We spent some time down in San Antonio this weekend, enjoying a long-overdue Father’s Day lunch with Dad McMains and some time visiting Mom McMains and her five new dachshund puppies. One of our projects for the summer has been getting Maggie swimming, and while at Mom’s, she finally got the hang of it enough to keep her head above water reliably. I expected her to get discouraged after getting a snootful of water a couple of times, but she just made a horrid retching sound, then whipped around and swam right back where she had come from.

Then on Sunday, I noticed Maggie going around to each of the doors that opened into the front room where I was sitting and quietly closing them. Now, the only time that Maggie is quiet is when she’s up to something, so I suspected she was trying to get away with some behavior she knew was illicit. Sure enough, when I checked on her a few minutes later, she had snuck a bag of dried cranberries into her room and was chowing down. (She hid her face in her pillow when she heard me coming, presumably on the theory that if she couldn’t see me, I couldn’t see her.)

Since Maggie’s likely to be the last of our kiddos, it’s a bittersweet time: knowing on one hand that we’re not going to have to deal with diapers anymore, or going through toilet training, but also that we won’t be hearing a first word or watching a fist step again. Wayne Watson expresses it well in his song Watercolor Ponies:

But Baby, what will we do
When it comes back to me and you?
They look a little less like little [ones] every day.
Oh the pleasure of watching the children growing
Is mixed with the bitter cup of knowing
The watercolor ponies will one day ride away.

Many of you will remember my friend Barry, who was beset with cancer and had been going through chemotherapy in the first part of the year. Mercifully, his chemo treatments have now concluded; he’s in good health, and is dealing cheerfully with the only aftereffects of his ordeal: some leftover fluid in the lungs from the bleo, and the need to get regular checkups, probably for the rest of his life.

Now, if you knew Barry, you’d realize that there’s only one way to celebrate his renewed vitality that would seem appropriate to him after such an ordeal: enjoying The Ring of the Nibelung in the company of friends. Barry’s the biggest Wagner fan I’ve ever known, and considers the Ring to be one of the high points of western civilization. I’ve found my own interest rekindled recently when reading a biography of The Inklings, the society that revolved around C.S. Lewis, and whose members included Charles Williams and J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings draws on the German legends that make up the plot of Wagner’s Ring.

I’ve never seen The Ring, nor even any of its component operas. But for the next seven days, I’ll be keeping a somewhat insane schedule, working in Austin during the days, watching the operas with Barry and friends in San Antonio as evening approaches. Goodwife Kathy has graciously offered to do the necessary child care to enable me this intensive soak in this sea of culture. (She’ll be coming along for this evening’s introductions to the leitmotifs.)

Now I’m off to see if I can find a recording of Elmer Fudd singing “Kill the Wabbit!” to play loudly on the stereo as a drive…

I ordered a passel of new Pennywhistles from The Whistle Shop last week. I’m pretty excited to get the order for a couple of reasons:

1. Clarke Natural: this whistle is probably the modern whistle that’s most like the traditional instruments. It has a conical bore, which gives it a more mellow sound than the Susato whistles I favor for general purpose playing, and has a wooden fipple which is supposed to give it an even nicer, mellower sound. I’ve not owned a conical bore whistle before, and will be glad to have one in my arsenal.
2. The Meg: Clarke has taken their Sweetone design and contracted with a far east manufacturing company to crank these purportedly quite good whistles out for a mere $3.00 each. I ordered several of these, one for keeping and a bunch for giving away so as to spread the whistle addiction a bit farther.

The order’s due in Thursday. I’ll post on whether these live up to expectations once I’ve had a chance to mess about with them a bit.

This Friday, Emily left for a four week stint with our relatives in New York. Her absence leaves a noticeable void in our family — not only because we have to remember to count to three instead of four when we’re tallying little heads (we’ve actually taken to borrowing a kid from a friend so as to make this easier for us), but also because of her unique gifts and contributions to the texture of our family life.

On Tuesday I took her for a day-long trip to Fiesta Texas, the Six Flags theme park in San Antonio. We had planned on a Tuesday so that crowds would be light, and the weather cooperated as well; though we got rained on a bit in the morning, the sky was generally more menacing than it was actually stormy. As a result, we never spent more than 10 minutes in line for anything, and several of the ride operators offered us the chance to stay on rides once our first go-round was complete.

Unfortunately, the trip has made it abundantly clear to me that I have become that most sad of creatures: a former roller coaster fan. Though I still have a tremendous appreciation of the engineering and design that goes into these enormous thrill rides, I find actually riding them to be less and less appealing as time goes on. My stomach has gotten weaker over time, and I find myself more often tottering off of the trains trying to regain my equilibrium than exulting in the fantastic experience.

Emily, however, has picked up the slack for me. She rode every one of the big coasters in the park (with the exception of the Rattler, which was closed when we got to the head of the line for lightning — imaginary as far as we could tell) and loved them without fail. She also got a big kick out of the spinny carnival rides which nauseated me simply to watch. (The thing that finally did me in Tuesday was The Frisbee: a giant spinning disk that swings on the end of a huge arm, providing for its riders all the fun I would imagine a Martini enjoys as it’s being mixed.)

So the torch is passed to another generation, and I’m sitting with my laptop, enjoying the vicarious thrill of Roller Coaster Tycoon.

I’m referring, of course, to Terminator 3. I went and watched it last night with a couple of guys from a Bible study. (Savor the irony of that for a moment. Aaaah.)

One expects a certain level of mindless mayhem where Terminator movies are concerned, and this one delivered that in spades. However, I never really cared enough about the characters to make the mayhem feel as threatening as it should have. Plus, the pacing was peculiar. One rather expects the biggest explosions and most impressive set pieces to cap off the film. Not in this case — it just petered out rather abruptly, and left me thinking “Where’s the climactic final battle?” Also disappointing was the fact that the way Arnold finished off the new Terminator — especially given that the Terminator from T2 could easily have escaped that situation. But, of course, I tend to think too much in films like these.

Anyway, a reasonably fun romp, but it left me rather dissatisfied.

Today I took the kids up to Austin for a noon showing of Captain Blood, the movie that catapulted Errol Flynn to stardom, at the Alamo Drafthouse. Harry Knowles has conspired with the owners of the Drafthouse to put on a Saturday Morning Film Club — a monthly event with free admission for kids and adults accompanied by a member of the junior set.

I was rather interested to see what Harry was like in person, since his writing seems to embody the best and worst of an individual whose emotional development stopped around middle school. While taking an unseemly interest in scatological and base humor, he also maintains a boyish enthusiasm for film that seems to resonate with fans and visitors to his heavily trafficked website.

The movie was superb. I hadn’t seen much of Errol in action before, and quite enjoyed the panache with which he played his role. The near-Shakespearian repartee among the characters drew hoots of laughter from the audience, and the furtive pleasure of scarfing down a sandwich during a film completed the experience. (The Drafthouse serves food during shows, so it’s actually an entirely licit treat.)

Harry was on good behavior for the kids, which made his introduction to the film, while a bit long for the young ones in the audience, altogether enjoyable for those of us with an interest in cinema. All in all, it was a great time, and we’re hoping to get back for these monthly events with some regularity.

We went to our company picnic on Saturday. The kids, as usual, had a great time playing in the water, interfering with volleyball games, and eating themselves silly. Two especially noteworthy aspects of this year’s picnic:

1. The kids swept the limbo competition! They were, of their own accord, practicing Friday night, and got 1st (Abigail), 2nd (Emily), and 3rd (Liam) in the contest. Their combined winnings: $60 of gift certificates for Toys R’ Us!
2. Emily befriended the lads from Amy’s Ice Cream who were there serving the stuff. (Incidentally, Amy’s is about my least favorite ice cream — it taste like licking a big scoop of sugared butter to me. Bleah. Kathy loves it.) Emily soon impressed them with her mad ice-cream catching skills — over the shoulder, over the sister, at a distance — whatever they’d pitch, she’d catch. (See the video.)

I just had my first voice chat via Apple’s new iChat AV with Steve. One of my biggest complaints with cellular phones over the years (aside from the fact that they’re phones, which I hate to begin with) has been lag, which makes it tough to talk without stepping all over each others’ words. iChat seemed to be subject to the same problems, to a degree presumably dependent on the speed of the connection between Steve’s and my computers. However, if you can get used to talking in slightly larger blocks, it’s quite managable, and a nice alternative to actually paying for long distance. Bonus feature: it pauses iTunes automatically when you connect to an audio or video conference, and unpauses when you’re done.

Update: I just tried it with video, and oddly enough, the lag seemed less. Either that, or I was just too amused to notice.

Thanks for bearing with the interruptions, Steve. 😉

I just picked up a copy of Cubase SL over on eBay, and am very excited about it. I’ve been looking for some good, affordable digital audio software for Mac OS X for quite a while, and while this is still more expensive than the entry-level stuff for OS 9 was, it’s also a good deal more capable.

The first project planned is recording some of Emily’s favorite songs with her, after which I’d like to do some whistle tunes, a few 1920’s songs, some sacred instrumental music, and eventually a Christmas album to send out this year. I’d also like to talk the guys in the Grant Mazak Band into committing some of the great local songwriters’ tunes to CD. Should be fun!

A bit of computer-related rambling here. Feel free to skip it if it’s not interesting to you.

Lately, a spate of web browsers have started including a feature called “Tabbed Browsing.” The way tabbed browsing works is that each window can have an arbitrary number of tabs, each of which is a different web page. The better implementations of this feature also allow you to bookmark tab sets, which is an enormous time saver.

For example, I have about 10 websites that I read daily. In a browser without this feature, I’d have each of those sites bookmarked, and would select each of the bookmarks sequentially, which of course requires me to wait for each page to load. In Mozilla, I’ve created a tab set bookmark called “Dailies.” When I’m ready to do a bit of reading, I just choose that bookmark, and Mozilla loads all ten sites simultaneously. As I finish reading a site, I simply close its tab, and the next site is ready to be read instantly.

There are a number of other situations where tabbed browsing is immensely useful: copying information from one page into a weblog page, clicking a hyperlink and having it load on another tab in the background so it doesn’t disturb the flow of what you’re reading, etc.

So after using tabbed browsers for several months and enjoying the utility and economy of screen space, I had an idea: why not extend tabs to other kinds of applications than web browsers? A tabbed terminal application comes immediately to mind, and news readers and email programs could probably benefit. Eclipse, a wonderful open-source IDE for Java development, already includes tabbed text editing in its bag of tricks. Even word processing, image editing, and other tasks might be made a bit more intuitive this way, as its often easier to manage multiple documents by clicking among tabs than by moving from window to window.

This would, of course, disrupt some long-used conventions, especially on the Mac, where there’s no equivalent of Multiple Document Interface — a convention many Windows programs already use and to which tabbed navigation would be infinitely superior from a usability standpoint. But the speed with which tabbed browsing has been adopted in web browsers makes me think that it would be easy for most people to grasp, and would offer significant benefits.