Happy birthday, Todd!

YOOOOOOOOU ARE MY WORLD!



(You'd have to be made of stone not to sing along to this song. Even better is using your hairbrush as a microphone and dancing around in your underwear with sweeping arm gestures.)

The death of cork

There's been a trend the last several years of vintners moving away from cork stoppers and toward twist-caps. (If you're interested, you can find a good history here.) It preserves the wine better, especially whites, and eliminates the chance of cork taint.

The main problems with twist-tops, though, is that people associate twist caps with cheap wine, and the "cra-a-a-ack" of a cap is just not as satisfying as the cork pop. So, along with advertising campaigns that focus on the quality issue, wine companies have been trying to find a happy medium for bottle stoppers. Some options are controversial, like the synthetic cork ("otherwise called lumps of robot shit and pulling one out of a bottle's neck is an unnatural act"). Some are pretentious, like artificially adding a sound to the twist-capped wines.

Anyway, I recently tried a bottle of Fernleaf 2004 Sauvignon Blanc. It was quite nice, kind of grassy and citrus-y. When I removed the white disk left on the top of the bottle after I unscrewed the top, it made a loud, surprising, ridiculous "POP." Is this the future of wine? Screw tops and fake cork pops?

More pictures from the weekend

Liam and Heather both look sleepy.

What's she doing to Mickey?

Liam tries toast for the first time, and loves it!

Thea has a teenager moment at Plato's.

Stormy Monday

Getting out the door this morning was a total nightmare. Mondays are usually tough, but this one was especially so, probably because the weekend was so action-packed. Heather came to visit while Todd went to Martin Short's Broadway show with Bob. Thea was pretty excited about Heather being in town, and we sold her on the idea of Daddy being away by explaining that he'd be on a sleep-over with his friend Bob, like Lila and Thea have sleep-overs?

Here's a photo of the family. I know it's blurry and we all look a little weird, but, sadly, it's the best in the bunch.



Anyway, this morning everything was an argument with Thea: what to wear, whether to have breakfast or wait until she got to daycare, who would buckle her into the car seat, whether she'd get a kiss good-bye and how many and how... EVERYTHING.

So I finally extricate myself from the kids and rush to work. I'm walking up the path to the building and I notice I'm limping, walking with a "shuffle, CLUMP, shuffle, CLUMP." Here's what I saw when I looked down:

Singing in the car

Singing in the car
Originally uploaded by haj1000.

"Mary had a little ma'am, little ma'am, little ma'am. Mary had a little ma'am whose feets was white and slow."

Meditations on the "R" word

Interesting thoughts from smart people:

The Cringe Moment: Can I Outlast One Season of Survivor?

As the African-American team took to the field, all I could do was sit there in a hyper extended cringe moment, just like I felt when I was a kid and hoping that whichever murderer, stick-up kid, or car jacker on the 10 o’clock news would not be black. But alas they always were, and alas, the black team met with a spectacular failure. They’ve totally got soul, but whether they can work as a team remains to be seen; because even in the second show, they probably only won because the Latin American team threw the race so they could kick of one of their own. C'mon my oppressed brown brothers and sisters is this how we are going to go out the first time in the only accepted RACE WAR 2006.

Fair Fare

'Fair and Lovely' has been doing the rounds of the market for decades now and ladies have been liberally white washing their faces with the potion hoping to shed their brown skins. And now, there is 'Fair and Handsome' for the man. The ad is hilarious. A regular Joe is at a wedding and in the dressing room, puts on some of the ladies' fairness cream. He gets ribbed for it and hides his sorry brown face in a corner where he bumps into a "fair" (less brownie, reality check please, deluded boy) guy who hands him 'Fair and Handsome'. The potion works miracles. We see him slathering it on his face and hey presto, to the background music of shrill women's voices singing a pansy tune, ALL of him becomes fair, right down to the soles of his feet!! He emerges at the wedding with a train of fascinated women behind him, all admiring his sudden Greek God looks (the cream even does plastic surgery?) and the elevated patrician status that his lighter colored hide suddenly bestows upon him. And all in the space of two days. [...] What kind of message are we giving out, people?

Elusive sleep

Last night, Liam went to sleep around 8pm and didn't get up until 5am this morning. It's the longest stretch of time that he's slept in months. Really, I can't remember the last time he slept that long.

A big part of that is the ear problem, I'm sure. Todd took him to the ENT specialist, who did recommend the tubes. He said that the risk of the surgery would be less than the potentially permanent hearing loss that Liam faces. So, I suppose there's really no choice to be made here.

Anyway, our chance of a whole night's sleep -- sweet, sweet sleep -- was shot around midnight when Thea woke up with a bad dream. She came into bed with us, and while it was incredibly sweet to see her wrap her arms around Todd and fall asleep with her forehead pressed to his, in bed she makes the crossbar on the family's capital H. What I mean is, Todd got the cuddly part; I got feet in my face.

We feel fine

Have you seen WeFeelFine.org yet? Incredibly cool, incredibly addictive. I feel impressed, and sad, and a little giddy.

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

Wow, that's really bright

Magenta foundation
Originally uploaded by kellygo.

It's hard to tell from my crummy phone picture, but our house foundation is now magenta. I thought we were picking a dark plum color. Maybe it'll darken as it dries?

I kind of love it, though.

Ten months old

Ten months old
Originally uploaded by kellygo.

Liam is 10 months old today! His top two teeth are coming in and his ear infection still hurts, but despite that he's pretty cheerful and mellow. Our son is sunny.

Barbie gets a haircut

Barbie gets a haircut
Originally uploaded by kellygo.

From last night. We're still finding nylon hair everywhere.

Liam kept us up all night

Ear infection boy
Originally uploaded by kellygo.

Even with a rampant ear infection, he's still the cutest blondie bear I know.

Sleepover, the morning after

Sleepover, the morning after
Originally uploaded by kellygo.

All in all, success!

Oh, Ann!

Ex-Texas Gov. Ann Richards dies

By KELLEY SHANNON, Associated Press Writer

AUSTIN, Texas - Former Gov. Ann Richards, the witty and flamboyant Democrat who went from homemaker to national political celebrity, died Wednesday night after a battle with cancer, a family spokeswoman said. She was 73.

She died at home surrounded by her family, the spokeswoman said. Richards was found to have esophageal cancer in March and underwent chemotherapy treatments.

The silver-haired, silver-tongued Richards said she entered politics to help others — especially women and minorities who were often ignored by Texas' male-dominated establishment.

"I did not want my tombstone to read, 'She kept a really clean house.' I think I'd like them to remember me by saying, 'She opened government to everyone,'" Richards said shortly before leaving office in January 1995.

Thea puts weird goo on her hands and loves horses

After cleaning up from lunch the other day, I came back into the dining room to see Thea dipping her hand in yogurt. When I asked her what she was doing, she absent-mindedly replied, "My hand wants a yogurt shower." Okaaay....



Two hours later, I found her "painting her nails."



And here's a picture from the day before, when Todd took her to see some horses, her latest obsession. They're bigger in real life than they are in picture books.

Cute airplane jammies

Liam is usually cheerful ...



...even when he's sleepy.



(That's the "seven-mile stare.")

Happy anniversary, Todd!

What can't we face if we're together?
What's in this place that we can't weather?
There's nothing we can't face.

Except for bunnies.


(I can't stop watching this.)

I feel so smug

Rocking the primary vote
Originally uploaded by kellygo.

Fifth anniversary of 9/11

On September 11 five years ago, I was working four or five blocks from the White House. My department was preparing for a staff presentation, so we were all in early. Most of us were introverts, and we were absolutely dreading the day ahead.

Around 8:50 a.m., just minutes after it had happened, my boss came into my office and said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Like almost everyone else who didn’t actually see it, I thought she meant a Cessna had lost control. When the e-mail went around the office that another plane had slammed into the WTC, we knew it wasn't just a small-scale tragedy, a one-time accident. We stayed glued to our computers looking for information, still confused about what was happening but with a growing awareness that our lives had changed irrevocably.

Todd called me around 9:45 a.m. to say a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. He had heard about it from a friend whose wife worked there. Now there was no denying the enormity of the situation. I started frantically calling my sister’s office number, because she worked about a block from the White House. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but it looked like all of downtown D.C. was locking down. Her line just rang and rang; I was increasingly panicked, because she was never late for work, EVER, and why wasn't the voice mail picking up? I was afraid she was going to be stuck in the building across from the White House, and by that point we had already heard that there was another plane that wasn’t communicating with ground control and that it was heading for D.C. We had also heard rumors that there was a bomb in the Capitol building. There was city-wide hysteria.

I finally thought to call her at home, and woke her up. She had a new girlfriend in from out of town, and they had overslept. When I heard her voice, I almost vomited from relief. Heather, completely disoriented and sleep-deprived, mumbled something like, "Shit, I overslept! I’ve got to get to work!" I told her to turn on the TV, that work was most certainly cancelled, and that I’d call her when I got home. Then I practically ran out of the office.

Unlike most of my coworkers, and the majority of people who work in DC, I lived within walking distance of my job. People who couldn’t walk home ended up being stuck for six or more hours while trying to leave the city. Some people had to walk to the border of DC and be picked up there. Some people ended up staying with friends or acquaintances, or camping out at work. We fared better than our friends in NYC.

Walking home, I passed people bewilderedly staggering outside and looking at the skies. Every time a plane passed overhead, we collectively cringed. People were crying, talking loudly and angrily on cell phones, and rushing about. When I got home at 10:15 a.m., I ran into two neighbors. One was high; he had been on the roof watching the smoke from the Pentagon until he was thoroughly depressed, and had come inside to self-medicate. The other one, an obese man who had been dieting religiously for a year, was going out for barbecue, hamburgers, and donuts. Myself, I got to my apartment, closed the door behind me, turned on the TV, and started drinking the good bourbon and crying. I didn't stop for about a week.

Bat phone

My new phone
Originally uploaded by kellygo.

The tech people use it at work to test analog lines. When I told Aloysius that I thought it was really cool and that I'd buy it if they were ever going to deaccession it, he looked at me incredulously, and said it was a dinosaur and that I could just take it. Woo!

Pic from February

Here's a picture from February that I resized for Todd last night. Cuties!

Ear tubes

Todd had to take Liam to the doctor this morning after a night of screaming and crying. (The screaming was Liam, the crying was a little of all of us.) His pediatrician recommended ear tubes. It sounds minimally invasive, but I still wish he didn't need them. And if I were to be completely honest, I feel a little like it's my fault for not being able to nurse him past six months.

On the positive side, maybe he won't end up needing the tubes after all, or if he does get them, we'll start sleeping through the night regularly. That, my friends, would be very, very cool.

Ablaze in This Haze

When you get a moment, check out this post and others from Ablaze in This Haze, a post-Katrina blog by a writer in New Orleans. Brilliant.

Liam's first time using a sippy cup

First time using a sippy cup
Originally uploaded by kellygo.

He was dubious at first but warmed up to it considerably.

Goatse

I refuse to be the only one of my friends to know what the goatse is. (Links on the Wikipedia site NSFW; also not safe for anyone prone to getting queasy.)

You're welcome.

Liam is huge

This is just a random picure of Liam from a couple weeks back to point out that our son is a gigantatron (and so, so cute).

Princess Thea drops the f-bomb

I MUST remember to clean up my language around Thea, and probably to police my friends, too. Gar.

Keith Olbermann's fighting words

Keith Olbermann is a liberal commentator at MSNBC in the same vein as Fox News' vile Bill O'Reilly, but without the support of our Congress and White House and presummably he's more reasonable. Since I don't have cable -- and even if I did I probably wouldn't watch a program like this because apoplexy makes my eye twitch -- I knew nothing about him before yesterday. Now I know that he is smart and eloquent when he's pissed.

Here is his commentary of Rumsfield's latest speech, in which Rumsfield compared those who oppose the war in Iraq to appeasers before the second world war. Here is the transcript, for those of us who are a little hard of hearing.

This was my favorite part of his tirade:

... This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.

And, as such, all voices count -- not just his.

Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their “omniscience” as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer’s New Clothes?

Bravo!