table manners and acting like a lady

What with Reanie going to a private school and all, we get to enjoy the fact that she has learned to burp on purpose. It works so much better, too, when she is in her school uniform. That's money well spent, NiMYRT customers.

So, since she's learned her new trick, she likes to demonstrate and practice her proficiency lots. Buddy's trick is a little more pleasant to endure since it is somersaulting. But he doesn't do this at the table. Reanie does burp at the table.

I'll say something about it being rude. Mama says something about it not being lady-like. Buddy says, "More chicken," and we pass him the fish.

At dinner tonight, Reanie roars a burp and says "excuse me". Same ol', same ol'. I, predictably, say something like, "It is rude to burp like that. especially on purpose. Stop." Mama says, "Reanie, be a lady at the table."

A few minutes later, Reanie burps again while scratching her butt (we're still at the table). I say, "REANIE! Stop scratching your butt at the table!"

So Reanie asks Mama, "Is scratching your butt being a lady?"

3 or 6 min of your life you won't get back

I watched the POSSx2 play like this for ten minutes or so before thinking to grab the camera. They'd wound down by then, but it was still fun for me (but prolly not for many of you blog readers). Can't remember how much we paid for this playset, but it was worth it. I'm trying to figure out a way to bottle up these laughs. for now, we have the videos.

No animals were harmed in the filming of this video clip.

Part I

Part II

Some pictures from the Lago Vista weekend

Some Thoughts

-thinking about #3, one would think "speech impediment" would be easier to say. I wouldn't want to be the first person to make fun of it him once he's aware he has trouble with R's. And W's. And "Th". And "S". And "V". And "B". And...

-thinking about #1, I'd reconsider the tactic of crashing him out to get rid of him. Might work that one day, but if you have to race again the next day...hang on. I can't remember the saying, but there is something about one's character that is proven when they are faced with adversity.

-thinking about #2, one of the highlights of my life has been to notice that #2 has favorite songs on the radio, and catching her singing full throttle along with Unwritten by Natasha Beddingfield...if she new, I'd go buy her anything she wanted right then and there.

Observation of the day

Helicopters make donkeys run fast.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

Reanie: I can't hear you. You have to say "No" louder.

Good Game

One of the fun things about these things is the numbers.

26 Deviled ("evil") Eggs

30 potions Cheese tray and bread

40 pieces prociutto and melon

30 pieces brucetta

lots of olives

24 servings Polenta and sausage

20 servings garlic scallops over linguini

60 pieces bacon shrimp over bed of spinach

36 pieces baked clams

40 portions fried rice balls

20 potions caponata

20 portions spiedini

20 portions Chicken Tikka, pita and hummus

30 portions caprese

24 potions baked pears

20 portions banana pudding

50 pieces chocolates

14.5 bottles of wine

have camera phone thing. must use it.

I snapped this picture while heading back at the end of a ride yesterday evening. This is the hill right before our house.

Today is my sister, Shaun's, birthday. Happy Birthday, Sssshhhhaaaaauuuuuunnnn!

On Being Buddy

He's all snotty right now, so he snores and sniffles and yucks. Put some vapor rub stuff on him last night, and that helped me sleep.

He was sleeping hard when it was time to load everyone up this morning, so I had to wake him up. Let's just say that Buddy prefers to wake up on his own. A lot much. But we got it rolling, and I had most of his clothes on him before he got really pissed off.

When he hit that point, I started wrestling with him out of funness and diversionary tactics. He got into it, complete with his new thing of simultaneously headbutting me to the nose or lip and kneeing me in the I-Created-Yous.

So I let out a breath that indicated he hurt me, though I didn't let go of my grip on his shirt as I tried to hockey-jersey him. But he stopped for a second, put his hands on my cheeks and said, "I'm sorry Daddy", and then gave me a kiss with his hands still on my cheeks.

And with his hands still on my cheeks, and just as I was falling into the "Aww" moment, He headbutted me in the mouth. I've got all day to plan my revenge.


Why is it that kids can take toys and stuff out of a box or off of a shelf three to six at a time and thrown them clear acoss the room in a matter of .03 seconds, yet when it is time to put thm away, they carry the toys one at a time and in such a way that each toy is cursed with 50X's normal gravity?


Of course, Mama will say the same thing about me and my stuff. It isn't my fault she lives in my office, though.

Toughness defined

Becky spent the day taking a chunk out of a huge goal she has for this year. How big of a goal? Well, today she rode 200K (that's 124 miles in old money). Wow! Right?

But it was 34 degrees and raining all day). And today was just the first step towards this goal.

Here's Becky tackling another goal (Mt Washington), but it isn't to show her in action so much as it is a way for me to say, "I'm inspired."

I'm no pettifogger, but only two other people showed up to do this ride(no, I wasn't one of them...I mean, hell no, I wasn't one of them). Toughness.

how to tell if someone went to a good college or not

I try to delegate houshold stuff as much as possible. When #1 is around, he earns his 11yr old keep with dishes, taking out the trash, and othe stuff appropriate for him that I don't want to do. But since I work from home, the daily stack of dishes piling up in the sink is pretty much my gig to eliminate.

Fortunately, it is one of the household chores I don't detest, which is not the same thing as saying I enjoy it. Sort of like going to the dentist, but at least getting an anesthetic . Which reminds of the time in college that I had a bad tooth, no dental insurance, and had to decide if I wanted to pay for the filling. It was cheaper to just get it pulled. And cheaper yet still to do it without anything to numb that sumbich. At the time, $40 was a very big deal to me. And since I've already gone on a tangent here, I'll add that it ultimately saved me even more money, because it made room for a wisdom tooth to come in.

But I digress.

Scottie stayed with us for a spell a little bit ago, and he took over doing the dishes after dinner. #1 was feeling pretty good about himself, but then again, so was I. There is a point to this story, I swear.

What with Scottie doing the dishes, he did it his own way. Sure, folks have their preferences about putting the silverwear up or down and so forth, but what really got me was what he did with the brush used to de-gunk the dishes before putting them in the washer.

Which reminds me that I prefer just washing the dishes by hand and putting them in the rack to dry.

Again, I digress.

So once Scottie had left, the dishes stacked up the next day. I looked around for #1, but I think he was at school or something, which meant I had to do the dishes myself.

After warming up and stretching, I turned on the water, dolloped some soap, and then scouted for the dish brush. But the thing wasn't in the sink or hanging on the little nail inside the cabinet door. While this kind of thing isn't cause for any concern, as it generally means #3 was playing with it somewhere, it did kind of give me the icks because what I like the least about doing the dishes is some OCD that I have to clean the brush before getting the gunk off the plates with it. I mean, it is wrong to use a dirty brush to clean off a dirty plate that is going into the dishwasher, right?

Frustrated, but already committed to washing the dishes, I opened up the washer (I only wash them Walton's style when the extra few minutes it takes aren't an issue) to begin the process. Lo and behold, it was already full of clean dishes.

I may be ok with doing the dishes, but for whatever reason, I hate putting them away. And for that matter, I'm ok going to get my clothes off of the clothesline or out of the dryer when I need something clean.

I digress, yet again.

So there is a bunch of dishes, but more importantly, the dish brush was in the dishwasher!

So, I concluded that Scottie must go to a good college to learn such a thing. Simply washing the dish brush with the dishes is probably the best thing taught at that college in Austin!

No School Today

This post isn't about me. Just about the week around me.

The last 7 or so days have been so packed that I'm sure I'm going to have to come back and edit this post to add in what was left out, but let's give it a first run anyway...

Last week began as usual. Work stuff for me and Mama. School stuff for the kids. Peter is doing his thing. A comfortable buzz of business. I was reminded early on in the week by Scottie that he was coming up for a spell (that's a good thing). I'd forgotten, honestly, but I remembered when he left a voice mail saying he was in Ft Worth and would be here in 45 minutes or so. I got the voice mail after he walked through the door, but I DID get the message!

It was good that Scottie was here, and not just because it is good to have him here, but also because he could help Noah (and me) gather data for Noah's Science Fair project which was due on that Tuesday, and not in a few weeks, as I thought. So, we all bundled up to ride and time some downhill stuff on Noah's bike as part of his experiment.

While this is all happening, Mama received and alarming email from one of her cousins living in Ireland about her (Mama's) Aunt and other cousin being stuck in Cuba without any money and "Send some immediately! It is an emergency! It cost more there than they thought!" type thing. No note about where to send it or if they even know the money is coming and no way to contact them (phone or email) to tell someone, "WTF are you doing in Cuba with no money?"

Stressful, and unnecessarily so. The bright side, for us, is that since that Aunt is the one who normally cares for Apple Granny, it meant Apple Granny was headed back to us to stay for awhile, as Nonno had to head to Terlingua for some business. The downside (for me at work) is that we could arrange for Tina (who cared for Apple Granny a few hours per day last summer) to only come in for a short spell each day with so little notice.

While this is going down, Peter moves out in a huff.

I get a call from the school that Buddy has a fever. Sorry , Buddy. I ignored that voicemail that day, and I played dumb when I took you to school the following day, since they require kids to stay away for 24 hr when sent home sick. But as I see it, he was never sent home sick. So there.

Kathe, Mama's closest friend while growing up, came to visit this past weekend as well, bringing her cool-as-all-get-out 18 month old, Jay. I wish we could just scoop up these two, even if would be awkward adopting someone our age. Kathe's husband died 6 months ago in a car accident, and this was the first time we've seen them since then. I'm not one for drama too much, but I just sort of hoped they'd stay for a long, long time.

Then Chloe's Aunt missed her flight back. I'm not sure if it was a missed flight in Cuba, the connecting in Pananama or what, but it meant that things were crowded cozy here with all of us, though Scottie beat the ice storm and went back south to Austin by then, while Granny stayed another couple of days.

Sadly, we got word about this time that Grandma (my step-Mom's mother) passed away on Thursday. We spent some time visiting with her over Thanksgiving, so I'm glad we had that. She was a classy lady.

The ice storm hit on Friday, cancelling flights, which meant Apple Granny was here for bonus extra days too! Since Tina had a previous commitment, Granny and I had Friday to ourselves, so I practiced making waffles, and we tried to see how much tea we could add to her honey without screwing up the honey. It was a good day. Kathe and Jay arrived.

Saturday was a planned team mini-camp from our house on Saturday. We'd been looking forward to this for some time. GSTz was gonna be there, complete with our Junior team, as well as the new women's team Lone Star Works has now...it was gonna be a blast. A training race thing in the morning, then a big, Mama-style lunch, just the way Mama would want it, with all kinds of family and friends and big appetites. But the weather was too much, and the thing ended up being called off at the 11th hour. Bum-mer.

It was probably for the best, as I ended up napping in full-on, drooling, wake-up-and-not-know-what-time-or-day-it-is mode for a solid hour that morning. Guess I needed it. Noah and I took turns riding the rollers. I was on my new track bike (Thank you, Robbie!). We made bets with each other to determine who had to go outside in the freezing rain and ice to get firewood, and we basically had a great time with all the little ones and company around.

Meanwhile, it is end of the quarter at work for Mama. Actually, it is end of the year stuff as well, so it has been stupid hours. She was on the computer last night at 1130p, and on it again at 645 this morning.

Oh, and the kids didn't have school yesterday, so I gave up trying to work. I messed around in the kitchen and came up with an even better (if I do say so myself) waffle recipe, and then we tried to catch a movie at the theater, though the timing was off for the one appropriate show at each theater we tried. So (gulp), I took them to the mall.

We held hands and walked up and down that place (I was not spending another day in the house, since it is also my office). We ate pizza. We played on the playscape thing. We rode the $0.25 rides which now take four f'n quarters each for one ride. We window shopped, and Reanie informed me of all of the clothes I should buy Mama. We went up and down the escalators. We checked out all of the fountains. There is something about the fountains in the mall that gets Buddy fired up. Sort of like his catnip. We walked right passed a toy store, and the magnet or black hole must not have been working, because they just looked in the window, said something like, "Neat," and we went on our way. Or, I said, "I think there are cookies up this way.'

The day really was a great one. Holding hands as we walked everywhere was the highlight of my day.

According the thermometer outside my window, it is 24 degrees outside. I'm glad my kids like the Jeep, though I really should get a top for it. We're off to school!

Oh, I forgot about Noah's shark tank! We picked up that on Sunday after taking Jay and Kathe to the airport. We then spent the afternoon getting it set up. Right now, it only has the "pretend fish" (per Reanie), since the water has to be conditioned for a week before adding the shark(s). Yes, sharks. I didn't know you could either.

This is NOT stalking.

Veggie left last night. While I shopped for groceries this morning, everything seemed to remind me of him.




It didn't seem like I could go anywhere without something triggering a memory.





Even if I wasn't sure what it was that was reminding me of him.





But when he's gone, he's gone. Until he comes back.

Oh...Veggie, we remembered the kit, but you left your underwear behind. Again. I tried wearing them, but they are too small.

Your Honor, I object. Leading the Witness

First sound or voice upon waking this morning...

Buddy: Mama, do you like movies?
Mama: Yes, Buddy. Go back to sleep.
Buddy: Do you like Thomas (the Tank Engine)?
Mama: Yes, Buddy.
Buddy: Do you like Thomas movies?
Mama: (sounding like she would rather be asleep) Yes, Buddy.
Buddy: Can we watch Thomas?

Buddy and his "R's"

Buddy has a little trouble with his R's. He's only 3 yr old, so we don't care too much. It is still cute and doesn't make him sound like he's behind grade level or something. Heck, since we don't have regular or cable tv around here, some entertainment can be had by getting him to say "R" words or words that have "R" in them.

A big part of Buddy's being is Thomas the Tank Engine stuff. He's got trains, tracks, books, DVD's, and whatever else capitalism dictated has Thomas on it. Part of his collection is Percy.

To get Buddy to do anything, you have to have some train to lead him and "encourage" him. Want him to sit down? Hold a train out and point to where you want him to sit down. Want him to join the family for dinner? Tell him, "I've got Gordon (or any other train you happen to have nearby)!" This morning, I needed to get him to the car so I could take him to school. I told him, "I have Percy." But Buddy responded, "I don't want Percy."

Keep in mind that Buddy has trouble with his R's.

Training with a capital "T"

So I was just riding regularly, but for now, I'm gonna call it training. Made it 48 days in a row on the bike. Some of those were 45 minutes on the rollers or 15 miles with Noah, but it was time in the saddle, and it was 48 days in a row of it.

Around day #40, I was well in the habit and I was actually starting to feel some sensations in the legs that felt like a bike racer would feel in her legs. I'd step on the gas, and the bike would go, and it would go at a speed that was fun. But then I'd remember that it had been more than 2 years since I had even sorta bike racer legs, and then the 30 seconds or so of fun would hurt in a bad way, not in a good way.

With so many days in a row, I started adding bits here and there that were like training to the mix. One of these workouts within a ride is what I call Slogs. Some folks call them Stomps. Some call them Standing Starts. Some call them stupid.

I was having some sensations that feel like a bike racer, so I took the opportunity to play around with one of the workouts I often dole out to athletes I coach. I tried these efforts in different ways to see if we couldn't maybe find something a little bit more to pull out of them.

The efforts themselves are riding very, very slowly to nearly a standstill, then taking off in full sprint from a very (too big) big gear. Sort of like starting in a car from a dead stop in 3rd gear. I tried some by starting right foot forward. Some left foot forward. Some standing. Some seated.

Somewhere along the way, I did something weird, and I felt my cleat move. But it didn't all fully register until the next big slogging pedal stroke when I came down on that loose cleat. With things askew, and pedaling as forcefully as I possibly could, something had to give. It was my knee.

If this had been any other time in the last two years, I'd be beside myself pissed that I'm losing time, but this time it is rather funny to me, because when I was describing it to a buddy, I said I have to take some time off of training to let it heal. But my time off of training still involved riding to keep the streak going.

My buddy pointed out that I said I was "Training" and he hadn't heard me talk about that in a long, long time. So, I may be down for just a little bit, but it is temporary.

Oh, but I lost the streak when I got some flu bug so bad that I was bed ridden for a full day and night. I very nearly just got up and rode up and down Nonno's driveway to keep it alive late that night, but then realized, I needed help to get up and go to the bathroom. Riding a bike just wasn't gonna happen, even with discipline. I'm back rolling now, though. Even pushed pretty hard at the track last night. I'm not calling my shot or anything like that, but I'm a least dressed and on the bench. And if the 4th string quarterback and back up holder get hurt, I might get to hold the ball when the kicker warms up. That's closer to the game than I've been in a while.

Buying footballs, toy cars, action figures, and even boxing gloves is something I've done as a Daddy. But today I bought a Barbie for the first time.

When Kid #1 was brewing in his Mom's belly, I was often asked if I wanted a boy or a girl. Considering I didn't have any kids at the time, I really and truly did not care. Ultimately I wanted some of each, but at the time, it seemed like a downer to folks when I said that it didn't matter.

Add to this that through Kid's #1-3, we never knew what flavor they were going to be until they were born. To me, it is one of the last veistiges of "Santa" that we get. Anyway, that we've held out on knowing whether it was XX or XY until game day has been part of the fun. Sure, it meant the baby room would have to wait to be decorated, but when Kid #1 was born, there wasn't going to be a "Baby's Room" anyway, and once Kid #2 was born, it didn't matter because they were going to share a room anyway...but I digress.

I've never worried about sissying up my boys or making sure they had manly boy's things. It pretty much works out that way, but it has never really been a focus. If my boys turn out like Daveed, I'll be blessed. Today, however, I thoroughly enjoyed having a girl.

Normally the toy department is a source of stress for me, much like going to Chuck E Cheese, Super Walmart, or having a kid's birthday party, but today, I had the Barbie aisle to myself, and I took the time to sort out which Barbie is best. We had twelve dancing princess Barbies, which would all fit the bill. There was a horse riding Barbie. A ballerina Barbie. A beach Barbie...ALL of the Barbies seemed to be the "right" one. On one hand, it seemed like a slam dunk that I couldn't get this wrong, but on the other, I wanted to put some thought into it too. Among the offerings of Barbies was a Sleeping Beauty Barbie, a Snow White Barbie (if I could have found the corresponding DVD, I would have picked this), and Belle Barbie (of Beauty and the Beast). That everything was pink and princess didn't even hurt my teeth.

Back and forth three times from the toys to the DVD's, which were at opposite ends of the store. Couldn't find Sleeping Beauty or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I settled on making my own gift pack with Belle and Beauty and the Beast.

Christmas morning is special with kids at all, but I'm looking forward to seeing my daughter's reaction on Christmas morning.

The Wall

Ths is the wall in my office facing the driveway. Chloe has put jerseys we've won in frames, and optimistially set up another ten frames on the wall facing the pasture. The ones shown here are:

1. TRP jersey signed by Alison Dunlap the year she won World's. It says, "Christian, good luck racing. I'm yours forever, Alison" I made up part of that.
2. 2001 TX State Champ Track. Me.
3. 2002 Texas Cup Champ. Mama, cyclocross
4. 2003 24r hours of Adrenaline Champ. Team: Me, Troy, Byrd, Jaime, and Erick T.
5. 2006 TX State Champ Time Trial. Noah
6. 2006 TX State Champ Criterium. Noah
7. 2006 TX State Champ Track. Noah
8. 2006 TX State Champ Road Race. Noah
9. 2006 Texas Cup Champion Road. Noah
10. Blank, but it is for 2006 Texas Cup Champion Cyclocross. Noah
11. 1997 Hotter-n-Hell Champ. Me.