Simple pleasures

It amazes me what makes me blissfully happy these days. Today, my little family went for a walk in the woods and it could not have been a more perfect day. The trees were insanely colorful, the weather had just the right whiff of chill in the air, Dean found every pile of wild animal poo to sniff and then pee on, and Jack floated along on Stephen's chest contented and cooing.

There is no photograph that could capture what it felt like to walk down the pipeline and listen to Jackson laughing as Dean ran far and near with his ears flapping in the breeze and Stephen making up words and giggling to himself as he humped through the woods in his true element.




We are a woodsy family and I can't wait to get to a campsite this fall and start showing our son how soothing it can be surrounded by nature and the smell of marshmallows over a campfire. We took him to REI today and found the perfect size tent just for him for said camping trip...

Grandparents make the world go round...

Jackson loves his monkey so much, now he gets to be one, thanks to Nana and Bud.

And many many thanks to Gran for saving the day on Saturday when I had to spend an unexpected day in the hospital with a sick patient. Jackson all but learned how to walk after 10 hours with her!

We would be lost without our parents as such amazing role models, gracious gift givers, and devoted babysitters. Huggies to you all!!

My Boy Has Mad Chops

He's got the vocals, the beatbox, the percussion and two adoring fans - I think my kid's a one man band.

We're working up to the point where we can get the whole "Don't Worry, Be Happy" scheme together a la Bobby McFerrin.

Turning the corner...literally.

It happened so fast. One day he was inch-worming and the next day he pushed up on all fours and took off and he has not been stationary since. The kid loves to crawl. In fact, he loves to do anything non-baby, like stand and cruise and chew adult foods. Forget baby food, he wants spaghetti and crackers and real whole veggies. Heaven forbid I try to give him mush. He gives me one chance where he fake chews it as if to say, "No Momma, chew. I want to chew. See?" If I persist with the puree, he slobbers it all onto the highchair tray and then swirls it around with his hands just to reiterate the point.

Getting ready in the morning before work has become like trying to put a hat on a monkey hanging upside down in a snowstorm. Stephen and I are doing well if we manage to get clothes on that match. Oh it'd be super easy if we let him have the electrical cords or the laptop or let him crawl into the bathtub unassisted. But alas, we do care about the little man's safety and so we corral and redirect and entertain with Stephen's old cell phone or my sunglasses or, when it really gets difficult to entertain him, my new leopard print slippers that now have drool stains on them.

Despite how different our lives have become in one short week, there's just not anything more heartwarming than watching Jackson crawl around to find me and smile up with the biggest "I found you, Momma!" grin when he does.



Welcome to mobility, my little one. May you always be able to find everything you want just right around the corner.

Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player

This picture was taken right before Jack burst into the chorus from "Bennie and the Jets"

Tough Loss

Well, Jack's first Carolina Football game peaked early in the first quarter when the score was still tied at aught-aught. It was all downhill from there - Forget "Go to hell State," I say "Damn those Wahoos."

Freedom of Speech

I am all about some free speech. And as much as folks might dislike the act, I think the Supreme Court is probably correct that one's ability to burn the American Flag in greivous protest of the government is fundamentally protected speech under the First Amendment.

But I have to say that if that is the case, the freedom of others to comment on such acts should also be protected. And so, if like this young man you choose to burn a flag IN FRONT OF AND BELONGING TO A VFW POST, you deserve the consequences of exercising your right to free speech. Even if one of the consequences is the time-honored punishment of pillory. Hey, at least the kid had three options:

The young man was given three choices: get turned over to the police, go one-on-one in a fight with a seasoned war veteran, or be duct-taped to a flagpole for six hours with a sign around his neck identifying his alleged crime: flag burning.

It was the third option that would still have the small town buzzing a week after a 21-year-old was hunted down and forced to endure a public humiliation with its roots dating to the Middle Ages. Members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1938 were incensed enough to tie up the man last Sunday after they accused him of setting the flag in front of their building on fire

Bravo and Semper Fi, You Old Magnificient VFW Bastards! Full story here.

Google-licious

I know it smacks of rapidly trending toward a Big Brother uber-control of all knowledge, but I am an unabashed admirer of and subscriber to a variety of Google-powered technologies. I use Google Voice, Calendar, Blogger, YouTube, and Gmail, among other things. One of their programs that drives most of the new (at least photographic) content on this blog is the freeware picture organizing and editing tool called Picasa. Picasa is a light-weight photo editor but really shines when it comes to displaying and organizing and sharing your photo archive. I even use Picasa Web Albums to share the myriad other photos that don't make the blog cut.

Picasa has just rolled out v3.5 which incorporates an amazing new facial recognition feature. This really is phenomenal - the program will now scan your already well-organized and tagged and geolocated photo collection, pick out faces from the crowd, and help you identify and tag those folks using your Google contacts list. Incredible. So now when you are looking for pictures of, say, Dad - they are just a click away, regardless of what folder or album they are in. Sweet.

Holy Ass-Bomber, Batman!

In what the security consultant firm Stratfor Global Alliance has called a 'tactical shift', an ass-bomber nearly succeeded in an attempted assassination of Saudi prince and CT czar Prince Mohammed bin Nayef last month. The would-be "ass"assin, Abdullah Hassan Taleh al-Asiri, was a known member of AQAP and gained access to the prince by repenting and recanting his allegiance to the Al-Quaeda terrorist branch. After secreting explosives in his own anal cavity for over two days, his wireless command detonation of the bomb only resulted in his own (as you could probably expect) graphic death and the incredulous surprise of the Saudi royal family security team.

The third tactical shift is perhaps the most interesting, and that is the use of an IED hidden in the anal cavity of the bomber. Suicide bombers have long been creative when it comes to hiding their devices. In addition to the above-mentioned IED in the camera gear used in the Masood assassination, female suicide bombers with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have hidden IEDs inside brassieres, and female suicide bombers with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party have worn IEDs designed to make them look pregnant. However, this is the first instance we are aware of where a suicide bomber has hidden an IED inside a body cavity.

It is fairly common practice around the world for people to smuggle contraband such as drugs inside their body cavities. This is done not only to get items across international borders but also to get contraband into prisons. It is not unusual for people to smuggle narcotics and even cell phones into prisons inside their body cavities (the prison slang for this practice is “keistering”). It is also not at all uncommon for inmates to keister weapons such as knives or improvised stabbing devices known as “shanks.” Such keistered items can be very difficult to detect using standard search methods, especially if they do not contain much metal.

Wow. I knew LTTE sank to new lows using women and children as suicide bombers, "butt" this is pretty imaginative.

Three Years

Three years seems like such a long time, but while some hours are longer than others, the days fly by into weeks and months like the whitecaps rolling in off the ocean, and soon where you started is but a speck on the horizon. And yet, every morning that horizon serves its intended purpose, welcoming the sunrise and parting sea from sky as it will all the days to come.

Three years ago today we wed. And so much fun we've had since then, degrees and homes and jobs and dogs and Jack and twice as much family as ever before and all this is still just a drop in the bucket of happiness that awaits the decades to come. At twenty years, will we remember what three felt like? Maybe, maybe not. But I guarantee I'll remember h-hour, d-day. Who could forget that smile?

Three years ago, we passed a little poem out among our friends and family. Legend has it that Robert Frost penned this gem, The Master Speed, for his daughter's wedding.1 And yes, we shamelessly stole it for our own wedding programs' epigraph. And I'll steal it again, year after year. Because, and this will always be the truth: we may not be as fast as we once were, in days of yore / but we are still together, wing to wing and oar to oar.

The Master Speed by Robert Frost

No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still—
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.

I love you, Kim. Happy Anniversary.

1. "The Master Speed," an epithalamium celebrating the marriage of Frost's daughter Irma to John Cone in 1926, was first published in the Yale Review in 1936 and appeared in A Further Range later that same year. See Nancy Tuten and John Zubizarreta, The Robert Frost Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 2000). An interesting explication of this poem can be found here.

One Giant Step for a Small Man

Jack has some serious ants in his pants about starting to walk. I think he has figured it out in his mind and knows what to do, he just can't control his legs because his Jedi force is still weak. But anytime he gets the chance, he pulls up on whatever he can grab and does the little two-step shuffle. He has resigned to a little inchworm-type crawl when he has to get something (like a cell phone) that lies just outside his reach. But I think as soon as he gets his sea legs, he's going to take off running.

Whoops..

when Dad wasn't paying attention, I had my way with a dog chew toy. Its actually not that much different from my toys, but a little saltier..

Smith Mountain Lake

What a wonderful trip we had this weekend with my coworkers at the annual Moses Cone Family Medicine Residency Retreat. There were so many more babies this year than ever before and Jackson had a great time playing with other small people. His only complaint was the humidity. It made his hair frizzy....

Gut check

Everybody needs a gut check once in awhile. I have them periodically. I'll narrowly miss running off the road because of some giant pothole I saw at the last minute, barely escape having my noggin cooked by an insanely close bolt of lightning, or come home to my neighborhood filled with sirens and flashing lights only to realize it's the house next door. It's just good practice to have those kind of days once in awhile and it only reiterates my assertion that there is someone looking out for us. As long as we pay close enough attention, they can show us the path to the happiest existence possible, even if it is only by comparison.


Since my last "be thankful, dammit" moment when the lightning almost took me out about a month ago, my level of anxiety has started to rise again. The job hunt has begun and I hear this tiny tick-tock, only the "tock" is going up in tone as if being pinched by a question mark. I am feeling the pressure of uncertainty again and I do not like it. It's to the point where, after a particularly anxiety-provoking meeting today and then news on the economic legal climate in Greensboro when I got home, well...I was starting to regress into my 2 year old temper tantrum-throwing self.


Fortunately, though, I happened to be paying attention today. My best friend is a photographer and just helped put together an exhibit of cancer patients for the new Cancer Center at UNC. http://www.tamaralackeyblog.com. And as I flipped through the amazing pictures, I started to reflect on the other parts of my day. The 19 year old that broke down in tears when her world suddenly changed with the positive pregnancy test I had to tell her about. Or the 64 year old Vietnam vet that sat speechless in my office when I told him he has diabetes. Or the 46 year old smoker who is living in a house with her husband, his ex-wife, and 9 other half-related pot-smoking relatives who saw me today after her heart attack to talk about how, no matter how hard she tries, she will never be able to stop smoking because none of the other 11 people in her house want to quit either. Oh, and, she doesn't have insurance to pay the hospital bills or subsequent care she'll need following her heart attack. Then there was the very sweet but morbidly obese 3 year old accompanied by his morbidly obese 17 year old mother who kept saying "You better talk to the doctor or she's gonna stick you" despite my best efforts to assure the fear-stricken child that no matter what he did, I would most certainly not punish him with a needle.


My husband is tall, dark, handsome, healthy, successful, and madly in love with me. My son is adorable, developing normally, and loves to sit on my hip and chew on my shirt while I wander around the house(even if he currently uses "ma ma" to voice his displeasure). I have a home and a job and a family that I love and that loves me. I do not have cancer, or 11 smokey roommates, or a morbidly obese teenage mother that threatens me daily with physical harm. All in all, my life is pretty darn amazing and that was just the reminder I needed to eat my giant slice of yellow cake without frosting while watching my glutinous tv shows in peace.

Labor of Love

It's official. The Pokeberry and Milkweed National Forest is gone. We destroyed it in a matter of a few hours. See, for my mothers birthday, I figured what better gift than a few hours of our time to help her with various odds and ends around the house. This was a terrible miscalculation on my part.

We showed up Saturday morning to find her with a two-page list in hand. It read something like this.

1) Wash conversion van inside and out. The pinestraw is making it hard to drive.
2) Weed the yard. All of it.
3) Hang all three 100+ pound mirrors to an approximate height of 10 feet.
4) Carry the remnants of a giant armoire to the street for pick up.
5) Solve world hunger.
6) Fix health care.

Five and six were a cinch in comparison.

I wish we took before and after pictures, but alas...you probably couldn't see the forest for the trees. Pokeberries, that is.