I love football.
I love football season. It helps the bulk of the winter pass by quickly, it is fun to spend long dark Sunday afternoons in the livingroom eating munchies, looking at the tube for hours on end, intermittently doing things like dishes and laundry when games are total blowouts or when they're doing a lot of gab between games. I love football.
It's too bad that NFL stands for No Fucking Luck for both my favorite teams, the Patriots and the Steelers. Patsies and Lerrrrrrrrrs this year. Oh well, guess I've gotta route for Denver. They've got a cute QB.
The season got its big kickoff with a little gathering of friends at Hoagie's house this weekend up in New Hampshire. Dan, Derek, Doug, Geoffrey and I were there, as well as a surprising addition of another former co-worker and his wife. Dan2 never comes out. But he was there and it was super to see him. I haven't seen him since I left the IT department at the college over 2 years ago.
We were harassed by flies while out of doors, so the party moved inside and football was consumed with baseball in picture in picture technology on Hoagie's 8,000 inch TV (damn!). We had lots of fun and I was pooped.
Hoagie has a really nice house. I mean, really, really nice. Interior -- immaculate. Lovely. Clean. New carpet. White walls. It made me sick. Sick, sick, sick. And it made me long for a day when I'll have a house that isn't a frigging pigsty, where any small effort I make is matched by the efforts of others, and we live in perfect harmony.
I, too, would like something nice to live in. Our place in Atlanta was nice, but we had no furniture, so we sat on sleeping bags on the fucking floor to watch our 13 inch TV. Things got better but more cluttered in Beverly, where we at least had a used couch, and the girl was too little to do any damage to anything. Plus, she never did anything bad anyway. When we lived in Marblehead, we did our own home improvement, and that was a big mistake. Nothing matched... the best room in the house was the livingroom, it was a gorgeous pink color with sandy white woodwork. I loved that room. The best decorated room we've ever had. Lynn was okay, but the interior was there when we got there and was sort of, New England Italian, if you know what I mean, with an ugly assed rug (brown poo colored) and really ugly linoleum in the hall, bath and kitchen.
Every surface in my house is in ruin. Walls have been colored on by my budding artiste Geoffrey, even though we got him a chalkboard to write on when he needs to do vertical art. I have to repaint his room, repaint Jessica's room, repaint my room... none of this is very endearing, especially when we thought he was done with this phase of life. Last week he took pen and wrote all over Jessica's wall. He likes to draw these faces, which are hysterical, and I love them, I just don't love them on the walls!
I wanted to redo Jessie's room anyway. Just didn't want to do it anytime soon.
Our house has a lot of potential. But I get the feeling we've run out of steam and we just can't do that. We're a million years away from having it all right and put together, but I get the feeling that while we have the boy under our roof it'll be a complete pit forever.
Anyone want a kid?
Kidding. I love my son. I just dislike some of his canvas choices for his self expression.
Remember my new washing machine? The washing machine which kicks ass and makes me sing childhood songs? Well, it almost died a horrible death last night. Let me 'splain. Jessica was sent downstairs with the equivalent of four loads of laundry. I instructed her to sort out the darks from the whites, to wash all of daddy's and my clothes in cold water cold rinse, and to wash all the whites in hot water. She told me she understood what I meant, and went down to wash.
Later, I went down to put the clothes in the dryer and saw that there was no sorting done, there were no clothes even visible which could mean only one thing. I could smell and awful rubbery burning stench. Kind of an engine burning aroma which means only bad things in the mind of a home owner.
She had put all four loads of laundry into the washer. All four. And, on top of that, used about 10 cups of laundry detergent.
Aw man. All I could see was me lying to the Whirlpool repair guy saying "Honest man, no one overloaded the washer. Three towels and some underpants isn't overloading!" So I pulled all the laundry out of the washer, got the manual out, read about how it has an auto shutdown over-ride feature where the machine will turn itself off if it feels it's overloaded. So obviously my machine had the common sense to cease trying to wash 900 lbs of laundry.
I should have guessed something was wrong when the lights in the house were flickering. That usually means there is some sort of wicked power surge going on. We'd once had that problem when my upstairs tenant and I were blowdrying our hair at the same time or something. Come to find out the electrical wiring up on the phone pole had been chewed at by some small critter and our source wiring was exposed, so power was leaking out into the ether and not making it to our house. I had started to think last night that it was happening again. Only this time, instead of a small furry creature chewing maniacally at our wiring it was a large blonde creature trying to save time by doing all the wash at once.
So my daughter got "spoken to" which means I sat her down, explained what she did, asked her what she was thinking, and I sat there, waiting for her answer.
The always popular "I don't know" was what I got from her, with her grey eyes staring back at me from her tired face. "I don't know." Obviously she was thinking SOME thing at the time, or else she wouldn't have done it. I asked her if she was temporarily insane or possessed by demons from the underworld. She shrugged. I basically told her to go to bed.
I think she prefers being yelled at instead of the cold, hard "just go to your room, I can't bear to talk to you right now" thing. It made her cry.
Sometimes, and I hate to admit this, sometimes I think it is important with her to hit on something emotional. She lets so much slide off her back and doesn't really express any anger until an inappropriate time. She really internalized Missy's euthanasia and didn't deal with it until much later. So I was actually pleased to see that she recognized that she screwed up, and didn't just shrug and say "Whatever."
We talked about it later after the washer engine cooled down. I went into her room and she didn't want to talk to me, but I told her the machine was okay and reminded her never to do it again, and, that I loved her.
Never go to bed angry.
Anyway... this turned out to be a longer post than I had anticipated. I have to see how badly Scott C is kicking my A at Fantasy Football in our Yahoo.com league (like I said, I love football) and see how our online Office Pool standings are doing. And, I have to go home to see if Geoff's writing on anything that will fit in the washing machine.
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