The kids are doing fine, they really are.

Zoe is either really confused, or doing a well-rehearsed routine whereby she'll see me and when I say, "Hi Zoe," she'll reply either, "Hi Zoe" back or "Hi Buddy." Which is something I say to Alex. Oh yes, for good measure, she'll say, "Hi Alexis" to me. That baby talk slur. Gotta love it.

She also does something that always cracks me up, and I'm not sure what she's even trying to do. Whenever she visits me at work, she'll inevitably have to leave, and when she leaves, her jaw always drops wide open with a feigned look of shock on her face, and that jaw will stay open while she's being carried away. I have no idea what it means, but I'm pretty sure she's just being sweet in some odd manner.

We also call her "Repeater Girl" sometimes, because she will say one thing over and over again, in different pitches and in different tones. Duck? Duck. Duccck. Duck! Duck...

But most of all, this girl loves her Kitty. She tried unsuccessfully yesterday to play her Kitty on her head with one hand, and suck her thumb with the other hand while she tries to play with Kitty's tail. Yeah, it's pretty tough trying to visualize that. She won't go anywhere without her Kitty, and she'll usually go looking for him after she realizes that he isn't around. At the playground, we actually give her Kitty otherwise she'd just sit there and obssess about Kitty's absence.

Not to be out-obsessed, Alex is completely awe-struck with Spiderman. It has grown into some full-blown fanboy stuff, whereby he'll just sing the first two lines of the theme song. He'll empty out a red toy bin, sticks it over his head, and pretends to be Spiderman. With a belt, he utilizes his Method Acting background and transforms into Cranky Guy, a.k.a. Doctor Octopus. He's not sure what they do, but he sure likes pretending to be them.

Speechwise, he is doing fairly well. He repeats words he hears, and he'll repeat anything. Like the swear words that slips out once in a while. He can name most things, and he'll continually surprise us by learning something behind our backs. Damn television.

He's a really sweet boy. I'll ask him for a kiss and he'll give me one, which is such a nice gesture. I know there are Dads out there who would high-five all the time, but I dunno. I used to think I would never kiss my kids on the lips. Now I've amended that slightly to "never kiss my kids when their mouth is open".

So yeah, the kids are doing great.

My wife text messages me at work today to tell me my toy is here, and I get completely distracted. I mean, just batty about it, so I called her back and told her she was a tease. But I finally did come around to unveiling my new used iBook, which I am currently typing on while my Mac Mini is importing some dubiously handheld crap wedding ceremony that I shot. It's not bad for a laptop that's actually about the same age as my now defunct iMac. I guess considering what I could have paid, it's a fairly good buy.

The Pros are that it has 40 gigs, which is rarer in earlier laptops. Hell, I don't even know what the previous owner was doing with that much space, and as far as I know from our email conversation, she wasn't into the graphic design or video. It's chugging on 500 mhz, which is a hundred faster than my iMac, but unfortunately three times slower than my Mac Mini. But it'll serve its purposes, because it is fast enough for video editing, definitely great for writing and great for basic web stuff. A good secondary computer that doesn't suck up spyware.

And since I already have most of the programs, I was able to just copy them and dump them from my Mac Mini to the iBook, and I think the licenses still work okay. I think. I'll find out.

I have to say that a couple of Cons is directly associated with the age of the laptop. The power cord seems a bit on the loose side. Doesn't fall out, but wouldn't take much to take it out. Also, one of the two batteries doesn't even work, and the one that does probably holds about an hour and a half to two hours charge. I don't imagine I'd need any more than that. I wonder if they made hand-crank iBooks?

No, I'm not joshing, it was on the online news a while back. They were making affordable laptops for educating Third-World countries, and they were trying to develop a laptop that ran without electricity and utilized open-source software that would cost about a little over a hundred dollars. And they were thinking that they would make it so that it would be worth close to nothing and look really childish so that no one would think about stealing them.

Well, this is an unfocused post about my new old laptop. I should write about the kids.

And I will.

If you're a Simpsons Fan, why haven't you watched This?

Potty Training

My wife decided to implement potty training today, much to my despair, because she's hardly home any of the nights this week. I was supposed to set the timer every 20 minutes or so, and then take him to the bathroom and just sit and hang out by the toilet. My use of jellybeans as a reward may prove to be more of a distraction than anything else, because then he's just obsessed about having more jellybeans, even though the rule was one per sitting.

But the first time we went to sit, he had already peed.

Change.

The second time we went, he had peed onto his fresh pants again. Damnit.

Change.

The magical third time, he one-upped me and laid me some brick. Of course, it was again, after the fact when he waddled about and I had to clean poop on the floor. Boy, that was my highlight. And since he was already standing up, I had the pleasure of making him lift up one leg so that I could get the creases and crannies.

And the fourth time, I sorta fell asleep, and he peed again. Got his blanket wet.

I hate potty training probably more than he does.

And the Oscar Goes to...

Watching the Oscars right now, but I got my ballot tallied out.

17 out of 24 of my votes panned out, and most of it came from reading the movie magazines, but a lot of it is how Hollywood thinks. Don't quite understand why "Crash" got best picture, but that's the only weird one I can think of.

Well, there are some news to catch up with, with the most important one first - my head smells like a muffin.

Well, okay, for just a short period of time last night. My hair smelled like a muffin. My hair clippers, which are quite old, have run out of lubricant for a while, and I've been using massage oil, and so we decided to use butter flavored cooking spray to lube up the old trimmers.

I also got me an iBook today on ebay, can't wait to get my hands on it so that I can do some more writing, and even some editing. Awesome!

Well, it's hard for me to write and watch the Oscars, so guess what I'm going to do.