Tag Archives: Van Saun Park

For Today I Am A Boy

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So tired. I’m pretty sure I am more tired today than I was after bicycling yesterday. Today’s fatigue is mainly from chasing Alexander around. Yes, he’s now in his 2’s. Stine once again planned an excellent party at Van Saun Park in Paramus NJ.

She had a party there last year and today was even better. Lots of food was prepared. All of it good. Stine is an excellent cook. The day started early, Julio and I with Alexander riding up to Van Saun Park to set up everything, move picnic tables and unpack various coolers.

I volunteered to help since I knew Julio would need my help and any opportunity to spend time with Alexander is always a good thing. After we unpacked everything Alexander took off to a play area, designed for 4 to 6 years, but Alexander doesn’t like to play in areas designed for his age group.

That left me chasing after him to the best of my ability. It was like that most of the day. Julio was busy grilling, Stine busy setting up the tables and making sure everyone had food to eat and beverages to drink.

It was up to me to play my part as the ‘manny’. And it was mostly a pleasurable experience. He held my hand when needed, and paid attention to me when he had to. The weather report mentioned scattered showers so I wore jeans and work boots since in case it rained, I wouldn’t want to get too muddy.

No one likes a muddy manny.

But despite the gray storm clouds in the distance it didn’t rain. It was quite muggy though. The food was excellent, the standard picnic fare, hot dogs, hamburgers, cole slaw, potato salad, salad salad. And a few birthday cakes which were quite good.

Stine definitely made a lot of food and of course I stood to benefit from the overabundance, which I did since my refrigerator now has a lot of food in it. I ate a lot today so I’m not hungry now, but it certainly won’t last past tomorrow. I’m looking at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I will be sated.

I helped them lug all the food and presents upstairs. Though the day was pleasant enough, I did find Alexander filling the role of the terrible 2’s. At one point he had one of his cousins toys, some cart that gets pushed around and Alexander pushed it around and around.

I didn’t want to stray too far from the group so I tried to get Alexander to circle back but he was most resistant to the idea, enough so that he was screaming ‘Ni ni ni’ pronounced ‘nigh’ it’s Danish for ‘No’. I did get my way and we headed back and I situated him amongst his family.

About 5 minutes later I was looking around and noticed Alexander missing. I mentioned to Stine, ‘where’s the baby?’ and she looked around frantically as did I. We spotted him about 50 feet away pushing that cart and headed to a play area on his own.

I ran over there and got him, gathered him up under one arm and carrying the cart in the other. He was screaming ‘Ni Ni Ni’ and wheat I believe was ‘Let Me Go!’ really putting up a fight. He looked at me as if I betrayed him badly.

Basically he was overtired, over stimulated and still trying to figure out his boundaries. I felt bad but as I had hoped, he forgot all about it 20 minutes later.

That’s it for me, I wanted to write before Lost comes on tonight and I do not expect to answer the phone or do much else but watch the show for the next 3.5 hours. Under the Wire.
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Take It In

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Another Friday. What else is new? Pretty tired. It’s been a somewhat productive day. Laundry mainly. That’s productive. Laundry isn’t about to clean itself. Last night was low key. Just TV basically, as usual.

It being a Thursday night I did not watch Keith Olbermann and still neglecting Rachel Maddow. By the time Rachel comes on I’ve had just about enough. So I watched Community which was very funny. I think the Indian dude, Abed (whom I thought was called Op-Ed) is the best thing on it.

Parks and Recreation was also funny, John Larroquette playing the old flame of Amy Poehler’s mother, played by Pamela Reed was silly. The Office was the best with Kathy Bates playing the southern owner of Sabre, the printer company that has taken over Dunder Mifflin.

It was a return to form for the Office, with the past couple of weeks being sub par at best. 30 Rock was also very good. Not too much Tracy Morgan which is a very good thing.

Tracy Morgan is probably the luckiest guy in television. His best routine on Saturday Night Live was Brian Fellows I think and that wore thin rather quickly. Elizabeth Banks played Alec Baldwin’s love interest and she was great as usual. And the hallucination after Liz Lemon had dental work done was tops. Jon Bon Jovi was actually good as well.

Bill came home in time to watch the 10:00 broadcast of Keith Olbermann but since he decided to clean up around his computer, I opted to play music instead of listening to Keith Olbermann. Bill had his laptop repaired by TekServe so after finally throwing out a lot of crap that piled up around his Mac, he started working on his laptop which needed to be reloaded with just about everything.

He was up until 1:30 doing that. He’s driving to Atlantic City tonight and tomorrow so I won’t be seeing him until Sunday, and most of Sunday will probably be spent sleeping in bed. The Winter Olympics start tonight. I’m fairly ambivalent about them. I may watch the opening ceremony though.

Nothing else seems to be on. But that won’t probably happen until later so I might as well catch Keith Olbermann. This afternoon while walking around town I ran into Chris Repella and her daughter about to go to lunch at Cafe Karma, or Karma Cafe.

Chris was talking to Eileen Lynch who I hadn’t seen in a few years. I think she might have moved but now she seems to be back. Also ran into Thaler Pekar who is a real sweetheart. She was looking good in her winter wear. Thaler and I talked for a while, she’s taking an improv class and I told her of my improv class story.

It seems to work for her, but I could never get past the most important rule of improv. Don’t say ‘No’. If you say no it ends the sketch you’re working on. If you say yes the sketch can continue in many directions. And my first reaction all those years ago was no.

Not too wordy tonight, so I will just end it right here.

To all the visitors who visit this blog and wonder ‘what the fuck is this?’, sometimes I have things to write about, sometimes I don’t. The thing was back in the day, I established a goal of writing at least 500 words a day. I was thinking of John Hughes, and felt I had to explain, and no, not that John Hughes.

Rand suggested putting it up on a blog so he created johnozed.com for me. Since I really didn’t have anything to write about today, I still felt compelled to write the daily allotment. And here we are with now over 600 words.

I guess I was wordier than I expected. Cheers!