3 year old weird

In which your humble narrator relates a bizarre dialogue with Child #1.

Child #1: (after drinking) This orange juice makes my body smooth.

Me: What?

Child #1: This orange juice makes my body smooth.

 Me: Why?

Child #1: It just does, okay?

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.

The Air is Brisk and Here are some Things I Loathe

In which your humble narrator pontificates on incommodious impediments to a calm and happy life.

• Class shoppers, those detestable undergraduate adders* and droppers who prevent you from getting an accurate class list until the third week of the term.
• Terrible Twin Cities drivers that do not understand that on a multi-lane road being in the right lane is a necessary precondition for making a right turn. Turning right from the left lane? Generally inadvisable.
• The social acceptability of cheap perfume for adolescent boys and undergraduate males. If I can smell you coming from 15 yards away there's a problem. If you're sitting in the fourth row in my class and making my eyes water, there's a serious problem. 
• Shopping for new cell phones. 
• The never ending mosquito swarm. I'm ready for a quick freeze to destroy all the blood-sucking little bastards.

*Not the snake kind.

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.

Heat Melts Brains

In which your humble narrator shares some weird.

Last Thursday I left my modest but well-appointed home at seven o'clock in the morning to make my way to the University to enlighten the minds our our nation's youth while simultaneously crushing their young spirits. I took the bus to the train and stood waiting at the station as the various over-perfumed junior account executives milled about fidgeting with their phones, when a large middle-aged woman wearing cargo pants walked onto the platform.

She proceeded to reach into the mid-thigh, velcro-secured cargo pocket and withdrew a piece of buttered toast. No wrapper, container nor napkin was evident. She took one bite, placed the toast back in the cargo pocket, chewed thoughtfully and stared out into space for about a minute until she repeated the procedure to procure another delicious morsel of toast.

Realpolitik

In which your humble narrator tries to tamp down the smoldering embers of sibling conflict which could flare into a full scale war of mutual destruction at any moment.

I should say as a caveat, both children are doing quite well. Each is charming, mostly well-behaved and pretty much delightful now that everyone has gotten over the long-lasting summer cold that's been going around.

Here are the little darlings on a recent outing to Gold Medal Park in downtown Minneapolis, conveniently located three blocks from Wife-a-roo's office. Child #1 is now using the toilet like a pro and Child #2 has found a new love of being upright and verbal.

Our recent conflict involves the unfortunate issue that Child #2 is interested only in whatever Child #1 is playing with at any given moment. Since Child #1 has a flair for melodrama, he provides massive reinforcement for Child #2's meddlesome nature by obligingly caterwauling whenever she interferes with his play things. Child #2, of course, finds his vocal histrionics absolutely enchanting and rarely misses an opportunity to irritate him. Child #1 no longer even waits for Child #2 to start messing up his train set. He simply begins fussing whenever she enters the room. Drawn to his siren-song of constant complaint, even if she wasn't in a mood to mess up his railroad, she usually cannot resist the invitation to battle over brio train tracks and Thomas the Tank Engine figures. 

Sadly, I have little interest or patience for this particular sibling ritual and usually just end up taking whatever toy has become the object of their concentrated desire away from both of them. This results in both of them howling at me instead of each other. I'm pretty sure there's a reason that I do this, but for the life of me I can't remember what it is.

It's August, When a Young Man's Thought Turns to Things He Hates

In which your humble narrator lists the vexations of high summer.

• The unmistakable odor of cheap cologne which wafts off of the business-type business people who ride the train downtown early in the morning.
• Being shiny all the time since it's so damn hot.
• The lack of four hour parking meters anywhere near the University now that the river road has been dug up for insufficiently explained reasons. "Utility work" indeed.
• The barely restrained glee of local newscasters when describing some fresh 'n' juicy, new double murder.
• Summer watchband stink.