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Thank SSCBJ for sick days, or personal days, or mental health days, or whatever it was I used yesterday to get out of most of my workday so I could get some bloody sleep. Bejeebers, I was exhausted.
Since Sarah’s doing the Brandywiners show this year, PLUS taking a class in a subject I don’t even begin to comprehend, I’m on Charles duty most of the time, so I’m routinely running a bit ragged. The weekend, which I’ll get to momentarily, nearly killed me.
Sarah had to be out of town most of the weekend at a wedding, so of course I made sure that my weekend was as busy as possible to make everything completely complex. I was singing in a benefit concert Saturday night, which included a Friday night rehearsal, so I had to find someone to watch HRB on Saturday; Craig and Mel jumped all over it, and did a bang-up job keeping him from eating nails and/or one of their cats, for which they are owed one ENORMOUS favor from me. That afternoon I took Charles and my parents to the Brandywiners picnic, at which there was frivolity and beer-drinking, and then sprinted home to try and get Charles to nap so I could shower and pack him up to go to C&M’s.
Of course, he refused to nap. At least, after a while, he stopped screaming, and busied himself trying to disassemble his crib through the combined efforts of mumbling incoherently while shaking the sides and banging his head into the slats as hard as possible. Since he was calm, I showered and changed, then I got him ready, dropped him off, and headed to Archmere Academy in north Wilmington, the site of the benefit, which went very well. Jenny and I sang “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better,” from “Annie, Get Your Gun,” which is inspired completely by a GAP commercial containing Claire Danes. Later we performed “No One Is Alone” from “Into The Woods” with two young people, Brooke and Madsy. It was all good times, and since my stuff was all done in the first act, I got to spend the second act eating and drinking in the lobby with the other people. It was fantastic!
After we were done, I returned to pick up Charles, who was a trouper despite the fact that it was 11pm before we got home, and we both passed out like your dad in the alley behind “Buxom.”
Sunday, we relaxed in the morning, and then went to a pool party at a BEAUTIFUL home near Hagley Museum. It was awesome; the pool was the size of my house, and instead of a diving board, it was just built into the hillside such that it had a stone wall and a diving ROCK. Charles splashed around and drank chlorinated pool water, and Sarah came back from Long Island in time to fling herself off of the diving rock and make everyone giggle.
Finally, we went home and fell asleep, which was just awesome. It was so completely rad. Nevertheless, I woke up yesterday morning STILL exhausted, and so I called in “dead” and went back to sleep. I awoke to attend a couple meetings, and then had time to run some errands, mow the lawn (untouched in three weeks; the neighbors were thrilled), clean the bathrooms (which had become sentient), and even do some woodworking. Good times! Good times.
Tomorrow: I make beer.
Here’s a holla at ye. Let’s start off with: new pictures (just the first 5 are technically “new,” as in posted today). Yay! Yay.
As you are undoubtedly aware, I am what might be most kindly described as “husky,” or, as one of my childhood teachers actually put it, “sturdy.” I wasn’t always this way; in fact, at the time that the childhood teacher knew me, my BMI was probably 2. I was skinny as a rail until college. That’s when I discovered that, without parents around and few athletic opportunities available, I could cut all my classes and sit in my dorm room eating corn pops and taking advantage of The Internet, which was in its infancy (well, toddlerdom) at the time. I gained something like 35 pounds in 8 months, a feat which is normally only duplicated by the best sumo wrestlers.
Ever since, I’ve been in a see-saw battle against my enormous waistline; at the moment I appear to have reached some kind of sad equilibrium in which I get just enough exercise to compensate for my staggering food intake, because I just don’t have it in me to diet anymore. (I can’t even face the low-carb diet now, because the thought of running a mile (which cold sucks) and not getting to eat a donut and/or entire honey ham makes me want to cry.)
Enter the modern technology of holistic wellness, or philosophical weight loss, or hippie diets, or some such type fad. All I know is this guy says he can hypnotize me, via CD, into not stuffing my face with candy I steal from children whom I beat up for their candy. His name is Steven Gurgevich, PhD, and he has a website, so he’s TOTALLY LEGITIMATE. Also he has a name that sounds like a dry heave, which has the obvious effect of throwing anybody off their feed.
It consists of three CDs. The first CD sort of explains everything about the process, which is complex and involves “spirit” and “emotions,” neither of which I’m entirely sure I have, and warns against “hidden saboteurs.” (I like to envision small Englishmen chopping up my fat-burning liver with axes.) The second CD has some tracks with pep talks about breaking down barriers and learning self-control, and the third CD, which apparently is the most important, has the parts I’m supposed to listen to when I wake up, or before meals, or if I accidentally find myself tearing away at the flesh of a squirrel I find on the road because I’ve hypnotized myself so well I didn’t eat for four days.
So far I’ve just listened to the first CD, and here’s what I can tell you: man, it was boring. That’s not to say it wasn’t interesting, but because Dr. Gurgevich is a professional hypnotist, he says everything in a very calm, even tone, and after a while you fall asleep. I can also report that so far it doesn’t seem to be working, because I had to take a break in the first CD to go get Pepper Steak on Rice With Vegetables from the cafeteria. Anyway, I’ll listen to some more of the CDs and let you know if I, for example, spontaneously lose 70 pounds.
If this doesn’t work, I’m going to go with South Bronx Paradise.
Yeah, I was heck of up all hours of the night for work, so we’re going to do a link day. But before we get to that: have you ever listened to a song, divined what you believe the lyrics to be, and think wow, that’s amusing/cool/sublime/sexy/etc., only to find out later that the lyrics AREN’T what you thought, and what they really are isn’t as cool?
I’ve been rather suckered in by Timbaland recently, such that he can release a completely repetitive song entitled “The Way I Are” and I’m immediately listening to my head and singing along. At any rate, during the chorus, Timbaland sings something that sounded to me like:
I’m about to strip
And I’m well-equipped
Can you handle me the way I’m are
The “well-equipped” part always amused me, for some reason; I assumed he was alluding to the massiveness of his wang, which was about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting Keri Hilson. Imagine my dismay when I looked up the lyrics to try and figure out something that Keri sang, only to discover what he’s really saying is:
I’m about to strip
And I want it quick
Can you handle me the way I are
Which is less funny, doesn’t rhyme well, and is just disappointing from every perspective (except I guess from Timbaland’s, since I’m sure he’s raking in unbelievable dough off the single). I was very saddened by the whole thing. Anyway, if you’ve got any examples of similar lyric anomalies, let me know, I’ll be amused by them.
The linkz:
- Best. Headline. Ever.
- What in the heck is this? I am beyond confused.
- Now, THIS guy is really on the ball.
- I don’t know many Canadians, and yet from the ones I’m closest to, this isn’t even remotely surprising.
- And let’s close things down with a quote from Bill Simmons’s latest mailbag. This may be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on the internet:
I want to go to the top of a really tall building, take a leak, finish, zip up, and then have my pee hit the ground. I want my entire pee to be airborne. Man I love beer.
What more needs said?
Well, the beach was delightful. We didn’t get to spend our usual week in Fenwick this year, due to rehearsals and classes and the concert I sang in Balmer last week, so there was sadness and gnashing of teefs, but we had a good time while we were there. Plus, since we weren’t down there for a super-long time, we didn’t have to strap our cargo carrier on the roof, as that is a Hassle. We managed to get up early on the 4th and get on the road by 9:15am, just about the time Charles needed a nap. He didn’t sleep much, unfortunately, but he’s a good traveller anyway so the 2-hour drive wasn’t all that painful.
We arrived around 11, got unpacked, and immediately commenced laying around doing nothing for extended periods of time. Charles discovered the big sunny porch, dragged most of his toys out there, and tried to figure out a way to punch through the screen and fall into the bushes. (He was never successful, thanks to the intervention of Sweet Crying Sainted Baby Jesus.) We watched tennis, grilled steaks, and eventually fell asleep, fat and happy.
Thursday we decided to drag Charles to the beach, despite the ominous skies. He rather liked it. After a while it started to rain, and I was tired of cleaning sand off of Charles, so we hoofed it back to the house and cleaned him up in the pool, which was for him almost as much fun as the ocean. After some ritual hosing out of the orifices of everyone, we went to a seafood place where I ate a plate of food almost as heavy as my son, who yelled a lot, ate everything that got near him, and generally made a big fuss. Our waitress was both Eastern European and scandalously hot.
Friday, Dad and I had intended to go golfing, but it was hot, so we went to the beach instead and left Charles in Sarah’s care, since she’s not really a beach kinda girl (She’s more of a laying-out-by-the-pool kinda girl, as long as she doesn’t have to put her head under water or actually swim or put her drink down or anything.) I frolicked in the waves, got a good sunburn, and generally acted significantly less than my age. Luckily, there were lots of young women there to admire my pasty physique and generally be creeped out by me.
After that we went to a BBQ place called Bethany Blues, wherein Charles was surly and we had to shovel our food down our gullets and take him outside so he’d stop staring at people and screaming. (I dunno what’s up with him recently, but he’s not fond of sitting in restaurants and enjoying the ambience. He ends up throwing food on the floor and screaming for no reason until I tase him take him outside. Hitting the terrible twos a bit early, I suppose.)
Saturday we basically packed up, sprinted home, changed clothes, and went to Mel’s baby shower, which was loud but filling; Sunday we went to my uncle’s house out in York (another 2 hour drive! Charles was thrilled) for my aunt’s birthday, and let Charles float around the pool in a little boat-like device my wife acquired for him. The boy is like a fish, I’m TELLING YOU.
And that’s all I have to say about that. Oh, for the rest of the pictures, head on over to Charles’s site. HILARITY IS TO BE FOUND THERE!
omg no time to talk on vacation just go here look at new pictures ok thnx bai
Okay, I’m going to force myself to post, but only because I’m off the rest of the week and do not intend to put anything up, unless I find myself with a strong desire to drunk-write, which is always a possibility, or if I take a picture of something particularly compelling (particularly disgusting diapers, or maybe my wife drooling whilst a-napping) and need to get it on the internets for posterity. I’m also not taking any responsibility for anything that follows being funny, ’cause if you think I’m going to worry about making you laugh at 2:18pm before my day off, well, in the words of Sean Connery, your mother’s a whore.
Yesterday I got to skip most of my workday to catch a bus to Baltimore with the Chancel Choir of First & Central Presbyterian (so named because they were both First, and the most Centrally Located, which makes the other Presbyterian churches like totally SO jealous) to sing at the American Guild of Organists Region III Convention. This may sound very similar to getting to go to, say, the Nebraska State Ophthalmalogy Opthamogoly Eye Doctor Convention, except that Eye Doctors are better dressed and usually less, well, girthy.
The ride down was largely uneventful, unless you were the driver, in which case apparently EVERYTHING is an event; he alerted us that when passing over the Susquehanna River, you could look to the right and see the Conowingo damn, which I guess is useful tourist information, but he also pointed out a Weigh Station, The Place Where You Drop Off Family Members Who Are Going On Cruises, and some $350K Condos. By the end, people were just yelling “SHUT THE #*$& UP” every time they heard the mic click on.
We were to sing in the Baltimore Basilica, which is notable for being the first Catholic cathedral built in the United States. The cornerstone was laid in 1806, and construction complete in 1821. In 1937, the cathedral was raised to the rank of “Minor Basilica” by Pope Pius XI, but by the mid50s the powers-that-be had decided that the building suffered from a condition they described as “being surrounded by FAR too many crackheads” and they scurried the See off to the suburbs. Now the Basilica is a “co-cathedral,” which is kinda like being a cheerleading co-captain: half the respect, and twice the teenage drama.
But I joke. The building is actually BEAUTIFUL, and since it’s mostly space and stone walls, the reverb in there is unbelievable. Since I mostly sing in carpeted rooms that suck sound right out of the air, listening to plainsong chant and Russian hymns bounce off the walls for 3-4 seconds after we stopped singing was fascinating.
We rehearsed there, and then had some time to kill before dinner, so some us went a-wondering around Baltimore. The Basilica is just a few blocks from Peabody Conservatory, which you may recall I went to for a few years before realizing how annoying other vocal performance majors usually are, so I wandered over there to see if things had changed, which of course they had. I got loads of pictures of the mid-town area, the best of which I’ll get online at some point. We had dinner, consisting of sandwiches, chips, and other knick knacks, at a nearby Unitarian church, and then went back to get dressed for the service.
The service started with a 30 minute concert by Mary Beth Bennett, who is most notable because she looked REALLY REALLY familiar to me and I couldn’t figure out why, and then about an hour of singing and praying and all that good timey religious stuff. Then we piled on the bus, drank some beers, and headed home.
Oh, also, I went to the Phils game on Sunday; they won, and I got a million pictures, which I’ll post later. Other than that, the only thing that was notable was that I went with two Mets fans in full Mets regalia and didn’t get peed on by anyone! It was stellar.
Tomorrow, the Wilmington & Western Railroad returns to Hockessin after nearly 4 years! I’ve been sort of on a train kick recently, and was surprised to go to the WWRR website and find out they’ve managed to completely repair all the trestles, bridges, and track that were simply wiped out by Tropical Storm Henry back in September of aught-three. Tomorrow, they celebrate the return of “service” out to Hockessin.
I remember the storm, and the destruction to the railway, pretty vividly; at the time, HW and I were living just off Greenbank Road, which is unsurprisingly only like 500 yards from the Greenbank Mills, from whence the trains leave on their meandering route out to the northwestern environs of New Castle County. Not more than a few days after the storm, I was driving around in the back roads nearby along Red Clay Creek and saw the damage; huge sections of track simply twisted and washed aside by the flood. All the wooden bridges were simply wiped out. Since the WWRR had basically just finished the repairs from the LAST damaging storm (Hurricane Floyd in 1999), I figured it was out of business for good, and was sad.
Which is how I almost got crushed under a steam locomotive.
Not more than a month or two after the storm, I was driving down Newport Gap Pike, and when I came up to the rail crossing, the lights were flashing and cars were stopped. I’m all like, “Um, morons, the flood DESTROYED the tracks. The place is out of business. The lights are just flickering ’cause of some mistake, or kids messing with them or something.” So I pulled around to the right intending to drive right through the intersection (which didn’t have those big arms to drop down and prevent such things).
As I did so, I casually looked off to my left and noticed that a large black object was moving in my direction. Now, usually when this happens, it’s my friend Courtney coming to do me harm of some kind (he occasionally gets revenge on me ’cause I may once have “accidentally” rubbed my genitals on him), and I know to get away as fast as I can. I wasn’t on the tracks yet, so I stood on the brakes, threw the truck into reverse, and backed up. I ended up sitting next to the person at the front of the line, who glared at me with great gusto.
What can I say? I’m an idiot.
Anyway, I wish the Wilmington & Western well (mmmm…sweet, sweet alliterations), and hope that nobody notices that they seem to get hugely damaging storms exactly every four years in mid-September, so at best they have 3 months of full service before it’s nailbiting time.
I added some new pictures, as well as some new functionality over at the photography page:
- The “random” button works now, in case you just want something pretty to look at and don’t give a crap what it is.
- The “contact” button works as well, in case you want to yell at me for something.
- I added a “new” button that shows you the most recent 18 pictures I uploaded.
- There are 18 recent pictures.
Go ahead, check it out! It’s only partially self-indulgent and lame.
Seeing as how I’m a bit of a gadgetphiliac (which is like being a fecalphiliac but with marginally less, you know, poop), I cannot tell a lie: I love the new iPhone. I covet it. Deeply. Which is completely stupid because it’s a PHONE. A $600 PHONE. (Which I want.)
But I won’t buy it. (Not least because if I spent $600 on a phone there’s a non-trivial chance my wife would kill me with a thatching rake.) I just don’t need it, which is how I justify most of my expensive doohickey purchases:
- New acoustic guitar: $800. Needed because my sister wanted back her guitar, which I had been borrowing. Or something. (I’m not sure she noticed she didn’t have it.)
- New camera: $900. Needed to take pictures of my adorable infant. (The camera I already had, well, it just didn’t DO it right.)
- New 50mm lens for camera: $100. I totally needed it to take more pictures of my adorable infant INDOORS. (I will use a similar justification next year when I spend $400 on an external flash with wireless remote.)
- New 28mm-300mm zoom lens for camera: $250. I just wanted to take better pictures at baseball games, really. But I do take pictures of my adorable infant/toddler with it.
Spending money is like an addiction, though, and sometimes it takes a hard moment to break one of it, like when one checks one’s bank account and discovers that one has overdrawn same. Not that I have, of course. But in the last few weeks, I have discovered that I need new pants, so I had to buy those; I couldn’t find my softball glove, so I acquired a replacement; I needed new batting gloves, so I bought those too; it adds up! Luckily, when taxes come around, I will deduct all these expenses because I’m writing a new novel about them, or at least that’s what you’re going to tell the IRS on my behalf if you get subpoenaed during the audit. (Burning questions: can other people be subpoenaed? Is “subpoenaed” the hardest word I’ve had to type all day? If I sell a single picture of Charles to my mother for like 50 cents, can I deduct all the camera-related purchases?)
Free time is hard to come by these days, but I managed to broker a deal with HW in which she would get to spend Saturday night in New York, partying with her sorority sisters while I tried to keep Charles from flinging himself off of the furniture, in exchange for which I got to go golfing with Brian, Craig, and My Popz (aka Teh Grumpx0zrz) on Saturday morning. I hadn’t golfed in a while, so I figured I’d better hit the driving range on Friday to try and repair my hideous golf swing. (Seriously, you know how the swing is supposed to be in a “plane?” Mine is in some kind of 4th dimensional heptangle. It’s unbelievable to watch; during the downswing the head of my driver actually tesseracts across the galaxy for a split-second.)
There’s not really a range anywhere near me since we moved, but I wandered over to Delaware Park and got lost a bunch of times trying to find the White Clay Creek Country Club located therein. Their website said they had some kind of “golf academy,” which I figured meant they had to have a driving range, but if it exists, I sure couldn’t find it. After wandering around aimlessly for a while, I said “to heck with all this jaun” and went to the liquor store, where my time could more effectively be spent selecting single malt scotches and forgetting to replenish my wife’s Captain Morgan supply, for which she beat me with a shoe.
Our tee time was at 7:15am on Saturday, so I got up at 6am and made some breakfast sandwiches for the crew. Craig and Brian arrived at the house, and we all piled into Craig’s car and met my dad at the course. I won’t bore you with a complete play-by-play; I’ll just say that, having not played in 2 years, I played some of the best golf of my life. I shot a birdie on the par 5, a par on a 4 somewhere, and if I hadn’t had a really unfortunate 12 on a hole on the front 9, I might have broken 100. Clearly I need to play less frequently.
After that I entertained Charles for the evening, with the capable assistance of Craig, who got some practice in for when his own male progeny sallies forth in September. In other news, Happy Monday! Don’t, like, die or anything.
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