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I watch Antiques Roadshow.  I can usually only stomach the original, British version, not the horrid American knock-off.  Frequently someone will bring in a family piece — say, a portrait of a relative from Georgian times, or a needlework sampler that a greatⁿ-grandmother composed in the early 19th Century C.E. — and will ask after its value.

Now, establishing an auction value makes sense for these: that establishes what items like it, in comparable condition, fetch to when sold to someone else with an interest in art.  But the valuers will go on to give a higher value for insurance purposes, which is supposed to be a “replacement value”.

Replacement?  What could that possibly mean?  Surely you aren’t going to go out and find another portrait of your ancestor, right?  Another sampler that a distant forebear created?  No, it probably means a contemporary of what you have — a portrait of someone else, or a sampler by someone else.

This baffles me.  Why bother?  If it’s Revere Silver, and there are other, more-or-less identical items on the market, “replacement value” make sense.  But the literally irreplaceable, the one-of-a-kind items?  When they’re gone, they’re gone.

My former boss (Jeff, if you’re reading, it was your father) once talked to me about an insurance agent approaching him about insuring his children.  He was likewise dumbfounded.  As he saw it, the argument seemed to be that, if his child died, it would take a lot of money to make up for it.  This is nonsense.  There is not a figure (in dollars) I would accept in exchange for Niall — there may not even be a figure in lives I would exchange for his.  That’s not big-U Utilitarian, but it is how I think.  Heirlooms like the cassette tapes that my family recorded for my Nana, which I now have safely in my possession and will be encoding to digital form, don’t make sense to insure.  There is no accounting for ancestry.  de la Rocha lyrics come to mind: “Sell your history for a VCR.”  No thanks.  You keep your VCR, I’ll keep my heirlooms, please.

I’ve had Niall since Saturday afternoon.  I drop him at school tomorrow.  As the seconds go by, I get more and more frantic about squeezing every last moment from the time with him.

We were listening to a random music mix, and G’n'R’s Yesterdays came on the rotation, which has the lyric “Yesterday’s got nothing for me.”

Niall’s eyes brimmed with tears, and he turned to me and said, “There’s nothing for me either, without you.”

However justified Jenn was in leaving to get on with her life — the appropriateness could be as high as 100% — the decision left a body count.

OK, let’s run down my week so far:

1. Wife left me and took Niall (my fault)
2. Got dropped from the interview process of the job for which I was applying (my fault, essentially)
3. Worker’s Comp claim was denied, so I will have to sue the WC insurance company (not my fault)
4. Ditzy HMO doctor whom I saw twice while out of work due to work-related injury claims I never told her I was off work, and refuses to sign my disability slip (fuckin’ not my fault)
5. Paid over $100 (that I didn’t have until friends opened their wallets) to file my taxes (my choice)
6. Ran out of meds (that said ditzy doctor forgot to refill) and for which I don’t have insurance anyway (not my fuckin’ fault)

So, today:

7. Computer crashes (shit happens)

You’d think with my whole professional and educational life spent living at the whims of computer hardware, I would have a top-of-the-line backup system in place.  You’d be wrong.

I fixed it.  The computer, and recovered the data.  It took some effort, but I did it.  I’m doing a full backup tonight.

Next step would pretty much have to be “blindness”, right?  I’d say “death”, but that’s not always seeming like such a bad alternative this week.

I don’t think it appropriate to write at length, or write details, in this public arena.  But not writing anything about this has made it impossible to write anything else on the site, so I’ll just do a fifteen-second version and leave it be.

My wife Jennifer has left me, taken our son, and asked for a divorce.  She has moved in with her parents.  She left the cat.

I am devastated, and left with no income and no disability checks yet.

Things might be slow in these parts for a while — or, I may go into fits of hypergraphia to keep my mind off things.  One or the other.

There’s a lot I want to write, and maybe I will write it and just not publish it.  As I said, this is really not the most appropriate arena to air it.

Anyone who wants to leave condolences, please do.  I might not be able or willing to give too many other details.  Anyone who wants to lend me $100, so I can pay for medication and maybe rent, I wouldn’t turn that down, either.

All hail the lucky ones!  I refer to those in love.

Niall, to Jenn:  Do you like sweet gopher poop?

Jenn:  Er, no.

Joshua:  Mommy only likes sour gopher poop.

Niall, to Jenn:  Do you like sour gopher poop?

Jenn:  I really don’t like any gopher poop.

Niall:  Have you tried gopher poop?

Jenn:  Er, no.

Niall:  How do you know you don’t like gopher poop if you’ve never tried it?

Niall and Sebastian recovering together on a couch bed, Niall from a virus and Sebastian (the furry one) from a liver condition.

Niall woke up feverish and vomiting.  We think he has the flu.  Very inconvenient timing, as I’m supposed to be at work in a handful of hours.

Sebastian is home, and we have Mika’s ashes now.  He will be going in for a checkup next week.

Mika, our beloved cat, died this morning in her hospital incubator following surgery.  She never regained consciousness.

Thank you to everyone who wrote in, publicly and privately, to wish her and us the best.

Sebastian is recovering well after his surgery, and is expected to make a full recovery.

Mika
1999 – 2007

Mika, our cat, is dying.  I got a second opinion this evening, which was essentially to keep her comfortable and put her to sleep when it seems that she is in pain.

Our glassy-eyed beast of the night whom we have loved since before we were married is going to be gone.  I am a wreck right now.

Friends of Mika, please make arrangements to come and see her.  She doesn’t bite any longer.

I’ll keep readers updated.

I found my hat.  Or someone found it.  It was sitting in the hallway outside the coat closet, so I picked it up, and I’m wearing it right now.

You don’t know what a big deal this is.  This is the only hat I own that has ever fit me.  Baseball caps, even large ones, fit like yarmulkes.  I groan every time I find out that the free giveaway at an event is a hat.

My father, who stands several-plus inches shorter than I (and is shrinking, I think), has an even larger head circumference.  He once spent approximately the GNP of Finland on a custom Stetson, I believe, and it comically rests on the bridge of my nose when I try to wear it.

This is the curse of the McGee head.  These massive skulls.  My brother has one.  My son has one, the uncomfortable details of which I’m sure my wife could inform you about.  And yet — and yet — I was treated for a Chiari Malformation last year.  My brain was literally too big for this head.

Don’t worry, I won’t let that fact go to my head.

Niall has two sets of favorite music.  System of a Down — seriously, System of a Down — and the most banal set of children’s CDs that someone started calling “Children’s Music” to him.  The latter are insipid, major-key jaunts on a Casio and nylon-stringed guitar, with a bad tenor and a bunch of breathy children singing the most profoundly weird songs.

I loathe them.  I would have said, under other circumstances, that the producers should slip under a freight train for producing, distributing, and charging for these, but Niall really, really does like it, and sometimes likes the same song over and over again.  Annoying, but not quite as annoying as his screaming his head off in the car.  Usually.

One time, Jenn and I were driving along listening to one of these atrocious CDs, and I began questioning the surrealistic lyrics in progressively off-color but G-rated fashion.  Jenn was laughing for a while, then chuckling.  But the one that got her to snap was the following:

Song: Did you ever see a lassie, a lassie, a lassie?  Did you ever see a lassie go this way and that?

Me: Is this one about a girl who goes both ways?

Jenn: STOP!

Today is my seventh anniversary with my incredible wife, Jennifer.  Jenn, when you read this, I love you, and thank you for the best seven years of my life, and a lifetime more.

I was watching The Two Towers with my brother. It came to the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and all the young children were being ushered into caves while the men and older boys were being armed.

“I care about the kids as much as the next guy,” I said, “but surely even a seven year old boy or girl could ferry arrows to the front lines?”

“We don’t talk about the arrows!” said my brother.

Niall, my boy who just turned one, was practicing spatial skills today. He likes to take objects and pack them in containers, and to unpack containers. There was an empty half-liter plastic water bottle on the coffee table and a large plastic iced tea glass, and he was holding on to the former and trying to fit it into the latter, but he was trying to put it in sideways. I worked with him on it for a while and showed him how to insert it so it fit. Then we tuurned it into a game. He would take the bottle out of the glass, turn it around 180 degrees, then reinsert it. Then we would clap together and I would praise him.

We did this probably twenty times, as I was calling to Jenn to come in and witness it. She did get to see it, and she started playing the game with him. He played successfully for a couple turns, then seemed to forget the trick and tried reinserting it sideways. One time he tried putting it in, then pressed really, really hard to get it to go in, then lost hold of it and it skittered across the table. He looked up at me expectantly and started clapping. It was the funniest thing, as it looked like he was trying to pull a fast one — “Now we clap, right?”

It was a lot of fun. For a while he was trying to hold both pieces to do the insertion, but his arms aren’t long enough to hold the glass away from his body sufficiently, so he looked at me and very clearly, through body language, asked me to hold the glass for him. It’s amazing how much can be communicated and learned without spoken language.

My wife and baby are back from twelve days’ vacation and they both remember me!

There are five new baby pictures, at the bottom of the list.

The new garden page isn’t ready yet, but I wanted to share with you the absurdity that is the kabocha squash plant. It now has seven squashes growing on it. Keep in mind that all the pictures are from a single plant, started outdoors from a single seed.

This is a joyous post.  On Friday, 03 October 2003, our son was born.

Named Niall Henry David McGee, he came into the world with a minimum of fuss in a quick and easy delivery after only ten hours of labor.  He was an alert, curious, quiet, 7 pound 6.4 ounce baby boy.  His favorite activities at present are sucking and farting, and to his credit he is quite good at both.

On Sunday they let us go home.  We were home for ten hours before we found he was running a fever, so back to the hospital it was.  It turns out he was dehydrated, and may have had a urinary tract infection (we are waiting on the results of the urine culture.)  Both are being quickly sorted out, through antibiotics and supplementation of his feeding with formula, once we found a nipple that he liked.

Jenn and I are happy but very tired.  I will keep you posted as things develop.  In the meantime, some pictures:

Well, the weblog is back after my week+ hiatus.  The holidays were great: Jenn and I were able to see both our families, and in the days after Christmas Jenn’s sister, Jenn’s brother, and my brother (ages 20, 18, and 18, respectively) came to stay with us in Thousand Oaks.  We had a fabulous time.

The highlight, perhaps, was my developing a serious addiction.  To a video game.  I don’t play video games.  Jenn has a Sony Playstation that I gave her as an anniversary gift because she does enjoy video games.  I have played and enjoyed games such as Roll Away and Mortal Kombat 4, but they never manage to hold my interest for more than an hour or so.  My brother rented some games to bring with him and, on a whim, picked up Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 since he knows I enjoy watching competitive skateboarding.

I love this game!  After they left Jenn and I went out of town, and on our way home I stopped to purchase a copy ($40, by the way) at Toys Backwards-”R” Us.  Last night I started playing about an hour after midnight, lost track of time, and finally stopped at 4:30 a.m.

So, I’m hooked.  I’ll probably play more tonight: I am very close to unlocking Venice Beach.