Archive | August, 2007

We have a nice array of cable channels at our fingertips here in sunny North Myrtle Beach. And since this is vacation – and almost anything goes when you’re on vacation – the kids have been getting their fill of Noggin and Playhouse Disney.

Those of you who subscribe to these channels can help answer a few questions that have cropped up in my head:

Does Pizza Guy from the Higglytown Heroes stand a chance of passing a random drug test? That guy has “stoner” written all over him.

Should they buy some looser-fitting clothes for the orange guy who hosts Yo Gabba Gabba?

Is it bad that I’m a little intimiated by Diego? I mean, the kid travels with a baby jaguar. That’s pretty tough. I probably couldn’t keep a tabby kitten under control, but he can lord over a jaguar?

Any input?

Wife and I manage our spending money in envelopes by category. Each paycheck, we budget for all the ways we spend cash and stuff an envelope accordingly. Our restaurant money goes in the envelope labeled “Dining Out.”

After eating out a few times on this vacation, I can sat this: I have made better use of Dining Out money. That’s for sure.

But I have to remind myself that I’m on vacation, so everything I know about the value of money is null and void.

One of the reasons we rented a condo for this trip is to get access to a full kitchen. With a kitchen, we can prepare our own meals and aren’t at the mercy of restaurant schedules and prices.

When we checked in at 5 p.m. on Saturday, the place hadn’t been cleaned (despite the rental agency’s promise to have it ready by 3 p.m.) so we had to get lost for a while so the housekeepers could get their clean on.

We piled back into the Odyssey to backtrack to the Olive Garden we passed on the way in, because what says “vacation” like eating at a restaurant that has a location within two miles of your home?

We pulled up to the OG to find that it had been stormed by people who apparently didn’t realize that it’s just the Olive Garden. Having to wait in line wasn’t going to work with two little angels who had been trapped in the car all day, so the OG plan was quickly scrapped.

We headed back toward our condo and saw a place called The Spring House Family Restaurant. From the outside looking in, it had everything we were looking for: the word “family” in the title, meaning our kids could be as obnoxious as they chose to be, and only a handful of cars in the parking lot.

The “only a handful of cars in the parking lot” should have been the tip-off.

Once we were seated, I asked Wife, “I wonder how many times I’ve been in this restaurant?” And she knew exactly what I meant. Obviously I had never been in that restaurant, but you’ve all been in this restaurant. It just goes by a different name where you live.

In this place you can get breakfast around the clock, a host of fried entree platters, and a handful of Italian dinners. I had the chopped sirloin platter and Wife got fried chicken. We got Son a little pizza and Daughter had chicken strips. All of this was served to us by the World’s Surliest Waitress.

Since it was a “family” restaurant, we let the kids goof off a little bit. After all, what are the chances that our kids would be the worst-behaved that a restaurant in Myrtle Beach has ever seen?

Ultimately, the meal got us what we needed: time out of the condo while the ladies cleaned, and food in our tummies. And we’ve got fun memories of The Spring House Family Restaurant.

On Sunday, Wife made a staple of our household: spaghetti and meatballs. On Monday, I made jambalaya. Tonight, we ventured out again. The result was even more interesting than The Spring House.

I’ll tell you all about it soon.

Greetings from glamorous North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina! The Family Vacation is in full swing.

We pointed the Odyssey out of our driveway yesterday morning and barrelled down the road ready to have some family fun. We stopped for a brief visit at the little college where Wife and I met, and dropped in on some friends in Columbia for lunch.

I could write a dozen posts just on the good time we had traveling yesterday. And I just may.

But for now, Daddy’s weary from an action-packed morning on the beach and in the pools, so I’m going to put a hurtin’ on the bag of potato chips.

I know the suspense has been eating you alive.

The air conditioner…

…is…

…fixed.

Thank heavens. It was a rough 12 hours or so on the second floor of our house.

And here’s the beauty part – I fixed it myself.

That bears repeating since it’s so seldom that I can make that claim – I fixed it myself.

The problem was that the hose that siphons off the condensation was clogged, which meant all the water drained into the pan under the unit. The pan is equipped with a little floater that cuts off power to the unit if the water is about to overflow.

All I had to do was vacuum out the water pan with a wet-dry shop vac and we were back in business.

We all slept in 73 degree bliss last night.

Daughter is making some huge strides with her drawing and writing.

To encourage her, Wife gives her a few words to learn each day. Wife writes the word on a piece of paper, then Daughter copies it onto her own piece of paper.

Usually after looking at the word once or twice, Daughter learns the word and doesn’t need the paper Wife prepared.

So far, she’s done her own name, her brother’s name and the name of the cat.

Judging by the little piece of paper I found in the kitchen tonight, it looks like I was the subject of today’s lesson:

If you touch my kids with a fork today, they just might fall apart.

All of us here at the MBI Estate had the pleasure of slow-roasting in our own juices last night because…

(wait for it)

…the air conditioning on the second floor decided to go haywire yesterday.

And just to put things in context, this is the third week of August. In the South. The muggy, muggy South. In oher words: IT’S HOT.

I tried to work my magic on the thing after dinner last night, but I couldn’t make any progress. And that’s not a total surprise when you realize that my a/c repair techniques consist of:

1. Sliding the thermostat to each end to see if the air starts blowing
2. Turning the a/c unit on and off at the thermostat
3. Checking the heat pump outside to make sure it’s not clogged with debris, like sticks or leaves or a neighbrhood kid
4. Throwing my hands up and saying, “Forget it! What do I know about a/c? I’m just a (insert name of cushy office job here)!”

So today we’ll call the repair guys to come out and get the thing running again. In the meantime, I can toddle off to the office and Wife can keep the kids down on the main foor, where he a/c is working fine.

And yes, I know that I’ve just cursed myself by saying that the a/c is running fine downstairs. I’m sure I’ll be posting tomorrow morning about how the downstairs unit has died.

Despite my lifelong dream to sell everything I own and hit the streets in Nashville looking for a recording contract, Wife convinced me yesterday that we should probably drive home and pick up our children.

She said we can go back to Nashville at some point in the future and I can pursue my lifelong dream then. In the meantime, I can learn how to sing and how to play musical instruments. I hear those two skills will help me crack into the biz.

Anyhoo…Yes, the wedding in Nashville was nice. Here’s a quick list of thoughts:

- Wife was a bridesmaid and looked absolutely gorgeous. Dress was flattering. Hair was just right. Everything was working for her.

- The happy couple left Sunday morning for a 5-day honeymoon in Cabo San Lucas. We’re praying that they’re not impacted too severely by this hurricane that has its sights set on Mexico.

- The Holiday Inn Express in Hendersonville, Tenn., puts on an impressive continental breakfast. If you’ve traveled even a little in your life, you know that breakfast isn’t always done well.

- The food at the reception was top-notch. The highlights were the sweet-and-sour meatballs and the prosciutto-wrapped asparagus spears.

- During the ceremony, the pastor gave a short lesson using the story of Jesus turning water into wine. He offered a perspective on that piece of Scripture that no one else I talked to had heard before.

- The father of the bride offered a very moving tribute to Wife’s late father during the reception. It was a very nice moment.

- Since the reception wrapped up around 5:30, there was talk of going out in Nashville Saturday night. We declined. Instead, we hung out with the parents of the bride and ate leftover reception food.

- When we got back to the hotel, Wife took 22 bobby pins out of her hair. It was sprayed so thoroughly that it barely moved when she took the pins out.

- We could not believe how big our kids looked when we got to my parents’ house to pick them up yesterday. It felt like we had been gone for a year.

- Wife and I were so tired that we barely slept last night. Luckily, there’s a beach vacation just around the bend. I’m sure we’ll get plenty of rest at the beach with a preschooler and a toddler.

That’s it for now. Have a great Monday.

The Wife and I are in Nashville for a wedding this weekend. As such, we are enjoying all the amenities the Holiday Inn Express has to offer, including both soft and firm pillows, continental breakfast and cable TV.

We have cable at home, but we subscribe to ghetto cable: we get about 20 channels for $10/month. We booted the “expanded basic” from the house around the time Daughter was born. The purpose was two-fold:

1. We wanted to save some $
2. There’s a lot of stuff on TV that wants to steal childhood from children, and we didn’t want that stuff in our house

For the most part, we haven’t missed the expanded channels. I mean, once you’ve seen a handful of episodes of Trading Spaces, you’ve seen them all. But we do miss a few things, like the Saturday morning VH1 Countdown.

In the days before kids, we’d read the paper and drink coffee with the VH1 Countdown on. Then we’d nap or go see a movie or eat in peace and quiet – whatever it is that people without kids do. It’s been so long I can’t remember.

There’s a point here somewhere. Let’s see…

Oh yeah. So we were watching the VH1 Countdown in the hotel room this morning and they played the video for Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls.”

This Sean Kingston kid is pretty interesting. He’s 17 and has a couple of extremely catchy songs on the charts. Part of VH1′s intro of the video told about how he makes a point of writing without using explicit lyrics.

Then they played the video.

If you know the song, then you know part of the chorus goes, “You had me suicidal, suicidal when you said, ‘It’s Over’”

VH1 apparently thought the word “suicidal” was inappropriate and muted it each time it came up in the song, which prompts me to ask the question:

Are we, as a society, such a group of paranoid wusses that we think our kids are going to haul off and do something stupid just because they hear a word in a song?

-and-

Is VH1, which I think is a Viacom brand, so spineless that they just mute the word rather than risk getting sued by the family of someone who does something stupid after hearing the song?

-and-

By muting the word, isn’t VH1 essentially saying, “Yes, we would be responsible if someone did something stupid after hearing this song. That’s why we’re going to just mute the word in question”?

-and-

How is it possible for one blogger to detail in the same post how he: 1) removed cable from his house because there’s a bunch of garbage on it that’s not good for kids, and 2) chastise a cable network for pulling potential garbage from their network?

I’m a pretty complex dude. By which I mean I’m a hypocrite.

Incidentally, the song isn’t even remotely about suicide. If the kid was suicidal when his girl broke up with him, he wouldn’t be around to write songs, would he?

Maybe it’s time to lay off the coffee and go take my shower.

Some things are just plain funny.

Wife just received a piece of spam email with this as the subject line:

This strength John Barleycorn gives is not fictitious strength

For some reason, that struck me as being one of the coolest email subject lines of all time.

I’ve finally confirmed that – just like the Bible says – there is nothing new under the sun.

The irrefutable proof of this came when I turned the pages of the Brooks Brothers catalog that arrived yesterday.

Featured within the first 5 pages of the catalog were two ties that I bought six years ago but that had since disappeared from the seedy underworld of men’s business apparel.

The ties I own are from different makers, but are the same ones in the new catalog. The first one, which I will call Red With Skinny Blue Stripes, I found at a Polo outlet for $15. The other, Red With Thicker Blue Stripes, is a Tommy Hilfiger tie I found at Steinmart for $10.

Note to self: You have enough red ties with blue stripes.

To buy the ties from Brooks Brothers right now would set me back $170.

Looking like a has-been in these ties for the last six years has been TOTALLY WORTH IT, because for one brief season, I will once again be in style.