My Saturday

4:40AM - wake up inexplicably. Not able to go back to sleep. Come downstairs to balance the checkbook. That was regrettable.
7:30AM - meet my running group in Wheaton for our weekly run. Good group of people. Good run. Weather borderline awesome. Well, awesome for Chicagoland in March. In the low 30s when we started and tons of sunshine. We hadn't seen the sun for months.
10:30AM - the Boy and I go get breakfast at Tangerine. The blueberry multi-grain pancakes were fantastic. Run some errands, including going to see the new digs of the best running store, bar none, in America - the Naperville Running Company. They moved a couple of doors down into a much larger location. It remains completely awesome.
12:30PM - go to the local soulless haircut factory for a haircut. I didn't have to wait very long and for that I am grateful.
1:00PM - Costco. On a Saturday. Wow. I noticed that most of the shoppers were as wide as they were tall. It was borderline disturbing. I did have to laugh at one really, really big lady who was using her scooter throughout the store as a bully pulpit get positively incensed when she couldn't get around a mob of carts to get to one of the sample stations quickly enough. She wanted her piece of lamb something fierce.
3:00PM - Home. I like being home.

And that's where I've been the rest of the day. CAL is at work and the Boy wants to watch a movie. I'm not going out again so here's to hoping he can find something in our DVD collection. Good luck, Boy, good luck.

The horror that is "American Idol"

Last night I watched the first twenty minutes of "American Idol." These are twenty minutes that I will never, ever get back. I should have known better. I will never get those twenty minutes back. It was perhaps the worst twenty minutes of my life. In that time, I saw the most horrific parade of untalented singers I've ever witnessed. And these are supposed to be the finalists? When your lone hope and most "talented" person is a girl missing several discolored teeth, sporting dredlocks, and looking like she needs a shower in the worst way, you're no longer on a trumped up karaoke contest, you're on "America's Most Wanted." And not wanted in a good way. For me, the horror is over. I just need to figure out how to get those twenty minutes back. Maybe I can sue Simon Cowell...

A Sunday Nap

This may sound like something so incredibly trivial, so not worthy of a post, but to me, it's just short of monumental. This afternoon, I took a real, honest-to-goodness nap. A nap. Really. The hour long break I got today fits the definition of the word in NAP in dictionary.com.

I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've taken a Sunday nap in my adult life that I can recall. It's simply not often that my Sunday schedule allows it. Calling it a day of rest is a bit of a misnomer when you are serving in our Church. But I'm not complaining. I'd even call this afternoon's nap a blessing. I got my day of rest. It's all good.

Dating Rituals of the American Teen

As the father of two girls and now a son who is a teenager, I've always been a bit unnerved by seeing them get into the dating scene. With Our Lady of BYU 1,400 miles away in school, she's far enough away where I can claim plausible deniability, which is fine with me. Besides, she never tells me a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g (I am telling you she may know where Osama is and no one would ever know from her), so that makes my deniability all the more plausible.

With CAL, it's a different story. She's here and there's nowhere for me to hide and deny. This past week I've had some unique insight into the fascinating world of teen dating. While we are still in the thick of a never-ending winter here in the Midwest, CAL's high school is getting ready for the big shindig that is the Spring Dance. This is one of the dances where it is tradition for the girls to ask the boys. So CAL and several of her girl friends decided to ask a bunch of boys and have planned a fun night. The invitation process, as it turns out, is elaborate. Each girl did her own thing. To ask her "date," CAL went with a fish theme. She bought three gold fish, put them in a fishbowl, and took them over to his house, with a note referencing all the fish in the sea that ended with asking him to the dance.

Said young man responded today. Here's his response:
A goldfish, as seen from the 2nd floor of our house. Really. It is. I promise.

So he said yes and now we've moved onto the DRAMA of finding a dress. I say we, but the only role I will have in this is paying for it, which is fine by me. CAL is being a real trooper as she tries to find a dress that doesn't look like it was bought at Whores 'R Us. Which, quite frankly, is virtually impossible. But I'm confident she and the stunningly patient SML will find the right one. Better her than me, that's all I'm saying.