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Over Christmas, we watched 4 dogs for a friend. (And her parakeet.) I have 4 dogs already. That makes 8 dogs. That’s a whole lot of dogs. The Danish person and the little girl are sort of givens in this house, and they weren’t unusually difficult over the holidays. Probably. I had 4 extra dogs and a bird around here, so I might not have noticed anyway.

I was a little scared of it, but my house is big enough and we’ve got decent, walled-off space outside for them to play, and the neighbors on both sides have dogs that bark at least as much as ours, so as long as things were reasonably under control – which they were – it wasn’t going to generate any controversy. The 4 extra dogs were in pairs, 2 little mini-dogs (Bijou and Marley), sort of Wiener-dog mixes, and 2 maxi-dogs (Shush and Tiger) that were bigger than any that live with us, hovering around 100 pounds. Continue reading

In no specific order.

If you’re going to have 8 dogs in your house, the more of them that are housebroken the better.

Batting .500 really isn’t good enough, and in this case, two out of three IS bad. Don’t ask. 

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I used to be an Apple evangelist. I still like Apple and some of their products, but we’re not friends like we used to be. Earlier in December, wrestling with a technical issue on my computer got me thinking about life and all sorts of stupid stuff (6 hours doing the same thing over and over to fix a stupid computer problem on your day off so you can work the next day will do that), including wondering why I was working on fixing the problem and not actually leapfrogging the issue and actually improving things. Continue reading

One of my wife’s friends sent us a Christmas card that said something like “May the coming year bring lots of changes.” It sounded disturbingly close to a Chinese curse that goes something like, “May your future be filled with change.” (I’ve read that this is actually a mistranslation or interpretation of another subtle Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Ouch. Too late.) Continue reading

It’s been a year with a lot of small but important changes. Sometimes the most impressive changes are the ones that are easiest to see – new house, loss of job, new pet, kid – but those sort of take care of themselves. They don’t happen all the time. For me, I find that I sort of coast through the big changes and it’s the apparent doldrums in between that get a little tricky. I could ramble about how my kid’s in preschool or recap the car accident I had in the summer, but my kid was in daycare before, and I didn’t get hurt in the accident and ended up with a very similar car afterwards. They make up events on the timeline of the linear version of my life, but they don’t make up real change. Continue reading

I’m excited to be applying for a little writing job at a major content website, it’s the kind of change I’ve been looking for. I’ve got almost no chance of landing the gig, a monthly retainer project reviewing and writing about digital photography, but just taking the leap of faith to apply feels good.

It’s got me started thinking about other stuff, and I’m working on some skeletal ideas for other blogs. As much fun as it is to ramble about broken toes and quitting music and how much I love the little birdies where I live, I’ve got tons of interests, and I’m interested in forging the discipline of writing regularly about some of them. Continue reading

Since I work at home, I wouldn’t easily get snow days anyway, but I feel cheated sometimes when people around me are off and I’m in my lair hunched over a keyboard and pushing pixels around. My clients are still in New York City, and it’s 60 degrees there right now. Me, I have half a foot of snow on the ground and it’s under 30 degrees, so I feel like I ought to get snow day. Locally schools are closed and people are staying home in some cases; 6 inches of snow is not exactly like armageddon, but it’s a nice excuse to take it easy when that’s what’s going on anyway. I’m not actually having any trouble working (remember being in school and trying to focus when it was snowing outside?), but it would definitely be fun to sneak out and play with my daughter for a couple of hours. Continue reading

To paraphrase George Carlin, it’s pretty easy to consider anyone who’d driving much faster than you as crazy, and anyone who’s driving slower than you to be a jackass. I’ve noticed some more granular versions of the rules here in Eldorado, and it’s deepend the awareness I already have that I’m a hypocrite. (Yay!) Continue reading

I offer now my own Dave Barry style contribution to Murphy’s Law; nothing scatological need be implied by the title.

I don’t know what cosmic law of attraction is involved, but as a mostly private person, I’ve found that the best way to abort a lonely fugue right at the onset is a quick trip to a bathroom, wherever I live, whoever I live with, and whatever I’m doing. Continue reading

This isn’t about computers, but a computer issue I had today got me thinking. I spent about 6 hours working on a dumb but crippling computer problem; seemed like it should have been minor, but minor or not, it would have stopped me from working come Monday so I needed to fix it. I have a Mac, but I run Windows XP on it, too, using a program called Parallels. It’s pretty cool when it works, and it usually does. But it introduces some new wrinkles, and occasionally I have to work for 6 hours to get things running again. (All things given equal, it’s been easier for me to coax a fussy program like Parallels back to working every once in a while than getting a Windows machine back up once things have gone awry. Virtualization is mostly cool most of the time. Your mileage may vary.) It’s a little sad to spend a Sunday doing stuff like this, but a) I’m kind of sick today, so I was sitting around anyway, b) some of the time I spent was just waiting for the computer, so I played PS2 while I waited, and c) better Sunday than during the week when I have real deadlines.

Anyway, after a bunch of trial and error – mostly error – I found a magic combination of stuff to fix it, and now I’m more or less in the same position I was in at the end of last week. Half of the last day of my tearfully short weekend spent just getting where I used to be. Continue reading