Tag: The Kinder

What I Want Thursday – 8/2/2012

/ Matt Talley / 1 Comment

Below are the things that I find are present for me today:

1. More time with my children.

2. I want to stick to my new diet and workout schedule and not fall off the wagon and back into the cookie/café Mocha/lethargic/big-belly abyss.

3. For my wife to finish some long ago promised sewing tasks for me.

4. More book shelf space at home. We read more and more on our kindles and have sold many, if not most, of the paperbacks that have filled our lives for years and we are still completely out of space for our books. There are stacks on the floor in both of our home offices, to-read piles on each night-stand, fiction and history filing the living room book case, literature lined up on the basement hutch, cookbooks on the bottom shelf of the china hutch, and single volumes littered across the normally unoccupied spaces of our small home. We more shelves, not less books!

5. A finished kitchen

6. Painted lawn furniture

7. Filson Medium Travel bag. My son and I went to the Filson factory store and I fell into love/lust over this piece of luggage. I know that sounds weird, but I fly a LOT – I am a Platinum SkyTeam frequent flier member and a Gold OneWorld member. Quality, attractive, roomy, useful luggage is a necessity.

8. A cigarbox electric Ukulele for playing blues with a slide.

9. A proper car camping/glamping kitchen set up.

10. A few books: Passions:The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson; The Lodge Cast Iron Cookbook; Paris Between the Wars 1919-1939: Art, Life & Culture; Ernest Hemmingway bio and a two books of his letters (1&2), etc…

11. A Truck bed full of wooden wine/port crates/boxes for a couple of open projects at home.

12. To give Heifer International a menagerie of animals. That is my charity goal for the year. I want to save, gather, raise, find as much cash as possible to give to Heifer International by the end of 2012 for the purchase of bees, goats, cows, water buffalo, chickens, trees, training and hope. It will provide animals and knowledge that will change lives for the good. I will add a link or a tab on my front page to a fund status page/counter and update it as the gift grows.

Big Game huntin’ in the back yard

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I can say with certainty that there are some unique benefits when you are my child:  They are allowed to watch cartoons at any point during the day, expletives are allowed as long as they are in another language (points given for Chinese curse words), cookies (in moderation) and cold milk are a food group of their own, no brussels sprouts will EVER appear on their plate, I have the tools and childlike imagination to build most anything that can be dreamt up, big game and zombie hunting are allowed in the back yard, sword fights with foam batons are good clean fun, mohawks and blue hair are just fine, and I will trick out a BMX bike like a hustler will pimp out a Caddy.  Apparently, I am an overgrown man-child with credit…  I am constantly amazed that my sweet wife both puts up with my antics and is contemplating procreating with me .

My son knows all the benefits of “Dad’s house” and this summer we worked on a wooden boomerang, build stuff in the shop, and sniped at dinosaurs with a pellet rifle perched atop his Wimbledon Cup-worthy bench rest that I built for him last year.  He is a dino-slaying machine!

When a 10 year old helps in the shop.

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My son loves to make, assemble, deconstruct and alter stuff in my shop when he comes out for his summer visits.  This year I put his little butt to work on a project that I knew he would like, that would help me out, and would teach him something: organizing my tool and supply bins.  I know, I know, it sounds really crappy – like I am forcing my kids to fan me while Stamps-With-Foot feeds me grapes on the divan, but it was great, I swear.

My J-O-B was throwing out a couple sets of large metal card catalog bins and after asking permission, I snatched them out of the bin and took both right home.  I immediately filled every drawer with often used crap, but didn’t get around to labeling the fronts.  It has been that way for 2 years and I have to pull out 2 or 3 drawers until I find what I am looking for.  Every time I have to rifle around looking through each cubby, I swear to myself: “THIS weekend I and going to make labels!”  I am glad I waited.  Now The Ruminator (my son’s nickname) can tell the difference between a wood biscuit, a deck screw, a blue wire nut, trim screws, roofing nails and finish nails, just to name a few.  I have organized shop storage and handmade placards that I will always treasure and smile at every time I see them.

What I want Thursday:

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  1. More time with my children. No one ends this life with the thought – ‘Man, I should of spent more time working...’
  2. The Longines 2011 24hr watch. Unveiled at Basel World 2011 and is an update of the Classic Swiss Air pilots watch custom made for the airline in the 1950s. It has a half-hunter case that NEEDS a picture of my wife and kids in it.
  3. A great sport coat that looks as good with jeans as it does with a tie and slacks.
  4. For my birthday to finally arrive so that I do not feel bad about buying an iPad2.  I both need and want a new computer and I figured out that I can do 95% of what I need to do on a daily basis on a pad.  As soon as I can open and edit CAD file reliably, then it will be 100%.  I have started lusting.