Rachel from Our Gaggle of Girls asked me:

Since you plan to have kids (and will therefore look back on this and laugh at yourself), some things you absolutely want to do and absolutely don’t want to do (ie: I won’t spank, I won’t use Lunchables, I will allow my child to jump on the bed)

The stores, they are crazy today. I overheard this (one sided) conversation.

Two boys were being pushed in that two-seater racecar/shopping cart combination. Three-year-old boy says to 12-month-old brother: “That is not what we are doing today. I am not in the mood.”

It was all I could do to not look at their mother and laugh. I really wanted to ask her the context in which her son heard her say that. I had to look away and walk around the corner.

“IIIII will never push my kids in one of those horrible racecar/lawn mower/Zamboni/shopping carts!” I realized as soon as I thought it, that I may as well start chewing my words right now!

Victoria would like to know what kind of advice I have for a single girl.

1. See the 2 books in the sidebar ->
GO BUY THEM!!
I am not making any money by telling you to do so.
The Five Love Languages is good for your relationship with anyone. The point is that sometimes the way we *feel* love not the way the other person expereses love. The book offeres some suggestions for showing other people love in a way that is meaningful to them. It also helps you know yourself.
The Questions For Couples book is a MUST for ANYONE who is planning on marriage or long-term committment. DH bought the book in electronic form. While we were dating, we each answered three questions a day for about a year. The book asks the easy questions first, and gets into the more difficult questions at the end. ANSWER THOSE QUESTIONS, even if its just for yourself. You should have most of those answers at least thought out before you run off and get married to someone who wants completely different things than you do out of life.

2. If he’s really going to be around forever, he’ll be around *next year* too. If you are not ready to (fill in the blank), and you want more time, you have every right to say so. This is not some sort of test that you give a guy to jerk him around, and see how much he really loves you. This is about your plans for your life. You have control, you have the ultimate say over how old you are when you get married, the length of your engagement, and how long you want to wait before having sex.
Like it or not, the converse is also true. If you’re telling the guy that you have to get married right now, and he had better propose before this date… you owe yourself some major introspection time.

::Steps off Soapbox::
Now go visit Victoria!

Naughty Bloggers Post Morosely

National Blow Pop Month

Nathan Blocked Poor Moe

I got nuthin. Good night.

 

Spigot  (spgt)

1. A faucet. See Regional Note at andiron.
2. A wooden faucet placed in the bunghole of a cask.
3. The vent plug of a cask.

Ok, first of all, how did I go through 27.7 years of my life thinking it was spelled and pronounced “Spicket?”

Second, there really *is* such a thing as a bunghole? Who knew!?

 

 

Bunghole! ::tee hee hee:: Why is that funny today?

What do these things have in common?

3 Musketeers Bar
Accupressure
A book about American quilts
Avocados
Cough Drops
Diet Coke
Indian Candy
Naan Bread
a Twenty Dollar Bill

These are all gifts that I have recevied from students in the last year.

I mentioned in class that I like avocados or quilting, students brought me a book and avocados.
I started getting a headache in the middle of two classes, and by the third class, one of my students says “I’m an accupuncturist, here, try this” and starts doing accupressure on my fingers.
I had a student who insisted on bringing me ethnic dishes every week, which was great, except im not sure how well refridgerated some of the stuff was.

What do these things have in common?

3 Musketeers Bar
Accupressure
A book about American quilts
Avocados
Cough Drops
Diet Coke
Indian Candy
Naan Bread
a Twenty Dollar Bill

Any ideas?

Usually when I see people tagging eachother, I swipe the prompt and post a response as if I was tagged too.

Well for the first time in my bloggy life, I’ve actually been tagged by another blogger. This one actually counts because 1) I didn’t tag her first, and 2) this isn’t some lame myspace bulletin.

::Yay!::

Five Songs
Name five songs that you are listening to right now, they don’t have to be new songs or even good but just what is currently in your rotation. A little explanation of why that song is in your collection is nice, too. Along with the five songs, tag five people to do the same.
And shoot, would you believe it? I don’t have five songs!!

Let’s see…

Ocasionally I listen to “whatever’s on the radio,” I know, I’m a sheep. I’m also a very cheap sheep.  

I Wish We All Could Win This CD has been on loop in my car for over a year. No more Church Girl comments from you heathens!!! I like this CD!

I was on the swim team, in Concert Choir and Varsity Choir with this rockin’ chicky. If I could find the CD’s anywhere, I’d snatch them up, but I’m not cool enough for The OC, let alone the OC Underground. I’m also not going to do her the disservice of buying them for a penny on amazon.

While I’m on the topic of High School Choir, last night I had this Dean Martin song stuck in my head. I couldn’t stop singing it all night. That was one of the songs from our annual high school dinner theater. Hey Collie, wanna sing this with me!!!???

Speaking of lame, it’s almost time to start singing Feliz Navidad Police Stole My Car!

I tag: Chase, Elizabeth, ClickMom, MissPriss, and Marriage101.

 

Ok so Kari rocks, and she kinda sorta gets me. Or, at least, she sent me a bunch of *really* useable writing prompts for NaBloPoMo.

Kari asked me to go out and do something that I would never do, and then write about how I felt or what I thought.

I dun signed up for a writing group. I accepted an invitation to go to someone’s house, and meet people, and talk to them. And not just meet one person, meet a whole group of people. Are you impressed? You should be! Some days I can’t even go to group events with people I know, let alone groups of strangers.

It really is an awesome group of people. Worth the drive. Worth the anxiety. Worth the embarassment of not being able to recite my blog stats on the fly (by the way, did I say “Hello!!” to all of you people who actually read this drivel!? I had no idea!!!). And nobody laughed at me for being the only one in the room that hasn’t published anything since my high school yearbook editing days.

I joined the writing group because this blogging thing has opened up the floodgates. Half the things I want to write have no place on this here internets. I have no direction, no ideas, no aspirations to publish my memoirs, but (cheese alert) If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to.

Should I crank out a couple of chapters of an unwritten book? A few short stories? Letters to people who will never read them? I don’t know. This isn’t really for anybody but me. So does it matter?  Deezee suggested that I start some basic free-writing. I’ve been carrying around an empty notebook in my purse for the last week.

I sent an email to an old friend who I’ve been missing. She’s part of the innocent childhood that I’m so desparate to get back to, but can’t. My life-long pipe dream. Based on a comment she made, I typed out a longwinded “well, in my life:” email. She didn’t need that. I rewrote to her as little as I could write and get my point across, and I journaled the rest of the letter instead. If she wants to talk about that later, or not, it’s fine.

Email and blogging has enabled us too much freedom to just verbally barf on people. Instead of reading a facial expression and knowing that the moment calls for a simple “Hey, I’m here,” we read whatever we want into an email from someone and respond back with our own alternating monlogues (thanks Deez, I love that new expression).

I guess it’s the monologues that belong in my offline writing. I’ll have to go with that for now.

Yes, yes, I have permission to be here. This is the beloved “DH”, “That Guy She Married”, the “boy” that “eww, she has to live with”, all that. The geek that keeps our web sites running, keeps spam out of her Inbox, works on a new dynamic button generator at 2am choosing through thousands of fonts for her new blog skin coming out soon, promiser of ear plugs, the one that blogs at length about how much I miss the free health care system in Canada, and that guy that takes three medications for allergies when my allergist swears my allergy test came back negative for *all* environmental allergy types (dust, smoke, cat and dog fur, pollen, etc).

Tonight, as we watched some “48 hours: Mystery” show about the grid of photos that the LAPD put out this summer about the 50 or so wannabe-model young ladies that Bill Bradford took, some of whom have been found dead, my wife murmers:
her: “Do you want to blog for me tonight, I’m so tiiiiired.”
me: “Really?”
her: “Yeah, I’m going to bed.”

So after tucking her in, I figured I’d refute some of her own blog since she so cleverly refuted my posting about the CostCo-size crate of ear plugs I was going to mail-order for her. But hey, I bought two packages of 33-decibel-filtering ear plugs which hopefully do the trick; or at least muffle the 100+-decibel snoring she claims eminates from me. And not that I’m ever worried about either of my blogs (personal blog, personal blog, tech blog) not getting enough traffic (or intimidated because ‘dink(y)’ gets like 80% of our monthly traffic, but figured the exposure for myself would be good.

After walking back to the living room and getting ready to log in to WordPress to write this, I see a shockingly funny IM waiting for me from a friend of Elizabeth’s from college:

(22:37:13) friend: Is Elizabeth having a baby
So I felt the need to deal with that before blogging at all.

(22:39:08) me: lol no, why

Truth be told, I was going to get crafty and lead him along for a while, but decided not to.

(22:39:36) friend: Okay, I was trying to interpret her blog.
(22:39:43) friend:
(22:39:57) me: which one?
(22:40:04) friend: 11/07
(22:41:14) friend: The last sentence.
(22:42:16) me: i’ve only had my green card a few months, we go back within 90 days of 2 years from the day we got approved (April-July 2008) and we’re thinking by then that yes, she will be, or that we’ll have had a kid by then
(22:43:12) friend: Ahh.

Anyway, figured I’d spend a few minutes clearing up some things.

Her recent post about immigration had some errors in it. I told her about it and she quoted an infamous country song “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

1. “DH graduated from a computer program in Canada and discovered that there was not a sufficient local job market in his industry”
Rebuttal: Canada had plenty of industry, and I was actually in final-round interviews for a teaching job at a private college in Ottawa that I was waiting for a mock teaching session to evaluate my teaching ability. I was on vacation in Florida waiting for the school to schedule the mock-class, with my best buddy Scott for two weeks around my birthday in May 2000. Being a geek, I had my computer (non-laptop) and started mass-mailing my resume around SoCal California where I’d visited in 1998 and loved. I knew someone else who was thinking about moving out here to SoCal (who ended up moving back out of SoCal later) so figured I’d know at least two people out here (plus my buddy Jorge), and found a business who was willing to hire me and move me down here from Canada.

2. “the small company couldn’t afford to get him an H1-B (permanent employment) visa”
Rebuttal 1: The company could have afforded it, but the process is lengthy, they needed someone ASAP, and I had already finished up a contract in Ottawa, so I needed work soon. I opted for the TN-1 NAFTA permit as a Computer Systems Analyst, which was a “show up at the border, get a stamped card in your passport provided you have the right paperwork, pay $56, and welcome to the USA for one year” kind of visa. As opposed to thousands of dollars in immigration lawyer fees to write up the paperwork and months of waiting to get approved.
Rebuttal 2: The H1-B visa is a dual-intent visa - you have a 3-year window to be a temporary worker but apply for a green card once you’re in the USA, so you can be here with non-immigrant intent, or immigrant intent, and renew it for a second 3-year stint but then i’ts over. The TN-1 is non-immigrant intent - you need to have proof that you maintain ties back to Canada or Mexico (the only countries where the TN-1 is granted from) and have intent to move back. But while here on the TN-1, I met Elizabeth online, and voila, here we are.

3. “all of the immigration requests for people who had bothered to *do the paperwork* would be put on hold so that a bunch of illegals could be legalized.”
Semi-Rebuttal: My worry at the time was that suddenly getting 12+ million applications from all of the illegal immigrants here in the USA would have overwhelmed the immigration services, inevitably delaying the process for everyone doing things legally. Turns out, it was an unecessary worry, as the same people who were out waving their flags promptly realized what a waste of time it was (and dealing with truant officers for pulling their kids out of school to go wave flags with them) and seemed to have given up the fight. For now. But in the meantime, Elizabeth and I did the paperwork and got everything together for the legal immigration process, and had our immigration interview in about 6 months. Do it legally, get approved, case closed. Stop trying to cheat the system.

(gets off his wife’s soapbox)

4. “See, look, I’m pregnant”
Rebuttal: No Arch, she’s not pregnant. Yet. Thus the (y) in her blog name of dink(y) … we’re trying to think of something else to call her blog and get her a domain name, etc. But pregnancy is in the plan, and by the time our new immigration appointment comes around between April and July of 2008, we’ll see what happens. ;o)

Well, that’s probably enough trouble for one night. I haven’t even blogged this much on my OWN blog in a while, and I figured after she reads this tomorrow morning while I continue to slap the snooze button mid-snore, it’ll probably be the last time I get to blog here. Heheh.

Much love,
DH
That Guy She Married
The Boy She Lives With
her geek

Dear women of the world:

Apparantly the topic of the week is multitasking. We all do it. Talk and drive. Read a book while sitting at stoplights. Eat lunch while walking across campus. Pay bills online while you burp the baby.

But is there no line to be drawn???

Is your life really *so* important that you *must* answer the cell phone while you are using a public toilet? Does the person on the other end of the phone really want to hear ::tinkle tinkle tinkle:: Hello? ::tinkle tinkle tinkle:: Oh, Hi Jess ::tinkle:: Yeah, I’m at the library ::tinkle tinkle::

Really ladies, YOU CAN CALL THEM BACK AFTER YOU HAVE FINISHED GOING PEE. Trust me, the person on the other end of the line probably wouldn’t have called you if they knew they’d here a toilet flush in the middle of the conversation.

Isn’t a restroom a place meant for peace and rest? Isn’t the point to take a break from the multitasking and go into the restroom to relieve yourself?

It’s time for us ladies to develop our own bathroom social contract. I do not need to come into a restroom get a mental picture of the person in the next stall having a one-sided conversation with her toilet!!