at our dinner table, we don't pray, we do thankfuls. about thankfuls:

• thankfuls begin by saying 'i'm thankful for ...' where dot-dot-dot equals something you're happy about in your life.
  
  
• thankfuls don't happen at every dinner.
  
  
• bella, to date, has been the one to determine if thankfuls occur or not.
  
  
• bella also determines who goes first for an ev...
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instead of using my scheduled writing window to write, i got caught up reading this post (excerpted below) from dooce and its accompanying comments, a portion of them at least. i'd recommend the full posting along with reader comments if you are as intrigued with the topic as i am.

this is an excerpt from an email i received yesterday from a lady i worked for many years ago. i love her dearly. my convictions and peccadilloes baffle her madly though. i prefer to think of it joann as someone with a keen sense for the annoying.

and, like there's something in the annals of this site that would deter a sensible human from choosing to sire and raise other humans. i mean it's not like they are going to eat feces off the bottom of their shoes or something, now is it?

guy A recently told guy B about how his wife was having twins. guy B excitedly asked when they were expected and guy A said two weeks from friday. guy B, shocked, said he just saw guy A's wife and she didn't look pregnant. this is when guy A said, not those kinds of twins, did a head-nodding wink and with his hands made the universal sign for heaving, cleaving bosoms. guy B said 'ooooohhhhh!, THOSE kinds of twins.'

i've decided the next time i see guy A i'm going to say i heard about their procedure and congratulate him on pulling off this spousal boon to fix what they must have collectively felt was a shortcoming in their relationship. as he beams with pride and before he can reply, i'm then going to ask if it hurt when he got the penis enlargement and however did his wife convince him to go to such drastic measures for something entirely out of his control.

guy A never liked me much to begin with.

i've been with my current employer weeks shy of fourteen years. it is the only company i've worked for in my adult life and i started in their lowest non-janitorial position.

yesterday morning in a windowless conference room i said to my boss the words "i'm cooked" and slid a resignation letter across the table towards him. he looked at the document and softly said "son of a bitch".

two days earlier i penned my signature at the base of a written job offer. to that, if someone handed me a blank piece of paper and asked me to describe my dream gig, my notes would not have been as appealing as the position outlined in what i put my name to here.

bookguy, who offered me sage and consistent counsel through my job quest, said i should have quit long ago not because it was the right thing to do professionally but because i seemed to be a natural at writing resignation letters. in thinking back to crafting the brief message, the words did flow with great ease from my keyboard which i guess says about all there is to say.

several folks asked about the subject line of yesterday's post:

michael, why are the drapes open?

the (i guess obscure) reference is from The Godfather, second installment specifically. this is what kay said to michael corleone moments before bullets rained through their bedroom window in an attempt on his life. the phrase has come to be synonymous with the importance of noticing the little things and how subtle shifts in these seemingly innocuous details can portend matters of great and grave consequence.

you are either better, worse or the same as you were 24 hours earlier. today is a 'better than' day.

the why the hell wouldn't ya guy told me a story about a friend of the family who was placed in an assisted living facility. for a long time he was perfectly ok with it because he was free to come and go as he pleased because he still had his car. as he got a little older and by some people's estimation a little less capable behind the wheel his children said he had to start thinking about giving up his car. his response was simple; if they took his car he was going to kill himself.

good to their word, they eventually took their father's car. when he learned of this he made his way to the second floor of the building he lived in, opened a window and stepped out of it. and, good to his word, died.

wouldn't you think the children of a man possessing this much conviction, would know the man possessed this much conviction?

this weekend, bella and alex had a spend the night at their grandparents. when we dropped them off bella said to my mother in a very serious manner.

BELLA
grandma, i'm going to try real hard to not say 'oh my god!' while i'm at your house because i know you don't like it when people say that.

GRANDMA
well that is true bella. i would appreciate it if you did not say that at my house or ever. i think there are better things to say than that.

BELLA
yes i know, father told me. so instead we've been practicing saying things like 'oh my goodness', 'oh dear' and 'oh bother'. but sometimes i forget and still say 'oh my god' but i will try not to.

GRANDMA
well, i guess that's all i can ask.

upon getting the sunday report, bella didn't say it even once the whole weekend. and when she saw the one-legged man at the nursing home while visiting her great-grandfather, she didn't even ask him where his other leg went. so far, five seems way more mature than four.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. can i keep this?

the following subject was discussed during one of the more recent work pow-wows at my desk. the guy talking is one of the youngest coders in our group and he's also probably in the best shape of anyone in the office, but as always is the case in our industry, his physique is beginning to slide which is starting to plague his thoughts. i assured him that if he stays in technology just a few more years, the problem will iron itself out because he will no longer be able to bend over in the first place. i didn't smile or laugh when i said it and he studied me seriously for a moment before waving me off laughing. i then gave him a reassuring, yet pitying, smile. in my tenure, i've watched many young men go through this body image revelation. no two really accept it the same so it's always a treat to watch.

in a related aside, many years ago bookguy said something to me that stuck firm since. we were on the elevator going to lunch and he told me he could tell if someone was overweight by seeing nothing but their shoes. curious i tested him and he was repeatedly spot on. when i asked how he was doing it he said the laced knots on their shoes were not centered on the tongue but more towards the inside of their body and this was because they pull their foot up onto their knee to tie it, versus leaning over and tying them straight on.

can't wait to send the kid at work into a further tailspin by applying this observation to him.

and i know your first impulse is to be jealous of the insightful and meaningful conversations that seem to routinely gravitate towards me every day. to that i say, you should be jealous. but you should also be chagrined that you don't get to hear all the juicier ones to blue for the net.

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.

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).

some things i believe:

television killed the american family.

air conditioning killed the american neighborhood. *

and, irresponsible amounts of available credit killed the american society.

* television didn't do our neighborhoods any favors either.

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.

emma idessia hoffman-rutman
09.01.1921 - 02.25.2006

in late february my mother and her brother drove halfway across the nation to walk into a country-side nursing home in the evening hours of a sunday night to tell their father that his wife of 66 years, and their mother, had died in her sleep the day before. upon tearfully presenting him with the news he sat quietly in his chair before softly saying 'that is the saddest thing i've ever heard'. and then he wept.

family v.
bookguy and i extend our gratitude to you for sharing your warm and rich home with us for our ski trip. i can't recall when i laughed or smiled so much in a week's time (and i am blessed to laugh and smile quite often).

keri, i knew i remembered you so fondly for a reason and am glad i haven't let you permanently sneak away. you were wonderful and charming then and are even ...

i've had a few folks inquire into my jaded tone towards alcohol consumption given my 'seemingly derisive' post about the guy wearing a 'GET DRUNK, BE SOMEBODY' shirt. my position is this:

in regards to alcohol consumption, i'm not arrogant enough to think someone requires all of their faculties to carry on a conversation with me, i just like to think i'm at least working with their A-game.

i assure you, it's not some biblical or puritanical assertion. i just find people who are inebriated to be less capable of meaningful or witty discourse than those who are not altered. that said, i have experienced one exception to this where i was at a party and talking to guy who the t-shirted dude on the plane would have certainly described as being wasted or possibly plastered (i'm the first to admit i'm deficient on the variant stages of inebriation and their proper semantics). this guy i was talking to led what i will simply call an alternative social life which i happened to have many candid questions about. this guy, in his state, freely answered any and every question i threw his way regarding the intimate details of his lifestyle. in this case his drunkenness assisted both of us in having a highly compelling and fruitful exchange (granted, one-way exchange) of information.

that's it. nothing too overly judgmental here. you're free to be drunk around me if it helps you unabashedly reveal things about yourself that i want to know and that you otherwise would not tell me, if this is not the case, may i direct your attention to the jug of sweet tea on the counter.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. missing keri