George Lucas. Knock It Off.

i'm going to keep this short, because i don't want to ruin anything for those of you who haven't yet seen indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull.

before i continue, i'd like to point out for those of you who don't know me well that i'm quite possibly one of the grandest indiana jones fans who ever walked the face of the earth. seriously. i'm about one tier down from those nerds (see picture below) who dress up like indiana jones on a regular basis (exploits while being drunk do not count - so don't bother bringing up my college years). the original trilogy is the main reason i joined the peace corps and spent years sweating away in sub-saharan africa, and one of the main reasons i decided to start teaching middle school social studies.

to me, the films are practically flawless. ...temple of doom isn't as good as the other two, but its still an awesome movie. i expected the new one to be a lot worse than it was going in: you definitely heard a lot from the nay-sayers for this movie (which isn't that surprising, as the coolest thing a person can do these days is hack away at a legend and act like some sort of critic). anyway, the movie was decent - i won't even bother saying 'it wasn't as good as the first three,' because even a chimp is going to know that before hearing anything about the movie. nothing can be better than the original three... unless, of course, they someday stumble across a secret vault and uncover a couple more movies that were shot around the same time frame, with the same cast and crew... you get where i'm going with this. so yeah... for those of you who haven't yet seen it, i'd recommend it watching it for sure.

but please remember this: george lucas is now completely mad with power, and his CGI stench and his God-awful script-writing and his market-whoring runs rampant throughout the entire picture. just a heads up, there.

if, like me, you grew up with harrison ford as your john wayne or steve mcqueen, then, for the love of God, go see this movie. if, for whatever reason, you only sorta-liked the original movies ("what's with the whip thing?") wait 'til it comes out on DVD before dropping $8 on an over-priced cinema ticket.

...and, if you hate indiana jones, and hated the original films since they first came out, please do the world a favor and go play in traffic. you are the reason bad things happen in this world. and, there's a good possibility you are a nazi.

cheers.

- brian

Last Man Standing

what's happening, gang.

i'd like to discuss our bird for a moment, if i may. the subject comes to mind because, as the running trend in our household at present seems to be 'girls, girls, girls!' there's been some light shed recently on our once sexually-ambiguous quaker parrot, fezzig.

let me backtrack for a sec, here: i had gone through a phase, upon my return from africa, where i really, really wanted a parrot. don't ask me why, i just did. anyway, long story short, kris eventually caved and we ended up purchasing fezzig in mid-november of 2005 from a pet store in lansing, MI.. for those of you who are unaware of such things, its practically impossible to determine the sex of a bird unless you have its DNA taken... which costs upwards of $200. neither kris nor myself cared enough about this to find out whether fezzig was into dudes or chicks.

there are telling signs, however. birds who tend to bond to female humans better are usually males, while those who'd rather hang out with males are generally females. opposites attract. that ol' tale. fezzig immediately bonded to kris, who therefore did most of the early training with it, etc. and, because of this, we figured fezzig was a male. don't get me wrong, here - to date, the bird and i get along just fine, but it definitely prefers kris when it comes to talking, etc.

at least it did.

rather recently, i noticed fezzig's been rubbing up against - or, backing up and rubbing its ass against - a lot of its toys and perches in its cages with its tail straight up in the air. in a rather comical and promiscuous manner. pushing three years now, fezzig's right about at sexual maturity for a bird. and, while it might be pretty disgusting to observe such behavior, its all perfectly normal. what was out of the norm, however, was fezzig's changing attitude towards kris. being the genius i am, i attributed to an animal's weird sixth sense about kris carrying another lifeform in her stomach. you hear about that sorta thing from time to time, and animals always are the first to sense natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis and the like. right? okay then. anyway, fezzig started preferring yours truly, and began snipping at kris given the opportunity. it even became less interested in hanging out with us off its cage. stuff like that.

i decided to read up on this, being the scholar that i am, and became suddenly aware that fezzig was showing the telltale signs of a female bird. the tail up in the air while rubbing itself against toys, the growing hostility towards females of any species, etc.

so fezzig, as it turns out now, is probably a female. and, for those mathematicians out there, that means that yours truly now gets the privilege of living with three chicks come june.

cowabunga.

- 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

Here We Go Again...

well kids, we're going to try this again, here.

*begin fanfare*

hi. how you doin'? we're the houghs. you may have heard of us. today we're relaunching an online site to keep people back home and spread out around the world updated with current events, pictures, and the like. much like last time, except this time way better. seriously. we promise this time.

here's a quick prologue for ya:

a couple months after getting hitched in october 2006, we moved from clare, MI. to orlando, FL. with a herculean moving truck, a loud parrot, and no job prospects in sight. this didn't seem to matter, though, as michigan was ranked 50th in the nation for its job market and economy (i mean, being unemployed in one state is just as good as being unemployed in another, right?). of course it is. besides, florida has palm trees and theme parks. what's michigan have... snow and construction? with this in mind, we slung on our hobo packs and sallied forth.

we got a cheap - but safe - place in southeast orlando for that first year. not the nicest place, but we weren't being shot at either, so we couldn't complain too much at the time. taking up multiple part-time jobs in order to meet the many ends, we whored out resumes and cover letters and desperately sought out professional careers to pay off our gargantuan student loans. after a few months, kristina took a job with kindercare as an infant teacher, and brian was hired as a 7th grade social studies teacher at a public intermediate school. and so, after much trial and tribulation, the cross-country carpetbagging and the months of fruitless searching paid off. *more fanfare* the houghs were established.

yes, all things were going well for brian and kristina when suddenly, out of nowhere, came the impending rumble of foreboding peril...

yes, friends, kristina was knocked up. three pregnancy tests in rapid-fire succession sure didn't lie... its nigh on 9 months later and kristina - or, as she's commonly referred to now, "preggosaurus rex" - is still, indeed, very pregnant (we'll get to that ol' tale later, though).

anyway, in april of 2008 we moved into a bigger place, closer to kissimmee, in order to make room for the baby without having to sacrifice the man-den (the room that houses brian's many swords, records, video games, and our parrot, fezzig). kristina switched to a different kindercare center, serving the white-collar big-shots at disney in celebration (that's a town), in order to avoid paying an arm and a leg in tolls and gas to commute to her old center. brian's first year of teaching in florida public schools went so well that he was asked to renew his contract with the school, despite state budget cuts and other economic woes of the like (we'll get to that whole fiasco later, too). and fezzig, who is beginning to sense that something's amiss in the hough household, is now entering sexual maturity. awesome.

...and so there you are. there's the prologue. you're welcome. now that everybody's up to speed with the grand hough back story, we'll be sure to keep you all informed from now on with updates, pictures, antidotes, etc. from our end (seriously).

stay outta trouble...

- the houghs