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Rampant yumminess

Rampant yumminess
I’ve got some yum for everyone else’s tum too – we don’t just feed babies here you know. For dinner I’ve whipped up some fishy ricey buttery garlicy lemony mushroomy goodness, and for dessert (or for diiner, if you don’t care for fishy ricey buttery garlicy lemony mushroomy goodness, I suppose), sugar-free chocolate brownie muffin things with decidedly not-so-sugar-free frosting. (I suppose that’s on the same order of logic that sees some people ordering a diet Coke with their two Big Macs for lunch, but cut me a break, it’s the only frosting I had on hand.)

I’m getting kinda handy with this sort of thing, if one doesn’t count the china plate that I broke today while working on v1.0 of the rice dish. 😯 That sent a nice big piece of ostrich steak into the floor, and from there it magically traveled to Xena’s bowl outside, instantaneously transforming her into the happiest dog in the county.

Yum. (Don’t worry, this’ll all be gone by the time anyone reading this blog reaches the house.)… Read more

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Home Base Music

Crash (minus time)

Reset the clock at 33 minutesIt finally happened to me tonight. The crash. My sister-in-law has been gleefully predicting it, oh, since about the time I started staying home with Evan while my wife went back to work. I suppose I had to know it was coming too. But it finally hit me this evening like a bag of bricks once my wife got home from work a bit later than usual. She came home after I’d been sitting on the toilet for a few minutes (and believe me, I wouldn’t belabor you with that detail if it wasn’t important to the story), a few minutes during which Evan had started getting fussy (see, I told you). He was at a full-bore wail by the time she walked in the door, and I wasn’t exactly in a position to get up and fix the problem; she immediately went to get him and determined that he and I were suffering from exactly the same problem at the same time! 😆 Anyway, I told her that I hadn’t gotten any nap time in, at all, and had only gotten a couple of hours sleep on Sunday night due to assorted fussiness and a full-blast crying fit, so I needed to take a nap.

For the first time since Evan was born, I woke up exactly eight hours later. My wife has evidently taken Evan, Olivia and Oberon to the master bedroom and closed the door. I’m assuming that I’m in the doghouse now, since I didn’t stay awake to prepare a meal or do the other stuff I usually do in the evenings.

The last thing I remember is looking into the living room from the bed in the nursery – things are lined up such that I can look through two doorways and see what my wife is doing on the couch – because Evan started crying while trying to nurse. I asked her what the problem was, and she said “[Arkansas football coach] Houston Nutt just quit! Didn’t even stay for the bowl game!” Now, I know, and I know that I said out loud, that no son of mine would be upset over that, and she said I needed to come in there and watch the news. And that’s the last thing I remember. My head hit the pillow with a resounding thud and I woke up almost exactly eight hours later with only Othello for company.

The problem has been that my body clock hasn’t so much been “rewired” by the baby as “dropped into a bathtub while still plugged into the wall outlet and short-circuited”. I’m taking care of him on an average 18-20 hours a day, with Sundays and Tuesdays as my only break. Sundays are still “work my ass off on the farm” days, so let me tell you, that’s not much of a break. The rest of the time, if I’m not already wide awake, my body expects to be woken up at three-hour intervals by the high-pitched announcement that I need to mix up a bottle of yum for my little buddy’s tum. (Yes, it’s official. With almost no one-on-one contact with the outside world, I have, in fact, descended into BabySpeak.) My wife will take the baby to sleep with her a couple of times a week, but even then, I wake up three hours after “I’m doing this so you can catch up on your rest” begins, and I cannot get back to sleep. It’s not because I get up and get on the internet or play games or watch TV; I think it’s become blazingly obvious that my internet presence has diminished tremendously over the past few weeks, often because the three-hours-of-sleep-at-a-time thing doesn’t do much for my clarity of thought for writing purposes either.

It’s like having a battery that you charge to only 1/4 of its capacity, and then you take it off the charger and use it in your camera, phone, iPod, laptop, what have you. Sure, it gets stuff done for a little bit. But you have to put it back on the charger sooner rather than later, and eventually it can’t hold a charge at all. And that was me tonight.

Please don’t think that this is in any way a complaint on my part about looking after my son. I chose this. This territory that’s usually thought of as housewife stuff, I chose it. My wife and I discussed this beforehand, and of the available options, I chose this. I wouldn’t miss this time with him for the world. As tired and cranky as I am when he wakes me up for a feeding, I can forgive anything in the world for the smile on that baby boy’s face the first time he sees me holding a bottle. Sometimes he smiles if I show up without it in hand. He doesn’t just have a bottle of formula in his pocket – he’s happy to see me. If you haven’t experienced it, there’s no way for me to describe what seeing that smile does to you. If you have, you know what I’m talking about, and you’re already preparing to laugh at me when that smiling infant turns into a cynical, sullen teenager someday.

I just need to figure something out about recharging the battery.

Complete, strip-the-gears non-sequitur here: there’s an interesting article on CNN about the one guy at the Weather Channel who picks out their local forecast music. Man, I remember when they used to play some really interesting stuff, back in the late ’80s when you’d hear some Jarre or Terry Riley stuff on there. The first thought that occurred to me upon reading that article was that I should send this guy a sampling of my own music, of which there are more than a few laid-back tracks, but the thought that occurred to me next was that, now that he’s been name-checked on the internet, something tells me he’s going to be getting more than 80 free samplers per month now. 😆

Also, it’s come to my attention that some portions of theLogBook are generating a virus warning from Sophos. There is no virus here. What’s triggering that is a WordPress add-on script to prevent right-click-and-save plagiarism and image theft, which is a bit of a hot-button thing with me (as anyone who was around me a couple of years ago will attest). I’m looking for other solutions in that area, but for now, I will begin shutting down the anti-right-click script in most areas of the site. Phosphor Dot Fossils, Pixel Fiction and Toybox will likely still be affected, since according to my site stats reports, that’s where most of the hotlinking takes place. But there’s no virus in those sections either. C’mon, folks, I run a cleaner ship than that. 😉… Read more

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Home Base

Addressing an important issue

I’m putting this in my blog, since it may be marginally easier than sending out 150 e-mails. Due to some persistent problems we’ve been having with keeping our mailbox at the house intact, we’ve decided to open a new P.O. box. Also, since I rarely make it into Fort Smith anymore, we’ll be closing down the P.O. box there, which is the address most of my friends from the internets know me by. Effective rightaboutnowish, any and all mail should be sent to the new P.O. box we’ve opened much closer to home. Anyone who needs to know what that address is can find it here, he said evasively.

That’s all for now. I’m effectively brain-dead from the constant “charge the battery for 2 hours and then start over” of baby-watchin’. There’s gotta be some better way to manage my fatigue, but for the life of me I don’t know what it could be. Everyone do me a favor – if your mom stayed home from work and made caring for baby you her full time job, or if your dad did it, call them and thank them, and give ’em a big hug next time you see them. For they are superhuman. My problem right now is: I’m not. :-/ … Read more

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Funny Stuff

The Mayor vs. the Devil

Time traveling voodoo cultWhat’s the matter, Mr. Mayor? Is it…Satan?

Seems a local small-town mayor is bedeviled by his past, in which he supposedly fought a pitched battle with a satanic cult and then came to Arkansas under an assumed name (which I assume wasn’t Beelzebubba).

My gut tells me that this guy has just fed the local media a lot of deviled ham. Or maybe he’s doing something totally goofy so he can have a publicly-known example of “mental incompetence” before some real piece of news about him hits.

I mean, I don’t know the gentleman, don’t have anything against him personally one way or the other, but…WTF?… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Gadgetology

Dad’s day off

Tuesdays are my wife’s day off, so about half the time they wind up being my day off from Evan. I feel like a bit of a heel for looking forward to Tuesdays. My wife has the baby most of any given Sunday, but that’s because I’m off at the farm working my butt off – not much of a day off for daddy. I love my kid, but it’s kinda nice having a day to myself once a week. His mom has hauled him into town for a pediatrician’s visit (normal) and his first round of shots (which I don’t think he’s gonna like). Then she’s got some other stops to make – and quite frankly, I think those have everything to do with showing the little guy off. 😆

In today’s “this day X years ago” posts, this topic cropped up, and I thought I’d go and take a look at what my music directory is like now, two years later. Survey says…about 120 gigabytes! Of nothing but music/audio! That’s almost exactly 1/3 of my main PC’s hard drive. Good Lord. This is part of why, the last time I was at Kent’s place and saw his Western Digital external drive, I’ll admit I popped a bit of a woody. That thing is nice, and it’s a RAID drive to boot (pitiful pun intended). Needless to say, that’s gone right onto the old wish list (right up there with the Wii I’m never gonna get at this rate :-P). Here’s hoping Santa think I’ve been a really good daddy this year. 😯

That’s all I’ve got in my brain right now. (Ain’t much, I know.)… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters

Fisher-Price presents: My First Shiner

You can tell Evan’s my kid by the way he fights sleep. That is to say, he isn’t merely resisting the notion of closing his eyes and surrendering consciousness – he’s actively trying to kick sleep’s ass so he can stay awake all hours like Daddy does. This is the cause of some almighty screaming crying fits at night, as well as lots of flailing about. He’s put an inexplicable scratch on the right side of his own nose that I don’t look forward to explaining at his next doctor’s visit. And now my son Sluggo has managed to punch himself just below the right eye and cause a bit of swelling. 😯 … Read more

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Critters Funny Stuff

The amazing true story of the puffball-fetching cat

Olivia and the puffballOur dog doesn’t play fetch like our cat does.

Oh, sure, you can go outside and throw something for Xena to fetch, but more than likely she’ll sit by your side, watch the projectile arc gracefully through the air, and wonder why in the world you threw it way out there. Throw a puffball inside the house, however, and nothing is as certain as the fact that it will return to you in Olivia’s mouth, and she’ll happily drop it by your feet and bat it around a little bit while she waits for you to throw it again. It’s fun!

Olivia also perks up at the mention of the word “puffball.” She can be dozing off, but if you say “puffball,” she looks up in anticipation.

Olivia and the puffball

Actually, Olivia carries a lot of stuff around, dog-like, in her mouth: hair scrunchies, string, cat toys (especially Claude), you name it. We’ve found wayward baby socks around the house in places where we never would have put them. Even better is that she’s teaching Oberon this valuable skill.

Don’t believe me? Click here for the video, taken in the doorway of Evan’s room.… Read more