Author: Marko

castle frostbite. friends. parenting.

taking a breather between storms.

I’m at the Fancy Bread Place, part of my weekly Dadcation ritual. (For those of you just tuning in, that’s when I get to leave the house for a morning once a week without kids in tow.) Two days ago, we attended a friend’s wedding over in the White Mountains, in a location that required us to do a lap of northern New Hampshire because you can’t get there from heah, at least not in a straight line. The wedding was lovely, though, and I’m glad we went.

Tomorrow, said friend and her husband are coming up to Castle Frostbite for a Halloween party. They’re bringing three little girls for a sleepover with our kids. We’ve done that before a few times, and it’s always fun, but LOUD. Five kids in the 3-8 age bracket can work up an amazing din. So right now I am enjoying a bit of quiet and calm before heading back to the Castle to get it ready for tomorrow’s festivities. There will be home-made “Bones of the Dead” cookies, mummy cupcakes, cocktail weenies, Halloween candy, and a bunch of, uh, special parenting sauce for the grown-ups. Tune in again on Sunday, when our intrepid correspondent live-blogs his hangover.

(I kid, of course. Our intrepid correspondent doesn’t get hangovers.)

 

castle frostbite. new hampshah. weather.

still here.

After-action report from Castle Frostbite: no big harm done here. We lost power for a few hours, and the winds were worryingly strong at times, but nothing got damaged. The chicken house remained in place.

The chickens have benefited from Sandy—when I let them out this morning, the run was a muddy mess, but all that moisture had drawn a lot of earthworms to the surface. It was like a breakfast buffet for the birds.

castle frostbite. new hampshah. weather.

snor’eastercane update.

The weather is still pretty sedate here in Upper Cryogenica. The wind gusts have picked up a bit, but it’s still nothing unusual for the season. The storm is predicted to pass well to our west, but we’re still in the cone of possible projected courses, so we’ll see how that goes.

New York is getting socked right now, and the storm isn’t even ashore yet. It’s making the windows here at Castle Frostbite rattle every now and then from seven hundred miles away. Boston is 100-ish miles to the southeast, and they’re shutting down the town and folding up the sidewalks from what I hear. I’m expecting to lose power as the storm gets closer, but we’re all stocked with firewood, batteries, and water. At least it’s not ten below with a foot of new snow on the ground outside. I just hope that the chickens don’t get blown into Quebec…

family. new hampshah. writing.

41.

IMG_0138

I’m not much of a photographer, but this picture is probably my favorite of all the ones I’ve taken. It’s the cemetery right up the road after the surprise late October snow we had last year. I used no filters or any post-processing, and the camera was the lowly built-in iPhone 4 one.

I’m 41 today. The sun is out, and the day looks a lot like that picture, minus the white frosting.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a lot like Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins—thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. I think I’ll turn the computer off for the rest of the day and take the kids out for some lunch and a bike ride out in the green. The writing will be here when I get back, as it always is. I have two novels to finish by the end of the year, but it won’t hurt things to take the day off from the regular routine. I need to recharge the batteries a little and think about how to spend my forty-second ride around the sun.

capitalism. castle frostbite.

megafridge.

This is our new fridge:

 

042

I don’t usually go all nuts over new appliances in the house, but I love this fridge. Our old fridge came with the house, and like all the other appliances in the place, it was an early Nineties piece of junk from the “Better Than Nothing” section of the appliance department at Sears. We replaced all the junk piecemeal as money allowed, and the fridge, being the biggest expense, was saved for last.

I will say that I didn’t realize how much our old fridge sucked until we got this one. The old fridge was a classic old layout, freezer box at the top and one door below that. This one has the freezer at the bottom, so you don’t need to bend down or crouch anymore to see what’s in the fridge. The whole freezer section is a drawer, and it has a lot of internal drawers for organizing. The fridge section has French doors, and enough LED lights on the inside that I feel like I’m looking at the bridge of the new J.J.Abrams Enterprise whenever I get out some eggs for breakfast. The right-hand door has an outer panel that opens separately, which means you can get out that gallon of milk or soda bottle without having to open the whole fridge door. It has telescoping shelves for tall containers, lots of various drawers for veggies, fruit, and meat, and more extras than a new Toyota. For all I know, there’s a nuclear fuel cell and a Bluetooth iPod interface in there somewhere.

Best of all: we now have a dispenser for cold water and ice cubes on demand. Yeah, baby—shaved or cubed ice, whenever I want it, at the touch of a button! You have no idea how much easier that makes my cocktail preparations.

I will say that I had to draw the line at the almost identical model that had the additional touchscreen feature on the front door. It had apps for Twitter and Facebook on the screen. Who the hell posts Twitter updates from their fridge, and what kind of wisdom are you going to share? “Just made a sandwich LOL”?

There is, of course, the possibility that fridge design has advanced to the stage where the fridge shares to Twitter whatever you’re taking out.

“@markosfridge: Marko just had a snack of half a tub of cream cheese and eight slices of hard salami.”

Now that would be a highly effective dieting tool. Maybe we should have gone for that model instead…

in the news. new hampshah.

earth….quake?

So we had an earthquake here in New England on Tuesday night. How about that?

I was hooking up the water line to our new fridge when the place started shaking. It felt like a washing machine severely out of balance, and that’s exactly what I thought it was at first…until Robin said that there wasn’t any laundry going. Apparently it was a 4.0 quake centered in Maine somewhere. (I think it’s God’s retribution for all that lobster-killing and Zumba whoring.)

Now, a 4.0 quake won’t even make you folks in California look up from your Cheerios, but to us here in Upper Cryogenica, any earthquake is a big deal, especially one you can actually feel. I’m already seeing t-shirts online saying “I Survived The Great New England Quake of 2012”, and pictures are making the rounds on the Intertubes with the obligatory Very Minor Damage (think “trashcan/lawn chair fallen over”) captioned NEVER FORGET. I love the Internets and the human capacity for humor.

intertubes flotsam.

“jackass” auf deutsch.

This video of a German dude doing a hop into a frozen pool—with fairly predictable results regarding personal injury—kicked over my giggle box this morning. If only there was a German word for glee or joy at the misfortune of others…

At least he’s a good enough sport to laugh at his own idiocy. Rock on, German Speedo Dude.

family. friends. travel.

team munchkin wrangler’s 2013 european tour dates.

My brother’s 40th birthday is in February, and we’ve been waiting for an opportunity to visit the family again, so we decided to roll two birthday parties and a family get-together into one and go over there, kids and all.

I just booked the tickets, and boy howdy, does it cost a chunk of change to fly two adults and two kids to another continent. We’re flying from Boston to Amsterdam (the most convenient large airport from my brother’s place), with a stopover in Iceland because we’re going by Icelandair, and their 757s don’t quite have the legs for a transatlantic hop. I was hoping for a longer layover so we could maybe do some looking around in Reykjavik on the way, but it’s just an hour-long pit stop to refuel that Viking long-plane, and I’m sure we won’t be able to see more than the inside of the terminal at Keflavik International.

This will be interesting. We haven’t been back to Germany since 2005, when Quinn was ten months old and Lyra was still in the planning stages. Now the kids are seven and five, and they’re old enough to a.) not be a nuisance on the plane, and b.) be aware of the trip and able to remember the event. Quinn is actually turning eight on the day of our arrival, so he’ll get a little birthday party in Germany.

We’ll be in Germany for just a little under two weeks, which should be plenty of time for family business and some sightseeing. I’m planning to take the wife and kids on day trips around the area, and there’s a lot to see within just a few hours of my brother’s place. Amsterdam is only two hours away, so I suspect we’ll go there for a day—I haven’t been to A’dam since at least 1995, and I’m really looking forward to going back there.

My brother has three kids in the five-to-ten bracket. We’re bringing our two. That’s five children of kindergarten-to-fifth-grade age under the same roof for almost two weeks, and a birthday bash thrown into the mix. I’m sure we’ll be just fine, and I know it will be a lot of fun, but you can also bet your caboose that I’ll be taking the maximum allowable quantity of New Hampshire-bought hooch I can get into Europe duty-free.