Hard To Find A Good Squid

I’m still in the process of figuring this blogging thing out. In an earlier post I may have mentioned that I wanted to change the name. I just hadn’t decided at that time which way I was going to go. My first thoughts were to go with something conventional. A name that was descriptive.

www.stayathomedadthathomeschoolsandcookslooksgoodinakilthatespeasandwantstoblogaboutit.com

Seemed a tad long to me.

So I’m going with something squid related. By the way, the header is original artwork. Leave it alone.

I started perusing Google’s image search to see what else I could find.

I googled: squid destroys ship.

And while there were plenty of pictures of squids, things that were squid-like, even things I didn’t know were squid related until I clicked the pic and found that yes, it had something to do with squids. Here’s a sampling of things that came up that made me scratch my head. I may have mumbled, “WTF?”

Sponge Bob & Sandy being chased by a giant worm.

Ok, it has a squid but this only marginally qualifies.

I don't even know what this is.

Ok. It has a squid lid. It made me laugh.

Death. Star. NOT A DAMN SQUID.

Seriously.

AND THAT IS WHY I WENT AND DREW MY OWN DAMN PICTURE OF A SQUID.

It Rained

It. Rained. Yesterday.

Hurray!

Well… it’s special to us here in Houston. It hasn’t rained much in all of Texas this year. As a matter of fact, we are in an “extreme” drought. And not in a good way.

I took the kids to run a couple of errands and I noticed some heavy cloud. Not that unusual for Houston in the mid-afternoon during the middle of summer. We went to the hardware store because they have a post office. Does your hardware store have a post office? No? Well, sucks to be you. Then we walked to the liquor store. Very cloudy now.

And yes, my hardware store/post office is in the same shopping center as a liquor store. I live in Houston. Every shopping center has a liquor store.

And there you have a major difference between errands with stay-at-home-mom and stay-at-home-dad. She’ll take the kids to the grocery store, the cleaners, the actual post office, even the mall. Only psychotic mommies take their kids to the liquor store. You see them on the news occasionally. With daddies, it’s expected. As a matter of fact, it’s downright cute. I needed vodka to make amaretto with. We walk in the store, I grab the vodka…

Zoey: “Why does it say ‘Peak’?”

Me: “That’s the brand name.”

Zoey: “Yeah. But why ‘Peak’?”

Me: “I don’t know. The people that started their vodka company decided that was a good name, I guess.”

Zoey: “Hmf. But it makes no sense.”

Sara danced around like a pixie. She was just so freakin’ happy.

Cashier: “Awww. She’s like a doll with that hair!”

See? I told you. Cute.

The sky was getting darker. I saw lightening! So we zipped straight back home and turned on the TV and the internet.

A tiny little storm was brewing up and moving from the northeast of Houston to the southwest. This meant it was going to rain at my house! And it did! It was awesome!

The funny thing is: it was a tiny storm. It moved slow, so it rained for about 45 minutes. Maybe two claps of thunder.

FIVE times while my kids were watching TV the EMERGENCY BROADCASTING SYSTEM broke in to let us know it was raining. It warned of high winds and lightening. Apparently it has been so long since it rained here the EBS people thought we might have forgotten what it was like to have a rain shower. “Be careful when outdoors.” Well, I didn’t need to be told twice. I ran outside, carefully, and watched those beautiful clouds unleash their mighty fury.

*sigh*

I’m still gonna hafta water the garden today.

What Do You Mean 'We're Out Of Coffee'?

The HORROR

Had an idea for a movie.

The premise is that for one day all coffee in the United States DISAPPEARS.

Productivity will grind to a halt. Commuters will slowly bump into each other holding suddenly empty travel mugs. They'll look at each like, "Never mind hitting my car, WHERE IS MY COFFEE?" Misspellings will QUADRUPLE. Meetings take even longer. Coffee shops everywhere will look like the zombie apocalypse with people lethargically meandering around them in and out like the undead that they are.

I call it, "A Day Without Colombian".

Secret Agent Dad

I’ve been a Stay-At-Home-Dad now for an entire month. Woo hoo!!!!

I shave about once a week.

Wooooooo hooooo!

But I have to admit. When talking to others it’s hard to say, “I’m a stay at home dad.” When I do, it sounds an awful lot like, “I’m unemployed and/or unemployable. I’m a sad sad excuse for a man.”

So, I’ve come up with another way to introduce myself to people.

Other People: “So… What do you do?”

Me: “Oh. I’m retired.”

OP: “Really?” They are REALLY interested now because I’m only 37. “What did you do before?”

Me: “Oh… I kept myself busy.”

I say it cryptically. Look the other way while chomping down on a Triscuit. “Meh… nothing special really.”

I then pepper conversations with things like:

“I heard different.”

“Thank goodness I’m not in Libya anymore.”

“Those bunkers are deeper than you’d think.”

“NORAD is sooo overrated.”

“The Space Shuttle is being retired for a reason…”

“Iron Man? It’s a movie? Hmm. I saw the prototype…”

I already have plans to set my phone alarm to go off right around when I want to leave. So when it starts buzzing or ringing or whatever I can pull it out casually and take a look at the screen. Then I’ll say softly, but just loud enough, “Oh CRAP. Not now. Why now? If that thing blows…” and then I’ll run out to my car and take off tires squealing. Of course I drive a crappy minivan, so the only squealing will be the serpentine belt.

Maybe I’ll scream into my phone on the way to the car, “Get the plane ready! I don’t care if the pilot is in Chicago! Find another one or I’ll fly the damn thing myself!”

Yeah. That’s what I’ll do.

Sara is scared

I ain’t got much today. I’m tired from being up all night. We got back late from the fireworks display. Nice little mini-adventure there that I can’t quite get my thoughts together to write about. I was wired, so I couldn’t go to sleep. But when I did go to bed the girls were in and out of my room so often that I should have started charging them for readmission. It wasn’t until after 5:00 am that I actually got to sleep for a few hours.

In the meantime. Things kids say.

Our darling night owl, Sara, yesterday afternoon had to go to the bathroom.

Sara: “I hafta go to the bathroom.”

Me: “Ok.”

Sara: “I need someone with me.”

Me: “Why? I don’t want to watch you pee.”

Sara: “But I need someone.”

Me: “No you don’t. You go all the time by yourself.”

Sara: “But I’m scared!”

Me: “Of what?”

Sara: “I’m scared of the zombies that are gonna get me.”

Zombies.

Well. There you go.

Hnnnnnnnnn.

Up Late Again

Last night I was really really tired but stayed up because Momma and the girls were watching a movie. It got to be really late and as a treat, we all went to bed together. The girls like to “start” in my bed. It makes them feel special. Even more special if Mom or Dad goes to bed with them. As it was so late, we all went to bed together.

Since it was late, they all fell asleep very quickly. This is good because I can’t sleep with so many wiggle butts in my bed. So I cleared a path to their beds and one by one carried them to bed.

Ahhhhh.

I laid me down and boing (that was a sound effect). My eyes wouldn’t shut. Exhausted, I lay their thinking about scenes from the Terminator 4 movie and how they just didn’t make sense.

Like, where “the resistance” are a bunch of resourceless people that go to extremes to stop ONE freakin’ robot and Skynet has a FACTORY that pumps them about by the zillions, and giant walking robots that have motorcycles in their legs, fly and can shoot lasers; how is that they can hide at all? Did Skynet like keeping smelly humans in small pockets around California the way we keep deer well fed around feeders on hunting leases? Did Skynet make robot killers and send then after people for sport?

And what was the deal with capturing people and keeping them? Where did Skynet keep them? Why? What did Skynet do with them?

And Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Holy crap. Cruise’s character goes through hell to get his kids to their mom, crossing rivers of dead people, blowing up giant robots, running for his life and what does he get? A “thank you”. They didn’t even invite him in for a sandwich. THEY OWE HIM A SANDWICH.

Anyhow, as my brain was turning these thoughts over and over I actually started to doze off. And it was right at that in-between place of being awake and coherent and asleep when I heard a door slam. It scared the shit out of me. I jerked awake so hard that I pulled a muscle in my shoulder.

But, as I said, I was in that magic limbo where nothing and everything is real. So I laid there wondering if I imagined it. Finally I was freaked out enough that I decided it was real. So I got up and started looking around to see what made a door slam. Both kids were asleep in bed. Stephanie was snoring. All doors that were supposed to be closed were closed. So I opened each one and closed them again to see if it made the same noise I heard.

Open… close. Nope.

Open…close. Nope.

Open…close. Nope.

Hmmm. So I went back to bed. And laid there. What made that noise?

So I got back up and went into the kitchen. I looked around in there. I have no idea why. I started looking out the windows. Maybe the door slammer got away.
Maybe it wasn’t a slamming door I heard but something smacking against the bedroom window. So I get a flashlight and start looking out the windows. Of course I mostly see the reflection of the flashlight but I’m hoping that the window smacker sees me and is so impressed with my flashlight that it leaves.

But then, maybe it didn’t come from outside. Maybe it came from the attic. Some critter was up there making door slamming noises. So I head into the hallway where the girls’ rooms are and the attic door (you know the kind with folded up stairs?) hangs in the ceiling. I pulled on it and let go letting the springs pull it shut to see if it made a door slamming noise.

It didn’t. It went “T-BONNNNNG”.

Finally after visiting every room in the house and experimenting with slamming doors quietly, I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling. Maybe it was the cat? Did it knock over something? Maybe a branch or something landed on the roof. No.. we don’t have any tree cover. Maybe something threw a branch on the roof. Who would be throwing branches on my roof and why?

And that’s why I was up until 2 am this morning.

Nothing Much Happened Today

I had gone to a friend’s house last night where a small group of us played some games. It was my “guy” night.

My friend Jason: “How does it feel to be around adults?”

Ben: “We barely qualify…”

And that’s when we broke out a game called Munchkin.

I’ve got cool friends.

And we drank Kool-Aid all night long. Seriously. And Diet Cherry 7-Up. I polished off a box of Triscuits. I got home at 1:00 am.

PART-EY!

I got up with Stephanie because I like to make her lunch. After all, it is always my fault if she’s lunchless and needs to buy it from Fast N’ Greasy. But then I went straight back to bed thinking, “The kids will wake me up. 7:30. 8:00 at the latest.”

9:30.

They slept until 9:30.

I have no idea how late they stayed up last night. But 9:30. Sheesh.

We went to the pool today. Nothing fancy. I did make a picnic lunch so we could hang out there for a while.

It’s garbage day in our neighborhood. The funniest thing I saw all day was a garbage man. Guy is hanging off the back of the truck cruising down the street. He’s of course covered head to toe. You’d think he’d be cooking covered like that, but for you folks not from Texas, people that work all day in the sun wear protection. And yeah, he’s cookin’. The funny thing is that he’s wearing a sombrero.

“That’s funny?” you ask snidely as though you’d expect all Texas garbage men to be straight outta Mexico where everybody wears a sombrero.

Well, in reality, not so much. Yes, a great number of undesirable working class jobs are manned by migrant workers, this guy was exceptional in that he was wearing a sombrero. Not a hat. Not a cap. A Mexican Hat Dance Sombrero. It had to have been 5 feet in diameter. It was covered in decorations, red lace, and sparkled. It didn’t have the dangling cat toys, but he might have taken those off because they can be distracting.

We stayed not quite 4 hours. We used a lot of sunblock. Compared to the other folks there, we are extremely white. Nordic white. Alabaster. White like a polar bear in a snow storm.

Funny thing here is that we’re getting quite tan with us going outside almost every day during this summer vacation. But we live in a multi-cultural neighborhood. “Multi-cultural” as in for about half of Mission Bend English is a second language. Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hindi, Pakistani, African…ese, West Indies, Pacific Islander, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Canadian all spoken here. And at our pool, we were the white kids.

We get home and I tell the girls to get in the bathroom and get out of their swimsuits, leave their towels and suits on the floor for me to wash. I told Zoey to get in the shower.

“Why do I hafta to go first all the time?!”

“I’d tell you, but you wouldn’t care. So let’s just say because I told you to and because you love and respect me without condition you’ll just do it. OK?”

“Fine.”

Two seconds later both kids are running through the house.

“Daddy, we have a surprise for you!”

I already know they are streaking through the house.

In stereo they say, “WHITE BOOTIES!”

“GET BACK IN THE BATHROOM AND TAKE YOUR SHOWER! Sara, why are you naked?” And then I see it. They have really white booties. They look like the Coppertone kid.

I caught myself checking out my booty in the bathroom later.

My ass is WHITE.

And then we went to the Katy Mills Mall because I hadn’t been tortured in a while. Stephanie wanted to buy pants from Old Navy. There was a deal that coincided with her need for pants. Then we went to Children’s Place. The girls weren’t even trying to be good. Here I am trying to catch pics of our outing and those two couldn’t pause long enough for a picture. All I got were blurs of boredom.

The only one of them capable of standing still. 

Then SWMBO dragged my unhappy white ass to J. C. Penny’s to return some pants she bought from the internet 6 months ago. It was two pair of pants for $17. She bought them because it was a great deal. But when they came in, with my exact size clearly marked on the tag, they were made for people 6 inches taller than me.

I’m thinking we are wasting our time. She takes them to the desk and the guy is like, “I’ll need a manager’s approval… meh. Whatever.” So he reimburses our credit card.

Stephanie: “Do you wanna go pick out some pants?”

Me: “I don’t need pants.”

Stephanie: “But it’s a great deal.”

Me: “Do you not see these two gremlins terrorizing the other customers? The yellow haired one just ate a catalog.”

Stephanie: “But it’s TWO pair of pants for $17.”

Me: “I didn’t need pants when you bought them six months ago.”

Stephanie: “But it’s a REALLY good deal.”

Me: “I REALLY don’t need pants.”

Stephanie: “Ok. If you REALLY don’t need them…”

Me: “I don’t.”

Stephanie: *sigh*

Then we went to La Madeleine. It happened to share the parking area with J.C. Penny’s which is why we went to Penny’s in the first place. Stephanie has a co-worker that is in sales. In appreciation for doing whatever it is that she does, he gives her La Madeleine gift cards. Plural. She’s got three. It was as good a time as any to use them and I didn’t have to make dinner tonight.

The place was trés chic. Like a cafeteria, you stand in line with a tray. But you order from a menu. You hold a giant wooden spoon with a number (or letter) on it so they can find you once you’ve sat down with your tray. The tray, apparently, is for your side items that they build for you in the cafeteria line. Stephanie ordered soup.

La M: “Oh crap. You wanted soup? At dinner time?”

Stephanie: “Sorry!”

La M: “No Prob. I’ll just grab some from the back.”

From the back.

We stood there and waited. We were the only ones in the line. By the time they came out with Stephanie’s soup the line was out the door and our orders that needed to be cooked were ready. Two ladies were standing there at the end of the line with dishes of food in each hand waiting for us.

It’s not like the next person in line was just being over extra-uber patient either. He ordered the soup too. Apparently they had an unexpected run on soup. It happens. Apparently.

For what it’s worth, the food was really good. And for a counter service/table service restaurant it was interesting. Portion size was perfect. The place was carved up into rooms so that you didn’t feel like you were eating in convention hall. Once the girls got to eating their behavior began to “operate within established working parameters”. I like that quote. It’s an inside joke that only I get. So… I’m laughing at you!

On the drive home Zoey says, “I don’t like ducks.”

?

Out of the blue.

Her brain functions on two different levels. Her non sequiturs are always unexpected and hilarious. I’m keeping track of them now, so stay tuned for more “Zoey-isms”.

So, in brief, nothing much happened today.