December 2003 Entries
Saturday, 12-6-2003: My brother and I took the kids to the City Museum in Saint Louis for the day. This is a place I visit with the kids probably 3 or 4 times a year. The City Museum is an old shoe factory in downtown Saint Louis which has been converted into a gigantic funhouse for all ages. Even if I didn’t have kids, I would still visit this place. It’s hard to describe but it’s an incredibly cool place. You can spend an entire day there and you still won’t be able to experience the entire place. I probably have a hundred photos of my kids and their friends in various parts of the City Museum. Here’s a few from today.
Wednesday, 12-10-2003: Life is like a mop. Sometimes life gets full of dirt and crud and hairballs and things and you gotta clean it out. You gotta stick it in here and rinse it off and start all over again. And sometimes life sticks to the floor so much that a mop, a mop, it’s not good enough. You gotta get down there with like a toothbrush, you know, and you gotta really scrub ’cause you gotta get it off! But if that doesn’t work, you can’t give up! You gotta stand right up! You gotta run to a window and say, “These floors are dirty as hell, and I’m not gonna take it any more!” -Stanley Spadowski in UHF
Saturday, 12-13-2003: No kids today. I spent pretty much the entire day sitting in front of my computer. I also went through a bunch of my old papers, threw stuff away and scanned some stuff into the computer. I worked on updating and creating websites all day. Tried to make some more pages W3 compatible.
Sunday, 12-14-2003: Picked up the kids from Colleen’s at 8am. When I got back they played in the snow for awhile while I took all of our bikes and toys to the basement. Tricia decided to let me watch Jordyn while she worked for a couple hours today. When she got back, we all went to her family Christmas party in Gillespe. Got home from that around 5pm or so.
Monday, 12-15-2003: I let Emily take my digital camera to school today for show-and-tell. Apparently all kinds of wacky picture-taking ensued throughout the day. Here’s one of my favorites…
Monday, 12-15-2003: Took back the video games I rented last week. Stopped by the lawyers office to pick up some papers that I accidentally let him keep. Just kind of hung around the house and played with the kids all evening.
Friday, 12-19-2003: Emily was sick today so Colleen didn’t take either of them to school. She brought them over for me to watch at 10:30am. Since Emily missed her Christmas party, I let them open one present to play with while I worked – the Simpson’s game for Playstation. They played that for most of the day while I worked. At 7:30 we went to Richard and Shirley’s party. I was bored so me and Payton left within about 20 minutes. Emily and Casey came over later.
Saturday, 12-20-2003: Woke up at 9:00 when Payton came up. Emily slept in until 10:00 when I finally woke her up. At 1pm I took the kids (Emily, Payton, Casey and Ryan) to a Christmas party at the Keasler Complex. It was from 1 to 3 so I just killed time while they were there – I went to Ace Hardware to get some electrical stuff and then to Kmart to buy Jordyn a Christmas present. Came back home after that. I finished installing a ceiling light in Tricia’s apartment so it actually works now. Tricia watched the kids for a few minutes while I returned our videos from Wednesday. I picked up Dumb & Dumberer while I was there and we all watched that.
Tuesday, 12-23-2003: Today I was on the phone with Sprint PCS customer service, SEing some info on an account. I identified myself as Charles from the collections department. While she was waiting for her computer to pull up an account for me, she says, “Hey Charles, do you have a direct number to the collections department. We used to transfer to 800-xxx-xxxx (she gave me a number) but it hasn’t been working since last summer so we have to use the regular line to get through.”
Just so I didn’t screw up my SEing attempt, I said, “Yeah, they changed that and I have the number here.” and I prepared to rattle off some random digits. But then I quickly looked on my own Sprint PCS phone in the text messaging. It said “PLEASE CALL 800-427-3632.” This is 1-800-HARD-MEAT (a gay chatline) and I’m assuming Murd0c paged me with that the other night. I decide to give the Sprint lady that and I do.
But this is where it gets good. She’s very grateful for this and says, “You don’t know how much this is going to help us out here! I’m going to send an email to everyone in the department here with this new number right now!” So apparently when customers are talking to Sprint PCS at that call center and they need to be transferred to collections, they’re going to be sent to 800-HARD-MEAT! I rock!
Wednesday, 12-24-2003: It’s 10:15pm and my kids are asleep. I’ve just put out all their Christmas stuff for in the morning. This year they’re getting Crash Nitrokart for Xbox, Simpsons Road Rage for PS2, a big cheap cardboard clubhouse that can be colored, a plastic sled for each of them, lots of Play Dough, a Power Rangers lego set for Payton, a Hillary Duff poster for Emily’s room and a Simpson’s poster for Payton’s room. They also got some junk in their stockings, such as silly putty, Pokeman videos, an Arron Carter CD for Emily, some kids songs CD for Payton and a few packs of Pokemon cards for each of them. Now I just have to hope that they sleep in until at least 7am so I don’t have to get up too early in the morning. Here’s some pictures…
