Why I Oughta...

Nat, the babe and I were up in Michigan for the past few days - and we were set to stay up there next week on vacation, but circumstances arose that required us to come home. My family loves the lake during the summer.  Everyone competes for weekends.  In fact...there's even a calendar and draft! But...for me?  I think I might prefer the winter.  It is calm.  Quiet.  Pretty.  We just light the fireplace (we used to read, but now with the babe...not so much) and relax.  I'm glad we got to spend a little bit of time up there, but I wanted more.  So glad we're going to be able to go up after voting for a few more days of respite.

Coming home from class two nights a week, I get to barely see the babe before she's off to **bed** for the night.  (I'm using 'bed' loosely.  It really is a bassinet at the side of our bed and she's in and out of it throughout the night for feedings and changings and what-not.) It is a wonderful feeling to come home to a family and one that makes me race home safely each night.  When I do get to spend some time trying to get her to sleep we share a little song together.  One that was pointed out to me by my good friend Neil as a good lullaby.  He was right.  It's a good daddy/daughter number.  For all those dads out there, hopefully you can share this with your babe's too!

If you know the difference between, say, a  Holtzapffel-style cabinet maker's bench and a split-top Roubo-style workbench , then this post will not impress you. (Bill Fox...I'm looking in your direction.) But...those of you guys who are cramped up in a condo somewhere on the northside and long for a little man-retreat, then you're going to be jealous! Anyway...back to the story.  Starting a few weeks back, I began to beat my cabin fever by beginning to organize our basement.  Our basement is probably like a lot of basements: unfinished, messy, damp, and quite a bit disorganized. During construction (or re-construction), the basement housed just about everything we owed that wasn't in our POD - and it was messy down there.  Once we moved in, we started to put everything that didn't have a home down there.  Over time, I bought some shelving units and began to put some of our stuff on the shelves, but in no particular order. We then inherited some of my siste

On Saturday night, Nat, the babe and I packed into the family truckster and went out into the night to find a place to grab a meal.  We headed south towards Oak Brook and began to call a few places.  Not one but 7 places we called had waits of longer than an hour.  Some had waits as long as 3 hours!  It was 6:30, so in the 'burbs, that is prime dinner time. We used to be 8 or 8:30 dinner folks, but not any more.  Now we're competing with every Chad and Michelle and their 4 kids in the western suburbs for a table at Maggiano's. After driving across town and back for an hour, we headed back to Elmhurst settling on grabbing a pie at Pizza Palace in downtown.  We called ahead and they had plenty of tables open.  But, as luck would have it, we took a different route home and passed by a place called the Silverado Grill .  I had heard "things" about the Grill, so we popped in.  When we got there, there was a couple waiting for a table, but the restaurant had open on

A few weeks back I was over at Harpo Studios talking all things Google with the production team and art department.  We have a few things moving forward - including Oprah using Google Earth for all broadcast maps now - and a few other things up in the air (fun things)! I was there with a fellow Googler and we both got a short tour of the studio.  Here's us below. The one thing that isn't in this photo - and hard not to discuss - is that each seat in the studio comes with house-supplied kleenex. So you don't have to worry that when Oprah plays with your heart-strings, they have you covered from a clean-up perspective.

At work, when you plan to take leave they invite you to a "baby shower" - it really is just a video conferenced meeting with a bunch of other dads from around the company.  The HR team walks you through the whole process and what details of the benefits are for the time you are away. After the "shower", in my inter-office mailbox was one of those yellow envelopes with all the lines on them.  I had a package from Mountain View. Inside?  Baby clothes!  Guess who's feeling lucky today?

This past summer and fall, I had a bunch of projects that required some power tools to complete.  I built a deck, put up bookshelves, put up a fence, and built a small pergola and gates - all things around the house that needed to get done. I've begun to build up my collection of tools - like hammers, sanders, clamps, and drills, but I didn't yet have a circular saw.  Anyone who's done any sort of carpentry will tell you that one universal tool that you'll use over and over is a 7 1/4" circular saw. Embarking on these projects actually required one.  I need to make a bunch of cuts and I didn't want to hack at them by hand. That's where my family comes in. First, because he was lending a hand on the deck, I borrowed my father-in-law's saw.  He had a real nice saw with a laser so you could see where you were cutting.  Because the saw is fairly indispensable, he needed it back shortly after I got it because he had projects of his own he had to tac

Last Friday, Nat, I, the babe and Nat's parents went to Barnaby's Family Inn in Des Plaines for pizza and beer.  For those of you who've never heard of or been to a Barnaby's, well...this hopefully will convince you to take the time to go. The back story to our history with Barnaby's is that both of Nat's parents are graduates of Notre Dame.  We were headed there for a football game a few falls ago and asked her folks where a good post-game bite to eat could be had.  Both of them volunteered the same thing:  Barnaby's. Turns out, it is an old pizza place a few miles from the stadium.  They told us to try the sausage pizza.  We went in with little expectations aside from satisfying our hunger. Little did we know that we'd start a personal pizza revolution in our own house.  This place was that good. The Barnaby's we went to in Des Plaines is set up exactly like the one in South Bend (and I imagine every other one in the country ).  There'

Over the weekend we had some of Nat's friends over to say hello and see the babe.  Nat said that we couldn't just put out a partially eaten sleeve of saltines and sugared fruit slices; we had to pull something together for a brunch-ish crowd. Now....I'm not normally the baker in our house - that's Nat's domain.  But with her having her hands full (with the child-rearing and all), it was time to play flour scientist and bake up a cake of sorts - a coffee cake. For my birthday a few years ago, my mom started to give us a Cooks Illustrated subscription.  She renews it every April and I've come to enjoy thumbing through it each month.  I've occasionally referred to it when making something (like potatoes in the oven), but I've never baked anything from their pages. Aside from the crazy quantities (you can sense that they really did tinker with them - I mean what's with all the 1/8 of a teaspoons!  We don't even have one of those!), we didn'

Earlier this summer, my sister and her kids came to stay with us.  They weren't here too long, but in that short time we had a ball.  She has two young kids - a girl and a boy.  The boy is 6, the girl is 9. We learned a lot about our house and it's ability to handle kids.  It wasn't bad, but we had some things that we have to come to grips with (like NEVER BUY ANYTHING NICE!) now that we're parents. One day this summer, my sister's son gets in trouble for something usual for boys like running around like a crazy person or eating his beyond messy sandwich on the couch or punching his sister.  As a punishment, his mom puts him in "time out" - which all you parents know about - for 30 minutes.  He couldn't play the Wii or even watch tv.  He had to sit in a chair in his room for the whole time. Being an ingenious boy, he asked his mom if he could borrow the kitchen timer so he could tell how long he'd been in "time out" (I think he thou