Read Listen Sweat Repeat

Read a funny Violet Blue article today. It discusses burning man and the gifts that sometimes keep on giving. The LW was laughing out loud.

Also, while listening to KXCI this morning, we heard a song by Jason Isbell called Dress Blues. Pretty sad stuff. The song didn't really hit me until I heard the part about "bombs in the sand". It made me think of all of the faces that only Jim Lehrer has the stones to show at the end of his broadcast.

CP continues to exert her will lately. She's climbing everything, nodding yes when she wants something, and becoming quite clingy when we drop her off at the childwatch room at the Y. We went last night and she fell asleep while we were upstairs on the weight machines. She's keeping us busy just trying to keep up with her.

Green Light

At the 22nd & Kolb stop light this morning after dropping the LW off at big blue, a blue toyota truck pulls up behind me. Well, we're both in the turn lane to go left, and around here the green arrow trails the green. Freaky, but it seems to work ....sometimes. The light turned green and there was about a 1/2 mile of traffic coming toward us in the other lane. Some people like to creep into the intersection, but I've found that sitting at the line until the light is just about to give me the green arrow allows me to stay out of the intersection (emergency vehicles anyone?). I still end up beating the other guys through the intersection, so it's usually a wash. This time, the guy in the pickup starts honking at me and moves right up on me so that all I can see out the back window of the wagon is grille. He honks some more. Can you see this now? There's no way to turn, but this asshole just wants me to move up. What do I do? Sit there. When he honked about the third time, I put it in reverse and backed up toward him. He stopped honking. We cruise down the road and I get to my turn off and, using sign language, tell him that he's #1 in my book. I hope that this guy visits downtown LA for some hot lead & manners therapy some time soon.

Went out to the mall with CP for a new SAHD playgroup that's starting after we got back home from dropping the LW at work. CP and I ran into the mom that does the Cinema La Placita event while we were at the mall playspot and had a nice visit too.

I hope that the dad group takes off. The Tucson Moms group has a huge following and does all kinds of cool stuff. I'm glad that it is out there as a support system, but I'd rather not be around any talk of scrapbooking or get the stinkeye from a group of women who think that the friendly neighborhood atheist is just there to eat their children. Sitting in any spot where alot of moms congregate, you can just feel the looks of "hmmm, no job for daddy?" and, since I don't wear my wedding ring (work & it's small since my fingers are stronger now) the, "oh, a single dad out to pick up women with his cute little prop". Sheesh.

Literate

A good friend from NorCal sent the link to this article recently and it was a good read. It discusses societal changes and the no-child-left-behind mess that's being thrust on the kids of today. I have never really given much thought before to oral and written language and how much help I had in acquiring it. As a kid, I assumed that everyone grew up around both sets of grandparents when they were kids and had roughly the same experiences that I had.

The difference in experiences came to visit our home recently, but after reading the above linked article, I can now understand what I was seeing. It was good to read the part about comic books turning the author's experience around when he was young. It was reassuring to know, since the LW went down to Heroes & Villians and picked this up as a reading stimulant. It worked quite well and I hope that it will be the start of many things good and helpful.

I'm pretty confident that CP's education will be supplemented heavily by the LW and I, but what about all of the kids who struggle so hard to learn the answers that they don't have time to learn how to question their world or don't have the wisdom of a grandparent on tap?

Selling

My 4WD sold yesterday. It was sad to see it go down the road, but it has a good home with some really friendly folks. A guy purchased it for his mom and she was really happy about it. I told her that it was still my baby and that she'd better take good care of it. It went for $4200 and that has already been applied to balances that we were carrying. It basically paid off CP's birth and my knee work from a while back and that's a good thing. Our insurance rates will drop and our debt has been reduced to the price of a used dirt bike. Yayyy!

The LW is selling her jersey as well.

Auntie M. is over today playing with CP. I got out in the garden and pulled everything except the eggplant and butterbeans out. I turned the chicks loose in the garden and they went right after all of the grubs they could scratch up. The LW just went out to work in the herb garden which is pretty weedy after the recent rains. I'll be working to drain the cistern pretty soon and get the pipe clogging stuff figured out....ugh.

And under the selling out this country heading:

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse from my previous post, the LW sent me this link yesterday about the proposed "Real ID" program. Schnikeys!! Soon there will be an office of state bar coding where the state will just tattoo a bar code on your arms..... I sent a link to my folks, but they probably won't read it.

WHAT PART OF YOU MUST HAVE PAPERS TO FLY FROM STATE TO STATE DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND!?!

Can you imagine having to show your passport to enter the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone? Think about that for a minute.

What if I live in a noncompliant state?

No federal agency will accept your state-issued driver's license as a valid form of ID. You will need to use a passport at federal buildings and parks, and for domestic air travel.

Quick...

...said the shrub....with illegal/warrantless wiretapping going to court and Padilla's case going to the jury, we need a distraction! - anyone...anyone.....oh, yeah, I've got it, we'll declare the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization! These clowns have known for a while just who is funding the muslim brotherhood and their ilk and haven't done a thing about it. Methinks this is just another part of the show.

Now for some flip flopping....deferment style: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I

What's next? What can possibly top endless war and .....?

Lips Are Sealed

Took CP in for a well visit and all looks ok. Her weight is a little low at 19lbs, but she's 31" tall. Still in the curve for growth, so no worries. The doc looked at her adhesions this morning and decided that it would be a good plan to tease them apart without any topical anesthetic. Cripes...5 minutes on the web shows that this isn't a good idea with vaginal adhesions. As if this wasn't enough torture for her, she was in for two more shots as well. I took a happy baby to the doctor and brought home a bleeding, unhappy ball of a child. It didn't help that the appointment was scheduled in her nap time either. So, this afternoon, we decided that our pediatrician has had his ass summarily fired and relieved of duty. We'll be finding a female pediatrician soon.

Two garden meetings should keep me busy this weekend and we'll be cleaning up around the house. Auntie M has agreed to come over and hang out with CP. It's an amazing thing to be out in the yard at the same time as the LW. It's only happened a few times in the last 15 months and I look forward to it.

CP has been recognizing things from images lately. If you show her a picture of an airplane, she'll do the sign. It's the same with other things. She's a smart one in my book.

ABMT

Going through the paperwork machine that is the AZ Board of Massage Therapy renewal and it's pretty straightforward except for a couple of things. I overlooked the grammar problems including an apostrophe where it wasn't needed (th'at looks' reall'y pro'fesshnull), but when I got down to the CE and payment parts, it was more than I could stand. They'll send you a wall certificate with your license for an extra $25. What? $25 for a slice of paper that you have sitting there in a box? Gotta call BS on that one.

Then there's the CE stuff. I'm required to have 25 CE credit hours - ok, I've got that part, but when you get to the part about whether or not the stuff you have is approved, here's what it says: "It is your responsibility to make sure that a course is offered by an **Approved Provider**. There will never be a published list of courses. You need to find a course that you would like to take and make sure that course is from an approved provider." What? This seems a bit circular to me. It's your responsibility, but there's not a list to confirm whether your provider is on it or not. Thanks!

The pièce de résistance however, is the payment part. Please enclose a money order or cashier check ONLY in the amount of $75 made out to the "AZ Board of Massage Therapy". ( NO personal checks accepted) Are massage therapists just such deadbeats that the state office that maintains our license paperwork will not take a check from us? Cripes....this is enough to make one question their vocation. No wonder people make those "happy ending" jokes......our own license bureau doesn't take us seriously.

Tiggy Winkles

Our treat for CP yesterday was a trip to Mrs. Tiggy Winkles toys over at Grant & Swan. We'd have gone to Kid's Center, but they close at 5:30 for some reason. Man, another 30 minutes might make for some more business. Anyway, CP had a great time, touched everything, and came home with a little toy jeep and a set of hard maple ABC blocks that are made in Bread Loaf land...Middlebury, VT. We almost picked up a book too, but the selection at Kid's Center is really great, so we waited.
We made the mistake of letting her sit down and play a kid size piano made by Melissa & Doug. Holy schnikeys....we thought that she'd wake the dead with that thing. It's a good thing that we have ABSOLUTELY NO ROOM IN OUR HOUSE FOR IT! Oh...she got a kazoo as well and can play it better than her mother.

Soft Hum

Sent the nephew packin' this morning and the dust has begun to settle. The hum of the freezer and the computer's power supply fan can actually be heard now. CP's adjusting to the new quiet and getting back to being the star of our little show. I can only imagine what my folks went through with my brother and I when they were 30 or so. A 10 year old and a 7 year old...I guess that an ATV was the only sensible answer, leaving the alternative of sending us out into rush-hour traffic as a backup. Here I thought for all of these years that they were just joking when they told us to go play in traffic. Nope.

Yesterday was my first visit to that place where a kid can supposedly be a kid. Sheesh! We walked in on rainy day and it was pure bedlam. I really liked their idea of marking the hands with the black light ink as we entered. From the front gate, we made our way through a large pizza as the nephew made his way through 129 tokens (one was given to CP for the teletubby ride). CP had all of this stuff around - games, kids, a scary band of moving furry critters on stage..... and all that she wanted to do was move the chairs in the big open portion of the dining room. Not just one either...she wanted to move all of them. After the pizza was gone, the nephew and I discussed the economics of $13 worth of tokens (to be raced through as fast as possible, of course) which turned into tickets, which in turn were exchanged for two small rubbery squishy toys and a big rainbow lollipop. The lesson seemed to sink in, but who knows. He was indeed being a kid.

He said that going to the pizza place was one of the best days of his trip here which also included:
- a week-long skateboard camp at a park Skateboarding magazine rated 9/10
- purchasing a new skateboard at a real skate store
- leaning how to help raise poultry, harvest eggs, then cook them
- a good lesson in how not to call mommy 20 times a day
- a visit to the International Wildlife Museum
- dropping my Sonicare toothbrush in the toilet
- seeing the Simpsons movie
- a rained out camping trip to Mt Lemmon
- his aunt buying him some really amazing comic books
- getting some business advice and a great brochure
- a good lesson in how to manually do the dishes

Kids & Rain

Crying, crying, crying.....not the baby, the nephew. He fell in the skate park the other day and happened to have one of his prized status symbols, his phone, in his pocket. It was completely ripped in half and I listened to all of the things he was afraid of on the way home. His worst fear - over the part about how his mom would ground him forever, was that there was some outside possibility that his mom would take away his dog Buddy. Of course, that would never happen, but maybe the fear of that thought will make him think twice about riding the skate park without a new phone in his pocket. Yeeeeeeeahhh....that'll never happen - as soon as he knew he was off the proverbial hook, he was prancing through the house bragging about how he was getting a new camera phone. 10 year olds with camera phones - just doesn't seem right. When I was ten years old, you were the greatest if you had a bike with at least one new tire.

It's been raining here and both trees are now leaning. It keeps raining the nephew out of the skate park in the evenings. We hope that it will let up soon to drop the humidity and get him out of the house and on a skateboard soon. CP's picking up all kinds of signs and word stuff. It's pretty funny to see her walk through the house and recognize sounds and planes flying over.

Gotta go chase her right now...