AC Capehart capehart

I had just finished a long phone conversation with my mom, and was talking it over with Carolyn when we heard what sounded like fireworks outside. I thought it wasn’t close enough to June to be fireworks season, and then it dawned on me. Maybe the Steelers had won the Superbowl. Altoona is close enough to Pittsburgh that this is considered “Steeler Country.” So, I went to superbowl.com and reported, “Yep, we won.” And then I chuckled and said, “Listen to me! ‘We.’ – Ha!”

We had a fun “First Friday” games night last night. If you weren’t invited, but should have been, send me an email.

It was a small group because I announced it so late, but we had fun. We started with Fluxx, then played Kill Dr. Lucky and ended up with some Magic.

I’m still yawning from the late night, though. And Sam kept Carolyn pretty busy, so she was unable to join us. Still, I’m already looking forward to next month!

Cat in a box

Originally uploaded by AC Capehart.

Man, you really never know what you’re going to get from Amazon.com.

In reality, this is a test-post from within flickr. I’ve joined recently, and started playing around. Now I’ll have 3 levels of pictures. Everything I take is on my hard drive. Things that I think worth sharing at all will be in my gallery and things that I think are quite good and may deserve a larger audience will show up in my flickr stream.

I told Carolyn’s voicemail the story of the forgotten wallet, and was therefore positively ebullient when she came home from work with two bags of Doritos. In snacking on these, I happened to read a little bit of the packaging. According to the bag, “It’s the only snack bold enough to call itself Doritos ® brand.”

Well, yeah. Any other snack that was “bold enough” to call itself Doritos would have the pants sued off of them by Frito Lay. And just to make that point, they make sure that the ®-symbol IS RIGHT THERE IN THE CLAIM! The word “Doritos” appears 6 times on the back of the packaging. And 5 times it has the ® symbol. The only time it doesn’t… is in THE URL! They want to be quite sure to protect the trade mark, while they taunt other chip manufacturers.

The most recent troubling forgetfulness happened today. But I need to preface this story with an introduction. I love Doritos. No, seriously, I looove Doritos. They were traveling food when I was a kid. I’d be in the back seat of the VW bug as we went from Durham, NC up to the Shack in Virginia — a rustic cabin in the blue ridge mountains. I hated the trip. 3 hours in the car every other weekend or so, but I loved being at the shack. It’s so verdant. I loved the wet, rain smell that I got to experience so often as we climbed out of the foothills into the mountains. But the one thing that made that long voyage bearable was that we got to eat Doritos. The spicier, the nacho cheesier, the better. When I could finally do it with my lawn mowing money, I went and bought myself as big a bag of Doritos that existed, and sat down and ate the whole bag in one sitting. Thinking back on it, I have to wonder how I managed to distract my parents long enough for that to happen. So, in case you missed it earlier, I love Doritos.

I’ve been forgetful in some genuinely annoying ways the past few days. Last Thursdayactually, it was the Thursday before that. Time sure flies when you’re forgetful! I was dealing with the car. Nothing special, just checking the oil because of a burning smell. I decided to top it off as it was a little less than half a quart low. I keep the extra oil in one of the compartments in the rear. To get to it, I have to use my key in the tailgate to lower the rear window. When I do that, I frequently leave the keys in the tailgate because I’ll need it to put the window back up. Only I had a container of oil that was about half a quart. So, I put that in, checked it again, threw away the container, put away the rag, and I was done. Time to go back upstairs and make dinner or something.

I’m sure that’s something you’ve been thinking for some time now. After all, college is just 16-19 years away for darling Samantha. (She might go early, she might take a year off — She hasn’t made her preference clear to me yet.) And college is not getting any cheaper. Thanks to some generous donations over the past few years from Grandmère and Great-Grandmother Ruth, Sam has a start at a 529 plan college fund.

We had our “Class Reunion” for our Bradley Method Birth class today. It was neat to get together. We’d actually run across the baby (and dad) from the other couple a day or two ago, but we’d not seen the Bradley instructor since class, and it was nice to be in a more casual setting (their house).

The babies seemed at best mildly interested in one another. The other baby did spend a reasonable amount of time looking at Sam, but Sam was more interested in looking at Mom. We put them face-to-face at eye level for a while, and Sam got quite chatty, which was cute.

Yesterday, Sam got another birth card. This one (ostensibly) came from Governor Ed Rendell, and his wife, Midge. The front looks like a normal congratulatory card. The cover says “Welcome Little One” and on the inside, “The world is one baby sweeter now.” And then comes the “personal” message from Midge & Ed. In handwriting-font, it says “As parents, we know how precious your baby is to you. Keeping your little one healthy means starting immunizations by two months of age. Congratulations, and remember to get those shots!” There’s an attached immunization record and growth chart. Ooh, and it gets better. On the back, “Hallmark is committed to encouraging childhood immunizations. We donated this card to your state as part of a ten-year national effort to help protect the health of our youngest citizens…”

Maybe I just have a dirty mind, but it took me a moment too long to parse this correctly when I heard it the first time:

“OK, It’s time for floor play. Do you want to touch your turtle? Here. Touch your turtle.”

— Sam touches her turtle.