To Lee

An individual by the name of Lee posted a comment on my last blog. I have one question: Did my brog make you raugh?

If you know the answer to this, we need to find a way to get together. My wife's sister and husband are back from Portland, and we always talk about finding you and doing a bbq.

Then again, if this isn't who I think it is, then you're probably scratching your head.

Either way, I hope you enjoyed my blog!

No Rest for the Unbelievably Weary

So, I have this cold. Not a mystery as to where I picked it up from ... girl one goes back to school, germs spread around like peanut butter on bread, and sure enough, I get it. The beauty is that I JUST had a flu shot on Wednesday. How ironic is that?

Of course, I'm not the only one who's sick. EVERYone seems to have a runny nose. I guess I'm just the hardest hit: weef's cleaning the kitchen, apparently feeling "fine"; girls one and two are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, tearing into every toy they own, with no regard for "the clean-up rule."

And now, my petri dish of a second daughter just crawled over, barking like a puppy, and demanded to give me a kiss--a puppy kiss. I'm simply never going to get better.

But you know what? I'd rather be as sick as a dog (pun intended) and know that my girls love me than be healthy and wondering. Not that I *do* wonder ... it's just nice to have that licking affirmation.

More Dayquil might help. So might a long, long nap. I'm sure I won't get the latter, so I'm going to go get some of the former

And Then There Were Three

Lori has an all-day "girls day out" activity planned with a bunch of friends. Shopping, lunch, and a matinee play at some comedy theater. They're not going to be back until late this evening. That means we get a daddy/daughter day! Not sure what we're going to do, but we're going to do something! SomethingS! LOTS of things.

"Like blog?"

Shut up. AFTER I blog. Smart alecks ... all of you. :)

Okay, so right now, they're playing with a measuring tape, measuring everything: each other; the dogs; the tv; their kitchen set; plates; cups; the couches; our wood-buring stove ... they're insatiable. The beauty is that they have NO idea what they're actually doing. They know the tape goes in and out of the tape measure, and it has numbers on it. But it's so cute.

I think we're going to go to McDougals for lunch. They'll have a kids meal between them (yes, they eat that lightly), then they'll play on the doohickey for a while, then we'll come home and they'll sleep. Before that, thought, I think we'll go shopping. They LOVE riding around in the car carts. You know ... the fun carts for kids that have little steering wheels in the front that do nothing other than spin freely? Yah. I could push them around our local store for hours (don't ask how I know) and they'll eat that up.

Dinner. What to do. Mac and cheese, I suppose, but that's so bland. Maybe I'll grill them some hot dogs. They do enjoy a well-grilled dog.

"It's time now. My time now. Give me my wings."

Vocabulary Lessons

So, today, I'm working from home. My wife volunteered at girl 1's school this morning, which left me with girl 2. Having much to do for work, I hunkered down in front of my monitor after I set up girl 2 with as much "Clifford the Big Red Dog" as she could handle. Apparently, it wasn't interesting enough. A few minutes later, she came bounding over to my (off-limits) area. "Daddy, I want see pictures!"

"Do you, now. And what do you want to see pictures of?"

"ME!"

I took a few seconds to soak this in and stifle a percolating laughter. After I got myself under control, I said, "Honey, can you say, 'narcissist'?"

"yessehseh"

"Okay, watch daddy. 'nar'..."

"Nawww ..."

"...cis..."

"sisssss"

"sist."

She said that one pretty well. So then we tried saying it altogether.

"Narcissist!"

"Nawsehseh!!!"

I couldn't keep it in any longer. The laughter bubbled over, and girl two just giggled and giggled.

"Sweetie, daddy loves you."

"Yessehseh!!"

"Yes, sweetie. Still want to see some of your pictures?"

"YAH!!!!"

"Okay."

That lasted all of 4 seconds before she decided to go check out Clifford again.

What a doll.

Fear and Panic in the Air

So, this morning, I've been working on this bug-reporting process document. Earlier, I met with one of our our project managers so he and I could go over the steps and verify them as accurate. I drafted up a document and sent it out for review.

A couple of hours went by. I've been working on some other projects, catching up on email ... regular work stuff. All of a sudden, I got a skype message from my team lead. "Hey, could you come in here?" He was in one of the conference rooms.

I don't have a logical explanation for it, but my immediate reaction was one of sheer fretting and dread. I honestly expected to go in there and face some kind of consequence for something I wasn't even aware that I had done. I felt like the proverbial lamb being led to slaughter. Not helping things is the fact that the conference room is glass all around, allowing me to see straight to my lead for about the last 25-30 feet. On the table with him was a pink sheet.

Come to find out, all the worry and panic was for naught; he only wanted to go over the draft I had sent him, the comments for which were mostly complimentary. The rest were comments phrased like, "Here's where I can see this being improved. What do you think?"

I guess it's just conditioning. In my last job, I very rarely ever heard anything of a positive nature from anyone--management, team members, peers ... anything that was discussed was always of a negative nature. Having been on the inside and now able to look in from the outside, it's an incredibly un-positive environment. Granted, I had one lead who went out of his way to be complimentary, but I sometimes wonder how much of that was genuine and how much of it was smoke being blown where smoke doesn't belong.

So now I'm in this great, positive environment, where there's an atmosphere of total open communication and unity. I guess I'm still not used to it. At my old place, it seemed like it was "every man for himself," as it were. On all levels: internal, external, contractors, government ... there just wasn't the feeling of one-ness, even though everyone's goal was to "support the war fighter."

I guess it's still gonna take some time to get used to being complimented for my work. It's definitely a good feeling, and I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually ... it'd just be nice to get to that feeling without the preceding fear and panic as to why I'm being called into an impromptu, one-on-one meeting.

The Legacy of Happiness

On Monday, I took the new highway for the first time, both to work and home. It didn't really shave anything off the morning commute, but the ride home took less than 40 minutes. That's a full half hour off my afternoon commute! My gas mileage is already thanking me. No standing on the highway, no bumper-to-bumper traffic ... nothing buy smooth sailing. It's great.

Wonderful. Just wonderful.

Hell Hath No Fury ...

When you're told that your child's school starts on 2 September, and you buy her new clothes that she may only wear when school starts, and you buy her pencils, crayons, glue, paper, and all the other accoutrement that come with going to pre-school, and you get her dressed and ready to go, AND you get to the school and try walking her to class, AND THEN you find out that--no--school doesn't start until the 4th, be prepared for the fall-out.

Such was the predicament for my sweet wife today. We've been telling girl 1 for weeks that today was the day she'd get to go back to school and see her old friends. Today was a gargantuan disappointment, and she let weef know just how disappointed she was. I can summarize in 3 words: it wasn't pretty.

Girl 1 likes to learn. She studies bugs and plays with them like they're regular toys. This presents a problem when they're playing in the back yard; we have a known problem with black widows that no amount of spraying or bug bombing seems to quell. So basically, we told her that spiders are OFF-LIMITS. She may play with box elder bugs, potato bugs, ants, or pretty much anything else she finds in the back yard EXCEPT SPIDERS. To her credit, she's done remarkably well. Anyway, so she has this penchant and passion for learning. Telling her that school was going to have to wait 2 more days was the equivalent of telling the female population between 9 and 22 in early 60s England that the Beatles wouldn't be performing tonight--they'd be performing on Thursday night.

Woman scorned? Try a 4-year old. Yikes.