Jul
15
July 15, 2007
It seems like for all the positive things I heard about having children (joyous, wonderful, can be taught amusing curse words), nobody bothered to mention that once you give birth, you will never have another relaxing weekend again. Remember doing whatever the hell you wanted to do with your 48 luxurious hours off from work, like sleeping in? Or reading a book for more than five minutes at a time? Yeah, forget that noise. This is Life 2.0, where the only person who gets to do what they want to do is the same person whose presence ensures you never get to do what you want to do. (Hint: this person is very short, and often can be found pooping their pants.)
It’s been a nonstop, extremely vigorous weekend of Toddler Summer Entertainment; we’ve shlepped Riley from the farm to the zoo to a bunch of playgrounds to our backyard and we’ve played in pools and fountains and jungle gyms and between all that and the eight hundred thousand million sippy cup refills and Riley’s increasingly delayed bedtimes (WHY GOD WHY) I am relieved as hell that it’s over and all this festivity can come to an end. Truly, I need a day of boring emails and pointless meetings to recharge my parenting battery. Thank god for Mondays (something I never thought I’d say, along with “Hold still while I get that booger”).
I thought I’d share some pictures of the zoo we visited on Saturday, because it was so . . . well, let’s take a look:
The benefits of this zoo is that it’s small, no one goes there (easy parking), and it’s a short drive from our house. The downside is that aside from a lot of tropical birds, some lemurs, and reindeer, there’s not much to the place.
Although there was this giant metal bear.
And there were these . . . what the fuck are these? My god, with their serpentine necks and freakishly deformed heads and — oh, wait. Alpacas. Okayyyy.
I would have photographed the emus but the sign made me crap my pants.
In order to shelter Riley from the alpacas and emus, we took him to the Creepy Garden of Metal Animals.
Which, I think, nicely prepared him for this.
Yes, if you haven’t quite gotten your fill of exotic animal life at the zoo, just mosey over to the little room near the entrance for a REAL TREAT.
Note Riley’s childish innocence peeling away in visible waves.
On our way out, I caught sight of this thing and almost called JB to bring Riley over — thinking, gosh, we talk about monkeys a lot, and I bet he’s never seen a real one, and . . .
And then I took a closer look, and we left the zoo. And I haven’t been able to watch “Curious George” since.
Jul
13
July 13, 2007
(Ooh! Happy Friday the 13th!)
Workplace decided to buy every interested employee an iPhone, and on the day the phone became available everyone went down to the Apple store and waited in the long-ass line and ate pizza and played cards and reportedly had quite a fantastic time. Judging by the flurry of emails Sent From My iPhone that swirled around during the weekend that followed—ostensibly giving each other tips on connecting to home WiFi networks and configuring this and that, but they could all be boiled down to “I CAN HAS IPHONE zOMG!”—people were more than pleased with their music-playing, movie-displaying, visual-voicemail email SMS cameraphone hunks of burning burning love.
(Why did Workplace invest in all these shiny new toys? Occam’s Razor explains this generosity far better than the murky ‘business reasons’ cited: it’s a new gizmowhatsit from Apple, and it’s cool.)
I missed all the excitement, because we were off on vacation. Now that I’ve seen firsthand some of the sexy, sexy things the iPhone does (pinch zoom, slot-machine-like rolling calendar dates, rimjobs, etc), I’m of course DYING to get my own (suckily, I now have a 2-4 week wait), and I feel like a total DINOSAUR at Workplace where everyone’s ringtone is the iPhone chime noise and people are texting away and doing that side-turn thing to display photos and my own phone can only, like, place phone calls (how 2005!).
It’s true that I need an iPhone the way I need a very expensive pony, which is to say not at all, but who am I to deny Workplace’s well-meaning but inexplicable urge to outfit its employees with Apple’s latest gear? Also, what does it say about me that of all the iPhone’s whistles and bells, the feature I think I am most pants-peeingly excited about is the ability to read blog comments and emails—remotely? You know, as if I ever go anywhere.
In other news, after a sweltering 95+ degree day on Wednesday I woke up to thunderstorms this morning, and at the moment the skies are practically pitch black and making threatening, I-ate-too-much-pizza rumbling noises, and it just started pouring a torrential build-the-ark downpour, and what the HELL, Seattle? PICK A LANE.
We haven’t played the weekend game in a while, have we? Let’s do it: what are you doing this weekend? Me, I need to pack up my kitchen because in theory the walls are getting torn down very soon, we’re thinking of taking Riley to the Cougar Mountain Zoo (because dude: LEMURS), and I imagine there will be as always multiple trips to Home Depot, Ace Hardware, and Half Price Books (behold my rockstar lifestyle).
Your turn!
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