Tim and Valerie

3 weeks since I last posted. I really need to try harder to sit down and write something. It got so bad that when I saw my brother last week, he mentioned to me “dude, your site sucks.  You never write anything.”  He’s got a point. Since so much has happened, let me refresh and encapsulate what occurred in the preceeding 3 weeks.

• David is crawling. He is hilarious. I have uploaded 3 pages of pictures to the Pictures link above. I’ll hack up another video for you to see soon. I got some really cute footage.
• I had a business trip to New Jersey recently, a stone’s throw away from Ellis Island and Lady Liberty. Our offices are in the part of NJ that’s a train stop away from Manhattan. I loved it up there, it was quiet, good view, good eats, lots of quiet working time. I already miss it.
• The Olympics gymnastics judging is blatantly fucking ridiculous. I love how the IOC gets super anal about performance-enhancing substances in the games but turn a blind eye to the blatantly obvious 14 year olds manning the Chinese girls team. And yeah, I said girls, because women have hips, and those Chinese girls are not women.
• Fuck China. Fuck the IOC. Their people are fabulous, and those Chinese girls are fantastic gymnasts. It’s the corrupt system and government that seeks to exploit their people for the glory of the ruling party. They can choke on their medals, they’re all hollow as far as I’m concerned.
• BTW, all we watch is the Olympics. Women’s beach volleyball (especially in the white outfits) is omfgawesome. Thank GOD for high definition TV.
• Rock on Michael Phelps. That 4×100 relay against the mouthy French had me jumping up and down shouting at my TV when Valerie and I saw it live.
• I can’t think of anything else. I just watched Nastia Liukin try to hold back tears after finding out that she’s the silver medalist because of some stupid fucking gymnastics rules, and now I’m all pissed again. Just like I was last night when Alecia Sacramone got robbed of a medal. It’s one of the reasons I hate gymnastics. No one ever “wins” like in swimming or track, you could be perfect and at the mercy of the judges, or totally blow it and knock yourself out of contention. It’s one of the reasons I hate watching golf on TV. Where is the fun in watching someone blow it? Everyone is so damn good that winning and losing is often determined by who doesn’t fuck up. Screw that.

And I’m spent. Here’s to more posting, you better bet your socks on it.

I’ve linked two clips meant to be played back-to-back from last Monday’s Colbert Report that are, quite possibly, the funniest 4 minutes in TV history. So sit back, take 4 minutes out of your day and prepare to enjoy the comedy brilliance that is Stephen Colbert. I mean, is there a reason why anyone would not watch his show? You can catch the entire thing online the next day if you missed it, and Comedy Central replays yesterday’s episode the next day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. It’s brilliant. My wife has stated that she’d leave me for Stephen Colbert, and to be quite honest I can’t blame her. He’s one sexy dude. One sexy dude who loves America. Amen.

Normally, I would post on the blog whenever something noteworthy happens in our lives, but I’m also keenly aware that people get kinda bored reading about David post after post after post. Heck, even I get tired of it. You’d think that we did nothing but fawn over our son on a day to day basis, so enraptured are we with his growth and development that we parade him on this site, thinking that everyone else wants to see him as much as we love him.

I’m pragmatic. I know that it’s gotta bore someone out there.

But, for those that do love the little guy, here’s a quick update:

• David had his first tooth poke out of his lower gumline. It’s now pretty clearly visible, along with his second bottom tooth. He was unnaturally fussy and clingy both days that a tooth broke the gumline, so that was our biggest indication that he was teething (along with him vigorously muching on anything he could get his hands on).
• We’ve started him on semi-solid foods, mostly rice cereals mixed with breastmilk or baby formula. Today Valerie tried to feed him some mushed peaches (baby food) and David did not like it, a few times he visibly retched and coughed whenever we tried to give it to him. We’ll probably try mixing the food in with the bland rice cereal to mute it down and see if he takes it that way.
• David is learning to crawl. He can successfully navigate himself up on his knees now, but he doesn’t move the legs to facilitate motion, he just straightens his legs out and plops back down. Occasionally he’ll dig a toe or two into the carpet and propel himself forward that way, but he also hasn’t learned to move his hands forward, so he winds up doing a face/chin plant into the carpet. Then, once on the carpet again, he’ll pull his legs underneath him and work his way up to his starting position again. It’s rather hilarious, and I got some video of him trying to scoot that I’ll have to put up here.

Ok, now that the obligatory David portion our lives is documented and open for commenting, here are a few quick-hit personal rants and thoughts that I have to get off of my chest:

• Children are always there. You can’t turn them off, give them away, or inflict your will upon them (unless you’re a sociopath, but then you shouldn’t be procreating you bastard). Sometimes all a man wants to do is sleep.
• Children are like an anchor to the ship of spontaneity.
• Valerie and I are seriously considering getting new kitchen countertops like Taylor and Anita did. We’re sick of ours and want them gone.
• Mankind needs to come up with a way of eliminating dust. Seriously. Shit’s annoying.
• The entire northside of Atlanta sucks. What a fucking suburban zoning nightmare.
• A car trip with an infant sucks so much that Valerie and I are considering buying Valerie a ticket and having her fly to future vacation destinations.
• I still hate SUVs. I hate how much room they take in a parking lot. I hate not being able to see around them. I hate them, period.
• You wont see me complaining about work, except when something totally out of the realm of ordinary daily bullshit occurs.
• Join twitter, fools, and tweet shit. It’s fun to read.
• I need a new wardrobe. I have, like, zero clothes, and shopping for clothing is depressing and expensive.
• I want a garage, so that I can get a new car and park it in there.
• Assassin’s Creed is fantastic. It’s rare you see a game that’s a stealth game that’s fun to play and exists in a fully realized world that is almost NEVER depicted in any type of media.
• When Barack Obama voted for that POS FISA legislation that Bush signed into law last Thursday, he lost my respect. Especially when he said he’d vote against it.
• This is one of the coolest things I’ve read about in a long time. I wish I could play with them.
• Oh, Chris. Call me when you can build me one of these.  kk, thanks, mr woodworker extraordiaire.
• Pidgin users: Pidgin stores your passwords in plain text, should you choose to save your passwords. The only thing that’s protecting them is a hidden .purple directory. Don’t believe me? Check the accounts.xml file in the .purple directory for yourself.
• Oh, and Brett Favre. I know you’re awesome, but each time I think about you wanting to come back to football, all I have to do is look at this picture to remind me of why you should stay retired.

And I’m spent. I had more, but I tend to forget it all when it comes time to put finger to keyboard and start typing. I hate it when that happens.

I’m featuring video of David in his high chair, chatting us up as Valerie and I enjoyed dinner one night. He was pretty psyched to be in it, and to be able to see us eat, and is still a big fan of it. If you’re curious, we got the booster seat-type high chair rather than the standalone version. The booster seat type can be setup and removed (and taken with us if needed) and isn’t absolutely massive. It’s a win-win, seriously. When you have kids, you have to think about these sorts of things 

On another note, last night David got his first tooth to break the gumline. He had been fussy all day, which wasn’t his normal mood, and late that night when I was browsing information on Diablo 3 (which looks omfgwtfbbq awesome btw) he jams my finger into his mouth, and I FEEL the sharp pointy surface of the tooth. Sure enough, after some ghetto dentistry to see for ourselves, he’s got a tooth that’s busted out and on its way to being visible. Yep, so breastfeeding has just been given a deadline to irreverancy, and now my pocketbook is going to suffer from having to buy this human eating machine food to sustain his rapid growth. Ugh.

Enjoy the video.

Last week Valerie, David and I headed out to Hilton Head Island for a week of relaxing, beach and seafood oriented fun. We headed out with Valerie’s parents as well as her brother and his girlfriend, and stayed in a 3 bedroom condo overlooking the beach.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I will bullet point the highlights and other random assorted thoughts and ideas from the vacation, our first of the year.

• Why do people from Ohio flock to Hilton Head? Why? Go away already, Ohio sucks.
• We had 8 days of perfect sunny not-too-hot weather to sit on the beach and bake and enjoy the surf and ocean.
• I ate seafood for 7 of the 8 days there. I can’t take anymore shrimp. Bubba Gump didn’t each as many shrimp as I did.
• It took me 2 or 3 days to truly wind down and drop work like a bad habit. After that I was able to really relax and enjoy the vacation and not worry about work.
• David was extremely well behaved, and he managed to steal his uncle’s girlfriend away from him during the trip. But David was fussy whenever we tried to go out to dinner, as well as during the trip down and back home. Gone are the days of a sleepy David during dinnertime.
• We hit some sort of prehistoric bug on our way down that got lodged in our windshield wipers, legs half through the gaps in the blade, all fucked up and huge. It provided us some measure of amusement during our drive.
• Sand gets everywhere. On everything. It’s inescapable, and after a while you forget it’s there.
• Since we had rented a condo, we wound up buying a bunch of food early on in the week to take with us to the beach, as well as to snack on and eat when we weren’t eating out, but on Thursday we went on some sort of berserk eating frenzy and ate everything in sight. It sucked come Friday and there was nothing to eat. Despite this, I think I gained 4 to 6 pounds from my gluttonous approach to dining that week.
• Because Hilton Head was so awesome, we may do a trip to Destin again this year, in late summer, to recapture the glory of beach life (and provide a welcome respite from work).

I’ll post up some pics of the trip when I get home, but if the email I sent to colleagues on Friday was any indication, I don’t think you’ll care to look through them. For the record, I got 2 “I hate you” and 1 “fuck off and die” responses back from my email of me smiling on the beach.