Welcome to my stuff

You know what this site lacks? A regular feature. All the best bloggers are doing it. You know what I mean, right? I'm talking about those bloggers that have this regular thing they do each week? I enjoy checking out theendisnow.com where once a week the author features the marquis of a nearby church. Blonde Vigilante puts up one of her own fiction pieces and every Wednesday on The Search for a Good Story Mr. Orange writes about his family.

The marquis idea is a good one, but it's taken. I frankly don't have enough fiction pieces to make that a regular feature, and writings about my family at this early stage in parenthood would consist of little more than eating, cooing and pooing. But I'll think of something. I'm warning you though that when it comes to this sort of thing, I'm not good at long-term committments, so I'm not promising much. How about five simple installments? Of what, you ask? Hell, I don't know. Stuff, I guess.

Stuff.

Hmmm.

OK then. Without further ado, I bring you the first edition of Welcome to My Stuff™.

The stuff you see pictured above hangs in the corner of our sunroom. We love our sunroom. And our stuff. Originally we were going to paint the room a boring beige color and wallpaper one wall in a tea-stained floral print to give the space that Parisian budget hotel look, but I eventually picked this sunflower yellow from the Martha Stewart collection instead. We love Martha. And her stuff.

The bright color of the walls gives off a warm feeling and for the European touch we were looking for, we decided to deck the room with, among other things, remnants of our various pre-parental travels. I guess you could call this corner the Prague corner because smack dab in the middle of the picture is a marionette hanging from the ceiling that we got during our trip to Prague. We call him Barbu which is French for "guy with a beard."

You may wonder why if this guy came from the Czech Republic would we give him a French name. Well, for starters my knowledge of the Czech language is limited to a few simple courtesy phrases, "guy with a beard" not being one of them, and furthermore even if I did know how to say "guy with a beard" in Czech, it would most likely be 19 syllables and consist mostly of oddly accented characters not found on my keyboard.

Anyway when we were in Prague two years ago they hadn't yet switched totally over to the euro so doing the currency conversion between dollars and crowns seemed to involve first calculating the derivative for the natural log and then multiplying it by the square root of the current Julian date. I never did get the hang of it, and as a result I discovered shortly after buying Barbu that for what I spent on him I could have just as easily purchased another off-season round-trip ticket to Europe. Oh well, you live and learn.

To Barbu's left is a small metal replica of a Czech street sign that says PRAHA. Praha is Czech for Prague. Are you keeping up in case there's a vocab quiz later? The sepia-toned photo underneath is a postcard depicting one of Prague's tram cars in the 1950s. Other pictures shown are the inside of a hot air balloon we rode in one Mystery Date early on in our dating days, some framed postcards bought in San Francisco, and two gifted posters.

My sister gave us the poster for Orangina and Elaine's sister gave us the one for the 1950s Book Fair. The latter was bought with the assumption that we would hang it in the baby's room, but we liked it too much to hang it where we would only see it during late-night feedings and messy diaper changes.

In the upper-left corner of the photo is an alligator sitting atop a wooden bowl filled with wine corks. The alligator is really only my stuff in the marital sense of what's your stuff is my stuff. It belonged to Elaine before we were married but he's cool enough that I now would want to consider him my stuff, as opposed to the extensive shoe collection she brought into the marriage which I would consider simply still her stuff. You can't really tell this in the picture but he's actually a stuffed animal. Not one I'd let my kid curl up with at night but one she might, once toddler years strike, point to and demand I get down for her to look at, carry around, and then leave for the dog to claim as his own when she's dropped it in the backyard. Meryl, the alligator is a look-but-don't-touch kind of toy.

As for the cork bowl, it was moved up on top of the hutch from its original location on our coffee table in the living room. Whenever we returned home from work, we would notice that some of the corks would have mysteriously disappeared. We knew the cat was the main culprit because sometimes we'd come home to find him meowing frustratedly at the oven and trying to reach underneath it to retrieve something. When Elaine or I would get the yardstick and poke around under the stove, seven or eight corks would come rolling out. Sometimes the dog would get in on the action and snatch one up to chew into tiny slobbery indigestible pieces. I should point out that not all the corks are from wine we drank ourselves.

Some are from champagnes.

The behemoth radio with the antenna that extends further than I can reach was a gift from my father-in-law. He has one of his own and claims he can get radio stations from all over the Western hemisphere. Admittedly at Sangean.com (the people who manufacture the radio) they say you can use it to pick up Morse code, military broadcasts and encrypted messages. One day I messed with it for hours trying to get something recognizable to come in on the shortwave band, but it was to no avail. We use it to listen to Garrison Keillor on NPR.

Well, there you have it, the first edition of Welcome to My Stuff™. I hope you've found it entertaining if not enlightening. I told you I wasn't going to promise much. If you ever come over for cocktails you can see it in person. Just don't touch my stuff.

Ok, you can touch the shortwave if you think you can get it pick up something other than Lake Wobegon.