Come To The Bark Side... We Have Dog Biscuits!

Someone in my SWTOR guild posted this in our discussion board last night.



Still trying to figure out if the pug is supposed to be R2-D2 or Jabba The Hutt.

He Wrote The Music! He Wrote The Words!

You all have probably already seen this on my Facebook page, but far be it for me to not spread the wealth.



Interestingly, one of the Related Videos on this video's YouTube page was "President Obama Addresses Economic Recovery House Meetings." Elmo and Economic Recovery - like peanut butter and jelly.

The PG Report

I imagine a lot of you have been saying "Hey Trackrick, it's great that you're buying a house, and that you saw a former member of The State, and that the siney guy always worries, and that you're clinging to a tenuous common thread with an 8-time Olympic gold medalist (more, if you count the 2004 Olympics too,) but what about PG??? What's she doing these days?"

Well, wait no longer!

PG is walking like a maniac these days, and has even learned (kinda) where she can and can not walk (though if the gate to the kitchen is open, that little stinker will often sneak in to see how far she can get before being busted.) A few times she's even come very close to running, in this blogger's opinion. She's proven that she has enough self-preservation instinct to be allowed to go down the stairs, so we let her do that every now and then. She's still a bit of a spaz, though, so I continue to worry she's going to fall down during a trans-room walk and clonk her head on the furniture.

She talks. A lot. Sometimes, she even speaks English! I've started paying close attention to her when she starts babbling, in the hopes of picking out actual words. Most of the time, it's blah blah blah, but then there was the "be back soon" that came out while departing daycare a couple weeks ago. Other words that can be definitively connected to actual real-world things are "ball," "chee" (cheese,) "Ma," "Da," "jump" (big fan of the jumping, that PG,) and "ABC" (to indicate pretty much any letter she recognizes.)

She also is a dancing fool, as this video footage shows:



And also, this footage, with a better angle to see just how much she's feeling da boogie:




We just had a fun (and by "fun," I mean not really fun at all) weekend that taught me a few things:

1. Even if milk is the only thing she will drink, never, ever give a baby that just threw up some milk to re-hydrate.
2. Don't let the aforementioned baby go to sleep on your chest in bed after giving her said milk (actually, M was the one that bore the brunt of that lesson.)
3. An unfamiliar drink becomes more inviting when presented in an infant bottle. That's how I got her to drink the Pedialyte.
4. Don't give the kid only one day to recover before exposing her to a busy day of pumpkin farms, get-togethers with Daddy's old college friends, and visits with great-uncles at nearby hotels.
5. M's uncle is cool enough to visit with a baby that had just returned-to-sender a day's worth of Pedialyte and crackers on the car ride over. Though, obviously, the part where we all go out to dinner had to be excised from the schedule.
6. Car seat covers are easy enough to remove for washing, but not as easy to put back on.

Ah, parenthood.

A Trunk Full of Puddin'

We went to the Baltimore Book Fair on Saturday, because M had to work the Mt. Vernon Cultural District tent, and she wanted company. Also, the plan was for PG and me to wander around and look at books. PG is a big fan of books.

The wrench that got thrown into this plan was the torrential downpour that began pretty much as soon as we got there. PG and I hung out in M's office and got tomato all over one of her cabinets (PG: Also a big fan of tomatoes and lunchtime) before going out in rain and joining M at the tent. It was a miserable experience for M and me. PG didn't seem to care one way or the other.

Since nobody was coming by the tent, M got to leave early, and while we were walking to the car in the parking garage, Michael Ian Black drove past us.



You probably know him from Ed or the Sierra Mist commercials from a year or two ago, or Viva Variety on Comedy Central about 10 years ago, or, of course, The State, which was on MTV in the early-mid 90's and has a DVD compilation currently in release date Limbo. He was there to promote his new book, and he drove right past us in his BMW with Connecticut plates. It's indicative of his level of celebrity that he had to drive himself down from Connecticut, but was able to do so in a very nice BMW.

In case you are unfamiliar with The State and therefore don't get the reference in the title of this post, here's some context for ya. It's kinda weird. The State was kinda weird in general.

The Siney Guy Always Worries

Eventually I'll have to post my thoughts on the recent Orioles event, but for now I present you with a 3-year-old's explanation of Star Wars.

Dancing

OK. The movie trailers I posted earlier were nice. This, however, is made of 100% Grade-A Awesome. It's one of those things that gives you hope for humanity. Of course, it also reminds me of the things I could have done before I settled down, like I would have ever done it, given the chance. I'm happy to live vicariously, though.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Oh Yeah... I Have A Blog

Yup. Kinda lost track of time. Here's what's been going down.

* When up to the lake the week that PG's daycare was closed for vacation. A fine time was had. It would have been nice to have seen everyone else who usually goes up, but the scheduling just didn't work out this year. It got pretty hot towards the end of the week. I could have done without that. I see that the temperatures up there are supposed to be pretty nice this upcoming week (the week that we normally would have been up there.) Oh well. Enjoy, everybody who's up there!

* Our quest to get a Wii Fit has finally come to an end. After haunting the Wii Fit page of wiitracker.com for a few days, I finally managed to order a bundle from Toys R Us.com that included We Ski and a cover for the balance board. Two days earlier, I had ordered the same thing from the same place, but didn't finish the ordering process before the supply ran out. So good news that Toys R Us was able to restock that quickly.

* After a great many months of talking about it, M and I finally got new cell phones. We both got LG Chocolates (not the new version that's just now coming out) for free, by virtue of having had our old phones for as long as we did, qualifying us for the discount.

As it happens, we received the Wii Fit and our new phones (which we had ordered online and where shipped to us) on the same day. So that was a pretty big day, UPS and FedEx-wise.

* PG's walking like a maniac (both metaphorically and, I suppose, literally) now. She still has a few balance issues, but they should work themselves out soon.

The talking, however, still hasn't really come. It's still all PG language all the time, with a few suspect words, such as "up," that may or may not have come at appropriate times on purpose.

She is getting pretty good at pointing at what she wants, though. The other night, after her bath, M told her that Daddy was coming upstairs to read some stories. PG pointed at the crib and grunted. That kid has been pretty sleepy in the evening lately. I blame the extra walking and her refusal to nap much at daycare.

* I saw The Dark Knight last week. I do believe it's my new favorite movie, edging out Return of The King because it's about an hour shorter.

* Two movie trailers, based on two of my favorite books of all time, have come out, and they have knocked my socks off, so to speak. Please to enjoy...

(HD version can be found here)

(An HD version can be found at Moviefone.)

That's about it for now. We're planning on seeing Wall-E and The Dark Knight at our local drive-in tonight, hopefully with a sleeping baby in our back seat. I'll be sure to let you know how that goes. It will be my first drive-in movie ever.

They Grow Up So Fast

One moment, she's just a little baby, learning to walk. And before you know it, you see this on the news...

Lolly Lolly Lolly, Get Your PrettyGirl News Here!

Looking over my "recent" posts, I have come to the realization that I haven't provided any substantial PG news in over a month. So here's the update...

PG is pretty much the same as she was in early June, except that she's a little bigger. Oh, and this too...

[Edit: I'm having some problems getting this video to work. Whenever I get the time to work on that, I'll see about getting that fixed. Stay tuned! And if you actually can see the video right now, then hooray for you!]

[New Edit: The video should work now]




That was taken on June 28. I didn't have a camera handy the first time she walked, a week earlier, but it looked a lot like that. In the week since this video was taken, PG has gotten a lot better at it, and I have seen her get up from a sitting position and start walking. She usually goes about 3 or 4 steps before wiping out, but you take what you can get.

Since I've started working from home (I'll get to that tidbit o' news in another post,) I'm the one taking PG to daycare every morning. I take her in the stroller, and I have her get out at the gate and walk up the door while I hold her hand. M and I have her walk from the car to the front door whenever we come home from somewhere too. PG's getting really good at one-hand-assisted walking. Big girl!

Otherwise, she's still talking her PG language, only with a little more variety. She might be using English words at the right times, but those are still too isolated for me to be sure if it's intentional or coincidental. She still tosses out a "Da" from time to time.

She's also pointing a lot now. Just last night, she pointed at her crib to make it very clear that she was too tired to sit through storytime. She ended up being so sleepy that she didn't make a peep when the neighborhood kids (and a dad or two) started setting off fireworks just about right outside her window. That save me the trouble of having to yell at my neighbors.

Having Fun With A Cat

This video goes to show that cats aren't just good for petting and keeping your lap warm - they're also fun to mess with!

Two Words: Aw. Yeah.

Between this and Iron Man, it could be a very good May this year.



I got this from Yahoo Movies. You can see a larger version (HD versions too) there.