dabblers

when i was a hardcore gym rat, my friend tony and i had a name for the folks who showed up after the new year: "the january people."

these were the folks who made resolutions to lose weight, hogged all the equipment for the first week or two and would inevitably be gone by march.

i never had much use for them and their lack of commitment and couldn't wait for attrition to free up "my" workout space.

so much for hubris. i have since become a "january person."

turns out there's another kind of dilettante i wasn't aware of, which i guess i'll call "the thanksgiving people."

a friend told me if i really felt badly about failing to help the hungry, i should volunteer at our local soup kitchen.

well, when i called last week, i could almost hear the lady on the other end rolling her eyes.

"when were you planning to volunteer?" she sighed.

when i explained it was whenever they needed someone, she said that everyone and his brother wanted to volunteer thanksgiving day.

ah, yes, i reckoned, working off that guilt for gluttony with an hour ladling out mashed potatoes.

i'd toyed with similar thoughts for years; not an original idea, apparently.

but hearing her apparent weariness with what bob dorough and miles davis called "december do-gooders" sort of confirmed what a hollow gesture it was.

they could use some help the week after thanksgiving, she said, when they were short-staffed and needed some restocking and prep work done before lunch.

yeah, i could do that.

frankly, if i never was assigned one of the "starring roles" on the serving line receiving grateful looks and words, i'd be just as happy in the background.

as the Lord said, the deeds done in secret are the ones He notices.

while this opportunity may have begun in penance, i pray that i may have the commitment to make this more than an hour's dabbling in charity.

too much food for too much thought

it's thanksgiving week and i'm anticipating a good meal. (and, yes, i appreciate what a great blessing it is to know where my next one is coming from.)

kris ran down the menu for thursday feast and asked if there was anything else i wanted.

lessee, after the turkey, ham, potatoes -- sweet and mashed -- two kinds of corn, pie -- pumpkin and pecan -- how could i want for more?

"green beans," i meekly asked.

"oh, yeah," she said. "we've already got that."

well, we're set then. wow. two of everything. what a lucky boy i am.

much more so than this sad sack:

If you think about it, pies are major players in communal feasting observances -- pumpkin for Thanksgiving and Christmas or apple for the Fourth of July.

Cakes, on the other hand, commemorate individuals.

this poor chap needs to loosen the belt on his thinking pants.

cat

not entirely sure how otto's going to deal with having a very small version of us in the house.

if baby should arrive weighing about what his mama and papa did when they were born, our little tabby is going to outweigh our boy by about 6 or 7 pounds. (plus, she'll have teeth and claws.)

she already seems to think the baby's room is hers. well, along with the rest of the house.

kris seems to think we'll have to keep the baby's door closed to the cat at all times to keep her out of the crib and/or other furniture in the room. (i reckon she'd like the extra perches for looking out the two windows.)

i'm going to see how the critter reacts to the kid.

otto might be bigger, but seeing a person this small might be enough to keep her off balance.

different size, different smell, different noises. that alone might be enough to keep the kitty at bay.

we'll see in about two months.

mountaineers on the radio

on days like this, i'm almost glad to not have cable television.

if i'd have watched an apparent university of cincinnati turnover reversed by a replay official into a touchdown against west virginia, i'd have fumed all night.

as it is -- having only heard it on the radio -- i'm merely disgusted.

judging from my friends' reactions -- and even an impartial sports illustrated columnist -- the bearcats got an unfair break.

not since the wvu-syracuse debacle of 1992 -- in which orange quarterback marvin graves initiated a bench-clearing brawl by chucking the football at a wvu defensive back, leading to three wvu ejections and the freaking syracuse kicker before graves, who did not get tossed, threw the game-winning touchdown -- can i recall such a lousy turn on a lousier call.

i told a friend this wasn't really a matter of close, but no cigar heartbreak. this, simply put, was maddening.

while i disagree on a few decisions -- like foregoing an easy field goal on fourth-and-long that might have helped us tie, if not win, the game -- it was a well-played contest by our boys that turned on a questionable call.

my best hope from all this is that this indignation will help provide next season -- the old mountaineer salve -- the contrast by which we can measure our greatest joys.

virtual bleachers

i've become convinced that eating at a sports bar to watch my west virginia university mountaineers play is bad luck.

so i passed on a friend's invitation to watch the wvu-cincinnati game with him and his wife.

i had a good feeling about this game, though, that it wouldn't be the slaughter everyone was predicting we'd suffer, and i wanted to keep up the banter with folks who were watching -- or listening -- with me.

if this were an afternoon game, i'd have been in the middle of household chores and listening to the radio.

but it was the evening of a long day and i was too jazzed to try anything major around the house.

so i sat on the living room couch with the radio tuned to wchs 580 am for the mountaineer sports network broadcast and my laptop open.

i was able to listen to the play-by-play without getting hysterical with live television, watch replays on espn360.com and exchange comments with friends on facebook and strangers on the smoking musket, an unofficial wvu sports blog.

while it was no substitute for a stadium experience or even the satisfaction of burgers and beer with friends, it was enough to share an evening with kindred souls.

(plus, given the way things turned out, we weren't out the cost of a night out while watching our team lose.)

pick it up

personal assistant cat, part 2
Originally uploaded by grumpnet

when we learned in may that we were expecting a baby, nine months seemed plenty of time to get ready.

well, we're about 12 weeks away from the main event and, as my sister and brother-in-law noted, sometimes you end up with less time than that.

would we be ready, say, in a month?

um ...

i thought once we had the baby's room painted, the hard part would be over.

well, kind of.

that just meant the biggest part was over. now we face lots and lots and lots of little things.

like putting up curtains and furnishing the room, for example.

my sister is kindly giving us a spare crib. we're registered for a changing table. i think we'll need a drawer.

then the rest of the house must be rearranged and rendered habitable. (one room, really, to accommodate the displaced study room. the basement can be done in stages.)

i feel urgency creeping in.

i have to keep reminding kris and myself that many have faced much more with much less.

we'll just have to stay steady and work forward.

holding her

practice, part 1
Originally uploaded by grumpnet

kris and i finally got to meet little elena a couple of days ago.

we each took our turn at holding my sister's fourth little princess.

a few seconds after kris handed off to me, the babe took the opportunity to shoot a poop into her diaper. oh, well. finders keepers.

luckily, i've been staying in practice with the steady stream of babies pamy here and my brother in florida have been producing.

pamy informs me her boy, now almost four, is behaving all-boy -- jamming things down the drain in the bathroom sink, decorating said sink with wreathes of toothpaste, testing the viscosity of shampoo down the bathtub and the like.

"i've never had this happen with the girls," she said.

unfortunately, i think i can relate to dimly remembered experiments of a similar ilk from my own years as a small person -- well into grade school, unfortunately.

with our own boy gestating in kristina's womb, i suspect we're in for an interesting ride in the next few years.

wvu makes like a tree

fill and repeat
Originally uploaded by grumpnet

and falls.

my no. 20 mountaineers headed down to tampa, fla., to play the unranked south florida bulls.

i knew going in that we always have problems with these guys. and playing down there is never a good prospect.

and, well, we moved the ball ok and shot ourselves in the foot just once with an interception inside the 20, but we had no answers for their offense.

they passed the hell out of us in a 30-19 defeat.

it didn't help that some key players are nicked and dinged, but who'd have thought our defense would let us down?

(on second thought, the biggest question seemed to revolve around our defensive backs, so, yeah, i think we know the answer: toast.)

normally, i'd be beside myself with a league loss, especially one where i thought we could win.

but i know these guys have our number in florida, and i suppose i've come to accept that.

luckily, the day wasn't wasted in anticipation of it -- even for the hope of eating burgers in a sports bar while watching what would have ultimately been a frustrating game.

got a coat of primer up in the baby's room. raked the leaves in the front yard. hopefully took out a yellowjacket nest.

a cheeseburger, beer and a mountaineer win would have been icing on the cake.

but that would have been greedy, wouldn't it?

just like dogs, west virginia university football will bring great joy -- and great sorrow.

the crazed mountaineer in me is just this side of deluded to believe we can win the remaining four games on the schedule -- which includes two top 20 teams.

get hard on defense and don't drop the ball. we can still win out. seriously.

old paint

old outlet
Originally uploaded by grumpnet

judging by the layers of paint on this non-grounded outlet, i could imagine it might be one that came with the house, which i think was built some time before world war ii.

i sometimes wonder about the folks who've lived here before us and the kinds of dreams they had.

they painted. they wallpapered. they added on and remodeled. they lived their lives. and then they passed away or moved.

and then it happened all over again for at least a few more times.

now it's our turn.

it's a good chance that this will be last time i see behind the faceplate of these sockets and switches until our child is, well, probably not a little boy anymore.

kris and i are deep in preparations for his arrival.

sometimes i get so engrossed in the tasks of making room for him, i don't even have him in mind.

other times, i dream and wonder.

i wonder if he'll be task-focused, like his mom, or detail-oriented, like his dad. (kris and i both hope it will be the better parts of both.)

i worry what we'll fight about. if he'll be as hard to motivate as i was. i'm fairly sure he'll be pig-headed. i just hope it's in a good way.

i imagine that as he grows, the way the house is will be the way he thought it always ever was.

same colored rooms. same furniture. same cracks in the walls. same goofy cat.

i even have little hopes. that he'd be good with both words and numbers. creative. maybe even wiry and athletic, like a cross-country runner or a swimmer. (if not coordinated, then at least i hope he'd have rhythm.)

after healthy, of course, though, we mostly hope our boy would be kind.

he might never recognize the efforts that went into giving him a good place to land.

but i hope he'd never wish he had better.

curved lines

somewhere there was a good idea when i made kris stand in the landing while i composed this shot. i'm not entirely sure what it was. maybe when there's more baby in the belly there will be more curve.

i hope the rain doesn't totally wash out the fall colors in the yard or in town. i'd like to get sort of a record of her tummy against the backdrop of the seasons like we did back in august.

after a trying first trimester, kris has an appetite and actually enjoys the thought of food again. (to her own chagrin, she'd tell you.) and she's also hit upon the right pillow combination to accommodate her back and the bump when she sleeps.

funny, though, she seems to whipsaw between grumbles when the lad decides to go for extended bouts of kickboxing and plaintive worry when he rests for hours at a time. apparently, like his mama and papa, our boy will rarely reside in the happy medium.

the little fellow definitely likes sweets and seems to enjoy moving most when we're in the newsroom. this does not bode well for his choice of vocation.

blaze of glory

scarlet oak
Originally uploaded by grumpnet

it seemed to take a long time to develop, but the autumn leaves seemed to finish strong the last week of october.

it's been raining most of the night, so i'll bet our trees will have been further denuded from saturday's showers.

if you follow the links, you'll be able to get a peek of what the mountain state offered by way of foliage this year.

(with any luck, we'll be able to get our yard cleaned up before our zealous neighbor crosses the street to do it for us.)