Passing Out The Pink

Ok, first off, never nominate me for a blog award. I'm a total heel at following the rules and nominating other people like you are supposed to. Scratch that. Nominate me. I feed off your validation. It's a drug and I will whore myself for you.



Look at that pretty pink award! Bestowed upon me by the saintly Jen at Steenky Bee. How saintly is she? I shall erect (stop that giggling, I can hear you up here) a shrine in her honour. No, in her honor (to honor her Americaness). Hold on a second...there. How's that? I'm sure she'll be thrilled. And I'm sure I'll keep thinking that until the cease and desist notice arrives.

What can I say about Jen that hasn't already been said? I mean, you all saw the Congressional hearings, who didn't? My interview with Larry King, the Barbra Walters special, 60 Minutes. And yes, I would face those contempt charges again. She's worth it. She's more than just a crazy haired blog stalker, she's family. And once our children come of age we'll actually be family. And I meant Reesie and Liam, she still lives in Utah after all.

So the deal is, like all of these things, I'm supposed to nominate 5 others. Now this has proved a little difficult since Her Steenky-ness awarded just about everyone on Technorati, but through various means I managed to block a few personal favourites. So, in no particular order:

1. Tracy at Kaply Inc. For teaching me some of the coolest swear words ever. Your angst and bitterness humble me. I wish I could give you a kidney, but ever since I woke up in that hotel bathtub full of ice in Singapore, well... the less said the better.

2. ciii of The Goat and Tater. Now I'm a little hesitant about giving another man a pink award, but I'm hoping Goat and Tater will like it and he can just pretend it came from Jen or any other woman. And if he could show his appreciation by sending me some of the beer he's brewing...

3. 'That Girl' at Hey You! Remember Me? She writes some pretty amazing stories, and I have this new thing for Southern woman.

4. Apathy Lounge. She needs some love this week. She's a teacher and being treated like one. Check out her banner, way cool.

5. Ellie at Me and You and Ellie. Ellie's got a cool blog that she and two of her friends co-write. I'm hoping she'll poor me a beer one day.

I know, I can stop here, but I'm on a roll now so I have to share the love.

6. Mike from The Newborn Identity because his daughter Maddie's eyes are totally freakin hypnotic. I know, I'm giving another man a pink award, but he's got a daughter so it's all good. And Mike left a comment the other day which made me feel like less of a loser for not being able to edit video. Don't get me started.

7. Jett Superior from All Blogged Up And Nowhere To Go. Just cause she's way cool and her blog kinda intimidates me.

8. Jaime at Gimme the Juice. Go take a look at her banner. Right now!

9. Mary Anna at Random. You need some pink on your blog.

'You need some pink on your blog?' Sorry Mary Anna. Ok. It's like midnight now and I didn't sleep well last night. Can't tell from the quality of my writing. I know, it's a gift. Ok, one last to round out to ten.

10. I Wrote This For You. If you ever need a shot of feel good, check out this site. The guy who writes it lives in South Africa. He has a friend who lives in Japan. The guy in Japan takes photographs of whatever he wants and sends them to the guy in South Africa who writes down something...well, nice. I think the deal is that neither of them know what the other is doing, they just match them up. Maybe you should just check it out before I spoil it any farther.

Alright, I'm propping my head up with a roll of paper towel now so I'm leaving. I think I will invent my own award, so if you weren't included above don't worry, your love is coming soon. It will not be pink. Oh, and it will be mine so I'll freaking nominate EVERYONE and then I'll tell Jen she has to nominate another 20 people to get it and it will be SO COOL!

*And Jen, just in case you think I'm picking on you? If there isn't a video on the below when you check this, come back later.

**And even though I just noticed that I wrote 'on the below,' I'm not changing it!

Pink Death

I'm going to be out most of the morning so I'll be late posting anything. I couldn't leave my legions empty handed though so here's a picture of my niece I stole from my sister's blog.



She is a pretty princess, but make no mistake, she could punch a hole through your chest and eat your brain. And not necessarily in that order.

Daddy, What Happened To Your Blog?

A good question indeed. I had plans yesterday. Big plans. You should be disappointed because it would have been great. You were probably involved. I had a new idea and I was going to call it the Sunday Shout Out. Just look:



Wow, right? Are you feeling a little tingle? Of what might have been? No, not that. Get off your ass for a minute and let the blood flow back into your legs. Better? Good. So Supreme Leader and I took the kids out for a bike ride yesterday. I took the camera and took a bunch of video clips of the monkeys saying cutsie stuff. The plan was to bring it home and feed the video into iMovie and stun you with my brilliance. That was the plan. Sixteen hours later when we finally got home and my knee was literally ON FIRE from riding into a vicious headwind coming in off the Pacific while I was towing a U-haul (child trailer) behind my bike it all fell to pieces. Oh, and when we turned around the wind switched directions and became a vicious outflow on the way back. Did I mention my knee was on fire? Do you know how hard it is to drive with smoke coming off your knee? Totally ruined my riding pants.

Anyway, I might have let my plans get away from me. Time was not on my side. By the time we got home I was exhausted. Once I'd rebounded and the kids were finally in bed I downloaded all my video clips and tried to get them into iMovie. And iMovie turned into a screaming bitch! If you're a PC person, iMovie is a cool Apple program for making your own movies. As long as it recognizes the file you're trying to give it. And therein lay the problem. And me going off the deep end. One of the reasons I love my Mac so much is that, most of the time, you give it something and it just knows what to do. No feeding it drivers for each new thing you want to add or you want it to do. It just does it. Or 99% of the time. So I ran into the 1%, being that it doesn't like the mix of audio & video files that Sony uses. Sony. FUCKING SONY!!! How in the name of all that's holy can you not program for Sony, the giganictest electronics company in the world?!?!?!?! Sure you can get a third party program and convert the video, but I have NO patience for that shit. I'm as patient as my children when it comes to electronics. It should all JUST WORK.

Sorry. I'm better now. So once I figure out all that crap I promise to stun you. It's not looking good at the moment though. Not with two children around during the day and Prime Time gearing up the season premiers. Hell, Life starts tonight. That means I have 3 hours of TV tonight. Woot! Lets make plans for some time around Christmas.

Here, watch this while I sneak away:

Conversations With Liam

Daddy: What happened here? (looking at a map that's been ripped off the wall)

Liam: It was an accident. It was on purpose.

Daddy: It was on purpose?

Liam: No it was an accident. The accident was on purpose.

World War Z

Ok, continuing on with the book theme, this is my newest read...well, along with the six other books I'm reading. It's a library book though so it's jumped to the top of the reading list. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it did not make it onto The Big Read's top 100 list. However, 40 pages in, I have to say it's a good read. If you like pandemics. And zombies.

The book is written as a collection of oral histories from survivors of a world wide zombie epidemic. It's not presented as a Dawn of the Dead type typical zombie story, but as an epidemic caused by a communicable pathogen that causes zombie-like symptoms. The interviews are done with people from all walks of life and from all over the world and the path of the disease is followed through their stories. As I said, I'm only 40 pages in, but so far I love it.

After all of the excitement this morning... sorry, yesterday over the 100 Books list, I'm thinking of doing my own list. Not necessarily of books I think you should read, but more of books that I've read and loved and why. I love book lists, but they always tend towards classics or the English Lit version of what you should read. Let me rephrase that. They tend towards, IF YOU DIDN'T READ THIS THEN YOU'RE AN ILLITERATE FOOL AND PROBABLY INBRED. Who needs that? Yes, there are books that you should read. Not because if you don't you'll be a lesser person for it, but because there are some books that touch on so many other works you have read and you may not even realize it until you do. And not only other books, but movies, TV, plays, cartoons, you name it. When you go the whole, READ THIS DAMMIT route you turn it into homework. Maybe you can get a person to start reading one of those books, but are they going to enjoy it? Or are they just going to push through it to say that they've read it, or worse, give up.

I'm not saying The Big Read list is one of those, really, I just went off on a tangent. And now I'm sitting in front of my computer looking at the time and wondering what the hell I was getting at and how do I wrap this up because there's a big warm bed (with a small warm person in it) and a stack of books beside it that I'd like to go read. Ok, here's the thing. I read a lot of other peoples lists today and I heard many people, both bloggers and commentors, making excuses for not having read the list. The list is a suggestion. The National Endowment For The Arts isn't telling you you're dumb because you haven't read these books. It's saying that these are some amazing books and we think you would really enjoy them. But you also have lives, jobs, CHILDREN, and that is a pretty steep list. If you have only read a couple, or even none, so what. You're not dead yet, you still have time. And hey, maybe you didn't like anything that was on that list. Maybe you only like science-fiction. Or Danielle Steele. So what. In the end, I think all that really matters is that you do read. And if you have children, go read to them. Because that is even more important.

*Are you wondering how you got here from a review of book about zombies? Me too.

100 Books

I found this on Unmitigated this morning and I love books so I had to do it. I've read 32 of the 100 books and have seen quite a few of the others as movies. One thing I find interesting in these lists is what gets left out. I found that this list seemed to favour books that have been adapted to film. And Jane Austen. Whatever, lists are always biased to whoever makes them up, regardless of whether it was done by a single person or a group.

"The Big Read is a USA National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline (or color) the books you LOVE .

Share this list in your blog, too, if you like."

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (and from the 10th grade I wanted to name a daughter Scout until that bitch Demi Moore screwed it up for me)
6 The Bible (Um, I read the first half. Do I get a half point? I have read the Koran and recommend it to anyone, just to glimpse the other side of the fence, so to speak. And it's really short)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (many versions of the movie, thanks wifey!)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Complete? No, but a lot)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (movie a million times, thanks mom! Oh, and mom can totally recite the first paragraph. Possibly more. She's got skills)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen (don't think I've actually read an Austen book but dear GOD the movies! I joke, but I have a man crush on Colin Firth so it's all good)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (his earlier books were much better, where are they? The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, I mean, just the name!)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (no, but the Gables are actually in my country)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (no, but a lot of other Atwood)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (I defy you to find a better closing line, the best)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (still on my shelf unfinished)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (seriously? That's it? This man is a genuis)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (good, but where's A Short History of Nearly Everything?)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (started it...)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (There are some amazing Japanese writers out there, how about some whose books weren't turned into movies?)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (was read TO me, does that count?)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (no, but I did read Wind, Sand & Stars)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Oops, forgot to underline favs. My children are tired of being ignored though so there's no going back. Maybe I'll make my OWN list. Oooooo!

PS. If you do this and copy my list for your own blog, don't be a loser like me and forget to take out some of the comments like I did with Middle Aged Woman's list. Hopefully I got them all before you've read this.

Not Sure What This Is Aboot

Ok, I've been trying to behave myself and only post once a day like everybody else, but... I just can't. I gotta be me. If I don't get these things down they just disappear. Or I find something I wrote down a week ago and it's just not that funny anymore. This way you can suffer the unfunny stuff RIGHT AWAY! Like a few days ago I had to send Liam up to his room for some infraction I can't even remember now. To show me how angry he was about this he stripped his bed and threw all the sheets and blankets on the floor. Apparently this was not enough so he stripped off all of his clothes as well. Then he wandered over to our bedroom and peed on my brand new Salman Rushdie book. Now I don't mind if he doesn't like Rushdie's writing, but I think he should read the book before making such a strong statement.

Continuing on with Liam's anger management issues, Supreme Leader banished him to his room yesterday afternoon for some reason. His protests stalled on the stairs and he needed some assistance getting to his room. I escorted him the rest of the way and tried to talk him down. I patiently explained why he had been banished and that we still loved him. He responded, "I'm rubbing nasty snot on you!" And he did. And he had a lot.

Later on in the afternoon the boys and I were playing in the living room. Daddy was hiding under a blanket while the boys dove off the love seat on top of me. At one point the screaming got a little too loud and since dinner was quickly approaching I told them we needed to relax now because it was quiet time. Then I threw off the blanket and found my little angels jumping naked from love seat to sofa and back again. I said, "Hey, quiet time is not naked time!" They thought this was funny as hell and started chanting "Quiet time is naked time!" I'm hoping my little talk with Connor holds and he doesn't start singing this at kindergarten today.

And finally, a little something special for some 'special' people.

Shaking Hands & Kissing Babies

Stop making excuses and take the damned picture or I will annihilate your entire planet!

(whispered) Sir, this is good PR. Remember we're trying to put a good face on the Empire.

Why can they not just fear me?



Pic by lorax_2112 (flickr)

Spiderman, Girls & Pick A State

There's no real point to an intro here, just press play and keep your hands away from the screen.



Connor discovered he could put his foot on his head and demanded, DEMANDED I take pictures. And while a picture is worth a 1000 words, nothing truly demonstrates the insanity of your children like video. More words than you really ever wanted.

If you'd be interested in having a five year old for the weekend please email me.

*Mamadawg, I guess you'll be going with Trooper now unless LOML likes younger men and can wait for Liam.

What's Your Thing?

Have you ever...acquired something, as a gift or whatever that you really didn't want and thought would be totally useless but ended up being something you couldn't live without now? This is mine.



I KNOW! Sexy, isn't it. I didn't get this because I'm a professional boxer or am involved in any type of sport that requires dental protection, I got it because my dentist told me I was grinding my teeth. At first I was all like, "Sure dude, and I hope that helps pay for your family Christmas in Maui or Whistler." And he's all like, "Dude, your insurance covers it 100%." And I was all like, "Whoa! Sign me up!" Ok, that conversation didn't actually sound like that but you get the idea.

DAMMIT! I ran out of creamer. Coffee sucks with 2%. Sigh.

Ok, so where was I? Oh ya. And now that we're there, let's back up a few years. I used to wake up everyday with really nasty neck and back pain. Like everyday. These caused delightful headaches and made me an all around lovely person to spend time with. Back in 2005, my first week into my new job, my neck seized up so bad I couldn't move. It was horrible. Horribly horrible. It happened again in July of 2007. I make fun of it now, but really, I've never experienced pain like that, ever. I could not move without intense pain. I couldn't lie down, first because it was excruciating to try and second, it would take 15-20 minutes just to get up the nerve to try and get out of bed. It took almost a week of drugs and physio for it to subside and having to sleep sitting up did not help matters. Both times it happened the doctors couldn't really pinpoint why it was happening or what caused it, only that it obviously was.

Then along comes my dentist telling me I'm grinding my teeth and offering me this $1500 mouth guard that, THANK GOD! I didn't have to pay for. And guess what? Pain gone. Gone gone. I started sleeping normally. No neck or back pain. If my dentist was more attractive I damn well might have kissed him.

When I get stressed by anything, like a lot of men, I box it up and ignore it. Unfortunately, I box a little more than the average bear and in the last few years the warehouse has started running out of space. And when you're sleeping, the warehouse doors open. My stress was manifesting itself in the teeth grinding, amongst other things. But the grinding was so bad it was effecting my neck muscles which in turn tried to hand off some work on my back muscles, and so on and so on and so on.

Losing my job recently has put some serious chew marks into the other side of my mouth guard, but all in all, it's still doing its job. And to think that if my insurance company hadn't paid for the damn thing I probably wouldn't have got it and still been suffering. Crazy. So what's your thing?

Will Clean For Sex

Now, I don't generally like to brag, but I'm hoping to get lucky soon and I'm thinking yesterday is gonna see me some action. Supreme Leader had an extended 10 hour shift so it was just the monkeys and me. Walking home from school Connor decided he wanted pancakes for lunch. I tried to suggest some other yummy substitutes but no, he wanted pancakes. Supreme Leader has walked me through it so I gave in to the inevitable and decided to give it a shot. And guess what? I didn't f*ck them up. Kids didn't get sick or anything. Sure they might have been a little darker on one side than the other and the edges were a little weird (have to work on my spatula skills) but they looked and tasted like pancakes. And just before you go thinking I'm a total pansy-ass and was using a mix, betta step back! It was just me and the Joy of Cooking.

And THEN the fever took me. The weather is changing and I decided it was time to clean up the cave before the rains begin. I washed the kitchen floor, the foyer and two out of three bathroom floors. (The en suite has carpet so washing it wouldn't have been a good idea. I know, carpet, but I didn't put it there and in the winter when the floor is cold... not so bad) I washed all three toilets, inside and out. I vacuumed the whole first floor. Spent quality time with the boys working on their writing & colouring skills. Took the kids to the school barbeque. Finally defeated Bowser with Liam in Super Mario Galaxy and got the kids in bed in time to watch The Terminator and Heroes. Oh, and posted. And I think I'm even missing some stuff in there too.

What do you think? Am I going to get lucky? And what happened to the days I would just put on my best Barry White voice and drop a "How you doin'?"

And then today rolled around and things turned...

And nicely segued into some...



Liam and I picked up Connor from school. One wanted to play in the playground before going home and the other didn't. Blows were exchanged. Play time ended. Two little boys screamed at each other the ENTIRE walk home. Daddy surprisingly kept his shit together most of the way home. Even laughed at how exhausted the little monsters were getting. The only time he had to lay down THE LAW was when one of them threatened to throw some type of orange berry at daddy and his pristine white lululemon hoodie. That DID NOT FLY. Why have I become the third person?

Whatever. I enjoyed a quiet (kinda) lunch by myself while the boys continued to shout at each other through their closed doors. Now... well, I was just about to say how everything is fine and we're all getting along but there seems to be a fight brewing over the Wii. Sigh.

Monday Love & Hate

I Had Something To Post This Morning, But After I Saw This...

I could survive for 1 minute, 16 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor

Oh... wait a second... I remembered writing a story about dinosaurs and children a year ago, back when I didn't have any bloggy friends. If you're interested, here it is.

Thanks to [bb-blog]

A Song of Snails

Is that part of a bug in your hand, you ask? Why yes, yes it is. Why is it in your hand? Do you really want to know? I bet you can already guess. I just fished it out of my 3 year old's mouth. He will not admit as to how this insect managed to find its way into his mouth though. And if you look at the picture again you'll notice there's only half a bug there. It must have been fate. Yesterday Ali from Cheaper Than Therapy mentioned her daughter pretending to be a frog and eating a bug and I commented that my kids didn't do that.

Friday night I was sitting in front of the computer reading somebody's blog when I noticed something sticking out of my keyboard. I blew on it thinking it would go away, instead it crawled back inside the keyboard. Ick. I think it might have come from this:


Jen from Steenky Bee had written a very nice post about her mother and then Blogger ate it. I'd been out pruning the garden and sent a pic to her for her mom. Because I'm that kinda nice. *blush* I'm assuming the little bugger fell out of the flower and onto my keyboard. I'm also assuming it's the same guy Liam snacked on. Oh, and Jen asked if she could use the flower picture for her mom's post she's going to re-post... that sentence sucks, but I'm not fixing it. Anyway, if you see this picture on her site, just pretend like you never saw before. Our secret.

Oh ya, and the snail song.



Don't worry if you can't understand the song, I couldn't either. He sang it perfectly clear before the camera came on. Then it was all mumbles. Damn kids.

Food Porn Saturday

Supreme Leader gets a jones for something she wants to eat and it must be eaten. The sooner the better or it's days and days of listening to, "oh, I'd love some ___," or "you know what I'd really love right now?" So today, after grocery shopping, it was dim sum! At our favourite dim sum spot, Sun Sui Wah.

Mmm, taro...


Alternative way of eating a barbeque pork bun...


Consequences of not just picking bun up (bitten tongue)...


Daddy's favourite...


And not for the faint hearted eater, Mommy's favourite...


And one, thank you Steve Jobs for putting video on iPods. Two, would you like a 3 year old?


Now it's a lazy afternoon at home with my extra large double-double (it's a Canadian thing) and a stack of books while I let the TV babysit the kids. Don't judge me.

Gettin' Down On The Island Of Sodor

Connor: (singing) We're busy, so busy, our wheels are spinning round. We're humping and pump-

Daddy: Huffing and puffing, hon.

Mommy: Stop laughing!


*If your child doesn't watch Thomas and Friends, this won't be as funny.

What?

" 'Meconium unlike later feces, is viscous and sticky like tar...' WTF? I'm so not touching that. I have an Empire to run, dammit."


Pic by shay4brains

Life Lessons

Liam: I'm going to be a droid!

Mommy: I'm going to be Boba Fett.

Liam: No! Boba Fett is bad!

Daddy: Well, that's not entirely true, hon. Boba Fett was a free agent, a contractor. Sure he was working for the bad guys when we saw him, but that doesn't necessarily mean he was bad. He could just as well have been working for the Alliance, hell, maybe he did. We get to see very little of him and don't really know his story. Did he have a family to support? Kids to put through college? That's not cheap, you know. Maybe he really hated it, but his love for his children meant he had to make some sacrifices, even if it meant going against his morals. I worked for an organization much like the Imperial Empire. It was soul crushing and I hated it, but it paid the bills and kept a roof over your head. Sure I could have left whenever I wanted, but places like that suck you in with their medical/dental benefits and accrued holidays. Those things are tough to give up, little man. A set up as big as the Empire, the pay was probably bad, but I'll bet the benefits made it worth it. Never underestimate a good benefit plan. And if the have an employee share purchase plan, you jump into that right away! You wouldn't believe how fast those things can add up. Look, Han Solo had a legitimate bounty on his head. A man's gotta pay his dues or pay the price, son. Not everything is black and white. I know you're only three and you've already gone off and found something more interesting in your nose, but these things are important and you might as well start learning them now. This shit's going to start coming at you pretty fast.

Thursday, Thursday

Thursday is losing some of its former magic now that everyday is a weekend. Oh well.

House, And Stay Away From Mine

So like, five minutes into House last night and somebody rings my door bell. WTF? Seriously? Two freakin, I don't know, twelve year olds asking me about energy something or other. I tell them to speed it up since House just came on. Then one of them is all, oh is it the season premiere? Cut the small talk, stupid, what do you want. Then they start asking about getting updates about my home gas bills. Home gas? Motherfucker I'm on electricity! I grab a shoe, whack both in the forehead and then run back to the tv.

Don't interrupt my tv.







What?

Bad Parents

We taught Connor his ABC's a long time ago. Even taught him how to write them. Then we forgot about it. Oops. Seems in between that time and kindergarten he kinda fell behind with his writing skills. Computers? Kid can write code in his sleep. PC or Mac. Unfortunately his teacher is not so impressed by this. Philistine.

Ok, not so cool. His teacher was actually kind of concerned about it since it was putting him well behind his classmates. We spent the weekend buying new books and coming up with a new 'quiet time' schedule so we can work on this. It must have helped since his teacher noticed a marked improvement over last week. I think part of this is probably just him overcoming his shyness and relaxing a bit. This was the second day in a row I dropped him off and didn't have to convince him I was indeed coming back.

*And now we flash forward in time to a whole new day where hopefully I can squeeze this post out. How is it that I have so little time now that I'm unemployed? I have 40+ extra hours a week and I feel busier than I was when I was working. I don't get it. I've started getting up early again so I can get some quiet time to myself. This has only worked for the last two days since it's so easy to just ignore that alarm and keep sleeping. Mmmm, warm bed. Probably be damn near impossible to get up once the rains start and it gets cold.

Oh ya, Connor. So school is getting better. He's not dragging his feet all the way now and he's actually starting to enjoy himself. Yesterday the teacher had set up an aquarium so once we got to class I was no longer needed. His first response to mommy when she asks him what kind of day he had is usually, "I had a bad day," though I think that's just routine now. After he did it yesterday he proceeded to talk for 10 minutes straight about the gingerbread man they worked on in class.

His writing is still weak, though mostly because he has the attention span of a fruit fly when we're working on it. I feel like lobotomizing myself with a pencil every time we sit down at the table. What makes it worse is that I can totally see a younger version of me in him and I'd love to go back in time and kick that younger me in the ass. With Connor, if it doesn't involve WWII era planes he just doesn't care about it. Throw into the mix that his fingers are weak from not being used for writing (strong aptitude with a Wii controller though) and that he's a lefty (parents are not)...sigh.

On the bright side, Liam is benefiting from all of our failures with his brother. Liam is also blessed with patience and will sit down all by himself and play contently for a long time so we're not too worried about him. Also, the kid is like Rain Man when it comes to puzzles. Bernadette wanted to get him a 100 piece Iron Man puzzle on the weekend but I thought that would be a little much, he's only three. So we got him the 24 piece one and he finished in under two minutes.



Well, today is a brand new day. Full of fresh and exciting new ways to screw up my children.

Snails

Untitled from Zoo Keeper on Vimeo.

Got Ink?

So I've been bitching a lot lately about how much I want a digital SLR. About how much better my pictures would look if I had one. About how good other people's blogs look because of the great pictures they took with their nice big cameras. I even found some extra money I'd been saving that I'd actually forgotten about that would have easily paid for one. I carefully prepared a sales pitch for Supreme Leader backed with weeks of subtle hints (she's shaking her head as she reads this) and "hey, look at this!" Feeling cocky and infallible I went in for the kill. "Maybe we should pay down some debt first. Besides, we're still paying for for your dragon."

DOH!

And she's right, as much as I hate to admit it. The dragon in question is a full back tattoo I started working on last September and finished back in May. It took almost 24 hours of work and stretched over 5 sessions. Two hours of driving each way and pain in the ass border line-ups every single time. All the work was done by Aaron Bell of Slave to the Needle in Seattle, Washington.

Supreme Leader and I went down in July of 2007 for a consultation and then we started work the next month after the drawing was done. This was taken on September 7th, a few days after my first session. This is five straight hours of work.



The whole family went down for the first session. Supreme Leader took the boys to the zoo while I hit the needle. We didn't realize just how long the first one was going to be. I think Bern was ready to let me walk back to Canada before I told Aaron we'd have to quit. (If you read about the trip, I don't mention the tattoo because I was planning on surprising my family with it)

Ok, second session, October 2007. Six hours under the needle. SIX HOURS of being stabbed with tiny needles, yee ha! This session was all filling in scales and shading.



Session three, December 2007, 16 hours in. Finally got some colour after two sessions of black. Aaron still hadn't decided what colour the head was going to be at this point.



February 2008, session 4. Lots of colour. This was another five hour session and Aaron actually wanted to push through and finish it off. He thought he only had about two hours of work left to finish off the eyes, teeth, claws and spikes, but I couldn't do it. I was in agony.



This is my fourth tattoo so the pain wasn't anything new. The size and amount of work required was though. Even though I was going a month between sessions and the surface skin would be totally healed it was still very sensitive. The first session was long and hurt, but no more than I'd expected. In fact I was a little surprised by what did hurt. Bony areas like the spine and shoulder blades hurt like I figured they would, but the fatty bits like my love handles? Holy shit! I have an old tattoo on my right hip which is only about... 3 inches below where the dragon ends. The difference in pain, even at such a short distance, was day and night. And the ribs? I don't know how people get their ribs done. I could not do it, not a chance. The areas where the dragon's claws and legs wrap around the sides was hell.

Anyway, every time we started new work it hurt more than the time before and it did it right from the start. You don't realize how much blood you lose either. Every time I'd get up off the table my legs would be shaking and I felt dizzy. Then I'd jump into my car and onto the I-5 for my two hour ride back home. That was safe.

Last session was back at the end of May and was only about two hours. This picture was taken about two weeks ago. The skin on my back decided to let me know just how unhappy it was with the rough treatment and wasn't in shape for photos for a long time. If I can get a better shot today I'll replace it.



And that's why I'm stuck with my old camera.

Random Sunday Thoughts

Nothing particular today, just a little of this and a little of that, but more of that than this. First off, found this on Sleep Deprivation Ninja's page. Much funnier if you use Twitter.



(Sorry about that overlap but I don't know how to fix it and don't really care to)

Second, my six year old niece Mikayla playing some Metallica.



I think her best work was when she covered Nirvana's In Bloom.

Third, what the hell happened to Helen Hunt? We saw "And Then She Found Me" last night and she looks like she just got out of Guantanamo. Was she sick or something?



I spent much of the early 90's in love with Jaime Buckman, but she had some meat on her bones. Probably helped that she showed off her belly button a decade before it was cool (and I love belly... never mind).



Fourthly (sorry, there was only supposed to be three), have you ever checked out your drafts? I just clicked on them to see what I still had open and Holy Hannah-Banana, Bat Man, there's like a 100 in there! Easily distracted?

PS. If Colin Firth was a choice on one of Two Dogs Running's special choice posts, I'd totally pick him.

Just Do It

Take 5 minutes and go over to The Big Picture and look at these photos, you won't regret it. I promise.

Pre-School, Day Two: Disillusionment

For quite some time now Connor and Liam have pretended to be Spiderman and Venom when they're doing their super hero thing. Connor is Spiderman and Liam is Venom. This started when we bought Connor a Spiderman learn-to-read book. It was meant for very young children so there's not a lot of emphasis on how bad the bad guys actually are. Connor decided early on he would be Spiderman so Liam had no one left to chose but Venom. Whatever, it made them happy.



For the past few months the boys have been venturing into the... I don't know, in-between cartoon channels? Not the toddler channel and not the big kid cartoons but the stuff in the middle. Know what I'm saying? Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is that they've been watching super hero cartoons. They are kid versions of super heroes, Spider Boy, Super Boy, Bat Boy, etc. On the flip side they're also seeing kid versions of the bad guys.

Tuesday night we get them in bed by 8pm so we can watch Fringe... I mean, so they can get a good nights sleep. Because that's important. Ten minutes in (after the melting plane passengers, yum!) Liam walks in. Connor had done the same thing two minutes earlier so I didn't even wait for his excuse, I just pointed towards his room and gave him a stern, "back to bed." Then the tears and unintelligible yelling started (unintelligible but always the same. You're a bad man. Dude! I SO know that. Get your ass back to bed). Supreme Leader takes him back to bed and talks him down. I would have. During the first commercial.

Supreme Leader: What's wrong honey?
Liam: Venom's a bad guy! He's not a super hero at all!

My poor broken hearted little man.



On the bright side, he has a new friend, Buddy.



What the hell is that, you ask? Why yes, it does look like stuffing, doesn't it?



Stuffing from the back of a 50's kitchen chair. A chair being held together with duct tape and hope. A chair being used to replace the dinning room chair that broke just like dad said it would if we kept leaning back on it instead of just sitting and eating OUR GODDAMNED DINNER LIKE WE'RE SUPPOSED TO!!!

Oops! Where did THAT come from?

From The Bathroom, Just Now

Liam: I AM NOT FULL OF POO!

Maybe not, kiddo, but your daddy sure is. (laugh track)

A little later...

Thump. Thump, crash!

Connor: What happened, daddy?

Me: I was running upstairs and my foot slipped off the step.

Connor: (looking behind his father who is sprawled across the stairs) But where is it?

Me: My foot? At the bottom of my leg.

Connor: But where is it?

Me: My foot slipped off the stair, honey, it didn't fall off.



Who's got nothing today? That would be me.

Socks from Marc Johns.

Thursday

Not where I'd planned to go today, but that's ok. If you hear this before you start work this morning, and I hope you do, play it in your head as you're walking into work. Cause you're a bad mother...

Pre-School, Hurricanes & Representin'

Yesterday was Liam's first day of pre-school.



This is Liam's first day of pre-school from 370 kilometres (230 miles) above the earth.*



This is Liam showing he'll be ready for his first gang.



Peace out, bitches.



*Ok, this is actually a shot of Hurricane Ivan (2004) from the International Space Station, but really... If you want to see some amazing shots of hurricanes from orbit, check out The Big Picture.

To Utah & Cali, Love Canada

You know who you are.

Bet This Guy Doesn't Get Man-Cold

We take the kids out to the airport fairly often. They love watching the planes land and they get to run around and get some fresh air. Minus the jet exhaust, but you know what I mean. Every time we are there, and I mean EVERY time we're there we see this guy. We park on an access road that goes around the airport and down the length of the main runway. This guy is out there riding it all the time. And yes, he's sitting in a toilet on wheels. A toilet on wheels with flames painted on it. Obviously he doesn't have any legs since he's sitting in the bowl.





I've never spoken to him because he doesn't stop long enough for that, only long enough to turn around and head back the other way. Sorry the pictures suck, but I was hiding behind my van since I figured it would look a little creepy running out onto the road to take shots of a disabled guy. Instead I decided to be even creepier and clandestinely do it from behind my man-van.

So while I slump here, fever ridden and bleeding from every orifice, wondering why nobody loves me and wallowing in my own pity I know that as cold and windy as it is today, this guy is out there right now. And while I should take some kind of lesson from that I think I'll still keep being a whiny-bitch and annoy my wife, cause it's what I do.

Rock on, brother.

**Retraction-I must apologize to the makers of Benedryl whom I mocked yesterday. Turns out that whatever the pill was that I took, it wasn't an anti-histamine. It was too big to be birth control, didn't do squat for my headache... whatever, I'm still alive and pretty sure I'm not pregnant.

***Supreme Leader now has man-cold. And no, not stoic mother-cold, MAN-COLD. If you can't be 'em...