Cheeky's Hideaway

So That's What They Mean By "Off"-Season

One of the perks of my job (besides free internet access and a climate-controlled cube set to 'glacial') is that I occasionally get to work on cool projects for cool clients.  This is relatively rare--I've spent most of the year trying to sell supplemental insurance and high-yield corporate notes--but when someone says, "Hey CroutonBoy, we need your help with a Colorado ski resort chain...are you interested?" the hardest part is not giving the messenger an open-mouth kiss.

So last week I flew out to Colorado to meet the client, pitch their internet-strategy, and generally look handsome and smart.  It just so happens that I also happened to know the client from waaay back in a former life, and she pulled some strings and set me and Oodgie up with a weekend at a fancy new resort they just opened.  You know, to do some research.

Now, before everyone gets jealous (and you should be) you should note the date.  Despite the presence of several feet of fresh powder the resorts themselves have closed for the season.  This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as it saved Oodgie the embarrassment of watching me learn to snowboard.  But it did mean that things were...quiet.

How quiet?  This quiet.

We had our run of the place.  No annoying crowds.  Incredible sales on winter gear and ski supplies.  The undivided attention of the resort staff.

Shuttered shops and restaurants.  Tour companies who don't return phone calls.  Empty hallways.  Tumbleweeds.  Literally.

I couldn't shake the feeling that it was chapter 7 of The Stand and Randall Flagg would come strutting around the corner.

But the deafening silence actually helped us relax, and in the end it was great to get away for a luxurious romantic weekend on the cheap.  I managed to avoid the internet for a few days, and it felt like we were gone for much longer than we actually were.  Can't complain about that.

But now I'm back.  I'm certain there'll be plenty to complain about soon.  Stay tuned.

The Most Important Thing You'll Read All Day

OK, not really.  In fact, you'll probably be pissed you followed that title to get here, only to realize I'm just plugging my new blog.

For some reason I felt that sporadic blogging here at Cheeky's Hideaway and the guilt I have for not blogging more frequently at DadCentric and Draft Day Suit wasn't enough.  I thought that my full-time job and parental responsibilities were insignificant enough to warrant me starting a new blog, because what I really need is another distraction in my life.

I may look like a mild-mannered professional, but within my chest beats the heart of a geek.  And there are others like me.  And just because we don't all order wedding cakes shaped like the Death Star or re-enact scenes from Grand Theft Auto doesn't mean we don't have a voice. 

So I'd like to proudly introduce My Wife Hates My Xbox, a new blog featuring (so far) myself and Mr. Big Dubya.  It's a place to discuss the nerdy, gadgety, and otherwise frowned-upon topics we enjoy which our spouses would rather we keep safely contained in basements and online chat rooms.

I hope you all visit and, if you enjoy it, tell your friends.  If it doesn't make sense to you, then I'll get you Oodgie's cell number and you can commiserate. 

Or perhaps I'll just let Robert Kelly explain...

Seven. Again.

First off, I need to thank the lovely Weirdgirl, who nominated me for the prestigious and totally-without-compensation Excellent Blog Award.   I've been a fan of her site and sense of humor for years, and, as Al Gore and Peter O'Toole can tell you (through clenched teeth) it's an honor just to be nominated.  Supposedly I'm obliged to pass this award along to ten other people (which means that at some point everyone will be nominated) but I'm going to wait on doing so until I actually have time to read more than ten blogs.

However, the bulk of today's blog will be a response to my friend Sparky at Dirt & Noise.  Like a bad penny or Cher, the "seven things" meme keeps coming back, and this time it was Sparky who is cruelly punishing me tagged me. 

Normally, I would use my kung fu to deflect or my spam filter to ignore the request, as I've done seven memes about a dozen times.  In my experience, only seals, sins, and samurais are good in sevens.  However, Sparky is one of my oldest, dearest friends (and pretty funny, too...you should visit her blog and say "Hi") and I can't simply blow this off like I would my taxes.  But since this is my blog, I'm going to slightly modify the rules.

Instead of the standard "seven things you about me," I'm going to offer up "seven things that Sparky knows about me but you don't."  And, as an added bonus, ONE of these is NOT TRUE.  See if you can guess which one.

1. I once dated a girl who we (quite appropriately) nicknamed Dig Dug.
2. My favorite and most-practiced karaoke song is "Rock Me Gently" by Andy Kim.  Watching me swing my hips to it is like watching a time-warp to a uniquely Canadian 1974.  It's Kimpressive.
3. I have seen, but not touched, one of Sparky's boobs.
4. I once confessed, "Sometimes, when I stop to think, I realize that there's nothing in my brain."
5. At the end of a very muddy and heavily intoxicated Jimmy Buffett concert, I sold the affections of one of Sparky's friends to a complete stranger for the price of a single wine cooler.
6. To furnish my first apartment in Minneapolis, I threw a "Bring Your Own Furniture Party."  OK, so my couch may have spent the previous three years in someone's garage, but it was cheaper than Crate & Barrel.
7. I am a life-long quest for the perfect nachos.  The title once rested with now-closed Smiling Moose Bar & Grill, but I rescinded the title when they "changed the chef."  I'm still looking.

I'm sure there are other, even more embarrassing things that Sparky could share about me, but she knows better than to share them as I have an equal (if not greater) amount of dirt on her.

If you're still trying to guess which one of the above is not true, check the comments.

Still Waiting For Her Period

Do you ever wonder how people who talk incessantly do it?  How it is they can continually be chatting about the most inane, pointless things, until their voice fades into background noise or you snap and crush their skulls with your bare hands?  How they can be so unaware of that I'm shoving an ice-pick into my ear to make the noise stop?

I wonder this often, for I seem to have sired one of those people.

Cheeky, god love her, is getting funnier every day.  Her nuggets of wisdom and insight are a constant source of amusement.  But they come at a cost.  A cost of persistence and repetition.

It would not be uncommon for the following sentence to come out of her mouth:

That's the blue piece that's the blue piece that's the blue piece it goes there like a puzzle thank you daddy for giving me the blue piece it goes there like a puzzle thank you daddy it's so beautiful it's so beautiful it's so beautiful that's the blue piece it goes there like a puzzle I'll show mommy I'll show mommy look mommy it's so beautiful that's the blue piece

Acknowledging or interrupting her only serves to change--not end--the conversation.  This morning, as I tried to end the above jumbo run-on sentence with, "I think breakfast is ready" I got the following

...the blue piece oh boy beakfast I love beakfast I love beakfast we're having eggys we're having eggys I love eggys I love eggys I love eggys mommy and daddy are having beakfast with me we're having beakfast together we're having beakfast together mommy and daddy and me mommy and daddy and me we're having eggys I love eggys thank you mommy for making eggys I love eggys where's my water

It's as if a wind-up toy with a perpetual motion device in it's jaw was using Cheeky's body as a vessel, because if you knew me and Oodgie you'd know we only open our mouths for yawns and sarcasm.

I've been wrestling with how this came to be for a few weeks, but it wasn't until I started trying to pick apart and transcribe Cheeky's dialog that it hit me.  And once it's written down it's quite obvious.

I'm a terrible parent.  I've spent so much time teaching her to talk and spell that I forgot how to teach her how to end a sentence!   She has no punctuation!

Either that or Oodgie had an affair with José Saramago.  Baby, you'd better fess up if there's something you need to tell me...

So now what?  They Might Be Giants don't have a DVD for "Here Come the ;, ?, !" 

But I've hit upon a solution.  We're obviously going to have to teach her all her punctuation at some point, but we might be driven to the brink if we can't make some progress fast.  So instead of starting off with the traditional commas and periods, I'm trying something radical.

I'm starting with parentheses.

If she says everything non-essential in parentheses, then we won't actually hear it. 

It just

might

work

As long as she doesn't say things like (daddy I hid your iPod in my crib) or (daddy I'm about to crap in your hand) I'm golden.

They Might Be Burrowing Into My Brain

In 1991, when I still had Mechanical Resonance and Long Cold Winter on heavy rotation in my CD player, a friend handed me a copy of Flood by They Might Be Giants.  I had heard of them, but to me they resided in some fringe world of music that only college radio hosts existed in, a world of pixies, sugarcubes, and dead milkmen.  I'm never one to turn down free music (obviously) but I figured it would soon end up as a trade-in so I could get credit towards the next Skid Row album.

Much to my surprise, I found it weirdly catchy. I thought all music was about babes and partying all night long, but their music was about birdhouses, Constantinople, minimum wage and some poor dude named Particle Man who keeps getting his ass kicked by Triangle Man.  I grew to like them, but I never quite shook the feeling that I was listening to music from a kegger at Lambda Lambda Lambda.

Fast forward 17 years.  I'm desperate to shoe-horn some quality music into my daughter's life...anything to counteract the mental decay that too much Dora & Diego brings about.  The traditional children's fare hasn't taken hold, and my attempts to educate Cheeky on the merits of Fugazi's 13 Songs or Supergrass' In It For the Money are constantly thwarted by Oodgie, who claims some ear-bleeding problem whenever I put them on. 

So I threw a life-line out to TMBG, and faster than you can say 1-2-3 they catch it.

At first I was delighted. There were songs starring ichthyosaurs, nonagons, and a triops.  I found myself singing about the number two and one dozen monkeys, and the still unemployed Oodgie took quite a liking to the seven days of the week.  This was stuff we could all dance to.

Until it became the only thing we were allowed to dance to.

Want Cheeky to finish her dinner?  Put on the 1-2-3's.  Want to get her to stop crying?  Put on the 1-2-3's.  Want her to exhale after she inhales?  Put on the 1-2-3's.  It's like crack, but without the pleasant side-effects.

So, much like live-action remakes of Dr. Seuss books, what was once fun and innocent is now a source of great pain. 

I believe it was Neil Pollack who noted that TMBG is the only band whose audience gets younger as they get older.  That may be true, but I still wince a bit with every repeated chorus, as I realize that both my tolerance and my own happy memories are being whittled away. 

Would I feel this way if we were listening to Led Zeppelin's children's album, or watching "The Nirvana Children's Special?"  Probably.  Let's hope Cheeky's old enough to appreciate the nuanced performance of Gang of Four or New Order--hell, even Vampire Weekend--before I get so desperate as to seek those out.

The Plumbing is Fixed

Remember that whole constipation thing?  If not, scroll down.  Remember now?  OK, good.  Anyway, so that's done.  Over.  Through.  Kaput.  We went from plugged to potty-trained overnight.

Never under-estimate the power of jelly beans and stickers to motivate a child.  Interestingly, this strategy didn't work at all for months, but as we all by now know when a kid is ready, he or she is READY, and you've got to be there, armed with whatever enthusiasm for public urination you can muster. 

All the credit on this goes to Oodgie, who smelled change in her the wind as I was heading out the door for my umpteenth business trip in as many days.  Although I regret not being there to applaud every tinkle while I was chugging Fat Tire on a corporate boondoggle lonely and bored on the road, I'm immensely proud of Oodgie's determination to pounce on the opportunity.  My one complaint is that the requisite celebration involved a trip to Target to purchase "big girl pants," which inadvertently led to Cheeky selecting underwear branded with satanic characters.  I would have preferred Thundercats Underoos, but it wasn't my call.

The downside of all this is that Cheeky is tapping her kidneys every ten minutes.  She'll have her underwear back around her ankles before the sound of toilet flush has died.  You'd think dropping the kids off at the pool or shedding a tear for old Ireland (or my personal favorite, taking the Browns to the Super Bowl) was the best thing ever.  And frankly if I got a treat every time I did that I'd probably think so, too. 

Think about that...every time you drain the lizard someone hands you a Snickers or a Red Hook.  How sweet would that be?  I'd carry a gallon of water with me everywhere I went...

The Shit Heard Round the World

"You ever take a dump made you feel like you'd just slept for twelve hours?"
                                    --Ricky Roma, Glengarry Glen Ross

Can someone please explain to me why anyone, no matter what age, would hold in a crap if they had to go?

Not to be too graphic, but the last place you want to be is between me and the bathroom after a bowl of All-Bran and a pot of coffee.  The human body has an entrance and an exit, and it was built that way for a reason.

So it's inconceivable to me that our child refuses to poop.

I mean, come ON!  You're wearing a freakin' diaper! Do you know how many of us pine for the convenience of just relaxing the bowels in the middle of a meeting or during the third quarter of a football game?  You have the gift of total freedom, a gift that will only last a few more months!  Why squander those precious hours with your sphincter squeezed tighter than Heather Mills' fist on Paul McCartney's checkbook.

Imagine, if you will, what it would feel like to hold in four days' worth of food.  You'd feel as bloated as a Macy's parade balloon, and you could bounce a quarter off your belly.  Meanwhile your confused, half-digested food would be stumbling around in the dark, desperately looking for a way out.  Wouldn't the claustrophobia lead your food to take matters into it's own hands and take an alternate route out?

Cheeky cares not about these things.  The whimpering and whining is heartbreaking for the first 3 hours, but quickly becomes grating after the 78 consecutive hours that follow.  She'd walk around with her blanket shoved in her crotch, and we'd hold her and gently remind her that she's a veteran crapper who just needs to let her natural talents take over.  No luck. 

Imagine what your mood would be like if you were corked up for four days.  Now imagine if you had no sense of rationality, decorum, or accountability.  Now imagine you've inherited the emotional exuberance of your half-Italian father. 

Not good.

The human body, thank god, has the capacity to overcome our mental limitations.  After days of coaching and a doctor's visit Cheeky finally relented.  Unable to hold back the massive forces churning inside, her rectum let loose a blast so powerful it could be heard in four states.  After-shocks continued for the next several hours, as half of Cheeky's body mass was jettisoned, and after each her mood improved dramatically.  Our perky little daughter was back.

Dumbfounded and relieved, Oodgie and I prayed the crisis had passed, and prepared to return to our bucolic life of peeling stickers off appliances and watching Family Guy reruns.

Until a blanket gets shoved back into a crotch.

"My tushy hurts."

Oh shit.

S*b*rbia

There's been a lot of talk around Casa de Cheeky as to whether this particular casa has outlived it's Cheeky-ness. 

My deep personal loathing of suburban America has kept us comfortably nestled in our snug, $700/sq. ft. grassless abode, patiently reminding ourselves of how much our mortgage helps our taxes while wincing every time a delivery truck grazes our car.  We love the convenience of walking half a block to the over-priced grocery store that smells like Bruce Vilanch's large intestine if it had been left on the counter all night.  We're just down the street from a movie theater that, including babysitting, costs $40 per show, and we've got tons of cool restaurants and bars down the street that we vaguely remember the insides of.  It's almost ideal!

But there's a down side, too.  Our yard is a lovely shade of asphalt.  The space between rooms is about the same as the space between these two words.  And the cost of school virtually guarantees I won't have groceries--let alone essentials like an iPhone--until retirement.

Meanwhile, our friends beckon us with bony fingers from across the rivers, tempting us with tails of gingerbread houses on gum-drop lanes, with attached garages and affordable schooling where all children are handed gold bullion and Ivy League scholarships.  "Join us," they call, "all are welcome."  Their dulcet pleas echo in our ears, promising joyous backyard barbecues, with traces of desperate pleas for companionship in shared misery beneath the surface.

No harm in looking, right?

This weekend we trekked north for a brief taste of what could be should our weakening bonds to the city ever snap.  Armed with a fair value estimate of what we could afford and a short set of rules (no McMansions, no Penn Station) we ventured into the wilds of Westchester County to see if our hard-earned equity could be turned into something that didn't require an elevator ride and a stored-value card to do laundry.

In Des Moines, or Little Rock, or Missoula, the sale of our apartment could probably be leveraged into an 8 bedroom estate with a carriage house, marble fountains full of 1958 Glen Garioch, and a family of jugglers and flame-eaters who would perform nightly for our amusement.  We didn't think our dollar would stretch quite that far around the city, but a bathroom with two sinks and minimal exposed plumbing seemed reasonable.  Sure enough, the towns we visited (officially "villages," which makes me think they're populated by Smurfs) were all charming and beautiful, with affordable schools, beach-front access, and no neighbors casually dropping anvils on the floor above us during Cheeky's nap time.

Of course those weren't the houses in OUR price range. 

No, the houses in OUR price range "have potential."  They're the ones that HGTV looks at and says, "Well, we COULD fix it up some, but we might as well just bring in the bulldozers."  Don't get me wrong, I'm as big a fan of floor-to-ceiling wood-paneling in EVERY ROOM as the next guy, but there's something missing when the only cleanser you need is Pledge.

And then there are the "pass-through" streets these over-priced quaint homes were located on.  "Pass-through" is suburban code for "acceleration-only" allowing cars to shoot by like Hot Wheels coming off the loop-de-loop.  Backing out of the driveway would suicidal, and ever since I saw Pet Semetary I've assumed all such roads were automatically accompanied with nearby burial grounds for the internment and resurrection of evil dopplegangers of pets and loved ones.  No thanks...I'll pass on the high-speed Frogger and homicidal zombie cats, thanks.

We walked away disheartened, not because we didn't find anything we liked but because of how obviously poor and unworthy we are.  It's not like we told the broker we were interested only in castles with helipads; we legitimately thought we might find a yard and driveway without also finding appliances from the dawn of electricity.  Nothing makes you appreciate your unobstructed view of the apartment next door like the prospect of commuting an hour to get there. 

My next strategy: contact some brokers to see if they can locate a nice house somewhere in the early 1990s.

I Promise To Post A Real Update Soon, But First A Tribute to Geeks

I really do have some juicy updates for y'all, but I've been busy fetching low-carb ketchup for Oodgie while her surgically-repaired foot heals.  It's not easy being the only person in the house who is both mobile and focused enough to make it from one room to another without being distracted by the need for candy/cheerios/Max & Ruby/little blankie.

Here's a morsel to tide you over until I get something better up later this week.  It's a flowchart of how Dungeons & Dragons made modern life possible (R.I.P. Gary) and, having charted my own path on the chart over the weekend, I have to concede some technical accuracy to this, particularly since I'm effectively writing this in the basement,  by myself, in the dark.  Make sure you click on the image to see it full-sized (or just click here)

This Alone Makes Me Want to Buy Tide

I don't often watch commercials, let alone rave about them.  Up until a couple days ago, I could only remember laughing out loud twice at commercials:  for Terry Tate, Office Linebacker and for Sprite's "Sun Fizz" ad.  I swear to god, though, I nearly soiled myself at Tide's "talking stain" commercial.  Maybe it's because I have a history of spillage, but I crack up every time I see this.  So in lieu of actual creativity on my part, I'm posting it here for your enjoyment.

I wonder if I can get Proctor & Gamble to send me a check for this...