From Wit’s End

We went to the local Chinese buffet with Rachel’s sister Jennifer and visiting sister Emily and cousin Taylor. They wanted me to take picture of the messy post-ice-cream toddlers, so I did.

I was trying out the new facial recognition feature on iPhoto, and practically fell out of my chair giggling when I saw this:

Rachel’s folks sent these flowers. Check out the Bible verse for a laugh.

It’s called “the Bandit Song”:

Bandit climbed the tree
Bandit swam up the tree
Washed the buses
Washed the cars

(The rest is incomprehensible)

Taken at a friend’s house during a party. Jack made his way into the office/school room, and found this most aptly-named board game.

“Daddy got some new sandals, and he gave me the box to play in.”

… or “See my mess and fear me!”

[Uncle Nik is visiting for the week for Vacation Bible School at our church. He's staying at Aunt Jennifer's house.]

Aunt Jennifer, Uncle Nik and Future-Uncle Tim all came over for dinner this evening, and a good time was had by all.

Jack had a lot of firsts today. I think his Uncle Nik and company played a part in some of it, because Jack had more of an audience to perform for (and he just thinks that his Uncle Nik is the coolest guy around!):

• He took four steps on his own.
• Uncle Nik taught him how to jump! I wasn’t in the room at the time, but he watched Nik and then apparently his feet actually left the floor once or twice before he fell on his bum. The rest of the evening he spent being pretty proud of himself and “jumping” while on his knees and saying “Bah! Bah!” in time with his bouncing.
• Jack is off the bottle! For the past few weeks, we starting increasing his sippy cup usage so that the only bottle he had was the last one right before bed. TOnight, on a whim, I decided to give him his last milk in his sippy cup and he took it! And when he drank it all, he threw it across the room!

So all’s well with us, and Jack is coming right along. Especially when he has a big audience.

Pollen,

Sweat,

Pinestraw, &

Static

Usually when we come back from church and we’re not having anyone over, I’m in the habit of getting comfortable by taking off my button-down shirt and shoes and hanging around the house in my t-shirt and socks. This afternoon, when it was almost time to go to evening church, and I was carrying Jack. “Well, Jack, we’re going to have to go to the back of the house so that Daddy can put his shoes and shirt back on, because … heh… ‘No shirt, no shoes, no service!’ “

I woke up this morning, made a bottle, and sat on the couch in the den to feed Jack. While I was feeding him I looked at the VCR to check on the time, and I couldn’t believe that the time has passed by so fast. I’m used to time just whizzing by in the mornings, but this was ridiculous. I could have sworn that I got up a little bit after 6am, and the VCR told me that it was 7:20am. What? Then I figured it out: The VCR itself had no idea of the ministrations of our well-meaning all-knowing federal government concerning the start of Daylight Savings Time, and innocently was trying to be helpful by springing ahead one hour as it was programmed to do. Somehow I don’t think changing the time on certain machines four times a year instead of twice a year is saving any energy.

You know how I know? He can directly imitate his Mommy and Daddy when they say “Abba” (“Abba” translated means “Daddy”) He’s also uttering other consonants like “ga”, “da”, etc., but “Abba” is the first sound that he can imitate from us.

Jack does his impression of Al Zarqawi [If you don't believe me, just look at the thumbnail of this picture from a distance.]

…that my son is half human and half vulcan.

Rachel walked into the kitchen this afternoon to wash some baby paraphernelia, and I asked her pointedly, “Is there something that I can do for you?” This stopped her up short, because she ‘remembered’ that the doctor told her to stay off of her feet, and she replied, “Um… you could wash this for me?”
“But of course, dear,” I answered. “Now if you would, please go sit on your butt and boss me around!“
“But I don’t want to boss you around!”
“It’s doctor’s orders, dear, so GO SIT DOWN ON YOUR BUTT AND BOSS ME AROUND!”
“Okay, okay, okay…”

[If you found this exchange somewhat unusual, just remember the saying: There is nothing so strange as somebody else's marriage.]

By “Mom-ular” demand, here’s today’s picture.

Jack’s proud poppa is always taking pictures of his son (while Jack’s momma rolls her eyes), so watch for more!

I’m saying “yes” to sugar snap pea pods (from our garden) and “no” to chocolate cake (on the table in the break room at work) at lunch today. True, I did have a slice of cheesecake for breakfast this morning, but i put fresh sliced strawberries on top of it to make it more nutritious. So there.

Our “Spring Break” vacation starts today. We’ve been greatly looking forward to this, because we haven’t been out of town since Thanksgiving, which hadn’t ended so well, so we were hoping things might go a little better this time. But once again, providences converged to divert our plans…

We arrived at our gate at the airport about an hour early, like one is supposed to. After we had sat there a while, though, the gate attendant got on the PA and told us that the plane was going to be about half an hour late. This worried me slightly, because this meant that our layover in Saint Louis would be one and a half hours instead of two. After the plane finally arrived, the gate attendant got on the PA and said that the plane had maintenance issues, and that he would keep us informed of any new developments. (Strangely enough, through the window i saw that our plane was painted a non-descript white, and had no discriminating marks of the carrier, which was USAir.) Just about then, it started to rain. I did a quick estimation on my notepad, and realized that we would probably not make our connecting flight in St. Louis, which was with Frontier Air. I called my dad to get the 800 number for Frontier to see if there was anything that we could do about this. Around this time, the gate attendant announced that the flight was cancelled due to the aforementioned maintenance issues. The crowd gave a murmur of dismay and went to the special services desk a ways down the terminal to recover what they could of their travel plans.

Rachel went to find a power outlet to charge her cell phone, and i waited in the customer service line and called Frontier to determine our connection options. Sadly, Frontier had no other flights from St. Louis that day, so we were going to have to come up with an alternative to our original plans, which was to fly to San Francisco to visit Brother Tom for a few days. The Frontier flight did layover in Denver, so I determined to try and get a flight there if we couldn’t get to STL.

Someone behind the service desk asked if there was anyone in the line trying to get to St. Louis, and most of the people in the really long line raised their hands. The desk agent told us to go back to our gate because they were going to try to get us a new plane. I followed the annoyed herd back to the gate, but I realized that most of these people may be able to get to St. Louis in time for the NCAA tournament game that evening (You don’t know the meaning of “March Madness” until you’re in an airport with lots of people all trying to get to the same city on such short notice), but Rachel and I still were not going to be able to connect with our other flight and pass through to San Fran, so I went back to the service desk, also realizing that i no longer knew where Rachel was, because i didn’t see where she went while i was standing in line the first time. Her phone went straight to voicemail, so I just stood in line waiting to see what would happen next.

I got to the front of the line and explained the situation and asked the lady behind the counter what was possible. Apparently the way i had arranged things was to our disadvantage in this case, because USAir was only contracted to get us to St. Louis, and was not willing to get us to Denver. (This was not the last of the little rules i was to come up against in trying to salvage this vacation of ours.) Not knowing what else to do, i rescheduled the flight to St. Louis for Tuesday, which was to be the day we were going to return to St. Louis from San Fran anyway. This way, whatever we did with ourselves in the intervening time, we would still be able to keep our reservation with Bluegreen in Branson, Missouri for the rest of the week. (That’s right, folks, Bluegreen is tangled up in this, too!)

About this time, Rachel showed up again, so I told her what I did. She agreed it was probably the best we could do under the circumstances, and we went to find a place to sit down and assess the situation and charge my phone, which was also about to fall asleep. I called Frontier Airlines to cancel our flight, and the nice lady on the other end told me that she couldn’t refund our money because the tickets were non-refundable, but that we would each have a non-transferable credit for the cost of our tickets, less a $100 re-booking fee for each of us when we used these credits. We had to rebook by December 11th, 2005, and we could book our tickets up to 11 months ahead of time. I got off the phone and told Rachel all this, after which we both proceeded to denunciate all involved: USAir, Frontier Airlines, and Bluegreen for whose sampler points’ sake we had done all this in the first place.

We finished our venting, and then I realized that we hadn’t yet retrieved our checked baggage from the ill-fated flight to Missouri yet. We split up: Rachel went to the gate to find our bags and i went to the service desk again to try and make lemonade out of these lemons by extending our time in Missouri. I realized that I was going to have to arrange any new flight time and accommodations in Missouri pretty much simultaneously because i didn’t know what airplane seats or rooms in Branson were available until I asked the respective service agents. So while I was in the USAir service desk line, I called the Bluegreen customer service number. I told the Bluegreen agent what i wanted to do, and he put me on hold to see if he could do it. Somewhere along the line, i realized that our reservations were to check out on Friday morning, but our flight back to Charlotte wasn’t until Saturday, so i was going to have to see if we could extend that back end of our reservation as well as the front end. (Somehow, the person who took the original reservation all the way back in January misunderstood me when I asked for “Tuesday through Friday”. Strike two, Bluegreen.)

When I got to the front of the USAir service line, i was still on hold with the Bluegreen service agent. The USAir lady just shifted me over to the side and took care of other people waiting until i was ready. To make a long story short, between these two agents of the market, this is what i found out:

• Bluegreen would waive the three-night minimum this once and could add two nights in a smaller unit on Sunday and Monday, and then we could finish out our time in the unit that we originally reserved.
• No, USAir didn’t have any available seats to St. Louis on Sunday, but they did have seats on Monday.
• No, Bluegreen couldn’t tack on just Monday night at the beginning, they were stretching it already adding two nights instead of three.

So Tuesday night was going to have to be it for the beginning. What about the end of this?

• No, Bluegreen couldn’t tack on Saturday night at the end, because it would be adding just one night, and besides our unit had already been reserved on Saturday night by someone else.
• No, USAir couldn’t move our Saturday return flight back to Friday, because that leg of the flight wasn’t the one that had been affected by the plane maintenance issues (Editor’s Note: YET).

(Remember what i said about annoying little rules?)

So we weren’t going to make it to San Francisco because a plane broke down, and we were going to have to find accommodations elsewhere on Friday night, somewhere between Branson and St. Louis, because a telephone agent and I misunderstood each other all the way back in January. It’s a crazy world.

While i had been on the phone, Rachel kept trying to call in to tell me where she was, but for some reason, my call-waiting would beep once, and then disconnect her. This had happened a couple of times. So after all this rigmarole, I called her back and agreed to meet her in Baggage claim. On the way there, I stopped at an ATM and got $20 cash on a whim. I found her sitting in the baggage claim looking somewhat despondent and threw myself into the seat next to her. We just sat there taking time to recover, wondering what to do next. I called Tom to tell him that we wouldn’t be making it out to San Fran, and while i was talking to him, my cell phone went dead. Rachel and i both burst out laughing.

We walked out the the parking lot shuttle stop. Rachel told me that she didn’t really want to go home, because hanging around at home wasn’t really a vacation, because there was always something that needed to be done, and we hadn’t been out of town for so long before that, anyway. A light bulb appeared over my head, and i said, “Why don’t we go to the farm?” Her face lit up just like I hoped it would, and she called home as we got on the shuttle bus to confirm our last minute “reservations” at the McCune Homestead. While we drove north to Virginia, we discussed how we might be able to use our credit with Frontier Airlines, which is mainly a western concern and doesn’t come out as far as South Carolina. The next day, i put the $20 bill in the offering plate at church to acknowledge the out-working of God’s Providence in the events of the weekend, and to thank him for caring about each and every one of our steps on this earth.

Mum found this place while my folks were looking for a condo in the Washington DC area. Weird, man.

Last night and tonight Rachel’s sister Jennifer, her housemate Susan and her housemate’s dog Jessie are staying over due to hardwood floor refinishing going on at her housemate’s house.  I am currently the only male in the house out of seven living beings (one man, three women and three dogs).  Some notes on the experience:

As we were getting ready for bed in our room last night, Rachel listened to all the activity going on outside and commented that it was like living in a girl’s dorm.  This gave me a small but not unpleasant artificial feeling that I was getting away with something…

When we woke up this morning Rachel told me that she had an unpleasant dream last night that she was only one of my many concubines.  The irreverent part of my mind recalled our hospitality situation of these two days, and i laughed and told her, “Don’t worry, you’ll always be my favorite concubine!”  She only partially appreciated that…

Everybody had a bad day today.  Rachel had her annual performance review at work today, harrowing under any circumstances; Susan’s loaner car broke down downtown (her actual car having broken down in the middle of a cross-country July4th vacation), my day at work was a little empty and boring, and Jennifer, being empathetic, was having a bad day because everyone else was having a bad day.

For my wife’s sake primarily, I was on my best behavior.  I made dinner, did the dishes, delivered the tissue box, and tried to help everyone feel at home.  At one moment, when everyone was at the diningroom table commiserating, I walked in with the glass snack-cube, saying: “It is my decree as head of the house that everyone who had a bad day today must eat at least one chocolate-covered nut.”  This was met with general approval and kudos for Rachel from our guests for training me so well.

We picked up the two side tables that Rachel remarkably found and matched from two different places in the multi-story furniture store that they visited last Saturday. After we moved them into place as shown in this picture, I told her, “Well, when you married me, you didn’t just get one night stand!”

The Basses and Tenors of the 1st Presbyterian Church Chancel Choir were rehearsing tonight for the world premiere of “The Martyrdom of Polycarp” by J.A.C. Redford, and our director was warning the basses about a particular note they were to sing, saying that the sopranos are singing a note that is just a half step different from that note at the same time, and the temptation would be to sing the same note and avoid the discord. “I called J.A.C., who lives out in California, about this and asked him if it was really necessary. Apparently he thought it was,” he explained with a chuckle.

It was here that I shot in: “So you made a long-dissonance phone call?” and was rewarded by chuckles and groans throughout the room.

My folks found this place while they were looking for a condo in the DC area. Weird, man.

Had a bit of a quiet spell at work today, and realized that it
might be fun to try and compose sentences completely made up of non-vulgar
four-letter words. Here are a few that i came up with: