Is this thing on?

Well, after a good 4 year run, I am calling it quits with LiveJournal.

Please update your bookmarks to my new blog at http://erith1.wordpress.com

So I haven't posted in a while, but this time I actually have a good excuse! Sara, Evie, my mom and I spent a week in Arizona, and we have the pictures to prove it. Sara was attending a conference for the 2nd half of the week.

The first struggle was getting out the door on time...especially since the time changed overnight! Sara realized as we were falling asleep so I jumped up and changed every clock I could think of. I didn't want to forget to change one that I would then look at in the morning and mess us up. I also almost accidentally changed the clock in the wrong direction before Sara corrected me.

Evie did pretty good on the plane ride out. She slept for a lot of it and didn't cry at all. We convinced my mom to check both of her bags so she could help us with carry-ons and she promptly paid the price by having the airline lose her bag she wanted to carry on. We got it that night though around 9 so it wasn't so bad.

First up was Montezuma's Castle and Tuzigoot, two Indian ruins. The weather was super nice and everybody immediately fell in love with Evie and her sunglasses. Everybody falls in love with Evie immediately, but she had never been exposed to so many people, so I had never seen the phenomenon on this scale. Some random lady even took her her picture! Some lady also told me she looked like Shiloh Pitt, and I thought she was just being nice, but there is some resemblance, especially in the father area.

Me and Evie:


Anyway, we went to the Grand Canyon and it was certainly as Grand as I remembered it, but not as breathtaking seeing it the second time. I think my mom was suitably impressed though. This time we hiked some on the rim and that was pretty cool. On the way back down to Phoenix we went through Sedona and that was actually really neat. I wouldn't mind stopping back there sometime. As Sara said, it isn't as amazing as the Grand Canyon, but in a way it is prettier.

After that Sara started her conference and we mostly just hung around Phoenix. Evie took her first swim in a pool, we saw the world's largest pipe organ, the Arizona Science Center, the Desert Botanical Garden, and the Phoenix Zoo. I have to say, I enjoyed the botanical gardens more than I thought I would. I never knew there were so many kinds of cactus!

One of the crazier things that we did was to hike Squaw Peak. Sara's roommate from college suggested we do it one day. She said it is very busy and people run up and down every day for exercise and she didn't think it would be too hard with the baby. Well! The trail goes up to the summit of a mountain overlooking Phoenix and is VERY steep. You gain 1200 feet of elevation in 1.2 miles. I know there is no way to properly describe it here to make you appreciate how steep that is, so you are going to have to take my word that you do not want to have a > 20 lbs. baby strapped to your back as you ascend! It may have had steps or something at some point, but they are long gone. It took us a little longer than expected to get to the top which meant we got there just in time for sunset. Some lady at the top told her that I inspired her, because if I could do it with that baby on my back, she wasn't going to quit! The bad news was that we weren't able to get back down before dark. The especially bad news was that I was wearing my prescription sun glasses! It ended up being okay though; nobody turned an ankle. All in all it was an extremely exhausting, but extremely satisfying experience overall. And Amy was right, there were many people doing the trail and some people were carrying weights!! So some people do apparently just go up there for the exercise.

Just as an interesting side note, we bought a CD of children's songs for Evie before we left and when we were listening to it I realized that we had the exact same CD when I was little (well, we called them "tapes" back in those days). That was an extremely odd coincidence, we didn't buy it for that reason! The CD was labeled as a "Classic". I don't think I am that old!

On the way back we accidentally left a bag at the security checkpoint! We had a lot of bags and the baby and then one bag got pulled out to be searched, so there was a lot of chaos. We didn't realize it for like an hour or so until we were getting ready to board the plane. I had to sprint back through the airport to get it, and sure enough, there it was. They had to search it, which I understand, but I was anxious to get back before we missed the plane. The suitcase was full to the brim with toys for Evie, but it also had 2 containers of applesauce for her in there, which is a no-no. I said, "Throw it away, I don't care." but the lady was like, "No, no. You obviously have a kid. Where is she, why don't you have her?" I tried to explain that she was with my wife back at the gate which was half way around the world, but regardless, "Just throw it away. We don't need it." Then she had to call the supervisor over and ask him about it. I was like, "Seriously, just throw it away!" Finally they "allowed" me to take the applesauce. So nice of them. Anyway, the plane was delayed, so we didn't miss it.

So I think that was more or less the trip. The end.

You heard it here first folks, after 16 years and about a million records, Brett Favre announced his retirement today.

Today is truely a day that will live in infamy.

An eruption has been sighted off the coast of gum island!

Evie got her first tooth!  Well technically.  You can't really see it per say (not with the guardian tongue in the way) but you can definitely feel that it has broken through.  I don't know that she has been any fussier than normal or anything.  She's pretty good in general.

So maybe I need to update that picture of her over there now that she is getting so old!

A funny story:

What's worse than asking someone who is not pregnant when they are due?  Asking someone when their TWINS are due 3 weeks after they were born.  Out of courtesy, I will not name the person who made this mistake because they are a reader of this blog.

An odd story:

The other night I heard a sound in the night, sort of a soft thump.  It half woke me up, so the details of this part are kind of hazy and dream like.  My recollection is that I heard a thump and then Sara handed me a double-A battery.  We didn't know where it came from but I just assumed it fell from the sky and thumped onto our bed.  I set it on my nightstand.  The next morning, I happened to notice that the clock was on the floor and eventually we pieced together that it must have fallen off the wall in the middle of the night, (and not made a sound?) hit the ground face down thus catapulting the battery up over the foot board and about 5 feet into our bed.

A creepy story:

We were standing in Walmart making a pet tag for Nala and this creepy old guy came over and was just sort of hovering around staring at our baby.  I kept glancing up to see if he had left but he hadn't!  Lurking and leering.  Finally as we turned to leave he mumbled, "Keep her bashful.  There are a lot of nitwits out there who will do things to little girls."  It was creepy to the max.

You may have seen these already, but if not you should definitely take a look.  Just as some background, apparently every night at the end of Jimmy Kimmel Live, there is a running gag where Jimmy Kimmel announces that they are out of time and they have had to bump Matt Damon.  That is, until Jimmy's girlfriend, comedienne Sarah Silverman, dropped this bombshell on him:



Well Jimmy Kimmel wasn't going to take this lying down.  And, like any good sequel, you need way more star power.

So it was a pretty big weekend in Evie land.  The biggest development is that she finally learned to roll from her front to her back!  Of course all babies in the world learn this first before learning to roll back to front, but I guess she is a little different.  Well, unlike when she learned to roll back to front, once she figured this out she kept with it.  So probably the first day she learned how to do it she did it like 6 times.  Now she can roll back / front / back / front all the way across a room!

She also kind of waved bye-bye.  My mom and sister were leaving and we were all fake grinning and waving and saying "bye bye!" like idiots for about 10 minutes and then all of a sudden Evie waved!  And then we all just looked at each other like, "Did she just do that?" so we all started waving madly again and she did it again.  Of course we have tried a million times since then and I don't think she really gets it, but hey, it is a start.

Along the same lines, we were trying to test her to see if she knows her name.  In a constant tone of voice we were saying, "Door knob!  Purple Shirt!  Nala!  Evie!" and sure enough she seemed to look only when you said Evie.  Of course, on later trials she responded to Fart Face, so again I'm not really convinced it wasn't a coincidence.

I was taking a shower today and I heard the door open and close.  I said, "Hello?" assuming it was Sara...but nobody answered.  So I waited awhile but it was completely silent and then I started to get nervous so I said, "Are there any Axe Murderers out there?"  Still no answer and I thought, "Geez, I'm so stupid!  Why leave them a loop hole??"  I don't want someone later to say, "Well, you asked about Axe Murderers and I'm really more of a Knife Murderer."  ("I have a hacksaw."  "Oooh, I'm an axe murderer"  See below)  So I said, "Are there any murderers of any kind out there?"  Still nothing.  Then I started thinking, "What if I am actually their first victim?  So they wouldn't actually be a murderer yet..."  So I was formulating another question, but then I just decided to get out of the shower. 

And p.s. it was just the cat.

You can educate anybody who isn't quite sure what kind of Stuff White People Like.

And thus fulfills my obligation to make an update.

J/k.  Look, I'm getting sick and tired of you folks (you know who you are) bothering me about an update!  None of you* have a blog and / or a 6 month old baby, so I don't think you realize how much work it is to keep up such a thing!

*With the exception of InteractiveReader of course, who puts my posting to shame.  However, she is not bothering me for updates, I assume because she knows what a burden constant blogging is!

Evie suddenly decided she wants to roll over and now she can't be stopped.  She has been able to for awhile, but it took a lot of coaxing.  Now she just automatically does it whenever she is on her back.  She still can only drive in reverse though.

I'm going somewhere this blog doesn't go very often...economic stimulus packages.  Read this really exceptionally fantastic idea about how they should be implemented.  I personally don't agree with economic stimulus packages in general, but neither does he.

One final note, Live at Radio City Music Hall by Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds is really good!  Dave and I used to have a pretty good relationship.  We hit a rocky patch during the whole Lillywhite Sessions debacle, but Busted Stuff and Some Devil were better than a dozen roses.  Still, the endless live compilations began to wear on me (see Live Trax vols 1 - 10).  How many CDs can I own with the same songs on them?  Finally, Stand Up did our relationship in.  But here comes Live at Radio City to make me remember all those romantic weekends at Deer Creek.  Of course it is good!  Did we forget that Live at Luther College inspired me to learn how to play the guitar?  And that Tim Reynolds still can play the hell out of a guitar.  Dave's voice is a little more raspy, the song selection is decidedly spiritual and I've never heard acoustic guitar sound so...sinister.  They really work that low E!  But it certainly brings back memories and I've spent more than a few trips in the car singing my lungs out.

That is all.

So I haven't really had any posts on Evie lately and I thought I should give an update because big things are a foot!

So two days ago we started Evie on her first solid food (rice cereal).  She seems to like it (she was already trying to reach for my oatmeal this morning) but she has no intention of swallowing any of it.  Everything goes out the way it came in!  Oh well, I know that's the way it is supposed to go at first.

Today she rolled over for the first time (back to tummy).  She has seemed like she has been on the verge of it for *so long* but she never quite did it.  She certainly is capable of it, but she just hasn't seemed to want to.  So today we put all of these toys just out of reach on her left side so that she would reach for them and then Sara and I were talking and all of a sudden, Evie just rolls over to her right!  There wasn't a single toy over there or anything.  So much for our motivation.

She sits up very well now and will stay that way for ~20 minutes before getting tired of it.  She will stand if she's holding on to something (like your hands or the side of the crib) but she doesn't try to pull herself up or anything.  You have to set her like that.  She crawls decently well, except only backwards!  It is kind of funny because she wants to crawl forward to get a toy but she can only crawl backwards, getting farther and farther away from the toy.  This makes her very frustrated.

Finally, she is only really interested in one thing...the jump-a-roo!  She jumps in that thing forever and just loves it.  If you ever try to hold her all she tries to do is to get you to hold her up under her arms so she can jump.  Jump, jump, jump she never gets tired of it.  And when she goes up in the air in the jump-a-roo she does these funny plies (sp?) with her feet in the air like a ballerina.

So we are currently experiencing a wave of the black plague sweeping through our condo.  Evie was first, culminating on Friday mostly with a really snotty nose and a fever.  Then I got sick Saturday and especially Saturday night.  What a miserable night that was.  Sore throat all day then including a stuffy nose and horrible sinus headache.  I didn't get much sleep.  Then this morning I felt a little bit better but Sara started to get a little sniffly with a scratchy throat.  So it is pretty snotty around here lately!

Today I received a wrong number phone call.  The problem is, the person who they were trying to call was also named Shane!  Took a while to sort that one out, let me tell you, very confusing!

Well first let me start on Thursday of last week.  I was leaving work kind of late and it was very cold and dark and there was nobody around.  I stopped at a stop sign and trotting down the middle of the crossing road was a coyote, cool as a cucumber!  I just waited at the stop sign as he calmly trotted by in front of me, probably 5 feet from my bumper.  He gave me a little grin like, "What's up?" as he went by.  What is going on with Chicago and coyotes??  My dad suggested that perhaps some ancient Indian spirit guide is trying to get a hold of me or something.

So on Saturday we went up to my brother's place at Madison and there are two things to note.  The first is that I ate a Bacon Brat Burger on Pretzel bread with some sort beer mustard.  That's something you certainly can't get just anywhere!  It was like a double patty burger but one of the patties was made out of a brat.  It was interesting enough sounding that I passed up the daily special, the Brat Favre.  It was pretty delicious, but I could have done without the pretzel bread.

The other interesting thing is that we went by a theater downtown and on the marquee it said that they were showing the Packer's game there on Sunday.  How cool would that be?  I would definitely go for that if I lived there.

After that, we went to my Grandma's 80th birthday party.  It was good to see a lot of the Halbach's that we don't usually see.  We haven't been to a family gathering for that side of the family in a long time.

YIKES!!!  The Packers are one win away from the Super Bowl and it doesn't look good!  Game is currently tied with 4 seconds left, but the Giants are about to kick a FG!

YEEEEEEEEEEEESSSS!!!!  Missed FG, overtime it is!

I know that I am an adult now because today I received this email from Sara:

"evie is hving some really wet sounding poop right now.  oh, stated jmping again, better change her quick!  oh no, not done!"

The joys of parenthood!

What else?  I'm excited about the prospect of a farmer's market opening up a couple of blocks from my house this summer.

Sara and I got library cards over the weekend (that's for you InteractiveReader).

It was really nice to have a weekend at home.  Even though I worked my tail off, it was nice to think that I didn't *have* to do anything! :)  Plus I think it may have helped Evie with her sleeping too. ::crosses fingers::

So we were talking about Mariah Carey because Evie decided to practice her high pitched shrieking skills all day today.  Sara admitted that she only learned as an adult that the lyrics to Dreamlover are "Won't you please / come around / 'cause I wanna share forever with you baaaaaby".  Until that point she thought the lyrics went, "Won't you please / come around / 'cause I wanna sheva weva with you baaaaaby".

Now we've all gotten song lyrics wrong at some point, so it's not that funny I guess, but this just really cracked me up!

I asked her, "What did you think sheva weva meant?" and she not only said, "a dance or something" but she actually demonstrated the specific dance that she thought sheva weva referred to!  I mean, sure I can understand not getting the words right, but it is so fantastic that she thought she had the words right and that Mariah just made up a phrase to refer to dancing.  That just slayed me.

So don't forget to ask Sara to "sheva weva" next time you see her. :)

This reminds me of that fake Geico commercial where the newlyweds had to live in the tiny house.  Except it is real.  And this man is crazy.

If you don't feel like going to the website, you can just watch this here:



P.S.  Happy Birthday to me!

Better late than never, right?

Hey, I've been busy.  Did the usual 3 state trip (IN, MI, WI) over the break.  It was exhausting!  I couldn't believe how much stuff we had to bring for Evie.  We couldn't have fit very much else in the car.  How do you do it with more than 1 kid?  It's still not over with yet, we still have more traveling for the next two weekends (IN and WI respectively).  I was really worn out by vacation. :(  I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that Evie has apparently stopped sleeping.

Okay, check this out.  Yeah, I read that book...saw the movie too.  Were they Rita Hayworth pictures by any chance?  You'd think they'd at least make prison escape movies that were up for best picture required watching for all prison guards.

So I get frustrated with LiveJournal from time to time.  (BTW did you notice all those annoying "link preview" things are gone now when you hover over hyperlinks on here?)  I found a program the other day that downloaded all of the content and comments from this blog and saved it on my computer.  So I have it now, which opens up the option to switching to another service (probably blogger because Sara won't let me pay for my own domain).  But should I?  Loyal readers what say you?

On one hand I think I would have better features since I won't pay for an account on LiveJournal.  On the other hand would I be disloyal to LiveJournal and to atroposmoirae if I switched?  Although it seems like a long time ago, I really started this with her in mind and it kind of feels disloyal to her memory to switch to something else.

Our article in Chicago Magazine is now posted online, so you can save yourself the $5 and read it there.

In fact, we were so pretty that they used our picture in the table of contents to link to the article!

I'm just putting this here because I think Evie needs to see it some day

Lebowski Fest '08 is being held in Chicago!
 
Unlimited bowling, White Russians, Creedence cover band, screening of the movie, what have you.

What more could you want?

The most amazing thing to me is some of the costumes from past events.  There is no character from the movie too obscure that someone hasn't dressed as them.  Also check out some of the past events such as tossing out the ringer full of dirty undies or throwing a coffee mug at the Dude's head!