We had quite a busy weekend this past week. I took off Friday (I have a lot of vacation time to use) and dropped my car off for repairs, and then Jen drove me to the dentist. I told Lily that I was going to the doctor and Jen said she cried until she fell asleep. Later on, we asked her why she had been crying and she said "Because I love him very much." Awwww...She hates going to the doctor and she's worried about her daddy too.

I like my dentist. He's from Puerto Rico and he told this story about how when he was opening his practice up here, the woman at PNC wanted to see his Puerto Rican passport before they would let him open an account with a $20,000 check. He tried to explain to her that he was in fact an American citizen and that a Puerto Rican passport was just a normal American passport, but he just couldn't get her to understand. So he went across the street and opened an account there.

The hygienist is a really nice woman from Russia. She always wants to talk about my weight loss. Go me!

After my mouth denumbed, we used a gift card and went to the Olive Garden. Lily loved the bread sticks, taking at least one bite out of four of them, and I had chicken and soup and Jen had soup and salad.

We watched Don't Forget the Lyrics, which was was terrible, but fortunately I had a lot of beer. Also, China Grove is the theme, and I was surprised to learn that Jen had apparently never, ever heard it before. For Jen's part, she was amazed that I grew up in the 80s and never heard Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)".

On Saturday, we dressed up Lily in her pretty Christmas dress and took her to Sears for a photo. She was cute, but she was all over the place and she eventually got very cranky. We were supposed to meet my friend Amy and her baby, but Lily was getting so upset that we had to cancel. She kept saying "I'm not sleepy!" and then fell asleep before we even got out of the mall parking lot.

After that, our friend Karen came over. Lily seemed a little shy at first, but after bath time she started saying "Karen's my best friend" and "I love Karen so much", so I guess she made a good impression.

On Sunday we continued with week two of our new recipe and family movie night tradition. We made coconut soup and Thai curry tofu. I liked the soup and had seconds, something I rarely do these days, but I didn't especially care for the entree. The movie we watched was Toy Story. Lily liked it, but some of Sid's toys were a little bit scary.

At bedtime, I asked her what she wanted for a bedtime story and she picked up "Green Eggs and Ham" and ran around the room saying "Sam I Am! Sam I Am!" which answered that.

Cross posted at:http://jugularjosh.livejournal.com/5410.html

I've been so busy at work that I haven't had much time to blog recently. Working under Rescusi Annie just sucks the life out of me. I've never had a cesarean section, but I am imagine it feels something like a conversation with her. Even thinking about it exhausts me, so posts about work will be sparse for the foreseeable future.

Also, though I'm happy about the outcome of the election, I find that I don't have a lot to say about it. I think Obama will be a better President than McCain. I never quite understood why John McCain considered maverick-hood for its own sake to be a virtue. His embrace of the "maverick" label failed, in part, because it's one of those terms that loses currency when one applies it to oneself. It might have seemed kind of edgy and cool to have the campaign's surrogates describing McCain as a maverick, but when he used the word to describe himself it came across as a bit too eager to please. It reminded me of Pee Wee's Big Adventure -- "I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel."

Finished up My Name is Legion on audiobook. Someone converted a bunch of books for the blind from audiotape to MP3 and I've been listening to those. It has two short stories and a novella. One story is good, one is meh, but the novella justifiably won a Hugo. I'm listening to Belle & Sebastian while I try to figure out which story I want to listen to next. One interesting thing about listening to books for the blind was the bit at the end where the reader said "If you experienced any difficulties with this recording, tie a piece of string to the tin, braille side up."

Had a very nice evening with Jen and Lily on Sunday. We made pumpkin soup, which was really tremendously delicious, along with sesame-ginger baked tofu squares and watched the Incredibles on the couch, all three of us together. (The Incredibles is such a great movie. I can't think of a single thing I don't like about it.)  We're going to try to do this every Sunday, trying a new dish followed by a movie. I think Lily was a little too young for the Incredibles, so we're going to try to go for Toy Story nest week.


Cross posted at: http://jugularjosh.livejournal.com/5201.html

So I had my 34th birthday on Friday. I can't even say that I'm in my early thirties any more. Lily knows it's my birthday, and when I ask her how old I am, she says "Two years old!", so I think that's what I'm going to start telling people.

We had a nice Halloween. Lily was a pink dinosaur and roared at everyone she saw. We spent half of our time trick or treating and half of it giving out candy and Lily enjoyed both activities. Lily is getting to be really sharp. She was holding two spoons at breakfast time and I asked her "What color are those spoons?". She looked at them both and then showed me one "This one is green," then she showed the other "and this one is purple", which I thought was a very sophisticated sentence and reflected  more complex underlying though process than I would have expected. I was expecting her to say something like "Green!" or "Purple!" or "Green and Purple!" but she discussed the two separately, compared the two and even connected the two clauses using "and".

Also, she likes to tell me what to do when we first wake up in the morning. "Go downstairs, see mommy." When we were walking down the stairs together, she issued me two or three commands and I said "Okay, bossy," and she said "I not bossy. I Lilyan Dessa Nisko" which is an awfully big name for such a little kid.

I'm actually pleased when I'm able to outsmart her. She's a very fussy eater sometimes, so one morning I grabbed an ice cream cone, stuffed it full of cottage cheese, sprinkled a couple sprinkles on top and let her eat ice cream for breakfast. Go me! I'm smarter than a two-year-old! Sometimes!

On Saturday, Tim came down to visit and we had an excellent visit. Early on Saturday, we bought a lot of food, Tim, Ancker and Frederick showed up and we played Unknown Armies. Everyone gave me presents too! Frederick bought me a zombie t-shirt and a remote control zombie, Tim brought me a zombie manga and Ancker stole some M&Ms out of Lily's bag and threw them at me.

The Unknown Armies RPG was fun, but not quite in the way that I intended. I was hoping for a serious game of mature horror and instead we had character sheets reading"the magical retard" and "the halfling hooker". I'm a kind of terrible tabletop GM (though I kick ass in play by post games and I didn't convey the themes of the game very well. So it turned silly rather quickly. Here are some quotes from the game.

In Gauntlet  Announcer Voice: "Mechanic has shot the hooker."

Josh: "He does not grab your testicles at this time."
Dave to Jen, who was sitting nearby: "Sure you don't want to play?"

Cultists: "Want some shrooms, man?"
Tim's character, Joe the Plumber: "No, thanks. I'm high on Democracy."

Since we finished up early, we still had some time to hang out, so we went to rent a movie. We got Teeth, a bizarre revenge fantasy thing about a teenage girl who goes around castrating men with the teeth in her girl-parts. (In fairness to her, every man in the movie is utterly despicable. As Tim said: "This movie takes a dim view of men. I have hung out with women without trying to drug, rape or fist them.") The mutation was apparently caused by the nuclear power plant that towers over the house in the establishing shot, and indeed, in every shot of the house. The tenth time they showed it, I was like, "That was subtle," and Frederick's like, "Yeah, it's practically subliminal."


It was fairly well reviewed on metacritic and had apparently won a few awards at Sundance. We were all sitting with our legs crossed by the time it was done. As Tim said as the credit's rolled: "Who knew a movie about dicks being chewed off could make for uncomfortable viewing?"

Frederick and Ancker took off and Tim and I turned in a couple hours later. We went looking for a coffee place when we woke up and finally had lunch at Arby's and coffee at the stand in the Palmer Park mall. I enjoyed my chicken, bacon and swiss sandwich, and Tim certainly enjoyed his meal, as it was spoonfed to him by the teenaged cashier. Coffee was crap though.

After that, we dropped off our junk and walked down to the parade to meet Jen and Lily. We hung around for a bit, leaving before the parade actually started. Tim napped and I played video games. If we had stayed, we might have gotten our pictures in the paper too! Jen saw a photographer and started hamming it up, and the guy came over and took some pictures of her and Lily.

They came home, Ancker showed up, then he took off. We watched "Thank You for Smoking" which was just brilliant. Jen went to bed, and Tim and I watched some Wonderfalls. Forget Firefly, Wonderfalls is the archetypal "killed before its time" show. I can't wait for the Wonderfalls/Pushing Daisies crossover later this year. Woot!

Tim and I got up early. He got a cute video of Lily dancing to the Monster Mash on his phone. Then we went to breakfast in Clinton. The waitress asked if we were brothers.

It's very strange. I turned 34 this week and we could see the video store in Clinton where we would try to rent R-rated movies when we wer 17. (And we succeeded. We just confidently handed our drivers licence to the clerk, who wasn't paid enough to do basic math in his head.) It's strange to think that was literally half a lifetime ago.

Cross posted at: http://jugularjosh.livejournal.com/5114.html

Before Lily was born, Jen and I used to read a chapter a night every October from Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October. (It's not to be confused with a bog standard novel of the same name, though both obviously take their title from Poe's Ulalume). I found it on mp3 and I've been listening to it on my walks around the lake. I timed it very well, having finished listening to the final chapter at about 1:30 today.) The book has thirty one chapters, each corresponding to a day of October in 1887.

Night in the Lonesome October is narrated by Snuff, the dog who is Jack the Ripper's familiar. (I lent the book to Dave when we first met, and he said "If anyone asks, the narrator is Jack the Ripper's dog, okay?")

It is revealed as the story progresses that once every few decades, when the moon is full on the night of Halloween (Apropos of nothing, apparently I was born on a Halloween of the full moon, something I learned just now.), the fabric of reality thins, and doors may be opened between this world and the realm of the Elder Gods. When these conditions are right, men and women with occult knowledge may gather at a specific ritual site, to either hold the doors closed, or to help fling them open. Should the Closers win, then the world will remain as it is until the next turning... but should the Openers succeed, then the Elder Gods will come to Earth, to remake the world in their own image. The Openers have never yet won. These meetings are often referred to as "The Game" or "The Great Game" by the participants. I think Zelazny called it that specifically for the purposes of the following exchange:

Last night we obtained more ingredients for the master's spell.  As we paused on a corner in Soho the Great Detective and his companion came out of the fog and approached us.
     "Good evening," he said.
     "Good evening," Jack replied.
     "Would you happen to have a light?"
     Jack produced a package of wax vestas and passed it to him.  Both men maintained eye contact as he lit his pipe.
     "Lots of patrolmen about."
     "Yes."
     "Something's afoot, I daresay."

Get it? Get it?! Heh heh heh.

Anyways, it is just such a fun book. Zelazny reads it on the version I have, and while he seemed incapable of getting through a sentence without parsing it on the Amber audiobooks, he sounds like he's having a blast reading this one. I wouldn't say it's his best written book, though it's certainly the most fun. I'd say it even beats out Neil Gaiman's Study in Emerald for the best Sherlock Holmes/HP Lovecraft/Jack the Ripper crossover (which admittedly is not the most crowded field.)

It's not the easiest book to find any more but any book that throws together Jack the Ripper, "The Count", "The Good Doctor" and his "Experiment Man" a Werewolf, a Witch, a crazed Vicar, a druid, and a Mad Monk, each with their animal companions and works as a serious novel is really worth seeking out.

Cross posted at:http://jugularjosh.livejournal.com/4628.html

It's been quite a busy week and I haven't had much time to blog. The owner of the company came in and I had to give a presentation about a project I had inherited. That went pretty well.

In accordance with Tim's advice earlier, I will be referring to me coworkers with code names. Present at the meeting were: Saucy Jack, Lord British, the Autistic Robot, and Resusci Annie. 

We had our nephew Christopher over on the weekend and that was a lot of fun. Lily loves him so much. Most of the people who read this blog are on my Lily picture mailing list and will have seen the picture from Chris's visit where Lily has her hand on his shoulder as they both look at the computer game he's playing. That's one of my new favorite pictures. But Chris had a great time hanging with me and Lily. Lily had a great time. Jen had a great time. I'd assume Chris's mom had a nice time too, and I had a great time. We played the new Rampage game on the PSII, and if you press the buttons during the loading screen, it makes a fart sound effect. Chris thought it was the funniest thing imaginable.

We also played some Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, which Chris had played, but I hadn't. It is an awesome game, though it's silly in parts. "I'm Doctor Doom. I've got a freakin' dragon on my team, but first I'm going to throw Bullseye and Evil Bucky against the Avengers. That ought to slow them down." And what was up with MODOK? "I see you have Reed Richards, the smartest man in the universe on your team. I'm going to paralyze you and make you answer some general knowledge trivia."

The problem with not keeping up with my blog is that I will compose or copy something interesting (I usually save posts-in-progress in the drafts folder in gmail)  and then find it's no longer topical by the time I get around to putting it up. For instance, this piece of Sarah Palin's wardrobe.

What $150,000 Could Buy in Your Community

According to my nefarious sources, $150,000 will get you:

37 People With Health Care for One Year OR

180 Homes with Renewable Electricity for One Year OR

3 Public Safety Officers for One Year OR

2 Music and Arts Teachers for One Year OR

12 Scholarships for University Students for One Year OR

2 Affordable Housing Units OR

47 Children with Health Care for One Year OR

24 Head Start Places for Children for One Year OR

2 Elementary School Teachers for One Year OR

2 Port Container Inspectors for One year OR

Sarah Palin's wardrobe!

The median monthly mortgage payment in the US in 2007 was about $1500. In other words, Sarah Palin spent very nearly as much on clothing in a single month as the typical American family will spend on housing over the next ten years.

Cross posted at: http://jugularjosh.livejournal.com/4425.html

Per Tim's suggestion, I'm going to start using code names for all my code workers in case they find my blog. Marie will become "Resusci Annie". I'll come up for other demeaning nicknames for the others as circumstances require them.

David Sedaris on undecided voters:

"To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?"

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked."

Lily is getting to the age where she's repeating everything. We were at the breakfast table and I was flipping through an issue of Wired. Jen was talking to me, and she didn't think I was paying attention, because she started saying things deliberately to get my attention, like "Blahblahblah, I'm pregnant again."

I didn't look up from my magazine, "You heard it here first, Lily. Mommy has a baby in her tummy. Tell the world."

(For the record, no she doesn't)

Lily's starting to get afraid of monsters. I told her that monsters aren't real, etc, etc, and I told her about daddy's song about being brave. (I said I'm Miss Muffet, I'm very afraid/but something inside me is making me stay/I know deep down that if I run away/I'll just meet more spiders and still feel the same) She saw something out at the back door and we went out to look at it. We saw that it was just our shadows and she said, "It's just our shadows! It's not a monster any more!"

She also serenaded us. We have Halloween poster of the Mona Lisa with a snake's tongue (called "The Moaning Lisa") and Lily is not a fan. First she told us "That girl has a snake in her mouth" and then "That girl is blowing raspberries at us." I sang Mona Lisa for her, and when I was done, she tried to reproduce the melody while she sang "Mona Daddy, Mona Daddy".

Cross posted at: http://jugularjosh.livejournal.com/4277.html

Work hasn't been great lately but Friday was slightly more tolerable. Marie flew home for a wedding or a witch's sabbath or something so I had a day without her breathing down my neck. I went to the dentist's office to replace a filling I had lost last December. It's nice to be able to drink something cooler than 60 degrees without a stabbing pain in my jaw.

On Saturday, Jen and Lily and I went to a local park for a Halloween festival. It had a flea circus, which I had never seen before. (That clip is the guy we saw performing) I had only ever seen them in old cartoons, and I didn't even know if they really existed. But it was really entertaining. We ran into my high school friend Marie Anne, her husband Scott and their twin, then later on our friend Megan and her little guy Raphael. Lily decorated a pumpkin, had her third annual hayride and really enjoyed it. Then she jumped around on some hay bales until she was too tired to walk home. She leaned up against me and said "You're my best friend, daddy" and I carried her back up the hill. Awww....

On Sunday, I blew off my family to hang out with Eric and Ancker and wound up feeling kind of guilty about it because I missed my own surprise party. :( I had a good time with Eric and Ancker though. We walked around Pburg and then came home and watched Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

Cross posted at: http://jugularjosh.livejournal.com/3940.html

I shall open this post with a link to the Shark Jesus:

Then I'll talk all about Lily. Sorry, Tim.

Jen usually picks up Lily from the sitter's, but she had to work late, and it was easier for me to take off two hours early and get Lily. I like picking her up, because Mary Beth tells her that I'm here and I hear her before I see her, and she comes running up and sees me and smiles and says "Daddy!" and then runs up and hugs me.

She wanted to wear my watch, which is a big, huge heavy thing. Here's a link to it. It's solar powered and gets a radio signal from the Atomic Clock four times a day.  It's actually a little too loose on me right now and I'm eventually going to need to have some links taken out of it. Lily just loves it because it's daddy's and it's shiny.

We got home before Jen. We called Grammy Kathy for her birthday, but somehow Grammy Kathy didn't get our birthday message on her machine. :(

Then Lily wanted to go outside, so we wound up in the cemetery. Lily wanted to climb on the "buildings". She also said "Race ya!" when we were walking along the path, and I didn't even know she knew about that kind of thing.

We spent a little time "picking flowers for mommy's birthday", (dandelions and whatever those cat tail type things that grow among long grasses are called, Lily helpfully blowing all the seeds off the seeds off the dandelions before we gave them to mommy) and went home.

Later that night, I asked Lily if she was hungry, because she only had a few bites to eat at dinner time. She said she wasn't, so I told her "I don't want to hear 'I'm so hungry' when we go up to bed." Then I paused and added "And don't make me turn this car around," because I figured I might as well get her acclimated to all the dad cliches early on.

Cross posted at: http://jugularjosh.livejournal.com/3766.html

One of the things I like about living in this modern world of ours is that if I'm online and I encounter a word or phrase with which I am unfamiliar, it's a very simple matter to learn what it means, often nothing more than highlighting it, right-clicking and selecting "search google for..."

Case in point: I was on a web forum where someone suggested reimagining the Joker as a Doctor Mabuse type character. I looked him up and learned that he was in Wikipedia's fictional telepaths category  Is there any other kind of telepath?

Speaking of wikipedia, very cool image here of the world's largest tracked vehicle: It looks like it should transform into Omega Supreme.

As much as I loathe Sarah Palin, I have to admit a grudging admiration for someone who, on the eve the release of the findings of an investigation into illegal acts she may have committed as governor, releases her own report exonerating herself of any wrong doing. In my personal lexicon, this will henceforth be known as "Pulling a Palin" and is a tactic I plan to employ during my next performance review and/or traffic violation.

The Lily section:

Lily is saying all sorts of things lately. She's gotten into the habit of blowing kisses rather than leaning over to kiss you. She stubbed her toe when clamboring up the stairs and rather than cry about it said "I blow my feet a kiss" and just kept going.

She also likes playing with Play Doh. She took the lids off her four different cans of it. She was putting them back on when she noticed that she was putting the yellow lid on the purple play doh, so she stopped what she was doing and looked for the proper lid.

Interestingly, Play Doh now has the disclaimer that it contains wheat. Was that really necessary? I don't think I'd be any more or less likely to let my child eat Play Doh whether she had a wheat allergy or not.

Lily has just realized that people have names in addition to their relationships to her. Our neighbor Ed was being visited by his grown son and Lily said to him, "That's my daddy. Joshua." Also, she wants to know the names of all her stuffed animals. Jen's name sounds very cute when Lily says it.

My Grammy was trying to get Lily to say her name,

Grammy: Can you say Lois?
Lily: I can't say Lois!

Heh.

And just last night, she was in the bathtub pretending to be other people. "We're pretending!" First she'd say "I'm mommy!" then she'd say "I'm daddy". For my part, I said "You are large, you contain multitudes", but Lily was not impressed with my Walt Whitman reference.

Cross-posted at: http://jugularjosh.livejournal.com/3512.html

Whenever somebody asks me what my favorite book (or movie or TV show)is, I'll hem and haw and say something like, "Oh, here are my top ten, in no particular order," because God forbid that I give a straight answer about anything when I have the chance to equivocate. And as my moods change I might shuffle books up and down and off my list, but the one book that is always there is the Last Unicorn. It's really the perfect fairy tale. If you haven't read the book, click on the link below and buy it. Pay for expedited shipped. Wait for it to arrive in the mail, then read it. Do this all before reading the rest of my post. I'll wait.

http://www.conlanpress.com/

Be sure to buy through that website, because there were royalty issues with the original publisher and Peter Beagle only gets money if you buy from Conlan press.

It's a wonderful book full of lyrical prose, and many, many memorable passages. It begins with "The unicorn lived in a lilac wood and she lived all alone.", a line that vies with "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." for the best opening line ever. If you had asked me a couple years ago what my favorite passage was, I would have told you this:


but now that I've seen Lily make her serious face when she's concentrating on something, I think the following is one of the best passages I have ever seen written:


Anyways, good book. Excellent book. Peter Beagle autographed our copy. Buy one for yourself today!

Cross posted at: http://jugularjosh.livejournal.com/3085.html