Maebius Musing

As referenced in my prior post, I will be taking a self-prescribed holiday from the Intarweb.

I will still check my email, I will check blogs from my friends (Nettle, Kwitchery, etc), but otherwise my browsing will cease, and my online game playing will be generally suspended.

Originally, I was going to start yesterday, but World of Warcraft beckoned me.   I now have, as of Thursday evening, June 5th, 2008.  My first max-level character!!!   I know it seems petty, but with my playstyle, I was surprised I made it that far.  I’m always more than willnig to help lower-level guildmates,  to go questing and help collect 5 stacks of some crafting material in the starting zones, and the like.  Plus, I roleplay and fish, and dance, so I’m not into powerlevelling.   However, I’m there, and the excitement leading up to that DING was quite palpable.  It honestly feels like a huge achievement.  Like stepping back and looking at a garden you planted which is full of little green sprouts after weeks of digging, tilling, and weeding.   I made it.   Yay me.

Tonight, I’m going to see friends of ours in a locally filmed and produced movie (on the big screen!).  It’s not particularly my usual style of movie, and I fully expect the cheesy factor to outweigh much erudite enjoyment.  But, The Abandoned does play on the local theatre screen, with private tickets only.  Which I have to admire, for even helping get some guy who lives near me “published” like this.   Hope it’s not too bad a movie. 

So now, with that out of the way, I’m offline.   See you in two weeks!

As a bit of an experiment, I plan on taking an entire week off from the Intarwebs.

I’ve noticed my blog feed-reader has grown quite sizable, and it takes me a good 2 hours to scan through all the juicy things I’d like to read each monday.  More if I actually start commenting on things, which I tend to do if work allows.  Fark, Digg, Goggle Reader, Warcraft forums.  Too much time invested.

I’ve also been playing World of Warcraft a lot lately, and am about 2 hours away from DINGing the max level on my priest Kanandi.  This is huge to me, as whilke I’ve played casualy for years, I never made it to max level, while others in my guild have gotten one, sometimes, two characters within reach of lvl 70 in the past couple months.

Yet, the internet is not life.  It is a virtual life.   I need to take a breath and enjoy the real one a bit more.

So, I have set myself some rules.  This is not a complete and total disconnecting, since my employment requires I be online a lot.   Some of our sales reps use my gmail account to communicate with remote offices.  I also want to maintain contact with my friends Wren, Nettle, and Varwolf.  Friends fall under the “Real Life” clause after all. 

The rules:  Starting this Thursday, I will unplug from the majority of my online life, for a period of approximately two weeks, or the Full moon.  Permission hereby granted to extend this timeline as required.

I will limit my email correspondence to work-related activities, and members of the Zen-porch gang (varulv included).

I will limit my own Blog reading to Nettle’s Blog and Kwitchery.

I will not play World of Warcraft, with the exception of logging into my guild leader character once a week, for a MAXIMUM of one hour, in order to resolve any administrative banking stuff.  Grinding XP, gathering loot, and killing pixallated monsters are taboo for this time period.  That character will be stationed in the capital city near the mailbox, ONLY. (this I count as work-related because it is helpful to others in the guild and decidedly the least “fun” I have in the game.)

The time I generally spend playing online at night will be dedicated to either sitting outside (weather permitting) and meditating,  or sitting inside meditating on topics.   I have gotten too far out of the habit of quiet time that is not distracted by electronics.  Personal intervention is required if I want to be in shape for a planned ritual at Starwood.

….that’s it for now.  This blog will be fairly inactive for the next few weeks or month.  You’ve been warned.  Wish me luck.

/|\  Maebius

We had some wonderful friends of ours stop up to visit recently, and have scheduled out some camping trips, and a Starwood Vacation this summer. He’s an engineer, she is an awesome “The Body Shop” saleswoman. (I love their Satsuma line). They have a 2yr old son, and watching their style of parenting gave me a good pondering for my own…

(The below is not meant to challenge or downplay the discussed strategies in parenting, merely highlight some differences to my own method, and ponder in an intelligent manner. I welcome debate. Please leave egos at the door, ye sibling/friend reading this!)

It’s interesting to see how different folks bring up their children, and if looked at in an unbiased manner, allows me to change our own thoughts and techniques. Parenting is an evolving art, and no amount of books can prepare you for the squiggly details of day-to-day parenting. It’s fun, it’s frustrating, but it’s entirely awesome to go through.

One big thing we do with our son is allow him to sleep in our room, and even our bed, whenever he wants. Granted, I’ve often lost sleep from from blunt-foot trauma to my nether-regions, fought the sleepy cover-theft-tango, and such, but we enjoy nestling in at night with a story and seeing a little face yawn and close his eyes right by the crook of his arm. We also are pretty well entrenched in the “mom or dad goes to bed with him” routine. If we are watching a movie, or playing outside, weekend bedtimes tend to stretch a bit later than “officially recommended”, but we sleep in the next day.

We’ve maintained that when he gets older, and school starts up full-time, there will be a period of weaning from this system, as he will need to get up before our current schedules allow for. I fully expect a week of hell when bedtime shifts closer to 7pm and it’s “Still light outside!”. I’m prepared to sleep in his room on the floor. However, even now, there are days when our little one actually requests to go in his bed. (This usually lasts until the midnight pee-time, whereupoin he’s back in our bed, but that’s easy enough to redirect when we bring him up to lay down again).

I see the Pro of the [perceived] mainstream method of “kid in own room, at own bedtime, good night now, shut door.” It gives the kid a set routine, which is important. It allows parental quiet-time in the evenings to work, chat, or whatever. In some part of my brain, I’d rather like that, but our current schedule with the wife waking at 5:30 is one factor our basic “mom and kid go sleep in bed now”. Yours truly then gets to stay up a bit later and play on the computer, or dry dishes, in peace.

It’s an interesting balancing act, between structure and coddling. There are many other things we do which seem odd and even “wrong” to some folks I know. We play video games for an hour if he’s been good at school. Some say games are just setting him up to be a TV/gamer junkie when he’s older. Yet we do limit the time. What weekend visitors do not see is the mid-week fuss when he wants to play and we enforce the ‘No’. I’m a huge proponent of outside time, whether we work in the garden (which bores him to tears), or run around with a bat playing the current favorite-of-the-week “pretend”.

Yesterday, we walked the entire fence line, just my son and I, at his lead, pretending we were “adventuring dragons”. My legs were not up for it, and there was plenty to do back home, but it was “Daddy hour” so I hiked through tall grasses and dodged ubiquitous thorn clusters. We found such geographic realms as (A)Reed Forest (near the pond), (B)Buttercup Field, (C)Spyro Flower Hill (so named because of unidentified purple flowers), (D)Thorn Path, and (E)Cow Skull Treehouse, and finally (F)Tree Slide Hill. This was a ton of fun, and something we encourage, though a family member expressed concern with encouraging him to wander so far away from the house.

There are many other examples I could toss out, such as snacking throughout the day, eating something different for dinner (Not that we allow just anything for dinner if he doesn’t like what we have, he just gets bigger servings of sides), and such. Yet it all comes down to one point.

Structure vs Freedom.

There are many points along the bell curve, and I’m finding we fall distinctly on one foothill slope. Are we too far down one side? Perhaps. But I’ll hold my tongue and accept that there are many, many other points along the curve. Life is nothing if not diverse. I like how we live, and will support our son, even if he grows to become the complete opposite of us.
…and if you are at all interested in “The Dragon Adventure”, I’ve created a map using Google Earth. Labels are described above.

I have a full-moon post in draft, honest. It concerns navel-gazing and friend-visits. It’s just still stuck in outline form and needs fleshing out, which is tough at work this week due to being the only one in the office (coworker vacation FTL)…. so, in no particular order a few mini-posts glommed together over the course of this week:

We have four new pets in the house, who look surprisingly like Mitosis. (brought in after their nest got lawn-mowed and fur-poofed.) They are SOOO CUTE! Will get pictures ASAP.

I am really enjoying “World of Warcraft” again. Apparently, I am getting a reputation as a darn-good healer even with quasi-crappy gear, and am starting to get randomly spammed invites to lvl 70 instances when I am online. Just dinged lvl 68. Also, Kanandi’s guild-mastering is getting much easier, since we now have a stable core of active people, and officers got clearly defined roles. Our casual nature made me frown upon seeming authoritative, but once I hammered out some basic outlines of what I needed people to handle, they offered to help and there was a sudden, blessed, synergy. It just works now, with little administrative crap to deal with. This frees me up to random-group heal. (Fact that a call for donations to upgrade our guild-bank resulted in 1,200 gold being donated over one week says a LOT for the loyalty and cooperation of my guild, with only three of our members at lvl 65+)

I completely rearranged my buttons, made a few simple macros, and such for my hunter, Nookni. While he is still stuck in Azeroth, I used the techniques and habits I got into with Kanandi-healing to put the most commonly used abilities on the same keys. This suddenly made using my hunter to farm and grind XP a whole exponential-level easier. Not sure why I didn’t do it before, but suddenly, it’s FUN to play the [solo] hunter again, and the lack of fun is why my prist is lvl 68 after my hunter of ~3 years is only lvl 55.

Also, just felt to need to brag that I was fighting a group of 4 demons a level below me, and managed to chain-trap one of them FOUR times, kept the crab off-tanking one, and proceeded to kite the other two with spams of wingclip, concussive shot, and WyvrenSting. Oh yeah, I was awesome! (drained mana pretty well, but only got hit a few times and was still at 90% health! I coulda taken 5!) I had never, ever done something like that so efficiently before. WoooHOO!

In other news, the garden has some tiny sprouts visible now, the seed-trays are going outside this weekend, and I hope to string-out my labyrinth on Sunday or Monday so we can begin officially hauling piles of poop to outline it. I was somewhat holding off in hopes of borrowing a roller to flatten and properly prepare the site, but recent walks around the area seem to lean me towards keeping it as-is. Might have better ‘natural resonance’ that way?

The hops bine[sic] is climbing steadily up the tree-post and is about level with my shoulder now, for those of you keeping track.

I have this sudden general sense of anti-ennui regarding my life. Nothing I can put my finger on, or point to other than the weather getting warmer, getting more stubborn in making my son go to bed ON TIME, and work being busy enough to keep me occupied, yet not overly stressful. Busy, yes, but hectic, less so.

A recent visit from friends of ours (who is an engineer) showed that a bit more structure might not be a bad thing. Doug almost wants to go to bed, and is fussing less and less now at night, so we might be over the initial hump of being firmly “Do it, now…because we said….now”. (more on this with up coming Moon-post).

That’s all for now…

It’s not often I find myself navel-gazing too closely when doing meditations. (see mirror-phobia)

Our little one is entering Kindergarden, and turning 5 years old this fall. (He’s all growed up!) What follows is a photo-spam of his recent school artwork, and him riding the buss when they visited the Kindergarden school this week. Dialup users BEWARE!

He went in for his official evaluation yesterday, and completed the battery of tests with fairly predictable and proud-parent results. Forgive me for a bit of well-intentioned bragging.

As for mental development, he was well over average in terms of vocabulary (he’s reading signs on store shelves now, while his Pre-K peers are learning their letters), and impressed everyone with his creativity, and exuberance to get tested. Average IQ for intellectual/creative/vocab wound up being somewhere around 125 (vocab/language skill was up at 131!).   GO BOY!

Otherwise, our concerns about his general habit of fidgeting during class, not paying attention, and constantly mumbling stories or singing under his breath were slightly assuaged. This type of behavior is slightly disruptive, but…. His ability to memorize lists and such, even though initially outwards he was not “paying attention”, then reciting them back later and getting all creative like saying them backwards, showed that he fidgets because he’s somewhat ‘bored’ with the simple things he does in school. Thus, he fidgets to stay stimulated.

One noticable improvement-area was a possible lack of focus in his left eye. He can not cross his eyes at all, and turns his head to follow a pencil moved towards that peripheral. Granted, I can not cross my eyes either, which my wife never knew. Nothing as serious as needing glasses, just something to watch… (and if he does, they will need to be prism glasses, like vertical bifocals). Otherwise, I’m going to summarize his “evaluation” as him being Gifted, and slightly out of focus, which causes the tired tantrums if he’s been playing games or inside all day. I’m guessing our noticing that video games tires him out slightly is due to effort at concentrating/focusing. All in all, a great report-card!

/cue Proud Papa.

In art, they made collages. The brown label/note reads as follows: “Piet Mondrain / Henry Matisse : Mondrain used primary colors and basic shapes. When Matisse became too feeble to paint, he did collages. We combined both styles for this project.” Our little one made the rather zen collage with three yellow shapes, centered on black. One circle, one square, one triangle. “That’s all it needed”, he said.

Next, we have the portrait class. He has two teachers, one with straight short hair, one with curly hair. See if you can tell which one is which.

Next on our Tour De Artiste, we have the interpretation of “sunflowers” by Vincent Van Gogh. Doug’s is the one of the bottom left, which I think looks remarkably like an orange dragon traipsing through a wooded field. He describes it as “The yellow are dandelions, the green is chive stems, and the orange is our yummy violets because she didn’t give me purple.“. How kawaiii!

Finally, the wall outside their Pre-K classroom, filled with painted flowers, bumble-plate-bees, and a rainbow of hand-prints.