Retribution, Roseola, and Radical Teachification

now, let me start off by saying that this is arguably the suavest 7th grade social studies teacher you are likely to see this year.

this was taken back in august, and sense then i have led my ever-vigilant teenage disaster-bombs through two months of european history. as the first nine weeks draws to a close, i have a few new grey hairs but haven't yet suffered from an aneurism. cowabunga.

updates. remember when a 20 year old kid decided to rear-end my pregnant wife in a school zone a last week? when she was completely stopped at a school crossing, allowing children to scamper off on their way home from school? remember that? well, that 2o year old kid's dad just ended up taking a big, fat $1400 love bill up the kiester, folks. that's the amount of repairs kris' uplander is going to require in order to remedy this fella's handywork.

serves the guy right for texting on his damn cell phone.

in other news, guess who worked a half day today? (it was me.) last night, the cannonball decided to spike a 102.4 degree fever. preggosaurus' mom sense (think 'spidey sense') went apeshit at about 12:30am, and she sprung out of bed to randomly check on the kid. sure enough, fever time. afterwards, yours truly couldn't fall back asleep until 3:30am. two hours later, the alarm clock bellowed and i was off to a bland half-day of work before commuting all the way back up to home in order to take the kid to the pediatrician's.

final verdict: the kid's sprouting three new teeth, a series of ant bites, and roseola... which i guess is some kind of baby rash that prompts toddlers to bust out 103 degree fevers. who knew.

...that was our day. how was yours?

slainte,

- brian

In the Rear/Alayna's Boyfriend

...does this title scare you? it should - nothing about it sounds pleasant at all.

two completely, unrelated events, though. the other day, as kris was heading home from work, some kid decided to rear end her while - get this - she was stopped at a school crosswalk. that's right. she was completely stopped at a school crosswalk, being pregnant and watching students cross the street, when a 20 year old moron flew up in a small sedan and rear-ended her super van. fortunately, both preggosaurus and the yet-to-be-identified baby are fine, and the damage to our car was minimal (just a slight crack in the bumper).

now, the other guy's car... that was totaled. that's what he gets for driving into the back of a battle wagon.

so we recently received news that some kid in the primrose toddler room is putting the moves on our daughter. she's got herself a suitor. evidently, this kid leaned and planted one on alayna, who then decided to sit next to him and play with his hair throughout their 'circle time.' i haven't decided on whether or not i need to send the kid off to a convent yet, but the little boy's dad did photoshop up this collage of the two lovebirds in romantic bliss.

Speaking of bliss, we also recently took the kid to chuck e. cheese's. i'm an old-school fan of showbiz pizza place, which was brutally taken over in some kind of mascot-ran pizza/entertainment business deal. i'm assuming the rockafire explosion was either kicked to the streets or else subsequently put to death, because they were nowhere to be found. the only animatronic character to be had was the ridiculously stupid mouse, mr. cheese, dressed up like a early '90s rollerblader (awesome!!).

anyway, the kid loved the place. there wasn't a ball pit, but they did have a play area specifically for toddlers, and she couldn't enough of the place. here are some pics for your viewing pleasure.

word to your moms,

- brian

Vans, Firewire, Scrapes and Tooths

fans, let me tell you this much right off the bat: the last 48 hours have been crappy as all hell.

allow me to explain...

about a week ago, the brakes went out in kris' chevy malibu... and no, not in a wacky, '80s movie style, either. no rockin' tunes in the background, no hilarious close-calls or teenagers screaming at the top of their lungs. nay, dear readers, instead it was the really, really expensive style of brake failure: after nine plus years of diligent service, the malibu's brake line had completed rusted out. too many michigan winters and tropical what-have-you - it was finally time to tie ol' yellar to the tree outback (so to speak). seeing as the houghs are somewhat of a procrastinating lot, we let the malibu sit in the drive for about a week before we realized, "oh crap, brian has to go back to work soon, and kris will need her own car to take the kid to daycare, go to work, tackle chick stuff, etc." so now we get to deal with it.

cowabunga.

and so, over the course of the last 48 hours, we have scoured central florida looking for a new car ('new' in the sense that we had not previously owned the vehicle ourselves, mind you). it has been a trying, trying ordeal, and i am officially 'funned out' with the whole affair in general. i have seen more sleazy car salesmen in the last two days to last a life time (four salesmen = one lifetime in my book). as this is kris' car, i'm pretty much offering my two cents on what vehicles to consider, but, as the 'pretty nice guy' that i am, letting her make the final call. she tends to look at things like 'safety ratings' and 'existing warranties,' while i tend to look for 'mp3 CD option' and 'leather interior.'

to each their own. she's checking out a van tomorrow morning, so hopefully the accursed 2009 new car fiasco will have run its course by sundown tomorrow. we'll see.

in other news, the cannonball sprouted her first tooth this afternoon. huzzah. her bottom right-center one. 'big whoop,' you might say, but this kid's fourteen months old. sure, she can gum her way through a tin can easily enough, but we've nevertheless been kinda holding out for that whole 'teeth' thing. now that its here, i'm a little more at ease. toothless chicks worry me.

in yet other news, i've been having difficulty with my new MacBook Pro: the firewire drive on it is 800 (as are all new Mac models), but all the old external hard drives i own are 400. i bought a converter so i can, oh, listen to music and upload my photo libraries onto the stupid thing, but the piece of crap doesn't even work. this means, dear readers, that i have to a.) return some piece of garbage to amazon and suck up the shipping cost, and b.) venture forth into the local shopping mall and head into the neighborhood nerd mecca (i.e. apple store) and have a few geeks take a gander at my compatibility problem... which should be loads of fun.

my biggest issue with this, of course, is that every damn time i walk into an apple store and talk to one of their 'techs,' i feel like a caveman... which is absolutely ridiculous, because i somewhat know what i'm talking about when it comes to computers. more than likely, i think its not my supposed 'normie' status that's in question, but instead the people that work at these apple stores. they are completely insane. they spend way too much time sitting in front of a screen and not nearly enough time enjoying the world of good ol' fashioned analog (books, records, trees, and people).

lastly, i began moving all my crap back into my classroom today (fun), and, at high noon in the hottest month of the year down here in florida, i had my ass handed to me. moving furniture across campus, slinging around cardboard boxes full of worn-out textbooks, and stacking chairs in 100 degree heat is hell on earth, folks. i've got more exposed wounds on me right now than i did when i was taking that controversial malaria medication my first year in africa. every muscle in my body (both of them) ache, and i seriously feel like i've been in a car accident.

in conclusion, i am totally looking forward to tomorrow (not). three grad school papers due, a new car (er, van) fiasco to figure out, hours and hours of more classroom muscle work in this horrible, humid august heat, and a computer problem that can only be remedied with the help of a crack team of elitest iNerds.

man, you are straight up jealous of my life, aren't you...

sad,

- brian

Preggosaurus Rex

hey players.

so... about this whole pregnancy thing. you should know, right off the bat, that we were not looking at having kids any time soon when this all went down. nevertheless, it happened. i'll spare you the details, but the end result was the transformation of kristina the wife into preggosaurus rex.

concerning babies: i live with a girl already, so having a second one around the house didn't sound like all that much fun. twice the clucking, half the bathroom space. not so awesome. besides, i've been looking forward to having an excuse to get back into playing with legos for a long, long time now. girls can't really get that much into the cool toys you can buy boys, unless you raise 'em as tomboys (which is a hair away from turning them lesbo, so you have to be careful there if you want grandkids down the road). therefore, obviously, yours truly was hoping for a boy. someone to pass the name 'hough' down - and not toss it aside for the first damn guy that throws a diamond in her face. that doesn't seem too ridiculous of a preference, either; in my opinion, its better to have the boy first before you start popping out girls - that way he can rough up his little sister's boyfriends when need be.

unfortunately, God and whatever other forces that be didn't seem to taken my preference into consideration when they implanted kristina with a girl. that's right, a girl. so now i'm forced with the dilemma of having to justify giving her legos every year for Christmas.

back to the pregnancy. we found out kris was knocked up sometime in the middle of october, and most doctors seem to think the date of conception (i.e. the date of 'getting it on') was most likely the same weekend as our 1 year wedding anniversary (happy anniversary!). for those of you who suck at mathematics as bad as i do, that puts the little squirt cannonballing out of preggosaurus sometime around june 22nd. this, as many of you know, is little under 30 days away. less than a month. now, we're pretty much set with a lot of what we need at this point - we've got the crib, we've got her nursery set up, we've got a lot of clothes, i'm got my uber-male diaper bag, etc. - pretty much all we need at this point are the little things and toys and stuff like that. not too bad.

...oh yeah, and a name. we still don't have a name yet at this point.

now, we've gotten a lot of suggestions from people out there (some good, most bad), and have come close to settling on given names a number of times, but nothing has stuck out concretely. i'm hoping to at least head into the hospital with a short list of narrowed-down names - that's my immediate goal, and i think its possible. i don't know.... if it gets to the point where i'm holding the kid at the hospital and we still can't figure out a damn name for it, i'm going to name it 'chuck' and just say 'screw it.'

so there you have it, readers - that's been the quick synopsis of the pregnancy. the way i see it, the pregnancy horror stories you hear about - the perils of preggosauruses and the stress of awaiting the arrival of a new baby, etc. - are most likely penned by cowards. seriously. folks, if you live with a harpy, she's probably going to be a harpy when she's pregnant. stop acting so shocked and appalled. so far *knock on wood* kris has handled this whole pregnancy thing extremely well. no pickles and ice cream on this end... though kris isn't afraid to eat a big bag of twizzlers in one sitting.

by the way, you guys wanna know how cool it is living with a pregnant woman? check this out:

...yeah. its that cool.

keep it real.

- brian