One More Shot

As many parents have discovered, there’s a point in time (usually sometime in the evening before/during/after the bedtime rituals have begun) where you find your voice rising with small flecks of anger and frustration embedded in the cold iron of your parenting.  At the same time, you’re desperately trying to suppress a bubbling laughter as a small nude terrorist who happens to be related to you by blood crosses his or her arms and sticks out their bottom lip in defiance.

It’s an interesting point of inflection.

We’ve been pushing the potty training angle this past weekend.

…there have been ups and downs.

The downs may have left stains.

One of the small joys I have in life is perusing mail-order catalogs.  It’s a nice, leisurely way to spend a few moments getting my shopping fix without actually ever buying anything.  And it’s one of the reasons I so enjoy coming up to my in-laws home in Madison.

On a monthly basis, my mother-in-law receives enough catalogs to be personally responsible for the deforestation of a small Latin American country.  It’s not that she orders from the catalogs, or even orders from any but one or two of them on a semi-almost-regular basis.  Catalogs are like rabbits and wire clothes hangers.  Turn your back on two of them, and pretty soon you’ll have a flood.

In any case, we showed up at our in-laws home this evening to spend a quiet New Years Eve watching some movies and enjoying free baby-sitting the company of family.  As usual around the holiday season, the kitchen counter contained a stack of catalogs about a half a foot high that had arrived just today.  Tossing aside the ones that didn’t interest me, I settled in to explore the wonders of the modern consumer culture.   I especially enjoy looking at the Catalogs of Crap (Lillian Vernon, etc).  But occasionally I branch out to the more classy options.   Today I found a catalog for the Vermont Country Store.  I flipped through the pages to pre-qualify the magazine for reading.  Finding the promise of hand-crafted this and old-fashioned that, I added it to my stack.

Gradually I worked my way through the magazines until I returned to the Vermont Country Store for a second, more thorough, look.  Page after page showed my initial assessment to be correct.  This was a folksy, quality magazine filled with expensive versions of simple things that your great-great grandparents might haver purchased for a few pennies at the local Five and Dime.

And then I turned the page…and found myself reading some very sensible and practical descriptions of …adult entertainment devices.

No.  I’m not kidding.  I was somewhat taken aback

This is why I love reading catalogs.  You never know what you’ll find in even the most staid of catalogs.

It’s been a busy few days.

Ok, Santa was up late last night.  He got here not long after my eldest was banished upstairs for bath, books and bed.  He did not leave until after midnight.

My wife was so concerned that she pitched in with the wrapping and then promptly gave him the advice that perhaps it’d be best if he wrapped all the gifts he was giving to good little boys and girls prior to Christmas Eve.

Click Me!

The assignment this week over at Digital Photography School is My Best Shot of 2009.  I opened up Picasa to take a look at my collection and found over 10,000 images staring back at me.

I ended up choosing this one after a somewhat thorough search.  It’s always spoken to me.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a Digital Photography School weekly assignment.  It occurred to me last night that I’ve probably taken several thousand pictures since I last submitted an entry, and they’ve mostly been of my children.

It’s probably good for me to keep trying to explore new styles and new situations for photography.  When I clicked over for the assignment running from 12/9 to 12/23, I remembered that I had recently taken this picture on a whimsy:

Click Me!

We are currently watching the Soup.

The Soup just did something that caused me to yell and curse in front of my wife and newborn child.

I happen to watch the Showtime series Dexter.  Because I don’t happen to get Showtime via cable, I’ve been watching the show via DVD.  Obviously that means I am generally behind the rest of the viewing public.

But that’s ok.  I’ve avoided most spoilers.  I’ve done so for two years now.

And tonight…the Soup basically showed me the ending for Season 4.

Darn it.  Darn it all to heck.

My (eldest) daughter learned an important lesson tonight:

Always hold on…to the balloon string.  Always.

The lesson did not go over well.

Also, I’m about 30 minutes into this series of videos reviewing the Phantom Menace (yes, it’s a little behind).  It’s hilarious…if extremely NSFW.

Wife:  You need to post more pictures.

Me:  I did.

Wife:  No you didn’t.  You haven’t put anything up since we left the hospital.

Me:  I just posted over 100 new images the other day.

Wife: Where?  I can’t see them

[I fumble around a bit with the computer] Me:  Here!  Look!  You just click the Gallery option.

Wife:  When I click “Gallery”, it doesn’t take  me there.  I don’t see that screen and I don’t see those pictures.

Me:  …but…but…they’re there.

Wife:  Husband, I assure you…you are delusional.

So…the last set of pictures I did not bother to organize into Sets on Flickr.  I just put them into my photostream.  The link at the top of my blog had gone just to my “Sets” page.

I have corrected the issue.  I now have links to both my sets and my photostream.

Enjoy.