...I Forget.

So, on the seventh anniversary of the day that I officially met my Trophy Wife™ on deviantArt, I went to Lucas Oil Stadium, and had a wonderful time watching the Indianapolis Colts pull out a hard-fought win over the Minnesota Vikings.  Meanwhile, my Very Pregnant Trophy Wife™ worked the whole day-- getting yelled at by numerous people who think that Customer Service means 'abuse at my leisure'-- and got to make lunch for the kids, who ordinarily yell a lot while Mom is at work and assume Mom's high blood pressure must come from other sources.

I feel that I should point out that I don't quite have the knack of the whole anniversary thing just yet.

Part of it is plain out forgetfulness.  My memory is a bit like Swiss cheese, with holes where the important stuff should be.  I can rattle off football and basketball stats and tell you what conference most college teams fall into, but I'm sure I couldn't even name all my nieces and nephews without my wife's help... which is singularly hilarious considering she's had thirty-nine less years to get to know the family.  I would blame it on the constant drug use in my youth, except for the sad fact that the only drugs I consistently used in my youth were No-Doz, Vivarin and Ephedrine.

And it gets even worse with dates.  Wayyyyy worse.  If I didn't have a calendar app on my phone, I would have no idea when birthdates, anniversaries and Days of Significant Note even were.  I am that horrible about them.

My mental calendar goes something like this:

January 1st - New Years Day

January 3rd - Mom's Birthday (drilled into my head from ten plus years of forgetting it)

January 31st - Last Day of January Day

February (first week) - Winter Can Officially Go Fuck Itself and Give Us Spring Day

March Something or Other - NCAA Basketball Championship Games

March (?) - Stepson's Birthday

May 2.... 4... 13... 26th (?)  Trophy Wife's™ Birthday

July 4 - July 4th Day (observed)

August (?) - Stepdaughter's Birthday

August 24-28 - Gen Con

October 31 - Halloween

November, Sometime, usually late  - Thanksgiving

December 21st - Shit, I Forgot I Was Supposed to Buy That One Thing For Christmas Day

December 25th - Christmas

I'm sure I'm missing some in there somewhere.  Our anniversary, for instance, is in.... October?  Maybe?  The fourteenth?  That sounds vaguely familiar.  But that's just to show how out of connect with dates I get.  My Trophy Wife™ once asked me if I knew her birthday, and I laughed.

"Ha-ha.  See?"  I said, holding up my LG Android.  "I have it right here on my phone.  May 2nd."

"Would you remember the date if your phone suddenly died?"  She asked.

"Of course I would!"  I scoffed.

"Without looking at your phone, what is it?"

- Insert horrifyingly panicked expression here -

It's actually a good thing that my birthday is on a national holiday; otherwise, I would never remember it.  Years would come and go without me realizing my birthday had passed by.  I would be constantly wondering why my 27-year-old body felt like it was at least 40-plus.  (I am that utterly oblivious to the passage of time, except for the fact that it affects my body in very bad ways-- usually involving aches, pains, and lots of medication.)  I'm desperately hopeful that COUCH is born on January 1st, or I'll never remember it, and that will be followed by all sorts of mutual recriminations and probable child therapy.

Therapist:  So what seems to be the problem?

COUCH: For starters, my dad is horrible.  For thirteen straight years, he's missed my birthday, and keeps making excuses that he can't remember it.

Me: That's because I can't remember it.  Ever since Facebook went belly-up, I don't get any alerts to remind me!  And didn't I buy you a game last year?

COUCH: That was for Gen Con.  Again.  Not for my birthday.  You can't remember that, but you sure as hell can remember that Peyton Manning threw for 3200 yards his last year with the Colts...

Me: 4700 yards.  Jesus, if you're going to bash me, at least be accurate.   

COUCH: You see?  This is why Mom cries herself to sleep so often.

This sort of outcome, a few years down the road, frightens me more than I care to admit.

* * *

Before I forget it (and I most likely will), I do want to say thank you very much to a very wonderful woman who, on September 16th, 2005, posted the following on an artist's wall at deviantArt:  "ooo... I'll have to give you a watch.  Your pictures are not just stunning but have a sense of storytelling to them.  I'll have to come back and give your gallery a thorough ransacking."

Little did she know that the artist would respond, and seven years down the road, she'd have met him, and probably despite her better judgment, both moved out of state to live in a house with him and then married him.  And in so doing, made him the happiest guy on earth, all jokes and barbs he makes on this blog aside.  

It's hard to believe it's already been seven years, and hopefully the next seven are every bit as wonderfully memorable.

Gender Revelations

Well.  That was enlightening.

So as of last Friday, my Trophy Wife™ and I went to the medical center where they performed a Sonogram (the artist formerly known as Ultrasound) on her to tell us what COUCH’s gender was.  This whole procedure put me in a somewhat maudlin mindset, and I totally blame Wal-Mart for it.  Because I can.  Observe:

See, neither my Trophy Wife™ nor I really wanted to know the baby’s gender ahead of time.  We were perfectly fine with it being a surprise that would suddenly become known to us in the delivery room, kinda like the time that he or she will first find the permanent markers and note that the walls in our kitchen are embarrassingly and boringly white.  We were both going to be happy with whatever came out of the womb, provided it wasn’t, say, man-eating and coated with sulfuric acid.  But as we walked through various department stores, we began to note with regret that gender-neutral clothes apparently went out with laserdisc players and betamax.  Even the greens and yellows (the predominately gender-neutral colors) had Transformers, dump trucks and dinosaurs-- or Cupcakes, big-eyelashed rabbits and words like Princess on them. 

So we held out our hope on Wal-Mart, the hub of Western Civilization, and the Communal Family Meeting Place (in Aisle Six, Preferably While Everyone Else Waits With Their Carts For You To Get The Fuck Finished Talking and Move Out of the Way.)  the one place we could be relatively sure that every family member who might have conceivably wanted to buy COUCH a Welcome to the World gift of some sort would probably go.

And sadly, Wal-Mart totally failed us.  Sure, they had more non-blue/non-pink outfits, but any of the printed shirts and onesies were still obviously pointed to one gender or the other, with slogans like “Future Football Star”, or “Princess in Training” or “Mommy’s Big Boy” or “When I Grow Up, I’m Going To Use My Vagina To Corrupt Your Son”.  So we were stuck.  Sure, we could have still held out and not found out what COUCH’s gender was, and A) waited to buy everything we needed until we knew whether we should buy it in blue or pink and went further in debt all at once than we will already do just having a child, or B) trained a prospective boy or girl to think that the “Daddy’s Little Princess”/”Mommy’s Tough Boy” pajamas they wore for their first year is not something they’ll need therapy for somewhere down the line.

Instead, we decided to go ahead with the gender reveal, and although I decided that I did want it, there was such a sense of finality to it.  If it was a girl, what would happen to all my dreams of a star running back/shooting guard or having someone to carry on the family name?  If it was a boy, wouldn’t I miss the idea of having a “Daddy’s Girl” or feeling my chest swell with pride when she went to prom or walked down the aisle?  If it was a girl, then Cade, Zane, or Micah were blown out of the water as names, and if it was a boy, Coda and Fable were gone.  And either way, COUCH was gone…you really can’t list a fetus as a Cluster of Unidentified Cells when they’ve been sort of Identified.  And COICH actually sounds vaguely like some kind of sexual euphemism, so we couldn’t even change the acronym.  There was just a small sense of comfort and familiarity with not knowing that would be going away.

That didn’t change our mind about it, however; it just gave us a lingering bit of sentimentality, like something that was lost and gone forever.  Sort of like my last shreds of dignity and innocence will be the first time COUCH drops an f-bomb or tells me to shut up and quit my old-man rambling.  So that was on the forefront of my mind as we went through with it. 

As a side note, It probably wasn’t so much on my Trophy Wife’s™ mind, but I feel that this was solely because what was on the forefront of her mind was something to the effect of “SWEET MOTHER OF GOD, GET THIS F^#@&ING PROCEDURE OVER WITH SO I CAN F&%$^ING PEE.”  Apparently, before your Sonogram you are required to drink an amount of water that is roughly equivalent to Lake Michigan.  My pet theory is that this whole process is simply to crowd the fetus up against the uteran wall for a clear picture, a bit like the old college prank with stuffing as many people as one could into a phone booth… back when phone booths actually existed and doing something like that was actually fun and not just a prelude to a sexual harassment suit.

So we watched the monitor screen with bated breath, looking for the telltale sign of a definitive penis/no penis picture.  COUCH was tremendously non-cooperative at first, which I can say is most likely par for the course with any child My Trophy Wife™ and I would procreate.  But as we watched the blobs and smears form into a picture (this time around, there was actually a slight bit of being able to tell what was what… I would like to point out that I correctly identified the spine, the heart, a femur and two gaseous anomalies that may have in fact been either organs or COUCH’s liquid lunch), we saw that there were a definite lack of “boy parts” as the nurse delicately put it. 

Although, if you look closely, there is a definite preponderance of “Predator parts."
That's awesome, as long as she stays the hell away from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Glover.

So we’re having a daughter.  COUCH is officially (as officially as they get, because in our society, the Sonogram techs are never allowed to say with certainty whether the blob in question is a boy or girl, because they can then have their ass sued by overly litigious parents who claim mental trauma over finding out that their girl has boy parts) a girl.

Strangely enough, this doesn’t bother me at all.  She can still like sports, if she so chooses, and still be a Daddy’s girl, and still be any damned thing she wants to be— artist, writer, astronaut, president, athlete—all of which I know is a lot to ask a 4 month old fetus, but I’m already a proud parent, dammit, so you can cut me a little slack.

In fact, as I told my Trophy Wife™, the only thing this gender reveal changes is the fact that now I’m on a schedule.  I have only fifteen or so years to actually go out and buy a handgun to scare the living shit out of any prospective boyfriends…

Because—and I’m sure you mothers and fathers can relate—there’s not a boy (or girl for that matter) in the entire damned world that’s going to be good enough for my daughter.

End of story.

Name Calling

So, as of today, my Trophy Wife™ and I have just a few more days of he/she’s before we learn which pronoun we’ll be using from now on when it comes to COUCH (Cluster of Unidentified Cells Hughey).  That’s the day that we will go back to the Ultrasound tech, who will plant a jelly-coated piece of tech on my Trophy Wife’s stomach and then translate the blobs and globules we see, sort of like a reverse Rorschach test.  Or, I guess, a little like reading tea leaves… she’ll point out that this little area here is actually a leg, when after looking at it closely, we were pretty sure it was a coffee stain.

The more dangerous side to this is the fact that now that we’re coming to know what sex Couch will be, the next step will be picking out a name.  This worries me for a couple reasons:

1)      I’ve gotten kind of used to calling COUCH… well, COUCH.  I realize that’s not a name to fall in love with (and as anyone with a degree in interior design will tell you, SOFA is a much classier name, anyway), but there’s a comfort with familiarity that makes it hard to give up.  My wife worries about what will happen to her post-partum.  I worry about what will happen to me post-name-um.

2)     If my Trophy Wife™ and I almost start small, sarcastic, surgical air assaults over drapery styles, I fear for what may happen with something as huge as the name of our child.

This is a slight exaggeration for effect, I should point out.  For one thing, our disagreements are more like small, sarcastic limited police actions. 

For another, the honest truth is that we both see eye to eye on a great deal more than we don’t, which helps explain why we’re, say, married.  We like similar music, similar art, and have generally similar political/socio-economic/religious views (None/Socio-what?/Feel free to have your own, and don’t preach to us about them or we’ll be forced to resort to snarkiness). We both love to work on art and craft projects and neither of us ever have enough time to do either.  We both like to spend time in the kitchen, and we don’t mind a lively debate as long as it doesn’t get too strident or too pointed.  We both have discovered, to our immense regret, that we would rather smash our head through razor-wire wrapped panes of plate glass than be subjected to some of the children’s/teens programming the kids insist on watching on TV (sometimes watching the same episodes multiple times).  Oh, and we’re both never wrong.  Even when logic, cold fact, public opinion and Wikipedia have all proven otherwise. 

Even so, the name thing has me a little worried at the outset.  I mean, I name my tropical fish, true… but most tropical fish have a couple years or so of life to them—or in my tanks, one to two months of glorious (and sometimes vaguely overfed) happiness and water changes before cardiac arrest and eventual toilet flushing, apparently—so if I name a fish badly, it’s not like they’ll be hearing it long, anyway.  And it’s not like they’ll respond to it in the first place.  They’ll come up for food once they’ve been conditioned to understand that “Big man in room that opens lid = food” and “Women in room that pays us no mind = no food”.  And once that happens, they’ll come up to the surface whether I call them by name or politely whisper a string of alliterative profanities.  (This would be, by the way, reason #382 Why Fish Are the Best Pets, Ever… because they are so low-maintenance that you often forget they’re there, and that’s fine, because they often forget you’re there, too.)

But a child?

Hoo-boy.  You’re saddling a kid with a name that they’ll be carrying for their entire life.   The name you give to your child may have everything to do with whether they’ll be keeping their lunch money ten to fifteen years down the line.  It may even have a lot to do with whether they get a job they want or get married to the person they want.  I mean, hell, it’s a responsibility.  If you foul it up and fall in love with a name like Eustace or Abercrombie or Spot, and you deck your kid out with that, you might as well shell out for the therapy when you do it.  Cause they’ll need it.  And then you’ll need it, because you can’t understand why the hell your darling child wishes you’d die a tragically ironic death at the hands of a serial engraver and his etching pen.

So this was a task we’d started to undertake—to find a perfect name for COUCH.  And it’s a task I feel I could be pretty competent at.  I’m a fiction writer, off and on, and everyone will tell you that a character name is deathly important: Scarlett O’Hara, Sam Spade and Holly Golightly wouldn’t have the same ‘name’ impact if they were Sandra Grey or Jim Smith.  I know this, so I often obsess over my character names… they’re not right until I say they’re right.  And being a sometimes-fiction writer, there were names that I naturally gravitated to.

Unfortunately, I’m a sometimes historical-fiction writer, so I was told that the first fifteen names on my list were right out because they were horribly outdated.  And that makes me a little sad, because Aethelred Hughey and Osbert Hughey both actually have nice rings to them. 

Shortly after that, we decided that for the sake of both our sanities, we may have been better off setting up a few ground rules when it came to our name choices.

First off, no weird-ass spellings for the sheer sake of weird-ass spellings.  This probably came about simply because I suggested that we could name our child whatever we wanted and just spell it “X” so he or she would be able to spell his or her name by six months old and therefore certifiably be a genius.  At any rate, it’s a good rule.  Do we have to teach an already-laughably-illiterate world that we can’t spell Michelle, so instead we named her MyShell?  If we’re going with a traditional name, we can go with a traditional spelling, like traditional people.  If a progressive spelling means “a wrong or excessively and badly phonetic spelling,” then we can be old-fashioned and staid just fine, thank you.

Next, no apostrophes for the sake of apostrophes.  Yeah, and My’Shell isn’t any better.  Nor is M’ark J’unior, Christ’pher or Qapla’.  Speaking of…

No names that sound like we threw syllables in a hat and pulled them out randomly to come up with something.  We’re not gonna have a child named Hibniquiwa or Korlerea’sha just because it’s unique.   Our child will have plenty of other opportunities to show his or her uniqueness without it being because their name sounds like Mom and Dad were binge-drinking when they came up with it.

No names that come specifically from a foodstuff or marketable product of some sort.  I kid you not, when I was looking up names, I was looking on a name site for some slightly unusual ones (My Trophy Wife™ and I both like the idea of somewhat nontraditional, somewhat esoteric names for girls, like Hope, Sierra, Ember, Coda and Destiny) when I came across a name that jumped out: Courvoisier.  Really?  So, what, you’d name your kid after the drink that led to them being conceived?  If you didn’t have money for the good stuff, did you name them Thunderbird?  What the fuck.   Thank god I didn’t have that couple for parents.  “And this is our oldest, Courvoisier, and the twins Löwenbräu and Schlitz.  …Yeah, we lost a lot of money in the stock market crash.”  

(Note to really young people: Löwenbräu and Schlitz were what we old people sometimes call beers.  Beers are generally low-alcohol-content drinks that often taste slightly better than piss but are worth it because you tend to feel happier when you have one in your hand.  This effect is reasonably similar to what you do nowadays with whole smoking bath salts and then going out and eating people’s faces thing, only a little more restrained.)

No names that will give everyone else unreasonable expectations of our child or just sets him or her up for failure.  Look, I love Peyton Manning… even now that he’s traded, I’m going to root for him when he plays anyone but my home team, which happens to be his old team.   And when he goes into the Colts’ ring of honor and the Hall of Fame, I’m going to be there beaming with pride as though it were me.  But if we have a son, there is no way in fuck I would name him Peyton.  Not because it’s a bad name—it’s not, and I rather like it!—but because immediately, there’s a huge heap of expectations on his not quite fully-developed shoulders.  He’s either going to be the next big quarterback at his school, or he won’t and will be an utterly miserable failure, working the late shift at McDonalds, and selling homemade porn videos on the side to help fund his dope addiction.  That’s what having the expectations of a name can do to you.  No Peyton Manning Hughey, no John Kennedy Hughey, no Martin Luther Hughey, no Bruce Wayne Hughey (Sorry, Angie). 

No names taken from fictional characters that either of us would like to take into a dark alley and beat to death with a cudgel.  To be fair, that mostly boils down to any names from Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, though, so we’re probably safe. 

So what are we left with?  Something like several million.  At least, that’s what it feels like.  Fable (girl) and Cade (boy) are two that I like personally, but there’s a few hundred books and an awful lot of possible police action left before we come up with a definite winner. 

At least, in a few days, we get to cut that down by about half.  

Thank God.

Gaming with Benefits

So Gen Con is coming again in less than a month.  Those of you who know me realize what that means:

It’s time for my Christmas in f**king August again, baby!

That says a helluva lot from someone who was born on Christmas.

[Editorial aside: Yes, I was actually born on Christmas.  Almost every year of my life, without fail, someone new whom I’ve met over the previous year finds out about this and goes, “Get out, really?” as though Christmas is a totally verboten day to be born.  And every year, I have to tell them that, yes, I actually bucked the 365 to 1 odds, just like everyone else who happened to be born on the day they were born.¹  

And yes, there is still something absolutely cosmically unjust about the fact that I don’t get presents on everyone else’s birthday.]

For the uninitiated (all two or so of you), this is the time of year when the biggest and most important  gaming convention in all the world—and I mean that with only slight hyperbole—comes to my hometown of Indianapolis, looks around a bit, and plops its Ranch-Doritos-and-Mountain-Dew-gorged fat ass down for a four-day weekend of the best bunch of role-playing, board, card and miniature gaming with a fair smattering of anime, cosplay, writers’ symposiums, seminars and MMORPGs.²  It’s the pièce de résistance of every summer, the one time of the year that I can happily walk for a mile and a half through stifling 103 degree heat (with sweat dripping off body parts that it should have no business dripping from) and still have a wide grin on my face that won’t come off with anything short of a belt-sander. 

Gen Con is far and away the best four days of the year, although Day 4 on Sunday is generally short, so there might actually be a neck-and-neck race between it, Tax Check Arrival Day, the First Round of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, and NFL Opening Kickoff Weekend.³

It really can’t be explained; it has to be experienced.  Watching guys walk around the exhibition halls in Lucasfilm Stormtrooper getups, side by side with grown men in Utilikilts carrying  backpacks with Naruto and Pokémon patches, and blue-painted women wearing tactically applied strips of leather/chain and elf ears and Cthulhu buttons.  And then the other ten thousand people dressed in novelty tees and torn blue jeans and costumes they created that are being held together with glue, stitching and clever use of a soldering iron.  And the only thing they all have in common is games.  Board games.  Card games.  Miniature war-games.  Role-playing games.  An army of gamers, thirty-five thousand strong. 

Hell yeah.  This is my time.

Now, every year at Gen Con, I try to do something a little different.  For a while, my criteria was “buy a new game and try it out,” but the last couple years the finances have not really allowed for it, and what with us expecting, I may have to *gasp* do the responsible thing and keep my buying a little under $200.  $300, if nothing else.

(It’s kinda funny; I think I just heard my Trophy Wife™ give one of those disbelieving noises that generally precedes a “You just said what?”)

So at any rate, a new game may not be in the budget.  However, what I’ve done each concurrent year is at least try something new.  Last year, I went to the Writers’ Symposium for the first time.  The year before that, I did my first Living Pathfinder Special That Involved A Lot of Running Around the Satellite Hotels and Was Therefore Awesome For Everyone But the Out Of Shape Asthmatics. 

This year, I’m running a game, something very new to me.  It’s Castles and Crusades, my personal favorite game that works well with a narrative/story style like the games I like to run (Dungeons & Dragons latest editions having jumped the shark and become too video-gamey for my taste and Pathfinder requiring an hour and a half of patience and a ridiculous head for numbers to create characters properly).  And that will be awesome.  I’ve already written up the adventure and am in the process of some tweaks, which gives me about a month to get everything put together and ready to roll. 

I’m psyched. 

Gen Con’s a month away, and already I have that little voice  in my head that says, “You’re ready to f**king get your game on, aren’t you?”⁴

So hell yeah.  Bring on August.  Please.

---

1 – Not including Leap Year (February 29th) children, naturally.  Those people deserve some kinda medal for hitting the bullseye on the dartboard right out of the uterus.

2 - Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, generally something like World of Warcrack, which are not real games, per se—they’re actually more like sedentary lifestyles for people who can’t focus their imaginations on a game that doesn’t exist on a digital screen of some sort. Think of them as RPG’s for the Angry-Birds-ADHD generation.  I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt in this case, because they are—at least in a generalized sense—games… kinda in the same way that algae is, in a generalized sense, a living creature.

3 – We’ll go ahead and assume now that the Day COUCH is Eventually Born will most likely crack the top three… although to be fair, that may completely depend on whether he or she exits the womb carrying a Gatefold 2nd Edition Dungeon Masters’ Screen or not.

4 – Among other things.  It also says things like, “No one will ever know if you hit that porn site, doofus,” and “Maybe $35 isn’t that bad a price for the Collector’s Edition of the 1977 Superfriends DVD,” so its judgment is probably iffy at best.

Womb with a View

So we just passed one of the most important hurdles of the pregnancy a couple days ago, the first ultrasound… and we’ve learned that COUCH is flying solo in the womb.  In other words, COUCH does not apparently have any little extra potential brother(s) and/or sister(s) cramping its living space.  This revelation is important for several reasons:

1)      It could have been emotionally detrimental to the older kids (my stepchildren) to suddenly drop a litter of squalling newborns on them, rather than just one.  Not that there hasn’t already been a dumpster fire of changes to throw on them already, but I’d kinda like them to not despise a whole passel of furniture-themed children for the fact that during their first few formative years the rest of us were eating cardboard and shoe leather just to be able to afford diapers and formula.

2)      With two or more children, buying a new car or minivan would suddenly jump from a suggested eventual course of action to an outright absolute right now necessity.  With just COUCH, my Suzuki Reno could handle most runs that didn’t require the entire family to go along if it needed to… and there is even the possibility that we could ride squished in Reno for short distances.  (Comfortably?  Oh, hell no.  But I come from a family that was large enough that we were required to squeeze in once in a while for everyone to go somewhere.  You learn to make do.)   Not having to pay for a new car is important because:

3)      There’s that lack of money thing again.  I do realize the wisdom in what others have told me, that you will never really be financially “ready” for a child.  But by the same token, when you start looking at the cost of living day to day, even the addition of one more mouth to feed and body to clothe makes you get a nervous tic just doing the math.  

No joke—the kids are currently gone to Florida to visit their dad for a month, and my Trophy Wife™ and I went grocery shopping last week: we bought enough for us to get by for a couple weeks, and still managed to spend less than fifty dollars.  When I pulled out my wallet to pay, I unexpectedly found that it was drenched, despite it being a warm sunny day outside.  It wasn’t until later that I realized it was wet because it had been weeping tears of joy.

So this nervousness about the possibility of twins had been embedded in me within the first few days after the initial pregnancy test.  My Trophy Wife™ mentioned offhandedly that she was feeling pains that she hadn’t felt until much further along in her earlier pregnancies, and she wondered if maybe it was twins.  She even coined the name SOFA for a possible second COUCH… as in, “Sofa King Not Expecting This.” 

At first it was cute, and I treated it like the little joke it no doubt was, but slowly as time passed and facts began to hammer away at us, the idea that we could have two (or more!) babies began to take root and become a full blown paranoid delusion.  

First it was the mention that she’d read that twins often happen at the pre-embryonic level when a woman suddenly quits her birth control and over-ovulates (oh, and by the way, she did suddenly quit her birth control).  

Then the fact that women over thirty are more at risk for twins (my Trophy Wife™ is officially twenty-nine with a very slight remainder).   

Then the fact that twins run in both of our families (which I was totally and completely unaware of, not that this in itself is at all surprising… I often have to ask my mom who people are at family reunions.  My brother was mildly insulted one year that I had to ask his name).  

Then the plain and simple fact that Murphy’s Law just seemed to point at us a lot and laugh, not unlike the ever-so-slightly-mad serial killer on whatever cadaver-coroner-clone TV show is popular these days.  

I started to get so paranoid about how our lives would be impacted by twins that when the ultrasound tech said there was only one embryo, I jumped up and high-fived her like she’d just tomahawk-dunked the ball to win the game… and posterized LeBron in the process.  

Okay, no, I wasn’t that excited.  I will admit that there was a small part of me that was a little saddened by the idea that we wouldn’t be having both a boy and a girl, especially since there is a pretty good likelihood that COUCH will be our only child together.  But then again, that small part of me enjoys doing up flower arrangements, watching overly sentimental movies, petting cute little fuzzy animals and engaging in idle thought rather than looking at our skyrocketing bills and empty bank account. 

So, yes, the ultrasound.   I never realized that there even was such a thing as multiple ultrasounds until I got in there.  The tech mentioned that there would be a normal ultrasound, and then they would do a vaginal ultrasound.  (Apparently this is standard operating procedure now.  There’s every possibility it has always been standard operating procedure, and everyone simply thought I was too immature to hear the word vaginal before, so they didn’t repeat it.  Of course, they never realized I would someday hear it while watching commercials during the Price is Right on daytime TV and would forever after be scarred by mother-daughter talks.)

I blinked very slowly and was going to raise my hand and ask her to repeat that, but thankfully thought better of it.  (Seriously, if you’re male and you ask a professional woman to repeat something like that term, you are immediately earmarked as a clod, a joker or a troublemaker, if not all three.  This holds true even if the professional woman mumbles and you have a pair of hearing aids and honestly didn’t understand a word she said.)   After the initial ultrasound—which is the one I grew up knowing about, where they gel up the mother-to-be’s stomach and run the scanner over it, kinda like buttering an overripe watermelon with a travel iron—my Trophy Wife™ was asked to adjourn to the bathroom and I was left in very awkward silence in the main exam room as the tech prepared for the… other… sort. 

I swear during that time she looked at me and slowly shook her head disapprovingly from side to side, as if to say that all of this was my fault.  I had no idea what she meant at the moment.

When my Trophy Wife™ returned, the tech explained the procedure, and in no-nonsense manner, made absolutely sure that she did not blow a single iota of smoke up my Trophy Wife’s™ dress.  Yes, she said, the probe and its gel was by necessity cold; yes, the procedure was invasive and would be uncomfortable, if not outright painful; yes, it would require the whole “feet in the stirrup” position that every woman utterly loves; yes, the probe was obviously a torture device created by a male, probably one who took great perverse pleasure in making it look as much like a magic wand as humanly possible.  I must have had a case of sympathy lightheadedness for her medical procedure/borderline-violation, because I more or less blacked out after that.

Fortunately, I awoke in time to see COUCH playing hide and seek in the confines of his current housing.  Currently, COUCH is about the size of a healthy lima bean (and he or she has a tail right now, Jess was quick to point out to me), so the ultrasound tech had to point out that yes, the small vaguely-circular blob was our child-to-be and not in fact a finger-smudge on the screen.  She printed out a picture for us to embarrass COUCH with later in life, right next to the one of him/her in the bathtub and the one where I’m frantically carrying him/her away from the carpet while he/she takes offense to me changing diapers and pees on me. 

Even so, there’s something sort of awe-inspiring about seeing that little vaguely-circular circular blob and knowing you had a part in its existence… like you can’t help but look at it and have your heart melt, thinking, I created that.  We created that.   It’s pretty fucking amazing.

You know what’s even more amazing?  That something as small as that can get a loudmouth smartass like me to shut up once in a while and just enjoy the moment.  

Pregnant Pauses

So...

We're kinda having a baby.

Okay, technically, "we" is mostly My Trophy Wife™, who gets to undergo the actual wonders of pregnancy and spend her spare time psychologically/verbally/physically abusing me for being among the gender that the great Creator didn't equip with a requisite Incredible Expanding Uterus™.  Yes, yes; point taken, mea culpa.  But still--

We're having a baby.  A fucking baby.

Yeah, I know, huh?  Deep breaths, inhale-exhale; not too fast or you hyperventilate.

I'm going to be a father.

 I swear to God I'm not freaking out.  It’s just a little overwhelming, that’s all.  I mean, I – and yes, that is to say, me, Mark, the guy who hides in his room when there are children around; the same person who willingly pays shipping costs to buy items online so he doesn't have to deal with stupid adults and squalling infants at the local stores-- am going to be a father.  A fucking father.  Okay, maybe I am freaking out a little bit.  (Surely not! What sort of world do we live in that you could expect overreaction from someone who rants over Indiana drivers, wedding planner prices and environmentalists?)

Somewhere, my own father-- God rest his soul-- is kicked back on his heavenly kitchen chair, saluting me with a cup of coffee (triple cream, no sugar) and smirking while he says, “Yeah, karma’s a bitch, ain’t it, boy?”

And I should also point out that this wasn't exactly a huge surprise or anything... My trophy Wife™ and I didn't just forget to “baggie the pecan log” or “wrap the smoked kipper” or whatever other horrible, horrible phrases you can come up with for that sort of thing.  We sat down and spoke very candidly to one another about the idea of children; neither one of us wanted more children when we first got married, but after you’ve been married a little while, there is sometimes that moment of sentimentality that stealthily creeps up and stabs you in the back of the head and makes you go, “What Common Sense?”  We took some extra time to consider and discuss if we really wanted to blow our remaining youth and always-dwindling money on a bawling bundle of shitty diapers, formula puke and financial ruin.  We even put together lists which pretty much boiled down to: 

HER PROS:

- Our home is a great environment for a new child

- The children would have a younger brother or sister, and in most circumstances this would be a good thing.

- Having a child teaches husband patience in childrearing, which may actually filter to other aspects of life.

- Mark’s mom would be ecstatic to have her youngest child give her a grandchild. 

- I can eat mountain ranges of chocolate and blame it on pregnancy.

HER CONS:

- Pregnancy = Eating weird food mixtures.

- Pregnancy = Weird hormonal/emotional whiplash

- Pregnancy = Pain and discomfort

- I sort of like sleep.

MY PROS:

- We can train the child from an early age to make sure that it is not going to grow up and be that child in Wal-Mart.  The one that you have to yell three names at to get to listen to you, and only then, because it fears for its ass cheeks’ continued lack of pain.  (Oh, yes, I tell you right now, I will be a spanker, if the child deserves it.   I’ve seen parents use the Positive Reinforcement style of parenting, which should be subtitled “Let the Child Walk All Over You While You Respond to His Misdeeds With A ‘No-No,’ and Then Wonder Where You Went Wrong When He’s Twelve and Won’t Do a God Damn Thing You Tell Him To.”  I subscribe to the old school Denis Leary School of Childrearing, which says ‘spankings = hot stove’.  A child touches the hot stove and burns themselves, you know what?  They don’t fucking do it again.  If a child commits an act and gets spanked, you know what?  They don’t fucking do it again.  And if they do do it again, they’re probably just gonna be a fucking societal degenerate and probable masochist.)

- I might be able to have a child with more than just a passing interest in sports.  And that’s not just because I want to be “that dad” who hangs around at the softball/baseball/soccer games and talks about how great his not-particularly good child is and blames the ref/ump/coach for his child’s lack of being able to run to first base without tripping over his untied shoes or going the wrong way.  I say this because sports really do teach children valuable lessons—things such as the fact that you’ll never be able to be good at something without practice, the fact that sportsmanship (being a gracious winner and not be a sore loser) and teamwork are two of the most important things you can ever take away from your youth, and that point shaving and offshore betting only work when you get past the high school level.

- Any child that combines the chromosomes of my Trophy Wife™ and I will very likely be one of the following: a ridiculous artistic prodigy, a brilliant author, a quiet and thoughtful near-genius, or the Antichrist.  It’s worth making one just to see which roll of the dice comes up.

- My wife will be too busy with a new child to realize the cat has quietly been sucked into an airplane turbine.  And she’s already mentioned once or twice offhandedly that if I saddle her with a child, we won’t get another.

MY CONS:

- I will consistently get screamed at by a yowling lungful of rage which then gives way to squalling torturous cries of pain or torture for no apparent reason I will ever be able to ascertain.  This will occur long before the baby is ever born.

- We have no money.

- We already can’t talk the kids into actually keeping our house clean (or for that matter listening to anything we might say) worth a damn… and when the baby is born, instead of being role-models for cleanliness in the house, the children will instead use the new child as further reason to not bother cleaning up-- as in, “What does it matter if I eat cherries jubilee and chocolate sauce messily in the living room… the carpet already has old baby poop stains in it.”

- We have no money.

- Instead of us laughing at those people in Wal-Mart with the horribly distempered child who screams as though his arms are being lopped off with a weed whacker because his mom won’t buy him the squirting frog toy that he saw and absolutely has to have, we will instead be those people.

- We have no money.

- Any chance we may have had of having a smidgen of privacy someday will go completely down the tubes.  Right now, at least, we have our bedroom, which is sort of a respite from the rigors of daily life (or it is, at least until Daily Life comes knocking on the door screaming that other aspects of Daily Life keeps pushing her and nuh-uh, I was just giving her a hug, and I haven’t had my computer turn yet and he’s been on there for hours, and isn’t she supposed to be on restriction for throwing the Wii Remote at me, and he ate the last yogurt and I wanted it!).  And let’s just say, if we have a child, any possible privacy would more or less be blown right out of the water, because for the first year or so, we will probably have little choice but to keep the child in our room.  I already can’t watch any cool movies downstairs because there’s a chance one of the kids might see a flashed breast or hear an f-bomb said by someone other than their mother or me, so this will mean that from now on, the closest I get to watching HBO will be the Pixar marathon on the Disney Channel.

- We have no money.

- We would totally lose the office, which was going to double as a library, game-design area, artist loft, craftwork space and aquarium refuge.  My plan was eventually to start painting in there.  With a child, My Trophy Wife™ and I will have to lock the paints in a safe for fear of everything, up to and including the cat, the fish tank and any appliances or electronics that cost over $500. 

- Oh, yeah, did I mention we have no money?

* * *

 Despite all that, we still managed to come up with a 'yes'.  As in, yes, we would not kill one another if we found we were to have a new child.  Looking back, it's entirely possible we were drunk.

That brings us around to a few weeks ago, when my wife stuck something white, plastic and a bit thermometer-y into my still-half-asleep face and said-- one could almost say accusatorially-- “Look.”

So I looked.  Across one little white bar there was the barest, thinnest little blue line possible.  It was smaller and less noticeable than the blue lines on a well-worn piece of loose-leaf school paper that had been weathered for a week and then used as toilet tissue.  It was infinitesimal.  I’ve seen mirages with more substance.  “And that is?”

“It’s a pregnancy test,” she reminded me.  “And there’s a little blue line on it.”

“Is that what that is?” I asked, squinting.  “So it’s negative?”

She gave me one of those looks.  You know those looks, especially if you’re married.  It’s that same look that she’ll give when she’s discussing her feelings during the fourth quarter of a back-and-forth playoff game and you ask if you can wait to answer until the next timeout.  It’s that look that says, ‘I realize that you cook and clean and are financially stable and at least marginally good looking after you spruce up for an hour or so, but remind me again why I married you?’

“No, the line means positive.”  She said, not quite in the tone you would use with a small, dull-witted child.

So I did what any red-blooded American male would do.  First I panicked.  Then I wondered if I was the father and I panicked some more.  And then logic finally took hold, and I realized that last I checked, we were married, so I wasn’t really in any trouble over this, and no one would come beating down our door and demanding I make a proper woman of her.  In fact, very likely, the Catholic Church would applaud the whole being married and having a child thing, if we were in fact Catholic. 

Of course, that moment of respite didn’t stop little niggling issues I had with the whole thing. “Wait.  Why the hell would the company that makes these do it so it’s a little minus sign if it’s positive?  Shouldn’t it be a little plus?”

“Because they’re from Wal-Mart and two lines cost more,” she responded.  “But  trust me, yes, it’s positive.”

“Look, I can barely see the blue line.”  I said.  “Maybe it’s… I dunno… marginally positive.  Like, I dunno, it’s not sure if you’re pregnant or just really ill.  A fertilized egg and a virus might look suspiciously similar to it.”

She exhaled one of those heavy exhales I hear more and more often from her as time goes on.  At the rate I hear them, by the time we’re fifty she’ll need a respirator.  “Fine then.  It is a little faint.  I’ll take another one in a few days.”

A few days later, she came downstairs as I was preparing to go to work and showed me another one.  The line was much more noticeable and much more blue this time around.  “See?”

I shook my head.  “Look, these tests are only 98% effective.  That might be a fluke.  And it’s still not a plus sign.  What’s up with that?”

“I’ll go to Planned Parenthood to be sure,” she sighed.

At work that day, I received a text message with a picture attached.  The picture was of a Test Result that listed my Trophy Wife™’s name, stating she was seen and that her pregnancy test result was Positive (they even put in the little plus sign so that I would know they meant positive) , along with an estimated date of delivery.

I called her immediately upon receiving it.  “Are you sure they didn’t mean some other Jessica Hughey?”

She hung up on me.

* * *

I kid, mostly.  Despite the fact that this is my first child and therefore there will be a lot of freaking out on my end, I have actually embraced the idea of having a little one with my Trophy Wife™.  I even lovingly came up with the pseudonym COUCH for our little bundle-of-joy-to-be because we’re more than likely not going to know its gender until the delivery room.   (COUCH stands for Cluster Of Unidentified Cells Hughey).  My Trophy Wife™ at first rolled her eyes at me when I mentioned it, but soon enough she began to get a kick out of the name and now wields it like Conan does his broadsword.

Just yesterday, for instance, after dropping the kids off, she mentioned offhandedly that maybe we ought to stop off and get a milkshake.  I joked that it was the pregnancy talking, and she slowly looked over at me, and with great calm in her voice, intoned, “COUCH demands a sacrifice of milk and ice cream.”

It was adorable, in a slightly sacreligious sort of way.  

I have a feeling the next few months are going to be filled with these little moments.  It’s gonna be an interesting next few months. 

Tales from the Wedding Altar

So, as of today, I have officially been married a month.  That would be at least thirty days, for all of you who have 28 or 29 in the pool.  Sucks to be you!

And in celebration of being married to my former Lovely Fiancée™ and current Trophy Wife™ for a month, I give you, as promised, random bits and pieces from the warped recesses of my mind.  Or as I like to call them...

Snippets, Stories and Dark, Nefarious Secrets Written in Code on the Back of a Wedding Invitation:

* * *

It's kinda funny, watching the awkward glances of everyone when your introduction song at the reception begins with, "Let's make this complicated, thinking is overrated; we're busting out of this shitty little town" as everyone realizes that your eighty-plus-year old mother is among the attendees.   To be fair to us, however, Nothingtown is sort of our song.  it was the first song I played for my Trophy Wife™ on guitar.  So now you know.  And knowing is half the battle.

G. I. Joooooooooe!

Also: do you realize how hard it is to find good wedding songs when the prospective husband and wife are most into the likes of Green Day and Breaking Benjamin?  Our first dance song was "Little Moments" by Rob Thomas, which was sort of a concession on her part, because she was originally thinking "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)", and my thought was that particular song had become so cliche over the years that it was almost two-dimensional.  We were going to have that as the song for our last dance instead, but the reception sort of just mellowed its way to an early close, so we sort of never really had a last dance.

I felt kinda bad about that.  I even offered to sing it to her while I [content mercifully deleted] on our honeymoon to make it up to her, but she politely declined.  

By kicking me.  

Multiple times.

* * *

Speeaking of awkward... yes, there was that first dance.  

I would love to tell you that we had a very good excuse for looking like we had all the rhythm of a pair of recent prosthetic leg recipients.

I would also love to tell you that we don't ordinarily dance with all the grace of flightless waterfowl.

But those would be lies.  At least in my case they are.  I don't deny that I am painfully white-- like, blinding, dazzling, Raised-From-The-Dead Gandalf Robes white-- when it comes to rhythm.  The only way you could have less rhythm than me would be to just step onto the dance floor and immediately go into cardiac arrest... and even then, there's a fair chance that you will flail around and flop to the ground with more rhythm than me dancing.

Now, my Trophy Wife™ has rhythm.  I know this for a fact.  But suffice it to say that having rhythm in a pair of jeans and a tee is a far cry from having rhythm while wearing a dress that gives you the mobility of a toddler wearing a sixty-five pound backpack. Srsly. Before my wedding, I had always wondered why paratroopers always wanted to be so quick to unhitch from their chutes after landing.  Now I know.

And knowing is half the battle.  G. I. Joooooooooe! 

* * *

After four months, the cat has finally begun to recognize me as its Nemesis.  

For a long while, it treated me as a logical extension of the Human Who Poo-Poohs Anything Bad I Do As Instinctual and Still Finds Me Adorable, or the Smaller Human Who Has Allergies To Anything And Everything Beneath the Sun and Who Nonetheless Insists on Clinging To-- and Sleeping With-- My Highly Allergen-Ridden Ass.  

Now it has slowly excised me from that and now has begun to rightfully recognize me as the Human Who Absolutely Loses His Fucking Mind and Chases Me With Pruning Shears or Small Appliances When He Finds Me On The Furniture.  This is a good transition. You can sense it now, in the early mornings, when I come downstairs for work, and it hears noise from its resting place, and curiosity overcomes it.  It makes its way downstairs and slowly creeps into the living room and sees... me.  

And there's that moment, when it realizes that it is the only other living thing in the room, and that it wants to be anywhere else in the house except alone in a room with me.  The fear is there.  It is palpable, in the air.   Like the tension in the moments just before something horrible happens and the buckets of red paint start flying in a slasher flick.  

So when I take a step, no matter what I'm doing-- and whether that step is even toward it or not-- the creature bolts like I've set its metaphorical nuts on fire with conductive static electricity.

Now, if I can just instill this sort of mindset in the children, I'll have it made.

* * *

Ahem.

Yes, that above is what we in the profession call a "joke".  It is a "take" that is not supposed to be taken "seriously."

Please remove yourself from your huffy moral high horse or I will be forced to sic Jesus on you.

What?  I mean, surely, that's got to be a Born-on-Christmas perk, right?  There has to be something to offset the years of massive suckmonstrage from getting combo presents, after all.

* * *

We got our wedding pictures back from the fine folks at Cheeky Chic Photography, and I was surprised to note that the professional photos were very beautiful.  Cause, for starters, a great many of them had me in them... and that usually does not equate to anything near beautiful.  

But moreover, the pictures gave me an insight to what it looked like in the bridesmaids' suite as they prepared for the wedding.  And it was nothing like I imagined.  And I did imagine it.  I mean, there was such a big mystique about the whole thing-- I couldn't even see my Lovely Fiancée™ the day of the wedding.  I couldn't sleep at our house.  I had to confab with her clandestinely just to make sure we didn't arrive at Blanton House at the same time.  Hell, she was worried that when I called her I was tempting the fate of our marriage or something.  So i could only imagine what was happening in that room across the hall from where I was changing into my tux.

So, like I so often do, I filled in the blanks.  My Lovely Fiancée™ had been indoctrinated, I decided.  By some sort of shadow cabal.  I even had a name for it.

The Cult of the Bridesmaids.

Insert musical sting here.

So you can imagine my disappointment when I found that the pictures were actually pretty tame.  There were absolutely no scenes where my bride-to-be was eating a human heart or dousing herself in cattle blood.  There were no pictures where she stabbed a young Cosmo model to signify her dismissal of the norms of dating and her ascension into the realm of married life.  There was not a single picture of her prancing around in her never-mind-thats in a paean to the Fertility Mother for asking for a prodigious womb (or, more hopefully, forgiveness for agreeing not to have any).  

I did not see her, her maid of honor Jennifer, or her daughter (our junior bridesmaid and now my stepdaughter) Journey, or Chloe or Hannah (the ring bearer and flower girl, respectively) or even her friend Shannon (who was there helping the girls do their hair) tossing chicken bones and runestones to augur what our marriage would be like.  There was no carving their names into lead tablets to bury beneath our flower bed so that I would be crippled if I tried to start an argument, or doing up a doll made up of bits plucked from my hairbrush to make sure I didn't bolt from the ceremony.

I was bummed.  It would have been a rare slice of life, like a National Geographic exposé into the women's bathroom at the local bar-- the one they gang up to enter.  But it was not to be.

Sigh.

Of course, you know, the photographer was female, too.  She might be sworn to secrecy, too.

Hmmmm.  Perhaps the Cult of the Bridesmaids lives on.

* * *

I'm apologizing, right here and right now, to my lovely Trophy Wife™ for anything I said aloud while we were waiting for her to come down the aisle.  Seriously, I'm a nervous talker.  You wouldn't think so, as often as I'm quiet, but apparently-- especially in front of a large group-- I just apparently feel like something needs to be said.  

So we've-- we in this case being myself, my best man Bob and my brother Dennis, the third groomsman-- stepped up to the front of the assemblage, and are standing there as the processional music begins, because it's actually nearing half an hour past what the wedding was slated for.  And the music plays through once.  I am not concerned-- I know that most brides have last-minute issues, and given the way my wife's hair usually causes her grief, it would not have surprised me to hear that her hair had to be talked out of a suicidal streak by feeding it ice cream and shots of Jagrmeister.  So I'm exhaling, I'm mellow, I'm at peace.  

And the music begins again.  And we stand there, joking around a little, and beginning to feel a little on the awkward, goofy side.  

And then the music begins again.  Now, bear in mind, we did not pick little two-minute waltzes for the processional themes.  These were fullblown orchestra pieces.  Three times.   I'm losing it...  I'm starting to nervously talk about how it was like this at Gen Con, too...

Hey, honey, we have a 10:00 game, and it's 9:25.  Just sayin'.

Honey, it's 9:35.  Don't wanna rush you, but we do kinda have to drive downtown, and park and, you know, walk.  

Honey, it's 9:50, and instantaneous travel won't be perfected for another twenty years yet.  

Honey, just take your time and let's try to make the 1 PM panel discussion, because we obviously didn't really want to play that game, anyway.  

(An aside: see, one thing I have noticed now that we've been married for a little while is that if we are going to arrive anywhere by any sort of scheduled time, I am going to have to stretch the truth by moving our supposed arrival time up by about thirty minutes, because I can see now that if we're not made late by hair or makeup or traffic or the kids, it will be by life in general.)

So yeah, by now I'm yea close to the line of freaking out.  I'm beginning to look at my watch and wishing I had my e-cig with me, and wanting to strangle Pachelbel and his fucking Canon, and am about a step away from telling Bob to go retrieve her.

(Another aside: I laugh at some people who chose their best men without considering the fact that they may actually have to perform the old, traditional best man rituals, such as bringing the prospective bride to the altar (in chains if need be!) and protecting the groom long enough for the wedding to go off without him receiving a knife in the gut.  I think these things out.)

And I have no doubt he would have done so.  He might have picked up every one of the bridesmaids and brought them out in curlers, and if I remained alive to our fiftieth anniversary, I would have never, ever, ever lived it down.

But fortunately, none of that happened.  At that point the bridesmaids arrived and the imminent cataclysm was narrowly averted.

* * *

Finally (for now), I want to bring up something and, again, let you take it with the grain of salt most things that I say are taken with.  I do realize their place in the grand scheme of things, and I do know it is not only a necessity of wedding decorum, but a polite thing to do.  And yes, we are still working on ours, so they will go out to each and every one of you.  But still:

Thank-you card writing is fucking murder.

Seriously, decorum is that you do not type a thank-you card, you handwrite it to properly show that it means that much to you, and to allow the recipient to know that you did not do a mass writing in Microsoft Word and only change the appropriate lines where necessary.  You personalize it; you leave a nice personal message to the recepient telling them thank you for showing up at the wedding, or for the gift, or anything of the sort.  You have the freedom to be creative.

So I started writing them with my lovely Trophy Wife™ a couple weeks ago, before the fan and the shit started shaking hands and forced us to put off a lot of things.  And I immediately found out two things:

A) My hand muscles are not nearly limber enough for long-term penmanship.

And, B) when I write, I am most notable for not knowing when to shut the hell up.

So an hour and a half in, my hand feels like I've been playing racquetball with it, using a lead-filled ball.  My fingers are contorted and tight and achey and completely fucking unused to writing anything longer than my name.  And I feel like such a spoiled little wuss kid in detention, shaking my hand every sixth or seventh word to get feeling back in it.  

I look at the writing on a couple cards I've done with a practiced, artistic eye: it starts out in my nice, tightly rounded and beautifully legible handwriting at the top of the card, and then slowly it work its way past teenage "have better things to do than write this report" penmanship, until it finally devolves into cuneiform by the bottom.

So, I would like to point out to anyone lucky enough to get a note from me... that thing at the bottom that looks like a sea monster should actually read "Thank you again!"  Or some variation thereof.

And yeah, we'll get those out soon.  Promise.

Hopefully sooner than my next blog.