Ketchup

Been out for a week, so a quick follow up on the going-ons around about here:

My beloved Jen Jen is now a married woman. With Beth being in the condition that she is (y'know, exasperatingly pregnant), we were unable to take the trip to the OC for the event, but I have mad love for those crazy kids. For some reason I imagine the four of us making popcorn balls in a kitchen somewhere, kids playing loudly in the background just underneath the sounds of some triumphantly indy band playing on a record player. Congratulations Jenny and Michael, I love you two something crazy.

I went to a fathering class on Saturday. One of the other fathers made a joke about having to be out at a certain time to get to a bar and watch the Seahawks with the guys. Oh boy, was that funny. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it was the diaphragm shattering laughter that ensued which made way for the illness that put me down for the last couple of days. We learned about how to pick a baby up without damaging their fragile little heads and necks (fuckin' babies), we learned about diapering and swaddling, we learned about having a plan for those times when the baby starts crying uncontrollably for hours on end and you have the urge to induce some sort of brain damage just to shut it up. My plan is to put baby in a separate room, close the door, open a beer (which will from here on out be in steady supply) and watch a couple minutes of Jaws, or The Big Lebowski.

On Sunday we visited the hospital and the "birthing suites" where the child shall enter the world. They're nice, a lot of wood trim everywhere. They seem very Scandinavian somehow, which is apropos for a hospital named Swedish. I imagined myself floating around the "baby entering the world" floor for hours, Biffy apparently imagined for the first time how real this all is going to become. She began to get worried about being able to do this, and tried in vain to reassure her that she'd be fine.

My beer supply is diminishing quickly.

I spent Monday rearranging the office which once held bookshelves and a desk and my amps and guitars so that it could now hold baby things. Things like a crib and changing table and all of these things that I would not know about, or realize that I would need to know about, two years ago. I am still holding out hopes of one day having a house with a basement where the amps can make a triumphant return in all their loud, feedbacky glory.

Tuesday I awoke to a flu that felt like it had taken a playpen to my joints and whacked unmercifully. Things have been pretty fuzzy since then. I tried to watch some Star Wars movies, but ended up sleeping through them in a feverish state instead. But I can say that even a fever does not make Ewoks palatable.

Ewoks still suck...