All posts by tim

The Pillowman

Watching Theater

We went to see the Pillowman on Saturday night. It was a sold out show. They had all the names from the reservations already attached to chairs. I suppose to make you feel like you were entering a totalitarian regime where the state knows that you’re visiting the theater. This ended up leaving some people pretty cranky, though, as they couldn’t choose their own seats.

I’d read this play before. I should really come out in the open. I don’t read plays. I think the Pillowman is the only play I’ve read in the past 3 years (ok, I read Swimming to Cambodia, but that’s a monologue).

On the subject…

Politics

On the subject of social security… shouldn’t it really be a system where the amount you get after retirement is based upon how much your kids (and grandkids) currently earn rather than how much you earned during your life?

Must Build

Stella

this design is brilliant:

I’m going to have to build one for Stella. The best thing is that you can stack books on the other side and see-saw alone. How awesome is that? Also I suppose it can become a game as you try to balance it out into a flat bookshelf while trying to load the exact same weight of books on both sides. Not to mention that jumping on one side can catapult all of your books across the room. Fantastic!

Lunch!

Stella

and dinner, really. We’ve finally hit the wall. I knew this wall existed. I knew I had it coming, but I was just hoping if I ignored it, it would go away. But Stella is really, really sick of our pretend “meals” we feed her. We’ve been feeding her basically the same thing since she starting eating solid food.

  • Chicken (cooked weekly and slowly growing more slimy over the week) or Cheese
  • Frozen Vegetables (mainly corn and peas because that’s what she likes
  • Milk
  • Water
  • Bread or Toasted O’s

She’s finally started getting a little antsy about this same boring food. Especially when she goes out to eat and gets hamburgers and cheese omelets. So last night I was making Grilled Chicken Breasts with Tomato, Olive, and Feta Relish for dinner. Usually dinner gets made after Stella goes to bed, but I made the sauce early and spooned it over her chicken breasts. I even put a piece of mint on there for garnish.

Sidetrack

I’d have a picture of this, but Julie’s laptop is a pain to use these days so we aren’t downloading pictures that often. I’ll post it at some point.

It was very artsy. And Stella had another first.

Stella’s First!

Realizing garnish doesn’t taste good and is just there to look pretty.

It was amusing. She pulled out the mint. Looked at it. Chewed on it a bit. Then dropped it off of her high chair as an offering to the dogs (who learned about garnish quite a long time ago and were not deceived).

She devoured the food. Which was excellent. And it had vegetables and cheese, so it was sort of healthy.

This led back to the fact that I really need to start cooking for Stella. I’ve been inspired by the past by the site Vegan Lunch Box, even though I could not be less vegan if I tried.

Not Sold Yet

Ramblings

So I’ve been listening to this With Lasers. I suppose we didn’t really want it to sell on day 1. Haven’t heard from the tile place if they’re going to be able to install our tile before our open house.

What else is going on? Julie and I are doing lots of small stuff around the house. Last night I:

  • Cleaned the oven. We sprayed it with horrific chemicals a few nights ago. Then I attempted to cook something in it, because I am forgetful. This released magical toxic fumes through the oven vent under the back left burner. Sometimes I feel like my oven resembles a steam engine. And one day it’s going to stand up on spindly white legs. Move forward from its niche revealing it’s long spindley be-gloved hands. It’s two front burners will flip up revealing his eyes and he will begin talking to me with his oven mouth. Inevitably I will say something rude and he will turn on his burner eyes and they will glow red, red, red! What was I talking about? Oh yes. Two hours after I sprayed the over last night I actually cleaned it. It is now nice and clean. And it only releases mildly toxic fumes when I turn it on.
  • Replanted a hanging basket with new flowers. The old flowers had died. These were the special magical yellow flowers. Yellow flowers apparently make people want to buy. Or something. I hate throwing away plants that I haven’t given around six months to struggle back to life. But desperate times and all that.
  • Played Lego Star Wars. For 10 minutes after I got Stella in bed, while Julie was getting Roxie from the groomers. Roxie looked even more ridiculous than normal. She had two pink ear bows, and a big pink bow attached to her harness. As always she looked naked and mortified.
  • Vacuumed the downstairs. Vacuuming is boring. There’s no way around it. No story there.
  • Ate McDonalds. The new geniuses they’ve hired are unable to complete an order correctly. I did not get my super-sized fries last night, and they decided this time Honey-Mustard was the same as Honey. Although that’s a step up. Last time I asked for Barbecue sauce and honey, and I got sweet and sour. I suppose she was keying off of the “and”. How sad is it that these teenagers cannot even properly perform a McDonalds job? A job that was designed to require next to no thinking.
  • Put on a missing cable TV wall plate.
  • But not in that order.

Could this post be my entry for The Holme’s Carnival of the Mundane? Probably not. I’m sure I can get more mundane than this.

For Sale

Updates

Our house went up for sale last night. It’s a bit bittersweet. This is the house that Julie and I did so much work on. We bought a table saw and learned how to put in Pergo floors. Travis and I spent weekends knocking out the back patio and building the frame for our wonderful deck. And the entire gang put so much effort into putting on the decking. And of course, Stella came home to this house. And I will always remember lying on the floor of her room sleeping with her on my chest. Breathing in the smell of her hair. It has been a good house. The listing is here. You know you’re curious you Lookey-Lou:

http://www.austinhomesearch.com/ahs/GetResults2New.aspx?id=185807

We have our first showing today at 11:45. I have a feeling it might sell fast.

This weekend was quite a bit of fun. Friday evening we were going to go out to eat as a pre-celebration for Julie’s birthday. But Waterloo south had a 45 minute (!) wait and we didn’t want to even attempt to go downtown where all the bikers were (Republic of Texas rally was downtown this weekend). So we ended up getting a baguette and some beer and eating Chicken Picatta at home. It was a pretty low key night. We watched “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, which Julie hadn’t seen and which was actually somewhat comical. My parent’s used this as an object lesson in obedience and “How to Behave in a Foreign Country” growing up. It was nice to see it as an adult and not take it seriously. And experience someone else seeing that fantastic climax for the first time. Julie was making fun of Doris Day’s casting for the first 3/4 of the movie and when we hit the climax it was sort of like, “Oh, I get it…”

Saturday was a whole bundle of fun. I went running in the morning with Stella. Then we went over to her Baba and Grandaddy’s house and hung out on their porch for a while. Baba dug out a bunch of old wooden blocks for Stella to play with and we just sat out and enjoyed the morning. I ran back over to our house and woke up Julie around 10:30, so she got a nice long sleep on her birthday. We ate some chocolate muffins for breakfast and then headed out to J.C. Penny. Oh, I forgot. We had gone to Kohls the night before to look for a new shirt for Julie for her birthday party and came out empty handed. It wasn’t that nothing fit, so much that everything was just so ugly that you couldn’t get excited about anything. So on Saturday we headed to J.C. Penny at Southpark Meadows. It was as if the gods were smiling upon us. They had tons of nice stuff, Julie tried on a bunch, and stopped trying things on because she had too much, not because there wasn’t anything else to try on. I like having good shopping excursions with Julie. Stella and I played outside the dressing rooms. We’d stolen Julie’s sunglasses and were playing games with those. Stella was also standing on her tip-toes (which I hadn’t seen before), and attempting to do chinups on the shopping cart. We had a lot of fun.

After that we headed out to McKinney state falls to go swimming, but it was closed due to bacteria levels. Bummer. Then we went to Garrison Park to go swimming, but it cost $3 and we only had about 30 more minutes to swim. Bummer. So we went and got snow cones. Stella had her first tastes of snow cone, and I’m proud to say she prefers Root Beer (my flavor) over Black Cherry (Julie’s flavor).

We headed home and went out to an early dinner with my Mom, Dad, Christine, and Brian. At Waterloo South. So Julie got her hamburger. We came home and had Julie’s birthday party. The usual suspects came out and it was a lot of fun.

Sunday, I slept in with Stella until 10:30. Sleeping in with Stella involves me going into her room about 7:30, and lying down on a pillow and a blanket. Stella then proceeds to crawl on me, alternating with dozing off in odd positions for short periods of time. It’s all very cuddly. We got up and cleaned up after the party, and then went out to breakfast at IHOP. We were bad this weekend about eating out.

That afternoon we went swimming at Dittmar pool with Christine and Brian. Stella seemed to enjoy the water, but I think she was overwhelmed by the number of people in the pool (heck, we were overwhelmed by the number of people in the pool). But it was a free pool on a hot summer day. Better get used to it kiddo, that’s the way you’ll be swimming in Austin.

We got home, and I realized that our Realtor was going to be taking pictures of our house and that the lawn was shaggy, so I rushed out and mowed it. I got out of the shower about 5 minutes before he got there. We got our paperwork signed and he mentioned that he thought we had tile in our master bath, and that no one wants carpet in their master bath. We find that argument hard to argue with. It is just too humid in a bathroom to have carpet. So we’re going to go out and pick some tile at lunch today. We’ll get that put in as soon as possible. As long as we don’t sell the house first.

All in all, it’s been a crazy time getting the house ready to market, but we’re definitely seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And it was a great weekend to boot. Stella has really started communicating with us, and really starting to stand up on her own, and toddle around. Plus she’d started using the “No” word. I really don’t like having to go into work these days. I’d much rather sit around and play with her. Ah well, this post is too long. I’ll let you guys know how the tile goes…

Ok, now listen up whippersnappers!

Ramblings

Music costs money. You need to pay for it. Stop your stealing, and whining about how music is crap, and start paying the artists who create good music.

I’m sick of you.

Last night I bought LCD Soundsystem’s new album from iTunes. The Holmes’ had given me an iTunes gift certificate for my birthday. My computer doesn’t run iTunes, and it can’t play the standard iTunes file format, but recently Apple came out with DRM free music. Suddenly my computer can play tracks I download from iTunes (as long as they’ve been converted and are distributed by EMI). This was great. I downloaded the tracks, and I’ve been rockin’ out. Thanks Travis, Ashley and Henry!

But… a bunch of people are complaining because apple is putting your email address and account name in the tracks you download. So all you music thieves can’t just dump the new tracks you buy on some music sharing service. Their is so much complaining about this. It amazes me. I wanted DRM-free tracks because I run linux, and I don’t want to have to buy a certain type of computer just to be able to listen to music. I did not want DRM-free tracks so I could upload music to file sharing services.

At work, I have an iTunes share so that others in the office can listen to my music. I was browsing one of my coworkers shares and noticed that he had an album that I wasn’t aware of anyone else in the universe who liked (Brassy). Then I noticed he had all of the music that I own. He had ripped all of them music off of my iTunes share without asking. This pisses me off. I’ve spent thousands of dollars building up my music collection. I support those musicians that I like with my money. I’m making your music theft possible, and I’m pretty much single handedly keeping the music business alive. Stop stealing music jackasses!

This isn’t Pokemon. You’re not trying to catch all the mp3s. Grow up!

If you want to listen to an album before buying check out a Napster.com. If it’s not there, then chances are the band is too small and they’ll be promoting themselves with mp3s on their website. Stop stealing music, there’s no reason for it. You’re going to make it so that no one can earn a living creating music. And then the music will really suck.

Sleep

Ramblings

So I’m a pretty heavy sleeper, but my body also hates alarm clocks. I have a really good internal clock because of this. My body will almost always try to anticipate the alarm clock and wake up just before it goes off. I’m liable to have a heart attack some day. I’m not one of those people who can hit snooze. When the alarm goes off my body has a full blown adrenaline-pumping flight reaction.

Because Stella was getting up around 7:15am every morning my internal clock was wired to not let me sleep after that point. Even when I wanted to on a weekend, and had traded all my video game playing time to Julie for the next 17 years in exchange for her waking up with Stella on a Sunday morning. But lately, Stella has been sleeping in. I get up and change her diaper when the alarm goes off at 7:30am and she goes back to sleep until about 8:15-8:30.