Do the Yak

This is where our next-door neighbor was fatally injured just before Christmas. His death was initially mysterious but ultimately just sad, as was much of his life. The final tragedy was his fall (probably) from the slippery roof of his house where he had lived his whole life. Early that evening, we saw an ambulance and police cars outside, but this wasn't a major concern because we'd seen emergency vehicles over there several times before. This is because Bill called them himself when the voices got too frightening. He took medication for his condition, but sometimes it stopped working, or maybe he stopped taking it. In the past, he went to a hospital for a couple of weeks to stabilize and then returned home. That night, after the ambulance had taken him away, a policeman came over to ask if we knew of anyone who had a key to his house, which was "like a fortress," he said. That's because Bill was afraid people were trying to kill him. He had an assortment ...

A phrase from a Beck song... yeah, it's been a while. In the interest of updating this blog a bit more frequently, I'm trying to be less of a perfectionist (MUST! TAKE! PERFECT! PHOTO!) and just throw over whatever I've got, because perfection is for the gods, as I keep telling everyone. So. One of the highlights of this fall was getting new tires for my car. I researched various brands and features and finally settled on buying from National Tire Wholesale because they had the nicest floor display:   See, that wasn't so hard, was it Yak? Lather, rinse and repeat...

And the proof is on Bye Bye Pie . Yes, that's MY ass looming out of your screen. Am I famous yet? They SAY the Titanic hit an iceberg, but inquiring minds know better. Last Saturday we drove to Connecticut and back to see an exhibit of Titanic artifacts. I've seen some version once or twice before, but this was a chance for the kids to absorb some of my sick fascination with this event. The artifacts were fairly lame, though the pictures and text on the walls were quite good. Turns out there are six sets of goodies touring the world at any one time, so RMS Titanic Ltd. is raking it in. This is not the Titanic story. The real downside, however, was that the exhibit was at Foxwoods, which I have never had an interest in visiting, and this just confirms it. The first thing you notice when you walk is is the aroma of stale cigarette smoke, which kind of goes nicely with the hideous turquoise carpeting and other decor. There are several casinos, including one -- ONE! smoke-...

Funny how running out of toilet paper brings out the poet in some people. * * * Things I noticed about the kids this morning: 1. Sarah was sleeping with just the top sheet over her (never a comforter, even in winter), curled up on her front with her butt in the air and knees almost to her chin. This position was extremely cute when she was a baby in a one-piece sleeper and it still is. I hated to wake her, especially since she hates waking up. Starting at about three months, she's fallen asleep quickly and slept soundly for at least 10 hours at night -- lucky us.Which reminds me of something that happened around the time she had just started to sit up on her own. One night I heard her on the baby monitor uncharacteristically fussing after we'd put her in her crib -- not outright crying, but still. Finally she was quiet. An hour or two later I went in to check on her and found her sound asleep sitting up in her crib, leaning over with her forehead resting on the crib bars...

My good friend from J-school, John Godges, just published a book called "Oh Beautiful" that he wrote about his family's experiences as immigrants and as Catholics growing up in America. I read it in manuscript (the first book I ever read entirely in PDF form, actually) and it was really good. I mean, REALLY good. I was afraid when I agreed to read it that I was going to have to grope for something nice to say about it so as not to hurt his feelings if it sucked, but this was not a problem. John is an excellent interviewer, writer, and thinker of deep thoughts about all sorts of interesting stuff. Go to his website and you can learn more about the book and even read an excerpt -- and of course buy it if you're so inclined, which would be nice for John even though I won't see one penny of the avalanche of proceeds that the blog post will generate. Being raised by strict atheists, I didn't know much about Catholicism before I read the book. Actually that...

Over the weekend the following things happened: I thoroughly cleaned the inside of my car, (including the disgusting floor mat, which I put in the "bulky items" cycle of the wash with a heap of Tide and Oxy-Clean); I swept the garage floor; and Ben made the inside of the fridge sparkle. No more nasty science experiments, and you can actually look at the shelves and bottom of the fruit and veggie drawers without having a sudden urge to take a long hot shower. These are things that have been on the to-do list for a long time, yet I didn't feel any particular sense of satisfaction while doing them. Mostly it was very boring. BUT! Now my heart soars like a hawk when I open the fridge or look at my impossibly clean floor mats in the car, which now also smells better. It really makes a difference after six years of sippy-cup spills, ground-in Cheez-Its, pulverized crayon, sand, salt and snot. I jut feel sorry fort the washing machine, which just gave up several years of its lif...

I was shocked to realize I hadn't posted during the entire month of August. What a twat, right? The random title of this post refers to the impending Hurricane Earl, which is supposed to brush Mass. tonight. A bit of wind and rain is all we're expecting in the Leafy Suburbs, however. Not like the last one that made landfall, Bob, on Aug. 19, 1991 (my 30th birthday, actually). It was a Monday; I had been visiting my mother in England and flew back Sunday afternoon with no inkling of the impending excitement. Monday morning I awoke to no wind but a torrential downpour and went to work at the paper to covering the storm and its effects, which mainly involved a lot of tree damage and downed power lines. The wind soon picked up quite a bit. The day's highlights included watching big long waves roll backwards out from land into Long Island Sound, and then trying to interview some hardy soul who had stayed in his oceanfront cottage. I knocked on the door and asked if he would ta...

A blog post by Peter Bregman linked to two really interesting other pieces: an interactive graphic showing how different portions of the population spend their time each day , and a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande asking some pretty profound questions about what we -- and health care providers -- ought to do when death is clearly approaching . I think about this latter topic probably more than I should, but maybe that's understandable since my father and Ben's parents are all in their 80s and having had the experience of my mother's death in a hospice in 2002. When I read these things about all this denial by doctors pussy-footing around and patients who can't accept the inevitability of death and prepare appropriately, I think, jeez, I could do better than that, I would face the truth and concentrate on quality of life, yadda yadda. But maybe I'm kidding myself. Especially with young children, I might fight to the end for a few more minutes with them. The thin...

A while back, I posted a link to this Snuggie parody  that was so funny I snorted at work. Imagine my delight when I found this sequel . But I'm a traditionalist. I'll stick to my plain red Snuggie, thank you very much. (UPDATE, June 2022 — I cleaned out a closet full of literally moth-eaten blankets and the Snuggie had to go. I was today years old when I figured out that I can just turn the damn heat up in winter.)

The other day I was rushing off to work and I grabbed a pile of bills on the counter that needed paying. But Ben stopped me and said there were important things he needed to explain about some of them. In other words, they weren't all your basic log-on-to-BillPay-and be-done-with-it kinds of things. There were phone calls that had to be made to enlighten various entities about the torturous history of our health insurance, like when this policy in my name changed to that policy in Ben's name on such-and-such a date, and so the doctor's office resubmitted a claim to the wrong insurance company and SNZZZZzzzzzzz... SO. BORING. Which reminded me of these two great posts on Steam Me Up, Kid, where she described trying vainly to take in the workings of her furnace and how to jump-start a car. So fucking hilarious. I sent them to Ben and now he sort of realizes when my eyes get all glassy during one of these conversations. I don't even care that it reinforces negative stere...

No, not my dad, someone else's . We're now at yet another level of entertainment technology -- they're making a sitcom out of the Twitter feed. but it's OK because it has William Shatner, and this could be the role he's been waiting for. We'll see how it fares with the profanity cleaned up -- there's not a lot left in many cases, if you look at the Twitter site. Families... can't live with 'em, can't shoot em. In that vein, check out Awkward Family Pet Photos , an offshoot of Awkward Family Photos . The tender image of " Parrot and Rifle " is the best, I think.

...after reading these personal ads . * * * Awesome weekend: the town garlic mustard pull on a beautiful Saturday morning... then an afternoon of fun with friends grilling, sipping beer and finding out that Ben is ridiculously good at Chuck-O ... then a date night seeing " The Secret in Their Eyes ," which was fabulous and which reminded me why I used to love to go to movies (still love to, just never do). The only slight flaw in a perfect evening was my cell phone buzzing repeatedly in my pocket -- tearful calls from Sarah missing us (combination of a new sitter and us having no lives and thus not having had any sitter for ages). On the other hand, we didn't go completely broke (the main reason we never see movies) because we skipped dinner due to the afternoon BBQ, and the sitter was a teenager who charged only $10 an hour. Yeah, only. Goddamn inflation. So then yesterday it was even more beautiful. We took the kids to Hebrew school and Ben asked around to see i...

Better late than never, which is the story of my life... Anyway, can anyone tell me the REAL reason why health care reform turned some (not all) opponents into hate-filled liars? I really want to know. Because that opposition sure wasn't based on anything factual or even plausible. I'm talking about the pieces in today's New York Times by Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert . And here's more good MMQ'ing from ElectoralVote.com: lessons from the whole health-insurance reform process . Now if Obama would just LISTEN to us because WE KNOW BEST, dammit. On an unrelated note, here are some swell new emoticons from Hyperbole and a Half : (::::)   "I feel like I am the underside of a pregnant dog." :O&   "I LOVE PRETZELS!!!! NOM! NOM! NOM!" :*(    "You make me cry sparkly tears." {:|     "I am a Frenchman." Q:|   "I'm Davy fucking Crockett." On Sunday we are going to Florida for a week. This is especially n...

The rising damp is a common affliction of houses in England, but now we get to experience it ourselves in our very own home. It's been raining quite a lot lately, and by "quite a lot" I mean "pouring steadily and without interruption since Friday night and it's now midday Monday and still coming down like a bastard." So we knew we'd get water in the basement, because whenever it rains a lot, it sort of leaks through the foundation on the uphill side of the house and trickles across the floor in one or two small rivulets to the sump on the downhill side. Not surprisingly, it trickled in more of a torrent over the weekend, but Ben has a Shop-vac so he kept at it, sucking up several hundred gallons. Then he went to check it out this morning, Day 3 of the Deluge, and found that the manageable rivulets had been replaced by several inches of water with bits of wood floating around and water going places it had certainly never gone before, including perilously ...

And to think I once planned to pursue the broadcast news track while getting my master's in journalism. Good thing I stuck with newspapers. They'll always be a vital and treasured part of our society, right? Yeah, so how's that advanced degree workin' out for ya? * * * Seen and heard (or heard of) on the way to work: 1. A man rubbing his ass against a card reader in a subway station. Because, you know, it was too much trouble to take his T pass out of his back pocket. He just had to get... close enough. 2. The most laughably stupid thing ever done while behind the wheel. On a ride to the subway after dropping off my car for repairs, we were slowed by an accident (clear weather). I remarked that the offending driver was probably texting and talked with the shuttle driver about stupid things we've seen people do while driving. Me: I once saw a woman zooming through the intersection in Brighton center while she was applying mascara in the rear-view mi...

The latest LasVegas hotel monstrosity? A new development for tourists in Bahrain? Nope -- it's the just-launched cruise ship Oasis, the biggest ever built . It has 16 decks, carries 6,300 passengers, cost $1.4 billion, and has seven "distinctly themed neighborhoods, each with its own unique shops, restaurants and bars to keep guest entertained during the evenings and the days where there is no port of call." For kids, there's a carousel on deck, buffets featuring animals carved from fruit, science labs, crafts centers and play theater. You can also get certified for scuba diving, take an ice-skating lesson, ride a zip line, play basketball, spar in a boxing ring, have a massage or see a version of the Broadway show "Hairspray" (see more photos here ). Snatches of conversations overheard on the maiden voyage: "Wow, I can hardly feel the deck moving! This is some smooth sailing." "Well, I can feel it moving... wait -- w...

A beautiful world of salsa... ...and manliness. It's a beautiful world out there somewhere.

They use this glowing red fingertip thingy to monitor blood oxygenation levels these days. Here is a closeup (ignore the puppy with dangerously dilated pupils): Here is the broader view (blurred right hand is waving at the fans): This was during our recent 11:30 pm. visit to our friendly emergency room. Becky went to bed earlier that evening with the beginnings of a cold and progressed at lightning speed to croup so bad she was having trouble breathing and could barely talk. There were some good points, however: When your kid can't breathe, they see her before any of the other malingering lame-o's in the waiting room AND they don't even ask you for your insurance info! At least not right away. The hospital we went to has a whole section just for pediatric patients, with smaller beds and cute itty-bitty pediatric catheterization kits (OK, so I'm snoopy like that). Also, some plastic funnels with a wide mesh-covered opening at the bottom. For, you know, catching t...

Today we bring you... Photoshopped Richard Scarry book covers . Last night we watched Olympic curling even though none of us has the faintest clue as to the rules. So we just imitated their language and threw in some random cricket terms, like, "Wow, the hog on that set of overs really curled his wicket in the third end!" Mostly I just love watching the sweepers look like old-time janitors on lots of Dexedrine. Of course today I had to learn at least a little bit about what I was watching, so I went to the Source of All Knowledge, Wikipedia. I'd thought that the number of similarly baffled people accessing the curling page had to be enough to crash their servers, but it popped right up for me. Huh.

...of Sockington , the cat who has 1.5 million followers on his Twitter feed . Milo would like you to know that he's a lot more interesting than Sockington. Just this morning, in honor of the Winter Olympics, he had a particularly lengthy game of drop hockey. This is where he jumps into the bathtub right after someone has showered, sits near the tap, and catches the drops as they fall from the faucet every few seconds. He swipes at them sort of like you would hit a hockey puck, then licks his paw. Did I ever tell you the story of how we picked him for adoption from the crowd of potential pets at the cat shelter? We looked at many cats in their cages and read their cards, immediately eliminating any that said the cat was not good with kids (at the time, Sarah and Becky were two and a half and 12 months old). I liked the look of this cat as soon as I saw him, with his tabby markings nicely interspersed with white. But we had to see how he would behave, so we took him for a test dri...

Olympics -- we love 'em. The girls clamor for ice dancing (usually on too late) while Ben sucks in air through his teeth as he watches YouTube clips of horrifying ski-jumping crashes. * * * Sarah has a new talent that is driving rusted railroad spikes through my skull: she has learned to make a noise exactly like when you blow on a comb wrapped with tissue paper. OK so maybe (no, definitely) I'm oversensitive to noises, but this one takes the cake -- every time she starts, I yell within milliseconds. I thought it couldn't get worse... until she brought home a long skinny balloon and started trying to make a balloon animal out of it. This involves a lot of twisting and sque-e-e-eaking and OH MY GOD IT'S GOING TO POP AND MAKE MY EYEBALLS EXPLODE JUST BEFORE I HIT THE CEILING. A dark quiet room is what I need at all times... * * * Becky is going to be eight in two days. She is getting too big and too independent to curl up on my lap. This saddens me. She and her f...

Oh my God, the agony of suppressing shrieks of laughter... For anyone who's ever had a cat with Issues, this one's for you: I live in a world of fur – Not the sexy 70’s porn kind either ...and then somehow I found this picture of The World's Most Disgusting Tattoo That Doesn't Even Involve Human Private Parts (but the cat, well...). That is all for today.

Apparently not everyone loves "The Sound of Music," including Christopher Plummer and the author of Sweet Juniper , who gets a little more peeved every time his wife makes him watch the movie: "I liked this family better before Sandy Duncan came along." "That's Julie Andrews." "Who?" "Why am I supposed to feel bad for these kids living in their giant mansion in the mountains?" "Because their totalitarian father didn't allow them music after their mother died." "I thought Sandy Duncan was their mother?" "No, she's the nun who takes care of them." "Those kids better have leprosy." "I know another girl who's sixteen, Liesl: her name is Anne and she lives in an Amsterdam attic and your creepy boyfriend is going to keep her from seeing seventeen." "Why are they frolicking so?" "Sister Maria is teaching them to sing." " 'La, a not...

Instead, I'm amusing myself with some new blogs: Yo Mama's Blog and Steam Me Up, Kid . Also today's post about the Big Three Boston-area furniture companies on Surviving Grady (Jordan's Furniture, Bernie and Phyl's, and bob's Furniture). They asked which was most annoying, and I commented thus: Isn't Bob the one whose commercials say, in most severe Boston accent, "You get the DRESSAH, the MIRRAH..." just so cheesy but without the unintentional camp of the others. I'll excuse Barry and Elliot because they have something of a brain between them, and I have a soft spot for Bernie and Phyl because I can go around saying "Quahliddy, com-fit and price ... that's NICE!" Becky is also amusing me. As I woke her from a sound sleep this morning at 6:45 (and don't get me started on predawn arisings), I tried to get her brain in gear by asking what she wants for her birthday (she turns eight in February -- jeez). After just a brief mo...

Lots of Monday-morning quarterbacking on the Scott Brown victory and what it means. Drew Westen in the Huffington Post nailed it down the best, I think: if we view Brown's victory as a referendum on Obama's performance on the economy and the health care mess, it's saying that Obama has disappointed voters by: Not creating enough jobs (even though the recession was not in the least bit his fault) Bailing out the banks and other big businesses with taxpayer money Screwing up health care reform by not selling its advantages to Joe Sixpack and allowing the GOP to portray it as expensive and risky, and by allowing too much Kumbaya bipartisanship and foot-dragging transparency rather than just ramming the thing home with the mandate and large Congressional majorities he enjoyed. On point #1, the argument was that the stimulus wasn't enough, even though it seemed massive sat the time. There is no way to say with certainty that if we spend X dollars, it will create Y job...

What. The. FUCK?! Some obscure GOP state senator wins a special election to fill Ted Kennedy's seat?? Jesus Christ. All I can do is curse and moan. Plenty of blame to go around, apparently. My top choices: Coakley and her aides did not take this election seriously after she won the primary. The campaign was asleep at the switch. And Martha had little to say other than "I'm a Democrat so of course you'll vote for me." The lukewarm Dems and independents likewise didn't think this was worth going to the polls for. Many voters were lukewarm about the health care bill or actively turned off by it, and voted for Brown as a protest. ElectoralVote.com and the Boston Globe both have good analyses. One notion is that even some initial Obama supporters are disappointed in his record so far: watered-down health care reform, Big Business bailouts, etc. Obama voters wanted change in 2008 and haven't gotten it, so they stayed home yesterday, while anti-Obama types ...

There's an interesting piece by Newsweek blogger Michael Scherer about Sarah Palin's recent hiring as a Fox News commentator. Scherer claims that Roger Ailes -- head of Fox News, former political consultant to Nixon, Reagan and Bush #I -- is a "genius"  because while his peers hire on-air talent on the basis of their abilities (debatable, but OK), "Ailes knows you can also hire talent for who they anger, who they unite and what they represent... Ailes had not hired another talking head in Palin. He had hired a mascot for Fox News, a living breathing symbol of all that the network hopes to be: a place for the forgotten, besieged, suburban and rural American middle, long victimized, often dismissed, beset on all sides by elites and liberals, haters and foes." In reference to "60 Minutes," Palin herself is quoted as saying, "More and more Americans are looking at some of these networks, that biased journalism, and saying, 'Nah, that gig is u...

That sort of sums up the rest of our vacation. I'm ecstatic to report that the kids will now sleep as late as we do (or in Sarah's case, wake up earlier and read quietly). So Ben and I got to loll around in bed until 9:30 or even 10 on some of those mornings. There is no greater pleasure than a good night's sleep and a gradual awakening when it's not still dark out. What did we do when actually upright, you may ask? For the most part it involved sitting in front of the fire, playing Monopoly, watching DVDs, cooking and eating, seeing friends, and just hanging out. Somehow the time seemed to pass in a normal fashion. We also caught up on some stuff we'd been putting off while Ben was unemployed, like taking the cats to the vet for shots and getting a plumber to deal with the clogged drain in the kids' bathroom. Isn't that exciting?Buy we did get out a bit... we went to a fun potluck in central Mass. at the home of an old colleague of Ben's. There were m...