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?

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.

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'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?

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. :)

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?

I posted some new pictures to Elliott's site yesterday. Elliott turned three years old on Saturday! We spent our morning getting soaked in the pouring rain at the zoo and having a great time splashing in puddles.

General Elliott news and milestones:

• His favorite things to do are jigsaw puzzles, marble races, and saying "Look at me! Can you do this?"
  
• He's still not into the "why" phase. That's fine with me. :)
  
• He's reading most of his old board books on his own quite easily, but has a lot more trouble with unfamiliar books at the same level of difficulty.
  
• He loves to help me in the kitchen. I've had to get creative to find enough jobs for him to do that don't involve sharp knives or high heat, but we can usually find something. He can cut up bananas or tofu or anything soft with a butter knife. He can peel vegetables. He can stir ingredients together, and set the table, and put rolls in a basket.
  
• He also wants to help with laundry, but when he sets out to fold clothes, it tends to devolve into sock-throwing chaos in under a minute.
  

Coming soon to a blog near you: news outside of parenthood!

Me: No wonder you're tired, you had a big day.
Elliott: No, I didn't! I didn't have a big day! I had a small day! A very, very small day!

I meant to write this up sooner: Elliott, Jon, and I discovered the best weekend activity ever for nerds of all ages. Weekend before last, we went to Robothon at the Seattle Center and it was great fun. Robothon is an annual event put on by the Seattle Robotics Society. They have vendors and demos and competitions and it runs all weekend.

Elliott's been obsessing about robots for at least a few months now, so it was an easy sell when I told him we were going to get in the car to go and see some REAL LIVE ROBOTS. I think he thought they would be 16 feet tall and have laser guns for arms, but he seemed to be satisfied with the small, peace-loving gadgets we found when we got there.

On the way in, we walked past the International Fountain, a rather odd-looking Seattle landmark especially popular on hot summer days:



This was a gray drizzly day, so I told Elliott that it was the spaceship the robots had used to come to earth. He was very enthusiastic about that story.

At the event itself, there was plenty to look at, but my favorite part was the MicroMouse competition. Here's an example of a MicroMouse maze (not the one I saw, just a random one from the web):



Each robot had ten minutes to explore the maze and make runs from the start corner to the center of the maze. The fastest run within that ten minutes would be the final time.

There was a big variety in the robots that ran the race. One was built from stock, off-the-shelf Lego Mindstorms components; another was almost completely hand-crafted from specialized components and circuit boards. Strategies varied a lot too. The Lego robot just followed walls, but the fancy circuit board robot mapped the entire maze with four downward-pointing "eyes," charted an optimal route, and then made speed runs to the center.

It was a great event for all of us and I hope we manage to attend again next year. Maybe one of these years I'll build a robot and bring it along, too -- or if all else fails, I'll check at the International Fountain and see if any robots newly arrived from space want to join forces with me.

Elliott: Jon, can you sit in the black chair?
Jon: I don't know, can I?
Elliott: Jon, can you sit in the black chair right here?
Jon: Can you ask me nicely?
Elliott: Jon, sit in this black chair that is right here that it will be fun if you sit in the black chair, Jon!
Jon, laughing: Yes, or you could cajole me.
Elliott: OK! I will control you! (Waving imaginary remote control)

Elliott's page has been updated and moved to a new domain: elliottcook.com.

Back when I was a kid, moms showed they cared by clawing each other's eyes out over the last Cabbage Patch doll at the mall. In 2007, we've moved on. Now it's all about securing your child's domain name. I had to backorder the domain from godaddy because it was taken, but eventually it came through. Woohoo!

We were sitting around the table eating dinner when out of the blue, Elliott told us his plan:

Holding out his thumb: First comes the eating,
And his index finger: then I wash my hands,
And his middle finger: then the runnin' around,
With difficulty, his ring finger: then, um..... um.... the NOT climbin' the cat tree...
His pinky: and then the STOMP! Stomp, stomp, STOMP!

Today was my last day on the job as a stay-at-home-mom. Now it's the weekend, and come Monday I'll be a working mom. After three years at home I feel very ready for the change and happy about what's to come, but also a little wistful about the end of this bit of my life. Mostly I feel grateful to have had the chance to stay home these first few years, and also grateful to have the chance to start up my career again without too much difficulty. I'm so lucky on both counts.

I told Elliott this morning that it was our last regular day like this, and that we were going to make it extra fun. He was pretty psyched about that. I let him decide the agenda, for the most part. I thought he might want to go to the zoo or the park or eat lunch in a restaurant, but whenever I suggested anything like that he said he just wanted to stay home and play with toys or read a book. So that's what we did. This morning he wanted to take a bath -- in Mommy's bathtub, to make it novel -- so that's what he did. (He smelled like my flowery bubble bath all day.) He wanted to take his nap early, and have me stay and snuggle until he fell asleep -- so that's what we did. In the evening, Chris had a late ultimate game, so Elliott and I had an early dinner and then met up with a friend and went to the playground. On the way home he was tired and there was a big hill to climb, so I carried him, and he said, "I'm sleepy, Mommy. It was extra fun."

Three years -- that's 10% of my life at this point, but 100% (and then some) of Elliott's. Wish us well, please!

May, 2007
Elliott's main site

Elliott's May pictures are up!

I'm not sure what the plan is, going forward. I am starting work in less than a month. Should I keep updating his site every month now that I'm going to be a lot busier? And then there's the question of how long it really makes sense to chart a kid's progress on a monthly basis. A baby grows a lot between four and five months old. But how embarrassing is it when your mom charts your progress from 98 months old to 99 months old?

So I think this all adds up to a rationalization to slow down to bimonthly or quarterly updates. Unless there are vociferous objections from Elliott's adoring fan club?

• Only one month until I start my new job!
  
  
• The weather in Seattle has turned downright gorgeous. It's about two months early for that. I'm sure we'll get smacked back down with some rain pretty soon, but I'm enjoying it while it lasts.
  
  
• Chris and Elliott are going on a mystery trip in two weeks. Chris wanted to plan the trip his way without my OCDish interference (smart of him) so he has not divulged any details to me. All I know are the trip dates and that they are going to California.
  
  
• Elliott is going through a hard time right now, having a lot of tantrums, separation anxiety, clinginess, and contrariness. Any kind of transition time is especially challenging. I am surviving.
  
  
• I'm spending a lot of time sorting and tagging my entire photo collection and scanning anything that's not already digital. It's going to be so great when it's done. Many of you will be subjected to slideshows on various themes when I've got it all together.
  
  
• Elliott's doing great on reading. As I type, he's sitting on the couch reading out loud to himself. He does seem to memorize easily so he gives the appearance of fluent reading on the second or third time through a book, whereas the first reading is pretty choppy. I'm buying a lot of Dick-and-Jane style books right now to give him plenty of chances to practice.
  
  
• I have to get an Employer Identification Number and all kinds of bureaucratic rigamarole in order to employ Laura legally as our nanny. I feel like such a part of the establishment. I'm the Man. Scary.
  

Elliott's been learning pronouns one by one over the last few months. First he learned "you," which he used for both first- and second-person. "Carry you, please!"

Next came "I" and "me."

Most recently, he's started saying "she," but not "he." It's not that he can't pronounce it. He just doesn't understand the difference between them, so he uses "she" for everyone.

Sometimes this grates, when he is talking about a specific male person: "Where is Daddy? Is she at work?"

But more often, his indiscriminate pronoun use makes me question my own assumptions. Elliott refers to every animal at the zoo, every unspecified person, every unseen person as "she." About a giraffe: "Does she like to eat leaves, Mommy?" About a baby of indeterminate gender: "Is she crying, Mommy?" About someone far down the street, whose gender I can't determine: "She's riding a bicycle! Is she riding a bicycle, Mommy?" About a person having a coughing fit in the next aisle over in the grocery store: "She is sick! She is coughing, Mommy!"

In all of those cases, I would have said "he." Why? No reason. For all of our modern sensibility about taking the gender out of our language whenever possible, there's still a surprising amount left over.

April, 2007
Elliott's main site

Elliott's April 2007 web page is up.

The latest news:

• Today is "Potty Training In One Day" day and it's going reasonably well, but it's too soon to tell if we are really done with diapers forever. I will post an update in a few days. There have certainly been plenty of successes today.
  
  
• I only have two months of full-time mommyhood left and I'm getting nostalgic about it already! Plans are falling into place for summer (full time with Laura, swimming lessons, lots of going to the park, possible co-op one or two days a week) and fall (five mornings a week of preschool, afternoons with Laura).
  
  
• Elliott continues his muffin obsession. A day without baking muffins is a day wasted, in his opinion.
  
  
• Another favorite game: say the names of three people (or cats) he knows, and then laugh. "Mommy, Daddy, Elliott! Leo, Norman, Elliott! Mommy, Grandma Cyndy, Norman! HAHAHAHAHA!" I haven't figured out what makes it so funny but it sure is easy to play.
  
  
• We are firmly into "MINE!" and "No no no no no!" territory. This too shall pass.
  
  
• If it has anything to do with robots, dinosaurs, or giraffes, it is way cool. Robot dinosaur giraffes send him into paroxysms of joy.
  

Elliott just peed in the toilet for the first time ever. It's a happy, happy day. :)

Next week we're going to try the "Potty Training In Less Than a Day" method. If it works we'll be done with diapers forever. If it doesn't then our future therapists are already making little "ka-ching" noises and daydreaming of Fiji. Wish us luck!

Good things lately:

1. Drifting off on the couch this lazy Sunday morning, and being startled awake by Elliott sneaking up and planting a kiss on my face.

2. Playing a 2-level contract as declarer, on shaky uninformed bidding, and making the contract anyway.

3. Playing Scrabble last night with Chris, Eric, and Jon. Eric had three bingos in a row!

4. Elliott, who was watching TV at the time, saying, "Turn it off, Mommy! I wanna make muffins in da kitchen now!" and then choosing oat bran over apple cinnamon.

5. Going to the park for a hike and a picnic this morning.

March photos
Elliott's whole site

What's new with Elliott this month:

• We're just back from a big trip to the midwest, and Elliott's first week away from home. He stayed with his grandparents and he had a blast!
  
  
• As I type, he is wearing dinosaur underpants and no diaper! This is day one of trying seriously to toilet train. I'm sure there is a lot of carpet cleaning in my future.
  
  
• On the airplane yesterday, when the plane was stopped at the gate, and everyone was standing around waiting quietly for them to let us off the plane, Elliott announced loudly: "Time to get off now! It's SEATTLE!" to much general amusement.