Musing on the present. Reminiscing about the past. Posturing for the future.
Where I put something when I’m too lazy to categorize it.
Merry Christmas out there peoples.
Our gift-opening rush (which was really more like Keaton’s gift-opening rush) just wrapped up. I cleaned up the mess while Sharaun got started on the roast. Looking forward to a nice dinner with the family.
Hope your day is/will/did go/going well and that Santa was kind. Again, merry Christmas!
The blog failed me last night. The Christmas tunes entry should’ve auto-posted Tuesday at midnight, like most of my entries do. Welp, it didn’t – and I only noticed late in the evening my time Tuesday. Regardless, it’s published now and should fall just below this post for your reading pleasure.
Construction began last night. Keaton held the walls steady as Sharaun fixed them with a sturdy bead of royal icing. Before long, the roof was on the gables and iced down. To ensure compliance with California’s stringent earthquake-rating building codes, we let the hull of the house sit overnight, roof propped on cups to avoid slippage. Tonight she was ready for gale force winds… and the finery began. Gumdrops, peppermints, licorice sticks, jelly beans and fruity Cheerios were stuck here and there (under Keaton’s direction) to make for festive, icing-drenched gingerbread house. Are we really supposed to be able to eat this thing, too?
I saw a study online the other day that really tickled me. It stated that, due to the amount of food they consume and associated resources needed to produce it, dogs have double the carbon footprint of an SUV. This means that, if you’re in favor of the environmentalist concept of “trading” or “offsetting” environmental impact, it’s half as bad for Mother Earth if you drive an SUV than if you own a dog.
I love when real science proves to be antagonistic or contrary to popular psuedo-science (or Oprah-fueled public misconception). Organic food leads to obesity; sunblock contributes to cancer; anti-bacterial sanitizers actually weaken your natural ability to fight off germs, and thus make you more likely to get sick; etc.
I think it would be hilarious to see a bigger comparative chart of activities that are thought of as environmentally-conscious vs. those that have garnered a bad name. For instance, the impacts of the massive fleets of recycling trucks burning fuel nationwide on a weekly basis graphed against the regained-resources we get from the materials they collect. Or, cloth diapers and the water and energy they consume vs. disposables. Maybe showing, unit-for-unit energy, that a landfill is actually the most efficient way of dealing with waste.
By the way, I don’t know if any of those things are true, but contrary science is fun.
Have a good Christmas Eve eve, folks. Until later.
Been a while since I wrote. Should be a slow week; writing should pick up. All over the place today.
Tonight (Sunday) I got a wild hair and wanted to cook dinner for the family. At work they make this roasted red pepper tomato bisque that I could eat ten bowls of, and since it was a nice chill gray day I figured it’d be fun to give it a try. After some internettin’, I had cobbled together a recipe that sounded good and we picked up the raw materials on the way back from church. Turned out to be dead-simple and pretty tasty, and the family approved so I felt accomplished.
Saturday morning my mom called and said that she and dad were considering a last-minute trip down for Christmas. A few hours of deliberation later and we got a copy of their itinerary in the inbox. Sharaun and I are both excited we’ll have family around for the holidays after all. We can cook a real-sized dinner now without feeling wasteful or overly-gluttonous (until we sit down to eat, at least), and we’ll be able to share gift-opening with Keaton. We were just lamenting the other day about not being able to spend the holiday with any extended family, and now we got that on lock. Thanks guys.
Cleaned out the computer desk area this weekend, found the DMV notice that Sharaun’s registration needed to be renewed… back in August. With the fees, it’s nearly 200% what it would’ve been four months ago were it done on time. My fault; I’m the one who’s responsible for doing “those kind of things” around here and it must’ve just slipped through the cracks. Bad thing is, I’ve been giving Sharaun a hard time for the past month, contending she’d lost the renewed stickers they must have sent when I (surely) paid on-time. I’ve been reminding her to call the DMV to get new stickers on an almost daily basis for weeks now. Dang.
As a blogging-mecahnics sideline, I’ve become quite good at blogging on the iPhone WordPress application. In landscape mode I can tap out the paragraphs at an alarming pace, with relatively few typos or rewrites necessary. Best of all, the prospect of tackling a full-sized entry via the phone is no longer too duanting. In fact, everything you’ve read up to now, including this very sentence is iPhone-birthed. Not bad as a handheld tool.
Don’t really have anything more. Goodnight.
It’s 10pm and, because we only have the one car at the moment, I couldn’t go to the gym tonight (Sharaun had the vehicle for her volleyball game). So I stayed home and played with Keaton before I put her to bed. Then, I decided I’d write (I’m doing that now) before I’d read a little, finishing off the book I’m in (haven’t done that yet, but have a strict be-done-writing deadline of 10:30pm so I can). Let’s go.
Feeling guilty, maybe, tonight I took the house to task a bit. I focused on the kitchen and master bedroom, mostly because I think Keaton needs to be responsible for her bedroom and toy room (and this behavior needs to be taught and continually reinforced, but I digress). Most of the scattered mess is random half-unpacked suitcases stretching back to travels as musty and dusty as our Thanksgiving trip to Florida.
This time, I can blame that solely on Sharaun. Once she packs a suitcase, it’s pert near impossible to get her to unpack it again. I’d do it myself, and make one of my trademark “piles” of unsavory materials (a technique I learned from my Dad, I fear, where I stack various items I feel aren’t where they should be in some conspicuous place as a passive-aggressive message to any opponent of tidiness), but she’s forbidden me from doing so, claiming there are unwraped Christmas gifts for me still half-packed inside. So, they rot.
As I was putting Keaton to bed tonight, I found myself wishing once again that she was done with nighttime diapers. She’ll be four in February and she’s still can’t make it through the night without one (not technically true, but you get my meaning). All her friends her age are out of diapers for good, and most of them have been for a while now. We’ve tried all sorts of different things… but so far nothing has worked. She’s great during the waking hours, using the bathroom at will and as trained as you’d expect any almost four-year-old to be; it’s just overnight that gets her.
Sharaun has a theory that she’s just a super-sound sleeper. She’s come in after naps sometimes (no diapers at naps, if we even get a nap) to find her having peed multiple times and not even stirred. She swears she read somewhere that kids who are really hard sleepers often have a harder time recognizing the impulse to get up and use the potty; no idea how that explains not being able to learn to hold it… but that’s her theory. I don’t really know… she is a pretty deep sleeper, so maybe there’s something to it.
We’ve tried doing no diapers and just dealing with the daily cleanup, but we got tired of the added work after two weeks of nightly accidents (sometimes more than one per night, which isn’t easily managed with a limited amount of fresh bedding). We’ve tried a psychological approach, “You’re a big girl, right? Well big girls don’t use diapers at night.”
And, I must admit, I, at least, have even tried twisting the psychological approach by adding the element of shame, “None of your friends still use diapers at night. Not Jake, not Gracie, not Matthew; no one.” I know, I’m a bad dad… but I’m telling you, I’m tired of diapers. We’ve tried a graduated approach, using pull-ups as some kind of intermediary “Look! They’re almost underwear” fakeout. All to no avail.
The only thing we haven’t tried is the high-tech approach one of my buddies swears by, where you hook some loud wetness-sensing alarm thing into their underwear. When it picks up on the first molecule of liquid it apparently sounds a loud alarm, theoretically waking the child and helping them remember to use the bathroom instead.
I haven’t tied this because, #1 it sounds all crazy 1984 loony and #2 who the crap wants to be scared awake by an alarm in the middle of the night because they are peeing? Seems like that scenario is a setup for some kind of future therapy… or at least some kind of unwanted urination/loud-noise subconscious association. Really though, I’ve not tried it because it’s probably expensive and sounds like too much like shock therapy, literally.
So we soldier on, going through diapers at the pace of one-a-day. At this rate, we may actually have two kids in diapers come next July. Now that thought is bumming me out. What do you think? Maybe she’s just not ready. Still, I’d love for her to ditch the diapers…
Goodnight.
Tuesday already?
One more week until work slows to a near stop. For all most folks will care, as good a “stop” as any real “stop” would be. No, we’re not one of those companies who “shut down” for the holiday weeks, but, effectively, the pace of business (depending on where you work at the sawmill, I suppose) dwindles significantly.
For me, one of the lucky folks who calls on customers (some of whom who do shut down for the season), things grind to an almost-halt. This will be most welcomed. Lately, I’ve been buried and I’m ready for a break. Our Christmas plans are strikingly stark; we plan to do the thing at home with the family. We may join some friends for Christmas day afternoon and the meals and good fellowship which accompany it, but other than that we’re kicking it family-style.
I don’t have much for tonight. We did tell Keaton about her coming new brother or sister, and video’d the conversation, but it wasn’t as all-out hilarious as I thought it might be and something crazy happened with the audio to where it’s got a terrible background hum. Even after several passes of noise reduction and voice amplification I was left with a slurry mess that isn’t worth further cleanup. So, you’ll have to take my word for it: Her reaction was underwhelming. I think she knows what’s going on, but almost four year olds are used to immediate pay-off, and this thing doesn’t satisfy there. Maybe as Sharaun’s belly grows and grows and grows it’ll sink in more for her. We’ll see.
OK folks… that’s enough for this evening. Off to load some 24-bit Beatles files onto my iPod (see the ‘tweener entry below for some context). Goodnight.
Hi internet friends. Hope you had a good weekend, mine was a mixed bag.
I mean, how can a trip to Disneyland be bad, right? Well, it can’t, really… but it can be… challenged.
First off, it rained. Just a little on Friday, but more on Saturday. And, since Saturday was my “get in free on your birthday” day, that was kind of a bummer. Ultimately, though, the rain didn’t bring us down nearly as much as I’d have guessed. The whole crew had ponchos and rain gear and we were relatively well outfitted for inclement weather. Besides, the rain kept the throngs away from the park, so the lines were nearly non-existent and we were able to walk on almost everything.
Second, sometime around noon on Saturday (my birthday) I started to feel pretty run-down. Things took a turn for the worse while we rode the jungle cruise and I battled hard to keep the cold pizza I had for breakfast from making a curtain call. After that it was only a few more short hours of walking around in the rain feeling nauseous before I called it quits and headed back to the hotel to get some rest.
In the end it didn’t work out too bad, though, as the rain really started coming down in the later afternoon and forced our whole party back to the room to join me in my quarantine. So, our two-day trip got cut short by half a day, but I don’t think any of us was wont for a good time. Proof that not even rain or liquid poo or upchuck can hamper a trip to the magical Disneyland. That place cures (almost) all that ails ya.
In other news, Sharaun is fast coming to dislike the brand new hardwood floors she wanted for so long. And, with each disparaging remark about how easily they dent and scratch I feel more and more dumb for dropping so much money on them. I know she’s not complaining to make me feel bad, but when she does, I do. In her most recent fit of floor-dent panic, I find myself arguing against a completely ridiculous “Keaton can’t play on them” rule. Guess we should’ve got the cheaper laminate or maybe just upgraded the carpet… I’m still working on convincing her that these minor surface marks should be seen as “character” and are something near unavoidable, but, as yet, she’s just not buying it. Oh, she will, as the stuff is glued down and not likely to go anywhere anytime soon. She’ll come around folks, I swear…
In other other news, if you’re a Facebook denizen (as most of you I’m assuming are) you may have seen that Sharaun trumped me at getting an announcement into cyberspace: We’re scheduled to have baby #2 sometime in early July next year. We are indescribably excited about this, and I’m feeling somewhat personally vindicated after the brief concerns over the working-ness of my junk. My plan, being that I plan disseminating news like this around the internet, was to announce the good news here on sounds familiar by simply posting the video of us telling Keaton she’s going to have a new baby brother/sister. And, now that the world knows, we’re planning on doing that today – so if I’m quick with the editing you may see that tomorrow. For now, here’s a screeny of Sharaun’s Facebook announcement… since she beat me to the punch:
OK I think that’s enough for today. Took the car to the body shop this morning, maybe I’ll have an update on the damage by tomorrow.
Goodnight.
Left the house to head to Chipotle; Sharaun wanted a burrito.
I’d stayed home from work today to help around the house because she’s sick. I did laundry, vacuumed, the dishes, tidied, fed and played with Keaton. All so she could rest and, with luck, recuperate for our trip to Disneyland this weekend. We were both hungry, burritos sounded good, and I took it as a good sign she had an appetite for the first time that day.
Five minutes from the house I had to make a quick stop as the line of cars in front of me stopped at the light kinda snuck up on me. I was able to stop, but was closer to the car in front of me than I’d like to be. Without time to even blink, the car behind me slammed into me; hard. I felt my head jolt back and then forward again as the force of the impact pushed me into the car in front of me. Two big bangs and it was all over.
After we all pulled off to the shoulder and figured out everyone was OK, I checked the damage. Oh man. The brand new car that Obama bought us… all jammed up and busted. Such a sad sight to see. It actually still opens and closes, and, apparently, the car drives OK. But, I’m a bit loath to take it down to LA tomorrow anyway. Looks like we’ll be packed into Sharaun’s car instead.
And man… my neck hurts. Hope it’s OK for Space Mountain by Friday.
Goodnight.