Updates... from another dimension!

I have a few random things to share here, starting with this most amazing one:

Yesterday, during the eclipse, I suppose some kind of weird time/space wormholey thing opened up and sent my shirt from 13 years ago into Mal's closet. I don't have timestamps, but am including pictures with my Pepa and D to show just how long ago I had this shirt. It must have shrunk during the time travel. But there it is.

Item the Next:
The weekend before last, during the children's message, Mary asked the kids, "What's something good you can tell me about your week?" A couple of kids answered, things like feeding their pets or getting some neat trading cards. Usually, Mal kind of tries to say something when it's his "turn," but is usually just silly or shy. But this time, he said, "I helped my mommy in the kitchen." So that's a notable first! He answered a group query appropriately.

He does help all of the time. If I get out the vacuum to clean up, he pulls out the carpet cleaner, pulls off every removable part, and "vacuums" as well. If I sweep, he pulls out the Swiffer and shoves my pile around. He even helps by being an encouragement. This weekend when I was spot-mowing (read: half of our back yard), he followed me around saying, "Mommy, you a good worker!" And, yeah, our lawn mower is electric, so I could hear him.

New topic:
I had a sort of epiphany this week. There are quite a few popular sites, like Stimtastic and ARK, that sell "chewable" toys. D has several, as well as some fidget toys. I've written about this in the past, but a now-subconscious habit I have had basically since I stopped sucking my thumb at the age of 5 is chewing on my fingers. I am not aware that I do it, but like sometimes I'll pick up my phone and can't do the fingerprint recognition because my fingertip is wet. And I have callouses on four fingers. It's truly weird, because if you ask me to stick my finger in my mouth and show you what I do, I really can't. It feels awkward. But obviously I do it.

I think it's likely that I have an oral fixation, which is one likely reason I start to panic (on a fairly low level) if I don't have something to drink, and that I use that oral stimulation as a way to deal with deep thought or stress. So my epiphany was: If these items had been around when I was a kid, might my hands be worthy of manicures today?

When I mentioned this to D, my rather astute teenager said, "It's never too late to start." That's true, but I can't imagine what mental gymnastics I'd have to do to switch, since, as I mentioned, I don't know I'm doing it, often until afterwards.

But also, I'm very glad for kids (and adults!) that there's more to address the issue than just, "Put your hands down!" "You're so pretty when you're not gnawing on that finger." "You're too big to do that." Ad infinitum.

Final entry:
Literally every day, at least once and often two or three times, my son will lift up my shirt and lay with his belly to mine, perpendicular, announcing, "Mommy, I love you body." Other times, he'll just rub my stomach and be so sweet, cooing, "Mommy, you body is hot." And every stinking time, it makes my day. I mean, I know he means that I'm warmer than he is (since I wear clothes), but it's still nice to hear.

I have other thoughts on that, but will end for tonight. Mostly because I want to play a game before head to bed. Night, all!

A Brief Word on "... they'll just have to..."

There was an article in the paper today about how some area schools are starting back early this year, and how the kids are noticing. Someone commented (I KNOW! Never read the comments. Nonetheless...), "Just wait until you have a real job. In the real world, you don't get a summer break at all, so soak it up."

As an aside, it's weird to me that even people who don't have alt-ed viewpoints consider school something other than "the real world." Interesting. 

But the level of resentment dripping off of this - how dare kids be disappointed their typical break is shorter?! - is my main focus.

Look around and you'll see something: A lot of adults are really pissed off at kids in general. Pardon my English, but it's true. I think these adults feel like they've grown into productive members of society with good work ethics and a healthy dose of stoicism, and that kids "these days" are just whiny toots.

I'm pretty sure these same people would have had these same reactions as kids were the circumstances the same. Also, one of the kids interviewed was talking about how it was a challenge to get the summer reading assignments completed in less time. So this wasn't about languishing by the pool while the 'rents work their butts off.

My question is: Why do grown-ups seem to hate kids so much? Why do grown-up people decide to have kids, and then just seem to lose all compassion and empathy for them?

I have a kid who has anxiety, and we are dealing with that. One thing I've heard concerning not just our situation, but others', too, is, "Well, someday, they're going to have to XYZ 'in the real world.' You need to make them start doing it now, because the longer they ABC, the harder it's going to be to adjust."

May I tell you how ridiculous this is, whether it's leveled at a child or an adult? 

People who have phobias or other impairments that prevent them from functioning typically in any given situation might or might not find exposure therapy useful. I can tell you now, if you have a fear of snakes, I'm pretty sure that if I lock you in a box with 50 non-venomous snakes, you would not thank me later for assisting in your recovery. Or maybe you would. I'm not irrationally afraid of snakes, but I don't think I'd like that, anyway.

It is furthermore the height of self-righteous pride for anyone to tell a parent, "Here's what's wrong with your kid, and all you have to do to fix it is..." This might shock those of you who observe from the outside and then have the audacity to propose a simple fix, but I can promise you that parents have thought of EVERYTHING. They've researched, they've sought opinions, they've gotten opinions that they never solicited (including yours), they've second-guessed themselves, and eventually they have settled into what is working for their family. Your input at any point in this process is worthless, unless you, too, have been through the EXACT same thing and offer a viewpoint with the caveat that you truly understand no two people or situations are the same.

Lastly, any time a person says anything about how someone "has" to behave "in the real world," I am truly blind-sighted by how narrow a view of what constitutes a functional life so many of us have. Not everyone needs to be able to maintain eye contact for an extended amount of time. Not everyone needs to be able to drive. Not everyone has to wear close-toed shoes (shout-out to my friend Dave for that one :D ). People can and do create lifestyles they can manage all of the time. Now, can you get a high-paying corporate job if you can't do these things? Except for driving, maybe not. But not everyone's life needs to look the same. Some skills are worth honing because they will be useful, but not otherwise (like cursive; and please don't flame me). Not everyone needs the same social skills as everyone else. Not everyone needs to conform to the same box or boxes or cylinders or whatever. Does that mean the off-beat person's life will be more complicated? Maybe. But it's going to be more complicated, regardless. Some people just have a more challenging time with certain functions than others. That's okay. It's different, but it's not bad.

I have a bonus point: If you see a situation which you think is not ideal, whether it's a person you don't think is meeting their potential or a family you think could operate better if only they'd listen to this thing you've reasoned out... and if you really want to help... rather than offering an opinion unbidden, how about saying something like, "Your family really means a lot to me. Is there some way I could help you?" then be willing to do whatever they ask, if they take you up on it. Seriously, your unbidden input can only strain your relationship. Trust me, everyone's doing the best they can.

In a Hurry?

Parents: "Kids want to grow up so fast! Why don't they just enjoy their childhoods?"

Parents, also:

In so many ways, we give our kids the impression that they're not fully people; they're people in training. But do you remember being a kid? Did you feel like an actually-fledged human being? 

I think we do this with really good intentions. We know our time with our kids is limited, and we want to "prepare" them to release them out into the world as responsible, equipped adults.

However, I'm afraid this often leads to our making long-sighted parenting choices when short-sighted ones would actually be better. For instance: If my kid's room is a mess, maybe it's just that they don't have the energy to clean it this moment, or even today... and it doesn't have to mean that OMG, they're going to grow up without any self-discipline and their house will be overtaken by roaches, and they'll get evicted and therefore I'm turning off the wifi until the room is clean, dang it.

Kids see this. So much that they know, as they get older, that even their education isn't important in this moment. Otherwise, why would they ask, infamously about algebra, "When am I ever going to use this in the future?"

How often has a kid, discouraged with an extra-curricular lesson or activity, been encouraged to keep going because, "Someday you'll wish you'd mastered *this* so you can do *this other thing.*" 

Do you know when I've learned the things I've needed to know as an adult, for the most part? Exactly when I needed to know them.

This might surprise you, but I never learned a darn thing about real estate until I had to "learn" it to take a test. And even then, I didn't *actually* learn it until I was working in the field. Same with insurance. And video production. And script-writing. And parenting. Yeah, pretty much all of it.

And I have a theory about why family vacations are so much fun for our kids (other than the splurging in terms of fun and money throwing-around and whatnot): When we're on vacation, we are in the moment with them. We're not planning for the next thing. We're enjoying the thing we're doing right then and right there.

What if we lived like that all of the time? Or most of the time? Or at least some of the time?

Maybe our kids would be more content being children if we let them know they're important *now.* They can do things in this day that have value. We don't always have to be projecting them into the future.

Nichole Nordeman tells a story of how she had volunteered to play a song at one of her kids' school events, and as the day approached, she hadn't prepared anything. Then this following song came to her. And although the song is directed toward the children, she said that, of course, the encouragement to "slow down" is actually for the parents. I'm trying. 

Moving away from the guard rails

I started writing this in response to a post on a mailing list.

Basic idea behind the original post: I have a few decks of cards. I know that card seven in deck 12 tells me where I can start to find the 2 cards I can actually care about in decks x and y.

There's some personal stuff mixed into the middle of the career advice, so it seemed worth capturing the silliness that goes on in my head here.

I'm assuming the original poster wasn't just a troll.

There's a definite learning curve here.

Learn to spot these patterns.

Along with all the others. There's probably a Lifetime Achievement Goal for this one.

When you do something like (first xs) or (nth xs 3)...think about it!

Are you really just accessing the first element of a sequence?

I know that seems to be the "clojure idiomatic way." And, honestly, I think a lot of lisp literature probably supports this sort of approach. It's *great* if you're processing a seq by recursing over head/tail.

But...is that what you're really doing?

And, seriously, is there *ever* a really good reason to call nth in the middle of general-purpose code? (Yes, I know common lisp gurus *love* cadadar, but it gives this lesser mortal a headache just thinking about it).

In your case, it isn't. Or we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Personally, I haven't found a better solution to your dilemma than combing through the source code and looking for smelly parts like this.

One good (cross-language) rule of thumb I've run across is "If it happens once...OK. If it happens a second time, start being suspicious. If you see this pattern a third time, it's time to move it to an accessor method kind of thing."

I have the fresh wounds to be aware: I spent a good chunk of time today taking a namespace file that had grown too big for me to handle and splitting it out into multiple pieces. This meant a lot of digging through source code and updating specs for new namespaces. I'm still trying to figure out how this part actually works in clojure 1.9. I probably should have checked out Cursive again, and I haven't gotten further than installing CIDER 0.15.

There's another angle here that makes me suspicious.

Is what you're doing really complex enough to warrant "several thousand" lines of code?

I'm not saying it isn't!

I have absolutely no basis for judgement here beyond gut instinct. And no room to judge...I wouldn't pass this next check by any measure. I'm just asking questions here.

How good is your unit test coverage? How good are your commented-out REPL tests? Or maybe you moved those elsewhere to keep from polluting your production code base. (I'd personally rather see them right in the middle of what I'm testing as examples of how to call the code I'm testing, but I think I'm in a slim minority here).

I'm sorry for the long circle around your actual question.

If you have "lots of irrelevant stuff" that turn up when you search your code base for [first second nth]...what have you been doing?

If you've been slinging together a bunch of unrelated data structures into linked lists and expecting magic to come out the other end, then I feel your pain. Welcome to the real world. It doesn't work that way.

If you can pick apart the bits and pieces where you've been doing the same thing over and over again, you might be doing things that are easy to extract. Hmm...I'm calling (first (second (nth x 7))) a lot, to get to the same thing. I'll write a function that does this instead and then spend as much time as I can digging through my code to search for that pattern to refactor it to call that function instead.

Personally, I've never had any luck letting my editor do that step for me. It either finds a ton of false positives that breaks everything when I try to run my code in production, or it misses a ton of false negatives that leaves me wondering why I invested the time installing that editor in the first place. (Don't take my experience here as worthwhile: my experience is about 3 years out of date).

But, really, if you're doing the (-> x (nth 7) second first) sort of pattern often enough that you have to wonder whether you were looking for your uncle's telephone number or your sister's twitter feed...there's a bigger picture problem in your code base.

Figure that one out again. Recurse.

========================

Personal historical perspective that doesn't add anything, except my personal amusement and possible historical interest:

I've been working with a couple of C++ developers on a python project,  and they've complained many times about this sort of thing.

I wish I had a better answer than "What did you expect was going to happen?" In a lot of ways, it feels like when I was doing C++ and everyone around me threw away days tracking down N-1 errors on their array accesses because STL vectors were just too slow/complicated.

It seems like there are probably XKCDs about this. If there aren't, the captions should be:

C gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ gives you enough rope to blow your entire leg off.

With great power comes great responsibility.

Fish Gotta Swim and Birds Gotta Fly

I had an epiphany last week. It's about fishing. I've never gone fishing. I like being on a boat, but I don't have any urges to fish, especially not catch-and-release. I can actually understand the draw of fishing for dinner, but the other? Well, I didn't really get it. Until last week.

In the past couple of years, since having put out bird feeders, I have become increasingly interested in birds. Since moving into this house, I actually joined the Facebook group Birds of Texas, where there are more experienced birders than I who are happy to identify birds when I am unable to do so. In our yard here, I have seen: House sparrows, house finches, Carolina wrens, Carolina chickadees, doves, cardinals, red-bellied woodpecker, painted bunting, black-chinned hummingbirds, and turkey vultures. It's interesting: I haven't seen nor heard any Mexican scrub jays, which were all over the place at the apartment in Oak Hill. I also haven't seen a roadrunner in our yard, though I've seen them in the area, including one that walked past our house in the street every day for a week or two. I felt like he was going to work, then coming back home with a lizard for the family.

Anyway, my parents moved to Temple earlier this year, and they live in an area with so much new construction that there aren't any mature trees. They put out a feeder, though, and are being inundated with visitors. When we were up there last week, I went to sit outside to see what birds I could see. Also, it was 100 degrees and about 70% humidity.

At any rate. I pretty quickly saw a dove sitting on their next-door neighbor's roof.

Weird-o.

Then, I saw a couple of pairs of house sparrows and house finches.

Bathing.

You rang?

I also saw some grackles flying around in the area, but they never landed in my parents' yard.

If you've never watched birds before, they do this thing where they'll end up trickling into the same area, they'll all hang out for a while, then every single one of them gets a telepathic memo or something, and they all take off.

At one point, I was sitting there, staring off into space, waiting for the birds to come back. I thought, "Ha. I'm sitting out here in the heat, waiting to see more birds. Common birds. And I'm not sure when they'll be back..." Then I realized: I WAS BASICALLY FISHING. Just without the water. And I under no circumstances intended to eat any of these for dinner. My cats might have a different take on that.

But I felt a camaraderie with people who enjoy fishing just for the sport of seeing what you can catch, and enjoying the still silences (boredom) between active moments.

Also, bird-watching probably means I'm getting old, a fact that next month's birthday would tend to confirm.

Speaking with Mal

Here are a few snippets from conversations with my son this morning, in the space of about 2 hours:

MAL: Eww. Earwax.
ME: Yummy!
MAL: No! Earwax is gross. Boogers are yummy!

Later, Mal handed me something that looked like a seed.
MAL: What's this?
ME: (realizing it wasn't hard-shelled) Um, did it come out of your butt?
MAL: Yes.
ME: Then I think it's poop.
MAL: Not, it not.

MAL: Mommy, deedees!
ME: Sweetie, there's not any left.
MAL: I just need two deedees!
ME: We already did two.
MAL: I just need five deedees.
ME:...
MAL: They're not tired! They're just closed! Right there!!

Permanent mood

And here's a bonus conversation with that child's dad, many many hours later.

ME: Good morning! Are you hungry?
JAMES: Yes.
ME: What sounds good?
JAMES: You want to do that thing you mentioned? With the pies and the cheese and the video games?
ME: Um, no. You can't do Chuck E. Cheese on the weekend unless you get there right when it opens.
JAMES: Is it too late for that?
ME: What time do you think it is?
JAMES: About 8?
ME: It's 20 'til 1.
JAMES: Wow. Thank you.

I think we can all agree I'm the best wife. I don't think I've ever even made a honey-do list. :)

Have an entertaining weekend, people!

Mini-Update

Last night, I was writing my previous blog post out on the porch, enjoying the sunset and sounds of Texas summer. I'd invited Mal to come out with me, but he was watching videos in the floor of our bedroom.

Anyway, at a little bit after 9, Mal opened the back door and said, annoyed, "Mommy! I'm TIRED!" I asked him if he wanted me to help him go to bed, and he said yes.

We came in, and, of course, nursed for a few minutes, then he said, "I want to go outside now." I have to admit, part of me was like, "What? I thought it was bedtime!" but I went back out with him, and at that point it was pretty much dark. We looked at stars, he looked for fireflies (I guess it's too late for them now), and he desperately wanted to see a shooting star.

We started hearing a very high-pitched whinny, which sounded kind of like a cartoon version of a little pony. Maybe it was a baby fox? Or a bird? Anyway, Mal decided it was a horse, and it kind of freaked him out. He wanted to come in before the horse got us.

I actually had him sit in my lap outside a few more moments, explaining that horses don't really attack humans (but you don't want to walk around the back of one!), and that whatever it was was probably just crying for its mama.

When we did come in, he decided it was a baby horse missing its mama, who had gone to get dinner at McDonald's.

And he was asleep within 10 minutes of that.

It's not always that simple or easy, but it's a lot better than two hours of insisting "you don't have to go to sleep, but you have to stay in bed!"

I understand it's different for kids who have to be somewhere the next morning; no judgement here. Mostly just thought it was a cute interaction I wanted to remember. :)

And this is how he went to sleep Saturday night: we were driving to watch the sunset. We missed it. :)
This is the only thing that works besides "deedees."