Stuck In Customs

We are still having a bit of trouble explaining “death” to Ethan, who just turned five years old so he is not highly trained in death and taxes. He is obviously sad, and he goes down the hill to the old tree to visit Maty’s grave every day. But we are still not sure he “gets” it.

Here is an example of why we are confused. I am not sure if this is an indication of my son being very creative or very weird, but it certainly is a nice display of orthogonal thinking, which I always like to see. Conversation as follows:

Me (Dad): “Yes Maty is in heaven now.” [pause]

Ethan: [confused, staring out the window]

Dad: “So she can now always watch you.” [pause]

Ethan: [still staring out the window, working things out]

Dad: “And now while she is watching you on your adventures she can protect you.”

Ethan: [creases his eyebrows] “So, you mean if I am walking down the street, and I see a bad guy, then Maty will appear and she won’t have any eyeballs or bones and the bad guy will think she is some kinda alien and then he will run away scared?”

Dad: [confused, staring out the window]

Here are a few pictures from GDC. Most of the things I did there were fairly boring and not picture-worthy, unless you consider talking to industry magnates in the Fairmont hotel bathroom to be exciting.

Below is a picture of a windswept Will, who is generally more hairy than me in almost every conceivable manner. The second picture is from inside the Fairmont as we are waiting for some sort of meeting that seemed rather important at the time, but I can’t remember what the heck it could have been about now. The third picture is my dad and Will trying out some of the force-feedback steering wheels. In that outfit my dad looks like George Steinbrenner.

We had a pretty good time hanging out at GDC in San Jose. Last year it was in San Francisco, and I like it a bit better there for some reason. Here are a few pictures from the Hayes Mansion, where we stayed. It was built back in 1904 and its unique construction enabled it to be one of the only surviving buildings since the big quake.

Below that are pictures from around downtown San Jose, including a very expensive tax-supported statue that looks like a pile of dog poop.

So it’s been very sad around here lately because my dog, Maty, passed away last night.

She was a very sweet dog and has been with us for about 12 years. Over the past few years, she has had severe heart disease and yesterday the doctors discovered what they think was a tear in the heart wall that made her heart swell up with extra fluid until it almost entirely filled her rib cage.

I have known that she was slowly dying over the past few weeks, so I did have a chance to take her on some extra walks and give her some big extra baths with brushing. She’s always had sensitive skin so that was always one of her favorite things. I think she knew she was dying too and she took whatever energy she could to make sure she came over to us to lay on the couch or on our feet.

This morning was clear and crisp outside, so I went out into the backyard and dug a grave by an old tree. As we buried her, Ethan ran back into the house and found her favorite ball and put it inside with her. We all said a few words, and then Ethan grabbed another shovel and helped me fill the grave with dirt. We also planted a little flower on top and marked it with a big rock. I know we will always remember her around here, and that she died of a heart that was too big for her little body.

Here is another commercial, featuring the ubiquitous Hyori again. This one is very typical of Korean commercials – they are very emotional and feature severe-looking men that are suffering from extreme angst.

We arrived in San Jose for the Game Developer’s Conference that is going on this week. There are interesting things that happen there, and I always get to meet some cool people with fresh perspectives. I tend to really like and appreciate the creative types, but I have little tolerance for the “tragic artist with false sense of entitlement” attitude that is fairly pervasive. The thing I hate most about the conference is all the incredibly bitter game developers that moan and groan about how horrible the industry is, yet they a) choose to stay in it b) continue to feed the system they hate. I don’t get it…

Will booked us at a place called the Dolce Hayes Mansion – here is a picture below. If you look close, you can see Will scaling a palm tree to get a coconut for our breakfast.

Our house has been descended upon by people of more direct Latin lineage than I, but they are doing a bang-up job of moving around rocks and dirt. We have a fairly major backyard leveling project, and, at times, I look out over our balcony and it looks like the walls of Constantinople are being rebuilt. Ethan always runs out there and yells “Hola! Como estas!!” Then he turns to me with a serious face and says, “They speak Spanish.”

I also found it interesting that they brought their own microwave that they store overnight underneath our inverted recycling bins. Every day at lunch (and they have been here over two weeks), they run an extension cord to our front door socket so they can warm up various Mexican confections.

All my close friends know me as a dessert freak, and if I am gonna eat dessert, I only want to go full throttle. I don’t want to eat a little tart or something “light”… So the other day I went to the Cheesecake Factory for dessert, where they have over 40 cheesecakes to choose from and I chose the newest one that is not even on the menu yet – the White Chocolate Peanut Butter cheesecake with chunks of Nutter Butters inside. I give this dessert a very respectable 8.6 on my scale. It was not as good as the Adam’s Peanut Butter Fudge Ripple, which is probably one of the best 2-3 types of cheesecake there… I notice that men try to rank everything they see, and I am no different, although I do take it to a granular ranking level with desserts.

I spend a lot of time in Korea, and this girl is all over the place. She is kind of the non-prego Britney that is wearing a ring that gives her +3 to Korean.

I’m always very interested in foreign commercials and how different cultures market products to consumers, so I spend a lot of time watching foreign TV even though I really don’t know what they are saying. Well, in this particular ad, it doesn’t really matter what she is saying… and it is a rather cool phone too.

I’ve taken to running in Zilker Park in the late afternoons. Zilker runs on the south side of Town Lake and it has a very nice jogging trail along the water that is filled with 50% fit people and 50% very strange people. I’ve noticed that Austin seems to attract some extremely strange people that look like they just barely can get by on a day-to-day basis, yet they find the time and resources to lounge around Zilker Park and drink bottled water.

The first picture shows the jogging trail along the water with some shirtless guys sporting non-religious tattoos. The second shows some bat droppings under a bridge. The third shows the Austin City Hall taking up an extremely valuable piece of real estate on the waterfront, which is just what I would expect from a fairly communist city. The fourth shows a fountain at the park and a building that looked really cool in the early 80’s.