Simian Farmer

Why my wife totally rocks: Reason 934

In preparation for the entry of a new life into this brave new world, it has fallen on the Simians to ensure suitable accommodation for all occupants, both current and imminent.

Thus, with the new baby destined for the nursery (after the first few months bedside, so as to make the nursing gig easier on my wife), the spare room has had to be remodelled into a little boy's room for Declan.  This spare room, aside from housing the occasional guest, also had enshrined within my valued Anakin Skywalker Force FX lightsabre.  (Drives the dogs nuts when it flares to life.)

During the demolition phase of the room, I cast a heavy and heartfelt sigh as I removed the wall mounts and prepared myself, psychologically, to relegate my icon to the basement with the rest of the Star Wars toys.

Upon seeing my melancholy, my darling wife assumed a sympathetic stance:

"You know Si, instead of taking that downstairs, why don't you just put the mounts up in our bedroom and you can keep it there?"

Oh yeah, baby.  She totally rocks!

A note on semantics

What follows is a brief, and certainly incomplete, lexicon of our son's burgeoning vocabulary at 20 months of age.

In no particular order whatsoever other than that in which they were recollected from my head.

And of course a picture, since he's just so frikkin' cute!!

"Gunka"

Just because I know that my brother sometimes reads this site, it behooves me to make special note of the fact that my son (Declan) has mastered the ability to pick out his uncle from many of the family pictures in which he is at least a co-star.

When this happens, Declan's face sprouts a grin that is alarmingly similar to that of his Uncle Buster.  He then looks at me (or his mother, if she's the closest one) with that same grin, and jabs a chubby little sausage at the photo in question.

"GUNKA!" he proudly proclaims.

If I am not rapid enough in my affirmation of the undeniable truth that has just been espoused by my son, he will look back at the photo, where his finger is still pointed unerringly, and say again, "gunka," more to himself, taking a private moment to share the information with the man in the picture, since his dad was too slow to join in on the chorus.

My son, at a very early age, is exceedingly fond of his gunka.  My wife and I are already afraid of what will happen when Dex turns 18 and can go out with Gunka... just the two of them.

Ah hell... it'll happen long before he turns 18.  Who are we kidding!?

A quick return to verbosity

My weekend was a little busier than usual, hence a noted lack of anything up in this space.

My wife had the audacity to go and spend the entire day on Sunday with a girlfriend... scrapbooking.  (Leaving me to fend off the boy and dogs.  Thus, I STILL have to finish the laminate in one of the bedrooms.  "You can finish that off in an evening during the week, can't you Si?"  **fluttering eyelashes**)  Our son's early years will be entirely recorded in pictures surrounded by colourful bits of paper, decorative doo-dads and thematic stamps from expensive ink pads.  (The First Year album is done, and is really quite impressive.  The title on the cover is done up with Shrinky-Dinks!!)

The next couple days will see me post the final instalment of the china diary, and I still have to record my thoughts on the Burns Night supper of just over a week ago.

Not from work here, of course.  That would be blatant misuse of company time.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go top up my coffee, clutch a piece of paper to my chest and wander the halls with a harried look on my face. 

That should take me at least to lunch.

You're going to do what with the who now?

I love this idea!

A daily, 14-minute, exercise program based solely on the motions derived from recklessly swinging a sweater-shrouded sledgehammer around in your own home.  (The sweater, ostensibly, to protect furniture, animals and small children from unwarranted blunt trauma.)

Shovelglove: Functional Sledgehammer exercise in 14 minutes time

Go ahead and click on the picture to embiggen it.  You'll note that there are a number of Star Wars toy ships in the background.

A sweater-clad sledgehammer being carelessly flung about by a guy in his home office while still wearing his pyjamas, surrounded by the geeky memorabilia of a reclusive and slightly obsessive youth, now inextricably inculcated into his persona.  Lose the glasses and goatee, shave the hair and that is totally ME!

I'm seriously thinking about getting something like this started for myself.

No... seriously!

I'd have to call it something different to prevent undue emasculation:

"The Thor's Hammer Sweat Regimen!"

"Steel Flingers Anonymous!"

"Post-Poundin' Performance!"

"OW!  My Back!"

This could really turn into something...

New favourite quote

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.

~Bill Vaughan

The China Diary (9 of 10)

Nearing the end now.

I'm a little more upbeat in this journal entry, but still seem to take an inordinate amount of pleasure in slagging the food.  It really wasn't all that bad... honest.

I'm impressed that I used a semi-colon correctly.

---

Monday, 27th March 1989
Hua Du Hotel
Beijing

Well, today has been the best day I've had since Hong Kong.  I got up at around 7:00 and then went down to the "Western Restaurant" and had some more shit for breakfast.  Then we got ready and took off for the Great Wall.  It was almost a 2 hour drive by bus and I slept most of the way.  When we got there we started climbing this section of wall that went for 1 km before it ended and became the old unrenovated section.  On the way up, I shot 22 pictures or so.  On the way down I bought a T-shirt, and I bought another one when I got to the bottom.  On the way back to the bus, we found out how persistent peddlars can be.  The just wouldn't let us alone.  We then drove a ways and had some almost edible lunch and then walked over to a very disappointing Ming Tomb.  then we took off back to the hotel, got settled back into our rooms, and I went upstairs to visit everybody.  I was invited to Julie's room and we talked sex and stuff; it was a lot of fun.  But then it was time to go to bed, and you know what happens now.
'Night.

---

I wish I would have put more effort into describing my experience at The Wall.  It really was the most humbling part of the entire trip.  Most of us were exhausted just walking the short distance back and forth that has been refurbished for tourists.  Can you imagine the human effort to build more than 5,000 kilometres of that thing!?  Truly staggering.

Group shot, eight of the nine of us.  I'm the handsome fella 'twixt the two girls in the middle.

And though it's a bit premature, a second picture, just of me, to make up for none in the last post.  This is on the return flight home.  I'm posting this one because I'm sporting one of the shirts I referenced in the journal entry above.

It reads:

Sticks and stones may break my bones,
But whips and chains excite me.

15 seconds: Spastik Jack

I will do my best to keep the 15 second video feature on Wednesdays.  Consistency aids in maintaining an audience, they say...

Some backstory on this one:

Our Jack Russell Terrier has actually been clinically diagnosed with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder).  We've come to understand it's really not all that rare in the breed.  Bloody hyper-active dogs that they are.  The most frequent way this materializes in ours is his habit of running circles.

Counter-clockwise ONLY.

On the rare blue-moon days when we vacuum our living room, there is a circular pattern of white hair around the circumference of the track he runs.  I wish I were joking.  His favourite and/or least favourite commercials spur him on to barking, blurred sprints.  Our whole family seems to have become inured to the effect, but company still  finds it vastly amusing.

Now, even when walking, he takes to lifting his left hind leg and carrying it since, when he runs, he's at such a banked angle that it's useless.

The alarming dearth of snow this winter has given both dogs freer range of the back yard than they would otherwise be able to enjoy.  There is another pair of dogs that live two houses down.  Hearing them bark when they're outside drives Jango (our Jack) bonkers.  He has now formed a similar, but much larger, track outside around our firepit.  It is nearly a perfect circle.

This clip was taken from our kitchen window this past weekend.  Crazy mutt.

 

Chocolate milk

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

~Thomas Merton


This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you’re doing, or it comes out flat. You can’t fake your way through this.

~Real Live Preacher

Another sign that bloggers may have acquired a rather reclusive reputation

(Click to embiggen)