Do the Yak

A couple of weeks ago on a typically drab winter Saturday, we decided to have some Wholesome Family Fun, so we went to experience SteveSongs . The venue is sort of a community resource/support center for families with very young children called WarmLines . Thus the average age of audience members at this bitchin' concert, not counting parents, was somewhere around two or maybe three, tops. So there I was in another Parenthood Moment, sitting on a blanket on the floor with dozens of noisy tots and the poor man's Raffi holding forth on stage. It was one of those times when the Talking Heads lyric drifted into mind: "Well... how did I get here?" The feeling of unreality intensified as I watched some parents really GROOVIN' on the sounds this dude was layin' down. Note the woman in pink shakin' it in front of the stage with her toddler in a beautiful moment of intergenerational bonding through music, mankind's great common denominator: Yes, that's an a...

It's cold. I hate that. Maintenance workers have been in my office three or four times to make the heating register blow warm air rather than a chilly breeze, but nothing they do seesm to last. But now I have a space heater in here, so I clsoe my door almost all the way and scurry out of my office only for the most basic human necessities (plus the odd meeting here and there). We tried the space heater in the kitchen, which is really freezing – not enough heating registers and too little insulation), but it kept tripping the circuit breaker. QUALITY. It's getting old as well as cold. I'm getting psyched to move into the Forever House. In the meantime, let us contemplate some good reasons to go to confession . And cling to the fact that we leave for Florida in exactly three weeks.

One of Sarah's first-grade classmates earlier this year was a boy named AJ in a recumbent wheelchair. We didn't know what was wrong with him but he seemed pretty immobile and unresponsive, so I assumed he had severe cerebral palsy or some such thing. He had a personal assistant who wheeled him in each morning and helped in the classroom. Another parent in Sarah's class organized a schedule where families could take turns bringing dinners to his house, since his mom was taking care of AJ alone – more than a full-time job – and she had two other young kids. So I made a pan of lasagna and Sarah and I brought it over (right around the corner from our house) between Christmas and New Year's. The mom seemed tired. I could glimpse AJ through the hall lying on a couch with some kind of machine to help him breathe. In calling to confirm arrangements, the mother who organized the dinners said that AJ wouldn't be coming back to school after the holidays. Yesterday, the school...

What kind of venemous egg-laying mammal are you? Click here to find out! (courtesy of Defective Yeti ) And now we're pretty much up to date with house pix. We have interior framing done... we have shingles (damn chicken pox!)... and we have lotsa Tyvek and even a stunted pine tree. But now we also have a shift change from framers to window guys, and unfortunately one of these fellows acidentally dropped a load of lumber from a crane onto his own truck (not at our building site, thank God) so that's set 'im back a spell. But the windows are here, the doors are coming... can the ducks be far behind?

... is dead of a heart attack at age 96. His secret to longevity? According to Wikipedia , it was "playing golf and eating Chikin Ramen almost every day. He was said to have eaten Ramen until the day before he died." If he'd only had time to choke down a hearty bowl on the day of his death, it might have postponed his demise! Defective Yeti has the scoop on the interment plans. Recent comment fom our eldest child after getting a Band-Aid on her left thumb: "I'm glad it's not my sucking thumb because thumb-sucking is part of life." And later, after explaining something highly conceptual to Becky: "When you get to be a first-grader, you get to be smart and you know these things."

Roofing the garage... ...and the rest of the house. The back of the house as seen from the back line of our property. Lotsa trees. The storage space over the garage.

UP-sy daisy! Hey, our house is now in 3-D! This went very fast. We're now in mid-December, or about three weeks after they knocked down the old house. Sarah: "Hey Mom, look at all those popsicle sticks!" Me: "They're called rafters. I think." From the road...

They've just poured the garage floor slab and the floor joists. Now there's a floor over the joists. No plumbing yet, but I spy some studs (and also notice the vertical wood on the left!)

So we started again from the foundation... The backyard. Do you like our inground swimming pool that's emptied for the winter? They cut channels around the basement perimeter for drainage... ...and then they dug a bigget hole where the garage was and they poured some more concrete to make the slab for a garage that will actually hold two cars as well as a screened-in porch where the sunroom was. There was some kind of slab there before, but it was resting on some inadequate gravel and we wouldn't want that porch to shimmy around. Ben took this photo because he was interested in how they made this, so if you're into construction, I hope you like it because I have no idea what the hell it is.

I thought it would take quite a while to disassemble a house that had taken many months to build. You know, bit by little bit. Wrong. This machine with lower and upper jaws just took a bite out of a wall and the whole thing snapped into matchsticks like you would crumble a graham cracker in your hand. We were in awe. The kids were delighted. It was a teachable moment that was so worth being late to school for.

That ol' sunroom is really gonna get some light now... And we all fall... DOWN! No more garage or sunroom. Now to take a bite out of the main dwelling as the electric lines snap like licorice whips (did someone remember to shut off the power?). The one thing that survived was the fridge, an old but large model that we wanted to put in our rental house because the fridge that's there was so small that dozens of objects came leaping out whenever we openeed the door, causing parents to hiss profanities. Turns out that when this bigger fridge was originally installed, various doors had to be taken off their hinges to get it into place in the kitchen. To de-install? Simply rip a hole in the side of your house! This is not a sight you'd normally want to see from your kitchen counter as you're sipping coffee. Are you falling behind those mortgage payments just a tad? Can you say "Repo Man"? How about "Demo Man"?

As threatened, the next couple of posts will include photos of the Forever House under construction. Notice how much space they take up that I don't have to fill with actual writing! These first three show the house that we actually bought, the 1950s ranch that's no longer there (first two are in back, the third one is the front). They were taken in October 2006.

Look out – here comes Multimedia Yak. This was taken on December 21 so it's already quite out of date. More pix to come...

I'm sitting on our couch with a girl on either side. We're basking in the post-dinner glow while Ben is at a board meeting for Becky's preschool. I'm typing this on a laptop and will post it via wireless router and broadband. The kids are watching "Zoom," one of several episodes stored on our DVR (it belongs to the cable company and is a lot cheaper than TiVo). We just launched the web site I've been working on for a year and a half and it looks awesome, and I get to play with Dreamweaver all day, making it even more nifty. And hopefully in a few weeks, I can take further advantage of the digital age by starting to do some of my work from home. Thank you Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Tim Berners-Lee, all the great guys at Xerox PARC... oh yeah, and Alexander Graham Bell.

It was 69 degrees today in Boston. This is January, in case anyone's forgotten (and I'm sure many have). The neighbor's leftover light-up snowman and reindeer look beyond ridiculous. And no one seems to be complaining, although I don't personally know any ski resort owners. So what this means is... why are we getting so worked up about Halliburton no-bid contracts and drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge? Petroleum-produced greenhouse gases RULE! Global warming? Bring it on, baby. What it also means is that I got to give Becky a bath at 4:00 this afternoon. Why? Because the two of us took a trip to the playground where there is always a large mud puddle. And apropos of the weather, Becky was wearing shorts and sandals (though the footwear got ditched early). And Becky informed me that at her pretend school, they're learning about bunnies this week, and part of the program involved hopping like a bunny – in the mud puddle. So. The reason that Ben...