For my own edification (apparently)

I'll admit that unless I wanted to provide the world with a play-by-play of my child's daycare experiences, my own lack of going to the gym due to an aggravated back injury, or a continuous storyline about how boring my job is, I really don't have that much to tell people about. So, my daily life would fall under the "pasttimes" portion of my blog title.

On the other hand, there's the "postulates" part. A Postulate, if you skipped 10th grade math (in the Mobile, AL public school system, Geometry was a 10th grade subject) is basically an assertion--a starting point for other ideas if you will. And it is the postulate side of things that I personally feel makes for a better read. Some of my best mental meandering comes from an idea about something else. The mind starts thinking about one thing and before you know it, you're six degrees of separation away from the original thought, onto something completely different, yet strangely connected.

As I was perusing my usual cadre of Web sites this morning (AKA: wasting time), I came across an article on MSN where the author discussed which was better: boxers or briefs for men. It wasn't so much the article that piqued my interest as much as it was my response to it. The author completely ignored Boxer Briefs, which combines the best of both boxer and brief worlds. And it is these very undergarments that I prefer 2:1 over the other leading national brand. In response, I left note in the forum regarding boxer briefs, and I also left my personal brand preference, Calvin Klein; noting however, that they are very expensive, but oh so worth it!

Hence...a Postulate.

It's no secret that my wife and I do well financially. We have a nice house, our children attend a good daycare. We don't live extravagantly, but we also don't want for much either. We drive moderately nice cars (I drive a 3 year old Dodge Dakota and my wife drives a 6 year old Hyundai Santa Fe with 100K miles). But, having money through a dual-income family comes with a price of course...which I won't go into.

But this whole underwear thing got me to thinking about money--having money specifically, and what the benefits are. And I came up with a thought that I feel was slightly profound.

Having enough money to live comfortably allows you to enjoy some of life's little luxuries and it is often these "little" luxuries that make the biggest difference.

Case in point: Calvin Klein boxer brief underwear. Now, I've tried a lot of different types:

• Target stores brand Merona


• Fruit of the Loom


• Kohl's store brand Sonoma


• Jockey (yes, the have them for men too)


• Tommy Hilfiger (found at Macy's)


• Calvin Klein

So, for those out there who think I'm just a brand freak and only buy expensive clothes because I can, you can see that's not the case. It's just that the Calvin Klein brand trumps them all with the perfect combination of cloth material and weight, snugness, durability, length and stylish good looks and I can thankfully afford to indulge in a personal preference department rivaled only perhaps by a woman's choice of hair dryer.

I hope that having an underwear preference (fetish even?...nah!) doesn't mean that I now fall under a "metrosexual" label or anything, because I still wear pleated pants; however, I do know how to decorate and coordinate colors. Hmmm.

Whatever! That's my Postulate for the day and perhaps TMI to boot. But the truth is, nobody reads this anyway, so mostly this was for my own edification and oh look, it's now time for me to leave for my Dr.'s appointment where I get to strip down to my shirt, dress socks and an XXL pair of paper boxer shorts so I can traipse down the hall of my orthopedic surgeons office only to stand in front of an x-ray machine operated by some 20-something year old hottie who probably thinks, "He's cute, but my Lord he's decrepit!" Yaaah!

There goes Santa Claus, there goes Santa Claus...

I took last Friday off to stay at home and pull old yucky wallpaper off as many rooms as I could get done in one day. I managed to remove the wallpaper in our main master bathroom common area and one of the sink/commode areas in the boys' jack-n-jill bathroom setup. I also got a skimcoat on both to fix those massive gouges I put with my scraper and to replace any sheetrock paper that came off with the wallpaper.

An interesting note: where the steam from years and years of showering has reached the wallpaper, the wallpaper is much more resistant to removal efforts. It took me nearly as long to do the boys' bathroom tiny area as it did to do the master bathroom area which is 5 times as large. Darn steam!

Anyway, now instead of mind-numbingly unnatractive wallpaper in our bathroom area, we have mind-numbingly stark white walls with no paint on them. And the real question is, how long is it going to take me to finish it all?
Which brings me to my blog topic for today. We're not talking about just schlepping some paint up on the wall and calling it a day. Nossir! We're talking about a full-scale, all-out assault on redecorating, which means:

• new light fixtures (2)
• new fan
• new towel rack (beause OMG what was she thinking buying that crappy silver towel rack at Target that shows the four honking screws in the front and doesn't match our gold fixtures? I swear sometimes that I should have been a homosexual since I have much better decorating taste (and sense) compared to many of the women I know)
• new paint for wall
• new trim paint
  and of course...
• new linens and such

All this adds up to mucho $$$ and even more time that I don't generally have. And with fall coming up (anyday now...hello?) I'll want to be outside, not cooped up inside.

But what's really bringing me down is my wife's idea to pay for all this; "Seriously honey, this can be my Christmas present; I don't really need anything." And before I knew what I was saying, I responded with, "Mine too!"

Wait! What? Did I just say that out loud? What the F*? No, I don't want my Christmas to consist of pretty red towels and hours upon hours of electrical work trying to figure out an outdated wiring code. I want clothes and...stuff!

So I'm kinda bummed about that. I mean, we did set ourselves a small gift limit to spend on each other so we will still be getting each other something, but still... What this at least does is free up money in my Christmas savings account to put directly towards the project. Hey, now we can afford the fan! Only 10 more things on the list to go!

Childhood Innocence

Thanks to the heat, we here in the South have been forced indoors in the afternoons. It's too hot to ride bikes; it's too hot to play ball; heck, it's even too hot to go swimming in the pool! What's a family of four to do?

Luckily, there are still some games around geared towards the young-ones. Interestingly, they are the same games we adults loved as a child--Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Hi-Ho! Cherry-O. All classics and all pretty much the only games on the market for the "under 5" crowd.

Obviously we don't still have our childhood boardgames lying around so we went off to our friendly neighborhood Target and purchased a few games to while away those long hot summer afternoon. As it turns out, Candyland has become my three year olds favorite game; so much so in fact that while the board itself is still in fine shape, the flimsy cards have become so over-handled that I can't even put a proper poker shuffle on them anymore.

The funny thing about this game though, is how it's evolved over the years. Take note:

Notice how in the old version of candyland, the two kids are whitebread, blond crackers and in the new, politically correct version, we have a cross-sample representation of ethnicities and genders.

Why am I not surprised?

But anyway, my son loves this game, but more importantly, he loves to WIN! We've been very careful to explain to him that the game is random and anyone can win at any time, to which he responds, "But you can't win everyday." The truth is however, that by hook or by crook, he seems to win more than anyone, but it's never enough. Should you get up from the game to go stir the pot of soup, or to put fallen baby back up in a sitting position, he will sneakily look through the stack of cards for either the "lollipop" or "ice cream" cards, which move one near the end of the game and close to winning. Another of his tactics is to skip a color. So, if he pulls a card with one red square, he'll move two; if the card says two red squares, he'll move three. He's very sneaky.

We've tried to explain to him that this is cheating and I'm particularly careful to ensure that he follows the rules, but I will admit to "fixing" it on the rare occasion where we adults have consistently won a game or two just so he gets the satisfaction of winning. And of course he loves it. But he's coming around to losing with grace. Generally it involves him saying, "Ok, let's play again and I guess I'm gonna win."

Now if we can only teach him how to be a graceful winner, rather than cackling like a crow who just found a new shiny object, we'll be in business.