next month marks five years that walt and i have been planning our family meals a month at a time. in recognition i've added several recipes that have been solid staples on our table. hope some of you get to enjoy them in your own kitchen.

Korean Bulgogi
Salt and Pepper Chicken Thighs
Hot Ham and Cheese Rollup
Spaghetti Bolgnese

i once read that mcdonalds restaurants were designed to make a person want to leave after twenty minutes. something about the molded chairs, brilliant colors, plastic art and the like. i never gave this theory much credit until i saw a target store's effect on my wife. within seven minutes of entering a target marty will need to defecate. and i'm not talking about a subtle sensation that needs answered in the next half hour or so. i'm talking about an urge so swift she grabs waify high school employees by the arm and commands them to direct her to the nearest restroom. i think their new store designs, which place the bathrooms up front by the checkouts, are in direct response to marty and others like her.

i on occasion get the feeling that having a website may have run its course, then i get to post some cherry life detail (about someone who is not me), like how target's color scheme makes my wife's sphincter go limp and i wonder what i'd do without such a viable and diverse platform.

the day after sassafras was born, i took the kids to the hospital to meet their younger brother. bella immediately latched onto the newborn making various cooing and gooing noises at him while waggling a finger over his face and belly. alex immediately went to marty taking his rightful spot on her lap. about five minutes into the visit bella spoke up and said she knew what we should name the baby. we asked what, preparing our poker faces for the worst. she confidently announced Abrey. after her proclamation she turned and hunched back over the infant as if the matter were resolved. marty and i both made faces, but they were different.

TROY
i kinda like it.

MARTY
what did she even say, avery?

TROY
no, abrey.

MARTY
spell it.

TROY
A-B-R-E-Y.

MARTY
abrey? that's not even a name.

TROY
sure it is. everything is a name.

MARTY
well, i don't like it.

TROY
and if i do?

MARTY
i'm not naming a child abrey.

TROY
it's two against one.

MARTY
alex, come here.

here's a thing to know when negotiating with the human who just spat another, smaller human out of their special hole; they always possess more stock in the business at hand than you. so abrey was out. after a brief bout of panic and uncertainty a name was unanimously agreed upon ... anthony. anthony walter dearmitt.

that said, everyone in our house calls him something different. marta calls him anthony. i call him antonio. bella calls him abrey. and alex calls him sassafras. no reason to not get a quick jump on the schizophrenia his world is sure to bring.


click here peggy

it's that time of year again, that time when i step away for a month of down-time and disconnectedness. truth is it's never been more necessary than it is right now, as some of you may have noticed from the last few weeks worth of sporadic activity.

and as always, i leave you with a bevy of last moment content (eating, alex, gallery). additionally, this year i have made arrangements for you while i'm away by implementing a random post generator. you'll notice in a couple of different spots on this page the word RANDOM ([a] third item in the right hand menu [b] above this section and to the right of '2 years ago' and also [c] at the base of the page). clicking this link will present you with a random post from the past six years worth of entries. i've taken measures to see that what is presented contains less drivel than most but this is not to say that you still wont find yourself completely disappointed.

in practice this is just a little helper in the event you find yourself missing your daily ritual of laughing with/at me and being reasonably ocd myself, i respect your rituals be they driven by compassion or malice. give it a spin and let me know what you think, unless you simply think i think a bit too much of myself. no need to send feedback in that regard because i'm well aware of this, although i usually try not to so overtly advertise the point.

so for the month of may i bid you adieu. be well.

now that bella is five i've decided to close, or at least stop updating her gallery, rockefeller center, so yesterday's post will be the last made.

i've a few reasons for doing this and for once don't feel the need to iterate through my logic. i hope you've enjoyed watching our first child go from the womb to a shining and confident young girl as much as i've enjoyed capturing and sharing the images. in the name of equity, the same will happen with alex on his fifth.

the page will continue to be available and the stories of her impact, uhhm, i mean contribution, to our family will continue. it's just the consistent photographic updates that will cease.

and for those who never knew what the rockefeller or captain monikers even meant, they are what walt and i called them in utero (that's means pre-birth for my three guy friends).

an occasionally asked for and long overdue feature of this site has just now been added. look right. sidebar. second block. searching! circumcision. hygiene. neurosis. even lyle lovett. you name it.

and it's not just the monorail section but each and every nook and cranny of the site. try it out. it's all at your fingertips thanks to the exceptionally fine folks at google.

tonight marty confided in me that she was concerned i may have run out of embarrassing things to say about myself and have moved onto her, since the last few posts have been greatly marty-centric (her breasts specifically, but her all the same).

she of all people should know that i haven't even gotten to the embarrassing parts of my life yet.

this item has been removed
at the request of one of the participants/subjects.

a surprising first for this site.
and, not surprising that it occurred,
but surprising that it took this long to occur.

given one half of my diet i should look like calista flockhart and given the other half i should look like ralphie may.

so i guess when you balance it all out, it explains why people think i look like this.

my goal was to read four books on my two week holiday break in december. on the down-side, i only got through two and half books. on the up-side, the exercise woke up my hibernating literary sex-drive. so much so that this is the first time i've updated the reading section in several months or six books, however you prefer to look at it.

after the super bowl, everyone debates the best commercial. after the annual ski-boondoggle, the participants ponder the best piece of banter. i'm naming the alpha quip from this year's steamboat trip to be ...

THE VOICE MAIL
setting : bookguy is leaving a message for his boss one morning before we headed up the mountain.

TROY
how funny would it have been if i had said, 'matt, come back to bed' while you were leaving that voice mail to your boss.

BOOKGUY
since saying that would have involved you getting up off the ground, i'm pretty confident it wouldn't have happened.

(now that is what i heard, but in rehashing the moment, bookguy swears he didn't say that but instead, 'since saying that would have involved you getting out of bed, i'm pretty confident it wouldn't have happened'. the fact that each option is equally applicable is not a small testament to how well we know one another.)

and a trip with bookguy would never be the same without a backwards kudo which can be seen in the runner-up conversation ...

THE COMPLIMENT
setting : bookguy and i are driving to the yellow sub with snake

BOOKGUY
i still think the most sincere thing you've ever posted on your site was the anniversary note to marty.

TROY
it's interesting you'd pick that out of everything.

BOOKGUY
it just wasn't the typical troy bullshit.

TROY
do you mind if i use that as an advertisement for my site.

BOOKGUY
what's that?

TROY
dearmitt dot com, just a bunch of typical troy bullshit. i think it has kind of a smart quality to it, not to mention, very flattering to the ear.

special note to peggy walter: click on these words

click here

i'm already the number one hit on google for 'silent tampon'.

and in my defense, this is not something i search through google for on a daily basis, i saw multiple hits for that string in my logs.

although i might be good for a biannual search on silent tampons or some such derivative.

on sabbatical ... see you june 1.

in the meantime, enjoy this and this and this and this and then of course there is always this.

click here to begin

come march, walt and i will have been using our monthly menu for two full years. in chatting about it, we've agreed we're very happy about it's effect on our dinner lifestyle. but, we also fully thought that an all-star lineup would by now exist where we could fill the entire month with nothing but topnotch winners. a quick glance at the recipe index (the best of the best) only has a paltry 11 items in it, and they are not all suitable for monthly consumption.

i think it is our hurly burly approach of selecting recipes (browsing through a number of recipe books) that is deficient. i'd liken it to picking doctors at random out of the yellow pages. some will suck and some will suck more. so my request to you all is simple, and i hope we can agree i don't ask much from you all, please send me the recipe to your favorite meal. i don't care what it is. i mean we had oatmeal last night for our official meal, we're certainly flexible. and frankly, i can't believe i haven't done this sooner. i've forever asked people for the name of their all-time favorite book, logic would reason that the same would apply to foodstuffs.

and if you a person who is only motivated by free money, i'm paying a shiny nickel to the sender of each and every recipe we try.

a surprising number of people have requested some sort of explanation about the what i'm eating section of this site. i've always personally felt that it should be, well for lack of a better reason, self-explanatory. but, that part of the site does get pounded by the masses coming from google so for those types some explanation may be in order.

but you all know the drill so if you're looking to kill a few minutes on the job, feel free to read the newly added, what i'm eating explained.

sidenote: i just went through a server upgrade and think that i missed some mail over the last few days. so if i don't respond to something, please re-gig me.

so the somewhat asked about gallery for captain is finally baked. i've not yet settled on a frequency for updating this yet. i posted to rockefeller center weekly for several months but that was primarily for my mom's benefit who was pining in distant pittsburgh, pa. now that she's here in town and gets regular smother of spoil stops she doesn't require the cyber fixes she previously thirsted for.

but, for equity sake and to not start that second-child slide so soon, i'll probably post every monday for the next few weeks as to let everyone, everyone that cares to that is, catch up on the little man since he's been living a rather reclusive life since his debut.

and as with rockefeller center, updates to this section will be noted on the front page and the photos are accessible from there or at the base of the gallery section.

allow me to introduce you to some troy math:

end of may work deadline +
a side project +
another side project +
a spanking new baby =

me taking the month off

the timing seems right in that i took last may off as well. i'll see you on june 1. and, make sure to check in because i have a surprise for you.

you'll notice i got the house ready before leaving by updating the eating section, the gallery section and of course it is the first monday of the month so i couldn't deprive you of the number one visited area of this site, rockefeller center.

permanent links to items listed in this journal are now available. what does this mean for you, a religious reader of this content? well, it used to be that if someone wanted to tell someone else about a particular entry, they'd have to do ALL the work themselves to get the intended reader to the item. like saying, go there today, but it has to be today or else it will get lost in the numerous posts troy always makes everyday or you might say, go find and read the entry made on 12.15.2002. basically, it's kind of a pain in the ass.

but no more of that slacking business. allow me to direct your attention to the smallish icon to the right of the category above this (and each) entry. in this case, the icon is just to the right of the word WEB. so now you can link and refer to items in one of two ways (there may be more, but i ain't got all day here).

1. right click on the icon and select COPY SHORTCUT or COPY LINK TO CLIPBOARD or something of the like depending on browser and platform. once done, you can paste the url into an email or chat client or anywhere else you may be inclined to paint the info. get the picture?

2. or, if you believe right clicking is evil or a little too much strain, you can just click on the icon and it will load a page where that is the only entry displayed. you can then copy the url from the address bar and paste it wherever you would like.

so essentially, i've made it much easier for you to share the ever vital information discussed in this forum. and you can pretend to not deem my content to be vital, but you know and i know, we're equally deluded into thinking it is.

now, if you're wondering why this is such a thing, it allows me and my mom and you to recall morsels from the past which you may have forgotten about but should not have. like this or this or this.

in case you missed it on the front page, this is new today.

the casting call is over. it's now up to the three humans asked to serve as judges to assume the unquantifiably difficult task of narrowing 80 photos down to three.

last year i held on publishing the entries until it was all decided, making everything available at once. you can thank big ed for getting an early glimpse at this year's crop before the judging is complete. this has added benefit because while perusing them, try to pick a few out that you would award the prizes and you'll get a vibe of how agonizing the judging process is. bottom line is there are a number of photos worthy of the grand prize but as it is, only one can be anointed as such. this is the major suck about the everyman. the un-suck is how amazing and diverse and talented the submissions and their artists are. i tip my hat to all those who participated.

without further delay, i welcome you to visit the everyman index and see what you're competing against, should you be in the game.

note: the photos will not be credited with the author's name until the judging process is complete.

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.