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”.

After the initial explosion in laughter, half the table deemed the clue valid, a quarter disapproved, and another quarter couldn’t stop laughing enough to vote. The children were barred from voting because they know better to reuse any adult language that they might hear.

Now, I couldn’t breathe because I was laughing so hard, so I stood there internalizing my laughter into mild tremors so as not to wake the baby. In the ensuing discussion, the word was repeated no less than ten times by five different people at the table. In a break in all the laughter and yelling, the woman conceded, “I added a ‘Y’.” She shrugged. “I tried to make the word sound…cute.”

“You made it an adverb!” cried her brother through laughter that sounded like it was detonated somewhere near the soles of his feet. Everyone burst out again. I thought about telling him that “cunty” was actually an adjective and that “cuntily” might be considered the adverbial form, but refrained from stoking an already raging fire.

We stayed for about four hours and went home with abs that were tighter than if we had worked out.

I was going to make pesto for dinner, but the basil had gone bad. I opened the cabinet and shoved my hand into a bag of Halloween candy to help me think of what to make instead. I must’ve gone through ten pieces before giving up and throwing vegetables into some tortellini. Maybe it was the ebbing sugar rush, but the dinner didn’t come out very well at all.

After dinner, #1GF! and I sat and watched Disctrict 9. Well, I did. #1GF! fell asleep, and then left the room after she woke up. I sat through the movie, but didn’t enjoy it. It was a heavy handed metaphor for apartheid, and I spent most of the time wondering how I could work the trite, formulaic elements into a book. If you see patterns in the things that sell big, write them down and exploit them, I guess.

Monday (Day 953): Batman Vs. My Bum Crack

The baby slept through the night for the second day in a row, and the fourth time in a week. I thought I was a genius.

The morning was all baby, and I sat down at the PC at just after noon to start writing. I checked e-mail and comments before I got started, and I didn’t get a single congratulatory comment on my blog’s eight year anniversary post. I was a little disappointed, but people who are lax in following blogs can’t expect to be followed. Comments are a two way street.

Other than that, I don’t have a lot of notes. I think Christian Bale called me to just say hello, but I think he really just wanted to take issue with my bad review of Turdinator Shitsation. He was very mature about it. He said something like, “Hey, Jon. It’s Christian Bale, just checking in on you.”

With the monotone gruff voice, I thought it was Batman calling to fuck with me again, so I was like, “What’s up, Batcock? What did you call to brag about some new crime-fighting tech-toy that you and your butler pooped out of your secret cave? What exactly do you want, you rich-boy, waste of space?”

The gruff voice reiterated, “Jon. It’s Christian Bale.”

“Whatever, Kilmer. Or is this Clooney. If it’s you, Clooney, that is the shittiest Christian Bale impersonation I’ve ever heard. You need to be flatter. Talk like you’re in a coma and eating gravel.”

“Jon. Really it’s Christian Bale. I just—”

“What is this a recording? Get a super power, ass juice.” I hung up the phone and went back to my writing.

I found out later that evening from Mr. Bale’s agent that it actually was Christian Bale, and he thought that I was really immature. I told his agent to lick my bum crack before I hung up on him, too. Or something like that. I told you, I didn’t have a lot of notes for the day.

Tuesday (Day 954): How Easily We Forget

The baby got up at 1:30 AM, which broke her two day streak of sleeping through the night. I no longer felt like a baby care genius.

I got up a few hours later, showered, got #1GF! off to work, got the baby to sleep, cleaned the bathroom, got the baby up, fed her, cleaned up the living room, fed the baby again, put the baby to sleep, grabbed a sandwich, and stowed the Christmas decorations in the attic. Ding. It was 1 PM.

I wrote for a couple of hours, fed the baby, cleaned the kitchen, made dinner, scrubbed the stove, froze some pesto, and got LOR 117 ready to post. Ding. It was then 8:30 PM.

We sat down on the couch, and #1GF! read Life of Riley 117, which was written while the baby was in her peak colic phase. She approved it for publication just before we went to bed.

As we lay in the silence, #1GF! turned to me. “I forgot about how much the baby used to scream,” she said.

“I know, me too.”

Wednesday (Day 955): Striving For The Ultimate Mac

The baby woke up at 3:30 AM to remind us that her colic phase wasn’t something that we had imagined. She eventually went back to sleep, and we groggily got up a few hours later.

Once #1GF! was off to work, I followed the general baby routine all morning, and then tried to clean up the house a little when she went in for her afternoon nap.

Keeping up with the baby, the domestic duties, and the writing can only be managed by someone with iron clad discipline and boundless energy. I try to muster that discipline, but there are a lot of times where I want to prop my skull on the back of the couch and stare at the ceiling. I don’t, but man, does it look tempting sometimes. Mostly, what I end up doing is stealing a few minutes of downtime to entertain myself with something stupid.

I was sick of hearing about people’s farms and mafias and aquariums on Facebook, so I made a quick logo for a fake Facebook application called Stacheville, and posted it to my wall. It looked fairly real, but didn’t really suck very many people into clicking the link and visiting the page.

When #1GF! got home, I was making mac and cheese. I was still trying to find the perfect recipe, and this time I added sharper cheese and a half package of apple smoked bacon. Everything tastes better with bacon, but I still hadn’t created the ultimate mac.

Thursday (Day 956): A Porn Star’s Cheeks

The baby woke up at 3:30 AM again, which is always a party.

A few hours later, I got up and followed the typical baby routine (gave the baby a bath, fed her, changed her, etc.). The baby wasn’t as playful as usual. Maybe the middle of the night scream fests were slowing her down, too. Then again, maybe she was as playful as usual, and I was the one in the coma.

Once the baby was for her afternoon nap, I washed down the kitchen cabinets. Really? “I washed down the cabinets” not only gets its own paragraph, but it’s pretty much your only highlighted activity for the day. Are you fucking with me, Dyer? I don’t pay you for this bullshit, dude. I want geeks with beards riding armored mammoths into the battlefields of funny. Can you dig that? What the hell happened to you?

Well, I—

No. There have been times where I shot coffee out of my nose from reading this shit. Do you have any idea what milky coffee and sugar feel like after a few hours in your nasal cavity?

Well, no…

Yea, like an actress’s cheeks two hours into a porn shoot. Yea. Not good. But, that’s what I’m willing to put up with here, Dyer. I’m willing to let you make my nasal cavity your personal playground as long as you deliver the funny.

Can I get on with this?

Sure. Now, make with the funny.

I wrote LOR 118 after a quick sandwich.

Stop.

Okay, now you’re really slowing me down, here. This was a two paragraph day, at best.

Oh, I’m slowing you down there, Commander Snoozebar? Wait, do you have a snooze bar on your site somewhere that I can click, and then you just wake me up when something interesting happens? Is that on here?

All I need is to get out two more sentences. That’s it. Would you let me do that? Can I just finish this day off?

Fine. I’m taking a sip of coffee now. Bring on the funny.

I ate leftover mac and cheese for dinner. Even though it wasn’t the ultimate mac, I still would’ve had sex with that meal if it had a pretty face.

And…we swallow the coffee without issue. Do you have an unsubscribe button on here somewhere?

Friday (Day 957): Who’s A Good Bowoy?

The baby woke up at 1:30 in the morning, and wanted to stay up and play for an hour. That was the report from the field, anyway. I got up at normal time and with only a sense that I didn’t sleep well.

I took over the baby so that #1GF! could get ready, and when I walked out into the kitchen, I noticed a big, brown spot on one of my newly cleaned cabinets.

“Goddamnit!” I said, derailing the “what the fuck?” that was about to exit the station on a one-way track to the baby’s ears. “I just friggin’ cleaned that yesterday.”

“What? What’s going on?” asked a near panicked #1GF!.

I pointed. “There’s a big goddamned brown spot on the cabinets. I just cleaned them yesterday.”

#1GF! rightfully looked at me like I was loosing my mind.

I looked at her sideways and slumped my shoulders. “I’m more domesticated than a lap dog in an argyle sweater.”

“Come on, Mr. Bojangles,” said #1GF!. “You never have to wear a sweater.”

“You are not helping.”

“Do I need to put you in your crate?”

“Not…”

“Who’s a good Bowoy?”

“Helping.”

I put the baby to bed and went in to write. #1GF! was on the other side of the desk working from home. You’d think that it would be easier having the two of us around during the week, but #1GF! is practically chained to her desk, and the baby gets too excited to sleep when her mother is home. So, although it’s nice to have #1GF! in the area, it doesn’t work out to be easier.

I wrote LOR 118 in every spare minute, but once #1GF! clocked out, she took over the baby care. I finally got the post published at 10 PM.

The baby was up and looking to eat a couple of hours later, and afterward, she was wide awake and ready to play. #1GF! tried to get her back to sleep, and I spent the extra time looking over the syntax for the Facebook API. After realizing that I wasn’t going to have the time to build a Facebook application at any point in the near future, I shut the PC down and went to bed.

Saturday (Day 958): An Old Man & A Lukewarm Glass Of Water

We got up and cleaned the house because a new insurance company was coming by to inspect. I went a little overboard on the cleaning, but the house needed it. I cleaned up my side of the desk for the first time in a long time, which is usually designated as a no-clean zone.

The inspection didn’t require a clean house, and lasted only ten minutes. The inspector seemed nice enough, although she insisted on wearing a dust mask to avoid picking up any potential germs that we might be carrying.

Once the inspection ended, we headed over to #1GF!’s mother’s house. We picked up some coffee on the way, and I’ve gotten so lazy about making coffee that I’ll drink Dunkin Donuts and almost enjoy it.

There was a time that I would forgo coffee rather than drink the smooth, watery black cup of nothing that is Dunkin Donuts coffee. I used to be someone who needed a kick from his coffee. A person who liked his coffee to taste how a tug on the short hair feels. Now, I shrug and think that it’s at least stronger than fucking tea. I’m on a crash course that ends with a tired, old man and a lukewarm glass of water.

When we got to #1GF!’s mother’s house, I set up her new PC and gave her some training on it. We visited for a while, and got out of there so that #1GF!’s mother could enjoy the new features and make sure that all her websites still worked on it.

We went home, and after the baby went to sleep, #1GF! ran out to get takeout. We tried to watch Bruno, but ended up shutting it off. I liked the Ali G Show and Borat, but this movie was sort of like watching that kid in class trying harder and harder to do something outlandish to prove to everyone that he’s funny. People can smell when you’re trying too hard, and this movie reeked of it.

Once the movie was off, #1GF! and I played a flash basketball game against each other. All you had to do was hit baskets over and over, and there was a tournament every two minutes to see how we ranked against everyone else playing online. We have a lot of fun with simple flash-based competition.

What I Learned

• After a while, you can forget how bad the screaming was.
• I don’t even know what strong coffee is anymore.
• Just when you start joking about being domesticated, you find out exactly how domesticated you actually are.
• I picked up a little about the Facebook API.
• Apple-smoked bacon is excellent in homemade mac and cheese.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.
12:10 PM: The baby falls asleep, so I snatch some leftovers out of the fridge and eat them while I wash the bottles, bowls and spoons.
12:25 PM: I start editing LOR again. Even though I have an hour and a half of writing, that only takes me halfway through the first draft.
2 PM: The baby wakes up, I change her, and I get her to laugh by jumping around until I’m ready for a nap. I distract her with a toy and slip away to prep her bottle.
2:45 PM: The baby eats, gets burped, and I read her a few books to keep her occupied.
3:30 PM: The baby isn’t anywhere near falling asleep, and I dig deep to come up with something to keep the baby entertained. I come up with two dust bunnies and a handful of nothing. I surround her with a moat of toys and talk to her while I start dinner.
4:15 PM: The twenty-minute dinner prep takes forty-five minutes because the baby can only accept daddy substitute toys for so long. I put dinner in the fridge, and try once again to get the baby to sleep. The baby freaks out for an unknown reason.
4:20 PM: I get the baby to bed, and try to sneak out of room. I get busted by a squeaky door. The baby starts wailing. I calm the baby down and try to get her to sleep, and all she wants to do is chew my finger.
4:25 PM: I try to sneak out after getting the baby to sleep a second time, and she busts me again by sheer clairvoyance. She starts wailing because her dad is trying to abandon her in her crib at nap time.
4:30 PM: The baby finally falls asleep, so I sneak out of the room to clean up the pots and pans from making dinner.
4:55 PM: I start LOR 116 again…for ten minutes.
5:05 PM: The baby starts crying. I ask the baby monitor if it’s kidding me. It’s too afraid to answer that it isn’t. I tell it that the baby can’t possibly be awake, and it keeps transmitting her crying noises in defiance of my sense of logic. I stare at the monitor for a minute, hoping that the baby will go back to sleep on her own. The phone rings as if it has the baby monitor’s back. I dive for the phone, only to pick it up and drop it back into the cradle. Of course, it’s a fucking telemarketer. I go in to check on the baby, and she’s asleep. I go back to the office, and I swear that the baby monitor is smirking at me. I sit down at the PC, and the phone rings again, waking the baby up. This time, the call is an automated message telling me that they’re not picking up my trash today because they ran out of time. What garbage company runs out of time?
5:10 PM: I search for a bill with a callback number on it, with the screaming baby limiting half of my mobility and disabling 22% of brain function.
5:40 PM: I finally find the number and call the garbage company, only to get a message that says the offices closed at 5 PM. Fuck. They called me at 5:05 PM, after the goddamned office was closed. And the baby screams and screams.
5:45 PM: The baby finally stops crying, but she won’t let me put her down. I bring her in to the office to sit on my lap while I type out an online form to the garbage company to let them know that calling after they’ve closed to tell me that my garbage isn’t going to be picked up is not cool.
5:45 PM: I fill out the form and click it into the tubes of the internet. I then prep the baby’s dinner and keep her entertained.
6 PM: I feed the baby. #1GF! arrives home and steals the baby for a few minutes. She returns the baby so that she can get settled in. My brain function is limited.
6:15 PM: We all sit on the couch and laugh. The baby throws up on her pants and shirt and my pants and shirt. I think she’s the best audience ever because no one has ever thrown up laughing over such poorly thought out material.
6:20 PM: I’m changing the baby and talking on the phone at the same time. I’ve learned to multitask.
6:30 PM: I change the baby into her pajamas, which she immediately throws up on. I clean her up and hand her over to #1GF! for a solid food feeding. I continue talking on the phone.
6:45 PM: #1GF! feeds the baby. The baby is strapped into the high chair with a five point harness and looks like a fighter pilot. I never use the shoulder straps, so I ask #1GF! how many G’s she is planning to subject the baby to during the meal. #1GF! laughs.
7 PM: I load milk into bags and put it in the refrigerator and start cleaning up the baby’s bottles and dishes.
7:30 PM:
“Would you mind turning on the Christmas lights for me?” asked #1GF!.

“Yes,” I replied without budging. #1GF! knows that I hate answering questions that start with “do you mind” because one of the people in the exchange inevitably needs further explanation of the reply. It’s the most inefficient form of question, unless the person asking intends to bulldoze the person asked by pretending the question was a command.

#1GF! tried again. “Hmm. Okay. Would you please turn on the Christmas lights?”

“No,” I replied as I flipped a page.

“Hmm.”

I kept staring at a magazine. “Would you like to make another attempt at rephrasing the question to trick me into turning on the lights for a holiday that is past?”

“Damn,” said #1GF! with a little surprise. “You finally figured it out.”

7:40 PM: I write down and dissect the day’s events to find out which spare minutes I could’ve squeezed some writing into. I don’t find many.
8:15 PM: I eat dinner and sit on the couch with #1GF!.
10 PM: I go to bed, and lie in the dark trying to find a use for Google’s Social Graph API, if time ever allows.

I’m in motion all day long, so why do I feel like I’m not getting anything done?

Tuesday (Day 947): Wearin’ A Beard Like Yea

Once #1GF! was off to work, I fed the baby, and then dusted and swept a couple of rooms. I had to talk to the baby the whole time I was out of sight so that she wouldn’t freak out. My plan worked, except she barfed on herself instead. I cleaned her up and threw in a couple loads of laundry, even though I’ve been pretty much banned from doing laundry since 2004.

The baby was scheduled for a nap, but she had no interest in sleeping. She sat in her swing watching me dust and sweep out another couple of rooms. When I was finished, she screamed with joy, and then threw up all over herself out of pure excitement. To her, throwing up is like clapping, so I took a bow to keep her from getting offended or clapping louder. I got her cleaned up and looked at the clock. It was already 3:30 PM.

When #1GF! got home, she took over the baby care and I came up with a solution to a bug that cropped up in Better Blogroll 3.0. It’s about time a bug cropped up in my widget after all these years. Once the bug was fixed and released, I got carried away trying to add new features. I ended up eating dinner at 9:30 PM with my brain swamped in PHP and WordPress innards.

#1GF! turned to me as I ate. “Do you ever worry about getting food stuck, you know, around your mouth.”

“Not really,” I said, not getting the hint.

She motioned to my beard. “That thing is out of control.”

I shrugged. “The baby likes it.”

“She does not.”

“She does. She tugs my beard when she sits on my lap.”

“She does that to me too.”

“Oh? She tugs your beard?” I asked. “I think that she might be wishing you had a beard. That baby is going to grow up to be woman who likes beards. You’ll see. She’ll be supporting the struggle. Oh, and she likes Miley Cyrus, too.”

“What?”

“Yea, you can nod your head like yea, party all the time like yea, do all the dishes like yea, and she laughs immediately as long as you’re the slightest bit close to the cadence of that song and follow what ever you say with ‘like yea’.”

“Seriously. What the hell happens around here while I’m gone?”

“I feed up the baby like yea, change up the baby like yea…”

#1GF! shook her head at me like she is prone to do.

As I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, my brain trekked back out into the fields of PHP without a computer as a guide. I did not fall asleep easily, but it wasn’t a bad way to doze off.

Wednesday (Day 948): Who Are The Commenters?

I got #1GF! off to work, showered, set up the baby’s bath stuff, and sat down at the PC to write. I checked my mail, and then tried to figure out a way to link regular commenters to social networks so that I wouldn’t lose track of them. The best I could do in the time I had was to work out a decent MySQL query. The rest of the day was standard fare of LOR and baby care.

After dinner, I went in to finish my edits on LOR, before returning to the den to watch Big Love with #1GF!.

Thursday (Day 949): She Pities Tiny Fools

I woke up relatively rested because the baby slept through the night. You hear that? The baby slept through the night.

Before she left for work, #1GF! read and edited LOR for posting. Once she was gone, I jumped in the shower. The baby was awake by the time I was dressed, and baby care resumed.

The baby was officially five months old, so I put her in a Mr. T onsie and took a bunch of pictures of her next to a plastic Mr. T head. I kept taking pictures until I got the expression I wanted, and then I posted it. When you entertain a baby all day, you have find ways to keep yourself entertained.

I wasted time looking for an image for a dyers.org eighth blogiversary post. I didn’t find anything interesting, so I shelved the idea for a bit. I left the office and dug into the still packed box-o-Christmas-presents to see what I could put away. I pushed around the contents and found a small tin of mustache wax. I shelved the idea of putting anything away.

I immediately stood in front of the bathroom mirror and dug some wax of the tin with the edge of a black plastic comb after failing to dig some out with a finger. I warmed it up and applied it to the ol’ ’stache. It held better than anything I had used so far, and within thirty seconds, I had a decent mini handlebar going. I divided my time between making old-time threats and telling myself that I must pay the rent. There was a lot of wide-eyed, high-eyebrowed finger-pointing going on.

When the baby got up, she seemed like she was starting to sleep on a schedule. I smoothed my ’stache back down, and put aside my old-time threats to put together an exersaucer for her. It didn’t require any tools and was complete in no time.

I plunked the baby into the middle of the ring, thinking that she’d have a blast being surrounded by all those new toys. She immediately got freaked out and started crying. For a kid who lives with a klutzy dad, and takes vaccination shots like a drill sergeant, I was surprised at her reaction. Maybe she was overloaded with too many new toys at once. I pulled her right out of there and accidentally threatened the exersaucer with a bout of bare-knuckled boxing for upsetting the little one. It wasn’t nearly as effective without the handlebar mustache.

#1GF! got home and asked me how the day went. I told her about the baby’s possible sleep patterns, eating habits, and fear of the exersaucer. #1GF! responded by telling me that I was giving the baby too much food. I wasn’t, so I defended my strategy. I had been trying to identify and reinforce patterns that got the baby sleeping through the night, and it was finally working. I wasn’t force feeding the baby, but giving her as much food as she wanted. Babies know when they’re full.

We had been tracking the baby’s sleeping and eating pattern since she was born, so I printed out spreadsheets to make tracking patterns easier. It was something that I should’ve done two months before. It made pattern recognition much easier. Yes, I created spreadsheets to track when the baby eats, how much she eats, and when she’s awake and asleep. Yes, I think it’s a little overkill, but at least I didn’t spend the time writing PHP to make it into a website.

#1GF! took over the baby care, and I went to the office to answer a lot of backlogged e-mail. It sounds sort of cool to answer e-mail from a ton of people who you don’t know, but it’s mostly beard related and trails off after a single reply. Today, I got an email from someone who wanted to know if I was an actor or a stand up comedian in real life. Nice. I’ll take it. I told him that I was just a stay at home dad, leaving not much left to talk about.

As I sat at the PC thinking about all this baby knowledge that I had been picking up, I wondered if being a stay at home dad was enough of a curiosity to get me a shot at writing a parenting article for one of the baby magazines. I shrugged and let it remain just a thought.

Friday (Day 950): Superhero Attack & Cosmic Ray Damage

The baby slept through the night again. They call me the sleep tracking super dad. I felt like I had solved a very complex puzzle.

#1GF! was working from home, which disrupted the baby’s schedule because when the baby saw her, it was like taunting her with a bottle. I let her hold the baby close to a feeding time, and the baby started crying, and I had to step in and take over. I wasn’t the most gentile person about it. I was just given a glimpse of a possible framework evolving out of my life of baby care anarchy, and it was fading back into the dust clouds of chaos. The situation returned to normal soon after.

After the baby ate, #1GF! went out to mail some letters, and I sat down to read our new insurance policy. Although we weren’t covered if the toilet started spewing sewage, we were covered against falling objects, including air and spacecraft. We were not, however, covered against hovercraft damage. I’m not sure what century the insurance company thinks we’re in, but they left the questions of superhero attack and cosmic ray damage open to interpretation.

Later, #1GF! brought back a coffee for me. It was an unexpected surprise. I got another surprise soon after when I cleaned up the biggest poop I’ve ever seen on the child yet. I called #1GF! in for moral support because I couldn’t see skin below the baby’s waist.

“This is absolutely remarkable,” I said after sending two baby wipes in to be slaughtered.

“So, when was the last time you left the house?” asked #1GF!.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “When was the last time the baby left the house?”

#1GF! thought for a second. “Two weeks ago.”

“Great. Then it was two weeks ago.”

“You need to get out.”

“There are people out there, honey. People who know things. About me. I’m not saying that they’re out to get me, but they are. They’re out there. Trying to get me. They’re after my flap jacks and they can’t have them. NO SIR, THEY CAN’T HAVE ‘EM!”

“Exactly,” said #1GF! as she walked out of the room shaking her head, as she is prone to do.

“Where are you going? Don’t you want to see how this turns out?” She obviously didn’t.

I called our garbage company because they were supposed to pick up our recycling on Monday, but didn’t. They were supposed to return today to pick it up, and it was already 3PM. Although the woman on the phone assured me that they’d pick it up by 7PM, they never showed up. I hauled our recycling bin back in from the curb for the second time this week. We pay for trash service here, so I wasn’t too happy.

I worked on writing and image searching for what should’ve been a quick post about running this blog for eight years. I ended up playing with images for far too long, and ended up skipping dinner. And thanks to the coffee, I was wide awake when the hour and minute hands jumped each other.

#1GF! was already in bed, so I closed the bedroom door so that the light wouldn’t wake her up. I brushed my teeth, and felt my way down to the kitchen for a drink of water. I then walked back to the bedroom a few minutes later, having completely forgotten that I closed the door. I kicked the door open with my nose, and the bang and ensuing whispered profanity had #1GF! sitting bolt upright and using a few choice words of her own. Luckily, the baby stayed asleep.

At 1 AM, the baby woke up, killing a pattern of two nights of sleeping through the night.

Saturday (Day 951): The Garbage Men Share My Sense Of Time

The garbage men finally picked up my recycling. I guess 10 AM on a Saturday is the same as before 7PM on Friday, which is the same as having it picked up on Monday, like it’s supposed to be. The same company skipped picking up my recycling the last time and left no reason at all.

I worked on roughing out LOR until 1PM, and got caught up. I was still twenty weeks behind on writing and editing, but at least the rough drafts were out of my notebooks and into the database.

Once again, the baby slept though the night.

What I Learned

• My garbage company thinks that leaving automated messages after they close telling me that they’re not picking up my garbage is acceptable.
• Baby care is not as serene as I imagined it to be.
• Google’s Social Graph API seems interesting, but I don’t have the time to find a use for it.
• The baby likes Miley Cyrus and beards. I don’t know whether to trust her instincts.
• When you entertain a baby all day, you have find ways to keep yourself entertained.
• Tracking sleep/eat times on a spreadsheet should be started at three months to figure out patterns.
• A few people out there think I’m funny. I mean, funny like I’m a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I’m here to fuckin’ amuse you? What do you mean funny? Funny how? How am I funny?
• I’m covered against falling spacecraft, but not against sewage. And my hovercraft will not be covered.
• The baby sleeping through the night is awesome.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

Monday (Day 939): Dyers 2, Bananas 0

I transferred myself from the bed to the couch at around 6AM, and I slept until 10AM. My sister came over at noon, and we all stared at the baby. I never understood how people could stare at a baby for extended periods of time, until I had one.

The baby, like her dad, is a good eater. If you watch her eating solid food, you’d think it was her favorite part of the day. Since I was old enough to eat solid food, I would devour anything my parents put in front of me, and I have never been what people would call a picky eater. If something is food based, and my temperament is hunger based, then said item will be ingested without ceremony or complaint–as long as that food was not a banana.

And that aversion has followed me through my whole life. I’ve eaten wet dog food that smelled better and was more palatable than “nature’s perfect snack”. When I was a young man, my fun-loving coworkers would covertly throw banana peels in the trash can under my desk because the smell made me nauseous. I’ve gotten over the nausea, but bananas remain one food that I don’t eat.

We gave the baby some banana puree in her food, and it was the only time that I’ve seen the baby try to retract her head through the back of the chair after taking a bite of something. She squinted her eyes and shook it off from the shoulders up. We tried another bite and got the same reaction. We switched to something else, and the baby went back to happily growling for more. The baby, like her father, does not like bananas. I was pretty happy about that. I felt like the baby and I had a common enemy.

I made homemade mac and cheese for dinner, and even though I was using a Mexican cheese blend, the meal came out surprisingly bland. I made a note to get a sharper cheese.

My sister headed home after dinner, and #1GF! and I watched Management, which was a bit quirky for a Jennifer Aniston based romantic comedy, but I’ve seen worse. The baby slept through the whole thing.

Tuesday (Day 940): Toss Logic And Follow The Script

It was sixteen degrees out with a wind chill of minus six, and the cold morning air was slipping its fingers under the covers wherever it found an inadvertent gap. Leaving that bed was about as inviting as hugging a corpse. My cold was moving to my chest, so I took my slight illness as license to stay in bed until an amazingly late 8AM.

Once I was up, I remoted into my parents’ PC to do some routine maintenance. The baby spent her time throwing up on things. She had gone through three onsies and a pair of pants before the grand finale of leaning over and barfing into her own sleeve. I couldn’t decide if it would be more fun to deal with a sleeve full of barf, or a PC full of problems. It was too close to call.

When I was midway through the removal of a series of completely worthless toolbars, a phone call came in from Dell. I handed the phone over to #1GF! because she had given someone a desktop as a gift this year.

“Is this #1GF!?” asked the rep.

“Speaking.”

“This is Dell calling about your new PC.”

“Oh, that PC was a gift for someone else,” #1GF! said.

“How would you say that it’s running?”

“It was a Christmas gift for someone else, and we haven’t had time to visit, so it’s still in the box at their house.”

“Oh. Okay. [pause] Well, did you have any problems setting it up?”

#1GF! shook her head and looked at the ceiling. She decided that ignoring logic and adhering to Dell’s script would get her off the phone faster. “No,” she replied.

“Great. Call us if you have any problems at (800) WWW-DELL.”

“Right. I’ll be sure to.” She hung up the phone.

If the Dell #1GF! bought was getting ready to launch a nuclear attack on the Russians and there was a sticker on the top of the PC that read, “In case of nuclear misfire, call (800) WWW-DELL for launch cancel codes,” Dell would still probably be fourteenth or fifteenth on the list of people we’d call to in order to save the world.

After the baby got up from her afternoon nap, we all piled into the car to run a few errands. It was so cold that the baby’s eyes watered when we took her out to the car. #1GF! returned some stuff at a department store before we went to a big box electronics store to pick up DSLite for my sister. My parents have been Nintendo portable freaks since the original Game Boy, and #1GF! and I were effectively throwing my sister into their cult.

We were home by 6PM, and I threw some ribs into the oven because they were so close to the expiration that the only options were oven or trash. They only cooked for a scant two and a half hours, but they were still finger licking, fall-off-the-bone delicious.

Wednesday (Day 941): The Booger Needs A Walk

I got up and got dressed early, so I decided to make a chocolate cake. Oh, I hear you. Really? You got up early, and baking was the first thing that you thought of to fill that extra time there, Brick Macho? You didn’t get cozy with some chamomile tea and a nice romance novel? What about a good cry? Did you have a good cry? If you don’t man up, I’m going to have to get a testosterone meter that is similar to those blood sugar testers that Wilford Brimley is always hawking…

Okay, enough. You want to comment, you do it below, but you’re not getting any more space in the body of this narrative. I tried to make a chocolate cake with chocolate butter frosting, but I mixed two recipes because it’s a geek’s nature to tinker.

I still wasn’t feeling well, and sneezed into my elbow like the CDC has been recommending these days to stop the spread of germs. It was just another piece of proof that you can’t win when you do the right thing because I ended up with a thumbnail sized giganto booger perched on my sleeve like a new pet. I looked at it with disgust while it tried to get me to take it for a walk. “That’s grosser than anything that baby has spewed out over the last few months,” I said to a nearby #1GF! who was taking care of an eternally fussy baby.

#1GF! was not having an easy time masking her disgust. “Oh, I agree,” she added quietly so as not to provoke my new playmate.

To avoid any future impulses to act on CDC recommendations, I changed into a boogerless, short-sleeved T-shirt before taking out the trash. Even though it was the middle of winter and I was in short sleeves, I wasn’t cold. When I came back in, #1GF! was standing at the counter going through the mail.

“It’s actually pleasant out,” I said. “The air is moist, and the wind is light. It was almost enjoyable out there.

“It’s 28 degrees.”

I was surprised. It felt like spring. “I guess when 28 degrees feels warm, it’s a cold winter.”

#1GF! nodded like she does when she’s half listening to me. “Uh huh. Um, quick question there Mr. Spock,” she said as she held up a Netflix envelope. “How did Star Track get to the top of our Netflix queue?”

“Trek. Star Trek. I don’t know,” I said, while trying to look like I was concentrating on washing my hands.

“Well, I didn’t put it there. Have you been playing with the queue again? Do you need to be banned from the queue again?” The last time I had been banned was 2005.

“I put it at number ten or something. Maybe our top movies are all long waits.”

#1GF! stared at me.

“What? It’s supposed to be good. Highly rated.”

#1GF! stared wider and wiggled the envelope a little for emphasis.

“It’s not Shatner. And. His. strangelypaceddialogue. It’s a young Kirk and Spock.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said #1GF! with a dismissive shake of her head.

“It’s highly rated,” I replied.

“If I fall asleep, you don’t have to wake me.”

“Highly. Rated.”

“Nanoo Nanoo.”

I sighed and dried my hands on a kitchen towel.

We were supposed to be at my parents’ house at 1PM, but got there a couple of hours late because the baby took an extra nap. They were all operating at a leisurely, post-holiday pace, and didn’t seem to mind.

My parents have had Nintendo hand-helds since the original Game Boy came out. For years, they used them for one thing: playing head to head Tetris. Through the various upgrades over the years, they played it over cable, then infrared, and now by wi-fi.

We gave my sister a DSLite so that she could join their hand-held gaming clan. And she joined with gusto. She was more excited about it than I could’ve imagined.

We hung out and ate Chinese food as a family, which happens less and less frequently as you get older. After the meal, my mom pointed to her fortune cookie. “What’s that over this letter?” she asked.

“That’s a shwa,” said my sister, drawing the word out with an extravagant flourish.

My mother turned to me. “Did you know that?”

“Of course,” I said with a superfluous amount of arrogance. “I know all about shwas, umlauts, commas…I know all about that writing stuff. I am a writer.”

“Ha! You’re a bum!” said my mom.

I nodded. “I am. It’s true. But, I’m a house husband and a babysitter. And a damned good one.”

“It’s true. You are,” said #1GF!. And everyone nodded in agreement.

Now, my mother didn’t mean anything by calling me a bum. I say that I’m the luckiest hobo of all time, but it brought an interesting perception to mind. A woman who stays home with her kids is a selfless hero who is admirably giving up her career to do her motherly duty and raise a family. A dude who does the same thing is a bum, and you wonder what deep-seated defect is keeping him from working. You know you do…no matter how liberated you think you are.

The conversation turned, and my sister mentioned that she was thinking about taking a sewing class together with her boyfriend. I was just about to make fun, and realized that it’s hard to poke fun at a guy who wants to sew when your favorite Christmas gifts this year were some baking pans and a cake tray.

After dinner, we had the cake I made, and it was sort of a chocolate brick. Everyone was nice about it, and pretended to like it. Next time I’ll know that you can’t just mix recipes without paying close attention to liquid/dry ratios.

I spent a little time working on my parents’ PC before we left because something was still causing it to crash. I suspect that it has something to do with those shitty internet games that people are so addicted to these days, but I couldn’t pinpoint an error. We headed home, and I promised to remote into their machine and take a look at it another day.

Thursday (Day 942): Nanoo Years Eve

There was snow in the forecast, so I got up early and did the food shopping to avoid dealing with those other nuts who go food shopping before a light snowfall as if the world was going to end. I was home putting the groceries away by 11AM, and #1GF! headed out to her mother’s house to help take down the Christmas decorations. It started snowing while she was gone.

I fed the baby and wrote a post declaring the end of the MaBeGroMo basic period. #1GF! was back home, safe and sound, by mid afternoon. She took over the baby care, and I started writing again. Before I knew it, it was already 6PM. #1GF! put the baby to bed, and we ate dinner ate 9PM. #1GF! had steak that I bought especially for her at the store, and I had frozen fish fillets because I just didn’t feel like cooking.

After dinner, we sat and watched the Star Trek prequel, which was action packed enough for non-fans, but contained plenty of nods to the old series for fans.

“What’s that?” asked #1GF! when a large spaceship came on the screen.

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s supposed to be an old version of the Borg,” I said.

“What’s a bork?”

“Borg. Sorry. Nevermind. Doesn’t matter.”

#1GF! rolled her eyes. “Nanoo.”

At another point, I burst out laughing when a new character appeared.

“What?” asked #1GF!.

“Nothing. It’s nothing.”

“No, what?”

I hit the pause button. “Well, that guy has to be Bones. He’s speaking with the exact same inflection that DeForest Kelley used in the original series.”

“Who’s Bones?”

Various sections of my eyebrows made simultaneous runs in different directions. “Bones? Chief Medical officer? Dammit, Jim! McCoy?”

#1GF! rolled her eyes.

“Never mind. Don’t say it.”

“Nanoo.”

“Don’t…”

“Nanoo.”

And later…

“Where the hell is Scotty?” I asked the screen.

“I don’t know. On Ork with Orson? Scotty calling Orson. Come in Orson.”

“Highly…”

“I can’t believe this is our New Year’s Eve movie.”

“Rated.” I paused the movie. “Look, I was thinking of you. I knew you’d fall asleep, and I didn’t want you to miss a second of the pure, heart warming gold that Sandra Bullock and Julia Roberts spin and weave into the very fabric of our hearts.”

“Riiight.”

I fell asleep after the movie and woke up at 12:04. I caught a glimpse of the animatronic robot that they replaced Dick Clark with a few years back. He wasn’t as freakish as he had been in past years, but it wasn’t something that I wanted to stare at for too long.

#1GF! started checking her email, and I went into the other room to shut down my PC. We ended up chatting through Facebook from different rooms before going to bed. I put my first lie through Facebook chat. I told #1GF! I wasn’t wearing any pants, when in fact, I had Adidas sweatpants on. I could hear her laughing in the other room, which was not a nice thing to do when someone tells you that they don’t have pants on, even if it’s the intended reaction.

Friday (Day 943): New Year’s Day

The baby didn’t sleep much all day. When she finally did go to sleep, I wanted her to be awake.

To start the year off on the right foot, I avoided showering and planted my ass on the couch for as many hours as possible. I tried to watch Dr. Who because it is a basic requirement in geek culture, but found it to be boring and hokey. I watched the Winter Classic, where they had a Bruins game on the field at Fenway Park. That was neat, but not as exciting as I thought it would be.

I made kale soup for dinner, but it didn’t come out as good as it usually does. #1GF! got me to make croutons for her even though I said that I wasn’t going to. For some reason, even though they are incredibly simple to make, and I’ll do anything for #1GF!, making croutons for her is the bane of my existence.

After dinner, we watched (500) Days of Summer, which I wanted to have renamed to the Dogshit Craps of Caca. #1GF! didn’t agree, but I’m sure that the studio could’ve made a killing. I know that I would’ve gone to the theater to see a major movie with a name like that. How could I not? It’s a good thing that they didn’t because their boring title matched their movie and saved me twenty bucks.

Saturday (Day 944): What I Can And Can’t Believe, Mr Bale

It was another snowy New England day, and the biggest thing that I did was to go out and shovel the driveway.

We watched Terminator Salvation, which sucked as badly as expected. Yea, I can accept a robot race set on destroying the human race, but I can’t accept Christian Bale acting like he was Batman the Terminator killer. And don’t ask me to believe that a heart transplant on the battlefield is possible without any sort of genetic matching or um, you know, sterilization. I’m petitioning to have this movie renamed to Turdinator Shitsation

At 8PM, I sat down to read some RSS feeds, and shut down my feed reader after a couple of hours without making a dent in the content. Although there was some interesting and entertaining information stuffed in the cracks of my feed reader, I found that hundreds of feeds are no longer pertinent to my life. No matter how cool I think certain GIMP tutorials are, or how clever some of the WordPress hacks are, or how funny some of the posts are, I’m twenty weeks behind on the blog, and a couple of books behind on my writing goals. That’s not even mentioning that I have a baby to take care of. Time is unbelievably limited, and reading more blogs not only spends time that I don’t have, but it resurrects the urge to post daily, which I don’t have the time for either. I wish there were more hours in the day, but wishes and a ten spot will buy me new socks.

What I Learned

• Sometimes, when the employees are brain-dead, a script is useful. Other times, it isn’t.
• Mexican cheese doesn’t provide the kick in a mac and cheese that you’d expect.
• The baby and I have a common enemy: Musa paradisiaca.
• Sometimes it’s easier to put logic aside and follow the script.
• Sneezing into your sleeve is recommended by the CDC, and thoroughly gross.
• 28 degrees can feel like T-shirt weather during a New England winter.
• I am the only member of my family to reject Nintendo.
• Stay at home moms are heroes, stay at home dads are bums.
• Don’t laugh at people who sew if your favorite Christmas gift was a baking pan.
• There is not a lot of time left for RSS Feeds after the baby care is done.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

Once I decided that I wasn’t doing the interview, I played ten minutes of QuakeLive. The game may have lost its appeal. It’s not nearly as fun as the baby.

Monday (Day 932): Writing All Day

The baby slept from 9:30 PM until 6:30 AM. It took me a while to figure out why I hadn’t woken up exhausted.

#1GF! was supposed to be on vacation, but she went into work to tie up some loose ends before the holidays. I worked on LOR 115 all day long, and finally got it posted.

I ate dinner at 10:30PM, and #1GF! read the details of our first few days out of the hospital back to me. It seemed like it was so long ago. We had forgotten how much screaming there was.

Tuesday (Day 933): Predictable As PHP

#1GF! was finally on vacation, and she took over the baby care. I updated my Better Blogroll Wordpress Plugin to allow the links to be sorted randomly, by title, or by rating. It took all day, but it was really nice to bury my head in something predictable like code for a while.

Wednesday (Day 934): Late Night Grocery Runs

#1GF! went out to get some Christmas shopping done, and of course, the baby rolled over onto her back for the first time while she was gone. I split the day between baby care and making three dozen macaroons and five dozen peanut butter cookies.

There was still a lot more holiday baking to do, so I went out to the store at 10PM to pick up pistachios. #1GF! asked me to pick up some pudding for her while I was out, and warned me several times that she needed regular pudding, not instant.

When I got to the store, I searched all over the place for pistachios, but couldn’t find them. I also couldn’t find someone to ask because the store was on a skeleton crew. I shook my head. The whole trip ended up as nothing more than a late night run for a couple of boxes of pudding mix.

When I got home, #1GF! told me where the pistachios were in the store, and I realized that I had walked right by them. She also pointed out that I bought instant pudding. I read the box three times because I swore that I picked up two boxes of regular. The shopping run was officially a complete waste of time.

I slumped my shoulders, tossed the pudding boxes on the counter, and went back to the store. #1GF! tried to stop me from going, but I figured that if I had all the ingredients ready in the morning, it would save us some time.

I went back to the store, picked up what I needed, and was back home by 11PM. There aren’t a lot of people in the supermarket after 10PM, but it was a lot more than I expected, beyond the typical baked teenagers hunting for snacks.

Thursday (Day 935): My Annual Fresca With Mee Maw Bon Bon

I was in the kitchen at 7:30AM to continue the holiday baking. #1GF! made a pudding pie, and I made jello jigglers, two dozen cranberry/pistachio biscotti, five dozen tri-flavored (cherry, pistachio, chocolate) spumoni bar cookies, and a pineapple upside down cake. That’s in addition to the three dozen macaroons and five dozen peanut butter cookies that I made the day before. #1GF! was not too happy with me for baking so much, but I didn’t have a lot of Christmas gifts to give, so I threw a lot of effort into baking to prove that I cared.

I finished at 5PM, showered, packed everything up, and we headed to my parents’ house to drop off presents and food. My parents weren’t feeling well, but some grandmothers will run out into the snow in their slippers just to get a glimpse of their granddaughter.

The days of going to multiple houses on Christmas Eve have been whittled down over the years to a single stop at a friend’s open house. We had never been to a party with the baby, and weren’t really sure how she would react.

I tried to give the baby a minute to acclimate to the people crowding around her, but the minute we got in the door, my friend’s mother whipped the baby out of my hands and ran into the other room with her. There was no stopping her. It was pretty funny. I went into the kitchen and had my annual Fresca.

I don’t know who thought up grapefruit juice soda, but I toast that bastard once a year. It all started one Christmas Eve when I visited my friend’s house and he politely asked me if I wanted something to drink. To be a pain in the ass, I asked for a Yoo-Hoo. When he didn’t have it, I asked for a Mello Yello. Then, a Dr. Pepper. Then, a Ramblin Root Beer, because I was sure that it hadn’t been made since the mid ’90s. My next move was to ask for a Fresca because no one but country club cabanas stock Fresca…no one but country club cabanas and my friend’s mom. I got a Fresca that year, as ordered. Now, every year, I drink a Fresca as an annual reminder of a joke that went too far and eventually backfired.

I stood in the kitchen with my Fresca, and the baby was off in the living room. It was weird to not have her in my sight. The other couples in the room got elbows in the ribs and raised eyebrows, and I tried to assist them by telling them how we had given up on the possibility of children by the time this baby came along. I’m not sure if it helped, but I doubt that it hurt.

They gave the baby Make Way For Ducklings, which is a classic childrens’ book that is set in Boston. We didn’t have it yet, and I was hoping the baby would get it as a gift at some point because I loved it so much as a child.

We stayed only about a half hour because it was way past the baby’s bed time, and we wanted to get out of there before she freaked. The baby was good the whole night, and was pleasant and fun the whole ride home. When we got in the door, even though it was early and we weren’t out for long, #1GF! and I were both exhausted.

Friday (Day 936): Christmas Day

We went to my parents’ house in the morning, and then to #1GF!’s mother’s house until 8PM. The baby was great all day, and was happy to watch everyone opening presents.

We went out to look at Christmas lights after we left #1GF!’s mother’s house, and found that we didn’t have the energy to care about Christmas lights. We whipped through a couple of neighborhoods, and got home around 9PM. We were exhausted once again. I loaded the presents into the house, and #1GF! put the baby to bed.

We ate leftover spaghetti at 10PM. I stood eating over the sink and thought, “All that running around. Well, at least we can relax in the morning.” I quickly remembered that with a baby, minimal sleep is the only option.

Saturday (Day 937): An 8 1/2 Hour Movie

I got up, straightened up the house, and cleaned the bathroom before I took a shower. #1GF! ran out to the store to pick up some lunch meat and rolls because her friend from Florida was stopping by for a visit on her way to a hockey tournament.

#1GF!’s friend came over at 11AM with her boyfriend and his two kids in tow. The kids had never seen snow, so they were on their backs in the neighbor’s yard making angels. They would occasionally pop in to change into some dry clothes before going back out. I was a little run down from all the Christmas festivities, so my entertainment processor was only running at half speed.

We had sandwiches, and her friend stayed for a couple of hours before heading off to hockey tournament.

#1GF! and I then spent from 1:30PM until 10PM trying to watch a movie. Netflix is almost useless when you have a kid.

What I Learned

• Sometimes, you just have to put the silly stuff aside to spend what little time you have on what’s important.
• You eventually forget how bad colic is.
• I know where the goddamned pistachios are.
• It takes hours to make spumoni cookies, and they’re not worth it.
• A pineapple upside down cake takes very little time and is totally worth it.
• I think baking for people means that I care.
• Sleeping in no longer exists.
• Netflix is almost useless when you have a kid
• Boring weeks are as brutal to write as they are to read.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

After dinner, the baby had the best reaction to me that she’s ever had. I walked into the hall, and the baby squealed, smiled, and hid her face in her mom’s shoulder while she jiggled with excitement. It was one of those cool moments that make you feel like you’re more than a barf cleaning machine.

After the baby went to bed, #1GF! joined Facebook. I gave her a quick tutorial, but she wasn’t sure that she liked it. I knew that she’d be all over it eventually. It just takes a couple of days to get its hooks into you.

Monday (Day 925): We Means You

I went out to get a haircut, but my regular barber wasn’t answering his phone and the local shop was closed. I was back home within ten minutes. It would’ve been five, if I didn’t have the extra weight of my forty pound hairdo.

#1GF! was working from home, and she’s one of those people who works from home without finger quotes around working. She chained herself to her side of the desk, and I spent almost the entire morning trying to get the baby to go to sleep.

Once the baby was down, I stood in the kitchen looking over her eating and sleeping chart to see if she was on schedule. #1GF! walked in to grab some water.

“I think we’re going to make cookies for the neighbors this year,” she said.

I looked up from my chart. “What? Since when do we exchange gifts with the neighbors?”

“Well, I thought it would be nice.”

I went back to my chart. “Good luck with that, I guess.”

“Uh huh. Just have the cookies made some time next week so that I can bring them over, wise guy.”

“Oh, yea. Will do. I’ll get right on that,” I said in a way that implied that I wouldn’t.

I made pesto for dinner and we watched a comedy called YPF, which I had no idea stood for “young people fucking”. It didn’t end up being too bad, and it got a few shock laughs out of me.

Tuesday (Day 926): Barf Ninja Blitzkrieg

The baby didn’t sleep much in the morning, so I walked around the house with her pointing at things and naming them. She applauded the tour by barfing all over herself and me, leading to a couple of costume changes and a bath.

When the baby finally went to sleep, I started working on the story for the beard 2009 shaving pictures that should’ve been posted months ago.

The baby soon woke up, and I fed her, waited an hour, and then gave her a batch of solid food. I made a goddamned mess of her, as usual. I took her out of the chair, and on the last spoonful, I dropped a huge glob of food on her pants. I left the high chair and dishes to be hosed down later. I took her to the bathroom to wipe her down the best that I could, while she laughed and tried to eat the facecloth.

I went in to change the baby’s barf coated pants, and noticed that I had completely soaked her Onsie while washing her face. I scrapped her second outfit of the day. I went to change her diaper along with the clothes, and in the middle of the change, the baby let loose and unexpected flood of pee, sending the changing pad cover chasing her clothes into the laundry.

I had burned through two outfits for the baby, a shirt for me, and a changing pad cover already. I grabbed the gas medicine, hoping to stem the tide of vomit before there was a full load of baby laundry to do. I finished changing the baby into a new outfit, threw a clean burp cloth on my shoulder, and grabbed the gas medicine off of the coffee table in the den.

I sat on the couch, and right before I could give her the medicine, the baby barfed in an arc over the burp cloth, down my arm, off my leg, off my sock and onto the floor. I shook my head and stared at the floor. I was being soundly beaten by the barf ninja.

I took the baby to the bathroom to clean her up for the third time in fifteen minutes, and had to walk on my heel to avoid tracking baby puke all over the place.

Once the baby was cleaned up, I put her on the couch while I wiped the baby puke off the floor. I used water and some paper towels, but found that the floor smelled like sour milk. Yea, I smelled it. I went and got some floor cleaner and a rag. The baby lay there squealing because she had figured out how to take her sock off. I cleaned the floor with a rag and threw it into the bathroom sink, picked up the baby, and resumed burping her.

I grabbed another pair of socks so I wouldn’t track puke everywhere, but gave up on changing my pants or shirt because I knew that barf ninja was a silent and unpredictable foe. I took the baby out of the den and past the bathroom with the rag in the sink that I had already forgotten about, and went into the kitchen, which was splattered with baby food. In fifteen minutes, I had inefficiently messed up three rooms, two outfits, my clothes, my socks, and left a trail of destruction that wound through almost the entire house.

In the afternoon, the baby was a lot better, giving me a chance to clean up before #1GF! came home. I made enchiladas for #1GF! while she watched the baby before her bedtime. It was a dinner that #1GF! wouldn’t get to finish because the baby refused to go to sleep.

After dinner, I sealed a couple of counters because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it during the day. #1GF! wandered around with the baby because she still wouldn’t go to sleep. At 9:30PM, I polished the dining room table. When you’re polishing a fucking table at 9:30 at night, and no one is coming over the next day, something is wrong.

By the time the baby went to sleep and the day ended, I was tired. When #1GF! informed me that it was Tuesday, and not Monday, as I had thought all day, I also felt like I had been robbed of twenty-four hours.

Wednesday (Day 927): The Bearded Sock Servant

The baby was squealing with happiness for most of the day because she discovered that no matter how many times she took her sock off, the big bearded person would put it back on for her. She slept an hour or two at a time, and I didn’t make too much of a mess while feeding her.

In my off hours, I worked on the getting the story for beard shaving 2009 written, which felt like the massive waste of time that it was.

At 5PM, our old contractor showed up to say hello. It was cool to talk to another adult for a few minutes before he had to get going.

#1GF! came home and took over the baby right in the middle of a diaper change. A mother’s love is stronger than poop, my friends. I shrugged and went out to finish getting dinner ready.

After the baby had gone to bed, I sealed the remaining counters while #1GF! wrote out Christmas cards. She had turned my manipulated Christmas picture of the baby into a Christmas card, and it looked pretty good. We ate dinner at 8:30PM, once the cards were done.

Thursday (Day 928): No Baby Zuul

I probably took care of the baby and worked on putting together my beard pictures from 2009. Then again, my record keeping wasn’t that good, so it’s possible that Venkman, Raymond, and Egon came over because I refused to confirm or deny what the contents of a jar of marshmallow Fluff really was.

Ray Parker Jr. showed up a little while later, and kept humming the Ghostbusters theme song until I asked him whether he was humming “I Want A New Drug” or “Pop Muzik”. I guess he didn’t like that very much because he grabbed a proton pack and yelled “Say hello to my little friend!” just before the guys stuffed him into their station wagon and left. There were no lingering paranormal signatures left behind, and the baby wasn’t claiming to be Zuul, so #1GF! was fine with having them over. Or something like that.

Friday (Day 929): Beard Shaving 2009

After wasting and hour remixing a song that no one would ever hear, I realized that I didn’t have the time for things like that anymore. There was far too much writing or cleaning up to do when the baby was asleep. I turned my attention to something marginally important, and published the 2009 beard shaving pictures. I also added the “handlebar and goatee” and “handlebar and chin puff” to The Quest for Every Beard Type.

#1GF! went out to do the food shopping after work, and had to call me a couple of times to decipher my handwriting. Oddly, she didn’t come home with things that were required to make certain meals because I didn’t put them on the list. I guess that she’s not clairvoyant after all.

I put the groceries away and then baked cookies while #1GF! spent some time with the baby. I tried to make cookies that tasted like a peanut butter cup, but the peanut butter ended up turning an outstanding chocolate cookie bland.

Saturday (Day 930): The Family Circle Feeding

I ran out to get a haircut in the morning and thankfully, the local barber shop was open. I had only been to the shop once, but this barber was a nice, old Italian guy that I had never seen before. I hadn’t had an old Italian guy cut my hair since Gino’s shaky hands started cutting more ear than hair when I was twelve.

Wait, no. That’s not true. The guy that took over for Gino was named Tony, and he was from Italy. And then there were the three Italian guys in Quincy center that I went to for a short time, and that basement barbershop with the Italian guy who couldn’t speak English, so I had to hand signal everything. And my regular barber for the last twenty years is a Sicilan. Okay, maybe if the guy who cut my hair wasn’t Italian, I would’ve been surprised.

I got into the chair and asked for something a little shorter than a regular mens’ cut. For a first cut, he did a nice job. It wasn’t my regular barber’s cut, but it was very normal looking. I gave him a $20, and wished him a merry Christmas on the way out the door. I think he told me that I should get some clothes that fit me to go with my new haircut, but I didn’t think that could be right, so I just smiled and waved like an idiot.

I went home and washed all of the clippings out of my hair and into the tub, but the tub refused to drain. I guess all the hormones prevent a woman’s hair from falling out during pregnancy, giving a pregnant woman a nice, thick head of hair. After the birth, the hair starts falling out in droves as it returns to its normal growing cycle. I grabbed a set of gloves and dislodged a small animal’s worth of hair from the trap.

As I was cleaning, I noticed that the tub was a wreck, so I felt compelled to clean that. And then if the tub was clean, the sink had to be cleaned…and, you get the picture. I cleaned the whole bathroom.

We gave the baby a bath and we went to a family gathering at my aunt’s house. The baby was good, and the family seemed to like her.

While making small talk about my lack of employment, one of my uncles asked about the traffic on the ol’ blog, and I admitted that I was down to about fifty thousand unique visitors a month. He was astounded. I told him that it was once around 150k and once as high as 225k a month. He was floored. I call 50k “down”, but it is a lot of traffic considering it’s just a personal blog.

Naturally, he wanted to know what I write about that would drive that sort of traffic, and I used my standard line that it’s mostly about what I eat for breakfast. Then, I admitted that I couldn’t explain its popularity. My cousin’s boyfriend is a reader, and he tried to step in to explain what the secret ingredient was that kept him reading, but he had no better luck than I did.

As I went on to tell my uncle about my beard pages and about being in a couple of newspapers because of them, I watched the realization spread over his face that the internet is a wasteland and people are insane.

My aunt stepped in and asked about the cookies I brought.

“Jon, you made these?”

“Yep.”

“Are they from scratch?”

[I never expect this question because it's the only way I make cookies] “Yes.”

“With flour and sugar?”, my aunt asked, just to make sure that I wasn’t using a modern interpretation of “from scratch” that included a box or a tube.

“That’s how cookies are made.”

She seemed genuinely impressed. “Wow. You’re just like your father. He always wanted everything made from scratch.”

“I think he just goes for taste. I go from scratch because I don’t want all the chemicals in my cookies.”

We talked about cookies and the conversation turned to biscotti.

“You make biscotti, too?” another relative asked.

They were both eying #1GF!, who smiled. “He does.”

I love when people think biscotti is hard to make. I think it’s a lot easier than anything that requires a rolling pin or a cookie cutter. It just takes a little more time.

I talked about cookies for a little while with my cousin’s boyfriend (a fellow beardo who was also heartily rocking his way through MaBeGromo), and the conversation turned to cars. It had to. Men can’t talk about cookies for too long. I played up the loss of ROCKET CAR! to the family sedan, and got a few laughs from the guys. My uncle fondly remembered trading in his 280Z for a Camry.

We brought bottles, but no nipples, so #1GF! had to feed the baby the old fashioned way. She stood in the middle of the living room and fed the baby so everyone could see how it was done and offer helpful pointers before the group hug. I’m just fucking with you. #1GF! vanished for a period of time, so I had to assume she was off feeding the baby.

We stayed a couple of hours, but I didn’t feel like I had nearly enough time to talk to anyone as long as I wanted to. On the way home we hit a bookstore because I wanted to see if I could pick up a quick Christmas present. I ran in and left #1GF! and the baby in the car.

I had a couple of books to look for, but there was a guy standing a foot in front of a bookcase and blocking all access to it. I could’ve said “excuse me,” but I didn’t want to bother him. I went to look up something else to leave the guy in peace while he made his purchasing decision.

When I got back he was still there. I hovered around him, and he didn’t move. I pulled a book from in front of his knee, and he didn’t move. It wasn’t the book I wanted, so I put it back and left. For some reason, that guy bothered me. I don’t know why. I didn’t even say, “excuse me,” but I felt that I shouldn’t have had to. You know, because I’m the king of the world.

The baby started screaming on the way home. It always seems to happen when we’re in shooting range of the house. It got so bad, that we pulled over and I jumped into the back seat for the rest of the ride. I exhausted every trick I had trying to quiet her down, but nothing worked.

When we got home, #1GF! fed the baby and I made eggs. Then, #1GF! made eggs. The breakfast-style meal didn’t detract from the feeling that it was past midnight, even though it was barely 8:30PM.

What I Learned

• Not even a made up story about Ghostbusters can save a boring week.
• There was once a “Ghostbusters” vs. “I Want a New Drug” vs. “Pop Muzik” controversy? (I guess so).
• Just a few words with another adult can be extremely entertaining when you care for a baby all day.
• I’ve gone to a high percentage of Italian barbers.
• I need some pants that fit?
• My blog does all right for a personal blog.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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 was made especially for me.”

“Yea, we had one of those in the ’70s too. Everyone did. Those Santas were a huge hit back then…like bell bottoms and macrame owls.” I raised my eyebrows and subtly nodded to the trash again.

“It’s not getting thrown out.”

“Just try it in there for a few seconds to see if it fits. It will look really festive in there…until trash day, at least.”

“No.”

I closed the trash drawer and shrugged.

“There’s no room in here for all of this stuff,” said #1GF! as she swept the living room with her eyes. To the untrained ear, #1GF! was making a simple observation regarding her environment.

She was right. There wasn’t. She could’ve covered every horizontal surface with a Santa, snowman, or reindeer, and even if she hung decorations on those decorations, she’d still have a crate of stuff left over. When you’ve been in a relationship for a number a years, you start to learn how to decipher which questions are statements and which statements are really questions. “Do you want to take out the trash?” or “Is that what you’re wearing” never amounted to as much of a question as #1GF!’s statement. What #1GF! was asking was, “I know you don’t want every surface covered in tiny craft fair Santas, and I respect that, but would you rather concede a few surfaces now, or force me to carpet bomb them with decorations under the cover of darkness?”

“Do what you like,” I said. “Just make sure that you leave a three foot space for me to eat my cereal, and make sure that the caganer ends up someplace he won’t be disturbed.”

#1GF! perked up. “You’re sure?”

“Yea. Put those craft fair wooden babies with real hair all over the place if you want.”

“Come on.”

“Seriously. Decorate the crap out of everything. Have fun with it. Just don’t make me help.”

#1GF! didn’t go as crazy as I expected, but there was at least one Christmas thing on every flat surface, including the soil of plants and tops of the doorknobs.

Monday (Day 918): Post Apocalyptic Grocery Shopping

I tried to put the baby back to bed after her morning meal, but she decided that she would rather throw up all over herself and her crib. She got her bath an hour earlier than normal. Once she was nice and clean, she smiled at me and threw up down my shirt. There was no end to the cleaning.

We had the first frost of the year, and #1GF! wouldn’t take the baby so that I could go out and scrape her car. She scraped and I put the baby to bed and cleaned up her tub.

When the baby got up, I fed her and took her out food shopping. She was really good, and fell asleep halfway through. She was probably bored because an unexpectedly large number of the basic foodstuffs that typically captivate her were replaced with empty shelves. The volume of basic items that were unavailable moved beyond inconvenient and into confusing. I scavenged what I could like a better dressed apocalyptic shopper and headed home.

I put away the groceries, and fed the baby again. I hadn’t really gotten anything done, and it was already 2PM. Christ.

I tried to put the baby in for a post feeding nap because she kept falling asleep on my shoulder, but as soon as I’d put her to bed, she’d freak out. I was following all basic and advanced troubleshooting flow charts, checking diapers, burping, rocking, and shushing, but the baby was up and down, over and over. I had no idea what I was doing wrong. She finally got to bed three hours later, and I sat down at my PC and yawned. I was in no mood for writing, but I roughed out the last few remaining days of backlogged LOR posts.

I made sausages for dinner and didn’t have peppers or onions to go with it because the supermarket wasn’t stocking them. #1GF! was visibly disappointed, but sometimes, dinner on the table means you get what you get.

Tuesday (Day 919): Batman, Herpes, And Advanced Foot Eating

We got the baby bathed and took her to her four month doctor’s appointment. She was only in the fortieth percentile for height and weight, which meant that someone measured wrong when they put her height in the ninetieth percentile at her two month appointment. She had her vaccinations and barely cried. One of the vaccinations was a drink, and the nurse dumped it into her mouth, leaving half of it all over her.

The baby took it all in stride and concentrated on trying to eat her foot. The doctor seemed concerned. “Has she been doing that long?” asked the doctor.
“What? The foot. Maybe a couple of weeks,” I said.

The doctor made some notes.

“Why?” #1GF! asked with a little concern.

“Well, it’s just that it’s more of a sixth month habit.”

See that? My kid thinks that her feet are food a full two months ahead of schedule. This is not genetic disposition talking: we now have conclusive proof that my kid is a genius. In two months, she’ll be reprogramming the robot and circumventing the firewall.

The doctor told us that the baby needed to start on solid food, so after the appointment, we went to the store to pick some up. #1GF! ran in to pick up some baby rice and strained fruit, and I sat in the car with the baby. I sat there in the passenger seat, and felt like those old ladies look when they’re sitting in the passenger seat waiting for someone. All I needed was a kerchief and a handbag to clutch to my chest. I had a pink striped diaper bag, which was close, but clutching it without the kerchief seemed pointless and silly.

We got home, and #1GF! worked from home for the rest of the day. I put the baby to bed, and I started writing LOR Week 114. I sat across the desk from #1GF!, one of us working for fortune, the other for fame, like a high pressure and low pressure front silently awaiting the rumble of thunder. I burped really loudly, and was surprised by #1GF!’s laughter-not because she’s extremely proper, but because I had forgotten she was there. “Sorry,” I said. “Not used to other people here when I’m writing.”

“I’m invading your space,” she said.

I was already back to work.

We had leftover homemade mac and cheese for dinner. I ate over the sink, which has been a bad habit of mine since I was a teenager. “You know what we don’t have?” asked #1GF!.

“Herpes?” I asked, while trying to keep the molten, bacon-infused cheese from scorching the roof of my mouth.

“No.”

“Hold on, now. Which one of us doesn’t have herpes? Because as far as I knew we were both herpes free.”

“No one has herpes. You know who you sound like?”

Me, in a gruff voice: “Batman.”

#1GF! dismissed me, and moved on. “Well, sure. Sometimes.”

I maintained the Batman voice. “I’m Batman.”

“No. You sound like that guy with the big hair and the glasses from that show.”

Surprisingly, I knew exactly who #1GF! was referring to. “Moss? Awesome.” I started into a horrible Moss impersonation and never circled back to find out what we didn’t have.

I went back to writing, and #1GF! asked if she could read LOR 114 early. “It’s not done,” I said.

“Who cares? Let me read it.”

“When it’s done, you can read it.”

#1GF! sulked off to watch TV. I wanted her to read it, but letting her read a draft would ruin the full effect of the post once it was done.

I rejoined #1GF! in the den later and she looked at me when I walked into the room. “Who loves you?” she asked.

In a gruff voice, I answered, “Batman.”

All she could do was shake her head.

Wednesday (Day 920): The Unreachable Wetness Of A Porn Star

The baby slept a good portion of the day, but when she was awake, she fully embraced her alter ego as the barf ninja. The barf ninja managed not only to secretly barf on me, but somehow barfed on an otherwise unreachable part of my ass that would require some sort of mirror to see. I only knew that I had been barfed on because I got this strange sensation of wetness where there shouldn’t be wetness, unless you’re a geriatric patient or a porn star. It wouldn’t be her last trick of the day. I put her back to bed, changed my jeans, and went back to editing LOR Week 114.

On the baby’s next feed, I tried to get her to take some formula. Unfortunately, she hated formula enough that she’d make a face and spit it out if there was even a hint of it in her bottle. In this feeding, I managed to get her to drink two ounces of the stuff before she knew what was going on. When she slowed down and realized what was going on, she pulled herself off the bottle and gave me a big, grimacing, “what the fuck?” face. I laughed and felt pretty smug for someone who just tricked a seventeen week old.

Once the baby was back to bed, I sat at my desk to write, and found that I was in the middle of another internet outage. It was the third outage in a week. I vowed to look into FIOS again if the internet ever came back up. If the services were the same price, I’d gladly give up a few channels for a small amount of reliability.

On the baby’s next feeding, the barf ninja emerged once again and paid me back for fooling her with formula. She insta-barfed all over me while we were sitting down. The couch and I were both covered. The baby looked satisfied, if not a little bit smug.

To welcome #1GF! home, the baby broke into a hysterical crying fit, and I cooked dinner while #1GF! put her to bed. The baby was still crying when dinner was ready, so I shut off the pans and left everything on the stove to congeal. I went back to editing LOR 114 while I waited.

We eventually ate at 9PM, and #1GF! sat on the couch anxiously waiting to read LOR 114 because it recounted the birth of the baby. The post was a mere seventeen weeks late, and nearly 8,000 words (that’s 32 pages) long. #1GF! found several errors, which I corrected as we went along, but thoroughly enjoyed the post. It was one of those times where recounting our life together in copious detail was well worth the time and effort. It was also nice to be able to relive the day with my biggest fan.

The baby slept in her room once again, and #1GF! and I went to bed in our room by ourselves. We were talking and laughing in the faint blue glow of the baby monitor. “What is this, sleepover camp?” I asked. “One little blue light in the room, and we’re giggling like kids.” Most days I feel lucky, but that day, I felt extraordinarily so.

Thursday (Day 921): Starting On Solid Food

I thought it was Wednesday, and the baby was all off schedule, too. She kept throwing up all morning, and had a fit just after #1GF! left for work. I finally got her to sleep, and started picking up the house. I did a little laundry, made the bed, and still felt like I was behind schedule. I also felt domesticated–really domesticated.

I sat down at the PC and wrote for a half hour before the baby woke up. I gave her a bath, and slipped in some formula when I fed her. She threw a fit and then wouldn’t even take regular milk. That was fun. When I finally calmed her down, she took the regular milk, but refused to go to sleep afterward. And of course, as usual, she started throwing up all over everything.

The baby spent her normal sleep time trying to do a raspberry. She didn’t quite have it, so I did one for her. She started laughing, which was still such a new thing for her that I called #1GF! so that she could hear it.

I gave the baby a double bottle at her 3PM feeding and she ate five and a half ounces before giving up. I actually thought, “Yea. In your face, baby. Who’s full, now?” I have no idea why. I thought that the extra full belly would put her to sleep for a few hours. On the contrary, the extra food created extra gas, which kept her awake and extra fussy. Nice job, dad.

#1GF! went out shopping after work, and the baby was still up, so I decided to try giving her some solid food. I mixed up a small amount of single grain rice and some stinky puree that I couldn’t identify as fruit or vegetable. I tore a plastic baby spoon out of the package and gave the baby her first shot of solid food.

She didn’t know what to do with it at first, and it drooled down her chin. I figured out that if I put the spoon near her top lip, more food stayed in her mouth. After a dozen spoonfuls, she was not only eating it like a champ, but was growling when I held the spoon in front of her too long. I felt bad that #1GF! wasn’t there, but I was out of milk, the baby wouldn’t eat formula, and she was close enough to the hunger zone that she could flip out at any time.

The baby got a case of the hiccups, but after I wiped her down and changed her into her pajamas, she fell into a heavy sleep. I cleaned up the house a little and tried to figure out dinner. There were enough leftovers in the fridge to tide us over, so I started writing a little more. #1GF! came home later and was sorry that she missed the solid food, but I told her that in reality, it was more of a test run than a meal.

I almost ordered FIOS, and when I got to the last click, I realized that the final price wasn’t really worth the hassle of ordering it. It was the same price as I was already paying, and I’d have to give an unknown installer access to the house for an undetermined amount of time. I closed out the window. #1GF! looked at me like I had finally lost my mind. “Fuck it. Who cares?” I said. “It’s less hassle not to get it.”

#1GF! had to leave the room, I believe, to avoid strangling me.

Friday (Day 922): Working The Rusty Valve

The baby got two rounds of solid food, which the doctor said were supposed to be delivered an hour after a milk feeding. The number of feedings was up to nearly one per hour, and the solid food required a lot more cleanup than a bottle. Writing was off the schedule, and I was having trouble getting normal chores done.

I moved the baby into the kitchen and emptied the dishwasher, and that took twice as long to do because the baby was fussy. I did a load of baby laundry that sat in the washer all day because I forgot to put it in the dryer. I got a high chair down from the attic with the intention of setting it up, but it was still sitting in the hall by the end of the day.

I did have an hour or two off at random points. I tried to write, but the rust on the valve was thick and the words only dripped out of me. I eventually got distracted by making Christmas songs sound dirty by inserting inappropriate bleeps. I have no idea why.

The baby was awake from 2PM on, and crying on and off because of a bad case of gas. I fed her for a final time at 6PM, and she fell asleep an hour later. I had three kinds of puke on my shirt, and I wasn’t even considering changing it. I was tired. And a little frustrated. And I didn’t know how it was Friday or how the day had gotten by me. I sat down at the PC and threw back a half a cup of cold tea. It was the best that I was going to get.

#1GF! showed up a little later from her assault on the mall, bearing pizza. We ate and watched a couple of shows while the baby slept.

I put out a quick post after dinner, and then tried to research Christmas gifts. Because my family had asked for things like “socks” and “hope”, I didn’t get too far. Those are difficult things to get with a couple of clicks.

I stayed up until 1AM with the GIMP, combining all the best elements of our home Christmas photo shoot with the baby because I thought #1GF! would really like to use it on a Christmas card.

Saturday (Day 923): Tender Breasts

In the morning, #1GF! and I gave the baby a bath, and I was psyched to be able to get her tub put away, the beds made, and things picked up. Let me repeat that: I was psyched to get a bed made. What the fuck? I had free hands for twenty minutes, and I rushed around cleaning and doing laundry. Yea, I looked behind the dryer for my testicles, but they were stuck back there under some dust bunnies and I didn’t have the time to get them out and rinse them off.

“You have no idea how relieved I am to just run around cleaning up,” I said to #1GF! as I rushed by. “It’s sad. I talk to the baby in a high voice all day and I’ve started thinking that picking up the house is somehow satisfying. My testosterone levels must be through the floor. I need to punch something or do something manly before this becomes a chronic condition.”

#1GF! rolled her eyes at me.

“I mean it,” I replied without putting my hands on my hips or pouting like a little girl.

#1GF! rolled her eyes more emphatically and moved on. “I think we need bamboo curtains on the windows.”

“There were some curtains in that Better Homes magazine…”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know. It was an old one. They were white with a brown stripe and might look good…” I trailed off and bowed my head. “Seriously. You’re living with a woman. You’re gay now.”

“Oh, stop.” She went to hug me.

“Don’t. My breasts are a little tender.”

At least she laughed.

In the afternoon, we went out in the twenty-five degree weather to get some Christmas shopping done. We made it through two stores in two hours before the baby was too hungry and tired to continue. We headed home with the baby crying at full volume in the back seat. I held the baby’s hand and talked to her soothingly, but I was getting a little frustrated. I couldn’t get anything done. The house was a mess, I had no Christmas shopping done, and I was running out of time.

I told #1GF! about it. “Don’t think that I don’t like taking care of the baby, but this is what I deal with all day. There’s no time to get anything done. I’m sure that there’s some time, but when I finally get her to sleep, I just want to write or have a little down time. Now, I know you’re getting most of the shopping done, but the one time that I want to try to get something done, I can’t because I need to take care of the baby.”

#1GF! sat silently listening as I went on. “I didn’t have time for half the things I wanted to get done this week. The house is a mess, her high chair is still in the box because I didn’t have time to take it out, and there’s a bottle of baby shampoo on the counter that I keep trying to put away, but keep having to do something else. That bottle of shampoo drove me crazy every time I saw it yesterday. I know. It sounds crazy. It’s a small bottle. It takes five seconds to put away. It needed to be wiped off and put away, but every time I saw it, I had my hands full. Then I’d feed the baby or do something else and forget about it. And then I’d see it later and it would remind me that I wasn’t getting anything done.” #1GF! was silent. The baby was still screaming. I sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault or the baby’s fault. I need to figure out how to do it all. I feel like I need to prioritize better or something. I’ll get over it.”

“Do you need a break?” #1GF! asked.

“No. Well…maybe, but I’ll get over it.”

“You want to go out without us?”

“No. I only get a couple of days with you a week. Give me twenty minutes and I’ll get over it.”

We went home and #1GF! fed the baby. I leaned on the counter and drank some cold coffee before going into my office and remixing a Jackson 5 track just to calm down from all the screaming. Then, I did some Christmas shopping online. I got 75% of my presents bought it a half hour. I was actually relieved to have something done so quickly. I don’t know why I thought I needed to go to stores. I think what I needed was to get the fuck out of the house.

We watched 30 Rock, which had a pair of horrible Boston accents in it, and then I tried to put together a Christmas card, but #1GF! vetoed it.

What I Learned

• Playing with your feet is a six month habit.
• Sitting in the car makes me feel like an old lady sometimes.
• Putting your baby in a different room for the first time is a little weird.
• Putting the spoon near the baby’s top lip keeps solid food from drooling down her chin.
• Moving to solid food doubles the number of feedings and halves your already limited free time.
• If you spend all of your time taking care of a baby, you’re eventually going to be dying to get out of the house. And you’ll feel guilty about that feeling.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

#1GF! went to bed at normal time, and I stayed up and watched two hours of Pumpkin Chunkin’, an annual contest where people spend an inordinate amount of money building machines to shoot pumpkins thousands of feet. I cannot explain why they do this, or why I watched, but once it was over, I felt a distinct lack of satisfaction before I went to bed.

Monday (Day 911): Flicked Like A Wayward Booger

#1GF! worked from home because we were going to refinance the house in the afternoon, and even though she spent her day working, it was nice to have her around.

I ran out at midday to photocopy our licenses for the refinance, but the library was closed. If they needed a photocopy, we’d have to send it later. The lawyer showed up in the afternoon, and stood at our kitchen table trying to figure out where to put all of his papers. A spider tried to scurry across the table, and as illogical as it sounds, my only thought was that the lawyer would somehow see the spider as a sign that the house was a spider infested death trap and something would go wrong with the refinance. Before the lawyer noticed, I stealthily squooshed it with my index finger and quickly flicked it on the floor like a wayward booger.

We sat down and refinanced, shaving a couple points and a number of years off of our mortgage. During the flurry of signing, the baby shit not once, not twice, but three times in the half hour that we sat at the table. They were uproariously loud poops, too. We were withholding our laughter like schoolchildren because in a business situation, you’re supposed to pretend people with ties are impressive and that bodily functions aren’t funny.

The baby had been up and down all day, but not sleeping. After the lawyer was gone, we thought she’d crash, but she was still going strong. #1GF! was working from home for the first time, and I think having her home piqued the baby’s curiosity and threw a wrench into our typical daily pattern.

#1GF! took over baby duties after work, and I called and ordered another replacement fire alarm. I wasn’t sure why three fire alarms had gone bad in the last year, but I was tired of talking fire alarms telling me that there was an error. If I wanted to listen to machines complaining, I would’ve gone to the basement and sat with the robot.

Once the fire alarm was on its way, I sat at my desk to write a Mabegromo kick off post. Inevitably, that led me into making up a few advertising banners for the event. With me, wasting time is an art form because it never looks like I’m wasting time from up close. I ate dinner late, but it was nice to have an uninterrupted stretch of creative time. It was also nice to click the publish button on a post for the first time in months. At 9PM, I rejoined the family as the evening wound down.

Tuesday (Day 912): Burp Cloth Ahoy

I got a couple of weeks of LOR transcribed in between the flurries of feeding and changing. There wasn’t much else going on, and the biggest thing that I accomplished all day was to trim a wallet-sized picture of the baby and snap it into a key chain.

Everything was running smoothly until #1GF! came home. Suddenly, the baby was propped up on pillows on our bed without a burp cloth under her, and wearing only one sock.

#1GF! looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

“Listen, lady,” I said to #1GF!. “I run a tight ship around here while you’re gone. I battle the tides of chaos all day, and fifteen minutes before you show up, a wave washes over the bow.”

#1GF! laughed. “Nice metaphor. Now, where’s her sock?”

“She kept taking it off, so I finally let her keep it off. The decision increased productivity around here by seven point eight percent.”

“And you’re pretty confident that she’s not going to spit up all over my new comforter.”

I stared. “The wave must’ve washed the burp cloth overboard.”

“The wave…”

“..of chaos. Yes.”

#1GF! shook her head and picked up the baby. “I’m going to get a new burp cloth.”

“Ahoy?”

“I’m going to get a new burp cloth ahoy.”

“No, you’d say…” And she was gone. Even though I thought that there was a pretty good chance that #1GF! was lowering a life boat to take the baby to find higher ground, she returned, and the rest of the evening went as it usually does: put the baby to bed, rustle up something in the galley, and hit the rack.

Wednesday (Day 913): Fonzie The Pimp Vs. The Mouth Of Dr. Deuss

The baby took a couple of hour long naps during the day, and I spent that time quietly transcribing weeks of LOR out of my notebook. I spent the other eight hours trying to find ways to entertain her. She sat on the mat. She sat in her swing. I carried her around while pointing at things. “Oh, yes, that’s the sink, and that one’s a cup. And look, there’s the floor where you like to throw up.” I read her a book, I know not which one, but gazungle gazingle, it wasn’t much fun. I looked at the clock, I hadn’t the skill, I still had a good seven hours to fill.

I had plenty of time, questionable sanity, and a baby who wouldn’t sleep, so I decided to tackle the baby’s cradle cap. Cradle cap is a mass of crusty scales on top of the baby’s head that is fairly common in newborns. It isn’t caused by hobo dads who fail to wash their kids. The doctor said it wasn’t a big deal, but I didn’t want to wait around for the months that it took to go away on its own

I had some cradle cap medicine, so I massaged it into the baby’s scalp as directed. The baby sat quietly while I combed out some of the scales. When I was finished, there were so many scales stuck in her vaselined hair, that I decided that I had better shampoo her hair out in the sink.

I cradled the baby’s head over the kitchen sink and washed her hair. She seemed to be enjoying herself, but I didn’t want to push my luck. I got all the loose scales out, but not all of the medication. Her greasy head still smelled like something out of an unmarked, silver tube of salve from your grandfather’s medicine cabinet.

I dried the baby off, and over the next hour, she threw up all over two onsies and a pair of pants. The onsies weren’t a problem. I just grabbed another onsie that was pretty close to the color of the one she was wearing. The issue arose when she threw up on her pants, and I needed to find a new pair. That matched. I’m the guy who the fashion impaired call fashion impaired.

I dug through the pile of tiny pants, looking for something close to the color of the pair that she threw up on. Nothing was remotely close. I then tried to think of what #1GF! would want the baby to wear, and came up blank. I stared at the various colors without any idea of what would match. I held pair after pair up to the baby, and didn’t think any of them looked right. Finally, I tried to think of what the baby might like to wear. I instantaneously pulled out a pair of pants and put them on her, and she seemed pretty happy with my choice.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure if the pimptastically fuzzy lime green pants matched even a little bit. If I had picked them, I knew that there was a good chance that they didn’t. I rubbed my beard and thought, “Who cares? It’s not like we’re going out. Sometimes, it’s better to feel good than to look good.”

It was getting late in the day, so after I put the baby in for a nap, I cleared a path up the attic stairs (which had been recently converted into a baby accessory hiding facility) and grabbed all the Christmas decorations from the attic. I wanted to surprise #1GF! by having a couple Christmas decorations unpacked and set up before she got home, but I only got as far as getting the boxes into the living room.

I started dinner so that it would be timed almost perfectly to coincide with when #1GF! would be home and settled. When #1GF! got home, she noticed her baby before the dinner or the boxes of Christmas decorations.

“Um, what’s going on with the baby?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to be nonchalant.

“Her hair is greased up like Fonzie…” She pulled the blanket off of her and saw the fuzzy lime green pants. “…if he was colorblind. I guess Daddy dressed you today.”

I have never claimed to know about fashion beyond monkey to monkey and giraffe to giraffe.

After dinner, I put the Christmas lights in the windows, and we were short one bulb. To make matters worse, I dropped one, shattering it all over the floor. We were then down two bulbs. I put two of the lights on a table to get them out of the way while I cleaned up the paper-thin glass shards that had exploded in every direction. While cleaning, I bumped the table and broke another bulb as the candles tumbled to the floor.

“Are you kidding?” asked #1GF! from the kitchen.

“Fuck. We’re now down three lights.”

“Yea, I heard.”

“Shit. Shit. Shit.” I crouched to start picking up the larger shards. “You know what the engineer asked me yesterday? He wanted to know if I was aware that I needed to start coming up with code words for swears. I told him, and I quote, ‘Fuck that shit.’”

“He’s right.”

“Oh, bumfarts.”

“What?”

“See? It’s bullshit. My swears are like a Chinese combo platter. If you want them to come out right…No substitutions.”

The baby stared on while #1GF! and I cleaned up the glass dust that the final two inch bulb had spread over an eight foot area. I sliced my hand on a tiny shard, and it looked like a war wound by the time I finished cleaning.

All the glass cleaning taught me a good trick though. If you need to clean glass off of hardwood, lay a flashlight on the floor. Every little particle will be picked up by the beam as you move it across the floor.

I cleaned up dinner, and the baby started making weird angry noises and wouldn’t eat. I took her in to change her, and she vomited on me like a spitting cobra, hitting me on the chest from two feet away while lying down. Then, she smiled at me. I mentally upgraded the baby from barf ninja to barf sensei.

I went to change my shirt, and #1GF! took over burping the baby. I walked back into the room to find #1GF! leaning forward, and the baby smiling. “Is there anything on my back?” #1GF! asked.

I leaned over her to look. There was a one inch wide line of barf running from shoulder to ass. “I’m afraid so. Barf Sensei!” #1GF! looked at me. “It’s her new name. It’s a step up from ninja.”

#1GF! went to change her shirt and put the baby to bed. I sat down and noticed that Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer was on television. My first thought was that I wasn’t about to sit and watch a Christmas special at my age. I soon found that I couldn’t look away.

Have you ever realized how much facial hair that special has? Santa had a really amazing beard, as did Yukon Cornelius. Even Frosty the Snowman had a badass goatee.

#1GF! returned and sat down next to me.

“Look at that beard,” I said, not bothering to hide my amazement.

“What?” asked #1GF!.

“Santa’’s beard. Look at that thing.” I pointed at two spots next to my eyes. “If I had that beard on my face, my mustache would go up to here!”

“Why is Santa so thin?” asked #1GF!.

“I don’t know. That’s sort of weird.” I pointed at the screen as Mrs. Claus spoon fed Santa some soup. “Mrs Claus doesn’t have white hair! And she’s like thirty years younger than Santa. She must be the trophy Mrs. Claus.”

“Maybe the old Mrs. Claus got sick of Santa staying out all night, year after year,” offered #1GF!. Suddenly, Santa was putting on his coat over his suddenly fat body. “Jesus,” said #1GF! “What the hell was in that soup?”

I shook my head. “I can’t imagine,” I said through a mouthful of ice cream that was being spooned directly out of the carton.

We eventually shut off Rudolph… and watched another episode of Rescue Me, which I get less interested in every time I see it. Sure there are a few funny scenes, but it’s just not worth the effort if you have to spend most of the show trying to scrub the image of Dennis Leary having sex with middle aged women out of your head.

Thursday (Day 914): Corn Flakes

The temperature was in the upper 60’s and it was raining. I took the trash out and fixed all the downspouts to keep my robot quietly sleeping by his window.

Thanks to a constant autumn wind, I walked across a lawn that looked as if I hadn’t raked it a few times already. I emptied the dead mums out of their pots and filled the pots with bricks so that the wind wouldn’t take them away.

Once #1GF! was off to work, I gave the baby more scalp medicine and combed the corn flakes off of the top of her head before washing her hair and giving her a bath. Babies don’t care about cradle cap, but I wanted it gone.

The rain cleared up in the afternoon, and I thought about taking the baby for a walk. The baby’s sleep times were erratic, so I decided against it. Instead, I decided to start tracking those seemingly erratic sleep times to see if I could find a pattern.

I filled the small amount of time that the baby actually slept with writing. I managed to get a couple of weeks of LOR transcribed.

Before #1GF! got home, I put red, plastic lobsters in the garland over the mantle, which we did last year as a joke. I was hoping to make it a tradition for our little house near the beach without opening the door to lobster trap lamps, boat wheel tables, and porthole mirrors.

When #1GF! got home, I watched Thursday night TV while she slept on the couch. She eventually went to bed, I caught the tail end of Beyond The Valley of the Dolls. I forgot what a period freak show that movie was.

The baby was up to feed before I went to bed.

Friday (Day 915): Weeding Out Suitors Decades Ahead Of Schedule

I worked on clearing up the cradle cap, and the baby’s head looked a hundred percent better than it did a few days before. I stopped using the vaseline medicine, and started using a small travel sized bottle of dandruff shampoo. It smelled a heck of a lot better than the medicine, and the doctor said that it should work just as well.

The baby was seventeen weeks old, so I took a movie of her to commemorate the occasion. It ended up being eight minutes of me beatboxing while the baby swung her arms and legs. For some reason, she liked bad beat boxing. I figure that it will be good to force on the poor chump who tries to marry her. Knowing that I’m eventually going to be beatboxing in your in-law apartment might weed out some of the less kind suitors.

The baby slept for long enough during the day that I almost got caught up on transcribing my LOR notes, and slept so long at night that #1GF! brought home pizza and we ate it while it was still warm.

Saturday (Day 916): Reverse Theft

It had been raining all night and the wind had been strong enough to flip our sixty-four gallon trash barrel, so the first thing I did when I got up was to check on all the downspouts. They were still doing their jobs.

When I got back in, I started getting the baby’s bath ready. I was on autopilot, and didn’t realize that #1GF! wanted to be involved in the process. I was simply running a pattern that I run every other day without thinking that she might want to give her baby a bath. Every day is like a weekday when you’re the stay at home parent because the routine doesn’t change. I finished setting everything up, and got out of the way so that #1GF! could give the baby a bath.

We dropped into the library before hitting a sports store and the giant warehouse store to get some Christmas shopping done. Once a couple of people were checked off of our list, we went to #1GF!’s mother’s house to haul Christmas decorations down from her attic and help set up her tree.

#1GF! took care of the baby, and #1GF!’s mom and I went to the attic so that she could tell me what to haul down. “Do you want a breadmaker?” asked #1GF!’s mom.

“I had one once. I used it, but not very much.”

“So, then take it. It’s just sitting up here.”

“Thanks, but I won’t use it.”

“Well, take it down anyway.”

I thought it was weird, but the conversation repeated itself regarding a box of mugs. The mugs and breadmaker sat in the living room, and while I was doing a health check on #1GF!’s mom’s PC, she tried to get them into our car by telling #1GF! that I wanted them.

Unfortunately, the plan was foiled when the PC turned out to be cleaner than anticipated and I returned to the living room ahead of schedule. #1GF! was about to haul the stuff out to the car, until we stood repeating back and forth, “No, I thought you wanted them.” The items went back into the attic.

After #1GF!’s mom’s house, we went to my parents’ house for a quick visit. The baby was doing well for not having slept all day, but we were pushing it. I made her laugh for my parents. You don’t think that laughing is a big deal, but at seventeen weeks, my parents hadn’t seen the baby laugh, yet. It takes longer than you’d expect for babies to turn into fun machines.

My parents gave me a couple of books, and gave me back my manuscript. I forgot to ask what my father thought of it. We hadn’t eaten all day, and I was noticeably slow.

We went home and put away all the giant cereal boxes that had filled our trunk since the warehouse store. I made broccoli alfredo for #1GF!, and there weren’t any leftovers.

We went to bed without the baby in our room because she fell asleep in her crib and we didn’t want risk waking her to move her. It was really strange not having her in the room with us.

What I Learned

• Christmas dresses heat up babies.
• Keep your eye on Santa so that he doesn’t run off with your baby.
• If you need to clean broken glass off of a wood floor, laying flashlight down will allow you to locate even the tiniest pieces of glass.
• If you let me decorate a wreath, it will not look right.
• Pumpkin Chunkin’ is not worth two hours of my time.
• The library is closed on Mondays.
• Fuzzy green pants don’t match a pink onsie.
• The baby can throw up like a spitting cobra.
• There is some awesome facial hair in Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
• Cradle cap medicine or ordinary dandruff shampoo can clear up cradle cap in less than a week.
• It’s weird not having the baby in the room with you for the first time.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

I reached out for the baby to put her in her car seat. “Come here, boy.”

We went to the Christmas Place to see if we could pick up some decorations. Yes. There’s a store here called the Christmas place. It’s next to a store called The Pool Place. No, I don’t know if the owners are practical or creatively stunted.

#1GF! bought two little fake trees for the front of the house. We found out at the register that the Christmas place is a lot more expensive than regular department stores.

“Want to go to the mall?” asked #1GF!, knowing that there was a large possibility that I did not.

I shrugged. “I don’t care. We’re out. If you want to get some shopping done, that’s fine. I’m just here to hang around with you two. What we do doesn’t really matter.” I entertained myself on the ride by setting XM presets on the radio that #1GF! would probably never listen to.

We went to the mall and did some Christmas shopping. The baby growled as we walked along. She wasn’t crying or even upset. She was just growling and having a good time with it. She was still growling when I put her back in the car.

“What’s up, Chewbacca?” I said, as an unusually gurgling growl came out of the baby. #1GF! thought it was a lot funnier than it was, and referred to the baby as Chewbacca from that point on.

Even though I said that my daughter looked like a boy earlier in the day, after a while, I started getting offended by the idea of the baby being called a Wookie. “Can you stop referring to my daughter as Chewbacca please?” I asked #1GF!. “You haven’t even seen Star Wars.”

“Do you hear your daddy, Chewbacca?” #1GF! said as she looked in the rearview mirror at the baby.

I shook my head. “I’m going to dig out my Star Wars tapes, and I’m going to make you sit down and watch every one of them.”

#1GF! gave me an eye roll.

“I am…once I figure out what pile of boxes the VCR is keeping off of the floor.”

#1GF! pulled into a home store to look for some cheap wreaths to hang on the windows. She came out with baskets. What is up with women and baskets? I just don’t understand. I’ve never purchased a basket in my life. Know why? Unless you’ve invented a time machine to go back and take some hottie in a poodle skirt on a picnic, baskets are useless. Try throwing a hammer into a basket. Know what you get? A woman who is pissed at you for ruining a basket.

Give me a plastic bucket or a milk crate for holding stuff any day. They’re a tenth of the price, and you never have to worry about all your stuff ending up all over the ground, unless someone dumps them out a window because you ruined one too many baskets.

We went home, and our friend came by to pick up his PC from hell that I fixed a few days before. It was a quick visit because the baby was already asleep. When you have a baby, you cease to be the main attraction. Usually, you’re too tired to notice.

I tried to make an easy spinach cream sauce for pasta that I found in The Silver Spoon. It may have been the recipe, or it may have been the cook, but it was not what I would call great. I didn’t have a large food processor, so I burned out a blender trying to make it. When I say burned out, I mean the blender started smoking, and I had to throw it away.

Monday (Day 904): Baby, It’s Gross Outside

The baby was up on the hour, and I couldn’t figure out what she needed most of the time. I was trying to write for the short periods that she slept, but reminded myself that the baby is my main job.

The barf ninja was on the loose, and she cost me two shirts and a pair of jeans, and cost herself two pairs of pants and a onesie. To bump things up a notch, she puked on me like my face was the backboard and my bellybutton was all net. Correct me if I’m wrong, but having a baby barf on your face has to be a level up in the parenting game. Whether it was or wasn’t, I had to call #1GF! to tell her about it. It definitely lightened her day.

I was on full time auditory regimen of Christmas music, and heard a remake of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” by Dolly Parton and Rod Stewart. It tainted the fun of the most common version by Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer with the thought of Rod Stewart trying to buy a senior discount ticket on Dolly Parton’s retirement age roller coaster ride. I wished that I had turned my head and allowed the barf ninja to fill at least one of my ear canals with vomit earlier in the day. I stood there frowning like a rich girl riding the bus. The only worse duet I could think of would be if Mickey Rourke were singing to Joan Rivers.

#1GF! got home just after I finally got the baby to sleep. She wanted to pick her up. “You pick up that baby,” I joked, “and the responsibility for waking the barf ninja is yours.” She moved toward the baby. “I mean it.” I threw up my hands as she neared the crib. “I’m out. It’s on you.” She looked at me, not sure if I was kidding. “I’m kidding. Go ahead.”

I left the room to let her have some time with the baby. I didn’t want to hover over her or make suggestions about some of the minor tips I had picked up, because I knew that would just make her feel worse about being away from the baby all day.

I went to my PC and continued transcribing LOR. I rejoined #1GF! at 7:30PM when the baby was back in bed. We watched Jeopardy! together, and I could only answer one question. I couldn’t even pose decent guesses to half of the questions. “What is this?” I asked. “Jeopardy, genius edition? If I can’t get at least a couple of answers, I feel dumb.”

“Huh?” asked #1GF!. “You not dumb. Jane still like.”

Tuesday (Day 905): The Wrinkled Cerberus

The baby was in bed before #1GF! left for work. “Do you have a shopping list?” she asked.

“It’s not done yet,” I told her. I made sure that the list wasn’t done because I didn’t want #1GF! to have to fight grocery store crowds after work.

Once #1GF! was gone, I sat at the PC and transcribed a couple of days of LOR. When the baby woke up, I decided that we were going to the supermarket-by ourselves-with no adult supervision. The potential for chaos was high, but if I succeeded, I knew that #1GF! would be impressed.

When we got to the store, I walked up to the door, and an old lady bent down to the baby. “Why aren’t you wrapped up?” she asked the baby. “Doesn’t your daddy know it’s cold out?”

If she got too hot in the car seat, the baby’s typical response was to freak out, so she might’ve been on the lighter side of bundled, but she was dressed appropriately. She had a fucking fleece jacket and a blanket on for chrissakes. I was on a mission, and this lady was a fat, wrinkly Cerberus packed into control top panty hose.

I wanted to lean in to the baby and say, “Is the mean old lady scaring you with her passive aggressive tendencies, or is she too dumb to know that a three month old doesn’t understand English yet? …What’s that baby? The bitch should shut her face because she hasn’t raised a baby since she found Moses on the bank of the Nile? …Oh, honey. That’s no way to speak to crazy ladies who feel the need to offer unsolicited, passive aggressive advice. We just nod and smile at crazy people like that.”

What I did was just nod and smirk with my eyebrows up as I walked past.

I whipped through the store, leaving at least one “awwww” in my wake. The baby was really, really well-behaved. I could tell that she wanted to go to sleep, but all those colored packages lining the shelves wouldn’t let her. She didn’t make a peep, and fell asleep on the ride home.

While I unpacked the groceries, my parents called to tell me that they were coming over. I put the baby to bed and ran around picking up the house.

The baby woke up and ate just after my parents arrived. She only threw up a little, and it was on me. My parents had a great time with her in the couple of hours that they stayed.

I put the baby to bed and made myself a cup of tea. I went back to transcribing until #1GF! walked in the door. Then, I made her dinner because I’m her bitch.

Wednesday (Day 906): Shit, I Forgot The Pie

I gave the baby a bath, got her fed, and put her to bed. I went back to my PC to cram in some writing, but the internet went down. I’m sure it wasn’t the whole internet, just my particular node. The phone went down with the internet, so I had to use my cell phone to call the cable company.

Sure, I have a billion minutes on my phone that I never use, but the principle of having to call a company on a cell phone to tell them that the phone and internet aren’t working is ridiculous. I can’t remember the phone being out when I was a kid unless there was a tree down on the lines. My phone was going down for no better reason than it was eleven fucking thirty. And it was happening every other week. We call this progress.

I called the cable company and they told me that my line was fine despite my lack of dial tone. The best that they could do to help me was to offer to send a technician out on Friday. Two days is considered reasonable for a dead phone line. We call this customer service.

I asked the woman on the phone if she was sure that there wasn’t an outage in the area because I had already experienced a couple of mini-outages during the week. She assured me that there wasn’t. When I asked if she was positive, she sighed as if she were a theoretical physicist and I had asked her to mathematically explain the existence of black holes.

I hung up and unplugged the cable modem and pulled the battery. When I plugged it back in, the cable came back on. Thanks for the basic troubleshooting, cable company. I went upstairs and looked up the FIOS. I heard from the announcer during one of my television programs that it was going to be the next big thing.

I had to stop the research because the baby woke up and wanted me to hit another milestone: I changed a diaper that made my eyes water. I’m not using a figure of speech. I changed a diaper that literally, like cutting onions, made my eyes involuntarily water. I could barely see the tape to secure the new diaper in place. There must be a merit badge for that sort of thing.

#1GF! came home and I started baking in preparation of Thanksgiving. I was going to make a pumpkin pie and three layer chocolate mousse cake with dark chocolate on the bottom, medium in the middle, and white on top.

All night long, #1GF! was discouraging me from making two deserts. I kept saying that I needed to hurry up to start the pie, and it got to be a joke as more and more time passed. About halfway through the chocolate cake, we both knew that I wasn’t going to have the time to make two desserts. What I didn’t realize was that, for the chocolate mousse cake, each layer had to be made sequentially. It took the time of making three pies, and I didn’t finish it until 10PM. There was no time for me to make a pumpkin pie.

I felt bad that I wasn’t bringing two deserts, considering all the work that goes into a Thanksgiving dinner. I also wasn’t sure what the mousse cake would taste like, and wanted a backup dessert just in case it sucked out loud.

#1GF! went out and brought back takeout for dinner, which was eaten while we waited for the final layer of the cake to cool. At 11PM, I turned to #1GF!. “Shit,” I said.

“What?” asked #1GF! in a near panic.

“I forgot the pumpkin pie.”

Thursday (Day 907): It’s Thanksgiving, Sucka

#1GF! tried to gently wake me up by whispering close to my sleeping face. Unfortunately, she did this from a standing position next to the bed, jolting me awake.

“Sorry, sorry. I didn’t want you to think that I was still in bed,” she said.

I rubbed my eyes and let my heart rate slow. “Next time, get real close and say, ‘Hey sucka!’ It’ll be way more fun.”

“Who says ’sucka’ anymore?”

I thought about it. Sucka had gone the way of sit on it. “Fine. Say something scary. Maybe, ‘Hey, jerk.’ or something.”

#1GF! stared at me.

“I don’t know. Something.”

Before we left, I tried to shave chocolate for the top of the three layer cake. It was a failure that left chocolate dust everywhere. I wrapped up the cake, and #1GF! packed burp cloths, various toys, and spare outfits for the baby and us. Epic amounts of crap went into that car in an effort to defend against the barf ninja when and if she struck.

We got on the road, and I threw in a couple of old MP3 discs into our new car radio. I know reading MP3 discs is a really old technology, but I’ve never had the technology built into a car before.

We picked up #1GF!’s mother, and went to my parents’ house to hook them onto the convoy heading for a home cooked turkey dinner at #1GF!’s family’s house.

On the way, #1GF!’s mother kept playing with the baby when the baby was supposed to be napping. She denied said playing, but the recent invention of rear view mirrors uncovered said ruse. You can’t trust grandmothers to make kids do things that aren’t fun. Once #1GF!’s mother got busted, the rest of the trip went without incident.

We got to #1GF!’s family’s house a little early, so while we were waiting for dinner to be ready, the kids took me to the basement to play Rock Band. All these years that the game had been out, and I had never played. Ever since I quit my job, it’s been ironically rare for me to find the time to play video games.

The kids and I rotated between vocals, guitar, and drums, and had a pretty good time rocking out. It was so damned good that everyone else had to come down and witness the sheer and devastating power of our band. Other than using the guitar skills that I dusted off from the Guitar Hero series, I had a lot of fun sucking at Rock Band.

When it was my turn to pick a song (an honor given to the person forced to take on vocals), I ran across a song by a band that was started by a guy that I hung around with regularly during my teens and early twenties. I stood up, pointed at the screen, and told a surprised nine year old and eleven year old how they didn’t understand how cool it was.

My parents knew the guy too, and I told them whose band it was. “That’s Bob’s band,” I said pointing at the television with a drumstick. “The Konks is his band.” They were as impressed as I was. You think someone’s band is just something that they do after work, and then you find out they’re on fucking Rock Band.

We ate a delicious Thanksgiving dinner, and my three layer mousse cake, although difficult to prepare, proved to be too rich for just about everyone. Chocolate pudding poured into a pre-made pie crust got a better reception. If you spend a lot of time making something that no one wants, all you did was waste a lot of time and a few ingredients.

The baby was excited all day, and my mother kept trying to tickle her feet while I was trying to calm her down for the ride home. Grandmothers are all the same. They have no respect for rules at all.

Friday (Day 908): Running Out Of Stories

I threatened to take the baby out to the Black Friday sales to get all the, you know, deals on utter shit that they put out for Black Friday. I wasn’t really going. I just thought it was funny to listen to #1GF! confusedly protest.

Once #1GF! was off to work, I started piecing together the beard pictures from beard shaving 2009. After seven years, it was clear that I was running out of stupid stories to tell.

#1GF! came home and we had leftovers for dinner before running out to the local home megastore to pick up some cheap Christmas trees that we saw in the black Friday circular. They were half the price of the trees #1GF! bought at the Christmas Place.

When we got them home, we found out why. Although they looked like the mini trees that the store normally sells, it seemed as if the store brought in these trees to sell at a discount on Black Friday. I wasn’t expecting anything great, but those trees were complete and utter junk. We couldn’t do anything with them, so we put them back in their boxes and put them by our door to be returned.

I took the baby to put her to bed, and it wasn’t going smoothly. I had to wave off #1GF! because she was following me around the house. She was only trying to help, but it made me feel like I was doing the wrong thing. The baby eventually went to sleep, even though I probably was.

Saturday (Day 909): A Rare And Pissy Mood

I woke up in a rare and pissy mood. Other than Thanksgiving, I hadn’t left the house in a week, and I didn’t feel like I had a moment to myself. Baby care isn’t rocket science, but it isn’t a simple nine to five or even an eight to six. Baby care is pretty much a twenty hour job that doesn’t let up. I needed to get out of the house and I didn’t care where we went. #1GF! quietly complied.

We ended up going to an outlet mall to get some Christmas shopping done. Despite being up early as if it were a work day, we didn’t get out the door until 1:30PM because that’s how long it took us to get our shit together. Babies radically slow you down. Radically.

We walked the whole mall and didn’t buy anything. In one of the stores, a lady reached out and touched the baby. I wasn’t a good defense man. Should I have dove in front of her or given her a ration of shit? I don’t know. Maybe. Even seemingly nice, normal people shouldn’t be touching other people’s babies.

By the end of the mall, the baby was revving up for a scream fest, so #1GF! fed the baby in the car before we got on the road. We were way in the back of the parking lot, but a lot of irate people gave up waiting for her parking spot.

When we got home, it felt like we should go out to eat, but the baby was in prime scream time. I started making a quick kale soup, not realizing that it had to simmer for an hour after it was prepared. We eventually ate dinner and watched an episode of Rescue Me to unwind. Although it was interesting in the first season or so, I think my interest in the show has waned beyond salvation.

#1GF! shut off the TV after the episode and said that she couldn’t watch another show if she tried. I sat on the couch for a minute. I guess that meant that I couldn’t either. I know it was an oversight more than a command, but the result was the same. I was going to bed.

What I Learned

• A blender is not a large food processor.
• You don’t have to pay to create a playlist on Last.fm. You only have to pay if you want to play it.
• The Christmas Place is convenient, but overpriced.
• Dolly Parton and Rod Stewart make a painfully uncomfortable duet.
• I can take the baby grocery shopping.
• Some diapers have the power to make your eyes water.
• Just because you spend a lot of time on a dessert, doesn’t mean people are going to eat it.
• Grandmothers cannot be trusted to follow rules.
• A old friend of mine has a song on Rock Band, which is a game that’s a lot of fun to suck at.
• Rescue Me lost its magic.
• Be careful what you buy on Black Friday. Sometimes a low price isn’t a deal, but cheap crap shipped into the store to make you think you’re getting a good deal.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

The dealer not only agreed to the deal, but said that we could pick up the car and take it home that night. It was a last second basket at the buzzer. We packed the baby back into ROCKET CAR! for one last ride, and drove back to the dealer in the dark to trade ROCKET CAR! in for a nice family sedan.

We signed all the papers, and the salesman jokingly asked if I was going to go hug ROCKET CAR! before we left. I absolutely was. Once the deal was done, #1GF! and I took the baby out to the parking lot, where a lonely, plateless ROCKET CAR! sat waiting for us. I could almost hear her asking when we were going home. She had no idea. I hugged her goodbye and took a few family pictures with her.

We drove off the lot with a brand new family sedan and #1GF! was beyond pleased. I was riding shotgun in a family sedan and I was fine with it. ROCKET CAR! belonged under the ass of someone who would enjoy it. I was a family man.

Monday (Day 897): Mr. Mom, Day One

The baby slept from 8PM until 4AM. Sure, waking up at 4AM isn’t the greatest, but having the baby sleep for eight hours straight was pretty awesome. #1GF! never went back to bed after the 4AM feed, and I got up at 6AM.

#1GF! put on her business clothes and noticed that they were too big. Way too big, actually. She had noticeably lost weight thanks to the baby. That didn’t make up for the fact that she had to go back to work, but it was a nice surprise.

#1GF! walked out the door for her first day back to work. She plodded across the lawn despite the sharpness of her business clothes. She turned around and welled up. “This sucks,” she said.

I stood in the doorway holding the baby. “I know. Thanks for not refusing to go.”

#1GF! turned and walked the final few steps and got into her new car. “Ooh, I slide right in,” she said with a smile as she slid across the leather seats and closed the door.

Can you make it okay for a woman to leave her baby behind? No, but buying her a nice family sedan with leather seats and satellite radio will temporarily take some of the sting out of it.

As soon as #1GF! was out of sight, the baby barfed all over me in an attempt to show me who was boss. I cleaned her up, fed her, and put her to bed.

I made coffee for the first time in a long time and then checked my e-mail. I ended up corresponding with the great great great great grandniece of Joseph Palmer. That was sort of cool. Thanks, Internet.

Once I had delayed as long as I could, I sat at the computer trying to decipher fourteen weeks of notes. I scribble small and tight, and some scribblings had already been orphaned of their meaning.

The baby kept crying in her sleep, and every time I’d get up to go check on her she would stop just as I got to her door. After a while, I stopped getting up, expecting her to stop. Then, she would keep crying and I’d get up and go to check on her. She’d stop just as I got to the door. I was living a bad sitcom and getting only a couple of sentences deciphered between trips to her room. It wasn’t my most productive day.

In an attempt to speed things along, I tried once again to use a speech to text application to transcribe my notes. If I was writing creatively off of the top of my head, the app would be great, but it was actually slowing me down because I would have to look at the notes to say them, and then spend time checking and correcting what the application thought I said. It was taking twice as long as typing, so I had to go back to staring at my notebook and typing. Between the baby and the deciphering, I only managed to get a partway through one week during the whole day.

Once the baby was tired of games and decided to get up for real, I found barf on the floor. It must’ve been surreptitiously served up by the barf ninja when I wasn’t looking. I cleaned it up, and not only stepped in more barf, but walked around with a wet barfy sock for longer than you’d think before figuring out what was going on. I had no idea where I stepped in it, and had to retrace a barfy set of footprints until the I lost the trail.

In addition to the loss of a pair of socks, I lost two shirts, and got formula and barf on two couches. I should’ve changed the baby’s shirt after the third time she threw up on herself, but I waited until the fifth because no one was coming over, and I’m a bad father.

I walked by a mirror and realized that I looked like shit. I never quite look all that great anyway, but my reflection reminded me of Jack Butler during Mr. Mom, but with bigger bags under my eyes. I put out my hand. “Give me the woobie, Ken.”

I fed the baby twice, four hours apart, and other than crying in her sleep and following her typical barf ninja routine, things seemed to be going relatively smoothly…until 3PM, when she completely flipped out. I changed her, fed her, burped her, fed her again, and changed her again, and she was still going. I tried to get dinner ready, but the baby wasn’t going to let it happen. She was only relaxed for five minutes at a time.

My parents called, and I couldn’t hear half of what they were saying because the baby was screaming. I used all my powers of concentration and was still only picking up every fourth word. When the baby arched back and power headbutted the phone as if it were vying for her intercontinental baby wrestling belt, I decided that it was time to hang up.

When #1GF! called to check in, I had to encourage her to go to the dealer after work to get the inspection sticker for the new car. I had to smile while I talked to sound as if the extra time away from the house would be no big deal. I had to ask her repeat herself a few times because the baby was screaming in my other ear. I called #1GF! back during one of the five minute lull periods when the baby wasn’t screaming to convince her that she shouldn’t worry.

I tried to start dinner again, but ended up leaving half prepared ingredients all over the counter. I was getting so wound up that I got aggravated at the baby for a brief moment before remembering that she’s just a baby and doesn’t know any better. I then got aggravated at #1GF! for not having a jet powered car or the ability to travel through time to get home even though I encouraged her to get an inspection sticker. I quickly laughed at myself for being such a goddamned wuss.

By the end of the day, waiting for #1GF! was sort of like one of those times where you have to pee really badly. The closer you get to the bathroom, the worse the discomfort. By the time #1GF! pulled into the driveway, I was pacing around and looking out windows. I just wanted to hand the baby off to #1GF! and get dinner ready.

#1GF! came in and took the baby. I started dinner. “So, how was your day?” I asked, trying to be positive and supportive.

“It sucked.”

“Good, good. So, how does the baby’s head look?” I asked without looking up from the vegetables I was cutting.

“What happened?” #1GF! said with a little panic.

“If it looks fine, then nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“It was nothing.”

“Spill it,” said #1GF! as she went over every inch of the baby’s head.

“She may have done a flying headbutt into the cordless phone while I was trying to talk to my parents. She didn’t cry, but she hit pretty hard. I think she was just trying to make me look bad on my first day of Mr. Momming.”

#1GF! took the baby off to bed. I had dinner ready and we were eating by 8:15PM. #1GF! shut off the Christmas music that I had been playing all day and we spent the rest of the night sitting on the couch and staring at the idiot box until our brains cried for mercy.

Tuesday (Day 898): Peeing Honey

I got up somewhere around 6AM, got #1GF! off to work, and put the baby to sleep. I sat down at the PC and continued transferring the past three months of Life Of Riley notes into posts. I fed the baby at 1PM, and she only stayed up long enough to ruin one shirt. I went back to writing and wondered if I should be back writing my next novel instead of wasting time writing what was amounting to an extremely long standing hobby.

I fed the baby again at 4PM. The baby was sick, so I had to suck boogers out of her nose with this little plunger. The baby didn’t like it one bit and struggled and fidgeted to keep me from getting that plunger anywhere near her nostrils. Why can I pop a moving target at three hundred yards in a video game and not be able to stick a plunger up a moving baby’s nose to suck out boogers? It’s as if all those years of video game hand eye training mean nothing.

By the end of the day, my nose was running and my throat was getting sore. I put the baby in her crib at 4PM, even though she was fidgety enough that I was sure that she wasn’t ready for bed. “I’m going to pee, honey (a comma makes a big difference in the preceding sentence),” I said. “and then I’ll be back to get you.”

When I went back in to her room, she had already fallen asleep. I was visibly disappointed that she wasn’t still awake. I slumped my shoulders and let her get some sleep.

When #1GF! got home, we got a phone call that we had been exposed to H1N1 at a party over the weekend. Awesome. I ended up going to bed at 9:30PM.

Wednesday (Day 899): Don’t Get Glitter On The Baby

I woke up at midnight choking on snot. A couple of times during the night, the baby did the same. I woke up again at 4:55AM because the baby sounded like she couldn’t breathe. We spent an hour trying to suck the snot out of her nose while she cried.

I went back to bed at 6AM, and #1GF! jumped into the shower. I stayed under the covers to keep warm, and eventually drifted off into a dream where I got lost in a dark section of the supermarket and someone was following me. I left the store, forgetting my groceries, and drove through a nighttime car show, but couldn’t stop because I sold my Evo for a family sedan.

As the morning light shined through the windows, #1GF! found a big smear across the hardwood floor. She had located the source of the puke that I tracked through the house two days before. I grabbed something to clean it up with.

The pattern for the day was hear the baby cry, wash my hands, and check on the baby who was already asleep. I got sicker as the day went on, and my nose would not stop running. By the time #1GF! called to check in, I was spending a good amount of effort simply keeping my nose from dripping on the baby. I know that it’s gross, but I couldn’t put the baby down because every time I did, she’d cry.

I didn’t think I’d have to take care of a baby while I was sick this early in the baby’s life. I went through a couple of boxes of Kleenex in a matter of hours. I finally got tired of tilting my head back and running to grab Kleenex, so dug through the medicine cabinet and found some DayQuil.

I took the recommended dose, and within a half hour, I started getting nauseous. I haven’t been sick in a while, so I figured it was either a side effect of the medicine that I had forgotten about, or related to the fact that I was drinking grape juice and plowing through water thirty-two ounces at a time.

At the end of the day, Tinkerbell knocked on my door, bearing more DayQuil. I complimented her on her sparkly wings, and let her fly around the house with the baby. When I went to take the new medicine, I realized that the DayQuil that I had taken earlier expired two years ago. I went to tell Tinkerbell to not get any glitter on the baby, but #1GF! was home and must’ve sent her on her way.

I woke up every two hours during the night because either the baby or I couldn’t breathe. Thanks to the lack of oxygen, I made it through the whole day thinking it was Tuesday.

Thursday (Day 900): Three Quarters, A Ball Of Lint, And My Guilt

#1GF! went off to work, and the baby freaked out in her sleep. I fed her and she was still asleep. She wasn’t feeling well, and still couldn’t breathe. I had to do something to help.

I tried the nose sucker, but it wasn’t coming out with anything. I eyed the saline bottle. We hadn’t used saline yet, but the doctor said that it was perfectly fine to use. I put the baby on her changing table, and squirted a couple of drops of saline into each of her nostrils.

I’ve seen every possible version and duration of this child’s crying so far, and let me tell you, this time the baby completely lost her shit. I felt really bad for her. I didn’t want her to feel abandoned while sick, considering she had never been sick before. I wanted her to feel like everything was going to be okay. I picked her up and walked her around the house for a while, and finally calmed her down by rubbing her back while I leaned against a wall in the hallway.

When the baby finally drifted off to sleep, I got under a blanket on the couch and watched season 3 of The IT Crowd. The baby slept most of the day, and I stayed on the couch with my guilt for not transcribing notes stuffed under one of the cushions. As the day went on, I only got sicker.

The baby perked up when #1GF! got home, but I felt half as good as when I woke up. I made a quick pesto for dinner and flopped back down on the couch. I stayed up to watch 30 Rock, but should’ve gone to bed at 8PM.

Friday (Day 901): Giraffe Pants & Chicken Soup Socks

I woke up to an orange glow that had started on the horizon and eventually masked the neighborhood with the tint of a ’70s Polaroid. Dawn broke and rain fell.

#1GF! headed off to work, and I got the baby to sleep for an hour so that I could check the inside and outside of the house for signs that the storm was making its way in. Once I dried off, the baby got up for an hour, ate, and went to sleep for an hour. While she slept, I tried to get some writing done.

The rain cleared up, and I thought about taking the baby out for a walk because it was suddenly and unusually nice weather for New England in the Fall. As if to cast her vote against, the baby woke up crying.

I put her on the floor with some toys, which didn’t work. I gave her some baby gas-x. That didn’t work. I gave her a teething ring and she wanted nothing to do with it. Then, I stood in the mirror asking “Who is that baby?” which she usually laughs at. She responded by screaming, pulling off my glasses, and barfing down my shirt. Who’s that baby? Barf ninja, that’s who. The baby was just short of pulling my shirt over my head, and she was still counting out her life in weeks. I saw trouble in my immediate future.

I walked down the hall with barf on my shirt and a toy giraffe in my pocket. There was a time that if you asked, “Is that a giraffe in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”, there was a good chance that I might just be happy to see you. At this stage of the game, it’s all giraffe.

I finally got the baby to sleep and started dinner. I was making a pot of chicken soup. After #1GF! got home, I somehow spilled chicken soup on the floor and stepped in it. I left the kitchen and ran into #1GF! in the bedroom. I thought she needed an explanation of why I was there and not working on dinner. “I have chicken soup socks,” I said while grabbing a fresh pair of socks from the drawer.

#1GF! looked at me quizzically. “What? Wait, what do you mean?”

“Chicken soup. I spilled it on my socks, so I need to get new ones.”

She looked relieved. “Oh good. I thought you had special chicken soup socks that you wore only when eating chicken soup.”

I laughed. “Are you kidding?”

She shook her head no.

“We’ve been together eight years, and the thought that I wear special socks to eat chicken soup seemed like a possibility to you?”

“You are an odd creature of habit.”

I touched the balled up socks to my knees three times, touched them to the doorknob once, and knocked on the woodwork twice. “Ridiculous,” I said.

#1GF! smiled.

“I may need to do some real soul searching about my personality quirks,” I said before returning to the kitchen to finish the chicken soup.

Saturday (Day 902): Rakesistance is Futile

I raked the yard and cleaned out the gutters for the second week in a row, and I could see the possibility of a third round of raking looming before the first snow. Raking is such an exercise in futility.

The baby was really good and talkative all day, so #1GF! and I took her out to the mall so that we could get some Christmas shopping done. #1GF! crossed a few people off of her list, but as usual, I didn’t buy a thing. I’m not a shopper. I’m a researcher. And I hadn’t researched anything yet.

When we got home, I sent out emails to all the car dealers telling them that I had purchased a vehicle and that they could take me off of their e-mail lists. I then sent a nicely worded email to the Subaru salesman, explaining that although he made an excellent impression on us, his manager completely blew the sale. I did it as nicely as I could.

What I Learned

• Below dealer cost isn’t unreasonable. Way below dealer cost isn’t unreasonable.
• Babies make moms drop pounds.
• Buying a woman a new car can take a little bit of the sting out of going back to work.
• Transcribing my tiny, scratchy notes sucks.
• The baby does not like the nose plunger, and she absolutely hates having saline squirted up her nose.
• Sometimes, a comma can make a big difference.
• Expired DayQuil is not okay.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

#1GF!’s brother and I finished the raking in a couple of hours, but half the leaves were still on the trees. I met up with #1GF!, and we were back home by noon.

I spent the rest of the day raking our own yard, and finished up at 5PM. I showered and #1GF! took over the dinner making duties. I wasn’t exhausted, but I was certainly tired of raking. #1GF! fell asleep on the couch early, and I wasn’t too far behind.

Monday (Day 890): A New Dealer Scam To Look Out For

I spent the morning playing with the baby and sending emails back and forth to different car dealers trying to secure a deal. At 1:30PM, we went out to a Jetta dealer to have ROCKET CAR! appraised.

They went out to have their appraisers look at the car, and I listened to another salesman verbally pounding on two customers. One was pinching the bridge of his nose, and the other had his arms folded and was staring off into space. The salesman simply repeated reworded variations of “give me a thousand dollars,” in an attempt to wear them down. They looked pretty tired.

They came back and made a lowball offer on my car. That’s what happens when you lock in a price before you show up. They play with what they have to make a profit. Unfortunately, I wasn’t budging on what I wanted so the numerous trips to the manager turned into the manager getting directly involved with the sale.

He and his suit sat down at the table and tried to get me to buy the “rare isn’t valuable” line of logic. There must be an online course where car dealers learn this shit. It think it’s a more advanced form of economics than my degree can handle.

The manager got tired of pounding his head against a rock, and stepped out of the process once again. That’s when the saleswoman pulled a new scam on me. She presented me with a printout of the book value of my car from Kelly Blue Book dot com. The printout listed the correct year, make, and model of my car, making it seem like a very upfront thing for a car dealer to do. But, I already knew the book value on my car, and it was two thousand dollars higher than the value listed on the printout.

I studied the paper. “That makes no sense,” I said. “I checked the book two hours ago, and this isn’t it.” The saleswoman made a face like it was very perplexing, and then made an excuse that she only takes what people print off for her. I didn’t bother accusing her of anything, but I was pretty sure of what was going on. I stood up and thanked her for her time. We had arrived at 2:30PM, and were leaving an hour later without a deal.

When I got home, I sent the saleswoman a link to the real book values to make her aware that I knew what had happened. I wasn’t accusatory, but I implied that the person who printed out the information must’ve had a horribly shaky hand to have accidentally unchecked every standard option on my car to arrive at the lower book value. Despite the nice tone of the e-mail, I was pretty irritated with the dealer and wondered how many unprepared people they screwed with that scam over the years.

The last note that I have for the day was that #1GF! made dinner again. Other than that, I have no idea what happened. A house party probably broke out when Kid ‘N Play came over to show us their updated version of the Kid ‘N Play kickstep. Crazy stuff like that always happens when those guys come over. Woot woot.

Tuesday (Day 891): Swinging With Bea Arthur

I did some more car research and then drove to the North Shore to visit a Jetta dealer who offered me another good deal via e-mail.

I took a look at the Jetta and it was not only less powerful than ROCKET CAR!, but it had less headroom. My head touched the ceiling no matter how far back I put the seat. That didn’t make me happy, but #1GF! was looking for a 2010 manual transmission, and this was on the list. I let them take ROCKET CAR! into their garage to appraise, so to pass the time, I called #1GF! and wandered around the lot.

After forty-five minutes, I got bored enough that I told them to bring the car back and then call or e-mail me when they figured out what their offer was going to be. They brought back the car in a hurry and we sat down at a table to talk. Because the deal was already set up online, there was no wiggling on price, so I knew that the dealer was going to try to play with the trade.

The salesman and manager went over what they found, and a $200 clear coat repair on ROCKET CAR!’s wing quickly inflated into $2,500 spoiler replacement. They also mentioned that all the tires needed to be replaced and took off twelve hundred for that.

I shut them down by throwing in a brand new set of tires and telling them I’d have the wing repaired. The spoiler doesn’t even cost $2,500 to replace, and the fact that it had a clear coat problem is a very common issue with the model. As I expected, neither concession changed their offer on my trade.

They wanted me to give them a Lancer Evolution VIII and $7,800 to leave with an underpowered Jetta that I barely fit in. It was like showing up to Hollywood swingers’ party with a supermodel and fishing Bea Arthur’s keys out of the bowl. And then having Bea tell you with a wry smile on her wrinkled face that it was “going to cost you $7,800 for a piece of this cookie.”

I told the dealer that I already walked away from a deal on an identical car at another Jetta dealer that would’ve cost me $3,500 because it was too much to pay for a Jetta. That’s when he knocked down the cost to me to $5,500. I just stared at him and wondered if he was deaf or stupid.

He confirmed the latter with his next comment. “We’re really close to that, so you should go for it.”

I was facing dealer math again. If $3,500 is too much, then $2,000 more is a deal that I should take even though I could beat his deal with a simple phone call. What? I reiterated that I had a deal for $2,000 less at another dealer, just in case the two of them were really hearing impaired. I also made sure to speak slowly and clearly just in case they were really just stupid. The dealer and the salesman looked at the numbers on the page as if staring really hard and concentrating would magically change my mind.

I couldn’t take more than two minutes of them staring at the paper, so I thanked them and told them to call me if anything changed. I wrote off the two hour stay and two hours on the road and walked out. It was another complete waste of time.

I picked up some milk and got back into rush hour traffic for the long ride through the city. When I was about halfway home, a truck on my left kept revving it’s engine and hitting the brakes as if to egg me on. People do this to my car because of the wing. I’m not a boy racer. I’m old. I rarely even break the speed limit. The only thing I use the power in the car for is to get around idiots who want to race.

I dropped a gear, hit the brakes hard, and zipped around the back of the truck and up his left side in one fluid move. That’s when I saw it was #GF!’s brother messing with me. I shook my head, waved, and thought about the odds of us being next to each other on the highway so far from home.

I got home and took the baby for a while. I tried to put her to bed, but I was having a hard time leaving her alone. She was so small, and I didn’t want her to be sad or lonely. Unfortunately, nothing that I was doing was soothing the baby. #1GF! eventually made me walk away, pointing out that sometimes having me put the baby to bed was as effective as hiring a clown to put the baby to bed in a moonwalk.

When I stepped back six feet, the baby fell asleep almost immediately. “You’re a genius at this!” I said pretty loudly before slapping my hands over my mouth. #1GF! shushed me and ushered me out of the room before I could squirt her with a flower or honk my bike horn.

Once the baby was asleep, #1GF! and I fell into a brief television coma. I snapped out of it and looked up a Subaru and suggested that we take a look at it because it was comparable to the car #1GF! wanted. I hoped that I wasn’t leading us on yet another research induced wild goose chase.

Wednesday (Day 892): What About A Subaru Legacy?

I woke up at 3AM to #1GF! laughing and trying to shush the baby. The baby was in full conversation mode, babbling near maximum volume. I don’t know if I slept much after that because I kept laughing. I was definitely awake at 5AM, laying there listening to the baby fidget, while my brain spun with cars.

We went out in the morning to take a look at a Subaru. It wasn’t bad looking, it was in our price range, it came in manual, and was all wheel drive. I hopped into the passenger seat to make sure that my head didn’t touch the ceiling, and hopped out. #1GF! took it out for a spin while I sat in the truck and entertained the baby. When #1GF! returned, I took the salesman’s card and we left. I told him we had to think about it, and he didn’t pressure us to stay. I liked that.

The baby fell asleep on the way home, and we grabbed a couple of subs. I got the baby inside the house without waking her, which never happens. She slept on the counter in her car seat while #1GF! and I sweated over the hot peppers loaded onto our subs.

When we finished eating, #1GF! went to buy some non-maternity clothes for her return to work, and I went back to looking up cars. I was disappointed to find out that, despite having good crash test ratings, JD Power thinks Subarus are pieces of garbage.

I sent out emails to the Jetta dealers to let them know that I was no longer interested in a Jetta. Then, I looked up for DIY ways to fix a clear coat issue on my wing.

The baby woke up, so I fed her, played with her for a while, and got her back to sleep without a lot of fuss. She kept crying in her sleep though, which was a little freaky. I’d pick her up, she’d snuggle her head into the space under my chin, and I’d rock from foot to foot waiting for her breathing to slow. I wondered why I hadn’t had kids sooner, which led me to wonder if I could remember myself in her position.

In the early afternoon, I put some ribs in the oven to slow cook for dinner. The baby was still crying randomly in her sleep, and every time I put everything down and got my hands cleaned up to go get her, the crying would stop before I got to her doorway.

#1GF! got home a little later, and we prepped dinner together. I peeled my potatoes, and #1GF! cleaned the beans. That last sentence seems like it could use an “if you know what I mean” at the end of it, but then, you wouldn’t know what I meant at all.

I sent #1GF! in to look at side by side comparisons of sedans that I had found in my research. When viewed individually, the sedans looked distinct. When viewed side by side, the differences melted away.

We ate dinner and the baby slept quietly. We had a peaceful dinner, and although it was odd, I missed the baby while she slept.

Thursday (Day 893): The Car Deals Keep Getting Sweeter

I woke up at 4 something in the morning, and really didn’t mind. At that point I was sleeping less, but minding it less. I checked on the baby once because she likes to run in her sleep.

We eventually got up at 6AM and #1GF! was in an understandably poor mood because our time home together was quickly coming to an end. There was nothing I could do to snap her out of it.

At lunchtime, I went to a couple of body shops to see how much it would cost to sand and clear coat the wing of ROCKET CAR!. It turned out to be about $200, as expected, but neither shop was eager to take on the project.

While I was in the area, I popped into the hardware store to pick up some sandpaper, in case I wanted to tackle the project myself. I realized that I had what I needed at home, so I left empty handed.

I went home feeling a little down about having to do all this leg work just to get a car and having seemingly good deals turn bad once everything was on the table. I put out a price request to a bunch of Subaru dealers and put in a call to a Honda dealer. A couple of dealers got back to me with below invoice deals. Things were looking up a little. For me, anyway. #1GF! was still in a back to work induced funk.

I made the bed and cleaned up the house a little just to try to cheer #1GF! up, and by late in the afternoon, she seemed a little better. It probably wasn’t my cleaning, but the fact that the baby was in good spirits and was chatty as hell. I spent the rest of the night trying to solidify a deal on a car so that #1GF! would have something nice and new before she went back to work.

Friday (Day 894): The Foot Flicker

I woke up thinking about cars, yet again. Constantly working angles and preparing countermeasures wears the brain down, while facing the constant lying wears on the nerves. The negotiation process is fun, but listening to the same bullshit with a different face can get tedious after a while.

I decided to go out and get the food shopping done. It wouldn’t solve our car issue, but at least we’d have things to eat while we pondered our options. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours,” I called to #1GF! on my way out the door.

“Food shopping doesn’t take two hours,” said the woman who hasn’t done a more than a handful of grocery shopping runs in the last few years. “Do you have money?”

I counted the money in my pocket. “It should be fine.”

“Here take a couple of twenties, just in case.”

“Nah. I have more than I’ve spent on groceries here. I’ll never use the extra.” And off I went.

It must’ve been bring your mom and grandmother to the store day, because the store was full of moms and old ladies. The moms distractedly raced through the aisles, trying to keep their carts full and their childrens’ hands empty. The old ladies apologetically clogged those same aisles by doing things like leaving their carts sideways while they got their faces really close to tuna fish labels. Some of them were leaning in so close that they looked as if they were trying to surreptitiously smell the cans.

When I got home, the baby was awake, so the ladies watched me put the groceries away. It was 1PM, two hours after I left. I was right about the time. Unfortunately, I had to admit being twenty dollars short at the checkout, making #1GF! right about the cost.

#1GF! and I had a brief talk about how we had ended up looking at cars that cost double what we had planned on spending. The conversation quickly veered into oncoming who cares?

I made some calls on cars, and the deals were starting to get juicy. We had a new Subaru on the hook for $300 over dealer cost, which was well below invoice, and I had a Honda on the hook for below dealer cost. I was as excited about either car as I am about girls with small glasses playing love songs on acoustic guitars, but when you get down near dealer cost, the pants are going to tent a little anyway. It looked like it was coming down to who was giving me the most for my trade.

I made some chicken thighs for dinner, and then baked some chocolate chip cookies for a birthday party we were going to over the weekend. By the time everything was cleaned up, it was already 9PM. #1GF! and I watched a couple of sitcoms and started falling asleep on the couch. I would’ve finished falling asleep if #1GF! didn’t amuse herself by flicking my foot whenever my eyes closed.

Saturday (Day 895): Someone Who Needs Me

I woke up to the baby babbling in the other room. I got up to put the baby back to bed, but by 7AM, I had to admit that I was failing. #1GF! stepped in, and two minutes later, the baby was asleep. Neither of us knew what she did.

#1GF! and I had breakfast and sat in front of DIY Network because we were consuming a ridiculous amount TV those days.

In the early afternoon, we went to the baby’s cousin’s birthday party. It was the first party that we took the baby to, and she only slept an hour all day. There was too much going on. She only threw up on one of #1GF!’s family, but said family member had disregarded several warnings to lodge a burp cloth between clothing and the baby. She didn’t listen, and she payed. People never listen to me. I think that they assume that the serious things out of my mouth are just jokes that they don’t fully understand. I joke a lot, but when I say, “Use a burp cloth,” or “Duck, motherfucker,” I’m being serious.

When we got home, I made dinner, and #1GF! put the baby to bed. I could hear the baby babbling nonstop through the monitor. “There’s no way that baby is going to sleep,” I yelled down the hall. I could hear #1GF! laughing in the other room as she continued her efforts.

I took the baby after she threw up on #1GF! for the second time. #1GF! came out of our room wearing a mortgage shirt from a house that we never closed on years ago. I looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

“It’s the baby. I’m out of shirts,” she said.

“I guess so,” I said, smiling at her in her bright yellow mortgage billboard.

“She has finally thrown up on every t-shirt I have.”

I laughed, and the baby tried to exact revenge by throwing up on me. I stuck my arms out straight with ninja speed and she barfed all over the floor. Sure, the floor was a mess, but I felt like I hit a home run because I was still clean. For the first time, I defeated the barf ninja. #1GF! stared at me wide eyed. The baby didn’t seem to notice that I was holding her at arm’s length or that she had thrown up.

Once the baby was asleep, we put on some chorus line movie that ended up in the queue because Roger Ebert recommended it. If you’re gay or in theater, you might’ve had a chance at understanding what the hell was going on, but neither of us had a clue. I lasted a half hour before I went to do clean up the dishes. #1GF! lasted ten more minutes before she realized that I wasn’t coming back.

#1GF! walked out of the room ten minutes later talking on the phone. The movie was still running. “You can shut that off whenever you go back in,” I said.

I put in Away We Go, a movie about a couple who roams the country trying to find the perfect place to give birth to their first child. Would I have liked it if I didn’t have a kid? Maybe. Okay, probably not. Fine, not a fucking chance.

I wish I could say that having a kid doesn’t change you, but it does. I still look the same. I still have the same John Doe haircut that peaked in popularity in 1962, and I haven’t been a sharp dresser since they stopped making Garanimals in my size.

Even though you’re essentially still the same body of water, there’s an inherent change somewhere that bubbles out of the deep and ripples the surface of who you are. Some of the things that you used to dedicate your time to, such as music, games, and writing, ride the ripples out and away toward the edges of your personality. They’re still there, but they’re no longer as close to the center as they once were.

It’s not that having a kid means that it’s not about you anymore. I think that having one makes you realize that it never was about you in the first place. And, generally, you don’t mind. Deep down, a new drive sort of takes hold, that supplants most of what you desire with just wanting your kid to be okay.

I never needed a dog or a sidekick to validate me (yet, I blog on year after year), and I never needed anyone to be dependent on me. Now that someone is, I own it. It has become part of who I am. And it carries only the weight of a four leaf clover rather than the gravity of burden. “For once I can say, ‘This is mine, you can’t take it.’ / Long as I know I’ve got love I can make it / For once in my life I have someone who needs me.” (listen)

What I Learned

• If you don’t know the book value of your car going into the dealership, the dealer may print off a trade value from Kelly Blue Book with all the standard options unchecked.
• The Subaru Legacy isn’t a bad car for the money, unless you ask J.D. Power.
• I don’t fit in a Jetta.
• Theoretically, I could sand and clear coat a spoiler.
• Invoice cost is not what to shoot for. These days, you shoot for dealer cost.
• Truecar.com is really good for finding what the dealer cost is and what people are paying.
• Roger Ebert is usually pretty good with movie recommendations, but when he fails, he fails hard.
• Parenting pushes most of your old priorities to the side.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

The baby was fed and burped, so I sent #1GF! to bed and put the baby to sleep. I had to wake #1GF! up at 8AM to feed the baby. The poor woman hadn’t been asleep for more than an hour. As the heavy curtains of sleep parted, #1GF! slowly realized who I was. “Oh good,” she said as she flopped back on the pillow. “Because they were ripping me off.”

“Who were?” I said with a smirk.

“CVS or Walgreens. They were making me so mad.”

That’s about all I got out of her. She fed the baby and I straightened up the house. I related the story of my failed breakfast attempts, and #1GF! went out to get some milk. I didn’t care about breakfast enough to leave the house, but #1GF! has overbuilt sympathy circuits. If she thinks that you even remotely want something, she’ll put in more effort than necessary to get it for you.

We gave the baby a bath and then I sat by the window and fed her. It was only 10AM, but my internal clock was reading somewhere around midafternoon. A neighbor walked through our leaf covered yard to talk to the baby through the window. I love small towns. I took a break from the feeding to talk a little.

I finished feeding the baby just as my engineer friend showed up with his wife, the lawyer, to see the baby, hitherto wheretofor subgum mumbo jumbo in perpetuum. The minute that they walked through the door, the baby had a fit. They stood there sort of horrified that they had somehow caused the meltdown, but I assured them that the baby was just tired from a warm bath and a full belly.

The baby quickly burned out and fell asleep. Our friends brought gifts of books and clothes, which was really nice of them. More importantly, it was really nice to see the both of them. Busy schedules have kept us from meeting up as often as I’d like.

The baby woke up before they left and smiled a little as if to assure them that they weren’t the problem. The neighborhood kids were running around outside, and the day seemed to be rolling along more smoothly than the start would have indicated.

Our friends headed out, and we went to one of #1GF!’s co-worker’s houses in the afternoon. She has a big, beautiful house set on a big chunk of land. It’s big enough that our house could be used as its garage.

I didn’t really know the husband all that well, so I asked about the house addition that was in progress. I’ve gutted and redesigned two houses so far, and I like to visualize other people’s construction ideas. I got a tour of the addition and an explanation of an exterior wood burning furnace that acts as a heat exchange with their main heating system. It was an ingenious system if you have the land and wood to use it. I had never seen anything like it before and was impressed with the idea and the install.

On the way home, we picked up a broken PC from another friend that had taken a solid smacking from a virus. The baby had been good all day, but was in no mood for a quick stopover. She was crying before we left the driveway. I fed her a half bottle with my arm over the seat, but it didn’t help. She kept crying and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. It was a loud, twenty minute straight cry. She was still going when we pulled into our driveway.

As soon as the truck was in park, I climbed into the back seat and said, “It’s okay, honey.” The baby looked up at me through red, teary eyes and smiled wide. It was a smile of relief. She was teary and smiling at the same time like a sun shower. Never have I experienced something so small that felt so fucking heartbreaking. It was as if all she wanted was to know that she wasn’t alone in the dark. I felt like I had slapped her. I took her out of the car and carried her into the house. I really felt like a heel.

A twelve week old baby cries a lot, and sometimes you can’t do anything about it. You learn to live with the tears. Looking into my daughter’s teary eyes and seeing her smile reminded me that a twelve week old doesn’t cry out of want. They cry out of need. At twelve weeks, want doesn’t exist yet.

We got the baby settled into bed and sat down to watch Dexter. It was only 9PM, but we were exhausted. I had to pick the baby up a couple of times during the show, and every time, she snuggled into my chest.

“Parenthood is different, isn’t it?” asked #1GF! as we stared at the TV.

“It is, but I love it. I get it now. I finally know what all the fuss is about.”

#1GF! smiled like we were in on a secret together.

Monday (Day 883): Deep Fried Awesome Wrapped In Bacon

I got up to take over the baby care, and #1GF! decided not to go back to bed. I thought that she should, but she’s an adult and knows what’s best for her.

I took the baby in to change her, and she somehow pooped all over her clothes. I have no idea how she did it, but of course she did it on my watch. I stripped her down and we gave her a bath and put her into some fresh clothes. The warm water sent her back to sleep for a few hours.

I looked up cars for a while, trying to find something remotely interesting in category of family sedans that #1GF! was interested in. They were all as exiting as dry toast, if toast had a massive advertising budget.

The baby woke up briefly to eat before going back to sleep. I stopped looking up cars, and #1GF! and I spent the rest of the day competing in Bejeweled. We used to compete against each other in various flash games years ago, mostly over winter vacations. The quiet alternation between reading on the couch and competing made it feel like a vacation day.

The baby had a screaming fit from 6 to 8PM, and then finally drifted off to sleep. #1GF! and I started watching Singles. I hadn’t seen the movie since college, and #1GF! had never seen it at all. Once I figured out that Superbad was on, Singles got sidelined. The sheer volume of awesome packed into Superbad made it very difficult to go to bed.

Evan: [examining the fake ID] Hawaii. All right, that’s good. That’s hard to trace, I guess. Wait… you changed your name to… McLovin?
Fogell: Yeah.
Evan: McLovin? What kind of a stupid name is that, Fogell? What, are you trying to be an Irish R&B singer?
Fogell: Naw, they let you pick any name you want when you get down there.
Seth: And you landed on McLovin…
Fogell: Yeah. It was between that or Muhammed.
Seth: Why the fuck would it be between that or Muhammed? Why don’t you just pick a common name like a normal person?
Fogell: Muhammed is the most commonly used name on Earth. Read a fucking book for once.
Evan: Fogell, have you actually ever met anyone named Muhammed?
Fogell: Have you actually ever met anyone named McLovin?
Seth: No, that’s why you picked a dumb fucking name!
Fogell: Fuck you.

It’s pure awesome on a stick, deep fried, and wrapped in bacon.

Tuesday (Day 884): A Speed Freak In A Diaper

I got up with #1GF! for all the feedings overnight. In the morning, #1GF! kept trying to send me to bed, but I argued that I didn’t have anything pressing at work the next day. The boss would understand if I was a little slow. Har. Har.

We were dressed before 9AM, and I went out and vacuumed the inside of ROCKET CAR!. I went to a car wash, and then cleaned the wheels in the parking lot because the “wheel bright” isn’t really.

When I got home, #1GF! and her friend took the baby out shopping. I had a lot of time to kill, so I decided that I’d try to buy a car for #1GF! before she got home. It was an ambitious plan. I got in my newly cleaned ROCKET CAR! and went to a Honda dealer to see if they had any leftover ’09s in stock.

I walked into the dealership, and I wasn’t immediately slimed like in a normal car dealership. In fact, no one paid any attention to me at all. There was a salesman leaning with his belly against the driver’s door of one of the showroom cars, and he looked like he was debating between going to get lunch, and locking himself in one of the bathroom stalls with a .45. There was also a really dark, bald man wearing aviator sunglasses sitting at a desk in the middle of the floor eating a sandwich. If the guy swapped his blazer for a set of cammies, I would’ve thought him to be a revolutionary general of a small, internationally unrecognized state. Talking to people who wear sunglasses inside never works out, so I walked over to the semi-suicidal salesman leaning on the car.

The salesman didn’t seem interested in talking to me, but he wearily turned around because it was probably in the dealership handbook that he had to. I asked him through the fog of his body odor whether he had any 2009s on the lot. He not only told me that they didn’t have any, but that there weren’t any anywhere. In the world. I looked at his pinky ring and Bill Cosby sweater and didn’t think that he was lying. He just didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. I thanked him and backed out of the showroom, fully convinced that the next employee I encountered would end up being a speed freak in a diaper. And nothing messes up a Tuesday morning worse than a speed freak in a diaper.

I was going to visit another dealership in Boston, but I didn’t want to waste time if the salesman was right and there really weren’t any ’09s out there. I went home and searched dealer inventories on the web. I found a few ’09’s out there, but there was no way that I had enough time to have the car bought by the time #1GF! got home. There wasn’t going to be a surprise for her that day, so I tried to find a checkmark elsewhere.

I started working on the PC that I picked up for repair the day before, figuring that I could earn a checkmark in a couple of hours time. That didn’t happen. The machine was missing the start menu, and every task had to be run out of task manager. It was definitely infected with something that did not play nice with others.

After banging my head against the wall for far too long, I eventually decided to take the hard drive out and add it as a slave in another PC so that I could work on it more easily. The infected PC was older, and made on the cusp of the screwless revolution. It had its own ideas about what easy was. Some design engineer tried to make the inside easy and compartmentalized, but ended up making it a convoluted, finger splitting mess of sharp metal and hidden connectors.

After a number of choice words, ranging from straight shots of the big four right down to convoluted combinations of swears that were making less and less sense, I eventually got the drive out and into another PC. I tracked down and replaced some of the missing system files, and got it to the point that it would at least boot with a start menu.

I had to take the front face off of the infected PC just to get the hard drive reinstalled because of the idiotic way the wires were routed in the case. I nipped a couple of fingers on unseen edges and progressed into even more interesting triple-score curse combinations.

I eventually got the drive back into the case, got a virus scanner running, and cleaned out a ton of viruses. After a few hours of scanning, the machine went into a reboot loop because some files were again missing. Which files, was the question. If I could’ve checked the scan logs, I could easily have found out, but when a PC is in a reboot loop, you’re not checking anything. I took the drive out again, and used the second PC to replace the missing system files. I then reinstalled the drive again into the convoluted beast of a machine.

And the machine wouldn’t boot at all. I had been working on the machine for hours, and it was steadily getting worse. I eventually had to resort to a factory restore, and work forward from there, rebuilding the PC application by application. By 10PM, I had the machine running. I still needed to finish installing some of the applications, but I was falling into microsleeps more and more often, so I gave up for the night and went to bed.

Wednesday (Day 885): A Car Salesman In A Bear Trap

I got up at all the feedings with #1GF! again. The baby was spitting up all over everything in the morning. There were no less than four barfs in an hour, at a cost of two shirts for #1GF!, two outfits for the baby, and a couple of burp cloths. I was spared so that I could warn others.

The baby was so contaminated with barf that we put her in the bath for the third day in a row (typically, babies who can’t crawl don’t need baths more than every other day). After the bath, she quickly fell asleep. #1GF! and I sat down with a couple of bowls of cereal and watched Kitchen Nightmares.

In the afternoon, we went to a large car dealership in Boston to look at a car that I had negotiated a really good price for through e-mail. According to the dealer’s website, they had nine ‘09 vehicles available. The woman that I had been emailing wasn’t available, so we got passed on to another woman, who introduced us to another salesman.

The salesman brought out a model that was a step up from what we were looking for on the premise that it was a tight dealership and they couldn’t get the model we wanted out of the lot without moving cars. It seemed reasonable, so #1GF! took the test drive, while I waited in the dealership with the baby.

She returned soon enough and the salesman and I went outside to look over ROCKET CAR!. He said that another Evolution had come in the week before and went out really fast. It’s not a common car and it was in good shape. It should sell fast. I was glad that the dealer wasn’t playing games.

I went back in, and we went over to the salesman’s desk to work out the deal. On the way, an oaf of a salesman kept trying to touch the baby’s hand. He succeeded once and the baby latched on. “This one came with a kung fu grip!” he called to his chortling cohorts. Har har har. You don’t touch someone else’s baby with your greasy, ass-wiping, cheeseburger hands, you fucking idiot. They have no immune systems. The moron wandered off, probably to lick some doorknobs. #1GF! put sanitizer on the baby’s hands and kept her from eating them.

We sat down at the desk, and the salesman went to get the trade offer from the manager on my “fast selling” Evolution. I stood up and walked around while he was gone, carefully stepping over the traps that he was waiting to spring on me. He came back and quickly offered 10k for the car.

I could feel the heat already starting to rise in the vicinity of #1GF!. I laughed. “The car books for eighteen,” I said.

“Let’s check Kelly Blue Book then,” he said with a fleeting, but smug smile. He brought up the site on the screen. In big, black numbers, it listed the trade as $18,000 for an average condition Evolution. His smug smile vanished when he realized that he just set a trap and walked into it. He went back to the manager to start the “I’ll ask the manager game”.

He came back and pushed a piece of paper across the desk. The 10k was crossed out, and a 14k was written in it’s place. He stared at it like two digits and a letter were a full blackboard physics equation that he needed to understand for an upcoming quiz.

I shook my head. “Fourteen? Listen. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m ready to buy a car today, right now, but I’ll sell the car myself or go somewhere else before I give you a clean Evolution for four thousand under book value.”

His one foot was stuck in a trap, so he was fumbling around. He tried to play the sympathy card as if I gave a flying shit how tough the car business is. “Well, your car is unique. It will be very hard to sell.”

“Earlier, you said that you were one of the top salesman in the dealership, right?”

“Well, yes.”

“You sell a lot of cars in a month.”

“I do.”

“You told me that you got one in last week and it flew off the lot. So, a guy like you should have no problem selling my car.” A second trap snapped on his other foot.

“Well, sports cars don’t sell well in the winter,” he said not realizing that he was leaning on a third rusty trap just waiting to snap shut.

“Maybe, but all wheel drive cars sell great in the winter.” It’s always funny to watch salesmen stepping into traps that they set for you. I don’t think they’re used to it, so they squirm a little more.

I’m a pain in the balls for car dealers. I know it, and I don’t care. I don’t care if they make any profit on a car they sell me, and I do my homework before I show up. If they try to bullshit me or if I don’t like the salesman, I walk out. I have deals prearranged, and I don’t sit waiting for the manager. If the salesman leaves the desk, so do I. I walk around the showroom near the door, and it usually cuts the management consultation to a minimum. I’m never impolite, but I never negotiate from the position that I need the car more than they need the sale. I almost always walk out, but with a smile because it’s all a game to me.

We hit a point where we were just staring at each other, so I stood up. “Thanks. It was nice to meet you, [whatever your name is]. We’ll try Boch. They’re pretty big and can usually make deals happen.” And I left the door open as I always do with “If anything changes, give me a call.” They always do.

#1GF! was so fucking irritated with the guy that she was still arguing him. The baby started to cry. And that’s when the salesman let it slip that he didn’t even have the car that we wanted available. To get the car we were looking for, they’d have to get it from another dealer and put a couple of hundred miles on it. He had wasted two hours of our time, and we decided that it was time to go.

On the way home, #1GF! and I dissected the negotiation. We knew that we were moving in the right direction, but it felt like we accomplished something and yet failed at the same time. “You know,” I said to #1GF! “I don’t mind a good negotiation, but car dealers make me feel like life is hard. Unnecessarily hard.” #1GF! agreed.

#1GF! made dinner and I cleaned up. I worked on rebuilding our friends’ PC, and finished around 8PM. The machine really was a mess. I needed to do hundreds of updates and service packs, followed by defragging and general cleanup. When it was done, I had a couple of peanut butter cups out of the undistributed Halloween stash as a sort of reward.

Thursday (Day 886): Experimenting On The Baby

I slept through the midnight feeding because I was dreaming that vampires were trying to eat me, but I managed to get up at the 4AM feeding, despite #1GF!’s protests. She was right that I was wasting valuable sleep time, but I was there for support.

When we finally got up for good, the baby refused to sleep. She stayed awake all day.

I spent the day researching cars while waiting for the baby to eat, sleep, or poop. We were supposed to go out to look at cars, but #1GF! suddenly decided that she wanted a 2010 instead of an ‘09 so that she could get a manual transmission. Because 2010s came at a much higher premium than closeout ’09s, I searched for another car with more features and a lower price to get her into a 2010. I found a few alternatives that were in the same price as the ‘09 we were looking at. I didn’t mark this as an accomplishment. The biggest checkmark I got all day was to scoop a snarled, moldy mass of hair out of a bathroom drain.

It probably wasn’t the best idea to experiment with a baby who was already sleep-deprived, but we gave the baby her first dose of formula to see if she could handle it. She ended up with painful gas that had her screaming for a few hours. #1GF! took her at 7PM, and had her asleep by 8PM. I was asleep on the couch by 8:30PM.

Friday (Day 887): So, You Hate Foreigners You Say?

I woke up at 4:40AM because the baby was shaking around in her bed. I lay there awake in the dark until 6AM, when she finally woke up. I didn’t want to be awake, but I couldn’t stop thinking about cars. Research and battle plans for negotiation filled my head.

Once we were up, I restarted the car research. I quickly realized that there are very few activities that are more soul slaying than comparing specs on family sedans. Maybe comparing insurance policies or reading EULAs would be close, but I couldn’t be sure.

After far too much research, I ended up with a list of which dealers had what family sedans on their lots. #1GF! really wanted a manual transmission, so I tried to find sedans in our range that we could get in manual. I got a good price on a Jetta, so we went to the dealer to check it out.

We walked in, and the internet guy I had been dealing with through e-mail immediately handed us off to a woman who used to be a Realtor around town. #1GF! went out for a ride in a Jetta SE, and I sat with the baby in the dealership. It was pointless for me to drive any sedan that we were buying. None of them had the power, handling, or the Ricaro seats that hugged you like your mama would if she approved of you driving a ROCKET CAR! around town.

#1GF! liked the way the car drove, and I liked some of the features, but we took the saleswoman’s card and left because we weren’t sure that the car was right for us. From there, we went to a Honda dealer north of the city. I asked for the woman who I had been working on prices with online. She came out and passed us off to a car salesman. I think car dealers must have phone people, internet people, and salespeople.

We made small talk with the salesman to lull him, and #1GF! asked what his busiest day was. He thought for a second. “Sunday,” he said. We nodded like it was interesting. “But, I don’t like Sundays. Especially if the Pats are playing.” We nodded a little more as if we gave a shit, just to force him to keep the conversation afloat. He shook his head with a scowl. “Honestly, I don’t like selling cars to people who aren’t at home watching football on Sunday.” #1GF! smirked and tried not to look at me. “I don’t like selling to people like that.” He leaned in and frowned. “They’re mostly foreigners,” he said without bothering to mask a fair amount of disgust.

I thought about mentioning the foreigners that aren’t too far back in either my or #1GF!’s family trees, but thought that negotiations are often uphill for people who incorrectly assume that they’re in a safe place. I tried not to roll my eyes, and had a clearer vision of who we were dealing with.

They brought around a sedan, and I sat in the passenger seat for a few seconds just to make sure that my head didn’t touch the roof. The inside was a lot bigger than the Jetta, but the cloth seats were ugly. They had some sort of squiggles in them that reminded me of the confetti on an 1980s birthday party invitation. #1GF! went out for a test drive, and I waited in the dealership with the baby.

I stood at a table in the middle of the sales floor, and people kept coming over to me and sharing parenting stories. I have no idea why. Maybe it was a slow day for car sales.

The baby quickly got fussy, so I fed her a bottle. I was the only customer in the showroom, so I tried to keep a low profile, but the baby growled the whole time she was eating, and I couldn’t stop laughing. Every time I thought she was done, I would pull the bottle away and she would growl louder.

When she was finished eating, she started sucking her thumb because she was ready to go to sleep. The salesman who hates foreigners let me know that she was sucking her thumb because she was still hungry. He knew this, he told me, because he had several kids. I smiled and nodded with raised eyebrows like he was a parenting god handing down tablets of wisdom from the mountain just so he’d fuck off. I didn’t mention that she sucks her thumb because her other option is screaming.

#1GF! came back from the test drive and took the baby out to ROCKET CAR! for a diaper change. The baby had somehow gotten around her diaper and pooped all over her pants. We were a long way from home and just starting negotiations, and we were without a spare outfit. We were still new to the parenting game, and were still building a checklist of what we needed when we took the baby out. Spare outfit was added to the list.

#1GF! came back in, and the dealers started the dog and pony show of appraising my car. They walked around it and frowned. They snapped pictures and shook their heads. I stood watching them from inside. It was the same deal as the last place. The salesman started explaining the value of my car to me, a guy who has a degree in Finance with a minor in Economics. “It’s going to be hard to sell because it’s a rare car. It’s a dealer’s nightmare.”

I contemplated explaining the effect of scarcity on price using a simple Marshall curve, but figured that it would be more fun to see if the guy could tangle himself up any further with “up is down”, “left is right” , or some other law that only exists on the showroom floor of car dealerships.

“Do you know the book on the car?” he asked.

“It’s eighteen,” I replied.

“From where?”

“Kelly Blue Book.”

He made a face and shook his head. “They’re not accurate.”

“I looked at Edmunds and NADA, too. They were about the same. Autotrader was a little higher.”

He paused. “Did you check Galves?”

I looked at him for a second and sighed. I check three pricing guides that line up, and he names a fourth to cut my credibility. If I named four, he’d have a fifth. “No,” I said.

“See, that’s the one you have to check.”

“Of course it is,” I thought.

He must’ve sensed an undercurrent of irritation. “Not that I know what your car’s worth. That’s out of my hands. That’s our appraiser.”

“Playing good cop, bad cop,” I thought. “Not impressed.”

He just kept talking. “You know, we sell a ton of cars. And we never advertise. We’re a good dealership.”

I’m more than willing to listen to bullshit from car salesmen, but sometimes I get tired of being treated like I’m more of a mark than a customer. I sang his radio jingle back to him. I scoffed. “I hear your ads on all the time.”

“Well, okay. Yea, you do.” He regrouped. “But do you ever hear us advertise prices? No. Never.”

New dealership truth: Advertising isn’t advertising unless it mentions price. Got it. Google ads are not ads. They’re now simply called googles.

We had already been at the dealer a couple of hours, and they were making us wait for some guy to figure out the appraisal. My irritation was starting to flow a little closer to the surface, and everyone was getting the hint.

They finally came back with $17,500 on ROCKET CAR!. I was happy with that. They were ready to set up the deal and brought out a paper with my trade and full MSRP on an ‘09 on it. I laughed at them and they looked genuinely confused.

I was looking at invoice or below and told them the price I already had from another dealer. The salesman acted as if I had just asked to fuck his grandmother and sell the sex tape on eBay. He called the sales manager out, and he told me that the only way that they could sell me a car near invoice would be to give me less on my trade. #1GF! and I walked, and as usual, I told them to call us if anything changed.

The baby had to sit in stained pants all through the negotiation. They were wiped off as best as we could, but shit on your pants, is shit on your pants. We drove home tired. The baby cried a good portion of the way.

When we got home, I whipped up a quick dinner. The baby wouldn’t sleep, so we sat her in her swing to keep her calm enough that we could wolf down our food. #1GF! eventually got her to go to sleep and went to bed soon after.

I knew that the baby would be up in an hour to eat, and an hour didn’t seem like it was worth the trouble of going to bed. I watched mindless TV and wondered where the day went. I settled in bed at 11PM, and lay awake, reviewing car deals in the dark. Once I put the cars aside, my brain moved on to the leaves that needed to be raked and other chores that needed to be taken care of. I eventually drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

Saturday (Day 888): A Shake Weight For Christmas

The baby started kicking like mad at 5AM, and #1GF! tried to haul her out of the room so that I could sleep. I tried to take over so that #1GF! could sleep, but she wasn’t going for it. #1GF! told me that I was pissing her off.

Now, I know that it was something that would be considered minor in most relationships, but it was magnified because things like that never happen in ours. You don’t notice a hole punched in the wall in an abandoned building, but you notice even a small scratch on a new car.

We’ve never talked like that to one another, but the lack of sleep, and increase in effort donated to cars and the baby were taking its toll on the both of us. We were nipping at each other more than we had ever been.

We put the baby back to bed and listened to her kick for an hour. I got my way and took her out of the room, and within fifteen minutes, she started screaming. So much for my plan.

#1GF! came out to feed her. The baby went to sleep for a half hour, and #1GF! and I sat on the couch watching a show off of the DVR. The baby woke up for two hours. #1GF! went to shower and I tried to get the baby to go back to sleep.

It was still a couple of months before Christmas, but the radio stations were already going full-time on the Christmas songs…and so did I. Full time Christmas all day long, baby. I don’t know when I started being pro-Christmas, but I think it was around the time I started ignoring the meaning and stress of the holidays to focus on the fun. I know it’s sick. I know.

I sat on the couch and a commercial for the shake weight came on TV (google it, if you feel the need). I was amazed. Completely amazed. I already had someone’s present picked out and I was two months ahead of schedule.

Once we were dressed, we spent the day looking up and talking about cars. I got five dealers on the hook for a price on a new Jetta. They all competed for the sale via email. Getting bids by e-mail is the only way to go these days. It’s a huge time saver.

The baby spent the day sleeping and throwing up on things. She was growling again and I kept laughing at her. She’s a lot of fun.

#1GF! went out and got us subs for lunch, and we watched an episode of The Shield together. We got a call that we would be raking the family cottage the following day, and weren’t too psyched about it.

Both of the ladies were asleep by 6PM. One was in the den, limiting my television access, and the other was blocking access to the PC. I stood at the DVR playing a web game thinking that #1GF! would wake up soon. Two hours later, I gave up and left the room. There wasn’t much that I could do without waking them up. I sighed and sat on the couch waiting for something to happen, and eventually started pouring the day into my notebook. Without the ladies, the house is really quiet, so the writing went fast. I picked up my book and started reading.

Within an hour, I couldn’t read another word, so I woke #1GF! up to send her to bed. I intended to watch a little television to wind down. #1GF! put in a call to her mother, and I spent the next hour listening to her doing blind tech support over the phone.

“Do you see where it says ‘password’? Password? Do you see a password box? A password box? For a password?”

Flying blind on tech support is usually painful, and this slow torture went on for an hour. I couldn’t concentrate on the TV and should’ve left the room and kept reading. #1GF! is one of the most extraordinarily conscientious people I’ve ever known, but during that hour, I felt like I could’ve been a lamp.

What I Learned

• You can have an exteranal wood furnace that piggy backs off of your heating system.
• Twelve week olds have needs, not wants.
• I know more than any male needs to know about family sedans.
• Manual transmissions are getting harder and harder to find.
• Getting bids on cars before you go out is essential.
• The internet salespeople you deal with online will not be helping you if you go to the dealership.
• People have no idea that you’re not supposed to touch someone else’s baby.
• Formula gives the baby some painful gas.
• Accords are bigger than Jettas.
• Take a spare outfit when you take the baby somewhere.
• Appraising a car at a car dealership is nothing but show.
• You can check three sources for car book values, and the dealer will come up with a fourth.
• I still like negotiating for cars.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

After a few guesses on my own, I figured out the difference between what he typed and what he thought he typed.

“Oh you’re good,” he said with a glint in his eye. “Maybe you should’ve taken that security job.”

I finished the setup and we went back out to the kitchen. My father played with his new laptop, and my mother played with the baby. The baby was all smiles. She does that sort of thing for company.

My parents left to beat the bridge opening, and the baby freaked out for a couple of hours after they were gone. #1GF! and I knew it was coming. The baby had been awake all day, and payment was due. The baby was down by 7:45PM and #1GF! and I sat on the couch watching TV.

Monday (Day 876): Broadcasting For Blow

I think it was 1AM, 2AM, 4AM, and 5AM that I woke up. I say “I think” because waking up every fucking hour or two during the night does a number on your mental faculties. I think I sent #1GF! to bed at 6AM, and sat with the baby in the den. The baby eventually calmed down and fell asleep, and I read a book on writing to pass the time.

Once #1GF! was up, I showered and did some wireless router research for my dad who was advancing up the technology chain much faster that I was. Maybe it’s just ex-security guy paranoia, but I’m still a proponent of hard-wiring everything. I don’t even like using cordless phones, and I have the impulse to unplug the baby monitor every time the baby wakes up. I don’t understand putting everything in the air where any dirty old sniffer can get a taste of your info. But, that’s just me.

Once I found a suitable router, #1GF! and I went out and picked it up at a local office supply store. I called my dad as soon as soon as the receipt hit the bag to see if he wanted an early birthday present. He was itching to experience the internet while sitting at the kitchen counter, so we headed to my parents’ house to set up the router.

We weren’t at the house very long before the baby started getting fussy. #1GF! fed her once and changed her twice, but it wasn’t doing much good. Once I was sure that the router was set up and secured, we decided it would be best to get the little chicken home. Before we left, my dad gave me a hand me down leaf blower because he got something more powerful. Jackpot.

We went home, and I made some burgers while #1GF! walked the baby around the house. I entertained them both by making faces and waving my arms whenever they got near. The dinner was ready before the baby was, so #1GF! ended up eating another cold dinner.

We wound down by watching Defiance, which was based on the true story of the Bielski brothers who evaded the Nazis and hid 1200 people in the Naliboki Forest during World War II. It was interesting because it was based on a true story, but it was really long and slow.

I got a crazy headache before bed. I don’t know why, or why it matters, but it happened.

Tuesday (Day 877): The Writing Bug Swaggers On By

I woke up late with the same headache that I went to bed with. I took the baby at 7:45AM, and once she had fallen asleep, I suddenly got very excited about writing. I hadn’t been interested in getting my fingers on a keyboard in a long time. If the baby’s nap wasn’t limiting my access to my PC, I might’ve sat down and written.

It seems that when things calm down and I get the impulse to write, I’m without access to my PC. Then again, writing doesn’t have to be done on a PC. There’s always pen and paper, but pen and paper lead to transcription, and transcription sucks the joy out of writing for me. I let the impulse swagger on by, but took it as a good sign. Things might’ve been starting to level out.

#1GF! got up to take over the baby care, and I went to the attic to glue some two inch insulation to the back of the attic door. Simple. Including the cutting and gluing, it was an hour project, tops. It’s called scope creep, folks, and it hides in the eaves of old houses to turn hour projects into all day affairs.

First, the attic door wouldn’t close, so I had to determine whether I was going to move the strike plate or grind it out. The latch looked like it had already been moved and ground, and I was worried that if I tried to move it again, the screw holes holding it to the frame would merge into a giant screw hole, and I’d spend a lot of extra time waiting for wood fill to dry. I decided to grind out the strike plate instead. A lot of noise, and a fair amount of stink later, the door would finally close and latch.

Once the door would close and latch, I found that it was horribly warped. An insulated door wasn’t going to help if there was a gap for heat to escape through, so I stared at the one inch gap in the corner in an attempt to will it away. I now know that my anger is not hot enough to unwarp a door.

The right way to fix it would be with saw horses and bricks, but I wasn’t about to push this simple insulating project back two days just to fix an attic door that no one sees. I took the easy way out and applied a lot of weatherstripping to stop the wind from whipping though the one inch gap. I was finally ready to start gluing the insulation to the door, which I did quickly because it’s a simple, fifteen minute job. It was 3PM before the insulation was glued and everything was cleaned up.

#1GF! wanted to give the baby a bath, but the clamps holding the insulation to the attic door prevented it from closing, and I couldn’t remove them until the glue dried. #1GF! wouldn’t subject the baby to the breeze the open attic door created, so the bath would have to wait. I was so frustrated with the project that I couldn’t talk about it.

I was lugging the robot back down to the basement, and he was flashing his screen like it was a ride the whole way down the stairs. I’m telling you: he is, hands down, the dumbest robot ever.

On my way through the kitchen, #1GF! asked me to vacuum the basement stairs on my way down. It was a logical and fair request. I had been tracking mud up and down those stairs for months with the lug soles in my work boots, so I tried to comply without a grudge. I was just afraid that I’d do something like lift a tread or find a crack that would turn a simple stair cleaning into a stair replacement.

#1GF! asked if we could take the clamps off of the insulation so that we could close the attic door and give the baby a bath without a breeze whipping through the kitchen. It was a little early to remove the clamps, but I went up and took the clamps off anyway.

Right when we were ready to give the baby a bath, she freaked out. I changed her and tried to calm her down. She eventually fell asleep, and my options were to put her to bed, which would cut off my access to my PC, or put her in the swing, which would cut off our access to dinner. Sometimes, food wins over words. The baby fell asleep before we could give her a bath.

Once the baby was settled, I took #1GF! up to show her the insulation. It was already pulling away from the door because I had taken the clamps off to give the baby that bath that she never got. I was not happy. I put the clamps back on the door and we brought down #1GF!’s winter clothes.

We sat in silence because a good bout of baby screaming makes you appreciate the quiet. I took the clamps off the door before we went to bed, meaning that simple, one hour project had taken about ten hours to complete. I sat thinking that the hours move so quickly that it seemed impossible that I’d ever get anything done.

Wednesday (Day 878): The Baby Doesn’t Speak English

I have no idea what planets aligned, but both #1GF! and I were dressed before 9AM. We gave the baby a bath. It was raining, and the wind and ocean droned on like a white noise machine. At 11AM, both of the ladies fell asleep under its spell.

I sat down to read a book on writing, and the urge to write resurfaced. I decided to act on it. A few hours later, the ladies were at my office door peering in. I didn’t end up writing, but I did transcribe some notes. I only managed to get a couple of days of Life of Riley roughed out in the time I had, which wasn’t impressive, but it was at least a start.

I put ribs in the oven at 4PM, and then entertained the baby while she sat on #1GF!’s lap at the dining room table. Both of them were laughing. #1GF! got the baby to bed just before the ribs were falling apart in the pan, and the baby woke up just as we finished eating.

The baby didn’t wake up in a particularly quiet mood, so I spent an hour trying to stop her from screaming. I failed, and #1GF! took over. I sat on the couch and watched part of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I couldn’t remember ever seeing before. I didn’t see what all the fuss was about, but it was probably scary in its day for people who didn’t live with long bouts of screaming.

Once #1GF! returned, we watched an episode of Dexter. #1GF! went to bed, and I stayed up. I wasn’t sleepy. Even though I feel like I’m constantly watching the sand pour through the hourglass, I watched the History Channel instead of doing something useful.

#1GF! got up at midnight to feed the baby and I was still sitting on the couch watching something about Dubya Dubya Two.

“I can’t believe it’s only Tuesday,” I said.

“Actually it’s Wednesday,” said a sleepy #1GF!.

“No, it isn’t.”

“You’re right. It isn’t. Technically, it’s Thursday.”

“What? No. It can’t be.” I got up and checked the DVR’s date and time to confirm. I just lost two days.

I tried to get the baby to go to sleep after the feed, and #1GF! came into the room to see how I was doing. #1GF! opened her eyes wide and nodded as if to ask for a baby status. The baby started closing her eyes. “I think she’s dropping off,” I said in a normal tone of voice. The baby’s eyes popped open and she started kicking and fidgeting. “Oh, nope. She’s awake,” I said shaking my head.

#1GF! started laughing. “Do you think that she can’t hear you?”

I rolled my eyes and slapped one of my hands over them. I made a mental note that just because the baby didn’t understand English, that did not mean that she couldn’t hear. #1GF! took over and got the baby to sleep because she understands the difference between hearing impaired and non-English speaking.

Thursday (Day 879): Recipes Versus Shopping Lists

I got up at 7:30AM only because #1GF! came in with the baby to wake me up. I think I might’ve slept until noon otherwise.

I got the baby to sleep after she ate, and #1GF! and I sat down to watch a sitcom on the DVR. It was nice to sit there together watching a sitcom in the middle of the morning. The baby eventually woke up, and I fed her and put her back to sleep while #1GF! showered.

Once we were both dressed, I read a cake recipe that someone had given me with a note that it was really good. It started with, and I shit you not, “buy two yellow cakes and some icing at the store…”

I’m not the greatest cook, but I don’t like to put premixed anything into cookies or cakes. I start with the basics. You mix butter, sugar, flour, and a few other basics in a bowl, pour them into a pan, and shove that bitch into the oven. The older the recipes, the better I like them. I’m prone to think that pudding mix and shortening are cheats, even though I have occasionally been known to use them.

It generally doesn’t bother me if a recipe includes a couple of cheats or didn’t go far enough to the basics. People make pudding cakes and boxed cakes all the time. This is the modern world, and chemical is king. I generally wouldn’t use a recipe like that, but it wouldn’t bother me. This was a little different. What I had in front of me was merely a shopping list masquerading as a cake recipe.

What really bothered me about the recipe was that it looked as if it had been photocopied from a magazine. That meant that the recipe made it through at least one lazy editor to appear in print. The fact that someone might’ve gotten paid for that recipe bothered me enough that I wanted to create a series of cooking videos for regular people.

I took a deep breath to let the Italian blood cool. The baby was awake, and I had to change her because we were heading out to #1GF!’s mother’s house for a visit. Babies shouldn’t have to face angry daddies for things that they have no control over. I put on my smile and started the change.

During the change, I noticed that the baby’s skin was so soft that I could barely feel it. It was like it was barely there. The baby spent the time staring at her hands, which she only recently started noticing. She had only recently learned to use those hands to hold a rattle without dropping it. To her, her hands were a super power that she was still trying to learn to control.

She also seemed to think of her feet as a second set of hands. I touched one of her feet, and she curled her toes around it like a second set of fingers. Newborns are so interesting, and they change so fast. Some of the tricks we used to use to make her smile over the last few weeks no longer worked.

We packed up the baby, grabbed a cup of coffee, and headed to #1GF!’s mother’s house. We stopped into the library on the way because #1GF! had finished her book. I ran in to grab another for her. With all the chick lit I’ve been picking up for her lately, the librarians probably have definite ideas about me having increased estrogen levels.

When we got home, we ate leftovers and spent a fair amount of time trying to get the baby to go to sleep. Then, we rotted our brains with the Thursday night TV lineup.

Friday (Day 880): Two Weeks To Go

We woke up to a screaming baby. I thought it was after 6AM, and I couldn’t believe how fast the night flew by. It was only 2AM. #1GF! took point on scream control, and I went back to bed.

I eventually got up at 7AM, and #1GF! and I sat on the couch playing with the baby. #1GF! didn’t want to go back to bed, so she put the baby to sleep and sat on the couch reading a book. I sat at the table reading, and writing in my notebook.

The orange LED indicator on my fridge had finally gone red, so I replaced the fridge’s water filter. Five gallons of water had to be flushed through the filter before it would be ready to use, so I spent ten minutes alternating between emptying water into the sink and onto the floor.

I went back into the den and #1GF! looked up cars while I played with the baby. The baby would grab my thumbs, pull herself up, and attempt to devour her own hand. When laying flat, she had no interest in her hand at all. I found it more interesting than the slight variations between family sedans.

The mortgage guy interrupted our joyride through adulthood to remind us that #1GF! had two weeks before she had to go back to work.

“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to go,” said #1GF! after she hung up.

“I don’t want you to go, either. This has been pretty nice.”

“It really has, hasn’t it.”

“Absolutely. I plan on highly recommending it to my wealthy and/or hobotronic friends.”

#1GF! finally settled on a nice, family sedan that would replace ROCKET CAR!. I didn’t tell ROCKET CAR! of this fact, and he sat happily in the driveway staring out at the ocean.

The next time I looked at the clock, it was 4PM. The baby was acting nuts, so #1GF! took her while I made dinner. She almost got the baby down before dinner, but she wouldn’t go to sleep. The baby sat laughing at me while I ate. It was so much better than screaming.

“There’s another girl in the house who appreciates your humor,” said #1GF!.

“But, I’m not doing anything unusual. You guys are going to ruin me. I’ll end up thinking I’m funny and people will roll their eyes at me.”

“You are funny.”

“I’m only eating.” I shook my head. “I’m bound for comedic ruin.”

“Well, at least you can entertain us.”

After dinner, I spent a couple of hours putting together a changing table, and then we rearranged the baby’s room to fit it in. We then moved all of the furniture back to where it was and jammed the table into a corner.

I took the baby at 7PM, but failed to get her to sleep. #1GF! took her at 8PM, and got her to sleep twenty minutes later. #1GF! and I sat on the couch for an episode of Dexter because stories about serial killers had somehow become relaxing.

Saturday (Day 881): The Dragon Wants Dinner

It was Halloween. I got up and got the baby to sleep by 8:30AM. I read A Writer’s Coach by Jack Hart, an excellent book on writing mechanics that had me thinking about condensing language and using active verbs.

#1GF! got up and showered, but by the time we were both dressed and ready, it was already noon. #1GF! put the baby in a jack o lantern onesie, took a bunch of pictures of her. An hour later, we walked down to the carousel to see the children’s costume contest. As a former city kid, as I get older, I find that it’s the corny, small town stuff that’s the most difficult to resist.

We rolled the stroller around the hand-carved carousel as the Wurlitzer band organ played a tune that could’ve been playing when the carousel was first opened in 1928. We found an old, green, wooden bench that had endured years of repainting, and sat watching the costumed kids revolving around and around on wild, wooden horses who had been carved as if caught mid-snarl.

As the songs played, a guy I used to hang around with in high school rode by with his wife and a two year old. I wasn’t sure if the kid was his, but it sure looked like him. They exited on the other side of the pavilion when the ride was over and got lost in the crowd. I’m not sure if it was intentional or not.

“Do you see your friend?” asked #1GF!.

“Nah. I think they left.”

“Did he see you?”

“Yea, he waved when they passed by.”

“Well, that’s weird.”

“Not really. People like waving to me more than they like saying hello. It’s like they like the idea of me better than the real thing. I dunno.” I shook it off. Things like that have happened to me my whole life, and it’s nothing that I can get worked up over at this stage of the game.

As we sat watching a toddler running around in a gorilla suit, a guy about my age walked by wearing a Social Distortion T-shirt. I thought it was sort of cool, until I saw that it was a concert shirt from 2009. Then the guy decayed into just another old guy, chasing an old band, trying to recapture youth that had silently slipped away from him long ago.

#1GF! and I sat watching the kids go by and the baby slept in her carriage. The baby woke up and stared at the carousel with her eyebrows down. She looked like she was ready to give the carousel a bit of baby ninjery, if it spun too close.

As we sat silently enjoying the antiquated atmosphere, an Indian boy of about five with a missing front tooth walked up to #1GF!, put his hand on her knee, and started talking to her like they had known each other their whole lives. The kid was glowing with personality, but he kept reaching toward the baby.

#1GF! finally had to tell him, “Okay, just don’t touch the baby.”

“Why?” the boy asked. “Is she sick?”

I couldn’t help but smile. The kid’s grandmother called him back to finish his ice cream.

We left our bench for someone else to enjoy, and walked home in wind that had gotten so strong that we had to yell above it to be heard. It pushed my jeans against my legs and pushed the carriage off course. Even with the gale blowing, it was warm enough that we didn’t need jackets.

When we got back to the house, I was sweating. The baby fell asleep at 5PM, and I gave out candy out to a couple of the early trick or treating neighborhood kids. #1GF! went next door to see if they wanted to park in our driveway to get their cars off of the street. They didn’t. Halloween in a beach town isn’t the same as city Halloween.

I put a chicken pot pie in the oven, and made plans to have people over on Sunday morning. #1GF! made plans to visit people on Sunday afternoon. I tried to think of something to bake for all those people to snack on.

Giving out candy isn’t really my thing, so I decided to make gingerbread cookies while #1GF! waited to give out candy. I must’ve rolled those cookies out ten times before flowering the shit out of them and giving them one last try. It didn’t help.

I eventually rolled the cookies into balls and put them on a cookie sheet as if they were drop cookies. It was the last thing I could think to do before dumping the whole ball of dough in the trash. How hard is it to cut a cookie? What do you need a fucking degree in gingerology to get a fucking simple cookie cut? What kind of bullshit is that?

By the time those cookies were ready to go into the oven, I was actually pissed off. I was making cookies when the first trick or treaters came by. #1GF! was off handling the baby, so I rinsed off my hands and took over her candy donating duties. I knelt down and held out the bowl of candy to a three year old in a dragon costume. #1GF! came out holding the baby.

The kid grabbed a handful of candy. “Can I come in?” he asked.

“Sure,” said #1GF! behind me.

“Great,” the kid said as he tried to figure out a way past my crouching frame hogging up the doorway.

“Do you want some dinner, too,” #1GF! asked.

“YEA! What are you having?”

His mom laughed and took the little dragon away. I didn’t seem like we were the first house this happened to.

What I Learned

• Windows Enterprise Defender sucks.
• Sometimes your parents will find inexplicable deals on tech. Sometimes, people fart “Eye of the Tiger”. It’s improbable, but not impossible.
• The Bielski brothers evaded the Nazis and hid 1200 people in the Naliboki Forest during World War II.
• Windows 7 looks exactly like Vista.
• If given the chance and ten minutes, a user will lose a password.
• Generally, anger is not hot enough to unwarp a door.
• Just because a baby doesn’t understand English, that doesn’t mean that she can’t hear.
• Now recipes have the ability to piss me off.
• I can replace my fridge’s water filter.
• The baby will only find her hand delicious if she’s sitting up.
• A Writer’s Coach by Jack Hart is excellent.
• Some kids are born with personality.
• Some kids are more interested in dinner than trick or treating.
• I can’t cut out a cookie to save my life.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

#1GF!’s family headed out, and we started preparing homemade chicken soup for dinner. Our recipe originated from reading the back of a dried chicken soup packet and eliminating anything I couldn’t instantly pronounce. It’s not complicated, and it’s hard to beat on the heartiness scale.

A lot of people have a roast chicken and then use the carcass to make chicken soup. You want to know the secret of a good chicken soup? Don’t use a chicken carcass. Boil a whole chicken for an hour (until the chicken juice runs clear but before the chicken falls apart in the pot), take it out, and shred the meat into strings by hand. Throw the meat back in the pot and dump the carcass. It takes a fair amount of time to do it this way, but the heartiness and consistency will keep you from ingesting a red and white can of chemicals ever again.

Macoosh came by later and ended up staying for dinner. It was rare that we got to see her, and it was good to have her around for a few hours.

Macoosh headed back into the real world, and I got the baby to fall asleep in my arms, which never happens.

Monday (Day 869): Treat Me Like A Car…When I Feel Like It

I woke up feeling wide awake and thought it was 6AM. I wanted to bound out of bed and attack the day. Unfortunately for me, it was really only 1AM. Will the perks of parenthood never cease? When 6AM really arrived, I took the baby out of the bedroom and she slept on my chest for a couple of hours while I watched Sons of Anarchy. It was an interesting twist on a drama, but I never got engrossed enough that I could see myself remembering to watch it.

Once #1GF! was up, I made a list of things that needed to be done around the house and attacked it. I went to the local home megastore to pick up some caulk and spray foam insulation. I was going to get some weather stripping, but realized that I already had some at home.

When I got home, I caulked the attic windows for a quick checkmark. I went downstairs to install some weatherstripping, but what I had on hand was compression weatherstripping, and there was no groove on the door to install it into. The only way that I could get that checkmark would be to take the door frame apart. I debated about the value of that checkmark while pulling on various boards, but soon moved on to something else.

I started installing insulation on the heat pipes in the cellar, and realized that the clips holding all of the pipes were too small to hold an insulated pipe. If was going to insulate the pipes, I was going to have to replace every clip along the way. It’s called scope creep, folks, and it happens as much at home as it does in the business world.

I went to the local hardware store to pick up some clamps and extra pipe insulation, and a guy on a bike did not like the speed at which I entered the store’s parking lot from the main road. He threw up his hands at me in aggravation. I shook my head. I’ve been run off the road on a bike by a car, and I’m all for people going green if they want to, but those people who want their bikes treated like cars should invest in a fucking air horn, and get the fuck out of the middle of the road. Unfortunately, the hardware store didn’t have any of what I was looking for, so I picked up some foam weatherstripping.

I went home, put the weatherstripping aside, and checked the bulkhead for leaks. I couldn’t find one, despite a small puddle on one of the stairs. I checked some bricks around the bulkhead for cracks, and couldn’t find anything there either. I moved on and insulated the one of the doors with the cheap, foam weatherstripping. I took another checkmark.

I went to another home megastore to pick up insulation, clamps, and some Rustoleum for any painting that I might do in the future. I got home at 8PM after talking to an ex-coworker in an aisle for over an hour. My day was pretty close to over, and despite all my good intentions, I had only two minor checkmarks. Insulating a door and caulking two windows, two projects that are as difficult as squeezing toothpaste, had taken me all day. It was a little sad.

I ate some leftover chicken soup and watched a new show called Flash Forward with #1GF!. The baby was asleep. #1GF! went to bed, and I wrote down a couple of days worth of notes in my notebook.

Tuesday (Day 870): Wrapping My Pipe

I went to the basement at 10AM to insulate the heating pipes. “This won’t take long,” I told #1GF!. She rolled her eyes. “Couple of hours, tops,” I reiterated. At noon, I emerged for a sandwich. At 2PM, I realized that I was one clip and one piece of insulation short of finished. I wasn’t happy about having to go back to the hardware store, but I was happy with my ability to roughly estimate materials.

I went back to the store because #1GF! was not going to let another project die at 90%. I felt the same. I bought insulation, clips, two extra pieces of insulation, and two extra clips. When I finished, I only had two pieces of insulation to return.

I thinned the spider population as I insulated, and was finished up and showered by 5PM. I felt like I hadn’t seen the baby all day, so I took her. She cried on me for a while and fell asleep soon after. It was the best I was going to get.

#1GF! and I sat down to watch another episode of Flash Forward. While I thought that the show had a great concept, some of the acting bordered on awful. #1GF! had a hard time with Harold from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle in a serious role. We weren’t sure that we’d be watching more than two episodes.

Later on that night, several fire trucks showed up to pick up a neighbor. When strobes of red and blue light fill your living room, it’s not a good sign. #1GF! went over to check on the wife, and I watched the baby.

Wednesday (Day 871): Urination Theft & The Restaurant Mall

We gave the baby a bath and then took a drive to look at some leaves. The trees hadn’t really turned yet, but we drove on routes 117, 62, and 2A, which run through the birthplace of the American Revolution. It was all very historic with its wooden fences and small towns.

As the miles passed, I stared out the window and thought about the concept of malls and how ingenious they are. If you have a store there, your foot traffic is all people who are looking to spend. If you’re looking to spend, there are ample opportunities to do so. Everyone knows why they’re there. It’s the perfect storm for buyer and seller.

I tried to apply the mall concept elsewhere, like say online. I ended up spending quite a few minutes dreaming up a business that is already known as Amazon. I then tried to apply the mall concept to sports and gyms, but failed.

The best I could come up with was a restaurant mall. Inside would be set up like a city in a movie set, with cobblestone streets, an artificial sky painted on the ceiling, lights that approximated day and night, etc. All the restaurants could offer outdoor or indoor seating year round.

I explained the idea to #1GF!. “It would be good for people because you could always find somewhere else to eat if the wait at your favorite restaurant happened to be too long. And you wouldn’t have to get back in the car and waste time driving.”

“Uh huh,” said #1GF! absently.

“Maybe part of the mall is all romantic hideaways, and another is a constant party for the younger crowd. It would be pleasantly and unmistakeably artificial. You could eat dinner, take a stroll down one the streets toward dessert town.”

“I think I could get on board with something that includes a place called dessert town, but aren’t you talking about a food court?”

“And that’s the problem. The only thing I can’t figure out how to solve is getting past the perception that the restaurant mall is just a food court. Well, that and the billions required to develop it.”

“Yes, the billions.”

I smiled and turned to #1GF!. “This is just like old times isn’t it?”

“With me driving aimlessly and you thinking up crazy ideas?”

“Aaaand how.”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

We stopped at a Dunkin Donuts to unload some excess liquid we were transporting. I always feel a little weird about using the bathroom and not buying anything, even when it is a chain restaurant. I have no idea why or if it’s a common feeling for people.

After our urination theft, #1GF! fed the baby in the car and headed home. We tried to take Route 20, but missed the turn and ended up on route 9, which was efficiently less scenic. We got home around 5PM, and ate leftovers for dinner.

Thursday (Day 872): From Now On Astronomy And Astrology Are The Same Thing

I think I woke up at 1AM. Or 3AM. Or 1AM and 3AM. I have no idea what the red blur on the clock really was, but I know it wasn’t 6AM. The baby was making regular and unignorable noises, so I took her out of the room to let #1GF! catch up on her sleep. As if to foil my plan, the baby was awake and hungry within an hour. I woke #1GF!, ate breakfast, took the baby back after the feeding, and sent #1GF! back to bed.

Before I knew it, it was 10AM. I felt a certain panic that the day was already slipping away from me. I went out at 11AM to pick up a tuck pointer to help dislodge some of the neglect that had crept between the bricks over the last few decades. I brought it home, inspected the worst side of the house, and wanted to repoint the entire thing. I could hear #1GF! in my head telling me to take it easy. If I didn’t focus on the big issues, I would never finish. I spent a couple of hours chipping and patching the obvious problems, cleaned off the tools, and went inside to dispatch a sandwich without the dignity of a plate or chair. It was devoured while standing over the sink, which had been my preferred method of sandwich eating for over twenty years.

With the fuel delivered, I grabbed a tube of Seamermate and a ladder and sealed a leaky seam on one of the gutters. Knowing that rain was coming, I reluctantly went around the gutters, cleaning out the leaves and debris. It wasn’t something that I wanted to do, but the little splashes of stinky garbage juice to the face really made the whole project refreshing.

As I was cleaning, noticed that a hole looked like it had been punched by a hammer in one of the new window frames. To make up for destroying the window, the culprit had filled the hole with common household caulk. I already had one brand new frame replaced for the exact same reason. My original contractor was a gift that just kept on giving. Like fucking herpes.

I was back inside by 4PM, and debated on doing more repointing because there was still daylight left to burn. Instead, I decided to shower and spend some time with my new family.

Neither #1GF! or I wanted to cook, so I ran out to get pizza. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Didn’t I swear off of pizza just a couple of weeks ago because it was an exercise in aggravation? Sure, but Thursday had traditionally been pizza night, and the baby was sleeping. There was no way that she would cry. We had the magic colic medicine.

When I got home, we barely managed to get through dinner before the baby woke up screaming. I took her, and she immediately threw up all over my shirt. As soon as I changed, she threw up again, this time going right over a burp cloth and onto my pants. Fifteen minutes later, she avoided the burp cloth yet again, and threw up on the shirt I had just changed into. Two shirts, a pair of pants, two burp cloths, and one and a half baby outfits were retired in a thirty minute period.

Soon after the baby had calmed down enough that she wasn’t screaming or making her parents change their clothes, we got a call for PC support from #1GF!’s family. PC support is always a patience building exercise, but I found that it’s even more interesting when you’re flying blind (i.e. you can’t see the user’s screen) and holding a baby. After a lot of “Well, what do you see?” and “Hold on a sec,” I got the problem resolved. I think tech support is how Buddhas and serial killers are built.

By 8PM, it felt like midnight. I was sitting comatose in front of the news, and I saw a story that there was a Harry Potter exhibit at the Science Museum. 1.) How is that news, and 2.) Since when is an exhibit about fictional witches something that belongs in the Museum of Science? Maybe I just didn’t understand science anymore. From that point on, I decided that I’d try to use “astronomy” and “astrology” interchangeably in conversation.

Friday (Day 873): Star Trek Waffles, Suicidal Milk, & Big Dig

I got up early and sent #1GF! back to bed. I lay on the couch with the baby on my chest, keeping guard over her until she summoned the one from whom she feeds. Because laying on a couch in silence in the pre-dawn light with a warm baby on your chest isn’t the most energizing experience, I fell asleep for a few seconds. I awoke as if I had been shocked. Nature was giving me a good hard slap in the face for falling asleep with an infant on my chest. I lay there watching the baby sleep, and then moved her to her swing for safekeeping once she woke up.

I didn’t have my book, so I went into the bedroom to get it, and accidentally woke #1GF!. I eased out of the room and let her drift back to sleep. The baby wouldn’t fall back to sleep because she was bent on having a one-sided baby chat with her father. She eventually woke up #1GF!, who took over her care.

I hadn’t gone food shopping in a while, and the milk committed suicide. I found it a few days after the fact, proving that I thought of it as nothing more than a gallon of milk. I told the reporters that showed up that the milk seemed nice, and although it hung out with cereal and cookies once and a while, it mostly kept to itself.

There was nothing edible in the fridge, so I dug around behind the bags of frozen vegetables in the freezer to see if I could rustle up a breakfast-like substance. What I found was a box of Star Trek waffles. Yes, they do exist, whether they should or not is still up for debate. I ate them and quickly realized that I should’ve left them in their cryogenic state for future generations.

I had a cup of tea and thought about the projects that I would be taking on that day. I was either going to repoint the fireplace, weatherproof the attic, or blow it all off to hang out with my ladies. I opted for door number three.

We went out to pick up some stuff at Target and Walmart, and ended up feeding the baby in the car in the Target parking lot. We would’ve fed her at Walmart, but whip out a breast anywhere near a Walmart and you’re bound to have five grubby kids hanging off it before you can shoo them away.

We continued the shopping trip by dropping into Babies R Us to pick up some things for, well, the baby. A woman in the store “Awwww’d” at the baby as I passed. That was sort of neat.

Once again, we thought about buying a funny Halloween costume for the baby just to entertain ourselves. There was a Frankenstein with a flat head and bolts in the neck and a giant crab with multiple arms. Even though the baby didn’t have the motor skills to stand (never mind trick or treat), her confused face peeking out of either of those costumes would’ve been pretty funny. It wasn’t twenty dollars funny, so they stayed on the rack.

After Babies R Us, we went to the supermarket. Well, I did. The baby and her mama went to Marshalls to look for whatever it is that babies and baby mamas look for in Marshalls.

I ran through the grocery store, shoveling food into the cart, not knowing how long I actually had before the baby sonically exploded in #1GF!’s arms. I made it to the last aisle in record time.

I looked in the freezer case for some chocolate ice cream, and scanned for my favorite, Big Dig. The stores never carry my favorites. When I saw an actual container of Big Dig in the freezer, it felt like my lucky day. I burst out with “NICE!”, and whipped the freezer door open to collect my prize. In my excitement, I startled an older woman nearby who was making her ice cream choice with the same care and attention that some women reserve for online dating services.

When I got outside, #1GF! and the baby were already in the car. With the doors closed, I could hear that we had pushed the baby too far. She cried the whole way home–possibly from hunger, possibly from being overtired.

Once the groceries were unpacked, #1GF! told me that she wanted quiche for dinner. I think we might’ve talked about it at one point during the day, but babies are mind erasers. Despite doing the food shopping, I didn’t have the ingredients for a quiche. I suggested something else, but #1GF! inexplicably had her mind set on quiche.

She ran out to get some cheese, and I stayed home for some quality time with my pretty little barf machine. Not moments after her mother left, I moved the baby slightly and she never settled back down. In fact, she screamed until her mother returned. Once I handed her back to #1GF!, she calmed right down.

I made dinner and #1GF! put the baby to bed. A call came in on our house appraisal, and with the money we sunk into the house, we were still in the hole tens of thousands of dollars. That was nice. It was a down market, and it’s never a loss unless you sell, but it even unrealized losses aren’t great to hear.

I went into my office to see if I could load Counterstrike on my PC because some old friends were getting together online to semi-relive the regular Counterstrike LAN parties of 2001/2002. I doubted we’d recapture the fun, but I thought I’d get involved.

I tried to be quiet, but the minute I turned on the PC, the baby started making small noises in the adjoining room. I was making a bad choice. I was opting for my own fun at the expense of the baby. I shook my head and shut the PC down. There would be other games. I was no longer the center of the universe, and I had to make good choices for the person who was.

#1GF! and I ate dinner and watched 7 pounds. At the 33 minute mark, I waved a hand at the screen. “Bah,” I said like an old man who was one question away from talking about how things were better in his day.

“What?” asked #1GF!.

“I have it figured out.”

“Oh, come on. You do not.”

“I do.”

“What happens then?”

“Well, if I tell you, it will ruin it for you. I’ll write it down and we’ll see if I’m right after the movie.”

I wrote down the ending on a scrap of paper, and quickly lost interest in the plodding, painfully obvious plot. I became more interested in the baby monitor. The baby made a small peep like she was in distress, and I wanted to go in and hold her hand or something. I turned to #1GF!. “Do you know how your mother feels, you know, since you had the baby?”

#1GF! got dragged out of the movie. “No. What? No. Wait, what?” She hit pause with a sigh. “What are you talking about?”

“I think I understand my parents more now that I am one. There’s an inescapable impulse there. I know that the baby is fine and she’ll never remember any of this, but I wanted to help her when she made that small cry. I have this sudden need to smooth out even her smallest problems.”

“I get that, but what does that have to do with my mother?”

“Has she ever given you stuff that you don’t need?”

“Sure. That happens to everyone.”

“Well, I think I’m starting to understand the parent’s viewpoint in that scenario.”

“Oh, good.” She nodded for a second, waiting.

I motioned to the movie. “Go ahead.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. I already know what happens, anyway.”

“We’ll see.”

After the movie, the paper had the correct ending on it, but #1GF! didn’t seem impressed.

At 11:30PM, we had to wake the baby because she hadn’t eaten in five and a half hours. That was a new record for her–one that we would pay for later.

Saturday (Day 874): Reading And Writing

Ah, payback. I woke up at 1AM, 3AM, 5AM, and 7AM because the baby was noisy or restless all night long. I finally got up with the baby at 7AM, and sent #1GF! back to bed. I sat on the couch trying to get the baby back to sleep. Once she drifted off, I started reading. I zapped in and out of consciousness for a few seconds at a time.

#1GF! got up and took the baby, so I jumped into the shower. While I was in there, I was suddenly stuck trying to plot out some scenes in my next novel. For some reason, the steam helped to loosen up the ideas. I wrote them down as soon as I was dry enough to handle a notebook.

In the afternoon, I returned some books to the library and picked up a few replacements. One was on writing, one was on publishing, and one was for #1GF!.

When I got home, I researched more agents before making pork chops and spaghetti squash for dinner. The baby had really bad gas, so I sat her on my lap while we ate. She eventually freaked out and I couldn’t calm her down. I handed her over to #1GF! and went to check my e-mail. #1GF! had the magic touch and finally got her to sleep.

What I Learned

• The baby’s nose gets clogged when she sleeps on her stomach on my chest. Flipping her onto her back unclogged her nose.
• Compression weatherstripping needs a groove. No groove means you can’t use it.
• A tuck pointer makes repointing infinitely easier.
• Star Trek waffles are not worth eating.
• My original contractor is like a herpe that keeps surfacing.
• Astronomy is to astrology as science is to Harry Potter.
• I feel like I understand my own parents a little better now that I am one.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

The morning was a typical blur of feeding and changing.

Once we were both alert, #1GF! and I discussed the job offer. Although it was good money and working in an interesting job with some really smart people that I already knew and liked, there were a couple of problems with it. First, there was risk involved. Despite having a good reputation at my old company, as the new guy, I could be the first laid off the next time the company emphatically announced that there wouldn’t be any layoffs. And mortgage companies don’t look fondly on that sort of thing.

The bigger problem for me was that I always said that if I went back to my old company, it would have to be for more money and a higher level than when I left. With this offer, I only had half the equation. No matter what my paycheck said, it would be difficult to shake the perception that I crawled back to the company. Perception is everything in business, and crawling is a career limiting move.

I felt that if I didn’t get a level boost before I got hired, I’d end up working my ass off behind the scenes again and be striving for a bump that would prove too difficult or time consuming for management to procure. It’s been a common theme for me. I work hard and smart, but I’m easy to ignore because I’m behind the scenes and don’t dedicate a lot of time and energy to self-promotion.

I once met with a mentor to find out why all my work couldn’t bring in a promotion, and I was told that even though I did a great job, my job, and I quote, “just wasn’t sexy enough” to attract the attention of management. If you want a phrase that makes you feel sick about the work you pour yourself into for a large portion of your waking hours, have someone in a tie use the word “sexy” to tell you that a good tie will trump hard work any day of the week, and all your work will never really amount to anything but more work. True or not, it was the most unfortunate conversation of my career.

I had the feeling that if I went back, I’d have to dedicate more energy to self-promotion than hard work to get anywhere, and I wasn’t sure that it was a route that I was willing to travel. Then again, no matter what my objections, the job was good money, and money talks.

About halfway through the day, I had oscillated more times between yes and no than a virgin on prom night. We were spinning over the same issues, and #1GF! finally got tired of talking about it.

“I can’t talk about this anymore,” she said. “We have to decide and get the call over with. It’s eating too much of our lives.”

“It’s a big decision.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You’re just trying to convince yourself that you want the job.”

“It’s a good job.”

“So decide.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think I’m tired of talking about all this.”

“But what do you think?”

“I can’t make this decision for you. It’s your decision.”

“But the answer will drastically change both of our lives.”

“Jon. Please. Just make a decision and call.”

I paused. If it was something I really wanted, the decision would’ve been easy. “I can’t take the job,” I said.

It wasn’t the answer #1GF! wanted. “Staying home is all about writing books for you, but taking care of the baby doesn’t seem to be at the top of your list of things you want to do with your life.”

“It’s at the top of yours?”

“Yes. It is.” #1GF! welled up.

“I’m going to work my ass off and be hard on myself anyway, and I think I can get a book published. We both know that busting my ass for the company isn’t going to do me any good beyond a paycheck. Quitting writing now is like every other project that I’ve left 90% complete. Plus, it’s not what I want to be. If I get really good at the job, in five years, I’ll be a really good corporate investigator. Sure, maybe they’ll relent and throw me a promotion to the level that I think I should be at already, but the more likely scenario is that I’ll work my ass off and end up with a ton more work from someone who’s getting a promotion for getting me to work harder. I’ve done that. I know the system. It’s not what I want. I’m switching industries and I know that I can do this. I just need time.”

We looked at each other. I felt horribly guilty for saying what I really wanted. “I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too. Just call. The sooner we get this behind us the better.”

I called and thanked the H.R. rep for the generous offer, but told her that I had to decline. I didn’t feel spite. I just didn’t think that it was the right move for me at that time. It didn’t feel good to make that call, but it felt good that the decision wasn’t looming overhead any longer. I wished the woman luck in getting someone into the position, and I meant it. She said that she hoped to get a copy of one of my books one day. Once I hung up that phone, my writing had a precisely defined opportunity cost.

As stupid as it sounds, had they offered me the title that I asked for, I’d be working for my old company right now, drinking coffee with old friends and elbow deep in interesting technology. Title has never been important to me if the money was right, but this was a situation where I needed a concession from the company to bring me back. I wanted to walk back in, not crawl. Justifiable or not, they asked me to crawl and just couldn’t do it.

It’s like that girlfriend you broke up with years ago. You see her a few years later and she’s lost a few pounds and gotten her teeth whitened, but before you take her home, remember that there was probably a good reason that you broke up with her the first time. Before you go back, you should know what those reasons are and figure out if you’ll get enough of what you need to start over. If you won’t, you’re starting off down the same dead end street, only to reacquaint yourself with lessons that you’ve already learned.

I set a lot of zeroes to the wind to follow a dream, and I was doing it a second time. If you ever feel panic that you’re running out of years, you know just how short it is. It’s too, too short. The further you get into it, the less money seems to fit as the answer. Sometimes, you have to do what’s right for you.

At some point, you’re going to have to bet on yourself even when it seems stupid. How big you make that bet is up to you. On this one, I had to push all in. I either have the cards or I don’t. Someday, I’ll look back on this time and think that it was either the greatest move I’ve made, or really, really dumb. No matter how it turns out, the big bets are the things that you remember, not the exact winnings.

We started roasting a chicken, and an appraiser came by in the afternoon to appraise our house for a refinance. We showed him all the improvements we’ve made in the last couple of years, and he spent a fair amount of the visit on his hands and knees examining the bathroom tile. He really seemed to like it, which was cool, but in a very strange way.

Once he left, we had roast chicken and vegetables. I tried to make chicken soup with the leftover carcass, but it came out terribly. The carcass is what I get rid of after I make chicken soup. I dumped the whole pot of bony chicken water down the drain.

After dinner, we walked up and down the hall with the baby to get her to fall asleep. She wasn’t crying as much as usual thanks to the colic medicine, but she was having a hard time falling asleep.

Tuesday (Day 863): Death To Telemarketers

I got up, showered, and started baby care. Before I knew it, it was noon. I cooked banana bread for #1GF!, and I thought it came out like garbage. #1GF! thought it was great. I can’t stand bananas, so I am probably a poor judge of banana related foodstuff.

#1GF! went out to take her mother to an appointment and I stayed home to take care of the baby. The baby fell asleep for a bit and I did some agent research. She woke up, I fed her, and then she smiled and laughed for a couple of hours before falling back to sleep. I sat at my desk and went back to looking up literary agents. Ten minutes later, the phone woke the baby up. I was expecting hours of screaming, but she went back to sleep fairly quickly and I returned to my research. It seemed as if the baby’s colic medicine had completely changed the way she was during the day. Yes, it seemed that way.

The phone rang again, and the baby woke up in an inconsolable fit. I walked her up and down the hall for a couple of hours to calm her down. #1GF! might’ve been right about not having the time to write when taking care of a baby. Maybe…if I had been doing any actual writing.

When #1GF! got home, she took the baby, who continued bawling for another couple of hours. It was a four hour scream fest even with the use of the colic medicine. She finally calmed down, but wouldn’t go to sleep. #1GF! played with her for a while, and I went back to looking up literary agents.

I took the baby back at 8PM, and put her to bed awake at 9PM. I felt bad. I didn’t know if we should stay with her until she fell asleep or put her down and let her fall asleep on her own. She fell asleep almost immediately, so I didn’t have to worry too much about it.

We watched Shark Tank and then Dragon’s Den, which are identical shows from opposite sides of the pond, which deal with people trying to sell their inventions to investors. I’m fascinated by people who can bring their ideas to market because most of my ideas go no further than the pile of scrap paper on my desk.

Wednesday (Day 864): Damn You, Software. Delete The Whole Bang

I was up at 5AM, but was waved off of the baby care by #1GF!. I lay in bed until 6:30AM. I drifted a little, but I’d wake up every time the baby would make a sound. I finally realized that laying in bed wasn’t doing me any good, and got up to have some breakfast while the baby fed.

I took the baby and sent #1GF! to bed for a couple of hours. I finished Approximately Heaven, but I have no idea how it could’ve been filed under humorous fiction. It was a drama, not a comedy. And it had no acknowledgments, which I found very strange for a debut novel.

I then finished the Idiot’s Guide To Getting Published. I didn’t like the long odds of getting published that it presented, but I did like that it congratulated authors who finally find their niche and get a book to market. It seemed like something to strive for. Let me say that again: I thought that being congratulated by a book was something to strive for. Man, that sounds pathetic.

#1GF! got up, and I hopped into the shower. Once I got out, I took over the baby care so that #1GF! could shower. By the time we were ready to tackle the day, the baby had fallen asleep.

I sat at my desk to work on something writing related. I looked up agent info, and then thought that it would be a good idea to either start my next book or get my blog caught up. I stared blankly at my desktop, without a single idea that would turn those good intentions into action. I stood up, walked down the hall, and thought of a thousand other things to write. I ran back to my desk, and as soon as my ass hit my chair, my ideas vanished. No one said that getting back to the writing was going to be easy.

The pages of my notebook were curling from the sheer volume of ink weighing down its pages over the last few weeks, so I set up a speech to text application with the idea that I would transcribe all the notes by voice rather than wearing my fingertips to bloody nubs on my keyboard. I was taking the first step to getting the Life of Riley back on track.

I put on the “Judy the Time-Life operator” headphones and took the bang out for a test run. The first thing that I noticed was that every time I said “thing”, the application typed “bang”. This happened over and over, no matter how I pre-cise-ly I e-nun-ci-a-ted. I finally laughed and said, “Oh my lord,” which it interpreted as “praise the lord,” which made me laugh even more.

The last things that it transcribed were “Damn you, software. What are you doing? Stop that.” I suspected that the software should be introduced to my robot. I took off the microphone and went into the living room to hang out with a human who often couldn’t understand my mumbling either.

A radio station had been running a contest where they would play rapid-fire snippets of songs, and if someone guessed all five, they won $1000. If they didn’t win, $100 was added to the prize money until someone guessed. Guesses were taken once an hour.

After a couple of weeks of listening on the hour, we heard someone finally guess the song scramble. The last song people had been missing turned out to be a Stevie Wonder song, and I felt a small amount of shame. The winner walked away with $8300.

I have no idea why #1GF! and I were so excited about it. Maybe it was because listening along was like rooting for a group. This is probably why people watch football and say “we won” even though the closest they came to participating was turning the television. Either that or the number of hours of baby scream time that we’ve logged has severely lowered the bar on what impresses us.

The baby woke up at about 3PM, so we all went out for a drive. I just wanted to go out because #1GF! and I didn’t seem to be on the same page, or in the same room, or in the same state of consciousness much during the week.

The air was cold and the leaves were starting to turn, but they hadn’t turned enough to be pretty. Mostly, they just made the world look like it was decaying.

We got some coffee and then went to a department store so that #1GF! could do some shopping. I opted to stay in the car with the baby. Eventually, the baby had a freakout, and I changed her to calm her down. In the process, I somehow managed to get crap on the outside of the dirty diaper, so I had to hold it until I could find somewhere to throw it away.

The baby stayed calm for a short time, but she started screaming again just as #1GF! returned. We headed for home with me still holding the diaper. I was going to throw the diaper in the store’s trash can when we drove by, but there were no trash cans. I was stuck holding a dirty diaper in one hand because there was no place else to put it.

We drove home for thirty minutes with the baby screaming loud enough that I thought that she would eventually split her car seat in half. We realized that she was probably hungry, and felt bad that we had kept her out so long. I crammed my free arm backward over the seat to hold her little hands. In my other hand, I was still pinching that dirty diaper between my fingers. The baby went through spurts of full-volume screaming as I tried to simultaneously distract her and keep that diaper from getting baby poo on the floor, dash, or center console. You don’t know how low you can really go until one of your main roles is acting as a shock absorber for a diaper. I was sure that we were going to hit a huge pothole and I was going to end up with a dislocated shoulder and crap in my lap. Or on the ceiling. Or in my hair. Luckily, no such pothole materialized.

#1GF! fed the baby when we got home, but the baby cried for a little while afterward anyway. I made fettuccine alfredo, and in the process, spilled a half cup of Parmesan all over the kitchen floor. Cleaning cheese from the cracks in your wood floor is not something you want to be doing when you’re cooking something that needs to be stirred constantly. I cleaned up the cheese with a vacuum, and realized that we had no extra vacuum bags.

I called to #1GF!. “Do we have vacuum bags? You can’t leave cheese in a vacuum bag, and that thing is full of cheese. We have no vacuum bags? We do? We don’t? Do we?”

“Slow down,” said #1GF! calmly.

“Don’t you want to eat?”

“Yes, but…” She waved toward the mess that was following me like a wake.

I stopped. “I don’t know why I’m rushing. I need to slow down. I just feel like I’m under the gun.” I then turned and threw a handful of salt, not into the pasta water, but into the alfredo. “Oh, COME ON NOW!” I said to the pan of slowly bubbling sauce. I grabbed a spoon and fished out as much of the salt as I could before it dissolved. I wasn’t entirely successful, but #1GF! was nice enough not to say anything about it.

After dinner, I wondered if I could get on TV as some sort of beard expert. #1GF! and I laughed about me sitting on the news in a suit going over the important points of beard growing during one of the news’s many fluff segments.

We watched I Love Lucy, and the end of The Blues Brothers, and I forgot how funny both were. We saw Lucy’s chocolate episode, which was one of #1GF!’s favorites. #1GF! couldn’t understand how I could quote The Blues Brothers after so many years, so I told her that I was on a mission from gahd. I don’t think she got it. She’s going to turn to me after reading this line and ask me to explain it.

Thursday (Day 865): Special Enlimpinators & Single Serving Comas

I was up around 5AM so that #1GF! could take her mother to an appointment. I was going to back to sleep for an hour once the baby was asleep, but wouldn’t waste the time. I got up and showered. “It’s 6AM, and we’re both showered,” I said, amazed. “It’s like we’re normal again.”

#1GF! was out the door by 6:30AM and it was still dark out. I sat at the counter eating a bowl of cereal. The baby was still asleep when I finished, so I emptied the dishwasher, and wasted an hour sitting in front of the TV. The baby kept waking up and falling back to sleep, so I had to keep checking on her. All I was really doing was waiting to feed her.

While I was surfing through the sea of crappy morning television, I saw a commercial for an asthma medicine called Advair. The first warning presented during the commercial was that this particular asthma medicine may increase the risk of asthma related death. What. The. Fuck. If you increase the risk of dying from the problem you’re trying to solve, how can that be sold as fucking medicine? Really, how does something like that make it past the F.D.A.? What’s next? Headache medicine that increases the risk of brain hemorrhage? Erectile dysfunction medication that includes special enlimpinators?

At 9:30AM, I gave up and found myself watching The Golden Girls. Yea, you read that right. If The Golden Girls is the only available source of entertainment, it’s time to move on. It had been four and a half hours since the baby had eaten, and she rarely went more than three hours without food. (I used to do something like this in TPS reports that I wasn’t sure people were actually reading. If you find this line, leave a comment with the sound that your favorite farm animal makes. If there’s enough comments, it should end up looking really confusing to a casual reader. Thanks for playing along.) Although I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do, I woke her up. It was for the baby’s well-being, not to detour a life that was on the verge of becoming tolerant of The Golden Girls.

I fed the baby, and when I changed her, I found poop on her shirt. I couldn’t figure out how long it had been there, so I decided to chuck the clothes in the wash and give the baby a bath. I had never given the baby a bath by myself, but there was no way that I was going to let a brand new baby sit around with an unknown quantity of poop on her person. I took a step away from the baby, said “Okay”, and then stepped back to her. I did this several times as I worked out the logistics of getting the bath ready. The baby just stared at me.

I eventually got everything set up, and gave the baby a squirmy bath. It was a lot harder than I expected with only one set of new parent hands to both wash the baby and keep her from twisting herself into odd contortions.

I dressed her, cleaned up the bath supplies, and picked up around the house. I quickly learned that having one arm wrapped around a baby severely limits the speed of any activity.

By 10:30AM, the baby was cleaned, fed, and burped, and drifting off to sleep in her swing without incident. I looked down at her laying there with her thumb in her mouth and thought, “I love that kid.” I smiled to myself. Once she was asleep, I made a cup of tea, took out the garbage, and turned on the PC. I was trying to work out the outline of my next book in my head.

I checked my mail, and listened to an ancient demo that a friend had sent to me of a band that I was briefly a part of when I was in my twenties. I had one ear in headphones, and the other to a baby monitor. I had my past in one ear, and my future in the other. In between them, I was trying to work out the present.

#1GF! returned in the afternoon and brought her mother for a visit. I made the two of them lunch, fed the baby, and put all of them down for a nap. I sat down at my PC and organized my agent submissions into a spreadsheet to help figure out which queries were still outstanding. Very few were. I then rewrote my query letter to see if I could make it more effective. It’s hard to tell where you’re going wrong without feedback. You don’t know if your query letter is bad, your manuscript is bad, or if you’re simply sending the perfectly good queries to the wrong people.

#1GF! and her mother left in the late afternoon, and the baby had a fit soon after. I got her to fall asleep at 8PM. It was a four hour freakout. I sat in front of the TV and watched I Love Lucy again because I didn’t have the energy for anything else. I grabbed some dinner when #1GF! got home at 9PM, and we found ourselves watching I Love Lucy together. Although, it had been a long day, and neither of us were really watching it. It was simply background noise echoing through our individual comas.

Friday (Day 866): I’m A Cheap Cigar, I’m A Way Of Life…

I got up bleary and tried to take the baby from #1GF! so that she could go back to bed. She wasn’t having it. We compromised and everyone would go back to bed. #1GF! slept for an hour, and I stayed awake, listening to the baby.

It was noon before the cycle of eating and sleeping began to normalize. I showed #1GF! my query letter rewrite, and looked up more agents.

I let #1GF! hear one of the songs from the demo that I made with a band when I was barely scraping my teen years off of my oxblood Doc Martins. She sat there with the headphones on, listening to “TJS-510″…

“I feel like such an old lady,” #1GF! said. “I can’t understand a word he’s saying.”

“He’s saying ‘TJS-510′,” I told her.

“Why?”

“That’s the license plate. It’s about a car accident.”

As if perfectly timed, my favorite scream in the song broke in. Even though the demo is naive, that scream has always been the best moment in the song for me. #1GF! pulled the headphones away from her ears. “Oh, boy. I feel like I’m nine-hundred.” She handed the headphones back to me. “I like the music…” she offered as a consolation prize to counterbalance her eyes which said otherwise. I guess with all the screaming we hear all day, I didn’t think that the scream was so bad. I took the headphones back with a grin.

I jumped in the shower and made a quick lunch, and #1GF! did the same. My parents came over and we had tea and ate cookies while we waited for the baby to wake up. The conversation seemed oddly slow for a while. The baby eventually woke up, and her grandfather fed her. I tried to get the baby to laugh by jumping around, and it worked as predicted.

Once the baby went back to sleep, my parents headed out. I made enchiladas and #1GF! and I sat in front of the TV. #1GF! fell asleep, and I finished watching Frost Nixon, leaving me as the sole survivor. For being about an interview, the movie wasn’t that bad.

Saturday (Day 867): Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti

I got up, showered, and cleaned the house because we were having one of #1GF!’s coworkers over in the afternoon. Despite having regular conversations with the woman over a number of years at my old company, I had never met her in person. That’s what happens when you’re back office in a large corporation that has more buildings than most companies have floors.

I was supposed to make cookies, but the baby was sleeping and the kitchen was already clean. I set out an assortment of whatever sweets we had on hand. The couple brought over cranberry pistachio biscotti, which blew away any cookie that I would’ve made anyway. They stayed for a few hours and left just as the baby had a minor nutty. I’m not saying that caused the departure, but screaming generally isn’t one of those things that makes people want to hang out.

#1GF! fed the baby, and put her to bed by 6PM. I stupidly said, “Wow. It looks like we’re going to eat dinner and maybe even watch a movie tonight.” Once the food hit the plates, the baby burst out crying once again. The dinner was cold and clotted by the time we got her to sleep two hours later.

I quickly checked my e-mail, and threw Yes Man into the DVD player. To pile stupid on top of asinine, I accidentally woke up the baby because I wanted to make sure that she was breathing. What? She didn’t look like she was. She definitely was, and she was pretty vocal about just how little she appreciated the interruption from her paranoid father.

What I Learned

• There has finally been a situation where I cared about title more than money.
• I know the exact opportunity cost of my writing.
• Speech to text applications are pretty cool, but aren’t necessarily time savers.
• Check to see if you have extra vacuum bags before you vacuum up a mess of grated cheese.
• Some substances can increase the risk of killing someone with the problem that they’re trying to solve, and they can still be considered medicine.
• I can give a baby a bath on my own.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.”

We walked by some overgrown lots with great views of the ocean.

“These lots aggravate the hell out of me.”

“I know they do,” said #1GF! absentmindedly.

“More than the boarded up houses right on the beach.”

“I know,” she said, less to agree than to pacify.

“We should buy up these lots. I’ll get a job, we’ll put the baby in childcare, and we’ll build an enormous monstrosity of a home. We’ll never have the time to enjoy it, and we’ll miss the baby growing up, but we’ll have several turrets of our own.”

“Don’t listen to Daddy, honey,” #1GF! said to the baby.

“And more importantly, these empty lots won’t drive me crazy anymore.”

“You’ll find something else like your golden blind cords weren’t spun to the exact same length.”

“Ooh, that would not be good.”

A couple of hours had passed when we finally returned to our humble, non-turreted house, but it seemed a lot later than midafternoon. To make it seem even later, the baby cried for a solid hour once we got her in the door. #1GF! turned on the hair dryer, and the baby magically quieted down.

I cut up some vegetables and threw them in the oven to roast (Note to self: butternut squash isn’t really a roastable vegetable).

The baby had her nightly freakout from 4PM until 6PM, and gave an encore performance from 7PM to 9PM for anyone who might’ve missed the first show. I eventually used #1GF!’s hair dryer trick, and that quieted the baby down without solving the underlying issue.

The baby eventually burped a few hundred times and fell asleep, leaving #1GF! and I with five more hours of screaming notched on our belts.

I tossed the roasted vegetables into some pasta and #1GF! and I watched Rescue Me to unwind. We had seen a few seasons of the show, and I had finally lost interest. Afterward, we caught a couple of episodes of I Love Lucy that were at the tail end of a marathon. I found it interesting that a fifty year old show was funny enough that it could make me laugh out loud, when most modern shows failed to get me to crack a smile.

Monday (Day 855): Beating Heavy Metal At Its Own Game

I got up and #1GF! was already awake. She was watching a movie called Even Money with Ray Liotta and Kim Basinger in it. The acting was as overdone as a soap opera and I was almost positive that it had to have been made in 1992. It was from 2007. I was in awe that something so new could be so 90’s womens’ television retro. I tried to sit next to #1GF! and read a book, but the awful dialog made it impossible.

I rolled my eyes and took the baby out of the room for a diaper change. The baby was still sleeping in the pack-and-play in our room, so we had been using her crib as a changing table. It was all set up with sheets, blankets and bumpers for the sole reason that it looked better when women came to visit. Don’t ask me. Sometimes I just go along with the goddamned program.

I put the baby in the crib and got a good solid wipeful of the brown stuff, and instead of dropping it into the diaper, I dropped it right onto the crib sheets. I stood staring at the three big globs of poo where there was nothing but clean sheet goodness before. Triple shit cakes on toast. I was not happy. I returned the baby to #1GF!, stripped the crib, and threw the sheets in the wash.

I went to the kitchen to scrub out the roasting pan that I forgot to clean from the night before. The pan was not coming clean because I was using one of those plastic netting scrubbers. Fuck scrubbers. Fuck them. They don’t work a tenth as well as old fashioned steel wool. They don’t even sound as good as steel wool.

“What’s that you got there, J-Bone?”

[explosion] “Steeeeel wool.” [double explosion]

“What’s that you got there, Fran?”

[shrug] “A scrubber.” [wah wahhhh]

I thought about throwing the pans in the dishwasher, but I imagined that I’d have to clean them afterward anyway. I was tied to my scrubbing. I stopped midway through and had breakfast. I ate my cereal and could hear #1GF! cleaning another diaper.

“Whoa! What did you do? Oh, boy…[several other random exclamations omitted]. That’s a four wipe diaper.”

Diapers are now rated by the number of wipes needed to clean them. A four wipe diaper for #1GF! is somewhere near a thirty-six wipe diaper for me. I chose not to enter the room to see that carnage. Instead, I finished my cereal and then finished the pans.

I threw the laundry in the dryer and it was all tiny baby clothes. There were socks that wouldn’t fit on your thumb sticking out of a tangle of pink and white. I threw the tiny outfits into the dryer one at a time. If someone kidnapped me and transported me to a space station as a cook, I would be more surprised at what my life has become.

I went into the living room to do something macho like have a cup of tea (I’ve been too lazy to make coffee, and associate fresh brewed coffee with writing, which I was heavily avoiding). The kettle whistled, and the baby cooed an answer to it in her sleep. I’m genetically predisposed to mention that the kid is a genius, communicating this early. I know all parents say that. This time it’s true. It has nothing to do with being her parent. She has the gift of kettle whispering.

The sun was shining in the windows, so I read on the couch for a bit and drank my stupid tea. No ladies showed up with crumpets, which I took as a good sign. Once you get on the crumpet ladies’ radar, it’s all manners and gossip, and I’m just not built for that sort of horseshit.

My hair, still unwashed, made me look like I was auditioning for The Cure, circa 1990. #1GF! walked in. “When are you getting a haircut?”

“The barber isn’t answering my calls, and I’ve been holding out just in case he took a vacation.”

“Just go up the street.”

“After twenty years? Somehow, going to a new barber just seems wrong.”

“That hair is wrong, George.”

“For the last time, I am not George Michael.”

“Faith a faith a faith.”

“C c c c c c come on.”

“See?”

I picked up my notebook and scribbled some notes while listening to the oldies channel. The room was filled with upbeat and comfortable pop from before my time, and it perfectly complimented the soft comfort of the sectional and the sleeping baby rocking back and forth in her swing. The muffled sound of a hairdryer in the background turned my attention to the woman getting ready at a leisurely pace down the hall. Having the time together to bond as a family, where time was slow and sometimes blurred, was a unique gift.

I called our current mortgage company to see if there was a faster way to get a lower rate without going through the refinance process, but they told me that the only way to get a lower rate directly from them would be to claim a hardship. Beyond that, all I could do was reapply for a refinance loan. I called our mortgage broker and made an appointment to refinance.

#1GF! left to take her mother to an appointment, leaving the baby and I in the house alone. I changed the baby and she smiled and giggled at me. That doesn’t seem like a major deal, but babies aren’t born with a sense of humor. It takes a while for them to be able to smile and laugh at the world around them.

I put her down for a nap and finished Tepper Isn’t Going Out by Calvin Trillan. I got the book on Saturday at 5PM, and it wasn’t a page turner. My reading speed had definitely gone up.

I fed the baby in the midafternoon, but she refused to go to sleep afterward. A couple of hours later, she started crying. I figured that it was time to eat again. It wasn’t. The baby freaked for forty minutes. I tried everything to calm her down, including #1GF!’s hair dryer. I plugged in the vacuum as a last resort, and the baby fell asleep in my arms before I could turn it on. There was no discernible reason for the outbreak. One second she was screaming, the next, she was out cold.

I sat on the couch enjoying the quiet and reading a book about book publishing. #1GF! walked in around 5PM. She looked horrified. “Oh no. The vacuum.”

I explained what happened. I was a little tired. I made dinner, and #1GF! took the baby while she freaked out from 7 to 9PM. I took her back for the 9 to 10PM freakout, and #1GF! took her back for the 10 to 11PM. Let me save you the addition: it was a five hour freakout.

When it was over, both of the ladies fell asleep. I sat on the couch listening to nothing but the scratching of pen on paper as I reconstructed the day in my notebook. When you have a colicky baby, you don’t need heavy metal. You get all the screaming and auditory chaos that you could possibly need.

Tuesday (Day 856): The Frustrated Old Man Freaks Out

I got showered and got no answer from the barber shop again. I bit the bullet and went down to a local shop to get my haircut. I felt weird about being there (because I had been going to the same place for twenty-five years and this shop had no sign), but I needed a haircut, and my barber was missing in action.

I opened the belled door, and took a seat. No one flitted around, and there were no black and white photos of overly serious models on the wall. All the magazines were from 2007, there was Clubman talc on the counter, and a couple of old guys sat waiting. I took this all as a good sign.

My haircut didn’t take long, and it came out pretty close to my regular cut. I smelled of Clubman aftershave, the sides of my hair were short and tapered while the top of my hair was long enough to comb to the side. It was a style built for Brylcreem.

When I got home, I suddenly realized that I had an old man haircut. Not an old man in the 2000’s haircut, but an old man haircut as defined by what I thought an old man was when I was a kid. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a haircut that one of those guys would wear, and it made me want to say things like “Oh, for crying out loud,” “hold your horses,” and “don’t have a conniption.”

Do we all define our stereotypical vision of an old person by the old people from when we were kids? I realized that I did. My particular vision involved men draped in overcoats and topped with hats with feathers in them who talk about Doubleya Doubleya Two and look like they might just sock you in the mouth with their gnarled up old fists.

Those men are pretty much gone now, yet that is the vision of old that I am stuck with. And it’s an illusion because old people aren’t like that these days. They don’t wear the overcoats, and if they’re wearing a hat it’s of the baseball variety. They rarely talk about walking uphill to school and hardly ever look like they would knock your whippersnapping ass out. It’s a bit disappointing, considering I’m now a few wrinkles and a hat away from being one of them.

I rinsed the spare hair off my head in the tub, and gave the baby a bath in the sink. Looking clean and fresh, we all went to the baby’s one month doctor’s appointment.

The baby was average on every measurement except height, where she was in the 90th percentile for her age. Once she was measured and weighed, we got her dressed and she had four shots. She didn’t notice the first two, but the second two set her on fire. It took #1GF! feeding her to calm her down.

The doctor recommended some digestion medicine called Mylicon to stop the crying fits, so we picked some up on the way home. The baby was sleeping off her shot trauma, so we drove around for a while enjoying the quiet.

When we got home, I cooked dinner and we prepped ourselves for an evening devoid of screaming thanks to the magical potion we picked up at the magical drugstore. After the baby ate, she got the first dose of her medicine and…cried anyway. She stopped for twenty minutes so that we could eat dinner, and I started praising the medicine’s fast-acting miracle properties. She then started up again. She ate and cried on and off until she passed out at 7:15PM.

I quickly checked my e-mail, and shut down the PC so that the baby could go to bed. There was no easy way for me to work. I write with a keyboard because I’d waste a barrel of ink crossing things out and a barrel of hours following squiggly arrows around the page between sentences. It’s fucking frustrating not to have a way to write, but what could I do? The baby takes priority. The new generation is here. It’s over for me anyway.

I went to sit on the couch, and within minutes, the phone rang and woke the baby up. She screamed for a half hour. I used every trick I had to make her stop, and eventually #1GF! had to take over.

I think that if you’re resolved to the fact that the baby is going to freak out, you can deal with it a little better. It still sucks, but you’re prepared. This was the same level of freakout, but it seemed worse because we had believed that the medicine would stop it.

This week was already hard. There were a lot of minor things going on, but the pile was growing. And when you think that you have a major item like colic out of the way, and you don’t, all those little things can get very frustrating.

You rush and do what you can when the baby is quiet because you never know how much quiet you have left. You’re constantly under the gun, and most projects hover in some form of completion that is always less than 100%. And sometimes when you know that you should be getting things done, you’re too busy staring at her or sitting comatose enjoying the unbelievable quiet.

During the day, I realized that what I was already doing everything that my book publishing manual was saying, and doing it unsuccessfully. It said to try submitting to publishers directly, which I hadn’t done because other sources said that submitting directly to publishers could end up burning your yet unhired agent’s contacts ahead of time.

I was fucking frustrated. I know the baby is #1, but if my PC was off limits at the times when I wanted to write, how could I move forward? The only way I could see would be to make inspiration not something to chase, but a box to be opened when time permits. Or something like that.

At 10:30PM, I had a mini freakout of my own. I vented about the baby crying all the time, not being able to get anything written, and about how doing one simple thing, such as going to the store, ends up being an involved process that eats hours.

“I feel guilty about leaving you to deal with a screaming baby, and yet getting inspired on command in the five minutes between screams is impossible. And honestly, I don’t want to give up a single smile on her round, little face just to put words on a page. The only time I feel like I can relax into writing is when both of you are asleep…and then I can’t write because tacking on the keys would would keep you both awake.”

I got louder.

“I’m right here,” #1GF! said.

I lowered my voice to a whisper. “And all the rejections for the book. Is writing another one really a good idea? It’s like painting something you can’t sell. What do you do with it once it’s done? Hang it in your den?”

#1GF! looked over the baby at me sympathetically. I went on. “Seriously. What do you do with a manuscript that no one wants?”

“You wrote a book,” she said as if it were an achievement.

“Yea, but what good is it?” I stared at the TV. “I think I need a win.”

#1GF! looked down at the baby.

I could see that I was upsetting #1GF!. “Or maybe I need to just shut the fuck up. I’m venting. It’s nothing. We barely have anything to do this week, but everything seems like it’s piling up. It’s nothing. I’m fine. Really. I’m fine.”

#1GF! looked at me like she knew I was going to go on, which I was.

“But, don’t you ever just want the crying to stop? Don’t you want to be able to spend time together? Get a good night’s sleep? Don’t you feel like the days are a blur of feed, change, and soothe?”

#1GF! looked down at the baby and then up and me. “No. I guess I waited so long for her.”

I paused. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t give her up for anything. That’s not what I’m saying. Her little smiles are a reward for all that work. I’ll have to learn to find inspiration in the five minutes that I can find. I’ll get through this. I’m just venting. It’s nothing.” We stared at the TV. “I’m sorry. It will all work out.”

“I can take the baby and you can write. I can go to the store. You don’t have to do it all.”

“That’s not it. I’m not worried about me doing things. I like doing things for you and the baby. This is about getting everything done within our new chokehold time limits.” I looked over at the baby sleeping on #1GF!’s chest and slowed down. “She’s so damned cute. I just need to get through this week. It all boils down to self-confidence. If I believe that I can do it, I can.”

It all seemed like bitching about three weeks of constant rain and wanting a sunny day. Cursing the darkness instead of turning on a light.

#1GF! went to bed, and I sat writing in my notebook until midnight.

Wednesday (Day 857): The Fifteen Second Rule

I got up and took the baby out of the room so that #1GF! could sleep. I stared at the ceiling while the baby slept on my chest. It wasn’t quite light out. I had a cup of tea, ate breakfast, cleaned up the dishes from the night before that I somehow forgot about, cleaned the bathroom, and wiped down the baseboards.

I traded phone messages with the H.R. rep about the job.

I talked to #1GF! about the job while I cleaned. The job would shelve my writing dream, but we agreed that it was a good problem to have. I took a shower, put together some documents for refinancing, and took them out to be photocopied. I dropped them off at home and then did the food shopping.

Midway through the store, I found that there was a pen in my pocket, but no notebook. I carry a notebook with me everywhere, and I didn’t know if I left it at home, or whether I should start searching the store to recover ten weeks of notes and scrawling. I looked around the aisle, and then called home. I tried the house phone and then immediately tried #1GF!’s cell.

#1GF! picked up. “What’s the fifteen second rule?” she asked.

I made up the rule so that #1GF! couldn’t inadvertently send me running around the house chasing her calls to various phones. I had never had the rule used on me. I smirked. “The fifteen second rule states that a caller must give the person at home fifteen seconds to attempt to call back on a missed call before said caller tries another phone in said house.”

“Did you do that?”

“I did not. It is an emergency.”

“Are you okay?”

I realized that our definitions of “emergency” were a little different. “Is my notebook on the counter?”

“Hold on,” #1GF! said. “Yep, it’s right here.”

“Then, I’m okay. I thought I lost it. I thought that my best case scenario would be taking the notebook from a bored teenager behind a customer service desk, and my worst would be the loss of ten weeks of the most important notes we’ve had.”

“Okay, I’ll see you in a bit, nutjob. Be careful. It looks bad out.”

On the way home, the wind really picked up. The trees were blowing around like those silly children’s sprinklers. By the time I got home, it was close to 5PM. I threw a frozen chicken pot pie in the oven, and managed to finish reading another book by the time it was ready.

#1GF! and I ate in shifts, but the baby only freaked out for a few minutes. The medicine might’ve been working, but it was unclear.

We had somehow gotten in the habit of watching Jeopardy! every night, so after dinner, I set up the baby monitor so that we could listen to the show while we washed the dishes. It wasn’t screaming amounts of fun, but it was an alternative use for the baby monitor. Once the dishes were clean, I put the monitor back in our room, and #1GF! took the baby to the den.

We’ve taken to talking to each other randomly through the baby monitor as a joke when one of us is putting the baby to bed. After I set up the baby monitor, I clapped thinking #1GF! would hear it.

When I walked into the den, #1GF! and the baby were both wide-eyed and staring at me. “I can’t believe you did that,” said #1GF!.

I burst out laughing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would be so loud.”

#1GF! still didn’t believe me, but I didn’t.

Thursday (Day 858): The Value Of Dreams

I read a book, had a cup of tea, and looked up mortgage rates. They were at 4.25%, which was lower than what I was refinancing at later in the day. I called the broker to let him know that rates had dropped.

I got a call from the H.R. rep about the job with my old company. They hit the bottom of my requested salary range, but wouldn’t hit my title requirements. They demanded an answer within twenty-four hours. I applied for the job five months prior, so I was a little confused about the sudden rush to get an answer from me. I asked for more time given the impact that the decision would have on my life. The rep said that she would have to see if that were possible and call me back. I found that a little irritating. If it wasn’t okay for me to take a weekend to decide, then the company wanted control more than they wanted me. Their inflexibility was going to earn them a quick decline.

I hung up and talked over the job with #1GF!. On the one hand, it would be the death knell of my dream of writing books for a living. It would also be the end of the Life of Riley series, the end of the beard growing, and a step towards something that is not my ideal career path. On the hand, it was decent money and a familiar environment, not to mention that #1GF! was better at taking care of the baby than I was.

The H.R. rep called back and gave me until the following Monday to decide. I was appreciative, but had a large decision looming over the weekend.

The mortgage guy was coming by to go over our refinancing documents, so I cleaned the counter and made a pot of coffee. I had to take the coffee grinder outside and grind the coffee on the porch so as not to wake the baby, which was a first. I’m surprised I didn’t think of it sooner.

At 3PM, we refinanced, cutting both our rate and our term. It felt like a win.

I called my sister and talked to her about how when recycling becomes cheaper than throwing things away, more people will do it. Right now, recycling costs me money, and frankly, the good feelings aren’t covering the hundreds of extra dollars.

#1GF! and I ate dinner and the baby was amazingly quiet. Afterward, I researched writing resources and then looked for publishers who might be interested in my manuscript. Courting publishers wasn’t the way that I wanted to go, so it didn’t last long. I answered some e-mail that had piled up, and got offline.

The baby slept, and #1GF! and I watched The Office. She was still surprisingly quiet.

Even though I had been keeping it a secret, my parents called and I talked to them about the job. The job was in a deep, deep part of corporate security that policed employees without their knowledge. My father mentioned that it sounded like something that I would be really good at. I agreed. “Yea, it’s an interesting job, but do I really need to be more paranoid than I already am?”

My father laughed. “I never thought of it like that.”

After I hung up, I expressed my concerns about taking the job and ending up with a cop mentality to #1GF!.

“You already have that!” she said. I grumbled a response and changed the subject to some of the ideas for books that had been rattling around in my head.

“You haven’t written in two months,” said #1GF!. “You just read all the time.”

“When people blog, I advise them to read a lot of popular blogs to get a feel for the style. When you want to write books, you need to read a lot of popular books. How can you write something that you’re completely unfamiliar with? I know that reading isn’t writing, but it’s necessary for a writer. You pick up new plots, new ways to write dialogue and characters…each book is a publishing success that I might be able to learn something from. Even the bad ones made it through a barrier that I can’t. So, I know it’s not writing, but it’s part of it.”

“You can justify it like that, I guess,” she said.

I sighed. “I know it’s justification on some level, but it’s necessary. It’s part of it. You know, Stephen King recommends that authors read for six hours a day.”

“So, that’s what you’re doing?”

“No. I’ll admit that I’ve been avoiding writing, but I want to enjoy this time with the three of us. I don’t want to miss the smiles or coos or anything. I love that kid.” The baby slept as her swing rocked steadily back and forth. We both looked at her. “So, I know I’m justifying, but chewing through books is me learning more about writing while I can’t write. I don’t have the uninterrupted time to write right now anyway.”

“If you’re watching her all day, you won’t have the time either.”

“So, either way, the dream is dead.”

“It doesn’t have to be…I hate it when you’re negative. You can still write with a job.”

“Maybe. But after working all day and then playing with the baby, I’ll be sitting down at 9PM to write. Even if I was inspired after a long day, I’d be too tired to do it. I just see the dream dying here. I’m not successful at it anyway.”

“Negative. You wrote a book.”

“An unsold book. And even if I sold it, what’s that worth? A couple of grand? You have the house and the baby, when does my dream come in?” The second I said it, I wished I hadn’t. The crowd in my head were chanting “Aaaaassss hole. Aaaaassss hole.”

#1GF! welled up. “Now I feel like shit.”

I knelt down next to her. “I’m sorry. That was out of line. Way, way out of line. It’s not reasonable, but I just want to write. This job sounds like it’s a good job, I guess. It’s probably really interesting. You’re better with the baby anyway. You read to her. I make her laugh and throw up.” I looked at her and went on. “It’s could be good money for the family depending on bonus levels.” We sat for a minute. “It’s a good problem to have. We seem to have a lot of good problems.”

#1GF! finally smiled. “We sure do.”

#1GF! fed the baby and went to bed. I sat in the den jotting notes, and thinking about closing down another chapter in my life. I had the feeling that some of the magic would drain out of things. The robot would return to being an ordinary shop vac. ROCKET CAR! would be sold for something sensible and family oriented. The mug of destiny would have to be returned with a taint of failure. Sometimes dreams provide more value when they’re in the clouds than when they’re flopping around in front of you gasping for air.

Friday (Day 859): The Anvil Of Writing

I watched the Wicker Man on demand because I was the only one awake. It was an oil slick of 70’s, LSD sort of weird floating on the surface of a beaker full of boredom. And the end was idiotic: if you’re trapped in a cage made of twigs on a cliff, don’t give up. Kick the door open and throw a couple of motherfuckers over the edge. Just stupid. It was listed as a classic horror movie, but it was neither classic or horror…unless you define “classic” as simply “old”. Then, it was a classic. By that definition, I am a classic.

#1GF! went out for a walk, so I watched Anvil! The Story of Anvil, about a band who was on the bleeding edge of heavy metal in 1982, and never made it big. Over twenty-five years later, the band is still hustling to get a record deal and playing to clubs with ten people in them. It was more than a little sad. It was The Wrestler, but real. It was pursuing a dream even though you’re failing.

We like to believe that there are happy endings and the underdogs will eventually win, but sometimes, actually, most of the time, the underdogs stay underdogs. Belief coupled with talent and persistence doesn’t necessarily equal a win. Sometimes the planets fail to align. I didn’t want to end up being the Anvil of writing.

When #1GF! returned home, she pointed out that I had puke down my back. I found that sort of funny. It was the baby’s version of “kick me” sign.

My parents came over for a few hours to see the baby. She was cooing quite a bit. They asked about the job offer, and I accidentally got into it. I didn’t want to talk about it, yet I kept dragging the conversation back to it. The more I talked about it, the more aggravated I became. It was an opportunity that wasn’t supposed to materialize.

My mother encouraged me to be rational and take the job, and my father seemed to understand not wanting to walk back into your old company at the level you were two years prior, no matter what the pay was like. Even though I value their opinions, the more I talked about it, the less I wanted to talk about it. It all boiled down to a simple question: Is there a price that will steer you away from chasing what you really want? Is a bird in the hand worth two in the bush? The answer is usually yes, but there is a price range where the question is nothing but maybe. I was in that price range.

All the book work has been fruitless so far, but that doesn’t mean it will always be, right? The angel on one shoulder revised my question to “How selfish are you?” #1GF! would have to continue working while I chased windmills. The devil on my other shoulder had a nice suit on. He simply asked, “Do you want to be in your own success story?”

My parents left and I started on dinner. The baby cried for fifteen minutes before we put her to bed. Fifteen minutes of screaming wasn’t bad at all. It was like heaven.

Saturday (Day 860): Could Have And Should Have

I had a dream that I was moving out of my dorm room and was late. I couldn’t find my car, and everyone had already left. You have to love when your subconscious tackles a big decision and doesn’t help unravel it a bit.

While I was watching the baby, I gave up on Tom Dorsey’s Nuclear Jellyfish because I couldn’t get into the story. It seemed like it would be right up my alley, but it didn’t work out. I pulled out my bookmark and set it by the door.

My mother called and said that she finished reading my manuscript. She didn’t want me to take it the wrong way, but the only word she could use to describe it was “sophomoric”. She reads a lot of books, and wasn’t exactly my target audience, but I tried to get more criticism out of her anyway. She didn’t really give me a lot to go on, but she’s a mother, and “sophomoric” was about as brutal as she was going to get.

I made pasta salad for #1GF!’s mother, and when we went to visit her, I left the bowl right in the fridge. At least I remembered to bring the baby.

On the way, we dropped into the library so that I could exchange a few books. #1GF! stopped the car and I got ready to run in.

I loomed down at my book list. “I’m an idiot,” I said.

“I hate when you say things like that.”

“If I take this job, some people are going to say I’m an idiot for going back. If I don’t take this job, other people are going to think that I’m an idiot for passing up on the salary. Either way, someone, somewhere is going to think I’m an idiot.”

#1GF! made an angry face at me. I jumped out of the car, shrugged, and then smiled. She stared back at me. I made an angry face and then smiled. She smiled back at me. I turned around to do this several times on the short walk to the library door.

I picked up four books, dropped off a few more, and got back out quickly. The baby was asleep. “That was fast,” said #1GF!. “What’d you get?” I read the liner notes of the first three books, and brought out The Idiots Guide to Publishing.

“I’m an idiot.” I held up the book to complete the joke. “I have this book. And it’s for idiots. Ergo…”

#1GF! was not amused.

We dropped into a store and picked up pasta salad ingredients. I made a batch of pasta salad in #1GF!’s mother’s kitchen while the ladies entertained the baby. It was sort of fun to cook in someone else’s kitchen. Soon after the pasta salad was done, the baby freaked out. We didn’t have the magic gas medicine, so we made a speedy exit.

I dropped by the grocery store on the way home to pick up some diapers. We got home at 5PM, ate the pasta salad I forgot to bring, and put the baby in the swing because we are bad parents. She fell asleep. I turned on Watchmen and #1GF! fell asleep. Despite being nearly three hours long and based on a comic book, I didn’t think it was a bad movie.

I watched a couple of episodes of Cops, which have somehow gone from amusing to depressing over the years. It’s all drunk driving, drug addicts, and pedophiles. I put on an episode of House, which wasn’t that much better.

The baby slept for hours, and most of the time I was trying to process the job issue. Interestingly, I found myself wording rejections most of the time. I tried not to, but it kept happening. What I wanted was to find a reason to want the job. Or maybe I just wanted something to make me forget about writing. “How much do I believe in myself?” I thought. “Can I really be an author? Even a midlist author? Or is it a better idea to take the check and spend my days investigating people who lie, cheat, and steal?”

We surround ourselves with certain people so that we can believe that the world as a whole is made up of people like those we surround ourselves with. But, it isn’t. It’s full of idiots, pedophiles, morons, drunk drivers, and assholes. Full of them. Would spending day after day seeking out those people at work alter my vision of the world?

I was making excuses. I was justifying. But, life is all about perception and justification. And life is short-inhumanely short. There isn’t ever enough time to dedicate to what is important to you, even if you’ve been lucky enough to discover what that is. In the end, the hourglass runs out faster than we anticipate, and the last things you want to be buried with are “could have” and “should have”.

What I Learned

• Butternut squash isn’t really a roastable vegetable.
• I Love Lucy is still funny after 50 years without once using the phrase, “ass juice”.
• A hairdryer can calm a colicky baby.
• There is enough screaming and chaos in a colicky baby to put heavy metal out of business.
• I have an old man haircut.
• My vision of old people is actually my childhood vision of old people.
• Mylicon stops colic.
• Job offers are good problems for unknown writers to have.
• Don’t clap in a baby monitor. It’s too loud on the other end.
• Want to save the world? Make recycling cheaper than throwing things away.
• I don’t want to be the Anvil of writing.
• Cops somehow turned from amusing to depressing in the last few years.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

All the screaming turned out to be some pretty bad gas. #1GF! handled most of it, but the non-stop scream fests weren’t bothering me as much as they had even a week before. Sure, I still wanted to get the poor baby settled as quickly as possible, but I wasn’t feeling the same panic or jangled nerves. My nerves were finally starting to recognize screaming as being the standard sonic state.

Once the baby was asleep, #1GF! and I watched an episode of Dexter and went to bed soon after.

Monday (Day 848): Modern Class Warfare

I took the baby out of the room for a couple of hours so that #1GF! could catch up on the sleep she lost overnight.

#1GF! soon got up and finished her library book, while I searched the library’s website for something new to read. My reading speed has definitely increased in the last few weeks, and I think #1GF!’s has, too.

The baby started fussing, and #1GF! took her out of the den. “I’m putting the baby in the swing because we’re bad parents,” she called out from down the hall.

I shrugged. If handing the child off to a machine kept her from screaming, then that’s what was going to happen. I was at the point where all the well-intentioned parenting rules were disposable if the baby was both safe and quiet. I walked out to the living room to witness the machine transfer.

As soon as the baby was in the swing, she power-puked the entire contents of her stomach all over herself, her clothes, and her surroundings. Pukes happen. But this particular puke illustrated the core personality difference between #1GF! and me.

Even though she was coated in puke, the baby looked relaxed, verging on serene. She has no problem expressing when she’s unhappy, and I wasn’t seeing any signs. My logic circuits surveyed the situation and evaluated that puke soaks into swings faster than it soaks into babies. I got a cloth and started cleaning the swing, and marked the baby for future cleanup.

#1GF!, on the other hand, has beefier empathy circuits than I do, and they are designed to override logic circuits in situations where immediate action is needed. Thus, when the power puke routines run, she can’t help but commence her comfort subroutines. #1GF! immediately picked up the baby and took her to get her out of her puked on clothes as if the baby was even aware that she had clothes with puke on them.

Within thirty seconds, I heard, “Oh, GEEZ!”

“What?” I called, pausing over a paper towel that was impossibly full of baby puke.

“She did it again. It’s all over everything.”

I went in and looked at the baby. #1GF! was correct. There was puke all over the place. The baby was smiling. My logic circuits sent me back to finish cleaning her swing.

As I was throwing the wadded up paper towels away, I noticed a constellation of dried baby boogers on my shoulder that sort of resembled the Milky Way. It had been there long enough that the danger of it going anywhere or getting on anything else was close to zero, so I went back to cleaning the swing. I’m not saying that I was a neat freak before I had a kid, but the discovery of a mass of someone else’s boogers on my shoulder once elicited a reaction bigger than a shrug.

We cleaned up everything and got out of the house by 2PM so that #1GF! could get some baby pictures developed. We dropped by the library and I ran in to pick up a couple of books for each of us. Then, we dropped by the kitchen place so that #1GF! could sign some papers for them. We dropped by a craft store, and #1GF! ran in to get some frames while I sat in the car with the baby. I ended up in the back seat making “goo goo” noises, but the baby stayed quiet.

We went to Dunkin’s, and I got a large black coffee. #1GF! tried to spice things up by ordering a watermelon coolata. I could tell that it was a “live and learn” experience for her from the first sip. Their coffee is barely drinkable, so I don’t know what made us think that they could have mastered a frozen fruit drink.

We drove over to the drugstore to get the baby pictures developed, and in the parking lot was a guy chomping a cigar in his Porsche SUV. He was parked across two spaces to keep other people from parking next to him. I know that #1GF! was heading to another spot, but changed her mind once she saw the crooked Porsche.

“Fuckin’ asshole,” she said louder than expected, considering the windows were down. Certain things can turn a mild-mannered #1GF! into a class warrior. #1GF! pulled the right along side, leaning forward and inching her way into the space that the guy in the Porsche was trying to deter people from taking. #1GF! could barely get out of her car once she was in the spot. “Ass. Hole,” she said to punctuate her parking job. She was at a level that was just below pointing at the guy after saying each word. #1GF! might be small, but she’s a spitfire sometimes.

#1GF! went in to pick up the pictures, leaving me and the cigar chomper sitting next to each other. I shook my head and thought that I’ve never been in a fistfight with someone smoking a cigar before, and it might be a little more difficult to win while holding a baby.

The baby started freaking out a little, so I took her socks off. For some reason, that calmed her down. The baby found her thumb, and stayed entertained, so once #1GF! got back, we took the scenic route home past sprawling, multimillion dollar estates on cliffs overlooking the ocean. By the time we got home, the baby was all smiles. She hadn’t slept much, so I wondered if we’d pay for those smiles later.

(Whether we did or not, is unclear. I was probably too busy calming down a screaming baby to make note of it.)

Tuesday (Day 849): Teenage Security Guards

I was up at 5:30AM and #1GF! already had the baby under control, so I went back to bed for an hour. I got up and read a little before taking the baby back. #1GF! and I showered and dressed, giving the baby two clean targets to throw up on. And she did try.

The first time, she tried to get me and projectile vomited all over her swing. The second time, #1GF!’s ninja-like reflexes had been dulled by a lack of sleep, allowing the baby to run a solid line of baby vomit right down one of her legs from ass to ankle. To punctuate her performance (or perhaps to make up for not donating any barf to Daddy), the baby then shit all over the place. And I mean all over the place. Her bed and her clothes were covered.

After a fair amount of cleanup, we ate a quick lunch, packed the baby into the car, and went to the food warehouse. We lingered there for a while, looking at all the giant items that we couldn’t possibly use in our lifetimes. I calculated that I had made my money back on the membership cost from the savings from giant boxes of Cheerios alone.

The baby started whining toward the end of our stroll, so we picked up the pace and got out of there before her screams startled all the hungry warehouse moochers who were eating their lunches one free sample at a time. We went out to the car and #1GF! changed the baby before putting her in her car seat and packing her in with all the oversized boxes.

We knew that we were pushing our luck, but we went to a department store so that #1GF! could make a quick return. She ran in, and I stayed in the car with the baby. Within five minutes, the baby started freaking out again, so I took her out of her car seat and walked her around the garage.

#1GF! had been speeding around the store chanting “No whammies…no whammies” under her breath, but when she came out of the store and she saw me holding the baby, she knew that we had pushed our luck too far. I moved the car to a less populated spot in the garage, and #1GF! fed the baby in the car. I imagined some teenage security guard zooming in the parking lot cams to see if he could see some boob.

I burped the baby, and then we packed her back in and drove to Montilio’s bakery. We picked up a Hawaiian eye and dropped it off at my parents’ house as a surprise for when they got home. It’s the best pastry ever and a good surprise to find in your fridge. The baby was asleep, so we had a quiet ride home.

When we got home, I cleaned up the house a little, and put an empty, extra large, plastic, bear shaped, animal cracker container next to the cellar door so that I would remember to throw into the recycling bin in the basement at a future, but unspecified time. I then made dinner and promptly forgot to take the container downstairs.

Right on schedule, the baby snapped. #1GF! managed to get her calmed down, and put her to bed. The house was dead quiet once again.

#1GF! and I closed ourselves into the den and started an episode of Dexter to finish off the night. Within three minutes of pushing play, the baby freaked out again. I swear that the baby can hear the push of a play button through walls. After a little bit of soothing, she soon fell back to sleep.

I walked back down to the den in the dark, and one of my perfectly timed steps punted the forgotten plastic bear container down the hall like a lap dog trying to lick the baby (see last week). It tonk tonk tonked against the hardwood floors and bounced off of the baseboard. I froze, ending up in a semi-crouched stance with my spread fingers four inches off of the side of my head. My eyes were scrunched, so I couldn’t see the look of death that I knew that #1GF! was shooting me. We stood for a minute waiting for the screaming to start, but nothing happened. The baby stayed asleep. I promptly took the container to the basement before it could happen again.

Wednesday (Day 850): Tearing Down A Man

I took the baby out of the bedroom at 6AM. She got fussy soon after, and was exiled to the swing. I didn’t want her making noise while #1GF! slept, and the swing was the easiest way to stop her. I tried to enjoy my latest library book, but it took a wrong turn somewhere and turned into a romance.

With the rhythmic ticking of the swing and my eyes numbly oscillating over words that I didn’t care about, I drifted into a light sleep. I woke up feeling guilty, and then thought, “Fuck it. What do I have to do? Everyone else is asleep.” I was finally getting bored with filling every spare moment with reading and let sleep overtake me a couple of paragraphs at a time.

#1GF! got up and jumped in the shower while I kept an eye on the baby. Once I was showered, #1GF! went out to get her hair cut. I fed the baby twice and kept her relatively entertained, although she did cry a fair amount just to keep me on my toes.

During one of her pleasant phases, I found myself taking pictures of her and laughing. I’m not one to capture much of anything on film, but the baby was having a great time, and so was I. Unfortunately, every time I looked at the camera’s screen, it seemed like the pictures weren’t capturing what I was seeing. It was like listening to your own voice and knowing that it didn’t sound right. The magic seen through a dad’s eyes was somehow being lost in the translation from analog to digital.

The baby soon went to sleep, and while putting my library books near the door as a reminder to return them, a note fell out of one the books. It was written on the back of a receipt that someone had abandoned as their bookmark. A woman’s handwriting described a really bad plot involving a fictional location called “Blingtown”. The excited description and number of exclamation points indicated that the writer thought she was on to a great idea. Even though I’m unpublished, I suddenly felt like there were other people who were closer to the beginning of the bell curve of writing talent than I was.

And that was the last contact I had with books for the rest of the day. Even if I had something to read, there was no time. I was too busy minding the baby. I even made dinner at noon and put it in the fridge because I managed to find a few extra minutes. I wondered what a full-time domestic partner could ever hope to accomplish beyond raising children and getting dinner on the table on time.

#1GF! eventually returned with her new hair did, and the minute that I took dinner out of the fridge, the baby flipped. It was uncanny. She would flip at dinner, irrespective of time of day, or if I was cooking or not. All it had to be was time to eat. #1GF! calmed the baby down, and I took a break from the baby duties to check my e-mail.

I got another agent rejection, and realized that I either needed to start my next book, query another twenty agents, or rewrite my query letter. Obviously something wasn’t working. Before I could decide on which of those things to act on, I had to shut down the computer so that the baby could go to sleep. I was starting to figure out that there isn’t enough time for writing and baby care in my day. As hard as it would be, the writing was going to have to give.

I always said that kids are the perfect excuse not to do anything useful with your life. Before I had a child, it was a joke. After the baby, I had a better understanding of my own quote.

With a newborn, it’s all about the baby. And a large portion of the time you once had to spend on yourself is gone. When you manage to find a spare hour, you do have the perfect excuse to sit and watch TV or stare at a wall to unwind. Spending your free time on building yourself into something more, can take more time and discipline than you can muster.

It’s a lot like boot camp: sleep deprivation, cleaning up messes that you didn’t make, and never being addressed by anything but yelling. And just when you think it’s time to relax, there’s more yelling. A baby tears down a man to build up a dad in his place.

The day was long gone, and I had no idea where it went, nor the energy to investigate its disappearance. I wanted to stay up late just to feel like I did something, but knew that I was too tired. I decided to get a small checkmark for myself by replacing a light bulb in the bathroom fan.

I stood on a step stool for a while, and eventually had to get the ladder because I couldn’t figure out how to get the fan enclosure open. I didn’t want the glass to fall on the floor and shatter, and I didn’t want to pull too hard and break some unseen, but necessary plastic clip, but I couldn’t figure the damned thing out.

I danced around the job, gently prying here and there. It was frustrating as hell, mostly because all I was trying to do was change a fucking light bulb. By the end, I was on a ladder, peeking into the fan trying to find some sort of hidden release latch.

I finally figured it out once I was frustrated enough. A good tug and the whole enclosure lowered in place on two giant clips that looked like coat hangers. Good design failed me because I didn’t think it could be that simple. I changed the bulb, and gave up for the day. I had the perfect excuse.

Thursday (Day 851): Offer / Counteroffer

I woke up dreaming about being attacked by a wolf, and having illegal immigrants sleeping in my basement. Other than the fact that it was the first day since the spring that I had to wear jeans, the dream was the most notable part of the morning. The afternoon was a bit different.

The H.R. rep called back and offered me more money to take the job with my old company. It wasn’t enough money, and they still weren’t budging on the promotion. Even though I had a feeling that the company wouldn’t come through in the end, I was reintroduced to the sense of disappointment that the company regularly instilled in me back when I dedicated a large portion of my time and energy to it.

I hung up with the rep and discussed the job with #1GF!. “We can’t take a cut in our household income for me to take this job.”

“No, we can’t.”

“Although, we’re doing okay. We wouldn’t go under.”

“No, we wouldn’t.”

“I haven’t had a solid success in a while though. The job might give me some sense of accomplishment that has been missing from my life over the last couple of years.”

“You have tons of successes,” said #1GF!.

“Not recent ones.”

“You’re the beard man. You’ve been in newspapers, and every other day someone else is linking to you on the web. Fifty thousand people…wait, is that right?”

“Yea, about that.”

“…come to check out your site every month. Fifty Thousand. And that’s not even your highest. That’s huge! What was your highest? A quarter of a million visitors in a month?”

“Yea. It’s all old, though. What have I done lately?”

“You wrote a book.”

“An unsold manuscript,” I corrected.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s a book. And they’re all accomplishments.”

I shook my head. “I guess so.”

“It’s good that you’re always looking forward, but you’re too hard on yourself.”

I thought that it was a nice thing to hear, but I didn’t agree.

#1GF! talked a little more and I called back the H.R. rep and made a counteroffer for more money and a better title. The rep said that she would have to look into it and call me back.

My parents came over at 2PM and fawned over the baby. That was fun. They left a couple of hours later, and the baby went to sleep.

#1GF! and I ate a quick dinner and the baby freaked out right on schedule. Our nerves must’ve toughened up a bit, because we were dealing with the screaming a lot better. By the time the baby was back to sleep, it was 9PM. #1GF! and I were tired, but not as tired as expected.

Friday (Day 852): Grade School Cafeteria Circa 1979

I got up and watched the baby so #1GF! could sleep. The baby ended up sleeping, so I read a book to pass the time.

#1GF! got up, showered, and took over the baby watching at 11AM. I went out to mow the lawn. Once I came back in, #1GF! suggested that I might want to clean out the gutters before the impending rain hit. I had thought about the gutters earlier, and forgotten.

My socks were already off, so I slumped my shoulders, put my socks back on, grabbed a ladder and went back outside to clean the gutters. About halfway through the project, I met one of the biggest spiders that I have seen in a yard. His body was as big as my thumb from the knuckle to the tip, and he had spun a web that stretched two full feet off of the gutters. The web was strong enough to catch full-sized dried tree leaves and leave them spinning in the wind like soundless wind chimes.

By the time I realized that he was there, he was a mere foot from my face. I was close enough that I could see the hairs on the big bastard’s back, and I assumed that my nose was within jumping distance. To make things more interesting, half of his web was clinging to my arms and shirt.

It was a tense standoff. My squinty four eyes staring down at him, wondering where he could’ve come from. His beady eight eyes staring back, wondering how my nose would taste after being numbed and wrapped in a cocoon. I moved slowly, and then lunged.

When I squashed him under my thumb, he made one heck of a mess, which I wiped on the roof shingles. Well, what did you think was going to happen? It’s a was just a fucking spider for chrissakes. Get a grip.

A hour later, the gutters flowing and free of muck. I hosed the stink off my ladder and gloves and left them in the sun to dry. There’s nothing like the stink of gutter water. I’ll put a vial of it toe to toe with any fetid pool you might know of. I went in the house and showered just to make sure none of the gutter water made it on to me.

We packed the baby into the car, and headed out to visit #1GF!’s mom. We dropped in to a department store on the way. #1GF! ran in, and I sat in the car mulling over book ideas. The baby started crying, so I changed her. That seemed to calm her down. I finished changing her just as the dude next to us got in his car. I had a hive-fiveable moment where I felt like I beat the clock, but the baby didn’t know how to high five, so I was left hanging.

When we got to #1GF!’s mother’s house, #1GF!’s aunt showed up, and the ladies argued about the correct way to tickle the baby. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that, as far as I knew, the baby wasn’t ticklish. I just let them argue over and apply their various tickling techniques. Watching other people fawn over the baby like #1GF! and I do was a lot of fun.

The baby didn’t sleep all day, and as a result, she started her pre-flipout checks at around 5:30PM. We headed for home before she was ready to launch. Thankfully, the ride calmed her down.

“Want to get pizza?” asked #1GF!.

I looked at #1GF! sideways. She didn’t look like she had lost her mind. “It’s after 6PM. We’re in the prime baby flip out hours. Just because the timer on a bomb ticks down to zero and doesn’t explode, that doesn’t mean that you start playing soccer with it. Plus, you know the pizza ‘ll just be cold by the time we get eat it.”

“No way,” said #1GF!. “Just don’t slam the door when you go in to get it and we’ll be fine.”

I wasn’t buying what #1GF! was selling at all, but I went along with it. We went to the pizza place, I didn’t slam the car door, and the baby stayed calm…until she got in the house. She then freaked out for a couple of hours to allow the cheese on the pizza to fully congeal. She finally fell asleep at 9PM.

I tried to reheat the cold, rubbery pizza, and succeeded only in creating a giant, rock-hard cracker that had the molten mouth-destroying power of something that was served up in a grade school lunchroom circa 1979. I winced as the molten mess mercilessly fused itself to the roof of my mouth. Life is a learning experience, and that day’s lesson was: pizza doesn’t reheat well. You’d think it would be “don’t get pizza during prime scream hours”, but I already knew that.

I waited for the pizza to cool back to rubbery, and ate it over the sink after the baby was asleep. I then swore off pizza until the baby gets older. It was a waste of eighteen bucks, but that wasn’t the real loss. The real loss was the dashed expectation that we might actually eat warm slice of pizza like normal people do. The money was just the kick while we were down.

For an hour before bed, #1GF! and I watched bad sitcoms on the DVR. There wasn’t a single laugh in the hour.

Saturday (Day 853): The Elusive Ice Cream

I got up, grabbed a bowl of cereal, and read Don Lee’s Rack & Ruin until I finished it around midafternoon. I finally gave up on Gods Behaving Badly, which despite having an interesting concept (Greek gods hiding out in a house in modern London), it turned into a romance novel about halfway through. There was no warning of said romance on the book jacket. I had been pushing through it like a Honda Civic down a Maine logging road in December, and the journey was looking more and more bleak. I pulled my bookmark out to make sure that the abandonment stuck.

I went to the library to drop the books off and pick up some new ones. I was following my book list haphazardly around the library, and hoped that the young girl or the old man that I kept ending up too close to didn’t think that I was trying to get their attention.

I picked up a few CDs and a couple of books, and left the library by 5PM. I headed to grocery store to pick up a couple of things, and had to go to a second store to pick up some ice cream because my local supermarket has stopped carrying both ice cream flavors that make ice cream worth eating.

Even though both of my favorite ice cream flavors are made by a Massachusetts company and are Boston-themed, they are strangely difficult to find. Which ones, you ask? The first is Big Dig, which consists of vanilla ice cream loaded with brownie pieces, caramel, and chocolate chunks. It’s only moderately difficult to find, and in tough times, a quart of it can generally be found stashed in the back of my freezer.

The other is Dice-Kream, which is vanilla ice cream stuffed with chocolate covered peanuts, hot fudge, and chocolate covered caramel cups. Dice-Kream was originally introduced as “Reverse The Curse”, and was renamed “Curse Reversed” once the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004. It was renamed to Dice-Kream in 2007 because the ‘Sox won the series again, making references to the Curse of the Bambino passe. I know all this not as a baseball fan, but as someone who has been checking for this ice cream every time he has been to the grocery store over the last few years. I hadn’t seen this flavor locally in over six months.

I had gone to two stores looking for ice cream, but didn’t have any idea what we’d be having for dinner. There’s nothing like a parent with a solid set of priorities. I walked in the door empty handed, put on a Phoebe Snow CD, and made mac and cheese from a box for dinner. I soon realized that I didn’t like Phoebe Snow.

#1GF! and the baby were having a great time together while I was gone, but it all changed at 6PM, when the baby started her nightly freakout. We did everything we could think of to calm her down and failed miserably. After more than three solid hours of screaming, she finally went to sleep. #1GF! and I sat on the couch staring at reality shows in a state of half-consciousness that probably made us the show’s ideal viewers.

What I Learned

• Eventually, your nerves start to reset to accept that screaming is the natural auditory state.
• All well-intentioned parenting rules are disposable if breaking them keeps a colicky baby both safe and quiet.
• Boogers on the shoulder are suddenly acceptable, as long as they’re dry and won’t get on anything else.
• #1GF! does not like watermellon coolatas. She would not drink one in a car, she would not drink one near or far.
• Crooked parkers make #1GF! crazy.
• There are worse writers than me out there.
• The baby is immune to changes in our dinnertime, and whether we cook or not. If we try to eat, it simply pisses her off.
• A baby tears down a man to build up a dad in his place.
• It’s difficult to find the time or discipline to write when you have a newborn in the house.
• It’s all about the baby.
• I can now replace a fucking light bulb in the bathroom fan.
• I don’t think that I’m hard enough on myself, and #1GF! thinks just the opposite.
• Even big spiders squish.
• Pizza can not be resuscitated once it has gone rubbery.
• I don’t like Phoebe Snow’s music.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.”

“It’s not the Cheerios. I guess I’m starting to wonder if I’m really going to be able to sell this book. Or any book. I’m trying to stay positive, but the rejections are piling up. I have that same sinking feeling that I had when I finally figured out that blogging wasn’t going to work out as a career choice. I’m doing something that I love to do, but how do you keep investing all of your spare time into something when you have no idea if you suck or not? I don’t know whether this is all just a pipe dream.”

#1GF! silently looked on like she was scanning the mountain for signs of an avalanche. We had company coming over, and it was written all over my face that I wasn’t happy. I knew I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine once everyone gets here. Maybe I’m just sick of the waiting. Waiting for guests, waiting for agents, waiting for the baby to stop screaming. But that’s what life is, right? Long stretches of waiting punctuated by short periods of activity. Right?” There was a loud crack, and I roared down the mountain taking out every minor issue in my path, and #1GF! let me wind myself down. When I heard myself complain that all contact with my friends had been reduced to virtual status updates, I knew that I needed to stop. “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry for complaining. I’ll be fine.”

“Yes, you will,” said a reassuring #1GF!, who was smart enough to wait for the avalanche to stop before pulling out any survivors.

The baby fell asleep, so #1GF! went out to the store. I estimated that I had an hour to accomplish whatever I wanted, and there were no potential roadblocks in sight. I kicked off the hour by eating some expired lunch meat because I was paying more attention to my writing than to tiny computer-printed dates. I was still chewing when I sat down at the PC. I stared at my list of agents for a couple of minutes and wondered where to begin.

I thought about writing, but I was already six weeks behind on the Life of Riley series and I wasn’t looking forward to chewing through the backlog. As much as like writing those posts, they don’t pay the bills, so I let them slide once again.

I contemplated sending out more agent queries, because even though my manuscript wasn’t paying the bills either, the income generating potential was higher for a book than a series of posts that I’ve been writing for free for eight years. Then again, the agent queries were starting to feel like an exercise in futility.

I stared at the screen. I felt like I should be writing my next book already, but I didn’t have any ideas for a new book yet. I stared at a blank file for a couple of minutes before opening a flash game and wasting the hour on that. My wasted time is my own damned fault.

By the time our guests showed up, the mindless entertainment of the flash game had me feeling better. Having a few people over to eat, talk, and stare at the baby for a while felt like a party instead of an obligation inserted into a schedule that was increasingly booked with blocks of screaming.

While we were sitting at our kitchen table, we mentioned that people in the neighborhood are very friendly. Sometimes, they even break that imaginary curtain and wave to us when we’re inside our house. Thinking that this was funny, #1GF!’s mother kept waving to anyone who walked by the window. None of them were our neighbors, and just about all of them gave a small, bewildered, self conscious wave to the woman vigorously waving at them from our kitchen table.

Everyone left by 6PM, and we prepped to give the baby a bath. Unfortunately, the baby fell asleep. There was no way that we were going to wake her during the prime screaming hours just to pursue proper hygiene, so we put her tub and towels away.

To keep us from being bad parents, the baby woke up ten minutes later, screaming at full volume. We pulled all the bath stuff out again and put her in the tub to see if it would calm her down. She was quiet and relaxed through the bath, and then returned to screaming as I wrestled her damp arms into the sleeves of her onsie.

When we finally got her to bed, I turned on my PC with the intention of digging through the trash for some of the productivity I had thrown away earlier. I ended up looking up Rubik’s cube solutions that I wasn’t interested in spending my limited energy and brain capacity on memorizing. I opened Facebook because that’s the place to go when you have a scorched Earth policy toward your productivity.

As I read through the list of clever, single serving bullshit, I realized that I have virtualized most of my friends like an offshore friend farm. I also realized that even though friend virtualization is cost effective, it doesn’t offer the power that I need. I was feeling the same toward the internet as a whole.

The internet, although we hoped it would grow up to be Cambridge, has turned out to be Hollywood. And like Hollywood, there are several good reasons to burn it to the ground before it infects everyone it touches with its bastardized version of reality.

The virtual world is slowly plodding down the path that television blazed years before, and everything is being trampled into a reality show, with an emphasis that’s quickly shifting from “reality” to “show”. We’re packaging our friendships and wrapping them in a fake smile or a quick joke to ensure that everything stays fresh and light. Meanwhile, we’re all chattering at once, and clapping each other on the back for how fucking clever we’ve become. And under the layers of plastic, real communication sputters and suffocates. Like Hollywood, you can’t see the problem until you’ve been cut off from it for a while.

Monday (Day 841): A Printed Manuscript

I finished Shining City by Seth Greenland. It’s an oddball book about a guy who takes over a prostitution ring after his estranged brother dies. I found it pretty entertaining in both subject matter and style.

The baby fell asleep at 8AM, and was still sleeping two hours later when I got out of the shower. The house was dead quiet. Instead of doing something useful, I started remixing The Ting Tings and Rolling Stones into something called “Sympathy For What’s Her Name”. I always get enthused about remixing songs until I’m two hours into a project and obsessing over two seconds of audio that don’t match up properly.

#1GF! left to go to another doctor’s appointment, and the baby must’ve known that she was gone because she woke up screaming. She stayed in that auditory state for a solid half hour. I laid her down, picked her up, walked her around, and took her outside. She finally stopped, possibly because she sensed that I was running out of places that I could take her. She was soon sleeping again.

I started reading a new book and #1GF! came home. She took over the baby, and I went back to remixing because wasting time on idiocy has always been a hobby of mine. I eventually got bored and checked my e-mail. No agent replies cluttered up my inbox.

My parents came over around 3PM, and I gave them the first three chapters of my book to read. They each sat at the table and read them, and then offered some mild criticisms. They seemed to like it, but what are parents really going to say about their son’s first novel? I printed out the rest of the novel for them, and convinced them to stay for dinner.

I gave my parents the full manuscript, and it was sort of cool to see it all printed out and sitting on the counter. A completed book, even if later found to be a hot pile of shit, is still a completed book. And all those pages made it really look like something to be proud of. Seeing those stack of papers felt like concrete proof that, although unpublished, I am a writer.

My parents left after dinner, and the neighbors showed up with a piece of ice cream cake from one of the kids’ birthdays. I love living in a real neighborhood in a small town. The mother and three kids stayed for a few minutes while the scream bomb peacefully slept nearby.

Tuesday (Day 842): He Likes To Lick Babies?

I woke up to the baby screaming. I should correct that. When I got up, the #1GF! and the baby were fine on the couch. My insistence that #1GF! go to bed and get some sleep somehow tripped the scream bomb’s timer. Whoops. Once we finally got the baby back to the happy state she had been in before I butted in, I took a shower, and then sent #1GF! off to bed.

I sat on the couch and read a book, and #1GF! slept until noon. She had been up all night. I picked up a message that a job that I interviewed for in May was getting close to hiring. They wanted to know if I was still interested in the the job.

Once #1GF! was awake, we determined what I’d have to earn for it to be logical for me to take the job. We figured out the number and I decided that if they hit it, I might as well give up on writing and go back to the corporate world. The moment was a shrug short of depressing.

I wanted to be on the way to being published by now, but I wasn’t making time to write and it was only going to get worse as time went on. At least taking the job would give #1GF! the chance to experience the health-giving effects of a lengthy sabbatical from corporate America. I left a message for the H.R. rep telling her that I was still interested.

Instead of writing, I looked up Verizon deals to use as leverage against Comcast. Within twenty minutes of searching, I wasn’t sure that there was even a deal to be had from either company. No matter what I did online, I kept ending at a final price that was much higher than the advertised price.

The H.R. rep called me back looking for my salary history over the last couple of years. How do you answer that question as an unpublished author? You know that the real question that they’re asking is “Do you have proof that someone else thinks you’re as valuable as you do?” Unpublished authors returning to tech don’t have that proof. I explained that to the woman, but she said that without a history, the job would dry up. I wasn’t sure if that was a bluff, but what could I do? As a writer, unless you have a book contract, you don’t have a salary history. I told the woman that I couldn’t provide a salary history beyond what I was telling her. It was the best that I could do, and she seemed to understand.

Because the neighbors brought us cake the night before, I wanted to make them a batch of double chocolate cookies. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any bittersweet chocolate on hand. #1GF! and I took the baby for a walk to the local market in search of some. I walked out of the market empty handed.

#1GF! seemed surprised. “Nothing?”

“Nope. I should’ve known. They don’t carry white chocolate chips, so what were the odds that they’d carry bittersweet? I’ll have to go to the supermarket.”

“You want to go back now, or go for a walk?”

I shrugged. “Eh. Let’s walk. We’re already out.”

#1GF! seemed pleased that I chose the correct answer on my own. As we passed the bakery, we walked by a woman sitting at a table opposite a small dog. They seemed to be sharing a pizza, and were possibly getting ready to reenact a scene from Lady and the Tramp. The dog was definitely sitting on a chair, he was definitely wearing a little sweater, and he was definitely licking the fucking pizza on the table while the lady ate her slice and smiled at him. He didn’t look like he had pockets in his sweater to hold any cash, so I can only assume that the dog would be putting out later.

The woman looked up from her date and into our carriage. “Oh look at the baby!” she said between bites. “Mr. Bojangles loves to lick babies, too!”

I wasn’t about to get into a “dog mouths are cleaner than human mouths” discussion with her, so I just sort of smiled and tried to keep one of my eyebrows from touching my scalp.

#1GF! smiled and waited until we were barely out of earshot before mumbling, “Just send him over if you want to see him to get punted.”

It was a very non-#1GF! thing to say, so I burst out laughing. She didn’t think that it was so funny. I’m seeing a new, protective side of #1GF!.

The baby was awake during the whole walk, and wasn’t freaking out. We walked down to the beach from the town center, and then back home on the sand. There was no traffic on the streets, and no one but dog walkers and old people dotted the sand. The sound of surf filled our ears. The summer was over, and the locals had reclaimed the shore.

Once we got home, the baby played the “payback is a bitch” game and screamed from 6 to 8PM. I handled a good portion of it without incident, but it ground me down. It’s hard on the upper back and the nerves. Both will toughen up eventually.

#1GF! put the baby to bed, and we started watching The Soloist.

“That takes a lot out of you,” I said as I flopped on the couch.

“What does?” asked #1GF!

I rubbed my face and pointed a thumb toward the hallway because my brain was slow on supplying the proper words. “That whole thing,” I said. “The screaming.”

#1GF! nodded. The screaming was hard on both of us.

Wednesday (Day 843): It’s All About The Cookies

I got up at 6AM to screaming and sent #1GF! off to bed. I got the baby quiet, and then enjoyed an hour or two of silence before she popped again. #1GF! got up and took over.

I went out and dropped off a library book, picked up a water filter for the refrigerator, and did the food shopping. When I got home, it was already 4:30PM. I unpacked the groceries and taped some quarters to the hands of the clock in the hopes of gaining a few extra minutes before the baby started her nightly sonic assault.

I made a batch of cookies for the neighbors, and put four Oreos on the top of the pile for one of the kids who mentioned that Oreos were her favorite cookie. I sent #1GF! across the street with the tray while the cookies were still warm. Sure, I baked them, but I’m not prancing across the street with them. Send the lady of the house out to be neighborly. Let me maintain a little bit of macho, you know what I’m saying?

#1GF! left, and I started making the broccoli alfredo. When dinner was ready and #1GF! was back safe and sound, the baby freaked out again. She screamed for a couple of hours, right on schedule.

I planned to drop some cookies off to my parents before they went on a road trip because I thought homemade cookies would provide a little relief as the miles piled up. Once the baby was finally calm, I was tired enough that I started having second thoughts about making the trip. #1GF! pushed me to go and said that it would a nice thing to do. She even offered to come along. She’s always trying to make people think I’m nicer than I really am.

We had never taken the baby out in the car at night, and we were going to have to do it at some point, so I warily agreed. We packed the baby into the car, and popped into my parents’ house at around 9PM. I ran in to drop off the cookies, and whipped through the house in under two minutes.

“I like your book,” my mom said as I was heading out the door.

“What book?” I asked, thinking I had lent her a book.

“Your book.”

It took me a second. “Oh. Good. Thanks.” Babies eat brain cells.

The baby was perfect the whole ride to my parents’ house, so on the ride home, she completely lost her mind. I twisted my arm over the seat to hold her hand, and she eventually calmed down.

We went home, fed the baby, and sat there in front of the TV like vegetables, putting the last hour of the day out of its misery.

Thursday (Day 844): A Job Offer? Well, Dunk My Bag

#1GF! and the baby were sleeping on the couch, so I ate breakfast, brushed my teeth, and read a book. When they woke up, the baby was all smiles. #1GF! and I sat there laughing with her. Those are the moments: kissing her arms and making sounds to get her to smile, and then watching her smile for what seems like no reason.

#1GF! fed her, I burped her, and everything felt storybook smooth. The weather was great. The sun created bright window patterns all over the hardwood floor. I opened the windows to let some air in, and finished The Wake Up by Robert Ferrigno. It was my second book completed this week and it was only 10:30AM on a Thursday morning.

To make the day a little more complicated, the H.R. rep called back with a certified job offer. It was pretty much an offer to resume where I left off at my old company. It was a different job, but the same salary, same title, and my two year sabbatical written of as a midlife crisis.

During the phone call, I tried to point out my value to the organization after working there for thirteen years, but apologized for being crude because getting me to return boiled down to money and title. The woman wasn’t surprised. “It always does,” she said. I countered with more money and a promotion. The woman said that she’d check on it and get back to me.

#1GF! and I mulled the offer over. On the one hand, it was an interesting job. On the other hand, it was like going back to an ex-girlfriend, but having a sneaking feeling that you’ll remember the reason you broke up in about four months time.

“You don’t have to go back,” #1GF! said.

“I don’t mind. It’s a good job…as long as the money is right.”

#1GF! nodded and we wondered what new path our lives were about to take.

I was in a negotiating mood, so I called Comcast’s retention department because Verizon was offering an identical service bundle for $30 less. I explained my situation to the woman on the phone, and she offered to bump up my services to match Verizon…and add another $15 to my bill. I said that her offer made Comcast $45 more expensive per month than Verizon for the same service. The woman countered that Verizon had limited business hours. That was the best that she could do. If I had problems after 8PM, I was out of luck. It was probably the lamest counter I had heard. I asked what more she could do, and she told me nothing. I hung up and shook my head. I’m a great negotiator. Take me with you to the car dealer. I’ll get you MSRP plus $15.

I called my barber for the fourth time this week and got his answering machine again. I’ve been going to the same place for twenty years, and the guy is always working. I started to get worried.

I checked my e-mail and had another agent rejection waiting. I left the rejection machine behind and went out to the couch to start reading another book. It was already 3PM, so I sent #1GF! and the baby in for a nap. They both slept, while I read and guarded the house from any deals that might be lurking in our mailbox.

At 5PM, I started dinner and made myself a cup of tea. I’d drink coffee, but you can’t grind coffee beans while a baby is sleeping. Plus, I’m getting lazier. Pushing a button on a grinder and pouring water into a holding tank had somehow become too much fucking work for me.

I made tea because if you don’t have the energy to grind your beans, just dunk your bag (why does this sentence make me want to add “if you know what I mean” or “that’s what she said” to the end?). Laziness does not pay.

Compared to coffee, tea just sucks. It’s not bitter. It’s not a pick-me-up. It’s something that ladies drink out of silver pots while wearing white gloves and nibbling on shortbread cookies. Tea is for when people come over to talk about what the hell is wrong with you, and I think drinking it alone offends some old Irish gene. I pounded the tea down and moved on.

I tried to look up a nickname that my grandmother used to call my sister because I had somehow started using it on the baby. I wondered where it came from. It seems to be made up, or so old that neither Google nor its inhabitants have ever heard of it.

When #1GF! woke up, I gathered her up in my arms. “It’s a good life, isn’t it?” I said as positively as I could. “No matter if I have to work or write, it’s a pretty good life.”

“It is,” she said. “It really is.”

Friday (Day 845): The Cookie Wizard

I read a book until noon. Actually, both #1GF! and I did. Then, we went for a walk until 4PM. The sea was talking over us, and the wind turned my hair into a tall, feathered mass on the top of my head. I needed a haircut. I ended up looking like a combination of George Michael and Flock of Seagulls, minus the pleated pants and skinny belt.

When we got home, the neighbors told us that they loved the cookies we sent over. Her daughter dubbed me “The Cookie Wizard” which I thought would make a good name for a cartoon or stoner band. Not bad. I’ll take it. The mom had the same look in her eye that #1GF!, my sister, and every other woman I’ve met gets when they eat those special-batch chocolate cookies. It’s funny the relationship women have with chocolate.

#1GF! and I took the baby inside the house, and she started crying around 5:30PM and didn’t stop until I was done making a batch of chocolate chip cookies for any company that might show up. I think the mixer might’ve set her off. Vacuuming a couch right next to her earlier in the day didn’t bother her, but a mixer with half the volume did. Go figure.

I checked my mail and had no new rejections. I also sent out zero queries during the week. I didn’t know if I should. Thirty queries seemed like a lot of potential rejection floating around New York City. I wondered how many rejections I would need to rack up before I gave up. What would I do then? Rewrite? Start another book? Pursue other writing credits? It didn’t matter. I had to shut down the PC at 8:15PM so that the baby could go to bed. It’s not like I would’ve gotten anything done anyway. Without the PC, potential was eradicated. I shut the PC down and read a book until bed.

Saturday (Day 846): Because Writing Feels Like Failure

#1GF! went to visit her mother and go shopping for girl stuff. I don’t know if they were really shopping for girl stuff, but it was enough to get me to throw up my hands and stay home with the baby without further explanation.

It was just me and the baby with no one to tag in if the baby got me on the ropes. Here’s where you’d expect some crazy story where #1GF! would come home to find the baby and me sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor coated in flour, but nothing happened. The baby was surprisingly quiet all day.

I finished The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz, which meant that I had finished three books in a week. I didn’t think that could be right. I had never read that fast. I was out of books to read only a few days after going to the library.

I set up the baby monitor and sorted through all the agents waiting to represent my manuscript. It didn’t take long, because there weren’t any.

I remixed some songs for fun, and worked on them until it wasn’t. Like I’ve mentioned before, my mashups start out as good ideas, but never come out that well. It’s just a way to channel creative energy when I don’t want to write. And at that time, I really didn’t want to write because writing felt like failure.

When #1GF! got home, we sat down and watched Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. It was full of racial stereotypes and really bad acting. The writing wasn’t all that great, either. I wondered how a character could afford to have not one, but two uzis sitting on the front seat of their primer-patchworked $200 car. I went to bed wishing that recent Clint Eastwood movies would stop sucking.

What I Learned

• If you’re not paying attention, you can end up eating expired lunch meat.
• Virtualizing means efficiency gains at the expense of power.
• Being away from the web makes me need it less.
• My reading speed went up. Three books in under a week? What?
• Seeing your printed manuscript sitting on the counter for the first time makes a book feel real.
• Comcast doesn’t really care about competing with Verizon on a case to case basis.
• You can’t find bittersweet chocolate in this small town.
• #1GF! doesn’t accept offers for dogs to lick her baby.
• Compared to coffee, tea just sucks.
• If you don’t have the energy to grind your beans, just dunk your bag.
• Women have a funny relationship with chocolate.
• Sending out zero queries gets you zero rejections.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

Another guy stood nearby, talking on a cell phone. It was like he had a broken volume knob or thought that he was so fucking interesting that the world needed to hear his every word. I could tell by his flip-flops and cow-like expression that we probably didn’t. He started talking, and I knew for sure. “I’m waiting for you at the bathrooms…I don’t know. The ones with the mens’ and womens’ rooms.”

Really? You’re at the bathrooms with the mens’ and womens’ rooms? Is it in the Northeast U.S.? Which beach are you at? Is it the one with all the sand and water? The water with the fish in it? Is it near those paved streets with all the houses on them?

I tried not to look at the guy because he just made me angry. I felt bad for the person who was trying to locate this absolute genius…unless it was a hit man. Hit men should know better than to call someone that they’re trying to bury. The guy continued on.

“Well, I don’t see you either…” I hoped that the idiot hit man was looking through a scope at another bathhouse. Sort of. No, I was. I wasn’t in the mood for ducking, and didn’t want some idiots blood all over the new carriage.

We decided to get away from everyone before we caught an incurable case of stupid. On the way home, we passed by a guy wearing a Jethro Tull T-shirt.

“Did you see that?” I asked #1GF! who was staring down at the baby.

“What?” asked #1GF!.

“That guy was wearing a Jethro Tull T-shirt.”

“Yea, that was a little weird.”

“I know. I mean, when was the last time you saw a Jethro Tull T-shirt?”

#1GF! thought for a second. “Geez. I don’t know.”

“Exactly. You probably saw one around nineteen seventy never. I feel like I just discovered the coelacanth.”

“The what now?”

“Coelacanth?”

“Oh, the coelacanth. See, it sounded like you said ‘flomble dingle’…”

“It was a fish that scientists thought had been extinct for 65 million years until one turned up in the 1930’s.”

“…or sailor camp. I thought you were getting sun stroke or something. Now, that I know that you were talking about the coelacanth…”

I shrugged. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ‘Tull T in the wild. Certainly not in the second half of my life, anyway. It’s 2009, right?”

“Yep.”

“You have as much of a chance of seeing an Edgar Winter Group T-shirt.”

“Edgar Winter Group?” #1GF! started laughing. “Seriously. Where do these references come from?”

“Edgar Winter. You know. ‘Frankenstein’? Dahna nuhnuh Nanuhnuh NAH! Dahnana nuhnuh! bwEEEEEoow…”

#1GF! just shook her head. People sitting on the wall leaned back so that they wouldn’t catch stupid from the guy walking along singing an Edgar Winter Group instrumental.

We got home at 3PM, and the baby freaked out. I made dinner while #1GF! tried to calm her down. #1GF! took the baby outside because, for some reason, fresh air can sometimes stop a crying fit cold. I have no idea why, but I’ve seen it work. Within a minute, #1GF! ran back inside. “EEEEEEAAAAAA GIANT RAT! GIANT RAT!”

I smirked and had to see the giant rat that had her so freaked out. I looked out the door, and a possum was ambling along the front wall of our house. I shook my head. “It’s just a possum.”

“It had a tail! A long skinny tail!” She did a shiver dance in place.

“They have long skinny tails.”

She stuck out her tongue and rolled her head. “Bleegh. Gross.”

#1GF! wasn’t going back outside, so once the baby started to cry again, we put her into her swing. She magically calmed down. #1GF! and I sat at the table playing Rack-o while the baby slept.

Monday (Day 834): The Tinfoil Shark

I woke up to the sound of a garbage truck, which had me out of bed, out the door, and dragging the trash barrel across the yard in under thirty seconds. It wasn’t even our garbage truck.

I came back in and took over watching the baby so that #1GF! could get some sleep. I was bleary and my hair was everywhere. I’ve finally fallen into the role of the bleary parent.

Once #1GF! got up, I decided to tackle a project that had been driving me crazy since we moved in. I’d close a door, and it would pop open. I’d growl at it. I’d close it again, and it would wait for a few seconds before popping open with a metallic fuckyou. I’d growl again.

This would happen so often that I just stopped closing doors. And that worked for a while. When you’re a klutz with a colicky baby, leaving doors open isn’t exactly an option. I shimmed hinges and moved latches so that all of the doors in the house actually closed. I finished the project at 6PM and felt that odd pride that makes you want to brush imaginary dust off your hands and nod at the end.

Staring at all the closed doors was about as good as it was going to get for me that day. Just after I started dinner, I got a call from my credit card company saying that someone had made a physical copy of my credit card and was racking up charges at some Ohio department stores. I had to confirm that I still had my card and then go through the charges just to make sure that I hadn’t made an emergency shopping trip to the Midwest.

You know, if you’re going to pretend that you’re me, shop somewhere fucking cool at least. Not that I shop in cool places. I don’t. But, if you’re counterfeiting credit cards and risking potential jail time for tube socks and a Snuggy, you’re one lame fucking criminal.

To make things worse, while I was sitting at my PC going over the lamest list of fraudulent charges I’d ever heard with the credit card company, I checked my e-mail and found two agent rejections. Unless you count any agent response as a good thing, the day really wasn’t getting any better.

I made dinner, ate it, and then in the process of cleaning up, made a tinfoil shark to entertain #1GF!. I put it on my shoulder and said it was to protect me from further agent rejection. It promptly fell off. I stared at the shark laying on his side on my kitchen floor.

“Are you abandoning me too, Rejection Shark?”

I picked up the shark and squished his nose into a point. I pointed him at my face and said in a small, tin foil shark voice, “Shut up, bitch. I’m a swordfish now.”

#1GF! started laughing.

“What?” I asked.

“Shut up, bitch?” asked #1GF!.

“That’s what you found funny?”

“Well, it’s a funny thing for a tinfoil shark to say.”

“I’m a swordfish,” said the shark.

#1GF! shook her head, as has become the custom around here. I looked to the baby, who was no help…although, she was sleeping, so she wasn’t hindering, either.

As I was winding down for the night, I found a door that I missed on my hinge relocation project. I sighed and debated on whether I should break out the tools or let the last non-closing door in the house drive me insane.

“90%” said #1GF!.

I growled. I’m infamous for leaving house projects at 90% complete. I reluctantly took out the tools and set to work on the last door, even though it went against my time-tested rule of never starting projects within an hour of when the hardware stores close.

By 10PM, the job was 100%, and all doors in the house would close and latch.

Tuesday (Day 835): The Rewards Of Parenthood

I got up and watched the baby for a couple of hours while #1GF! slept. I ate breakfast, and sent #1GF! in to shower. The baby was in a playful mood, so I didn’t get much reading in. She also seemed like she had grown into a giganto baby over the previous week or so. Although, giganto is a relative term.

I started cleaning the bathroom in the midmorning, and was showered and dressed by early afternoon. We left the house not too long after. It was in the 70’s with clear, blue skies and a light breeze. I wished we had a better reason to be out, but was happy to at least be out running errands on such a beautiful day.

We picked up a gift certificate for the real estate agent who sold us the house because she was coming to visit the next day. #1GF! ran in to get the gift certificate, and I sat in the car with the baby. I couldn’t help but focus on the fact that agents weren’t interested in my book.

The baby was awake, but quiet, so we all went grocery shopping together. It was a big risk, given her propensity for random screaming, but one of us was going to have to take her shopping eventually. We thought that it might as well be while we were both there to handle any sonic situations that might arise. And none did. The baby almost seemed to be having fun as we rode up and down the aisles…if a five week old can have fun.

We went home, and I cleaned the windows in the front of the house so that the real estate agent wouldn’t think that our real names were Lurlene and Jethro VonDirtenbagen. I wiped months of dirt off of the outside of the windows as the neighborhood wrung out what they could from a summer that was quickly drying up.

Some families walked down the street equipped as if they were going to the beach, while other families played with their kids out front. Some of the neighborhood kids rode by on their bikes with plastic water bottles jammed in their spokes to make motorcycle noise. It was a new twist to an old idea, and it sounded a lot better than the cardboard we used thirty years ago.

I threw another dark brown, wadded up paper towel in the trash and imagined that I’d be out there one day. But, at that time, I had six more windows to clean.

Once the windows were done, I cleaned the counters and the appliances. To celebrate, I stood over the sink and ate a couple of my rejected, “non-Italian macaroons”. They tasted just fine to me.

When the chores were done, I managed to finish the last few pages of Wild Fire by Nelson Demille. It was about a secret and unstoppable government plan to destroy major Middle Eastern cities if a major terrorist attack happened on American soil. It was an interesting concept, I suppose.

I went looking for rejections in my e-mail and came back empty handed. That should’ve been a good sign, but it felt more like I was just waiting for the rejections than hoping for acceptances.

The baby had been awake all day, and at 5:30PM, she had a fit. By 8:30PM, she was still screaming strong, with no solution in site.

Some days are completely wasted on maintenance. You clean, knowing that things are just going to get dirty again. Hours pass, you wear out, and everything looks pretty much the same as it did before you started. When you hit the end of the day, all you can think is, “What the fuck was that?”

And then the baby starts screaming, so you’re not going unwind with a book or some TV, and you’re certainly not going to bed early. You dim all the lights in the house to try to calm the baby down, and the perpetual dusk makes you even more tired than you already are. You couldn’t hear any music over the baby if you wanted to, and you know that the computer is nothing more than a dual purpose time vacuum and rejection machine.

You pace the halls trying to sooth your screaming child, and all you can do with your time off from her is make notes in your notebook about how loud she’s screaming. And how you cleaned windows. And how the day slipped past you without even a courteous nod in your direction.

You aren’t going to get much sleep, so you can’t look forward to that. You just sit and wait for the next feeding or diaper change to come along.

Suddenly, you realize that the baby won’t even remember this day. Or week. Or month. Or year. Hell, she won’t remember the next three years. And yet you tend to her like she’ll remember every tear, locked away in some recess of her brain forever.

That’s parenthood.

You might try to find some small reward for yourself for stuffing a chunk of your personality into a trunk to be dusted off and opened like a personal time capsule in twenty or so years, but it will be in vain. You’ll think things like, “If I do the windows, I’ll sit down and reward myself with a cup of coffee later.”

You could try to set up a reward system for yourself. Sure, why not? Maybe you push that cup of coffee off after the windows, and save it for when the baby stops screaming, just to feel like there is a part of you that still exists beyond the diaper changing machine you’ve become. And the baby will eventually stop crying long enough for you to collect your reward.

In early parenthood, the chores are constant, you can’t possibly plan, and there is no end in sight for the arbitrary nature of the tasks you face. And for most of those tasks, there will be few rewards beyond the baby smiling and laughing once and a while. But, sometimes, even though you love that kid to death, sometimes, you just want a hard chair, a black cup of coffee, and three feet of space to call your own.

And when you find those spare minutes to actually sit down for that reward, it will be too late at night, and you’ll be too tired. You’ll end up staring at the oil slicks atop the cold murkiness of the cup and know that coffee isn’t a reward that can undo the knotted nerves that come from three hours of screaming. You’ll dump that reward right down the sink and take the fans up to the attic, because summer is over and you still have things to do.

Wednesday (Day 836): Sex In Public

I showered, and then made a batch of chocolate biscotti. I was planning to make almond biscotti, but was corrected by #1GF! that my intention was to make chocolate. I was not aware of said intention, but went along with it lest I be attacked by a chocolate freak who was looking to score a fix from her favorite pusher man.

The real estate agent who sold us the house came over to visit. We showed her the renovations and she seemed impressed with them. She stayed until the midafternoon. We drank tea and ate lemon cupcakes with lemon filling. It was all very civilized. My parents showed up a little later, and the visit followed the same pattern: tea, sweets, and idle chatter.

After everyone was on their way, I threw a frozen lasagna in the oven that a friend had made for us. I put the baby in her swing, and she fell right to sleep. #1GF! and I ate dinner and sat on the couch watching TV for hours without a single scream. It was almost like being on a date. It’s amazing how much you can appreciate something as simple silence when you’ve been conditioned to screaming being the normal state of things.

I turned to #1GF!. “I feel like I’m having sex in public or something.”

#1GF! raised her eyebrows and gave me a sideways glance. “Um, bescuse me?”

“Okay, Maybe that’s not a great analogy, but I’m having a great time doing something really simple, and I’m paranoid that something is just around the corner waiting to ruin it.”

“Ah. Well, that is a bad analogy, but I understand completely.”

The baby slept in her swing until almost 10PM.

Thursday (Day 837): Defending Against A Pack Of Baby Ninjas

The baby wouldn’t sleep, so I got up with her and watched a movie with a four star rating, that I would’ve given maybe one. I dropped the baby back to #1GF! at 9AM and sat watching more crappy TV. “Why am I doing this,” I said to an empty room as I flipped through the channels. Baby or not, there was no reason for subjecting myself to more shows that were only good enough for Thursday morning cable.

I shut off the TV and jumped in the shower. I took the baby back while #1GF! did the same. The baby was surprisingly quiet. I thought that maybe she had developed a longer fuse, but I was still expecting some sort of trick. I had a quick lunch and sped through a few household chores, but she was still fine. I decided that we should push our luck.

#1GF! and I dropped in to the library to pick up a few books, and then to the local home megastore to pick up some mortar and mums. We took turns going in, and it worked out well. The baby’s fuse still hadn’t entered the barrel, and she was suspiciously quiet. Sort of like a landmine.

We got detoured on our way home by three detail cops working a construction site. One half of the road was blocked with a dump truck, and on the other side there was a head-on face-off involving fifteen cars and a school bus. Did I mention that there were three uniformed officers “working” this detail? Three?

While we were stuck in the road, pinned in by cars and boxed by trucks, the baby’s fuse finally burned down. She started freaking out right there in the middle of the police-caused traffic jam. It was great, great fun.

We got home at 4PM and spent a couple of hours getting the baby to quiet down. She responded by sleeping for less than thirty minutes before starting up again.

When I found a spare minute, I would stare out the window merely cataloging the things that I needed to take care of. I lacked the motivation to start any of the projects because there was a sonic scream bomb with a faulty timer waiting for me in the other room. Newborns eat motivation for breakfast, and then make you clean their diaper.

I made a pot of coffee at around 6PM, and was about to start a little writing when the baby started screaming again. That bout lasted for only an hour. Are you keeping score? Scream in car, scream two hours, take half hour off, scream for a few more hours.

By 7PM, I had changed her, shushed her until my lips were falling off, and worn a path into the hall from walking back and forth. She was still screaming when I turned her over to her mother. I felt like an enormous failure. It took hours to calm her down. When she finally fell asleep, #1GF! and I were toast. We went directly to bed.

I lay in bed listening to her coo and grunt in her sleep, and I finally drifted off. At one point, she screamed at the top of her lungs in her sleep, waking us up. It wasn’t so much waking us up, as scaring the shit out of us. It sounded like an insane teenage girl had broken into the room and screamed briefly before vanishing. Once our hearts stopped pounding, we drifted back off…until a few hours later when she woke us with a wave of grunting that sounded like she was using some form of baby kung fu to defend herself against a pack of angry baby ninjas.

Friday (Day 838): Acorn Bombs and Sonic Grenades

There are a lot of days that I think I’m wasting my time with writing. That I’m dreaming. That the extent of being published will be this blog on this quiet corner of the internet. Thoughts like that can drain the color from some of my days. This was not one of them.

The sun was pouring through the windows and warming the hardwoods. The gentle tic tock of the baby swing propelled a sleeping baby back and forth while some innocuous, soft, classic rock filled the room with comfortable white noise. While you were at your desk checking e-mail or preparing for a meeting, I sat at the kitchen table, showered and dressed, sipping a black cup of coffee and reading a book. These are the forgotten moments that feel like they mean something. They’re the rare moments that make not having a job seem like a good decision.

After my coffee, I went out and mortared the hole where the electrical comes into the house because the original contractor didn’t think that a large hole from the outside of the house into the basement was something that should be sealed up. It didn’t take me long at all.

#1GF! had to go to a doctor’s appointment, so we all went along. The baby was sleeping, so I stayed in the car with her. I wrote in my notebook and everything was fine for about forty minutes. We parked under a patch of trees to shade the car from the heat, completely unaware that the trees were dropping acorns like bombs. One slammed off of the roof and woke the baby up. Then, all hell broke loose.

I changed the baby in the back seat, bounced her, and shushed her until the sides of my mouth were sore. Nothing was working, so I tried to change her again. I even tried the pacifier, which got lost somewhere in the car. This went on for twenty minutes, while a woman sitting in a nearby car looked on and frowned.

When a baby is hungry and there is no food, you’re auditorily fucked. I took the baby out of the car and tried to calm her down with that fresh air trick that she suddenly wasn’t falling for. While walking her around, the trees started dropping acorns again. I actually leaned over the baby to shield her once I heard some acorns dropping. I don’t know what was in these acorns, or how high they were falling from, but man, they were slamming into the roof of the car hard.

After twenty minutes, a smiling #1GF! walked out into the parking lot to find me walking around the truck with a screaming baby. I had been trying to avoid going in to find her, but if she hadn’t shown up within five minutes of when she did, the scream bomb was going into the doctor’s office. She came out just in time. #1GF! fed the baby in the car, and I realized how relieved I was not to hear the baby screaming. I wanted to take a quick, celebratory nap.

When we got home, I sent out three more agent queries before we gave the baby a bath. After the bath, we fed her with a bottle, and she freaked out at 7PM, right on schedule. Between 9PM and 10PM, she calmed down, and I went in to continue querying agents. I got seven more done. I was tired enough that I queried one agency twice. So, maybe I only did six. Then again, if the agency sees the double query as big enough offense, I only did five. I went to bed at midnight, but felt like I should be getting more done.

Saturday (Day 839): I Change The Poopies

I got up at 7:30, and #1GF! was already on the couch with the baby. I felt late and disoriented. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The unshaven face, the straight expressionless mouth, and the bewildered eyes staring back at me reminded me of the way my grandfather looked early in the morning when I stayed over his apartment as a kid. Although nostalgic to the point of smelling the Ivory soap and almost being able to hear the tinny AM radio on top of the refrigerator, this was not a good sign.

I took the baby and changed the baby twice in a half hour. Changing the baby never feels like a win, but it feels like a ripoff when it’s in rapid succession. On the second change, I was thinking, “but I just did this.” I put the baby in the swing, made the bed, and #1GF! started making pasta sauce.

#1GF!’s family called and said that they’d be by in an hour. I picked up around the house, and ran out to the store to pick up some bread or pastry so that they’d have something to eat. The bakery only had cookies and muffins, and the local supermarket had crap on toast. I went to a small specialty supermarket and found what I needed. I was also supposed to pick up white chocolate chips and $5 scratch tickets, but no one carried them. It’s a problem of living in a small town.

#1GF!’s family had already arrived by the time I got back. They brought vegetables from their garden, including a pumpkin for the baby.

I dropped the pastry on the counter and took the baby because she needed changing. I wanted #1GF! to be able to hang out with her family. The kids thought it was hysterical that I could be capable of changing a baby’s diaper and wanted to see me do it. They kept running in and out of the room giving a play by play of the action.

“He’s changing it! He’s changing it!” [run back in] “There’s poopies!” [run out screaming and laughing before running back in] “Jon is changing the poopies!” And so on. I’ve never seen kids having so much fun over a diaper change.

#1GF!’s family left after a quick lunch, and we got the baby to sleep without a problem. #1GF! plopped herself onto my lap and put her arms around my neck. “I love you,” she said.

“It’s a good life we have isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“We have the house and the baby. It’s not exactly how we planned, but it’s still pretty great. We’re pretty lucky.”

“I waited a long time for you.”

“I’m glad you did.”

I went out to mow the lawn and edge the walk. #1GF! gave one of the neighbors a tour of the house while I was gone. I took a quick shower, and it was already 4PM. I took over watching the baby, and #1GF! went out to plant some mums and sweep up the porch. The sun was out, and it was warm, but you could feel the underlying chill in the air that put it’s cold, bony finger against its lips and shushed you every time the wind blew.

I made a pasta salad for dinner and the baby stayed asleep while we ate it. She actually slept from 8PM on, so we watched Milk, which didn’t end up being a great way to spend a little free time. If the movie hadn’t been a true story, I probably would’ve given up on it halfway through. Even so, I shrugged at the end like I had just watched something on the History Channel.

What I Learned

• Festivals draw out the idiots, derelicts, and looneys. I know. I go to them.
• There are people who still wear Jethro Tull T-shrits.
• #1GF! does not like possums.
• A swing can halt colic.
• Some criminals are lame.
• Rejection Sharks aren’t very effective.
• The baby isn’t going to remember any of this.
• Sometimes, babies scream in their sleep.
• Being stuck with a baby looking for a nonexistent food supply sucks.
• Diaper changes in rapid succession feel like a ripoff.
• $5 scratch tickets and white chocolate chips are impossible to find in our town.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

I went back to my house and washed my hands so that I could play with the baby. #1GF! was holding her, so I rubbed from the back of the baby’s scalp to the front in a gentile swipe. The baby’s eyes closed like a doll’s. I did it five or six times, and #1GF! would laugh every time, causing the baby’s eyes to pop open.

At 2PM, I sat myself at my desk to get some queries out to agents. I spent part of the time reformatting and spell checking my manuscript, and then dove into getting the queries written and sent. At the end of four hours, I only had eight queries completed.

My goal was to get ten queries out a week, but it was a lot more time consuming than I anticipated. Maybe the difficult part is recompiling the submission package to meet each particular agent’s guidelines. Some agents want three chapters, some fifty pages, some want you to include a synopsis, and some want nothing more than a query letter that addresses specific questions about your credentials and the marketability of your manuscript. Others want some combination. And from what I’ve read, sending something outside an agent’s guidelines earns you a quick form rejection.

Once you have all of the information compiled the way the agent wants it, you need to find a way to break the ice with her so that she might actually read past the first paragraph of your query. That means looking up an article she may have written or knowing something about their current client list.

Imagine doing this with someone you’ve never met and have no ties to. Now, imagine trying to do it ten times in a day. It’s as fun as cold calling someone with a “great offer” at dinnertime. The day is gone before you realize it, and you have nothing more to show for it than a head full of useless facts about about people that you’ll probably never hear from, who will probably never see your query under the pile on their assistant’s desk.

At the end of the day, I had sixteen queries sent out, four of which had already been returned with rejections. It wasn’t the best way to boost an ego, but rejection is a major part of the game. You write your book and then stand on the porch with your two black shirts, two pairs of black pants, one pair of black boots, two pairs of black socks, one black jacket, and three hundred dollars personal burial money, and you wait without encouragement until you’re invited in. That’s just the way it goes.

I made enchiladas for dinner while #1GF! continued looking after the baby. I took over after dinner because #1GF! hadn’t had a break for hours.

I had the baby for a mere hour and couldn’t get her settled down. She cried, cried, and cried, and when she was done with that, she moved on to yelling. At one point, my frustration hissed out of me like an overpressured radiator, and I gave the baby an angry “SHHHH”. I felt immediately bad about it because I remembered that she was just a baby, and you can’t be angry at a baby for doing what babies do. My frustration was immediately replaced by the awareness that the baby was a gift, so I smiled and tried harder to calm her down. It still didn’t work. #1GF! took her for ten minutes and she fell right to sleep.

I went to check my e-mail and found that some douche nozzle was selling my beard chart on a T-shirt without telling me. I know it’s not high art, but I’ve had offers to have that chart appear in a few books, and I’ve turned them all down. If I wanted someone else to profit off of my work, I’d go get myself a boss. I sent a note to the parent company to let them know that I wanted the T-shirt removed from their store, and they took it down.

#1GF! fed the baby and went to bed early. A day of taking care of the baby combined with night after night of sleep loss were taking their toll. For some reason, I only feel that I can relax and work on my book when both of my ladies are asleep, so I continued my agent research until about 1AM. I only managed to find a few more prospects.

The baby woke up just after I shut the PC down. I was still wide awake, so #1GF! and I talked while she fed the baby. It was sort of nice sitting there as a little family when most people were asleep. It would’ve been nice to be sleeping, but you do what you have to.

Monday (Day 827): TLA 4eva

Ha! After all the previous confusion about when Labor Day was, it was finally upon us. I woke up at 8AM, and #1GF! was already feeding the baby. I grabbed a waffle, reheated a cup of coffee from the day before, and then brushed my teeth. I walked down the hall to see what I could do to help. I could hear Kitchen Nightmares on. I thought #1GF! only watched it because I did. Everything was under control, so I went in for a shower.

When I got out, I took the baby and spent some time trying to figure out why she was freaking out. It turned out to be a bad bout of gas. We gave her a bath and put her in her swing to see if it would calm her down.

Now, we didn’t like putting the baby in a swing because it was like giving over the baby care to a machine. We’re normal (ahem) humans and should be able to rock a baby to sleep. Unfortunately, the record seems to disagree. The swing not only stopped the baby’s crying, but it put her to sleep. If it ended up being a crutch for her later on, we’d deal with it later on. When you’re constantly facing hours of screaming, you sometimes take the path of least resistance. I gave in to the baby’s new, robot overlord, and it worked it’s magic. The baby was soon asleep.

It was already 11:15AM, and we hadn’t done anything but give the baby a bath. #1GF! went in for a shower, and I made coconut biscotti and read a book while it baked. After her shower, #1GF! dusted the house and then took a nap on the couch. We still hadn’t done much, but we gave ourselves a couple of imaginary checkmarks for having cookies and clean place to eat them in.

We went out for a walk around 4PM, and the kids across the street asked if they could see the baby. We said sure they could, and waited. The little girl looked at us. “Well, we can’t…um…cross….”

We’re new to the whole parenting thing. We walked the baby over to them so that they could see her.

“My aunt is having a baby,” said one of the kids.

“Oh, so you’ll have a baby cousin,” said #1GF! “That’ll be fun.”

The little girl got fidgety, “Well, they’re not married, but we call her my aunt. I’m not sure if the baby is really my cousin.”

#1GF! and I looked at each other and smiled at our own lack of wedding rings.

“He’s your cousin,” I said nodding reassuringly, which the little girl seemed to like.

We walked to the post office, and #1GF! stopped into the bakery to get an iced coffee.

“I can’t believe we’ve been off together for a month. Seriously. When was the last time you had a month off? High school?”

#1GF! shrugged and sipped her iced coffee. “Um, like probably.”

“This is the 2000’s. You should’ve totally like texted me that.”

“You don’t text.”

“I know. You’re so 2008 and I’m so two thousand and late. LOL BRB WTF?

“IKWYM 459 JD + #1GF! TLA 4eva.”

I shook my head. “4eva. Perfect.”

When we got home, we went out to do the food shopping. #1GF! ended up sitting in the car because the baby was freaking out once again.

During the trip, I finally figured out where supermarkets keep fresh basil. Its not in with the other herbs on the vegetable rack like you’d expect. It’s actually stocked with the tomatoes, which I found completely by accident. I had looked for basil on three other occasions in two different supermarkets and failed to find it. I was under the impression that it was some sort of specialty item that no one carried. I felt like shaking my fist at the basil and saying “I gotcha now, you sunnufabitch.” Why didn’t I just ask someone? Because I like having something to shake my fist once and a while. Happy?

We made it home a little more frazzled than we left, and I put the groceries away while #1GF! fed and changed the baby. I took the recycling to the basement, cleaned the dehumidifier filter, and straightened up the house a little before taking the garbage out. I stopped doing minor chores just in time for the baby to freak out again. Forty-five minutes later, the baby was being fed whether that was what she was yelling about or not.

I started dinner, but #1GF! told me to forget it. We’d have leftovers if the baby ever calmed down. I leaned on the counter and made some notes about the day in my notebook.

Sometimes having a baby is like having a new boss who has no patience, doesn’t speak English, and yells all the time. Then at other times, when the baby is smiling at you, you understand exactly why you do it.

Tuesday (Day 828): They Grow Up So Fast

I took the baby out of the bedroom, and sat on the couch reading a book. While reading is not necessarily a constructive activity, I was happy that I had broken free of the tractor beam of the T.V. screen. I read until noon, at which time I got dressed and had lunch, not necessarily in that order. It’s really not a bad life. Not at all.

#1GF! and I went out for a walk and noticed that the normal crowds of bronze, shirtless old men wearing gold chains had been cut back to skeleton crews. They would soon be packing their leathery skins into their parkas until next season. It was a sure sign that fall was coming.

I had no job, my brain had gone to mush, and I was out walking during the day for fun. With the exception of a few query letters, I hadn’t written a paragraph since the baby was born.

I came home and read on the couch again with the baby sleeping next to me. I finished that book before dinner. I checked my e-mail and had another form rejection. I tried Oxyclean, and dead or not, Billy Mays was full of shit. That stuff doesn’t whiten anything. I shook my fist at the laundry and went to the kitchen to make dinner.

Pesto is a really simple pasta sauce consisting of pine nuts, basil, olive oil and grated parmesan. I typically made the dish by putting dried basil in olive oil for an hour to reconstitute it. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. Now that I had an actual package of fresh basil, I was going to make pesto with it.

You want to make pesto for yourself, you say? No problem. It’s one of the easiest pasta meals to make. You throw 1/3 cup pine nuts in a food processor with a third of a cup of olive oil and chop ‘em up. Throw in about half of a small Stop & Shop package of basil (say 15-25 leaves of varying sizes) with a pinch of salt and chop that up. Now throw in 1 1/4 cups of fresh grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and pulse until blended. It takes less time than boiling water. Mix that shit in with pound of whatever pasta you’re into and you’re good to go.

I threw in a couple of cloves of garlic with the pine nuts (because my problem with authority extends all the way to recipes) and it was, by far, the best pesto that I’ve ever made. It would be fresh basil from there on out.

Before we knew it, it was 8:30PM and the baby was working her way into a full-volume freak out. She seems to regularly scream at night. We went through the normal troubleshooting options, and as usual, none of them were working. When we were changing her, the baby had to move up to the next diaper size. Our little girl was no longer an N. She had bumped up to a Size 1. It didn’t help to stop her crying, but it was a mini-milestone for us to think about while her screams bounced around the halls.

Once the ladies of the house were calmed down and in bed, I went back to researching agents. I worked for hours, only managing to add eleven names to my list of potential agents. The hours I put in seemed ridiculous for a few names, but each of those names had the potential to publish a book, and without any other contacts in the publishing world, it’s all about potential.

Wednesday (Day 829): Hey, Kids!

I took the baby out of the room to let #1GF! sleep once again, and sat on the couch reading another book. Once #1GF! was up, she sucked me into watching Bad Boys on cable for the hundredth time. It wasn’t half as good as one of my all-time favorite action flicks, Bad Boys II. Yes, I’m serious. No one ever believes me on this one. Bad Boys sucked. I won’t fight to keep that one from wherever movies go to die. Bad Boys II, on the other hand, contains one of the most over-the-top and underrated car chases I’ve ever seen on film. That’s a fact.

I took a shower at 12:30, and #1GF! and I went out for a walk along the beach. The slowly moving parachutes of the para-surfers were the only indication that there were other people out enjoying the shore.

We were walking by a giant dune and #1GF! turned to me. “I can’t believe we’ve been together almost eight years.”

I nodded. “I know. It seems crazy, doesn’t it?” I smiled. “It won’t be long before you’ll be lovingly spooning tapioca to me in the home.”

We pulled over to the side of the sand-swept street to give a Chevy Suburban plenty of room to get by. As it passed, one of our neighbors waved and yelled “Hey, kids!” out of the back seat. There was no one else around but us and the baby. It’s funny to think that you’re old, and still be known as “the kids” to people who aren’t your parents.

When we got home, I made a quick pan pasta sauce with the remaining fresh basil, and ruined it at the last minute by adding too much salt. To make dinner more delicious, I turned a loaf of garlic bread into a black garlic rock.

I was more irritated than I would’ve thought a man could get about screwing up dinner. I like my food and I don’t like to screw up. When I screw up and it affects my food, it causes issues. I was aggravated enough to let it show.

After dinner, #1GF! and I tried to watch Dexter, but the baby has a sixth sense about when we put in a movie, even if it’s on mute behind a closed door. She was completely inconsolable for two solid hours. #1GF! and I walked up and down the hallway so many times that we wore a trail into the floor that should be apparent to woodland creatures long after humans are gone.

I had turned on my PC at some point during the early evening in the hopes of checking my agent query letters after the ladies had gone to bed. At 11PM, the baby was still screaming her lungs out. When she finally calmed down, she had been screaming for three straight hours. My nerves were too jangled to care if an agent thought my book was marketable or not. I shut off my PC without checking anything and went to bed.

Thursday (Day 830): Post Or Die, The Ink Runs Dry

I woke up, and my first thought was not “what a glorious morning not to be working,” or “isn’t this perpetual state of weekend awesome?” The very first thought in my head was, “How the fuck is it Thursday already?” I was as surprised at the thought as you are, given the nature of my life. I mean, how did I know that it was actually Thursday, anyway? Shh. Don’t question miracles. Let’s just agree that it was amazing.

I took the baby out of the room at 6AM so that #1GF! could catch up on her sleep. I read on the couch for a bit before dozing off. The days and nights of screaming were taking their toll. I woke up in a panic that I might kick the baby off the couch with my big, dumb man legs or something.

Because my fatigue was affecting my logic circuits, instead of just sitting up and staying awake, I turned around the other way on the couch so that my head was near the baby. I crimped my body into an uncomfortable position on half of the couch and fell briefly back to sleep. I woke up with my brain battling my body on whether or not sleep was really good idea when you’re a klutz sharing a couch with a newborn.

The brain won, and I sat on the couch reading until 8:30AM. I changed the baby and brought her in to feed at 9AM. While the baby was busy, I ate, brushed, and showered. I then reclaimed her so that #1GF! could do the same.

Once we were showered and ready, the baby fell asleep, so I took the time to send out four more agent queries. We were planning to run some errands, but decided to wait until after the next feeding so we didn’t get caught in a store somewhere with a loud and hungry baby.

We made it out the door a few hours later. I dropped in to check on the status of some contact lenses, and then stopped by my parents’ house to hang out for a little while. My mother can’t seem to stay outside of a two foot radius from the baby. It’s understandable, but it’s really funny to see a grandma from this perspective.

We left with a couple of tomatoes, and I convinced #1GF! to stop off and treat herself to a Blizzard. I think the things are one of the grossest desserts you can buy, but she likes them. She stopped after a little persuasion, and I held the cup for her while she drove. The baby wasn’t really psyched about being out of the house, so my other hand was twisted back over the seat trying to soothe her.

We went home and ate leftovers for dinner, and I was going to send out more queries, but something held me back. I felt like the queries were causing me to stagnate. Maybe it was the ingrained “post or die” mentality of blogging, but spending all the time trying to sell someone on what I had written instead of moving forward on my next book made me feel like I was standing still. It was worse than standing still. It felt like I was pointing to a high school trophy and trying to convince people how good I was, rather than moving on and creating a new accomplishment. Fiction doesn’t stagnate like blog posts do, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was wasting my time on marketing at the expense of production.

I gave up on the queries and read at the table while I waited for the baby to doze off. I put down my book, and just as I started making notes about the day in my notebook, my pen died. It was a crappy pen, but it had been the pen that I had become used to writing with over the course of a year. I stared at it as if I had eye beams that could generate ink, before shaking it and giving it one last try. I quietly said, “Come on, man,” to it when it refused to write. With hundreds of thousands of words of faithful service behind it, that pen deserved a sendoff like Spock at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. What it got was me quietly saying, “Aw bitch,” before unceremoniously throwing it in the trash.

I pulled open the junk drawer and pushed aside batteries, rubber bands, and an unexpectedly large number of twist ties to find a replacement that I could conscript into service. #1GF! walked in at the sound of my rummaging.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“My pen died. Now, I need a new one.”

“Hold on a second,” she said, as an idea carried her into another room. I continued pushing around the bleak prospects of second hand advertising pens while I waited. #1GF! returned to the room.

“What about this?” she said as she pulled out a silver pen with a magician’s flourish. “I got it years ago as a gift and never used it.”

I looked at the lean, polished pen and shook my head. “I don’t know. I think it’s a little too fancy for me.”

“I’m not using it. It’s been in my desk for years.”

“Thanks, but it’s too fancy. My readers call for the mention of “ass juice” at least once a quarter, and I’d feel pressure to go highbrow if I wrote with a pen like that.”

#1GF! shrugged and returned the pen to her desk, and I grabbed a cheap, plastic pen from a finance company that I had never heard of. It narrowly suited me, but that’s how they all start before I fall in love with them and they die on me.

The day wound down, and #1GF! finally put the baby to bed at 10PM. I straightened up and set up the remote controls for easy reach in a night feeding. The mouse on the DVR was flashing a red light at me, so I reset it. When the light turned green, I gave it the thumbs up. I suddenly felt really uncool about giving an impulsive thumbs up. I quickly realized that I was wasting brain cycles on how uncool it is to give a thumbs up to a fucking computer mouse with no one else in the room. This is what newborns do to seemingly normal human adult brains.

I went back to writing notes for the day, and the baby started choking while I was writing this line. You have no idea how fast you can move until you hear your baby choking on vomit. Then, when you run in to the room in a complete panic, you find the baby either asleep or smiling at you. This is what babies do.

Friday (Day 831): The Rock Fails Where The Reed Succeeds

I took the baby out of the room at 6AM, and I was already showered and dressed by the time I tried to give her a bottle at 9AM. It doesn’t seem like much, but at the time, it was a major accomplishment.

The baby was spazzing and wouldn’t take a bottle. I thought it was a matter of time, so I tried to impose my will as a parent on the baby by being persistent. I was actually thinking, “Spaz all you want, but you will be fed, baby! Mark my words. You will be fed.” The baby was having none of it. I eventually had to give her up so that #1GF! could calm her down. I lost a test of wills with someone who had only been breathing air for five weeks.

#1GF! got the baby calmed down enough to eventually take the bottle. After she fed, we gave her a bath. It all went fairly well, and the baby was soon napping. I went to work on writing queries.

It was 9/11 and all the publishing houses were in New York, so I decided not to make my slim chance slimmer by sending out my queries on a historically tragic day. I don’t know if that mattered, but waiting a day to click send wasn’t going to kill me.

Before I realized it, it was already 2PM. The baby was up, so I played with her for a bit while #1GF! checked her e-mail. The baby eventually went back to sleep, and we used the baby monitor for the first time. I wasn’t happy about it. It seemed like we were cheating at parenting. Being able to move outside of a three foot radius of a sleeping baby allowed me to get a lot done, so I got over that feeling pretty quickly.

As soon as I made dinner, the baby had another fit that we couldn’t figure out. It was as if she knew exactly when dinner was ready or when a movie started, and didn’t like it one bit. We eventually got her calmed down enough to run some errands after dinner.

We went out to pick up my contacts, and ended up at Babies-R-Us. I don’t know how it happened, but I have to admit that that store had some cool Halloween costumes for babies. There was a Frankenstein suit (complete with a flat head and bolts in the neck), and a robot costume that I couldn’t stop laughing at. The baby is way too small to go trick or treating, so they stayed right on the rack where they belonged. I’m practical like that. On the other hand, #1GF! went crazy buying little outfits even though the baby’s closet was already packed full of clothes that have never been worn. She’s a mom with a job. I wasn’t going to set foot on that battlefield.

Saturday (Day 832): Faith A Faith A Faith

I got up at 7AM to the sound of rain hitting the windows like popping corn. Our experience in the house has told us that when the rain falls horizontally above, there will be basement issues below. I threw on some jeans and work boots, and my first bleary act of the day was to go into the basement to check on things. I walked the perimeter, and the basement was bone dry. The robot rolled over and flashed a thumbs up on his screen. I blinked hard and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes as a reply.

I threw on a coat and walked the outside of the house to make sure that the drainpipes weren’t planning to send anything in later in the day. Of course, one of the drainpipes was clogged and the gutters were overflowing on one side of the house. I went back into the basement, grabbed a ladder, and fished a wad of leaves out of the murk. The water rushed down the pipe like a toilet flush.

Puddles were mobilizing to threaten the window wells, so I dug out a trench that leads water away from the house to frustrate their advance. I used the dirt to fill in some low spots to prevent future puddling. I leaned on my shovel and nodded despite the pelting rain. It was the best I could do.

I came in, peeled off my wet clothes, showered off the cold, and grabbed a bowl of cereal. As I sat at the counter, my loving #1GF! came into the room to thank me for keeping our house from flooding.

“What’s up, George Michael?” she asked.

“Huh?” I said through chomps of Cheerios.

“Go look in the mirror. You gotta have a faith a faith a faith.”

I was so focused on getting a bowl of cereal after my shower that I had forgotten to comb my hair, which was admittedly getting sort of long. And maybe it was just a tiny bit feathery. Thus, instead of being a hydrodynamic hero, I was George Michael. How fickle the public is. I ran a comb through my hair and returned to watch the baby while #1GF! showered.

The baby soon turned on me too, and I put her in her magic swing to calm her down. She fell asleep, and I grabbed some fall decorations from the attic, as ordered. I promised not to get involved with any decorating because I hate decorations. The less I was told about, the less I’d notice. I just delivered the boxes to the lady of the house and got the hell out of the way.

I sat down at the PC and sent out six more agent queries for my novel. I was up to twenty-seven queries outstanding.

A few weeks before, I brought #1GF!’s mother some coconut macaroons because she mentioned that she liked them. When she tried one, she claimed that they weren’t “Italian macaroons”, which were the only kind of macaroons that she liked. After a failed search for an “Italian macaroon” recipe, I assumed that she meant almond macaroons.

I made up a batch of almond macaroons and pine nut cookies as a surprise for #1GF!’s mother, and we went to her house for a visit. I brought out the cookies as if I bought her a new car, and her eyes lit up.

#1GF!’s mother took one bite, and claimed that they were not “Italian macaroons”. I know of almond, and I know of coconut. I do not know Italian. The best I could get was that an Italian macaroon sounded like it was either a coconut macaroon wrapped in an almond macaroon, or a completely fictional cookie invented to keep a steady flow of cookies flowing to #1GF!’s mother.

We debated on what an “Italian macaroon” was until #1GF!’s mother suggested that we go to a local bakery who supposedly made really good “Italian macaroons”. We were planning the trip until we were warned that we would have to ask to taste one first, because they were usually stale. We decided to pass on the trip to a bakery that sells stale, and possibly fictional cookies.

Her mom put the cookie down and asked me, “So, how do you like being a dad?”

I answered the only way I could. “I love it.”

“Good.”

“The screaming at all hours has to go, but that’s the price you pay, I guess.”

She nodded in agreement. Colic has run in #1GF!’s family for generations.

I did a few minor chores because I was the only one who could easily reach high places, and then kept the baby calm while #1GF! helped her mother with other stuff. I eventually had to run out to a Walmart to pick up a couple of things for #1GF!’s mom.

When I got to the store, everyone looked soaked to the skin even though it wasn’t raining. And most of them were in cotton sweatpants. Can someone please explain what the fuck is up with Walmart customers and cotton sweatpants? I wondered if I could write a story about a pick up artist who picks up women at Walmart. He would probably hang out near the prescription counter. I’m not sure if he’d wear sweatpants because it might be too big of an obstacle even for a Walmart pickup artist.

On the way home, #1GF! and I picked up a pizza. We ate it with the baby sitting in the swing. The baby was quiet, but I couldn’t enjoy the pizza because I couldn’t shake the feeling that the baby was ready to pop. I also wasn’t enjoying it as much because we were eating pizza at the dining room table like civilized adults instead of on a couch in front of a movie. And the lights were low so as not to irritate the baby. It was like eating in a bomb shelter with an actual bomb.

The baby started her nightly freakout at about 8PM by power-puking all over #1GF! and the couch. Throwing up only quieted the baby momentarily, and she was back to screaming soon after. There was puke everywhere. All #1GF! could say was “Hon?” like there was something I could do to stop the column of baby vomit from going everywhere. All I could think was, “Well, at least this freakout started a little later than usual.”

My sister called at a time when I had to take the baby from #1GF!, but I proved that I could talk and care for a baby at the same time.

“What is that?” my sister asked.

“The baby.”

“That is loud.”

“Yea. She does this every night now.”

“Ugh.”

“It only lasts a couple of hours.”

“Ew.”

“Yep. I’m going to have to call you back some other time.”

“No problem.”

I wasn’t having any luck calming the baby down, so #1GF! took her from me because she couldn’t stand the noise anymore. That was about 10PM. We were starting to think that the baby might have colic.

What I Learned

• Agent queries take up a lot of time and feel like shots in the dark.
• Spending time writing queries feels like siding with marketing at the expense of production.
• I made coconut biscotti.
• A swing is an invaluable tool for calming a colicky baby.
• Supermarkets keep basil in with the tomatoes and not in with the other herbs.
• Oxyclean isn’t as good as Billy Mays made it out to be.
• Pesto should only be made with fresh basil.
• Some people still think of us as “the kids”.
• I get attached to crappy pens.
• I’m stuck with a “post or die” mentality.
• There is no such thing as an “Italian macaroon”.
• One bad hair day, and you’re George Michael.

Share, Bookmark, or E-Mail This Article

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.

I gave my parents a couple of warehouse sized cans of tomatoes to take home, and they gave us some fresh tomatoes from their garden. We sat around the table eating and talking into the early evening, and then they headed home.

#1GF! and I were eating some leftover lasagna, when we finally figured out that it wasn’t Labor Day weekend. I got a call from a friend who laughed at me and told me that it was actually Easter before telling me that I needed to go out and get a damned job.

The baby slept most of the day, which made me think that the night was going to be pretty rough, which somehow, it wasn’t. It was oddly quiet. I lay there in the dark trying come up with new book ideas that I was sure that I’d eventually have time to write.

Monday (Day 820): Edible MP3 Players

I woke up to the baby crying, which is getting to be the normal way for me to wake up these days. I sat with the baby while #1GF! went back to bed to get some rest. The baby slept on my chest while I sat watching TV.

We eventually found our way out of the house in the afternoon to pick up a baby care reference book. We didn’t need anything else, and there’s not much you can do with a live scream bomb strapped to you, so we drove around aimlessly. It was just nice to be out of the house and in motion while expending zero effort.

When we got home, I made fettuccine alfredo, but the baby had a fit before we could enjoy it. I walked up and down the hall with her screaming in my ear. After an hour, I had to hand her over to #1GF!. The baby was frustrating to troubleshoot, and loud as hell. #1GF! ended up feeding her even though it wasn’t her time to eat. I couldn’t blame her. If I produced baby food, I would’ve tried to plug up the baby’s scream hole with it, too.

Once the baby was down, I shoveled down a lukewarm, semi-clotted alfredo, and went to check my e-mail. I had an idea for something that I really thought would be cool while I was cooking, but lost it in the scream blitz. I’ll remember it when a major company is making millions off of the idea five years from now.

I’ll be sitting on the couch with the robot, and I’ll be like, “Fuck. You see that shit, Robot? They’re selling edible MP3 players now. I thought of that five years ago and the baby screamed it right out of my head.” The robot will probably just beep in agreement because I’m the boss and he doesn’t want to admit that he doesn’t know what an MP3 player is. #1GF! will probably be in the kitchen stirring medication into my prunes.

And I’ll make such a big fuss about it that my daughter will end up telling people at school that her dad not only wrote over twenty unpublished novels, but he that he is the original inventor the edible MP3 player. She’ll eventually bring in the shop vac and tell the class that it’s a robot. All because of colic. Great. Thanks colic. Thanks for making me lose the idea that will eventually cause my little girl to wear headphones all the time to drown out the taunting.

Tuesday (Day 821): All About Nipples

In the pre-dawn hours, we stared at the baby when she was quiet, changed her when she made a mess, and fed her when she cried. The morning was quieter and smoother than normal, and I wanted to keep it that way.

My mother called early, and the ring of the phone startled me pretty badly. The screaming has made me a little high strung. #1GF! walked in and handed me the phone. I explained to my mother that she had inadvertently caused me to launch a full bowl of Cheerios all over the kitchen. #1GF! took a look at the mess and walked away laughing.

“Do you guys ever fight?” asked my mother.

“No, not really. Once in a great while we catch ourselves talking in a less respectful tone, but that’s about as crazy as it gets around here.”

“You two are amazing.”

“It’s pretty good, yea.”

#1GF! vanished for a little while I was on the phone, and once I hung up, I walked into a room where she was trying out a breast pump for the first time. I guess I wasn’t supposed to see that show.

After you’ve seen just about all there is to see on your lady, including the inside of her womb, it’s sort of weird to see her ducking for cover to hide something. “You have to get out of here,” she said while trying to cover up, wave me off, and gather the tubes and hoses at the same time.

“But it looks so weird,” I said while staring like a monkey seeing a space ship for the first time.

#1GF! grimaced. “I feel like a cow.”

“Mooooo!” I said before my brain could catch up with my mouth. It was not the correct thing to say, and I was summarily ejected from the room.

Once the equipment was packed back into it’s secret hiding spot, we spent some of the warm, summer midafternoon out for a walk. As we strolled along the beach, we talked about how lucky we were to have three months off together. Not many people we know have had that opportunity as responsible a