November 2006 Archives

Random thoughts gathered while driving all over creation last night...

1) It's hard to believe that having a kid was what drove us to do this, but dear lord, it's a wonderful feeling having your Christmas shopping nearly done before the calendar flips over to December. No lines at the mall, easy to find parking, much less of the annoying holiday music overload.

2) While I was probably far happier than any human should be that the games in Toys R Us were in alphabetical order, they sure make it hard to buy plain old Trivial Pursuit. There have been five more editions released since the original came out, but the only one they had was stacked up to the ceiling, and was the "Totally 80's" edition. While my parents lived through the 80's, I'm not so sure they want to relive them. Sad that I had to turn to Amazon to get what I was looking for.

3) If you're a lawyer, and you're doing pro bono work, bully for you, but having a PROBONO license plate on your PORSCHE might not be the best way to keep it real. Why not paint it on the side of your Gulfstream jet?

4) This thought isn't from last night, but from this morning. Mrs. Dave called up TinyPrints yesterday and gave them a good bellowing through the phone. Careful readers will note that yesterday I was hesitant to mention them by name, and for a while I thought I was justified in my discretion - they agreed to overnight the right set of envelopes to us. But lo and behold, the overnight package arrived...and we got ANOTHER set of envelopes for John and Madelyn from Miami Beach. So TinyPrints, here's to you and your simian suckiness. Untrained monkeys could do a better job of order-filling.

So a few weeks ago, Mrs. Dave ordered our birth announcements from a company who shall remain nameless (though we're happy to out them if they don't come through pronto). Obviously, since we don't have the date/weight/name just yet, we can't get the announcements themselves, but this company offers the option of sending the envelopes first so that they can be addressed ahead of time. She placed the order with the hopes of getting the envelopes prior to Thanksgiving, so she could start addressing them over the long weekend at my parents' place, without any distractions other than food, more food, and the occasional walk on the beach (it's still beautiful, even when it's 35 out). Unfortunately, they did not arrive before Thanksgiving. They did, however, arrive today, with the return address already on them.

The return address was John X and Madelyn Y.

The city was Miami Beach.

The package was not mailed anywhere NEAR Miami Beach.

The only silver lining in all of this is that Mrs. Dave is not only completely in her rights to call and completely bawl them out, but since this IS a birth announcement order, and they basically have to sit there and take it since they'll be hearing from a 9-month-pregnant woman whose order they screwed up. I just hope she has it in her to give them a good reaming.

In the spirit of Mrs. Dave's post, a few of my own...

1) The continued good health of those that I love, especially my wife and our soon-to-arrive Weird Baby. Her back may be a bit cranky - and I don't blame it after 37 weeks of lugging the Golden Fetus around - but the now-weekly reminders that everything is going ok, and the constant negative results that come back from every test she has to take are very reassuring. To the point where I almost think it's a psychological ploy to distract us from the fact that we should be completely and utterly freaking out. But no, everything is as it should be.

2) Supportive friends. Talking with my best friend last night, he mentioned once again that he and his wife were very excited for us. He may just be blowing smoke up my ass, but given his feelings toward his other baby-fied friend (well, mostly his friend's wife), I tend to believe him. He's very much of the "Cool. Rock on." school of life-altering events, and generally tends to get as excited as I do about most things not involving Red Sox and championships, so to see him expressing this degree of support for anything is quite nice indeed.

3) Employment. Not that the job market is as dire as it once was, but I've been at my current place of business for five years now, which is twice as long as I've been anywhere else. For a while, every day at my last job - 2.5 years' worth, all told - was an extension of the longest stay, and there are only so many one-year or nine-month positions you can take before it starts to look shady on a resume. But while there are certainly benefits to working for a big company - stock options, a major health plan, more advancement opportunities - there's a lot to be said for working for a family company. The hours are flexible - the boss doesn't care when I come in, when I leave, or what I do while I'm at my desk (like blogging) - as long as I get my work done on time and the clients are happy, I'm in the clear. Which is nice, because when times are slow, I can do a metric assload of work on the web site or other personal projects. And it's nice to know that I'll be able to take as much time as I need (within reason) when the big day/little girl comes. Because it's not just a family business, it's a family-oriented business. And despite the occasional excessive presence of certain members of said family, I'm perfectly content doing what I do.

"I couldn't decide what to get, so I took both. I'm liking the brownie-donut combination."
"I think someone would make a lot of money if they could actually make a brownie donut."
"Ooh, yeah. But what would you call it? The bronut?"
"..."
"..."
"I don't think I'd use that name."

Every so often I'll preface a question to Mrs. Dave with "So I've got a question." She's learned to be wary of these types of questions, and rightfully so - more often than not they're not actual thought-inducing investigations, more the types of silly observations that occur to me while driving around late at night. Two such recent ones stemmed from a couple of pop chestnuts...

She wore a raspberry beret
The kind you find in a second-hand store

Now, I admit...I'm not the type to frequent second-hand stores of any type, but given the relatively low popularity of berets - and raspberry-colored ones in particular - it comes as somewhat of a surprise to me that they were so popular in urban Minnesota in the early 80's that one Prince Rogers Nelson dedicated an entire song referencing their commonality in establishments of thrift. But further to this line of questioning, would you actually BUY a raspberry beret you found in a second-hand store? It seems to me that headwear would be one thing you'd probably want to buy first-hand, new, off-the-rack, so as to avoid sharing head-borne...stuff...with previous wearers. I mean, if memory serves, many stores won't accept returned hats for specifically that reason.

But let's move on.

Your best friend Harry
Has a brother Larry
In five days from now, he's gonna marry
He's hoping you can make it there if you can
'Cause in the ceremony, you'll be the best man

Such a strange family dynamic displayed by the friends of one Mr. Marvin Young, better known as rap artist Young MC.

First, the narrator asserts - via the rarely-used second-person, no less - that Harry is his best friend. However, despite having a brother (Larry), and despite Harry being his (the narrator's) best friend, Larry is asking the narrator to be his best man. Larry must have a low opinion of his own brother, but a high opinion of his brother's taste in friends, while simultaneously opting to ignore his would-be best man's taste in friends (being as how his would-be best man's best friend is his brother, whom he considers below him in considering for best-man-hood).

But wait - there's more. The wedding is taking place in a mere five days! So apparently, he's waited until less than a week before his nuptials to rule out his brother (and perhaps his lesser-known brothers Gary, Barry, and Zacharry) but to ask his brother's fairly socially inept best friend (as established in the three previous verses) to serve as the chief organizer, toast-giver and master of ceremonies at the wedding in question. Top it all off with the tautological delight that is "He's hoping you can make it there if you can", and well, you've managed to upstage the apparent commonplace discovery of vermilion military millinery in Minneapolitan consignment stores. Congratulations, Mr. Young.

My wife is an extremely thoughtful person.

On our last day of Lamaze classes a few weeks ago, she had the very generous idea of buying a small gift for the other couples in our class. Fortunately for our budget, there were only two other couples in the class, so we were able to make it a nice gesture instead of a bag of M&M's for everyone.

Then a few days ago, a package arrived at her office from Babies R Us, where we had registered. We'd actually just finished cleaning out our registry so we were trying to figure out a) what it was, and b) who was still sending us gifts, since the showers (yes, plural...we have very nice friends and co-workers!) had also happened a couple of weeks ago. So we opened up the package and it was one of our Lamaze class partners, responding in kind with a quilted sheet for our Pack & Play. They included a note with their order, but...well...apparently the character count for that form was limited. See for yourself.

Thanks to T&A for the unexpected gift!

Got sick of deleting ~150 junk spam comments a day, so I've turned on registration both here and on Mrs. Dave's blog. I'm sure our web host will love us for it, not having to track all of that bogus feedback in their internal database. Sorry if that blocks you, faithful reader/commenter, but it's not like I'm drowning in comments...