Out for lunch...back in 35 minutes.

Sorry, I'm taking the night off. Another failure in a string of sub-par performances as of late. I'll come roaring back after I round the 100 post mark.

I apologize to both my readers.

Day eighty three.

Doubled over in pain...my position for the night.

I don't know if I caught something nasty or ate something unfortunate, but I spent a good portion of the day today on the toilet. I feel like somebody is stabbing my lower intestine with a weed eater. Since our friend Chris was recently emancipated from his appendix, I'm wondering if it is contagious.

The good tidings from today: Abby is now crabbity-crab walking around things. I picked her up at day care, and they said she just started doing it and wouldn't stop. Sure enough, I brought her home and she stepped a good 3 feet across the coffee table. Apparently she's decided to catch on to things faster now.

As for Lily, I noticed tonight that her nose was letting some snot loose. A minute or so later, before I could even address the issue, she had found a kleenex and was wiping it off herself. How freaking cool is that? My girls. So amazing. I also heard her at one point saying, "Hi...hi...hi," very softly. I turned to look, and she had the phone up to her ear. Ouch. Now my intestines are on fire and my heart is breaking, too.

I'm off to rehydrate myself.

Day eighty two.

Abbityabbityabbityabbityabbity

Lilylilylilylilylilylilylilylilylily

You try writing about cardboard. It's tiring.

Our daily constitutional made it 18 feet into the yard and pitched camp.

I'm bewildered by how much I miss the girls during the day, how much I enjoy them when we're together, and how very sweet the post-bedtime part of night is.

Short, but true! I don't feel super hot tonight, so I'm off to read and listen to Wheat's show on the Current.

I did pick up the slack with new pictures today, though.

Day eighty one.

Abby was made for hats.

The yard is a perfect spot for key-spotting.

Squinty McGee and Flapjack...two life-loving hobos on another whirlwind adventure!

Scrapbooks. Cardboard. I fail to see the difference.

Lily has some cross words with the maple tree.

I spent a good portion of the night doing my near-yearly cardboard recycling chore. There are few tasks I hate more than this. Last year the basement flooded a bit and I had to don some breathing gear to clean up whatever mildewy moldy creature was concocted by meltwater and cat poop; that was a little worse. Still, I hate doing cardboard.

Since I let this little gem of a job go idle for so long, I am normally swimming in a sea of moist, spidery boxes. What makes this task so maddening - and this is the thought my mind stews on while I rip my fingers apart and cut absurdly long lengths of twine - is that it all seems so unnecessary. There has got to be a better way than the City of Minneapolis approved method. I can imagine Abby and Lily chuckling knowingly when I tell them, years from now, how I used to recycle cardboard; then they'll ask me what cardboard is and what was it like to live during a time when objects were sold with something called "packaging". Then we'll all have a good laugh and go bowling.

Doing the cardboard does have the benefit of seeing a yearlong time capsule of our life as reflected in our waste. I was struck by some interesting boxes. Size 2 diapers. The box for our stroller, which we've almost run into the ground now. The box from my Nikon. Many more diaper boxes.

I came across lots of cardboard trays that come with packs of baby food, and I was struck dumb by the memory of buying baby food for the first time. Standing in the store, we were overwhelmed a bit, but I remember thinking, "Man, they'll be eating this stuff for years." This must have happened only a couple weeks ago, I swear, but now we're not really buying much jar food anymore; they're gleefully happy with avocados, grilled cheese, random vegetables, ground beef, failed aioli paste, etc.

Recycling cardboard. Bet you never thought you could reminisce like that.

Day eighty.

Rerun photos yet again. I will pick up the slack tomorrow.

Lily, here showing her ability to emote every possible feeling at once. Scaredsadhappypoopyexcitedhungry.

Our kids spelunk our mouths with reckless abandon. Lily has a ball testing my gag reflex. Here Abby works on Jen's pouty mouth.

Random porch moment with Abs and Jens.

I've got poopy diapers, I've got poopy diapers.

"I've got huurt feelings, I've got hurt feelings..."

We co-opted this song from the Flight of the Conchords all night to narrate what the girls were doing. "I've got stinky feet", "I've got a runny nose", "I've got great parents", et cetera. Funny at the time. Not so much now though.

Screwing up meals makes me irate. Cooking, for all its inherent romance and sophistication and excitment, can be an unforgiving wench of a hobby. A royal pain. When it works out, the effect can be sublime (I do believe I've made grilled cheeses that whisked me into a trance like state). Failures, alternately, are the bitterest of let downs, and I normally thrash my culpability around the kitchen - "What's with that damn stove?! Are these shallots from hell? Why is the dog trying to kill me every time I take a step?" I can recognize all too clearly that tipping moment during the process when I begin to careen down a path of inedibility. There have been nights - few, far-between, and thrilling - when I've snatched victory from the jaws of the disposal. When things go ill, though, they usually dip into the catastrophic.

Tonight was unsatisfyingly neither of those. It went bad. I thought I saved it. It turned out mediocre.

First and foremost, I feel let down by the aioli recipe I was using, but partly it was my mistake for remembering aioli as something easier to make than it is. The recipe said to whisk together the egg yolk and some mustard, then slowly add olive oil. Yeah, I did that. However, it didn't mention that, in truth, you truly need to be mixing that stuff on high or whisking it at 1,000 RPM. As a result, it never came together, no matter how hard I tried to salvage it or which combination of swear words I spat into it. Twenty minutes later, I was hunched over what was a garlicky, oily goopy bowl of anti-aioli. Un-aioli.

Since we would, in the best of circumstances, have been eating around 8, I did not even entertain the notion of trying again. Instead I fried the salmon in the oily non-aioli on medium heat. It actually looked alright; I was getting hopeful. After it was done, I laid it on a bed of greens, sprinkled with balsamic vinaigrette, and served with a side of artichokes.

It was close. But I overcooked the salmon...it was dry and lost a bit of taste in the process. Certainly not destined for the trash, but it was almost worse to taste the redemption, then end up settling on purgatory. Bah. Damn you, gods of cookery.

In tot-related news: I almost forgot to pick up the kids today. In a bizarre and inexplicable turn of events, I became so focused on the script I was writing that I completely missed my departure window. By the time I finally checked the time, there was no way I would have made it, but luckily I had Jen around to bail me out, even though she'd just begun relaxing for the first time of the day. She's a lovely person like that.

We made good on yesterday's proclamation and hung out in the front yard today. Lily is flaking a bit on her "Picking Dandelions Makes Daddy Happy" lessons, but we're practicing. She seemed instead to want very badly to pick the neighbor's tulips. She has good taste in flora.

Day seventy nine.

Rerun photos today.

Props to Jen for grabbing this. Good shot of my legs, I reckon.

Old blue eyes.

66% of The Gels Girls.

I want to revolutionize stoop culture

Lily Ellen.

I've never been a big fan of our front yard. It's smaller than our back yard, the grass is two steps closer to death than in the back, we can't really have the dog out the front, my landscaping there has been minimal to nil, and it gets wicked hot during midday. My time spent there has been proportionally little.

Despite this, I've always rather lamented what I perceived to be a lack of family front-yard activities. From the tales I'd heard from my parents, the front yard or the front stoop (were you lucky enough to be blessed with a stoop) was where it all went down back in the day. People would drift street-ward after work, clad in something with suspenders, clutching a can of beer, and begin trading wavering opinions on Nikita Krushchev or Elvis or whatever populated the newsies that day. Kids ran through the streets, unopposed and maniacal, games of stickball breaking out suddenly and without warning. This is how I imagine anytime before 1982, back to and including 3,209 B.C. It's just easier on my brain that way.

These days, and in these streets, there's just not an enormous amount of action happening streetside. Granted, half our block is taken up by a church, and the other half is only sporadically occupied with breeding folks. Still.

I was served up a slice of self-awared hypocrisy only after I started observing some neighbors across the street hanging out with their kid in the front yard almost every day. We barely know the couple, two very nice women who had their girl Ruby the very same day we ushered the twins into our mortal coil. As spring slowly took a toehold, I began to see Ruby and her moms out front more frequently. Eventually I came to realize that never spending any time in the front yard meant I was really not part of making a better, more social neighborhood.

I am going to hang out with the girls in the front yard more often. We'll mix it up a bit, because I love the back yard like a misfit third child, but the front is going to come into the rotation. We started tonight after dinner; headed out, sat in the grass, ate some sticks, and even got to see Matt and Jen from down the street, something that would never have happened in the back yard. So we're already winning...go team Gels.

Now I just need to find someone with whom I can discuss Elvis. Or Krushchev.

Day seventy eight.

Me and Abby, hanging out by 11th Ave. What up, 11th Ave peeps?

Still hasn't gotten out of this habit.

And this one still loves airplanes.

Let down by paganism.

One of our twice-yearly family "portraits". This is getting much, much more difficult to wrangle.

For four straight years we have lived two blocks from what is one of the largest May Day celebrations in the country and have never once been in attendance. Our excuses for this are lame but valid, and we've always been eager to rectify this shortcoming. This year we decided to strike out and experience the frivolity.

I think I can sum it up with: meh. A good chunk of the blame rests on my shoulders, I suppose I didn't put much forethought into the parade route and what our strategy would be. I'd assumed that we'd go to the park and the rest would be self-explanatory. This proved to not be the case at all. After following the crowd to the east part of the park by the rec center, I found only more crowd. I was told that the parade would be heading right by us, but instead all we heard was the faint sounds of the parade and all we saw were paraders walking by in a "done" state of mind.

So, we apparently missed the parade. Not to worry, the ceremony would pick up the slack. We headed off to the hillside and sat. Aaaaaaand sat. By 3:50 (the thing was supposed to be at 3) kids starting to voice their displeasure, and we decided to bail since we were flirting with nap time. Five minutes later, as we were a block away, we heard the ceremony begin. Grr.

All in all, I wasn't impressed very much. Take away the ubiquitous and unsurprising carnival food, the people busking here and there, the awkward petition requests, and a chick playing a sitar which was kinda cool, and you've got an art fair minus the art. It was Boulder on a slow Tuesday. Missing the two main events may be clouding my editorial on this, though.

Tonight we went to Flight of the Conchords with Marj and Neil. We had some serious reservations about taking them to such an event, but we think they enjoyed it, or they're being very polite. Very good show I thought; there was humor, and that worked well for them. And they rocked a bit too.

Day seventy seven.

What intense musings lie behind those blue eyes?

Abby enjoying the outdoors.

On the way to May Day.