toby of the day, something about a sunday

Sometimes on Sundays we look at houses. We find them accidentally as we wander around the neighborhood, or in once in a while we even search them out on craig’s list. Mind you, we are nowhere near solvent enough to ever buy property here in the city that is not part of a superfund site. We just like looking. Anyway, the other day, on our way to go swimming, we stopped into one. We used to be somewhat self-conscious about doing this and would comb our hair or at least wear deodorant but mostly we don’t bother anymore. On this particular day, jon and toby were both wearing their swimsuits. I was wearing my “weekend” pants. I should point out that my job, which mostly involves me sitting in a room by myself all day, has absolutely no dress code. Consequently, for me to have decided that a particular pair of pants is somehow inappropriate for wearing during the week says a lot about that pair of pants. This pair of pants I had designated as “weekend pants” more than a year ago. They are not pants worn to impress people. And most certainly, they are not the pants of someone looking to spend 1.5 million on a house. Or so we thought. Whether it was a sign of the friendliness and tendency to avoid stereotyping here in San Francisco, or the utter desperation created by an abysmal housing market, I can’t say, but the realtor would not let us leave. Of course, it never helps that when people ask what we do, and we say we are neuroscientists, you can almost see the dollar signs fall over their eyes like some cartoon as they immediately imagine that we are neurosurgeons. we are not neurosurgeons. Anyway, she just kept handing us stacks of business cards and leaflets and telling us about the school system, suggesting that maybe we should consider a condo if this wasn’t quite what we were looking for and giving us contact information for her finance guy (who I imagine would be unable to control his laughter when we told him our income). Finally some more gawkers arrived and we were able to slip out the back. It did give us plenty to chuckle about during our walk up the hill to the pool, who knew a housing crisis could be so much fun. Maybe next time, I won’t wear any pants at all.

toby of the day, why we no longer answer your calls

Recently we got a new telephone. In addition to providing us with a phone that will actually charge, it has lead to a new game where toby points at the phone while yelling “hide it!” at which point I hide the receiver while he pushes the page button. Sometimes the game continues as toby searches the apartment following the sound of the phone, although just as often he is immediately distracted by books, balls, or pieces of lint that he encounters between the page button and the phone receiver and the phone just beeps for a few minutes before finally giving out. Regardless, it has made the entire phone answering process more challenging since now after ensuring that the person calling is someone we might wish to speak to, we have to scurry about and find the receiver before the person talking to the answering machine just gives up. I feel that these types of daily adventures are what are going to keep the Alzheimer’s at bay, at least until we become crazed hermits because we’ve lost the phone entirely. In any case you should always leave us a long message to give us time to dig through the closet or crawl out from under the bed.

toby of the day, extremely belated holiday edition

In addition to the towels and singing card, toby also got some puzzles from my father. Having watched the video of toby hurling balls around the living room, my dad decided to play it safe and buy him puzzles rather than potential projectiles. However, little does he know that most anything reasonably round can constitute a ball, for example the small radish from the vegetable puzzle is almost a circle and therefore spends it’s time flying through the air to screams of “a ball!”

Jon and I used to wonder what sort of holiday traditions we would follow because while we don’t believe in either of the magical men associated with Christmas, we do have fond memories of the holidays from when we were kids. Fortunately, it turns out that toby has decided on our holiday tradition for us: we will spend our time off huddled inside and full of phlegm. Last year, we canceled our trip to Portland because toby had come down with his first cold. This year, toby’s temperature shot up on the Tuesday before christmas while we were out and about downtown. It was high enough that even after some giving him some Tylenol on the muni, it had only gone down to 102 by the time we arrived at home. After about 30 hours though, he was mostly recovered, and decidedly chipper. This was perhaps because he had managed to hand that cold off to jon and I. Unlike toby, we held on tight to that cold so that even a week later, Jon still had a hacking cough, and I had an upper respiratory and ear infection. Yes, an EAR infection. what kind of adult woman gets an ear infection, you ask. apparently this kind. anyway, maybe next year we can teach him some Christmas carols or actually buy him some gifts ourselves or something and head this whole holiday cold thing off at the pass. I don’t know though, it’s hard to fight tradition.