What Do Pumpkins and Washcloths Have In Common?

Nothing.  Duh.

Except that you may see both in this post.  I have uploaded two new albums since my last post.  Here are some pictures from Halloween (he was a monkey in case you can't tell).  And the album has some good ones of him sitting in a pumpkin patch.

From Halloween, Pumpkin Patch, Mom's Visit

Here is another album I uploaded slightly before Halloween, so it's just a bunch of random candids; he only has two teeth on his bottom jaw, you can sort of see them here:

From 10-20-08

 

Lastly, a super duper exciting video of him crawling around.  But the funny thing that cracks me up about it, and why I hit Record in the first place, is he's crawling around with a washcloth in his mouth and shaking his head back and forth.  He does the head-shaking when he's really happy, so we think it's his version of dancing.  You be the judge...

Washcloth from Brian Palmer on Vimeo.

As always, go to vimeo to watch the video in HD.

That's it for now.  Only one set of parentheses.  This blogger must be rusty. 

Wait, wait.

(((((((((())))))))))

OK I feel better.  Post is good now.

Redbox

I rented a movie for the first time in a long time this weekend, and decided to use Redbox, a kiosk at my local grocery store. I've never used one of these things before. It was stupidly easy. I reserved the movie online in less than 2 minutes (including registration), went to the store and picked it up in about two touch-screen presses and a credit card swipe. All movies are $1/day (only new releases though), and you can just keep it as long as you need to, though if you start going more than 4-5 days you'd have been better off getting it at Blockbuster or such. Returning it involved one touch-screen press and slide the case into the kiosk. Done.

Just thought I'd share. I usually totally ignore all that kind of crap in grocery stores (well except for the coin counting machines, those are pretty cool, especially now that you can use them with Amazon for no fee). In fact I didn't even know it was there until a few weeks ago, and I've been going to that store for a year now.

The movie I rented was Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It was...meh. Funny in spots. It dragged on in others. Important to note that Apatow did not write this one, only produced it. It was written by Jason Segel (of How I Met Your Mother), which probably explains all the gratuitous dong.

The Annual "Whatcha Watchin'?" Post

In response to Dung, here are my top five currently-running shows (i.e. still airing new stuff), in order:

1. The Office
2. Big Bang Theory
3. Psych
4. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
5. Heroes

The Office continues to be my favorite show, hands-down. I also really liked the British version, and you can't go wrong with either one. This is one show that I require that Ash pay attention to, because I love all the subtle looks and innuendos and such, and I get sick of her asking "what'd I miss?" all the time when I just burst out laughing for no audible reason. She's been cooperating quite well this year; it's been a struggle to make her put down the DS.

Big Bang Theory is one show where I find myself LOL'ing more than any other show. The Office is great, but a lot of its charm isn't in pure, raw humor. I can see how BBT is a niche show, being more for the nerd crowd or people who can at least appreciate nerd humor. But for me it's great and I hope the networks continue this trend (which also includes Chuck).

Psych was one of my favorite shows before, but this year they must have brought on some new writer(s) or something, because it was significantly and noticably more funnier than the first couple seasons. Yeah, that's right, that just happened. More funnier. And I have added Maggie Lawson, who plays Juliet, to my top five "Adultery-Pardon" watch-list.

Sunny is just as hilariously wrong as ever. I find myself not exactly craving to watch each week's new episode(s), but when I do watch them I laugh my politically-incorrect ass off.

Heroes has been getting some bad geezer press this year, what with all the schizophrenic plot lines and new characters and time travel and... While I do feel like they are missing the boat from a general plot perspective (what TV was really lacking at the time Heroes came out was just a great sci-fi show where genetically supercharged heroes kick ass, a la Buffy or Angel or Dark Angel, or even a TV-version of X-Men or Fantastic Four), instead of focusing more on great characters with great powers, they are turning more into Alias/X-Files with these season+ long story archs that never go anywhere and rarely answer questions. It's a mess. But I love it. Ash hates Sylar, but every time he comes on screen I'm like a kid at Christmas. He's the best...villain...EVAR! I love his scenes. But don't worry, Sylar's not taking Maggie Lawson's place on The List.

Honorable mentions go to Eureka (sweet show), Biggest Loser (though they need to drop this whole couples format, I think it's stupid and unfair...if you're going to start a competition as a couple, you should finish it as a couple), and the 2008 WSOP (shuffle up and deal!). We watched the first episode of Fringe and haven't seen another one yet. And if Reaper ever comes back (did it get canceled?), that show definitely deserves honorable mention if not in the top 5 somewhere.

It's My Birthday, My Birthday...

It was my birthday this past Sunday, and it was nice. Got to just hang out with Ash and Emmett, and we went to Outback for dinner and I finally satisfied my irrational, yet surprisingly consistent, semi-annual craving for a bloomin' onion. Unfortunately they make those things for like 4 people, so after about a third I start to get nauseous. Why do they always ask you if you want a box for it? Sorry, but no one is taking home a bloomin' onion. That's gross. Try warming that up tomorrow and let me know how that works out for ya.

I also splurged and got a glass of sweat tea. A glass and a half in, and I take a sip and my mouth feels like when I dive into Crystal Lake and graze the bottom with my mouth open. I look at the glass, and there's a quarter-inch of sugar at the bottom. I have never seen that before. Oddly enough, it wasn't even good sweat tea.

All day I couldn't get this out of my head:

Little Man Crawling

He crawls! Time to babyproof...


Crawlin' from Brian Palmer on Vimeo.


More Crawlin' from Brian Palmer on Vimeo.

Anal Annihilation

I finally got a chance to use the jogging stroller today for the first time. Just jogged for a few minutes in the neighborhood. There's an ever-so-slight incline for a bit, but regardless just having to push and manage the stroller was enough to not just kick my ass, but utterly and completely annihilate it.

Emmett slept through the whole ordeal. Typical.

Speaking of Emmett, he's doing well, thanks for asking. Sitting up on his own, pulling himself up (and then laughing as he lets go and plops back on his butt), and even crawling a little bit. It started as a bit of army-crawl, kind of swinging his hip around to the side, spinning himself 90 degrees into a sitting position, then reversing the whole process. Now he's cutting out the sitting-back-up-thing and actually crawling a little. I wish I had video but there hasn't been a good opportunity to do some filming lately.

For now here are some pics:

From 08-22-08

From 08-25-08

Giggling Virii - Caught on Film

Here are couple more HD home videos (click through for HD, embedded videos will only be in SD).  I really like this camera, it's a Canon HG10 (no tapes or media, records movies in HD right onto a hard drive, which oddly enough, is also typically abbreviated as HD, making it HD-on-HD Lovin').

First up...remote-flippage.  (Why does that come up on spell-checker?  "flippage" is totally a word...what the shit, there it goes again!  Stoopid computers)

Remote-Flipping Giggles from Brian Palmer on Vimeo.

Next up...fuzzy block poundage.  (Oh...but "poundage" is a word?)

Fuzzy Block Giggles from Brian Palmer on Vimeo.

Parentheses FTW!

Speaking of Old Crap

As a follow-up to my last post full of photos, some over a month old now.  Here is an updated "horsey ride" video in HD.  I forgot to post that as well. 

 

Mah bad.

 

Fun While It Lasts from Brian Palmer on Vimeo.

 

Yeah, I know.  Same video.  How lame of me to blogurgitate.  Is that a word?  Is now...

 

Edit:  to view it in HD, you have to go to the video on vimeo's site apparently - clicky clicky.  It does not come across in HD when embedded.

A Few Older Albums

I have been meaning to post these photo albums for a couple weeks and just never got around to it.  Believe it or not, I was actually busy at work.  Yeah.  I know.

All of these are with our new camera, a Sony SLR I bought a month or so ago.

6/10/08 sample:

7/3/08 sample:

7/11/08 sample:

I will have pictures uploaded and posted of our vacation to Michigan hopefully this week.

For Kim and Jeff:  "individual and social responsibility" first appears on page 2.

Horsey Rides for a Quarter

It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.  OK, well no one got hurt, but this video was kind of cute that I took of Emmett bouncing on Ash's leg.

I need to play around with some settings on the way I create and/or upload the video, so I need some more practice, and this seemed like a good one to start with.

Shelves. Yeah...boring, I know.

Ash is turning me into an Elfa® fanboy.  These shelves are sold at The Container Store, which we used to shop at a lot when we were living in GA.  They are custom-cut for your measurements and completely modular/customizable, meaning you can hang up some shelves, then move them up or down as you need to.

The first project in our new home that we did using Elfa® shelves was the laundry room, which just had one long shelf over the washer/dryer.  We converted this to three shelves, which added a ton of storage space in our tiny laundry room.  This was my first Elfa® install, and I understood then what Ash saw in these shelves.  They were wicked easy to put up. 

So then we decided to do our master closet, which is not really a walk-in, but yeah you can walk around in there a little.  Basically what we did was split the long wall into two shirt-length hangers and a single hanger for pants, with shelves on top.  Before it was just your typical one shelf with a hanger below it across the whole wall, which is just so much wasted space.

 

To be fair, I should mention I think you can buy this kind of customizable and easy-to-hang shelving at Lowe's/Home Depot, but when we went there to get something for our laundry space, they weren't able to cut the shelves to fit our dimensions.

Materialism (a.k..a. Gadget Pr0n, a.k.a. Bring on the HD!)

I admit. I'm very materialistic. Being a boy, I specifically like gadgets (as opposed to material goods such as...oh...clothes or furniture or furnishings and such).

With our tax return in hand, I guess you could say we've gone on a bit of a tear here in the last month or so. It started with the entertainment center. Well, the entertainment center didn't arrive until 7pm one night. Ash was gone, so I had to deal with these nimrods for the next two hours by myself. Needless to say I saw enough plumber's crack to last a lifetime, and their solution to when something doesn't fit right: kick it or push it until it fits ("that's what she said" - Michael Scott). They didn't install the back panel of the left tower right (the cords go up instead of down), and the whole right tower needs to be replaced. Awesome.

But anyway, it's not like you take it down to Target and go up to customer service. It took 2 months just to get it delivered, so I expect it'll be another two before they actually fix what was messed up from the first time. And you better believe Ash'll be there when they come back!

So anyway, once the crack-heads left, I measured the TV opening and went to Circuit City and bought the largest HDTV I could fit into that space. To give you some perspective, we replaced an old standard definition 26" Sony Trinitron that was about 12 or 13 years old. So we went from that old P.O.S. to a 46" Samsung LCD.

The next day, we brought out a DirecTV installer to get a dual-tuner HD DVR. Holy sh'pocky! HD channels rule (girls drool). And being able to record in HD is obviously a must. We have a Tivo and have always been huge Tivo fans, but a) it wasn't dual-tuner because you need a 2nd satellite line coming into the house which DirecTV had to install, and b) we would have had to buy a whole new HD Tivo anyway.

Since we are doing away with the whole receiver/cd player/speaker setup from before (we just never used all that stuff), I did buy Ash a Bose iPod docking station that is the bomb. Not a real bomb, that would suck. Just the bomb. You can see the unit in the top of the left tower in the picture above.

Hearing music stream forth from the iPod out of some real speakers prompted me to purchase a new stereo for my car yesterday, one with an iPod/iPhone connecter built in. So I can control the music from the actual stereo. Anyone with an iPod Touch or an iPhone knows how impossibly and horrifyingly dangerous it is to do anything with the device while you drive. So this will make it more safer and better sound quality. The FM transmitter I was using before was definitely not the bomb. Having to change stations every 5 miles was so idiotarded I can't begin to fathom how people actually use those on a daily basis.

So, you see how this works right. Ash wants an entertainment center...I get a TV. We get a new TV...gotta get an HD DVR. Want to get rid of the receiver and the CD player and the speakers? Well we need a docking station then. You don't want me getting into a wreck do you? Well then I need a new car stereo. It's all justified. Paperwork's all there, look it over...

p.s. Count the parentheses in this post and you can understand why the blog is called Parenthetical. Hell I even get past the title without dropping a pair in there.

Flickr

So I'm trying out Flickr for uploading my photos to instead of Picasa-slash-Google; linking to photos in Google and placing photos in the blog is a PITA, so I wanted to see if Flickr would be easier.  Seems odd that blogger and Google photos would be integrated so poorly, seeing as they are both Google tools.  Here is the link to my new Flickr account.

For starters, I uploaded two albums.  The first is when a couple of ex-co-workers visited.  Ooh, neat, I just put the picture right there (click the pic to go to the full album).  OK putting pics in the blog is much easier than Picasa.  That's insane.  It's your own tools, Google!  Can't they play nice?

The second album is of Teh Emm3tt, of course (click the pic for the full album).  There's some good shots of him and Xander laying next to each other on the bed, some shots of him sleeping, me sleeping, me and him sleeping, him playing Super Baby, and ... mom playing Wii.  To calm him down one night, we did a sing-a-long to Fountains of Wayne which we streamed through the Tivo.  Technology's swell.  When it works.

But now its time to say
What I forgot to say
Baby baby baby
Come on, what's wrong
Its a radiation vibe I'm groovin' on

Captain Fussypants

So what kind of 2-month old doesn't calm down in the car? Our kind. He's gone on two car rides today. The first one it took him about 20 minutes to calm down. The second one he was happy and smiling as I put him in the car seat, after 10 minutes (on my way back from Blockbuster returning Dan in Real Life and Into the Wild), he cried his poor little eyes out.

Our usual trick is to bounce him while holding him in a sling, which is convenient because it frees my hands up to type this.

Here are some updated pics. We had a pediatric appointment on Friday, and Em is 101/2 pounds! So he's put on almost 4 pounds which, and I really have no frame of reference but, I think is a good thing. And he's outgrowing some of his newborn clothes already. Doc says we can expect about another month of The Fuss though. Yay.

...

I started this blog 6 hours ago. It is now 9:20 and he finally went down for the night. I so look forward to the day when I don't put him in his crib, slink away, and then have a desire to celebrate when I don't immediately hear him start to fuss.

Resurrection

OK, OK. I give. If the fans want more blog, well then, I guess I can prolong the death of this one at least a little longer.

Next, they'll want cake. Anarchy!

Here are some updated pics of Emmett. For the prior albums, you can always click on the "Brian's Public Gallery" link at the top. Feel free to explore, Dora.

So, here's some of the highlights of what's been happening in the PalmerRaineyan house:

• I watched Em by myself quite a bit this weekend. I survived. The long-lasting impact on Emmett's life remains to be seen. He is being monitored for laziness, fast-food cravings, and twitch reflexes that will tell if he has been over-exposed.
  
• We finally closed on the house in Columbus. Rawk.
  
• We watched the movie Once, and liked it. I bought Ash the soundtrack.
• We got crap reception with Verizon, so we switched to AT&T. I got an iPhone, and I'm loving it so far. When we decide we are keeping AT&T for real, we'll send out new digits.
  
• Ash is addicted to nonograms, after I bought her Picross for the DS for Christmas. You can try a few yourself here.
• I am still addicted to oGame.

We need ideas for good movies to rent. The writer's strike couldn't have come at a worse time. With Emmett here are watching more TV than ever, and even with Tivo suggestions that are recorded, we are running out of stuff to watch at 3 in the morning while one of us is up with the little man, bouncing on an exercise ball, trying to get him to go to sleeeeeeeep.