The Severed Cortex

There was a period of time over the last month where I was sick and couldn't hang out with Robert, but we have managed to get together a couple of times.

Just Hanging

Netflix is just about the greatest invention in the world except for Cheetos and the tight white shirt for women. In fact, despite my love for Cheetos those two inventions should be reversed in priority. Nancy didn't necessarily think Netflix was a good idea at first, but if you look at our queue you'll notice very few movies that I might be interested in. Clearly Nancy has found something useful to her. She has also found something useful for the rest of us too because sometimes she lets one of my movies slip through and other times she gets a movie that Robert would like. The latest one is Ratatouille. Somehow Robert and I missed seeing it in the theater.
The plan was simple: hang out at the house and play some Playstation, watch Ratatouille, and eat some food. That's what we did.
I still had some duckies left on my Best Buy gift card so on the way back to the house with Robert we stopped at the Edwardsville store to get some games. PS2 games are starting to disappear from new store shelves so we didn't have many to choose from. We managed to get Gran Turismo 4 and a Looney Tunes game. Originally Robert picked out an ATV racing game, and that would have been fine, but I talked Robert into picking out GT4 since car racing is one of my favorites. Hey, it was my gift card.
We came back home and after struggling a bit with the Looney Tunes game, we finally figured out how to play it. I played it with Robert for awhile until we decided to order some Chinese food which I placed and picked up. In the interim, Nancy played a couple of games with Robert including Guitar Hero. They both suck at it. When will they learn that I'm the rock star in this family?
Upon returning fresh from the hunt for food laden with MSG, we settled in front of the TV to watch Ratatouille. The food, from Shangri-La, was its usual fantastic and the movie wasn't bad either. I won't say it's the best movie I've ever seen, but it was definitely above average. I've always liked Patton Oswalt and it's nice to see him get some exposure as a decent talent. Granted this was a voiceover gig, but usually the fat toad like actors never get the kind of opportunity to be involved in better Hollywoood projects. It seems like he's managed to do so without selling out too. But I digress. Robert loved the movie and after some fortune cookie goofiness (I don't remember which saying we used), I took Robert back home.

Boat Show

It had been a couple of weeks since Robert and I spent time together mainly because I had been sick. By the time I was feeling better, the weather was crappy. Finally back on the 9th of February we were able to get together. Unfortunately there wasn't a whole lot to do. It was warm enough to shoot the model rocket I got for Christmas, but the winds were just a little bit too high. I've shot rockets in high winds and the parachute mechanism on model rockets is not always conducive to high winds. If you like rockets smashing to the ground in a thousand pieces I suppose it's conducive but that would be the only way. I perused the RFT website for things to do and about the only thing I could find was the St. Louis Boat Show. It seemed a little boring especially since we went to the fishing show in Collinsville last month to look at boats, but there honestly was nothing else to do except hang out at the house for more movies and Playstation. Boring.
I made an executive decision to go to the boat show and I set up the plans on the Friday night before. On Saturday morning Robert called and asked if his sister Keyani could go too. I was fine with that especially since Keyani's big sister really let her down and dropped out of the program. (It's OK to say you cannot do the program anymore. It's not OK to leave a kid hanging like Keyani's sister did.) I didn't have a problem with it, and neither did Nancy, but I still wanted Robert's mom's permission. She called me back and we figured out that it was all Robert's idea ... which I guess in this case is OK. Robert's mom had some issues since this is supposed to be Robert's time, but we agreed that bending the rules this one time wouldn't be so bad.
The boat show was enormous. The entire America's Center was filled with boats and the adjoining Edwards Jones Dome had boats, trucks, and tons of fishing and travel vendors. I thought we would be bored after an hour, but three and a half hours later we were still hanging out there. There was a 40 foot aquarium with all kinds of fish. There were multi-million dollar boats that we got to walk around in and everyone thought they were all very cool. (This Formula 45 foot yacht will set you back $3000/month. I overheard the sales guy talking to a potential customer.) Even Nancy said she'd go fishing with me if I bought that kind of boat. We also spent some time watching the Dock Dogs, which while not overly exciting still brought laughter and cheers from the crowd.
Some 4 (or 5) hours later we drove to Collinsville to eat Bandana's barbeque and based on informal polling, an overwhelming good time was had by all.

The Baby

On February 13th, 2008, Robert's mother gave birth to a baby boy named Christefer Marlin. Unfortunately he was born 2 1/2 months premature and right now he has a stiff hill to climb. Robert's mother is recuperating and hopefully will be out of the hospital soon. Young Christefer will be in for a couple more months but everyone is optimistic on his development. Nancy and I were able to go see him and he is tiny, tiny, tiny; two pounds and 14 inches long. Robert is very excited that he has a younger brother now and that he can now be called Big Brother.