Royale with Cheese

I'm sorry.  It's been over a month since my last confesstion.  It's weird too, because this website looks completely different than it did last time.  I guess I will just wing it and see what happens.  Quite often, I upload the pictures first, which usually inspires (reminds) me to write about something.  I'm not going to do that this time, and I'll tell you why.  About a week ago, I came home to a dead computer.  One could argue that a computer was never really alive in the first place, but as a huge fan of the Terminator franchise, I will disagree with you.  I still think Judgment Day is coming.  Before I get too carried away, I didn't lose much from this massive hardware failure, except for a lot of time.  I am a responsible individual who occasionally makes a backup of important things.  All of the pictures I have taken since my last backup are still on my camera.  I am currently typing this from my laptop.  I can't reach the camera from here, and I am pretty comfortable in this chair, so the pictures will have to come later.  Yesterday I came home from work to find that the refrigerator door was open.  It's possible that I didn't close it after I finished with breakfast.  It's also possible that my innocent looking two-year old opened it.  After interviewing all possible suspects, I believe it to be the cat's fault.  The good news here is that we got to clean out the fridge, which should be done once in a while anyway.  The bad news is that we had to make new dinner plans, as well as make a trip to the store to replace a few items.  It wasn't the way I intended to start my vacation, but that's life.  Tiffany and I are leaving tomorrow for Paris.  I am so excited to have a few days off.  Perhaps in a future blog I will discuss whatever it is we actually do, but for now all I can tell you is what we have planned.  Friday morning we booked a tour (en Anglais) of the Palace of Versailles.  I think this is going to be good stuff.  Who doesn't want to see how French royalty lived?  Seriously, I think it is going to be cool.  The only other thing on our agenda is the Metallica concert on Saturday night.  In addition to our front of stage pit tickets, we found out last week that we won Snake Pit passes through the Metallica Club.  I will snag a picture off the internet so you know what I'm talking about, but basically we will be as close as we could possibly get.  They are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Black album on this tour, and the snake pit was a part of the stage back then.  I missed that tour, as I was only 13 and lived under the dictatorship of my parents.  We are super excited to be attending this show.  It is a sold out show at the Stade de France, which is the national football (soccer) stadium.  It holds 80,000 people, which is the second largest concert I have ever been to.  This will be my 19th Metallica show, but my first one on another continent.  Other than that, we have no real plans.  I know are going to spend some time at the Louvre, and probably some other touristy places.  Is it weird that I want to go into a McDonalds and order a Royale with Cheese?  Some of you know what I'm talking about, and the rest of you never will.  My guess is that a McDonalds hamburger tastes like crap no matter what language you order it in.  They do have free wi-fi, so I may abuse that a little.

OK, I just got the pictures uploaded.  The first picture is from Easter.  The rest of them are from the Murray family reunion at Lake Brownwood.  The reunion was fun as always.  We all ate too much.  Ethan spent his time blowing bubbles, flying his toy plane, and throwing rocks into the lake.  Kids are so easily entertained.  Oh, and I found a good picture of the snake pit from Prague.  Enjoy, and I will talk to you when I get back.

Things That Happened in March

As usual when I start writing these things, I am strapped for time.  Fortunately I don't think I have much to put here today.  I just feel kind of bad that I haven't written in a while.  My birthday weekend was a success.  Matt, Lisa, Tiffany, and I had a great time touring the wine country and enjoying our time together.  There has already been some discussion about doing this again.  Over the course of the weekend, we visited a handful of wineries, as well as the Garrison Brothers bourbon distellery.  That place was amazing.  Travel tip: if you want to drink extra boubon, take this tour with people that don't drink bourbon.  As we were leaving that place, we ran into a guy that I went to high school with.  He also worked at HEB back in the day, so he recognized Tiffany and Matt as well.  It was fun to see him, and we all had a good laugh about it.  It's weird to run into people you haven't seen in 15 years.  Matt posted a slideshow of the pictures from this trip on my Facebook page if you haven't seen them.

I have spent much of the last couple of weeks doing research for our upcoming trip to Paris.  I am starting to get pretty excited, even though this wasn't at the top of my list for vacation spots.  I am excited about rocking out to Metallica with 80,000 European fans.  My guess is that we won't be the only Americans in the crowd.  This morning Ethan told me that Metallica was his favorite band.  I promise I am letting him make up his own mind about this.  A couple of weeks ago, we took him to the civic center to see Veggie Tales Live.  He seemed to enjoy that pretty well too, so he doesn't have perfect taste.  We also have tickets to see Elmo Makes Music in a couple of weeks.  I will try to endure that as well as I can.  To make up for that, we are going to see the Toadies next week.  Last weekend, I had to work, so Tiffany took Ethan to the zoo.  His favorite animal was the jaguar, or at least that is what he remembers the best.  I guess that's everything for now.  I told you I was in a hurry.  I have to stop writing so I can find some cute pictures to post.  Have a great weekend.

Life support

Today I realized that what used to be a blog that I wrote a couple of times a week has pretty much become a quarterly newsletter.  It isn't that I don't want to write it.  In fact, there are several times a day where something happens that might be blog-worthy.  I'm just not that good at the follow through.  There is so much social media out there and I just don't know how to use it properly.  Do I tweet it?  Do I Facebook it?  Maybe I should save it for Google Plus.  Maybe this blog is the old fashioned way, and maybe I'm too old for that other stuff anyway.  I did eat lunch today with a friend who is much less tech savvy than I am.  He won't be reading this.





















I am not going to attempt to catch you up on the last couple of months.  Basically, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and a couple of lesser holidays have passed us by.  January was a rough month, and I am glad it is over.  We are gearing up the next major holiday, which of course is my birthday.  You don't have to buy me anything nice.  Large boxes of cash left on my doorstep will be perfectly fine.  My birthday plan this year is as follows:  cabin rented outside of Fredricksburg, wine, food, good conversation with my best friend, his wife, and no kids.  I do love my child, but sometimes I love him from a distance.  Here is a cute little story that my wife will love, and my mother will probably roll her eyes at.  I was driving Ethan to daycare this morning.  The radio is on, and when the song changes, he asks me, "Is this Metallica, Dad?"  He was right.  It was Metallica.  Not only is my boy a genius, but he has excellent musical taste.  I can't wait until he is old enough to go to shows with us.  That said, his mother and I have plans to see a couple of shows without him this summer.  Metallica is playing in Paris in May.  We were already talking about going to France anyway, and so we just built a trip around that.  It seems perfectly logical to me.  In June, Metallica is headlining their own music festival in Atlantic City.  We had kind of a Sophie's Choice situation between these shows and the one in France.  In the end, we made the responsible decision to go to both.  For you statistics people, I think this puts me over 20 Metallica shows.  Last month I saw Tool for the 15th time.  It was amazing as always.  The Toadies are coming back to Abilene in April, which is always a good time.  All in all, 2012 started off pretty crappy, but I think it is looking up.  Hopefully it will not be another three months until the next blog.  If it is, just know that I am having a good time, and I will tell you about it when I can.

The one before the holidays

This is the third time I have sat down to write this blog.  I am not a professional writer, and I am easily distracted by other things.  Also, for the last week or so I have been sick.  So I haven't had time to write, but I have been reading quite a bit.  In anticipation of the David Fincher film, I finished reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  It was a decent book, and I am about halfway through the second one.  I know a lot of people read these books a few years back, but the last couple of years have been super busy for me, and I am just now getting caught up on a few things.  We finally got around to watching the last Harry Potter film this past weekend.  Nothing super exciting is going on around here, but I will catch you up on what has happened since the last blog.  Give me a minute to go back and read it.  Maybe whistle the theme to Jeopardy or something.  OK, you can keep reading now.

We took our annual trip to the DRI pumpkin patch to take some pictures and pick up a couple of pumpkins.  Since we were there only a couple of days before Halloween, there wasn't much to choose from.  Ethan was pretty happy with the choices he made though.  As for the holiday itself, we did make a couple of stops to trick or treat.  I don't think Ethan really understood what was going on, but he was sure glad to have the candy when it was all over.  Even with the limited stops, we had enough candy for three people which worked out nicely.  I didn't mention that Ethan was dressed as Larry the Cucumber from Veggietales.  Although I have come to despise this show, Ethan cannot get enough of it.  Thank you Netflix streaming for allowing my child to have an endless source of cartoons at his disposal.  I guess there are worse things he could be watching.  I'm talking to you Spongebob.  He actually doesn't watch that much, but I will admit that using a smart phone on a two year old often has the same effect as Kirk setting his phaser to stun.  Go ahead.  Soak it all in.

Tiffany and I celebrated our 11th anniversary a couple of weeks ago.  A year ago on our anniversary, we were in the audience at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.  This year, we settled for dinner with my grandmother here in Abilene.  Our actual anniversary trip was a few days later.  We went to Dallas to see Stephen King speak.  As longtime fans of his books, we both thought this would be fun to do.  This was a fundraising event for the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.  The whole thing lasted a little over an hour, but in my opinion it was well worth it.  He discussed politics, conspiracy theories, and talked a little about his new book.  For those not in the loop, his new book is about a guy who goes back in time to stop the JFK assassination.  I will probably read it as soon as I am finished reading about Lisbeth Salander.

That pretty much brings us up to date.  Wait.  I just lied.  No, I said pretty much, so I guess I didn't lie.  Nevermind.  Last Tuesday night began the new season of musicals at the civic center.  The first one was Young Frankenstein.  Yes it is based on the Mel Brooks film, and yes it was just as funny.  In fact, I would say that it was probably one of the best plays we have ever seen here in Abilene.  In discussing this play with a few people, I discovered that there are actually people who haven't seen the movie.  I realize Mel Brooks may be an acquired taste to some, but this is definitely among the funniest films ever made.  Of course, I've always been a little strange.

Eternal Flame

It's funny how you can go several weeks with very little excitement, and then all of the sudden you have a million things going on.  Since we returned from the cruise, I feel like we have been going non-stop.  Now that our washing machine is fixed, I also feel like we are doing laundry non-stop.

The 14th of October was Granny's birthday.  The entire family spent the weekend at the MCM Elegante together.  For those of you not familiar with my mom's family, here are the basics.  My mom is one of four girls.  I am one of ten grandkids.  Ethan is one of seventeen great grandchildren.  By the time you add spouses into the mix, it brings our total to well over forty people.  I know that's not the largest family in the world, but with seventeen kids running around it was plenty.  Granny bought all of the little ones matching Halloween pajamas with their names on them.  Ethan has already worn his a couple of times since then.  Granny also made each of the ten grandchildren a quilt.  These are serious birthday favors.  It seems that Granny did most of the gift giving on her birthday, but we did get her something in return.  The grandkids pitched in to buy Granny her own iPad--just what every hip 84 year old needs.  You can laugh now, but she seemed to be enjoying it quite a bit before we ever left the hotel.  She has already figured out how to read her email, check Facebook, and play Words With Friends.  Do you really need it to do anything else?  It was a fun weekend all around, and it is always good to see the family.  I regret that I actually got very few pictures of the whole thing.  Hopefully someone got some good ones.  We did have a professional take pictures of the group, as well as some of the individual families.  I will post those if and when I am able to get my hands on them.

This past weekend, we decided to make a quick trip to the State Fair.  If I were to write a book about things you shouldn't do with a two year old who hasn't had a nap, this would probably fill a whole chapter.  I'm not going to say I didn't have fun, but it sure seemed like a lot more work than usual.  Fortunately, the weather was agreeable.  It took us about fifteen minutes to find something fried to eat.  We started with Fried Buffalo Chicken in a Flapjack and some Deep Fried Queso.  Both of these things were excellent, and probably our favorites from the trip.  I attempted to try fried Frito Pie, only to be told that they were out.  Really?  Buy some more Fritos.  We aren't in the middle of nowhere.  Let me run across the street and just get some for you.  Then you can fry them.  Everyone's happy.  I'm just sayin'.  That seems like a poor way to run your junk food stand.  Over the course of the afternoon, we also ate fried biscuits and gravy, fried pepperoni pizza, fried pineapple upside down cake, and fried Autumn pumpkin pie.  I didn't care for the pizza, but everything else was pretty good.  We also got a barbecue wrap with some fries, and I had a bratwurst for a late night snack.  They seriously ought to hand out Nexium and Lipitor when you walk through the gate.

We did manage to do a few things that didn't involve food.  We endured the Amazing Dobermans, which weren't that amazing.  We wandered through all of the craft booths with people selling all kinds of things that so far I have managed to live without.  We did get Ethan a wooden puzzle of his name.  We walked through the Auto Show, which is always one of my favorite parts.  Once it was dark, we watched the parade.  Ethan really enjoyed it, and probably would have even more had some jackass with a camera not come and stood right in front of him.  Dude, you are too old for parades.  Move over and let the little kids have their fun.  We capped off the evening with a concert on the main stage by The Bangles.  Susanna Hoffs is 52 years old, but she still looks and sounds as good as she did when I was 9.  They played all of the songs that everyone knows, as well as a few that nobody seemed to know.  I thought they were pretty good, and if Ethan hadn't slept through most of it, he would have liked it as well.  He was awake for the encore of Walk Like an Egyptian.  I made the mistake of calling this his first concert.  Tiffany corrected me and said that when he was just a few weeks old we saw local band The Penny Jar.  Now that I think about it, he has seen them at least twice.  My bad.

Bonus Trivia:  The Bangles' hit Manic Monday was actually written by Prince under the pseudonym Christopher.

Serenade

A couple of weeks ago, I posted our vacation pictures on Facebook.  My Aunt Vicki was quick to point out that I didn't include a picture of my feet.  She couldn't believe that I didn't take one, and she was right.  I took one.  I don't know why I have all of these feet pictures, but for some reason I find them interesting.  I was saving this particular picture for this blog, which I intended to post about a day or two after the pictures.  Now that some time has passed, I will probably have to give you the short version.  It goes like this.

The last week of September, we took a cruise.  Specifically, we took a Southern Carribean cruise on the Serenade of the Seas.  In addition to myself, Tiffany, and Ethan, were my sister, her husband, and their baby, and my grandmother and her best friend Patsy.  We all flew to San Juan, Puerto Rico and spent the night before getting on the big ship the next day.  I would have liked to have spent a little more time there, but I guess we will have to do that another time.  Fun fact:  We took a cruise in 2008 that was supposed to stop in San Juan, but we didn't make that particular port of call due to a hurricane.  Including my planned trip to New Orleans in 2005, that brings the total number of times hurricanes have screwed up my vacation to two.  This was our fourth time on a cruise ship, and also the fourth time with Royal Carribean.  It was the first time that we had to take a two year old with us.  This presents a whole new set of experiences.  The ship itself was gorgeous.  It wasn't the biggest ship we have been on, nor was it the smallest.  They layout was great, and getting around the ship required minimal effort.  The staff was extremely tolerant of the children.  While many people thought Ethan was cute, his cousin Murray practically had a fan club.  I thought eating in the dining room was going to be a disaster, but overall Ethan did extremely well.  He got to test out his tastebuds on things like lobster, prime rib, and leg of lamb.  Kids menus are for girls.  He ate extremely well the entire trip.  If memory serves, the itinerary was something like this: sea day, Barbados, St. Lucia, Antigua, St. Maarten, St. Croix USVI.  As we were somewhat limited on what we could do with the kids, we spent a lot of time at the beach.  Although I don't generally consider myself a beach person, we did have a pretty good time.  Ethan loved being in the water.  We took the kids to the zoo while we were in St. Maarten.  I think they used the term zoo a little freely.  It was a few chain link fences with some Carribean wildlife.  It was kind of fun though, and it was a nice break from the beach.  We also got to eat some pretty interesting island food in a few places, including something called fish wings.  I just did a quick google search on fish wings and came up with nothing, but I swear I didn't make it up.  They were delicious.  I know it has something to do with a fish that is native to that island.  I also bought a bottle of banana ketchup, which I intend to try soon.  I'll let you know.  At the end of the week, we were all exhausted.  It was a fun time, but it is always good to be home for a few days.  Tiffany was home for about 12 hours before she had to get up and get ready for work again.  I took two extra days off just for good measure.  I will also note that we had a ton of laundry after this trip, and after two loads the washing machine stopped working.  We had to order a new pump, so we lived around our piles of laundry for about a week.  We are now having trouble with the ice maker, and the fan in the wine fridge.  Apparently appliances are only made to last three and a half years.  Thanks to the washing machine incident, I now know a good appliance guy.  This past weekend was Granny's birthday.  I will discuss that in a future blog (probably).

Back to School

If these photos look similar to those on the last blog, it's because they were taken at the exact same place, for the exact same reason, but on a different day.  Apparently when you have a child, you are expected to attend the birthday parties of every kid whose parents might have had some contact with you at some point in your life.  I have also learned that there are very few places to have a birthday party for a toddler in this town.  I actually feel a little cheap that we just had Ethan's party at the house.  All things considered, I can never get enough pizza and cake.  Ethan was more interested in the jumping castle and playing basketball than the food.  Those are Sesame Street stickers on his face and legs.  I don't know why they are there.

I started writing this a couple of days ago.  I got sidetracked, and now I have completely forgotten what I was going to write about.  It looks like I covered the birthday party already.  Based on the title, I may have had some commentary on going back to school.  I don't know if there was something specific there, or what.  I guess I will just wing it.  Here's what I can tell you about this time of year.  My drive to work in the morning becomes exponentially longer.  I guess that everyone that lives between my house and the school is either a teacher or driving their kid to school.  None of these cars are on the road in the summer.  There are a few kids hanging out on the corner in the morning waiting for the bus.  I guess their parents have jobs.  Another thing I had to hear about all week is how people are sad that their kids are grown up and going to school.  I personally cannot wait for my kid to go to school.  I will feel like I am getting a fat raise.  Daycare pricing is ridiculous.  Actually, for the number of hours they watch my child every week, it's a bargain.  School is essentially free, except for the taxes which I am already paying.  I have been told by everyone I know that I will be sad when my kid starts school, but I just don't see it.  Since he has gone to daycare since he was about four months old, I don't really see much difference.  We actually refer to the daycare as school anyway.  Ask me about all of this again in three years and I will let you know how I feel then.  As for now, school is just another step toward getting him out of my house.  And yes, I do love my child.

I know these pictures are almost the same.  I liked them because it actually looks like he is playing something resembling real basketball.  I have purposefully left out the other 100 pictures I took.  There is one or two more on Facebook for those so inclined.