Tag: Atlanta

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Roxanne!…You Don’t Have to Put on your Red Light…

Landscaper Update: After having a heart-to-heart with my landscaper on Sunday morning, he finally admitted that he wasn’t holding to the letter of our agreement, which was that, once started, the job was finished in sequential days. Not this, “show up one day, skip a day and show up at 2 p.m. the next day.” He “feels really bad” about his behavior and I’ve given him another chance to make it up. As if me and the $2,000 of mine that he has really has a choice.
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And now a Haiku:
Generation “Y”
There are things that you must learn
About your MySpace

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After a rather revealing conversation with one of the few daycare workers that we actually like, we learned that she only makes $8 p/hour. My wife and I immediately looked at each other and thought, “Damn! We pay more than that for our childcare each week.” This immediately prompted a conversation about, “Can we afford a nanny after all?” Which led inevitably to the Internet.

Now, apparently, we aren’t the only people to have this brilliant idea as there are literally dozens of Nanny sites out there all claiming to have “highly qualified WhiteBread Nannys for Hire.” Ok, I made up the “WhiteBread” part, but really, it’s in there between the lines if you look closely enough.

However, not wanting to shuck out $150 for every Nanny for Hire Web site, we turned to everyone’s favorite “Craig’s List” here in Atlanta. I posted an ad and within a day I’ve gotten two replies. The e-mail were both very lucent and they seemed like good candidates. But being the savvy techno-Taurus that I am, I went a lookin’ on the Internet.

A Google search of the Web revealed minimal details…mostly just their e-mail with some generic correspondence. No images to speak of either…what would I do? Then, in a flash of Gen-X brilliance, I remembered, “Ah, MySpace.”
GOLDMINE! I found them both!

Let’s review them as a group shall we?
My comments in yellow Italics

The first potential Nanny…
Name Witheld
Orientation: Straight
Here for: Friends
Gender: Female (yeah, sorry guys, wouldn’t hire ya)
Age: 21

Opening line in her Intro: “Wuz good ya’ll this Ashley aka Goldie. Im 21 years old and I live in Stone Mountain. I have a 1 year old son… Carson aka Nuk that is the love of my life.”

Hmm, she didn’t say in her e-mail that she has a child. I might be willing to overlook that though. A playmate for my sons might be welcome.
Continuing…

Some answers to those random questions that apparently MySpace posts:

Q. Are you close to any family members?
A. My Little brothers (aw, that’s sweet!)

Q.What’s the best feeling in the world:
A. Being a Mommy (good answer for a possible Nanny!)

Q. Let’s walk on the:
A. WILDSIDE ha ha (um, what?)

Q. Ran away from home:
A. Yes (ok, you were probably young…whatever…)

Q. Done a drug:
A. I plead the fif (wait what…what just happened here????)

Q.What makes you scream?
A. Bad Ass Kids (Ok, I think that’ll just about do it…)

Folks, I can’t make this stuff up…it’s all true. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll post the 2nd one’s details. They are equally interesting I promise.

Ya’ll come back soon now, ya hear!

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Dad Blogs DIY Family

No really, I’m gonna replant!

I’ve been going on to people at work–because they’re the only people I talk to other than my in-home family–about my errant landscaper. He’s fairly young and inexperienced, so yes, the term “landscaper” is a bit generous. Let’s call him “my yard guy.” That might more appropriately represent his help to me.

At any rate, he did show up after not showing up the first day and then not showing up until late the second day, oh and then not showing up yesterday despite having told me that even if it rains he has covers he can work under. Riiiiight.

Here’s pretty much all he’s done this week:

See all that blank area in front of the house on both sides of the door? Well, if you look closely, you’ll see stumps from the shrubs that were there previously. He hacked those out with some power hackers that he was very proud of (“These cost $400!”). He said he’d return the next day with a stump grinder, but I’ve not seen him since.

However, I do have my plant material that he’s purchased for me (below). I’d have hoped to have something a bit larger on the Japanese Maple, but they do get pricey. I got a “Waterfall’ variety for in front of the house and a Sango Kaku for the top of the yard and a Seiryu for the far right side.

Can you believe that tiny little pile of rocks cost me $70? I had to go get those myself from Pike Nurseries Stone Center here in town.

So, work is being done, just not too often. The dirt is supposed to be delivered today, but he has to build a small timber retaining wall before he can place all the dirt, so I’m sure I’ll be looking at a big pile o’ dirt for a few days.

But I’m confident it’ll look good when he’s done and if not, well, at least I’ll have all the materials there to fix it myself. 🙂

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Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States

Random Story Part 1

Recently, my friend had to “let someone go” at the office. She’s a real manager see, not just someone with a manager title like myself who actually only manages him or herself. Anyway, partly because it’s just fun to do, and partly because there are legal reasons for doing so, she went through this ex-employee’s laptop to see what he’d been spending his days doing, because, quite frankly, he’d not been doing much meaningful work.

In addition to opening every piece of e-mail labeled “porn,” he spent a great deal of time searching the Internet for seemingly random things (Yeah, I do that too…does it make me weird?). The top four searches on his Internet history were:

The most obviously funny one here being “cheese” of course. Over the last week, we’ve applied the use of the single word “cheese” to many situations–most notably when we have nothing else to say in response to a question, “I don’t know…um….CHEESE!”

We also took those four search terms and created short situational stories that were just too much fun! Now, I spend all my days either writing about industry terms like, “threat,” “risk,” “mitigation,” and “viruses.” All in all, it’s pretty boring stuff, so anytime I can flex my creative writing muscle and break out of the ho-hum, I like to do so. In that vein, I thought I’d create my own four random words and start writing short tales to go along with them. Most won’t have endings because I simply don’t have that kind of time, but it should be fun.

For this exercise, I’m using the random word generator found here. Today’s four random words are:

  • reckon
  • down
  • avoid
  • caps

Hmm, shouldn’t be too difficult, let’s see…

After enjoying a few wonderful spring-like days, winter came back with a small vengence. I reckon that the elephant ears I’d planted only the day before just barely below the surface should survive, but there are no guarantees. I’d gotten up early to get the baby when his swing stopped swinging and had hoped to avoid having to change him, thus waking him up any further, but a massive poop blowout, smelling remarkebly like formaldehyde, soaked through his onesy and dripped down my arm. There was no getting out of it…I had to change him!

Trying to keep a crying baby quiet while juggling bottles, diapers, wipes and clean outfits isn’t easy. As I pawed through the drawer full of socks and caps, I tried simultaneously propping the bottle up against a stuffed animal to it would stay vertical thus keeping the baby from sucking too much air.

Ok, not much real creativity there since this did, in fact, happen this morning, but it’s fun nonetheless. I like this idea…think I’ll keep it up.

Have a great Easter weekend all!

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Dad Blogs Family

Brownie Points Akimbo!

Being Good Friday and all, I took today off to give my wife a break. My wife, as you may remember, recently gave birth to our second son and she’s been on maternity leave for just over 6 weeks now. Seeing as how she’s been caring for the youngin’ every day for more than a month I felt now would be a good time to bank some brownie points…you know…since it’s spring and I really wanna get out in the yard (and um, maybe buy a riding lawn mower).

All in all it’s been an easy day. We went to Home Depot, we went to the paint store and picked up some samples for our front door. The previous owners painted it black (“you bastards!”). It’s quite the travesty and I just have to paint it.

Anyway, the baby has been asleep for nearly 2.5 hours now and I just know that the second I sit down to blog, he’ll start screaming. So far I’m wrong, but we’ll see.

Back to the brownie points…I figured I’d book these major brownie points taking care of the baby today and all till my wife tells me that she booked me a massage for this afternoon at 5 p.m. Dang! Don’t get me wrong, it’ll be nice, but there goes at least half my points.

So there I am yesterday cooking dinner and the phone rings. I pick it up and the person says, “May I speak to Mr. X or Mrs. X” and I say–grammatically incorrect–“This is he,” and the other person says, “This is Massage Envy just calling to remind you that Mrs. X has an appointment at 3 p.m. and you have one at 5 p.m. Thank you.”

AH HA! So that’s how it played out huh? See, she didn’t tell me she also had an appointment booked. That gives me back at least half the points I had lost. A gift of guilt, while appreciated, doesn’t quite carry the same weight now does it?