We now return to your regularly scheduled blog, already in progress

I know it’s been six days since I wrote a full-fledged blog entry, but if it makes you feel any better, I have desperately wanted to do so long before now, and my failure to do so has weighed upon me heavily during every waking hour of every one of those blogless days … which, seeing as how I never sleep, means I’ve suffered lots of self-imposed failure-to-blog guilt.

As I mentioned last Thursday, however, Jayna came down with a cold, and the days since have been one big ball of sleepless, coughing, nose-blowing, snot-wiping goodness.

Friday, I took a sick day so that I could tend to her while Wonder Woman was at work, and despite her illness, we still had a lovely time together; as any parent with more than one child knows, when you have an opportunity to spend a long stretch of time with just one of your children, it feels like a mini-vacation, because you don’t have to get up in anyone’s grill with the “Stop touching your brother/sister!” and “Who had that toy first?” and “It is not acceptable to hit each other!” and “If the two of you can’t behave, I will lock you each in your respective dog crates and spray you with the hose again!” (Don’t worry; I’m just kidding about that last part. I would never lock my children in dog crates and spray them with a hose. Those are two separate punishments, and I never combine them.)

Tuesday, the child still was not well enough for school, and Wonder Woman again had to work, and I didn’t want to burn off another sick day, because what if I get, like, swine flu before the end of the year and I need those sick days for my own damn self, but don’t have any left because I used them all up on behalf of my selfish children, who don’t care about my needs, which causes me to resent them for the rest of my days, creating an irreparable rift in our parent/child relationship, and what about that, huh? HUH?

So, instead, I tried juggling my work duties with my nursing duties, and that went not so awesomely. At one point, I got so desperate that I loaded Jayna into the car and drove around for 45 minutes until she fell asleep, then pulled into the parking lot at the public library, busted out my laptop and hijacked a Wi-Fi signal so I could work while she slept, which I figured would be for at least a good hour or so. My plan would have worked perfectly, except that she started having a coughing fit two minutes after I stopped the car, which woke her up, so instead of being a productive employee, I spent some quality time in the children’s reading room checking out the library’s pet gerbil, who spends his day snuggling up in a big pile of snuggly looking stuff and napping, and is it a bad sign when you find yourself wishing you were a gerbil stuck in a glass tank at a public library?

Of course, by yesterday, the cold had jumped from Jayna’s body into Zan’s, and it was pouring cats, dogs and livestock outside, so Mommy was trapped in the house all day with a pair of sick kiddos … which, on the list of “Fun Things To Do,” is right up there with wearing chopped-sirloin underwear and dropping a rabid badger down your pants.

The stir-craziness of a full day indoors culminated in a crescendo of screaming and fighting yesterday afternoon, about 15 minutes before I was scheduled to conduct a phone interview with one of the members of The Wiggles, and I’m so glad the kids quieted down by then, because something tells me it would have been bad form to beat my children whilst talking to one of The Wiggles, am I right?

Point being: until some big corporate sponsor comes along and ponies up some cash, my life occasionally will get in the way of blogging about my life.

You hear that, big corporate sponsors? Pony up, bitches. I mean, who wouldn’t want their product associated with a blog where some foul-mouthed, sleep-deprived guy talks about meting out cruel and unusual punishment to his young children?

Posted in Life, Parenthood | 17 Comments

Can’t slow down

This sign is located adjacent to Zan’s school, and I often end up parking right by it. On two previous occasions, I’ve said to myself, “Ooohhh … shiny lights! Me take picture!” and then attempted to shoot the pretty sign, and on both of those occasions, the camera said, “You left the flash card at home instead of putting back inside of me, dummy.” I finally got it right yesterday.

I was going to use the photo as a jumping-off point to write about how I wish I could slow down, but I’m much too busy for that right now. (I swear, a new blog entry is on the way … I think.)

Posted in Featured Photo | 6 Comments

Homework

So the way this homework thing works is: Zan brings home on Monday a packet of homework that he needs to complete by Friday. Tonight, before dinner, he and I sat at the table to take care of some of it, me with the goal of helping him complete two of the seven pages.

Now, let’s talk about a couple of pleasant surprises:

1.) We got through three pages of homework tonight. Three. Uno, dos, tres. And we were psyched and high-fiving and having a grand ol’ time. We’ve already had a couple “I don’t wanna do homework” semi-meltdowns here, so tonight’s experience was a welcome one indeed.

2.) I took exactly one math class in college. I was required to take at least one, and the least was plenty for me, thank you. I think the course title was “Math 1″ … or maybe it was “Math for shitheads who never plan on taking another math class for as long as they live, so help them god, amen.” There are reasons I ended up writing for a living, people … and one of those reasons is BLECH! MATH! Now, as if the whole athleticism thing wasn’t enough of a tip off that a DNA test might be in order to determine who this boy’s real father is, I’ve discoverd that my son loves math. Yes, he used the word “love” when referring to the practice of working with numbers. (Is it true that an over-the-counter DNA-test kit now exists? I might need to run a quick errand.)

Actually, there was a third pleasant surprise, too: as mentioned in the previous Photo of the Day, I am not at all a fan of giving 6-year-old kids homework. Having said that, I’m pretty sure I actually enjoyed doing my son’s homework with him. Seeing how well he’s doing and how much he already knows is very cool, and any activity that requires he and I to spend time together on a nightly basis for years to come is alright with me.

Posted in Featured Photo | 8 Comments

Hewlett Packard wants me to feel bad about myself

HP Deskjet 5550

I’ve had the color-inkjet printer shown above for just under six years, and if six human years are equal to 42 dog years, then 42 dog years are equal to 750 computer-technology years … which means, technologically speaking, my printer is … hmmm … times seven, carry the two … um … a billion years old. (I always sucked at math.)

Zan recently needed to bring to school a picture of his family, so I printed one out for him. Here’s what it looked like:

Freaky Fenway Family

Turns out I had pretty much run out of ink, so I ordered some replacement cartridges online, and, in an effort to save a few bucks, I purchased refurbished cartridges rather than new cartridges … because I’m very poor conscientious about my family’s finances.

So the refurbished cartridges arrived, and I installed them in the printer, and then I opened the Print Utility application on my computer so that I could check the ink-level indictor to make sure that I, in fact, had received full cartridges. Unfortunately, when I clicked on the “Supply Levels” tab, I was greeted with a message that said “Go fuck yourself.”

Well, I still remember a time when the “Supply Levels” tab had far better manners, and would instead reveal a lovely color indicator that showed me a heartwarming visual representation of just how much ink was left, and I very much wanted those days to return, so I shuffled on over to Hewlett Packard’s website to see if their “Support” area might be able to enlighten me.

The closest thing I could conjure up from the depths of the “Support” search engine was the following little nugget, and based on the solution offered, I’m pretty sure that when Hewlett Packard uses the word “Support,” they mean “moral support” rather than “technical support”:

ISSUE:
After installing a new HP Inkjet print cartridge, the ink level indicator remains at the previous level.

SOLUTION:
Continue to print and ignore the ink level indicator. The print cartridge is full of ink, it just is not being measured accurately.

Really? No, seriously: really?

That’s some damn fine, highly insightful information right there. So insightful, in fact, that I’ve decided to also apply it to the following dilemmas:

  • an illuminated “you’re almost out of gas” indicator on my dash
  • an almost-empty gauge on my home-heating-oil tank
  • a near-zero balance on my checking account

As pleased as I was to have had Hewlett Packard resolve all of those annoying problems for me, I still kinda wanted to know where my “Supply Levels” info had run off to, so I sniffed around the HP site a bit more, which led me to the following similarly helpful bit of HP “Support”:

We are sorry to inform you that there will be no Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) support available for your HP product.

Well, that sucks. But they didn’t just leave it at that, did they? No, they didn’t.

A small set of HP Inkjet printers beyond 5 years old are not supported with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

“A small set” … in other words, “There are a few losers out there who still are using one of our ancient relics.” So now you’re calling me a loser, HP? Oh, don’t act all innocent; I can read between the lines, assholes.

And as if insulting me and my old printer wasn’t enough, HP then had the balls to throw this at me:

Please consider upgrading to a newer HP product that is supported on Mac OS X 10.6.

OK, tell you what, HP … I’ll consider using this month’s food money to replace my near-mint-condition printer with another one of your products that presumably will be obsolete in five years if you’ll consider GO SUCK IT.

Posted in Geek, Life | 22 Comments

Dishes are done, man

Oh, the blogging I wanted to do today. I mean, when you have this much “funny” and “witty” and “sheer genius” pumping through your bloodstream 24/7, you need an outlet, you know what I’m sayin’?

But here it is, 11 p.m., and I am just now finishing a day of working, and an evening of taking care of the kids, and helping Zan do his book report (because, you know, if there’s one thing 6-year-old kids who are spending all day, five days per week, cooped up in a classroom for the first time in their short little lives need, it’s fucking homework and book reports … and, yes, I know I’m cursing, but I have to pretend in front of my son that I think homework is a GREAT IDEA! and SO MUCH FUN!, so guess what, Internet? You get to bear the brunt of my displaced hostility about the whole homework thing! You’re welcome!), and putting both kids to bed, and emptying the dishwasher, and doing the dishes, and taking the trash down to the curb — to include an assload of big, bulky, shit-we’re-getting-rid-of stuff from the basement — and so what you get instead of my special brand of world-class blogging is me ranting like a pissy little bitch about stuff that really isn’t that big of a deal, and, again: You’re welcome!

The best I could come up with was this picture, which I snapped at approximately the same moment that I heard what sounded like my daughter crying and calling out for me, and I swear to Christ, we have the kids’ monitors on every single moment of every single night except, without fail, on those occasions when they actually do wake up and are having a problem and do need Mommy and/or Daddy (to include that time a couple years ago when, just before I climbed into bed, I went to check on Zan, who was absolutely sound asleep, which was great, except something didn’t smell quite right, and as I got closer to him, something didn’t look quite right, and did he spill something in his bed, or is he bleeding, or, wait, no, sweet mother of god, he vomited in his sleep and has been rolling around in it for who knows how the hell long, and it’s a good thing we always, always, ALWAYS have his video monitor on … except, of course, on the night he hosed his bed down with puke and didn’t even wake up).

So I dashed up the stairs, where my stuffed up, sore-throat-having daughter was crying, and had apparently been doing so for long enough that she was a teary, snot-filled, dry-heaving mess. After a few minutes of holding her up in front of the toilet after she informed me she thought she was going to throw up, I got her settled down and back to sleep without any vomiting … but she’s sick, and if ever you’re on a game show, and the host asks “How many days of pre-school does it take for a 4-year-old who hasn’t been sick in months to suddenly develop a full-blown cold inside of two hours?,” the answer is “Five.” (And if you win the game with that answer, I expect to be compensated.)

And there’s the sound I love oh-so-much … the sound of a baby monitor broadcasting the pathetic cries of a sick child who drifts in and out of sleep all night, occasionally crying out, which simultaneously makes me feel terrible for the sick child and makes me wish I was completely deaf.

Nothing like following a long day with a long night, am I right?

Well, at least dumping it all on you has made me feel a little bit better. Thanks, Internet. Good night.

Posted in Featured Photo | 12 Comments

Girl on the Cob

As my long, slow descent into the dark and dreary depths of fall and winter in New England continues, I figured I’d take another look back at summer.

The photo above was taken at my uncle’s place during our annual Labor Day Weekend fiesta … you know, the weekend when I keep telling everyone that summer doesn’t officially end until late September, even though I know that’s just a technicality?

Posted in Featured Photo | 7 Comments