“Well some things you can explain away, but …”

ME: So how’d guitar lessons go today?

LI’L DIVA: Good.

ME: Practice those (windmilling ala Pete Townshend) power chords again?

LI’L DIVA: (rolling eyes) No.

ME: Ahem. Learn anything new?

LI’L DIVA: Yeah, some song by … The .. Clack?

ME: The Clash?!

LI’L DIVA: Yeah.

ME: (eyes popping) Which one? Which one? “Should I Stay or Should I Go”? I actually sang that in our band in high school. We never played any where outside of my friend Tim’s basement before --

LI’L DIVA: No.

ME: “Rock the Casbah”? We also --

LI’L DIVA: No.

ME: "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais"?

LI’L DIVA: What?

ME: Which song?

LI’L DIVA: “Train” something …

ME: “Train in Vain”?

LI’L DIVA: Yeah.

ME: I have The Clash on Broadway box set you can borrow and -

LI’L DIVA: What’s a “box set”?

I have apparently failed on many, many levels.

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I’m Not Pregnant

… but I did write this piece “When Husbands Go to the Ends of the Earth for Their Pregnant Wives” for the WhatToExpect.com website about My Love and her completely absurd demands on me, the man who knocked her up.

And, if you clicked that link and read the intro – yes, I am the blog editor for the NYC Dads Group these days. Even though I live in Connecticut. Hey, everybody is outsourcing these days.

To Whom It Concerns at My Son's New Middle School

If you do not find Excitable’s name on your sixth-grade class list, it's not for lack of trying.

I attempted to register him at least two and a half times.

And in two languages.

When the forms arrived in our mail this spring, I diligently verified the home address and phone numbers printed on them as instructed. They were correct, according to the phone book, as that's where I needed to check since I received the forms for someone else's boy at a different school.

In all fairness, the school also sent me a form with the right information on it. Behind the other boy's sheet I found one addressed to my son. In Spanish.

But that's why we have Google Translate.

Have No Fear, It’s Hangar 24 Beer

You probably noticed, assuming you are still here, that I’ve taken some extended blogging breaks this year. Where was I?

Well .. I was in rehab.

For bad beer consumption.

Thank heavens, my taste buds were saved by Hangar 24 Brewery, a very generous craft brewer based in Redlands, Calif.

Out of the blue this year, they sent me this ginmorous insulated case of some of their many fine, fine brews for me to sample. See:

And sample, I did. Not a bad one on in the bunch. In fact, one of the tastiest, most consistently good batch of diverse beers from one brewer I’ve every had. Here are some of my faves:

Labor of Love for the Game

My father did not bury bodies for the mob. It only looked that way, every spring and summer, based on the contents of the trunk of his sedan.

Shovels. Pick. Soil rake. Gloves. Pull-over galoshes. A thick, crusty layer of dried mud everywhere.

The only DNA a forensics team would recover, though, would be from dad's sweat, blood and popped blisters.

These tools were not of his accounting trade. They were the ones that helped keep me and my teammates playing on the poorly draining baseball infields of my youth.

I don't carry these implements today, even though the minivan I drive could house half a Home Depot. This is because we have a storage shed full of tools and more at our Little League field. My fellow baseball parents and I used them often all this usually cold then usually rainy then usually hot season.

I Ran. I Didn’t Die.

Why is the woman on the left coming at me with a camera?

a) She’s excited to see a “hot” dad in the flesh.

b) That’s not a camera. It’s a small oxygen tank and she’s offering me a hit.

c) She wants to know what detergent I used to get my safety-green colored shirt so much brighter than hers.