On Sunday morning we decided that we would have a little ceremony to inaugurate our new house in Newton. So Sarah and I invited our parents over for a tour of the empty home. We bought some orange juice without pulp so that we could make mimosas. Venkat had given me a basic picture of the ritual in an Indian household on Friday. They put milk onto a burner and cook it until it boils over spilling over the stove. Then you put rice into the milk and make rice pudding. Our plan seemed simpler but lacked the tradition of a milk worshipping culture. Venkat also mentioned that when coming to the US that people are given instructions on names that wouldn’t culturally work well despite being very popular in India. The one he pointed out in particular was Gopi.

Jeremy has been having nightmares lately. He told me one of his nightmares was that bugs were eating his feet. Maybe it’s the season but I had nightmares on Saturday night as well. The first nightmare I was in Vegas at a key conference for my business. While doing a printout through the computer I somehow accidentally requested that all of the money in my life savings accounts be liquidated as cash to be output in another room as $100 bills. I then was running around for the rest of the nightmare trying to get the money back where it belonged. I probably would never have remembered the dream but later in the dream I had Madeline in a backpack and she fell out of the backpack backwards onto the ground from the height of where I was standing onto a hard marble floor. In the dream she instantly died when she hit the floor. It was too much to sleep through so I woke-up. It’s not tough to analyze that with buying a home, having a start-up in the middle of lots of negotiations, and having a child under 2 years old – I have some natural anxiety about money and safety. The cats that keep me up at night don’t even have to work that hard.

Sarah and I arrived about a half hour early for the ceremony at the house on Sunday morning and I was still a bit freaked out from the nightmares. To keep Madeline occupied I went outside to swing her on the playground. She likes to order who goes on which color swing, with her on the red one and me on the yellow one swinging at the same time. I hadn’t thought she would be able to use the swings but we had lightly tested her on a set while returning from Bar Harbor and she was able to hold the chains. On Saturday night we had gone to the Park by Zaftigs, which now has a totally new mural, and she had swung on those. The child next to us was about a year older and kept asking her mother to swing her “super high” and Madeline was interested in going to such a height but I kept her at a reasonable safe height and counseled her that the “super high” height was for older kids. So I was swinging her on Sunday morning on a beautiful cool summer day and she wasn’t too high but for some reason she let go of the chains while on an upswing and fell backwards onto her back landing with her back flat on the hard backyard ground faster than I could think to catch her.

Madeline was shocked and hurt so she wanted Sarah for comfort. The fall looked innocuous since she fell with a uniform distribution on her back and only from the height of the smallest swing, about a foot. But she was upset for about an hour as both sets of parents arrived for the event. Sarah was rocking with her and we all were concerned that she might pass out with a concussion or head injury so when she got tired and started to close her eyes Sarah kept her awake. We gave up on the mimosas and as Madeline settled into more normal behavior we drove the half-mile to the Atrium for a Cheesecake Factory brunch.

After brunch we went up to the play space and we couldn’t help but note the very cushy foam floor that was installed there. It squashes under your feet like you are walking on a piece of hard memory foam bedding. The idea is that the mall doesn’t want any falls by the kids climbing around on their play equipment. I got a recommendation that I’ll be following-up on shortly to install rubber mulch under the swing-set both for Madeline’s safety and any other kids who might want to play on the swings. It cushions falls up to 9 feet. They sell it by the pallet for $500 per pallet at Home Depot. We may also buy a swing with a back to it for her and a baby swing for her sibling we are expecting in January. After reading the book on medical errors, Internal Bleeding, I and other parents need to take the fall by Madeline as a warning sign and fix things before it happens again. Other folks could also consider this event as a reason to put safety mulch under their backyard swings and take other precautions.

I’m looking forwards to an end to nightmares but I’ll need to be more vigilant when I am awake. The nightmares give me practice drills for things I need to be careful of. Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual about this stuff.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“You’re afraid of your imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.” From H. Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

I liked the idea that having a vision of something, a dream of what could be, carries with it a responsibility to work towards fulfilling the concept. It puts us as sometimes unwilling servants to the creation of our own ideas.

While I was on the plane I had the other idea. There was a passage about how the main character was reading a book that had been annotated by another character. It made me think of something that might be a cool concept. What if different people could collaboratively annotate a book analogous to when one person reads a book already underlined and written in by another. It wouldn’t be a very hard technology but basically everyone could be the equivalent of a Talmudic scholar writing in the margins around a book. Sure we have discussion forums on news articles but I was thinking of taking a political book like the one from Barack Obama and letting people add their thoughts. The reader can then choose to read thoughts or view underlined comments from other readers. Some could be in the same group like a class or a book group and others could be strangers like experts or just fans of the author/genre. The annotations could contain links potentially to other books when a book refers to content in another book. It might be especially interesting for something like Shakespear, the bible, or pop-fiction.

There is the barrier that people don’t yet read books in electronic form… but that could change any time now.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Go figure that I would have trouble sleeping now that Madeline is starting to reliably sleep through the night. Part of the problem is this darkness that comes in the fall. It isn’t even the shortest day of the year yet but even last night I was wandering around in the dark to exchange the movies and to pick up our Indian food at Rani. It was only about six thirty. Sarah is one of the people who can’t wait for daylight savings time so that she will see light when she gets rolling to work at 7AM but as soon as that happens it will be dark at about 5:30 or even 5:00. But I can’t exactly make a rational claim that I am unable to sleep properly due to increases in the length of night. In theory it ought to help. I normally would be reading my Tom Wolf book now but I stumbled around the condo for a few minutes trying to hunt it down in the dark without any luck. With three rooms and two occupied by sleeping people it left me with one room that was searchable with light and even then I had to remain quiet.

Annabelle is awake with me at 4:30 AM. She doesn’t appear to sleep until nobody is looking. As a nocturnal creature she is quite happy to have company. Unfortunately her idea of fun is to turn my world into a low budget haunted house by popping out of corners to bite or paw at me then return into the darkness. Annabelle is a kitten still which has been a challenge with Madeline because the cat has far too much nervous energy to expend. Today I pushed Annabelle off of the chair when the food came to keep her from riding her snout through the Chicken Tikka-Masala and afterwards for the next twenty minutes she had that Lou Ferigno/Incredible Hulk rage look about her. She was pissed off. So then we tried to eat dinner and let Madeline wander in the living room to do fun things like change the DVD. On Wednesday we were watching American Dad and Madeline managed to switch the DVD player to a cheesy CD starting with The Wheels on The Bus prompting a 30 minute sing and dance-along. Last night I watched the angry cat with fur bristling wait and hunt for Madeline until finally she pounced from behind scaring Madeline into the cry that led her into Sarah’s arms for the sleep inducing nursing.

I had thought up until recently that I was chump-change in Madeline’s eyes relative to Sarah. Since Sarah has the whole nursing thing working in her favor, spends a little more time with Madeline, and is a mother I thought that Madeline might even get annoyed when Sarah left me alone with her. But the past two times the baby sitters came (Phoebe on Tuesday and Julia yesterday, Madeline started crying as soon as she saw the babysitter and clung to my leg to show that she was very comfortable with me. So I sat in the rocking chair with her on my lap and she calmed down. On Tuesday we all walked to Brueggers and I parted after my morning bagel. Thursday I co-watched the Vincent Van Goat video with Julia on the couch slipping out at a choice funny moment when the cactuses were dancing. The important thing to note here is that Madeline seems to put me fairly high on the hierarchy of people that she is comforted by. I must admit a certain pleasure in being more attractive as a caretaker than the babysitter. I’m loved?

I feel a nasty cold coming on with a sore throat congested sinus and light headedness. It’s raining outside and according to some guy who planned a memorial golf tournament tomorrow it will rain all day on Friday. I don’t know what a memorial golf tournament is but I’m assuming it memorializes someone who died. Plenty of people probably say to their friends – “If I die why don’t you get 16 people together and figure out who is the best golfer in my name”. Personally I would hope to have enough friends and family to have a memorial capture the flag tournament. I’m not talking one quick game but a round robbin 10 team 20 person per team tournament with each team taking a name that relates to my life – like the ChannelWave team or the Improv team. I should sleep or replace fluids or something. I hope my cold doesn’t last too long. It probably won’t kill me.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night I had trouble sleeping. It was probably some residual jet lag. I passed the time in the middle of the night by reading A Man in Full. The chapters were both stressful because I had gotten to the point in the book when everyone's life is falling apart. One guy had a bad day where he got towed and ended up killing someone in the towing lot because he was so frustrated. When I finally got back to sleep I had a dream where I was looking at a lake and I noticed that at night a large dog looking like a dalmation was sleeping at the top of the water a few inches beneath the surface. I wondered how this made sense and then saw other dogs sleeping beneath the surface. The next morning in the dream I went back to look at the lake and could see through the port hole clearly down to the bottom. The dogs were diving down to where other intact animals like cows, pigs, and horses were corpses at the base of the lake and the dogs feeding off of them throughout the day. I then looked to the edge of the lake where I saw a gigantic snapping turtle that was beyond dinosaur scale. It had a long neck about four feet in diameter and rather than having one oval plate it had a series of them fused together to form six figure eight like indentations in a giant shell. The snapping turtle was reaching its long neck into the water to eat the carcasses at the bottom of the lake.

It also reminded me of a dream that I had a few days ago. I was with Madeline and her adopted brother at a playground. I looked away for a moment and both of them were missing. I looked throughout the area and couldn't find them. When I asked people if they had seen either they said they had but not recently. I awoke in a sweat with a giant adrenaline rush when I realized that they must have been abducted.

These dreams seem to be new and possibly related to the rewiring of becoming a parent. One more obvious in its relationship than the other.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was losing sleep the other night given that it is a New Year. I try not to put too much weight on the arbitrary turn of the year but the breaks and fits and starts of life including work make me retrospective and prospective. In my dream I was walking on a dock at night with Madeline. We were looking for a place to sleep in the cold. Madeline somehow transformed into a dead pigeon that I was having trouble holding onto but I knew that she was the pigeon so I was very careful to try to keep her safe and in control. But, since dead pigeon’s have a way of sliding around on a cold icy dock I couldn’t keep control of her and I kept losing track of her as she slid closer and closer to the edge. At the edge I went to grab onto a wooden pole to keep my balance but it was covered with long sharp spiked hooks designed to hold the fish that had been captured by the boats. As I realized one was cutting into my hand I also watched the dead bird slip from the dock and fall into the water. I also lost my balance and fell off the dock as well. When I hit the icy water I couldn’t see Madeline and the heavy cold water flooded into my heavy winter outfit making me heavier as I struggled to reach upward to swim up. I was also trying to figure out how I could grab onto Madeline to pull her out of the water but I quickly found myself paralyzed by the cold water and unable to move at all, sinking fast, and resigned to die.

I awoke with a startle and looked beside me to find Sarah and Madeline fast asleep beside me.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)