Personal

kiwi-flavoured future

July 1, 2017 by krisis

I first proposed that Crushing Krisis might be the longest-running blog in Philadelphia back in 2003 (at which point it almost certainly wasn’t), going further to verify that claim in 2008 (at which point it almost-surely was), and finally started owning up to it on CK’s anniversary in 2009.

Crushing Krisis’s claim to that auspicious title will finally come to an end later this summer, when it relocates from Philadelphia to New Zealand along with its author, moi, and supporting players E and EV6. Oh, and of course, OCD Godzilla will be coming too – I’ve already been assured of that. Repeatedly.

Yes, that New Zealand – the one that is “Down Under” along with Australia. The one where people refer to themselves as “kiwis.”

No, I am not joking.

There is much more story to tell along with the announcement of this major transition but I’m not prepared to unfurl it all at this very moment. Considering I don’t even especially like to travel (or, at least, to pack for travel) and have only left the country a handful of times in my life, this constitutes the biggest possible change to my personal status quo I’ve ever experienced, save for perhaps leaving my amazing job, having a baby, and leaving my previous amazing job for a potential unstable amazing start-up job.

All of that definitely helped me prepare for this and I do plan on talking about it here. A lot.

Suffice to say that my plan was not to stay at home fathering and blogging quite this long. As the possibility of our relocation loomed it became obvious that the present was not the time for a Philly-based job search for a long-term and executive position!

It also explains why I was a bit preoccupied with life in June and fell off of my ambitious (but, not impossible) posting schedule for the month.

Now, in addition to reading my talking about listening to music, writing music, reading comic books, and fatherhood, you’ll now be hearing about the process of becoming an American expatriate as well as us getting to know New Zealand, plus my utter glee at finally having an excuse to spell “colour,” “flavour,” and “favourite” with a “u.”

If you’ll excuse me, OCD Godzilla and I have to get back to a several-hundred line project plan to figure out how and when I’m going to ship an entire home recording studio and over 25,000 comic books halfway around the world.

In the meantime, please enjoy this photo of a kiwi bird:

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

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)

Here’s the dealio…

June 12, 2017 by krisis

A brief note for those of you who have been dutifully keeping up with my Most-Wanted omnibus blogging (and everything else – I see you, Drag Racers).

Your intrepid author sitting on his front step (which is called a “stoop” in his ancestral home of South Philly), still glistening from his Monday workout in his never-ending bucket list quest for visible abs (slowly but surely) and with a little bit of a neck beard (I ain’t getting pretty just to get sweaty).

First: you are wonderful. I’ve been receiving so much awesome feedback both here in comments and on the various message boards I inhabit. This writing has been really fun to do and I am very happy you are enjoying it.

Second: As you may have noticed, I am about two weeks behind on the omnibus posts. That’s not only because they take a long time to research and write, but because I had a one-two punch of (positive!) life stuff happen for over a week that keep me from writing.

Because I am incredibly stubborn, I am still posting the Most-Wanted posts on the days they were scheduled to hit. However, also in my stubbornness I haven’t been posting any posts that would be ahead of the omnibus posts or debuting new comic guides.

I’m going to put an end to that stubbornness and get back to making more timely posts. I’ll still be filling in the Most-Wanted posts as quickly as I can – and we are absolutely going all the way to #1 – but it might run into July. Keep your eye on the slider images in the sidebar for a quick view of what’s new – or, just head to the Most Wanted Omnibus tag or the “comics” category.

I only get to make this post because you are reading, which is a great situation to be in. As a reminder, CK’s hosting expenses are now supported by readers on Patreon. If you’ve enjoyed reading this in the past month as much as you have some of your traditional favorite web sites, comics, or magazines, consider chipping in $1 a month to keep CK up and running all year round.