Just the boys

Theo and I are finally getting back in the game. Tuesday afternoon/evening we were pretty much wiped out, after getting up early to take Ruth to the airport. Neither of us is at our best at 5:30 AM. Luckily for all three of us, airline travel is a lot less of a hassle when you flash military orders and a red passport.

The Norfolk airport is just as we left it, except it now has a Starbucks concession. When it's 7AM and you're holding back tears because you don't want to upset the 17-month-old who is staring at you and depending on you and you alone for the next 7 weeks ...well, a venti is in order.

We're all lucky I got us to the airport at 6AM in a decaffeinated state. Ten years ago, did I really make a habit of driving the Chicago expressways at 8AM with no coffee?

So the first day was bad news. Daddy wanted to stare at the wall and stew, but Theo wanted constant attention. Not the best start. But I got over it pretty fast and today we took a long walk, probably 7 miles or so round trip. I put him in the stroller and finally tracked down the Elizabeth River Trail.

This woefully underpublicized resource runs from West Ghent (where we live) down through Fort Norfolk, into the Freemason Neighborhood and Downtown, and much farther. The city is doing some construction on a section, so I had to detour into The Hague, well worth the early morning view. I'm so dismayed by the lack of useful descriptions of the trail I could find using Google that I've decided to break out a camera and Google Maps and document it. The way my other projects are going, If I finish that before our next move, it will be a major victory.

So the two of us walked down to the USS Wisconsin and back to West Ghent. Now knowing that our three or four favorite neighborhoods in town are all within a half-hour walk, I once again feel like the money we're spending to live in this area is so worthwhile.

I've also managed to be pretty good about another plan for deployment, to eat as many meals as I can with Theo. Never could do it when Ruth was around, either because of timing conflicts, me being unable to get dinner ready by Theo's early dinnertime, or because we wouldn't give up our valuable just-the-two-of-us-and-food time. With just the toddler and I here, none of that applies. Although I did have to throw him a piece of bread tonight while I fixed a hasty meal. [In another one of those "separated at birth" coincidences, Tom posted about this at Milspouse just yesterday.]

In truth, I settled in fast because I'm excited for her. I'm excited because she was ready to do her job, and now she's out in the thick of it. It will be hard to adjust to a new command and new duties as she's dumped into the middle of a deployment but she's had to deal with more.

I don't worry about Ruth and I. Seven weeks is a cakewalk, almost not worth worrying about when so many people (like us, earlier in the decade) go through so much more. I worry more about how the two of them will deal with the separation, it's a whole new world for them. I suppose 17+ hour days with no time to think about home will help ease the transition for Ruth. For the toddler, Routine is King, and anything works as long as you do it at the same time every day, so I plan to just carry on as usual, show him lots of pictures and movies of his Mommy and talk about her often.

The last question -- am I a worthy single parent? We'll just have to wait and see.

Excitement?

A question I've been hearing a lot lately is "Are you excited about your new house?"

The answer, every time -- No. I'm not excited. Not even a little, and I'm not sure why.

It's a very nice house. It's in a gorgeous neighborhood. Our neighbors are friendly and generous with us. We're an easy walk or near-instant drive to everything we enjoy about Norfolk. There's very little it requires in the way of redecorating or repairs -- I painted a couple rooms and we're hanging curtain rods.

There's still plenty of boxes to empty and things to be organized and stored and hung on the walls, but when I'm not busy procrastinating, isn't all that part of the fun of a new place?

Yet, the only thing I've been even mildly excited about this week was our new refrigerator.

I definitely don't regret buying in the midst of the current financial climate. Before the real estate slowdown, this house would've easily sold for far more than we paid, so in that sense we got a "great deal." We have a solid, unspectacular loan with lots of money down from a local bank and my wife has an extremely secure, well-paid job in (sadly) a growth market. We also received some reminders during this move about the uncertainties and inconveniences of renting that left me happy we didn't go that route here.

Despite all our friends here, we did leave some friends and a comfortable routine behind in New England; I could just be missing our past lives, looking for something to replace them.

One possibility that has been sneaking into my head recently -- Ruth is weeks, or even just days, from getting on an airplane and heading to wherever her new ship will be meeting her. As we've learned from experience, approaching separations such as deployments cause all kinds of strange, almost random behavior when we know they're inevitable. This could be predeployment dread that I'm just directing at our new house.

Or, maybe I've finally truly internalized the nomadic lifestyle of the military family and it's left me hopelessly cynical about what should be a happy time. I know that if Ruth's plans come together then this house, however beautiful, is going to pass out of our lives in 4-5 years or less.

So...yeah. This little vent has cleared up nothing in my mind. It is a very nice house. Theo, Guinness and Aslan have settled in like they've lived here forever. I guess that's enough for me.

It's been a long day.

Photo credit: Grandpa

We're here

It took about 11 hours total, pretty amazing with a toddler and two cats, but we made it to Norfolk. We may have a house tomorrow, I hope.

Cats were SILENT almost the whole way down, which isn't like them. Theo was an absolute angel, because he always is. Bedtime for me. Walkthrough tomorrow morning...

Dear users of the Craigslist "Free Stuff" section

The proper response to a listing under "Free Stuff" is "When are you available for me to come to your house and take these items off your hands?" The proper response is not "Hey, call my cell phone."

Let's think about this -- from the moment I decide that something in my house that has been sitting in a closet since I moved in 3.5 years ago is worth so little to us that it must be given/thrown away, I'm doing YOU a favor. From the moment I pressed "publish", I stopped having an archaic music box in my house, and started holding a piece of YOUR property until you can come here and pick it up.

I might give partial credit for "Call my cell phone to give me your address and I will come straight over," but chances are that I'm going to get three responses in the first couple hours a listing is online, and whoever makes me do the least work is getting the goods.

And yes, I realize it would've taken me less time to dial a phone number than write a blog post. Shuddup.

Home, if you can call it that

Theo and I arrived back in Newport from our extended roadtrip yesterday afternoon.

Of course, with just about a week and a half until the movers arrive, this place is barely home anymore. The hiatus may continue, aside from a snarky comment or two and maybe some reader items posted.

Blogging from the road never even occurred to me. Too busy living, or just busy, I guess.

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.

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.