This is week 137 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 952): See You Next Tuesday, Adverbially

We hung around playing with the baby all morning and then went to #1GF!’s friend’s house for a small party. Her friend has a big, boisterous family that is full of really funny, really loud people. Most of the time there are so many funny stories and conversations going on at the same time, that it’s hard to focus on just one. They’re always a good time, but without fail, at least one person will locate and cross any lines that you may have to get you to laugh.

I got roped into a game of Taboo, and ended up so far in the lead that it was a head-shaking shame. I tried to throw the game by pretending that I didn’t know the answers, but I ended up blanking out for real. We still ended up winning, but most of the fun was in the other players yelling and berating each other when they couldn’t get an answer.

After the game, I stepped out to the kitchen and had a piece of a diet cake. It tasted like regular cake, but eating a diet cake just seemed wrong to me. If you’re going to eat cake, eat cake. The baby was great, despite not sleeping all day, and fell asleep on me while I stood in the kitchen. Not even the ongoing yelling an taunting from the current game going on at the table could wake her.

They moved on to another game where one person had to guess an object that the rest of the players decided upon. The players would give vague, single word clues to describe the object, and the less clues the guesser needed, the more points he or she got. I only observed so that the baby could sleep.

Now, during the game, one woman looked for support because she was reprimanded for a clue she used to describe her sister in a previous game. When asked what the word was, she looked down at the table and softly shrugged out, “cunty”.

This is week 136 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 945): Christmas Is Over

I went out to shovel at 1PM because all of my shoveling from the day before had been negated by the constant wind. It was zero degrees with the windchill.

We took down the Christmas decorations, and I made one of my favorite dinners: pasta with leeks, apple-smoked bacon, and Italian parsley in an egg sauce.

Monday (Day 946): Imagination Vs. Reality In Baby Care

What I Imagined A Day Of Baby Care Would Be:

6 AM: Get up with baby feed her. The baby smiles and thinks all my jokes are funny.
7 AM: Baby goes to bed and I start writing.
11 AM: Baby wakes up cooing gently for food, as tiny cartoon birds fly in patterns above her crib to entertain her. She has a wonderful time while I prepare her food.
12 PM: Baby goes in for a nap and I split my time between writing the great American novel and fending off agents who want me to sign on with them.
4 PM: Baby wakes up to feed again. We have a good time playing after she eats. She simply loves Perl, and even though her code is not as efficient as it could be, she has a good handle on regular expressions.
6 PM: Mom gets home, takes the baby, and after a few button pushes on the Food-A-Rac-A-Cycle, dinner appears on the table as if by magic.
7 PM: I put on a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, and retire to the office to write for an hour.
8 PM: I emerge to let the evening untangle while I sit on the couch and let #1GF! feed me bonbons.
10 PM: I drift off to sleep with a sense of satisfaction for raising a child and writing the great American novel.

What A Typical Day Really Is:

3 :XX AM: Something happens that the baby doesn’t like, and she spends some time venting about it in her language, which we can’t really understand.
5 AM: Baby goes back to sleep.
7 AM: Huh? Wha? I’m up, I’m up.
7:15 AM: The baby gets up and eats. I grab some cereal, take out the garbage, and re-shovel a path to the car that the wind has obliterated once again. I come back in and take the baby so that #1GF! can get ready for work.
8:45 AM: I get the baby to sleep, and get the tub and towels ready because it’s bath day.
9 AM: I shower, respond to e-mail, and start editing LOR 116. I’m twenty weeks behind on posts, and estimate that I won’t be writing another book for at least that long unless I let LOR die.
10:15 AM: The baby wakes up, and I bathe her, change her, and keep her occupied until her bottle is warm.
10:45 AM: I feed the baby and walk around burping her. #1GF! calls and reminds me it’s our anniversary. I thought that it was six days away. The odds of me going shopping are fast approaching zero, so I give her gift by wishing her a happy anniversary. It will happen to you one day. Oh, you’ll see.
11:45 AM: The baby gets a bowl of solid food and I walk around burping her. She throws up on my shirt. She doesn’t seem to mind. Oddly, I don’t seem to care, either.

This is week 135 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 938): Pwned By Lunch

I wasn’t admitting it, but the running around and lack of sleep were quite literally making me sick. I spent the morning answering #1GF! asking “Are you all right?” by waving her and trying to convince the both of us that I just had a runny nose. I was working on the power of positive thinking.

In the afternoon, we went to a friend’s house for a 1PM turkey lunch. It wasn’t like “Oh, let’s make some leftover holiday turkey into sandwiches.” This was a full turkey cooked specifically for sandwiches. If that wasn’t impressive enough, each of the more than five different cookies that were put out for dessert looked better than anything I had ever made. It was the first time I ever felt pwned by lunch.

I kept my hands out of the cookie tin so as not to spread any more germs than necessary, and made a mental note never to invite these people over to eat unless I could afford a caterer and learn to extend my literary lies into the real world. Sometimes, there’s nothing to do but concede that there are levels that you will not reach.

We went home at 5PM, and I fell asleep on the couch. I spent the rest of the day in and out of consciousness, and had a miserable night’s sleep. I woke up with mechanical regularity during the night, and at 3AM, I was positive that I was going to throw up. which isn’t an expected feeling for people who have been out of college for a number of years. I lay on the cold bathroom floor until the feeling subsided, and returned to bed to reclaim what few dreams I could corral.

This is week 134 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 931): Horizontal Snow

There was a blizzard going on, and the winds were some of the loudest we’d heard since moving into the house. Everything was rattling, which was pretty impressive considering that these little piggies live in a house of brick. The wind kept us up a good portion of the night.

When we got up, the trash barrel (that was weighted down with garbage) was ten feet from where I left it the night before. We couldn’t see out of most of the windows because they were covered with snow. Where we could peek out, we could see that the snow was going by the window horizontally.

I went out and shoveled through a three-foot drift to free the cars, and then moved them into odd angles to act as wind breaks. I didn’t know if the idea would save me any future shoveling, but the neighbors were sure to think that we both came home wasted.

I came in, showered for warmth, and took care of the baby. Even though it was a Sunday, #1GF! worked from home.

The day ambled by. We made chicken soup for dinner, and it wasn’t the greatest, possibly due to a lack of salt.

Later in the evening, I finally turned down the opportunity to be interviewed about my beards for a magazine because the reporter had a million questions and I couldn’t find the time to answer half of them with something witty. Maybe turning down free publicity was dumb, but the baby takes priority these days.

This is week 133 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 924): Nothing Is Real

#1GF! gave me a break from baby care after my outburst in the car the day before. It was like having free down time, and I wasted it by inserting inappropriate bleeps into an Ella Fitzgerald Christmas song to make it sound a lot dirtier than it was. Then, I got slightly productive and spent some time writing one of the backlogged Life of Riley posts. When I emerged from the office at noon, the baby was clean and dressed, and I wasn’t.

In the afternoon, I did some photo editing to create the baby’s first Christmas card, and then made a seven picture baby montage as a stocking stuffer for the baby’s grandma. In thirty years, when my daughter looks back on the cute hat she was wearing in her first Christmas photo, she’ll never know that the moment we shared with everyone never really existed because she didn’t actually like wearing that hat. Ah, the modern world. Soon, nothing will be real.

When I returned to the family, I finally set up the high chair, and then ruined a roast by adding enough garlic to put an end to half the cast of Twilight.

This is week 132 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 917): Carpet Bombing With Decorations

I made some pancakes for breakfast and they didn’t come out all that well. Then again, even bad pancakes aren’t all that bad. I was dressed by noon, and #1GF! was already taking some Christmas pictures of the baby because the mall picture from the day before didn’t come out as well as we had expected.

#1GF! set up two decorated mini Christmas trees, and then put the baby in her Christmas dress, sat her on a chair with a polar bear, and snapped off as many shots as she could before the baby stopped cooperating. The baby was happily confused by the process, but the shots came out better than the picture with the mall Santa.

I assembled our pipe cleaner Christmas tree and #1GF! did the lights and decorations. I worked some more cradle cap medication into the baby’s scalp while #1GF! rummaged through boxes of ornaments. “So, what do you want on the tree this year,” she asked without looking up from one of her boxes.

“I don’t care,” I said, because I really didn’t care.

“You have to care a little,” said #1GF! after finally looking up from the box she was rummaging through.

“Listen, as long as I don’t have to hang an ornament, you can put pink unicorns and Santas made of tampons all over the thing if you want to.”

“That’s the spirit,” said #1GF! while shaking her head and digging deeper into a box.

“Look, we already have a crackhead wreath outside because of me, let’s not pair it with a crackhead tree. You know I’m not a decorator.”

#1GF! had a hard time arguing with solid logic, so she picked and placed ornaments until the tree was sufficiently festive.

I started homemade mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner, and realized that I had accidentally bought mozzarella instead of cheddar. There was no time to run out to the store, so I had no choice but to roll with it. Even a bland homemade mac promised to be better than the boxed variety.

While dinner was cooking, I pulled my recently returned manuscript out of its manila envelope and started to read it for the first time in a couple of months. I only made it through the first paragraph before stuffing it back into its envelope. I wanted to edit almost every line. It was not a happy time.

#1GF!, on the other hand, was having a grand time decorating the house. She stopped for a moment and held up a hand-made Santa head. “Where can I hang this?” she asked. The thing looked like it teleported out of a craft fair in the ’70s.

“I have just the place.” I opened the trash drawer.

“I am not throwing this away,” said #1GF! with genuine offense. “Someone made this for me.”

“Are they dead?”

“No.”

“Then…” I eyeballed the trash.

This is week 131 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 910): My Crackhead Wreath

We returned the crappy mini Christmas trees to the home megastore, and then went to the mall to get the baby’s first picture taken with Santa. #1GF! dressed the baby up in a red velvet dress with white fur lining, and twelve bucks later, we had the baby’s first Christmas picture.

Although the dress was heating the baby up, she didn’t complain. She just sat and stared straight ahead at the camera like a tiny member of the Claus family. No one could get a smile out of her, but at least she didn’t cry. You can see the result on the Vetoed Dyer Family Christmas Card.

I went to take the baby back from Santa, and he tried to ignore me. When I started taking the baby out of his arms, he said that he wouldn’t mind holding her more. I took her back semi-forcefully while #1GF! collected the card.

The baby was hot, so instead of putting her back in her car seat, I carried her through the mall in my arms. A lot of people smiled at the baby as we passed, and even though I hadn’t done much in making her what she was, I couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of pride.

We picked up some aspirin and a bunch of red bows at Walmart, and then went to a craft store and picked up thirteen fake wreaths for under $50. The wreaths and bows were for #1GF! to decorate our windows, and the aspirin was for me because the baby screamed in Walmart until we were forced to change her in the middle of one of the aisles when no one was around.

When we got home, #1GF! put the bows on the wreaths and fluffed them up. My job was to stick them on the windows. I didn’t fluff them or put bows on them because I am no good at that sort of thing. I did one wreath, and while the other twelve were saying “Merry Christmas” to passersby, mine was yelling “Street Pussy!” and trying to sell itself for crack.

This is week 130 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 903): Not A Boy, Not A Wookie

I started the day off by cleaning the bathroom. Not because I wanted to, but because I had a couple of hours of babylessness to fill.

To unwind after that couple of hours of joy, I spent a fair amount of time transferring and expanding on an old Finetune Friday Christmas playlist to Last.fm only to find out that they wanted me to pay them just to play it. You know what? Fuck that shit. I’m not paying to stream music. I wanted to flush the PC down my freshly scrubbed toilet, but then Last.fm would still be out there laughing at me with its hand out, and my innocent, but elderly PC would be all wet and minty blue.

I growled and trudged into the baby’s room. #1GF! dressed the baby in one of her better outfits, and I watched as she threw up all over it. #1GF! put the baby in overalls and a blue shirt. “How’s that?” #1GF! asked as if I cared if the baby wore anything but white onsies all day.

“Awwww. I have the cutest son ever.”

#1GF! opened her mouth wide with offense, and marched the baby into the bathroom. I followed and caught her trying to put a barrette in the baby’s hair. I had to stop her. “We are not doing the whole ‘barrette in the hair’ or girly headband thing. Who cares if people think she’s a boy or a girl? She’s a baby.”

“She does not look like a boy.”

“Okay.”

“Say it. She doesn’t.”

“Fine, she doesn’t look like a boy.”

“Alright then.”

The barrette fell out of the baby’s ultra fine hair and clicked on the tile floor.

This is week 129 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 896): Happy Trails, ROCKET CAR!

“So what do you want to do today?” #1GF! asked me.

“Get dressed?” I replied. Sometimes, it’s best to start small.

We did get dressed, and then drove to a large Honda dealer to have ROCKET CAR! appraised. I had already locked in a price that was below dealer cost through e-mail. The car we were going to see wasn’t a manual, wasn’t the color #1GF! wanted, and it had 88 miles on it (which is about 80 more than I like on a new car), but you have to make a few concessions when you’re below dealer cost.

Interestingly, the dealer didn’t bother with the dog and pony show that goes along with appraising my car. They took a look at the outside, peeked at the engine, and looked up what they could wholesale it for. It took a lot less time than usual, but in the end, they undervalued it, anyway.

We left Honda and went to a local Subaru dealer to see if they could do any better on the trade. We saw our salesman, and he brought out the manager to appraise ROCKET CAR!. Oddly, the manager didn’t find it necessary to say hello. The salesman tried to introduce us to him, and he begrudgingly shook my had without taking his eyes off of the car. He didn’t bother with #1GF!. Within a few minutes, the manager walked away without saying anything.

“Well, I guess he got what he needed,” the salesman said in a surprised tone.

We certainly didn’t. The manager went into the building, leaving us standing in the parking lot. When we followed, the manager gave the salesman the lowest bid on my car that I had gotten from any dealer. The manager left such a bad taste in my mouth that I didn’t bother haggling. You don’t expect to be treated like royalty when buying a family sedan, but you don’t expect to be treated like garbage, either.

Maybe he was having a bad day. Maybe he wasn’t. In either case, if that was how the sales manager treated people who wanted to make a purchase, we couldn’t imagine how he treated customers who needed service after the deal was done. And with J.D. Power’s Subaru ratings, I had the feeling that there could be a lot of service. I had to tell the salesman that I was sorry but I had better deals on the table with other dealers. We left.

I wanted to get #1GF! a new car before her first day back to work, but there were only hours left and it didn’t look like it was going to happen. I felt bad, but you can’t get desperate when you’re buying a car, even if the woman you’re buying it for deserves it.

When we got home, I gave it one last try. I called the Honda salesman back and I got connected to a woman who couldn’t speak English. I dialed again and got the same woman. Thinking that the salesman’s card was a misprint, I called the dealer directly, and they connected me to the same woman again.

I called the dealership’s internet manager and left a message that for $500 less than he was offering, I would come back and purchase the car that night. Remember, I was already below dealer cost on the car, and running out of time, and yet I still found it necessary to continue pounding on the deal a little more. All he could say was “No.”

Within fifteen minutes, three different people from the dealership called me back to try to make the deal happen. After the experience with Subaru, it was nice to be dealing with people who really wanted to sell us a car.

This is week 128 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 889): Raking For The Boss lady

#1GF! and I were out the door at 7:30AM to go rake the family cottage. Wait, let me rephrase. We went to #1GF!’s brother’s house together, and #1GF!’s brother and I were tagged for raking duty. The women folk were tagged for child care. #1GF! stayed for a bit so that the baby could visit her cousins.

Before I went to go rake, one of the baby’s cousins wanted a kiss goodbye, so I bent down and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Her head shrunk back and she looked at me with a furrowed brow. “You’re face is scratchy,” she said as she rubbed her cheek. She then turned to #1GF! and said, “Make him shave.” In this family, they’re no longer building ladies, they’re building boss ladies.

I don’t know how it got down to just #1GF!’s brother and I raking a family cottage that neither one of us uses. Oh, wait. Yes, I do. One year, #1GF!’s brother volunteered to rake the cottage and dragged #1GF! along. Then, the sister in law got roped in to the event. The sister in law eventually figured out that raking sucks and had a baby to get out of it, leaving #1GF! and her brother to rake.

Luckily, #1GF! met this nice guy who loved her and didn’t mind helping her out. A few years later, #1GF! said, “Wait a minute. Why am I still raking?” and had a baby to get out of it. The brother and I don’t have ovaries, so we had no way out of the raking unless we were in the hospital waiting for a baby to be delivered, which required precise timing that was way beyond either of us. So, the two of us were stuck raking the family cottage on our own.

This is week 127 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 882): Octogenarian Love Making

We woke up to the baby crying so often that we no longer bothered setting the alarm clock. This day was no different.

#1GF! got the baby under control, and I shuffled off to the kitchen for a bleary bowl of cereal. The first mouthful of sour told me that the milk had turned. I poured the whole bowl into the sink. An earful of crying followed by a mouthful of sour milk wasn’t the greatest way to start a day.

I looked through the cabinets and found some ancient packets of instant oatmeal, so I tore those bitches open and dumped them into a bowl. I threw the bowl into the microwave for a couple of minutes, and when it came out, it smelled like sweet, steamy sewage. I turned on the tap and got the same sewage smell. For some of the highest water rates in the state, smelly water is more common in my town than I ever remembered in the city. The oatmeal followed the cereal down the drain.

I was cranking the key and pumping the gas pedal, but my day was refusing to turn over. All I needed was a punch in the face and a glimpse of two eighty year olds making sweet, tongue-waggling love on my lawn to ensure that the rest of my senses got off to the same bad start. I left the kitchen and avoided looking out any windows on my way back to the den.

This is week 126 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 875): Beard Growing, Password Cracking Machine

It was October 25th, so as has become the custom, I put down my razor and started my annual winter beard. It gives me two good months of growth before the holidays.

I watched the baby for a bit so #1GF! could go back to bed. When she got up, we cleaned up the house a little.

I loaded some remote control software and logged into one of #1GF!’s family’s PCs to get rid of a fine piece of malware called Windows Enterprise Defender. It sounds legit, it looks legit, but it’s a piece of malware.

I was happy to resolve the problem, and even happier that I didn’t have to spend an additional couple of hours on the road thanks to some remote software, but that malware was a fat pain in the ass to extract. Once the virus was cleaned up, my father called to ask my opinion on a laptop. I guessed that it was going to be PC day. I was ready to shoot down his laptop as overpriced and underpowered, but the laptop he found was a pretty good deal. He bought it on the way over to see the baby.

The baby was tired, but stayed awake while my parents were over. My father opened the laptop and went through the setup process. It was Windows 7, which looked exactly like Vista to me. I needed to install a virus scanner for him, so he shut down and we moved to a room with network jacks. Once we were back up and running, my dad forgot the administrator password and we were locked out of his brand new laptop after a record ten minutes of use.

This is week 125 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 868): All Kinds Of Pie

The baby’s cousins came over for a visit, and I did “up high, down low…too slow” with them. You know that game. They high five you, then when they try to low five you, you pull your hand away. The kids liked it just as much on the thirtieth time as the first.

When they tried to do the same to me, I threw a wrench in like I always do.

“Jon. Jon. Jon. Jon. Jon. Jowwwaaaan.”

“What, honey.”

The little cousin held her hand up. “Up high.”

“A pie?”

“Yea. Up high?”

“Well what kind of pie are we talking about here.

“Up high.”

“Blueberry…Blackberry…lemon…rhubarb…it better not be mincemeat. I am not a fan of mincemeat pies.”

“No. Jon. Listen. Up. High.

“I forgot apple. Your grandma makes a great apple pie, doesn’t she?”

“Yes. No. Jowan. Up. High.”

“Oh, see, I thought you brought me a pie.”

“No.”

“Are you sure.”

“Up high, Jon. Here. Right up here. Up. High.”

“Fine. But, I’d rather have an apple pie than a high five. Are you sure that the pie you brought isn’t in the car? I’d better go check.”

Her shoulders slumped. “There is no pie, Jowan. Up. High. Up High. Don’t you get it? Not pie. Up high. Up here. Right here. Up high.”

“This seems like a ripoff.” I slapped her hand up high.

“Down L…”

I slapped her hand before she finished. “Too slow.”

“Up high,” she said again.

We played until I learned to play the game properly.

This is week 124 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 861): Turn Around, Bright Eyes

All I know about this day was that I made a pro/con list to help me decide whether to take the job with my old company, and we started watching Frost Nixon, but ended up too tired to finish it, even though it was only 10PM. There are no other notes from the day, so I’m going to assume that Bonnie Tyler came by singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” until I told her to get the fuck off of my lawn.

Monday (Day 862): Guiltily Pushing All In

I woke up in the middle of the night thinking that someone was in the house and lay there straining to hear the smallest noise over my paced breathing. It took me a while to piece together that the pillow next to me wasn’t #1GF!, and that #1GF! was probably the person prowling around in the kitchen. I got up to verify because there’s no sense in getting murdered over a hunch. It turned out to be #1GF!, who mouthed, “Sorry” when she saw me squinting at her.

I went back to bed and had a dream that I was in class, and a guy kept kicking my chair to intentionally annoy me. I turned around and broke his finger. He stopped kicking my chair almost immediately. I then had to go to a college function to meet a prospective employer. The businessman looking to hire me clapped me on the back and told me that I was lucky that he smoothed over the finger breaking incident with the dean. I rolled my eyes internally and smiled at him like he had done me a favor.

This is week 123 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 854): The Golden Turrets

In the morning, #1GF! was outside with the baby talking to the neighbors because that’s what it’s like around here in the summer. It’s a genuine neighborhood. #1GF!’s family was supposed to visit, but bagged on us. I have to say that I was a little disappointed.

#1GF! looked up cars because she made a deadline that we were going to get a new car before her maternity leave was over. As we sat on the couch talking over the blander points of family sedans, the second feeding of the day came up. The baby fed and fell asleep on her mother after arching her tiny back and stretching her arms so that her fists were alongside her ears.

“We have a baby,” said #1GF! with a bit of amazement.

“Yes, we do.”

#1GF! and I took that baby out for a walk in the early afternoon and the same issue came up. #1GF! turned to me. “You know, sometimes I can’t believe that we had a baby.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Sometimes I feel like we’re just watching her, and I worry that someone is going to come by to pick her up.”

“It’s all very unreal, isn’t it?”

“It is. I sometimes feel like this can’t possibly be happening.”

I hugged her. “It’s happening all right. And no one is going to pick her up. I shredded the receipt.”

This is week 122 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 847): Enjoying The Bone Alone

I got up at 6AM to take over watching the baby, so that #1GF! could catch up on some sleep. Once the ladies were both out cold, I started reading one of #1GF!’s library books because I had no books of my own left to read. I was so far outside of the target audience that I quickly drifted off and started thinking about the plot to my next novel.

#1GF! was soon up to take over the baby care once again. I put ribs in the oven at noon, put the baby down for a nap, and then went to waste some time mashing up songs with Audacity. I gave up after a few hours of getting nowhere.

The baby had been asleep for hours and the house was quiet. I cut some potatoes and set them on the stove to boil. I dried my hands on a kitchen towel and looked around for something to do. Instead of starting something productive, I found myself simply waiting for the baby to wake up. I soon realized that I was leaning against a counter and staring at the cabinets.

My mother wanted a picture of the baby, so I imported the contents of the camera. The sheer volume of pictures that #1GF! had taken seemed almost excessive, given the amount of time the baby had been outside of the womb, but I couldn’t blame her. I found seven decent shots and created a four by five inch collage with Gimp, and saved the copies onto #1GF!’s thumb drive so she could have them printed at her leisure.

I wanted to eat dinner with #1GF!, and because 6PM on was prime scream time for the baby, I timed the ribs to be ready at the blue hair special hour of 4PM. After four hours in the oven, the ribs were pulling away from the meat with zero effort. They were just begging to be eaten by any nearby carnivore. No, really. I could hear their little voices calling through the oven door. At 4PM, I took that sweet barbecue pan out of the oven and gently placed it on the stove.

The minute those ribs touched the cook top, the baby woke up and initiated a sonic bombardment that would run over two hours. The baby wasn’t even close to the kitchen. Not only does the baby seem to know that she should start screaming at dinner time, but she manged to evade my dinner timing trickery. #1GF! and I definitely enjoyed the ribs, but we each enjoyed them by ourselves against a backdrop of screaming.

This is week 121 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 840): The Avalanche

The first thing I did in the morning was to spill a full bowl of Cheerios all over the kitchen floor. The room looked as if someone had placed a tiny charge at the bottom of my bowl and set it off as I walked across the kitchen. I shook my head and surveyed the havoc for a second before #1GF! walked in. “Don’t come in here,” I said, holding up a hand. “It’s a mess.”

She surveyed the room, lifted an eyebrow and smirked, waiting for the explanation of why the floor looked like a birds eye view of the sinking of the titanic.

“I have no idea what happened,” I said. “I couldn’t repeat it if I wanted to.”

#1GF! shook her head and walked away to tend to the baby.

Once I got the kitchen cleaned up, that minor incident was enough to tilt my mood into a general malaise. I walked into the other room with #1GF!.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” #1GF! asked. “They’re just Cheerios. You’ve got twelve cubic feet of them in the cabinet.”

This is week 120 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 833): Catching Stupid

I took the baby out of the bedroom at 7AM and tried everything to calm her down so that #1GF! could get some rest. When I finally gave up, I put her in her swing, and she promptly fell asleep. I sat at the table reading.

Once #1GF! was up, we gave the baby a bath, got showered and walked down to the town “Endless Summer” festival that takes over the main street of town every year.

The festival drew more derelict looking people than a Walmart on a Saturday, and was just about as exciting. As unusually snobby as it sounds coming from a guy who wears a hobo’s beard and hasn’t held a traditional boss/slave job in more than a couple of years, the whole thing made me want to sell the house and move to a new town.

We left the festival soon after we arrived, and sat on a bench under a pergola near the main bath house. A woman walked by in an extremely short skirt and stripper shoes, saying “…and once I signed that contract with god, there was no turning back.” I was intrigued to know the actual terms and conditions of that contract, but I wasn’t interested enough to sit through the horror story that probably led to it’s creation.

This is week 119 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 826): Rejections And Yelling

When I woke up, I took the baby out of the room so that #1GF! could catch up on the sleep she lost overnight. The temperature outside was hovering in the 60’s and you could feel fall creeping around the creaky hallway floor.

Once #1GF! was up, I grabbed a sandwich and we sat down to watch Kitchen Nightmares. I glanced out the window and noticed that the neighbors were all out working on their houses. I felt like I should be doing something too.

I changed the baby four times before noon, which seemed like a lot to me, considering it was only my portion of the changings. The baby soon fell asleep, #1GF! jumped into the shower. I sat by the window reading a book. So much for keeping up with the Joneses.

The baby woke up before the shower was over, and I tried to keep her quiet long enough for #1GF! to dry her hair.

As if the cosmos was determined to cram something useful into my day, a neighbor came over and asked me to help move a twenty-nine inch tube TV. Do you remember how big those suckers are? The larger models that were introduced at the end of the tube TV life cycle aren’t quite a one-man job to carry, but not quite a two-man job, either. They’re perfectly balanced to pry themselves away from your meager three-fingered grip and through the floor, unless of course they force you backward, using a couple of your ribs to cushion their fall. When you have two people, it’s more of the same, just with more fingers and ribs getting in the way. Luckily, this TV didn’t have to go more than a few feet, so the job was done in under ten minutes.

This is week 118 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 819): Swearing In Old Movies

We woke up to screaming for the second day in a row. The baby got fed and changed, and then I stayed with her so that #1GF! could go back to bed. I ended up watching the original version of The Taking of Pelham 123 with Walter Matthau. It wasn’t bad. The pacing wasn’t as slow as most 70’s movies, and the swearing seemed more natural than it does in film today. Once and a while, a guy would throw out an F bomb, and it would smoothly merge into the flow of dialogue instead of appearing like something that was thrown in to keep the ratings board on its toes.

The main activities of the day were feeding and changing the baby. A neighbor brought over some baby gifts, and she got a tour of the house. We were still under the impression that it might be Labor Day weekend, which was reinforced by all the Labor Day sale ads on TV.

At 2PM, my parents came over. I made toffee chocolate bars and didn’t like them, but they seemed to go pretty fast with everyone else. My parents brought a blueberry pie, so I had a slice of that instead. There’s nothing like sitting around eating a piece of blueberry pie when the rest of the world is working. It was Sunday, so most people weren’t working, but we didn’t know that because the days in Newborn Land were so well blended together.

This is week 117 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 812): Playing Operation While Drunk

There are milestones in taking care of a newborn that everyone knows such as first steps or first words, but there are also less noted, but just as memorable mini-milestones such as the first day home from the hospital, the first diaper (as well as the first literal shit storm), and the first marathon screaming session.

Today marked several mini-milestones worth noting. Not only was it the first time that the baby managed to defy the laws of physics to throw up and fill one of her own eye sockets with barf, but it was also the first day that she threw up on my face. Yep, the little tyke threw up directly on my face. Oddly, she didn’t seem to notice either instance. Like a college student bound for disciplinary action, she threw up and moved on.

In addition to the vomit related checkmarks, we also clipped the baby’s fingernails for the first time. Big whoop, right? Clipping fingernails counts as a milestone? If you’ve cut a newborn’s nails before, you know it does. If you haven’t, a newborn’s nails are tiny and as thin as paper. If you don’t cut them, the baby shreds her face at night. Sure you can try filing them, but the nails are so thin that they flex under the pressure of the file. You have no choice but to clip them.

Newborns have minimal control over their bodies, so as a parent, you spend thirty seconds at a time trying to load a nail into a clipper before the baby moves or jerks it out of place. It’s like playing Operation (the wacky doctor game) while drunk, if the game were rigged to spurt human blood. If the baby fidgets when you finally get the courage to apply pressure, you can easily end up cutting the tip of her finger off. Yea, I’m serious. And no one wants to remove body parts from a brand new baby.

This is week 116 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 805): The Tapioca Peninsula

I watched the baby in the morning while #1GF! tried to catch up on sleep lost during the overnight feedings. I was hitting my limit on watching TV, but before I realized it, the television had eaten the morning and part of the afternoon. At 2PM, I jumped in the shower, and thanks to the 90 degree, muggy weather, I was sticky and sweaty ten minutes after I toweled off.

Our friend’s daughter dropped by to take advantage of the beach (and our free beach parking) before she left the country on a foreign exchange trip. She brought an ex-boyfriend along, which seemed a little odd, but I’ve found it’s better to keep quiet about things that seem odd in other people’s relationships.

The pair of them came in for a minute to see the baby before heading down to the beach. We had met the ex once before, and he seemed like a pretty nice kid, but he made so many references to tapioca during the conversation, that it started getting a little odd. I didn’t know if I had had barf on my shirt that looked like tapioca, if the guy just had just visited his grandparents, or if there was a new, trendy fascination with gummable puddings sweeping the minds of young people. I was perplexed.

This is week 115 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 798): The False Zen of Parenthood

The nurse brought the baby in at 2:30 AM to feed. I had dropped her off at the nursery a little over an hour before, so we were not running on a lot of sleep. I swung my legs over my cot, put my elbows on my knees and ran my hands down my face. Even though it was dark in the room and I wasn’t awake enough to know what was going on, I knew exactly where I was. I stared at the floor and tried to keep my eyes open, groggily accepting whatever the nurse needed to do. Within an hour, the baby was back in the nursery and we went back to sleep. We both slept like rocks.

At 6:30 AM, #1GF! tried to wake me by whispering my name a few times. It didn’t work, so she whispered louder. Any kid who grew up with The Amityville Horror knows that if you hear loud whispering of unknown origin, you listen to that shit or the room fills up with flies. I sat bolt upright. I was bleary and suddenly on high alert. There was nothing in the room but an apologetic #1GF! looking down at me from her craftmatic hospital bed.

This is week 114 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 791): The Stubborn Baby Vs. Professor Falken

It was the second day the baby was overdue, so #1GF! and I went out went out for a walk to help shake the baby loose. It didn’t help. In keeping with an ancient Dyer tradition, this baby wasn’t going to jump just because someone told her to.

The day was a prickled mess of waiting and pacing, broken up only by the wake of a close friend’s grandmother. One of the bereaved walked up to #1GF! and told her that she was “the cutest pregnant girl that she had ever seen in her whole life.” Not a bad compliment, especially for a wake.

Because #1GF! was two days overdue, I constantly asked her if she needed anything, and jumping up over the smallest noises. She couldn’t sneeze or shift in her chair without me hovering and asking if she was okay. I felt felt as useless as Professor Falken watching WOPR slowly cracking the launch code.

I didn’t sleep too well.

This is week 113 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 784): The Veto Factory

A bucket and a half of water-stop concrete went into the cellar this day, my friend, and nary a grain did return. That cellar, she swallowed them whole. It took me a few hours to finish sealing the remaining cracks in the basement floor, and when I got upstairs, it was only 2PM. I felt like I accomplished something and still had a good portion of the day ahead of me.

#1GF! made me an egg salad sandwich, which she secretly prepared while I was in the cellar. She took a nap, and I looked up baby names.

Once #1GF! got up, we went through the list of baby names together. I tried slipping a few previously rejected names back into the list, but #1GF! was shrewd and fast on the override button once again. I expect that #1GF! must be running out of vetoes, or the veto printing office must be running on a twenty-four hour schedule.

For post dinner entertainment, we watched Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist. #1GF! seemed to like it, but I was always getting pulled out of the story by the reactions of the characters. When a Yugo makes a u-turn at a relatively slow speed with no oncoming traffic, there is no need for a passenger to freak out unless the character is written to be very nervous. I would’ve been able to tolerate being yanked out of the story all the time if the movie kept me laughing, but it didn’t. The movie wasn’t horrible, but it could easily have been titled “Michael Cera Infinitely Acts Nervous”.

This is week 112 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 777): Ice Cream Dirge

I made blueberry pancakes for #1GF! and then went out to clean out the gutters. I wore no shirt, a tool belt, and had six pack abs. I fed a bunny who was perched on my shoulder, and #1GF! looked upon me lovingly and wondered how she could deserve such a perfect life. Or something like that. I know there were blueberry pancakes and gutter sludge, but beyond that, my notes are a bit fuzzy.

The sky was blue with only a few puffy clouds who were gracious enough to apologetically skirt the sun like people ducking around tourists taking pictures. The sea was green and clear. It was 82 degrees, and there was a breeze. It was an absolutely perfect day in terms of weather, so I packed up a couple of sandwiches, and #1GF! and I went to the beach.

The only thing that was odd about the next three hours on the sand (other than the superb weather) was that the ice cream truck switched from its mangled version of “Turkey In The Straw” that inexplicably skips a lot of the notes, to some sort of ice cream dirge. It was the most depressing song I’ve ever heard coming out of an ice cream truck.

As we walk back from beaches, I saying to #1Helga, “In United States, trucks play ice cream song. In Russia, song play YOU!” #1Helga just looks at me likes I am crazy peoples while ice cream dirge make me sick for homeland and frozen borscht truck.

This is week 111 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 770): Bad Radio and Yard Work

When I look through my wall of CDs these days, I rarely find anything that I want to listen to. I might stop at a few times and think that I’d like to hear a song from this CD or that one, but it’s rare that I want to listen to a CD the whole way through. Sometimes, I miss having a whole house audio system that shuffles through the songs in my library and plays them to any of the rooms.

That was one of the best features that I built into my first house. I have yet to build it into this one, and instead, lazily rely on the radio to shuffle songs for me. And radio is a poor shuffler with a library of old songs. Familiar songs. Songs that are like a worn out pair of shoes that you know you shouldn’t leave the house in, but put on because, even though they have no spark or zip, you’re comfortable with them.

I never bother changing the station because the dial on the radio is off just enough that the numbers are misaligned from the needle by at least a couple of points. It doesn’t matter much because I know that the other stations are just as bad as the one playing. It’s all the same ten to twenty year old songs that are safe, hummable, and boring.

Usually, just to get something unfamiliar, I’ll put on gummy teenage pop radio. I’ll listen to songs about riding disco sticks until I can’t take it anymore and favor silence.

This is week 110 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 763): Fireworks I Couldn’t See

I woke up thinking about all the minor chores that I should be taking care of, but quickly found that a bit of nice weather sapped any motivation that I had for doing them. I couldn’t simply pretend that the list didn’t exist, so I couldn’t bring myself to sit on the beach. As I sat on the stoop eating a PBJ, I felt like running errands would be a fair compromise between work and play. I’d be driving in the sunshine most of the time, yet accomplishing a couple of things on the way. By the time I finished my sandwich, I realized that it was way too nice of a day to waste running errands.

#1GF! wanted to go to the beach, so we went for a walk along the shore. The nice weather had dragged out the locals and tourists, packing the beach with people. We didn’t walk very far, and took a couple of breaks so that #1GF! could rest.

This is week 109 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 756): Clive Owen Staring At Things

I made #1GF! breakfast and then we watched home shows all morning. #1GF! wanted to clean up baby stuff, but I took the morning off. I rejoined her at noon. Some things got put away, but we basically shuffled stuff around the house to make them appear more organized.

It wasn’t quite rainy out, so we couldn’t justify sitting around the house for the rest of the day, so at 2PM, we thought about going out and shopping for more baby related stuff. What type of stuff, we didn’t know. By that point #1GF! was getting swollen, so the idea of going out died in committee.

We spent the rest of the day sitting on the couch and watching movies like it was a rainy day. We watched Paul Blart, Bunny Chow, and The International. It didn’t seem possible, but each movie ended up being worse than the one before it. They were all utter crap.

The only thing that I found slightly interesting in that five plus hour marathon was that in Paul Blart, some of the scenes for the West Orange Mall were shot in the South Shore Plaza, where a lot of people on the south shore of Massachusetts get their mall fix. During the movie, I was more interested in figuring out where they were in the mall than at the plot or the “overly zany” action. Most of the time, the figuring wasn’t worth the effort because what do you do with that knowledge once you figure it out? “Oh, yea, I know that elevator. Maybe I can ride it one day to remind me what a waste of my life Paul Blart was.” Yea.

Even though I thought he was funny in The King Of Queens, Paul Blart was one of those movies that put Kevin James in the same category with Jack Black. You can see their potential, and you want their movies to be funny, but they just don’t seem to work. At all.

Monday (Day 757): Readers Cracking Whips

Wrote LOR from 8:30 to 5:30. On a break, I opened Facebook to see who was being clever today. Within thirty seconds of poking around, I was told by a Facebooker to get back to writing. You know, having readers who know your writing patterns and bust on you to keep you on track is pretty damned funny. I shook my head and randomly laughed about it for the rest of the afternoon. On my only other break, I went out in the sun for three minutes while I ate my lunch, but none of my neighbors tried to send me back to the keyboard. It was a little disappointing.

This is week 108 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 749): Father’s Day

My parents were supposed to come over for Father’s Day breakfast, and I overslept. I planned to make Belgian waffles, but #1GF! didn’t think we’d have enough food, so she ran out to pick up muffins and sausages. I showered in about ten seconds, and didn’t have one thing prepared by the time they got to the house.

My parents brought me a gift for Father’s Day. Considering that I’m not officially a father yet, and Father’s Day gifts are only supposed to travel from child to parent, I felt bad that they only Father’s Day gift to my father was breakfast.

We didn’t end up playing a game or anything because my father didn’t feel like it. It was Father’s Day, and he was the only official father in the group, so the call was his to make. We sat and talked around the table for a few hours, and I made a couple of sandwiches later that were eaten by under protest of not being hungry.

My parents went home, and #1GF! and I cleaned up. I’m not a clean cook by any stretch of the imagination, but a waffle iron always ends up being a damned mess no matter how neat I try to be. I sent #1GF! out of the kitchen because she mentioned that she was tired, but couldn’t figure out why. I explained to her that she was making a baby, and should be laying on the couch or something. She dismissed me, but headed for the den to do as she was told anyway.

It was so windy, rainy, and dark that if felt like winter. We watched movies and TV for the rest of the day to complete the feeling. I found the TV boring, but didn’t make a move to try something else because the weather seemed like a perfect excuse to do nothing. I doubt that we’ll have moments to sit around like this once the baby shows up, so I thought that we should take advantage while we could.

Monday (Day 750): LOR 107 All Day

The first waking thought of the day was what a good life I have. The second was that it was really awful that either #1GF! or I would inevitably die one day and leave the other behind. As I lay there in bed, I found this to be a pretty odd thing to wake up thinking about.

Once I got moving, I sat down and wrote LOR 107. I took a break for lunch, and ended up thinking about how one could produce an illusion of time travel through faster than light speeds. For example, say you were watching an event on earth with a telescope. If you could travel faster than the speed of light, you should technically be able to outrun the image of the what you saw, point your incredibly powerful telescope at the earth, and wait for the event to happen again when the image from the event caught up to you. I was feeling a little smart when I found an almost an identical idea in a book that I was reading. I wasn’t happy to find out that science fiction writers (and probably a lot of other folks) had thought of this idea years ago.