I Like People

I often get frustrated with people, either because of their stupidity or my own lack of social skills, and declare that I want nothing to do with the human race. This past week, though, I've felt rather fond of our little species. Following is a list of people for whose existence I have been grateful this past week (if you're not on the list, I think you should ask yourself, to paraphrase Janet Jackson, "What have you done for Ben lately?"):

• FoxyJ, who has filled the role of Supermom superbly, both before, during, and after the move, despite the fatigue of being two months pregnant. When she and I do difficult things together, I'm reminded of what a good team we make.
  
• S-Boogie and Little Dude, who remain lovable as ever, despite how frustrating they can be sometimes.
  
• My sister L, who did the footwork of househunting for us so we could just get here and unload the truck into our nice new home.
• My mother-in-law, Earth Sign Mama, who flew out to Davis, helped us pack, helped FoxyJ drive across Nevada, and helped us unpack here before flying back home on Monday.
  
• The elders quorum in Davis, who helped us load a 16' truck in about 45 minutes.
• The relief society in Davis, who helped us get our apartment cleaned a good hour and a half ahead of schedule.
  
• My mom, two sisters, brother, brother-in-law, and my sister's boyfriend who I'd never met before, who all were ready to unload the truck as soon as we got here.
• Green Mormon Architect and family, who stopped by to help while we were unpacking on Saturday.
• Edgy and Dec (or is his blogonym now Flameman?), who would have helped, had I arrived two hours earlier, as I intended to.
• My brother-in-law L, who showed up Monday morning to mow our overgrown lawn.
  
• Tolkien Boy, Brozy, Samantha, and all the other friends and family we've seen and/or will see soon, reminding us of why we moved back to Utah.
  
• My boss, who said a couple weeks ago, "Hey, I heard you were looking for a full-time job. Do you want to work full-time for us?"

Life is good. I'm kind of exhausted now because we've been going nonstop for a couple weeks, but I'm happy. I spent a good portion of the drive here grinning, and I don't think it was just because I was in the moving truck, with not a screaming child in earshot.

My Gambling Addiction OR How I Lost All the Money in My Wallet

Last Friday night we stayed at a hotel in Winnemucca. I arrived first, so while I was waiting for Foxy and the kids, I wandered into the casino. I had a dollar in my wallet, and I've always been curious to try a slot machine, so I put the dollar into one. I pressed the button and... lo and behold, I was rewarded with two gold dollar tokens! I decided to be a smart gambler and quit while I was ahead. I had, after all, doubled the money in my wallet.

Then Saturday morning, as I was leaving, I was faced with the choice of turning in the two tokens for two dollars in real money, or trying to win something more worthy of turning in for real money. So I put the two tokens into a slot machine and... I lost.

After driving home from Winnemucca with no money in my wallet, I have learned my lesson: I will never gamble again. Unless, perhaps, I have two dollars in my wallet next time I'm in a hotel in Nevada. That way if I lose the first one I'll have a second to gamble with.

A New Year's Eve Toast to Earth Sign Mama

If I won $50,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, I would pay off my school loans. And then I wouldn't have any money left. But pretending for a moment that my school debt is not quite that horrendous, I would then buy a couple hundred CDs and several hundred comic books. Maybe I'd buy myself some superhero undies. If I were feeling really generous, I'd buy each of my family members a candy bar.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, is much more generous with the $50,000 she won on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Apart from the nice little chunk of cash she gave each of her children, she paid for a family vacation in San Diego this past weekend. She paid for the rooms in a very nice hotel, she paid for every meal, she bought plane tickets for those who needed them, she paid for San Diego Zoo tickets, she spoiled her grandchildren with overpriced memorabilia and treats that their parents would never buy them. All we had to do was show up. And then enjoy a weekend of having grandparents and aunt and uncles entertain our children.

It was fabulous--a great way to end the year.

What did your mother-in-law get you with her game show money?

1. The Measure of Friendship 2. Drivin' Movie 3. Anticipation

1. Today we drove through Tehachapi, the town where my friend Th. is from, and then we drove through Fresno, the town where my friend Green Mormon Architect is from. Tehachapi is a pretty little town, picturesque hills with trees sprinkled about; Fresno is not so pretty, dirty highways with homeless people sprinkled about. But Fresno did have a yummy Inn-N-Out, right at dinner time. So now I'm not sure which of my friends is better.

2. Please don't tell my mother-in-law that we let our children watch two movies on our ten-hour drive today, rather than insist they enjoy the world around them. Or that we didn't stop to look at the world's tallest thermometer or the groovy cheese factory or any of the other random roadside attractions that she would have stopped at, despite her children's protests.

3. Tonight we are sleeping in a motel in Sacramento before we go check into our apartment in Davis tomorrow. I feel like the children of Israel, waiting to enter the Promised Land. Or Abraham, camped at the base of Mount Moriah, waiting to offer up the contents of his checking account to his new landlord.

If you doubt that a month of wandering the desert with two small children will drive a person insane...

...just take a look at my new profile picture.

Dear USPS,

If you're going to totally ignore the dates I enter in the date field of the change of address form, how about you just don't put those fields on the form in the first place? Then maybe we wouldn't have problems like FoxyJ's final paycheck being sent to California a month before we get there.

Thanks,

Mr. Fob

$50 OBO - Two children, less than five years old

This morning at 5:30 after Little Dude climbed out of his playpen for the twenty-fourth time of the night, I got back in bed and mentally composed a bitterly humorous (if not very original) post about how I wanted to sell my children.

At 7:30 I gave up on the idea of going back to sleep and sat down at my computer to work. One of the first web pages I came across in the course of my work was a news article about a woman who was being tried for the murder of her daughter. Among the evidence against her were journal entries she'd written complaining about how parenting is stressful and sometimes she wished she could be free of her children. Now granted in this case there was also DNA evidence pinning her to the horrible crime, but I decided not to write that post I'd been planning anyway.

I will admit, though, that my children have been causing me a lot of stress over the past few days. For several months I've been looking forward to this month-long vacation, but now a week into it I'm ready to be in my own home. I'm enjoying spending the time with family and friends in Utah, and even last week I was thinking about how so long as I have my computer I feel like I'm at home (and I'm taking my computer everywhere I go because I need it for my job), but the problem is that the kids aren't so easily adaptable. They're stressed out by all this moving around and the interruption of their routine, and I don't deal well with stressed out children. I get grumpy and yell at them to stop screaming.

We spent last week with my sister, which was nice except for her Stairs of Death, and now we'll be at my mom's for three weeks. There's not quite as much space here, but I'm hoping we'll be able to get into some kind of routine and some sense of normalcy, before we rip them back out of that routine and take them to Grandma and Grandpa's in Vegas for a week and then our new home in Davis.

I'd like to have happy, calm children, but I'll settle for a good night's sleep and Little Dude staying in his bed.

An hour and ten escapes into tonight, I don't have much hope of that happening.

Changing Plans

According to the original plan, we would have been in Utah by now. We were supposed to be out of student family housing by the end of June so we made plans to load up our moving cubes on June 28th, then drive to Utah while all our stuff got shipped to Sacramento, where it'll be stored until we get there in August. The only problem is that we neglected to inform the moving cube people of this plan early enough, and as it turns out a lot of people move at the end of June. In a college town--imagine that.

So the earliest they could get us a moving cube was the first weekend of July, but sorry, they don't do deliveries on Saturdays, so nothing till Monday the 7th. So I begged and pleaded with the student family housing people, and they reluctantly agreed to let me pay rent for an extra week. Meanwhile, I've been stressing about moving on a Monday because it's hard to get people to help during the middle of a weekday and my job requires me to work four hours a day Monday thru Friday, which is kind of hard to do when I'm driving across Idaho.

Then today the moving cube people called and said Hey guess what we can deliver your cubes on Saturday how do you feel about that? So with two days' notice we're moving our moving day up by two days and, as it turns out, both Foxy and I are happy about it. We were at the point where we couldn't do much more packing until it was closer to zero hour anyway, and as much as we'll miss Seattle and our friends here, we're ready to get this move--at least the first part of it--out of the way.

Incidentally, if you live in the Seattle area and are looking for something to do Saturday afternoon, say between 3:30 and 6:30, shoot me an email and I'll see if I can find something for you.

The Scientific Method

This weekend the J-Fob family drove to Portland to visit our friends the Architect family and FoxyJ's sister, SkyeJ. We had a great visit with everyone and now the kids and I are home while Foxy is spending another night in Portland so she can get back in Jeopardy's contestant pool tomorrow morning. And on top of all the fun we had, the trip provided an opportunity for me to exercise the science muscles I've not used in the ten years or so since I've taken a science class. As you'll see, my grasp of scientific inquiry is astounding. Observe:

Question. It is a well-known fact that car travel with all four members of the J-Fob family is stressful, even nerve-wracking. Why is this?

Background research. I've noticed that long drives by myself are very peaceful, so obviously it is not driving itself that induces jaw-clenching anxiety. Just about every one of the long car trips I've taken with my wife and kids over the last few years, though, has led to headaches and vows never to do it again.

Hypothesis. It must be one of the other members of the J-Fob family--either FoxyJ, S-Boogie, or Little Dude--who is the cause of so much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Experiment. As a control, all four of us drove to Portland together. We left on Friday at 3:30pm and arrived at 9:40pm. For the math-challenged, that is more than six (6) hours for what should be a three (3)-hour drive. Most of it was spent listening to S-Boogie scream "GO FASTER!" or "MAKE LITTLE DUDE STOP SCREAMING!"

The next step in the experiment was to systematically remove each of the suspected troublemakers from a similar trip and compare results. As the first test, I drove home this afternoon with S-Boogie and Little Dude, leaving FoxyJ behind with her sister. We left at 1:35pm and arrived at 4:25PM. That's a little less than the expected three (3) hours, much less than the previous trip's six (6) hours. Most of this time was spent enjoying the scenery while S-Boogie played quietly by herself or napped, and Little Dude did the same.

At this point I decided that the results were conclusive enough that I didn't need to proceed with more testing.

Conclusion. It is clear that the member of the J-Fob family who makes car trips stressful is FoxyJ. In the future we will either leave her home or send her by plane, train, or post. It may seem cruel to thus exclude our wife and mother, but she is a logical woman and I'm sure will agree with the conclusiveness of this experiment, and that her sacrifice is for the greater good of the family. I am also fully confident that future trips will prove the repeatability of this experiment, as S-Boogie and Little Dude will continue to be the pleasantest of little angels without their mother in the car.

I hate to think where we'd be without science.

Jiggedy-Jig

One year and two days ago I moved to Seattle from Utah. Ten years and fifteen days ago I moved to Utah from Hawai'i. Twenty-seven years, ten months, and eight days ago I moved to Hawai'i from... well, that's debatable. And not the point of this post.

The point is that I have spent most of the last month visiting the two places I have lived for most of my mortal life, and yesterday I came back to Seattle, and it's nice to be home. I love the happy Mormonness of Utah and the laid-back alohaness of Hawai'i, but Seattle is my home now and it's a good place to live. I've felt at home here since the day I arrived in a moving truck with my brother last September, and I felt at home in Utah from the day I got off the plane in Salt Lake City ten years ago. I'm glad to have lived in just the right place for each period of my life, and it's nice that I can go back to visit my family and friends in former homes, and even nicer that I can then come back to my present home, lie down in my own bed, and get a good night's sleep.

Career Advice

If you can't handle listening to a baby screaming over the hum of a jet engine without complaining rudely within earshot of the baby's parents, you should probably not be a flight attendant.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

This morning we found these tentacly worms washed up on shore, and then when the tide rose they started swimming around. I have never in my life--and remember, I grew up in Hawaii so I spent quite a bit of time at the beach, and I have the skin cancer to prove it--seen anything like this.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Traveling Fobcave: Day One

So our thirteen-hour trip yesterday was actually a fifteen-hour trip. We had many potty and diaper changing stops, and at both lunch and dinner S-Boogie needed some time to run around a bit. Little Dude refused to nap until 6:30 in the evening, and then woke up a half-hour later. There was much screaming, but certainly not as much as there could have been. We listened to the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events and frankly, weren't impressed. What does everybody love about this series? Perhaps it was the multipart voice cast, but I thought the dialogue was horribly stilted.

Then we listened to I Need Your Love--Is That True? : How to Stop Seeking Love, Approval, and Appreciation and Start Finding Them Instead by Byron Katie, which we both really enjoyed. Katie speaks of loving what is--accepting reality as it is and not torturing ourselves about how it should be. She encourages people to question their thoughts rather than believe them, so instead of accepting your thought that your spouse should do or be such and such, asking yourself, "Is that true?" Usually it's not. To say that something should be other than what it is is to argue with reality, which is a battle you'll lose 100% of the time.

So I tried very hard to question my belief that my children should not be screaming at me from the backseat. This is going to take a bit more work, I think.

Home Again?

Well, here we are, back in Utah. Boy, that was a long trip. It feels like we've been in Washington for months!


Actually, I just took a quick trip down State Street to Costco, then up past the library and our old apartment, and I was surprised to find that Utah doesn't feel like home to me, despite the seven years I lived here. I guess that's a good thing. We'll see how at home I feel when I get back to Washington on Saturday.

On the Road Again

7am. Little Dude's internal clock works like, well, clockwork. Never mind the fact that he went to sleep three hours late last night.

8:30am. Pancakes provided by Theric. Mm. Maybe I'll let him live.

9am. Managed to get even more stuff in the trunk. Yay!

10am. On the road.

11:30am. I feel sorry for people who live in Sacramento. I'm not sure exactly why it exists.

12:30pm. Lunch at In-N-Out (a must before leaving California). Not only does this one accept credit cards, but the cashier is nice enough to tell us so before we waste money on ATM fees.

1:30pm. With California--and more specifically, the Bay area--behind us, I'm now able to breathe clearly through nose and mouth, and my eyes no longer feel like they're going to fall out. From allergies, anyway. Now they feel like they're going to fall out from driving.

2pm. Reno. See note on Sacramento above.

3pm. I actually kind of like driving through Nevada. It's certainly not a pretty drive--nothing like the drive from Seattle to Berkeley--but it's kind of peaceful and relaxing to drive really fast with long spaces between little dots of civilization. Also, this is somewhat of a familiar drive to me, so I felt kind of at home.

3:30pm. The rest stop before Winnemucca. We've been here before, we think, but it's hard to say along this stretch of road. It's really windy. I'm not sure what exactly I had to say about this stop, but I remember I wanted to say something. Hm. The toilets have no liftable seats, which means that you get to sit on the rim where everyone splashes. S-Boogie definitely got a paper seat cover here.

6pm. Elko. The motel dude charges me even though Orbitz already did, but later on he gives me a refund when I convince him to look it up. The room is clean and big and there's a nice dark spot to put LD's playpen/crib away from the rest of us.

7pm. Dinner at La Fiesta. Deep-fried ice cream. Yum.

9pm. Still loving Foxy's laptop. If I had one of my own I'd never have to go home.

California

I'm allergic to it. Other than that, though, it's a nice place.

Fobbing the Thteedcave

Yesterday was uneventful, mostly. Spent eight and a half hours in the car, making frequent stops to go potty and run around. Ate lunch at McD's in Weed. Murdered Theric.

True to their generation, S-Boogie and the Big O spend all their time talking with each other on the phone, despite the fact that they're in the same room. Little Dude, meanwhile, is ravaging the Thteed bookcase.

Up next: lunch.

The Advantage of Having a Mirror on the Ceiling

I woke up this morning and saw an incredibly attractive man in my bed.

Fobbing Oregon

9am. How many bags do you suppose we can stuff into a Chevy Cavalier and still have room for four people?

1pm. Mems how I mentioned a couple weeks back that I only had one more paper due this quarter? Does it surprise anyone that I waited until this morning, when I'm supposed to be getting ready for a two-week road trip, to actually write the darn thing?

2pm. On the road.

2:15pm. First forgotten item: the sling. Which means I get to carry Little Dude in my arms for the next two weeks, and he will not be falling asleep while we're out and about.

5pm. Portland. Wow. I'm in love. And traffic's not even too bad, considering we're passing through at 5pm on a weekday. Going the other way is much worse; I guess everyone who works in Portland lives in Vancouver.

6pm. Salem's okay, I guess. At least we made it through without being tried for witchcraft.

6:30pm. Surely the next town will have a Shari's. Every other town before now had one.

7pm. Okay, we'll settle for Denny's. Thank goodness they put us in the back corner, where five hours of sitting in the car can work its way out of the three-year-old without disturbing other customers too much.

8pm. Back on the road.

9:30pm. I'm digging the America's Best Value Inn in Roseburg. Cheap, clean, big room, internet connection. I'm also digging FoxyJ's new laptop, which allows us to take advantage of said internet connection. I might be digging the big mirror on the ceiling over the bed if I weren't, um, traveling with two small children.

11pm. Who, by the way, won't go to sleep. I think Roseburg is where my brother was born, but I haven't seen any umbilical cords or placentas to support the theory.