Tag: Roswell

Categories
Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Feeling sorry for myself, care to join me?

epiduralSo this morning, CareerMom and I headed down to my Orthopedic Surgeon’s office and I was treated to two exquisetely painful epidural steroid injections. Actually, when we got down there, they didn’t have me on the schedule and I was this | | close to pitching one of my famous fits, when they came out and said they could fit me in after all. So, that was good. Crisis averted…tantrum, unnecessary.

It’s funny to read the description of the procedure by doctors who have apparently never had these. While it’s true that they numb you up pretty well and that you don’t feel the steroid needle actually go in, but what you DO feel is when they hit the bone…repeatedly…and when the steroid itself starts oozing around in there and doing its magic.

This is the third time I’ve had this done, but the first time I’ve had two at one time…not fun. I think I sweated out a quart of water in the 15 minutes it took to complete the procedure.

So now I’m kicked back at home with an ice pack on my back and jerking every few minutes as the steroid finds a new nerve to bully around, but I’m assured I’ll start feeling some relief in a couple of days!

Yaaah.

Also, three women got to look at my hairy butt this morning, and none of them were CareerMom. Hooray for them!

Categories
Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Ebert and Roeper would give me a "Thumbs Down"

boredThis weekend, even CareerMom, from whom patience springs forth like the water in Niagara Falls after the winter thaw, had seemingly “gotten over” the constant entertainment requirements of our children. Thanks in no small part, I feel, to Daycare and the constant entertainment provided there, as soon as the kids get home at night, and from the moment they wake up on the weekends, it’s, “What are going to do now?” “Can we go swimming?” “Well, when CAN we go swimming?” “Can I have a snack?” “Well, when CAN I have a snack?”

I tell ya, it’s enough to drive you nuts! Especially when you consider what our kids do today compared to what we did as children. I told MLI on Sunday that he’d done more by 11 a.m. than I did an entire weekend growing up!

When I was a child, the weekends were for “catching up.” Saturday mornings, assuming I beat everyone out of bed, consisted of my watching cartoons for about an hour and then once everyone was up, doing chores until the house was spotless. After that, if I wasn’t helping my dad with one of his many, never-ending projects around the house, I was left to go happily cruising around the neighborhood with my transistor radio hanging from my bicycle handlebars, looking for other kids in a similar plight. What ensued from there was anyone’s guess.

As a comparison, here’s our weekend with the boys:

Saturday

  • Took both boys with us to the gym at 8 a.m. where they played in the huge gym play area consisting of a McDonald’s-like tunnel system, a kid’s basketball court, computers and all sorts of other things.
  • Played with the boys outside for a while. Rode bikes, threw balls, the usual.
  • I ran to Home Depot while CareerMom did something with the kids at home…dunno what…something to do with blocks and cars.
  • That afternoon, I took MLI to a Braves game, via the Atlanta MARTA system. MLI thought riding the train was pretty cool, except that we caught it at its northern most point, and it took nearly 30 minutes to get to the transfer station and by then we were both hot and bored.
  • At the game, we sat down and by the time I got dinner for the both of us, it was already 8 p.m. By the top of the 3rd inning, MLI says, “Daddy, I’m already tired of looking at this!” Determined to stay for a while, we stuck it out till the 5th inning and then made the trip home.

Sunday

  • We’re still in “church transition” so went to the gym again.
  • Played with the boys outside for a while.
  • While I killed all the plant life in the backyard (herbicide), CareerMom took the boys to the neighborhood park for a while.
  • After lunch and naps, took the kids to this new indoor play area with a gy-normous foam filled pool thingy. Was pretty darned cool!

The whole daggum weekend revolves around the kids! By Sunday night, even CareerMom’s nerves were getting frazzled and though we both felt bad talking sternly to the boys, even parents need a few quiet moments.

Oh, and on top of all of this, MLI had been asking for the mailman to bring the DVD “Aladdin” and so I ordered it from my Netflix account. It came on Saturday and I stuck it in the DVD on Sunday.

AladdinDo you see anything wrong here? Did you know that there is more than one “Aladdin” movie on DVD? I didn’t. Why would anyone even bother stocking anything other than the Disney version?

Trust me, this is NOT the Disney version.

Despite the colorful packaging, I’m pretty sure this cartoon was created sometime back in the 80s, before cartoonists began attempting to synchronize voices and mouth movements. It was bad…really bad.

So, in total, my entertainment ideas fizzled miserably this weekend, and truth be told, I think we’re all a little relieved that the boys get to go to Daycare today and we adults “have” to go to work. People always tell me to “treasure this wonderful time when the kids are young,” but it’s funny how the people who tell you this, never seem to have children that young at the time of the telling. I think that by the time you’re ready to say this to someone else, you’ve long forgotten how much work it actually is.

Right now, I treasure the few moments the boys are off playing by themselves…right up until one of them steals the other’s toy, or when one of them pushes the other down and a cry-fest ensues. Those moments are GOLDEN!

Categories
Dad Blogs Family

Chef Ramsey…psshh…You Don’t Scare Me!

Gingerbread houseI love watching “Hell’s Kitchen.” Having worked in numerous kitchens growing up, and myself having a love of cooking, I get my kicks watching Ramsey bring tears to grown men’s eyes. Granted, most of these contestants were handpicked by studio directors, no doubt under the watchful gaze of a psychiatrist, for maximum hysterics value, but it’s still fun to watch regardless.

Plus, after having lived under the tyranny of multiple drill instructors for six weeks, Chef Ramsey’s tirades pale in comparison to that of “Master Sargent Aleman” (oh ye of the state trooper hat and the gritted teeth) whose very gaze was enough to loosen the sphincters of many an 18-year-old recruit.

But it’s almost a shame really what Hell’s Kitchen has done to the art and joy of cooking. Admittedly, cooking in a high-pressure restaurant is far different from cooking for the enjoyment of it at home, but the show does little to depict the beauty of the ingredients, the smell of seared steak and onions, and the joy one gets from perfectly plating up an entire meal at the same time and delivering it to the table hot and delicious.

Which, come to think of it, is kind of like what having kids does to one’s joy of cooking.

I used to LOVE to cook, and on the rare occasion that I get to do it without a 15-month-old clinging to my leg and crying as I’m trying to one-handedly flip something in the frypan, I still enjoy the heck out of it.

But like Hell’s Kitchen, having kids means doing away with dinners that simmer patiently for an hour on the stove; instead, cooking has become this frenzied, “What can I cook that we’ll ALL enjoy” event that leaves me frustrated and dejected. In that respect, I’d take a restaurant full of parents who cook for their family, over a bunch of well-trained culinary students, to staff my kitchen any day! With these seasoned family chefs, I know that what I’m going to get may not have the freshest herbs, or the most mouth-watering Ahi Tuna available at the market that day, but you can bet that whatever we cook, it’s not gonna be raw, at the very least palatable, and by golly, if it’s rice, we’ll call it rice, NOT Risotto!

Course…there’s not much difference between Ramsey’s ranting and my kids hollering after they’ve left the table, but at least on Hell’s Kitchen, the diners are generally shielded from the noise. And on more than one occasion, as I’m trying to finish that last bite of some unusually tasty treat that I was able to prepare, as the kids come running up to me asking me something completely banal like, “Do you know why Superman wears red boots?” I’ve been very tempted to quote Chef Ramsey and say, “Pi** off!”

I’m pretty sure CareerMom would hang me up by my testicles if I said that, so I just play along nicely. Ramsey should have to cook with kids running around in the kitchen. I think it would mellow him out a bit.

Categories
Dad Blogs Family

Remember, the Meme you save, may be your own!

caution signB ikini over at Pantsfreesia (also a lady whom I work with in a remote kinda way) tagged me for a meme, I suspect largely because I’ve been a bit of a bummer lately and the goings on at work didn’t help and I figure she knows I needed a diversion.

Now, I’ve never “memed” in my life–that I know of–and though I had an idea what a meme was, I had to look it up. It seems there are rules to this memeing and so I’m going to give it my best shot and see what happens.

This particular Meme originated from Mommy Needs Therapy and has made its way down to my proverbial neck of the Internet. The idea is to write a six-word memoir of your life.

Egad! Six words? Folks, I’ve never summed anything up in my life in less than 20 words (er…except maybe that time when my motorcycle went skidding out of control on some pinestraw and I could see a big tree coming up quickly on my left side and I couldn’t do anything about it. I think I uttered two very succinct words then, “Oh” and “SHI*!”)

In addition to the six-word memoir, here are the other rules:
breakerbar

  • Write your own six word memoir.
  • Post it to your blog including a visual illustration if you would like.
  • Link to the person who tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogsphere
  • Tag 5 more blogs with links
  • Don’t forget to leave a comment in the tagged blogs with an invitation to play

breakerbar

So, without further ado, here’s my memoir:

…*sigh*…this is difficult….”Satisfactory goals, unsatisfactorily met, looking forward”

I realize this sounds horribly egocentric, but after all, it’s my memoir, not my eulogy. I hope my eulogy is significantly more upbeat, being delivered by my uber-successful children and a wife who didn’t spend her best years helping me get up out of my chair because I over-extended myself.

Duty done, now I’m passing this along.

TAG! The following people are IT:

– Trisha over at TrishaTruly
– Leighton over at My Best Investments
– BirdPress
– Father of Five (cuz dude, with that many kids, I KNOW you’ve got a memoir waiting in the wings!)
– Allison at That’s What She Blogged

There now…all done!

Oh, and don’t forget that there’s a Woot!-off going on today!

del.icio.us Tags: ,,,