While stumbling through the sundry of magazines, flyers, and letters in our mail today, I came across a piece that made my heart skip a beat.
In terror. Skip a beat in terror. Nothing good ever happens to me. You should know this by now.
There was a letter addressed to me from the US District Court.
Our recent trip to New Jersey coupled with the vast amount of pictures taken has prompted me to give up and implement a photo gallery. The link should be accessible from the header above.
The software I’m using is currently in Beta, so I’m not making any guarantees of its robustness.
Now, before you get any ideas, I watched Project Runway
Now Project Runway has moved from a channel that I barely watch (Bravo) to one I don’t think I’ve ever watched (Lifetime). And Bravo, seeing the gaping hole in their line up, have done a Star Trek and rebooted the series with a show called The Fashion Show. Watch as they substitute one fashion premise with another, slightly different one. Gasp in amazement as Heidi Klum morphs into Kelly Rowland. Shriek in dismay as the easily quotable, highly refined, eminemently mockable yet likeable Tim Gunn is replaced by a wonder discovered in the darkest unexplored regions of New York that I have dubbed…Poodle Boy. His name is really Isaac Mizrahi, and apparently he’s well respected in the fashion world. But after watching the show a few times with my wife, I’ve decided that I Don’t Care and that He Annoys Me.
I’ve been trying to convince my wife that following such an obvious disaster in the making is a mistake that will lead only to heartbreak. She’s not listening to me.
And she’s kicked me out of the room.
Tim….I miss you buddy.
The saga of our small mountain of sand has reached its final chapter…I hope.
After a long day of travel from the shores of New Jersey to the heart of the Heartland, my little family pulled into our driveway only to be blocked from pulling our car into our own garage by the remnants of the giant pile of sand delivered oh so many weeks ago. I don’t know if the lack of sleep just made me extra curmudgeon-y, but something in me snapped and I resolved to take care of the situation with all possible haste.
That I was able to sneak out of my daughter’s room after only an hour or so of stories and songs is either a sign that our recent trip abroad (to New Jersey) grew my daughter’s confidence in sleeping in Big Girl Beds on her own, or that she was simply so exhausted by the day that she just gave up to sleep at 9:00 central.
Upon further consideration, I’d have to say it’s the exhaustion.
Click me!
Yes, we’re home once more. All things considered, this was a relatively short trip. We flew out Friday and came back this morning.
Somehow I ended up with 300+ photographs. Somethings will have to be pruned.
Honestly, this will give me greater impetus to use the new Photogallery software to host the bulk of these pictures (a surprising number of which are actually good).
I hate to waste an evening where I get Micah down with time to spare before I feel the need to pass out, but I think that my own exhaustion is setting in.
Plus I still don’t have coffee.
Tomorrow will be rough.
It’s remarkable how social a child who had been playing shy all day becomes Little Miss Social Butterfly once we announce it’s almost time to head back to the hotel. My grandparents got more attention in the last 30 minutes than they had gotten in the previous three hours.
There’s something about seeing stereotype after stereotype play out in front of you that makes a person think that maybe reality isn’t as real as they might think. I think I need to start making up bingo cards for New Jersey-isms every time I come back to this state.
In any case, we’re here now. Remarkably enough, our daughter has already fallen asleep on her makeshift bed. It only took a minimal amount of screaming.
I am reaching the end of my rope. Our daughter is just not sleeping. Thus we’re not sleeping. And I’ve run out of coffee. It’s almost enough to make a grown man cry.
One of our in-town friends told us the other day that for all that we wept and moaned over our daughter’s lack of sleep and her growing assertiveness, she’s still a pretty mild child. I suppose it’s all relative, really. This is our first child, and the first time that we’re doing all of this. So her joys and her horrors become our baselines. It’s hard to get a grip when your sample size is one.
On to other news…
We are going out of town for the next few days, so posts will probably be few and far between. Just a heads up.
Our daughter had been staying with my in-laws for the past few nights while my wife is away at a conference. They reported a much better success rate at getting Micah to sleep in her bed without too much fuss. So I’m in her room again trying to replicate their success. Here’s to hoping I get to go downstairs within 30 minutes.
In other news, I’ve been giving serious thought about putting up new galleries. There has been a small but insistent set of inquiries/demands that I put up more pictures than the one or two that I end up uploading to flickr. I had had some galleries on the previous version of this website, but I allowed it to go fallow in much the same way I had allowed my posts to slip.
So I’m considering a few new options and a few old favorites. I haven’t really decided yet if I’m going to go through with it. There’s something about picking one photo from the many and setting it down next to a story, even if that story only relates to the picture by the merest glimmer of imagination.
We’ll see.
…this much we know to be true.
Click me!
Sometimes the walls fall with the gentle pressure of years of wind and rain and the abundant patience of the world.
Sometimes the walls fall with pick and ax and anger and joy, the effort of a lifetime gone in moments of passion.
Sometimes walls just fall.
Sadly, my neighbor found this out the hard way.
During the deconstruction of my backyard in preparation for sod and sand, we were left with an abundance of large pieces of stone. These stones were used by the previous owner of the house to build a nice fountain, and all the walls of our over-grown gardens. As stones don’t really go bad, we were loathe to just throw them away. They were, after all, still good. Another few thousand years before they hit an expiration date.
We found a neighbor to take the stones off our hands. Three days of effort, a hand truck and a cart moved what must have been a ton or so of stone from our backyard to her home down the street and across the way.
She took the stones and built a long low wall in front of her home. It was quite pretty really. The intention was to safeguard her front yard vegetable garden from the ravages of rodents.
It stood for about a month or so. This morning she found a portion of it fallen.
The best we could figure, it was the water drainage that did her in. The guy she had help her out didn’t seem to account for building the wall over the low spot of the garden, or the downspout that emptied not too far from there. He didn’t think how the water would just run along the wall during a good storm, until it seeped into the low soil.
Of course, he’s long gone by now, so he also didn’t see a five foot portion of the wall come down.
My neighbor is now weighing her options.
