This last month our garbage cans were run over by friends and family. Twice. At the beginning of the month Jessica’s sister creamed them with her parents’ Buick (not pronounced like quick). In the middle of the month my friend Tony nailed them as he was backing out of our driveway.
The good thing is that they’re rubbermades and they withstood the smashing.
This morning Grandma Forland asked Evie if she wanted an Egg. To which Evie replied, “Egg, please.”
Then Abby yelled out, “Eggs and buttered toast! Eggs and buttered toast!”
Evie joined in, “Bustoast! Bustoast!”
Evie will probably kill me for sharing this with the interwebs when she gets older and someone says, “Bustoast,” to her.
Abby is five today. Five years ago we were in the hospital and Jessica was in intense labor (at the time of this writing, according to my computer she’ll be five in a few more hours). I can’t believe how much has changed in our lives since Abby was born, but much of that change is in direct relation to our having had Abigail. I remember doing a lot of crying when Abby was born. They were tears of joy and I’m sure they mixed with snot as I whimpered, wept and rejoiced over the new life I was seeing in front of me instead of her wiggling in Jessica’s stomach.
Abby can walk, talk, chew gum, read, imagine and laugh. My mother has often told me that my smile is something she remembers most about me growing up and I can certainly say that Abby’s smile is what lingers in my memories as well. Abby’s laughter and calling me silly, or asking me to tickle her, is something that I will cherish and recall when I hand her off some day to a husband who will hopefully find her to be one tenth as beautiful as I think she is.
Abby is smarter than I think any other children her age are. I’m probably rather biased. I’m rather biased about my daughters and wife, but I think that’s acceptable. [editors note: I’m crying now so I’ll stop. What a pansy guy I am ;)]
Happy Birthday, Abigail Ruth! Your mother and I love you very, very much! I hope five is more wonderful than four.
The audio CD is 25 years old. I remember getting my first CD: Queen’s soundtrack to Highlander. I believe my second CD was Diamond Rio (yes, I bought a country album). After that I don’t remember. I’m glad that I can buy all digital now 🙂
Why on Earth do advertisers demand that commercials have weird, weird, weird implications? The latest maxi-pad (feminine napkin) commercial drives me bonkers! Who decided that they should describe a woman’s body part as a roller coaster? At what point in time does the average woman find herself in a situation where she thinks, “I have got to get a maxi-pad that can handle this Jennifer Garner/Alias type activity. Periods & my daily commute simply don’t mix.”
This sort of thing scares me mostly because I know they’re working on a more extreme commercial with tree chippers and chinchillas. I don’t know how they’ll fit, but its coming.
This morning I asked Abby about a song that I had heard her singing along with on a kids CD. She began to sing it. I joined in at one point and then she stopped and told me that in the recording of the song at times only the kids sang because they knew, “… the anniversaries**.”
** that is verses in case you’re not quite sure what she was trying to say
When you read quotes like this:
I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled). – Joel Spolsky
Its hard to want to upgrade.
So, in the continuing saga or me against AT&T I went into their store recently (as in Friday evening) and I asked an employee, “I have a weak reception area that I live in, do you know which phone you carry has the best antenna for improved reception?” The perfect answer was given to me, “Do you have friends that have AT&T service? You could invite them over to your house and see who has the best reception.” If I didn’t want one of those blasted iPhones so bad I’d totally jump ship.
Today I got a phone call from AT&T. Well, it was from a computer at AT&T. Or at least I think it was. It could be the nation wire tapping program just doing a routine monitoring of my line pretending to be AT&T. But assuming its AT&T a recording, yes a recording, told me to call AT&T to ask them about my account. It gave me the phone number to call, told me that I should call them about my account, and then gave me the number to call again. Only I had no paper to write things down with so I hung up, tried to dial the number from memory and then got a wrong number message.
A recording! Why is it that they can afford to do any number of things that are called advertising but they fail to offer the customer service experience that would make customers want to do business with them? Can you believe that in a customer service scenario they chose to use an electronic device to 1) irritate me like nothing else and 2) cause me to have to scramble to remember a number and 3) use a recording to communicate ‘an important message’? So I called AT&T’s customer service line that is published on their website and after a little pinball-like action through their automated system I arrived at a customer service rep named Leslie. Leslie was nice and helped me the best she could, she helped me determine that something had shut off my auto-pay plan (which has worked for some time now without a problem). Something had shut it off three months ago. And after accumulating three months worth of bills they were kindly letting me know that, finally, I should pay my bill. Three months! A recording! Agggghhhhhhh!!!!!
I don’t know who is responsible for the numbskullery that is their procedure and policy in dealing with billing snafus but this was a really irritating way to interrupt a Friday. So I’m going to pay my bill and attempt to reset my auto-pay program, but this is just irritating. Thanks for nothing AT&T. A recording!
I happen to have had a very forgiving set of parents. They put up with my playing loud music (live loud music, not just recorded loud music) and they would also put up with my thundering down the stairs when I descended from the second story of the house. As a teenager very few things I did were quiet. They endured it all and never allowed my brother to kill me no matter how much he might have wanted to end my noise at any given moment. One other thing they allowed me to do was to completely cover my walls with memorabilia from events in my life. I had everything up on my walls.
It all started with eight pieces of paper that I drew a face on with chalk. I took those six pieces of paper and made a large rectangle out of them (assuming 8.5″ x 11″ pieces of paper edge-to-edge that’s approximately 34″ x 22″). Then, next to the chalk drawn face things began to be stapled up. I initially wanted a ‘nook’ of focused cluttered above my desk but it didn’t take long before the organism grew to take up much of one long wall. After several years time I had stapled, tacked, taped or nailed pretty much everything onto my wall leaving only small bits of actual wall showing.
Ketchup flavored potato chips my aunt gave me, an engineers cap that had died throughout my junior high years, pictures, receipts, ticket stubs, advertisements, drawing and other assorted things arrayed my walls. People would come into my room and just stand there taking in the volume of crud that was mounted in the room. I have zero aspiration to replicate that cacophony of ‘decoration’ but it was fun while it lasted. It was passed onto me later that my parents were heard mumbling, grumbling and groaning as they patched the hundreds if not thousands of holes in the walls to repaint the room after having to remove the wallpaper. I got off easy simply removing the junk from the walls and putting most of it into garbage bags when I moved out 🙂