I started to write a post about politicians who cheat on their wives, and the fact that Republicans always fail to understand why it matters. It's not that Democrats are such saints; far from it. Of course Democrats cheat just like Republicans cheat. The difference is that Republicans (at least the conservative, dogmatic ones) are self-righteous and sanctimonious, and are always running around telling people how to live their lives. So it's more than a little hypocritical when they get caught doing all the things they rail against.

I mean, how do you go from bashing Clinton for cheaing on his wife, to then cheating on your wife? Or from being a gay hater to soliciting gay sex? Do these people not stop and think about it from time to time? It really boggles the mind.

Anyway, so Democrats get caught cheating and Republicans are all, "See! Look over there! They're cheating too!" And nobody ever seems to point out, yeah, but IT DOESN'T MATTER because the Democrats weren't claiming to be holier than thou. They weren't casting stones at glass houses. They were just going about their business, letting people live their lives, and then they did something stupid. Who cares.

And yet, every day on TV, you hear Elisabeth Hasselbeck or Glenn Beck or some other dumb beck missing the point. Except that I don't think they're really missing the point. They're pretending to miss the point because they secretly know how awful it is to go around casting judgment on everyone else, and then to turn around and do those same things.

This topic got under my skin after reading this Meghan McCain article on the dailybeast.com. I agree with most of what she says, but it all seems so non-controversial and obvious. Why are we even talking about it? Also, when is she going to realize that she's a Democrat?

But I digress. I started this post talking about how I started a post about politicians. And then I went and wrote a post about politicians. When in fact I had changed my mind and planned to post links to ugly dogs instead. So here are the ugly dogs, and I dare say that they are even uglier than you might imagine. My favorites are Elwood (slide #3) and one-eyed Gus (slide #5). As I told my friend Shannon, I don't think I'd want to touch any of these dogs. Or maybe I would, just to see if they feel as gruesome and slimy as they look.
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A few weeks ago, our good friends David and Butters came to Atlanta for a long weekend. It was lots of fun and we did all kinds of things that I can't remember now. One of the best things we did was a photo shoot in and around our house. David is an excellent photographer, like a real one. Not just like a real one, but an actual real one. In fact, he spent a good bit of time while here in Atlanta working on a photo project about inventors. Years ago, he took photos of us when we got engaged that I absolutely treasure to this day, and he has a clever and fairly famous blog too.

Anyway, he took all these wonderful photos of us looking like a respectable and normal family, and not the kind of people who, say, forget to bathe their children for weeks at a time. Or go to work with spit-up on the shoulder of a work blouse. You know, he made us look charming and lovely, which we're not, but it sure does make for some nice photos.

Click here to see the photos that David selected, optimized, and uploaded to an online gallery for us. And below are a few of my favorites from David's picks.

Thanks David!






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It happened again. I decided to do some surfing on etsy.com and in about three-tenths of one second, I found about seventy-five things I needed to buy.

Let me rephrase. It's not that *I* need to buy anything. It's that my poor deprived children are lacking several critical items, and who am I to deprive them. I mean, aside from being their mother. But you know what I mean.

Like, who knew that Alex needed a "Hip trendy toddler travel animals at the zoo coloring wallet" -- and that is the official name of this item; I'm not making that up. Here it is. Isn't it cute? It's a little baby briefcase of sorts for small children who need to tote their crayons and paper around, and by gosh are going to do it in style. Crafty, hipstery style.

I like everything about these. That they involve art materials. That they have fabric with bold, iconic and playful imagery. That they have complimentary, colorful fabric on the inside. That they appear to be well-constructed. That they are a clever idea of a real live person, and not something sold in stores. That they can be taken along as a distraction at a restaurant. The list goes on.

And now for a confession: I bought three. Which sounds a little crazy, but as I was concluding that I must have one, I also concluded that these things would make better gifts than whatever plastic pieces of shit we'd get from Target before the next kid birthday party.

So now we have animals at the zoo, sock monkeys, and alligators.

Crying baby, must go, later.
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Today after brunch we stopped by the Grant Park fire station. We had heard that the fire stations around town were doing open houses this weekend, and Alex is just a wee bit obsessed with fire trucks and fire stations. So we dropped by to touch the trucks, and the nice fireman let Alex sit and "drive" the big ladder truck. Quite a thrill. And when we lamented the fact that we forgot to bring our camera, fireman guy took a photo with his phone and emailed it to us. It's a little blurry, but still pretty good. A highlight of the day for sure. And Alex got to make his favorite fire truck sound. More than a few times.


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Update to the post below: the segment is online! Watch it here.
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If all goes as planned, I'll be on TV this Sunday morning at 6:30 am. It's a PBS show called Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, and the show focuses on Dr. Joseph Tate, the OB/GYN who delivered our eleven month-old baby, Andy. My mom is acquainted with the show producer, and they got to talking about show topics, at which point my mom told her all about Doc T. Then a bunch of us Doc T fans sent her loads of information about him, and voila, the show idea began to take form.

A few weeks later, a camera crew was here in Atlanta, getting footage of Doc T in action as both a baby mama doctor and orthodox Jew. While they were here for the shoot, they interviewed me at our house. They made sure to get Jarboe in the set since he's an old hand at this TV stuff.

It's not clear how much of my interview will end up in the show versus on the cutting room floor. It's also not clear how many things I said that will be embarrassing or awkward when I see them. Watching yourself on TV is like that; somehow you always come across seeming freaky and dumb, at least to yourself.

Anyway, I doubt any of you are up at 6:30 am on a Sunday morning, but if you are, or if you have a DVR, check it out. In Atlanta, PBS is channel 8 or 808 in HD, if I remember correctly. The air-time will vary by location so check local listings.
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Nothing much to report because a) there's no news and b) I'm about to keel over from exhaustion. I woke up at 4:30 am thinking about this and that, and then couldn't fall back asleep, so I decided I might as well be awake with coffee and the internet rather than bored to death in bed. So I got up and accomplished approximately sixty-seven things from 5:00 am to 7:45 am when the rest of the house inhabitants started stirring. Which was great! It's almost impossible to find more than four minutes of kid-free time to do anything, so a multi-hour block was positively exhilarating. Plus, it's fun drinking a warm steamy beverage while the sun comes up.

However.

Now I am very, very tired. And it's even more boring to read about someone being tired than it is to write about it. So I'll stop writing about it.

One thing I was thinking about this morning is, isn't it amazing that the gas tank in your car is always empty, but the trash can in your kitchen is always full? It seems like that wouldn't be possible, and yet it seems always to be the case.

On other pressing topics, I spent part of my child-free time at the crack of dawn this morning updating the about page of this web site. Nothing radical or especially exciting, but there are a few new tidbits on there if you've got nothing better to do.
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Alex, age 2 1/2, looking sweet and innocent



And Andy, age ten months, showing off them choppers


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This here is a garden. But it is not any old garden. It represents weeks (months?) of planning, strategizing, surveying, laser-leveling, scouting, reading, chopping, sawing, nailing, de-sodding, tilling, lugging, heaving, dumping, raking, digging, planting, mulching and watering. This pile of dirt is like Jay's third child, and most of his waking moments this weekend -- and for a long time leading up to this weekend -- have been spent preparing for the birth of this child.

Without further ado, I give you Jay's garden [insert oohs and ahhs here]:



I kept the car in the photo so you get a sense for the scale of the thing. It's 8' x 12' and takes up literally half of our back yard. It will soon, God willing, yield tomatoes, cantaloupe, watermelon, cucumbers, strawberries, squash, zucchini, and various herbs. Those are the contents of Jay's part of the garden.

Before the planting began, I demanded sweetly requested one quadrant for my own planting pleasure. So far my quadrant includes catnip and, uh, catnip. Which will probably be kaput in a few days, thanks to hallucinating cats with the munchies rolling all over it.

The garden is exciting for many reasons, one of which is that it justified the purchase of a new piece of manly equipment. Chez Sandhaus is now home to a shiny red cultivator, a nifty gadget that eats through the Georgia red clay like it's nobody's business, and then chews it up into itty-bitty bits that a plant can grow in, after it's been supplemented by fancy dirt with fertilizer, mushroom compost, peat moss, and other weird stuff I probably don't even know about.

Much as I hate to admit it, I secretly enjoy the cultivator. In fact, I got Jay to cultivate some dirt around our mailbox so I could plant some pink impatiens. (Did you know that the word impatiens doesn't have a T after the N? I learned that this morning and immediately started wondering what percentage of people in the country know this; I suspect fewer than ten percent, maybe even lower.)

Alex just showed up at my desk demanding more party mix, and talking about how he wants to go to a party. He's obsessed with parties these days. Parties and Thomas the Tank Engine and Wabi Sabi, the Japanese feline protagonist of a book we bought recently.

Which reminds me that Wabi Sabi would make a good name for a cat in real life. Perhaps a third cat acquired from the Humane Society for relocation into our house.

Speaking of names, I also like the name Dot-com, as in Tracy's sidekick in 30 Rock. Maybe we need to get two new cats so we can use both names.

Not sure how we got from gardens to cat names but here we are. Better head back to the family room since I'm the only one not watching Top Gun right now. It was in my bag of mother's day gifts from the Jay-bird. Blu-ray, of course. Jay doesn't really care what the movie is so long as it's Blu-ray. He wouldn't have his beloved wife watching some wretched low-res DVD, people. Now that's love!

Happy Mother's Day and hooray for Jay's garden and hooray for me for no longer having to hear about how the tomatoes aren't in the ground yet. Those suckers are in!
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Yesterday I unhappily discovered that all the links from the gallery page have stopped working. As in, years and years worth of hand-built galleries, whoosh, gone. A quick investigation shows that all the year and month gallery directories (ie, /2007/08/gallery_name/) have vanished into thin air, and it's not clear why.

I've contacted Tech Support about this, meaning I've told Jay to get on it and make it snappy. (He tells me the same thing when he runs out of undershirts and needs a load of whites, so it's a mutually beneficial system we've got going here.) He has to talk to the hosting people and they apparently aren't available until Monday. Note to self: time to switch to a new hosting provider; what are we paying them for if shit is disappearing and they're not available to help fix it?

Anyway, I doubt anyone has even noticed all the broken galleries. But in case you have, that's the story.
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