If I were to write a letter to an ombudsman from American Airlines or Miami International airport it might read something like this.

If I were to write a letter to an ombudsman from American Airlines or Miami International airport it might read something like this.

To whom it may concern,

I was recently travelling with my family including my wife, 2 and a half year old and 4 month old to Turcs and Caicos. Since there aren't direct flights we chose to go through Miami International airport. The trip to the island was fairly uneventful and surprisingly pleasant. Unfortunately the return trip was one that my family would prefer to never repeat again.

When we arrived at the airport at Provinciales my wife, carrying our baby in a sling was placed into the "high risk" search group. I don't know if anyone has ever tried to move a family of 4 with a toddler, an infant, a double stroller, laptop, and camera through the security checkpoints at airports but it is a complete nightmare taking about ten minutes with much frustration and confusion among children and parents often involving crying by more than one party. The walk through security was no exception this time.

Then while we were waiting at the terminal we were called to the front and told that our seat assignments had changed. We were given a better set of seats on the flight to Miami since they were in the bulkhead row. For this we were happy.

Upon arriving at Miami we had to split-up because our stroller was taking a very long time to get off of the plane and the attachment to the plane was too hot for the children. So I had a stroller and my wife had two children when we finally got out but because it is a long, multi-step journey from the plane to customs we ran into some problems. I couldn't find my wife coming out of the plane because one of the kids had needed to go to the bathroom. Because it was such a long wait to get the stroller I assumed she had gotten onto the train to customs.

So I took the train and then went down the escalator. I then waited for about 30 minutes. I wanted to return to look for her but there was neither a way to go back or a way to ask for help finding her from the prior areas like the train transfer or escalator. Since I had the transportation for her I learned that she had great difficulty getting both children to the customs area by herself. She finally appeared bedraggled with another passenger who had taken pity on her carrying our baby.

We got through customs fine but then arrived in the hall where baggage needs to be picked off of the baggage claim, walked through customs, and then transported to the area where it is then transferred into a cordoned off area. This place was a disaster with two kids and a double stroller. Since it had already been an ordeal they were starting to melt down as small kids tend to do. But we figured that if we had gotten through customs and our baggage then we should be all set to get some food and hop on our plane.

We then came to a very hard to navigate exit from the customs area. I am not sure if we walked the wrong way or not but we had to remove our kids from the double stroller to avoid the immense lines for the elevators by elderly and handicapped people. We were, with some trouble able to navigate the two changes in elevation on escalators with some great difficulty and then follow a path that directed us to our terminal only to find that we needed to go through a new security check that was backed-up with a long line.

The only thing worse than a security check with melting-down children is a long line with melting-down children. So at the end of the long line we reached the area where we prep all of our stuff and there were no buckets to put our things into and we were told the stroller wouldn't fit through. So I had to leave my wife with the two screaming kids after she hit me over the head with a bucket from another line to stroll the stroller over to the other side of the security area. Since we have to travel with a stack of tickets and passport documents I gave them to my wife and hoped for the best for getting through on the side where I was giving the security folks my stroller. But they wouldn't let me through without my ticket and my wife had gone through with the tickets already. Luckily when I returned to the side where we had originally tried to cross the security people recognized me and were able to figure out a way to get me through.

Following this security zone we then had to go both down an escalator and up an escalator to reach the terminal area where our plane was. The travelling in non-accessible areas was starting to become quite painful since every time we are able to place our kid or kids into the double stroller we need to take them out in order to go on an escalator. Given the long lines for the elevators it was unrealistic for us to wait.

But we did finally make it to our gate with about 30 minutes to spare for our flight and were able to find some food which we desparately needed since food isn't served anymore on lunch time flights and we hadn't expected an hour and half ordeal getting to our gate.

When we did get to the gate we needed to get our seating assignments. For some reason we didn't get seats on our flight despite having booked it 4 months in advance and having already been on a flight earlier in the day that we were transferring from. So we were assigned three seats in the last row in the back of the airplane - split into two seats and one.

After boarding the plane our 2 year old fell asleep on my lap. This was fine except that the plane didn't take off for an hour since they had been waiting on the tarmac for rerouting instructions. We were told that the plane would get cooler once it took off and the air conditioning system kicked-in.

After taking off, a few minutes later the air conditioning did kick in. Unfortunately it then get very hot after about 20 minutes. We assumed it was some fluke of the back of the plane but were again very uncomfortable. I'm not sure of the expected flight time of a plane from Miami to Boston but it felt like about 20 hours total. Actually the flight plan after the hour of extra time on the run way added another hour in air to avoid some storm. This is fine and expected BUT the plane itself was unbearably hot and miserable in our last row bathroom view seats.

About 2 hours before the plane landed we finally complained to the stewardess that the plane was too hot. She told us that the reason why it was hot in the back of the plane was because the people in the middle of the plane had complained that it was too cold. Since the thermal controls of our plane couldn't handle everyone being comfortable the middle people had been given their wish to the detriment of our comfort. When asked the stewardess did lower the temperature of the back of the plane which made it survivable for the last couple of hours on the plane.

By the time we landed we were sweaty, tired, frustrated, and miserable but very happy to be home.

I think there are a number of areas where American and Miami Intl. could improve.

1. Get rid of all the elevation changes in the customs / re-security check process. They are brutal.

2. When people with kids book travel months in advance. Give them seating arrangements and keep them.

3. Try to figure out a more streamlined approach to customs to avoid a re-checkin through general security a second time.

4. Either get different zones for air conditioning planes, ensure uniform air circulation for temperature, or monitor the temperature to make sure neither folks in the back or middle are dueling for hot or cold to make the other uncomfortable.

5. Do better to avoid situations where the planes board in hot tarmacs to then have passengers wait an hour or more in hot planes.

6. Understand the special needs of people travelling through security with young children and assign staff to help/support them similar to staff who support handicapped people. Possibly provide them priority when going through security checkpoints.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:32 AM | Permalink

I went on a business trip to Belgium last week. The trip was from Monday morning to Thursday evening so it was mainly a trip to the inside of airplanes and airports but I did actually see Antwerp for a few hours after 6PM on Tuesday and Wednesday night. On the plane ride over from Washington I chatted with a local couple from Belgium who suggested a few things to do in Antwerp. The first was to eat fine food. Horse meat was suggested as an excellent and highly underrated meat offered in local restaurants. But I didn't see anything listed as horse meat on menus where I travelled. We did manage to go out to a restaurant near the cathedral on Wednesday night that was in a building built in the 1600s with exposed thick wooden beams and a piano floating on some beams in the middle of the second floor. Since I was staying in my own hotel I walked the city both Tuesday and Wednesday night. Antwerp has some interesting architecture including a big old train station, the cathedral, and a cobblestone street lined with high-end clothing stores and old buildings. The city is a diamond town so there are many orthodox jews in the diamond district. They dress in traditional black outfits, men wear their hair shaved with two locks on each cheek, and many men sport giant furry round hats. I saw more than one family with a woman travelling through town with four children under the age of 6 pushing a double stroller and having little kids straggling behind them.

I felt lonely as I was travelling since I had left behind Sarah, Zachary, and Madeline. It might have been that spending so much time on airplanes and in a city where I didn't know anyone. I was and am glad to be home.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:50 AM | Permalink

Time seems to have floated past me without any blog entries for the past few months. This gives me an excuse to boil things down to what is important about what I have seen and learned and get something into the blog in the month of May.

I had my wisdom teeth out and it was not as painful as expected. I had a few moments of worry while the dentist was working over my mouth imagining that he was just pulling teeth without thinking much about it and had taken a few extras instead of the four we had discussed. The actual experience was just gross since the holes just kept bleeding for days and it is very disgusting to have big clots of blood in your mouth all day and night.

Madeline keeps charging ahead in her quest for language. She picks up words on a regular basis and has some cute interpretations of complex words to include words she already knows. For example her impression of the word raspberry is RAS-Baby. So she asks for more ras-babies when we have them in front of us. She is better about sleeping through the night but still puts up a big fight filled with tears and screaming when bed time comes around.

We went to Disney in Florida last week on a vacation. Sarah kept having trouble finding things she wanted there. Since she drinks cranberry juice and seltzer we went in search of it in the World Pavilion at Epcot where there are restaurants representing different world cultures. Oddly no world culture offers cranberry juice but they all do have the same list of Coca-cola beverages. We also went looking for gum only to learn that due to the strong desire to avoid gum stuck to their amusement parks the Orlando area is a gum free zone where gum can’t be purchased on the Disney properties, in drug stores, or even at the airport. We had the most fun hanging out at the pool and walking around outside of the parks with Madeline, now at 19 months. We found the Animal Kingdom to be a zoo but mainly because it was so busy full of people and not because it was easy to see animals. I would have preferred to be at the San Diego zoo but Madeline did enjoy the petting area where we could brush goats and look at a cow. I’m sure we could find a more efficient way to accomplish the same experience.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:26 AM | Permalink

While on the plane traveling on Delta earlier this week to the HIMSS conference and back I managed to browse through the whole SkyMall catalog. Delta had managed to screw-up my flights on Monday so that I was in transit from Boston to New Orleans from 9:00 AM to 10:00 PM EST including some fun two hours after boarding the plane in Boston watching my connection slowly get missed. Then once on the ground in Atlanta I got called by Aaron as he got onto the next flight on stand-by while I was waiting in line to figure out whether to go to Mobile Alabama on a 9PM flight then rent a car in a city where there were no remaining cars at the airport. Luckily I did manage to get on the 7:50 flight, the third standby that I had waited for and finally arrived in New Orleans to find that my hotel room had been cancelled so that Aaron and I needed to bunk together with a bed on the floor for me. The important thing in all of this is that I had plenty of time for my computer to power up and down and learn that I need to power down rather than close my machine and that led me to my reading the entire SkyMall catalog.

While most products today are blah I found three that were of interest. Two of the solutions were cat related. Until I had a cat I didn’t realize how many unsolved cat problems people had. For example the cat litter box is a terrible thing to have to look at and the cat likes to sit in the litter then spread it all about the kitchen floor. The folks in this catalog created a litter box that looks like a large vase with a plant on the top. The cat can climb into it and you don’t have to look at or smell the cat litter. Furthermore it helps to keep the cat litter from getting strewn all around.

Cats have a nasty habit of using their claws on a brand new mattress at 2-6 AM while people are trying to sleep. While scientists have split the atom they haven’t come-up with a viable solution to this problem that I know of. They invented the scratching post but for some reason the cat would prefer to use the mattress because of the fun and silly things I will do in response like spraying her with a bottle of water, free shower, feeding her, or locking her in the bathroom. But finally they invented a scratching post that dispenses treats so that the cat learns that the post is the right thing to scratch.

All of that innovation was also combined with adult pajamas with feet. Who wouldn’t want that?

The Midwest Airlines people don’t want to be acquired because they take pride in their luxury services. The PR person when interviewed stated that Midwest Airlines “considers themselves to be in the service business, not in the moving people around in a metal cylinders business”.

So now I am riding on a Delta flight again. This time to Utah to go skiing with the Falkoffs. I watched Rocky Balboa on the plane. It’s the movie predicted from the Airplane series with an elderly Rocky fighting. I liked the movie but I would have changed the ending. I think they should have had him die in the ring rather than winning his last fight. I realize that Stallone wouldn’t let a Rocky movie have a dark ending but it would have been the best way to close the story. The reason why I would have Rocky die in the ring is that the movie is about how he lost his wife Adrian and he has a hole in his life because of it. The theme would be more about how people can’t live without the things that you love. It would be more adult than the other Rocky themes where the underdog always triumphs in the end. It would show that Stallone had matured and not decided to recycle old material with a little twist. But they did what they did so I can only think of what it could have been.

Lately Madeline has been a happy baby who laughs and smiles most of the time. She has her fits but she likes to play games like tent. Tent is when we hide under the covers in the bed. We then can make the tent dark by closing off the light or light. She can climb in and out of the tent. When we are playing it she giggles and smiles and calls out her requests for dark and if she gets out of the tent she calls out more, more, more. It is also easy to make her laugh by dropping things onto her like her hat or my gloves while she is in the stroller. She loves it when I pick her up and lift and bounce her on the couch then let her fly above me as I hold her with both hands and spin.

Madeline had been wanting a potty after hearing so much about it in books. We brought it home. She sat on it and then we had something in it. This was about three weeks ago now and it hasn’t happened since. Beginners luck. Lately we have seen a number of dolls, stuffed animals, and balloons piled high on top of the potty. Her play style is to want to have her play objects all ride together. Among the new toys she has is a small toy stroller and it is piled high with whatever she can find on a regular basis.

Here are some words she now speaks (sorta): and just what I can remember
Ball, balloon, more, Madema (Madeline – probably my favorite thing to ask her to say), momma, daddy, bagel, cheese, juice, cup, pppp (grape), nana (banana), meow (cat), U (orange/clementine), doll, moo (cow), bock-bock-bock (chicken), sss (snake), owl, bye-bye, tent, dark, yeah, no-no, uh-oh, nurse, brrr (cold), hot-hot, yum, up, down, belle (Annabelle), dog, pot (potty), car, psss (pee), duh-duh (I have no idea what that means but she says it)

Posted by Dan Housman at 01:15 AM | Permalink

Last year we avoided a ton of torrential rain showers by going to Atlantis in the Caribbean. This year I was trying to figure out where to go to avoid the May rainy season in the Caribbean. The first good thing is that May travel is considered off peak because it is supposed to be spring in the northeast. Those of us who live here know that spring is closer to mid June in reality. I wouldn’t open a pool until after Memorial day. I wasn’t too pleased with the pricing on my resort hotel room prices when I went to the Beaches site for Turks and Caicos. The price was about $585 per night to sleep and feed Sarah, me, and Madeline. So for a week this would be about $4095 or $2050 per person before they started adding in the taxes.

So I tried to find a workaround for the pricing issues and potentially look for something nicer by looking into Villas. My first stop turned-up this one since I had to look at the top of the Kismet on St. John. The costs weren’t as bad as one would think for the top shelf stuff if Sarah and I were to manage to find 10 friends to bunk with in this place was $17,000 per week. Now that might seem like a lot but the pricing with 10 friends to split the accommodations for 12 would be $1,416. Now this wasn’t exactly apples to apples since the Beaches folks were offering food and beverages along with their price. But there was a mention of a 25’ catamaran that you can use.

So I looked for another villa. This time I found the Trident Castle. Yes it is in Jamaica not Turks and Caicos or St. John so I suppose it again isn’t a perfect comparison. This place sleeps 16 so we would need 14 friends instead of the requisite 12 for the hovel on the other island. The pricing on this one was a little higher. It was $5600 per night for the place back in 2006 for the off season. The upside is that it included a number of key elements such as 3 meals per day and an open bar. The breakdown for the 16 people per person for the lodging in this case would be about $2100 per person for the trip.

Personally I am not sure if either one will be the right match but my quick math shows:

Beaches all inclusive: $2,050/person
Kismet castle in T&C: $1,416/person (A bargain! I think you need to buy your own food)
Trident castle: $2,100/person (But herding 16 folks could be a big pain)

Now clearly we could slum it in the islands at a lesser locale than these mega-villas but that didn't seem very interesting. Well… if anyone is up for avoiding the rain and can spring for some castle living I’m all ears. I also will not ensure that a hurricane won't hit in May.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Our protagonist finds himself sitting on the floor of a Philadelphia airport in the hallway with passing carts moving along plugging his battery weary computer and phone into the outlet he has managed to position himself near. The temporary owner of the other half of the outlet is a nice young man who helped the protagonist to realize that he was trying to plug into a convenient outlet that the airport had decided not to power because it was likely to be useful to commuters trapped in the USAir terminal. Upon attempting to connect to the Internet he found that the AT&T corporation had bought the rights to sell the wireless internet services at this airport for $7.95 but could offer People magazine for free through a slow pipe to him so that he could learn more about the break-up of Reese and Ryan or Brittany and K-Fed. He finally found his name called and entered onto the plane to find himself in the dreaded middle seat of a cramped jet. He is better off than some others on the plane who are discussing how they could have duplicate seating assignments. The cabin door closes and the plane sits on the runway for an hour with little air shooting out of the vent above his head. When the plane finally flies it’s short 45 minute route it takes about an hour to land at Logan Airport. The delay has caused a secondary delay and now the plane has no home so he sits in his cramped seat waiting for the parked plane to find it’s way to a point where he can be dropped off. When the plane finally docks with the terminal another 40 minutes has passed on the ground again with the air slowly leaking out of the vent above him. The woman in front of him mentions that she is ready to tear a hole in the airplane to get out as the back of the plane awaits the exit of the passengers in front. He stays calm thinking of home and his one year old daughter and wife waiting for him. He has been away for three days but it feels like weeks and he is more than ready to be greeted to a familiar place with a familiar smile. He hears the call of ‘da-da’ beckoning. The baggage takes another thirty minutes to return and he curses having brought luggage to work out in but not having worked out in the time he was gone. His neck and back hurts from the backpack on his shoulders. When the line looks long for a Taxi a hotel shuttle van driver shoos him into the back of an empty van. He waits inside wondering whether or how this could be faster than the long taxi line. An old man climbs into the cab. Then a couple of octogenarian ophthalmologists. The driver keeps looking for more people to pack into the van. It drives into Boston stopping first at a hotel in Copley Square then at a location on Berkeley street. By the time it reaches St. Paul street it is nearly nine o’clock. It is six and a half hours since he started a journey home from Philadelphia. He walks in the door to find the baby asleep but his wife is glad to see him and it is time to be home and sleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:53 PM | Permalink

Our protagonist finds himself sitting on the floor of a Philadelphia airport in the hallway with passing carts moving along plugging his battery weary computer and phone into the outlet he has managed to position himself near. The temporary owner of the other half of the outlet is a nice young man who helped the protagonist to realize that he was trying to plug into a convenient outlet that the airport had decided not to power because it was likely to be useful to commuters trapped in the USAir terminal. Upon attempting to connect to the Internet he found that the AT&T corporation had bought the rights to sell the wireless internet services at this airport for $7.95 but could offer People magazine for free through a slow pipe to him so that he could learn more about the break-up of Reese and Ryan or Brittany and K-Fed. He finally found his name called and entered onto the plane to find himself in the dreaded middle seat of a cramped jet. He is better off than some others on the plane who are discussing how they could have duplicate seating assignments. The cabin door closes and the plane sits on the runway for an hour with little air shooting out of the vent above his head. When the plane finally flies it’s short 45 minute route it takes about an hour to land at Logan Airport. The delay has caused a secondary delay and now the plane has no home so he sits in his cramped seat waiting for the parked plane to find it’s way to a point where he can be dropped off. When the plane finally docks with the terminal another 40 minutes has passed on the ground again with the air slowly leaking out of the vent above him. The woman in front of him mentions that she is ready to tear a hole in the airplane to get out as the back of the plane awaits the exit of the passengers in front. He stays calm thinking of home and his one year old daughter and wife waiting for him. He has been away for three days but it feels like weeks and he is more than ready to be greeted to a familiar place with a familiar smile. He hears the call of ‘da-da’ beckoning. The baggage takes another thirty minutes to return and he curses having brought luggage to work out in but not having worked out in the time he was gone. His neck and back hurts from the backpack on his shoulders. When the line looks long for a Taxi a hotel shuttle van driver shoos him into the back of an empty van. He waits inside wondering whether or how this could be faster than the long taxi line. An old man climbs into the cab. Then a couple of octogenarian ophthalmologists. The driver keeps looking for more people to pack into the van. It drives into Boston stopping first at a hotel in Copley Square then at a location on Berkeley street. By the time it reaches St. Paul street it is nearly nine o’clock. It is six and a half hours since he started a journey home from Philadelphia. He walks in the door to find the baby asleep but his wife is glad to see him and it is time to be home and sleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:53 PM | Permalink

I finally got around to watching it again on the flight out to Sacramento. I had hoped to watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the last trip out to Vegas with Jeremy but I had been unable to find it at the local Hollywood video store. What I had failed to realize was that it wasn’t in drama or horror. It was filed in comedy. So when I was rifling for some replacement content for Sarah while I was away I found the film and it gave me something to occupy me as I was traveling to my 1 hour layover in Vegas en route to Sacramento.

Among the things that I noticed on this second viewing were the cameos. I wasn’t sure whether they were cameos or just actors in the film before they became famous. Cameron Diaz was a reporter in an elevator and Spiderman, Tobey Macguire, was a hitchhiker that they scared away. The film was as much horror as it was a comedy which is why I like it. Of course I am a big fan of the book because it is so grotesque in it’s hyperbolic descriptions of a drug trip in Vegas. It made me nice and anxious to watch it knowing I would be in Vegas and off on a three day trip with Lisa getting married on Saturday.

Things are looking great. Madeline has been continuing to progress on schedule with many confident walking steps. While she can only do four to five steps at a time before stumbling over she walks with confidence into her falls. She almost looks like a comic trying to make a joke of walking while drunk. Andrew, Sarah’s brother, came by to grab some laundry that passed through us and he mentioned that children from the age of zero to six live life in a constant state of being on something akin to an LSD trip. Andrew happened to go for Halloween last year as none other than Dr. Hunter S. Thompson complete with a pair of glasses from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Depp?). I am not sure if the LSD story can be scientifically proven but Madeline does gurgle like a dinosaur a lot and seems to try to communicate with objects that are only apparent to her. She has begun to wave and today, Yom Kippur, enjoyed waving at Maestro whenever he barked in the other room.

My parents and I went with Madeline to the park and stopped at the swings as well as the kiddie playground. At the kiddie playground she enjoyed riding down the slide. Her fleece pullover generated enough static electricity against the plastic slide that her hair stood-up at the base of the slide. The kiddie playground had a foam soft floor that she worked-out on with much crawling and standing. She liked to stand near an object then walk towards it. One of her favorite objects to approach was the adult swings. She would grab a hold onto it and then awkwardly fall down because it was an unstable object. Some teenage girls with braces and non brand name pants with holes cut into them came by thinking it would be cool to try to swing on the special kids swing. Madeline watched them and was entertained. Their brothers or friends, a tall skinny acne faced boy and a little kid with a mohawk, then played a karate fight that Madeline was entranced by. The footage from the video camera partially captured much of this experience so hopefully I can effectively archive it to show to Madeline at some point when she is beyond her LSD trip youngest years.

Life is good on other fronts too. I am starting to do work with Peter on a marketing project for a recently funded venture backed start-up. I find the chance to focus and drive the business forwards in a scalable way a great little challenge. I am psyched at the opportunity to build a marketing plan and execute it. Plus I’m getting paid for it.

In other fronts we found one viable prospect to expand our healthcare warehouse practice. The prospect is in Cincinnati, which is a pain, but it looks like a good fit and they have a lot of interest in getting a solution put together if we can get them to trust that we are capable at providing one. I am on my way to Sacramento for a conference just on warehousing for healthcare so I am hoping there will be some good contacts and I can find some qualified prospects for putting together a product in this space.

Sarah and I keep vacillating about whether or not to move away from our current spot. Our searches in Brookline have led us to start to investigate Newton. We went to watch the Patriots game at Carl’s house, a lab friend of my dad’s. Carl has a son, Elias, who is about a month older than Madeline, so the idea was to have a play date and watch the game. It was great to see the Patriots whoop the Bengals after everyone saying that the Bengals were a great team that would be almost impossible to beat. Any given Sunday? But the Pats had a swagger and confidence in this game. They were scoring touch downs while the Bengals had trouble sneaking field goals in. Carl’s house is in Newton and despite having the same number of people as us, three, they have about ten times the amount of space. They bought the house as a fixer-upper but it was in generally good shape from what I could tell. They had been fixing it up already for a couple of years and it looked great. It made Sarah and I think that maybe Newton would be a more likely location for our next move.

The other thing that the fixer-upper made me think of was that we could do some serious home improvements on the Brookline condo like a new bathroom and kitchen plus some electrical work including a wall mounted flat screen TV and it would make the condo not bigger, but more livable. The thought was that if we do buy some Newton house we’ll have to do ten times that in renovations so why should we be afraid of doing renovations where we live now. All the neighbors who just moved into the building are busy fixing-up their new living spaces. Why not us?

I believe that among the reasons to think about these living space changes is that now that we are having gotten married and with a baby and such rapid changes it feels strange to start having things stand still. At some level things are becoming daily routines again and with so many changes it feels awkward as a change to have no changes. Granted we get our surprise all-nighters like on Thursday and Saturday night when Madeline decided she wanted to clank her stacking cups and press the buttons on the Winnie the Pooh surprises interactive song book, but in general things aren’t changing much and we are in the mode of always looking forwards rather than just living in today.

Everyone’s birthday is approaching. Madeline will be one. I will be 33. Sarah will be 31. Lisa and Dave will be married. Hattie and Jose will be married. Ilana will have a baby. Amy will have her second child. Kilimnik and Hillary will be working on their first baby.

Among the rentals, not Fear and Loathing, we picked-up The Girls Next Door. I learned that the Playboy mansion is on 9 acres. It made me think since the Marshfield house is on 11 acres. My family has 2 more acres than Hef’s mansion. Will we end-up like Hefner, living in some dream life?

We don’t take as much advantage of the house in Marshfield but we live well when we are there. Hopefully the momentum from the Homer street pre-wedding clean-up renovations will be enough to get the Marshfield renovation begun. After 23 years my father had a new driveway put in just in time for the wedding. Nick Falkoff is doubling as contractor and wedding planner. The funny thing is that it is a very good combination for those of us who believe that if you have a nice house that you can have a great wedding in your own back yard plus it is a perfect time to invest in a renovation. So a wedding cost can include fixing your house the way that you want it. Thus a wedding planner/home contractor is a perfect slash business.

Lisa and Dave are holed up in Marshfield right now panicking about the last minute preparations for their wedding and their CD release party the following day. I need to create a toast, which is causing me to shuffle through my memory back to when I was a child in Watertown, going through those supposed LSD years with my big sister in a room we shared sleeping in bunk beds, with a floor full of toys, and a ladder to the loft above. I’ll come up with something for Lisa. She is a hero of mine and she and Dave are a good pair. I’ll have to remember some facts about Dave. I wish I had more stories or spent more time with them.

But things are good and having broken the fast with Starbucks at 2PM and then eating a Blue Ribbon dinner of brisket at 5 PM I find myself on the plane missing my baby and thinking those thoughts that most all fathers think when they kiss their baby goodbye to then board a plane. I hope this plane or the one coming back doesn’t crash and I get home safely. I want to see my baby again soon and there is no goodbye that would be dramatic enough to capture a last one. So I kissed her and she had cried because her bottle was empty. I’ll see her again soon.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:11 AM | Permalink

When we got our cat Annabelle about a month ago at the MSPCA at Angell Memorial they provided a contract regarding the spaying of her. Since they didn’t have an appointment for the following few weeks and we were going to California we scheduled the appointment to spay her for the day after we returned from our vacation surrounding DK’s wedding. Given that we took a red eye with a baby back on Monday night and spent Tuesday trying to sleep and pick her up Annabelle was the main project upon returning.

Traveling to California with Madeline at 10 months is about as challenging as when she was 3 months but our minor adjustments to the plan made the trip much easier and often more fun. The adjustments were as follows.

1. Travel in first class in the first seat of the airplane where there is a little area where a baby could stand-up, crawl around, and play with toys while we have lots of legroom to kick our feet up when tired.

2. Minimize driving times and separate them with long periods out of the car. Try to place driving activities strategically near expected nap times.

3. Utilize babysitting resources at night. Hire a babysitter through the hotel for one night and bring parents in an intersecting trip to watch her while partying at the wedding.

4. Keep things simple by keeping events and activities to a minimum including skipping events that don’t appear realistic for coordinating moving the whole crew around to like the slew of social events associated with a wedding (rehearsal dinner, post wedding brunch, dessert hour, etc.)

5. Don’t bother bringing a laptop.

I won’t say we didn’t have our challenges but the adjustments helped us to avoid doing too much. But we did have some challenges.

In order to travel with our first class ticket using frequent flyer miles I needed to accept flights with a layover in Chicago. What that meant was that we left on an 8AM flight. Given the recent hullabaloo about liquids, gels, and other ways to make improvised explosives the word on the street was that we needed to be at the airport at about 6 AM to clear security and drop off our full load of items including a car seat, stroller, baby backpack, and two massive bags. Since before this we needed to wake Madeline, feed her, change her, and prep her mentally for a flight the start time for the day in Boston was 4AM.

The flight itself was bearable although we couldn’t take advantage of the more comfortable seating arrangement with Madeline requiring constant holding or attention. This meant that the day really started at 4AM and we never got to catch-up on the sleep during the flights. Furthermore while the real time elapsed may have been 8 hours, somehow it felt like about two to three days had elapsed on the plane such that by the end of the second flight Madeline had determined that the only thing left to do would be to shred the magazines we had brought and since we didn’t have an alternative that she was interested in we helped her to do so with the provision that Sarah periodically fished mid-sized magazine spitballs out of Madeline’s mouth.

So when we arrived at SFO we were tired and had we been home we would have gone straight to sleep. Instead we took the asinine transportation system that is the SFO rental car area. I have become so annoyed by the SFO rental car system that I have considered flying to San Jose where all you need to do is cross the street just to avoid it. The first problem is that they have a train that you need to take to the rental car area. In the past I had made the mistake of going to an off airport rental car location and the punishment is that you have to take the train to the rental car area and then take a bus from there to the rental car location. Most airports just have a bus that picks you up but because the train is so slow and awkward to get to they don’t want to provide any advantage to the off airport folks who could probably get you from the baggage claim area to the rental car in a minute using a shuttle. Instead we went through numerous elevators and lifts in a map that can only be considered idiotic but necessary for traveling with a large load of items just to get to the rental car location where we then were able to wait for half an hour while the one agent dealt with two people who had errors with their agreements. This was at Budget. I would consider renewing my Hertz get to your car fast membership but now that it is over I may just avoid this airport.

Had this been the only problem with rental cars at SFO I might not be calling for a public pillory of the planners who devised this devious rental car system but upon returning to the airport on Monday night I had additional problems getting to the location. I had filled the car with gas as required to save a few bucks on South Airport road. This road pointed towards the airport and I took it there but as it approached it suddenly turned into 101. The signs on 101 said something about taking the San Bruno exit to get to the rental car areas. Upon taking this exit I found myself going 70 miles per hour on 380 or some other highway away from the airport and couldn’t turn around for 8 miles. Upon returning to the airport I decided to ignore this sign and went into the airport where I was able to painstakingly travel through every part of the airport on the local airport road until about 5 miles later, the approximate distance of the train ride from the airport to the rental car location, when I saw a sign for “Rental car customer parking”. I turned into this location only to find that it was not what I had expected. It was a place for people renting cars were expected to park their cars. I didn’t have time to ask anyone about why this service was useful at an airport but did finally reach the rental car lot.

While dropping off the car the attendant was blasting some Spanish radio station on the car next to us. But when we left with our stroller, car seat, baby backpack, two suitcase, diaper bag, and travel backpack luggage on the second floor there was an elevator either to the 3rd floor or to the first floor. The 3rd floor is where the train lets you off to go to the rental car offices. The first floor is under the train platform and the elevator specifically instructs you to go to the first floor to get to the train. We did this but since we had a ton of luggage and so did everyone else the tiny elevator didn’t fit more than one family at a time. So we needed to wait for an elevator to go down one level. When we got to the bottom we then had to walk to the other elevator that takes you to the top of the train station and then wait again for a tiny elevator that couldn’t fit more than one family at a time. Finally we were up at the train station on the third floor and then I watched as the people were let out into the rental car entrance area followed by both sides of doors opening and we saw we could have just gone up one elevator instead of the idiotic route we took. Next time just go to the rental area.

But the rental car got us to Half Moon Bay fairly quickly. I was surprised, although I should have known, that in the morning and evenings anywhere in the Bay area during the foggy months that it is foggy and somewhat cold regardless of where you go. So we found that Half Moon Bay was foggy and cold but we did look around and then went to sleep in our room at the Best Western about five thirty PM with a brief wake-up to get the room service hamburger and club sandwich. Madeline’s diapers smelled terrible so I left them outside the room beyond the slider on the deck in plastic bags in the area overlooking the golf course. At night we heard what sounded like an animal rustling near the slider but the diapers were still there when we awoke.

We had breakfast at the hotel but then decided to tour the area by going the ten miles to the Ritz Carlton. We didn’t actually know where the Ritz was so we drove up the highway looking for it only to learn later when Sarah called them that it was a right turn at the corner where our hotel was. The Ritz was fun to see and offered some great views of cliffs over the water. We walked the edge of the golf course and didn’t have to pay for parking. An agreement must have been made between the folks at the Ritz and the government that they would be allowed to build 36 holes of golf by the ocean if they provided free public access to the beach. The lot we parked in had multiple Bentleys and Lotus vehicles in it. We parked next to a Bentley that was parked diagonally across two spaces to avoid riff raff from getting too close to it.

After leaving the Ritz we explored the downtown area of Half Moon Bay and decided that there wasn’t anything there. We then went to a local restaurant for lunch after checking out of the hotel and found that the view was great through their plate glass windows but the glare was enormous. I ordered a crab roll and decided that lobster is a better crustacean than crab since it tastes better. Sarah ordered a chicken Caesar salad despite being at seafood restaurant. Madeline ordered fruit salad.

After lunch we walked the beach and remembered the same thing we always remember on vacations when we get to the beach. Wouldn’t it be great to have something to lie down or sit on now so that we don’t get covered with sand? We are going to have to start bringing a lightweight blanket on all trips that might involve a beach or park.

The trek into San Francisco was quick. We stayed at the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental and upon arrival the bellman stole my car. He basically didn’t offer much choice in whether I would use their $65 per night valet service. It wasn’t a terrible service but I figured there might be a cheaper one. I had told Sarah that I loved the food at Tsunami but in order to go out to eat we were going to need a baby sitter. I called to the front desk to learn that they offered babysitting through an agency and hooked up a babysitter with a $15 fee for the set-up and $11/hour with a 4 hour minimum. So we put Madeline to bed at 7:15 and then waited until about 7:30 PM when the babysitter was set to arrive. The reception folks thought it would be best to call us to alert us that the babysitter had arrived and the call rang a nice loud phone by Madeline’s crib and woke her up. A few minutes later Donna, a grandmother, appeared at our door covered in big jewelry on her hands, ears, and neck. Donna was a professional at babysitting and was confident that Madeline could be brought back to sleep. Sarah first tried to comfort Madeline and then switched to nursing her. Donna mentioned that babies that are still nursing are the hardest because the only thing that they really want when they are tired or upset is their mother. Despite multiple efforts to calm her down Madeline had clearly become aware that she was about to be ditched and to be left with this total stranger and she was absolutely pissed. So as we walked to the elevator after about 45 minutes of wrangling to try to leave Donna with a sleeping baby we could hear the screaming of our baby about 50 doors away from our room. We told Donna to call us at dinner whenever Madeline fell asleep. Sarah looked as if she had just been through a war and was experiencing some form of traumatic stress having to leave her screaming baby in a fancy hotel in order to go to a restaurant. We did manage to eat at Tsunami with Molly and Yuval and Sarah spent about an hour calming down after 30 minutes into dinner we received a call from Donna to let us know that the she had rocked Madeline to sleep in her stroller.

The next night we went to the Top of the Mark with Zoe and Dave after a walk in Golden Gate park at the Japanese tea garden. We saw some great views and halfway through snacking on gourmet cheeses, raw foods, cocktails, and a bottle of wine Sarah and Madeline disappeared back to the room to change because Madeline had spat-up on her fancy dress. Sarah didn’t return and we decided to stay in for the night and watch most of a season of “Flavr4Lov”, the reality TV show where Flav-a-flav does some odd version of the Bachelor while wearing clocks around his neck.

Tiburon was a quick drive out of the city. It was purported to be Paradise given locations like the wedding being held at Paradise beach and a road for walking called Paradise drive. It was quite nice. The best part of Paradise was having a babysitter for Madeline both nights. My parents arrived in town at about 3 in the afternoon and watch her while Sarah and I enjoyed dinner at the hotel restaurant. We stayed at the Tiburon Lodge in a spa room. The Spa room included a hot tub in the back and mirrors on the ceilings over the hot tub and the bed. I didn’t think to bring back pink champagne on ice but next time I will.

Sarah’s mother had made the astute observation about Annabelle the cat that her nipples were growing about two weeks ago. By the time that we returned from California and I picked-up Annabelle in Bedford she had also grown very round in the belly. The two theories were that she either had worms or was pregnant. It turned out that she was pregnant despite our never having exposed her to a male cat. The spaying included a complementary cat abortion operation so we aren’t going to have kittens in the near future.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:15 AM | Permalink

Among the many reasons why it is hard to write these days I must include that the cat actively attempts to interfere with any attempt on my part to use the computer on my desk. She begins by hiding behind the flat screen monitor and periodically swipes her paw at my fingers as I type. After I get frustrated by this and stand-up to get her to follow me away from the computer she will then reseat herself in front of the keyboard in order to block me from resting my hands in the typing position. If I manage to brush her away from this position she will then walk across the keyboard itself in hopes of clicking on a key that will permanently lock the computer in an awful funk like running in Norwegian mode or setting off control keys that show strange symbols for paragraphs while using MSWord. Luckily she appears to be at rest for the evening at the moment and I have been spared the routine. Otherwise this would never have made it out.

The baby on the other hand offers a different form of interference. Basically I have come to the conclusion that if you have a life and a hobby and then you become a parent you will need to choose from among the following options. A – Sleep, B – Doing a hobby. When you no longer have time for sleep this generally means that you will also have no time for playing poker on Friday nights, working out three days a week, writing a blog, creating nify nick-nacks out of pine cones, and other such nonsense. The challenge is simply that a baby is not a fully capable person able to do things like eat, clean, use the toilet, entertain themselves, or play poker on Fridays. Because of these challenges you can’t leave them alone. They have funny hours that they keep for their day including sleeping at 8PM and waking-up at 6AM. This means that you have to be home a few hours before 8PM, like 6PM and awake at 6AM. Doing some simple math on the free hours. If you work from 9 AM to 5PM this basically leaves you with the drive home and the bleary hour or two you have to feed the baby in the morning and then figure out who will care for her while you are at work as your extra time. You also have the hour and a half of time after she sleeps to squander at your leisure only to wish you had spent it sleeping the night before. If you work an hour or two later in the day then it leaves you with nothing in terms of spare time. So this is the more likely reason for not producing anything in writing on a regular basis. It means that information needs to be condensed into forms like haiku. For example here is a brief passage recalling key events from the trip that Jeremy and I took to Vegas.

Circus Circus Vegas for kids with women in lobby giving birth to more kids. Chinese taxi driver – ‘you want to get raid?’. TI club good. Dancing with Nebraskan woman 6’4”. Stripper tells story of popping eyeball out with long heel and coroner’s office job. Jeremy recognizes porn producer at club. Old Vegas – Freemont street experience during the day is mainly looking at a bunch of crack dealers. Old casinos have $2 blackjack. Win money but watch wives gamble their wedding rings. Hard not to look at just the stage during ‘O’. Mayors convention in town meeting mayors. Rio floor no good to dance on because of beer glue. Too many grinding dudes on floor. Next time go to Rio roof bar not dance club.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:44 PM | Permalink

I am sworn to secrecy due to some bachelor party oaths regarding the precise events of last weekend. I am not sure why such secrecy surrounds bachelor parties given that it can only breed suspicion to not make it clear what occurs and nothing of great interest ever does occur at these events. At least nothing has thus far in my experience. I met DF on the plane in Denver. He was busy programming something in SAP and I had just finished reading the latest issue of Maxim. I had read Bar stool sports on the way to the airport and found one article of particular interest by the publisher. He listed the top 10 decisions in life that he should have made earlier. A big one was switching from a queen sized bed to a king sized one. Given that I have been scrunching into a corner of my bed to accommodate a growing baby I believe that the most important thing I can do in the next three months to improve my quality of life is to switch to a king sized bed. He also had other insights like the benefits of online betting vs. a bookie and how happy he was he didn’t get a racing shirt while in Montreal. I had also bought a bottle of Patron tequila on advice from someone that it would be a good item for a bachelor party.

DF and I didn’t sit with each other at first. I was sitting with three generations of women. A mother, daughter, and 12 month old grand daughter. It was fun playing with the baby given that she wasn’t mine and to compare books, toys, and stories. DF came back to inform me that there was seating in economy plus so I moved. From what I can tell they squeezed people who fly coach in one half and stretched a few extra inches for other folks in coach to create economy plus. While I am happy for the airlines for doing so it is quite annoying to be squeezed for cash to buy a few inches of leg space. They almost want me to be uncomfortable on the plane in order to upsell higher cost products.

When we landed in Reno we went to the rental car location we realized that nobody was policing our rental car selection. I had promised DK that I would rent a Viper or something more special like a Lamborghini but we settled on the best convertible that they had – the Mustang. Oddly I had a dream last night that I was hanging out with Lindsay Lohan at a party. She got too drunk to drive but we were having a good time and she was glad to have the company of a normal non-famous person. So she asked me to drive her Lamborghini. Unfortunately I don’t drive stick very well and it was a disaster. But all rental cars in the US are automatics so I didn’t have any trouble driving the Mustang with the top down at night while DF marveled at the view of the stars in Tahoe.

We arrived at the Northstar cabin and drank the bottle of Patron with DK, CS, and the host. The cabin was incredible with a huge open kitchen that connected to the dining area and living room. Downstairs they had bedrooms, predominantly with tons of twin beds. The cabin looked out onto the golf course but you couldn’t see the 4th green outside the large two tiered deck until morning. Upstairs, our host, DK’s future brother in law by marriage (he married DK’s fiancées sister) slept in a king sized master suite bed with a big bathroom and Jacuzzi tub. The evening was low key and we tried to come-up with as many embarrassing stories about DK as we could. MM, the best man, and Roc had shown up at some point to make Roc the 6th player for golf in the morning. CS held his liquor despite thoughts that he might not do so well with the tequila.

The next morning CS cooked some egg concoction for breakfast. He called it German pancakes and explained that it was like Yorkshire pudding. Since he didn’t have any milk he used the flavored creamer for coffee as a substitute. They came out well and tasted good with the bacon.

We headed out to play golf. 6 people played in two sets of three. Our group got a straggler from the course, a 70 year old named Dell, and his wife who wasn’t playing the second 9. He was fun to play with but made our plan to bring illicit beer onto the course in our bags a no go. The course was fun and despite not having played in a year I was still terrible at golf. After playing we all agreed that we should play more often while home and may actually begin some golf again in the fall. The crew then moved on to purchasing dinner at the adjacent supermarket and I avoided the decision making process and inefficiency of six grown men shopping for a barbecue by calling Sarah to give her the update on the fun thus far. I then forced my decision for blue cheese dressing upon DK when the time came and we rolled on back to the home front.

It was Friday night and DK’s friends from San Francisco were streaming in throughout the afternoon and evening. I counted about 14 people total but since they were moving around I wouldn’t bet on the actual number. MM, DK’s good friend and brother in law who married DK’s sister was the best man. MM is having triplets with DK’s sister through some fertility process. MM is also in a wheelchair so we all spent time pondering how fun it will be to get around with those three kiddos when they are born. I can barely keep up with one.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:52 AM | Permalink

I had to book my airfare early for DK's wedding because I wanted to use Frequent Flyer miles. American is having a pretty enticing offer that perfectly maps to my travel plans for the wedding. The wedding is in August and I got the offer just in time about a week ago. The offer basically provides a 25% discount on miles needed for an award flight from August through November where the ticket must be booked by May 31st. That's the right schedule for a wedding in August.

At first I thought I'd use 25% off of a 25,000 mile ticket but I figured that with the baby and percentage discounts being more valuable the more you spend why not fly first class for 33,000 miles per ticket and make the trip nice and cozy. If anyone is interested the offer is Here.

It is so rare that a special offer actually works for my real plans.

Posted by Dan Housman at 01:20 PM | Permalink

Among the benefits of leaving on a vacation for the Bahamas in May and having a deluge of biblical proportions fall upon the Boston area while we were gone is that my status as a prophet has gone way up. The main rationale for going on vacation this year in May was that last year, when we got married in May, we couldn’t help but notice that it rained 90% of the time. This combined with our second date on Memorial day when Sarah was violently sea sick on a whale watch that occurred during a hail and sleet storm. I also add my own past experience of trying to hike Mt. Chicorua in May and accidentally lighting my tent on fire by trying to warm me and Pete Forsythe up from a sleet storm we had hiked in using the camping stove inside the tent. So my personal experience with May in Boston is that it is a violently cold and rainy month, which is why we went away. But I do enjoy hearing that people respect how applying such wisdom could allow us to avoid an enormous basement flooding, sump-pump activating, disaster.

Our own challenge came when we returned home and had unpacked all of our shoes to place them into the closet where we store coats and shoes. Sarah stuck her nose into the closet and discovered that it smelled awful. Given that it had been at 100% humidity for about 6 days and that the rain could easily have penetrated the roof one theory for the horrible smell was that some old sandals, golf shoes, and other sweat filled beasts had gotten activated into smelling terrible. This was my hypothesis. I was in denial.

Sarah’s hypothesis was based on the incident prior to our 4AM exit when we were packing in the early morning for our flight. We aren’t normally wandering about our condo at this hour so it is possible to observe things that aren’t normally visible to us. In this case Sarah was in the kitchen and bumped into a small black mouse. The last time this had happened Sarah had let out a primal shriek that led me to believe, when I heard it from another room, that something terrible had happened to Madeline along the lines of her falling off of the refrigerator. This time Sarah was more calm and she just jumped but the mouse was as frightened as she was and rather than returning to a hole in the wall the mouse ran around the corner from the kitchen and into the open door to the closet with the shoes and coats. I had been rummaging for Tivas so the door was open. We spent a good portion of time on the cab ride over to the airport discussing how we were going to finally take the plunge and commit to purchasing a stray cat or kitten at the animal shelter.

Sarah’s opinion was that the smell in the closet, a musty sweaty rotten smell reminiscent of a basement, was the smell of that mouse dead in the closet. It wasn’t like we had closed the door on that mouse. We had left it open expressly to avoid having a dead trapped mouse in our closet upon return but it was left as a possibility. But I still clung to my musty rain theory. We had been trapped in Miami when we were returning due to massive rain that closed the airport for six hours and I could imagine it activating smells in shoes in the spring time.

We were delayed in Miami airport for so long that we got to listen to Bush’s 8PM speech about immigration reform although we had originally been scheduled to make a 3:30 connection back to Boston. I tend to think of the strategy for immigration reform when it comes to the mice in the condo. Our job is to reduce the opportunity for the mice (don’t leave food around) , seal the borders (plug holes that mice come through), and have appropriate border security forces (a cat), and reasonable penalties for illegal immigration (death by cat or if trapped in a humane trap – return to the wild 5 miles away). They have a five step plan and so do I my problem has been getting commitment, consensus, and resources to execute all areas of the plan. I wonder what the government’s issues are?

Madeline had enjoyed the airport. She liked interacting with the faces of people smiling at her and she discovered that Sarah’s phone was the most fun toy she had ever gotten her hands on.

By Friday night my excuse for not going into the closet to clean it out was that it was dark. We had returned home on Monday night. The real reason was that I was procrastinating the event and didn’t want to get too involved with death. So instead we watched the finale of Season 5 of Six Feet Under. In the end everyone dies in some cool scenes flashing into the future with a great song playing in the background. It was a good ending except for one dumb guffaw killing off Keith through gunshots while he is guarding money in an armored truck. It was just dumb but we played the ending scene with the cool song about 5 times. In one frame you can see Alan Poul, one of the producers, at a funeral for the mother. After that we watched Capote but Sarah fell asleep before they executed the killers by hanging. I had expected more from it, to be super curious about reading “In Cold Blood” but the movie was flat and long. I understood why Sarah fell asleep.

But by Saturday morning after having eaten our ritual breakfast at Brueggers I had run out of options and it was time to clean out the closet. I pulled out both bins of shoes, took out the luggage, and took all of the jackets out of the closet until it was bare. No dead mouse. I threw out a number of shoes that seemed to have offensive smells or were rendered useless due to holes in the bottoms out of my bin of shoes. Sarah went through her bin and that was when she found it, the suicide bomber.

The mouse in her shoe bin was grey. I am not sure whether black mice turn to grey or not so it could have been a different mouse but this was a dead mouse. It was a suicidal mouse trying to drive us out of our apartment with it’s stench. I doubt it was totally conscious of the effect that it has on us. Waichi is moving out of her apartment downstairs. Part of her reason for not buying the condo at a good price from the guy who wants to offload it is that she can’t deal with the mice dying. We bumped into her this morning as she was moving her boxes into a U-Haul in front of the building. She found a dead mouse that had been rotting for a long time behind her sofa two days ago and refrained from calling me to scrape it out because it was two in the morning. She had called me down one day about six months ago to scrape one out from under her radiator in her kitchen. It’s funny to see her needing my help because she is a kidney transplant surgeon and goes on missions with Doctors without borders to war torn or disaster areas but she is disgusted by dead mice.

But the effect of the mice rotting in closets, under floor boards, behind couches, under radiators, in cupboards full of sunflower seeds meant for birds, is the same everywhere. We have a dread of it and makes us want to run away to somewhere else. Nobody likes death in their own home.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:47 AM | Permalink

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:25 PM | Permalink

At about 9:30 PM on a Friday night I was sitting alone at the SeaFire restaurant feeling awkward in a fancy resort alone. I had exhausted most logical activities such as reading through the menu to review the prices of steaks. A filet at the SeaFire costs either $42 or $46 depending upon your appetite for meat. A woman walked up to me and asked “Is she all right?”. My first response was “She is hopefully going to come back soon as soon as the baby calms down.” At that point I recognized the woman and why she was asking me the question. She was the water woman from the beach the day before.

On Thursday we had decided that it would be good to get Madeline some experience with the warm teal Caribbean water. So we took her to the beach and found some of the chaise beach chairs with the shades that go over the top. These are the coveted items on the beach and we only obtained them because the people in them had inherited theirs from a pair of early risers who had gone for a walk and never returned. Sarah and I were lounging happily with Madeline sitting first with Sarah and then Madeline was moved over to sit with me for a while. I had her sitting facing away from me so that if she fell backwards I could catch her. But I wanted to see her face so I pointed her back towards me. I mentioned to Sarah that I felt this was a less stable configuration. At about this time the people in front of me started having an interesting exchange. A pair of New York women were being picked-up by some resort cruiser guys and I wanted to listen in on the outcome. It was a little drama to be had on the beach where otherwise all there was to do was stare at my baby or stare at the many scantily clad teenagers wandering about looking for the resort cruiser guys to pick them up while their parents were away getting drunk on $11 Bahama Coladas.

That was when Madeline fell backwards, rolled off of the chaise and before Sarah or I could catch her, fell face first into the sand. Sarah must have read a book that sand is among the most dangerous of elements for a baby since she immediately proclaimed that it was her worst fear of coming to the beach that this would happen since Madeline could be permanently blinded by an incident of this gravity. I tried to help Madeline who was not too happy having fallen and done a face plant and was helpful in trying to explain to Sarah that it was better than Madeline falling into concrete. I was brushing off the sand from her face but it wasn’t easy to do. Apparently baby faces when covered with suntan lotion are infused with some form of sand glue that allows sand to attach and bind to the face. So Madeline was just crying and Sarah rushed off in a panic to acquire water.

While Sarah was gone to the bar the water woman appeared along with the woman from New York who was getting hit on by the beach cruisers with their water bottles. The water woman was a mother, whose child didn’t appear to be traveling with her, who knew how to help out in this situation. She let me know that I needed to tip Madeline’s head so that the water didn’t go into her nose while she poured water down Madeline’s face with the water in her bottle and got a large part of the sand away from her eyes. She recommended going to the shower by the beach to finish the job and when Sarah returned with a glass of ice water I continued to apologize for my lack of diligence and let Sarah know that we had been helped by an experienced mom who knew how to handle this sort of situation. The mom did reinforce the gravity of the situation by mentioning that it is quite possible to get a very painful scratch on the cornea from sand in your eyes.

So we finally went to the shower and spent time washing out Madeline’s face and body to remove the sand and parted ways with the water woman. We decided that the beach was too dangerous for the rest of the day and moved to the zero entry kid wading pool to swim in shallower water but it was closed due to a fecal matter incident that was not our fault. Think Caddy Shack and Bill Murray.

So the water woman was now dressed in her finest resort casual dress looking at me oddly as I sat alone in my 30th minute staring at the menu waiting for Sarah to return. She had to be thinking something along the lines of “Boy – these are the most incompetent new parents that have ever walked the face of the earth.” We chatted for a minute or two and I informed her that Sarah was just outside nursing the baby because Madeline had been unhappy about the situation at the restaurant. The water woman went outside to say hello to Sarah.

Among the things to keep myself entertained while waiting alone for my wife and child to return was the birthday song that was being sung on a regular basis. The Bahamians must equate volume and excitement with luxury since they were practically yelling while they clapped a happy birthday each time at a volume that could be heard on neighboring islands. The wait staff was also trying to figure out what to do with me since I was this guy not ordering food at a fancy restaurant so I let them know we were having a problem getting the baby to calm down. Sarah had mentioned after I had tried to calm Madeline with a bottle that she wasn’t going to ruin people’s evenings who were paying through their teeth for a fancy meal with a crying baby. This seemed to especially apply to the local Bahamian couple sitting next to us that had a long discussion with the waiter, who they knew, that they had finally been able to come out to the restaurant after all these years. The Bahamian man leaned over to ask me at one point “So – no dinner for you.”.

It was after this that I decided to go out on my quest to see what Sarah was doing. I found her outside of the restaurant sitting in some outdoor waiting tables nursing Madeline. It looked like Madeline was about to go to sleep but there was a problem. Apparently at 9:30 at night on Fridays the streets at this resort are filled with entertainment. The entertainment was a parade including a marching band blasting music at volumes loud enough to drown out a Bahamian birthday song at the SeaFire restaurant. It was also loud enough to prevent Madeline from easily sleeping since every time Madeline started to dose off the rough equivalent of a person crashing a pair of cymbals over her head occurred. I had to laugh at the oddity of the event and given the two evils of the loud parade or the restaurant we opted to place her carefully into her carriage and stroll into the restaurant to order dinner.

When we sat down Madeline was sleeping and we had some cautious moments discussing the current scenario. We were sitting on a bomb that could go off at any moment but were going to eat our $42 steak and $40 tuna along with a Caesar salad, Merlot, and desert. We were on a mission to enjoy a nice meal while on vacation. That was when we learned that the Bahamian couple next to us was celebrating their birthday. The color from Sarah’s skin drained out of Sarah when the clapping, shouting, birthday singers arrived at our table. The nearby tables of knowledgeable parents looked on and were sympathetically mortified as well.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:16 AM | Permalink

While I had been quite proud of myself a few weeks back for getting the best possible rate for travelling to the fabulous hotel complex in the Bahamas around Atlantis I believe I have been outdone by a more industrious soul. I was chatting with Tara from work about getting cheap rates using the Comfort Suites approach to staying near Paradise Island and she and her husband were also looking into a similar trip.

Through a comparitive survey of airfares and calls into the hotels she achieved the following rates. It is only anectdotal and may include taxes etc. but it sounded like a winner to me.

1. Jet Blue now has direct flights to Nassau from Boston Logan airport. My flights go through some ugly connections so by itself this would be a great strategy. The additional benefit is that the fares were quite reasonable. She quoted fares around $120 per person (round trip?) for the flight. So that would be $240 for Sarah and me with a baby on our lap.

2. She called the hotel (Comfort Suites Inn) and asked one receptionist what the cheapest discounting option was. The woman said that a Sam's Club membership offers the cheapest option at ~$179 per night for a room that would fit two addults and a kid or two. The rooms all have common areas included in them. So for five nights and six days this would come, rounded up with secret costs ($200/night) about $1000. Tara called back an hour or two later and claimed to have a valid Sam's Club membership to claim the high discount rate.

So her total for the same trip that I paid a total of $1944.94 would have been $1240 saving about $700 and taking a direct flight instead of one with connections. If only I had known earlier. I concede defeat as a bargain hunter to the better and cheaper skater.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:16 AM | Permalink

I wasn’t sure how hard it would be to get a passport, whether we needed one to take Madeline to the Bahamas, or what we needed to take Madeline to the Bahamas. Plus it was a Monday and I go stir crazy watching Madeline if I don’t create chores that involve wandering about the earth. The original chore that I had planned for the day was to finish entering tax information in Bedford but it proved elusive and less fun than the procurement of the passport. So I meandered over to City Hall at about 9AM with my baby in hand and asked them what I needed to do. Among the odd things about having a baby is that you get a social security number for them before you get the birth certificate. The birth certificate sits on file at city hall waiting for you to purchase it. It is like those rides where they take a photo of you going through the plume or at the most terrifying point on a roller coaster when the hulking muscular dude next to you is screaming like a schoolgirl and vomiting into the air. Then you have to walk past and purchase some form of proof that you actually went through it to show your friends for $20. Well in this case the ride is childbirth and while the pictures would have been superb and I would have paid a few hundred bucks to see them but all they sell you is a copy of the proof of birth. The proof of birth is apparently all that is required to cross the border into the Bahamas with a child today but given the complexities predicted based on immigration reform, increased border security, and protectionism it will become harder to smuggle small babies into tropical countries and back without proper US paperwork in 2007. The people at the city hall office were gushing and happy to say hi to Madeline and especially enjoyed squeezing her big Michelin man arms.

So I decided to go through the process of obtaining a passport. They handed me some paperwork and sent me packing to get some passport photos of the little one and I meandered on my way to the next phase. I took Madeline to Walgreens to get her passport photos taken. The woman behind the counter was busy printing some giant stack of pictures so she warned me that it would be a while before she could photograph us. So I spent 15 minutes trying to manufacture purpose in Walgreens and that resulted in my purchasing a bag of sugar, a can of shaving cream, and a ten pack of sensor razor blades plus reading the latest gossip about the many babies about to be born in Hollywood. The photographer at first had me holding Madeline at an odd angle that nearly made me throw out my back but she then decided she needed a cart to rest the baby on to take a proper picture. This created a scuffle between her and the woman on the other side of the store using the cart for something like stocking razor blades and shaving cream. But Madeline sat teetering atop a black piece of cardboard on top of a cart for the required two minutes to take two beautiful pictures for her passport photo.

After a brief pit stop eating a bagel with Jeremy and Ari including watching Ari walk around a tree five times (although I think he really went around twenty times) a full bottle of milk and a god awful diaper change I was ready to return to City Hall. Once there I filled out the form thinking I was all set. I had to wait to get it processed after waiting behind a small pair of Asian women and an entourage of people working to help them to renew the license for their nail salon. The women gawked once again at how cute Madeline was and we had a good time for the twenty minutes that I was waiting. But when I handed them the forms they let me know that I couldn’t be the only person signing on the passport. Sarah was also needed at the same time. Now getting Sarah and me in the same place at the same time from 9 – 5 is not a trivial operation. So for whatever fear that the US Government had that I was going to procure a passport and steal Madeline off to the Tablisi to sell her on the black market was going to require some co-ordination with Sarah. So I called Sarah and we agreed that we could reconvene upon City Hall at 4:30 with a full 30 minutes left to get the paperwork signed and to do the oath.

So at 4:40 we walked into the office once more and the women started to look at Madeline again. But the main woman who processes everything, especially passports, looked very cross. She mentioned in a mildly passive aggressive way to the other woman working behind the desk that someone had forgotten to tell me that they don’t process any new passports after 4:00 PM. They especially don’t like to do so when there is an Asian woman and her daughter getting a rush passport set for a family of 12 to travel to Kamchatka without the right paperwork that she had been helping to pull together the forms for since I left at noon with Madeline. But she was willing to help us out, although disgruntled about having to stay past 5PM to get us serviced. But at 5:10 PM Madeline Eve Housman’s first passport application was officially paid for and is now en route to some government way station where it will be processed about three weeks after the government cashes our tax payments.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:06 PM | Permalink

(Update -- I was outdone in price by someone else in April. See Mr. Cheap outdone by Mrs. Cheap.)

Sarah had her heart set on going back to Atlantis in the Bahamas for a relaxing spring trip. We were going to look into how to get there last night be we immediately ended-up looking at those ridiculously expensive projects in Dubai, The World, and The Palm and never got around to pricing the Atlantis tickets. I highly recommend watching the promotion videos for the Dubai properties. They remind me of the science fiction promotions from Vanilla Sky or Total Recall where people sell you on a fantasy mind vacation. Among the fun parts is their large focus towards the end on security to make sure you feel sure that those lowly peasants don't invade your private island and kidnap any of your wives.

But I digress. After realizing that going through the front door at Atlantis I was going to get socked with a bill for $2500 before they got their hands into my wallet I decided to google around for a back door. I was hoping for some sky auction or maybe someone selling scalped tickets to Atlantis but I did find a woman who was providing tips on getting a luxury Carribean vacation on the cheap. She had made specific reference to a hotel that is less than .1 miles from the Atlantis resort but is owned by the company.

"A stay at Comfort Suites Paradise Island, for example, includes a pass that allows you to use the facilities of the luxe Atlantis Resort and Casino. "

So I did my own little search for a cheap package fare to get me into this back-door for the Atlantis resort figuring that the room is going to be a hotel room with a bed regardless of what package I pick and with some extra cash we can splurge on a dinner, go scuba sailing, or buy more coronas from the hard to find liquor store. So I went online to CheapCarribean.com and hunted for a lowest price for the Comfort Suites. It came out with a price of $799 per person with flight for the hotel with a special offer expiring today. While I didn't actually believe the offer was going to be a problem I did want to put the booking behind us so that we could enjoy some fun in the sun with Madeline during a rainy May, if it is anything like last year. So I booked us on the cheapest possible days with the unfortunate layovers that go through Miami since Boston doesn't offer direct flights to Nassau. During the transaction they found a lower price than the one initially offered, not that I asked for one. They also tried to pitch the upgrade to the deluxe suite for $300 that seemed to offer the same luxury caramel colored furniture but with a view of the pool. I turned that option down.

So in all the trip cost $1944.94 for the three of us to stay 5 nights and six days. I had really wanted to find a "promotion code" since the taunted me with it during the purchasing form but I didn't think I would get a much better deal and have never been able to find good promotion codes when I needed them.

I'll know if I got a good deal or not in a couple of months.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:29 PM | Permalink

We recently started purchasing avocados from Trader Joes. It started when we were at Linda’s and she had served a Caesar salad with avocados in it and we were struck that we could buy these wonderful treats ourselves and do what we wanted with them. The two basic uses for an avocado around the house are in a salad or in a quickly made guacamole. In general if an avocado is on a menu somewhere at a restaurant I will go for that food. At fancy restaurants the avocado likes to live with the best foods. My favorite tuna tartar from Cuchi Cuchi comes jumbled together in a cylinder with avocado. A burger is always better with the southwestern style adding the avocado. Even the lowly working class burrito makes itself a staple with the thwack splattering green onto an abstract canvas of black, brown, white, and red before the canvas gets rolled and covered in modern silver foil. I can’t have a tailgate football party without the guacamole from Whole Foods and it is my sincere hope that as I experiment in my own home with the avocado that I can create a fresh and tasty food as good as the plastic containers full. Even this morning, during brunch with Lynne and her friend Dave at Lineage, I ordered a breakfast dish with eggs over black beans with a nice mound of avocado in the corner of the dish.

Mr. Wanda, a tall African man with a deep voice, a square high hairdo, and a curly beard was our traveling chef on the safari we took in Tanzania. Among the many things he provided us to eat from park to park were large salads filled with avocados, onions, and tomatoes. A perfect vegetable can be purchased hard in an African marketplace, then tied to the roof of a Land Rover, only to be removed strategically to always have the perfect soft flavor each day for a week. That was one of the luxuries about being on safari. We had a personal chef traveling with us and most meals included a very generous portion of avocado in the salad.

I have lately noticed that watching Madeline grow reminds me of our trip through the Serengeti, Ngoro-Ngoro crater, and Lake Manyara. At first when we would see a bird or animal we’d get excited and try to take pictures, and stare for an hour. It didn’t matter too much whether Kennedy, our guide, actually knew the proper name for the birds. The important thing was to see some amazing thing we had never experienced before and to observe it long enough that it could become a part of our experience. So with Madeline I have a buzz inside where I am looking every day for something little in her developing process that I hadn’t seen before. At first it was just to see her at all, a real human developed out of nothing, the latest rung on a ladder of evolution above me with everything back to the original primordial ooze descending into the distance behind us. But as she develops we could anticipate an intentional smile, standing up, rolling over, walking in the Bjorn, walking in the woods. This last week I got to see the first giggle and her first solid food going into her mouth.

On our safari in Africa the first time we saw a lion in the tall grass and hot sun it was amazing. We looked for almost an hour. As we drove about we kept seeing the lions each day for four days. After seeing a hundred lions you start to say to yourself – ‘eh, another lion, I’ve seen one of those’. The same is true with the elephants, giraffes, and pelicans – amazing creatures but they appear mundane after four days of spinning around a giant open field. Instead we go off looking for rarer creatures like the cheetah, leopard, or rhinoceros. It is almost impossible not to get sensitized to the novelty of the current wonders and instead go moving towards the next new wonder. So lately Madeline has been smiling often but I am looking for a second giggle, a new tooth, and a purposeful roll. I have to catch myself to stop and just appreciate how far she has come and smile back at her for an hour because happiness in a five month old baby isn’t assured. Plus the best way to get that second giggle is to give a smile a big workout.

I wonder how Madeline sees the world as well now that she has become so aware of things. The smiles must, in part, be due to her own safari of what is now so mundane to me that I have become completely sensitized to it. I can only try to experience the amazement of seeing things for the first time vicariously through her. It is spring now and the crocuses are rising from the ground for the first time in her life. She experienced a cold snow storm as we walked through the windy blowing blizzard to Zathmary’s for a breakfast only a month and a half ago. We eavesdropped on a group of college girls gossiping about an affair that one of their friends was having with a married man while tasting the Zathmary’s breakfast food. Last month suddenly, Zathmary’s closed in all locations. But something new will replace it. We have so much to show Madeline as it gets warmer out. A trip to the zoo to see the giraffe, the gazelle, and the lion is a likely activity.

But while it is still cold out I am guessing that we will move past the banana and rice cereal that we have been feeding her for the past three days and introduce a new food. I saw two foods pictured in the Good Housekeeping guidebook on raising your baby listed as ones to introduce to a baby that I can’t wait to see her eat. The first one were pieces of cheese cut into interesting shapes like a star or triangle. The second one was a light green slice of avocado.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:40 AM | Permalink

In my reading of Fear and Loathing in America my interest in Hunter’s letters increased significantly as he approached the dates that covered writing and publishing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. F&L in America gives plenty of references to Hunter doing plenty of interesting drugs including his firm stance that a part of his candidacy for Sheriff of Aspen was that he would continue to do mescaline on a regular basis. But the volume of mind-altering substances referred to in F&L in Las Vegas was incredible. On the back of the Las Vegas book it summarizes the basic premise that a gonzo journalist and his lawyer had a crazy adventure in Vegas that the average traveler out on a bender could only look at with awe as a religious achievement to bent living:

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…. Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge…”

When I first met Sarah two weeks after we had met I had a business meeting in California that took me through Las Vegas on a flight where I met her for some fun in Vegas. We sat by the pool at the Excalibur, sipping drinks and listening to the dim sound of the repetitive Disney style musac in the background, and I read F&L in Las Vegas to Sarah using my best impression of Johnny Depp in the movie who was probably doing his best impression of Hunter himself.

At night we went out to Nephrotite’s lounge in the Luxor tower and drank until about 2 am although we were having trouble getting drunk because of the extra oxygen pumped into the air to keep people from falling asleep while gambling. We left Vegas on a Sunday night skipping our original flight because we were busy playing black jack and drinking free booze on the floor of the MGM Grand which we learned was originally designed to resemble the emerald palace from the Wizard of Oz complete with the yellow markings on the rugs guiding drunken gamblers to the tables to represent the yellow brick road.

I don’t owe the Fear and Loathing book anything with regards to having a continued long term relationship with Sarah. But it is something like a favorite song that I can get a little sentimental about to remember the care free and more wild state of mind I was in when we first met. It's only buddy in the first books that Sarah and I read is Tom Robbin's 'Still Life With Woodpecker, "yumm", that I loaned Sarah because she is a red head.

While Hunter’s Vegas story as a whole smells of hyperbole, and Hunter helps because his style is always hyperbolic – like when he thought the only way to get rid of a girl was to feed her to the lizards in the desert - the amazing thing to learn in F&L in America is that by his own admission: Thompson wasn’t on drugs while working on F&L in Las Vegas.

He wrote in a letter to his publisher – “The only thing that vaguely alarmed me about your letter was your statement to wit: ‘You know it was absolutely clear to me reading Las Vegas that you were not on drugs…’ This is true, but what alarms me is that Vegas I was very conscious attempt to simulate a drug freak out – which is always difficult, but in reading over I still find it depressingly close to the truth I was trying to create.”

So while this isn’t as big of a discovery as the guy who dragged Oprah through the muck with a thousand little pieces I did find it interesting that Hunter, one of the more interesting authors, generally wrote sober even if he did get twisted from time to time.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:41 AM | Permalink

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Now that Sarah and I are back from our vacation in California we are ready to face the next big hurdle in our lives. After three months of maternity leave, on Monday, Sarah returns to work. While this was a known event it crept-up on us suddenly and now we are scrambling to figure out how to not become totally dysfunctional while having both of us work with an infant needing our constant care and feeding. The initial plan is to have me stay home on Monday, Sarah to stay home on Tuesday, for me to take Madeline to my mother’s on Wednesday, and take Madeline to Sarah’s mother in Bedford on Thursday. This leaves the conundrum of what to do on Fridays. But that isn’t a problem until it happens.

The return to work is taking a toll on both of us. I have to adjust to getting back into a rhythm for my work and it is tough with a mix of programming, marketing, management, sales, etc. to find the right priorities to get everything done. Sarah was nearly crying over not having gotten the laundry finished and put away last night along with the apparently relentless cancerous growth of clutter in our apartment. I think everyone suffers from a general haze in January trying to figure out what they are really supposed to be doing this year. I intend to spend more time selling and less time developing or marketing but that may be a tricky proposition. I have been getting plenty of calls from people offering director of product management jobs but I have been turning them down because the arrangements at my current gig are still quite good and the whole scene around personal knowledge management or medical data warehousing haven’t played out yet. I belong more on the initiation phase than as a clean-up guy even if it pays better to just organize a bunch of people already rowing a ship out of synch.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:54 PM | Permalink

Tuesday morning – Los Angeles California

Sarah and I have embarked upon our first journey with Madeline. We are taking the trip to Southern California and then drive up the coast to San Francisco. The tickets are from the trip that we didn’t manage to take last year because Sarah had such bad morning sickness. Now with Madeline we have different challenges.

We didn’t know what to expect at the airport for traveling with an infant. We knew that Madeline could fly free but she needs a number of items just to roll, carry, or hold her that need to get onto the plane and transported along with us. We met Ami and Ilana at the gates since they are also traveling to Southern California and driving up to San Francisco. Since they recently moved to Boston and are apparently following us through California my best guess is that they are Russian spies. I must be getting too close to building that uber-weapon that will wipe out all energy supplies by breaking them down chemically without releasing heat. But that is supposed to be top secret work so they shouldn’t have known about it. I knew Ami’s cover as a physics professor was thin.

So we had to get through the dreaded security check with an infant, a laptop, a car seat, a snap-and-go, a car seat base, a diaper bag, a bag of baby clothes, and a breast pump. Carrying all of this through the security check was recommended to us when we went to check-in our bags since they mentioned that you just gate check the baby stuff.

As our turn in the line became apparent leagues of other travelers migrated to the other security booth to avoid the apparent mayhem and delays that would ensue from our attempts to clear the security check. The first problem we had was that Madeline wasn’t officially on the tickets. So the security personnel had a discussion between a trainee and a superior to determine if it was alright. Apparently if your baby isn’t on the ticket you might be planting a baby bomb into her or she could be used as a part to assemble a larger weapon. But the cool head of the superior saw that we were not to be thwarted and allowed us through to the X-ray and metal detector area. I knew what to do with the laptop, you take it out of the bag and put it into it’s own basket. The baby does not come with such clear instructions.

After hearing that you are supposed to walk through with the baby in the car seat I dismantled the snap and go, took off my shoes, and started to walk through the metal detector with the car seat. Apparently this was wrong so I had to then remove Madeline from the car seat, put it through the security check, and then she went through in my arms without a problem. We then worked to collect our disorganized belongings at the other side with the help of Ami and Ilana, put our shoes on, repacked Madeline into her car seat, reassembled the snap and go, and rolled off to buy some magazines and food for the flight. They no longer serve real food on flights across the country. You can buy a snack that includes Oreos, cheese product, crackers, Goldfish, and an inedible sausage, but no real food.

So when we got to the gate we had added a full load of two hamburgers (that Sarah initially ordered as cheeseburgers without the cheese), one chicken whopper , three magazines (Maxim, Us, and In Touch), and two large BK beverages. Madeline was having a good time getting changed in the bathroom while the woman at the check-in counter was looking for the man who was scheduled to sit next to our mess. He was offered a different seat and gladly accepted it leaving us with three seats rather than two. When we were called in group 4 we were a total disaster trying to get to the gate with Madeline beginning to get upset. So we had to add one full bottle of milk with baby attached that cries when milk is removed to our set of items traveling onto the plane.

Putting a car seat into the plane is a bit of a challenge. You first need to bind the seat to the base to get onto the plane. This allows you to walk down the aisle bumping into things as you go and if people are traveling in the other direction you can lift the seat and hit passengers in aisle seats in the head with the car seat. They are normally gracious because they pity you for being the person with an infant on the plane. When you get to your seat you need to dismantle the base of the car seat from the seat in order to belt in the base. The base must go in the window seat, which makes sense, since you couldn’t get past it once it was in if it was in the aisle seat without out detaching the base. Since the baby is in the car seat it makes life a little more challenging as you take-up two seats to manage the base and seat. Sarah was able to sit in the third seat while I finagled the seat. While all of this seat wrangling was going on Madeline was not happy unless attached to the bottle. But we did manage to get her installed.

The flight itself was easier than expected. Madeline only cried at the beginning and we watched a bad movie called Dreamer with Dakota Fanning. Given that we had three seats I would hate to imagine what would have happened if we had tried to pull off this flight in two seats. Maybe we’ll find out on our return trip.

I figure that Madeline is a better actress than Dakota Fanning and I read two tabloids on the flight so since we are in Hollywood for about 14 hours she should give her acting career a shot. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any roles for an 11 week old yet. The Michelin ads are apparently filmed at a different time of year and she isn’t an identical twin.

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last night was a quiet night out at with Yuval, Molly, and the star of the show, baby Gabriel. I was interested, more than usual, in what future may lie ahead of me with a baby when Madeline turns 18 months old. Gabriel looked like a very solid human being in comparison to Madeline, who is still a helpless little rag doll that can barely hold her head-up. She is doing her tummy time according to Sarah and held her head so high that she went off balance and rolled over to scare herself. Gabriel likes to grab everything. When he was getting changed he prefers to grab the telephone and try to talk into it or call the operator. I read Gabriel a story this morning and we pointed to the words like duck or squirrel and he could say words that would be hard to understand without the picture like squiel for squirrel or buk for book. He apparently believes that all fruits and vegetables are an apple.

Yuval and Molly are teaching Gabriel to be bilingual in Hebrew so the apartment is filled with books that would look familiar children’s classics like the hungry caterpillar but the words are in Hebrew. Looking at them I was thinking about how I couldn’t even read or speak enough Hebrew to read those short children’s books. They made me feel the fear of being illiterate or as a late stage Alzheimer’s patient as I imagined what it would be like if every language were to be foreign to me. I also wished that I could speak another language with Madeline and had some vague dreams of filling our apartment with French children’s books and calling a phone pal via Skype to teach myself French as Madeline ages.

On the car ride out to the airport I listened to an interview with Joan Didion. I remember her as an essayist from my AP English class in high school. She wrote an essay or a book of essays called Slouching Towards Bethlehem that I remember were used to show us young incompetent writers how to write properly. Unfortunately it didn’t stick with me so I still write like a seventh grader, but I also never declared myself to be a premiere essayist. I would love to reread the High School books again. I’ll get my chance in fourteen years when Madeline is reading the modern equivalents. But I’ll have to get her to and through Goodnight Moon in a couple of languages before I can graduate back to the good stuff. Joan Didion won some major book prize this year for her latest book about coping with the death of her husband while she was nursing her daughter back to health from a coma. The book sounded a bit morbid but one line of the interview stuck out in my memory.

My rough recollection of her statement was “Most people who have gone through grief go through this - You keep thinking of things that the other person needs to know about and you can’t tell them.” People persist in memory as real. You can’t help it that when you find something that would interest them you want to talk to them and enjoy sharing a thought with them. But it hits a wall of reality that they are dead when you proceed to the next step to tell them and they aren’t there anymore.

But people appear and disappear mysteriously. While I was boarding the plane back to Boston I bumped into Wilson, Ron’s best man/woman, who is coming to Boston to spend the week of Thanksgiving with her family. Wilson and I collaborated to acquire the poor man’s first class seats in the exit row, shared pictures of Madeline, and synchronized our Pay Per View TVs to watch Wedding Crashers again. Now we are just cruising over Nebraska and I can’t wait to see my beautiful wife Sarah and my darling baby Madeline when I get home.

Posted by Melody at 02:21 PM | Permalink

Everyone has an odd airline stewardess story. Please feel free to send me yours. We exchanged a few while dining out last Friday. Here are a couple of mine.

While feeling bothered at having been awoken to move my seat from the reclined position into the upright position I asked the stewardess why this was necessary or safer than reclining. Her answer was that the change in position from back to upright affected the aerodynamics of the airplane during landing. I am still pondering how this could ever be possible but I guess she didn’t major in Physics at school.

When flying home from a weekend in California with DK I distinctly heard the overhead announcer say “We are cruising at 35000 feet and we will be serving smagmandiviters shortly.” I have always wanted to start a restaurant called Smagmandiviters since.

While flying on Ted the video tutorial on safety kept welcoming us to Ted as though Ted was a real person. “Ted welcomes you” and “We know you have a choice and Ted is glad you chose us for your airline.” I started to crack up because it sounded so silly that this fictitious person who is really an airline would be gracious. Then as they were going through the safety instructions the instructions for the floatation device were “There is a flotation device under your seat cushion that can be easily removed by lifting your seat. Don’t do that now!“ Like I was going to tear apart my seat while watching the safety video.

JT had a funny story about Southwest. The stewardess had sung Leaving on a Jet Plane before take off. During the flight they experienced a lot of turbulence. So the stewardess told everyone to put one hand on their seatbelt. Then she asked everyone to raise their right hand but leave their other hand on the seatbelt. Then she announced that everyone was now riding the Southwest rodeo.

Apparently the airlines are all headed for bankruptcy again. Detroit is heading in the same direction. The result will be that the companies will restructure and older employees including ex-stewardesses will lose their pensions since that’s one of the things you get to ditch when you go bankrupt. I can imagine that at some point someone should legislate that pensions should all be ditched for 401Ks or other mechanisms where the employees keep their money separate from the corporation. There is no reason to allow a big clunky business that is likely to go bankrupt to be responsible for people’s livelihood when they are 80. It is too tempting to screw the old people.

Posted by Melody at 04:09 PM | Permalink

July 4th weekend was a lot of fun. We didn’t have a lot of time to spend in Chicago downtown but there are some highlights of downtown Chicago worth noting from the small amount of time we did spend there. The Museum of Science and Industry has an exhibit called Body Worlds at the moment where they plasticized 200 cadavers in various ways including posing them on horses, cutting out different layers (cardio-vascular system, bones, muscles and bones, nervous system, etc. They even had a cadaver which was a woman with an unborn child. That one was a little tough to avoid thinking about the horror of the circumstance prior to plastinization. But for the most part the cadavers were artistic and I felt like I learned a lot about the world of the body that would otherwise have been too intangible to learn. The museum also has a great train set model of Chicago and Seattle with a train going through the mountains to reach in between. The robot exhibit was terrible. It didn’t have any robots, just a lot of toys from the 1950s and a video promotion from the iRobot corporation.

On the drive to the museum Sarah’s uncle Paul and I were talking about potential treatments for Alzhiemers and Parkinsons. They are starting to test nanotechnology spheres that can cross the blood brain barrier. The localization of them is done through tricks with the immune system and antibodies to locate certain blocks of cells and they can then release the key missing enzymes (nerve growth factor) back to only the areas affected by the neurodegeneration. It sounds like a workable idea although I can already imagine that the next few science fiction novels will start to go for robotically controlled brains through nano-technology that locates a region in the brain and can then be controlled by radio signals. Such an application would allow someone to make a person feel orgasmic when doing a mundane and unattractive task like sweeping a floor. That could lead to an ultimate state like the one in Brave New World where people were bred for different castes.

After the museum we pressed onwards to a bar where we learned that Chicago hasn’t outlawed smoking in bars yet. Sarah asked for non-alcoholic versions of Mohitos or Pina Coladas but they couldn’t figure out how to do it. After the food we walked to the Hancock building to go to Top of the Cock, a very nice art deco bar that overlooks Chicago and lake Michigan. When we were there it also overlooked the sunset. It looked like a scene out of the Aviator with the big styled art deco ceilings, elevators, and bar areas. We only had drinks there but the dining area is visible below and you can see how prepared and dressed people get to go there. I could imagine the women going out with their boyfriends dressed fancily and wondering whether their boyfriends would pop the question. I think you would need reservations in advance to go but it beats the skyline restaurant in Boston Top of the Hub that is very cheap in comparison.

On Tuesday morning we went back into the City for a half-day to see some sights. We went to Navy Pier. The pier itself is a bit of a tourist dive with overpriced un-refilled drinks and a big mall. But boats leave from the pier for various cruises in the harbor and through the city canals. We took an architectural cruise for an hour and it was awesome. The boat went through the east river and the tour guide pointed to all of the skyscrapers to describe the style they were in, when they were made, why they were made, and who made them. The architecture reminded me of Ayn Rand’s the Fountainhead and it was very grandiose. The Mesian boxes were pretty but not very interesting while the post-modernists had warped the same boring rectangles into prisms and curves that hugged the river. Many of the skyscrapers are built above the original train system because there was no other way to negotiate the rights to the land. It led me to believe that Chicago is a ripe city for a scary terrorist attack by exploding a train underneath the skyscrapers. This was on Tuesday, two days before the attack on London’s transit system.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:18 AM | Permalink

Behind hidden doors...

One of the main draws of New York City are the Broadway shows. So the first thing that we did when we arrived at the Hotel Pennsylvania across the street from Madison Square Garden was to ask at the ticket desk whether any of the great shows like Spamalot or Chicago had tickets available for Saturday evening or Sunday. They came back with a bunch of offers for shows that sounded like they had finally put the music of Brittney Spears into a musical (actually that would be pretty cool). So Sarah and I checked into our non-smoking but smoke ridden coffin of a room, the door looked like the entrance to a mausoleum, and opened the window to air it out. We then rushed back downstairs to where James and Stephanie were waiting for us in the car so that we could go to the other major attraction in New York city – illegal knock-off bag shopping. I better get used to the world of designer bags since I am going to have a daughter.

After parking in a faux little Italy in SoHo we walked the fifteen blocks in a sudden torrential rain shower that was a good change from the hot 90 degree weather. We did manage to buy two umbrellas for the four of us and I had to hold the one for Sarah and me because I am the taller one. I tried to cover mainly her because she is pregnant and might dissolve in the acid rain of New York.

Upon arriving at Canal Street we began the quest for the knock-off bags. As someone who doesn’t understand bags as a fashion statement I mainly was there as a consultant on illegal activities and getting into trouble, which I am better expert for. I was also the only one who had seen the illegal bags before so I was an expert on the process. My former experience was in the winter of 2003 during a massive blizzard that buried the PT cruiser for a week. In 2003 the shops had giant rooms full of knock-off bags. During that blizzard there had been one incident when we were in a big store full of bags and the police came past and the store had completely closed with us trapped inside for five minutes before some fashionable and Jewish looking fashion label enforcement police had busted into the door and started yelling at the proprietors. Times had changed and the stores were tiny and brandless so I figured that either the Internet bust had broken down demand for these bags, the shops shrunk in an inverse proportion to the temperature, or the crack down by the Prada police was taking it’s toll on the industrious Nextel phone and walkie-talkie wielding immigrants of Chinatown.

So we entered a number of these smaller establishments and looked at their bags but unlike the last time I was there the bags didn’t have any labels on them to identify that they were Prada, Kate Spade, Gucci, or Coach. You had to know the style before-hand to figure out which was which. Sarah was quite unimpressed and was looking for a black Kate Spade diaper bag and would settle for nothing less. You have to have standards in these things. We entered a number of shops with all four of us but the bags just weren’t the knock-offs we were looking for. Disappointed we split apart for a while. James and Stephanie ate Lychee nuts. One industrious illegal bag salesman popped out of a basement door bulkhead and started waving a catalog of bags in front of a fashionable teenager in front of us. Sarah walked past and let me know that she didn’t want to go down into a bulkhead to buy a bag. We then found Stephanie and James wandering in a daze and since the heat had returned we stopped into the local Chinatown Hagen-Daaz outlet for some smoothies because James and Stephanie couldn’t find the place that had the perfect Boba-tea drinks.

After the refreshing tropical mango smoothie we were considering leaving Chinatown when we stopped in one last shop to see if there was a chance that they had different merchandise. It was the same crap but this time Sarah asked the magic question. “Do you have any Kate Spade bags?”. The small Asian woman put her finger to her lips and told us to be very quiet. She then pointed to the wall and told us to follow her. We followed and in the wall was a cut-out shape of a hidden door. She opened the door and Sarah, Stephanie, and I all walked into the secret room filled to the brim with illegal knock-off bags of all kinds along with another woman who had been shopping there before we arrived and we had never noticed. So the reason why the stores had gotten smaller was because they had subdivided them into the legal storefront of bags without labels and the illicit labeled back-rooms with hidden doors.

Stephanie wasn’t looking for a bag but she found a shiny gold bag that matched her shoes and was probably a thousand dollars retail. She paid $30 bucks for it and the woman carefully wrapped it and warned her to tell nobody about what had transpired. Sarah was inspired by this but she hadn’t found her Kate Spade black diaper bag yet so we had to press on throughout Chinatown seeking out the illegal door with the secret brand name password in every shop we could find. We had to leave Stephanie and James to eat more Lychee nuts on the street while we pursued our mad lust for this bag.

We tried over twelve shops and found back rooms in so many different shapes and sizes all filled with various Whitman’s samplers of bags. I envisioned that there might be other rooms behind these rooms where the illegal activities kept getting more illegal. If you asked once in the bag room for drugs a smaller door would open. Once in the drugs room you could ask for prostitutes and climb into the basement. Finally you could ask to be transported to another dimension and a strange portal would open taking you to Zeta-7, the planet in a distant solar system where all stolen articles go.

Eventually we came upon a shop that had hanging above the counter a bag that looked just like the Kate Spade black diaper bag that we were desperate to find. So we asked the Asian woman if they had Kate Spade and walked through a display area filled with clothes and through a door behind it into a large back room with two mothers with their two daughters. The back room also contained someone in a hidden toilet who walked out of a wall so I asked whether I could go to the bathroom. The back room didn’t hold the bag we were looking for so Sarah asked her specifically for what she wanted and the woman though about it and said that we needed to wait for five minutes. We spent the five minutes discussing the features of diaper bags with the two mothers who had been through the experience since they had their daughters in the back room with them ready to be sold into white slavery. The Asian woman buzzed someone on her walkie-talkie in Chinese and after five minutes the same tagless bag we had seen came back with a Kate Spade label carefully superglued to the front. Sarah examined it with the mothers for quality and compliance with the standards of the manufacturer and then negotiated a $35 settlement with the woman. We left the store and found Stephanie and James.

I highly recommend the experience.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:26 AM | Permalink

Sarah and I took a road trip to New York to go to Jason Lin’s, Stephanie’s brother’s, wedding. We took most of Friday off in order to get down to New York. The plan we had created involved going out to the Chrysler dealership in Concord to pick-up my PT Cruiser from the shop, driving to Bedford to drop off the Passat, then driving into New York City to check-in to the Hotel Pennsylvania, followed by driving back to the New York Botanical Gardens for the wedding at 6PM. The day started out fortunately enough. My three way Skype call between the US, UK, and the Netherlands started at 8am instead of 9am. Nothing says “wake-up” like a ringing computer next to your bed. The call went to 9:30 which was when I had expected the call to end in the first place but I got a 90 minute call in and felt good about doing it on the Internet dime rather than paying the phone company. Sarah and I then proceeded to run around packing random things. We had to get a stain out of the tuxedo, figure out how to bring the portable DVD player and DVDs, get bathing suits for the pool, and get my contact lenses.

Finding things in the apartment can be very annoying. The other night I lost my glasses and spent a panicked hour looking everywhere for them including going back and forth to the car in flip-flops and tearing off some skin from my arm reaching under the seat of the Passat. I have been more than patient enough with the RFID and nanotech folks and I deserve my HomeID system so that I can find all those HIDden items with a tricorder-like device that points like a divining rod to my lost items and lets me know what inventory of junk I have throughout the apartment. When is this technology going to help me out around the house? There is one product out there from iautomate – I guess I should have registered for it. ( ). The glasses were found in the bed where I had taken a nap earlier in the day and lost them in the folds of the comforter.

The PT Cruiser had $745 worth of repairs. The steering pump had been replaced because it had broken and they had decided to not only fill the air conditioning system with Freon (good timing at least) but also to run some expensive fluorescent dye test that didn’t appear to have had any results according to the payment slip. We were in a hurry so we pushed out of the dealership and I figured I wasn’t going to get anywhere with the dealership staff and I was lucky they hadn’t found some other awful problem like a broken flux capacitor or that a mafia don had installed an explosive device underneath that I would need to have removed. The dealership loves to find problems with the car that I can’t possibly ignore. In general the answer to what will happen if I don’t fix something is “You might die!”

So once we hit the road at 11:40 we figured we were in good shape for a 6:30 wedding. I was listening to the phone religiously because I had told a VC friend of Brad’s that I would be in the city on Friday and he had left me a message via email to ask if I was in town. But the phone never rang so it was all about the wedding.

We didn’t expect it but we hit severe rush hour traffic when we got close to New York at 3:30PM. When we thought about it we were near the Bronx, where the Botanical Gardens are, so we made a significant change of plans to avoid the traffic. Sarah changed our hotel reservations to Tarrytown, and we drove straight to the Botanical Gardens. The major worry that Sarah had, since this new plan didn’t involve stopping at a hotel, was that among the hundred things we had done before leaving for New York, the one she should have done was to iron her new wrap that was likely wrinkled. Since we were going to change somewhere at the Botanical gardens this wrinkly wrap would be unacceptable and she might freeze to death in the 90 degree heat of an unnaturally hot June.

So we walked about the botanical gardens from 4:00-5:45. The botanical gardens are very nice but I noticed that all the signs were pointing in directions that led to gates rather than being like the arboretum where once inside you actually reach the nice flowers when you walk around. The secret to the arboretum is that they charge you multiple times. The initial fee of $6 gets you onto the grounds, but to see a nice rock garden it costs another $1 per person. We enjoyed the rock garden since we were the only people there and it was nice and romantic to walk alone. Sarah wanted it as her backyard since it was maintained in a natural state filled with flowers of all sorts, with waterfalls, and trees. One section of the rock garden area was filled only with native flowers. We stopped on a bench for a while there and enjoyed the warm weather.

They also had a big white building that cost $7 per person to enter and with a AAA card we got some deal that was $7 for two people. The building was advertising the spring flower show so basically if you wanted to see spring flowers at the botanical garden you had to fork over the cash. It was actually very impressive inside of the big greenhouse building since it had multiple mock climates including a desert, rainforest, palm forest, and lily pads in a big pool. I was impressed and thought we got our extra seven dollars worth.

So at 5:45 we suddenly needed to change and drive over to where the Lin/Moy wedding was to be held. The wedding was at the Snuff Mill. I assume that is where they mill snuff? We were parked at the main gate and sweating heavily from our walk out in the heat. So we cranked the new air conditioning on to keep our clothing from sticking to our skin and then changed comically in the car. I had never put a Tuxedo on with a steering wheel in front of me but the secret is to periodically leave the car and return. It took about 20 minutes to change completely and I wasn’t much faster than Sarah despite her need to fuss with beauty products and worry about how ironed her wrap was despite the irrelevance of a wrap on a swelteringly hot evening.

So we arrived at the wedding at 6:25 and were just on time. Lots of other folks hadn’t adjusted well to the traffic problems so there was a commotion about how to handle some of the gaps in the guest list since any delay at the beginning would cascade through the wedding activities throughout the night. They started about 15 minutes late, just like we did at our wedding, and plenty of folks had arrived in that extra window. A few stragglers processed by accident behind the bridal party walking to the stage but it wasn’t important. The ceremony itself was lightning fast. Both Jason and Kathy said some words that they had written themselves. Sarah and I had a good time although we didn’t know most of the Chinese/Taiwanese family members at the wedding. After the wedding we tried to caravan back to Tarrytown behind the Lin family Prius. The Prius contained a GPS device that led us through some crazy back roads to avoid a detour but after about half an hour we arrived back in our hotel room and got some sleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:30 AM | Permalink