Simian Farmer

All's well that ends well

The title applies both to tonight and to the Christmas season to date.  Thank God I have a digital camera in front of me to flip through, else I might have a hard time recollecting (let alone recounting) the past week.

I'm in the basement after having just put Dex to bed.  Previous to that I put Tavish to bed after mopping up the massive puke splatters he left all over the kitchen once I finished dosing him with his antibiotics for the sinus infection he collected recently.  Both boys got head colds after Dex came down with the croup a couple weeks ago, so it's been nuthin' but snot and crankiness for goin' on 14 days here.

I've a stack of CDs in front of me as I'm in the process of ripping my collection to iTunes because, thanks to my brother (Uncle Buster), I got me a new iPod for Christmas and I love him just a little bit more for it.  (I just finished listening to Joy Ride by Junkhouse, and hoo boy... have the past few days ever been.)  It's the 8 GB nano, and the fact that I'm going to be able to store over 2,000 songs on something the size of a couple matchbooks just boggles my mind.  I like the word 'boggles'.  (Not quite as much as the word 'boobies', but that pretty much goes without saying.)

I'm also on my third stiff rum 'n egg nogg, so this might get interesting.  It's not that I'm a great fan of egg nogg, but it makes for a great delivery system to get rum into my system in much the same way that popcorn exists solely to deliver butter and flavoured salt to my GI tract.  (Dill pickle is my favourite.)

But I said I was going to talk about Christmas... so let's.  I think it started on Christmas Eve.  (Well, that day, but it's the only day of the year where we refer to the day by its latter half, which is silly really, but that's just my way of saying it was the day, not the eve, of the Eve.)

Finding the Spirit

A few conversations yesterday evening that helped me onto the path of finding the Christmas spirit...

(This in spite of the fact that Amy was out the door five minutes after I got home from work because both boys had been whining constantly all afternoon and she was just about to SNAP! and so I kicked her out and bailed on a fancy dinner with my team from work where there was going to be lobster bisque (!!) served before the entrée.  Yes, it was going to be a yummy supper with free booze and all that, but still...  My wife's sanity (thus mine by association) is at least marginally more important.  (If Momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.)  On the plus side, when she got home, I did get to check out the new bra she got for herself.)

(Are nested parentheticals (like this one) at all grammatically correct?)

*****

[Declan, plaintively, arms raised, two seconds after I walk in the door.]

"Gimme a hug!"

*****

[Declan reclines on the sofa, stares at the tv, magnetic drawing board in hand, obviously knows his mother's habits all too well.]

"Hmmm, news?  Nope.  Not da news."

[Pause while he scratches a few lines.]

"Just soaps."

*****

"Well Dex, Tav's supper is ready, do you want some of my noodles?"
[As I said that I was secretly pining for lobster bisque.]

"Nope."

"How about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?"

"Uh, no."

"I can fix you a grilled cheese sandwich.  With ketchup!"

"No, Daddy!  Just... no."

"Well, you can sit there until we're finished our suppers then."

"Budd-ller jelly, Daddy."

"You want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich now?"

"Hmmm... yes."

"Yes....?"

"Pease, Daddy."

"Okay then."

*****

[I pick up a whining infant and engage Declan in a very familiar conversation.  He's back at his drawing pad.]

"Hey Dex, do you know what time it is?"

"Baby bath time!"

"Yes it is!  Do you want to have a bath with your baby brother?"

[Very curtly]  "Nope.  Drawin' a car."

*****

I feel better now.

Gord, Frankenstein and Murray

It always takes me a long time to get into the holiday spirit.  Every year.  My Decembers normally start out with a bit of an offensive funk to them that hangs around until after the middle of the month.  I give this as the reason for the fact that I never get Christmas cards out or, if I do, they arrive some time after the new year.

I have become increasingly disillusioned with the commercial aspect of Christmas.  I can't stand it.  Billboards, radio and tv commercials, keeping up with the Joneses.  Material oneupmanship seems to have usurped the podium when it comes to the Reason For The Season.  I can't for the life of me recall any of the presents I got last year, let alone the year before that.  Not that I wasn't appreciative -- just the glow of getting something from someone is such a short-lived high.

I can't stand the fact that just about every fucking Wal*Mart in the country is keeping its doors open 24 hours a day to cater to people who want to go shopping at three in the morning.  Holy enabler, Batman!

Christmas music assails me over the radio and mall PA systems and the aural deluge has middlin' success at best.  (Though a good Bing Crosby doing White Christmas is hard to resist no matter what the mood.)  I see people traipsing around in red and white Santa hats and my lips may flicker up in the hint of a smile, but I seem to battle it back down.  There are decorations all over the place at work, but the holly and candy canes, the miniature fake trees and dangling snowflakes, the frosted windows and the gutters festooned with blinking, multi-coloured lights aren't doing much to help me rail against an unwonted apathy.

We got our Christmas cards (most of them) out this week, so friends and family can enjoy them before New Year's.

I think it's the fatigue of the past few months piling up and weighing down.  Our little family has gotten so inured in our domestic routine that it seems to take a Herculean effort to stray significantly.  We went out for my birthday supper on Monday night and only after an unexpected enquiry on my cell phone did we realise we'd promised Grampa and Baba we'd show up for dinner at their place.  (Oh, shit...)  Must have been karmic justice that Dex puked up his ceasar salad and calamari just as we ordered some mango sorbet for dessert. 

We got our Christmas tree up on Sunday night but it still stands naked, bereft of lights and little hangie things.  It's a sad green thing, waiting there to be dressed.  We still haven't any lights up on the outside of the house, and won't bother at this point.  Maybe a couple of swirlies up the trunks of the bugle pine out front.

My brother's coming down from his most recent stint welding up north and may or may not hang out with us this weekend over the break.  I heard via Granny that, as of 8 PM last night, he'd been up for 36 hours straight helping out with an emergency: the rig lost some pipe down the hole they were drilling and needed to call in a second crew of 'fishermen' to get it out.  Word was he would probably be released to get some sleep by 6 this morning.  I hope he did.  Probably a little crabby(er) by that point.

I seem to be dwelling so much on what's not getting accomplished that the things that are present, right in front of me, suffer by association.  I'm terrified right now at the prospect of spring.  (As an example of what I'm dwelling on.)  There has been no poop collection from the backyard in over two months.  Winter came early and gave it to us up the ass at the end of October and with it brought along a shitload of snow in consistent layers such that you could probably take a cross section of our backyard and analyze the stratigraphy of poo deposits.

(Wow, from Santa to scatology all in one post...)

To reiterate, it takes a while for me to get into the holiday spirit each and every year, but this year seems to have had that funk extended a little.  I'm immensely looking forward to having my sister-in-law and niece (BANDA!) come stay this weekend.  We have a turkey to cook and there will be more Christmas cheer very, very soon.  But it's late this year and I don't like how it feels.

I can feel the encroachment of general holiday merriment.  It IS coming.  Tomorrow is the last day of work before the office closes for a week - and my mirth has never tarried later than the last day of work before Christmas - so Saturday should see me with a shit-eating grin and a big, huge hug for Sister and Niece (BANDA!).

God bless us, every one.

Eleven thousand words

We've not really been up to much that could be called exciting lately, and so our camera hasn't gotten as much exercise as it used to.  It regularly sits right on top of the television, poised for when one or both of the boys do something note-worthy and we can run and grab it just in time to miss the whole thing.

So instead of the Fraser family engaged in earth-shattering and/or hilarious predicaments, I'm posting a few pictures of us ensconced in our natural habitat.  Though I think there's something to be said for being able to find the earth-shattering in the everyday.
*****

Yet another reason why my wife is totally cool

Company Christmas party Saturday night.

Dinner's done.  Dessert's done.  Comedian's done.  My wife, on her third glass of white wine, probably needs to have a fork stuck in her - might be done.

Chatting amicably with an extremely extroverted wife of one of the VPs.  Over top of the loud music, kneeling by our chairs at Table 30 - which, by the way, got called first for the buffet dinner; first time in my life EVER! - until she and VP Hubby had to excuse themselves to the next bit of small-talk.  Hugged me, and then hugged my wife.  My wife returned the embrace.

After, Amy turned to me, slightly red in the face, and said, "Oh my god, Si, I totally just Han Solo'd her!"

I can't begin to calculate how many brownie points a vague reference to a Return of the Jedi editing oversight is worth in the midst of the cacophony of a company Christmas party... but it's a LOT!

Stats whore

I used to follow the details of the traffic that came to this site with a fervour bordering on the obsessive.  Was it from a search query?  Linked from elsewhere?  If so, where?  Book marked?

That novelty has worn off and I hope I'm more concerned with what I put up here rather than who reads it.  As I mentioned to someone recently, I write here for me and have convinced myself it's to an audience to keep me accountable for how well (relatively) I do it.  I'm really only concerned about someone from work finding it, but even that fear has abated to an acceptable level of ambivalence.

There's a whole other discussion about what I can't write here out of respect for the privacy of my family and friends.  And my own as well.  The day I choose to use this site to come out as a bi-sexual cereal killer with a penchant for turkey gravy on my scrambled eggs and a chronic twitch in my left leg from that time I got curious with a cattle prod, I'll know I've crossed a line of some sort.

But I do still take interest in some of the larger trends I see in my stats.  The graph shown below, for instance.  I've never, in the last two-plus years, received that many hits in a day.  (Paltry, by many accounts, but still.)

That monstrous spike on the right was this past Tuesday when I posted the best Christmas photo ever of my two boys.  Cute kids in distress / humourous situations is a sure draw for bloggers.  (Also interesting to note that all the weekly valleys occur on the weekends, when folks aren't at work to surf the net as frequently.)

Similarly, the graph that shows my past year of traffic:

I've been nothing if not steady over the course of 2006.  (There's probably a humourous "Stay the course" joke that can be inserted here.  But Dubya's too easy a target these days.)

This graph tells me two things.  First, that my participation in the recent NaBloPoMo blogger event did Jack and Shit for the significant amount of traffic that comes here.  Not that that was my hope, and I did learn a few things, but now I know.  Reinforcement, if nothing else, just to write for myself here.

Second, and more tellingly, kids are a sure lure for folks to come visit.  (So be careful what you post, eh?)  That spiky thing in March where I got nearly a thousand more hits than in previous months was due almost exclusively to two posts.  First this one, where I called the play-by-play over the course of 14 hours as my wife went into labour with our second son, culminating in him being born on our extravagantly expensive memory foam mattress.  And then this one, where I explained that day in more detail, making sure to mention that Amy chastised me for grabbing the Ralph Lauren towels when I was so directed by one of the strapping men in uniform occupying our bedroom at the time.

That spike may have been a bit lower were it not for Dixie, who I suspect was refreshing her browser every 15 minutes to see if anything had changed.  (She's expecting her third now, so can certainly be excused for the vested interest.)

It's no wonder then that so many "Mommy Bloggers" have found success in posting about the vagaries of stay-at-home life with their children as the focal point.  I love this medium as a means to share tid-bits of Fraser minutiae with family and friends (old and new), but there's a cautionary lesson to be garnered as well.

Best Christmas photo EVER!

Amy got a real winner when she took the boys to local mall on Monday afternoon.

If you click the picture it'll open up an even bigger one and, frankly, I can't stop giggling.

Nascent temporal awareness

Sometimes this having kids thing is way fun.

The boiz and I got up this morning to let Amy sleep in.  She has a Stampin' Up calendar demo to do as I type this and she took the morning to get ready.

Tavish insisted we get up at 6.30, so I gave him a bottle and Declan was up a few minutes later at hearing us putter in the kitchen.  Our morning ablutions are a must in the Fraser household, so we three boys repaired to the water closet.  Courteously, I asked Declan if he had to go pee before Daddy.  (He still sleeps in a Pull-up but otherwise is totally into the whole underwear thing -- with middlin' success.)

Declan vehemently replied, "No, Daddy!  I peed yesterday."

Today was a bit of a milestone for the three of us.  Tavish has blessedly stopped puking on a whim and now only christens bits of the house a couple times a day.  Blessed be! Combine this new lease on freedom with the full shopping list taped to the fridge and I decided it was time I could handle both wee bairns at Superstore.  Tav got fussy in the cart seat stuffed next to Dex, but once I plopped him in one of the purple plastic bins (which I bring instead of using bags), he was amazingly content and transformed into a point singularity of nine month-old cuteness.

Dex further stunned me with his burgeoning vocabulary as I brought the last load of groceries in from the car.  He was poised on the threshold of the front door when I entered and, as he pulled his sippy cup of milk away from his face, he furrowed his brow in a totally Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins moment and uttered with unwonted aplomb, "There you are, Father."

I could hear the capital "F".  Amy and I have no idea where he picked up the occasional "father" and "mother" appellations. 

Now we're hangin' out in the basement for the afternoon.  If Declan starts getting all sesquipedalian on me, I'll let you know.

Yawning or snarling

One of my very favourite bloggers (in terms of writing and being just generally swell) recently posted about an experience at work (she's enviously self-employed*) -- a job she normally wouldn't have taken but for a gut feel she had regarding the client.

Her whole post was an indication to me of the exact opposite tack my company is taking right now.  Over the past three years we've made the transition from family-owned and -oriented company to semi-public to, just over the last month, being publicly traded on the NYSE and the TSX with a successful IPO (initial public offering).  Heck, our CEO rang the opening bell on Thursday to open trading on Wall Street.  VERY BIG DEAL!

We have implemented strict policies and procedures, procurement practices and preferred vendors, delegations of authority and a project controls matrix that spells out cast-in-stone project account codes and activity relationships.  Our efficiency initiative has reached the point where implementation is mostly complete and the new focus is on sustainability going forward.  (Did any of that make sense?  Should I be scared at how easily it rolled off my tongue?  err, fingertips?)

This is all a level of detail at which a company our current size *must* operate in order to comply with government regulations in both Canada and the US (regulations largely in place to avoid fiascoes like Enron and Worldcom), as well as to keep a tight enough rein on efficiency and the bottom line.  When I came on board in 1999 we had just broken 200 million in annual revenue and were run by a pair of brothers, sons of the man who started the company with a single bulldozer in 1953.  Now, seven years later, after being sold and now trading on the stock market, we're pushing 750 million and will break a billion in short order as we grow our resources with the cash influx from public funds.

However, if any sort of situation like the one described in the post I linked were to crop up, it would be summarily dismissed with a snide chuckle and quickly forgotten.  When I read it for the second or third time I asked myself, at what point does the corporate entity usurp the culture of family-oriented business?  (Perhaps I should say human-oriented business.)  That's the font of my frustration.  I'm not so naive as to be ignorant of the fact that we're in business to make money.  But that impetus, here, now, has reached a level where customer-client relations are suffering, employee turnover is at an all-time high, job satisfaction is low and people actually find themselves (seriously!) running to the HR manager in tears.

Hell, even two of our top brass put in their notices through November and December.  The timing is no coincidence since, after the company sale, they signed seven-figure bonus agreements that would see fruition only after three years.  Were we in Denmark, methinks I would smell something rotten.  (Points for catching that reference.)

I'm not too sure what else to say, really.  The near future will probably see two types of people attracted to work here.  Those who have established themselves (or come on board) with the intent to rise to positions of authority and compensatory comfort, and those who are willing (would prefer to?) come get lost in the bureaucratic morass that is inexorably insinuating itself into the workings of the corporate machinery.

Where do I see myself?

I used to laugh almost every day at my Dilbert comic -- from a distance.  Now I'm starting to chuckle uncomfortably.  As soon as I start printing them out and pasting them all over my office (or, god forbid, my cubicle) I'll know I've overstayed my welcome or accepted my lot.

(* I realise self-employment can be and often is a double-edged sword, but I trust you see the perspective from which I'm coming at this.)

Chipping away at my own career prospects

We have a burgeoning new intranet site here at work.  (And by 'here at work' I am definitely NOT implying that I'm writing this from work.  No sir.)

Each division has been given its own virtual section to build as it pleases (within guidelines) and my department is hell-bent on having the best.  There's a prize of some sort promised for the best, designed by a certain deadline, as judged by our CEO.  (How's that for arbitrary?)  We have some real competition types here.  Especially our VP.

One section of our departmental site is for member bios.  There are only mug shots there currently, but we've each been tasked with scribing something brief to tack up on our digital cork board.

Now, the VP I work for has previously threatened me when I call him on something or make a smart-ass comment he was about to think of (allegedly).  Threats normally along the lines of, "Are you aware of the tenuous nature of your employment, Mr. Fraser?"  Meant in jest, and which eventually came to feel oddly reassuring.

I haven't been thus threatened in a while, so I thought I'd take it upon myself to compose the bio for our VP and offer it up via email to our department as a whole for consideration.  I wrote and sent this out Friday afternoon and still, as I write this (again, not implying composition from work), am employed.  (Only names have been changed.)