terror in a onesie

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

We ended our Fourth of July vacation as we began it: driving in the car. We were half-way between Little Rock and Memphis, an area slightly less populated than the middle of Wyoming. As we sailed past the only rest stop in miles and miles, Liza sang out, “I’m stinky!”

Misty confirmed that, yes, her diaper needed changing. “Look at my poop hands!” Liza said, displaying her mighty poop hands while I looked for the next exit. About three years later I found one and pulled off the interstate. The only place to change her was on a gravel road leading to a field.

We plopped her on the side of the road and performed our best Bo-and-Luke-Duke fast-change routine. We were partway through when I looked up at a tractor that was patiently waiting to drive into the field. We finished up and got in the car. “That’s a John Deere tractor!” Eli said as we drove away.

That wasn’t the most surreal vacation moment. The most surreal moment came during lunch on Saturday. We were following the American tradition of having sushi for the Fourth of July. Liza was tearing through a cucumber roll while Eli picked daintily at his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The restaurant’s TVs were showing ESPN, which was carrying the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest.

Have you ever watched this thing? It’s like a train wreck involving pallets of Wonder Bread and the wienermobile. At one point I stared at contestant Joey Chesnut, whose mouth was encrusted with bits of hot dog bun as if starring in a porn movie sponsored by the Food Network, and wasn’t sure I could finish my meal.

So in conclusion: USA! USA! USA!

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Some blogs would put pictures of fireworks here, or possibly embed a Lee Greenwood song.

We give you the best Keyboard Cat ever.

We’re out for the weekend to do family-type stuff. Enjoy!

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

First it turned out that the LOLrus died in 2005.

Now I learn that Fatso, the keyboard cat, died in 2000.

Since these things come in threes, it’s clear that we’ll soon learn that Rick Astley actually died in 1995.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Last night we watched “Virtuality”, Ron Moore’s TV pilot that became a mini-movie instead. It’s about a crew of astronauts who are on a starship headed to Epsilon Eridani and who are also part of a reality TV series. Thanks to the show, I have a request: Dear science fiction and fantasy TV/movie writers, please stop using rape as motivation.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Saturday was my first opportunity to tape skits for DCTV, so of course there were vampires.

Fine, fine, we had vampire hunters as well. That’s Buffy, Alucard, Edward Cullen, Spike, and Mina Harker in that photo. Why were they all together? Find out in September!

(And thanks to Patrick for the cast photo.)

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been working diligently on the lighthouse cross stitch. And everything was going great until today when I sat down to begin lighthouse #3. I completely miscounted and stitched for an hour only to have to remove all but about 20 stitches and start over. I was so disgusted that I put my tools away for the afternoon. I did take a photo though before I started work this morning.

In other news, on Friday night we had a sleepover for Ashley’s birthday party. Ashley, Jessica, Sheila and Wendy came over. We painted our toenails and watched “Mama Mia!” (Most of which I missed except for the part about Colin Firth playing a gay man. I just about cried.) We ate and talked and in the end decided to go to bed at 1:30 because I knew that Eli and Liza would wake everyone up at six o’clock. It turns out sleepovers in my 30s are exactly like sleepovers in my teens. With one giant exception: I had no idea in my teens I’d spend so much time in my 30s talking about reproductive issues, poop and breastfeeding.

Lastly, New Kid Pictures!
Here’s Liza doing her new thing of dressing herself from the dressup drawer. And of course, what is the one thing you must do once you have on your backwards sideways swim top and wearing one leg warmer on your arm? DANCE!

Geof came over last week and took some photos of the kids as well. We waited until the sun was heading down and then I attempted to art direct but the kids were having none of it. The photos are still awesome anyway.

Click the photo to see more of Geof’s photos.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I tell you what: go watch the video for Billie Jean. When you’re done, listen to the entire Thriller album.

Twenty-seven years later, and still one hell of an album.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

We have reached a magical point in rearing Eli and Liza: occasionally they go off and play together for up to an hour. It’s like how Furbys would sometimes spontaneously talk to each other, except Eli and Liza have no off switch. The two of them will come wandering through the room, each pushing a small shopping cart or baby stroller filled with random junk, or they’ll climb up on Eli’s bed and roll around and hide under pillows and fall down yelling, “TIMBAAAAAH!”

They don’t do this consistently, of course. There’s always the problem of toys and who has what. Eli and Liza have to go through their own version of the Great Compromise in divvying up toys, which I guess means Eli is Virginia in this metaphor and Liza is Delaware, so let’s move on, shall we? Eli sees Liza with a toy and decides that he has to have that toy right now Right Now RIGHT NOW! If Liza won’t let him have it, he sniffles, shoulders slumping, as he says, “She’s never going to let me have it! I’ll never see it again!”

Sometimes Eli realizes Liza wants certain toys that he’s done playing with, so he takes them, throws them in his room, and closes the door. If he could set them on fire and scatter the ashes just to deny Liza the pleasure of playing with them, he’d do it.

Sometimes Eli can con Liza. He finds another toy and applies his best used-car salesman tactics. “Liza, do you want this robot? If you want this robot you have to give me the balloon. Give me the balloon and you can have the robot!”

His negotiation tactics still need work. One time last week he told Liza, “Can I have that toy? If you don’t give it to me, I’m leaving!” Liza looked up at Eli and said, “Nope.” Eli shuffled off slowly, looking back the whole time, so Liza gave him a “how can I miss you if you won’t ever leave?” look.

They even fight over bugs. We’ve had a minor infestation of small black beetles. Liza has paroxysms of joy when she sees one. “Hiiii, bug! Hiiii! Look! He’s running! He wants to play wif me!” She’ll pick the poor beetle up, traumatizing it for the rest of its very short life. Eli naturally demands his turn. “When do I get to play with the beetle?”

I can only imagine what’ll happen when they discover cockroaches.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Pirate pickup lines.

Which of Jon and Kate’s octuplets you’d like to be.

That one YouTube video that is unbelievably cute.

Tinted avatars as political activism.

Movie titles that are unintentionally creepy when muttered by Christopher Walken.

Robot sexual positions.

The YouTube video involving Keyboard Cat playing off that one unbelievably cute YouTube video.

Things that, when eaten, pass through the digestive system unchanged.

How Twitter is dying, nuh-uh is not, is too.

Any other suggestions?

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

This is a Big Daddy, from the game Bioshock.

He protects the Little Sisters — mutated girls who have a certain resource you need in the game. You can see one to the right of him.

And here’s what it looks like when I try to fight him! Caution: this video contains scenes of violence, gore, and piss-poor gameplay.

I don’t know who bonzot, creator of the video, is, but my heart goes out to him. I, too, suck at dispatching Big Daddies.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

What makes this more interesting to me than other stop-motion animation music videos I’ve seen recently is the video’s use of makeup to produce some very disturbing effects.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted about any scary kids’ toys. I don’t know if that’s because Eli and Liza’s toys have gotten less scary or because I’ve grown desensitized to them. If it’s the latter, then I’ve finally found a toy to shock me out of my complacency.

Meet Ribby the frog.

Ribby doesn’t look too bad. He’s a cute purple color, with a sweet smile and –

Aaah! Make it stop!

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

The White House has unveiled their proposed revamp of financial regulations. One of the changes would require banks and other companies that offer loans to keep 5% of that loan on their books. See, one of the causes of the current financial mess was banks offering loans to anyone, knowing they could turn those mortgages into asset-backed securities and sell them off. This securitization (which I’ve previously covered) let banks and mortgage lenders take the commission and pass the risk onto others. The theory is that people will be more cautious if they can’t dump an entire loan. If it’s their money, they’ll be more careful.

Tom Deutsch, who’s one of the directors at the American Securitization Forum, is having none of it.

Deutsch says retaining more risk would require lenders to have more cash on hand to cover losses on loans. That could make it harder for banks to lend money, he says. And Deutsch doesn’t think the reform is necessary. He says mortgage lenders’ inherent interest in their own reputations already gives them enough skin in the game.

“Hundreds of mortgage originators have gone out of business because they sold bad products to investors who wouldn’t buy their product again,” Deutsch says.

This is an interesting view of the world, one in which the securitization industry’s role in the recession is the equivalent of your aged incontinent dog accidentally widdling on your new carpet. He can’t help it, and he does feel bad about it! Besides, we all know people act in their best interests all the time!

Waiting for mortgage lenders to go bankrupt if they make bad loans is like waiting for drunk drivers to crash and die — it may eventually happen, but in the meantime they’re liable to do a lot of damage. Securitization let mortgage lenders shovel bad loans out the back door as fast as they were coming in the front, delaying their day of reckoning until it took the whole economy down. It rewarded mortgage lenders not for making smart loans, but for making lots of loans that they could turn around and sell quickly.

It’s nice that Tom Deutch doesn’t see a problem with how things went. But if he’s not willing to cut back on the booze, he shouldn’t be surprised when others are far more skeptical of his and his colleagues’ driving.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve had the notebook crafting bug:

Click to see some of the other notebooks I’ve made over the past week or so.

So, question: Should I put up an Etsy store and start selling my creations?

I’m still hard at work on the lighthouses. I’ll take a photo after tonight’s work and post.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Sunday night, for the first time in far too long, I ran a game of Paranoia.

Paranoia, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, is an RPG originally published in the 1980s. It was an unholy union of Brave New World, 1984, and the Three Stooges. Players took on the role of Troubleshooters, hapless people in a futuristic underground complex run by the Computer, who is helpful yet insane, and who is entirely obsessed with rooting out traitors. As you might imagine, it finds a whole lot of traitors, especially since the players are given every reason to mistrust each other.

How’d it go? Towards the end of the night, a player managed to catch his one-ton power armor on fire. The fire broke through to the power unit, at which point the player managed to hit the explosive bolts, turning one giant exploding exoskeleton into a smaller exploding exoskeleton and many deadly flaming pieces of metal. Another player fired an experimental tangle gun to try to stop the metal, only to discover that the gun didn’t so much shoot sticky strands away from the user as drape those strands about the user. A third had little choice but to activate his experimental rocket boots, which consisted of two boots with twelve rockets each and a belt with twenty-four adjustable sliders, one for each of the rockets, making the whole get-up incredibly fiddly and near-impossible to use.

I don’t run Paranoia games because it gives me the chance to kill players. I run them because it gives me the chance to put tools in the players’ hands and let them kill themselves.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

My mom saved a couple of boxes of my children’s books for me to give my kids. They’ve sat in the bottom of Eli’s closet since before there was an Eli. He’s looked through the books off and on a couple of times and has come up with a few gems that he likes to read. Curiously, the ones he’s picked out are some of the ones that were my favorites. In fact, I think he’s come up with three out of about my top five favorites.

Gus was a friendly ghost is one of them. It’s a kitschy 60s book with decent line drawings. Gus has a dashed outline that I’ve always itched to cut out. (I’ll have to ask Eli if he feels the same way.) My mom always groaned when I pulled Gus off the shelf. It’s amazingly long for a picture book. It takes 15-20 minutes to read and that’s why my mom hated it. It’s why I hate to see it come off the shelf as well. Often, if it’s late and we’ve had a long day I veto it because of its length.

Saturday night though, we read it and it was fabulous. When we opened it, Eli had to examine my five-year-old signature in the front of the book. Eli laughed at all the things in the story I thought was funny when I was a kid: “…on account of mice.” I cracked up the both of us reading it. We had a long discussion of what Tapioca is and why Mouse liked it so well. And when Gus gets mad at Mouse both of us were in the dumps as well.

The 20 minutes I spent reading that book was one of those times I live for as a parent. So thanks go to my mom for making me save those books all these years.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

You know how the other day I mentioned that I was working on a cross-stitch piece someone hired me to do? Well, that generated a fair number of questions I thought I’d answer in a post.

How did the person find me?
A long time ago, like around the time Eli was born, I was talking with the wonderful women at my local cross-stitch store and the topic came around to people looking for people to stitch for them. I mentioned that I’d be interested in that kind of work. I left my name and number and about a month ago I got my very first inquiry.

How did I decide what to charge?
Everybody told me to charge hourly. I thought about it quite a lot. Hourly is certainly the way to go in most endeavors like this. I looked at some of the work I’d done previously and did some calculations. I came to the conclusion that no one in their right mind would pay me an hourly rate to cross-stitch, there’s just too much time involved.

I decided to do a per job charge, depending on the complexity of the work and what materials were or were not provided. I love stitching and as long as the pattern is something that I would most likely do without getting paid, the money is just fodder for my ever increasing stash.

It just so happened that the dollar amount that I came up with in my head exactly matched the dollar amount that my client came up with as well. I considered that an excellent sign and took it as an indication that I should take the job.

Am I going to be able to get it done in time?
We set a date of the end of September. My client wants to give it as a gift so I am working very hard to make that September date. I’m actually doing better time-wise on this project than I do on my own stuff. I know I need to spend a certain number of hours per day working and I haven’t been skipping very often. There are five lighthouses and a compass rose in the pattern and I have one lighthouse done and have more than half of the compass done as well. If I work as I’ve been working the past few days, I’ll be able to finish the compass today.

Does having a set deadline take the joy out of the work?
I haven’t found that to be true yet. Ask me again at the end of August.

I think I’ve covered all the questions people have asked. If you have others, post them below and I’ll answer them.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Look what I got!

That’s right, thanks to Misty’s gift, I’ve leapt into the future of 2005. Finally I can play Bioshock on my TV, like God intended.

What’s that, Xbox 360? What do you mean, an interloper?

Oh, him? First-generation Xbox? He’s harmless. I mean, it’s not like he’s really any threat to someone like you, with your –

Kill it? No! That’s crazy talk! That Xbox has served us faithfully. I’m going to send him to a farm in upstate New York, where he can frolic in the fields and –

I won’t do it! I won’t!

Oh, well. It had to be done.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

The list is long but boils down to this: trying to acclimate to Eli’s last summer before school starts.

In an effort to keep things light this summer, I didn’t schedule any camps or lessons of any kind for the kids. Ironic, since this is the first summer Eli’s been old enough to be eligible for most activities that run in the summer. Instead I opted for just hanging out with our friends, especially the ones with pools, and getting Eli extra time with Josh before they go to separate schools in the fall.

We’ve gone and developed quite the schedule anyway. Mondays we play at church. Tuesdays are my morning off. A girl from church is coming over to keep the kids so I can run errands or grocery shop alone, which is a mother’s nirvana. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays haven’t quite settled out yet but will be some order or combination of going to the Botanical Gardens, spending time with Josh and his family or having Hallie over so the two of us can experiment in the kitchen.

This summer is already more bittersweet than I expected it to be. Eli is so ready for school, I’ve been saying it for a year now. And yet. And yet. It seems a giant corner to turn. A street he will go down mostly without me. I thought I would have NO problem with that. I’m looking at the couple of months until school starts and I’m wondering what else we can pack in before he goes.

The big news around here is another dishwasher leak. The first one, Stephen and his dad repaired in a day and cost less than $20. This time, the part wasn’t in stock so today marks a week of me washing dishes. It’s still not going to cost very much to repair the dishwasher and Stephen can do it. The bad news of the story is the slow leak ruined the kitchen floor. I had the folks who installed the hardwoods send someone to look at it and he gave us an $800 estimate. We’re thinking about replacing the hardwood with tile since this is the third time in seven years we’ve had water damage somewhere in the kitchen.

In crafting news, I’ve been working on a cross-stitch for hire job. It’s a lovely set of lighthouses that I need to get done before October.

And making notebooks for folks. I’ve made and given away a few and made a few more. I especially like making them now that I have an actual paper guillotine instead the 1-sheet cutter I used when I first started the process.

(Yes, I know Narwhal is misspelled. They’ve sent me a new card to replace that one.)

So all in all, shaping up to be a really busy summer. I’ll make sure to take my camera to the gardens this week so I can post some new photos.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said ‘time to delivr on healthcare’ When you are a ‘hammer’ u think evrything is NAIL I’m no NAIL
–Senator Chuck Grassley’s Twitter feed

You know, a lot of political speech would have been much better on Twitter.

Heres truth: NO FEAR! Now everybody back to work. (@fdr)

Hey peeps, lurkers support me and Vietnam in email. (@trickydick)

@meinfuehrer We’ll fight on beaches, fight on landing grounds, fight on fields & streets, fight on hills. Never surrender! (@frmr1stlrdadmiralty)

Ask what cntry can do 4 you? FAIL. Ask what you can do 4 cntry. (@hatlessjfk)

@baldandblotchy U liek peace? U like librlzation? Open this gate! Tear down wall! (@gipper)

4 score + 7 yrs ago = America. Now we fight so gov’t of ppl & by ppl & for ppl won’t perish. (@honestabe)

I actually like that Grassley’s tweeting, even if he does sound like he belongs on Xbox Live. I’m interested in there being more information from our elected officials, especially less-filtered information. Grassley’s messages are directly from him, typed on his Blackberry when the mood strikes him. Good for him.

I only hope he won’t profess an undying love for Edward Cullen.