• One good side effect of working from home for a week is that my gasoline budget was $0.
  • I was also able to cook a couple of nights, which was very nice.
• I introduced Girlie Bear to the “Bro Code” tonight when a boy, who recently broken up with one of her friends, told her that he ‘liked’ her.
• I’m going to have to call a staff meeting with the feline members of the family.
  • Irish Woman was organizing a few things in the basement, and found two bags of barley that had been chewed into and consumed by mice.
  • The deal is supposed to be that I clean the litter box and they make sure I don’t have to deal with rodents.
• It is rarely a good thing for your wife to call for you from the basement, which she is organizing, in ‘that’ voice.
• Signs that she loves us – She made an extra trip to the grocery store to get fixings for cheeseburgers, and picked up the ingredients for banana splits while she was there.

• You know when you take a class and there’s that guy who spends his time trying to prove to the instructor that he already knows the material by asking very pointed questions and having input on the answer?  You know, the one who makes any lecture take almost twice as long as it needs to be?
  • That jackass is even more annoying on a distance learning website.
• After using software to get a remote desktop on a system at the training vendor to do a practical lab this afternoon, I now remember why I prefer *Nix and command line interfaces.
  • Hmmm, 30 seconds to draw a pretty picture and hit a button, or 8 seconds to type in the command, compare it to the one in the book to make sure I got it right, and hitting “Enter”.  Decisions, decisions.
• I am, however, fortunate in that the software I’m training on this week is the version we are going to be upgrading to this spring.  Usually I learn the old stuff just prior to an upgrade.
  • For you non-geek guys out there, who I call “Those whom the gods are not punishing for past sins”, that would be like learning how to drive an American car with an automatic just before it was mandated that everyone drive a British car with a clutch on the other side of the road.  Yeah, it’s still driving, but nothing is where you think it ought to be.
• It is a good thing that we have been taking extra time to do housework this week, because Girlie Bear’s friend’s family ran out of heating oil today and we were able to open our doors to her without having to run around like mad people.

Here is what I accomplished today:

• Got Boo ready for school and took him there
• Cleaned up a roll of paper towel that the cat had shredded in the kitchen
• Put homemade vegetable beef soup into the crockpot
• Completed training module on backup infrastructure
• Got off my butt and got going on something else for work
• Got Boo from school
• Fought a running battle with the Clan of the Soccermom to retrieve bread, milk, and bananas
• Cleaned up another roll of paper towel that the cat had shredded in the basement
• Prepared the rest of dinner
• Served dinner so that Irish Woman could attend a 6 PM work meeting
• Kept a lid on the kids so that Irish Woman could attend her meeting in peace
  • Maybe I wasn’t so successful at this one
• Got Boo ready for bed
• Read “Elmer the Elephant” to Boo after he noticed that Girlie Bear’s pajama pants matched the patchwork elephant.
• Put away dinner
• Did the dishes
• Made buttermilk blueberry pancakes from scratch for tomorrow’s breakfast
• Cleaned and seasoned two cast-iron skillets

And now, if you all don’t mind, I’m going to get some rest before I have to get up tomorrow and do it all again.

• Irish Woman and Girlie Bear went out to get their hair done did, so I took the opportunity to get some housework done.
  • Swept, scrubbed, and waxed the hardwood floors in the living room, dining room, and hallway.
  • Laundry
  • Started dinner.
• Apparently nothing is scarier to a grown woman than having another woman working her head over with scissors, who suddenly turns to her co-worker and says “I don’t know how to do this.”
• Dinner tonight was a pork loin cooked with sauerkraut in a crock pot, garlic mashed potatoes, and steamed peas.
  • I’m ashamed to say that only Girlie Bear and I ate the sauerkraut, and she only ate it because I reminded her that kraut makes an excellent breakfast food if she didn’t want to eat it at dinner.
• Our after dinner activity was to give both dogs emergency baths because they came in from the yard as chocolate labs.  Unfortunately, one of them is silverish-black and the other is yellow.
•  You know, I realized I had truly become domesticated today when I got excited about the new shower head that Irish Woman brought home.
  • Of course, the fact that I did housework and cooking rather than play video games and take a nap when she went out to get a haircut might have been a clue as well.

• You know you’ve waited too long to eat breakfast when two scrambled eggs, three pieces of sausage, two biscuits with gravy, and a cup of coffee leaves you craving protein.
• Girlie Bear asked if she could have a car today.  At that exact moment, someone walked across my grave.
• We had a two inches of new snow this morning, followed by a warm-up in the afternoon, followed by a sudden drop in temperature with high winds.  As the new snow was being blown in big clouds, Irish Woman commented on how much drifting was going on.  I told her to imagine that going on for three days, with a foot of new snow every day, and she’d have a North Dakota blizzard.  She says I’m not doing a good job selling my idea of moving home.
• I better get points in heaven for nodding sympathetically while my ex-wife detailed all of the health-related travails that her mother, Medusa, is going through.

• This morning, I woke up two hours early, forgot my eyeglasses, medicine, and breakfast, and left my wife home alone with the kids because school was delayed.
  • Tomorrow ought to be better, although school’s already delayed again.
  • Still don’t know where my glasses case is.  Luckily, I found the spare set I lost a couple of weeks ago.
• Dogs are carnivores, right?
  • Apparently Moonie has a taste for fresh fruit. He cleaned out the bananas in the fruit bowl, and several of the apples had tooth marks.

Hi, I’m DaddyBear, and I have a confession to make:

I am a heartless bastard.

I am a heartless bastard because I object to being told that everyone else’s life is none of my business, that is until it’s time to write a check to pay for it.

I am a heartless bastard because I believe that there should be shame in taking charity for one second longer than you absolutely need to.

I am a heartless bastard because I expect children, no matter their socio-economic, cultural, or family circumstances to call me “Sir” and have good manners.

I am a heartless bastard because I expect parents to provide for their children before they provide for themselves.

I am a heartless bastard because I am unashamed to tell people that life isn’t guaranteed to be easy, comfortable, or fun.

I am a heartless bastard because sometimes, albeit rarely, I will look at someone and decide that they are just not worth the calories, oxygen, and space they take up.

So, that’s my confession.  I am DaddyBear, and I am a heartless bastard.

• Want to see something well built?  Try taking apart the basement bar built by a raging alcoholic in the 1970’s.
  • This guy couldn’t dig a footer for a retaining wall to save his life, but he made sure the place he kept his booze was secure and solid.
  • Some of this wood is what I have taken to calling “iron pine”.  It’s lumber that’s so old and hard that it breaks off screws if I don’t drill a pilot hole.  I salvaged everything I could.
  • Next on the hit parade – relocating the 450 pound Coke machine.  I must really, really love my wife.
• Good – Getting a new stoneware muffin pan for Christmas that is supposed to make huge muffins.
• Good – Trying it out by making strawberry muffins from scratch.
• Not so good – Forgetting to put in the baking powder.
• Bad – Instead of a sweet, moist, fluffy treat, I ended up with half a dozen 88mm frangible semi-wadcutters.
• Koshka decided to help Girlie Bear with her homework this morning by taking a nap on top of her history textbook.
  • Girlie Bear had a long talk with her about it, but Koshka maintains that she is an expert in early American colonial history, so she can really be an asset.
  • Koshka later came to me to plead her case, and I must say, she made some good points.
• School was called today because Kentucky apparently can’t figure out how to keep the streets open and safe when 3 to 4 inches of snow fall, with temperatures in the mid to high 20’s.
  • Funny thing, states like North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Montana all figure it out pretty regularly.
• The schools are on a 2 hour delay tomorrow with no precipitation in the forecast.  
  • Temps are going to be in the teens overnight.  
  • I guess someone wants to snuggle up in their flannel sheets tomorrow instead of cowboying up and putting on their long underwear.
• Commuters were driving 14 miles an hour on the interstate highway this morning, but I saw remarkably few stupidity crashes, so I guess it was worth it.
• There was almost a foot of snow drifted into my driveway when I got home, but that didn’t last.
  • I may rarely fire up my weed eater in the summer, but I always do my best to make sure the driveway and sidewalk is shoveled.

• It is difficult to do calisthenics in the same room as an affectionate Labrador Retriever.
• Irish Woman tried her hand at making homemade butter.
  • We ended up with a pound of tasty butter and a cup of buttermilk.
  • Bonus – homemade buttermilk blueberry pancakes for breakfast.
• It is a sign of love that you are willing to get out of the house early on a Saturday morning to fetch a new sofa-sleeper and chair that your loving wife has purchased.
• Greater love hath no man than a brother-in-law who gives up part of his already-crowded Saturday schedule to help you schlep a sofa-sleeper from the truck to the house.
• A change of plans occurred when we realized that the new sofa wasn’t going to fit down the basement stairs with the equipment we had.
  • Thoughts of taking an axe to the walls were considered, but eventually discarded.
• New chair and old couch are in the basement, old chair and new couch are in the living room.
  • A side effect of this is that Boo can now do sleep-outs in the living room without me having to break out the air mattress.
• It is a true mark of talent to eat the last of the leftover stew just as the bread you made to eat with it is starting to go stale.

• Boeing 757’s make excellent snow blowers.
  • Luckily for me, I was watching from the window of my building.
• There is an inverse relationship between how fast people walk from the parking lot to the guard shack and the sunrise temperature at the airport.
• I know chicken stir fry isn’t usually made using bacon grease, but it sure does smell good.
• There is a correct way to wear dread locks and an incorrect way to wear dread locks.
  • The young lady who made my coffee today was as ate up as a soup sandwich.
  • I drank the coffee, though.  One must have priorities, after all.
• Today may go down in my personal history as the day I quit having sympathy when other people have to start doing their job the way I’ve had to do my job for months.
  • Yep, it’s going to be another year where “people skills” go on my career development plan.
• The Louisville Zoo has a huge bear enclosure, complete with a running stream and a deep pond for them to swim and play in.
  • I’ll never understand why they don’t let some live salmon or trout loose in there every so often.
  • It would be recreational for the bears and educational for the children.
• Today, at the grocery store, I began to understand why real bears eat their young.
• For future reference, an 80 pound, 12 year old Labrador Retriever can have one adult-strength aspirin, twice a day, after she hurts her back leg trying to follow her idiot brother in a desperate escape attempt out of the back yard.
• Boo’s homework for the night was to find pictures of words that start with “W”, have us print them out for him, then cut them out.
  • I suggested Wotan, war pig, and weasels, but I think I was overruled.