Saturday Grab Bag Week in Review

I’d like to offer belated apologies for the unevenness of Monday’s post, which no doubt owed at least something to how burnt out I was on the topic at that point as well as the consecutive nights of staying up late followed by getting up early. But even more than for the readability (or appalling lack thereof) of what made it on to the blog, I’d ask forgiveness for completely neglecting to include certain expressions of gratitude associated with the whole ordeal. I’m grateful to my in-laws, who stepped up during crunchtime on Sunday; not only did they bring dinner to the birthday party, but they pitched in with bathing and bedding-down the two older children while my wife tended to the newborn, freeing me up to get down to the final pre-release push much earlier than I otherwise would have. I’m also grateful to my wife for her understanding and support as I bailed on various child rearing and housekeeping tasks (not to mention marital quality time) in the name of staying on deadline for the freelance project all along. On the flipside, I’m at least somewhat grateful that the project subsumed the weekend in such a way that we did not spend a lot of time gnashing our teeth over the Orioles/Yankees series, and in fact on Sunday night my wife watched much of the game upstairs while I had the Gameday app running in the background on the computer downstairs. (Obligatory BASEBALL MONTH reference!) And in a small but meaningful way, I’m glad my wife and I have an accountant who does our taxes, which had been finished back in early March, and that filing my household return by Monday the 15th was not part of the weekend pile-up.

Mostly, of course, I’m grateful that the whole thing is done. But you probably gathered that from the original rambling.

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I had gotten pretty lazy about bringing a lunch in to work in the weeks leading up to paternity leave, and through my first forays back into the Big Gray, but this past week, my first full 40 hours since something like the last week of February, I managed to remember to stockpile early in order to have something to eat at hand every day. (And now I have a headstart for next week because on Wednesday there was an office pizza luncheon.)

Anyway, on Tuesday I went down to the suite's kitchen to nuke some soup for lunch. There are three microwaves in the kitchen, and when I arrived two of them were already in use, and they continued to hum as I warmed up my bowl in the third. It occurred to me at some point, standing and waiting in front of my microwave, that I was in a virtual nexus of radiation which might not be entirely safe, especially considering that the models that end up in office kitchens tend to be older cast-offs. No ill-effects so far, but I will continue to monitor the situation.

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So I said I had nothing left to say about Community, barring a huge crossover between the show and my personal bailiwicks. But then Parks and Rec on Thursday had Patton Oswalt talking about Star Wars VII? COME ON.

Funny enough, not only had I heard in advance about Patton's guest spot on Parks, but my brother-in-law made sure to e-mail myself and my wife on the off chance that neither of us had been aware of it (and also on the off chance that we would ever miss a Thursday night NBC sitcom block), because he knew it was the kind of thing we would want to be right up on top of. Which was sweet of him. However, the link he sent us was to the extended outtakes of the filibuster scene, and my wife and I opted not to launch the video. Call us old-fashioned, but we both preferred to watch the episode of Parks and Rec in question first, and then check out the special feature, as it were, after the fact. So we saved the video for Friday night. (For the record? Worth it.)

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Another laying-the-geek-on-pretty-thick idea I had regarding blog aliases for my children revolved around an old Marvel comics series I was pretty into as a kid, The New Mutants. The hook for this series was that the New Mutants were the junior X-Men, and the main characters were in fact children (adolescents, sure, not toddlers and babies, but from the parenting perspective the differences between those two stages are minimal). As I said, I was a fan when I was a young adolescent myself, and it was brought to mind thanks to the baby's recent weigh-in at ten pounds, which is one of the standard sizes for a cannonball. Thus I've been calling the baby "little cannonball", and Cannonball, as it happens, is the codename of one of the New Mutants.

(He's the blond flying one.)

The other four original New Mutants were Sunspot, Karma, Mirage and Wolfsbane. Sunspot was the only other boy, so presumably that would be the little guy's handle. (And once again, considering his affinity for astronomy, fairly appropriate.) Karma would be a decently apt handle for my daughter (considering that is surely what she will visit upon me as the years go by) if it weren't basically a stripper name. And Mirage and Wolfsbane are great codenames for the illusionist and the lycanthrope in the comics, but neither is an intuitive gimme for the little girl (she's more or less moved past the wolf-howl phase, sadly). Ah well, the search goes on!