Category Archives: Family

Teach on, MacDuff

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Things are looking up here at Casa de Chaos. My beautiful wife has begun work as a high school English teacher in Baltimore County.

She’s inherited 9th and 12th grade classes mid-term; the 12th graders are in the middle of Macbeth, while the 9th graders have, well, done mostly nothing. They’ve had a substitute for the past four months, who relied largely on vocabulary worksheets to pass the time.

Paula still has to complete her masters coursework, but she doesn’t have to student teach now (obviously)–an observer will come in to evaluate her in her own classroom. That’s a relief in many ways (including matters financial).

Plus, her benefits rock. As soon as hers kick in, I’m dropping mine like a rotting, blighted potato.

Feline Home Invasion

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For those of you not in the Baltimore area, it’s worth mentioning that it’s rather unpleasantly cold and snowy here right now. We got about 5 inches of snow on Saturday, and it’s 10 degrees outside right now (an even 0 when you take into account that mythical wind chill).

The weather brought us an unexpected (well, not wholly unexpected) houseguest. The Mooch showed up at our back door, whining and holding up altenating paws to get minor relief from the icy ground. Naturally, Paula let him come in the door.

He ensconced himself in the back half of our basement for a while, seeking shelter under an obsolesced foosball table near our water heater for a while. And then he started making himself at home.

Our two resident cats were none too pleased. Lucy, our 25-pound alpha female, made noises I hadn’t heard from her before. Desi, her submissive cohabitant, seemed spooked at first, then indignant.

Seeking to avoid conflict, I shut Mooch in the back of the basement for the night with food and water (after establishing he knew what a litter box was for and installing a backup box for our cats in the other half of the basement). And then we went to sleep.

At 6 this morning, I heard Lucy growling from under the bed. I tried to coax her out, as Paula went into the bathroom. Mooch came in to wish her a good morning.

Apparently, Mooch is really Houdini. He must have squeezed through a small gap in the framing of our finished basement that allows the sewage drain to pass under our basement bath and out through the back of a closet. Like an early riser at a bed and breakfast, he was wandering the halls and poking around for his morning meal.

I’m going to call the vet today to make an appointment for our feline houseguest. I suspect he may be with us for a while.

Banished

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It’s 10:39 pm on MLK Day, and I’m sitting in my basement surrounded by piles and piles of crap.

The relocation of my office to a corner of the basement is almost complete; I still need to run phone lines in here, so for now our DSL connection and my office phone base station are still sitting up in my former office, where Kevin is sleeping (or. perhaps, IM’ing now that he has bedside bandwidth).

While I got my desk down here and reassembled on Sunday night, the real work of moving all of the detrius that had accumulated in my office over the past 7 years was left for today. Kevin and I moved bookcases, filing cabinets, and piles and crates of stuff up and down two flights of stairs. By dinnertime, we had finished with the cleanup and the installation of the major elements of his room, as well as the reconfiguration of what is now Jonah’s exclusive domain.

Jonah arrived home from a visit to a friend’s house, and we found he had still not finished watching a video (“The Secret Garden Revisited”) that he was supposed to watch as homework for some “character education” mini-unit that his teacher is doing. During the course of trying to get him to sit down and watch the damned thing, he became increasingly petulant and whiny.

During the course of this episode, it was revealed to us by his brother that Jonah had in fact been lying about the events of the previous weekend and had in fact called my ex a bitch. Precise words and context–she was trying to break up a “fight” between them, and Jonah, who is almost 11, said, “Don’t touch me, bitch!”

So, that led to some more catharsis, as you can imagine, I’m sure.

By the time all had blown over, and the kids were all in their respective bedrooms, I was aching tired. But still, there were these piles of crap all around my desk….

I guess I know what I’m doing during conference calls tomorrow.

Down to the Dungeon

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We’re beginning preparations here for The Great Household Shuffle now that the new year has arrived. When you live in a rowhouse, you’d think the amount of rearranging you could do would be limited, but necessity is the mother of deck chair-shuffling. And in this case, the necessity is that I have a newly 14-year-old son who needs his own room.

So, I’m surrendering my office of the past 8 years, and moving my business operations below the waterline, as it were, into the “clubbed” half of our basement. That happens to be our family room as well, so I’m doing a bit of downsizing in the process. But on the plus side:

    I’ll be able to:

  • play Katamari Damacy during teleconferences.
  • ride my mountain bike on the trainer stand, also during teleconferences, on mute
  • hear when people walk up to the front door
  • fold out the sofa bed if it’s a slow day

There is the small matter of reduced daylight, being next to the laundry area, and having to deal with children’s toys scattered across the floor of my workplace. But I’ll burn those bridges when I come to them.