Library Fines belong to malicious gnomes, not daddy doctoral students

I have had several books out from the library at the university since my daughter was born last spring. I even remember leaving the baby, wife, and mother-in-law one afternoon to go pick up several books. Of course they sat in the trunk for about 8 months and then on my book shelf until this week. The university has sent me nasty notes telling me to pay my bill or I would be sequestered to Dante’s lowest level of Hell. I finally took back the books tonight.

Me: “Um, here are several books I checked out a while back. I am returning them because they belong to you.”

Librarian: “I have bad news… You owe a fine.”

Me: “Crap. Are you sure?”

Library: “Yes, $10.”

Me: “Ten dollars?!” Then the sound of me slapping old Hamilton off my forehead before tossing the bill towards the librarian and politely asking for my receipt.

I then skipped home through the smelly orange trees and late dusk sky.

ENTs on crack

So we hurried off to the Ear Nose and Throat doctor for the baby's appointment today and once we flew down the roadways like Mario Andretti, we came to a screeching halt at the "the Doctor is 30 minutes behind schedule."

Ugh.

So we waited, and I shoved Cheerio after Cheerio into my daughter's mouth. A lady came in with 2 two-year-old boys who must've been like Laurel and Hardy's evil doppelgangers. They spit and cried and fought and beat each other until I could not take it. I wanted to walk them out to the playground and shove them down the metal slide head first causing a concussion that would quiet them even briefly.

Eventually (after an HOUR mind you) we were able to see the doctor who gave his whole spiel as if he were entering the Guiness Book of World Records or at least was secretly Racer X. I'm glad we heard it all from our pediatric nurse beforehand. Then he told us to go home and think about it, but I think I was still cooling myself off from being left in the dust by his high powered, Asian rant about tubes and ears and swimming pools and kids.

We'll probably go ahead and get her tubes, but the dude was a bit peculiar if not at least highly knowledgable. But did he get his MD from Nascar?

Poker.... why? You brought her!

Our wonderful friend has offered to baby sit almost everytime I see her, and tonight was took her up on it. She babysat one other time for two hours so my wife could talk me to dinner for my birthday. Tonight we were invited to a Texas Hold 'Em tournament at someone's house nearby. Since we'd played in a free tournament over Christmas, the wife thought she could do as well as last time, so we went.

My best friend should've been there, but he didn't RSVP until about 24 hours before hand. We get to this guy's house and he has ~25 people and give tables set up. His laptop was jacked in to the HD TV and played the antes, blinds, and timer in giant flickeringly bright numbers telling us when we needed to pay more money and how much.

I started with pocket 10s, and my wife thought I was bluffing on the very first hand so she called me over 500 chips. Needless to say she was out within the first 10 minutes of the evening. So she sat there watching while I made it to the next table. Our friend who dragged us along and was the last man standing last month, was out quite early too. Once I was booted we stuck around and played at the loser's table for awhile and then rescued the babysitter.

Everything had gone well at home, but the baby would not lie still to have her diaper changed. J ended up chanding the baby standing up on top of the diaper table. And then she went to sleep without a peep, so all was well. My daughter is the best baby in the whole wide house!

Noodles come out the nose and ears

Tonight I came home from work to a quiet house. I thought the baby was asleep, so I kissed my wife and proceeded to lay all of shit all over the living room table like I do every night. All of a sudden I heard a google-wail from the dining room, and I turned to see my daughter sitting at her high chair with peas stuck up her nose looking at me like she was pissed that I didn’t say hello to her too. I went over, and of course my wife asked for me to finish feeding her, which I hesitated to do after an arduous day in the salt mines. Then she mentioned I could feed her whatever I wanted. And since I’ve wanted to try new foods, I yanked the jarred spaghetti from the cabinet. I surreptitiously unscrewed the jar and proceeded to scoop chilled tomato base noodles into her mouth. Then the wife, says:

"What’re you feeding her?”

"’Sca-betti’! I yelled out"

And then silence. I don’t think the wife really knew what to say, and had little more to see as I sat there giggling and laughing hysterically while I shoveled those noodles into her mouth…. The same noodles she then spit out all over her shirt.

I finished her meal while the wife watched Master P NOT dance with some expert dancer lady who is too damn patient. Then I threw the baby in the tub after she was good and covered in pasta goo and sauce. I sat on the small plastic chair in the tub and was splashed to hell and back as she laughed and played in the tub. Mommy was done with Master P and sat on the commode covered in a towel so she didn’t get splashed by the tsunami wave of the bambino.

veryGEORGE!.com

veryGEORGE!.com

I am so damn addicted to these people that people look at me strange when I tell my wife the latest thing Leta's doing. Now Dorj has a blog, too. (Did the Armstrong's make it?) I wish someone would make me a cool one so I don't have to pay.

Norton Sucks

Thursday night of last week my computer decided to stop working. Just like that. Nothing. nada. I ask my network admin friend who as been stuck working at the Fire Department doing grunt work and he doesn't know. He's fixing cabinets, and I am begging my wife to check my email on her computer once a night. Nicely. Gotta be nice to the wife.

Today I grab my ankles, call Toshia and pay $35.00. 10 minutes late they tell me Norton Firewall is the culprit for the last 5 days of funk. We disable it and I surf naked, but not literally since I sit here in my living room where my daughter plays. And Mr Winkie does not need to be out there for us all.

Head Banging

My daughter has her fourth ear infection since she was born. As we've been pouring medication down her gullet she's been sniveling and snotting all over the place. Through her misery, she continuously flips her head backwards.

Tonight, Me: Stop! Don't bang your head backwards!

[Insert her flipping her head backwards as fast and as hard as she can, again.]

Me: No, no. Don't bang your head! We're not a head banging family! Do you see me dressed in leather?

Ponderings and Musings

I have such a horrible decision to make and no way to make it. I need to finish my degree and have shoveled way too much money into the public school systems to stop now. Although my advisor is MIA and has been for sometime. He will never contact me, but then when I do not contact him he holds me responsible. He allegedly makes comments about me to other people where he complains about the fact that I’ve not graduated yet after 5 ½ years. Of course, if I had it my way I would’ve changed my major two years ago. Now I am shit out of luck and have no idea how to get out of the hole I find myself standing in. Do I change my major and take the last two classes that aren’t offered at an opportune time? Or do I keep pouring my financial aid funds into the university without actually taking any classes? Or do I just stop? I don’t know anymore what the degree will get me except that title in my name. I cannot get more money, and I am less concerned about titles now than ever before. I am secure in my job and my life and my family. This pursuit is less interesting than ever. Damnit.

Official site of the Pittsburgh Steelers - Article

Official site of the Pittsburgh Steelers - Article
I was so worried and the fourth quarter of the Steelers/Colts game freaked me out as it was more of a roller coaster than the Jackrabbit at Kennywood. Two more game! ONE FOR THE THUMB!

BENJAMIN STOVE

So there's this wild thing going around the Internet now. Some dude supposedly discovered an old crop circle painting pre-dating ROSWELL. This is wild, and he's trying to hunt down it's origins. Check it out. You can even join the growing forums to help out the bloke.

When your ferret wanks off, for the love of Pete, Do NOT interrupt him!

One of these days my family will petless. Until then I will pay as much as it cost to have my first born on kenneling the animals. So today I go to pick up the ferrets from the kennel and the nice young kennel lady asks us to join her in a small room where dogs and cats pee on a small table as waist height so you can get it all over the very front of your pants at crotch level. This lady proceeds to tell us that she thought one of our ferrets caught his foot on the edge of the wire mesh cage, but she went to investigate, they realized that it was not his foot at all. It was something else, she said. Then it got very silent. Almost immediately my wife doubled over laughing while this woman’s face turned redder and redder. I immediately shouted “It was his penis?! His Penis? It was caught???????” She got redder. I spoke louder. My wife laughed harder.

She assured us that he was fine and things are ok for him. My wife didn’t have the heart to tell her that we’d caught him wanking his Georgy (not to be confused with the turtle) on other occasions. We just never ever understood if one should stop a ferret when they’re doing this or let him finish. I suppose it’s polite to allow him to finish in private. I suppose the kennel lady caught him unawares.

My House is Over-Protected by A Killer Turtle Named George

Do you ever realize that after a long trip away from home that nothing can be quite what it is again after you return? Our friend drove us home from the airport this afternoon to our 65 degree cold house that was more or less exactly as we left it. As we unlocked the front door, I smiled up at a small sticker I bought my wife last year that read PROTECTED BY KILLER TURTLE. Now when I first purchased the sticker on Ebay I thought it was funny… until today.

My wife’s obsession with turtles only mirrors God’s obsession with choirs. And since everyone and their roommates dog’s sister’s friends know this fact, we have tons! And one is, yes, you guessed it, ALIVE. Not like Frankenstein alive but more like swimming around trying to figure out who he is. See, he was found buy some boy of hers in college when the turtle was dime sized and now he’s quite a bit larger. He also has lived in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. So he gets a little confused about who he is especially since people change his name every time he moves. I just call him George, but he was a “Hi My Name Is…” tag on his tank so we all know. Of course it’s facing outward since we humans can read and he cannot.

Anyway, George, as I call him, had a friend named Plukey the Plecostomus who would eat the green algae shit from his tank. Plukey kept things clean and always reminded George that his spiny-ass would not taste very good. For this reason his mommy and I would keep a fresh supply of goldfish for him. Now after two weeks, I guess we pissed off George since we weren’t here to turn on his light each and every day. We came home to Plukey’s head floating around the tank sans body.

God rest Plukey the Plecostomus. May your outtards cause George to be constipated as he realized your truly loyal friendship as he murks around in his algae shit that no one will scrape from his tank. Get your own old toothbrush, George. I did my part.

Sometimes hats make her happy and sometimes they don't

We decided to visit my parents house on New Year's Eve before we had to prepare for our very small, daughter-friendly New Year's Eve party at my in-laws. Of course, it is a moral imperative to wear the outfit to the house of the person who bought the baby the outfit the very next time you see him or her. So we bundled her into a huge, heavy purple and faux white fur jacket before strapping the baby's hands into gloves large enough for an infant King Kong. We then strapped one of those hats that only a mother would force a child to wear upon her very bald 9-month old head. I swear the velcro strap is linked to her larnyx because she suddenly let forth with a wail that shook that snow from the window panes. This wail continued to emanate from her very small lips until we unstrapped her 15 minutes later at my parent's house. She adored having her hat off and played nicely all evening.

Of course, then there was today. My dad had purchased her a bear hat with faux fur and ears, with a matching hat. We precariously strapped this different hat around her head as we held our own ears braced for the sudden shattering of the sound barrier. This time she just looked up at us, chewed on her face with her reverse vampire fangs, and smiled. No earth quakes, avalanches or tsunamis. Just a happy baby in a warm, ridiculous looking hat. So then we made our way in peaceful quiet back to my parent's house for a New Year's dinner. When we got here my wife took the hat off our daughter's head to only have her immediately scream louder than the traffic on the nearby highway. Shoving the hat back onto her head was like clicking mute on the largest speaker in the tri-state area. Hat off, scream, hat on, smile. Nothing more. Go figure. She played for a long time before deciding to take off her hat herself, later, on her terms.