Swat the gnat

About two weeks ago, my uncle Zom got a little carried away with some repairs in the cabin and drove the family fishing boat ("Foam") onto some rocks.  Getting it off damaged the propeller and keel, so ten days ago he and I took advantage of the time, tide, and weather to put it up on the sticks and effect some repairs.

For the next two days (during low-tide only, when the boat was out of the water) he bogged the keel with fibreglass while I painted.  It was fun!  I painted the bum of the boat all by myself, scraping off barnacles and working on the thick viscous antifouling paint.  I did one side each day, the first with roller (rollers make it much easier) and the second without (because we only had one roller and it was well trashed by this stage).

But one thing I'd not thought through was that where there's fibreglass being applied, there's also fibreglass being sanded off.  The first I was aware of this was when a shower of white particulate crap blew around me.  Some of it must have gotten into my contact lenses because I had to take them out when I got home that evening.  My right eye was really sore, it felt like there was a rough patch on it and every time I blinked or rolled my eye, the rough patch scraped and ground against the rest of the eye.

By Friday it became clear that it wasn't magically going to get better, so on Monday I visited our local GP, Elspeth.  Elspeth is Scottish and a hard case.  "Soo Nathan, hurt yer eye have ye?"  "Yes, fibreglass."  "Ooo dear.  Let's have a lewk at it shall we?  I'll just drap some of this in it, turn your eyelid inside out--nice trick isn't it?--and ah yes, you do have scratches on your cornea but there's no fibreglass left that I can see.  There's a lot of light out here, let's take a peek at it in the dark room shall we?  I call it a dark room but it's really just the cupboard.  Yes, lean against the stationery shelf, that's fine.  Ah yes, definitely scratches.  Well, we'll put some cream in it and patch it for a few days."  "Can I turn my eyelid right side out now?"  "If ye must, dear."

So I left with an eyepatch.  But not the kind of eyepatch that gets admiring looks from amply-proportioned female passers-by.  No, the nurse packed the patch with cotton balls so it looks like I'm a frog that's just been squeezed (technical term: exophthalmic) and then, because injury without insult is just wrong, she drew a cartoon girly pink eye on the outside in biro.  So instead of people thinking "oooh, what a grizzled war veteran, I bet his dong could bring down the Hubble Space Telescope" as I walk down the street, I got "pffft".  Story of my life.

The eyepatch, of course, makes me monocular.  So far I've stood up inside the fridge, failed completely to put away frypans on the hanging kitchen rack, and was comically beaned by a set of keys that my wife threw to me and I was unable to triangulate on.  No wonder pirates are funny.  All I need is a pegleg and twin appetites for rum and sodomy, and I'd be set!

I should be back in binocular mode in time for my trip to Sydney for linux.conf.au next week.  Until then I'm in squinty bouncing-off-things-mode.  Whee!

Anyway, lesson learned.  Next time work downwind from Zom.  And harden up before I visit Elspeth again.

What's your motto?

"Always tell the truth".  Life became so much simpler when, in my early twenties or so, I realized that lying is so much more difficult than just telling the truth.  It works with coworkers, with customers, and with family.  I work hard to avoid situations where I have to lie because the short-term reason for lying never seems to justify the long-term problems it causes.  And that's the truth!

It turns out that "the muscles from Brussels" wasn't just a rhyme, it's a pun too.  I never knew that the Belgian capital is famous for its seafood.  Who knew I'd fly halfway around the world, endure jetlag that feels like someone's using my brain as a bungy rope, only to drink beer and eat mussels--exactly what I was doing 48 hours before I left!

Amusing things I saw today:

• shop on the same block as the hotel: PRONUTOPIA.  It sells ... wait for it ... bridal gowns.
• in the Museum of Ancient Art: "Virgin with a bowl of porridge".  Apparently it defined the use of texture in a somethingorother ... I was too busy snickering to read it all.
• Sherlock Holmes pub with flashing neon sign saying "KARAOKE"

Finally, the winter is over.  At least, the weeks of chilly rain are over and now there are warm days in between.  It was amazing how clear and obvious the break was: rain rain rain rain rain rain SUN!  The kids are now able to play outside a few days a week, we've (mostly) stopped lighting fires, and on one momentous day last week I actually wore shorts . Yes, shorts.  It's fantastic.

Best of all, though, the 1/2 acre we're on is awash with spring.  There are cute little bell-like white flowers under the lemon trees, the apple and plum trees are covered in flowers and if you stand closer than ten feet to them you can hear this all-surrounding buzz from the bees in the flowers.  We're planting the garden: Jenine has some pepper seedlings she's preparing to put in, and last year's pepper bush is back again and bigger than ever.

Speaking of peppers, we had a raging party last Saturday to celebrate the kids' citizenship.  The paperwork came back and they're all Kiwi now!  So we hung NZ flags, asked our friends to bring uniquely Kiwi food, and threw a bash.  Our house is really really tiny, but it all worked out.  The party is related to peppers (for those of you following along at home) because among the chips, Cheezels, pavlova, and mussels were these amazing savoury pepper-and-cream-cheese treats from our friends Sandra and Tom.  They run a pepper greenhouse in Matakana, and they brought jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese.  They claimed the cream cheese took the pain out, but I still need a chaser of red wine to ease the burn. 

And now today, amidst the spring glory and the post-party crash, I'm packing to head off to Belgium.  EuroOSCON is next week in Brussels, my last trip for the year.  I'm under strict instructions to bring back chocolate for the family.  I'm planning a trip to a WW I battlefield (any WW I battlefield!) this Friday, and forays into downtown Brussel's jazz club scene with Adrian Holovaty when he shows up.  If you'll be around, ping me!  It'll be fun to be in Brussels, but I'll miss home.  I can be happy with the thought that two weeks from now I'll be back in New Zealand, back with the family, back in spring time.

It was 106 degrees here today in Portland.  It's supposed to get to 108 tomorrow.   I spent  today indoors at Rael's office, with a few quick brief trips to Powell's and the 7-11 during which time I lost approximately 200 pounds of body fluids through evaporation, osmosis, and theft by tiny elves.  I will spend tomorrow inside Rael's basement, playing Uno with his kids and doing a day-long impersonation of JD Salinger by not going outside, not sending mail, and ignoring the telephone.  Sunday I will move to the OSCON hotel and prepare for the coming week of craziness, when I'll get little sleep, running around like a madman, but at least I won't have to be outside in his smothering sweatening hobo-baking granny-killing blood-boiling nightmare inferno of swelt.

Tell us a little something about your first girlfriend/boyfriend.

Beautiful, bookish, seventeen, and immediately discarded in favour of her perky sixteen year old sister.  I was a shitbag.  It wasn't even that I was a womanizing stud in my youth (or ever!).  It was just that her sister was curvier and I had no practice in saying "appreciate what you've got" to my hormones.  So sad, so very sad.  She took it with grace, from which (with the benefit of distance) I deduce that I was no great catch at age seventeen.

What's the strongest association you have between a scent and a memory?

Right now it's the stream of diarrhea running like a river from the homeless man who was parked on the sidewalk two blocks away from Rael's office.  The smell was like nothing I've smelled before, and I've had two small children who like dried fruit.  It was a Niagara of effluvia, a smell that travelled with you even as you looked away, gagging, and thought "well, there's nothing I could do" while awkwardly making your middle-class excuses as you strode onward checking to make sure that smell that stuck in your nose, the smell that wouldn't go away even when the man and his predicament were blocks away, the smell that was making your psyche ache, wasn't coming from a drip of homeless shit on your clean new limited-edition Puma sneakers.

I agree strongly with David agreeing with Mena (that last post is friends-only) about privacy being essential around kids.  I'm a laid-back guy who doesn't like formalities and who is naturally distrustful of extreme emotion whether adoration or paranoia.  I didn't used to believe those who were concerned about kid privacy, until Jenine did an artsy photo shoot with our kids.  Black and white film, white sheet, light spilling in through the window, chubby kids ... naked.  Not porn, just the occasional cute baby buttcheek.

Naked was the problem.  We keep our family photos in Gallery, which helpfully shows how many times each picture has been viewed.  The art photos had >100 views, compared to the 7 to 10 for the hundreds of other photos we took that month of the kids fully dressed at the playground, friends' houses, and riding their bikes.  Only possible explanation: preverts.  And that was enough to creep me out.

"Chicago, Chicago!  It's someone's kind of town!"

After four days in airport Wyndham, I can safely say that outskirts Chicago is not my kind of town.  I was in town for RailsConf and got to meet a lot of friends without the pressure that comes when it's my conference we're at.  But the surroundings: cultural wasteland.  Best meal we had was a 20m drive away, fantastic Indian food, but it made Rael ill.  That's the best that can be said for the area around O'Hare, other than: avoid, avoid, avoid.

Now I'm in downtown-ish for YAPC.  That's a Perl conference.  It's been fun moving between Rails and Perl worlds, but now I get to catch up with a whole new group of friends.  I hadn't realized how long it'd been (2 years) since I'd seen them last.  The food has improved with proximity to the city centre: great ribs last night and tonight I'm going to try my luck with The Best Chicago Pizza.  Fingers crossed.

The longer the summer goes on, the less well I deal with being away from my family.  I miss my kids.  I miss my wife.  I miss having a hallway that has no ice machine and no throng of badge-wearing disciples babbling excitedly about multiRAID failover strategies for transparent application blah blah blahs.  I'm ready for a day by the pool, a day with a book, a day without the laptop.

I think that day will probably be in November.

Raising Children Who Think for Themselves

Stranger in a Strange Land

Atheism: The Case Against God (Skeptic's Bookshelf)

Cities and the Wealth of Nations (Vintage)

The first two of these books are the dessicated husks of read books, books whose knowledge and delight have been sucked out.  The last two books are sucks in progress, so to speak.

Suck is the right word to use when talking about Heinlein, too.  I mistakenly thought the book was good.  Obviously I need to eat more Omega-3 or smoke less crack or whatever, because it is teh suck.  Bigtime.  I think I wrote more in my notes on the book.

The parenting book was awesome, recommended in every respect except the bits around sex and alcohol.  I'm not as Texan.

Atheism is fantastic, but slow going.  It's very reminiscent of my first philosophy class, only without the "brain in a vat" and with a lot more of "if they say this, then they're logically inconsistent because ...".

Cities is also good.  It's a 1984 economics book.  She starts by pointing out how stagflation goes against every economic theory, then offers her own (that cities are the centerpieces of economies in ways that nations are not).  It's interesting to learn about economics from (the first chapter is a summary of the other theories and it's VERY readable) and also just to explore this idea of cities central to economies.  She's got another book where she goes into it in more detail, but I'm enjoying this one plenty.