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With the sounds of Frank Sinatra whispering holiday lullabies in our ears, the holiday season moved into full swing last night with the erection of a seven foot Noble Fir in our living room. A massive tree-lighting ceremony followed while the cats played handball with the lower hanging ornaments.

There was one major glitch in our festivities that unfortunately did not reveal itself till early this morning. After getting the tree in the house I was so excited to launch the decorating festivities last night that I forgot to return to the car and close both the trunk and the side back passenger door. So yes, the car was fully open to the public all night long. I am sweet! These are just the kind of irresponsible acts that build towers of confidence in the wife as we prepare to bring forth a newborn into this world. No doubt she will have nightmares for weeks that involve: babies left on the roofs of cars, babies left in whiskey barrels floating in the Willamette river, and babies left in ovens.

Today is a big day for us here at The Ranch. The Comcast folks are coming out to rewire the house so that I can finally move my office to the lower level and make way for nursery construction. We made a mad dash to the IKEA in Seattle this past weekend, where helpful editions to both the home office and the baby nursery were purchased. I will miss my big window. I hope the kid appreciates the sacrifices I’m making for his new digs.

Bonus: The gift everyone needs this year (thanks Peter).

The holidays come with snow. We’ve had snow on the ground for 24 hours now. Nothing spectacular just enough to make all the bushes look like frosted mini-wheats. The neighbors are attempting to draw me into a battle of who can have the most magical holiday light display. I feel like I’m in a Chevy Chase movie. I came home from Target the other day with a few packages of lights. The neighbor took one look and said, “Only 400 lights there, son. You’re going to need at least 4000 just to get in the game.” Ok, so now it’s no longer a Chevy Chase movie, it was more like ‘Swingers’ when the boys go to Vegas and sit down at the $100 blackjack table and realize they just don’t have the chips necessary to compete.

Four days is the proper amount of time for a weekend. It gives you enough time to see everyone, get your chores/projects done, and spend quality time on the couch or in the chair recharging your batteries.

Our visit down south was eventful. I spent a large portion of the time replacing my fathers garbage disposal and kitchen sink faucet. I don’t think my father cooks very often and I would bet that his kitchen sink goes days without use. With his garbage disposal on the fritz, it was almost impossible to cook in his kitchen. Any little piece of food that went down the drain immediately backed up the sink. To remedy this problem, my father had on hand a little something called the Kleer Drain, which is basically a heavy duty device that in form looks like a plunger but in function acts more like a small atomic bomb. With the pull of a trigger it sends a charge of forced air down the drain and blows the pipes completely out. The unfortunate side effect of this plumbing enema is that the person working the Kleer Drain gets covered in sink jelly. The Kleer Drain had to be called in twice during the Thanksgiving meal preparations, which was two more times than I had a tolerance for. So after dinner was over I got busy swapping out the old disposal for the new one (which he had bought THREE years ago but had never bothered to instal).

Friday, the new disposal was working fine but when the misses made coffee and went to turn off the kitchen faucet the entire thing popped off the sink basin. Kelly and I found this to be utterly hilarious. Father did not. It was obvious to me (although I didn’t want to tell dad) that the violent force of his Kleer Drain technology had basically broken every seal in the plumbing of his kitchen sink.

A new faucet meant we had to make a trip into town. After procuring a new faucet we stopped in at some antique stores where I found some nice underpriced mod lamps, and a vintage Minnesota Twins pennant. There was also this killer vintage pram from the 50’s or 60’s that I lobbied for hard but the misses vetoed because of its impracticality. She was right of course. But it would have been sweet. Here’s kind of what it looked like.

Back at the house, the new faucet was installed and other sink repairs were made. I pleaded that henceforth the Kleer Drain be only used on toilets. And I don’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity when that goes off.

*Update: Just got off the phone with dad. Last night the bears ripped open all his trash cans and spread the remains of Thanksgiving dinner all over the yard.

The cook is in the kitchen. Today, I am working on stage one of the big Thanksgiving dinner feast that I am preparing to bring down to Pa Skelton’s tomorrow. I’ve got the kitchen humming at top efficiency and have b&w scans of master chef Julia Child stuck up on the cabinets with jelly and banana for tough love inspiration. The pockets of my Ben Davis Printers Apron are filled with wooden spoons, can openers, and a half-flask of Old Grandad Bonded Whiskey. After the Witchcraft concert last night, I have the kitchen wired up to only play medieval mëtal from Scandinavia and Beethoven’s Late String Quartets. One of the cats wrestled a robin to the ground and began preparing her own thanksgiving bird. I just can’t seem to convince the cats to go vegetarian. The misses walks around the house sniffing at fresh diapers, given as free samples at the end of our last baby class. She seems to like the smell of Huggies the best.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Sore back today from moving mountains of records in preparation for transplanting my office downstairs and turning what is currently my office into the baby room. I really wish I would have picked a more lightweight hobby when I took up record (vinyl) collecting oh so many years ago. I’m terribly torn as to how much longer I want to continue to haul around these hefty slabs of wax. Frankly, they just don’t get appreciated or for that matter listened to enough to warrant the real-estate they consume. With the simplicity and efficiency of digital music not to mention the small footprint those files take up (my external hard-drive is not even 1/2 a square foot), it’s almost impossible to justify the continued presence of vinyl. I’m sure there are hundreds of records I own that I don’t have digital files for yet. On the other hand, the sheer number of digital songs that I have instantly available (my iTunes tells me that I have 73.7 days worth of music to listen to!) is a poignant and prophetic indicator that I will always have WAY more music then I have time to listen. So the question of the day remains; what to do with all these damn records?

I suppose I jumped the gun when I mislabeled the storms we’ve been having around here as ‘monsoons’. Apparently, they weren’t monsoons at all but rather the remnants of Typhoon Cimaron, which beat the crap out of the Philippines and Vietnam before deciding to bring the fight over here. By Monday, I was beginning to Google things like: “How to build an Ark in 10 easy steps“. To make matters worse, Sunday night around 9pm we had an Earthquake in downtown Portland. Ok, that actually sounds worse than it was. It was reported that only a few thousand people felt the tremor. No one I know felt anything.

It was movie night at baby class yesterday. I found it a little hard to concentrate during class knowing that election reports were flowing in around the country and I was sequestered in a conference room at the bottom of a hospital watching this women on the T.V. with impossibly large, I love Jon Bon Jovi butt-rocker hair trying to negotiate her drug cocktail on the way to delivering her baby. It was like a deleted scene from ‘Dazed and Confused’. Certainly this is not the ‘Joy of Childbirth’ that I have been told so much about. Again, when the rocker-haired mom fist appeared on the screen, the misses busted out in uncontrollable laughter. It might be time to update that video. The teacher passed out this handout entitled, “Daddies are Bonding in Their Blogs”. Apparently, there are all these ‘dads’ who keep these things called ‘blogs’ where they talk about things like birthing classes, baby gear, etc. I know, I know, I’m thinking the same thing you are — what a bunch of losers those guys must be. Get a job hippie!

Got home and flipped on the tube/internet to see what our country had been up to during baby class. Hazzah! Victories! Impressive. Looks like the outlook on the U.S. Senate is looking good but the closeness of one or two key races could bog things down in a quagmire of lawyers for quite awhile. What a system. Oregon went democratic and all those crazy measures that were put on the Oregon ballot by the whacko-set all got ceremoniously dismissed.

The monsoon season has taken hold of the Pacific Northwest. The rain is falling with force and great volume. The wind snaps around knocking the house about. It sounds as if someone is breaking into the garage every few minutes.

Good weekend all the way around. Again with Nomeansno Friday night at Dante’s. Excellent turnout and a masterful set by the Canadian trio. I’m very happy to have seen them twice on this tour. Saturday was the Good Doctor’s birthday which started with furious indoor paintball action. The trio assembled for the paintball adventure were all virgins to the sport, yet had always been intrigued by the idea. Having gone through the Halloween season without so much as a fake mustache for dress-up, it was time to catch up on the fun. So we made a pit stop at the Goodwill to tailor ourselves some stylish suits. The Good Doctor made out the best when we found an all-brown business-class suit that included pants. I secured a Borat inspired double-breasted jacket that I complimented smartly with a pink oxford shirt and a plum/teal tie. The pattern on the tie looked like it had come off the bed spread of a cheap Midwest motel.

Properly attired we made our way to the Paintballing warehouse. We arrived at the same time as a large group of eager looking East Indians. Inside, already playing were about 20 kids ranging from about 11 to 17. So to recap, the total assembled group was small children wearing a lot of camouflage fatigues and regulation paintball gear, a large posse of East Indians dressed in normal street wear, and three 30-something men dressed as Wells Fargo middle managers. Let the games begin.

Entering the battlefield one is immediately struck by the glum dinginess of the room. It’s a medium sized warehouse lit only by fluorescent lights on the ceiling. The ground is a deep wet soup of exploded paint, plastic casings, and saw dust. The Good Doctor’s comment was that it felt like we were in the trash compactor in Star Wars. Strategically placed around the field are giant yellow inflatable barriers that serve as ones protection from enemy fire. You get separated into teams and take position on opposite ends of the floor. The referee blows the whistle and total chaos breaks loose as paint pellets traveling 200 miles an hour start whizzing by all around you. My biggest question going into this whole experience was, what does it feel like when you get shot? As luck would have it I got the answer to that question in about 13 seconds when I ducked out from behind a barrier and took one hard to the knuckle of my shooting hand. FUCK! That really hurt. The protocol when you get shot is to hold up your gun and call out and walk off the field. This is a bit dodgy however as trigger happy kids take this opportunity to add a little something to make sure you are really dead.

After the first initial hit, I got into the swing of it. I quickly realized that my hight was an advantage over the little enemy squirts and used it mercilessly to deliver full face shots. Is it wrong to derive so much satisfaction from watching some kid’s mask explode with paint from your own hand? I felt like a great artist – the Jackson Pollack of paintball.

In the end I walked away with a nice big raspberry on my forearm, where a ball had traveled up the sleeve of my coat. There was also a big welt on my underarm which got hit when I raised my gun to indicate that I was out. The underarm shot still smarts.

The East Indian guys were the most fun. They were just having a blast out there and laughed off every shot they received. In the end there was much high-fiving and hand shaking with that crowd. Building bridges through gun play?!?

Saturday night, everyone reconvened for an epic night of sushi gorging at Sin Ju, where the days war stories were mulled over and the wives were forced to listen to strategic overviews and play-by-play break downs.

By Sunday I was tired and sore. We made it over to Corinna & Brian’s wonderful baby shower where I ate too many delicious cupcakes. After that I needed nothing more than the healing powers of the couch.

Baby class tonight, which means no Halloween parties, no trick-or-treat, and no pumpkin carving. Hopefully, at the very least, they’ll show some type of gory birthing video cause if they don’t the whole night is a bust.

Image above taken from Plan59.

Bonus costumes: Captain Smalls, Coleson, and The Devil’s Minions.

The birthing classes are off and running and already we are knee deep in Wharton’s Jelly and calculating the viscosity of mucus plugs. You just can’t have a conversation about newborns or yet-to-be-borns without discussing at least three or four different types of fluids. Fluids, muscles, and membranes – the biology of fun. Our teacher put on some great puppet simulations last night which featured a skeletal pelvis giving birth to a cabbage patch doll. That was totally worth the price of admission right there. And, as anyone could have forecasted, the misses and I succumbed to several bouts of uncontrollable giggling when it was clearly inappropriate to do so. We practiced ‘mom’ having contractions by walking in this group circle, then the teacher would say, “here comes the contraction” at which point the ‘mom’ is supposed to bear hug the ‘coach’ (that’s me) for support until the contraction passes. I found this exercise so excruciatingly funny (especially when I took a peek and saw all the earnest looking expressions on all the other coaches faces), that it became me who was clutching on to the wife for dear life desperately trying to suppress a Junior High style giggle festival. This bodes real well for my delivery room decorum don’t it?

The neighbor on the Southern border of The Ranch has taken to watching television outside. He’s situated a television on his patio with the screen facing the direction of our homestead. And here’s the kicker, he only watches M*A*S*H. There must be some cable channel that playes M*A*S*H episodes back-to-back all day long. Seriously, I used to even like M*A*S*H. I especially thought the theme song was great (The Bobby Hutcherson version is fantastic), however, now with the theme song playing every half-hour, any enjoyment I once receive from the tune has deserted me and left behind only the mad desire to hold steaming red hot irons to my ears. Mercifully, the rain has begun to return to the Northwest which should put the kibosh on the outdoor theater. Although…Crap! From my office window I can now see that he’s erected some kind of anti-rain tarp technologies. Weird, the whole scene kind of resembles the tent barracks of the 4077.

The misses and I went for a road trip this weekend to Hood River. I had never been there before. The downtown is very cool and reminded me a lot of Red Wing Minnesota, except with way more windsurfing and extreme mountain biking stores. We attended the Hood River Fall Festival, where the main attraction is apples. So many varieties of apples that I lost count. There was also a fairly large craft fair going on. But I must confess that I am lost on the whole aesthetic of the ‘Craft Fair’. Which is a bit odd as I like both craftsmanship and hand-made goods. Yet the typical good at a craft fair has the air of a counterfeit. I wonder how many people get shopping-drunk at those craft fairs and then sober up at home to find themselves the proud owner of fairy crystals and overly contrasted airbrushed scenes of Big Sur.

Tonight, the misses and I attend our first baby-class. I can’t even remember the last time I went to a ‘class’. Should be interesting.

Bonus: Kelly’s baby dance from her baby shower (photographer unknown).