matthearn.com

I have decided, unsurprisingly, that I really really really REALLY like hanging out with my son, babbling and tickling and drooling and all that. In a similar vein, I have also discovered that I really really REALLY don’t like showing up to an office every day, during which time I have to go for like 8 hours without seeing my son.

(This is something you sort of have to have kids to understand, but I can probably, in the space of this massive parenthetical aside, make an analogy for my pet-owning readers: imagine you have acquired a pet. A cat, dog, gerbil, whatever. Now imagine that your spouse attempted, for 13 1/2 hours, to squeeze this pet through an orifice on her body that is, normally, much smaller than the pet itself, and in the end they had to actually cut her open to get the pet out because the pet turned out to be ridiculously large. Imagine that this pet is completely unable to fend for itself, and you are required to tend to its every need, including feeding and elimination of poo. Then, imagine that this pet looks just like you. And lastly, imagine that every morning when you wake up, you go into your pet’s room, and he is so happy to see you that he grins from ear to ear and giggles. You can probably begin to grasp the nature of the awesomeness of this.)

So anyway, I think I need to figure out a way in which I don’t have to work anymore. My Plan A, inheriting the Viscountcy of Sidmouth, doesn’t seem to be working out, so I’m trying to figure out a Plan B. Possibilities include:

• Inheriting from actual relatives – a possibility somewhat limited by the fact that I am descended from no one with any wealth to speak of.
• Winning the lottery – In order to do this, I would actually have to play the lottery with some frequency, which is something I can’t bring myself to do.
• Writing a book, or recording a Grammy-winning CD, or something – That still seems like an awful lot of work.

Any ideas? I’m willing to try anything at this point. In fact, if you are interested in having me do some difficult work (political assassinations, wedding planning, etc.) that only requires a day or so of work per week but pays exorbitantly, I would entertain any offer.

You should totally call me.

A surprising fact that you may not realize is that I graduated from high school in 1996. Sure, I act like a 4-year-old, but I am in fact 28 years old. We celebrated these facts on Saturday at a 10-year reunion at Costa’s, a Greek place in Wilmington.

Now, I’m not much of a drinker (cough, cough), but to be on the safe side we dropped our little boy off at Sarah’s parents and rented a hotel room near the restaurant for the evening. So we checked in with some friends at about 5pm and hung out, watched a little football, and walked over to the bar at around 7:45 (trying to be fashionably late, and all).

We were, of course, among the first people there. Well played, Trebek. I rented a Heineken from the bar and began the chatting. There’s no need to come up with a complete replay, but here are the highlights:

• Hearing TJ joke about the time that he caught his jacket on fire in chem lab on a Bunsen burner being operated by me and Josh. In 1993, it was not funny, as TJ seemed likely to kill us. 13 years later, it was life-threatening funny, as we had been drinking.
• A nice gentleman whose name I won’t reveal here, let’s call him “Kansas,” passed out in the men’s bathroom covered in excrement (whether it was his own or he had somehow acquired someone else’s was unclear). He later reappeared and got in a cab, but not before Brian touched him. I will never shake Brian’s hand again, and I recommend none of you do either.
• My wife decided that, as the party wound down, we should go to Mikimoto’s. She doesn’t like sushi. HW is remarkably unpredictable after between 2 and 7 cocktails. As it turned out, they were closed anyway, so we went to the Washington Street Alehouse and rented some more beer and met some more friends.

The next morning was tragic and painful, but we applied emergency McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches and felt much better. And that was about that. Not much of a story, really. Possibly because I don’t remember much.

I feel James Lileks’s pain, I really do. He probably wouldn’t believe me; his response would be something like “That’s ridiculous. You wear XL. Everything is XL or bigger,” which is true. But there’s XL, and then there’s XL.

For example: I have long arms and a fairly sizeable neck, like a football player crossed with a spider monkey. As a result, I buy shirts of neck size 17 1/2 inches, with 36 inch sleeves. Just finding shirts like that is a major challenge; most shirts are built such that the sleeve length is exactly twice that of the neck, so a 17 1/2 usually has 34 or 35 inch sleeves, depending on maker, leaving my wrists exposed, which leads to much tut-tutting from Goodwife Smith next door. (I think they already believe I’m a witch. I don’t wish to be branded a trollop as well.) When I do find a shirt that fits my extremities, however, I’m faced with another sad fact: major clothiers seem to assume that if you have a 17 1/2″ neck and 36″ sleeves, you have a 72″ waist. It’s like wearing a tent with buttons. I end up tucking 2 or 3 yards of material into the back, which is basically a signal to everyone “I BUY FAT MAN CLOTHING.” Luckily, my mother-in-law is able to remove most of this extra material and make my shirts look non-ridiculous.

My size problems exist with pants as well, though. I have an inseam of 34 inches. Luckily, pretty much every store carries pants in that length. Unfortunately, they tend to stock them up to only a certain waist-size, which is invariably smaller than what I wear. It’s as if the buyers make a certain assumption: people heavier than 225 pounds do not exist in their reality. Anyone who is tall enough to wear a 34″ inseam is also going to be built like bloody tent peg and require a 30″ waist. Anyone who needs a 38″ or 40″ waist, well, they can’t possibly be more than 5’8″ tall, so we’re not going to offer those pants in anything longer than a 30″ inseam. My favorite store shopping experience on earth is the mecca that is Target, but I can’t buy pants there. Their 34″ inseam pants stop at 34″ waist. The only things I can get in 36″ or 38″ waists are 32″ and 30″ inseams, respectively, and it’s getting too cold out for capri pants (though my ankles do look stellar in them).

I won’t go into great depth about hats, but there’s a certain fact that I wish hatmakers would realize: when a person’s head gets wider, it also gets deeper. I can get most ballcaps on, at the very end of their adjustment band, but they sit atop my head like a bloody beanie. Two notable exceptions: a John Deere hat that I bought in Texas many years ago that’s big enough to hold a moderately-sized watermelon, and an NRA hat that I got back in college when I joined for a year. (Don’t ask.)

All of this is frustrating, but compounding the situation is the fact that I appear to be on the cusp of “big and tall” status. If I go to an actual “big and tall department,” everything is WAY big. Like, 48″ waists and 40″ inseams. Ridiculous, gigantor stuff. Plus, it’s all made by Dickie’s, and looks like something my grandfather would have dismissed as “awful conservative.”

One shining beacon in the darkness has been Old Navy, which James doesn’t like because it’s Staggeringly Hip, but which I like because they have pants and shirts aplenty in my varying sizes. At this point I get 90% of my decent clothing there.

Now if I could just convince Nike and Adidas that some of the people walking the earth have feet requiring more than a C-width shoe.

I’ve decided I should get a job with Microsoft, or some other large company, to come up with better error messages. The old “fatal error: 0x03F33B458C out of memory” just isn’t cutting for me, because it doesn’t have much meaning to the average computer user.

“Fatal error? Am I going to die?” they ask, and I have to reply, “No, it’s just fatal to the program.”

“Oh. Am I going to have to buy a new computer?”

And I weep.

No, what we need are error messages that convey the true importance of the problem at hand. Here are a few suggestions I’d like to make:

I think this would be totally way better than the current messages, right? At least it’s entertaining. 404’d!

Whew. Things seem to have calmed down a wee bit in my office, and I think I finally caught most of the way back up on my mail and various tasks. By which I mean, I’m only like 2 years behind at this point. As the old saying goes, “God put me here on earth to perform a number of tasks. Right now I’m so far behind that he’s probably going to smite me and give my tasks to someone competent.” Or whatever.

Does God still smite people, or are we assuming that it’s just dumb luck and poor medical care? Discuss.

So: Texas, and trip thereunto. I had purchased plane tickets back in June, not long after Charles popped out, and long before we realized an important fact about him: at about 6pm every day, he gets moderately cranky and displeased with his lot in life, mostly because he’s tired, and partially because of the whole Hezbollah thing. Our flight down was, of course, scheduled for 5:20pm. The flight back up: 6:25pm. Peak Charles Sadness Time.

Even better, we decided it would be best to fly into Austin, to which there are no direct flights from Philadelphia. So we were dealing with layovers, and plane changing, and the distinct possibility that a baggage handler would lose the base to our carseat, which would force us to secure Charles to the backseat with chewing gum and strands of hair.

Charles was, of course, a perfectly good boy. Sarah and I were, of course, sobbing wrecks. Imagine the last time you were on an airplane with a screaming infant, and how annoyed you were at being trapped in an enclosed space with it; now, multiply that stress by a factor of ten. Luckily, for most of the flights Charles didn’t make a peep. This did little to alleviate our stress level. Scotch, however, did.

We discovered at some point that airlines routinely don’t assign passengers to the first 2 rows of coach class, reserving them for who knows what, and when you get to the gate you can request to be placed in them, if you get there early enough. So we did. On the first flight, from Philadelphia to Austin, we were in a three person row with some poor soul who clearly had done the same thing, but hadn’t counted on the presence of a small infant, and was NOT pleased about it. He avoided eye contact with us at all times, except for once when glanced over his way and he immediately poked himself in the eye with the safety instruction booklet.

Charles must have sensed the animosity somehow, because he tried to pee on the guy. We were doing a quick in-cabin diaper change (simpler than carrying him all the way to the back to use the john), and Charles decided to let fly just as Sarah was starting to peel the diaper back. We caught it just in time, although I did get pee on my jeans. This is something I’ve grown to accept about fatherhood: I will, most of the time, smell strongly of urine and rancid milk.

We landed around 10:30 Central time, gathered our luggage (packing light is not an option where infants are concerned), and made our way to the rental car counter, which was right by the baggage return. Handy, that. Even better, the rental cars were parked right across the street! We didn’t have to take a bus driven by a toothless drunk to get to our car? I nearly wept for joy, which meant I dropped a suitcase on my toe, which caused me to weep fo’ realz.

We loaded up the car, and I drove while Sarah and Charles slept. The drive was about 2 hours, and was actually rather pleasant, except for when a deer ran out into the road and I discovered that the rental-car model of the Pontiac Grand Prix is not equipped with anti-lock brakes. Scared the bejeebers out of Sarah; Charles didn’t even wake up. I wasn’t able to ascertain the opinion of the deer on the situation, but I’m guessing it was “What the heck, man? It’s midnight! What are you doing out? Jeepers. I hate humans.”

We arrived in Mason late that night and got set up in Sarah’s parents house, which was originally constructed in the late 19th century, with additions and outbuildings built over the next century or so. It unfortunately burned a bit back in the 90s, but has been almost completely restored to its former glory. Sarah’s parents have been working hard on it for some time, taking up to 2 months out of every year to drive down and paint/decorate/repair. I myself spent a couple afternoons helping Charles the Elder rebuild the old fence that keeps cows from wandering onto the homestead.

The morning after our arrival, Sarah’s uncle Fred came over to greet us, and he and Sarah’s dad and I went out to do rancher things. We “moved water,” which means moving around the massive irrigation sprinklers that Fred uses to keep his fields moist in the drought that they’re currently experiencing, and also stopped by the cattle auction to watch them, well, auction cattle. It’s pretty much what you think; they bring a bunch of cattle in, and a guy is rattling off a patter that pretty much sounds like “heeeeeeey-batter-batter-batter-look-at-that-heifer-ain’t-
she-sweet-she’s-got-a-nice-wiggle-do-I-hear-50-no-60-no-that-was-just-a-
twitch-I-guess-how-about-55-then-okay-that’s-totally-cool-now-60-65-70-
okay-sold-to-the-fat-guy-in-the-hat-no-the-other-fat-guy-no-you-in-the-
red-yes-you-you-just-bought-a-cow-you-idiot-etc.” It’s pretty neat, and they had barbecue brisket available for lunch.

The following day we stuck close to the house, because it was well over 100 degrees outside. I spent most of it shooting at things with Sarah’s dad, trying not to embarrass him too outrageously, but what can I say? If I can see it, I can hit it. I am that awesome. You do not want to step to this.

Wednesday we went into town and did a tour of the local shops. The town square has hit some kind of boom; when we were last in Mason, 3 or 4 years ago, there were one or two small antique shops and a few other specialty stores. Now, the stores completely ring the courthouse square, and we went into most of them so Sarah could buy presents for people that she likes. Luckily, Sarah doesn’t really like that many people, so it was a quick trip.

Thursday, we went to nearby Fredricksburg for more shopping and exploring. Fredricksburg is an interesting place; I sort of describe it as a mini-Austin. It caters to a sort of artsy, hippie crowd, and has a fair amount of upscale shops and art galleries and the like. It also has the Chester Nimitz Museum, celebrating the town’s favorite son. We bought a few things, and went to a hot dog place and had some seriously loaded down 1/4 pound dawgs. Mine: chili, cheese, and onions. I gassed up the car real good on the way home, if you catch my drift.

Friday was a travel day, heading to Waco, where Sarah’s grandparents live. We made a stop on the way at Harry’s in San Saba to purchase me some righteous new boots, as well as a stop at Weber’s gun store in Temple (also notable for being Sarah’s mom’s hometown) because I wanted a new pocket knife. We also went to a Dairy Queen for grub. The trip took, with all the stops, about 6 hours, during which Charles slept like a marathon-winner. That boy sure does love the car, I tell you what.

The time in Waco was spent visiting with family and relaxing; Saturday night was Papaw’s big 80th birthday party, so all of Sarah’s aunts and uncles and cousins were there, including Kelli and her husband Brandon and their Brood (the capital B is for big; they have 4 kids, all born within a year of each other, due to the magic of triplets and extreme virility).

We went to church on Sunday, and then just hung out on Monday and Tuesday, watching TV and playing with Charles. Wednesday we flew back home, and that was that. Then I went to work on Thursday and immediately wanted to kill a lot of people.