doodledee

I see that KFC is running commercials touting the health benefits of eating their deep fried chicken. It's low in carbs! It's high in protein! Who cares if it's fried chicken? You'll never be healthy if you don't eat a bucket a day!

Wrong. So many levels. But funny. So many ways.

It was hella windy a couple days ago. Like 40 mile an hour gusts or something. It knocked down tons of leaves, except, of course, for the huge maple tree in my backyard that always seems to stubbornly hang on to its canopy until like Thanksgiving. I suppose that's ok, though, as I'm pretty sure the pilgrims originally treated Thanksgiving as just a big leaf raking party / backyard barbeque and that only in recent times have Hallmark and the NFL transformed it into the all day gluttonfest that we know and love today. Jerks.

To top it off, the winds ushered in a couple days of drizzling rain. It's the kind of rain that doesn't require an umbrella on your way to the coffee shop, but it's bound to ruin oodles of cardboard suits of armor tomorrow night. This also means that not only are all our yards covered with leaves, they're covered in heavy, wet leaves. The kind you practically have to ring out before you bag them. Ugh.

But it's not all bad. Heavy wet leaves are too heavy and wet to be blown around with a stupid leaf blower. What a treat!

A week or so before the baby was born I went down to Best Buy and picked up a Tivo. I'd been thinking about doing it for maybe a year, but never really had the guts a good enough reason to pull the trigger. With a kid on the way, however, the window of opportunity threw itself open and I grabbed it by the horns. Yee-haw!

The reasons for having a Tivo when you're a new parent are pretty obvious. It timeshifts live stuff, so when the baby starts crying or whatever, you can just hit 'pause' and take care of problem and not miss anything. It also records super easily and can hold a bunch of stuff, so when you wake up in the middle of the night, you can just fire up one of the 50 odd episodes of Good Eats you have archived and learn [again] how to make a giant pot of baked beans even though it's a waste of time because Libby won't let you make them because she says you can't just have beans for dinner and that's so wrong but I guess maybe kinda right.

The reasons for not having a Tivo are also pretty obvious. It's expensive. It can only record one channel at a time. It's expensive. If you're recording one channel, you can't watch a different channel. It's expensive. Blah blah blah.

Long story short, I had the Tivo in my house for about three hours before I brought it back. Primary reason: it's expensive. Secondary reason: My cable company has [basically] the same thing for way, way cheaper. Sign me up.

So now I have the cable company version. It's ok, but it's not as cool as Tivo probably would have been. At least I have digital cable now, which means I get like 100 more channels including highbrow stuff like BBC World and Discovery Times and lowbrow stuff like VH1 Classic, and CSPAN 3. I think I can even get premier league soccer games now. And lets not forget the on screen program guide and impossibly long channel change times! Wee!

In summary, I will also be using the kid as the primary justification for: upgrading my computer, drinking more margaritas, and - if everything goes according to plan - for building a pair of rocket skates.

We're all moved back in now. It's nice to be here. Thanks to everyone who stopped by and visited us in the hospital and/or stopped by the house since we got back.

[Name] Nicholas
[Weight] 8 lb 3 oz
[Length] 21 1/2 in
[Birth date] 10/19

More pictures real soon.

Yip yip!

The bus I usually ride to work in the morning starts its route just down the street from my house. This means that most mornings I'm the first one on the bus, so I get to pick the seat I want. I usually take one a couple rows back on the left side, because that's the side that faces Calhoun later during the trip.

It also means I get to observe how a bus fills with people.

It's more fun than it sounds.

What I've noticed is that up to a point the behavior is obvious and predictable: with few exceptions, everyone looks for their own seat. The exceptions are usually those rooted in the societal rules of seating, such as husband and wife, and perhaps two old ladies who are close friends.

The magic starts when all the seats have one person in them and somebody gets on the bus and has to make the awful decision about which stranger they are going to sit with. When it happens to you, it's never fun. When it happens to others, it's like a spectator sport.

Through careful observation, I've started to detect a few patterns:

• More often than not, a women boarding the bus will sit with a female stranger instead of a male stranger.
• More often than not, a dude boarding the bus will also sit with a female stranger rather than another dude stranger. Furthermore, initial observations seem to indicate that dudes will sit with the most attractive female available.
• Both males and females will normally double up near the front of the bus rather than look to the back. This rule sometimes takes precedence over the rules stated above.

It's also neat to watch people try and defend against the double-up. Some riders box out by sitting on the inside seat, effectively forcing someone to crawl over them if they want to share a seat. That can be messy. Others imploy more traditional techniques like the old 'newspaper on the seat next to you' or the 'coat on the seat next to you' or the 'mysterious spill that still looks wet on the seat next to you'. Some of those techniques are amazingly reliable.

Maybe I'm weird, but I'm kind of in the other boat. I like it when I'm picked. Not because I especially like sharing a seat or anything, rather, it's just reassuring to know that in a snap-judgment situation, a perfect stranger has deemed me the least gross and the least scary and - most importantly - the least likely to start a conversation with them.

Screw the rest of you kooks, I'm normal!

I've had it with "two thumbs way up!"

Two thumbs up is enough. We get it. We know you liked the movie. Or at least if you're Roger Ebert, we know that there was some hot chick in it. But there's no reason to keep awarding the 'way up' modifier. It cheapens the review, and frankly, it jeopardizes the integrity of the whole institution of movie reviewing.

In summary, it's stupid.

"No, you're stupid" - Libby

One of my favorite parts about going to the grocery store is looking into other people's carts to see what they're buying. Sometimes I do it to get ideas about stuff I might like to eat, but more often than that I'm just trying to get a cheap laugh.

Cub is a better place to do it than Byerley's, mainly because you seem to get more 'variety' in the types of people shopping there. At Cub you get your soccer moms pushing 2.2 kids around in a cart shaped like a truck, your young couples holding hands while they shop, your new immigrants - who always seem to shop in groups of 18 or more - picking through the dried peppers, and your confused old dudes who zone out while staring at the shelf with 12 different types of tartar sauce on it, trying desperately to remember which one they like best.

At Byerly's on the other hand, you get your people who like French Gruyere and your people who like Swiss Gruyere. That's about it.

So anyway, today I did a big Cub run, and other than the adult dude helping his mother pick out which croutons she wanted - which apparently is a 15 MINUTE JOB - the cart spying wasn't all that great. I did see a couple of neat ones, though:

I saw an older lady pushing her cart toward the check out lanes with only 36 rolls of toilet paper and a 12 pack of Diet Dr. Pepper in it. She wasn't walking very fast. I wondered if maybe the caffeine would help get her moving. Ha.

Later, while picking up some iron pills for Libby at the Friendly Cub Pharmacy (no Riss, ah boo), I saw a young couple buying an EPT. Later, when I pushed my cart out to the car, I noticed an EPT box lying on the ground in the parking lot, open and empty. You think she... umm... used it right there?

Ew.

baby update: no baby

tick tock tick tock

Today is the day that tickets go on sale for the December 16th one time showing of all three Lord of the Rings movies back to back to grueling back. That's 9 total hours of film. That's-a spicy meat-a-ball-a.

Hmm. On one hand it sounds kinda fun. I'm sure there'll be plenty of cheering and stuff and people will probably really get into the whole 'experieince'. I bet some dorks even will dress up. That's always good for a laugh.

But on the other hand, 9 hours in an enclosed space with a bunch of nerds... uhh, I think I get enough of that at the office.

I'll pass.

Lots of people are freaking out about the whole Schwarzenegger victory. I'm not really sure why they're so mad, but I'm thinking it has something to do with those sneaky meetings with Ken Lay that Arnold had a couple of years back.

Ok, no, I really don't think that's why they're mad. I don't think that story got enough press so that people really even knew about it. And even if it would have, I don't think a lot of people would have been able to connect the dots. I guess maybe they will once California doesn't get - or even pursue - any restitution from the energy companies that stole from them during the 'crisis'.

But really, who cares. Personally, I'm just bummed because now I have to listen to *everyone* in America do their Arnold impression. Ow, my freakin' ears.

Kick ass! There's going to be another ice palace in St. Paul this year for the Winter Carnival. It's the first one built since 1992, and with luck it will both look better and lose more money then any palace in history.

For $20, you can 'sponsor' a block of ice used in the construction of the palace. That sounds kind of neat. I wonder if you get to keep it after they tear it down? What they should do is hand the blocks out to people who sponsored them and have them store them in their freezers over the summer. Then next winter have people bring them back and use them to rebuild the whole thing. Well, maybe not the whole thing, but maybe a wall or something.

Anyway, here's to a nice cold winter.

Bill Murray has that new movie Lost in Translation out. I'm pumped to go see it, but realistically I'll probably just wait until it comes out on video. [insert your own 'you just wait'-kid story here]

He's old school cool because he was in Caddyshack and Stripes and Ghost Busters and he was on SNL back when it was hip and edgy. This means that people who laugh at Nixon jokes and/or grew up in the 80's probably worshipped him at one time or another. I know I did: "That's right boys, it's the Ghostbusters", "Here he is, Cinderella story"... gimmie a break, that stuff rules.

Then he took some time off and kind of laid low and then started taking some lesser-known roles in movies like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. They were darker and weirder and he had more wrinkles and they were right up my alley. That scene in Rushmore where he's in the hospital elevator smoking two cigarettes at once is classic if you ask me.

Now with this new movie he's getting all crazy popular again. He's all over the tv, magazines, newspapers, you name it. It's currently playing at the Uptown and it's been packed for most every showing. ("Worst theatre in town" - Rivkin; "Good popcorn" - me) I even read some oscar rumors the other day. Neat.

It'll be fun to see how the re-found popularity thing plays out. Figure with all this recent exposure and accolades, he's maybe not as hip and maybe not as dark and it might suddenly become less fashionable to wear a trucker hat like Bill Murray because, hey, if old people like him how cool can he be, right?

I say who cares - he kicks ass. Until they try and make Tenenbaums 2, that is. Then he's just stupid.

There's yet another state workers' strike on the horizon. The Strib ran an oddly doom-and-gloom story that broke down some of the talking points. In the end, it's mostly about rising heath insurance premiums.

State negotiators say that the skyrocketing cost of health care -- the state share per worker has more than doubled since 1997, to $7,485 -- has forced them to ask employees to pay more: nearly double the current $59 monthly premium for family coverage and an increase in maximum yearly out-of-pocket copayments and deductibles from $2,200 to $5,000.

State workers only pay $59/mo for *family* coverage?! ATTENTION STATE WORKERS: That's less than I pay as an individual. Jesus Johnson, quit your bitchin'. Yes, heath care costs are out of control, but that's another issue entirely, and we're all going to have to pay more until somebody fixes it for all of us.

Wow.

Out of nowhere the other night Libby announced that she had a craving for Red Lobster. More specifically, she had a craving for "these awesome cheesy biscuits" that you get for while you wait for your dinner. This was more or less her first craving since she got pregnant and will most likely be her last. So much for my dream of Popeye's fried chicken 3 nights a week.

It was news to me that she had even been to Red Lobster. I've only eaten there once, maybe 15 years ago, and all I remember is that I had popcorn shrimp and that Libby wasn't there. She claims that she went one night while on a business trip. She ate alone, with only the cheesy biscuits to keep her company. >sniff< It's so sad.

I wasn't thrilled with the idea of going, but after a couple of evenings of pouting, I caved and agreed that we could skip our [heretofore mandatory] weekly Pho outing and go see what the big deal with the biscuits was all about. Plus, there was a pretty good chance that I'd get to order something with "Capt'n" in the title, and that's always fun.

Result: Biscuits were good. Hot and cheesy and greasy and fake-garlicy and delicious. The waitress gave us an extra bag to take home. We had them for lunch the next day. Bring it.

That said, Red Lobster is a joke. For $25/head - with only one of us drinking and no appetizer or dessert - the food is criminally bad. Take it down by half and you maybe have a concept. How a place like that stays not just open, but packed to the gills [get it?], is completely beyond me. Who are these rubes? And why does everyone in this place - myself included - have such a bad haircut?

I figure in 15 years I'll be ready to re-evaluate.

Last night the Big Wu played at the Cabooze. Molly and I went.

Last spring Minneapolis extended the closing time of bars, letting them stay open until 2 am. The music played until 1:58. And it was an all-ages show, meaning no lines at the bar, meaning easy access for us 21+ folk, meaning several beers for Dave.

I went ahead and skipped the half-decaf this morning in favor of the full strength. It didn't help. I think I looked at my monitor for 10 minutes before I realized I had somehow managed to get to work. Guh?

[insert your own 'you just wait until you have a kid' story here]