{"id":1740,"date":"2009-12-19T15:35:23","date_gmt":"2009-12-19T21:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/?p=1740"},"modified":"2009-12-19T15:35:23","modified_gmt":"2009-12-19T21:35:23","slug":"christmas-before-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/2009\/12\/19\/christmas-before-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"Jam-packed pre-Christmas update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/hizzouse\/q4-09\/daddyevan.jpg\" alt=\"The Daddy &#038; Evan Show\" class=alignright \/>Sorry I&#8217;ve been neglecting you, blawg (and any readers still left out there).  I&#8217;m still getting used to the whole rhythm of having a steady job.  You&#8217;d think (and I would&#8217;ve thought) I would&#8217;ve gotten used to it by now, but it still hasn&#8217;t happened for whatever reason.  Evan has lots of overnight outbursts, and sometimes I think they&#8217;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&#8230; 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 &#8211; no more radical changes in my in\/out times from day to day &#8211; but the sad part is, the hours have normalized to where I&#8217;m only home to tuck Evan into bed two nights a week.  At this point I think I&#8217;m having more trouble with that than he is.  I miss my Evan time.<\/p>\n<p>I do make the most of it while I&#8217;ve got it though &#8211; he&#8217;s been wanting to sing along with the ABC song and Jingle Bells a lot lately, and I&#8217;ve been trying to accommodate him, especially since his musical tastes aren&#8217;t developed enough to know that daddy can&#8217;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 &#8220;NICE TURN SIGNAL, BUDDY!&#8221;  (In case you can&#8217;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.)<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/hizzouse\/q4-09\/threeamigos.jpg\" alt=\"Three Amigos\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Evan&#8217;s been getting along just fine with the other new addition to the family too.  Actually, everyone&#8217;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&#8217;s in our house, he has absolutely zero interest in going outside (unlike Oberon).  We&#8217;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&#8217;s had to dig through a few trash cans to find dinner in the past, and it&#8217;s a habit he&#8217;s having some trouble breaking.  But he&#8217;s not being destructive or terribly messy &#8211; on the contrary, he doesn&#8217;t leave a single crumb when he eats &#8211; and he&#8217;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&#8217;s very choosy about using them, and that give his enforcement of household feline peace a little bit of authority too.  It&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;m leaning more and more toward the former.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of Oberon, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/2006\/12\/20\/the-bit-i-forgot-to-mention\/\">today marks three years since we adopted him<\/a>.  December 19th being the life-changing day that it is in our family history, that also means <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/2006\/12\/19\/oh-god\/\">three years since I saw Sultry drown<\/a> right in front of me, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/2006\/12\/20\/jump-now\/\">three years since I gave my notice at the station<\/a> where, ironically, I&#8217;m now working again (though in a very different capacity), and all of those events directly or indirectly are tied in with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/2007\/01\/15\/its-official\/\">Evan&#8230; happening<\/a>.  Looking at where I am now is kind of eerie: I&#8217;m back to working at the same TV station, where a black cat showed up to replace <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/2008\/06\/04\/rip-othello-1994-2008\/\">my sorely-missed black cat<\/a>&#8230; more than once I&#8217;ve looked around, worried, to make sure that I get to keep my kid out of this deal.  It&#8217;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&#8217;t want restored.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and by the way&#8230;NICE TURN SIGNAL, BUDDY!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll try to blawg a bit more often.  In fact, there&#8217;s some really startlingly inconsequential blogging just around the corner&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sorry I&#8217;ve been neglecting you, blawg (and any readers still left out there). I&#8217;m still getting used to the whole rhythm of having a steady job. You&#8217;d think (and I would&#8217;ve thought) I would&#8217;ve gotten used to it by now, but it still hasn&#8217;t happened for whatever reason. Evan has lots of overnight outbursts, and sometimes I think they&#8217;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&#8230; but it robs me of sleep on the flipside, and I have to try to get some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,22,7],"tags":[64,60,57,72],"class_list":["post-1740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-and-baby-makes-three","category-critters","category-toiling-in-the-pixel-mines","tag-little-e","tag-obi","tag-livvie","tag-puck"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelogbook.com\/earl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}