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This year I bought myself an early birthday present.

I've needed a new snowboard for a few years now. I bought my last one when I was still in high school, right around the same time I bought a pair of sunglasses that lasted almost as long. Sigh, how I miss them — but that will have to wait for another post.

The last board served me well, but I had it for over 10 years and it was starting to show its age, with chunks missing from where I had hit rocks or scraped it on the ski lift, rusty rails, etc. Not to mention that in the last decade the technology has changed a lot. My new board is a good bit lighter, and a better fit for how my riding style has changed, since it's also a little shorter.

I bought a Ride Crush, in blue.

Not only do I like the design printed on top, but it was actually designed by the kids in a middle school art class:

How cool is that?

And to top it all off, the majority of the designs are almost invisible when the board is room temperature (and the rest of the board looks like a sheet of notebook paper), but when it gets cold — like it will when in use — the designs get darker.

I got to take it out toward the end of February, and it rides like a dream. I couldn't be happier.

Have I mentioned that I cook now? A while back, Megan and I started making deals. I work full time, and she works part time and cleans the house and pays bills. I cut the grass, weed-whack, and edge; she poop-scoops and rakes. I take the trash out, she does my laundry. She vacuums, I lift my feet as she vacuums under them.

Another one of those deals is that, except in the event of extenuating circumstances, I do the cooking, and she does the dishes. This deal came about because we used to try to alternate who would do which, so that neither of us would have to do both on the same night. I never have liked doing dishes, and apparently Megan doesn't enjoy cooking much (baking may be another story), so this eventually evolved into me cooking full time and her doing dishes full time. And on top of that, it's up to me to plan dinners for at least a few weeks in advance so that we have everything we need (she does the shopping), and so that we remember to thaw frozen things in time and can eat less boxed food because everything is still frozen.

Megan openly admits that she doesn't feel very adventurous when it comes to cooking. She sticks to what she knows she likes. On the other hand, I tend to let my nose lead the way. That's not to say that I don't follow any recipes or stick to familiar things. On the contrary, I use them all the time. I just am a bit more adventurous when it comes to flavoring. I like to open the cupboard, grab random spices, pop the lids, and sniff. If I think a few things smell good together and will go well on the dish I'm working on, we try it.

I have also found a culinary mentor in Alton Brown. I watch a lot of Good Eats, which is sort of what you might get if you crossed Julia Child with Mr. Wizard. I've yet to find an episode that I didn't find interesting and quite watchable, even if the topic was a food I'm not at all interested in, like celery. A funny thing he does occasionally on his show is to bring up a tangent, explore it just a little bit, and then cut it off and say something along the lines of, "but that will have to wait for its own show." With any luck, I can do the same here. At least I seem to have managed to pull it off so far. We'll see how long it holds up.

I like to think that my cooking goes hand in hand with my new willingness to try new foods. I've tried tomatoes in the past, and didn't like them much; but we went to a new burger joint in Philly over the weekend and I forgot to order my burger without lettuce and tomato. When it arrived, I decided to just bite the bullet — or the tomato, as it were — and leave it on, instead of picking it off like I normally would have. Again, I didn't vomit, but again, I was not impressed. And honestly, if even Iron Chef Bobby Flay can't make a tomato that I like, I'm not sure anyone ever will.

Over the years I have declared several forms of bankruptcy: Email bankruptcy, and Google Reader Bankruptcy spring immediately to mind. But I have never declared Blog Bankruptcy, that I can think of. That is, until now.

I'm sorry, but having not posted a thing since February (and having been behind even at that point!) there are so many things that have happened that were blog-worthy, but I can never hope to catch up. So in the interest of moving forward, I'm just going to… move forward. If that makes sense.

Of course, there are some things — pictures, videos, stories — that are just too good to pass up. When I get around to it, I may mention them. Then again, I may not.

So instead of, "Where were we?" I'm asking, "Where are we?" And the answer is never simple.

Birthdays

Megan's birthday is just a few days away, and I accidentally informed her that I have a surprise planned. You see, we are busy people. In order to keep everything straight and make scheduling time with friends and family, we make heavy use of Google Calendar. We both have a personal calendar; we have a shared/family calendar, a birthday-reminder calendar, and a meal-planning calendar; and on top of that, I have a separate calendar at work for my heavily-scheduled Monday to Friday, 8am to 4pm life — such is the burden of working in IT. Perhaps there is sufficient subject matter in that last sentence for its own separate discussion, but as my new-found culinary mentor Alton Brown would say, "that will have to wait for another show" (or blog post, in this case). Ironically, that bit about my new culinary explorations may in and of itself be worthy of revisiting. (I should write these things down so I know to come back to them.)

Suffice it to say, our calendars are many, and sharing them can get complicated. When I switched my primary email address from gmail to google mail for my domain, complications arose and Megan could no longer see the details of my personal calendar; only which chunks of time I had blocked off. I finally got around to fixing that for her with — of course! — her standing over my shoulder, watching. The unfortunate circumstance just so happened to be that I have a calendar event for today, Friday the 16th, labeled "Surprise for Megan!" It was only on my screen for a few seconds before I realized it was there and turned it off, but the damage was done. She had seen it too. So, she knew that today's surprise (a post for another time — man, I'm getting good at this!), was coming for a week or so. Once the cat was out of the bag, I figured I might as well have some fun with it, so I posted about it on facebook and twitter to antagonize her. After all, what fun is in a non-surprise surprise if you can't antagonize? I'm only glad that the calendar item didn't say what the surprise was.

My birthday follows shortly thereafter, and of course we have some festivities planned for celebrating birthdays with friends and family. (Franklin Institute for the Body Worlds exhibit! I'm sure there'll be pics from that. Various dinners and trips and whatnots also planned.) My birthday should be, by all estimations, very low-key this year. I had asked all of my friends and family to consider donating cash in lieu of gifts to help recoup the cost of an early birthday present I bought for myself in February: a new snowboard — yet another topic to be explored later. So my expectations are quite low: a couple of envelopes of money, to be promptly deposited in the bank and allocated in the budget bucket to offset said expense; and maybe if I'm lucky, a couple of hand drawn crayon/marker/sticker masterpieces from Dylan or my niece & nephew.

Growing like a weed

Dylan is about 16 and a half months old now. Much like Mr Brown, he can moo, and make somewhere around 20 other animal sounds, or name them, and say funny things like "duuuude!" He also has a few dozen (baby) signs down. From "please" and "more" (the first two he learned), to "thank you", "I love you", and "Sorry" (part of the time out routine). My personal favorite at the moment is what we call "home alone," and yes, it's exactly what you're thinking.

I expect to get notification for my Father of the Year nomination any day now.

He can walk and run, can't quite jump yet — though he sometimes tries — and his new favorite thing is to climb on stuff. He can get onto and off of all of the couches, the patio chairs — and even though he knows he's not supposed to, the coffee table. I've heard that he can climb all the way up into our bed, which would be more amazing if the bed frame didn't make a perfect step for him, but honestly I'm still a little amazed. He can go up and down the stairs all by himself (though he does get supervision for safety's sake), and he still loves to dance. He can throw a ball, though he doesn't always have control over the direction. That's a nice way of saying he runs the Statue of Liberty play more often than not.

He mimics almost every sound he hears, and yes, that includes his own burps and farts, even at the dinner table. And then he promptly laughs at himself. And then Mommy tries very hard not to laugh too, but usually fails. I can't say I blame her, it's pretty funny. I happen to be pretty good at not laughing, but I have to admit that Dylan has restored my ability to laugh. He's starting to pick up on very subtle sights and sounds — noticing the cat before anyone else, or a small bird in a picture, or a chirp in the distance that nobody else realized they were hearing until he pointed it out.

Snowpocalypse

Living near Philadelphia, there are a few constants about the weather:

1. Winters will be colder and generally more severe than I'm used to. The farthest north I've ever lived, prior to PA, was in Salisbury, MD; where school would be delayed due to FOG, or closed for two days because of two inches of snow. Here, things don't start shutting down until you're counting in multiples of FEET of snow; and while I'm fortunate enough to be able to work from home when needed, it's possible to count the number of times that the university has been closed due to inclement weather in the last 50 years on a single hand. Even if you lost a finger or two due to gangreen you picked up by touching a SEPTA bus.
2. Spring lasts about three weeks, and consists of alternating periods of really nice, mid 70- to low 80-degree weather and chilly 40-degree rainy weather. Enjoy it while it lasts!
3. Summer is hot and muggy, and there are no decent beaches to go to and enjoy it. Everyone here says "down the shore" — which drives me (pardon my french) absolute batshit frickin insane (a topic for another post) — referring to the beaches in New Jersey, usually Wildwood or Cape May. I've never been to Wildwood, but I've been to Cape May, and let me tell you something: That beach sucks. In fact, I've never been to a beach north of Delaware Bay that I found to my liking. I like to imagine that up here in the north they have a whole fleet of steamrollers dedicated to driving out every morning and flattening the beaches out so that nobody can enjoy the fact that they are actually made of sand. The "beaches" tend to just meander out, flatly, into the ocean; the waves gently lapping at the shore. 

This winter we got somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 inches of snow. Not all at once mind you, but 70 inches divided by 3 events spanning less than 2 weeks is a lot no matter how you slice it. It was only a few inches shy of an all-time regional accumulation record, which is a big deal, to hear the meteorologists talk about it. I suppose they live for this sort of thing. It was also a big deal for those of us who have to shovel the driveways and sidewalks, but not in a positive way. Our neighborhood builder/contractor/whatever (a topic for another post) hired just about the worst possible service to clear the streets, too, so they were barely — and in some spots, not — drivable.

There's a lot more going on than that, but I don't want to overdo it on the first post back, so let's stop there.