Web Commentary for boys! Fire stealth combat car!

If you want to read what this awful blog post is about, action your clicker finger here to transform into blogging power. Be a hero!

So the above images are supposed to teach you about "reinforcing gender stereotypes" and the language in kids' commercials, but all it really did was make me want a t-shirt with all the "boy words" on it. Ultimate! Stealth! Ninja! Mega!

Also, my favorite line from the article is as follows: I hyphenated words that were meant to stay together, like "special forces" and "killer boots." So, today I learned that the words "killer" and "boots" were meant to stay together, which is awesome, but which also makes me disappointed in my own boots, as they have a demonstrated lack of killing power.

I also learned that "Reinforces Gender Stereotypes" apparently means the same thing as "understands an audience." I mean, it's not exactly nefarious to advertise BATTLE POWER ROBOTS to boys watching a show called ROBOTIC POWER BATTLE.

Well, it might be nefarious, but it's not nefariously sexist.

I think The Swede would totally watch a show called "Friendship Magic Fun Party." The Boo would practice his karate moves on her until she changed it back to Battling Robots or Raceway Ninjas or Blue's Clues. Then Jen would unplug the {EXPLETIVE DELETED BECAUSE MY MOM READS THIS} television and tape the sign with the big red X on the front which means "there will be no more television until our children stop being such obvious gender stereotypes." I'll be sitting in the other room, watching sports on the big television and eating a giant turkey leg.

New Composting Bin in Faculty Lounge!

As most (3 out of the 5 of you that read this blog) of you know, I'm teaching a class at one of the universities here in Portland, so I'm on the faculty distribution list for emails. Yesterday, I received an email from the business school with the following header:

New Composting Bin in Faculty Lounge!

Now, I know what you're thinking - only ONE exclamation point? That's right. In Portland, this sort of game-changing news only merits the single exclamation point. It's a difficult adjustment for me to make, because, being from the South, I tend to get WAY over-excited about the prospect of a new composting bin. Like, at least 4 or 5 exclamation points excited, so I have to back it way down to a one exclamation point level, with maybe a touch more excitement, which I excuse by noting that the header is in Title Case rather than Sentence case.

So, the email has been a wild ride already, and I haven't even opened it yet. Then, I open it, and the first sentence kills the whole experience for me. After the greeting, it begins "I have some exciting news regarding our waste diversion efforts this quarter."

And here's the problem. You know when you go to the theater and they show you a preview of a movie and there's just way too much in the preview and then you feel like it spoiled the movie for you because you know how it's going to end?

Yeah, email writer, I KNOW what the (reasonably, Scott, reasonably) exciting news regarding our waste diversion efforts this quarter is. You've already told me. Sure, the email contains important details (it's got a foot pedal and a lid, YAWN), but there's no anticipation. No buildup. I already know about New Composting Bin in Faculty Lounge!

But wait.

At the end of the email, there's hope.

"If things go well with this new bin, we will look at getting 2 more for the other kitchen areas in the building."

A possible sequel. Well played, email writer, well played.

It's like at the end of Flash Gordon after (SPOILER ALERT) Ming gets run through by the sharp point at the front of a space ship and then he's dead and his ring is laying on the floor and then it says THE END on the screen and then a hand that looks like Ming's picks the ring up and you hear Ming's laugh and a question mark appears so it's all "THE END?" But it was actually THE END because there was no sequel to the Flash Gordon movie even though it was so very awesome. But I never understood why they made these long sharp tips on the front of the spaceships. Like they were DESIGNED to run people through, bayonet-style. I mean, that seems like a very inefficient way for a spaceship equipped with lasers to kill people.

Left unsaid is what happens if things DO NOT go well with this new bin. Like, if they go awry. Horrifically awry.

Well, Portland isn't perfect

Ok, so the Boo and I were walking to Sunnyside Environmental School to pick up Shelton yesterday. It's about a kilometer from our house to Shelton's school. And yes, I denote distances in metric terms now.

The Boo, pictured pre-rampage.

It's kind of a long walk for the little fella, so he likes to mix in some running and some karate chops and some side kicks to keep things interesting. Sometimes he falls a little behind, but I just yell "Ketchup" and he comes running. Um...not because he loves ketchup, well, he DOES love ketchup, but it's because "ketchup" sounds like, nevermind just watch Pulp Fiction.

So, we're walking down the sidewalk, and I catch an adult voice saying something that sounds like "Do you HAVE to walk on the flowers?" I turn around and see a guy with a look on his face of I-can't-believe-I-live-in-such-a-world. Meanwhile, The Boo is oblivious that the guy even asked him a question. He's just walking along and has obviously brushed up against some flowers that were sort of hanging over the sidewalk. I look at the guy and say "Excuse me?"

Now, here I must interject that I didn't say "EXCUUUUUSE ME?" in a challenging sort of way, but simply "Excuse me?" in a way to signify to this guy that I wasn't sure I understood exactly what he had said. SPOILER ALERT: I was completely in the right here.

I'm tired of calling this guy "the guy," so I'll call him Belty McShorts as he was wearing a t-shirt tucked into his shorts and a belt. He also had stupid facial hair, which isn't important to the story, but this is my blog so I can be as petty as I want.

So, I say "Excuse me" and Belty looks up at me and says "I asked HIM if he HAD to walk on the flowers." He says this like I'm rudely intruding on the conversation he's having with my pre-kindergarten-aged son.

For lack of something else to say, as I am a bit nonplussed, I reply "He's five."

Belty starts to go into his whole thing with "That's no excuse for walking..." but I interrupt with "No, I mean he's five, so he's not going to understand your rhetorical question." It's Belty's turn to be nonplussed, but he manages to croak out "What?"

Now it's MY turn to lecture, so I say "He's five, so he's not going to understand the purpose of your clever sarcasm. He won't get that you're trying to be mean to him." Meanwhile, The Boo has just kept on walking, so I turn to catch up with him, leaving Belty to fire his parting shot, which was "Don't have any more children."

Ok, so, I have to admit that my immediate instinct was to go home, make a baby with my lovely wife, wait four or five months, get an ultrasound that clearly shows the baby (maybe one of those fancy 3D ultrasounds, go all James Cameron on him), knock on Belty's door and be all "Boo-yah! Another kid that will trample your flowers in five years, Belty!" Then I remembered that Jen and I have decided that two children are a gracious plenty and that spite probably isn't a good enough reason to have a third.

Not the victim.

The Chimney Foot

You know when it's sort of cold in your bedroom and so you get under a ton of covers but then you get a little too warm but you don't want to get out from under the covers so you stick your foot out of the covers to try to reach some sort of equilibrium? This is called "The Chimney Foot," and The Boo makes use of its unique thermodynamics on a nightly basis.

The Chimney Foot in action. No, that is not a trick of perspective,
The Boo's foot is really that huge.

Having this tiny practitioner in the house has allowed me to study The Chimney Foot, leading to one particularly counter-intuitive finding: somehow, The Chimney Foot is much, much warmer than the rest of the body. You would expect it to be cooler due to its contact with the frigid outside world, but I actually made a grilled cheese sandwich (not pictured) on The Boo's Chimney Foot.

The Saturday Market

On Saturdays in the Spring and Summer by the Willamette River, which runs through Portland seperating the East (where we are) from the West (where downtown Portland is), there is a sort of arts and crafts festival, where people come together to sell baby slings, rocks painted to look like Oregon landmarks and homemade didgeridoos.

There's also festival foods, so Swedish and Boo each had their first taste of Elephant Ears. The wetnaps afterward were also a huge hit.

Anyway, we had a "Portland Moment," which I captured on our Flip and will share with you now.




If you're having trouble soaking all of that in, I'll explain that clip. It is a man riding in circles on a unicycle playing the bagpipes. Of course, he is wearing what can only be called a "Cargo Kilt" and a t-shirt that says "Keep Portland Weird." This sort of thing is called a "Portland Moment."

Another example of a Portland Moment is when we realized that one of the Boo's male teachers is named "Thimble."

Hearing that someone is named "Thimble" always leads to the following sort of conversation:

Me: Thimble?
Other person: Yes.
Me: Really? Thimble?
Other person: Yes. Thimble.
Me: Like, Thimble. As in the thimble thing?
Other person: THIMBLE. Yes.
Me: Wow. Thimble. Thhhhhimble. Thimble. Thim. Bull. Thimble.

That last little bit is my repeating the word over and over again in different ways to make my brain understand the fact that there is a human being named Thimble. Anyway, I met Thimble and he's a good guy and I think his name might suit him, but that may just be because he jumped in front of a huge needle to save me from being poked.

Anyway, Shelton gets bored while shopping for didgeridoos, so she likes to run and play in the park:

And Hughston likes to try to figure out why anyone would voluntarily listen to bagpipe music:


And I try to compose a lovely picture with cherry blossoms in the foreground and young people laying around enjoying their youngness in the fuzzy background and it turns out almost perfect except I didn't notice one little twig hanging down that blocks the girl sitting up and ruins the whole shot.

Flashback - The Flight to Portland

Ok, I'm going to do some flashbacks of what's happened so far, but, being flashbacks, they won't tell the entire story about how all of our stuff got into a truck or how Jennifer kept handing me new boxes to try to cram onto the truck even though there was no more room on the truck, but I will show the picture of me standing on the back of the truck in my pajama bottoms after finally closing the back of the truck.

And here it is.


This picture is pretty pointless because of what it doesn't show: namely all our stuff behind those big boards and the intense hostility between me and the picture taker, who had been making me carry out boxes all morning to stuff into a full truck that she seemed to think magically expanded based on her increasing urgency that "This has to go, too!"

This is how I got even with her, and it wasn't really even that hard.

See, Jen and the kids were going to Portland on December 30, 2009, and since they weren't coming back, they got one-way tickets on Delta. Since I needed to come back to finish dealing with the house and wrap up some work-related stuff, so I got a round trip ticket.

On US Air.

Which meant that while we all (Nixon included, but not the cats) had to head to the airport at 5:30am, I would be seperating from them and traveling alone. Gloriously, comfortably alone. Alone to eat what I wanted, when I wanted. Alone to read or listen to my iPod or wander or sleep. Happy. Alone.

Meanwhile, my lovely bride sent me this text message before she even got on the first plane:
"I am at the gate in line for a seat assignment. I am Miss Misery and I want a divorce. Security people were really nice but that was the worst ordeal ever. I blame you."

Jen single-handedly had to run the Orange Alert Choo-Choo Train through the security checkpoint. Her and two children means three carry-ons, 6 shoes, three jackets and two DVD players. That's bad enough, but what really sent her over the edge was that she had forgotten the tablespoon of water in each of the two water bottles she had brought for the kids. Disposing of that water in an airport is somewhat akin to disposing of spent nuclear rods.

My connecting flight was delayed for two hours in Denver. I nearly wept with joy.

George the cat expresses an opinion

So, our cat George has a urinary tract infection, so, since Jen is working at an office in Lake Oswego and I am working from home, dealing with the sick cat was left up to me. If you are as unfamiliar with the workings of a cat's urethra as I wish I were, then you might not know that these sort of things can be quite serious for a male cat. In fact, George has actually, in the past, developed crystals in his urine that have blocked up his tiny cat junk. If untreated, I imagine that this could cause him to swell up and explode like a particularly grisly, ammonia-odored water balloon. We can't have that happen; we'd almost certainly lose the security deposit on the rental house.

So, all I had to do on Friday morning was corral the cat, put him the crate that he despises more than anything, and get him to the vet office a mile and a half away without a car. So, I put on my nice, "C'mere Georgie" voice, immediately signaling to the cat, who has known me for 11 years, that I was going to do something awful to him. One crash-riddled chase scene later, George is trapped in the bathroom, and I'm off to get the crate.

This is as close as George will allow me to get to him now, because

he thinks he is the victim in this story. Cats are jerks.

The only way to get George into the crate is to turn the thing on it's end, pick up George and drop him head first into the crate. It is at this point that I find out that George's infection hasn't progressed to the point of a blockage, because he...

Well, look, I mean, nobody wants to get peed on by anything, ever. I'll grant that. Once you're being peed on, who or what is actually DOING the peeing is pretty much beside the point. You're being peed on. The rest is just degrees of increased horror. But a cat peeing on you is just unacceptable. There's also volume to take into account, which, in this case, was surprisingly prodigious. And what do say when your cat pees on you while you're trying to help him get well?

If you're as quick-witted and pithy as I am, you probably say something like "Dude, you just peed on me." And that type of snappy dialogue, whoever is reading this, is why they are creating a sitcom based on my life.

After my shower (not a euphemism for what I just described, but an actual shower), I put the crate containing George on the back of my bicycle and rode to the vet, eliciting weird looks because George yowled the entire way. Yes, I have a miserable, screaming cat on the back of my bicycle. WHATEVER. Don't you dare judge me, Portland. You're PLENTY weird yourself.

I wish I could say that I carefully avoided as many bumps as I could during the trip, but I'm apparently too petty to resist my need for revenge against an ill 18 pound cat for even a few minutes.