Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Wednesday, September 28, 2005 This is a corner of the end table in our living room:  This is my son's head:  You can probably imagine what happens when one, in its precarious position atop two vertical feet of wobbling toddler, abruptly topples from its lofty position and comes into sharp contact with the other. I don't have any pictures of that. Because instead of falling and clipping his skull on the corner shown above, he fell and clipped his skull on this one:  That's the corner with the rubber cushion on it. It's actually self-adhesive, but the adhesive only works if you don't have a curious baby who insists on taking apart everything he can reach. And if your toddler isn't one of those, you probably don't need the cushion anyway. Hence the yard of packing tape holding it in place. The tape will probably also strip off a fair volume of the varnish under it when we decide to take it off. But since there's a good chance that we won't decide it's safe to leave the coffee table unguarded until he's seventeen or so, we have plenty of time to worry about that later. And for the time being, it made the difference between M. Small crying for twenty seconds over his rubber-cushioned head-bump, and whatever would have happened if that sharp wooden corner had connected with his temple, which frankly I don't care to think about too much. I would have gotten you a picture of the scene after what actually happened, but by the time I got back with the camera he had forgotten all about it and was busy trying to remove the grate from the heating vent. So if you have a toddler and pointy wooden furniture, hie thee to the baby store and get yourself some of these little cushions, if you haven't already. And some packing tape, too. Trust me, it's a big deal. How big?  The childproofing isn't so much an accomplishment as an ongoing process. This week we got some stuff that Trash ordered over the Internet. Power-strip protectors, little plastic shells you use to wind up the venetian blind cords, and a switch lock to keep him from turning on the garbage disposal. And for everything we'll take down in a few years, there'll be something else going into place. Soon it'll be V-chips and Internet filters, then locks on the liquor cabinet and an alarm system for his bedroom windows. First, of course, we'll have to get a liquor cabinet. And probably also some more liquor. It was a year ago last Thursday that we found out that he was going to be joining our family. Which of course means that his birthday's coming up in just a couple of weeks. Don't forget to send him a birthday e-mail: m.tinygiant@gmail.com. Thanks to everyone who's already sent thoughtful and kind messages, especially the former Treasury Secretary of Sudan. With all that's going on in your life right now, I had no idea you cared. posted by M. Giant 10:05 PM 13 comments 13 Comments:Where did you get the thingys for the blind cords? I could totally use those - to keep the cats from chewing them to pieces.
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SOOOO BIIIGGGG!
By I clocked my forehead on the non-rubberized corner of the coffee table when I was M.Small's age. I have a neat dent in my forehead, but I turned out okay.
By My sister ran into a coffee table when she was three and has a cool scar across her eyebrow. It's not puckered or anything, there's just a line of no hair.
By Love the "so big" picture - thanks for that!
By Oh my god. Thanks for giving me something new to worry about. It's a good thing your little guy's so unbelievably cute, or else I'd be angry right now. Heh.
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Oh gosh, but he's cuteness personified! He and my Lucas (17 months) would have a blast tearing the house apart together!
By What a wonderful invention it is, this thing we call the Internet!
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I love the So Big! picture. And I'm glad your story had a happy ending, because that first picture freaked me out. ("Oh, no! He hit his head on the corner and cut it, I know it! Dammit, don't they know they're supposed to put a rubber cushion on every sharp corner in the house?")
By My head connected with the corner of a table when I was three (unprotected corner, even) and after a few stitches, I turned out ok. Well, maybe that's a bad example..... ;-)
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I wanted to thank you for the pic of m small. He is getting so big. And cute. I am always looking for new pic. And i read every thing you put in here too
By It is impossible that he is so big! I can't believe he will be a year old - it seems only yesterday when he decided he couldn't wait to come live with you guys and showed up so early. Congrats on the happy family.
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Seriously? We've got those and when I saw the picture with all the tape, I almost woke the little fella with my laughing since ours have the very same tape holding them in place! Self-adhesive, my ass! They have worked wonders though, when they weren't pried off and immediately stuck into his mouth.
By Saturday, September 24, 2005 When M. Small was only a couple of months old -- and hence M. Tiny -- we started playing this game with him called "How Big Is M. Tiny?" In case you're not yet familiar with this soon-to-be Olympic event, the way it works is you say, "How big is M. Tiny?" And then you raise your hands way above your head and go "Sooooo big!" Well, we didn't actually play it with him so much as play it in front of him. He didn't exactly have the hang of it for quite a while. Although he did get irritated with anybody else in the room who didn't respond properly. He would just stare at any noncompliant guests until they got with the program. It was a spectator thing for him all the way. Until a few weeks ago, when he realized he can participate. He doesn't actually pronounce "Soooo big!" or indeed anything at all, but wherever he is, if someone asks him, "How big is M. Small?" his little hands go shooting straight up in the air. Cutest thing ever. So we figured it was time to teach him something new. This time, we invented our own game, one that we call, "Where's Your Nose?" The rules of this one are a little more complicated. You ask M. Small where his nose is, and then wait for him to point to his nose. The extra challenge lies in avoiding the common pitfall of pointing at someone else's nose. Or, when he was first mastering the game, at his mouth. But this was only a couple of weeks ago. Since then, he's pretty much mastered "Where's Your Nose?" even now that we've added the additional degree of difficulty of not pointing at his nose for him or pointing at our own. Eight months to learn "How Big Is M. Small?" Two weeks to learn "Where's Your Nose?" Obviously we started with the wrong game. posted by M. Giant 9:51 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:We have a similar game that Baby G's dad taught her: "How much do we love Mommy? THIIIIS MUCH!" I enjoy it, for obvious reasons - I am the mommy. Heh.
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When we were trying to teach Baby C to play "So Big," we would grab her hands and hold them in the air for the "so big!" part. Then one day, I said, "How big is [Baby C]?" and she reached over and grabbed my hands, and lifted them up.
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Apparently, it takes children about 14 years to learn the "dad, where's your wallet so I can rob you clean"-game.
By We're trying to teach our 1 year old "How old is Mo?" We're hoping that she holds up one finger (no, not that one). But she just holds up her arms and says "Oh Biiiig". She'll be 2 in January so I think I'll just start working on "two" with her!
By When you teach him to answer "How old are you?" teach it to him in Spanish. A little Anglo kid saying "uno" or "dos" is beyond adorable.
By Thursday, September 22, 2005 Bedtime Stories Last night, M. Small went to sleep quite a bit earlier than normal. Before his last bottle of the night, in fact, which lately has been around 9:00 or 9:30. We let him sleep for an hour and a half, and then I made up his bottle and took him out of his crib at around 10:15 to feed it to him. It was pretty much the normal feeding routine, except that it was an hour later in the evening, I was doing it instead of Trash, and I was waking him up to feed him instead of feeding him to put him to sleep. He put away eight ounces and change without ever opening his eyes. I rocked him for a bit to lull him the rest of the way back to sleep, stood up, stepped over to his crib, and bent down to put him in it. As soon as his back touched the mattress, it arched up and he made a sound like somebody was poking him with very long, hot, electrified needles. I picked him back up and snuggled him against me as I stood there at the crib rail. He went back to sleep almost immediately. I swayed from side to side for good measure for a few minutes, his head on my shoulder. And then I put him in bed again, and his imaginary torture started all over. Repeat half a dozen times. This has happened several nights in the past few weeks. Our perfect, ideal, angel child, who was sleeping through the night at four months, has apparently decided that that's for babies. If he's going to sleep, he wants to be held while he's doing it. For a while, the only way to get him into his crib was to make sure he was well and truly asleep before putting him there; essentially, fooling him into lying down. And even then, just putting him down would often wake him up again, and begin the cycle anew. It must seem strange to him; he never goes to sleep in his crib, but he's always waking up there. Kind of like being a drunk with a really determined enabler. We're pretty sure that he used to wake up in the middle of the night, and just lay there watching his mobile in the glow from the nightlight until he fell asleep again thirty seconds or two minutes or five hours later, because what else was he going to do? But now, he's realized that we exist even when we're not there in the room with him. So how to get us there? Send up a storm of howling, naturally. I don't know how many nights Trash and I went down, trying to soothe him into a state where he would go into his crib again, only to have him sit up crying every time until Trash gave up and slept on the sofa with M. Small snuggled in just above the space between her body and the back of the couch. So the kid actually got plenty of sleep. The wife? Not so much. This was at its worst the week before we went camping, and the week immediately after. Not least of all because it kept happening at different times: at midnight, at one, at two, at four, at five. And the night after that one was even worse. The worst of that is over (for now, at least), but his schedule is shifting so that he takes longer naps during the day and falls asleep earlier at night. I wasn't about to let his 8:45 bedtime turn into just a ninety-minute nap. Last night, at 10:45, after trying over and over again for about twenty minutes to get him back to sleep, I knew what I had to do. It was one of Trash's rare nights off from childcare, otherwise I would have called her in to put him to sleep for me. And even then she might have ended up doing the same thing I did, which was to carry the mostly-sleeping kid out to the couch and let him burrow in. We have a pretty comfy sofa. There's a nice pillow from our bed on one end of it, because we got tired of carrying it up and down the stairs and just left it there. There are sheets and blankets, and if there's anything more snuggly than almost thirty pounds of fleece-clad deadweight drooling onto your shirt, I'd like to know what it is. All those nights I tried to convince Trash to go upstairs and sleep in our bed while I took a turn at couch duty, I wasn't being entirely selfless. As I lay there, and as he made sleepy and sporadic attempts to wiggle out of my arms, I thought of how there have times when I've looked forward to when he's older. When he can either sleep through the night reliably or entertain himself when he doesn't. When he's old enough to talk to us, and feed himself, and not need his diaper changed every few hours, and not have someone in the room with him almost every minute he's awake, and be able to leave the house for an afternoon without a big duffel bag full of supplies. And then I thought about how when he's that old, the days of me lying on the couch while he sleeps on top of me will be over. Done. Gone. And then I wasn't in such a hurry for him to get older any more. Something tells me it's not really up to me, though. * * * As if to drive that very fact home, his first birthday is just a few weeks away. Feel free to send him a birthday message at m.tinygiant@gmail.com. And keep it clean, please. I don't want any language he doesn't hear at home. * * * Today's best search phrase: "Seinfeld Puddy have to listen how you're smarter work everyone." Smarter than…who, again? posted by M. Giant 10:12 PM 10 comments 10 Comments:At first, I was thinking acid reflux since you'd just fed him. But my seven-month-old went thru that (and I'm well versed in the couch sleeping position) very early on and continued with it sporadically until we just put her in our bed. So we co-slept until she was about 3 months (something I SWORE I'd never do). She started it again a few weeks ago, and it turned out to be an ear infection - the pressure on her ears was worse when we laid her down. I don't really have a point, other than I feel (felt) your pain.
By One of my most favorite things to do when my kids were babies was to have them sleep on my chest while they napped. Now that they're three and five it's just a distant memory but one that I'll always treasure. Enjoy every minute. Goodness knows they grow up fast.
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Okay, it's hard to come up with a tactful way to put this, and I'm reasonably sure it's something you've probably heard, and you're careful to avoid this, and even if you hadn't heard it wouldn't matter anyway, but Just In Case I should bring it up:
By This makes me laugh. Apparently, I did exactly this for ages as a baby, driving my mother insane. (I think she planned on being a stay at home mom until I started this. Then she got a job teaching at a technical college! No crying babies there.) Apparently, I use to start to cry as soon as I was lifted down over the edge of the crib. I was fine until I entered the Evil Sphere of Influence, or something. No advice, sorry. Just saying you don't have the only baby who develops a completely random aversion to sleeping in the crib. Hopefully it passes soon.
By I was looking at M. Small's wish list link on the right, and it gave me an idea. Since he seems to like Baby Einstein so much, maybe you could have a tape start in his room and he might fall asleep watching it. Not a perfect solution, but you wouldn't have to stay up as long with him. Just an idea.
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Isn't there a web site that shows important events and famous births that happen on your birthday? M. Small might like to have that e-mailed to him so he can read it when he grows up.
By Have you tried having him listen to the soothing sounds of Britney Spears?
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Don't worry about it. We've read that kids go through rough spots when they are working on developmental jumps. m.small is probably working on either vocabulary or grammer (making two or three word sentences). Just imagine how hard it must be to learn English... and English with no swear words!
By I enjoyed your post so much, because when I'm on the floor sleeping with little D, I have those exact same thoughts. About once a week he decides to scream from 10-11pm and will only calm down with me laying on the floor with him. (This is a compromise so I can fall asleep--sort of--instead of sitting in the rocking chair). We play the Innocence Mission lullabies and when What a Wonderful World comes on (goofy, I know) I think about how much I love having him fall asleep by me and how quickly he's growing up. It makes the screaming part bearable.
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Oh, the things we parents do for our babies!
By Monday, September 19, 2005 Fourteen years ago last week, George H. W. Bush was still a popular president. Babies were born that week who are now in high school. And I got married. People are always amazed when I tell them how long I've been married. Even when I had only been married a couple of years, people were amazed. Part of that is context, of course, because none of the other kids in my social studies class were married at all. I'm kidding. We didn't get married all that young. But in this day and age, in the big city, it's still unusual to have been married this long without being five or ten years older than we are. Generally speaking, people either tend to wait until their thirties or forties, or they're just living on borrowed time until one of them gets carried off by a varmint. But we've gotten the best of all worlds. We got married fairly young by modern urban standards, so we have that much more time together. And we're in it for the duration, which means even more time together. Now we've got this wonderful, beautiful child in our family, who came along at the right time, without some rush to make an addition before the two of us got to know each other (we knew each other just fine when the rush came, thank God). Our marriage has outlived one of our cats, who lived a long life herself. We've been married for two-fifths of our lives. I can't imagine not being married, and don't especially care to. The day after our tenth anniversary -- September 15, 2001, in case you're wondering -- Trash and I were at a wedding. Someone with a video camera asked how long we'd been married, and when we told him, he asked what our secret was. I made some stupid wisecrack, which I've regretted ever since. What I should have said is that the secret to a long, happy marriage is to marry the ideal woman. Do that and everything else falls into place. Happy anniversary, Trash. I'd marry you again, especially if I also got to keep the last fourteen years. posted by M. Giant 9:35 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:I would totally marry your wife too- she's got to be one of the most charming people I've ever met socially in Mpls. Happy Anniversary!
By You are so sweet. Happy Anniversary.
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Must be a great day for anniversaries: that was my parents wedding day (together for 28 years now) as well as my in-laws anniversary (40 years together?)
By Very sweet...Congratulations!!
By Well, I can't begin to even be aware of the number of MY stupid wisecracks I've regretted in the past 14 years. But I'm really happy that every now and then, I get lucky and somehow let you guys know how much I love and appreciate you both. You're still my favorite old married couple.
By Thursday, September 15, 2005 Happy Camper Six years ago this month, Trash and I were sleeping in a tent in Custer National Park, somewhere in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Also with us were another couple, Kraftmatik and the Krank. This was our two-week, multi-state road trip, and it was among the first of many nights that we would all be sleeping under the same nylon dome. Late this particular night, the peaceful atmosphere was abruptly rent asunder by a sound that transfixed us like a bolt of solidified nitrogen through our collective spleens. To call it a cry or a scream is to elevate cries and screams to unheard-of levels. It was the long, keening wail of some unholy beast of the mountains either meeting some horrid end, or causing some other creature to meet its, freeing it up to come after us next. I don't remember which of us slept through it and which of us lay awake, staring wide-eyed at the tent ceiling until dawn broke. I do remember that this was the summer that The Blair Witch Project came out, and jokes about being ill-fated campers weren't yet completely funny. All I remember is that that sound defied description. It was the sound of the curtain of the world being drawn back, so that the legion demons who teem behind it could call out a howdy. We never did find out what that sound was, or what made it. Until this past weekend, when Trash and I took M. Small camping in Wisconsin. It was the sound of an eleven-month-old boy on his first camping trip. Several miles down the road, going by the volume. It's probably just as well that we didn't go camping on Labor Day weekend proper. That's one of the busiest camping weekends of the summer. And it's even more just as well that we didn't go to the spot in Custer National Park where we normally camp, which is a little grouping of four or five sites at an intimate little spot where the mountain pass is a little wider than the road. Because with M. Small making those noises at 9:00 p.m., and at 10:00 p.m., and 11:00 p.m., in a crowded campground, with the next tent only a few dozen yards away, we wouldn't have been very popular. This is not to say that he didn't enjoy himself, because he did. He loved being outside for hours at a time. He loved pointing at the trees that towered around our campsite. He loved riding in the stroller through the campground, and in the baby backpack I strapped on for the first time (an experience that constituted reason number 843 why I will never be on The Amazing Race). He loved the Bambino Gazebo we stuck him in, and not just because it was hip-deep in toys. He also loved being put in the portable crib inside the tent at bedtime. We could tell because he screamed his joy at passing airplanes. Even though there weren't any. Trash and I took turns going into the tent to try to calm him down. Lately, he hasn't been sleeping through the night, and one thing that we've tried is just sitting in view of him so he knows we're there, but not picking him up. We tried something along these lines while camping, but for some reason the sight of one of us sitting on the tent floor next to him was just about the funniest damn thing ever. Until we tried the other thing we've been doing to try to get him to sleep, which is to lie down and snuggle. Which, in the tent, was even funnier. Fortunately, this was the first night, and by the second night, a great deal of the novelty had worn off. The second night, most of his wakefulness occurred after we'd already gone to bed. The first night was preferable. I've heard that decades ago, some parents used an expedient to get their kids to sleep that we in the modern era might find a bit extreme: They stuck their kids' heads in the gas oven for a few minutes. I, of course, would never, ever do that. But it's hard, late at night, to listen to a screaming kid while looking at the column of smoke rising from the campfire and not harbor a fleeting, evil thought or two. Today's best search phrase: "Velcro is faster 50 lbs." With fifty pounds of Velcro on you, I don't see how you could be faster than anything. Especially if you're on carpet. posted by M. Giant 10:03 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Putting the tot's head in the oven is a little extreme. But, the occasional dose of children's Nyquil never hurt anyone ;)
By A little kid benedryl doesn't hurt either...and think of all the night time allergic reactions you're warding off.
By Monday, September 12, 2005 Baby Steps M. Small is walking. Not as I write this, of course. As I write this, he's asleep (although given how fragile that state has been for him lately, I probably shouldn't jinx it). He's taken his first "steps" over the past month or so, if by "steps" you mean "random, directionless shuffling, followed almost immediately by falling down." He's not yet to the point where he can walk for the amount of time it took me to write this paragraph. And it wasn't that diaper-commercial moment I've always pictured, where one parent coaxes a solo stroll from the safe arms of the other. He's too independent for that. Last night he traversed the width of the living room, from love seat to sofa, without having to grab onto anything or anyone, and without ever taking an unplanned sit-down. Once he finished his Lindbergh-like journey, he grabbed the sofa cushion, buried his face in it, and screamed in exhilaration at a frequency that even the cats could barely hear. Of course, the camcorder batteries were dead. I'm the worst father since those things were invented. He's been working on this for a good chunk of his life. We encouraged him as he learned to pull himself up to a standing position using his Intellitainer or the end table or whatever, and then as he learned to locomote around using furniture as a railing, and then to stand unaided (first unsteadily, and then surefootedly enough to applaud himself and wave at us as he did so). As the process went on, so to did the childproofing. I anchored the bookcases to the walls a couple of months ago, using bolts like the ones the Navy uses to keep fighter planes from blowing off the flight decks of aircraft carriers. We moved the breakable stuff from the aforementioned end table to higher ground a couple of weeks ago--or, more accurately, I moved them, and then Trash rearranged them so they didn't look like ass. We stuck little plastic stoppers into the unoccupied electrical outlets (what few there are, in a 1950-built house) The cabinet doors that wouldn't accept a handle lock, we tied shut with yarn and shoelaces. We jammed baby gates into every living room entry point two days ago, at the top of the basement stairs, and across the alcove where a not-terribly-well-balanced table, a six-foot vertical CD rack, and a floor lamp reside (any one of those things could topple and crush him with little enough effort on his part, but we know that left his own devices, he'd be able to create a domino effect that would end with him in the basement seconds later). So we're pretty well M. Small-proofed. Just in time, too, looks like. Walking is a major milestone in any child's life. Because that's when the falling begins in earnest. And that's not the only thing. Baby's first hands-free promenade across the room initiates the lifelong parental balancing act between protection and freedom. You know he's not going to get any better at walking if you don't let him buckle and land on his diaper-padded butt a time or fifty. But how much will he learn from toppling full-length and banging the back of his head on the living room rug so his cerebellum sloshes around like a raw egg in its shell? Well, among other things, he learned from having ice pressed to his noggin that that stuff is cold. Again. We've been looking forward to this development for a while for reasons aside from the usual ones. Turtle, thanks to her awful table manners, has become the fattest of our three cats at barely a year of age. And it's not like we can put her on a diet, because Strat needs to have food accessible to him at all times thanks to his diabetes. However, if the cats can be said to belong to individual human members of the family, then Strat is mine, Phantom is Trash's, and Turtle is M. Small's. This appears to be both by her choice and by his enthusiastic agreement. He's been dangling sparkly cat toys at her from his Intellitainer seat since he was six months old, and she patietly bears his clumsy grabbings and rubbings of her and comes back for more. So we're hoping that given this powerful bond that's been forged between them since either of them was more than three months old, he'll soon be chasing her around. She'll trim down to a healthier weight, and he'll be too busy pursuing her to spend any time figuring out how to hide in the dishwasher. Today's best search phrase: "Willy is a cheater and enjoys eating crap." And he knows people who are trying to Googlebomb him, too. posted by M. Giant 9:30 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Oh. the first steps. My sister just adopted an 11 month old girl. She was swaddled in the baby home (foreign adoption) so her legs aren't as strong. She is standing but you have to put her in the standing postion and straigten out her feet. She is at the just learning to sit up by herself stage. My sister doesn't mind. A little extra time to baby proof the house
By Just in case you haven't already done so, remember to remove low tables with squared corners from your living room, including coffee tables and end tables. Those things are a leading cause of major head injuries among todders. Rounded corners will still hurt, but they won't cause the same severity of injury.
By Tuesday, September 06, 2005 Fun and Games: Mutually Exclusive? One thing I don't miss about my early days of PC gaming is that moment when the install splash screen comes up and there's that long, suspenseful moment when you wait to see if the game you're hoping to enjoy will even work on your machine. I don't miss it because it still happens. The weekend before last, Zen Viking was in town and he came over on Saturday to play computer games. We didn't have a game picked out or anything; we just figured that with the teetering stack of unopened game boxes and jewel cases in my study, we'd probably be able to find something to divert us for a few hours. We bought Myst IV Revelation months ago, as soon as it came out. I tried to install it back in May, but quickly discovered that I had about a third of the hard drive space and half the processing speed it calls for. So that was out of the question. But that was okay, since Myst games tend to take weeks rather than one Saturday. We put it aside and dug into our stash of games made by the PC gaming equivalent of CheapAss Games. We shuffled through them and, after some discussion, settled on The Crystal Key. I went into the study to install it while they played with M. Small. I watched the progress bar reach 26%, then 42%, then stop. The entire system froze, in fact. I tried again. Same result. We picked another game. Dark Fall, I think. My computer didn't even read the disk on this one. Same with Traitor's Gate. Obviously there was some problem with my computer. I brought down a spare CPU; hooked it up to my monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers; and tried to load The Crystal Key. Which froze the system with the progress bar at 42%. The other games I tried behaved similarly. I went back upstairs and unhooked Trash's computer, the best, most powerful box in the house, from its peripherals and hauled it downstairs. I hooked it up in my study. The best, most powerful box in the house could not resist the system-freezing properties of The Crystal Key. At 42%, no less. Again, the other games failed to install properly. We tried a different game, which we knew wouldn't be a problem because it was relatively dated. The hurdle it threw up--the fact that the system didn't have Quicktime 4.0 installed--seemed surmountable. We just waited twenty minutes while it uninstalled Quicktime 6.0 and installed Quicktime 4.0 in its place. And then it didn't work anyway. The next game we tried didn't last long. Once it gave us a message saying it required Quicktime 2.0, it was done as far as we were concerned. We resigned ourselves, then, to playing Myst IV Revelations, knowing we wouldn't make much of a dent in it given what was now left of our afternoon. I put the install disk into Trash's drive, saw that the process was going to take a good thirty minutes, and went to hang out with everybody else in the living room. Thirty-one minutes later, the game refused to work. The launch screen would come up, but if you clicked on Play it would just disappear. We installed again. Same deal. We tried swapping the disks between the two CD drives. No joy. No help in the ReadMe file either (which, as always, might as well have been called the BiteMe file). We went online (after plugging in the Ethernet cable, of course, because I hadn't doen that when I hooked up everything else) and found the source of the problem. Myst IV Revelations is available exclusively on DVD. This means you need a DVD drive on your computer to play it. Which was not a problem, because, as I've said, Trash's computer is fairly advanced, and it has one. What is a problem is that Myst IV Revelations does not work on a system with Windows 2000. The site even has this totally condescending way of putting it: "Keep in mind that Windows 2000 is primarily an office operating system, and is not optimized for computer gaming." Like we're the idiots for having a hard drive that outstores NASA's entire Apollo program ten times over and a video card that didn't exist a year ago and a built-in DVD drive separate from the CD-ROM drive, and we're not running them on a computer with a seven-year-old operating system. Gee, sorry. Stupid us. Fuckers. Of course there was a patch, which we downloaded. Of course it didn't work. And then we tried this game that has Tim fucking Curry in it. It installed and started fine, but then when we actually began game play, in place of a game display we got an error message reading "You must have Quicktime 6.0 to play." By this time it was down to a Sherlock Holmes game that Trash and I had each tried and gotten stuck halfway through, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. We went with the Sherlock Holmes game. I'm proud to say that we finished it in about six hours. This was, of course, with liberal use of a couple of online walkthroughs, especially as midnight drew near. We wouldn't have needed nearly so much help if we'd been able to play for an extra three hours instead of spending three hours trying to actually get a game going. Old friends, old computer problems. The nostalgia of it all just about made me shit my pants. Today's best search phrase: "Trash can turkey." Oh, just buy a deep-fryer, you cheapskate. posted by M. Giant 9:10 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:De-lurking to post... when I first read "Trash can turkey", I thought it meant Trash (your wife) can (is able to) turkey (wha...?). Threw me for a loop before I realized trash and can needed to go together to form a noun, instead of a noun-verb phrase. I thought turkey was some kind of new dance or something. Or maybe gobble like a turkey? Anyway, I think I'm fully awake now. Thanks for the morning's brain teaser! :)
By Trust me, you are not missing anything by not getting The Crystal Key to work. The graphics were crappy, the story was non-existant, and it only takes about 2 hours to play. It's a poor, poor substitute for the Myst games.
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Thanks, guys -- it really was like those marathon game nights of old. And the lameware issues just made more room for quality time (with the bambino, as well as y'all).
By (just google up the name and you'll find the Urban Dead site.)
By Saturday, September 03, 2005 I don't know how many more signs the universe could have given us to tell us not to go on our trip this week. Gas prices so high it would have been cheaper for us to fly to Rapid City than drive there. The difficulty we had arranging coverage to feed that cats and give Strat his injection. Several inches of rain today. M. Small's cough, which was supposed to have cleared up days ago, which instead developed into croup. A visit to the vet this morning to have a lump under Phantom's jaw checked, which resulted in her being put on a twice-a-day antibiotics regimen for the next two weeks. It just wasn't in the cards. And then, of course, there's the fact of three children younger than M. Small dying in the New Orleans Convention Center, for no good reason aside from rank incompetence. So this is what happens when we see a disaster coming days in advance, let alone a major terrorist attack with no warning. After two and a half years, billions of dollars, and hundreds of American lives spent in Iraq, we lost the War on Terror in one week. Thanks, dear leaders. But I'm not just going to sit here and bitch about it. The money we planned to use to rent a van and buy gas (back when gas was still less expensive than printer ink) is going to relief efforts. Which you've probably already donated to as well. But just in case you're still comparison shopping for the best giving opportunity, allow me to offer you a few of the options we've explored: Tubey's Kids Katrina Classroom Care. Television Without Pity is running a donation drive where, for every $2,000 the readers donate, a recapper will be chosen randomly to recap something of their choice. I make no promises as to how this outcome may affect me, because it depends on whether I'm chosen and whether I can prevail upon Zen Viking to lend me his treasured Wookie Christmas videotape if I am. So far enough has been raised to run three recaps, and I think at least a fourth is well within reach. And check out The Fug Blog for a growing compendium of donation options. And, when you go back to work at the end of the weekend, check with your employer to see if they're matching donations. If they aren't, ask why not. Trash's and my employers already have matching programs in place, so we didn't have to get all owly. About that, at least. Plenty of other stuff to be pissed off about in this country right now. posted by M. Giant 8:57 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:
When M. Small gets a little older, tell him about his 1st camping trip that wasn't.
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Matching programs are great.
By Oh man, croup is a bitch. I'm sorry to hear poor M. Small has it, and even more sorry that you have to hear it. Hope he feels better soon!
By Can we all just stop with the whiny ass 'our leader is an imbecile' crap? Its pretty easy to say from behind a computer desk, but chances are we all didn't run for president for specific reasons... mostly being unqualified.
By Can we blame FEMA instead? Because Idon't think anyone, except maybe the prez, thinks he did anything but a terrible job. Let's just blame him, shall we?
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