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So I had a pretty good birthday yesterday. My friends at work took me out to my favorite Mexican restaurant for lunch. Then when I got home I loaded up the wife, the girl, and the boy and we headed for the local Thai restaurant. Marissa had mentioned this a few weeks ago and I was all for it. Of course, starting the day before, she started whining about it and offering up different suggestions. I think this was after she looked at the menu online. So as we were driving there, I kept going on and on about how good it was going to be to eat a lot of good spicy Thai food, and then I drove past it and went to Panera. I love Thai food, but I won't torture my family for it.

After dinner we walked over to the pet store and let Jack look at the animals. He got pretty excited about the tank full of clown fish. Can you tell what movie he's been watching a lot lately?

I kept looking for Heff to show up for dinner, but I guess Nashville is just too far to drive for someone you've known for oh, 28 years now?

Here's one more Mojo Nixon tune, just cause I feel like it.

Ambushed at the Office

They got me. People were giggling when they saw me when I walked in the building this morning, so I knew something was up. There was also German chocolate cake waiting as well, so I guess I have to forgive them. When I woke up this morning, Marissa and Jack had a chicken biscuit with a candle in it for me.

Turn Right at the Light, Go Past the Trailerparks

As I go into the last 8 hours of my life of being a pre-old fart, I'm going to celebrate what little rebelliousness remains with me. Let's take a trip to Mojo World. Turn it up.

The Boy Gets Sewn Up

We had our first trip to the Emergency Room with Jackson late yesterday afternoon. He was playing down in his sister's room when he sat down on a glass vase and cut his legs up. He had two small cuts on his left thigh, and two cuts on his right calf muscle. Three of the cuts were pretty minor, but one on the calf had carved up a small chunk of muscle, and kept oozing blood even after we put pressure on it for a while.

I wasn't sure if a clinic would do stitches, so we went ahead and took him to the ER at Summit. Fortunately, they weren't very busy and took him back pretty quickly and the doctor looked at it about 10 minutes after we got there. He decided that the cut would need some stitches plus they wanted to take a X-ray to make sure there was no glass in it.

The X-ray was not fun, since we had a hard time making him hold his leg still enough to take three shots. Then the nurse came in and put something on a cotton ball and taped it over the wound to deaden the area. After about 15 minutes, the doctor came in with an EMT that was helping out that day to do the stitches.

It turns out the cotton ball was just to lightly deaden the area so the doctor could inject more stuff to really deaden it up. Marissa was holding Jack's chest, I was holding his thighs, and the EMT was holding his feet. This part was just terrible. When the doctor stuck the needle in Jack started screaming at the top of his lungs and bucking all over the place. His face turned beet red and he kept saying "Daddy are! Daddy are! Daddy are!" Jack was crying, Marissa was crying, I was crying, and the EMT didn't look very happy either. The doctor, who looked to be in his late 50's, was completely unconcerned and put the three stitches in very quickly.

On the way home, we got Jack ice cream and potato chips, so he cheered up pretty quickly. We also got him some band-aids with the characters from Cars on it, so he was pretty happy about that and made Marissa put a few extra ones on him. Marissa and I were nervous wrecks the rest of the evening, and I don't think either of us slept very well.

Guessing Game Update

Ok, no one had a clue what the image was from last week, so here's the original picture in all it's glory. Maybe you can tell where I cropped the image from now. Are those skid marks?

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

I forgot to wear green today, but to make up for it, here's a classic to help celebrate.

Hardins Cave

We went to Hardins Cave last night. This was my seventh trip to this cave, but it was still a lot of fun. We had a good group, including several new grotto members. I would try to name all of them but with my poor ability to remember names I'm sure I'd mess things up horribly. Joe Stewart was there with his seven year old grandson, along with Kylie. Jody Bailey actually showed up, which was great since he knows the cave so much better than I do and was able to point out things that I never noticed or had forgotten about.

We went back to the rope climb-up and then turned around since it was getting late and we had gotten a late start. I kept up pretty well on the way into the cave, but I started slowing down a good bit on the way out since my total lack of staying active over the winter started catching up to me and my quad muscles were just about shot from climbing over the piles of breakdown.

We found some really nice crinoid stem fossils in the ceiling in a few places. The biggest difference between this trip and most of my previous trips was the amount of water in the cave. This was the first time I've actually seen the stream in the cave with running water, and there was a small waterfall very close to the entrance that had never been flowing on any of my previous trips. The waterfall in the big room was flowing as well, whereas in the last few years it's only been dripping.

Photo Guessing Game

So let's have a guessing game. Anyone care to ponder what the above image is? I cropped it out of a larger image and enlarged it a bit, but otherwise it has not been enhanced in any way. Actually, it represents a "de-hancement" of sorts. If I stare at it long enough, it starts looking like the face of a demonic bunny.

The winner of the contest gets a virtual overnight stay at the Motel of Love in Chicago.