The Ottermanempire.com

dobie and the dancers,
originally uploaded by haltse.

For daddy’s or Dobh’s memory? Anyway while last night’s game against Edmonton was ( do I know enough about the game to call it) abysmal? The highlights for Dobh pictures with Howler/ Pack Dancers and being side checked by a rude bitch that believes knocking down a toddler and being the aggrieved party is ok.

More to follow. I have a new bike , a new loathing for how insurance companies calculate their risk and the need to write a book called “working with children that vote”

Today was my second real day back at work after the new year. It was to last  oh about 2 hours before I had to head out to meet Erin at the ER.  Dobhran had began shaking in distress and was having considerable pain issues while running  a fever.    Looks like he had very early pneumonia and was taking an adverse reaction ,   drugs,  breathing treatment and some antibiotics to take home. He sacked out, letting me get some work done.  

Which is great since I couldn’t get up the “important” story about Facebook taking action against screen scraping and could have spent all day shouting at the screen.  Really  on days like this it’s hard to get the Golgafrincham B Ark out of my head.

Dobhran, aka “pork chop” , “dosbin”, “Dobie” and on special occasions little lord farfanoogan  will be having a nicely manufactured Christmas this year.  Many licenced, plastic and on the whole  worth their weight in lead toys are awaiting his rapt and often violent attention.  Next year though? Erin’s been out in the woodshop between hobbling ( it’s like PT for her bunghole, er leg ) between a new play cube and my delightful ( so far)  bike  which has gotten us talking about making more of Dobhran’s toys.   I found this jet on my  web travels and have to say I’m impressed by it, though not the price of the plans. I think I want to build the wee one some form of gentle motion simulator but he’s really into bikes and cars. How the hell we make him a mini “hang on” that he won’t fall off is another matter..  maybe I’ll stick to cars for the time being.

Build the AQUAPLANE kids backyard fun ride!

 Over the last couple of weeks my parents have been in town.  Since I have a massive amount of vacation time , and Erin’s recovering from her bike 2.0 mashup, I took all of it off +1 day to get Erin to an appointment tomorrow morning.   On the whole we had a sedate  type of vacation with much of the usual touristy stuff  bypassed in favour of the practical nature of finding another vehicle, making sure  kids trip to ER was the only one  ( he’s taken a real shine to climbing and falling) and working our way through casual diner attitudes.  I’ve  barely touched computers,  read only a few deserving blogs and kept my email to  under 5 pieces  and don’t feel the worse for it.

Purely anecdotal but since the last visit it seems like wait staff, retail clerks and most service industries we interacted with are staffed by  humorless, cookie cutter clones that seem to have totally bought into their commerce cog role.Anything that’s not in the line of being an expert at detecting false currency  or fake id’s is usually not going to interest them.  Why am I being asked if I could  find everything?

Will someone go get me one? put it on back order and call me when it gets here?  ( I’m old enough to remember that being a possibility @36)  no I didn’t think so. I’d rather we dropped the pretense offer of a service that will never be rendered.

While we’re talking about crappy CS let’s  go a car shopping.

Special shout outs to the car dealers that failed to secure our business.

Bell Road Scion

Aziz you truly suck as a salesman for anybody that gives a rats ass about what their wife thinks.Your insulting manner, refusal to acknowledge what we wanted to buy over what you wanted to sell and general ineptitude with the truth has done your franchise proud.

Bell Road Ford

Josh,  It doesn’t matter that your bosses want you to call up and keep reminding us about their great offers. If you don’t have the car we want , an Escape Hybrid, we’re not going to buy it. Tell those assholes that you’re losing ANY future chance that  we’ll ever buy from their dealership. 

Bill Luke Dodge

Ah Heather  really so SO  very close. We’d agreed on a price after the usual bullshit of having our direct requests ignored in favour of their usual  dog and pony show where they try to sell you  $800 car alarms that costs me $140 online (OEM)it’s plug and play and really easy to install. How hard is it? Patriot, any color, minimal trim and an Auto Tranny? 

I said I would  arrange financing privately and get back with you. Get a call from her before  9am asking were I was at.   Thankfully this convinced me that I didn’t want to deal with ANY  new car dealer and redoubled our efforts to get a second hand one. There’s a second hand Isuzu Rodeo outside.   I own it, no payment , fuck them all.

Walmart:

Bought a fresh turkey, the bag broke on the treadmill covering some produce. Not only did I have to clean it up  but I had to buy the unusable produce.  Supervisor refused to engage Erin on this and wandered off.  Their fucking packaging broke , took out yet to be paid for items which she made us pay for. We’ll see what their reply is on this one.

WTF you mean I have to sit my licence,
originally uploaded by haltse.

He was in such a good mood tonight was the wee one. He was not in a good mood when he had to depart the bike I think he knows this thing is fun already.

Someday’s this blog becomes as mundane as a medical talk show. Knowing that I will still soldier on and relate my current state of health so that the kid can look back and say, “so that’s why daddy was such a grumpy bastard”

Starters I use a CPAP machine to  treat my sleep apnea  which , for the uninitiated, is a device that blows air , at pressure, up my nose  so that my airways are held open at night . Not doing so makes me feel like I have a hangover, can’t think properly and  am prone to intense bouts of tiredness  ( yes including driving)  it’s dangerous when untreated and shortens your life.  SO

I have a sinus infection that wont go away and is blocking my nose..    It’s hell squared. So on more pills, then a shot, then a look into my head to see if there’s something odd about it’s construction.

 Anyway the fun part. I had to take the kid to the Dr with me ,since  day care is on the other side of town, I presented him at the desk with a ” I hear that it’s customary in your country for medical services to require your first born..  I took the precaution of bringing my son”     The kid is too cute for anyone to object to such “abuse”

So what do you call nasal sex? 

Fuck nose.. </sting>

It’s upgrade time at the house. Over the weekend Erin’s pc  “Grew” a new brain and mine found a new video card which I bought about 3 days before Erin  changed hers and I could have had the old one…

For free..

So  Erin joined the  Dual core club emasculating my  silicon dick by about   , well let’s just say a lot.   This is  computer war:)  

 Took ourselves out to Glendale blues and jazz festival for a couple of hours on Saturday which was quite pleasant in all respects other than the quality of the food.  I know that $8 for one of the most uninspired BBQ sandwiches  from a company  that made it’s own sauce and basically did a worse job than going to Fry’s and buying  a bun, shredded BBQ pork and ANY  sauce that you could get your hands on :(    One of the kettle corn venders made a half assed job of making it and  well you get the picture.  Gov enforced monopolies  ( least in this time/space) don’t promote quality.

Now if any of you have ever looked at the permit process , the multi permits , to get to be a vender at such an event  you have to wonder that  all this control and regulation doesn’t result in  something enjoyable. 

Sunday  I looked after the little one which was  cute and not too fraught with flying food, breaking cups or tantrums:)   From either person..    

One of the better articles I read this weekend.  My main take away from it is the certainty of climatologist’s that can’t accurately predict  a few weeks, let alone decades,  is interesting.     Sadly this is yet another  area you have to either devote all your time to ( like rebutting 911 conspiracy / moon hoaxers)  to even get a handle on it.     The planet seems to have been  doing this for far longer than we have, it’s cute to  take the anthropogenic  

In short there’s far more urgent items that are going to kill us a lot more quickly so while we’re throwing money at an issue that should it exist , and be caused by us , will occur after we’ve ingested one more evil cow.. 

Next up .. Imus in the, well at home not doing much.   This was such a non event that I didn’t bother blogging , podding or otherwise referencing it other than on comments to some blogs.     The same week the Duke non rapists, non criminals finally were released from a corrupt justice system ( it’s not just one guy it takes a village to be that vile)  Al Sharpton was  castigating  Imus for an insensitive remark   , ultimately leading to Imus’ dismissal , yet  Al’s comments on the Duke case when it broke are far more damaging than  “hurt” feelings   

So it goes,  

Thursday night saw a heated debate between Erin and myself re the relative sickness level of Dobhran and what to do about it. We ended up in ER because me being right isn’t as important as Dobh .

Here’s the  account as I sent it back to the Twitter service ( Just because I make fun of it doesn’t mean I’m not trying to find something. I’m sure this should be a feature, rather than a standalone service, oh wait  It already was, this is just easier to set up for people that don’t want to  run fake, or real chron jobs on their wordpress installs.  You can see the whole thing over here.

Hal : Back home finally , he’s sleeping, I shall try to follow suit.

 Hal : Dobhie has a form of pneumonia .viral or bacterial ? Not known but it is not good either ways

Hal : Dobhie has a form of pneumonia .viral or bacterial ? Not known but it is not good either ways
Hal : Passed 3 a.m eternal and still waiting. Kid is happier but we are not. Need zzzzzz

 
Hal : X-ray over now it is time for nebulizer how much fun are you having @ 0230 ?

 ?
Hal : At ER with the little one he is far from frilled

 
Hal : Dobh has what looks like RSV, he’s not a happy bunny.

The  hospital called back the next day to say  it really is RSV and not pneumonia  and he’s  really making an OK recovery  with some spots of crankiness.    I still think the ER system in Phoenix is fundamentally broken  , even though this wasn’t a busy night took forever and a day.   More soon. 

For some reason I was compelled to go look at the sleeping Dobh tonight which I usually haven’t done ( standing rule  #1 never wake a peaceful baby )   The day was weird , why  just as things are looking up and  hope was yet again an option.  Sadly  there’s no Aristotelian police to arrest those for  breaking the law of identity otherwise I’d be spending a lot of time in the witness box for the prosecution.

All animals are equal, some are more equal than other. Yep a little snowball that turned into an avalanche.I’m frustrated that  what seems to make perfect sense has others confused when I try to explain that an object can’t have different attributes and still be the same   and this was not at a “deep” level, ok not even at a shallow level, ” no man steps twice in the same river” sort of thing. This was simply  A is A   fucking A! 

Wrote a letter to the Governer of AZ re her support for speed cameras which I will post tomorrow. Was not happy to see DPS  come out in favour of them  on the grounds that  they too have contradicted themselves into a corner.  Seemingly speeding is bad ..it’s SO bad that they need to slow people down 14 days or so after the event so they can concentrate on ‘real’ hazards on the road. I’m sorry  either speeding is serious enough to warrant your attention  or it’s been an overblown stick with which to beat the public with.  The quotes from the Redflex people that run the program are interesting they seem to suggest that the cameras are going to sell because of the revenue stream…  Don’t even have the decency to play along with the politicians and lie… 

  I am also tired about even posting shit like the above. I’m really close to pulling the “pissed otter” back and telling you how cute my kid is, how much he’s accomplished in 16 months and maybe  start some cat pictures.

Finally, at long last, after a difficult and complicated pregnancy  Quick Recorder was brought into the world and is a pretty way of creating the basic building block of podcast.  More on the work blog but for now I have some housekeeping.
Dobhie the cute.  New video  is up at Podcast.john-paxton.com and has him wandering around a park on a happier day. Today is not happy he’s got a double ear infection, more time of work for  Erin :(  I just couldn’t leave today which is  horrible feeling:(    

Maybe I’m just looking for it but representations of torture seem to be increasing within the entertainment sphere as a  handy little plot device, not happy about it.

Today’s meal at Earl’s wasn’t exactly torture but  on three occasions now I have had a dish in transition. Their curry has gone from vindaloo to , are you sure this isn’t just isn’t a sauce from the store?  Today’s attempt was on par with Pataks sauces, I like those but maybe  restaurants should aim a little higher.  I really used to like this place but  it’s sad to see a slide so completely into the mediocre.  Previously the people I’ve been with have on the whole experienced one  meal failure per  4-6 people.  Scottsdale triangle. …

A rant is coming soon.  Seemingly Janet  the governer is into speed cameras for reasons that ring hollow on anything other than revenue  generation. In short  whenever somone refers to law enforcer  rather than peace officer I thin you really get which side of the state their bread’s buttered on. 

This last year has sucked for low grade illness interspersed with violent

Am I not well?  It looks like Erin ,myself , Cakey and the cat tried to pull off a small town theater version of the Aristocrats.  I’m on the  third set of covers  in two days.. That’s how much control I have when awake! So apart from my liver taking on sudafed ( have to sign for it with an ID what a crock of shit ) Immodium , my regular med and some mucinex  I’ve pretty much had 1 packet of bugles and lots of water and some tomato soup ( the chicken gets a break since I have no soul) 

Coupled with apnea for which I use a mask to correct it’s been a whole host of no fun:(  Can’t drive anyway, heads buzzing and I’m not sure I want to detail the car…

even worse. Kid had to go to daycare I see little of him , drive him to daycare, and Erin picks him up by the time I’ve been getting home after 7 he’s into crank I need a nap/sleep stage or he’s asleep.:(  Had to cancel a monthly meeting x 2   and the Poe event at the Paper Heart on Friday looks unlikely  even at this stage.

20 mins and all this sitting up has me ready for a nap.

This is fun.  For a  project I checked out a site on a trial  that I’m damn sure I cancelled within a few days because frankly the service offered for $9 is way over the top for the  minimal resources provided and the answer to the question that I was investigating was fulfilled in 10 minutes of set up. ( i.e  does it do anything interesting..)

Get this a generous offer · 1 year domain registration - $30 which is so funny I just hurt myself laughing. One thing that I find odd is that  mails from the company re the billing were not sent,  how odd is that?  

Anyway this is a crappy situation for customer service since it’s really my responisibility to ensure no one, even if their practices appear to be a little sharp in the non  notification of billing ( given the pricing structure and the feel of the site it seems to be playing on the less sophisticated  web user ( ok that’s why I am upset, it’s pride at having been made a fool off:) ) 

Today we took the morning off from partying , oh wait , that was a dream. Anyway after we surfaced it looked like commerce was unavoidable and the Mall at Arrowhead was the chosen destination , needed a car seat for Dobh, Erin needed more clothing on the grounds that  she’s been steadily shedding pounds and sizes these past few months.   This lead to the unenviable position of her being nowhere near the largest women in the story but I was the largest  guy.  I have no idea how these poor stick figures of men survive  snoo snoo :)  Anyway it felt like rather than a cigarette extinguisher there should have  been a can for  half eaten doughnuts, or fried chicken legs or just something that could get across the enormity of the problem  but  seriously  you think there would be fucking leftovers?   I know people that live in glass houses shouldn’t sunbathe naked  but  my neighbours can look away..  yet oddly they don’t?

Anyway coming up  Homeopathy, Homosexuals and the priests that love em….

December has been a month of yuck healthwise for all in the house. Kid’s been to the DR more times for ad hoc visits than ever and sadly has taken the term inconsolable to heart. 

1am Mon

1am Tues, Erin stayed with him, neither slept well

Wed: To daycare, he  choked  phlegm, puked and  fevered re being sick  and so I have my little one back again.  This time I’m taking my vacation days which have been stacking up to nurse the little forker  into a happier mood.. hopefully:)

To work , yeah I’m not working but…;) ,  at home I bought a rf keyboard/ mouse  connecters to the flatpanel and will likely  get that working tonight. 40″ desktop with a PIP showing TV/ dvd  how  f’ing cool is that… Very is the answer.   In other news.. I’m tired. 

Ah Dobhie is  having a rough time, Mommy is having a rough time and daddy is  making for that direction:)  Today Dobh was  the victim of toddler on toddler violence when some little miscreant decided that he wanted a toy  and that violence was the answer ( sounds like a budding politician)

One round, lasted under 5 seconds , during which time he held his ground, until they pulled off the 18 month old future prison officer. Poor thing has some bruising but  is otherwise ok.  I thought we’d have a little longer before having to deal with this but damn it he was really cute and nearly  blemish free this AM in the Hawaiin get up and spiky doo.   Hopefully isolated  since at one stage he’s going to be attacked and will prevail.. something that’s scarier to many adults than that of the bully, they get the bully , they love the bully…  they don’t like those that fight back..