Saturday, December 29, 2012

Mayans Lie

The Jeanners and I are back home after spending a few days in St. Louis for Christmas.  It is good to be home, good to have Sam back somewhere familiar where there's room to stretch out a little bit, and time to take him outside, and time to just sit and play and have life get back to normal.  The traveling and X-mas parties and such really threw off his schedule and he was waking up in the middle of the night, ready to start his day, and just made him a little bit crazy.  Which made Jeannie and I pretty exhausted for a lot of the trip (except for when Jeannie's Mom took Sam for a few hours and I got to take the greatest 4-hour nap of my life.  Seriously, it was the nap that I've been waiting to take ever since the little Dude's been born.), and a little crazy, too.

Work ended up being not too damned bad this year, probably the most pleasant holiday season I've ever had there.  No real pain-in-the-ass customers, adequate # of people scheduled, etc.

My favorite parts of the Christmas break were:  getting to spend some time with Jerns' brother and Grandma, both of whom were staying at Jeannie's folks' house, hanging out with E. Elz and J. Knese sans Sam and feeling a little bit like the hip adult that I no longer am, and chatting with some nieces and nephews about relationships and how generally sucky it is to be in your twenties and faced with some life decisions that seem to be (and I guess are) monumental and life-defining.  Anyway, I do not envy any of them right now, and I'm glad my twenties are over and that I made a few big choices back then and that the choices seem to be working out pretty well.

Katie the World Traveler will be at our home soon, fresh from the wilds of Africa.  It'll be good to catch up and see the girl again after an absence of a few months.

It feels good to be home!  I don't even mind being up before 6 this morning because I am up before 6 in my own damned home!


Saturday, December 22, 2012

Solo

The Jeanners left town yesterday morning, early, in a mess of holiday travelers at the airport, and it's quite a story.  But it's her story, so I'll let her have the opportunity to tell it if she wants to.  I'll just give this teaser trailer:  picture the J-Dog running through a packed BWI airport, with no shoes or belt, carrying Sam, trying to get to her gate.  At like 6:30 in the morning.

Anyway, so they're gone, and I am stuck here tending the home fires.  Been at work yesterday and today, and it's been super-busy, but really no Christmas-ruining moments or anything.  I haven't blown up and cussed out my boss this year or anything.  And I gave my co-workers their Christmas presents and they all seemed to like them.  Especially the hypercolor t-shirts I got my boss and another co-worker.  I'm pretty happy with those gifts.

So last night after work I passed the time by wrapping presents and giving myself a haircut.  Tonight I installed our fireplace doors (went relatively smoothly).  Tomorrow after work it's clean house and pack clothes.  Monday is work and then flight to St. Lou and then Jeannie's family's Christmas party.  It'll be nice to see the Jeanners and the Little Dude.  Tonight when I got home from work I went to hang up my coat and I saw his little red jacket hanging on the hook and it made me miss him.  Although last night I was looking forward to having a Sam-less night of uninterrupted sleep and sleeping in (until 7:15).  But I still ended up waking up at 3 in the morning and then again at 5, thinking that I was hearing him.  I wasn't.  Although when I talked to Jerns on the phone tonight she said that Sam's schedule was all sorts of screwed up and that he ended up waking up this morning at like 3 in the morning.  Ugh.  I hope he is a little closer to normal by the time I get to St. Louis.

I think that's all I've got.  Another busy day tomorrow, I'm sure.


Tuesday, December 18, 2012

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like St. Patrick's Day

Well here it is, a week before Christmas and it's like 60 degrees and sunny and moist.   Very spring-like.  I'm about to take a walk to the liquor store with Sambone.  I love taking little kids to liquor stores.  I don't know why, exactly.  But it's not as bad as it sounds, because in Baltimore you can't really buy any alcohol (beer, wine, anything) except at a liquor store, with very few exceptions.  So it's not like I can just run down to Schnucks and pick up a six pack.  So off to the liquor store we go.  And geez, this time it's not even for me, it's for a co-worker's X-mas present.  So get off my back, already!

So anyway, it's really eerie not having any winter weather, like, ever, but I guess I might as well take the little dude outside and enjoy it a bit.  I've been working more day shifts at work lately and so there have been more days where I haven't gotten to spend much time with the dude, so it's been nice to hang out with him today.  And I've gotten a bunch of laundry done and some cleaning done so that after we leave town and come back we're not coming back to a place that is dirty and shitty, which is always a downer after the holidays. 

We got our fireplace doors the other day!  Woo-Hoo!  Just in time for the 60 degree days of winter.  Now I just have to install them.  Should I try and install them while Jeannie and Sam are out of town this weekend (which will be easier because there will be less baby around when the hammer-drilling is occurring) or should I do it sometime when Jeannie is here so that she can talk me out of suicide when I get in over my head and screw everything up? 

Alright.  I should really go pay attention to the kid over there. 

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Laser Light Show

Jeannie and I have changed our schedules such that she now goes in to the office on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then I go into work on Thursday night.  So I'm finishing up the third day in a row of hanging with the little dude and I have to say, I'm a little bored.  Not that there isn't literally tons of stuff that I could be doing (literally - if you wrote down everything productive that I could possibly be doing on its own little scrap of paper, and then put all of those scraps of paper in a Rubbermaid [TM] tub, that Rubbermaid [TM] tub would weigh one ton), but it's just that all of the things I could be doing are 1000 times more difficult to do while watching a child than they would be if I wasn't watching a child.  So I think to myself, "Oh, I'll just hang out here with the kid, and then I'll do __________ when Jeannie's home and I don't have to watch the kid."  Except that whenever Jeannie's home I just want to hang out and play with her, so nothing ever gets done.  And I'm bored. 

Anyway, nothing too exciting going on.  Did some Christmas shopping, although I did most of my Christmas shopping this year either online or over the phone. 

The Jeanners heads to St. Louis a week from tomorrow, and then I'll be following a few days after that.  It'll be another quick trip this year, but hopefully we'll get to see everybody we want to see. 

The other night in bed I put on a laser light show with two flashlights.  It was OK. 

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Sorry, Mom and Dad

I would just like to say that I'm not normally the type of person who uses the expression "cocksucker" lightly in public.  And even though my mind is very often a filthy cesspool, I try and keep that shit to myself amongst those with whom I am not very closely acquainted.  

I blame the lack of sleep.  Which, by the way, seems to have been solved by two Nyquil-filled nights. 

Oh, and shit doesn't really count as a bad word anymore, does it? 


Saturday, December 08, 2012

I would like to catch up on sleep, you cocksuckers.

You know, I thought that once the kid started sleeping through the night that life would get rosy again and I'd never feel sleepy again.  But it turns out that because he wakes up every day sometime between 4 and 5 in the morning, I'm just as tired now as when he was waking up at 2 in the morning and then going back to sleep until around 7 or so.  Damn you, baby boy!

Here's what I want:  elves watch the baby for about 2 days, Jeannie goes away (if she was here I would want to hang out with her.  Plus, her incessant coughing has been keeping me awake), and I sleep for 2 days.  I think 2 days would do it.  Get me caught up.  I just need a little catch up.  Probably I should just go to bed right now. 

Everybody's been sick lately, especially Jeannie, and me only a little bit.  It's felt like for about 4 days now that I was about to get sick, but then I never actually get sick.  Just sinus pressure in the head and a little congestion and the hint of a sore throat in the mornings.  Jeannie had the full blown thing with running nose and coughing and bleagh and blarg (meaning just general crappiness).  Sam had runny runny with big snot bubbles coming out of his nose when he laughed or breathed. 

Work has not gotten shitty yet, but shittiness is looming on the horizon, like a flock of crows ready to take a collective dump on the windshield that is my work life. 

Weird thing is that I've actually been having trouble sleeping when it comes time to make sleepy sleepy.  I get into bed and start thinking about too many things, and I have the damned Travolta/Newton-John christmas CD running through my head.  Ugh. 

Enough for now.  Bastante. 

I'm now going to send my mom an e-mail with a video of my kid taking a bath. 

Monday, December 03, 2012

The Lord of the Danneriliion (or, There but not Back Again)

I am currently in the midst of re-reading a bunch of JRR Tolkien stuff.  Haven't read it since I was about 12 or 13.  Reading The Hobbit at work and The Silmarillion at home.  Enjoying them both.  It's pretty amazing how different his 3 major works are (those 2 plus the Lord of the Rings), and yet they all tell different parts of the same massive story.  Quite a body of work.  I think that the Silmarillion is my favorite.  Very lush and poetic storytelling.  Not much dialogue.  Pretty much my favorite type of writing.  I remember when I was a kid reading books I would pretty much skip any paragraph that looked like it might be descriptive, and just jump to the dialogue.  Now I'm essentially the opposite.

Also, and I know I'm about 3-5 years late on this, I have started using Spotify, which is pretty danged awesome.  I'm a little curious about how it's NOT going to prevent anyone involved in music from making any money.  Or at least prevent people involved in music from making the gobs of money that they 1) used to make 2) might have one day made 3) dream of making one day.   Still, as a listener, it's pretty danged awesome. 

The Sambone has a bit of a cold.  Poor little dude.  [He's still in a pretty decent mood, though, although I'm currently starving him a little bit to try and wait until Jeannie gets home to feed him.  Cause I know she'll be ready to feed him when she gets home and that way she won't have to pump.  I hope she's not mad at me for revealing the secret that she sometimes pumps milk out of her breasts in order to feed our young baby.]

If she is mad at me, I might erase the bracketed text, along with this and the next sentence.  If I do have to erase it, I will replace it with this sentence:

"Well, that's all I've got right now.  Gotta poop!"