It's November 30th, a Ditchman High Holy day, whereas 6 years ago today I did the wisest thing in recorded family history; whereas I asked Marci to marry me. Whereas, in spite of her keen sense of duty, self-sacrifice, and self-determination she actually said "yes" anyway. Whereas I am eternally grateful.

She will celebrate the high holy day by being too busy to notice it. She will toil in the kitchen over the din of crying children, making supper and cleaning house, and tonight she'll sleep in 3-hour stints waking intermittently to feed the baby. Researchers have found that interrupted sleep will make a man crazy, but she's too far gone for that: she married me, remember?

Sorry boys, but I'm the luckiest man alive. No man's wife puts up with more and lives to shut up about it. This is a woman who took me on, if only for the challenge, and merrily repeats it day after day. Then she bore my children, which is like suffering through more of me around, and gives them all the impossible love they demand.

When we got married I told her selfishly that I would never be happy working in construction. She took something I hated and made it something I could be proud of. And then when I indulged in my selfish pursuits she left me the checkbook and got out of the way. And when I demanded wine and fruit and pearls, she got me all that and starlight. Again, I'm the luckiest man. I don't need anyone to tell me about it. I'm well aware of it.

She married me, who had nothing and was nothing. It was an endeavor with no legitimate hope of a favorable outcome, and yet she made a man out of me. Now we have a successful business and a happy family and we live in the nicest house in the suburbs. She's a hardworking genius -the Edison of Oceanside- but she's too humble to notice. And too busy. She's an ardent wife, a powerful mother, and the household executive. And she has no expectations that anyone will care.

I may not be cognizant enough to notice it all, but what I see is enough to slay whatever pride runs awry in this domicile and I know enough to at least say thank you, Marci.

And I love you.

You amaze me.



~

Greetings from a windswept and rain-soaked Thanksgiving morning in Oceanside, where Family Ditchman pulled it out early to run the local Turkey Trot, 3rd annual -and three times in a row for us! It rained all night but cleared up just in time for a strikingly beautiful beachside race. It's raining again now, but we got nary a drop on us this morning, and for that we were very grateful, given the regettable fortunes of previous races this year.

It was a good run. All bragging rights were secured, and we shall indulge guiltlessly later today with extra helpings of pumpkin cheesecake. We're headed over the river and through the woods to see grandmother and other parts family, which should be nice. That is to say: it will be a nice long drive up the Interstate 5 in rainy holiday traffic. Oh well. I can look forward to Michael Medved's Thanksgiving lecture (if the kids fall asleep.)

Today's new thing was the "double-jogger stroller" which we borrowed from family Harrington. This is quite a machine! Load up your family and all the gear and go for a nice run. As Kurt put it: "Yeah, it works great! But it's like pushing a Hyundai!" Actually it wasn't so bad, but your typical runner's workout it is not. Still, I got a lot of impressive nods from overly-confident dads pushing their wimpy single-jogger strollers. (But I was sweating more.)

So I let Mrs. Ditchman push it to see how she liked it. And how about that Mrs. Ditchman? Four weeks out of birthing and she's pushing a Hyundai in a 5K! What a woman.

For her, I am very grateful. And also for my healthy family, my loyal friends, and these fine suburbs in this great nation. God bless us, every one.

Happy Thanksgiving.



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No work today! And for that, I am grateful. Still, when I have a day off it's usually spent cleaning out the garage. Tools and trash and sawdust pile up for weeks on end while I go in and out of there between jobs. I finished the biggest job of the year yesterday and am just happy to have it behind me. The thing is heeeuuujjj! I adjusted the rafter spacing by an inch. I know this concerns you, but it just seemed like there were too many rafters. There were also too many sets of engineering plans. The set I was referring to says my new rafter spacing is fine and dandy, but of course the customer used the other set of plans to pull the permit. There is some concern it won't pass inspection, so I didn't get paid yesterday. It's a holiday week. Who knows when the inspector will come?

But this customer is a real nice guy, (like they all are.) He's recently retired and seemed to be looking for someone to talk to every day, since his wife is at work. He'd wander out on his heeeeuuujjj patio each afternoon and chat with me, while I pretended that I didn't have chronic leaden-stomached nausea. He began to tell me his life story last Thursday and I felt like I was going to hurl the whole time. At one point, I just wondered where the story was going to end. It should have been obvious: it ended with us standing right there on the patio beneath his unfinished shade structure.

Mrs. Ditchman asked Little Ditchman if she wanted to help make a "pumpkin cheesecake" this morning. This got a perfectly cocked head out of her, like a golden retriever hearing a new noise. Seems the words "pumpkin", "cheese" and "cake" aren't really supposed to go together. The kid might be right. We'll see.

I stopped at the grocery on the way home and bought dinner: CRAB. I love CRAB! Love it. It was on sale and I thought we'd celebrate the big job ending, (even though we haven't been paid yet) which is why I went for it. Rung up on the cash register at $54.00 but I had a club card, so it came down to $20. What savings! Gone are the days when things could just be marked down -now you need to be in the club. I'm in a million clubs, and am very popular with junk mail as a result. My uniquely adept form-filling abilities qualify me to be in such a prestigious array of clubs. My wallet is a vast repository of club cards and they drive me beats-all batty when I have to fumble through them at the checkout stand. One time I had a register lady chide me for all the cards I had and I just looked at her like, whose fault is this? Oddly, last week I was overcharged ten bucks for a bottle of wine. Didn't get my club savings, which is the whole reason I bought it. She carded me and I actually showed her my I.D., which screwed up everything. The savings didn't come up in the computer, so it couldn't possibly exist, but I went back and showed her -had to take her down the aisle and point out the tag on the rack. She was astonished that a mistake could possibly have been made, and ripped the tag off right then and there, cursing some thoughtless stock boy under her breath, and depressing some hapless shopper standing behind us. She gave me ten bucks. I guess that's how it works with price increases at grocery stores: Rip, Snarl, Redeem. The free market at work.

There should be one club card. You could have a million clubs, just one card. Put it on your iPod. Bluetooth the thing. Use my fingerprint. Scan my buttcrack. Really, who cares? Has anyone ever actually been denied club savings for not having a card? The checkout person usually has one hanging from her apron and she just scans it for you! ("Club card?" "Use yours.") The whole thing has reached absurd proportions. Still, I am a "Super Saver" with nearly a thousand "Rewards Points" in the current "earn cycle" with a "verified total savings" of well over $30! And that's just in my last purchase! I know it's true because it was verified. Imagine how much I could save if I used my "gift card points", "coupons", and "double coupons": they'd be paying me to take all that wine and CRAB off their busy, troubled hands!

Anyway, I'm going to bring it all up at the next club meeting.

~

It's a good thing we had a boy this time. It's a good thing we had a boy this time because this morning The Little Ditchman actually asked to watch Dancing With The Stars instead of Little Einsteins. Mommy saw this as a cute she's mommy's little girl thing. Dreams of going off trail and scampering up steely boulders deep in the Sierra with my son are now vivid and pronounced.

Seems the two-year-old will get to stay up a little later on Monday and Tuesday nights (and Wednesday is dance class, of all things.) She caught a glimpse of the Hollywood dancing a few weeks ago and was transfixed. Last night she overheard us talking about it and climbed up on the couch a few minutes before it came on, and when the show began... all was stillness, mouth agape. I watched the first dance and then cleared out when the Little Ditchman commented on the nice "red tap shoes" of one of the dancers. She was eating M&Ms at the time. So there they were, Mommy and daughter, sitting on the couch eating chocolate, watching Dancing With The Stars, and commenting on the shoes. Like I said, I cleared out of there. With a beer.

I suppose it was inevitable. "That's my show!" she exclaimed, over and over, after she got out of the bath and prancing naked in the hall before bedtime. So I got the dinosaur book out this morning (a good one -one from my childhood -one I was keeping in reserve) and tried to interest her in some Jurassic pursuits, but eventually she just asked to watch DWTS. I put Little Einsteins on and went upstairs to get ready for work. With a beer. (Just kidding.)

It's just as well. I want to make a woman out of her and Mrs. Ditchman is more qualified to emphasize the feminine parts than I am. But I will teach her the dinosaur names for good measure, just so she doesn't fall into that trap of being unduly impressed by all the precocious boys out there, with their X-Boxes and Bionicles. She'll hold her own. I've already got her waving her hand and saying these aren't the droids you're looking for, so we're off to a strong start. Next spring we'll work on the Alec Guiness impersonation.

But no DWTS for Little Digger. I'll go back to watching Fringe, with all it's sci-fi gore and gunfire, if that's what it's going to take. We're gonna make a man out of him.

And I suppose he has this to look forward to, along the merry way to manhood (from Lileks):

When I was growing up Jane Russell was the old lady in the bra ad. It lifts and separates! It’s an 18-hour bra! These were mysterious concepts. What happened after 18 hours? Did it burst into flames? Did it drop and smush? Even the word PLAYTEX was strange, like some sort of moist clay-like plastic.

Bras are very unnerving to boys of a certain age. A trip to the department store often meant some red-faced time in Bra Land with Mom, looking up at acres of bras hanging like scalps from some strange war only adults knew about.

~

Wanton, unapologetic Spoiler Alert.

At the beginning of 24: Redemption, which I watched last night, the screen says: "The following takes place in real time," and it says it completely without irony, given that after this episode, the show takes a two month break, no doubt well-deserved after the two-year CTU-free intermission we've recently enjoyed out in tv wasteland.

Jack Bauer is in Africa (!) in that famously war-ravaged country of Senegala or Sri Kanya or Mozamboku or something, and there is about to be a military coup. Will Jack stop the coup? No -he's busy saving the children of Africa and, no, he doesn't save all of the children of Africa, though you might expect he'd try if given enough time, which is that elusive little thing that he never has. Twenty minutes or so into the television "event", our hero is strung up in a jungle shed and being tortured until it looks like he's going to break, sobbing and blithering until he reveals everything he knows; everything from where the children are hiding to the Pentagon secrets to Season 7 plot points and the color of Tony Almeda's gym shorts, but he escapes with the old break-the-torturer's-neck-with-the-legs routine. Genius! I guess the writers had to rough him up early on to get him good and mad for the next twenty-three and a half hours, for which they are also saving their own creative powers.

Mrs. Ditchman noted how hot he was, at about this point. She couldn't put her finger on what it was, exactly. She mentioned something about his masculine physique. If I had pointed out that a stoic hero of Jack Bauer's magnitude would probably be no less helpful around the house than yours truly, I'm sure I would have gotten the line, You're no Jack Bauer, honey. Uh, no. I'm not.

Because if I were, you'd be dead by now, honey. All of Jack's friends and family are dead, or mostly dead. (It's their most defining trait!) Early on in Redemption we meet a guy who's a friend of Jack's -old special forces buddy- and this guy seems like a real winner; really looking out for Jack, wants the best for him, wants the torture within to be easier than the torture without, etc. But an hour later they're all escaping with the African children and the guy steps on that heretofore unnoticed dramatic plot device, the land mine. After an emotional exchange, ("Go on without me! There's no time!") Jack turns tearfully and leaves his sorrowful buddy behind, standing there immobilized in the jungle. Minutes later in the distance: Boom. The sound of closure in a Jack Bauer relationship.

A bad guy came on screen. I recognized him from the red beret. Then another bad guy came on screen. Mrs. Ditchman recognized him from General Hospital. She said "he was bad on that show, too" so the poor bastard was typecast, but hey there's a paycheck in it. (Or perhaps she was referring to his theatric abilities.) And then there's the new president, who may be bad or good -we don't know. She (yes, she) is about to be sworn in at the inauguration, so any political maneuvering can't be dramatically instituted until she takes the oath later on in the show. Meanwhile, Lame Duck President is having his last oval office whiskey while plotting the opposite of whatever it was she was plotting (there's a coup brewing in some African nation, remember?) They meet. They talk. They admit nothing. They smile menacingly. And then he gives her the notebook with all the presidential secrets. Seriously folks, it's all in a notebook. With a metal cover. (But not the codes, he says. Evidently, that's a different notebook.) Anyway, I was glad to see they got a new president. This show has had ten American presidents in the past seven years and I, nor evidently anyone else in the writer's guild, don't see any reason to stop electing new ones now.

So Jack escapes Africa with the children but in order to cover the cost of the iconic evacuate-the-embassy helicopter ride, he must give in to the bureaucrats and agree to suffer the torturous fulfillment of a congressional subpoena on torture. Earlier in the show he took a white hot machete to the ear and moments later he was on the phone, but he fought bravely against giving in to that subpoena. It was for the kids' freedom that he relented -for the kids! He didn't have a choice. In the end, they all escaped on the helicopter which should have just picked them up out in the jungle an hour earlier. Other refugee children were left at the gates, arms outstretched between the bars. Jack looked down as the chopper lifted off. He couldn't save them all, dammit, but he did what he could. Our forlorn hero.

Great show! The Season 7 promo alone looked better than all of Season 6, but a world with a nuked Valencia is probably an easier venue for a good thriller. I'm looking forward to it! It showed Jack in DC and I fretted over the fact that the first twelve hours of the season were going to be on an airplane, but then Mrs. Ditchman explained to me that this was a 24 "event" and not officially bound to the parameters of the new season -so they have the liberty to reset the clock. Whew. (But will six hours of next season take place at a congressional hearing? Tune in for non-stop Jack Bauer action!)

If you missed it, the DVD for 24: Redemption comes out tomorrow because, hey, Christmas is coming.

(Incidentally, Season 7 begins on Sunday, January 11th -the week before the real inauguration. Coincidence? I think not. Coinkeydink? Yes.)


~

I gave up on Fringe this week. You know, Fringe? "The show everyone's talking about!" It was on and I had the opportunity to watch it and I just didn't. Mrs. Ditchman said, "Your show is on," and I just said "No thanks," and went upstairs. She put on DWTS (which is on two nights in a row, in case you were wondering.) It was a strange, slightly guilty feeling giving up on the show like that -like breaking up with a cute girlfriend who you wanted to like but though she claimed to be enamored of you she always treated you with a mild, underhanded contempt. We were mid-story, and I just found myself not caring what happened and resigned myself to never finding out.

In a similar vein, or perhaps not, I am about two-thirds of the way through a book and reached a couple chapters I had already read. They were the chapters that got me hooked -I picked up the book a while back and just started reading somewhere in there and found it all compelling enough to start from the beginning, (which is saying something.) Now I've reached that section, and I'm wondering if I should just skip ahead or re-read. It doesn't matter, but I'd be finished faster, I guess. I'm not someone who puts back books just to grow the list, rather, I want to get something out of them. Is this one giving me anything? Meh. It's merely a good read. I can tell, because I started to skim those chapters and found that I only recalled, like, half of it.

And so if these are the things that trouble me most in life, then I'm a lucky man! But truth be told, I have other troubles, and relaying them here would be a sour, pessimistic way to end the week and have a weekend. It's Friday! And I have as much work to do today as I've had all week and half the energy to do it! We're all still sick here, some of us seem to be fairing worse, and even the cat's sick -which has us worried. He's old. And what do you do for a cat? It's not like you're going to give him a Tylenol, wrap him in blankets, talk sympathy and lovingly feed him Campbell's Chicken Noodle -no, he just has to suffer through the illness. Poor cat. He's lucky too, though. I mean, he's 19 and what's the lifespan of a Persian Cat in the wild? Ahhh, the wilds of windswept Persia, where prides of Persian Cats roam -among the fittest players in Nature's awesome display of the daily struggle to survive in the animal kingdom. Now there's a TV show I'd watch. On Domestic Animal Planet Network.

Have a purrrrr-fect weekend! (Sorry.)



~

Came home last night to find the baby answer book opened to a page that said something like "endless crying," so that's what it's been like around here.

Also, we have router problems with our ethernet. Meaning: our net access is being routed into the ether. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. We're being routed! No time or patience for any of this.

Still feel like I have a ten pound rock in my stomach, which makes it hard to bend over. Since most of work is "bending over", this makes for a trying week. Now, if we could route the endless crying, there might be hope.


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