Lou:

I’ve tried to write this several times, and even now, I’m a couple of days late. This is your birthday note. It’s a lot harder for a dad to write a birthday note for his daughter than you’d think, because he wants it to be perfect. Your mom asked all your closest grown-up friends and relatives who came to your birthday party today to write birthday notes to you describing their favorite memories of your first year. There are of course so many wonderful things you’ve done over the past year (and before that, even) that I couldn’t even pretend to pick one. My favorites for the moment are how you’ve started kissing me every once in a while (though your baby doll is apparently more kissable — must be the lack of stubble), how, when I’m carrying you around, you’ll point to something (usually a light switch) and say “deh,” which is your rendition of “there,” which expands to “take me over there, daddy,” and how your quirky sense of humor is developing (for example, yesterday, you started taking a breath in and out very heavily, and when I copied you, you just cracked up and kept doing the funny breathing thing to prompt me to copy you). These are the sorts of things that, if I had no other thing to live for or care about, would make my life the most worthwhile and happiest sort of life. Put simply, it’s just very very fun to watch you growing up.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine had a baby, and she at some point told me that the baby was the best thing she and her husband had ever done. She was a lawyer helping people out of bad situations (not a nasty greedy corporate lawyer or an ambulance chaser), so for her to say that her baby was the best thing she had ever done was a pretty good thing. At the time, I don’t think what she said really clicked with me. Babies were great, I thought, but after all, they’re pretty darned easy to make if you’re well-equipped to make them, so to call a baby the best thing you’d ever done seemed like a bit of exaggeration. I don’t think it’s possible to understand how great a child is until you have one. I hadn’t talked to that friend until just the other day since the time she told me about her baby’s being the best thing she had done, and I’m happy to report that I can now agree with her. I understand now.

I’ve done some pretty neat things. When I was a kid, I was (with your grandmom) very much into recycling because it seemed like a good idea to try to make better use of natural resources. At my various jobs, I’ve written some neat programs that helped people. One project I worked on actually helped to save lives in Tennessee, or so the letter of commendation I got said. I’ve done plenty of other cool stuff. And so has your mom. Before we had you, she was a teacher, and teachers are one of our most important and under-appreciated resources. And she was good at it, I could tell, and I was proud of her. She helped shape the minds of some very bright kids, some of whom could go on to do very great things. Your mom and I aren’t the best people in the world, and we haven’t done the greatest things in the world, but we’re not exactly chopped liver with respect to doing good things and having an appreciation for the genuinely good. So for you to be the best thing we’ve ever done or produced is a pretty good thing, and she and I agree that you’re our crowning achievement.

Since you were very young, there’s been something special about you, a glow or shimmer of sorts, a sparkle and a brightness in your eyes. I’m sure all parents see this in their children, but others also seem to see it in you, so I don’t think we should chalk what I’m saying up to a father’s blind love. You’re the best little person I know. You’re my favorite person, and that’s saying a lot, because there are a number of people I love and respect very much. The last year of my life has been dotted with the most exuberant, happy, boyish moments I can ever remember having had, and you’re responsible for most of those moments. Thanks for that, Lou, and happy birthday to you.

Had our first real date in about a year last night. Six or seven months ago, we went out for dinner and sat there nervously talking about how the baby was probably doing. We were better about letting go last night. Went out to dinner at the Bonefish grill, which was excellent seafood, if a little pricey. Then we headed over to the mall to watch Episode III, which was much better than probably any of the other movies in the whole series, though it had its warts (like the fact that it took 30 minutes to tie up loose ends when I was already pretty much aware of how the loose ends were going to be tied up and was ready to leave).

We left Lennie with Abbey, Ashley, and Fleda (that’s alphabetical order, notice, and not necessarily [but not necessarily not] an expression of order of preference), and when we got home, they were nowhere to be found. Shortly after we checked all the rooms in the house (figuring they had heard us drive up and were playing a little joke on us), we saw them walking up the street with Lennie zonked out in the stroller. She had been fine all night, and they took her on a walk to help put her to sleep. She continued to sleep for another hour or so, and when she woke up, we went ahead and took her to bed to put her back asleep.

And that was that, date night over, a pretty big success.

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I’ve just started reading Animals in Translation (by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson) for my book club. The book club purports to be a skeptic’s book club, though we hardly focus on skepticism it often seems, and in most cases, the bulk of the meeting attendees haven’t read the book. I haven’t read one of the books in probably close to two years, though I go to most of the meetings to listen to the discussion (to my credit, I typically don’t speak up, figuring I haven’t really earned the right to do so (I also happen to be painfully shy about speaking up, even among these people many of whom I’ve known for years)). So, Animals in Translation. The subtitle is “Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.” Basically, the primary author has autism and so thinks in ways that allow her to make life better for animals in slaughterhouses.

It’s a fascinating read so far (after just a little more than a chapter) in part because it provides a view of what autism is like. I’m always fascinated by things like this. When I took an abnormal psych class in college, I was very disappointed to discover that we covered indicators of conditions (”in order to be diagnosed with X, the patient must exhibit nine of the following fifteen boooorrring behaviors”) rather than what went on in the heads of the sufferers of conditions. So to read an autistic person’s accounts of how she thinks really floats my boat. The way she thinks is relevant within the scope of the book because she claims to think in much the same way that animals think, and this similarity of thought process gives her an outlook that helps her make life more comfortable for the animals she works with. For example, she can walk into a chute that directs cattle to the slaughtering floor and figure out very easily what’s making animals balk inexplicably.

She describes in the first chapter how she thinks not in words and sentences the way many of us do but in pictures. When someone talks of macroeconomics, for example, she says the picture in her head is of a macramé potholder. So she can’t talk intelligently about macroeconomics. The prospect of thinking solely in pictures is astonishing to me. I can’t imagine life without the voice in my head that represents my thoughts. Grandin suggests that images are a key part of animals’ approach to the world as well. And since she shares this with them and can often see details that might bother animals (e.g. a sudden change in the lighting of a pathway), she can suggest changes to slaughterhouses that not only make life better for the animals but that enhance production for the slaughterhouses.

Initial (skeptical) thoughts on the book are that much of what she says is very speculative. There’s a lot of “I’ll bet that X if Y” with not much in the way of evidence to back up her assertions. Of course, she’s writing something vaguely related to popular science in a narrative style, so there should be no expectation that she’d be especially rigorous with her facts. But it does stand out to me and bother me a little bit from time to time. Another example that comes to mind that seems a little weird to me is her statement that when she thought of the dot-com boom, her mental image was of rented office space and unused computers, and that when she saw this, she knew not to invest in any of those stocks. This seems too prophetic to be credible. (And the dot-coms seem to be booming, or at least ramping up for a boom, again, by the way.)

These little issues aside, the book is so far absolutely fascinating, and it’s an easy read, almost folksy at times in the ease of its narrative. This tone wouldn’t suit some books, but it seems to work for this one. Grandin has written a number of other books, some of which focus more on her autism, and given my interest in that sort of personal narrative, I imagine I’ll look into getting one or two of those if I have time after finishing this one. So far, the book gets two thumbs up. I hope over the next two weeks as I read it to record here a few more impressions.

My company is looking to hire a couple of full-time senior developers. The following criteria must be met:

• You must already live near or be willing to relocate to Silicon Valley.
• You must have a minimum of five years of application development, with a focus on the following skills, in descending order of importance:
  • Mozilla application development
  • XUL
  • XPCOM
  • C++
  • javascript
  • CSS
• Experience developing on two of the following three platforms: PC, Mac, Linux
• Experience working on Open Source Software projects is a plus.
• All the usual buzz words (self-starter, team-player, etc.) apply.

Send me a resume at abcdefg@hijklmnopqrstuvw.xyz (but replace abcdefg with my first name and hijklmnopqrstuvw.xyz with learnhouston.com) if you think you’re the person for the job. If you’re not the person for the job, but you might know who is, have that person send me a resume and include your contact information. There’s a small reward for whoever turns up a person we ultimately hire. Please don’t apply or send me resumes for those who don’t meet the criteria listed here.

Most of this is old news, as I’m woefully behind on blogging stuff about Lennie. Late or not, here goes.

Around the 20th, we discovered that her two top teeth had broken through the surface. We noticed this at her first concert ever, a free show put on by Sundown in the City, an effort to revitalize the downtown area of Knoxville by bringing bands in to draw crowds. We saw a good local band named Dishwater Blonde and then part of sort of a funkish band whose name I don’t remember. This picture helps illustrate how much Lennie liked the concert.

I’ve taught her bad table manners by grunting and mmmming with satisfaction as I eat and as I feed her. She picked the habit right up and now lets us know when she wants something to eat by emphatically Mmmming. She’s not shy about going up to pretty much anybody who’s got food and begging.

A few weeks ago, she took four steps in a row, followed by four more later the same day. Then a few days later (when I was out of town for a week), it was 11 steps. Now, although crawling is still her favored and most efficient mode of transportation, she doesn’t think twice about walking around, and she’s very prone to do so if I take one of her hands. It amuses and delights me to take one of her hands and walk around the room with her, just daddy and Lou Lou taking a stroll.

She’s too big really to sleep on Mleeka (her favorite place to sleep) in a conventional baby posture, so she sometimes just lies down in Mleeka’s lap and winds up across her legs, with a couple of her own limbs hanging down. She looks like a sloth or a leopard or some sort of animal that you might find sleeping in a tree with limbs dangling. In other mommy-closeness news, Lennie loves to nurse in the tub. She’ll be sitting at the foot of the tub playing with her toys, and she’ll turn and grin at Mleeka. Then she’ll climb up Mleeka’s leg and dump herself onto Mleeka’s chest so she can reach to nurse. She nursed through a whole bath — hair-washing and all — the other day.

She’s a big kisser and I think understands the word kiss. In any case, she understands that if you smack your lips (that’s kind of how she kisses), she should smack hers too, and she’s pretty good about kissing her baby doll. She seems to understand that hugs and kisses are how we show affection, and so she’s getting better about giving out hugs and kisses, though they often wind up being more like headbutts. “Baby” is her favorite word right now (though she says it “bah-bah”), and she goes around proclaiming “bah-bah” for long periods at a time and seems very proud about it. All in all, she’s got I think 30 or 40 words now, some of them (maybe 9 or 10) very much a part of her daily repertoire and some of them just things she seems to understand but not utter or to use infrequently. Mleeka was reading the other day that your average kid knows maybe 3 or 4 words by this age.

Lennie’s a whiz at climbing stairs. She first did this a few weeks ago at Dave and Karen’s, demonstrating no trepidation at all and just charging up the stairs (with me trailing close behind). She’s generally very brave and hasn’t yet developed that very useful fear of falling, which makes co-sleeping sort of scary. She’s figured out that the red chair I got for her is in fact hers, and she loves to crawl around on it as if it’s a jungle gym (again, no trepidation about the danger of its tipping).

What else? She waves bye bye (has been for some time), she still loves swimming (assisted by mommy), she’s gotten very good at playing with her elephant shape sorter, though she still tends to need help figuring out which hole to put a given block in, she still dances like a mad fiend, she still (less frequently than before) talks on the phone earnestly, and she’s started reading her books aloud, in much the same fashion that she talks on the phone (using a different voice and intonation, as we do when reading to her).

In 20 days, she’ll be a year old. This is impossible for me to comprehend.