We’re Like Toddlers, Really

You know how toddlers need just the right amount of food, sleep, activity and entertainment or they come completely off the rails? Annie and I are just like that. It’s kind of sad, really. If we get off our schedule, skip a meal, drink heavily, or whatever, we totally get all grouchy and irritable. We once overheard Rose ask Dave if he needed to eat something after he snapped at her. At the time I laughed. Now it sounds like a perfectly reasonable question.

We had a busy weekend. I woke up at 8am on Saturday, and after goofing off with a video game for awhile, I got together with Eric and Jill to attend a Sushi class at the New Seasons store by our house. The “class” was a sample line with some photocopied sushi recipies. Three minutes and three veggie rolls later, I was pretty disappointed, but we made up for it by going to SushiLand by Lloyd Center, one of those conveyor-belt places, which was pretty good, and neatly addressed my sushi craving.

Afterwards, I went out for my first driving lesson. Having never gotten my license when I was a teenager, I found that with each passing year my motivation to do so lessened while my embarrassment grew. Finally, when Annie got pregnant, I was faced with the prospect of my wife having ride the bus to the midwife, and faced up to the fact that I needed to get off my ass and get my license. (Realistically, this would never have happened, as my parents would move mountains for Annie, but I would never have lived it down.) The easiest solution seemed to be signing up for a behind-the-wheel driver’s ed. course, which was going to cost about $500. Because of the cost, it’s been put off for awhile, but that turns out to be for the best, since Eric recently started teaching at a driver’s ed. school, and has offered to give me lessons for free.

Sean got in on the deal too, and after getting his permit first thing Saturday morning, Eric took the two of us to a big empty parking lot by Benson High School and had us drive in circles for about two hours. It’s still a bit humiliating, but doing it with my brother and a friend is definitely easier than a total stranger. We’re going to do this each weekend for the next several weeks, so with any luck, I’ll be ready to get my license in a couple of months!

Sunday, I woke up at 8am again (I guess my body’s already adapted to my work schedule), and around 10am, Dad showed up to help us build a desk for Annie in the garage. She’s going to be turning the garage into her craft studio, and she needed a big work surface. So we took this old laminate desktop and built a frame for it, attached to the bare studs. It’s not pretty, but it only took about an hour, and it’s very sturdy. I’ll try to post some photos tonight. Here’s a photo!

After that, we headed over to my parents’ house to help Dad move all his books from the basement into the twins’ old bedroom. He built some new shelves, but even with 6 floor-to-ceiling shelves absolutely packed full of paperbacks, there was still a pile on the floor of another bookshelf’s worth of books. We had originally entertained thoughts of alphabetizing his collection, but after getting a better grasp of the size of the collection, we gave up on that.

On a side note, while doing this, Dad got to talking about some old records in the basement, and started talking about an old blues record he had, which was called (I’m not making this up) “This is Howlin’ Wolf’s new Album. He doesn’t like it. He didn’t like his electric guitar at first either.” The record is long since out of print, and has never been reissued, but while looking for it on Amazon, I found a review of a Howlin’ Wolf box set which said that “If blues was liquor, Howlin’ Wolf would be straight whiskey.”

After getting home, I spent a few hours wiring up an old stereo in the garage with enough extra speaker wire to allow the speakers to be placed just outside the garage door to give us outside music when we have backyard parties (which we’re hoping to start doing soon). After I finished, Sean told me the internet wasn’t working (which had been happening off and on for awhile).

Long story short, I got it working again, but only after spending nearly three hours on tech support (one hour with Comcast, and two hours with Netgear).

After that, I was a bit tense, and realized that I hadn’t eaten anything in about nine hours, so I made some pasta. Unfortunately, before I could eat it, I got into a huge fight with Annie. We were both in weird moods for various reasons, and this fight got a lot worse than it should have been, and I ended up eating a cold dinner because I was too stubborn to let something really minor slide. Things are fine now, but like I said - toddlers.

Edit: Added a link to a photo of the workbench Dad built.