matthearn.com

Honkin’ at the honey in front-a ya with the bright eyes.

Hey, we all just had us a baby and whatnot, so posts will be…few. In the meantime, you can always go check out Josephine’s homepage. The latest update is crazy cute.

Josephine-Hearn.com

7:35am. 7 lbs. 11 oz., 20.75 inches.
Everyone is doing GREAT!

UPDATE: 7:00: heading to the OR in 10. Sarah’s mood is “freaked out, man.”

UPDATE: 6:13: the nurse is having difficulty finding a useful vein in Sarah’s arm, mostly because Sarah is a ZOMBIE. Sarah: “Braaaaaiiiiiinnnnns…”

Up at 4:30; at hospital at 5:30; going through medical history. T-minus 90 minutes, people! Who has an iPhone and is ready for a baby? Moi.

Updates throughout the morning.

Crazy day for baseball today. First, Manny Ramirez suspended 50 games for using a banned substance. MLB didn’t specify what was used, but Manny explains:

“Recently I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was OK to give me,” Ramirez said. “Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy. Under the policy that mistake is now my responsibility.”

Tough break for the Dodgers, who are running away with the NL West right now. Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far the other way? I fully support throwing the book at guys who are popping greenies and squirting HGH under their skin, but if a doctor in good standing gives someone a medication for a health issue, perhaps that could be taken into account? Of course, if Manny receives any special treatment (he almost certainly won’t), Phillies fans would rightly be murderously angry over J.C. Romero’s treatment in an almost identical situation.

In sadder news, Danny Ozark, Phillies manager in the 70s when they were pretty darned good, passed away this morning at age 85.

To brighten the mood, here’s a touching piece on Stan Musial. It’s from last summer, but I just found it today and wanted to make sure my homies saw it. I never knew much about Stan, but over the last few months have been learning more, and he’s rapidly becoming my favorite “Non-Philadelphia Ballplayer That I Never Actually Saw Play.” I even selected his batting stance as the one I use for my MLB2008 “The Show” 3rd baseman (who obviously throws right, but bats left, like Jesus Chase Utley).

Stan’s somebody I would have liked to ask my grandfather (a lifelong baseball fan, as well as a darned fine semi-pro player in the 1930s) about before the Alzheimer’s. Too bad.

Hilarious account of a dude doing his first Broad Street Run. A braver soul than I. Also he apparently murdered a fellow runner:

I like cars. Specifically, I like fast cars. It goes without saying, therefore, that I’ve never really owned one, because if I did I would be imprison’d and/or dead. But because I’m, frankly, reaching for ideas today (24 hours until GO BABY), here is a list of cars that I’ve had. (Not necessarily owned, but cars for which I have been the primary driver.)

• 

  The Barge

  1972 Pontiac Grand Ville. This was my “first,” the car I drove almost exclusively after I got my license in 1994. We called it “The Barge,” because it is quite literally the largest sedan I’ve ever seen. It handled like a sponge, but had a HUGE engine and could hustle. It lasted until early 1996, my senior year, when the engine problems finally killed it, and my dad sold it to a guy who wanted to take the massive 454 engine block, rebuild it, and put it in a GTO. I still have dreams in which I’m driving this car.


• 

  The Benzo

  1983 Mercedes Benz 240D. After The Barge died, I got to drive The Benz, off-and-on, until the end of senior year. It was a nice car, built like a tank, but it had a diesel engine with all the acceleration of a mule. Gas mileage was good, but the car would not go faster than 83 miles per hour, and it took like 3 minutes to get there. Had a nice Benz suspension, though, so it handled nice. It met a sad end in the summer of ’96, not long before I went off to college, when my sister bounced it off another car and a rock.


• 

  The Saturn

  1996 Saturn SL2. My mom purchased this while I was away on Senior week in 1996, for the simple reason that I had the Benz in Rehoboth, my dad had his white Saab 9000, and Mom needed wheels. Also my sister was getting her license, so they really needed a third car again, even with me going off to school. After my 2 year sentence at Peabody Conservatory, I transferred to UD and needed a car to get to jobs/rehearsals/gigs, and my sister went off to college herself, so the Saturn was transferred to me. It was my faithful ride through three years of college, until I traded it in on my truck.


• 

  Mine was black.

  2002 Ford F150. Another vehicle I dream of at least once a month; I loved this truck. I had just graduated and had my first real job, so I felt I deserved a high-end automobile; to that end, I went to the Ford dealership and had mine custom-designed. Mostly this was because I wouldn’t drive one with an automatic transmission, and apparently no dealer in the country had a V8 available with a stick, but this meant I was able to pick every option I wanted, down to the hot stereo, 4×4, color, and pimpin’ alloy wheels. It was a fantastic truck, but after a while, gas prices were going way up, and my wife was having to drive all over the state for her job in a rapidly aging Mazda. So, we traded in the truck for a brand-new Honda Accord, and I started driving Sarah’s old car.


• 

  Izzy

  1998 Mazda Protege. This car served us well for 10 years, by far the longest of any car we’ve had. Sarah got it in late 1997 when she was driving down to see me at Peabody every few weeks, and continued to be the primary driver until I took it over in 2005. It was cramped, underpowered, automatic transmission’d, and handled like a lawnmower. Sarah was sad to see it go, but when I got my hands on the Saab, we gave it to a car donation company, who sold it and gave the proceeds to the Choir School.


• 

  Current Whip

  1997 Saab 9000 CSE Turbo. Actually an older car than the Mazda I gave up for it, but manifestly bigger, and faster. Also safer; it’s got airbags all over the place, and weighs nearly as much as my truck did. Plus it’s a stick-shift, so I feel like a man again. I managed to acquire it through the benevolence of my father; he bought my mom a new car a while back, but wasn’t offered a significant amount in trade-in, so he kept both his Saabs, the 9000 as the daily commuter, and the 900 convertible as his “man about town” car. When he started working from home, he no longer needed a commuter car, and donated it to, um, me. EPIC WIN!

Those are my cars. What do you be drivin’?

For those of us who are tired of hearing about Swine Flu and how it’s a global frickin’ pandemic (thanks, cable news!), GraphJam comes to the rescue:

Go Maine!

If you ignore the fact that the federal government still refuses to recognize gay marriage, 5 out of 50 states now allow it (plus the District of Columbia). We’re getting there, people. We totally are. Sadly, Delaware may take a little while, but at least last month the General Assembly shot down a constitutional amendment to ban civil marriage, so my home state’s not entirely bass ackwards.

Antibiotics suck. Not only is Charles still fighting an ear infection, the Amoxycillin gave him a yeast infection on his, um…how shall I put this? On his nards. His berries. His junk. This is absolutely something we wanted to be worrying about 4 days before having our second child.

The in-laws were kind enough to take him to the doctor on Monday, who diagnosed his various ailments and gave him a different antibiotic (hopefully one that won’t give him explosive diahrrea, another fun side-effect of the Amoxycillin), along with a topical cream for Dong and The Twins (Alphonse and Mortescue, he calls them (not really)). It seems to be doing the job, but the challenge is to get him to take the medicine, because even with grape flavoring, it mainly tastes like nasty cough syrup and just a wee soupçon of brake fluid. Also any ministrations directed at his groin are met with resistance, defined as “a lot of screaming and flailing of legs,” which means that every time I put the ointment on his Wang and the Chungs, I get kicked in the head. Repeatedly.

For those of you that aren’t parents, this is what being a father is like: every day, your offspring will do something so unbelievably cute that you can barely stand it. Also, every day, you’re going to have to do something gross like put lotion on your son’s balls. That is parenting, in a nutshell.