You may recall from my last post, I quickly mentioned this:

“So despite sleeping horribly last night, interrupted by a vomiting toddler…”

Now, many of you may have read this as the whining of a jaded, careless parent. But no, you’re wrong. That right there is what is called a narrative device. More specifically foreshadowing.

Any amateur writer can come up with a story and use foreshadowing to create intrigue about a plot point he devised earlier. But imagine the sheer creativity, neigh, genius it requires to foreshadow an unknown future event. Some may call it luck, some coincidence. Those people can leave, cause I call it tonybullard.com.

(You can tell how serious I am by all these italics. ITALICS!)

So on to the point. Yesternight (the proper term for “the night before last night”) Noah threw up. I was sure he did it because he got to worked up crying and screaming, coughed to feign sickness, and gagged himself. Yes, he’s just that scheming. So I blew it off. You know, ’cause I’m fricking parent of the year.

JUMP CUT TO: Tonight. Noah refuses to take his vitamins. He usually chows down on these things like it’s the end of the world and we’ve given him anti-zombie tablets. In my effort to coerce him, I eat one. It’s a kids vitamin, I doubt it will kill me. This tactic doesn’t work. We basically force him to eat the thing. Thumbs were pressed into mouths.

Within 3 minutes I feel what can only be described as “gross.” This is fairly low on the scale of “Fine” to “Chest Burster.” None the less, it’s no fun. I say to Teresa, “no wonder he doesn’t like them, I feel kinda gross.” (See that folks? that’s called “consistency.” It’s also known as “doesn’t own a thesaurus.” ITALICS!)

OK, so prayers, lights out, I sit at the computer while Teresa settles him into bed. I here “Tony?” faintly from Noah’s room. I poke my head in.

“How gross did you say that thing made you feel?”

Then, as if carefully planned, I hear the indistinguishable sound of vomiting.

“Geez! Not that bad!” is the first thing that pops out of my mouth. Lights come on, Noah has covered his bed in his dinner, and Teresa runs from the room claiming she’s going to join him in his “Ode to Leftovers.” Cleaning, Changing, blah blah blah.

So there you have it folks. We, Teresa and I (if I go down we all go down!) force fed our child a vitamin that made him vomit. If we can do this, brag about it on the internet, and not get arrested, then anyone can have a child.

Here’s lookin’ at you future parents!

Filed under: family by tonybullard
5 Comments »

So this morning I began my second try at a year end total of 1500 cycled miles. You may recall that my 2009 attempt ended abruptly, just 75 miles short of the goal. Well, now I’m 10 days into the new year, and only 45.21 miles behind schedule. What a way to start. 4.23 miles a day doesn’t sound like much when my commute is about 7 miles one way if I take the short route. But when you factor in things like this morning’s 19 degree weather, it suddenly becomes a little more daunting.

With the loss of last year’s goal looming over me, I knew I couldn’t avoid biking in cold weather much longer. Having a month with no miles covered makes the other 11 that much harder. I squashed my biggest hurdle by buying some nice warm gloves. I had bought some cheap ones last year, and lost one of them over the summer, so it was easy to make up excuses to not ride. I do need all my fingers for work. So despite sleeping horribly last night, interrupted by a vomiting toddler (and that line right there cements the topic of all the comments for this post), I managed to get up this morning, dress up like Randy from A Christmas Story and make my way to work.

Over the weekend we had a little bit of snow. Just enough to create nice slabs of ice on everything, and no weather warm enough to melt much of it away. I was a little afraid of sliding around this morning, so I took the route that puts me on the Greenway for all but 1.5 miles. That way if I’m sliding around, at least it’s no where near any 2 ton steel death boxes.

While the weekend rush of cars had managed to clean of most of the roads, the Greenway was still patched with snice – the product of light snow fall freezing into crumbly ice patches over days without any replenishing snow. I wanted to take some pictures, but that would have required me to free my hand from my new toasty gloves. Again, I need those.

The commute itself was rather uneventful. I think I enjoy riding the Greenway right now as I’ve learned to slow down and not race to and from work every day. Next time I feel the hankering for speed I’ll get back on the roads and pass the long lines of cars that stack up in the mornings. That’s always fun.

So, no real moral lesson of wisdom to impart. Just documenting my first sub-twenty-degree commute. Sprry if I made you super jealous.

Filed under: cycling by tonybullard
1 Comment »

Filed under: rambling, video by tonybullard
2 Comments »

Found this sculpture at a small art gallery while I was waiting for a friend to meet me somewhere. It even came with makeshift drum sticks!

Filed under: rambling by tonybullard
No Comments »

Another year has come and gone.

Forgive me if I don’t have a cheerful holiday tone in this post. I’ve not been motivated enough to post in a long while, and I’m essentially forcing myself to write this one. So to those who yelled at me about posting again…happy holidays. Here’s your gift.

About a month ago I was given the treat of being able to sleep in. This is a very rare occasion, as Teresa would probably starve herself to death if she knew she could get a few weeks uninterrupted sleep. The only mornings she gets up before me is when she works, and Noah tends to wake up from her moving about the house, so even my weekends start pretty early. I rolled around in bed waking every so often, trying to ignore the growing worry. Something was amiss. Teresa NEVER gets up before me if she doesn’t have to…

And boy was there a catch. I walked into the bathroom, to find this:

There’s always a catch.

So there you go, for those who don’t already know, we’ve got another one in the hopper. August 5th due date. Birthday will be right after mine. Hope he/she doesn’t get too jealous when we blow all the party money on my birthday each year. Them’s the breaks.

So Christmas happened. I wanted to say that this year went off without anyone vomiting through the night like last year, but Tree is pregnant, which means there’s plenty of it happening.

Noah got more presents than God. Our den looked like a wrapping paper monster committed seppuku. He literally ran from present to present, trying to figure out how to devour as much fun as possible before it somehow slipped away. He was like someone at a radio station event in one of those cash snow globe things. And this was before the in-laws came into town. Two days after I cleaned the house, finding wrapping paper bits like sand in your body after going to the beach, it all happened again. It took Noah about 40 minutes to lose his favorite toys. We spent hours looking for them. Since Christmas day I’ve spent most of my days searching for some toy Noah can’t find. It’s maddening.

Seeing the Korte’s was nice. I didn’t get to see them much because of work, but I know Teresa appreciated having someone else around to take care of Noah while she was sick, and I’m sure they loved hearing her complain about being hungry, but unable to eat anything. Their visits are always good and bad. Good, because they leave behind things like half eaten Hershey’s Chocolate Cream Pie. Extra good cause with tree being so sick, it’s all mine. But bad because, despite their host’s many objections, they continue to use the ice crusher in our fridge door, which leaves crushed ice for 3 days following their visit. So every time I get something to drink I’m attacked my ricocheting ice pellets that end up on my floor, later to be soaked up by my socked feet. But you know…then there’s pie.

So New Year’s came and went. Tree and I celebrated the clock turning by sleeping/sitting at the computer. You can guess which one of us did which.

I managed to miss my 1500 mile cycling goal by just 74.42 miles. I tried hard to finish it, even learned that i could do 20 miles in just over an hour (which surprised the crap out of me) but the last 3 days of the year were bitterly cold, and I simply don’t own the right clothing to go biking in 20 degree weather. So I’ll reset the 1500 mile goal for 2010. February last year I barely road at all, so I’m sure if I just try to avoid lulling months I can overcome it pretty quickly. That, and now that I’ve discovered riding 14 miles straight to the train station in the mornings, skipping the bus, is quite refreshing, I’ll probably do that more often, which will certainly up my daily mileage.

(This is why skipping the bus is worth the extra 8.5 miles)

Oh,there’s also this:

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

I was playing a game on my phone that Noah likes to watch called “Abduction” where you make a cow jump from platform to platform by tilting your phone. As I was playing Noah just started counting out of the blue. We didn’t prompt him to at all. he got all the way up to 13 before starting back at 1 again. As always, once we tried to video tape it, his performance tanks, and he insists nothing in the world is more important than cars.

Filed under: cycling, photography, rambling, video by tonybullard
3 Comments »