When reading the following quote from Daring Fireball out loud:

What matters is profit; market share and revenue only matter insofar as they lead to making money.

Hays’ comment?

“Isn’t that the point of having a job?”

I think he’s smarter than KL.

I sleep pretty deeply. I have since college. It comes from spending days working on school projects with less than a few hours of sleep each night. I kinda trained myself to sleep through pretty much anything.

At 2:33 this morning I bolted upright in bed: “What was that?!?”

A noise woke me up. I have no idea what the noise was (I was asleep!), but I have this sense that it sounded like a record player needle being raked sideways across the vinyl of an album. Yeah, yeah, I know… all you kids born >1980 are asking, “What’s an album?” STFU.

Meredith replied somewhat groggily (groggily?), “Um, I don’t know… sounded like a woodpecker on a metal roof.”

Yeah, I’ll buy that… we don’t have either (woodpecker or metal roof), but it was a descriptive response to an interrogative that she surely had exactly the same context I did… asleep and now instantly awake.

At this point, we both realized the wind was howling as the dryline for some storms was passing through. The power flickered, but not in your normal brown-out kinda way… more like the way arcing happens when you go to connect jumper-cables to your dead car battery. I decided I probably ought to get up and check it out. With all the wind, it could have been anything. About a million things ran through my head. Okay, really just a few: broken window? chimney cover? door blown open?

Our alarm system’s control unit chirped it’s little, “Hey, notice me” chirp. It’s like the “Hey, you just opened a door/window” chirp, but different. I walked into the laundry room and pushed one of the myriad buttons that will silence it. It’s made that noise a couple times recently and Meredith discovered on the Internets that there’s an internal battery that’s dead and needs to be replaced. We just haven’t gotten around to that. Oops.

Then it happened. All within about 3 seconds. First, the world’s loudest CHIRPCHIRP then a second or so of deafening silence. Then…

WEEEWEEEWEEEWEEEWEEEWEEEWEEEWEEE!!!!!!!!!

And it didn’t stop. I’m standing there in the hallway staring up at the little plastic box on the wall that’s screaming at me wondering, “Why don’t you stop doing that now?”

Meredith was a little more rational at that point and was trying to disarm it. Then I shouted at her, “Why don’t you disarm it?!?” and she shouted back, “I’m trying, but it’s not working.”

Well this isn’t good.

The neighbors are surely going to notice in the next few milliseconds that we haven’t made our house stop blaring at the entire neighborhood. At 2:45 in the morning.

By this time, Griffin’s shown up and she’s (rightfully) in full-freakout mode. Oh goody. Now let’s put ‘calm her down’ on the list with ‘make noise stop’ and ‘keep neighbors at bay’. I came out of the laundry room to talk to her and she instantly clung to me. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, nothing’s wrong. The alarm is broken. There’s no fire or anything.” That seemed very reassuring to her and she was much less upset.

But now I’m staring back up at this damn plastic box on the wall. The keypad seems ineffective. It is totally unresponsive. The main computer is in the top of our master bedroom closet. Do I need to go get in there and press a reset button or something? Meredith walks into the hallway and looks up… “Can you just yank that off the wall?”

Brilliant!

I grabbed the step-stool from the laundry room and immediately proceeded to climb up to the wailing box. Yank. It came free pretty easily. There was quite a lot of wire that fed out of the wall behind the box. And then a couple of twist-caps. Perfect! I grabbed the wire on either side of the twist-caps and yanked.

Ahh, blessed silence.

For 1.3 seconds.

Then the control unit in the laundry room apparently noticed the alarm wasn’t going off (okay, it probably really noticed the open circuit). “CHIRPCHIRPWEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” The high-pitched whine was incessant. I couldn’t believe it. Seriously? I thought to myself…

“Goddamn you fucking thing, did you see what I just did to that other piece of shit plastic box!?!”

Seriously.

Coherency kicked in at that point (it wasn’t NEARLY as loud). I grabbed a screwdriver and removed the unit from the wall. There was the cable coming out of the wall and split into a little jack thing on the back. Meredith asked, “Can’t you just unplug that?” Yeah, you would think that if you were sane and your alarm was a nice, 21st century alarm, but this POS was built in the 80s — way back when the wiring was connected directly to the circuit board via little one-way punch-in block connectors. “Just cut it,” she said.

For several second I contemplated that it really was stupid that I should have to cut wires connecting into this little breadboard. Again, I’m trying to rationalize why there isn’t some sort of jack/connector that’s unpluggable. Then…

<Snip>

It’s now after 5am. Things have been silent for well over two hours now. And no neighbors have come knocking. And the police haven’t shown up. So, I think the alarm’s broken (no shit), but the rush of adrenaline totally screwed up my ability to sleep and I’m likely to be a walking zombie tomorrow (today). Although, writing this has seemed to been effective at allowing me to relax. Maybe I’ll wander back to bed and see if I can’t sneak in another few hours. I am working from home today, so no need get up early to get into the office.

Oh look, the storms are here.

Well, the Spring volleyball season has started at our local community center. And Griffin’s gotten her team assignment and had her first practice. She’s very excited about her teammates. Some are friends and some aren’t, but there’s also a handful of the vball wizards in the mix.

Griffin’s no slouch, but because she’s slight of frame and a little shorter than her peers, she’s at a minor disadvantage. Although, I should back up… that was her status as of the end of the last vball season. She has definitely put on some height, and I think she’s definitely built some strength, so I do expect her to perform more consistently this year (muscle memory and all).

But the good (bad?) thing is that she’s a fierce competitor and takes mistakes personally. It’s a tough parenting balance because I want to encourage her to succeed, but I try to temper that with the “it’s just a game” speech.

I do love that she gets excited about her teammates, and she’s encouraging and enthusiastic. She gets fired up when she needs to. Sometimes that’s a liability (technical mistakes and such), but at this age and level of play, those are certainly forgivable. I much prefer seeing the excitement.

Volleyball season runs through the end of the school year and she’s going to have to miss a few games, but she does love it and I love watching her play.

Oh, and Meredith pointed out that we now have some kid-related sports practice every night of the week except Friday. Whee (small price to pay, though, right?).

This past weekend the boy and I had quite a bit of time together. Griffin had sleep-overs on both Friday and Saturday. So Friday, he and I were paging through the home-theater channels to see what movies there were.

I am Legend

Cool. But is he old enough? I’d heard that the baddies were more campy than scary so I figured he’d be okay with it. Idea: Let’s watch the free preview… that didn’t go so well… “Um, maybe we shouldn’t watch this.” Actually, I guess it did go well, because he did the responsible thing and wave off (unlike his father). We ended up sticking The Fellowship of the Ring into the DVD player.

Saturday morning, we decided that I am Legend would be more palatable in daylight with a whole day before bedtime. I like Will Smith, but he plays pretty much the same character in all his movies. And I haven’t read Matheson’s book, but my understanding is that there’s a bit of deviation from it, especially around the happy ending of the movie. But that’s not the point….

I remember seeing The Big Red One with my dad when I was like 10 or 11. It was a bit of a father-son moment. It was the point in time where my dad said, “Hey, you’re getting old enough that we can enjoy some of the guy things like war movies together.” It was something I didn’t really realize at the time, but after Hays was born it clicked, and I’ve been waiting almost 10 years for it to happen.

And then on Saturday night, we were once again out and about and decided to catch a discount showing of National Treasure: Book of Secrets. I had taken both kids to see it during its original theatrical release, but for less than a fiver I had blocked out two hours of entertainment. It’s flashier than the original, but the “puzzles” in this one are framed much more obviously as plot devices, which makes them predictable (eye-rolling). Nick Cage is a damn fine actor, but he’s not aging very gracefully. The pancake makeup and (assumed) hairpiece were noticeable. But it’s an entertaining story and Hays enjoyed it — nine-year-olds aren’t nearly as critical of movies.

After the movie (10pm), we went and got burgers and I learned that I’m getting old. Eating a grease bomb at 10:30 at night is a sure path to night-long indigestion and heartburn nowadays. Damn.