My wife and I first went to Hawaii many years ago, back when we were just starting to date. It was where we realized we loved each other. One of my main memories from that trip though was cramming our luggage into a Miata and driving away from the airport in Hawaii, towards our hotel. I remember being so incredibly happy to be on this romantic tropical island, with this fantastic woman, cruising down the highway in a convertible. I was giddy, or at least as giddy as a fairly stoic computer programmer gets.

So, on last week's trip, as we drove towards our hotel in our Mustang convertible, I couldn't help but recall that first trip. I love my daughter very much, but it was bittersweet to drive down the Maui highway with her in the backseat. We had a good vacation, but it's hard to compare it with that first romantic trip.

The trip went pretty well. My wife didn't lose her wallet and no one got ill. For the first time in over five years, I got TONS of sleep, although this was a bit of a mixed blessing. As it turns out, putting two adults and a five year-old in a hotel room is a little awkward. My daughter would fall asleep at around 8:00 or 8:30 at night, and then we pretty much had to be quiet in the dark since her bed was mere inches from ours. I bought a tiny little flashlight and I'd read my book with it. It felt the teeniest bit naughty to be doing this by flashlight, but, ultimately, it was not very naughty. No more regular hotel rooms for us.

The hotel did, however, have a "Kids Club" program where you could drop off your child for hours at a time. Thankfully, this was appealing to our daughter (mostly because she got to watch tons of TV in the "Club"), so the wife and I got to enjoy some "Adult Club" time. Of course this partially consisted of Scrabble, but not entirely!

We spent lots of time each day either at the swimming pool or at the beach. It shouldn't have been surprising to me, but everywhere I looked there were people in bathing suits. I kept awkwardly noting that I was semi-accidentally staring at women in bikinis. Each time I'd feel self-conscious and look elsewhere only to find another woman in a bikini. As it turns out, Hawaii is chock-full of such creatures. I tried not to feel like a lech. Bikinis rock.

On the flight back home, we got a lesson in bad parenting from the mother behind us. She'd chastise her kids with random punishments, then she'd revoke those punishments just as randomly. She seemed surprised when the kids didn't behave. Look, no one is going to confuse me with Parent of the Year, but I'm pretty sure that parenting requires at least a modicum of consistency. Frankly, I'd recommend three or four modicums.

Overall, I'm pleased to give this vacation a rating of First-Vacation-Since-The-Kid-Was-Born-Where-I-Was-More-Relaxed-Than-I-Am-At-Work. Huzzah for Hawaii. Huzzaii!

We leave for vacation bright spanking early tomorrow morning. This is the first vacation we've attempted in the child-era that doesn't involve visiting grandparents or Disney. It's a big girl vacation!

Of course, as usual, forces are conspiring to make this vacation as unpleasant as possible. My wife's work is kicking in with a vengeance, as is my daughter's asthma. Although my wife always lobbies hard for these vacations, and does most of the planning, she usually tries to sabotage them at the last minute. I guess she's teaching the kid to follow in her footsteps.

Typically my wife will become ill right before a trip, or if that tactic fails, she'll do something like leave her wallet at home (back before airport security required your driver's license every 13 seconds). She successfully pulled off the wallet trick twice. She's crafty, that one.

So, it is with baited breath that I await tomorrow's surprise disaster. Will her head implode? Will my daughter develop some sort of explosive bowel syndrome? Perhaps my wife will don a burka and refer to the security guards as infidels. Ahh, it's mysteries like this that keep the love alive in our relationship.

I'm so curious, I can hardly wait. Back in a week.

It's time for weekend round-up! Woooo! The internet demands to know about my weekend so, who am I to deny these inquisitive packets their manifest destiny? Feast upon my weekendy bits, little packets. Sooo good.

Saturday morning I went for a two-hour run. I'll be running the Chicago Marathon this October so my training runs are getting longer and longer. I fully intend to qualify for Boston this time, unless I give up, which astute readers will realize I am prepared to do (at any time!). After this difficult run I found out that I ran too hard. I wasn't really aware that you could run too hard, but apparently our running coach had intended the majority of this run to be done at an easy pace. Somehow, I misunderstood what "easy" meant. Yes, I do feel stupid. And tired.

Afterwards I stopped by a sporting goods store to buy some new running shoes. Foolishly, I informed my wife of this errand and she then asked me to pick her up a swimsuit. Yes, a swimsuit. We're going on vacation this week and apparently she needs a new swimsuit. Now, understand that typically when my wife goes shopping for swimsuits, or other random clothing items, there are large amounts of frustration and anger (hers, not mine) associated with the process and the products. My strategy during these shopping trips is to quietly lurk in the background, saying very little. Years of experience have taught me that comments like "That looks nice" are met with snorts of derision.

So, needless to say, I was reluctant to insert myself into this process, but she insisted. My task was then to purchase a size X swimsuit, pastel-colored, with something called breast-support. Of course no one swimsuit met all these absurd criteria and I was left thrusting several swimsuits at the cashier, begging him to tell me which one was closest to pastel-colored. After much squinting, we chose the mostly-black one.

Astonishingly, my wife likes the swimsuit. Our marriage endures.

Today we went to go celebrate my mother's birthday at my sister's house. I appreciate my family a lot more now that I have a small child who requires much entertaining. When we're at my sister's house, my daughter plays with her two cousins, unaided, the whole time. It's like I don't even have a child. I'm not quite sure what they're doing for all those hours. Sometimes the two five year-olds and the eight year-old just sit around talking. What do five year-olds have to talk about with each other? Candy? I must admit, candy is mighty compelling and tasty.

Tonight we have to complete one of our major pre-vacation chores. We must slog through as many hours as possible of TiVo programming. TiVo is, as the government stated in one of their what-do-you-mean-separation-of-church-and-state moments, divine. However, you don't want to have a big backlog of stale TV when you get back from vacation. Shows like the Olympics or the Daily Show are perishable and must be watched in a timely fashion. Wait too long and you're the only one at the water-cooler still cracking wise about J. Lo, or Michael Jackson, or disco, or how fat William Taft is. Oh, TiVo Lord, I shall worship at thine altar tonight.

I spent a few hours at my daughter's preschool yesterday. She'll be going to kindergarten soon and my wife reminded me that this was my last chance to spend time with the kid in this particular environment. My wife goes there all the time and comes home with a variety of germs worthy of a medical school textbook, so I guess she felt it was time for me to douse myself in the puddle of fluids known as preschool.

My daughter's preschool is a classic San Francisco school. It's highly unstructured where the three and four year olds get a surprising amount of autonomy. If one kid smacks another one, instead of getting an old fashioned whuppin', the teachers sit down with both kids to talk about their feelings and their actions in a blame-free manner. It's all very touchy-feely. To someone used to a more structured environment it appears to be total chaos, but somehow it does actually all work. It's also vegetarian. Yuck.

I went to a PTA meeting for the school last year where the parents were encouraged to write down words that described the school on 3x5 cards and then post them on the wall so that we could all discuss them. I hurriedly wrote down KIDS and smacked that on the wall before anyone else got a chance to take my word. (Score!)
One of the administrators reviewed all the cards and selected one that said GRANOLA. She seemed slightly befuddled by it and asked who wrote it. Some poor parent raised their hand and the administrator asked what they meant by GRANOLA.

"You know. Granola," the parent replied.

"No, I don't know," said the administrator, either totally oblivious to the hippie world she lived in, or just wanting to screw with the parents.

"The school. It's kind of....well...granola," the parent offered helplessly.

The administrator would not be deterred. "What do you mean by that?" she asked.

At this point another parent heroicly came to the rescue. He piped up with, "I think what they meant is organic. The school is very organic."

The administrator seemed satisfied by this answer and we were allowed to continue with the rest of the agenda.

Anyway.

So, yesterday morning I mentally prepared myself for children running amuck during my preschool visit. I practiced by watching my daughter out of the corner of my eye during breakfast. She had some raisins with her breakfast and kept dropping them on the table. She has been taught that any surface in the house that isn't a plate, probably isn't clean enough to eat off of. So, each time she dropped a raisin on the table, I'd see her immediately look at me, look at the raisin, and then, thinking that I wasn't watching, quickly pop the raisin in her mouth.

After a few iterations of this, I informed her that I could see her. I felt ready for the mayhem that is preschool.

Preschool, as it turns out, was anti-climactic. One kid kept snacking on the playdoh, which was pretty amusing, but it was homemade organic playdoh, so it probably won't kill him. I tattled on him anyway though. Some other kids pushed each other around, but they then attended a kiddie-summit and made nice-nice.

Today someone got to my blog by doing a Yahoo! search on whoops + cheerleaders + no + panties.

I guess the Internet is such a cornucopia of porn that you can choose between various flavors of cheerleader-with-no-panties porn. Some folks prefer the intentional panty-less cheerleader, while others enjoy the whoops factor. It's a big tent. Panty-free cheerleader porn for all.

HOWEVER, here at I Am Prepared to Give Up at Any Time, we DO NOT support those cheerleaders who remove their panties on purpose. We hate them. Skanks. We do, apparently, support those cheerleaders who inadvertently lose/forget/burn their panties.

Whoops, indeed.

Went down to Palo Alto this Saturday to splash around in a most excellent kiddie pool. My daughter frolicked in the piss-warm water for a couple hours, thrilled that she wasn't out of her depth in any part of the pool.

I probably shouldn't refer to the pool as piss-warm. In any other city, it would be warmed by the urine of a hundred children, but Palo Alto is one of those places where I don't think people even have urine. Everything is all clean and fancy and piss-free. Freaks.

During the drive home, my daughter slumped forward in her car-seat, totally exhausted by the activity. Small children can fall asleep in unnatural, how-can-they-possibly-be-asleep type positions. My wife, meanwhile, had also fallen asleep. Her head was tilted back and her mouth was wiiiiide open. I think I could have stopped the car, and inserted my daughter into my wife's mouth, and neither one of them would have woken up. I should have tried it, traffic sucked.

If you listen very carefully you can hear angels singing.

Today, the Giants dumped Neifi Perez, arguably the very worst player in baseball. I mean, the best thing the Giants Manager, Felipe Alou, could say about Neifi during his departure was "He showed up everyday and didn't complain," but then Felipe realized that he couldn't even say that. He qualified it with "He did complain a little bit last year."

There you have it. Neifi Perez, long regarded for his abilities to not complain, except when he was complaining, now needs a job. I recommend he look outside the field of baseball. He wasn't so good at that whole hitting-the-ball-thing. As it turns out, that's a useful skill in baseball.

As a Giants fan, I am supremely pleased to see him dumped. As a curmudgeon, I'm a bit disappointed to lose one of my favorite things to complain about.

Bye Neifi.

Today I found a copy of the first blog I had created, back before everybody had a blog. We didn't call them blogs back then. I think they were called "cotton gins" or "online journals" or something like that. It vanished from the face of the Internet when our ISP packed up and quit. I managed to save the files though, and I read them today for the first time in about four years.

Back then all I ever wrote about was the baby (as opposed to now where only 75% of the entries are daughter-related). Every post was about a new fluid that she squirted out, or some feeble attempt at crawling/walking/not-screaming. There was usually some description of the previous night's attempts at sleep. A few pictures of the happy baby were displayed, but mostly there were a lot of pictures of a somber or crying baby.

Frankly speaking, it was a tremendously miserable time. Our daughter had a condition called colic. Colic is the name that doctors use when they don't know why your baby is crying. That's what my daughter had in spades. Our doctor described her as the most colicky baby he had ever seen. We found that both alarming and reassuring. Eventually I figured out that pediatrics is not really a science. There's no good test that you can do on an infant. You can't ask what hurts, you can't x-ray them, you can't slice them open and peek. All you can do is shine a light into whatever orifice is willing to open and see if there's a big sign that says something like "Root canal. I need a root canal, doc."

Our daughter generally woke up between 4 and 10 times a night for the first 9 months or so. The vast majority of her waking hours were spent screaming at the top of her lungs for no reason that we could determine. I'm not a religious man, but I prayed for death (usually mine) every day for the first year or so. She didn't start to sleep through the night with any regularity until she was 3 or 4 years old.

Things are obviously much better now. However, to punish her for all those screaming days, I will post the very ugliest baby picture that I found on the old blog. Hah! May her future high-school boyfriends find this page.

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As it turns out, kids have birthdays about once a year. That means that there will be one birthday party per kid per year. Now, if your kid has lots of friends, or goes to school, or doesn't live in a vacuum-packed isolation chamber, they will be invited to many other birthday parties. I haven't run the exact numbers, but the end result is that you end up taking your kid to a birthday party approximately every 18 seconds, give or take.

Usually my wife handles this duty because she's the good parent, but sometimes I get to share in the love. From what I can tell the requirements for a birthday party are:

1) The children must be entertained either by keeping a steady stream of trinkets and gifts coming their way, or by somehow overloading their under-developed nervous system, or by flinging them through the air (I'm not making that up, this has occurred at several birthday parties this year).

2) The children must be crammed full of sugar, preferably they will even be topped-off with candy just before the party ends, ensuring that the parents get to enjoy the post-party sugar-crash.

3) Some appropriately demographically-targeted character must be present. Maybe it's an Elmo cake (because Elmo is delicious), or a Barney pinata (which works on at least two levels), or perhaps Batman swoops through the party and slaughters several of the misbehaving children.

Yesterday my daughter and I attended a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's. This party met all the requirements:

1) Sensory overload! The restaurant was brimming with games, flashing lights, music, and electro-shock.

2) Cake and candy. Check, check.

3) Chuck is apparently some kind of rat. He has three friends/coworkers/lovers that are a dog in overalls, some funky bird, a shaggy purple thing, and a guy in a moustache (not the gay-cop moustache, but more of the I'm-a-pizza-making-Italian-stereotype moustache). These characters are completely devoid of even an inkling of personality. Nada.

My daughter's two favorite things there were the giant habitrail and skee ball.The habitrail was odd, it really looked just like a kid-sized version of the structure that you let hamsters play in. It was missing the exercise wheel and the see-through ball, but otherwise it was pretty much designed for giant rodents. Kids would go in and just kind of disappear for a while. God knows what's in there. She came out seemingly unscathed.

She also played tons of skee ball. In skee ball, described here, you roll a little wooden ball up a ramp and score various points depending on where it lands. My daughter really really sucked at this. A high percentage of the balls she launched would either end up in someone else's ramp, or would ricochet off the base of the ramp and hurtle across the arcade. Most of the others would haplessly end up in the "0 points" area. She LOVED it. The machine then squirts out tickets based on how many points were scored. It gives out two pity tickets no matter what. After each of her games, she'd scream, "I GOT TWO TICKETS!" and clutch them tightly.

Tickets could then be redeemed for surprisingly chintzy prizes. I'm not easily surprised, but they did it. The caliber of prizes were along these lines:

- 40 tickets would get you something akin to a sticker
- 80 tickets would get you a small unidentifiable plastic trinket
- 200 tickets would get you 100 tickets

Thankfully the parent throwing the party had given each child a special "100 tickets" ticket which enabled the even the feeblest of children to get some sort of prize. With those 100, plus my daughter's several tickets, plus a few more that I earned with heroic skee ball efforts, we managed to get the world's smallest dispenser of lip gloss. She smeared that glittery crap over her lips every several minutes for the remainder of the day.

Chuck E Cheese's other claims to fame are their pizza, which makes Little Caeser's taste gourmet, and their animatronic characters. My daughter, of course, thought the pizza was the best she had ever eaten. Meanwhile, the animatronic characters, Chuck E and his "friends", are unveiled periodically during the festivities to lurch back and forth and sing some bits of pop fluff.

The best part of the "performance" was that a person in a Chuck E. Cheese rat costume comes out in front of the stage and dances to the song along with two miserable uncostumed employees. These folks were so devoid of enthusiasm that they actually sucked energy out of the room in a near physics-defying disregard for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy be damned. By the end of the song, children listlessly hugged the floor for warmth while we parents helplessly gawked at these merciless energy-eating "dancers".

We had a fine time, but I still give this party a rating of Please-Let-My-Wife-Do-This-Next-Time.

Pretty busy day yesterday. Let's review.

During my early-morning exercise class (at Coit Tower!) my ultra fit instructor inquired about my marital status. She was hoping to fix me up with one of her girl friends. Usually I don't get those types of offers. Typically people say things to me like "You should meet my buddy Fred... and fix his computer. He'd do it himself, but he's too busy dating my hot friends."

When I bragged to my wife about my almost-potential-date she shrugged her shoulders and said, "Go for it." She's the jealous type. Harpy.

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Giants game. They lost 12-3 including one horrific inning where they coughed up 10 runs to the Reds. The couple sitting to my left were Reds fans. They had a great time.

Afterwards I punished myself by doing a hill-repeat run. Hill repeats are an awful kind of workout where when you make it to the top of the hill, you reward yourself by jogging back down and doing it again and again and again. On the positive side, however, I did not actually die.

Had a lovely chat with some of the neighborhood gents after that. We lamented about the Giants and blamed various members of the Giants organization for their woes. We generously spread the blame around. Ill-advised pitching changes? Yep, we got 'em. Inexplicable trades by the GM, giving up valuable bullpen members to bolster an outfield already filled with hapless hitters? Indeed! Players who just plain looked tired? Yes, both young and old flavors! Check check check! Blame for all!

The day closed out with a trip to the mall for some birthday shopping. My daughter did her usual sing-and-dance routine throughout the mall, entertaining shoppers from the food court to Nordstrom.

So, in summary, I exercised, saw a ballgame, chatted with the neighbors, and went to the mall. Perhaps I am not the counter-culture anti-christ that I picture in my head. Hmmmm.

Note to self, be more satanic.

My daughter's fifth birthday party was this last weekend. She wanted to hold it at our local playground so that's what we did. This being August in San Francisco, naturally the weather sucked. It was gloomy, occasionally drizzly, the whole time. The kids didn't mind though.

My wife, being the Super Parent In Residence, handled most of the party preparation. By most I mean, of course, all. Well that's not exactly true. She

- handled all the invitations
- reserved the picnic tables
- bought the supplies
- cooked all the food
- created the goody bags (including hand-decorating each one)
- figured out how to entertain the kids

Whereas I:

- was in charge of pressing the pause button on the boombox each time my wife signaled me.

I did an awesome job.

The boombox was an integral part of an activity called Pass The Parcel. This is a "game" where essentially you just wait your turn to get a present. My wife must have read some secret book on kids because somehow she knew that kids loved presents. Go figure. That's why she's the brains of this relationship and I'm the braw... Well, she's the brains.

Happy birthday, kid. Your momma done good.

People often stop me on the street and ask, "Mike, what's it like working from home?" After I avert their gaze and mumble something unintelligible, I go home and send them an email or an instant message that says this:

For the first few weeks, you're starved for human interaction. Telemarketers become your friends and you develop a Pavlovian response to the doorbell. (Why, yes, I would like to hear about Jesus!). If you have roommates or a spouse, your puppy-like behavior when they return to the house each day will be endearing, and then, after a few days, annoying. When they swat you across the nose with a newspaper, you'll have mixed feelings. On one hand, pain bad. On the other hand, attention good.

After a while (maybe months, maybe years), the pendulum swings the other dysfunctional way. You start to shun social contact. Occasionally you find yourself peering out your windows from a crack in the curtains. Your disdain for telemarketers returns. Any friendly dog-like tendencies that you gained in the first few weeks, are replaced with cat-like indifference. You read blogs.

Eventually you move into the final phase where you make peace with it all. It is during this phase that you finally reap the greatest reward of working at home, wearing no pants. You can save tons of money on pants. Theoretically you can save a lot of money on all clothing and hygiene items in general, but I'm going with pants here because no pants is funnier than no shirts. A guy sitting at his desk with no shirt on is just a slob.