3.14 = Fear

The pie is cooked. If I had exchanged "The" for "Your" there, it would sound kind of noirish. "Your pie is cooked kid, see? You gotta scram and scram fast!"

The pie is cooked and now the waiting begins. And I question myself. Will it be good? Did I use too much sugar? Not enough? More spices, maybe? Why aren't I a better parent? What's this thing on my nipple? Why do we own so many fucking cats?  I've had difficulty with pies in the past.

I'm hopeful for this one. Apple, of course. I was hopeful for the last two as well though, and those ended up pie tragedies. There were angry, jonesing, diabetics picketing the house to ask us how we could do such a thing to pie.

But still I hope because as the Torah says, "Every ThanksGiving is a new chance to eat pie." Except, in Hebrew. Which I would lay on you cats here, but our keyboard doesn't have Hebrew keys. Anti-semetic keyboard.

Happy Thanksgiving bloggy people. Gorge well.

HM

My Love Done Gone Away

A glass of Skinny Girl Sangria by Bethany Frankel. An old Celtics game on tv. Next stop, the cover of Classy Dad magazine.

Can anyone tell me what the above combination signifies?

A. I am relaxing after finishing my set at the local female impersonator club. I do Imogene Coca.

B. I just love thinking about Larry Bird and Bethany Frankel together. It just makes me happy, you know?

C. My wife isn't here tonight.


If you picked A and C, you left out B.

My woman up and gone to St. Louis. She heard that big river calling'. And also a teacher conference type thing. And also she wants to be known as The Queen of BBQ Ribs. She'll be back Friday.

I miss her. So do the kids. There was crying that could only be staunched by a parent's love applied through ice cream. The kids cried too. Then they made me pretend to be her while they pretended to be the ones going to St. Louis. They made sure I/she felt it. "I'm going to St. Louis for fifty days!" exclaimed the Peanut at one point. That doesn't sound fun to me.

The house feels empty without her. I'm a little lonely even with the kids. It's too quiet. And I can't even watch the Wire. That just wouldn't be right. Hence, I'm hanging with the Frankel. "Got cankles? Drink Frankel!" is what her slogan should be.

I'm going to try to keep us all out of the house and busy while My wife is gone. Lots of park trips, a little shopping, library, tax attorney's office, a showing of Paranormal 3, MMA match.

I know it's best for all of us, a little time apart. Time to miss each other. A chance for the kids to see their mother travel and understand it's a common, attainable thing. And it's something she needs to do for work.

Still, all in all, I'd rather be watching the Wire.

Miss you my love.

Catmandu and other Cat Puns

There are a lot of cats here in my little city. Feral cats. I was going to say that there are cats everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE, but that kind of hyperbole  . . . one could be lead to believe that I as I type this, I have a feral cat in my pants. Which I don't right now.

There are many feral cats here. In the city, I mean. Not my pants. More than the average amount of obviously feral cats for a small city. This winter there was a gang of them trolling near our block. I saw them appear through a crevasse in a giant snowbank, seven of them, in single file. As I watched from my car I opined, "What the fuck is this?" They followed the leader right through a path in the snowbank across the street. Filthy, bedraggled, feral, cats.

Remember the Disney movie "The Aristocats?" These cats would've showed up, beat, murdered, and intimidated the Aristocats out of their own territory, moved in, and set up shop selling drugs. Coke and heroin mostly, with a healthy side business in "the 'Nip."

They are dirty, disheveled, disdainful looking animals, But they're still cats so when I see them a little part pf me still goes "Awwwww. So cute!"

It can't be a positive sign of wellbeing for the city."Roving gangs of murderous drug dealing cats," doesn't exactly say "cosmopolitan" right?  You never talk to people who go on and on about how they, "visited Madrid and it was sooo amaaaazing. The Royal Palace was beautiful. And all those feral cats! Breathtaking."

That ends this presentation of, "The Wonders of Everett." Tune in next week for, "What's up with the lack of trashcans?"

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Just want to take a moment here to mention Movember. I participated last year, and I wanted to this year, but I just couldn't come up with a good idea for the plate. Haven't mentioned it before because the guilt. Oy, the guilt.

What I will do in this space is push the hell out of the page all the Dads over at Dadcentric, as well as Dad 2.0, Man Of The House, NYC Dads Group, and Dadlabs... ... have ready for your donations.

Movember. Grow a mustache, fight Cancer.

Wired

We're finished. Screwed. A friend from my wife's workplace brought over the first season of The Wire Saturday night. We're now 8 shows in. I've moved The Pman's potty into the living room so we don't have to leave the tv and at 2pm in the afternoon in my house you can hear conversations between myself and the kids like, "Well sweetie, they had to kill him because he was a fucking rat. You gotta kill a fucking rat." I think the kids are handling it well. The Pman keeps telling us his name is Omar and the Peanut has us all using beepers.

We've been watching The Wire, and we're fans of Walking Dead. And, after one and a quarter seasons of the latter and 8 episodes of the former, I can safely say I'd much rather face a Zombie apocalypse than live in the projects of Baltimore. You know the difference between a junky and a zombie? Junkies don't crave brains.

Speaking of The Walking Dead, if anyone out there watches it, please explain to me how the farm girl who rode into the forest on a horse and exploded a zombie's melon with a baseball bat could suddenly get all squeamish while watching one get bashed in the face with a crowbar? Does not make sense. Show shit the bed on that one.

Too much tv around here right now, I guess.

HM

Hard Lessons

Today in my house we learned a lesson. If you don't want to cleant that shit up, don't do that shit.

We have a set of plastic bins from Target. Don't mean to brag. We have a set of colorful plastic bins from Target in which a lot of the kids' smaller toys are stored. Blocks, dolls, fake food and plates, old pay as you go cell phones, poker chips, empty cigarette boxes, bottle caps, 3 penny nails, mercury. You know.

I heard the sound of thousands of tiny plastic pieces hitting a hardwood floor. "Are you dumping out the bins?" I asked rhetorically. "Complete Silence!" They answered. I asked again. "Yeah but, we're using them for some lunatic pre-schooler made-up game reason!"

"OK," I said,. "But if you empty out all the bins, that means you are going to be doing a lot of cleaning up later. Ok?"

"Ok," they replied with confidence.

I drove my point home annoying parent style. I went around the corner, got them looking at me, and repeated myself in a voice that was still at the same volume it had been when I was a room away. With an added threat, "You guys will have to clean it up all yourselves."

"Ok," They answered brusquely. They were a little annoyed now because some loud moron kept moving closer and closer to them, repeating himself as he went. I don't blame them.

"Alright," I answered with all the arrogance of someone who knows he's about to be right and can't wait to get there. Parents really do suck.

And so it happened. I gave them a 15 minute warning. Ten. Five. 2. One and a half minutes. 47 seconds. 31. 19. 11.  You can tell I'm getting mad when I slip into prime numbers

They were shocked when I started yelling. Shocked. But to their credit they dug in and tried not to get the job done.

I helped, of course. I put the bins back in the rack. put a few toys in each so they would have an idea of what went there. Had their hands replaced with rakes. To little avail.

When it's time to clean up around here, you have two choices. Clean-up and win first prize. 15 minutes of tv or a treat, maybe both on a good day. Second prize is, your fired. There are no steak knives.

So clean up or go to time-out and if you continue to fuck around, you go to bed.

The P-Man never had a chance. There was a carpet of foot hurting, over-priced, beloved pieces of plastic from one end of the room to the other. Probably thousands of pieces. He tried for a little while. He failed. Time-out, back up from the time-out, five minutes of cleaning, bedtime. He cried for about 5 minutes and then passed out. Couldn't. Handle. The Clean-up.

The Peanut continued. Alone against a sea of junk. I let her go for a bit by herself. Then I pitched in. We finished up and went off to collect her prizes. She was so proud of herself. "I did it all by myself. daddy!"

"Bullshit!" I did not reply. But I could've. I was well within my rights. It was cool how proud of herself she was for cleaning up her own mess. It was a gargantuan task. I just hope that feeling of pride doesn't backfire when she gets older.

"Yeah daddy, I was shitfaced and I hit this guy dead on. But instead of driving away, I stopped, collected the body and took it home. A skil saw and some lime later, and boom, no more body! I cleaned it up all by myself!"

Of course, I'd still be proud of her.

HM