The list of Academy Award nominees was released today. I didn't get up at 5:30 to watch the event. I can't handle Mira Sorvino in the morning.
So, let's see how I did with my Academy Award major category nomination predictions
Back in the day, Amy and I hosted some pretty damn lavish Academy Awards parties with fun prizes and statuettes for the guest who correctly guessed the most winners. For the 2004 show, I was en route to Seattle and stuck in a snowstorm in Wall, South Dakota. Our friends Sarah and Heather picked up the baton, however, and hosted the bash and the contest that year, and I nearly pulled off an upset victory by guessing nearly every award winner despite not having seen any of the nominated films (Heather, my arch-Oscar-nemesis won that year). I didn't even watch the show last year; probably because I really can't stand Chris Rock.
I probably will watch the Jon Stewart-hosted event this year, though I fear this is the kiss of death for the overexposed Daily Show host. Look what happened to Letterman.
The nominations are revealed tomorrow at 5:30 PST. I have never tried to predict the nominations before, but based mostly on that unquantifiable je ne sais pas called "buzz," I offer you my 2006 Oscar Nominee Predictions.
We took Ray to the Seattle Mariners' annual FanFest at Safeco Field yesterday. For two days, they open the field to the general public (well, the $10-paying general public) for base running, fly-ball catching, tee-ball hitting, etc. It's mostly geared toward kids, though Ray is too little to engage in many of the activites.
He does enjoy, however, the Mariner Moose, and when we learned the Moose was holding court in the center field concourse, we made a bee-line for the event.
Just as we got to the front of the line, the Moose's handler announced that the Moose had to take a 15-minute break. We patiently waited, but the Moose didn't return after 15 minutes, or even after 30 minutes. It was cold, and though Ray was being a trooper about the whole thing, he started muttering about wanting to go home, so we left. On the way out, we bought him a stuffed Moose toy, which he loves and which we hope helps to prevent his being disillusioned and bummed out about baseball in general.
At one point while in line, Amy turned to me and said: "You know, this is really a letter-writing offense." She was reading my mind, as I had already begun to compose the complaint letter which, if my complaint-letter-writing skills don't fail me, would net us some free baseball tickets or other juicy booty from the Mariners. They disappointed my son, and they must pay!
Click "Continue Reading..." for photos and the complaint letter.
I try not to spend too much time with Sunday newspaper staple PARADE Magazine and its obsequious celebrity profiles, shallow news features, and "Howard Huge"® comic (a "big dog" cartoon that manages to be less funny than "Marmaduke"). In fact, I don't think one can spend too much with the lightweight rag. Just yesterday, Ray tossed it aside after 2 minutes and asked me if I was done with the Style & Leisure section yet. (editor's note: Ray is 2.)
About the only section of PARADE that's sometimes worth the cheap-ass paper it's printed on is Walter Scott's "Personality Parade"®, and then only for a cheap laugh. Walter answers reader-submitted letters (that have been obviously re-written by flacks) that pose sycophantic questions about famous people ("I just love the beautiful and talented Famey McFamousperson, star of CBS's wonderful new comedy 'Mixed Nuts,' which is on at 8 EST/7 CST Tuesday nights, and I was wondering: does she have any pets?")
Walter sometimes allows a bit of snark to creep into his responses, and you can just tell that he's not really keen on what these kids nowadays are into.
This Sunday's issue carried a strange question.
This week's Blog Shout Out is a special edition focused on my friend Holly's excellent blog, Self-Portrait as. It's excellent not just for the exceptional design (done by yours truly), but for Holly's keen storytelling, wicked sense of humor, relentless self-examination, and the occasional tasty recipe. You should go there and read every word of it now.
I met Holly about 10 years ago in Iowa City, where we were both graduate students at the University of Iowa. Holly is the only person from that period of my life with whom I still keep in touch, and I consider her one of my closest friends. She makes excellent popcorn, has a taste for hot Dr. Pepper, likes The Young Ones and Zorro: The Gay Blade, and once went to Halloween party dressed as one of Brigham Young's pregnant wives.
Oh, and she has an essay in the The Best American Essays 2005 collection, which was edited by Susan Orlean. Not too shabby!
King County Metro is trying out wireless internet service on some of its routes — mine included! This post was written and submitted on the bus!
The only problem is I just ordered a cellular data plan before I knew of this service on the bus.
Yesterday, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo related his experiences trying to purchase a photo depicting President Bush and embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The existence of this photo (and possibly others) has not been disputed by anyone, including the White House. In fact, Bush talked about it at a recent press conference ("I had my picture taken with him evidently. I've had my picture taken with a lot of people. Having my picture taken with someone doesn't mean that I'm a friend with them or know them very well.")
Yet when Marshall attempted to buy the photo from Reflections Photography (the offical Bush/Cheney photographer for the 2004 Bush/Cheny campaign) he learned it had been removed from their catalog. He got the company's president (a maxed-out Bush/GOP contributor) to admit that she personally removed it. She intimated that the call to do so came from the White House, and she referred to the removal of photographs (plural) as well.
The whole issue is wrapped up like this sinister plot with the good guys trying to obtain some sort of proof of Bush's misdeeds — something to finally catch him red-handed. I'm all for that, of course, But looking at it from the point-of-view of someone concerned with visual representation and meaning, I can't help but conclude (preliminarily) that the whole thing is just a big Macguffin and is distracting from the real story. Actually seeing the photo in question adds nothing to what people already know: that Bush and Abramoff were once in the same place at the same time and shook hands (or hugged, or whatever). That's it. Why are journalists and bloggers elevating The Photograph to almost mythical status?
To answer this, let's explore the status that the photographic image holds in our society and whether or not that status is valid.
How much do you know about the principle of church/state separation? Is America a Christian nation? The Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) has an interesting online quiz to test your knowledge.
FFRF Separation of Church and State Quiz
I was an FFRF member when I lived in Madison, but they were a little too militant for me. The Gaylor family, which runs the organization, are locally notorious for, among other things, overturning (rightly) the state's recognition of Good Friday as a holiday. Their web site has pretty good resources and they very actively pursue legal issues at the state and national levels concerning the Establishment clause.
Gah! I just looked at my site in Internet Explorer for the first time in a while, and man does it look crappy compared to how it looks in Mozilla Firefox.
I need to tweak the CSS to workaround IE's lameness.
Here's a screen grab of how it's supposed to look.
How about you esoteric Mac users out there? How do things look? Any obvious formatting or alignment issues in Safari, Mac IE, or whatever other browsers you people use?
I spent most of my free time today setting up a MovableType plugin called Meow, which will allow me to post to the blog via regular email. If all goes well, this very post will have been contributed via Meow.
The installation went pretty well. I had to configure a new mail account on my server and edit an XML file to set it up, but it seems to be working.
So, nothing of substance today, I'm afraid. Today was a geek day.
update: I need to hack the plugin to remove line breaks from the email message before posting. This is a common complaint on the author's website, but he has apparently abandoned the project, so if I'm successful, I'll post the modified version here.
update 2: That was easy. I can't repost the Meow author's work, but if you get the plugin from his site, open up "meow.cgi" in a text editor, and add these three lines around line #307, it should do the trick.
my $unbrokentext = $$new_item_hash{$msg_count}{'body'};
$unbrokentext =~ s/(\S)\r\n(\S)/$1 $2/g;
$$new_item_hash{$msg_count}{'body'} = $unbrokentext;
The building I work in also houses a number of research labs. I'm not savvy to what goes on in them, but I can infer from some of the signs posted throughout the corridors that there's some nasty stuff floating around.
Last summer, a chemical explosion in one lab forced an evacuation of our building. That incident, and the FEMA-like response to it, prompted the College to ramp up their lab safety awareness program.
Shortly thereafter, these rather cryptic signs appeared on every door in the building.
I can't say that this made me feel particularly good about spending 8 hours a day in this building. The very existence of these signs implies that lab workers had been leaving their labs and touching door handles while still wearing their chemical- and bio-hazard-coated gloves! For how many years have building inhabitants been smearing toxic residue onto their hands (and other places) simply by going to the bathroom?
But the signs have also created some rather humerous moments. The other day, someone came to my office to meet with me and reported that, upon seeing the signs, she felt compelled to remove her winter gloves but didn't quite understand why she had to.
It's interesting to read about My Fair Hometown of Detroit's efforts to prepare for hosting the Super Bowl and compare them to the efforts of Beijing, which is preparing for hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Similarities? The demolition of historical landmarks, for one.
A couple months ago, Ray picked up a green bean between his index and middle fingers and put it up to his lips like a cigarette. He was greatly amused by this, and, obviously, Amy and I were horrified. He said he was being like "that man," and gestured across the street. I was pretty surprised as we have never called attention to anyone smoking, and he had never asked about it. But he apparently saw someone doing it in our neighborhood and it made enough of an impression on him that he easily mimicked the process of taking a drag.
I was reminded of that today when I saw this cheerful little nugget [from boing boing]: Photos of a three-year-old smoker
I wonder if he knows how to inhale.
As a Seattle-based blogger, I suppose I should mention that the Seattle Seahens Seahawks apparently won some big football game.
For the record, my favorite sports, in order of preference, are:
Security expert Bruce Schneier runs an interesting blog that I read regularly. Though he works primarily in the field of technology security, he addresses the topic of security more broadly on his blog, using real life examples of the difficulty of doing security right. His recent article on verifying credentials got me thinking about the role that identification plays in one of my favorite movie genres, the heist film. With the imminent deployment of the misguided "Real ID" national identification card system (read the ACLU on Real ID), this topic is doubly relevant.
I had to catch a later bus yesterday because a meeting ran over time. Taking anything other than my usual commuter "express" service is chancey. The evening express bus starts on campus, makes few stops, and generally ferries other University employees back to their homes. The "local" route, on the other hand, originates in the bowels of south Seattle and carries a much more diverse, and often strange, mixture of folks.
The bus was crowded, as usual, but I was lucky to find a place to sit. After about 15 minutes, a man squeezed himself down the aisle and stood next to my seat. His pants were about halfway down his ass and about 4 inches of his butt-crack peeked out right at my eye-level. He also smelled really, really bad. He then accosted another passenger in the aisle.
The largest representation of your personality type can be found in the these U.S. cities: Salt Lake City, Albuquerque/Santa Fe, Providence, Phoenix, Reno, Norfolk, Indianapolis, Seattle/Tacoma, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, Miami/Ft. Lauderdale and these international countries/regions Denmark, Israel, Argentina, Greece, India, Iceland, Romania, Sweden, China, Turkey, South Africa, Middle East, Japan, Indonesia, Italy
I got a disappointing haircut last weekend. It's not going into the Annals of Bad Haircuts or anything, but it's just ... well, disappointing. The edges aren't clean, it's not entirely proportional, the sideburns were really messed up (I fixed those). From a distance, it doesn't look too terrible, but up close you can just tell that no pride went into this cut job.
One of the hardest things about adjusting to life in a new city is locating new local versions of all the services you grew accustomed to in your previous locale, and hairstyling is one of the hardest to find. It takes time, money, and you can only check a new place once every month or so.
Back in the halcyion days of my youth, I worked as an assistant store manager for the Pier 1 Imports store in my hometown of Dearborn, MI. At the time, the greater metro Detroit area boasted 16 Pier 1 locations, and my store routinely placed second in sales and corporate recognition only to the region's flagship in tony Royal Oak. I left the company in 1993 to pursue my graduate studies in Iowa, but I continued to receive reports about the store from my mother who remained a regular customer. The other day, she told me some depressing and infuriating news: the Dearborn store was becoming a Pier 1 clearance outlet. Depressing, because of what it says about the demographics of the neighborhood; infuriating because I thought of the whole "clearance store" concept and never got credit!
the bonster from i hate peas posted an old photo of the two of us from, probably, 1989 or 1990. Check out the swooping hair and big hoop earring on that guy! Compare with this other old photo.
I recently removed all references to my and my partner's real names from this blog. I was inspired by my old pal Oscar Madison's Columnist Manifesto blog, and specifically, his post about "pseudonymity." Oscar also refers to his wife as "B"; I opted for the more Victorian "A—" for Amy.
Amy questioned this move, observing that people who know us already know who she is, and anyone who doesn't wouldn't be able to do anything untoward with just a first name anyway. I also got a couple emails from relatives expressing the same puzzlement.
So, I find myself forced to say something I typically say about four or five times a day: Amy's right, and I'm wrong. Referring to her as A— just made for more typing for me (A— vs. Amy) and came across as silly and, possibly, pretentious without solving any real problem.
For the purposes of this site, I will remain "majorsteel" (which is just an anagram of my real name, anyway), but Amy will once again be "Amy." Welcome back, love.
One of the ostensible reasons for my keeping this blog is to improve my writing. Of course, I haven't actually done anything formally to improve my writing except write more. It turns out, there are rules for good writing that go beyond simply being grammatically correct and having good spelling. Who knew?
Whenever I ask Ray what I do at work, he replies "Meet!" For indeed, a great deal of my time is spent in meetings, as you can see by this screengrab of my calendar on a typical work week.
The Guardian Unlimited reports that researchers from the University of Minnesota and University of North Carolina have found that (1) the more meetings one has to attend, the greater the negative effects; and (2) the more time one spends in meetings, the greater the negative effects.
I think, however, that being in higher ed insulates me from a lot of the negativity that I hear occurs in the private sector. I actually like 70%-80% of the meetings I have to go to — in fact, I probably propose about half of them. I just had a staff meeting the other day in which my staff expressed an interest in having more and longer meetings!
There is very little about the higher ed sector that can be said to be more efficient than the private sector, but it seems that we have more productive and useful meetings than they do.
The distinctive blue and orange Fremont Bridge 
spans the Lake Washington Ship Canal in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. The bridge opens an average of 35 times per day, making it the busiest drawbridge in the country.
We happened upon an opening today, on the nicest day in the last month.
Geez, how many "ph" -> "f" substitutions can I make in one day?
All day today, people were calling my cell phone — wrong numbers, all of them. It struck me as odd since my cell phone number isn't published anywhere, and no one except my staff and Amy know it. Finally, this afternoon, a woman with a very thick accent stayed on long enough for me to ask her how she got the number. She claimed to actually want to talk to someone named Jim, but it wasn't me. She read off the phone number she was calling, and it wasn't mine. I couldn't understand her enough to find out her name or where she worked, but I had enough to start digging into the problem.
I called the extension she gave me ... and I got my own voice mail! ("The call is coming from inside the house!") Could I have an alter-ego that I wasn't aware of? A doppelgänger, perhaps?
This week, the shout outs go to two new blogs on my Blogroll:
mclir's Synaptic Junction Daily
the bonster's i hate peas
both are friends of mine from long, long ago... Welcome, and nice seeing you again.
This photo of me as a baby used to be up at our old family web site, but it's been offline for a while now. After my last ultra-serious post, I thought this would liven things up around here a bit. (Click to enlarge...if you dare.)
Despite what my "I'm Reading" sidebar says (as of today), I am reading The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand. (Hey Amazon: Update your web services interfaces already!)
Every now and then, my thoughts tend to drift to wondering about what our world would be like if the field of science (or any academic pursuit, really) hadn't been hampered and stifled by religious dogmatism. Think, for one, how long the concept of heliocentrism languished in the prison of ignorance and superstition wrought by the medieval Catholic church. Even now — for example, in stem cell research — dogmatism fueled by ignorance is standing in the way of possible medical progress.
The Metaphysical Club tells a similar story, but in the field of philosophy. I am hardly qualified to comment authoritatively on philosophy or the history of American thought. I took some philosophy in college and graduate school, and I've read a great deal of the works of C. S. Peirce, who figures prominently in the book (though I can say now that I did not fully comprehend him). But, Menard does a really good job of describing the historical tension between philosophy and religion and in placing the work of Kant, Hegel, and others in that context. I can't help but stretch the time line to the present day and think about how that tension is still being played out in the academic and political arenas.
Amy and I nearly had a shotgun wedding and the Blue Shield of Washington had its finger on the trigger.
Amy's on her own, insurance-wise, since we are unmarried and of different genders. If we were married, or if she were a boy (or if I were a girl), I'd qualify for a spousal rider on my medical plan. But we're neither, so we don't.
Amy inadvertantly allowed her health insurance to lapse. She thought she had set up a payment program, but either it didn't "take" or she mis-remembered. She feared that the insurance company wouldn't allow her to make amends, so for a day-and-a-half there, we were seriously considering gettin' hitched.
The insurance company, it turned out, is both benevolent and merciful, and allowed Amy to even up her account.
I was afriad I'd have to return all those "Little Bastard" T-Shirts we bought for Ray!
In an effort to focus on writing instead of designing, I made a big push tonight to fix all the nagging issues I've have with this site, and implement a number of things I've been meaning to. You might notice some changes to the look-and-feel of the site. Here's a list of everything that's new, in case you care.
One of the biggest — and most expensive — consequences of losing all this weight on the South Beach Diet was that I needed new pants and belts. I have dropped from a 34"-35" waist to a 31"-32". I literally had nothing to wear for the holidays. So, I spent a good deal of time shopping for myself at Christmastime. They say it's better to give than to receive; but when you're both giving and receiving, that's the best of all!
One day, I was at a store with Amy and Ray. My search for trousers had turned up empty, so I was in the kids' section looking for stuff for the little guy when I overheard a woman and her young son discussing his size. She told the chubby young fellow that he needed a "10 H."
A shiver went down my spine as my mind raced back 25 years to the first time I learned what the dreaded "H" stood for in boys' pants.
I've always liked cole slaw, but I've never made it for myself. If it's available as a side at a restauarant, I usually get it. But it never really occurs to me to whip up a batch in my own kitchen. It's sort like a mint on your hotel room pillow. It's nice when it's there, but I'm not going to go and put a mint on my own pillow at home.
Cole slaw is more complicated than a pillow mint, however. The cabbage has to be chopped up finely, it needs a mayonnaise-based dressing that is not too mayonnaisey. And it needs to be slighty tangy, but not too tangy.
I think the prospect of chopping up all that cabbage has always been the main reason I've been dissuaded from delving into the culinary art of cole-slaw-making. We have a food processor, but setting it up and cleaning it afterwards is often more of a pain than the chopping.
However, the other day, inspired by a very simple-but-very tasty-sounding recipe in the South Beah Diet Quick & Easy Meals cookbook, I whipped up a batch of absolutely scumptious cole slaw that I have been devouring ever since. In fact, I just got done making myself a second batch. Here's the recipe:
Here's a run-down of my favorite recents posts from some of the blogs on my blogroll
Sometime back in December, there was a nice, relatively warm, sunny day here in Seattle. On that day, a colleague of mine approached me and asked me to join her "Ride in the Rain" bike team. "Ride in the Rain" is an annual "challenge" sponsored by the University of Washington's Transportation Services department and designed to encourage bicycle commuting even when the weather seems less-than-conducive to being outside. Teams form and members get points for each one-way commute they make during the month of January. If you make 20 or more, you get to attend a party.
I am now 1/10 of the way to getting my party, and I am very, very wet.
My (so far) lone 2006 blog commenter, nina — who runs a superb blog over at "The Other Side of the Ocean" — offered me some good advice on increasing readership to my little neck of the overcrowded blogospherical woods (one of my New Year's Resolutions).
One good way to build readership is to do blog homework on a regular basis. This consists of finding blogs that you like and commenting on them. The authors inevitably check out your blog and if you are entertaining enough or link to them in your sidebar, they'll reciprocate.
So why don't I comment? It's one thing, I guess, to spray my nonsense in my own little self-contained universe here, but quite another to shake up my paint can and splatter graffiti all over someone else's (regardless of the fact that I'm being invited, even encouraged, to mark up their walls). If I have something to say, I'll say it here, and people who know about me and this blog can come and find it if they choose. Blogging is inherently a form of exhibitionism, granted; but it's on my own turf and you can take it or leave it.
If I say something on someone else's blog, I feel, I'm racheting up that exhibitionism another notch. Instead of stripping down and dancing around naked in my own house with the windows open, I'd be taking a brief naked stroll through someone else's living room. I'm assuming that they and their guests, who came to their house to enjoy their witty conversation and company, want to see me naked.
But now I'm thinking that my metaphor (or is it an analogy?) is wrong. Commenting on blog posts is all about open discourse and idea sharing and all that. It's part of the whole process. I certainly like it when people comment on my blog. Maybe bloggers and blog-readers really do want me to naked in their living rooms every now and then.
Methphorically (or analogously) speaking, of course.
Comments?
Yesterday, I wrote that I was once on the verge of engaging an innocent title company agent in a Saussurian tongue-lashing over the nature of signs and signifiers (specifically, signatures).
It occurred to me that it's once again time to blow the dust off yet another decade-old graduate school essay. Today's sleep-inducing work is a mercifully brief treatise on Saussurian linguistics. Specifically, it's a critical piece on Marxist heavyweight Tony Bennett's (no, not that Tony Bennett) book "Formalism and Marxism", in which he apparently says something about Saussure, or something, that pissed me off.
In the essay, I boldly suggest that "Bennett's critique of Saussure rests upon a misunderstanding of both Saussure's conception of la langue and the significance of his sweeping elimination of linguistic change from it," and I controversially state:
I would suggest that Saussurian linguistics, by the two very premises Bennett links it with Formalism, is generally not applicable to the study of literature or any other use of a language system.
Or is that "moron signatures"?
After just posting about signatures, I was reminded of a minor argument I got into with a home title agent in Madison, WI, when I was refinancing my first house. The documents I had to sign (all 4,190 of them) listed my full name, "James" plus middle initial and all. My signature, however, uses a variation of "Jim" and doesn't typically include my middle initial.
So, I signed all the documents with my 3-stroke swoopy mark, only to have the agent review them and tell me I had to re-do them all.
"The signature has to match the name as it's typed on the form," she explained.
"But, that's my signature," I protested. "It doesn't look anything like my name in the first place."
She told me that it was "obvious" there was no middle initial within the swirly, non-representational lines that comprised my signature, so I had to go back in and add it. "Isn't the point to just indicate that I read and understood the documents? You were here the whole time and saw me sign it. That signature is on file at the bank, it's on my passport, it's on my driver's license. What am I going do, come back and assert that I don't owe you any money because my those documents don't have an 'M' on them?" I was prepared to launch into a philosphical discussion about the nature of authentication and identity. I thought about invoking Saussure and discussing the arbitrary nature of signs. I wanted to stand up and assert my right, guaranteed (probably) by the U.S. Constitution even, to freely sign my name "Washington Irving" if I wanted to!!!
And then I patiently re-signed all 4,190 documents with my middle initial....
"A signature always reveals a man's character - and sometimes even his name." -Evan Esar
Back when I peddled wicker at Pier 1 Imports, I had to authorize a lot of returns and sign off on a lot of voids, error corrections, bank deposit slips, etc. During the busy season, having to stop to sign something every few minutes got to be a big hassle. So, I worked at reducing my signature to the barest minimum number of strokes (3) while having it be still somewhat recognizable as my name (if you're drunk and have bad eyesight). I even timed myself signing the old way vs. the new way and found that I saved about 2 seconds on each signature. Over the normal course of a day, that added up to ... well, about a minute. But still, that's one more minute I could spend with customers helping them decide which pillows go with tea-stained rattan.
I adopted my new efficient-but-illegible signature in other aspects of life as well, using it whenever I opened new bank accounts, got new driver's licenses, or signed new leases. When my first passport expired a few years ago, the last vestige of the old "James M. L----" cursive was nulled-and-voided by the U.S. State Department.
I got thinking about signatures after two things that happened yesterday.
The Wall of Separation blog has a post about Jimmy Carter's appearance on The Daily Show the other night in which he expresses his concern over the breaking down of the separation of church and state.
Thomas Jefferson, one of our Founding Fathers, said that we should build a wall between the church and state. That wall is being deliberately and ostentatiously, not secretly, broken down. So, there has been an increasing merger in this country of fundamentalism on the religious side, fundamentalism on the political side, and the two have come together.
There are 569 Google hits for the phrases "new years resolution" & "blog more." I'm surprised; frankly, I thought there'd be more. I would certainly like to write more in 2006 and try to expand my audience (or, rather, gain one to begin with).
Others, in no particular order, are:
Relatively boring and unspectacular goals, but eminently achievable, I think.
A few days ago, Amy, Ray, and I went to see the Golden Gate bridge. While we were driving back, Ray was playing with his MagnaDoodle in the car and he was putting the pen-thingy in his mouth. I gently admonished him and reminded him that we don't put things like that in our mouths. He responded by saying that he was being "like daddy."
Apparently he has witnessed me putting a pen in my mouth, which I guess I do unconsciously. It is a nasty habit, and is certainly not setting a good example. I decided to kill two birds with one stone on this one and explain to him the concept of "new year's resolutions" and promise to him that one of mine would be to stop putting pens in my mouth. He listened, but I assumed the whole conversation bored him as he didn't really respond.
This morning, after he woke up, Amy wished him a "happy new year" and talked with him some more about what the "new year" means. Ray listened intently and then said: "And daddy not put pens in mouth."
So, now I most definitely have to break that habit. The damn kid absorbs everything!!
As we have for the previous two New Year's Eves, Amy and I went to bed around 9:00 pm. I was never that big of a New Year's reveller, and having a toddler with sleep issues just makes it that much more of a non-event.
I just got home from spending nearly 2 weeks in California with Amy's parents. Amy and Ray are staying on another week to take advantage of some "grandma time." Our chief base of operation was Amy's mom's house in Menlo Park, CAmy We also spent two nights at her dad's place outside of Sacramento.
Ray fell back into some rather annoying sleep habits, unfortunately. He started waking up around 5:00 am and refusing to go back to sleep. In addition, he didn't nap well, so he was always exhausted and was borderline cranky (when he wasn't a full-bore crank-monster). Even in a semi-sleep-deprived state, however, he's still a pretty fun little guy and we had a good time playing hide-and-seek in grandma's yard (even though he directed me where to hide and wouldn't cover his eyes and count while I hid) and touring the neighborhood looking at Christmas lights. Ray adores his grandma, so he was just happy having her around. He got a Pooh Bear tea set as a gift and thoroughly enjoyed making and serving pretend tea for people.
So, now I'm a bachelor for a week. I originally had quite ambitious plans for fixing up our basement TV room, painting it, rearranging it, etc. but I have scaled back on those and now plan to just focus on relaxing and recharging. I can't really say that the past two weeks were much of a vacation, even though we did get to go out on our own a couple times. But when Ray doesn't sleep, no one sleeps, and that just creates stress.
