Episodes

I.
I brought James his bowl of cereal. Cinnamon Cereal. It's the Aldi version of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and he thinks it's spectacular. J bought a box of it for me over the summer on a vacation week, and I turned my nose up at it. "Why would I eat that? That's kid's cereal!" (This was dishonest of me. I love sugary cereals. I always eat the worst-for-you cereal I can find when we're visiting her parents.) I didn't get into it then, so James got the box, and James loved it. He loves it so much that he insists on sipping out all the milk with a straw once he's finished the actual cereal part. And he hardly ever finishes all of the actual cereal part with anything else.

Buying Cinnamon Cereal is a once a month treat for him. When he knows it's in the house I usually hear him making noise in his bedroom earlier than usual. At about 7:30 or so I'll go up to his room and open the door. This morning he was sitting on the edge looking at the door, and as soon as he saw my face he said "Hi Daddy, we have some Cinnamon Cereal?" He asks for it when he gets up from his afternoon nap too, and then when we tell him he can't have cereal at 4 in the afternoon, would he care for cucumbers and hummus, he starts to sob that he needs it and he wants it to be morning so he can have cereal again. His deep disappointment is worsened by the fact that he's in the midst of a horrible sugar crash at that point after a morning of being out-of-control wired.

So this morning, I poked my head in his door and he said "Hi Daddy! We have some Cinnamon Cereal?"

I brought him downstairs, and went into the kitchen as he scrambled into his booster seat.

"I wanna big bowl."
"I'll pour you a big bowl."
"Make sure my bowl is big."
"Okay, it's a big bowl of cereal."
"I want lots."
"Yup."

I'd eaten already, but I needed to leave in 20 minutes, so I repacked my gig bag while I sat at the table with him and chatted.

"Daddy?"
"Yes?"
"You will not go anywhere today."
"What's that?"
"You will not go anywhere today."
"Hmm...well, I do need to go to rehearsal today."
"Why you need to go to rehearsal?"
"Why it's your job?"
"Because hat's what I do to get money."
"Why you need to get money?"
"We use money to buy Cinnamon Cereal. So I'm going to go to rehearsal today to get some more money to buy more Cinnamon Cereal. That's how we pay for it."
"You be back by suppertime?"
"Um, I don't think I'll be back by suppertime today."
"When you be back?"
"I'll be back a little after bedtime. Should I come say good night to you?"
"Yup."

J padded down the stairs holding Owen a few minutes later.
"Good morning, James! How's your Cinnamon Cereal?"
"Mommy, I'm havin' lots in my big bowl. Daddy is gonna go to rehearsal to buy me more."


II.
My carpool sat around a table at Wegmans with empty lunchplates stacked in the middle of the table and half-full cups of tea (really hot toddies, thanks to a surreptitious bottle in a handbag) steaming in front of us.

"How's the outlet table?"
I craned my neck to check.
"Still taken."
There's only one table with access to a power outlet in the Dewitt Wegmans. It's almost always taken when we arrive, usually by an old person who isn't even plugging anything in. We wait until they leave, and then we descent to power our devices as we kill the four or five hours until concert time.

"Okay guys, I need an idea for a date with J on Sunday night."
"Dinner and a movie."
"It needs to be something we can do in the house, because we won't have childcare. And it needs to be cheap. On the free side of cheap, actually."
"Hmm...so no dinner out?"
"Nope."
"You should...play a game. Bananagrams is fun."
"We don't have Bananagrams, but that could work."
"You should make dessert together."
"You can spend a little bit of money, right?"
"Yeah, a little."
"Okay, if you to a Joann's Fabric--"
"I'm curious to see where this is going to go."
"Yeah, what does a bass trombone player do at Joann's Fabric?"
"Shut up. So, if you go to Joann's Fabric, and you buy some spare fabric you could make a blanket together."
"That could be really nice, actually."
"Just to confirm, this is something you've done before?"
"Shut up."
"Can you make dinner together?"
"I'd like to give her a break from making dinner together."
"Can you keep her out of the kitchen and make dinner for her?"
"Possibly...but I'd kind of like to hang out with her, and I have trouble in the kitchen sometimes. Like with pizza, I've had no luck at all."
"Maybe you should have her make dinner while you practice Clarke Studies. That sounds like a great date all around."
"That's how it usually seems to go."

"Hey, I think they're getting up from the corner table!"
"Nope, just stretching. False alarm."

III.
"Thank you all very much for your patience. The committee would like to thank you all for your playing this afternoon, they said they heard some really, really fine playing and that the level was phenomenal across the board. They are going to hold one more round, a final round, and they'd like to hear four out of the ten of you. Okay, 4 out of 10 chance, those are good odds. So, for the last round, the committee would like to hear numbers 102, say 109, number 104, say 109, number 108, please let the last number be 109, and number 110. $*&# it. The rest of you, good job, sorry it didn't work out this time, thanks for coming down.

"Hey congrats, play well in the final round."
"Thanks, good to see you again."
"Congrats, good luck!"
"Safe travels back."
"See you at the next one."

"Hi, my name is Roy Smith, I have a reservation to fly from Charlotte to Rochester tomorrow morning? Yes, that's the one. Yes. Yes, I was wondering if there was any chance that I could get out on an earlier flight this evening. At 7:00? Yeah, that'd be great. Now, what what sort of fees would there be to get on the earlier flight? Oh, really? Wait, I'd get $10 back? That's fantastic? There's no fee, and I can go home tonight?"

And that is the story of how Southwest, even though they advertise too much during football games, is a wonderful organization. The orange juice was good too.

Blog Prompts, pt. 3

Your best or your most embarrassing date with Julie

The most embarrassing is probably the easiest to come up with. During my last week of undergraduate J and I had been dating for just a few months, and the future was very murky for us. I was going to move to Chicago, she was going to be in Rochester. We had tried to figure out whether we could see much of each other during the summer, and it didn't look good. I needed to work, and the only work I could find was in Rochester, a miserable job doing early drive-thru shifts at a Tim Hortons. J's work was going to be in Pennsylvania, and there wouldn't be much time for either of us to travel. I don't think either of was thinking "this is the end," but much was uncertain.

I had planned a nice date for us before we said good bye for the summer and then possibly much longer afterward. I made a reservation at a nice restaurant down in Henrietta, scrounged through my disheveled apartment (I was moving later in the week) for some dress clothes, and told her I'd pick her up at her dorm for dinner. I wasn't sure what we'd talk about. Would she be weepy about saying good-bye? Would she be all excited to go home and go to the camp where she'd be working? How was I supposed to feel about all this? Would she miss me over the summer? Would I want her to be miserable missing me? Were we really going to try to live like this for the foreseeable future? And where on earth were my truck keys?

Actually, where were my truck keys?

Since campus was just a few hundred yards away I rarely had need to drive my green 97 Ford Ranger, so it had been several days since I'd needed to take it anywhere. I looked at the clock and saw that I should be leaving if I were to pick up J in time. I started rooting through boxes. I looked under the bed. I looked in my coat pockets. Nothing.

I called her once I was a few minutes late, and she walked over to my very messy apartment to help me look. This was not how I'd envisioned the evening going. We moved heaps of dirty laundry, opened up all the boxes I'd taped shut, and found nothing. About a half hour later I called to cancel our reservation.

We ended up walking to the diner down the street. She was in uncomfortable shoes, and I think the weather turned ugly. We played cards there and chit-chatted, but the evening never turned into any except a few hands of Phase 10 while we waited for our soup and me occasionally saying "I wonder if I put them in the desk drawer?" and J telling me that she had looked there.

We don't have many chances nowadays to improve on our "best date" experiences, although I can say that, though further apart, the quality of our dates is much better now that we're married. I think both of us are at a point, what with the house and everything, that our idea of a date night is much more about saving the money that would be spent on a babysitter and dinner out towards a new can of paint or a kitchen island and staying in with brownies and Netflix. It's also become much harder to find a true night free since I've transitioned into full time work with the orchestra. I have a concert at least one night every weekend, and sometimes I'll be booked solid from Thursday-Saturday night, with rehearsals in the other evenings. So "date night" for us is actually usually something along the lines of having a nice conversation in our sweats on a Tuesday at 10:30 AM while James peers into the window of the carwash.

We did have a great date a few months ago, though. I arranged a babysitter, and we both dressed up in our nicest non-concert clothes. (It feels wrong to put on a tux or a plain black suit to go out on a date.) I had bought a very nice ring for J that I knew she was interested in (It ended up not fitting, so we returned it) and we had a fancy dinner overlooking the canal at Aladdin's in Pittsford. We took a nice walk after dinner, then drove out to see a movie in Henrietta. Just dinner and a movie. But it was the only chance we'd had for dinner and a movie since James was born--it was a Tuesday evening, and neither of us had rehearsal--and it was the only dinner and a movie we've done since.

A Wild Civility

A man ydrove to Target store some fancies for to find
To please his wife and make disport withouten any wine

At Target on a cluttered shelf a label-maker lay,
It boughten was to make a date at end of weary day

The day was weary even though the sun was shining mild
For every day is weary when ye have a two year child

The child was put into his bed, his prayers were allen made
The man turn'd to his wife and next her to their couch he bade

He offered her the present and made gift with alllen pomp,
But she ylooked upon like it were a muddy swamp

"O husband mine, now think ye that our labels are amiss?
I never for our date tonight would have expected this."

The man said "Wife I bought ye this and listen to me please,
For now we might tell difference among our many keys."

"The key that locks the dead-bolt looks to me alway the same
As the key that shuts the latch and now we may give them a name."

"I looked on the ynternet to find of blogger's telling
But its use was never told of much as straightening of spelling"

"And ordering our house is just as holy and as meet
As clothing well our bodies with fine clothes and scentes sweete."

"For scripture says (I thynken) that to godliness is nigh
All cleanliness although I can't tell where or why."

"I thynken though we happy be when all is right arranged
For when the home is filthy you are wont to be estranged"

"And will not come ysport in bed, but storm with faces dour
And must not rest until the kitchen floor ye mighten scour"

"So now we wenden unto sleep and know all set in place
And ye will come to bed with joy and peace all in your face"

And thus he ended making speech of words he thoughten deep
But while he sermons made his wife had fallen all asleep.

Dates

J and I are on a date tonight. You can tell it's a hot date because I'm blogging in the middle of it.

No, we really are on a date. A lot of our dates are at home nowadays, because we have a small bear that lives upstairs. We've had to get creative since he entered the picture, because "dinner and a movie" requires "lots of phone calls and emails to get ahold of babysitters and then additional time to prep outfits-diapers-and-food and then heartbreaking separation anxiety when we drop him off and having to get back by 7:30 anyway so that he gets into bed somewhat close to his bedtime."

So we do that sometimes, but more often than not we have our dates at home. This requires creativity, which is a lot of fun. A few weeks ago we made up our own game where we advanced across a homemade board by answering fun conversation cards. We played a game of I Spy awhile ago, but we were "spying" into the five places where we've lived since we were married. We look at old photos and reminisce. We made our own "jazz and dessert" night with cheesecake, dressing up in our finest, and dancing to old Miles Davis recordings in the living room. For awhile we were doing a once-a-month date of cooking international food and taking pictures to show off to the general public. We haven't done one in awhile, mostly because we're saving money by not buying food to help defray the cost of our recent auto repairs. (Paypal donations can be made here.)

So anyway, tonight's date is "lines from the pocket," which we stole from Whose Line. I wrote out about 20 random lines for us to draw out of our pockets and read aloud (in the midst of whatever conversation was happening otherwise) at 10 minute intervals. Don't worry, most of these are not super-romantic lines. There is no card that says "When I gaze into your eyes I see all the splendor of the starry beauty of a sable summer night." There is, however, a card that says "Did you remember to take out the trash?"

I did remember to take out the trash. I was going to take it out after he went to bed, but at 5:30 he was pulling empty cans of crushed tomatoes out of the recycling and dripping their remnants onto the kitchen floor. He's become obsessed with the trash bin recently. I think it's because he figured out that there are empty yogurt containers in there and there might be something left at the bottom. If he's left unattended in the kitchen he knocks the top off of the garbage and digs until he finds an old yogurt. The trash is also dangerous because we're no longer sure what we're throwing out. This afternoon, unbeknownst to James, I watched him take two of my cornet mouthpieces and drop them in his diaper genie. (Ewww...) J asked me recently, "Do you think, if we had a little girl, that we'd be dealing with these sorts of things?" James was standing in a rocking chair and sucking on a power cord at the time.
 

He's been pushing the chair up against the table, and using it to climb up and reach whatever we're hiding.

But back to our date. We're having a grand time. The trash it taken out, we're having some good dark chocolate, and James is in bed. We need good dates nowadays. Thank you, THANK YOU, to all of you who gave us gift certificates to nice restaurants for Christmas. We will love a chance to have a date out of the house.

Now, are any of you interested in doing some babysitting?