I tried to share my Pitt tickets with my friend Chas, but his grandmother is having her 90th birthday celebration that weekend. My alumni friend Liam didn’t have time to enter the alumni lottery this year, but he wants the tickets to the Pitt game to meet up with some other alumni friends.

The rest of the tickets are going to my uncle. Corbin is probably the biggest ND fan in the family, and he subsidizes my ticket ordering [which amounted to $800 this year]. I really only ever want to go to one home game per year, so he always takes the rest of whatever I get. He laid dibs on the Michigan tickets right away.

Basically I jumped through all the hoops that I usually do, but don’t get a payoff this year. No vacation, no ND football game, its a good thing I have a baby to play with.

I’ve gone to see The Dark Knight, which was the first time since Abraham graced us with his presence that Debbie and I managed to get out alone. I went to the zoo, where the boy and I became an exhibit to all of the women around when Debbie went to the restroom. I went to Whiskey Island on Friday afternoon for a picnic, took a walk by myself to get some alone time with nature, watched swallow bug-catching, a swallow-heckling oriole, and played with a groundhog for a little while.

Last Monday my office was one of the three County offices raided by the FBI and IRS-CID as a part of their investigation into corruption by County officials. Apparently they came over the intercom and told folks to go to the canteen [which is what everywhere else is called a lunch room]. The design room keeps the overhead speaker turned off because we’d rather not listen to the best in soft rock from the 80s, 90s and now, so I didn’t hear the announcement. I happened to be both on my computer and on the phone, both no-nos, when the FBI knocked on the door. I’d already managed to tell Debbie everything she needed to know to get the scanner at home working though, so it was no big deal.

I went to the canteen, where everyone else was, and filled out a sheet that asked for basic information and job duties, and then got to take the rest of the day off.

When my mom rolled up here for the 4th of July, we planted a tree for Abraham. I had a tree planted for me when I was born as well. I even wrote about it for Young Authors, so you can read that here. Although that picture is from a month ago, Abraham is already much bigger, I’d say near 12 pounds. He’s started smiling and chuckling a little, and I can actually sort of play with him now. The only rough part is that when I’m at work he’s in his best mood, so when I come home I get to interact with him for the part of the day when he’s at his worst. It gets frustrating at times.

I got season tickets to the Notre Dame football games this year, blessed be my monogram. I don’t know that I’ll be able to get to more than one of them, however.

The weather has been wonderful, and today looks as if it will continue that pattern. Dinner is a daily choice between eating on the porch or watching some old school Muppet Show episodes. I recently discovered that I can get Mr. Wizard on DVD as well. Abraham’s going to talk to folks at school about these crazy shows that aren’t on TV anymore and no-one is going to know what he’s talking about except his teachers.

I haven’t been to a rock and roll show in forever. It hurts.

2080/220 = 9.454545

9.5 days * 6.6 miles per day = 62.7 mpg.

If the average cost of milk is $3.50 a gallon, it costs me a little more than 5 ¢ per mile.

3.5/62.7 = 0.0558 $ per mile.

So the next time someone asks, I’ll tell them that I get 62.7 mpg of milk which is about 5¢ per mile; and secure my nerddom for all time.

When I was a kid I had a sweet bike, with a big fat back tire that was perfect for laying a nice thick piece of rubber down when I skidded out. The only problem was that it was red, white and blue, and not a very aesthetically pleasing design either. So I took the thing apart, painted it black and silver, wrote a name I’ve since forgotten on the top tube, and basically pimped it out for an 8-10 year old.

Now I want to do the same, but this time I want to build my own road bike. This biggest obstacle to this project is that I’m no bike geek; I don’t know what brand of frame to look for, who makes good rims, gears, shifters, brakes, etc. The learning curve will be kind of steep if I’m to get anywhere with this. The biggest help for this will be the few folks I know who are hardcore cyclists; Lou, Jeff and Andy, I’ll be on y’all like Mama Cass on a ham sandwich about this, once I’ve got the renovations under control.

In the evening he’s usually overstimulated from all the new things he’s learned during the day, so while he feeds he fusses mightily. Sometimes he gets full and doesn’t really know what is going on and becomes inconsolable by Debbie.

I’m an expert, however, at both waking and getting the boy to sleep. Here’s a demonstration of the former:

The latter basically consists of me laying him across my body and letting him hear my heartbeat and look at my face until he’s out like the fat kid in dodgeball. Takes no more than 10 minutes, every time.

I’ve been reading him Robert Bly’s The Night Abraham Called to the Stars and The Silmarillion.

The other day I referred to him as Lord Squirmoculous, and treated him as if he were a commanding alien from an alien invasion force; disguised as a baby, of course. This has been quite fun, and we’ve been running with it. Saying: “Lord Squirmoculous commands x!” and “Your forces are leaving Squirmocula now, sir!” and “If you don’t listen to Lord Squirmoculous, he’ll unleash the Squirmoculizer!” Poor little guy, he has no idea. Heh.

Cash Flow

This was a silent film assignment to get us acquainted with the equipment and basic storytelling.

Dialogue Sequence

This film assignment was more concerned with writing dialogue and camerawork than the first one.

Don’t Be Curious

Shot on Super 8mm color film stock, we had a limited amount of film, and had to plan and ration its use. The result is fairly disjointed since we ran out of film.

Vice Versa

Intermediate film project on 16mm Black & White. These films only made it to the rough cut stage, as the pre-production and production itself were the stressed items instead of post-production. Neither of us were very happy with the outcome, we never really liked our story, and all the other ideas got turned down.

Hammer to Fall - 2002 Notre Dame Fencing Video

I made this for my teammates at the end of the 2002 season. Not an assignment. I made this kind of thing fairly often in high school as well.

Pressure - 2003 Notre Dame National Championship Fencing Video

Same deal for my senior year.

Brown Bag Burgers near Great Boredom Mall is another tasty little eatery with a mural on the wall. Although their burgers aren’t the Best in Cleveland, they are the exact perfect size for eating, leaving you full but not stuffed, satiated, not begging for more. That’s a hard balance to strike.

I painted, put down quarter-round, replaced a pane in the doors to the bedroom, and painted those too. The plaster needed some serious patching but that was done awhile ago. I’m having quite a bit of contracted work done on the bathroom and getting a closet expanded. One of the small rooms is disappearing to make this happen, but it is certainly worth it. During this process we’ve found some painted-over hand-made fixture gems. Here are some hinges:
Stripped of their paint [and original black enamel, unfortunately]:

And restored [thanks to Rustoleum]:

The window sashes have similar paint-encrusted metalwork, and I’m still working on restoring the original doorbell [you can see the paint-encrusted version and the empty spot in the photos above]. The door itself is probably going to take a week or two of work itself. I’m not looking forward on the constant removing and rehanging of it.

There will be pictures of the bathroom and closet when they are finished.

Abraham is one week old and I’ve still not managed to get rid of him. I took him to Petco the other day to see if anyone wanted to adopt him. That didn’t work, so I went to Home Depot to try and return him there. Home Depot will take just about anything back but they wouldn’t take the kid.

We’ve been told that routine is the most important thing for a newborn, so we’ve been trying to establish one. Abraham’s in utero routine was to wake up at 10pm and be up from 2-5am every night. This has continued for the most part ex utero. We’ve been trying to change that using various methods. The first is bath time. Every night at 8, and try to keep him awake until we feed him right before 10. By doing this we hope to get a good start to our sleep. This only sort of worked, we neglected to realize that by sleeping all day, of course he’s going to party all night. Yesterday we kept him up with frequent small feedings and he decided to stay awake for a few hours on end on his own. Last night he only fed twice, at 1:30am and at 5. I barely woke up in my memory, but Debbie says I was fussing nearly as much as the baby when he cried.

Naming Convention

We chose Abraham, after a moderate amount of deliberation, because we wanted a strong, biblical name that isn’t used all of the time. The name Abraham certainly fits that bill, and I hope my son grows into it; and becomes as strong and honorable as his namesake[s]. The biblical Abraham is huge figure in Islam, Judaism and Christianity, and Kierkegaard [and other philosophers, so I've been told] have used the story about him and Isaac as a frame to analyze ethical and moral behavior.

There’s also Abraham Lincoln; a pillar of humanity if ever there was one.

In terms of nicknames, I’m not a fan of Abe, but I like Bram. And Abraham rolls off the tongue so well that there isn’t much need to shorten it. Everyone liked the name except for the crossing guard.

Depending on who you ask, you’ll get a couple of different answers for his middle name. Originally, I didn’t want to give him one, Abraham Harvey being imposing as it is. But in February, my grandma died. Her name was Frances Sue. I considered having a boy named Sue for a brief time, but settled on Francis, which works out well since Debbie’s father is named Frank.

Miscellaneous

Abraham wiggles alot.