Best and Worst Things I Acquired This Year

Best:

• Sink wrench - I got this a few weeks ago when I was replacing our kitchen faucet.  I could not believe how well it worked.  It literally turned faucet replacement into a 20 minute job.  
• Our new back patio furniture.  Patio tables are for chumps.  And I was a chump until this year. Now that we have lounge-y furniture back there, my only regret is that we didn't have this setup while I was a smoker.  
• Oscillating saw - What do you want me to cut?  Because I can cut any fucking thing with this saw. I cut the shit out of all kinds of shit after I got it.  
• ipod nano - Anyone who works out should have one of these.  So light and small and has a little clip on it.  I can't believe they redesigned it this year.  That was dumb.
• Booze caddy - I actually got this from Dave back in 2005, but it was at my parents' house until this year.  I finally set it up, and now I don't know what I would do without it.  It measures out shots.  It rotates.  It keeps the bottles off the counter.  Genius!
• G.I. Joe Classic bound copies of the original G.I. Joe Marvel comic books.  I read damn near all of them. Childhood revisited.  Hooray.
• Faucet - the aforementioned kitchen faucet was a real lifesaver. Now we have way better water pressure, and the sprayer works like a champ. Voosh!
• Baby Bjorn - I could take Edith wherever the hell I wanted, and no one could say shit.
• Rain Barrel - Technically Chelsey picked this thing up, but Chuck and I installed it.  Having a rain barrel and using it to water your garden means you can be as smug as you want about things.  The Kosterpeldings are part of the solution.
• Stratus Pro Basketball Game from 1988 - I had this as a kid and overpaid to re-acquire it off of eBay  Childhood recaptured again.  
• Gas grill - This summer, Chelsey and I paid $15.00 for a nice gas grill at a garage sale. I have always been against these, but as expected, now that I own one I love it. Grill goes on. Grill goes off. Terrific.
• Blue glass figurines from my Grandma - When she moved into her apartment, I got the shadowbox that she used to hang on the wall in her house.  But she took the blue glass items it used to hold with her to the apartment.  When she passed away this year, I got most of the blue glass back into her shadowbox.  Now it's all hanging in our living room.  That's pretty great.

Worst:

• When I got the ipod nano, I decided to wear it like a watch with this dumb wristband.  It was a horrible decision.  For like two weeks I looked like a huge douchebag.  Huger than normal.
• New Balance 840's.  Purchased a week before the half-marathon for way more than I normally pay for shoes.  They didn't work out, and I felt like a moron.
• Tilly & the Wall - Heavy Mood and Cat Power - Sun.  I can't believe we paid for these crap-ass albums. 
• Maroon button down shirt. I got this from H&M, and for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to to wear it and not feel like a putz. Don't know why.  I just can't do it.  I think I'm a light colored shirt wearer.  That's just the way it is.   
• A bright blue sweater vest with a Goodwill logo sewn on.  I feel like I'mrepresenting a car dealership or a printing company at a trade show whenever I put this on.

Fourth of July

Lest we forget...

The Summer of Handiness and Swimming

I haven't written on this thing in a while.  Mostly because I generally blog from work and I've been really busy this past month.  Like super-duper busy.  Way more busy than I generally am.  I'm not really cut out for working that hard.  I hope it stops soon.  Now then.  Here are some updates.

KING EDITH


When I found out that we were going to have a baby, I was most excited about the 9-month old age.  I don't know why.  I just feel like that's the age where it all comes together, before it all flies off the tracks.  Edith has proven to be no exception.  She's so fun to hang out with now.  It's all cure noises and drunken attempts at walking.  I love it.  She also smiles at everyone and everything.  Oftentimes waving while she does so.  We take her swimming all the time. Which is also something to see.  Today she exchanged screams with a kid who looked to be about 18 months.  They just went back and forth.  Screaming.  It was great.

HANDINESS


Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not really that handy.  I aspire to be handy, but sooner or later I just want to get things over with, and I start fucking shit up.  For some reason, this summer has proven to be new era for me in this realm.  Suddenly I am able to carefully complete projects and not have Chelsey make fun of the quality afterwards.  I think this might have something to do with Edith, or the fact that we are going to be selling our house in the next year or two, but whatever the reason, it makes me feel like a real man.

A few things that might be adding to this:

• Chelsey's Dad.  I've done a few projects with Greg Erpelding (who is really fucking handy), and one thing he taught me was patience.  We would be right at that part of the project where I would start doing dumb things, and he would stop and smoke a cigarette.  Genius.  It slowed him down, and gave him a chance to think about things.  I of course don't smoke cigarettes when I project, but I do bear that in mind.  I try to tell myself to slow down throughout the process.  I have to do this.  The urge to fuck shit up is really strong in me.

• Realistic Scope.  Some shit I can do.  Some shit I can't.  I can't pour concrete.  I just can't.  I'm sure I have what it takes.  But I'm just as sure that I can't do it.  Mostly because I can't imagine what the conversation would go like when the concrete truck pulled up.  So I'm trying to know my limitations.  Which is hard, because our driveway is about 30 feet of crumbling cement and shame.  I want to fix it.  I know I can't.

•  Chuck Koster.  I never though I would say this, but I actually think that working with Chuck on projects has officially turned from being a diminished returns arrangement to an advantageous one.  We have somehow gone from getting dumber when we think as a pair to getting smarter.  I don't even want to talk about this because I'm afraid I'll jinx it.    

• Success Begetting Success - So far this year, I have built a fence and gate for keeping rabbits and such out of my wife's stellar garden, redesigned the backyard patio, installed a rainwater barrel, fixed/replaced the gate that leads to said patio, and redid the shower in our basement.  Each of these projects have gone unexpectedly well.  Creating new pressure for the next project not to be fucked up.  

• Being a dad.  I'd be stupid to ignore the fact that being a father creates a certain amount of internal initiative to stop being such a fucking moron.  

I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT MUSIC


In preparation for the half-marathon this year, I made an all-time best music of Brent playlist.  It's a fucking monster.  I think it has something like 1300 songs on it.  Basically any song that I ever liked.  Putting it together took like a month, and I'll be damned if I'm not going to enjoy something like that after putting so much time into it. So I have been listening to nothing but my favorite songs for the last two or three months.  Subsequently, I have no idea about any 2012 music.  Ask me what my favorite album of the year is, and I will have nothing to say.  Ask me what my favorite songs from 2012 are, and I will have equally little to say.  I'm listening to my "need2listen" playlist right now (my playlist of current music that I need to try to form an opinion on) and all I'm getting out of it is that The Flaming Lips new albums is hard to listen to, and I need to take that crappy Cajun album Kent had me download and the Neutral Mile Hotel mash-up off my ipod.  Not really productive. So I'm going to try and cram in the next few weeks and decide if I like anything.  In the meantime, I'm open to suggestions.  Which reminds me.  Chuck, I have the new Japandroids.  I realize I should have said something when you had your Japandroids shirt on yesterday,  But somehow it slipped my mind.  I hear that album is real good by the way.


THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR  


Friends of this blog will note that the house next door used to be occupied by a weird old lady who talked Chelsey's ear off about World War Two and hoarded and smell like piss.  Well, you might remember that we accidentally had that lady removed from her house by calling the cops to check on her when we feared her dead.  Since then, she's sold the house to a nice couple who gutted the house, and fixed it all the way back up.  Now that house is nicer than ours.  Which is a little hard to take, but mostly we're just really happy and thankful about how things turned out.  Apparently the old lady had not used the bathroom (bath or toilet) in quite some time.  She appeared to have a system that involved buckets in the basement.  So it's a really good thing that she found a new place to live.  And it's a good thing that her house which once looked like I could push it over, is now a happy place to live again.

There.  That's a nice recap of the last month.  Hopefully I will be able to stay more on top of things going forward.  Oh!  And I don't know if I ever said this, but Chuck has kindly offered to take Deuce for a while so that we can hopefully invite him back to the house when Edith is a little more stable on her feet/less harassing of Deuce in general  Hurray for Chuck. Also we went on a little vacation last week, but I'll let Chelsey handle that in her blog.

Cold Turkey!

Let me open this up by saying King Edith has been a sleeping champ for most of her life.  Months 0-4 have been a breeze.  She would go to sleep no problem, and sleep for large chunks.  Until 6 months hit...

She has grown progressively less and willing to sleep through the night in her crib.  This is our fault.  We know it.  I think this is what happended. 

Around the 6-month mark, she had a few spells where she wasn't feeling well.  On those nights, she would wake up extremely frequently throughout the night.  In the early mornings - when she would wake up at like 5am - we would bring her into bed with us.  Just for the last two hours of sleep mind you, but we did it.  Kent and Leslie - do not do this at this age.  Because those two hours become three hours, because she's up at 4am, and we need some fucking sleep.

As time went on, we found that the only way to get her to sleep past the 2am or 3am hours was to bring her to bed, and make sure not to roll over on her as we all slept.  Usually this entailed me going downstairs to make room, but it worked.  She would sleep.  We would sleep.  A small amount of sanity would return to the househould.

See, the 6 month mark is notable for many reasons.  For one, she's much more tuned in to what is going on around her.  She actually knows who is around and where she is.  So she definitely notices when she's all along in a crib.  For two she's picking up all these new skills.  She's crawling.  She's pulling herself up.  She's sitting up.  All this crap that she never did before, that she really likes to do at night.  Three, she hates to be on her back - which is how babies are laid down to sleep generally.  So she wakes up in her least favorite position, notices that she's alone, and starts crawling around. And screaming. 

Such has been our last three weeks.  She's sleeping or screaming in her crib until we can't take it anymore and bring her to bed.  It's also brought about a lot of weird conversations between Chelsey and I in the middle of the night.  We were not meant to interact at that hour.

So this past weekend we went to Kearney, and pretty much had no choice but to let her sleep with us all night for two straight nights.  There was no other way to do it.  I could do into detail about this, but suffice it to say a screaming baby in a house full of people is a lot worse than a screaming baby in a house with just6 sleep-deprived parents.

We got back from Kearney yesterday and she went to bed at 8:30.  She woke up thirty minutes later.  Screaming.  I took her, and tried to settle her down.  She was totally awake.  So I took her downstairs and watched Green Lantern with her on my lap.  She fell asleep instantly, and then woke up 30 minutes later screaming, because she couldn't get comfortable on my lap. 

This was the final straw. 

I took Edith upstairs.  Woke up Chelsey and told her to go to the downstairs bedroom, shut the door, and turn on some music.  We were going Cold Turkey.

Cold Turkey is something we'd been discussing for a while.  It's the method where you let your kid cry it out until they fall asleep.  We figured we'd employ this method eventually, but had designs on carefully planning it out somehow.  I don't know what we were going to do, but at 9:30 last night, I was like "Fuck it.  I can't take this anymore."

And we began.  My friend John Fallon gave me a very practical baby guide that I have since forwarded it Kent.  It contains a very brief guide for this method.  You basically put her down, shut the door, and kiss your sanity goodbye until she falls asleep.  And let me just say, it is as advertised. 

I would let her cry for ten minute increments, and then come in for about 30 seconds. I wouldn't pick her up.  Just stroke her back, give her back her Devery Henderson (yes, we still call them that) and tell her it was going to be okay.  She returned this coaxing with an array of screams.  Then I left and shut the door. 

I did this three of four times.  I think it took about 40 minutes for her to fall asleep.  It took another two hours for me to settle down.  Hearing your baby cry for 40 minutes is not for the faint of heart.  Even if you have a good attitude about it, which I did.  It's just hard.  I watched two netflix movies (finished one, started and ended another) in the process.  I don't know if I was more rattled, or scared she was going to wake up.  But she didn't make a peep until 4:45am.  Which was amazing.

Then - to my great surprise - she actually calmed herself back down in the morning.  I had to replace her Devery Henderson once and she pretty much just went back to sleep.  She stayed asleep until I left for work at 7:00am. 

So that's how that went.  I'm sure there are darker days ahead, but last night was the first one in a long time that I actually felt like I had control of my baby's sleep pattern again.  I could feel the sanity slipping back in over my shredded nerves this morning.  It felt better.

  

Why You Don't Mess with the Kosterpeldings

Today Chelsey and I got our neighbor removed from her house. And we got her house condemned. We didn't mean to, but we were fairly sure she had fallen in her house. And were afraid to go in and check on her because she is a hoarder and the idea of going in her house frightens us. So instead we let her lay there for like 20 hours, and called the police first thing this morning.

They came in, scooped her up, and condemned her house. From what I understand a crime lab was involved. Lots of pictures. And policemen choking and gagging from the state of her house on the inside.

So now she's gone. And we both feel bad. But it was either that or let her lay there until she died. There was no way we were going in that house.