Archives for 2017

feeling heated

June 20, 2017 by krisis

I’ve always been constitutionally incapable of dealing with heat.

My mother was the opposite. You’ve never met anyone more eager to bake in the sun on a sandy beach than this woman. She would wake me up before 7am when we were vacationing at the Jersey shore to let me know she was headed down to the beach, already equipped with her chair and her book.

(I would spent the day reading in the cool confines of the hotel room, punctuated by occasional trips to the pool.)

Memories of being hot as a child are on my brain because our central air conditioning is mysteriously on the fritz at the moment. It turns on and works mightily for anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes, and then its double-breaker in the basement trips with an audible CLACK. The first few times it happened I simply reset the breaker, but breakers trip for a reason and continually flouting that reason with manual intervention seemed unwise.

We’ve kept EV6 and I entertained and cool throughout this week with a combination of car trips, mall walking, and cold showers. It’s the nights that are getting to me. Like a video game character who cannot recover hit points while he’s poisoned, I don’t actually seem to derive any sort of restorative qualities from sleep when I’m feeling too hot. We are now on day five (the repairman is due tomorrow) and I am starting to feel delirious.

It reminds me of childhood nights spent at my paternal grandmother’s house, which was equipped with fans and a single air conditioner suspended above the kitchen door which I saw turned on only once in my life. On those hot nights I would sprawl in the middle of a couch or bed, arms outstretched to find the hidden cool spot on the top sheet or beneath a pillow as I counted the slow seconds until morning. [Read more…] about feeling heated

Song of the Day: “Love Me Down” by Jason Derulo

June 19, 2017 by krisis

It’s often the case in my insular little world of no TV or radio that I’m aware of an artist for years before I hear a single note of their music.

That was the case for Jason Derulo. I knew he was an R&B singer and a good dancer, but hadn’t heard a single song of his before the band tackled “Want To Want Me” when it exploded as a song of the summer in 2015. I don’t know what I was expecting from him, but it wasn’t the sparse, slightly campy, almost retro vibe of that tune.

(We discovered it medleys perfectly with Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”as we tinkered with the arrangement to save me from singing the entire thing in falsetto.)

I was enamored enough to check out the entire Everything is 4 LP from which the song was plucked. I liked a lot of the LP and its breezy, synth-filled, 80s R&B vibe, but no song hit me as squarely as “Love Me Down.”

Comic Book Review: Dark Days – The Forge #1 by Snyder, Tynion, Kubert, Romita, & Lee

June 15, 2017 by krisis

This week DC launches a major event that promises to be the biggest story of the Rebirth era to date. What are the mysteries of Dark Knights: Metal, and is its first chapter Dark Days – The Forge at all accessible to readers not well-versed in DC’s history?

Dark Days – The Forge #1 (digital)

Written by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV. Line art by Andy Kubert with Danny Miki, John Romita Jr. with Klaus Janson, and Jim Lee with Scott Williams. Color art by Alex Sinclair and Jeremiah Skipper. Letters by Steve Wands

DC Comics has always delivered better mysteries than Marvel.

Maybe it’s down to their “Detective Comics” namesake, or maybe it’s because none of Marvel’s major characters are as dedicated to unravelling secrets as Batman, but DC Events always seem more mysterious to me than their Marvel counterparts.

The Forge is no exception. I went into this quite suspicious that the story would work for me as a minor DC fan. I enjoyed it, despite there being a few elements that went over my head.

I think an even newer reader might actually fare better than me, because a lot of my confusion came from knowing just tidbits of some of the stories and being confused about what relied on history and what was introduced. To fresh eyes, this will all have the ring of a story that’s been in motion for years.

The central thrust of this issue is that Batman has been exploring a worldwide mystery, possibly spurred on by a revelation Court of Owls. It’s not about a villain or an imminent threat to the Earth, but it’s the sort of ball of yarn he cannot help but unravel. Per his usual M.O., Batman has been keeping other heroes in the dark, bringing them in only as-needed while using his vast resources both as Bruce Wayne and Batman to pursue an answer.

He isn’t the only one in the middle of an investigation. Hawkman recounts an unending life of reincarnation as he ponders the mysteries of the Nth Metal. And, Hal Jordan is assigned by one of the Guardians of the Universe to investigate an Earthbound mystery – and it’s no coincidence that the mystery is deep below Gotham City. [Read more…] about Comic Book Review: Dark Days – The Forge #1 by Snyder, Tynion, Kubert, Romita, & Lee

work duration vs. work effort, and walking the (productivity) plank

June 14, 2017 by krisis

Today, my friend and former colleague Stephanie wrote a great, brief article on productivity, procrastination, and burnout for SuperYesMore entitled “The Law of Reversed Effort.”

I tend to approach all tasks in life exactly as Stephanie describes the simple act of walking across a plank of wood on the ground.

[S]ay I put a long sturdy plank of wood on the ground in front of you and asked you to walk across it. You’d tell me “no problem” as you scurried along it. It’s such a simple task.

Let’s say I need 5 hours to accomplish something in our house. Anything. Blog writing. Exercising. Room cleaning.

I look at that personal work effort like it’s a plank of wood I have to step across. If the board is five times the length of my stride, I need to take five steps. If the work I want to do is 5 hours worth of work effort because that’s how fast I can type, exercise, or clean, I find 5 hours over the span of my week where I can accomplish said thing.

I starting thinking about the thing as already being completed if not for the formality of spending the actual 5 hours of work effort.

That’s not always the case, because work effort does not always equal work duration.

In a professional project management sense, that’s tends to result from a constraint on the schedule of the resource which puts in the effort. If you only have access to the designer on your project for an hour each day, it will take 5 days to do 5 hours of work. The work effort is 5 hours, but the work duration is 5 days.

However, let’s say your designer is available all day, every day. That 5 hours of work can be done in the next 5 hours starting at this very second, right? [Read more…] about work duration vs. work effort, and walking the (productivity) plank

she can read (much to my amazement)

June 13, 2017 by krisis

Much to my amazement, our nearly 4-year-old seems to have quite suddenly gotten the hang of reading.

Actual reading. Not just spitting back memorized texted in a simulacrum of reading. I still remember the first time I witnessed that, because it was the day we told all our friends we were pregnant. It was our friend M’s daughter’s third birthday, and she “read” me an entire book from front to back. I was in total shock that she could read so many words and so quickly, until her father pointed out that she had simply memorized the entire thing.

Our copy of Jumanji came with a CD of the audiobook narrated by Robin Williams. I put off playing it for EV6 as long as I could but finally the asking became more constant. I let her follow along with the book on the couch while I cried silently in the kitchen.

EV6 has always been good at memorization. It started one night when she was still impossibly small when she spat back the final page of Nightsong at me during her bedtime reading.

That was just the beginning. Since then I’ve heard this girl recite dozens of her books back at us – including a word-for-word rendition of Jumanji, and that is not a short children’s book.

Her current favorite thing to memorize is comic books, which I suppose must be slightly easier to do since you can focus on dialog balloons as if you are learning the script of a play. She has the entirety of the first 20 issues of Lumberjanes committed to memory. Sometimes she’s got it down after hearing it only two or three times, it’s amazing.

It’s amazing, and it keeps her nose buried in books all day every day, but it’s not reading.

I haven’t been too fussed with pushing reading skills on her while I’ve been staying at home. That’s in part because I learned to read so late, and partly because I feel like America’s school industrial process is overly quick to push advanced reading and math skills on kindergartners who aren’t always developmentally ready for them.

Despite that, I also haven’t ignored the skills. We’re always sounding out the words we encounter during the day and having little spelling bees on the refrigerator. I’s exclusively directed play and that’s fine. She’s three. I don’t expect her to read.

Or, didn’t expect her to read, because that’s what she’s been doing for the last week. [Read more…] about she can read (much to my amazement)