Notes on a Saturday evening

- How do you know it's way, way too hot at 9 a.m.? When you work in the yard for only two hours, and you drink four bottles of water and still don't have to go to the bathroom. Welcome to Memphis in July! (Found just one ball in the backyard this morning, but there was a Pinnacle sitting in the side yard of our front when we came home from lunch. Dude, that's a serious duck hook.)

- Darn you, Chris Connelly, for your "My Wish" features on SportsCenter this month! Oh sure, the kids are so sweet, the stories tingly, but must I sniffle like a baby every time?! And using the Rascal Flatts song? Well played, Connelly.

- When Toll House cookies were recalled due an E.Coli scare and Val and I decided to avoid a near-death experience on general principle, we switched over to Pillsbury to get our cookie fix. We like the kind that come in squares and only need to be pried apart and baked, because we're lazy and when we want cookies, we want them NOW. It turns out, the Pillsbury ones are easier to break apart and they taste just as good as Toll House, so no, we probably won't be going back. Of course, it turns out that Toll House may not have even been reponsible for the scare. Oops. Stinks for them!

- Val and my Dad have extolled the virtues of the movie Parenthood for years, so last night when it was on WGN I finally decided now was as good a time as any to find out the joys of being a parent. I figured it would be a final transiton getting over Marriedhood, when you snuggle on the couch all night eating cookies and sleeping until noon on Saturday, and Singlehood, which is when you sit on the computer in your pajamas at 7 o'clock on a Friday night with nowhere to go and shop for Star Wars figures on eBay.

Anyway, being a parent doesn't seem so bad based on the movie. However, Adulthood blows. Ye gads, I didn't expect all that drama. It felt like Love Actually, which is another good movie that I wouldn't want to watch more than once a year, also about different people whose lives are intertwined, all of whom seem to think that life isn't worth living unless you're constantly under pressure. Unless you are a naked movie stand-in. Those two seemed pretty happy.

- Following the brouhaha over my mysteriously cracked Tilt last fall in which AT&T essentialy told me, "sucks to be you," I finally bought a new cell phone, a Samsung Propel. The Propel doesn't have a touch screen, though it does have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, uses a storage card to listen to music and hold tons of photos, and as you can see from the pictures I posted earlier Saturday, the camera is pretty awesome.

The only problem I've noticed so far is that even though I always set it to locked, somehow my butt keeps calling Val, especially at 3 a.m. when I'm at work. Those commercials aren't as funny to her when she's trying to sleep and Cooper keeps waking her up doing aerobics on her bladder.