Pico DiPaolo

The Halloween of 2005 is remembered with an extravagant storm that rolled in, oh, just minutes before we were to leave for the big neigbhorhood parade.   Did I mention that it was big?  Joelle got to go to three houses that year  -  yippee.

Chris wishes they had just gone to three houses this year because the Halloween of 2006 will be remembered as the Mosquito Swarm of 2006.  (Steve:  ”You should have sprayed up before you left.”  Chris:  “It’s just like flavored human to them.”)  The mosquitos chased Joelle and I all day.  They were in the car, the house, the forest at the Titmouse club, we batted them while carving pumpkins…  I have so much “tropical DEET” on my skin I feel like I could take a shower and I’d still smell this sickley sweet odor. 

I lit four citronella candles on our porch, but they managed to thwart that and make it into the house whenever I opened the door to give out candy.  Chris and I literally killed over 20 mosquitos in the house!  Joelle got into the game and ran around the house yelling at us whenever she found one.  Oh, and this sickley sweet odor is apparently just for my smelling pleasure, because they’ve been landing on me all night – I have four coats of the stuff on and they usually don’t bite me anyway! 

I wonder what the Halloween of 2007 will be like?

Our church had a little “trunk or treating” event tonight where all the pastors pulled up their cars and handed out candy from their tailgates. Joelle thought this was an incredibly interesting and entertaining experience. She would walk up to the car and gawk. We’d prod her to say, “Trick or Treat.” She didn’t know what to do when faced with the incredible decision of which candy to take.

Each time she secured a piece of candy, it was like a new victory. She came back proudly displaying her prize to us. We’d then say, “did you say thank you?” She’d walk back to say thank you, making each trunk a two step process.

What a strange experience for kids. They walk up to complete strangers (however; in this case, not all were complete strangers) and are encouraged to take candy from them. I’d really be interested to know how trick or treating came about. I’m glad Joelle got in this practice round before trick or treating a bit with daddy on Halloween!

Joelle: (Daniel Powter’s ‘Bad Day’ playing) “Boy, he really must have had a bad day.”

Chris: “He’s saying, ‘YOU had a bad day.’ Maybe he didn’t have a bad day.”Joelle: “I didn’t have a bad day. I just have fun days. ”

Chris: “Good, all my days are good, too.”

Joelle: (45 second pause) “Well, the day I had four shots was a bad day. That was my only bad day.”

I know that there was at least one other time when Joelle had to get 4 shots, but she was a baby and somehow it’s easier to give a baby a shot.  Sure, they cry (ok, wail), but they don’t have a memory of it afterwards.  (I will say that the heel jaundice test was an absurdly awful experience for both Chris and I.  Joelle was less than a week old and that woman dug at her heel for blood for what seemed like hours).

Joelle, being 4, remembers these four shots and is walking around with an air of authority that the world owes her something for the injustice she suffered.  In general, I agree with her.  Four shots.  Oh, and she had to get the flu mist.  Who knows what that feels like, having been personally given the shot again this year. 

Don’t get me wrong… I’m 100% for immunizations – I just wish there was a less painful way to get them or spread them out.  (It had been two years since her last immunization).  Maybe they could give two in year 3 and two in year 4?  My main point in posting this is as a reminder to myself to make Chris take baby #2 for her four year shots!    

I used to have this talent. I used to be able to plant pretty much anything anywhere and it would grow. I’ve always loved to garden and “owned” my parents atrium from a pretty early age. Sarah and I would plant flowers in pots to decorate our tree house. (We won’t mention where these flowers came from…)

My talent continued with only limited exceptions at Kobi Park (the Pecan tree and chinch bug incident are the only notable exceptions over the 6 years we were there.) I like to mow, trim and plant. Weeding is mundane, but given good weather, I don’t even mind that. Weed eating is another matter. Not sure why I refuse to learn how to do that.

Apparently, I’ve met my match with the Barryknoll ecosystem. The previous owners of Barryknoll used Chemlawn. Perhaps in discontinuing that service we immediately inherited a weak lawn accustomed to monthly fertilizing and chemcials. Or, maybe it’s the shade. Kobi Park had no shade and now we’ve got these huge Oaks covering almost every inch of our yard. (which I love and would gladly trade for the gardening mishaps.)

I write this with hopes that our yard, which is half dead, will recover by spring. We’ll have a new baby and replanting the yard may not be an easy feat. We still don’t know if it was brown patch, carpet worms or grub worms, but we tried everything and it’s still dying. My favorite though was when I planted $50 worth of new flowers in the front before Chris’s 30th birthday party. I should’ve done this planting the night before because they were ALL dead by the next weekend. Nice. The dead stubbies are still in the front bed as an albatross for my gardening skills.

I’ve found myself busy lately and haven’t picked up a book in a while (besides studying for the CFA, of course). So when I saw an article about DailyLit in my RSS reader I was intrigued.

DailyLit is a service that takes literature in public domain and breaks into e-mail sized chunks so you can read the classics via e-mail just a few minutes at a time. You’re reading your e-mail anyway – just pretend it’s another forward that you have seen before but find mildly amusing so you read it again (you know you’ve done this). Can’t you spare 5 minutes a day? If so, you can read some great books.

I just finished Frankenstein. I found that at first I would read one e-mail a day when I came into work. As I got into the story I started using the “send next fragment immediately” feature pretty often because it was such a good book (could be because it was a thriller as opposed to something a little more slow-paced). Here is what the e-mails look like.

You can search by title or author. The number of books is limited enough to where you can easily browse through all the titles to see if something interests you. Here is a screenshot from the site (very bare bones, which suits its purpose).

You can schedule delivery for any time of day and have the frequency be daily, weekdays or every other day. I would hope that they add “twice daily” in the future – who really is going to take two YEARS to read War & Peace and who wants to click on “send next fragment” that many times?

Anyway – I recommend it, let me know if you try it and what you think about it!

Like most Americans, Joelle enjoys her TV viewing experience.  Her current favorite, much to our dismay since we now have cable and this is “free” on PBS, is Dragon Tales.  A surprise to me – I have no idea what makes her like a show or not.  Anyway, we do allow Joelle to watch TV during breakfast and she had it on one Saturday morning.  We were all sitting at the table eating and Joelle kept commenting on parts of the show.  Chris said, “I can’t really see Joelle, but I’ll watch after breakfast.”  She was very perplexed about him not being able to see.  If it’s her favorite show, it stands to reason that it’s daddy’s favorite show.  She said, “You have the bummer chair.”  I think she’s still working out a way to fix that.  It’s likely that mommie will get ousted from my premium viewing chair and daddy will secure that spot. 

I imagine this to be exactly what Erin told Joelle at the Magic Castle. We met Erin and her momma, Alice, at the Magic Castle to play. Alice and I were positioned on the bench near the gate to ensure that the girls didn’t run out into the mall. Still, we asked that they check in periodically so that we knew they were safe. Erin came ripping around the corner to do just that and I asked her to find Joelle for me. I thought she would think of it as a fun hide and seek game and that maybe they would play that together. Instead, both girls came back in a minute. The second Joelle caught my eye, her expression was priceless: “What the heck, mom?”

I later found out she was playing a mermaid in the “sea” area and that she had to turn into a human sooner than she wanted. Oh well, at least I knew she was safe!

Joelle’s class is split up into the Fall birthday gang and the Winter birthday gang.  The Fall pack is currently on parade, with our own star shining this Saturday.  I took Joelle to the latest birthday last weekend.  Surprisingly for me, it was at a park we had never been to.  I wonder how many parks there are in Houston?  The theme was kites.  A little unusual for the Fall, but quite inventive and fun.  All the kids got a kite.  There were about 13 of these little 3 – 4 year olds proudly marching onto the field wielding their plastic kites with hazardously long tails.   Suddenly, they swarmed and began to run with all their might to get the little kites up….  right into…. a soccer game.   It was quite comical.  When I first told the story to Chris, he envisioned other kids playing.  No, this was a “no costume” pick up game with adult men.  (Ask Chris about the costume comment.  There is a reason God thought it best to give me another girl.)  I can see why the “no kid” adults are sometimes at odds with the “kid” adults. 

Petie and I were discussing what to watch on TV one night and realized it was getting late. Maybe we have a 30 minute show on the DVR? Then it hit us – we don’t watch any 30 minute shows. Maybe we could tape some? Uh, there ARE no more 30 minute shows. The sitcom died sometime in the last couple of years.

I know that some of the issue is that it is still early in the season – it seems that many of the sitcoms come on as the season goes on…Here is the complete listing of 30 minute shows according to the broadcast station websites. I assume all shows listed are still on and I’m not including animated series and not including other networks besides the “big 4″. Before reading on, how many sitcoms can you name?

Returning shows:
ABC: According to Jim, George Lopez
CBS: How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, King of Queens, The New Adventures of Old Christine
FOX: The War at Home
NBC: Scrubs, My Name is Earl, The Office

New shows:
ABC: Help Me Help You, Big Day, The Knights of Prosperity, In Case of Emergency, Notes from the Underbelly
CBS: The Class
FOX: ‘Til Death, Happy Hour
NBC: 30 Rock, 20 Good Years

Now that seems like a lot in a list – 10 old, 10 new for a total of 20. However, if you look back at the 1989-90 television season, 11 of the top 19 shows were 30 minute sitcoms. There are only 10 sitcoms returning this year and more than that were more or less “mainstays” for at least a couple of years in the 1989-90 season.

Fast forward to the 2005-06 television season and 1 of the top 20 shows was a 30 minute sitcom. You could call 9 of those shows “reality” shows, so maybe that’s what Americans are turning to today.

Here are a few interesting articles about this type of thing:

History Speaks to Reality’s Untimely End 2/13/2003, Media Life Magazine – discusses fads related mostly to game shows, but also with a bit about fads in sitcoms and cop shows as examples.

A History of Comedy on Television 1970 to Present – at the very end of this page the author refers to the all-time low (1950) being 11 sitcoms and the all-time high (1979) being 44 sitcoms with ups and downs in between.

Finally, Sitcoms Online allows you to keep up with what’s going on in the sitcom world.