The Aforementioned Odds and Ends

And now, here's the Best of The Rest of early September news!

Did I ever post a picture of the baby announcement that I designed and we sent out shortly after PrettyGirl got her full membership to Population Earth? Well, if I didn't, you can now see it at http://www.typecastpress.com/samples.html! Just click the thumbnail in the lower-right corner.

I'm pretty jazzed that my design was well-regarded enough to be used to sell the printing service!

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We went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival a few Saturdays ago. A friend of mine goes every year, but I've never taken him up on his invites to come along. But he was headed for Iraq soon, so I took this last chance to see him (before he left, hopefully not forever) and we all went down there.

A fine time was had by all. Well, PG was pretty non-plussed about the whole thing, but the rest of us had a good time. The whole thing was in a wooded area with permanent structures. Like a theme park that's only open a couple months out of the year. There were vendors standing here and there offering their wares ("Pretty garlands for the fair ladies," said one, both times we passed him.) There was a glass blowing workshop where they gave demonstrations and sold glass items. My friend had gotten M and I a couple of blue glass goblets for a wedding present a couple of years ago, and I suspect I know where he got them now. Very nice. There was jousting (which we missed) and other live shows. We watched "Macbeth in 20 Minutes or Less" and a two-man show that involved a lot of swordplay and beer drinking. Apparently, they weren't technically allowed to drink beer on stage, so they urged us, the audience, not to bring them any beers while pointing at the beer stand where one could get beer. And when someone brought them beer, they would insist they couldn't take it, in the meantime taking the cups and hiding them for later clandestine mug filling. They ended up drinking a lot of beer.

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I was looking at my high school's listing on Wikipedia a couple of weeks ago. There was a section that listed all of the school's State Championships, and my 1987 Cross Country team was not listed (nor, for that matter was the 1974 team.) So I signed up for a Wikipedia membership and added it. Problem solved!

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I was driving to work the other day and noticed a PT Cruiser up ahead with Moe, Larry and Curley airbrushed on the back. It was like those T-shirts you see at the county fair, only instead of a wolf in front of pine trees and a moon, you had The Three Stooges. Just their heads and shoulders, in an upside-down triangle configuration with Curley at the bottom point.

I pulled up closer and saw that the car was advertising an air brushing service. If you were trying to get people to give you money to air brush designs on your car, would you really use The Three Stooges as an example of your work? I have nothing against The Three Stooges, but I don't see them as being a hot-ticket item in the world of car decoration.

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And now, since it's taken me so long to get this done, the best of the current mid-September news!

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Our local classic rock station is playing every single song they have on file... in alphabetical order. They started last Monday at 6 AM, and, as of about 6:15 PM, they had gotten as far as the songs that start with "Love" (Love Hurts, Love Is A Battlefield, Love Is Like Oxygen (pronounced "ox-ee-jun",) etc.)

They claim they have no idea how long it will take. I'm guessing they'll be done by the end of this week. "Ziggy Stardust" will probably be the last song.

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PG came home with pink eye on Wednesday and saw the doctor about it on Thursday. I felt bad that I had failed to keep her from catching it from me, but the doc thinks that PG had the germ first, and I got it from her, but it took longer for the symptoms to show up in her.

So PG was prescribed some ointment for her eye. We were directed to put some under her lower eyelid, which would upset her and make her rub her eye, thus getting the medicine in there. Things did not go according to plan, however, as PG is totally cool with there being goop below her lower eyelid. So we have to rub it in for her.

While at the doctor's office, PG weighed in a pound and a quarter lighter than the previous week's visit. We're guessing she had a big present stored up for her diaper when she got weighed previously. In any event, the doctor wasn't worried about the weight loss.

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This past weekend had a few firsts, of various significance, for PG. The big one was that she had her first solid food. It wasn't really all that solid - pretty much a bowl of breast milk with about a tablespoon of rice meal mixed in - but it was a start, and it was also her first time in a high chair. The results were very messy, of course, but she took to it right away. She got a little mad when the rice soup wasn't coming fast enough, in fact.

Another first was her first time in a bouncer - a springy seat that is suspended from the doorway. The only other time I've seen one in action was when PG's cousin Todd was in one, back at the turn of the century. He thought it was the single greatest thing to happen to him at the time, and he made no bones about singing its praises to the world as loudly as a four or five month old baby can. PG didn't have the same reaction. She thought it was OK, but she wasn't overwhelmed with joy or anything. Of course, Todd never really liked being on the ground, so the bouncer had been like deliverance for him.

Finally, PG had her first bout of uncontrollable hair. At some point during her nap on Mommie Saturday morning, the front of her hair got pushed up and she spent the rest of the day with it sticking up. Put her in red checkered overalls, and she could have sold hamburgers. There was nothing we could do to get the hair down, not that we tried very hard. She looked silly with her hair like that, and I'm a big fan of silly babies. That night's bath took care of it.

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The new TV season starts this week. Tonight is Heroes and the time travel show, Wednesday is Bionic Woman (some of which I've already seen, since Amazon has been giving away free downloads of the pilot episode, in the hopes of hooking people into buying the whole season from them.) Smallville starts back up on Thursday, and Survivor has already started. Lots of shows to take up my time. M doesn't have any show to call her own, now that Gilmore Girls has gone. Of course, there's always Grey's Anatomy. I'll have to remind her about that.