Spent this week away from work again. Went to Disneyland with the family and a couple friends, then hit a baseball game yesterday. Today, I'm puttering around the house and doing chores.

Not too much to report about the Disney trip. I can officially declare that the housekeeping folks at the Hawthorne Suites in Anaheim have an impressively lackadaisical approach to work Sometimes your room gets cleaned and sometimes it doesn't. It's a daily surprise built into your vacation. That and the mystery liquid liquid in the hallways warrant a rating of What The Hell Is Going On Around Here? for the always surprising Hawthorne Suites. Congratulations.

The kidlet enjoyed the trip but found the rides to be generally too scary. Eventually we learned to avoid any attractions with the following characteristics:
- Speed
- Darkness
- Water
- Animatronics bigger than a breadbox

Those restrictions didn't leave us with many acceptable rides. The only rides that didn't scare the bejesus (sp?) out of her were the ones that basically just went around in a circle. Carousel. Dumbo. Other Dumbo-esque rides. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Had a pretty good time overall though.

The Giants game was a little better than I expected. Got to see Barry hit his 8,325,389,216th homer of the week. They lost, of course, but we Giants fans can take consolation in the close games. Close is good, right? 3-4.

Ok, 11:00am and no chores done so far.

This last weekend was my wife's birthday and, uncharacteristically, I decided to plan a surprise party for her. Although she's a clever gal, I thought I could pull it off. I have established a precedent of low-effort birthday celebrations for many years now. This tidily sets my wife's expectations nice and loooooow. Plus, I can lie fairly carefully and effectively when I have to.

What I had not anticipated, however, was how poorly I think on my feet. I present the following three bits of evidence. Behold my idiocy:

1) I rented a video projector for the party and was in the process of hiding the various cases of paraphenalia that came with it when my wife arrived home early and saw the projector case in the trunk of the car.

"What's that equipment in the trunk?" she asked? She didn't refer to it as "that thing", or "the big crate", she recognized it as some sort of equipment. It did have sort of an Audio Visual air about it.

"Huh?", I replied, buying time, my mind racing for an appropriate cover story.

"The equipment in the trunk. What's it for?"

At this point, I sprang into action. I slammed the trunk shut.

"Don't look in the trunk!!" I squeaked, "Or under the guest bed!!!!".

2) After contemplating the trunk fiasco, I decided that the equipment was a dead giveaway for the party. Equipment means event. And what kind of event occurs right around a major birthday? That would be a surprise party. I called one of my assistants, specifically my Chief Officer of Surprise Party Deception, telling her about the breach in surprisiness. With her help, I constructed a story about how my wife's sister, who is an artsy performer-type gal, wanted to do a presentation for my wife's birthday. The equipment was for her presentation and was supposed to be a surprise. I was going to urge my wife to hush up about the equipment and let her sister pretend to surprise her. It was a credible story.

Later that evening, I pulled my wife aside.

"Ok, you saw the equipment. Jig's up. Here's what's going on..." I started

"No!" she squawked, "No jig! Jig not up!"

"Look," I said, "You know something is up. Let me fill you in..."

"No! I don't want to know! Why do I have to know?!?!"

I was stymied. She obviously realized this was related to her birthday and wanted the surprise more than the knowledge of what was going on. The little minx wasn't going to let me deliver my cover story

"But! But! I don't want you to.... I mean, it would be best for your sister, if you pretended not to know!" I insisted. That was it. I got in the word sister.

"Ok, I won't say anything to her," she replied.

That was really as far I got in that lie. I managed to gurgle something about her sister. Frankly, this was probably about as good as it was going to get, but still I couldn't believe that I wasn't even able to tell my lie.

3) Day of the party. The last bit of trickery involved actually getting my wife to the restaurant where the party was at the appropriate time. My Chief Officer of Surprise Party Deception took her out for lunch, shopping, and pedicures. Then, at the appropriate time, I called the wife on her cell phone and excitedly told her about a dining room table that I just saw. You see, we've been looking for a dining room table since the last century. I knew that she'd be motivated to see such a thing. I explained that I had just walked past our neighborhood furniture store (coincidentally, right next door to party!), and saw this new table in the window. The store was closing soon and she needed to come down right away and see it. Obviously, there really was no table.

"What does it look like?" she asked.

This was the home stretch. I was not going to be deterred by her interrogation. I had contemplated this question in advance. "It looks nice! It's rectangular and modern looking, so it'll go in our space nicely. It has some nice inlays that match our floor." I thought the word "inlay" was a nice touch.

"Well, what style is it?" she asked, "Is it trestle-style?"

I had no idea what a trestle was. No biggie though. "Look, you know I don't know dining room jargon. Just come see it. It's nice. They're closing soon. Hurry."

"Hmmph" she said exasperatedly. "Well, how many legs does it have? Four?"

"Yes! Four legs!" Zing! I'm rolling!

"Four? That's no good!" She exclaimed. "You know that won't work with our bench. People will bang their legs getting in and out. We need a pedestal style table."

Doh! Oh man. I can't believe I biffed that. Who knew that "four legs" would be the wrong answer for a freakin' table? I hurriedly calculated whether I could change my answer. I raced through the following possibilities:

- "Oh. I looked again. No. Not four legs. One. Just one."
- "Oh, look! There's another table next to it! It's a pedestal! Come see that one instead"
- "I'M ON FIRE! COME HELP!!"

None of those seemed realistic so I just reiterated that it was really really nice and she should hurry. Thankfully, with my Chief Officer of Surprise Party Deception simultaneously telling her that it was about time to finish up anyway, she agreed to come see the table.

Amazingly enough, after all these screw-ups, we really did get to surprise her.

Happy Birthday, sweetie.

Went to my first Giants game of the season today. In honor of my presence, the Giants rolled out their most anemic offense. Skipper Felipe Alou painstakingly combed through the lineup removing anyone with abilities in the, apparently unnecessary, hitting department. Here was the lineup:

Neifi "What was Felipe Alou Thinking Batting Me First?" Perez
J.T. "Warning Track Power" Snow
Marquis "My Deal With the Devil Ended Yesterday" Grisson
Pedro "The Bench Must Be Getting Cold Without Me" Feliz
A.J. "Who Needs a Nickname With a Last Name Like" Pierzynski
Michael "I Was a Giant Killer When I Played For the Opposition And I'm Still a Giant Killer" Tucker
Dustan "Less Is" Mohr
Cody "I May Look Only 13, But I Bat Like I'm 12" Ransom
Brian "I Haven't Heard Of Me Either" Cooper

Our pitcher today, Brian Cooper, did a reasonable job, but I had never heard of this guy before. As near as I can tell, the Giants cobbled him together before gametime from spare parts: bits that were removed from Robb "Anyone Need A B?" Nen's shoulder, Barry Bond's skull from his previous, regular-sized head, eye of newt, etc. Frankly, the cobbling was pretty good. These Giants can't hit, but they can cobble with the best of them. Kudos to the medical staff.

Although we lost 3-0, I had a nice time. Often when I bring the family to the ballpark, I have to spend a large chunk of time entertaining the little'un. Since this game only took a little over 2 hours (thanks anemic offense!) and the wife did a lot of the entertaining, I got to see the whole debacle. Hazzah!

Took the kid to Six Flags Marine World today. Her preschool is closed for Spring Break and I get a lot more vacation time than my wife does, so that puts me squarely in charge of Spring Break Duty. This is not the beer and wet T-shirt filled party that you might think. It's a lot more like babysitting, except that the kid is mine so I don't get paid and I don't get to raid someone's fridge.

This was my first visit to this Marine World and it became quickly apparent how inferior the average amusement park is to Disney[land|world]. I noticed three major differences within minutes of experiencing the park.

1) Disneyland is a Theme park. Most other parks are Amusement parks. It's not that Disney isn't amusing (ignoring the films for a moment), but rather that all other parks fail so drastically at the "theme" part. Marine World is part marine-themed (dolphin shows, water skiing shows, etc), part Looney Tunes, part non-Marine animals, part midway games, and part random rides. Really it's Marine-Non-Marine-Zoo-Looney-Midway-Ride-World. I guess that name didn't test well.

2) The rides make horrible noises. Either they start off with horrendous beeps or alarm sounds, or you get bombarded by many decibels of compressor/generator/jet-engine noise. Rides at Disneyland are music-filled or damn near silent.

3) All employees at Disneyland have the vast majority of their teeth.

I'm not a handy guy. I'm the opposite of handy (which apparently is maladroit, thankyouverymuchantonym.com). This is one of the reasons why I never wanted to own a home. I loved being a tenant and having the luxury of getting things fixed by picking up the phone. I suppose I can still do that, but it's not free anymore. If it wasn't for the absurd tax deduction I get from my mortgage, I would have never bought a home.

Anyway.

So, when something breaks around the house, invariably I have to have a professional fix it. Or, if it involves power tools, my wife jumps to the rescue. She loves her power drill, her circular saw, her automatic super-duper thing-fixer. Unfortunately, two things broke this last week that do not require power tools. Both of them were toilets. Double unfortunately, I have actually fixed toilets in the past.

My father is a mechanical engineer. He understands how everything works. As a loving and dutiful father, he did his best to teach me how things work. He taught me about cars. It didn't stick. He taught me about sprinklers and gardening. It didn't stick. He taught me about assorted household gadgets and that didn't stick either though. Toilets, however, stuck. Why, oh why, did it have to be toilets? Why did my brain make room for toilets and not for engines? We'll never know.

So, toilets are the one thing that I fix. It's a glamorous life I lead. Today, I got to fix two of them. The sad part is that I took two trips to the hardware store, bought about $30 worth of toilet innards, and didn't need any of it. Brainpower and a simple adjustment was all that was needed in both cases.

Man, I am ALMOST as smart as I need to be.

My four year-old daughter doesn't really care for daily body maintenance tasks like brushing her teeth or pooping. I'm with her on the teeth brushing, but the poop issue drives me nuts. She prefers to hold her poop until it's ready to explode out of her.

There was a long while, when she was about 3 years old, when she entirely refused to poop. Her stated reason was that poops were too hard and consequently they hurt (actually I think her exact words were "Owwwwie!"). So, she'd hold it in for about a week and then when she finally did poop, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure enough, it hurt like the dickens. We spent endless hours trying to convince her that if she pooped more regularly, say once a day, then it wouldn't hurt so damn much. She was steadfast in her belief, however, that more pooping would just mean more "owwwwie". It was tough to convince her otherwise. Her logic was pretty sound. If something hurts, why do it more often?

The end result was that she'd have these periodic, toilet-plugging, epic, oh-my-god-even-daddy-doesn't-poop-that-much poops, about once a week, and the rest of the time, tiny amounts of stool would leak out into her panties. This irritated me to no end. My daughter soon realized that soiled panties resulted in an annoyed or mad father (FYI, this is textbook-quality bad parenting). So, then we had the problem where she'd try to hide the fact that she had soiled her panties. However, due to her young age, deception was a bit beyond her. She'd generally try saying something, out of the blue, like "Daddy! Don't look in my panties!" Her feeble attempts at trickery were so ineffective I almost felt like schooling her in the fine art of deception, but, wisely, I have not yet done so.

I soon realized that I needed to be more supportive and less annoyed if we were ever to make any progress. Of course this is the tactic my wife uses almost all the time, but I'm just not as good at this as she is. So, I've been making a concerted effort to mask my annoyance when she has a little "accident", which, luckily, doesn't happen nearly as often. Now, she merely does a poor job of wiping.

(One of the surprises of parenting was that kids don't just figure out how to wipe their butts. I never thought I'd have to explain to someone how to wipe. Weird. Evolution should have weeded out all the people who didn't wipe their butts well. Who is mating with these folks?)

So, when I help her get ready for bed, and I find soiled panties, or evidence of a poor wipe-job, I do my best to state very-matter-of-factly, "Whoops, looks like there's a little poopy on your bottom. Let's go get you cleaned up, sweetie.". Yesterday, my daughter turned to me and said, "Daddy! You don't sound mad at all!" I explained to her that I've been working on being a better parent and that there was no reason for me to be mad about poop. She replied with, "You're doing a great job, Dad!" and she gave me a big thumbs-up.

Wooo! Two thumbs up for my parenting!

Baseball season is upon us.

I wasn't always a baseball fan. In fact, for the majority of my life, I completely ignored it. I was never much of a sports fan and even less of an athlete. My few experiences with playing baseball were quite embarrassing. Unlike fast-paced sports like basketball or football, in baseball all attention gets focused on a single person performing some unnatural act, like hitting a baseball with a bat, or catching a zillion MPH baseball with an oversized novelty glove. Being an uncoordinated individual made these acts damn near impossible for me to perform. So, I had no interest in playing baseball and thus no interest in watching other people play it.

In fact, I never really understood why it was called America's Pasttime. Frankly, it doesn't really seem to fit in with the rest of sports entertainment that Americans enjoy. It's not fast-paced like basketball. It rarely has violence or major injuries like football, hockey, or NASCAR. There are no cheerleaders. What gives?

Then, about 10 years ago, I found myself commuting two hours a day. I got sick of my CDs fairly quickly and eventually turned to talk radio. One of those talk radio stations was a sports station. In general, I hate talk radio. Who wants to hear Joe Average spout off about anything? I'd rather hear someone knowledgeable. For the same reason, I will usually turn of the TV News when they start interviewing the Man On the Street about anything ("Oh, I voted for Schwarzenegger because I like him". Thanks for the insight, Joe). Anyway, sports Talk Radio was an exception for me. All these Joe Averages knew tons more about sports than I did. So, I kept listening. Then, baseball season started and my beloved sports talk was often replaced by baseball game broadcasts.

I learned something quickly. Baseball is GREAT on the radio. A good play-by-play announcer will paint an efficient and evocative picture. A good color announcer will weave in interesting analysis and stories. It's great background entertainment.

At one point the Giants had a 3-4-5 lineup of Matt Williams, Barry Bonds, and Darryl Strawberry. If you know anything about baseball (and I finally knew a little at this juncture), you know that that's an exciting set of batters to have in the heart of your batting order. For the first time in my life, I actually turned on a television to watch someone bat.

Now I follow the Giants fairly religiously. I got to 5-10 games a year and I watch, listen to, or read about the others. I read baseball books and blogs. I even have a fantasy baseball team or two. Baseball is a great sport for a nerd like me. Since I've always been interested in statistics (which still seems like an odd thing to me), baseball is the perfect sport. Sabermetricians have mined the 100+ years of baseball, with 162 games a year (these days), for all sorts of interesting results. And, one can hardly discount the appeal of cutting out of work during the week to catch a day game, then sitting in the sun with a beer and a hot dog. I may be a geek, but I'm not completely immune to the simple pleasures.

Anyway, this is a long way to go to say that the Giants don't have it this year and that makes me sad. Five words sum it up: "Your starting shortstop, Neifi Perez".

Ok, one more little bit of information here. I used to read a baseball site that ran a fantasy baseball game where the goal was the draft the WORST possible team. This was defined as having a team composed of the players who did the most damage to their team. So, a player who sits on the bench all day definitely does some damage to the team (uses up 1 of 25 roster spots), but a player who plays every day and stinks does more damage. So, the "best" teams in this league consisted of players who had convinced their managers to play them every day, but really stunk it up and didn't belong in the Major Leagues.

The top player in the backwards league, the player who caused the most damage to his team, was......Neifi Perez.

Brian Sabean, why hast thou forsaken me?