Of Ten Hour Days and Magellan

The new schedule went into effect last week, not only giving exhaustion a new look, but also transforming my days at work into increasingly annoying adventures in dealing with an all too often unhappy public. Eh, what can one do? Working three days a week is awesome though, truly, because the rest of the week I spend with our son. My better half and I, and the baby obviously, only have one day a week together without other obligations, but so far, apart from falling asleep all the time, we're doing pretty well. Those three days where it is just the boy and I are an interesting mix of joy and frustration, mostly his frustration poor guy, as he is at that stage where he is in orbit around mommy. He also prefers her restaurant to any other, so we often make trips into the city. I think I could really get the hang of this stay-at-home Dad thing. In this part of the world it is a rarity--Maryland has yet to join the twentieth, let alone nineteenth century, in a lot of ways--but sometimes it is important to help nudge people into the now. I'm not usually a fan of the now, but in this case, the massaging of gender roles into something a bit more comfy and logical is a good thing.

Still, some traditions are kind of nice, including one I just met for the first time, Father's Day. I must say it went swimmingly. After a delish lunch with the family, I drove up to the main branch of the Baltimore Fencing Center to watch my pal Craig fence in a tiny foil event. It has been far tooooo long since I saw some fencing, let alone lifted a blade to smack and stick my friends with, so it was good to hear the familiar sounds. He and I drove down to his place in Arlington afterwards to join our respective wife and kids for some further celebrating. My family, my bride has often commented, are a bit like Hobbits with gift-giving: it's a defining feature of my familiar culture. To that end she honored the day with two really cool presents, the first is a "diaper-jacket," which is not, as you might think, a jacket with diaper attachment for those days where restrooms are hard to find, but a really sweet fleece with pockets for all sorts of diaper related gear. Here's a link to it:

http://marisa-kristines.stores.yahoo.net/dacajainbl.html

The other gift is kind of funny as well as super cool: a Magellan Crossover GPS:

Here's the story on that one. For most of my life, the one thing I could pride myself upon, the one gift I seemed to have, was that I was awesome with directions. Drive there once, I could do it again years later; I always knew where the ocean was no matter where we were in a city; that sort of thing. Well, sometime shortly before or after the arrival or our son, I lost this ability. My "human GPS" status had gone. Even finding new Chinese restaurants with Uncle Pete, in cities I used to know like D.C., found us lost once or twice each trip. SO, L. decided to get my a GPS to replace the one I "lost." Very sweet. I have loved it too. This particular model has topos as well as road maps, so the fun can extend beyond pollution-generating transport.