We can all stop pounding vodka, my emails are no longer in Russian. Unfortunately, my dictionary still is. The problem seems to lie within the Baskerville font this time around, though I still can't say why. I was up all night trying to fix it, and I went to bed with that sick feeling in my stomach like I'd just wasted more time in this precious life. But the garbage men hauled off some large trash items I had placed out there, just as a test, so they saved me some time I would have blown on removing them myself. Perhaps it's all finding its own equilibrium. God bless the garbage men! I'll say it again, these guys have done more for world health than anyone in the last 150 years.

Not that my aluma-garbage poses a threat to world health.

I've been barking and whining about the DST change, but Matt reminded me how great it really is. He's right, of course. I want to wake up with the sun and get home from work before it goes down so I don't feel like the day is done and gone, all spent on bacon-fetching. I prefer taking out the garbage cans in the daylight, instead of dragging them down the driveway in the dark, with the silhouetted neighbors peering through the windows at me, scowling at the ruckus. Taking that first sip of coffee and seeing the morning sunlight casting a shadow of the blinds on the hardwood floor always warms my soul from the inside and revs up the day. Just the sight of it takes me back to some good moments: living the artist's life in that bungalow in Pasadena, waking up in the cottage on the coconut plantation during my honeymoon. I could sit and sip coffee all morning, just watching the shadow slide across the floor. And I have, at times prayerfully.

A moment from my honeymoon, best vacation of my life, nearly five years ago:


So DST is great, if only for the sunlight. And it's becoming easier. When the baby comes, you spend weeks begging the little bugger into a routine, and then she gets a cold and won't sleep through the night, throwing off any schedule you may have mastered, or at least mustered. You finally get her feedings synched with your timetable so you can fit in the rest of life -work, making dinner, doing the dishes- and then DST rolls around. Everyone adapts to the new time just fine, except the child, who is now waking up an hour earlier, needs a nap an hour earlier, is hungry an hour earlier. You'll get her whipped into shape and then she'll get sick again, or you'll go away on vacation and she'll be up late in the hotel, with her sleeping off hours in the car. Then you notice on the calendar that DST is going to roll around again in a couple weeks and you either give up entirely or force the issue -which is all nonsense to a child.

Children have a unique sense of time, alien to us. They understand God's sun and moon and the pangs of hunger and sleep. Clocks were invented by man as if to best God, See? I can measure your daylight! And then we go ahead and change them every six months without admitting their imperfection. To children, the clocks are merely a novel way to display numbers, with the meaningless flipping of symbols, and a way to measure only what they can and can't have right now.

This is why teaching patience is so important, and if you haven't learned it your child will teach you (and it will be a painful experience.) But if this life is a gift, then patience should be more than just tolerating the passing of time with a long wait. Without patience, life is an intolerable succession of inaccessible moments that makes joy fleeting. With patience, comes the moment to be able to reflect on past and current joys and the hope of them to come. It is here that the beautiful details of life reveal themselves to be the once and forever hiding place of God.


~

The Bitchin Factor at work. (Also, your tax dollars.)

Yes, we can launch a shuttle into space in the middle of the night to build robots on the space station but we can't fix the hole in my street!

No sooner did I finish plinking out yesterday's notes did I drive off to work and notice some effort had begun on The Neighborhood Problem. By "effort" I mean that someone came along and spray painted a bunch of lines and letters on the asphalt. This happened once before, but this time the lines and arrows are bigger and the words more descriptive. Is something being planned? Some kind of removal or excavation or... or... well, it could just as easily have been a creative graffiti artist, some frustrated mom with time on her hands after the kids are off to school.

The shuttle launched at 2:30AM last night. Mrs. Ditchman asked if they sleep on the way up there, which I thought was funny, but it's a fair question. It takes about two days for the shuttle to get to the space station, even though it's only a few miles up, and once they're there the sun rises and sets on the station like every 20 minutes. So if my DST lag is getting to me, I'll just think about the poor astronauts.

In addition to the 200 million dollar Canadian robot they're going to build at the International Space Station, they're also going to install a closet. I guess they need somewhere to put the tools. The Japanese Space Agency designed the closet. If that sounds funny, just imagine your closet in zero gravity, so, yes, we're going to have to put the Space Agency in charge for that one. (I imagine a real poofta in his pink NASA jumpsuit, prancing around the space lab in zero G, holding up color swatches and draperies.)

It's a good thing I got most of the complaining in this past week because the inspector signed off on the big job. Yes! I am very grateful to be able to put it behind me. Over budget and overdue by a few grand and a few months. Chalk it all up to experience, that one. On to the next set of headaches. (Note to self: increase contingency dollar amounts.)

I would have posted it to the Alumablog, but I downloaded a suitcase of some wonderful new fonts into my 'puter and somehow my Helvetica got replaced with the Cyrillic alphabet in the process. It wouldn't have ordinarily been a problem except that Helvetica is the font that EVERY APPLICATION USES. All my emails and address books are now in Russian. I can't work on the website. All other projects are on hold. Damn Macs! Curses to these infernal things! They're worthless! Save yourself the brain-in-a-vice pain of Mac OS and buy a PC!

(Just kidding.)

So here's the big beautiful aluminum bastard in case you were wondering what all the fuss was about:


Dasvidania!


~

Again, more days where I just can't seem to get anything done. But it was a fine weekend, with godly weather and friendly people. We attended a birthday party yesterday morning for a friend of the Little Ditchman. Hullabaloo was there! My kid saw him come in and ran over and sat down. He said he recognized her, but all the stars do that. (People calling in to talk shows all the time: "You probably don't remember me, Dennis. I called a few years ago? I was the guy with the friend who..." Dennis: "Oh sure! I remember you!") But she woke up that morning announcing that Hullabaloo was going to be at Zach's house, and sure enough, when you wish upon a star dreams really do come true. She's a Hullabaloo groupie! There's two Hullabaloo guys, but I've only seen the one (which, I guess makes him "Hulla") as, if you want both guys, you've got to shuck out double the shekels. They do something like 350 shows a year! Man. Do the math and it sounds like a good living, playing music and making kids happy. I was thinking I could save money and be my own Hullabaloo at the Little DItchman's party, a la Steve Martin in Parenthood. I mean, how hard is it to play "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain" on guitar? I would grow a goatee and call myself "Ballyhoo".

Two thirds of the way through the show she bailed out on her own. Went outside and looked at the stuff on the patio. Too much of a good thing, I guess, but of course, I've always said that a short attention span was a sign of higher intelligence.

Also, there is this:


It cannot be explained. Months ago we all noticed an "upwelling" in the center of our street. It was the damnedest thing! It started as something of a curiosity, evolved into "local item of interest", but has since been elevated to "object of concern". Upon close inspection, it looks as if something is erupting out of the street, like one of those bitter man-eating tripods from Spielberg's War of the Worlds. The asphalt started to crack, and then there was another upwelling adjacent to it, and then we noticed that the street never dried. Someone went out and put an old caution horse to it, and calls to The City were made. I heard someone came out and did tests. Evidently nothing can be done about it. No really, that's what they said: "Nothing can be done about it!" Some say it is a natural spring, and with groundwater levels higher from the recent rains, well, we should have all seen it coming.

I'm glad I sealed my foundation before I laid the hardwood floors, is all I can say. Some are worried because they've watched local residences slide down hills without precedent. Some are worried that the street will open up into a sinkhole the size of the Everglades. And still some are concerned about the state of affairs with the city officials and the local Dept. of Works. That's me. The local train stop just opened up last weekend. It was 10 years late and 150 million over budget, and I'm still waiting on a final building inspection of a little shade structure and the deletion of "Roberto's Taco Shop" from my city account.

Add this to the woes of Daylight Savings Time, and suburban living plods on endlessly. DST is tough on a kid, and somewhat worse on the parents. Why, the party yesterday was at 10:30AM, meaning it was really 9:30AM! Earliest birthday party I've ever been to, I can tell you, but at least the Dad served good hearty morning brews out of the fridge in his garage and naptime came after, which is how one schedules these things, (and all of life.) I try not to lose any sleep over it, but it's DST so I did lose sleep over it. Literally. An hour to be exact.


~

Last night at dinner the Little Ditchman refused to clean her plate. Actually, she refused to eat most everything that was on it, for some reason. We have her trained to ask, "May I be dismissed pleased?" when she's done so she doesn't just slide down and roll around under the dining room table while everyone's still eating. Anyway, she asked to be dismissed to which Mom and Dad simultaneously replied, "No!" She cried and whined, wearing us down at the end of the day -when she knows full well we're already worn down past the tread- and yelled "I wanna be dismissed please!" Mom said, "Eat one more green bean and then you can be dismissed."

The Little Ditchman immediately grabbed one bean, jammed it in her mouth, made a face, and climbed down off her chair.

She's not even two years old yet! I was amazed, since I thought this was five-year-old behavior. This kid understands everything you say, notices everything going on around her, and fills her empty memory with it all. Mrs. Ditchman, less impressed. "I'm with her all day," she commented. She talks like a two-year-old, so it's easy to assume she doesn't know much. (Not my wife, the child.)

And yesterday, the little one commented out of nowhere from the back seat, "Daddy loves tools!" We don't know where she got this. We're not even sure she knows what "tools" are, exactly.

Who knows what else she's got in the little person brain of hers. Probably best to keep a better eye on myself. I said "damn" the other day, only to have it repeated back to me by the toddler. (Whoops.) And another thing, kid, I don't necessarily love tools. I just have a lot of them because of the job. Now shut up and go potty train yourself.

Speaking of "damn" and "tools", this work week is finally coming to a close. The Big Commercial Job is mostly behind us, and we're just waiting on the Dreaded Final Inspection. I'm losing sleep over this because the architect drew up the plans with a two foot front overhang on one section and it's clearly been built at three feet. But I didn't have a choice! The post would have been on the fence line! The inspector is the type of guy who noticed last week that the middle hole was an inch off. And then there's the bureaucrats of the city building and planning departments sending us bills for all those fire inspections we ordered for Roberto's Taco Shop. Now I like mexican food, but we've never done any work with any "Roberto's Taco Shop". I don't believe I've ever even eaten at any "Roberto's Taco Shop", but try and tell that to the people behind the desk under the fluorescent lights. It's torture. "This is your receipt... And this is my receipt for your receipt." Administrative officials really are like terrorists: False sense of power and authority, inability to hear the other side of the issue, their paperwork as effective of a weapon as a a dirty bomb. And as messy. "Mistake? Heh, heh. We don't make mistakes." At least with bureaucrats and paperwork, people don't die. (Just people's dignity.)

So we're waiting on the final inspection. I'm holding my breath. It may come today and it may come next week -since they're closed every alternate Friday, and Jeebus knows what Friday this is. I'm sure there's another Brazil reference for that one. Brazil is one of the greatest films ever made, by the way. Brilliant. Prophetic. Hilarious. Depressing. There's not a government building in the world that I haven't walked into where lines of dialogue from the film haven't echoed in my head. I'd tell you the whole story of pulling the permits for this patio cover at the retirement community, but it'd be easier if you just netflixed Brazil. It's the story of my life. (Before I got married and lived happily ever after.)

"They've gone back to metric without telling us!"

Tell you what: we're closed this Friday, too. Have a nice weekend!


~

Some mornings this life is like tactical wrestling. It's grabbing you by the heels and trying to flip you upside while you're looking for an advantage, all the while fending off that ever-present foe, Gravity itself.

The Little Ditchman won't eat her grapes this morning. Won't eat grapes! She also refuses the bagel and cream cheese and pours her cup of water over it. She will only have nuts. Nuts! Nuts, I say. Nuts. Also, I went to get her out of the PJs and into some proper daytime clothes and had her in a shirt that was at least a size too small. Well, we're all older today.

Had a fine birthday, if you were wondering. Spent it building an aluminum patio cover all day and then had dinner with the in-laws. It wasn't the sunset martini cocktails on the beach I had imagined for myself, but you can't have everything. Birthdays are kind of a funny thing for me, as I've kinda been partial to Christmas and Halloween. There were a lot of birthdays in my family, half of them forgotten. My dad's birthday is just a few days after mine, so ours was always kind of celebrated together. Do you like German Chocolate cake? My dad did. So that's what kind of cake I always had on my birthday. Perhaps that's why I've never been particularly impressed by cake.

The best part of yesterday was all of the phone calls and emails I received. Thank you! Thank you, all! I got a call from almost everyone in my wedding party (you know who you are) and a call from almost everyone in my family (you know who you are). I have five siblings and six nieces and nephews, so these family holidays get spread over the calendar rather thinly. Anyway, it was never really a wow-bang day growing up. My dad: "Isn't it your birthday? How old are you again?" Nearly every year.

I admit I'm often the sibling-out on the birthday well-wishing. I don't know what it is, really. I hereby resolve to change! I am going to make my own calendars with everyone's birthday and anniversary on it! From here on out it will be impossible for me to neglect! (Oh, brother.)


~

It's my birthday! No use beating around the bush about it. But it does always kind of spring up on me. I guess that's what happens when your birthday is near the beginning of the month. Oh, it's March! Already? What happened to February? Whoa, hey, it's my birthday! And suddenly I'm older.

And wouldn't that be odd? If you just aged a year in a day, instead of gradually over the course of time? Then there would be no hiding it at all, and an entertainment for everyone else. Oh, look at that poor sap. Must be his birthday today. He looks at least a year older than yesterday.

I'm 38, in case you were wondering. 38. 38! Ah, well. I guess I feel about 38. Actually, now that I think about it, I feel more like 36, but I always was slower to mature. In any case, it's good to be 38. It doesn't really bother me. I'm in better shape than ever, ran three marathons in the past nine months, the weather's good, and I'm finally getting some plants repotted.

Every year I do it. The cold passes and you look out to see all the plants faded and stuffed, their roots clearly strangling themselves in undersized containers. The leaves have gone yellow from too much rain. The buds of spring flowers are stunted from lack of fertilizer. So I re-pot.

No one was making me stay, so I ditched work early yesterday and went to Lowe's. I noticed they had finally got the water plants in so I got some of those for the pond. And then I got a new lime tree to replace the one I killed by having too much clay in the bottom of the pot. (Poor drainage contributed to an iron deficiency, I wager. Sad thing finally just gave up and quit growing.) Also got a nice orange Freesia and a few others. Went home and continued the repotting, busting my hump out back of my house instead of someone else's. That's the way it is. I complain all week about how tired I am, then spend the weekend digging holes and pushing wheelbarrows.

But I feel fit! And I'm beginning to get a tan, so that's nice. My hair is still turning gray, but I think the hairline has stopped its receding. I'm 38!

These are the happy years, I'm sure, the ones that just fly by. The ones where the kids grow like weeds and need repotting daily. You spend so much time with your hands thick in the soil of life that you barely notice the seasons changing. If life has its seasons, 38 is midsummer, with the children's laughter like the summer sun and your slightly graying hair like dry meadow grass missing the spring rains. The earth begins to crack in midsummer, but you don't notice -you're going full bore through life raising a family, building a home, running a business, getting things done. Everything's growing. Harvest is months away to worry about.

Being a kid is a magical time, with the curiosity of springtime and its new growth, bursts of life, and the ever-changing mood of weather, but being a 38-year-old adult is better than being a kid, at least, that's what I'm teaching mine. (If it's not, then what have they got to look forward to?) Adulthood brings freedom, at long last. Unrestrained, unhindered freedom! Independence from others deciding your fate! The full power of self-determination! Oh sure, all the old obligations are still around, but somehow in adulthood, there is joy found in fulfilling them. Freedom is what kids long for all Spring, but will only arrive come Summer.


~

When an avalanche falls on Mars, is anyone around to hear it?

Evidently our robot satellites are! I find it more fascinating that we have robot satellites circling Mars than I do that there was a ho-hum avalanche on the red planet. It's a neat photo, with its contribution to science close to nil. It's really all about the Bitchen Factor, which is why NASA exists to begin with. Why do we go to space? Cause we can. Cause it's bitchen! Is there scientific knowledge to be gathered? Sure. Also, it is bitchen. This is a big part of why Americans do things.

"We don't know what set off these landslides," said Patrick Russell of the University of Berne, Switzerland, a HiRISE team collaborator. "We plan to take more images of the site through the changing Martian seasons to see if this kind of avalanche happens all year or is restricted to early spring."

And this is important why?

"Our Mars program is the envy of the world," said Alan Stern, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. "We plan to launch a total of five more missions in the next decade, beginning with the Mars Science Lab rover next year and a Mars Aeronomy Scout mission in 2013."

See? Because it's bitchen.

Like the hard-at-work Martians, I spent my weekend moving mounds of dirt from one location to another, as if I didn't get enough of it at work last week, but this was my house and my dirt. Why did I do this? Because my daughter thinks it's bitchen. It is. I've been building a sandbox.

It puts me in the company of other great earth-movers of the world.

The weather is terrific today, as it was yesterday, making it so much easier to fulfill MY MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE HAPPY! It's amazing how weather can have such an effect on one's mood (or, at least, my own). It was cloudy and overcast last Saturday when I was moving mounds of dirt from location to location. I had so looked forward all week to working in the yard, only to have dreary weather on my Saturday afternoon. "What a drag," commented Mrs. Ditchman. Yes, it was a drag. And that, literally. With the wheelbarrow. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

But today it's beautiful out, and it's work, work, and more work. A drag, yes, but somewhat less so than yesterday, which is why I missed a post.


~