Thanksgiving the First: Early Turkey Day with the Chicago Sobczaks

...Well i suppose they technically aren't the Chicago Sobczaks anymore - they belong to the outlying small towns of the Chicago area.

But still! Grace and I had a thought a month or two ago to take Adam on his very first plane ride to visit our Sobczak relatives up north in Illinois where he could meet, among others, his great-grandfather and great-grandmother.

As our schedule happened to work out, the week before Thanksgiving was our best option - happily, due to my Uncle Jim and cousin Mary C. having to work during the actual Thanksgiving weekend, they were planning to have their Thanksgiving meal during the weekend of our visit. Double helpings of cranberry sauce this year!

Our little piece of the Sobczak clan had a great time; Adam was terrific on the plane both in departure and return - spent most of his time either snacking, napping, or playing and garnering a few compliments about his temperament in the process from (relieved, i'm sure) nearby passengers.

It brought smiles to our faces to see everyone: Uncle Jim, Aunt Mary, cousin Mary C. (not too far from having her own little Sobczak soon!), her husband Jack, cousin Joe and his wife Ania, cousin Jim and his children Andrew and Rebecca (wife Renee regrettably absent due to a seasonal cold) and, of course, Grandpa Al and Grandma Lu.

I've posted pictures and video below of our quick weekend trip: enjoy!

My grievances. Which are grammar-related.

is there someone out there in my vast blog readership who has a background in the world of journalism or is well-versed enough on the rules of print who can explain what i seem to find time and time again when i read my weekly subscription of Time magazine:

a small excerpt from an article discussing the future of the US dollar -

"There's widespread agreement that this setup has to change but little agreement about how to change it. Which is a risky situation."

this always looks wrong to me when i read it, most likely due to the educators of my youth advising us all against the horrors of fragment sentences. have the rules been relaxed since i left school or is this some special exception granted to the news world?

"I wanted to find the answers to my grammatical questions and I searched everywhere. But I found nothing"

just seems like you could bust out some compound sentencing up there and make it flow easier on the eyes.

men be acting like zombies at the mall

we had a little family trip to the Galleria mall this weekend for some bits of casualwear/workwear shopping, our first with Adam (not counting when he was in utero), and our trip convinced us of one thing:

You don't really notice the great masses of stroller people at the mall until you become one of the stroller people.

Belated Happy Halloween - Oct 31

never fear, Super Grover is here! gotta love a company that lets their employees dress up on a workday and drink booze on company premises starting at noon.

Adam's October : Halloween and 5 1/2 months

October found Adam extremely busy - continuing to perfect his rolling-over technique as well as adding the newly acquired sitting and 'inchworm' crawling moves. he took up eating rice cereal and in a sometimes related and messy note also figured out how to make the universally loved "pbbbbtttttt" sound.

our good friends Steven and Lauren made the trip all the way from Austin to spend some time with the little guy and he was eager to please with smiles, laughs and generally being a happy baby who slept well for his guests in the bedroom next door. we all took a trip down to Galveston to walk the Strand and a bit of the seawall as well and finished up the weekend with a trip to Chinatown for some delicious dim sum lunch.

November should be an increasingly mobile month for Adam Ant and Grace and I look forward to getting our exercise trying to keep up with him

UPDATE: forgot to add that Adam had a photo session in his first ever Halloween costume which his 'uncle' Rich, for those of you video gamers out there, aptly titled the Super Monkey Ball outfit.

Who says modern medicine has its priorities out of place?

I didn't think there was much, beyond the Viagra and Cialis ads that flood the prime-time airwaves my son will eventually view, in terms of prescription medication developed for entirely discretionary / non-life-threatening conditions.

but hey! - now there's Latisse - to help prevent the life-crushing malady of "hypotrichosis" - excuse me, i mean inadequate or not enough eyelashes.


aside from being born with a condition where your eyelashes are so short as to not serve their evolutionary function of filtering dust and other irritants from your eyes (and i'm not convinced that Brooke Shields' "before" example here fits that bill), is it really worth the possibility of "skin darkening, eye irritation, dryness of the eyes, and redness of the eyelids"?



to the credit of the makers of Latisse, there's no mention of possible explosive diarrhea or insanity / suicidal thoughts, but still it seems a bit of an annoying potential downside for a little bit of body fashion. aren't there eyeliners on the market that give the ladies' eyelashes an illusion of being longer without the cost of prescription copays or physical side effects?



bottom line: scientists spent a good amount of time and R&D money figuring out how to make eyelashes a little longer while the riddle of cancer continues on largely unsolved.

Rules of the road

as i continue my early descent into the crabby "get off my lawn" phase of adulthood, from time to time i encounter situations where i get really annoyed with the selfish 'me-first', no-logic attitude put on display by some of the other human beings on this planet.



since i spend a decent chunk of my day in my car it's not surprising that a lot of these encounters are vehicle-related. in the world of driving there are certain fixed rules (speed limits, drive on the right side of the road, red light means stop, etc.) and then there are unwritten rules based on the concept of 'hey we're all in this together' and common courtesy. most of the problems you find on the highways and byways of America are due to certain people who willfully ignore the latter set of rules for their own immediate but ultimately insignificant benefit.



a good case in point that happened to me just this morning on my usual route to work downtown:



there's an overpass on a stretch of my highway commute where two lanes converge down to one as the overpass filters you onto the connecting highway. a logical and courteous driver quickly reviews the issue [two lanes' worth of cars must assimilate into a single lane without incident] and concludes , all cars and drivers presumably being equal, that at the point when the two lanes definitively become one the order of assimilation would be 'Car 1 from Lane A merges, then car 1 from Lane B, then Car 2 from Lane A, and next Car 2 from Lane B', and so on, presuming that car 1 in Lane A was slightly ahead of car 1 in Lane B as they neared the merge. this elegant ballet of merging cars occurs all over the US on a daily basis usually without a hitch because most people get the system.



what i see happen a lot to other drivers and today to me is when one of the cars in the other lane decides to circumvent the natural order.



so say i'm car 2 in Lane A; Car 1 in Lane A has gone ahead, then car 1 in Lane B goes - ok it's my turn now - fantastic.



but hey! - car 2 in Lane B sees me moving forward to my place in the merge and then proceeds to zoom up right on Car 1 B's bumper, keeping pace with me as our two lanes' width of total car-nage creeps up to the point where only one lanes' width will be able to proceed.



it's usually at this point that i start giving the pissed-off look and making the internationally-recognized criss-cross hand gestures that represent "hey , dummy, first one lane goes and then the other - get it?"



most of the time i get a look back like i'm the one who's being a jackass - there's about a 0.001% chance the other driver will cop to being the one who is in fact out of turn.

being desirous to avoid either vehicular body damage from collision or personal body damage from an unknown crazy person packing heat, i typically back off and let the baby have his bottle and we both drive off in a mood degraded a few points from earlier before the merge.

and what did the other guy get out of it? he's exactly one car-length ahead of where he would have otherwise been , something on the order of 0.3 seconds quicker to his destination, and for that minute gain a cost of shifting the world's vibe meter perceptibly more towards 'bad' than 'good' and also further cementing my conviction that the bad-natured people of the world will inherit the earth by stepping all over the meek.