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I'll be in NYC this weekend for various reasons, the most writerly of which included a weekend lunch with my agent to go over the last round of revisions and meeting up with Matt Cody, author of the upcoming Powerless, to coo over his (and his lovely wife's) newborn son. Unfortunately, the agent-meeting had to be canceled for unexpected reasons, so we'll just have to settle for emails and phone calls for now.

The primary reason for the trip is, of course, to finish packing up the last of Kate's things in anticipation of her move to Denver next week. I cannot describe how happy I am that we're finally at that dream-like future place that was always there and never here, and describing things is what I do for a living. We'll also be meeting the reverend on Sunday, and... oh, I dunno. Other stuff. Probably walking somewhere, or looking at things, or maybe a movie. If I want to think about 9/11 for the next couple days, maybe I'll suggest Cloverfield. We'll see.

Under the weather
The question at the Casa is 'who isn't sick?' And the answer is 'nobody'.

• Kaylee is (with nigh-unbelievable good spirits) simultaneously fending off a tough chest cold, a case of shingles, and a minor staph infection. It takes five minutes to give her all her medicine. Nighttime is the worst for her, though that's gotten a lot better since I started applying Vicks vapor rub before night-night (and she stopped tasting it).
  
• Dizzy is currently taking both seizure meds and hypothalamus supplements twice a day to deal with the attacks she's been having recently. The docs weren't sure which would be most appropriate, so they prescribed both. The downside here is that, while she is a lot better, we still don't know which med is helping.
  
• I caught Kaylee's cold... last weekend? Was it only a few short days ago? It seems much longer. My voice is nearly shot, swallowing anything is a bit of a chore, and my rest isn't very restful. I worked from home yesterday and spent my time writing up training docs while wrapped in flannel -- outside observers (who are advised to stay a good 10 feet back from me) have opined that I sound better today. That's nice; perhaps I could feel better in the near future as well? That'd be swell.
  
• Jake... is actually okay, apart from his perennial limp. I think I'll have him make me supper tonight, so I can rest.
  

Under Deadlines
Work-related stuff reached a fever pitch this week (coinciding with my own fever), but I think the worst of all that business is past; the only worries now concern my hosting dozens of web-based conference calls in a couple weeks -- likely to put a strain on my throat in the best of times, and hard to even imagine the way I am today.

Book-related stuff hits another mile-marker near the end of January. I have a series of fairly minor (but fun!) edits to make and send off to my agent, prior to meeting with them face to face when I'm out in NYC around the... well, I was going to say 25th, but I get in late. Hmm. Unless they feel like meeting on the weekend, maybe that isn't going to happen. Ahh well.

Under 90 Days
(I know, I'm reaching on that one.) It's a mere 86 days til the wedding! If you have gotten a save the date card and haven't checked out the website for all the cool info... well, you should. That is all.

What's up with the lead picture?
That's Undead, a should-be-a-cult-hit movie out of Australia; it's equal parts Dawn of the Dead, Shawn of the Dead, Tremors, and Army of Darkness... with just a tiny pinch of Spaceballs thrown in. It's fun. Netflix it today!

Go here. Grab the Weird Al Yankovic/Firefly video "Your Horoscope."

High-larious.

Generally, Kaylee likes when we put lotion on her (which happens often enough in the dry climate and drier season), so the rub down wasn't all that unusual.

She did notice the smell, of course -- how could you not -- and dipped a couple fingers into the jar to take a closer sniff.

She then popped both fingers in her mouth.

I'm fairly sure she won't do that again.

KK has contracted ... something. The doctor believes it's shingles, but is also testing to make sure it's not a Staph or Strep infection (I didn't even realize you could get a strep infection externally), which are both a bit more of a problem. Shingles (think localized chicken pox) is apparently more painful in adults, and the girl has been in remarkably good spirits despite itchy spots on her side and a slight fever. The biggest problem at this point has been daycare, which she can't visit until everything she's recovered.

Dizzy has a pretty serious series of 'attacks' on Saturday, involving a lot of muscle seizures and utter disorientation and loss of equilibrium. I was able to narrow down the cause of that to dehydration, but the reason for the dehydration (she still won't go anywhere near a bowl -- I have to give her water with a turkey baster) is still up in the air. The most recent news from the vet's test is good -- it looks like it's some kind of thyroid gland underperformance, which can be treated with supplements in her food. I'm already inclined to believe that diagnosis, as it would explain some lingering questions regarding her general fitness. (The fact that when she and Jake eat the same amount of food, and are the same size, she gains weight while he loses it.)

So that's been most of my spare time in the last few days. Whenever I've had a few minutes to myself I've worked on the new website and cleaned up some old directories on the server that desperately need it.

Things to do this month: revisions on Hidden Things, and scheduling flights to New York (both for the end of this month and in April).

Things not to do this month: devote any more brain power to wedding reception seating arrangements.

- random-average.com is live. random.average-bear.com still work, for now, but the days are numbered.
- average-bear.com is moving to a different location on the server, which is making a number of programs like movabletype very angry.

By "complex" I mean, "an often hastily cobbled together solution that somehow manages to accrete enough history and mass that simple removal of the resultant organism is possibly dangerous, and attempts to control, rebuild, or unify the whole is passively (or actively) resisted."

I pack a lot of meaning into a single word.

((I've also packed this entry with analogies. This is self-musing, so if you don't like how it comes out, well... tough.))

Average-bear/random-average (and, before that, bears-cave) is something quite beyond a landmark in my online timeline. Significant sections of the website date back to the mid to early nineties; taken as a whole, the site informally documents well over a decade of my life in one form or another -- in very real ways, it *is* the timeline. (Unfortunately, in some ways it's a very outdated one, and was not helped at all by the recent loss of the main blog templates, which served only to remove the site's look and feel, without actually making any of it more accessible.)

The problem is, the site is very much like a house that I've been living in for the past 13 years.

Alone. (With guests over, yes, but still...)

I built the house myself. I didn't actually know how to build a house at the beginning, and didn't get organized until five or six years after beginning -- until then, everything was basically one big entry room with a lot of crowded closets. And no chairs. Or windows.

I've switching building tools a number of times, and moved to different neighborhoods with different zoning laws...

In short, it's a mess. Although it causes me pain from time to time, the smartest thing I did early on in my blog-building (which only covers about half of the life of the site itself) was to separate my gaming-related posts into their own blog, where they could flourish in a garden of minutia. I never did that with any of my other interests, and now...

Here's the deal: I need to set up an author-site.

I know what I'd like to include within that site. I know the author sites that don't go anywhere near as far as I'd like to go in making it personal (Cory Doctorow's), those that are almost-but-not-quite enough (Gaiman) and those that put so much crap on there that it's not a writer's site -- it's just a personal website with a blog from someone who happens to write (Average-bear).

So I feel that what I'd like to do is:
1. Break random-average off into it's own domain, with all the gaming stuff therein, well and truly separate. That's easy.
2. Create a clean new site. (Mostly done. Empty, but mostly done.)
3. "Fill in" the site's blog archives with pieces of relevant stuff from this site. (So much harder than it sounds -- 3400+ posts to sort through for possible export?)
4. Archive average-bear and move on.

I'm not sure I can accomplish #3 without (a) shaking the current site to pieces or (b) polluting the new site with the same poor organization. Even if successful, it'll take ages.

Why do it?

Because there IS a lot of history here, and I'd like to carry at least some of that over.

Also, I need the stuff on this site. Well, I need three things, really.

1. The gaming space (listed first because it's easiest).
2. The writing space.
3. The living space, in which i can talk about home improvement projects, travel adventures, and my extended family shenanigans. (I *need* that, personally. The blog has become my diary/journal/history, if nothing else.)

I want two and three to be the same place, if at all possible, because i really do NOT want a situation involving three different sites, in which two are specialty sub-areas and the third becomes the dumping ground for the other eight-tenths of my life.

Another thought occurs to me -- moving a few things from here to the author site, and some of truly pedestrian (read: personal) bits over to doyceandkate.us, into some kind of communal blog. The Money Pit entries... most of the pictures and geeky fanboy stuff.

That might work. It's still going to require a painful sorting process as I figure out what's going to stay in the old place when I move, but that's the pain of every move to a new house, right?

I apologize for this post -- this is really boring behind-the-curtain stuff that I would normally only inflict on a couple people via a CC'd email, but I feel like thinking out(very)loud today.

We could have done it with a lot less attention to detail. We could, in fact, have not done it at all and simply painted the walls. Part of the reason the whole project has taken extra long as been because of all the little details we decided not to skip, but the end result is a lot more satisfying, I think. Eventually, there will be a series of youTube videos detailing the whole crazy process.

We're not quite finished, but we're a bit closer. When we last left our heroes, the to-do list was:

• Finishing coats on the cabinet doors.
• Getting the doors back on.
• Retaping the kitchen for cabinet painting.
• Cabinet painting.
• Installing a new microwave under the counter (which simply won't happen this week).
• Shampooing the carpet throughout the family room while the room is still totally unloaded.
• Reloading the room with furniture currently in the front room, once the carpet dries.
• Rebuilding the front room toward some semblance of normalcy.
• Cutting, painting and installing crown molding in the family room.

All the checked off bits are a bit misleading, as I actually missed a small section of the cabinet 'kick plate' area that needs some paint, and I also need to add "touch ups" to that list, both in cabinet-white, and the green of the walls, but it's close. It's getting there. This coming weekend should see the microwave installation.

Finally, a disclaimer: since I'm the one posting about this, I might be giving the impression that I did a lot of the work. Yes, I did a fair amount of the wrap up, and the wall painting, and the baseboards, but make no mistake: if this project was "the Dagon fight" from Conan the Destroyer, Kate was the heroic barbarian doing all the serious damage, and I was Malak the Quick, running in at the end to hesitantly count coup, stand atop the dead body, and thereby reap the benefits.

End of January, I'll be out there to help her pack up, then there's a flurry of trips back and forth in early February and (by Valentine's Day) she'll be out here pretty much full time, excepting work-related travel and (of course) the wedding in April.

That second sentence is a very good one to both type and read, but the simple fact is it's the first sentence that I keep thinking about.

Kate heads back to New York tonight.

We've been doing the long-distance relationship thing for a pretty long time -- 22 months, almost -- and I think we've managed very very well, but I have to tell you, I'm spent. It's gone past challenging-but-fun and into circumstances-clearly-unnatural-and-unwelcome.

I will proudly and smugly relate tales of our early trials and adventures for years to come, but the end of that phase and the beginning of the next could not, now, come a moment too soon.

What we thought the job was:
Repaint two rooms.

What the job turned out to be.

• Unload both the family room and kitchen, taking everything off the walls and everything off the counters.
  
• Remove all the kitchen cabinet doors.
  
• Remove and dispose of the deceased under-the-counter microwave. (*salute*)
  
• Tape up the family room (easy) and the kitchen (nightmarish).
  
• Prime the family room to cover the very dark paint color.
  
• Paint both the family room and kitchen.
  
• Realize after two coats that no, it's not going to dry darker, it's too much of the wrong color, and we need to redo it.
  
• Retape and repaint the whole thing.
  
• Start painting the cabinetry doors, requiring at least two coats, both sides.
  
• Start rehanging pictures in the family room.
  
• Keep painting cabinet doors.
  
• Retape the rooms in reverse, so we can paint the baseboards.
  
• Paint the baseboards, windows, doorframes, and most of the cabinet fronts.
  
• Start rehanging the cabinets.
  
• Run out of both the white paint we're using, and the tape we need for retaping the kitchen (again, nightmarish) so we can paint the cabinets themselves.
  

That was everything as of Thursday morning. Didn't matter that we didn't have paint at that point anyway, since I was working all day and Kate's wrist (very justifiably) needed a rest by Wednesday night. Last night, we picked up more paint and tape, but I'm still not at home, which leaves Kate to work on the remaining to do list until I get home, knowing we can't work too far into the evening, since she has to be back on a plane. That list includes.

• Finishing coats on the cabinet doors.
• Getting the doors back on.
• Retaping the kitchen for cabinet painting.
• Cabinet painting.
• Installing a new microwave under the counter (which simply won't happen this week).
• Shampooing the carpet throughout the family room while the room is still totally unloaded (a process I foolishly haven't explained to Kate, meaning I'm stuck with the this weekend).
• Reloading the room with furniture currently in the front room, once the carpet dries.
• Rebuilding the front room toward some semblance of normalcy (though I've loved having a couch out there this week).
• Cutting, painting and installing crown molding in the family room. (Hey Dave?...)

We (or at least I) planned to redo the flooring in the master bath over the holidays as well. Needless to say, that didn't happen.

Don't misunderstand: I thought I Am Legend was a wonderful adaptation and update to the original story, well-acted and scary; Sweeney Todd was a horrid delight; and even Golden Compass was an enjoyable romp (kudos to Meera, I think, (or De) who summed it up as 'great frosting, white cake').

But for sheer joy of watching, truly laugh-out-loud moments that made me cover my mouth to keep everyone else from losing the dialog, heart-warming, heart-wrenching, touching, smart, true film making? (With perhaps the best soundtrack I've heard in years as an added bonus.)

Juno. Number one with a bullet. I highly, highly recommend you go see it, if you have the means.

It's a bit like being asked in for a reading by the studio rather than having to stand in line for the open auditions; definitely feels nice, but doesn't actually confer any assurance of a role.

Still, it's nice.

kt literary - your home for deft literary agenting and lowercase optimism

Kate and I spent pretty much the whole New Year's weekend assembling the site, up to and including.

• Domain registration (okay, that was a few days earlier)
  
• Setting up a new installation of Movable Type
  
• Setting up the front page (which cries out to be a Flash animation at some point)
  
• Customizing an oswd.org design
  
• Getting the design to work with MT 4s 'improved' template organization (a new arrangement of SixApart's that gives me pain in parts of my brain I didn't even know could hurt)
  
• Getting in content
  
• Getting the backend pages like archives and the like to basically match the site without the pain of totally rebuilding their templates
  

All in all, it came off pretty damn swimmingly and (to quote De) pretty much screams "Kate" from one end of the site to the other. What more, aside from functionality, could you want from a site representing your business?

One annoying quirk with the site that we still haven't decided if we're going to try to fix: the "main content" section of each page is stupidly narrow if you view the site in Internet Explorer 6.0. The code for the related /div is clean as far as I can tell, and it displays just fine in Firefox or IE 7.0, so... yeah... either upgrade your IE installation or (my recommendation) switch to Firefox, because I don't like putting time into fixing code to be compatible with outdated browsers.

Feedback (or some way to force IE6 to display the damned content div correctly) is welcome.

I'm gonna make a list of 10 characters, it is a secret list. If you want, comment to this post with a question like, "2 and 8 have a dance off, who wins?" and then I answer them in a seperate post and it is the most fun meme ever. And you can ask as many questions as you like.

This is a fun game, wholly supported and endorsed by the Average-Bear Coalition for Crumbcake Research. Go over there and help me figure out her list.