Gratuitous Cuteness

In which your humble narrator dang near burns out his retinas from an overload of adorableness on the part of Child #2.

Child #2 received a monkey hat from a friend of mine. Don't look at it too long or you'll damage your optic nerves.

Winterize this!

In which your humble narrator tries to act like a local-born Minnesota person and muses freely on the topic of the weather. 

Now that I'm slowly emerging from the fog of Pie Day, Thanksgiving and Pie for Breakfast Day I can begin to fret about all the stuff that needs to be done to get ready for winter. Usually, this being Minnesota, Land of Frozen Tundra and passive-aggressive Scandinavians, we're all set for winter by Thanksgiving because November is a winter month (and so is April most of the time). Fortunately it's a well established fact that cold weather is highly correlated with moral fiber and excellent character. This is why the upper Midwest is awesome and Florida is a hell hole of moral weakness and general turpitude.

But this year, despite the weird rash of accumulating snow in October, it's been unseasonably warm, leading to all sorts of licentiousness, gluttony and sloth the likes of which we rarely see in the frigid north. So I haven't got the insulation I bought stuffed into the appropriate crevices in the attic, nor have I put cling film on the upstairs windows. We were all excited when we bought our house because it had replacement windows. Then we moved in. And now we know that we have the absolute worst replacement windows in the history of windowdom. They are shite. Especially because the cheap bastards that put them in cut costs by only putting single-pane windows in upstairs... which has only one heat vent... strategically located in the bathroom... in the shower. I like a cold bedroom, so it's not too big of a deal most of the time. However, I hate having to wipe the windows off every day after we shower (no exhaust vent either). So I've got to do the window film thing upstairs which means that I have to find the hair dryer that a friend of ours left at our old condo two years ago.

Also I still haven't raked the leaves in the back yard. They came off of the neighbor's tree so I'm afraid it might be socialistic if I raked them for him. Glenn Beck's website doesn't seem to offer any guidance on the issue.

So I've got a ton of crap to do all of which I'll start as soon as I get my butt off the couch. I predict that will occur sometime tomorrow.

Happy Pie Day, America

In which your humble narrator discusses the familial tradition known as "Pie Day."

It's Pie Day again. As I write, Wife and I have completed 7 pies with one in the oven and one yet to go. Each year, on the Wednesday that precedes Thanksgiving, we gather together to celebrate the making and baking of many pies twinned with a nod to those Puritan jerks by practicing discipline and self denial by not eating any of the pie until tomorrow. That way, we can experience true gratitude.

This year we're skipping the self-denial part because my Grandma's here and she gets crabby about waiting.

To help you initiate your own family tradition which explores the dualism of abundance and scarcity in a context rich with Americana, follow these simple steps:

• Step One: Take the Day off work (natch)
• Step Two: Plan your Pies and write down your schedule
• Step Three: Follow the rules of Pie Day

1. Don't talk about Pie Day
2. Don't talk about Pie Day
3. There are no rules
4. Make your own crusts, you lazy piece of #%@!
   
5. Make sure to make more pies than there are people expected at Thanksgiving. To achieve the proper sense of abundance, at least 1.5 pies/guest is recommended.
   

Mailbag Monday

In which your humble narrator responds to life's most pressing conundrums, even if they are invented.

Here at Rotten Baby Omnicorp Media-Mania, Inc., LLC, Ph.D., DDS, we view our service to all three of our readers as a sacred trust, and as such we have set aside today to answer some of the pressing questions that have been flooding our (imaginary) inbox. Today, gentle readers, we will answer the mail.

Dear Rotten Baby,
I am new parent and I am sick to death of all of the advice that complete strangers give me regarding my infant (human) child. I have read all of the popular child rearing books and have become convinced that I had better just muddle through as best I can and figure things out on my own. Yet, old ladies constantly stop me in the grocery store and give me conflicting, weird advice about childcare while admonishing me for everything that I am supposedly doing wrong. My question is, may I hit them with a brick?
                                          -Peeved Parent in Peoria

Dear Triple P,
No you may not hit them with bricks. That is an easily adjudicated case of assault. Since this happens in the grocery store, I suggest a 3-5 lb. bag of citrus fruit. It'll hurt like hell and leave no incriminating marks or bruises. I prefer Valencia Oranges, but you may wish to try several varieties of citrus fruits and make your own decision.

Dear Rotten Baby,
Long time reader, first time (imaginary) email writer. I am hosting Thanksgiving for my family on Thursday. This is the first year that my mother has not been hostess and I am nervous about living up to her standards. Any tips?
                                          -Nervous Hostess in Vancouver
Dear Nervess,
I hope to hell that you're in Vancouver in Washington State and not in British Columbia. Otherwise you are up embarrassment creek without a paddle of everlasting shame. You see, Nervess, The Canadians get their thank on in October. So if you're a Canadian, that ship has already sailed. If you're not Canadian and you want to keep your overbearing mother in her place, prepare nothing but side dishes and then ask her where the hell the turkey is when she arrives. Persevere in this little fib all evening, heaping subtle guilt on her at every turn. She'll be too flabbergasted to judge you.

Dear Rotten Baby,
I get the distinct impression that you're writing these letters to yourself because you can't think of anything else to write about today.

                                          -Suspicious Salvatore in San Antonio
Dear Sal,
You are so dumb it makes my teeth hurt. If there was a Church of Stupid, you would be the Pope. We're writing these letters because people love advice columns and we are convinced that this will send our site traffic soaring to add the demographically crucial Filipinio, trangendered, chicken-farming, Buddhist, fourth reader.

That wraps up this edition of 'Mailbag Monday," boys and girls. To have your queries, imaginary or otherwise answered, send an email to:
rotten.baby.blog (at) gmail (dot) com.

Yes you can! (But you shouldn't!)

In which your humble narrator discusses ideas that are not-so-good.

Exhibit A: d'Armond Speers - A linguist (good! We love linguists because your humble narrator is one... sort of.) who decided it would be a super-fun experiment to only speak Klingon (!) to his infant son until he was 3. Because, really, who doesn't want to use their children as free experimental subjects?

It think this falls into the category of "Things you can do, but shouldn't." Things like:

• Speak only Klingon to your infant child
• Decide to never cut your fingernails again
• Buy a house that you cannot afford
• Accept free drinks from a guy with an eye-patch named "Slash"
  
• Vote Republican
• Eat at Arby's
• Ask Amy Winehouse to baby-sit your children
  

Good old Teddy Roosevelt said, "Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive." I don't know the translation into Klingon.

It's Thursday, so that must mean I hate things

In which your humble narrator tallies five hated things.

1. The "environmentally friendly" detergent at Costco that proudly proclaims its greeny-goodness but only mentions its "lavender fragrance" in extremely light, 8-point font. All of my clothes smell like old lady.
2. Living down-wind of a down-scale apartment complex from whence much trash blows into my yard. Did you know that Frito-Lay is still manufacturing Funyuns? I didn't until we moved to this house. I thought they had gone the way of the Dodo, betamax and fluffy chest hair.
3. The media omni-presence of Sarah Palin. Congratulations, conservatives. You've found a right-winger as annoying as Susan Sarandon. I suspect if they ever meet, the universe will collapse into an inky-black hole of self-righteous incoherence.
4. The invention of medical-themed daytime television. Please see "The Doctors" and "Dr. Oz." My prescription? Cancellation.
5. People who have blogs about "maintaining a simple life." 
• Step One: stop blogging. See? Simpler already.
  

Finally! Somebody made a smart phone that will raise my kid!

In which your humble narrator directs your interwebular attention toward a grand spectacle of idiocy.

At last! I no longer have to go to all the trouble of trying to figure out non-verbal, enigmatic, semi-screamy Child #2's wants and needs. All I have to do is buy an iPhone and this killer app!

Now Child #2 can cry at my new iPhone and I will instantaneously know what her problem is. If this works I may not have to even look at her for another 4-6 months! It's even better than an illegal Guatemalan nanny because this way I get an iPhone!

Hooray for technology!

Fun with Google Auto-Complete

In which your humble narrator encourages "the Googles" to do ridiculous things with very little prompting.

Astute observers of the interwebs who use "the Googles" on a regular basis will be familiar with the relatively new auto-complete search feature which gives us a whole bunch of supposedly relevant options to choose after entering just a letter or two. Here are a few of my favorite auto-complete options.

"I" with a space after it reveals the option:

• "i like to tape my thumbs to my hands to see what it would be like to be a dinosaur"

"Why" offers this triumvirate of philosophical inquiry:

• Why do men have nipples?
• Why is the sky blue?
• Why is my poop green?

"be a" offers you the insanely optimistic option to:

• Be a perfect person in just three days!

"You make" obviously gives us:

• You make me touch your hands for stupid reasons.

And because I'm immature, "farts" produces the painfully underpunctuated:

• Farts you just can't trust them
  

You certainly can't.

More Fun with Carbon Monoxide

In which your humble narrator curses the fools at the Kidde Company for their lousy carbon monoxide detectors.

Regular readers will recall our near death experience with the "silent killer" (no, not farts, carbon monoxide). This prompted me to purchase a carbon monoxide detector. On Friday, I installed it whilst the children were eating their lunch. After 4 minutes, it went off. And it wouldn't stop until I unscrewed and pried the back off and cut it's little battery heart out. Then I opened all the windows and cut off power and gas to all the dangerous appliances. I called the emergency line at Xcel Energy and they sent a guy out within an hour to locate the source of the carbon monoxide.

There was none. Just a #&@%! faulty alarm. Eighty-five decibels of fun and $25 down the toilet.

Kidde Corporation (A UTC Fire and Safety Company), prepare to receive an angry letter. Also, I will be visiting your CEO and board of directors at home in the middle of the night to scream at them at exactly 85 decibels for no reason.

Five Things I Hate Today - Cat Barf Edition

In which your humble narrator expounds upon five hated things.

1. Waking up at 5:00 because a cat is projectile vomiting on your bed. And it wasn't even my cat, it was my wife's mentally challenged, Siamese jerk-cat. Then he ran away while barfing, leaving a vomitous trail across the bedroom (the only carpeted room in the house) and down the wall along the stair case. Just try going back to sleep when your bedroom smells like mostly digested pet-grade tuna.
2. Cleaning the coffee-maker
3. The fact that it's not socially acceptable to laugh at middle aged, spandex clad people on those damn roller-skis
4. People that refuse to use capital letters in emails
5. Ear wax
   

A Head-on Collision on Memory Lane

 In which your humble narrator recounts one of the horrors of high school gym class.

Last night, I went over to a friend's house to deliver some cookies of thanks and some cookies of remorse. This particular friend, (Let's call him Chris, because that's his name) fixed my sister's computer many months ago in return for some cookies. Then she didn't make good on her cookie promise for a long time, so yesterday she came over and entertained the children while I made some snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies to repay her confectionery debt (after levying a heavy baker's tax on the finished products).Sister labeled them "cookies of thanks" for the original computer fix and "cookies of remorse" for taking seven months to get them to Chris.

So after delivering the cookies and seeing Chris' (and the affianced bride of Chris') new home we ended up talking about traumatic brain injuries which, of course, led to a discussion of high school gym class. At the Jesuitical boys' high school that I attended we had two required semesters of pain and humiliation gym. In my first year I got a concussion when someone stepped on my head while playing flag football. In my second year I had my nose broken by a volleyball. I should stress that the offending volleyball was not the one from the game in which I was playing. It was some other game's volleyball. I was engaging in my usual, half-assed participatory way in the game. I wasn't awful at volleyball like I was awful at running for a long time or swimming. But there's this sudden whoop from the other side of the gym and I stupidly looked toward the noise only to have a wildly served volleyball slam right into my nose. Here is a helpful graphic representation:

So I went to the nurse and she said of my blood streaked face and shirt, "Wow, that's gross," and gave me an ice pack. What was it with school nurses and ice packs? They're not actually a panacea for every illness and injury known to human kind. I skipped eighth period and laid around the nurse's office until it was time to go home. So I rode home all bloody on the bus and walked from my stop to my house and went in to clean up. This was the first time I'd seen myself in the mirror. And, boy, that was not right. El Schnoz now had a sort of twisty, ski-jump to the right thing going on. This was going to need to be set straight since I could see where the cartilage and bone were misaligned at the bridge.  No one was going to be home for several hours. Since these were the days before cell phones, calling the parents was a giant pain in the butt.

So I grabbed the tip of my nose and stared at my watery eyes in the mirror and pulled down... hard. The feeling of jagged cartilage sliding back into place over bone is something I cannot adequately describe. I don't think I've ever screamed aside from that afternoon.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don't look like Owen Wilson.

Watcha got cookin'?

In which your humble narrator talks about food, even though maybe he really shouldn't.

I cook. And for the most part, I cook because I enjoy it. It's the least odious component of housewifery as far as I'm concerned. I read books about food. I listen to radio programs about food. I have what's grown into an actual collection of cookbooks. I used to just own cookbooks, but then I started buying weird, non-utilitarian cookbooks with recipes for turkeys stuffed with weiners, tripe, 60's style canapes, et cetera. Once you go down the road of just buying cookbooks for the awful food photography or weird antiquated prose dedicated to the "noble onion," I'm pretty confident that it qualifies as a "collection." I nabbed this from flickr, but it does appear in one of my cookbooks from the 1960's-1970s "creative period" in American cookery.

What always shocks me is that someone spent time creating such a putrid dish. I sincerely doubt that it had been "a winner at the dinner table for generations" when this was published.

The only thing that Americans are more neurotic about than sex is food. Rather than food being an enjoyable component of the whole "staying alive" thing that we've all got going on, it's become yet another arena in which we get to broadcast our social and political viewpoints to the world. I fully cop to being snooty about food. I prefer organic stuff when I can afford it. We don't eat highly processed stuff. We generally avoid food with scary chemical ingredients. But mostly I've made those decisions because the snooty foods taste better and are generally better for us. Yet, I don't think that really confers any moral superiority on me. I think dinner should just be dinner most of the time. And that means not talking about the food and its pedigree while you're at the table. And at the same time, I realize that most people eat garbage. Yet somehow I don't think looking down my nose at people the shop for groceries at Wal-Mart is going to lead them to make better choices when it comes to food. Manufacturers of food-like products have spent a lot of time and money convincing us that we don't have the time to cook and then offering us "convenience foods" that taste yucky and aren't very convenient. The greatest success of American advertising has been to convince us all how busy* we are. But hey! Here's a miracle product that will solve that problem.

When we were kids, my sister and I would ask Dad what was for dinner:

Us: What's for dinner, Pop?
Dad: Food.
Us: What kind of food?
Dad: Good food.
Us: Yeah, but what is it old man? We're too short to see what you're doing on the counter there.
Dad: Good food that you will like.
Us: You are completely obnoxious.
Dad: Yes.

And the thing is... I do this to my wife all the time. She's a picky eater, so I don't like to tell her what's in dinner because then she'll spend twenty minutes trying to pick out the offending ingredient (usually a vegetable).

My Mom was asking what motivated this behavior the other day. "Why does everyone always ask and why does the cook never want to answer the question?" I told her it was like when you buy a gift for someone and do a fancy job wrapping it up and then you finally present it to her and she sits there with a fully wrapped present on her lap and asks, "What is it?" And you say, "What the hell is wrong with you? Just open the damn thing!"

Sit down and enjoy the meal.

*Here's a handy test of whether you are "busy": 

1. Do you watch Dancing with the Stars, America's Next Top Model, Project Runway or Oprah?
2. Do you have machines that wash and dry your clothes for you?
3. Do you have indoor plumbing?
   
4. Do you have time to take footnoted blog tests?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you are not "busy" so please do not talk to me about it.

The Sexual Politics of Baby Clothes

In which your humble narrator decries the public's tendency to assume that his tiny, adorable daughter is a dude.

I didn't realize it when we had Child #1 (male) that everyone... and I mean nearly everyone, assumes that babies are boys unless they are dressed in ludicrously stereotypically girlie clothes. Since Child #2 is a baby lady, this has become much more apparent when we're out doing errands and old ladies start talking to "him" and referring to Child #1's "little brother" and talking about how handsome* Child #2 is.

Since we're cheap, Child #2 wears a lot of Child #1's baby clothes. Babies don't have a whole lot going on in the sex differentiation department. Onesies work equally well to cover up boy bits and girl bits. It doesn't help that baby girl clothes are usually more cheaply made and more expensive than baby boy clothes (Wife and Sister-of-me assure me this is the case for adult lady clothes as well). Yet, unless Child #2 is wearing either pink or light purple, people think she's a tiny dude. What's up with that?

I'm not putting one of those stupid velcro bows on her head. It ain't gonna happen.



*Admittedly she is "handsome" in the traditional sense that it's applied to women as in "pretty but tall with a big nose." Child #2 seems to have inherited "El Schnozola Grande" from my side of the family. I pray daily her head will be big enough to carry it off as an adult.

I married a sex researcher

In which your humble narrator comments on his Wife's profession and a book he recently managed to finish reading.

It's an absolute delight to tell people that you're married to a sex researcher. It's even better if you're telling local, born 'n' bred Minnesotans. Their little eyes get big and narrow quickly. Then they pronounce it "interesting," which is Minnesota-Speak for either "that is so boring that I will probably die right now" or "that is too horrifying to even contemplate; I have no choice but to go into a coma."

Wife wasn't a sex researcher when I married her, but that's what she does now. It's actually much, much, much more boring than you think it is. She mostly does fancy (and sexy) math and writes statistical program syntax and consults on research methodology for the faculty in her department.

If you know the history of sex research (or as I prefer: sexy research) you know that it all started with Alfred Kinsey, a voyeuristic, scientific, hedonistic, occasionally masochistic researcher at Indiana University who collected a lot of super-smutty data from a lot of perverted people. He was also one of two main characters in T.C. Boyle's The Inner Circle, a fictionalized account of Kinsey's sexy research as told by a fictional assistant, John Milk. Boyle's portrait of Kinsey isn't particularly flattering. He is presented largely as a somewhat cold, compulsive man whose control over those who surrounded him extended even into the bedroom. All in all, Liam Neeson seemed a lot nicer in the movie.

What was striking about this book was the listlessness of the novel. Boyle usually creates characters, that even if you don't particularly like, are at least interesting. In this volume he took a man who was arguably one of the more interesting scientists of the twentieth century and makes him into a stern, creepy controlling father figure for a bleating little weiner-man narrator.

Somehow I thought the book would be a lot more salacious. But then again I thought being married to a sex researcher would be too.

This weekend I did not die

In which your humble narrator describes the horrors of code compliance and the likelihood that it will kill you in your sleep.

I almost never die on the weekend, and this past one was no exception, but it I did come closer to death than usual.

Regular readers (hi to all three of you!) will remember my water heater woes from a few weeks back in which we learned that we needed to have an expensive metal liner shoved down our chimney for many hundreds of dollars, so that we would not die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Last Thursday, after most of the coldest, wettest October in Minnesota that I can remember had passed, the chimney guy (I'll call him "Ron" because that's his name) came with his chimney helper (I refrained from referring to him as the "elf.") to put in the new liner. They worked for about three hours, finished up and went away. Hooray!

Then it warmed up, which was nice. So the furnace didn't really run Friday or Saturday. Then it got cold again, and since we don't like freezing it started kicking on Sunday. Everybody was sort of crabby and disagreeable all day. I had a headache that wouldn't go away, even though it never threatened to blossom into migraine-awfulness. It was just sort of a crappy day all the way around.

Then on Monday I woke up with a headache again. I went down to the basement to start one of 37 loads of laundry that needs to be done weekly and noticed that the basement was humid, smelly and was making me feel woozy. Also, the furnace was overheating and blowing stinky air out of the intake vent. Then I went outside and noticed that there was no smoke coming from the chimney. Then I turned the furnace off and opened a lot of windows and called Ron. Ron was there within a half an hour, and seemed more freaked out than I was. I sort of assume basic human decency coupled with visions of lawsuits danced in his head. I figured that since we hadn't already expired that we were probably all good at this point.

Anyway, he fixed it within about 3 hours. (Which is when my headache went away too!) Apparently a piece of the new liner came loose and blocked the furnace exhaust entrance to the flue, causing the furnace to backdraft into the house.

I'd just like to point out that the old, non-code-compliant, ostensibly dangerous chimney liner never tried to kill us all in our sleep.