Rookie of the Year: Not So Empty Nest
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Weekly. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Now that I’m about to have a kid, it’s time for me to officially unveil my dad humor.
I’ve been honing it for years.
The Wife of the Year doesn’t appreciate it nearly as much as I’d like her to. My nephews and niece seem quite keen on it, though. My son? Oh, he’s going to love it.
Only The Kid of the Year could be as easily amused as I am.
Case in point: our new Nest camera.
We got a DropCam Pro as a baby shower gift. Nest, which bought DropCam, released an updated camera at about the same time, so we exchanged it. Now we have a web cam for the nursery that’s night vision enabled, transmits at 1080p and can be turned on and off via an iOS app. Besides the size and design that can sometimes be mistaken for a webcams for live streaming, the only purpose of this camera is for security and real-time recording that will be stored directly through smartphone.
The night vision — black and white, but with clear visibility in pitch darkness — is pretty awesome. And watching what’s going on at home in real time on my iPhone is pretty awesome, too.
As is spying on my wife.
It’s going to be great to check in on my son, while he’s in his crib, without waking him. And it’ll be neat to use the built-in speaker and microphone to talk to him from afar when the mood strikes.
But for now, while we await his arrival, the Nest cam is sitting on the computer desk in the study, with a view of the living room. As far as my wife knows, it’s off. But one morning, before I left for work, I turned it on, ostensibly to test the notification settings — it can send out an alert when it detects motion or sound.
I was on the N train at Ditmars when it alerted me to movement inside the apartment.
I opened the app. I could see my wife had triggered it. There she was, on the couch, reading. You can zoom in and enhance the picture, so I did that.
And then I started talking to her.
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Matt Marrone is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.
