Carleen and Mike

Bartlesville is experiencing a little bit of excitement at the moment. Apparently we’ve had so much rain in the past week that it’s effected our water supply. Now, before you read what I just wrote and decide I sound stupid, I guess it has to do with the excess water diluting the alkaline levels. Here’s an article about it from our local paper. According to the Water Plant Supervisor:

“What’s happening is that we’ve had so much rain, the alkalinity has been driven to a level that our coagulant will not react with it,” Jinkens said.

The solution? Injecting caustic soda into the water supply. Yummy. Don’t you just love knowing about all the crap that goes into our water in order to make it drinkable.

According to our city manager, Ed Gordon, everything is moving along quite swimmingly although it will take a few days before the entire supply has been treated to its entirety. Meanwhile we should feel perfectly safe drinking our water. Yeah right.

Officials say safety is not an issue, as untreated water has not been allowed through the system.

“The water we are now using and drinking is safe. It is a technical malfunction only and does not affect the quality of water,” Gordon said.

Gordon said the Oklahoma National Guard has been notified in the event that help is needed, and that several cities have offered to help Bartlesville through the ordeal.

“The City of Tulsa has said they will bring water tanks if we need them, and Copan Water Plant has offered to help,” Gordon said. “A crisis brings out the best in people.

This whole ordeal created quite the hoopla yesterday. I even had a friend text me on my phone to tell me that we may be without water for two or three days and another telling me to hurry up to Wal-Mart because they were about to sell out of water. I was about to go to Wal-Mart to stock up but called Mike who filled two canisters up and stuck them in the fridge (I imagine he was probably shaking his head with a chuckle as he was doing this…that nutty wife of mine). It’s crazy how the idea of being without water can send people into to such a tizzy.

I have this condition. It’s called compulsively changing blog templates condition….or something like that. I like to change templates. A lot. Blog templates are the fashion statement of the web. If I wasn’t doing this, I would probably be at the mall spending too much money on multiple laced tank tops of varying colors just because Penny’s is having a two for one sale. It’s just a lot of fun, dammit! However. Not all templates are of the same caliber and I expect I probably make the few readers we do have rather dizzy with all the changes sooo…per Mike’s request. Here is a new template. I hope it works out and has nothing wonky to it. I will be adding widgets soon because I’m a widget maniac these days….

Happy Mike?

Ok, I’m tired of dealing with the damn Theme on this blog, it’s time to pick a theme and stick with it. Our current theme keeps jumping back to default on its own, and I’m tired of the crap involved with handling it, it’s frustrating and it takes up too much of my time. So yeah, this is an ultimatum to Carleen: Pick a theme you like, make sure it’s got what we need, and could we PLEASE stick with it (assuming it doesn’t act all wonky like our current one).

While Mike was gone attending his friends wedding in New York (if you have time, you should ask him about it…interesting trip) a few weekends ago, I had to get a little creative with Liam…he’s turning into a real rascal, which is totally not a big deal, only to be expected, however, he’s a handful and on one particular day I ran out of things to entertain him with so I decided to try something new. We sat on the kitchen floor together and played with flour and water. This kid had been making gremlin like noises all day at the top of his lungs. The minute the flour and water bowls were put in front of him he went dead silent. Sigh…finally.

I had to upload it in two takes because it was too long. To see the conclusion of this event at which point Liam pours both bowls on the floor and starts the ever popular bang banging game, go here. Sorry about the buzzing noise…our laptop is having some hard drive issues. Or mabe it’s the fan. Who knows.

This week starts my first full week as a Stay At Home Dad. Whoo Hoo! It’s been great so far, if a bit awkward for me and Carleen - we have, like, time to do stuff together. Liam has been a bit rough over the past few days, not eating so great, only eating certain foods and being generally difficult to put down to sleep. He doesn’t go down with a bottle anymore, he only goes down (for me) with a walk in his stroller. Carleen is able to get him to go down with a little rocking, but she also generally puts him down at night, where I have taken over days. We’re hoping it’s just teething. It’s kind of upsetting to me, since he’s so squirmy and fidgety it’s hard to rock him, that’s something I miss from when he was younger - rocking him to sleep. He doesn’t even like to be in bed with us anymore, he is squirmy, wakes up often and starts crawling around half-asleep, banging his head into the wall. Carleen brought this great book home called Good Nights which discusses co-sleeping with your child(ren); it talks about how great co-sleeping is for children and how it develops this great bond between parent and child and how much better children sleep in bed with mom & dad. And our boy wants nothing to do with it. To be fair, it could just be a phase of independence, maybe when he’s older he’ll be more interested in co-sleeping.

It’s good, in any case, to be away from Central States. My hands haven’t been this clean since I started working there. I don’t think I’m completely acclimated to daytime hours yet, but it should be very soon. I’m a bit overwhelmed at all the various things I can do, now that I’m back on daylight hours. I really want to have a barbeque, I think I may have to set that up soon.

Via Chrissy, I got this link which rates your blog as if it were a movie. Our blog was rated:

Mingle² - Online Dating

Ouch.

I didn’t go with Mike to New York this time. Plane tickets are outrageous right now. His friend Jamie is also getting married in the Fall and Mike is best man so we plan to save for that trip instead. It’ll be interesting flying on a plane with Liam. I’m already having horrible nightmares of him screaming because of ear pain. I used to have problems with that. The flight attendents would give me plastic cups filled with steaming hot wash cloths to cup over my ears as we descended. I never could understand why that was supposed to help, but it did.

Even though I didn’t go, I did schedule vacation leave for the time that Mike is away. So, these last few days have been interesting, having Liam all day long. Yesterday, my friend Cindy and I went to Tulsa for the day. Liam’s nap schedule was off. He didn’t have his morning nap but slept on the drive down, although I don’t think it was enough since he got pretty cranky towards the end. My friend Jennifer had invited me out that night but I ended up not going. I dropped Liam off at my mom’s where he spent the night. I went back home, ate fried chicken from the deli at Wal-mart, and watched re-runs of Columbo for most of the night. It was strange not having Liam around after having had him around twenty-four seven for the past two days.

Liam has started pulling himself up and can walk along the sides of things. It’s so much fun to watch him think things through and problem solve his movements. Today he finally figured out how to pick something up once he had dropped it from a standing position. Previously he would just get annoyed and start to cry. He’s confident enough now with his standing that he buckles and let’s himself fall, then grabs the toy he’s dropped. Of course, the next thing he has to figure out is how to lift the toy in one hand and pull himself back up with the other. The toy always presents a problem since it prevents him from being able to use that hand to grab onto things and steady himself. My brother, mom and I sat on the couch for almost half an hour today watching him work things through. I wish I had some video clips to show on here but we’ve started using a regular video camera and I haven’t figured out how to transfer it to the computer and downsize it into a quicktime video. That kinda goes beyond my computer expertise.

Being able to pull himself has, however, presented some problems when it comes to putting Liam to sleep. Everybody who takes care of Liam pretty much has a different method for putting him to sleep. It will change often, according to his own development. My mom strolls him around in the stroller and talks and sings to him. I’m not entirely sure what method Mike is using at the moment. I’ve always been able to just feed him his bottle and stick him in his crib. He’ll fuss a little when a lay him down but quickly starts to play and sing to himself until he eventually tires himself out and starts to make a specific lulling moan sound. When you hear that sound you know he’s on his way out. But now that he can stand up, he get’s distracted by all things he can see outside his crib. I’ll rock him for awhile, kiss and hug him then tell him “nite nite”. The minute I stick him in his crib he pulls himself up and starts looking at things, the fan, the window, the mobile on his crib. He never cries and eventually, in most cases, he does fall asleep. When he doesn’t he’ll just start yelling really loud “mam, mam, ma”, “babbabba”. If that goes on for five minutes or so you know you’ve lost him. Give it up, strap him in his car seat and drive, otherwise you’re just going to make the rest of the night painful. So, bedtimes recently have taken a lot longer than usual. He also has his upper front two teeth coming in, probably another reason he’s not going down as easy.

I have a few days left of vacation. I think I’m going to spend most of tomorrow outside. I bought a bunch of plants the other day and I’m going to stick them in pots and do something creative next to our front door. I haven’t told Mike this. He’ll probably find out via this post. It seems like whenever he leaves for New York, I go out and spend money on “house improvement” stuff. Last year it was a wall unit. I promise, baby, I’ll buy less groceries this week.

I’m probably going to change the template on here again soon. Not because I want to but because this template has a tendency to display photo’s and javascript stuff all wonky.

Sitting at home in New York as I type this and it’s good to be home. The trip was fine, I went through Dallas/Fort Worth instead of Chicago this time. I like the way Chicago splits up the flight times a bit more evenly, but DFW is a very well designed airport. It’s basically clusters of smaller terminals each connected by a tram. What I think this does is spreads what would be a huge amount of people into managable chuncks, so it doesn’t feel as chaotic as what it might otherwise be.

After getting home we sat outside sipping drinks and chatting. Just the simple act of sitting outside at 4 in the afternoon was pretty mind-blowing to me, this is something you really can’t do in Oklahoma once May comes around. At 6 we headed to Sylvan Beach where several of us celebrated my Uncle Mikes 51st birthday. I was too tired (having only gotten 3 hours of sleep the night before) to be much for conversation, but it was just good to be in the presence of my family again. I went to bed with the window open, another thing that doesn’t happen at all in Oklahoma (it’s strange all the little things I miss; another example is all the trees - it struck me this time how many more trees there are around here than Oklahoma).

So the next 2 days aren’t going to be terribly relaxing, I’ve got to get ready for Brian’s wedding and all, but still, no less fun. I’ve got Brian’s bachelor party tonight (put on on by Jamie) which I am looking forward to that. Then sunday is Father’s Day, nothing much planned, but Aunt Kathy is coming out with Hannah - maybe I can get everyone to play Killer Bunnies. Monday mom is taking me out visiting family and then Tuesday morning I plan on just hanging out and relaxing for just a bit longer until I have to head back South. It’s gonna be a good trip.
-M

“Free at last. Free at last. Oh Lord, Free at last!” These words were spoken by me this morning at 7:00 am upon leaving work. After nearly 5 years indentured servitude working at Central States Business Forms, I called it quits. I haven’t formally quit yet, I still have vacation days left, and I’m makingdamn sure I get paid for them. So I’m going on vacation, coming back and quitting. It’s a shitty way to do things I know, but I’m tired, very little is done to show that the management cares squat for the employees and I keep losing my temper more and more and more often out of work as well. It’s time and I really can’t emotionally afford two more weeks there. I feel good about this, with Carleens new salary, it’ll be good to stay at home, awake during the day and watch Liam, not to mention get much more work done on the house.

Also, I leave for New York tomorrow (6 am flight - have to get up at 3 am, ugh). A friend of mine is getting married and I’m the best man. I’m not too sure how I feel about being the Best Man, however. I appreciate being in his wedding and have no problem being part of the wedding party, but since I moved down here we’ve slowly lost contact with each other, not really talking that much. Nothing happened between us, it’s just the normal difficulties of maintaining a friendship long distance. So Best Man just doesn’t seem like my particular role in all of this. Surely there is someone closer to him, who he sees more often than me? This means I have to make a speech. I might have to bring up the fact that I got a D in Public Speaking in college (a required course for Photography, whatever), and see if that can get me out the speech. If not I’m looking up Irish Toasts that might be appropriate and try to memorize it in 3 days.

I’m looking forward to the trip certainly. Jamie, Brian’s (the groom) cousin, is putting on a backyard Bachelors party (thrown together last minute, as he had no idea he was responsible for this). Jamie’s parties always rock. They inevitably involve: fire, music, food and more alcohol than you could possibly drink. Thanks to Mr. Crohn, I’ll only be able to partake in the fire/music combo, but that’s all I need with Jamie & Co. I also look forward to a lot of time spent outdoors (NY: where you can actually enjoy being outside), practicing my Native American Flute. I’ll be gone until Tuesday, so it’ll be a nice long trip, I can’t wait!

-M

Chani caught a young squirrel the other day. It was wounded severely but not quite dead. I had to kill it myself. This was probably one of the worst things I’ve had to do. It really was a mercy killing, but that doesn’t make it feel any better. I’ve never had to do anything like that before and it made me think about a lot of things. It made me think about people that can go out and hunt for sport regularly. I suppose using a gun makes killing something much less personal than standing right over a creature and watching it die, but still, it took a lot courage for me to be able to that and frankly, I’m glad I’m disturbed by it. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some hippy “Don’t kill animals” statement. Human beings are omnivores, we’re wired that way, take a look at our teeth - we’re built for an all-inclusive diet. I just think we those that hunt would appreciate what they take much more if the kill was much more personal.

I also thought about Liam. I wondered what I would have told him about my actions were he a bit older and would have grasped what was going on. I thought about this a lot, but I really don’t have an answer. How do you tell a young child that taking a creatures life is sometimes more humane than allowing it to live? Since we’re dog owners this is something we may eventually have to deal with, I should really come up with some way to handle that.

I’ve always been a really big Bruce Lee fan. Don’t ask me why, I’m not entirely sure but I think it officially started after watching The Crow which starred his son Brandon Lee who fell victim to a freakish accident on the set of that movie and died. I was a sophmore in high school at the time, and within a few months of watching that film I had read every article I could find on Brandon and Bruce (I had quite the collection of Black Belt magazines), bought every movie with them in it, read Bruce’s offically biography twice and the book Bruce Lee wrote Tao of Jeet Kun do, visited his grave at Lakeview Cemetary in Seattle (Mitch was going to college in Bellingham at the time. Him and his friend Dan took an unofficialy leave of absence from class just to drive me down there…thanks guys :-), and started taking JKD lessons from one of but handful of JKD instructors who just happened to live here in Bartlesville (The classes were short lived. Tennis season started so I had to quit and the instructor was nice enough to send me along with a video on how to punch because, well…I punched like a girl). Yeah. So. I was kinda obsessed.

Anyway, Justin Lin, the guy who made the third Fast and Furious movie (or is it the fourth…I’ve lost count) has decided to make a spoof based on the making of Game of Death, the last movie Bruce Lee made. Left incomplete at the time of his death, Game of Death was supposed to be his greatest work, written and directed by Bruce himself. It was unique in comparison to his other stuff in that it wasn’t just a movie about Bruce Lee kicking everybody’s ass, but a movie about WHY Bruce Lee was able to kick everybody’s ass (see philosophy of JKD). Unfortunatley, in the middle of making the film he was asked to star in Enter the Dragon, which would eventually be his claim to fame, and shortly after that he died. It was partly because of this fame that they decided to complete Game of Death using a bunch of different Lee look-a-likes, which subsequently spawned hundreds of other Bruce “Lee” movies, a period in film history now refered to as the “Bruceploitation” tradition. It’s this idea that Lin is trying spoof:

The film’s gist? A fictional, behind-the-scenes look at the auditions for Game of Death. With Finishing the Game, Lin — who self-financed the film — handles the notion of Bruceploitation the way Quentin Tarantino pays tribute to blaxploitation in his 1997 cult favorite, Jackie Brown.

Finishing the Game pokes fun at the entertainment industry’s relentless efforts to hold onto something great that, in reality, is gone forever. In a closing scene, Lin shows a casting director presenting the final candidates. There’s a white guy, a guy in a wheelchair and a guy over 6 feet tall — it’s all pretty absurd.

What’s interesting is how the making of this movie seems to be leading to the same “Bruceploitation” that Lin is making so much fun of:

Finishing the Game also leads what looks to be the next wave of Bruceploitation: A Chicago theater company is working with David Bowie and Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang on a Bruce Lee musical, and director Rob Cohen has been pushing to make a movie that features the real Bruce Lee in CG. (Don’t hold your breath for this last one: The Lee family says they’ll never back it.)

Well, that’s a relief! Next thing you know we’ll have a Bruce Lee themed park complete with killer robots. Oh, wait, the Chinese are already doing that.

Remember back in the day when you’re great grandma or whoever would wear the same outfit every day of the week? When you had one work dress and one fancy dress that you would only wear on a real special occassion. Then one day somebody created a Walgreens, then a Wal-Mart and all of a sudden you’re wearing American flag t-shirts that have Made in Vietnam typed on the tag. Well, in an effort to “confront consumerism”, a lady in Seattle got smart and designed a simple brown dress that she wore every day for an entire year, even managing to make it into an entirely different outfit each day. She documented her experience on a website, Little Brown Dress. I really admire this woman, probably because I know I could never do it. I don’t have the fashion sense for one thing, and my sewing machine still has yet to be officially “broken in” since I got it as an xmas gift a few years ago. I haven’t even sewn curtians on it. However, Mitch’s girlfriend, Sayaka, got me a really neat sewing book last xmas…really nice simple modern skirt and pant patterns. *sigh*…one day.

She’s moved on to a different project now, wearing only the things she has made herself.