I like things done my way...by people other than me.

We bought one of those pre-packaged, pre-cooked whole-turkey complete dinners, enough to feed four or five that you simply heat in the oven for two hours. Saves time and mess, and my mother thought it apropos since we have Sophie to look after and we generally didn’t like the idea of having to toil over the bird. Call it fast-turkey, except without the large fries and a coke. And why not?

It feels great having my mom and sister here. It’s a house full of all the women of my life. They’re gonna be in town through the weekend. This afternoon they went on a short site-seeing trip to Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But this morning, they spent it reading their Twilight series novels, my mother reading it in spanish and my sister in english. Yes. My mother. Twilight. She’s in love with Edward Cullen. I think it’s kinda cute, really. She’s already said she’ll get hooked if she starts watching the movies. Nina and I smirk about the whole thing: vampires that go to high school.

So we had a baby girl on November 18, which happens to be my mother's birthday. Her name is so perfect, Sophie Anne Castro. It was Nina's choice, which came to her one night that we were at Times Square. Sophie was born 6 lbs., 3 ounces, 19 inches long. Today she's a week old, and she's about the same weight and size, behaving perfectly normal for a newborn as far as her pediatrician says. She's had her moments of crying fits late at night but that's what you expect of a newborn baby. We've handled it in stride. And let's not forget about 'Mommy', Nin has recovered very well. She's totally about and quickly losing her post-baby belly. Good times! My mom and sister are on their way tonight to join us, and along with Nin's dad, it's going to be a very special Thanksgiving.

I've got jury duty tomorrow morning. I need to appear at the Hudson County Superior Court at 8:30 a.m. I understand this is my civic duty, and all, so I don't mind it much despite the fact that I'm a bit biased to criminal cases because of my father's wrongful indictment. The last time I had to serve jury duty, it was exactly what I had told the judge on that case, and he ended up shuffling me over to civil court. By the way, I had been selected as a juror, we were THIS close to going to trial to hear a lawsuit filed by some Chelsea apartment owners against a neighbor that had caused their property damage while he did construction, but at the last minute the case was settled. Maybe it will be the same shenanigans tomorrow. Maybe not. But whatever the case may be, I'll use the time waiting in the jury pool to continue studying for my first licensing exam, which is next week Thursday! Building Systems.... the refrigeration cycle in buildings, heating and cooling loads, and where to appropriately locate a dew point in a wall. Please feel free to go ahead and yawn now. I know. Boring. But I did want to take this part of the exam first for this reason, to get it out of the way. Oh, and did I fail to mention that my wife is eight months pregnant? Nin can barely fit into our apartment, she's so big. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but yeah, eight months. We're not any more nervous about it as any other first-time parents would be, but I still find myself blanking off on occasion, staring out far-eyed during conversation or in front of my computer at home or work, cross-eyed with wonderment. We. are. going. to. be. parents. Technically we already are. At some point in the near future, a little girl is going to look at me and call me "Daddy". She is going to want answers.

Yes, there is a lot going on.  

Tonight: Sergey got us a bottle of Courvoisier—the man has got a taste for cognac—and we just had a few sips each over the kitchen table...and Nin had her Becks Non-Alc beer. Let me tell you. She was very diplomatic about it. But that’s what brought me here to this post…well, that, and scanning through a few photographs from last weekend out on the ferry to Staten Island. Yes, we took a ferry to S.I., and it was our first time, and I had never gone to S.I. until then, and that was despite the fifteen years I’ve lived in and near this city. And we did pretty much what the tourist do…take the ferry there, and then turn around and come right back to the city, cause it was so easy to do so, cause it was THAT easy.

The other day we were given a presentation by a vendor company that does audio/video work; set ups for flat screen TVs, home entertainment systems, and interactive low-voltage lighting. They showed us the latest innovation in speaker systems; one of those uses the entire wall as the speaker’s diaphragm. In other words, you’re basically wiring directly to the sheetrock or plaster coat on your wall, and you do not need a ‘speaker cone’, but the entire wall is used to emit sound. Don’t ask me about the technology behind it, even our presenter was as well baffled by how it works, but he said he heard it and couldn’t believe his ears, the walls were emitting music, not hi-fidelity sound but music nonetheless, and I suppose it harks to that of Musak, or the background music you’d hear at a dentist waiting room, or in an elevator, and I’m having flash horror thoughts of Air Supply’s I'm all out of love, I'm so lost without you, I know you were right, believing for so long...Jesus God. Of course I brought this information home and Nin, her dad, and I had a good laugh at the dinner table being smart-asses about it; how a neurotic home owner would think the house was haunted; how you could hook this up to the alarm system and freak out a would-be burglar with an evil voice, saying: “Get out or you DIE! You DIE! Mwah ah ah ahh!” Corny, I know…but it’s Friday and I’m having a little fun with this. In other news, my dad-in-law just got his driver’s license. Big news for the big man. He is on a mission to get a car! He wants to buy one very soon, and once he gets his then it will be a fairly simple process for us to get ours. I’ll teach Nin how to drive (she knows the general idea but has not had the practice for a few years now and would like to have the confidence required to take on road and street traffic) for her upcoming road test. It’s scheduled for mid-October, and by then she’ll be at 8 months preggers. She’s gonna need some extra room between her and the steering wheel for the belly! Given: with a baby comes a new car. We don’t own a car because we never felt we needed one. Our lives were carefree then, and went about our bit’ness not having the responsibility of caring for others aside from ourselves. But once the baby is born everything will change, or so how everyone who’s had a child keeps reminding us, and we’re going to want to drive to the places we need to go to rather than dealing with schlepping onto buses and trains with the stroller and the diaper bags. Wouldn’t you concur? Anyway, it’s Friday. I’ve got a few more minutes to relax here before I get busy again with these friggin’ pool house options. We’ve been trying to draw a pool house for a client, but I’ve never encountered such a moving target as this. In the past year we’ve drawn nine options. Nine. And the client keeps coming back to us with something he doesn’t like about it. Eventually we’ll get it right. Or maybe he’ll get tired of paying for options and he’ll finally settle. His grandkids are gonna want a pool to play in.

NYC…you gotta love it: I gave some guy a hard time this morning. He was pissing in the street, right out in the middle of the morning rush out of Port Authority. Jeez… Standing over the curb with his dick out pissing into the gutter, not making any effort to conceal what he was doing, not caring whatsoever of who saw. Ever heard of a restroom, buddy? Anyway, I called him a fucking dog and told him he should be ashamed of himself. I’m sorry, was I wrong?

I never mentioned that on Friday we went to go see Inglourious Basterds. Oh buddy that movie was fun. Tarantino has done it again. It’s tense. It’s suspenseful. It’s hilarious.

The wifey, my father-in-law, and I stepped out just now for some grilled meats at a local bbq place on 60th Street. Not bad at all… it was a Portuguese place. And it was kind of a special occasion to celebrate that my dad-in-law finally received his social security card. This is very good news. Now he can apply for a driver’s license, start looking for work. He’s eager to move out to his own place and get rolling on a life of his own and technically on his own. He hasn’t been a burden on us in any way, but I suppose it’s starting to get dull having to live out of his suitcase and the relative inconvenience of our sofa bed in our living room. He said he already has a job interview next week that he’s happy about, and from what Nin tells me, he is kind of a big shot in the radiochemistry field, someone who should not expect a cold shoulder when applying for a job, and one who could land something very well paying and much higher up on the Totem pole, if you don’t mind the unusual Native-American reference. When he first came we had talked about it and I got my first sampling of his sense of humor. “I’m going to build America’s next H bomb,” he’d joked. We are confident, as he is, that he’ll find something good. As for me? Well I’m hoping for decent sunshine and no strong winds, for a good bike ride tomorrow morning. Still I don’t want to sound like one of those whiny people we’ve been hearing and seeing around, the ones that can’t help themselves complain that their weekend was ruined by anticlimactic Tropical Storm Danny and 'oh how I really wished I could get at least another day at the beach since fall is almost here and the school season is about to start again', boo hoo…but yeah, I suppose I do want nice weather as well, and I wanted dried figs to take with me, to munch on but the wifey forgot to get them from the food shopping trip and it’s no big deal, I guess, but it’ gonna be a long ass ride to Cold Springs, New York…if I manage to last that long…and I probably could if we don’t go the Hudson Drive route…too many climbs… So pray it won’t go that way, or better yet talk to the leader dude tomorrow morning and ask him…asa nisi masa…asa nisi masa…asa nisi masa…shushhhhhhh.

They started demo-ing the old hotel on the corner of Park Avenue and 48th Street (Weehawken, New Jersey… not to be confused with Manhattan) and I for one am happy to see it go. It’s to make room for a rental apartment complex with a couple storefronts at the sidewalk level. I’ll cross my fingers and hope the designers build something admirable. Ever since Jennifer Moore was raped, beaten and murdered there, that place has been exactly that in my eyes, the RB&M Hotel. I can’t speak for anyone else, but disturbing violence of this kind is especially difficult when it happens in your neighborhood. The proximity of it, I guess. We live just a couple of blocks away from this corner—and I’m sure there are rape and murders that happen all over and on any given time, but it was uncomfortable, not creepy, nor scary, nor fascinating, but uncomfortable having to walk past this place and each time think of that poor girl. Well, I don’t know where this post was going, but I said what I wanted to say. Good riddance, and let’s move on. The neighborhood needs a major facelift anyway.

We had a very smooth trip back from Miami, I’m glad to say. The flight was thirty minutes early and practically turbulence free. At Jamaica Station the L.I.R.R. showed up right on time, or rather we showed up right on time for it, and the bus ride from Port Authority was quick and painless. I love it when everything falls into place when we travel. It was the same way going ten days ago. This time the weather in South Florida was more agreeable than the last time we went, and we got a good four days of beach out of it, water temp at around sixty-five degrees, barely any waves and hardly any strong winds; Thursday was the best day of them all. It was so perfect I actually felt guilty about it. And since we had such a great time getting sun, it meant that we had less ‘substitute’ things to do, like going to the movies, or to malls, even though we did drive to Sunrise to Sawgrass Mills Mall twice, and IKEA once, but that was for necessary shopping, certainly. We had the pleasure of attending our baby shower. The one my mother had been planning for two months prior. I kept saying the baby shower was more for her to point out that she’ll be a grandmother soon rather than anything else. She’s been waiting long enough, and hopefully it will be just three months more. Of course we loved all of the gifts and gift cards and money and stuff. Nin wasn’t familiar with the baby shower concept because in Russia they don’t have them; they don’t like to celebrate the child before the child is born, as a superstition of sorts to not jinx what has not happened. I explained to her that it was a reunion of my mom’s friends and my family for them to shower us with gifts over some nice food in a posh restaurant. The restaurant was called…get this…Dolores but you can call me Lolita, which is probably one of the more unusual names I’ve ever heard. We had a nice time watching people fuss over us, and I hadn’t seen some of the guests for more than ten or fifteen years, but I won’t go into all of that. About the gifts: tons of baby clothes. The cutest stuff you’ve ever seen. Onesies. Jeans. T-shirts. Mittens. Booties. Hats. Hoodys. Not all of it pink, thank god, but some of it in other pretty colors and some sets in older sizes…I think we’re totally good when it comes to clothes. And there were also tons of other baby stuff that you can use your vivid imagination for, since I’ll skip all of that too. We visited my friend Diego and his wife Jazmine at their new apartment, and got to see their daughter Sasha, who recently celebrated her first year birthday. Nina fell in love with her cuteness. She really was a very cute toddler. Sasha’s bangs were too long, something Jazmine said they were going to correct soon, and I thought that little girl’s hair looked like that of Robert Smith from The Cure. Throw on some heavy black mascara and eye shadow and she would make all of the post-punks proud. Yesterday, Saturday, was something. We woke up at three-thirty in the morning, and I drove the women in my life: my mom, sister, wife and our unborn baby girl, in a rented SUV all of four hours up to a farm town near Orlando called Coleman, the place where there is a federal penitentiary that holds my father. We visited him for most of the afternoon and it was great to see him, greater than I thought it would be. His eyes were bigger because I think his vision got a bit worse and he was wearing thick-lens glasses, but they were the same sad eyes I inherited, still smiling back at me. We spoke of the usual things, told him all of the recent news about the family and friends, but by the third hour of being in that noisy visitor’s hall with about two hundred other inmates and their families, we had grown weary; had been weary because we didn’t get more than four hours of sleep the night before, so Nin and I were numb with fatigue. My sister drove back. She had to. I was out of it. But that wasn’t the end of it, cause when we got to Miami, Nin and I took showers and got dressed up to go to my friend Rick’s birthday party. It was at the swankier than swank Area 31 restaurant in the Epic Hotel in Downtown Miami, interior decorated by Philippe Starck, candles against glass and dim lighting and natural wood paneled sliding doors and all the ultra-modern trimming you could dream up, with plate-glass windows offering an incredible 16th story view of Downtown facing Bayside and the Port of Miami, in that Saturday Miami night. So fucking chic. That place. It was decadence. And for example, the valets parked the Ferraris, Bentleys and Porsches right downstairs at the drive up. Luckily I had borrowed my mom’s ’98 Toyota Corolla for the night, and when the valet drove it up to the curb…the new paint job looked so great.

It's our last day in Miami, but while we drove back from visiting my dad in Coleman, FL., I couldn't resist documenting the ever-changing mood of the South Florida sky. Breathtaking, awesome, at times scary, and at others luminous, but never dull.

Tonight we step out to my friend's birthday party. We're not staying late since our flight leaves at ten ay em tomorrow morning. But I have plenty to write about...and will soon.

I’m liking the song “An Easy Tonight” by the Swedish-American trio Thieves Like Us. Something about that song and the sound of the band reminds me of Joy Division. The Thieves Like Us title is a pretty pervasive one, no? Not only is it a name of a band but also the title of a movie as well as the name of a famous song, and so on…all inter-related to some degree, I’m sure. It’s catching.

We recovered this Sunday after spending Saturday and Friday painting our apartment. I have lower back pain. I have white paint under fingernails. I even had a spec of white paint on my contact lens, and it wouldn’t wash off. White paint, you ask? Where’s the color in your life, Jairo? No. We didn’t bother coloring our walls. We’ll probably move out of this apartment in a year or so, anyway, so we didn’t feel it necessary to decorate to any great extent.

Tomorrow’s the next ultrasound. Thursday, we take off to warm beaches and palm trees, hopefully under a sky that will look like this.

It came as no surprise to me that my doctor gave me a clean bill of health at this morning’s visit. I quit smoking more than a year ago. I hardly ever drink; haven’t for the past few months. I bike ride at least fourteen miles on a weekly basis. So yeah, I guess I’m in good shape. Yet during the visit, the good doctor kept me in suspense by using tactics you’d expect a police detective would use to sweat information out of a suspect. He told me to sit in his office, and wait, he’d be right back. Then he walked out to some back room and came back to the corridor and spoke in a low voice to a nurse. “I think I should tell him . . . . ” he whispered, “No, I’ll speak to him about . . . . ” Meanwhile, I’m leaning an ear to the doorway to try and catch what, and of whom, they were talking about. Then he finally came back and started off with: “Okay, we got the results of your blood work…” and he shuffled through the test results of my blood that I gave three weeks ago. I had totally forgotten I gave blood for tests. He flipped through the pages to indicate what all the complex abbreviations represented; this one about my liver, that one confirming I’m not diabetic. “And last but not least, the thing everyone worries about…” he said. At that point something changed on his expression. It wasn’t much, just a slight twitch of his right eye, like it was the start of a cringe. To add, the ‘last but not least’ part of my blood work was on the last page of the stack. For that instant it really did feel like time was on slow-mo. I started to pull away, expecting something was wrong. He’s going to tell me something awful, I wondered. I’m gonna start my day with some bad news. “—Cholesterol… yours is low…it looks very good. You’re in good shape, Mr. Castro.” I mentally sigh in relief. It reminded me of this episode of Family Guy. You think that it's in med school where doctors first learn how to toy with our sensitivity?

So I posted on Facebook that Nina’s dad Sergei arrived from Moscow yesterday afternoon. After the quick processing of his visa, he has physically immigrated to this country…and to our humble apartment for the next couple of months. Now he’ll have to spend a few weeks to acquire a social security number, try some job prospects through Monster.com, and then work out all the other little details like an apartment, a car, so on and so forth. And he’s excited to be here. He’s never been to the U.S. before, and yesterday it was nice to walk along the boulevard with him and show him all the sights and sounds and minutia of things that are different than there and that we take for granted here. Then it started raining again and we had to scurry home. Of course he brought his laptop with him, and since he’s well versed, he set himself up with our wireless router. Nin joked that it will now be three of us spending quiet nights on our computers, each in their own section of the wide living room. Maybe we should join the online game and play each other (because he’s a seasoned veteran on World of Warcraft, you see…) Anyway, he finally started nodding off at around ten last night, which technically was 5:00 a.m. for him.

Things are great. Nin is doing great. Recently she complained that her belly is not as big as she thought it would be by this time, even though the last ultrasound showed that our little creation is of normal weight and size, if not bigger than that. She’s a little over five months along. She’s carrying ‘low’ she said. I have noticed that for some women, the belly starts just under the boobs, and for others it is set lower, like into the front of the pants, lol. So I guess we have a low-rider baby, Holmes. Wattup with that?

I recently order Kaplan Questions and Answers for the Building Systems portion of the exam. I still need to study a bit more for my first exam, but I’m totally stoked. I’m waiting for the Authorization to Test from the New York State Board. I’m feeling salty. Itchy. Eager. I want to take it. And pass it. I don’t want to fail. No one wants to fail. No. Failing is not an option. Must pass. I will use all of my Jedi powers. All of my mind tricks. Including extra horse pills and bottles of Gatorade. I will pass the exams.

The more I see 'stuff like this' the more it simply blows my mind....



http://www.reactable.com/

Another early morning post… Woke up early after that dream about the licensing exam. I’ve been studying off and on for it, not being as dedicated as I should be, and maybe the dream is trying to tell me that. Technically, I still have some time before taking the first one, so I’ll get there when I get there. But I dreamed I was in a large white room seated at a large table, along side people from all backgrounds, young and old, of all nationalities. We were waiting for the next essay question, for some professor-looking guy seated at the end of the table to replace the acetate sheet on a projector that was set up to a screen on the wall behind him. In the dream I thought that this system of using a sheet projector seemed dated. How long has it been since I’ve sat in a classroom and taken an exam? Anyway, the guy was Asian, and he was smoking a cigarette, and he looked snooty, and didn’t utter a single word. He finally replaced the sheet, and on it was just one word, one word and nothing more, that of course I forgot since the dream. It was at least three syllables long…started with an ‘R’… Never mind the word, I was panicking in the dream because I didn’t know ‘it’, couldn’t figure ‘it’ out. And I didn’t want to show that I was totally stumped before all of those people. There must’ve been at least two hundred people there, and it seemed like we were all freaked out by this single word, and had no idea what was required of us to solve the problem. It was one of those classic frustrating anxiety dreams when you feel you have no way out, that nothing can save you, and you wish a hole would open up in the earth and suck you in, or some magical white light would come and wash you away to oblivion. Meanwhile back in reality, I’ve been studying the mechanical systems of buildings, specifically conductivity and heat loss calculations, greenhouse effect and heating and cooling loads for buildings. Believe it or not, and I know it’s silly but I scanned through some of the pages of my study guide to look for this mysterious R word. Was it Radiation, Resistivity, or Refrigeration? Retardation? Dunno. I realize I can’t dwell too much on this dream. I should just study. But wouldn’t it be great if there were a device that could record and playback your dreams? Something you could buy at some store, hook it up to yourself before going to bed, and voila. I’d buy one of those. Which gives me a perfect segue to this…


Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

It felt good to look at the clock this morning and gather that I don’t have to rush to work. I have this Friday off for summer hours, so I’m writing this from the home computer. But I need to call in, gotta get that email from Morgen copied to my gmail account. Nin’s still asleep and I’m making myself some pasta for breakfast. Pasta for breakfast, you ask? Well, I want to go for a bike ride so I’m trying to load up on carbs; probably go up 9W for about twenty miles. In the past few weeks, things have been pretty usual for me, and for us. Happy little campers amidst the celebrity deaths, the circus in Albany, and the usual turmoil and unrest all over the world. As well, the Tour’s going on over in France, and I’ve been catching it on Versus.com. Today, Lance is in second, going into the mountains.

Nin says she’s starting to feel the baby kicking. Apparently it’s different for every pregnancy, but for her, now at twenty weeks, she’s definitely showing, and our to-be-born has a tendency for gymnastics and her own little version of karate. (We’re still assuming it’s a girl.) Later when she’s close, we’ll see real Radio City Rockette style kicks, I’m sure. Nin’s trying to manage her weight, and she’s been doing a good job at it. Still, yesterday we met up in the city after my work cause she had gone to her tanning salon session close to Union Square Park, and we walked back to Port Authority from there, and as we approached Port Authority, she got the sudden urge; call it a craving, for an Edy’s shake. Dulce de leche. When she had doubts of whether or not she should have it, typical of me, I didn’t stifle the urge. I reassured her it was the baby whom got the urge, not she. Yeah, it needed the fuel for all of those roundhouse kicks and ballet pirouettes. And then, while crossing 8th Ave, Nina came up with the most perfect name for our daughter! We thought we had a name, but this current one is so much better! Why didn’t I think of it! Anyway, it’s top secret, we can’t say just yet, sorry. But it’s sooo great. And if it turns out to be a boy, we’ve got a great name for him, too. *flips a coin*

Diego called me on Father’s Day to wish ME a happy one, when it should’ve been me calling him, since he’s the one with a ten-month old crawling around. He said technically I’m already a dad, so I guess he’s right. Nin’s belly is getting bigger and bigger; she's at eighteen weeks, give or take a day. Last night, late into early morning, she woke me up by saying she was hungry again. Then we stayed up—our cats were having one of their frenzied fits and keeping us awake—and we talked about how it seems as if she’s always hungry and is eating more. It’s the usual second trimester mode, the doctor had said. But after we figured out the day-by-day calorie count, it doesn't really seem like the case. But by all means, sure, let’s eat, I said. So we had cereal. Friday she has her next Ultrasound appointment. When we find out the sex. Do you have any idea how exciting this is? Think of it, reader. What do we have growing in there? Will it require a little sporty tuxedo, or a little ballet tutu? Then again, girls have been known to wear tuxedos on occasion…and tutu-wearing boys… Well, it wouldn’t faze us any way.

We’re also set for our usual summer trip to Miami in August. Ten days. Beautiful skies and Beach. Diego also mentioned the reunion party we want to have, since a lot of our long-lost friends have either moved back to, or are going to be in the Miami area during that time. Tcir is even having a birthday. So we thought it would be good to get the old gang together, we haven’t seen some of them since high school. It was Diego’s idea originally, but I thought it was a splendid one and now I’m stoked.

Our cats tend to curl up together this way. Sometimes they’re bundled up so tightly you can’t tell where one cat ends and the other begins, and they’re just a blur of fur. When this happens, and I find myself needing to get their attention, I’m forced to yell out something like, “Hey, you animals!” and then, maybe, if I’m lucky, at least one of them will turn and face me.