I've earned 0 cents so far. My wife says I'm several years too late. We'll see. I got some fresh (I think anyway) ideas for informative content with regards to my hobbies - RC cars and machining. If nothing else, it'll keep me working on the site to keep it from delapitating.
You don't see ads on this blog and Max's blog because I'm not sure if the scripts will jive with the rest of the code and frankly, I can't be bothered to find out.
[ add comment ] | permalink | related link
The day Max was born, my wife and I realised that being parents is mostly about worrying. When you have a newborn in the house, you never really let yourself forget how fragile they are. I was told to make sure he slept with his head to one side, so he wouldn’t choke and drown if he vomited. This made perfect sense, yet I never would have thought of it on my own. I wondered what else I didn’t know about taking care of babies. Just carrying him seemed like something that I could mess up badly, so I made up this habit of reminding myself to support his neck, lest I forgot and broke it.
I remember the first night he came home with us. We had bought this little barrier to put on our bed, so he could sleep in the middle without being crushed by either of us. I remember waking up to check that he was still breathing, and it always seemed like a minor miracle that he still was. I’d never been responsible for anyone in my life. I’d taken care of pets and plants before, but even then, I often mishandled them – watering too much, not watering enough, feeding too much, feeding the wrong things, not knowing enough, knowing enough but doing too much. Yet, here I was, in charge of a person - one so tiny and weak, he can’t even turn his head, and I’ve been taking care of him for several hours and he’s still breathing!
It must have been around this time that I told myself things would get easier. He would grow bigger and stronger and I wouldn’t have to worry about him then.
He took his time, but he did grow bigger and stronger. Soon, he was starting to crawl around in bed. We worried that he might fall off the bed when we weren’t watching so we put some pillows around him. Soon, he got strong enough to climb on top of the pillows and promptly proceeded to fall out of bed.
After that, we stopped letting him sleep alone. Chores and errands just about came to a halt as someone always had to be on falling baby duty. My wife was still working at the time, so we had a nanny during the day. She had the foresight to train Max to climb down from the bed as soon as he was able to stand up. We thought that was brilliant - he would learn about the height of the bed, and about falling and about being careful and he’d be safe again. Things would get easier then.
He did eventually learn to climb down from the bed by himself but he never did learn to stop rolling off the bed in his sleep.
About a month after his first birthday, he got quite ill. He’d had bouts of runny nose before, but the pediatrician always put off prescribing medication and he was always able to shrug it off on his own, with help from mommy’s milk. But this time, the flu got worse and he started coughing and making this frightening sound – a sound no child should ever have to make. He needed several trips to the doctor to use the nebuliser, which he naturally hated. Feeding him his medicine was an exercise that required two strong adults and plenty of washing up after.
Another thing that became apparent about this time was that he was getting quite heavy. Both me and my wife had tired arms and sore backs from carrying him. I told her not to worry, as he’d be walking soon anyway, so we wouldn’t need to carry him much longer.
Sure enough, it wasn’t long before he took his first step, but it wasn’t so much a walk – more of a drunken stagger. We were busier than ever, stooping over him with our aching backs, trying to keep him from putting his eye out on stone steps and table corners. It was just a short phase, I told myself. Soon, he’d be walking steady. Things would get easier then.
Before long, he was walking and running. More running than walking, and mostly in the direction opposite to where we wanted to go, so we started having to run after him whenever we took him out. Shopping trips started taking twice as long and became three times as tiring.
You know what I said then? I said things will get easier when he starts talking and we’re able to communicate with him.
Now he is almost two and a half, communicating well, and stubborn as an ox. He’s resistant to potty training, impossibly resistant to weaning, sits on the floor when we ask him to walk, runs all over the place when we need him to sit down, insists on eating with his hands, doesn’t like drinking water, doesn’t like drinking powdered milk or fresh milk, gets upset when he’s hungry, refuses to eat when he’s upset, only wants to wear his smelliest pair of shoes, doesn’t want to wear socks, doesn’t like to take baths and doesn’t like coming out of baths.
Still, I’m sure, things will get easier.
[ 1 comment ] ( 2 views ) | permalink | related link
I've had this vise for several years now. It's cheap and it works but the jaws aren't very well made.
Each jaw is held on by countersunk screws. Some of the screw holes aren't aligned properly, so the screws don't sit flush in the countersinks. Whenever I grip aluminium plate with the vise, the screws gouge into the surface of the aluminium. Time to make some new jaws out of aluminium.
Each side of the vise has a small step, so the new jaws will have to have a step as well. The surface of the step is curved unevenly so I need to flatten them first.
On the movable jaw, I just milled it flat. The mini mill didn't complaint too much about the hard material. On the fixed jaw, I had to grind and file, which took a long time.
After two nights and one Saturdays worth of work, I managed to fully ruin both pieces I was working on. The first one, I forgot the size of the screw holes and drilled them 1mm too big (plus I forgot to centre drill them).
On the second one, I managed to (A) cut the step 2mm too wide on the first pass, (B) counterbored the holes on the wrong side and (C) make the counterbore holes 1mm too small.
Lessons learnt: I need draw better plans than this before I start cutting, and if something doesn't seem right, I need to check my measurements.
A nice mess to clean up later. Oh well, at least that's one resolution done. Started out making something useful but ended up making something totally pointless.
[ add comment ] | permalink | related link
Ahhhhh…
One weekend left to the year and there are no more weddings, birthdays, house warmings, full moons, farewells, welcome home parties, annual dinners, store openings, soft launches, grand launches, religious celebrations, new years of one type or another or anything of that sort on my radar. I hope I didn’t just jinx it, but it really looks like I can sit back, relax and be totally selfish this weekend.
Not that I don’t enjoy festivities but, at the risk of sounding not very 1Malaysia, I get a bit overwhelmed by all the celebrations in this country. That’s why I am really looking forward to this weekend. In a funny way, it feels like the year is finally starting for me.
To celebrate, I’ve come up with some resolutions. Not for 2010, but for the rest of 2009. Here they are:
1. Make something useful or decorative or totally pointless on my milling machine.
2. Start the machining section of this website
3. Finish up day 2 and day 3 of the new Japan pages and put up a link
4. Find the notes to our South Africa, Cambodia and New Zealand trips
5. Write a blog rant I’ve been planning for years
6. Wire up my new RC car and take it out for a spin
7. Go for a swim
8. Bake a bread
9. Unwrap and watch The Simpsons Movie DVD
10. Learn the words to Mr Tamborine Man
I know what you’re thinking, but if you consider that I work on these things during the idle seconds of my life when I am truly alone, it’s actually quite an ambitious list.
[ 1 comment ] | permalink | related link
I know I haven’t written in awhile. Sometimes, I feel like I should just stop blogging altogether. But at other times, like tonight, it feels like I could keep this blog going for awhile.
It’s easy to see that the topics of this blog are mostly rants about my wife. This is not because I don’t love her. It’s just that ranting is what I do. I cannot not do it. I know this makes me a petty person, but this is how I deal with all the petty little things that eat at me daily. There’s an old Chinese saying that goes great men do not remember squabbles with petty folk. Great men don’t waste time sweating the small stuff of course, because they are too busy doing great things. I, on the other had, enjoy telling stories a little more than is healthy, and therefore am doomed to collect the smallest details that life tosses my way. You could call it a bad habit. I blame my poor memory for it. I like to write things down because I don’t trust my own memory (and come to think of it, the memory of others as well). My dad has lived through some interesting times and has collected more than a handful of pretty amazing stories to tell. My life pales in comparison, yet I have this great fear that one day, I would have lived through a great story and not remember much of it. This is why I write things like what you read on this blog. Unfortunately, this also means I’m not headed in a very good direction as far as greatness goes.
I’m not ignorant of the fact that washing dirty linen in public is widely considered foolish. Then again, we can’t afford to all think like that, can we? We can’t all pretend domestic disagreements don’t happen. Somebody has to write about them.
I do, of course, have other rant subjects beside my wife. I just don’t blog about them as much because I can talk to her about these things. Tonight, I had a spark of ingenuity. I thought why not talk to my wife about the issues we have with each other?
We’d already had a heated discussion earlier tonight about some really stupidly small things. After cooling off, I thought I’d not blog about them and we could just talk about them and resolve them one at a time. For some reason, this seemed like a good idea at the time. I was even feeling good about myself for coming up with such a novel idea.
I thought, okay I’d just apologise to her and then tell her my side of the story. I asked if she wanted to listen, to which she said she already heard it. If I was wise, I would have read the signs and quit right then. Me being me, neither wise nor great, pushed on – “No, that’s not the whole story, would you like to listen to the whole story?”
Eventually, she relented, so I started my story. I’m not a particularly fast or loud speaker, so I guess it’s not surprising that the first half and what would have been the second half of my first sentence were interjected by her side of the story, in its entirety, told in a high-pitched, high-volumed voice (which may or may not be considered yelling, depending on point-of-view). From there, I tried – I really tried – to salvage the situation with the calmest voice I could muster to request I be allowed to finish my story, to which she said she’d already heard it. I really really tried not to get drawn into another argument but I failed. Anyway, from the amount I was able to say and the amount she was able to say, we determined that all my difficulties stemmed from my inabilities to deal with hardship because I was brought up in a sheltered environment while her difficulties were caused by her being “stressed” and the fact that she was “stunned by (the) cockroach”.
As I mentioned before, my memory isn’t all that great, so it is conceivable that I might again one day have this brilliant idea of trying to talk calmly to my wife after we’ve had a heated discussion. When that happens, please, somebody give me a good knock on the head.
[ 4 comments ] ( 3 views ) | permalink | related link
Next
Avatar
