What my life is like right now:

We've bought a stroller/carseat/carrier and are waiting for it to be delivered. Baby Supermarket (via Amazon) delivered it promptly, but it arrived damaged and they've been very good to us and have shipped a replacement. Today, we bought a really nice chest of drawers/changing table that we literally said the baby will have until teenage years. We plan ahead like that. Some co-workers threw us a very lovely shower and filled in a lot of the other gifts and our respective sets of parents are helping with our crib and other expensive. (Cribs, when you factor in buying a mattress and bedding are freakin' expensive. If you can get away with putting a child in a dresser drawer, amid socks, I suggest going that route). We're still trying not to freak out, but the time draws near and we have a feeling the child is going to be at least two weeks early.

I'm reading Getting Things Done on the suggestion of my college friend Tiffany and Mr. Glark who both have incorporated some of the techniques, especially in regards to e-mail organization, into their lives. I have lots of energy and I think I get lots of stuff in my life done, but it's always through cycles of complete panic/inactivity and frenzied work. I love the concept of "Relaxed control" and I know that my productivity problems are almost entirely organizational. So I'm hoping to get a handle on that. I'm right at the point in the book where it stops being about "Here's what we're gonna do and why" and to the nitty gritty of "This is the label gun you need" and "set aside two uninterrupted days, seriously." So that to me is a clear stopping point, but I hope to devote a weekend very soon to the next phase. Mentally, I'm totally on board. I just need to clear my schedule to get this system set up.

This is a very different book from the last one I read, The Road, which just tore my heart out and ate it.

I've been cranky the last two days. This despite writing a whole new LCP sketch, finishing final drafts of two others that I'm very happy with, knocking out a story for work that I've been reporting on for literally six months and having generally good luck lately. Either it's stress or hormones.

Happy Father's Day tomorrow to all daddies and future daddies out there.

He makes me laugh so much. I can't wait to see him on Flight of the Conchords.

I started doing "weecaps" (shorter than a recap but longer than a recaplet) for Television Without Pity last night of Last Comic Standing. You can find my write-up of last night's premiere here. What I didn't realize when I got home from a very late LCP meeting was that the show was two hours long. So I stayed up very late working on it trying to make sense of people trying to be funny at like 3 a.m. That's how committed I am to my craft.

A story ran in today's paper featuring me (and several other guys) modeling cuff links. Yes, it has come to pass and all my hard work has paid off. I am officially a hand model. Mine is the second from the top:


Photo by Deborah Cannon

A few months ago, a bird's nest appeared in our entryway, seemingly overnight.

The entry to our house is a long corridor with a very high ceiling that ends in two adjacent archways. The birds had defied gravity to build a nest way up in a corner that had no support beneath it. It was stuck to the side of the stucco:






We took it to be a good omen, of course. In the house, a baby grows inside my wife. Outside, the birds were building a nest for their own babies, choosing to do so in our doorway. We'd watch them through the tall curved window above the front door as they chirped loudly. Their heads were visible even from this low angle. We'd watch them leave to collect more building materials, then come back later. The cats would watch them for hours through the narrow windows on either side of the door.

A few weeks later, Rebecca found the broken eggs directly beneath the nest, amid a pile of loose sticks, dried stems and grass.



We were a little heartbroken over the speckled, broken bird eggs. The contents of the eggs were dried on the concrete in the Texas heat bake.

The birds from the nest were gone. We no longer heard their calls.

Then, recently, they came back. I don't know if they're rebuilding or if new eggs are on the way, but we can see the white-stripe-winged birds up there again, chirping and going to and fro, making the nest even bigger. The other day, I saw a bright green piece of faux grass that might have come from someone's Easter basket.

There's no way to get up high enough to see what's going on in that nest. Our tallest ladder barely reached halfway up there. But I watch from inside as often as I can, trying to get a peek of small wings, of higher-pitched chirps, hoping this time that there's no fall, no broken eggs.

You can always count on Gail (from Popculturejunkmail.com) to set the record straight on entertainment controversies. She's got a great test pattern debunking some of the misinformation out there about the "Sopranos" finale.

I rewatched the last scene in HD several times last night. Tony is definitely wearing the same shirt when he walks in and when he's sitting down, he just has a jacket over it and the cut to the table is very quick, so I can see how people might have thought he was looking at himself.

The eating of the onion rings like communion wafers by Tony, Carmela and A.J. is interesting and I've been hearing some people swear that they saw Meadow walk through the door of the restaurant (in my broadcast, she's crossing the street, we see Tony look up as the door chimes, and that's it).

Kudos to the Star-Ledger for getting the exclusive David Chase post-game interview. They deserve it.