Nursery

The guest room has been officially transformed into the nursery.  Don't worry, we still have room for guests so come visit us!

Before

After

The Great Baby Gear Heist of 2012

(To be read in the slick-talking east coast criminal voice of your choosing)

We left real late at night, see, under cover of darkness...harder for people to see our plates. Packed light, would need the trunk space later for "the goods." Headed east on the Mass Pike, crossed into New York sometime around midnight. Started raining. Made it real hard to see since our wipers sucked. Hadn't needed them all winter. Harder to drive but harder to see our plates too, gotta cover your tracks, don't take no chances. We drove all night and through the next day. Laughed at a sign for Fangboner Road in Ohio.

Heh heh hee...Fangboner. C'mon, even us hardened criminals like a good laugh. Ok that's enough. Back to the caper. We thought about stopping to see some of our "associates" in Chicago, but we had bigger fish to fry. We pushed on and rolled in to my brother and Danita's place outside Minneapolis exactly 23.5 hours after we left Boston.

The next day we had Liz's mom do our taxes. When the great criminals go down, it's always for tax evasion. Ya gots to have a good tax person if you don't want to end up in the pokey, blind and syphilis-ridden.

That night we met up with some of the old gang at Town Hall Brewery to cool our heels a bit before the capering. The Schulz's came all the way up from Northfield, where they are more feared than Jesse James and his gang. The Neshes (who are planning their own baby heist), Reeses, Walkowiaks, Kovalas, Peiks, and Kerns showed up too. We had some laughs.

The loot grab began in earnest on Saturday. It's almost too easy, like taking candy from babies except for the candy is actually things babies use and you take it from other people and not actual babies and all's you have to do is have a pregnant lady show up somewhere, throw a few bucks worth of chicken chili in a crockpot, and everyone gives you tons of free stuff on their own free will and you don't have to "take" so much as "receive." Got it? Even people who can't show up for the free chili SEND gifts in the mail. My aunts Lori and Lois sent us an entire baby stroller and got not a single scoop of chili! There's a sucker born every minute, as the saying goes. The best part: I didn't have to do nothin'--I played some golf with some "associates" while Liz worked her magic.

Saturday Shower at Alli's

We pulled a second job that night at Amy and Andy's place. We haven't been on that softball team in 7 years and they STILL gave us a bunch of loot. We also got the most hilarious gag shower gift ever designed by Kristy Rolig. It's too hard to explain bu t it was "from" a couple we used to bowl against, Herb and Vicki. Herb killed a guy after 'Nam and was in the St. Peter hospital. The gift included Winstons, lighters, and defaced stuffed animals.

The final phase of the operation was on Sunday at a nondescript community room in a senior citizens condo. Might have been Liz's grandma. Not sayin' for sure so as not to implicate her. After bowling a few games, I showed up at the end to help load the loot into the getaway car...during which time we notices a little problem: there was no way we were going to get all the loot into our '78 Challenger (car year and model changed to protect the innocent). We stuffed everything we could into space bags so as not to transport air across state lines. We ended up having to return a bunch of stuff, get gift cards, and re-buy them once we got back to MA, which if you think about it is really like stealing gas. To really top things off, my brother, a legitimate businessman, gave us a free new set of wipers that "fell off a truck" at his legitimate business. And since no self-respecting caper wouldn't involve the transport of alcohol, we got some discounted wine and Surly from Vinifera Wines and Ales, along with a discounted bottle of scotch which I later sold to a co-worker. OK, now here's the best part...the thing that's really gonna put us in the criminal hall of fame along with Bonnie and Clyde and and the diaper astronaut: we grabbed three Diet Cokes for the drive home from my mom's place...you see where I'm going with this? That's right--street value in Massachusetts: 15 cents. yep, 3/5th of two bits, allllll profit.

Sunday Shower

In short, it's good to have family and friends...you know, to fleece.

St. Pats in Southie

We crossed another item off our "things you have to do to be considered a true Bostonian" list* when we finally attended the annual St. Patrick's day parade in Southie earlier today. It was an experience to say the least. Just getting there was an adventure; the trains were packed. Like, India packed. Like European football game stampede packed. Like one toxic fart away from killing an entire subway car full of people packed. But we finally made it onto a train and soon joined the wasted throngs to watch the parade. Luckily Liz's friend Erin from school and her opera singing boyfriend David were there to protect the fetus from any Irish jostling.


Well, we saw things. Bad things. Five year old boys fist fighting while their parents watched? Check ("You need to stop fighting and cussing," said one of the moms as they walked away. At least she was trying). Extreme intoxication? Oh yes. Thirteen year olds smoking? Yup. Public drama? Oh you better believe there was public drama. Hoochies? As far as the eye could see. Sunburned gingers? Yes. Weeping? Also yes. We saw a belligerently civic minded girl spot a discarded paper bag (among a sea of litter), pick it up, and yell "Who! FU#KIN!' litters!?" "YOU'RE littering the streets...with your profanity!" yelled a clever guy. Liz and I were discussing whether this event or the St. Louis Mardi Gras bacchanal was trashier. We deemed it a draw.

The parade itself was, in a word, shitty, even by parade standards. The first thing in the parade, a recycling truck, really set the tone. This was followed by several SWAT trucks and paddy wagons, many of which were likely occupied. A show of force right off the bat was probably a good reminder to all the Southie hoodlums and their kids.

OK, the bagpipers and world war II reenacters were cool, but that was it.

There were all these weird gaps in the parade flow, as if it was planned by hungover Irishmen or something. They didn't even have port-a-potties or food for sale. We did see Scott Brown, so there's that.

"The Emperor says if I lose fifteen more pounds a Speederbike will be able to hover with me on it. Then I'll get deployed to Endor for sure. Finally kill me a coupla' them Ewoks."

We were glad we went but it might be our last time. Since we were all dead sober, I told Liz we owed it to ourselves to try it one more time hammered. You know, after the kid is old enough to drive us but too young to drink. I reckon that would give us a narrow window between age 14 and 14.5 by Southie standards. After an arduous bus trip, we retired to the relative calm of Roslindale for corned beef, cabbage, and a Murphy's. Real dignified like.

*Other list items include: finishing the Boston marathon, bayoneting a Redcoat, sexual intercourse with an Affleck and/or Wahlberg, beating up a MIT geek, Truck Day (yes, this is an actual thing), getting tossed out of Cheers before noon on a Sunday, having a verbal altercation with someone in Yankee garb on the Green Line, murdering somone on Craigslist, and summering on Nantucket.

I'm a bad bad man

Things have been quite good of late. Liz's oven timer is over half way to indicating the bun is done, and she's been generally feeling pretty good. She's been going to pregnant lady yoga and still hits the treadmill regularly. Except for the ever growing bump (which now kicks), the biggest difference is that she's been snoring a lot more than usual. The things I'm expected to put up with. Sheesh. The most recent series of ultrasonic waves bounced off a (what appeared to my untrained eye to be a quite impressive) penis so there's that. Other than the stockpiling some baby equipment, which I'm sure Liz would be happy to tell you all about, that's all the baby news.

I try to be nice but sometimes I'm not. Last night I went to a concert with a friend from work. The "band" is called Die Antwoord and they're a South African hip-hop duo but it's really more about performance art. The members are "Ninja" and Yo-landi Visser, pictured below.



Their schtick is that they act super tough and gangster but then say and do highly un-gangster, un-tough things. The hip hop is mediocre but the overall persona is pretty fun. Anyways, it was an interesting crowd and although we weren't the oldest people there, we were in the upper percentiles. I was packed in behind a tall, thin, person with about a two-inch-long afro. This person was jumping around with abandon, and in order to prevent him from spilling my beer, I was holding out a hand or elbow to absorb the shock when he jumped into me. After a few minutes of this, he turned around, revealing himself to be a girl, and said "If you put your hand on me again I'm going to punch you in the face." I just laughed. A few minutes later she started jumping into my friend Mark, and yelled at him when he started jumping right along with her. I then said to her "If it makes you feel any better ma'am, I thought you were a dude." She said, "Oh, nice, nice" and walked away. I felt proud of myself.

I also try to not use ethnic stereotypes for comedic value but sometimes I do. Today we went to Costco. We have this running joke about Costco and it revolves around the fact that usually about half the people in Costco at any given time are Asian. "You know who loves Costco?" I'll say. "Who loves Costco?" Liz will say, making no attempt to hide the fact that she's humoring me. "Asians love Costco," I'll say. Costco can be a pretty big cluster on the weekends, but it was snowing a bit earlier today and I was wondering how that would affect the crowd levels. I wondered out loud whether the weather might have the Asians hiding out in their ramen bunkers. Liz called me a racist. When I saw the parking lot full of Toyotas I knew I was out of luck. For the record, I love Asians. Best behaved kids in all of Costco. Now the Greek guy that smashed Liz's pregnant belly between his cart and ours, that guy sucks. Later, in what can only be described as a Valentine's Day miracle, went to go buy our annual Valentine's Day steaks and found two big juicy prime porterhouses erroneously labeled and priced as choice flank steak. I probably should have notified someone in the meat department about their error, but as I said, I'm a bad, bad man.

Our Pending Addition

Due to a dwindling supply of blog topics and viable gametes, Liz and I decided that after ~18 years together it was time to expand the family. And because we can't count on nieces and nephews to care for us when we're decrepit. Oh and because there was just too much love to contain between just two people. Also that. Probably should have listed that one first but anyhoo we decided it was time.

Liz, being Liz, got a book called Taking Charge of Your Fertility and began charting and temperature taking and just generally showing her fertility who was boss. She took no guff from her fertility, believe me. Given our long history of unfruitful boots knockin' and some thyroid issue mentioned in the fertility book that Liz convinced herself she had, we were prepared for a long, arduous journey to conception.

Nope. One try. Boom, zygote. Book it. Done. Needless to say the book worked. My repeated requests to be henceforth called King Virile the Dongnipotent were rebuffed, unfortunately. Felt a little cheated, actually, but gift horse, mouth, etc. Despite readying myself for the day for some time, actually seeing the two-lined pee stick was kind of a shock. I felt pretty weird for a few weeks--like nobody in the history of the world could ever understand what I was feeling. But that was early October and I've had plenty of time to adjust to the new reality. Liz, despite some nausea and fatigue, got through trimester #1 relatively unscathed. We've since had an ultrasound and bought a baby carrier backpack so I think we're pretty much ready.

The ultrasound was pretty amazing, actually, to which anyone who's seen their new kid for the first time can attest. We were not expecting to see it moving around already. It all got really real really fast. So everything looked normal, it had both a brain and a heartbeat, and the limb counts were well within specs. They couldn't see external genitalia yet so we won't find that out for another four weeks. Unless Liz is lying to me, neither of us have a strong preference other than healthy and not a total A-hole. So, God willin' and the Creek don't rise, we'll be seeing this little guy or gal on or around June 15th.

A Strange Occurence on the Soutwest Corridor Bike Path

Since I take the same bike path to work every non-rainy day I see a lot of the same people day after day. Some of their stories are pretty boring: lady jogging off the baby weight behind a stroller, guy walking his distinctive dog, guy in the Orioles hat, long gray ponytail man who reads the free newspaper outside the T stop every morning. Some have slightly more interesting stories like guy passed out on the bench who gives off a cloud of booze vapor that you can literally smell from ten yards away in a stiff breeze while biking at full clip and Jehovah's Witness lady who hands out pamphlets at literally the least busy intersection in a one mile radius. Sometimes I like to give them backstories: gray ponytail man is a Vietnam vet still dealing with his PTSD demons. Jehovah's witness lady is ambivalent about her religion and doesn't want to expose very many people to it (seriously, we can't even celebrate our birthdays, you'd have to be nuts to convert...but hey, if some pamphlet you got at a deserted intersection changes your mind, I guess it's fate).

Some people, however, are just a mystery, like these two older Hispanic gentlemen I see all the time who are always walking towards each other carrying sticks (I've creatively dubbed them Stick Man #1 and Stick Man #2). Do they know each other? Why are they carrying sticks? Are they just makeshift hand weights? For protection against dogs? Thugs? Are they thugs? My curiosity finally got the better of me and so one day I decided to follow Stick Man #1, pictured here.


I tailed him from an inconspicuous distance for about a half mile until we came to a playground. He stopped and stood motionless by the jungle gym for several minutes while I hid behind a tree. I was just about to leave when Stick Man #2 came walking from the other direction. I suddenly noticed that the playground, normally teaming with laughing children, was deserted and eerily silent. The birds, normally cacophonous, were still. The squirrels...well, the squirrels pretty much just went about their business. I mean, you know squirrels, them nuts aren't going to gather themselves. Anyhoo, the two Stick Men were just standing there, maybe 20 paces apart, for some time. Again, I was about to leave when all of a sudden they started making these intricate gestures at one another with their hands and sticks, mostly stylized versions of the sign of the cross. This went on for several minutes and again, I was about to leave when literally all hell literally broke literally loose.

Suddenly they both disappeared into a cloud of sand and leaves. After a minute, my eyes adjusted and I realized that they hadn't disappeared but were stick fighting at such a blinding speed that they were hard to follow. Yup, they were Catholic stick ninjas! What ensued was the most dizzying display of martial arts prowess I have ever seen. It was like watching the spawn of an unholy threesome between Yoda, Jean Claude Van Damme, and Donatello that took place on Bruce Lee's grave fight his twin brother to the death for the love of their mother. Which one is the mother, you ask? Michelle Yeoh is the mother. Who's packing the largest green wiener, you ask? Jean Claude, ironically.

They jumped. They ducked. They thrusted. They dodged. Did they parry, you ask? Oh hell yes they parried. Also, you ask a lot of questions about imaginary scenarios I make up in my head to pass the time while biking. They seemed perfectly evenly matched. Every time one seemed to get the upper hand the other would execute some miraculous move to turn the tide. Stick Man #2 grabbed a handfull of playground sand and tried to throw it in Stick Man #1's eyes. He batted aside every individual grain with his stick and shouted "Please, the sand in the eyes trick? That hasn't worked since 1987!" #2 then turned and pretended to run away, with #1 right on his heels. #2 ran full speed into one of the swings, did a full over-the-top 360 degree swing, came down behind #1 and delivered a vicious stick thwap to the back of #1's knees. He howled in pain but stayed on his feet. They fought for what seemed like hours as I ran around stomping out the leaf fires that were being ignited by the flaming shards of stick that flew off their sticks when their sticks crossed. It was truly the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life. Finally, they fought to what appeared to be a draw. Panting and glistening in sweat, they slowly backed away from each other in the directions from whence they came. "Adios, Sam," said #1. "Until tomorrow, Ralph," said #2. It was pretty crazy.

A few days later I decided I would try and get a picture of #2 for the blog. I passed #1 as normal but never saw #2. Also, #1 wasn't carrying his stick. Then, near the playground, I saw this...


Did I actually make a stick cross and take a picture of it? Yes I did. Google images was no help and I'm not that good at Photoshop. But seriously, Stick Man #2 is missing. If you see him, tell him to call and at least let me know he's OK. I'm starting to get worried.

Jason

Sunday, Aug. 7th

I wish I could blog only about where we've traveled and what we ate there but sometimes life is profoundly sad, something we were jarringly reminded of when we answered a phone call from John Kerns Friday night in the middle of watching Black Swan. Assuming it was BWCA-related, I was floored when he told me that one of my best friends was dead.

When we first heard car accident and later a fall, and given the "heard through person X who heard from Y and Z" nature of the information, we hoped and thought that it all had to be a mistake, but still Black Swan didn't get finished. I woke up happy and refreshed the next morning; it took a minute before I remembered what had happened the night before. When the phone rang a few minutes later and Liz broke down crying after listening for a few seconds, I knew there hadn't been a mistake.

So, now I have to talk about the life of someone I loved with many, many fewer wrinkles and grey hairs than a hoped I'd have. Everyone who has said things about Campbell on facebook has talked about his quite literally endless supply of energy and desire to make the world better. This is no coincidence and these two facts basically define who he was.

I knew of Jason in high school in the one year we went to Anoka together before about half our class left for the newly constructed Champlin Park. I knew him as one of the cool kids and just kind of assumed he had the standard high school cool kid attitude. The next time we met was a few years later at Gustavus. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but I know he came from across campus to my dorm to say hello, having heard from Aaron Wredberg that another northern suburbs kid was attending GAC. It was pretty much history from then on, whenever the dorm phone rang and Campbell was on the other end you knew fun and adventure were soon to follow, probably in a baby blue LeBaron:

Let's pledge the OK's, an unregulated fraternity that are allowed to "spank" you, feed you unpleasant foods, and otherwise make you feel uncomfortable.


Let's join the rugby team. Doesn't matter if you're small, you can be the hooker.
Let's go skydiving/snowboarding/scuba diving.
Let's go rollerblade down the stairs at the library. You go forwards, I'll go backwards.
Let's fill this empty milk jug with beer, leave this party, and drive to the casino.
Let's blow off the rest of this case day and drive down to Mardi Gras.


Let's drive down to Chicago and see the Grateful Dead.
Scratch that, we can see The Dead anytime, let's go to see Lollapalooza in Kansas instead (the Dead concert we'd skipped turned out to be their last).


OK then, let's have a Jerry Garcia memorial party at my parent's house.

Even with all of this, he found the time to work with special needs college kids.


And countless other things that were either with other people or upon which the statutes of limitations have not quite expired on quite yet...

As you mostly all know, Campbell was very unhappy about injustice in the world. Since he was the first person we'd met in college who was more passionate about the plight of the downtrodden as he was keg etiquette, Ross, Drew, and I often gave him good-natured crap about his constant quoting of Chomsky, Zinn, Nader, and Ghandi. I remember "clearly" a "deep" conversation we had one morning (after an all night "think"-a-thon) about some current world conflict or strife--Campbell: "Well you know, Ghandi always said...ah, forget it." I'd like to think some of his freshly learned wisdom rubbed off on us despite our being dumb 19-year-olds in flannel shirts.

In what is the understatement of the decade, the guy had charisma. Whether you were one of the highly attractive young ladies he had the superhuman ability to attract, some nerd he'd met through student government and treated with genuine respect, or the attractive lady nerd he met in one of he his peace studies classes, you pretty much knew you were dealing with a unique individual when Campbell was around...one in how many million is tough to say.

Tuesday, Aug. 23rd.

The funeral is over now and I'm back in MA. The wake was tough, but wholehearted laughter often rang out from a given area of the funeral home. The funniest moment for me was watching a co-worker of his from the home office in LA go through one of his photo albums from our GAC years (all captioned in Campbell's 3rd grade handwriting), OK rush's Hell and Olympic days, more specifically, showing scenes even more graphic than the pic I posted. Seeing the look on the guy's face change as he flipped through page after page of people playing name games and having hot eats and cool treats was pretty damn funny. I told him, "No biggy, just top secret fraternity initiation rituals."

"Jason never mentioned those," he said.
"We'd have had to have killed him," I said tactfully.

The funeral was, bluntly, emotionally brutal. Although speakers from every period of his life very eloquently and sometimes beautifully spoke about what he meant to them, it made his loss that much more acute. My favorite, the LA guy from the night before, spoke about how his hope was that Jason would be given the opportunity to be reincarnated as, and I paraphrase, one who guides others down the path to enlightenment and/or knowledge. He said Jason would probably unhesitatingly accept.

Pretty much.
Hearing people from later on in his life describe his passion for government and labor rights painted a very different and yet somehow very similar picture of Jason compared to the years I knew him best. An inevitable progression I think.

I held it together pretty well until the interment. I'm glad I saw saw his fiance Stephanie shoveling earth onto his casket. She wasn't shoveling weakly or ceremoniously; I think she needed to finish the job herself. If I never see anything half that heartbreaking again in my life I will also be glad. I don't think I could have been that strong in her place and I told her that. She maybe wouldn't have thought she could have either before she did.

After everything, Ross, Drew, and I headed out to Somerset, WI to see music, as we had with Jason many times. We saw DeVotchKa and the Flaming Lips on a perfect night and both were great. As if "Do You Realize" needed to be any more poignant.

Well, so long, my friend, those who knew you best will be saying "Campbell would have wanted us to do X" for the rest of our lives.
Do
You
Realize?