• Feel free to call me a neglectful parent. I should be ashamed of myself. Can you believe that it took me three months to buy the Lovely Tess her own domain name Imagine the shame and regret I would have felt if some one else snatched it up. Hopefully, when she gets older, she’ll forgive me. And what will I do with tesscarpenter.com? Well, not much. I suppose for now it will just be a link to the flickr slide show of her photos. Until I can figure out how to make some money off her cuteness.
• Just try to listen to The Seedy Seeds’ The Little Patton without it getting stuck in your brain for an entire week. Go ahead, i dare you. Catchiest song of the year.
• Finally, our radiator covers have arrived. Rather than torture ourselves with trying to keep them paint-drip free by using a normal brush, we went at them with cans of spray paint. Yes, spray paint. You know what the worst part of spray painting is? Holding the little frigging button down for an hour. Your finger starts cramping after 5 minutes. Luckily, the smart folks over at Rustoleum figured out a solution to this problem. Nice. Unfortunately, after a couple of coats of paint, we realized that spray paint sucks. The surface is all rough and it’s spotty. In the sunlight, it’s completely obvious that it was spray painted. So, I had to waste another morning sanding the covers down and then paint a final coat with a brush. In the end, they came out great, and at least I can credit the spraypaint for covering the insides of all of the many slats. Some of the before photos, and finally, the after. Hooray! On the bright side, I have some extra spray paint to go tag the neighborhood with.
• Go check out Cake’s latest videos for tons of wacky fun!
• The Lovely Tess had a grand time at her first week of school. She got an “A” in smiling, but unfortunately got an “F” in pooping in my pants. Somehow, she’s saved all of it for home. Sometimes, she saves it for 7:01AM when I’m trying to get out the door while trying to chase down a very-unwilling-to-get-in-his-crate puppy, cleaning spit-up off the sofa and my pant leg, and blow drying the Lovely Suse’s pants that have just been spit-up on. Hooray for parenthood! Actually, I had this moment on Tuesday morning when it suddenly dawned on me that I’m a father. I had my work bag over one shoulder, Tess’s school bag over another shoulder, a plastic bag with a big pink crib bumper in it, a pocketful of tissues and pacifiers, and Tess in her car seat in my hand. Oh, and I was wearing a track jacket and my white Jack Purcells that gave me a very 50’s-dad sort of vibe. It was weird.
• We have this reputation for having stupid-busy Sundays, and recently, they’ve become increasingly tortuous. Over the course of the day, we would do all of the laundry, including all sheets and towels, do all of our grocery shopping, clean the house from top to bottom, do yard work, cook dinner, make ice cream, give george and tess a bath (but not at the same time), etc. etc. It’s tiring. It suddenly occurred to us that at this point, we have no lives, and spend most of Saturday at home as well. Well, why not just spread out the tasks over two days? Ooh, smart. Suddenly, our Sundays just became a lot more relaxed. I like it.
• Twice in a row, I have failed miserably at trying to duplicate the Deluxe Town Diner’s blue corn pancakes. I think I’ve officially given up. I suppose I could just buy their mix, or better yet, just go there and eat them. It’s two minutes from our house and a fun place to go. I’ll just save myself the hassle. I can only pick so many battles, you know?

• Today is the Lovely Tess’s first day of school. She’s taking quantum physics, linear algebra, Italian, and organic chemistry this semester. We expect she’ll be taking graduate classes next year. Actually, she’ll be taking “sit in the bouncy seat”, “smile”, and “poop in my pants”. That last one is an especially important class. We’ll try to train her to poop at school every day so that we never have to change a nasty diaper. That’s worth the cost of daycare right there.
• Somtimes, you just need a big heaping plate of fried food. Of course, this isn’t just any plate of fried food. These are the best frigging fried clams in the world, from The Clam Box in Ipswich. Be prepared to wait in line for an hour to make your order, be prepared to pay cash, and be prepared for the possibility of having to wait 20 minutes while they change the fryer oil at 2:30pm every day, but it’s completely worth it. They’re simply perfect. Golden, crispy, and not at all greasy, they have it down to a science. I see people ordering these gigantic fried clam plates, but they’re mostly french fries and onion rings and not as many clams. If you order a large box of clams for a few dollars more, you get a big giant pile of clams, which is why you’re there in the first place. You can get fries and onion rings anywhere, but no place has clams like this. We make the trip once a summer, and that ends up pretty much being our only meal of the day. A stomach full of fried food will keep you from being hungry for a while.
• Thanks to finally figuring out how to use our laser level, our photo walls got hung perfectly in no time. I expected it to be a complete nightmare trying to get things lined up correctly, but the level took all of the guesswork out of it. Of course the photos include shots of Tess, our wedding, George, and Forno Campo de Fiorethe home of pizza bianca in Rome. You know, the important stuff.
• For as long as the Lovely Suse and I have been together, I’ve been looking for new shoes. Seriously, we would walk around NYC searching for replacements for my favorite pair of black shoes in the world, and five years later, I’m still looking. Basically, I just look for a new version of my old ones, but nothing is quite right. I actually bought a pair last week and thought that they might work, but they hurt as soon as I put them on. Then, I finally decided that I could just spend $50 to get the old ones rebuilt with new heels, soles, insoles, and welts. Good as new! Well, not quite, but it will do the trick. They looks great again, and I know I don’t have to worry about having them fit right or be comfortable.
• Who the hell is Zac Efron and why he is on the cover of every magazine? Usually when I see a celebrity in Us Weekly that I don’t know, I just assume that they’re on Grey’s Anatomy, which I’ve never seen but apparently, has a cast of 12,000 people, and I’m usually right. High School Musical? What the hell is that? I guess I am getting old.
• Maybe you’ve heard me talk about Pizzeria Bianco and Pane Bianco? This and this may show you why. I missed my yearly pilgrimage to Phoenix last year, so hopefully, we’ll make the trip out there this winter. Please.
• This is the time of year to go get some tomatoes, slice them up, put them on slices of crusty bread, sprinkle some salt and olive oil on them, and eat. By the way, our tomatoes are doing great, and we’ve already gotten about a dozen off our plants. Not to mention the bowls and bowls of super sweet 100’s that we’ve gotten off our other plants. This is the time of year that we wait for all year.
• The phrase that makes the Lovely Tess laugh the most is “dirty butt.” She also enjoys “poop”. She obviously inherited her parents’ sense of humor.

• I accidentally (but conveniently) deleted a bunch of system directories on my work computer on Friday afternoon. It was completely stupid, but recoverable since all of my own files live on a different disk. Only the recovery takes a couple of hours, meaning an early exit for me. Why didn’t I think of this sooner?
• I’m in the midst of trying this new ice cream experiment. We eat ice cream/frogurt almost every night, and for the past two and a half years, we haven’t bought a single pint of it, preferrring to make it at home instead. Still, even after making it every week, we’re not always happy with the way it comes out. I know that we’re limited by the ingredients that we choose to use (2% milk, heavy cream, sugar, yogurt), choosing to go a little lighter so as not to gain 3,000 pounds. If we made a honest-to-goodness custard using egg yolks and such, I’m sure that we would have no problems maintaining a nice creamy consistency. I’ve even considered using natural stabilizers and emulsifiers, but the lack of availability and high cost has kept that from occuring. While flavors such as malted vanilla chip, mint chocolate chip, and cookies and cream have no texture issues, our fruit flavored ones (raspberry, blueberry, blackberry, etc) tend to get very icy when frozen solid. Supposedly this use of corn starch helps to absorb more moisture and keep the ice crystals from forming, so I’m very interested to see if it works. Currently, it is in the fridge at home waiting for a churning in the ice cream maker, but the consistency right now is of pudding. And very tasty pudding at that. Maybe we should just eat pudding.
• I really don’t intend to be mean, but can anyone help me figure out what’s going on in this photo? When I saw it in the paper yesterday, I thought it was just some sort of printing error, but it’s not. It’s like he has two heads or something. He’s obviously a smart guy, since he’s a mayor and all, but I’m just curious.
• I’m not all that happy that in about seven years, I’ll be cheering on Arod to beat Barry Bond’s home run record. But seriously, I would probably root for just about anyone to wipe out Bond’s mark.
• We’ve conquered the french fry problem of a few weeks ago. I know, it probably seems that all we do is stay at home and play with big vats of oil, but we usually only make them about once every six weeks or so. I was so disappointed last time, though, that I had to make another attempt. I went with the Cook’s Illustrated recipe, and it worked like a charm. I also went back to using just a big pot of oil instead of the deep fryer to ensure the right temperature, and that, along with an overnight presoak of the fries in water and the addition of corn starch made all the difference. Yes, apparently corn starch fixes everything. I may need to buy a gigantic box of it soon.
• We may break records in terms of number of photos taken at this weekend’s upcoming family festivities. With great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, all sons and their respective wives, and for the first time ever, all five grandkids under the same roof at the same time, I think my parents’ heads might explode.
• Our upstairs neighbors are away on vacation for the next three weeks. We get along great with them, but it’s really nice to have the place to ourselves. Especially with the lack of noise from their two teenage boys, it’s eerily quiet. Thank god, they didn’t give us any pets to feed this year.
• This is the 1,401st post here, going back to July of 1998. That’s nine years of my life. Does anyone know what the oldest, constistently updated blog is? Granted, I stole the original homespace idea from DaveG, but his weekly updates disappeared long ago. Maybe we’ll take this week to look back what I was doing this week during some of those years.

The question people tend to ask us most is “Who does Tess look like?”. Well, for the first few weeks, we didn’t really know. She looked like, well, Tess. There was no immediate resemblance to either of us, no distinctive features that would immediately be a tipoff. She would forge her own physical identity.

However, a recent revisiting of some of the Lovely Suse’s baby photos changed all that. Granted, the Lovely Suse spent the first year of her life without much hair to speak of, but otherwise, the resemblance is pretty uncanny.

Yes, I had to do a double-take on that last one. The Lovely Suse is the spitting image of her mom circa 1975. I guess it runs in the family, huh?