Dental Health

I sat in the very comfortable waiting room completely alone, except for the distracted receptionist. It was the swankiest dental office I've ever seen--antique golf equipment, expensively matted prints, and shiny, dark cherry furnitue were accented by dramatic, red walls and thick upholstery. It flashed through my mind that I can't trust any recommendations from this doctor--he needs to cash in on any possible procedure to pay for all of this...

As I filled out five sheets of ill-thought-out forms (which asked for several pieces of exactly the same information to be rewritten in three different places), I got even more irritated--Extra charges for missing or being late for an appointment. I glanced at the clock--I had gotten to the office 20 minutes early and it was now 8 minutes beyond my appointment time. I had a desperate urge to walk up to the receptionist and demand $20 since it was they who were late. Then I envisioned having my dentist attack me with one of those sharp, curved, picky things and changed my mind.

Just then, the phone rang. Eventually, the half which transpired within my earshot caught my attention:

"Oh, I'm glad you are being careful."

"Yes, but it will definitely pass."

"Oh, not yet, then."

(nervous chuckle) "Well, I guess you could use rubber gloves."

"Yes, it does happen sometimes."

"Oh, I am sorry to hear that."

"It certainly will."

"I suppose you can search for it if you like."

"Okay, see you tomorrow, then."

She turned to a colleague who was walking by and said, "Mrs. Watkins will be in tomorrow. One of her crowns came loose during Thanksgiving dinner and she accidentally swallowed it."

Eight Minutes

That's how long I have to write before I have to run upstairs and wake up Ryan to help him get ready for school. He's been off for a week for the Thanksgiving Holiday (we used to get 2 days when I went to school), so he's off schedule.

We spent a lot of the weekend putting up Christmas lights and our tree. I'm the painfully sentimental one in our family, but Fran is the one who loves to decorate for Christmas. My job is to take out our Christmas dishes, which we use for a month each year as a change of pace. Maybe it gives our other dishes a rest, too...We still use the same Blue Peony dishes that we got for our wedding (15 years ago)--we've only broken 2 or 3 pieces in all that time...

I put together new vaccuum cleaner yesterday. I'm not sure why we've gone through about four of them in the past 5 years, but we have. As I was putting it together, Kaitlyn, my daughter who will be three years old in January, walks up behind me and says "I think you're missing a piece, Daddy..." She really cracks us up all the time.

Two weeks ago I went and taught a science class to Ryan's second grade class. First of all, I don't know how these teachers do this every day--Hyper 7-year-olds who seem to just blurt out whatever comes to mind randomly. That night, Ryan came home--according to him I received excellent reviews from his classmates--he had a stack of homemade Thank You cards which were a real hoot. Some of them had drawings of "me"--unflatteringly accurate as might be expected from 2nd graders. My favorite line: "Please come back anytime and do something different".

Eight minutes are up. I haven't taken time to write anything worthwhile for a while now, so thanks for sticking with me, here...

All No Work and No Play Makes Hiram a Dull Boy...

Fran's been checking out all these weird books from the library and reading them. She brings home a bag of 7-10 books every week or two, and reads through them quickly. I'm starting to be convinced that she's just run out of options and is scraping the bottomo of the barrel for something to read.

Currently on her nightstand: "The Shunning", complete with dramatic, swooning Amish girl on the front.

I asked her if the book ends with someone going nuts in the barn and hacking down the door with a butter churn....

The Small Stuff

Sometimes I wonder if my life is some giant psychology experiment like "The Truman Show" or something. I seem to get into funny situations which sometimes turn stressful--all from the best of intentions.

For Ryan's soccer team, I agreed to take action shots of the kids during the games--we did it last year and the kids were really happy to get dramatic, stop-action photos of themselves in the middle of playing--we handed them out at the end-of-season party.

Fran got a little irritated that I volunteered to do it again. Her issue was that it made me miss the game while I was messing around trying to get pictures. It also really got under her skin that no one really bothered to thank me after last year's party (which would have been nice, but I'm just glad that they all seemed to like them--I think most kids don't learn manners as well as we were taught them). The fact is that I really like the challenge of doing it--My original plan was to just take action shots of Ryan so I could make a poster for his room, which has a sports theme. That felt a little selfish to do. Maybe not, but this is what I mean by the best of intentions leading me astray.

Ryan and I took a trip a couple of weeks ago, and when he got back I was really swamped with catch-up work. Day after day I had the entry of "finish editing pictures and have them printed", but the task went unchecked.

Oh yeah, that's my real secret to getting good pictures--it has to start as a pretty good picture, but editing really improves them--I divide the image using the "Rule of Thirds" either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Then I boost brightness and contrast slightly to make the colors pop out a little more.

Anyway, that takes time, and I had over 100 photos to go through and edit down to one featuring each kid, then send them off to be printed at the photo lab. Fatigue and my busy schedule caused me to put it off, day by day, during the week leading up to the party on Saturday. Fran wanted me to just give it up, and I quickly determined not to even mention it to her again because she was so ticked at me for agreeing to do it in the first place. At this point, she started to say that it was just my idea and that nobody even wanted me to do it.

I had edited all the pictures by Friday night but hadn't burned a CD or anything so I couldn't drop them off for processing (I hate printing them out on my printer because it is expensive and not as nice as real photograph paper). So I woke up early Saturday morning and went to work--I had to crop them to the right size and send them to the Wal Mart photo lab online. As I was in the middle of the final editing stage online, Ryan started asking repeatedly if he could use the computer to play a game. Focused on the task at hand nearing completion, I tuned him out.
Then he started asking me again and again in a whiney voice, which shook me out of my focus (one of his friends always talks with a whiney voice which drives us nuts when he comes over).

So, instead of poised and mature, I slammed my hand down on my desk and bellowed harshly, "Ryan! Cut it out!" which made him bolt into his room and cry. Nice, huh? Mission accomplished. I let us both calm down for a minute, finished submitting the pictures, and then went to apologize, but it really hurt his feelings and he continued sniffling.

This brought Fran around to investigate and I told her the whole story. I guess I could have just lied since I knew that the pictures were already an irritating issue to her and I also knew that she was about to tee off on me once she found out that it had led to me losing my patience with Ryan. I wonder what most people would do--Lie and make up something? I am really terrible at lying, so I would rather just take my lumps.

Of course, by telling Fran this I got the whole story about how she never thought I should have done the pictures in the first place. I felt the insinuation that I was just being a delusional fool and just offering to do something to bring attention to myself. It seems to me that anytime anyone does something nice for someone else, this could be said...You just have to decide which view of life you are going to take. My motivation at that point was just completing something that I said I would do. I wasn't looking for thanks or recognition or anything like that. Parents had seen me on the sidelines taking pictures of their kids and had told me that they were glad I was taking pictures of the team and that they were looking forward to seeing them. It would make me look more foolish to have done that for several weeks and not have anything to show for it. The pendulumn would swing from "Nice guy" to "Wow--he really doesn't have his crap together, does he?" (not mutually exclusive concepts, by the way).

I guess Ryan eventually forgave me for yelling at him and, after days of begging barefooted in the snow, Fran eventually let me back in the house, so all seems to be well. At the party, one of the kids, who had a pretty flattering action shot since he is unusually un-coordinated, turned to his dad and told him "I would really like to learn how to take pictures!", which I took as an indirect compliment.

Sometimes the "small stuff" makes me stop and take a look at my philosophy of life compared to other people's. It's still a work in progress and contains flaws. I know in my heart that my motivations are well-directed, and I guess that's what matters.

Now, back into the cage for another experiment...

Special Delivery

When I went to get the mail last Friday, this magazine, wrapped in a clear plastic bag (to protect it from stray drooling), winked up at me, wedged amongst piles of bills and Christmas ads.

It's funny that Ryan really doesn't have a taste for candy. This Halloween, when we dug out his bag for trick-or-treating (for my non-American acquaintences, please let me know if you don't follow me here...) it was still full of candy from last year that he a) never ate and b) never missed.

Kaitlyn, however, makes up for his lack of a sweet tooth. She often wakes up saying "I want chocolate!" We have a little bag of Hershey's kisses, and we give her one when she craves chocolate. It turns out that she probably has inherited it from me, but sometimes I like to think it at least partly comes from her native Mexican ancestry--you know, the guys who stuff cocoa leaves in their cheeks. Well, maybe not.

At any rate, this magazine cover inspired my evil plan which I immediately set in motion.

I showed it to Kaitlyn, who was just waking up from her nap. She got excited and grabbed the book from my hands just so she could look at it. I told her, "Kaitlyn, maybe Mommy could make this for us!"

Off she ran.

Fran laughingly told me that Kaitlyn had come to her with the magazine asking her to make the chocolate bundt cake on the cover. She thought it was so cute that she saw it and thought to ask her Mommy to make it (wink). Ironically, she had everything, except for the raspberries, that was needed for the cake, so she was tempted to make it. That's the kind of mom that she is, and the reason it was a good idea to put my doll-like daughter up to presenting the proposal rather than doing it myself.

Sure enough, a picture-perfect replica sat on our kitchen table three hours later.

What a life!

Where Have I Been?

First of all, I love this picture of Kaitlyn.

She loves to watch the movie "The Sound of Music", and one day she was inspired to go and find props to match Maria's guitar and suitcase. Not bad creativity for a 2-year-old.

I suppose there's no good single answer to the question of where I've been, though.

Here's kind of the funny, poetic justice answer:

About two months ago when some of Ryan's friends were over playing, they kicked my wireless router over and it disconnected. I came along, in a hurry, and needed to get on the net for some reason or another...When my wireless network failed, I noticed that several of my neighbors have unsecured wireless networks, and I jumped on theirs (in case that might be illegal in some way, you could read it this way: It's possible that my computer somehow, and without my direct action or knowledge, spontaneously connected to a network that may or may not have been my wireless router--at this point I'm really not sure (hee hee) ).

After a while, I kind of forgot that we were doing that and it lasted nearly a month. Finally, I thought to myself "Why keep my service? I have 2 networks with perfect reception on either side of me..."

I'm not saying that this was nice or ethical, but, you know, it was more about seeing if that would work. So I canceled my service.

THE DAY I canceled the service, after poaching it for over a month, the guys on the right put a "For Sale" sign in their yard (no, I don't think I had anything to do with that), and they started the process of moving, which, apparently, includes unplugging the wireless network. So I was down to one network with no backup.

Two weeks ago, the guys in front of us got some kind of different internet connection and didn't put it on their wireless network.

So we were hosed--All I could do was laugh at myself for trying to get away with it.

In the meantime, Ryan and I went out of town. When I came back, we got the new FIOS internet, which is screaming fast, and it cost the same as our old DSL service. In fact, we got all new hardware, etc. so we actually came out way ahead on the deal. Total monthly expenses saved : $0.00.

But for a while there I could only get the internet at work so I didn't feel comfortable posting anything of substance.

It's funny, too--I go through times of feeling self-conscious about my posts and feeling that they are very self-absorbed and trivial. During those times I find it hard to make time to sit down and write. I guess I had one of those episodes too while I took time off.

And, my friend "Anonymous" (his poor mom couldn't think of anything else to name him?) is moving away, and that's depressing too.

At any rate, I'm all Blogger/Google upgraded so I think it should be easier to post pictures and other stuff, so I'll get back in the swing of things and catch up on the now-elapsed moments of brilliance and hilarity.