The power of the time out, and when to use it.

January 27th, 2012

(note, the above is not Dale.  Thanks and credit to whoever’s kid it is – I couldn’t find it)

So far, Sam and I have been pretty lucky with Dale.  He sleeps through the entire night, says please and thank you when he wants and gets something, and is extremely compassionate with his peers at daycare.  With his improving communication he can tell us pretty quickly what he wants and doesn’t want, which makes life easier on all counts.  However, he’s fast approaching two and once in a while we observe evidence that there’s a dash of the terrible twos on the horizon.  When a temper tantrum surfaces (more accurately, a wail and throw to the floor), we just ignore him or turn him around in his chair and within 30 seconds, he comes to his senses and returns far more agreeable than he  was moments ago.  If in the midst of the tantrum if he does something he knows he’s not supposed to, we sit him on our lap in the living room and endure a time out.

The time outs are as bad for me as they are for Dale.  I speak sternly to him for 30 seconds, then we sit in silence for a minute and a half, then tell him I love him and he gives me a hug.  The look on his face during all of this is positively enervating: he looks at the ground, doesn’t say a word, and is terrified to look up at me.  Given the impact it has on him, I’m forced to review the offense he committed and I wonder how on earth throwing a carrot on the ground justified making him feel this way (note though, it’s extremely effective, because he hasn’t thrown a scrap on the floor in almost two months).  The problem is, the time outs are SO effective with Dale that it’s tempting to use them to communicate other dos and don’ts.

Here’s an example: this morning  he insisted on having yogurt in a cup, and when we brought it to him he complained that he didn’t want it.  Then he wanted applesauce served with his snowman spatula; we gave it to him and he didn’t touch it.  I told him he wasn’t going anywhere until the yogurt was finished, he finally finished it, then started complaining yet again.  I concluded he needed a time out to put a stop to the fussiness and to communicate that it’s not okay to waste a bunch of food that he asked for in the first place.

Was that worth a time out?  Maybe, maybe not.  Sam doesn’t think so, and I’m on the fence.  It did halt the fussiness to be sure, though…and that’s where it’s dangerous communication.  Everyone is entitled to a bad mood, including 2-year olds, and Dale just got over the stomach flu so I feel he might be especially entitled. But I can’t take it back, only learn from it moving forward. Would I do it again?  Probably not.

Don’t misinterpret this post: I’m not asking when our readers feel it’s okay to discipline your child, because the answer truly varies on the parent (how they were raised, what values they choose to uphold, how they were punished, etc) and parenting one’s child is nobody’s business but their own (and their spouse’s).  I’m just conceding that there are no cut and dry rules that apply to child rearing.  If Dale continues to be such a good kid, we might not have to worry about this too much.

Posted in David's Diatribes | 1 Comment »

Oh the things that daycare brings.

January 26th, 2012

When you’re greeted at the door of daycare with your child’s clothes in bags like the above, you have no idea what the rest of the day is going to bring.

This time, it brought the stomach flu – the infamous 24 hour pukeathon that runs through populations like the dividing stripes that course down the highway.  His first vomit was at 2:30, then 3:10, 4:00, 4:10, 4:45, 5:00, 5:25, 6:00, 7:05, and finally 7:45.  After that he was exhausted and went to bed, our bed, on top of every beach blanket we could find that hadn’t been thrown up on already.

As an adult, you know what to expect with these flus, but as an almost two year old you’ve got no idea what’s happening.  Hence every time he’d throw up, he’d cry because it scared the daylights out of him.  By the end of it, I think Dale was just annoyed.

In classic parent fashion, the second I picked him up from daycare, he immediately vomited all down my leg and onto my shoe.  Later it was on my arm and shirt, then Sam’s arm and shirt, and finally all over her pants.  Two loads of laundry later, it’s as if nothing happened.  And this morning, as Dale sits in the living room amongst his familiar surroundings, he barely remembers that yesterday even occurred:

He’s 100% today, and I hope to say the same from us.  Sam called daycare to give them an update, and only 5 kids out of 16 were there today.  On top of that, three of the teachers were out sick.  I have been drinking hand sanitizer, but with every uncertain twinge I feel I get worried.  I told Dale, “thanks for the present from daycare, buddy,” to which he cheerfully responded:

“No problem, Dad.”

Posted in General | No Comments »

Name that tune, or how to forget to name that tune.

January 25th, 2012

For the past week I’ve had this song cemented in my head:

The reasons behind it are obvious: Dale is currently obsessed with Elmo, and sings the Elmo song every chance he gets.  Clearly, the song is cemented in his head as well.  Before that it was the rastafarian version of “No more monkeys jumping on the bed.”  We hear dozens of these types of songs every week, but only one or two tend to stick in my head all day long.  And it raises the question as to why.

Back when I was studying for one test or another, I remember consulting books on how to improve your memory, and the solutions they gave were vast:  eat protein while you’re studying because it improves memory.  Listen to a particular song while you are studying and play that song when you need to remember the material.  Eat chocolate while studying because that increases epinephrine levels which help with memory (e.g., why we remember near-death experiences with such detail).  For me, the best trick was to study in absolute silence and with no distractions, which allowed me to photograph whatever I was studying in my mind and recall it whenever I needed it.  These conditions aren’t that easy to find, and certainly aren’t the case with Elmo and the jumping monkeys…half the time, we have those songs playing in the background while we are juggling three things at once.

I wish I could crack the code, for not only would it help me to remember certain things better, but I could interrupt the pathway and forget the things which I want to (Elmo and the jumping monkeys).  The solution would certainly be a multi-million dollar endeavor, since everyone would like to have a better memory…especially a new mom who tends to forget what she did 5 minutes earlier.  Thoughts?

Posted in David's Diatribes, General | 1 Comment »

Matriculation into the big leagues.

January 23rd, 2012

When I graduated from college in the spring of 1999, I was given a canvas briefcase which was to be my guardian as I moved from dorm room into the real world.  Sticking to my Minnesota roots, the bag was made by none other than Duluth Pack, whose name emblazoned the front face and corralled the moose in the middle of the patch:

The bag went with my every day to work for four years, and under similar ceremonious circumstance, I exchanged it for a backpack when I started graduate school.  Almost six years later, with a Ph.D. among the items now carried with me, I brought the bag out from the closet and dusted it off to begin my professional career once again.  Just over two years later, the bag that I once thought “would last forever” (yet backed by only a 1 year warranty) was showing some serious signs of wear:

These are in every corner of the bag: tremendous holes that barely offer protection for the contents inside.  I called Duluth Pack, they told me that while my story was touching, they had no reason to extend the warranty…but I could have it fixed at $60/hour labor.  And like a bad breakup, I swore to never buy Duluth Pack again.

My professional career continues, and with this passing birthday I finally graduated to what I now feel will be the last briefcase I ever own.  Canvas has been broke so that leather could emerge:

On the left, my new Saddleback Leather briefcase, in dark coffee brown (fitting for me).  It is an amazing feat of bovine construction, made of 4 solid pieces of 100% full grain leather (for a primer on leather, see here) and weighing an unbelievable 7.5 lbs.

A quick digression about me and leather: 1) I have no particular affinity to the material.  2) I have no particular sympathy towards those who preach anti-leather. 3) It’s my bag, my money, and my own business. 4) So mind yours.  A truism about leather is that it can hold its own against any man-made material out there – certainly canvas – and with a little care it will last a long time, and improve with age.  That’s the bet I’m making.

An ancillary benefit of this bag is that it can quickly be converted into a backpack, which you can youtube search if you’re interested.  I’m really not, but it’s nice to know that if I need free hands on the way the work, Saddleback has thought of a solution already.

The story behind Saddleback is a little absurd.  The owner, a guy named Dave like myself, was at a bullfight and upon watching the durability of these creatures, decided to make a business off of them.  He paints it a little more romantically than that, but the brass tacks is that he’s exchanging animals sacrificed for sport for animals sacrificed for briefcases.  He backs all of this up with a 100 year warranty, and has two kids which will hopefully assume the family business should he decide to croak and my bag decide to need service (see above).

If you read the primer I linked above, you’ll undoubtedly notice the cheap leather indications in the picture above, taken on my old Duluth Pack bag.  The tanning of the leather was skin-deep, so to say, which means that the leather was not dyed throughout and the core is the ‘wet blue leather’ that they started with.  All of my new briefcase has been dyed throughout:

Where does that leave me?  Tomorrow my career will move forward, just like it did yesterday, but I will now carry my belongings in the briefcase that will be given to one of my children when they are ready to begin careers of their own:

(Another digression: I have no idea why I select so many items – watch, briefcase, dogtags, Bob Dylan CD collection – with my offspring in mind.  I just do.  Whether they appreciate it as much as I do is ultimately up to them, and I’m not certain any particular upbringing will help foster appreciation.  I guess that’s all part of the uncertainty of parenting).

Here’s to hoping that my new bag, and the future of Saddleback Leather, bring prosper and longevity with them.  Otherwise I could have stuck with canvas and saved a few bucks.

Posted in General | 3 Comments »

Reviving the dead? And a year older at that.

January 23rd, 2012

First the apology:  just a couple of posts after lambasting the lethargy of other websites, ourlifeinithaca fell to a similar fate.  The secret behind successful websites – those which have frequent content – is to make posting part of your daily routine, even if there isn’t much worth talking about.  And falling out of that routine is easy to do, and a bad habit to break.  Hence I will try to get back in the swing of things once again.

Last week was monumental, if turning 35 is something that they build monuments over.  Sam goes the extra mile on my birthday – always has – and this year my birthday started with breakfast (Lucky Charms) in bed which I enjoyed with Dale.  I ate the cereal, and he picked out the charms, while we watched cartoons on the tv in front of us.  Back when we lived in Minnesota, I used to get Wuollet’s marzipan cake for my birthday, which I argue is the best cake on the planet.  Since they don’t deliver outside of a 1000 mile radius,  Sam had to make one herself: 4 layers interleaved with sheets of marzipan, and what was going to be an apricot icing turned out to be French instead (Sam’s attempt to make the apricot variety turned out to be a disaster…also a tradition with Sam).  Dale loved the candles, and as soon as I blew them out he asked for them to be turned ‘on’ again.

There were two big birthday items this year, of which I’m only going to discuss one today (the other will be discussed tomorrow, since it will arrive this afternoon) – that is, a new zoom lens for my camera:

It’s the smaller one on the left, which is situated next to brother-in-law Adam’s monster on the right.  It’s a 70-200mm lens with image stabilization, which means that my shaky older hands can be factored out of the equation of a good image.  I’ve only started to play around with it, but with no effort I’ve been able to enjoy razor sharp images like this one I took from the living room window:

The birds didn’t get to enjoy Sam’s cake, but I did refill the feeder so they could feel like they were part of the celebration.

But the best part of the day wasn’t so much turning 35 – actually, that was among the low points – it was having Dale sing happy birthday to me which he did perfectly:

Posted in General | 3 Comments »

A happy holiday season from Hotlanta.

January 2nd, 2012

Disclaimer: I just surveyed the pictures I uploaded for this post, and it’s going to be a fair challenge to weave a coherent story…but here goes.

As I type this, I am saddened by how quickly the past 10 days has gone.  Leaving my work computer at home (reread that, it’s incredible), I decided to try and have an actual vacation and instead packed up 150+ lbs of other gear for our holiday down to Atlanta.  I’m glad I did, because there was plenty to do, and a lot of video/pictures to take.

We held Christmas morning at Sam’s parents house, where the longstanding tradition of single-file present opening was replaced with intermittent shifts of childhood fury.  Dale quickly got the hang of opening presents, and was continuously rewarded with toys from Santa, Grandma, and G-Don (grandpa).  Realizing that it isn’t polite to be hasty, he took brief pauses to play games – including ‘balance whatever on your head.’

Dale wasn’t the only one who had been good this year, and Don and Colleen rejoiced in their new fun wine glasses that complemented each other nicely.

(Sidenote 2: I took hours of video, but minutes of pictures…so I don’t have too many from Christmas morning – but assume that he received plenty of gifts).  Afterwards, we went outside and took advantage of Atlanta’s brisk but tolerable weather, and Dale took advantage of some fun-looking stairs with the help of Grandma and G-Don.

The games continued throughout our visit, and among my favorite were the host of challenges that Don presented to me in order to receive one of my Christmas presents.  Above was step one: a message written in Morse code.  After conquering that, I then had to break a code of letters which led me to a third clue, and finally to a new pizza flipper that was hiding behind a TV in the bedroom.  This challenge was by far one of my favorites from the trip…hopefully it becomes a tradition of its own.

But back to playing with the toys.  After spending a few days at the Grandparents’, we headed over to Adam (Sam’s brother) and Jenn’s house, to hang out and let the cousins bond.  Dale was mesmerized by Hayden’s big gift from Santa: a new drum set.  He was channeling his inner Gene Simmons in the photo above, and made music of like caliber.

When the noise became too much to bear, we headed back outside to play with toys, and cousins.  Hudson and Dale got along swell as they practiced their chipshots in the yard.

Playtime can only be that if it’s balanced with learning time, and when Dale wasn’t running around with his relatives we got back to Ithaca routines of reading books and snuggling on the couch.  Clifford the Big Red Dog was a hit, as always.

A big hit in Atlanta and for yours truly was cooking on Adam’s Big Green Egg, which isn’t a mere alternative to grilling on Baby Green back home, but rather is a unique concept in grilling entirely.  I liken it to a slow cooker with smoke, and indirect heat.  18 hours after putting on a pork shoulder, we enjoyed the best pulled pork I’ve ever had in my life.  You really need to Google “Big Green Egg” to see what this is about, but it was amazing.  And Adam has become an amazing grillmaster at the same time.

No trip to Atlanta is complete (for me at least) without a trip to the Georgia Aquarium – my fifth time there but Dale’s first.  He was immediately mesmerized by all of the aquatic life, and quickly identified the “Pout Pout Fish” which he loves to read before bedtime.  He also braved touching a starfish in the water, as long as Dad was holding him.

We left Atlanta after a week, and spent the rest of the weekend at home (more about New Years coming this week).  And here we are, 10 days later.  I can safely say that my attempt to weave the story from the pictures failed miserably.

Many thanks for the wonderful hospitality and making the end of 2011 terrific for all of us – especially Dale.

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

My visit to a synchrotron.

December 27th, 2011

Apparently all it takes to get a tour of a synchrotron is to ask.  Knowing this, and doing that, I asked my friend Aaron who works at Cornell’s variety of the particle accelerator for a little behind the scenes…and he was happy to oblige.  I must insert a disclaimer here: despite a high respect for physics, I only peripherally comprehend most of the concepts, hence my recap of the tour will be extremely incomplete.

Here is the outline of the accelerator, taken in 1979. The box at 6 o’clock was where we started the tour, and over the course of 2 hours we made it half way across the 768m circle.  While it is no longer used to collide particles (those tasks are reserved for the far larger synchrotons which exist elsewhere), there are still multiple experiments that go on daily.

The orbit of the synchroton is a few stories below the Earth’s surface, for no particular reason other than it’s easier to maintain business as usual above ground.  I took this picture from the entrance of the box at 12 o’clock in the first picture.

To make particles accelerate in a predictable fashion, and to collect data from their bombardment with other things, requires a lot of computers.  I was shocked at how old the electronics were, given the type of research that was going on here.  It literally looked like a scene out of War Games.

I have no idea what this is – presumably it is in observance of the Christmas holiday.  If I had to make a second guess, I’d say it had to do with the safety checks that are omnipresent throughout the tunnels.

There are two accelerators in the picture above, I think.  The orange tube on the left is a tremendous dipole magnet, and the large blue box on the left is a quadripole magnet.  Both serve to control the direction of moving particles and to accelerate their speed.

Back in the days when they did collide particles, they used to use a lot more equipment, including the fuselage in the picture above.  It’s just too big and heavy to remove now that it’s out of commission, hence in the picture above forever will it remain.

As it turns out, all of this high-energy stuff produces tons of radiation, which would lead to a quick demise of the operators if it wasn’t contained…so to combat this, there are huge slabs of ‘heavy’ concrete throughout the synchrotron.  “Heavy” means that the concrete contains a high concentration of iron oxide (I think), which somehow absorbs radiation.  Don’t ask me how…nor can I remember why they decided to carve a big tunnel through the slab above.

Throughout the tunnels, there are rooms interspersed which are jammed with expensive looking equipment.  In the picture above, they are looking at how things behave at extremely high pressure – center of the Earth-style pressure.  To generate things of that caliber, they put two diamonds of very small surface area opposite from one another and press them together really hard.  The picture above detects what happens afterwards.

And I had to grab a picture of this sensor for it’s sheer size.  It’s a CCD sensor, just like the detector in your camera, however this one is about 20×20 inches.  Cost?  Over $300,000.  It’s a good thing I wasn’t put in charge of writing the grant used to pay for this, because as you can clearly read in my descriptions above, I have barely any idea what goes on below Cornell’s surface.  However, the tour was tremendous.  I plan to take one or two more before I leave Ithaca, so I can make it a true learning experience.

Posted in General, You Gotta Check this Out! | 1 Comment »

The rise and fall of modern blogs.

December 20th, 2011

For nearly as long as we’ve kept up Ourlifeinithaca (over 5 years now), I’ve kept in touch with others through their periodic postings on their websites.  Keep in mind, this was back at a time when Facebook, Twitter,  and text messaging hadn’t secured an ironclad grip on our interpersonal communication, hence the methods of news dissemination were more limited.  However, the Blog (a term I continue to refuse to use for our site) was a wonderful thing, because it offered a chance for the author(s) to throw out whatever ideas or pictures they had into Googlespace, and the responsibility was left to the voyeur to find them.

At their peak, I was following 41 blogs.  Actually, this number is inflated, since just as some sites would establish, others would conclude…I’ll estimate that in the actual peak, I was monitoring 20 sites.   However, the number has been on the decline – in support of this, I went through all of the sites I used to follow and marked when they last posted.  The tallies are here:

Currently, there are only 13 which remain active.  Perhaps not surprisingly, those which have persevered are arguably the best: in content, in writing style, and in effort.  Without a piece of evidence to support these contentions, I’d say that the people who put forth the effort to maintain their blogs do so because they get something out of it personally. Writing is certainly cathartic, and if you don’t feel this way, well, then you’re frankly doing it wrong.

I then advanced my conjectures one step further, and analyzed why I believe postmortem sites suffered their demise.  I present these here:

If you had a blog and have kids, you got off lucky and I offered the excuse of family obligation (n.b., this is in accordance with my sincere attempt to regain the “Minnesota Nice” I had before I left the state).  In reality, the separation between ‘Family’ and ‘Lazy’ should be more greyed, since everyone makes time for their hobbies, and blogging is just that – with kids or without.  Some went on to create a new website to mark their move to another location or stage in their life…but the blogs managed to dwindle anyhow.  And as for 5%: well, I never knew the authors personally so I can’t really say why they stopped.

I’ll be the first to admit that the hobby is a tough one to maintain, especially when the alternatives of quick posts to Facebook or Twitter are so readily available, and especially when oftentimes it just isn’t that easy to come up with new ideas.  However, I also believe that searching for new things to write about refreshes the author’s creativity…and creative writing is truly a dying art.

I conclude with a tip of my hat to the remaining 34% – or those 13 blogs that I continue to enjoy reading, thoroughly.  Your efforts haven’t gone unnoticed, and like you, we’ll try our best to keep Ourlifeinithaca going.

Posted in David's Diatribes, General | 1 Comment »

Back from Minnesota, a late Thanksgiving.

December 20th, 2011

Bad habits are hard to break.  In particular, I’ve aspired to return to the traditional frequency of posting on our website, but life and deadlines continue to get in the way and hence only now am I writing about our trip to Minnesota last week. It was only 4 days – far too short – but we managed to pack a lot of family time into it.  Our repeated Skype conversations with Grandma and Grandpa have paid off, and when we arrived Dale was immediately at ease in their house:

When he wasn’t chanting ‘grandma, grandpa, Kojo, Erin,’ it was ‘Kelsey, Devin’ – his two cousins that are always so considerate of him:

I have a bunch of photos I wanted to include with this post, but they are all at home on another computer.  I’ll plan to upload more in the next day or so.  Also a highlight of the trip was meeting our new niece, Elle (pronounced liked the letter), and seeing tired parents Erin and Kojo who are experiencing the familiar crash course of parenting.  There was even a little snow outside, so I got to go sledding with the kids down the hill which I took when I was a kid.  The trip down was far less eventful than I remember, but the hike up was as painful as it has always been (especially carrying Devin up).

It seems that every third trip to Minnesota is especially good, and this was one of them.  We’re excited to move back someday, the only question is how.  Until we figure that out, we’ll look forward to the next visit…and until then, hope to post on Ourlife a bit more frequently.

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

On a quest for the best.

December 5th, 2011

There are at least seven types of coffee drinkers.  These include 1) the obnoxious “don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee;” 2) the timid “like the caffeine buzz, but don’t like the coffee taste so let’s add a bunch of flavored creamer and sugar;” 3) the impecunious “how much is that? $6 a pound? Forget it, bring me Folgers;” 4) the  excessive “how much is that?  $6 a pound? Forget it, bring me kopi luwak;” 5) the European “eSpresso.  Not eXpresso!” 6) the American “More is always better; ” and 7) any permutation of all of the above.  Historically – for the past 12 years or so – I’ve been in camp #6.

I won’t alarm you and confide how much coffee I drink on Monday – Friday.  Assume it’s a lot.  More alarming, though, is how much I can drink on the weekend – little to none – and without shakes, headaches, or desire for any.  I know this is a rare phenomenon, but that isn’t what is guiding the rest of this post.  Instead, I am a firm believer in the adage “there’s no such thing as toxic substances, only toxic levels” and as such, I begin to worry about how much I’m drinking.  And further, I’ve finally realized that how coffee is prepared has a heck of a lot to do with how well the end product will taste.

This distinction is firmly rooted in the mentality of #5, where flavor trumps any ancillary, caffeinated benefit that coffee possesses.  Many balk at the concept of $15 a pound coffee, but bat not an eye at  $3 a bottle water – or alternatively, price is all they fixate on.  This goes both ways: some assume that more money has to equal better, which paves the way for niche markets and coffee beans mortared in animal feces (above) that go for $500 a pound or more.  My new quest is to drink less coffee, but more wonderfully flavored coffee…at what I feel is a reasonable price.  Hence, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the science of coffee extraction, which I’ve titled “a quest for the best.”

First, I should debunk a few myths (at least I’ve concluded they’re myths).  Freezing coffee does nothing to preserve flavor.  Refrigeration is even worse.  Roasted coffee produces a shell of carbon dioxide that preserves the flavor of the roasted bean, but when this is removed through grinding or cold conditions, the end products are quickly oxidized which alters the coffee flavor.  Blade grinding can increase the temperature of the beans, which extracts unsavory and bitter metabolites from the beans – excessive temperature of the water can do this too.  And if that wasn’t challenging enough, one can over- or under-extract coffee depending on contact time with the grounds.

I’d typically be the first one to argue that most of this is malarkey: there is no perceptable difference between coffee run through Mr. Coffee vs. that extracted with all of the observations above.  However, I’ve now done this comparison a number of times and the differences are striking.  So much so, that I’m willing to put in a little extra effort, drink a little less coffee, just to get a better cup.

And above lay the formula for my ideal morning jolt (of flavor).  850mls of filtered water, in the microwave for 5 minutes (to get to 190 degrees), added to a French Press containing ~58 grams of freshly ground coffee, extracted for 4 minutes.  Sound crazy?  Come over for a cup and you’ll see exactly what I’m tasting about.

Posted in David's Diatribes, General | 4 Comments »

« Older Entries