Now that the kids are older and either moved out or are often out, Marty and I are edging our way into those scary waters where a couple has just one another to talk to. When I was younger, I thought this period would resemble life before having kids. Light. Carefree. Easy. In some ways, it is, but when you have sent children you love more than you thought possible into the world, I think my mind ...
After her morning shower, Marty dashes to the basement to get clean underwear. All she had on was a tank top. When she rounded the corner into the laundry room she saw anthony standing there, wearing only a hooded sweatshirt and, like her, no pants or underwear. Seeing his naked buttocks she pulled up and the following ensued.
Yesterday I talked about the challenging and rewarding parts of the deck project. Today let me share the most exciting part of the build. A few years ago, Marty got me a GoPro for Christmas. It was a great gift and something I often use. I record everything from tennis matches to family dinners. A new thing I've been using it for is to make time lapses of work I do. ...
Alex would not be described as an outdoorsman. He lands squarely in the home-body category and this includes even staying inside his home. This became a conversation point at a family dinner. We were telling Alex he needed to get out more. Get some exercise. Get some sun. When the sun topic came up, the following exchange took place.
MARTY
You should sit outside everyday for fifteen ...
I was in my home-office talking with Marty when the phone rang. It showed bookpimp's name as the caller. I hit the button to answer it on speaker so he and marty could chat as well.
TROY
Hello Michael Engelbrecht.
BOOKPIMP
Hello Troy DeArmitt.
TROY
Hey, don't say anything incriminating because my girl's here.
the holiday season is upon us which means an uptick in our social get togethers. as has been discussed previously, i am always on the lookout for great questions to be asked of people i meet. the safest and most productive question i've ever run across is simply "What are your interest?" versus the american staple "what do you do?" which is one of the worst possible questions for a whole variety of reasons. the "interests" question should get any conversation moving and if it does not, like they say they have no interest, then you know to cut bait (fast) and mingle your way to the next party-goer.
should that fail or you already used that question on someone at last year's party, i've got a new one for you to churn the conversational waters. the question is: what is your most memorable moment from last year?
i've been using this for a bit and it is raw, uncut gold. but brace yourself because this simple query can lead anywhere. expect everything from the mundane (i finally got a promotion i've been wanting) to the fascinating (i dissected a human cadaver) to the tragic (i lost my mother). aside from the mundane, which can usually offer something with some work (do you think there is antying you could have done to get the promotion sooner?), you are assured of avoiding re-hashing people's netflix queues, pop music taste and favorite eateries.
while the cadaver conversation was extraordinary, my favorite detail from this young medical student was about the initial moments of the experience. upon first seeing the body she described the confusing blend of panic and fascination but the dominant memory was hearing a student behind her sobbing as the dissection began.
the downside of this new super-question is holiday parties are not long enough to fit everyone in. i could have talked to cadaver-girl for three hours and not have even been close to done and there were twenty more people to get to.
as mentioned yesterday, i recently took a road trip. it is an annual trip east i have been taking since the kids got old enough they did not require a full-time staff of two. on this trek i visit friends and family and since starting the company, i mix a work stop or two along the way. the time for me is restorative and joyful and one of my favorite annual traditions (amidst many).
this year i got ambitious and over-planned the week, seeking to milk every day and hit every drivable connection. after getting home-sick i decided to trim a bit off the end and head home a full day early. in thinking on it further i thought i had a neat opportunity to surprise my family with a premature return (because we do like surprises: New Car Story).
so i planned my eleven hour drive out so i would arrive just before sunday dinner, fifteen minutes before to be precise. once home, i parked a few houses down the street to walk the last bit (so no one accidentally spied my car out front). using my cell, i called our home line and got marty. we exchanged hellos and then i said that i might not be home on monday night. there was a long pause. i knew her mind had already started thinking through the implications of me being a day late since the kids were to start school on tuesday. as she processed the news, i walked through the front door. i found bella knitting on the living room couch. on seeing me she dropped her needles shot her arms into the air and bellowed, "dad's home!!!".
i walked into the breakfast room in time to see marty hanging up the phone. she turned and gave me a wry smile. after separating from our hug i asked if i was going to find a shirtless college boy or two jumping out of our bedroom window. she said i would not, they left earlier in the day.
do you know how if you ever click on something in amazon, then all the amazon-suggestions and even sidebar ads on other websites tend to be related to what you looked at/for on amazon? marty knows. marty knows because she was looking for new underwear and accidentally clicked on a pair of crotchless panties. ever since that inadvertant selection, those curiously designed pantaloons have been chasing her all over the web.
if asked why she would ever click on that, with an exasperated huff she replies, "it was a small thumbnail, i couldn't tell what they were and they looked weird, so i clicked". our eleven year-old anthony can attest to this confusion as he saw them pop up while using marty's computer to renew some books at the library. he pointed at the screen and asked his mother, "mom, what's wrong with these underwear, that lady's butt is falling out of them".
the above picture shows anthony sitting on the front of a slow moving house boat. the lapping waves occassionally slapping the tops of his feet. he's been sitting there almost twenty minutes and seems rather transfixed by it all. it is worth nothing that alex is the one driving the boat so both of our boys are making the most of this new experience. at some point during anthony's reverie a woman o ...
we have had car trouble in our last two long-distance family vacations. the second instance left us stuck in sidney, nebraska for two days. technically we broke down on the highway twenty miles past sidney but it was the closest town with a aaa-recommended garage. as we were figuring out what to do, marty told me that there was a Cabelas there which is one of those big outdoor sporting stores like...
i'm not much an april fool's guy but i can appreciate a clever and well executed prank. here is one of my recent favorites.
everything starts kinda fast but the the thing to know on this is that this college teacher has a class rule that if your phone rings in class you have to answer it on speaker. hijinks ensue.
for my birthday bookpimp sent me a dvd of a tv series called Going Deep with David Rees. he said he thought my family might enjoy it. he was right. my family does enjoy it. but my wife enjoys it more than all of us combined. there is something about david's manner and delivery that absolutley destroys my wife so much so she has almost (1) spit out her drink (2) passed out from not being able to get her breath from laughing and (3) even coming dang close to peeing herself from laughter. so thanks bookpimp for hooking us up so. and for the record when marty gets laughing that hard we pause the show (because her laughing so is distracting) and we all just turn and watch her reeling on the couch holding her stomach (or her other parts).
in honor of marty's birthday today i'm sharing part of her all-time-favorite episode: the party hole.
it makes dirty clothes on the bathroom floor seem tame, maybe even welcome
i found a pair of bella's underwear in the dining room.
when i opened the silverware drawer in the butler's pantry, i found a pair of anthony's pajamas stuffed towards the back.
no comments were made though until we found one of alex's socks pulled over the doorknob of our home's front door. marty pointed at the sock and asked me if that meant one of the boys were having sex upstairs and we should proceed with caution.
i thanked her for suggesting it was one of the boys and not my only daughter.
i promised answers to the jokes posted last week. here they are:
ANTHONY question: how do you tell if you have a dumb dog? answer: he only chases parked cars note: saying the word 'parked' proved quite effortful for anthony and caused a lot of people to scrunch their faces in thought while they ran through the options. it was neat seeing the moment they got it as their countenance relaxed going from strain to smile.
ALEX question: what do you call an elephant in the arctic? answer: lost note: i continue to marvel how easily alex carries himself with strangers. in the early days he seemed to be a guy who would be forever fearful and intimdated by unknown folks, especially grown up ones, but recent years have exposed a quiet charisma in him that is so unassuming it for-sure sneaks up on most people.
BELLA question: what do you ghouls and ghosts wear? answer: boo-ties note: while you might have expected more from bella, on this day, all her focus is given to better, faster coverage of the homes she hopes to hit. i need to tell her that some people reward smart jokes with extra candy.
BONUS:
while trying to find their jokes last week, here's a riddle the kids stumped me with.
you go into the woods and get it
you sit down to search for it
and you bring it home with you because you can't find it?
what is it?
i'll let that slide through your fingers for a bit before the reveal.
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence
New York City, April 4, 1967
and for those who are more hankering for a chicken mcNugget:
Wife texts husband on a cold winter's morning: Windows frozen, won't open.
Husband texts back: Gently pour some lukewarm water over it.
Wife texts back 5 minutes later: Computer really screwed up now.
the director of my office sent an email to our young, female center coordinator. in the message he meant to request the following.
i need you to please contact the editors of the following journals.
instead his email read
i need you to please the editors of the following journals.
when i arrived at the office, because of the dropped 'contact', the recipient of the message read the sentence to me, asking what she should do. before i had time to respond a graduate student in our space who overheard the question said, "the only proper response is to write back and ask if you can please them one at a time or have to please them all at once."
this was far more entertaining than anything i had planned.
if you're not laughing routinely, you're not listening hard enough
"i had to ride my bike home with a stapler in my underwear."
marty's response to the question of how her day went.
there's a saying that kids say the funniest/darnedest things. there should be another saying that says kids make parents say the funniest/darnedest things.
our house has a swear jar. anyone caught using swears (e.g. damn, shit) or even simple potty words, sometimes called bathroom words, (e.g. penis, butt, nummers) may be called out and penalized. i know many homes with growing children employ this tactic to bring awareness to the use of such words, attempting to make their children more aware of their place in the vocabulary/society. our operation has the slight twist to typical installments in that bella began and governs our swear jar. what drove bella to this drastic, even if unoriginal (unless your qualify a child starting it), response is she is the last one in our house to giggle at creatively blended strings of potty words or lavishly crafted scenarios about bathroom happenings by her two younger brothers ... or her father ... and even sometimes her mother.
many a night bella has sat at the dinner table appalled at her brothers conversation and hysterical laughing at some extra-juvenile story. when she looks to me to correct and scold the boys, she may find me laughing right along side or even congratulating one of their boys for their detailed recounting. extra-exasperated she turns to her gender-comrade in arms only to find her with her head bowed and a hand covering her face trying to hide her laughter. in one of these moments bella, with all but a fist slamming on the table, called our behavior outrageous, and wholly embarrassing, and what if she had a friend over, and then she declared that going forward, people caught using such words, especially at our family dinner table, would have to pay a penalty, the amount to be determined by the offended party. i broke the unusually long post-proclamation silence (in an equally unoriginal move) by pledging five dollars to this swear jar and told bella to see my people when the balance was exhausted. more hysterics. while she didn't appreciate the added laughter she was quick and glad to accept her foundation's first funds.
it time, and after seeing she intended on enforcing her policy, after she'd announce something like, "ok alex. you owe the swear jar seventy five cents for that story" i came to the aid of my family. using my paternal authority, i proclaimed an amendment to the swear jar mandate. it was this: if the person telling the story can make bella laugh while using an offending word, the teller doesn't have to pay the fine. at first bella said fine because she would not laugh at such childish attempts at humor. but what she didn't prepare herself for was how the tales and descriptions would grow, as a desperate storyteller fought to get bella to crack a smile. the details became wild and grandiose and the imitations of sounds and shrieks became remarkably believable and piercing. this extra effort has saved the accused many a coin as for all bella's propriety and blossoming maturity, she too is a storyteller at heart and can't help but appreciate a good and spirited yarn full of juicy words and pulsing images.
i may have been the only guy in st louis who was hoping texas would win game seven. my logic, the cardinals got game six, it only seemed fair and just to give the series to the never-won rangers. that way everyone walks away with a positive. but it was not to be. in honor of their effort, allow me to share my all-time favorite texas-related string of words. it is a bit of advice from a texas father to his boy.
Son, it is very rude to ask a man where he is from. If he is from Texas, you will find out, and if he's not, don't embarrass him.
from a 1944 pro-texas booklet called Texas Brags that was put together by a fella named john randolph. i came upon it in a recent new york times magazine.
