Speaking of organization, I’m trying my best to get systems in place for that. I have a big calendar for writing shit down. It’s a “Year at a Glance” type deal. My only problem is finding double sided sticky tape strong enough to keep the goddamned thing from falling off the closet door all the time.  I don’t deal well with electronic calendars because they’re not immediately in my face all the time. I’m a visual thinker. The electronic calendars work great for macro type stuff like reminding me of doctor’s appointments, but for planning my day, forget it.

During any hectic, hastily-scheduled day, I get a number of ideas. When I’m at work, I tend to write them down on these little notecards that show up in the OR as a result of being included with surgical gowns. I’ve literally got several dozen of these cards if not over a hundred of them. When I’m not at work, I email myself the idea. You should see the archived mail file in my Gmail account!

The little notecards are in a box on my desk at home, really similar to what this guy does.

Granted, if I got around to making my videos, I would do it with a better camera. I think he must have filmed this one with a leftover security camera from 1987. My ideas? I don’t remember the last time I sorted through them, or even flipped through them like this dude, although I add to the stack every day. It’s a mess. I’ll probably never get around to it someday.

The ideas I get are anything from blog subjects or video blog subjects, t-shirt ideas, chocolate recipes, painting ideas, design idea, dumb jokes, and all sorts of other right-brain garbage.  I often wish I didn’t have a physiological need for sleep so that I could get around to all of it.

I’m the same way with projects too. I installed my own eight camera security system, which included much crawling around in tight spots in my short and obstacle-filled attic. I can pack for a weekend trip or a bike event really well. I’m excellent at getting errands done.  I tend to do well on busy days at work.

When I don’t have much to do, though, man I get lazy. On slow days at work, when all there is to do is clean stuff and stock shelves, I’m like a twelve year old boy procrastinating homework.  I call it “chimp work”. I should be happy, because I’m getting paid a San Francisco nurse’s wage to do the work of a trained ape, but I find it very frustrating. I’d rather be assigned to replace someone working a liver surgery and have them go do the chip work.

With every job I’ve had that’s been low productivity, I’ve been incredibly lazy. I worked at a plastic surgery clinic once where I was usually scheduled to work until 3:00pm but all the cases would usually be done by 1:00pm. The last two hours of my shift were for cleaning, stocking, and checking supplies for the next day’s cases.  During those two hours, all I could think of was getting the hell out of there. When I was younger, I had a job at a video store. This was one of those video stores where you could be there hours without a customer showing up. After I’d seen every frikkin’ movie in the place, I would find stupid ways to entertain myself. I’d draw. I’d try to set a personal record for holding my breath. I’d invent games. Funny thing, when a customer finally came in, it was such a drag because I would have to kick into “work mode”. These assholes were interrupting me. Seriously, I couldn’t wait for them to leave so I could get back to my impromptu solitaire games.

The year I spent as a car salesman was even worse. It’s an incredibly boring job when business is slow and the monkey work is horrible (blowing up balloons, rearranging cars on the lot, cold calls… yuck!) but it’s even worse when a customer comes on the lot because people have a prejudiced notion of car salesmen. It doesn’t matter what kind of person you are, you’re automatically an asshole in their book. I’d have to approach them, even though I didn’t want to, and I could tell they didn’t want to be approached. What made matters worse  was the reputation of the dealership where I worked. We ran those “no credit – no problem” ads all the time, but unfortunately there are a lot of people who don’t understand the difference between “no credit” and “bad credit”. My game of skipping rocks in the mud puddles got interrupted so they can treat me like shit for two hours of negotiation on a pickup truck for which they could not obtain financing if they had a 90% down-payment.

“Well, I don’t understand why I ain’t gettin’ no loan. You said ‘no credit – no problem’ and I ain’t got no credit”

“Incorrect, sir. You have plenty of credit, it’s just all shit. By ‘no credit’ we don’t mean we want people who can’t get credit.”

Of course I didn’t say that, but I wanted to.  That job was just the beginning of my path to the land of the jaded.  But then being jaded is another subject altogether.  I’m talking about being lazy.

So anyway, when I show up at a service counter and some entitled-acting woman with big hair and purple fingernails named Lesheshequaqua can’t get off the cell phone call she’s been on all afternoon while she half-assedly rings up my purchase at a small town Walgreens, I don’t like it, but I get it.

If I’m busy, I tend to stay busy.  I tend to do well and get shit done. When I’m not busy, I tend to get lazy and resent the idea of anything that pulls me out of that state of being brought on by dormant cerebral tissue. Yeah, I recognize that’s kinda ‘broken’ and I should fix it. It’s been broken for a long time though, so I imagine if I work really hard at it I should be able to change my attitude sometime before I drop dead of old age.

There has to be, right?

When something shitty happens, we demand justice.  That’s just human nature. If someone steals something of ours, we want it back. If someone hurts us, we want to hurt them back. But sometimes there isn’t a tangible way to get that feeling of justice. This is especially true in the case of sudden deaths. Sure, there might be a shooter to prosecute or a bad driver to sue, but that doesn’t bring back the person you lost, so there’s no real justice. Regardless of what happens to the horrible (or not so horrible) person, you’re not getting your loved one back, and you’re not going to feel “whole” in regards to the sense of loss. So it feels good to think that there must be some kind of reason, some kind of schematic, behind the death. Rather than just accepting that you’ve lost someone randomly to some asshole who tried to drive home from a night of drinking, it feels better to believe that a god had a plan for that person elsewhere… maybe as a guardian angel, maybe to reincarnate, or whatever. The comfort of a “master plan” works for problems ranging from relationship issues to huge natural disasters.

In North Korea, some of the prison camps house people who were born there. Some of the prison camps hold not only the person being punished, but the next two generations after. These people are subjected to hard labor, torture, and starvation. What’s the plan here? What kind of nasty, perverted god would allow a lifetime of human suffering to meet some grand scheme? I’m sure there are plenty of people who could reason it out. The human mind has an amazing capacity for seeing what it wants to see.

Rape? Terrorism? Infant mortality? Are such things part of some master plan with a happy ending?

The “master plan” idea removes notions of human responsibility, random misfortune, and our frailty in the face of such things as the ocean, bears, and falls from high places.  Anyone who has read and understood Life of Pi (or has seen the movie) understands the idea that a fantastical story with sentiment is much more pleasant than one of human cruelty and violence.

Another problem with the “master plan” is it removes the idea of human free will. An omnisciently-planned reality doesn’t leave room for human free will, and the existence of human free will contradicts the idea of a pre-planned reality.

Moreover, the idea that everything happens for a reason means that there is some specific outcome that is to occur from my having put on both the shoe and sock on my right foot before moving to the left instead of doing both socks first. It means there’s a special intention behind my having purchased two bunches of bananas instead of just sticking with one. It means there’s an envisaged specialness to the way I wipe my butt after a big dump.

It doesn’t make sense. Random makes sense.

Overall, the device is effective but crude. It uses short bursts of suction delivered in a hard-to-regulate means and must be inserted, withdrawn, and re-inserted a number of times to be effective. My daughter hates it.

One of my wife’s coworkers recommended the NoseFrida. When I heard about this thing, basically a mouth pipette with a filter, I laughed. The whole idea of inhaling away your baby’s boogers just seemed silly and kind of disgusting. But my wife insisted, and in fact had already ordered the thing, so I went with it. It only costs about fifteen bucks anyway, so it wouldn’t be too much of a loss if it didn’t do a better job than our existing bulb syringe method.

The genius of the NoseFrida is its simplicity. In fact, I probably could have fashioned my own device for a couple of bucks, but it’s cheap enough not to go through that trouble. To use it, you stick the hard plastic cone-shaped end of the tube in the kid’s nostril and then other end in your mouth and inhale. The suction time is only limited by your lung capacity and you can fine-tune the amount of suction as you go. You inhale softer for the runny stuff that comes out easy (I’m always afraid it will saturate the filter and make its way to my mouth but that’s probably just paranoia) and you inhale for vigorously for the sticky green boogers that don’t want to come out.

While my kid hates the bulb syringe, she doesn’t so much mind the NoseFrida. We tend to use it when she’s in her little bathtub, because the humidity of the surrounding air softens the mucus and we can easily rinse the device right there in the bathroom. Besides, playing in the bathtub is a nice distraction from mommy and daddy performing an unpleasant and invasive nose procedure.

Unlike the bulb syringe, with the NoseFrida you can see what’s coming out of your baby’s nose. You can decide on your own whether or not that’s a good thing. Also, the NoseFrida easily disassembles for cleaning.  After a few months’ use, especially with my kid having a nasty cold for the past couple weeks, I’d say this thing has more than paid for itself. My wife and I even take kind of a perverse pride in bragging about how much snot we’ve pulled out when we use it.

Click here to go to the NoseFrida website

Pre-baby and pre-marriage Carolina, enjoying a couple too many birthday drinks a couple months before I met her.

Before we were married, and definitely before
we’d thought hard about houses and kids.

One of Carolina’s favorite activities;
washing a skinned knee after a good bike crash.

Carolina in her natural environment.

Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

Mommy, meet baby… Baby, meet mommy.

Encouraging baby to try new things.

I really hadn’t thought much about what Carolina would be like as a mother before last November, which I realized after the fact.  Of course, when we met and through our first bit of dating, she was the cute girl who liked playing tennis, golf, bicycling, hanging out with her friends, and driving too fast.  We did all the things dating people do.  During our first couple years together, she played a lot of different roles; socialite, aunt, tenacious project engineer, and bicycle crash stuntwoman.

Although we hired wedding planners when we got married, Carolina did the majority of the grunt work in putting that together.  She’s always been the one to negotiate unusually over-the-top cooperation out of usually uncooperative people.  If you’re traveling with her and the flight gets cancelled, you will not be spending the night in the airport… the counter agent may or may not end up thinking she’s a bitch, but you will be on that plane.

In our household, she’s the one who figures out the budget, negotiates yardwork projects with the lawn guy, and keeps track of the mail.  She’s also usually a bit better at making appointments and handling a calendar than I am.  This balance of work flips me to the nontraditional roles like cooking, cleaning, getting the groceries, etc.  Of course I still kill all the spiders, wash the dog, lift the heavy stuff, and fix the broken stuff.

When Carolina told me she thought she was pregnant I told her she was imagining it.  When we had empirical evidence that she was, in fact, not imagining it, we both launched full-steam into “baby prep nesting mode”.  We had to find the house.  We had to get the nursery stuff.  We had to arrange the doctors.  So many open houses and so much real estate red tape.  So much research on child-rearing.  So much stress.  Time flew by.  2012 was a blur.

Well… 2012 was a blur until November 14.

Nicole came into the world with a huge amount of unplanned drama, but we very quickly recovered from it when we saw how healthy and beautiful she turned out.  She’s almost six months now and every day with her has been fantastic.

Carolina and I don’t always agree on parenting techniques, and for me that’s the most stressful thing about being a dad.  We both make compromises on lesser things and stick to our guns on things we think are most important.  For the most part, we don’t end up having major disagreements… However, if Martians came right now and zapped me away forever, I know Nicole would turn out absolutely fine without any input from me whatsoever.   The same is true if they’d zapped me away last November.

Nicole would grow up a confident, loving, hard-working, athletic, and worldly girl.  She’d graduate college.  She’d pursue her dreams.  She’d speak excellent English and Spanish and quite possibly some other languages.  She’d cook excellent arepas and probably not-so-excellent catfish.  She wouldn’t get pushed around by rude and ignorant people with “customer service” jobs.  She’d recover quickly from a bicycle crash and play and excellent game of tennis.  She’d get all this from her mom.

While I’m glad I’m around to watch all this happen and participate in raising Nicole alongside my wife, I know Carolina would have it handled just fine if the little green men zap me away to Planet Xthreeegonoth.  She would doubt herself and worry a lot through the years, but I hear that’s what being a mom entails.

Nicole is a fantastic baby because her mother is a fantastic person.  Oh, and nobody should try that “of course she’s fantastic, she’s a baby” nonsense, ’cause not all babies are fantastic.  Some babies, in fact, are little jerks.  No, I’m serious.  OK, I’m kind of joking, but I’m partly serious.  Nicole is a happy and well-adjusted baby who loves meeting people, has a massive amount of curiosity, and can roll with a change in her routine with the best of them, and that’s nurture, not nature, my friends.

I couldn’t be happier knowing Carolina is my daughter’s mommy.  I’m confident Nicole is also happy about it.  I hope she knows she’s appreciated every day, not just some day in May the greeting card companies decided on.

By the way, if anyone is listening in on my conversation with my brain, a “snap” is a slang term for a “kelly”.

WHY, brain, do you start to sing “Cielito Lindo” and end up changing to something about Porky Pig being a big fat sonofabitch by the third line of the song?  Either that or you chant the entire lyrical content of the chorus as if you’re ranting angrily in Spanish.  All the damned time.  It’s NOT funny.  It’s stupid.  It’s annoying.

By the way, if anyone is listening in on my conversation with my brain, “kelly” should have been capitalized, like “Kelley” because it was named for a doctor… specifically Howard Atwood Kelly, M.D from Johns Hopkins.

I have no idea why “Johns Hopkins” is written without an apostrophe.  Are the Johns plural?  Was there someone named “Johns”?  I don’t know.  But you know what?  I didn’t know Dr Kelly’s first and middle name until I Googled it a few seconds ago, so there’s that.  I can tell you Freddie Mercury’s real name was Farrokh Bulsara and David Bowie was David Jones but he changed it so he wouldn’t be confused with the Monkees.  Didn’t have to Google that stuff.

By the way, a “kelly” (Oops. I’m sorry, a “Kelly”…), which is also called a “snap”, is a hemostat.

I only recently learned that closing parentheses should really go before the end-of-sentence punctuation and I’ve always known I use ellipses too often.  “What’s up?” you say?  The opposite of down.  Down, however, is completely relative… as is “up”.  For example, “up” in California is the exact opposite as it is on the other side of the planet, which contrary to popular belief is NOT China, it’s the Indian Ocean.  Yep, no matter where you are in the contiguous US States, if you dug a hole straight through the planet you would end up in the Indian Ocean, not China.  By the way, “US States” is redundant.  So is “ATM Machine”.  The opposite side of the planet from Bogotá, Colombia is Jakarta, Indonesia.  I know that ’cause my wife’s Colombian.  No, that’s not true… I know that because I’m a huge dork.

By the way, a hemostat, like a Kelly, although Kellys aren’t the only kind of hemostats, is an instrument primarily intended to stop bleeding from small blood vessels during surgery.  When you were watching M.A.S.H. and Klinger said “clamp” the person next to him probably handed him a Kelly.  Wait, that’s not true because Klinger didn’t do surgery.  I meant Hawkeye, who was named because of his Iowa alma mater, University of Iowa… I went to school there too.

In space, there is no “up”.

Dr Kelly also had a rectal speculum named after him.  I learned that when I Googled his name.  I’ve never seen a Kelly rectal speculum.

Dammit, brain, see what you did?  You got me all off track from what I was originally trying to say.  Wait.  What was I originally trying to say?

There is also a hemostat called a “mosquito”.

There’s no proprietary system of feeding the video through the internet, out to space, and back to the house like the Dropcam we sent back after experiencing 27 second delays. This camera works directly through the wi-fi in your home, using its own IP address (which you can specify to a fixed address with the right router), and has username and password protection to keep the creepos from snooping.

The video is fed right to our Apple devices.  With a Mac, we just type the IP address of the camera in a browser window and the image and camera controls pop up on the screen. For iOS devices, there’s an application (there are also apps for Android and Windows Phone, for those of you still using a BlackBerry, use http://www.totalcontrolapp.com/).  We tend to use my wife’s iPad as the main monitor, so we get a great big image with decent sound from the baby’s room.

Sometimes there’s a one or two second delay, but that’s to be expected with any camera system of this type.  Best of all, it only was only a bit over a hundred bucks! That’s less than what you’d pay for the models marketed solely as baby monitors, and most of those have crappy cameras, tiny screens, and no pan/tilt features.

Before I gush too much I’ll mention the not-so-good aspects of this camera.

1. First of all, setting it up for me was a major pain in the ass. Much of that pain can be avoided by noting the points below.  It took me over four hours, but if you know what to expect and you’re prepared, I can imagine it taking about twenty minutes maximum.

• First of all, to set up the camera, it needs to be plugged into your router via an ethernet cable.  My router was an Apple Airport Express from about four years ago.  There’s no ethernet output on that thing.  So the first thing I found myself doing after I unboxed the camera was making a quick trip to Radio Shack at 8:30pm to buy a new router before they closed.  I went with a Netgear WNR2000-100NAS and I’m happy with it.  I haven’t yet figured out what I’m going to do with the old Apple router.
• Also, the instructions included with the camera are very poorly written.  I suspect the original language was Mandarin or Cantonese and my portion of the instructions were translated by someone for whom English is a secondary language.  After some reading, rereading, and playing around, I finally managed to find my camera’s IP address with Foscam’s app.  I then followed Foscam’s instructions for setting up the camera on my computer, which was really frustrating.  Also, on my Mac, the damned sound doesn’t work.  Supposedly there’s eventually going to be a workaround, and maybe there has been already, I haven’t checked.   What I eventually learned was that setting up the device on the iOS app was a piece of cake.  I wish I’d done that in the first place instead of screwing around with the program on my laptop for three hours trying to get the sound to function.

2. The apps for your phones and portable devices aren’t free.  It’s something like five bucks for the iOS app.  I think the Android and Windows apps are slightly cheaper.
3. The controls for pan and tilt are very jerky, especially on the iPhone.  This isn’t a big deal if you’re scanning around the room or trying to focus on a large general area, but when you’re trying to get the camera aimed so that all four corners of the crib are in frame it’s easy to get a bit frustrated.
4. The wall mount is hideous.  I found it to be a necessary item in my scenario, because I wanted the camera aimed directly down at the crib.  If you have the option of placing the camera on a shelf this isn’t an issue.
5. The camera has to be plugged into a wall outlet, which requires routing a cord.  For my case, it’s just a matter of aesthetics.  Older kids could easily escape your watchful Eye of Sauron by simply yanking the cord out of the wall.

Now it seems like I’m bitching. Really, though, even with that list of five gripes, I love this camera. Best of all, since it’s portable and has so many control features, I can continue to use it as my daughter grows. Also, if I need to move it to a play room or the back yard, all I have to do is unplug the power cord and move it wherever I need it.

At any point, you can start and stop a video recording or snap a photo with the app. You can also set the record function to trigger every time the baby moves. We did this the first night we had the camera and woke to find over 600 short video clips on the iPad. Needless to say we don’t use that feature anymore.

If your baby is curious like ours, you might see a little glowy-eyed munchkin glaring at you through you monitor app. That’s happened to us a couple time, as our kid was fascinated with the night vision LEDs for a week or so. I noticed when this happens, she kind of looks like The Terminator. My wife doesn’t think this is as funny as I do.