Sometimes it's like looking into a tiny little mirror.

Tonight was guy's night at our house. I took my son out for dinner on the way to his gymnastics class. We had a really great time, and he was unusually talkative about school.

So we're sitting there over hamburgers, talking about his friends, talking about his classes, talking about the games they play at recess. A lot of it is very similar to what we did. They play a lot of the same games, even the ones I thought were obscure. Comparing my school experience to his was a lot of fun.

I was shocked to find that the public school system has completely failed to teach him to play kickball, but that's another story.

We started talking about the more artsy things like their music classes, and he told me he doesn't like music. I asked why, and he told me that he hates to sing because he's a boy. Only girls like to sing, apparently.

I quickly corrected this by pointing out that there are lots of men who sing, at which point he brightened and said, "Oh yeah, like that guy from Kiss!" (I filled in a few gaps in his rock education a bit at this point. God, I'm proud of that kid.)

Even thus informed, he maintained his staunch anti-singing position, telling me, "It's okay. Everybody else sings pretty loud, and the teacher can't hear who's making noise and who's not. I just move my mouth. Nobody can tell." He followed this statement up with a demonstration of his fakery skills, with the caveat that "you'll be able to tell 'cause there's not a bunch of other kids singing."

The parent in me was dying to have a little chat about correcting that behavior... but he had pretty much described exactly how I got through more or less every class I ever took where they expected me to sing, too.

I called my mom to tell her the story while kidzookie was in his class. She and dad had a long laugh at my expense.

The Further Adventures of Diabetic Cat

So Diabetic Cat has stopped eating, stopped drinking, stopped using the litterbox, shows signs of heavily labored breathing, and can't be bothered to get out from underfoot, and can't be bothered to avoid the dog.

Good signs, huh?

We took him to the vet, and those things are all signs of his diabetes not going so great. They're keeping him overnight and doing some x-rays and shit.

That sounds cheap.

I can't go through this shit again. This is the most awesome pet I've had since my dog I had in high school. God damn it all. Someone please tell the universe to stop kicking me in the balls.

Where There's Smoke...

My wife and kids are out of town right now, visiting with my father-in-law. I've been living the bachelor life for the past week (translation: too much beer, too many video games, too little sex).

My wife called this evening so that I could talk to the kids. My three year old daughter had a lot of questions about the new dog, and I was so caught up in how adorable her excitement over the new pet is that I failed to notice I'd tapped an extra zero in on the microwave.

So I told the microwave to cook my dinner for 30 minutes instead of 3.

I didn't notice this until there was thick, black smoke fucking POURING out of the microwave.

I slapped the microwave off, opened every window in the house, and turned on every fan in the house. I finally pulled the charcoal briquette that remained of my dinner from the microwave and hucked it still smoking into the trash. Amazingly, the fire alarm hasn't gone off. Yet. Perhaps that should concern me.

The smoke outside was already dense enough to make my eyes burn because of a wildfire in the eastern part of the state. At this point, I'll have to go outside into that poison to get some fresh air.

It stinks like death in here. And now it's hotter than hell because I'm not running the AC and cooling the outdoors. Damn it, I turned into my dad.

Richard Lewis is ancient.

Why does that make me feel so old?

Undone by my own jackassery

Taco: Now I'm giggling at the ongoing gag of the heroine's impotent petulance. I'm totally using that bit in one of the things I make up but don't write one day.

Coyote: Dude, you need to, if you haven't already, start a doc for all your ideas and notes so that when you open googledocs it's always right there, staring at you. Stop having awesome ideas and not doing stuff with them! I command it! Write more, damn it!!

Taco: Dude, you rock. I forgot that I had one of those, so I went off to add that nugget to it and found this one, which I'd forgotten: [removed because of that fucker who keeps stealing my half-finished stuff]

Coyote: Clearly I'm not doing enough begging on the make Taco write more battle front. I'll have to increase my efforts.

Taco: Taco is full of what we in scientific circles call "The Suck."

Coyote: The findings of the council are quite different. You wouldn't want to anger the council would you? They control all the mansex. And cheese. Truly they are powerful and wise.

Taco: *hypothesizes that Taco is full of The Suck*
Taco: *develops an experiment to test this hypothesis*
Taco: *performs said experiment*
Taco: *records findings*
Taco: *checks findings against his hypothesis*
Taco: *finds that, indeed, Taco is Sucktastic*
Taco: Yay for science!

Coyote: I can't help but notice that your findings and the details by which you came to those findings have not been put up for peer review. Also yay for science!

Taco: If I had any peers, I would put it up for their review ^_^

Coyote: Thank you for making my point for me. BOOYA!

Taco: Curse you, Richards!

I shaved my head tonight.

I'm not sure why, except that I'm losing my hair anyway and tonight seemed like as good a night as any. So I scalped myself. It feels really good and I don't think that I look appreciably more ridiculous than I did before. Hrrrmmmm.

I lack what they call "social skills."

So yesterday my stomach wasn't doing all that great. Let's just gloss over the details and say that what I did to the bathroom wasn't pretty, and it took three flushes of our industrial grade toilets to undo the damage.

I washed up and left the bathroom. A woman was leaving the women's room at the exact same moment, and she stopped and gave me a look of... well, not horror, exactly. Perhaps concern?

It was an awkward moment, and I lack the social finesse to navigate such treacherous waters. But, I reasoned, I've never seen this woman before, so she must work for the other company on our floor. What's the worst that could happen?

So I did the first thing that popped in my head, which seemed pretty funny at the time:

I held up three fingers and said, "That's right. Three flushes." And I walked off for the breakroom to reload on caffeine.

When I stopped to fish my access badge out of my pocket, she walked past me. As in going the opposite direction of the other company on our floor. I watched until she got to the end of the hallway, scanned her badge, and entered our office space.

Shit.

Heh. Shit. I just caught that.

Oh hell... I'm doing it again.

Their brains are like little sponges.

So I very nearly taught my sweet little daughter the word fuck tonight. Fortunately, I worked harder than I should have this week and managed to turn a simple case of the creeping crud into what now feels suspiciously like bronchitis. The coughing fit that elicited the poetical utterance also rendered it unintelligible.

My daughter now yells, "Ock!" every time something annoys her.