All posts by tim

Co-sleeping?

I am insane

It looks like the second largest cause of death for children in Austin might be because of the uptick in co-sleeping:

Travis County officials warn parents — don’t use alcohol, drugs or sedating medicines if you chose to sleep with your infant. The safest place for you baby to sleep is a crib or bassinet. Always place an infant on their back to sleep.

This is especially scary since:

In 2007, seven children died of suffocation or asphyxiation. And so far in 2008, Travis County has already reached that same number.

I definitely sleep to heavily to sleep with a child in bed.

Hooray for Light Rail

Public Transportation

This is awesome. They’re proposing light rail through my neck of the woods.

View Larger Map

Hopefully this won’t get killed by all the haters in the suburbs. Maybe by throwing them a bone in the case of commuter rail they’ll let those of us in central austin have light rail.

I’m actually hopeful about this. By going down Riverside there are no obstructionist Neighborhood Associations to get in the way, and a lot of new condo developers who would love this amenity. It will provide a quick and easy way for us to get to the long center (and the Dougherty Arts Center by proxy), the hike and bike trail, etc. And I’m sure they’ll rejigger a lot of the bus routes to meet up with it.

I know I shouldn’t get excited about it, but it would be a really good change for Austin. The last few times I’ve gone downtown at night I’ve noticed that parking is becoming a nightmare. The Long center costs $7/car. Which I suppose is normal if you’re seeing a $100 show. But if you’re seeing a $15 show in the small theater it’s a bit exorbitant. We really need something like this to keep people in downtown and the cars out.

More Trail

Politics

Great News! No matter what you feel about this neighborhood associations vs. developers story, the fact that we’re getting the extension to the Lady Bird Lake Trail is great news. That was one of the worst stretches to run on the sidewalk, and navigating through the parking lot to get to the sidewalk was always an adventure in not getting hit by a government employee traveling 50mph over speed bumps.

On the topic of buses…

Public Transportation

The Austinist is running a series on getting to know your city council candidate. It’s been uninteresting to say the least. It looks like they’re all copying each other’s answers – “Growth Bad! Bring Back Old Austin!”. But it truly got into ridiculous in the interview with Ken Weiss:

I’m proposing that CAPMETRO go to a hub and spoke system. The hub and spoke system is utilized by every major freight company in the world, including FedEx and U.P.S. The hubs would be the current transfer centers located around town. Express buses would be uses solely at direct one stop buses from point A to point B. For example, you would get on an express bus at North lamer and 183 transfer center and ride all the way to the new transfer center at Congress Avenue and Ben White Boulevard. Limited buses would be confined to major roads like Lamar, Burnet Road, Congress, Guadalupe, Springdale Road, Airport Boulevard, and the like. These buses would stop only every 15 or 20 blocks and at those stops are where people could transfer to local buses. The local bus would be the bus making all the stops in a particular area or neighborhood. This route would utilize smaller buses such as a 15, 20 or 25 foot bus or even 15 passenger vans as the case may be rather than a 40 foot bus. These buses would stay strictly in the local neighborhoods.

Genius! He managed to describe the exact system CapMetro uses today. Exactly. Including almost getting the locations of the transit centers correct. He then goes on to criticize the city for “budget spending”. So I don’t think he’s a particularly viable candidate, but his answers aren’t that far off of Jennifer Kim.

Where’d the students go?

Public Transportation

Julie and I have been having this ongoing debate about the number of students living around us. I think there are very few, she thinks there are about the same. I contend that the bus stops should be full when I jog by them at 7:15am, she contends that students don’t wake up that early.

So I jogged past one of the stops today and noticed that they’re discontinuing the PB line. That’s the one that goes down Parker and Burton. The one I took to school when I was in college. It’s being discontinued because students don’t live over here much anymore.

Interesting, although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The apartments Julie and I lived in are a condo conversion now

On a sort of related note, we took a walk and wandered through Edgewick yesterday. It’s a Newmark subdivison they’re building. It’s basically a bunch of small homes, townhomes, and garage apartment homes all stuck quite close together. We toured a few, and they really use the space wonderfully. Would have been great for us before we had kiddos.

But I am sort of sad that such a big development is not going to add any more kids to this area. I wonder if the City of Austin is right, and that in ten years we’ll be discussing shutting down Linder, rather than overcrowding issues. It doesn’t take long to do apartment to condo conversions, and there are a lot of apartments around here with desirable city and lake views.

Goodbye Roxie

Trauma Jar

Julie and I were getting groceries on that stormy day. We had our hands full and as I fished in my pocket to get the keys to the front door I saw something behind me. It was a bedgralled blond dog with long overgrown hair. She appeared to have decided to come in the house with us.

I put her in the backyard, but she started barking due to the thunder. Feeling sympathy I convinced Julie to let me bring her in and give her a bath. Julie didn’t want to. I gave her the bath and Roxie followed Julie around the house for the next day. Obviously knowing who she had to convince to get adopted. She was our hobo dog. Ready to settle down after a rough life riding the rails.

So yesterday stunk. We had our vet appointment for Roxie at 4:30pm. That morning Stella was a hellion. Screaming louder than we had ever heard her scream before. She’s been off kilter because our lives have been so busy, and I think our generally despondent mood just pushed her over the edge.

My mom graciously volunteered to watch Stella while we took Roxie in. Roxie had been lying in her bed for two days. I occasionally picked her up and took her to the water bowl or took her outside. While Julie was gone I took her to her water bowl. She drank a bit, then staggered towards the back door.

I took her outside and she stood on the grass. Then she staggered around, wagging her tail with her head in the air. Roxie was never a big tail wagger, so you could really tell that she enjoyed being outside. She wandered slowly through her normal haunts. Then she stopped at the best place in the yard. There’s a box hedge to the left and the right, and you can see the entire yard all the way up to the 600 year old oak tree.

Roxie just stood there for about 20 minutes looking at the oak tree. When I look at that tree I feel like my life is so short. Many generations have come and gone under that tree. I can’t even imagine how old it must feel for a dog.

Her passing was quick. The vet agreed that while she could potentially help her, she could never get her quality of life back up to anything resembling good. We got to spend some time saying goodbye to her after we agreed that putting her to sleep was the best option. They put her on a leopard print blanket so that she wasn’t on the cold examining table. She looked very peaceful as we looked into her eyes. Then she was gone and they took her away. And we sobbed for a bit. And then left to go get Stella and get some big hugs.

This morning Stella said, “No pee yet” when we walked into the kitchen. She had become the pee spotter for incontinent Roxie. And I had to explain to her that Roxie wouldn’t be peeing on our floor anymore, and that she’d gone to the doghouse in the sky to be one of Jesus’ doggies. And she did her frownie face for a few seconds and gave me a hug, and then ate her breakfast.

Thanks to everyone for your kind words.

I didn’t think it would be so hard

Trauma Jar

So my dog Roxie is dying. From what I can tell she’s dying of old age. This has involved a loss of appetite. Loss of weight. A bit of dementia. A bit of hearing loss. A lot of incontinence.

We kept expecting to wake up one morning and she wouldn’t wake up with us.

But she just keeps getting worse. Her back legs barely keep her up. This morning she woke me up howling softly. She was splayed out flat on the floor. She had slipped and landed so that she was partially under our Victrola, and couldn’t get up. Plus she had slipped on her own waste. Which I’m assuming was not particularly pleasant for her to lay in.

This insured that she got a bath today. Which she found unpleasant.

Then at lunch time she got stuck in the middle of one of our box hedges. And barked to be let out. Just now she got stuck inside a chair. I’ve figured out that she’s getting into these messes because she’s trying to stand up with something else helping to prop her up.

She’s sitting on my lap now. I guess we’ll need to see the vet in the next few days.

I guess I’ve been prepared for her to die, but not for her to suffer.

You can treat me like a rockstar.

Personal

My new shoes

Shoes. For many years I hated shoe shopping. I did it as infrequently as possible.

This started at age 12 when my feet hit size 13. I bought my first pair of white Reebok hightops on a summer trip to visit my grandmother in Michigan. They seemed like a good idea at the time. They were a name brand. Which made me feel like I was cool, even if no one else saw it that way.

I got these same shoes the next year when my feet hit size 14. And the next when they hit 15. By the point they hit 15 it was less of a choice as that’s what they had in the store. The size 15 white Reebok hightops were hand carried in a suitcase into the Soviet Union. There is video of me dancing in them, my voice cracking. At the point the video was taken I was 6’2″ and somewhere between 100 and 120 pounds due to a bout of Amoebic Dysentery, and so the shoes appear to have been taken from a giant japanese transforming robot. There are many pictures during our travels of other children wearing my shoes. Engulfed up to their knees in white shoes.

When I came back, I decided it was time for something a little more practical. Something that would let my ankle bend. So I decided to go with the fashion trend from a few years back and buy some top-siders. I went down to the big-and-tall store. Figuring that was an appropriate place to buy large shoes. You know, because they sell clothes for big-and-tall people. Me being a tall person.

Once there the salesman found the top-siders for me and asked if I was going to go water skiing. Or head out to Colorado. At the big-and-tall store. And that’s pretty much how it went for years after. I would go into a store and ask what shoes they had in my size. They would bring me out a box and crack a joke. About watershiing, or snow skiing. And I would decide if I was at all interested in their 1 pair of shoes. More often than not it was on to to the next store.

A few years ago, my oldest sister (who also has feet proportionate to her height, but out of proportion with what stores want to stock) told me about Zappos. Where you could put in your shoe size, and they’d show you all the shoes they had in stock. I figured this sounded good, but I was completely unprepared to have thousands of choices. The first pair of shoes I bought there was almost impossibly difficult because I had too much choice. I had gone from the Soviet shoe-stores to the west, and it was too much.

Last night I went back again. Chose size-15. Men’s shoes. Black. And got my list of hundreds of shoes. I chose what I wanted and made my purchase at about 5pm last night. They have free shipping to you. And free shipping back if the shoes don’t fit. When I checked my email this morning, I got an email saying they’d expedited my order. Just because. I can only assume that there must be someone there with size 15 feet who knows what I’ve been through and sped things up for me. I had another email waiting with my tracking number. I went to UPS and looked it up. The shoes are out for delivery.

Wow. Around 14 hours after I placed my order the shoes are on a truck, and I’ll get them today. What rockstars.

My view on writing

Watching Theater

Neil Gaiman sums up my entire view on playwrighting. He was asked to provide counterpoints to people who had interpreted or analyzed his work:

Once you’ve written something it’s not yours any longer: it belongs to other people, and they all have opinions about it, and every single one of those opinions is as correct as that of the author – more so, perhaps. Because those people have read the work as something perfectly new, and, barring amnesia, an author is never going to be able to do that. There will be too many ghost-versions of the story in the way, and besides, the author cannot read it for the first time, wondering what happens next, comparing it to other things that he or she has read.

And theater even more so. Because you have actors and directors who have crafted the characters in very specific ways. Some that veer further from what is in your mind, and some closer. You have designers who are creating an enivronment that is valid, but that can be very different from what you see in your head.

And if that isn’t enough change, you bring in the audience. And they bring in their own views, expectations, and experience. Every audience will laugh at different jokes. Be touched by different moments. And the reactions of their fellow audience members will color their reactions. As will the review they read in the press. And so it becomes this amazing collaborative effort, Between everyone involved, especially the audience. Rather than just passive, they make the meaning. And the playwright was just the person who started with a few words.

We actually saw a play last week that was very symbolic. And we were able to overlay this play like a stencil on the playwright, and her husband’s lives (as we imagine them), and it seemed incredibly personal and autobiographical. But we don’t really know the playwright and her husband. So we might have been reading too much into it. And the playwright might have had no clue that this symbolic play was almost a one-to-one parallel to her life. It might have been subconscious. So in that case who is the arbiter of meaning? Who is the most right?

What do you think? Does meaning belong to the writer or the audience? And is one more right than the other?