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2005 was Noah’s third Halloween and, this year, he really seemed to get the concept. Noah was a race car driver this year. After losing a Harriet Miers-ish lobbying battle in 2003 for that costume, Noah’s conservative base finally got what it wanted today when he climbed into his little red and white jump suit for the first time. (For those of you interested in Noah trivia, he was a frog in 2003 and a bat in 2004.)

Halloween started off with a kid-friendly party at Ralph’s office. It took a decent amount of encouragement and outright bribery to get Noah into his costume. Only after a promise to visit the various fish tanks around the office and to seek out candy from Ralph’s co-workers did he finally agree. Of course, it was only a little while into the event that Noah demanded to wear his costume ‘five times’ and required the same bribery to get him to agree to take it off! The work party was very cute and Christy, as usual, outdid herself with the planning and preparation of food, treats for the kids and balloons. She also custom-made several of the kids’ costumes including Noah’s cousin Talia’s Strawberry Shortcake costume. Noah and Talia always look cute together, but especially so in their respective costumes…too cute!!

As darkness fell, we were all looking forward to going trick-or-treating with Noah around the neighborhood. Grandma and Grandpa stopped by which was a good thing because Noah requires a posse to go with him when trick-or-treating. He held his Daddy’s hand, demanded that Grandma held his bag and was stricken with sudden bouts of shyness as his candy was collected by his Grandma. He very politely said ‘trick-or-treat’, ‘Happy Halloween’ and ‘Thank you’ at each stop and ended up with a nice little pile of candy. This was a major improvement over last year’s trick-or-treating experience where we went to three stops, one of which involved giving all of his candy to our neighbors across the street!

The evening ended with a visit from Noah’s friend from school, Lauren. Noah has notified us several times that he intend to marry Lauren (although, he said that she has to go home aftwards). We took Noah and Lauren across the street to El Dorado Park where they were having a Halloween carnival complete with a jump house and games and activities for kids. It was a very cute event and Noah LOVED the bounce house. I kept joking that, toward the end, he looked like a heavyweight boxer in the late rounds, so tired that they can barely lift themselves off of the mat. Well, you do what it takes to get a good night’s sleep out of them and this year’s Halloween events, hopefully, did just that.

It was really fun to see Noah start to really understand some of what was going on and to enjoy it himself. After his initial rejection of his costume, he seemed to really like it and he did look very cute. It won’t be too many years before he just wants to be some sort of bloody monster and go out and steal candy from little kids, so we have to enjoy this while we can.

I really do love this time of year. Football is reaching its halfway point, the World Series is on, the hot days are (hopefully) over with for the year and the time is finally about to change back to normal. I never liked daylight savings. Anyway, after going to Chicago last week to see the Bears defeat the Vikings at Soldier Field in Chicago, I was able to watch more games on TV this week.

I flew my Bears flag that I got at Soldier Field last week and watched most of the second half after Noah and I got back from running errands. Given the two strong defenses, it was expected to be a close game (Chris Berman said that the score was likely to be something close to the 5-3 score in the baseball game the night before). Even though they are only 3-3, the Bears are in a tie for the lead of the NFC ‘Norris Division’ with Detroit who won a surprising victory over Cleveland after benching Joey Harrington in favor of veteran Jeff Garcia. I’m surprised that the Vikings were able to win against Green Bay, the 52 points the Redskins hung up on San Francisco (sorry, Dale and Rina) and that the Bengals finally returned to earth. San Francisco, Tennessee and Houston are all in real trouble and it’s clear that the AFC will be decided in Indy.

Weekend afternoons have become great ‘Daddy Time’ for Noah and I to hang out. Today was no exception as we embarked on a very typical set of errands which just barely necessary but are more a result of Noah’s desire to visit his favorite places.

First Stop: The ‘Big’ Car Wash
Noah loves the car wash. He generally gives us two to choose from, Rossmoor Car Wash (aka ‘The Big Car Wash’) and the Mobil Gas Station on Los Alamitos (aka ‘The Little Car Wash’). Today, it was the Big Car Wash.

Noah’s interest in the Big Car Wash is driven, for the most part, by his desire to increase his ever-expanding fleet of toy cars. The car wash people are smart in that they fill their lobby with lots of stuff that you might be interested in, and a display of cars that Noah is definitely interested in. A car wash typically ends up costing us about $30 by the time we buy Noah’s car, a Pepsi for Daddy and pay for the car wash and the tip. So, we got the car washed and we moved on to the next stop.

Next Stop: Baskin Robbins
Almost from the moment we got back in the car after the car wash, Noah demanded some of his favorit ice cream: Wild and Reckless flavor at Baskin Robbins with rainbow sprinkles! I wasn’t up for any ice cream today, but thanks to the chain-store shopping centers that have popped up everywhere, a Starbucks is never far away. In fact, at the Rossmoor center in Los Alamitos, there is a Baskin Robbins/Togo’s store right next to, you guessed it, a Starbucks.

Much to the delight of the patrons at Starbucks, Noah sat there wearing his Chicago Bears hat (similar to his Daddy’s hat) eating his ice cream while Daddy ordered a Grande Latte. Oh, my God, have we become the classic suburban family. Noah sacked his entire ice cream in no time flat and we were off to the next, and possibly most important stop: Target!

Target
For anyone who knows him, Noah’s absolutely favorite place to go is Target. He likes to go there for, you guessed it, to purchase more toy cars. A typically trip includes a race to the Matchbox aisle, some sugar cookies from the cafe and, sometmes, the purchase of other things that we may need.

Noah also likes to try to scan his purchases to ensure the proper pricing (or, maybe just to hear the scanner thingy beep) but he is not quite tall enough for it as you can see from the picture. In any case, with Matchbox cars in hand we proceeded to the checkout and skipped the sugar cookies this time because we had just come from the ice cream store.

Back Home
On most normal weekend days, our trip would also include a stop at Islands for chicken strips and french fries (we really do feed him a healthier diet than is apparent from this article, no really we do!!).

However, today, we were running a little late and Noah had not had his nap for the day and the Bears game was still on (the Bears won in a low-scoring defensive struggle). Noah, of course, didn’t nap but our little excursion did burn off some energy and made for a fun and somewhat productive errand outing. It’s the little things that make the weekends something to look forward to!

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(Editor’s Note: The title of this post was the first time that Noah typed his own name without any assistance!)

Make sure to register with tinkleflick.com. Why? Well, first of all, we are going to use the website to notify everyone immediately when the baby arrives. Registered users of tinkleflick.com will receive an email notification and the site will be used to post pictures, descriptions and accounts. Also, if you want to contribute content to the site either by writing articles or commenting on existing articles, you will need to be a registered user. If you register, you will have access to the “dashboard” which will allow you to manage your account (i.e., set up your password and nickname) and write articles and post comments. You do not need to be a registered user to access the site, but you do need it for everything else. Let us know if you have any questions.

Well, we have about six weeks to go before the new baby arrives on the scene. So far, all indications are that everything is going fine. A little scare over a heartbeat reading last week turned out to be nothing. An abundance of caution on the part of our doctor, while a little frightening at first, was worth the effort. All readings are normal and the baby has moved into the correct position. So, now we just have to wait…

For those of you who are cynical and not too easily offended, you are missing the best show on TV if you do not watch South Park on Comedy Central. It just so happened that I was working on the latest version of our website last night which is as blog format and it ocurred to me that South Park is really an animated blog for Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the show’s creators. They have a decidedly libertarian approach (to which I can relate) and they get away with saying things that would cause an absolute uproar if anyone else communicated the same message. However, since they attack everyone so often that it removes any sensitivities that normally cloud political speech. That, and the fart humor, it their genius!

One of the things that Trey and Matt do is turn recent events into South Park episodes very quickly. Last night’s episode was no exception because the topic was a flood of a low-lying area near South Park and the public panic caused by failures of government and media to blame. As Wendy can attest, I was literally laughing out loud as the episode progressed. It just further cemented, in my mind, the genius reputation of Matt and Trey (as if ‘Team America: World Police” wasn’t enough).

Now, a cautionary note. If you have never seen “South Park” before and you are at all sensitive about your race or religion or are offended by crude humor, then stay away. Otherwise, set your TiVo to record last night’s episode immediately and sit back and enjoy the only really uninhibited political commentary on television.

Welcome everyone to the all new tinkleflick.com. I know, I know, it’s not nearly as fancy as the old site. However, while it might be less fancy, I finally have given up the holy grail of trying to both write the content for our website AND write and maintain the code. The old website was, if I say so myself, very cool. With the flash graphics, rollover top menu tabs and everything I was pretty proud of it. And, with that site, I actually wrote all of the code by hand that supported it.

As geeky-cool and fun as that was, it took a lot of time and I ended up having to split the time that I did have to spend on the website between writing content and constantly fixing and updating the code. As those of you who paid close attention noticed, many of the features never really got rolled out because I never really had time to write the code to support them. Plus, as I have mentioned to a few close friends, I have identified the arrival of baby tinkleflick as a golden opportunity to re-brand the website.

So, I have finally given up (for now) and went with a pre-packaged blogging system that does most of what the old site did but for which the code is actually free. I decided to use WordPress which is a free, open-source system that anyone can download and install easily. I seriously took me about 10 minutes to get it downloaded, installed and up-and-running. If you already have a hosting service, I highly recommend it. If you are planning to set up your own blog, I highly recommend WordPress. I purchased a system a few years ago called pmachine, which is OK, but WordPress is WAY better.

OK, so there you have it. I just realized that my spare time is extremely valuable to me and that spending that spare time with Wendy and Noah was much more important to me that geeking out for hours on end with PHP and MySQL books spread out all over the office (as much fun as that is…and I actually do think it is fun!!) but everyone seems to really like the website so I want to continue to produce it. Now, I can spend some time writing witty comments for you all to read and make some pictures available and we all should be satisfied.

If you really liked the old version of the site, don’t worry too much. Some day, after Noah and his sibling are off to college, I’ll sit down and code the perfect website.

Heres’ to more content, even if the presentation is not quite as slick.

Cheers,
Ralph