That said, this afternoon while the wife and the baby were taking a nap, the boy and I were in my home office. He sat on my lap while we enjoyed a "Sesame Street" podcast (their "Word on the Street" video podcasts on iTunes are great... and free), part of a free episode of "Word World", and some music (Kermit the Frog singing "The Rainbow Connection").

With my four-year-old son on my lap, the two of us just hanging out, I realized how hard it was to feel anxious and upset at that moment. With everything I'm facing, it's easy to get buried in the worry, the anxiety, the feelings of desperation and anger, and there are times when I feel almost overwhelmed by them. But in that moment, the phrase "count your blessings" took on an amazing significance to me that it hasn't before. Because, in that moment, I felt blessed. It felt odd, because I've been feeling a bit forsaken lately. I'd been feeling like God gave me some chances, I blew them, and He moved on.

But I sat there, in that little bubble of contentment, that little moment of just a peaceful and easy happiness, and the whistling winds of worry stopped blowing for a few minutes. I knew they were on the horizon, but for a few minutes, I didn't care. For a few minutes, I was just able to enjoy being a dad to an incredible little guy who I've probably had less patience with than I should lately, but who still loves me and looks up to me despite my flaws and failures. And that was a blessing.

I guess, at a time when I've been feeling like blessings are few and far between, that moment of happiness and contentment really hit home the fact that there are still blessings to be found in my life. Whenever I'm feeling frustrated, whenever hoplessness is trying to sit on my shoulders like a fat man eating a candy apple (don't know why, but that's the image that enters my mind when I think of a great weight on my shoulders), I'm going to pull out this memory.

I guess my point is that most of us have blessings in our lives that we take for granted. It might be a friend who you can always rely on for a joke. It might be a child who is always happy to see you and greets you with a smile and a hug. It might be a pet who you can always depend on to cuddle with you when you need it. It might even just be having a hang-out spot where they'll greet you by name and make you feel welcome. There are these people and places in our lives that make us feel good, but when we're feeling overwhelmed, it's easy to gloss over them and forget they exist. And that was my insight on "count your blessings" this afternoon, a reminder that I had this little blessing sitting in my lap, and that he was just one of the many blessings I could still find in my life if I just opened my eyes and noticed them.

If you want to love a black woman, you've got to love her hair, because it's almost a third member in your relationship.

I'm a "nice Jewish boy," married to a black woman for six years now. In the early days of my relationship with my now-wife, she took me to see a production of Black to My Roots. She told me that if I wanted to understand black women, I had to understand their unique relationship with their hair.

With a mother who took great pride in her hair, I grew up knowing that women had a different relationship with their hair than men did. Still that didn't begin to prepare me for what I would learn when I fell in love with a black woman. For black women, it wasn't just about the fashion or style of the moment. There was this much deeper undercurrent of conflict between what God gave them and what society told them was beautiful. For my mom, it was just a matter of some dye, a good cut, and a few styling techniques so she could maintain it at home. For black women, hair can be a second religion.

I learned about "naps," "the kitchen," and most importantly "good hair" (check out a a musical number about good and bad hair). "Good hair" is about black women holding themselves to the standard of beauty of the dominant white culture and why many black women, including my wife, will apply dangerous chemicals to their hair to straighten it out and spend hours on maintenance of that style. The importance of hair is also passed down from mother to daughter, reinforced by countless hours of mothers styling their little girls' hair... painful combing, intimate braiding, talking, togetherness. Hair is, for black girls and their mothers, what sports and tools are for boys and their fathers.

I would ask why she didn't just get a short "natural" (a.k.a. a short afro) and wear a wig when she felt the need for something longer and straighter. She's a beautiful woman and has the bone structure that could pull off a short natural with elegance. But she had tied up so much value in her hair, both the look and the ritual of it, giving that up was something hard for her to even imagine.

The funny thing is that I learned I loved naps. When her hair was freshly washed, moisturized, and dried, before she assaulted it with a curling iron -- especially when she was due for another visit to the salon and she'd grown out some naps that were untouched by those chemicals -- I loved to put my fingers in it. It was springy and soft, and felt good against my fingers. Once it was straightened, it would become drier and harsher. I didn't really enjoy running my fingers through her hair when it was straight and processed. I loved it when it was freshly washed, nappy, and soft.

Despite her need to have "good hair," something about the fact that I loved her naps endeared me to her. I think it was that I could love her as God made her, and accept her as she remade herself. The things that attracted me to my wife initially were her smile, her way with words, and the fact that under all that black woman fabulousness, she was as much of a sci-fi and mythology geek as I am (if not more). But as I've grown to love her, I've learned to love many different things about her, including and especially her hair.

I don't know I'm allergic to birch pollen. Never been tested for it. I get unpleasant sinuses at certain high pollen/dust times of the year, but they were never bad enough to go to an allergist.

So if it's swine flu... farewell. If it's not, I'm hitting Costco tomorrow and picking up an industrial strength bottle of Claritin. I already have the megabottle of Benadryl (Kirkland brand "Allergy Medicine") and use it as an occasional sleep aid (most non-prescription sleep aids like Tylenol Simply Sleep are just Benadryl with a different name). I'll get the megabottle of Claritin tomorrow.

And if the Benadryl knocks me out so much tonight that I don't hear the baby crying (I'm on baby call until 3 a.m.), apologies in advance to my wife.

I decided to do something about the second part (since Wilno's basically a moot point now) and ended up stumbling on a review for Barney's Pastrami in Everett, WA. The review practically glowed and Googling for more led me to a number of "best pastrami" raves. I decided to try it.

Barney's is a hole in the wall shop in a 1960s era building barely big enough to call itself a strip mall. The interior feels as old and banged up as the outside, and the TV was running Fox News. One of the few negative reviews I read said the place was dirty. I wouldn't agree with that. But an old, shabby, worn place with fogged up windows and one too few light bulbs isn't going to look bright, shiny, and clean now, is it?

Before we go on, let me clarify something for the uninitiated. In the world of pastrami sandwiches, there are two main types. There's the deli-style pastrami on rye, and the stand-style pastrami on a roll. These are two very different beasts and each has its fans.

The deli-style pastrami on rye, when done like the greats of the industry do it, takes a cool hunk of pastrami and slices it to order, then quick steams it to warmness, and serves it on a crusty rye bread. This pastrami tends to be a bit more crumbly and tender. Even the fat is softer and more tender when the sandwich is warm out of the kitchen.

The stand-style pastrami on a roll is pre-sliced and is kept warm by sitting partially submerged in water in a covered steamer tray. It's usually served on a hoagie roll with mustard, pickles, and cheese. The cooking style tends to make it a bit more chewy than deli pastrami.

Now that we have that out of the way, Barney's is a stand-style sandwich and not one of the better ones I've had. Perhaps they were getting to the end of a tray that had been out all morning, but the pastrami was too chewy and in my first bite all I could taste was the salt. Pastrami is supposed to be salty. It's basically a corned beef that was smoked instead of boiled. But there's a line between good salty and bad salty, and when the pastrami's been in the tray too long, it can cross it.

It was hard to distinguish a flavor beneath the salt, but what flavor I caught was merely okay in my opinion. I'd have liked the pastrami more if the flavor was less salty, but that still would have just allowed the sandwich to claw its way up into the middle range of pastrami sandwiches.

By the way, if you want to see how pastrami is made, make sure to Tivo the cold cuts episode of History Channel's "Modern Marvels" next Tuesday. They'll show how the Carnegie Deli does pastrami from start to finish.

The roll at Barney's was decent, the mustard blend good, and the swiss cheese passable. But when you go for a pastrami sandwich, you're there for the meat. Everything else is window dressing. And here, the meat failed to deliver. I'll admit that I've always favored deli-style over stand-style, but I've had good stand-style and this wasn't it.

I went a little after 11 a.m., so there is the possibility that you'll get a better sandwich during the lunch rush when they're cranking through trays and the meat has less time to sit and stew. On the other hand, some places will periodically taste the tray and start serving from a new one if the pastrami doesn't pass muster any more. Some won't start a new tray until the old one is gone, period. Can't say which Barney's is, but I have my suspicions.

Still, even being that salty and rubbery, was it worse than 5 ounces of cold pastrami-flavored top round from the supermarket deli counter, served on mass-produced rye bread with a wimpy soft crust? No. Fake pastrami on lowest-common-denominator rye from a supermarket is the dick joke* of sandwiches. But merely being better than a dick joke is nothing for anyone, including Barney's, to be proud of.

* Among many comedians, the term "dick joke" refers to a dirty joke that takes no talent to write or tell and relies on shock value more than real humor to get a laugh.

Wilno is a brand I grew up with. My sister and I both started out teething on chunks of dried Wilno. My dad and his parents would often have one hanging and drying in their kitchens. I actually have a Wilno Kosher salami hanging in my kitchen right now. My father brought me one as a congratulatory gift when he came up to see the new baby. Imagine trying to get a 5 pound salami through airport security and you'll know how much my father cares.

Every once in a while, I'd get a bug and see if I could find a local distributor or seller of Wilno Kosher products, possibly one far off who offered them by mail order, but all I could find online were rumors and dead ends.

Since Wilno Kosher is a trademark of the Sara Lee company, even though they've never listed it on their web site, I decided to try calling Sara Lee's consumer hotline. They told me that what ended up on the site was a decision made by marketing, but it didn't really matter. They said that a few weeks ago they announced that they would be shutting down their kosher meats division, shuttering Best's Kosher, Sinai Kosher, Shofar, and Wilno as of January 30th. You can read the November 19th press release for full details.

I'll admit I panicked. I got angry. I asked the representative why Sara Lee hates Jews? I regret it now, but I was in shock. It's been bad enough that Wilno Kosher was hard to come by. But come January 30th, it will close its doors.

I called my dad and told him to stockpile Wilno Kosher. He told me to call them back and ask if the salamis could be frozen. But unless we rent a commercial freezer and fill it to the gills with salami, we'll run out eventually. Stockpiling it would only be a delaying tactic.

I can only hope that someone will buy the brand from Sara Lee and bring it back unchanged. But in today's environment, where health concerns and economic concerns are constricting the market for a premium kosher salami, I don't see it happening soon. While the press release said Sara Lee plans to put the meat processing plant (facility and property) up for sale, it said they were decommissioning the equipment and made no mention of seeking a buyer for the brands.

I'm heartbroken.

My son, a.k.a. "twoboo", was born yesterday, tipping the scales at 9 pounds, 11 ounces...

... ten fingers, ten toes, and one stylin' hair do.

I was able to choose from a variety of upcoming appointments with the physical therapist. No problem.

When I called the sports medicine clinic, it turned out their hand and wrist person is only in that office on Mondays and has nothing open until 3 weeks from today. "Is November 10th okay for you?"

Sure, I'm a brand new patient with a worsening condition that's driven me to seek treatment from an orthopedic specialist, but I'll just explain to my condition that the doctor isn't available for three weeks and it will happily go into remission until the doctor can see me.

If you're in say Vegas, and you call up a hotel, say "I'm in town, got any rooms," and they're full up, they'll try to help you get booked somewhere else. If you call a doctor, they'll tell you when he/she is available, and if that doesn't work for you, that's too bad.

I know that doctors are not hoteliers, but it would be nice to see an attitude that says: "We understand you may be in pain. If we can't serve you within a reasonable time period, we'll be happy to recommend some other doctors who might have an appointment available sooner."

Best I could do was get waitlisted for a sooner appointment if someone cancels.

Of course, you can bet I'm now going to shop around.

Last week, there was a Shelby Cobra, red with white rally stripes, in the parking lot at the supermarket. My 3-and-a-half-year-old was mesmerized. He spotted it the moment we pulled into the lot and said "Daddy, I want the red car." I could only second the emotion.

I'm turning 40 in a few weeks, have another kid due a few weeks after that, and I'm trading in my Elantra GT (which I bought because it looked like a Saab 9³) on a CR-V LX with AWD today.

Instead of getting a Corvette and a pretty new wife with even newer breasts, I'm buying a sensible car and sticking with the gal what brung me to the dance. Best I can do is get it in red and put side steps on it (mostly to help pregnant wives and small children get in and out of the car, but with a bonus of them looking sort of cool).

Is the CR-V really a "mom car" as I saw someone call it on one forum when I was Googling to see what people had done with their V's?

Has anyone done any interesting paint, lowered one, jacked one up, put rally stripes on one? I'd love to see one with rally stripes.

Has anyone strapped on a turbo charger, run a dyno after putting on a CAI, anything?

When I was thinking about the Mazda5, I could find lots of discussions on performance and appearance mods. But for the CR-V... not much.

Help!! Aside from an Obama bumper sticker (he's popular with the young folks, I hear), what can I do to make it look cooler? Do you have URLs for sites where there are pictures of pimped CR-Vs that I can use for inspiration.

Help!

I could first challenge whether I'm really grown up. I still laugh at farts. Laughing at farts is not a grown-up behavior.

I remember being 3, or 5, or 16, and thinking about who I wanted to be when I grew up. Back then it was simple: cowboy, rock star, fireman, doctor, lawyer, president. The sky was the limit and the job's name was its description.

I'm not the person I wanted to be when I grew up, but when I was growing up I didn't know that who I am now was even possible. I didn't know that you could be someone who wasn't defined by their job, or that you could still have hopes, dreams, and ideals at my age.

The goal now is not to be who I wanted to grow up to be back when the world was simpler. The goal now is to be the person I can be happy being... not merely content, but happy... and I'm pretty darn close.

How about you?

Now, the thing is that lots of people think "Gonna Fly Now" is the most inspirational music from "Rocky," but it's not. It's just happy music. The inspirational piece of music is called "Going the Distance". This is when Rocky's up against it, when Rocky's fighting his demons, fighting his doubt, fighting against everyone who tells him he can't do it. This is the darkness of self-doubt that Rocky conquers to beat Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago.

"Don't Stop Believin'" has a good chorus, but it's essentially a power ballad. When you need something about slogging through, earning every hard-won step toward your goal, and making it to the end... "Going The Distance" is your music.

I am soooo lame.

It's a cool job. Has a lot of potential for growth and doing neat stuff in the process, plus the money should be pretty good. I think I got myself a little too over-excited about it.

Just a few minutes ago, after checking my personal e-mail for the umpteenth time this morning, I just needed to hear Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'", so I went to Amazon and paid $0.99 to download an MP3 of it to my work PC and I'm listening to it as I type this. Actually just started it for a second time.

This is how lame I am.

It's the Iron Chef drinking game... every time Pim describes something as "lovely," you drink. By the end of the first chef's courses, we're blotto.

Get her a thesaurus or get her off Iron Chef!

And what about Robert Irvine's meltdown? First JAG on "The Next Food Network Star" (which I didn't get called for despite my kick ass audition video), then this. They need to avoid ex-military for a while.

OTOH, it gives us a chance for more Michael Symon. Him, Mario, and Alton are the holy trinity of "Food Network stars I'd like to have as poker buddies." Yes, no Guy Fieri (his machismo seems too contrived), no Bobby Flay (his doesn't), no Emeril (my kid's asleep -- keep it down, guy), no Dave Lieberman (my secret nickname for him is Buffy), no Rachel Ray (shudder), no Giada (I just don't need the porn voice-over soundtrack with every bite), but Paula Deen would be allowed to sit in for Anthony Bourdain when he went out for a smoke.

A woman was talking about how we rely more and more on our pharmacists and then cited a time "when my daughter's temperature came back." Well, I was up on my high horse and spurring it to a gallop with that one.

"I'm glad your daughter's temperature came back," I said, talking back to the radio. "What happened? Did she drop to absolute zero? No temperature at all?" Then I got sidetracked for a moment, contemplating whether absolute zero is the absence of temperature or merely the absence of heat, but I got myself back on track, fuming over this idiomatic, colloquial slangmongery, where QFC was talking down to its patrons using incorrect English. I pledged to blog about it when I got home.

As I prepared to start this blog entry, I went to get the definition of "temperature" from Dictionary.com so I could back up my righteous indignation.

Whaddaya know? "Temperature," when applied to body temperature, can mean a fever. Both the Dictionary.com unabridged and American Heritage dictionaries say so. I got myself worked into a lather... and I was wrong.

Don't tell my wife.

Anyhoo, I said I'd discuss the KUOW pledge breaks that were interrupting "All Things Considered" and thus driving me to KOMO 1000 AM. See, there are three reasons why I do not call in a pledge:

1: Even if I pledge, I still have to listen to pledge drives. So my listening experience is the same as a freeloader as it is as a member.

2: I joined KCET in Los Angeles when I was young and stupid. Every two weeks they called and/or or sent me junk mail, asking me for more money. I estimated that they spent at least 30% of my pledge amount on the costs of their junk mail. I donated that money to pay for programming, not to pay for harrassing me.

3: Six weeks after I donated to KCET, a dozen other charities suddenly started mailing me. They shared my contact information!

I like the content on public television and public radio. I'd be happy to make a $50-75 donation to KUOW since I listen to it so often. I even sent them an e-mail saying I'd gladly pledge if they could promise me that I would be put on ZERO mailing lists. I never got an answer.

Give me a "here's your money, now leave me alone" option for pledging, and I'll be all over it like white on rice. But if pledging gets me MORE inconvenience than freeloading, then I'll be over here listening to CDs or AM news radio while you get this latest pledge drive out of your system. In the meantime, the only support I can pledge is my emotional support.

So, originally the plan had been to do 8 separate art pieces for my wife for our anniversary (which was today), then combine them all into one big piece and print and frame it for her. Eight is still the eventual goal, but the number I could get done by the anniversary was three, and I printed and framed two pieces separately instead of combining them all.

The first piece I printed was the "We Are Ladies" homage to "Little Britain". It turned out very nicely.

The second piece was a new one which combined six public domain images from NASA with one of our wedding photos (the wedding photo is not public domain).

One of the ways my wife impressed me on our first date was that she knew many of the various forms Zeus had taken to seduce mortal women in Greek mythology. Meeting a woman as beautiful and smart as her who also was into Greek mythology... be still my heart... No, really. I've been a mythology buff since I was 9.

But that just turned out to be a symptom of her deep-rooted sci-fi geekery. She and I watch "Doctor Who" and "Heroes" together (and "Eureka" and "The 4400" and "Torchwood"), plus we bring home sci-fi books and trade them. Part of our anniversary celebration the last two years (last year and this year) is to just go geek out at a book store.

So sometimes I call her "my sci-fi bride," and that was the theme I decided to use for the art piece.

The landscape at the bottom is a detail from a Mars Rover image from within Victoria crater, chopped off at the skyline. The background is a detail from a larger photo of a stellar spire in the Eagle Nebula. The planet in the upper left is Venus, radar imaged and color coded for elevation. The woman is, of course, my wife. And the space craft range from a space tug to a satellite to the ISS.

I framed it with a gold colored wood frame, with the gold really picking up colors from Venus nicely, and it's now hanging in our upstairs hallway. She liked it very much.

Her art project for me... The Luggage from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It was TOO cool.

READ ALL THE INSTALLMENTS: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 [here]

Now I'm not a neat freak with OCD issues who can't sit on a toilet someone else has used. Still, I prefer to wait long enough for that toilet to cool down. You know what I mean... when you hit the toilet too soon after someone else has used it and the seat is still warm. Even if you use a seat cover, you can feel the residual warmth. And all I can think is that I'm feeling someone else's ass heat. It's not body heat. It's not 98.6 degrees. It's ass heat, butt BTUs, gluteal glow, tush temperature. It is a lingering leftover from strange parts of strange men, and it just grosses me out. I would rather sit on an ice cold toilet seat than one raidiating another man's ass heat.

Of course, there's time for it to cool while I wipe it down. Toilet seat cover or not, I always grab a clump of TP and make sure to eliminate stray droplets... and stray hairs. I don't know which is worse: the coarse curlies you know to come from the front, or the shorter ones with just a slight curve that are undoubtedly the hair de derriere. What I do know is that I make sure they're gone, gone, gone... no chance of one grabbing hold of my leg and suddenly I've got some other guy's pube hitching a ride on my thigh.

But once I've made it to the safe confines of a toilet seat that is cool enough and clean enough, there's always the sounds... the wet fart, followed by a plop (or worse, a sustained splashing), followed by a moan... or maybe a sigh. And I'm tempted to reach under the stall with a bottle of Immodium... or maybe a cork. And I'm not an innocent. I have subjected others to the fart-plop-sigh and the fart-splash-moan. That doesn't make it any better or easier to listen to as someone's intestines reward him for doing or eating things he shouldn't.

When I leave the bathroom at home, I wash my hands out of habit. But when I leave the men's room, there's more than habit. There's this desire to restore the sense of being clean that warm seats, stray hairs, and the sound of pneumatically assisted pooping have stolen from me. There's a desire to lather away the discomfort and find some happy place that smells of soap and sounds of rushing tap water.

I dry my hands with paper towels and step back out into the unisex hallways, walk briskly toward my desk, and try to forget... try to forget... try to forget.