The hipster cure

In my ongoing quest to meet interesting people and do interesting things, we accepted a dinner invitation from a gay couple, one member of which I met at a Wharton alumni happy hour a few weeks ago. He suggested a spot for dinner that I had not heard of and it turned out to be a fabulous funky hipster type place with organic hamburgers and a band where the lead singer also played a washboard with her really long fingernails.

The dinner was made especially entertaining by the fact that Eric and I were both teetering on the edge of what turned out to be just moderate food poisoning, but we didn't know that at the time. As we were standing waiting for our dates to arrive, we both confessed to having eaten week-old Mexican left-overs for lunch and experiencing waves of nausea all afternoon, and then agreed that we would try to stick it out but we would warn them that there was a chance of abrupt departure. As it turned out, a beer and a polenta with buffalo mozzarella and tomato pepper relish appetizer was all we needed and we even managed to stay up long enough to have a drink on the patio with the steam-punk statue figure things that were all over, one of which appears to be waiting tables in the photo above.

I have not yet made a final ruling on if there are enough interesting people in Tampa to make it worth living here, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Where's that playground

We spent the better portion of this past week in Lancaster, PA visiting Muz (my grandmother) and my aunts Barbara and Penney. The kids had a great time exploring Muz's house, enjoying the hotel, and seeing new scenery from their carseats, but it was a deviation from our normal schedule of spending many hours per day at playgrounds around house.

The third morning in PA as we were turning into Muz's neighborhood, Emerson says from the back seat:

"I'm just trying to figure out how to get to the playground."

List of things I have just recently learned

Lifelong learning is my middle name. Here's some recent evidence that it is happening. In the past week I have learned that:  

Two people using pool skimmers in just the right way can get a very large turtle out of your neighbor's pool. The skimmers will then be needed to get the surprisingly large amount of turtle poop out of the pool.

You can get certified in Dog CPR and First Aid.

You can use something called neem oil on your tomato plants as an organic pesticide/fungicide/miticide AND as a natural bug spray on your skin (though I am not yet clear on if this should happen at different levels of concentration).

Dabbing vinegar on the mosquito bites you get in spite of wearing a suffocating amount of citronella and other natural herbs and oils instead of DEET makes them stop itching. 

The tomato plants will probably still die from the leaf miners that are munching swirly designs into all of their leaves even as I write this.

There's a red light traffic camera at the corner of Waters and Sheldon in Tampa. The fee for running a red light even though you would swear that they altered the photograph because you NEVER run red lights is $158. Boo.

Good job hookers

The grabbers have become the hookers, and Emerson congratulated them often during lunch today. Each time they helped him eat a pea or a blueberry he would gleefully proclaim: Thanks hookers! Good job hookers!

From one to the other

Emerson was holding a balloon in his carseat on the way to the playground today. I overheard this exchange:

"It's mine! No it's mine mine mine said the other hand."

Too hot

Yesterday was a hot one here, like it was in most of the country. We were out in the yard playing tee ball for all of about 15 minutes when Emerson suddenly stopped playing and said,

"Dad, let's go inside. I will drink water and then I will feel better."

We are the 2% (No relation to the 1%)

I read in The Week this week that 98% of US households have a TV. We are not one of them.

The cable guy was here today because we moved the router to a different part of the house. We get internet service from the cable company but, having no TV, we do not get cable. The cable guy, a chunky fellow who I'm pretty sure had been in a dunk tank full of cologne before coming into our home, was more than a little weirded out that we didn't have a TV.

"Whoa," he said several times. "I've only seen this once before with family that was homeschooling their children and I was there hooking up their cable for the first time. It was crazy; these kids were so excited to get just 13 channels that their dad was giving them because they had been so good."

Sometimes it is fun to be the weirdest part of someone's day.

The Grabbers

We had some friends over on Saturday who have a daughter just a few months younger than Emerson. At one point they were vying for a small shovel which she was holding and Emerson was getting frustrated that his attempts to take it away from her had been foiled.

"These are the grabbers!" he suddenly proclaimed, opening and closing his little fists again and again in her direction. "Give them the shovel!"