One year ago today, Lucy-the-cat threw up on your (closed, thank god) laptop. I cleaned it up and never told you. By now, it should be clear there was nothing to worry about! Enjoy!

And people say men are no good at communicating in relationships.

(Does mentioning a substance that came out of my child officially make me a parent blogger, now?)

One of the more pleasant pictures of Piper while ill, immediately after an eye-scrubbing.

Anyhow, four days of rotten sleep left the entire Hirsch family clobbered and susceptible to a hacking summer cold, just in time to return to New York City and watch all the sidewalks melt down to slag as a giant heatwave rolls through town. It's around 11 p.m.; I worked from home today to avoid coughing on anyone at WNYC, and I feel like a horse ran over me today. I've had no appetite at all, though I forced myself to have a bowl of cereal and a handful of trail mix this afternoon. I'm about to go to bed, and it's still approximately two thousand Kelvin degrees outside. My environmentalist side has required me to put the window a/c units on "economy" mode, and the cats are still melted down to little furry piles of butter.

Piper's coughing herself awake in her room, which portends another rotten night's sleep for all of us: Kate's working overnight while Piper and I keep the home fires extinguished.

I called an Apple Store, just for kicks, to see how things were going during the launch, and if he thought they might have any phones ever. He described the line to me, the one outside of his store, as something like a human Möbius strip – a warping tendril folded in, a thing without earthly end.

"I'm looking at eternity," he said. "I can see the tail of The Beast."

via Penny Arcade – The Shipment.

Here's what I've learned in the last 11 months:

• Having a kid did not magically change me in one instant. This notion that parenthood flips a switch inside one's head is bunk, as near as I can tell. We came home from the hospital and I was surprised by how little had changed. Dirty dishes: check. Meals to cook: check. Books to read, jobs to do, Kate to laugh with: check, check, check. There was just this small person who sleept a lot, in the next room. Was I a father then, or simply a caretaker? Dunno.



• I know I'm a father now, though. Eleven months of having this marvelous little person in my life has altered me as surely as wire shapes a bonsai tree. Slow, ever-changing circumstance and gradually altered habits have crept up on me.
• I watch her learn – to roll, to babble, to eat, to splash – and I am amazed.
• Cooking for the people I love is one of my greatest joys, and cooking for Piper one of the best of those joys. So many people seem to assume that babies should only eat bland, pureed, overcooked mush… and sure, Piper's eaten that sort of thing. But watching her happily scarf down the curried lentils and currants I'd just made, and then go back for seconds? Awesome.



• Just in the last week, she's crossed a threshold: to wit, the door from her room to the hall. I set her on the floor and turned my back while doing [SOMETHING DIAPER RELATED] and when I turned around, she had actually left the room to go out and investigate the fringe on the edge of the hallway rug. Friday she tossed herself into the frigid sprinkler at the park. Yesterday she chased the cat around the living room in slow-motion Lurch-O-Vision. This morning, she beat on the glass-fronted electronics cabinet with her remote control. She is going to break things, it's clear: She is going to fall down, cut herself, bang her head. There Will Be Blood. And I will put band-aids on her and cheer her on as this heady cocktail of pride, caution, adventure and foolhardy exuberance hits us both.
• I am her Abba, this year, even if Piper has not yet mastered the word.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/12/anthony-bourdain-war-fast-food

…

And since then it's all been about the little girl. Because I am acutely aware of the fact that she's a blank page, her brain a soft surface waiting for the irreversible impressions of every raised voice, every gaffe and unguarded moment.

I'm not against hamburgers. But I believe that a burger should be made of "beef" (not necessarily the best beef, but definitely recognisable as something that was, before grinding, mostly red, reasonably fresh, presumably from a steer or cow, something that your average doberman would find enticing). I don't believe my hamburger should have to come with a warning to cook it well done to kill off any potential contaminants or bacteria.

It is repugnant, in principle, to me – the suggestion that we legislate against fast food. We will surely have crossed some kind of terrible line if we are infantilised to the extent that the government has to step in and take the Whoppers out of our hands. It is dismaying – and probably inevitable. When we reach the point where we are unable to raise a military force of physically fit specimens, or public safety becomes an issue after some lurid example of a large person blocking a fire exit, they surely shall.

But if you are literally serving shit to children, then I've got no problem with a jury of your peers wiring your nuts to a car battery and feeding you the accumulated sweepings of the bottom of a monkey cage. In fact, I'll hold the spoon.

In this way, me and the PETA folks and the vegetarians have something in common. They don't want us to eat any meat. I'm beginning to think, in light of recent accounts, that we should, on balance, eat a little less meat. PETA doesn't want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle deep in their own crap, because they don't want any animals to die – ever – and basically think that chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don't want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them provably less delicious. And, often, less safe to eat.

…

Much like I'm considering throwing a wrench into my car.

On Wednesday, I drove the car to the VW dealer for two free (free!) recall repairs — you know, the ones where they mail you a sheet that says, "We're issuing a voluntary recall on part 3F01AQ, the interior light bulb off-current flow oscillator. Please drive your car very, very slowly to the dealer, never allowing your eyes to drift up to the dome light — WE SAID, DON'T LOOK AT IT — and then back away from the dealer, keeping your hands at your sides and speaking in hushed tones until you are at least one hundred feet from the vehicle. Why are we recalling this part? OH NO REASON. WE JUST MISSED YOU. KISSES, VW"

Anyhow, the recall said the repairs would be free, and since we're thinking about selling or trading the car in, I figured demonstrating that we'd done the maintenance would be a good thing. I also asked them to do the (non-free) 100K miles maintenance.

Thursday afternoon, the dealer calls me to tell me they checked the coolant lines and found oil in it. "Damn you, BP!", I shouted, waving my fist towards Tony Hayward, but then the mechanic corrected me. The Deepwater Horizon oil gusher had (probably) not put oil into the coolant: some crack or leak in the oil cooler had. Parts and labor to replace the oil cooler: $711. For a car we'd like to sell off.

The math is sadly simple: Value of car with repair: ~$5000. (or $6K, if you believe the Kelly Blue Book, which I do not.) Value of car without repair = much, much less. So we do it.

The bummer is psychological. I can see pictures of oil spreading over the sandy beaches on the Gulf coast. I have no way of knowing whether the dealer actually found oil in my car's lines. And it's way too easy to imagine their incentives to do more work on my car: $711 doesn't grow on trees. But if I can't trust the dealers to tell me honestly whether something's wrong or not, I suppose I shouldn't take my car to them. It just rankles that I can't easily do the "verify" part of "trust, but verify."

With the car locked up in the drunk tank through the weekend, hauling down to Pennsylvania on the train with a return trip less than twenty four hours later began to feel like a drag, so I helped maneuver Kate and Piper down to Penn Station and onto NJ Transit, and I stayed home on Saturday.

What did I do? Surprisingly, the exact same things that I did on my 'mental health days' when I was a teenager. (I got sick vanishingly rarely, so my mom would periodically encourage a day home from school for no reason at all.)

Ate pretzels dipped in peanut butter. Despite having shelves of things in my "to-read" pile, read chapters of books I've read a million times before, instead: "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," "Dune." Play video games. Talk with friends. Cook truly stupid combinations of too-old leftovers, feeling virtuous about reusing the congee, tofu sausages, beet greens and goat cheese, figuring the only person I'm endangering is myself.

Oh, and of course the awesome adult tasks that keep a household running: fighting other building residents for washing machines, balancing bank accounts, cleaning up cat barf, dressing the rolling dishwasher up as R2D2, staying up too late. Then Sunday, my work week began, as it does every Sunday.

When I'm in the midst of my regular life, picking hairballs off the floor and out of Piper's mouth, I have very few contiguous blocks of time to do any kind of serious project work, like writing or researching or freelancing radio pieces … and I frequently think that's what I would be doing if I had more time. Who knows? Maybe that's exactly what I'd do after several days of this hardcore goofing off.

But this past weekend was all about the goofing, and I feel simultaneously guilty and relieved about it. My personal to-do list is just as long as it was, but the car and my wife and daughter all come home tomorrow, and that's the best news of all.

Admittedly, her movement technique has a bit of the "harbor-seal-galumphing-on-dry-land" about it, but I'm sure that'll smooth out with time.

This bodes very well for her sense of humor, I suspect.