My So Called Life

Cthulu Dreaming

/ Shane / 2 Comments

The other night I had a dream.

We were on a cruise. I don’t know where we were going, but we were deep out in the ocean, far from land. After we had been at sea for a few days, there was going to be some sort of special event in the evening. We put Evie and Oliver to bed and apparently left them there by themselves, and Sara, Rachael and I went out to the deck for the big event.

It started at about sundown and everybody got in a big group and started chanting and doing other weird things. It got very dark, both because the sun went down and because ominous clouds rolled in to cover the sky. As the chanting and dancing went on, we quickly realized that we had somehow gotten mixed up in some kind of cult ship, and we were the only ones on board who weren’t part of it.

Before anybody noticed that we weren’t participating, we snuck inside, where we could watch out the window. The chanting and dancing were getting frantic and a huge storm started up out of nowhere. The howling wind tossed black waves over the side of the boat and things were visible only by the lightning that split the air so frequently, it was almost constant. However, inside where we were, it was safe and dry.

“The other people are going to be swept off the boat!” I thought, but even as I thought it, I realized that they wouldn’t be. They were protected by whatever ritual they were preforming. The storm was summoned by them.

Suddenly a wave of fear passed over me like nothing I had ever felt before. Something was coming up from the very depths of the ocean. The cultists were summoning one of the Great Old Ones from below.

I grabbed Sara and Rachael’s hands and started pulling them as far away from the deck as I could. They struggled against me because they also knew something awful was happening and they had a terrible curiosity to see what it was. Even as I ran, I too wanted to turn and look, but I knew that if we even glimpsed whatever was coming, we would either become a slave to it like the cultists, or we would be driven mad.

Finally the thing was upon us and we crashed down in a corner. The storm was so loud we couldn’t hear what was going on on the deck. I pulled on Sara and Rachael’s hands to keep them crouching down and facing the wall. I held Sara’s eyes with mine and I screamed, “Don’t you dare look away!”

Because I wasn’t paying as much attention to Rachael, she kept struggling to get up and look, and I had to keep pulling her back down. Again I was tempted to look myself, but I resisted. When the lightning flashed I could see the shadows of enormous tentacles played out on the wall, bigger than the boat itself. I thought it would sink us, but it didn’t.

Finally, the thing went away and it was quiet.

I could see right away that none of the cultists were missing or dead. They all returned to sort of normal, cheery people and started up a party which was some sort of Hawaiian themed luau. They still didn’t realize that we had not participated in their ritual, but I knew they would eventually figure it out. I had to get us off the boat before then. In the meantime I had to smile and laugh and pretend like I was totally on board with Elder-Squid worship.

After a long time I got a hold of a pair of jet skis that we were going to use to escape from the ship. Just as we were preparing, Evie and Oliver woke up. Sara grabbed Oliver and I picked up Evie. We were running to the side of the boat to escape when Evie said to me, “Daddy, there’s something on me!”

I looked and both of the kids had some sort of fungus growing on them.

My stomach sunk and I knew this was related to the previous night’s activities. I didn’t know if it was some sort of plague that lived at the bottom of the ocean, some sort of spore the creature had brought to the surface with it, or if it was some kind of punishment from the dark god for not participating. But I knew it would be fatal, and it would be swift. I knew at that moment that there was no point in leaving the boat.

Evie didn’t seem to be in any discomfort, so I pretended to be cheerful. Inside though I was being torn apart, because I knew I was going to watch the kids die, followed by Sara and Rachael. I wished that I didn’t have to die last and I was filled with despair that all of my efforts to save them were in vain. We might as well have been driven mad by the Old One if we were going to die anyway.

The only chance we had was to play along as cultists and see if they knew of a cure to what we had. It was a dangerous game though, because we didn’t want to let on that we weren’t part of their group. For all I knew, the very fact that we had this stuff was proof that we hadn’t participated.

As I went from person to person trying to delve for information, I started to notice that they were changing. Little patches of slime here, a crusty barnacle there. They were transforming into some kind of sea creatures. Eventually I realized that they knew this was happening, and they were happy about it. That had been the whole point all along.

With horror I realized that the fungus growing on Evie and Oliver was part of the same process. Even though we hadn’t joined in, we were going to meet the same fate.

I woke up then and it actually worked out pretty good because the volume on the monitor was off and Evie was just yelling that the butterfly lights were on.

Light Scoop

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Recently, Sara and I upgraded to a Digital SLR camera. For those not in the know, this is a digital camera, but it works like an old school film camera. In other words, you can have one of those super-zoom lenses, you can change to different lenses, and you have full control over all those little camera words that don’t mean anything to me, like ISO, and F-stop.

I’ve never owned a nice camera, not even back in the stone age when we actually had them. Even if I did, I would still probably stick to the built-in modes. Sara used to have a nice camera and she is much more adventurous with adjusting the settings. So Sara is the master of the camera, but I’m learning a little bit from her, mostly about more basic stuff like composition.

Now if you have little kids, a Digital SLR is almost a must. All of our previous digital cameras were so slow that we would almost always miss whatever shot we were trying to get. After the camera clicked you’d have to wait 2-3 seconds for the camera to recover. In that time the kids would do all sorts of adorable things and I’d be muttering, “Come on, come on!” until the camera came back.

Of course, the downside of the awesomeness is the cost. The camera itself is pretty pricey, and then you have lenses and other things on top of that to turn out truly professional pictures. However, we recently purchased a piece of equipment for < $30 that made a big difference in the quality of our pictures: a Lightscoop.

Basically, the Lightscoop is a mirror that fits over your flash to bounce the light off the wall or ceiling, rather than going directly on your subject matter.

Why would you want to do such a thing? Well, I’m glad you asked.

For one thing, it gets rid of red eye, but the real advantage is that it provides a more natural, more flattering light than a regular flash. The human eye is not used to seeing things the way the flash works. Our normal light source is diffuse, not directed from one close point.

Here is a picture from their website of an example. Basically, if someone or something is close to the camera and the flash goes off, you can wash out that person with too much light, and everything else will be in shadow.

I have definitely taken a picture or two like that one on the left. You can see more examples here.

Of course the first thing we did was try some of our own before and after pictures, and this thing really makes a difference. It is certainly the cheapest piece of camera equipment you can buy to make this kind of significant difference!

Hamburger Sausage

/ Shane / Leave a comment

As is often the case when manipulating raising children, it all comes down to how you phrase things.

As any parent of a toddler knows, getting them to eat things is tricky at best. Especially when it is something new. I don’t know how many times we’ve had something that I *know* she’d like, if only she’d try it. But getting her to even try it is a huge chore.

Well, one of the obvious tricks is to change the name of something to sound more toddler friendly. For example, Evie would not try hamburger. What kid doesn’t like hamburgers? On top of that, she loves ketchup and anything with ketchup on it. So we knew she would like it, but she would never try it. Never, that is, until Sara got the brilliant idea to form the hamburger into “sausage links” instead of patties (like when you make a snake with play doh). Evie loves breakfast sausage, so when we served her “hamburger sausage” one night, and told her she could dip it in ketchup, she was hooked. Now she LOVES hamburger sausage and chows down like crazy on it.

The same thing worked for falafel. Of course, falafel is not even meat, but it does kind of look like sausage. Call it falafel sausage and you’re in business.

I could go on and on with examples. It’s so funny how framing a thing properly changes her attitude entirely.

Sun Poisoning?

/ Shane / 8 Comments

I mentioned that I got a little sunburned at the water park last weekend. It was a decently bad sunburn, but it didn’t seem SO awful. There weren’t any blisters or anything.

I have had a few bad sunburns before in my life, and they were followed by really insane itching, so I was kind of worried about that going in. Sure enough, a few days later, the itching hit.

I am not unaccustomed to intense itching. I am extremely allergic to poison ivy and I’ve had it more times than I can count. This itching…I don’t think I can even describe it. It literally drove me out of my mind to where I couldn’t think of anything else except the itching. I ceased to be a human being. I was like an animal. Anybody who saw me would have assumed I was a crazy person. I was randomly slapping myself, hopping, twitching and making unintelligible noises. I could not be reasoned with.

I tried every remedy I could think of. I took the maximum dose of benedryl the Internet said it was safe to have. The same for Ibuprofen. If you don’t know me, then this probably seems like no big deal, but I NEVER take more than it says to take on the bottle. NEVER. I was ready to gobble down the whole bottle, if it would help. I seriously considered taking even more benedryl, even though it wasn’t safe. At the very least, I was hoping it would knock me out (since it usually makes me pretty sleepy). I rubbed aloe gel with an anti-itch medication in it all over myself. I tried a bath. Nothing was working.

Finally I discovered the only thing that worked – a shower so cold that my teeth would chatter. I think that this worked for one of two reasons, either A) I was so busy trying not to freeze to death that I couldn’t concentrate on the itching, or B) it was so cold it was making my skin go numb. Either way, this was the only thing that helped. And I mean it only helped, even in the freezing cold water I was twitching and slapping. Therefore I took a freezing cold shower for about 3 hours. A couple of times I tried to get out, only to be driven back into the shower a few minutes later. 3 hours is a long time to stand in a shower, let alone a freezing cold one.

So I am standing in the shower just sobbing my eyes out (did I mention I was out of my mind?) when Sara says, “You have to go to the emergency room.” Now this was sort of a problem. On one hand, yes, this was absolutely the worst I have ever felt in my life, so if something merited a visit to the emergency room, this was probably it. On the other hand, I felt so stupid saying, “I am sobbing in the shower because my sunburn is itchy.” I knew that nobody would take me seriously and I would be forced to wait for hours. And I knew that if I had to get out of the shower for hours, I would not be able to do it. To even think about getting out of the shower would set me to sobbing again.

So I said I wouldn’t go (wouldn’t come out of the shower in fact) but Sara eventually convinced me to talk to a doctor to at least ask if I should go. The answer was no, but by the time all of this happened I had calmed down a little bit.

One interesting thing that came up while I was talking to the doctor was that he said, “Could it be an allergic reaction?” I seized on the idea like a drowning man. The itching did feel more like an allergic reaction. Could it be? Because before that I was really hating myself thinking, “Everybody gets sunburned and they don’t turn into crazy people. Why am I? Is there something wrong with me? Am I some sort of super-pansy?” This was never confirmed one way or the other, but at least I can tell myself that it WAS some sort of allergic reaction. At least it leaves the window open for me not being a super-pansy.

I should also mention that this has happened to me twice before in my life, when I got really bad sunburns. I just kind of thought, “Well, those were when I was a kid, so I’m probably not remembering the itchiness right.” Now I would say, if anything, it was more itchy than I remember.

So the doctor said I could stay in the cold shower if that helped, so stay I did. I tried to go to bed once, but I couldn’t take it and I had to flee back to the shower. Finally it got late enough that I actually fell asleep on my feet in the freezing cold shower and almost fell over. So I ran downstairs (Sara and I agreed there was no way I could sleep in our bedroom) and fell asleep as fast I possibly could.

It worked!

I mostly slept through the night and in the morning I felt a lot better. For the rest of the day I was still super itchy, but it was manageable. If I hadn’t experienced the insanity itch the night before, I would have said this was the itchiest I had ever been, but by comparison it was nothing! At least I could function like a human.

I didn’t take a shower or put any aloe gel on or anything like that. The itchiness was just below the level where I could handle it and I was afraid that if I touched it or itched it or something, it would start to get worse and worse and I would be back to where I had been the night before. That thought scared me badly.

I feel like nobody could believe me how itchy it was. They’ll say, “Oh yeah, I’ve had itchy sunburn before, get over it” and then I think, “No way could they be talking about the same thing.” Maybe Sara will chime in and verify that I was literally out of my mind.

And speaking of Sara, thanks to all of her help in this. She got the kids into bed, called the doctor, got me things when I was in the shower, and generally took care of me. Quite honestly I’m surprised she was able to look me in the eye this morning after that pathetic showing. And she didn’t laugh at me, or at least not too much. I’m sure it was quite hysterical from the outside looking in. She didn’t even update her facebook status.

I’ll tell you one thing though, from now on it’s sunscreen city in my house. Not only would I avoid that again at all costs, but I also would never want to put anybody else through it. Consider this a PSA on my part! Forget the pain of sunburn or the skin cancer or any of those things, think of the itching!

So that’s it. Has anyone else experienced this? Did I have some form of sun poisoning or am I just a wimp?

Fruit Fly Don’t Bother Me

/ Shane / 5 Comments

Contrary to the title of this post, fruit flies drive me crazy. The title is in reference to the song Evie sings when a fruit fly is buzzing around her: “Fruit fly don’t bother me, fruit fly don’t bother me, fruit fly don’t bother me, ’cause I belong to somebody!”

We have two problems, 1) we have an amazing amount of fresh produce lying around at all times. Between Sara’s two-a-day banana smoothie habit and the tomatoes etc. from the garden, amongst all of our other fruit consumption, about every square inch of available space is covered in fruit. 2) We save compost for the garden. I’m not sure this is really a problem anymore, since we now store it in seal-able containers, but I think it used to be more of a problem when we were using empty milk cartons.

For whatever the reason, we have fruit flies from time to time and I HATE them! It’s kind of funny though, you never really see a big cloud of fruit flies. Usually you see only one fruit fly. Finally you kill it and you think, “Ha, I got that fruit fly! Now I won’t have a fruit fly bothering me anymore!” Not so. Somewhere in the house, fruit fly dispatch sees that I’ve killed one and sends a replacement out to bother me immediately. There is a never ending supply of them!

BUT! We have now won the war! I’m here to tell you, I have the cure for fruit flies!

Take a regular cereal bowl and fill it with equal parts apple cider vinegar and water. Then put a few drops of dish soap in. The fruit flies are attracted to the vinegar and they try to land on the water to get it. Normally a fruit fly can walk on the surface of the water due to the surface tension. This is where the dish soap comes in. The dish soap breaks the surface tension on the water and the fruit fly sinks to the bottom.

If you have fruit flies, try this out! It is an amazingly effective fruit fly trap and doesn’t cost anything. Sara and I were cackling gleefully every time we trapped one of the little bastards. Here’s to a fruit fly free home!