New Pics 11-30-05

The grandparents on Thanksgiving.


Here's one of my cousin Hyrum's wife, Allie -- well, at least her shirt -- holding Cooper. (Thanks to Hyrum for letting me snag these from his blog.)

Savannah takes a turn at feeding Hyrum and Allie's son, Ian. (Yeah, that's a helmet. The way Ian eats is apparently an extreme sport.)

Big sis and lil' bro.


Savvi makes her brother smile.

A couple with my maternal grandmother, Elsie Scott. She rode up with my cousin, Josh -- Hyrum's brother -- a couple of weeks ago. This was her first time to see the Coopster.

What's New with the Fam

Okay, I don't know if I've updated on some of these topics lately, and I'm too lazy to go back and look, so here goes:

Cooper -- We took him to the doctor last week for something (I think it was his ongoing Gershon issues and his congestion.) Anyway, they weighed him and he was 10 lbs, 6 oz. That's up 22 ounces in two weeks! We had noticed he was getting noticeably heavier, but even we were surprised by that number. The weight is nicely distributed, though. He has definitely gotten longer (taller,) but we don't know exactly how much. Unlike his sister at the same age, he is staying closer to the Winston end of the Churchill-Shriver scale -- his cheeks are wider than his head at any other point, and he still has a nice collection of chins going.

He's not as low maintenance as the kid in the NICU who didn't even cry when King Peter lost his crown. First of all, he's almost always hungry. And when he's ready to eat, he loses any semblance of a sense of humor. Once, I made the mistake of not getting him his bottle right when he wanted it, and I got my hand too close to his mouth. I know babies aren't supposed to eat meat at this age, but somebody forgot to tell Cooper that, because he was going for a finger sandwich. I think any other cranky behavior is due to the Gershon.

The cool thing about him is how sweet he is most of the time. He still sleeps a lot, but whenever he wakes, he typically spends the first several minutes smiling at us. This morning, something I said or did made him do a sort of giggle that was so cute I forgot how little sleep I had gotten. He also has a knack for smiling at me whenever I pretend to fuss at him. I think this is going to be his strategy for getting out of trouble -- winning 'em over with cute.

The Fridge -- In case I didn't mention it earlier, Sears fixed the fridge just in time for Thanksgiving.

The Car -- After spending over a thousand bucks on repairs, I worked with my dad for a couple of days to finish the repairs and get the engine purring again.

Thanksgiving -- Did I mention a thousand dollars spent on car repair? And the fact that I spent Friday and Saturday working on the car? It was, as usual, not a good Thanksgiving. That morning, my dad -- influenced by his negative experiences working for car dealerships -- decided that we had paid all that money for them to do no work at all. He shared this sentiment with Kelli, which put her in a great mood. She shared her mood with me. True to form, I overreacted and managed to piss her off, piss my dad off and ruin my day all within a span of a few minutes. (And I wonder why I have so many ex-clients and so few current clients...)

On top of all that, we decided to order our meal this year. We thought we were getting fresh, deli-cooked food. Instead, we got pre-packaged, factory food -- including a pre-cooked turkey. Overall, it was pretty terrible. What's worse is that I could have spent my day cooking, and it would have put me in better spirits. Instead, I just sat around watching football all day with nothing better to do.

I've officially sworn off this holiday in its traditional form. Next year, Disney World!

Work -- I've spent the better part of the last week working with my friend Chris Tomberlin at his company, Outpost Pictures. It was cool working with Chris again. I've got a pretty large project for the old alma mater coming up soon.

Kelli -- She's beautiful, sweet, strong and sexy. What else is there to say? I'm the luckiest man in the world! Last week, we celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary. It was pretty low key with a new baby, but we at least got to go to the movies, which is a rarity these days. Kel's trying to put a few pounds back on. The rapid weight loss took a toll on her, and she's ready to get back to normal.

Savannah -- She's beautiful and sweet as always. She's still crazy about her brother and is always in his face. She really enjoyed her time with her grandparents last week. She also got to see her 8-month-old cousin (actually, 2nd cousin) Ian. She was enamored of him and kept him smiling and laughing most of the time. She actually got to feed him, which I missed unfortunately. I hear it was quite the adventure. Savvi's really into learning how to read now, and is sounding out words all the time. She'll be reading very well by the time she starts Kindergarten.

Health -- Kelli and I are getting back on the Body-for-Life bandwagon starting tomorrow. I don't know if she's going to do the workouts or not, but I'm going full bore. I'll start a new blog tomorrow with my current measurements, my goals and the sheer humiliation of my before photos. Don't eat for at least an hour prior to viewing.

Depressories

Are you like me, sick of all those motivational posters and calendars with pictures of beautiful mountainscapes or little kittens dangling by a single claw with the caption "just hang in there?" There is a solution. You can invest in my new business venture: Depressories -- unmotivational products for the professional who doesn't want to get their hopes up.

For example, using the kitten poster, we simply replace the caption with our own: "Let go already." It's the perfect message for the modern American who is disillusioned by devoting decades of his life to a greedy corporation whose executives pilfer his pension funds and leave him penniless in his advancing years. For those burned by manipulated election results, we offer a poster of a voting machine draped in an American flag with the caption, "Why Bother?" Then there's our signature product for the Paxil generation, "Today is a good day to kill yourself."

Many Americans today find themselves smothered in debt, exponential interest growth and escalating late fees. For them we offer several products: "Screw the Creditors," "Default Now," "Bankruptcy is Your Birthright," and the ever-popular "Sometimes you just have to skip town" featuring an image of a family of four helping Dad swap the license plates on the station wagon.

To maintain the proper workplace attitude, Depressories offers phrase-a-day desktop calendars. Some of the phrases include: "You're right. Your boss is an idiot," "Reject authority," "I want immediate gratification and I want it yesterday," "That's not in my job description," "Butt-kissers finish first" and "Nobody likes initiative." For women: "Sleep your way to the top," "Somebody has to clean the glass ceiling" and "Bonuses are for boob jobs."

Adjunct to our Depressories line are our misfortune cookies. A sample: "Be ashamed of mistakes," "Forget history, and repeat it," "Hold not on to hope, but rather a grudge," "Distrust everyone for they distrust you," "Buy the extended warranty" and "You're adopted."

Anyone with suggestions for new Depressories of misfortune cookies, post them in the Comments section.

Confessions of a Fat Bastard

That's eventually going to be the title of a new blog that I'll use to keep track of my fitness efforts, but for now, it'll suffice to sum up my opinion of myself. Over the last two months, I've gained 20 pounds! I would say that if measured on a aquatic mammalian scale, I'm now in the neighborhood of beluga whale. I'm trying to prevent an escalation to orca.

After a long year of halting progress in maintaining my fitness and diet routine, I finally realized in September that the only way I would be able to stay fit would be to stop trying to eat several (5-6) small meals per day and cut back to only 3 small meals. The heart of the problem is my work schedule. Over several months-long periods this year, I worked in excess of 80 hours per week.

When you can only manage 3-4 hours of sleep per night, it's tough to find the time and energy to work out. Somehow, the idea of lifting 60 pounds of steel over my head when I can hardly walk across a room without falling asleep seems just south of stupid. There's an obit you don't want your name on: "Franklin, 35, was found dead with a dumbbell lodged in his brain after the dumbass fell asleep during a bench press. His family, mortified at his idiocy, is forgoing a funeral and would like to donate his body to ballistics research. Thus far, most law enforcement agencies have declined the donation stating that Franklin was 'not a challenging target.'"

So, cutting back to three small meals with no snacking worked out really well. I was able to get back to a moderate 220 pounds. That sounds huge, but I'm 6'3", so I can handle it. I was feeling good about my new plan and my descent to walrus class. I needed only stick to the plan until my schedule allowed me to start working out again. At the time I was sleeping about 6 hours per night and working 60-70 hours a week -- not a busy schedule for me. It could get worse, and it did.

As I wrapped up the Alabama videos, I began to work 110 or more hours per week. I began sleeping, at most, four hours per night. Even though my workout had been on hold for several weeks, this change in my work schedule was detrimental. What happens when I work those kind of hours is an interesting study in psychology and physiology.

To successfully manage 18-20 hour work days, you have to drink a lot of coffee. The key to knowing when you've had enough to stay awake is to keep drinking until you can feel every cell in your body vibrate. If you're not that in tune to your body, lie still on a smooth surface. If your body begins to drift around like that creepy little pointer on a Ouija board, then you're there.

When you don't have time to fix more coffee, supplement with sodas. By no means should you drink water, because those additional caffeinie-free fluids will force you to spend too much time in the bathroom.

The second key to staying awake is food. Lots of it. It's 3am and you're trying to figure out how to keep going for three more hours before your morning nap. You've just finished off a pot of coffee. It's been four hours since you had your last snack. Time for food. There's no time to prepare something. The obvious choice is anything in the house that starts with "choco" or cleverly avoids the phrase "trans fats" on the label. I don't know why, but that's immediately what I crave. Some lady on a commercial with wireframes of roundisg human figures and way too much text on the screen tells me it's due to cortisol. A young man with an MD from one of Guatemala's finest educational institutions concurs. Cortisol or no, there's got to be some cake in this house somewhere.

I know some people who work out to support their food habit. I don't get that. If I'm carving out time in my schedule to work out, I'm not going to ruin it with Oreo's or a trip to Mickey D's. I have the opposite problem when my work schedule gets full. I'm sedentary, spending 18-20 hours a day behind the computer. I'm not working out. AND I'm eating too much of the wrong foods. There's this weird, fatalistic switch in my brain that says, "if I can't maintain a fitness routine, then I may as well eat as poorly as possible. It's the equivalent of driving your car off a bridge because you're low on gas. I can't explain it, but I wish I could change it.

A couple of days ago I got tired of sorting through clothes that I can't wear, so I cleared out the closet. It was sobering and depressing. Depressing because only two years ago I had to replace most of my wardrobe. I had lost down to about 205 from 242, and I had better muscle tone than ever in my life. I still wasn't in peak physical condition, but I was roughly at porpoise level, maybe seal. Now here I am, going in the opposite direction.

I hate when people suggest I have a weight problem. I don't see it as a weight problem, but a work problem. I had never weighed more than 185 until I was 26. That year, the combination of a divorce, a stressful work situation and, of course, 100-hour work weeks pushed me above 200 for the first time. (I had also stopped eating on a vegetarian diet, and my metabolism slowed down.) When I was 28, I had started doing cardio every day and was eating a better diet. I got back below 200. Kelli and I bought bikes that we rode every single day. In July of that year, I started a new company called Wannabe Films, and I haven't ridden my bike since.

Since '98, my weight has gone up and down -- up when I'm working too much, stressed out or when Kelli is pregnant. This year brought all three. My weight has gone down in years when I'm working only a moderate amount and our stressors are fewer, but those are also years when we weren't making enough money. So there's the rub -- make money or be healthy.

I suppose the only solution is to find a way to work smarter -- not harder. (Okay, I promise that's the last time I quote Successories on this blog.) I need to find a way to work, make adequate money to take care of my family and work 60 hours or less per week. I have plans and ideas, but at some point I have to rely on God to make them reality. Until then, my short-term goal is to get down to sea lion.

No More Thanksgiving!

Somebody up there does not want us to enjoy Thanksgiving. To wit, a description of Thanksgivings past:

1996 -- The first year Kelli and I were dating. Let's cover the basics of that year: the 5th anniversary of my first marriage, followed shortly thereafter by my first divorce -- not necessarily a bad thing. The Powers That Be refused to replace the three employees that left my department at TCI cable, leaving me as a manager with no one to manage and doing the work of four people. After working 110+ hours per week, putting on nearly 25 pounds and waking up one morning to discover I was driving, I quit without another job. My last day was to be the day before Thanksgiving. Thanks to my usual bad luck, I worked until 5 am Thanksgiving morning. Kelli had gamely hung in there with me all night (that's when I knew it was love), so we went back to my place and crashed until about 2pm. We obviously didn't go to Mobile as planned. Instead, we went to dinner at the Omelet Shoppe and caught a Star Trek flick.

1997 -- We try going to Mobile again. The night before we were to leave, we reheated some leftover seafood from Ralph & Kacoo's. By the morning of our travel day, Kelli was deathly ill with food poisoning. We made the trip anyway, but she spent most of the trip in bed.

1998 -- Our first Thanksgiving in Carrollton. Familial conflicts made the trip less than enjoyable. I suppose that's pretty typical of most people's Thanksgivings. Shortly after, my mother had a heart attack due to un-managed back pain.

1999 -- Our one good Thanksgiving. We were on our Honeymoon cruise. Of course, Kelli had been deathly ill due to a respiratory infection and an allergic reaction to an anti-viral right up until the wedding. Then, I was down with strep for the first three days of the cruise. Thanksgiving was the first day I felt relatively well.

2000 -- We started off in Mobile for Thanksgiving. Kelli was coming down with something. She thought it was a sinus infection. We then went to Carrollton for an extended family gathering. Kelli was really sick and smelling phantom onion smells. Her mom joked that Kelli was pregnant. On Monday, we found out she was right. That's the silver lining.

2001 -- Savannah was a baby. We went to Mobile, and everything was fine -- believe it or not. Of course, we were in the middle of a four-month period of no work and were headed toward our worst financial crisis of our lives.

2002 -- Kelli's extended family packed about 40 people into a 900 square foot house for the big meal. It was a 2 1/2-hour drive each way, and a bratty distant cousin kept being mean to Savannah. Miserable trip!

2003 -- We were on our way to Mobile and our engine died just outside of Montgomery. Kelli's cousin Stephen had to rescue all of us -- me, Kel, Savvi and Pippin (the cat.) We were stranded at their house in Millbrook for most of two days while we tried to find a way to get us and the Expedition back to Birmingham. The dealership in Prattville told us the engine was locked up and we needed a new one. We had the car towed home. My dad and I put some oil in it, cleaned the oil pan and strainer and replaced the oil pressure switch -- good as new. Our actual Thanksgiving dinner was a menu of various junk food items. For what it's worth Kelli was hospitalized with the flu shortly before Christmas.

2004 -- Unbelievably, a pretty good Thanksgiving, at least as far as we knew. We went to Mobile and had quite the feast with my extended family. We didn't know it yet, but Kelli was in the first days of a doomed pregnancy. We lost the baby on New Year's Day. And Sears caused us to wreck our car just before Christmas. Happy Holidays!

2005 -- Thanksgiving Day isn't here yet, but so far not so good. Cooper is still sick with a respiratory/sinus thing. His umbilical cord was starting to smell infected this afternoon, so Kelli was going to take him to the pediatrician. On the way, the car shuddered and the "check engine" light came on. She came immediately home. Tomorrow, I take it to the dealership and rent a car to get us through the week. I guess two years of driving with a locked up engine isn't too bad!

Our offensive line...

is the worst I've ever seen. (That's the last time I pick a game with my heart.) Bama was not ready to play, and it showed. That is inexcusable. I expect coaches will be fired after this. Typically, the head coach would go after losing three to the Cow College, but I think everybody's giving Shula a bye on the first one. Offensive coordinator Dave Rader has shown no ability to build an offense around his available talent, and has shown even less ability to be imaginative. (Where was Jimmy Johns?) O-line coach Bob Connelly has to go. I'd expect special teams/tight ends coach Dave Ungerer to face the music as well.

Anyway, at least there's a month to practice for a bowl game. Roll Tide.

Iron Bowl Day!

It's the most important religious holiday in the state of Alabama -- the High Holy Day of Football. Today is the annual Iron Bowl showdown between Alabama and Auburn. There's always a big national debate this time of year about which is the most intense rivalry in college football, and anyone who says anything other than the Iron Bowl has never set foot in this state.

As many people have learned over the years, when you move here from elsewhere in the world, you must make a declaration at the state line. You must answer one simple question that will determine your fate for the rest of your life: "who ya for?" There is no middle ground in Alabama. Even if you are a graduate of West Point with a master's degree from Notre Dame and a doctorate from Stanford, you have to make a choice -- is it Alabama or Auburn?

There was a time, and I hesitate to mention this in a public forum, when I thought I might like Auburn. It lasted for about 2 weeks when I was, I don't know, maybe 13. Coach Bryant had died. I was going through puberty. I had grown six and half inches in one summer, and I think I was still dizzy from the height. It didn't last long enough for me to actually buy any Auburn stuff, which is good, because I would have had to go through the ritual ruination when I came to my sense. That ritual consists of burning the offending items in a crimson cauldron sprinkled with Dreamland Bar-B-Q sauce, urinating on it to put out the fire, then burying it with a lock of tiger's hair (or a feather from a golden eagle, if you're in a pinch.)

Apart from that brief daliance, I've been an Alabama guy. I don't know why. My parents don't really give a flip about football. Unlike so many of my friends, I wasn't raised right when it comes to football. I am, however, correcting the sins of my forefathers by raising my kids as Bama faithful. Savannah has been to more games in her four years than I had attended prior to my freshman year at the Capstone, and she already knows the fight song by heart. (And she sings it the right way, unlike all those cretins out there who think it's "Yea, Alabama, Crimson Tide." It's "drowned 'em Tide," you posers! Look it up!)

I remember how devastated I was when Alabama lost to Mississippi State in 1980, snapping a 28-game win streak and dropping the Tide from its last #1 regular season ranking. I didn't understand it. Alabama isn't supposed to lose. How could this happen? Had God forsaken us? Savannah had a similar reaction after last week's OT loss to LSU.

Had things worked out differently, my life could be a real challenge in the fall. My first true love in high school was an Auburn fan. She eventually attended the Cow College, and I assume she married some poor misguided soul who will burn eternally for wearing the orange and blue.

What the hell kind of color combination is that anyway? Orange is just not a pretty color, I'm sorry. I know Auburn's is not as offensive as the road pylon orange in Knoxville, but it's still orange. You know the old saying, "all things evil wear orange." Or as they say in fashion circles, "orange is the new puke." For religious reasons, we don't let our kids wear Halloween shirts -- not because we're ultra-conservative and opposed to Halloween celebrations, but because we're opposed to orange in all forms. It is the anti-crimson.

I am sometimes saddened that I wasn't able to save my high school sweetheart's soul, but it's a broken world. Freedom of choice does mean that people have the freedom to choose their doom. Sadly, many do just that. Fortunately, God smiled upon me and blessed me with a wife who knows blood cells come in only two colors: crimson and white.

As for the question of the best college rivalry, it's no contest. Only the Iron Bowl is so intense, so contentious that the game was not played for 40 years -- all because the two teams couldn't even agree on the proper per diem for the players in 1907. As a result, it's not the most often played rivalry. It definitely is the most heated. Only in Alabama do we live all year for one game. Even if it's pushed to the backs of our minds, thoughts of this game are present during each of the four seasons: football season, recruiting season, spring practice and fall practice.

Today is the 70th matchup between the Tide and Tigers. My pick: Bama 16-13. What else?

Attack of the Hippo Heads!

Cooper is settling into his personality a little more now, although I must admit that I don't know him as well as I knew Savannah at this age. With Savannah, it felt like I knew her instantly. Very few things about her personality have surprised me to this day. Cooper's a bit more of a mystery. He is developing a little more of a temper -- mainly because he has had sinus congestion for a couple of weeks. He is also battling some Gershon issues and some colic (which always sounded like a vegetable to me) brought on by his formula. (He has forgotten his superior belching skills since coming home.)

When I hold him, there are a few things that really jump out at me. He has these deep eyes that always look like he's plotting some conspiracy or staring deep into your soul, reading the thoughts and impulses even you don't know yet. He is obviously beautiful. And he has a melon roughly the size of a hippo's. Don't get me wrong, I don't think he's freakish or anything. Cooper's just following the hydrocephalic lead of his old man. You know those fitted caps without the little adjusty thing on the back? Can't find one that doesn't look like a yarmulke on me. And sunglasses? Forget about it. Even the biggest ones look like a monocle on my cabeza. And no adult should have a face that is perfectly circular. I guess the upside is Kelli can use a 12" frying pan as a stand-in for me in family photos.

They always say that a large head is an indicator of success. It's an exciting thought for my children. Savannah's a member of the giant melon club, too. If there were a Franklinland theme park, the character costumes based on us would actually have heads smaller than ours. My kids should get something in exchange for a lifetime of stretched-out necks in their shirts and sweaters. The real question is: where's my payoff?

If head size is indicative of success, I should be like the white male Oprah (also a hippo-head.) I should have the money of Bill Gates (I could swallow his little pinhead whole), the fame of Ben Affleck (famous due only to his hat size, because it sure ain't for his acting), and the power of Ted Kennedy -- the undisputed King of Craniums. That thing has its own zoning restrictions.

Why should I suffer through a life of mediocrity while dragging this thing around? Do you know what kind of neck muscles it takes to walk around with a 40-pound medicine ball on your shoulders? I've always wanted to go to New York for Thanksgiving, but I'm afraid a crowd of volunteers with matching Macy's shirts will start clipping cables to my head and pulling me back into the parade. Hollywood is not an option -- "Look Mommy! John Boy Walton got fat!" And forget about me ever getting near Easter Island.

This kind of attic space should be celebrated, not ridiculed. I want my success! It's my birthright just as surely as success in women's golf is the birthright of every attractive lesbian, like a knack for comedy is the birthright of every short, thin Jewish guy and like the presidency is the birthright of everyone named Bush... or so they seem to think.

So for all the melon heads out there, I will achieve my success. I will rise up and snatch it away from those of lesser cranial volume. I will stand up for everyone who, like me, had to get two paper crowns from Burger King. I will stand up for the lowly, the oppressed, for everyone whose promise of large-headed triumph has been denied -- except Patrick Swayze. You had your shot, Road House. I will stand up for the Big Heads. And then I will quickly sit back down, because holding this thing up is exhausting.

More Great Trigon Spots from Bob Ebel

Check out "Spinach/Spanish", "Snotty Doctor", "Cerebral Cortex" and "Food Pyramid".

Kid Actors

The best child actors are... well, Dakota Fanning. There aren't many others. In all of film history, only a few kids have transcended precociousness or self-aware mugging to do real acting. Jodie Foster, Tatum O'Neal and Anna Paquin come to mind. Probably the best male child actors both have Alabama ties -- Lucas Black in Sling Blade and Haley Joel Osment, especially in The Sixth Sense. (I personally love Peter Billingsley's performance as Ralphie in A Christmas Story, but that's still not Fanning-esque.)

I've worked with a few kids, and directing them is tough. The key with kids is to get them to relax and ignore the fact that they are acting. They have to ignore the camera, ignore the crew and ignore the equipment. That's to say nothing of actually becoming a character. It's hard to do. I've worked with some so-called professional actors who couldn't pull it off. I read about a commercial director named Bob Ebel recently who brings out great performances from average children. He does it by disguising the camera and gear in a set that looks more like a household room.

Here's a link to a brilliant spot he did for Trigon Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

I Wish Terrorists Would Take Issue with my Hedges

Yard work is a funny thing. I don't mind doing it. In fact, there is a Zen-like bliss that comes from isolating yourself in a cocoon of small-engine noise and the visual serenity of staring at patterns in the grass for hours. But I find it really hard ot get motivated to do the yard work. Maybe motivated is the wrong word. All I have to do is look outside at the jungle that is taking over my driveway, and I'm motivated. I want the yard clean. It's just tough to make the time commitment.

If I don't do it soon, though, the Sierra Club will come in here and declare the hedges along my driveway a protected ecosystem. I think I saw a sloth in there the other night, but it's hard to tell. They're so slow-moving, you can't see those things at night. Maybe if they'd smile or something.

The problem is not one of maintenance. Mowing, blowing and edging I can handle, even though our front yard is nearly half an acre. No, my nemesis is that hedge row. And to call it a hedge row is an insult English boxwoods everywhere. The bushes are something called Thorny Elaeagnus. It's a bush that can grow as tall as a tree and spreads like a vine. And it has 1-2 inch thorns! It grows up to a foot per day. Getting rid of it usually results in cuts all over your arms. Think of it as Kudzu on steroids with a nasty disposition.

The bushes (let's call them Agnes) had been allowed to grow at least 10 feet tall in the years prior to our moving in. After trying to contain it, we've finally resolved to remove it -- not completely, just prune it down to a "hat rack." We've brainstormed a number of solutions. The first and most obvious choice was to invest in a herd of hedgehogs. Brilliant! But, it turns out that hedgehogs don't crave hedges the same way an attention hog craves attention. It's just a name. That left us with the challenge of liquidating our stock of hedgehogs. I thought it was a safe investment, especially since the brochure said they were "prized for their delicious meat and luxurious pelts."

Plan B was a more aggressive approach -- flamethrowers. The rising price of oil made that impractical. Plan C - appeasement. Our negotiators attempted to meet the demands of Agnes, but when the bushes referred to us as "nancy Chamberlains," we walked away and declared open war. I don't understand the Chamberlain thing, but no plant calls me Nancy. Plan D -- Fargo. We hat-rack the individual bushes then shove them into a wood chipper. Then I started thinking about those 20+ foot thorny limb/vines whipping about like a cat of nine tails, shredding me worse than if I were the main character in another Mel Gibson torture-mentary. I ditched that plan like my crazy college girlfriend who I only went out with on a bet.

Plan E -- convincing radical Islamic terrorists that my hedge row is an affront to the Quran. The problem is I'm too lazy to read the Quran to determine what would the offense would be. And what's up with all the different English translations of that word? Is it Quran? Koran? Couric? Somebody make a decision, please! Maybe I could convince them that Agnes is a symbol of the US economy...

Other failed plans: Plan F -- nanotechnology. The problem there was that the nano race are very secretive people and quite protective of their trade secrets. They are also easily offended by the misappropriation of the nano name. There goes the University of Illinois' plan to change their mascot to the Fighting Nano-monkeys! Plan G -- slave labor. That one went over like a lead balloon... kind of like this joke. Plan H -- anti-gravity potting soil. The bags floated away as soon as we put them on the utility trailer... along with the trailer. At least we saved enough to get rid of that lead balloon. Plan I -- introduction of natural predators. Did you know that plants don't have predators, per se? If so, why didn't you tell me. I don't think that botanist at Auburn has stopped laughing yet.

So we come to the final plan, Plan J -- hard work. Cut the stuff back, load it on a utility trailer and haul it to the dump. It could take days or even weeks, but it has to be done. I've got to move quickly, though. I just saw a very boxy-looking woman wearing a hemp dress and Birkenstocks casing the house in her Subaru Forester. I think the Sierra Club is on to me.

The Thing About Losing is...

It sucks. For all of you who hide from all things football, Alabama lost its first game Saturday in what had seemed like a season of destiny. For those of us who sit awake during 4 am feedings of our newborns, worrying about whether the offensive line will be able to sufficiently protect Brodie Croyle from speedy, dangerous defensive ends, the loss was tantamount to the shattering of our dreams. I was going to compare it to the loss of a relative, but that seems harsh. However, I have lost some distant cousins and great uncles that didn't hurt this much. I know, I'm a heartless idiot -- save yourself from the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome of sending me hate mail.

And to make matters worse, Auburn won a big game against Georgia last night. Don't get me wrong, I don't completely hate Auburn. Auburn is a great client, and I really enjoy working with them and visiting the town. However, I hate when they win a big game because of their fans. I have friends who are Auburn fans, and they don't seem to be obnoxious, but I'm always afraid it's lurking down deep inside them. I just know that one day they'll go all William Hurt and turn into some feral beast that feeds on hapless Bama fans in the dark of night. (That's right, I just referenced 1980's "Altered States." Put that on your Netflix queue!)

Maybe I listen to too much sports talk radio. Every Auburn fan who calls into those shows talks only about Alabama, never about Auburn. If Alabama is losing, they call in to gloat. If Alabama is winning, they call in to diminish the victories. And then there are those who call in to say that not every Auburn fan is obsessed with Alabama, and in doing so, they spend the entire call talking about Alabama.

This is not to say that there aren't obnoxious Alabama fans calling in. There are plenty. The haters in crimson tend to throw around buzzwords like "class" and "tradition," and they never fail to reference the late Coach Bryant and Alabama's 12 national championships. But I can rationalize their behavior as being aberrant in comparison to "real" Alabama fans -- reasonable, respectable fans who don't gloat or boast about the fact that Alabama is home to the greatest sports tradition in all of recorded human history, but who, out of a deep magnanimity, pity fans and alumni of lesser schools. Fans like me.

So the loss was a blow to my Alabama arrogance. That arrogance is lessened of late, thanks to a recurring three-year cycle -- year one: a losing season; year two: mediocrity; year three 10 wins and the false hope that Bama is back. It seems we're in year three. Let's hope the cycle ends here. Otherwise, I might have to learn fan humility, and what fun would that be?

As an Alabama fan, there is only one thought as each season begins: national championship. Alabama could have no coaching staff and a roster of one-legged octogenarians, and we would still believe. "Well, Coach Bryant once fielded a team of lab chimps and overweight circus clowns and got 10 wins, because they played as a team."

I'm not one of those Bama folk who buy into the whole 12 national championships talk. Alabama never claimed a certain number of NCs until after Coach Bryant died. (By the way, only rednecks and the uninformed call the legendary coach Bear. Real Alabama fans afford the man the respect his position deserves and call him Coach Bryant, even in death.) In the mid 80s, as the Coach Perkins era was in full swing, an SID (Sports Information Director) named Wayne Atcheson took it upon himself to put a number to Alabama's championships. The number he picked was 12, which would be defensible if not for one glaring, idiotic choice: 1941.

You see, since 1937 the gold standard for determining the national champion(s) has been the wire service polls: the Associated Press and the ESPN/USA Today (formerly United Press International.) In that era, Alabama has won seven national championships (1961, 1964, 1965, 1973, 1978, 1979 & 1992) and has been robbed of a couple of others. 1941 is not one of those championships. That year, Alabama lost two games and was nowhere near being the best team in the land, but some drunken idiot at Atlantic Sewing Monthly or some such organization named the Tide number one. This is not something to gloat about.

Had Mr. Atcheson chosen 1945, I could get behind that one. In '45, the Tide had two of the greatest players in their history, Harry Gilmer and Vaughn Mancha. The mighty twosome led Alabama to a 10-0 record, a victory over USC in the Rose Bowl and recognition as national champions by the National Championship Foundation. I know that's not a wire service poll, but those weak-minded fools were swayed by an old Jedi mind trick: they gave it to Army, the same Army who, it just so happens, won a war that year. (Of course, had the Tide been in charge of the campaign in Europe, Hitler would have faked his suicide and fled to Argentina in 1942 and hundred of thousands of newly enlightened ex-Nazis would have been goose-stepping through Nuremberg chanting "Rollen Tide Rollen!") The Tide had been named champs four times prior to 1937. There was no real standard then, so some years saw as many as five champions.

Even now, with a loss, I'm still devising scenarios which would get Alabama to the championship game. LSU will lose to Arkansas, putting Alabama back in the SEC championship game. Virginia Tech loses to Virginia. Miami loses in the ACC championship. Penn State suddenly remembers how lousy they've been in recent years and just gives up. Notre Dame's players will all quit football to enter the priesthood. Texas is declared ineligible after their home state gives up on this whole "federal experiment" and secedes, once again becoming the Republic of Texas and stealing our president, naming him to a lifetime term as Cowboy-in-Chief. Then, Alabama meets USC in a rematch of the Rose Bowl of 60 years ago. The score is the same as then: Alabama 34 -- USC 14.

(Please do not read the above paragraph to anyone who has the power to declare me legally insane.)

So here I am, facing headlong into a scary Iron Bowl this Saturday and trying to come to grips with a loss. Savannah doesn't really understand it either. When I called home after the game, she asked, "Daddy, why didn't we win?" I said, "because sometimes your team just doesn't win." What I wanted to say was, "because one of those blind crack addicts in the striped shirts wouldn't know an offensive pass interference penalty if he had just finished watching a Ken Burns documentary entitled "Offensive Pass Interference: Every Way it Can Happen and How to Know it When You See it in the Alabama-LSU Game." But I'm not bitter.

------------------------
In other news, Kelli's getting sicker. I'm exhausted. Savannah's fine and Cooper's a little Gershon'd. But who cares about any of that? Alabama lost.

Here's the pic...

that some of you may or may not be receiving depending upon your level of worthiness. Bribes are not only accepted, but encouraged.


For comparison, here's Savannah's birth announcement:


Kelli and I are getting to know his features well enough now that we can tell the difference between them. The biggest difference we've noticed is the shape of their lips. Where Savannah has my top lip and Kelli's lower, Cooper has Kelli's top and my lower.

For those of you keeping score, that leaves Kelli and me with exactly no lips. Here we are, the lipless freaks, trying desperately to whistle. And of course, there will now be no kissing, which may explain what happens to the love lives of new parents. Don't you worry, though. We have a plan. I'm going to have my lovehandles lipo'd and the fat injected into our lips. That would give each of us lips roughly the size of a hippo's. Hippo lips. That's what they'll call us. Or lip handles. Your choice.

Sleep at a Premium

Sorry for the distinct lack of blogging the last couple of days, but we're all pretty tired around here. Here's a quick rundown of life in the Franklin world:

Kelli sick -- It doesn't seem to be anything serious, but Kelli is a little under the weather -- sinus congestion, sore throat, slight fever. She's taking some antibiotics and resting. She slept in the guest room last night, which left me with sole care of the Coopster. Combine that with an early morning yesterday, and I'm pretty wiped out.

We got some work -- I had a meeting in Tuscaloosa yesterday that will result in some new work for the University. The last thing I expected from my next project is that it would be a re-working of my last project. Fine by me. Work is work. BTW, God is good, and faith is rewarded.

Body for Life? Yeah, right. I've been too tired and too busy this week to really re-establish the workout routine. I'll keep trying, though.

Some good meetings -- I've met with a couple of guys this week about representation and the development about some of our TV/film projects. Don't want to bore you with the details, but we are really getting focused on moving our careers into a new direction. On those same lines, we got a verbal commitment from Alabama's gymnastics team to take part in a reality series next season that we will develop. Now to sell the series...

Pics on the way -- I'm headed out now to pick up a bunch of photos of the kids. We printed one birth photo of Cooper with his birth stats to send out to those special people in our lives. (You know who you are.) If you don't get one, don't take it personally. We can still be friends; we just don't think you're all that special. I'm sure somebody does, though. I can't imagine whom, but stranger things have happened. Not many stranger things. I think I'll quit while I'm way behind.

My Nemesis and Friend

Now that we're home and settling into life with two kids, I'm trying to get into some healthy life habits. The trick is fitting everything in. There's work, the yard, the house, taking care of the kids, and, of course, my work with orphans. At least I think they were orphans. They were all wearing matching t-shirts and eating food off the ground in the park. I guess they could've been kids on a field trip having a picnic. I bet that was it! Idiot! No wonder they looked traumatized when I started crying and screaming at them, "you poor children! Your parents are dead! Your parents are all dead!"

With Kelli still recovering, my share of the load is larger than usual. I'm trying to fit in a couple of hours a day for working out and some spiritual quiet time. It's a work in progress, but not impossible. It's all about time management. But if there's one thing that is likely to throw me off my game, it's -- and I hate to say this, because I'm betraying an old friend -- it's television. It sucks me in like that cross-dimensional vortex thing from the show "Sliders." (It's a classic.) TiVo has only made things worse. Now I know there's always something on I want to watch. And when there's two hours of "The Amazing Race" and a new "My Name is Earl" on the Now Playing list, it's tough to pull yourself away. I NEED to know what happened to the annoying Bronx family. My health can wait.

I'm 35 years old, and there are so many things I've never done. I can't speak a foreign language. I've never finished a Russian novel. I almost never read. I don't know anything about philosophy or the great thinkers. I don't know Bach from Bartok, and I wouldn't know Charles Mingus if his piano fell on my head. I don't even know what instrument Mingus played! Work often catches most of the blame from me, but the real fault lies with television. That wonderful, mind-numbing, taste-lowering, irresistably tacky lightbox television. Damn you, Zworykin and Farnsworth!

But before we throw our TVs out the windows and scream, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" we should stop to consider all the good things TV has done for us.

Without TV, we wouldn't know how many maggots a person can eat in 30 seconds with their hands tied behind their backs. Without TV, we would never consider packing all of our belongings for a 3-hour boat ride. If there were no TV, what would we point our furniture at? Without TV, I wouldn't have been able to steal that last joke from "Friends." No TV would mean I would be limited to watching only a single game on Saturdays, and that would be criminal.

TV has taught us how to find our perfect match -- by competing against 11 other single losers, of course. TV has taught us that if we have dark secrets haunting our relationships, it's best to reveal them to our loved ones in front of the entire world. Jerry Springer is our friend. Thanks to TV, war is finally entertaining again.

Without TV, there would never have been a trained chimp co-hosting the Today Show. When is Katie Couric going to retire, anyway? Great icons of our pop culture heritage would be meaningless: Fonzie's jacket, Archie Bunker's chair, that little robot who said "beedee-beedee-beep" on Buck Rogers.

TV has enriched our lives, flavored our culture and expanded our language. "Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!" "Bang! Zoom! Right to the moon!" "I think you were a little hard on the Beaver." "Nip it in the bud." "Missed it by that much!" "No soup for you!" "Doh!" I'm not apologizing for TV anymore. It's like the crass uncle you don't want to take to parties to meet your friends, but you can't wait to see when you go home. So my brain may be a little smaller and my worldview a little shallower. Who cares? My name is Wayne, and I'm a television addict -- not that there's anything wrong with that.

Update on Cooper -- Three Weeks Old

Believe it or not, Cooper is three weeks today. So many of our friends have yet to see him. In some ways, it seems like time has stood still over the past few weeks. Given that it's cold & flu season, we're hesitant to take him around too many people right away. We'll probably start easing him into some outings over the next two weeks.

He had a check-up today. He's almost back up to his birth weight at nine pounds even. He has gained almost 2 inches in length (I guess it's not really height until you can stand under your own power.) I even had to adjust the position of the car seat straps to accommodate him. His check-up went well, but they had to take a lot of blood. I've never heard him cry so much. He had a pacifier in his mouth the whole time, so he ended up sounding like Chewbacca "talking." Not the roaring Chewie, but the "roah-roah-roah" soft-spoken one. Okay, okay. Next time, you try typing in Wookie.

The reason for the extra blood was a slight bump in his adrenal activity in his original lab work in the hospital. Dr. Stone said that was to be expected with the way Coop was struggling to breathe at birth. This is just to double check the numbers and ensure that everything is okay.

He's been allowing us a couple of three-hour stretches of sleep at night. Last night was an exception, as we totaled about 4 hours. He is still a little congested, so sleeping was a challenge. The kid is also eating us out of house and home. To think the NICU doc was worried about his "eating problem." I still harbor a deep desire to step on that little man. Need to repent of that one.

Savannah is very attached to him, and even began sobbing as we left for pre-school this morning. "I want my baby brother, she cried." We're still fighting her need to constantly touch him. It's funny; already she can tick him off faster than anyone. They already know how to behave like siblings. She simply touches his forehead or kisses his hand the wrong way, and he starts complaining. And she has already complained about the music from his bouncy seat interfering with her movies. Welcome to our future.

On a Scale from Winston to Maria

I don't know if it's the lack of sleep or what, but being the parent of a newborn does funny things to your brain. For instance, I spent most of my few sleeping hours last night dreaming that Birmingham was being destroyed by a superstorm which I controlled from my iBook. That's the last time I watch a cheesy disaster flick like "Category 7" while playing Snood right before bed. (By the way, I'm thinking of optioning the film rights to Snood. As bad as I hear "Doom" is, I couldn't do much worse.) Sometimes the sleep deprivation can come out in creative ways.

When Savannah was an infant, there were certain terms we adopted to describe her mood or condition. I'm expanding that to create a new lexicon, a verbal shorthand for parents in need of a certain economy of words:

•Vladimir -- As in Putin. To describe a gassy baby who has no trouble venting.
•Wyatt -- A condition of spitting up. Usage: "Uh-oh, he's Wyatt right now." "Why, did he urp?"
•Leon -- When Vladimir goes to far; having the Trotskies.
•Gershon -- The opposite of Leon; Bound; constipated.
•Bratch -- The term for a girl who is being both bratty and, well, that term reserved for the most severe of female behaviors. (We are Beta testing some options for the male equivalent. Brick? Prat? Bratstard? Son of a bratch? Brathole? We're working on it.)
•Churchill/Shriver -- A scale, ranging from 1 (or full Churchill) to 100 (full Shriver) for describing the baby's appearance. It's been said that all new babies look like Winston Churchill. As they grow and mature, their faces become sleeker, more angular. The most extreme angularity results in an appearance similar to that of Maria Shriver and requires regular face sharpening. Usage: "What does the baby look like." "About a 9.5 on the Churchill/Shriver scale."

Halloween Pics of Savannah

Here's Savannah as a unicorn. Not a bunny or a butterfly or a narwhal, but a flying unicorn.

The Miracle of Modern Technology: or How e-mail Saved My Privates

I'm going out on a limb here; I detest chain e-mails. You know the ones I mean, those messages that end with a phrase something like this: "forward this message to ten of your friends if you care that God is being forced out of our society. If you don't care, then trash it and transplant your family to the mouth of a volcano -- just to prepare yourself for eternity," or "forward this to anyone who needs sex or your genitals will rot and fall off." Seriously? I know I missed out on sex ed in the eighth grade because I had mono, but I don't recall anyone talking about chain letters ensuring the health of your manhood.

Do you remember chain letters? They were the old school predecessors to these e-mails. Maybe a half dozen times in my life I've received an anonymous, badly photocopied letter that promised good health, good luck or good fortune if I forwarded it. Those letters were always afforded a special place in my home -- somewhere between coffee grounds and banana peels in my trash can. (For the uninitiated, my experience as a janitor during college taught me one thing -- old coffee grounds and banana peels create possibly the most noxious smell this side of cat urine. And cat urine, for what it's worth, should be used as a chemical weapon. It's hard to get fired up about a revolution when you smell like a litter box.)

The popularization of e-mail has been a boon for chain letters. Whereas a person could go a whole lifetime and receive less than 20 paper chain letters, I sometimes get that many in a week via e-mail. What's worse, with e-mail, the letters are no longer anonymous. You typically know who sent it to you, to whom they sent it besides you and, sometimes, who sent it to the sender. The reason the old-fashioned chain letters were typically anonymous was because no one would dare lay claim to such crackpot ideas.

So, what to make of the chain letter renaissance? Are they a powerful force for change? Or simply a nuisance foisted upon you by your friends and family? Perhaps more perplexing is why we so readily forward them with no sense of shame whatsoever.

Though most of us don't like to receive them, we've all sent at least one. (Admit it. You were really worried about the AIDS needles in the gas pumps.) The ones Kelli and I forward are typically political in nature. There's something about being blue in a red state that makes you enjoy getting folks riled up. Political chain letters are more defensible, whether they lean left or right, because they can actually lead to tangible results. People embrace an issue, call their representatives and laws change. That's a naive view, to be sure, but you get the idea.

The ones that really tick me off are those that take on some kind of metaphysical worldview, like the overlord of e-mail is monitoring your outbox. (It could be Xenu. I hear he's got some free time since slaughtering billions of souls in Earth's volcanoes and then cramming them willy-nilly into the bodies of humans, resulting in a spiritual confusion that can only be solved by following Messrs. Cruise and Travolta to your local Scientology hoedown.) The metaphysical variety typically insist that failure to forward the e-mail will result in some catastrophic effects on your personal life: the aforementioned genital withering, loss of friends, loss of livelihood or the theft of all of your jewelry and electronics. Come to think of it, that last one may have been an actual threat...

Equally annoying are the ones that make some pie-in-the-sky promise about free money or goods. Let's settle this once and for all; Bill Gates is NOT going to send you a big check just for forwarding an e-mail to a bunch of people. Unless there's some provision in the Patriot Act allowing Microsoft to monitor everyone's e-mail activity, it's not going to happen. (Now if you told me that viewing certain anti-administration sites might result in a subpoena from the FBI, I might believe you.) And Mr. Gates did not becme the richest man in this country by giving his money away to every rube with a computer. In case you forgot, his job is to do exactly the opposite. Afterall, the guy has ugly paid shirt and oversized glasses habits to support. Likewise, Disney is not going to send you free passes to the Magic Kingdom. They will, however, charge you $7.50 for a late afternoon seizure.

It's time to put these e-mail threats to the test. The "Sex Fairy" e-mail I received this week promises that I will get lucky within 10 days if I forward the message to ten people in need of some lovin'. Otherwise, spontaneous emasculation. I realize that this e-mail was intended to be funny, but you know people are sending it out in hopes of a little wully-bully. I could send it out to ten folks and keep all of you updated on the status of my love life. First of all, eewww. Secondly, Kelli is three weeks out from a C-section. It ain't gonna happen, Sex Fairy or no. Instead, I'll risk the withering.

If, in a couple of weeks, you learn that I have testicular cancer, then I'll make the e-mail available to all of you as a preventative. But we all know the truth -- these e-mails are bunk. I mean, I never forwarded any of those chain letters, and it didn't have any ill effects on my luck or financ-- Hmmm. Come to think of it, nevermind.

The Seizurest Place on Earth

Note: I posted this earlier today, but only the title published. I will now attempt to recreate it from memory. Apologies if I don't bring the funny the second time around. I am merely human.

Last night, Savannah and I went to see the new Disney flick, "Chicken Little." The film was showing on the only screen in Alabama to feature the new REAL D digital 3D technology. Gone are the blue and red paper glasses of the past. Instead, we received plastic glasses with polarized lenses. The glasses were modeled to duplicate the look of the glasses the titular chicken sports in the film. This means that even the most beautiful people in the crowd looked like complete dorks. Film truly is a democratic medium. In order to achieve the 3D effect, the polarizing lenses resolve a dual image coming from the new digital projector. I haven't found out much more than that about how it works, but I'll be looking into it after last night. You'll see what I mean soon enough.

We got there early to snag some primo seats -- right in the middle, as far back from the screen as the screen is wide. (That's the secret formula to the best seats in the house. Keep it between us.) There we sat -- the two of us and four other early birds. We had our dorky plastic glasses and our snacks, and we were just waiting for the film to start. A twitchy-looking manager entered and asked that we all leave the theatre while his crew re-cleaned it. We had seen a couple of theatre drones in there doing a half-assed cleaning job when we arrived, and I thought that was just the way they cleaned theatres these days. But now they were telling us they needed to clean again. Wow! Real customer service. Way to go, Manager Man!

The six of us gathered up our five-gallon buckets of soda, our bushel bags of popcorn and brick-sized boxes of candy -- all puchased with 6 months, no interest financing -- and headed out to form what would become a substantial line. As more and more people arrived, a sense of suspicion began to grow amongst the "Linies." (That's the term the popular media used to describe us. We prefer "Liners.") "I wonder what this is all about," said one. "I thought it was to get the glasses, but the glasses are right there in that box," another noted. I decided to add a little dash of intrigue. "We were all in there and they kicked us out." The collective gasp from the Liners nearly sucked all the air out of the building, like the sudden pressure drop inside a hurricane.

Then a bunch of theatre goons walked past with about a half dozen stantions -- you know, those pole thingies used for roping off areas. "They're blocking us out." "I heard somebody say something about reserved seating." "No, it's about the 3D. It doesn't work if you sit too close." I didn't buy that. Why would any exhibitor spend a quarter million dollars leasing a new projector and screen only to sell LESS tickets? Of course that would explain the additional $1.50 charge on our tickets.

Heir Manager returned to let the orginal seat squatters back in. The unity of the Liners was broken. It was now a matter of Haves and Have-nots. We have been in the theatre already. The rest of you have not. Indeed that theatre was remarkably cleaner -- not a single kernel of corn and only the lightest touch of stickiness to the floor, and that only for the sake of nostalgia. And, to my chagrine, the wing sections down front were roped off. I was at least partially wrong; I admit it. (Don't get used to it.) Savannah and I grabbed our original seats and settled in for some three-dimensional, digital wizardry.

The place filled up pretty quickly with couples, families and a few brave souls who obviously lost a poker bet and were forced to bring a whole cadre of kids. And we all divorced ourselves from our shame and enthusiastically donned our dorky chicken glasses. Then the Manager-nator returned, looking even twitchier than before. He welcomed us to the theatre and the first-ever Disney 3D blah, blah, blah.

Then the evening took a turn for the surreal. "You'll want to keep your glasses on the whole time, during the previews and through the entire film." Interesting. Maybe it takes a little while for the 3D effect to kick in -- a warmup period for your eyes and brain. Le Managére continued, "Because if you take the glasses off during the movie, it could make you sick." Huh? "The way the picture comes out, it kind of sends like signals that scramble your brain." What the? The unity of the Liners was back. "We've had a couple of kids... toss their popcorn today." Great. Somehow, I missed the part about the vomit-inducing, brain-scrambling signals in the ads for the movie.

"The signals can affect your brain kind of like an epileptic seizure." Okay, the gloves were off. It was us versus them now, and we weren't going along willingly with these Shadow Government operatives and their Mickey Mouse mind-control conspiracy -- at least not without some free popcorn or something. "But it's not a seizure." Oh, okay. Whew. It's like a seizure, but not an actual seizure. What a relief. Roll the movie, then Über Manager.

So the lights dipped low and the trailers started. The first screen that came up was a graphic that told us to take off our glasses for the previews. Now what? Who do I trust; the Mysterious Managismo or the team of Disney flunkies who hastily put together this art card? Playing it safe, I told Savannah to keep her glasses on, thinking her the more likely to urp because of the alien brain waves. I alternated between glasses and no glasses -- not because I was testing the differing physiological effects on my system, but because I couldn't make up my mind.

I don't know if it was from watching the 2D trailers with glasses on or from the effects of the 3D imaging, but for the entire film I had a the taste of metal under my tongue and a mild nausea. Yeah, this is going to revive the box office from its recent doldrums: the threat of seizures and the sensation of having just eaten an aluminum can. Brilliant!

As for the film itself, I'd give it two out of five stantions. This is not only Disney's first digital 3D film, it's also their first 3D digitally animated film. (Talk about a marketing nightmare.) In their infinite wisdom, the brains at Disney sold all of their traditional 2D animation stations (and canned a bunch of animators) to replace them with 3D systems. Their logic is that films like Shrek and the Pixar ouvre are successful because they are animated in three dimensions. Note to Disney: It's the stories. The Pixar films could have been hand drawn on bar napkins, and they'd still be better than Chicken Run, because they're well written. And they don't give you seizures!

Inside the Mind of a Four-Year-Old

This is a conversation I had with Savannah earlier today. I still don't know what it means.

Savannah: Daddy, were you ever frozen when you were a kid?
Wayne: I don't know what you are talking about.
S: (exasperated sigh) I mean, when you were a kid. Were you ever frozen? All day long?
W: What are you talking about?
S: I'm talking about frozen.
W: I don't know what you mean by that.
S: I mean, were you ever frozen?
W: No, I was never frozen as a kid.
S: I was.
W: I still have no idea what you're talking about.
S: (bigger sigh) I mean I was frozen one time.
W: Okay...
S: I'm talking about I was frozen all day at school... For six days.
W: If you say so.

This is but a microcosm of life as a parent. How are you supposed to explain to someone whose brain works this way why they need to wash their hands before dinner or wear pants in public? I've decided to give up. I think we'll just let the inmates run the asylum. Until then, I think I'll go figure out how to freeze myself. If only I had a new freezer with that option...

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Sleep Deprivation and its Dissuasive Effects on Personal Physical and Spiritual Fitness

I'm tired. I'm accustomed to sleeping very few hours at night, but now those precious hours are broken up by hour-long feeding sessions. And last night, we slept on the sofa. I had planned on getting back on the Body for Life bandwagon after I wrapped up the Alabama job a few weeks ago, but Cooper made an early appearance, as you know. It's one thing to maintain a fitness routine with a new baby, but to restart one that has been dormant for more than 3 months is nearly impossible. I'm not lacking motivation, especially given that Coop thinks my breasts are capable of lactation! I may have to invest in former Alabama coach Dennis "Hold the Rope" Franchione's bra for men, the Franssiere.

I am also really wanting to establish a daily routine of reading the bible and prayer/meditation. I'm a really bad Christian, as far as those things go. Not that I think that behaviors are key to spiritual maturity, but it's tough to have a relationship with someone you know very little about and never talk to, but that's exactly my relationship with God. Once again, exhaustion is taking a toll.

The solution, I've decided, is to turn the problem over to Wannabe Films' consumer products division, Wannabe Amalgamated Products Consolidated, Inc. Our R&D folks are now working on a liquid sleep product tentatively named "SleepFast." Three shakes a day combined with a 20-minute power nap are like a full night's sleep. Our biggest problem right now are the flavors. The best the chemists can come up with are liver & licorice, strawberry-mothball and malted turpentine.

Some of our other upcoming products include: ground beef in a giant toothpaste tube called "I Can't Believe it's a Squeezeburger!" "Tube-O-Salad" (with patented keep-fresh plunger.) And "Pinch A Loaf" -- oven-ready frozen breads in 10 and 20-foot lengths. We are also working with our friend David Adams of Metro PictureWorks, whose products division is Metropolitzenprodüktworkenz. Our combined effort is to bring to market David's invention, "B'day Mate!", a bidet in a can product. "It's like dipping your bum in a raging mountain stream!"

On the Phone With Customer Relations

Should I be capitalizing "With" in the title? I can never remember. Where exactly did I put my AP style book from Mass Comm 102? Anyway...

We considered buying a new fridge last night, but we decided it would be wiser to save about $400 and have the current fridge repaired, which is still very nice, BTW. In looking at new iceboxes, we noticed something; There's not much difference between a $900 fridge and a $1,400 fridge. If you pay an extra $500 (even $1,000) you get the following:
•heavier doors
•digital push buttons for controlling the temperature instead of those little twisty dials
•a cheap plastic piece of crap for storing 9 cans of soda (I can't tell you the number of times I've needed to quickly cool a 9-pack.)
•door alarms and locks (A great feature if you're trying to push your daughter into an eating disorder!)
•little slide thingies on all the crisper drawers (So your kids can just screw up all your produce when you're not looking)
•shelves that slide out, because you're too good to extend your arms to their full length like those crackers across the tracks
•the satisfaction of knowing that you have enough money to throw it away on all of the above

And freezers... there's essentially no difference between one freezer and another. It's like these manufacturers aren't even trying anymore. I need to see some innovation to spend the extra money. How about a snowball maker for mid-summer snowball fights? Or a frozen margarita dispenser? Or a cryo drawer for freezing your pets until modern medical science can come up with a cure for "swallowed a whole pack of firecrackers, then hiccuped and blew up his colon?"

So I tried Sears national customer service hotline again. They reviewed the case, then put me on hold for about 72 hours. When they came back, they connected me with National Customer Relations. ("I did not have customer relations with that woman.") I was informed that my case had been deemed NCR-worthy. A lady named Christy tried to contact the general manager of the Galleria store, who was conveniently on vacation. Every time we try to reach someone over there, they are on vacation. I think that's their pat answer when they don't want to answer the phone, kind of like the standard McDonald's line, "I'm sorry sir, but the shake machine is broken." I'm glad whatever company makes those shake machines isn't in an important industry like traffic lights or airplane landing gear.

The manager's trip to Cabo (or, let's face it, Branson, MO) worked in our favor. Christy contacted the District Manager. We will hear something back by next Tuesday, hopefully sooner. Until then, we have to live with the WLC (world's largest cooler.)

Three words of advice: Don't do drugs. Stay in school. And don't shop at Sears.

Seacrest out.

Snotty Babies, Unicorns and the World's Largest Cooler

The banalities of everyday life have returned. My parents went back home on Sunday. That night was the first with just the four of us here, and it felt amazingly normal, like that was the way life had always been. Kelli's mom is here now, helping out while Kelli recovers. My new role in the house seems to be periods as a chauffeur, interrupted by sitting around on the sofa trying to stay awake. This is must be exactly what Michelangelo's days were like. God, I need some work!

Halloween was low key for us this year. Savannah seemed to have a little bit of a cold yesterday, so we kept her home from school. The trick then was to keep her away from her brother, which was virtually impossible since she is obsessed with him. In the vein of not risking Cooper getting sick, we just put out a bucket of treat bags for the Trick-or-Treaters. I'm always amazed that people will keep their kids out of school for a little runny nose and then send them out in the cold to go door-to-door begging for candy. Seriously, are they that hard up for some unchewable Tootsie Rolls and a wad of stuck-together candy corn from Halloween '93? By the way, Savannah went trick-or-treating as a unicorn.

By last night, Cooper had come down with Savannah's cold/sinus infection/snot-nose syndrome. He had trouble breathing all night, which meant he had trouble sleeping, which of course meant we had trouble sleeping. Today, he managed to catch some winks. We, however, have been walking around like zombies -- the slow-moving, old school, George Romero ones, not those manic "28 Days Later" goons. We've had to suction out his sinuses pretty regularly, which ticks him off.

Finally, our fridge died again. We transferred what we could to the basement fridge and then filled all the drawers in the broken one with ice, turning it into a 25 cubic foot cooler. I'm pretty sick of the whole refrigerator saga. Therefore, I'm swearing off fresh food forever. From this day forward, I will only eat canned food or junk food full of enough preservatives to mummify me alive. I'll also consider spoiled foods. What are cheese and yogurt, after all?

Savvi's Debut Album

Okay, I don't know if she has any singing ability or not, but these photos would be great for her album cover: