Breakfast at Tiffany's...

OK, so today I was just sitting here, minding my own business. Stacey and I got to bed late after having some friends over last night. In addition, Sammy has caught a little stuffy nose from one of the culture samples that were running around here on Pie Night the other day. Olivia, whom as it turns out is sitting right next to me crying, also had a rough evening with a cough. So this morning, being the less than dutiful husband that I am, I thought it a good idea to go downstairs and supervise the chaos.

So, I'm sitting there, minding my own beeswax, trying to quietly watch, "30 Rock" on The Netflix. I'm almost all the way through, "Mad Men" and half way through, "Breaking Bad" and needed something a little less course for a Sunday mornin'. By the way, I'm really starting to dislike Betty Draper. I was rooting for her in the beginning. But now she's kind of dropped off the deep end and gotten mean. I especially dont like the way she treats Sally. Oh, and Walt and Jessie are cranking out some mad....well, Crank and I think he's about to kill off his boss, the Chicken man. But dont spoil it for me.

Annnnnyhow. So I'm sitting here, after commandeering the remote from Lexi, and shutting down the Hannah Montana brain-drain. However, not using the television as a babysitter has it's drawbacks. See, once Lexi went from Beta Waves to Alpha Waves she was on a mission. She was bound and determined to make breakfast. Then Isabelle wanted to show me something with my feet whereby my mother and her mother were out hanging clothes, and apparently my mother hauled off and hit her mother right in the nose. So after going through all six colors she knows how to spell, she then enlisted Olivia to put on an impromptu concert or...whatever you call ballerinas dancing in front of your view of the T.V. Then Isabelle was convinced that her mother, whom was recouperating from being up with the babies all night, needed to be awakened with a seventeen course meal.

So after they all wore me down for about an hour of, "dad, can we make a big breakfast?" Whereby my first 1,000 answers were, "No, let's just have a bowl of cereal." I finally relented. So, I agreed to JUST waffles. I know Lex and Josh can make the batter and I was OK with cleaning up seven plates, sixteen forks, thirty-two cups and spilled orange juice, milk, grape juice, Ovaltine and whatever else the hell we got out while I was in the bathroom for thirty-five seconds.

So, as I'm sitting there, taking Sammy's onsie off (Josh tried to feed him and due to the graphic nature of, "30 Rock" he failed to notice he was drowning his brother with a bottle and Sammy puked it all back up. Finally, knowing I was about to uncork, I sent the three older kids to the kitchen to make the damn waffles already. Of course, with the nose of the camel so squarely in my tent, they chewed me down to agreeing to bacon (how do you say, 'no' to bacon????) I hear them all behind me slamming cupboards, dropping plates, mixing stuff with every imaginable variant of spoon and every piece of measuring accoutrement we own.

So of course, not to be outdone, Lexi shows up to the side of me with what appears to be three bananas sliced and placed lovingly in a circle around a plate with grapes and in the center is a big glob of what appears to be blueberry yogurt. "For Mom, do you think she'll like it?"

So, I of course threw one of my mini-fits after trying to empty the dishwasher and put our tupperware away. By the way, WHAT the HELL is the deal with tupperware? Can we NOT make about five standard sizes of tupperware? Have you ever tried to restack that crap after your kids have been in there digging around? You basically have to pull every swinging peice of storage plastic out, stack in on the counter by type, size, depth, and appearance and then put it all back in strategically, while trying to keep that damn lazy-suzan in the corner cabinet from rotating 15 degrees every time you let go of it. Not to mention every time you bend down to put another stack in, you realize there is yet one more undefinable section of mystery goo on a section of the cabinets you didnt notice before.

Meanwhile, back at the batcave, someone broke the slidey-thingy inside the toilet, so everytime you hear water running you freak out and run back to the bathroom and jiggle the handle to avoid over-flowing the tank and soaking the back of the garbage can, which by the way is full, with poopy diapers and you without pants have zero desire to brave the elements and empty, but because of the mental anguish involved in getting a 12 year old boy to focus long enough to hear you, you run out and empty anyway. As you leave the back porch you're greated by an 85lb dog that steps on your feet with her claws, and you spy yet another six piles of labra-extract that your son AGAIN failed to pick up yesterday in between snow storms.

So then you get back inside, and someone has put the baby on the floor and now they're doing urban dance moves around his head, trying their best to surprise everyone in the house when the self-fullfilling prophesy of making him cry comes true. But wait! It gets better. So you offer, out of the kindness of your heart, to watch the two littlest (sickliest) kids while your loving spouse takes the other demon-spawn for 3 hours of down-time. Not to be outdone and this not being her first rodeo, she counter-offers with YOU staying home for the first hour and her staying home the second and third hour. Oh, by the way, you also get to chase the other three through the halls of the church and coral them into the Honda before you snap and pull one of their arms out of their socket for thinking their cute and smarting-off in front of one of the casual associates in church who already think you're PTSD and liable to snap at any moment.

I gotta wrap this up, Diego is singing about some humpback whale and if I have to listen to another 24 minute episode of some latino kid saving the world one animal at a time I'm going to pluck an eye out or something worse. "Gracias!"

Anyhow, I gotta go, there's yogurt sliding down the side of the table in the kitchen and apparently I am the only one on this level of the house qualified to notice and act. Stacey's upstairs running the hairdryer and keeping Isabelle and Josh away from Sammy on the bed. By the way, what is it with 12 year old boys? Have you seen their hands and fingernails??? Talk about disgusting. He coughs all over his hands which are already perma-sticky and then sucks in snot and moping around attempts to find with 1/100th of his daily allowance for effort to put a fork back in the drawer from whence it came. Now I'm refereeing between a sassy 10 year old girl and a 2 year old as to watching Diego or Hannah Montana.

Pray for me.

Alright kids. Love ya and all, but I gotta bounce. It's too cold to hide in the garage and I have to make a presence upstairs with a smile and excitement for our quality time together after the long...exceptionally long...holiday time off from work. I friggin' love Mondays!

J

So much cooler online...

Hi. Yeah, it's me again. I'm taking a short break from my online training to give you, the reader, a quick update. Plus, I sorta have a smallish case of Adult A.D.D. In days gone by, I've punctuated my daily work schedule with intermittent bouts of Facebook, or personal mail delivery and recovery, but today, I'm proud to report, I have focussed on my school work for nearly three hours. OK, let's be honest. None of you are on Facebook today as the post-holiday requirements have been biting into our quality time together. Dont get me wrong, family (Isn't it About Time (R)) is important, but come-ON here folks, you're KILLIN' me.

So, let me just give you a run-down. So, we had inlaws and outlaws over to the house yesterday for Turkey Day. Before that, it was Pie Night, an annual tradition dating back upwards of five years in this particular neighborhood and a few years prior to that in another neighborhood we were kicked out of. So, I dont have a clue how many people showed up to the festivities on Pie Night, all I know is we went through over 100 plastic knives and forks. There were kids playing in the front and back yards, basement, a veritable din of efforts going on across the ground floor of Casa de Kenworthy and about 10 pm we shewed everyone to the main exit point a little worse for the wear.

So, ok, what I'm doing today now, to go back to the opening statements, is a Distance Learning course. It's a self-paced learning module that the Army insists I need to have before reporting again here at the beginning of Deciembre for one more go-round with the Active Components knowledge managers. I tried to tell them I was, "Self Smarted" but they weren't having any of it. So, about December 4 I'm going to climb on a big ol' jet airliner, and head back to South Carolina for Phase III of my Smarting. So, to that end, I have to finish four modules of between 5 and 9 mini-modules of slack-jawed blah blah blah with maximum retention. Yeah, and for those of you that know me, that's no short order considering my inability to focus...SQUIRREL!!!

Hold on, I gotta take this call...oh, that was, "Coast to Coast Car Ports." See, I'm looking at a nice 24x36x10 car port metal garage for our lot next year to park our trailer under at the lot. But, before I do, I have to get a couple of other things in order. Anyhow, my dream is to have water, power, and the proverbial pot. Plus it would be nice to finish my little fence and the parking area, put in a fire-pit and maybe fence the place in.

I lost my train of thought, where were we? Ah, yeah, the distance learning. I better get back to it. I need to finish a few sub-modules so that I can take Stacey Lou out tonight and see Footloose or something else. She's been locked in the house a few days too many.

Oh, last thing, I did the, "300" exercises again this morning at the Rec Center. I'm happy to report it wasn't nearly as bad as it has been the previous couple of weeks. I talked with Wayne Brown and he's almost convinced me to take up swimming as the missing peice of my reportoir of inadequacies.

Alright kids, back to the modules.

All the best meow meow.

J

Dante's Invierno...

Hey, what's up? *head nod* Hold on, let me snag a Diet Luv. Been one of those days. *sigh*...man. Hey have a seat will ya? Man, you're making me nervous. Wow, where to start huh? Been one of those weeks. Let's see, we've got the snowblower, the new workout, the girls' combined birthday, return to work, the baby...sooooooooo much to go over. I'll try to keep it straight for you. Hey you want some music? Hold on, let me go grab something...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtMy5IBmX7E&NR=1

So, I just finished writing a whole diatribe about how I went to the gym, and how my gut hurts and how we had a party for the girls, and how I bought a snowblower. Only I hit, "publish" and it logged me out, and now a perfectly good verbal diarreah was forever lost to the Western World.
MAN that sucks! Anyhow, you better have a seat. This could take a while.

OK, let's just hit the lowlights. Bought a snowblower. Now I lost all ambition to outline the dichotomy of having a new 209 Cc Orange Beast (I named her, "Ariel"). She can shoot snow a reported 50 feet, however Old Man Winter only set upon us with an inch and a third of the white powder so I haven't had a chance to fire her up.

Then there's the new Navy Seal and 300 Work Outs I started last week. Suffice it to say, my gut hurts from doing situps and floorwipers so bad that I think I have a bout of Montezuma's Revenge, when in fact it's just dormant muscle layers deep in my abdomen that have been reawakened. I'm tellin' you, it hurts from just above the Octagon all the way up my bellaye to my sternum. Mostly from the aforementioned, "Floor Wipers" which consists of laying on the floor, and holding a 45 lb bar and a 45 lb plate on each end straight up in a bench style hold while moving your feet up from the left plate to the right some 50 times. Then, I tried what's termed a, "Dead Lift" wherein you use that same setup, and put one hand over, and one hand under the bar and just stand up. Well, you start out like you were bent over with a sway-back and stickin' your butt out all seductive-like, then you just hold on to that bar and stand up. It's that easy. Only...50 TIMES! Yeah, in ONE DAY!! That's what I said!

So, now my back feels like I'm 80 and I'm going in for some cement to be put in it, and my gut feels like I've eaten 5 bowls of Fruit and Fibre and all this in the name of aging vanity and an attempt to rekindle my youthful vibrance. Plus I was hoping to lose 10 lb of inner-tube weight around my middle but...MAN this is a lot harder than the brochure said.

Nice jumping off point. See, I just finished ruining five full days of Navy Seal and "300" workouts with downing a half a pizza for my girls' combined Estrogen Fest birthdays. Yeah, that's what I said, 5 each 7 year old girls and 5 each 11 year old girls in one pool/pizza party. Oh man, I'm lucky to have escaped it alive. I got stuck in the drive-through at Little Cheeser's and they started talking. By the way, the girl at the window hands me four pizzas, four breadsticks and two 20 oz drinks. So I'm like, uh...didnt I order 2 liters? So she says, "Oh, did you?" Well, I only charged you for 20 ozers. To which I'm wondering, 'Hey, Blondie, I realize you're 17 and you're destined for greater things, but REALLY?! four pizzas, four breadsticks and we're all dozen of us going to warsh it down with a half a sacrament cup of drinky-drink?!' But I was too frightened by the cacaphony of Relief Societies in Training and just drove off dumber than what I started.

Anyhow, I gotta go, I gotta thing. All the best to you and your's. Just...pray for me a little will ya?


OK, attempt numero dos to save this to the public record.

Hugs and Medicated Wishes.

J