HALLOWEEN

Life ain't fair, kid. Beast got just one extra Halloween, yesterday, at the day care center he and Noodle attend, whereas the big sister gets a second extra Halloween today at her school - featuring a parade of extreme cuteness, and thanks to The Man^TM Keeping Me Down A Little Early, I'll be able to watch and photograph the proceedings. The little diva has -two- different princess outfits - yesterday's was the standard E-Z-Tear getup from Walmart, today's is a whole 'nother level, purchased at Story Land in New Hampshire back on summer vacation when we had that kind of money.

This one's got the tasseled pointy hat, y'all.

But why do the princess shoes have to be so. damn. narrow? Did Cinderella's evil stepsisters get jobs in R&D for Amalgamated Plastic Princess Shoe of Shanghai?

Last night Noodle got out of bed and wasn't supposed to do that, but then the little lady told me she did it to get a picture of me off her dresser, to sleep with all night long.

Aww. There's something in daddy's eye.

The Beast will have to go quite a ways to top that kind of spontaneous adorableness, but he'll try his darndest when he wakes up. Any minute now.

FOLLOW YOU, FOLLOW ME

Hey, take a gander over to the right and become a follower of this blog. It's new!

UPDATE: Sweet! I've got one.

TELLING MOM

Well, whaddya know. She didn't have a conniption or anything. I was bracing for a meltdown, but she held it together nicely and began threatening to show those empty suits what for.

Down, Ma. Down. Easy now.

So it's back to getting the house ready for winter this afternoon, while the weather's still decent. I'll be on a ladder, which is always good for laughs.

Watch for a blog detailing my job search shortly, where you'll be able to share in my struggles and laugh at my failures.

THANKS FOR THE HITS - KEEP 'EM COMING!

And that means all thirty of you.

Look for lots more posting here in the days and weeks to come, and maybe there'll be enough material to spin off into a new blog - after all, I can no longer say things aren't interesting, and I can also dash off things that I hadn't in the past for fear of The Man slapping me down. (Moot points for $1000, Alex.)

In the meantime, I do appreciate your warm thoughts and support, whether this is the first you've read of me or whether you heard me stink out the joint on the air back in '89.

So. Who needs a guy whose marketable skills include running off at the mouth? Anybody?

MY WORK HERE IS FINISHED. MY WORK THERE AND THERE AND THERE HAS JUST BEGUN

Date: October 28, 2008
To: Everybody
Re: What I prefer to call my final vacation memo

CHRIST, NOT ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE BITTER AND MAUDLIN FAREWELL NOTES.

(Just thought I’d get what you might have been thinking out of the way.)

First of all, I want to thank everybody I’m going to forget to thank later on. It’s been just shy of 20 years, and also I’m senile, so forgive me in advance.

C’MON, BURN SOME BRIDGES. GIVE ‘EM WHAT FOR. TELL ‘EM WHO’S GOING TO BE FIRST AGAINST THE WALL WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES. CRY HAVOC, AND LET SLIP THE DOGS OF WAR…

Not so much. Check this out:
• I get to leave the snow shovel in the garage until sunrise.
• I get to make something for dinner other than “whatever takes 5 minutes”.
• I get to sleep for seven whole hours. All at once.
• I get to completely ignore the idiots in Washington and Albany.
• I get to give my wife more kisses.
• I get to put my daughter on the school bus.
• I get to play in the leaves with my son.

That’s not a bad deal at all. More people should be so lucky.

BULLET POINTS? YOU USED BULLET POINTS? DORK.

Old habits, sorry.

Many thanks to everybody who has offered assistance and good wishes. I may just take you up on that one day, but I’m lucky enough to have Celeste by my side. (Hooray for jobs with tenure!) And offers of help go both ways – if there’s anything you need from me, I’ll lend a hand as best I can.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, on the table in front of me is a beer with my name on it. And if I can’t find my name on the first beer, it’s definitely on the second one.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

So.

Guess who's just become a stay-at-home dad?

YET AGAIN, THINGS ONLY PARENTS SAY

You don't have to recycle boogers. Get a tissue.

Mommy made nice meatballs and you're chewing the tires on your brother's car instead?

I'll explain what "prairie dogging" is some other time.

I told you before, if you keep hitting the pumpkin with the mallet it's going to-- (sfx: mallet going through pumpkin, pumpkin goop gets on child's shoes, screaming ensues) See?

THE BIG BANG

4:45. House is spotless.

4:46. Children arrive home from birthday party.

4:48. House looks like a 300-pound pumpkin exploded inside a toy store.

ON THE KIDS' PLAYLIST

Beast:

Pinball Wizard - The Who
Sing A Simple Song - Sly and the Family Stone

Noodle:

Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive - Dr. John

FIFTEEN POUNDS OF CRAZY IN A FIVE-POUND SACK

My tiny little brain is still trying to re-absorb the week.

Noodle has been alternating between nightmares and needing the potty, Beast turned 3, the Nana had to be hospitalized for a bit of falling off the wagon, yours truly had to blow up his schedule for a three-hour congressional candidates' forum and then get said Nana off to the hospital, and Her Awesomeness has been lost somewhere in a cloud of flour as she attempted to bake Beast a birthday cake as well as a couple of banana breads for the big school bus driver's appreciation day today, plus it's over to Kingston for a lighting part that just came in so that I can fix the living room lights and then off to the Wal-Mart to return some insufficiently flattering Noodlewear. She's not being spoiled...it's just that she's 99th-percentile tall for her age and standard clothing sizes don't work all that often. Add that to Wal-Mart's superior quality control (/sarcasm) and it would have been less of a time-suck to buy the nicer stuff straight off, except that the bank account is approaching Bush-approval-rating levels.

Yeah, you caught that right, I'm doing electrical work. Red's hot, black's not, why is my hair sticking straight up and what's that burnt-flesh odor I'm smelling?

OW

Note to self (and all other dads out there):

When giving your child a ride on your shoulders, do not give them a sippy cup or they will experiment with gravity and fluid dynamics using your scalp as a target. This is especially troublesome if, like me, you have a bald spot and if, like me, the beverage in question is cocoa.

Thanks a whole bunch for the spillage and sticky hair, son, but be aware that if you weren't so damn cute it would be on right now, ya little punk.

WHAT, NO PONY?

Here are some little girls with some pretty cool grandparents. This is their playhouse:

Holy moly!

Lorraine was meticulous about every detail. The two-story dwelling was built just like a house, with real siding, windows and a roof. The exterior includes a front porch, a gazebo, a second-story deck and an attached garage to house the girls' electric toy cars, as well as gorgeous landscaping that includes flowers and plants.

450 square feet. That's bigger than our old apartment in Hyde Park. But I dunno...the Code of Building Stuff For The Kids dictates that all playhouses be built strictly of scrap lumber and other materials found lying around out behind the house, and there's a minimum number of protruding rusty nails required for that always-exciting possibility of a trip to the hospital for tetanus shots.

ON THE KIDS' PLAYLIST

Beast: Yesterday I Had The Blues - Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.

It goes something like this:



Awww, yeah.

AVE ATQUE VALE, FAIR HOOVER

The faithful reconditioned Hoover Windtunnel that compliantly snarfed up eleven years' worth of stuff to which no self-respecting vacuum cleaner should be exposed has finally bought the farm. Our replacing the carpeting with laminate may have been the final insult to its dignity, but hey - the kids have allergies and the last tenant's dog dander was still in there someplace.

Hail and farewell.

600 GREENLIGHTS

I'll be doggoned. The fine folks at Fark have seen fit to greenlight some more of my headline submissions, to the point where I have reached the magic 600 mark - and since most of what I submit over there has little if anything to do with raising young'uns, I am pondering an additional blog in which I might deposit whatever's not worthy for Boogerland.

In the meantime, not a day goes by where Noodle and/or Beast doesn't blurt out some new word you'd expect from somebody with a far more advanced vocabulary. Noodle for one is nailing the context, so she's not just parroting what Word Girl's saying. Brag brag braggity brag brag brag.

ON THE KIDS PLAYLIST

...is a Steely Dan album cut whose name eludes me because I put the mix CD together at random and it's out in the car and I'm too tired to go get it right now.

THE $22,800 BABY MONITOR

Holy moly:


So not quite everybody is having trouble out there, seeing as they have 23 G's around to drop on a baby monitor.

MOMMY AND DADDY: THE SCREENPLAY

Eat your heart out, David Mamet:

ME, cuddled with the kids:

Aww, honey. Look what I got.

WIFE:

How come Beast's not squirming like he usually does?

ME:

Because he's concentrating on eating his boogers.

WIFE:

Long as we don't waste any food...

You should hear some of the conversations that start with Her Awesomness saying "Brian, come here and look at your son." Usually it means he's butt naked and something from the condiment shelf is smeared all over his body.

WHY, THOSE ROTTEN GOOD-FOR-NOTHING SPOILED BRAT KI-- HEY, WAIT

AWESOME job, guys:

They have most things kids their age want, the boys said. "We decided we want to give rather than get way too much," said Matthew, the older of the identical twins by 2 minutes. Last week, Mom and the boys were at Lloyd Town Hall and wondered why there was a line of people outside the building across Church Street. The people were waiting to get into the Highland food pantry of Ulster County Community Action. "So many people in this town are so poor," Andrew said. The boys didn't look the other way; they went across the street and inside. They looked at the half-bare shelves and saw a solution.

Themselves.

"It was our choice. Mom said we could have a little (regular) party or a big blowout party that donates," Matthew said. To the shock of their friends, they chose to donate. Now the boys have invited both their classes from Highland Elementary School, along with a few other friends and family, to their home Oct. 12.

The whole thing, you read it.

And for anybody in New York reading this, here's the links to many of the county-level groups who provide this kind of help.

THE WISE HEADS OF THE SENATE PREVAIL FOR OUR CHILDREN

Hey, great. The Senate passed their version of the bailout bill, just tweaked a teensy bit from the original so that it's no longer a measly 3 pages, but 451.

Here's the full, gruesome PDF. Skip ahead to page 300 for the good stuff, to wit:

Subparagraph (A) shall not apply to any shaft consisting of all natural wood with no laminations or artificial means of enhancing the spine of such shaft (whether sold separately or incorporated as part of a finished or unfinished product) of a type used in the manufacture of any arrow which after its assembly-
"(i) measures 5⁄16 of an inch or less in diameter, and "(ii) is not suitable for use with a bow described in paragraph (1)(A).''.
"(b) EFFECTIVE DATE.-The amendments made by this section shall apply to shafts first sold after the date of enactment of this Act.

And so, parents of America, the answer to all our problems from the learned men and women of the Senate: yes, you WILL still be able to warn your kids that they'll put their eyes out playing with that stuff.

MESSING ABOUT ON FACEBOOK

You can go look me up on Facebook now and find (so far) a few pictures of the beastlings and a couple of me from the days when my mom thought I'd look good in lederhosen.

NOBODY looks good in lederhosen.