little things

boy pulled his first slice of pizza from the box today. #milestones
— some asian guy (@grumpnet) November 1, 2014

after today's preschool halloween party, kris was beat, i was beat and the kids were amped. picked up a couple of boxes of pizza on the way home. kris and i killed ours in one sitting. the boy finished  his in two. it was in his second attempt that i witnessed the milestone.

passed

so west virginia beat oklahoma state on the road. i managed listen to most of the first half on the radio while raking leaves and mowing the lawn and watching the boy and, later, his sister play outside.

then i took a shower and watched disney's "aladdin" with the kids after supper. (boy really doesn't like watching conflict or tension.)

that said, not paying attention to the game went a long way to making the time pass and providing a release valve to the pressure of listening to a conservatively called game.

was pleased that we finished strong. we are bowl eligible now. and now, seriously? we're playing for a shot at the conference title? just gonna enjoy the ride.

crazy ivan

Offensive left guard Quinton Spain (67) is a leading contender
for all-Big 12 honors. (Photo: Charles LeClaire, USA TODAY Sports)

because i can't stop myself, i'm taking another look back to before the start of the season, when usa today's paul myerberg all the way back in june picked west virginia to finish no. 78 among 120 division i football schools.

he wrote:

So this isn't a Big 12 contender, but we knew that already. Instead, I see WVU as a borderline bowl team – not three-win bad, as some have suggested, but hovering somewhere between five and seven wins. WVU wins five if the current predicaments at quarterback, offensive line, defensive line and special teams remain unresolved; WVU goes 7-5 if two or three groups improve before the opener. It's a shaky situation, in my mind. The $1 million question: How many wins does Holgorsen need to return in 2015?

as of this week, he had wvu up 17 spots to no. 22 after a steady rise since the start of the season.

and just to add to the pre-game jitters, video explaining why wvu will upset oklahoma state in stillwater tomorrow. (i particularly agree with the first two commenters on this post.)

the next test

last look back at our latest — and hopefully not last — success. (the last time i did this, we went into a two-year swoon.)

i, of course, took my concerns to a wider audience with this blog post wherein i worry about our recent visit to the rarefied air of public acclaim.

tomorrow's game should once again tell us a lot about this team, its coaching — and its conditioning. (it's gonna be hot in stillwater: sunny with a high of 91 degrees.)

with any luck, i'll be doing yardwork with the kids and hopefully off balance enough to not get too wrapped up in the ballgame.

whirlwind

holy cow, whatta day. up before dawn, on the road with the sun and four potty breaks on the drive up. only blemish on the day was not getting the boy on a stadium bus for free. (oh, yeah, and failing to pull boy's pull-up all the way over his pecker for the drive home as he slept was the other.)

cornered by the camera.

for the record, he ate a bag of chips, a bag of pretzels, a protein bar, a footlong hot dog, popcorn, peanuts, another regular hot dog, three chocolate chip cookies and a liter of water.

needless to say, what with the upset of west virginia beating its first top five team in seven years and its first ranked team since last october against oklahoma state, i'm a pretty happy guy. (fox sports highlight here.)

top that off with this late-night supper, and i'd put this among my hot 100 of best days.

eats hardees bacon cheeseburger, onion rings and vanilla milkshake. pops cholesterol/hypertension meds for dessert.
— some asian guy (@grumpnet) October 19, 2014

seriously. i'm grateful and glad.

and i know the Lord has better things to do than care about the outcome of football games, but the win was just the cherry on top of what i'll call a blessed day: a well-behaved boy, a safe journey to and from morgantown, a generous dad, a job that allows me to buy food for me and my family, kind strangers and unexpected friends. blessings all. thanks be to God. amen and amen.

farm visit

the latter part of the day.

kris thought it would be a good day to take advantage of good weather and a friday to visit gritt's fun farm in putnam county. she thought we'd have the place to ourselves, but we knew we were in trouble when we saw multiple school buses and a lot full of cars.

still, the kids had a blast for about four hours. we left in an orderly fashion. the boy even said "thank you for taking me to the pumpkin farm." and we had pizza for supper. except the baby, who doesn't like pizza.

tractor train never disappoints.

they added a petting zoo, a pedal kart track (not nearly enough karts) and even built restrooms with running water.

they also had chickens and rabbits.

of course, they still had the popular corn pit and pumpkin patch.

baby nearly choked on this stuff because she kept laughing.

seriously, it was about this side of uncomfortably warm this year, unlike our last two visits, which were on cold mornings.

kuya left her.

plus, the boy loved the slide ... but you can only have a first time once.

discoveries

the kids yesterday discovered albums, specifically, soundtrack albums.

they were listening to kris' pandora children's music channel when idina menzel's "let it go" from "frozen" came over. as an online "radio" station, it's only going to get played once and there's no rewind, so when the boy wanted to hear it again, i had limited options.

i wasn't going to pull up the youtube version of the song because the kids tend to get distracted by video on the laptop and then just want to watch more.

probably my next soundtrack album purchase.

and i wasn't about to buy a soundtrack album off amazon or itunes, but the thought occurred to me that maybe the streaming music site spotify might have it available. and sure enough, it did.

(side note here: it's kind of a modern miracle, isn't it, that i can pull up an album in its entirety through a cable line and it doesn't cost a cent?)

(the other side note: this is very good soundtrack. watching the movie for the first time, i didn't think it hung together well at all, but subsequent viewings/listenings reveal smart lyrics and a musical cohesiveness and variety that wasn't apparent in the inital go-round.)

so i called up the track and the kids did their re-enactments to accompany their singing as they've been wont to do all year, but then i did something they'd never heard: i just started playing the rest of the album.

and they were mesmerized.

baby just stood in front of the speakers closely listening to the words. the boy was giddy to hear the catchy, now-familiar melodies of the other musical numbers featured in the film. he even did a soft-shoe song and dance of the movie's, well, song and dance sequence, all of which was too precious to interrupt with an effort to catch it on video.

that it was coming without benefit of the movie and purely as an audio experience seemed to strike them as such a novelty, that they could enjoy this music without dramatic visuals and dialogue was like a revelation to them.

i suspect and actually hope that i've kindled in them the same appreciation and love for the movie/stage musical that i've enjoyed all my life.

overtime

judging by my recent posts, it's obviously been a football month. kris says i become crazy during games. i may need to write a first-person piece with interviews of mental health professionals.

so it's taken me about eight hours to come down from a big west virginia win today. it wasn't "big" in the way that beating alabama or oklahoma would have been. just big in that we kept our shit together and battle and battled and battled and came back after not having our way as many expected for most of the game.

the past two years, when adversity reared its head, we'd fight, but ultimately cave. this time, we beat back and stunned the team that's been our nemesis since we entered the big 12 with a heart-stopping, last-second score.

this team seems to have heart. (and, so far, health.) going into our match-up next week with undefeated and top 5 baylor after their own wild game, i think we can definitely get jacked up. now whether we can execute and stay focused is going to be our next hurdle.

civil right

UPDATED STORY: Same-sex couples in WV can obtain marriage licenses today http://t.co/gPVglP8Gsu #WVequality pic.twitter.com/3LRtrsWQQe
— Charleston DailyMail (@charleywest) October 9, 2014

there's a long story behind where we are now, but suffice to say history was made in west virginia this afternoon when the governor and attorney general announced they would not put up a fight on behalf of the state's ban on gay marriage.

i'd been following the issue for the past couple of years as one state after another either legalized the practice or had its own bans struck down. i observed with the remove of someone not directly affected by it, but curious to see how it would play out.

i never in a million years would have expected the day would come to my socially conservative mountain state.

but when i learned of our officials' actions, and the more i thought about my friends who would be affected by it — how much they wanted to formalize and officially recognize their relationships —  i became kind of overwhelmed with relief and a happiness for them that i never dreamed that i'd feel.

the newsroom was a flurry of activity as the staff rallied to cover the story, pulling together to cover all the angles and buoyed, perhaps, by the sense of history being made and that we were the ones recording it.

football hero

lil leatherhead, mountaineer field #HailWV pic.twitter.com/oyFCZYeQ0W
— some asian guy (@grumpnet) October 6, 2014

the boy is starting to get into the spirit of things watching football games, btw.

i pointed out to him the kansas jayhawk mascot lurking on the sidelines of this weekend's game and while he noticed it, didn't seem to be fazed.

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a little while later, though, as the crowd grew rowdy to stir up the defense near our end of the field, he was taken up enough in the noisy spirit to chime in, "hey, you scary bird! you're not so scary now!"

what it lacked in catchiness, i think it made up for in inspiration and effort.

quick snap

this was probably the best thing in yesterday's game between west virginia and kansas. nice and surgical.

the rest? boggy. no urgency. lots of points left on the field, as they say.

i should be grateful, given the extraordinary strangeness of the day, where 11 of the top 25 were upset and five of the top 10 teams went down.

but i'm hoping that the rosy assessments from guys i've come to trust that we're good enough to sleepwalk through games against bad teams or that we can still administer an ass-whipping even when we're not firing on all cylinders are correct and not indicative of a regression back to last year's flat team that couldn't finish games.

flush with pride

implements of destruction.

so the arm toilet tank lever on the commode broke this morning. a trip to lowes — after an unsuccessful visit to pile — yielded an aftermarket version of our kohler angle-mounted lever, which was a perfect match. (not pile's fault; easier to have a handful of universal mounts versus a wall full of specific makes.)

turned out the driving from here to the west side back up to corridor g was the hardest part of the job. well, that, and figuring out how to get the arm into the hole in the side of the tank without breaking it off the lever.

(turned out they didn't separate. all i needed to do was remove the nut and thread the whole arm through the hole and re-tighten the nut. glad i didn't do something bone-headed, like force the pieces apart.)

all told, the operation took about 10 minutes — an all-time record for home repair.

anyhow, getting to use the tiny channel lock pliers to loosen the old lever and tighten the new new one made me feel like i was actually doing handyman work. little victories.