Engineer Archive

Kurt made me promise that I wouldn’t blame him for the way Sophia was dressed since I told him to let her choose what she wanted to wear, so I won’t. It’s really my fault. I told him to let her choose her own clothes. I assumed that any normal human being would know that they need to select either the top or the bottom themselves and then give the toddler two or three choices of the other that are known to match. Kurt didn’t do that. He laid out three random bottoms and three random tops. I have pictures of the results. Please be warned that they my burn your eyes.

Sophia was oddly hyper that day (2/8/10). It may have been due to the bright color selection or it’s also possible that her selection was a reflection of her mood. I had such a hard time getting a good shot of her that I started running up and down the stairs hoping that would slow her down enough for me to focus on her. I put her hair up in a ponytail and wanted pictures of that, so Kurt tried to help me by holding her, and upside-down. Then she ran in and out of her room giggling as Kurt chased her. He finally caught the elusive toddler again to complete her look for the day. Those are dress shoes he’s putting on her, with socks, she insisted.

Yes, she actually went out in public looking like that. We aren’t cruel. It was her choice.

This weekend since we had a birthday party to go to on Sunday, we (Kurt) spent Saturday doing little projects around the house that he hadn’t completed when we moved in six years ago. Shut UP. When we moved in Kurt put in hardwood floors and sealed most of the nail holes with putty, but not all.

This nail putty is nail polish remover with wood chips in it. Just pick a can the coordinates with the color wood and when the polish remover evaporates, presto, little wood plug.

I went around the house doing laundry and collecting trash from our many little trash cans. Sophia occupied herself in her room for once, but after about twenty minutes, she became bored and wanted to play with daddy. At this point Kurt was working on the steps leading to the top floor, so much like a cat would while you read a paper or book, Sophia laid right in the way.

Kurt was filling the holes on the bottom step and Sophia laid across the step above with one arm and one leg dangling in the way. His routine was adjusted accordingly to, move toddler arm, putty, putty, move toddler leg, putty, putty, move toddler to next step up.

Last night Sophia was laying across the steps again. Kurt told me about telling this story to a coworker then asked Sophia, “Do you remember helping daddy finish the stairs?”

“YES!”

“Did you get your first contact high?”

“YES!”

After work Kurt’s job is to entertain the child while I fix dinner. If she’s too rowdy to sit on his lap and watch the news they start roughhousing and he’ll swing her by the arms and toss her on the couch…repeatedly. If I happen to be upstairs at the time, Kurt arrives from work it becomes our bed instead of the couch.

Instead of swinging her by the arms it more of a pillow softball game, Sophia will stand up on the bed giggling uncontrollably and Kurt will swing a pillow at her. He doesn’t swing nor hit her with enough force to actually knock her down, but she purposely falls upon impact. This game could go on forever.

Last week Kurt and Sophia played this game. On one occasion after knocking the toddler down, Kurt put the pillow down at the head of the bed. Sophia got up from her fall, saw that Kurt didn’t have his ammo, retrieved a pillow, and handed it to him to continue the game. Kurt laughed and obligingly hit her with the pillow, then set it down to come tell me about it.

As Kurt tells me the story we hear the most pathetic little cry, “daddy”. She sounded like she was either in tears or near tears. Kurt ran up the stairs to see her leaning off the edge of the bed, holding a pillow.

The motorcycle rolls in, “Daddy’s home,” I say. She runs to the window watching him check the mail, then runs to the top of the stairs. “Eh-Low!” She shouts.

“He can’t hear you from there.” Down the stairs she goes, pushes open the door purposely left ajar, “Eh-low, eh-low, eh-low”. She says in rapid fire.

Flash Fiction Friday is hosted by g-man. You may also visit Flash Fiction Friday 55’s, a blog dedicated to hosting 55 Flash Fiction Friday posts.

The Laura as you know from yesterday’s post is our couch. Last year my parents bought Sophia her own couch and it’s pink with Dora the Explorer all over it. We dubbed it The Dora, it’s The Laura’s illegitimate child.

We keep some of Sophia’s toys in the living room. We can mostly push them back and sort of make them blend in. The Dora is not something that blends well. It’s not that we don’t want it to look like we have a kid, we just don’t like making it look like the kid took over the entire house. Dora has lived largely in Sophia’s room. That is, until not-a-nanny (AKA Smarmoofus) came to visit this year.

Kurt and I had talked about covering The Dora so that Sophia could have her couch in the living room but we never got around to doing anything about it. Smarmy dragged me to the fabric store and I found three yards of red upholstery that somewhat matches The Laura and three yards of a mossy color upholstery that somewhat matches The Farris. All of it was on clearance and all for nine dollars.

Smarmoofus and I finished most of it before she left and Kurt and I finally got around to putting the finishing touches on it Sunday.

We figure Sophia will be able to relate to the new Muppet Couch since she has watched all the first season Muppet shows. She’s never seen the Dora the Explorer show, and that’s not a hidden request for Dora videos.

For two years after Kurt and I moved in together we had two couches. One was his red leather couch, which our cat was slowly destroying with his back claws as he dug in for powerful lift-offs across the room, and then there was my couch. My couch was some black velvet-like 80’s couch with rainbow colored glittery pinstripes. Don’t laugh it was free! I promptly covered it. The cover for my free couch cost $50. You may laugh now.

Almost six years ago we bought our current house and soon after that sold Kurt’s couch because our living room was too small for two. We needed more seating so we purchased two Ikea chairs. About three years ago, we decided it was time to toss the free couch and buy a real couch both of us liked and that wouldn’t get destroyed by our cat’s jackrabbit impressions.

We probably went to every furniture store in the county and a few outside the county. We went everywhere! Finally, we went to La-Z-Boy. I always thought they only sold recliners and had cheap furniture. Not that I wanted something super ‘high end’, but I didn’t want anything that would fall apart after a couple years either. Turns out, I just don’t know jack about brand names and such. I absolutely fell in love with a curved couch and the huge ottoman in front of it. We looked at everything in the store, but I kept coming back to that one.

La-Z-Boy doesn’t refer to their furniture by model numbers. They use proper names, so anytime the sales lady heard me refer to *that couch* she would say, “The Laura”. “Umm yeah, that one. The curved one, with the ottoman.”
“The Tasha”

After Kurt sat on everything in the store at least twice, including the recliners that tilt forward to help old people back onto their feet, he finally agreed that was the couch for us. We picked out colors and fabrics for the couch and the pillows and then went through the process of completing the sale. One of the other sales people stuck up a conversation with us while we waited for paperwork.

Our sales woman to sales man: They’re buying The Laura
Sales man: Oh, are you buying a chair too?
Kurt: No, not yet, but once we see it with the Ikea chairs we’ll probably come back

The man looked like Kurt had just killed his favorite pet right in front of him and ate the heart.

Sales man: You’re going to put Ikea chairs next to The Laura?
Kurt: No, we’re putting The Laura next to Ikea chairs. We had them first.

If it hadn’t been for that exchange we would have never bothered to remember the names of our furniture. We did go back weeks later for a chair and bought the Farris.

Today is Sophia’s appointment for an evaluation on her lack of speech, finally. I reminded Kurt last night and he said to her, “When I get home tomorrow I expect you to be talking.” Imitating how she should sound he told her what he expected to hear. In a stuffy British accent he said, “Oh daddy, I expect your day was exceptional.”

You know how in cartoons if the character is baffled by the actions of another you’ll hear a tinny clinking sound and the character will blink several times. I swear Sophia did that. I think I even heard the blinking sound. “Are you going to say that when I get home tomorrow?” He asked her. “No” she said without any delay.

While watching a commercial about erectile dysfunction weeks ago, Kurt took the time to work with Sophia’s existing vocabulary.

Kurt: Do you have erectile dysfunction?
Sophia: No
Kurt: Do you have prostate cancer?
Sophia: No
Kurt: Do you even have a prostate?
Sophia: No
Kurt to me: She’s already ahead of the other toddlers, she even knows Biology.

I hate laundry day. It’s not that we have huge piles of clothes all over the place to collect since I’m a stay-at-home mom I can keep on top of that stuff now, maintaining the laundry at a dull laundry roar. I did often fell behind when I was working. On one occasion it got so bad that after Kurt told me he needed sock or underwear or something he went and stacked all the laundry in such a way that it was literally up to the ceiling. Yes, in the time it took him to achieve that he could have put a load in the washer himself, but this is Kurt and it’s more important to Kurt to be an ass.

It’s also not that I have to haul our clothing from the top floor where the bedrooms reside to the bottom floor of our tri-level home or that there aren’t any handrails on said stairs because Kurt never put them back in even while I was pregnant with Sophia, nope it’s not that. Nor does it have to do with the stealthy moves I’m required to choreograph in order to get Sophia’s favorite crunchy blanket and formerly white polar bear away from her to have them incinerated washed and dried by naptime.

Sometimes I can feel my knees and back aging years while doing laundry, but that isn’t my problem with laundry day either. The issue is Kurt’s motorcycle t-shirts. He has a friend that travels all over to see motorcycle races and Kurt always gives him a little cash for a new T as if he doesn’t have enough. He has so many motorcycle T-shirts that one time that he had to dress up for a meeting at work and everyone thought he bought the clothes special for that day. Since every shirt comes from some special place and is some edition only available at that particular race and some of them have been signed I have the special task of trying to keep ever shirt in pristine condition.

I wash all of our laundry in cold so no worries there, but the drier tends to ruin things and so I hang dry the special T’s, all of them. There isn’t any room for sweaters of mine, which actually have tags that specify, “Lay flat to dry”. T-shirts don’t have that. At all. Ever.

After several trips up and down the stairs hauling dirty laundry down and clean laundry back up and then folding it all I leave Kurt’s things stacked neatly on the bed. When he gets home, or more specifically, just before he crawls into bed for the night, he will remove the piles from the bed and place them on his dresser. I do all that work and he just puts them ON the dresser! His dresser has a small TV on it so as he stacks clothes up the side of the TV to the top, he then adds a pile to the top of the TV that straddles to the other pile in support. He doesn’t do this all the time mind you, just often enough that it pisses me off-fa-fah.

I would put them away myself but his clothes organization system is much too complex and rather arbitrary considering he’s an engineer. He has a three pile sorting system just for T-shirts, one pile for new and pristine shirts, one for ‘older’ shirts and a third for ‘almost out the door but will actually never make it to the trash shirts’. I could help them find their way into the trash but that would illicit similar reactions as separating Sophia from her blanket or polar bear but on a grander scale.

On the upside Sophia’s blanket has had all the crunchiness removed and her polar bear no longer has spiked fur and is back to being white. She missed him so much that when she saw him appear in the rocking chair in her room she grabbed him, brought him down to the living room, climbed into the recliner, and shared milk from her sippy cup with him. She would take a sip and then offer it up.

My laptop resides upstairs in our spare room right next to Sophia’s room. I can of course move it and use it anywhere, but usually that’s where I am if I’m using the computer. Kurt’s computer is a desktop and lives in the man cave.

After Sophia goes to bed, at eight, I turn off my speakers so that any site I happen to land on with sound won’t blast her awake. If I have a question, comment, or complaint for Kurt and he happens to be at his computer, rather than shout or walk all the way downstairs I will use the text feature on Skype.

Tonight I was on IRC with a friend coordinating her flight out here. Kurt was watching TV at the time so I went down to see how long we should invite her to say with us. “fourty-five minutes to an hour” he says. He’s such an ass.

Later Kurt went downstairs to his cave. I sent the proposed itinerary to him on Skype. I commented to him on how long she would be traveling for her return trip, I drop her off at the airport at 9pm and she wouldn’t arrive home until 9am the following morning. That sparked the following conversation between Kurt and Smarmoofus though me. Kurt Skyped the text to me and I pasted it onto IRC to Smoofy, and the other way around from Smoofy to Kurt.

Kurt: Of course it’s long. She needs to transfer planes 3 times, then get on a riverboat and go upstream 24 miles, then get on a mule and go 14 miles through a swamp.

Smoofy: He forgot about the canyon pass…

Kurt: I was thinking about that, but I figured Ar-Kansas probably doesn’t have any passes.

I’m such a geek and now I’m blogging about it. I think this must complete a geek mission and I should be leveling up at any minute.