Teething is a... well, you know.

Product Review: Baby teeth (1.5/5)

Do you have teeth? Me too. Remember when they grew in? Me neither, and thank the luckiest of stars above, because it is rough. Teething gets 1.5 stars. Or less.

So I have a beautiful daughter. She's smiley, happy and the light of my life. That's all fine and good, but when I ordered this child I did NOT order a lengthy and untimely ordeal like teething. Her first two teeth came screaming in around 3 1/2 or four months. Stressful. I have read in a very reliable baby book of baby-rearing knowledge that teething does not, in fact, cause any of the following: night waking, fever, extra night feedings, etc. This is an obese lie, the largest lie you can even imagine. She woke up a ton more at night and had a fever and needed more food. I'm sorry Dr. Smarts, you aren't a mother, and you don't have your own baby with teeth coming in.

Lovable and drooly bulldog.

Anyway, we had already been through this teething business once and it blessed us again around seven months. By blessed, I mostly mean scammed. She was for sure teething for about three weeks. I could see the little white buds on her top gums and she was drooling like a bulldog (a precious, lovable bulldog). Then, Houdini-like, the symptoms and the little buds disappear. They just left me wondering if I was a mother making up symptoms to explain an inability to soothe my own baby. I swear, they really were coming in!

Then, in December, she had some back-to-back colds. A nice little Christmas gift for us. At the tail end of the last one, she managed to sneak some teething in for a New Year's surprise. Not one, not two, but three pearly whites just magically appeared with no more fanfare than a bit of extra drooling (think three bull dogs), extra sleeping and a slightly more cranky Charlotte.

She is now trying to break these three new teeth all the way out of gum-jail. I'm really surprised by the quiet nature of this third teething round. It's not so bad as the first or second time (and the second time really did happen; I'm not crazy) and I am also a fan of cutting multiple teeth at a time. I'll take a week from the pits of Tartarus if it means all the teeth coming at once.

So, if you're thinking of ordering a round of baby teething, here's a review for you to ponder:
Delivery: A bit early, then a no-show, but then just right.
Satisfaction: Well, it increases the ability to chew food and smile less like a toothless grandpa, but it does increase nose-biting ability. That's from experience, people. Terrible experience.
Cost: Doesn't cost much, just a few extra pounds perhaps as you stress-eat your way through bags of chocolate or gallons of ice-cream.
Overall: 1.5 stars. It's worth it in the end, but boy-oh-boy, it's a rough ride.

I'm lucky I still have all my digits.

Today's post brought to you by a miracle

"I spilled water on the computer" is not a great text from your wife to get at work.

The imperiled Pew! Pew! Kickstarter

Sarah had been using our laptop, which I have named Freeman, when she tipped her giant water mug and the lid came off. Water spilled onto the keyboard, and she snatched the mug away. Freeman automatically logged her off and powered down as she quickly dried the keyboard, unplugged the power and removed the battery. That's my wife!

If I learned anything in my two years as a computer repair technician at PCs Unlimited, it's that computers don't do well underwater. And being a starving journalist, replacing or repairing a dead laptop could take a big chunk out of our finances. Without going into too many embarrassing budgetary details, our cost-cutting project this week is learning to make ramen from scratch.

What's more, I had launched the Pew! Pew! Kickstarter just that day. I needed Freeman, or at the very least the files on Freeman, to create the magazine I promised my Kickstarter backers. Even if the Kickstarter raked in twice my goal of $500, replacing Freeman would put us right back at square one.

When I got home from work after 11 p.m., Sarah was still up. I told her not to worry, it wasn't her fault, but I may need to get a second job. I'm a pie-in-the-sky kind of guy, meaning I have a very poor sense of what jobs are available and how to get them, so any conversations about finding work slowly spiral out of control until I'm talking about being a carney or signing up as a Mars colonist.

We tried powering Freeman up 4 or 5 hours after the spill, but during bootup he started beeping, which usually means something's gone wrong with the fiddly bits inside. Those fiddly bits are usually not cheap. On the plus side, the keyboard was much cleaner.

I went to sleep worrying about Freeman, worrying about Sarah, worrying about whether my insurance would pay for booster shots before I joined the circus. I prayed that Freeman might be OK somehow.

This morning, I tried booting Freeman up again. This time I still heard the beeping, but I didn't hear the cooling fan. That could be good news or bad news -- fans are cheap to replace, but they're not electronically complicated -- so if water somehow took out the fan, the rest of Freeman's guts couldn't be doing well.

I dug out my static clip and opened Freeman up. You know how when your walkie-talkie breaks as a kid, you get a screwdriver and open it up, even though everything you know about electricity comes from watching cartoon Ben Franklin fly kites? Despite the hundreds of computers I've opened up, I felt a lot like that.

I unplugged the fan and looked at it. Wonder of wonders! Miracle of miracles! A dried clod of dust was lodged in the fan, just big enough to keep the fan from spinning. When the water seeped into the fan, it must have dampened the dust and clumped it all together. I removed the clump and named it Dustin.

Dustin

After that, Freeman booted up fine. I'm grateful for a God who answers my prayers, and I'm grateful that he has a sense of humor. Now I'm writing a blog post with Charlotte on my lap. If I'm rambling, you'll have to forgive me. I'm restraining Charlotte, because she's trying to eat Dustin.

Update: A couple of days later, Sarah made a batch of miso ramen. It was delicious.

If you're our neighbors, please shut up

Resist the urge, Steve. Resist the urge. Photo by Fran Gambín.

We live in a college town, a couple of blocks off campus. I can genuinely say I enjoy living here, but pretty much only when school is out. When school is in -- especially at the beginning or end of a semester -- there's a party every weekend night.

Sarah and I were lying in bed at about midnight last night. We could hear the bass notes of a nearby party.
"I'm giving them half an hour, then I'm calling the police," Sarah said.

"It's OK. It's not too bad," I said.

Sarah gave me a dirty look. She had a rough day and didn't feel well.

She looked inclined to violence, so I said: "That's just what I was telling myself. I was just trying to CONVINCE myself that it's not a problem."

Then I'm assuming the partygoers got too hot and opened the windows, because a tide of OPA GANGAM STYLE crashed over us.

"Look out the window and see which house it is," she said.

I did, and every window outside looked dark. If I strained at the blinds of one house, I could see a strobe light.

"It's that house again," I said. "Let's burn it down."

"No," Sarah said. "That's not real."

House fires, not real? At my job at a great metropolitan newspaper, I listen to the police scanner for hours. Just last night fire crews responded to a house in Hyrum after someone said they saw flames. Last Monday I laid out a story for the News-Examiner in Montpelier about a fire that burned a family's house half to the ground. There was a great picture of the mother holding an oxygen mask over their pet turtle's head. Fires are real. And I really wanted to burn their house down, but my own wife kept denying the very reality of arson as a solution. I needled her, trying to find out what her specific objection to my plan was.

"I could go next door and fill a can up with gas and use that to get it going."

"Stop that. That's not real."

A few minutes later, I tried a reconciliatory approach.

"I guess I keep forgetting how close that house is to the other side of our apartment building. I bet a house fire right there would burn us up, too," I said. "But then again, our house is very wet."
Sarah laughed. We were at the tail end of a warm spell, and melted snow pooled up in our parking lot and over the sidewalk, coming right up to the foundation. The sagging rain gutters dripped more steadily right in front of our door. The lake wasn't new, but because we don't have a basement, we haven't complained to the landlord yet. But about a year ago, going to an early morning class, I opened the door to find a family of ducks.

"How many diapers do we have in the trash?" I asked. "We could set a bucket of dirty diapers on fire and leave it on their doorstep." This motion also died in committee.

"They have 14 more minutes. Then I'm calling the cops."

"You know what we should do? Here's what we should do. I'll take some speakers over there, plug them in and play Shaina Feinberg's cha-cha album. That would get them."

"I don't know what that is."

I should note that Sarah hates 95 percent of things I try to introduce, and she's never loved anything new after 11 p.m.

"It's the diametric opposite of whatever music they're playing. It's impossible to party to." I played it for her on our tablet.

"Turn that off. That's the worst thing I've ever heard."

For the record, Shaina, I like the album.

Sarah was afraid the noise would wake Charlotte. I said if it did, I'd take Charlotte, crying, over there and none of them would get lucky. Nothing kills the mood faster than a crying baby.

"No, you won't," Sarah said. "Why do you keep saying these things that aren't even real?"

"I dunno. I'm tired of calling the cops on these guys. The cops probably think I'm a whiner. I guess I want to do something that really makes them question their grip on reality. Where could we get 20 -- no, 50 cats? I want to break into the animal shelter, steal 50 cats, put them in a van and back them right up to their door. I'd let them go, and suddenly their house would just be full of cats."

No use. Sarah told me to call the cops, and when I refused, she stalked off downstairs with her phone. A couple of minutes after the call, the party stopped. Sarah made me look out the window again. I told her the cops were there, all right, with choppers and national guard tanks. She gave me another dirty look.
Sarah couldn't sleep for another half hour afterward, she was so mad. We watched Keeping Up Appearances on the tablet, and I couldn't help feeling a little like Hyacinth, the human killjoy. We broke up their party, but hey, they were asking for it at 12:30. And while by the light of day I realize arson isn't the answer, I still want to do something incredible. I want to host the loudest outdoor dance party in our parking lot. I'll do it every day for a week before finals and invite all my non-student friends. Then, at the end of the semester when they're partying again, I'll sneak over and caulk all their doors shut.

But Sarah's right -- I won't do any of that. None of it's real. What's real is the seasonal swing from party town in the spring and fall to ghost town over Christmas and summer. Even though those kids will someday turn 25 and realize that all parties are horrible and binges are killing them, they'll move out and we'll be stuck with another batch of 18-year-olds. They'll be younger every year, and every year my wife will remind me that we need to get out of here.

Maybe when I'm 45, and Charlotte is out of the house, and I'm having a real midlife crisis -- maybe then I can burn their house down.