Shining Redux

This is very well done. Makes The Shining look like the kind of movie Heather would plead with me to go to with her. Like the little boy should be Dakota Fanning and the dad should be Colin Firth

Ink-ohol

Two stories about it:

1. I've got issues with Beer Karma right now. Here's how it works: You bring beer to your friend's house when you come over, they bring beer when they come over. It's important to keep the balance on this. When fortune (free beer style) smiles on you, you should put yourself in a position to enable fortune to shine upon others.

My current situation is that I feel like I've been doing a lot of receiving lately and not much giving. We've been having people over, and not going out, so that's how it goes. Tonight, however, we're going to some friends house for dinner, and I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself to bring good beer. I've been drinking free, friend-provided beer for weeks, it's only proper that someone else should have that pleasure. So, I'm going to have to search out some prized northwest microbrew to bring along tonight. That should even the scales and put me on a level beer karma footing.

2. Heather and I drank our finest (and only) bottle of wine this weekend. It was a bottle of 98 pinot noir from Tualatin Estate Vineyards, where I worked briefly after college. It was really good wine at the time, and it was supposed to age well. We were married at the vineyard, and drank this wine at the wedding. So Heather and I had been dragging it around, miraculously intact, for 7 years, and through 3 moves. We'd been putting off opening it for a "special" occasion, but everytime some special time came around, we'd either forget about it, or not feel like wine, or not think the time was "special" enough. So, saturday night, we felt like wine, and that was all we had, and we opened it up. We drank it before dinner with chocolate chips, and drank it with our burgers and beans dinner. We are so sophisticated. It was great. I wish we had another bottle we could open every week. It was also a good reminder that a random late-summer evening spent sitting on your new deck with your cute wife, nearly-potty-trained toddler, and sleeping-through-the-night infant can be as special as any event.

Congratulations

I always like to make fun of people who spell it congradulations.

Anyway, congrats to the 1,000th visitor to the site. It was one of my co-workers. Donna? Tim? Lyn? Stop by my office for your official gingersnap prize.

Sorry Robyn, number 1,001.

Training

This is what my side of the conversation sounds like to my co-workers today:

...
Ok, put him on.

Hi buddy, do you have something to tell me?

Oh, you're sitting on the toilet?

What did you do?

Did you go peepee?

Did it go in the potty?

That's great, buddy, are you going to put your poopoo in the potty too?

That's a good idea. Tell Mommy when you want to go, OK?

etc. etc. etc.

Guess what we're doing this weekend.

Toward a language ideal...

Pete speaks what I think may be the future evolution of english. All unnecessary information is left out, so that he communicates only the facts, without any flourish.

Not: "Mom, I saw a man sitting in his house as we passed in the car just now!"

Instead: "See one man in house"

Yesterday, Pete was playing at a public playground, and a little girl maybe 3 years old came to play near him. Pete was making sing song sounds with his voice as he played in his own world, and the girl came up to him and said "I'd like to play over here now, so can you please keep it down?"

Pete just stared at her for a few seconds and must have dismissed her authority, because he went back to what he was doing before, making his sounds and playing with trucks or planes or something. A few minutes later, the little girl came back up to him and said, "If I have to remind you one more time, I'm going to put you to bed!"

I think this confused Pete, but he didn't argue with her. 5 minutes later, he came up to Heather and said "No Mom, daytime!" He found a loophole in the 3 year old's threat!

Do you think that women have an inborn ability to out-communicate men?

Lost

While taking a run along Waikiki beach last week, I stumbled upon a large crowd. I asked what everyone was waiting for, and someone told me that the cast of the TV show "Lost" was going to be arriving any minute and that they'd be premiering the first episode of season two on a large outdoor screen. So, I decided that if Heather couldn't be there with me (her favorite show right now is Lost), at least I could bring back some pictures for her. She has, after all, been serving as the effectively single mother of my children a lot of the time lately (I've been traveling for work quite a bit), and I was, at the moment, taking a run on Waikiki beach, after an afternoon of sunbathing and sitting on my hotel balcony (we really did work, I swear).

So, I ran back to my hotel, grabbed the camera, and ran back to the crowd. It took about 15 minutes, and when I got back, the first cast members were arriving. It was fun to see the celebrities, and interesting to participate in the crazy scene involving young girls giggling and screaming and reaching out to touch people, cast members signing women's chests (in exchange for a promise not to sue), and middle aged women who felt compelled to refer to rare trivia when asking for autographs:

Middle-aged Woman: Harold, Harold, will you sign this please!!!
Cast Member: Sure, here you go, are you going to get everybody?
Middle-aged Woman: I'm going to try! There are only 51 of you, after all.

I had to go catch my flight, so I didn't get pictures of everyone or see the season premiere, but I got a few pictures of favorites.

Heather was very excited that I got a picture of Matthew Fox:

I was happy to get a picture of Maggie Grace:

Waikiki

I was out of town this week, doing some work in Hawaii. As you might expect, it was really rough.

Pete Makes Faces

Happy Face

Tough Face

Thinking Face

He came up with these faces on his own, and he knows them by name. But they're not parlor tricks. Not completely at least. The thinking face is what he would actually look like if you asked him if he remembers how many giraffes were at the zoo last week. The tough face is really what he looks like if I tell him to be tough after scraping his knee.

Amazing Photography

Check out the amazing photography. The site is in french, but not too hard to navigate.

Via design*sponge

New Header

Look at that nice new header, Nora. Do you think all 8 of the people who read the website will like it?

I posted some new pictures to Flickr. Check them out. Pete has a baby and he likes to pat it.

New Pictures

I've been enduring some criticism lately for not uploading any new pictures lately. So, here you go, I'm at your mercy. There are new pictures of our recent trip to the zoo and Heather's reunion in our flickr account. Just click on the "Daily Zeitgeist" on the right sidebar.

Reunion

Sorry about the extended absence. I was in Las Vegas for work last week, and couldn't post. Surprisingly, I don't have any good stories from Sin City. Maybe if something comes to mind, I'll post about it.

Heather's 10-year reunion was this weekend, and one exchange stood out.

When we first arrived, a guy who now teaches ballroom dancing and is married to a sommelier told Heather that he had really wanted to ask her to senior prom.

He was going to kidnap her from her house, rush her into a waiting car, and drive away. He had friends arranged along his route that would act like they were trying to stop him, and he would shoot them with the fake gun he'd brought along. He had a tape prepared on which a large-voiced man (he worked for a radio station at the time) explained the mission. The car chase would end in a shootout on the roof of a building. Somewhere in there, he'd pop the question. It was to be a special agent extravaganza.

Someone else asked Heather the day before the plan was to be executed, and it never came to be. Fortunately for me, I think. Consider the following factors:

1. Excellent dancing skills.
2. An uncanny foreknowledge of Heather's eventual Alias fixation.
3. Creativity.

I'm lucky nothing ever started there. I would've had a hard time competing.

I'll be putting some reunion photos up on flickr in the next couple of days, for anyone who's curious.