Hendricks

I had the most delicious Gin and Tonic of my life last weekend when we were camping. I enjoyed it so much, I had to take this picture. Turns out, it was made with Hendrick's gin. Slightly above my normal price point. I went to Liquor Mart and asked, "If I normally think gin is yucky, but I loved this, what can I get that is almost as good?" The answer was, "Just look for this on sale. You are going to be disappointed with everything else."

But since it was mere hours before the season premiere of Mad Men, I didn't have time to wait for a sale. And it was a special occasion...

I made my gin and tonic and then realize the upstairs TV no longer had AMC. So I tried to switch out the cable box from the basement with unfortunate results. Long story short, I poured my G&T into a jelly jar, screwed on the lid and biked to a friends house to watch Mad Men.

I felt like my Grandma, who always brought a pre-mixed martini to our house in a Lawry's spice jar. Turning into my Grandma is a good thing. Totally worth the price of that bottle of gin.

Omar Little/Genghis Khan

Photo from HBO.

I was thinking about taking a meta moment of silence to commemorate the last episode of The Wire, watched here last night at Casa De MetaMegan. But I think we can all agree that there have been many, many moments of blog silence since we started watching The Wire 3 months ago. It's hard work getting through 5 seasons of a television show in just 3 months. Hard, but rewarding work. Sigh.

Back to blogging, working, getting to bed before midnight and maybe I'll even get those thank you notes in the mail soon!

In other news, I am way behind on all the precious things Jack has been saying and doing. We went to see the Genghis Khan exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science the week after Christmas. There was a 60 second (or so) movie reenactment of the life of Genghis Khan, and Jack was very interested in the crying baby at the beginning. He watched it several (20) times. Days later, we were in the car amongst the museum ephemera and Jack recognized the hat we made at the end of the exhibit. He said,

"Baby crying, grew up: Genghis Khan."
Laughter ensued.
"Baby crying, grew up Genghis Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaan."
Laughter.
"Baby crying, grew up Genghis Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaan."
Laughter.
"Baby crying, grew up Genghis Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaan."
Sighing.
"Baby crying, grew up Genghis Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaan."
Yes, he sure did Jack.
"Baby crying, grew up Jason Khaaaaaaan."
No, Genghis.
"Jason Khaaaaaan."
Genghis.
"Baby crying, grew up Genghis Faaaaaaaaaaaawwwn."
Ugh.

We got home eventually, but it was the longest conversation I've ever had with a two year old about a 13th century warrior/statesmen.

Photo from wikipedia.

It's Almost Midnight... Do You Know Where MetaMegan is?

I am about 5 dozen cookies into my contribution for the bake sale. Because I didn't start until after 10:00 P.M. Because I was working and watching The Wire.

Smarty Pants Revisited

I already mentioned how I did some dumb things while making my smarty pants outfit. I mentioned ruining the shirt and the end table. But did I mention that at one point I sewed the front and back of the pants together? I did do that. But it still turned out to be a cute outfit. Dave thought I was going to sew the smarties on individually, like sequins. That may have been cool, but I never could have done it while watching our new TV obsession, The Wire.

The World's Saddest Vacation Picture

Poor, poor, poor Dave. Working through his vacation. And by that I mean, my vacation. And by, "poor Dave" I mean, "poor me."
Jack was just about as much fun as his daddy. But he's a baby, so it's OK.

At least Grandmom and Luke were having a good time. I entertained myself by taking pictures of my foot.

In a nutshell, Dave works too much, and I am not only saying that because his business trip, for which he left at 2:00 pm on LABOR DAY has been extended another day. OK, I sound annoyed but really, I came up with the subject of this post when I was thinking about how awesome it is that I filled up Dave's netflix queue with the first season of Gossip Girl and I can watch it without any sarcastic "XOXO's" from the office where Dave would normally be working while I watch TV. (Love you, honey!) It's sort of hard to come up with exactly the right intro for a post about Gossip Girl though. I suppose I could have segued somehow from Sparkly Vampires right into Gossip Girl. Too late now. I need to power through the GG marathon and get this DVD back in the mail before Dave gets home. You may be wondering why I didn't just put GG in my own netflix queue. And for that I have one word. And that word is Twilight. Boo yeah. Did I mention that I put Sleeping Beauty in Luke's queue? Netflix trifecta.

And now I fight the urge to explain that I am watching/reading all this pop culture trash ironically. I am really an intellectual. For reals.

XOXO
MetaMegan

Mr. Noonle

I spent a good part of Friday complaining to various people that Jack was suddenly afraid of Mr. Noodle and how this was a huge problem because I count on an hour of Sesame Street on Fridays to get through my work from home day. Probably, if I had spent that time working, instead of complaining, I wouldn't be procrastinating working right now on this sunny end of summer holiday weekend. But then I wouldn't be blogging as a way of procrastinating, and not everyone would get to hear/read about Mr. Noodle.

Did I just blow your mind?

So it used to be that as soon as Mr. Noodle came on, during Elmo's world, in the last 15 minutes of Sesame Street, I had to turn off the TV. No big deal. But Friday, I turned on the TV at the very beginning of Sesame Street, and as soon as the first non muppet appeared on screen, Jack said, "No! No Noonle. T.B. OFF!" Sigh. I turned off the T.V. and started complaining.

I was still complaining 9 hours later when we sat down to dinner and had this conversation.

Me: Luke, Jack is afraid of Mr. Noodle.
Jack: No Noonle!
Luke: Who's Mr. Noodle?
Me: You know Mr. Noodle, he's sort of a vaudeville type of old fashioned clown? He's on Elmo's world.
Luke: Never heard of him. Jack, do you like Mr. Noodle?
Jack: Yesh.
Me: Argh! I know you know who he is!
Luke: Nope.
Jack: T.B. Off. No Noonle.
Dave: Luke, you know Mr. Noodle. He's the one who has the brother, Mr. Noodle
Luke: (Lightbulb!) Oh yeaaaaaah.

Panic Attack Magazine: A Thousand and One Ways That Christmas Can Kill You

This month Dave got to enjoy Panic Attack Magazine because I read it to Dave, Luke and Grandad on the way to Eldora last weekend. Luke loves it because of all the recipes for sweets and pictures of junk food and toys. Dave mostly ignored me, but I think some of the message sunk in.

We learned that you need to bleach your tree trunk, let it dry out in the driveway, clean off mold and allergens, never let your tree dry out, put your tree up immediately, and don't leave it for more than a month.

Inspect each ornament for dust, dirt, wear, tear, frayed edges, and allergens.

Call ahead to ask your hostess not to use scented candles that can inflame airways. Call ahead, people.

Also, know that your baby could pull on the stockings and get clocked in the head by a clunky ornament holder. And once again, a little bit of panic crept in. Dave busted me when he saw the naked stocking holders, with the stockings limply laying on the chair, homeless. "Yup. Good job avoiding a head injury."

In other news, posting once a day for the entire month of November caused me to get burned out, hardly write anything, post only pictures, and take Dec 1 off. Then the cable was out on the 2nd. When I got home from the PTA meeting on the 3rd, I had to do a whole days worth of work due to the cable outage, plus watch the last two episodes of Band Of Brothers. See, I bet I never even said anything about how our latest TV obsession was Band Of Brothers, and now it's all over.

So, now I have to ease back into the posting thing, and after writing about how ornaments and trees can kill you, I don't even have time to cover the fact that your children will have holiday meltdowns, and be afraid of Santa, and I am not even going to touch the fire safety. Sigh.

If I can find the memory card reader, I should have cute pictures for tomorrow though!

Pre/Post Mad Men Musings

Welcome to the, "I'm Back! And I'm going to start posting again! And using a lot of extra punctuation, (mainly parenthess!) post!"

I told Dave that I sort of feel as if I have been a zombie for the last month and I am finally back to being myself again. (ie: Toast as a side dish.) This weekend I was cleaning closets and organizing rooms and crossing things off my to do list - and this is a to do list that is so old and neglected that it has stuff on it from early September. (Sorry Katie - I never bought that baptism gift!) (Dave pointed out that I stopped looking at my to do list right around the time my blog output completely dropped off to hardly anything.) I don't know if it was beginning of school stress, end of Bean's life stress, or the changing seasons, but I have shed my zombie inclinations, just in time for Halloween! (Braaaains!)

Speaking of Bean, Dave and I were at a party on Friday and I was overheard saying, "Oh, plans for tomorrow? I am taking the boys to get a flu shot and then we are picking up the dog's ashes."

Another mom said, "Um, you might want to throw in a trip to the ice cream store or something."

Good advice. We had a nice weekend, and the weather was perfect for a little backyard ceremony.

In other news: Jack is looking like he wants to start walking. Perfect timing because the memory on my camera is full and I can't find the card thingy. (When Luke was about to start walking there was a smudge on my camera (birthday cake from his party) and I freaked out and ran to the camera store. They dipped a Q tip in windex and wiped off the lens.)

Moving on... ***Mad Men Spoiler*** Who watches? And do we think Don is the father of Betty's baby? I think not. Thoughts? Just six short months until next season.

B is for Bowling

Most people already know this, but just to get everyone up to speed, I am sort of type A, and I used to be obsessed with my GPA. When I was in school, that is. I don't care about it now, obviously. Or maybe not so obviously since that is what I am writing about. But back to high school. I am not going to put any dates on in, but I can guarantee this: when I was a junior in high school, and our gym class was held at the local bowling alley, Rob Base was definitely playing on the radio. (Parenting Aside: We went through a long phase of counting to 3 to give Luke a chance to follow orders without getting a time out. Once I couldn't stop myself from following "1, 2, 3" with "get loose now." Luke cried and said, "' 'Cept I don't want to get loose." ANYWAY, I was not very good at bowling. And by "was" I mean, "as recently as two months ago, I took Luke bowling and got the bumpers for both of us, and he beat me." In high school I was even worse. In order to get an A in bowling you had to bowl 100. It quickly became apparent that I would not be bowling 100. What to do? Was I to get a B for the first time since grades were invented? A B? In bowling? Well, there were easy two options for getting an A. The first would be to cheat and give myself a score of 100. Aside from the moral and ethical dilemma of debasing myself by cheating at bowling, there is a slight problem that I have with arithmetic. Geometry? No problem! Algebra? Calculus? I love you! Arithmetic? Hmm, not so much. I am not sure that I had both the understanding of how to keep score and the ability to make the numbers add up to something resembling 101. In retrospect, it is entirely possible that I was bowling A caliber frames, but not adding up the score correctly. But based on my scores at forced, work-related team functions over the years, that's probably not the case. But I digress, I would never cheat, especially not at bowling. That left me with option 2: Bowl during my free time and bring in my score sheet for extra credit. Almost as bad as cheating, was having to bowl a terrible game in my free time and then turn the results in for extra credit. I have done many extra credit, brown nosing projects over the years, (I wrote a paper on the catalytic converter before I switched majors from engineering to the more employable field of botany) but I couldn't make myself be a big enough geek. Sure, my friends would have been happy to go bowling with me! Sure, I told my parents I was bowling half the time anyway! (Hi Mom and Dad!). But I had to draw the line somewhere. I had to take a stand and plan to enter my senior year without a 4.0 in order to relieve to pressure and survive. I didn't cheat, I didn't do extra credit, I got a B and it was the healthiest thing I could have done.The point of this story is that in my first two games of wii bowling, I bowled a 144 and a 177, beating everyone. Because I am awesome at wii bowling. Or everyone else is really bad. But probably because I am awesome. I stole the picture from here.

Dun de dun duh, Dun de DAH!

Jack had his first non friend/relative babysitter on Saturday. (Milestone for Mommy.) OK, we hired one of the teachers from the daycare, so it's sort of cheating since she is a professional. Dave and I had dinner, drinks and we saw a movie. I was thinking I could do one of those mastercard, or visa or whatever "Priceless" commercials. But first of all, that has been done to death. And secondly, I can only mentally add up some of the cost without thinking maybe it would have been better spent paying for a year of Jack's college tuition.

Then I keep reminding myself about how I didn't see the 3rd Indiana Jones because I went to the theater at the Great Northern Mall with my friend Kristen, and when we found out that ticket prices had gone up from $5.00 to $5.50, we just couldn't justify that extra 50 cents. That was 19 years ago. If I had seen the movie I am sure I would remember how good it was. Instead I am thinking about all the interest I have earned off those 2 quarters. (At 4% compounded annually for 19 years, it's $1.05, or approximately enough to pay a babysitter for just slightly more than 6 minutes.)

But enough about how cheap I am.

We saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and it was awesome! At first I was thinking it was sort of cheesy, but then Dave reminded me that Indiana Jones is very, awesomely cheesy. I really wish I would have saved that poster I had of Harrison Ford in my room for all those years. Sadly, I was not able to find a replica in 30 seconds of internet searching. OK, I searched for another 30 seconds. I don't think this was it exactly, but it's close.

Blog It Out

Monday night I was live blogging our first attempt at crying it out while simultaneously googling "crying it out". Who knew that allowing your baby to cry causes most of the problems in our society today? Probably lots of people. Of course it wasn't as easy as letting Jack cry for 10 minutes, as I reported, and the next day I sighed, and rubbed my eyes, and commiserated at work with my fellow mommies about how I was up until 12:45, when I finally gave in and nursed my little baby to sleep. And then we were up again at 6am. Poor me. And then I was banished from the club, stripped of my complaining rights, and that was that.

Since other people have it worse, I did not volunteer the fact that Tuesday night, Jack slept from 8pm to 6am. So it seems that our evening of crying it out was totally effective, just what the doctor ordered, and the answer to everything! (Probably not.) Or maybe Jack was just having a hard time adjusting to the crib after sleeping so close to his mom and dad and brother all weekend on our camping trip. (Oh, the guilt.) Regardless, the damage has been done and Jack is now as ruined as his older brother.

In other sleep related news, I will now begin getting a lot more of it because we watched the last episode of Deadwood this evening. That makes 36 episodes in about 6 weeks. I will now go into withdrawal, and to get through it I think I'll try to get to sleep before midnight a few time a week.

Now to sleep - last night I dreamed of a skunk eating all the vegetables in my garden. Possibly as it was actually happening. Darn that skunk and it's zucchini, melon, and pumpkin leaf eating!

Not The Memorial Day Camping Trip Post

The Memorial Day Camping Trip Post will have to wait because I think the camera is in the car and it's raining and I'm lazy, etc.

Nothing new to report on the Deadwood front because I mistakenly forgot to update my queue, and received The Savages (Carrying the emotional scars of an abusive childhood, siblings Wendy Savage (Laura Linney, in an Oscar-nominated role), a long-aspiring playwright, and Jon Savage (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a professor of drama, now face the challenge of caring for their ailing elderly father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), despite their emotional disconnect from him and each other. Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills) wrote and directed this indie drama.) instead of Deadwood. Hmm. Sounds really fun.

In the future I am going to try not to mix the Academy Awards, alcohol, and my Netflix list. Maybe I'll take notes and then update my queue the next day if the movies still look good.

Too Much TV

Between 2 episodes of Deadwood and the 2 hour season finale of American Idol*, I don't really have time for the latest dummening story. But tomorrow is another day. Please enjoy the picture. Jack is smiling (grimacing) because I am training him to be a ham for the camera, but he really didn't enjoy the peas at first.

*Don't worry - I watched the American Idol finale on triple fast forward. It took 120 minutes down to less than 5. Before I could remember an A or B or C list star's name, their song was over, and I didn't have to listen to it. I just wanted to see who won, and who cried, and who looked surprised. About 1 second after the announcement, as the hugging commenced, the recording stopped. If there was 2 more seconds of banter before the results were announced, I wouldn't have seen it! This would have been the worst Tivo tragedy since the Broncos won in overtime that bittersweet afternoon last fall.

Halfway There

It's Wednesday! Halfway through the week, halfway through Dave's business trip to Dayton (miss you honey), but most importantly, halfway through my Deadwood fast. With Dave out of town, I'm not watching any episodes until his return (because I am nice). Attempts at work to strike up a conversation about Deadwood has led to dead ends. (And not because the show went off the air some time ago.) Conversations have gone like this: "never heard of it." and "I like westerns as much as I like outer space". Which, on the surface, seems to mean, "I've never experienced it, please tell me all about it, I bet it's fascinating. But really, it means, stop talking to me about Deadwood. So it was very exciting to have this dinnertime discussion with Luke. (Names have been changed to protect the, the, well, innocent doesn't seem quite right.)
******************************************************
Luke: Montgomery said he has seen every movie.
Me: Really?
Luke: Yes, Montgomery said he has seen Return to the Jedi. And I asked him if he had seen the Pod Races and he said, "Yup!" and I asked him if he had seen the Clone Wars and he said, "Yup." and I asked him if he had seen some other movies and he said, "Yup."
Me: Well, sounds like he has seem a lot of movies.
Luke: Then I asked him if he had seen Deadwood and he said, "Yup. There's a giant in it." Is there a giant in Deadwood?
Me: Nope, no giant. And I guarantee you that Montgomery has not seen Deadwood.
*****************************************************

So yea! I got to discuss Deadwood. AND I was able finally prove that Montgomery makes up stories. This has been a battle since Luke's first loose tooth, when Montgomery said, "Oh. I have 10 loose teeth." And "The tooth fairy isn't real." Darn that Montgomery!!!