Halfway down the Danube

The last ten years (part two)

The last post covered 2001 to 2003.  What happened then?

2004 and 2005 were good years.  We were living in Bucharest, Romania, in a nice townhouse in a somewhat run-down but pleasant residential neighborhood.  I had an interesting job as component manager of a large USAID project. Claudia was pregnant with our second boy, David, when we arrived; David was born in July 2003 and was a baby and toddler throughout this period.

Bucharest is an interesting town, and those were good years to be living there.  Romania was desperate to join the EU, so my work was pretty easy and straightforward.  The economy was growing rapidly, so you could see things getting better from month to month.  We were two hours from the mountains and three hours from the beach.  The expat community was friendly.  I had a Dungeons and Dragons group.  There were large, green parks with playgrounds, great for the boys.  We lived in a small townhouse with a friendly landlord, easy walking distance from the supermarket.  What was there not to like? 

2006 was a complicated year.  In January, I got a job offer from BearingPoint, a large consulting company.  The job was to take over CLERP, a USAID project in Yerevan, Armenia.  CLERP was a troubled project and USAID had asked BearingPoint to fire the Chief of Party.  BearingPoint was casting around for a replacement, and they found me.  Meanwhile, Booz Allen wanted me to go to Southeast Asia for a month.  I ended up going to Southeast Asia (Laos and Cambodia) for a month and then moving to Armenia.  At this point we had just-turned-four Alan, toddler David, and new baby Jacob, so things were getting a little challenging.  But we found a pleasant house in the Arabkir suburb of Yerevan and settled in.

Here's a summary of my time in Armenia: I was there just over two years, of which the first six months and the last six months were pretty horrible.  The year in between was just fine.  The first six months were rough because the project was pretty messed up and needed a salvage job.  The last six months were rough because 1) USAID cut our budget, which meant we had to end the project several months early, while slicing off a bunch of workstreams;  2) we got a new COTR (the client representative who gives direction to the project) -- the old COTR had been very good, pedantic and meticulous but honest and fair, while the new one was a crooked local with a chip on his shoulder; and, 3) BearingPoint was spiraling downwards into bankruptcy, causing the home office to become both incredibly difficult and almost completely useless.  The year in between, none of those things were true, so it was actually pretty good. 

We never did fall in love with Armenia -- we found it a difficult country in a bunch of different ways -- but we did have some good times there, including a wonderful trip to Nagorno-Karabakh.  Alan had a good teacher, David had a good preschool, and Jacob learned to walk in the back yard (and ate figs right off the tree).  And the view of Mount Ararat never palled.

But CLERP ended in March 2008.  I stayed on another three weeks to do wrapup and write the final report, and then flew back to Germany -- where we had just bought our first house, in the small town of Fladungen, and where Claudia was several months pregnant.  Good things both, except that I was now without a job.

 

 

Chisinau, last days

And so back to Fladungen.

My project was originally supposed to end in late September.  It turned out that we had extra money -- a fair bit of it, actually.  The previous Chief of Party, the guy I replaced, had been pretty frugal.  (Actually way too frugal.  He'd let several key personnel go, and the project was several hundred thousand dollars under budget.)  So I was able to get a "no-cost extension" and stretch the project nearly to Christmas.

But everything must end. So now I'm back in Bavaria, looking out at our snowy back yard (actually not that snowy; it's an unseasonably warm December) while Claudia teaches English spelling to the boys at the kitchen table.

Odds and ends:

Moving to Moldova

So I have a job offer.

It's a bit strange, because it's only for seven or eight months.  A project in Chisinau, Moldova has lost its Chief of Party.  The project ends on September 30 of this year, but they need a COP until then.  It looks like that will be me.

Claudia and the boys will come with me.  We're thinking to put the boys in the International School there for the rest of the school year -- three months or so.

Some obvious questions:

Why Moldova?  -- Because that's where the job is.

Where is Moldova? -- Check a map!  It's in Eastern Europe, between Romania and Ukraine.  From where we are, it's about 1600 kilometers' drive. 

What's it like?  -- Briefly, it's a small, poor, former Soviet Republic.  The capital is Chisinau, a small city of about half a million people.  By all accounts it's a nice enough place, if poor.  It's usually pretty quiet.

Moldova is not part of the EU.  They dream of joining some day, but that would be many years from now, if it ever happens at all.

Will this lead to more work? -- Excellent question.  Short answer: we don't know.  The company that's hiring me thinks they have a very good chance of winning a follow-on project.  They also have made noises about hiring me for something else when this project ends.  This is not my first trip to the rodeo, alas; I have learned, through grim experience, that consulting companies may sometimes overstate these sorts of things just the tiniest bit. 

On the other hand, who knows?  My own experience suggests that it's easier to find a long-term position when you're already in one. 

How are the kids taking it? -- Pretty well so far.  They're worried about leaving friends and grandparents behind, but intrigued by the notion of a new country.  More on this anon.

How do you feel about it? -- Honestly?  Pretty mixed, though mostly positive.  I was hoping for something longer-term -- like, years.  Seven months is sort of an awkward period of time.  Also, it's going to knock a hole in my short-term career, which has actually been going really well lately; if this hadn't come up, I was going to make a business trip to DC for a conference, followed by three weeks in Vietnam, followed by another trip to the West Bank.  Basically I was booked through early April, which was nice.

But the short-term career wasn't supposed to be a career.  It was always supposed to be a stopgap until we found something more stable.  And it's been hard on Claudia and the kids, having me away for weeks at a time.  This will give us at least seven months of stability and living together.

Also, to be honest, I'm looking forward to being a COP again.  Being a freelancer is interesting, but running big projects has its own special fascination.

So, what kind of project? -- Oh, the usual.  Business environment, commercial law.  Tax stuff, which will be new for me, which is good.  Helping the Moldovans get past the lingering Soviet legacies of red tape and paranoid suspicion of the private sector.  Very similar to what I did in Romania and Armenia; should be right up my alley.

Well then, what next? -- I have some short-term obligations that I still have to finish.  The biggest one is, I'll be in Washington, DC for a few days around February 14 in order to make some presentations at a conference. 

After that, it's up stakes for Chisinau.  Our tentative plan is to drive, taking three days and two nights.  (You could do it in two days and one night if you put the hammer down, but we don't think keeping the kids in a car for 14 hours is a great idea.)

So that's the news.  Watch this space (and our Facebook feeds) for more information as it comes.

The last ten years (part one)

In brief:

I started the decade, January 2001, underemployed, having graduated from Yale with my Masters the previous May.  I was working part-time tutoring students for the LSAT, but it wasn't what you'd call a career.  I was living off savings in a studio apartment off DuPont Circle in Washington DC, keeping company with my then-girlfriend Claudia.  I spent a lot of time on Usenet.

And then...

2001 June:  Proposed marriage to girlfriend, which she accepted.  Got job offer.  (It was in that order.)

2001 July: Went off to Serbia to start new job as consultant.  This was less-than-a-year-post-Milosevic Serbia, and it was kind of a strange and interesting place.  We ended up living in Belgrade for almost two years, and made a number of good friends.  Oh, and I trained for a marathon.  And found some people to game with.

I lived at first in a dark apartment above a courtyard in the Dorchol neighborhood of Belgrade, just around the corner from (then President of Yugoslavia) Vojislav Kostunica.

2001 October:  Came back to DC to run the Marine Corps Marathon.  We ran past the Pentagon, which had been hit by the September 11 hijackers just a few weeks earlier, and was still under reconstruction.  Strange times.

Also that October: got married, in Ostheim, Germany.

2002 March: A baby boy!  Alan, who is now eight and a half and loves Legos and comic books and science.

Also that March: found out that I'd be out of a job by May, because our project was being replaced by a bigger project that wouldn't have a place for me.  ("We have too many lawyers."  Long story.)

2002 May: Finished the project.  Became a freelancer working with the World Bank.  This was interesting, but stressful -- getting paid could take months.

2002 summer: Trip through the Adriatic -- Montenegro, the coast of Croatia, Slovenia -- with Claudia and baby Alan. 

2002 Autumn: Claudia came down from Germany with the baby, and we all moved into a nice little house in Golsvortiyeva ('Galsworthy') Street in Belgrade.  Two bedrooms, big bathtub, cheerful blue and yellow decor, skylight that made a pleasant drumming when the rain came down.  We were only there eight or nine months, but it was Alan's first real home.

2003 March, Serbian PM Zoran Djindjic assassinated.  I'd walk in his funeral procession, along with nearly a million other people.

2003 April:  Started this blog.

2003 May:  Got a job offer in Bucharest, Romania, as a component manager on a large USAID project.  Left Belgrade.  We would live in Bucharest for nearly three years.  Still by far my favorite of our long-term postings -- nice country, lovely people.  (Oh, and lots of gamers.)

2003 June: Moved to Bucharest.  We traveled there by overnight train, a trip that we both still remember.  Found a nice place to live -- the house on Strada Bruxelles, just north of the city center.

2003 July:  A baby boy!  Enter David, currently seven years old, who loves reading and Nintendo and is incredibly picky and stubborn about food.

2003 September: Claudia moved back from Germany, post-birth, and we settled down for our first winter in Romania.

(I was still spending a lot of time on Usenet.  Though, with two kids, less.  Had met my deputy Maria, who would become my best friend in Romania.  Hadn't met the gamers yet.)

More in a bit...

Tribes

We have a facilitator, a guy who helps us get meetings.  Zambian, thirtyish, economist-turned-consultant.  Very energetic.  Like a lot of Zambians, he has a biblical name -- let's call him Elijah.  Elijah is pleasant enough, and very engaged, but up until tonight hadn't shown much emotion.

So we're sitting around the table having our evening meeting -- five consultants, Mary the admin, and Elijah.  The following conversation takes place:

Colleen (a consultant):  ...so they're trying to sell it for export, but the volume is just too big.  The first posting on Zamace didn't attract a single bid.

Me:  Wait, remind me.  What is "Zamace"?

Colleen:  It's the Zambian commodities exchange.

Me:  Oh, right.

Colleen:  So we don't know what their exposure is, but they've taken at least $20 million in commercial bank loans --

Me:  You know, "Zamace" sounds like the name of a 70th level reptile lord in World of Warcraft.

[silence]

Colleen:  [blank look]

Mary the admin:  Oh my God you are such a dork.

Elijah:  [silently laughing]

Me:  Elijah?

Elijah [struggling to compose himself]:  Ah, hah, ha ha --

Me:  Horde or Alliance?

Elijah:  For the Horde, man.

Me:  For the Horde.

Summer vacation, cont'd

It's still summer vacation.

Oh, the little ones have gone back to kindergarten.  Leah is two now, so soon she'll be staying all day (until 4:00) instead of coming home at noon.  Jacob is going-on-five, so now he's a "vorschulkind" -- the kindergarten class just before first grade.  He's the youngest in this group, but he's big for his age.  He's starting to read a little -- we use the Headsprout lessons, which have worked very well.  But the two older boys are still home, and still enjoying it.

It's been a very cool and rainy August.  We had a fire in the wood stove a couple of times.  Retired the plastic swimming pool a couple of weeks ago, haven't refilled it.  Rain almost every day.  It's been a great year for slugs, mind.  (Something I just discovered: baby slugs, right after hatching?  Are white.)

The boys and I are still plowing through The Lord of the Rings, though we've reached that kinda slow part early in _The Two Towers_.  Claudia has a bad cold.  I had a fairly horrible toothache last week -- dentist on vacation all month! -- but got some painkillers, and it's mostly gone away, at least for now.  (Have I mentioned the Crappy Teeth Gene?  My father, two sisters, me, various cousins, and now it appears the boys as well.  Overall I can't complain about my own genetic legacy, but I could wish I hadn't passed the Crappy Teeth Gene on to my poor kids.)

Work: I'm currently waiting to hear on long-term bids in two countries; both are FY 2010 money, which means we should hear by late September.  (Because that money is supposed to be obligated by midnight on September 30.)  These things are rarely done very far ahead of the deadlines.  So it's unlikely that we'd hear anything before Labor Day.   (For non-Americans, that's September 6.)

Short-term work, I've got another trip to the DR Congo coming up -- mid-September through early October.

It's still quiet.

Stupid fake Manji biscuits

A bit of background: many years ago, I took a year abroad in London.

This was back in the Thatcher years.  And while London was a very interesting place in many ways, it was not yet a great place for a poor college student to eat.  Cheap, student-level restaurants were mostly British and -- there's no nice way to say this -- nasty.  I lost 20 lbs. that year.  I pretty much survived on two things:

1)  Indian food, especially those little cheap sambosas you could take home in a bag.  They'd stay good for up to a day.  I must have eaten a thousand of those things.

2)  McVities Milk Chocolate Digestive Biscuits, the most perfect food ever created by man.

God, I loved those biscuits.  Slightly chalky biscuit body, like a graham cracker but a little denser and not as sweet.  Coating, one side, high-quality milk chocolate.  Simplicity, elegance, power.  They are wonderful chilled with a glass of milk, or warm with tea.

Cleaning out the shed

We cleaned out the shed in the garden today.

This was one of those large, scary, kinda disgusting jobs that one puts off, and puts off, and puts off some more.  In this case, for two years.  The shed is at the far end of the back yard, and it's pretty big -- the size of a one-car garage.  When we first bought the house, we walked back there, lifted up the shed door, and said "whoa damn, this is a huge thing here".  And then we spent the next two years saying "you know, we really need to clean that out sometime".

Long-term readers of the blog will recall that we bought our house from a 90+ year old lady, a retired schoolteacher who lived here for nearly 40 years with her boyfriend.  (Yeah, she had the same boyfriend for almost 40 years.  No, they never married.  There are over 1500 stories in the naked Fladungen.)  And old people, they sometimes turn into packrats, you know?

Over a hundred wooden crates.  Oddly shaped pieces of lumber, too big to fit in any fireplace or stove.  Dozens of flower pots, all sizes.  Empty paint cans, old tires.  Three generations of gardening tools, ranging from "hey, this is still nice and sharp" through "wait, what the hell does this thing do?" to "metal piece promptly snaps free from wooden handle, falls to floor -- clang."

Short-term

A bit more on life as a freelancer.

I live by short-term work.  To pay the mortgage, put food on the table and provide for a basic living, I need about 100 days of work per year.  Less than that means dipping into savings; more than that would be gravy. 

Some of my work involves travel and some does not.  A typical job is a mix -- go somewhere for two weeks, then come back and spend a week writing a report. 

When I describe this to people their first reaction is often "oh cool, you get to travel a lot!"  And that's true: I do travel a lot, and that is cool.  But it's more complicated than that.  For one thing, long distance business air travel is no longer the thrill it used to be.  For another, a lot of my time in-country is like "wake up, breakfast, meeting meeting meeting meeting meeting, write up notes in hotel room, dinner, do e-mails, sleep".  It can be really interesting professionally, but there's usually not a lot of time to wander around and play tourist.

And then there's the family.  Claudia has things down to a routine, but there's no way to gild it: being a single parent of four small children for two or three weeks at a time is hard.  It's just wearing, mentally and physically.  And while the kids are used to Daddy being away, they still tend to get really wiggly-squirrelly for a couple of days after I leave, then again after I get back.

This is not to complain!  I have work, and there are some parts of my life that are really quite pleasant.  (Most obviously, I'm getting way more time with my kids than I would if I were working full time.) It's just... a little complicated, is all.

Anyway.  So what short-term work is out there right now?

What's up (May 2010)

Noel asks, "you there?"  Oh, yes.  But then, why so quiet?

I'm now starting my third year as a freelancer.  When we left Armenia, I thought this might last... maybe six months?  But then BearingPoint went bankrupt and, well, it's been one short-term gig after another ever since.  Burundi, the Philippines, Uganda, Senegal, Congo, Tanzania, two weeks here, three weeks there.

If I were ten years younger, or fifteen years older, this would be fine.  Swell, even.  But turning Claudia into a single parent of four small kids for weeks at a time is suboptimal.  And the uncertainty (will I be there for Claudia's brother's wedding in August?  For her birthday?  The boys' first day of school?) is a bit wearing.  And I was sort of having a career before, and I guess I'd like to get back to that.  And also, health insurance. 

Being freelance has its points!  It certainly teaches things: self-sufficiency, patience.  I get a lot of time with the kids.  Everyone should be freelance once. 

But I'd kind of like a job now.

So what's going on?

Writers block

I don't get it very often. 

But when I do, it's unpleasant, because writing is more or less what I do for a living.  So the inexplicable inability to write more than a sentence or two at a time gets compounded by a fairly unpleasant cocktail of economic anxiety and "what the hell is wrong with me?"

So far, it's always passed within a day or two.  Like my occasional bouts of insomnia, it seems to be just this weird thing that I get sometimes.

(Hey, this post is clearly labeled TMI.  Right down there at the bottom, see?)

The trees in our back yard

September was plums. 

Holy God, was this a year for plums.  We have eight old plum trees in the back yard, but last year they didn't do much of anything.  So it came as a surprise when they burst into... what's the word for an excess of fruit?  Lots.  Lots of fruit.  Plums all over the grass, attracting wasps.  Claudia made plum jam and plum cake and plum chutney, and the baby crawled around the yard picking them up and eating them.  I picked buckets full.  We offered them to friends and neighbors, but everyone else was having a plum year too.

Ripe plums are blue with a blush.  Violet means not quite ripe.  The tastiest are ones that have just fallen off the tree, picked up off the grass before the bugs get to them.

For some reason this inspired me to count the trees in our back yard.  There are twenty three -- nineteen adult trees, a sapling and a seedling.

Unemployment

Last day of employment.

Briefly: my former employer went into Chapter 11 a few months back.  The reorganization process is under way, and involves selling off chunks of the business.  My division got bought by a competitor.  The competitor doesn't want any of the "on call" employees, the guys who are hanging around waiting for projects. (I assume this is because they want to keep costs down, but nobody has gone into that much detail.)  Phone call, check your e-mail for the termination packet, thanks for your service, hope to work with you again someday, oh sure let's have coffee when you're in town. 

Click.

This doesn't come as a surprise. I've been waiting for the shoe to drop since the bankruptcy filing.  (In fact, I was mildly surprised it took more than two months.)  And the wolf is not at the door -- we have savings, and I have enough short-term work to keep the mortgage paid and food on the table for at least the next little while.  I've been a de facto freelancer for almost a year now, flying off to Burundi and the Philippines and such; as a practical matter, the only real difference is that I no longer will have to check with my employer for conflicts of interest. We've been living quietly, and can continue so for quite some time.  I /think/ we'll be able to land another position before too much more time goes by.

That said, it's been a bit of a shock.  I haven't been fired from a job since 1986.  (Title insurance.  Not my thing.)  There's a whole oh my God how am I going to feed these kids? thing going on; it's not rational, but there it is.  There's been something of an... I'd say an emotional rollercoaster, except that implies high bits.  More like one of those cheap Haunted House rides, where you go on rails through different rooms with a different stupid reaction in each one.  Bam!  Here's anger!   Now fear!   Try some depression and self-doubt!  Bam! 

Okay, well. I think we're mostly past that.  So now what?

Well, we go on COBRA -- thank you, COBRA Stimulus; you're going to save us rather a bit of money -- and I get serious about looking for a job.  Otherwise, no big change.

That's the news from Fladungen.  How are you guys?

Things I loved that are going away

Sleepless in a Marriott. Been meaning to write a version of this for a while.

I have been slowly saying goodbye to:

Tabletop role-playing games.

Floppy comic books.

Comic book shops that sell floppy comic books.

Print science fiction magazines.

Print newspapers.

Usenet.

Some of these will stagger on for years yet, dwindling but still around.  In 2020 I expect Usenet will still exist, in some attenuated spam- and troll-infested form.  And a decade later, when we're all driving hydrogen-powered cars and getting text messages from the AI sailing the blimp probe around Venus, there will still be a few retirement-age guys gathering to play D&D.  (Or, more likely, to argue about which edition.  "But 3.x nerfed the druid!").

Print SF magazines, on the other hand, are clearly circling the drain. They'll be gone within five years.  And traditional floppy comics won't be far behind -- they locked themselves into the comic-shop market back in the 1980s, and a lot of comic shops are marginal businesses that won't survive the recession. 

Print newspapers are the only thing on that list that's of much consequence or interest to the larger non-nerd world.  Smart money says that within a year there will be a major US city, and probably several, without a daily paper.  I don't think that's been true since... oh, the 1850s at least.  It's a little hard to imagine America without newspapers and everything that goes with them: headlines, political cartoons, editorial endorsements, Sunday color funnies. Sic transit gloria mundi.

What will you miss?

Circadian

Circadian is the technical term for biological rhythms that run on a daily cycle. 

Lately I've been more and more aware of mine.  I'm not sure if this is because the rhythms are actually getting stronger (though they may be) or because of the life I'm living just now.  I'm not going to work every day; and while the days are pretty full, I have a lot more liberty to notice how my energy and attention seem to rise and fall through the day.

Young Americans

Okay, that Bowie track.

Young Americans is not considered one of Bowie's great albums.  He was out of his mind on coke at the time, of course.  And in a somewhat tentative and experimental space musically -- glam rock had run its course, and it wasn't clear what was next.  So the album is kind of a mess.  Basically there are two tracks to take away from it: 'Fame' and the title song.

But they're good tracks.  Flawed, but good.  'Fame' was Bowie's collaboration with Lennon, and if you haven't heard it, go listen.  And 'Young Americans' was... well, it's hard to say exactly what it was.  But it's worth five minutes of your time.

(Note the saxophonist and the backup singers.  Bowie was experimenting with soul and with funk.  He'd get better at putting it all together later, but this is a pretty promising rough first draft.)

The day after

Wednesday morning I went to the airport to get Claudia.

It turned out that waking up at 2:30 was -- I can't say a mistake; I'm really glad I saw history made.  But I'm perpetually a little short on sleep, and losing half a night made me really, really sluggish and stupid.  So much so that I had to pull the car over at one point and put my head down for five minutes.  Alan was in the back seat (he has vacation this week; the other boys are still in kindergarten) and he poked me after a while.  "Get up, Daddy!"

Then I made a wrong turn on the autobahn -- this on a route I've driven perhaps a hundred times -- and ended up making a vast circle around Frankfurt, losing an hour.  Poor Claudia had to stand and wait, wondering what had happened.

Well: we did all get home in one piece at last.

Hedgehog

Oh, almost forgot: we caught a hedgehog today.

We were out in the yard raking leaves (okay, I was raking, the boys were sort of goofing around) when Alan suddenly yelled, "Daddy, an eagle!"  Or that's what I heard.  Of course he said Igel, which is German for hedgehog, but it did make me stare wildly up at the sky for a few moments.

Anyway, there it was, a little gray-brown spiky lump by the side of the plum tree.  I sent Alan upstairs to fetch David (Jacob was asleep) and we watched it for a minute.  It didn't do anything.  So I got the red plastic bucket and very slowly crept up on it.  This turned out to be unnecessary; it didn't run or even startle.  When I got close it curled up a little, and I was able to scoop it into the bucket easily.

True thing: I've never seen a wild hedgehog before.  Well, we don't have them in the US.  We have skunks, raccoons, opossums, and porcupines, but no hedgehogs.

Well... it was interesting.  They can curl up, you know?  And the texture of the spines is pretty neat.  David reached into the bucket and touched it readily.  Alan was more cautious -- he's heard they have spines, and was wondering if that meant it could sting or such -- but eventually both boys were gently stroking and poking it.  The hedgehog just curled up a bit more.

There was the discussion you'd expect: what do they eat? slugs and earthworms (I think) -- and the question of keeping it was raised and vetoed: it's a wild animal, it has a life out here -- and then I tipped it gently back out of the bucket and we went back to raking and swinging on the swing and hanging around.

After a few minutes Alan yelled, "Daddy!  It's moving!"  And it was.  Not in any hurry, mind.  (Do hedgehogs ever hurry?  They must sometime, right?)  It sort of waddled across the back lawn to the big juniper berry bush that grows by the back terrace and disappeared into the leaves.

And that was it.  They're not very dramatic animals.

Still... neat.

Yard Work

Cleaned the back yard yesterday.

The yard is not that big -- maybe 50 meters by 30?  -- but it's well forested, with more than a dozen fruit trees: apples, cherries, a plum tree, a big old walnut.  So, leaves everywhere, and lots of fruit on the ground.

My mother-in-law, A___, came over to help.  Her idea.  I think it was partly to hang with the grandchildren, partly to make sure the house wasn't falling down without Claudia here (Claude is in the States with the baby for a couple of weeks, did I mention that?) and partly because she just likes that sort of thing.

A___ is a ferociously energetic worker, so I was a little apprehensive.  But it turned out fine.  I did most of the raking, she picked up most of the apples.  I broke down the kid's play set -- too cold now -- and stored the pieces in the shed and cleaned the sandbox and put the cover on it.  She  sorted the apples into three categories: rotten (goes to the local "green dump"), okay (goes to the local juicer, who'll juice them, keep the leftover dry paste for apple fodder, and give us a chit that can be used to buy juice or other stuff), and perfect (downstairs for eating through the winter).  My father-in-law brought over the little trailer, and we filled it eight or ten times with leaves, dried grass, fallen twigs, and rotten apples.  A___ came by at ten in the morning, and we worked at it on and off until six in the afternoon.  The work still wasn't done -- the smaller front yard is hardly touched -- but the back yard looks fantastic.

Of course, there are still plenty of leaves on the trees, so I'll have to go out again for a couple of hours next weekend.  Still!  I'm really pleased with how this worked out.  It helped that it was a beautiful day, clear and cool and crisp.  (A bit unusual, that -- October around here tends to be foggy, especially in the mornings.)

Yes, this is a "daily minutia" post.  But here's a thing!  Come November, I'm going to try the post-every-day thing again.  Did it last November, and that seemed to work okay.  Maybe I'll eventually finish some of those threads I started back then, who knows.

Anyway, that was Saturday.

Misereeeeey

Everybody is sick.

No, not quite.  Claudia, though very tired, has managed to fight it off.  The baby isn't sick thank you God.

But Alan brought home a bug from school last week, and Jacob got it, and David, and me.  Alan has been home most of the week.  Jacob has developed a weird secondary staph infection, which doesn't seem to be dangerous but has put creepy-looking spots all over his face.  I'm achey and sluggish.

It doesn't look like anyone is going to die or such.  Just lots of runny noses and coughing and fever and little boys lying on the couch watching more television.

For no particular reason, I'm going to link to this.  It came out seven years ago -- a geological era in Internet time -- and it's still awesome.

And for now, that's all.

Snails and oleander

We have a big oleander plant, which I hate.

See, oleander leaves are poisonous.  And not just a little, either.  They're, like, eat one and die kind of poisonous.  And I can just see a small child (of which we have no shortage around here) picking up a leaf and nibbling on it. 

But this plant is precious to Claudia: she's had it for around twenty years.  It was a tiny little thing when she got it.  Now it's huge, and sits outside on the back porch.  We've warned the boys about it, and I make a point of collecting the fallen leaves and dumping them in the compost pile (composting will break down the toxins -- I checked), but it still makes me twitchy.

Anyway. Sitting on the back porch today, I noticed a small motion on the ground near the oleander.  It has been in bloom recently, with lots of trumpet-shaped white blossoms.  Well, some of the blossoms had fallen on the ground... and a couple of snails were eating them.

I bent over slowly and watched.  We have two sorts of snails in our garden, the big plain ones and the little stripey ones.  These were the big guys, shells about two inches across and bodies double that when extended.  Long as your middle finger, say.  They come out more when it's cool and damp; it was a cool damp morning.  They were methodically munching up the flowers.  One had the narrow stalk of the trumpet stuck down its throat, so that the whole blossom slowly turned and vibrated with its chewing.  It looked like a cow working on a cornstalk.

The internet is unclear on whether the blossoms are as toxic as the leaves -- one page says yes, another no.  If they are, I guess the toxins don't bother molluscs.  The snails don't seem to go up the plant after the flowers -- maybe because it's mechanically difficult, with light, close-packed stems?  Or maybe there's something that keeps them off?  But now that I'm paying attention, I see that the fallen blossoms disappear quickly -- the plant is producing plenty, but there aren't any on the ground around it.

High point of my morning.  Go figure.

Ping

Less than a week now. 

Claudia is having her face done (because you want to look good when they wheel you into the operating room).  Jacob is napping: we're keeping his afternoon naps for now, but shortening them to an hour or so.  The boys are watching Disney's Jungle Book (the original one from 1960 or whenever) while I type this on the couch.

-- Do you know, I've never seen TJB before?  The animation is pretty good.  The story... hm.  I should do a post on kid's movies one of these days.

Job stuff: I'll be going to Burundi for two weeks in late August.  This means I'll be leaving Claudia with three little boys and a two-week-old baby.  Claude says she's fine with this. 

Bujumbara is one of the few national capitals that's still kind of hard to reach by plane.  There aren't a lot of flights: two a week from Brussels, while everything else goes through other African capitals, mostly Nairobi.  So I overnight in Brussels going out, then wait two days and take a red-eye coming back. 

I also have an interview in a couple of days that might lead to a long-term job.  Still iffy at this point, so perhaps more in a bit.

Where we're at: July

Twenty-some days to go.

If all goes as planned, Claudia will go into the hospital about three weeks from now, have a planned C-section, and be out in a few days.  The boys will be on summer vacation then: in Germany, it's about six weeks long, and goes from the end of July to early September.  So, a busy time.  I'm stocking up on superhero cartoon DVDs.

Work, hum.  I just finished the report on the draft Jordanian company law.  This was surprisingly hard to write.  It ended up being very very short -- around 20 single-spaced pages.  By the standards of international consulting reports, this is like... I don't know, a Twitter post or something. 

Basically the problem is that the draft law looks fine.  There are only a couple of major problems with it, and they're really easy to describe and fix.  I'm in the position of the car mechanic who says "it was a loose wire, and I did an oil change while I was in there.  Otherwise, you're good."  This is the first time this has ever happened to me.  I mean, international comparative commercial lawyers aren't cheap, so you don't usually retain one unless you strongly suspect there's going to be a problem. 

Okay, I have a notion of why this happened in Jordan, but it treads near the edges of what it's professionally appropriate to discuss.  Let's say I don't expect it to happen again very soon. 

I have one other short-term assignment on deck: Burundi, for two weeks -- late August and early September.  Yes, the Burundi in Africa.  Yes, that will involve leaving my post-op wife with a new baby and three little boys.  Yes, we've discussed this.  We're neither of us delighted, but work is work and we can't really pick when it comes.  So, Burundi.

Otherwise, the weather is fine, and I'm seeing a lot of my little boys.

(Noel is grumbling about machines.  I have a post in mind about that, though it may not exactly answer his question.  Give me a day or two.)

Yikes

Was up in the attic a lot today.  We're having the housewarming party tomorrow, so there's been a lot of boxes headed that way.

I'd been in the attic before and I'd noticed a lot of wasp's nests.  Paper wasps, yah?  The nests ranged in size from plum to apple.  They were all dry and dead... it seems like our attic was prime real estate for a while, and then not.  Go figure. 

The way we live now

This is a funny time in our lives.

I'm between contracts.  Left Armenia at the end of March; aside from some short-term stuff (a week in Jordan), I won't be working until at least October, and maybe later.  I don't know what the next contract will be, nor where.

We're expecting a new baby in August, a little girl.

We've bought a house in Germany -- rural northern Bavaria, to be precise.  The house was something of a fixer-upper, so we got it fairly cheap.  But there was, and still is, plenty of work to be done.

So: it's sort of like a prolonged vacation, or a piece of retirement early.  Except not: we're working all day on the house.  Really, all day -- it just never stops.  We got the basics done (painting, wallpaper, new kitchen, new bathroom) and then our stuff from Armenia arrived, boxes and boxes of it.  Four weeks later we're still unpacking.

Feel the love.

And y'all thought I was exaggerating! Anyway.

A link for Noel. It's the Andrews Sisters, from 1944, and yes, they're singing what you think they're singing in the chorus. Frankly, I don't think you can find that in Vegas anymore.

Some notes about the song: during a USO tour, Morey Amsterdam sleazed off the song from the great Trinidad bandleader Lionel Belasco -- named like a London boxer in the days of Pierce Egan, and for much the same reason: Belasco's father was Sephardic -- who in turn had adapted it from a folk song from Martinique. There was a complicated lawsuit. The music business in the 1940s was very strange. Today most people know Belasco through Terry Zwigoff, the movie director from Appleton (Wisconsin), who adapted Daniel Clowes's graphic novel Ghost World in such a way to highlight Belasco's music.

Since I have to do everything bass-ackwards, I first came across Belasco while researching the Venezuelan waltz. Oh, hell. Some things should not fall down the memory hole.

Did I ever thank Colin Alberts for recommending Leo Katz's books to me? I should do that here. (Also, I just realized: William Ian Miller is from my neck of the woods, isn't he? Like, Shawano or something.) Also, if David Tenner is around, Robert Murray's The 103rd Ballot has been inspirational in recent months.

And two book recommedations for Will Baird on Ukraine and Russia. The first, Anthony's recent The Horse, The Wheel, and Language. It's a strong synthesis of late Soviet and post-Soviet archaeological findings on the Indo-Europeans, as well as his recent results on horse domestication. Anthony has something of the North Americanist's perspective, where long-distance migrations and vast social changes due to new domesticates are amply documented. (Incidentally, there's a long post on the Siberian Ket, Alaskan Eyak, Pacific Northwest Tlingit, and Canadian Athabaskan -- including American Southwest Navajo and Apache -- linguistic connection that I'm not going to write. I am a tease, aren't I.) There's an interesting bit of the sociology of anthropology here: many Europeanists believe in the extremely local development of prehistoric European cultures -- little migration, and that caused by the achingly slow spread of agriculture -- which multiple lines of evidence show is flawed, but academic inertia keeps in play.

They ate a lot of fish.

The other book is Andrei Sinyavsky's Russian Folk Belief, a phrase he uses in contrast to Russian ecclesiastical belief. Sinyavsky is perhaps better known in the West under his pseudonym of Abram Tertz, which would be as if an American writer in exile wrote under the name Benny Siegel or Al Capone, or possibly Nat Turner. I picked the book up for its folklore, but there's also a large section on non-Orthodox Russian religious movements, including a section of Protestantism in Russia. It should tell you something about his baseline that Sinyavsky considers Seventh-Day Adventism a rationalist faith; and also, that he has nothing but admiration for the diverse sectarians he met in the camps. I'd quote some, but I'd have to quote the whole chapter.

One more to go.

I know why the Caged Demonwolf sings

People have occasionally asked me,

Carlos! How do you stay a week ahead of the news cycle the way you do?

Let me answer with a digression. I had the misfortune of watching CNBC at the gym the other day. There are two things you need to know about its éminence grise, Larry Kudlow. The first is, Kudlow has done more cocaine than you can possibly imagine. He is the Annabel Chong of Andes candy. The second thing, and it's related: Kudlow has remarkably poor judgment. And in Kudlow, one can see a microcosm of the modern media. To paraphrase someone or another, think of legitimate journalism, then take away reason and accountability.

It might be a coincidence, but it's the second tier of writers I knew in college who have won Pulitzers, not the first tier. Not yet, anyway.

On that note, here are some posts that will never be seen, on topics few people would actually read:

• Richard "Humanity Dick" Martin, the early nineteenth century Irish animal rights activist and avid duelist.
• John Chilembwe, late of Nyasaland, who managed to learn about John Brown at a Bible college in Virginia.
• The goddess of smallpox, Sitala.
• Chaos theory and why general equilibrium economics sometimes makes me laugh.
• Dimitrie Cantemir, Ahmet Ertegun, and Dick Dale: an eternal golden braid. (This one I might try for a wider audience, along with the tapirage and feather painting piece.)
• Cycad toxicity and mammalian evolution. Sorry, Will, but the data are too equivocal.

One thing that has really vexed me here is the lack of literary talk. I get tired of discussing a sterile dying genre. It's like shoveling dirt on a guy in an iron lung.

Another thing: no groupies. Instead, I get fanboys who want to be spoonfed. Take it to LoserCon, homes. I won't miss that at all.

New house

We're in the new house tonight.

I don't say "home" because maybe it isn't?  Quite, yet?  But we're here, so presumably that will come.

Assembled the IKEA bunk bed for the boys this afternoon, leaving the ladder for last so we could do that together.  The boys absolutely love their bunk bed.  Of course, they immediately got in an argument over who got the top bunk... I think this is genetically hardwired.  If you brought a pair of boys out of a Pygmy tribe from the Congo rainforest, and introduced them to a bunk bed, I'm sure they'd start arguing over the top bunk.  Anyway: I oh-so-cleverly tried to defuse this by saying that whoever had the top bunk had to let his brother come up, but whoever had the bottom could declare it off limits.  That worked for about twenty seconds, while they thought it over, and then they started fighting over the bottom bunk.

Jacob, BTW, can climb to the top.  No mean feat for a toddler!  Having managed it once, he now wants to climb and then jump into my arms... again, and again, and again, and...

After the boys fell asleep (which took a while.. such excitement!) Claudia and I assembled our bed.  (Understand that our stuff is still on a boat coming from Armenia via Georgia, the Black Sea, the Aegean, the Mediterranean, around Gibraltar into the Atlantic, the English Channel, the North Sea, and Hamburg.  So, making a virtue of necessity, we've bought some stuff.)

It was a cloudy day, and now it's a rainy night.  The big church down the street rang ten a little while ago.  Claude just made some soup. 

And so to bed.  Good night, all.

In Germany

This is more of a placeholder than a post.  Been in Germany since Saturday.  Staying at the in-laws.  We bought a small house, which we're working on every day -- lots of wallpaper stripping, painting, and the like.  Hope to move in next week.

More anon, I hope.

How Obama can win in Pennsylvania

Phone banking.

Me: Hello, I'm calling on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign...

Older White PA Ethnic: Faith and begorrah, 'tis the Devil his self! [click, dial tone]

Hm.

Me: Hi there! I'm calling on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign...

Another Older White PA Ethnic: Aiee! Vade retro, Satanas! [click, dial tone]

Huh. Maybe a different list...

Me: Hello there! I'm calling for the Hillary Clinton campaign...

Younger White PA Ethnic: I know who you are.

Me: You do?

Younger White PA Ethnic: Yeah. I know. I know. Like, I did everything you told me to.

[pause]

Younger White PA Ethnic: I have their teeth right here.

Me: Listen, I gotta go. [click]

NB: some people like my voice.

Easter alone

Had a quiet Easter.  Did some painting.  Brunch with some friends.  Went home and took a nap.  Dinner with some friends.  Went shopping (probably for the last time).  Walked home. 

Claudia and the boys are well, though Claude is pretty tired.  She and her family spent the weekend working on the new house.  It snowed in Bavaria yesterday, so it was still snowy today. 

How was your Easter?

Painting over the astronaut

Did some painting last night.

When we first moved into this house, Alan and David shared a room, while Jacob slept in ours.  But when Jacob was big enough, we moved him into David's room, and moved Alan downstairs.  To celebrate him having his own room -- big boy!  Not afraid to sleep by himself! -- we painted his room.  Neither Claudia nor I are artists, but we got modestly ambitious and painted a sort of mural... an astronaut floating in space, colorful stars and planets, and a spaceship.  It ended up looking pretty nice.  So, every night Alan went to bed with the spaceship on the wall over his head, and the astronaut hovering protectively by the foot of his bed.

But now it's just me in an empty house, and the landlord would like the room back the way he left it.  I'm painting in stages.  The stars and planets and spaceships are all bright colors, so they will need several coats before they're covered.  Did the first couple of coats last night.

I found myself oddly reluctant to cover up the astronaut.  Just paint, of course.  But... thanks for watching over my little boy, spaceman.

-- In other news, the Hash House Harriers will not meet today, because large public meetings are still forbidden under the State of Emergency.  So, I'll take a nap instead.

-- Suddenly today, as if a switch had been flipped, the streets were full of vendors selling flowers.  The last sullen scabs of dirty snow haven't quite disappeared from shadowy corners, but the air is warm and the birds have been going nuts for a week now.  Saw my first bee this afternoon, buzzing around some violets for sale outside my office.  Yeah.

Whiskey Tango, say again?

This Monday my sister was chased by wild dogs in Paterson, New Jersey. Almost she convinces me to see Passaic Falls.

An interesting book was mentioned last night: 1906's The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. In addition to the descriptions of trials of cannibal sows and buggered mules, the book also compares Léon Gambetta's autopsied brain to that of the Hottentot Venus.

You know you want to.

Friday: I got nothin'

Another challenging week: project shutdown blues.

Armenia's Presidential election season rolls on, with portraits and slogans of the ruling party's candidate everywhere.  It's clear that the wrong sorts won't be allowed to get a word in; at this point it looks like PM Sarkisian will win in the first round.

The Embassy is making it harder for contractors to get in; I'm going to need an escort now if I want to visit the Commissary or anything else inside the main building.  If we were staying much longer this would be infuriating.  As it is, it's... adding to the general atmosphere.

Closing days!  Ugh.  Don't want to do this again soon.

What've you guys got?

John Rogers, mensch

As most of you know, my cousin Scott was killed in Iraq last year. 

Scott's older brother, my cousin Mark, held a fundraiser in Scott's memory.  The money from this went to Fisher House, a charity that helps military families.

There's a guy named John Rogers who has a blog called Kung Fu Monkey.  John Rogers has done a lot of things.  He used to be a standup comic.  More recently, he's been a Hollywood screenwriter, working on movie scripts... some successful (Transformers) some less so (Catwoman).  More recently still, he's been writing the Blue Beetle comic book, which is pretty good if you like comic books.  Which I do.

Anyway: John announced a while back -- like, a year ago -- that he'd match contributions to Fisher House, dollar for dollar.  So when cousin Mark decided to do the fundraiser, I sent an e-mail to John and asked if he would match that.  He said he would.

Now, this was months ago; and, at the time, we didn't know how much Mark would raise.  I told John maybe five thousand dollars.

Meanwhile came the writers strike.  Maybe some of our non-American readers haven't heard about it... well, professional writers for movies and TV are on strike.  Have been since early November.  So, John hasn't had much income for the last three months, except for what he gets from writing the comic book.  Possibly he's sitting on a huge pile of cash, I really don't know, but still: the guy's been pretty much unemployed for a while, and he doesn't know when he'll be able to work again.  The strike could resolve tomorrow, or drag on for many months.  Even if you're flush, that's gotta make you thoughtful.

So yesterday cousin Mark e-mails me and tells me how much he ended up raising.  Mark's a hard-working guy, and he's really put some time in, and when the pennies are all counted the final figure is rather larger than $5,000.

So after some thought I send John Rogers an e-mail.  I hem and haw a little and basically say, look, this is more than you bargained for, and things have changed, so if you don't want to do the matching thing, that's cool.  Everyone will understand.

Got a response in about ten minutes: send the receipt.  He's matching the entire amount.

I don't really have a lot to add to this. 

Thank you, John Rogers.

What I learned this week

How to write a budget spreadsheet in Excel that is totally honest, yet deeply misleading.

It's all about framing, and making the reader buy into your assumptions.  Like so many things, I guess. 

Random tip: never accept a budget in pdf.  Or, accept it, but politely ask to see the raw Excel file.  "Oh, it's all complicated and ugly" -- yes, well.  That's what you made me this nice lovely .pdf file for, right?  Rest assured that I'll base all my decisions on it.  But eccentric that I am, I want to see all the rows and columns, unhidden, and the formulas too.  Humor me.

Ahem.  Little loopy here... a week of late hours.

May get back to blogging (and responding to e-mails, returning phone calls, etc.) in a day or two.  Meanwhile, Excel: mighty servant or terrible master?  Talk amongst yourselves.

Thanks

We had a nice Thanksgiving.  It was really Claudia's day -- she did all the cooking; I did what I was told -- so I think she should blog about it.

Thanksgiving is a totally constructed tradition, you know?  Before the Civil War, it was about as meaningful as Flag Day.  It didn't really get going until the 1920s.  The modern version -- family, travel, big turkey dinner -- only came together in the Roosevelt administration. 

Of course, constructed doesn't mean bad.  Stopping to give thanks once a year is probably a good idea.

Weak

This post, and me.

Me: I have something.  Don't know if it's a cold or an allergy, but basically my nose has been dripping nonstop for a day now, my eyes are red, and I'm all bleary and stuff.  Bah.

This post: I'm reaching.  Did a post over at the Fistful today.  I don't think that counts towards my post-a-day here, but if you can't get enough of my deathless prose, there you go.

Also found a cool description of a visit to the Yezidi Kurds, from Christian Garbis' blog.  No, I don't think that counts either, but it's neat. 

Yezidis are Armenia's largest remaining minority; there are maybe 50,000 of them, or just under 2% of the population.  We've driven past those villages, and we've seen Yezidi herdsmen on the slopes of Mt. Aragats, but I don't think I've ever talked to a Yezidi.

(Mike Ralls had an interesting suggestion the other day: since we know that we have just five or six months left, maybe we should make a list of "things to do before leaving Armenia".  Claude?)

Tell me why (I don't like Mondays)

First, Alan was up in the middle of the night with an earache.  It turned out to be no big deal, but it did keep both of us awake.  I was having a bad night already, thinking about stuff (see below); I did eventually get some sleep, but Claude got almost none.

Second, I'm starting to break the news about no follow-on projects to the staff, one at a time.  This gets a little tricky.  We have people who will certainly land on their feet and find other jobs that are just as good or better.  But we also have people who've come to rely on this project, and who will struggle to find new positions -- not so much because they aren't competent (everyone at the project is competent; most are good, several are excellent), but because it's just hard to get out there and look for a job in Armenia.  It's not a big place, nor a rich one.  So, instead of announcing this at the weekly staff meeting, I'm doing this one by one.

Quiet Sunday

Another beautiful fall day.  Had a nice walk this morning with the boys.  Jacob and Claudia are napping.  Alan and David are watching Yin Yang Yo on television, killing time until 2:00 when the Mystic Power Rangers come on.

(There's a post yet to be written on the jaw-dropping awfulness that is Power Rangers Mystic Force, and why Alan loves it so very much.  But not today.)

A bit of news: last night at the Marine Corps Ball, we found there won't be a follow-on project. Or at least not until long after our project has closed its doors.  This is IMO unfortunate, but nobody is asking my advice.  So we close our doors in May and that's it.

What does this mean for family Muir?  Well, it puts a clear limit on our time in Armenia.  When the project ends in May, we won't have anything to keep us here.  We might leave a little earlier or later, but it's unlikely to be later than June.  As of today, we're probably about six months away from leaving.

(Leaving for where?  No idea.  But that's the nature of the business.)

So, this will be our last autumn in this house and in Armenia.  That's a little sad.  I guess we should enjoy it as best we can, while we can.

I'm going to go out and rake some more leaves.

Long Tuesday

Tuesday is usually my long day. 

Every Tuesday evening, I have at least one conference call with the home office, and sometimes two.  Because of the time difference, these can't start before 6:00, and sometimes not until 6:30 or later.  So it's not unusual for me to be at the office past 8:00 or even 9:00, and to come home long after the boys are in bed.

That's kind of a bummer.  I enjoy my evenings with the boys.  Well, okay, usually.  If one or more of them is tired and cranky-whiny-just feeling difficult?  Less so.  Especially if I'm tired myself.  But mostly I really like hanging out with them, watching cartoons, having a snack, maybe rolling around on the floor a little.  It's a small corner of the day, but usually a pleasant one.

(I'm typing this while on the conference call, a sentence at a time -- mute button on so nobody can hear the keys.)

(Okay, this was another "daily minutia" post.  Will do better tomorrow!)

Bali, plus ten

Ten years ago, Claudia and I met for the first time.

Met face to face, I should say.  We'd been meeting online for a few months at that point.  We were both active on the same mailing list.  One day I e-mailed her off list -- in all innocence -- to ask about a fine point of Turkish grammar.  We started mailng back and forth and, well, one thing led to another.

Mysterious Doug and Claudia sightings

Were Doug and Claudia seen having a picnic on a grassy knoll in Central Park last weekend, perhaps with the equally mysterious New York City Math Teacher and NYCMTin (and some weirdo from Brooklyn playing with the kids)?

Could they possibly have been spotted at the base of the Empire State Building, no doubt plotting something nefarious?

And what was Doug's recent secret mission unqualified offering in the District of Columbia?

Don't ask me. I'm sitting at home trying to convert anecdotes and data into something worth reading.

The Pure Product of America: A likely story!

You know, I have more classics of Filipino cinema ready to go. Are you afraid? You should be.

Hey, where's the new computer?

There's a story there!

The Pure Product of America: Yay!

An evil story.

The Pure Product of America: Yay!

Oh, Lord. Here, listen to the sweet songs of my youth while I wet my whistle. (Mmm, Angostura.)

Sick, sick, sick

Claudia and I are both sick, and the baby too.

It's a cough, although it seems to take the three of us differently. Jacob has a perpetually runny nose and is cranky and miserable, very different from his usual sweet self. Claudia has a shallow cough and is very tired. I have a nasty convulsive hacking thing, with strange night sweats. Eh, you don't want to know. We're just sick.

I have posts in mind about election violence in Armenia (three dead so far, two bombings, one shootout at high noon in the holy city on Easter Sunday), about Lake Sevan, maybe about MRIs (they are, you should not be surprised to hear, Armenian).

But first I think something for Carlos and Luke:

Sick, sick, sick

Claudia and I are both sick, and the baby too. It's a cough, although it seems to take the three of us differently. Jacob has a perpetually runny nose and is cranky and miserable, very different from his usual sweet self. Claudia has a shallow cough and is very tired. I have a nasty convulsive hacking thing, with strange night sweats. Eh, you don't want to know. We're just sick. I have posts in mind about election violence in Armenia (three dead so far, two bombings, one shootout at high noon in the holy city on Easter Sunday), about Lake Sevan, maybe about MRIs (they are, you should not be surprised to hear, Armenian). But first I think something for Carlos and Luke:

The Return of Squirrel Boy

So we've been dosing our son with drugs. All for his own good, of course! Alan has mild ADHD. It's not crippling, but it's definitely an issue. It's hard for him to concentrate. When he's having a bad day, he can't stop moving, wiggling, talking -- and he won't meet your eyes, which drives his mother crazy. We've tried various things. Routine, routine, structure. That helped some. Dietary supplements -- fish oil, for the fatty acids. That helped a bit. Avoiding certain triggers. (7-Up soda. Makes him totally manic. No idea why.) But there are limits to what you can do, and more limits to what you can do in Armenia. There are some wonderful new physical therapies out there for ADHD kids. Not available here. (Hell, Armenian doctors aren't really aware that ADHD, like, exists.)

It's about time

My sister, who is off to Berlin -- glamour! -- has accepted her boyfriend's proposal of marriage. Woo Cam and Mike! Note: Mike is a very nice Chicagolander who likes Vienna Beef hot dogs, Mike Royko, and Studs Lonigan. He does not have a robot sidekick named Skeets yet. My father once made him eat a bug. He'll fit right in.

Ou sont les nerds des antans: Wargaming

My friend Sydney Webb (1) recently wrote this over on soc.history.what-if:

When I think of 'wargaming' I think of 16mm hexes, 1/2" counters, zones of control and odds-based CRTs. And rule books that did so much to prepare me for the intricacies of the Income Tax Assessment Act. Yet in 50 years time when I'm dead and Doug and Claudia are enjoying a well-earned retirement at a coastal spa I don't think *anybody* will be playing John Edward's _The Russian Campaign_. Is wargaming dying? Of course not! Traditional miniatures - Napoleonics and Ancients - are as popular as ever, at least in the UK. The younger generation have their Orcs and their Robots as well. 30 years later RPGs are still going strong, albeit more sophisticated that the D&D and EPT of the mid-70s. And gaming takes new forms - CCG and the German fluffy games that have an elegance that we could only dream of when we played _Monopoly_, _Squatter_ or _Careers_. In particular, there are the computer games. There must be a 100 times as many people playing _Call of Duty_ now as were playing _Sniper!_ a third of a century ago. So wargaming will live on. The channels of delivery, to use biz-speak, may change but the experience of "You are in command..." will live on.

(1) Not an actual person. I wish this were so, but it isn't. Nerdy stuff follows.

Note to self

Someone secretly replaced my brand-name caffeinated coffee with decaf. Okay, it was me not looking at the label. Thought I was bitten by a tsetse fly or something. Some content: Olin Shivers describes, acknowledges. Dan Everett gives a talk on the extremely unusual Amazonian language Piraha through here (unfortunately, it's not streamed, Doug). YouTube: improbable jam, buzkashi. (No, I don't know what Hogun the Grim is doing with Bruce Willis. Are you going to ask Hogun?)