Apparently, you can't knock on your daughter's window without scaring the living crap out of her...

Thursday night, I had just said good night to Julia and turned off the light. I decided that I would walk to the corner and get our mail from the community mail box tower thing there.

I grabbed the mail key, unlocked the deadbolt of the front door, opened the door and pulled the door knob. As I was pulling the door shut, I noticed that the knob wasn't turning, which meant that while the dead bolt was locked, the knob was locked, but not latched. In my haste to shut the door behind me, I didn't have time to register that the knob wasn't unlocked.

So locked outside, I thought I could either get the mail and then try to get back inside or just start knocking now since I had literally had left just a minute earlier. Surely Julia would let me in

I started knocking. First I knocked lightly. Then I knocked persistently.

No action inside.

I started knocking again. This time, I tried to vary my knocks so it sounded like a code.

Knock! (long knock) Knock-Knock! (two short knocks)

I tried this for a bit. Still no action inside letting me in.

I walked over to Julia's window through the shrubbery and knocked. I tried knocking a few times. Then I walked over to the front door and knocked some more. Still no action inside!

Finally, I started to ring the doorbell.

Nothing...

I rang the doorbell yet again several times.

At last, I saw Laura appear in the doorway of the master bedroom. Finally! She'll let me in.

"Bob!" she yelled. "Answer the door!"

I rang the doorbell again more persistently.

"Bob!" she yelled again while walking forward. At this point, I tried waving my arms.

"Bob! Answer the door!" she kept yelling.

This was getting ridiculous. Surely someone inside would realize that the only person who would be knocking and ringing so persistently when it was this late in the evening would have to be the world's worse burglar or a family member who had locked himself outside. It seems they were thinking it was the burglar.

Finally, Laura walked over to the front door and answered it.

"What in the hell are you doing?!"

"I was locked outside," I said.

I looked over to the staircase to downstairs and noticed Julia creeping up the stairs looking nervous.

"Are you insane knocking on her bedroom window?" Laura asked with some force. "You scared her half to death! She ran to our room yelling, 'Someone's knocking on my window!'"

"I thought she would know that it's me since I just went outside."

"Well, you thought wrong!"

"How else was I supposed to get back inside?" I asked.

"I don't know," Laura said. "Maybe you should have thought of that before you locked yourself outside."

"If I had thought about it," I said. "I wouldn't have locked myself outside."

I tried explaining how I locked myself outside, but she cut me off.

"I don't want to hear it. Your daughter is scared half to death. It's your fault so you put her to bed."

Julia chimed in with, "You really freaked me out, man!" sounding like Tommy Chong.

I put Julia back in bed. I apologized for scaring her and told her it wouldn't happen again. If I was to lock myself outside again we devised a few strategies.

1. Knock on Laura's window.
2. Ring the doorbell
3. Use a secret knock. I tapped out a knock that would be my knock.

If I ever lock myself outside again and I use the secret knock, I just have to hope that Julia still remembers what my knock was.

The next day, Laura took joy in telling people at work what an idiot her husband was for not only locking himself out of the house, but scaring our daughter by knocking on her window. I'll admit it. It was pretty stupid, but as I protested. Even when someone stupidly locks themselves out of the house, there has to be a way of getting back inside.

Audiobook: Breathers: A Zombie's Lament by S. G. Brown

I just got done with this audiobook called 'Breathers: A Zombie's Lament' by S. G. Brown.

It's my first attempt at zombie fiction and it was pretty good for the most part. The story centers around a zombie named Andy, who woke up after a horrific car accident killed him and his wife to find that he's now one of the members of the the undead. In S. G. Brown's version of zombies, the undead are shunned members of society while the living, referred to as breathers, retain all rights as citizens.

Andy lives in his parents wine cellar doing nothing all day but watching cable TV and drinking expensive wine that gives him no pleasure. He spends his nights at the local zombie support group run by a recently deceased therapist. Andy can't talk because his mouth was sewn shut. One arm is near useless. Also, his ankle is broken so he's slow moving.

Getting to and from the meetings is dangerous as breathers take sport in pelting zombies with food, ripping off zombie appendages or just killing them for sport. His zombie friends of Jerry, a 'dude' speaking guy and Rita, a beautiful woman who's constantly applying makeup walk with him to and from the meetings.

I almost gave up on this book because it got long winded. Andy is constantly whining about how he doesn't understand why he can't just walk down the street without being yelled at or vandalized or why he can't sit in front of a fire without fear of being thrown into it.

The book picks up steam when Andy and his friends meet Ray, a zombie who they initially mistake for a breather. He introduces them to a treat of venison he calls 'Ray's Resplendent Rapture'. The meat is beyond delicious. Soon Andy starts to feel rebellious and is arrested by Animal Control, who polices the zombies, for trying to protest for zombie rights. Then he notices that he's starting to heal. Andy and his friends start to realize that Ray's meat may not be venison after all.

The book goes unconventional for a long time, but then kicks into zombie movie territory near the end of the book, which almost ruins it for me.

Overall, I liked it. The narrator's lamentable delivery (call back to the subtitle) means that when the jokes come every now and then (like the one where Andy is offered a finger and he says that he never liked finger food), that I was groaning a lot at the corny jokes.

Saw Toy Story 3 - Laura cried

Laura sometimes has some trouble with Pixar movies. For the longest time, she wouldn't watch Toy Story 2 because of the scene were Jessie the Cowgirl is telling her story of being loved and abandoned by a little girl who grew up.

As a parent, it's hard to sit through those kind of things and not think about the inevitable day when your kid will grow up and shun the very things that they used to love. It's sometimes welcome and sometimes sad.

When Julia was just two or three years old, we watched Monsters Inc. on DVD. At some point in the movie near the end, which may have been the time when Sully says goodbye
to Boo, the girl from the human world, I looked over at Laura to see her bawling like a baby.

I laughed and asked, "What's wrong?"

She said through tears, "This is why I hate Pixar movies. They just SUCK you right in and make you cry!"

Laura eventually got over those two movies's sadder moments and now can watch them with no problem.

However, Laura knew Toy Story 3 was going to be a problem when a co-worker who had seen it mentioned to Laura that it was a great movie and that it was sad.

"Am I going to cry?" she asked.

"Yes."

So Laura was going into the movie expecting it to be sad and expecting to cry.

The movie starts off the bat with a downer of a premise. The toys are in the toy box and have been there for years it seems. They are all that's left of all of Andy's toys throughout the years. They even mention losing some toys, like Bo Peep, who was voiced by Annie Potts in the first two movies, to yard sales. Funny!

Then it's discussed that Andy is going away to college. His Mom is giving away his room to his little sister, so he has to decide what to do with his stuff: take to college, put in storage or trash. He puts Woody in the college stuff and puts the toys in with the attic stuff, but when the toys accidentally get put on the curb with the trash, Woody acts to save them. In the confusion, they end up in the daycare donation stuff.

When they get to the daycare, it looks like all their troubles are solved. They are told by Lotso, the purple bear that leads the daycare, that they'll have a never ending stream of toys to play with, but then things quickly turn for the worse when they are locked in the wing for toddlers, who are much rougher on the toys in the bigger kids room. The toys then have to break out of the day care, which is run like a prison at night.

Eventually, it all culminates with Andy having to say goodbye to his toys as he's leaving for college.

I looked over at Laura while this was happening and she was wiping her eyes. She knew I was going to be looking over at her and she laughed while crying and muttered, "Stupid Pixar."

All in all, it was a pretty good Toy Story movie. I wouldn't call it my favorite. It was pretty funny, but the scenes near the end were rather bleak. Maybe repeated viewings will spruce it up. It still ranks up there with the other ones though. It has a lot of great performances from Lotso to Ken, who spends a lot of time insisting that he's not a girl's toy while trying on tons of outfits.

How Bill and I sound to others while on the phone to each other...

"Yo!" Bill said to me as he answered the phone the other day. He was with some people who were kind of listening to the one-sided conversation on his end. When he got off the phone, he was asked who he was on the phone with.

"My brother," Bill said.

"Yeah, I figured," one of them said. "I can always tell when he calls because you talk to him like an asshole."

I had to laugh at that because we've often been accused of doing nothing but arguing when we're together. It sounds like we're having a row, but that's just the way we communicate sometimes. We once rode in a car to Chicago with my wife, Laura to try out for a trivia show on VH1. We were all on the same team. After the trip, Laura stated emphatically that in no way would she ever ride with us on a trip again. It was all she could do to drown our arguing out.

That same week as my call to Bill in which he was considered rude by those listening in, Bill had called me from where he was on a business trip after he had gotten in for the night. I had just watched one of our favorite shows the night before, and we were discussing it. This usually involves a lot of "Remember the part when?" with one of us describing the joke and us laughing at it.

Laura calls is "reminiscing" about a show. I've tried to do this with her, but she doesn't have the whole twin link, so it usually bombs.

As I'm talking, I hear from the bedroom from Laura, "Why is she still up?"

I told Bill to hold on and walked over to the bedroom.

I told Laura that Julia was in bed and that I was talking to Bill on the phone.

She laughed and said, "Ohhhh! I thought you were talking to Julia because it sounded like you were talking to a child."

Is it free? Are you sure?

Trying a new strategy. Shorter blurbs of my life.

Today, we had a free lunch for those of us who worked on a new project. At first, I wasn't going to go to this lunch because I didn't realize that it wasn't just a lunch where you had to bring your own, but a free lunch, which I almost never turn down. You got to save money where you can these days...

So me and some other guys near me decide to go down to the free lunch. We stop at a co-worker's desk I'll call Ted.

"Are you going to go down to the lunch?" I asked.

"Umm... I don't know," he said skeptically. Ted isn't exactly keen on getting dragged to things he'll have to sit through.

"There's a free lunch..." I say slightly enticingly.

"What are they having?"

We said we didn't know, but I offered to call him at his desk once we got down there to tell him what it is.

We get down there. I open up the warming trays and survey the pickings. I pick up the phone and call Ted.

"It's fajitas. Chicken or Beef."

"And it's free?" Ted asks.

"Yes."

"Are you sure?" he asked skeptically.

Well I hadn't looked around, but I was fairly certain that there were no cash registers hidden to surprise us once we got our food and sat down.

"Yes, I'm pretty sure."

"Okay." He hung up.

All that trouble and he didn't even come.

I realize that's a pretty simple story....

It's Only a Movie by Mark Kermode

I was skimming the new releases at Audible when I came across a book, It's Only a Movie, that looked interesting. It was a memoir, which I like if they are humorous. This one seemed to fit that bill. I find out that Mark Kermode is a movie reviewer, but one that I had never heard of before. Still, the sample was pretty funny, so I took a chance on it.

Even though Kermode isn't what I would call famous, although he does work for the BBC. I thought his book was a very interesting and very funny listen, not that being famous is a qualification for a good memoir.

Kermode talks about his love of film throughout his life with criticism of films that entered his life and peppers this with stories from his life. For example, his chapter on the first time he was ever on radio was so funny that I had to listen to it twice to get the full details because I was laughing so hard. Same for his chapter on going to Russia in 1992 to cover a movie shoot there. What starts as a fun idea turns into a nightmare that doesn't surpass any movie about troubles in traveling, but it certainly tops them all in the laughs department. Kermode and a writing partner have to endure smelly trains, cramped cars and harrowing plane rides all for the search of a film crew that seems to be everywhere that they aren't while dealing with post communist society that doesn't have any of the conveniences that he is used to.

All in all, if you like movies, or talk of movies, then this book is a good start.

Laura is tired of me writing about her...

I was kind of jazzed to write a new story about Laura. It involves Laura yelling at me for taking her covers when I came to bed even though she was hogging them and I had none. It also involved me protesting and her responding with a "I don't know what you're talking about! I don't have any!" when she clearly did. It was going to be a funny story because she doesn't remember saying it. She was talking in her sleep.

I mentioned that I was going to write about this, but she said that she's getting tired of me writing about her. So I'm left with a problem. What do I write about when I've run out of subjects to write about. I could write about Julia, but sooner or later, she's going to realize that I've been writing about her from time to time, which will probably coincide with her teenage years. I'm sure she'll have no problem with it. She'll probably have a little chuckle about embarrassing moments posted on the internet for the whole world to see, but was probably read by dozens if I'm lucky.