Classic quotes, Vol. 36

Here's a selection of some recent notable quotes, this time from my wife J-, our 5-year-old daughter M-, and our 1 year-old son E-:

M- (looking at a picture of a llama, with a tone suggesting it had personally done something to offend her): Seriously?? There's no hump on this camel!

J- (spacing out while talking to E-, who was getting into things in the kitchen as she read a dessert recipe): No, put that down, Lemon!

M- (overselling it a bit, referring to E- having grabbed at her Swedish pancake and knocked it to the floor, after the waitress had assured her it would be replaced): Well! THAT will be quite the story to tell my kids, when I have kids!

J- (explaining her love for birds of prey): See, the thing is, I find all other birds repulsive.* But owls, and falcons... I love them, for some reason.

---

* Sorry, bird lovers: On review, she reiterated her unusual position that "repulsive" is not too strong a word, and yes, she meant "all". Even blue jays, and cardinals, and doves... and lovebirds, and sparrows, and hummingbirds... and all your favorites. ESPECIALLY your favorites.....

Classic quotes, Vol. 34

Here's a selection of quotes from the past few months, from my 4-year-old daughter M-, my 7-year-old son D-, and my infant son E-:

M- (excitedly, pointing to a Bud Light truck parked near us at the gas station): Daddy, I see the waaater botttttle truuuuuuck!

D- (drawled slyly, while doing his homework, as if idly asking about the weather, or some other not-remotely-related topic): Hey Dad, what's forrrrrrty-three plus thirty-six?

M- (using her Important Announcement voice at the dinner table): This hot dog BUN is too hot! (asked if she's sure) ...No... the thing that's inside it. (asked, "You mean the hot dog??") Yeah, the hot dog.

E- (whenever he deliberately pushes or drops things off his high chair, with the detached tone of an innocent bystander): Uh-oh.

M- (very matter-of-factly, about a song she made up): It's a very long song... I can't sing all the words in ONE day...

Me (after our shared laughter at my wife apparently stopped by quite so funny): No, no, I'm not being mean-- I'm laughing WITH you, as we both laugh at you!

M- (very excited, and distinctly unfazed, regarding the corpse of an unfortunate mouse, victim of our cats): We should save it, and when it turns to bones, I can study them! Because when I grow up, I want to be a vegetarian, and help animals!!

Things that amuse me, Vol. 9

Here's another selection of items that have been amusing me these days:

1. Only a kid* can be taken just as seriously with chocolate smeared all over his face as he is any other day and time.

2. Much like a dog chasing a car until it slams on the brakes, every time I succeed in swatting a fly with my bare hands, I immediately regret even attempting it. And yet, there I am again swinging away the next time.

3. My wife --who shudders at the mere thought of an insect** going about its life far underground, much less anywhere inside her house or immediate one-mile area-- so craves the attention of a cat that, when faced with what I'll call my Dismayed Reaction to her observation of fleas and ticks on the stray cat she and our kids had been frequently petting for a few days, she shrugged them off and casually explained, "You just need to wash your hands..."

4. My two older children, D- (7-year-old son) and M- (4-year-old daughter), have lately alternated between 1) experimenting with the power of demanding privacy in the bathroom/when changing; and 2) loudly offering each other audiences before their porcelain throne/mooning each other at will.

---

* Or possibly Hitler.

** Even a firefly!

Important Question: If I didn't notice a sparkle, can it still be a vampire?

This is the kind of urgent question that cannot wait until it's not the middle of the night to ask of The Internet.

This evening, close to midnight, we were shocked to discover an intruder in the house that may be either a bat or some kind of darting swift or swallow. It didn't stop panickedly swooping toward my indefensibles long enough for me to get a good look at it before finding a safe enough nook in which to plot its revenge.*

So, after several fruitless hours of searching, the question I have for you all is this:

Which one of us will wake up with this thing on our face?

It's kind of important that we know this as soon as possible. Please share your educated hypothesis** in the comments.

---

* And J- couldn't see much from under the blanket, where she was, quote, "Protecting the baby."

** Additionally, I suppose, you could answer by telling us who will never wake up after this thing was on our faces?

Classic quotes, Vol. 28

It's been a surprisingly long time, but at long last, here are some quotes I've collected in the past few months from my 4-year-old daughter M-, 6-year-old son D-, 2-month-old son E-, and wife J-:

M- (calling down from upstairs while supposedly getting ready for bed, in an overly dramatic announcer's voice): I have a feeling! [...] I have a feeling... of monsters?

D- (matter-of-factly to M-, as she returned from informing me that she's "pretty sure [she] heard a mouse", because she "heard footsteps somewhere but they weren't Mom's"): So, what did he say about all this mouse business?

M- (sassily, when called out for playing in her room instead of cleaning): I was folding a shirt. ...Is that called 'playing'?

J- (reluctantly, referring to her then-overly-pregnant state): Alright... while I'm dressed and looking relatively decent, you should probably take my picture.

M- (in the tattletale voice): D- is pretending to haaaaaaarm meeee!

E- (while smiling): Ah gugrggggg!*

---

* Trust me, this is much, much cuter in person.

Amusing searches, Vol. 11

Here are more of the most amusing searches that have brought people here, offering me yet another opportunity to employ my superpowers of Mockery and Sarcasm.

(All search strings are reprinted exactly as they were entered, and the search text links to the post at which the visitor arrived.)

• escort woman says "you look handsome" (Cumberland, RI) - Escort woman then says, "I have to charge you extra for compliments." Sorry, champ.

• reasons a 3 year old might not talk (Cambridge, OH) - Well, to make light of your understandably vexing problem, now that I'm on my second 3-year-old, I gotta say I haven't come upon a single reliable reason so far. Even unconsciousness.

Still hoping one will come along, though, for at least a few minutes at a time.

• homosexual sons of stay at home fathers (Plymouth, MA) - You do know I was kidding, right?

• pinworm potty (Kuching, Malaysia) - Boy, that really makes me just wanna hold it forever.

• things that I don't like doing (Mumbai, India) - I came up in this search of yours??   .....frowny face.

• what is the worst smelling diaper (Knoxville, IL) - That's kind of a philosophical question, so I'll give you a philosophical answer: the one you're changing right now. (Closely followed by that one you changed a couple days ago, wherever it may now be rotting.)

Reports of my death are only mildly exaggerated

Editor's Note: Please humor me by imagining this post being grunted over my shoulder as I slaughter mice by the thousands, sword and shield in hand.

Editor's Note: And a gun... a really big, cool gun.

Now that I've gotten my Internet service up and running, I felt honor-bound to offer you all some kind of post as a reward for waiting patiently this whole week. By the computer, quietly whimpering all along, no doubt.

As a bonus for me, your standards are probably set really low by now, much like a food critic on the brink of starvation. I've always excelled at soaring over low standards as easily as I take the high-standard bar right in the teeth.

But speaking of teeth, as I listen to our new house settle and make all those noises houses do, I recline with bated breath, like the world's laziest hunter, waiting to see if we can all (theoretically) feast on roast mouseflesh tomorrow at breakfast. Otherwise, it's back to good old ladybugs and houseflies. By the handful.

The story of my short time in this (wonderful, amazing, joyous, I swear) house has been undeniably written in blood, though thankfully not much of it has been human.

If I were to make a size-relative hash mark for every life I've taken in the past six days, I could have re-created Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte twice, or, more likely, covered several walls with thousands of tiny scratches forming no discernible pattern. Either way, I'm pretty sure I'd be in trouble once my wife saw it.

But what my wife would like less would be the sight of me getting ready for breakfast by dabbing at blood stains on the old carpet someone saw fit to put in the kitchen while yelling at our 2-year-old that I meant it when I said to stay upstairs for just one more lousy minute.*

For you see, since my wife already had quite a long commute from our old apartment, and our "new" 120-year-old house is 2 hours farther away, she'll continue staying at my parents' house most of the time during the week, probably through the rest of the school year.

Our 5-year-old son D- is there with her as he continues at his old kindergarten until Christmas break, and thankfully after getting to play in his new bedroom for awhile on move-in day, he's eager for the school transition instead of dreading it.

And he's making the most of the opportunity to start over fresh, it seems, by not only torching every bridge a 5-year-old could possibly have built, but first desecrating them and then laughing while they burn.

So you can see why I've been even scarcer than recent months around here. I do appreciate the Amazon click-throughs some of you seem to have made after my previous post, and also the comments on my handful of recent status updates on Facebook. It's nice to not be totally abandoned even when I've abandoned everyone else for the time being!

I'll try to cobble together some list posts and other fragments that don't require as much consecutive minutes of focus, to get back in the swing of posting on here.

In the meantime, keep an eye on my Facebook status to make sure I haven't joined the fried mouse corpses in a fuse box somewhere in our dank old basement. ...Which I love, somewhere deep down. Deeper than the source of water that bubbles up through the floor now and then.

---

* In case you somehow missed her repeated announcements to the world at large, she will SAVE the mice. All the mice!**

** That was before I explained to her in greater detail this evening about the bathroom habits, or lack thereof, of housebound rodents. Now she "hates all the mice", and presumably thirsts for their life force.

I've got your Father's Day right here...

A belated Happy Father's Day to the approximately 3% of my readership who is both male and a father, and same to the husbands of 92% of the rest of you.

I spent my day sleeping in, using the computer (for a welcome change of pace), and playing outside with the kids, who are trying to see if it is scientifically possible to melt the paint off the walls out here in Maine with the sheer quivering force of their pent-up energy.

While that may sound all quaint on the surface, I want to know what it says about my performance as a father thus far that the most attractive games to my son involved, in however convoluted a way necessary, punching me wherever he could reach?

His 2-year-old sister swung happily on the swings for more than an hour, using the wind she generated to keep always just out of reach of the blackflies, but this lanky 5-year-old was very soon discontent with boring old swings, soccer, and basketball.

Some of the alternative games we tried were:

1) "How Dare You Steal the Ball, I Will Now Punch You in the Butt While Roaring to Get it Back,"

2) "I'll Pretend to Be the Squirrel From Ice Age Attacking a Large, Ferocious Predator as Foolishly as I Make Him Do in the Ice Age Videogame I Was Just Playing,"

3) And finally the even more convoluted, though tragically aborted, "The Basketball Court is Water, the Picnic Table is Land, and I'm a Fighter-Guy Fighting Dragons to Save People in a Way That You Somehow Know Involves You Being a Series of Dragons Who Are Foolish Enough to Just Stand Next to the Picnic Table While a Knight Works Them Over With Both Fists Until His Hands Hurt Too Much to NOT Move on to Short, Efficient Kicks Instead."

Oh, and, should you ever be put in a similar situation, be advised that catching and teasingly holding one, then a second, fist carefully aimed at your back may result in a frustrated, em-boy-sculated cry of, "Don't ever do that again! I want you to leave me alone for the rest of your life! ...if you're going to do that again."

Notice that even at five, he's perceptive enough to say "your life" instead of "my life". Nothing like a special day of recognition to remind one's parents of their sizable lead in the race towards death. Happy Father's Day again!

May you all live long enough to feel the next volley of anniversarial punches, always stronger than the last.

Decision 2008: Trick or Treat

Just a quick Halloween rundown today, starting with this curious picture:These two strange children followed me around all day without revealing their identities or to whom they belonged. I would have called the police or Child Protective Services, but they seemed to be getting prodigious amounts of candy thrown at them, and thus I figured they might be of some use to me.

Two straight days of glorious stomachaches later, I stand by that decision. If only D- and M- could have been there... J- and I might have gotten twice as much candy.

Elsewhere, in an effort to hone her pumpkin-carving skills as well as get out the vote amongst the elementary-school and elementary-school-chaperone demographic, my sister decided that night to carve the Obama-Biden symbol into a pumpkin, with the word VOTE etched above it.

The day after Halloween, there wasn't much left of it:I can't decide whether this was an underhanded voter-suppression move by neo-conservative squirrels or merely an innocent nibbling of the alternatives by right-leaning independents who had their fill of nuts over at the Palin rally.

Speaking of nuts, I hope to be acting it with a few hundred thousand of my new closest friends in Grant Park tomorrow evening-- in case I don't post tomorrow, I'll see you all at the end of this long, strange tunnel Wednesday morning!

P.S. I squish you

The other day, J- left me a nice note before heading off to work at the crack of dawn (in response to an even better note I had left her, thereby granting me the clear edge here), and while it was, as I said, nice, as we approach five years of marriage and 10 years of knowing each other, we're past the stage of saving every little scrap of everything in a shoe box somewhere.

That being said, I want to clearly state for the record that I would in no way ever deliberately defile or deface a love note from my wife in any way, no matter the size or lyricism of it, except in the rare case that I could do so in a way that was absolutely, unquestionably hilarious. That opportunity has, fortunately or unfortunately, not yet arisen.

However, after her note lies upside down on the counter all afternoon, I think I can be held blameless for later accidentally using it to squash a tiny bug walking across our counter. Our counter! Of all the disrespect for the insect kingdom to show me... my counter! In my own home!! No, I am not redirecting the focus here.

Do you have any idea how many bugs I have respectfully let walk, fly, or crawl out of my sight, probably to be squashed by someone else later that day? But this little guy just strolled along my primary food-prep surface (and you know he was defecating all the way) careless as you please, insulting my intelligence by trying to blend in with the little specks in the pattern on the counter, figuring for some unknown reason that I don't have the peripheral vision of a... an owl? Something with incredible, godlike peripheral vision, anyway.

So, yeah, I grabbed the note and poinked that f***er-- no big deal, right? Tell that to the O in love.

But you know what? Since my wife is first finding out about this right now along with you, let me just take the opportunity to point out here that right amongst a handful of other things at the core of our relationship is her hatred of bugs and my sworn duty to protect her from them. So I'd say that disgusting smear of life's essential gooey parts is a flourish that only a truly loving husband could think to provide, and thus I converted what had been a mere note into a unique declaration and symbol of our love. Before throwing it in the garbage.

I may need to re-spin this.

---

Editor's Note: Yes, I'm aware that "life's essential gooey parts" could be completely misread, but since it's also a great name for a band, I'm leaving it in.

You're either with us or against us

In case you haven't been following the news closely, we here in Chicagoland have been subject to numerous infestations of deadly animals previously unknown to the area as well as attacks by familiar adversaries. We recently dealt with a cougar roaming the streets of the city, we frequently dodge bands of coyotes at dawn and dusk, and, if the gossip on the street is to be believed, people are also fighting off chupacabras and carnivorous unicorns on at least a bi-weekly basis.

And, if all that wasn't enough, we now seem to have alligators commanding our life-giving waterways like terrifyingly toothy admirals at war:

It's no croc: Alligator found in Chicago River
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080620/ap_on_fe_st/odd_chicago_alligator

And you know what they say about alligators-- whenever you see one, there are at least 173 that you can't see.

Clearly, we are at the forefront of a burgeoning war against nature. Of course, this isn't really a new conflict any more than World War II was a sudden flareup of tensions after a couple decades of happy rainbows. We made a very uneasy, unbalanced agreement with Nature sometime after the Industrial Revolution and it has been stringing us along while taking the time to regroup before coming back for more. All those hurricanes, mudslides, awkward rashes, mosquitoes, and deadly-virus scares in the meantime have just been training exercises and passive-aggressive warnings from our bitterest enemy.

By not making a separate peace with nature's predators, and by not offering concessions to the gods of weather, such as laying down our hated umbrellas and burning our Doppler-wielding meteorological shamans at the stake (sorry, Tom Skilling, but I don't want to be eaten by a cougar), we were unable to keep the forces of nature divided and prevent them from putting aside their differences and reuniting to rid themselves of the human menace.

As far as I can see, the logical next steps for me are as follows:
1) stop shaving
2) start hording gas
3) wear protective athletic gear on the outside of my clothes for some reason
4) fashion some lightweight armor plating for my Camry

Meanwhile, I'll practice my one-armed pullups and begin indoctrinating my son into an eventually ancient brotherhood of stoic, overconfident warriors, training him against the unbelievably prolific but lazy neighborhood rabbits and the irritating rats that occasionally wander over from a nearby restaurant's dumpster.

Next, I'll school him in the weak points in the offense of nature's greatest killing machines, once I find out what they are (I'm confident he'll be all over this part of the training, as it would give him an excuse to roar more often). Thankfully, there is a well-stocked free zoo here, and I'm sure you'd agree it's better that we take those predators out before they escape and run rampant across the city without any of the lovable whimsy of either of these bands of recent escapees.

In case you think I'm exaggerating, I'll pick just one more piece of evidence from the pile here at hand:

Python found in toilet in northern Australia
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080620/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_australia_python

Clearly, they've already learned when we're most vulnerable and most embarrassed to be attacked, so they're way ahead of us.

But fear not, dear readers, because this isn't all bad news: if it comes to it, we can at least satisfy our need for spite by destroying nature along with ourselves, in ways we're all quite familiar with, and secondly, you all just might be getting those Armageddon* tote bags I promised you sooner than you thought.


* The world-ending event, not the awful movie.

Can't you smell that smell?

So recently, the office in our apartment (which is really more like an overgrown screened balcony) has taken on, shall we say, a horrendously unpleasant odor. Now, I don't mean to insult the office by suggesting it smelled like our neighbors were cooking again, because this was quite a different smell. Nor did we think we had somehow left a diaper in there (we closed up shop during the winter and don't go in there often).

No, this smelled distinctly like some kind of animal, such as a mouse, had crawled into a corner somewhere and quietly shuffled off this mortal coil.

Upon further investigation, it turned out to be merely the smell of damp old carpet, due to a leak somewhere in the wall. After even further investigation, however, it turns out I was partially right (one can generally assume that I'm always at least partially right). When moving everything away from the wall where the rain was leaking in, I discovered what can only be described as a mouse that is not alive:

How long this poor bastard lay there decomposing, I'm not sure, but I don't envy the condition or stench of his surroundings. Of course, he's clearly been dead, or possibly undead, for decades or longer, so I doubt he noticed much.

A wake was held between 1pm and 1:01pm on Friday, May 1, at My Office Funeral Home. The deceased was then laid to rest in Toy Chest Memorial Cemetary.