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Tomorrow, the Wilmington & Western Railroad returns to Hockessin after nearly 4 years! I’ve been sort of on a train kick recently, and was surprised to go to the WWRR website and find out they’ve managed to completely repair all the trestles, bridges, and track that were simply wiped out by Tropical Storm Henry back in September of aught-three. Tomorrow, they celebrate the return of “service” out to Hockessin.

I remember the storm, and the destruction to the railway, pretty vividly; at the time, HW and I were living just off Greenbank Road, which is unsurprisingly only like 500 yards from the Greenbank Mills, from whence the trains leave on their meandering route out to the northwestern environs of New Castle County. Not more than a few days after the storm, I was driving around in the back roads nearby along Red Clay Creek and saw the damage; huge sections of track simply twisted and washed aside by the flood. All the wooden bridges were simply wiped out. Since the WWRR had basically just finished the repairs from the LAST damaging storm (Hurricane Floyd in 1999), I figured it was out of business for good, and was sad.

Which is how I almost got crushed under a steam locomotive.

Not more than a month or two after the storm, I was driving down Newport Gap Pike, and when I came up to the rail crossing, the lights were flashing and cars were stopped. I’m all like, “Um, morons, the flood DESTROYED the tracks. The place is out of business. The lights are just flickering ’cause of some mistake, or kids messing with them or something.” So I pulled around to the right intending to drive right through the intersection (which didn’t have those big arms to drop down and prevent such things).

As I did so, I casually looked off to my left and noticed that a large black object was moving in my direction. Now, usually when this happens, it’s my friend Courtney coming to do me harm of some kind (he occasionally gets revenge on me ’cause I may once have “accidentally” rubbed my genitals on him), and I know to get away as fast as I can. I wasn’t on the tracks yet, so I stood on the brakes, threw the truck into reverse, and backed up. I ended up sitting next to the person at the front of the line, who glared at me with great gusto.

What can I say? I’m an idiot.

Anyway, I wish the Wilmington & Western well (mmmm…sweet, sweet alliterations), and hope that nobody notices that they seem to get hugely damaging storms exactly every four years in mid-September, so at best they have 3 months of full service before it’s nailbiting time.

Seeing as how I’m a bit of a gadgetphiliac (which is like being a fecalphiliac but with marginally less, you know, poop), I cannot tell a lie: I love the new iPhone. I covet it. Deeply. Which is completely stupid because it’s a PHONE. A $600 PHONE. (Which I want.)

But I won’t buy it. (Not least because if I spent $600 on a phone there’s a non-trivial chance my wife would kill me with a thatching rake.) I just don’t need it, which is how I justify most of my expensive doohickey purchases:

• New acoustic guitar: $800. Needed because my sister wanted back her guitar, which I had been borrowing. Or something. (I’m not sure she noticed she didn’t have it.)
• New camera: $900. Needed to take pictures of my adorable infant. (The camera I already had, well, it just didn’t DO it right.)
• New 50mm lens for camera: $100. I totally needed it to take more pictures of my adorable infant INDOORS. (I will use a similar justification next year when I spend $400 on an external flash with wireless remote.)
• New 28mm-300mm zoom lens for camera: $250. I just wanted to take better pictures at baseball games, really. But I do take pictures of my adorable infant/toddler with it.

Spending money is like an addiction, though, and sometimes it takes a hard moment to break one of it, like when one checks one’s bank account and discovers that one has overdrawn same. Not that I have, of course. But in the last few weeks, I have discovered that I need new pants, so I had to buy those; I couldn’t find my softball glove, so I acquired a replacement; I needed new batting gloves, so I bought those too; it adds up! Luckily, when taxes come around, I will deduct all these expenses because I’m writing a new novel about them, or at least that’s what you’re going to tell the IRS on my behalf if you get subpoenaed during the audit. (Burning questions: can other people be subpoenaed? Is “subpoenaed” the hardest word I’ve had to type all day? If I sell a single picture of Charles to my mother for like 50 cents, can I deduct all the camera-related purchases?)

Free time is hard to come by these days, but I managed to broker a deal with HW in which she would get to spend Saturday night in New York, partying with her sorority sisters while I tried to keep Charles from flinging himself off of the furniture, in exchange for which I got to go golfing with Brian, Craig, and My Popz (aka Teh Grumpx0zrz) on Saturday morning. I hadn’t golfed in a while, so I figured I’d better hit the driving range on Friday to try and repair my hideous golf swing. (Seriously, you know how the swing is supposed to be in a “plane?” Mine is in some kind of 4th dimensional heptangle. It’s unbelievable to watch; during the downswing the head of my driver actually tesseracts across the galaxy for a split-second.)

There’s not really a range anywhere near me since we moved, but I wandered over to Delaware Park and got lost a bunch of times trying to find the White Clay Creek Country Club located therein. Their website said they had some kind of “golf academy,” which I figured meant they had to have a driving range, but if it exists, I sure couldn’t find it. After wandering around aimlessly for a while, I said “to heck with all this jaun” and went to the liquor store, where my time could more effectively be spent selecting single malt scotches and forgetting to replenish my wife’s Captain Morgan supply, for which she beat me with a shoe.

Our tee time was at 7:15am on Saturday, so I got up at 6am and made some breakfast sandwiches for the crew. Craig and Brian arrived at the house, and we all piled into Craig’s car and met my dad at the course. I won’t bore you with a complete play-by-play; I’ll just say that, having not played in 2 years, I played some of the best golf of my life. I shot a birdie on the par 5, a par on a 4 somewhere, and if I hadn’t had a really unfortunate 12 on a hole on the front 9, I might have broken 100. Clearly I need to play less frequently.

After that I entertained Charles for the evening, with the capable assistance of Craig, who got some practice in for when his own male progeny sallies forth in September. In other news, Happy Monday! Don’t, like, die or anything.

Listen up people: here is the big news. Me and Old Navy are BOYS. Or…boyz? Boyxi0zrzx? I can’t keep track anymore. Anyway, once again, Old Navy has saved me from a fate worse than death: not owning any pants that fit over my Beyonce-style derriere. (Note: this fate is worse than death for anyone who may meet me in their daily travels. For me it’d be fine; I’d go naked most of the time but for the restraining order and all.)

My pants situation has been worsening, ’cause I’m hard on clothes; my inability to eat without dribbling colored liquids onto my lap, coupled with general clumsiness and the fact that my junk and booty both apply TREMENDOUS pressure on anything attempting to contain them, means that pants just don’t last very long. I finally had to throw away one of my few remaining pairs of good khakis on Monday because I sat down to eat my morning omelette and split a hole right through the crotch, through which my various Bits attempted to fairly LEAP. I think I ended up putting on pajama pants to go to work.

The big issue is that I am just fat (38-inch waist) and tall (34-inch inseam) enough that nobody bothers to stock clothes for me. Target has fat kid waists up to 42 or so, but doesn’t carry any 34″ inseams once you get past about a 34″ waist, because apparently people over 6 feet tall are NEVER anything but completely skinny. The same thing happens at pretty much every store at the Christiana Mall, including Macy’s, Aeropostale, The Gap, all that good stuff. A notable exception is Penney’s, which does have a boss Big-‘N’-Tall section, if you don’t mind wearing Dickies, which I do.

Old Navy, however, has 34-inch inseams all the way up to 40 and 42-inch waists, and is therefore my solution for all fat tall kid pants. Yesterday, HW and I finally found time to go (I bribed her by also taking her to Red Robin for gourmet burgers; mine had guacamole in it and was SO GOOD (and yet I wonder why I have a 38 inch waist)), and I picked up two pairs of pants that make my ass look absolutely delicious. For reals: one of the sales girls got that look in her eye, you know the one where they’re all “I want to bite you on the butt,” but she managed to restrain herself, probably because she saw that my wife and son were there.

And no young boy should have to witness his father’s booty getting chomped on by someone other than his wife.

I’ve been sick all this week, which has been Unpleasant. Like most males of my generation, even the slightest cold sends me into a spiral of whininess normally only seen if you kick me in the harblz. It started last Friday with a major league sore throat, and was exacerbated by a HUGE weekend of frivolity, starting out with a performance of the National Anthem by the Cathedral Choir at the Phillies game on Friday night, continuing with Charles’s birthday party on Saturday, and then finishing up with a Sunday involving three lengthy church services, a piano recital, and a banquet celebrating our collective churchy awesomeness. Let’s tackle each item in chronological order:

The Phillies game was both awesome and totally unrad (and also anti-tubular), in that our performance was sweet, and James Earl Jones was there reading “Casey At The Bat” to a bunch of kids in the infield, but that the Phils ended up losing 13-0 (I left in the bottom of the fifth ’cause my throat felt like someone had poured battery acid into me) and JEJ, who got old while I wasn’t paying attention, seemed particularly hunch-backed and mildly Alzheimery. It was very depressing to see Darth Vader in this state, being led around the stadium with a big dopey grin on his face.

Or maybe he was just drunk, I dunno. That would be AWESOME.

I took along my camera, and got a few decent pictures of the game, but I couldn’t get close enough to the field to really get anything totally supersweet, and I lack a 300mm zoom lens, something I intend to rectify before I go to another sporting event.

Charles’s party on Saturday was HILARIOUS. I made a half-decent cake (half of it was chocolate (the decent part), and half of it was boring-ass vanilla ’cause that’s all my wife will eat), cut Charles a piece of the chocolate side, and let him rub it in his hair and ears for a while. Great times. We got a bajillion pictures which I intend to post, possibly later today when I have time to get them off the DVD and do some editing. (Note: we finally bought a DVD burner and have been steadily moving pictures onto DVDs, which is totally kick-ass because I have 4GB worth of cards for my camera, and every time I load them onto a laptop I completely max the hard drive. Plus the long-term storage prospects are pretty pimp.) Charles also got a huge number of presents, most of which he didn’t get a chance to open before he got so unbelievably sleepy we had to put him down for a nap. We’re saving the rest of his toys for later opening when he gets bored with flinging his new enormous-lego-style blocks at the cats.

Sunday was a LOOONNNNGGGG day, starting with an 8:30 christening service for Charles’s buddies Tori and Rowan, whose parents decided to baptize them simultaneously in the interests of time. Charles got a little angsty during the service, so I took him out in the hall for a diaper change and a little crawling around, which was nice because it got me out of the rest of the service. (I’ll never argue with anybody’s right to worship in whatever way they choose, but the service featured a little too much arm-waving during hymns for the liking of a High Church dweeb like myself.)

After that service ended, I ran over to the Cathedral for our usual Sunday service, which on this occasion featured a period to recognize and reward all the choristers, acolytes, and other participants, which meant the service ran to about 105 minutes, which caused my ears to bleed a little bit, but that’s nothing but a thang. After THAT completed, those of us who take our piano lessons from the Cathedral Choir School’s various teachers (even if we don’t actually get lessons through the choir school’s scholarship program) performed the piano recital, which was of course completely ridiculous because they had me performing last, normally the spot reserved for the best student, which I am not. Also it was rather embarrassing because I’m roughly twice the age of the other performers. At least I didn’t screw up too badly. Wooooooo.

Then we had the choir school banquest, which was fine but chaotic, and I gathered up my various robes and music and headed over to Christ Church (where my father is coincidentally the Deputy Organist-Choirmaster (I’ve been considering getting a little tin star made for him)) for an evensong, which wasn’t too bad. Our clergy doesn’t much enjoy doing the officiating at such services (it involves a great deal of chant-singing), so I’ve been doing it, and I managed to get through it without coughing up too much of my lungs. (I was sick; you may recall me mentioning that earlier.)

I stayed home from the office on Monday and Tuesday, attempting to recover my wits; I even went to the doctor on Monday, something I rarely do for myself, because my mother was diagnosed with a case of bronchitis last week, and homey don’t play that.

The graphic atop this here page sure is grim, ain’t it? It’s been up since winter, and I intend to put something more spring/summery up ons, but sadly my time at home with the computer has been SEVERELY curtailed by the fact that my wife is working on some kind of paper, and hasn’t let the laptop out of her grasp for 3 weeks. (I suppose it’s also possible that she’s developed a life-altering addiction to Teh Pr0n, but I don’t think so.)

It’s kinda sad, really, ’cause I have like 8 tons of totally hott photos I took with my camera over the last few months, featuring flowers and trees and geese and whatnot, that would be hella rad up there, but sadly I have not been able to edit and upload and make the necessary template modifications. Which is sad, really. Totally sad.

What is also sad is that, despite not having posted in roughly 9 days, I don’t have much interesting to say. I thought I did; I had in fact written four or five paragraphs of something that I thought was totally AWESOME when it was rattling around in my head, which of course turned into absolute pap when neatly typed into El Computador. So, I beg your forgiveness. I’ll give you a hint: it described my boy Kyle as “the fastest human being I personally know.” So, you know, HILARIOUS stuff there.

The weekend was pretty busy; I helped my dad move a piano to my sister’s house AND some of my grandmother’s stuff OUT of hers before she moves to Florida, and managed to do it without exploding my spine. We saw “Chicago” at the New Candlelight Dinner Theatre (it’s New!), which was outstanding. We went to a birthday party for our friend John, who is Old (not New!). Sarah went to the beach for a fun overnight with friends, and Charles and I joined her on Sunday morning because I was singing an evensong in Lewes that afternoon; it was windy and cold and I about froze my nads off. BOO TO THAT. We did get Nicobolis, though. Can’t beat ’em!

I’ve been keeping up with my jogging, although I haven’t been SUPER good about it; I try and get out three times a week, but sometimes it’s just one or two. I’ve basically been eating everything in sight, justifying this by saying “Hey, I’m jogging like ALL THE TIME!” As a result, I’m getting fatter and fatter, so now I’m back to my “eating nothing but vegetables and small amounts of meat with no sugar” diet, along with drinking buttloads of water. Great times! Not really.

Wow, I’m sure typing up the hilarity today. I’ll try and do better later in the week, really I will.

I’ve been getting swept up in a lot of “Disaster Recovery Tests” here at work, which basically means I end up driving out to some hotsite for a few days and working my tail off. The basic idea is that we have to assume that our data center was destroyed by a comet or overrun by Commie Nazis or something, and we have to rebuild everything. I actually enjoy them, because while it’s hard work and long hours, it’s almost completely technical problems, which is the part of my job I don’t despise with every fiber of my soul. Unfortunately, many of the technical problems appear to be with stuff I don’t control (invariably the backup systems get all screwed up and take 3 times as long to get running as we had anticipated; so far this has happened EVERY SINGLE TIME, and yet we invariably allocate like 3 minutes to get that stuff built), so I spend a lot of time sitting there watching OTHER people panic.

Anyway, we did one starting Friday morning in Carlstadt, New Jersey, which is like one good camel spit from Manhattan. My part in the test wrapped up at about 2am Saturday morning, so I went back to the hotel, got some sleep, packed up, checked out, and drove through Manhattan to Brooklyn to meet my boy Josh for some Wild Fun, which at this stage in my life consists mostly of eating everything I can find.

We grabbed brunch at a nice place called Rosewater (very reasonable; I think we paid about $36 for our grub, which was pretty nice by NYC standards), and then headed into the city to misbehave. We wandered all over Greenwich Village and its environs, ate at Joe’s Pizza (really good), got ice cream at Cones (bloody outstanding), and then a few hot dogs at a street vendor (tasted like a tobacconist’s carpet), along with going into a few fun shops selling things like raccoon penis bones (really).

We went back to Brooklyn to chillax for a while (my left knee has developed the annoying habit of developing AGONIZING PAIN if I walk more than a few miles, so I needed to rest it up), met up with Josh’s girlfriend Cassie, and spent a few hours jamming on our Guitars (we, sadly, did not play Freebird). After Cassie’s nap, the three of us went out and got delicious BBQ (I don’t remember where). Mmmmm…brisket. Then we went back into Manhattan to go to a party, at which I met a large number of Josh and Cassie’s friends and drank too much vodka.

I may or may not have said horribly racist things in the cab on the way back to Brooklyn. I honestly remember nothing of the ride (I fell asleep for most of it), but woke up the next morning with a feeling in my stomach that indicated either I had cast aspersions on the heritage of various persons, or had simply poisoned myself with alcohol, or both. So, to all who were in the car with me (Cassie, Josh, and some poor Middle Eastern driver), I apologize for any and all things I may have said about anything. (This is a pretty standard boilerplate statement that I issue whenever I drink more than 3 cocktails in one sitting.)

Sunday we all slept in until about noon, and then Cassie had to go meet friends for brunch, so Joshums and I went to the Miracle Grill, a satellite location of the official one in Manhattan that’s mostly known for being Bobby Flay’s first big restaurant, before he got famous and turned into a dick. I had an omelet with herbed goat cheese in it, which was ridiculously good.

Then we hung out at Josh’s apartment playing Burnout until I got back in the car and drove home, where I collapsed and entertained myself by tickling Charles to make him giggle, which is HILARIOUS.

Yesterday was Sarah’s birthday (she’s heck of old), so we went to Red Robin (which recently opened near us, and which we had been advised was rad) to get some burgers and meet up with friends. There were perhaps 15 of us, 5 of which were small children. I spent most of my time making sure Charles didn’t eat silverware, but here’s what I came away with:

• The burgers are fantastic. I had something with egg on it, and I say, anything you can do to add fat and protein to my meat, DO IT. (More on this later.)
• The fries are free. Let me repeat that: the fries are free. And they just keep bringing them to you, like tortilla chips at Mexican restaurants. And they’re not little cheapy fries, but enormous steak fries, one of which was the length of my forearm. I wouldn’t want to meet that potato in a dark alley! Ha ha!
• The burgers aren’t bad reheated and feasted upon the next day, either.

It wasn’t haute cuisine, but it was good, and Red Robin himself was there, to the mirthful delight of all. If I could describe Charles’s response to the enormous mascot, it would probably have to be “speechlessly enamored.” Sarah even got a picture with RR, which I can’t find at the moment or I would have scanned in.

I’ve been in a pretty serious burger mood recently for some reason; Friday night, I took a last minute trip to NYC with my parents and ate at the Ben Ash Deli, known worldwide as “The Deli Across The Street From the Carnegie Deli Which Is More Famous.” Like all good NYC delis, the meals are enormous. I got a basic bacon cheeseburger, which contained a half-pound of beef and easily another half-pound of bacon. As I was eating it, I somehow finished the beef first, and was left with a bun and a handful of bacon. I actually had to stop: I had had enough bacon. This has never, EVER happened before. My mother wondered if I was feeling okay.

We were in New York, incidentally, to see the St. Thomas Choir of Men and Boys sing the Bach St. Matthew Passion; it was last minute ’cause my rents were going with a friend who had to back out. It was, nevertheless, 8 bombs of awesome. They had TWO orchestras of “period instruments” (wooden flutes, weird fat oboe things, old-style violins strung with catgut and bowed with tree limbs or something), a good gaggle of soloists, and of course St. Thomas Church, which is a rather resonant place to sing. Plus the conductor looked like an Austrian Richard Marx. I was going to shout “PLAY HAZARD” during a tender moment, but my mom grabbed my arm skin with her fingernails like she used to do when I misbehaved in my vigorous youth.

The Phillies preview is TOTALLY COMING, I swear! I might even throw in something about how my fantasy baseball draft went! I’m sure you’ll be thrilled. Hint: Mark Teahen is the highlight of my team. It’s going to be a GREAT season.

Oh hi! Long time no see, and all that noise. Once again, I have come through my semi-official March no-blogging-allowed time unscathed. In case you’ve missed things and need to catch up, the high school show that Sarah and I rock out on happens in March every year, so basically I disappear off the face of the internetz for the duration of the really hectic part. Which is now over. So I am at your service, once again.

Not that you asked, but the show went really well, almost surprisingly well, considering we started out short on time and THEN lost rehearsals to snow days, such that the pit band had only gotten together twice before tech week. Woo! Also, we waited until the last possible second to find a pianist, and through the blessings of Sweet Sainted Baby Jesus we were able to get the inimitable Steve Weatherman, who singlehandedly saved the show at least thrice. Wooooooo Steve.

Adding to the miracles was the fact that pretty much every single person involved with the show caught the Rotavirus during tech week. In case you are unfamiliar with how Rotavirus works, here’s a snapshot of the symptoms: first, you spray liquids from all of your major holes, and then you sleep. Then you wake up and spray some more, and then feel achy for a few days. This is not conducive to dancing and singing, but everybody pulled through, with the help of a lucky snowstorm Friday that postponed that evening’s show. Oddly enough, I was almost completely unaffected, aside from a queasy feeling all weekend and being unbelievably achy on Saturday. Somehow, we survived.

Now, of course, everyone’s asking me “Hey, now you have all this free time! What are you going to do?” Well, duh: all the of the crap that’s piled up for the last 6 weeks. It’s amazing Charles has gotten bathed and fed, with how little time I’ve had. It’s amazing I’ve been bathed and fed, although to be honest, I do smell a little like fish. I haven’t eaten fish in weeks. I’m wondering if there’s a flounder trapped in a fat roll on my back. (It happens sometimes when I go swimming in the ocean, too.)

Anyway, my plans for the next while involve cleaning my house, playing with my son, napping, and watching baseball. Yay, baseball! BTW: Phillies preview coming up in the near future.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, which was like 26 days ago so this is TOTALLY CURRENT AND UP TO DATE AND YOU CAN’T TELL ME DIFFERENT, here are a short list of various reasons why I love my wife:

• When we took a road trip to the Outer Banks last fall, I made a mix CD of various recent tunes that I liked, which included some Alison Krauss, John Mayer, and that new Avril Lavigne song, “Keep Holding On,” which is in 3/4 and therefore I like it. (I have a thing for that meter.) After listening to the first few tunes, HW turned to me and said,

  “Were you on your period when you made this?”

• Yesterday, we were in the kitchen feeding Charles and making lunch, and she walked by me and bumped her hip into mine. I said,

  “Did you just do what I think you did?”

  Sarah giggled. “Yep.”

  “All trying to give me the hip bump?”

  “I farted.”

• She takes so much in stride:

  Me: I just pulled a chunk of wax out of my ear the size of a lady bug.
  Her: Eww dude
  Me: Jeepers, what the hell. I thought I cleaned this ear the other day. I’m getting even MORE wax out.
  Me: What the [very bad word]! I think a bee tried to build a hive in here.
  Her: EWW
  Me: I’ve scooped out 3 big chunks with my pencil, and I think there’s more.
  Her: Oh, weird.The date on my watch is messed up.

So, in short: Sarah is rad.

On the news front, the show is chugging along; we open Thursday, with three rehearsals between now and then to get things right. Woo! I’m terrified, but I always am at this point.