JamesSlusher.com

Sign number 235 that my wife shops at TJ Maxx too much: she got a Thanksgiving card from them.

I’m not lying. She got a hand-addressed Thanksgiving card.

I’m in serious trouble.

Tannenbaum

Originally uploaded by jaslusher.

Christmas season hits the Slusher household. Emily, Jonathan and Marilyn did an excellent job decorating this year’s tree.

I was feeling a bit under the weather, so after putting the tree together and making a couple of pathetic passes at decorating it, I gave up and went to bed. I woke up and voila! This beauty was in the dining room.

Emily

Originally uploaded by jaslusher.

Well, we got a reply back from the modelling agency in Atlanta and they said that we lived too far out of their area.

I reckon there must be a lot of procrastinating photographers who don’t know that they are going to do a shoot until an hour or so ahead of time. That is the only reason I could think that we would be too far away.

How could anyone resist a face like that? Maybe I’m just biased.

I have often seen debates as to the use of the word “irony” and to what it actually means. I personally think that this is what defines it. Any time you use the word in the future, it should meet that standard.

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all.

I’m working nights and my wife and kids are out of town, so it has a bit of an anti-climactic feel to it. That and this being my first week of work in 2 months, I’m already wiped out.

But all in all, I’m a person who has much to be thankful for. 99% of the reason I have to be thankful involve the wonderful people in my life and all of you read this blog, so I just want to say that I am thankful for you guys.

Take care and I hope you have a good Turkey Day, too.

If I could, I would. I’m not ready to go back to work. 3 or 4 more years, maybe, but not today.

Sigh.

I probably don’t need to pile onto the “I hate Sony” bandwagon. I haven’t bought a cd from a RIAA label in years. I probably buy between 1 to 2 cds a month now and I have no need to go to a retailer to obtain the cds that I want. So none of the evil stuff that they do now has any effect on me. I was boycotting them before boycotting was cool.

But because I am hearing so much about them, I started to wonder just what I was missing. People are really upset that this big corporation turns out to be a soulless money vacuum. Who would have ever thought that might happen?

So I went to the sony.com site and looked at their artists. Man, they have got tons of artists. So I decide to see if there are any artists that are going to cut me to the quick by never, ever buying one of their albums. To narrow the search down, I decide to peruse by genre. Let’s choose Rap (they don’t even have a Hip-Hop category).

Wow. Some person I have never heard of and Cypress Hill. That’s it under their Rap genre. Two listings. I like Cypress Hill now, but not enough to be devastated. The more I think of this, the more screwy this sounds. 2 Rap artists, that’s it?

So I look under R&B. Bow Wow and Compton’s Most Wanted are amongst the first two artists I see. R&B?!?! Compton’s Most Wanted is Rhythm and Blues? Are you f*&^ing insane?

I quit there. I figured that I won’t miss any of their artists. I haven’t missed them yet, have I? And besides, when a so-called music industry leader can’t even get the genres of their talent correct, they can’t be that smart.

If we (as podcasters, listeners and consumers) do things right over the next few years, we can create a music business that rotates around more informed axes.

Just to prove how cutting edge I am (not that you good people need any reassurance), but I recently played the song Chicago from Fall Out Boy on one of my podcasts. This morning I see their video playing on TV.

I was cool before cool was cool.

Fine. I surrender. You win. I give up. Since everything I post about ends back up on the subject of my beautiful kids, let’s talk about them.

They are gorgeous. In anticipation of all the “they must take after their mother” jokes, they both actually favor me a fair bit. That little fact sticks in Marilyn’s craw quite a bit. I believe that she (having more dominant traits than yours truly) expected to have them favor her a bit more. Frankly, so did I. But it didn’t turn out that way and I’m taking what I can get.

We had at one point thought that JD would be our last child. My thoughts on the matter are this: when you are kicking out kids like this, maybe you ought to stick with it. It’s hard to discuss this without sounding like I’m bragging (and maybe I am to some extent), but I think we are only helping the gene pool. I have no idea how many kids we might end up having, but we have recently discussed the possibility of a third. Give us a year, we might abandon that whole idea again.

Everyone who reads this blog with any frequency realizes that JD had an operation. He took it like a champ and except for a little scar you couldn’t tell he had anything done. I don’t know if after 2 months a personality can be assessed, but I really expect him to be the quiet type. He is strong as a little baby ox, so that is what I’m expecting him to be–the strong silent type. Of course, neither his father or sister are silent very often, so maybe we will influence him.

On the subject of his sister, well, I really don’t know what to say. You have to experience Emily to understand what being with her for very long is like. She is beautiful and she knows it. She is also scarily smart and she knows that, too. As her skills at using both of those gifts increase, I expect her to become a force of nature. My biggest hope is that I can teach her to use her powers for good. It might be a challenge, though, teaching her how to use beautiful and smart when on my best day I might’ve hit cute and clever. But what the heck, Leo Mazzone coached John Smoltz for years, maybe I can pull the same sort of thing off.

We recently sent her pictures to a modeling agency in Atlanta. She really likes to be in front of a camera and pose and say “cheese”. So combining that with her good looks, we are hoping that at least we could get her some modeling gigs to help pay for college. If it gets bigger than that, that would be cool , too.

The smart thing is way harder to deal with. She is way beyond her 3.25 years in some respects but right at it in others (we just recently got her potty trained). It requires a balancing act that is difficult to maintain. At slightly over 3 she has been using the computer for almost a year and a half now. I have a mouse with thumb button that I change to be like a left click so that her tiny little hands can use it easier. She flips through noggin.com and related web sites with ease. I’ve also sat and watched her win a game of regular solitaire and a game of spider solitaire by herself. I only learned to play spider solitaire myself in the last few months and she and I play it at the same difficulty level. In my defense, I do win more than she does.

I worry about her, probably needlessly. She picks things up so quickly and so easily that I don’t worry about that much. I worry about not spoiling her too much and I worry about molding her into a good person. I’m caught in the Parent’s Paradox: I want her life to be tough enough that she develops character and easy enough that she never needs it. It will be 20 years or more before we have any idea of how it turns out. Scary.

So those are my kids. If you hadn’t noticed, I have been posting a bunch of pictures to my Flickr account recently. Feel free to check them out.

I have been a faithful Rocketboom watcher since my brother first introduced me to it. It is a videoblog or vlog or whatever-the-kids-call-it. It talks about a variety of different topics and is more entertaining than most things I see on TV.

That having been said, stay away from the comments. Good lord, they are awful. No matter what they put up, there will always be a certain percentage of people that just bitch and moan about that days episode and a certain percentage that gush how wonderful it was. These commenters tend to rotate viewpoints fairly frequently. So in essence, you get the same comments day after day, with a cast of characters that switch sides randomly.