Month: November 2009

Quotes – Grandma hit the fence edition

/ Shane / 3 Comments

So over the weekend, my mom was going to drop Evie and I off at the doctor’s office, and she managed to nick the fence in the back with Sara’s car. It was no big deal, nothing hurt, nothing really damaged (the fence took a little hit, but I think it’s probably fine), but it gave us a lot of fun teasing her about it all weekend. So hopefully, whoever has my mom’s name for Christmas is reading this, because I think any poem about my mom would be remiss without this incident (in my mom’s family, we draw names for Christmas and usually write poems about the person who’s names we get…mostly making fun of that person).

Anyway, I’m sure we will all forget about this little incident shortly…all of us, that is, except for Evie who continued to bring it up all weekend.

::Me backing the car out::
“Don’t hit the fence daddy!”
“I won’t.”
“Grandma did.”

::Sara backing the car out::
“Mommy, do you always hit the fence?”
“No, we don’t.”

::Evie functioning as tour guide::
“…and this is where Grandma hit the fence…”

And another driving-related-but-not-Evie-related quote that made me laugh:

Sara: “That George Lopez billboard really annoys me. Look at how annoying it is! He’s just looking at me, annoying me.”

Not the actual billboard, but similarly annoying

If anything could cause me to drive into a fence, it would be those billboards.

Writing roadblock: she’s just not that into you(r writing)

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Every time I read the “how I made it” story of a successful author, it inevitably contains a part about how supportive their wife has been. Believing in them when no one else would, supporting them for years when they were making no money, bending over backwards to take care of the trivialities of life while their head-in-the-clouds husband whiles away the hours on nothing. Now granted, some of them are on their 2nd or 3rd wife, but either way, they had someone who made their success possible.

Must be nice.

For some reason, Sara just isn’t really into it. In retrospect, after she read my stories, she just really had no opinions. I was positively begging her to rip them apart, or tell me which ones she liked, or really anything at all. Her reaction was always, “Eh. I don’t know.” Not exactly what I was going for. So the first obvious sign of her apathy was that she hasn’t been reading my completed stories. At first I was bothering her about it, but at some point I realized that if she didn’t want to read them, I wasn’t going to force her. So I stopped bringing it up, and let’s just say she hasn’t been begging me.

Now this doesn’t really offend me, but it seems very odd to me. If she was doing something similar, writing, or blogging, or painting, I would be falling all over myself to see it. I would just be curious. I wouldn’t be doing it to put on some sort of show of support, I would really be honestly excited to see her creative output. So her lack of interest just seems very atypical to me.

That has been the main thing, but there have been a few other things as well. For example, we were talking about rearranging the basement, and I mentioned that it might be nice to move the computer upstairs. That way, she could have the laptop, but I could still write on a computer. Currently, I write all of my first drafts long-hand in notebooks, to avoid hogging the laptop (this will probably be the topic of some future post). I don’t feel like it is fair for me to hog the main computer all the time, but it also slows my first drafts down quite a bit. So I thought moving the other computer upstairs, where it is more accessible, might be a nice compromise. But Sara refused on the grounds that the computer desk is ugly. Well, it is ugly, but that seems like an awfully severe position to take!

I can definitely see that writing time can cut into family time, or household chore time, etc. Maybe it has to cut into that kind of personal time in order for it to be successful. So I can see how someone might become sort of annoyed with the whole deal. But at this point, I don’t think it has really negatively affected her in any way. And she’s not really anti-writing, more just apathetic towards the whole thing.

So needless to say, she doesn’t need to worry about any dedication pages in any upcoming novels. How about you other writers out there? Is your significant other supportive or not? In what way? How important is it to have the support of your spouse?

A ghostly wakeup

/ Shane / 5 Comments

There is a new weapon in the war against Evie waking up too early. We have finally resorted to the supernatural.

Evie has always had trouble staying asleep, some of which has been documented here. Through various tricks and subterfuge, we have sometimes managed to make her sleep in later (by later, I mean 5:30 or 6), but just when we start to congratulate ourselves on our success, she will start a push to get up earlier and earlier. It was in the middle of one such push, that we decided something new had to be done.

The problem is that Evie (and all toddlers) love routines. Everything that happens to her, she tries to incorporate it into a routine. Sometimes this can be used to our advantage, like the routine we use to get ready for bed, and sometimes it hurts us. In this case, her preferred routine was to wake up at about 5, and then have me come in to tell her it was too early. Then we repeated this at 5:40, 5:50, etc. until Sara came in to get her up around 6. She loved to talk about how daddy came in and told her to go back to sleep. And as time went on, the wake ups became earlier, more frequent, and she became more reluctant to go back to sleep.

I started trying to explain to Evie about the clock, and how she can’t get up until the first number is 6. She seemed interested, but I think it was a little much. It was hard to know that the first number was the important one, and the other numbers didn’t matter in this case. Also, Sara pointed out that she wouldn’t be able to understand that 5 is too early, but if she woke up and it was 7, that was okay. So Sara had found some toddler alarm clocks online that you can set to display an icon, such as a sun, when it was okay to wake up, or a moon if it was too soon.

Rather than spending money and buying some specialized clock, we realized we could make do with what we had. We used an extra light timer we had lying around, and we hooked that up to a set of ghost lights that we had hung in her room as a Halloween decoration.

I can’t begin to tell you how fantastically this has worked. She has been sleeping in (or at least staying quiet in her crib, which amounts to the same thing as far as I’m concerned) until 6:30 every day for almost two weeks! And she’s so excited for the ghost lights to come on. The first day, by the time we got into her room, she was literally jumping up and down and pointing at the ghost lights in glee, yelling, “Mommy! Daddy! The ghost lights came on! They said boo and I woke up!”

And this is despite the fact that Sara and I continue to botch the job as much as humanly possible. On the first day, when success was the most important, we accidentally set the time wrong, so that the lights came on like 45 minutes later than they should have. This meant she was yelling for us to come in and we were cringing in our room, trying to decide if we should go in or wait. After that, it took a couple more days before we managed to get the timing right. The timer is not digital, and there is a lot of ambiguity about the time it is displaying.

All in all though, it has been amazing. It has probably been one of the single most effective tools we have used to keep her in bed until a reasonable time. And now that we have the system in place, we are able to adjust her schedule by subtly adjusting the timer over the course of a few days, without her noticing. This is how we moved her from 6 to 6:30, and also how we managed to control the time change without disrupting her sleeping schedule.

The downside is that we’re stuck with ghost lights in her room for the foreseeable future. But maybe someday we can find some other kind of fun light to switch off to.

McDonald’s around the world

/ Shane / 4 Comments

I am fascinated by the fact that McDonald’s located in different parts of the world have different menu items that are customized to the local culture. And I’m not just talking about the Royale with Cheese, I mean really weird stuff.

I talked about this a couple of years ago, after personally seeing some strange things at McDonald’s in Italy and England, especially the “McPink” which involved Ham. Meg had some interesting things in the comments that she’s seen in China and Italy, such as cucumbers and spicy sauce or taro root pies. A co-worker from Canada has complained about the lack of poutine at McDonald’s here in the states (for those of you not in the know, poutine involves french fries and cheese curds, covered in gravy) (and for those Canadian readers out there, spell check does not recognize the word poutine, proving that you shouldn’t be eating it, thank-you-very-much).

So anyway, here’s the latest list of weird stuff McDonald’s sells around the world. I think we can all agree…sugar soaked spaghetti?? Come on Philippines, what are you thinking?!

A lot of good information is on the Internet

/ Shane / 6 Comments

I actually tried this to be sure it was true. If you type “why wont” into Google, it will list you the top search terms. And the top search term is…well, I will let the image speak for itself:

By the way, am I the only person who noticed “why won’t god heal amputees” on the list as well?

Link via FailBlog.