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Weekend wrap up

This weekend was a lot of fun but flew by way too quickly. On Friday night I came home from work just before Elise and Maly got home. Elise stopped at Whole Foods on the way home from picking up her packet for the Capitol 10k and bought sushi for us for dinner. We fed Maly a regular dinner, but decided to see if she liked sushi. I’d venture to say she really liked it.

On Saturday Elise photographed a wedding with Marc. Maly and I quickly packed up and hit the road. Our mission: to find a bicycle trailer so I can take her on bike rides with me. I had been shopping them on craigslist all week and realized that I could buy a brand new one for what I was finding on craigslist. I went to InStep’s website to find that Toys ‘R’ Us and Target were retailers. We went to Toys ‘R’ Us because I wanted a bike trailer and because I knew I could position myself to totally spoil my daughter. No bike trailers so we decided to leave. I had picked out a really cute denim dress with embroidered cherries and matching body suit for Maly, but decided to suppress compulsive purchases and just leave the store and continue on with our mission. I happened upon a little beach basket for Jack to take with him on his summer trip to San Diego and decided I couldn’t pass that up. So we had to endure the Saturday line at Toys ‘R’ Us.

Maly and I walked across the parking lot to Play It Again Sports where we found a bicycle trailer for $200. It was the same one that I found on InStep’s website for $150. And the one at PIAS wasn’t even in a box. Earlier, a Toys ‘R’ Us employee tipped me off on a bicycle shop on S. 1st that might carry trailers. We went to support the local guy only to find a trailer for $200. We loaded up again and headed to Target where I found a great Schwinn trailer for just over $100. Maly and I came home and started assembling the trailer just before Elise got home from her shoot. Once I was done with that, we went for a test ride.

Later that evening I cooked dinner for Rob, Julie, Elise and myself. I smoked salmon filets and made a dijon butter sauce and a basil and cilantro chimichurri. Elise roasted some fresh vegetables with course cracked pepper and rosemary.

On Sunday Maly and I woke up early, scarfed down breakfast and left to meet Rob, Luke and Jaden to watch Elise and Julie run the Capitol 10k. We had a great time watching the girls and the rest of the runners. Rob and I were really proud of our wives who have been running together for the past several weeks to 1) get in shape and make Rob and me look like wimps and 2) to help Elise train for the Danskin triathlon this summer.

After the race we took the kids over to Run Tex to play on the bouncy things and to see if we could win some door prizes. Elise won a pair of jogging shorts and a water bottle. Woot!!! Score!

We left the after party and stopped at Pluckers for some much needed and very healthy buffalo wings. Elise and Maly played after lunch while I gutted the flower gardens in the front yard in preparation for our landscaping overhaul. I then took Maly for another bike ride. We really like the new trailer. I’m hoping to get into shape and to show her the proper way in which to consume canker worms.

Elise and Maly went to church while your humble narrator removed the guest bathroom toilet and cleaned/replaced the wax ring that seals the toilet flange. Fun stuff, let me tell ya’.

It was a good weekend and I look forward to more of them now that Spring has sprung and my little Sugar can go out and do fun things with us.

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Monthly Maly Letter: Month 11

Dear Maly,

You turned 11-months-old today. Despite my efforts, I can’t seem to stop time. It’s seems like just yestereday you turned 10-months-old. In another month, you’ll be a year old. I’m really good with math like that. When you experience something in life that is known as “algebra”, we’ll take a family vacation.

As I write this, you are in your crib in your room, crying. Your Mom is out with her friends for their monthly girls night out. You and I played, you ate dinner, I bathed you, brushed your hair and put you down after walking around the house with you in my arms – just like when you were a newborn and I would walk you around the house and talk to you so you would fall asleep. It brought back fond memories holding you with my left arm and using my right had to cup the side of your head while playing with your hair with my thumb. You seemed tired, so I put you down in your crib and, with super hero gusto, bolted for the door and closed it behind me before you noticed I was gone. It seemed like you would fall asleep immediately but you stirred a few minutes later. I think you miss your Mom.

You’re becoming such a little person now. You easily feed yourself and you like everything that we give you to eat. You’re really starting to interact and talk to us now. You’re such a smart little girl, too. You know what the ceiling fan is, you know what the light is, you know what Mom’s and my nose and eyes are, you know what kitties are as well.

You also know that I get mad when you hit me in the face. I don’t think you understand what “mad” is, but rather, you know hitting in the face gets a reaction so apparenty that’s fun to you. We’re working on this hitting thing. I told you that I was a second degree blackbelt but that didn’t seem to phase you. When you’re able to stand more than ten seconds on your own, we can start sparring and I’ll show you what’s up. Seriously, it’s one of those things that babies do and your Mom and I have to figure out how to be good parents and fix your little slappy happy habit.

You caught a really nasty cold while on a road trip to Oklahoma with your Mom, John, Christine, Jack and Grayson. When your Mom and you came back home, you were horribly miserable. Your eyes were red and you could only open them 3/4 of the way. You were so weak and worn out. Your nose kept running and you had a nasty cough. I felt so bad for you and wished I could have fixed your hurts for you. Your Mom took you to the doctor where you were prescribed antibiotics and ear drops because the doctor thought you had an ear infection.

Your Mom and you took the prescription in to the pharmacy and went home. I came home from work to see you sad and sick. I went to the pharmacy to pick up your medicine. While waiting in line, I fought back tears. I hated that you were sick. I hated that my little girl was feeling so bad and there was nothing that I could do to fix it. I didn’t like thinking that we were going to have to give you antibiotics after we’ve been so good about feeding you the right foods and were vigilent in not giving you anything synthetic.

You’re feeling 100% better now and I’m so happy to have my little girl back to normal. You’re spunky and excited about everything again and EVERYTHING that you point to is a “Doh, doh, doh!!!” You’re too cute.

Your hair is getting longer and longer and it’s so beautiful. I’m jealous. Believe me when I tell you that I once had hair. Your hair is such a beautiful golden blonde. I love to play with it while your distracted playing with your toys. I always thought I’d shave a mohawk on my child’s head because I’m weird like that, but now I would never dream of doing anything with your hair. It’s so gorgeous and I can’t wait until it gets even longer so your Mom can laugh at me because I wholeheartedly tried to put your hair into pigtails but end up with a mash of hair above your forehead and another behind your right ear.

I can’t believe that in one month you’ll be a year old. In twenty years, you’ll still be my little girl. I love you so much and never thought that it was humanly possible to cherish someone other than your Mom as much. I’m so proud that you’re from such a loving family. I’m so proud of you.

I love you so much. My chest swells when I look at you and hear your giggle. I’m so thankful for you and I promise that I will do everything that I can do to make you giggle, keep you from getting sick or feeling hurt and teach you to love the way that I love you.

I love you, Sugar.

Love,

Daddy

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Actual conversation with our next door neighbor

“If you ever throw a FUDGING flashlight at my FUDGING cat again, I will FUDGING kill you.”

My wife is FUDGING awesome!

So… I had to play diplomat and introduce ourselves to the next door neighbor, who is renting the house from the owners, who we actually know and like.  The conversation went something like this:

“Hey, let’s bury the hatchet (otherwise my wife will FUDGING kill you).  We’re long-since overdue in introducing ourselves and would like to be friendly”.

Our effort was well received and the cat is safe right now.  I think.

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Bachelorness

Elise, Maly, John, Christine, Jack and Grayson all drove to Irving on Friday, stayed with Christine’s parents that night and then drove up to Oklahoma on Saturday. John, Christine and the boys went to OK City for Christine’s Grandma’s 95th birthday and Elise and Maly went to Okeene to visit Elise’s Grandma as well as a fraction of the Boeckman uncle, aunts and cousins. Yours truly stayed here in Austin and endulged in some “me” time.

On Friday I went out with some coworkers for drinks at the bar at the Stephen F. Austin Intercontinental Hotel. I got home around 8 and played Scarface on the Xbox. Scarface isn’t really a game you should play if you have a wife sitting in the same room who might make note that every other word said is, “f#*k” or “cockaroacha”. Or a game you should play if you have an 10-month-old daughter whose first words, if exposed to said game, might be, “Tsay ello do my leedle fren!!!”

On Saturday I slept in really late. I woke up and decided it was time to treat the deck with water sealant. The last time I did that, I got really high. And then we had to drive to the hospital to have a baby. Ugghh.

This time I wore a mask but still managed to unintentionally get a little stoned. It’s hard to spray water sealant up without some of it coming down.

A trip back to the ol’ HoPot and another gallon of water sealant and the job was done. And then it was back to making coke deals as Tony Montana on the Xbox for the rest of the night.

On Sunday I got my haircut, fertilized the flowerbeds and garden, watered the lawn, cooked a Thai basil soup and then sold drugs as Tony Montana on the Xbox.

I rushed home from work on Monday in time to meet Elise and Maly after returning home from their trip to Oklahoma. I gave Maly a bath and played with her for a while before it was time for her to go to bed.

I played with Maly for an hour on Tuesday morning before my girls were off again. Elise drove to Mom’s house to drop Maly off so she could go on a photo shoot with Marc.

Elise and Maly and supposed to come either tomorrow or Friday. In the meantime, I’ve been building my empire, buying and selling cocaine, driving expensive cars and saying cockaroacha by night all while missing my girls.

Mom sent this photo today of Maly helping in the courtyard. Maly’s starting to stand on her own. I miss my little Sugar.

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Yeah, it’s really big

My Lacie d2 Big Disk Extreme was delivered yesterday. 1TB. That’s 1,000GB. This thing is awesome. I can store and backup EVERYTHING. I don’t even think anymore. When a thought comes to me, I don’t even bother processing it, I just throw it at this harddrive and am done with it.

What’s funny though is that I’ll bet it won’t take too long to fill it up with photos and videos.

What’s even more funny is that I’ll bet by Christmas we will be seeing 1TB thumbdrives.

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Check your yarbles at the door

I bought tickets to The Lion King as a Christmas present for Elise this past year. She’s really wanted to see this production for years and made sure to let me know as much in November. So I made sure to sell my left kidney so she and I could see this magnificent Broadway show while it was being performed in Austin.

Many of my friends have seen The Lion King and I was told that I would love it. I knew Elise would love it as she likes things like plays, flowers, talking about her feelings, breakfast foods and Grey’s Anatomy.

The night started out with something in the world of married folks we like to call “not communicating effectively”. Allow me to verbally paint the picture for you:

The male role: [While scratching his groinal region] “We need to leave at 7:00 p.m. to get there on time.”

The female role: 7:35 p.m. and we’re rushing out of the house late because: makeup had to be applied, the baby had to be nursed, earrings had to triple-checked, husband had to be ostracized because he’s wearing jeans, wife’s blouse had to be ironed, all the while said husband is also being yelled at for not mentioning the fact that the tickets clearly indicate that there will be no late seating. In black and white, plain English the ticket reads, “Those who arrive late will be denied entry and be forced to sit on the steps of the Bass Concert Hall where the husband will be subjected to discussing what happened on last week’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Or his wife’s feelings on breakfast foods. Whichever is deemed by the wife to be more painstaking.

We were late for the show. I won’t name names here but someone had to to triple-check her earrings and hence didn’t eat dinner which meant the husband had to stop at Jack in the Box for a Jumbo Jack (excellent breakfast food, by the way) and we arrived somewhere remotely near the University of Texas campus at 8 p.m., which was when the show started. It was about at this point at which the tears started falling. I really didn’t want to spend two hours and forty minutes having “hakuna matata” beat into my skull. But the real tears were from my wife, who really wanted to see this show. We didn’t have $8 cash to pay to park in the parking garage (see wife needs Jumbo Jack meal above) so I pleaded with the gatekeeper to let me in and allow me to walk to the office to pay for a parking ticket with the credit card.

Elise had dressed up so beautifully for the evening and really wanted to see this performance and have a nice date with her loving husband. I was still in the dog house for “not communicating” that we had to be there on time. Just after we parked I gave her her ticket and told her to go to the show without me so she could secure our seats. I told her I would get into the theatre if it meant I had to discuss “my feelings” or last week’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy with the box office attendee.

The University of Texas is nestled on 40 acres. I think I walked the circumference of 41+ acres while trying to find the Bass Concert Hall. I stopped and talked to two foreign exchange students who, in hindsight, clealy indicated that the Bass Concert Hall was, “over there”, but for whatever reason, I thought “over there” was actually, “over in that other direction.”

I finally found the Bass Concert Hall and was greeted by Elise. We found out that they did in fact allowed late seating. We had to wait a couple minutes for Scene I to end so an usher could show us our seats. While your humble narrator was trekking the campus, Elise was able to watch the performance on a television monitor in the lobby.

I sat there for two and half hours and tried to look at my own eyebrows while humans pranced around the stage in costumes that would make for great Gwar concert while singing “hakuna matata”. But I also held my wife’s hand because it was something that she wanted to do and that was the most important thing for me.

Next time, we’re going to see World Combat League.

And we won’t be late.

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Mac guy

I sold my PC today. It had been on craigslist for a month or so and a college kid from San Marcos drove to our house this afternoon to pick it up. He told me he plans on adding an external 100GB hard drive and turning it into a DVR. Now my old computer will get some use. It was hard letting it go because my parents gave me the pieces in which to build that computer a couple years ago as a Christmas present. I severed ties and am now, officially, a Mac guy. I don’t “own” an Windows PC any longer. Elise has her HP laptop (which I don’t touch unless I have to fix something for her) and I have a Dell Latitude laptop that I’ve, on numerous occassions, wanted to give some serious latitude to — as in launching through the 8th floor window of the office. We’re supposed to get Macbooks for our work computers in a couple months and until then, I’m not attaching myself to my work computer any more than I absolutely have to.

In the meantime, my Mom emailed me last night to tell me that she’s having to ship her brand new Hewlett Packard desktop with Windows Vista © Doesn’tCrashAsMuch Premium computer back to HP because it, errr, crashed.

And I guess it should go here where I make mention that I’ve seen a 102.72% return on my initial investment in Apple stock five years ago after I realized that Apple is a bad ass company upon buying my first iPod.

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Monthly Maly Letter: Month ten

Dear Maly,

You turned ten-months-old today. You’re now into the double digits. Just from looking at pictures of you, it’s amazing to see how much you’ve changed and grown in just a month. You’re such a pretty girl and every moment I spend with you makes me just that much prouder of you. It’s undeniable that you’re my child due to your outward appearance, but sometimes I think you’re just too cute to be from my gene pool. Your hair is getting so long and it’s a gorgeous straw-colored blonde. We thought your eyes would have decided by now if they were going to change to either brown or blue. It’s looking like they’re going to stay brue. Or blown. Or stone. You have a very beautiful eye color. Very unique – just like you.

You reached many milestones this month. You cut your first two teeth in late January. They’re your bottom front teeth and as each day passes they grow bigger and bigger. Gone are the days of your empty toothless smile. You have choppers now. I’m anticipating the day when your mom tells me that you bit her while nursing.

Since you have teeth now, we’ve let you start eating solid foods that you can pick up with your hands and put into your mouth yourself. We started you with these little star shaped Gerber “Puffs”. It wasn’t but a few days after that when we started letting you try all kinds of new finger foods. You now eat green beans, ground turkey, potatoes, asparagus, mozzarella, grapes, mango. It’s so much fun to watch you eat on your own. You do an awesome job of feeding yourself and there isn’t a food yet that we’ve found that you don’t like.

Except little pieces of broken screwdriver handles.

Your Grandma was here for my birthday a couple of weeks ago and while you were crawling around on the kitchen floor, you found a little tiny piece of a screwdriver handle. You don’t ordinarily put random objects into your mouth so I watched you as you crawled around on the floor, toting your little piece of broken plastic, sitting yourself up occasionally to say, “oooh oooh ooooh oooh” as you held your treasure in your hand in front of you. I turned my attention to something else in the kitchen and turned and looked down as you started to crawl away and made a wretched gagging sound and a pool of drool spilled onto the tile in front of you. I watched you for a second to make sure that you were okay. You sat there on all fours silent and not moving. With Super Sonic Daddy Hearing I then heard you silently gasp for air as the piece of plastic had lodged in your throat. I ran over to you, scooped you up, held you face down, horizontal to the ground and slapped you hard enough on the back that, if you weren’t choking, would have warranted a visit from Child Protective Services.

The piece of plastic came out. You were scared from the whole ordeal. I was scared, too. After I held you, kissed you, told you it was going to be okay, you stopped crying. I put you in your high chair as your mom started getting your lunch ready. I stood there next to you and ran my fingers through your hair. Your Grandma asked me, “You’re worried about her, aren’t you?” to which I lied and said, “Nah…” Your Grandma looked at me and said, “You’re a good dad.”

I can’t put into words how much you mean to me. I try very hard to be a good Dad for you. The love I have for you is something that only a parent knows; only my love is a gazillion times more.

Yesterday was your first Valentine’s Day. I bought you a fancy pink dress with flowers sewn into it. Your mom was shocked that I bought something so “girly”. I also got you a Valentine’s Day card. Your mom went to Double Daves last night to pick up our dinner and while she was out I wrote a message to you in your card. You sat in your high chair and ate asparagus and ground turkey as I wrote to you. I don’t know why, but I got teary eyed at that moment. I guess I was reveling in how happy I am to be your dad. I hope that one day when you’re much older, over the phase where you hate me (sometimes referred to as the “teens”), and possibly even married and have a daughter of your own that you’ll read that card and know that I tried my best to be the best dad that I could.

I love you, Sugar.

Love,

Daddy