i mentioned that we recently potty trained anthony. he has recently entered phase three of the potty training process. in the event you have never potty trained a human and aren't sure what the evolution of a developing toddler looks like, it is this.

phase 0 : not potty trained. totally comfortably deucing in their diaper and sitting with said feces in direct, warm contact with their ski...

he's been a consummate professional and team player and good things usually happen for those kinds of people. i think that's a lesson a lot of young people in our locker room can learn.

steelers coach mike tomlin addressing the performance of his 4th string qb, charlie batch

we went camping over the weekend. when we came home anthony started complaining that his eye hurt. marty looked at it but couldn't see anything. he continued to get more agitated until finally holding his eye closed with his hand for the rest of the evening. both marty and i would check on him after he'd been alone for a bit wondering if he was exaggerating his state but every time we looked in on him, he was playing with one hand and holding his eye closed with the other.

in the morning marty took him to our eye doctor. after examining him the doctor confirmed that his eyeball had been scratched. he leaned into anthony and asked him if he knew what had happened to his eye. anthony said that an invisible baby dolphin jumped at his face and scratched his eye with its invisible tail. fortunately there seems to be an antibiotic for that.

excerpt from Jim Harrison's novella The Man Who Gave Up His Name

or view the side by side comparison to see what's changed in eight months

click to enlarge

yesterday i mentioned some things anthony deems pleasing to the palate, today i thought i'd share some i call tasty. this occurs to me as i recently went out for dinner with a couple of friends and stumbled into an wonderful dish, a cornbread dusted tilapia which is a very pedestrian name for a very tantalizing treatment. with the food still lingering on my taste buds, once home, i searched for a recipe. instead of seeing how to make it myself, i found the very dish i was after being touted as one of the 25 best options to be had in my city. of the twenty-five, as of three hours earlier, i'd only experienced one of them. you should know, i (and/or marty) don't get out all that much.

25 saint louis dishes you need to order now

while i am not someone i would call a foodie, i am someone who makes rich food a part of his routines, so the next logical step was to craft my list of the best eats in stl. they include:

cornbread dusted tilapia at cyranos
i'm going to start here because this is what got the ball rolling. this is a place known for their desserts. their bread pudding has been called one of the best in the country (perhaps because of its mid-west stylings). but their tilapia was easily the best piece of tilapia to ever sit before me.

chargrilled pork at lemon grass
i was introduced to lemon grass by a vegetarian. he told me that even with over sixty items on the menu, he thought that over half their sales were for their chargrilled pork. the first seventy times i ate at there it is what i ordered. then i tried the chargrilled shrimp and now choose between those two depending on my mood.

spicy beef noodle soup at wong's wok
there was this hole in the wall chinese place near my where i lived that served a special dish on fridays and saturdays called spicy beef noodle soup. it consist of a large bowl loaded with noodles and a chunks of seasoned and stewed beef on top. if you went by this place on fridays or saturdays you would always see no less than seven to twelve of these bowls on the tables with ravenous patrons hunched over them, piling the piping noodles onto a large spoon with their chopsticks before eagerly bringing it to their mouth. initially, it was hard to ask what the dish was because most of these folks spoke very little english.

as an aside, the people here have taught my kids several chinese words one of which aleo still uses to send me off in the morning.

mango roll at i heart mr sushi
i've been routinely eating at i heart for about seven years now. at my peak i was eating there three days a week. since their mango roll was first slid before me i've never eaten there since without ordering one.

garlic and onion shrimp at pho grand
the mark of how good this dish is is that all humans you come in contact with for the next three days will know and hate you for having this dish it but you just won't care. exclusion and solitude are a small prices to pay for such a flavorful experience.

shrimp and brie stuffed salmon at mccormick and schiffs
the original comes from jake's seafood in portland but through mergers and acquistions it has been brought to my backyard. surely not as good, but still ridiculously good.

beef kabob at cafe natasha
the people and atmosphere at cafe natasha are wonderful. the kabobs are even better.

whatever they're serving at the farm haus
i've just recently discovered this place but my first experience was over the top. and i have to say whatever they're serving becuase that is how they run the place. you come in for lunch, the only thing on the menu is the blue plate special. it's different every day but whatever it is that day is what you can have, aside from choosing between sweetened or unsweetened tea. i went on a friday which was breaded fish, rice, beans, and hushpuppies. these would be four things i'm not even particularly fond of and my salivary glands are still trying to come to grips with the culinary tryst. decadent. i hope to next go when they're serving bacon wrapped meatloaf with mashed tater tots.

know one i don't, please drop me an email, even if it's from another city as i'm next going to share a few national gems i know of.

while getting ready for bed, anthony pleaded, as he often does, for a quick round of ogre or pillow wars before having to relent to sleep. to raise the stakes, he added the following details: it's hard to say what's more twisted about this little guy, his creative spirit or his culinary proclivities.

the one you may have heard


the spirited original


and in case that didn't put a grin on your face and some tap in your foot.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. enjoy your anger

last week was high on troy week. at every turn it seemed i was being lavished with a body of compliments and kudos and appreciation for a variety of things, unrelated, from a variety of folks, also unrelated. some of the people i see weekly and some of the people i hadn't heard from in many months and in one case many years. the many years person rounded the week out, coming in on saturday evening. it came as such a surprise and carried such an unexpected remark, it is the only specific item from the week i'm going to share: the "pager site" mentioned would be the third website i ever made in my life, which justifies my friend's astonishment that it could have possibly withstood any test of time. regardless, if that isn't a puff of wind up a fella's skirt, i don't know what would be. thanks j. and thanks not for having the thought, but for having the consideration and going to the effort of letting me know you had the thought. i appreciate this doesn't always happen, or doesn't happen enough in today's frenzy-filled days at least.

and then monday morning as i walked anthony to school i took in my scene. my four year was energetically charging on his bike towards school, which he is still thankfully crazily excited about. i was appreciative of the early fall weather. i had a solid night of sleep. i had a good swim the day before. i thought of the previous week and how dear and giving my world had been to me. as i studied the blue sky i thought that perhaps this life of adulation may be my new standard and i could now routinely expect such generous feedback from the folks in my life. perhaps this was the universe making good on all of the karmic rewards surely due a soul as kind and gentle and needy as mine. then at work, before i had logged the first hour at my desk, a young co-worker told me that some of my behaviors were indicative of a high-functioning autistic and she wondered, aloud to me, and believe it or not, innocently, if i'd ever been tested. before her sentence was complete, i heard the magic bubble that had been following me around for the last seven days implode with a wispy simper behind me. and that quickly the universe i thought may have so recently changed in my favor, appeared to have righted itself.

a student of mine from last year forwarded me a link today. he said that after seeing this interview he felt it might be of interest to me and of possible use in future classes. i opened the link. this was the first thing i heard. after that line i paused the video, now fifteen seconds into a thirty one minute interview, readied a reply to my student and wrote, "that is possibly the single greatest line i've heard in regard to technology since i've begun working in technology."

i've never heard of stephen fry but after listening to thirty minutes of him free-styling here, i can assure you that three months from now i will be very familiar with his thoughts on technology and life's chase.

you can all thank luke, the most stylish student i've ever had the pleasure of working with for this juicy and marbled slab of greatness. and, send good thoughts and karma his way as he looks for a curious endeavor with a non-profit in the atlanta region.

STEPHEN FRY: WHAT I WISH I'D KNOWN WHEN I WAS 18 from Peter Samuelson on Vimeo.

in honor of anthony's first week of school, let's keep the anthony roll running. i mentioned (i think) that we had been doing some last minute potty training with him to get him ready for school. that went well and good and thankfully fast. the best part is i can round out our picture series of our family using the rest room.

please note the complete set is only viewable in our bathroom. i thought i had posted more of them but a quick search says otherwise (just aleo). so sorry but i think that a picture of me moving my bowels would probably be counter-productive to my employability but i figure if you're a guest in my home, you can deal.

yesterday was anthony's visiting day at preschool. he was ready eager to go sitting on his bike in the front yard a full thirty minutes before we had to leave. i couldn't hold him off to the for real time so we left quite early and arrived before the doors had even been opened to the public. he made himself at home in a sandbox he has played in many times before due to its close proximi...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. crystal clear

one month ago i talked about how after three years of working at it i finally swam my first official 50m pool length. three weeks later, august 22, i swam that same 50m freestyle length but this time when i reached the wall, i did a flip-turn and swam a return 50m length back. had you seen me after i completed this circuit you would have thought i was just accepted into the space program.

last weekend i swam fifteen full laps with flip turns in each (resting after each lap), and this weekend, the last weekend the outdoor pools are open, i hope to swim twenty laps, still with a rest after each, which would represent my new distance goal of a nautical pool mile (2,000 meters). the last step is to remove the need to rest after each lap. the only sad part to this story is i'm going to have to do this in shorter (25m), indoor pools during the winter months.

ten minutes before i was to leave for work it began to rain, torrentially. when i was ready to leave, i stood in the open doorway of my home not wanting to begin the nine minute walk to the office. from the kitchen where she was doing dishes, marty called to me that she and anthony could drive me to work. i waved her off saying i didn't want them to bother. three minutes later with me still in the doorway, marty appeared with anthony in her arms saying, "c'mon anfer, we're going to drive dad to work." she flashed me a smile as she and anthony ran out the front door to the van.

we didn't say much on the way to the office. after getting out of the car and just before swinging the door shut, i thanked her for going to the trouble of driving me. she leaned towards me from the drivers seat, "watching the rain in the doorway the way you were, you looked like a girl with a new haircut and i didn't have the heart to send you out in the rain to mess it up."

this is definitely not the manly image i wish to project to my wife and lover.

and i'm not sure that i got the punctuation right on that previous statement, i reckon grammar dave will appear soon enough to let me know, but the "wife and lover" descriptor above is meant to refer to one person and not two ... and certainly not more than two.

although, back-peddling explanations like that probably aren't going to doing much for my manly street-cred either.