Your List of Lists

In which your humble narrator taxonomizes awesomeness. 

It's a March round-up, y'all. First up:

Things that are Awesome

• Archer
• Fat Tire
• Chili-Mac from scratch
• Brunch with friends whose children play with our children largely unsupervised

Things that Are Awesome but Sad

• When Child #1 describes his stomach bug which produced a lot of diarrhea with the statement: "My bottom is sick."

Things that are Awesome by virtue of the longevity and consistency of their Awesomeness

• David Bowie

Things that are not Awesome

• March Snow
• Wife-a-roo's "raise"
• Trader Joe's parking lots. They are designed by the Architecture Firm of Satan, Satan, & Beelzebub.

January Can Suck It

In which your humble narrator crowns a new most heinous month.

Named for the two-faced, Roman jerk deity, Janus, January is our most iniquitous month. It's cold. It's dark. It's still snowing, and it's long.

The furnace needs to be replaced. The new roof is leaking in at least one place, maybe two. There is nowhere else to pile snow from the driveway or the garage apron. I've taken to shoveling at night, filling a wheel barrow with filthy snow and surreptitiously dumping it on the property of neighbors who have offended my delicate sensibilities in some way.*

The newly Ph.Deeded wife has still not gotten a raise.

The children have been sick all month. Everyone had a horrible cold last week and both kids got pink eye. This morning I woke up unable to open my left eye. It was cemented shut with dried eye filth. Thank you, so much Child #2, who thought "NO TOUCHING DADDY'S FACE" was some hilarious invitation to a game of "smear mucus into Daddy's eyeballs."

It's an inauspicious start to 2011. February's probably going to suck too, but at least it's short and it can't possibly be colder and darker than it has been.

*"What a hideous jacket, you get three wheel barrows full of dirty snow on your doorstep."

A Teensy Misunderstanding

In which your humble narrator freaks out Wife-a-roo.

Thursday night, while preparing dinner after a long day of finding a leak in the new roof and discovering that it turns out we're going to need to replace our 33-year-old furnace or face the consequences of freezing to death, I was hunting for the can opener. Actually we have two can openers, the good one and the crappy one. To make it more interesting, they look exactly the same. One of them (Ol' Reliable) is a little heavier and actually opens cans. The other one (Seamus McPieceofcrap) lurches around the edge of the can like a drunken Irishman frequently popping off (see drunken Irishmen) and then bursting into a tuneless version of 'Danny Boy."

I couldn't find Ol' Reliable and was using Seamus to open up a can of crushed tomatoes and he did his usual terrible job, leaving two connections between lid and sides preventing me from accessing the delicious tomatoes contained within the can. Using the special 'moron center' of my brain, I resolved to just push down on one side to free the lid. And so I did, resulting in me neatly producing a little deli slice off the side of my left index finger. Being an incompetent clotter (I'm not a hemophiliac or anything, it just takes a long time) I clamped my thumb over the cut and raised my hand over my head.

"Shit," said I, "I cut myself." Wife-a-roo was at the kitchen sink. She whirled around and did her frightened muppet noise and started sputtering, "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit," which seemed a bit melodramatic.

It was then that I realized my left hand was covered in a tiny, tiny amount of blood and a copious amount of crushed tomatoes.

Conversational Torpedo in One Act

In which your humble narrator transcribes a recent conversation between Child #1 and Wife-a-roo.

Scene: At home, the office, the last day of 2010...

Wife-a-roo: Child #1, this is the last day of the year.
Child #1: (barely glances up) Yes.
Wife-a-roo: Tomorrow will be a new year.
Child #1: Why did you say that to me?
Wife-a-roo: Uhh... huhhh... what?
Child #1: (Insistently) Why did you say that to me?
Wife-a-roo: (Incredulously) Uhh... I though you would be interested.
Child #1: I wasn't.

Babies Watching Babies

In which your humble narrator watches a baby watching babies and loses any sense of perspective.

Child #2 is a far more social animal than Child #1. She smiles at strangers. She's learned all the names of the other little children in her two-day-per-week daycare room. She talks to cashiers. She's simply way, way more into people than Child #1 was as an 18-month-old.

Her most recent favorite pastime involves watching Babies (2010) the Thomas Balmès film about, well, babies. Wife-a-roo found the film on the online streaming section of Netflix and it's been a regular staple for about a week. Particularly in the evening after a hard day of annoying her brother, changing clothes twelve times and spreading filth as far as the eye can see, she toddles up, says "Watcha Baby!" and demands to be placed in lap in front of the computer. She'll usually watch intently for 10-20 minutes as the four babies from far-flung reaches of the globe go through their little baby lives. She's quite approving of the amount of dirt that the African and Mongolian babies get to experience on a regular basis. Another favorite scene is when the little Mongolian chap is taking a bath in a washtub and a friendly goat drops by to drink some of the bath water.

It's clearly animated viewing on Child #2's part. She imitates the babies facial expressions and even describes their emotional states, "Baby sad," or "Baby laugh." In short she's enthralled.

I'm less enamored. I've done a lot of baby-watching in the past three years and frankly I'd rather spend my screen time watching British people being devastatingly cruel to each other or possibly exploding.

Minivantastic

In which your humble narrator purchases a Mom-mobile.

Bit the bullet. Bought the minivan. I don't love it, but it's a hell of a lot easier to insert my squirming progeny into the sliding doors and high seats than in my beloved wagon of yore. No one explained the crippling back pain associated with child-rearing to me before I went and impregnated Wife-a-roo.

Word to the wise, if you're going to be the Mommy and stay home with your children, it behooves you to be a smallish woman (around 5'4" tall) with hips. If you're lanky and over six feet, the problem you run into is that small children are small (hence the name) and spend most of their time all the way down on the floor. If you're tall, the floor is very far away. Also the children are fickle and like to be picked up from the floor and then returned to the floor approximately 457 times per hour. This is a recipe for lambasted lumbar.

And I can't overstate the importance of hips. If you don't have them, there is no convenient place to place one child while simultaneously using your free hand to prevent the other child from eating dirt.

Tick, tick, tick...

In which your humble narrator perpends upon the coming autumn with fear and trembling.

Summer seems to abruptly deserted those of us nestled into the curves of the upper Mississippi. Unfortunately a richly deserved, bright and sunny autumn seems to be nowhere in sight. After the constant rains of the early season I feel more than a bit annoyed by the constant cloud cover of this September.

In remembrance of my ability to manufacture vitamin D only a few short weeks ago, here are some photos of my offspring from an early August outing.

Child #1 runs down a hill at Gold Medal Park in Minneapolis.

Note the clearly more predatory approach of Child #2. If she ever gets Zombified* we're in trouble.

Dissertations for Wife-a-roo and myself are both in progress. She's ahead of your humble narrator, but she started two years earlier and is only going to finish a couple of months before me. I intend to point this fact out to her on, pretty much, a daily basis for the rest of our lives.

In other news: Twitter is still stupid.

*This is apparently the correct spelling of the past tense of the verb "to Zombify." Don't doubt me. This is a quality blog; I looked it up.

I'm trying to run a respectable patio here...

In which your humble narrator cleans up the garbage heap of vice, fornication and sin that sits outside his side door.

At 4:40 this morning I woke up to a persistent yowling. As I emerged from sleep I was fairly sure it was feline in nature and my thoughts turned immediately to our emergency back-up cat, Akbar. He only has two brain cells and if one of them goes on the fritz he frequently gets "stuck" in whatever activity he was pursuing when half his cognitive function blinkered out. I figured, eyes still heavy, that he was downstairs yowling at phantoms. But it kept up.

I rolled over to make Wife-a-roo go deal with her retarded cat (Akbar is why Wife-a-roo is no longer allowed to pick pets independently) when I noticed that Akbar was sitting by the bed, not making any noise at all. Our main cat, Harold was asleep at the foot of the bed as usual.

So I stumbled out of bed to investigate the yowling. It was loud. It was punctuated by wild shrieks. I went downstairs to the kitchen. The window was slightly open and the noise was louder. I opened the side door to see a guilty looking tom cat shuffle off into the front yard. An irritated pair of yellow eyes peered back from under the raspberry canes. A saucy looking little lady cat had apparently decided to turn our patio into an early morning niche d'amour. She had tags on but was clearly on the prowl for some lovin', making me wonder about whatever neighborhood yahoos hadn't spayed their little darling. She was also clearly peeved about my arrival on the scene.

It took much more effort to dislodge her from her little hissy-hussy den than I anticipated. Which is how I ended up in a bathrobe chasing a spitting mad, hot 'n' bothered lady cat out of my yard with a broom at 4:45 in the morning. As I trudged back into the house, Venus was particularly bright in a cloudless sky.

The Big Schlep

In which your humble narrator goes to the big city, eats pizza and bagels and discovers that there are a hell of a lot of playgrounds in Manhattan.

Apologies for the infrequency of postings of late. The end of the term and its accompanying flurry of work and a recent trip out east have left little time for writing lists of stuff that irritates me. 

Child #2 rides the subway

Child #1 looks out over New York Harbor

Wife-a-roo, and Children #1 and #2 and I flew to New York last Wednesday. Wife-a-roo had a job interview with some sexy research outfit doing even sexier research than she usually does. Since they paid for her flight and we had access to an empty apartment courtesy of one of her investment-banky cousins,* we decided to make a trip of it.

Both children were surprisingly good travelers. The flight out was completely without incident except for when Child #1 was informed that he would have to remove his shoes in the security line. This prompted an on-the-floor screaming (and sock-footed) fit much to the delight of our fellow travelers behind us waiting for their own chance to do the TSA tango. Calm was restored on the other side of security when Child #1 was re-shod as he choked back the tears of rage and humiliation of having to go sock footed in public for 1.5 minutes.

We stayed in Manhattan near Gramercy park for two days. Wife-a-roo had her interview which went well. We saw an old friend from college. We ordered freakin' awesome takeout.

On Friday, Wife-a-roo's father drove down from ye olde New Hampshire homestead to meet up with us. We had lunch at Veselka, a Ukrainian restaurant in the village. Then we piled into his ancient Volvo and went out the Mid-town tunnel to the Long Island Expressway to go stay for a couple of nights at the North Shore Home of Wife-a-roo's aunt.

A brief note on Wife-a-roo's family and their relationship to cars. They kill them. Dead. Grandpa's Volvo has 323,000 miles on it. The air-conditioning is kaput. It was 90 degrees and humid on the L.I.E. outbound on a Friday afternoon. Then the car overheated.

Happy Birthday, Baby! And now for some violent purges...

In which your humble narrator celebrates his daughter's existence and spills his guts.

As of last Friday, Child #2 has made the complete circuit around the sun. Feeling ever pressured by society's expectations that we celebrate these sort of milestones by "doing" "something" (other than our regular routine of keeping the children alive and then collapsing into the forgiving, oaky arms of a mid-priced Kentucky Bourbon once they're finally in bed), we organized an extremely modest festival in honor of Child #2's first year.

We invited two sets of friends with children near the same ages as ours (our only local friends with similarly aged children), plus my mother and sister. The children (all falling between 1 and 4 years) played as a group, mostly independently. Food was eaten. Cake was mashed into faces. Fun was had by all until everyone had to go home to take a nap. Child #1, currently suffering from bad pollen allergies, was watery-eyed and full of snot at the end of the party. I trotted out to the local chain apothecary to purchase some antihistamines for his sad looking little self.

Walking back to the car, I thought to myself, "Hrmmm, I feel a little bit queasy. Must have been the cake" (not usually partaking in rich, butter-creamed sugar-bombs). And I went back home.

The next 6 hours are a bit foggy. I know that I completely purged my entire digestive track with a violence best described as "Stalinist." I remember sitting on the potty thinking, "I am going to have a terrible funeral. The Rabbi is going to have to tell everyone that I died from pooping out all of my internal organs. Everyone will be embarrassed."

Child #1 got it and puked all over my house... but I was sick so I didn't have to clean it up. He was so ill that rather than running around as a maniac as per usual, he actually spent most of Sunday in my bed watching Curious George cartoons, at least while we weren't sleeping or he wasn't leaning over to vomit on my pillow.

Needless to say, we survived. It was yet another vile virus brought home courtesy of Wife-a-roo who apparently works in an open sewer staffed by lepers militantly opposed to hand-washing. We're thinking about putting up a decontamination tent in the yard.

In better news, it's the last week of term. By this time next week, I should be free and unencumbered by undergraduate papers for at least 4 weeks. Now about writing that dissertation...

Wife-a-roo's quotable quotes

In which your humble narrator relates an utterance from his spouse of nearly nine years.

Granted, it was relaying a pronouncement from Child #1, but still.

"Your son told me that I was round like a circle."

 "Wait. In reference to what?" I said. "He was feeling my head," she replied.

Oh, of course! They wore shirts! It all makes sense now.

In which your humble narrator prattles on concerning poop and cartoons.

It's Saturday morning and Wife-a-roo is minding the progeny. I informed her yesterday that every single poop that either one of the little darlings produces this weekend is her responsibility because both of them crapped so much while she was at work this week that in order to maintain the poopy-diaper ratio that keeps our marriage intact, she was going to have to be the main poop-changer for two days. So this is just like a vacation for me, except I'm still at home and have to clean and grade papers and work and stuff.

For some reason I woke up this morning with a strong "It's Saturday!" feeling which made me want to watch Saturday morning cartoons. But sadly the Saturday morning cartoons of 1984 aren't on anymore. Mostly it seems to just be more of the same insipid morning "news" shows that are on during the week only with third-string anchors instead of Meredith Vieira, George Stephanopolous or Harry Smith.

On the plus side, after some interwebular research I finally found the answer to a a question I've been asking for what seems like months. That question was (usually directed at Sister-of-Me) "What was that one weird cartoon about a bunch of animals living in a tree in a park, and maybe they fought crime or something? I feel like there was a girl Panda bear and maybe a bashful mole involved somehow."

The answer is "Shirt Tails."

I had completely forgotten that they wore shirts. Duh.

And last, does anyone remember another cartoon on at that time which had the hilarious title "Pole Position?" Fortunately I was only able handle one entendre at a time at the tender age of 5. It was a sort of British speed racer. I encourage you to go here to read the theme lyrics, because if you're immature like me, they'll make you giggle.

Double Indumbnity

In which your humble narrator reminds you that the children are our future and as such we are hopelessly screwed.

I spent a few minutes this morning trying to track down a quote I'm pretty sure I read in a Joe Queenan book. I can't remember if it was Mr. Queenan or if he was quoting someone else. Without further nattering it was something along these lines:

If children are so smart, why isn't one of them in charge of the Federal Reserve?

While a spectacularly bright boy over all, Child #1 does manage some truly epic failures of smartness in his brain thing. On Tuesday night, Child #1 was looking a little queasy at dinner and not eating much. His mother got him some frozen yogurt (bad idea) and he ate a little. After dinner he decided he was going to help give Child #2 a bath and ran from the kitchen into the bathroom. Upon entering the bathroom, he began to vomit (while running toward his mother), slipped on his own puke, slid across the floor on his ass, leaving a trail of pink yogurty barf. Much wailing and distress ensued.


The next day he got pink eye, which he's handled with all the stoicism you would expect from a two-year-old, by trying to gouge his eyes out, intermittently wailing, and smearing yellow-green eye pus over all my modestly appointed home.

The baby pooped through two sets of clothes yesterday, and her nose is still running, leaving her with a ring of gray (frequently linty) boogers around her nostrils.

I'm leaving the little darlings in the care of our baby sitter today while I go to teach some undergraduates about curriculum analysis. Undergrads may be nearly as gross as children, but at least none of them will touch me.

For this, I am truly grateful.

Overheard on Craigslist

In which your humble narrator offers up a risque Craigslist post for your perusal.

Courtesy of Wife-a-roo, who trawls Craigslist every night because we don't have any money to buy anything and she needs to get her shopping fix somehow:

"This gently used Fisher-Price baby rocker swings both ways."

Kinky. I'm glad my kids didn't need their baby-swing to also be some sort of pan-sexual freak-fest.

Wife-a-roo's Quotable Quotes

In which your humble narrator transcribes the wondrously weird wit and wisdom of Wife-a-roo.

"How did I get syrup on my butt?" (January 14, 2010)

 An existential question for the ages if I ever saw one. How, indeed?

Practical Jokery

In which your humble narrator discusses unimplemented plans for messing with his wife's head.

I actually almost never engage in practical jokery, which is sort of a shame since I'm really, really good at coming up with things that would completely annoy/surprise Wife-a-roo. It's a double pity because this is a woman who has gratifyingly large reactions to moderately startling circumstances. You can walk up to her, tell her that you now plan to hide behind a sofa and then jump out and yell "boo!" at her in exactly 43 seconds. She'll still jump when you do it. Here are some fun, unimplemented plans for messing with my wife's head.

1. Whenever I happen on the book that she's reading, I will flip one page forward. 
2. Reprogram Child #2's talking robot bear to say (and sing!) wife's name in that creepy robot bear voice it has. Then I shall put it on wife's pillow while she's mumbling about sleeping for "five more minutes*" and turn it on.
   
3. Pour regular cow milk into her rice milk cartons.
4. The next time I edit one of her papers on sexual health research, I will search for the term "sex" and replace it with the term "doin' it." "Sexual" will be replaced with "freak-nasty."
   

And last, even though I didn't do it, I should give an an honorable mention to Sister-of-me who changed Wife-a-roo's homepage to babyeinstein.com. Much flabbergasted sputtering ensued.


*Or, you know, 40 more minutes.

The White Menace is Coming! Surely We Shall Perish Anon!

In which your humble narrator procures medication for his daughter gets his media criticism on and discusses the cultural differences between the frigid tundra of Minnesota where he lives and the smoggy, semi-southern hills of Cincinnati from whence he came. 

Child #2 has an ear infection. We were supposed to get round 2 flu shots for both children yesterday but the on-again-off-again fever of Child #2 spiked once more yesterday morning so we took her in to see the doctor. The regular baby-doctor is off on Mondays so we saw a tall, laconic family practice doctor of Scandinavian descent, named "Olav Olson" or "Hjalmar Carlson" or "Lindstrom P. Nordic" or "Sven McSwedish" or something. He seemed delighted that we spoke in low, measured tones and communicated primarily by subtle eye-brow movements. Prescription for antibiotics in hand, we repaired, as a family, to the fancy-people's grocery to get some drugs at the pharmacy and donuts at the bakery.

Child #2 seems in better spirits already, just in time for the much ballyhooed snowstorm of the season which is supposed to begin later today. After attending to my personal grooming this morning, I flipped on the teevee to watch the weather while I got dressed. The local news boys and girls were nearly wetting themselves with anticipation of the (potential) 5-7 inches of white snow which will (maybe) fall on the metropolitan area (or somewhere else) over the next 36 hours. The sparkle of weather-related insanity gleaming in their glassy teevee eyes, they prattled on and on about the coming snowstorm as if it was the long-awaited messiah of frozen precipitation set to come to earth.

I don't remember this kind of frenetic weather mania from my childhood in Cincinnati. We had a couple of good snows, the occasional tornado and a lot of thunderstorms, but not the single-minded obsession with the weather that occupies a large portion of the real estate in the heart of any true Minnesotan. For example, the pre-first-snow paroxysm is not unique. There is also the annual "first thunderstorm rumpus," and the "first 80 degree day madness." The local newsies are an excitable bunch.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. I like winter. I don't even mind the shoveling since it's an activity that, even Wife-a-roo will admit, cannot be pursued with small, stroppy children in tow. The only things I don't like are scraping snow off the roof, and the media frenzy that precedes each potential life-threatening snow fall. For God's sake, people. It's Minnesota. It's not like winter should come as a surprise.

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.