The Benefits Of Merging Households

I'm in Massachusetts this week at camp. But thanks to the fact that MLB has discovered AppleTV (and I've switched my account to bill his credit card), I receive regular e-mails from iTunes letting me know he's been very busy since I left town. Watching six seasons of "Top Chef." Hopefully by the time I get home he'll have perfected his boeuf bourguignon.

Things My Children Will Never Own, Vol. I

An Hermes coloring book.

Sorry, my little unborn darlings. Even if Mummy becomes a bestselling author and sells the movie rights to Merchant Ivory, she will never, ever, ever shell out $130 for a twelve-page coloring book.

(Yes, this is a real thing, and yes, I said twelve pages. Twenty-four illustrations. That's about $5.42 per page.)

You're just going to have to learn to be content with the backs of pages from old Social Registers like all the other little future debutantes.

Myster and MLB: A Love Story

Kill The Spill!

We made this game at work. And by "we made" I mean a bunch of people who are not me actually did all the work, and I just offered helpful suggestions from time to time. But I think it's the helpful suggestions that make it magical.

Milestone

Today I used MLB's real first name in a blog post. I figured it was OK since -- well, you know. Cat's kind of out of the bag. Don't look for it to appear here, though. He'll always be MLB to OTS.

(Side Note: The same blog post included the return of Friend Pete, who hasn't been heard from in a while, mostly because he hasn't been heard from for a while in real life. As long as he surfaces by next June and is wearing the right color necktie for the wedding photos, it will all be OK.)

Let Me Take You On A Long, Rambling Journey

Preface: Brendan keeps threatening to take me out of his Google Reader unless I start posting. He didn’t say I needed to make my posts interesting or coherent, though — just available. Be careful what you wish for, BJK.

My brother dropped me off at the airport last Wednesday night — I was on my way to meet MLB at a wedding that would include a performance by Mini Lady Gaga — and as we unloaded my suitcase from the back of his car, he told me he had something to show me. It was a ring. He was finally going to ask Geneva to marry him.

“We’re not going to steal your thunder, though,” he said. And then I pointed out that it was a little silly to make my bridal ego a factor in planning their wedding considering they had a baby two years ago.

So now it’s Super Happy Wedding Planning time around the old family (Geneva’s sister is engaged, too, so the two sets of parents between the four of us are probably lying awake at night with visions of dollar signs and catering contracts dancing in their heads), which is great because now someone else cares about bridal magazines as much as I do. Or almost as much, anyway. It also makes it that much more likely I’ll end up DIYing things like invitations because hey, if you can split the expense of a Gocco, it would be silly not to screen print your own stationery, right?

This is the point at which Tony will e-mail me and say something like “Why are you posting this on your blog when you could be writing it for work?” so I’d better change the subject before I end up writing the same column twice. Look for further tales of family wedding planning and screen printing fun at Alaska Dispatch. Moving on:

Today I learned that if you cook cherry Jell-O and demi-glace at the same time, your kitchen will start to smell a little bit like Play-Doh. (Side Note: Those of you with some minor culinary inclination may have tripped over the phrase “cook cherry Jell-O”; You don’t cook Jell-O, you might be thinking, and you would be right. Unless, that is, one happens to be making the fruity candy popcorn recipe recommended by Finnskimo.) MLB and I skipped out on a first-birthday kegger and a sixteenth-anniversary cookout to stay home and clean our kitchen.

Yes, it took us all day to clean our kitchen. We travel a lot. The dishes pile up. We just invested in a SodaStream, though, so no more aluminum cans for us. Which is good. Since we take the recycling out about once every six months.

As long as we’re on the subject of gadgets (if you consider the Wii a gadget), Netflix for the Wii is the year’s greatest advancement in home entertainment. I just started watching “The Tudors.” I wish someone would have told me this was coming when I tried to cleanse my palate of “The Other Boleyn Girl” by watching “The Six Wives of Henry VIII.” Nice and British, but too much talking. Not enough jousting and stabbing and infidelity and scandal. “The Tudors” strikes a much better balance. Plus Natalie from “The Commitments” plays Catherine of Aragon.

In other news, my sweet peas are sprouting, my pansies are blooming, my strawberries are blossoming — and these are not strange double entendres, but references to our deck garden. I may even end up with some edible broccoli raab this summer.

Speaking of the deck — and warm weather — the dog seems to have decided that the best way to start each day is to chase tennis balls up and down the creek in our back yard. The wet, cold, wet, muddy-bottomed creek. So I hope the dog thinks the second-best way to start each day is to spend an hour hanging out on the deck all alone drying off, because if she’s going to be that into water sports, that’s what she’s going to be doing.

Since this post seems to be going nowhere fast — and the sun is still shining; score one for Alaskan summers — let’s just end on a high note with a gratuitous photo of Nephew:


No, he doesn’t have Sideshow Bob feet. Those are his father’s shoes.

Puppy Needs A Yard

I showed MLB the plan I drew up for the deck using smallblueprinter’s garden planner.


“I like how the dog looks even fatter in that diagram than she does in real life,” he said.