ever-fixed mark

Our house is over 100 years old, and it doesn’t have central air conditioning. I realize that this is not a problem on par with, say, being stuck in a hot zone in the Middle East (hi, Steve! How’s that new job going?) but it is vexing nonetheless. I had always dreamed that when I reached a certain income level I would have attained some yuppie creature comforts, but somehow as we moved up the socioeconomic scale, our standard of living seemed to diminish. When we finally bought The Big House, we found ourselves without central air, a second bathroom, or a backyard.

Why no AC, you ask? Partly because people here cling to the quaintly Puritanical idee fixe that “it only gets hot around here two weeks a year, so hell, you don’t really need central air.” This is a base fallacy, as any temperature tables would bear out.

Also, we live in the least affordable, most overpriced county in the country, according to Forbes. Not New York City, not San Francisco: if you take into account not just real-estate costs and cost of living, but also “lack of job opportunities” and salaries, we’re the biggest suckers on the planet. Whoo-hoo! We’re number one!

And being number one means being grateful to get anything remotely affordable, while studiously overlooking the lack of amenities. After all, you can always add a bathroom/install central air/annex a back yard. (Well, maybe not that last one.)

Thus, we are renovating. We’re having our third floor insulated and turned into office space, a playroom, and a spare bathroom, and having air conditioning installed on all three floors to boot. This will free up one of the downstairs rooms as a guest room, so guests will not have to sleep with the baby, and frees up the current office with the Gothic wallpaper for one of the boys. (By the way, you wouldn’t believe how many hits I get for the search “Gothic nursery.” Are there really so many of you out there decorating baby’s room in black? Rock on.)

I’ve read A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun, and I know that renovation tales are supposed to be fraught with drama and cost overruns. A horde of foreign men with charming accents is meant to invade your home, swearing in languages other than English, tearing down load-bearing walls in error, and generally upending your existence, all the while teaching you Valuable Life Lessons couched in the metaphor of construction. I wish I could oblige, but this process has been so straightforward I can’t believe people bitch about renovation.

To wit, we promised to pay a well-regarded contractor an obscene amount of money to install some HVAC and throw up some drywall. Without taking any kind of deposit, or even seemingly confirming our ability to pay, he started work basically on time and has proceeded according to plan without bothering us too much. Periodically, we go up to the sweltering attic to check on the progress with our expert eyes (”uh, looks OK!”). The men all have New Hampshire accents — not so charming — and they swear in English. Today, one of them was bitten by a tick! And bled all over the place! I gave him some nail polish remover to flush the sucker out. And that’s about it for the life lessons.

There was one small delay while the plumber was MIA for a few days. If we hadn’t suffered that setback, the AC might have been operative before the Great Heat Wave of Ought-Six, and I may not have sunk into the depths of despair when one of the unit air conditioners crapped out in the middle of the night and all five of us (Dog included) were forced to spend two days confined to the TV room. But the guys have been installing ducts all morning, just as promised, and Minor has decided that all the drilling, pounding, and shouting will not interfere with his newly-instituted three-hour morning nap, so all is right with the world.

A few weeks ago, my Mac died. Again. The kernels, they panicked, and all Apple’s geniuses and tech support men couldn’t revive Freawaru again. (That’s my computer’s name.)

I do most of my work on a desktop PC in my office, and some on a laptop PC that belongs to one of my clients. The Mac sits in the kitchen, where I use it to keep tabs on e-mail, order groceries, blog, and videoconference with my parents. I sometimes take it on business trips, but I always copy only the files I need and then, as soon as I return, copy new or modified files back onto the PC. I back up the PC to a bigger hard drive once a week. So when the Mac crashed, I was secure in the knowledge that no valuable files were gone with it.

Except.

Except my photos, movies, and music.

When I first realize this, all I could think about were the photos. I was literally sick to my stomach at the thought of losing all Aitch’s photos, as well as Minor’s first month with us. Very few of these photos were available in hard copy. Some had been incorporated into movies, which were safe on my iDisc, an internet hard drive that comes with a dot-Mac account. After a few hours of feeling depressed, I suddenly realized that many (not all) of the photos were backed up on my video iPod. The trick was getting them out.

After poking around on the Web for a few days, I found File Juicer, a program that lets you convert the huge “.ithmb” files that lump together all of your photos on your video iPod to .tiff files, which then can be imported back into iPhoto when your new hard drive is operative. There is a loss of quality, as the resulting .tiff files are at a lower resolution than the original files, but it’s a small price to pay for regaining your first kid’s babyhood.

After I had solved that problem, it was a week or two before I realized that my music was similarly trapped. Unfortunately, Apple does not make it easy for people to get their music from the iPod back to the computer, even using a hack like File Juicer. You can’t even see your music files on your iPod; Apple makes them invisible. And there’s no way to synch back from the iPod to iTunes.

For the uninitiated, Apple permits you to “authorize” up to 5 computers to play any music or video downloaded from iTunes. These protections prevent you from sharing willy-nilly. They also may sharply limit your ability to enjoy what you’ve paid for; Husband and I, for example, have authorized each other’s Macs to play our playlists, and since each Mac has died twice, each of us has reached our 5-computer limit without being able to authorize the other’s computer (two dead hard drives + one live hard drive for each of us = 6 “computers”). You can deauthorize a computer via the interwebs, but it’s not so cinchy to deauthorize a dead computer.

Your might wonder what the big deal is, if you only listen to music on your iPod anyway, but if you authorize a new instance of iTunes to synch with your iPod (so you can download more music), it will synchronize that instance’s empty database with your iPod, erasing all the data on it. You can always re-rip all your CDs, but in my case 99% of the music existed only in electronic format. It really stinks that I legitimately paid for most of the music on my iPod (OK, not all; before iTunes, back in the old days, I was downloading music off LimeWire), and through no fault of my own, I couldn’t access any of it. I mean, the photos were my fault; I should have backed them up. But you can’t back up invisible music.

Or can you?

I downloaded a nifty little program called RIP to do the job. This application, whose interface features two simple buttons, first sucks all the invisible files out of your iPod onto your hard drive, and then imports them all back into iTunes for you with the playlists, ratings, etc. intact. You can download a trial version, which you can open 10 times, and then after that you have to pay for it — $15 well spent.

From now on, my backup routine will include all my files.

I went to the real, live, bricks-and-mortar grocery store the other day, something I rarely do, and a trip down the feminine hygiene aisle has prompted the following:

What’s with the sudden super-abundance of super, super-plus, and super-plus-plus tampons? You can hardly find a Regular anymore, let alone a “Slender” or “Junior” or whatever euphemism passes for “smaller than a grain silo” these days.

Is this the “Starbucks effect,” where big is the new small? Or is it the “7-Eleven effect,” where they discontinue the smaller sizes to force you to buy more?

Or…is there some kind of a correlation between global warming and menstrual flow? (A very inconvenient truth.) Is that why we suddenly have so many “red states”?

Whenever Aitch perceives a new specimen of insect, he asks what it’s called and then asks his father, “Daddy, do we like it?” Then he adds it to his “Litany of Bugs,” which he immediately recites:

“We like ladybugs!

“We like fireflies!

“We like caterpillars!

“We like dragonflies!

“No we like ticks!” and so forth.

I have impressed upon him that we “no like mosquitoes.” I happen to have blood that especially appetizing to mosquitoes, and thus I am often imposed upon for an early evening snack. This has made my summer, with all the mosquitoes breeding in the standing water from our recent storms, a living hell. Outside, I have to be doused in awful-smelling DEET. At night, after I shower, I’m plagued with bites. The mosquitoes seem to congregate around places where I am likely to be sitting still: by my kitchen computer, where they nip at my ankles as I blog, and in Minor’s room, where they get me while I’m trying to rock him to sleep.

I’ve always been mosquito bait. When I was younger, my cousin once counted 72 mosquito bites on my legs. In the Peace Corps, I carried a mosquito net everywhere I traveled, and was actually bitten on the soles of my feet during one of my rare outings without a net.

Why is this? Theories differ: is it blood type or carbon dioxide output? Alcohol consumption or body chemistry? Maybe high cholesterol or lactic acid? I don’t know, but female mosquitoes require human blood to fertilize their eggs. Hey, at least I’m fertile for something.

Husband here.  Sorry about Wife’s blog being down.  Technical issues.  Won’t happen again.

Most parents find out early that you express concerns about your child’s development at your peril. Other parents will tell you that their little Oliver didn’t speak until he was called upon to defend his doctoral dissertation, and he’s just fine! Your pediatrician will carefully refrain from expressing an opinion and tell you to call Early Intervention. And if your child is adopted, other adoptive parents will tell you with certainty that it’s attachment disorder. Doesn’t matter what it is: wetting the bed? Dislikes vegetables? Kelly-green poop? Attachment disorder.

Aitch has consistently been several months behind his peers in language development. He said his first words later than his friends, strung two words together later, made complex sentences later. (I’m basing my comparisons on children born within a week or two of Aitch.) I am told that this is not unexpected for an adopted child; that it takes them awhile to re-set their language learning apparati. I can’t find any evidence for this, though, and I’ve known plenty of children who came to this country much later, having lived under far worse conditions, whose development is on target or even advanced.

We had him evaluated by Early Intervention, who told us that his language development was within normal bounds. I know that they use a wide range for normal, which I’m sure is appropriate, but I’m sure my informal comparisons are accurate, too. Since Aitch seems to be progressing at the same rate as everyone else, albeit with a few months’ lag, I’m not worried about this, but I’ve been keeping my eye on it.

There are two major syntactical elements that Aitch has yet to master. One is negation. He hasn’t yet figured out when to use “no” to modify a noun, versus using “not” to negate a verb. Until very recently, he has prefaced positive statements with the word “no” to negate them, such as “No Minor is crying now.” We always repeat it correctly (”Minor is NOT crying”), and recently he has begun to use “not” correctly on his own. He often rehearses negative versions of statements as though he’s trying to remember how it goes (”No Minor is sad! Minor is NOT sad!”).

The other element is pronouns. Aitch rarely uses pronouns, even in reference to himself. He is probably the only almost-three-year old on the planet never to refer to himself as “me” or claim something as “mine.” He calls himself by his first name, earning the nickname “Jimmy” after the guy on the Seinfeld episode who referred to himself in the third person.

The other day, Husband said to me, “I don’t think Aitch is going to be studious.” I’ve had the same feeling. He’s just not as book-oriented as Husband and I were at that age, according to our parents. Aitch reminds me of a guy in my Peace Corps class who was crap at learning Arabic in the classroom but was so social that he picked it up in the cafes in no time. What Aitch lacks in natural aptitude, he makes up for in willingness to practice. He starts conversations everywhere we go.

I sometimes think about the kind of child Husband and I might have produced biologically. We are both ept enough socially, but introverts and loners at heart, and we are both very language-oriented (computers for him, spoken languages for me). I’m picturing a little Asperger’s tot, hiding alone under a table, creating anagrams out of XML tags.

I would have loved that kid, but I’m so thrilled we got Aitch instead.

We are finally, knock wood, achieving some kind of a normal routine with Minor. It hasn’t been easy. Our biggest issue with him has been extreme fussiness— his, and then subsequently ours. We’ve spent the last few weeks ruling out various theories: it’s not reflux, it’s persisted after his medications have been discontinued, and he is capable of going more than two and a half hours without a feeding. It turns out that he just gets bored easily. In other words, as long as he is simultaneously 1. being held 2. in constant motion and 3. entertained by a thrilling panorama enfolding in front of him, he is suddenly not gassy, ill, or hungry.

So five minutes in his swing while I fold laundry? Oh, the screeching! The wailing! The gnashing of gums, the rending of garments!

Five hours on a whale watch tour? Heard nothing from him but delighted giggles.

The advantage of this, of course, is that Minor is extremely portable, as long as we’re porting him someplace interesting. Here’s what we were able to enjoy on Saturday:

I always thought that babies were a hindrance to your life. How could you go anywhere with an infant in tow? But Minor doesn’t prevent us from doing anything. He just prevents us from stopping.

Friday, I went to the gym to run. I hate running at the gym. I’m generally a fan of fresh air and real reality, and running indoors on a treadmill listening to an iPod while watching TV, completely disconnected from the others doing the same thing around me, strikes me as futuristic in the worst possible way. But, hey, the gym has day care; the beach doesn’t; and the day before, Minor screamed for two whole miles — as if running weren’t painful enough, I need to have Minor articulating my pain?

A lot of people are bored stiff by the treadmill, but I actually enjoy using the speed and distance meters to challenge myself. As a bonus, I can get caught up on the world via the cable news networks we don’t get at home. I always see something interesting. Once, I saw an old boyfriend from college on Fox News. No, he wasn’t involved in any kind of police standoff; he is a financial analyst, as is his identical twin brother, and the gimmick is that they appear together and give their different slants on a particular topic. That’s why I could be found on the treadmill that day, yelling at the screen, “Hey! Didn’t they use to be English majors?”

And Friday the excrutiatingly dull coverage of the Supreme Court’s decison on tribunals was interrupted by footage of Bush and the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, who was sporting the most awesome ‘do on a head of state ever. Check this out. It’s a little bit Beatles, a little bit Richard Gere, with just a soupçon of Mary Tyler Moore thrown in.