For a few seconds, anyway.

Little Dude is sneaky. Still, we’ve found his early morning sneakiness (IE- raiding the cupboard and subsequently enjoying his slice of pilfered heaven while hiding under a blanket) trends on the heels of a candy/ice cream shopping trip or some kind of treat bonanza the night before.  Enter, Lady-Friend and her recent shopping trip.

Lady-Friend is tough, but she’s no match for the power of her fruit snack cravings. Case in point: When I left for work Tuesday morning, our cupboard was a graveyard littered with stale crackers, orphaned candy and “There’s cereal in that box, but it’s the crappy crumbs so I’m not eating it but maybe someone else will“. When I got home Tuesday evening, the graveyard had become to a tooth-busting storage shed for every  Watermelon flavored Gusher (or, as Little Dude calls them: “Gutters”) the grocery store had in stock that afternoon. Which is cool. I just tend to think Gushers feel more like biting into a fruit-flavored octopus than an actual treat.

Needless to say I’m in the minority and after Tuesday’s Gusher liquidation binge, Little Dude’s trend of daring dawn raids remains unbroken.

I walked into the kitchen Wednesday morning to see a blanket– the same blanket we’ve repeatedly pulled back to reveal Little Dude grinning over half-eaten tubs of ice cream, cake, jam, popsicles and aerosol cans of whipping cream– wedged up against a wall in the tell-tale sign snacks were being snuck. After a couple uninterrupted and unusually quiet minutes, an empty wrapper out slid out from under the blanket.

Apparently, Little Dude still operates under the idea if he can’t see you he’s invisible. I kind of think that’s awesome.

Sorry the pics are so big, one day I will learn how to properly down size these puppies!

How lucky was I this morning….and all before 9!  Wanna guess how the rest of my day went?

For a while, I thought I was a PC guy.

Post-college, my on-again-off-again advertising/graphic design relationship with the Mac did a triple reverse pike belly flop into the pool of quick and dirty corporate PC computing. Which was ok with me. I’d been dating PC for decades and had plenty of comfortable, “I can fix that” history with all its bugs, driver updates and plug and pray theatrics.

BUT, after decades of making out with the utilitarian PC brand and a few years of flirting with a Macbook Pro, our family recently invested in a “you gave my TV big time screen envy” iMac. I’m late to the party, but the streamlined, simplified elegance of this machine is like warm–but still at arms length– hug. The computer’s IN the monitor? No more towers? No more wires? No more jet turbine cooling fans? Customer support that practically wraps me in a scarf, skinny jeans, Converse, square glasses and stylized bedhead? Cutesy, pop bubblegum graphics to visually hold my hand with a wink and  a smile?

It’s double-fine.

And double the price. We had to rent the basement out to a wandering troupe of lost magazine salespeople for two weeks and three days, but what’s price when you’ve got a gleaming, glowing monitor the size of your youngest child perched on the desk in your office?

Nothing, that’s what.

Thank you for:

Always making me laugh

Loving this lady, even though

Keeping it real

Keeping it spicy

Being you!

I love you guys, more then you’ll ever know!

Happy Birthday!

That means I’m back in a cushy pair of Saucony’s and running a leisurely 10-minute mile at all hours of the day– but mostly at night because A) Cache Valley’s star-lit, cricket filled evenings can’t be beat and B) lower chance of running into/being seen by people I know. I’m not sure what happened between October 2009 and June 9, 2010, but the choice of filling my closet with Medium sized T-shirts and 30-waist pants now feels like a poor one, my home-run hitting, Kardashian rivaling butt’s got some seam-splitting back and the feeling of jiggle when I go down a flight of stairs is 236% overrated.

Being a “tall guy”, convention says all my vertical space helps in subtly stashing weight– that or people are lying when they say “You aren’t faaaaaat”. Still, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, because the mirror tells me my hard-fought six-pack is gone, my arms look like unwrapped tubes of Pillsbury sugar cookie dough, and if I shaved my chest I could make some enticing cleavage.  That and the other night when I pushed my gut out and jiggled it for “I’m overweight I tell ya!!” effect, Little Dude disgustedly crinkled his nose and said, “Don’t do that, Papa. It looks like you ate 325 sheep and turned into a fat dude.”

Not to say I’m crying about it. Every year over the last four (d**n you, aging metabolism!) I come down from the off-season and have a pants-too-tight realization that motivates me into fighting shape just in time to shirtlessly enjoy the later half of summer… before I gorge myself into a 15-20 pound ice cream/pizza/burger/chocolate chip cookie “I’ll eat what I want because I deserve it” weight gain over winter.

Of course, I blame Tony Horton and his P90X. Once you realize the key to weight loss and sculpting a “Holy crap– that’s me!?” body, it’s easy to fall off the bandwagon because you know the formula– and know that it works. The real frustration is I’m rhetorically punching myself in the rhetorical privates for giving up all the dedicated sweat equity and egg-white eating from last year. After all, what’s the fun of setting goals if you can’t practice achieving them over and over?

Answer: No fun.Or I’ll just keep telling myself that.

In the mean time, I’m logging miles and flipping that Ragnar Relay guy breath mints.