sounds familiar

Hi internet.

Can I get a collective sigh for the long-awaited arrival of Friday? Good; good job internet. Without jinxing it, I wanted to mention that tonight is the fourth night Keaton’s gone to bed “big girl style.” For you barren folks, that means she goes to sleep without the aide of a pacifier. This is an awesome milestone for us. At this point, she’s going down for both naps and bedtime without much protest. In fact, Sharaun actually packed up and mailed her pacifiers to her sister (who’s about to pop herself), and let Keaton help pack them. When I put her down the other night, she said, “Paci mail to baby Hobson.” Yup, the pacifiers were mailed to baby Hobson. Goodbye pacifiers.

All day yesterday guys, I was struggling with myself to make a choice. I’ve written before about how I tend to worry most over the little things (I know I have, but it’s getting harder and harder to find entries in this mass of writing), and this is a good example. And, since it’s foremost on my mind, I’m going to gestate and give birth to this decision right here, laid bare, in front of the blog. Here we go.

The setup: I’ve been invited to a “pub crawl” with a group of upstanding fellows. These fellows, while not the normal crew I run with, are all birds of a feather and of like age with me. For those unaware with today’s modern street-vernacular, a “pub crawl” is a walking outing centered around moving from bar to bar whilst having one drink or so at each. The idea being that you get to check out a bunch of new bars, hang out with friends, and drink alcohol.

The problem: I can’t tell if I want to go or not. Deep inside me, I bet it would be an awesome time and I think I’d have a blast with the guys. In some other way, though, I feel like this is not my bag. There are a couple factors at play here, but I can summarize it plainly by saying that 1) I’m typically not the guy at the bar, and 2) I’m not sure, but I think I kinda feel “too old” to be crawling pubs. Now, I know both of these things are rubbish, but they are indeed the psychological blocks I’m dealing with. Let’s take them one by one.

First, it’d be fairly accurate to call me a “homebody,” at least as a generalization. If it comes down to the choice between “going out” and getting some drinks or staying home and drinking some beer with friends – I’ll usually choose the latter (by the way, neither my homebodiness, nor my propensity to go out, is tied to alcohol consumption, I’m just framing this in the context of a “pub crawl.”) Some part of this is built into my Scrooge-logic, where I realize that socializing at home with friends is cheaper than socializing at the local overpriced watering hole. Some of it is just my nature.

Second, a “pub crawl” makes me feel old. In fact, most bars make me feel old these days. Unless they’re the dank, cavernous, dreary kind, they’re usually glitzy-trendy hotspots filled to the brim with fancy-smelling youngsters all looking to shack up for the night. Me and glitzy-trendy just don’t work, I just feel awkward and out of place. In fact, the whole concept of a “pub crawl” seems to shout “wasted college kid” to my subconscious. And, while that may have been OK when I was actually in college, thinking about it now makes me feel a bit like the fat, old, balding guy who’s just posturing.

Anyway… there it is. Still not sure what I’m going to do.

Goodnight.

Happy Monday friends. Me, I had a good weekend. Managed to do a fair amount of cleaning and organizing around the house and get in some good kickin’ it time with friends. Neither Sharaun nor I is feeling top-notch, both fighting something, and Keaton’s got “the croup,” according to the doc. So, we’ve hung a “Quarantined” sign on the door to ward away those of good-health from the little infirmary we have here.

Oh hey, before I forget, I finally got around to posting some pictures from our Christmas in Florida. You can check them out here.

Remember Friday when I wrote about the storms coming to sunny California? Yeah well, the storms came, and they beat upon our street with fists of wind and rain. The news, of course, covered the squall as if Al Queda was behind it, with unrelenting 24hr coverage and plenty of Johnny-on-the-spot reporters to give everything a nice local color. I don’t know when weather became cause for round-the-clock “death watch” reporting, but things have gone a tad far if you ask me. When I start seeing computer simulations of what “could” happen if the wind picked up to 900mph (just hypothetically), I change the channel. Anyway, back to those fists of wind and rain: In this fight the wind was Smokin’ Joe and our backyard fence was Ali. And, for those confused by pugilistic allegory, here’s some visual aides for that last sentence:

Yeah, it totally blew down, about ~30ft of it, posts snapped clean off at the dirt (where I suspect they had already rotted a good deal). I actually tried, during the fiercest winds while the fence was wobbling fiercely but still holding onto the ground, to go tie some guy-lines to the posts in the most trouble. The wind was so strong, however, that I couldn’t even use the nylon strap to right the tilting thing, pulling with all my might and using my weight, I was nearly lifted off the ground trying to wrestle what had essentially then become a huge wooden sail. I mean, look at the toppled BBQ Anthony and I built in the foreground there, that thing ain’t light. After that, I gave up and just let the thing go down. The tall shrubs we have on the other side of the fence were all that kept it from blowing away completely.

Oh, that last pic? That’s what I did to save another wind-wobbly section of fence. See that tie-rope? It’s secured to an old gas grill I happened to have laying around in the backyard, and, while the wind was strong enough to drag the grill across the lawn, it couldn’t quite manage to pull it over the retaining wall. I know it’s ghetto engineering, but it worked. I’m sure the first caveman-graven wheel wasn’t quite a Michelin, either.

I was going to write some more… but I just don’t have it in me. I’m gonna bake some cookies and listen to some new albums instead. Goodnight lovers.

Hi. Happy Wednesday.

To start, let’s do a couple barely-introspective paragraphs:

You may remember (although, you’d be quickly forgiven if you didn’t) that we had houseguests back in September. While they were here, we set them up with five-star accommodations (read: the air mattress in the former computer-room now nothing-room). And, as a testament to my laziness and general apathy, I’m sad to admit that I just today deflated that mattress and folded/stored all the bedding. Oh yeah, some three-and-a-half months later.

It was all part of this “assess and purge” sort of cleaning kick I’m suddenly on, taking stock of what we have and how it’s stored, and getting rid of non-essentials wherever possible. We’ve got a ton of junk we don’t use or need, and it’s time to start getting rid of it – donating, selling, or just junking altogether. It feels good to free up space and organize, even if it does drive Sharaun a bit mad when I get a little OCD like this. Sometimes, I just reach a breaking point and go all flip-out neat-and-tidy crazy… this is one of those times.

Next, let’s do a music paragraph:

Over the Christmas free-download period (it’s customary for some of the online music-enabling sites I frequent to offer “free” downloads over the holiday season), I somehow ended up grabbing a copy of The Pretty Things’ 1968 album, S.F. Sorrow. Before just a few weeks ago, I’d never even heard of the album, didn’t even know it existed. But, as soon as the first song came over the speakers I knew I’d stumbled onto something special. Let me tell you now, I absolutely love “finding” amazing albums I’ve never heard of. Having somewhat of a big head about the amount of the “important music” canon I’m familiar with, these UFO gems always seem so special. This is some sort of under-the-radar psychedelic rock-opera masterpiece, apparently recorded at Abbey Road during the same time the Beatles and Floyd were in-house recording Sgt. Pepper and Piper, respectively. Man, what the heck was in the water at Abbey Road that year? Anyway, the album itself is immediately likable and interesting… and I’m really glad I “discovered” it, forty years after it was made.

Now let’s do a random today at work paragraph:

Sometimes I just feel like I’m in the wrong place for the particular moment. I’ve written about the sensation before (but I can’t seem to find the link… lil’ help?). Today was a classic case of that type of day. I sat at work all morning knowing I should be at home instead of in my fuzzy-walled cubicle staring at my computer screen. I just felt that I wasn’t supposed to be there, and the draw to get where I was supposed to be was strong enough to be almost physical, a muscle-urge to actually pack up and walk out the door to be with my family. I’m not always sure what the catalyst is for such urges, they tend to seem pretty random, but there’s no denying the “push” accompanying them. Anyway, I sat there, listening to my iPod and dreaming away the morning – doing next to nothing for the shareholders, who, if they could’ve peeked in on me, would likely petition the board for my removal. I just wanted to be home, to be doing things other than the great-nothing of work. Hey, I like that… I might start calling work “the great nothing” instead of “the old sawmill” from now on… not a bad nomenclature. Anyway, the feeling eventually passed, or better faded into a general want to just head home and be done with it.

And some Keaton paragraphs:

This month, Sharaun and I decided we’d get to work on teaching Keaton how to use the potty. The myriad of advice on when to begin this parenting process is mixed, and to me it just seemed most logical to just do it when we felt we might be successful, gaging that percentage by the cues she’s giving us at the time. And, being that, for the past few weeks, she’s shown a marked interested in “the potty” and the whole potty-process, and has taken to announcing her pees and poos with “Keaton use(d) the potty!,” we figured the time might be right. I mean, I’m no parent, or anything… but the good Lord saw fit to put this child under my care – so I must’ve showed some sort of promise, or kernel of talent, or something… you’d think.

So, as of yesterday, when she makes her potty announcements, we march her into the bathroom and go through the process: 1) pull down your pants (she has a lot of trouble with this, and seems to want to pull her pants “up” instead… which I keep telling her won’t work the same at all), 2) we’ll take off your diaper (again, having a step in there that she can’t do herself seems bad… but I’m not ready to toss the diaper yet), 3) sit on potty and do the good stuff, 4) wipe, 5) wash hands.

Thinking about it as a child, it really is quite a complex process of human engineering to relieve oneself in-line with current Western thinking on hygiene. I mean, there’s like a whole symphony of events that have to align to make the execution flawless. How do you, for example, explain to a semi-verbal not-yet-two-year-old that her pee-hole isn’t even lined-up over the pee-receptacle? There are a hundred bits of minutiae like that, too. Heck, pondering it, I’m amazed I hit the blow as much as I do myself.

I’m happy to announce, though, that, today she made her first two pees in her little kid potty, and it was quite a moment for Sharaun and I. I’ll let ya know if we experience continued success.

Finally, the closing thing:

Goodnight, love your bodies.