Tag: Olivia

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Should We Talk About The Weather?

Mission: Impossumble III

Last night, the super-nasty thunderstorm that had been dropping tornadoes all through Oklahoma went right over my house, complete with a very big, very obvious rotating wall cloud. Which, of course, my wife took my son out on the back deck to see, since it wasn’t even raining at our house. I’m all for giving him an intellectual understanding of bad weather so he’s not afraid of it, but… wait a minute. Who’s this knocking on my door at 3:30 in the morning? “Dad, I’m scared.” Um… yeah. Couldn’t get him back to his own bed without a major meltdown until 5 in the morning. Good show!

But other interesting phenomena happened at our house last night as well. I don’t think he was deposited by the storm either. He was lured by the smell of dog food on the back deck. (The reason dog food hits the back deck is simple: Xena hauls off her dog food bowls to points unknown for fun. It’s gotten expensive and a bit silly trying to replace all the bowls. So… dog food on deck!)

Of course, it wasn’t our dog chowing down on dog food. It was someone all three cats were very eager to eat, erm, sorry, meet.

… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Jam-packed pre-Christmas update

The Daddy & Evan ShowSorry I’ve been neglecting you, blawg (and any readers still left out there). I’m still getting used to the whole rhythm of having a steady job. You’d think (and I would’ve thought) I would’ve gotten used to it by now, but it still hasn’t happened for whatever reason. Evan has lots of overnight outbursts, and sometimes I think they’re all about making up for lost daddy-and-Evan time. He just wants me to hold him until he falls back asleep. Daddy can do that… but it robs me of sleep on the flipside, and I have to try to get some nap time in after Evan goes to day care, and the end result is that it often seems like I do two things: work and sleep. My hours have normalized a bit – no more radical changes in my in/out times from day to day – but the sad part is, the hours have normalized to where I’m only home to tuck Evan into bed two nights a week. At this point I think I’m having more trouble with that than he is. I miss my Evan time.

I do make the most of it while I’ve got it though – he’s been wanting to sing along with the ABC song and Jingle Bells a lot lately, and I’ve been trying to accommodate him, especially since his musical tastes aren’t developed enough to know that daddy can’t really sing worth two craps. He also listens to every word I say on the drive to day care in the morning. Case in point: one day I had some choice words for the driver ahead of me. Evan then repeated those choice words all day at day care. Thank God the words were only “NICE TURN SIGNAL, BUDDY!” (In case you can’t tell, some vital portions of my trash-talking-other-drivers education took place during one of my visits with my grandfather; the classroom was the maze-like street grid of New York City.)

Three Amigos

Evan’s been getting along just fine with the other new addition to the family too. Actually, everyone’s getting along with Puck, the new black cat (code names: Puckalufagus, Puckbill Cat-a-puss). Puck also got some of his education on the mean streets, and it shows: now that he’s in our house, he has absolutely zero interest in going outside (unlike Oberon). We’re still experiencing a bit of a learning curve with convincing him to stay off the kitchen counter, out of the trash cans, etc. etc.; I gather he’s had to dig through a few trash cans to find dinner in the past, and it’s a habit he’s having some trouble breaking. But he’s not being destructive or terribly messy – on the contrary, he doesn’t leave a single crumb when he eats – and he’s emerging as a very benevolent alpha male, keeping the peace when the other two cats fight. Puck has been allowed to keep his claws intact because he’s very choosy about using them, and that give his enforcement of household feline peace a little bit of authority too. It’s not uncommon to see all three cats curled up together, which may be a new ground speed record for universal adoption-to-acceptance in our house. He sleeps with me at night; as yet, I don’t know if he picked me or if I picked him. Considering that he showed up at my workplace on the first night of my new job, I’m leaning more and more toward the former.

Speaking of Oberon, today marks three years since we adopted him. December 19th being the life-changing day that it is in our family history, that also means three years since I saw Sultry drown right in front of me, three years since I gave my notice at the station where, ironically, I’m now working again (though in a very different capacity), and all of those events directly or indirectly are tied in with Evan… happening. Looking at where I am now is kind of eerie: I’m back to working at the same TV station, where a black cat showed up to replace my sorely-missed black cat… more than once I’ve looked around, worried, to make sure that I get to keep my kid out of this deal. It’s nice to have the job (and even nicer to have the cat), but there are some parts of the status quo that I don’t want restored.

Oh, and by the way…NICE TURN SIGNAL, BUDDY!

I’ll try to blawg a bit more often. In fact, there’s some really startlingly inconsequential blogging just around the corner…… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters

Welcome to Evan’s Man Cave (formerly Daddy’s Man Cave)

Evan has figured out how to open and close the door to my game room; the only thing he hasn’t quite gotten his head (or his height) around is the operation of the doorknob (or, for that matter, the lock – daddy senses a bit of doorknob surgery in the near future before that happens…), but other than that, he’s likely to open the door, greet you and welcome you in. I don’t even think this is my game room anymore. :shocked:

He’s also taken on another bizarre habit. He has a blankie horse, you see, and it’s become clear over time that this is his “comfort animal” – his security blanket with a horsie head, if you like. But lately, he’s taken to walking through the house with blankie horse’s head clamped in his teeth, “hands-free.” It took me a moment, and then I realize where he had seen this behavior, and it wasn’t from either of his parents.

PUFFBALL!

My son’s being raised by cats.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters

Poopocalypse Now!

This morning, during what seemed like it was just going to be a routine diaper change, darling son of mine unleashed an event that shall forever be known as the Poopocalypse. Now, I’ve hunted for poopapotamus in the suburbs around Poopopolis before, and I’ve read many times a passage of Dickens calling for decreasing the surplus poopulation, but this was a real game of poop goes the weasel. I’ll admit to having barely hung on to my own breakfast during this one, it was such a mess.

And now the pictures! (But not of that.) Let us speak no more of the Poopocalypse. … Read more

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Critters Home Base

Unearthing the past

Amazing what turns up when cleaning my old room.

Jump Cut City raw tapes

These are the Jump Cut City raw tapes, straight out of the camcorder, the original footage that we’d pile layers of sound effects, etc. onto later. When there was a big Burchuss scene, we’d dub Burchuss speech audio directly onto these tapes as well. What a find! If one had professional editing gear and time, one could probably do a Lucas number on these…oh…wait.

Jump Cut City raw tapes

I’m going to have to look at some of this stuff and see what’s on it, because several of these JCC adventures never ever got finished.

Boxed Kitten

We’ve been boxing stuff up to store it away and get it out of the baby room, though obviously we wind up with the wrong thing in the wrong container from time to time…

Boxed Kitten

(Don’t worry, that lid was closed for all of three seconds, and wasn’t locked down. On the flipside, Olivia’s not jumping into every box we’re unpacking or repacking now…)… Read more

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Critters Gadgetology

4 days to go

I have’t gone in to work yet, but today we get back to the big countdown: 4 days until the end of my penance in the TV industry. Can’t wait.
Oberon and Olivia
Oberon and Olivia are chilling out after all the Christmas cheer. Actually, they got to spend a lot of the day in the house with no people around – as usual, we head to my sister-in-law’s place for Christmas. I missed seeing Sampson and the other kitties around; there’s only one cat left up there. It’s easy to figure out why when you see real live bald eagles zipping around the mountain.
My Cat Is The Real Boss
My wife liked the bundle of Olivia goodies I got her. As crazy as she is about her kitten, I hoped they’d go down well. I filled the mug with these chocolates that she likes a lot, so all was well. I suppose sometime this year I need to update that design with one that includes Oberon and says “My Cats Are The Real Bosses.” 😆 Anyone who’s interested in picking up the Olivia-wear can still find it here.
I got a nice big spindle of dual-layer DVD+R blanks, new boots (seems that the incident a week ago today was pretty much the end for my already-slowly-disintegrating farm boots) and socks to go with them, and the 4-disc Chronicles Of Narnia DVD set. And today, I got…technical problems. Zen has suddenly decided that it will no longer run Paint Shop Pro 8, nor will it let me reinstall it; I’ve had to load up PSP5 to get any graphics work done. As a possible solution to this problem, I managed to get IE7 uninstalled at last, at the cost of Microsoft trying to tell me every 15 minutes that my computer requires Critical Updates.
Time for me to get cleaned up a bit and head to work. 4 more days…… Read more