But enough about you

Someone just canceled a 90-minute meeting. so I have an unexpected chunk of free time. Since I don't seem to make time to post here under normal circumstances, I'll take advantage of this boon by posting now.

Life has generally been really good lately.

Work: I've been at Google a little over a year now and I'm still thoroughly enjoying it. I'm continuing to learn at a rapid clip and I'm a lot more useful to my team with each passing quarter. I can't do justice to describing what a paradise it is for an engineer to work at Google - not because of all the nice perks, as welcome as yesterday's massage was - but because of the incredible infrastructure and tools we have available to help us do our jobs. Google gives you a fulcrum and a really big lever and then asks you to move the world - and you do!

I usually get to work between 8:30 and 9:30am, and leave at about 5:30pm. I eat breakfast and lunch at work. So with the time at work and the 15-minute commute, there goes 45 hours of my week. I'm really happy when I'm at work. If the rest of my life were less interesting, I'd spend more time here.

Family: Jon and I are doing really well. I don't like to use my blog as a platform for dissecting partner relationships, so I'm not going to go into any details about what's working and what isn't, but it's mostly working and we're pretty happy. Jon is obsessed with playing go and spends one night a week at the Go Center, as well as playing lunchtime games at work and playing online with people around the world.

Elliott is three and a half and getting to be a pretty interesting little person. He finished his first year of preschool and will go to preschool for two more years before starting kindergarten. We're thinking he'll probably go to private school but that's not decided yet. He's reading lots of books, playing lots of "soccer" in the back yard with Jon, taking swimming lessons with Laura, going to summer camp, getting skinned knees, refusing to eat 80% of the foods he meets (but eating the other 20% voraciously), forgetting to ask nicely, building forts, requesting extra snuggles, considering stopping sucking his thumb, playing computer games, and making really dumb jokes over and over again. He's a good kid. I have a bunch of pictures stacked up that I keep not posting to elliottcook.com - I'll try to get to that soon.

My Dad is biking a lot, trying not to spend too much time at work, and enjoying the hot summer days. My Mom is recovering from a long-term vision problem and doing some genealogy research.

Myself: I don't have a ton of free time during the week. I come home, make dinner, hang out with Elliott and put him to bed, and by then it's 8:30pm and Jon wants to play go. :) Sometimes we do that or watch a TV show on DVD. I'm trying to read more this year than I did last year, so some evenings I do that. I've recently taken up beadwork again and I'll be going to a wire wrapping class at a local bead store next week. I've played too much Eschalon (a single-player RPG with a Mac version) lately. I'm still slogging through paperwork associated with my divorce, which is not quite complete yet. And of course, I like to hang out with friends, when I get a chance, which is not often enough.

So that's why I never update this blog any more.

And what about you, dear readers? What are you up to lately?

I was out of town 4/19 through 4/27 and it took longer to recover than usual because I got sick near the end of the trip - today was the first normal, productive day since before we left. I'm finally really back!

Some trivia:

I'm experimenting with tinted lotion to cover up my ghastly pallor. Results mixed so far - not as streaky and orange as I feared, but not completely unstreaky or unorange. Maybe I should have gotten something more expensive, but I thought I'd start at the low end and work my way up.

I saw a good friend from grad school today. She moved away about three years ago and I've really missed her. I wish she would move back, but things are going well for her on the east coast, so I guess we'll have to stick with occasional visits and emails. More local friends would be good - there's just no substitute for talking face to face.

I started a task today I'd been putting off for months. It wasn't nearly as bad as I feared. Now, as a reward to myself, I get to put together some of the LEGOs I got for 25% off at the math store. (The sale's still on, hurry in!) Because I'm that kind of LEGO freak.

Jon and I went to some open houses this weekend. We saw quite a range of houses, from amazing (but already sold) to soulless and cookie-cutter. I love this part of a house hunt - all dreams and fantasies. It's like trying on glamorous costumes and playing dress-up with your whole life.

First of May came and went - OFS has officially begun. ;)

Sit-ups good.

I'm in San Francisco today for the ad:tech conference and the big announcement of the feature I've been working on for the last few months.

My product, Website Optimizer, used to be just a feature of AdWords. To get to it you had to sign up for an AdWords account and then click the link to GWO. As of today, you can now sign into GWO directly. I'm hoping that people will find the signup process a little more user-friendly now.

There was a lot of work behind that simple-looking login box, and I'm proud to be shipping this and moving on to the next thing. Whew!

I flew down to SFO last night and spent the night at a friend's house in Palo Alto. My friend and his girlfriend have a beautiful new house with some very interesting power- and water-usage micromeasurement features - my friend can see real-time graphs of what devices are consuming how much power and water. He showed me a recent graph of water usage in the master bathroom and there was a spike of water used by the toilet at 9:43am and then a smaller spike used by the "his" sink at 9:44am. "See?" he said. "I washed my hands." Very cool stuff.

I fly home this afternoon. This quick trip has been a really nice break for me - delicious dinner at a swank Palo Alto restaurant last night, Rock Band on the XBox afterward, the announcement today. I should probably do things like this more often.

What's better than dyeing things other colors?

I am most recently reminded of this by dyeing easter eggs, of course, but the lesson is universal. Color is happy-making.

Tomorrow morning I get to wake up early and hide the eggs for Elliott to hunt. Let's hope he finds them all or it's going to be a stinky rotten egg spring.

I finally finished my taxes. "Married filing separately" is really crappy. I don't recommend it. I am shooting for "Head of household" for next year. Schedule H (for household employers) is also no barrel of laughs but after preparing state unemployment taxes all year, paystubs every two weeks, and a W-2 and W-3 in January, it was actually kind of humdrum.

Someday I will probably break down and get an accountant but I've survived another year without one. Go me.

Just spent seven hours at work on a Saturday playing Rock Band. I'm mostly lead guitar, but by the end my hands were tired so I tried out drumming and singing as well. The singing was not as much of a disaster as I feared.

I'm now solid on guitar at the medium level, and shaky but ok on hard.

Why is it that whenever you pick a mystery set list, it includes Green Grass and High Tides?

The Elliott photos that I meant to put up last month are finally up!

March, 2008
Elliott's site

What's new with Elliott:

• He is getting ridiculously good at platform games on the web. Anything where a dog has to jump from place to place and gobble all the bones, for example, and he is great at it.
  
• I think Laura and I made too big a deal about how cute he looks in boxer briefs, because now he refuses to wear tighty whiteys any more. Oh well; I guess that was a step in the right direction anyway.
  
• He's still obsessed with robots, and with fighting them with "shooters."
  
• He's learning to play nethack! That's my kid! I'm so proud.
  
• He's still my cuddly little boy.
  

I've got a new hobby/addiction. Rojonoir, I know you play. Anybody else out there willing to play go with a total beginner? I've been playing against Jon, but he's still winning handily even with a 9-stone handicap - and he claims he's not that good. So I'm easy pickings. :)

Only four episodes of Buffy left after several months of watching the whole series. I'm within easy bingeing distance of the end. So now the question: gorge myself in a sprint to the finish, or savor slowly?

And the other question: what next, when this is done? Pay my taxes and catch up on other life stuff, maybe? Or just plunge back in to the next addiction?

I'm in the bathroom; Elliott's on the other side of the closed door.

Elliott: Mommy?
Me: Yes?
Elliott: What are you doing in there?
Me: What do you think?
Elliott: But what are you doing in there?
Me: It's just me and a toilet. What do you think I'm doing?
Elliott: Fixing it?

I ascended again last night... woohoo! The writeup is over in the nethack community.

Tomorrow and Friday I'll be at Whistler on the Google Pacific Northwest ski trip. I lead a really rough life.

On the flip side, Jon's cat Oscar is doing poorly. He has lost two pounds in the last few months, which is a lot for a cat. We've moved him into a kid-free zone in the bedroom and Jon has been coddling him and feeding him ahi tuna and mackerel, which sounds expensive until you find out what the ultrasound and feeding tube were going to cost. It seems to be working, which is great -- but my bedroom smells like mackerel.

It's good to be getting away.

There has been a mild amount of buzz in the blogosphere the last few days about the Five Whys technique for getting to the root of a problem. When something happens, you are supposed to ask why five times, and you'll get to the root cause.

Elliott must have been reading too many blogs, because this is the week he started doing the completely typical three-year-old thing of asking "Why?" incessantly. So far he seems to be listening to the answer and not just saying "Why?" again as a knee-jerk reaction. I am hopeful that the listening thing will stick.

I have been expecting and dreading this phase for the last six months or so and now it is here. So far it's not as bad as I feared. Ask me again in a few weeks... Just don't ask me "Why?" I feel so frustrated. :)

We're going to see Mike Daisey's Monopoly! at the CHAC on Friday. Anybody local want to come? Get yer tickets here: Brown Paper Tickets.

Happy Hauler rocks my world. All my junk is gone and I have blessedly empty space.

( Who comments the most on this journal? )

Here's what's happened lately --

• Elliott and I went to Minnesota for Christmas. Elliott had a bad cold the whole time we were there, which put a damper on things, but we had a good time anyway. My parents got me some Lego sets (at my request) and the excellent book Forbidden Lego, so I've been doing a lot of miniature construction work lately. Elliott is getting interested in "grown-up Legos" in addition to Duplos, which is great.

• For New Year's Eve, Jon and I hosted a small gathering at my house. Our friend David introduced us to a Spanish tradition of eating twelve grapes at midnight, one for each chime of the clock. A few of us pulled it off, which supposedly grants us twelve months of good luck and prosperity. I guess it's harder with the large, white variety of grape typically found in Spain at the end of the year -- but we were using little purple grapes that were easy to swallow quickly. David said it still counted.

• I've been re-watching Babylon 5, since Jon got me season one on DVD for Hanukkah. (My first Hanukkah!)

• I'm famous: I was on the Official Google Blog a few days ago.

• Over the past few months, I've been decluttering my house. A lot of stuff has gone to Chris' condo (or will soon) and I'm hiring a junk service to come and cart the rest away. I can hardly wait.

• I've decided that when I'm at home, I'm only going to cook vegetarian (mostly vegan) food. I get plenty of meat at work and at restaurants, and I've been wanting to expand my vegetarian cooking repertoire, so I'm going to try this for a while. Tonight I made spinach fettucine with basil-cilantro pesto and artichoke hearts -- a recipe from the Veganomicon -- and it was delicious. The pesto has almonds in it instead of cheese and I think it came out really yummy.

That's the roundup for the last few weeks. What's up with you, fair readers?

MyHeritage: Celebrity Collage - Old photographs

I use Google Reader as my feed reader, and I've started using the "shared items" feature. Here are the things I've marked as share-worthy so far. Enjoy!

I impulse-bought a waffle iron last night, and this morning I fought hard with it and won. The first "waffle" was a big gooey mess that overflowed the iron and stuck to the grid. Much fierce scraping and cursing ensued. The next two waffles separated in the middle but looked waffle-y from the outside. The final, fourth waffle, was perfect.

Emboldened by my victory, and fortified by fresh fruit and waffle-y goodness in my tummy, I moved on to the next big project. I changed out the horrid, outdated, half-functioning light fixture on the ceiling of Jon's bedroom for a modern brushed-nickel fixture. That turned out to be even dicier than the waffle making, but with some help I got that done too.

Now I rest.