As much as I love to go on long road trips, the day before is never a good scene in my house. I try to come up with every possible excuse not to go or even to get ready to go.

Maybe that's a good thing, today, since there's plenty of purging and packing still to do in these parts. Of course, during the purge'n'pack I'm thinking of all the things on the trip list that aren't getting done, thinking that leaving for two weeks is stupid and I should find an excuse to come back early, and thinking that I'm not doing nearly enough rolling around on the floor with Theo this morning.

Once I'm out on the road all will be well, of course, and once I'm in IL I won't think nearly as much about needing to come back. Maybe I should just throw everything in the suitcase and start driving, ready or not...

RIP, The Morning Nap 2007-2008

So ever since the weather has improved, I've been hoping that maybe Theo would drop his morning nap early, give us a chance to start getting out and about more during the day. He's always been very sensitive to not getting his naps in, so leaving the house for more than a quick morning walk was tempting fate.

So of course, now that I really need him occupied for several hours in the morning and afternoon so I can get things done around the house, he has of course decided that he doesn't need that morning nap after all. Dropped it practically overnight, as if he never slept in the mornings at all.

Watch what I wish for, I guess.

Quote of the night, so far

"Only in retrospect do I see the wisdom of the great many things I've done."

An IT guy's job is sometimes therapy.

"Hi, I'm a Mac..."

And, you're a pussy.

We're finally getting past the stereotype of Macs as the computer for artistic, sensitive, effeminate types. There's gotta be a dozen easily led blonds in Hollywood for every Drew Barrymore, go hook up with two or three of them and tell your publicist to stop describing you as "distraught" in public.

Then zap your PRAM and rebuild your desktop. You never know what viruses those Hollywood types are carrying...

Whoops, Old Mac Guy mistake, he's running OS X. How about "Reset your system management controller and run Software Update?"

Update

Kid is STILL ASLEEP at 8:30 AM, probably because he was awake (as were we all) from about 4 until 5:30 this morning. Sounded like teeth, or maybe a bad dream... who knows?

I'm very happy with how the house is coming along. The basement has taken far less time than I thought, the attic is almost done, and the garbage bags and donation bags are moving out the door. We're even getting more money than we'd thought for our used CDs, which is a nice bonus when I'm going to be living on rice and beans the duration of the fall.

Our infant stuff isn't selling on Craigslist as well as I'd hoped, but such is life.

I'm insanely jealous of Tom L. right now.

Michelle makes me laugh.

Brewing is all but offline. I've missed my date to bottle a batch of beer for our August trip (maybe tonight?), and I'm debating if I'm going to brew again before Norfolk, or just keep my ingredients sealed up and pick up again in September or October.

Everything is still online for the house we're buying in Norfolk. We've passed the inspection but we're still waiting for some financing hurdles. This might actually happen...

We've told our landlord we're out of here at the end of August and the minivan is reserved. No official date from the movers yet, but Labor Day should see Theo and I reduced to nomads, with all our stuff on a truck somewhere.

I can't say it enough -- we're going to miss Newport and a lot of people here; whatever people say about New England rudeness we've never seen it from the locals on the Island.

I'm already exploring our new neighborhood via Internet. Ruth and I already know it pretty well from our last stay in Norfolk, but I'm just checking out what's the same, what's different and daydreaming, whenever I have a few minutes...

We're going to find just as much fun there as we have here, assuming we don't put ourselves in the poorhouse buying drapes and couches and rugs and whatnot.

Spud is awake and chattering to himself. It's inevitable, whenever I realize that he's been asleep long enough for me to get something done for myself, he wakes up. I'm out of interesting things to babble about anyway.

That's my son

The local energy monopoly's favorite pastime these days is to show up on our block at a random hour of the day or night, tear out a section of the street with jackhammers and pavement saws, fill it in again and then come back several days later to do it all again.

So yesterday morning was our turn; the crew showed up just before 9AM, told the folks across the street to move their cars, and made extra sure to be rude and uncommunicative when the neighbor and I started asking questions.

So I put Theo down for his nap right at 9AM, turned on fans and white noise and crossed my fingers. His window is right below where the crew turned on their jackhammer about 9:30.

KID SLEPT UNTIL 11, not a peep out of him.

Of course, they turned off the noise about 15 minutes after it started, then they all stood around until lunchtime and the whole commotion was gone before we got home from our walk. WTF?

The postscript -- late that afternoon the tree commandos arrived to take a dying tree out of the neighbor's property. The tree guys were mega-cool, they waved to Theo and talked to Daddy in between swinging chainsaws, running the wood chipper and using their Bobcat with a claw on the front to haul away logs. Luckily they'd finished all that right at Theo's bedtime, or else it could've been a long night.

Today's walk

Today was almost 2.75 miles. Had to go look in on some cats for a friend right in the middle so I have no clue about time.

Then this afternoon all three of us took a walk to the farmer's market since Ruth had today off from work. It was 2.8 miles, with a stop at the coffee shop as Theo fell asleep in the stroller, so we took the time to catch up with a friend we'd run into while out and about.

Today's walk

A quick two miles. Theo was a beast yesterday after his morning nap consisted of passing out in the backpack, and Daddy's hips are feeling yesterday's long walk. I'm sure we'll be out for another walk later today.

addendum

One of my current projects is taking some long hikes of Newport, bringing Theo along in the baby backpack a friend loaned us. This morning I covered 5.2 miles on the island, with no apparent damage to legs or feet (yet). My next goal is a walk from our house, along the entire Newport Cliff Walk and back, probably about 8 miles. After that I'm going to work on finding a walking route I'm comfortable with down to the Ocean Drive/Brenton Point park area.

This may be too much to do before the end of August considering what has to be done around here, but I can't spend every moment in the house...

A realization, and a roundup

Another post about myself and the blog, a sure sign of a blog in decline. Will I still be posting next week or will it be hiatus time again?!? Tune in and find out!

Over the past week, I've decided that if all goes well with the new house in Norfolk, I want to move Theo and I to Virginia and vacate this house before the end of August. Paying a month of rent in Newport will be bad news once we have two mortgages in Norfolk.

The realization from the post title: Theo and I need to be in Illinois for two weeks in August, maybe more. So in the past week, we've time-traveled from being over two months from moving, to being three and a half weeks from moving.

Following Paul's Law of Moving, while adding the corollary that "People with toddlers take twice as long as the childless to accomplish any task," I'm pretty much already in hopeless territory. (Confidential to Paul: Let us know you're alive, mmmkay?)

Thus, recreational blogging will pretty much stop until maybe Labor Dayish, unless I really find the need to vent. There are a few loose ends in need of tying around here, so I'm going to make the following series of broad generalizations and unsupported statements:

Tom (and MyMilitaryLife) directed me to this all-too-relevant USA Today Op-Ed from William Kistner, a Navy spouse and father who found himself standing on the pier (or probably tarmac in this case) as his wife was deployed to Africa. I'll recommend it while noting my regret that I can't talk more deeply about the subject right now.

What I'm reading lately: I've recently finished Into Thin Air and Under the Banner of Heaven, both by Jon Krakauer. I recommend them both highly.

I read The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame. The story he tells in this book is equally compelling to me, partly because I'm more of a football guy and partly because the story is far from over.

I started to read and failed to finish a memoir that I would love to talk trash about, but I have too much respect for the person's accomplishments to rip on the book. I won't say more about it, but the next time you read a bad memoir, just remember that I warned you not to do it.

I also (finally) read Einstein's Dreams, which was fantastitabulous.

I mentioned it to Tom this morning, but I'll reply to his post here too: Homeownership is scary, but after being goaded into it by my wife, I've found it well worthwhile -- when the situation is right -- and no more risky or stress-inducing than renting. The risks and stress are just different. As long as you put some money down on a place up front, get a fixed-rate loan from a reputable lender like NavyFed or USAA and stay well within your means (don't borrow as much as the banks will loan you, even if you're 100% certain that promotion is coming next year), the current problems in the mortgage market simply won't apply to you.

Finally, the post that's been percolating the longest, my thoughts on this month's Atlantic. Definitely read "What Rumsfeld Got Right" and "Electro-Shock Therapy." The battery problem is the fundamental issue in our current energy crisis -- oil has been our cheap, large-capacity portable energy storage, and now that it's no longer cheap, batteries need to get better fast. I admire what GM is trying to do with the Volt, but because they're GM I have every confidence in the world they will mess it up. I'm just happy I shouldn't have to worry about buying a car for a few more years.

As I've thought it over, my opinion of the cover story, "Is Google making us Stupid?" has evolved from cautious pessimism to outright disdain. It's nothing more than a bunch of controversial statements that have gotten attention because Oooo, they're so contrarian.

Twenty years ago, high-minded Atlantic writers would've been blaming all society's ills (e.g., short attention spans, declining literary culture, USA Today, declining subscriptions at the sorts of high-minded journals that employ Atlantic writers) on that popular pre-Interent boogeyman TELEVISION and its minion the sound bite; if they were talking about politics, they might have thrown in an unkind word for Rush Limbaugh. Fast-forward to today, and Carr tries to claim that the Internet is dumbing down CABLE NEWS, as if CNBMSNBFOX had led us into the golden age of an informed, wise electorate before the Internet reduced us all to quivering mush.

And just like the proper response to scapegoaters of TV has always been "Change the channel or turn it off, moron," someone needs to tell Carr that if he really believes that our pre-Internet brains were superior, he can rejoin the majority of humanity who still lives offline.

The truth is, the culture Carr pines for never had a golden age except in the minds of its partisans. It's never been large or celebrated; exclusive and difficult would be better descriptors. Someone who spends their time jumping from blog to blog or refreshing their RSS feeds shouldn't turn around and cast blame on a fault-tolerant global information network for rewiring their brain. They did it to themselves.

...one more thought. A lot of the "me too-ing" of the Carr article has been fake concern about the "pose" or "tone" of blogging, that blogs by their nature foster an attitude of post-GenX ironic detachment or somesuch. For anyone who thinks that similar "bloggy" pieces of short, witty, self-deprecating writing didn't exist before the Internet, please get yourselves a volume of Montaigne.

Assuming, that is, that you can still read on paper.

New iPhone features

OK, I give in

Not writing here in almost a week usually means I have something on my mind that I don't want to make public.

So here it is: Yeah, we did put an offer on a house while we were in Norfolk. And the offer was accepted, so we have a contract to close on the house before Labor Day. It even looks like we'll be able to finance it without selling our current house, or selling Theo to the highest bidder.

We like this house a lot, but having been burned before by the homebuying process, I'm only about 51% excited about it right now and Ruth is more like 0.5% excited.

Maybe after the inspection I'll let myself get 60% excited or so, but don't expect any full-blown giddy around here (or any other details about the place) until we've signed the closing paperwork and have keys in hand. Email me if you're interested and think you're someone who should know this information.

We're home

It's been a long trip but we're back in Newport. Theo handled the car ride quite successfully, a good test run for the much longer drives coming in August and September.

The trip was a great success. We saw a bunch of houses we like in our price range, and most importantly talked to a mortgage banker who will give us a reasonable loan without selling our bodies, our current house or Theo. So we're planning our next move as far as making offers, and when there's something interesting to tell, you all will be the last to know. Thhhhhpt.

On my mind.

You know that you've got too many things on your mind when you think about checking the (running) washing machine for the baby monitor receiver. It was in the bathroom, thanks.

I don't post much about anything related to Ruth's work because I'm paranoid, and all evidence to the contrary I have to assume that her entire chain of command (Hi Mr. President) and all the other scattered millions who get DoD paychecks are reading whatever I write.

That being said, given that this blog is mostly personal and that this subject has dominated my thoughts all summer, I don't know why I haven't mentioned much that OHMYFRAKINGJEEBUS we're moving in about two months. This afternoon we leave for Norfolk to go look for a house.

Of course we won't be able to make any solid offers until we sell our current house in Norfolk. More than any particular home features, we want to move to a walkable area of the city where we can continue living with minimal car dependence, as we have here. As a lot of you probably know, it's not easy to muster much enthusiasm for looking at a bunch of homes that might not (but realistically, given the market, likely will) be around when we get around to making an offer.

In the end, I have to tell myself that our solid financial condition and the total buyer's market in Norfolk will leave us able to buy SOMETHING adequate in a neighborhood we can live with, even if our current place doesn't sell at all. We can even drop the price of our current place to a fire sale price, say 25% off our original asking price, and our equity would leave us with enough down payment to afford something nice in the area we want. [NOTE TO ANY POTENTIAL BUYERS WHO MIGHT HAVE READ THIS: FUCK YOU, I'M NOT LOWERING THE PRICE THAT MUCH. NOT TODAY, ANYWAY. AND YES, I'm intentionally screaming.]

This certainty in my brain that the variables of the situation all fall in our favor does not ameliorate the uncertainty, or the corresponding worry in my gut, at all. I should totally be preparing to get us out the door in four hours rather than writing a post, but it's one of those Get This Out of My Mind situations.

So right now I have posts percolating about last month's polo match (too many cute pictures to count) and Tom's "support systems for military husbands" post. If you see either of these posts this weekend, you'll know that the house selling and buying is going very, very well, but I wouldn't advise holding your breath on that...