Tag: family

On social interaction

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Like many people, I just went over a year without any real social engagement with anyone outside of my family. In the last week and a half, one of my best friends has come into town for a weekend, my son’s best friend came up from Indianapolis and spent the night, we went to the county fair, and then we just got back from spending a weekend with my aunt, one of my cousins and his family, and my brother and sister-in-law. I had Monday to recover and then I’ve spent the last two days in professional development from work where there are minimal expectations for me to be properly socialized, but minimal expectations still include “please do not be a snarling rage-beast around outsiders.” There is one more day of this, then three days where I won’t be expected to socialize with anyone, and then a day where the only living thing I’ll have to interact with will be a rhinoceros.

I am exhausted, and I have been for three days. Like, post-convention level exhausted. Like, brain-fogged, not-in-the-mood-for-anything exhausted. I was ready for bed at eight last night and if I could get the sun to turn off I wouldn’t object to going to bed right now.

I promise, I’ll be human again eventually, but damn am I running on empty right now.

Yum

On By Luther M. SilerIn CookingLeave a comment

Pictured on this table: Lebanese salad, tahini, beef shawarma, fried eggplant, homemade hummus, homemade baba ghanoush, fried chicken, hand-cut French fries, and Lebanese rice, along with pita bread, both homemade and store-bought garlic spread (made for the chicken, but also delicious with the fries,) fresh parsley, pickles, tomatoes and a homemade tomato sauce to go with the eggplant. Not pictured: a thousand deserts, including about thirty different varieties of baklava and nammoura, which I had never had before this weekend and oh my God.

I don’t know if I made this clear, but my cousin married a Lebanese woman, and for this and a whole lot of other reasons it is very clear that marrying her was the best decision he ever made. And this was only one meal. Like, these folks don’t cook, they COOK, and trying to claim you were full was just not going to work. I can think of three-day periods where I have eaten better in my life– work trips to Nashville and Raleigh come to mind– but I have never come close to eating this well for three days in a row when literally everything in front of me was home-cooked, and she (well, not just her; my cousin definitely pitched in, but it was clear who was in charge) didn’t break a sweat doing it, either.

(Have I paid for my overindulgence today? Maybe a little, yeah. Worth. It.)

Click is still very much available for pre-order, and to go even deeper into asking my audience for things it would be super duper if a handful of those of you who have already read it would review it over on the Amazonmachine. Currently available for just under five of your American moneydollars, and launching f’real f’real on July 26.

Just woke up from a nap

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

… and now I’m ready for bed. We are home; two nights on an air mattress was kinda brutal even without the one night where I have an anxiety meltdown (I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, probably, if you didn’t see the Tweets) and the drive home today was … challenging.

I don’t think we’re going to get to Black Widow tonight. I’ll be lucky to get a half-hour YouTube video recorded before I have to sleep again, frankly.

Once you see it

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, PhotographyLeave a comment

My absolute favorite thing about my cousin’s house is that they have figured out where they want all of their pictures but have not figured out what pictures they actually want to display yet, so things like this are all over the place.

The view from my cousin’s back yard: Novi, MI

On By Luther M. SilerIn PhotographyLeave a comment

I, uh … I can get used to this for a couple of days.

In which I uncle

On By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

Intellectually, I knew that my own son was quite large when he was born, and that my nephew, a day short of six weeks old in this picture, was an average-sized infant, but … man. Lil’ dude is teeny.

Between having to share a queen bed with my wife last night when both of us are used to a king, the lack of a fan in the room, and the barely-functioning air conditioner– I do not have anything nice to say about the hotel we stayed at– I am crabby and tired at the moment, and am very likely to go to bed absurdly early tonight. Tomorrow, I start formally Planning and Preparing. We’ll see how much I get done.

Lights!

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

This is as exciting as my day got– picking out the lighting for the bathroom remodel. That’s what they look like; bask in its room-lighty glory. Or not; we didn’t exactly go super-complicated on this particular decision. I suppose we also picked out a bathroom exhaust fan, but seeing as how the entire decision-making process for that was to authorize whatever our contractor had already suggested, and I couldn’t pick the one we chose out of a lineup if my life depended on it, it didn’t count for much.

My criteria for the lights: 1) brushed nickel, to match everything else in the room; 2) smoked glass so that I’m not staring at bare lightbulbs, and 3) facing downwards to make the bulbs easier to change. My wife argued with none of these determinations and I more or less went “Okay, whatever you want” beyond that. I think we’ve been surprising the people at these places with how quickly and easily we’ve been able to make decisions throughout this process, although I did horrify the saleslady at the fixtures place a couple of weeks ago by abruptly snarling at my wife about something or another; Bek knew exactly what I was doing and laughed about it, but the saleslady clearly thought I had decided to die on the hill of refusing to have oval-shaped pulls on the vanity or whatever it was that I’d complained about, and you could see her bracing herself to be an unwitting bystander in Marital Drama.

I suspect these people probably have a touch of PTSD, and I don’t blame them for it; we probably ought to just get along in public and not make jokes. I will do better in the future.

There’s not much more to report here, really; I planned for the first couple of days of summer break to be low-activity and I’ve successfully achieved that. Tomorrow we are heading to Illinois to finally meet my new nephew, so expect a hotel window picture tomorrow evening and maybe some baby pictures if my brother and sister-in-law will allow it. Maybe I’ll just put my hand over his face and post that; we’ll see. We’ll stay overnight– the boy is psyched about staying in a hotel for the first time in forever– and be back Sunday, and then Monday morning I start actually Preparing for Things. We’ll see how well I do.

Pictured: not my nephew

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Or maybe it is. How would you know? There’s no way to know, they all look alike.

I am, in fact, rather impatiently awaiting the birth of my first nephew and first nibling; he is not here yet, but from what I hear he and his mother have been working on it since about 7:30 this morning. While I’m sure I’m not remotely as excited as my brother and my sister-in-law, I have thought of little else all day. There hasn’t been an update in a little while (and I made it clear to each and every one of my classes that I would be checking my phone constantly and basically dared them to have anything to say about it) so hopefully that means everybody got busy real quick. 🙂

The new parents aren’t wild about pictures of lil’ dude being spread all over the internet so I probably won’t post any pictures of him once he’s here, but I might post pictures of somebody else’s kid so y’all can pretend.

Who else is excited about something right now?