I finally got around to watching it again on the flight out to Sacramento. I had hoped to watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the last trip out to Vegas with Jeremy but I had been unable to find it at the local Hollywood video store. What I had failed to realize was that it wasn’t in drama or horror. It was filed in comedy. So when I was rifling for some replacement content for Sarah while I was away I found the film and it gave me something to occupy me as I was traveling to my 1 hour layover in Vegas en route to Sacramento.

Among the things that I noticed on this second viewing were the cameos. I wasn’t sure whether they were cameos or just actors in the film before they became famous. Cameron Diaz was a reporter in an elevator and Spiderman, Tobey Macguire, was a hitchhiker that they scared away. The film was as much horror as it was a comedy which is why I like it. Of course I am a big fan of the book because it is so grotesque in it’s hyperbolic descriptions of a drug trip in Vegas. It made me nice and anxious to watch it knowing I would be in Vegas and off on a three day trip with Lisa getting married on Saturday.

Things are looking great. Madeline has been continuing to progress on schedule with many confident walking steps. While she can only do four to five steps at a time before stumbling over she walks with confidence into her falls. She almost looks like a comic trying to make a joke of walking while drunk. Andrew, Sarah’s brother, came by to grab some laundry that passed through us and he mentioned that children from the age of zero to six live life in a constant state of being on something akin to an LSD trip. Andrew happened to go for Halloween last year as none other than Dr. Hunter S. Thompson complete with a pair of glasses from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Depp?). I am not sure if the LSD story can be scientifically proven but Madeline does gurgle like a dinosaur a lot and seems to try to communicate with objects that are only apparent to her. She has begun to wave and today, Yom Kippur, enjoyed waving at Maestro whenever he barked in the other room.

My parents and I went with Madeline to the park and stopped at the swings as well as the kiddie playground. At the kiddie playground she enjoyed riding down the slide. Her fleece pullover generated enough static electricity against the plastic slide that her hair stood-up at the base of the slide. The kiddie playground had a foam soft floor that she worked-out on with much crawling and standing. She liked to stand near an object then walk towards it. One of her favorite objects to approach was the adult swings. She would grab a hold onto it and then awkwardly fall down because it was an unstable object. Some teenage girls with braces and non brand name pants with holes cut into them came by thinking it would be cool to try to swing on the special kids swing. Madeline watched them and was entertained. Their brothers or friends, a tall skinny acne faced boy and a little kid with a mohawk, then played a karate fight that Madeline was entranced by. The footage from the video camera partially captured much of this experience so hopefully I can effectively archive it to show to Madeline at some point when she is beyond her LSD trip youngest years.

Life is good on other fronts too. I am starting to do work with Peter on a marketing project for a recently funded venture backed start-up. I find the chance to focus and drive the business forwards in a scalable way a great little challenge. I am psyched at the opportunity to build a marketing plan and execute it. Plus I’m getting paid for it.

In other fronts we found one viable prospect to expand our healthcare warehouse practice. The prospect is in Cincinnati, which is a pain, but it looks like a good fit and they have a lot of interest in getting a solution put together if we can get them to trust that we are capable at providing one. I am on my way to Sacramento for a conference just on warehousing for healthcare so I am hoping there will be some good contacts and I can find some qualified prospects for putting together a product in this space.

Sarah and I keep vacillating about whether or not to move away from our current spot. Our searches in Brookline have led us to start to investigate Newton. We went to watch the Patriots game at Carl’s house, a lab friend of my dad’s. Carl has a son, Elias, who is about a month older than Madeline, so the idea was to have a play date and watch the game. It was great to see the Patriots whoop the Bengals after everyone saying that the Bengals were a great team that would be almost impossible to beat. Any given Sunday? But the Pats had a swagger and confidence in this game. They were scoring touch downs while the Bengals had trouble sneaking field goals in. Carl’s house is in Newton and despite having the same number of people as us, three, they have about ten times the amount of space. They bought the house as a fixer-upper but it was in generally good shape from what I could tell. They had been fixing it up already for a couple of years and it looked great. It made Sarah and I think that maybe Newton would be a more likely location for our next move.

The other thing that the fixer-upper made me think of was that we could do some serious home improvements on the Brookline condo like a new bathroom and kitchen plus some electrical work including a wall mounted flat screen TV and it would make the condo not bigger, but more livable. The thought was that if we do buy some Newton house we’ll have to do ten times that in renovations so why should we be afraid of doing renovations where we live now. All the neighbors who just moved into the building are busy fixing-up their new living spaces. Why not us?

I believe that among the reasons to think about these living space changes is that now that we are having gotten married and with a baby and such rapid changes it feels strange to start having things stand still. At some level things are becoming daily routines again and with so many changes it feels awkward as a change to have no changes. Granted we get our surprise all-nighters like on Thursday and Saturday night when Madeline decided she wanted to clank her stacking cups and press the buttons on the Winnie the Pooh surprises interactive song book, but in general things aren’t changing much and we are in the mode of always looking forwards rather than just living in today.

Everyone’s birthday is approaching. Madeline will be one. I will be 33. Sarah will be 31. Lisa and Dave will be married. Hattie and Jose will be married. Ilana will have a baby. Amy will have her second child. Kilimnik and Hillary will be working on their first baby.

Among the rentals, not Fear and Loathing, we picked-up The Girls Next Door. I learned that the Playboy mansion is on 9 acres. It made me think since the Marshfield house is on 11 acres. My family has 2 more acres than Hef’s mansion. Will we end-up like Hefner, living in some dream life?

We don’t take as much advantage of the house in Marshfield but we live well when we are there. Hopefully the momentum from the Homer street pre-wedding clean-up renovations will be enough to get the Marshfield renovation begun. After 23 years my father had a new driveway put in just in time for the wedding. Nick Falkoff is doubling as contractor and wedding planner. The funny thing is that it is a very good combination for those of us who believe that if you have a nice house that you can have a great wedding in your own back yard plus it is a perfect time to invest in a renovation. So a wedding cost can include fixing your house the way that you want it. Thus a wedding planner/home contractor is a perfect slash business.

Lisa and Dave are holed up in Marshfield right now panicking about the last minute preparations for their wedding and their CD release party the following day. I need to create a toast, which is causing me to shuffle through my memory back to when I was a child in Watertown, going through those supposed LSD years with my big sister in a room we shared sleeping in bunk beds, with a floor full of toys, and a ladder to the loft above. I’ll come up with something for Lisa. She is a hero of mine and she and Dave are a good pair. I’ll have to remember some facts about Dave. I wish I had more stories or spent more time with them.

But things are good and having broken the fast with Starbucks at 2PM and then eating a Blue Ribbon dinner of brisket at 5 PM I find myself on the plane missing my baby and thinking those thoughts that most all fathers think when they kiss their baby goodbye to then board a plane. I hope this plane or the one coming back doesn’t crash and I get home safely. I want to see my baby again soon and there is no goodbye that would be dramatic enough to capture a last one. So I kissed her and she had cried because her bottle was empty. I’ll see her again soon.