30 January 2010
A few days ago, I solved the problem of our eye-sore bookshelf.
You see, we bought the bookshelves you see pictured here nearly two years ago. I boldly declared that I would ensure all our books would fit onto this shelf and, that should we acquire new books, I would get rid of old ones to make room for the new ones.

So this assertion fell flat on its face. We simply own too many books, and the number constantly rises. Soon, the shelf you see here featured books laying on their side stacked on top of the original books. Very ugly.
But then I had the lamest epiphany in the history of epiphanies: I can stack the wicker baskets on the top shelf, thereby freeing up room for books up there. Then I can reorganize my books the proper way.
What you see here is the end result. I took our set of stone bookends, placed them on the top, and removed thirteen “general knowledge” books from the shelves (think Guinness books and almanacs). My wife insisted they be placed in size order for aesthetic reasons, so I complied even though I saw no rationale. Then, with about 12 inches of freed-up space, I set to work organizing my books once again, as they had been two years ago. My wife go in on the action, and together we pulled about a dozen more books off the shelf to be taken to Half Price Books, where the cheap-skates there will probably give me 75 cents for the books.
Today, I finished the project, including realigning our secondary shelf off to the right (that one houses fiction and cookbooks, so I generally shy away from that one).
In case you’re wondering, I keep the books in order of subject, like the Dewey Decimal System, only better. My books are in order of importance. By “importance,” I mean: if aliens came down to our planet and wanted to know what we knew, they could start at the top of my shelf and work their way down. Or, put better: if I forgot everything about the world in a horrible (but strangely appealing) freak accident, I hope my wife would have the good sense to say: “Well, all you have to do is read these books, beginning at the top left and working your way down to the bottom right.”
The ranking (from most- to least-important) is as follows:
General knowledge
General science
Mathematics
Physics
Chemistry
Cosmology/Cosmogony
Astronomy
Geography
Biology
Zoology
Baby/Child Care
Language/Etymology
History
Biography
Art: Painting/Sculpting/Drawing
Art: Photography
Art: Film
Television
Music
Computers
Humor
Religion
Fiction
…Okay, okay, I know you can make solid arguments here, such as that music is more important than TV, but besides ranking by importance, I also try to flow from one topic to the next. For example, drawing kind of flows naturally into photography, which flows naturally into film, which flows into TV, relegating music to a lower position than it should have. Also, I agree that a book on taking care of a human baby should trump a book about black bears, but in that case I work up the “ladder” – books about plants come before those about fish, which come before those about mammals, which comes before humans.
Don’t like it? Don’t worry. I don’t let people borrow my books anyway.

31 January 2010
So here I am at the end of the first month of the year. This is, for me, nearly a repeat of the final day of last month: my wife and son went to bed unusually early, and I am staying up late taking care of selfish pursuits.
Today started off rather slow. Owen and I watched some videos on YouTube. Then we had breakfast. I finished reading a book I just obtained a few weeks ago (try finding the gap in the books above to determine the subject of the book I was reading). Around 11:00, Jennifer said it would be a good day to get some work done around the apartment. So, since I guess we’re gonna live here for a while more, we rearranged some things in Owen’s room; we moved his chalkboard and his kitchen, and made room for a shelf that had spent the last year in our room. We organized some stuff in our room, too, and got to vacuum some areas that hadn’t seen a vacuum in a while.
We left the house around 4:00 and drove to Mississippi Market. There, we bought a few things to use with dinner this coming week, and I finally purchased this cool handmade wallet I had been coveting for about a month now. We next went to Cub, which is always such an unremarkable adventure I’m not sure why I’m wasting such a long sentence discussing it. Then we went to a Minnesota Atheist meetup. Today’s meetup featured an all-you-can-eat spaghetti buffet, which we attended partly because we had nothing else to do and partly because our friends Chad and Mindy would be there. I’m glad we went – our friends showed up, we met some other cool people, reconnected with some people we’d met at the Children’s Museum a few weeks back, ate a lot of food, and let Owen tire himself out running around with a bunch of other little heathens.
There you have it. One month down, eleven to go.

27 January 2010
Between yesterday and today, I’ve been checking out houses for sale. My wife finds houses that look decent, and then sends me the links, and I tell her what I think of them.
We’re gonna try to buy a house this spring. While I like the idea of living in a house, the whole process of getting approved for a mortgage, finding a realtor, driving around looking at houses and making offers on houses is very unappealing to me. I’ve done it too often; more than I thought I would have. One reason why it annoys me so much is because we always seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. To put it in simple terms, it’s as if all the good houses are at least $150, but we can only get approved for $100. So we look for houses, and see that there’s nothing nice for less than $120. So we make an offer, which gets rejected. I hate it.

28 January 2010
Tonight, I went into Owen’s room to say goodnight to him and he immediately stared crying, saying that he wished our cat Oliver hadn’t died. This was somewhat of a repeat of last night, when he said that he was worried that he was starting to forget what Oliver looked like.
Oliver and Owen were pretty much best friends; we have lots of video and photos of the two of them playing together. While our other cat initially viewed Owen as an outsider competing with her for the attention of the adult humans in the home, Oliver warmed right up to Owen and accepted him as just another person in the family that could pet him.
Oliver died last June, not quite making it to his seventh birthday. Owen’s sadness regarding this loss has recently been renewed, I think, because our other cat, Emmaline, has suddenly decided to start sleeping on Owen’s bed. Oliver used to do this all the time, and Owen felt very special because of it. I’m not sure what made Emmaline suddenly decide to pick up where her littermate left off (cold weather?), but when she hops up on Owen’s bed, it immediately reminds him of Oliver.
I told Owen he could pretend that Emmaline is Oliver when he feels her down by his feet in bed like that, but he pointed out that Emmaline doesn’t stay on the bed as long: “She only stays on my bed when other people are here,” he said, which is his way of noting that Emmaline sometimes jumps off his bed when my wife or I leave Owen’s room for the night.
Owen says he wants another cat, and I feel the same way. The problem is, cats are expensive at first, and there’s a good chance Emmaline won’t like the new cat, or that the new cat won’t sleep on Owen’s bed, either.

29 January 2010
Remember the other day when I whined about our bad timing regarding all major life events? Well, this morning, as I was leaving for work, I picked up my cell phone and saw that I had a voicemail. It was the woman who we’ve been working with to get our mortgage. She said that she took a closer look at our paperwork and realized that our short sale was only two years ago. “You need to wait three years after a short sale before buying another house,” she said.
This really took the wind out of my sails, to use a cliche’. As my wife pointed out later when I spoke to her on the phone, there is no way this mortgage lady didn’t know about this before; in several email and phone conversations, we had told her the date of our short sale, and she said nothing to correct us.
This pisses me off because, ironically, after complaining about our bad timing in a previous post, my wife said that at least our timing in buying a house is good this time around.
Well, if it seems to good to be true, it is (sorry, I just used another cliche’). Interest rates are low, housing prices are low, I have ample vacation time to use, and a new home would be the perfect place for Jennifer when she has the new baby.
Now it looks like we’ve gotta wait another year. I’m sure the interest rates will double in the next year, and housing prices will soar, meaning 12 months from now we won’t be qualified to buy anything nice. And is it possible to have a home birth in an apartment? I guess I shouldn’t care if we make a lot of noise on that day, none of our neighbors seem to care about their volume.
So what’s gonna happen next? I don’t know.

25 January 2010
A few days ago, an agent wrote to me saying that she had read my entire manuscript (she had previously requested I send her the whole thing). She had some very nice things to say about the manuscript, though she said the first half dragged a bit. Halfway through her email, she told me she regretfully could not take me on as one of her clients. She cited the economy as a reason.
Today, I wrote back to her sympathizing with the current economic climate. I told her of my plan to have the book professionally edited, even asking her if she would be willing to specify what she feels would be an ideal length for the first half. A couple of hours later, she responded by saying something like: “James, I was being honest when I said I couldn’t take you on as a client right now. Ask me again in two years.”
This seemed odd to me, as I was unsure how she could’ve mistaken my words as an indictment of her honesty. (Shouldn’t reading comprehension be one of her strong suits?) Weird.
This seems to be something of a theme in my life: I go to college after moving out on my own and getting married, I buy a townhome when the price of housing is skyrocketing, then buy a house when the market is even worse. When I got hired at Lenscrafters, it was an employer’s market, and I was chronically underpaid for the first five years I worked there. Now I’m shopping a book around when no one is buying books.
My timing is all wrong.
Maybe I should invest in a newspaper business right now. Or buy stock in a VCR company.

26 January 2010
Speaking of timing…
My wife and I are about six months away from having our second child. Yes, that’s right, I have once again infected my wife with that sexually transmitted disease known as “life.”
We had an ultrasound a couple of weeks ago, and they checked to make sure everything looked normal. (Looks can be deceiving though: I guarantee that little fetus has OCD.) That’s about the only sort of ‘medical’ thing we’re going to do, though. I think of having a baby as just another thing a body does… it’s natural and there’s no need to interfere. I mean, of course, things can and do go wrong, so I’m grateful to live in a country that has outstanding (if unaffordable) medical care.
Today we interviewed our fourth and final midwife. The idea of a midwife is to come to your home when you’re about to give birth and provide any support that you need. Notice: this is different than the doctors, nurses, and midwifes at hospitals, who are there to provide any support they possibly can. Ideally, I wouldn’t even want a midwife there, but I suppose they’re kind of like a car mechanic. Yeah, that’s right, I said a car mechanic. Let’s say I plan to drive across country – I can do it. I know I can do it. Sure, there’s bound to be some necessary maintenance, such as refueling and checking the air in the tires. And there is the remote chance that something will go very wrong. So I’ll hire a mechanic to sit in the backseat and ride with me. He’s not going to interfere unless he really has to. And I mean REALLY has to; if there’s just a flat tire, or if I need my battery jumped, I can handle that. He’s just there for the very unlikely stuff.
I hope that makes the idea of a home midwife understandable to the men who are reading this.
At any rate, at the ultrasound we asked not to be told the gender (which probably was nearly impossible to tell this early anyways). So who knows? A boy? A girl? We don’t know. This means we have twice the work: we have to pick out two names. The upshot is that we have twice the number of names we can immediately cross off: James AND Jennifer.

22 January 2010
This evening, we ate at Panera. I had a gift card, so it was a rather inexpensive meal. I learned that Panera isn’t such a great place for vegetarians; nearly every soup, salad and sandwich has some kind of meat (almost always chicken) in it. There are a couple of salads without meat, but they’re just plain, boring salads, which I could buy at any restaurant. The only non-meat soup is a French Onion concoction, which I tried last time I was at Panera, and it tasted like snot. Or, rather, it tastes like what I imagine snot would taste like.
I was weak today and ordered the potato soup, which has chicken in it. I’m not sure why they had to throw chicken in there, but they did. I ordered it in a bread bowl, which my wife lovingly pointed out is a waste of money since it:
A. Costs $1.00 more,
B. Doesn’t have as much soup as a regular bowl, and
C. GIve a person way more bread than they actually want to consume.

23 January 2010
Today was a stay-at-home day. My wife decided she was going to make a big batch of really tasty soup. She used a bunch of fresh ingredients, including whole peppers that she chopped up. She even sent me to the store to purchase some cumin. This was the only time all day that I left home. I drove four blocks. Yes, I know, it’s kind of pathetic to drive four blocks. But, come on, the sidewalks are buried under mounds of snow, and it was raining. So I drove to Mississippi market and bought some bulk cumin.
I took the first spoonful of soup and immediately began coughing. The vapors alone were spicy enough to irritate my respiratory system. Owen declared it was too spicy and didn’t take a second spoonful. Jennifer concurred. I finished the bowl of soup (it was tasty, after all), though it required me to get up twice: once to refill my glass of water and once to blow my nose. I actually used the soup more as a kind of salsa, dipping lime flavored chips into the soup to scoop up just the smallest amount. Jennifer plans to buy some more broth to dilute it. Oh well…

24 January 2010
Today, while the rest of the state spent the evening with their best friend (football), Owen and I went and played board games with a meet-up group.
I don’t want to say I don’t care about football, but by comparison to nearly everyone else, I really don’t. My parents are the same way, and so I guess I inherited such non-caring from them. The thing is, I don’t really get the whole attraction to the local team – or any local team, for that matter. What’s the appeal of the one particular team that happens to play closer to my home than any other? I mean, I understand why a person would support their local high school, or even college team: they maybe went to that school, their kids go to that school, or maybe it’s just because all the kids from that school are the local neighborhood kids. But not so pro-sports. Players are traded back and forth across the country and no thought is given to where the team resides. If I’m a Vikings fan, what does that mean? Did I love the Vikings team that existed in 1998? If so, is it just coincidence that I am a fan of the 2009 team? Because they’re two totally different teams, made up of people who were raised and schooled from various other states and who maybe spent the bulk of their pro careers playing for other teams.
Maybe people like the local teams because, hey, they play in a conveniently located place. I could understand this with baseball, where the home team plays nearly a hundred home games each year. But football? How attached can you get to a team that plays in town ten times at most? And considering the going rate for seats at a football game, how many home games does a person even attend? Most fans just watch it on TV, thereby negating the benefit of having them play nearby. I guess, in this way, I am more capable of understanding one’s love of a particular athlete, regardless of the team they’ve partnered with this year. I am much more sympathetic to people’s attraction towards Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, or Michael Jordan than to, say, the Timberwolves.
And isn’t it odd that we don’t apply this proximity rule to anything else? Should I prefer the music of Bob Dylan or Prince, or that old classic Surfin’ Bird due to their Minnesotan roots? Does Jingle All the Way, or anything by the Coen brothers automatically get two thumbs up?
I am also intrigued by the emotional investment given such teams. WIthin minutes of today’s loss, my Facebook page was flooded with angry, upset, and otherwise depressed friends – some who I didn’t even know cared for football. I have a few favorite films from the past year – and if they do not take home some Oscar gold next month, I am going to be mighty pissed off.

20 January 2010
Today I declined an offer from an agent. A few agents have been responding to me lately. Two of them said no. Another said something like, “There’s no way I would represent something like that.” Another agent said she wasn’t taking new clients at this time, and another turned me down due a family crisis that suddenly put a moratorium on her work.
But, among others, I received an email from one agent who said she loved the sample chapters I sent her. She said my story needs to be told – it needs to be “out on the shelves” to use her words. She then began to detail all the work my book need, from an editing standpoint. I’m fine with this, because I know the book isn’t perfect; I know it’s too long. But then she said that it needs to be edited and that we will need to do this before sending it out to publishers. Oddly, she next tried to preempt any objections I would have to this. Then she said that she also works as an editor (isn’t this my lucky day?) and that she’d be willing to edit my book. She asked me to let her know if this sounded good to me and, if so, she would respond with her fees.
So I thought about this for several days. To me, this sounds like a conflict of interest. If she makes money off of her clients by editing their books, where’s the incentive for her to make money marketing the book?
Today I replied by saying (in part):
“I am reluctant to hire an agent as my editor. Many sources warn of agents who make their living editing their clients’ books. It seems that in generating income in this manner, agents are less aggressive in seeking a publisher for their clients. … I will pass on your offer to edit for the time being.”
For several hours after writing this email, I fretted that I’d done the wrong thing. “Maybe I just shot myself in the foot,” I said to myself (I use clichés when I talk to myself). When I got home this evening, however, there was an email waiting for me. In its entirety, it read: “okay; thanks for getting back to me.”
Yep, that was the whole message, complete with a non-capitalized ‘o’. When I read this email, I knew I’d made the right decision.

21 January 2010
Owen was very interested in the new calendars we hung up at the beginning of the year. He made me pick him up and answer all sorts of questions about the calendar, like: “What does that say?” (He asked that in reference to “New Year’s Day,” written on January 1). He asked why there was nothing written on the 21st, and I just shrugged my shoulders and said: “I don’t know, there’s just nothing special going on that day.” He asked if we were going to do anything, and I said: “Well, I’ll probably go to work, and you’ll go to preschool.” He then announced: “We are going to IKEA that day.”
“Oh really?” I asked.
“Yes. Write it on the calendar, okay?”
So I did.
Then he asked me to write down that we were going to go at 5:30.
So I did.
And that’s what we did today.
Well, pretty close, at least. We showed up at IKEA at about 5:10, so we were a little early, but we stayed past 5:30, so I’m sure he was fine with it.
We ate dinner in the IKEA restaurant. We explored the toy section, and then looked for a bigger bed for Owen. Then we went downstairs and bought him an ice cream.
That is all for today.