I can haz nefu?

Indeed, I can!!

It is my pleasure to announce to you, my dear readers, the birth of my nephew, Caleb Alexander, born this day the Twenty-Fourth of April in the year of our Lord Two Thousand Eight.

Here's the stats:
Weight: 7lbs 5oz
Height: 20.25 inches
Fingers: 10
Toes: 10
Awesomeness: Complete

The only pic I have as yet is a little small and grainy. I'm assuming it was a camera phone. But here it is. Of course, the LOL elements were added by me. Just for grins.

...the day after

I'm not going to be drinking whiskey ever again.

Okay, at least not for the rest of the week.

I don't do hangover's very well. I spent several hours this morning praying for Death's sweet release, knowing it would not come.

On the other hand, it's an interesting position to read a post on my own blog, and feel like I'm reading it for the first time.

Sorry for inflicting that one you.

Although my recommendations still stand.

TTFN,
MST

God... I am such a geek

I can't help it really.

This is the first time I have gotten really, and I mean REALLY drunk, comma, in quite a while. I didn't realize, until recently, that Knob Creek whiskey was a product of our nice ol' Kentucky friends over at the Jim Beam distillery. God, I lurv those guys.

Anyway, I'm pretty drunk, and I think it's HILARIOUS to blog when I'm drunk.

So here it goes. I was watching season 1 of Rome. I think it's a great series by HBO. It ranks right up there with Showtime's series "The Tudors". I can't wait til season two of that comes out on DVD.

But now that I've finished the second disc of Rome, I decided to watch, drunk as I am, good ol' Kenneth Brannagh's version of "Henry V". Ah, I have such memories of this play. When I was in grad school, my very good friends and I took a course by one of the most brilliant professors in the field of Shakespearean drama, little ol' Douglas Brooks. We spent weeks developing a scholarly edition of the St. Crispin's Day speech from said play. And so it stands dearly in my heart.

Thus, I popped it into yon DVD player as I am very, VERY drunk on premium whiskey. And thus in such state of veritable bliss, I noticed in passing that the part of "Boy" was played by none other than the very Dark Knight himself. That's right. The man who appeared in Stephen Spielburg's "Empire of the Sun". The inimitable Christian Bale. God. That guy is such a good actor. He couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old. What I wouldn't give to be in his place. I always dreamed of acting Shakespeare on the stage.

Anyway. I give you now the greatest recommendation that I can of any film adaptation. Check out Branagh's "Henry V". There is simply no play in the world that can be bad if it's got Brian Blessed in it. I dare you not get chills when he looks right in the camera and says: "Bloody CONSTRAINT!!"

I'm gonna go sleep it off now.

Love you all,
MST

Upadate:
Lest we not forget, other great British actors, at least those that I know if. Don't overlook anything with these actors:
Christian Bale
Dereck Jacobi
Brian Blessed
Dame Judy Dench
(okay, she's not in it, but I still also love Maggie Smith (Professor McGonnagle, for the win))

I'm really not looking forward to the hangover tomorrow...

KUT is dead to me...

Okay, at least for the next week or so.
For those of you not reading this in Austin, KUT is our local public radio station.

My morning listening routine usually consists of listening to Jason and Deb on 101X as Michelle and I get ready. In fact we have both developed an unhealthy addiction to that morning show, but that's another post.

Anyway, on my way to work in the car, I usually switch between 101X and KUT so that I can get the news of the day from NPR. Unfortunately, this week is KUT's annual give-us-some-fucking-money-cause-the-fucking-republicans-took-it-all-away drive.

Which means I can't listen to KUT this week. I mean, I pay my taxes, I vote for the people who fund public radio and television, and I even manned the phone banks once for the PBS station in College Station. I know this sounds really selfish of me, but I've already PAID for NPR. Through my taxes.

They've started this line of begging where they say, "Oh, don't you love the in depth reporting we do, like when we spent 600 straight hours telling you about every last person who lost their house in Katrina? If so, then you need to pay us for that!"

No, no I don't. Because it's PUBLIC FUCKING RADIO!! That's the whole point. I don't have to pay for it. If I paid for it, it would be Sirius. Or it would be cable. Besides, even if I did give you fifty bucks, it would be a drop in the bucket next to the corporate donations you already get, so that those corporations can get more write-offs. And I'd still have to listen to the longer and longer sponsor ID cuts in between stories. I know that ArcherDanielsMidland is the supermarket to the world, or what have you. I also notice that I haven't heard any investigative reports about how they are raping the environment lately. Curious, no?

So, instead of getting to listen to actual news when I switch over from 101X because they're playing the same Foo Fighter's song for the hundredth time in a row, or because I don't want to listen to that stupid titty-bar commercial again, I am forced to listen to the local KUT voice talent saying how much they enjoyed bringing you a thirty-minute retrospective on local washboard players.

So, please, for the love of gods, vote for people who will fund NPR and PBS at higher levels. So that I can listen to that cranky sports guys on Wednesday without hearing him beg for money.

TTFN,
MST

Mo' money, mo' problems

I promised myself that I would try and blog more, so here I am. Blogging.

I hate just blogging for the sake of blogging, but I guess I'll try. If you don't get completely bored by my life, the way I am, I guess it'll work.

I've been working on a budget. Again.

I attempt this every so often, because my wife and I are both horrendous with money. Oh, we follow the old axiom of "Pay yourself first", of course. We've got the requisite 401K, state retirement account, Roth IRAs, savings account, etc. But now that our credit cards are payed off, along with our cars, we've got more disposable income than either of us ever thought we'd have at this point in our lives.

And we spend it. Frivolously. At least, that's the way I feel about it.
So, every now and then, I attempt to sit down and create a budget. I figure that if we put most of this disposable income into savings each month, then by the end of the year, I would be able to buy myself a brand new car and pay cash for it. No more car payments. And in another year after that, we could afford to go anywhere in the world that we want to go and spend as much time there as our limited vacation time will allow.

The only problem is that I have far more good intentions than I seem to have follow-through ability. And Michelle is as bad as I am.

Still, I will try once more, just like with dieting. Maybe it'll stick this time.

Mark put me onto a really good website, as well. www.mint.com

It's more or less a free, online version of Quicken, or similar expensive money-managing software. You log onto the site, connect through it to the secure servers at your various accounts, and the program gathers your transactions and categorizes them into wonderful little pie charts, average comparisons, and budgets.

Mark assures me that it is all very secure, and I trust him on these things. The only thing he obsesses about as much as computers and Street Fighter is his money. And so far it works pretty well. I need to feed it some more info, but already, Michelle and I can see where we're pissing away all of our money.

Well, that's enough about dirty, sexy money for one night.

TTFN

I'm so gay sometimes

I don't usually post from work, but this will be a quick one.

So I was logging into Rhapsody last night, and I saw that Kylie Minogue has a new album out, entitled simply X. Just for esses and gees, I put it on.

And here's how I know I'm gay.

I REALLY LIKE IT!!

Especially the track "No More Rain".

I recommend giving it a listen, if you like that kind of thing.

And no, I don't you to set me up with that new receptionist, no matter how cute he is.

Too many question . . . no answers

So, it seems like lately, there are lots of things that are making me unhappy.

Well, unhappy is maybe too strong a word. Annoyances, frustrations, uncertainties; I'm not sure if these are better terms either.

I haven't been blogging, because I'm not sure that anyone else wants to hear about these nagging doubts, these incessant gadflies, the little things that add up to a general sense of discontentment in my daily life. But, since I don't really have anything else I feel like talking about this night, I guess you're stuck with it.

I guess the problem is that I feel, just, locked in. Like I've settled in to a life and it would be just too much trouble to try and break out. And then there's the fear. Frankly, it's not fear for myself. But I feel like I have to maintain this lifestyle for Michelle's sake. She says that she doesn't care, that all of these things we enjoy and spend money on are not that important, but she seems happy. Or maybe that's a front as well...

Take, for instance, our house. Now, it's a lovely house. And I like it. When we first moved in, I LOVED it. But over the last few years, the polish has worn off a little, and I see all the little things that I was too inexperienced to realize at the time would drive me nuts. Like the slope of the yard that makes it impossible to sit in a chair on the grass. Not that you would want to, because it faces the west and heats up to a thousand degrees every afternoon as soon as the weather warms up. Or the multi-story thing. Which I thought would be super fun, not having grown up in a house with multiple stories. But it's impossible to control the temperature correctly between the upstairs and downstairs.

Or the fact that, now that I have to live in it, I realize that a blind chimpanzee was responsible for designing the layout of the living room. And then there's the neighborhood.

It's a great neighborhood, don't get me wrong. And I thought it would be great to live there. In fact, when I was a kid, this is exactly the kind of neighborhood that I dreamed about living in. But I'm not a kid anymore. I don't have any friends to ride my bike down the street and hang out with. Everyone here is either much older than us, or they have little kids, and we have nothing in common with them. I dream of having a cool couple move in next door who are looking for another couple to hang out with on the weekends. That's a whole 'nother post, though...

The point is, here I am living in the suburbs, like I dreamed about as a kid. I grew up in the sticks, and couldn't hang out with any of my friends, because they all lived in town and during the summer I was mostly isolated. It wasn't until I was a teenager and got a car, that I could really got out and do stuff with friends.

Okay, so I should get to the point before you all completely abandon this post.
Except, I don't think I have a point.

Well, okay, here's the point. I hate living in the suburbs. I feel like such a tool living here. I come home and pull into my cul-de-sac after a 45 minute commute, and I have to weave around all the cars, because everybody here has, like, three cars in parked around their house. I feel closed in, with my tiny yard, my tiny garage, my tiny driveway. I just long to fell open space around me.

And that's my first conundrum. What do I do about it? Part of me thinks it would be cool to sell the house and buy a really overpriced apartment downtown. Would it be open spaces? No. But at least then, I would feel like I was more connected to the city. I could walk to the grocery store. Take the bus to work. Walk down to the clubs and hip restaurants, and not have to worry about driving home. And perhaps we could afford a little honeycomb up in the sky, where we felt like we could look down on the world and just take it all in.

Or we could look for a place far outside of town. Fifty or sixty acres, full of trees , with a couple of ponds, maybe a creek. Someplace I could raise some horses, or maybe some little burros. Or even goats. I could really have a reason to drive a pickup. I could buy a tractor. I could go out on my porch in the evening and smell the dew coming up on the grass; feel like I could really put down roots and make a life. Build something.

But instead of either of those, I am stuck in the middle. Stuck in suburban hell. Stuck in mediocrity. And that's the way I feel about my whole life right now. And I don't know what the frak to do about it.

Perhaps this is not the right place to vent these issues. I'm not sure you guys really want to listen to my shit. But there it is. It's what's going on in my brain right now.

Thanks for listening.

Am I back?

"You never write . . . "
"Are you there?"
"Update you f***ing blog!!!"

I'm not sure that anyone is left to read this.

I have no idea how long it has been since I posted an entry to this blog. To be honest, I'm afraid to look.

I don't know what has happened to me. I wouldn't call it writers block. I certainly wouldn't call it a lack of ideas. I have ideas bouncing around in my head all day long. I mean, it's really crowded in there. I wouldn't even call it laziness. I haven't been lax about other things lately. I've been dieting, I've been traveling for work, I've been exercising several nights a week; hell, I even built a wine rack. From scratch!

There's a metaphor that comes to mind, though, from back in the days when I lived on a ranch and helped my grandfather work cattle. We would get a bunch of cows in triangular shaped pen, like a big funnel. At the small end of the pen, there's a chute. It's the only way out of the pen. Now, the cow's don't want to be in the pen. We're doing things that cause them anxiety, like spraying them with chemicals. They want to be there, and there is only one way out.

But here's the problem: THEY WON'T TAKE THE ONE WAY OUT! No matter what we tried to do, when we got them near to exit, they would balk. They would turn back to the crowded pen rather than go down the cramped chute, into the unknown. Sometimes it would take us hours to get them out of the pen and down the chute. It was frustrating and just made you want to quit and go home.

Now, what does this have to do with my writing?

Well, the thoughts in my head are like cattle in the pen. They go around and around, but when they get near the outlet, they seem to balk. I have so many ideas for stories, but when I sit down to let them out, they balk. It's frustrating, and it makes me just want to quit and go home.

But here's the thing about working with cattle. You have to have patience. If you let them balk, and don't get them down that chute, even if it takes all day, then you might as well give up on working them anymore. Once they learn that you won't make them go through with it, they never will go down that chute.

So, I won't give up. Maybe I won't ever produce a novel. But I must continue to write, as so many of you have urged me to do time and again.

Please be patient. If I can just get the ideas headed down the chute, maybe you won't be disappointed.

Talk to you again soon, friends.