Category Archives: The Obvious

The things that are so obvious that it is funny.

Start Your Weekend Off with a Dig!

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So, last night was the beginning of our weekend without the kids for our eigth anniversary.  The Kaes have the girls, and we have this odd sense of freedom.  As we left the house we were waiting at a traffic light and I looked in my rear view mirror there was a woman picking her nose.  I didn’t think much of it because after driving for so long I’ve seen more nose picking than would make for a good blog entry to write about.  But in a split second she slipped her finger into her [feeling sick here, sorry] mouth.  At this point in time I should have looked away but I was shocked.  I wanted to see clearly and penetrate the slightly less that crystal clear image I was seeing to make sure that I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing.  She did it again.  I busted into odd laughter and Jessica asked what was so funny.  I told her.  And then I think I pretty much ruined the whole evening for her because of my obvserving one strange woman doing things that ought not be done.  I dug myself a whole there was no getting out of.

After we spent some time together we were able to forget about the gal and things went smoothly and we had a good time.  Day one ended with no other freakishly weird things happening 🙂

T-Ball is Birth Control

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This evening at Abby’s T-Ball “switched-up sports” Abby had a pretty good time.  She didn’t obey the coach 100% of the time, but she did manage to spin around with her brand new, not so soft, leather glove… right into my male body parts which are certainly not accustomed to such intense contact.

I’m pretty sure this will help keep our family of four, four.  But the upside to this is that Abby was very apologetic, which I can’t explain clearly enough.  She repeated her apology over and over until I whispered out, “I forgive you.”  Which was what she needed to hear, because after that she was ready to play catch with another boy who pretty much immediately cried when she threw the ball to him and caught him in the chest when he wasn’t expecting it.

I guess I don’t have to worry about her and boys quite yet 😉

Stink

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If there’s one thing I pride myself on its my ability to keep to myself when needed. As much as I often want to make comments on things I refrain. For those of you who know how often I make comments you can probably extrapolate how many comments don’t get said.

On the airplane on the way home from some meetings this week I refrained from commenting (for those of you in Texas thinking, “We should have gotten together” but we didn’t, apologies, there just wasn’t time on this super-quick trip). You see I wanted to tell the man who wreaked of alcohol that he should probably drink less so that the smell didn’t pour out of his pores. But then, I came in contact with a family of people from a different part of the world. The entire family sat around my seat in various other seats in a U shape. And they emitted the smell of Jr. High. That is to say that in Jr. High most boys don’t bathe as often as they should. Only this was an entire family of stinkiness. An entire family of people who really should have just rented their own private plane to stink up. The upside is that the alcohol smell actually went away. The downside was the three girls sitting in front of me and the alcky were all too young to be sitting by themselves, but were doing so despite the better judgement of evey other passenger on the plane and the flight attendants. They insisted that wiggling, giggling, jiggling and fiddling with their seats as well as making lots of other noises was a good plan.

Their fathers came up periodically to congregate in the aisleway. Which of course sent the stewardess into 9/11 commando mode and she had to scurry them off to their seats. I’m not worried about devout Hindus [as was evident by their garb and makeup between the eyes], who won’t eat animals, let alone kill them taking a plane down, but it could be the perfect smoke screen for some guy to go and try to open the door.

The Cat in the Hat Principle

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As a rule, when I find others may benefit from my experience, I like to blog about it. This morning I experienced something that hasn’t happened since Abby, but needs to be written about for other fathers: The Cat in the Hat Principle. This principle can be summarized as follows: When poop can go everywhere, it will go everywhere.

You see, I was changing Evie’s diaper and when I opened up the ‘package’ it was fully loaded. Apparently whatever we’ve been feeding her decided that a mass exodus was the best plan of attack. So when I started wiping the poop started to spread – just like the spot in the Cat in the Hat books. Except for I didn’t have cats A-Z to wip up after me. As soon as I started the substance spread to the areas I was trying to wipe instead of coming off. It was as if the poop was one of the biblical plagues.

Eventually, after probably laughing silently to herself, Jessica stepped in and became cats A through Z. She quickly cleaned up and I went to the washroom to avail myself of its cleaning products hoping that the phenomenon didn’t reproduce in our recently cleaned bathroom.

Beware fathers of babies – this could happen to you!  And tell your other father and father-to-be friends, this needs to be warned of so that they don’t panic and lose consciousness with the baby on the table.

I Pledge…

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The latest Best Buy commercial starts with all sorts of pledging.  Not pledging with value, but instead pledging of garbage, drivel, and stupidity.  Pledging to help you get into debt on a new TV system.  Pledging to show off their stuff to friends (in greedy, selfish boasting).  And of course pledging to help you.  Right.  Best Buy employees are about the least helpful employees.  I have asked for help there several times and not gotten it.  Instead they only work in departments that give them kickbacks.

I pledge to not shop there.

Ed

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Happy birthday to my brother, who is, if my memory serves me correctly, twenty-seven today. I have to guess on that because if my memory serves me correctly when Ed gets around the right element (such as myself and many others) he reverts to about 14 or so and we all laugh at the excessive amounts of fart jokes. And if we’re lucky its just the jokes that are farty, because sometimes when we’re all hanging out like that it can also involve non-joke farts. In which case our wives, who have not descended into the pits of adolescence, yet again, are disgusted and think we’re pretty much ‘dorks.’ I suppose dork is a word that would have been appropriate at 14… maybe the gals just shift into adolescence differently 😉

Anyway, Happy Birthday Ed, and I fart in your general direction.

Randy Peterman the Sit-Com

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You probably have heard the age old adage, “God made man in His image.  Man returned the favor.”  That would be a quote from Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain.  It has nothing to do with this post.

I love it when folks say, “You’re funny,” to me because it makes me feel like they find me funny.  But its all a lie.  I’m not funny.  If you walk up to me and say, “Randy, give me all of your money.” you are more likely to get money than if you were to walk up to me and say, “Be funny” and get a joke.  I think you’d have a much higher chance of walking up to George Bush and getting the correct spelling for ‘strategery’ than you would me whipping out a funny quip.  But I do try.

What really gets me going is a funny scenario where my mind can just go off into the never-never land of imagination and put people in very, very strange situations that could never happen.  For example putting me in a fast food employee scenario.  That would be weird because I could riff on the concepts given me.  The problem with that scenario is that its been done too many times.  However, what if a person worked fast food and truly excelled at there job?  What then?  Imagine the annoyed customers when an employee actually gave a rip!  I would be really ticked off if an employee actually asked me if I liked my food while I’m trying to reconstruct the elements that could potentially make up a hamburger.

And that, in short, is why there is not a Sit-Com based on the comedy material of Randy Peterman.  Because there really isn’t comedy material… its just a bunch of pops and clicks that happen to coincide with very strange thoughts that come out as a tumultuous blech of weirdness.  And there’s already a show called Southpark that does that.

Customer S… This mailbox is full, you are being transferred to the attendant

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I tried to pay for my college classes today.  Tried.  As well as trying earlier in the week.  Accept that the folks responsible are – shockingly – busy.  And thus when I get transferred to their voice mail I also get transferred to the operator at the college because I can’t leave a message in their full mailboxes.  So tomorrow I’m going to drive down to the school, between the hours of 9:30 and 12:00 and pay for classes.

Query: How many phone messages does it take to fill up a voicemail box?  And why do critical-to-business employees have a quota in the first place?
If people want to pay for classes let the appropriate employees have a terabyte of storage space so that you can be making money rather than carefully limiting employee effectiveness.

With This Ring

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Things have been a bit gonzo-crazy lately around here.  I have had too much going on the last couple weeks (ha ha, probably years, but we’ll say its been more hectic this last couple weeks) – some of that is going to be wrapped up shortly, and some of it I’m going to put away.  Some of it is going to stay.  However, yesterday, after the 4 years birthday party for Abby (Tuesday she’ll officially be four), Jessica and I went out driving.  We just needed some time to talk and catch up on what the last couple weeks had not allowed us to catch up on.

It is at times like that when I am so glad that I’m married to Jessica.  I love to spend time with her and to share my life with her.  I’m glad she shares her life with me.  She’s a fantastically good wife, a stupendous mother, and a super cook.  Three important things 😉  She also loves to discuss theology with me, which I appreciate immensely.

When I found out that the pretty blonde girl liked me and she was in honors math I knew that I had something good on my hands [1995].  When she said she’d take seminary courses with me and move down to Texas with me I knew that I was amazingly blessed to be married to her [1999].  And yesterday as I was driving and talking with her explaining to her why I had made some choices and she was genuinely listening to me as her husband and friend I knew that I was blessed beyond what I could comprehend in this relationship [2006].  October 3rd we’ll be married for eight years.  That’s five years longer than we dated, which is pretty amazing.

If I could go back and do it all over again I’d probably change a few things [insert long list of stupid things I’ve said in 11 years or so], but I certainly wouldn’t trade my wife for anyone else.