4:30am spookiness

Posted on by

3:15am
Woken by gentle thunderstorm. Listen to sounds of the house. Roll over, return to sleep.

3:30am
Open eyes. Something has woken me, not sure what. Turn head, see daughter standing silhouetted in bedroom doorway, unmoving. Wait a few seconds thinking “please don’t let her be a zombie who tries to eat me”, and ask “Honey, you okay?” while running over my zombie contingency plan in the back of my head. She says “Yep” and walks away.

3:32am
A large thunderclap hits and I decide to check on the kids. Max is sleeping, Maggie was awakened by the storm. Snuggle her for a bit, listening to thunder and watching a lot of lightning through the window. Chat in hushed terms for a minute about storms. Do not mention zombies to daughter.

3:40am
Just as I am about to head back to my oen bed I hear a loud thunderclap. I also immediately hear creepy baby sounds coming from the living room. Hold breath, wonder if Stephen King is writing my night. Baby sounds a second time. Maggie sits up with “Dad! Did you hear that?! Is it Mom’s radio?”.
“Not unless it’s set to the creepy-ass possessed demon zombie baby station” I think, running over THAT contingency plan in my head. But before I can answer, more thunder and spooky infant gurgling from the living room. Maggie says “Oh, no, I know what it is.”. Turns out they bought a new baby doll to give as a present later this week, and it’s supposed to make those sounds. (apparently it doesn’t sound demonic to anyone but me?).

3:50am
Back in my own bed. Lots of rain and thunder. After a couple more outbursts from the Twilight Zone baby in the living room, I put the damned thing at the other end of the house and make a point of NOT looking to see if it’s head turns to watch me leave the room.

Damned Halloween weekend and all it’s scary movies.

3:53am
Lying in bed I hear a tiny far away voice that I think says “I liked the other room better.” Leaning over, I grab my iPhone off the nightstand to write this entry…just, y’know, in case.

Outside, the storm is getting louder.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Halloween Happiness

Posted on by

SO much fun was had trick-or-treating this year.

Jeanne went as a dead teacher (complete with gummie worms crawling in her hair). Max went as Calvin (complete with a homemade stuffed Hobbes), and Maggie went as Pippi Longstocking (so cute)! I went as Great Aunt Ruth, in a beautiful flowered housedress and a horrible flowing blonde wig that went down to my ankles!

According to the Veggie Tales songs, when they had to kiss their Great Aunt Ruth “it felt weird… She had a beard”. Well, I have a beard, so it seemed like a good costume! I got quite a few catcalls, thank you very much! Of course, my son kept telling people “I don’t know him. I’m not admitting I’m related to him”!

The kids raked in a TON of candy! This was the first year that they weren’t tuckered out early, so after getting their treats we went to Big Boy’s to get at least a little healthy food!

I was pleased that both kids picked costumes from books they’d been reading instead of off the television, even if one of them was a book of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons!

So, a great time. It was a warm, wonderful night, we giggled our way through the whole event, and now it’s time to try and sleep off the sugar buzz!

Halloween pics!

Thursday Night Quotes

Posted on by

Leadership


Men make history, and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
Harry Truman

A leader’s role is to raise people’s aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will try to get there.
David R. Gergen (American journalist and U.S. White House advisor born in 1942)

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery quotes (French Pilot, Writer and Author of ‘The Little Prince’, 1900-1944)

And a bonus quote, because I like it…

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt

The World Series is over!

Posted on by

And so begins another Baseball Off-Season.

Congrats to the Philadelphia Phillies. I was hoping the Rays would win, but that was mostly because I’m an American League kinda guy, since I grew up with the Detroit Tigers as my home team. The young players on the Tampa Bay Rays made a nice showing by getting to the World Series after their dismal season last year, but the Phillies handled them pretty nicely.

Now begins the waiting, and hoping, and scanning of the newspapers by all baseball fans:

“Has my team made any trades?”
“Did they pick up a superstar?”
“Did they trade a superstar away for some hot prospects?!”

Next week are the General Manager Meetings, where the trade talks usually get heated up… looking forward to that!

October 29, 2008 – swiped from all over LJ

Posted on by

Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you’re in a heterosexual marriage, and you don’t want it “protected” by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

I was going to write a paragraph after copying that sentence. I thought about writing about how my marriage certainly wouldn’t be in any danger because someone else got married, whether they were straight or gay. I thought about writing about how it’s laughable that people want to legislate who can fall in love with who, and who gets to decide what a marriage should really be. I thought about wrting a rant against the people who use religion to object to gay marriage but let a whole lot of other things that are in the bible slide by with nary a complaint.

But then I re-read the sentence, and I think that pretty much covers it.

Link-a-Rama

Posted on by

This video from Ron Howard is wonderful. Fun, nostalgic, pro-Obama, and heartfelt. Worth watching… especially if you like Andy Griffith or Henry Winkler!

This program, Earthscape, is really really neat! I’ve got it on my iPhone, and love it. It’s sort of a ‘user generated’ photo mosaic/map/wikipedia thing of, well, the planet… (Some folks have said it’s similar to Google Earth, but I’ve never used that so I don’t know.)

Anybody else watch the show Chuck on Monday nights? Jeanne and I are big fans, it’s funny and action packed and sweet. They have a bunch of fun online extras you can check out here. The “Webisodes” are great!