Yes, I used the word "blogonym." But that's not the point of this post. (Life With Unicorns)

In a day that has had its ups and downs so far, but which was in danger of beginning a quick downward spiral, I was rescued by this text from Sweetie, which I just now noticed, and which I'll quote verbatim (other than substituting Mr F's blogonym):

Mr F just counted to 10!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1-10!!!!!"!!"

I'm guessing at the number of exclamation points Sweetie used, as they're very small and hard to count on the actual text.

This bit of good news comes on the heels of Mr F also learning to say "Set... Go" when we say "Ready."

So things are getting talky around our house.

Also, as you can see from the picture on this post, Mr F has recently learned to swing correctly. I'd like to take credit for that development, but he did it by mimicking a girl on a swing next to him the other day.

It's like we have our own TV show! Only without commercials. Or sponsors. Or "production values." (Life With Unicorns.)

It's here! The video I alluded to in the classic post "The Pancakes Of Time Get Their Revenge."

I finally figured out how to load up ... or upload, as we techies say... videos from my phone onto the Internet, and all I had to do was create a completely new Youtube account because I was completely unable to access my old Youtube account after Google acquired Youtube, even though I have a Google account, and Youtube said I could use my Google account, so the point is that eventually there will be no new email addresses because I will be using every conceivable combination of numbers and letters to bring you stunning high-quality video like the following, which I cleverly call:

Mr Bunches Cooking Pancakes.

Bad Republican: Rick Santorum says kindergartners are Nazis, and he would know because he has fascist relatives. (Publicus Proventus)

Bad Republican Rick Santorum -- whose actual existence is only third on the list of Google results you get when you Google "Santorum" -- has no chance of getting elected president and isn't really trying; he's just trying to up his Q-rating so he can get the time slot that Glenn Beck will be vacating this year on Fox. Which is why he can say stupid things like how pre-kindergarten classes are actually Nazi indoctrination schemes.

Speaking at a Republican forum which featured the people who you won't see in the campaign at this time next year, Santorum talked about the growing threat of "socialism:"

His uncle, he said, “used to get up in a brown shirt and march and be told how to be a good little fascist.... I don’t know, maybe they called it early pre-K or something like that, that the government sponsored to get your children in there so they can indoctrinate them,” Santorum said.

(Source.) I think two key points to take from that quote are that (1) Rick Santorum's uncle was a fascist, and (2) The apple never falls far from the tree:

Photo Essays: Table Of Contents:

Page down for a complete list of all the photo essays ever published here:

  The many faces of Mr F

  Durable S'mores and the Secret Homes Of Angels

  This is how my life looked over the past 12 hours... in the antimatter universe.

One night, Mr F somewhat unwillingly helped me make Rice Krispie treats.

Stretching My Legs In Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

"We are going to Wal-Mart to get a mattress, and NOTHING ELSE."

We held the water balloon fight in the front yard because the bees are in the backyard.

Mr F has a slinky & a swing, I have a digital camera.

"We are going to get a trumpet."

We actually never got near many pumpkins at the pumpkin farm.

It's like a scene from Scooby Doo!

Everything looks more significant if you do it in black and white, even just hanging out.

People carrying flowers passed the library.

An experiment

I hope they never find OUR secret place.

Everything looks more significant in black and white, 2.




Do I have your attention? Because you can GET A FREE BOOK, simply by Buying a Book!

Buy one of these books, and send me proof of purchase (you can email me here ) and I will send you any one of these books free. (Put "Books" or "Buy one" or something like that in the subject line so I know it's not junk.)

BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE!

Buy them on the Kindle? No problem: Buy a Kindle version, I'll send you a hardcover version, free! Or I'll deposit enough to buy you a second Kindle version.

The Scariest Things, You Can't Imagine Print: $10.00 Download: $1.25 A shape-shifting demon torments children while their parents stand by. A widower haunted by the ghost of his wife tries to understand her requests. A baby stolen from his mother by gargoyles returns, full of hatred for the life he's led. A family of children raised by grave-robbing corpse stealers tries to discover a way out. An elderly man possesses the power of life and death in his retirement. These stories present images and people who will haunt your thoughts for a long time after you read them. BUY IT ON KINDLE BY CLICKING HERE, just 99 cents!

Just Exactly How Life Looks Print: $11.18 In Just Exactly How Life Looks you'll be introduced to unforgettable people living remarkable lives. Cowboys wander in a timeless desert. Scientists meet in secret to plot a new way to get attention, and money, from people. A man and his would-be lover try to find lions on safari, and more. The people and places in this book spring to life fully-formed and full of anxiety and imagination. They worry about the time they have had and the time they have left. They bury their loved ones and look for new friends. They talk and laugh and hope and cry and die, while their friends and family and enemies and Gods watch them, seeing, in their faces and actions and fears, a portrait of just exactly how life looks. Buy it on Kindle by clicking here, just 99 cents!

Eclipse Print: $11.50 Download: $1.49 Claudius wanted to be the first man to reach the stars... and maybe he was. In a stunning psychological horror work, "Eclipse" unfolds slowly, beginning with Claudius drifting through space after something has gone wrong with his mission. As he stares at the only thing he can see, a tiny rock off in space, he mulls the events that led him here, reflecting on his childhood and the mission-turned-into-murder. Or did things go bad? As "Eclipse" unfolds, the reader is treated to a twisting, constantly changing landscape created by Claudius' own mind, as version after version of what-might-have-happened pile on. One thing is clear, though: Something has gone wrong, and Claudius may never reach the stars. Or will he? Buy it on Kindle by Clicking here, just 99 cents!

Do Pizza Samples Really Exist? Print: $10.06 Download: $1.49 Why will paying attention to Paris Hilton destroy the universe? How can one number be better than the other? Are saber teeth really necessary for a good movie monster? Would Hollywood as we know it exist if not for Jennifer Aniston's hair? These questions and more are asked, and answered, in the only book that dares to explain how jellybeans are related to the apocalpyse. Essays on pop culture, things that are The Best, and life show a provocative, and hilarious, way of looking at the world.

Thinking The Lions, and 117* Other Ways To Look At Life (Give Or Take) Print: $12.98 Life, only funnier: Here's the book you've been waiting for, assuming you've been waiting for a book about a guy who spends his time trying to prove velociraptors didn't exist, who teaches his kids to gamble and helps them with their homework by wondering what would happen if you cut a superhero in half, whose own wife said he would get a crocodile for a babysitter, who finds squid chili romantic, and who generally makes the most -- or the least? - -of his life.

Are you the electronic reader type? Get most of these books and my blogs on your Kindle for as low as $0.99. Click here for details.

I am about 80% sure that I won this debate. (Quotes of the Day,

"I don't care if it says Firefly or Firefox... or barf."
-- Sweetie, talking about her shirt.

Sweetie had two shirt-related adventures yesterday, although I'll forewarn you that I'm using "adventures" loosely in that sentence, as they were "adventures" only to someone like Sweetie, who, after venturing down to State Street to spend her Mother's Day present from Mr F and Mr Bunches (who gave her $50 to go shopping on State Street) said, later on, that she felt sort of wind-burned and tired from going out.

We gone there because Sweetie, for Mother's Day, gave me a list of things the Babies! could buy her, and the list included "a t-shirt," and also various gift cards, and Sweetie then gave me $50. So on Saturday morning, we were getting ready to go to State Street to take the boys to the Farmers Market and bum around for a while, when it occurred to me that later on, I would have to take Mr F and Mr Bunches back to State Street to get Sweetie the t-shirt she wanted, a shirt I knew she wanted because she'd pointed it out to me on TV a few nights before, and I'd paused the TV and taken a picture of the screen with my smartphone, thereby proving that there is no amount of phenomenal technology that cannot be trivialized in my hands. (The picture I took of the TV to remember what shirt Sweetie wanted is the picture on this post.)

Realizing that I'd be going to State Street twice, and being lazy, I then suggested to Sweetie that for her Mother's Day gift, we simply take her shopping, right then and there, and she could buy herself whatever she wanted, up to the limit of the $50 she'd given me, and Sweetie agreed, which, if you're keeping track, means that pretty much the Babies! did not give Sweetie anything for Mother's Day, the gift of "cash" involving, typically, less thought than even a gift card, and in this case, even less thought than that, in that Sweetie hadn't yet given me the $50.

In short: For Mother's Day, Sweetie got $50 out of the bank and went shopping, and my involvement on behalf of her two youngest children was to suggest that. If it's the thought that counts, then I still got off easy, as I didn't even think very much about that idea.

(Just so you know, she's getting taken to a movie and dinner by the older kids, who although they will likely have to borrow money from her to do that will have their hearts in the right place.)

We'd "gone out," on the shopping trip that so wore Sweetie out, to two stores, and the second of the two was only so that Sweetie could use the restroom. True, we'd also gone sort of out of our way to go past the Old Red Gym on campus, because the Old Red Gym looks like a castle, and Mr Bunches wants to see it, but in total Sweetie was "outside" for about 20 minutes on 60-degree day.

Although, now that I think about it, Sweetie bought two shirts at that store, so technically she had three shirt-related adventures* on a single day

*Again, used very loosely.

The other two shirt-related adventures were, in no particular order**

** other than the order in which I put them, which is a very deliberate order that I chose for dramatic impact, because I'm always conscious of the dramatic impact of the parts of a story I'm telling, making me more or less the Christopher Nolan of blogging.***

***I don't think I actually was thinking of Christopher Nolan there; I was thinking of the guy what everyone says actually wrote all of Shakespeare's plays... Christopher Marlowe? Was that his name?****

****Having now looked it up, it was Christopher Marlowe I was thinking of. No offense, Christopher Nolan.

first Sweetie was looking at a catalog last night, and in it, found a shirt that she liked, and said to me "I like this t-shirt. Do you think I should get it?" and she showed me the picture of the shirt, and I responded, and I quote:

"Ho... Pie?"

That's not usually something I say to Sweetie, as our conversation usually doesn't involve either hoes or pies, except for those occasions when I point out that I am not really crazy about pie, and then Sweetie mentions that I love pecan pie, and I agree with that but say that's kind of a special occasion thing, which prompts Sweetie to then also list the other kinds of pie I also have enjoyed in the past (peanut butter, candy cane, lemon meringue... etc.) because marriage is all about proving your spouse wrong on a point so completely minor that it cannot possibly be blown up into an argument (that's called "winning at the marriage"), so back to the story:

Sweetie said, and I quote:

"What?"

And I pointed out to her that the shirt had "HOPE" spelled out in messy writing on two lines, like this:

H O

P E

Only messier, larger, and on a shirt in a catalog, so that when I'd first looked at it, I thought it read "Ho Pie."

Having just ruined that shirt for Sweetie the way I once ruined her first choice for a wedding dress -- I'd been asked to look at one in a catalog before we got married, and I looked at it, pronounced it ugly, and said that the "antiquiing" effect made it look as though the dress was old and getting kind of rotten, all without knowing what any sane, rational fiance would have known*****

*****What Any Sane Rational Fiance Would Have Known: If you are asked to comment on a wedding dress that is not actually in the act of being worn by someone else, it is probably the one your fiancee is thinking of buying, and also your opinion will NOT EVER help anyway, so just say you like it.

so Sweetie didn't get that dress, and I got no credit for helping prove true the old adage that the groom seeing the wedding dress before the marriage is bad luck, and on this occasion Sweetie did not decide to get her HOPE t-shirt for fear, I guess, that more people than me would wonder what a Ho Pie was and why Sweetie was in favor of one.

The third, but actually the first(*6)

(*6)Remember, I put them out of order for dramatic effect,

t-shirt adventure began with me noticing earlier that Sweetie was wearing a Firefly t-shirt, and saying "When did you get a Firefly t-shirt?" Sweetie then reminded me that she'd shown me the t-shirt earlier but first said:

"I had one," which I knew was kind of a lie because I also knew that she had only recently shown me the Firefly t-shirt online, an occasion I remembered because she'd asked me to come look at it and said:

"What was Firefly? Was that the Nathan Fillion show?"

forcing me to remember who Nathan Fillion was, and briefly thinking he was the guy who'd written all of the Shakespearean ouvre before I got it sorted out and accused Sweetie of wanting to buy a t-shirt solely because she thought the guy who used to star in the TV show which was referenced on the shirt was hunky.

(Which she does.)

When she turned up with the Firefly t-shirt, that conversation had happened recently enough, and had involved enough men who were (are) better looking than me, that I had not yet overwritten it, in my mind, with wondering whether, in the comic books, Green Lantern and Green Arrow had been teamed up because they were both Green superheroes.(*7)

(*7: It sort of seems like it, doesn't it? They really didn't have anything else in common and yet had their own magazine in which they had adventures together, so apparently in the superhero world, having "green" in your name is enough to link you to all other green superheroes, which is I bet how Match.com works, too.)

So I said to Sweetie: "No, you didn't. Did you just order that?" I was being careful, though, because unlike a noncontroversial topic like "You really do actually like pie, so why do you say that?" a topic like "Ordering T-Shirts" can actually be construed as an attack on a spouse, and I didn't want to attack Sweetie, I just wanted to prove that (a) she didn't always have a Firefly t-shirt, but (b) she'd recently ordered one, so (c) she'd sort of just lied to me, which meant that (d) she loved Nathan Fillion and (e) I would get to watch my TV shows later that night, which was important because I'd taped four episodes of Monster Bug Wars and wanted to watch them.

Sweetie just fessed up, though, saying "Yeah, I ordered it and I had it," which is the kind of wifely logic you can't use to get to watch your TV shows, so I had to press on with Point (d) to get to Point (e), and said:

"You just got it to get a shirt that reminded you of Nathan Fillion because you think he's hot."

Which almost makes sense if you don't think about it at all.

Sweetie said: "No, I didn't, I just like the color and the shirt. I don't care if it says Firefly or Firefox... or barf. I'd have gotten it no matter what."

Which left me with nothing else to finish up with but:

"You'd have bought a shirt that says Barf?"




Click here for more Quotes of the Day.