Our Story

My friend Tom says he’ll call me “in about an hour,” like, two hours ago, so I decide that it’s a good time to sit down and write another blog entry because I don’t want the site doesn’t get all crusty and dry like pizza that’s been left out for too long. And, it occurs to me as I sit down to write this: I haven’t written a blog in seven days.

Seven days. The number hadn’t really rung so true to me earlier in the day. That blissfully ignorant part of my day which I spent watching the Poley kids pummel each other in Super Smash Brothers for our Nintendo 64, or when I was doing observations on Galations 4 during church this morning, or even as I sat on the couch watching Memento forwards with the Schmozer a few hours ago. Seven days wasn’t such a big deal then. I mean, writing “once a week” isn’t so bad when school and work and bills and the other distractions of life are pulling you in a thousand different directions, right?

Right. Sure. Nobody’s going to blame me for not keeping up our pokey little site over the course of a week because everyone knows that Ken & Sarah Walker are busy people with things to do and people to see. No problem. All of this affirmation is conveniently no more than a synapse away from the trailing thought that I should feel bad about not blogging over the course of a whole week. Well, that is, right up until the point where I try to write.

And then, that feeling begins to set in.

You know the feeling. You know it if you’ve ever put off a term paper to the last three weeks of a semester and sat down in front of the blank computer screen waiting for your fingers to start typing, or decided that you’re going to spend the next 45 minutes punching out a letter to a friend you haven’t seen in five years and trying to figure where to begin, or thought to start up a journal again and finding your pen just hovering over the paper. It’s that feeling that takes the edges off of the words that would pour forth from the recesses of your cerebral cortex—well, would pour forth if your brain didn’t feel like its gravity had increased by an order of magnitude while you weren’t paying attention—and turns them into the mental equivalent of projectile artillery: large, slow-moving, and dumb. This feeling makes it feel like you’ve begun to type while wearing surgical gloves…stuffed with cotton…wrapped in wool mittens…tipped with duct tape…

So here I sit on top of the dryer in our bathroom, at 12:20 AM on an early, snowy Monday morning, eating pistachio nuts like they’re going out of style, and slowly coming to the realization that I have absolutely nothing to say.

No, I did not watch the Superbowl this year. When I asked Sarah if she wanted to watch the game Sunday night her reply was, “Not really. Do you?” To which I replied, “No, not really.” Instead, we stayed at home and watched Being John Malcovitch for a little more context to Adaptation (which was a great flick). At any rate, from what Jai was telling me, we didn’t miss much–the football was good (but, who really cared, aside from my Aunt in Sarasota?) and the ads were awful. I found this in my travels:

The Morning News: Super Bowl Ads: A Postmortem. Michael Jordan playing one-on-one against his younger self is existentially depressing in a thousand different ways, but here�s the worst: TV ads are so lifeless that they resurrect an aging legend from his advertising heyday and it still falls flat. Ouch.

In other news, Sarah and I got back our much-anticipated tuition reimbursement from my company and are now gleefully able to pay off our Christmas-season headiness. That, and I was finally able to act on an eBay auction for an almost new, well priced Sony Clié with free shipping. It gets here tomorrow. I can’t wait!

Here I sit blogging in the NJIT computer lab (we love wireless networks) because I know going to the Registrar at lunch time is something tantamount to water torture.

So Sarah’s Palm IIIe crapped out the other day due to what appears to be a screen-related failure: when I powered the unit up after a long stretch of having been off, the screen was all streaky and unreadable. This was a bitter-sweet event for me because, in my heart of hearts, I know that it means spending money on gadgetry. That this otherwise mortal sin is passed over by the Walker Household Budget Committee and my Best Buy recipt forgiven.

Right. Anyway, I immediately went to the web and tried to figure out what replacement Palm would be best for my wife. Generally, when I consider purchasing a Palm for someone who isn’t an obsessive, pathological, geek-monger such as myself, I try to go for value. And, there are a great many Palms available for around $150. I’m not talking about the trash that Palm has been trying to pawn off on unsuspecting newbies such as the Zire, but older Palm Vs and Sony Clies that, while a few years old, still deliver a great form factor and some wonderful features.

So, like any good husband, I discuss this with my wife to alert her of the situation and discuss with her the possible options when she stuns me with the words “I actually really wouldn’t mind taking your Palm.”

(beat)

I probably heard her wrong, “Well, I figured that maybe we could upgrade each of our Palms like every 18 months or so and sort of switch off who gets the new Palm, just to be fair…”

“No, I just really wouldn’t mind your upgrading each time and my just taking your old one.”

And it sinks in: not only do I get to spend money on a gadget, but I get to spend money on a gadget for me. This is huge. I ask my wife if she’s sure; yeah, she’s sure. I kiss her and thank her and can’t wait until dinner’s over when I can start pouring over eBay and Amazon and SonyStyle to find the uber-handheld that would be a significant upgrade and a good value.

This is what I found.

I love my wife.

Note: Don’t anybody ask why in the world I wouldn’t get a Pocket PC: Here’s why.

So, it was my birthday yesterday, and the Schmozemonster proved she knows how to throw a party. Though no iMac was to be had by reason of rejection by the Walker Household Budget Committee, we are one step closer to computing euphoria due to the lovely office chair that Charlie & Irene got for me. Sarah herself purchased a fancy new garbage can in light of the festivities. You may be asking why in the world my wife would get us, er, me a garbage can? Well, the fact is, we hate our garbage can.

You also may be wondering why we would be so empassioned about a 10 gallon rubbermaid container. That’s because you’ve never had to live with our garbage can–to watch as the bag collapses in on itself after the can is about half full, to use the tilt-in lid as it amasses vile sticky goo after three days of use which must be washed off by hand, to knock that self-same lid into the garbage by accident such that it amasses even more vile sticky goo in one fell swoop. To be sure, this new can is a blessing.

Schmozer, being cunning like she is, hid a new pair of leather gloves in the garbage can box–gloves that match my aforementioned leather jacket. What’s more, she made a rockin’ chocolate cake of which I have devoured three slices in the last 24 hours.

Jaime, Sal and Brandon came over, too, and we had a great time drinking coffee and chilling.

I love my wife.

Entries are likely to be sparse (cough, shocker, cough) for the next few days as I ramp up for my Prob & Stat exam, Foreign Policy paper, and Guided Design proposal…

Sarah found a new cage for Code Red, whose emotional distance had prompted us to believe that he may have an eating disorder. I got home yesterday to discover that Sarah had, eight hours previously, faced the two cages towards each other with the doors open so Codey could hop right in. That is, if Codey did anything other than eat millet and shriek when Sarah and I are within 4 feet of him (Bernie, on the other hand, has expressed her overt desire for my attention by alighting herself on my laptop monitor as I write this). I once asked Sarah what she thought would happen if we took Codey out of his cage and put him on, say, the coffeetable. We decided that he’d probably spontaneously combust: feathers everywhere.