I bought my ticket today.

Leaving on August 15. Not coming back until September 4. And flying alone.

*Sigh*

My daughter and I ended this day by walking around in a park. She would hold onto my thumbs, and I would slowly ease them out of her hands, thus leaving her to walk on her own. She realized that after taking a step or two by herself, and fell onto the grass laughing hysterically.

Then we went for pizza. Broccoli for her, anchovies for me.

Something woke me up in the middle of the night.

No, it wasn't a loud truck. Not the train. Nor a wild party in the neighborhood. Not the smell of something burning. But it was a smell. A foul, pugnant, offensive, overbearing smell.

It was a skunk!

Somewhere in the village, a skunk had sprayed its overbearing liquid. Possibly in defense when fronted with another animal. Or a car.

But as a result, everything smells like a skunk in here now. Including me. Gee, I can just imagine the looks on my fellow biker's faces when I show up for our 50 mile ride this morning. They'll probably leave me in a ditch enroute.

Hello. I will be your skunk for the day.

Man, it's raining!

Rain. Rain. Rain.

Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain.

I am going away again in a month. For almost three weeks. *Sigh* If this pathetic on-line airline ticket website service thing doesn't forget to send me my ticket. Again.

What is the deal with these ticketing websites, anyway? I have been doing most of my banking on the Net for years now. With no problems. What so ever. Never has my money just mysteriously disappeared from my account. Never have I had to call the bank and have someone say to me, in a patronizing voice: "Now are you suuuure sir, that you actually transferred this amount into your account? Couldn't it be that you just accidentally did not transfer it, like, at all?" But time after time, year after year, this is what I get from the airlines. All of them. BA, AA, Air France, KLM, SAS, and the rest of them. All of these clowns. "Sorry sir, I have no record of that transaction. Oh, and by the way, that flight is now full." I mean, is it a requirement that if you land a contract, writing a booking engine for an airline website, that it actually should not work? Ever?

Actually, I am not pissed about this. I learned my lesson a while ago. Now, I buy my tickets way in advance, to allow for all the screw-ups, and lost reservations, and tickets to Detroit (I mean, who would go to Detroit, voluntarily, anyway?), and wrong prices, and middle seats, and all the other stuff that you can possibly fuck up when taking someone's reservation for a simple airfare.

You know what though? I am pissed. But not at the airline. It's this whole going away again thing. Alone. For weeks.

And on top of it all, if I have to go somewhere, this really isn't where I want to fly to!

I have a completely different destination in mind.

I was right, I was right, I was right!

When I arrived at the daycare, my daughter was sleeping soundly. She woke up as soon as I opened the door to the room where she was sleeping. Grumpy, wrinkled, and hungry. She half-wimpered, half-growled in my shoulder as I carried her to the car. There she did one of her stiff-as-a-board-so-you-can't-put-me-in-that-car-seat-thing. She usually saves those for a rare occasion, like when we're driving guests somewhere or if we think that we are really late going somewhere. But I had already decided what to do. First, I subjected her to my singing. That usually catches her offguard, as it did today.

I sang all the way to the pizza joint across the river. There, I ordered a large slice of chicken/broccoli/tomatos/bacon/onions/ranch dressing accident. Next, I fed her the toppings. She was starving. She had already finished everything I sent with her to the daycare: The double ration of banana-oatmeal, the eggs, the boiled carrots, the orange, the milk/half&half, and a good chunk of the wheat-cheerios-like-thingys. And that was after the breakfast of 6 oz of milk/half&half, banana, puffed wheat, and apricots.

After we jointly destroyed the humongous pizza slice, and I had stopped singing at her, she was already in a better mood. Then we danced around in front of the pizza place, in the rain, and that even brought out a little smile. So then, there was only one thing to do: The Drive-Around Top Ten!

For those of you that are unfamiliar with how this goes, listen carefully: You put one kid in car-seat. Put yourself behind the wheel. Find a winding country road, preferably surrounded on all sides with lots of things to gawk at, like trees, and bulls, and barns, and bikers, and more trees, and babbling brooks, and more trees, and dogs. Did I mention trees? While this is happening, you set your iPod on random. And look for songs that bring forth more smiles. And skip passed those that cause the kid to cry (see later).

I always thought the iPod was meant for me. I mean, my wife had an inscription put on the back: "for the dad..." Turns out that was all wrong. This widget was meant for bringing out smiles on my daughter's face. And boy, does she have a mostly solid, if somewhat unusual taste in music! For a one-year old at least, I think.

So without further adieu, here is the current Drive-Around Top Ten List:

1. Music Non Stop - Kraftwerk (Album: The Mix)
2. Mbube - Miriam Makeba (Album: Africa)
3. Enter Sandman - Metallica
4. It Had To Be You - Frank Sinatra
5. Brazil Samba - Michael Kamen (Album: Brazil Soundtrack)
6. Wishin' And Hopin' - Dionne Warwick
7. On The Street Where You Live - Quincy Jones (Album: Big Band Bossa Nova)
8. Sonata in C, K.545 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
9. Born Blind - Sonny Boy Williamson
10. Summer In The Country - Roger Whittaker (Album: The Last Farewell)

Actually, this is a little skewed, since we only got to listen to about 15 songs. But still, some of them where never going to make the list. Even if we'd made it a Top Fifteen list. For example, my daughter cried when I played her Sting's "If I Ever Lose My Faith". And it wasn't one of those oh-tha-is-so-sweet cries, either. It was basically a please-turn-this-off-right-now cry. Heh-heh-heh.

We made a few stops on the way: On a really interesting parking lot in front of an old supermarket, where my daughter wanted to crawl around, and in a field of brown cattle, where we ate a lot of flowers. By the time we were back home, the smile had reached her eyes, and there was no more grumpiness to be seen.

So this is my advice to girls that say they are feeling grumpy today: Go out in a field and eat some flowers, have a sloppy pizza too, and find your favorite music. I guarantee it will drive that grumpiness away.

There comes a day, once you have stopped blogging, where you start thinking like this: So many more interesting days than today have passed since I last blogged that it would be silly to blog about today.

To fight this, I decided to blog about the most mundane, boring day that would come by. And that day is today.

Since I last blogged, I have had a day where I biked a 100 miles, and survived; a day that I spent in anguish waiting to hear if my mother was OK, after learning that her house got broken into, in broad daylight; a day when my daughter turned one years old; a day when I learned that a sweet, dear friend of mine is pregnant; and a day when I basically had all my professional wishes fulfilled, for a day.

Now lets talk about today. The sky is gray. It is muggy. Even the wind is too lazy to move. I've spent this specimen of a day on equally thrilling projects: Trying (and failing) to wire money to a former Soviet Union country (which explains the failure); looking at different types of stone and gravel for my garden; changing insurance companies for our house/cars; fighting a losing battle with my voice-mail settings; ordering a new set of checks; missing people who I haven't seen in a long, long while; calling someone 17 times (busy signal for the first 16 times), just to hear him say that what I had asked for can not be done; getting a message from my wife that she will not be home until sometime late tonight.

Now what does this all mean, ladies and gentlemen? I will tell you what it means. It means that this day is a challenge! It is testing me. Pushing me. Daring me to give up and let it slip away. To say 'Bleh!' and just hope that tomorrow will be better. But I refuse. I utterly and completely, flatly refuse to give in. This. WILL. Be. A. Good. Day.

And I even know exactly how to do it.

Five minutes from now, I will be driving to pick up my daughter. She can join in with the day, and be irritated, pissy, grumpy, and moody. But I will not be. Because I will be with my little girl. I will just smile to her, sing her a soft song, stroke her cheek. And let the grumpiness dissolve into nothing, evaporate, and go away.

See? Easy, peasy!

It's been so many days since I've blogged, that I am almost shy to finally write a few words. Also, I had quite a lot to blog about, but now that I finally start blogging, it is on a momentously uneventful day. It has been one of those dear, hazy, quiet summer Mondays. That almost look like Sundays. The only difference is that I am not the only one doing some work today.

Father's day was an interesting day for me. Obviously my first. I still don't think I know what it is about, being new on the job and all that. The point is obviously to huckster a few extra trinkets to unsuspecting wives and offspring, for them to give to their gadget-laden dads/husbands. But I had all sorts of unusual events happen to me on this day, all strangely related to fatherhood.

It began with my sister calling just as father's day had started. Well, it was after midnight where she was, anyway. We talked for more than an hour. And we almost never just 'talk'. First, we talked a lot about our mother. But then the discussion turned to our father. And we actually talked about him. Which I can't remember us doing before. I don't think we are an especially dysfunctional family. It's just that she is almost a decade older than me, and by the time she was ready to start accepting me as an adult – ready to start answering my probably incessant questions and actually talking to me – I had kind of moved on to other people, perhaps some sorts of 'sibling substitutes'. So although we get along very well, and are actually quite alike in many respects, we rarely just 'talk'. Turns out we have a similar take on our father. Go figure.

Then, when I woke up yesterday morning, and took my daughter for a drive to the hardware store, I heard the most sad, depressing and miserable, yet endearing in a strange way, story on NPR about fatherhood. It was a radio interview with an older gentleman, who talked about his terse relationship with his father, the father's teenage escape from his abusive and violent father, and then the original gentleman's years with his son, until the son, his only son by the way, drowned at the age of fifteen. By the time I got to the hardware store, I was a red-eyed, bawling mess. You can just imagine the puzzled stares I got from the other males as I walked in like that, with my baby daughter on my arm.

In the afternoon, we went to one of the region's lakes. My girls dipped their feet in the cold water, giggling, while I lay beached on the shore. I think I am finally getting the point about taking your kids to the park, the beach, etc. It is a contiguous space of sand, grass or other innocuous surroundings, where the rugrats can roam around with lowered supervision. There are no power outlets or scissors at the beach. So you can relax for a bit.

Throughout the day, all sorts of little, non-commercial 'dad' stuff popped up. I would look other dads in the eye and actually imagine I understood some of it. Or maybe I was just especially susceptible. Excited over becoming a member of this strange club of men.

Finally, my wife sent me to the video store last night. 'A comedy' was her only condition. On a whim, I picked up 50 First Dates. Actually, if you haven't seen the trailer, don't watch it. Just see the movie. It is so much better not to know. Suffice to say, if you are expecting a classic Sandler/Barrymore slapstick, you might be pleasantly surprised. For me, it was a film about fathers. And for the second time in one day, I cried.

Makes you wonder if Mother's day wouldn't be a more appropriate day for me.