So anyway, he was up last night throwing up with a 102.1 fever. He wanted a bowl by his bed in case he couldn’t make it into the bathroom and he wanted medicine. He also a cold washcloth for his head.

(Seriously, if there is ever a gender reversed staging of A Streetcar Named Desire, Spenser is a lock for Blanche)

It didn’t help that our dog was howling at the thunder and random slamming doors all night. That was fixed easily enough with an old n-bark collar we had lying around. The batteries don’t work, but just putting it on him quieted him down. So essentially no sleep last night for mommy and daddy.

Has anyone out there experienced this with their kids? Is it a psychological thing we need to be worried about? He has a fever most of the time when he’s sick so I know he’s not faking, though he does tend to drag it out long past when we know he’s better. At least Holly is tough. She could eat rocks and salmonella-laced mold and get stronger. She’s like her mommy in that way.

Now let’s get this caveat out of the way. I love movies and I’m VERY easy to entertain. All I ask is that I not be bored. And I don’t bore easily. Chuck Wendig and Michael Underwood have great reviews of the movie where they lay out some very real problems with the movies, but I did not have the same problems. I like Michael’s review because he addresses most of his issues around the choices the filmmakers made. I, on the other hand, liked the choices the filmmakers made. I liked that it was more of an alien invasion movie than a superhero movie. I liked all of the origin stuff because I never dug that deep into it previously. I liked that Clark was all good yet, that he was still learning how to handle being  so powerful.

I was never a big Superman fan, so I don’t have the same attachment to his ideal portrayal that others do. I liked his portrayal here, especially the action scenes at the end that were the focus of much of the critics derision. These battle scenes, though loud, and huge, and destructive, are exactly what I think would happen if two indestructible aliens went at it. Chuck’s review, I think, calls them consequence-less battles, and he may be right. I think the best test of the success of Man of Steel will be how the sequel handles the destruction leveled during the fighting. If they just gloss over it and go on with the next villain then I think MOS will have been a failure. But if the sequel addresses the fallout of that destruction and Superman’s role in it, then I will be very happy.

I also really liked Lois Lane in this movie, though I agree with other reviewers that she seemed shoe-horned in to the last half. So all-in-all, sure there were flaws and plot holes, and Superman is still one of my least favorite heroes because he is so all powerful, but this movie took some chances and was more exciting that Superman Returns. Which I also liked, but didn’t LOVE.

I don’t suspect this will be the first big movie this summer that I love and most everyone else hates. I expect to love World War Z, The Lone Langer, and White House Down as well.  I think everyone will love The Wolverine.

In non-computer news, I’ve been to quite a few movies lately (some even with my wife!) and have more in the pipeline. I love summer. I was able to catch the new Star Trek and Now You See Me, and Becky and I went to see The Hangover III and This Is The End. I enjoyed all of them, but my bar for success at the movies is incredibly low. I hope to see Man of Steel this weekend with either my son or father or both.

So more later, I’m sure. I have a big piece I’m working through on how welcoming and safe the mystery community is in response to the SFWA stuff, but that’s still marinating. I also want to write about how even though movies aren’t as good as TV these days, they fit my viewing habits better. So lots of stuff coming up.

Also, I think I will be going to an every day posting schedule for at least a month to get my new stats package acclimated and get people reacquainted with this place. I had some of my best stats during the last month I did that. So exciting times here. Enjoy.

My god, it’s full of stars…

UPDATE: I couldn’t even get out of the FTP stage due to my new modem/router not playing nice. I don’t have the time or energy for this sort of crap right now so I think I’m keeping the site hosted at WP.com for the time being. Stupid technology…

SECOND UPDATE: Okay, I think I did it. I used the auto install of WordPress instead of manual to avoid some FTP issues I was having, and it has worked so much better than comments online led me to believe it would be. So have a look around and let me know what you think of the place.

But I did, and now I think I’ve got everything back to normal, though I’m about a week behind on my work. Blech. As part of this revamping of my cloud life, I bought into a 3 year prepaid deal for web hosting through 1and1.com which is where I have my domain name registered. In the back of my mind I’ve been thinking about switching to a self-hosted blog through WordPress.org, but in the immediate term, the reason I signed up was because I was able to get 50gb of cloud storage and 250 email addresses with 2gb of storage each for $35 for three years. Even if I keep my website housed on WordPress.com, which at this point I’m more inclined to do due to lack of sufficient time on my part to handle the maintenance of a self-hosted site, the web storage and email addresses are worth the price alone.

I’ve been interested in getting into some cloud storage that isn’t sponsored by one of the major email companies. Right now my stuff is spread across Google Drive, Skydrive, and Dropbox. Skydrive is where I have pictures and video stored, Googe Drive is where I have my writing stuff stored, and Dropbox is where I keep my editing stuff because they work better with my iPad and Microsoft Word. I’d love to get all of my pictures and videos into storage with my web host so I’m better protected if Microsoft folds or randomly decides to get out of the cloud business.

So that’s where I am with the cloud these days. Is your head in the cloud at all?

Saturday morning Becky was at work and I was cleaning the house with the kids. I got an email from her saying she wanted to do something fun that night. So did I, but there’s kind of a problem. We’ve been awful at cultivating babysitters outside of our immediate family. So when the last-minute urge for dinner and a movie hits, and all of the relatives are booked up, we don’t have any options.

Well, we don’t have any sane options. Here’s what we did.

Because of this lack of outside babysitters, and our kids being at an age where it’s frequently required for us to get away from them RIGHT NOW on occasion to save everyone’s sanity, we’ve become pretty good at finding non-traditional ways to unload the little monsters, er, lovely darlings. Two of our favorites are IKEA and the Soaring Eagle Casino. Yes, I know it’s shameful to bring kids into a casino, but they love it.

So Saturday afternoon when we realized we couldn’t find a babysitter, my brain starting looking for other options. Then I thought, “Hey, didn’t Soaring Eagle just open a water park?”

Indeed they had. So I made a reservation, packed up the kids, and when Becky got home from work we left. And we all had a great night. The kids were excited to stay in a hotel and go to the Kids Room with video games and a playscape and any number of ways to distract and entertain them, while mommy and daddy had a nice dinner, played some cards, eavesdropped on the Huey Lewis concert, and had some reasonably priced drinks in the sports bar. We all fell asleep that night watching Saturday Night Live and it was grand. The next day we all went to the water park where Becky and I both felt better about our bodies and our parenting skills, and then we came home.

So instead of dropping $150 on a babysitter and dinner and a movie, we dropped $200 or so to go away for the night. It’s probably not the best plan, but it worked.

In other related news, the rotting scent of failure has been surrounding me in an aspect of my real life. Yesterday I was finally able to crack open a window and let the smell dissipate. And let me tell you, I know as Americans we have a history of embracing failure and learning from it and all of that crap, but we don’t talk enough about how much it sucks to fail at something.

And it does. It’s embarrassing and depressing and, depending on the timing, can ruin your life. So far the timing on my particular failure has been okay and there does’t seem to be any long-term harm on the horizon except to my ego. But man, I’m shell shocked and kind of nervous about trying again.

I’m still wondering what to do about June here at the site. I initially thought about doing a post every day, but I’m not sure that’s the best thing. I’m still way behind on the amount of writing I need/want to do on my new novel and any words I write here are words that aren’t going in the novel. That’s not to say I won’t post here at all, because this site does feed a part of me that I need and I hope you all out there find it entertaining enough to pop by when I have something to say. I just suspect I will keep the same random schedule I always have. But maybe I’ll make sure no more than two or three days go by without me posting something here, even if it’s just a picture. How’s that? Would that work?

And on a final note, I’ve lowered the prices on my editing services for the summer, so go check them out and tell all of your friends. My kids have a very expensive toy habit.

It started with my dog scaring a rabbit to death.

Actually, it probably started with the former owners of our house with a tiny little oddly shaped back yard planting a tree big enough to reach the moon and house an entire colony of tree people. That tree has ruined our deck, our foundation, and until we chopped it down with the gleeful hate of a thousand neighbors, our basement drain. So because our drain still has lots of chunks of that damn tree clogging it and I haven’t had the time to get down there and clean it out, every time it rains the drain backs up and we get a little bit of water down there. It always drains away after a day or so and only leaves a faint musty odor for a day or two as well. 

So, this rabbit. Dog killed it, I, being the suburban goober I am and not knowing any better, throw the corpse in the trash. Oops.

And then it rains. A lot.

Did I mention my kids are incapable of ever shutting a door when they play outside leaving our house open to any number of critters?

So anyway, we have a rabbit corpse in the trash, a monsoon in our back yard, and a basement drain that doesn’t work so good. 

The first sign of trouble came with the flies. They started showing up in huge clumps at the windows. We spent a few days swatting them, spraying them, vacuuming them and any other number of ways to make them go away. Our first thought of course was the rabbit in the trash. But there were no flies around the trash. Then we came home from work one day to an awful smell in the house coming from the basement. I went down and saw that after about four days, this batch of water hadn’t drained and was really starting to stink. So I sucked it all up with the ShopVac and bleached the floor and put enough deodorizers and coffee grounds down there to choke out the Black Death. 

But the smell remained. Not as intense as before, but still pretty awful. So the next day we sent the kids out to my in-laws and I donned a respirator and gloves and went poking around in the basement. Guess what I found. Go on. Guess.

A dead possum. Ew. 

So learning my lesson from the rabbit corpse, I threw the possum corpse over the back fence into the yard of the neighbor I’ve never met.

More bleaching, more deodorizing, more slight reduction in the smell. But it still wouldn’t go away completely. After sniffing around in the basement and following the smell trail up to under the deck, I figured the deck must be the source of the smell. That was immediately confirmed when I cracked open the first deck plank and was treated to a smell that could only be described as dirt-enhanced death. But no corpse.

After enlisting the help of my neighbor (the non-corpse deposited neighbor) and his power tools with free beer, we cut out a chunk of the deck playing find the smell. We never did find a body, but there was a puddle of standing water that smelled so awful it had to be the source of everything that had ever gone wrong with the house. I assumed it was a liquid curse and disposed of it as such. By this time the smell in the house had diminished quite substantially and I’m hoping what’s left is just delightful leftovers from the previous rotting  goodies. My next step is to get a truck and take everything from the basement (up to and possibly including the cat) to the dump. If that smell remains, then it’s only a matter of time I suspect before there’s an “accident” that burns down the entire house. 

And the weeds are back too. I wouldn’t be surprised if these devil weeds weren’t what killed the rabbit and the possum in the first place. And then possessed them to invade my house with their smells. Forever.