for about three years now i have had a line-item on my to-do list that read:

redesign 'what i'm remembering'

i'm finally checking that off and i invite you to visit the new and even more revealing version of what i'm remembering.

the man who lives across the street from me is known in the neighborhood as gardener bob. this moniker stems from the point that he is by passion and trade a gardener. in his backyard he has multiple raised mounds of dirt housing his various plants and through the spring and summer months he is often seen walking and crouching around and among these beds. to many in the neighborhood i am known as ...

NEIGHBOR LADY
i feel sorry for the first guy to break bella's heart.

TROY
yeah, i hope he wears a cup to the discussion.

an exchange between a neighbor lady and myself while watching bella handle a surly playmate.

i fell asleep while putting alex down. that was about 8:20pm. i woke up three minutes ago. that was about 7:16am. so the only thing i have to offer you on this friday morning is an assurance that i am a better rested soul than usual.

excerpt from american experience's documentary on sex researcher, alfred kinsey. here, alice ginott cohn talks about her memory of being interviewed by kinsey.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. mercial

tickling is a major staple in our house. we have numerous tickling games, tricks, ploys and methods. but we are also a house of rules and some tickle-related rules we have include:

1. no tickling someone when they are going to sleep, sleeping or waking up.
2. no tickling someone when they are eating or preparing food.
3. no tickling someone when they are sitting on or standing in front of the toilet.

if i could only pick one of those to enforce going forward it would be number three, without question or hesitation. although number one is pretty sucky too.

many of these battles unfold a little bit like this:

TROY
alex, come here, i want to whisper something to you.

(alex starts walking towards me, albeit suspiciously. if bella's in the room her head snaps up and looks our way. if she's somewhere else in the house and heard my words she runs to the room we are in.)

BELLA
ALEX! don't do it! it's a trap! he's going to tickle you.

(many times alex has already moved too close and i grab him up, throwing him over my lap, tickling him madly.)

ALEX (through great laughter)
DELLA! DELLA! help me della.

(and bella does answer but as soon as she arrives to save him i push him away and grab her up throwing her over my lap and begin tickling her.)

BELLA
ALEX, HELP! HELP ME ALEX!

(and like bella, alex rushes to her rescue and i trade the kids out again. and so our game goes. sometimes i think the sport would go for hours but one, if not both of the children, in their excitement resort to hitting, kicking and biting to save their ally and they are big and surprisingly strong and their father is delicate so this is usually how the games end, with me massaging a bitten arm or rubbing a punched temple.)

last night marty had her monthly neighborhood meeting. i arrived home from work late and when i walked through the door, marty handed anthony to me and walked out the door. after about an hour of uneventful play, i herded the younglings upstairs, brushed teeth, pajamad bottoms and asked bella to read to alex while i put anthony down. five minutes later while rocking anthony near his bed i heard music start playing from alex and bella's room. TURN THAT MUSIC OFF! I'M TRYING TO PUT YOUR BROTHER DOWN! the music abruptly stopped. five minutes later bella walked into anthony's room, handed me a piece of paper as if she were serving me a summons, turned and walked out. the note read:



after getting anthony to sleep, i went to look in on bella and alex. alex was asleep and bella was scrawling out a second note. i asked what it was and she handed me her tablet. the page read:



item number six was not initially scratched out. that happened when i asked her why she included number 6. IS STRICT. she asked what strict meant. i told her. without pause, she took the tablet out of my hand scribbled over the line and handed it back to me. this edit effectively removed the only qualification i could claim on her well-itemized job description.

marty took the kids on a play date a while back. when she came home she was morose. i asked what was wrong. she said she felt like she just walked off the set of 90210 and that all of her clothes were ugly, and out of style, and didn't fit her right and all these other moms not only managed to keep up with the latest trends but their clothes were also ironed and free of kool-aid and/or vomit stains. i studied marty momentarily, gauging if she was working towards a punch-line, because this is pretty unlike the girl i'm married to. there was no punch-line.

her observations about the moms at our kids' preschool are right though. they are stylish, not quite high-fashion but certainly trendily-appointed. think camouflage capris. they also somehow seem to always be freshly showered too. these are not the sorts of things the dearmitt-walter home can claim with any sort of daily regularity.

seeing my partner injured so, i jumped in as it seems men are wont to do. i said to her, 'marty, you're a parent. you know this. you accept this. they don't. they dress like teenage girls in a sophomoric attempt to transport themselves back to when they were the popular kid in school and lived at the mall because for them it is a way to escape the reality of their faltering adulthood."

my words did not hit the mark. later that day, marty called one of her three sisters. the sister said ... "marty, while you're looking at them wishing you looked nicer, they are probably looking at you wishing they had the self-esteem to not try so hard." yeah, i guess that's sorta ok advice. ok enough to mend marty's mood more than my own words at least. what do you say we call it a girl thing and leave it at that.

admittedly, after hearing the sisters take on things, i thought more about it. while we'll gladly take the self-esteem card, i don't know that it would work for everyone. for instance some of these grown, near-forty women wear thongs and frilly bras (i know this because so many of these items conspicuously peek out of their other teenager wear). the hottest piece of lingerie in our home is a 1987, threadbare, psychedelic furs concert tee marty sometimes wears to bed. unfortunately when she puts this wisp of a garment on she's not always attempting to ignite our relationship. i know this because when she looks at me looking at her in it, she sometimes sighs and says:

MARTY
don't even think it. i'm tired and i'm going to bed.

TROY
but you got THE shirt on.

MARTY
the only reason i got THE shirt on is because you forgot to wash whites again.

TROY
it could be fate talking to us.

MARTY
well, you or fate need to do a load of laundry before i'm taking any messages.

conversely, if she did ever come to bed in a bedazzled or satiny thong, we'd spend twenty minutes studying it, talking about how comfortable it was (or wasn't) and examining the physics of how it worked. marty would probably convince me to try it on and then we'd laugh hysterically at the outcome and i'd eventually do zany dances on the bed. after tiring of the sport i'd ask her to put the furs shirt on and she would and we'd return to our life in our home, which is quite a ways away from the 90210 zip code. and for us, gladly so.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. confused

for the past ten years i've been reading of scientific studies contradicting long-standing health beliefs. after analyzing the breadth of data, i've concluded that by taking all my past and present vices (i.e. fast food, drinking, smoking, masturbation) and weighing them against my positive practices (i.e. dietary moderation, sobriety, cardio-vascular exercise, masturbation) i should live to be as old as if i had never done any bad or good things in the first place.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. calling home

five years ago the everyman photo contest was ranked #837 by google when searching the phrase "photo contest". today it moves between the number 1 and 2 slots. this is a totally organic ranking meaning it has been achieved with zero advertising or search engine trickery. quite a feat for a contest that offers a $50 prize.

i also believe that this ranking has helped raise the submission count from 2,100 last year to 5,500 (and counting) this year. and this with still a whole month left. and that was my subtle reminder to any of you who have notions of entering this year's mix. tick-tock, tick-tock.

UPDATE: and a mailing list nearly 2,000 names long! of the 20 entrants in the first year's contest, 17 had eaten at my dinner table. those days seem to be long gone.

yesterday's post about how bella would fight a kidnapper made me remember a moment she and i had at a show earlier in the month. i took she and alex to the touring Walking with Dinosaurs production (which by the way is super-great and if it comes through your town, go!).

before the day of the show i had prepared the children for what to expect. there would be life-size dinosaurs walking around but they shouldn't get scared because they were all totally fake and were robots and had people inside them controlling what they did and they wouldn't eat us. this preamble was necessary because marty terrified the kids on a water-park ride in denver called Journey to the Center of the Earth. this ride through dark tunnels had giant dinosaur heads swinging out from the walls. part of their motion involved convincing gestures of eating the occupants of the rafts zooming by. when our raft slowed at the end, both bella and alex were frazzled and shaken. given this recent experience when i first mentioned the dinosaur show to them they both shrieked saying, "NO WAY! i'm done with dinosaurs. not going!" had the tickets been inexpensive i would have skipped it, but they weren't so we were going, plus i wanted to see it. using my powers of persuasion (and promises of cotton candy) i got them on board and we went.

after the initial shock of having the lights go out and seeing the dinos enter the arena, the kids settled down and began to very much enjoy the show. alex lit up to the ones he recognized and bella gave alex warnings of action about to take place. i pointed out a funny bump on the top of one of the dinosaur heads saying it looked funny. bella in her matter-of-fact tone told me that was his nose and it was there because he was too big to run away and had to stand in water to avoid getting attacked and that 'bump' is how he breathed, like don't ya know dad?

towards the end of the show after the tyrannosaurus had been unveiled bella leaned into to me and said:

BELLA
for that one (pointing to the t-rex) i think i would need two people for each leg, four for the stomach and two, no, three for the head.

TROY
bella, what are you talking about? you mean if you had to operate the t-rex that's how many people you'd need?

BELLA
no dad, that's how many people i'd need to kill it.

i'm no child psychologist and therefore don't know what six-year old girls should be thinking on, but will stake my un-credentialed career on the point that military strategy is not an age appropriate behavior for someone wearing pigtails and eating sticky pink sugar. that said, does anyone know if west point has an elementary school and if so, are they taking late applications.

at a weeknight dinner last week bella informed the table that our family needed a password. when asked what this was she went on to say that it's a secret word only our family knows and would use if we, the parents, sent someone to pick one of the children up. like if bella was walking home from school and someone pulled up saying, "bella, your mother asked that i take you home today." bella would ask them what the password was. if they knew it she would go with them. if they didn't she would not. this led to a lengthy discussion about what to do if the person didn't know the password. i suggested if the person was in a car, the child should turn and walk in the opposite direction and go to the closest home of someone we knew and ask for help. bella then asked what to do if someone didn't ask anything but just grabbed her. marty said, very succinctly, that she gave bella and alex full permission to do whatever they could to get away. kick, claw, bite, scream, punch, gouge eyes, you name it you can do it. bella then thoughtfully ranked her skills saying she was a great pincher and could kick hard and yell "YOU'RE NOT MY FATHER! THIS IS NOT MY FATHER!" louder than anyone else in the family. then she looked at alex and said "and alex is a great biter, especially with his zombie tooth." marty and i both turned our eyes to bella and said in unison "zombie tooth?" bella, getting her next bite of food together, said "yeah, his zombie tooth. that broken one in the front."

this would be his front-left tooth which bit the dust a few years back when bella, alex and i were leaving the pool. i mummy-wrapped a shivering alex in an adult sized beach towel and told him to follow me. when he took his first step, his feet got tangled in the towel and he fell forward. because his arms were pinned inside the towel given the snug wrap job i had done on him, the first thing to hit the pool-deck was his nose, the second was that unfortunate front tooth. when i picked him up he was a bloody mess and i didn't learn the extent of the damage until i delivered him to marty at home, still quite bloody. in the midst of her first aid she looked up and said "troy, his tooth is chipped." marty's a tooth-girl and was quite, well, pissed that i had wrecked her first-born son. she hot-lined the dentist and asked if there was anything we could do. while she was on the phone i was holding the still sobbing alex. she started relaying questions the doctor was asking. is it just the one tooth? is the gum-line bleeding? what color is the tooth?

MARTY
can you see a bloody-pulp?

TROY
a bloody what?

MARTY (to the phone)
did you say bloody pulp? yes. where?

TROY
marty, i think i'm going to puke.

MARTY
troy. look at the tooth. where it broke. are there blood and veins and stuff coming out of it?

TROY
oh my god, marty. tell them they're going to make me puke.

MARTY
just look at the damn tooth troy! is there a bloody pulp or not!?!?

there was no bloody-pulp on the tooth which kept my puke-free streak alive. seeing how upset marty was through the rest of the evening, the next morning on my way to work i stopped at the pool and found the missing tooth piece. i put it in my pocket where it lived all day at work. when i got home i told marty to hold out her hand and dropped the little shard into it. she called the doctor back and told them we had the tooth chip asking if they, or we, could glue it back on. they said they could but didn't recommend it saying the cement would age and it would break off at some point probably when the child was eating and he would then swallow it. by the time marty told me this news i said that was good because i forgot i put the tooth back in my shirt pocket and sent it through the washer. even though it wasn't of use, marty was non-plussed about my losing alex's tooth a second time.

marty can sometimes not see the bright side of a situation, like how her son now has a cool and jazzy weapon against would-be kidnappers; his razor-sharp and smart-looking zombie tooth.