Workaholic Dad

With horror I have realized that I haven’t posted anything on this blog since December when Mackenzie was just 3 weeks old. In the last post she just learned to work a pacifier around in her mouth and now – almost 10 months later she still hates the rubber nipple substitute.

The reason it’s been so quiet around here – aside from family, work, home taking up most of my time – is that there is not very much for me to write about. My beautiful and talented wife is doing such a great job with her blog – No Ordinary Homestead – that there is not much left for me to say here.

It’s not easy being a working dad, as many of you out there know. We miss quit a bit of the milestones our little ones experience in the few minutes we happen to see our children awake on weeknights after we get home from work.

Thank god there are weekends as those are great time to really bond with the munchkin. Mackenzie is almost 9.5 months old now and is developing so fast. Almost everyday there seems to be a new skill she perfects.

I pledge to better myself about my posting regularity and perhaps I finally may have found a few more things to write about.

So, tonight August 15th Metallica is playing a show in Belgium – about 3 hours drive from here. Originally we wanted to go there when we found out about it during a concert of theirs in June, but somehow we spaced on that and well, now it’s too late to go. Instead of headbanging at the concert watching a few of their music videos on YouTube will have to do.

I love Metallica, all of the old stuff including the black album and a few of the songs from the newer albums. Every single time I listen to a few of their songs I can’t help but playing a bit of air guitar, singing along and even voicing along with the guitar solos. I know – I’m a dork, go ahead and say it.

The first weekend of June the Mrs. and I traveled to the Netherlands to see Metallica play at a 3 day festival called PinkPop, funny name – killer line up. We had tickets for all three days, but decided to break the spirit of 3 day music festivals by staying in a hotel nearby. We are just too old for camping out with 30,000 unwashed people surrounded by mud, puke and other body fluids. No thanks!

While there was a lot of other bands there worth checking out, all I cared was about Metallica. Their music pretty much is what kept me out of trouble in my youth I think. The first time I heard Fade to Black when I was about 12 I knew I wanted to play guitar.  I begged my parents for a guitar for my birthday and immediately after getting it – Thanks Mom and Dad – I started practicing their songs – and of course those of a few other bands too. I spent countless hours listening to their CD’s and then trying to play it myself. Never very good, but at least it kept me busy enough to keep me from doing stupid stuff I would regret later. An idle mind is the devil’s workshop after all.

Getting my heart broken, trouble in school, the typical teenage issues of dealing with parents – Metallica got me through it. It saddens me a bit that the Mrs. will listen to their music, but she will never be a fan. To my shock when we went to see them together, she wanted to buy one of their T-Shirts…SCORE, but no – she’ll like their music, but I still have my doubts she’ll ever fully appreciate their musical genius. On an aside, recently I read an interview with David Garret, a star violinist, where he referred to them as musical geniuses as well. I guess I am not as musically retarded as I thought.

Back to the concert – I just hope the baby had developed enough in the womb by that time to hear the music – pre-natal music appreciation class so to speak. Only time will tell.

To follow on to my hotel room saga from yesterday, my lovely wife got to experience the wonderful world of Indian tech support staff over the last few days while trying to move her many blogs into her new mommy blog – www.NoOrdinaryHomestead.com. With close to 1000 posts and many many comments not an easy task.

Today I had the pleasure of meeting with the management of a very large outsourcing company today and had to chuckle a little bit when he praised the quality of their indian telephone operator service. Apparently that is still very good – they attempted to do the same thing in China but from 1000 applications 20 could read english (but not write it) and 5 could speak it appropriately. Personally, I think the cost cutting potential for companies using offshore telephone support is outweighed by the grief (and in most cases future buying decisions) of the customer. I have to think back to an old King of the Hill Episode in which Hank Hill attempts to straighten out his insurance policy and ends up talking to a guy in Bangalore, India.

Just imagine, the horrible tech support some companies offer from India coming out of China: “You been on hold for four hour – you leave now”. Don’t get me wrong, I am most definitely not a racist and I have very high regard for the IT skills of many of the offshore companies, but wouldn’t it be nice if the operator that introduces himself as John Smith was really John Smith, rather than Mohinder Ramamurthy who helps you using a telephone script and knows little about troubleshooting the actual problem.