My So Called Life

The Case of the Convulsing Cat

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Our quiet breakfast was interrupted by Nala’s “distress cry” (the one that sounds like Ed McMahon’s “AYoooooo”), despite the fact that she was laying on the rug right next to us, safe and sound. This was followed immediately by Nala vomiting all over the rug.

Nala vomiting is certainly nothing out of the ordinary, especially lately. Ever since we switched her food, she’s had a bit of a setback on the hard-won, anti-vomit front. I jumped up to clean up the vomit, cursing Nala under my breath for doing it on the rug rather than 6 inches away on the hardwood floor. Nala, wisely, decided to get out of my way.

She took one tentative step and then collapsed, arms going rigid and locked, convulsing on the floor.

This only lasted a few seconds, but they were tense seconds. I didn’t know what to do. I was right there with her, petting her the whole time and stupidly repeating, “Nala, are you okay?” Anna shepherded the kids from the room, but they obviously picked up from my tone and body language (and the fact that they were being shepherded from the room) that something was up. I was surprised that the kids weren’t more upset by all of this. I assumed they didn’t understand what was going on, but Evie later quite matter-of-factly stated she thought Nala was dying, because she was “very old”.

After a short time, Nala was able to get up, after which she hid under the table for awhile, until she regained her bearings. After that I was able to coax her out, pet her, and then she returned to normal. In less than 5 minutes, you would never have known anything was wrong.

Naturally, I was a little concerned. My cat doesn’t seize every day. I couldn’t help but think this was related to the recent diagnosis of hyperthyroidism. I thought perhaps the food was not controlling it properly, and maybe things had gotten worse.

I took her to the vet, and the vet couldn’t find anything wrong with her. Everything checked out normally. Furthermore, there is no correlation between hyperthyroidism and seizures, nor were seizures a side effect of the prescription food. It is also apparently very rare for an older cat to develop seizures, other than from eating something toxic.

“Has she gotten into anything lately? Eaten anything she shouldn’t have?” the vet asked me repeatedly. “No, not as far as I know,” I answered repeatedly. I mean, there’s always the chance; she does a lot of things I don’t know about (most of them involving peeing on something). The final result was “keep an eye on her” which made me feel distinctly foolish while paying the vet bill.

This was all quite the mystery. Nala was acting totally normal, but it seemed awfully foreboding. One doesn’t just have seizures. It felt like when your car starts making a weird noise and you just ignore it and hope it goes away, even though you know it *always* means something is terribly wrong.

The next day, Nala threw up on the bathmat, consisting entirely of flower blossoms. I have to say, there are worse things than a cat who magically vomits flower blossoms, but it got me thinking: could I start a band named Magical Flower Blossom Vomit? And also, although we’ve had this flower for months, I’d caught the cat eating it only over the past week. Could that be significant?

(not my picture)

It could! The flower is a kalanchoe, and it does not agree with cats:

This plant contains components that can produce gastrointestinal irritation, as well as those that are toxic to the heart, and can seriously affect cardiac rhythm and rate.

and

Animals may develop severe weakness and cold extremities, collapse, and eventually die because of cardiac arrest.

Of course, only my cat is dumb enough to keep eating a flower that makes her sick, day after day after day. I really cannot conceive of how this cat ever could have survived in the wild. I don’t know. But I do know that the cat has neither seized, nor vomited since I moved the plant. That plant has sat in the same place since September, why did Nala suddenly decide it needed to be eaten?

Has she been chased around by screaming children one too many times? Is she trying to end it??

An Interview with Yours Truely

/ Shane / 1 Comment

The blogging platform Glipho recently interviewed me as part of their “Meet a Glipher” project. Therein, I discuss my secret blogger origin story, divulge embarrassing pictures of myself, and discuss advice about blogging and parenting.

I’m cross-posting the interview here for posterity, but you can also see the original post here.

#meetaglipher… Shane Halbach (@shanehalbach)

A hundred or more thanks to Shane Halbach for being our Meet a Glipher this week! Chances are you’ll probably know Shane for his sense of humour in his posts and which are often about his brilliant kids (or co-bloggers). He’s also recently sold a short story to a superhero anthology published by Crossed Genres, so congratulations to him!

1. Why did you start blogging? Why do you continue to do it?

Before “social network” was even a word, before Twitter and Facebook (before even MySpace for god’s sake), a good friend of mine kept trying to get me to join LiveJournal; not for the blogging really, but for the sense of community she found there. Despite constant nagging on her part, I never quite got around to making an account.

My friend later committed suicide.

The year after she died, I spent a lot of time thinking about her, and one day I went and opened a LiveJournal account in her honor. I didn’t really know what I was going to do with it, but having it made me feel closer to her. Once I started using it, I could very quickly see what she had been trying to tell me all that time. In my experience, bloggers are generally nice, encouraging people, and there really is a sense of community. It’s very interesting to me that, all of these years later, Glipho is building its own community of bloggers. So it’s really come full circle for me.

My blog has gone through three major periods. In the beginning, I mostly used it like a diary. I never expected anybody to read it. (Those embarrassing posts are all still there…*please please* don’t go back and read them!) Eventually, it just wasn’t really interesting enough for me to continue, and I gave up for about a year. When I started blogging again in August of 2005, I changed my focus. I started using it more as a place to keep interesting links I found on the Internet, and turned it more into something that was interesting to me and that I enjoyed, rather than something I felt like I had to do.

I’ve seen so many blogs come and go, and I think that the absolutely essential element for anybody who wants to sustain a blog is that you have to enjoy it. It doesn’t matter what you talk about, but it has to be you, and you have to enjoy it for its own sake. Otherwise it becomes work. If you’re doing it to “get readers” just quit now and save yourself the trouble.

The third iteration of my blog began in January of 2009, when I challenged myself to blog 7 days a week. I didn’t really have a plan or a goal of how far I’d take it, but I just thought it would be interesting. Though I eventually scaled it back to 5 days a week, I certainly never thought I’d still be keeping that schedule four years later.

This was a big difference though, because it really flipped a switch on blogging for me. The constant need to come up with content really kindled a spark in my creative side. I had never really used my “writer brain” for blogging, it had always been a separate thing. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with so many posts without making them dull or uninteresting, but instead the opposite happened: I started looking at the world in a new light, and finding inspiration for posts everywhere. I always figured I would stop blogging when I stopped enjoying it, but I think I’m enjoying it now more than ever.

2. You blog a lot about your kids, Evie and Ollie, who are adorable, intelligent, and hilarious. Do they ever read your blog posts? Will they read them in future? And how will you feel if one day you are the topic of THEIR blogs?

They do not read my blog, but they are aware that it exists. Particularly when they make me laugh, they’ll say, “Put that in your e-blog!” or “Is that a quote daddy?” Since Quote Monday is essentially just me transcribing the things they say, I guess you could consider them my co-bloggers. There are currently 198 “From the Mouths of Babes” posts, and that’s not even counting the posts I wrote *about* them. I know a lot of bloggers who never published 198 posts.

The Internet is forever, so I know they will read the posts someday, and when they do, no jury on Earth will convict them when they kill me. Unfortunately for them, my entire life is basically online, and I don’t think there is anything they could write that would be more embarrassing than anything I’ve already put out there myself.

I would love for them to be bloggers though. I wish everybody blogged everything all the time. For some reason, people seem to not want to put their lives on display to be dissected by Internet trolls. Weird.

3. Have you had any particular experiences as a result of your blog?

My all-time personal favorite was when I wrote a blog post about a childhood hero, Commander Mark Kistler, and he actually stopped by and commented on the post. I still get warm and glowy when I think about it.

One time I wrote a post and skillfully tied together two unrelated items (a quiz about which horrible disease you are and frozen pickle juice popsicles) with the title, “Do Pickle Pops give you Rickets?” Shortly thereafter, I received a couple of comments from the company who made the pickle pops. I just imagine the marketing guy sitting down at his computer in the morning thinking, “Ah, look! Bloggers are starting to talk about our product! We’re really going somewhere now!” and then just doing a spit-take with his coffee all over his monitor when he sees that title.

They were good sports about it though. I changed the post title even though they didn’t ask me to, and they sent me a bunch of free pickle pops. I do feel obligated to say there are no studies linking pickle pops to rickets. Unfortunately, my own study concluded that pickle pops do, in fact, taste like frozen pickle juice.

4. How involved are you with the online community? Have you attended any blogger meetups?

I have so many friends who I only know virtually, but I guess that’s not that unusual anymore. I’ve never attended any blogger meetups, but I have met people in real life who read my blog. It’s a little awkward and unbalancing when they know so much about me and I don’t know anything about them. Plus, when I try to launch into all my funniest stories they go, “Uh, yeah, I already read that on your blog.”

5. What blog(s) do you love to read? Any favourite Gliphers?

My favorite blog is John Scalzi’s Whatever. His is the blog my blog aspires to be. As far as Gliphers, I sort of pick and choose at the buffet of my feed. But some of my favorites are Frank Granati, Lindsay Parnell, Rachel Monte, and A Few Fine Things. I think they would all be surprised to know this.

6. Do you have any “core principles” you try to abide by as a parent?

I think the main thing we try to impart is to live simply. It’s so hard to do in this day and age; it really requires an effort. I’m doing everything I can to set my kids back 100 years. Have fewer, better quality things. Understand where your food comes from and what’s in it. Enjoy the outdoors. Read a book. Downsize your house. Forget about gadgets and cell phones and computers.

What’s that? Why does daddy work as a computer programmer? Do as I say, not as I do, children.

7. What are the three main pieces of advice you’d give your kids about functioning as adults, once they’re a bit further along the grown-up end of the spectrum?

Hey, this sounds like a good future blog post!

Don’t spend more than you have. I don’t care what everybody else is doing. Most people are idiots.

Your life is not your job. It’s wonderful to enjoy your job, but if you don’t (or even if you do), you need to have other things you enjoy. If you can work less, do it. Compiling more money is not more important than the things you love. Don’t miss out on your kids when they’re little.

You are what you eat. Don’t be “high fructose corn syrup” or “pink sludge from McDonalds”. And please, please don’t be some chemical I can’t pronounce. If you must be, at least shorten it to something hip and cute, like “Hydroxy”.

8. What made you decide to start writing on Glipho and how is it working out so far?

Someone in my online writer’s group said he had invites to a new blogging platform. I thought, “Hey, I like blogging!” As simple as that.

At first I wasn’t sure if I would use it regularly or not, but I kept telling myself, “Well, just a little longer…” However, there are two factors strongly in Glipho’s favor that keep me on: 1) I feel like I am reaching a totally new audience with Glipho (hello UK!) who would not have found me otherwise, and 2) because of the community, even though I get less traffic on a Gliph than on the same post at shanehalbach.com, I am more likely to get a comment in Glipho. I can tell you, nothing puts a smile on a bloggers face faster than a comment on a post!

9. Any particular goals, blogging or otherwise, for 2013?

I think the plans for world domination don’t kick in until 2015, so 2013 is pretty open.

As far as blogging and writing go, I would probably continue on as I have been. I’ve sold some of my short fiction recently, so that continues to be a goal of mine. Making money on writing is like a soap bubble dream; it seems too crazy to actually exist, and I’m afraid if I touch it or think about it too much, it will pop.

Also, I am learning how to play the accordion! If I can continue improving at my current rate then I can…well then I would be able to…you know how beloved accordion players are, so I guess the rest goes without saying.

Follow Shane here and on Twitter.

The President comes to work

/ Shane / Leave a comment

When they first announced that the president was coming to my work, I have to say I was less than impressed. It’s a pretty big place, with a couple of thousand employees. I kind of figured it was like when people say, “Oh, you live in Chicago? Do you know Bill Smith?” And besides, haven’t I been dealing with my famous neighbor for 5 or 6 years now? Yawners.

But then it turned out he was coming specifically to talk about transportation research, in my specific building, which was a little bit cool. Things started to get exciting. They were painting offices, cleaning up parking lots, planting flowers. They even renovated a bathroom for the Presidential tushy. A memo went around saying not to look in the direction of the President, or approach the windows, lest we catch a sniper’s bullet for our impertinence.

At some point, though, we crossed a line. It became pretty obvious that we were quickly becoming a pretty backdrop and nothing more. First they told us his speech was invitation only, and we weren’t invited. The President was arriving with his own crowd of people, who would watch the speech. Between that and all the work being done to clean the place up, I started to wonder why he didn’t just film his speech in front of a green screen, and paint on a generic backdrop after the fact. Finally they sent an email telling us to just go ahead and work from home that day. I guess the fill-in “scientist” extras felt a little self-conscious around the real thing.

And then the actual day rolled around. There were pictures and live streaming videos. And there was the president, at my work. Talking to people I talk to every day. Hanging out where we eat Burrito Loco. Joking with the guy who runs the football pool at work. It was *totally awesome*! My boss’ boss gave him a hug!

There he is! The guy who runs the football pool at work! (among several other people I recognize in this picture) (such as the President)

Now here’s the thing: it was *not* like when someone asks you if you know Bill Smith from Chicago. 8 of my co-workers, people who I pass in the hall every day, have coffee with, or chat with while I’m warming up my lunch, got to present their research to the President of the United States. Not just attend his speech, not just shake his hand, but talk to him and explain what they do. No matter what happens, they’ll always be able to point to a picture of them chatting with the sitting President of the United States.

All of my world-weary ennui went right out the window. It was damn cool.

I wasn’t at work that day, so it was all sort of one-off. I’ve been a lot closer to Mr. Obama on several other occasions. But I did a little vicarious living, and I still feel like it was a little closer than the average man gets to the president. We’re practically old buddies now. Maybe next time he comes to work he’ll want to carpool.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my tushy needs to go have an important “meeting” in the Presidential Suite.

Accordion Update

/ Shane / Leave a comment

It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about my accordion on the blog. That’s mostly because there hasn’t been much to report.

Periodically, I would get it out and noodle around on it, but not very often and increasingly less and less. Usually it was far enough between times that I was mostly just struggling to maintain what I knew, not really improving. It was obvious that what I needed was practice time, but learning anything (particularly an instrument) is an exercise in frustration and futility, and requires a lot of persistence.

Last Halloween, a friend introduced me to a neighbor who was also learning to play accordion. It seemed a shame that two accordion players would live so close together and not meet up. Through a series of mishaps, it took some time to actually make it happen, but eventually we did meet up a few times to play.

This was the motivation I needed.

As I suspected, what I really needed was practice time. Actually playing the accordion in front of someone else was very motivational to not suck. And even now, when we’re not meeting anymore, I’ve still managed to practice a good 20 minutes a day, 3 days a week. And it’s amazing how much of a difference that makes!

There’s really only one accordion book, the Palmer Hughes Accordion Course. I’ve had this book since day one, but I never got into it. The whole thing seems so cheesy, with stupid, childlike illustrations accompanying stupid, childlike songs. It’s sort of a shame, though, because now that I’m really going through it, it’s actually a really good course!

I think part of it, though, was hearing the songs played by someone who could actually play them properly made them seem less silly. Listening to him play, I was like, “Hey, that actually sounds like a real song.!”

Each song in the book adds an additional skill, and the difficulty increases pretty quickly. As soon as you master one song, the next one piles another level of difficulty on top. I’m not ashamed to admit that it took me awhile to get “Mary had a little lamb” since they used a jazzed-up version to work on your two hands doing two different things at the same time. So even though the song is simple, the concepts weren’t! It seems like each new song make me go, “Oh man, I can’t do that *at all*.”

Nothing is more motivational than actually seeing progress. I know playing the first 3 or 4 songs in an introductory book is nothing to brag about, but it’s a long shot better than nothing and getting easier all the time!

Lonely Eats the Pancake Maker

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We take our pancakes seriously in this house. For the past several years, we have made pancakes every Sunday morning, like clockwork. Of course, this tradition goes over *very* well with the kids, which means we need to make at least a double batch, and a triple batch if we want to have leftovers for weekday breakfasts. Picky Evie generally tries to eat her entire week’s allotment of food in that one meal. Last week, she ate 13 pancakes (granted, smallish, but still).

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Even with two griddles going, demand far outstrips supply, and the kids are clamoring for more as fast as I can make them. Right about when I’m finishing up cooking the last of the batter, everybody else finally gets their fill, which means by the time I sit down, I eat solo.

Like all of the best traditions, it evolved organically, but is now firmly entrenched in the fiber of our family. I’m not joking when I say that I think all four of us look forward to Pancake Day. As traditions go, it’s not the worst thing in the world.

My favorite part about Pancake Day, is trying different recipes. There’s our famous pumpkin pioneer pancakes, slow rise pancakes, and coconut pancakes with pineapple sauce (wow, been too long since I’ve posted a pancake recipe on here!). We’ve done crepes, Dutch babies, and sour yogurt pancakes. Pancakes with jam, pancakes with marmalade, and pancakes with lots and lots of maple syrup. Blueberry pancakes, walnut pancakes, and peanut butter pancakes. And then there’s French toast. Don’t even get me started on French toast!

I hope that we have Pancake Day for the next 20 years. I hope that when my kids are teenagers, they make sure they’re home (and awake) on Sunday morning (don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath). I hope that when my kids have kids of their own, they make pancakes on Sunday.

Long live Pancake Day!