disclaimer...

Ok, it's a great looking costume, and "award winning" and all that... but the poor kid fell on his face before he even got out of the driveway tonight!

"help us, obi wan kenobi..."

As promised, here are the pics of the kids' Halloween costumes...



In case it's not obvious... I was in charge of one costume and my wife was in charge of the other. Who did a better job? It's not for me to judge. Although I will say, only ONE of the costumes won First Place for "Most Original" in the town Halloween Parade this weekend...




Oh yeah, baby...

(PS> Yes, that IS an actual color-changing LED light on Artoo's head. Thank you.)

cute pics of kids...

Because it's been a while...




Stay tuned for Halloween pics, too. The boy's R2-D2 costume is seriously going to kick ass.

Shhh....!

I don't want to type too loudly lest Old Whitey here get jealous, but his days are officially numbered. There's about to be a new kid in town.

Oh, yeah...

i wonder if he usually... "takes the helm", if you know what I mean...?

Via Dr. Bitch, big entertainment news of the day... George "Sulu" Takei has come out in a recent interview. Which is great, y'know? Good for him. But really... do those Star Trek fan-fiction weirdos needed any more fuel for their twisted little fantasies.

dave's political shitstorm minute...

Seems that the Miers nomination has tanked. I have mixed feelings about it... given that most of the criticism of Miers was coming from the RIGHT, I expect we'll eventually wind up with someone more conservative and more ideologically objectionable. but in the meantime...

NYAH-NYAH!!

A handful of indictments tomorrow would make this a fine week indeed.

dave's celebrity gossip minute...

I hear Angelina Jolie wants to adopt some more kids. I think it's pretty clear from her history that Ms. Jolie has a bit of an obsessive personality, and that adoption is her new Billy Bob. Problem is, you can't just have those Cambodian kids lasered off when you get tired of them in a few years.

exam day...

Today promises to be a fairly low-key, if a bit long, day. I'm giving two midterm exams, which means a whole-lotta sitting around doing nothing. Or grading, which is what I SHOULD do while they are test-taking. We'll see... maybe a little of both. Then in the afternoon I'm having lunch with a former colleague... the guy who replaced me for a short time at the Old School. We worked together pretty closely during the transition... now he teachers Anthropology at a "Major Texas University", as they say. Anyway, he's in town for a conference of some sort, so we're going to get together at the Museum of Natural History and catch up.

Then I have to head back downtown for a committee meeting at 4:00. Yay. The good news is that my OTHER committee adjourned it's business for the semester on Tuesday, so I won't have to meet with them until the Spring. Maybe this whole committee-thing won't be so bad after all.

Other tidbits...

* I finally got around to updating iTunes on my Mac the other day, and I have now discovered "podcasts". Not the crap that people do in their bedrooms, but stuff from NPR and Nature and Macworld. It's great for the train. One more way to multi-task!

* Speaking of the Mac, I'm starting to get itchy for an upgrade. A recent consolidation of the Powerbook line, and a price drop on the 12" Powerbook in particular makes it a pretty good time. Plus we just recently got a $5000 check back from the house closing, and a $1600 rebate from the idiot movers who lost our truck for a month. (Boy, did we have to fight for THAT check!) So we have a little extra cash lying around this month. We'll see.

* I'm still sick. I thought it had gone into Sinus Infection Land, but that seems to have passed, and it's been a chest thing for a couple of days. Fuck. Are there any symptoms left that I've missed??

* The woman sitting next to me on the train has a perfect manicure. (So RED!) Now she's doing the lipstick thing. Love that. Anyway, *I* on the other hand have paint all over my hands as a result of applying a primer coat of special "sticks to plastic" spray paint to our Astromech-droid-in-progress last night. Know what the special "sticks to plastic" spray paint sticks to even better than plastic? FLESH!!!

I think that's it for now. I'm going to take advantage of the whole "no teaching today" situation to close my eyes for a while.

will this make me a "scab"...?

Well, it's beginning to look more and more like the part-time faculty at our University are going to go on strike. Which raises the question of...? What do we FULL-TIME do? Do we cross a picket line and teach our classes anyway, or do we try to hold class someplace else, or online, or...?

And I'm not the most pro-union Democrat you'll ever meet anyway, but in this case any sympathy I may have with the PT faculty's issues (which is not a whole lot) is going to pretty quickly evaporate if their strike fucks up my semester. My inclination is to teach my class at their regular time and place... picket lines be damned. I don't like to be bullied and I don't like groupthink and I don't like other people deciding for me how I should feel about this or that issue. And if I'm not overwhelmingly supportive of the PT Union's demand, I consider my primary responsibility to MY job and MY contract and MY students.

And I know the life of an adjunct professor is pretty crappy and low-paying and the prevalence of adjuncts is symptomatic of wider problems with the academic establishment, but... still. I still can't help but feel that if you've been working a part-time job for 15 years... you must not be very good.

about last week...

I was so distracted last week about various distracting things that are still occupying certain parts of my distractible brain, that I never got around to writing about my guest lecture gig. (There are other things I haven't written about as well, but that's mostly on purpose.)

I rolled into the Hamptons at around 10:30 PM Thursday night, so figure I was coming off a 3 + hour drive from NYC. I checked into the swank guest house, and proceeded to pace off excess energy and fuck around online until 12:30. (Mistake!) By 7:30 next morning I was up and off to the Old School where I was welcomed back like a conquering hero by all my old colleagues. It's good to be a superstar! I was even told by an English teacher that it was like seeing a historical figure come to life. ("Like Charlemagne" she added, in her posh, British accent.)

My ego was feeling fine last week, I must say.

The lecture was impeccable, if I do say so myself... and the HS students were rapt and attentive and asked questions. Questions! THOUGHTFUL questions! More questions in 2 hours than I've been asked ALL SEMESTER by my college kids. I was "in the zone". There was applause... there were accolades... there were invitations to return on a regular basis.

I am... indeed... "The Man". If there was any lingering doubt, let it be cast aside now.

Then I spent all day sitting at the lunch tables, telling the same life-update story to person after person after person. That part was quite grueling. My voice began to give out. I started to get headachey. Too much socializing takes a toll on me.

So, by 2:00 I was on the road again... 5 hours later I was home. It was a long, sleepy drive but I took lots of food breaks and managed not to drive off a bridge. So... that was that... all in all a pretty good day. I don't know if I want to do it again. As nice as it was... that was a LOT of effort for a few hundred bucks. I probably will do it though,... since I have an overly-strong and often-misplaced sense of loyalty, and because I'm a sucker for rapt audiences and comparisons to historical figures.

bite your tongue, weather.com....

"Windy with showers this evening changing over to rain and snow overnight. Low 37F. Winds NNW at 25 to 35 mph. Chance of precip 70%"

Oh no you di'-nt!!

morning commute non-entry snipped from email...

God... 6:40 AM is way too fucking early to be on a train. I don't have any idea what I'm doing in class today... EITHER class. I was supposed to review for midterms, but... that's not something that I should really waste a whole damned period on. I'm too tired to plan anything, though. It's still the Week From Hell... committee meetings and crap, and the Mother-in-Law is flying in in a couple of days, so we're spending all day cleaning the house and/or fighting over cleaning the house...

I promised my students some grading by today, but... fuck...

Anyway, I'm gonna go read my morning blog downloads and then maybe take a nap. No snoring, I promise...

have i mentioned there was ICE on my car this morning..

Tonight marked the third visit by someone to supposedly FIX our heat upstairs, which currently has none. You know? The upstairs? Where everyone SLEEPS? Including two small CHILDREN?

How fucking hard can it be to localize and repair this problem?

hey, i know...!

Let's go pick apples in the pouring rain! After all, it's a refreshing 48 fucking degrees!

(Ah, it's good to be back...)

back to reality...

I probably don't need to explain why I haven't blogged for a couple of days... you all saw the "list". Basically, Thursday and Friday came down to 48 hours of constant anxiety, punctuated by a handful of perfect moments that made the whole two days... well... more than bearable.

I may say more about that. But probably not.

a list or something...

I hate starting the day off by oversleeping... even when I have nothing in particular to be late for. I mean... I don't teach on Wednesdays, I just have office hours at 10:00, which means I can miss 2 or 3 trains and still get to work in time to sit in my office and do nothing, but I still like to catch my regular train and get there at the regular time. And when I don't, it just fills the morning with a constant low-level feeling of being rushed and stressed. And there's no reason for it at all.

Especially when I have legitimate reasons to be stressed!

Agreeing to give this talk on Friday was downright insane. Because it has to be ready TODAY, given that I drive out there tomorrow night. It also means I'm DRIVING to work on Thursday, which... ugh... I never know how much time to leave myself to drive into Manhattan. It's so fucking unpredictable. I always wind up overcompensating and leaving at 4:00 AM or something.

But because I'm driving, that deprives me of 4 hours of useful train time to plan my regular Thursday classes. So everything I'm doing for the next two days has to be done by tonight. I know it's probably NORMAL for SOME people to REGULARLY be prepared for things two days ahead. I hate those people.

So I need to make myself a list or something.

To Do Today:
* Grade at least one set of homeworks for each class
* Print out in-class activity for astronomy tomorrow
* Figure out what the hell we're doing in physics class Thursday
* Go through Friday's presentation once more and figure out what's missing
* Print out some directions and other files for Friday

To Do Tonight:
* Watch "Lost".
* Select and pack change of clothes, overnight bag for Thursday night.
* Iron clothes for Thursday.
* Plan drive for Thursday morning, decide on times. Figure out how the hell I got to the Lincoln Tunnel last time, which was accidental, but very effective.

To Do Thursday:
* Drive to NYC
* Teach classes, discuss midterm exams with both.
* Have lunch with out-of-town visitor.
* Attend faculty meeting.
* Remember to pack up my computer gizmo bag from the office.
* Have coffee/dinner/?? with out-of-town visitor. Wait out rush hour. Consume large amounts of caffeine.
* Drive to Hamptons. Stop often to rest if not enough caffeine. Stop often to pee if too much caffeine.
* Check in at Guest House. Look over presentation one more time. Sleep.

To Do Friday:
* Get up early if presentation still needs work. (I always like to stick in a few last-minute slides!) Iron clothes if necessary.
* Head to Old School for breakfast, chit-chat w/ former colleagues.
* Give talk.
* Hang out through all 3 lunch shifts, chit-chat w/ former colleagues.
* Begin driving towards home by 1:30 or so
* Resist and/or succumb to impulse to visit once-favorite Long Island lap-dance establishment.
* Continue driving towards home.

I feel like I'm missing some things... especially with regards to things I need to do tonight. But I think I'll print this out and use it as a check-off list. It will give me the illusion of control, which really... is about all I can ever hope for.

the judas priest thing...

There was a Judas Priest concert around here the day before my birthday that I *almost* convinced myself to go see. Now, I was never much of a Priest fan as a teen... I was always more of an Iron Maiden kinda guy. Iron Maiden, being more progressive and science-fictiony was basically heavy metal for guys who really would rather be listening to Rush. Kinda like Rush was Pink Floyd for kids who didn't smoke pot.

But I digress...

I was never a HUGE Priest fan, but I had the requisite albums in my LP collection... British Steel... Point of Entry... Defenders of the Faith. I enjoyed these albums and all the "hit" songs, but... eh... they were never a favorite. But in light of recent events, I can now look at these old Priest songs in a whole new light. You see... since Rob Halford "came out" a few years back during his vacation from the band... the songs take on a whole new meaning. I get great pleasure in knowing that all these songs we teenage boys once thought were about motorcycles are really about a good, hard ass-fucking!

games people play...

When I fall behind in grading, sometimes I bribe myself... other times I try to trick myself. Like for instance, I could semi-intentionally neglect to charge my laptop all afternoon, so that I will have no choice but to close the lid on the train and work on something else.

Of course... nothing's stopping me from sleeping.

f-f-f-foolin'...

God... these long weekends are a killer. It's been 5 days since I've been to work, and I found myself sitting on the edge of the bed this morning looking at the alarm clock, saying to myself... "5:40?? Shit, is that really what time I get out of bed??" Unfortunately, the answer was - yes.

So, if you think a 5-day weekend would mean that I perhaps had done a little extra course planning, or caught up on my grading at all, well... clearly you're new around here. I did do a lot of work on my guest lecture for Friday, which mostly consisted of resurrecting an old PowerPoint and changing all the fonts. (It's amazing how quickly fonts look dated, isn't it??) I had a problem while planning for today's classes - it's happening a lot lately - where I know exactly what I want to accomplish in class, but I also know that it doesn't amount to NEARLY 90 minutes worth of material. Around 10:00 PM last night, a flash of inspiration hit, and I now know what I'll be doing to fill up the physics class, but as far as astronomy goes... well... that second flash of inspiration had better come along real soon.

My whole astro class has become a bit of a disaster, actually. I cut out some topics early on, and then rushed through the historical stuff, and now I find myself kind of disturbingly far ahead of my syllabus. I'm worried I may run out of stuff to teach. I think it may be time to look into some MOVIES!

In other news... still suffering from migrating cold symptoms. Last night I was starting to feel pretty normal, but today I feel sinusy and headachey. Both kids are walking snot factories too. It's a LOVELY time to be at our house!

Today begins the Two Weeks From Hell. I think my wife is going to be out for the next two evenings, then I'm away Thursday nite, possibly until lateish Friday. Then next week I have two committee meetings and the mother in law is visiting, and we're going to a party Saturday, and my daughter's weekend classes start, and the wife is spending Sunday in the city with her Mom, and I have to start this fucking R2-D2 costume over again because the silver paint I used is flaking off the plastic trash can, and I have to write 2 midterms by next Thursday...

I know. I've been through it all already. Sometimes I just forget and need to jump start my anxiety levels.

Oh, also... speaking of anxiety... for the past 5 days I've been vaguely unsure of the whereabouts of my iPod. I was 99% sure that it was in my other blazer, which I left at the office on Thursday (you'll recall there was a blazer swapping incident that day) but my brain is famously unable to let go of that 1%. (Update: I'm in my office... it was in the blazer.)


On a completely unrelated note... the rock radio station around here suuuure does like their Def Leppard. And speaking of bad 80's rock... remind me to tell you the thing about Judas Priest...

But right now, I have to go...

and the "parent of the year" award goes to...

I was trying to give the Boy medicine this morning, and the Dimetapp was empty and I couldn't get the cap off the Sudafed, and I don't even remember saying it, but I must have, because while I was checking on the dosage for 3-year-olds on the bottle, the Little Guy picks up the bottle of Dimetapp and says...

"What... da hell... is... UP wif yis?"

Me: (calmly) Buddy, don't say that.

(thoughtful pause)

Boy: ... shit.

"that's a perfectly good bike! who would throw that away...?"

The third Monday of the month around here is "bulk trash pickup" day. Which means that all over town, curbs are piled high with mattresses and lounge chairs, bikes and microwaves, bookshelves and treadmills. And I can't tell you how hard I am fighting my genetic predisposition towards driving around town and loading up the van with junk. I swear to god... this would be like CHRISTMAS for my Dad!

nothing ever works...

I decided yesterday to try looking into Apple's mail program (cleverly titled "Mail" if you must know) as an alternative to the Eudora I've been using for 4 or 5 years. I've been reading about many people who have switched recently, so I was hoping that maybe it didn't suck as bad as the version that I tried out with OSX 10.1. And yeah... it doesn't. It feels nice and streamlined and Appley, so I may stick with it.

One problem.

I needed to import all of my existing Eudora mail... 7000 or so saved messages, which it did happily, even keeping my subfolder structure intact, but when it imported the messages that *I* myself had sent, it somehow dated them all as being sent "Yesterday". Which kinda permanently fucks up my sent-mail archive. So now I have to decide if I care enough that it's worth NOT switching over.

Or maybe there is an update I can download and DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN!

Computers are FUN!

snif, snif... squawk!

I have a headache. And a fever. And now I'm congested too.

It's the fucking Bird Flu, I know it.

ok... this is serious now...

The rain has GOT to fucking STOP.

Now.

Really.

how much worse can it get, dave?

We have dual zone heating in our house... meaning... one floor of our house is heated, while the upstairs is TOTALLY NOT!!

on the bright side, after another 36 I'll almost surely be dead...

Leave the house, walk to car, notice it's raining, walk back to house, pick up umbrella, open to test for spiky-ness, walk back to car, drive to train station, get out of car, pick up umbrella, push little somehow-now-jammed handle pushbutton repeatedly to no end until reaching the conclusion...

Birthdays... oh how they suck!

There is a science department meeting today, and we all have a "project" that we're supposed to have completed, which of course I haven't even started, so I have to go to my office and rush-rush-rush the thing out before noon. Not a big deal, but it does mean that nothing else gets done today.

I woke up with a sore throat today. Not sure why. There is a lot of low-grade semi-cold floating around the house. Snotty kids. Maybe this is that.

I'm wearing a grey blazer with brown shoes because my brown blazer is at the office. I'll swap them when I get there, but in the meantime, it really bugs me.

I had yoga class yesterday. The verdict is still out on this one. It's a lot more rapid-fire-Vinyasa crap than I really care for... but the instructor always pulls some kinds of weird-ass pose out of her bag-of-yoga-tricks that I've never seen before, which feels like utter TORTURE while I'm doing it, but makes me feel really great after class. She still runs 15 minutes over, though... which is NOT cool.

I put first coat of silver and blue paint on the Artoo trashcan last night. Painter's masking tape doesn't really work very well on the plastic, so I think I'm going to have to do a lot of touch-ups, but I think it's going to be cute. My wife and I are currently arguing over the minimum acceptable face-opening size for safe visibility. Moms ruin everything.

I feel like I was awake every hour from 1:30 AM to 5:30 AM last night. Bedwetting incidents... scratchy cats... then there's that damned "alarm clock" thingy. At least that has an off button. Oh yeah.. did I mention I was a half hour late getting out of bed? Yeah. I'm having Jolt caffeinated gum for breakfast at the moment.

Oh, also... I forgot my watch.

So, it's 7:30, and the day already kinda sucks. Oh well... at least I have the lame presents and perfunctory sex to look forward to!


(PS> I managed to PRY my umbrella open, which is good, because it is fucking POURING. Also, I just realized I left the powercord to my laptop at home. Buy guess what? I HAVE A SPARE! At the OFFICE! Take THAT, Universe!!)

"I'd like 2 reams of 8.5" x 11"... extra curly...!

Almost every day on the way to work from the subway station, I pass a stationery store called "JAM Paper and Office Supply". I don't know about you, but when I'm shopping for office paper, I always look for the word "jam" right there in the name.

it's not even going someplace NICE...

One of those days, right... late committee meeting, try to rush and get a train at a decent hour... sit down on a train, but screw up the track numbers cuz you don't know the schedules this late... quickly gather your things and rush OFF the train when they announce it's not stopping where you want to GO...

The upshot? Not only am I NOT getting home at a decent hour, but my fucking leather jacket is going to TRENTON MOTHERFUCKING NEW JERSEY... WITHOUT ME!!

starting to lose it...

Busy... man, do I hate being this busy. My October calendar is PACKED. It's not even funny. Tomorrow is my fucking birthday, and I keep forgetting. I bring this up not to solicit birthday wishes from readers, but rather to point out how little it matters. It's just one more thing to "deal with", really... I could honestly do without it. Can I celebrate by being allowed to SLEEP for all of Yom Kippur?

The number of meetings I'm expected to attend seems to be growing exponentially.... and... I'm sorry, excuse me a moment...

"HEY, ASSHOLE!! That's a very nice 20" Dell Inspiron laptop you've got there, but believe it or not, it does NOT entitle you to take up FOUR FUCKING SEATS. MOVE IT!

Where was I? Ah... The number of meetings I'm expected to attend seems to be growing exponentially, and when you add in various social commitments, and the impending Holiday Seasons... I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed. Make that VERY overwhelmed. A sample...

Thu 10/20 - lunch w/ friend from out of town.
Thu 10/20 - Evening: drive to Hamptons
Fri 10/21 - lecture at Old School, drive home (4 hrs)

Tue 10/25 - Academic Committee meeting
Wed 10/26 - Student Life committee meeting
Wed 10/26 - Mother-in-law visit

Sat 10/29 - Daughter's weekend 'enrichment' class begins
Sat 10/29 - Evening work party in NYC
Sun 10/30 - Wife in city w/ Mom all day, watch kids

Mon 10/31 - Halloween (must complete transformation of trashcan into R2-D2)
Thu 11/3 - Work/student party/event at 6:00 PM

That's not to mention, at some point in there I need to write, deliver, and grade 2 midterm exams. And yeah, I know some peoples' lives are like this all the time, but... NOT MINE. It's not even so much the events themselves as the mental energy that must be expended THINKING about the events. Every committee meeting means a 14 hour work day... every party means social-anxiety-stress... every deadline means procrastination and worry. Then we get to plan our trip to Baltimore for Thanksgiving. OH BOY!!

It was not my intent to be such a downer today, but... I'M TIRED AND I LOST MY FUCKING COAT!!

choosy dads choose...

I made the kids lunch today and then cleared the table of all the bread and stuff and went to check my email. After I while I noticed that The Boy was sitting at the table going... "J...A...I...F! J...A...I...F!"

OK, I'll bite... "Whatcha spellin', Buddy?"

(I was pretty sure I knew what was coming...)

(pause) "Peanut Butter!"

Yes, yes you are. My only question is how he knows what a lowercase "f" looks like.

the delicate dance of parental responsibility shirking...

So, the wife is at a professional conference of some sort in Manhattan today, which means I'll be stuck on kid duty from wake-up to bedtime. (It's pouring rain too, so we'll be trapped in the house all day.) I'd bitch and moan, except that the Old School came through with a speaking fee for my guest lecture, and agreed to put me up at the Guest House for a night, so in a couple of weeks I get to leave work on a Thursday and drive to the Hamptons for an overnight gig. I think I win.

it's not MY project, but...

... wouldn't you think if you were going to spend hours designing a custom closet online and spending $800+ on the pieces that at some point during the process you would have actually measured the fucking closet to make sure that what you were buying was actually going to FIT where you intended to put it?

I'm just saying.

out of joint...

Last night I found myself sitting in a chair with my left palm and wrist aching (new piano -> carpal tunnel and tendonitis) and a dull, deep pain in my right arm from my fingers up to my elbow. (wet fall weather -> arthritis flare up.) It's not much better today, although the right is better than the left. Being old sucks. Less than a week until I hit the downside of my 30's. Pushing 40? Yup. Pushing it so hard my arms hurt.

and those little yellow lights don't do SHIT...

The fog around here in the mornings lately is fucking insane, and I can't imagine it's going to get anything but WORSE as the weather continues to cool. I seriously almost drove into a fucking ditch yesterday trying to make a left hand turn onto a road I couldn't see. The last thing I need in the mornings is low-grade, white-knuckle driving-stress.

Anyways, I graded some papers yesterday, and then some on the train today, but I'm STILL not caught up. And I have more coming in today. I was a little depressed by the marginally-more-than-50% hand-in rate in the physics class for the most recent assignment. Although I guess it matches the typical marginally-more-than-50% ATTENDANCE rate most days. Some people had better get their withdrawal forms in.

Ok. I need to make some plans for Astro class.

students have lives...?

So... I've been invited to serve on the "Student Life and Outreach Committee". That's the way they phrase it, you know... "We would like to INVITE you to serve on such and such committee." I'm not sure an answer of "no" is really an option. Nonetheless, I've tried to think of a way to respond to the Dean to say, politely... "You know... I think my expertise would really be put to better use on another committee... given that I really don't give a rat's ass about students OR their lives." But I can't help but feel that wouldn't come off well. So I guess I'm stuck.

school update...

I think I mentioned that my wife and I had a meeting scheduled with our daughter's principal on Monday? Maybe? Anyway... the result of that meeting is that, pending a few reading and math tests and a talk with the school psychologist, we will most likely be the parents of an "instant second grader" some time next week. It basically comes down to... yeah, it would be nicer if this could be handled within the first grade classroom, but the teacher doesn't really have the time or the experience to modify the curriculum THAT much, so the only place for her to really get work that's at her level will be in second grade. So. There you go. Time to call that financial planner...

She's a little sad about leaving her new friends after only a few weeks, but her initial reaction was a HUGE smile and a shout of "YES!" She spent last night doing practice problems in math workbooks. (With no prompting from us, I might add. It was completely her idea.) Should a first grader really be "cramming" for an exam?

out of the closet...

For reasons still somewhat unclear to me, we're installing a custom "Pax" closet system into the master bedroom. Purchasing said closet system involved not only a certain amount of "consultation" with the IKEA closet planner guy, but sitting around for a half-hour while they pull all the pieces from the warehouse. All this with two evil little children running around and fighting and screaming at one another. Add another 20 minutes of trying to figure out how to get five 8' long by 24" wide boxes into the van, and you may just be able to imagine the scope of the headache I had yesterday afternoon.

So... there is $800 worth of closet-fixin's sitting in our foyer. This Friday I get to empty the closet... tear out the existing wire shelves, spackle the wall-holes, and then generally keep the kids at bay while my wife assembles FIVE giant pieces of IKEA furniture. (The wife has inherited the job of furniture assembly. It's like a puzzle. She enjoys it. Totally fucking fine with me.) The end result will be a beautiful, well-organized closet with considerably LESS storage space than it had before. But you didn't hear that from ME...

"Hello? This is Discover Card fraud protection...?"

Sorry. No time to post. We're out spending all the money we got from the sale of the house. On Things...! We....! Really...! Need...!

is he strong? listen bud, he's got radioactive blood...

I've decided that one way Netflix allows you to SAVE money is by allowing you to rent extremely silly DVDs that, despite their silliness, you've been tempted to actually drop $50 on everytime you pass them in Target. Case in point... last week I Netflicked the first disc of "Spiderman - the Complete '67 series". As much as I enjoyed some of the groovy music, I'm somewhat disappointed that overall, my tastes weren't quite as discerning when I was EIGHT as I remember them being.

One amusing thing... a large number of the voices are from Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer! Example... J. Jonah Jameson - Donner... his secretary is "Mrs. Donner" and every random child and paperboy sounds suspiciously like Rudolph himself. Worse yet... you'd never know when he's Spiderman, but when he's Peter Parker, the voice becomes a little more tenory... it's HERMEY!!

I feel betrayed somehow...

one, two, three, four... HI-5...!!!

We're going to take the kids to go see Hi-5 this evening at a Hurricane Katrina benefit event in upstate NY.

I dread the peppiness!!

Although, a couple of the chicks ARE kinda hot...