Spent the weekend with my family and parents and went to Strasbourg, PA taking the kids to see a life size functioning Thomas the Tank Engine, lots of fun, tons of merchandise, my four year old was totally overloaded, my parents were like pick what ever you want us to buy you, and he had choice paralysis and had to be "forced" to pick some items. Not like we wanted to buy him stuff he didn't want, but we knew they had stuff that we couldn't get in a regular store and that he'd totally regret not getting some of the cool items they had on sale.
(They had mad Thomas stuff in Tokyo, Thomas candy, gum, cookies, chips, crackers, every kind of toys, bibs, clothes, etc. ad nauseum.)
He was pretty afraid when we told him that we were going to see a "real" Thomas, and it took him a while to warm up once we got there, he kind of freaked out when we got online to board Thomas, I basically had to threaten him with throwing out all of his Thomas toys to get him to board the train without a complete and very public meltdown. Once the train took off he was totally cool.
I was talking to him about the trip today, after he reconfirmed that he had a good time I asked him why he was scared, was it that he was going to see a "real" Thomas? He said yes, and then I thought and asked, "Did you think that Thomas was going to talk?" to which he answered yes.
So I was like now I get it, an actual talking giant train the size of a small building would be pretty fucking terrifying to anyone. "So would you want to go next to ride Thomas again?" "Yeah and to buy stuff again too!"
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Monday, June 19, 2006
Bitter Pill
Coming back from vacation is always a bitter pill of sorts, particularly an urban vacation. I just got back from Tokyo two days ago, and spent most of yesterday driving through summer weekend Jersey Shore traffic to pick up my kids from their maternal grandmother's. When you come back from a tropical vacation you know that if you lived in Aruba or Grand Cayman or where ever unless they decriminalized drugs and you were sitting on 2 mil in pension you'd probably wind up bored out of your mind, doing some kind of service industry job, because that's what people do in those places.
An urban vacation for me is like a time machine to eight years ago when I had spending money and wasn't thinking about kids or how we're going figure out a way to flip our current house to get a bigger one in the same town we live in without much additional income, again life's temporarily about seeing cool shit, eating good food, sex, getting loaded and for me of course CD shopping in a city that much of world finds interesting.
Then back to the future it's 11:20 PM I've some how watched 2 hours of stupid TV because I'm afraid of waking up the two children that are sleeping on my lap, the younger of which is making me pay for being away for two weeks by screaming every time I'm out his site for three seconds, or if I'm not carrying him. The cookie I gave the older one that I was amazed he ate so quickly before he fell asleep has actually not been eaten at all but is crushed underneath him and ground into our velvet couch, and the handy vacuum has been full for two months so I can't use that, so I have to shake the cushion off out back, where there's a congregation of about 3o to 40 bugs hovering around waiting to rush into what they think is my cool air-conditioned home, but they're wrong because the guy who installed our new furnace last fall never hooked up any of the cooling system, which the repair man who came by today said was not the norm (the repair man had his forearms pierced with two large barbells in each arm, I've never seen that before), my house has been hot as fucking Hades, so I turn off the kitchen lights open the back sliders, stick the cushion out and start dusting it off, but wait I forgot about the motion trigger security light out back, so it's a mad dash back in whilst fending off bugs, which after going to so many Buddhist temples in Kamakura I'm trying not to kill so many bugs as I use to. Then I realize that that stomach ache that has reached back to my spin is actually hunger, so I heat up the bocca burger I was planning to eat three and a half hours ago for a third time, and currently I realize that that was 40 minutes ago, so I think I'll need to move on to a new burger or other food.
My wife is still in Tokyo on business for a few more days, so alone I'm getting to shoulder all of our children's insecurities from not seeing their parents for two weeks and imagining that being a single parent to more than one small child must really fucking suck.
Rewinding a bit, once I finally get the little one up to bed and begin to clean up, an actually good show comes on TV, that political comedian, Frank Black I think his name is, anyway I try to watch him as I clean up, and of course underneath the couch cushion there's enough crumbs and raisons to satisfy a preschooler on a two hour car ride that I have to clean up now as well. I haven't really been able to unpack, and repair man has to come back to fix the A.C.
An urban vacation for me is like a time machine to eight years ago when I had spending money and wasn't thinking about kids or how we're going figure out a way to flip our current house to get a bigger one in the same town we live in without much additional income, again life's temporarily about seeing cool shit, eating good food, sex, getting loaded and for me of course CD shopping in a city that much of world finds interesting.
Then back to the future it's 11:20 PM I've some how watched 2 hours of stupid TV because I'm afraid of waking up the two children that are sleeping on my lap, the younger of which is making me pay for being away for two weeks by screaming every time I'm out his site for three seconds, or if I'm not carrying him. The cookie I gave the older one that I was amazed he ate so quickly before he fell asleep has actually not been eaten at all but is crushed underneath him and ground into our velvet couch, and the handy vacuum has been full for two months so I can't use that, so I have to shake the cushion off out back, where there's a congregation of about 3o to 40 bugs hovering around waiting to rush into what they think is my cool air-conditioned home, but they're wrong because the guy who installed our new furnace last fall never hooked up any of the cooling system, which the repair man who came by today said was not the norm (the repair man had his forearms pierced with two large barbells in each arm, I've never seen that before), my house has been hot as fucking Hades, so I turn off the kitchen lights open the back sliders, stick the cushion out and start dusting it off, but wait I forgot about the motion trigger security light out back, so it's a mad dash back in whilst fending off bugs, which after going to so many Buddhist temples in Kamakura I'm trying not to kill so many bugs as I use to. Then I realize that that stomach ache that has reached back to my spin is actually hunger, so I heat up the bocca burger I was planning to eat three and a half hours ago for a third time, and currently I realize that that was 40 minutes ago, so I think I'll need to move on to a new burger or other food.
My wife is still in Tokyo on business for a few more days, so alone I'm getting to shoulder all of our children's insecurities from not seeing their parents for two weeks and imagining that being a single parent to more than one small child must really fucking suck.
Rewinding a bit, once I finally get the little one up to bed and begin to clean up, an actually good show comes on TV, that political comedian, Frank Black I think his name is, anyway I try to watch him as I clean up, and of course underneath the couch cushion there's enough crumbs and raisons to satisfy a preschooler on a two hour car ride that I have to clean up now as well. I haven't really been able to unpack, and repair man has to come back to fix the A.C.
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