PAgent’s Progress

This was one of those weekends where I wound up more tired at the end of it than I was at the beginning.

Friday night was family movie night. However, when we considered our options, we only had The Muppet Show (first season) and A Muppet Christmas Carol. Out of curiousity, I checked the other disks I currently had out from Netflix, and “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” was rated PG. I couldn’t believe it, a movie that I had gotten for me and my wife to watch, and it was suitable for my kids.

So, we watched Hitchhikers Guide. The kids really liked it, which was a bonus. My son was actually able to keep up with the plot. When Slartibartfast was talking about the huge computer that was destroyed before the Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything was calculated, he suddenly blurted out “It was Earth! They’re talking about the Earth!” I was blown away. The kid is six, remember. I would love to see Hollywood turn out more movies rated PG that the kids would like to watch.

For reasons I won’t go into, the wife had to drive herself to urgent care later Friday night. No big deal, but she didn’t get back until around 4:00 am, so she didn’t get much sleep, and I didn’t get much sleep waiting for to get back. Saturday morning, I had to drive my daughter to a pottery class. But the fun was just beginning.

Saturday evening, several of my daughter’s friends came over for cake and ice cream to celebrate her birthday. Then we all went to Safari Sam’s. Safari Sam’s has the largest indoor jungle gym in Oregon. If there is a better place to methodically exhaust a child, I cannot think of it. We had pizza for dinner, and dropped off all but two girls.

Then the slumber party began. Slumber parties are fairly easy for me as the father — I just stay the hell away from them. I’m not going to bring anything to the party that will be of any use to these young ladies, and furthermore the very last thing I want these little girls to do is go home and tell their fathers that “Mr. PAgent is so much fun to play with”. No thank you. I’m sort of allergic to buckshot. Makes me break out in angry red holes.

Nevertheless, there were a few consequences to having our family room occupied. The biggest was that the cats slept with us, instead of being locked in the family room overnight with the girls. They pretty much tapdanced on our heads all night. Between knocking things off dressers, scratching to get under the covers, fighting with each other, and generally walking on our faces, we got very little sleep again last night.

After we said goodbye to our guests this morning, I took the kids out to a local farm. We went through a corn maze, got some hot dogs, and picked out some pumpkins. We ran home and hurriedly cranked out three jack’o'lanterns, then got out the rest of our Halloween decorations.

Our daughter opened the rest of her presents, and then I got busy fixing her birthday dinner. For her special dinner, my daughter wanted steak, mashed potatoes, and corn. I had scored the last fresh corn on the cob of the season at the farm, and made garlic/sour cream mashed baby red potatoes (skins on) to go with. I grilled the steaks outside in the dark. Dinner turned out well, and she seemed happy with it, especially the corn.

Tomorrow is Halloween, so we will have to get the kids dressed, and get them around the neighborhood. One of us will have to stay home to deal with the little darlings and the bigger hoodlums that come around. By the end of the evening, we will be exhausted. But this happens every year, in one flavor or another.

My little girl is ten, now. It doesn’t seem that long ago that we were terrified to take her out of the hospital, because the weather had turned cold while my wife recuperated from the C-section. I remember our first foray out as a family, to get a hamburger at Big’s Hi-Yu-He-He drive-in. My wife was terrified of some injury occuring to this fragile little creature, and she rode in the back seat hovering over the car seat the entire trip. When we actually got there, we decided we couldn’t go in because the restaurant was full of cigarette smoke. We ended up eating in the car. Even then, my life had changed completely, although I hadn’t yet realized how much, and there is almost no way to measure how much it has changed since then.

Here’s to my little girl: You are the most frustrating person in my life, but I have been wrapped around your finger since they cut you from my wife’s body and placed you in my arms. I cannot imagine my life without you. Happy Birthday.

10 Reasons Why Gay Marriage is Wrong

01) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

02) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

03) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

04) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

05) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

06) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.

07) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

08) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.

09) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

Blatantly stolen from craigslist via LinkFilter.

The other morning I began to gradually awaken, like a massive whale slowly approaching the surface to breathe. My eyes cracked open and I read the time projected on the ceiling. It was about 5:30 am, a good half hour until my alarm was set to go off. Why was I waking up? I checked the usual suspects: My wife wasn’t poking me, my bladder wasn’t overly full, I didn’t have a distressed child peering into my face-

*chirp!*

Wait. What the hell was that? Did I just hear something?

Did I?

Guess not.

*chirp!*

There it was again! What WAS that? I bet it was something the kids left turned on. Part of my daughter’s spy kit, or an electronic timer left on.

*chirp!*

Oh crap. Now I recognized it. When we’d moved into our last house, in Eugene, the smoke alarms had been hardwired into the house with a battery backup. When we took possession, the house had been around 50 degrees, and the low battery warning had been chirping just like that. We had no way to reach the smoke alarm, so I had listened to it chirp for about half an hour, slowly going insane. And then it had stopped. I realized later that it had stopped because we had turned on the heat and the house had slowly warmed up. A warm battery produces more juice than a cold battery.

*chirp!*

And I could hear the heat coming on, in preparation for hitting a setpoint at 6:00 am. That means that I-

*chirp!*

I just had to lay there in bed until the battery in the smoke alarm warmed up a little bit.

…?

Aaaahhhh…

Of course, then my alarm went off. Later I mentioned to my wife that we needed to pick up some lithium 9V batteries for the smoke alarms. We had installed all three alarms at the same time when we bought our current house, and they would probably all need to be replaced together. Then I promptly forgot all about it.

Until this morning.

*chirp!*

I looked at the ceiling. It was 1:15 am. Damn it! I never replaced that battery, did I? Crap! And there’s no way it’s going to stop this time-

*chirp!*

-in fact, I was sure it was going to keep it up all night. So I climbed out of bed, put on my robe and went out into the hallway. I needed to determine which smoke detector was making the noise. It could be the one in the hallway, or the one in the living room. I just had to wait until-

*chirp!*

Damn it! The sound was almost completely nondirectional. It could have come from either one. I decided to just go get a battery. I went out to the garage and grabbed a spare 9v battery, then came back into the house. As I walked under the smoke alarm in the living room, it went-

*chirp!*

Aha! I knew which one was the culprit now. I pulled a dining room chair over, climbed up on it, and opened the alarm. I yanked the lithium battery out, and carefully snapped a new one in. As the battery terminals made contact with the appropriate connections –

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!!

the alarm went off right next to my ear for a couple of seconds. I heard a series of loud thumps from the bedroom and my wife popped into the hallway, looking disheveled and anxious, and altogether uncertain as to how she had managed to teleport from being horizontal in bed to being upright in the hallway. In fact she looked very much like some deep sea specimen that had gotten dragged far too rapidly up into the bright sunlight, not certain how it happened, and not happy about it.

“I thought you heard me get out of bed.” I said, from my perch up on the chair.

“…no…” she mumbled.

“It was a low battery.” I said, fairly obviously.

“…OK…” she said. Then after she checked on the kids (who had of course slept peacefully through the entire episode) we both stumbled back into bed, and slept the rest of the night.

Now I just need to remember to change the other two batteries. Maybe I should write myself a note.

Nah. I’m sure I’ll remember.

The rains have been toying with us for a while, now. Every time a front came through, we would ask ourselves, “Is this the beginning of the rainy season? Is it time to put away the sunglasses and sneakers, and set out the Gore-Tex parkas and mud boots?”

Well, I believe the above 10-day forecast makes it abundantly clear. Winter has arrived. We can look forward to mostly gray weather until spring.

It’s not all bad. When I was in the midwest, I missed the wet weather. Even in the dead of winter, the Pacific Northwest remains green and lush. I grew up on Puget Sound, which has even grayer and wetter winter weather than Portland does.

I guess I have gills. The truth is, too much sun and dry weather can make me cranky. We can go weeks, months even, without a drop of rain during the summer, and there’s nothing like that first rain shower after a long dry spell. I encourage my children to join me on the sere, brown grass, doing our own peculiar rain dance. But we’re not asking for rain, rather we are celebrating its arrival. And I love the smell of rain after a dry spell — it smells clean. And there’s nothing more soothing than listening to the patter of rain through an open window as you drift off to sleep.

There is a kind of rain that occurs here that I have not experienced anywhere else. It looks almost like a heavy fog, or as if you were walking under the world’s largest produce mister. You can’t actually pick out individual droplets, and if you didn’t know any better, you would say it wasn’t even raining. But you only have to be out in it for about 30 seconds to get soaked to the skin. I love that kind of rain. I used to take long walks at night when it was drizzling like that, when the streetlights would create halos of light in the fine droplets hanging in the air. It makes me feel rejuvenated. There was nothing like it in the midwest, and while I lived there I missed it horribly.

Lest I sound like some kind of hydrophilic deviant, let me assure you that by the time spring rolls around, and the clouds roll back for the summer, I will be as thoroughly sick of the rain as everybody else. I will cheer when the grass dries out and I can put my raincoat away until fall. But for now, it’s not unbearable yet. I can appreciate it for what it is – the inevitable backdrop to winter here in the northwest. Cold, miserable, and familiar. And somehow comforting.

It was prom night at Red Robin. I had some sympathy for the boys. They all looked a little lost and ill at ease. The girls, on the other hand, all looked like they were trying to look sophisticated and sexy. But it takes more than an expanse of cleavage and high heels to carry that off.

There was one young lady that just blew my mind. In contrast to the prom dresses the other girls were wearing, she had on a white ‘nurse’s uniform’, one that plunged in a deep V in front, and only extended an inch or two past her crotch. Combined with the lacy white stockings that only came up to midthigh, she presented quite a picture.

Okay, she looked like a porn star.

But someone should have told her that you can’t go halfway on an outfit like that. She sat down at her table, and immediately started smoothing her skirt, tugging it down, pulling the hem down, and smoothing it again, over and over. It was obvious why she was doing so: Once she sat down in that outfit, half the restaurant would see everything she had if she didn’t. But in her compulsive tugging, she ended up looking completely schizophrenic. Why put that dress on in the first place if you care what people see? If you’re going to pull off a dress like that, you really need to just embrace your inner tramp.

It seemed to me that all the girls, and not just the budding porn star, thought that being sexy had to do with the clothes they wore, the makeup they had on, and the jewelry they put on. They just weren’t old enough to have learned that sexy doesn’t start at your clothes and go in, sexy starts between your ears and works its way out.

And just a side note to the young woman at the table next to ours: It was, like, really fun to, like, listen to you, like, talk to your friends. But I, like, hope that when you go to, like, college, you pick a major that, like, doesn’t involve public speaking.