Phone call mishaps

OK, so I'm at work and I have this shower display that has a crack in the base of it. I call the manufacturer to get a repair guy out to fix it. She says that I need to call another number for after sales support. I say, "OK," and take the number. I'm feeling good, making progress.

I dial and after a few rings this sultry recorded voice answers that I've connected to some line where all my wildest fantasies would come true. I thought, "Eight hours straight sleep? Six maybe?" Alas, no. They were selling some phone sex stuff "where women are dominant." I chuckled a bit and hung up.

My boss, Brad, walks by and he's kinda a horn-dog and I tell him about it. He says, "Redial." I do and get this same line and he takes a listen and laughs and hands it off to the millwork manager and he smiles and shakes his head.

I do some more research and find the right number and we're back on track.

As we were finishing up the day, Brad, Steve the floorcoverings manager, and I get to talking and it turns out that a guy at the store had a door-to-door salesman come by his house and talk him into purchasing a $1800 vacuum. Young couple, maybe 24-25, wife is expecting in a few months, money is probably tight. Yikes. I guess he felt just stupid. Apparently they have all hardwood floors except for a couple of throw rugs on top of everything else. Somebody who is good at math could figure out how much that thing will cost at $70 monthly payments. But I guess that thing can pick up carriage bolts.

more stuff

Kids doing well. Zach has claimed on of Olivia's pacifiers. It's easier for him to gnaw on. I'm surprised that she let him because she has a tremendous emotional attachment to her "paci." When she hasn't had it for a while and then wants it she will search up and down for it. If Elena or I show it to her, she gets a look of such relief and joy like a little addict searching for a fix.

We drove by another house yesterday. We really liked it and have asked for a showing for this one and another. Both are on the edge of Rochester and have a few acres to putter around on.

We watched Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events yesterday too. I liked it. The time period appears to be around the 1920's but people have faxes, pagers, remote car locks and fabulous inventions and architectural anomalies. I think Elena liked it too but not as much as me. I thought that it was going to be one of those movies that was all *bang* *bang* *bang* bad stuff happening and you couldn't catch your breath. One of those exhausting movies like Black Hawk Down. Nope, there were appropriate breaks. Jim Carrey did a great job as the deranged greedy struggling actor/adoptive parent of three newly orphaned wealthy children. Jude Law narrates. Lots of other cameos.

The Rise and Fall of Worm

Olivia was playing in her sandbox today and found a worm. She immediately fell in love. I'm not sure how well he liked it but who knows. He was repeatedly hugged and kissed and got to be stretched and squeezed in some grubby little hands. Olivia gets excited a lot and she will point and scream at things like "Truck" or "Dora." Well, she would yell at the worm but it came out like "Moon." We kept trying to correct that but that's what she wanted to call it. She thought it would do tricks so she told it to "Speak," but it didn't. No doggie treat for you Mr. Worm. The family decided to go on a walk and Olivia insisted on bringing it along. So there she was running up and down the sidewalk carrying this worm giggling and laughing the whole way. Zach just sat in his stroller and watched her.

After we got around the block and back home we saw that the worm had expired. I'm not sure what happened to him but I think Elena took care of disposing of the body.

We watched National Treasure the other day. It was entertaining and I liked it. No Indiana Jones for certain but OK. I was hoping that it would end differently.

Worked over the deck

Worked a short day today and came home and we went to the bank to open Zach a savings account. The lion's share of his loot came from Elena's loose change collected over a year or so. We waited for a little while and the kids were getting restless, almost to a breaking point. Zach fell asleep on the way home and Olivia went down shortly after we got home. I went out and sprayed the deck with some sealer. Been wanting to do that for a while. Didn't take long just had to take the time. A while after I was done Elena told me that I sprayed the back door a bit so going to have to clean that off sometime.

We watched Finding Neverland the other day. The big drama/action sequence was some kids helping a deathly ill Kate Winslet walk down a flight of stairs. It wasn't as exciting as it sounds. Johnny Depp also starred. He played the author of the Peter Pan book. Elena told me that she liked it. I guess it won an Oscar.

Kids to GG Watson

Elena and I dropped the kids off in Decorah yesterday and drove back to Rochester. We're leaving them for the first time overnight and we missed them but I'm sure that they're having fun. When we got home we put in DVD #2, of six episodes of the "best of" TV show Friends. It was OK. I think DVD #1 was better. They did all these flashback episodes and ones with extra characters brought in. Yea, if I have to watch Friends, it should be just the six friends. Not the six with one fiancee or whatever.

I was cutting up a cantaloupe the other day. I sliced it in half and started slicing one half up. The girl and the dog were next to me, her on a chair and him whining pitifully. They both love cantaloupe. I was slicing away when I hear Elena rise an alarm. I look over and Olivia had picked up the other half of the cantaloupe and held it up to her face and was taking a big bit out of it. I grabbed it away and gave her some chunks in a bowl. And then more chunks and more chunks. She had eaten half of it when I distracted her with a toy.

Today we woke up and went to the farmers' market. I had never been to the one here and it was crazy busy. There were about 40 booths and hundreds of people. They had lots of veggies and flowers but you could also buy peacock feathers, handcrafted wooden decorations, buffalo jerky, deer antlers, jams, jellies and honey. We bought a yellow watermelon, a cantaloupe, some zucchini and some salsa. Afterwards, we headed to Salad Brothers for lunch. I had the hot-ham-n-swiss and beer cheese and Elena had the same except she doesn't like swiss cheese so she used my spoon to scrape it off and deposit it onto my tray. The Dr. Pepper was especially tasty.

We went to a used book store. When we walked in there was an elderly lady pricing books and her son, I think, bored stiff because they were both quite eager to ask us if we wanted help finding anything or could help in any way. Elena and I are browsers so we declined to their chagrin. They went back to pricing things and we went to looking. I found some old MAD magazine books and I'm trying to culturize myself a bit and picked up the Iliad and Odyssey. They had many different copies of those books, some abridged and others the full deal all for the same price. I picked up the unabriged ones. If I'm going to read them I might as well do it right. Elena picked up some books and a piano music book. They have so much stuff at that store. There are books just piled everywhere and I mean everywhere. You can't get to the cooking section because of the stacks. Not that I was interested in a 50 year old copy of the Betty Crocker cookbook but as an example. Right at the entryway they have a table with stacks of recently purchased books. Under the table are stacks and around the table are stacks. Next to each of the persons chairs were stacks. Massive inventory. We go up to check out and by that time the proprietor, the woman's husband, is there. He takes our books and hand writes us a receipt. Uses a hand calculator to total it and makes change. I'm glad that we weren't in a rush but it is refreshing that even though it only added perhaps 2 minutes to the process it did force us to slow down our lives and think, "Am I always and so used to be in such a hurry that this couple of seconds is starting to tick me off?" As we left the son looked at us and said to me, "Thank you, Sir. Please come again." I thought it was funny in that Elena bought more than me and she had paid. I think it was only because I caught his eye as we left, but it was still funny.

We went to the movie Wedding Crashers this evening. It starred Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn and Christopher Walken. It was entertaining. I'm a fan of Walken and I didn't know that he was in it until he showed up as a bride's parent. It had some good laughs in it. I'd wait for the rental though. We only went to it because everything else looked worse.

For supper we went to Azteca a new Mexican restaurant near us. It is authentic and we had a good meal. I had three tacos and Elena had some bowl with ingredients in it that you scoop out to make tacos. It was good and we'll go again I'm sure.

Off to watch Finding Neverland.

New pics

Some of our hardware broke down and our ISP couldn't get to our house for over a week to fix their stuff. So no internet connection for Scott. Not so good. The shakes weren't so bad but I just hope that the boils go away soon. Naw, it wasn't so bad. I just kept telling myself that. Oh well.

We've had a lot of adventures recently. Zach is about ready to roll to his stomach. He eats and eats. All the time. Olivia has a jones for the DVDs we have of Dora the Explorer and Shrek. Over and over.

Elena and I dropped the kids off at daycare for a day of driving around looking at houses. We went by 7 houses in and around Rochester and saw some nice ones. We went by Salad Brothers for lunch. I had a turkey, bacon and swiss sandwich with beer cheese soup and a Dr. Pepper. Quite good.

I exchanged pressure washers for a more powerful gas one and it works slick. I took it to our deck and just watched the dirt and algae just get ripped off. Elena ran it for a while too. It's kinda fun to use.