James was annoyed that we missed two days of posting, so I’m sorry to the internet for not gracing you with my insightful comments for, what must have been, the longest two days of your life.

In my defense, I threw two parties on Saturday, and drank too much at the second, so I needed Sunday to recover. James was also off for maybe the first Sunday ever so I wasn’t really thinking about posting.

Oh yeah, the parties. So much fun. With James being off on Sunday we thought we should try inviting friends over Saturday because he wouldn’t have to get up and go to work in the morning. Plus, it was a weekend so I could get my parents to keep Sydney for the night. Then to make myself feel less guilty about having an “Adult” party I decided to have a small play date/party for Sydney earlier in the day.

I don’t have many good pictures of the kids, so I promise to pester Amanda into sending me some of her nearly professional ones.

The kids played in the sprinkler and on the swing-set, and Amanda, Kate, and I got to sit around and have highly inappropriate conversations. It was lots of fun.

I just think these two are funny because when I was scrolling through all my pictures I had the first one up and the second looked like the exact same picture except for the running laughing Nick in it.  If you can imagine scrolling through and all of a sudden having Nick appear out of nowhere.  It made me laugh.

Our second party was pretty great too, although I did have a little too much to drink so I couldn’t even attempt to take pictures of that. That will be one that I bug Kate for pictures of.

Sunday I had a nice quiet breakfast with my husband, a nice lunch with my parents, and a nice boring evening at home.

James is leaving for a meeting in Hagerstown in a few hours, so Sydney and I are on our own tonight. Tomorrow we are driving to PA to visit my grandfather, and Wednesday is Sydney’s official first day of Kindergarten! The homeschool kind anyway. We’re both very, very excited. I expect my next post to be all about our first day of school, so have a nice Tuesday and Wednesday everyone!

So, it is my turn to post, and I don’t have anything to say really.
Today is six months until we board the ms Veendam, the Holland America cruise ship for seven days in the Caribbean. My grandmother wanted to get all four generations together trapped on a boat for a week to celebrate her 90th birthday. Our last family reunion was in the eighties in New Jersey, so it isn’t exactly easy to get us all together. I haven’t seen my oldest cousin Lars since his wedding in 1995, he has two kids and lives in Texas, I think. I saw my cousin Rob at his wedding in 2002, I think he also has a kid and they live in California maybe. My cousins Bob and Carrie are also married, living in Maryland and Virginia, and I honestly don’t know if they both have kids or not. Somehow I was placed as lead coordinator between all of the members of my generation, and responsible for planning out, in advance, an excursion during which we can all reacquaint ourselves. I would love to see everyone again, hence the motivation behind the cruise. It is going to be quite an event.
I’m just not sure how to approach everyone in advance. I could probably do a generic form e-mail to everyone in the next couple of weeks. That would go over better than akward personalized correspondence. “So, Lars, remember when I was eight and annoying and you were 12 and cool and obsessed with Star Wars? Want to ride an innertube down a cave in Belize with me? I’m cool now too.”

Alright, this post is just to clear up a few things.

First, anyone who knows me knows that I would never allow anyone to flush my pet down the toilet. If and when our hamster dies, she will get a proper burial in the back yard. To suggest anything less is just disgraceful.

Second, while I am a 26 year old happily married woman, I refuse to buy condoms. I don’t know what it is. It certainly has nothing to do with Catholic guilt… This fact did not (this time or the one time before this) stop my husband from sticking me by myself, in the self checkout line, with no less than five people behind me, to scan the aforementioned Jumbo pack of condoms myself. Of course you can’t try and hide something like that, a twelve pack maybe, but a 36 pack? No the whole world will see that, and wonder what kind of crazy plans you have for the evening. Any embarrassment/shame he felt standing there, with the old woman pharmacist, was completely trumped by my “I’m buying condoms, right in front of my four year old daughter, and there is not another person here to even attempt to shield this from her” shame.

If she had asked what they were, I was totally prepared to force James to make balloon animals out of them.

So Liz has been asking for a Hamster for a while, I don’t really know what my specific reluctance was, it was kind of a vague, do we need another mouth to feed?, does it stink? Am I going to end up officiating an impromptu funeral service at the toilet in three weeks, mourning how great she was and how she was called home early for being so special before we rushed out to buy a replacement?

Eventually I convinced myself that I could have fun with this too, the key is the accessories. We started with the basics:

Note the hamster wheel, cool vertical tube on the right side leading to tubular elevated loft. Nice, right? Nice start, to me. Here’s what I envisioned as we headed back to Wal-mart to buy the add-ons.

Doesn’t that rock! We have a tub going over the main residence with a playground leading to a spiral slide heading back down into the opposite side of the main residence, we’ve got dual fork tubes leading out of the starter tube heading up to a Ferris wheel, yeah that’s right, a mini hamster Ferris wheel, motorized for the lazy hamster who still likes that spinning sensation. Or you can go south to a dual entrance playground with a swing and further tunnel down for a summer home, with an alternate food supply and surplus bedding, because, as Liz said, she’d starve before she found her way back home. This hamster would be the envy of all hamsters by the time we got home.

Then came the challenge. Our cage is not compatible with the wal-mart system.

We got a ball.

I have become obsessed with Stumble Upon. Not that it’s really anything new; I’ve been obsessed for a while. I love stumbling upon new and cool stuff on the internet. Get it “stumbling upon” with “StumbleUpon”? HeeHee. Yeah, so what if that is exactly what they were trying to convey when naming it, I do not care, my joke is funny. Alright, so it’s not, I don’t care, move on.

Anyway, in my many hours of stumbling I’ve noticed something. It’s become a big thing to put recipes up on the internet, but not just plain old ingredients and instructions, no. Now we get entire works of photojournalism to accompany them. Step by step instructions with pictures after every step. “A dash of salt?!? What do you mean a dash of salt?!? How much is a dash?!? Oh, there’s a picture showing some lovely person’s hand holding what they consider to be a dash of salt. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me!!”

Now there’s no excuse for your cake to taste like cardboard, your steak to be the texture of concrete, or your pasta to be so salty you’d think you dropped it in the ocean!

A few months ago, (I think the end of March, beginning of April) Sydney and I had the crazy idea of attempting to grow our own tomatoes. I am usually horrible at keeping any kind of plant life alive. I have a black thumb; It’s well known, and documented. Well not this year. This year we went to Target. This year we bought these tiny little clay pots filled with dirt and seed packets from their dollar section. We planted them in the tiny little clay pots. (When I say tiny, I literally mean about two and a half to three inches high) For some reason they grew, and grew, and grew some more. So I had to get bigger pots, and then even bigger pots. Then my Mom said “You should probably get those in the ground” And something about getting “Root-bound,” to which I politely nodded my head like I had any clue what she was talking about. So I made myself a little garden in the back yard. The plants kept growing. Then we got little green tomatoes. Finally, recently, we got to pick our first tomato. (Also recently, I started wishing that I had bought into the whole “Tomato cage” craze, you’ll understand why in a minute) Of course, I’m the only one in this house that eats tomatoes, so I got to make myself a tomato sandwich.

So without further ado, my recipe for a Tomato sandwich:

First buy and plant some tomato seeds:

Water them:

Let them grow:

And grow some more:
(There are other plants in these pictures.)

Finally let them grow so unruly that that you realize why people decide to cage these beasts in:

Pick a Tomato:

Slice the tomato:

Toast Bread:

Apply Mayo:

Apply tomato slices:

Place second piece of bread on top:

Cut in half:

Enjoy:

Now don’t you feel like you were actually there?

So Wal-mart now keeps their condoms locked in a glass case. No big deal, I have no problem asking for the condoms behind the counter, I am over thirty, married, and have no shame. So I thought.

I didn’t mind asking the elderly woman at the pharmacy how I obtained the condoms from the glass case. I didn’t mind when she grabbed a key and a cane and wobbled me over to the case. I didn’t mind when she unlocked the case and stood there waiting to see what my selection was going to be. I didn’t get uncomfortable thinking that she was curious whether I was a “for her pleasure” kind of guy, or a “Magnum XL” kind of guy.

When I grabbed the larger box of our usual brand (Trojan Blue box, whatever that is), assuming that it was a 6 and 12 pack option, and realized that I had grabbed a 36 pack, triple my anticipated purchase, I had a moment of panic.

Do I put it back, conveying, “Whoa! Too much sex for me! Let’s not get carried away, here!” Or do I carry on like I knew what I was doing, bold and confident, no self-consciousness about it at all, communicating, “Yes, I come to Walmart every three days for something, but I am going to go through this many condoms before I come back on Thursday, you should just leave this case open for me!”

Apparently my catholic shame lives.

No not the pasta. I guess it’s considered pasta. I think it’s made from potatoes. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually eaten it. It’s really fun to say though. Like “Nyo-key”. It’s a cute name for a pasta. It’s also a cute name for a pet, a small pet. One that runs around in tubes. Like a hamster. A hamster named Gnocchi! Doesn’t it just make you all happy and squishy inside? Or as Sydney would say “It makes my heart happy”. Well here you go: A big old heaping helping of Squishy heart:

My husband is amazing. This totally makes us even on the scooter.

Liz

In the same breath as you said, “I promise to not censor him…” you said, “but I’m not going to let him…” I’m just saying.

I have a healthy degree of paranoia when it comes to safety and security, but sometimes I just don’t think that anyone is going to find anything all that interesting about me so much so that they are going to go to great lengths deducing where they can find me to see how I look in the trunk of their car.

My paranoia mostly confines itself to obscurities like what the hell Tilcon is doing across from the air base and what makes the water green and luminescent. I wonder what happened to the previous residents of our house and if their whereabouts are related to the large pile of dirt in my neighbors yard and the patch of weeds that grows really well in my yard. Utility companys charging random bogus fees just to see if anyone is going to question them about a Ancillary Service Rate Charge when it is such a small percentage of the bill. The “public landfill” that only has empty tucks drive in and full trucks drive away. That sort of thing.

Besides, who are we going to even tell about this site? Parents, siblings, a handfull of friends and some random moms? Maybe a few of my work girlfriends. No one that doesn’t already know which manager of which restaurant in which state. Even our regular readers from previous sites won’t tune in very often because they know our track record for posting frequently, and it’s not good. So even our regulars aren’t going to be following that closely, I’m sure we’ll notice the IP address of an unknown stalker trying to ascertain our whereabouts, because… oh yeah, we comb the records of who looks at our site to see how often people read it and figure out who they are. Some posts are wriotten for a specific audience and we don’t want that to not be the most recent post until they’ve been on to read it.

That’s not paranoid.

Yup, James wrote a whole paragraph about being more open and honest on this site.   He gave out the name of his place of work.  I made him change it.  He went ahead and changed the name of the state we live in, too.  I’m not that careful, but whatever.  I promise to not censor him on this site, but I’m not going to let him do anything potentially dangerous.

It is currently 5:21 AM.  I’ve been awake since 4:44 AM.  Why, you ask?  I don’t know why!  Don’t you think if I knew why I’d be attempting to fix that problem and not sitting here writing, and having a cup of coffee?  The coffee might be a bad idea, but after 30 minutes I gave up and resigned myself to the fact that I was up for the day.  And I bought creamer yesterday, so I’ve been craving coffe since 2 o’clock yesterday.

I uploaded the video of the Bean reading her book.  I forget how to embed it though, so it’ll take a little research.

Reading

If that worked I’ll be shocked. Okay it didn’t. I promise to get a video up soon. Okay, you can download it if you really feel like it, but I’ll warn you that it’s ginormous. I’ll get it embedded soon.

I was talking to my wife last night about our old websites. I haven’t visited hers in… a while. Mine I actually visit once in a while, I’m not sure why. I keep feeling like someone as interesting as me should really be sharing my fascinating life with the world, but I never seem to have anything quite interesting enough to warrant being the breakfast blog after such an extended hibernation. A new site means lower expectations. I can strive for the every other day post, and they won’t be very interesting at first, but you have nothing to compare them to, so they automatically become the most interesting thing you’ve ever read by me on this particular site.

Last time, I found that I only got comments when I discussed television, even though my better stories were about life and family. This caused me to write for my audience and I began writing only about television. I’m not promising not to write about television, but I am going to break out of the TV only rut I was in and write about the rest of my life as well. It wouldn’t hurt if you commented on the real stuff too.

I am also going to commit to being less vague in this incarnation of the Journal. I’ve always tried leaving out specifics as to where I work (a restaurant), where I live (mid-atlantic), or any other identifying features (weird mole on the back of my head). I’m throwing that out the window now, and sharing my actual information and life with the family, friends and misunderstood old men of the internet community.

In concluding post #1 in my column, I do like the alternating post motiovation of this site because it will inspire us to post more often. My goal for the first month is for one of us to post every day minimum. Which shouldn’t be hard since this month we are having a party, starting kindergarten, getting a new vehicle, taking at least one mini-vacation and visiting an amusement park. So, don’t touch that dial!

Crap. sorry, I promised less TV references.

James