All the Billion Other Moments

I’m off from work this week, but it seems that it will be the busiest week of the year for me.  Everyone wants to see the kids (and who can blame them?), so we have a lot of visitors and visiting to do.  Today is a visiting day, so I Got up early and tackled Chapter 8 before we have to leave.

I never managed to make it back to the book today, but I do feel like the day was fairly productive, which is a rarity for a weekend. Denise managed to find my missing stack of notecards (thanks!), so I’m ready to dive in tomorrow.

It’s been a rough time since I last posted. My day job has changed again in ways I don’t fully comprehend yet (although so far, so good). My youngest daughter has been ill and after a trip to the ER and numerous doctor’s visits and sleepless nights we now have the pleasure of pinning her down to take nasty tasting antibiotics twice a day for the foreseeable future. She’s doing better now, and that is, of course, what matters. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to writing every day again soon.

I’ve been blog-tagged by Holly.

I could take the easy way out. I did use “joy” in my last post, but that’s unfair, because I already knew I was tagged by the time I posted. I have to say, when searching the blog for the term “happiness“, it was a little disheartening to see what the internal search engine came back with.

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.

Ouch!

I think of myself as a somewhat cynical person with a generally positive outlook. That might be completely untrue, as I haven’t really spent too much time in close self examination of late. I figure I know me pretty well, but I could be wrong.

So what’s my “One little thing that fills you with warmth, that bubbles you over with quiet happiness, or tickles you with its good-hearted hilarity, or makes you glad you just took a breath, and are getting ready to take another”? It’s pretty simple, really. It’s watching Vanessa when she’s watching her older sister, Rachel, play. The look of pure joy on her face when she watches her big sister is just indescribable. You get the feeling that there is just too much happiness for her little body to contain, and it’s beautiful.

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Alright, I tag the following:

• Bohdel
• Dursin @ SecretMonkey.net (it’s not a blog, but it’s close enough)
  
• King Tractor
• markm
• Neil Gaiman (that’s my long shot)

The rules are here, so get to it!

Born: June 28th 2005 9:27am EDT
Weight: 9 lbs 8oz
Height: 21 inches

I need to get one of these for my wife. She’s not good at getting out of bed, and this could be the perfect solution (unless she smashes it to little bits).

I’m a long time hater of alarm clocks. I don’t like be awoken to the standard alarm noise. It fills me with rage almost the second I wake up, which is a crummy way to start the day. See, I’m not a morning person until I get out of bed, and then things change (usually). I’m quite happy with my Digital Zen Alarm Clock. At least I was, until just now, when I saw they have a new verison with a silent strike mechanism. It wakes me up with a single peacful chime, which will repeat itself at progressivly shorter intervals if I fail to get up. It very rarely chimes more than once.

I’m doing my best to do some writing on the novel every single day. I’m not going to make my original goal for finishing the first draft of the novel by the end of April, but it should be close (I hope). The back is getting better, but it still bothers me, especially when I sit at the computer for too long. I started going back to Kung-Fu class last week, which is good and bad. I got used to having more time, but I really need to go. I enjoy it immensely, and I need the exercise.

Denise and I are going through all our paperwork in an attempt to organize the filing cabinet, safe, and boxes of papers marked “Important“. A lot of them aren’t, or at least not anymore. We burned out our last shredder and bought a new one. It was cheap but I hope it’ll at least last a year.

I started reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and I’m really enjoying it. Thanks to Del for mentioning it recently.

This year had to be one of my all time greatest birthdays. It started simply enough. I woke up in a hotel room next to my wife, with my daughter sleeping nearby in the hotel crib. We rose early, ate free breakfast and hit the hotel pool. I love to swim. I can not remeber a time in my life when I could not swim, and I really don’t get to do it very often. It still makes me feel like I’m four years old without a care in the world. Playing in the pool with my daughter is even more fun that just swimming around. She smiles, says silly things, and tries not to get too wet.

After that we went back to our room, showered and got ready to head on out for the day’s activities. Then my cell phone rang. It was my friend, Brom. I have to be honest, my first thought was "What’s wrong with his website.".

I answered it anyway. "Hello."

"Hey man, how’s it going?"

"Ok…"

"Can you hold on a minute, actually."

"Yeah."

The next thing I knew I heard singing. It wasn’t just Brom (who is quite an excellent singer when he wants to be), but also my good friend Dursin. They sang the traditional birthday song, and it was quite amazing. It’s great to have two such wonderful friends in the world. I’ve known Dursin since we were 5 and Brom since we were 10 or 11. Thank you both so much.

After that, the family and I headed off to the Third Annual National Buffalo Wing Festival. We ate a lot of chicken, and had an all around great time. If you like Buffalo Chicken, and you can get there, I recommend it.

Then we went to the Walden Galleria Mall, wandered around amongst masses of shoppers (it was "Tax Free" week) and Rachel had her first McDonalds cheeseburger. She asked for a cheeseburger out of the blue, so I bought a couple. We each had one, and we ate them together. Rachel then terrorized people by pushing her own stroller around. I good time was had by us.

Returning to the room after a long day I had "Happy Birthday" emails from my Mom, my Dad, and my Kung-Fu Instructors (which was a surprise). What could be better? Rachel was too excited to go to bed for quite a while, but that’s ok.

There wasn’t a moment of the day that I wasn’t having a good time (even when the two year old melted down). Thanks to everyone who made it so special.

We had a pretty crazy weekend around here, and I started back to work Monday to find a number of fires to fight right off the bat. I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about my daughter.

Sometime she really cracks me up.

One night last week I came in from the grill with some pretty nice looking pork chops. As the smell filled the room my daughter ran over and yelled "I want steak!" The night before we had, in fact, had steak from the grill.

"We’re having pork tonight. That’s pork," I replied.

She belted out, "Yeah. Pork is good steak".

Can’t argue with that.

Tonight we had pasta, and Denise and I also had salads. After the pasta was gone, Denise asked "Do you want something else?"

"I want my salad."

"Do you want something out of my salad?" Usually Denise and I will give her a few carrots or a cucumber, but she’s never had a salad.

"I want salad in a bowl!"

Denise shrugged, gave me a look that said, "she’ll never eat this", and handed her salad bowl over.

"This is my favorite dinner I never had."

Apparently it was, because she ate almost all of it while my wife hungrily looked on in amazement.

The other night, I stayed up working on my novel outline. After that didn’t go as well as hoped I made my way to bed. I grabbed the tap light my wife had left for me in the hall and made my way to bed as quiet as can be.

"You might think I’m asleep, but I’m not." I looked over at my wife, and she hadn’t moved at all, except for her lips.

"Why aren’t you asleep?"

"I can’t breathe through my nose. It’s all stuffed up."

I thought for a moment. "Do you want me to get you a Breathe Right Strip?"

It was silent for a moment and I assumed she had fallen back to sleep. "No. I have to get up soon anyway."

"Honey, it’s 1:30 in the morning." She never get’s up before 7:30, and that’s a rarity.

"Exactly."