Cheeky's Hideaway

Moviefone Lies!!! It Lies, I Tell You!

I swear to god, if you go onto Moviefone you'll see that Syriana is playing at 5:20 on 34th street.  It's all there in black and white.  So you get the babysitter, make plans to meet up with friends and grab dinner at your favorite restaurant, and head out the door, but when you get there....it's a 6:00 movie!  What the...how the...huh?  Bastards!  And by 5:00 everything else you might actually want to see has already started, except for the Chronicles of Narnia, which CroutonGirl/Claudster/HotMama has no interest in seeing.  Someday, we're going to plan a date night that actually goes according to plan.  We ended up seeing Fun With Dick and Jane, which was...fine...I guess.

Meanwhile, Cheeky is really starting to teethe, although the only real evidence is the mouth fisting and the drool slick you find everywhere she rests for more than 30 seconds.  I hear stories about kids who are absolutely miserable during this period, forced to chew on frozen bagels for solace, but she's been totally awesome.  She's also become enamored to the totemic Xbox controller, which has made babysitting while Mommy's out shopping a little more challenging.  ("No sweety, let Daddy get past the rotating blades first, then you can try to digest it.")

Next up:  New Years Eve with some friends from Claud's/CheekysMom's/ HackingCoughthatShakestheWholeHouse's mommy groups, accompanied by ample consumption and followed by Tylenol, club soda and bitters.  If we play our cards right, we may even get to see fireworks over the East River.  It sure beats the insanity that is Times Square, where, for the record you will find exactly ZERO New Yorkers, unless they're cops or Al Roker.

I hope everyone has a fun and safe New Year!  Stay tuned for more Hideaway high-jinks in '06!

I'll take an extra helping of sugar, and can you pass the bowl of heavy cream?

Oh God, I feel like I'm going to burst.    I've eaten nothing but high-octane, sucrose-infused fatty meals for three days.  My veins are so clogged I can actually see chunks passing through them under my skin.  Ugh!  It was all for a good cause, of course...gluttony has long been a fine way to celebrate the Nativity.  I had grand plans to cease the consumption today, but ModClaud/CroutonGirl/CheekysMom/ NameStilltoBeDetermined came home with about sixteen pounds of  left-over pastries forced on her by friends leaving for Ireland today, and it takes a bigger man than me to turn down cannoli.  Of course, it's making me into a bigger man, so that day may come sooner than I think.

Meanwhile, our apartment is collapsing under the weight of trash, laundry, and refuse generated over Christmas.  We have a super-hero cleaning lady who couldn't make it last week because of the stupid transit strike, and when left to our own devices our home quickly resembles Hunter S. Thompson's hotel room.  The excitement of helping Cheeky open her Christmas presents contributed greatly to this, especially since she seemed as interested in the paper as she was the gifts.  We were hurling stuff on every available surface so we could rush her to the next gift, each of which she took to with her usual enthusiasm: staring blankly, looking at us for encouragement, then shoving it in her mouth.   She made out like a bandit, as did Leap Frog, whose stock futures rose nearly 39% on revised Wall Street estimates of future revenue generated by Cheeky.  We're considering moving some of her toys to her crib now--not because she want them or it's safe now, but because we need some place to put them.

All in all, it was a great and relaxing holiday.  Cheeky was her normal cheerful self, despite having her skin bleached by perpetual flash photography.  She really didn't get what was going on, but it was a primer for future years, when we'll need to restrain her with galvanized bridge strands and X26 Tasers to save presents for Christmas morning.  Personally, I can't wait.

One last thing:  I want to wish my sister a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!  She started 2005 battling lymphoma, but she turned 25 on Christmas Eve and is now strong-like-bull and cancer-free.  You go girl! 

Putting the "Ch" back into Chanukah

I tend to forget sometimes that my daughter is also a citizen of Israel.  My wife, who should have married a good Jewish boy, maybe a doctor, is one of the Chosen People, although she admits openly that she's Jewish in much the same way I'm a minister.  She was raised in all the traditions, but you'll be hard pressed to find a more acute case of Christmas Envy.  So the holiday focus at our house has been almost exclusively on the one which favors electricity. 

So I've been thinking about how to acknowledge the Festival of Lights without (a) misrepresenting it, and (b) misspelling it (which, apparently, is impossible as long as you're close).  But before I could come up with anything clever I found this in today's paper.  From what I'm told by my better half, this pretty much sums it up.  Shalom!

You Cannot Stop Her, You Can Only Hope to Contain Her

Our lives of sedentary parenting are numbered.  Now that Cheeky's realized that a little bit of effort can result in forward thrust or centripetal force, she's started rehearsing for the Clown/Krump Battlezone.  Like all objects with mass, however, she is subject to the same laws of Newtonian physics which govern marbles, asteroids, and frisbees.  For example:

1)  Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

The application of this law is evident approximately 10 minutes prior to her being retrieved from her crib.  It's during this hatching phase that she builds up the initial momentum (stored as potential energy until awakened by gas) which will carry her through to her next nap.  It generally starts as simple shuffling around the crib, but develops into full drum corps routines, complete with kicking and thrown objects.  Eventually her arms are a blur of movement, or she's twisting into full scorpion pose to retrieve the Times Metro section.  Fortunately, we have deep wells of external force to apply when she tries propelling herself into the coffee table, and as long as I'm not distracted by Godzilla vs. Gigan or Jesus Christ Superstar (as I was today...daytime TV sucks) I can usually keep that motion within a confined space. 

2)  The relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma.

I've learned this the hard way.  There's not a lot of mass in Cheeky's little hands, but there's an enormous amount of acceleration when she goes for my chest hairs or neck fat.  She pounds her chest so hard I sometimes think she'll break a rib, and her kicks (especially when my crotch is in the vicinity) have the well-aimed precision of Ikken hissatsu.  I can't wait for the day I get brained by a teething ring to the temple.

3)  For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

This law is the most enjoyable to watch.  For example, if your action is to roll onto your stomach, but you've never learned to roll back, then the reaction is ten minutes of struggling and grunting while the only thing you can see is a stuffed giraffe or a table leg 3 inches from your face.  The time would be shorter if your parents weren't amused enough to watch it for that long.  If your action is to squirm out of our arms onto the couch, then the reaction is the pillow falling onto your head when you hit the cushion with a resounding "poof" sound.  Unfortunately, this law applies to events which happen to her, so if my action is to toss Cheeky into the air, the reaction is to be doused with metabolically altered applesauce. 

God help us if we ever have to put Cheeky in one of these....

Deck the Halls with Han and Leia

Why must networks trot out so many spectacularly awful Christmas specials every year? I saw an ad last night for The Christmas Shoes starring Rob Lowe, which made me wince and avert my eyes, and Chris, writing on his blog, reminded me of A Carol Christmas, starring Tori Spelling, Gary Coleman, and William Shatner (I challenge you to find a better cast than that outside of the Hollywood Squares). It seems that every year, in the name of “family entertainment”, we are peppered with all-star tales of redemption and generosity, tired retreads of “A Christmas Carol,” and special episodes of familiar shows in which some character finds “the true meaning of Christmas.” It’s just a matter of time before we’ll have CSI: Santa’s Village and A Very Hughley Christmas…brace yourselves.

This is probably why so many of us fall back on the classics, like Frosty, Charlie Brown, Rudolph, and the Grinch, when we are watching with our families. For all their flaws (the Burl Ives snowman gives me the willies) they are light years ahead of these tossed-off catastrophes. But sometimes, a show is so incredibly painful, so staggeringly repellent, that it transcends its genre and enters into the realm of madness. I’d like to pay homage to one of these shows that haunts me from my youth…a holiday special which lured me in by appealing to my dearest pre-adolescent love, and which I look back on with bafflement and admiration at the dreadful results. I’m speaking, of course, of the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Here’s a brief summary of the plot: Han needs to get Chewbacca to his home planet in time for “Life Day.” (We all remember the Bob Hope Life Day Special, live from Kashyyyk) His wife is fretting because he isn’t home yet, as is his son, Lumpy (a common Wookie name), and they spend much of the show calling various Star Wars characters because…it’s the holidays…or something. Anyway Imperial Stormtroopers make a special appearance to wreck one of Lumpy’s toys, as does—this is no joke—Jefferson Starship. Harvey Corman appears as a character who drinks through the top of his head, and as an intergalactic Julia Child. We learn that Bea Arthur was actually the owner of the Mos Eisley cantina--she even dances with Walrusman. Boba Fett makes his first appearance ever in a cartoon that is the only cool part of the show. Finally, in a Vegas-like coup de grace that makes Ashlee Simpson’s Orange Bowl appearance sound like “The Sound of Music,” the entire cast of Star Wars sings a Life Day song. Badly. Very, very badly.

I LOVED Star Wars. I was SO excited to see this show. I was NOT expecting Art Carney to be involved. 

I used to frequent a local comic book store in Spokane (yeah, like you’re surprised by that), and I got to know the owner pretty well. One day he held up, with literally shaking hands, a video cassette he had just acquired of this holiday special. His excitement was intense and genuine, but not because he was a huge nerd (although that didn’t hurt). It was because this show has NOT been aired since November 17, 1978…for obvious reasons. At some point, shouldn’t someone step into a production meeting and say, “you know, maybe building a story around characters that only speak in grunts isn’t a good idea?” 

By the way, for a little added humor this season, check out this funny article I discovered about the worst holiday specials of all-time. Feliz Navidad!

Tumblin' with the Tannebaum

Welcome back to the program!  I've been hesitant to post anything while Typepad was floating upside in the tank this weekend, but it looks like things are back up and running.  My apologies to anyone who had the shock of viewing last Fridays unformatted blog again...'twas very kind of Typepad to expose that monstrosity to world one more time.

As Claud/CroutonGirl/BallandChain reported on Wednesday, Cheeky's mastered the art of rolling, and has rapidly taken to incremental scooting.  This gives us about 8 days, 12 hours, 37 minutes, and 9 seconds before she's mobile enough to find the box of shattered glass and steak knives we left on the floor and forgot about.  Her object of pure desire, the one which will make her squirm and twist and hang upside down to reach, is the remote control.  *sniff*  That's Daddy's girl.  I'm not psyched to have competition for the magic wand, but if I'm watching a rerun of the Fifth Element and she's got the remote, I can always claim that she picked it....

We finally recovered from this week's holiday parties enough to get the Christmas tree up (bitters and club soda does wonders in the morning).  Claud/CroutonGirl/AchingFeet always envied the gentile boys and girls who celebrated the holidays with trees and electricity, so she throws herself into the presents and the decorations.  Cheeky's got a bunch of things under the tree already (mostly re-wrapped toys we stole from her closet)  and I'm starting to think I need to do more shopping.  'Tis the season for appropriated pagan rituals and obscene displays of consumerism, I guess.

So last night it occurred to me in a dream that Frosty the Snowman didn't have to be a jolly happy soul.  What if you were to get a bunch of bull-dozers and dump trucks and build giant snowballs, maybe 40-50 feet in diameter.  If you stack them you could have a giant snow man several stories tall.  If there's really magic in that old silk hat we found, we could put it on the top and have a Super-Frosty.  Then he could do battle with Mothra or Mecha-Frosty, or leave a path of destruction through Tokyo or New York.  How cool would that be?  I hereby claim all movie rites to Frostaur the Destructor or Snowtron, Defender of the Universe (depending on audience testing)...coming to a theater near you.

Anyway, I have to run.  Cheeky has learned to speak dolphin at an incredibly high volume, and if I don't go get her she'll wake up the neighbors...

Ghost Writers in the Sky

Today's entry is brought to you by CroutonBoy's better half.  And by the letters "C" and "L", and the number "5"

Okay, before I even get started I should warn you: Croutonboy’s not here right now. That’s right, after a no doubt exhausting day of powerpointing, the illustrious father of this blog has invited me, his beloved wife – croutongirl, mrs. Croutonboy, cheeky’s mom, etc. – to weigh in on the day’s events. At last we meet.

Today was an important day. It started when we all headed out to Queens this morning in observance of “Take Our Daughters (Children? Is that the more pc version?) to Work” day. The day was rife with fun and excitement, and it marked a few more firsts in our lives: my first trip to the Tower in Queens; Cheeky’s first flirtation with corporate America; and a new party trick she pulled out at baby group much to our collective shock and amazement.

First things first: Queens. While I expected to be greeted by something out of the Thunderdome, the ‘hood didn’t really seem so bad. I mean, I’m not saying I’d like to build a summer home there or anything, but the plenitude of auto repair shops filled me with the warm fuzzies. After we arrived and toted Cheeky through the halls, mentally ranking her cuteness to the other kids around (she, of course, ranked first, hands down), we stumbled through the minefield of cubicles to the party-room playing host to the day’s events. Delighted by the array of miniature peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, mounds of chicken fingers and piles of ice cream bars, we quickly stuffed our pockets and made our way to the corner, where Santa was poised in wait, patiently allowing child after child to sit on his lap and make demands. After some initial hesitation, we decided to subject Cheeky to this rite of passage. Happy to say, she took it in stride, placidly posing for the Polaroid with the only side effect being a rather large clump of Santa’s beard we had to pry from her little vice grip hand.

After Santa, we headed over to another room where a scary clown who both looked and smelled more like a hobo and wore more makeup than Tammy Faye rode a unicycle around. Deciding that he creeped us out too badly to stay, we quickly exited before he could get too close.

That about sums up our visit. Other than a nice, stinky diaper and stroller skid marks, I think we left the office no worse for wear. I can’t however, say how scarring the site of wall-to-wall cubes might have been for Cheeky. Maybe she’ll be scared straight.

Next we made our way to Park Slope for the holiday gathering of the cool new mom’s group. Yes, after much trial and error, we’ve found a fantastic group that’ll stick. And it gets better – the first thing I noticed at my friend’s apartment was a 50 inch plasma TV mounted on the wall. When I told her that Tony would kill or die for one of those she said, "no, wait, I’ve been meaning to mention my husband got the Xbox 360 and would love someone to play with."  When I mentioned this to Tony, his response was simple…when?

The best part of the mom’s group, aside from hanging out with fun people and commiserating about our lives, was when Cheeky took center stage and wowed the crowd with the new trick – rolling from back to front. Amidst my maniacal clapping and high fives for her being a show-off, one friend broke the sad news: time for baby-proofing.  She gave us a window of 10 days. That ought to be an adventure.

For now, though, we’ll simple enjoy the tricks and be glad that today’s encounter with the corporate world hasn’t taken the fun out of our daughter…yet.

Mindless Monday

Mondays are like the opening monologue on Saturday Night Live.  They're awkward & repetitive, they last too long, and they're only purpose is to introduce something happening later in the show, like a musical guest.  I don't have a musical guest this week (although Nickel Creek is welcome to stop by if they'd like) so I spent most of today looking ahead to what I hope will be the last busy week of the year.  Tumbleweeds start rolling down the corridors around mid-December, and I figure if I can stay focused long enough to make it to the office holiday party (screw you, O'Reilly) I can start "working from home." 

Main Entry: mind·less
Pronunciation: -l&s
Function: adjective
1 a : marked by a lack of mind or consciousness  b (1) : marked by or displaying no use of the powers of the intellect  (2) : requiring little attention or thought; especially : not intellectually challenging or stimulating

To go with that theme, here are my "thoughts" for the day.

No one can stop this juggernaut!!

I reported two weeks ago that my fantasy football team may have finally run into the rotating blades of elimination.  But it's a marathon, not a sprint, and just when it looked like all hope was lost, the I have arisen to vanquish my enemies.  My big money league is peaking at the right time, my Midwest league is so awful that I may actually get a wild card at 7-7.  It's on baby!  Coaching advice for the Rams:  you need to feed the ball to Steven Jackson 50 times a game from here on out, especially in the red zone.  Trust me...I know what's best for you.

More evidence that baby's are chick magnets

Our friends throw an annual holiday party called "Dress Up to get Messed Up," usually involving limos, tuxedos, and debauchery that carries well into the wee hours.  Cheeky wouldn't have any of that, but we thought she'd be good for a pre-party function hosted by the organizer.  I strapped her into the Bjorn, and the three of us headed uptown for cocktails and snacks.  Within minutes, Cheeky was doing the rounds with every lady in the place, while Mommy and Daddy snarfed pigs-in-blankets and Jameson.  My can't lose business plan is now to rent Cheeky out to single guys looking to talk to ladies who would otherwise give them the Heisman.  The brilliance of this is that the babysitters pay us.  It's perfect, I tell ya, perfect!

Laid up

Claud (who is still looking for a blog name, by the way) may have sprained her back yesterday, and is exempt from heavy lifting for a few days.  This means no Christmas tree yet (it was much easier when Harry AND Sally carried the tree than when she did it by herself) and a lot of exclamations of pain when Cheeky needs out of the exer-saucer.  We both really hope it heals soon, since it's no fun to solo manage a squirming infant all day when your lower back feels like it's caught in a bear trap. 

King Laertes: Do you see that boulder over there?  I want you to lift it!
Hercules: That boulder is too large.  I could lift a smaller one.

Sorry...couldn't help that one.  Now I'm spent after wasting 30 minutes looking for the "Il Returno de Hercules" video.  I'm going to bring a new cold pack to my wife now...

A Format C: Moment

Those of you who visited the Hideaway on Friday were witness to something I’ve feared for years: the exposure of my technical incompetence. I bought the domain www.cheekyshideaway.com and was all fired up to map it to the blog, but somehow I managed to:

a) Erase all the formatting, rendering the site a giant white page that looked like it was a left-over web-site from 1997

b) Eliminate any and all image links for Fridays contribution

c) Piss off the technical support at GoDaddy, who were visibly straining to not end every sentence in their e-mails with “you moron.”

As you can tell, I’ve managed to at least reverse the problem, if not solve it, but I’ve been humbled. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, having always prided myself on being able to figure these things out; I was even briefly known as “Help-Desk Tony” by a contingent of Claud’s friends, until I protested because I didn’t want to get calls every time someone’s printer wasn’t working.

That doesn’t mean I’m done trying. There’s lots of cool looking daddy sites out there (BIYF and Mr. BigDubya have gone through recent facelifts) and I aspire to a slicker look here, too. I’ve got my HTML basics book on my bedside table (next to my pocket protector and propeller hat) and you may see some changes in the days ahead. I’ll probably end up making it unreadable; at this rate, my next change may send shocks through they keyboard to my readers. Then again, I may just give up…I’ve been known to get frustrated from time to time.

BAM! It's Winter!

We woke up this morning to snowflakes the size of soccer balls filling the sky. It looked almost Dickensian, except that the rooftops in our part of Brooklyn look more like post-war East Berlin than 18^th century London. A week and a half ago it was almost 60, but Snow Miser apparently realized his year-end review was coming up and he’d been slacking along the Eastern Seaboard. It’s not Minnesota cold—I once saw a newscaster in Minneapolis throw a cup of coffee into the air, where it instantly crystallized into powder and floated to the ground—but between the wind outside my office and the splendid desolation of Queens I feel like I’m a character from “The Thing" (except without the crawling head...eww)

You’d think that all this would have inspired us to get our Christmas decorations up, but…not so much.  No tree, no lights, no holly, no menorah, nothing.  Can you say “lazy?”  At this rate, Cheeky’s first Christmas will be in 2009.  I’ve at least tackled most of my presents, thanks to the magic of Amazon.  I HATE going to malls this time of year, what with the slow-walkers too busy sucking their Orange Julius to notice you’re trying to get around them, and the claim-jumpers who bought everything sized “L” on the rack the day after Thanksgiving, leaving you to wonder why Banana Republic makes such a high percentage of its clothes tailored to gnomes and ogres.  The other major advantage to online shopping is that I don’t have to deal with stores that aren’t for me.  Abercrombie and Fitch makes me feel ancient and fat.  Thanks, Brookstone, but I don’t need a digital chronometer installed in my shaving mirror.  And why the hell do you need a Sunglass Hut every 30 yards?  Is the sun going nova?  It’s much easier to buy online, spend the extra 8 bucks for wrapping and shipping, and forget about the whole thing.

By the way, Claud is finally getting jealous of all the fun nicknames floating around in the blogosphere.  After hearing about SuburbanMisfit, Mrs. BigDubya, CapeBuffalo, and MorphingIntoMama, I had proposed a contest to get her a fun nickname, but at the time there weren't any takers.  We talked about a few last night, including CroutonGirl, SapphireandTonic, MyFeetHurt, and CheekysMom, or maybe a symbol like Prince, but I feel like we can do better than that.  So I'm re-introducing the contest...if you have any suggestions on either specific names (the more appropriate and/or embarrassing the better) or at least some methodology for picking one, we'd love to hear it.