Dan Q
Parenting is about sacrifices.
Here, I’m making the noble sacrifice of forcing myself to drink a delicious beer so my 10-year-old can use the customer-only bathroom at a beachside amateur football club. Such a sacrifice.
Enjoying a glass of cava while the kids peer down out of the window of a Barcelona skyscraper.
Day 8 of my sabbatical. Think I’m doing this right?
This boy is excited and ready for Spain!
This child is eating sausages with one hand while playing a video game about eating sausages with the other.
Is this life-imitating-art or the other way around? Who can possibly say?
Off to Spain! BRB.
Six or seven years ago our eldest child, then a preschooler, drew me a picture of the Internet1. I framed it and I keep it on the landing outside my bedroom – y’know, in case I get lost on the Internet and need a map:
I found myself reminded of this piece of childhood art when she once again helped me with a network map, this weekend.
As I kick off my Automattic sabbatical I’m aiming to spend some of this and next month building a new server architecture for Three Rings. To share my plans, this weekend, I’d been drawing network diagrams showing my fellow volunteers what I was planning to implement. Later, our eldest swooped in and decided to “enhance” the picture with faces and names for each server:
I noted that she named the read-replica database server Demmy2, after our dog.
It’s a cute name for a server, but I don’t think I’m going to follow it. The last thing I want is for her to overhear me complaining about some possible future server problem and misinterpret what I’m saying. “Demmy is a bit slow; can you give her a kick,” could easily cause distress, not to mention “Demmy’s dying; can we spin up a replacement?”
I’ll stick to more-conventional server names for this new cluster, I think.
Playing simultaneous games against both children might have been less challenging if they hadn’t both kept trying to start fights with one another at the same time! 😂
This morning’s actual breakfast order from the 7-year-old: “A sesame seed bagel with honey, unless there aren’t any sesame seed bagels, in which case a plain bagel with honey on one half and jam on the other half, unless there aren’t any plain bagels, in which case a cinnamon and raisin bagel with JimJams on one half and Biscoff on the other half.”
Some day, this boy will make a great LISP programmer. 😂
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a parent look as awkward as the one whose kid, in a combined toilets/changing room, just pointed at me, saying: “Daddy, look! Look! That man’s using his willy to pee-pee in the standing-up toilet!” 🤣
This weekend was full of science.
This started on Saturday with a trip to the Harwell Campus, whose first open day in eight years provided a rare opportunity for us to get up close with cutting edge science (plus some very kid-friendly and accessible displays) as well as visit the synchrotron at Diamond Light Source.
The whole thing’s highly-recommended if you’re able to get to one of their open days in the future, give it a look. I was particularly pleased to see how enthused about science it made the kids, and what clever questions they asked.
For example: the 7-year-old spent a long time cracking a variety of ciphers in the computing tent (and even spotted a flaw in one of the challenge questions that the exhibitors then had to hand-correct on all their handouts!); the 10-year-old enjoyed quizzing a researcher who’d been using x-ray crystallography of proteins.
And then on Sunday I finally got a long-overdue visit to my nearest spirometry specialist for a suite of experiments to try to work out what exactly is wrong with my lungs, which continue to be a minor medical mystery.
It was… surprisingly knackering. Though perhaps that’s mostly because once I was full of drugs I felt briefly superpowered and went running around the grounds of the wonderfully-named Brill Hill Windmill with the dog until was panting in pretty much the way that I might normally have been, absent an unusually-high dose of medication.
For amusement purposes alone, I’d be more-likely to recommend the first day’s science activities than the second, but I can’t deny that it’s cool to collect a load of data about your own body and how it works in a monitorable, replicable way. And maybe, just maybe, start to get to the bottom of why my breathing’s getting so much worse these last few years!
The other weekend, I joined in with the parade at Witney Pride, accompanied by our 10-year-old who’d expressed an interest in coming too.
It was her first Pride but she clearly got the idea, turning up with a wonderful hand-coloured poster she’d made which, in rainbow colours, encouraged the reader to “be kind”.
You know what: our eldest is so woke it makes me embarrassed on behalf of my past self at her age. Or even at twice her age, when I still didn’t have the level of social and societal awareness and care about queer issues that she does already.
When we got to the parade’s destination, the kid found a stall selling a variety of badges, and selected for herself a “she/her/hers” pronoun pin.
“It’s not like anybody’s likely to look at me and assume that my pronouns are anything other than that,” she explained, “But I want it to be normal to talk about, and I want to show solidarity for genderqueer people.”
That’s a level of allyship that it took me until I was much, much older to attain. So proud!
Back in 2019, the kids – so much younger back then! – and I helped undertake some crowdsourced citizen science for the Thames WaterBlitz. This year, we’re helping out again.
We’ve moved house since then, but we’re still within the Thames basin and can provide value by taking part in this weekend’s sampling activity. The data that gets collected on nitrate and phosphate levels in local water sources – among other observations – gets fed into an open dataset for the benefit of scientists and laypeople.
It’d have been tempting to be exceptionally lazy and measure the intermittent water course that runs through our garden! It’s an old, partially-culverted drainage ditch1, but it’s already reached the “dry” part of its year and taking a sample wouldn’t be possible right now.
But more-importantly: the focus of this season’s study is the River Evenlode, and we’re not in its drainage basin! So we packed up a picnic and took an outing to the North Leigh Roman Villa, which I first visited last year when I was supposed to be on the Isle of Man with Ruth.
Our lunch consumed, we set off for the riverbank, and discovered that the field between us and the river was more than a little waterlogged. One of the two children had been savvy enough to put her wellies on when we suggested, but the other (who claims his wellies have holes in, or don’t fit, or some other moderately-implausible excuse for not wearing them) was in trainers and Ruth and I needed to do a careful balancing act, holding his hands, to get him across some of the tougher and boggier bits.
Eventually we reached the river, near where the Cotswold Line crosses it for the fifth time on its way out of Oxford. There, almost-underneath the viaduct, we sent the wellie-wearing eldest child into the river to draw us out a sample of water for testing.
Looking into our bucket, we were pleased to discover that it was, relatively-speaking, teeming with life: small insects and a little fish-like thing wriggled around in our water sample2. This, along with the moorhen we disturbed3 as we tramped into the reeds, suggested that the river is at least in some level of good-health at this point in its course.
We were interested to observe that while the phosphate levels in the river were very high, the nitrate levels are much lower than they were recorded near this spot in a previous year. Previous years’ studies of the Evenlode have mostly taken place later in the year – around July – so we wondered if phosphate-containing agricultural runoff is a bigger problem later in the Spring. Hopefully our data will help researchers answer exactly that kind of question.
Regardless of the value of the data we collected, it was a delightful excuse for a walk, a picnic, and to learn a little about the health of a local river. On the way back to the car, I showed the kids how to identify wild garlic, which is fully in bloom in the woods nearby, and they spent the rest of the journey back chomping down on wild garlic leaves.
The car now smells of wild garlic. So I guess we get a smelly souvenir from this trip, too4!
1 Our garden ditch, long with a network of similar channels around our village, feeds into Limb Brook. After a meandering journey around the farms to the East this eventually merges with Chill Brook to become Wharf Stream. Wharf Stream passes through a delightful nature reserve before feeding into the Thames near Swinford Toll Bridge.
2 Needless to say, we were careful not to include these little animals in our chemical experiments but let them wait in the bucket for a few minutes and then be returned to their homes.
3 We didn’t catch the moorhen in a bucket, though, just to be clear.
4 Not counting the smelly souvenir that was our muddy boots after splodging our way through a waterlogged field, twice
This checkin to GC2W6AF Babel Fish reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
The younger child and I had an initially fruitless search in, under and around the nearby bridge before we had the sense to insert our babel fishes, after which the hint item became clear to us. A short search later the cache was in hand. SL, TNLN, TFTC!
This checkin to GC8TNPE Incy Wincy reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
The elder child and I are staying nearby and couldn’t resist coming to a nearby cache with so many FPs. The name gave us a bit of a clue what we would be looking for but nothing could have prepared us for for this imaginative and unusual container! FP awarded. Attached is very non-spoiler photo of us with our very own Incy Wincies. Greetings from Oxfordshire!
Hot on the heels of my victory over Wonder Boy 35 years after I first played it, I can now finally claim to have beaten Golden Axe, 25 years after I first played it.
Couldn’t have done it without my magic-wielding 7-year-old co-op buddy.