Apologies and Wakachicka

First, I want to apologize for the lowered post output recently. I've just been very busy, but I do have an gigantic backlog of worthy commentary just waiting to spring forth soon, so stay tuned. By way of "inching back into the pool" I leave you with this actual quote from my wife:

"Wakachicka wakachicka wakachicka"

She was listening to Barry White at the time.

Sackcloth and Ashes

I generally don’t make political comments on here, because people just can’t deal with it anymore. People have become mean spirited and close minded in regards to politics (or maybe they always were). I am going to say this much though: If Obama wins tonight like it looks like he’s going to, I’m going to wear sackcloth and ash to work tomorrow. This is not entirely a display of mourning, but also a reflection of my belief that after Obama implements his tax plan, his energy plan and his domestic ideas, all I’ll be able to afford is sackcloth and ash, so I might as well get used to wearing it. I honestly believe that it could be worse than the Carter Presidency, in which inflation, interest rates, and unemployment all hit double digits. I hope I’m wrong. I hope that I’m the one who hasn’t been paying attention, and if I do find myself in a better place in three years because of Obama I’ll take all that extra money and buy each of my liberal friends a glass of wine. Those of you in California may have to go in halfsies on the airline ticket. So, here’s to… Hope. 8^)

Next up: Thoughts From the Road (LA & PDC 2008)
(which I should have already posted, but I’ve been a wee bit lazy)

This Post Is Not About Flies

Let’s talk about flies for a second, just to set the stage for last night’s events. Anyone with children has become used to the idea that there will be flies in the house sometimes. This is not because children are unclean, which they are, but because children believe door hinges are sacred objects, and that to use them any more than absolutely necessary is to risk invoking the wrath of the door hinge gods. A child going outside to pick blackberries a block away from home will leave the door open on their way out because, well, they’ll be coming back through that door at some point and they don’t want to close it without good reason. The phrase “but I’m coming back in” has been wielded by children all over the world as an all powerful talisman against the bogeyman of needlessly closed doors, and it has worked for them. Along these same lines, a child also believes a conversation is only valid if one member of the conversing group is standing in an open doorway. As an experiment, I once gave one of my daughters a stern lecture about leaving the door open. I included all of the normal reasons, including incoming bugs and outgoing conditioned air. I gave her this talk *while she was standing in an open door*, distractedly swatting at the bugs that were attempting to fly past her, upstream into our house, their little wings working courageously against the torrents of powerful, conditioned air that were pouring out of our house in the opposite direction. I kept this talk going as long as possible, and never once did it sink in that she was currently doing exactly what it was that I was telling her not to do. For reference, both of my school aged children are straight A students. It’s just a kid thing.

So, the above is basically my excuse for having the occasional fly in my house, but as the title above states, that’s not what this is about. This is about what happened around 2am last night, in my bedroom (don’t get your hopes up). Let’s start with this: For those of you who don’t know it, the primary purpose of a man’s leg during sleep is temperature regulation. A little warm? Expose one foot. Really warm? Uncover an entire leg. Arctic chill? Retract both legs fully into the blanketed warming area. (Yes, I am aware that brings us dangerously close to being reptiles. Take it where you will.). Well last night fell into the “a little warm” category, and as such I had one foot properly exposed, as diagrammed in the male body temperature regulation manual. At some point after 2am, I felt a slight… crawling… on my ankle. My first thought was “Damnit, there’s a fly in here”. I shook my ankle once, frustrated in the knowledge that we were about to begin the fly version of “wash-rinse-repeat” in which every 30 seconds for the rest of the night I would shake my foot and the fly would take off, circle the room once, then say “Oh hey, look at that! A foot to land on!” and we would start all over again. Anyone who has played this game knows the joy of it. They fly, however, did not leave when I shook my ankle, so harnessing my growing irritation I gave it another really, really good shake. That’s when the fly… skittered. That’s the best word I can think of. It skittered up my ankle, squeezing itself between my calf and the bed. This brought me “moderately” more awake (in the sense that the Titanic “moderately” sank beneath the ocean), and allowed me to ascertain several things:

• The creature was much, much larger than a fly
• The creature was hard and spiky
• The creature was moving at a rapid pace up my leg towards regions where hard, spiky creatures are strictly forbidden (unless you’re Richard Gere).

At this point I did what any red blooded American male would do: I levitated. I’m not sure if any muscles were actually involved in this, or if it was sheer will power alone. I’m not even sure if I “rose” into the air, or if I just teleported to a position approximately three feet above the mattress. Either way, that’s where I went. Once there, I rotated face down and sure enough, there below me was a dark, fast moving thing roughly the size of a large pecan. The thought “house fly” was quickly replaced with the obviously more correct thought: “daemon imp from the blackest pits of hell”. After a brief moment of reflection, I came to the conclusion that sharing my bed with a skittering, spiky, daemon imp was probably not going to work out for the best. That decision made, and still hovering in the air, I called upon my years of martial arts training and assaulted the creature with an attack best described as “one man slap fight at 200 frames per second”. One of the approximately 4,000 blows I got off in the first 1.3 seconds of levitation made contact with the daemon imp, hurling it into and almost through the bedroom wall. This was good, because the sheets were already beginning to smolder from the friction created by my humming bird like assault on the creature. I was in no way reassured by the loud crack it made on impacting the wall, but I nevertheless allowed gravity to resume its normal governance over my body and lowered myself carefully to the floor. Upon inspecting the carnage I discovered that my adversary had, in its dying moments, managed to transmorgiphy itself from daemon imp into a dinner plate sized cockroach, which I think you’ll agree was infinitely more horrible. Well played, daemon imp.

So now I had a dead cockroach and a heartbeat of around 830 beat per minute to deal with. For the cockroach, I gathered him up in several large paper towels and headed to the bathroom, past my wife who was already up “doing things that mothers do in the middle of the night when they have a six week old child”. That’s when I made a fatal mistake, flushing away any chance I may have had of getting back to sleep that night (not that there was much of one to begin with). My wife asked “what was all of that?” and in my complete and total ignorance I replied “A cockroach just crawled up my leg while I was in bed”. You see what I just did there, don’t you? The shudder that went through her body at those words actually rattled dishes in the kitchen. Before I opened my mouth about it there had been exactly one half of the matrimonial bed that had to deal with heebie jeebies for the rest of the night. Now it was a clean sweep. Instead of lying down beside a beautiful, happy, tired young woman I was now going to be sleeping beside the equivalent of a blue fin tuna wired to a car battery. And I was pretty much in the same state. In fact it was fun, because we were close enough to set each other off, arcing back and forth like a pair of shock therapy patients on relays. One gets a jolt, the other gets a jolt. Yay us. And let me be honest, we went off several times during the remainder of the night, each of us convinced that every crease and crevice in the sheets was actually the starting line for the “Next Great Roach Race for the Crotch”. I may be exaggerating slightly there, but I don’t think so. Sleep was not an easy mistress last night.

So here I am this morning, once again tired and out of sorts. I left my wife at home this morning with very explicit instructions in regards to the exterminator we supposedly employ (the “explicit” part referring to the language she should use with them). I want to come home and see that our house has assumed the natural color of pesticide. I want to see already dead things digging themselves out of the ground to get away from our house. I want an old Indian man to walk right out of a Stephen King novel and tell me not to bury anything in the back yard, because the ground has “gone sour”. I’m calling in the exterminator, the catholic church, and the national guard because I don’t care how long you live in a house, to the question “how many times over a ten year period should a cockroach crawl across your sleeping body” the correct answer is indisputably “none”.

The Silver Lining: The funniest sounds you will ever hear are those made by someone who thinks a bug is crawling up their leg, even if that someone is you.

One Season to the Next

I took a walk at work today. It was a beautiful day for it, and my office is in a really nice neighborhood, so it just seemed like the only reasonable thing to do. I really enjoyed the walk, but I did notice something a little different when I walked by the big grass field. It's a field I used to play Ultimate Frisbee on before life got so busy. It's similar to the fields I've played soccer on, and flag football on, and even bears resemblance to the lined and leveled football fields of my high school days. It's the smell. That fresh, well kept grass smell that becomes so strong in Spring and Fall. It's always had that effect of instantly transporting me back to... somewhere. Soccer, football, ultimate, any of those places. It's always a good moment. It brings with it that little boost of adrenaline, that singularity of focus, and the happy, clean feeling of getting ready to walk out onto the field of competition. I've always loved that feeling, that smell. Today was different though. I walked by the field. I smelled the grass. I got transported... but I didn't go to my old football fields. I didn't go to the ultimate fields either. In fact, I didn't go to any of my old battlegrounds. I went somewhere else. Just like that, the second the smell hit me, I was at my child's soccer game. Both of my daughters play soccer now. They are both pretty good at it, and both really, really love the game, and I love watching them play. And that's where I went. So I don't know when it happened, and I don't know how it happened, but I think that what's going on here is that maybe that smell belongs to them now, to my little girls. My days on the grassy fields are drawing to a close, and theirs are just beginning to bloom, and honestly, I'm OK with that, although my wife might argue otherwise. I'll always love that air of competition. I'll always think I'm ten years younger than I am. Still, nothing I've ever achieved on those fields can bring with it the same joy as watching my children on their fields, finding out what they're capable of, running, playing, laughing, competing... growing. Enjoy those grass covered fields girls. I cede them to you without regret. I would tell you to make daddy proud, but I think you're already there.

There are two kinds of people in the world

Those that secretly hope that there are no monsters in their closet, and those that secretly hope that there are.

Career Choices

I hit the 5 year mark today at what I lovingly refer to as my "day job" and it brought with it a thought provoking contrast. Several years ago a good friend of mine left his "day job" and the company stroked him a check north of $30K for the effort. I've stuck around at my "day job" for five years now and they sent me a gift card... for $75. Basically what that means is never, ever, ever take career advice from me.

Why I Can't Blame God Tonight

This is going to be a little rambling, and is definitely a divergence from my usually lighthearted post, so bear with me…

Barney the cat passed on today, six days after our new daughter, Wren, was born. He had developed some sort of bladder condition with a long and impressive sounding name, the short of which was that his bladder was blocked, backing urine into his kidneys, and hurting him pretty badly. It would eventually kill him. For $700 to $800 we could purchase a “chance” at getting him better, with the high probability that the problem would recur again in the very near future. The other option was the one that most pet owners have to face at some time in their lives: when is it best to let your pet go in the most comfortable, happy terms you can arrange? That was an especially difficult choice for such a good cat, a creature that had been with my wife through so many hard times, and who had so clearly and visibly loved her and this whole family. I won’t go into a long litany of everything he did for us, I’ll just say he’s the best male cat I’ve ever known, and even had the good graces to not trigger my cat allergies.

The decision we made was very, very hard on my wife (ok, on me too), and is only one of many crappy things my wife has had to deal with during what should be a beautiful time in her life. Things like my ex who decided, in the middle of Kari’s pregnancy, to sue for custody of the kids she gave up 7 years ago. Kari is one of the most wonderful, thoughtful, caring, beautiful women I have ever known and she deserves more than anything to enjoy her time growing and caring for Wren. She doesn’t deserve all hardships put on her lately, most certainly not to lose a creature that had been like a best friend to her, days after what should be one of the most joyous events of her life. It’s the sort of thing that really pisses me off, and would generally make me scream and rage against the injustice of the world, and maybe even call God out by name on it. I’m not going to do it this time, however, and if you’ll bear with me a little longer, I’ll tell you why.

I used to tell people that the scariest moment of my entire life was the day I was playing with my oldest daughter, then about 3 years old I guess, in a plant warehouse. We were playing chase. She was running from me, laughing hysterically, when she hit a thin puddle of water on the finished concrete floor. Her feet went out from under her faster than you could process it happening. The first thing to hit the concrete was the back of her head, and it made a sound like a high powered rifle going off. In that brief moment, I was sure that her brain had been hurt. I don’t think I had ever really known fear before that moment. Despite the fact that my daughter was in fact fine, I still have trouble even thinking about that day. The ghost of that raw, chest crushing fear is still right there. I tell you this as introduction to the “other” day in my life when I really, really knew what freezing, crushing, pleading to God fear is.

My newest daughter, Wren, was born at 1:22am last Thursday morning. She is a beautiful, healthy baby who at age 5 days already shows all the signs of being a future world leader. My incredible wife had a somewhat difficult labor (never ever trust anyone who says the word “cervidil” to you) but came through it like a champion. Those of you who have had kids will know the combined sense of joy and relief that comes when you see your healthy baby child come out of the womb looking healthy and whole. It is an incredible, euphoric moment because as much as we don’t like to admit it, we all have hidden fears of the worst and finally seeing our healthy child alive and well, well it’s just a good thing. So Kari and I both had that moment of utter happiness when Wren came into the world, and all was good. In our case, several nurses from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit were already on hand because of a fairly common condition which basically boils down to “the baby made a poo while still in the womb”. This happens all the time and the NICU folks were just there to suction her out really well in case any “myconium” (baby poo) had gotten into her nasal cavity. As soon as Wren was out the doc handed her to the NICU staff to do their thing. They put her on the warming table and got started in a fairly standard fashion. Then things started to turn. A good ten seconds passed, and we had not heard Wren cry yet. I cannot and will not try to convey the feelings that started up then. Another ten seconds went by. From my standing position by my wife I could see them get out the respirator bag. My wife and I both heard the word “intubate”. More time passed, but I don’t know how much. The world started to turn over. I remember my wife, with tears running down her face, praying one word, out loud, over and over again: “Please… Please… Please”. I remember the most terrifying moment of all, when all of the nurses in the room suddenly gathered around the warming table, not working on Wren but trying to act as if they had all just casually drifted into a little clump around the table. They were clearly doing what they had been taught: shielding me from seeing what was happening to my child. This more than anything convinced me, as I stood there gripping my wife’s hand, that our daughter was laying on a table dying. I wanted to run to her, but I wanted to stay out of the way. I wanted to cry to her that I was there, but I wanted to hide from my wife what it was I could see in the nurses faces. I felt a huge, gaping void open up inside me, and then I did what probably millions of people before me have done. I tried to make a deal. I said “God, please don’t take my baby. Don’t take her, and I promise that I will never forget that you gave me a miracle today. Please God. Please”. I prayed that over and over in my head, and whether or not that prayer had anything to do with anything, God didn’t take her. At some point we finally heard her cry, and we got to hold her, and she was beautiful, and healthy, and alert. She was alive.

So all of the above is to tell you why I can’t blame God tonight. It hurts to have to let Barney go, and it hurts to see my wife have to let him go. It hurts to look around the room and see his toys there, to see the catnip filled scratch box that he used to flip upside all the time. He really was a good, good cat, and he put up with more out of our crazy family than any one cat should have to. He deserved a long, happy life. He deserved better than some stupid bladder disease, and my wife deserves better than having to tell an old friend goodbye when she should be celebrating a new one. I’m going to grieve for both of them, and for myself, but I’m not going to get angry. Five days ago I made a deal. I got a miracle. And I remember that. And as cliché as it may sound, I think maybe Barney’s job was to get Kari safely to me, to this family, to this time with our new baby girl. Maybe he did his job. He was there when Kari needed him, and he was there for this family when me, Kari, and my two daughters were learning how to *be* a family. So maybe he did what he was supposed to do, and maybe he has a new job now. I hear that cats make great guardian angels, and I happen to know that there’s a new little girl in town that is going to need one. I think she would like Barney the cat.

Goodbye Barney. Thank you for taking care of Kari until I could get there. You're a good, good cat.

I am so outnumbered

So I'm about to have my third daughter any minute now. Well, technically my wife is going to be the one having her, which works out pretty well for me, but the point is still the same: That Steve Guy is getting to be severely outnumbered in the 'ol hacienda. The count will be 1 wife, 3 daughters, one female rabbit and one extremely smart female dog against me, one male cat, and one male dog that is sporting the approximate intellectual capacity of quartz. A special note on those two dogs, the female (Savannah) is so "alpha" and the male dog (Patch) is so "not alpha" that I actually saw her humping him once. That story is 100% true. So as you can see, I'm working with a pretty short deck when it comes to male camaraderie around the homestead. To make matters worse, the other two males in the household are now starting to defect. Again, true story: I looked out the window into the back yard just the other afternoon and saw Patch, the "male" dog, squatting to pee. I kid you not. He saw me catch him too, the defector, and I swear to you he shrugged. It was mostly with his eyes, but I saw it. "Et tu, Patch"? So clearly the dog has cached it in, and it was just down to me and Barney, the male cat. Notice I say "was". Barney the cat is in serious danger of turning his man card in as well, as I witnessed him just last evening... this is hard to say... running... from the rabbit. This is not a big rabbit. In fact, it's downright small. It also has the approximate texture of your typical Elvis painting (velvet, for those of you not from Tennessee), and is the only rabbit I know that will hop in your lap and start licking you. On a scale from one to intimidating, it clearly rates as "primary character from a childrens story book". Barney tried to act like a cat at first, getting excited and stalking the rabbit, but was immediately put off his game when the rabbit spotted him and ran towards him like a long lost lover off the cover of one of those books my mother used to read. Since then the cat has had no idea what to do with the rabbit and has mostly stayed out of it's way. That in itself is understandable. It's when I see Barney doing the "fast walk" all over the house, looking jittery, with the rabbit hopping along behind and sniffing his heels that the cat starts to lose points. I had hoped that they would get along with each other and play together, or at minimum tolerate each other. Having the cat run from the cute and fuzzy bunny wasn't really a consideration. So there it is. I'm starting to feel very, very alone in guy land. Once the baby is born I think I'm going to call a guys only meeting, just me, Barney and Patch. We'll discuss restoring a little, just a little, testosterone to the house. Wish me luck. Maybe I should bring some Zima.

Crazy Driving

True Story:

We're driving home from my wifes grandparents today. I'm typically a very "aware" driver in that I try to pay attention to what's happening in a 360 degree radius around the car, as well as far ahead of us. Because of this, I was not particularly caught off guard when, as we drove along in the left lane of the highway, two cars in the right lane suddenly decided to hit their brakes and swing across our lane and into the left turn lane beside us. I was also completely aware of the car zooming in on our right (also known as "my wife's side") from the merge lane there. I did a quick set of mental calculations (insert joke about mental abilities here), figured out that at everyones current speed I could just drive straight through on my original vector, and did just that. At no point was any car closer to us than the standard highway manual would approve. We neither swerved nor braked. If you're eyes had been closed you would have never known that we had had a moderately close encounter with a group of standard issue highway morons. It was smooth as silk, and if I may say so, by the book. Several seconds later my wife gave her carefully considered and insightful assessment of the entire episode with the following sentence:

"You drive like a maniac."

I briefly attempted to argue that I had not, in fact, been in any way, shape, or form responsible for the driving of the other three motorists, but my wife, wielding her 9th month of pregnancy like an iron mace, crushed my flimsy arguments and cast them into the soundless realms of "Husbands who know when to shut up".

On a side note, I think it's best we avoid restaurants while she is still pregnant, lest I accidentally cook a bad meal while we are there.

Gas Giants

It's official. The three most massive objects in the solar system are now the Sun, Jupiter, and my wife... and like Jupiter, my wife can now be officially classified as a gas giant. Those of you who have never experienced pregnancy are now thinking "How could he write something like that about his pregnant wife?!?! What a jerk." The rest of you, those who have experienced pregnancy, are thinking "Ahh... she's into the last two weeks then. Good for her". In the spirit of fairness, according to the "gas output" barometer of pregnancy, I've been in my ninth month since before my wife and I met, so I can't exactly complain. In fact, to be totally honest, it's been a little bit liberating. The new rule in the house, at least until the baby moves out of the majority of my wifes torso and into a baby crib, is "do what you got to do." I think I'm winning.

I'm Back

Well, I got totally blindsided with some really, really bad news a couple of weeks ago, so I've been completely out of my game. I don't think I'm going to talk about the news, but I am going to start back working, blogging, and getting back into the normal swing of things as much as I can. To that effect, here is a picture I sketched out a month or so ago of a waiter Mark and I saw downtown. The sketch is only a minor exaggeration at most. Mark and I both refrained from saying anything funny after he appeared for fear that the top of his head would slide off if he smiled any bigger.

No Excuse

There is really no excuse for not having one of these...

http://www.kidrobot.com/2008/munny/?p=about

Not Funny...

In the car, on the way to pregnant woman yoga class:

Wife: I think I have super hearing today.

Me: You do seem to have picked up on a lot of little sounds that I've missed today. Then again, I have a tendency to filter out annoying little sounds pretty quickly.

Wife: Ugh, we are going to be really late...

Me: Did you say something?

She didn't think it was funny either.

Why my children have no chance

Me: *says something totally gross during dinner. Think Nickelodeon kids game show gross.*

Eldest Daugher: Dad! That is totally innappropriate at the dinner table!

Me: Yes, but I leaned back when I said it so I technically wasn't at the dinner table.

Magic Numbers

OK, when I started this blog I made a conscious decision to stay away from politics because I can get a little fervent in political debates, and that’s not what I want this blog to be about. It was a tough decision at the time, because we all know that the U.S. political system provides the world with upwards of 2/3 of its entire global comedic output, but it was a choice I made. And now I’m going to unmake it, at least for one post. Today’s break from convention will be brought to you by: NPR.

I think most people with either internet connections or any small amount of working gray matter are aware that media outlets have long left behind the days of providing news, and have rather (or “Rather”) moved into the business of *making* news. We can argue about agendas and ideals later, but I think most of us would agree on that statement. Well one of NPRs big drives over the last two years has been to convince America that our economy is teetering on the brink of total collapse (I like any sentence that includes the phrase “teetering on the brink”). The only real problems they ran into with this crusade were:

a) Most of the key economic indicators (pre-oil-spike), including employment, seemed to categorically refute NPRs premise
b) The vast majority of U.S. citizens were of the opinion that they personally were in a pretty good situation, economically speaking.

So those were two pretty tough strikes against them. Given that, most of what NPR was able to do was put on display the general goofiness of most of us Americans when polls started coming out with results that showed that around 85% of nation felt that personally they were doing just great, but that they also felt that the rest of the country was having economic problems. That’s like ten people standing around in a circle, wearing black label Ralph Lauren, drinking Starbucks coffee, and blogging from their iPhones about how rough the other 9 people in the room obviously have it. We are indeed that easilly influenced. In fact, I’m pretty certain that right after I finish this post I’m going to start my own media outlet and convince people that the only way to stave off Armageddon is to send me all their money. I guarantee that 100% of every 20 cents on the dollar will specifically go to a cause of some kind. If you don’t believe me, just re-read the preceding two sentences until you do.

OK, back to the meat of the post: NPRs amazing street magic. NPR has apparently decided after two years to concede the fact that actual numbers show that we are not, in fact, losing jobs (although the economy is certainly slowing down), so this is what they did (and I’m seriously paraphrasing here). See if you can follow this:

Talking head #1: So Talking Head #2, the numbers don’t seem to be showing actual job losses. Why is that?

Talking Head #2: Well Talking Head #1, here’s my theory, {insert log and rambling story about immigrants here that most resembles an audio version of Three Card Monty}, so what I think is that all of the job loss is occurring in the illegal immigrant sector, so it’s not being reported.

Talking Head #1: OK, so there is some real job loss going on out there, how is that affecting our economy?

There… did you catch that? It’s a little subtle, isn’t it? THEY MADE UP THE NUMBERS THEY NEEDED! And they *told* you they were doing it. If this were a magic show, every single person in the audience would have just stood up and said “Uh… we saw that. You just pulled that straight out of your pocket. It wasn’t even subtle. ” At least my kids used to tell me to close my eyes when they were making things “magically” appear, and they were all of about 5 years old at that phase. And let me tell you, the NPR fellas didn’t even so much as pause to catch their breath as they whipped through that little trick because they knew that if they gave us even one second to digest that little tidbit, the entirety of their audience would suddenly turn to each other and say “Did that just happen? Really? They just did that?” I really can’t convey in this quick post how jarring it was, so if you want to go look it up on NRPs site the report was from Thursday, July 10th. It reminds me of all those movies where the cop tells the motorist “Hey, get that broken taillight fixed” and the motorist of course responds with “what broken taillight?” because he obviously hasn’t seen the other 532 movies in which the cop then smashes the taillight with his night stick. "Oh, those job losses. I didn't notice them until you whipped out the magic nightstick there". The key difference, of course, being that those are movies, something which at least 35% of the American public has come to understand as not being real life.

I have to say, I honestly can’t decide if I’m mortified or excited by this new frontier in news reporting opened up by NPR. On the one hand, all pretense of reporting actual news has just gone out the window, but on the other hand, we are in for some really, really good stories in the near future. Next up: the Fox News Special Report on Illegal Immigrants with Laser Beams on their Friggin Foreheads.

Lovely

I turn and look lovingly at my beautiful, 7 months pregnant wife and think to myself “what a wonderful, incredible wife I have”. I feel the love I have for her radiating outwards. It fills the room. My wife turns to me, sees my love for her written plainly on my face, and stares softly back at me. Then, ever so gently, she says to me: “Hmm, I’m really going to have to trim those eyebrows of yours.”

Doesn’t that qualify us for an automatic upgrade to the next highest major wedding anniversary?

Avian Crack Cocain

So we have a bird now. We don't actually own it, it just visits us, often. It's fairly small, and mostly black with a nice little bit of orange under the wing. It has a fun little "chirp chirp chirp tweeeeeeeeeet" call, and oh, by the way, it's a drug addict. That's the only possible explanation. I'm thinking crack cocaine because that's the only substance I know of that delivers this level of derangement combined with a nearly suicidal need for more. Definitely crack cocaine. Identifying the problem was not easy at first, because bird crack and human crack have some key differences. Both versions of crack create irresistible addictions, but human crack looks mostly like small chunks of dirty glass whereas bird crack, apparently, looks more like the side view mirror of a red Volkswagen Jetta. It can also resemble the side view mirror of a gold Nissan Maxima. We're fervently hoping that it does *not* bear any resemblance to a titanium blue Hyundai Veracruz, which happens to be in the shop right now but is due out any day, otherwise some "serious action" might have to be taken. Let me explain exactly what we are dealing with here.




This little black and orange bird simply will not leave the side view mirrors of any of our vehicles alone. Not only does he think it's OK to hop around on the mirror casing, he apparently believes that if he achieves the exact right unladen velocity, wing speed, and general agitation level he will be able to fly into the mirror itself, finding I suppose 77 vestal virgins, a pot of gold protected by a tiny black and orange leprechaun, or maybe just more bird cocaine. And here's a fun fact (yes it is) for those of you who have *not* studied avian scatology recently: birds can produce their own weight in poop approximately every 37 minutes. This speed is accelerated if there is automotive paint nearby, a substance which, for unknown reasons, was specifically designed to disintegrate if bird poop is so much as mentioned in it's presence. So no, I'm not very happy with our visitor at the moment. Not only do the review mirrors of our vehicles look like they were recently caught in an eruption from Mount Saint Birdpoo, but the windows themselves have a wonderful sort of powdered poo faux finish appliqué where the stupid things wings grind in yesterdays lunch as he tries to fly through the mirror to Neverland. And you can't keep the car clean, because humans sleep, whereas drug crazed little bird do not. So what to do, what to do...

Scare him off? Well that sounds like a good idea, but remember that drug addiction is a powerful force, even for tiny little birds. Now I'll be the first to admit that living in a residential neighborhood in a nice little town that could stand in for Mayberry (if Mayberry ever came up sick) probably lowers me down on the "potentially dangerous predators" list, but I should get *some* reaction when I approach an undersized bird. Not with this little guy. I walk out the door, talking to him in the same voice that makes the much larger family dogs go belly up and pee themselves, and he barely acknowledges me. He doesn't even flinch until I am *almost* within arm’s length, then he doesn't fly away, he just hops down to the window sill. I take another step and he hops back to the back window sill. I again close the distance and he finally leaves the car, but only to land a few feet away, raise one little bird leg as if to look at his little bird watch, cocking his head sideways, and clearly says "Aren't you late for work?" When I finally actually *run* at him he flies about 20 feet away and starts wolfing down food as fast as he can, eyeballing me the whole time. "You see that?" he says, "That was a blackberry. You didn't see it? That's OK, I'll be replaying it for your on your car in about 15 minutes. You can catch it then".

So my other option, short of a flamethrower (which would probably also damage the paint) is to park the cars in the garage. That would be a fantastic idea if not for the black hole in there. I mean an actual, physical black hole. Irritatingly enough, it’s a very tiny black hole. If it had the full working force of a real black hole it would be awesome. Some day someone will invent a trash compactor that is basically a black hole in a box and we’ll be able to crunch down a whole house to the size of a pop tart. Of course, you’re not going to want to drop a 10,000lb pop tart on your foot, but still, it would be cool. Unfortunately, our black hole only has enough power to draw everything into the garage, without actually crushing it. I would just bite the bullet and clean the garage out (again) but if I did that and parked the car in there, by the next morning it would be hopelessly jammed in by all the new junk that accumulated in there during the night. Clearly that’s not acceptable, so where does that leave us? Honestly I don’t know. I’m fairly certain my ten year old will call PETA on me if I “take drastic action”. I’m considering a plastic owl (because I’ve done such a good job of outsmarting this bird to date), hiding the mirrors each night with a bag, or re-watching some old Wile E. Coyote cartoons and trying to get the mailing address for those ACME catalogs he always seemed to have lying around. I like the last choice best. Those always seemed to work out.

Wish me luck… meep meep.

P.S. I did find this which may make me rethink the ACME plan.

This morning in the shower (no, it's not that kind of site)

Me (in shower): Hmm... I wonder if there isn't a high paying job out there somewhere who's description is "Spend time in shower"?

Wife: I only think you could get that job if you were some kind of hot Playboy type chick.

Me: You know, I think the surgery might be worth it...


Because hot showers are just that good.

To Edit or Not to Edit...

OK, I just want to take a second and apologize for my last post. I may go the rest of my life without coming across something as rich in comedic potential as that movie (Happening), but instead of thinking it through and really putting together a good post, I just put down the first things that came to my fingers (notice I said fingers, and not mind, because apparently those two operate at different speeds, and sometimes with completely different thought processes). Granted, I was bleary eyed and dumbfounded by the movie I had just seen, but c'mon, I had in front of me what could only be described as the penultimate REASON for the existance of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and I whiffed at it. My bad. So the question is, would it be bad etiquette to go back and take another stab at it, or do I have to let the corpse of my former post lie mouldering where it fell?

By way of atonement, I point you to this awesome website: RiffTrax. It's by the creator of MST3K, and you can not only watch clips online from the latest movies and shows, you can ORDER SOUNDTRACK OVERLAYS for a huge host of movies. Happiness, thy name is RiffTrax.

The worst movie... ever.

Ok, so we saw "The Happening" tonight and I just have to say that even referring to that thing as a "movie" is... well, it's just wrong. I'm not going to waste time looking up the definition of "movie" on wikipedia, but I'm almost certain it would use words like "story", "plot", "acting" and "climax", all of which were conspicuously missing from whatever it was we just saw. M. Nyght Shamwow has definitely played himself out. I would give a "spoiler" warning before I move on with this, but I am being dead honest when I tell you that nothing I say about this movie can make it any less enjoyable than it already is. It doesn't even have camp classic potential, it's just... bad. It's so bad I can't even hold it in my head. Every single part in the movie was so entirely disconnected from every other part that it's like trying to hold a bunch of oiled BBs together in a fishing net. I'm forgetting more and more of it as I type. Oops, there goes another meaningless, unrelated, silly little bit of stupidity. Bye bye wasted grey matter. I hardly knew thee... bleh. So, back to trying to decipher the point behind this tragedy. Ready? Go.

As nearly as I can tell, everyone on the left coast is now in a race to see who can get their Eagle Scout Envirowonk badge first, and M.N. Shammy is now vying for the lead with this movie. I would like to add here that I am actually an environmentalist in the original sense of the word, in that I believe we should try to take care of the planet. I have children, and I would like for them to have trees to play in and air to breathe. I am *not*, however, an environmentalist in the new sense of the word, which apparently includes the belief that humans are some sort of geo-rash on the surface of the earth, just waiting for a good creme to come along and clear us up... which is, coincidentally, the closest I can come to finding a point in Mr. Shama-lama-ding-dongs movie. Apparently, the plants are really mad at us for being here, and spontaneously evolve a neuro-toxin that causes us to kill ourselves with the closest and/or most macabre tool available (because evolving a poison that would kills us directly would have been just mean, not to mention clearly outside the realm of possibility). All these plants must have missed the reports on how much the earths biomass has increased over the last few decades, but then again, they are just plants. Plants that are capable of developing and un-developing neurotoxins in a matter of hours, communicating over long distances among varied species, and also apparently capable of summoning up a pretty darn vicious wind, ala Moses and the Red Sea. Pretty much everything but read an environmental report noting that plants are doing pretty well right now. Maybe they should have taken a Rasmussen poll before going off the deep end... You know, dangit, this movie was so pointlessly stitched together that I can't even figure out how to work in some paragraph breaks in a review about it. I'm just going to start throwing them in at random, unless my lawyer advises me that tossing in random and meaningless style elements in a story might somehow constitute a blatant plagiarism of M. Nyghts movie. Next Paragraph:

Sometimes I like to use the phrase "heavy handed" when describing a movie or book in which required plot elements are just slapped onto the metaphorical table in front of you, with no preamble or finesse. Well, that analogy doesn't cut it for this story. It was more like watching a pre-teen boy who grew three shoes size in the last month trying to walk down a broken sidewalk with one leg asleep, his shoelaces tied together, and a Wild Kingdom tranquilizer dart sticking out of his neck. It just stumbled along drunkenly, crashing into various and unrelated story elements, until it finally just gave up and sank down against a wall somewhere. Ironically, the very first person to speak in the movie can't figure out who she is, can't complete a meaningful sentence, and finally decides that the best thing to do with herself is to jab a wooden stick into her neck. Perfect analogy for the movie. I'll buy the stick.

So, the story was lame, the elements disconnected, then how about the acting you ask? Yeah... no redemption there either. I'm guessing that the story was so bad that it just sucked the life out of the actors. In fact, I'll bet that in the original script the people didn't actually commit suicide when the neurotoxin hit them. I'll bet that idea came from the actors, shortly after they read the script for the first time. I'll even go further and suppose that in the uncut version you'll find a part about actor agents being brutally murdered by plants that were angry at where they had been cast... I mean placed.

The net net on this movie is that it's just about the worst excuse for a one line environmental message that has ever been perpetrated on an unsuspecting audience. Sadly, I would have been perfectly happy to listen to this one line message if it had been even slightly dressed up with a decent story, but alas, it was not. It was just... badness. I could go on for hours on this, but seeing as I already wasted an hour and a half my life tonight I think I'll just wrap it up with this deep and meaningful message which I think could, in itself, become an hour and half long feature film:

Do. Not. Go. See. "The Happening".

Good Googlie Goo

Well, since my last topic covered the use of the word "butt" as a comedic element, I suppose I might as well go ahead and talk about breasts for just a second now and get that one out of the way too. Specifically, I'm going to talk about my wife's breasts. She's 7 months pregnant now (yes, I still have it) and I have to say, I'm becoming concerned. Let me start by saying that before her pregnancy (and in the interest of fair disclosure, yes I'm bragging here) my wife was a tall, beautiful, slender, nicely curved woman with very well shaped but more or less standard sized breasts. That (the breast part) has begun to change now, in the same way that Mt. Vesuvius underwent some slight changes around AD 79. Exactly.

By now you have a good idea of what I am talking about, and have built a little mental model in your head to visualize the degree of change I am talking about. This model is wrong. Oh, I know. You could be one of those people who is already prone to huge exaggerations in your mental modeling. If that's the case, then you're still wrong. Probably by at least a factor of three. The rest of you aren't even in the ball park. It's not your fault. Your working from preconceived notions based on past experience, when what I'm talking about here just has to be experienced to be understood. It's like the Aurora Borealis, only without the whole frozen Alaskan tundra thing. I've actually told my wife that if I detect any more growth in "the valley" I'm going to start running guided mule tours in there ala the Grand Canyon. We're going to need the money to buy new clothes for her.

Now, I don't want to sound ungrateful. I know that there are impoverished village women in Africa that would love to trade places with my wife. I've seen them on Discovery Channel, God help me, so I'm not complaining. I'm just putting this out there as an observation, without judgment. Things, they be a'changin.

Oh how the mighty have grown old...

So, this exact phrase came out of my mouth on the way back from my 7 year old's soccer tournament in Nashville (yes, we drove to Nashville for a seven year old's soccer tournament, what of it?).

Quote:

"Enough! You girls can find something funny to talk about that doesn't involve the world 'butt'!"

I have nothing further to report.

Glacial Tractors

Let me preface everything I am about to say with the admission that I do, in fact, have a rather substantial case of road rage. It's not that I'm impatient, I just have a very low tolerance for inconsiderate people, most of whom seem to have drivers licenses. I do try to remember during these stressful times that I am an example to two little girls, and should therefor not act upon this rage, despite knowing full well that both I and the other driver really need some action on whatever issue is at hand. I just ball the emotions up nicely and tuck them away inside somewhere, because otherwise I might live a long and healthy life, which would just subject me to that many more idiots before I get to rest. So, with that groundwork laid, on to today's (actually a couple of days ago's) story.

Two days ago I start the long trek to work, from Helena to Mt. Laurel (don't ask why I haven't moved closer. I don't know). I'm waiting to turn left onto Highway 11 via the shortcut which, if you don't know about, I'm not going to tell you about, when a tractor of some kind proceeds to run the light. My light. It just lumbered on through the intersection that we were waiting to turn into, without a care in the world. Now, to be clear, when I say "runs the light" here I'm using the term "run" entirely metaphorically. A more accurate description would be, perhaps, that it "inched the intersection", or maybe that it "crept the intersection at sub-glacial speed". I'm almost certain that the tractor was not actually moving at all, but had simply been put into neutral to allow the earth to turn beneath it. You may think I'm exaggerating here, but allow me to explain the actual order of events: The tractor entered the intersection just a few seconds after our light turned green. Two minutes later, when our light turned red again, the tractor was... still in the intersection. So there you have it. I'm not sure what that comes to in feet per second, but I'm guessing it's pretty darn slow. What I really don't understand is, if he was already so close to "stopped" that only the most advanced scientific equipment known to man could even register his motion, why not just stop when the light turned red? It's not like he was going to stand that thing on it's nose, trench up the concrete, and throw himself through the empty metal frame that used to hold a windshield. Was he worried about the approximately 15 feet of ground he would lose during the two minute wait at the light? Because if he was late for work, he really, really picked the wrong vehicle. So I didn't understand that part at all. Fortunately for me, despite having to sit through another light, I was granted even more time to contemplate happy-tractor-driver-guy because, of course, he was only about 20 yards beyond the intersection when the light turned green again. There was barely enough room to fit me and the two cars in front of me onto the road behind it without blocking the intersection! Luckily for me I was still in the tiny little Volkswagen something-or-other rental (the kind of car that comes as standard emergency escape equipment in a Cadillac Escalade, usually stored to the left of the spare tire). Things get a little hazy after that but I can say with certainty that 1) I was on Highway 11 for some undetermined amount of time, 2) the pain in my left eye went away by noon, and 3) my vision is pretty much back to normal now. All's well that ends well I suppose.

So that was Wednesday's driving adventure. I can't decide if I should tell you about Thursday's driving adventures next, in which I encounter a train doing it's "Tribute to Eternal Stasis" or if I should just skip on to some other topic. Maybe the incredibly insane bird that is in love with both our cars (an Eastern Towhee, apparently)? I'll just have to see how I feel.