I am in fact keeping track of a backlog of topics I need to write about, and I honestly intend to get to them in good order, but only when I can find sufficient inspiration to write about them in greater than the workmanlike manner which has overtaken this blog of late. Well, that sentence didn’t start things out well, did it?

I’m awake at this time because, despite my wife’s warnings, I went outside to rearrange garbage cans and other things that go bump in the night when I should have instead gone to bed. I was less awake then, and I probably could have nodded right off, while she was wide awake, and now we’re probably both awake, as she is in the girls’ room comforting them on account of things being terribly windy and noisy outside.

In Southern California, we have precious little weather to complain about: it’s sunny all but about one or two months out of the year, and we even have a name (”June Gloom”) for the dismal time of the year when, for several weeks at a time, it does not become so before 10am. Aside from this summerly phenomenon and the time in the winter when it becomes foggy at night, we have the seasonal Santa Ana¹ winds, which defy tradition and blow violently in from the East, knocking over garbage cans and sycamore trees and Nicole Ritchie.

The last week or so has been terribly cold, to the point that one is well advised to wear long pants until almost lunchtime. I’ve been working through lunch as of late, so I just wear shorts to work and try to park close to the building. Last night and tonight, the cold is giving way to the Santa Ana winds, which are generally hot and dry; even at 2am I didn’t find it particularly cold going out and looking for all the things that might be making noise. At this moment there is still a lot of bumping and thumping going on, so I suspect it’s the door on the neighbor’s shed or possibly our garbage cans, which are these monstrous bins with lids shaped like airplane wings for maximum lift. Nevertheless, we have all switched rooms about so that I’m now alone in the girls room, while they are holed up on our bedroom with Jennifer. Hopefully the girls will all find the more easily explicable noise of our rattling windows easier to cope with.

¹ I’m guessing named after Santa Ana, the patron saint of high winds.

In the last couple weeks, the following things have broken in my house: a sprinkler in the yard, my car battery, the ice maker in the refrigerator, the dishwasher, and the chain on my bike. Also, when I have groceries delivered this weekend, they gave me a 16 lb turkey even though I requested at 12 lb turkey. As a result, the turkey is still going to be frozen on Thanksgiving, which will present a challenge when it comes to cooking it, especially considering that the oven billows smoke every time I turn it on because of the filling that oozed out of an apple pie I made last week.

Over the weekend, I replaced the car battery, installed a new chain, and repaired the sprinkler. Tomorrow, the appliance person will come to take a look at the dishwasher, and I’ll buy a bag of ice, try to scrub out the pie filling, and butterfly & brine the turkey in an attempt to speed the thawing. The ice maker will have to wait until after Thanksgiving.

Sometimes everything seems to break at once. Of course, there is a balance to everything and on the upside, I just got a huge bonus at work and a free computer; now if I only had time to spend one and play with the other.

A while back I mentioned that I bought a gas motor to put on my bike. It has been working just great, but I just haven’t had a chance to write about it. For the past couple months (except when Jen or I were traveling), I’ve been commuting 1-2 days per week on it, and for my 15-mile round trip, it only takes about 5 minutes longer each way than driving my car, depending on how many stop lights I hit. I still have yet to use all of the two gallons of gas I bought back in September, and I figure I’m getting somewhere around 150 MPG, which I think is good considering the number of hills on my ride to work. In a few more months, there will be a more direct route to work opening up, and I suspect that my trip will get even shorter. Maintenance on the little engine is a breeze; an oil change takes just a couple minutes. I’ve never really been a hands-on car guy, so learning about the little engine has been fun experience for me. I’ve likened the little engine to riding a tandem with Lance Armstrong on the back; the bike is a little unwieldy with the extra weight on it, but you go a lot faster.

The only trouble I’ve had so far is that my (ten year old) chain broke on the way to work on Thursday. Luckily, the motor allowed me to quickly buzz back home and get my car, though it’s evident that the motor prefers to have some help from the pedals.

I have a backlog of things I need write about, but I do have to post this one thing out of order. Today, Anna went to Disneyland with Jennifer. We had some passes left over from our trip at the beginning of the summer and had to use them before next weekend. We left it up to Anna to choose who would take her.

Jennifer took Anna early this morning and Tara and I puttered around the house and ran errands. In the evening, as I was getting Tara ready for bed, I got a call from Jennifer. Actually, it turned out to be Anna calling on Jennifer’s phone wanting to talk to Tara. She had missed her during the day and wanted to talk to her. I put Anna on the speakerphone and listened as the two of them talked. Anna asked me to let Tara stay up until she got home, which would be 15-20 minutes beyond her bedtime. Since Tara took a three hour nap, I decided to let her stay up.

When Anna arrived home, the two of them were very affectionate and excited to see each other. When Anna finally got ready for bed and went to lay down (in Tara’s room for the last few months), she insisted on straightening out Tara’s blanket. It’s really sweet to see the two of them so close. I think this is just what we had in mind when we decided to have Tara.

I’ve been back home for a couple weeks now and things are more or less back to normal. After about a week of jet lag (mostly, getting up at 4am and being dead on my feet by dinnertime) I was mostly back to normal. I was just about twelve hours off my normal schedule while in Spain because the people there get up and stay up so much later than my hours back here.

Even in the week I was gone it seems like Tara got bigger and is talking so much more. Here words are still not very clear (eg. “lothloth” for “washcloth”), but she clearly knows what she’s talking about. She is able to to put together several words (”Anna’s chair,” “Daddy sit down,” and the surprising “I want my applesauce”) and her understanding of prepositions is surprisingly good. For some reason, however, she likes to call herself “baby” rather than “Tara.” At least she’s not calling herself Piglet, which is how I refer to her more often than not.

Anna has also been growing in abilities; she’s starting to read and write. It’s an amazing process to watch. The other day she made a pizza, which she does quite a lot lately, She then wanted to play pizza delivery, so she made a box out of paper plates and wrote “Ches Pesu” and a little picture of a pizza chef on the top of the “box.”