My favorite things

- I never wrote about Valentine's Day. It was wonderful. We saw Islands play at a mellow little show, and it was perfect. A night with the nicest man on earth listening to the nicest voice on earth. Hallways is still my favorite song these days. We've seen Islands play how many times now? And Nick Thorburn in his other musical incarnations how many times on top of that?

- I took a crazy adventure to Arizona for Holly's wedding. It was the perfect weekend. Tamsen flew here, and the two of us drove with the kids all those hours down the 10. There were two incidents of vomit, lots of old college friends, lots of good meals, lots of laying in the grass and talking, lots of making a mess of Holly's apartment, lots of swimming/playing/visiting, lots of not sleeping, lots of wedding, and one beautiful reception with one beautiful bride who seemed to not be able to stop smiling.

- Tamsen stayed for a few days after we drove back, and this happened to coincide with my birthday and a visit from Stelth, who was playing with the Lumineers on Conan O'Brien, the taping of which Tamsen, Andy, and I attended. A marvelous birthday. We also visited the Griffith Observatory, the SM Pier, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a farmer's market, and Souplantation before Tamsen forced me to let her go home. I really, really, really like visiting and getting visited.

- For my birthday, I got some shirts for the kids, a rad little photo display set, a salad spinner (which has been in use constantly since), a flower, a Troy and Abed shirt, 5th Element on bluray, and a three-hole punch. Or it could be that the three-hole punch just arrived in the same Amazon order as the salad spinner. Also drawings from my kids and several nice cards.

- I finished up all my jobs and got a new gig doing publicity for my friend's new novel, Evertaster. I'm a slow reader, but I am reading it, and I'm genuinely loving it. It's fun to research blogs for promotion, and I'm learning a lot.

- The kids are maturing. They're both really into drawing right now. Elliot is drawing clear and discernible creatures, most of them being robots, zombies, skeletons, astronauts, aliens, monsters, or monsters with hearing aids. Or kittens. My favorite of his recent drawings is Ki-Adi-Mundi. Yes, the drawing has a huge head, yes, Elliot titled the drawing himself with no prompting, and yes, Elliot is his father's son. Corryn tends to grab a pen whenever she finds one (which is forbidden, as she's drawn on every piece of furniture we have), run to the scrap paper bin, and then fill the ENTIRE PAGE with the most intricate little scribble clusters...for half an hour at a time. She's started to draw dots over eyes and noses and mouths whenever there's an image already on the paper, just like Elliot did, but she's doing it much earlier than he did. If you ask her what she's drawn, she'll either say Elmo or Daddy. Elliot is also writing letters now when he sees them nearby to imitate. Isn't it amazing how humans are like scanner/printers, but imperfect ones that get better with age and practice?

- The kids' other favorite activity these days is pretending to be kitty cats, which to Elliot means being very snuggly while meowing incessantly, and to Corryn it means collapsing onto her belly and screaming, "MOW!"

- Andy got a little professional-development fellowship for the summer, so he'll be taking one class at USC once a week and getting paid for it. Then he starts the PhD program at USC in August.

- So we have to move. We put in our intent to vacate papers already. Here's to hoping we find a new place. Where, when, and for the price/size we want. No, we've done our homework and we have a plan, I'm not actually very worried about finding a good place.

- We're going to Colorado next week.