Simian Farmer

Wordless Wednesday (12)

Another orator in the family

My apologies.  I have been remiss in revelling in the amount of braggadocio that is my wont when either of my sons do something that I think approaches the essence of cool.  When they travel along that asymptotic line which, as it approaches infinity, very nearly makes one as cool as The Fonz.  It is, of course, utterly impossible to get there, but a mathematical approximation is within the reach of some.

So has the younger Fraser done.

He's talking.

My wife and I have been waiting for it, and he's not disappointed either of us.  To my wife's barely contained glee, I cannot deny that wee Tavish's first recognisable word was definitely "mommy".  (My {our?} criteria for a word to be acknowledged as having meaning when uttered by one of our sons is that there is a definite association made between the sound and an object or, at a more advanced level, with an action or a concept.  Thus, while it was entirely feasible that, at one year of age, Tavish could have - and perhaps even did - mashed together the sorts of sounds that ended up sounding like "trilobite", it is astronomically unlikely that he would have been able to make any sort of association between his glottal meandering and a long-extinct three-lobed arthropod.)

So, "mommy" it was.

His progression since then has been astounding.  The insufferably proud parent in me takes it fully as our due.  We talk a LOT to our boys and I think one of the keys has been an effort to provide verbal cues for the things each of them takes an interest in.  So, much as I'd love for Tavish to pick up on the identification of a series of prime numbers, I'm more than content to brag about him being right more than 75 percent of the time when he says "tree".  There is a wallpaper border that runs around his nursery at change table level, and it is festooned with cute little leopards, giraffes, zebras, trees and clouds.  He's aced "tree" and "zebra", though the latter word is still probably only identifiable by me or my wife. 

Just yesterday he spent a solid two minutes pointing at one cloud in particular, jabbing it with a pudgy finger until he was certain he had his daddy's voice associated with his digital thrusts.  He tried the word out for himself and seemed pretty pleased (as was I) with his fledgling effort.

My favourite though - and colour me biased if you must - is his enthusiastic abuse of the word "daddy".  When I get home from work I can hear him nearly from within my truck.  He begins by pounding on the living room window with his fleshy palms.  When he sees me walk up the driveway, he turns around and trundles to the front screen door where he presses his face up hard against the screen and gives me a toothy, smoosh-nosed grin and a Gatling gun barrage of "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! ... "  Each little word flies unhindered into my beating heart.

I take my time removing my shoes at the front door since the wee boy continues to pepper me with the word until I stand up straight, when he raises his arms, squishes his cheeks with his shoulders, and says it one more time with a gleam of anticipation in his eyes.

HUG!

Other (less exciting) words in his vocabulary include "puppy", "cheese", and "stuck".  When he strains to climb out of his booster seat after supper, he grimaces and complains of being "stuck".  When he wants to pull his blanket off the couch but he can't because his older brother is sitting on it with a feigned look of ignorance, Tavish tugs and whines that it's stuck.

He hasn't yet strung together two words in a row, but at the rate he's going, it can't be very long.

The Century (4/4)

Here it is, Friday, and this little exercise has come to an end.  I hope it's been as enlightening for to read these few things as it has been for me to dig a little bit and dredge some of them up.

I think I did such a good job that I'll take the whole weekend off and not bother to post anything.

Enjoy your respective weekends too, eh?

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The Century (3/4)

The penultimate instalment of my 100 Things.

I rarely get to use the word 'penultimate' in its proper context, so you can imagine my glee at being able to apply it above.

Items 51 through 75.

What new insights will be revealed about the Simian?

You must go below to see!

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Wordless Wednesday (11)

The Century (2/4)

Part two of my 100 things.

26 through 50.

The end of the first half.

And it seems like I just started.

OK, sorry.  I'm stalling...

The Century

I've tried my hand before at those "100 things about me" blog posts.  I've never been really satisfied with the end result, and I think I've deleted them from my archives.

I started another one in the middle of July and promised myself that I'd keep it in draft form until I managed to think up enough items I thought were interesting.  Now that I've done that, I have also decided that I'm SO interesting I can afford to break it up into four different posts over an entire week.

25 things about me, served up fresh and steaming hot, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.  I'm sticking to the photo thing on Wednesday.

Enjoy!  (I think.  Remember, I'm being honest.)

Golfing handicapped

I'm going golfing this weekend.  Which should be a display of gross incompetence, exacerbated by inebriation if all goes according to plan.

You see, a friend of mine turns 30 this weekend.  His wife, for the past year, has been planning a surprise trip for him and three of his friends.  So there are four of us headed to Vancouver Island off the coast of BC for three days, two nights, and three rounds of golf.  We get to stay in a villa!

I should be entertaining for my friends, at least, because I haven't golfed since my company tournament last June.  (There was no company tournament this June, what with us now being too big and corporate and money-oriented to bother investing as much as we used to in the people who operate the company.  But I won't discuss that here.)  I did get out to the driving range with my brother earlier this week, and was surprised how well I hit the balls, not having picked up a club in over a year.

So, my goal this weekend will be to enjoy myself in the company of friends, not worry at all about how lousy my shots are, and try to think up an excuse to use the company credit card to buy an expensive dinner.  That last bit will be the easiest, don't you worry.

No posting again until Monday.  But I've been working on a theme for next week and I'll unleash it in all it's self-aggrandising glory first thing Monday morning.  God, I love talking about myself.

Also, have I mentioned Amy and I are going to Cuba in October?  Because we're going to Cuba in October.  Abandoning our boys for a week and heading where no American dares to tread.  Amy's mom will stay at our house to fend for the wee lads, and I suppose Amy will miss them horribly.  More on that, probably, as the date nears and we realise we still haven't updated our passports.  This is where I should make some sort of comment about buying cigars that are tightly rolled on the velvety thighs of young virgins, but I can't think of anything lascivious enough.  Odd, for me.

Random aside: working in a long row of cubicles for the past few days, I have discovered that the more rapidly and consistently a person is typing, the less likely they are doing any work.  I composed this post while humming the 1812 Overture to cover my tracks.  Also, it's a lot harder to fart discretely.

Wordless Wednesday (10)

Click it for a bigger attitude.

Cube 216D - Day 1

Yesterday (day 0):

Made the move over from the head office yesterday.  Had my former phone booth of an office packed up and ready to go by the middle of the morning.  Had a chicken wrap for lunch.  Cut my finger and bled on my desk.  Walked to the first aid room for the first time in my eight years with the company.  Am pretty sure that it's the only room in the entire building I've never been in.

Packed last boxes into my truck at 3 PM and called my brother.  Said I wanted to go to the driving range for an hour.  Everybody at this office would think I was moving, everybody at the other office would think I was still here.  It was almost too perfect...

Today:

6:30 AM - Arrive at new office early to unpack boxes.  I am one in a long line of about a dozen cubes along the north wall of our two-storey office building.  Since I'm on the north wall, I can see the sun reflecting off the building across from me, but that's as close as I will come to seeing it from my cube.

There was a note on each desk as I walked through the building to my station.  The front was stippled with faux confetti and read: CONGRATULATIONS!!  The inside read: Welcome to your new workstation!!  I tossed it into the recycle bin with the understanding that the card was more excited than I was.

7:00 AM - I have unpacked most of the boxes and I managed to throw out even more paperwork than I did in the initial purge when I packed them.  I'm not too sure how much was because I deemed the paper unnecessary and how much was because I didn't really care.  Probably some beautiful confluence of the two.

7:30 AM - All boxes are unpacked and I am in the final stages of sorting.  More office paraphernalia will arrive later this week so that we may outfit our workstations in the corporate-approved accessories.  I can't wait to see my 'personal shelves' and 'folder sorters'.

Other cube-dwellers arriving now too.

8:00 AM - 90% organised in my new workstation and I have made my first attempt at turning on my laptop computer.  It powers up wonderfully but lacks any sort of connectivity to the world outside my two and a half walls.  I do nothing but utter something like, "Well, crap."  There is no emotion in my voice.

8:10 AM - I eat my banana.

8:15 AM - I call the IT Helpdesk, which is located in Ontario, over 3,000 kilometres from where I work.  Since they cannot connect to my machine remotely because the lack of any sort of connection is the problem I'm calling about, they can do nothing at all for me except to tell me to reboot a couple times and unplug and re-plug a couple of cords.  Nothing works, but John is very personable over the phone.  He puts in a service call for the guy who now works down the hall from me to go to the basement and patch in my connection.  I don't know when he'll do that.

8:30 AM - I complain about the lack of connectivity to a co-worker, who says that the IT guy down the hall will have to go to the basement and patch in my connection.  I briefly experience dejà vu.  I wonder aloud why they didn't just plug them all in at the same time.  He looks at me and shakes his head, like after eight years here I should know better.

8:35 AM - I decide to go and get coffee.  I don't know where it is, so I wander the halls, carrying my mug that says "You are safe.  Do not panic," while I whistle random tunes I probably heard on Treehouse TV.  I find a coffee-maker, but the reservoir is out of water and I refuse to fill it up cup-by-cup with my empty mug.  I go in search of a water pitcher.

8:40 AM - I find a water pitcher in the big kitchen on the first floor.  There are two, side by side, so I feel no guilt taking one back up to the second floor.  I wouldn't have felt guilt anyway.  I top up the reservoir and select a single serving of Chocolate Almond coffee.  With one packet of raw sugar, it's quite yummy.

9:00 AM - Still no IT help.

9:10 AM - I wander down to the first floor to see if I can find the IT guy.  I am quite proud of myself when I think to make note that the number of my LAN port is D2-87 so I can tell the IT guy.s  I have no idea what he looks like, but I assume he'll sport the minimum of corporate attire, wear his hair intentionally umkempt and have some degree of a sullen expression on his face.  I cannot find him.

9:15 AM - return to my desk and open Notepad so I can record the morning of my first day at the new corporate office.

9:35 AM - Still no IT help, I have typed all that is written above and am contemplating a second cup of coffee.  I wonder when I can post this tripe to my blog.

9:40 AM - Random IT guy pops his head around the corner of my cube and says, "Trouble?"  I've never seen him before, but I was right about the hair and the attire.  Wrong about the sullen look.  I would call it more cocky.  I give myself a mental gold star for getting two out of three and reboot my computer for what I hope is the last time today.

9:45 AM - Look out world.  I'm back online.