matthearn.com

I hope everybody had an enjoyable long weekend. Mine could not possibly have been less restful, and for once my children aren’t entirely to blame. Only, you know, mostly.

The elder 66% of my children have birthdays this month, so Sunday we had a large birthday party for them. I’ll get to more on that later, but wanted to establish that fact to explain why I took Friday off from work: preparation.

The day actually started with an early morning workout, during which I established why perhaps it’s time to pick a new workout routine: I wrenched my upper-middle back doing squats, and it’s still a little jacked up. It’s a spot that I routinely injured in college, but hadn’t bothered me in a while. I think the issue was the dieting; even on my kickass Lean Gains protocol, was keeping me from recovering properly, and squatting heavy twice a week (with deadlifts on the other training day) isn’t going to work until I start eating surplus again. Last Monday’s workout felt pretty bad, and Friday’s was just a crapsaster. I’m taking this week off, and I’ll get back to it next week, with a new routine that only has me squatting once a week.

After that, I got to go to Charles’s school for “Donuts for Dads,” which was awfully cute. Everybody’s dad got a donut and some juice, and then Charles read me a story and showed me some of his schoolwork, and then the class sang a song about the importance of composting. (Side note: I don’t know how recently you may have graduated kindergarten, but when I was there we spent a fair amount of time working on letters and phonics with an eye towards learning to read in 1st grade. All the kids in Charles’s class can just flat-out read. I would have assumed it’s because it’s a “gifted” class, but parents of kids in other classes say their kids read pretty well too. I guess we’re playing catch-up with Japan, where all the kids can speak 3 languages by age 2.)

Once “Donuts” was done, I got to go home and spend pretty much the rest of the day in the yard: mowing, raking, cleaning, weed-whacking, doing everything I could to make the property somewhat safe and pleasant for small children. Of course, this meant that I awoke Saturday morning with my injured back tighter than Rick Santorum’s anus. I could barely walk. This did not, of course, keep us from loading everybody into the car and heading out to Lancaster for my cousin Carolyn’s wedding, at which my children utterly destroyed the dance floor.

Weddings, I have to say, are surprisingly fun with children around. Sure, you have to keep them from sticking their hands into the wedding cake, but once the dancing starts they can be pretty much left to their own devices.

Sunday was the big party day. The theme was “Knights and Princesses,” so we rented a big castle moon bounce, decorated with medieval-y tapestries and a replica suit of armor provided by Sarah’s mom, and the kids made posterboard princess hats and knightly shields. We managed to get through the whole day without anyone being injured, even after I made the beer-induced decision to get into the bounce and do backflips. (You may not believe it, but my back did not approve, and reminded me of my folly the next morning.)

On Memorial Day, we celebrated by “sleeping in;” everyone in the house was up by 7am, except for Josephine, who slept solidly until almost 10:30. After doing some clean-up, we piled back into the car to go to my sister’s housewarming, where we ate faaaaaaaaar too much, as one is wont to do on Memorial Day.

Additional bullet points:

• Our friend Mary devised some kind of butterscotch-flavored Rice Krispy Treats, which made an appearance at the party on Sunday, and which are now required fare for all future parties. I think she had to email the recipe to like 75 people.


• If you like moon bounces, get one that inexplicably has a 7-foot high soft basketball hoop on the outside. You’d think it would result in a really stellar slam dunk contest, but what ended up being FAR more fun was 3 adult men taking turns trying to fling a soccer ball through it from 50-60 feet away while drinking a lot. Only one of us managed to do it (get the ball through the hoop, that is, not the drinking; we were all very successful at that), although I did at least hit the rim once.

Had us a nice little vacation last week. Went down to Ocean View with the folks, ate like pigs, swam in the indoor pool in the clubhouse, chased the kids around the yard, drank entirely too much. After 3 days of this my body simply rebelled. I felt like six asses all last week. (Punctuation is important: “I felt, like, six asses all last week” would be a different matter possibly resulting in divorce proceedings, criminal charges, and PETA protests.)

Last Saturday was spent mostly at Little League, because we had the opening ceremonies, picture-taking, and the opening game, all spaced out perfectly to maximize our inconvenience. Opening ceremonies were from 8:30-9:30am, and then pictures didn’t start until 12:30, and of course the game itself was at 3pm, meaning we basically had time to go home and then drive back. I managed to at least get a little yard work done after the game, which I had to frantically finish on Sunday before friends came over, at which point my diet went out the window and I drank beer and ate barbecued flesh like I was being placed in stasis for a trip to Mars.</NERD>

But I need your help with a little bit of dream analysis, because I’m worried that I’ve edged a little closer to the deep end and treading the dark waters of sanity is becoming somewhat harrowing. (Apparently I’ve turned into H.P. Lovecraft again.)

I dreamt the other night that I had gone to see organist Peter Richard Conte perform on some kind of theatre organ, but which turned out to be very oddly operated in that he spent most of his time running around banging on drums and actually blowing on pipes with his mouth to make the sounds. Suddenly, I found myself actually in the pipe chamber with him, as he conducted some kind of interview of me, broadcast to the audience outside, in which I did some of celebrity impressions and a host of funny voices.

Apparently the audience loved this, because as I left the interview the crowd outside went nuts. I then found myself at some kind of outdoor high school bonfire being congratulated by everyone I met, assured that I would soon find great success in television, and to escape the throng I ran off towards some large field with a massive climbing net or web, a football field wide and hundreds of feet high.

I’d like to say I then dreamt Mr. Conte appeared as a big spider in the web and ate my feet, but that would not be true as actually I simply woke up.

Important note: I had gone to bed stone sober. What, in the name of all that is holy, does all of this mean? Am I, in the words of noted psychologist Kanye West, “cray?”

I now know far more than I really wanted to about my oil boiler. (Who am I kidding? That thing is fricking PIMP. It’s apparently the best boiler that money can buy, and it’s built like a brit shickhouse.)

After running it out of oil the other day and suffering through a night where the temperature in the house hovered at 56 degrees Fahrenheit, Burns and McBride came out this morning to fill it, but were flummoxed by the fact that there seemed to be two delivery connections. I pointed out that we have two tanks, and they pointed out that there’s only one vent, so it’s possible that only one of the connections works, and the other is vestigeal. They said they’d send out a Delivery Manager to take a look.

I met him at the house, and he turned out to be a nice gentleman, who confirmed that there are two delivery connections, one for each tank. He only filled one tank, because we discovered that the air vent seems to be partially clogged (something else I’ll have to get fixed), and he was afraid of building up too much pressure in the tanks. He said that the boiler might have difficulty starting up, because of air in the line, but showed me how to bleed that, and went on his merry way.

And of course I couldn’t get the damn boiler to fire. It’s heavily computerized, and has logic to prevent it from running if it realizes it’s only spraying air. So it’ll try for a bit, and if it doesn’t get any fuel, it turns off, and starts flashing a little green LED. There’s a button on the front to reset it and try again, so I figured I’d bleed out the air, then hit reset, and everything would be gravy.

I loosened the bleeder screw, which I expected to work like the one you find on automobile brake calipers; you have somebody press on the brake, you loosen the screw, and air and fluid comes pouring out. In this case, the oil only dripped, which I thought was strange. Anyway, I hit the reset button again, but nothing happened; the little green light kept flashing, and the motor on the front didn’t turn on. I tried switching off the power to the system, tried messing with the thermostat, but got nowhere. After 15 minutes of frantic googling, I discovered this handy online manual, which explained that to prevent fuel oil from filling up the burner, you can only reset the system three times before it goes into “restricted mode.” Getting it out of restricted mode just involves holding the button down for a long time. No problem. I figured if I could just get the motor to kick off a few times, it would eventually pump all the air out, and start getting good oil.

After resetting the system 9 times, I started to rethink my strategy.

I realized that the reason that brake fluid comes pouring out of the caliper when I bleed the brakes is that someone is pushing on the brake pedal, producing pressure in the system. The only pressure in the system was being provided by gravity, and it apparently wasn’t enough. It occurred to me: what if I reset the system while the bleeder valve is open? Every time I reset the system, it ran a motor that I assume must be some kind of fuel pump. Would this pump the air out? I loosened the bleed screw a turn, and hit the button.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOSH

Oil/Air foam came spraying out of the valve. This was a positive development. The motor eventually turned back off without firing the burner, but I figured it just needed another go. That didn’t work, but one more round of bleeding the air and one more reset led to:

WHOOOSHclickclickclickWHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH

Amusingly, no matter how new it is, any oil-fired boiler is instantly “Old Girl.” The instant the boiler fired, I yelled “That’s it, Old Girl! Hell yes!” A few moments later, when “she” coughed and sputtered when another little air bubble hit the burner, I coaxed “No, no, Old Girl, stay with me STAY WITH ME!”

In the end: she was busily heating up the water for the radiators, and I smell like a damn refinery. I had to return to work afterwards; I’m surprised my coworkers didn’t insist on burning my clothes and hosing me off outside.

How do you stop a Polish army on horseback? Turn off the carousel.

Since we’re moving in a few days, and things have been crazy hectic around the house, we’ve been remiss in properly entertaining our children. We need every spare moment to pack, clean, and/or paint something, so more often than not we plop Charles in front of the TV with a sippy cup of milk. It’s “television as babysitter,” something I detest. We try and find time to play and read, but it’s become very secondary. So on Monday, we determined that dangit, we’ll do something fun.

The Wilmington Polish Festival has been going on for over fifty years. It benefits St. Hedwig’s Parish, a local Catholic church of some note; I’d enjoy sharing some of its history with you, but unfortunately the parish website is silent on the subject. I can report the following: the church has been there for the entirety of my existence, and I’ve never been inside it. Since they’ve had the festival for 52 years, I assume the church is at least that old.

How can you tell a Polish neighborhood? By the toilet paper hung out to dry.

We had gone last year with Charles, and had a pretty good time; he rode a few rides, we ate some fair food. I would have liked to have gotten actual Polish grub, but the line into the food tent was like a Soviet bakery. This year we hoped would be better, by going on the first day of the festival, as soon as it opened (5 pm).

No such luck.

Sarah drove up from New Castle with the kids, and I headed down from the office. We met there around 5 by a ticket booth, which was closed. The line into the food tent already stretched a hundred feet, and it wasn’t clear if they had started serving anything yet; the lady at the information desk reported that things were a little crazy on the first day, the volunteers weren’t organized yet. They would start the rides as soon as things got in order.

Why couldn’t the Polack change a light bulb? All he had was a twenty-dollar bill.

My parents met up with us around 5:30, and the ticket booth still wasn’t open. We got in an “alternate” food line that according to the annoying tween girls in line “behind” us (by the time we got into the tent they had somehow butted in line in front of my wife, although to be fair, my wife is a wonderful person, but has no sense for how to stand in a line such that people realize you’re actually in the line and don’t get in front of you) was for “Polish seafood,” which was an unfamiliar cuisine to me. I have a well-known rule about beer: if there’s a beer on tap that I haven’t tried, I have to try it. The same rule applies to food: I gotta try everything once.

Once we got inside, we realized that each tent was serving the same thing. This was not well advertised, however, so one line was just 75 feet shorter. Fine by me. We also realized that “Polish” seafood is identical to American seafood: crabcakes, shrimp, and a breaded whitefish. We all got Kielbasa plates at astronomical prices and sat down to eat.

At the Greek festival, which we’ve been to for the last few years, lines aren’t a problem. There’s only one line, at the gyro tent, because that seems to be the only Greek food Americans like, although why they come to the Greek festival to stand in line for one when every deli in Wilmington produces a quality gyro I don’t understand. We always get stuffed grape leaves and souvlaki and my favorite, the lamb sandwich. (It’s like a cheesesteak, but with lamb, on pita. Succulent.) Most of these items are served at different stations, so you may have to make a couple stops, but you never stand in line for more than a few minutes. The Polish festival does food in the style of Communism: one central location, and a lot of waiting.

Did you hear about the Polish man that locked his keys in his car? He had to use a coat hanger to get his family out.

While we were finishing up miniscule pieces of Polish sausage, Charles ate two micrograms of chicken fingers and noticed the rides had been activated, so he was off. Sarah charged after him, and purchased a wristband that allowed him free access to whatever he wanted. My parents and I hung back with Josephine and the stroller so we could finish our beers, and my father, the kindest and gentlest man I know, shared with me a hilarious Polack joke that I will not recount here because it is in ridiculously bad taste.

We wandered off to find Charles and HW, holding Josephine in my arms because she was a little hungry, a lot tired, and a bit overstimulated by noise and lights. When we found them, Charles was having the time of his life, riding the carousel, a moonbounce, a train, some jeeps. There was a motorcycle ride, but it went up in the air and he panicked a little bit at that. Eventually, he discovered a large obstacle-course thing, featuring a ball pit and a small angled climbing wall, and went through that something like 4,000 times while the rest of us retrieved corn dogs.

I love a good corn dog. Let me tell you: these were not good corn dogs. They tasted like they’d been fried in vinegar. I suspect the milk in the batter had gone bad, and wondered if I’d spend the evening on the pot. I ate it, though. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that I waste food.

A bar customer asked the bartender if he wanted to hear a Polack joke. The bartender pointed to a large man at the end of the bar and said, “He’s Polish.” Then the bartender pointed to a burly policeman near the door and repeated, “He’s Polish.” The bartender finished, “Now think about whether you want to tell that joke, because I’m Polish, too.” The customer replied, “I guess I won’t tell that joke after all. I’d have to explain it three times.”

After a while, we were starting to flag, and Josephine was getting downright irritated at the lack of a breast in her mouth, so we skedaddled. Here’s the final report: go to the Polish Festival. It’s running through Friday, although rain may put a damper on the festivating. Be prepared to stand in line and pay too much for too little food, but then also be prepared to watch your kids tear around like maniacs on a bunch of rides at ridiculous prices. It’s a nice middle-ground between the Greek Festival, which doesn’t really offer much in the way of rides or games, and the Italian Festival, which now charges an entrance fee and therefore can suck it.

I tried to play like I’d post on vacation, but gave up in favor of heavy drinking. Now that I’m back, you can enjoy some pictures taken on my vacation.

Cats are messed up animals. Pete, for example, has developed a somewhat fatherly relationship with Josephine. Occasionally, when she’s being fed or resting in her bouncy seat, Pete will come by and gently lick her head, or rub against her.

She, of course, loves him. When he saunters by she can’t keep her eyes off him. It’s rather amusing. I have been told that cats tend to bond with humans of the opposite gender, but my anecdotal experience hasn’t borne that out. The cats at my parents house always prefer my father. (I guess he smells like a boss cat. Who knows.) At our house, Pete usually likes to sleep with me (until I start tossing and turning), and Poly’s always been Mommy’s girl. (JD and The Cheat didn’t seem to care.)

The best part about Fatherly Pete is that if Josephine is upstairs, and is crying, and we don’t go up to get her right away, Pete will sit at the bottom of the steps and stare at us, as if to say, “What the hell! She’s crying! You gonna do something about it? Jerks.”

Poly, of course, has responded to the appearance of another child by being annoyingly ingratiating. There’s been a lot of dragging of slippers and little plush toys all over the house, and a lot of loud midnight meowing, as if to say “Hey! Look at me! I’m still here! Look, I brought you a present!” until finally we kick her out so she doesn’t wake the baby.

The Cheat is now an outdoor kitty, since I couldn’t teach her not to pee in the basement. Sometimes she seems to be handling it well, and sometimes I find her huddled behind the air conditioning unit with a wild look in her eyes. She does at least have a cute collar now.

Even as we speak, a supremely competent fellow named Joe is installing Verizon FiOS in our new house. (Well, new to us. The house was built before my great-great-grandparents were born.) My excitement is ExxxxTRREEEEEEM. I’ve wanted to try FiOS for a while, since a package including basic TV, internet, and phone is the same price as my comcast package. So I’m basically going to save the equivalent of a phone bill every month, which is not insignificant. I’ll also not have to deal with Comcast, who do not offer ESPN Classic as part of their digital package, an oversight for which I’ve been waiting years to punish them.

Moving continues apace; we’ve been hauling boxes and bags of anything that fits into our cars, and I donated my motorcycle to a buddy who hauled a bunch of furniture up for us. Hopefully we’ll actually be able to start actually sleeping here in a few weeks, after we rent a massive truck to haul our beds and other furniture.

Like I said: excitement. EXXXXxxxXtreeee3AM excitement.

I’ve had this funny spot in my vision for a couple days, and also I haven’t seen an optometrist in roughly ever, so I scheduled an appointment to have my peepers examined yesterday. I’m the only person of my age that I know who doesn’t wear any kind of corrective lenses, but recently things have been…not necessarily blurry, but definitely less well-focused than they were ten years ago. It was time.

I knew the basic drill from what my various friends and family reported, so I read off the letters and words and impressed the hell out of the technician by reading the bottom line of the close-up card without even squinting. Then Dr. Nguyen came in and we got down to Business. He put the big metal Mardi Gras mask in front of me and started twisting dials, checked for astigmatism, all that good stuff. Then he grabbed some eyedrops off the shelf, which I assumed were to dilate my eyes, but instead he said “These are a bit of anesthetic, they may sting a bit,” and quickly dropped them in before I could ask “what exactly are you about to do that might cause me pain?” which turned out to be an important unasked question.

Then he flipped off the lights and used another tool with a bright blue light to look at my eyes, and tossed off the following sentence like he was asking a waiter for an extra spoon: “I’m going to press this blue light against your eyeball. Open your eyes wide.”

You’re going to do what now?

Hey, uh, could you not, um…okay, bright blue light, getting closer, that’s close enough, OKAY PLEASE STOP PRESSING THE BLUE LIGHT AGAINST MY EYEBALL and he pulled it away.

“Now for the other one!”

Um…do we have to, uh…wait…wait…no…BRIGHT BLUE LIGHT AGAINST MY EYEBALL AGAIN TOTALLY NOT COOL and we were done.

“Ocular pressure’s totally normal.” Yeah, thanks for that.

Also thanks to everyone who had had this procedure done but didn’t warn me that SOLID OBJECTS WOULD BE PRESSING DIRECTLY AGAINST MY PUPILS. Awesome times.

After that, he did dilate my eyes, and to rule out a neurological reason for the funny spot in my vision, he had a technician do a peripheral vision test which I passed with flying colors. After my pupils were as big as pupils have any business getting, he shined a painfully bright light around my retinas for a while.

“Okay…first of all, your vision’s 20/15. You don’t need glasses.”

Just like Ted Williams!

“I do see a little scarring on your retina…” (Perhaps from the fact that you just shined an automobile headlight into my eyeball? Just throwing that out there.) “…but that’s normal.”

The funny spot is probably just the eyeball equivalent of a bruise, and will probably disappear soon. Yay! I don’t have eyeball cancer or syphilis or something!

“We’ll see you next year for another appointment!”

Great, ’cause it’ll take me that long to forget what it was like to have A BRIGHT BLUE LIGHT PRESSED AGAINST MY CORNEA.

Let’s just cover everything in rapid-fire list form, ’cause that’s how I be rollin’ fo sho. (I don’t understand many of the things I just typed.)

• I’m down to 249 as of this morning, despite drinking more than I should have over the weekend; I attribute the continued weight loss to constantly working on my house and not eating much. Saturday I was 750 calories under where I should be, which is roughly the equivalent of a cheeseburger. I compensated on Sunday by sharing half a Bobbie and drinking a lot of beer.


• How about that old Tom Watson yesterday? I wish he’d made that last putt on 18. Perhaps he should borrow my new putter; I am a horrible golfer, and yet the first time I used my new clubs I was dropping 8-12 footers like what. I was an unstoppable putting deity. I’m just saying, if Tom wants some pointers, he should totally call me.


• Progress on the purchase of a new house and sale of the old one continues apace; the home inspection on the “new” 150-year-old home revealed that, in the words of the inspector, the house is “totally rockin’.” We also discovered that the radiators, which we thought had been disabled in favor of a modern heat pump, are fully functional and heated by a boiler in the basement. My new house has the same heating system as Harlan Elementary School, and in no way is this a bad thing. Apparently the boiler is just about the best one money can buy, it’ll last for 40 years, and it was installed just three years ago. Acres and acres of win.

  
  On the current home front, we’re cleaning and scrubbing and patching holes and just generally making the place look less like the family home of 4 dirty people and more like Felix Ungar lives up ins.



• Why don’t people name their kids Felix anymore? If HW and I have a third kid I’m totally pushing for that.

I haven’t updated everyone on the status of my gut, so here’s the lowdown: still fat. Lost 19 pounds in a little over 5 weeks, though, so I guess I’m doing something right (not eating; occasionally running until I throw up).

I’d like to lose about 38 more. That’s gonna be tough; even in 2004, when I was about as skinny as I’ve been since high school, I bottomed out at around 225. Getting down to 215 would make me positively hott, methinks, but it’s gonna be really, really hard. Particularly since we have a long vacation scheduled in a month or two. I’m going to try and run or ride every day while I’m beachin’, but who knows. I highly doubt I’ll be paying much attention to diet.

Annoyingly, I ha’en’t had much time to exercise, because we’ve been so busy; my usual lunch hour spent running through the woods or lifting weights hasn’t happened in nearly two weeks. You might be wondering what’s kept us so busy, and to that I reply: we bought a house. It was all very quick, mostly because we’d been admiring the house from afar for literally years, it came back on the market, and we found out somebody else had put an offer in. We overbid those folks and got it. Home inspection is tomorrow, after which I should be able to post a few photos.

Now I just have to be able to, you know, pay for it. And sell our current dive, which is really what’s keeping us busy; we’re throwing stuff into storage and doing Xtreme Kleening 2009. There’s a little bit of touch-up painting to be done, plus the basement where Veronicat (aka The Cheat) has made her litterbox, i.e. the entire basement floor. That’s the biggie; we won’t even let our realtor come look at the house until we get the basement cleaned up. But keeping the basement clean requires keeping The Cheat from peeing and pooping on it, which unfortunately for her means she becomes an outside kitty. So tonight I’m getting her vaccinations up-to-date, we’ll be getting her groomed, finding her some kind of shelter, and then her ass is on the streets, son. (Well; the fenced in backyard. I’m not letting her roam free, for heaven’s sake.)

So that’s what be happ’nin’. More updates on the subject to come.