At 10:30am, 15 August 1992 our son Alexander Frederick Kerezman came into the world.

Ten years later, Alex (a.k.a. “the Spud”) is a healthy, smart little computer gamer and budding golf enthusiast with a clever wit and good manners. Well, sometimes “wit” and “manners” clash just a little, but nobody’s perfect. If we can get him to relax a bit more and learn to truly enjoy life, I think he’ll grow up to be one heck of a neat person.

Happy Birthday, son. I love you.

I like my job, yes, but that’s not the reason I want to stay at work for the next few days. You see, Portland’s experiencing something of a one-week heatwave, and I want no part of it. I absolutely wilt in 90+ temperatures. Our house becomes a kind of sauna, or perhaps the term is ‘blast furnace.’ From mid-afternoon all the way until well past midnight, our abode is unbearable.

My office, on the other hand, is tiny but it has air conditioning. Mmmm. I love being cool and comfy. Too bad I don’t have a stockpile of food or a nice place to sleep.

Oh well. I should just suck it up and be miserable with the rest of my family. It wouldn’t be fair to them anyway, now would it?

I did something Saturday afternoon that most people aren’t aware that I’ve ever done.

I trimmed back both the rhododendron bush next to our front door and the big leafy shrub that’s been taking over the bend in our walkway for the last three years. The rhodie is in pretty sad shape, limbs and leaves all over the place. I cut it back pretty drastically, but at least we can see out the window now and get to our front door. Yes, it was that bad. Over the last few years I’ve done very light trimming to keep the rhodie out of the doorway, but this is the first time I’ve made a serious effort to rehabilitate the little shrub.

As for the other bush, whose name I do not know but probably should, we’ve been letting it grow unchecked since we moved in. It used to be no taller than I am, and was neatly contained in its bed on the inside of the walkway curve. Over time it’s grown upward and outward to the point where you almost have to walk in the grass to get around it. While I did make pretty good progress on that plant, I expect to make a few more passes at it with the pruning shears over the next few weekends.

For grins and chuckles I also got the neighbor’s grape vines the hell out of our tree and off our house, did a tiny bit of trimming on the other, better-grown rhodie at the corner of the house, and removed what looks like some ivy vines that wanted to climb up the drainpipe.

You didn’t know that I sometimes get a kick out of pruning shrubbery? See what happens when you assume you know everything you need to know about a person?

Yes, I went to the department-head meeting. Yes, I downloaded the Maximiser data at 10:00. No, I didn’t get sis’ CD-ROMs mailed off. (Whoops.)

We did, however, eventually get down to the Family Fun Center for some… er… fun. This time we started with the bumper boats. I love bumper boats, and these have squirtguns. Muahahahaha.

To dry off, we played 18 holes of minigolf. The huge group of kids (did their shirts read YMCA? I think so.) let us play through as they massed at the first couple of holes. Once past them, we had nobody in front of us (or behind, really) for the rest of our game. No pressure! At one point I got down on the astroturf and blew on Erica’s golf ball to make it go in. Needless to say we took very little of the game seriously, which is the best way to play minigolf anyway. Scorecards? What fer?

After that we split up, Wendi and Erica taking on the go-carts while Alex and I tried out the arcade. Oddly enough our first game was air hockey, and it was just about the most fun we had in the arcade. We’ve pretty much decided “to hell with the arcade next time.” The money would have been better spent on another round of bumper boats.

Once our arcade tokens were finally exhausted we decided to head out, grab some snacks and head for home. By way of Future Dreams. While at Safeway (of all places) we noticed the paperback for the most recent Raymond Feist “Krondor” novel. This computer-game-based series isn’t bad, but it also isn’t all that superb. We picked this one up anyway, and… it isn’t bad, but it also isn’t all that superb. (Why no, in fact, I’m not going to waste time with a full review. Why yes, I did finish reading it in a mere three hours.)

We came home, kicked back, prepared and enjoyed some chocolate chip cookies, read comics and novels and such, and then Wendi and her dad took off for another late night of karaoke. Meanwhile I got online, read and replied to my usual ultralight stack of email, then decided to post a recap of my vacation day.

Um, I guess that’s everything up to this point, isn’t it? Tomorrow it’s back to the salt mines for me. I hope I’m up to it. I’m a little depressed about the conjunction of my small raise and the increase in insurance deductions, but I’m trying very very hard not to let the depression get ahead of me. Wish me luck.

After a busy stretch at the office, and with both my newly-improved paycheck and Wendi’s double-gig-weekend payday coming, we decided that tomorrow should be a day off. We’re going to run errands, then we’re going to take the rugrats down to the Family Fun Center in Wilsonville. We checked it out on Sunday (we played minigolf, actually) and enjoyed it enough to want to go back during the week when it might be just a smidge less crowded.

I still have to show up for the department heads meeting at 8:00, and at 10:00 the Spring book Maximiser data gets released. *sigh* So I can’t leave until after that’s installed. Then we run to Future Dreams for the comics, and to the bank to set up my account. (I get my own debit card so that I can’t possibly screw up the family finances whenever I go out to lunch or something. This way I can pay my Future Dreams and Northwest Link monthly bills on my own, yay!)

In other news, I just finished burning and labelling the six CD-ROMs of anime music videos I promised my sister as a wedding present. I’ll package them up for mailing tomorrow morning while I wait for the Maximiser data to be released.

At least I’ll get most of a day off, dammit.