smacky and bucky

I watched Sunday's episode of The Walking Dead last night, with Henry in his chair turned toward me so his first memory won't be a zombie eating someone!


And now, since this post is all over the map, here's a random video. It's from the first Caps game Laura and I ever went to, November 17, 2009. It also happened to be a game in which Caps forward Matt Bradley traded punches with New York Rangers Aaron Voros. Bradley got a cut above his eye, bled all over himself, got stitches, and came back in the third period and scored the game-winning goal! You couldn't have scripted it better than that.

Labels: Baby, dog, hockey

Yesterday was a lazy Sunday. I made omelets and bacon for breakfast, then pretty much spent the day on the bed, hanging out with Henry and watching movies (just him and me while Laura watched cooking shows and such in the other room).

First up: Moon

This was a VERY, VERY good movie! And 99% of the movie was just Sam Rockwell. I won't spoil the plot at all. You should watch this.

Next up: Descent 2From Netflix streaming, this movie was an unnecessary sequel to a scary original movie about five female friends exploring a cave system in West Virginia and the monsters they encounter. The sequel picks up just after the first movie, with the survivor of the first movie going with a rescue team into the caves (via a mine shaft this time) to search for the others. Oh, and the survivor has amnesia until she gets back into the caves (convenient). All the feelings of claustrophobia and dread from the first movie are gone. We know what the monsters look like from the first movie, so there's little shock there. You just watch and wait for the next person to get killed. They stumble across the bodies of the people from the first movie in reverse order, basically, so ultimately the sequel becomes a journey through the cave system in the reverse direction. By the time it ends you're just glad it's over. Boo.

Next up: NosferatuI didn't get more than 15 minutes into this one, I'm afraid. It looks very good, with creepy Klaus Kinski playing creepy Nosferatu, but German subtitles are a bad idea when you're holding a wiggly baby. Had to turn it off.

Next up: Graduation DayAlso courtesy of Netflix streaming, this is one of the cheesy slasher movie ripoffs that were popular in the early '80s in the vein of Halloween and Friday the 13th. This one is from 1981 and costars Vanna White, pre-Wheel of Fortune. She's supposed to be pretty bad in this, even among a group of bad actors in a slasher movie. But the boy decided he was bored or hungry or something, so I had to turn it off before the first teen is even killed. Here's a shot of Vanna from the movie from the web:

My brother-in-law Rick got four free tickets to last night's Caps game from a client he does business with, so we took Henry over to his great aunt's and headed to downtown DC! The seats were awesome, and the game had everything: last second comeback, overtime, and a sudden death shootout! Unfortunately the Caps ended up losing 4-5, but it was still a great game! Some woman even stopped by just before the game started and gave us four Capitals caps, courtesy of the company that has the season tickets for the seats we were in!

Great Caps game last night. Laura went to her neighborhood "knit night"(wine and knitting and such, which is great therapy for her, to be around adults!) so it was me and the kid. And even though our guy was a little sore from the THREE vaccinations he received yesterday afternoon at his two-month appointment, since he's such a perfect little guy he just fell asleep in my arms, then slept another hour in his swing.



He didn't make it long into the game. He's only two months old. He's hardly glanced at the dogs and cats in our house yet, and they're real. TV certainly means little to him.

His newborn PJs are now officially too small, but he's kind of swimming in his 0-3 month PJs now! He hasn't hit 10 pounds yet, so this photo is misleading. He's not a chunker. Bent over and head tilted down has to be about the most unflattering position an adult could be in when photographed. It only seems to work for babies.

MarkWaid (on Twitter): I stopped using the "40 yr olds who live in their mother's basement" slam after I realized it also applies to Batman.


OH SNAP! How did I go so many years without realizing that????

Yesterday we drove up into Maryland to visit Henry's godparents (Laura's sister and husband). Baby clothes were purchased, coos over the baby were made, and barbecue was eaten!

Here's a pic I posted on Facebook:

One of the comments really bugged Laura. A friend of ours left the comment, " You know I think Henry is adorable, but I don't like seeing a baby bottom atop someplace I might eat! Parents do this all the time..."

It didn't annoy me, because she has a valid point, although I don't know why she thinks his clean pants are worse than the dirty wet rag they use to wipe off the table between customers. His pants are definitely cleaner. L got defensive about it though. But the number of people who "liked" the pic (and how many of them have or had little kids) is validation that we aren't monsters for doing that.

Besides, I could have posted the pic I put on Twitter:

along with the caption "We are great parents. Don't worry, he couldn't finish his, so I helped!"

Kids are fun to pose.

This weekend: tomorrow, up to visit L's sister and husband for lunch, then home in time to watch Caps hockey!

Sunday, relax and then another 5 pm Sunday Caps game! Wooo!

Hockey, hockey, hockey! Beer, beer, beer! Sitting on my butt! The American dream (well, I guess the Canadian dream, to be stereotypical. I just can't get into Redskins football. Sorry USA).

How editors pass the time in the office kitchen:

Every time HR slaps up a new jive-ass poster ("Wash your hands asshole!") onto the metal cabinet doors, we use the magnetic poetry to make it better. This one has remained untouched in this form for over a year!

I still giggle at:
"Wash your stinking paws damned dirty ape. You're gonna need a bigger boat."
"Hear my germs."
"Use Soap and make a proposal."
"Rub and scrub man thoroughly for 20 seconds."
"Scrub the smell off."

The Caps played really well last night, beating the Rangers in Madison Square Garden 5-3! Henry was super whiny, crying if you didn't bounce him. I spent most of the game standing in front of the TV with him. HD looks really good 18 inches from the screen.

Today is my Friday! We have Veterans Day off (Thanks for your service, all past and present! Yes, despite what you hear on talk radio, it's possible to be a liberal and not hate the military!) tomorrow, so I went ahead and took Friday too, because, hey, four-day weekend! Laura has a lot of work to do (despite not really being 100% back to work yet, and yeah, she's thrilled about that), so I will be on baby patrol.

Finally, someone posted this pic on a Tumblr site without attribution, so I'm compounding the crime by stealing it from the person who posted without giving credit. Oh well, it's not like I'm making money blogging:

This weekend was pretty good, though tiring. Friday was the 60th birthday of my mother-in-law, so we loaded up the car, grabbed the kid and the dogs, and went down for the weekend (three-hour drive). Luckily the boy sleeps the entire trip in the car (yay! knock on wood...). Her birthday dinner was at one of the few pretty good restaurants down there, a German place in the middle of nowhere, across the street from a tiny municipal airport.
Run by a German couple (husband is the chef), they have cold German beer on tap, served in big ceramic mugs, and bratwurst and red cabbage and a lot of food perfect for a cold fall night when you want to eat heavy food then do nothing else the rest of the night. The boy also (amazingly) decided his car seat was super comfortable and slept through dinner too! When we got home from the restaurant, all I wanted to do was watch the Washington Capitals hockey game I had recorded while we were out, only to discover that the box screwed up and stopped switching channels at channel 6 instead of going to the programmed 642, so instead of the game it recorded 3 hours of CBS shows (delete!). Sigh. At least the Caps won, I read on the web instead.

Saturday we went to visit the recently widowed family friend who lives in the area down there. Her niece and I assembled a storage unit that took up an entire wall. Here's the kicker: the thing had been disassembled and the pieces piled in the garage for years, so (1) the particle board was dirty; (2) the boards were slightly warped in places, making getting the brackets to line up really interesting; (3) instead of instructions, the box with the screws contained a single, roughly sketched, hand-drawn figure (WTF?); and (4) I sliced open the palm of my hand somehow while doing this and it hurt like hell. We finally got the thing together... and it took only 3.5 hours. Oh, and the screws for the thing had rust on them from sitting in a paper box in the garage for years and the dead husband only had a few rusty screwdrivers we had to use to put this thing together (what the hell, was he buried with his good tools? Very strange.).

Sunday we gained an hour, which made the day seem somewhat reasonable, as we had to fit in a 3-hour drive home and the gazillion chores that needed to be done before we could sit down. Silver lining: The Caps had a rather unorthodox 5pm Sunday game scheduled, so I Laura took a nap while I watched the game and held the boy while he slept (he was in one of those moods where he would sleep in my arms but start crying if you dared to try to put him down). The Caps won this game too, so it was fun.

Then we watched the Halloween episodes of Simpsons, Cleveland Show, and Family Guy (way to air them a week late, Fox) and recorded Dexter and The Walking Dead to watch later this week and went to bed.

I would prefer to spend today watching zombie movies while holding our boy, but gotta go to work to get paid.

This is currently my favorite photo of our little guy, though it make L and I a little sad, because it shows someone with a smile of complete joy and innocence.


When was the last time you smiled like that? It was probably before you ever went to school, learned what bullies were and how they got off on your pain, started bringing home hours of homework, got in trouble for speaking in class, missed the bus, forgot your house key, and the million other things you start facing by age five.

It just makes me so melancholy to know I can't help him keep that smile forever. Growing up you get a lot, but you lose so much too. Until you can't really remember what it was you lost. Until you see a smile like this and you remember. And it makes you melancholy.


I sound like Zelda Fitzgerald.

Did I ever tell you the Eye of Sauron is in my office? Because, yeah, it is...



Also my fake Onion photo caption of the day:


Also, yeah, week seven. That's when you and your spouse start feeling exhausted and start bickering with each other about who is not doing their share in raising the kid and/or helping around the house, in case you were curious. Bump in the road. This too shall pass...

You know what won't pass though? This:

My tweet Saturday night:

Funerals are more fun when you are holding a smiling baby who is oblivious to everything except how much he likes you. Sweet innocence.

And that was Saturday. We went out of town to a funeral of a family friend (technically the spouse of a family friend whom I had met exactly once). I sat in a pew near the back and held our little boy while he slept. At one point he slowly opened his eyes, looked up at me, smiled like "Oh cool, you've got me," and went back to sleep. And once again I re-enacted the end of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and my heart grew a little bigger. (Don't get me wrong, most people still suck. This little one is just cool with me.

The after-funeral (wrap party?) reception was at L's mom's house, and there was a ton of food. Awkward moment: The deceased's ex-wife (divorced over a decade ago) came to the funeral. I glanced around to make sure there were no cameramen lurking in the corners, then breathed a sigh of relief because I remembered this wasn't an episode of Real Housewives of Kilmarnock, Virginia, so it was unlikely there would be any prefabricated drama.

We came back home in the late morning and unpacked and got ready for the trick-or-treaters (which entailed putting a skeleton from the dollar store on the front door, filling the candy bowl, and putting the dogs in one of the bedrooms with a couple of bones and a promise to let them out later).

The boy had footie PJs with pumpkins on it for the holiday.


He also had a hat with kitty ears on it, but the hat made him sad, so it didn't stay on more than the time to take a photo. Dig the matching orange binky!


This year we had a TON of kids come to the door demanding candy. I gave out all the candy we had bought (six bags) then had to find other candy in the house (emergency bag of Tootsie Rolls to the rescue!).

We finally turned out the light at 8:30 and I opened the small cooler Laura's mom had sent home with us. It contained enough shredded chicken, barbecue sauce, and coleslaw to make about 10 sandwiches! I made a great sandwich and put my feet up. The Walking Dead show premiered on AMC, and it was good. Close to the original comic, good effects, and gory as it should be. It flashed a warning before the show, and it was needed! Looking forward to next week's installment.

So for the record: People still suck but the kid gets a pass and zombies are still cool, I don't care what the jaded hipsters might say.