When Niall had his sixth birthday last month, we had a birthday at Chuck E Cheese’s.  Because they’re six, my mom made the other boy¹ a small bag of “stuff” so he wouldn’t feel left out.  We warned Niall of this in advance, and at first he was very upset, then worked through it, making sure, in his words, “His toys won’t be bigger than mine, will they?”

I was listening to a truly vile Republican on KPCC today — one of those insufferable brats who worries that his fellow citizens could get rewards, too, but might — might might might — be OK with it if he can guarantee that he will be much more equal than everyone else.

Niall is six, and I can work on training him out of it.  The Repubs, though: I just want Obama to match the picture and say:

¹ Yes, singular.  Really, it’s OK: 1 is the ideal number of guests as far as Niall is concerned, being the smallest integer greater than or equal to the number of guests he’s comfortable having (approximately 0.4).  There is so much of me in him.  While I think I can program out the greed in him, I have no idea how — or, indeed, whether — to code having an easier time at parties, or to like people more.  Something something Jenn something something LiveJournal something something the first indication of a culture clash is people who would use fucking LiveJournal in the first place something something [redacted].

» Disability Doc

I just went to my state-appointed disability doctor today.  Different one from last time.  This doctor actually seemed to care.

The nurse had taken my blood pressure.  It was high.  Without health insurance I have been unable to afford medication out-of-pocket.  The doctor went about explaining it to me:

Doc:  Your blood pressure is very high.  It should be [switch to kindergarten teacher voice] One.  Thir.  Tee.  Oh.  Ver.  Nine.  Tee.  Or lower.

And I’m thinking, What the fuck, doc?  I was in an on-the-job accident, I didn’t have my frontal lobe removed.  Quick, I thought.  I need a shibboleth.

Joshua:  It’s the diastolic that’s especially bothering me about that.

And a light goes on behind her eyes.  Gooooood doctor, I think.  Maybe we can talk like adults now.

» A Levenshtein Edit Distance of “maybe pay attention to the computer”

I was pretty sure that I was going to spell “shibboleth” and “diastolic” correctly in that previous sentence.  And I seemed to.  So I tried appending a ‘q’ to the end of each, and Firefox recognized the modifications as errors.  I have to do this because of an apparent bug in Firefox in which the spell-checker will sometimes turn off without warning, leaving me wondering if there are false negatives.  Which leads me to a story that:

My ex-wife was/is one of the worst spellers I have ever met.  She makes my father look like the O.E.D.  When she was first telling me where her parents live, and where [Redacted.  Gawd.  The casual reader has no idea how much shit I redact -- how much shit I unilaterally redact, as far as blogs go -- about the divorce.  I believe that discretion is the better part of valor, but I can't even allude to the fact that I'm being discreet without losing valor.  So I'm going to spend one whuffie on this rather innocuous story that I'd probably tell about anyone, and one more on this very allusion to valor.  If that's enough to send you on your way, happy trails.  Nine fucking years.  Aargh.]

Anyway.  She emailed me her parents’ address, and I was going to drive down there with my mother.  My mother was looking up directions on Mapquest.  I read the address from my email, and said “The street is ‘Vangard’.  Without a ‘u’.”  Good thing for fuzzy matches.  The street is, of course, ‘Vanguard’.

So at one point in our marriage, Jenn had left a printout for work on the coffee table and my eyes caught a few words moving past it.  There was a glaring typo.  I said, as meekly as I could, “Hey, do you want me to edit this for typos?”  She said “yes”.

So I’m reading this document, and it’s just riddled with misspelled words.  So I fix them with a pen.  And, to help, I tell her, “There’s a setting you can turn on in Microsoft Word so that it underlines typos in red as you type them.”

And she says, “Oh, it’s on, the computer is just wrong a lot of the time.”

Thank whatever that she caught the typo on the tattoo artist’s essay for her second (and fucking huge) tattoo with a line from a friend’s poem surrounding it.  She didn’t let me copy-edit that.

OK, maybe that was more than one whuffie.  I don’t care.

» Macintrash

I’m typing this — once again — one one of my Mom’s MacBooks.  Firefox had slowed to a crawl.  I tried quitting it to restart it, but, no, you apparently can’t restart an application through the application menu if it’s stopped responding.  But I also couldn’t do anything else on the system; full freeze.  So I hard-power-cycled it (thank you, Steve, that the OS did not override that), the computer restarted, and: Firefox is gone from the quick-launch menu!  I thought I was missing it but, no, it just wasn’t there.  Then I realized I was being foolish: of course when an application crashes you should remove the ability to restart it quickly it in the future.  Doing otherwise would be ludicrous.

(Yes, I know I’m typing this on that very Mac.  To avoid hypocrisy — as far as can be avoided after this post — I’m turning it off as soon as I hit “Publish”.)

(And yes, I know, I’m in a terrible mood.  Sorry.)

At Niall‘s new after school program …

Of which I wasn’t included in the decision …

And didn’t yet know the name of …

And didn’t have the address for …

Because I didn’t know he had already been transferred to it …

At a church …

I went to pick him up, and was on the authorized pickup list!

On the last line …

In different handwriting …

Under Jenn’s boyfriend’s name.

[Insert.  Emotion.  Here.]