Today is one of those days I wake up with a random song stuck in my head, courtesy of an overactive subconscious. This happens to me on an average of about 4 days every week, and it gets annoying quickly, as the songs are usually bad ones. This morning’s Soundtrack of Doom: “Philadelphia Fever” by Elton John.

The Fourth of July party was successful this year; Jen and I worked hard to get the house ready for visitors, make food, and stop to enjoy ourselves. Friday we put off the inevitable one more day and I took my bride to see Episode III, which we both enjoyed. Saturday and Sunday we moved furniture back into the living room (for what felt like the 15th time), organized all the piles of stuff that had been thrown in random places before the floor sanding, and attempted to make the kitchen look as pleasant as possible. During one of my trips outside to the garbage cans, I found our sleep number bed stacked neatly on the exam room porch (we have two small porches off the back of the house, and the exam room porch seems to be the Universal Deposit Area For Unannounced Deliveries) and moved it inside. It could have been around this time that I pulled the Achilles tendon, but I don’t know for sure.

The parade itself was longer than last year’s, and the overall tone was a little more PC than last year’s: there was no POW-MIA float with a bamboo cage and coolie-hat, AK-toting ‘Vietcong’ guard. The huge Reagan stuffed puppet did not make a return appearance. However, the Governor and his lousy hair showed up with a gaggle of sign-toting supporters and three Secret Service Suburbans in tow (no doubt scanning the crowd for hidden Catonsville sleeper cells) and there was a ‘float’ sponsored by a local Gentleman’s Club: a six-wheeled, shit-brown Hummer H2, followed by the Hustler Honey or whatever they call the local talent, astride a Harley chopper with a huge “FOR SALE” sign on the side. There’s nothing like free publicity, even when your model is three sizes too big for her leather ass-chaps. A wholesome family event, indeed.

Overall, though, the parade was fun, and it felt good to sit in the sunshine and enjoy the day.

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I finally took five minutes to figure out why the detail popups on my design pages weren’t working; some bad CSS implementation and a gremlin in the HTML b0rked the script, so the page hasn’t been working for about six months now (d’oh!)

This weekend was a blur of preparation for the annual 4th of July parade barbecue on the Lockardugan Great Lawn. The challenge was to get everything ready for the party and put our house back together in three days’ time. I’m pleased to say we got it all done in time and had a great afternoon to boot, but there was one casualty: I pulled my Achilles tendon at some point on Saturday as I was moving furniture around. Sunday morning I woke up to a swollen ankle and a day of hopping around on one foot.

I wish I could tell you exactly how it happened, but there was no Joe Theismann moment when I heard it pop. The nurse practitioner couldn’t really tell me much yesterday, so I have an appointment to see a ‘specialist’ today who can diagnose any major problems. In the meantime, I’m not driving anywhere (it’s the right foot, naturally) so I’m playing hooky.

It’s 7:53. Jen and I were both awake a full hour early, laying in bed together and trying to wish away Monday morning. Having three days to basically fuck off before returning to work was good; it would have been better if Baltimore wasn’t a hot sweaty armpit and we hadn’t just returned from the land of sunny 60° weather. (Waaaah waaaah waaaah.)

I love my wife for many reasons, one of which is that she made coffee this morning, another of which is that we both took a groggy minute to write about the impending sense of doom we’re both feeling. (Imagine two adults in an empty room, sipping coffee and typing on laptops. It looks like a spread from a high-concept design magazine, except for the piles of unopened mail, dust bunnies, and socks laying around us.)

The lawn is finally mowed, the garden has been partly weeded, and we moved the dining room table back where it belongs. Jen’s raised bed is out of control. We have a tomato plant that’s 6′ high. Other than that, we’ve been deliciously lazy: a vacation from our vacation. Last night, my bride treated me to a dozen crabs and a couple of Coronas, and that made Sunday night a lot brighter.

More trip updates are forthcoming; I took yesterday off.

I got two more magazines front-loaded on my bank card last month; two scintillating titles I read regularly: Teen People and Seventeen. I’m getting tired of this shit, as they have to cancel out my card again and send me a new one.

I’d love to go to the house of the guy who has this scam set up and wring his miserable neck.

This evening we’ve got some old friends from the Left Coast jetting into town to attend the wedding of a fellow MICA graduate. Having Matt and Soph in town is always an occasion for late nights, excessive drinking, and monumental hangovers, as well as an excellent time. It’s a shame that, given our current lifestyle and schedule, it takes a visit from out of town to show us how much fun our humble city can be sometimes. We have reservations at Birches in Canton (aaaah, the old neighbahood) at 7:30, which should give us enough time to get home, get fabulous (when you have peeps from San Francisco in town, you have to represent, so I’ll be putting in my gold teefs) and get into Canton to hunt for a parking spot, which will probably be as easy as delivering a baby while water-skiing.

We also have a standing invitation to join our friends Rob and Karean for a party on the river in Annapolis on Sunday, which will have to be considered carefully, given our full schedule. I have plans to rip the floor out of the kitchen that morning, so any festivities will be predicated on our success in there, but I could really deal with an afternoon away from the house with my baby.

I’d better find a way to sleep on my lunch break, because the next three weeks are going to be brutal. We have the following events scheduled for the days leading up to our trip to Ireland:

• Having the first floor sanded, which will take four days and require
• Removing the floor-standing cabinets, sink, and stove from the kitchen in order to
• Pull up two layers of linoleum down to the bare wood beneath.
• Oh, and move all our furniture out onto the front porch, don’t forget that.
• Then, there’s travelling by plane to North Carolina the weekend before our overseas trip for the Lockard Reunion, and
• Somehow fit life, freelance, and a few beers in between.

We are doomed.

This weekend Jen’s sister Christi graduated from U of M, and we hosted 4/5 of the family in Catonsville. Saturday Jen spent the day retrieving people from airports while I attempted to mow the front half of the lawn before it grew higher than our roofline. We took everybody out to the Ship’s Ahoy (our local dive-bar-turned-respectable-restaurant) for crabs, something everybody wasn’t really sure they were in the mood for until the lady dumped two dozen steaming hot 38’s on the table. We had a great time sitting around and catching up with everybody over what turned out to be too many beers (our bar tab equalled or exceeded the food bill) and returned to the house to accidentally call Jen’s Dad and share our anniversary cake. I have pictures of all of this, but they’re stuck on my phone.

Just for the record, the bakers got the cake wrong again for the second time. (They offer a complimentary one-year anniversary cake free of charge so you don’t have to keep the dregs of your actual wedding cake in the freezer, which is a nice idea.) We were not amused. Almond, DAMMIT!

Sunday there was much driving. And sitting. And waiting. Speeches were given, asses were numb, and Christi walked across the stage. We hooted and hollered, and took blurry pictures, and then waited through more speeches to leave.

Congratulations, Christi!