sacrifice fly to Michael Young. Close, but no cigar.

I spent today working at home, because we had to go over to the optometrist early in the afternoon and the commute time would have been silly to throw into the mix. This meant that I got to chat with samwinolj and jeff_duntemann when they came by to pick up the color laser printer that I'm loaning to Sam to use with his new startup business (because he may actually need it). And I was here when the guy came by to give us an estimate on painting the house.

In the meantime, I got to argue with our Product Manager about obscure bugs in the interface caused by a third-party library, fix serialization bugs in other people's code (and add some cleanup code to some of my serializations, just to be fair about it), and generally get a few things done remotely.

And I have a new toric lens for my right eye that doesn't seem to make it itch. :) Yay!

I'm sitting here watching the Home Run Derby on ESPN. Apparently, Josh Hamilton hit 28 homers in the first round, finishing just before we got home from dinner. Now we'll see what he does in the finals...

In other news, bedlamhouse and ladyat are coming up to catch a Cubs game with us in a couple of weeks. That should be fun!

The weather was nice today, so naturally daisy_knotwise and I spent it in the garage. See, Gretchen's brother jeff_duntemann is in town and they're supposed to go through the boxes of stuff that still haven't been sorted out since our move here from our old house and their mother's old house back in 1996. I figured some presorting was in order.

We found many things. I found three boxes of my stuff that we cleaned out of my dad's house before he died -- I'll need to sort through those later. We found several boxes of "good stuff" from Mrs. Duntemann's house that I piled up for Gretchen and Jeff to sort through. I found a box full of SpaceTime Theater props and such that had somehow migrated to the bottom of the pile. I found my chess and bowling trophies, my baseball gloves, and my Cardinals caps.

And I found a box from our old house that contained the hardware to assemble the bookshelf that Rolf Wilson gave me for a wedding present when I got married to Carol. The bookshelf has since been assembled using different techniques, but it's a nice set of hardware.

I wish I'd found it sooner.

This would have come out better had I remembered that I'd turned off the flash on daisy_knotwise's camera when we were down in Lisle. But it'll do...

Let Sleeping Babies Lie Gretchen says that the appropriate familial remark here is "Get this kid off my neck!" Ok.

My brother-in-law, jeff_duntemann posted here on why he believes idealism is a bad thing. I don't know if I exactly agree or disagree. I think that some idealism is a good thing and -- like most things! -- an excess of idealism is what's going to get you in trouble.

Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good." Well, yeah. If you spend all of your time searching for the perfect solution to a problem, you'll discard a lot of perfectly good, but perfectly imperfect solutions. As a result, you may never get anywhere. (I'm anticipating a problem of this sort at work shortly. We'll see how that develops -- or doesn't, as the case may be.)

The trick, in my opinion, is that you need to select your choices from the feasible set. Now, the feasible set isn't a fixed entity. It may get larger or smaller, sometimes due to luck, sometimes due to the choices that we make ourselves. Jeff mentions his college friend who wasn't interested in any woman who didn't look like a Playboy centerfold. That's not a choice that I'd make, nor does it appear to have been in his feasible set. But maybe it could have been, if he'd done the right things and made the right choices and had the right set of luck. We might assume that he'd improve his chances if he improved his own appearance, or perhaps if he made a lot of money, or even went into politics, just to pick some possible examples. Any of those things is a lot of work.

If you don't do the work, you don't improve the choices that are in your feasible set. You can even watch them get more constrained by the choices that you've already made.

Being lucky doesn't hurt. I'm 26 years now at a job that I got by being in the right place at the right time. And that job's resulted in a lot of things landing in my feasible set of choices.

Like my two pretty little daughters. :)

daisy_knotwise and I might have said, "It looks like no kids." Ideally, we would have been able to have children without going through all the hoops that we went through. But ideal wasn't what we got.

We got feasible. And feasible has turned out to be pretty darned good.

Look at your feasible set. And make your choices.

They told daisy_knotwise last night when she called to ask about the van that they'd call around ten this morning.

Of course, they didn't. She ended up calling them around 11:15 and was told they were "just finishing it up". We have the van back and will be taking it over to Meineke for them to check out early next week.

Then we'll find out who owes who an apology.

Well, that's not too hard: my late parents. And I'd bring the grandchildren they never had the chance to meet.

daisy_knotwise took the van in to the dealership (which has been sold since we bought the van) for some recall work. The dealership called back with a list of $1900 worth of work that the van needs that isn't covered by the extended warranty. They also claim that the silly tire pressure sensor -- which would be covered by the warranty -- is working, although the folks at Meineke (who we actually do trust) have told us it is burnt out.

We have declined the interesting work list and will be taking the van to Meineke at our earliest opportunity to find out what they think it needs.

It's a shame, because this is the dealer closest to our home, but I'm being pretty unimpressed at the moment. Maybe more data will change my mind.

Maybe not.

Update: We'd called after lunch to see how the work was coming and were told that they'd call back when the work was done. When we didn't get a call by late afternoon, Gretchen called back and was told that the service department was closed, the car was waiting for parts, and that the service guys had called and left a message to that effect on our answering machine.

Exactly which answering machine that would be is a mystery to us, as there's no message on the home phone or either of our two cellphones.

Keep digging, guys.

Tonight, Katie came to daisy_knotwise and announced in her own, not too subtle way that she wanted to be placed on the potty seat. Not too much later, there was a poopie in the toilet. :)

So far, so good.

I got a bit of the chorus for this on the way to work the other day and have been hammering on it for a few days while daisy_knotwise puts Katie to bed and Julie is being kind enough to sleep through the banging on the guitar. At one point, I thought I was going to write another full verse and then a bridge, but when I came back to it tonight, I realized that:

The verse I was working on was the bridge

The tempo was too slow

The chords on the verse weren't quite right at the new tempo

And I desperately needed a tune for the bridge

Those things taken care of, I finished the song. :)

This is inspired by -- and otherwise has absolutely nothing else to do with it, save for a similar McGuffin -- a fine Astro City story by Kurt Busiek, "The Nearness of You".

All that said, I suppose I should actually post the lyrics.
( Lyrics inside... )

Ok, the Brewers had to give up a real prospect to get CC Sabathia. The Cubs, however, pretty much gave a mess of pottage for Rich Harden. And although Harden could break down again at any moment, right now Tony La Russa's looking at Carpenter, Wainwright, Clement, and Mulder who all appear unable to pitch, so a starter who might break down is looking pretty good to him, I suspect.

Thus, Tony threw Mulder out to start tonight against the Phillies saying, "Who better? If you've got a better choice, let me know."

Mulder lasted 16 pitches and three batters (one strikeout, two walks) before leaving with shoulder pain in a game the Cards lost 4-2.

I think Tony's saying in a none too subtle way to his GM, get me a pitcher.

Fortunately, at least for me, this was someone else's crunch.

I was walking out across the parking lot on my way to lunch and noticed a fire truck and an ambulance. As I got closer, I saw a man who'd been loaded on a stretcher and an SUV that had bashed into a rather expensive car. My reconstruction of the accident is that the expensive Lexus from Texas had pulled out from one of the side aisles into the main aisle leading to the exit without bothering to stop and notice the rather large SUV that proceeded to hit him, not having a lot of choice in the matter. (The SUV, not the Lexus.)

When I got back, everything had been cleared away save for the Lexus from Texas, which was sitting forlornly in the parking lot, its left front wheel sitting at a very odd angle with the shock absorber sticking out and a big bunch of dented metal on the left front panel.

At least the SUV managed to avoid hitting the guy squarely in the door. Given where they ended up, I'd guess he swerved.

I knew that I needed to be careful when making that turn.