What I'm happy for this Christmas

Home brewed coffee. Not many thing better than grinding up the beans and making it right there in the kitchen. Instant coffee might have been cool for astronauts but it was a huge step back. I can't really think of anything 'instant' that is worth eating.

The free 5 guys meal M and I stumbled into. We were out last weekend? It was lunchtime, we saw a 5 guys, decided that's what we wanted. It was a new location. When we got to the door, we were asked for invitations. I guess the employees were supposed to invite friends and family. We were neither and almost walked away. The guy at the door let us in anyway. We ordered and were told it was free. What's better than unexpected 5 guys? Free 5 guys. Then the drink dispenser was like one of those ideas that the guy who spent 7 years getting his undergrad randomly spouts out at unexpected times. An unlimited beverage combination machine with more flavors than I have ever seen. We shall be returning, even if we have to pay.

Having a kid in May. It gave M and me the whole summer and fall to get used to the parenting thing. I don't know what people do who have kids in January.

DVR. I now watch football games in 45 minutes and don't chew up my entire day. So long as I stay away from sports news, I get away with this. M doesn't even mind tagging along. Bonus mention for the 30 second skip ahead feature. Recorded TV shows no longer require gunslinger reflexes to avoid rewinding when the show resumes. Even though I rail against cable TV, this is actually a decent feature.

Frozen breakfast sandwiches. Had to lower my standards here a bit. When we were in Delaware for a wedding the hotel had a wide variety of microwavable breakfast sandwiches. I hesitated but jumped in anayway. They were excellent. Breakfast sandwiches are easily one of the best parts of the grand and noble first meal of the day. The enjoyment I experienced inspired me to seek these out at the store. I don't eat them every day, but when I get a chance, I do not deny myself a nice microwaved sausage egg and cheese biscuit.

Ron Swanson. Too bad he's not real.

Discovering that we can run the house fan 24x7 and not need to crank the heat/AC to keep the house comfortable. Thank you nameless contractor who tried to charge me $7g for a few balloons and a netbook to make my house more comfortable.

And now a few things that I could stand less of:

Certain 'seasonal' songs. Go away already.
Rick Perry. Going away soon.
TV with laugh track. Should be gone by now.
All things vampire. Oddly not gone yet.
People who think Ayn Rand is awesome. I doubt you finished an entire book and basing your life on a single book, any book, is not giving your life enough credit.
Thinking that things were better 'back in the day'. They weren't. Those days are gone and not coming back.
Perfume/Cologne magazine inserts. I make every one I see gone.
Ryan Reynolds. Almost gone.
International Bad Guys. Ghadaffi, Bin Laden and now Kim Jong Il all gone. It was a good year. Still time for Ahmadinejad, Chavez and Cheney. You know Cheney doesn't have a pulse, right? Look it up. He probably falls into the vampire category as well.
SOPA. Hopefully gone soon. Contact your people in Washington. The olds are trying to take away the internet.
Bonus Rooms. If you can't afford your house, rent out your bonus room. Then go away.

Intruder alert

This bandit was in my house. He took all my money, sleep and free time. I was glad to give it.

Carrot explosion

Back to original

Last gasp of the stache

2 days left

Tasty skull

Lazy Monday

Running out of places to take these pictures

Desperado times

Happy day after thanksgiving

Only a few days left. Starting to get bushy.

Happy turkey day

Yeah. Thug life.

Sipping till I feel it

Holding it down on Tuesday

My name is fritz and I will be your trainer today

Getting bushy

Morning sunshine

Freak Friday

On the Thursday grind

Only? Two weeks to go

Looking like a social studies teacher

Happy nov 14

Respect mah

Authoritah

Mr Saturday

Saturday night's alright for rocking the pushbroom.

Friday face

Almost forgot. Never fear.

Starting to get used to it

Wednesday edition

Looking fierce

It is getting hard to take these without laughing

Starting to look like Tobias Fünke

Mr mustache

Latest progress.

Things I shouldn't like but do.

Getting my teeth cleaned. Yeah that's right. With the metal hooks and the aggressive flossing. I try to fall asleep when I go to the dentist, just to show how much it doesn't bother me. Daily flossing? Love it. Even some blood is nice - it's tells me I'm getting deep in there. I sort of like biting my nails, but lots of people like that. I read recently that nail and ice chewing is a mild form of Pica. No bezoars here.

Ever felt the back of a baby's leg? right behind the knee? Maybe it's just baby E, but there's a seriously weird fold there. Like a giant callus. So fun to feel that sucker.

Sore muscles. Like so sore you can't move. Then you take the heel of your hand and push really hard on that sore muscle, until it hurts so much you can't take it, then you push harder. Yeah that's good stuff right there.

Drinking nothing but coffee and not eating. This is probably downright unhealthy, but it sort of gets the whole body buzzing with no lethargy. I don't really do this often, it's more by accident. But when it does happen, it's amusing.

Gossip Girl. what? you don't like the adventures of Blair, Chuck, Serena, Dan and Nate? I left out Vanessa because she's just annoying. I only pretend to not like it so M will let me watch something else. It seems to be an entertaining, yet completely implausible show. At least it keeps my attention. And Chuck Bass is Roger Sterling's long lost grandson. He's terrific.

Nightmares. Every once in a while I get one that is so bizarre and twisted, I think I know where the human centipede guy is coming from. It's nice to know the brain can take a wrong turn now and then. They usually wake me up and stay with me for weeks, making me wonder what the heck is wrong with me. I love knowing that we're not all 100% in control, despite appearances.

Dubstep. This is probably the only one that I seriously questioned putting on the list. Dubstep has to be the tobacco of music. The first 15 times I heard it, I thought it was terrible and stupid. Then I had one more taste and I started to see why someone could like it. I don't crave it all the time, but every once in a while I sneak off and fire up some Skrillex when no one is looking. woobwoobwoobbangbangbangwoobwoobwoob. I feel like I'm in the matrix. I also love me some bad rap like Rick Ross and Wiz Khalifa. No lil wayne. I tried, but weezy got nothing for me.

Mullet cars. Just something about the cars I envied when I was 6. I hadn't even heard about an Aston Martin, but I definitely knew Knight Rider and the Dukes of Hazzard drove. I suppose mullet cars is a pejorative term, but I saw a lot of mullets in those cars and the two will always be associated.

Airplane turbulence. I don't know why everyone freaks out about this. There's 100% nothing you can do about it. If it's your time, it's your time. Deal with it. Being scared isn't going to get you out alive. Plus, going down laughing like a maniac is pretty badass if you ask me.

how to take out the trash

This crude comic may look familiar to some, and others not. Just something I am playing around with...

Sponge B wetpants

This is going to be borderline repetitive for anyone who has raised or is currently raising a child, but since this is my first rodeo, I am entitled.
Easy E has a new trick that he only performs with dad, which is to coat me with a thick morning vomit every so often. He eats his bottle, smiles, gets up on the shoulder to burp, I feel the burp gears turning against my shoulder, but instead of gently belching in my ear, he arches his back like a champion loogie spitter, unfurls a huge wet burp and with a 7oz finishing move of warm sticky milk, which seems to come out in a single continuous slug rather than several wet splashes. It's almost like it is encased in a slime membrane, only to disintegrate on contact with me or the chair.
The first time this happened he got it mostly down my back. A nice warm feeling yes, but a quick puke shower is not very satisfying. The next time he managed to get some in my mouth and my ear. Not cool man. And yesterday he dumped most of it down the front of my shirt and into my lap, making me the only person in the room with sopping wet pants, for a change.
These events do not bother him. I do not share his enthusiasm for purging.

new idea

What if people could continuously grow teeth, like sharks do? Not that it wouldn't be painful and annoying when one went bad and had to be fixed or removed. I'm not trying to put dentists or dental hygiene companies out of business. Maybe denture manufacturers can go, but there would be a whole new industry in tooth pulling and prosthetics while the new teeth came in. I think it would be awesome.

new stuff

 So many ideas swirling around, it’s impossible to get them all into one coherent theme, so I’m just going to do this stream of consciousness thing…

Baby E has some new tricks:

The AM projectile vomit on dad. Yeah. In the mouth, in the ear, down the shirt. Everywhere but the towel I have draped over my shoulder. Actually, I shouldn’t say that. Sometimes it goes on the towel, but COME ON – it’s hanging veritically, he’s puking horizontally, what do I expect? A magic Velcro-vomit? I need a miracle vacuum towel to instantly adhere liquid to absorbent material instead of watching it all roll off like the towel was made of microfiber. Boooo.

He sort of rolls around.

He sleeps without his magic swing. This was a scary few days.

He has noticed my iphone and stops eating when I browse and feed. This is unacceptable.

Lots of toe, nose, hair, shirt and mouth grabbing. His hands are cold and slimy.

He reliably blows out the diapers. If he did the deed more than once every 2 days I think they could be contained, but this is not the case.

My new favorites – Spotify for it’s queues and Pandora for it’s genres. And I don’t even really like music. Saves me a lot of time scouring youtube for music.

Is there anything that is a bigger giveaway for your low station in life than a prominently displayed dreamcatcher? I’m not saying everyone with a dreamcatcher in their life is picking flies out of their hair every day, but I don’t see many of the top 1% rocking out with the dreamcatcher on the rear view mirror. I’m just saying.

What are you supposed to do when someone says you like someone else, but that comparison is not flattering? We have a new guy at work, and people all say I look like him and vice versa. He happens to rock the same haircut and similar eyewear. But is that where the comparison stops? Ok maybe I do look like Moby. This is where I start growing the beard.

My home gym equipment is all failing. My other pullup bar broke, but only with minimal falling this time. This is not acceptable. To get around this, I did some agility drills in the field near our unit the other day. Nothing shady about a guy running around in the dark at 6AM in a field. Nope. I only hope that no one sics their doggy on me.

And that’s about it. Weak.  I really thought I had more. Maybe again soon. 

Come on Irene

With two natural disasters in less than a week, I am officially preparing for zombies next.

We lost power for a couple of hours, saw some rain and wind. I missed an online fantasy draft because of the power outage. It was pretty sad. All of that is nothing compared to what I saw this morning. It was almost too devastating to believe:

The garlic bulb I planted so many weeks ago has been knocked over, the leaves are all sad and droopy. I don't think insurance will cover this. We can only rebuild and move on.

Here taste this

The other day, after returning from work, M handed me a baby bottle and asked if I thought it tasted bad. I took a sniff, didn’t smell bad. I even took a taste. It wasn’t terrib.. oh my GOD what is that get it Out Now!! IT IS STUCK TO MY MOUTH NOTHING TASTES GOOD DEATH ROTTING PLAGUE ROADKILL*&%# It really was unlike anything I had ever tasted. It started off kind of sweet, sort of like vanilla ice cream, then it took an almost savory note, sesame-like then diverting into pure copper/soap/funk. It coated my mouth, no matter how much I spit or gargled, it wouldn’t go away. It only made whatever I tried to mask the flavor with taste bad as well.  So it wasn’t good.. I really don’t have the words to describe the flavor any more. Even thinking about it give me goosebumps and the weird saliva rush before you boot everywhere.  Turns out E thought the same and while he didn’t cry or freak out, he definitely rejected the bottle no matter how hard M tried to get him to take it. Now the question was, how did it get that way? It was one of the frozen milk samples. We’d been feeding these to him for a while, there hadn’t been a problem. We tested the frozen stuff weeks ago when M read that sometimes it can taste bad. We thawed some and E took it fine. No problem. M had been defrosting them in chronological order, so we knew if they all of a sudden started tasting bad, we’d be able to find them. We tried a few more from the next scheduled frozen sample and BLEAGH MAKE OITSTOPAHHHHH. This was going to be a problem. What happened? We took great care to make sure it stayed cold. It didn’t taste or smell like spoiled milk, so I didn’t believe there was a temperature fail in there. It wasn’t very old, maybe 6 weeks, maybe less. Something weird was happening. Luckily we were at the end of May’s supply and had a schedule pickup/dropoff for June’s milk. I had high hopes. So Monday was my day off, I had E for the duration and my task was to find where the ‘good’ milk started. I believed it was M’s diet, maybe she had some garlic or curry or something that she ate that took a few days to leave the system and we’d be back in business. We had an entire month’s supply of frozen milk, maybe 50 bags’ worth, so a little more than one per day. I stared out  thawing 3 at a time, careful not to let them get too warm, I didn’t want any ‘good’ ones to go bad by my hand. I set up fresh bottles for the milk to go in, I had spoons for tasting, I had grape juice to wash any bad taste away. First taste was bad, I expected that. I still wasn’t used to the flavor, so it was most unpleasant. I went to the next bag, still more awful. I think this one was actually worse. I gagged. My stomach retched. I had swallowed some. The sneaky bad taste didn’t come right away. It took almst ten seconds to set in. By the time I realized it was terrible, I’d already taken a second taste to verify, since the first taste wasn’t terrible and then it hit and built and didn’t stop getting worse. It coated my tounge, it got in my throat it was everywhere. I had to step up my anti-fouling procedures. I got a toothbrush, I got fresh coffee beans.  After each wretched taste, I scrubbed my tounge, drooling the pre-puke drool, deeply inhaling coffee aromas to get the funk out of my sinuses. The nasty milk was all over the kitchen sink because the flimsy storage bags weren’t exactly pour friendly. The reek was everywhere. I was only 2 days into the month. I tried to discern what a ‘good’ bag looked like versus a ‘bad’ bag. I went deep into June – the 18^th, that was sure to be good. Gong. Wretched. Horrible. So did that mean that every bag from 6/2 – 6/18 was bad? That was almost 30 bags. I couldn’t arbitrarily throw them all out. M would kill me. I had to test them all. Wait.. I had to test them all?? Do you know how insanely BS it is knowing you have to repeatedly taste the worst taste in the world and you have no idea when it might stop? I was furious and profoundly sad at the same time. M suffered quite a bit to build up this store. Was all her work for naught? What was E going to eat? Why had this all gone so wrong? Why did it have to taste to bad, why did I get to taste it? When would it end!?! SO I started in, defrosting bag after bag. Gagging, wretching, spitting howling mad. E watched me with a curious look on his face. Innocent to the suffering I endured for his welfare. M occasionally ventured down to ask how it was going. The she would laugh as I described how bad it was. It was strangely hilarious. The empty bags piled up in the garbage, the world’s nastiest empties, never to be rivaled by any frat house recycling bin. My senses grew stronger or immune, because I stopped actually tasting how bad the milk all was. I had a hard time telling if it truly was bad, I had to take bigger tastes, gargling it like a fine, foul single malt, never swallowing. At one point, I couldn’t tell if the taste was permanently in my mouth. I needed a better plan. M had a new bottle of milk in the fridge. I tasted it. It was fine. I took a whiff. It smelled like… nothing. I took a big whiff of the nasty milk and there was a distinct smell. Not terrible on it’s own, but the association was enough to make it distinctly unbearable. Now I could detect bad milk without tasting it. Unfortunately I had to stick my nose in the bags and huff them like a shoe glue addict, deeply inhaling several times, getting the distinct aromas and molecules into my sinuses, only to replace it with coffee to overwhelm my senses back to normal. Bag after bag we went through. One of the bags had a leak. When I came back to the defrosting station, the bowl was milky white. I smelled it before I saw it. The horror. I have read that smell is the sense most related to memory, the oldest sense we evolved, the one most deeply ingrained in our brains. Now I had damaged mine with foul milk. I will always associate diesel exhaust with my father’s old diesel VW rabbit.  Burning leaves and fresh cut grass have their seasonal associations. Even wet dogs have pleasant memories. I now have a new one to add to the catalogue. There is an end in sight here. I did eventually get to a good bag. There was no sweet smell of hell-taste in a bag from June 25^th. I had to be sure. I tasted it, waited for the foul and… nothing. I waited longer, Maybe it was sneaking up on me and… nothing. I was ecstatic. I had another bag defrosting, was that a winner too? It was!. Unfortunately I cannot assume the rest are winners. We have to taste/smell every on from now on. The theory is that there is a statute of limitations on the freezer milk and it’s about 6 weeks. Further research has shown that we can (and could have) prevented this by adding more steps to the process, but that’s a pain in the ass. But we are going to do the extra steps now. It’s all chemistry in the end. Now I have to go get something to eat to get this horrible smell and taste out. Even thinking about it makes me frown. 

Fallin off the ceiling...

Not that Lionel Ritchie song. I think he was dancin' in the ceiling. Maybe after he dances, he falls. But I fell. I good 5 or 6 feet. Yesterday at 7am or thereabouts the hook in the ceiling that had previously bore my weight during my home gym acrobatics for the last few years gave way, sending me crashing to earth, or at least the loft floor. 
I often thought about what would happen if it did let loose. Would I die? unlikely. People fall from 5-6 feet all the time and they don't usually die. Maybe if I landed on my head, vertically, pile-driver style, I could die. Or maybe if I landed on some rocks or into a pit of tigers. But then I am dead, and so be it. Maybe I would be wounded, paralyzed. That would really really, suck. I was genuinely afraid of that. But then again, people crash around like that all the time - it's called sports. Hockey, football, MMA, racing they all see guys crashing every day. It's rare. I took my chances. And if something happened, well I wasn't naked or hanging out with reprobates. No one would say anything bad about it. 
But then it did happen. I was doing this sort of inverted pull-up when there was a loud SNAP. I saw the hook go flying out of the ceiling. I saw the loops of the rock rings go slack. I saw the ceiling sort of twist and invert. I felt a big pain in my heel as I hit something on my way down then there was a really loud BANG. M happened to be watching. I knew she wasn't going to enjoy this. I think that was my first thought. Then I made sure I could breathe. Check. Moved my hands, then my feet, then my head/neck. Nothing seemed to hurt yet. My lower back was starting to get numb, so I knew I had landed there. And maybe my head? It was ringing. I could roll over maybe. I didn't hear any crack or snapping, so I didn't believe anything was broken. I rolled over, took a few more deep breaths and.. nothing. I was fine. The first thing I thought was "Wow.... that was F*****G CRAZY" and I started laughing really hard. I really haven't felt that great in a while. The adrenaline was incredible. 
Back when I skied, in the last few years I had a number of occasions when I thought was going to die or at least really injure myself. I remember small details about all of these crashes, even though they probably happened in a second or two, the memories go on forever. The ceiling fall is like that. I didn't have my life flash before me, but I definitely had a lot of thought going on in a very short burst. I suppose it is good that I don't have these life threatening events too often. On the one hand every single last one of them burns like a hot coal in my mind, a more vivid memory than almost anything else. But on the other, I'd hate for the pursuit of one to be the last thing I do. So I will stick to more mundane stuff for now. Until I turn 44 and start having a midlife crisis. The I'll probably start running with the bulls or skydiving naked from an aeroplace... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtkT_jkJHc0&feature=player_detailpage#t=27s

old habits break easy

Maybe it’s E, maybe it’s the lack of sleep (related to E, but which isn’t technically true, I get plenty of sleep), maybe I am just losing my edge, but I’ve broken down in a number of ways recently. And really I don’t care one bit.

Cable TV. Yep we have real cable now. DVR, HD channels, hundreds of them. More entertainment than I can possible consume, even given an imaginary ‘reset the day’ button where I could go back and start every day over again, I would die before exhausting an entire day’s programming. Oddly, I have barely watched it, despite my extended summer vacation of sorts. Part of the reason is that the TV is in M’s ‘office’, but the real reason is, that there is nothing on that I am the least bit interested in watching. NFL coverage was nice to watch on ESPN, but that’s about it. The reason we got the new hookup was the old provider’s internet kept dying. With two people working at home, not a good idea. For the most part I am happy with the install, except for the installer guy who commented on the orphaned guest bed in the loft, saying it looked ‘wicked comfy’ and asked ‘if the baby slept there’… Errr….

Social Networks. I joined google+. I still will not join the face one.  I am too late to the party on the face site and I still don’t get the point. I just figured I’d have to join one sooner or later. We’ll see if anyone else joins and uses google+.

Crappy sneakers. Yes, I finally decided I don’t need expensive sneakers anymore. In fact, the cheaper the better. I buy new sneakers maybe once every 5 years, so why try and look cool with my shiny new Nikes that are 4 years old? It looks ridiculous. So I got some epically lame kicks, that sort of look cool in a retro hipster way.

Changing clothes. It’s easy to wear the same shorts for a week or more when you don’t leave the house. I only have to change my shorts when E does some business on me, which is getting rarer. I did go into the office a couple of days this week, so clothing changes were required there. It really felt weird.

Truer words

http://i.imgur.com/vHLx5.jpg

Thanks to A for this nugget of gold.

This other one I found on my own.

http://www.theredneckmommy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Redneck-vs-Baby.jpg

9:21

Nine minutes and twenty one seconds. That's how long it took me to suck down 5.5oz from one of E's bottles. He can do the same in around ten minutes. My whole neck was cramping up, I had blisters on the inside of my lips, it was miserable. I did it with water, he does it with milk. I get points for not vomiting or crapping my pants. It was ridiculously hard and I will not be doing it again.

Another fun thing to try is answering telemarketers in character. For example, I received a call from 'blocked number' and answered as a pirate. "Arr.. who be this? Arrr this be Captain B arrr". It turned out to be our confused property manager. It sometimes backfires. I have also recently accused the caller of barking at me and then asking what the (non existent) ringing noise was. I have plans to tell the next wave of political callers about my miraculous conversion to a particular faith, and see how long they stay on the line (only if they are for the side I disagree with, of course). And any fundraisers, you're going to get me asking YOU for money. See how much fun that will be. muwhahahaha

House-man

NOW I see where daytime TV and things like QVC come from... In the brief periods where E is not eating, howling, getting changed or playing, or things like the dishes or laundry are getting done, I really don't know what to do with myself. There are some exercises I do now and then, but these cannot be done infinitely. I can eat, which takes some preparation and cannot be easily abandoned if the lil man calls. Or I can screw off. Case in point yesterday I got caught up in an Amazon.com labyrinth, trading down purchases to get more and more for less and less. At one point though, M called down and asked if I saw Whitey Bulger was captured. Incredibly, I had not. Reading news requires a bit of concentration and time, which is at a wicked premium. It is much easier to find activities that require neither, like aimlessly cruising around online instead.

I read today that Whitey mocked Boston media members he recognized and then talked some trash to the judge at his hearing. The man has coconuts, I will grant him that. To be 81 and still getting this much attention, not bad for the all time FBI hide and seek champion.

I did manage to accomplish something else yesterday, lest everyone think I'm going start getting really wierd. I went grocery shopping at 8am. Surprisingly there were other people with the same idea. Some of them I even recognized. Our unemployed(? he rarely shaves, wears a lot of white T-shirts in public, and I hadn't seen him at the train in a while) neighbor was there, along with a lot of other middle aged guys, by themselves. When I worked at the grocery store in Brighton, the bachelor hour was 8pm on a weeknight. out here in the sticks, it's 8am.

Oh and to the old lady staring daggers at me for buying a lot of groceries early in the day and screwing up your 4 Skybar/4 Eclipse gum purchase - who eats Skybars? what is wrong with you? I don't even know what's in those things. I'm glad to see the 70s never ended for you.

Other things I have learned recently

1. Salad spinners make excellent centrifugal drying tools for baby bottle parts that aren’t quite dry coming out of the dishwasher.

2. I enjoy spying on my neighbors from E’s bedroom window. It’s a bit of a ‘Rear Window” situation since I spend so much time in there.

3. The less I am able to be online, the more disconnected I feel. Eventually, I may become completely ignorant of the world around me. At least I’ll fit in more that way.

4. As soon as I sit down for a task that takes longer than 5 minutes E starts crying. Case in point. I started this entry 4 minutes ago and he’s freaking the F out. It’s a short one today.

8lbs of poo in a 6lb bag

That’s what this is, sort of. The bag doesn’t have a weight limit, but it does weigh 8lbs, or what baby E weighed when he arrived a little over a month ago. He does this every 5 days or so. It’s been 6 and a half wild weeks since M woke me up at 2:30 and informed me that I I did indeed have time for a shower, but we were probably going to the hospital that Friday morning in May. And here it is, the last day of Spring. So what are my thoughts on this?

It’s mostly better than I expected. I must work with and be related to a bunch of drama queens, because everyone swore a baby birth was a cataclysm on my life from which I would not recover. It hasn’t been that bad so far. Sure I wake up now and then and stare at a howling red faced gas machine, but that’s ok, it’s what I signed up for. I say only mostly better than expected because there are some things I was not informed of that would have been good to know ahead of time.

1. The wild opinions of healthcare professionals. I used to have a high opinion of healthcare professionals. I suppose when it comes to lifesaving measures, I still do have a measure of regard and respect for them. However, when it comes to the mundane and possible nonsensical questions of new parents, the response I have received is less than stellar. Maybe I am no good at the boring parts of my job too? Maybe I am condescending and dismissive of the irritants and ‘this is not a problem’ problems I deal with? Nurses, administrators, physicians – all of them have been found wanting. Just about the only people I’ve had a semi satisfying experience with has been the Insurance company. Welcome to the new bizarre world. Maybe this is part of the cataclysm.

2. Everyone else acting crazy. Some people warned me that my wife and baby momma could potentially lose 15% of her mind in this baby process, and that I would need to make several long-term adjustments to deal with it. This piece of advice has been complete and utter rubbish. M has been, if anything, even better than before. Sure there was some mild crying initially, but things are much, much better now, as I was certain they would be. If anything, I think many other people are treating us differently than before and it’s a little weird.

3. The amount of stuff required to transport an 8lb human. Why does someone who weighs 5% of what I do require 500% more stuff to get around? No one told me I needed a panel truck to take a weekend trip and I am not sure this situation will get any better. I refuse to buy a larger vehicle. Maybe I will start wearing smaller clothing?

Those are my first impressions. It’s nothing that hasn’t been said before, but I’m sure people were curious about how I felt about this sort of thing. Maybe.

I can say unequivocally that I enjoy being a father, possibly more than I thought I would. I was a little worried that I’d start assuming that slope-shouldered, paunchy ‘dad’ stance with some pleated shorts and white sneakers. I’d grow some regrettable facial hair and be only able to talk about what the local sports teams were doing or the weather or my new snow tires. I’d have no idea what the wife did with the kids and step in now and then to be a ‘dad’ when I felt like it. If you see this guy coming, shoot me. Or at least hit me with the nearest heavy object. I can’t really see myself not being dad for a long, long time and I like that idea.

Part of the reason I have been able to get into this so much is that I’ve been spending a lot more time at home. A whole lot more. Like all the time. I haven’t been to work in 2 weeks. And I’m taking yet more time as I type. A could of weeks into this adventure M and I discussed how things were going and it seemed like the status quo wasn’t working, so I took advantage of Bill Clinton’s FMLA (thanks Bubba!) and will be spending lots more time with E and M while she goes back to work a bit early and I don’t. When I do go back, I will try and change my role a bit so I can spend more time with these guys, possibly working from home, and expanding the ol’ horizons. I’ve been doing the same thing more or less for almost 8 years now. Maybe I can do something else?

The worst smartphone in the world is a baby monitor. I know it’s not really a phone, but it’s sort of shaped like one, can be made by a handset maker, conveys basic information at a glance (time, date, temp) and like the worst of all email/texting/phone monsters, squawks uncontrollably at the worst possible times and is entirely un-ignorable. Well, you CAN ignore it at your own peril, but I choose not to as much as possible. And it’s not like an annoying email or even an ‘urgent’ call. Those are usually initiated by an adult, maybe even a semi-educated one. The baby monitor is initiated by well, a baby and rationales for being quiet or going away do not apply.

So that’s about it for now. I have a 6 week old who is going to wake up in 20 minutes and look for some food and maybe new clothes. And I love it.

Finally

My bathroom project is finally (mostly) complete. It started with a sink (these things usually do for some reason). M and I got it in Montreal. It was amusing explaining to the customs agent that we were importing a sink. It was not amusing carrying it around Montreal on a hot summer day. We had the sink and the original bathroom. It started out like this.

The scruffy white areas above the sink and to the right (where the light switches are) were covered in this weak tile. Nothing horrible, but nothing exciting either. The tile looked like this:
We needed a countertop. The wooden vanities in the sink store looked nice, but buying these pre-fabricated was too expensive for my cheap ass, so we found 8 feet of Virgina rock maple butcher block counter top for a decent price. I ordered and waited and waited and waited. Eventually it arrived and I barely fit it in the Subaru. I drove home, trying not to be decapitated by 110 lbs of sliding wood. We got it home and it sat behind the couch for a few months while we decided how to approach it. I did my research, decided I could handle it and went looking for tools. I asked the local tool rental place about what I needed and they told me it would be easier to ask a local woodworker. Great. I liked that idea. I called a few and waited and waited and waited and decided if this joker didn't want my money, hey I have 8 feet of this stuff, why not at least try? So I turned the dining room table into a saw horse, made my cuts and went all-in. It was mostly good going. The wood was intended to be very hard and cut-resistant and was generally slow going. The hardest part was getting everything straight. Some of the cuts came out at funny angles. I borrowed a hand planer flattened those edges amish-tyle, but without the sweet beard or suspenders. M thought we should add a sidesplash to the backsplash, so I ripped a sidesplash out of the backsplash. This was not fun with hand tools. It took the better part of a day but it got done.

Next up was color and sealing. I don't need it to be food-safe, so a more industrial finish was acceptable. The fumes were a concern so I needed a good weather day to do it outside. A couple coats of cherry stain got a nice rich color. Th urethane came next. I read the instructions and started cleaning the countertop with mineral spirits, like the can said. Unfortunately it got all cloudy and started looking bad. If I read the can further along, I would have realized the mineral spirits came before the stain and I had just un-did some of the previous staining I just finished. A third coat was needed. We banged that out, got two coats of urethane on and it looked something like this:

So the wood was done. This weekend was the final assembly. After last weekend's toilet and vulgarity explosion I was not looking forward to another 5 hours on my back with water spraying in my face, but this needs to be done before the Rooster arrives. I jumped in after an enormous brunch and a gallon of coffee. Demolition was relatively fast. Once I fitted everything, I realized this bathroom didn't have 90 degree angles on the corners either. Yippee. The counter and back/side splashes were installed. The faucet was fitted, the sink was adhered and the last step was cutting and installing the wall paneling. we elected to go for a bronzed-looking metallic finish. It sort of matches the faucet. I think this stuff is intended for ceilings, but it can work on the walls. It's not cheap and kind of unpleasant to cut cleanly. Eventually we got it done with minimum destruction. The final product is here. I'm happy.

The hot/cold lines aren't exactly perfect. I bought the wrong sizes and my retrofit of the existing lines didn't really work, so it's one more trip to Lowe's and then we're done. Finally.

New Stuff

I know I’m going to look back at this and think I was delusional, but right now, on March 8^th 2011, I really don’t believe my life has changed all that much since learning I was about to become a father. The circumstances were not accidental, it is something I have thought about for many years, and I feel M and I are fairly well prepared to handle the eventualities of it all. Media portrayals of impending parenthood are usually filled with dread, consternation, anxiety or fill in the blank fear. I think I did have a rough sleep the first few nights, realizing that my life was going to change at some distant point in the future, but these days I sleep fine. I assumed there would be great upheaval or general craziness. I’m not complaining. I know a lot of people have medical situations that are out of their control. I’m referring to the complete lifestyle adjustment that I’ve seen happen when that first positive test result appears. For me, it just hasn’t happened.

What has been upended is our house. Sure we’d been a little slow in making changes over the past few years. I don’t think this was due to laziness, but more a sense of contentment with how things were. We had a big rush in the early days, covering up taste specific color choices the previous owners selected. There were some furniture buying expeditions and the semi monthly trips to Homegoods for ‘treasures’. Exotic vacations were the primary source of the various decorative items in the house. Every so often we’d decide something that sat in the corner disused was due for a charity run. Lately though, M (with some help from me) has been on a tear. A new working schedule has allowed copious unstructured time to comb less frequently used areas of the house, uncovering great veins of stuff that we just don’t need.

TV’s ‘American Pickers’ profiles two guys who look for houses with piles of junk in the yards. They pull up in their van, ask if they can look around and start asking what the owner (frequently an elderly man with a ratty hat) will sell his treasure for. Many times, after removing years of weeds or other layers of rusty junk, the pickers will present the old guy with something he hasn’t seen in years. At which point he remembers how much he cherishes that rusty bicycle and refuses to part with it for any price. I am fascinated by this show partly because I see a bit of myself in these old guys. I think it would be great to have a big barn filled with old tractors and jukeboxes. I’d plan on cleaning them up and displaying them or maybe selling one if I felt it was worth something. Realistically, I don’t have the time or inclination to do anything remotely along those lines. What seems quaint and fun when portrayed as old coots with valuable antiques could be presented just as easily as crushing mental disorder if someone decided to call them a hoarder. What’s the difference between an old lady in a house filled with porcelain dolls and some old farmer with a barn full of motorcycle parts? The problem is, I didn’t have any tractors, only boxes of wires, piles of broken picture frames, bags of curtain rod hardware, old magazines, older clothes, mementos from past jobs – nothing I remembered I had or anything remotely valuable. It all had to go. Rooms have been painted, framed art and pictures have been relocated. New art is up. I like the gallery and rotating display aspect of this. Much as I howl and complain during the course of these minor renovations, the results I have to agree with.

My bathroom renovation is also sort of moving along. I have decided to use butcher block for a counter top to go with a sink M and I picked up on our travels. Knowing my potential for destruction, I bought a much larger counter top than I needed and decided to cut it down to fit. In case I ruined one section, I had more than enough to start over. Someone as a local hardware store suggested I turn the job over to a local woodworker. I thought this was a good idea and contacted one. He never returned my call and in the meantime, I started to get creative. I turned the dining room table into a sawhorse, rigged a vacuum cleaner to the saw and started cutting. M was and continues to be skeptical. I have the final counter shape and size finished. I even used some of the scrap to make a backsplash. A sidesplash was also needed, so I hand-sawed 30 inches of 3” thick rock maple into two 1.5” thick pieces. This was not fun. 5% of the way through I had serious doubts. There was no turning back. There are some legendary tales of certain members of my family undertaking borderline foolish tasks when an easier way is available, and I seem to be no exception. It got done. I am proud of it so far. The final piece is to cut the hole for the sink. This could be my Waterloo, Barbarossa, Spanish Armada moment when it all goes down in flames, or sawdust. If this fails I probably won’t detonate completely, but I will definitely seek professional help. For the wood. Not for me. I don’t need that kind of help.

This was a legendary winter for us. I won’t get into tales of woe and shoveling, but I will offer one piece of advice about breaking ice off of your roof. Make sure there’s nothing underneath the icicles when you start swinging away. This includes anything that might be hanging on the side of your house. It seems that, similar to people jumping off buildings and pinwheeling off the sides as they plummet, large icicles do the same thing to houses and combing through snowbanks looking for shattered vent shrouds CSI-style is not very exciting. I’m sure the next home inspector will have something to say about our unusual looking vent shroud when it comes time to sell. I am hopeful, however for our shrubbery. Given that the last few bushes we purchased failed to thrive in the wintertime, I decided to take a more proactive approach to saving them. When the big snows came, I carefully covered the smaller bushes with garbage bags and then dug them out and uncovered them when the sun came out. Eventually this became untenable as the snowstorms piled up and I could no longer locate the bushed to rescue them. Eventually they emerged from the receding piles and for the most part they do not look like they spent the last two months buried in plastic in the dark under feet of snow. The bushes out front I cannot say the same for. They caught the brunt of the snow shoveled off of the walkway and look distinctly like someone dumped 400lbs of snow on them. The branches are mostly intact, but the footprint is more along the lines of flat instead of tree-like.

Only the spring will tell how well they handled the winter. Right about the same time we’re getting the first tips of the lilies we’ll get the Rooster hatching. This I am genuinely excited for, much in the same way a kid gets excited for Christmas or the first day of school. I probably won’t bawl or throw up though. We’ve stocked up on lots of bizarre baby gear with European sounding names. Exotic materials and clever designs all but guarantee a first round draft pick or an Ivy League scholarship, don’t they? I’m already planning adventures and activities for the little achievement machine, dreams that I hope won’t be dashed by temper tantrums or vastly differing interests. If the little man decides he really likes flower arranging I am in big trouble. I have no way of predicting these things. He seems to like kicking and thrashing about a lot. He likes it when M eats, or at least he thrashes more when food is involved. I hope he likes books – M and I have a lot of books. I hope he’s adventurous with food, but I don’t care if he isn’t. It’s easy to boil up some plain pasta if he doesn’t like whatever masterpiece M and I prepare for ourselves. Athleticism isn’t required, but it will help. He’ll probably be taller than both of us. This does worry me. I know how much I ate and still do eat. We spend a lot on food. Our cart of food for two people looks just as full as the cart with three kids hanging off of it. I can only imagine how muc more food we will be buying. I don’t know if M is prepared for it. I have tried to explain how gallons of milk disappear overnight, how cereal is eaten by the box, how I was rarely full and always hungry, but not for lack of food or eating. There was never enough. School will be interesting. I guess what I’m really hoping for is a 6foot plus nerd with a quick first step or decent putting stroke.

Yes I said nerd. I am a nerd. I’ll admit it. Another person came up in conversation and the nerd label was tossed out and I couldn’t stop laughing. Nerd fit them perfectly. Then someone pointed out that I, too, was a nerd. I denied it for a bit, searching for contradictory evidence, but I could find none. I like nerdy things. Maybe not in the comic books and role playing video game sort of way, but I love NOVA, The New Yorker, corny music, quirky movies, interesting cars, sports minutia, bow ties, and financial news. I read geeky blogs, I work in a very nerdy area of the economy, my friends are sort of nerdy, I make nerdy jokes that get lots of laughs. In high school I was in several plays and was on the academic challenge team. I’ve never ridden a motorcycle. Never driven a convertible. Never rocked a mullet. Never beaten a stranger up. I’ve never played a guitar or surfed. I was a terrible skateboarder. I’m no good at basketball. As much as I tried, I couldn’t get the cool clothes I wanted when I was younger, a fact that I somewhat feel good about now. I don’t like underground music or poetry, waxed cotton pants, civil war style beards or other hipster nonsense. I have no tattoos and other than watches, no jewelry. I’ve never worn Drakkar Noir or Cool Water or any other supposed aphrodisiac cologne. I don’t tan. I Can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t even hear the correct lyrics of songs. I like my glasses and I’m not visiting Dr Robert Leonard for that ridiculous teenager hair he touts. I guess Popeye the Sailor had it right all along.