I rarely have time to post here these days. Heck, I don't have time to even think about what I would post, if I did have the time. When it does come up on my mental roulette wheel, it's a source of mild guilt. I expect I have a readership of 12 people, tops -- but how could I disappoint all of you by leaving you without updates for so long?

This ( Read more... )

A year ago, I was in heaven and hell, trying to reconcile the astounding miracle of new life with the devastating toll of new fatherhood. That experience has flattened out, but only slightly; there are still miraculous highs and agonizing lows to having a now-one-year-old in the middle of my life.

This week, it's been heaven and hell for other ( Read more... )

After some eye-roll-inducing last-minute delays from the sellers, we closed the deal on our new house yesterday. The next week will be a cavalcade of tradesmen -- carpenter, locksmith, possibly but hopefully not electrician -- and then the furniture gets moved in two weeks. This prolonged style of moving is actually less stressful for me than the ( Read more... )

This weekend, we flew back from Alberta to Cape Breton...X celebrated his first birthday...and Puffin and I celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary.

In both cases, "celebrated" is a little strong. Obviously, X is too young to know what a birthday is, and since he (along with both of us) was still jet lagged and cranky from the trip, we didn't want ( Read more... )

This week we did Calgary. Superficially, the Calgary leg of our trip observed the same formula as Lethbridge: up with the dawn, out of the house before any of our hosts awake, drive to a playground so X can wash gravel, then alternating socialization with babysitting until X (and the rest of us) goes down for the count ( Read more... )

Everybody gets angry. It's an instinct; our pre-sapient ancestors felt it with the same keenness, even though they had no words to describe it. It was probably a useful evolutionary trait, like fear or even greed. But in North American culture, it sometimes feels like we don't have enough to get angry about, so we embellish minor slights until they ( Read more... )

Here we are in Lethbridge, Alberta, or Fort Whoop-Up as it was once known, due to the 19th century whisky trading post that facilitated the whooping up of many local settlers.  Now, Lethbridge is mostly the domain of Mormons, Hutterites, and retirees who believe Sun TV when it tells them that Obama and the ghost of Jack Layton are sneaking into ( Read more... )

One last post before I fly west. I'm joining Puffin and X in Lethbridge, and we have plans to visit Calgary and Edmonton. I had also hoped to pop over to Nelson, to visit my old friend Salvatore, but Puffin's Mom is in the hospital right now, and if she doesn't recover soon, we'll probably have to rearrange our travel plans, including nixing the ( Read more... )

Puffin writes:

"Your son is on a tear today. He was fussy in the am but i dropped him off at J's anyway. Apparently there he got into a fight with another baby. It was mutual. J says they were rolling on the floor, tussling before she managed to separate them and make them apologize. Sheesh. When she brought X home i took him to bed but he spent an ( Read more... )

Yup, things are looking up. We finished our three-day run of A Promise to Repair -- all that stress and scheduling for three performances -- and I have no interest in post-mortems or hindsight analysis. I just wanna move on to my summer.

So far, that means rather a lot of packing. But I also did a speedy rewrite of my zombie play (Zom Rom Com), in ( Read more... )