(Un/Re/I )Do Nominated for a Pushcart

Hi all,

I just received word today that "(Un/Re/I )Do" was nominated for a Pushcart prize. It originally appeared in this past summer's issue of Alligator Juniper.

In other news, I've been working on putting together my thesis for my final semester and I'm finding out that I won't be able to submit the full book as my thesis. The thesis limit is 200 pages, and I'm at well over 250 with 3 unfinished stories still to go in. This is kind of a sad revelation for me, but at the same time, I think it's going to give me a little more leverage room to assemble a smaller selection of already done stuff and then be able to spend more time on new material. I think the subset of Not an Autobiography will be masquerading as Fractured Self.

Zen and the art of computer fuckups

So I'm a computer guy, right? I should know better than to break my home computer. But you know what, I did just that. Below is a cautionary tale of sleep deprivation, time constraint pressures, and mild stupidity:

Two thirty AM and she still won't sleep. But bouncing, sootzing (everyone else calls them binkies, i call it a sootzer), and holding her close is keeping the howl from the depths of the abyss at bay. My only problem: I'm fucking exhausted. It's late into week three, and I'm leaving for school in a couple of days, and my child has not yet learned the blissful value of deep sleep.

Two thirty AM and I need to stay awake. Too many nights before I've nightmared about falling asleep with her in my arms--waking then in terror when she wasn't there only to find her in bed where she was all along.

Two thirty AM and I am reading release notes for SuSe 10.3. My laptop's already done the upgrade hoops. No frills, no problems there. Maybe I can take the leap tonight. Maybe I can upgrade the desktop too. Maybe it'll get done by the time my baby sleeps. Maybe I can do a wireless install.

Two thirty AM and that's one hell of a lot of Maybes. More rational, awake, aware minds would say, "Stop the fuck right there." Those minds weren't present that day at Two Thirty AM.

Not reading, the doc correctly, I fire up YaSt and tell all my packages to update from the server. Things go ok for a bit. Then the installs start failing. Packages die on the way to Nigel (that's the pc's name). Fuck. I abort, hoping not to have destroyed the system too badly.

Think fast at 3 am and you don't think thoroughly. I backup my fiction, and NOTHING else.

Three AM and I slap in the SuSe 10.3 install disk. I know this won't let me install over the network without a hardwire lan connection, but I figure I'll just do the base system and update in the morning.

Four AM, packages selected, install started, and the child is down for the count. System installs take forever, so I join my baby and we collectively hit the hay with my already sleeping wife. Till Day

Till it dawns on me when I check my PC that something seriously bad has happened. It's a failed package. I ignore it, clicking through, thinking "I've seen this before...probably a useless program that linux has 3 redundant similar programs to choose from." Package ignored, install continues, and I wait through it. Initial boot time comes, and INITRD fucks up. I don't know enough about linux to know much about this, but I do know that that means the bootloader just got fucked in the ass. And no bootloader = booting the OS. MOTHERFUCK is the proper term for the moment.

Still not thinking too horribly clearly, I try a full install update by hauling the pc down to the router and jacking into the lan. I waste the weekend with such configurations. It all boils down to a libzypp something or other that hates life and won't download or install.

I get desperate. School is rapidly approaching. I want to spend time with my wife and baby, and I still have all my workshop responses to do. I grab up a little bit of logic and reinstall version 10.2.

This works. Sorta. But it doesn't boot to the graphical system. Stupidity washes over me and I forget the "startx" command, and keep typing "Sax2" instead. (at least my monitor got configured, right?). At this point, If I would have stopped, thought, looked at a couple of things, I could have avoided everything that happened next. But I didn't do any of that, I boldly forged on and fucked up my computer to a point where someone from linuxquestions.org said "serious forensics" would be required to recover my data.

What did I do? A fresh install of SuSe 10.3. Fresh install means format drive, start over, page one.

Why would I do this without backing anything up other than my fiction, you say? Is it because I'd much rather deal with losing all our wedding pictures, honeymoon pictures, a lot of Sue's art, and 30 gigs of MP3s? No. You see, I thought that I backed everything up. My pc has 2 HDDs in it and the 2nd drive was supposed to be dedicated to holding my music collection, and being a 75gb drive, It had plenty of room left over. Under the 10.2 system, I thought I copied my home folder to the Music drive. Thinking and doing are 2 different things. The difference here lies in the fact that I didn't have the music drive mapped correctly, and actually, none of the data I stored in /music actually was on the 2ndary drive. All of it was on the primary.

So when the fresh squeaky version of 10.3 finally loaded and I mounted the music drive, every cell in my body said, "Oh Fuck!"

But I'm a computer guy, right. So all is not lost. (though I did give up for a few days, till my wife told me that many of those photos were required for Christmas gifts. [again Oh Fuck!]).

I flooded the n00b forum of linuxquestions.org and a coupla folks said "so sorry for you," while another couple said that my task was doable, but tricky.

Tricky because I couldn't remember if my filesystem before the format was reiserfs or ext2. And that's a big difference in systems. All I knew for sure was that my pc was ext3 at current.

So fortunately for me, SuSe when updating did a quick format, so I figured most of the data was still there. I downloaded a few live CDs, made specially for system repair, and lucked out with them. One of them allowed me to see the deleted partition, and restore it. Turns out it was reiserfs afterall...something that worked to my advantage because reiserfs has a goddamn wonderful command that allows you to restore a deleted partition. I did that, and within a few hours, data was restored.

In all, I recovered probably 90-95% of what was lost, with most of the loss hitting the mp3 collection (which fortunately is easy to replace).

During this ordeal I learned one hell of a lot about linux, and I also learned something more valuable than anything Pirsig ever talked about in the book that I stole this blog's title from: Never ever update your computer with a screaming infant in your hands.

Live from Louisville

Emilie Simon:



You know, you'd think that since I'm in IT I'd be much more net savvy, but I missed out on the rise of the internet. I don't own a cellphone, and hope not to, nor do I Myspace or really YouTube...but slowly, like an old man, I'm learning the new technology of the time, and as you can see above, I've found the point to YouTube: watching music videos I want to see, unlike my highschool days and MTV where I spent my precious 30 minutes before the schoolbus hoping that Garbage's "Only Happy when it rains," or Collective Soul's "Shine" would play, because if they didn't, if I had to be subjected to fucking "no diggity" or Destiny's Child, I knew I would have a shitty day. Needless to say, I had a lot of shitty days in high school. I think if YouTube existed then, and I had a computer then, I would have enjoyed high school, I would have bee popular, and I wouldn't be live in Louisville now, because Popular people are generally too happy to be introspective enough to feel driven to the forced isolation of the writerly life.

Oh and I miss my wife and daughter immensely right now. Right up to the point that I don't care about using that adverb in the preceding sentence. In my defense, how could I not miss pumpkin butt:

I love the internet.

Check this out:



How can you not love the internet for stuff like that?

Upcoming Publication

Hey all,

I just heard that Wordriot.org will be publishing my story "Abject Objectivity Goes for a Walk" in their November 15 issue. Rock and roll!

Home Sweet Home

Today, Sue, Molly and I just got home from another 4ish day hospital stay. This time, Jaundice was the culprit. I never really thought that We'd have to have Molly hospitalized for Jaundice (since it's such a common infant thing, but we did, and here's the story). Before I get started, though, don't worry. Everything's fine.

When we were originally released from the hospital, Molly's billirubin level was at 9. Billirubin is the stuff the causes Jaundice...and that stuff is actually broken down red blood cells and other junk that need to be shat forth with great force to be removed from the body.

A day after release, they sent a nurse to our house, who checked Molly's Billi scale, and found that it had gone up some more...to like 13 or so. From there, they prescribed Molly to be in a Wallaby. Wallabies, contrary to popular belief, are not miniature kangaroos. They are clunky heat spitting fiber optic light things for babies. The light stimulates the liver to process things and clean the billirubin out of the blood. Normally, a Wallaby is all you need.
And for 2 days, that's what we did. We put up with the loud, bright, wonky thing. It sucked for changing and feeding time because the Wallaby had to be wrapped around her chest, and it's cord wasn't all that long. The only cool thing about it was that it made Molly look like a glow worm.

Unfortunately, her Billi level kept going up, and on Saturday, we were sent to the hospital. To your left is Molly packed into her carseat. Isn't it darling?

Once we got to the hospital (St. V's instead of Hamot (our pediatrician is a St. V's doctor)), they admitted us to the pediatric ward where they put two big billi lights on Molly and drew a metric fuckton of blood before the doctor came in and started screaming at them for drawing far more blood than necessary. When we got to the hospital, Molly's billi level had already dropped a bit--down to 20 from 21 from the morning's check. The doctor had Molly admitted to the NICU, and Since Sue is breastfeeding, we got to keep the room in Pediatrics until things blew over. Sue also got to eat foods on the insurance company's bill because of the breastfeeding. I got to scrounge.

By Sunday, Molly's Billi level had dropped to 12.x and things were looking a lot better. The doctors and nurses also explained to us why things got so bad. Basically, all babies will have jaundice to some minor degree as their bodies expel the billirubin, but Molly's was a little worse than normal because of an AB blood type incompatibility between Sue's and Molly's blood. So when Molly was born, her body killed off all of Sue's blood in her system in addition to the other blood cells of her own, and a giant surplus built up in her system. Furthermore, babies don't start making new red blood cells until all the extra ones created in the womb are recycled. So once this stuff started building up in Molly's system, it made her very tired. The tiredness made it hard for Sue to get Molly to eat, which meant that Molly got dehydrated and then stopped peeing and pooping, and thus that's how we ended up in the hospital.

So they put Molly on an IV and had Sue continue feeding her as normal (though we did have to bottle feed the breastmilk at first), and slowly but surely the Billirubin level came down. On Sunday and Monday, Molly had a really ugly rash from the Billi, but that's pretty much gone now, as is most of that classic yellow skin coloring.

During our stint in the hospital, Sue and I were a nervous wreck, but we were very thankful that Molly only had Jaundice and not something more serious. Sue's mom ferried back and forth between the hospital and the house, taking care of us (making sure I was eating), and the cats, and helping with the phone calls and keeping everyone informed. She did a super job at keeping Sue and I sane during this rough time, and Molly's so lucky to have so many concerned and loving grandparents.

Notice the little sleepy eyes drawn onto Molly's "VR" goggles there in that last picture. One of the nurses did that. We thought it was awesome. In fact, all the nurses in the NICU were fantastic. Another one made a little Raggedy Anne namecard for Molly once things started getting a little more crowded on Monday. Everyone at the hospital did a wonderful job at taking care of our daughter, and because of that, we're home and happy again.

Project Dad

You heard it. On 10/1/2007 at 20:50 after 30 hours of labor involving way too many hours of relentless usage of Pitocin, my wife and I were rewarded with the most beautiful little creature love and marriage can buy: Our very own Molly Marie. Look at her, isn't she darling? I surely think so. Vitals: 7lbs 13oz, 20 1/4 inches. She's been happy, healthy, and an all around great baby in the house.

I'll be posting more soon, but good lord, she's darling.