Tag: Dad Blogs

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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?

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Dad Blogs Life in these United States Society

What People Do (Privately?) in their Vehicles

When I drive, I like to look at the people around me. It’s always amazing how many people seem oblivious to the fact that everyone can see them picking their nose (my friend Pam has an obsession with poop, mine is nose-picking), putting drops in their eyes, yelling at someone on their Bluetooth, or stuffing their pie-holes with a burger.

If you don’t have polarized sunglasses, I highly recommend them for voyeuristic driving activities. See, when you look through your rear-view mirror at the car behind you and you’re either A) Not wearing polarized glasses, or B) Not wearing any glasses at all, the sunlight usually creates a glare, preventing you from really seeing in. Polarized glasses however, change the direction of the sun’s reflection off the glass so that you can see through the glare. Nifty stuff this science!

Anyway, people in their vehicles are notoriously bored. Some alleviate the boredom by doing any one (or more) of the aforementioned activities—some with more aplomb than others. Most people simply sit there like bumps on a log looking like their life has come to a sudden end and they just really don’t care.

It’s sad really that a race of beings, such as humans, could evolve themselves into such mindless boredom.

When questioned, most “minds” would say that human’s greatest society-changing discovery might include:

  • the steam engine…and thereby the combustion engine of today
  • medical marvels (antibiotics, MRI’s, X-Rays, etc.)
  • the microprocessor

But I offer a different view. I believe the most society-changing discovery of all time (not including fire…cuz obviously fire trumps all) is the Air Conditioner. Yessir, once again we can thank the British for making us miserable. Were it not for one Michael Faraday in 1820, inventing the first in a long line of modern air conditioners, we might all be outside doing something more suited to our heritage. Instead, we’re stuck in our cars.

Think about it, without air conditioning, we couldn’t stand to sit in our cars; we couldn’t sit in these blasted skyscrapers and we darn sure couldn’t run our supercomputers. Oh sure, we could still have toasters and hair dryers, but there would be no advanced computers and we wouldn’t all be sitting in our automobiles—miserable—on our way to work everyday.

So next time you’re sitting at home watching sports on TV, consider the AC. And then, feel free blame the Brits.