Current events

You want current events? Watch CNN.

I've been playing around with Adobe Premiere and all of its fun little features and I am pleased to announce that my film making abilities have just gone Hollywood. All I'll say is greenscreen, ladies and gentlemen. Greenscreen.

See? How awesome is that?

Macy won't sleep...

It's 5:10 in the morning on Monday, May 25. Memorial Day. A holiday. No daycare today. I get to sleep in. What better way to celebrate this privilege than by waking up early and writing about it! It was Macy's idea, actually, so I can't take full credit.

It started Friday night when Jack and I camped out in the backyard. Surely you remember that. If not, just scroll down and look at the pictures. I'll wait... As I said in that post, I did not sleep epically well. As a result, Saturday was a blur. I was irritable and fun, no doubt. On Sunday we went to Betsy's mom's for a barbecue and I bought a bike at a yard sale. I know, right? A yard sale? On Sunday? Cuh-razy! Anyway, I bought a bike. Then I rode it a bunch and got all sweaty and sore. It didn't take long.

On Thursday (out of order, I know... deal with it), our garbage disposal stopped working. Timely and sensible me decided that last night around midnight would be the best time to finally take a look at it. The diagnosis: I don't know crap about garbage disposals. We're calling someone to take a look at it. But we can't call them out today unless we want to pay a ridiculous emergency holiday charge. Which we don't. So we won't. Call them, I mean.

Anyway, I finally got to bed last night around 1:00. I fell asleep (I'm guessing) sometime around 1:30. Then, around 4:00 or so, Macy woke up crying. Betsy sat up with her for half an hour and then came into our room, where I lay in a half-doze, and tagged me in for my shift. Here I sit in my daughter's room writing this while she races around her room, oblivious to my pleadings, dragging out all of her toys. And at this unbearable hour I am reminded to thank my children's aunts, uncles, and grandparents for buying so many loud toys. Their kindness WILL be repaid.

Roughing it

I went camping last night with Jack in our backyard. He's never been camping before and I wasn't sure how he'd do, but he really enjoyed it. We had a campfire and made s'mores and looked at the stars and watched a movie on my laptop. Just like the settlers did it.

So, here are my camping pros and cons:

Pro- You step out of your comfort zone
Con- You end up being very uncomfortable

Pro- You get to roast marshmallows
Con- You have to eat bitter, charred marshmallows

Pro- You get to light a big fire and stare at it, occasionally feeding further bits of fuel into it as the night progresses
Con- Your wife frequently pokes her head out the backdoor and reminds you not to burn the house down... although this event isn't exclusive to camping

Pro- You get to put up a big tent and wrap up in sleeping bags and blankets
Con- You have to evaluate what you can't live without for the night and then realize, too late, that you forgot something and when you call your wife to ask her, your voice dripping honey, to bring it out to you, she just hangs up and refuses to answer her phone for the rest of the night, no matter how many times you call and then you're forced to get up go get whatever you forgot yourself (not based on actual events, just a hypothetical situation)

Pro- You get to sleep in the open air, experiencing the glorious morning, straight from the factory, so-to-speak
Con- Birds wake up early

Anyway, I'm not an outdoorsman. I'm barely an indoorsman. I have gotten soft in my old age and I don't feel bad about it. What I do feel bad about is my back, which is stiff, sore, and aching from sleeping on God's Mattress, which is how I will forever after refer to my backyard.

Spousal abuse 2

I'm sitting at a friend's house writing this. Why? Because I have a cut and a bruise on my right eyebrow. Why? Because my wife threw a set of keys at me. Why? Because she is unstable. And because I asked her to. And because she thought I would catch them. And because, as previously stated, she is unstable.

T-Ball

I am not what you would call a sports fan. I played two seasons of little league baseball, which I hated, and then I wrestled for half a season in the eighth grade (I broke my wrist and couldn't have been more thrilled). I took one painfully embarrassing year of phys. ed. in the ninth grade (it was required) and I have since watched something like two dozen sporting events, very few of them with any kind of enthusiasm. I am pleased to announce that early signs indicate that my son will be following in my footsteps. At tonight's t-ball practice he introduced himself to his coach as "Luke Skywalker" and then pretended to fall asleep. His t-ball bat is a lightsaber and his mitt is perpetually on the wrong hand, not because we bought him the wrong glove, but because he doesn't care. When picking up the ball he first cleans any stray blades of grass from the ball's surface and then hoists it daintily betwixt two pudgy fingers. While running around the bases he was lapped by one of the team's two girls. I can only assume that they will one day marry.

Watching him practice was like going back in time and having an out-of-body experience.

new computer = new computations

I got a new laptop today. I'm pretty excited about it because now I can blog all I want and Betsy can't kick me off.

I have to go now. Dinner is ready.

Spousal abuse

My wife just threw a loaf of bread at my face. I'm preserving the loaf of bread (which has a distinctly Matt-shaped imprint on it) which I will share with the courts of Indiana.

Today was... interesting. Jack's preschool had a May Day picnic, complete with a dance around the Maypole and the kids all dressed in a springly manner. All over the yard were displays of artwork and there was a very soothing sort of music floating around the place. The smell of hot dogs and hamburgers permeated everything. Also, it rained the entire time and the school staff hurried around to everyone explaining that they were keeping an eye on the radar and the rain would end soon and the day would NOT be ruined. Lies.

Also, my computer took the Dump of Death last night and I will be purchasing a new one just as soon as I can. Which could be a while.

Free stuff and Latin.

Okay, so kind of a big week... and a half. Busy, anyway. Here's why.

What you see here is a 52-inch HD television that was given to me FOR FREE by my new best friend, Missy, my next-door neighbor. It has been banished to the garage because it has inspired screen-envy in our other televisions which has triggered the release of high-octane, testosterone-charged television programs which Betsy and I feel are wholly inappropriate for our children. Cock o' the block, kind of stuff. You know how men are.

So I have literally spent every free minute of the last four and a half days reorganizing our garage, which, you may remember, was already a mess due to a fairly successful garage sale, to make room for this glorious beast.

On top of the garage work I have been trying to get used to our new Fios service. We have a ton of new channels and a new DVR setup to figure out, so that's sort of fun and irritating.

And, finally, LOST! The season finale was last night and it was... pretty good. I don't feel as emotionally invested in this season as I have been in other seasons. It seems like they took all this time pushing the rock to the top of the hill and now the rock is rolling down the other side of the hill bouncing and crashing and smashing the whole forest down. There seems to be a great lack of detail. Anyway, it's the best show ever and they could do the final season with Ewoks and it would still be great.

And, being a total Lost nerd, I went to the trouble of finding out "what lies in the shadow of the statue." If you watch the show you'll know that Richard answered this question for us, but he had to be a pretentious douche and he answered it in Latin. So, I Googled it and it seems that some other pretentious douches translated it for us. He said, roughly, "He who will save us all." So... there you go.

Busy, busy, busy...

I've got a lot going on right now, so there may not be any posts for a bit. Sorry.

The new girl...

We had an ultrasound today. For the baby. The one in Betsy's womb. The one I TOTALLY PUT THERE!

Anyway, we both thought for sure that it was a boy, but we were both wrong, which is no big deal. At least, that's how Jack acted. He went with us and after the initial "It's a girl," he just went back to playing his Gameboy (which is actually MY Gameboy, thank you, very much). We're pretty excited to be having another little girl. Little girls aren't quite as malicious as little boys, not until they start school. And little girls, as far as I know, don't pee on everything. The mechanics are just all wrong. So, I guess we're pretty excited.

robot invasion

I built two vibrobots yesterday. I spent three hours working on them. I used two Altoids tins, two small motors, three AA batteries, a coat-hanger, some popsicle sticks and a bunch of carpet tape. It was totally worth it and not at all a tremendous waste of my time. Just ignore any comments made by my wife. She's cynical about anything that doesn't immediately have a purpose. Except for babies. For some reason she looooves babies.

Note: For those of you who aren't familiar with vibrobots, they basically just shake and rattle around and don't do anything helpful whatsoever. Well, I guess they have one purpose: to keep tinkering husbands busy for three hours on a Friday night. And, evidently, they terrify 22-month old little girls.

Turn your trash into... more trash!

I love clever stuff. Not novelty furniture (except for those chairs that look like giant hands...THOSE are awesome) or kitchen utensils that look like fish (even though we have some). I'm talking about those guys who take a metal coat-hanger and bend it and cut it and make something out of it. Well, I'm not talking about the guys who make those things, I'm talking about the actual things. Let's not get confused. But those guys are pretty cool, too. Mostly.

I have trouble throwing things away because I'm convinced that there is a cool use for just about everything and someday I'll figure out what that use is. I have a box full of broken toys and stuff in the garage that I refuse to throw out. Someday I might get that rare tumor thing that John Travolta had in Phenomenon and then I'll get super smart and I'll actually build some cool stuff. Then I'll die, like in the movie. It would probably be a better use of my new-found intelligence to figure out a way to not die.

Anyway, I found this website, Instructables.com, and there are all of these people who post ideas for making your own stuff out of trash and other spare parts. Like, this one guy built a tiny barbecue from an Altoids tin. Awesome? Yep. There were clocks made from Altoids tins, survival kits made from Altoids tins, guitars made from Altoids tins, an Altoid dispenser made from an old iPod... I just typed in "Altoids" and clicked "search." I'm sure there's tons more cool stuff on there.

I also love origami. I really do. I used to work as a machine operator in an ice cream factory and there were often large lapses in the actual work. So, standing around, leaning on pallets of raw materials, I got bored. So I found a scrap of paper and folded it into a frog. I would make about three dozen a night and just leave them wherever. Pretty soon people from other shifts started complaining about the paper frog infestation. I just love the idea of taking something plain and ordinary and giving it new life as something beautiful or useful or just plain fun.

And what's with the weather today, huh? Frickin' amazing, right?

Not hugs, either, apparently.

*sigh*

It seems that some people can't tell the difference between pretend misspelling and for really real misspelling. Here's an easy way to tell the difference: If Matt Beers writes a word, however he chose to do so is the accepted proper spelling. If Matt Beers writes a word and you know deep down in your simple little heart that he spelt it wrongly, then you need to assume that he done so purposefully.

I am referring to "amination" in the title of the last post.

Amination is easy if don't care about doing it good.

I've been playing around with some animation styles, testing this and that to find a good balance between quality and easy. Flash is the obvious answer, but I don't have Flash and that would require learning something new. I prefer to use only things I already know. So, I am going to be making some short cartoons and I will post them here and there and everywhere. I will post them in a box. I will post them with a fox.

This is gonna be awesome.

What a weekend.

This weekend was a very trying couple of days. Saturday was absolutely gorgeous, but Betsy and I had a seven-hour training session for the daycare, so we got to spend the whole day inside. I won't go into details about how informative the training session was, but it certainly left us feeling bitter about the whole affair. Then we went home, fed the kids and had a fairly relaxing evening.

While we were relaxing and feeling sorry for ourselves for having missed out on all the sunshine, some folks from church were dealing with a far more serious set of issues.

Scott and Rachel Amstutz saw their third child born a week ago. I don't know any of the details, but I assume things went well. Saturday was their oldest daughter's sixth birthday. I may be wrong, but I heard that they went to the Fort Wayne children's zoo, which I am guessing was lovely on such a day. That night, after the kids went to bed, Rachel was feeding their new daughter and began to feel ill. A few minutes later she stopped breathing and was rushed to the hospital where she died. Apparently there was blood clot in her lung. (I don't have nearly enough details to be calling this account "fact," so if you would like more info, I would suggest not asking me.)

Anyway, I've known Scott since the eighth grade, I think, and I first met Rachel when she worked with my friend, Joe, at Chic-fil-a. Scott is an amazing guy and Rachel was always very nice. It's an awful tragedy and it left Betsy and I feeling very upset.

One thing that amazes me in this is Scott's attitude. He has shown nothing but gratitude to God for the time he spent with his wife. He has been encouraging and faithful and set an incredible example of how a Christian faces loss.

Betsy and I are praying for Scott and his kids, and we're trying to appreciate every minute that God gives us.

My back hurts.

So, being a fat guy with wide, flat feet has finally caught up with me. I have a hard time finding comfortable shoes, so I usually just go with Chuck Taylors, which aren't exactly lauded for their arch-support. As most of my day is spent on my feet I find that these less than stellar shoes have, in conjunction with my copious belly, wreaked havoc on my back. I wonder if Bilbo Baggins ever had this problem.

I got biz-ay!

I actually did get busy today, not in the sense that I implied in this post's title, but in the traditional sense of getting busy by doing actual work.

Today was such a nice day that I decided to get started, REALLY started on the garage. Sometimes I say I'm going to clean the garage but what really happens is I move piles of mess from one side of the garage to the other, sweep where the piles of mess used to be, then move everything back. I pack the piles in tighter so it appears that I've actually made more room, but nothing legitimate is accomplished. But today I tore it up. I cut up a bunch of cardboard boxes, I moved my table saw, I threw some "old trash" (Betsy's words, not mine) away, I swept, I reorganized some of the kids' stuff, and I got things ready for our upcoming garage sale. There's still a lot left to do, but it looks so good that if I stopped now, it wouldn't be a big deal.

I also mowed.

Then I took a nap in the hammock.

I would go into greater detail on both the mowing and the nap, but I have to pluck a five year-old cretin from the tub. He is apparently drinking the bath water and sticking things in his butt. Somehow, these problems fall under my jurisdiction. I am not flattered.

So, I have this other website that is so much being launched as it is evolving into something worth seeing. According to my wife, the statement "something worth seeing" is kind of a big, fat lie. I may or my not disagree. We'll see.

This video is what visitors to the website will see upon... visiting... the website. Hmm.

Invalidated... again.

It really annoys me how easily I am dismissed by pretty much everyone I know. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the dumbest. I read a lot, I watch a lot of intelligent movies and television... sometimes. I listen to enlightening music and I pray a lot. I involve myself in group discussions and I think I can hold my own on a variety of topics. So why do I get the feeling that everyone is just waiting for me to stop talking so the "grown-ups" can talk?

I have some theories.

The first problem is that I'm kind of an ass. I have a hard time not making jokes about everything. I'm getting better at recognizing inappropriate humor when I think of it, but that recognition isn't enough to convince me to keep my mouth shut.

The second problem is that I never went to college. Well, I went. I took four classes, then dropped one because I didn't want to write a paper on speech pathology. I decided that I wasn't ready.

So, no proper education and a foot perpetually in my mouth. These are the reasons why my wife and my peers don't take me seriously.

The real irony is that the only time I'm taken seriously is when I'm joking.

The end.

The cool kids

I was never very cool in high school, a trend which I have faithfully continued to the present day. There were these girls in my class... I guess they weren't cool, either, but they acted cool and it always seemed like they knew something the rest of us didn't. For some reason, I always wanted to be one of them. Well, not a girl... I mean, every guy goes through phases, but that isn't what I'm talking about. Anyway, they were always my ideal of "cool."

One of them was actually a good friend of mine, but she spent most of her time with them. Of course, I had friends of my own and we all pretty much existed in our own world, our own inside jokes, our own agendas. But there was something special about those girls.

Maybe it was because they didn't ask for or seem to want permission from anyone to do anything. Or maybe it was because they could make you feel like you needed THEIR permission to do stuff. It might have been that they were the perfect balance of funny and confident and smart. But, probably it was because they were all pretty hot and still talked to me.

Looking back I'm beginning to realize that, except for the confidence thing and the hot thing, I was kinda one of them. In Government class we all broke away from the rest of the class to form our own political party. In journalism I was included in their inside jokes... usually as the butt of the joke, but still, I was there. And even now they remember me fondly, I am told.

I wish I had realized this stuff fifteen years ago.

Lasers.

I'm sorry, but this post has nothing to do with lasers. I misled you and, for that, I apologize.

I've officially begun the first garage-cleaning of the year. Typically, I clean out the garage about five times a year. It's not because I'm a clean-freak or anything. Quite the opposite, in fact. I'm relentlessly messy and if I didn't clean the garage every few months we'd eventually lose the mini-van.

I have two character flaws... well, as far as you know... unless you read my wife's blog... that I wouldn't mind waking up tomorrow without. They are these: I am a pack-rat and I love to start projects, but I hate to finish them. This makes it very hard to keep my garage in any kind of order. Let's face it. It makes keeping my sock drawer in order.

Betsy has accused me of being a pile-maker. I make piles. If you walk through our house on an average day you'll see stacks of my belongings... books, video games, movies, CDs, clothes... EVERYWHERE. Some guys express their basic maleness by sleeping around, spreading their seed, making certain that their genes live on. Not me. I just leave my crap lying around everywhere I go. It could be worse. I could pee on stuff.

I guess the whole garage sale thing (Did I mention that we're having a garage sale? I think I did a few days ago.) is me trying to break out of my pack-rat routine. I'm even getting rid of some of my old Star Wars stuff... maybe.

The problem is that I've given myself no room to grow. I have so much junk and no place to keep it. In a way it's good because it keeps me from buying more junk because where would I put it? But in another way it's bad because... well, my house is full of junk.

(Note: I don't want you to think that our house is a maze of stacks of old newspapers and shoe boxes filled with decade-old cheesecake. Betsy sees to it that everything is kept clean and tidy. But it's pretty evident that there is a certain amount of stuff that is un-organizable. That's all me, not Betsy.)

I have a headache...

I'm addicted to caffeine and I don't drink coffee and if I try to drink a soda in the morning I get dirty looks from Betsy. I get headaches a lot from caffeine withdrawal. Chocolate seems like an acceptable solution, but once I start eating junk, the rest of the day kinda goes in that direction.

I enjoy tea a great deal, but I don't like hot tea and iced tea with breakfast is sort of weird. Well, my friend, Brian, and his wife often have this hot orange Russian tea that is very, VERY tasty, but I don't know how to make it and I can't very well go over to their house every morning. Betsy wouldn't allow it.

These headaches make entertaining a house full of excited children something of a challenge. Betsy often experiences the same thing, but she's a trooper and she doesn't complain much. I, on the other hand, am an accomplished whiner, born of a long line of whiners... and quitters, but I'll talk about that later. Also, farmers, but I would rather NOT talk about THAT.

So, this morning has begun well, with the exception of a caffeine headache. I will press on and I shall overcome. Or be overcome. Time will tell.

This day, as opposed to others.

We had another birthday party for Jack today and I think he's starting to expect them every three weeks or so. We're gonna have to do something about it. Like military school.

Right now Betsy is sleeping on the couch and the 40 Year-Old Virgin is on USA, so all the cuss-words are gone but all of Paul Rudd's hilarity is pretty much in tact. "You know how I know you're gay? You like Asia."

I bought Rock Band yesterday and then played until my hand cramped up, then I played MarioKart until I got mad and started swearing at the Wii. Then I went to bed. I said all this on my Facebook status already, so I apologize if this statement is a rerun for you.

I play a lot of video games, so much so that I don't do much of anything else. I wonder how other people get things done. I'm guessing that if video games had been invented ten years earlier, Punk Rock would have never happened.

I am so unmotivated it's sick. I want to lose weight, but I don't want to do the work. I just want to wake up thinner. I want to be a professional writer but I don't want to write. I just want to wake up rich. I want to stop being a slave to my television... Actually, no. I don't mind that so much.

Anyway, I just wrote all this because I'm afraid that if I skip a day on this blog I'll skip a week, and if I skip a week I'll skip the rest of human existence, which would bore my readers. So, that's all for today. There will likely be something less interesting and more depressing tomorrow.

A goal achieved, a dream realized. And facts.

Last night we went to Panera and got some of that soup I was just talking about. It's amazing how knowing what you want and then going out and getting it can really make you feel pretty good about the world.

After dinner Betsy took Jack to buy some shoes and I took Macy to a bookstore where I bought yet another needless information book. I love trivia. Here are a few tasty bits:

Bruce Willis's real name is Walter.
Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button (not so sure about the authenticity of this one, but it sounds good).
The average woman consumes six-and-a-half pounds of lipstick in her lifetime.
The bones of the garfish are green.
Diet Pepsi wasn't invented until 1983.
The Sahara Desert covers nearly 5.6 million square miles. The next largest desert, the Arabian Desert, covers about 500,000 square miles.
The largest snowflakes on record were somewhere in the area of eighteen inches in diameter.

No one needs to know these things.

I really, really, really, want to eat a Chipotle burrito right now. RIGHT NOW! Although I might be persuaded to trade the burrito for a bread bowl of broccoli cheddar soup from Panera. But here I sit in my living room, writing about what I want but not eating it. Does this automatically classify me as "unhappy?" Or "fat?" Or both?

On an entirely different and unrelated note...

When Betsy and I first got married we bought this really cool computer desk. It's really wide and has a hutch and everything. We've had it for seven years and it has moved from house to house, room to room, and finally, today, I removed the hutch and put it in Jack's room, were it will probably remain until the day it dies.

In Macy's room is a bookshelf my mother bought when my brother, who is 37 this August, was a very small child.

Our first kitchen table is now my maternal grandmother's property.

My desk is an antique that we got from Betsy's dad.

Betsy's dad has a parlor table that we got when my paternal grandmother died.

Our second kitchen table is in our bedroom. It is my "puzzle table."

In our garage are some cabinets that my friend's dad pulled from on old bank he was demolishing.

My point is this: We do a good job of getting the most out of the crap that comes our way and Betsy has stated that we have all the crap we need.

Long, lazy day...

I'm tired. I played a bunch today. Some Laffy Taffy and cherry cola and I'll be okay. Don't worry.

April Fool's Day

I posted as my Facebook status that I am going to be having a testicle surgically removed. Not true. A lie.

So, here I am, telling whoever reads my blog that I will NOT be losing a testicle (hopefully) and that everything in that region is in proper working order.

I would also like to emphasize that I am a big believer in quality over quantity, which is not necessarily a reference to the afore-mentioned topic. But it kinda is.

Look at me with the posts!

Yes, I'm updating... again... which throws my average time between updates into a mathematical anomalous frenzy. But in the interest of consistency, I have nothing important to say.

Betsy and I are making a list of stuff we want to sell at a garage sale in May. So far we have a bunch of stuff that, if seen at someone else's garage sale, would make us wonder, possibly out loud, "Who buys this crap?" We have about a hundred or so VHS tapes, a coffee table, a rug, some toys with mystery grime in all of the crevices, video games compatible with only obsolete systems, and a bunch of my stuff that Betsy doesn't want anymore.

I love garage sales. You get to see your neighbors in a whole new setting: their garage, wedged into a lawn chair or perched on a kitchen stool, drinking a diet cola or bottled water. Amidst 100 piece puzzles with 94 pieces and one-armed action figures and plastic baggies filled with teeny tiny guns and swords and Lego pieces, which, for some reason, are always grouped together, and the train track (still-in-box) which is labeled as having all its pieces, but, alas, no engine and kids clothes grouped together by age instead of by size as if all eight year old girls are the same size and the one moldy bowling shoe, you get a clear glimpse of the core of the individual. These are the things that they no longer want but that they are unwilling to dismiss as valueless. Anthropologists thousands of years from now would do well to study the garage sale, but they'll probably be too busy looking at our fossilized poop.

So, break out the folding tables and portable DVD player! We're hunkering down for a long Saturday of avoiding eye-contact and hoping that the obnoxious neighbor kids stay in their own yard.

Gum

So, my five-year old son has begun what I can only assume is going to be a long, moderately successful career as a criminal. I shall explain in the next paragraph.

Betsy left a pack of gum on the stairs, meaning to carry it up to her office when next she aimed herself in that direction. But when she went upstairs, she forgot about the gum, on account of its not being there. Days pass and Betsy recalls having placed a pack of gum on the stairs, but can't seem to figure out what happened to it.

Fast forward through much searching, many questions and several stern accusations. Normally we wouldn't put so much effort into finding a pack of gum, but with a toddler, a preschooler, and an aging dog in the house, we thought it would be best to locate the gum.

Fast forward through the rest of the stern accusations to the point where Jack confesses to having taken the gum, hidden it in his room, and at some point in the following two days or so, having also eaten, not chewed, eaten the entire pack. Fifteen pieces of gum, straight down the hatch. If my elementary school mythological mathematics is correct, he should be digesting the last of the gum in about one hundred and five years.

Okay, here I go.

I've been having a really weird few weeks. Jack turned 5 and Betsy and I got him signed up for kindergarten and I got really, really constipated and didn't eat anything for about two days because everything I ate just kept stacking up on top of everything else I had eaten and I just kept getting rounder and rounder and feeling like I was stuffed with wet clay. So, I drank some magnesium citrate and pooped like a fire hose. My pooping is back to normal but my son is still 5 and is still starting school in the fall.

Most of my time has been spent arranging various things for my OTHER website, which isn't any more interesting than this one. However, the lack of updates on THAT website is the fault of my friend, Brian, who has all of the computer know-how and is just as lazy and as creatively impotent as I am.

Macy is talking a lot more, which I love because everything she says is so cute and stupid. Kids are fun that way.

Betsy is still pregnant, which I may not have even mentioned yet, but she is. September 18 is the tentative launch date. I feel way less anxious with this one. That seems unfair somehow. With Jack it was nine months of overreacting to ever little thing. With Macy it was nine months of wondering about the child's sex (we found out ahead of time with Jack, but we waited with Macy) and trying to remember what was coming next. This time, we're both tired all of the time and kids are such a constant part of our lives (what with the daycare and all) that adding one more to the household doesn't seem like a very big deal. Poor kid. Not even born and it's already being ignored.

And the weather has been pretty nice, lately, too.

Updates forthcoming...

I'm getting around to it, people... person... alleged person. I really am. I'll be writing something soon, I promise. I am currently busy with life stuff and a jigsaw puzzle. I'm pretty swamped. But soon... soon.

I don't think there was ever any hope...

I don't know why I thought I would maintain a blog. I have never stuck with anything. In the eighth grade I left the wrestling team halfway through the season. I dropped out of college after a mind-expanding three classes. I once volunteered to write articles for our church newsletter, but when I was given an assignment, I didn't do it. No reason. I just didn't feel like it. I never talked to anyone about it. Never apologized. I just didn't do it. Jobs. Projects. Hairstyles. I never stick with anything. And now that I'm married I have even less attention to devote to the things I don't plan on doing. So why did I think I could keep a blog running? Because I'm stupid and I let myself trick me into making plans that will never pan out.

It's probably for the best. I've noticed myself getting dumber and I would hate to have my declining mental functions documented on the interweb.

blehhhhh...

I've been feeling really aimless lately. I haven't written anything for months and months, with the exception of this stupid thing, which I have been pretty much ignoring, as well. I don't know if it's the winter getting to me or if I'm just feeling that my age is outpacing my progress. Whatever the problem, I think I just need to be productive in spite of my lousy mood. I think I'll make those t-shirts I was so excited about four months ago. Or I'll finally start working on the website with Brian. Or I'll start painting or something. I'm just so restless that I don't feel like doing anything but watching T.V.

The move...

So we're moving a bunch of stuff around at my house right now and I'm beginning to think I may have gotten the raw end of the deal. I just relocated all of my books to a very strictly limited location (from an already strictly limited location, but one with a door that could be closed to hide any unsightly piles, a feature of which I took full advantage,) and I have realized that I don't have enough room. Not only can I never purchase another book, it looks like I'll have to get rid of about a hundred or so of the books I already have.

I'm sure I could comb through my library and find a hundred books I could live without, but the problem is that I'm a complete and total pack-rat and I don't want to get rid of anything ever. If I'm expected to get rid of books, objects with a millennium-long tradition of established value, what else will I be expected to get rid of? I have compiled a list of treasured items that will soon be gracing my curb (if you see anything you like, feel free to take it).

One surf board in fair to poor condition. It might actually be the only surf board in Indiana that isn't decoration inside an Applebee's.

Two bamboo bird cages. No birds. Birds smell.

One medium-sized self-portrait. It's so good it's almost a mirror.

Some drippy kind of artwork I did on part of an old desk using long-expired car-paint. If you turn it upside-down it looks like a painting of the sea floor.

A window from my mom's house. I know. How could I bring myself to part with it?

Two guitars. One of them once had someones (I feel like this word should have an apostrophe, but spellcheck says, "no,") foot through it, but I fixed it with hot glue and duct tape. The other one I got at Salvation Army for twenty bucks. Between the two guitars I count seven strings and a whole lotta rockin'.

Most of the other stuff I have given to my son who has become immediately attached to said items. In a month or so I'll sneak them out of his room and hide them away in various nooks and crannies throughout the house.

Anyway, I guess getting rid of stuff is what being an adult is all about. On a related side note, I have managed to retain all of my old Star Wars toys by hiding them in an antique army footlocker which is buried in my backyard. My wife can look all she wants, she's not finding anything.

A new post, even though the old ones are still pretty good.

One of my hobbies, or habits, depending on your point of view, is a board game called Settlers of Catan. It very complicated. If you've ever played it you don't need me to explain it and if you've never played it you probably don't care, so I won't bother with anything like details. Anyway, this game seems to be addictive or maybe it possess you with the devil or I don't know what but it seems like everyone who plays this game becomes a wee bit obsessed with it.

The problem isn't that I can't give up the game. The problem is that I recently went through a dry spell with the doing well and the winning and this and that and I don't really want to get into it, but I lost fifteen games in a row. FIFTEEN! And no one I know is all that good at Catan. They're all praying each night that they can have a tenth of the insight I have. So, by some stroke of ill luck these mediocre dice throwers are pulling out these massive kills and there I sit staring down the barrel of my four meager points. WHAT?

All bitterness aside, game number sixteen put me back on top.

I can't, for the life of me, figure out why I bothered starting a blog if this is the crap I'm gonna write about.

a Wii bit lazy

I got the Wii balance board for Christmas and I'm already fighting the urge to cheat, you know, instead of running in place, just shake the controller so it thinks I'm running, then rack up lots of minutes and unlock all of the fun, non-lethal games. I really need to not be so lazy. Seriously.

On a somewhat related side note, I just watched my wife, in a passionate effort to post a high score, fall off the balance board. Twice.

almost... not yet, though

I'm almost ready to update the blog. Still kinda busy with doing less productive things.

In lieu of actual thoughts or event notifications or anything of interest (which isn't a very good reason for reading my blog in the first place) I will list a few of my New Year's resolutions.

1. Stop acting like I know what I'm talking about. I rarely do.

2. Pay more attention to my health. I'm not saying I want to drop sixty pounds (which would require removing both of my legs and all non-essential organs), I just don't want to wake up one day to find a crew of EMTs cutting away one wall of my house so they can get me out.

3. Spend more time focusing on God.

4. Stop being afraid of falling flat on my face in front of God and the world. God already knows the worst about me, so a little failure isn't going to rattle Him and the rest of the world already has pretty low expectations when it comes to me, so I really have nothing to lose. I just need to stop being a baby and jump into the pool.

And now I have to go shoot some zombies.