Category: Artifacts

Three weeks ago, we moved to our new house. Here are three last shots from the old place.
  

The kids made a car on their penultimate night at this home. They filled the trunk with stuffies, turned off the lights, and drove the dark roads following the sat-nav until they found a motel.
 

Here are the last two pieces of bread that I baked in the building. The gods gave me a run of good loaves for the past few weeks. (If you want a great sourdough info, check out Chapin‘s newsletter).
 

Finally, the last morning routine in this bedroom with a quick gesture sketch, continuous line drawing, and tiny poem. Shoutouts to ashlyn, Citlaflor, Hazel Burgess Art, Beth Kempton, Wendy MacNaughton, and Nadia Gerassimenko for helping mold this regular morning jaunt…which has unfortunately become irregular after I was coincidentally dragged back into the office after four years of working from home after this same weekend.

So in both ways this was the end of an era. Four years ago, we were living with my in-laws. Their tenant left this rental house a few months in late 2019 and they had not found a replacement before the before the pandemic hit. Given the parents’ age, I exiled myself to this place for a several long months—which included my first grind through the brutish biennial budgeting season as a state worker.

After things settled down the family joined me here. The kids were 6 and 2. They kept growing. I guess we did too. At the end of 2023, we bought our own place. The kids are now 10 and almost 6.

The “real Vegas” is not the spectacle of the Strip. It’s our quiet lives in these beige stucco boxes carpeting the Valley. Like most of suburban America, it’s a splendorous existence that we barely appreciate.

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It’s been three weeks at the office. It’s a treat to regularly hang out with my coworkers in person. But that marginal benefit is far outweighed by the cost of commuting every day.

There are so many things I’d rather do than piloting a metal box across the town to accomplish tasks that I’ve done at home for four years. But I’ve also heard horror stories about workers who have taken ill advantage of remote work. So I get why my massive organization settled on this brute solution.

I can’t complain too much. Commuting is a mere annoyance, even if the unnecessary nature of this blanket directive makes it particularly irksome.

So I thought up a new project to redeem the time. I’m going to march through my collection of CD’s in alphabetical order by performer.

I will listen to each disc at least once through. After that, I can re-listen and skip tracks before I move on to the next album. If I buy any new CD’s, I’ll listen to them once and then slot them in line.

This project popped into my noggin while listening to an ambiance album featuring the didgeridoo. I was underwhelmed, but I thought about the artist. I presume he thought it was a great piece of art, at least the best he could do at the time he published it. At that moment, I decided to give each of my musicians at least one generous, full hearing.

For three decades I’ve been listening to the spoken word—sermons on tape, talk radio, and podcasts. As I get older, I’m being overwhelmed by the verbal clutter. Let’s fill that metal box with music.

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The kids insisted on reading Grumpy Monkey Oh No It’s Christmas before leaving while Mama checked out of the supermarket.

Mama was not amused as she waited outside. Her ire disappeared when I rushed out with blood soaking through his mask, dripping down his throat.

He didn’t complain about a bloody nose until the book was done!

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Apple Vision Pro has finally entered the conversation, on Youtube and in my podcasts. “Spatial computing” will be the future!

Great! I’m doing nothing.

The iPhone didn’t hit its stride until the 4—why spend hard cash on alpha technology?

More importantly, I want the six year old to remember a world without VR.

Growing up in the early 80’s, I was among the first cohort who always had a computer at home, but we didn’t connect to the internet until college. I’m grateful that my youth was disconnected from the world wide web.

I’m not so stubborn to skip the ubiquitous internet of today’s reality, but I feel no rush to interjaculate our children’s world with digital light knifed through their pupils.

That future can wait.

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Happy New Year!

Here’s to Dragoning for the next lunar cycle.
 

 
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I accidentally caught stunning clouds while the wife recorded the kids riding bikes in the park.

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We moved this week. From our in-law’s place to our own house. And I moved from working at home back into the office.

The latter move was unnecessary except someone decided it was important. Such is the nature of work. Fortunately I enjoy the company of my coworkers. The commute is annoying¹, but the time at work is still enjoyable in its own way.

The former move was also unnecessary, except that it’s nice to have a home of one’s own. We’ve been living with her parents for a decade. This autumn, we finally found a place that we liked more than the possibility of buying a better indeterminate place.

Life rarely gives perfect choices. It’s a blessing to be presented with good options—many folks don’t get such moves.

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1. In spite of my complaints, I experienced a sublime moment driving east on 215 pressing towards the orange glow of a rising sun, immersed in Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations. Epic way to start a Wednesday. ↩︎

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My former intern in private practice joined the State Public Works Division half a year ago. He finally passed his last architectural exam.

At the time I was working from home, but I snuck into the office with party hats and poppers to properly celebrate at the Monday morning staff meeting.

Nothing like the smell of gunpowder in the morning.

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Getting your license is hard. 2010 was my year of misery, a slogging through seven tests. Never a moment of peace with the enormity always under the pillow.

And I was lucky, working only 30 hours a week. Those great recession paychecks were ugly, but I had “free” time to study.

Unfortunately, my guy’s celebration was short lived. In the past couple of weeks, we had a shakeup at our agency. He got picked to run our most public project, a room with our administrator, right before we head into the nasty budget season and the birth of his first child.

I’ll be there for him, just like I have all these years, cheering him on.

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Now that he’s been transferred out of our main office, I’ve been called back in from working remote.

A space just opened up.

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After an hour of climbing the new play structure in an outdoor atrium, they raced around the small berms at Downtown Summerlin after the holiday light parade.

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This was our first holiday season (almost) fully out of our shell. We’re still masked and not dining out, but rubbed lots of elbows these past few months.

We attended the Downtown Summerlin Halloween parade, trick and treated at Calstock Court, visited the Clark County Museum Heritage Holiday, stood in line for the illuminated cactus garden at Ethel M (overrated), and came back to the outdoor mall for their Christmas parade. I forgot how busy the holidays can be!

With time, I wonder how we will judge this four year hibernation¹.

It wasn’t all bad — before the pandemic we had tired of the dining scene, so we saved a ton of cash and learned how to cook white-people cuisine. We also successfully avoided COVID (so far).

But it wasn’t cheap. We worry how this long time might affect the kids. They seem fine, but are we deluding ourselves? Like everything else parenting, I guess we’re making shit up before we reap the whirlwind.

Best not to worry and just run some hills.

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1. Check out Ayano Imai’s gorgeous book, While He was Sleeping. ↩︎

 

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The boy is notorious at not doing his part of cleaning up. One Sunday, the girl figured out a hack, enticing him to help. They took videos of each other cleaning up — and played it backwards on the iPad to great hilarity. Viola! A clean playroom!

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Our daughter had jaundice that kept us in the hospital an extra night after her birth.

Late into that third night, I walked around the ward in a sleep deprived haze. I suddenly realized that my parents were just making shit up as they went. I also realized that this was now my fate for the coming decades.

Maybe some parents know the answers; do they figure it out after the 3rd or fourth kid?

But I ain’t got no epiphany to share after almost ten years in this parenting game.

I’d love to think that I might have something to do with raising them right. But I suspect that our main job is to avoid traumatizing them and to avoid spoiling them. And to share cool stuff along the way.

Between those two wide bounds with that fuzzy directive, I wonder if we actually exert all that much influence over our kids.

Who knows, I’ve been making shit up all along the way.

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