smacky and bucky

I received a text from a former coworker about 30 minutes before work ended yesterday.

"Want tickets to tonight's Caps game?"

She works for a different association now, and one of their printers has season tickets and couldn't go to last night's game and offered them to her. She couldn't go either, but very kindly thought of me (always posting Caps stuff on Facebook). She also said she was getting the tickets for free and would pass them to me at the same low, low rate.

I called my pregnant (and only) wife L and confirmed she felt like going and texted back "Heck yeah!"

The former coworker's office is two toll roads and about 25 minutes away. She didn't know where the seats were when I left for her office (the printer was sending the tickets over with a driver).




The Caps came back from a 1-3 deficit to actually take the lead 4-3 in the third period, but the Ottawa Senators scored again to tie and take it to overtime, then they scored the winning goal with less than 20 seconds left.




Wow, what a bad picture of me. I asked my wife to take it from about a foot away with a phone camera. Lesson learned. Hey, just over my right shoulder, in the same row, and woman is breastfeeding her baby under that light-blue blanket. Just so you know.

The only annoying thing was the couple who sat beside us came in late and got up between every period to go smoke. Jersey Shore looking fools, both of them. And this was him the entire game: "C'mon [player's name]! God dammit!" Repeat 10,000 times.

But the tickets were FREE and I'd sit next to the douches again to see a game.



I forgot to record Lost last night too, but L pointed out I can watch it today on FIOS on Demand with no commercials, so yay! Now I just have to avoid spoilers all day.

We ordered dinner delivered last night. I got pizza and Laura got a steak and cheese sub. The place we ordered from makes great pizza and sandwiches, by the way. The following took place between 7:30 and 7:35:

L Takes one bite of the sub, makes a face, and tosses the entire thing into the trash.

Me: "What's wrong?"

L: "It tasted chewy."

Me: "Could I have eaten that?"

L: "No."

I know pregnant women go through phases where everything smells funny, where food cravings come and go, and choosing not to eat something is fine... but to decide I couldn't have it for lunch the next day and it has to go into the trash instead? I was not expecting that.

This is a replica of the Caps jersey from the 1980s. Chinese bootleg from ebay? Probably. I mean, the ones on the team website are $225 and I got this from a seller in Canada (but the item shipped from China in a week) for $64.

Oh! The Kettler Pro Shop in the complex where the Washington Capitals practice has items I haven't seen anywhere else (even on their online store). Yesterday I bought a hat for our son! I'm getting kind of excited about being a dad... :-)

The look on his face makes this pic (click pic for full photo. Why is it cropped? Weird):



His tweet caption is awesome too: "Just another Wed. night eating wings in silence at a Hooters in suburban Denver."

Although I retweeted it and someone asked if that was me! I had to point her to the Found Footage site and tell her I've never actually been inside a Hooter's, because the food looks horrible in the commercials and I usually eat dinner with my wife, who isn't as enamored of boobs as I am (and really, how could she be?).

We had a really nice weekend. Saturday morning we went to IKEA and picked up a few items (which I later had to assemble, of course). On the way back we stopped for lunch at Famous Dave's for barbecue. Yum. We got a really tall cabinet for the bathroom and I was happy to successfully mount the thing on the wall. It's always dicey in our old house. Is this drywall or plaster? Do I need an anchor or just a screw? But fingers crossed it will stay where it is.

We also got these, which I love:



Yep, we got two different colors. White for me and black for Laura. $17 each, and the height adjusts and the top slants or lays flat. When it's flat (as with the white one above) it looks like a mod '60s side table.

Saturday night we watched the Washington Capitals beat Tampa Bay (yay!).

Sunday morning Laura made crepes from scratch for breakfast (yes, she is quite the cook!):
Then we took the pups to the dog park where they had a blast in the beautiful weather.

Sunday afternoon I decided to tackle a huge chore. I need to replace and upgrade the attic insulation (the house was built in 1935 and who knows how many decades old the insulation is? I can tell you it has completely disintegrated above the drywall and crumbles at your touch. (1) Yuck, breath that in much? and (2) How efficient could that be?

Before I can do that, though, I had to tackle another big chore. The sheet rock in the attic was covered by acoustic tiles that had been glued up. Again, who knows when that was done, because all the tiles came off with the slightest tug. I pulled every tile down and stacked them into neat piles. I then filled up eight contractor bags (42-gallon, 3-ply bags that hold a lot and don't tear) and tossed each one out the back attic window into the back yard.

I dragged each bag into the garage. One a week will go out with the trash for the next two months. I found two random items in the attic:







The after pic: All the little tan circles on the ceiling are made of solidified glue. They'll be gone when I tear out the drywall and the insulation above rains down. I am not looking forward to that chore, but I have to get it done before summer because I want to limit the amount of time the attic is uninsulated in the heat (like, tear it out on Saturday, install new insulation on Sunday).

Our ultimate goal is to actually make it a livable space up there, with new drywall up, AC and heat vented into it, durable carpet on the floor and a sofa up there. Yes, there is a real stairwell up to the attic already, off the kitchen, but it had been walled-in at some point, if you can believe that! We had it cut open again, but then covered it in plastic sheeting because right now it only leads to that hot dirty attic. So with the stairs inaccessible, the previous owner (or the owner before him?) installed your standard pull-down stairs in the hallway ceiling in front of the bathroom door. We'll have those removed and the attic flooring where the hole is filled in again. The pull-down steps are old and rickety, and when I pulled it open yesterday the bottom set unfolded and bonked me on the head. Bitch!

I got all that done in a few hours in the early afternoon, got cleaned up to get all the "who knows what this dust is made of?" stuff off me, then watched an episode of the X-Files and had a nap in the guest room with the dogs and one of the cats (as in the pic in my previous post!).

In the late afternoon Laura and I were watching CSPAN and and all the pontificating aholes in congress talking about how this health care reform bill would make the plant implode if it passed. The phone rang and Laura spoke to someone for a minute, then asked me "Do we want to go have Thai food?" "With who?" I asked, because she never identified the caller and I am not psychic. She said who it was, friends of ours who live a few miles away and have a 1-year-old boy. We've been bombarding them with questions, since they've gone through everything we'll be going through in September (when Laura has our baby. Because she's pregnant. I mentioned that before. Keep up!). They were headed to a Thai place literally only blocks from our house, so we wandered over on foot, enjoying the 70-degree late afternoon. The food was very good, their son is adorable and was very well behaved, and the walk back home was even nicer, with slightly cooler temps.

Last night we watched the final pontificating reps alternating praising and damning the health care bill, then saw it get 219 votes (of the 216 needed to pass). Then I read bit in bed while Laura stayed up to watch the other two votes. (One republican called a democrat a "baby killer" for voting for the bill. He yelled it out much like when Joe Wilson yelled "you lie" at Obama during his State of the Union. You could hear it very clearly. Classy.

So it was a productive weekend in the DC region. I started work on Project: Attic Reform and congress worked on health care reform.

There is something comforting in a nap. Babies understand it. Animals understand it. And I'm starting to remember it too. The last few days I've come home from work at 3pm (We have flex time, so I work 7-3, if you can believe that. It's great because there's basically no one there the first two hours of my day so it's so quiet and I can work in peace.) and go into the guest room and watch an episode of the X-Files on DVD. After the episode ends, I turn the TV off, turn out the lights, and settle down for a 30 minute nap. Different animals join me and nap as well. Yesterday I woke up to find two dogs and one of the cats sleeping next to me, so I hopped up and snapped a pic. That's my laptop in the lower left. It has a big puffy Cobra sticker on it. I use it to control the weather dominator!

I was glancing at my blogger dashboard, and my 1,000th post was two posts ago. It also happens to be the post in which I announced we had a healthy baby boy coming. I'm glad it was a post of fitting importance.

I didn't forget about the blog (ok, maybe between Twitter and Facebook, I did forget for a second...) but last week was SO damn stressful that I wasn't fit to write anything over the weekend. Friday night I had a migraine and went to sleep at 9pm and slept 10 or 11 hours. Saturday I honestly can't recall much. We watched the Caps beat the Rangers that night. (Yay!) Sunday morning I met up with De for a comic show and lunch.

The absolute neatest thing I found was a parking permit for the Swan hatch (from the TV show LOST). It's currently in my VW (which is also an in-joke because when the DHARMA Foundation was active on the island in the 1970s, they used VW vans to get around).


The second neatest thing I guess was issue 93 of Weird War Tales for less than a buck. Featuring the first appearance of the Creature Commandos!

Yes, a werewolf, a vampire, and a giant reanimated corpse terrify the shit out of the Nazis! This is why comics are so wonderful. Speaking of comics, Kate talks about Neil Gaiman and Death over on her blog!

Then Sunday afternoon the pregnant wife and I took our two dogs on a long walk in the Del Ray neighborhoods (lots of younger couples out enjoying the first warm day of the year). Laura enjoyed critiquing the various strollers we saw, Lexi enjoyed getting pets from various strangers, I enjoyed the sunlight, and Kirby eventually forgot he was supposed to be afraid of everything and his tail started wagging as he walked along and sniffed the air. We all, human and animal, felt like we were emerging from a cave after a long detention.

The doctor called with the test results from Tuesday. Long story short:

The baby does NOT have down syndrome. (We had been told it was a 1 in 6 chance of that based on previous blood test). So we had to wait from Tuesday until this afternoon for the results.
But all the chrmosomal checks they made were fine.

And two of the pairs they checked were X and Y.

And now we know definitely it's... a boy.

We're having a boy.

A BOY!

Oh man, this week. Only Tuesday?

Crap.