Say Uncle!

I have been called many things in my life, some of them unsavory. I've held several titles in long list of mediocre jobs, accrued a handful of nicknames, even performed on stage a variety of personae. But one title eluded me my entire life until now. All I had to do was marry into it.

I am a proud and at times affectionate uncle. An uncle who shamelessly picks favorites (don't judge me) and thoroughly enjoys this newfound idea of a return-policy child.

Don't let the limp, docile position fool you. If she's not running around wreaking havoc, it's because the benadryl kicked in.

That's not to say I don't try. I can adapt to an active child. Let her kick and kick and wiggle and bounce. Outside.

She's the outdoor child. She's even travel size for convenience.

Yes, here's the favorite. He actually is docile. And sweet and lazy and fat. Plus he likes me and laughs when my whiskers tickle him. The perfect baby.

To all of you who read this and care, think before you start a family. If baby-hunger strikes as more of a mild craving, the "maternal munchies" if you will, stop. Wait. You may only have to wait out a sibling to be satisfied.

Uhhh...Three and a half?

This sage answer is Max's response to his father's blurry-eyed query, "How many cups of sugar does it take to get to the moon?"

SPEAKING OF CUPS...

Ok, so it was a lame segue, but admit it, it caught your attention. There is a store called Color-Me-Mine in town, a relative hotspot for college dates as well as girly craft time, mommy/daughter date... oddly enough I didn't see any guy-only parties there... huh.

It's a pretty basic setup: go in, pick some blank ceramics off their walls, use their paint to decorate it in whatever design you wish, they bake it in a kiln and you pick it up a few days later. I had heard of this delightful place when my Mrs.-B-to-be just started dating, but we never managed to make it there.

Until now.

But first, some back story (I probably should have told this more chronologically but that Goofy segue was priceless). I am a firm believer in hobbies. Everyone should have an interest, something that they like, yet can never fully explain why. I have many, and am even audacious enough to try and push one of them into a career. Everyone should have something they compose or practice or sculpt or even collect.

Now I, being the sensitive caring attentive husband that I am, know something in particular that my wife loves to collect:

Teapots.

It didn't take long for me to put two and two together; why buy her a teapot when we can paint one? She likes teapots, I like painting, we can color-me-mine! ...er, color-us-ours... I even did a bit of online research to ensure that they not only had ceramic plates, cups, etc. They had teapots.

So for our date night I took her out to color-us-ours a teapot! Only problem is, no teapots. Whether they had simply run out or just didn't provide them to begin with, I never found out. All we could find on their shelves was an entire tea set - cups, saucers and all. Unfortunately this was a bit beyond our price range. And then came the moment I have come to dread most of all in my dating blunders. My darling wife turns to me and asks: Well, do you want to just go?

All my work, my planning, my connecting two and two, my noticing something that she likes and catering an activity to her interests, gone. As a new husband, desperate to impress the woman who holds my heart, it shattered me. I could not, would not let this evening fail. So we grabbed some cups and got to work, not having any idea what to paint.

She designed something to commemorate the date and slip in a few inside jokes.

Meanwhile, I eventually decided to honor one of our favorite movies with one of our favorite soundtracks.

Represent.

Was it the perfect evening? Did I sweep her off her feet? Did my insight and sensitivity leave her dewy-eyed with admiration and love? Of course not. We're newlyweds. Most of my date ideas before our marriage were blunders, but she's still here, so I must be doing something right. I'm certainly still going to keep trying.

Next time maybe I'll just buy her a pot.

On Vertigo

Do you get Vertigo?

I swear, everyone talks about how great it was, but I think it's one of the weaker Hitchcock pictures. I just don't get it. Nor do I have an issue with heights.

Now, my wife's a climber. She's bouldered, climbed, rappelled, all that jazz. I, however, have slipped into a climbing harness but once. On a fake plastic wall in a Bulgarian mall. She was there, too, actually.

Last August she gave me a grand tour of the place she lovingly calls her "Graceland" - Zions National Park in Southern Utah. I had been there before, but not like this.

We woke at 3am (quite a feat for my beloved) and hiked to the precarious precipice known there as Angel's Landing, an isolated outcropping that provides an excellent view of a large part of the Park.

We came.

We saw.

We loved it.

We've wanted to go back and explore other areas, to cave, to swim, to hike, and also- to climb. She's got me hooked. I love to climb!

Saving for school has to come first, so climbing equipment has been put on hold. But this summer we took a day and decided to relive that glorious day with the closest thing.

A wall.

She's still better at it than me, and it is my best and favorite workout now. Too bad it's so pricy.

We had a blast and hope to hit the wall again soon. And then some red rock!

On Dating

As the honeymoon ends and jobs and school and other engagements rob us of more and more of our time together, it has become a lot trickier to find time for a romantic evening. An even greater challenge has been chronicling such events to remember later. When we were dating and all through our engagement, we lived four hours away from each other, so our date weekends were a huge deal that often got thoroughly photographed, as evidenced clearly on facebook. It struck me as not only incongruous, but a real shame if we should cease cherishing our dates now that we blissfully share a roof.

This was taken on our way out to a restaurant. We hadn't gotten dressed up for a night out in a while, so we tried to make it a big deal. Note the gorgeous hairstyling. Oh and hers, too.

Sadly though, halfway through our meal, I realized that the camera had been woefully left behind in the car. Another date with no memory to thrive upon. we had tried so hard, gotten all dressed up, I opened doors, it was a huge deal! So huge that I stopped my beloved on our way out to take a photo as proof - PROOF! - that we still go out, we're still classy. That romance isn't dead.

So, our dates aren't all going to be photo-ops. I'm realizing more and more that going out to eat can just be a private affair with no self-imposed paparazzi. We can save the camera for our more adventurous dates.

An early Halloween treat, or why Bruce Wayne is THE MAN!!!

This man.

Is my hero. Now more than ever. May I tell you why?

So my darling wife and I come home from doing laundry and skyping my parents (internet still hasn't happened at the Bugg Basement) and I head to our tiny bathroom. I notice something in our tub. This is hardly out of the ordinary. Being a basement apartment, it lacks a certain level of ventilation. So, to prevent an accumulation of moisture which could lead to mold in our (tiny) bathroom, we shower with the window open and leave it open to let the steam escape. This isn't a brilliant process, but ironically the bathroom window is our only one without a screen, so we've stuck with it, and the wind has occasionally picked up some debris to let it flutter down and litter our bathtub. Leaves, a sprinkling of dirt, nothing huge. And then, of course, there are the guests that crawl into our home. On all eight of their legs. Upon my wife's request, I am, or rather my footwear is, less than hospitable. But this something in our tub is not one of the usual visitors. This one is much larger.

In an agonizingly slow two seconds my brain juggles various identities to award this guest. A rock? A rat? A frog? A ba-

...

I close the door immediately, leaving the light on in the (tiny) bathroom.

"Honey," I force a strained smile. "Don't go in there."

Normally that phrase is used in our house after our (tiny) facilities are put to use, so naturally her eyebrows raise in a silent query.

I steel myself before opening the door yet again to investigate further. It could be a toad. Some poor frog hopped through the window and has been stuck in our tub drying out for hours. Poor thing. Poor brown indiscernible lumpy mass. But wait, what's that twig protruding from its chest? Something is definitely sticking out from the toad's torso. Has it been impaled? No that's not a twig. What could it be except some bizarre limb... an arm...

... or a wing.

I close the door once again, and reluctantly inform her of my suspicions. Just to be sure, I crack the door open a third time. Definitely not a toad. ...But it's not moving. And it's rather small...

And with one simple vowel change, my brain switched from "Ewwww" to "Awwww" A poor defenseless baby bat had taken it's final flight into our tub. Sad. Even sweet, really.

I close the door once more and prepare to dispose of the remains. After all, as my wife has often informed me when arachnids make their presence known, I'm the man, this is my job. I don a hoodie, pull the hood up, place a garbage bag in a box and grab our broom to sweep it in, close the bag and toss the poor creature, preventing my wife from ever seeing the cruel hand Nature dealt it. I reach the broom out, still keeping all but my arms out of the room. It's inches away. Poor thing, I think. It's really quite a tender little -

And then, like the Devil himself erupting out of the fiery maw of Hell, a wing shoots up like some torturous, sadistic jack-in-the-box.

- a tender little BEAST! IT'S EVIL, VILE WRETCHED FILTH KILL IT KILL IT I'M IN HELL GET BACK YOU MISERABLE SPAWN OF SATAN YOU SHALL NOT DEVOUR ME O FOE OF ALL THE EARTH BACK I SAY DON"T LET IT TOUCH ME KILL IT KILL IT GAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

I of course didn't say any of this. Terror struck me dumb, but for a few shuddering noises I made as I wrenched back my broom and box and slammed the door shut. But I like to think my brain is much more articulate than the rest of me in moments of panic like that.

By now it's after 11:00pm, no exterminator can come until tomorrow (like we could afford one), and its our only bathroom. With no answers coming to us, my wife heads upstairs to our neighbor, who's having a little party with some friends. While I rip my hair out down in our living room, pacing helplessly, she pokes her head in and asks, "Hey, random question, but does anyone here know how to get rid of a bat?" Her inquiry is well met by her friends. They are from California, they explain and bat disposal is apparently a common dilemma. One young woman is particularly "game." An eager twinkle in her eyes, she takes command of the situation. First, she instructs one of her fellow partiers to "hold her booze," and then asks me if we have a towel, pillowcase or T-shirt which we don't particularly care about. I proffer her a towel and she boldly swings the door open, gives voice to my aforementioned (and inappropriately placed) mental "Awwww" and deftly scoops up the vile creature, cooing something about how they're cute, almost like a chihuahua with wings, all under the lens of the iPhone camera held by her booze-carrying counterpart. Cute? Blasphemy.

She carries it to a brick wall on a house opposite ours and, once freed, it climbs up of its own accord. We thank the inebriated strangers as well as our neighbor, discuss our now shared suspicion that the chirping we've heard coming from the gutters on one of the corners of the house seems to only be heard at night, and agree to express our concerns about a nest to our landlady. We SLAM the bathroom window shut, scour the shower clean, and take a much-needed shower, trying not to think about the recent occupant.

Bugs don't creep me out (insert last-name-pun here). Spiders, no problem. Ants? Annoying. Moths? I'll push through my childhood phobia and kill them. Flies? Maddening. Roaches? Juicy. Which is why I keep my winter boots out. Heck, give me some combat boots and I could even handle scorpions. But anything - I mean ANYTHING with fur, claws, a discernible heartbeat, beady eyes observing me like some hellish demon, or with wings to rise into the night and haunt innocents? Mommy.

Which brings me back to my original point:

This could never be me.

There is a moment in Batman Begins, when Bruce Wayne faces his fear, embraces his dread, and stands stock still amidst a pillar of bats fluttering around him. I now know I could NEVER. DO. THAT.

So, just in case the last two movies hadn't proved it to you, go see Dark Knight Rises and see if it can get through your thick skull that not only Batman, but

BRUCE WAYNE IS THE MAN!!!