Todd Stadler's blog

Nephew Park

Do you remember Jurassic Park? The idea was that someone had perfected a technique of regenerating dinosaurs using bits of fossilized DNA. He wanted to create an island safari park where people could experience the dinosaurs up close, while of course protected from the various dangers inherent to them. And then everything went wrong and the velociraptors got out and people died and hey, that's a UNIX system.

I bring this up because Project Nephew similarly went horribly, horribly wrong. Except instead of velociraptors scurrying about, it was some sort of stomach virus. Not that the difference mattered much to those involved.

Project Nephew, for those not aware, is the name I gave to the visit from Rachel (Julia's sister) and David (her five-month-old son, my nephew). It was supposed to be a happy time. A time for cuddles and laughs. A time for us to teach David how to drink a real, Northwest-style IPA. You know, typical aunt-and-uncle stuff.

But the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, they say, end up covered in vomit, desperately wishing to fall asleep. Something like that.

It all started on Tuesday, when Rachel fell ill. I felt sorry for her, of course, as this meant not only discomfort for her, but also the canceling of social engagements. At least Julia had the week off for spring break, so there was someone to comfort Rachel and take care of David.

In fact, Julia even offered Tuesday night to feed and change David when he woke up in the middle of the night, which I much appreciated, since I was still going to work the next morning. Or so I thought, he said with no small amount of foreshadowing.

Yes, foreshadowing. For several hours before David woke up to tell us he was hungry, Julia woke up to tell me she was ... not. She communicated this, not in her usual fashion of saying to me, "Todd, I'm not very hungry," but rather with a complex system of movements that involved her jumping over me, out of bed, and down the hall, quickly, to the bathroom. There were sounds involved, as well, but these will be left as an exercise for the reader.

"The bastard viruses got Julia, too!" I might have said in an overdramatization of the week's events, shaking my fist at the sky and vowing to kill every last one of them (the fact that they are technically not alive notwithstanding).

This left me in the unique position of being the only person in the house who was (1) not ill and (2) able to feed himself and others. Which meant that, mere hours after Julia woke me up to say she felt awful, David woke me up to tell me that he also felt lousy, but for entirely different reasons.

Fortunately, David's malaise was easily dealt with (or so I foreshadowingly thought), as all I had to do was make up a bottle of his formula and sit there with him in my arms while I thought about how professional parents probably know how to choose feeding positions that don't cause various body parts to hurt and/or fall asleep.

"There! Now, that wasn't so bad was it? I just might get used to this baby thing! Middle-of-the-night feedings aren't so bad! Boy, some parents really complain for nothing!" (Let the reader understand: this is highly complex foreshadowing.)

I was even so chipper that I felt up for changing David's diaper, which was clearly soaked. (Dear reader: are you expecting the foreshadowing's antecedent to appear here? You will be disappointed.) With Julia's help (as much as she was able to offer in her virus-addled state, lying on the hallway floor, nearly passed out — and yet such was my novicehood that she was still more knowledgeable than I), I eventually wrangled David out of his clothes and diaper, and into a nice, clean, notably lighter diaper.

"There! It was a little frustrating, but I did it! I changed a diaper! I was a little slaphappy from being tired, but David found it all rather humorous, and I laughed along with him."

Then Julia said something. "Did you say something?" I asked her. "No," she said, in a way that sounded like part of a very banal conversation — unless, of course, you had been predisposed to heavy amounts of foreshadowing and were very wary at this point of unreliable narrators.

"That's odd," I thought. "If that sound didn't come from Julia, then it must have come from David. More precisely ... David's diaper!"

Yes, the little stinker (and I use that phrase in its most literal sense) decided to poop in his pristine diaper mere seconds after I put it on him. My desire to lecture him on environmental issues, however, was overcome by a much greater emotion. Namely, fear. Fear of having to change a diaper ... in that way.

I mean, it was one thing to have changed a wet diaper. That's all well and good. Who hasn't dealt with someone else's urine at one time or another?

But poop. ... Poop. ... Poop?

(On an completely unrelated note, let's have a vocabulary quiz. Do you know a more common phrase for "non-productive emesis"? I do!)

As if the prospect of a poop-filled diaper wasn't daunting (read: nauseating) enough, a pre-changing inspection revealed that David had chosen to critique my previous diaper installation, noting that the slightly loose fashion in which I'd fastened the tabs made for a less than hermetic seal around his legs. I'll let you work out how he did that.

To make an excruciatingly drawn-out story merely unbearably long, I changed a poopy diaper, and some poopy pajamas, which certainly moves me well forward in the pantheon of human achievement, I should think. And all was settled and quiet, that night.

... Except that you forgot that I still had some leftover foreshadowing! Aha!

Yes, the next morning, I, the last healthy person standing, was knocked off my feet and onto the couch. Or the futon, or any horizontal surface not previously covered with a whimpering, flu-riddled human frame.

And there we remained for two days. Four people, unable to move — three due to overpowering illness, and one because he simply hadn't learned to propel himself in a meaningful sense. Yet. (No, ignore that, that foreshadowing still points to the future.)

And then, let's see. I got better. Sorry to cut the story off like that, but there's not a lot to say about two days of groaning and consuming little but water and rice and still, somehow, having to tend to a baby somehow unaware of his fellow humans' suffering.

Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention, Julia and I committed to a life of abstinence.

Just kidding. But man, do I have a lot more respect for parents. It's all (relatively) fun and games with the baby ... until the viruses (or the velociraptors) come for you.

My, uh ... horse

I kind of feel like the folks at Hasbro dropped the ball here.

Fig. A: My Little Ponies and their offspring/destroyer, Gargantuus

While walking through my local Fred Meyer the other day, I noticed My Little Ponies (at bottom in the photo) that were, well, not little. And, frankly, probably not ponies. I'll get to that.

(It's true that they also weren't even mine — strike three! — but I presume that the titular first-person pronoun refers to Mr. Hasbro, stemming from the fact that you don't technically purchase My Little Pony, you just consent to a long-term lease from the corporation, which retains all rights.)

Anyhow, as I understand it, the appeal of My Little Ponies lies in combing, say, Pinkie Pie's hair while thinking how nice it is to own a pony just like you've always wanted — especially one that is pink, has a pearlescent mane, and doesn't actually require feeding or cleaning up after and can be tossed in a bin when Mom tells you to clean up your room. Because it's, you know, diminuitive. Oh, and also presents very little danger of trampling you due to its very limited range, if any, of movement.

Again, as I understand it, one topic these toys are not created to encourage thinking about is reproduction. Specifically the very problematic reproduction so obviously suggested in the photo above.

Let me explain. Of course, it's always troublesome when a community of single-gendered, yet seemingly asexual creatures manages to create offspring. Is there an as-yet-unobserved My Little Stud? (I will preclude the possibility of budding out of hand because, frankly, I find it distasteful.)

Assuming that My Little Stallion does reside at the Hasbro factory, there is still the rather troubling size of these equine young. Even if we assume that My Little Dam gave birth to a baby exhibiting such gigantism, it is likely that that mother is no longer with us, perhaps long ago having been crushed under the weight of the amniotic sac from which her monstrous offspring emerged.

And even if she did manage to survive the the birthing process, the mother was almost certainly crushed by her baby when it learned to roll onto its back and, subsequently, onto its mom.

No, biological reasoning argues against these babies being those of My Little Ponies. Anything that, in its infancy, has a volume that I'd estimate to be a buttload greater than a commonly accepted meiminorequusulian volume will clearly not grow up to be My Little Pony!

It is instead likely that some sort of equine cuckoo species has deposited its young among My Little Ponies, tricking them into raising its infants until such time as the interloper young can turn on their caretakers and, indeed, the entire community of My Little Ponies.

In short, Pinkie Pie, this spells the end. Comb your mane, prance, and frolic. For tomorrow you die.

Old news: in-laws on the Web

Let's pretend that I use this blog to keep you updated on the daily — or, at least, weekly? monthly? — events in my life. What's happened lately, you ask?

Well, Julia's sister Kimb got married to a nice drummer named Joel. Never can go wrong marrying drummers, I always say. (Dear random Web acquaintance, did you know I'm a drummer? No? Please don't make me explain all my little in-jokes. It totally kills my flow.)

Julia and I had a good time visiting Houston, seeing both her and my parents, and, as always, having some tasty food. Not to mention getting to wear t-shirts in February, one of the few months when weather in Houston is reasonable.

But I know that you come to this blog for the hard-hitting Todd-centric news. I hear you cry, "All this fluff about your in-laws is nice, but what's the 'Todd' angle?"

Well, I made Joel and Kimb's wedding Web site. (I have now made wedding Web sites for all of the Melton sisters, though, yes, one of them is my wife.)

Their friend Erin had designed a cool invitation featuring the birds, skyline, and the wedding's brown-and-red color scheme.

There wasn't a lot of content to put on the site, so I used it as an excuse to play with animation that would otherwise probably be rather annoying.

I was going to make the birds a bit more interactive, such that they flew in the first time you visited and then only stirred if you moused over them. However, Kimb liked the birds flying in every time, and I needed to finish the site before they sent out the invitations, so it is what you see.

Anyhow, it was nice to be able to hone my skills on a small, fun site.

But frankly, at this point, I'm more excited for Kimb and Joel and their new life together.

Puns at work

It came out at the staff meeting last week that the company that does customer service for our warehouse in Wisconsin also does customer service for Kohler. Yes, as someone put it, "the toilet company".

This prompted me to ask the person next to me if maybe we should publish a book on bidetlilies.

Reasons you probably didn't think that's funny:

• You couldn't tease apart that portmanteau into its constituent parts: "bidet" and "lilies".
• You didn't know what a portmanteau is, so you don't expect to understand the rest of whatever it is I'm talking about.
• You didn't know that the word "bidet" is pronounced "bi-DAY", thus making it a pun on "daylilies", a kind of flower.
• You didn't realize that I work for a publisher of gardening books, including at least one on, yes, daylilies.
• I don't know, you don't get lots of kinds of humor because you're kind of thick, maybe?

Anyhow, I bet that if I were to do a spreadsheet of how I spend the various minutes of each day, it would turn out I spend a surprising amount of time coming up with awful puns. Most of them are probably even worse than that one.

You should be glad that I'm so lethargic about blogging, or you'd have to read a lot more entries about how clever I think I am with this pun I totally made up by myself.

I should write something for my blog, about my life

Oh blog (bruin?), how I neglect thee!

My sister-in-law's father-in-law (which, I believe, makes him my ... cousin? acquaintance?) has this habit of inserting strings of periods ("..........") into his emails, which apparently comes from his time in the military. He was, I believe, a communications officer, working on some early teletype machine, which would shut down the connection between two terminals if nothing was sent in a set period of time. Thus, to keep the connection open, it became convention (or perhaps just a habit of his) to tap the period key every few seconds while he was thinking of what to say next.

(Can you tell how second- or third-hand this story is? I don't even know what branch of the military it was! Maybe I should just put a disclaimer on the whole thing that says: "Warning! May be completely false! Who can say?")

Of course, this is no longer necessary in emails, since you just compose your thoughts — whether on- or offline — and send them in one fell swoop. Your internet connection only has to be open when you send the email, and besides, such connections these days do not depend on activity to stay up.

And yet, last I heard, his emails still contain random strings of periods that indicate where he was thinking of what to say next.

I bring this up partly because I think it's an interesting story. And partly because, as I grow older, I feel compelled to tell "back in the day" stories, even if they take place back in someone else's day. Look, the point is that reminiscing is taking place!

But I was also thinking about how this habit of his relates to blogging. (See, I brought it back!)

Back in the day (that is, in my day), when blogs were new and shiny and still under warranty, you had to post something every few days or weeks to let people know that you hadn't totally given up on your blog (this was, you'll remember, back when it wasn't yet cool to give up blogging).

That was because back then people maintained a list of bookmarks that they checked every so often, and if someone were to check your blog several times in a row and find it hadn't been updated, they were liable to remove you from their bookmarks. Which meant that, even if you updated twice a day after that, they'd never know. (The horror! All that work writing a review of your ferret calendar, and for nothing!)

Thus, it was important to update your blog, just to justify your spot among the elite, bookmarked sites. Assuming your blog was there in the first place, which, frankly, I doubt this one ever was.

But! Along came RSS feeds, which allowed people to subscribe to your blog and be alerted to new updates, no matter how infrequent! Huzzah!

Through the magic of FeedBurner (a Google-owned online tool that keeps statistics on who's reading what via your RSS feed), I know that people are reading my blog, and, in spite of my infrequent (and, let's get it out there, low quality) posts, the number of subscribers isn't going down.

And yet (and here, finally, is where I tie it all back to the story from the Australian military* in one glorious paragraph) I feel compelled, when I notice that I haven't posted in almost a month, to say something. Anything! Even, say, a meta-entry about how I haven't posted entries, replete with, say, a metaphor pulled out of the air. Just to keep the connection active.

*Yeah, I didn't actually mention that he was in the Australian military. I don't know, I just didn't think it really mattered. Probably should have, though, as it makes my seemingly pointless anecdote seem more foreign, doesn't it? "Ooh, Australia, is it? Well, now your geezerly memories seem so ... South Pacifical!" Well, I'll have you know, mysterious uncredited narrator, that my spell-check has alerted me that neither "geezerly" nor "Pacifical" are real words! Also, my content-check has alerted me that this footnote is increasingly unnecessary.