Sunday, February 7, 2010

toby of the day: I spy something that begins with the letter 'C'

So for the past month or two, I’ve been thinking about making an end of the year post, the sort of post that could make up for all the spotty posting of the last few months, the sort of post that could fill you in on some of the year's highlights --toby’s first camping trip in Yosemite with 30 of our closest friends; proudest moments --toby has memorized much of the soundtrack to Dr. horrible’s sing-a-long blog and belts it from the highest point he can find, usually the cat scratching post while wearing oversized gloves and doing lots of elaborate arm movements; greatest betrayals --in conjunction with the previous section, toby spurned the hand stitched alligator costume that I made him for Halloween and instead dressed as captain hammer. Although, in truth, this really also belongs in the proudest moments section; and general craziness --our new motto is ‘Sunday is the new Friday’ because, in our pre-toby days we could drink many drinks on Friday and use Saturday to recover. We can no longer do this because toby begins screaming “mama. . .maMA!” at 7am sharp every day, even, much to our chagrin, on Saturdays when we are responsible for watching him the rest of the day which he seems to believe involves more than laying in bed watching movies on the laptop in between naps. However, if you treat Sunday as Friday, you can hand him off to the daycare Monday morning, assuming you can manage to dress him and endure the train ride, and then you have the rest of the day to treat as a Saturday, wallowing in bed and watching the likes of Point Break. I should point out that, as you might imagine, jon was a wee bit intoxicated on the Sunday afternoon when he came up with our new motto. Consequently, we haven’t yet decided whether it is the best idea we’ve ever had, or the one that will ultimately lead to our destruction, or at the least a stern reprimand from the people who sign our paychecks. So far though, I’d say it’s been a rousing success.

However, in the midst of all this, we’ve also been applying for jobs. This has been problematic for me in two respects. First, is the fact that after 45 applications, I have not gotten any jobs. While this supports my contention that I would be better off as a baker, it does not do much to boost my own morale. Second, and perhaps more troubling is that jon has gotten some jobs, well, one so far. Which is great, or would be great except that it is in a place so strange, so frightening, so unbelievable that I almost can’t bring myself to mention it. That place, of course, is iowa. It presents me with a similar dilemma as one I confronted the other day when a friend of Toby’s came down with scabies. Because scabies is such a perfectly silly yet creepy name for a disease and at the same time, at least I had thought, such a sufficiently obscure disease that you can use it whenever you need to make light of some other sickness e.g. “if you go to fred’s house, watch out for scabies! Ha ha!” Now, I have to rethink my go-to joke disease, to something like, oh I don’t know, botulism or myxomatosis. See, it’s hard to find a good replacement for scabies. Iowa had been my scabies, as in “you live in Rwanda? Wow, well, at least you’re not living in iowa, am I right?!? Ha ha!” and yet now our living there is no longer impossible. In fact, it is quickly gaining traction in the realm of things that are possible. Faster than I can say scabies. And that is very scary. Very scary indeed. You see, after half a dozen moves over my lifetime, I have finally found a home here in San Francisco which, sadly, is the one place that I cannot continue to live without jon and I both making a drastic career change. And since we’ve never really had the chance to try out the career that we’ve been practicing towards for the past 14 years, I feel like we should give that one a try. Only thing is, we very well might have to give it a try in iowa. Anyway, as you can imagine, all this thinking about my future in some cornfield has left me without much energy for writing quick witticisms. In fact, I bet that you’re feeling like this is the point in the post where I would usually change the tone, start pointing out all the bright sides to the current predicament, how living in iowa will be a great opportunity to join an older ladies bowling league or learn about the intricacies of thunder-snow or watch more television, but I’m just not there yet. Someday I might be. But not today. So until then, here are some pictures of toby, may he never come down with a case of scabies, or iowa.

3 comments:

chickenncookies said...

Same-sex marriage is legal in Iowa. Iowa 1, CA 0.

Poser said...

I second chickenncookies. Iowa might be an upgrade in the sanity department. Cool state bike tour (ragbrai).

IB said...

respectfully disagree.