• I got irate with Irish Woman and ‘forced’ her to go out to dinner with a family friend.  You would have thought I was telling her to clean the bilges on a fishing trawler when I told her she was going out to have some adult time so that both of us could keep our sanity.
• Last night Girlie Bear had a friend sleep over, and everyone in the house was asleep by 10.  I guess working all day at the zoo and then swimming for two hours wore them out.  It’s so nice to have a quiet evening at home.
• When you get up in the morning and make a big breakfast of whole wheat banana pancakes from scratch, you become the cool dad very quickly.
• What do you get when you mix a broken leather recliner, some scrap lumber, the feet off an old couch, and a cheap Norwegian?  You get a new comfy chair for the living room and a happy place to sit and drink beer.
• I’m glad that storm passed to the north of us, but we definitely could have used the rain.  I’m not looking forward to the water bill we’re going to get after watering the vegetable gardens every night for a month.
• Apparently I’m making pickles tomorrow.  All that water mixed with all that sunshine is making our garden very fruitful, and the cucumbers are the first to deliver.
• Some would look at a broken water main knocking out water to the house in the middle of a heat wave as a bad thing.  I look at it as an excuse to rotate our stored water.
• I think I’m going to have to try my hand at coyote hunting, assuming I can get permission from the gentleman who owns the woods behind our house.  Irish Woman saw a big one the other day that wasn’t afraid of her, and we just heard a big group of them either fighting or taking down something big in the woods.

• If, while watching the human interest stories on the morning news, the following goes through your mind:  “If you are not going to die, then shut the heck up.  If you are going to die, then please get on with it and let the rest of us enjoy the rest of our lives”, then you can assume it’s going to be one of those days.
• Giving me a ration of crap because I prefer to make my own coffee rather than drink the free coffee in the break room 15 minutes before you come ask me for a favor shows that you are the biggest optimist in the world, or maybe you’re just thick.  The jury is still out on that one, but it doesn’t look good.
• Dear software engineers – If you put your software on a given operating system, please take the time to put your bloody programs in the standard places for things such as your latest doodad.  If you do not, you doom me to spending hours searching through multiple directories looking for a @#$!@!@ 25 line script that is used to turn your 1@#$!@# !@#$!2 !@$#!!234!@@$#!1@@!$!@#$! program on and off.
• Also, the next time you fail to update your documentation for seven revisions of your software, thereby foiling my attempt to not spend hours looking for the aforementioned !@#$!@!@# script, I am going to find you and beat you to death with the leg bone of a Maltese whistling pony.
• To the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, I hereby pledge that I will make it my life’s work to destroy your political careers and leave you destitute and friendless in Tibet.  Exactly what were you drinking when you decided to shove all of the traffic that normally gets on two of the three major highways in downtown Louisville onto my route home so that you could spend tax money moving broken concrete from one side of a bridge to another?  I sincerely hope your grandmothers were stuck in traffic with me this evening.
• Tonight I got through the hardware store in record time, bought only what I had on my list, and escaped after spending only $21.  That’s some kind of personal record.
• To the young man in the lumber department who caught the 17 2×4’s that I pulled down on myself before they cascaded down on my head and shoulders, thank you.  May your life contain all of the good things that would have otherwise happened to your co-worker who stacked the lumber like that.
• Someday I will come home, pop open a beer, and sit down to watch televised sports to my hearts content.  Until that day happens, I will have to make do with opening a beer, leaving it in the kitchen, taking care of bath time, and watching Winnie the Pooh before remembering I opened a beer an hour ago.

When your spouse is working from home, sexual harassment is actually not such a bad thing.

• This weekend was the annual Hoosier Roundup, in which the extended families of 10 siblings who were born in the 1930’s and 1940’s all get together, take over half of a state park, drink, eat, share news, and compare children.   
• It’s not really camping if you bring along a microwave, refrigerator, air conditioner, and satellite dish, but I wish I had one of those campers.
• I gave up this weekend and got a hotel room instead of camping out with the rest of the family.  I love sleeping in a tent, but I got to the end of the weekend without Irish Woman having heat stroke, neither of us threatened to harm the other over some trivial element of camp set-up, and when a little weather came through in the middle of the night, I wasn’t awakened so that I could comfort the wife during a flashback to the tornadoes of ’74, so I call this a success.
• Apple pie moonshine is quite tasty.
• The beer selection at the package store in SmallTown, Indiana, is not very big.  The selection of Mountain Dew, rolling papers, and caffeine and ephedrine pills, on the other hand, was quite extensive.
• I now remember why I don’t drink Corona.
• You may be the biggest 18-year-old stud in the world, but when two big middle-aged fathers come over and demand your oversized water balloon slingshot because you repeatedly hit their families during dinner time from half a block away, you give it up without arguing.
• I must be getting old.  People who were in middle school when I joined this family were pushing around baby strollers and herding toddlers this weekend, and I have no idea how that happened without me noticing.
• Boo had his first bottle of soda for the first time today.  After speaking in tongues from the sugar rush for 15 minutes, he crashed for 2 hours.  
• You may have served on a joint base where it was common for members of the different branches to give each other a hard time, or maybe you played basketball in a bad neighborhood growing up, or you played professional sports of any kind in New York, but you’ve never heard trash talking like what you’ll hear when playing horseshoes with four generations of men who have been playing against each other since the Roosevelt administration.

I will treat you like a lady when you act like a lady. If you act like a twit, I’m not going to be less than polite with you, but I will treat you like a twit.

Tonight at the grocery store I worked on a new skill. Unfortunately my new ability to kill with my mind is still very underdeveloped. I think the best I did was make a woman in the produce section have a slight itch on her neck, but I’ll keep practicing.

• Getting up at 5 AM on a Saturday to go blueberry picking had best be the first step toward a batch or two of blueberry pancakes or muffins, or there will be one surly DaddyBear walking around on Sunday.
• My wife is a genius.  She dressed Boo in a day-glo green shirt to go berry picking. That way we could find him against the dark green of the bushes and grass when he decided his foraging would be better accomplished two rows over.
• I’m pretty sure that if Boo had eaten one more blueberry at the farm, he would have re-enacted one of my favorite scenes from Willy Wonka.
• As mentioned yesterday, Boo got his first bowcaster.  Interestingly enough, he got it from his mother.  I am saving up to buy him his own miniature Wookie suit.
• A Catholic Parish Picnic and Carnival in Southern Indiana is a lot like a small bierfest in Bavaria, complete with games and a beer tent.  
  • Of course, the Biermadchen at the church didn’t show as much cleavage as she would have if she was wearing a drindel.
• Forgetting to take my arthritis medication on a day when I am going to be up and walking around for 12 hours straight wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done.
• The offer to sleep in on Father’s Day meant being unconscious until 6:37 AM.  Hoopla!
• I shouldn’t complain about the coffee at the IHOP.  I may be old and weak someday too.
• The look on Girlie Bear’s face when I said that if she keeps her nose clean and the minivan lasts that long, then she could take it to college was priceless.  I think she was hoping to get the sporty little thing that Irish Woman drives.  Instead she shall get the noble steed, SilverRust, the minivan guaranteed to make her uncool.
• Flexibility is important.  Torrential pop-up rainstorms means grilling steaks over charcoal turned into steaks grilled on a cast iron griddle.