bella had a homework assignment. in it she was to go through her house and count things. things like doors, windows and such. the last page of the assignment was left open. here she was free to pick the object she would count. she chose picture frames. after dinner i ambled through the dining room and found this.


click to enlarge
it seems that bella kept losing count so devised this error-free numbering system for conducting her inventory. and, should you be curious, we have 132 picture frames in our home. and at least 132 post-it notes as well.

over the weekend, marty had to make a morning run to the grocery store. when this happens, my sleeping body will get nudged and told she is leaving and i'm on. i blearily sit up and look for the clothes that got dropped next to bed the night before. once she sees i'm staying upright, she leaves.

i immediately move to the bathroom, urinate, brush my teeth and walk out. bella, like an appar...

sunday morning is 'big breakfast' day in our house. on big breakfast day we make our one stovetop breakfast of the week. typical offerings include pancakes, waffles or french toast, bacon, omelettes, sometimes sausage, fresh fruit and occasionally hand-cut hash-browns. about once a month we look to invite another family over to share in our weekly debauchery. those gatherings are always pajama-friendly and never begin before 11am.

big breakfast is my favorite morning because in addition to lavish vittles this is the one day of the week where i am naturally drawn from sleep by the sound of birds or smell of cooking food. sometimes, on bird days, i might begin to wake and sense marty next to me, warm, close. i might hear bella and alex quietly engaged in a made-up game down the hall. it is here i viscerally know the value of my home.

big breakfast last weekend did not start in this fizzy way. on this day, the first thing i sensed was having my toasty flannel sheets and layered quilts harshly flung away from my resting frame. while my body tensed against the cold morning air and before i could open my lead-heavy eyes, bella excitedly screamed from the side of the bed, "DADDY! DADDY! I CAN SEE YOUR PENIS! I CAN SEE YOUR PENIS! I CAN SEE IT DADDY! ALEX, TELL DAD YOU CAN SEE HIS PENIS. GO ON, TELL HIM!" to which i hear my son obligingly, albeit less animatedly add, "i can see your enis daddy". not birds, not the neighbor's wind chimes and not wafting flapjacks, but instead taunts and heckles at and about my lifeless manhood. and i would say that on this day, at this moment, i also viscerally knew the value of my home which is seemingly about as predictable and hostile as the american stock exchange.

bella has candy hidden all over the house. if we serve a meal she is not interested in, she will sit down at the table, make a face and oftentimes groan in some exaggerated way. soon after this she will ask to be excused. we offer her an alternative such as yogurt, fruit or a muffin to which she will many times decline. we remind her that this is dinner and the kitchen is closed afterwards. she nods in understanding and repeats her request to be excused. we thank her for joining us and send her on her way.

then in-between conversation points you may hear from the next room cellophane being opened or paper being torn. this is bella hitting one of her many candy stashes. we call her back to the table. when she arrives the smell from her sugar of choice is in the air. we explain that eating candy in private is not a healthy or honest choice and that if she is hungry she needs to eat something more substantial. after tolerating the advice, she smiles broadly, claims that she has had enough dinner and confidently asks, can i have dessert now?

excerpt from the website of friend of mine who is, professionally, a historical archivist.

I've been pretty obsessed with taking pictures of my toy collection and posting them to Flickr. My girlfriend's nerd alarm went off yesterday, I'm suprised I haven't worn it out.

but were he not setting off such alarms, wherever would we get great photography the likes of this ...

and, before you answer, consider that without people who enjoy the above, you may never benefit from the likes of these ...
and, i super-love this sort of stuff, which he seems to have tons of ...

i hope to see chavez at the pending everyman. which as i just consulted the website, and then my desktop calendar i see deadlines this monday. not exactly a good sign when the host gets caught by surprise. so, if you got 'em, bring 'em. time is rapidly dwindling away.



and, given the everyman's approach, our house is about to enter the time of year marty's nerd alarm gets chucked against every wall of our house, viciously.

bella's single complaint about kindergarten, to date, is that it is too long. when marty consoled her by saying it would get easier and she would get used to it, she replied ... "but it's just too hard to go all day without loving you or father." those are called 'mad skills'.

days later, a teacher told me that parents are welcome to come and eat lunch with their children. curious about h...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. three shows

for about fifteen years i've kept a large glass coin-jug on my dresser. at the end of each day i drop my loose change into it. about once a year i pour the contents onto the floor in front of a movie and roll my bounty. the collection typically amounted to several hundred dollars. since bella became old enough to request the jug be handed to her my annual accounting has dropped from the just under five hundred realm to the just above forty dollar range because you see bella likes playing with coins. bella likes playing with coins a whole lot.

one of her favorite treatments is to sticker the coins. how this works is she will empty the jug onto the floor and go through them one by one checking each side. coins that already have a small random sticker on them go in one pile, coins that have no mark go in another. once divided, she places a sticker on each coin in the stickerless pile and when done returns all the coins back into the jug. such an audit, which occurs about once a month, can take anywhere from one to three hours and is typically spread over a full day.

bella has it in her mind that i get paid at the end of each work day with a small handful of change. she thinks the size and diversity of the mix indicates how hard i worked. if i tinkle a large handful of coins into her cupped hands she proudly says "boy dad, you sure must have worked hard on this day!". a telling thing about bella is when i have just a few or no coins to share she doesn't harangue me but quietly accepts the news, maybe even giving me a commiserating "that's ok dad, we've already got lots of coins". criminally precious.

several months ago a relative of mine, cousin debbie, was in town and staying with my folks. we went over one night for dinner and bella became quite smitten with her (that my forty-something cousin would hang out with bella under the dining room table played a great role in this friendship). when it came time for us to leave, bella very seriously told cousin debbie she should come live with us because it would be lots of fun. debbie gracefully declined saying she wouldn't want to impose. bella cheerily said it was not a problem because we were rich, 'we have piles of money in every room of our house.' truth told, that is a correct statement. although a minor omitted detail is the aforementioned piles range in value from $1.34 to $12.75 depending on how much bella lost sight of and how much you're able to find.

i've previously commented on the totally schizophrenic nature of children but have never really exposed the same trait in the keepers of those children. the below three shots represent a sub-sixty second block of time during last week's spiritual outing. i like this series because it does much to illuminate the dramatic shifts possible in one's state when little humans are constantly in your grill.

additionally, twenty minutes before these snaps, i was asleep in the ultra-bed. when i stirred naturally from my slumber and opened my eyes, i found bella's round face inches from my own, studying me intently. her expression changed slightly when my eyes opened. we silently looked at one another for a few seconds before she raised her arm, patted me on the head and brightly said "your hair is crunchy dad". she then rolled out of bed and marched off. i share this incident because i feel understanding how my day began may help to explain my impressively alert and welcoming glances below.

as you may have noticed from my unintentionally, unannounced absence last week, i pulled the car off the highway (the car being my mind and the highway being my life ... cliff note for my closer friends). and not only did i pull the car onto an onramp, i actually removed the key from the ignition, tossing the small ring onto the dashboard where it sat all week, with one notable exception.

the hiatus was medicinal. and i'm not talking about your three-aspirin variety but a count backwards from ten caliber of narcotic. the topper ... i slept outside all week. have you ever slept outside? and i don't mean tent-outside. i mean outside-outside. my naked feet poked between the slats and over the edge of our beach house's second-story deck, the ocean winds massaging my triple-E soles. only one night did i sleep alone. all other nights, i had bella or alex or both nestled in an armpit or sprawled across my chest (marty and sassafras slept indoors, enjoying the bountiful real estate their bed offered).

one night after reading books on the porch-bed alex was drawing on a piece of paper with a bic pen. he set the page down and the wind lifted it off the deck sweeping it away. he immediately pointed at the lost parchment and sent me packing.

ALEX
daddy, my paper.

TROY
yeah, your paper blew away alex. you should have held onto it better.

ALEX
you get it.

TROY
no, me not get it. i'm in bed and it's probably a mile away by now.

ALEX
get my paper daddy.

TROY
alex it's gone. i can't get it. here, finish your picture on my hand.

he looked at the the back of the hand i set in his lap, shrugged indifferently and resumed his artwork. thirty minutes later my hand, arm, chest and stomach looked like a drunk tattoo artist was pissed at me. i mostly didn't mind serving as little man's canvass but alex became obsessed with fully covering my nipples with the blue ink of the pen. do you know how hard you have to press a ball point pen against a flaccid male-nipple to actually color it? allow me to answer; hard enough to make the full-grown owner of that male-nipple wince ... repeatedly.

alex has expanded his most most used phrases (previously why and no). i present, in order of frequency ...

• i no want to go home
• i no want to go to bed
• della ... della ... where are you della?

and on that last one it is great to see bella pop her head from around a corner and yell "i'm over here alex" with a big and sunny wave of her arm. alex then head-down runs with full swinging arms to join his big and super-fly sister.

granted, five minutes after that warming scene alex returns using using a phrase which is unfortunately climbing the ranks ...

• della hit me daddy

on the positive side, it's cheaper than speech therapy.

marty recently suggested, seriously, that we replace our current furniture with outdoor/patio chairs and tables because she doesn't see the point in replacing our home's kid-broken furnishings with nice stuff just so it can be trashed like the originals.

i upgraded her thought by suggesting indoor tire swings and felled tree trunks like they use in the great apes display at the zoo. i mean why sugar-coat the problem we are combatting.

last night after brushing teeth and knocking the larger, more visible pieces of earth off the children we walked into their bedroom for pajamas and books. it was at this point we learned that earlier in the day bella had given one of her stuffed tabby cats an impressively thorough haircut. fine black and white synthetic hair coated the sheets of her and alex's bed as well as many other nooks and crannies of the room (damn the oscillating fan). and for added effect, perfectly centered in the room lay the large pair of orange-handled scissors used to commit the malfeasance. truth told, upon first impression, it looked like something pretty wicked happened in this corner of the house and i was somewhat relieved that the only victim was not only inanimate but also not one of my belongings.

as punishment we made bella vacuum the mess up. not only did she prove quite skilled at the cleaning, she enjoyed the act immensely all but asking if there was more she could do elsewhere in the home before going to bed.

i once read that the key to effective discipline is always knowing your child's currency, the one thing they covet above all else. i fear that bella may have read the same article because she's pretty keen at hiding hers from me. there's few things less sucky than handing out what you think is going to be a loathsome task only to have the recipient bouncily say, "ok. i'll get the vacuum' as if it's the high-point of their day.

alex has two toys of choice at the moment. one of them is a six foot inflatable alligator and the other is a three-inch high space-cowboy he calls 'cool guy'.

let's begin with the object that inflicts the most physical pain upon me, the life-sized gator. to date i've walked my groin into its upright tail four times. sure you'd think something this large would be easy to spot but it's a sn...

question. do you know the two words most used by a three year old? they are 'no' and 'why'. another question. do you know how demoralizing it is to get whittled down in an argument by an opponent who refuses to say anything other than 'why'? it is the equivalent of losing a chess game to someone who moves nothing but pawns, which for those who don't play chess is pretty sucky.

another que...

in case you're wondering where your host has been, he's wondering the same thing. i haven't intended to checkout like i have but just got caught in the wake of change. with a new job comes new routines, new people, new focus, new hours, and quite simply just new, new and some more new. now that i'm going through it i realize i was in great need for some more 'new' in my life. and aside from the neglect this part of my world is seeing, things are going swimmingly, i just haven't yet hit on a steady cadence for my days.

last night while i cooked dinner, bella sat at the counter and sketched me (below). the details are great, from the print on my shirt (which is dead-on) to the korean bulgogi in the skillet (which was so good), to my cable-wrap glasses (which are mightily bent right now) to the smile and wide-eyed gaze (sleep deprived delirium) her eye was quite succinct. unfortunately that keen eye had to also nail my flared and stubby legs. dumb luck that.

our bathroom door doesn't lock. come to think of it, our bathroom door doesn't even latch. it stands wide open much of the time, occupied or not. casting a glance that way while walking down the hall often results with spying bella sitting on the john chin resting on her bracing arm and her legs dangling from the seat.

you may think that given the state of our door hardware, people would respect that when the door is swung closed, the room is occupied. we're not quite there yet. five minutes before the writing of this thought i was attending to my late afternoon constitution when the door pushed open enough for bella's head to pop through. "oh!" she exclaimed. "sorry dad, i just need one of these." her arm reached to the back of the door and pulled a bath towel off a hook and she and it disappeared. she called a "thank you dad" out as she quickly ran down the hall.

i'm not a math guy but this equation is one which i'm all over. that is, if bella is hurriedly after a full size bath towel, something pretty bad just went down. there was a time i'd try to figure out if it was one of my valuables or another's but parental experience has shown me that it is always my stuff. the kids have yet to be employed and therefore haven't acquired anything of merit or value. the last thing marty voluntarily purchased out of need or desire was back in 98 and that item fell when bella was just three. so what is left is a house chock full of dad-stuff. and it's not like i prefer delicate and costly electronics or anything. and certainly not stuff that couldn't withstand being doused with a bowl full of milk that got upended during a scuffle between bella and alex for the remote while yelling "my show, no my show, no my show, NO, MY SHOW".

many more of those sorts of battles and that argument will become a moot point because marty and i are in agreement that we're not replacing any more broken household items until the children leave for college. if you could see some of the antics that go on in our miniscule tv room, you'd know the tele is already living on some serious borrowed time.

i'm reasonably certain there's a game afoot in my home called 'hide dad's shit'. there are simply too many of my possessions that go missing at any given time for any other explanation to be plausible.

distrustful of my hunch? when i find my favorite tie rolled up in the bottom of marty's twelve-year old moon boot in the back of the coat closet ... downstairs ... i'm feeling rather convinced.

yesterday i had two at-home jobs. the first was making dinner. after toiling to prepare wholesome and tasty sustenance for mi familia, bella sang a song through the meal, chin on palms, annie the orphan style that partially went something like this:

i hate being a kid
because everyone is mean
i hate being a kid
i wish i were a kitten
because everyone loves kittens
and father is so mean
father is so mean

we received this ten-minute, off-the-cuff serenade because i didn't serve her milk to her in a bowl. unbeknownst to me she was playing kittens and kittens don't drink milk out of cups, they drink milk out of bowls and fathers who don't know this are stupid-heads (child speak for priggish asses) and deserve, yep you guessed it, to be fired.

my second job was washing towels and rugs (because i didn't complete my chores on sunday). so i finished them and brought our fluffy yellow bathroom rug up. the kids were the first to get the benefit of the dryer-warm carpet, alex in particular. the second i pulled his diaper off for his bath he loosed a ten-inch long torrent of urine diagonally across the rug, smiling broadly at the arcing stream. not a drop hit the tile which could have been easily dealt with. all of it was perfectly placed and then absorbed into my freshly laundered mat.

but to be comprehensive about the day, while i was making dinner bella and i were playing prison-break. how prison-break works is she sneaks up behind me and bear hugs the bottom half of my legs together so i can't move. this is the prison part. then i have to use the keys, my tickle fingers, to try to get out of prison. this is the break part. when bella was three prison was fun. now that bella is five and quite strong, having her lock on unannounced is akin to someone duct-taping my feet together, hanging a fifty pound weight around my neck and giving me a hearty shove at the top of a stairwell. alex has watched this production a number of times, thumb-in-mouth and always standing a safe distance away. tonight he decided to step up and while bella was gigglingly bear-hugging my calves from behind and i was trying to tickle her loose i heard a quick, sharp crack, immediately followed by bella wailing. i turned to find alex with the biggest, proudest smile, resting a wiffle ball bat on his shoulder as if he's between walk-the-batter pitches. bella is holding the crown of her head with both hands screaming childs' curses towards him. this is one of those parental moments where the best you can do is simply not laugh out loud.

so obviously for a guy who gets heckled through the dinner he prepared AND has someone piss all over his day's labor moments after its completion, it's not shocking to learn the highlight of my march 14 was when my two-year old brained my five-year old with a long, yellow club. i mean, at least it was a plastic club and to be fair we were playing a game named prison-break.

bella fires more people than trump. this started a few months back. not sure what seeded it or even where she heard or understood the meaning. just one day people, meaning marty, started getting dismissed whenever bella became annoyed. earlier this week marty and alex were a few minutes late picking bella up from school. as marty approached, the door opened and bella's teachers walked her out.

MARTY
sorry i'm late.

MISS JUDY
oh, what's the bother? someone has to be first and someone has to be last.

BELLA (pushing her way through everyone towards the stroller)
mom, you're fired!

but, similar to the adoption trend, marty is the first to feel the brunt, but whatever hell she is catching is sure to be ultimately spread throughout the family. last night when i announced i had to walk the babysitter home, i was immediately "fired 50 times". don't get me started on this escalation-bullshit. upgrading my penalty by such magnitude is a complete abuse of one's power, and i for one take exception.

and forget the minor detail that we have children who don't wail and scream when we leave them with a sitter but instead when we return and send the sitter home. i always thought kids cried when parents left and rejoiced upon their return. we have to literally peel our children off the help just so they can get out the door. like my two year old son bear hugging the leg of our 20-something babysitter. which puts me in the awkward position of kneeling behind her prying his fingers off the back of her lithe thigh, pleading with him and apologizing to her simultaneously.

TROY
he really doesn't hate us. nor is he afraid of us. he just doesn't see outsiders too much because his mother is a bit of a shut-in and i'm a bit of germ-phobe. so, again, they don't get to see new people a whole lot. now dammit alex! let go of the maria's leg so she can go home! i'm really sorry about this.

in my distracted state alex leans forward and bites my hand which causes me to lurch forward head-butting the girl's ass (also lithe) which makes her fall in my lap and inadvertently pulls alex into her groin. this would of course be the moment marty chooses to enter the foyer finding the two men in her life rolling around on the floor with the one coed in the neighborhood who has not yet been warned to not babysit at THAT house.

i sense more firings on the horizon.

i'm sure you've all deduced by now that last week bookguy and i went on our annual ski trip, now seven years strong. the trips are always rejuvenating but they are also always melancholy at the end. the gloom begins when we part ways in the airport concourse exchanging a clap-on-the-back farewell hug.

after that comes the quiet and lonely walk to the gate. once there, i slouch in a chair waiting for the boarding call, sound-bites from the week playing through my mind. many make me grin. when the saint louis flight was announced i took my place in line. the guy in front of me was wearing a t-shirt that read across the back 'GET DRUNK, BE SOMEBODY' and the truthful reality of my itinerary sank in.

more melancholy feelings.

upon arriving home, my spirits lifted knowing i'd have different kinds of hugs awaiting me there. from marty, i got a thankful, re-enforcements have arrived sort of hug. from alex, a tiny-armed bear hug around the neck. but from bella i got a turned shoulder. i sat down next to her and asked what was wrong. she told me i was a bad father for leaving for so long and she was no longer going to be my friend. i explained that this was unfortunate because i had been away becoming an armpit doctor and was anxious to check hers to make sure they were alright. she turned towards me inquisitively.

BELLA (6)
are you being for real?

TROY
of course i am. do you think i could make something like that up?

BELLA
well, what do you do? how do you tell if armpits are ok?

TROY
like this ... (and i grab her tickling her madly)

and just like that we were again fast friends, for real. now i'm astute enough to know it won't always be that easy which is part of the reason she will start being invited on the annual ski trips very, very soon. i reckon the hard part will then be explaining what 'GET DRUNK, BE SOMEBODY' means and why she doesn't want to be that somebody.

hello pittsburgh steelers. long time fan, first time caller. please get 'er done this weekend. i've been patiently waiting and i suck at patiently waiting. thanks. i'll look for my response off the air.