Welcome to malshag.org, the chronicles of our growing family consisting of several humans, six dogs, two cats, some reptiles and a gay rhino.
L decided three weeks ago he had had enough of this sitting stuff, and decided to stand up. Luckily, I had my camera handy.
Since the evening standup, he’s also become quite a fan of walking while pushing his truck thing across the floor. He “parks” it against the baby gate or the coffee table, and stands there slamming it into the furniture over and over again.
A little update on the updates to our 1960s ranch house. When we first moved in, we ripped up the nasty teal green carpet and found water damage and nasty linoleum. After replacing a section of subfloor, we decided to paint the linoleum to at least seal the nastiness until we could put proper flooring down. We picked up a few gallons from Sears, and they tinted it Smurf blue.
After promising ourselves for months on end we’d put the floor down “really soon”, and then getting married, going through pregnancy, and having L, we got off our butts and took care of it. E’s sister and her husband J were gracious enough to lend a big hand.
The obvious quick choice was laminate, for cost and ease of installation.
Installing the laminate with two people made all the difference in the world. With J and I alternating tasks between cutting and positioning, we got the whole room done in half a day, with a break for sandwiches halfway through.
I can’t say emphatically enough that I was so glad we a) spent the $20-$30 and bought a good laminate installation kit (tapping block, metal L tap pull, and spacers) and b) asked at Lowe’s for the correct blade for the mitre saw that’s used to cut laminate. It made the job 900% more mistake-free.
We were sad to see the Smurf blue floor go, but are very pleased with the finished product. If we could do it again, we would have bought the thickest underlayment we could afford, to eliminate some of the classic laminate tap tapping noise you hear while walking across the floor.
The next steps to finish this room are to replace the trim and baseboards with something more flat, give the walls some paint, and install a few can lights.
The huge storm a month ago left us with David Lynch-style power problems. Turning on the microwave made the lights dim. Running the air conditioning at the same time as the dryer caused a worse brownout. Those two coupled with the dishwasher caused damn near candlelight dimness in the house.
I finally called the power company and reported flickering lights. I accompanied the repairman to the back of the house, where he immediately noticed that the neighbor’s ridiculously overhanging tree had severed our neutral power wire. He hacked off some branches and hooked us back up.
In the process, I noticed that our fence was split in the corner, on the same neighbor’s side of the house. Since our dogs have the free run of the yard, this needed to be immediately corrected. E walked around to the neighbor’s side of the fence. This weirdo has had enormous street light poles on his side of the fence for as long as we’ve lived here. Though they were disgusting to look at, c’est la vie. When we looked at the poles from his side of the fence, they were not only freestanding and not screwed into the ground, they were secured with wire to our fence posts. The weight of the poles over time had finally yanked our fence apart.
We were fuming, and fought with this guy to have this stuff immediately corrected. I screwed a two by four to the side of the fence that was split and secured it quite well. In the meantime, the guy took down the street light posts, and despite our insistence that he use our lawn guy for the tree trimming, decided to trim the thing himself.
Everything has been corrected and our power has been restored, but I’ve never seen anything more terrifying than our neighbor standing on the very top of an extension ladder dangling between thick power lines trying to cut tree branches with a Sawzall.
L now fancies himself a man of leisure, and sits around in his diaper working on his truly formidable moustache.
Initially we told him he looks a bit like Dick Dastardly, of Dastardly and Muttly fame. Failing to procure any TNT or flying machines to fit into character, he grew discouraged and decided instead to heighten his aspirations to even bigger whiskers.
He’s settled on a full blown Wizard of Oz moustache, aligning his countenance with something a little more his size and build. He crawls around the floor with his little adornment, purposely overpronouncing the word “MOO-stache”.
I try to laugh about it and not egg him on, instead telling him that getting a job would take away some of that extra free time he seems to have so much of.
Any woman in the throes of pregnancy will be happy to point out that during this miraculous forty weeks, their hair gets much thicker, more luxurious, and grows more quickly than ever before. Pregnancy books always include this little morsel of information for first time moms looking for a bright spot amidst the ten month sea of vomit and back pain. What seems to be an undiscussed portion of this particular change in the woman’s physical realm, is where the hair goes after the birth. The answer? Everywhere.
I began to notice it when my son was a month old. Stray hairs began to appear on the kitchen counter, the foot of the bed, and the dashboard of the car. Hair materialized near the toaster, the fax machine, and the houseplants. Long hairs wrapped around my car keys, curled up in the wells of my contact lens case, stuck halfway deep in the open tube of toothpaste.
Four months into my angelic son’s little life, our house was enveloped in hair. It was as if the strands had a collective consciousness and were drawn by magnet to the places we held most hygienically dear. I couldn’t escape the feeling, at times, of being watched.
My wife’s final follicle-filled shower found her plowing through her tresses with a fine toothed comb, vigorously swirling large resultant wads on the wet wall of the shower to mark the downfall of her thick, shiny mane. As I passed by the clear curtain, I jumped at what I thought to be a small otter plastered to the side of the tub, ready to do evil furry otter things. She turned the water off, picked up the large lump of hair carcass, plopped it in the small garbage can under the sink, and sighed a deep sigh of satisfaction.
Aside from a replacement drive belt for the vacuum, there are no remnants of our Poltergeist-ish encounter with one of the dark sides of pregnancy. The endless locks that infiltrated our poor home with their many tentacles have receded somehow into the void. I can be sure, however, that during the pregnancy period of our second child, any even comical mention of hair growth will rob me of a little sleep that night.
I’ve talked for ages about how I’m going paperless, to the point it might as well be a New Year’s Resolution. But after month after month of scenes like the one above, I’m fed up enough to fulfill my own wish.
In the past, there were a few stumbling blocks in my way, that have all been recently resolved.
First, more and more companies are archiving statements online in .pdf format, and allowing completely paperless billing solutions. This will cut down drastically on the amount of papers that actually need scanning, and reduce my endless procrastination on what before seemed a hopelessly unattainable goal.
Second, I bit the bullet and acknowledged that our HP All-in-One printer/fax/scanner/copier is actually good enough to do the job, if I don’t put overbearing time constraints on this project.
Third, I broke down and invested in a redundant storage solution. After tossing a number of ideas around and reading reviews, I went with the D-Link DNS-321 NAS, and two 500G hard drives in a RAID 1 array.
Lastly, I was informed that our city dump has an absolutely enormous shred-it-yourself shredder to get rid of all the resultant unneeded paper.
I’ve still got some dread about wading through years of paperwork and sheet-feeding endless bills and receipts, but possibly eliminating the need for a file cabinet is truly exciting. The key is going to be whether or not I can scan papers and dispose of them faster than they are coming in the house.