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So our baby girl is due next week. We are both very excited, but we recognize there is still a lot of work to do before our little girl enters the world. Here’s what we’ve accomplished in the past two weeks:

Candyce’s Baby Chores, as dictated by Candyce:

1. Cleaned out all dresser drawers and donated unused clothes
2. Washed, dried and sorted baby clothes
3. Sewed bows on the bassinet
4. Placed orders online for a million things, including a waterproof cloth bag.
5. Researched healthy green products
6. Wrote in the baby book
7. Read books
8. Took naps
9. Attended water aerobics
10. Made hospital supply list
11. Completed birth plan
12. Cleaned out old books and art supplies
13. Sewed big flowers onto headbands.
14. Made onezees with ruffle butts (I have no idea what this means.)

My Baby Chores:

1. Re-plastered kitchen and dining room walls. Taped off everything in my house and then sprayed on texture. Sanded and then painted. Then I spent 8 hours cleaning up the mess.
2. Installed crown moulding on kitchen cabinets.
3. Weedeated three yards, or is that weedate three yards?
4. Mowed three yards
5. Raked three yards
6. Hung pendant lights above kitchen island, completed wiring at the switch (made possible with the heroic help of Grampa Howard)
7. Built two box beams, installed on kitchen ceiling (Two down, two to go.)
8. Broke down boxes to be recycled
9. Assembled and stained two wood barstools
10. Cut butcherblock table top, installed sturdy metal legs
11. Repaired antique dresser / baby changing table

Let’s talk about antique furniture. I’ve watched enough of the Antiques Roadshow on PBS to know that many people have ruined their antiques by trying to “restore” them: “In original condition, your armoire is worth $15,000. But since you restored it, it’s now worth $2000.” We’ve all seen this, right? This show has been on television for about a decade now, and most people have adopted this hands off attitude toward antique furniture.

The problem is that most people can’t afford to have a professional recondition/restore/repair an antique into working condition. I’m one of these people. One option is to store the antique dresser away for twenty years with hopes of hiring a pro when I’m loaded with cash in the future. Unfortunately, I run the risk of having termites, moisture, or mold destroying it in some storage unit on the outskirts of town. Plus, we won’t have the pleasure of using the piece of furniture in our home. So this can’t be the best option.

So my other option is to carefully and discreetly repair the dresser in a way that would please the original carpenter. So here’s what I did:

1. Used wood glue and small brads to hold the thing together, making the drawer openings perpendicular again
2. Tacked small woodblocks inside the dresser to prevent drawers from going in too deep
3. Tapped the runners up 3/4 of an inch for two drawers so that the face would be flush with the front of the dresser
4. Sanded the sides of the drawers to allow them to fit comfortably in the dresser body
5. Thinned out the sides of the most reluctant and warped drawer with a hand planer
6. Rubbed a candle along the wood runners until the drawers were able to slide in and out with ease

Now it works like a dresser is supposed to work. What’s wrong with that?

This morning I discovered these awesome free paper toys on ReadyMech.com. For all of my artsy friends who are parents, this could be a fun activity with your kids. From their website:

“Readymechs are free, flatpack toys for you to print and build. They are designed to fit on an 8.5″x11″ page and printed with any printer. You’ll need double-sided tape, thick matte paper, and 10-15 minutes for build time.”

Click for larger image.

It’s time to write about the subplots of my life in 2008…

1. I love being married. Candyce is the most wonderful person I’ve ever met. It’s a privilege to spend every day with her.

2. I wake up early. Since Candyce graduated college twelve months ago, her daily routine involves working at the coffee shop in the mornings and freelance graphic design in the afternoon. In late December we found out we were going to have a baby, which meant that a lot would change (for the better, of course.) One of the first changes was that Candyce can’t lift heavy things like the patio furniture and umbrellas in front of the coffee shop. So every morning since January 1st, I’ve gotten up at 5:30 AM and I am out the door by 5:45 AM. I enjoy the cool mornings and like the idea of getting a head start on the day.

3. Life takes management. An ambitious person like myself will continue to seize opportunities and pile on new projects. At the moment, my ongoing projects are remodeling my home, refreshing my landscape, preparing for a baby, and charting a financial course for my family’s future. None of this will get done unless I work hard and consistently. However, you cannot have progress on multiple projects unless you stop working and assess progress.

I take one day every two weeks to sit at my dining room table and grade myself on my progress. If I am failing on any project, then I need to recognize that and change the way I am doing things. For example…

• In March I realized that the project was taking too long, devouring time and money. To get things on track, I opted not to build a computer docking station / office in a recess in the living room. Instead, I spruced up the wet bar that is already there with new paint and drawer pulls.
• In April I realized that I the remodel had slowed because I was intimidated by the electrical work that needed to be done in the kitchen. I decided to call in the help of Jason Myer–handyman extraordinaire–to coach me through the first day of wiring.
• In May, I realized that my landscape was crumbling because I was spending all of my time inside. So invited over eight friends for six hours of hard work on a Saturday morning. I called this event a “Baby Daddy Work Day.” Honestly, I hope this becomes a tradition for expectant fathers. Every guy needs a little help to get his fortress in order.

4. I don’t watch remodeling shows. Do doctors come home and watch ER? Do police officers and district attorneys unwind with an episode of Law & Order? I’ve been remodeling my house for eleven months now, and the last thing I want to do is watch someone else remodel their house. I don’t mind getting updates on real life remodeling projects from my friends, but home remodeling shows tend to be far detached from reality. (In other words, these shows make me feel bad.) Plus, the “remodeling for profit” shows stand in utter contrast to the common knowledge that the Real Estate market sucks. I wrote about this earlier in Flip This House Viewer’s Guide.

5. Breaking up with NPR. I’ve listened to National Public Radio consistently since 1998 when I was a sophomore in college. Since then, NPR has been my source for news that is not dumbed down. However, there is one consistent weak spot that frustrates me: hosts rarely challenge their guests. I’m not asking for a shouting match, but a host needs to have the confidence to challenge a guest’s research and opinions on behalf of the listeners.

The least challenged guest is the career academic who just wrote a book and is therefore ready to deliver his well-rehearsed opinions. If left unchallenged, he can (and always will) run his mouth about contentious social and cultural issues for ten minutes straight.

On a side note, I am always amused how the non-fiction books featured on NPR have the same rhythm to their titles. These are not the mysterious and succinct titles of fiction novels. No. The modern non-fiction titles are so wordy that they often warrant multiple punctuation marks. The length seems to be critical to the success of the book, because they leave no doubt as to what they’re writing about or who they are writing for. Nine times out of ten, the books featured on NPR appeal to someone’s intellectual vanity as well as their insecurity as a citizen in a world superpower. After a few minutes of searching online, I found some examples:

1. Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium by Dick Meyer
2. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says about Us) by Tom Vanderbilt
3. Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America by Gustav Niebuhr

I am not well-read enough to give an informed opinion about the evolution of book titling, but it’s clear that you don’t have to look far to know that trends are trends, and no segment of pop culture can escape the desire to be cool. Trends are as rampant on NPR (my preset station #1) as they are on Power 98.3 (the hip hop station, preset #2.)

Right now on Power 98.3 everyone is little: Lil John, Lil Scrappy, Lil Wayne, Lil Mamma, Lil Flip. I searched for entertainers with the word “lil” in their name, and I found 513. If you were a rapper in the early 1990s, it was good to be the master of ceremonies: MC Hammer, Young MC, MC Lyte.

Personally, I’m rooting for the rappers and R&B singers who buck the trend and keep their birth names: Chris Brown, Jim Jones, Mike Jones. Why? My name is Matt Smith.

6. We do not drive far. In my thirteen years of driving, I’ve never witnessed such a drastic increase in gasoline prices. Over the course of four weeks at the beginning of the summer, gas prices increase from somewhere in the $2.90 per gallon to $4.25 per gallon.

As of this morning in mid August, gas prices of fallen about fifty cents per gallon to $3.75 since from the high a couple months ago. I snapped this photo on my phone on a particularly painful day at the pump:

Gas prices suck.

Candyce and I decided to change our lifestyles to cope with the higher prices at the pump.

1. We combine errands. We make lists of places that we each need to go to, and then we plan our trips around town together. It’s actually a lot of fun. Errands aren’t as cumbersome when you’re cruising around town with your girlfriend listening to music.
2. We don’t drive far away from home. This is fine with me, because I moved to leafy green South Tempe because it is so pretty and close to fun stuff.
   
3. We carpool with friends. I’ve always been an advocate for carpooling, but it doesn’t work unless you find someone who shares your conviction. Since everyone is feeling the pain, it’s easy to plan a night out with your friends using a single car

Every barista at the coffee shop has given up their cars altogether and now ride their bikes to work. Keep in mind…it’s summer in Phoenix, and it’s not comfortable to ride a bike under the sun. It’s cool though…the streets are more friendly when people are zipping around on bicycles.

Me and Miah

Jeff found this photo of me and Miah from four years ago at backstage at Steubenville West. It blows my mind to think that this little baby is going to be in Kindergarten in a couple weeks. And no doubt, she will be the best dressed in her entire class. She is one of the most furiously fashionable people I know. Me? I still wear that brown shirt.

While our Stacey and Candyce were having a Bible study early this morning, Jeff and I hopped in his Porsche and zoomed to Agritopia to hang out at Joe’s Farm Grill and The Coffee Shop. The best part is that he had me drive. It was quite a machine. On the way home, we explored San Tan Village, a new outdoor shopping destination in Gilbert along a new stretch of the 202. It will probably make the next edition of Suburban Shopping that Doesn’t Suck.

When I was a kid, my grownup neighbor Brian always made time to entertain me and my brothers and sisters with jokes, funny stories, or goofy antics. He brought so much joy to us as kids. Now all of my brothers and sisters are grownup, but we still laugh and smile when we remember how Brian made time to entertain us. How wonderful is that? He gave us twenty years of laughter.

So I’m trying to keep that tradition going. Until the day I die, it will be top priority for me to make children laugh. So when Jeff, Stacey, and little Miah came over our house for dinner, I told Miah to be ready to party in the pool. I can’t say that I looked very tough playing children’s games in my backyard pool, but I’m okay with that. Looking cool is overrated.

After dinner I pulled out some old magazines to show Jeff and Stacey my life at the turn of the century (that is, the year 2000.) It was like show and tell for grown ups. “Here’s me in Rolling Stone…Teen People…YM…Seventeen…TV Guide.” These were artifacts I unearthed from the trunk Mom and Dad found in their basement.

We finished the night by watching a recording of my friend Robert win The Price is Right. I’ll write more about that later.

I’m trying to get rid of as many things as possible because I’m unnerved about the number of “baby boxes” that are shipped to my house everyday. Candyce and I made a pact that we wouldn’t purchase anything unnecessary for our newborn, so I trust that these boxes contain only the essentials. But those essentials are adding up fast.

Since I cannot stand clutter, I’ve spent the last three days exploring my house with hopes of finding unnecessary possessions. If this new stuff has to stay, then this old stuff has gotta go!

I’ve already eliminated 99% of my “nostalgic stuff” from my home shortly after I got married. That means I trashed at least 150 pounds of stuff from The Real World, college, Boy Scouts, high school, and various art classes. These all were fished out of the boxes marked “keepsakes” that I dragged from house to house. I could not have been happier than the day I dragged my black trash barrel to the curb because I knew that once the trash truck flipped that barrel upside down, there was no turning back.

So honestly, there wasn’t much left to throw away. That is until I decided to see what was inside a footlocker my dad gave me two months ago from his years in the Navy. For the record, my dad brings stuff from his house in Georgia every time he comes out Arizona. My guess is that Mom wouldn’t let him throw the stuff away and muscled him into bringing it out to me. So as their house became more simple, mine became more cluttered.

Junk in the Trunk

I popped the latches open and then lifted the lid and got a waft of crypt-like air from Mom and Dad’s basement. I lifted away the layers of old T-shirts, yearbooks, photo album, CD cases, and letters from girls.

Over the next two hours, I held each item and tried to remember the moment in my life when that item meant a lot to me. Once the nostalgia evaporated away, I ceremoniously dropped each item into the metal trash can. That includes about 75 CDs.

I mean really, what do you do with old CDs? I converted most of my music to MP3s two years ago, and do you know what? I haven’t touched those MP3s since. It seems like too much of a hassle to go digging for them on my hard drive. All the music I could ever need is on Rhapsody.

I decided to sell those grunge/alternative CDs to a trendy music store in my neighborhood. He slid the stack back across the counter and flatly stated: “I can’t do anything with these.” I ended up donating them to a music store on 7th Avenue downtown because the store was cool (think High Fidelity) and I knew they needed a lot of help to keep their doors open. So here I am on my second round of music, and I didn’t even bother ripping them onto my hard drive. I just threw them away.

Welcome Freshman

The last two items in the footlocker were two yearbooks from a huge part of my life:

1. Young Harris College 1996-1997
2. Georgia Tech 1997-1998

Young Harris College had a fantastic program that allowed local high school students to attend classes like college kids. This was a big deal to me because I had too much ambition to sit around my senior year and pretend to be king. In a lot of ways, YHC was the high school that I always wanted.

First of all, I couldn’t believe that these things are 10 and 11 years old. A lot can happen in eleven years. A couple weeks ago I hosted a week at Camp Covecrest for teenagers who were toddlers at the time that yearbook was printed. That blew my mind.

I eagerly flipped through the pages of both yearbooks and saw the names and faces of classmates I’d forgotten about. This made me happy. So I went on Facebook to look up some of my favorite people and see what they are up to. I could not find anyone! What’s the deal here?

Everyone in those yearbooks are around age 30 now, and maybe they don’t waste their time with social networks. Who knows? I’m concerned that this is becoming a trend in my life. Nobody from The Real World New Orleans cast showed up for The Real World 20th Anniversary earlier this year. It was just me representing the seven of us. It seems like everyone I met between ages 18 and 21 have disappeared from the face of the earth. I care about these people and it would be nice to know how they are doing. (So if you are reading this and you were in one of those yearbooks, send me an email!)

So now my teens and twenties are reduced to a cardboard box just large enough to hold a pair of Dr. Martens.