February 2011 - A Happenin' Month

So much going on each February - Valentines' Day, my birthday , Grace's birthday plus a bejeezus-load of year-end work for myself and Grace. Free time in the first few months of the year is always in scarce supply but we still made time for the good stuff in life.

As Adam gets on the home stretch toward his second birthday, he has been ramping up his collection of sentence fragments - conversation is getting diverse and even more interesting! "I help" "Adam fall down" "Daddy Ipod please" and so on. Getting into some wholesome family mini-traditions; settling for Sunday morning breakfast watching Thomas the Tank Engine is a current favorite.

Over at Sugarland's open-air mall, running out the post-lunch energy

The building blocks, they go kablooie

Round and round, goes the whirly-basket

Adam and Audrey work together (?)

Uncle William helps out with Ipod monkey game fruit puzzle section

Cruisin' the living room with daddy power

Adam literally hanging around with yoga-like spinal flexibility

Adam and his friend "Cake" (Kate) make the swingset scene

Adam and Mommy do some soccer-gymnastics

Adam's Tower of Babble

D.J. Monkey Choo-Coo Train

Sneak Peek at Adam & Dad Storytime

Audrey!

Evelyn!

Daddy has "1" birthday this month!

Rockin' the shades

Load up the delivery ATV

Adam is fascinated with the neighbors' ceramic dog

What a great photo of mommy and son!

Christmas 2010 and January 2011 - in mid-February!

Q1 (the first three months of the year, in non-accountant speak) is not the best time of the year for free time and idle projects like photo/video uploading and blogging. Work tends to be as bracing and furious as the hard freezes that swept our area in the last couple of weeks and energy tends to run low.

So now that the year-end financials have been assembled, blessed, and shipped off to the worldwide powers that be, let's catch up on some family moving / still images!

Christmas 2010

Christmas for the young man starts shirtless and +Slinky

Adam takes the Hasbro Fast n Furious Tokyo Drift car for a spin

Audrey and Adam modeling the J. Crew Kids' Christmas collection

Paw Paw and Gung Gung testing the specs of Evelyn's cheeks

Adam and Audrey explore sine waves through the medium of Slinky

The family crowd gathers for gifts

Mommy performs the first of many soundings of this horn

Adam gets his ATV on

Audrey the Christmas elf

Storytime for the kids with Gung Gung

Discovery Green! First Time Ice Skating

Not easy to pose on the ice

A return to Moody Gardens Festival of Lights - slightly foggier / drizzlier this time

The Official Christmas Family Photo (and no, it's not slouching - our Christmas tree was that short)

January!

Hanging out with Mom, Dad, and Grandma in Victoria - New Year's Day +1

Laundry Basket Spaceship Rides - for as long as Adam's weight doesn't exceed Dad's arm strength limits

Nerf and Adam share some rare face time

Nose!

The coolest ATV-rider hat ever

Rolling down our street

Winter is for football!

Winter is for futbol!

Tunnel shenanigans

Rainy day ABC12345s

Adam's first bike ride

Ad music that drills a hole in my brain

The winter holidays are great - good times with family, excellent food, presents and whatnot - but the sooner they are over the sooner I will be free from hearing this ad on TV and wanting to drive my Pilot into a lake in protest.





I know the ad men threw this song in there because it's catchy and light and emblematic of all the bright and happy lives that Honda owners lead but for me it happens to be the type of late 2000s alt-folk-hipster rock (?) that I couldn't stand the first time my friend's friend played the entire Vampire Weekend CD on a never-ending loop during a couple of days at my friend's family riverhouse.

November 2010 - A Time for Adam and "Punkin"s!

(pumpkins)...November begins with the throwing out of Halloween jack-o-lanterns and most often ends with Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.

November was a really full month, from having our good friend Steven stay and visit with us on his way to a New Orleans software developer conference to a nice, breezy day at the zoo and ending it all with a bunch of Chow-side family over at our house for the Thanksgiving break. Lots of time for Adam to play with his cousins and various aunts and uncles, lots of time for the elders to play Mahjong well into the late hours.

One day you're carrying your son everywhere he needs and the next you're wondering how he got so tall and so fast on his feet!

Happiness is a well-stocked toolbench.

Steven: Bringer of Smiles.

Steven and Adam appreciate each other's version of "The Aristocrats"

Contest winner!

All the cool Jedis wear white.

Superblanket Boy

Adam hangs out with new cousin Evelyn.

Showing the old folks how Mahjong is played

Adam and Audrey laughing it up at gymnastics

Photographed shortly before his gold-medal triple backflip dismount

Time to make-a the joose

The kids are crazy with the running and the yelling.

Adam helps Dad with his shoes

Mommy and Adam checking out the fishes.

Adam chats up some antelope (or xebu? can't remember)

Zoo time is good time.

Halloween 2010 Adam - October

Nearing the 1 1/2 year mark, Adam's continuing to branch out his personality. Whether getting funky to his toy music or excitedly grabbing a book and plopping down on Mommy or Daddy's lap to point out the animals and shapes, he's staying active on a constant basis. Mommy and Daddy having a great time too!

Technically Adam's second Halloween this year but this time around he was no mere candy-distributor, he took his costume on the go and made the rounds on our street to collect some various forms of sugar to be eaten by Mom and Dad later.








Ready to Hit the Streets for Some Serious Trick-or-Treatin'



Meet and Greet with the local Halloweeners



Bravely Facing the Lurking Doorway Spider



Halloween Bee Dance!



The Cleaning-Up Smile



Breakfast with Beard-Style Dad




Making Paw Paw & Gung Gung proud: Drinking Soup the Chinese Way




Readin' with Dad

AT&T's lack of shame

I'm known relatively far and wide for being a grammar snob; am I crazy to keep up this vendetta? Should I just lighten up?

Happened to have the World Series game three on TV tonight and in passing noticed that the in-game AT&T World Series Trivia infographic read, from what i can remember, pretty much as follows:

"What was the last year in which the American League team won it's first home game of the World Series?"

AT&T is a major company with presumably a large marketing staff. Nobody along the chain, from the junior staff who researched and wrote it to the marketing manager who approved it to the tech guy that programmed it as an on-screen graphic, noticed or cared that they should have used "its" instead of "it's"?

You might say, "I'll bet you none of the viewers who read that sentence noticed or cared either", and I'd say that's part of the problem too.

Proper grammar and word usage, on their own, aren't really a significant issue; what's more important is that "it's" instead of "its" captures a downward trend in the state of professionalism. At one point in time, corporations' marketing arms were judged on both the effectiveness and the polish of their messages; if that goes, what can the rest of society and culture do but start sliding away as well?

Maybe "it's" and "its" don't bug you that much; how about if the trivia read "During the last half of the Rangers' season, how many of they're games went to extra innings?". Where's the tipping point? Do you think anyone in the AT&T brass saw to it that someone was fired or at least verbally ripped up for the written gaffe that millions of baseball fans saw splashed alongside the AT&T logo?

The muddled but sporadically depressing and brilliant movie Idiocracy has several scenes of a radically dumbed-down future in which slack-jawed people endlessly gape at mindless TV dreck and communicate basically in monosyllabic grunts. There are a couple of steps between a few proofreading errors and that reality, of course, but it does all start somewhere..

Back in my day... / Gimme now!

Could just be the thirtysomething in me talking, but I was listening to Adam Carolla's podcast today and in the course of conversation he made a remark about the intersection of youth and modern technology that I instinctively agreed with:

(not a direct quote but close enough)

" You feel a little bit sad for our kids growing up now, that they'll be able to watch How The Grinch Stole Christmas in August, and that they won't give a shit about it"

It's really true; there's a certain balance between escaping the needless inefficiencies of the past and the ever-increasing accessibility of the present and near-future and in the end I'm not really sure what is ultimately better.

Back in the 80s and 90s when I did most of my growing up in a world devoid of recording technology there was an air of excitement when CBS rolled out the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special. You saw the commercial announcement sometime earlier in the week and mentally marked your Transformers calendar, making sure to speed through dinner on the day of the show in time to plant yourself in front of the TV on time so as not to miss a minute. All bathroom breaks had to be handled during the allotted commercial time; any moment you missed being absent from the TV room would be one you'd have to wait another year to see.

During the golden years of the Simpsons my appointment in front of the TV on Sunday nights at 7 pm was pretty much non-negotiable.

Same thing in the water-cooler Seinfeld era, one of the more prominent last signifiers of the "collective media experience"; if you missed out on the popular show of the moment, you forfeited opportunities to enjoy it the next day a second time in discussion with your friends / coworkers.

Sure, it was all incredibly inconvenient when you look at it from afar - adhering to Entertainment's schedule instead of Entertainment bending to fit your life. However, the introduction of DVRs, iPods (from which I admittedly do enjoy tremendous utility on a daily basis) and all have removed the concept of delayed gratification from the entertainment equation and weakened the sentimentality and sense of occasion one can feel toward a particular experience.

Not going to be home to catch 30 Rock? Just set your Tivo to record it. Forgot to do that ? Just go watch it on Hulu....I suppose this could be a slight caveat as I think Hulu posts new shows a day or two after the original air date, but still a world away from "oh well , see you next year Charlie Brown".

Anything is in reach at any time, which is great to the extent of not being robbed of the chance to enjoy something meaningful/humorous/special but at the same time strips any media from truly belonging to a time or season, a moment in which you feel a bond however slight with a particular community.

Accessibility is a wonderful thing, no mistake - as one example I know that I'm more educated and enriched from many more possible sources than I could have known ten years ago, as a result of new technology's subservience to my go-go lifestyle: I load up my iPod with podcasts and listen on the way to, from, and at work about business and money matters from NPR's Planet Money team, general how-to (from the How Stuff Works guys), and get entertained by the likes of the aforementioned Adam Carolla, Kevin Smith , and others.

So having what I want when I want it or when I can access it has its share of good too, but I realize both its worth and its drawbacks based on my having grown up in a world of relative "without". My son and everyone else in his generation will grow up in an environment where on-demand media is the only existence they will know; telling Adam about my days in footy pajamas waiting eagerly in front of the (analog) television, getting a palpable charge of excitement (then, and even now the tremors swell from deep within my memory banks) from the sights and sounds of the announcing lead-in....

....will be a completely alien concept to him. How do you now effectively explain and instill that value of how having to wait for something, despite its short-term downside, heightens the overall mood of a moment and in the end typically makes for a greater overall experience?

In the end I'm sure this will just be my turn at the "in my day things were better because...", same as how LP records are better than CDs (another innovation of my day that will be an extinct relic before too long), Carson is the funniest late-night host of all time, and so on. I guess my generation is no more exempt than any of the preceding that maybe, this time, what's unfolding in the new landscape is detrimental to the human experience.