A finch has made a nest in our shed right under a tray for paint and in a pan used for changing oil in our cars. Sure hope the little chicks don't come out three-headed...
Monday, April 16, 2007
Oh Little Birdie
A finch has made a nest in our shed right under a tray for paint and in a pan used for changing oil in our cars. Sure hope the little chicks don't come out three-headed...
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Spring Has Sprung
That greenish, yellow dust is pine pollen folks.The local news station said it's the worst measurable pollen in something like eight years. Even though the weather is beautiful, you can't open your windows or the entire contents of your home will be covered in pine pollen dust.
I know this from experience.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Never Make A Promise You Can't Keep*
The promise: To build a tree house for my son Spencer before his fifth birthday.I would like to mention up top here that this was not my idea – but the wife’s. She’d been looking at web sites and books with schematics and decided that she would take off the week of Easter, essentially Spring Break for the masses, and we will build the tree house.
The beginning of my tree house boot camp started on Saturday, March 26, 2005. My wife and Spencer drove to a lumber store in Burlington, NC, because it was significantly cheaper than the local Lowes or Home Depot.
My wife is all about the discount.
When they returned, Spencer ran in to tell me of how the wood fell out of the truck and that “people he didn’t even know” helped them pick the wood off of the highway. Yes, I just said HIGHWAY. My wife and son were one of those people – the kind who spill lumber out of the bed of a truck. Shortly thereafter, I ferried 60 pound bags of cement to the backyard and hauled whatever timber was needed at the moment off the back of the truck.
In the blink of an eye, my wife darted off to rent a two-person auger. Boy, did we feel sore the next day. But shit if we didn’t get some holes burrowed and 6” x 6” x 12’ posts set.
We finished framing the tree house, fastening lumber with lag screws to the pine trees which acted as the back of the tree house. Since we don’t have much in the way of tools, we borrowed a power drill and some drill bits. Outside of that, our circular saw, a hammer, and a pair of vice grips do the bulk of the work.
Day One was over and we were spent.
Sunday, Day Two, began at the crack of dawn. The kids were fed breakfast, coffee was made and by 9 a.m. the family was outside and construction continued. 5 ¼” x 6’ x 10” decking boards were placed as flooring. By now it was apparent that our thorough measuring wasn’t all that thorough: some angles weren’t straight and some lumber wasn’t level. We were well on our way to building a tree house of Dr. Seuss proportions.
Midway through the day, my hands became to sore – the hammering of ten-penny nails and screwing 2 1/2” screws into planks with a shitty drill bit took its toll.
We broke for the day at dinner time.
Monday found rain in the forecast so I attended a business meeting most of the day and it turned into a day of much needed rest; a day to recoup our energies and step back and take in what progress had been made.
Tuesday began much like the other days: the kids got fed the coffee brewed and then off to the backyard to work amongst the backdrop of whirring saw blades, buzzing drills, kids hollering and us screaming back at them. The agenda called for putting up the 6’ x 6’ sides, slapping up railings made with 2 x 4s and placing the balusters. The balusters mimic the look of the deck in our backyard and also function as a safety element prohibiting the kids from falling off the sides. As dusk arrived, the yard was cleaned of its construction litter and the tools placed back inside, because the next day was Spencer’s birthday and for that we spent the night at Wrightsville Beach.
Wednesday morning slogged by because we couldn’t leave too early since check-in time at the hotel wasn’t until after 3 p.m. We packed clothes and organized toys to be used as distractions for the kids during the 2 plus hour drive to the beach.
The wife was behind the wheel and we were somewhere east of Raleigh. She came upon what appeared to be an unmarked police car. He sped up and she followed him. Then he slowed down and got behind a car in the right lane. My wife did the same. He broke out of the right lane and sped up. Again, my wife followed suit. Finally he settled back into the flow of slower moving traffic in the right lane and with that my wife made the executive decision that the unmarked car is not a cop after all but probably just some business man. She zoomed past him in the left lane.
Moments later she cried out, “Dammit! It was a cop.
I turned around to see the red and blue blinking lights. I started to search for the registration in the glove compartment.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Do you know hwy I pulled you over?”
“I was doing the speed limit,” my wife snapped back.
“Ma’am,” he said emphatically. “Don’t argue with me! I haven’t written a ticket in over four years but I still could if I wanted to.”
The cop is obviously angry. He lectured her about safe driving. “Especially with children in the car,” he said.
“Ma’am,” he said sternly. “Please drive safely.”
The rest of the car ride to the beach is done in silence.
The beach was fun. The weather was great, the ocean water was predictably cold, but the pool was heated. Spencer did double duty going from beach to pool to beach and then back again to the pool until late in the evening. We attempted to eat dinner out by our youngest Cole was restless at the dinner table so we retreated to the room and ordered room service where we sat and ate as we looked out from our balcony to the beach, the waves and the horizon.
We ordered The Incredibles on pay-per-view and collectively snuggle in bed. Despite all the hype I’d heard about the movie, it barely kept my interest - or anyone else’s for that matter – and consequently drove the whole family to sleep.
Sunrise came too soon.
We hit the breakfast buffet, tackled the beach and pool one more time, than headed back home. Once home the car was emptied and it was back to the business of building a tree house. A couple of hours were put in tinkering before we shower up and the babysitter arrived. The wife was on vacation after all so a nice dinner between the two of us was a must.
Friday - Day Four of proper building if you are counting - came and we framed the roof, built a ladder, and attached a slide. The wife had second thoughts about putting on a tin roof because it cost too much so she settles for a blue tarp. I balked at the blue tarp because it didn’t appear very safe – the tarp wasn’t going to break the fall of a pine tree limb. So the roof situation is rethought and it is decided that the tarp with go and the tin roof will stay.
Saturday came and we now had a tree house in the backyard. But it was raining and the yard was all tore up from all the lumber and saw dust and still muddied from the previous rain storm earlier in the week. Our goal to finish in time for Spencer’s birthday party on Saturday was achieved only nobody was going to get to enjoy it since it was pouring down rain.
We kept the promise we made by building the tree house in time for his party. But it wasn’t an easy task.
And another lesson in the world of parenting was learned: never make a promise you can’t keep.
*A version of this essay originally appeared in Raleigh's The Hatchet.
Friday, March 16, 2007
The Dirt On Dad
The first major obstacle, and there would be many, that I had to wrap my head around when I first became a stay-at-home-dad was laundry. With a thirteen-month-old boy, there was always laundry to be done. Growing up my mother always had a dedicated day for laundry, usually Saturdays but sometimes Sundays. By the time I got to college and started washing my own clothes I noticed religious undertones to doing laundry; for some it was like the Sabbath, a day dedicated to observing nothing but washing machines and dryers.
But with an infant, laundry can be a daily routine. There are burp cloths, drool bibs and exploding diapers. It is basically impossible to keep a baby’s clothes clean - they puke, they piss, they crawl, and they cry - there’s not a moment in their existence at this stage of life when they possibly can’t soil their clothes.
Laundry, and the constant need to do it, was the first household chore to make me feel like I was going mentally ill. It was like trying to stave off waves from the sand castle you built at the beach as a kid, a useless and plumb silly task. And just when you thought you’d gotten a hand on the boy’s laundry, along came time to wash our clothes. I had to have a crash course from my wife in the basics of “line drying” clothes and told that it was imperative that I read the labels as to how to care for certain articles of clothes. Curses! It just seemed to never end. As a matter of fact, almost seven years later I still find that there’s always a load of laundry to be done only now I sometimes ignore the pile of dirty clothes until they get up and walk away.
It would pretty much be the same way with dishes. There would always be a bottle to wash. Although we were still breast feeding our son, my wife had to pump her breasts so there was always an arsenal of breast pump mechanics to be disinfected and cleaned as well. I began to formulate a design for the man-boob; some sort of breast-like device that a father could wear that would simulate the scenario of breastfeeding on mom’s teat. I’m sure it has been invented by now.
The dishwasher and the laundry machines became my new best friends, we shared coffee and conversation together most mornings although they weren’t very good at conversation – it was pretty much a one-way street but they were very attentive and great listeners.
In keeping with the cleaning m.o., I started a very intimate relationship with our vacuum cleaner. Much like dishes and dirty clothes, there wasn’t a day that went by that I felt I couldn’t find a reason to use the vacuum. That first Christmas after I became an at-home dad my wife got me one of those Dirt Devil hand-held vacuums, the only downside to the Dirt Devil was that it didn’t come with a holster. It would be much further into my tour of duty that I would discover the genius that is the Swiffer and his glorious cousin the Wet Swiffer. Somewhere down the line, I began thinking about leaving my Hoover for a Dyson, but those Dysons I just couldn’t afford.
There’s one common thread here and that is my own anal retentiveness. I found that I was becoming completely obsessive about trying to have everything clean all the time. A few years later I would learn to let go, that it was OK to not have the household clean as a whistle 24/7. I realized that the pursuit of such a thing would drive you completely bonkers. I also have come to the conclusion that it is perfectly okay to be bonkers.
Bonkers.
But with an infant, laundry can be a daily routine. There are burp cloths, drool bibs and exploding diapers. It is basically impossible to keep a baby’s clothes clean - they puke, they piss, they crawl, and they cry - there’s not a moment in their existence at this stage of life when they possibly can’t soil their clothes.
Laundry, and the constant need to do it, was the first household chore to make me feel like I was going mentally ill. It was like trying to stave off waves from the sand castle you built at the beach as a kid, a useless and plumb silly task. And just when you thought you’d gotten a hand on the boy’s laundry, along came time to wash our clothes. I had to have a crash course from my wife in the basics of “line drying” clothes and told that it was imperative that I read the labels as to how to care for certain articles of clothes. Curses! It just seemed to never end. As a matter of fact, almost seven years later I still find that there’s always a load of laundry to be done only now I sometimes ignore the pile of dirty clothes until they get up and walk away.
It would pretty much be the same way with dishes. There would always be a bottle to wash. Although we were still breast feeding our son, my wife had to pump her breasts so there was always an arsenal of breast pump mechanics to be disinfected and cleaned as well. I began to formulate a design for the man-boob; some sort of breast-like device that a father could wear that would simulate the scenario of breastfeeding on mom’s teat. I’m sure it has been invented by now.
The dishwasher and the laundry machines became my new best friends, we shared coffee and conversation together most mornings although they weren’t very good at conversation – it was pretty much a one-way street but they were very attentive and great listeners.
In keeping with the cleaning m.o., I started a very intimate relationship with our vacuum cleaner. Much like dishes and dirty clothes, there wasn’t a day that went by that I felt I couldn’t find a reason to use the vacuum. That first Christmas after I became an at-home dad my wife got me one of those Dirt Devil hand-held vacuums, the only downside to the Dirt Devil was that it didn’t come with a holster. It would be much further into my tour of duty that I would discover the genius that is the Swiffer and his glorious cousin the Wet Swiffer. Somewhere down the line, I began thinking about leaving my Hoover for a Dyson, but those Dysons I just couldn’t afford.
There’s one common thread here and that is my own anal retentiveness. I found that I was becoming completely obsessive about trying to have everything clean all the time. A few years later I would learn to let go, that it was OK to not have the household clean as a whistle 24/7. I realized that the pursuit of such a thing would drive you completely bonkers. I also have come to the conclusion that it is perfectly okay to be bonkers.
Bonkers.
ESL For Kids - Trying to explain the good from bad*
Just the other day my 4-and-a-half year old son Spencer got his first black eye.
It happened the way most injuries happen to little boys – by accident.
Spencer was watching a television show. Worked up with nervous energy, he decided he was going to start spinning around in the middle of the family room.
“Be careful,” I said.
“Know your surroundings,” I said wondering to myself if my words ever since past the cranial cracks of his thick skull.
“Watch it!” I hollered. The preceded to chide him about getting too close to the edge of the futon couch, visions of hospital emergency rooms dancing in my head.
And that’s when I averted my eyes for s second.
And then there was the sound: Thunk! The indecipherable wail of sheer pain followed soon after and I knew exactly what had happened by deductive reasoning. Now finding the exact spot of impact was a more challenging task.
“Where does it hurt?” I asked him.
“My fa-fa-faaaa-ce,” he said.
“I know, I know but where on your face?” I said.
“Here,” he said between sobs and pointed to his cheekbone.
I did my best sports trainer impersonation to try and get him to let me put some ice on it, but he would have none of that nonsense. Thirty minutes later, he was no worse for the wear and back out on his bicycle riding about the neighborhood, nary a spot of evidence to indicate the household trauma that just took save for an itty, bitty scratch just left of center of his nostril.
By the next day, a fair amount of his left cheek was puffy, like he’d been bitten by a bug or something. As day-three-after-the-accident began, the makings of a black eye were starting to appear. By nightfall, he had a full-fledged shiner.
The next day he came home from playschool talking about frozen peas. After much deliberation, I deducted this: His teacher Jane had mentioned something to him about having a “shiner” and that he should put a bag of frozen peas on it.
“What are peas?” he asked.
“Those little, round green things you hate to eat,” I said.
“Why would you put peas on your face?” He asked.
Clearly, I could see this was going down a road I was going to be unable to navigate; a road where questions arise like possums crossing the blacktop in the night. You know they are out there it’s just that you don’t ever expect to see them, much less hit one.
I was about to crash full-on into a serious dilemma of inexplicable dimensions.
By the time my wife came home from work that night, Spencer’s left eye socket was a marble of purple, blue, green and yellow hues. She asked him how school was and he told her about the frozen peas. She was as confused and I was at first mention of the frozen peas.
“Frozen peas?” she said. “What are you talking about?”
I stepped in and explained everything as best I could.
My wife beamed with excitement.
“Your first shiner!” she said.
“We’ve got to get a picture of that,” she said. “We’ve got to document that.”
“But why do they call it a shiner mom?” asked Spencer. “And why are you so excited about something that has caused me so much pain?”
Silence.
My wife turned to me with a look of astonishment on her face: “Uh, help me out here Greg,” she said.
“It’s like a rite of passage,” I began, “You will have painful things happen to you over the years that mark your path to becoming a young boy, and even, a man.”
This is precisely the wrong thing to do here, as most parenting textbooks will tell you; you should avoid at all costs giving existential lectures to children, much less children under the age of five. But I do it so often, and sometimes, I think I do it well.
I tried my best to explain the ratio of bruises and broken bones to a boy’s age. When I was younger I had amassed over 300 stitches by the time I was 15 I told him. I added that I also had my share of scrapes and bruised yet I somehow managed to avoid ever breaking any bones. I suspected I may have broken a rib and a toe over the years but they were never officially diagnosed by a doctor.
I then launched into a spiel about good and bad, trying my best to explain their differences, or in some cases, why using the term “bad” might actually mean good. Its times like this that I feel like I’m teaching an ESL class to my kids. “Some things, bad or good…” my wife wisely interrupted me before I ran off down the Philosophy 101 road.
“We’ll stop talking about your shiner now,” she said.
Another good example of teaching ESL to my kids happened just a few weeks before the “shiner” incident. It was the day I got blindsided by the “hurricane” fiasco.
As the days leading up to Hurricane Frances counted down, it was virtually impossible to avoid having the kids see/hear references to the big storm. Sometimes they spot the occasional gun-toting Iraqi or some cracked-out redneck while channel surfing past the evening news, but I usually do a good job of monitoring what goes in their eyes and ears.
Yes, my kids watch too much TV. But shit, what do you do when your son figures out how to operate the remote? In my case, I tell ‘em ESPN is channel 31.
Sports are good.
And there are all kinds of lessons to be learned through sportsmanship; through playing on teams. But, and there’s always a “but,” it can bite you in the ass.
Here’s my ass-biting anecdote: We are driving in the car listening to the local modern rock radio affiliate when an emergency broadcast bulletin is broadcast over the radio waves.
“Beep! Beep! Beep!” screamed the radio.
“A tornado warning has been issued for…” and blah, blah, blah the National Weather Service went on to warn residents of hurricane force winds and possible flooding. A voice spoke from the backseat.
“That was kind of scary dad,” said Spencer.
“Well, hurricanes can be kind of scary,” I said, “and dangerous.”
“If hurricanes are so bad, why is there a hockey team named the Hurricanes?” he asked.
“Damn!” I said to myself then dug deep and hard.
“Maybe the people who named the team just wanted to focus on the fact that hurricanes are strong and powerful,” I said in my best faux televangelist speak. “Maybe they just don’t want to think about the bad things a hurricane can do.”
I don’t think I dig a good job of saving my ass – my days are numbered.
*A version of this essay originally appeared in Raleigh's The Hatchet.
It happened the way most injuries happen to little boys – by accident.
Spencer was watching a television show. Worked up with nervous energy, he decided he was going to start spinning around in the middle of the family room.
“Be careful,” I said.
“Know your surroundings,” I said wondering to myself if my words ever since past the cranial cracks of his thick skull.
“Watch it!” I hollered. The preceded to chide him about getting too close to the edge of the futon couch, visions of hospital emergency rooms dancing in my head.
And that’s when I averted my eyes for s second.
And then there was the sound: Thunk! The indecipherable wail of sheer pain followed soon after and I knew exactly what had happened by deductive reasoning. Now finding the exact spot of impact was a more challenging task.
“Where does it hurt?” I asked him.
“My fa-fa-faaaa-ce,” he said.
“I know, I know but where on your face?” I said.
“Here,” he said between sobs and pointed to his cheekbone.
I did my best sports trainer impersonation to try and get him to let me put some ice on it, but he would have none of that nonsense. Thirty minutes later, he was no worse for the wear and back out on his bicycle riding about the neighborhood, nary a spot of evidence to indicate the household trauma that just took save for an itty, bitty scratch just left of center of his nostril.
By the next day, a fair amount of his left cheek was puffy, like he’d been bitten by a bug or something. As day-three-after-the-accident began, the makings of a black eye were starting to appear. By nightfall, he had a full-fledged shiner.
The next day he came home from playschool talking about frozen peas. After much deliberation, I deducted this: His teacher Jane had mentioned something to him about having a “shiner” and that he should put a bag of frozen peas on it.
“What are peas?” he asked.
“Those little, round green things you hate to eat,” I said.
“Why would you put peas on your face?” He asked.
Clearly, I could see this was going down a road I was going to be unable to navigate; a road where questions arise like possums crossing the blacktop in the night. You know they are out there it’s just that you don’t ever expect to see them, much less hit one.
I was about to crash full-on into a serious dilemma of inexplicable dimensions.
By the time my wife came home from work that night, Spencer’s left eye socket was a marble of purple, blue, green and yellow hues. She asked him how school was and he told her about the frozen peas. She was as confused and I was at first mention of the frozen peas.
“Frozen peas?” she said. “What are you talking about?”
I stepped in and explained everything as best I could.
My wife beamed with excitement.
“Your first shiner!” she said.
“We’ve got to get a picture of that,” she said. “We’ve got to document that.”
“But why do they call it a shiner mom?” asked Spencer. “And why are you so excited about something that has caused me so much pain?”
Silence.
My wife turned to me with a look of astonishment on her face: “Uh, help me out here Greg,” she said.
“It’s like a rite of passage,” I began, “You will have painful things happen to you over the years that mark your path to becoming a young boy, and even, a man.”
This is precisely the wrong thing to do here, as most parenting textbooks will tell you; you should avoid at all costs giving existential lectures to children, much less children under the age of five. But I do it so often, and sometimes, I think I do it well.
I tried my best to explain the ratio of bruises and broken bones to a boy’s age. When I was younger I had amassed over 300 stitches by the time I was 15 I told him. I added that I also had my share of scrapes and bruised yet I somehow managed to avoid ever breaking any bones. I suspected I may have broken a rib and a toe over the years but they were never officially diagnosed by a doctor.
I then launched into a spiel about good and bad, trying my best to explain their differences, or in some cases, why using the term “bad” might actually mean good. Its times like this that I feel like I’m teaching an ESL class to my kids. “Some things, bad or good…” my wife wisely interrupted me before I ran off down the Philosophy 101 road.
“We’ll stop talking about your shiner now,” she said.
Another good example of teaching ESL to my kids happened just a few weeks before the “shiner” incident. It was the day I got blindsided by the “hurricane” fiasco.
As the days leading up to Hurricane Frances counted down, it was virtually impossible to avoid having the kids see/hear references to the big storm. Sometimes they spot the occasional gun-toting Iraqi or some cracked-out redneck while channel surfing past the evening news, but I usually do a good job of monitoring what goes in their eyes and ears.
Yes, my kids watch too much TV. But shit, what do you do when your son figures out how to operate the remote? In my case, I tell ‘em ESPN is channel 31.
Sports are good.
And there are all kinds of lessons to be learned through sportsmanship; through playing on teams. But, and there’s always a “but,” it can bite you in the ass.
Here’s my ass-biting anecdote: We are driving in the car listening to the local modern rock radio affiliate when an emergency broadcast bulletin is broadcast over the radio waves.
“Beep! Beep! Beep!” screamed the radio.
“A tornado warning has been issued for…” and blah, blah, blah the National Weather Service went on to warn residents of hurricane force winds and possible flooding. A voice spoke from the backseat.
“That was kind of scary dad,” said Spencer.
“Well, hurricanes can be kind of scary,” I said, “and dangerous.”
“If hurricanes are so bad, why is there a hockey team named the Hurricanes?” he asked.
“Damn!” I said to myself then dug deep and hard.
“Maybe the people who named the team just wanted to focus on the fact that hurricanes are strong and powerful,” I said in my best faux televangelist speak. “Maybe they just don’t want to think about the bad things a hurricane can do.”
I don’t think I dig a good job of saving my ass – my days are numbered.
*A version of this essay originally appeared in Raleigh's The Hatchet.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
It's Tourney Time!
Yes folks, it is officially tournament time in my neck of the woods and that is some serious shit to some people (most people!). I live in ACC country where UNC, Duke and NC State all rub elbows and shoulders with each other on a regular basis.Now I grew up in ACC territory and lived pretty much in the shadow of the University of Maryland but I was never a Terps fan as my old man went to Villanova so the Big East took priority over the ACC in my family's household.
People often toss around the cliche that basketball is like a religion around here, but it is pretty much true - much like Sunday mornings, everything stops when there is a basketball game on in Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh.
I first encountered this phenomenon when I moved to Carrboro - a small town east of Chapel Hill - from Los Angeles in 1995. Now I had been well-versed in the fact that the locals took their indie rock music scene very seriously and in the mid-'90s. The town would become a mecca for the indie scene; kids still come to worship it to this day.
But I was totally unprepared for the basketball fever.
It's an eerie feeling when you go to the grocery store in a college town and all the aisles are empty.
"What's going on today?" I asked the teller. "Carolina game," she said.
Of course I would should learn of the huge UNC/Duke rival, of the canonized State coach Jimmy V, and of how some people just purely can't get along with one another based on the color they wear.
When I worked in Raleigh at a weekly newspaper, one of my co-workers told me how in high school the teachers would just leave the ACC tournament on TVs in the classrooms all day and nobody was expected to do much of anything except for cheer on the Wolfpack. And of course it's perfectly understandable, if not downright acceptable, to play hooky from work on ACC Friday. If you are one of the unfortunate saps who has to work, everyone turns a blind eye to having the TV or radio on or obsessively looking at the sports ticker at the bottom of your computer screen.
In the 12 years that I have lived here, I have only had the opportunity to see two UNC games and one Duke game, the latter coming just last week.
I was working a Duke/Maryland pre-game party for a local catering company. We were set up in the Hall Of Fame room which is connected to Cameron Indoor Stadium where Duke plays. Cameron is legendary for many things, from its tiny size and intimate setting to giving birth to the Cameron Crazies - those over-enthusiastic fans who paint their faces, wave hands and bounce up and down for the entire duration of the game.
My co-worker had gone to Duke and was asking me if I'd ever seen a game at Cameron.
"Nope," I said. "But I've always wanted to."
"We could totally sneak in," he said. "I mean we're practically already in the building."
So he spent the better part of the two hour pre-game party schmoozing security guards with plates of food and endless sodas. But it was all for naught because when our shift wound down and the game got underway, the hostess of the party said she had two extra tickets and asked if anyone on our staff wanted to go.
An that's when it came down to me and my co-worker.
We didn't finished our breakdown until close to half time so he suggested we go over to the campus bar and pound some beers. "Sounds like a great idea," I said. At the bar he told everyone that we were going to the game and that it was going to be my first time at Cameron which was kind of like having some one who has gone to Spring Break three times nod at the fellow who was about to lose his Spring Break virginity - that look that said, "you have no idea what you are in for."
"I'm excited," I said. I never let on that I wasn't a Duke fan but then again I went in the spirit of competition not as a fan of either team. "This is just so random," I said to him.
"I was just watching this episode of Oprah about this whole positive thinking craze surrounding this movie The Secret and the book the Laws Of Attraction," I said trailing off as I looked at the big screen and half time stats.
"Dude," he said. "Never begin a conversation that starts with 'I was watching Oprah,'" he explained as he patted my shoulder.
With that, we finished our beers and watched the game.
And I have to say it was exciting; the place was filled with electricity and at only 7,000 seats it was downright intimate even though we had nosebleed seats.
Now if I could just see a Carolina/Duke game at Cameron, with Carolina winning, that would be utmost fulfilling...
Go Heels!!
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Plight Of The At Home Dad
So I pulled into my son Cole's playschool parking lot this morning and it looked surprisingly empty.
He only goes Monday, Thursday and Friday from 9am to 1pm (so I tend to really look forward to those mornings).
I spent the better part of the morning listening to him cry and whine about how he didn't want to got to school... only to get to school and find out that it was a TEACHER WORK DAY!
Now, I came home and saw that it was clearly marked on the calendar. But Monday my wife works late so I took the boys to hang out with another couple with kids and had dinner. Tuesday night I had band practice and last night I had to work a catering gig (pre-game cocktail party at UNC's business school prior to tip off for the UNC/NC State game) only to find that my free morning had disappeared.
And I have to say I think that if I was a mom, I would have had a least two to three calls from other moms in my son's class setting up play dates for the teacher work day, especially since we're experiencing record temps here in the Carolinas this week (yesterday it was in the 70s!).
Which brings me to yesterday: Weather was warm and I suggested to my son that we go to the park. Bored of the park we usually go to, he suggested the "yellow" park which is the park in this faux village community called Meadowmont that he knows about because we went to the pool there last summer.
We get to the park and thee is one mom with an infant strapped to her chest and another child with long curly read hair (held in barrettes) and they are having a picnic of sorts ON THE PLAY STRUCTURE. Another group shows up comprised of two moms each with infants slash toddlers who appear to be sisters and with their mother (i.e. grandma).
Then me and my son.
The moms immediately interact with each other with "grandma" starting off the AHD smack down when she asked the redheaded woman if my son belongs to her. My son has brown hair and blue eyes and, ahem, looks just like me! The redheaded mom (now officially referred to as "hippy mom") said "no" while one of the sister moms sort of gave me that "sorry my mom's a kook" look.
Grandma and her daughters decided to have a picnic themselves ON THE PLAY STRUCTURE and - possibly realizing how rude this was - asked the hippy mom if her kids would care to join them.
It was like I didn't even exist.
Shortly thereafter, I noticed hippy mom standing over by the tree line watching her daughter go pee. I was duly impressed that she had taught her daughter to stand up and pee until I realized that her daughter was a boy. He ended up peeing on his pants by virtue of letting them land on the ground where he had just peed. Did hippy mom changed his pants? No. He spent the rest of the time there swinging on swings and sliding on slides with pee-stained sweat pants.
Now I can sorta roll with that - you got caught unprepared but it was a nice day and figured it would dry out quickly. But what I couldn't understand was putting barrettes in your boy's hair. Fine, let your kid grow his hair long, but don't make the boy look like a girl. Grandma added insult when she made some comment about being "an older sister" to which hippy mom replied "brother."
Hippy mom left a short while later (after her son ran around screaming in my son's face acting like some monster; I wanted my son to break out a wrestling move on him as he clearly had the size advantage but he proved even wiser by just saying, "Stop, I don't like that,").
Then, as I'm helping my son cross the monkey bars I heard grandma shriek, "Where's my purse?" and I saw that her purse was by the monkey bars. One of her daughter's pointed to the monkey bars and said "over there."
Grandma got up, walked over, picked up her purse and put it down by her side.
So in one trip to the park I got vibed as a pedophile, excommunicated from parental conversation and insinuated I was a thief.
And now today I got blindsided by the teacher work day and wonder if there's a play date with several moms' of my son's classmates going on at some park somewhere.
He only goes Monday, Thursday and Friday from 9am to 1pm (so I tend to really look forward to those mornings).
I spent the better part of the morning listening to him cry and whine about how he didn't want to got to school... only to get to school and find out that it was a TEACHER WORK DAY!
Now, I came home and saw that it was clearly marked on the calendar. But Monday my wife works late so I took the boys to hang out with another couple with kids and had dinner. Tuesday night I had band practice and last night I had to work a catering gig (pre-game cocktail party at UNC's business school prior to tip off for the UNC/NC State game) only to find that my free morning had disappeared.
And I have to say I think that if I was a mom, I would have had a least two to three calls from other moms in my son's class setting up play dates for the teacher work day, especially since we're experiencing record temps here in the Carolinas this week (yesterday it was in the 70s!).
Which brings me to yesterday: Weather was warm and I suggested to my son that we go to the park. Bored of the park we usually go to, he suggested the "yellow" park which is the park in this faux village community called Meadowmont that he knows about because we went to the pool there last summer.
We get to the park and thee is one mom with an infant strapped to her chest and another child with long curly read hair (held in barrettes) and they are having a picnic of sorts ON THE PLAY STRUCTURE. Another group shows up comprised of two moms each with infants slash toddlers who appear to be sisters and with their mother (i.e. grandma).
Then me and my son.
The moms immediately interact with each other with "grandma" starting off the AHD smack down when she asked the redheaded woman if my son belongs to her. My son has brown hair and blue eyes and, ahem, looks just like me! The redheaded mom (now officially referred to as "hippy mom") said "no" while one of the sister moms sort of gave me that "sorry my mom's a kook" look.
Grandma and her daughters decided to have a picnic themselves ON THE PLAY STRUCTURE and - possibly realizing how rude this was - asked the hippy mom if her kids would care to join them.
It was like I didn't even exist.
Shortly thereafter, I noticed hippy mom standing over by the tree line watching her daughter go pee. I was duly impressed that she had taught her daughter to stand up and pee until I realized that her daughter was a boy. He ended up peeing on his pants by virtue of letting them land on the ground where he had just peed. Did hippy mom changed his pants? No. He spent the rest of the time there swinging on swings and sliding on slides with pee-stained sweat pants.
Now I can sorta roll with that - you got caught unprepared but it was a nice day and figured it would dry out quickly. But what I couldn't understand was putting barrettes in your boy's hair. Fine, let your kid grow his hair long, but don't make the boy look like a girl. Grandma added insult when she made some comment about being "an older sister" to which hippy mom replied "brother."
Hippy mom left a short while later (after her son ran around screaming in my son's face acting like some monster; I wanted my son to break out a wrestling move on him as he clearly had the size advantage but he proved even wiser by just saying, "Stop, I don't like that,").
Then, as I'm helping my son cross the monkey bars I heard grandma shriek, "Where's my purse?" and I saw that her purse was by the monkey bars. One of her daughter's pointed to the monkey bars and said "over there."
Grandma got up, walked over, picked up her purse and put it down by her side.
So in one trip to the park I got vibed as a pedophile, excommunicated from parental conversation and insinuated I was a thief.
And now today I got blindsided by the teacher work day and wonder if there's a play date with several moms' of my son's classmates going on at some park somewhere.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Pets: To Have Or Have Not*
It was my son’s third birthday and he got a little fish tank.
Both the wife and I grew up with fish tanks so delving into the issue of having a pet with a fish seemed like a reasonable idea.
Of course, we do have a proper pet - a cat named Ginger who has been with us since the early ‘90s. We got Ginger while we were living in Los Angeles. You see we had these friends who were real animal lovers. They lived in Tujunga, a small neighborhood above Glendale in the San Fernando Valley. And these people rescued just about any animal that they could; they had birds and cats and dogs and snakes and fish and hamsters and shit if you told me they had a flea circus I wouldn’t have been surprised.
So Ginger was rescued by them as a kitty from the netherworld streets of Los Angeles. She became ours by proxy; she was the only cat that ever warmed up to me and would always come to me whenever we were at their place. It was a no-brainer that when our group house situation dissolved in Glendale, that we would have this grey, short-legged Burmese come live with us in our Los Feliz apartment.
As the story goes, she was found by a dumpster near a Ford dealership in Tujunga. She turned out not to be neutered like we thought so we got her fixed. But that was after we discovered an infected sore underneath her fuzzy hair and had to have surgery for the nasty abscessed thing. She would also survive the great big rumble that was the Northridge earthquake and even traveled with us in our car during our exodus from Tinseltown and has been warming our hearts in North Carolina ever since.
But when the kids came along, she made herself scarce, occasionally showing her face after they went to bed. Friends and relatives often debated that she even existed becomes nobody but us ever saw the cat. They’d see the litter box in the bathroom or the food bowl in the kitchen and be like, “You guys have a cat?”
So to say that we didn’t have a pet would be a disservice to her.
Anyway, Spencer got one of those 2-gallon hexagon fish tank set-ups and we were off and running in pet fish land. I began to dream of a school of African cichlids brooding about in a wall-length aquarium but was quickly steered back to reality by my own memories of sticking my G.I. Joes’ in the family fish tank “scuba diving” only to contaminate the water and kill all the fish.
There was no way I was going to shell out top dollar for a bunch of fish that would be dead in a month’s time.
We tested the waters with some goldfish, but I don’t remember them lasting very long. We turned to a beta – the Japanese fighting fish. The fish had simple needs and could handle life as a loner. Spencer named him Blue, because, well the fucking fish was blue!
Blue had a good run of several months, maybe even half a year before he died during a 4-day trip to Maryland because we forgot to get someone to come over and feed it while we were gone. God bless cats, man. You just leave out some food, a little water and some fresh litter and they are good to go.
When Blue bit the dust, we had our first major trauma of having a pet: death. We had opted to flush the first batch of dead goldfish down the toilet to the Great Big Aquarium In The Sky, but with Blue Spencer wanted nothing to do with that – he wanted to give Blue a proper burial. He dug a hole, made a marker out of popsicles sticks and we had our moment of silence for Blue.
For a good year after that, every time Spencer drew a family picture he would include Blue. Of course the thing he scribbled on the paper looked nothing like a fish and I’d have to ask him what it was. “That’s Blue, dad,” he’d say emphatically.
I decided maybe we should get another beta for the kid. So we went to the local pet store and got a marble-colored beta for him. Spencer named him Lots Of Colors. He must have some Native American blood in him I thought after finding out the name of the new fish. I mean my wife was adopted so anything could be possible when we get to talking about bloodlines.
Lots Of Colors didn’t last very long. Spencer was older now and I didn’t supervise the feedings quite like I used to with Blue. I’d catch him feeding the fish three to four times of day, not the little pinch of flakes as instructed. We were talking gobs of food. The tank started getting dirty and green with algae. The fish would hide amongst the meager plastic plant and singular sea shell. This would cause Spencer to tap on the glass to see “if he was okay.”
Lots of Colors joined the other side a few days later. He lived long enough for us not to be able to get our refund back but short enough that we decided to bail on the idea of having a pet fish.
By this time, Spencer’s younger brother Cole had come along and Ginger sightings were more prevalent. I guess she started to figure out that if she wanted to get some attention she was going to have to come and get it.
In the mornings, both the boys would lay down with me in the morning on the floor of the family room and chill out to some Sesame Street. Ginger would waltz out from her nesting area under our bed and lay herself down next to us, allowing the boys to pet her while she groomed herself.
One day the phone rang.
I answered it.
It was some telemarketer and I quickly hung up and placed the phone back in the kitchen.
I came back into the family room and Cole was nowhere to be found. I called out his name. He didn’t answer. I went from room to room looking for him but didn’t see him anywhere.
I did this twice.
A slight panic set in.
I heard a noise in my bedroom. And again I walked in to find no child there.
“Cole, where are you?”
And then I heard a noise under my bed.
I figured it was the cat since she pretty much lives under there almost all day long every day. But then I saw a tuft of hair by the bed frame and under it a smiling face. And I realized that Cole had “followed” Ginger under the bed. I don’t know how he managed to get under there – it appeared I was going to have to lift the frame of our king size bed to help him get out because they was no way he was going to navigate his big head through it. Yet he did.
So he apparently chased the cat down the hallway and followed her under the bed to her secret safety zone.
I haven’t seen the cat in weeks and I’m thinking it’d be best to wait until the boys are a little older before talk of getting another family pet comes up again.
* a version of this essay originally appeared in Raleigh's The Hatchet.
Both the wife and I grew up with fish tanks so delving into the issue of having a pet with a fish seemed like a reasonable idea.
Of course, we do have a proper pet - a cat named Ginger who has been with us since the early ‘90s. We got Ginger while we were living in Los Angeles. You see we had these friends who were real animal lovers. They lived in Tujunga, a small neighborhood above Glendale in the San Fernando Valley. And these people rescued just about any animal that they could; they had birds and cats and dogs and snakes and fish and hamsters and shit if you told me they had a flea circus I wouldn’t have been surprised.
So Ginger was rescued by them as a kitty from the netherworld streets of Los Angeles. She became ours by proxy; she was the only cat that ever warmed up to me and would always come to me whenever we were at their place. It was a no-brainer that when our group house situation dissolved in Glendale, that we would have this grey, short-legged Burmese come live with us in our Los Feliz apartment.
As the story goes, she was found by a dumpster near a Ford dealership in Tujunga. She turned out not to be neutered like we thought so we got her fixed. But that was after we discovered an infected sore underneath her fuzzy hair and had to have surgery for the nasty abscessed thing. She would also survive the great big rumble that was the Northridge earthquake and even traveled with us in our car during our exodus from Tinseltown and has been warming our hearts in North Carolina ever since.
But when the kids came along, she made herself scarce, occasionally showing her face after they went to bed. Friends and relatives often debated that she even existed becomes nobody but us ever saw the cat. They’d see the litter box in the bathroom or the food bowl in the kitchen and be like, “You guys have a cat?”
So to say that we didn’t have a pet would be a disservice to her.
Anyway, Spencer got one of those 2-gallon hexagon fish tank set-ups and we were off and running in pet fish land. I began to dream of a school of African cichlids brooding about in a wall-length aquarium but was quickly steered back to reality by my own memories of sticking my G.I. Joes’ in the family fish tank “scuba diving” only to contaminate the water and kill all the fish.
There was no way I was going to shell out top dollar for a bunch of fish that would be dead in a month’s time.
We tested the waters with some goldfish, but I don’t remember them lasting very long. We turned to a beta – the Japanese fighting fish. The fish had simple needs and could handle life as a loner. Spencer named him Blue, because, well the fucking fish was blue!
Blue had a good run of several months, maybe even half a year before he died during a 4-day trip to Maryland because we forgot to get someone to come over and feed it while we were gone. God bless cats, man. You just leave out some food, a little water and some fresh litter and they are good to go.
When Blue bit the dust, we had our first major trauma of having a pet: death. We had opted to flush the first batch of dead goldfish down the toilet to the Great Big Aquarium In The Sky, but with Blue Spencer wanted nothing to do with that – he wanted to give Blue a proper burial. He dug a hole, made a marker out of popsicles sticks and we had our moment of silence for Blue.
For a good year after that, every time Spencer drew a family picture he would include Blue. Of course the thing he scribbled on the paper looked nothing like a fish and I’d have to ask him what it was. “That’s Blue, dad,” he’d say emphatically.
I decided maybe we should get another beta for the kid. So we went to the local pet store and got a marble-colored beta for him. Spencer named him Lots Of Colors. He must have some Native American blood in him I thought after finding out the name of the new fish. I mean my wife was adopted so anything could be possible when we get to talking about bloodlines.
Lots Of Colors didn’t last very long. Spencer was older now and I didn’t supervise the feedings quite like I used to with Blue. I’d catch him feeding the fish three to four times of day, not the little pinch of flakes as instructed. We were talking gobs of food. The tank started getting dirty and green with algae. The fish would hide amongst the meager plastic plant and singular sea shell. This would cause Spencer to tap on the glass to see “if he was okay.”
Lots of Colors joined the other side a few days later. He lived long enough for us not to be able to get our refund back but short enough that we decided to bail on the idea of having a pet fish.
By this time, Spencer’s younger brother Cole had come along and Ginger sightings were more prevalent. I guess she started to figure out that if she wanted to get some attention she was going to have to come and get it.
In the mornings, both the boys would lay down with me in the morning on the floor of the family room and chill out to some Sesame Street. Ginger would waltz out from her nesting area under our bed and lay herself down next to us, allowing the boys to pet her while she groomed herself.
One day the phone rang.
I answered it.
It was some telemarketer and I quickly hung up and placed the phone back in the kitchen.
I came back into the family room and Cole was nowhere to be found. I called out his name. He didn’t answer. I went from room to room looking for him but didn’t see him anywhere.
I did this twice.
A slight panic set in.
I heard a noise in my bedroom. And again I walked in to find no child there.
“Cole, where are you?”
And then I heard a noise under my bed.
I figured it was the cat since she pretty much lives under there almost all day long every day. But then I saw a tuft of hair by the bed frame and under it a smiling face. And I realized that Cole had “followed” Ginger under the bed. I don’t know how he managed to get under there – it appeared I was going to have to lift the frame of our king size bed to help him get out because they was no way he was going to navigate his big head through it. Yet he did.
So he apparently chased the cat down the hallway and followed her under the bed to her secret safety zone.
I haven’t seen the cat in weeks and I’m thinking it’d be best to wait until the boys are a little older before talk of getting another family pet comes up again.
* a version of this essay originally appeared in Raleigh's The Hatchet.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
When The Shit Hits The Fan... Er, Floor
So the shit storm came with a vengeance.
As I said in the previous post, my wife began to feel ill on Monday, calling off work because she felt "off" and nauseous. I wasn't feeling too bad myself and quite frankly was looking to tap into the uber gene most parents possess (usually moms) where I would be able to weather the storm and take care of everybody. I mean after almost seven years of daily exposure to the petri dish that is preschool/toddlers/kindergarten, surely I'd built up a tolerance to such nastiness.
I always marveled how my mother could manage to handle our sick family while being sick herself but then again my mother's motto always was that "she was too busy to be sick."
Anyway, so my wife came to me in the evening and said "that's twice," meaning that she had thrown up twice today. I left to pick up my oldest from elementary school. He got home and ate a Nutrigrain snack bar (which is par for the course). I still had the Hershey squirts and I didn't feel the slightest bit nauseous. But my tummy was rumbling. I hadn't had much of an appetite since the day before and barely touched any of the food we had made for the Super Bowl.
I dug through the cupboards and found a can of chicken noodle soup and ate that with liberal amounts of Ritz Crackers sprinkled on top. When I finished, my 6-year-old came up to me and said that his stomach hurt and I quizzed him on the status of his tummy ache.
Shortly thereafter the fun began.
My belly had been percolating vigorously since the soup. I began to feel flush and walked back to my bathroom where - with little warning - the contents of my stomach erupted into the toilet. I'm talking power vomiting with all the velocity of a fire hose. The kind of puke session where you are lucky to catch your breath between upchucks.
Before I could leave the bathroom, I could hear my oldest throwing up in the kids' bathroom.
The rest of the night was spent with buckets and towels by beds and keeping your fingers crossed that the bathroom wouldn't be occupied when you needed it. And even if it wasn't occupied, there was always the chance that the water hadn't refilled in time for flushing - which is always a pleasant thing to be greeted with in this frame of mind.
At one point during the night, there was a juggling of sleeping arrangements which found both boys in bed with my wife and me in my youngest son's bed.
I felt the rumble and sat up, grabbed the bucket, wretched into it and began my way to my bathroom. The second heave unleashed a torrent of shit down my leg and I made a mental note to put on socks as a buffer after this round.
When I got to the bathroom I found my oldest asleep on the floor, wrapped in towels with his head next to the toilet. I stepped over him, sat, shat and puked. At some point I had to pull my pants off and clean my legs yet still managed to hover my ass above the toilet when my stomach erupted.
I can honestly say it was one of the most heinous smells.
I cracked the window but a record cold spell was in effect and 8 degree wind blew across my clammy body. I closed the window.
Then my son woke and threw up on the floor in front of himself, waking my wife who walked in, squeezed her nose and said, "did you shit yourself?"
My house was beginning to look like the aftermath of one of my rugby parties in college, with bodies strewn about the bathroom and vomit in the air.
I took a hot shower and tried to conjure up some yogi mojo; some sort of mind-over-matter mantra to get me through the night.
And that's pretty much how the next several hours went: my son puking, my wife puking, and me shitting and puking myself.
So much for the uber parenting gene.
At least for me.
I've since concluded it may be the sole possession of the female species as my wife managed to tend to me and our son while still dealing with it all herself.
After we all were tapped out, my son passed out but my wife and I were overcome with muscle cramps and joint pain. I laid as still as possible in bed doing my best birth-breathing impressions, still searching for a mantra.
We couldn't sleep.
This actually proved beneficial as we took this sleepless time to tackle a few loads of laundry and some general disinfecting.
Then we tried to sleep again.
But I just couldn't. TiVo sure would have come in handy and I was forced to prop myself up in a chair with pillows and a blanket (and yes, a bucket) and stave off the urge to puke and shit.
Sunrise came and my wife called in sick for her and our son and the family spent the better part of the next day nodding off like junkies.
Today is Wednesday.
My wife has returned to work but the boys are both home with me.
I still don't feel too good.
I would like to find the cold side of a pillow, a dark room, and several hours of sleep...
As I said in the previous post, my wife began to feel ill on Monday, calling off work because she felt "off" and nauseous. I wasn't feeling too bad myself and quite frankly was looking to tap into the uber gene most parents possess (usually moms) where I would be able to weather the storm and take care of everybody. I mean after almost seven years of daily exposure to the petri dish that is preschool/toddlers/kindergarten, surely I'd built up a tolerance to such nastiness.
I always marveled how my mother could manage to handle our sick family while being sick herself but then again my mother's motto always was that "she was too busy to be sick."
Anyway, so my wife came to me in the evening and said "that's twice," meaning that she had thrown up twice today. I left to pick up my oldest from elementary school. He got home and ate a Nutrigrain snack bar (which is par for the course). I still had the Hershey squirts and I didn't feel the slightest bit nauseous. But my tummy was rumbling. I hadn't had much of an appetite since the day before and barely touched any of the food we had made for the Super Bowl.
I dug through the cupboards and found a can of chicken noodle soup and ate that with liberal amounts of Ritz Crackers sprinkled on top. When I finished, my 6-year-old came up to me and said that his stomach hurt and I quizzed him on the status of his tummy ache.
Shortly thereafter the fun began.
My belly had been percolating vigorously since the soup. I began to feel flush and walked back to my bathroom where - with little warning - the contents of my stomach erupted into the toilet. I'm talking power vomiting with all the velocity of a fire hose. The kind of puke session where you are lucky to catch your breath between upchucks.
Before I could leave the bathroom, I could hear my oldest throwing up in the kids' bathroom.
The rest of the night was spent with buckets and towels by beds and keeping your fingers crossed that the bathroom wouldn't be occupied when you needed it. And even if it wasn't occupied, there was always the chance that the water hadn't refilled in time for flushing - which is always a pleasant thing to be greeted with in this frame of mind.
At one point during the night, there was a juggling of sleeping arrangements which found both boys in bed with my wife and me in my youngest son's bed.
I felt the rumble and sat up, grabbed the bucket, wretched into it and began my way to my bathroom. The second heave unleashed a torrent of shit down my leg and I made a mental note to put on socks as a buffer after this round.
When I got to the bathroom I found my oldest asleep on the floor, wrapped in towels with his head next to the toilet. I stepped over him, sat, shat and puked. At some point I had to pull my pants off and clean my legs yet still managed to hover my ass above the toilet when my stomach erupted.
I can honestly say it was one of the most heinous smells.
I cracked the window but a record cold spell was in effect and 8 degree wind blew across my clammy body. I closed the window.
Then my son woke and threw up on the floor in front of himself, waking my wife who walked in, squeezed her nose and said, "did you shit yourself?"
My house was beginning to look like the aftermath of one of my rugby parties in college, with bodies strewn about the bathroom and vomit in the air.
I took a hot shower and tried to conjure up some yogi mojo; some sort of mind-over-matter mantra to get me through the night.
And that's pretty much how the next several hours went: my son puking, my wife puking, and me shitting and puking myself.
So much for the uber parenting gene.
At least for me.
I've since concluded it may be the sole possession of the female species as my wife managed to tend to me and our son while still dealing with it all herself.
After we all were tapped out, my son passed out but my wife and I were overcome with muscle cramps and joint pain. I laid as still as possible in bed doing my best birth-breathing impressions, still searching for a mantra.
We couldn't sleep.
This actually proved beneficial as we took this sleepless time to tackle a few loads of laundry and some general disinfecting.
Then we tried to sleep again.
But I just couldn't. TiVo sure would have come in handy and I was forced to prop myself up in a chair with pillows and a blanket (and yes, a bucket) and stave off the urge to puke and shit.
Sunrise came and my wife called in sick for her and our son and the family spent the better part of the next day nodding off like junkies.
Today is Wednesday.
My wife has returned to work but the boys are both home with me.
I still don't feel too good.
I would like to find the cold side of a pillow, a dark room, and several hours of sleep...
Monday, February 05, 2007
Ugh
Freaking jinxed myself with that post on Febreze...
My youngest came down with a stomach virus Saturday night and spent every twenty minutes or so releasing bodily fluids from mouth and ass.
Many loads of laundry and many sprays of Febreze later, this stomach flu tries to attack me but it's Super Bowl Sunday and I refuse to relent my body to it managing to only puke twice in the morning and strictly siding with the diarrhea side of the bug. I was hell bent on sticking to my plan of making ribs, bacon wrapped shrimp and crab rangoon for the grubfest that is SBS. I least I have plenty of leftovers!
I'm not sure if I tossed my cookies (one of my father's favorite phrases) because I was holding a bucket for my son to vomit in and had to smell it and watch his tiny body wretch or that the bitch of a virus was making a bee line for me.
Now, it's Monday morning and the little guy seems to be bouncing back just as the same time that my wife is starting to go down with it.
I managed to keep down some food this morning and even braved a cup of coffee because I had to peel my eyes back to get my 1st grader to school.
He may come out unharmed because he's been on antibiotics for an ear infection that crippled him last week (and yeah I know there's a difference between bacterial and viral infections but I'm lookin' for salvation anywhere I can get it).
Buckle up.
It's going to be a bumpy ride.
My youngest came down with a stomach virus Saturday night and spent every twenty minutes or so releasing bodily fluids from mouth and ass.
Many loads of laundry and many sprays of Febreze later, this stomach flu tries to attack me but it's Super Bowl Sunday and I refuse to relent my body to it managing to only puke twice in the morning and strictly siding with the diarrhea side of the bug. I was hell bent on sticking to my plan of making ribs, bacon wrapped shrimp and crab rangoon for the grubfest that is SBS. I least I have plenty of leftovers!
I'm not sure if I tossed my cookies (one of my father's favorite phrases) because I was holding a bucket for my son to vomit in and had to smell it and watch his tiny body wretch or that the bitch of a virus was making a bee line for me.
Now, it's Monday morning and the little guy seems to be bouncing back just as the same time that my wife is starting to go down with it.
I managed to keep down some food this morning and even braved a cup of coffee because I had to peel my eyes back to get my 1st grader to school.
He may come out unharmed because he's been on antibiotics for an ear infection that crippled him last week (and yeah I know there's a difference between bacterial and viral infections but I'm lookin' for salvation anywhere I can get it).
Buckle up.
It's going to be a bumpy ride.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
My Love/Hate Relationship With Febreze
When I first discovered Febreze I immediately feel in love with the product.
I live in a home with two boys and a cat and the introduction of Febreze was godsend: it power to eliminate odors is rivaled by none (okay, maybe Lysol).
It is the champ of the cover-up.
Cat piss? Gone.
Kid puke? Gone.
Spilled milk on a rug? Gone.
Hairballs? Gone.
Pee in a bed? Gone.
Essentially, it will cover up just about any foul smell that you can find on your carpet, sofa, bed or any piece of fabric soiled by pet or child.
So you can clearly see why I would championed such a product and find salvation knowing that I can take out that blue bottle, spray and "Viola! Odor be gone!"
So what's the downside?
Well, my friend, the downside is that as soon as I walk into a room and get the slighest whiff of Febreze I immediately begin to run down a list of what could have transpired to require the need for the miracle spray.
Was it kid puke?
A cat turd dingle berry?
Spilled Beer?
You get my drift.
If only I could get the same results from a Yankee Candle...
I live in a home with two boys and a cat and the introduction of Febreze was godsend: it power to eliminate odors is rivaled by none (okay, maybe Lysol).
It is the champ of the cover-up.
Cat piss? Gone.
Kid puke? Gone.
Spilled milk on a rug? Gone.
Hairballs? Gone.
Pee in a bed? Gone.
Essentially, it will cover up just about any foul smell that you can find on your carpet, sofa, bed or any piece of fabric soiled by pet or child.
So you can clearly see why I would championed such a product and find salvation knowing that I can take out that blue bottle, spray and "Viola! Odor be gone!"
So what's the downside?
Well, my friend, the downside is that as soon as I walk into a room and get the slighest whiff of Febreze I immediately begin to run down a list of what could have transpired to require the need for the miracle spray.
Was it kid puke?
A cat turd dingle berry?
Spilled Beer?
You get my drift.
If only I could get the same results from a Yankee Candle...
Quitting The Family Band*
“I quit the band,” he said.
“You quit?” I said. “But you can’t quit.”
“I quit dad,” said my 4-year-old son Spencer.
And then he left the room.
We had just launched into a skronk fest: He on mom’s trumpet, his 15-month-old brother on drums (or shall we say cymbal) and myself on bass.
As a stay-at-home-dad going on year four of my tour of duty, there are often times of the day when jam sessions occur. The instruments have always been lying about the homestead although I’m not quite sure how the band actually started.
Or why it stopped.
But I can tell you that it all pretty much began with Thin Lizzy. Before Spencer’s younger brother came along, I’d always force a trip to the record store when out running errands. If there’s one thing you learn when you become a parent, it’s that you have to steal back your personal time or it will quickly vanish in a haze of family duties. Oftentimes I’d duck into CD Alley on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill and browse. One day I bought Thin Lizzy’s classic Jailbreak. When we got back in the car, I slipped the disc into the CD player and off we went about the day’s business.
As the weeks passed, Spencer soon began to request Thin Lizzy. He loved the “Cowboy Song,” “The Boys Are Back In Town,” and “Emerald.” He would incessantly listen to this CD to the point where my wife wanted to ban it from the car. I quickly pointed out that it was better than listening to The Wiggles or Barney.
She agreed.
Once Jailbreak was worn out (with Spencer usually referring to the album-closer “Emerald” as the “fight the fight” song), on the next visit to the record store he asked if Thin Lizzy had any other records.
So I got him Black Rose (favorite songs: “Waiting For An Alibi,” “Get Out of Here”) and then Fighting (most requested: “Fighting”).
Before long his young, feeble mind couldn’t fathom the band pictures on the CDs and he yearned to see the men playing the songs he heard. So I bought him a DVD of Thin Lizzy live in Australia in 1978.
I think soon after watching that was when the family band started.
Sometime after the inaugural viewing Spencer started to strap on my guitar and began to mimic Gary Moore’s guitar licks. He’d stick the guitar pick in his mouth and clap his hands above his head to an imaginary crowd or jump up, spread his legs and then ape doing hammer-ons.
I quickly used his interest in music to capitalize on my own wanton needs. If Spencer liked listening to music and he liked watching music then that’s what we would do: There was Devo’s The Complete Truth About De-Evolution DVD. And Zeppelin. The Who’s The Kids Are Alright (which was a mistake because shortly after viewing Keith Moon play drums Spencer began to try an incorporate some of his more famous moves like playing with his feet or hitting the cymbals with his hands).
Not wanting to short change punk rock, I tossed in Black Flag live in Europe from 1948, Fugazi’s Instrument, Minor Threat live at DC Space, and even the first Turbonegro documentary. With songs about making pizzas, Spencer was instantly gratified by Turbonegro, although he wondered why they looked so creepy.
Devo won his over completely for the sole fact that I was able to explain that front man Mark Mothersbaugh was the guy “from Devo who does the theme song from Rocket Power.” Nickelodeon’s animated cartoon Rocket Power is set to a backdrop of skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding and features a zine-making junior high girl named Reggie and her shredding little brother Otto.
It appeared that my son was on his way to a life of rock’n’roll. At first, he flirted with the drums, then the guitar, and then back to the drums. The guitar was fun because I’d plug the axe into my shitty Peavey amp and turn it up. He’d pull the mic stand over and started making up songs. I quickly learned to keep my Fostex X-14 four-track within arm’s reach for just such circumstances. Back on drums, my wife taught him the basic intro to Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and again he was off and running in dreams of rock’n’roll grandeur.
Soon after, he discovered that other kids were into the rock. Like Rick Davis, son of local musician Ben Davis (formerly of Sleepytime Trio, Milemaker, Bats & Mice and now fronting Ben Davis and The Jets). Rick had a band and that band even had a name – The Take-A-Rides. Rick played his first gig at age four sandwiched between Bringerer and Merge Recording Artists’ The Rosebuds. According to Rick’s dad, he has since retired the name Take-A-Rides in favor of the Secret Sea Turtles. ‘He’s into heavy, slow music now,” explained Ben in an email.
The days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months and soon I was living out Jack Black fantasies of School Of Rock proportions, teaching Spencer how to throw the goat and how to wield a mic like Iggy Pop. One day before I headed off to practice with my band the Chest Pains, he asked me if we were ever going to play live.
“Like on stage,” he said.
“Sure,” I replied.
But won’t you get nervous?” he asked
“Probably but that’s natural,” I said. “A lot of people get nervous – actors, athletes, musicians – before they perform,” I explained.
“Well, when you get to practice tell your friends you know the world’s greatest drummer,” he said.
“Who is that? Mom?” I said.
“No, me dad!” he said.
When my wife came home from work that one fateful night – the night my son quit the family band – I told her I had bad news.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Spencer quit the family band,” I said.
“Dad!” hollered Spencer when he overheard the news.
“When I said ‘I quit’ I just meant that I was dome playing for the day,” he said wiggling his head and holding his hands up in the air flashing traces of the goombah I-talian bloodline he got my side of the family.
And so the band isn’t “officially” broken up yet, we’ll just call it on a hiatus.
*Versions of this essay appeared in Raleigh's The Hatchet and Australia's Monster Children
“You quit?” I said. “But you can’t quit.”
“I quit dad,” said my 4-year-old son Spencer.
And then he left the room.
We had just launched into a skronk fest: He on mom’s trumpet, his 15-month-old brother on drums (or shall we say cymbal) and myself on bass.
As a stay-at-home-dad going on year four of my tour of duty, there are often times of the day when jam sessions occur. The instruments have always been lying about the homestead although I’m not quite sure how the band actually started.
Or why it stopped.
But I can tell you that it all pretty much began with Thin Lizzy. Before Spencer’s younger brother came along, I’d always force a trip to the record store when out running errands. If there’s one thing you learn when you become a parent, it’s that you have to steal back your personal time or it will quickly vanish in a haze of family duties. Oftentimes I’d duck into CD Alley on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill and browse. One day I bought Thin Lizzy’s classic Jailbreak. When we got back in the car, I slipped the disc into the CD player and off we went about the day’s business.
As the weeks passed, Spencer soon began to request Thin Lizzy. He loved the “Cowboy Song,” “The Boys Are Back In Town,” and “Emerald.” He would incessantly listen to this CD to the point where my wife wanted to ban it from the car. I quickly pointed out that it was better than listening to The Wiggles or Barney.
She agreed.
Once Jailbreak was worn out (with Spencer usually referring to the album-closer “Emerald” as the “fight the fight” song), on the next visit to the record store he asked if Thin Lizzy had any other records.
So I got him Black Rose (favorite songs: “Waiting For An Alibi,” “Get Out of Here”) and then Fighting (most requested: “Fighting”).
Before long his young, feeble mind couldn’t fathom the band pictures on the CDs and he yearned to see the men playing the songs he heard. So I bought him a DVD of Thin Lizzy live in Australia in 1978.
I think soon after watching that was when the family band started.
Sometime after the inaugural viewing Spencer started to strap on my guitar and began to mimic Gary Moore’s guitar licks. He’d stick the guitar pick in his mouth and clap his hands above his head to an imaginary crowd or jump up, spread his legs and then ape doing hammer-ons.
I quickly used his interest in music to capitalize on my own wanton needs. If Spencer liked listening to music and he liked watching music then that’s what we would do: There was Devo’s The Complete Truth About De-Evolution DVD. And Zeppelin. The Who’s The Kids Are Alright (which was a mistake because shortly after viewing Keith Moon play drums Spencer began to try an incorporate some of his more famous moves like playing with his feet or hitting the cymbals with his hands).
Not wanting to short change punk rock, I tossed in Black Flag live in Europe from 1948, Fugazi’s Instrument, Minor Threat live at DC Space, and even the first Turbonegro documentary. With songs about making pizzas, Spencer was instantly gratified by Turbonegro, although he wondered why they looked so creepy.
Devo won his over completely for the sole fact that I was able to explain that front man Mark Mothersbaugh was the guy “from Devo who does the theme song from Rocket Power.” Nickelodeon’s animated cartoon Rocket Power is set to a backdrop of skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding and features a zine-making junior high girl named Reggie and her shredding little brother Otto.
It appeared that my son was on his way to a life of rock’n’roll. At first, he flirted with the drums, then the guitar, and then back to the drums. The guitar was fun because I’d plug the axe into my shitty Peavey amp and turn it up. He’d pull the mic stand over and started making up songs. I quickly learned to keep my Fostex X-14 four-track within arm’s reach for just such circumstances. Back on drums, my wife taught him the basic intro to Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and again he was off and running in dreams of rock’n’roll grandeur.
Soon after, he discovered that other kids were into the rock. Like Rick Davis, son of local musician Ben Davis (formerly of Sleepytime Trio, Milemaker, Bats & Mice and now fronting Ben Davis and The Jets). Rick had a band and that band even had a name – The Take-A-Rides. Rick played his first gig at age four sandwiched between Bringerer and Merge Recording Artists’ The Rosebuds. According to Rick’s dad, he has since retired the name Take-A-Rides in favor of the Secret Sea Turtles. ‘He’s into heavy, slow music now,” explained Ben in an email.
The days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months and soon I was living out Jack Black fantasies of School Of Rock proportions, teaching Spencer how to throw the goat and how to wield a mic like Iggy Pop. One day before I headed off to practice with my band the Chest Pains, he asked me if we were ever going to play live.
“Like on stage,” he said.
“Sure,” I replied.
But won’t you get nervous?” he asked
“Probably but that’s natural,” I said. “A lot of people get nervous – actors, athletes, musicians – before they perform,” I explained.
“Well, when you get to practice tell your friends you know the world’s greatest drummer,” he said.
“Who is that? Mom?” I said.
“No, me dad!” he said.
When my wife came home from work that one fateful night – the night my son quit the family band – I told her I had bad news.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Spencer quit the family band,” I said.
“Dad!” hollered Spencer when he overheard the news.
“When I said ‘I quit’ I just meant that I was dome playing for the day,” he said wiggling his head and holding his hands up in the air flashing traces of the goombah I-talian bloodline he got my side of the family.
And so the band isn’t “officially” broken up yet, we’ll just call it on a hiatus.
*Versions of this essay appeared in Raleigh's The Hatchet and Australia's Monster Children
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Alien Abduction
So I had another alien abduction dream the other night.
I think I've had about a dozen or so over the last few years.
This one was sorta generic and par for the course in that it featured the basic big, bright light outside which needs to be investigated, that feeling of lost time and not being able to account for your whereabouts, and that feeling like you've been drugged.
The kicker was that during my "return" I sort came to walking down a dark hallway in my house only to find a stranger sleeping on my couch.
I walked over and pulled the covers off the stranger to find that I was looking at myself sleeping on the couch.
Chills rolled down my spine.
I shuddered off the chills and *poof* the dream went away.
The weird thing was that I actually slept on the couch because my 6-yr.-old came into our bed and 2am complaining of an ear ache.
The next day while channeling surfing I stumble upon a show about Roswell on the National Geographic channel.
Now I wasn't totally blown away by the coincidence because one can always find a show on aliens or Hitler on cable television.
But then today, I took said sick 6-yr.-old to the doctor to see if he had an ear infection (he does) and during our stay in the waiting room (not the mass populace waiting room, but the second tier room they put you in after the initial nurse consultation), the boys and I had this odd conversation about dreams and nightmares.
My 3- yr.-old's reoccurring "nightmare" is when I'm the tickle monster. I've actually heard him laugh in his sleep before and had him tell me the next day that I wouldn't stop tickling him on his dream.
But then my oldest son went into this elaborate dream about finding me in a room stuck with needles, lotsa of needles, all over my body and that the image totally freaked him out.
I think I've been listening to The Doors too much or something...
I think I've had about a dozen or so over the last few years.
This one was sorta generic and par for the course in that it featured the basic big, bright light outside which needs to be investigated, that feeling of lost time and not being able to account for your whereabouts, and that feeling like you've been drugged.
The kicker was that during my "return" I sort came to walking down a dark hallway in my house only to find a stranger sleeping on my couch.
I walked over and pulled the covers off the stranger to find that I was looking at myself sleeping on the couch.
Chills rolled down my spine.
I shuddered off the chills and *poof* the dream went away.
The weird thing was that I actually slept on the couch because my 6-yr.-old came into our bed and 2am complaining of an ear ache.
The next day while channeling surfing I stumble upon a show about Roswell on the National Geographic channel.
Now I wasn't totally blown away by the coincidence because one can always find a show on aliens or Hitler on cable television.
But then today, I took said sick 6-yr.-old to the doctor to see if he had an ear infection (he does) and during our stay in the waiting room (not the mass populace waiting room, but the second tier room they put you in after the initial nurse consultation), the boys and I had this odd conversation about dreams and nightmares.
My 3- yr.-old's reoccurring "nightmare" is when I'm the tickle monster. I've actually heard him laugh in his sleep before and had him tell me the next day that I wouldn't stop tickling him on his dream.
But then my oldest son went into this elaborate dream about finding me in a room stuck with needles, lotsa of needles, all over my body and that the image totally freaked him out.
I think I've been listening to The Doors too much or something...
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Punch Number Two
I got woken up this morning by my almost-7-year-old shrilling "Snow! Snow! Dad there's snow!"It wasn't even 6am yet.
Of course they cancelled school because that's what they do here in NC. I remember one year they cancelled school at the thought of flurries. But over the years they've learned their lesson; a few times they cancelled school and not one drop of precipitation ever made it to the ground.
So today we get a meager two slushy inches and they cancelled school.
Kids are stoked as it is a rare treat to get snow in our neck of the woods but it does happen. But not enough that you care to purchase the necessary clothing for toddlers who will grow out of something overnight. Fortunately, my sister lives in the Midwest and is always passing along cold weather hand-me-downs.
I think she was appalled when years ago, when our first kid had experience his first taste of snow, she had called and asked if he got a chance to play in it. I told he he didn't have any boots so I put plastic trash bags over his shoes and secured them with rubber bands because - after all - somebody has to represent the white trash side of the family.
But the thing that sucks most about snow days, isn't the fact that "no school" are the two words I want to hear least, is that snow here just sucks. It rarely ever snows enough to do something fun like sledding or tobogganing and the snow is almost always on the side closer to sleet than powder.
So it is really like playing in the mud after a few hours when the sun finally breaks through and the temperature warms a bit.
I dig managed to make a tiny, snowman with a pine needle mohawk only to have my moody 3-year-old kick it over because "snowman don't have mohawks, Dad!" he barked.
Not to mention, today was the day both boys were suppose to be in school (3-year-old until 1pm, 6-year-old until 3:30pm) and I had big plans about what I was going to do with my free time.
Instead, it's "can you say cabin fever?"
One, Two Punch
So just last week we were rolling in temperatures above 70 degrees here in Carolina.Over the weekend we had a cookout with some neighbors and we were joking about how ridiculous it was that we were in t-shirts and shorts and grilling during the MLK holiday weekend.
And then it came: the fucking frigid weather.
So cold in fact, that daytime highs were in the low 40s.
So what's a stay-at-home dad to do but improvise.
Enter the indoor camping extravaganza.
Needless to say, the wife wasn't to happy about this one. But I (think) I convinced her that it was a good primer for the boys for when we finally get back into camping (this spring I hope; we registered at REI when we got married but we haven't been since Number 1 was born and that's creeping up on seven years).
Friday, January 12, 2007
The Cave
The place in the woods where the degenerate "burn-outs" would hang out - was called The Cave. Riding past there onyour bike when the hoodlums were there was like riding the gauntlet. Sometimes they'd throw rocks at you, sometimes they'd throw beer cans. You were going to get heckled that much was for sure.
Years later I befriended one of the local juvey hall kids and went there myself. At some point they had built a rope swing that swung off the top of it which was pretty hairy and pretty scary. I saw a guy get stuck and watched his friends scramble to find a branch long enough for him to grab so he could get back. Serious injury would have resulted from a fall from that height. Although the dirtbags were smart enough to knot the end of the rope which formed a rudimentary seat thus saving your upper body strength from being tapped out in just such and occasion.
My older brother told me a story about how one of his friends was kicked out of his house in high school and he spent a couple of nights at the cave (although there doesn't seem to be much room in the cave).
And when I told another friend about my recent trek to The Cave he asked if there were any moldy Penthouses to be found. Fortunately there weren't. But there was a shitload of broken glass from smashing beer bottles on the rocks.
So on a recent trip to see my parents I took my two boys on a expedition to see the creek, the "black path," and the cave.
A little bit of neighborhood lore for them to take with them back to North Carolina.
The Woods
I spent a lot of time playing in the woods as a kid. We used to ride our bmx bikes back into the woods by the creek. Skipped stones along the bank or search for salamanders, turtles or snakes.There was a path that went from Lake Needwood all the way to the National Zoo in D.C. It was dirt for a long time and then somewhere around the end of elementary school they paved it and it became known as the "black path."
if you said you were going to the black path people knew exactly what you were talking about. By the time I got out of high school, me and my friend Scooby would ride our mountain bikes on it, searching for paths that spun off of it. If we didn't find anything, we'd get to D.C., park our bikes and saddle up at some cafe like Zorba's on 19th Street and drink pitchers of beer under the summer sun. Those were good times.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Cackalacka Xmas
Frosty The Snowman made out of hay bales.That's how we do it in North Carolina folks...
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Christmas Trees and Bodily Fluids
I'd been meaning to post a few words about the family tradition of hunting for Christmas trees a few days ago but was rudely interupted.
The interruption started as most do - with a holler "Daaaddd!!"
I knew my oldest was in the bathroom as I had heard him threw the vents talking to himself.
Then I heard a flush.
The flush was followed by the holler.
I arrive to find that my son had shoved about an entire roll's worth of toilet paper into the can.
And to find the water quickly rising.
Immediate action needed to be taken so I thrust my hand into the toilet, grabbed the wet gob of tee pee and extracted it, throwing the soggy goop into the waste basket next to the can.
"Dad, what are you doing?" exclaimed my 3-year-old while my 6-year-old is wooting it up. "You got your hand in the toilet!" he says with a yelpy smile.
"Don't ever do this," I tell them.
"Never stick your hand in the toilet."
It was a classic, textbook example of the old adage "do as I say, not as I do."
Then I preceeded to wash my hands about 15 times in a row.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Ta Zizzle In Da Zizzle
I'm not usually such a fanboy, but when I spotted the star center for the UNC men's basketball team eating breakfast at the local Whole Foods, the first thing I thought was that my son Spencer is going to be so stoked when I tell him.
This was followed shortly thereafter with "He'll kill me if I don't ask for an autograph."
So here it is.
Thanks Tyler.
Monday, December 11, 2006
Priceless
This popped up on the wall of the new subdivision of million dollar homes they are building up the street next to my son's elementary school.
Middle Age Rage
Nice pic of me hollerin' at Victory Factory/Chest Pains gig.
Photo by the wife.
It's always nice when she can make it to the shows.
This time we actually had our two boys sleep over her sister's house, so we got to take the post gig partyin' back home to the House of G.
Like old times.
Victory Factory
I got to share the bill with my friend Ron Liberti's band on Friday, December 1, in Chapel Hill.
Ron makes great gig posters.
Monday, November 20, 2006
I, Caterer
So last Saturday I had to work a shift for a party some woman was throwing for her husband to celebrate his 70th birthday.
It was a tented event on the grounds of a place called Fearrington Village (which you can peek at here: http://www.fearrington.com/).
The party involved such entertainment as character actors walking around interacting with the guests [cheesy] and tango dance group [sorta cheesy] and three tenors doing opera [had they had old Bugs Bunny cartoons projected behind them on a backdrop? Priceless].
Some guy actually said this: "This is the nicest party I have been to that I didn't pay $1,000 to get into."
He was met by much laughter.
Some days you feel like Bob Newhart,
other days you feel like Peter Sellers.
It was a tented event on the grounds of a place called Fearrington Village (which you can peek at here: http://www.fearrington.com/).
The party involved such entertainment as character actors walking around interacting with the guests [cheesy] and tango dance group [sorta cheesy] and three tenors doing opera [had they had old Bugs Bunny cartoons projected behind them on a backdrop? Priceless].
Some guy actually said this: "This is the nicest party I have been to that I didn't pay $1,000 to get into."
He was met by much laughter.
Some days you feel like Bob Newhart,
other days you feel like Peter Sellers.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
AHDCIKC - Being There Part 3
Dave Lux, he of the 17-inch monitor'ed lap top, enjoying a festive post-convention cigar.
AHDCIKC - Being There Part Two
The group makes their way to Arthur Bryants via a [shortened] yellow school bus. It's a raucous ride through downtown Kansas City.
We arrive to find another bus, this one of the chartered variety, parked in front of the joint and several folks let out sighs.
But no sooner then their sighs fade does it become apparent that the crew on that bus is leaving the restaurant.
The mouths of sighs become smiles.
Intrepid British journalist John Perry asks what to expect.
"Various parts of the pig all cooked to perfection," I say.
"Yah, but which parts?" he asks.
Many pitchers of beer are procured.
Veni, Vidi, Veci.
We came, we saw, we conquered.
At Home Dad Convention In KC - Being There
I get up bright and early.
Too early considering I had a hotel room to myself and nary a kid demanding my attention in sight.
Then I went to the lobby for a few cups of complimentary coffee (much needed).
I spotted a few AHDs doing the same.
Shortly there after I hopped into the car of KC Dad Kevin “Kace” Christensen now dubbed a “shuttle” and made my way with a few other dads and a Japanese woman to the spot on the campus of UMKC where the convention is taking place.
The Japanese woman Renge Jibu is on assignment for some business magazine in her home country. “Japanese men do nothing at home,” she says with head tilt that is customary in her country.
People register, breakfast is consumed and introductions are made.
And soon after, the first of the day-long breakouts begins.
I attend a breakout on kids and the internet which is really informative but mostly pertains to parents of the tween’er set and kids who use email. The moderator is Dave Lux from Chicago and he has some scary shit to say like the fact that 1 out of 7 children will be sexually solicited in a year’s time or that 75 percent of children are willing to share personal info online.
I make a mental note and place this in a file for a few years down the road when my kids actually use the computer for such purposes. Right now both my kids strictly use the computer for video games and virtual puzzles but I am aware that my 6-year-old knows how to boot the sucker up and often goes online unsupervised. It wasn’t so much of an issue say a year ago, but now as a first grader and ardent speller the boy could easily find himself viewing inappropriate material whether it’s some knucklehead lighting himself on fire on YouTube or one misplaced vowel away from porn.
Taking candy from a stranger somehow seems like such a trivial thing these days. Yet it’s basically the same principle that is applied here.
After a brief break it's onto the next breakout which covers the topic of going back to work and preparing yourself for a return to the job market. Much of what is discussed pertains to recent grads more than At Home Dads but the general info regarding resumes and cover letters is a nice little refresher.
What isn’t explained (and maybe because it can’t be) is how to address the gap in work history due to being a stay-at-home-dad. One fellow is really concerned about how this will look a few years down the road and is aggressively taking courses and looking into grad school to make sure he’s got something to account for during that time besides bottles, diapers and memorizing the theme to Barney.
I believe more is achieved with the internal discussions amongst the men in the room then the career counselors but they do provide excellent questions which prompted the transfer of information between us all.
***
Lunch is basically the make-yer-own sandwich spread and serves its purpose to fuel up the conventioneers for another couple hours of talking heads, fluorescent lights and all things At Home Dad-esque.
***
My post lunch breakout is an open discussion amongst the dads that is segregated by age. I hit up the 2-5 age group even though my oldest is 6. I figure I may get some fresh insight on 3-year-olds and possible shed some myself to those about to run into the 5-to-6-year-old bracket.
Lots of interesting discussions come up: from the importance of routines to clean-up tactics.
“Routine is key,” says Steve Lundy from the KC Dads group. He uses the 3 B rule: “bath, books, bed,” he says.
Minnesota Dad Tom Vytlacil points out that while routine is key, kids are “event sensitive not time sensitive.”
With all the great ideas and good advice, I suddenly feel like I’ve been teleported to an episode of Dr. Phil what with high level of enthusiasm being used among the informative exchanges.
From there it’s off to the Kids, Nutrition & Behavior breakout.
This breakout focuses more specifically on the concept of a minimally processed, organic food diet. This being the Midwest, it comes off a bit forced trying to push this type of diet on what I perceive as the meat-and-potatoes sensibilities of the locale. Working in food service and living in the most cosmopolitan part of my state, most of this is either old news or stuff I already have implemented (buying/using local and seasonal goods, substituting soy milk for milk and keeping a minimum of the ingestion of sweets). It also can be stripped down to the age old adage "you are what you eat.” Of course if my kid eats at McDonalds all the time and drinks soda there’s going to be some nutritional – and behavioral – issues to be addressed.
That said, I still gleaned some valuable info from the session.
[Note to organizers: more coffee after lunch! Or maybe nap time!]
The last breakout of the day was about depression and isolation and the one I probably got the most out of despite the fact that it had this sort of Iron John/AA vibe to it: we are all men with this unique experience and we are not alone.
The day finished with brainstorming sessions on likes and dislikes and on getting a leg up with the planning of the 12th Annual At Home Dad convention. Capping off that was men sharing their anecdotes with the crowd.
And yes, I broke out the Breathing Penis story.
I won’t tell it again here, you had to be there for it.
Then it was back the hospitality room at the hotel for cold beer and conversation before boarding a bus for ribs and BBQ at Kansas City’s stories Arthur Bryants.
Monday, November 13, 2006
At Home Dad Convention In KC - Getting There
Friday, Nov. 10, 11:15am: Shoeless and without belt I clear security. This is the first time I have flown in years (in a post 9/11 world). One of the security guards at Raleigh/Durham International – a catering colleague of mine – recognizes me.
“I know you from somewhere,” she says, her pierced tongue affecting her slight Southern drawl. “[Blank] Catering,” I say. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “They fired me and [blank]. It was over some bullshit.”
***
With the better part of an hour to kill I dive into Bradley Udall’s The Miracle Life Of Edgar Mint.
***
I sit down for lunch – an $8 veggie burrito – when the biggest son-of-a-bitch of a man sits down next to me. I overhear his cell phone conversation which involves talk of wrestling and how he’ll need a shot because his shoulder is hurting him. He’s mentions Hulk and The Undertaker to who ever is on the phone as well.
“Do they call you Tiny?” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “My brother is even bigger.”
Then he explains how both him and his brother use to wrestle professionally. His brother wrestled under the moniker Mr. X.
“And your alias was?” I ask
“Tiny,” he says.
***
I take a puddle jumper (as my father would say) to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., to make my connecting flight to Kansas City, which is where I am headed to attend the 11th Annual At Home Dad Convention. And yes, I am as surprised as you that it even exits much less on its eleventh year. Two shuttle trips across Dulles’ tarmac are required before I reach Concourse A… and a vodka tonic is required ($7).
Drinking at the airport reminds me of a time back in the late-80s when I spent several hours waiting at National Airport for a friend of mine – stuck in Chicago because of bad weather – to make it to the East Coast from Los Angeles. After several hours killing time in an airport bar, his flight eventually got cancelled and I had to leave only to return the next day to pick him up. I left thinking about how strange airport bars are; the strange mix of people you find there; the stories told and heard.
Twenty minutes later, beverage consumed and airport bar memories relived, my worse fears are revealed: my flight has been delayed an hour. This has several ramifications. First off, it most likely means I won’t rendezvous with British journalist (and father) John Perry at the Kansas City airport. We had planned to split a cab to the meet & greet session that evening at Boulevard Brewing Co. in Kansas City.
It also means I will miss the free beer at the meet & greet.
But this is Parenting 101: expect the unexpected.
I secretly admit to myself that I’m glad I’m not traveling with a wife and two kids and having to face a long flight delay. Because I am traveling alone, I exhale a sigh of relief.
Accentuate the positive.
There’s another trait learned as a parent. Making the best of a shitty situation is a weekly, if not daily, occurrence.
I peek at the departure board. My flight it delayed yet again.
I contemplate another adult beverage.
***
I stave off the desire for an adult beverage with a slice of pizza and my novel. I fantasize about possessing a text-messaging cell phone, an iPod, or a lap top. But I’m fully antiquated with nothing but a book, a pen, a few scraps of paper stapled together which turns into a makeshift notepad, and a meager slush fund in my pocket. Whittling away the hours in an airport is not a cheap proposition.
I check the departure board again. My 3:30pm flight has now been delayed from 4:30pm to 5:30pm. Clearly, the skies of United aren’t as friendly as I’d like them to be.
There goes the meet & greet.
Yet I’m starting to feel like a real working father and husband, one who has to slough away the hours at airports on business travel. Only I’m missing the fancy watch, the carry-on tote with wheels and an expense account.
***
Suddenly, I get this slight foreshadowing; a wee bit of déjà vu – like I’m soon going to be the angry drunk at check-in on some reality television show. Luckily for me, somebody else would step up to fulfill this role an hour later.
I speak with a Vietnam Vet who is in town for a battalion reunion that’s part of the new Marine monument dedication.
With all the delays and gate changes, mass confusion ensues and several KC-bound folks board the wrong plane.
I am one of them.
I introduce myself to the young woman sitting next to me and ask her about her travel plans. She is going to meet her boyfriend in Kansas City who is coming from Texas.
“And what about you?” she asks.
“I’m going to a convention for At Home Dads,” I tell her.
“What?” she asks.
“A convention for stay-at-home-dads,” I say.
“I’m going to write a story about it,” I explain. “I want to know who these men are.”
“A bunch of losers!” she exclaims with a hearty laugh.
Fortunately for her, I have boarded the wrong plane and won’t spend the next two hours schooling her on the definition of loser.
The best news when I finally board the right flight – at 6pm – is that nobody is sitting next to me.
I settle in and get back to The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint.
***
The woman across the aisle from me is reading Vanity Fair and I can smell the pages as she turns them.
My dinner is a blend of pretzels, roasted red pepper sesame sticks and BBQ soy nuts. All chased with Minute Maid orange juice. Yum!
***
When I finally get to Kansas City, it is passed 8pm.
I stand outside in the blustery weather – a mix of snow and sleet – and wait for a shuttle to take me to my hotel. Roughly, thirty minutes and $17 later, I’m at the Hampton Inn and ready for some food and drink. I call one of the organizers, KC dad Andy Ferguson, but the group from the brewery has splintered apart since the meet & greet and he apologizes for not being able to point me in any AHD direction.
I walk down the street from the hotel and step into a pub called Tomfooleries. I order a sandwich and a few beers and then head back to the hotel for some sleep.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Monday, November 06, 2006
In Four Days...
I'll be here:
http://www.athomedadconvention.com
and so will these folks:
http://moderndaydad.com
http://kchomedad.blogspot.com
http://kev.homelinux.net
http://www.hail2pitt.org
as well as about 40 some other proud stay-at-home dads.
and we'll talk about things like this:
http://www.athomedadconvention.com/2006_Convention_Web_Program.pdf
http://www.athomedadconvention.com
and so will these folks:
http://moderndaydad.com
http://kchomedad.blogspot.com
http://kev.homelinux.net
http://www.hail2pitt.org
as well as about 40 some other proud stay-at-home dads.
and we'll talk about things like this:
http://www.athomedadconvention.com/2006_Convention_Web_Program.pdf
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Houston... We Have Poop
So September proved to be a landmark month in the household: my 3-and-a-half year old son is now officially potty trained.
That means no more diapers.
And diapers are expensive.
But I'm sure the cost will quickly be absorbed somewhere else.
During this past month, I had to face one of my greatest fears as a parent.
And I stood and faced it head on.
You see, before I ever even thought about having kids, I always wondered how parents delt will the public bathroom with kids-on-the-cusp of potty training.
I've been in some nasty bathrooms in my day, but I don't think my boys will be seeing the inside of a rock club's bathroom anytime soon.
But then there's always Six Flags, A Durham Bulls game or - gasp! - the fast food restaurant in the middle of nowhere on a long road trip.
So a few weeks back the time finally came for me: I had just arrived at the soccer fields where my 6-year-old has practice. And after about two minutes the little guy told me he had to go pee.
"For real?" I said.
"For real," he said.
"But you just went before we left the house," I said.
"Dad," he said with a huff.
Then he stomped his foot on the ground and said, "I have to go potty!"
And that's when we saw the Port-A-John.
So we both went in and I instructed him not to touch anything. He peed in the urinal but couldn't keep his eyes of the exposed toliet seat.
We left I and took a deep breath of fresh air.
And then he stopped.
"I have to go potty dad," he said.
"But you just went," I said.
"I have to poo," he said.
So we went back in - and like the trooper father that I am - I held my son over the toilet seat and watched him take a dump into the cesspool below. He was sort of tottering on the edge of the toilet seat and began putting his hands where no human should ever have to put them unless in the middle of some sort of tortutous interogation.
I tried to get his hands in control while removing him off the seat and then he slid forward... leaving a streak of poo on the seat and across his butt check. So now do I not only have to wipe his ass (have you ever seen toilet paper in a Port-A-John?) but clean the seat off as well.
At one point I thought one of his shoes - from the movie Cars - was going to fall in and that I would find myself trying to explain to a crying toddler why I wasn't going to retrieve his favorite shoe from the mucky muck of poo.
So I faced the public bathroom fear - in a Port-A-John no less - and lived to tell about it.
And yes, they had hand sanitizer in there.
This is Chapel Hill afterall.
That means no more diapers.
And diapers are expensive.
But I'm sure the cost will quickly be absorbed somewhere else.
During this past month, I had to face one of my greatest fears as a parent.
And I stood and faced it head on.
You see, before I ever even thought about having kids, I always wondered how parents delt will the public bathroom with kids-on-the-cusp of potty training.
I've been in some nasty bathrooms in my day, but I don't think my boys will be seeing the inside of a rock club's bathroom anytime soon.
But then there's always Six Flags, A Durham Bulls game or - gasp! - the fast food restaurant in the middle of nowhere on a long road trip.
So a few weeks back the time finally came for me: I had just arrived at the soccer fields where my 6-year-old has practice. And after about two minutes the little guy told me he had to go pee.
"For real?" I said.
"For real," he said.
"But you just went before we left the house," I said.
"Dad," he said with a huff.
Then he stomped his foot on the ground and said, "I have to go potty!"
And that's when we saw the Port-A-John.
So we both went in and I instructed him not to touch anything. He peed in the urinal but couldn't keep his eyes of the exposed toliet seat.
We left I and took a deep breath of fresh air.
And then he stopped.
"I have to go potty dad," he said.
"But you just went," I said.
"I have to poo," he said.
So we went back in - and like the trooper father that I am - I held my son over the toilet seat and watched him take a dump into the cesspool below. He was sort of tottering on the edge of the toilet seat and began putting his hands where no human should ever have to put them unless in the middle of some sort of tortutous interogation.
I tried to get his hands in control while removing him off the seat and then he slid forward... leaving a streak of poo on the seat and across his butt check. So now do I not only have to wipe his ass (have you ever seen toilet paper in a Port-A-John?) but clean the seat off as well.
At one point I thought one of his shoes - from the movie Cars - was going to fall in and that I would find myself trying to explain to a crying toddler why I wasn't going to retrieve his favorite shoe from the mucky muck of poo.
So I faced the public bathroom fear - in a Port-A-John no less - and lived to tell about it.
And yes, they had hand sanitizer in there.
This is Chapel Hill afterall.
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