Category: general

Where I put something when I’m too lazy to categorize it.

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so i think i might puke

It's zen.

Hold on.  Slow down.  Let’s take a breath and blog.

Our schedule this week is about to give me a nervous breakdown, y’all.  Tonight Sharaun dragged me to the So You Think You Can Dance live show.  Let me tell you, that’s four hours of my life (counting transit to and from) that I’ll never get back.  Tomorrow I’ve got Keaton as Sharaun’s at volleyball.  Wednesday night we’re doing a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving-style meal with a big group of friends from church.   Thursday night we’re doing a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving-style meal with a big group of friends from not-church.  Friday night we’ll have to pack for the sunrise flight to Florida the next day.

Oh, and the flooring guys will be here tearing the place up the whole time.

Meanwhile, I think we’ve found the only possible solution to the Thanksgiving flight problem I mentioned yesterday.  Well, not truly a solution, as we still haven’t managed to change our flights – the costs are just too high to do so.  But we are able to do same-day standby for free on a slightly earlier itinerary.  It’s by no means a guarantee, but it’s about the best we can ask for without auctioning off the farm.  We need three seats on each leg, and right now there are nine left.  So… maybe it’s more like an outside chance… but it’s what we have.  Here’s hoping.

Goodnight.

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to do

Oh, and... thank God.

Note before we begin: Yes, I am playing with new themes.  No, they are not 100% yet so please pardon the dust.  Moving on.

Things to do before I leave for Shanghai and Taiwan:

Get a haircut. For my Halloween costume, I shaved my beard super tight in hopes it would help the faux beard and moustache stay attached. It didn’t. However, the transition from this short facial hair to my overlong already-needed-a-trim head hair is now too stark. When I go overseas or even to a customer domestically, I like to have a fresh haircut. For some reason, having a tight crop in the “fade” area makes the baldness on top appear a little more… “intentional” or something. Also, a nice close cut helps me carry authority and appear erudite when speaking. So says me, at least.

Wash the dress clothes. For a week now I’ve not had anything brown-based to wear. I’ve been cycling through the grey, black, and dark pinstriped pants coupled with the same three or so dress shirts that are un-wrinkly enough to wear. The problem started back when Sharaun was in Florida. Not that I rely on her to do my ironing, but she will occasionally iron all my dress shirts so that I have a nice stable of wearable items. Problem with sticking to blacks and greys means that I’ve also run out of clean black dress socks. I’ll need a range of colors for the week abroad. It’s important to not only come well-groomed but to come well-appointed also. Shockingly, I haven’t been to the Asia-Pacific region since before Keaton was born. Managing to dodge the love/hate bullet that is Asia travel for this long, I’d like to show up looking as if my station has improved since that last visit years prior. I mean, why not, right?

Get the big-trash people to come by the house and take away this massive pile of big trash that I’ve been storing alongside the house. We bought a new dining room table a month or so back, one that can accommodate a larger dinner party or maybe someday a real family Thanksgiving. I had to do something with the old table, so I moved it into the backyard. Some friends had indicated they might want it as a prop for a house they were trying to rent, to fill out the space and hopefully make it more attractive to potential tenants. I left it out there while we went to Mexico and the thing got rained on heavily. When I returned, it was literally a woody mush holding precariously to the shape of a table. When I tried to move it it fell apart in pulpy pieces, literally crumbling in my hands. I threw it back by the shed, along with the chairs, amongst a growing little pile of things I don’t use anymore (like my years-old Craigslist-purchased lawn mower and some large wood and plastic scraps from various projects). Time to move this off the property before the coming winter rains reduce it to even more of a mushy mess.

Call the floor guy. As part of the (now overdue) Q3 “home upgrade” item I try to include in each year’s budget, we’re getting hardwood flooring installed in the house. I bought the materials long ago, and have been delaying the actual install to work around various travels and events now for too long. I need to call our friendly Eastern European contractor and get the dates scheduled so we can have the things in before the holidays. We’re both pretty excited about the floors, and have also both become quite detached from the care of the current carpet – not even bothering to give it a clean post-Halloween Bash. We’ll also have him replace the carpet in our master bathroom shower/sink area (carpet in a bathroom, really?) with some nice large tile – since we’re doing “floor stuff” anyway.

Order some of those credit card “convenience” checks. To pay the floor guy. We don’t carry a balance on our single credit card; we pay it off every month. However, we use it almost exclusively as our preferred method of payment for as many purchases as will allow it. All this to accrue airline miles which we can use to shuttle around the USofA visiting our scattered friends and relatives (or for the occasional international trip to Oktoberfest in Munich, “cough-cough 2010”). Since the flooring install will be check only, and will be a substantial outlay, I can’t overlook the chance to net miles from the transaction. The card we have allows me to get one mile for every two dollars on checks (one-for-one on most normal transaction and two-for-one for a limited set). Yes, the checks impose a minimum fee for usage, but ultimately, doing the math, the miles are worth it. We typically end up netting between four and five free round trips per year, or enough for a family jaunt and some me-alone or Sharaun-alone travel to boot. Not bad.

Fix the walls. Again, as part of the Q3 “home upgrade” bucket, I had some wiring work done in the main room. Because most of the wiring had to run through external or hard-to-access internal walls, the work was somewhat invasive and required a good deal of drywall cutting. This leaves me having to go back and patch, texture, and paint the worked areas. It was worth it though, not having to do the work myself (I hate working in the attic pulling wires) and getting the surround speakers mounted attractively only the wall sans visible wiring. The last items on that Q3 list involve mounting the flatscreen and getting a custom entertainment cabinet built on the wall below it. In the end, everything will be attached to the wall with no wires to be seen. Should be a large improvement to the room.

Wow.  Gotta run.  Tons to do.  Goodnight.

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prince charlie

Pod person.Well friends, it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m taking a bit of a break from doing some housework.  Keaton is dancing around in her Princess Araura costume as Animal Collective plays.  She keeps singing something about finding her “Prince Charlie.”

Prince Charlie… I LOL’d.

Oh and yes: housework.  As the sole proprietor of this here shop for another Mr. Mom weekend, I’ve busied myself tidying, laundering, and scullionry.  After church Keaton and I swung by the grocery store to pickup some foodstuffs for lunch (and I couldn’t resist a sixpack of Sam Adams Octoberfest brew, a cold bottle of that goes so well with housecleaning).  She got a turkey sandwich, some grapes the size of small eggs (which were on sale), and a glass of milk.  I had a few salt-and-pepper kettle chips (“send a man shopping,” they’ll say…), grapes, and a turkey sandwich of my own.  I heard they changed the food pyramid recently… wonder how I did?

Random topics today, if you hadn’t already figured it out…

Y’know, I’ve got to hand it to whoever does the new Scooby Doo cartoon on TV.  We caught an episode of it while in the hotel room down in Mexico, and I was pleasantly surprised at how true-to-formula it was (that formula being how I remember the show when I was a kid).  The voices are spot-on, the stories develop and play out as expected, and the jokes are still aimed at adults as often as they are kids.  Keaton seemed to dig it (she is my child, after all) so I was more than happy to setup a recurring recording for it on the DVR.  Watching it with her is like going back in time a little.  Good job Scooby people, good job.

I spent a good bit of time Saturday further tweaking all the props to get them perfectly dialed-in.  And, as expected, once I had things pretty much how I wanted them, two of the props suffered major breakdowns.  Always; always, always, always.  The stupid coffin popper appears to have popped his pneumatic frame right off the bottom of the coffin – that’s not going to be an easy fix; and I found the crank ghost as a sad crumpled mess of glowing cheesecloth, hanging by one arm and going up-and-down.  Ugh.  At first, I figured I’d just let ’em rot for a day or two… not wanting to see how badly things were broken and learn how long it’d take to fix it all.  But, I had some free time Sunday between loads of laundry so I took a look.  Happily, things were all fixed and back to working order in under thirty minutes.

Goodnight.

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mexico & cat pee

Watch me.So, tomorrow, Mexico.

Work’s gonna be tough. Mind wandering. Not a lot of meetings Friday so not a lot of motivation to stay rooted in the office.

We leave bright and early, fly to L.A. first and from there on South to Mexico. Hopefully, we’ll arrive with time to find the Florida/LSU game on Mexican TV. Still have to pack; couple paperbacks, some swim trunks, jeans and a nice shirt for one night, a hat, sandals… who needs much more?

Maybe I need to expand a bit on my harsh-sounding anti-feline sentiment yesterday.  See, the cat has decided she is going to quit using her littler box and instead urinate and defecate on the carpet.  This doesn’t seem to be a one-time thing, either.  In fact, tonight, for the first time, I walked down our hallway and, at the end, smelled that worst-of-all smells: cat pee.  I knelt down and sampled the bouquet and sure enough that putrid overpowering stench was emanating from our carpet, right where the cat has designated it her new commode.  Let me make it clear: this won’t be happening.  Yes, haters, yes; I will simply get rid of this cat I nursed to life from a bottle as a kitten.  I’m not going to have an animal using the house as a bathroom; not gonna happen.

I accidentally set this entry to auto-post last night at midnight… and left it incomplete.  Not that it’s much more finished now, but at least it has a picture and stuff.  Blogging has been hard this week, cut me some slack.

That’s it then.  Mexico and cat pee.  See ya later.

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a floor is meant to be walked on

Use me.Good evening internet.

Sunday morning Sharaun and I got in a disagreement about our new wood floors.  For those not up-to-speed, we’re in the process of doing hardwood floors (well, we haven’t started yet, but should soon… depending on when the material gets here).  In her opinion, we should wait until after our large, often raucous Halloween party to put down the new flooring.  In my opinion, it doesn’t matter and I’d rather do it sooner versus later.

Now, I realize that, looking at it plainly, my point of view may seem daft and that there seems to be a fair amount of logic to her argument.  I mean, why put down beautiful brand new flooring right before you invite a hundred people into your house to stomp drunkenly around on it?  Why risk this kind of ruin so early after getting it?  Makes sense right?  Wrong!  To illustrate how my mind works and why I disagree, I’ll tell a story.

The very day we bought our new car we were headed out of town to stay the weekend with friends in Tahoe.  As we were in a huge rush, we needed to do a quick lunch.  As the driver, I suggested we swing through a fast food drive-up window and do a road lunch on the way up into the mountains.  Sharaun looked at me askew, “You really want to eat in the new car on the first day we own it, and let Keaton eat in it too?”  “Well, I figure we have a decision to make,” I replied, “Are we ever going to eat in this car, or let Keaton eat in this car?  And, if we are, then why wait?  I bought a new car to use, not preserve.”  OK, so I paraphrased my actual statement, partially because I don’t remember it word-for-word and partially to make it sound better, but you get the gist.

To my wife’s flooring argument, I see it as at best simply delaying a certain eventuality.   To me, it all boils down to a simple question: Are we ever going to have people over at our house in a situation where there could be a risk that our floor will be damaged, or do these new floors mean a moratorium on entertaining?  If, at some conceivable point in  the future, a week from now or a year from now, we’ll be willing to put our floor at risk – why ever strive avoid it?

Is it just to have something “nice” and “pristine” even if for a little while?  To enjoy the fleeting unmarred newness while it lasts?  If so, that makes about as much sense to me as putting a brand new pair of shoes on the shelf for a month before wearing them.  Ahh… but I can hear the females flocking to support my wife’s position now, offering up tricky counter-arguments like, “It’s not like that at all!  It’s more like buying new shoes and not ruining them by running a marathon in them on day-one.”   (Please imagine that read in a nagging, high pitch, holier-than-thou voice.)  Women are crafty, and they stick together, so I could totally see myself facing that retort from my wife’s estrogen-sharing sympathizers.

But c’mon ladies… it’s not really like that at all!  It’s simple utilitarianism:  A floor is meant to be walked on, is it not?  And, if we’re not willing to let people walk on it, even en masse, then why are we getting it?  Furthermore, if by getting this floor I’m now going to be expected to act as if it were constructed of eggshells, I’d rather not get new flooring at all.  See friends, cold, hard, logic.

When I buy a lightbulb, I immediately begin contributing to its eventual death by plugging it in; when I new clothes, I wear and wash them right away.  Thing are made to be used, so says me.

Unfortunately, my wife sees no logic in my logic.

Goodnight friends.

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Luna Alice In Wonderland Princess

Instant love.It’s Tuesday, right?  OK no, you’ll read this on Wednesday… but it’s still Tuesday for us right now.  Sharaun’s at volleyball and Keaton and I are here giving the freshly-leaked Islands record a spin.  We’re withholding our judgment right now; we agreed we need to get through the whole thing at least once before we form any opinions.

Recently, a young girl at church heard about Keaton’s weekend pony ride with Grammy & Grandpa and decided that she’d make a gift to Keaton of a rather large toy pony she had from when she was an even younger girl.  Now, when I say “rather large” I’m meaning the word “rather” plus the word “large.”  Yes, this is a pretty big plastic pony; the thing has heft, a respectable weight to it.  It’s so big, in fact, you could mistake it for an actual ride-able pony (a toy ride-able pony, but a ride-able pony due to its stature alone).

The thing had appeared at the house when I got home from work today, and Keaton couldn’t wait to show it to me.  “Look dad,” she barely contained, “Look at my big pony!”  “Wow,” I said, not having to feign, “She’s beautiful.  What’s her name?”  “Luna Alice In Wonderland Princess,” she replied, matter of factly.  Yes, that’s her name; that’s what Keaton named her.  To clarify, she’ll add “‘Luna’ is her first name, ‘Alice In Wonderland’ is her middle name, and ‘Princess’ is her last name.  Did you hear me dad?  Are you looking?  Look with you eyes please.  Dad.  Dad.  Dad did you hear me?  Are you looking?”  Oh man I wish I could freeze her for a little longer than a year to get a little more than a year with her every year; she’s that fun sometimes.

A confession: We’ve lived here in our modest first-home now for about seven years.  Not once during this time have I ever cleaned our windows; inside, or out.  Never.  To look at the windows, you would surely know this.  The tracks and grooves which they sit in are dusty, dirty, and strung with cobwebs in the corners.  Now, I don’t mean to say our house is the picture of disarray… quite the opposite, I think , if one were to drop-in and perform a quick visual check for cleanliness, we’d pass muster OK; clutter aside.  But upon close inspection, the white-glove kind of inspection, oh the neatness-police would find plenty to fine us for.  I was thinking about washing the windows, inside and out, this weekend.  But… then I thought… “It’s gonna rain soon in this year.”  So I changed my mind.

Ohhh… Sharaun has the Biggest Loser on.  It’s the first episode of some new season, the one where I like to try and guess which of the fatties might be hot once they lose 250lbs.  Gotta run.

Goodnight lurkers, unashamed readers, and unabashed commenters.  Love you.