I would imagine those of us born into the digital age would pick it up almost immediately, as plainly wrong as the number 13 on a grandfather clock. Digital time pieces, even those in fully 24-hour "military" time do not go to 60. They should never read 60 seconds or 60 minutes. After 23:59:59, the next tick-tock should bring us back to 00:00:00 and a brand new day. Or in the case of my personal bedtime, the last 10-20 minutes of the day. I used to regularly stay up much later, but those were in the BC days. Before Children.
This is not, however, a broken clock, but an example of a relatively rare event: the Leap Second^. As we all (hopefully) know, the Earth we live on spins around once a day. None too surprisingly it is this day that we set our clocks and calenders by: 7 make a week, split it up by 24 and you have an hour. The sticky part about using the daily spin of the planet as a timepiece is that it is not actually constant. That precocious moon of ours is actually slowly sucking up energy from the spin of the Earth, which slowly moves the moon farther away from the Earth while at the same time making our days slightly longer. I wouldn't spend a lot of time trying to watch the moon zip off to Mars or to catch some extra sleep on your longer days: the moon is drifting away at 3.8 centimeters (1.5 inches) per year, while the day is only getting 1.7 milliseconds longer per century.
Still, in a world of computers and instantaneous communication one needs a timepiece more accurate than the length of a day. The best way to keep careful track of time is an atomic clock. Basically when you excite (heat, bombard with light, etc) any atom it will emit energy always at the exact same frequency. Frequency is just a fancy way of saying how many times per second. As this is completely fixed and unchanging no matter the temperature or motion^^, you can just count the number of times the energy from an atom oscillated and keep time to better than a nanosecond (one billionth of a second). In fact, the International System of Units (SI) has defined the second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation from the cesium-133 atom.
So we have two ways of keeping time: the fixed atomic clock and the slowly changing day. How do we keep them synched up? The Leap Second (you knew I would get back to it eventually).
At irregular intervals over the past 35 years an extra second is added to our clocks, which tick away in agreement with atomic clocks, to bring them back into agreement with the day. This occurs on either June 30 or December 31, roughly every other year as determined by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS). And on those days a digital clock should read 23:59:60 in the weird non-time second right before midnight.
At least that is how things used to be. The IERS is debating whether to do away with the Leap Second altogether, as its unpredictable nature (the Earth does not always slow down at the same rate) means planning things out into the future to the nearest second is not possible. At least, not possible if you use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the present basis for all our clocks. The new plan is to add a leap hour every 600 years or so, which is an idea so dumb it seems to be mostly an "Up Yours" from the atomic clock camp to the solar day camp. It is truly amazing. There are stupid politics literally everywhere.
It is starting to look like a Leap Month won't be enough to get my remodel project back on schedule. Our initial hope was that we would be home by Thanksgiving... which
is tomorrow... OK, Plan B then. Home by Christmas. I have now been informed that will also probably not happen, although the house will probably look finished by then. Final inspection is required before the city will sign off on occupancy and it just doesn't look like we can finish dotting 'i's and 't's in time for the holidays. I imagine getting an inspector out that time of year is also a toughie. So now it is early January barring a miracle. Someone get me a crazy old man, a young girl who no longer believes, and the 34th street sign. Oh, and might as well throw in a 1980s hockey jersey while you are at it.
In the meantime, let me get you caught up on some more things that happened a month ago. You could call this entry "Doors and Floors," as that is what we got. I will start with the doors, as they come alphabetically first, although if you peek hard enough you might see some of the new floors in the same photo. Doors (and windows) to the outside were installed eons ago, but the internal doors waited until the stars properly aligned, or some such. The inside doors are actual one of the few places we have been dissatisfied with the process. Our contractor talked us into solid core doors, assuring us that hollow core doors would be just too light and "fly all around." Well now we have doors worthy of Al Capone's vault. I foresee smashed fingers and loud closet-originating thumps. Oh, and yes, they also cost us more.
All in all we got 3 sets of folding doors, 3 sets of sliding doors, 3 door doors, and one super-gigantic blast door suitable for stopping the onslaught of the Imperial army. The top photo is the folding doors to the pantry outside the kitchen and the next are the sliders for the closets in our bedroom and (if you squint) the closet in the bathroom. The last door photo is the giant pocket door that leads to our bedroom, which is truly a wonder to behold. We went back and forth with our architects on this one. They wanted a pocket door. We wanted a solid bedroom door to keep out sound and riff-raff. I guess we "compromised" on this rolling slab of wood.
Our house had all wood floors before the remodel so after playing with the idea of putting in some slate or slatescape (a ceramic-style slate look-a-like available in large sheets) we finally decided to stick with wood floors everywhere. This led us to the 1/4 vs. 3/4 inch controversy. Apparently the wood floors we already possess are unusually thin, 1/4 inch not the present standard 3/4 inch. This requires a special order for the flooring people and therefore, perversely, more money even though we are using 2/3 less wood. Having our budget already well into the red, this led to one of the bigger fights we have had with our contractor, as the costs were passed along. In the end we caved once assured all our closets would get floored, something that was not included in the original plan.
So just above you can see the new kitchen floor next to our old den floor. One is raw and the other is covered with layers of polyurethane, so that is why the colors look so different. Just to the left you can see where new floor meets old floor in our den. They had to blend in the old with the new in this interwoven manner, doing their best to get similar wood grains so that the transition is not to obvious. Apparently old floors and new floors tend to have different sized wood grain as the length of time the trees are allowed to grow is very different. Fifty years ago they were cutting down old, existing forests. Today they plant and harvest trees, encouraging their growth and cutting them at the most economically efficient time.
Here is a similar meeting of the two wood ages in my bathroom. There was some debate over whether to keep wood in here, which used to be a bedroom/office pre-remodel, or tear it all up and put something more bathroom friendly, like tile or stone. I think the almighty dollar had the final vote here.
Keeping to our theme of time (barely), I just read a blog from my good friend Kavula describing how time seemed distorted as he waited for his firstborn child to breathe her first breath. I have also found having twins is bit like living in the bottom of a tremendous gravity well. Time has definitely slowed. I think it might be a reflection of how much work raising a child (or two) is. Fun times fly by, hard work drags on. Of course child-rearing is an unstable combination of the two, so as you might expect there are moments when things zip by before you get a chance to properly appreciate them. Still, I think I have packed more into the last year than I did the previous five and it kinda feels like it.
Maybe it would help not to remodel your home at the same time.
But time does march on as these photos from the girls' first birthday party do attest. As you might recall form the last post, we had our private party on their actual birthday, but the public one the following saturday. Like any proper event, the twins went through multiple outfit changes. Rylie can be seen in her black and white ensemble on the floor and in her red hedgehog inspired overalls sitting on Jacole's lap. My mother is undoubtedly getting up to help with yet another outfit change into something the girls could wear while eating their giant duck cake. Photos of that do exist, but I mainly shot video which I am too lazy to put on the web, so instead you are forced to imagine what it is like to have a child up to its elbows in yellow duck frosting.
Here are Kayla (in blue) and Rylie greeting the guests as they enter. It is quite pleasant to make your acquaintance Mr. Wild. Oh, you look absolutely smashing in that blouse, Melissa. Please, have some cupcakes and enjoy our yellow duck-themed table you can see in the background of this photo. Oh, pay that crazy Candice woman no mind. She just wants to change our outfits again. Toodle-oo!
Of course as any party- aficionado knows, the real boogie-ing doesn't start woogie-ing until the guests are all gone. Heck, sometimes it could even be a week after the fact, like when Kayla put on her pink mouse outfit, grabbed the baby lawnmower, and proceeded to bust a move. Yes, we have a baby lawnmower. No it doesn't have blades. It has a place to put different shaped blocks. Why are you so obsessed with the mower when this baby is clearly cutting a rug like nobody's business? I'll tell you what, we'll go on to the next photo and you can forget you ever saw the baby mower.
Ok, now we have Rylie in the cat outfit, caught in a moment of deep introspection. Is she pondering the ephemeral nature of being or maybe considering her place in the great chain of --- What? Yes, she is also leaning against the baby lawn mower. They play with it a lot because they can use the push bar to hold themselves up. Look, if I showed you a picture of Socrates thinking on a rock, would you ask me about the rock? No, I didn't think so. Let's move on.
Here we see Rylie screaming in delight while Kayla looks on, probably a moment after some witty remark of mine-- Oh crap. The freaking lawnmower is sitting there dead center in the middle of this picture, too. Well take a good look. You can see the holes that allow you to put different shaped blocks into the mower. Yippee. Hold on while I check the rest of my photos....
Nope.
This one, too...
Sigh. Apparently it is in all my remaining photos, like the haunting visage of a ghost that appears only during development of the film. Well, my treatise on the deep thoughts and ideas of genius one-year olds is just shot. So let me leave you with a picture of Kayla having a moment of pure joy.
While standing on the mower.
^ Although they both have "Leap" in their name, Leap seconds are a bit different than Leap Year. While Leap Seconds account for the changing spin of the Earth, a Leap Year is a year with an extra day in it to account for the fact that the orbit of the Earth around the sun (our year) does not split up exactly into whole days. Since a year is roughly 365.25 days, we add an extra day every four years to account for that 0.25 bit. Of course it is not exactly 365.25 but really 365.242375, which leads to fun variations like no leap year once a century, except for those divisible by 400 (1600, 2000, 2400). Phew! Time keeping is a pain in the butt.
^^ This is not entirely true. Thanks to General Relativity if you move a clock around you will change how time flows for the clock, which would make it appear inconsistent to a stationary observer. I know it hurts my head, too.
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