so swollen genitalia are a possible side effect of the latter parts of pregnancy. comes with the territory, the cool-doc said.

it's hard to feel poorly for pregnant women because as a male, i've struggled with swollen genitalia syndrome for going on twenty years now.

this has been brought to you from the 'things you possibly didn't know about pregnant women or troy' file.

i figure i ask everyone to make themselves vulnerable and submit to and compete in the everyman, yet i've never put any of my stuff up for like judgment. so i decided to enter my first photo contest. the maiden test, my community's 35th annual amateur competition.

the awards ceremony happened saturday and in my category (local city theme) i won second place. oh, and i also won first place. my reaction, blown away. my prizes, a couple a hundred bucks in loot and the possibility of one (or more) of my photos appearing in next year's city calendar, which is somewhat cooler than the jack itself.

as for my confidence level, you can possibly intuit something since i didn't mention this before the judging took place. but, the real question is, would i have said anything had i not placed.

if you're curious about the pictures, this is what took first and this is what took second. i know i kinda cheated by using bella in the second place photo. the judges stood no kinda chance denying that little beauty anything. the only shock is that it didn't place higher than the other one.

and, not that i went there looking for this, but i did hear a few grumblings in the room about the selected photos. while i'm sure they weren't talking about my entries, it was an odd relief to see that the everyman is not the only contest that gets beat up when all is said and done.

nose spray. ever since moving to saint louis some odd decade ago, nasal sprays have been a dear friend of mine. as my nose would clog due to allergies in this humid climate i would without hesitation hit the bottle as it were. as years and use continued my adherence to the dosage directions wandered. wandered to the point that after a rather long binge recently i took a moment to see how far out of bounds i had traveled and discovered that i was taking hits at twice the recommended rate for twice as long as one is supposed to in a continual fashion, without consulting a physician at least.

its juju. did you ever wonder how this delightful mist works? you simply shoot a jet or two or five up your nose and SHABBAM!!! your clogged cavities stretch wide and breath deep, welcoming that demanding oxygen once again. the drug's magic is in a chemical that forces your nasal cavities to recoil like a slug to salt, thus creating the open airways no matter how much congestion stands behind them.

the burn. what i learned through overuse is that your sinuses become reliant on the chemical agents not only to expand but ultimately to even maintain their usual pathways. if carpet-bombed enough your nasal thoroughfares become accustomed to this forced retraction and without it will eventually collapse on themselves causing clogged airways even after your ailment subsides. but don't sweat it too much because in as many days as it took you to create this confusion your sinuses will recover and regain their composure, returning to their original state.

as my brother-in-law says, i take double the recommended dosage so you don't have to.

as per usual buddy james takes what is already good and makes it better as seen in this email excerpt referring to yesterday's post. we best not get into how buddy james has such carnal knowledge of this little known fact about myself.

i was part of a conversation with someone recently (i can't remember who) where they were asking/wondering what one's skin would look like if it hadn't been abused by the sun for however long they have been abusing it by the sun. the listener told the curious one to drop their pants and look at their ass-skin in a mirror because this is most likely their last frontier free of skin-damage.

having done this easy-enough test i found that if i were to mimic the skin on my left cheek over my entire body, i would have many more tiny, pointed pimples than i presently do. i'd also have a stray and wispy hair about every four square inches. so my sun worship is back on. in fact, i may need to upgrade my tanning bed privileges given this new window into the world of 'what-could-be'.

and the record remains unblemished; i've yet to meet a drunk guy i've liked.

as noted yesterday i recently purchased an electric toothbrush. something i didn't mention is that another thing i'm doing now is i read the instructions for things that i buy. i haven't done that since i could make noise with my armpit. and i couldn't read before that. if you do the math that does mean i've never read instructions.

not only am i now reading the instructions, i'm heeding them. for instance point five from the braun people reads:

5. never drop or insert any object into any openings.

the problem is they do not specifically apply this tenet to their product. therefore, i'm forced to take it as general advice. one would think they might say "do not insert this item into electrical outlets, lest you may have a bad day" or "do not prod humans smaller than you with this device because that would pretty much make you a dick and karma would dictate some larger human will later violate you in a like manner."

given my quandary, problems abound.

there are three garbage bags sitting NEXT to the dumpster behind my house. they're mine. i put them there. i'm fearful of placing them INTO the actual dumpster.

a man pushed me at the ATM because i wouldn't put my card into the slot. he didn't even give me time to explain. he just called me a name involving the rather troglodytic term 'moron' and cut in line.

i've urinated on the bathroom floor eight times since getting my toothbrush. i have tried explaining the reason to marty, i even showed her the instruction pamphlet, which i now carry in my wallet for quick reference, but she just grabbed it from me, crumpled it in her raised fist, threw it back at me and told me to stop pissing on her floor.

i wrecked my car after swerving to avoid going through a tunnel and then almost got hit by another car once i realized i inserted myself in my car in the first place. that close shave knocked me out of my inserting things into other things stupor.

however, the instructions for some elbow patches i just bought tell me to never think about something i'm unaware of. this may get worrisome.

oh, and happy birthday to the raised fist one.

i've realized, only recently, that i have been abducted by aliens. i'm not sure how long it has been going on, only that is has been awhile. the signs were numerous but the course of events began so rapidly and mildly i was impotent to put it all together. but, this is how they want it.

the epiphany began after waking up from a dream where i was being escorted around by someone who knocked on doors after passing through them. i was then suddenly sitting in a diner, eating alone with my father. for those of you who know my father and i, know the plausibility of this, but you see, the aliens don't. they just know that this should be a viable combination. but we're unique like that. then a waitress moved to the middle of the serving floor raised one foot and passed some very audible gas. all the patrons in the restaurant looked up from the plates or conversations to stare at her and her looking back at them standing with one foot square on the ground and the other slightly raised, bent at the toe. has flatulence woke up bella. not in the dream but in real life, which woke me.

when i went to get up to get her i could not bend my arms. it was as though the joints were soldered and hence swollen and since rusted. but the elbow joint wouldn't give. i laid there for a moment, bella crying and me looking at my arms as they were magically held in invisible plaster paris, up and away from my body. i kept working them until the hold broke and i was able to begin slowly moving them. they were ginger all that day but getting better by the next.

after this, things started becoming more apparent to me.

first, this journal, for the last several months has primarily focused on aspects of the body. while this has long been a pastime of mine, it has been a little unbalanced as of late.

next, i bought an electric toothbrush. you see, this pulsating device of insertion had unknowningly become comforting to me, because of the experiments plied to my body by the guys who welded my elbows.

then there was the startling change in my behavior where i started getting up at 6:30. yes in the morning. to say this is unprecedented would be an insult to every instructor and employer who ever talked to me alone in their office about my loose definition of punctuality. (what is punctuality, really, if we think about it, is it real or is it simply imagined, and in the big and evolutionary picture, i'm really way early, all things considered?)

there's more, but i fear if i delve much deeper into my symptoms you may actually begin to believe me but i will mention one other aspect of this all just so you know the serious nature of my situation. i am actually doing work at work.

scared yet?

the bar scene. this is something i don't do a whole lot. correction, this is something i don't do at all. i used to but was broken by the spouse of one of marty's high school girlfriends. you've yet to meet the guy who could tell more stories about being smashed, hammered and wasted in a single sitting. he was your all-too typical card-carrying, ankle-tatooed, window-decaled, bulky sweatshirted fr...

our mailman smokes or rather chews a cigar while walking his route. he is a very affable guy and when we moved in he made it a point to come up and introduce himself. we religiously receive a christmas card from him, chat regularly, basically we're friendly.

sometimes if we have more stuff than will fit through the door's mail slot and the door is unlocked he will come in, go to the kitchen and set our mail on the counter and then leave as discreetly as he entered. i like this. it's a little bit of mayberry right here in the big city.

the other day he was bringing one such bundle in when he caught me home from work, heating a plate of leftovers in the oven and singing michaelpella-style to the stevie nicks melody Edge of Seventeen. ok, so getting caught doing the whole singing thing, pretty bad, but it was what i was doing while singing that proved the real burn. i have this condition where hearing stevie nicks makes me want to move and groove as she did in those long 70's flowing, tasseled dresses. unfortunately, in my homage, something doesn't properly translate. perhaps it's the undersized khakis, my awkward grinding motions or even the contorted faces i make when singing. bottom-line is it may look a tad off.

steve the mailman got a little more than he bargained for on this day.

on the positive side, at least it lessens the embarrassment of all the brown wrapper magazine and vhs sized parcels he delivers to my address.

note: it didn't occur to me until writing this up that i always thought the lyrics of this song said just like a one-winged dove instead of the more accurate and flight-worthy white-winged dove.

and for my lackadaisical postings this week, i'm givin' love with the above and this and this.

friday i had a to present an intranet design to my groups' primary client. all went well but the two-hour affair left me a touch on the spent side. so i left work a little early as to get a small nap in before the girls got home, only upon arriving home i found that my dsl provider severed my internet connection a full 10 days before they were supposed to as part of an 'upgrade' they are mandating on all customers.

16 hours later i was able to raise a web page again. i then went to check my mail only to find it equally disabled. i called them next. it would seem some moron was trying to send me a 260mb email. after further investigation it was discovered that that moron was me. at the end of every month i have my monthly logfile detailing this site's web activity emailed to me. this file is usually around 15mb, but after being linked to by jason kottke, metafilter, usa today and a south dakota 10 o'clock news show, this single text file came in at 260mb, which in itself exceeds my full web space allocation. and this does not even account for the rest of my site. ultimately this single large-ass item was rendering my mail file completely impotent. after 8 calls to my host, 6 attempts to kill the individual message, and three full deletions of my mail file, i can again receive mail.

the bad news is anyone who sent me any mail between friday afternoon and sunday evening will have to resend it should they want me to see it. the worse news is because of that mail fiasco which turned my 30mb mail file into a 1.5gb frankenstein, i have 25 days to get a 1.8gb daily space average down to under 250mb or else my usual $25.00 hosting fee will more resemble a meager $1800. and, i hope it goes without saying that the everyman prizes next year may suck worse than this weekend if i don't get that squared away on the quick.

and, i have a favor to ask of someone. if i prove unable to reduce this billing amount, i need someone to tell marty for me. someone who is big and strong and can run like the wind. a lesser man may not survive the deed.

a recent behavior being questioned, frowned upon and ridiculed by marty is how i've been wearing my sweaters as of late. first, we're all painfully aware by now that i have a tragically misshapen body. it is modeled, sadly, after my feet. my size 6 EEE feet. for those lacking visual aides, this would be square in proportion. given this, sweaters manufactured for the average human fit me more like an oversized and striped tube sock rather than a comfortably hanging and stylish winter garment. for this reason i must buy them bigger than my height might suggest. the shortcoming in this compromise is they are also much longer. to adjust for this i have taken to cuffing the waist band much like i do the wrist bands.

marty says this looks stupid. i contend that it also looks stupid to have one's sweater hang to some point between their groin and kneecaps, possibly more stupid in fact. i mean if you were to throw some ankle warmers on me i'm suddenly and very concisely transformed into every side-ponytailed aerobics instructor from the 80's. i gotta say i'm not budging on this one. partially because if i were to move too suddenly all the various pieces of debris that have collected in the cuffed hem of my sweater would be certain to spill onto my lap and about my feet. wanna talk about looking stupid.

there is this popular video tape for babies that we have. i'm not going to say which one, no point. at the end of the tape the video's creator comes on to say something or another about the merits of the program and why you should buy more of them. i've come into the habit of uttering a particular phrase whenever she graces the screen. what i say each and every time is "stripper gone good."

the reason is quite simple. this woman simply looks the part. she looks as though she once may have felt comfortable walking around on tables in skimpy garments until marrying a wealthy patron where she's now doing that whole mom in the burbs thing, only with an entrepreneurial bent.

marty typically just rolls her eyes, employing her often used troy-annoyance-defense-mechanism. bella typically just looks at me momentarily and then returns to her task of beating her blocks against some valuable. the other day after saying my little quip, bella quite unmistakably uttered the phonetics of the same phrase. marty did not roll her eyes this time. they did something else, the description of which i will spare you.

my defense; "well, at least they weren't her first words".

and for the record "oh suck" which i say every time the wood bin is empty weren't her first words either. close to the first, but not her first.

one difference between this year and last is that last year i didn't eat breakfast in the shower.

getting older is all about getting better and here it is just a few days into the new year and i've already satisfied my 2003 improvement.

marty has entered the second half of her pregnancy with captain*. she started showing about a month ago and her clothes stopped fitting a few weeks ago. frustrated for apparel she started ripping stuff out of the closet which slowly started to pile up on the bed in an unbuttonable fury. solution: raid the hubby's side of the walk-in.

do you have any concept how frustrating it is that after two years of religious gym-going you discover that your new svelte frame is the same girth as a half-pregnant woman.

and she's got room to swim in even my most hip-hugging khakis.

there's two years down the crapper.

* captain is baby number two's in utero name, rockefeller having been bella's pre vaginal chute-ride moniker. i had suggested Copernicus but walt nixed it for complexity reasons and somehow captain emerged as its elementary counterpart. and, you can keep your capt stubing jokes to yourself. i ain't in the mood and i don't have the time. there's a jazzercize class across town i need to sign up for.

in case you haven't noticed, i've been out to lunch. i've also been out for brunch, tea and a late night snack. actually i believe someone secretly exercised some technology-aversion conditioning on me because during my holiday sabbatical, every time i walked into my study i would look at my desk, turn around and walk out.

instead, i slept. i had bella ask what that was on my chin. it was a zit. i made two homemade pies. i observed that more people that come to my house prefer pumpkin over apple pie. i burned a cord of wood in the fireplace. i ran the side of my thumb through a cheese grater, twice, while talking to the intentionally-disshevled guy. i finished one book about someone who wanted to have more sex and started another about someone who wanted to have less sex (can you guess which one is fiction). i did some other stuff but suddenly find myself sidetracked trying to gauge where i fall on the sex issue.

i'd like to say that my mind was ready to heave and vomit two weeks worth of quality thoughts but in reviewing my notes, and if the above serves as any indication, it appears the best i'm able to divine would be a wispy, odorless fart. you know the saying "i know people who can shit better stuff than that"? well, do you know people who can let a wispy, odorless fart better than that? you can now check yes to that box. so it may take a little bit for me to get my sea legs back but back they will get. and meantime, i can hopefully spend the next few days collecting and organizing all of your everyman photos which are certain to begin pouring in given the deadline is this friday @ midnight.

friday.

midnight.

be there or be the sex-hungry guy in my previous book and not the sex-laden guy in my current book. yes, the everyman equals sex and loads of it. maybe not for you and maybe not for me, but if i recall my younger years with any kind of vividness, maybe was all it took to get any still-breathing man off the couch and in the car.

well, if you consider the four prime tickets to the david sedaris reading this april that are tacked to the wall of wonder, i'd say i am. so we've established that i'm your buddy, but the more pressing matter is are you mine? do you deem yourself worthy of one of these golden tickets to what is sure to be a night of hilarious bliss.

it's time to separate the alphas from the betas and see who really, really, viscerally, wants to be the one, or three, on my arm come showtime.

now i know many of you would consider marty to be a logical candidate. i'd advise you to consider again because after somewhere between 11 and 15 years of comments like "what's your website address again" and "no, a little to the left, a lot really, just start going left and i'll tell you when to stop" or the daily ritual of getting struck about the head and told that i'm going to be late for work again if i don't get my odor-ridden ass moving, i assure you, her ticket is up for grabs, way up.

in dissing the mispronunciation guy yesterday, i remembered once, back when i used to teach computer classes, that i convinced a roomful of people that you could pronounce the word ambiguous as ambi-guous, kind of like ambidextrous, only with a gous on the end. i defended the version by claiming it was a british manner of saying it, like when you hear people say advertisement or harassment funny. they bought it.

i curiously got this from an episode of ER where i heard a character, from Britain, pronounce the word as such. i fell in love with it started using it whenever possible and when not possible, inventing reasons to use it. then, six months later i caught the rerun and discovered that, somehow, someway, i misheard her and she actually pronounced it the way everyone pronounces it, well everyone except the 14 people in my computer class.

sorry guys. but, if it's any consolation, i still say it the screwed up way too. it's just another one of my 'hey look at me' antics i exercise daily. like i always preach, if you can cause one person to fire one extra neuron through the day, you've earned your societal keep.

bella's new favorite saying is 'my toy'. everything she can see, touch or conceive is her toy. when we were taking a shower the other day she pointed at my penis and said 'my toy'. i explained that i was very confident that that was not her toy, mostly because it was my toy, my favorite toy in fact. she thought on this for a moment before smacking my toy with a toothbrush, another of her toys and reclaiming it as her toy.

the best parenting advice i ever received came from my father-in-law; "you just gotta be smarter than your kids". i try to live this and thought quickly at this moment and decided to remove the curiousity, so i turned around before continuing my ablutions. i then heard another softer 'my toy' seconds before feeling the toothbrush attempt to pierce my rear crevice. let's just say my surprise could have snapped that brittle plastic in half.

when recounting this drama to marty she asked which toothbrush she had. all i could say with confidence is that she didn't have mine.

now oddly, my whole family brushes their teeth with the same toothbrush, mine.

i don't like most holidays. i like getting the day off but many times i don't even know what the day of the hour is. thanksgiving is different though. it is one of my more serious holidays. i mean once you get past the fact that it represents the beginning of the end for those pesky indians (*) the base tenet of thanksgiving is pretty cool, and highly needed. as a practice i take some time to think on what i have to be thankful for through the past year. typically the list is short and probably, if compared to someone else's list, a little backwards. i tend to keep it pretty lean, not because there isn't a lot for me to pay homage to but because one statement can usually wrap up the kind of year i had.

for instance this year's item of note is that i'm thankful that the worst experience so far has been the batteries in my gameboy running out twice in the same week. they usually last longer but bella likes the noises the games make and sometimes walks around with the gameboy like it was a portable boom box doing little flutter dances here and there. one such time she left it on and drained the rechargeables. this is bad because i have sadly become addicted to playing gameboy on the john and if i don't have this digital heroin, well let's just say that things don't go as swimmingly as one may like. enough said? hope so. if not, drop me a line and we'll talk, probably for much longer than you you will be comfortable with.

another positive indicator of my life is that when a colleague asked me on wednesday if i would be in on friday i was able to say, "Oh. Friday? I wasn't aware Friday was even a workday."

life is good.

* don't hate me for being facetious, hate me if you don't know what facetious means, but don't hate me for being it.

so bookpimp was asking me if the new what i'm coveting section of the site was a one-time deal or something i looked to maintain and keep updated. after laughing hysterically i assured him that not only will it be routinely updated but it very well may receive more attention than any other part of d.com. i mean here it has only been a week and i've already added two new items to the list. i don't want to exclude any exuberant gift givers this holiday season because every recession needs a good shot in the arm to get that economy going again. and no one, and i mean no one, is going to say troy dearmitt didn't do his part to ease any consumeristic angst my fellow citizens may be experiencing.

so last night we went to a family story time deal at our local library where this very animated lady read all of these great stories and sang billowy songs about hanging, chopping, squishing and burning turkeys, given the coming holiday and all. i'm here to tell you that interspersing a gobble, gobble in-between these horrific tales of mutilation does not right the wrong done in terrorizing these young children so.

all right. so we all know that i was the only one horrified by these images but all i'm saying is clucking funny and fanning your arms about doesn't help soothe my cringing nerves in any way. at least marty was kind enough to give my knee an empathetic pat while i sat staring at the macabre library lady.

in anticipation of the coming holiday season, i've created a new section of dearmitt.com as to not leave too many of you scratching your heads on what to get your humble but gadget hungry host this year. so i invite you to please visit my personal life registry also know as what i'm coveting.

so i'm working on a new section for the web site. i'm not entirely certain what to call it just yet. leading candidates are Rockefeller Center II, the Return of Rockefeller or maybe even Carnegie Hall.

for those bad at reading between the lines, yes, we are expecting number two.

and for those really bad at reading between the lines, that is not a reference to the feces-based number two but the kind of number two that a census bureau would be interested in.

and for those who are just butt stupid. marty and i are expecting our second child. you can expect to be deluged with photos and silly captions come early may.