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.