Those of you who are from the southern part of the US or have visited here have probably tried to choose a barbeque restaurant. It can be a daunting task, especially when you consider how many varieties of barbeque there are and locals’ near-religious fervor about which variety is best and which restaurant is supreme. If you have a local twisting your arm and dragging you to a restaurant, it’s best to go along. Nod and smile when they tell you how wonderful the restaurant is. Keep quiet if you disagree with them after eating there.

But what if you don’t have a local guiding you? In that case, you’ll have to choose a restaurant by its exterior. Lucky for you that there are several indicators of a good restaurant.

Let’s start with the sign. What style is it in? If the sign has the restaurant’s name painted above a Coca-Cola or Pepsi logo, you’re in luck. If the sign is faded or has letters outlined with wan neon, that’s good as well. Be cautious of modern shiny signs.

Does the sign include an illustration or mascot? Drawings of plates of food or ribs are okay, though not great. Pig mascots are good; smiling anthropomorphic pigs are even better. Is the pig surrounded by flames? If so, it should look happy about the situation. Best of all is an anthropomorphic pig eating ribs. Such a sign says, “Our food is so good that pigs will commit cannibalism to enjoy it.”

Look at the building. It should be run-down. If it looks like it’s moments away from being torched by angry health inspectors, you’ve probably chosen well.

Roll down your window. A good barbeque place will smell of cooking meat from a block away. Would your vegetarian friends take one breath and fall over dead?

How busy is it? A run-down shack with a hundred cars parked around it, many of which are pickup trucks, is likely a local favorite. Is the line out the door? If the restaurant has gotten a write-up in some magazine, you may be fooled by the presence of tourist cars. To guard against that, look for cop cars. County cops know where the best restaurants are.

Finally, before you commit, go in and look at the restaurant. A menu with few choices is ideal. If they have a lot of items on their menu, they’d better be catfish and chicken and perhaps meatloaf. Vegetables had better include bacon or other meat squeezins.

None of these guarantee your choice of restaurant, but in the absence of other information, they’re good indicators.

Having finished “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” I was a little surprised at the ending.

Continue reading It’s Especially Impressive Given How Long it Takes to Get a Book In Print →

“Mom, Mom! Get the camera!”

“Okay.”

“Mom, Mom! This is Waffle Fingers!”

“Mom, Mom! This is what you do with Waffle Fingers!”

“Did’ja get it?!?!”

Yes, Eli I got the photo of you and your Waffle Fingers for all of the internet to gaze upon.

109:23:38 Armstrong: I’m at the foot of the ladder. The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about 1 or 2 inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained, as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. (The) ground mass is very fine.

109:24:13 Armstrong: I’m going to step off the LM now.

109:24:48 Armstrong: That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.

109:25:08 Armstrong: Yes, the surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.

109:25:30 McCandless: Neil, this is Houston. We’re copying.

Armstrong and Aldrin. Conrad and Bean. Shepard and Mitchell. Scott and Irwin. Young and Duke. Cernan and Schmitt.

And in memory of Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee.

(Transcript courtesy of the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.)

When Eli came home from the hospital, he slept in a portable crib in our room for the first night or two. After that he moved to the crib in his room, with one of us sleeping in the rocking chair next to it. We took shifts in case he burst into flames and we had to put him out.

It’s obvious that Liza is a second child. She’s never slept in our room. We’ve never spent the entire night sleeping in her room. The first time she slept nearly through the night, we weren’t up at 1 AM making sure she wasn’t dead. In that respect we’re much more laid-back than we were before.

That doesn’t mean we’re completely relaxed. It turns out that you get an additional subscription to Guilt Magazine with each child you have. Perhaps that stops after some number, but for us that number is clearly greater than two. Both Eli’s and Liza’s latest issue have the screaming headline “ARE YOU SPENDING ENOUGH TIME WITH YOUR CHILD?” on the cover. Misty reads Eli’s issue, since she spends a lot of time holding Liza and feeding Liza and burping Liza. I read Liza’s issue, since I play with Eli from when I get home until he goes to bed, and only really see Liza at 3 AM when I’m trying to put her back to sleep.

Eli’s been making me play Katamari Damacy. Perhaps if I combined him and Liza into a big katamari, I could alleviate some of my guilt.

Last night we went to dinner with some friends and by dinner I mean “Kids Eat Free” night at Rooster’s. While we were there my friend asked me how my mom was doing. I did the double-take head wobble because she doesn’t know my mom. And while I was staring at her blankly for a moment, she followed up with, “I read your post about your mom.” It’s not that we mind putting this stuff out there it’s that we’re surprised when any one person has actually read it and then says something about it in person.

In an effort to get Eli potty trained before school starts, we have gone hard core. We started Monday. No diapers or pull ups, only real underwear during the day. And since he was dry this morning, he’s going to bed tonight in undies.

This process has been very hard for me because I’ve not wanted to deal with the mess. I didn’t want it on my floors and I didn’t want to have to clean it up. I know I’ve been cleaning up his diapers all this time but that’s different, I didn’t have to actually touch the pee or poo. My own bodily fluids gross me out, even more so someone else’s. So because of my squeamishness I’ve kept him in pull-ups. But this past weekend I realized that unless I gave up both his pull-ups and my squeamishness he wasn’t going to get trained. The pull-up has been a safety net for all of us.

He gets positive reinforcement for correct behavior (he gets to watch a show of his choice, play on the computer, or save it for playing PS2 games when Dad gets home) and negative reinforcement for incorrect behavior (He has to clean up his own mess, all of it. He goes into the tub with a container of baby wipes and wipes himself down and then takes out his trash and puts his clothes in the washing machine, followed by a time out on his couch and no play time with mom for about 30 minutes). After all the time we’ve messed with M&Ms and treats and trying to go to Chuck E. Cheese’s, his lever was really the tv. I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before. So yesterday and today he’s watched a lot of tv. But you know what? I don’t care. I’ve seen more progress in the past two days than in the past two months combined.

I bought him a box of Kandoo Wipes this afternoon at Wal-Mart. He only gets to use the flip top box when he goes to the toilet and poos. He promptly sat down and did his business so he could play with the box. Okaaay. Who knew that was all it was going to take?

He still has accidents. One yesterday and one today. He tanked up on water earlier today and I didn’t realize I needed to remind him sooner than usual. He started to pee and called me and said he was leaking. That’s what he says, “Moooommmm! I’m leaking!” I got him into the tub and he had stopped peeing. He started again and I told him to stop and go to the potty. So he did. He can control it! Let me say it again because I never thought this day would get here…

My kid can go to the toilet! Yippeee!!

I really thought that I might have to send this kid to Kindergarten in a diaper. This is a really big deal and the very hardest challenge I’ve faced as a parent. I have yelled at him way too much over this and I’m glad to see the light at the end of what I thought was the never-ending tunnel.

All we have to do now is to be down to zero accidents by August 20. Wish us luck.

Click through each one to see the sets.

I have survived Atlanta. It was cooler than here in Alabama, a fact that surprised me but helped me survive seeing The Decemberists outside in July. Misty didn’t kill Eli, Liza, or herself, so overall I count the weekend to be a success. I got home late Sunday afternoon, just in time to play with Eli, eat dinner with Misty, and smell Liza’s head. The baby wash we use makes the top of her head smell like a thousand babies sighing contentedly.

Here’s a random topic that came up this weekend: 1980s cartoons and action shows. What ones do you remember watching? I watched the usual range of action shows — Knight Rider, Airwolf, Magnum P.I. — but as far as cartoons go, I watched some weird ones. The weirdest involved strange talking animals, such as Shirt Tales, but nothing beat Pandamonium for wacked-out cartoon strangeness. See, there’s this mystic pyramid that an evil guy wanted, only it broke into bunches of pieces and fell to Earth. Two kids tried to rescue all of the pieces of pyramid before the evil guy could find them. The kids had help in the form of three talking pandas who could smush together into a single super-panda.

There’s no need to give me that look. Why would I lie to you? Besides, now that YouTube exists, I can prove that the cartoon existed by forcing the opening theme on you.

Not since the heyday of Sid and Marty Krofft was kids’ programming so crazed. Go ahead, I dare you: come up with a stranger cartoon that you watched.

A few days ago I wrote a post about the passing of someone I used to know.

A friend of ours, Dan, asked Stephen the day I posted it if it was weird writing about personal stuff here on the website with so many loltreckers and toilet fixers stopping by. Stephen and I talked about it on Thursday night at dinner and the answer to that is no. Here’s why.

I debated about writing that particular post at all. I wanted to write down a couple of the good memories that I had of him even though I still had some unresolved feelings about him. My own memorial, I guess. I talked to LanaBob! on Friday and she reminded me of several other things that I had actually forgotten. She remembers them because she and I were just becoming friends when my mom and this man were dating. So it was good to chat with her about it and be reminded that relationships are complex and not always resolved in neat little packages when someone dies, and that there isn’t always a chance to say “Goodbye” or “I’m sorry” or “I forgive you”.

But I also wanted for people to know that I struggle with stuff even though I am a Christian. The feelings and thoughts that I had as a non-Christian didn’t just disappear when I became a Christian. This is a big deal to me because I spent a lot of years pretending that I didn’t have those non-Christian thoughts and feelings. I really thought that I could personally will away all my bad feelings toward others and, by strength of will, forgive. It doesn’t work that way.

All these changes take prayer. A lot of it, and remarkably enough, it’s not necessarily prayer for God to change me. (Some of them are and those never hurt.) A lot of the prayers are about getting outside of myself and praying for the other person. No, it’s not prayer that they change either. Wouldn’t it be great if it worked that way, though? It’s prayer for their wellbeing and their spiritual growth and their safekeeping and it can’t be out of spite. It has to be prayed with gratitude for my own forgiveness. Something happens when I am praying good things for someone I have a hard time forgiving. I start seeing them through God’s eyes and gradually I can, maybe not forget what happened, but start putting it behind me.

This is the part that I didn’t talk about it that post. I hadn’t been doing that for him. I had been nursing my anger at him and carrying it around because I felt foolish for trusting him again. Forgiveness isn’t something we do for others, it’s something that we do that builds character in us. It’s about God teaching us about his forgiveness of us. So I’ll be working on that now. It seems pretty silly to be angry at a dead person. I’m guessing I’m going to have to let this stuff go.

Talking about what’s real for me so people can see it is why I post the personal (uncomfortable) stuff here. It lets people know me better and it keeps me honest. (And I didn’t do a good job with that in that post because I didn’t want to talk openly about forgiveness.) It is my personal journal made public. I owe a lot of my desire to do that to Heather Armstrong. She is a master of telling her story with humor and grace. I wish I were half so competent but I’m much too serious and have a hard time finding the funny sometimes. And writing these things here remind me that I have an internal life that doesn’t involve my kids. It’s pretty easy to get subsumed in the mommy lifestyle. Stephen and I also talked about what we would post and our rule is to never post anything we would mind our mothers reading. And isn’t that just a good rule for living life in general?

So there is your answer, Dan. It was probably way longer than you wanted to read but I’m glad that you asked the question and that I heard it second-hand because it made me finish my thinking on the topic. Thanks.