Tagged: The Lord of the Rings
Hutt’s New
Well, it’s a whole new year according to the fairly arbitrary human construct that is a complete circle around the sun, and you know what that means–it’s the season of empty promises!
Yes, now that we’ve imagined a clean slate for ourselves, let’s renew that annual gym membership so we can visit two (maybe three!) times this calendar year, all the while feeling guilty about the money we’ve commoded… Let’s also vow we will stick to a diet consisting only of kale and almonds, until that fateful night we have to stay late at work and don’t really feel like cooking and, oh look! There’s a McDonald’s on the way home. Surely just one Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese won’t derail our progress. Not a chance!… And yes, let’s buy several books that we fully intend to dutifully page through every night instead of gaping at the tv screen—except all of the shows we’ve been following are returning from their holiday hiatus, and we can’t be the ones in the dark on the latest plot twists at work tomorrow…
Sure, it’s a dangerous time to make promises—to resolve to break the rhythm of the past year, or even many prior years. And that’s why I’m here to tell you what you can expect from Twinfamy in 2016.
You may have noticed I have not regularly been attending my own party here at this fine publication, especially in 2015. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to apologize. (See what I did there?)
The truth is that for the most part, 2015 felt like an entire year of recovery, reshaping, and even occasionally (*GASP!*) relaxing—and in the middle of all that, while I occasionally peeked my head out of my cave, for parts of it I wasn’t all that sure what this blog actually ought to even be anymore. Continue reading
Things I Did This Weekend: A Non-Exhaustive List
1. Woke up at 3am both mornings to rescue the Twins from drowning in a sea of their own mucus, caused by a recent onslaught of sickness.
2. Wiped tiny noses every thirty seconds, literally working through six boxes of tissues.
3. Wiped tiny squirts of child cold medicine defiantly spat at me off my face every four to six hours.
4. Listened to my washing machine suddenly start playing dubstep mid-cycle, culminating in a crash and sudsy water pooling below it.
I told it three times to let me know if it needed to go potty.
5. Helped my wife scour the Pseudonymous Family’s vast collection of receipts and instruction booklets for the washing machine’s warranty information, continually chasing down toddlers who took off running with unsearched piles, wiping their noses on them.
6. Worked during too-short naptimes and into the wee hours of the night on a National Science Foundation research grant proposal that is due Wednesday and nowhere near done.
7. Got my son to repeat “My Precious” several times after he woke up from a nap with a raspy, swollen-sinus voice that made him sound exactly like Gollum. Which made it all worth it.
Statistics Reveals That I Hate It
I’m fairly confident I will look back on this semester as The Semester That Shall Not Be Named, and my reasons for this are statistically based.
And that is because, against my better judgment, I enrolled in two statistics classes.
At the same freaking time.
Although, yes, it was ultimately my decision to plague myself with such nerdery, I was not left with a whole lot of options. You see, certain classes I need to take are only offered during certain semesters, and because I’m hoping to finish all of my classes in the Spring (before taking the dissertation plunge), I needed to be economical with my schedule.
Accio Jack Daniel’s!
However, once I’d plotted everything out accordingly, my eyes were drawn to this semester, where a Dark Mark had materialized above my yellow legal pad. Sadly, the optimal schedule meant a double dose of stats, meaning that fun would be SO out this Fall.
While–if I say so myself–I can hold my own in the subject, I find it incredibly boring and tedious. The time required to understand it and perform well on tests is way more than I’d like it to be. As you may have gathered, I’m a word guy, so if I have to do school work, I’d much rather spend my time reading interesting research or writing papers for publication, NOT verbally abusing uncooperative math problems.
Picking Up the Duckie
If there’s one thing I learned while growing up, it’s that–in the words of the great philosopher Hoots the Owl—“You gotta put down the Duckie if you wanna play the saxophone.”
I’ve since devised lifehacks allowing me to defy this nocturnal avian jazz musician’s First Law of Multi-Tasking, deftly blowing the perpetual 12-bar solo that is being a husband, dad, and student while still keeping a firm grip on the duckie that is this fine publication. However, during the month of July, the song’s tempo sped to a breakneck punk rock moshpit pace, and as I attempted to keep up with the chord changes, the poor little duckie came flying out of my hand.
Since I know you hang on my every Twincident, O Loyal Reader, I’m sure you noticed things have been considerably quiet ’round these parts. I’ve always told myself I’d never let writing about being a dad get in the way of actually being a dad, and the past few weeks found me in that very position. While writing is a deep passion of mine, I can’t let it jeopardize my sax life.
I had to huck the duck.
Twinfamy 