theparkerfamily.org

  • how I met your mother: engagement, part 2

    (continued from part 1)

    this is the fifth in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other.

    immediately after the lady sparkler’s crazy Texas friends started haranguing her into haranguing me into marrying her, I thought to myself “you know, I do love her, and want to spend the rest of my life with her…”

    and so i decided to get a ring. that was December. I had the ring two weeks later.

    we were already talking about going to new York for my birthday (April) and it seemed like (at the time) my beloved’s marital haranguing might actually die down by then, at least long enough for me to propose uninterrupted.

    not so much.

    by February, i was sufficiently badgered to explain to her (in no uncertain terms) that from now on, each time she brought up engagement, i would move the “hypothetical” proposal back another month.

    by April, she had managed to add *fourteen* months to the engagement time line. so, while i hadn’t succeeded in her stifling the running of her mouth, i at least knew that a proposal was the farthest thing from her mind when we pulled into NYC’s Penn Station the second week of April.

    the same, however, couldn’t be said for me…

    I was a wreck, and constantly obsessed about the ring — where it was, and whether it had fallen out of the triple-bagged cocoon in which it was placed. to make matters worse, on the day i was going to propose (april 14th) it rained, and rained, and rained, and rained.

    i had already decided I couldn’t propose to the lady sparkler inside some silly, human-built structure because whatever we were inside could be torn down, or worse, turned into a starbucks.

    so, i decided i would do the deed in Central Park, which (obviously) wasn’t particularly rain-friendly, which meant that april 14th became april 15th, and engagement day became tax day.

    that afternoon, i marched my beloved around central park for over an hour, mostly because i couldn’t find a place to propose. i know it’s crazy, but there are a *lot* of people in new york — who knew? — and every single one of them seemed to be lounging around central park.

    before we left DC, i had asked my best friend from college (and future bridesmaid) if she had any suggestions about the whole engagement process. it turns out that her husband was such a mess when he proposed, that she was convinced (right up until she saw the ring) that he was dumping her.

    her solution? pull the ring out first.

    and, when we finally found a secluded spot, i did just that. the lady sparkler was resting for a moment on a mostly horizontal tree, when i pulled out the ring, and sat down beside her.

    she didn’t hear a single thing that i said. she was like the crow from the secret of n.i.m.h., when he sees mrs. frisbee’s medallion and says: “ooooooooooo, SPARKLY!”

    interestingly enough, to this day, she has no idea what *she* said either. (for the record, it was: “oh. my. god. are you, like, serious?”)

    i have what i said written down somewhere, but it was exactly what you would expect: “love, blah, blah, blah, so happy, blah, blah, life together, blah blah.” she replied, “yes, yes. oh my god, yes.” which — i would surmise — is just about as good of a response as you can get.

    speaking of which, on our way out of central park we ran into the back of another boy proposing to another girl, and it looked like he had arranged for a photographer and her parents to join in the festivities.

    unfortunately, she looked abjectly horrified. yeeeesh. at least *we* lived happily ever after.

    PHOTO: tulips, new york, new york.

  • how I met your mother: engagement, Texas-style

    dear sparklet,

    this is the fourth in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other.

    there are some stories that get better with age … and then there are stories that start out really $&#% funny, and stay really $&@#% funny.

    I hope this is the latter.

    a few years into the relationship, we made the honest mistake of going to Texas. sure, the lady sparkler’s parents were great, and her sisters were awesome … but her friends? lunatics.

    apparently, something in the water down there causes people to think that 18 months of dating is the maximum allowable before some kind of engagement is necessary, beit of the voluntary or shotgun variety.

    the sparklers, being a bit past that “threshold” had apparently tripped some kind of Texas state-wide alert system, where friends hold waves of rolling interventions to make sure “everything’s alright” and that the boy doesn’t have any “problems” that needed to be addressed (likely by overwhelming displays of machismo, or belt buckles, or both).

    by the end of the year, after a couple of months of interventions, the lady sparkler was in a tizzy … and her occasional, badly disguised, open-ended questions about an engagement timeline started getting more and more pointed (and more and more badly disguised).

    each time she would tizzy, we would talk … and each time we’d agree that *we* needed to have a timeline that worked for *us,* even if it was at odds with the posse was forming along the Rio Grande.

    I should pause.

    sure, Texans are ten-gallon-hat-sized-crazy for thinking 18 months of dating is suitable for long-term mate selection (which leads to all sorts of redneck/missing teeth/social Darwinist jokes which I will forgo due to likely readership demographics) …

    … but it is possible that my people (from the opposite side of the “war of northern aggression”) just might fall off the other end of the commitment scale. I have friends that dated for 8 years before the topic of marriage even came up, or (worse yet) were engaged for 5+ years before deciding whether they should actually tie the knot.

    so, from my worldview, i thought that I was being carefree to the point of reckless abandonment by thinking of proposing to a woman I had been dating for *only* two years. yet, all the while, the great state of Texas was negotiating with Chuck Norris to come shift my worldview for me.

    I digress …

    by February, my beloved had become as subtle as a three year old in the aisle of a toy store … and I was started to dig in, solely as a matter on principle. by the 27th time the issue was raised in those three months, I sat my beloved down, and we talked. it went something like this:

    me: “you know i love you. and i want you to know that you can propose to me anytime you like …”

    the lady sparkler: “ummmm.”

    me: “no, seriously. I know how much you want to get engaged… so you are welcome to go ring shopping, pick out something nice for me, and then get down on one knee and propose. I promise I’ll wear the ring everyday.”

    her: “uhhhhhh.”

    me: “what’s wrong, sweetie?”

    her: “I think I’d prefer if you proposed to me.”

    me: “interesting. okay, here’s the deal. let’s say we have a date for the hypothetical engagement, let’s call it X.”

    her: “is X soon?”

    me: “well, interesting that you mentioned that … each time you ask when it is, or suggest that X should be coming sooner, the hypothtical engagement date becomes X + 1 month.”

    her: “so, when is X then?”

    me: “i’m not sure, but it’s now TWO months later than it was three minutes ago.”

    of course, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had bought an engagement ring two months earlier and was just waiting for her to shut her yap about it, so it could be a surprise.

    continued …

    PHOTO: Statue, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York.

  • the clothes don’t make the (wo)man

    photo
    well, another weekend, another closet redone. this time mine (I hate being left out) and on the cheap (spent $39 on wood, saw-ed and installed myself).

    i have this pathological need to be doing stuff now, which i understand is probably a flavor of nesting … only coming from the more-militant-yet-somehow-less-productive wing.

    but the real news comes from the lady sparkler, who is showing enough (understatement!) to start considering actual maternity clothes instead of continuing to accessorize her regular jeans with rubber-band-as-belt-buckle.

    unfortunately, part of said awakening is finding out how much of a pain it is to shop for her new situation. truth be told, she hated shopping for regular clothes, so I guess no one was expecting her to suddenly hit a clothes-buying stride now that she is, er, buying for two.

    honestly, she’s a clotheshorse in her new found state, and looks great in everything she’s brought home. however, she’s begun complaining that certain clothes that lack definition (mommy mumu’s as it were) make her feel like she’s smuggling a watermelon out of the produce aisle.

    I’m sure I don’t know what that means, but I’m equally sure that she is sticking to a-lines and tailored-style clothes from here on out. (personally, I’m guessing that the maternity industry keeps some mumu’s on hand just to make sure the more expensive, tailored clothes fly off the shelves faster.)

    all that said, other than clothes and me pretending to be useful, we’re really just biding time until we know the gender.

    next sonogram is june 19th, and baby sparklet be well past the point where we can stare uncomfortably at his/her/its lower regions and make some sort of guess … provided, of course, that sparklet isn’t being bashful.

    16 days.

    PHOTO: recovery dinner from the weekend that was @ the heights, columbia heights, washington, dc.

  • how i met your mother: the first dates

    []
    dear sparklet,

    this is the third in a series of letters to baby sparklet about how mommy and daddy met and woo-ed each other.

    it’s pretty difficult to pick out one event that would qualify as a first date.

    the first thing we did together outside of work was go to Ben’s Chili Bowl. however, it was for lunch, and bridesmaid Mel was nice enough to chaperon that little event.  i am pretty sure those two things disqualify Ben’s from the “first date” competition.

    (that was also my first hot dog is several years, and i can still remember how my stomach ached after that was all over…)

    several weeks later, the lady sparkler and i went for a hike in Shenandoah national park … and barely survived. we made the mistake of hiking down (to some waterfalls on hazel mountain) instead of up.

    hiking downhill seemed like a good idea for the first six miles, and proved to be easy enough that we kept going farther than we had planned. we were having a great time talking, laughing, and poking t.l.s. with a stick (well, that last part was mostly me…)

    unfortunately, the six miles back uphill to the car sucked most of the will to live out of our poor, frail, out-of-shape, trying-to-impress-each-other-with-our-outdoorsyness bodies.

    we stayed on the trail two hours longer than we had planned, which meant what had been planned as a day event now required dinner, which was a first for us.

    and so, our first dinner date (however accidental) was at a ruby tuesday’s in warrenton on the way back to DC. to this very day, the sonora chicken pasta i had that night is just about my favorite comfort food on the planet.

    now, i was mostly a vegetarian when i met the lady sparkler … i did eat some meat (almost all of it was chicken), i never cooked any dead animals at home, and never ate meat more than once or twice a month (i guess you could say that i was a social carnivore.)

    so it was much to my surprise that after our hike, i found us talking about barbecue — which is not something I talk about much, so i’m guessing the lady sparkler must have brought up.

    to keep up with the conversation, i found myself telling her that she should come up to Glover Park to try the ribs at Rockland’s, regardless of the fact that i had no earthly idea what they tasted like and would probably faint watching someone eat them.

    she thought it sounded great.

    so, while i had successfully arranged our first “alone” date back in DC, i had also managed to create a rather awkward situation. whatever meat i was eating at the time, i can assure you that it wasn’t anything that looked like it was once alive, much less slaughtered, cooked over an open flame, and hacked into little strips.

    that next weekend, we met at Rocklands, and ordered at the counter.  me: a cute little array of sides (coleslaw, mac and cheese, potato salad).  my future wife: a huge slab of meat.

    and so, i watched my wife-to-be pack away half a rack of ribs.

    when finished, she proceeded to suck the marrow from the bones, and then lick her fingers clean. i kissed goodbye whatever vegetarian tendencies i had, right then and there.

    and the rest, as they say, is history.

  • new theme (launch, v11)

    well, while i was rebuilding the site anyway i figured it was about time to ditch the old three column format. it’s not my design, but that may actually be the point — i find i like designs longer when i have nothing to do with them.

    it’s the 11th design i’ve had since my first site in may of 2002, and i can’t think of one that lasted longer than 18 months.

  • the end of baseball in washington

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    photo.jpg, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    i might be about done with the washington nationals.

    the austin spaklers are in town for the lady sparkler’s birthday, and to get some some quality time with her belly. it’d been a year since we saw a nats game, so we tossed in one of those for good measure.

    it turned out that we had three sets of friends there, and we had a great time all around. the food — ben’s chili bowl, again — was fantastic. the stadium is beautiful.

    but the game was awful.

    of course, part of that might be because the nationals are awful. luckily, they were facing the orioles … who are equally awful.

    the two teams are averaging 6 runs allowed per game. together, they allow more people on base than any other teams in the league. washington leads the league in errors, and baltimore is close behind. both are in last place in their division.

    all that futility should mean a scorcher of a game. but alas, did i mention it was awful?

    i swear, there was 20 minutes between each inning. it took until the 5th inning for washington to score its first run (which would also be the last). the game was over in two hours and 31 minutes, but i would have guessed it was twice that.

    in fact, when nat’s shortstop Cristian Guzman homered in the 5th i was excited … until i realized that it tied the game, vastly increasing the chance it would go into extra innings.

    (not to worry, tho, as baltimore “stormed” back to win 2-1.)

    but worst of all, we had to watch all the happy O’s fans … who have to win the award for most socially awkward fan base in the country.

    i know that baseball is a game of stats (which is probably a polite way of saying math geeks) but O’s fans makes red sox and yankees fans look normal by comparison … preppy or thuggy, as the case may be, but without that certain “a/v club” veneer.

    but, at least the O’s have fans.

    honestly, the nats would have better success if they built a giant bar, with great food, a huge HD television, and a $25 cover charge. that way DCers could come and socialize, without feeling guilty about paying attention a baseball game.

    (wait, that’s actually what they did …)

    in the end, the two-plus hours where i didn’t watch the game was great, but the 20 minutes of the game i watched during pauses in the social agenda felt like an afternoon at the dmv.

    it took forever, and no one was particularly happy with how it turned out.

  • Shamu Snubs the Conservancy

    Well, not really 🙂

    Sea World / Busch Gardens and their “Animal Ambassadors” stopped by the Conservancy this morning … and a couple hundred of us gathered in the garden out back to see a Red-necked Wallaby, some type of lizard, an American Alligator and Magellan Penguin. Shamu (the killer whale) did not attend, nor was he expected (can you imagine *that* kennel carrier?)

    I have to say that (a) the southern tip of Argentina is back at the top of my travel list, and (b) everyday would be better with penguins.

    Photo: Penguin (detail) © Amy Hawthorne.

  • photos: the best of europe

    [Eiffel Tower, Paris, France.]
    ECPA20090504_1496, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    not everybody has the patience to sort through 800+ photos from a family vacation, so i have distilled out about 70 of my favorites from scotland, london and paris. there is more commentary on the trip to come (UPDATED: it’s here now) but wanted to get the pictures up quicker than my weary brain can draft real blog posts.
    Explore the Photo Set:
    Photos: The Best of Europe (Slideshow)

  • website: hackers, and my blog, and stuff

    i feel so violated.

    early this week, i was making a quick change to the blog, when i discovered hundreds of files filled with all sorts of obvious porn keywords (khandi-alexander-nude-pics.html) and some more with not so obvious porn keywords (blue-lotus-tea-recipe.html).

    now, i would have been fine if was making porn-star money for hosting the files … but no one appeared to be sending me my cut of the proceeds.

    for three days, i tried everything from deleting the files to figuring out where the security hole was that needed to be plugged. i had the latest version of the operating system, the latest version of WordPress, i deleted “extra” logins to the system, and i changed to a new WordPress theme (hense the new design) to make sure one of my “upgrades” wasn’t at fault.

    but each night at 12:04 am, the porn files mysteriously reappeared. out of desperation, i finally contacted my web host — i did that last because i knew they were going to be useless — and sure enough all they could manage was “sorry we can’t help you, but try resetting your passwords.”

    oops. hadn’t thought of that …

    sure enough, i reset all the passwords, and the site hasn’t been hacked since. hard to believe it was something so simple (and stupid, and obvious).

    i think there is some sort of life lesson in here somewhere, if i only knew where to look.

  • into the closet, pt 2

    ecpa20090525_2077
    this whole baby thing is going to have a profound impact on the lady sparkler’s life, but in no way more than the loss of the second bedroom as her own private boudoir.in a vain attempt to soften the blow, baby mama’s birthday present this year is a container store / elfa makeover for her closet … because she now has to make room in there for baby sparklet (a conversation which we’ve already had with her spleen and bladder).

    the purchase was easy enough. i sketched something out beforehand — with Google Sketchup because i am a dork — and the store turned it into a “parts” list. someone in the back readied the order and put it into our car, while the sales clerk walked us through how to assemble the new system.

    my personal life-goal now shifted to not having to paint the closet.

    first, i unloaded all of the crap from the closet … and tried to ignore that the closet needed to be painted. then i took down the existing shelves … and tried to ignore that the closet needed to be painted.

    then i repaired the 30+ holes from the use of railroad spikes to hold up said shelves … and tried to ignore that the closet needed to be painted. then i went to bed … and tried to ignore that the closet needed to be painted.

    and then i woke up, and painted the closet.

    in the end, the closet went together fine and the baby now has about three-eighths of the closet (two hanging bars, two shelves and three drawers). it’s not quite the space savings i was hoping for, but it will do for now.

    i sure hope baby sparklet is small, and doesn’t grow much.