Atomictumor

Times are good, times are good.

Last night, after dropping off the kids at the legacy in-laws (thats the best name I can determine for a situation like this - alert Emily Post), me and my Lady went arm in arm to the local Mexican food eatery for a nice, grown up double date thing with Bos and Eaves.

With big ass mexican beer and margaritas.

And damn, lemme tell you. That place (the name of which always eludes me, and I can’t be arsed to look it up, so deal) throws some food at you. We’ve had the fajitas there before, and never finished the plate. So, since the Lady and I were both starving, we decided to split an order of fajitas along with a big ass sampler platter, and DAMN. We didn’t finish the food.

Finished the booze, tho, and then the four of us went back over here to drink more booze and play spades, on account of the Lady and I have a crazy psychic connection when we’re playing spades that almost allows us to crush the pathetic competition, except that we tend to be too ambitious, and end up losing. Still, one of these days, we might actually have those 12 tricks that we both think we do, and then we’ll be all like “IN YOUR FACE, COMPETITION” and the competition will be all like “damn, I just got pwned by AT and Ladyfriend”.

Then we’ll drink heavily and sit back, convinced in our mutual awesomnitude.

Look it up.

So, anyway, we got here, and the spades game never happened, because we got to drinking, and listening to music (Hot Chip and Radiohead, both on vinyl, for those keeping track), and we talked about stuff. While Bos and I were talking about cool, interesting, important things like the flash hard drive on his little Asus EEE (which I’m starting to see the point in. I mean, at first, I saw the 900 MHZ processor and half gig of RAM and thought “loser”, but it’s designed to surf the internet and do word processing, not, like, render all sorts of crazy 3D stuff, or track ballistic missiles or something. Those paying attention know that I have, in the house, at least 3 computers capable of rendering all sorts of crazy 3D stuff and track ballistic missiles, but what do I do with them? Surf the internet and word processing. So, there you go) and the new phone that I’m imminently getting to replace the old and busted Samsung piece of large ass heavy not working crap that I carry around on my belt, the ladies were talking about something boring like babies, or families, or something, and having some sort of moment, or something lame like that.

Who knows.

Anyway, we all had a good time, Eave’s nose didn’t seem bothered by the cat hair, and nobody got mauled by the dogs. Then they left, and the Lady and I cuddled up in our amazingly, incredibly, insanely comfortable new bed and snickered about how they had to go pick up their kids and put them to bed. Heh.

And then this morning, we slept in till 10:30 (!) and fixed tasty omelettes for breaky. And lo, it was good.

(this post really had a lot of parenthetical asides. Not sure whats up with all that. I guess I’ve missed em.)

I came into work today with my little external hard drive. See, for various reasons, I haven’t had music at work for the past few weeks like I always used to do, so I brought the hard drive in, hooked it up to the company lappy (yes, I have a company lappy. Season of change, lemme tell ya) and got down with some of the music.

Now, I didn’t have a lot of time to get a lot of music. You have to transfer it from the media computer, which (for various reasons) has a wifi connection, over to the lappy, which has a wifi connection, over to the hard drive. I guess I could have hooked the hard drive straight up to the media computer, but the plug is behind a dresser, and lo, the obstacles we all have.

So, I didn’t get a lot of music. I got maybe 14, 15 records, all newish stuff, or stuff that I haven’t listened to in a while. Stuff that kinda caught my eye in the 5 minutes I was throwing stuff on the drive (before the 45 minutes it took to transfer).

Today, after driving the kids to school, where Juicebox and I sang Happy Birthday to BJ, and talked about how he’ll have two mommie’s when we’re all in heaven, I got to work and plugged that bad boy in. Its been great listening to music.

The song playing now, and the one that prompted me to write this today, is Casimir Pulaski Day, by Sufjan Stevens. I haven’t listened to it in a long time, its a song that always had a huge emotional meaning to me.

Golden rod and the 4-H stone
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the bone

It just always used to hit me.  I’d be in tears by the time the song was over, and when I got to the point when I felt done being in tears, when I wasn’t going to let sadness overwhelm me anymore, I just kinda avoided the song.  If it came on the shuffle, I’d skip it.

Well, it came on today, of all days.  And it brought back my talk with my little boy, who has two mommies.  And my big boy, in the car the other day, about how much he loves the people in his life.  And my talk with my second love of my life, about how she loves BJ for reasons that I can maybe understand but not explain, and about how I love my second love with every part.  And it made me think that I’m not sad that today’s birthday girl is gone, but that I’m happy that I have her birthday to celebrate with my family.  And it brought back 10 years in my past.  And it brought back the thought of untold years in my future.

And it still puts a lump in my throat, that song, but not the same way.  It brings out the amazing goodness of life, about how it has downs, sure, it has hard downs that we experience, but the amazing highs of being up overwhelm them, and how those surreal joys, when you’re thinking “this can’t be real” are somehow more real than the hard times.

And I smile instead, as I send a text message to that sweet second love of my life “I love you”/

So, today when I went to pick MastaG up after school, he was getting in the car singing (literally) the praise of leftover night.

His plan for dinner:

“First a waffle. Then I’m thinking some pizza. And then, after that, I’m going to hit the hamburger helper.”

I can understand some of his enthusiasm. Both the lady and I know our way around the kitchen, and after my king hell sick last weekend, I had an abnormally large desire to cook and eat delicious foods.

That, and, well, we’re broke this week, so no eating out.

Anyway, the choices are

• Hamburger helper - Cheesy Macaroni or something. We had this Sunday, so its a little long in the tooth, but he doesn’t seem to care. Its good for the immune system.
• Pizza - Monday’s the 5 dollar pizza night. I had some hardcore craving for pizza.
• Fried Chicken - Tuesday, on top of getting the badass bed (which is like sleeping on God’s feather pillow), I made the tastiest fried chicken I’d ever made. Could have been the extra egg, could have been the frozen flour and cornmeal, could have been the graham crackers. Point is, damn, damn, damn, it was tasty.
• Spaghetti - A perpetual favorite in the AT household. We make it good, and we make it plentiful. I had some for lunch today.
• Waffles- Almost forgot that one, it was Sunday’s breakfast, and my first “back to life” food.  Bullet got me a bitchin Belgian waffle grill for Christmas, and we had to take it for a test run.  Yum.

So, yeah. Now that I think about it, I’m kinda psyched for leftover night too…

3 year-old Lugnut just ran up to me and said, very excitedly, “I have a bag of money!”

I saw in his hands a brown lunch bag, filled with something.  “You have money in there, Lugnut?”

“Yes!  CASH MONEY!”

I took the bag and peeked inside.  It was full of toy elephants.

I wonder if we can use them as a down payment on a new house?

So, we’ve all agreed that the new Bed, the one that came today, behind the closed bedroom doors not 20 feet away from where I’m sitting right now, has to be capitalized.

Because its freakin awesome.

See, I had a decent bed. Sure, it was old, and lumpy, and handed down, and it had been flipped a dozen times trying to bring that lump/comf ratio back even, but it was good because it was a goliath California King sized monster of a bed, and I got some long legs.

Now, I was on that thing by myself for a good long time, and when I laid in it, it was like I was the ruler of a giant, industrious world of bed. The industry was, well, sleep, I guess, but it made it in spades. And I was King AT. Actually, I prefer El Presidente AT. Or maybe Duke AT. But then you get into brown humor, and nobody wants to go there.

I digress.

Anyway, that bed was the cats meow, and I slept on it like a mighty man. It was big, and cold, and pretty lonely, but the big makes up for most of it, so I had plenty of room to stretch out, or roll around, or jog in place, or whatever I fancied.

When the Lady came into the picture, and the time came to consolidate my stuff into her house because it made all sorts of sense (still does), we both totally agreed that moving a big ass industrious world of bed was probably not entirely needful, and in fact, would lead to all sorts of problems. So, I Craigslisted that bad boy, and got me like 75 clams. Score.

The Lady, now, she had had a little bed adventure (ooo, that sounds bad too…) of her own, and went out a year ago or so and bought a nice cherry bedroom set with a pillowtopped queen bed, the kind of thing that makes little puffs of cotton brag about being tuff. It was a massive ass sleigh bed, but as it was a queen, it wasn’t quite a world, and I don’t know that it was very industrious because, well, the pillowtop was a little too soft, and the mattress kept in that body heat so that your body was a bit of a scale representation of the planet Mercury, with one side (the side facing the bed) boiling hot, and the other side (the side that you’ve ripped all the covers off and fastened a lawn sprinkler to) very, very chilly. A poor compromise indeed.

But, hell, we sold that bad boy too. Now, this is where our logic seems a bit hazy. Neither of us really dug on the big ass sleigh footboard, because it liked to kick you in the leg when you weren’t paying attention, and the mattresses issues have been well documented, sure, but we ended up selling the mattress and box springs, and moving in the old family mattress that had adorned her former guest room (which was now the kids room) for us to sleep on.

The guest mattress was a queen, and had no real flaws, but a distinct lack of comf. It was not industrious. It produced sleep, but the kind of sub-quality sleep that had you pouring coffee in your hat and stretching your back against all sorts of interesting things to work out the morning kinks. We slept on that thing for a good few months, me, the Lady, and Mikey (the Beagle), and every night dreamed little dreams about the magical day when an industrious world sized bed would come into our lives.

So, we bought one. We went out a couple weeks ago, shopped around, and found a bitching headboard and mattress. The mattress is a combination of my old beds bignitude and general thermal reliability, and the Lady’s queens newness and not-old-and-bustedness. We were picky, now. We laid in many beds in the course of our shopping. We discovered that apparently california king beds are, despite the fact that they really kinda make more sense, not easily found in places that aren’t California. We found that most bed frames have foodboards, and are ugly. We found that furniture shopping is an facinating industry, filled with mazelike showrooms that lead to dead ends, leaving you prey for the slow but relentless salesperson to try to hit you with their latest financing offers, despite how many times you explain, in english, that you’re buying your bed with cash.

Finally, we found our Bed.

So here it is:

And let me tell you, its friggin sweet.

“But AT, why’s the door closed to your bedroom?”

Oh, thats because the Lady and I have fully agreed that we are not going to get on The Bed until its bedtime tonight. Because how often do you get to lay down for bed for the first time in a brand new sweet ass world of industrious and beautiful comf? Not often, man. Not often.

But the problem is, that sweet ass Bed calls. Its all like “AT, dude, she won’t know. Seriously. Take a nap.”

So I closed the door.

Keeps the cats off it too.

Friggin cats.