Mike Pirnat

It’s almost impossible for me to believe, but Claire’s now one thousand days old.

In that time, she’s transformed our lives in countless ways, amazed us at every turn, and given me a whole new perspective on the world. It’s been simply astounding to watch her develop into her own beautiful little person, by turns loving, funny, and fierce.

When she first arrived and became our focus, the most important rule we had was that any day that ends with all of us still alive was a victory.

So here’s to a thousand consecutive victories… and hopefully many, many more to come.

children, claire, life

…of 2008. (Not that I’m really blogging that much these days.)

Everyone else seems to be doing these big end-of-year posts, summarizing their years, their learning, achievements, setbacks, joys, and sorrows. I’m not sure when it happened, but I’ve largely lost the patience to go on and on about my life (I guess Twitter kind of takes care of that for me any more), so I’ll keep this short (if not sweet).

2008 was a year. We had a miserable few months of illness and sleeplessness, followed by a good long stretch of absolute, utter joy with our daughter, Claire. I read less than I like to, but greatly enjoyed what I did. I wrote far less code for myself than I like to, but I was able to instigate a quantum leap in the level of Javascript written at work, as well as contributing a number of fixes back to the Dojo framework. I played an awful, awful lot of Rock Band. I enjoyed PyCon and Velocity, in spite of their flaws, and I wish that work and family allowed me more time to contribute to the community. I continued to grow as a photographer, though I was frustrated by several months of inaction and lack of inspiration from which I’m still trying to play catch-up. And in these rocky economic times, I’m happy to remain in my position at American Greetings.

I’m overwhelmingly proud of my wife’s accomplishments, both academic and parental. I’m ridiculously happy to be my daughter’s father–the role of Daddy suits me just fine; she amazes me daily and has truly transformed my emotional well-being.

I am immensely grateful for my friends, for my family, and my good fortune. I hope for a better, more peaceful future in 2009, that we may all heal the hurts of these mad days and enjoy the fruits of the life we’re given.

To all who may read this, here’s a quick little toast to the passing of the old year and the dawning of the new. Cheers!

claire, dojo, life, pycon, python, work

He Who Rocks and Puts Away Lives to Rock Another Day

Originally uploaded by mikepirnat

The kiddo has had a pretty strong musical interest for a while now, but in the last week or so she’s gotten really excited by my Rock Band controllers, which have been hanging out in the corner of the family room, right where they’re easy for her to get at if she wanted to. I’m content (thrilled, in fact!) to have her noodling around with my original Rock Band 1 controller (of the woefully busted whammy bar), but I’d like to keep my pair of RB2 controllers in good shape for as long as possible.

So, off we went to Guitar Center to pick up a couple of guitar hooks to hang the controllers on the wall, safely out of reach from curious little hands.

I’m not sure if I’m more embarrassed by buying guitar hooks for my fake guitars, or by the fact that we’d worked up an elaborate tale of how I’d recently inherited a (fictional) ukulele collection (to explain my concerns about whether the hook would be narrow enough to hold the guitar head). Sadly, no questions were asked about my purchase, so we never got to try out the story.

So, here you go–photographic evidence that I am, in fact, pretty much a total dork. Enjoy.

children, claire, geekery, music, retail-therapy, video-games

It’s hard to believe that Claire is now 256 days old, or just over 0.701 years! It has an oddly familiar way of feeling simultaneously like both an eternity and an eyeblink. We’re getting more sleep than in the zombie days of October and January/February, which is a definite plus, although we seem to have just hit one of the “magic” weeks where all the kid wants to do is be fussy. In spite of her stormy disposition this week, she continues to astound and amaze us every day. Just 109 days until cake and candles!

claire, life

The thing about being a relatively new parent is that life very quickly becomes a complete blur, and after a certain point you’ve no sense of what day it is, let alone how many weeks old your little bundle of joy is. This makes life tricky, since there are certain milestone weeks that are usually the harbingers of sudden shifts into higher levels of fussiness and sleep regression.

So what’s a frazzled dad to do?

Well, I do have Python, and I seem to have Google Reader open an awful lot, and cron jobs are a lot better at remembering to do things than I am… So here’s my fifteen-minute solution that I whipped up the other week in between putting Claire down for her morning nap and getting ready for work. (File names and URLs have been changed to protect the innocent.)

#!/usr/bin/env python
 
import datetime
from dateutil.rrule import rrule, DAILY, WEEKLY, MONTHLY
import PyRSS2Gen as RSS2
 
# You'll want to change all of these values, obviously...
KID_NAME = u'Claire'
BIRTHDAY = datetime.datetime(2007, 9, 10, 21, 57)
FEED_URL = 'http://yoursite/kids_age.xml'
FILENAME = 'your_path/kids_age.xml'
 
def periods_between(freq, start_date, end_date):
    rr = rrule(freq, dtstart=start_date)
    periods = len(rr.between(start_date, end_date))
    return periods
 
def format_entry_body(months, weeks, days):
    body = """<h1>Today, %(kid_name)s Is...</h1>
    <ul>
        <li>%(months)s months</li>
        <li>%(weeks)s weeks</li>
        <li>%(days)s days</li>;
    </ul>
    <p>They grow up so fast!</p>"""
    kid_name = KID_NAME    # so we can cheat with locals()
    return body % locals()
 
def make_rss(body):
    now = datetime.datetime.now()
    # Add a hash component to the item link so that the RSS reader
    # will recognize this as today's new entry...
    item_url = FEED_URL+'#'+now.strftime('%Y%m%d')
    rss = RSS2.RSS2(
        title=u"How Old Is %s?" % KID_NAME,
        link=FEED_URL,
        description=u"How old is %s in months, weeks, and days" \
            % KID_NAME,
        lastBuildDate=now,
 
        items = [
            RSS2.RSSItem(
                title=u"How old is %s today?" % KID_NAME,
                link=item_url,
                description=body,
                guid=RSS2.Guid(item_url),
                pubDate=now,
            )
        ]
    )
    return rss
 
def to_xml(rss):
    xml = rss.to_xml()
    # Make our xml at least a tiny bit human-readable
    xml = xml.replace('><', '>\n<')
    return xml
 
def main():
    now = datetime.datetime.now()
    months = periods_between(MONTHLY, BIRTHDAY, now)
    weeks = periods_between(WEEKLY, BIRTHDAY, now)
    days = periods_between(DAILY, BIRTHDAY, now)
    body = format_entry_body(months, weeks, days)
    rss = make_rss(body)
    xml = to_xml(rss)
    f = open(FILENAME, 'w')
    f.write(xml)
    f.close()
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

You will, of course, have to install dateutil (via easy_install) and PyRSS2Gen (the old-school tarball way) so that they can do the heavy lifting for you.

Then all that’s left is to cron it to run daily, and point your favorite RSS reader at the feed. Voila! You’re on top of exactly how old your kid is, and quickly on your way to becoming Parent of the Year.

children, claire, geekery, python

11:49 PM. From down the hall, an ominous THUMP…. THUMP…. THUMP… The sound of Claire kicking her legs against the mattress like some kind of imprisoned mermaid.

Me: Drums… Drums in the deep…

Liz: You know, that’s what I think every time she does that.

Me: Damn, I love you.

children, claire, humor, liz, lord-of-the-rings

You Don’t Say
Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.

March 1 was strangely mild; I laughed derisively when the weather lady declared that it was “coming in like a lamb” for once. Silly, silly woman. As a recent fortune cookie told me, “the lion, when hunting, does not roar.” And that’s what our small handful of balmy days were–that nice peaceful time before the lion pounces and tears you limb from limb.

So, after a Tuesday ice storm that had my car out of commission all day (plow didn’t come before work, I got my car stuck in the ice and snow, and did some underbelly damage in its extraction, Liz was paying close enough attention that she was able to stock up on food and supplies before the whole state got socked on Friday. Her efforts made sure that once I was home from work on Friday, we could just hole up in the house and watch the snow come down, and down, and down down down, burying our yard and turning the neighborhood into an icy moonscape.

We entertained Claire. We had cocoa. I played a ton of Mass Effect. We watched a couple ski down the street. And still the snow kept falling, and falling.

Finally, on Sunday, the weather broke, our plow guy cleared out our driveway, and we emerged into the sunny day to explore the new world.

I shot a bunch of photos on Saturday and Sunday, including some great shots of Claire.

While I enjoyed having an excuse to wear my Jayne hat, I think it’s safe to say we’re all looking forward to spring.

claire, liz, photos, weather, weekend

I might be old, but dammit, I ROCK!

Yes, I just completed the solo guitar tour on Rock Band, and even though I was only playing on medium, it feels pretty freaking awesome. My wife (goddess!) sprung for an Xbox 360, and my mother-in-law (what a sweetie) sent me Rock Band, and I’ve basically been playing three hours a night since the goodies arrived.

We had a bunch of folks over Saturday evening to rock out, and lo, the rock was out in force. A buddy of mine gave me a drum throne to make the experience even better. Liz also scored some great wine to share with us (mmm, vintage Grand Cru Champagne….) and cooked an amazing meal (mmm, beef tenderloin; mmm, Guinness chocolate cake) that all enjoyed. Meanwhile, our daughter (angel!) slept through it all (miracle!).

I’m looking forward to getting folks together again soon (regularly?), but for now, this little rock star needs his beauty sleep.

birthday, claire, food, friends, video-games, wine

I’ve discovered that Claire responds really, really well to “The Ballad of Serenity” as a lullaby. (That’s the theme song from Firefly in case you didn’t recognize the title.) I’ll sing it softly to her at bedtime or naptime as I hold her and then transfer her to the crib, repeating it as necessary until she drifts off. After three weeks of this, she’s learned to konk out within a few minutes with hardly a complaint.

I feel like I need to mail a check to Joss Whedon or something.

claire, firefly, sci-fi

I spent the better part of a week in bed with a nasty case of influenza–chills, aches, sweats, nausea, digestive “issues”, 102.9 degree fever–the works. And once again, everyone in my family had the great taste to all get sick at the exact same time, so you can imagine the fun that Liz and I had trying to comfort and care for Claire while we were clobbered by the bug.

But! Surprise, surprise! It turns out that even influenza can have a silver lining or two.

First, I lost six pounds, which is nice in the wake of holiday indulgence and a baby-driven complete lack of regular exercise routine.

More importantly, I now know what’s happening to my sock drawer.

About once a week, I find my sock drawer in disarray, half-open and mixed-up, with two or three pairs on the floor in front of the dresser. I’d been wondering why and how for a while. Luckily, when one spends a week in bed with said dresser in direct view, one gets a chance to observe the cause and culprit first-hand–namely, Valentine the cat. She’s figured out how to open the drawer, then jumps up onto the dresser and starts digging in the socks until she’s satisfied with the disaster she’s caused. I watched her steal four pairs of socks before she finally got bored and dashed off to chase her sister. I just about died laughing.

I know I sound like a broken record–but I’d really love to have a couple weeks or even a month of 2008 in which I’m not being devastated by the illness of the week.

cats, claire, health, humor, liz