Northbound

Not a great month for doing stuff, last month was, but hey. Carried over:

• If the weather ever, ever, ever gets dry and warm enough, take the durn bookcase out of the garage and stain it and put it in the upstairs bedroom.  For pity’s sake, why is it this hard to coordinate having time to do this with the weather?  I don’t get it.  (FAIL, raining again this weekend.)
• Compare bids on home theater wiring (waiting on third bid) and schedule installation.
• Schlep to Michael’s and get them to fix the glass in a frame that I accidentally broke while trying to put cute and adorable baby pictures in it.  (accomplished, just need to get the frame out of my wife’s car and get it hung)
• Get taxes out (accomplished).
• Get high chairs put together (I probably have another month to do this).
• Wait patiently on agent to finish reading my manuscript (can’t stand it)

New this month:

• Schlep to Targét and get new shredder (the old one, a Staples product, went belly-up and is unfixable – check out online product reviews before you buy this particular pig in a poke) (accomplished – ordered online; Target didn’t have them in stock).
• Schlep to Home Depot or Lowes for gray sand to fill in cracks in patio (accomplished – some SOB complained about me always using pwned in this context, so, accomplished)
• Schlep to Shop-Rite for free pork shoulder (they were out of pork shoulder, got ham instead, which I am OK with but the Mrs. is unenthusiastic about)
• Schlep to Costco for formula and suchlike (accomplished – and accomplished again)
• Make it through Abilities Expo without either crying or killing someone (accomplished)
• Prepare tomato patch (accomplished)
• Get wife’s car to have car seats installed (accomplished)
• Write piece on IVF for submission to NRO (FAIL, couldn’t finish it, and it sucked anyway)
• Produce next in series of cute adorable baby videos (which I can’t link to prior editions for copyright purposes, but are available on request).
• Finish giant mosaic dealie for upstairs bathroom
• Order tiles I need for next mosaic project
• Watch final round of Masters with pimento cheese sandwich in hand (accomplished)
• Finish at least one medium round in Desktop Tower Defense (accomplished!  The secret is just to build and upgrade the cheap pellet towers, everything else doesn’t give you the same bang for the buck).
• Fertilize the grass (accomplished).
• Spray-paint the spot on the smoker where all the rust came off (accomplished).
• Get right rear tire replaced due to slow leak (accomplished, but ended up shelling out over $600 for brake work).
• Call lawyer with respect to wills (accomplished).
• Call financial services guy re 529 plan (accomplished).

The question answers itself, but one of these stories is more Grand Prairie than the other.

July 2007:

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

April 2009:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton assured Iraqis on Saturday that the Obama administration would not abandon their country even as it presses ahead with plans to withdraw American troops amid a recent surge in violence.

Clinton said the drawdown would be handled in a “responsible and careful way” and would not affect efforts to improve Iraq’s security forces, or complete reconstruction and development projects.

Also:

On her first trip to Iraq as America’s top diplomat, Clinton said the country has made great strides despite a recent surge in violence. High-profile attacks this past week primarily targeted Shiite worshippers. More than 150 people, many of them Iranian pilgrims, have died.

Ahead of her arrival, Clinton said the attacks are a sign that extremists are afraid the Iraqi government is succeeding.

“I think that these suicide bombings … are unfortunately, in a tragic way, a signal that the rejectionists fear that Iraq is going in the right direction,” Clinton told reporters aboard her plane.

Oh, scha, right. If John McCain had been elected, HRC would be out there saying that these suicide bombings were a signal that Iraq was still going in the wrong direction, and don’t you forget it.

• Newborns are selfish, but not in the way most people are selfish.  Newborns don’t know from money or property or even greed.  “Selfish” means that they think about themselves exclusively and could care less that you need to cut the grass or pay bills or pee if there’s some better way they think you could spend your time.  “Inconsiderate” is a better word, if you multiply it by ten thousand.
• Newborns do not get the concepts of “please” or “thank you.”  Ingratitude is their modus operandi.  You could spend the entire morning holding and feeding a newborn, and ten minutes later, they can holler as loudly as though you’d been neglecting them shamefully.
• Newborns do not know from “just wait one minute, please.”  Whoever wrote that Obama line about the fierce urgency of now has spent time with a newborn.
• Newborns are honest.  They will tell you what’s on their minds, and won’t waste time with “constructive criticism” or white lies or any other social lubricant.
• Newborns are famous for their inability to tell time or adhere to the normal circadian rhythms of light and dark.  But if you put a newborn in its crib for the night, said newborn will wait until one second after your head hits the pillow before crying, without fail.
• The dad in Marley and Me has a long speech at the end where he says “A dog doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull.”  A newborn doesn’t care about any of this, either.  The difference is that your dog will suck up to you show you affection.  A newborn won’t, but at least a newborn won’t track dirt through the house or shed all over the couch.
• Newborns don’t care about politics, sports, or literature.  They have no cultural awareness other than deep-seated fashion prejudices (zippers are better than snaps, socks are not worth the time).  Your best, most timely Simpsons quote won’t work on a newborn, period.
• Newborns can get along with anybody; they don’t care who is holding them or who is feeding them as long as the job gets done.
• Newborns will pee on you without thinking too much about it.  Other people, like your boss, take years to develop this skill.

You are at a fast food joint, the kind where the condiments are served in a little bar off to the side.  You have your meal already and are sitting down to “enjoy” it.  (In this particular instance, you have a sub-standard burger on a stale bun, served at room temperature, that you have paid four dollars for, but that’s beside the point.)

Another customer notices that there is a jam in the ketchup dispenser.  A low-level kitchen staff person is sent out to fix it.  He takes the pump out of the ketchup jar.  He looks it over.  He drops it on the floor.  He then very casually puts it back in the ketchup jar, wipes a little bit of ketchup from the top end away with a (presumably filthy) towel, and then screws the pump back in.

Do you say anything?

Before you get too hot and bothered about the NFL draft this weekend (not that I’ll be paying attention, not with the Cowboys not having a pick) it is instructive to look at the first round of the draft 10 years ago (formatting courtesy Wikipedia)

I read George Will as saying that it’s only OK to wear jeans to listen to Jerry Jeff Walker, to which I say, problem solved.

Same as it ever was, in Newsweek:

The unemployment statistics raise uncomfortable questions about race and economic inequities. Failure to recognize the implications of the data has serious ramifications not just for social policy, but also for economic forecasting. Such a failure can lead to faulty predictions about consumer spending, credit-card defaults, commercial real-estate prices and retail-business bankruptcies. When we portray job loss as indiscriminate, we are in danger of overestimating its economic consequences while downplaying its social costs.

Last month was very successful, so doing this again.  (This does NOT count as “blogging”, it’s more of a self-help thing than anything else.)

Carried over:

• Stain bookcase that’s sitting in garage and haul it upstairs (FAIL, it has just been too nasty to do that much outside, much less a big project like this).
• Try to refrain from bugging the agent who is reading my manuscript (FAIL, I sent her a note to tell her about the McSweeney’s piece).
• Scan in  GWB photos and Reagan letter and reprint them (ran out of color ink).
• Then schlep over to Michaels to get them framed (which is more doable than it sounds because it’s in the same center as Costco and Babies R Us).
• Call someone to get the home theater wiring done (well, managed this, but bid was four times what I thought it was going to be).
• Put together high chairs and clean out a lot of the other mound of baby cruft in the dining room (largely pwned, the high chairs are a low priority).
• Get Mrs. to look at tax returns and get them filed.
• Get first round of thank-you cards out (largely completed).

New:

• Schlep to day care center to fill out registration forms (pwned).
• Mount old political buttons on frame (pwned).
• Learn to change diapers (pwned).
• Get birth announcements out in the mail (pwned).
• Get started on garden work (pwned).