My So Called Life

Just in case our family wasn’t loud enough already, we bought a piano

/ Shane / Leave a comment

We have been planning to buy a piano for quite some time. The kids have been saving every penny they have for almost a full year, starting with Christmas presents last year. I have to say I am VERY impressed with the determination and focus with which they saved. Pretty impressive for two kids their age to stick with it for so long.

It’s kind of amazing how much money the kids were able to save up. We told the kids we would get a piano when they had saved up $200, so they put forward a pretty significant amount of money. A lot came from Christmas and birthday gifts, but really it came from everywhere: tooth fairy money, psych experiments, and any change dropped on the street in a 3 mile radius. It was kind of funny; when we finally opened up the “piano bank” to count the money, it was full of hundreds of the grubbiest, nastiest street pennies the city of Chicago has to offer.

We bought the piano from Keys 4/4 Kids, a “501(c)3 nonprofit organization that accepts, restores, and sells donated pianos. Proceeds from piano sales support music and arts programs for local youth.” Corbin was suuuper nice and helped us pick out an absolutely beautiful piano. Evie got her heart set on it immediately, so of course we ended up buying one that was at the tippy-top of our price range.

However, it was worth it, because Evie has just had a blast with that piano. She plays it every minute she gets. She’s decided she would like to be a “famous composer” when she grows up, and the floor around the piano is currently littered with the “sheet music” she’s creating. The two current favorites are “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater” and “Love Me Tender” (taught by Grandma Kathy). One or the other is played about ever 5 minutes, so they have a way of sticking in your head.

a girl and her piano

Looks like someone will be ready for some piano lessons, if you’re thinking of Christmas gifts!

 

It’s Quote Monday. That’s what they *do*.

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Ollie: “Oh! Oh! I think my boogie went into your kiss!”

Evie: “But I don’t understand. We always buy chocolate at the store, but where does it go?”

Where indeed.

::playing frisbee with Ollie, and he kept making me chase it::
Me: “You really like to make me walk in the sun.”
Ollie: “Okay, well then run.”

Ollie, showing me a drawing: “This part over here is a tarantula. And this red part is a person inside the tarantula’s tummy.”
Me: “Oh no, the tarantula ate a person?”
Ollie, incredulous: “Uh, yeah? It’s a tarantula. That’s what they do.”

 

 

My Quest is at an End

/ Shane / 3 Comments

For nearly 2 1/2 years, I have been on an epic quest. A quest, for a hat. And I’m here to tell you, my friends, at long last my quest is at an end.

Way back in June of 2012, I told you I was looking for a new hat. I needed something to protect the baby pink smoothness of my vast, vast bald spot from the ravages of the sun, but I felt like maybe I was finally too old for a ballcap.

Since that time I have quested ceaselessly for said hat. I mean CEASELESSLY. I have tried every possible kind of hat on god’s green earth. I have looked online, in department stores, in outdoor stores, at hat stores, basically any time I was in a store that sold hats, I tried them on.

When I try on a hat, I just feel dumb, like everybody is looking at me going “Whoa, look at that dude! Who does he think he is?” I just feel like I can’t pull it off. All of the hats imply a certain “look” and I just don’t have it. I don’t know what kind of look I have, but I guess they just don’t make a hat for me. And I didn’t want to spend the money on a hat and not wear it, so I just kept looking.

Until the other day, when I bought this fedora:

Now, just to be clear, I cannot pull off this hat. But I saw it, it wasn’t worse than any other hat I saw, and it was on clearance. Done.

Mainly I was just tired of the whole, endless search. It’s clear that I was never going to find a hat that looked good on me, so it was either buy a hat that’s not going to look good on me, or not buy a hat. However, I decided then and there that if I was going to buy it, then I was going to own it. No leaving it home because it looks dumb on me, no taking it off quick if I see somebody I know, no hiding it. If a two-tone blue striped fedora wasn’t my look before, it is now.

Basically, I’m relying on the fact that the key to “pulling it off” is just pulling it off. I’m going to wear that thing with confidence, and any funny looks I get, imagined or otherwise, can go find someone else to bother. That’s the kind of guy I am.

A fedora kind of guy.

Our Yearly Race

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Sara pointed out the other day, that going to the Comer Classic is as much of a family tradition as pancakes and applesauce. This was our 4th year. Every year is a little bit different, but some things are the same. For example, they still have killer face painters.

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(Ollie is a cheetah, because “they’re fast”)

The thing that’s different every year is how old the kids are. That first year, Ollie was a 1 1/2 year old. It’s a lot easier to manage the kids these days (even without the help from Grandma and Grandpa!). That let Ollie and I catch Sara a couple of times on the route.

Sara got a personal record for her race, finishing under 30 minutes…

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…and Evie got one for her race as well. I could see that she was really working hard. She definitely left it all on the field.

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This year Ollie got to participate in the (sort of lame) kids’ dash. Next year he has big plans to go up to the mile “like Evie”, except she has even bigger plans to run the 5k with her daddy. Uh….we’ll see about that one, sweetheart! Way to pick on the one person you can beat in a race.

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Grumpiest Cat

/ Shane / 1 Comment

You know how some people reach an age where they comically lose any desire to hold back from telling people how they really feel? They’ve just gotten too old to bother with social niceties, and they don’t really care what you think anymore? With people, it’s hilarious. With cats? Not so much.

For the past couple months it has become pretty clear that Nala has reached that stage of life where she is just too old to care anymore. This mainly means four things:

  1. Anybody is fair game for biting, at any time, for any reason. Sneak-attacking your achilles is no longer just my special gift to Sara; I’m ready to share that gift with the world.
  2. You’ll get up and pet me when I damn well tell you to get up and pet me, starting with 3 a.m.
  3. If I decide the kitchen table is my throne, than I shall recline on said throne. Your shouting is the buzzing of flies to one such as me.
  4. *I* decide where my litter box is.

This has all been a sort of slow evolution, but this is how it went down.

First off, she’s pretty much always woken us up in the morning, but I can kind of understand that. She knows we get up at about the same time, and she’s just early by 30 minutes (EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.) I mean, she’s a cat; I don’t expect her to tell time.

But then she started being off by like an hour and a half. And then she started also being off by about 7 hours. And then also maybe off by 4 hours. And then I started to think to myself, “Wait a minute, I don’t think she DOES think we get up 45 minutes after we fell asleep!”

We started tossing her in the bathroom one of the times she would wake us up so that we could actually get some sleep. She promptly responded by pooping on the bathmat.

Now look, let he among us who has not pooped on a bathmat cast the first stone. I figured that poor cat probably didn’t expect to get tossed into a dark bathroom for a couple of hours with no litter box, and didn’t plan ahead, bathroom-wise. When you gotta go, you gotta go. She did, after all, politely pee directly into the drain in the bathtub, which is about as polite as you can be in your time of need.

Except she did it EVERY DAY FOR TWO WEEKS.

I don’t mean to make it sound like she actually stopped after two weeks. Au contraire, mon frere. It’s just that it took me two weeks to go, “Wait a minute, I don’t think she WAS coincidentally trapped right when she has to go to the bathroom. I think she might even be doing this on PURPOSE!” (Give me a break, I was extremely tired; I was getting up like 4 times a night.)

Sure enough, these days she just saunters in and goes when she feels like it, even when we don’t lock her in there.

Just to recap: she wakes me up multiple times per night, just to show me she can. She uses my bathmat as her bathroom, ignores me when I tell her to get off the table, and bites me whenever I turn my back to her, yet she still expects me to buy her ridiculously expensive, medicated cat food.

All of this is a long way of saying that when Nala goes, and it may be sooner, rather than later, I will never, ever get another cat.