Notes From Home: Volume 4

It’s time for another update of my life at home!

* The Moose (9) needed a haircut, so we attempted to give him one with some clippers we bought recently. It went poorly.

Fortunately, a neighbor was able to salvage his hair. It’s better but still not great.

I actually think the hairstyle is perfect if he was a member of Color Me Badd or EMF (you're unbelievable!) or some other musical group from the early 90s. While it will grow back, I have no idea what we're going to do with his hair in 4-6 weeks when it does grow back!

* We don’t have any type of a sleep schedule for the kids. In normal times during the school year, the two year old (Luigi) would go to sleep between 8:00 and 8:30 and we would wake him up around 6:30. He did not like waking up this early. He also got a 90-minute to 2-hour nap in the afternoon. Now, he goes to bed after 9:00 PM and wakes up around 9:00 AM. We don’t even try to give him a nap. Overall, he probably gets the same amount of sleep, but I’d rather that he went to sleep and wake up a little earlier. Meanwhile, I’m typing this at 10:38 PM on a Tuesday evening, and The Moose is still awake creating some kind of bank or something.

* Pedro Tulo (age 6) has started to notice the expiration dates on milk and other products. When seeing me wear a 2017 Penguins Stanley Cup Champions T-shirt recently, we had the following exchange.

Pedro Tulo: Your shirt is going to expire.
Me: I have shirts that are 20 years old. It will be fine.

* Since we’ve been home 24/7, I’ve noticed that Ziggy sleeps a lot. A lot a lot. He’ll be 12 this summer, so I know he’s getting older, but it just seems like he sleeps all the time.

(Apparently, this picture of Ziggy is brought to you by Intel.)

* The Moose is learning about Ancient Greece. While it seems like he’s interested in the portion about Olympics, he only seems moderately interested in any of the other parts. However, The Moose really enjoys trivia. He regularly asks me to ask him questions and wants to know how my team does when I play trivia with my friends. So I mentioned to him that there always seems to be questions about Ancient Greece and Greek gods. Sure enough, there was a category on Jeopardy! last week about Greek gods. Thank you Jeopardy!

* I mentioned this on a previous blog post, but the last time that I bought gas continues to be March 15th.

* Finally, sadly, a significant number of restaurants aren't going to recover from COVID-19 and being closed. Restaurants are a tough business even in good times, so it's not like the majority of them have huge amounts of cash reserves in case of an emergency. With that written, Chick-fil-a isn't going anywhere. The kids really like their food, so we went through the drive through for lunch as a treat for them. The line of cars was at least 30 deep. And it moved effectively and efficiently. Chick-fil-a is going to outlive us all!

For more of my "Notes From Home" during the COVID-19 crisis, please click here.

Link City

Earlier this week, there was a private event at a Northern Virginia Chick-fil-A for bloggers to preview their new brunch menu. I applied to participate in this event, but the client did not select me. I think that part of the reason is that my Sean's Ramblings Facebook page has less than 40 likes. This number needs to go up. In the next few months, I'm going to apply to be a media member for the 2017 Academy Awards. Sure, I only see 1-2 movies in the theater these days, but wouldn't you like to see me on the red carpet asking Natalie Portman if she'd like to bring her family over to my house for a Passover dinner? I could ask Meryl Streep whether she would want to appear in the next Alvin and the Chipmunks movies. For the Oscars to take my application seriously, I think I need to have at least 100 Facebook likes. I'd probably feel more confident in my chances if that number was closer to 10,000.

Oh, I also probably didn't get selected for the event since it was for "mommy bloggers," and while I write about being a dad, I'm not exclusively a "daddy blogger." [Falls Church Patch]

The word "jagoff" is officially in the Oxford English dictionary. Congrats to John of Ya Jagoff on helping make this happen. [Ya Jagoff]

I am honored to finally have a Tweet worthy of making it on Alex's This Week in Tweets. This is a slight consolation for not getting invited to the Chick-fil-A event. Well, except that I didn't get any free food for this tweet. [Everybody Loves You]

Lowell is a fellow Pittsburgher than now lives in Northern Virginia. He loves Harambe and hates John Cullen. He also has an entertaining Twitter account though many of the posts are R-rates. He's also running in the 6.6K run and family walk, so please donate to his cause supporting the Mario Lemieux foundation. [Lemieux Foundation]

Meat Loaf would do anything for love, but he won't do that (meaning give up fantasy sports). [The Washington Post's DC Sports Bog]

Finally, Emma G busks outside my Metro station once a week nearly every week. She usually does cover songs, and she's really good. It's really a nice way to start the day. She recently performed at The Kennedy Center, but before you watch the video check out her amazing story. [Stuff]

Dancing in the Dark

Lacochran had this exchange with her husband a few weeks ago:

Just last night we had the following conversation:

Hubby: We have all these phone books. I thought I might get rid of a few.

Me: Get rid of them all.

We're probably the last people to do so.

I replied that "I keep our phone books too just in case the power goes out or there are computer problems. I figure as soon as I throw out the phone books, we'll lose power and the computer will die!"

Well, last night the power went out just before 7:00, and I used our phone book for the first time in years. My first call was to Dominion Virginia Power to report the power outage. They already knew and told me over 4000 customers were out and that crews were on the way. The 4000 customers included Mamma Lucia and California Tortilla in the neighboring shopping center (Dominion didn’t tell me this). Seeing that the chicken in the stove still had about 30 minutes left when the power went out, we needed food quickly in order to survive the blackout. That’s where the phone book came in again.

Chick-Fil-A: Hello.

Me: Hi. Is this Chick-Fil-A?

Chick-Fil-A: Yes it is.

Me: Great. Do you have electricity?

Chick-Fil-A: Huh?

Me: Do you have power there?

Chick-Fil-A: What?

Me: We live a few miles from you and the power is out in the entire neighborhood. I just wanted to find out if you were open before I drove there.

Chick-Fil-A: Oh, OK. Yes, we have electricity.

Thank you, phone book!

A few other notes about Blackout 2008:

- We bought flashlights at Target just this past weekend because I thought we should have some.

- It’s very difficult to get a good workout on the treadmill without power.

- Nothing is more romantic than eating Chick-Fil-A by candlelight with the cat tryinig to jump on the table.

The power returned around 8:45.

Finally, I received a comment yesterday thanking me for the eye candy picture I posted of Derrick Inglut. To be fair, I feel l like I should post a picture of my favorite LPGA golfer, Erica Blasberg.

Links of the Day

As you can see below, my blog is rated G. When I tried this last week, I was rated PG because the rating system didn’t like the fact that I used “Dick” when writing about Dick’s Sporting Goods and Steelers defensive coordinator, Dick LeBeau. This site could become PG-13 if I write about former Pittsburgh Pirates coach Rusty Kuntz. What’s Your Blog Rated?



(“Borrowed” from Arjewtino.)

This Friday, July 13 is Chick-fil-A’s Cow Appreciation Day. For some reason, I think this has nothing to do with South Park. Anyway, if you visit Chick-fil-A on Friday fully dressed as a cow, you will receive a free combo meal. Anyone in a partial cow costume will be offered a free entrée.

Finally, Yahoo has a story about Harry Potter fans hoping to avoid spoilers. Please note that the article contains a spoiler about the 6th book, which I think everyone should know by now. I will write my own Harry Potter preview with predictions sometime soon, but then there will be no further discussion about the book here.