“Dad, your car smells like moldy pizza and chewed shirt sleeves.”
Unfortunately, I think he was probably right.
Archive for the 'Charlie' Category
Charlie refused to wear a Winnie the Pooh bandaid tonight. Another little piece of childhood slips away.
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For anyone who doesn’t already know, here is the definition of a wet willy, according to wikipedia:
Wet willy: Usually performed on a sleeping or otherwise unsuspecting person, the perpetrator of a wet willy wets his or her finger with saliva and inserts it into the ear of the victim. While not typically resulting in physical harm (although ear infection might occur), the moist sensation can be extremely unpleasant.
Charlie snuck up behind me while I was sitting at the computer and gave me a wet willy.
I hate wet willies.
I yelled in at Lori, “That is one trick I REALLY wish you hadn’t taught him!”
She replied, “I didn’t teach him that!”
Which sparked a “yes, you DID!”, “NO, I DID NOT!” bickerfest.
After a few minutes of this, Charlie decided to speak up.
“Uncle Scott taught me that. He said Charlie, do this with your finger and stick it in your Dad’s ear.”
Grrrr, Uncle Scott is in trouble.
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Kid with a cough? Try Runny Rhino cold relief pops. Cool concept, cough drops in sucker form for kids. They seemed to work for Charlie.
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Charlie and I made an Igloo on Friday afternoon. Or at least we tried. Once we were finished it looked a little more like a bee-hive. It was fun though. I’ve never built an igloo or… beehive before.
It’s starting to melt now, and it’s beginning to shift and crack, so it’s getting more unstable everyday. The problem is that when you’re six years old, you just doesn’t realize that going into an igloo that would probably be condemned by the city isn’t safe. It’s hard telling Charlie that he needs to be careful around our snow creation. I guess I’ll just have to make some snow rats and cockroaches all around and slap a condemned sign on it myself.
It was kinda starting to look like a bona fide igloo here.
Umm, not sure where it went wrong, but it went very wrong.
After patching it, we called it done. Looks a little more like a bee-hive.
I dubbed it our little “Ugloo”
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I was talking with Charlie on the phone the other night. The cell phone connection wasn’t very good so he couldn’t understand me very well.
Finally, in a frustrated tone, Charlie tells me:
“Dad, you can just tell me when you get home. I don’t know what you are telling me. You sound all scribbly.”
Scribbly. I love it.
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For the past couple of weeks I’ve been seeing commercials for the NEW Pirates of the Caribbean online game from Disney. The big push in the commercial is that you can play for FREE!
I decided to go ahead and sign Charlie up so he could play it today. I knew there would be a catch with the “play FREE” thing. I know they HAVE to make money somehow, so I wasn’t surprised when I found out they had different levels of play. Basically, the more you pay, the more advanced features you get. The FREE version is a “light” version of the game. No problem, Charlie is only 6, he’s probably just going to walk in circles and hit everything he can find with a sword. It’s not like he’s going to get into the whole Multi-Player/Community facet of the game yet.
After I signed up, downloaded and ran the game I figured out the REAL catch to trying to play the game for FREE. Turns out that if you don’t pay for access, you get thrown into the “FREE BASIC ACCESS QUEUE.” This is the equivalent of being forced to sit at the back of the bus. I’ve been sitting in the Queue for over 2 hours so far staring at the intro screen to the game. My bet is I never see the actual game (maybe if i sign in at 3am!).
How do I know this is the catch? right on the intro screens they put this link:
“Don’t Want to Wait? Upgrade to Unlimited Access”
Personally, I think they should have been a little more honest and used this as their link text:
“Thanks for getting conned by our multi-million dollar ad campaign stating that you can play our fantastic new Pirate Game for FREE. We are glad you appreciate how carefully we crafted our campaign to target your children. Obviously it’s a pretty hollow offer, so now that you have your child begging you to let them play the cool game that they saw on the TV commercial, just suck it up and give us our $9.95 per month. We’ll also be happy to accept a yearly payment for the bargain price of $79.95. Again, thanks for getting sucked into yet another commercial scam!”
I suppose their text is a little shorter.
In short, if you are going to advertise a GAME to KIDS that they can play for FREE, make sure they can really play for FREE. Throwing out bait like this, and then switching to an entirely different setup at the last second just pisses off the consumer - ME.
What is even more upsetting than not getting to play the game as promised, is that this immoral corporate marketing tactic is probably working, and Disney is raking in the cash hand over fist.
But, who would want to listen to what I have to say. After all, I’m just sitting at the back of the bus.
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We went to the zoo today. As we were walking up to one of the exhibits, I asked Charlie if he remembered what was in it. I was testing him to see if he could remember from the last time we were at the zoo.
He answered immediately and in his most confident voice “There are Leprechauns in there.”
Last I checked, we went to the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo not the Irish Folklore Zoo.
It would be a pretty cool idea actually, they could put one of those little zoo feed machines outside the Leprechaun pen and fill it with Lucky Charms. They could make a little extra for that pot ‘o gold.
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Sometimes I stop by the office on the weekend to make sure everything is A.O.K. This past Sunday I stopped by with Charlie. As I was doing a quick walk through, making sure everything was locked up, the air conditioner was turned down, and the big freezers were running, Charlie was just roaming the halls.
Shortly before we left, I noticed he seemed to be acting odd and clutching his superfriends backpack a little tighter than normal (he sometimes wears his backpack because he thinks it’s cool.) I shrugged it off as daddy paranoia. He was fine. No problem. We locked up and headed for home.
As we pulled up in front of the house and I began unbuckling Charlie, he commented “Dad, I really really liked it.” He picked up his backpack and held it tight.
Huh?!?
“What did you really really like?”
“It was in Terry’s office, and I thought it was cool.” Clutching backpack even tighter.
Uh Oh, me-thinks my kid has sticky fingers at this point.
“Charlie, did you take something??”
“But, It was cool Dad!”
“Give me your backpack, and get in the house. We need to talk.”
I headed into the house opening the backpack. What could it be, what did he take? I began pulling toys, a change of clothes, and a plastic bag with a wet bathing suit in it (not smelling so good) out of his backpack. I wasn’t finding anything. At this point, Charlie was sitting on the couch staring at me with his “I’m sorry Dad” eyes.
“Charles, What did you take?”
“Maybe it’s in the bottom of my backpack.”
I dig deeper. More clothes, more toys, and then lastly in the very bottom of the bag, a single penny. Could it be? My boy stole a penny? I held it up and showed it to him. “Did you take this?”
“I’m sorry Dad, I really liked it.”
A penny. A 1976 penny. At least it’s an antique!
Well, it doesn’t matter what it is, you’re still not supposed to take something that doesn’t belong to you… Right?
So I went on and explained that was wrong to take the penny and that was stealing. He apologized, and I said I would take it back.
He looked at it and said, “Maybe you’d better hide it so I don’t take it again.”
Poor kid, I’ve given him a complete complex over lifting a penny from someones desk. arg. I explained to him that I trusted him, and I know he knows better now. I showed him that I was putting the penny in my wallet and told him that I would return it on Monday.
If he turns out to be a kleptomaniac, I hope he at least learns to take the silver coins! 
