End of Silence

When your wife calls you at 5:30 at work to tell you that there’s water pouring out the front door of your house?

I say, “Fuck!”

I thought I wasn’t going to have problems with birthdays making me feel old until I turned 40. I neglected to take into account that some else’s birthday might do it. The Boy turned 6 yesterday. I can’t be the father of a 6-year-old.

I haven’t posted much lately because things have been nuts. We’ve been in the process of getting a new roof on the house for three or four weeks and we finally finished this week. I still have to figure out how we’re going to pay for it, but it looks pretty good. In addition to replacing the shingles and the flat roof portion, adding/removing various venting systems and flashing and replacing rotted siding and eaves, we’re also still going to replace a rotted back door and will need to paint all of the new woodwork. It’s just primed right now to match the two year old unfinished paint job courtesy of me in the front entry area. We’re either going to paint the whole damn house or just the primed stuff depending on the estimates.

We had Thanksgiving in Dallas with my Great Uncle from Worthen, England. He’s the last of my grandfathers brothers still with us. I went to see Helmet the first night in town. It was good to see them again after all these years. I went with an old high school friend whom I haven’t talked to much lately. It was a nostalgic evening all around.

My band, The Bad Rackets (I had nothing to do with the site design. In fact, I’ll be re-doing it as soon as I finish a few other prior obligations), had another gig Thursday night with Ugly Beats, Blue Flames and Faster Disasters. Our next show is an early one at Beerland on Saturday, December 18th. The Wife and I ate at Stubb’s before our show at Room 710. We saw Lance Armstrong who was attending some sort of cycling dude dinner. We decided not to hassle him.

We put our tree up last night and attended the KUT Holiday Sing-a-long. It was a little harder to get into the holiday spirit with temperatures near 70, but it was fun.

I signed myself up for Holidailies this year, so there’ll be a lot more activity this month. I’m hoping that I’ll have the time to live up to the commitment. I already screwed up and didn’t mention the Holiday Sing-a-long on Metroblogging

As some of you may know, my father-in-law works for Morning Edition. He’s been part of the production staff almost since the show’s inception and sometimes reads the voiceover translations for the stories that air. This morning, he was the voice of an Iraqi kidnapped at gunpoint (it’s the first story listed on the linked page). In the past, I’ve heard him as a Chinese AIDS activist. I’m almost always on the way to work in my car and a little bit groggy when I hear him. It’s just a little surreal to be half-listening to a story on the radio and suddenly realize that it’s your father-in-law talking about having a gun to his head while being kidnapped in Baghdad.

We all headed down to San Antonio on Friday morning to celebrate my mother-in-law’s 60th birthday. My in-laws flew in on Thursday afternoon and we met my brother-in-law and his boyfriend in S.A. on Friday afternoon. We hit some new places and some that we discovered on our last trip.

Our first stop was the Havel camera shop, the nearest authorized service center for my malfunctioning Fujifilm 3800. They took a look at it and informed me that it’d be $138 to fix and would have to be sent to the main Fujifilm service center, which means that we’d be without a camera for roughly four weeks. Since we don’t get down to San Antonio too often, I had to make a spot decision whether it was going to be worth it to pay to get the current camera fixed or buy a new one. It looks like relatively comparable new cameras are going for about $200-$250 these days. I decided to fix the old one. I hope I don’t end up regretting that decision. My mother-in-law took plenty of pictures, so I’ll have to try and get some of those if I’m going to post anything of the kids anytime soon.

We had a good time on the trip, hitting our old favorite, Liberty Bar, on Friday night for dinner. We had an old-fashioned lunch at Olmo’s pharmacy at McCullough and Hildebrand. The malts were very good. The Boy dug weighing himself on the old scale they have at the front. We went to the San Antonio Children’s Museum on Saturday morning. It was a huge hit with The Boy and The La found enough things to keep her interested. The S. A. Children’s Museum puts the Austin Children’s Museum to shame. We had lunch at Schilo’s and tapas for dinner at Club Cohiba which is in the basement of the Havana Riverwalk Inn. Sunday brunch was at Mad Hatter’s, just down the street from the place we stayed last October. We managed to sneak out for a few hours Saturday night and hit Zen (beware of ridiculously long flash load time if you decide to visit their web site), simply because it was right next to our hotel and La Tuna, still one of the coolest places to grab a beer. Ever.