When we put Zoe to bed at night it’s anybody’s guess when she’ll actually go to sleep. She has her old man’s circadian rhythm and stays up all night. Bedtime is 8:00, but sleepytime is usually more like 11:00.

One thing she does in the hours between the two is send email. Here’s what was waiting in my inbox this morning:

$$$$$$$$I wish we were rich and we had a 90,6743 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

From your lips to God’s ears, peanut.

There’s finally a term for the songs that get stuck in your head: Earworm.

Beth and I have had our go-rounds with them and we had already stumbled across one of the suggested methods for getting a song out of your head: make like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and “give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now!” We sometimes do a sort of tag-team where she’ll give me hers and I’ll give her something different back, and every once in awhile we’ll just give each other one for fun. A perennial “favorite” in our household is Cher’s Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves. (And now one of you has it.) (I took a short break after writing that last sentence there and guess what — I gave it to myself.)

Even Zoe gets them. We went to Second Spin a week or so ago and picked up some CDs, and among my choices were two from the .99 cent rack: Cher’s Greatest Hits (including our two top earworms: Gypsies and Halfbreed), and one I just picked at random, Jimmy Ray. The Cher was, well, Cher, but the Jimmy Ray actually turned out okay. It’s vaguely rockabilly pop and has a few decent songs on it that have gotten stuck in my head — and Zoe’s head too, apparently. Over dinner the other night she put her hands over her ears in frustration and growled, “Da-a-ad!!! I keep hearing that “shake-a shake-a shake-a” song in my brain!” I immediately recognized it as song #2 on the CD, Goin’ To Vegas, because I’ve been infected with that particular earworm too.

So I did the caring, fatherly thing and I helped her — I gave her song #1, Are You Jimmy Ray? instead. “Daa-aa-aad!!!” was the anguished response. She really was mad at me about it (for a kid with my sense of humor, sometimes she has no sense of humor), so I tried to explain to her how everyone gets songs stuck in their head and how the best way to deal with it is give it to someone else, and that led to me telling her about how much Beth hates Gypsies, and that reminded me of the new Cher CD, so I ran to get it and put it on the kitchen CD player — and when I got back Beth was gone. So I enjoyed a little of it myself.

Halfbreed! That’s all I ever heard
Halfbreed! How I came to hate the word.

And then Zoe left the room too.

Halloween is just around the corner, so preparations of the Mausoleum de Atkins have begun. Yesterday’s total at the party store: $170. We take our Halloween seriously around here.

Well, not all of us do. For me and Zoe, Halloween is our favorite holiday. We decorate the house, there are weeks of costume deliberations, trick or treating is elaborately planned, jack-o-lantern designs are carefully selected… We like us some Halloween. But Beth doesn’t. Beth is, in fact, the Halloween Grinch. Despite her (or to spite her?), the decorating began today.

Zoe spent the day field-testing her Spiderella costume and was kind enough to pose next to all the decorations for me. First we have the tall gravestone:

This will go in our courtyard graveyard, along with the other headstones from last year that I can’t find right now. I’m going to put together a few dead bodies crawling out of their graves, and the whole thing will be creeped-up by the fog machine I picked up at the party store. Pictures of this will come after I set it all up next weekend.

Then there’s the door decoration Zoe picked out:

The rubber tongue was a key consideration in her selecting it:

I found myself strangely attracted to it. We got along very well; I think maybe we have a future together:

I should probably also mention that the dogs will be dressing up too. In Beth’s defense, she’s the one who went out and got the costumes for them, so she’s only half-Grinch, I guess. Courtesy of Beth, here’s Suki in her costume. She’s even less thrilled about it than she looks:

I couldn’t get Billy to pose properly for his picture, so you’ll have to trust me when I tell you it’s a lovely headband with a little vampire bat that sits right between his ears. He keeps scraping it off on the floor, I don’t know why.

When you’re decorating the house, it’s almost a law that you have to use that cheesy stretchy spiderweb stuff, isn’t it?

We think the spiderwebby stuff looks best if you don’t stretch it all out evenly, so there’s clumps of it that make it look like cheesy stretchy spiderweb stuff. You get more of a white trash Halloween effect that way, which is nice.

And the piece de resistance is the feather in the cap of that white trash look — the huge half-assed spiderweb nailed to the tree by the front door:

Yes, we’re unreasonably proud of this piece. I especially like how it looks like it was made out of strips of torn bedsheets … because it was! Also, the way it hangs there loosely, looking nothing like a real spiderweb, is very pleasing to the eye. And the crowning glory of it, of course, is the skeleton dangling from the bottom with the spider positioned to begin snacking on its head. That was Zoe’s idea. I’m so proud.

So that’s the state of the Halloween preparations today. I’ll be in Fresno all next week but will be coming home over the weekend to carve many pumpkins and put together the dead bodies for the graveyard. I’ll post more pictures then, maybe even with the fog machine on.

Oooooooohhhhhhhhh!!! Boo.

Bicycling, that is.

Zoe and I just got back from a trip to the No Training Wheels Proving Grounds (aka Valley College‘s parking lot, right around the corner) and I’m happy to report that the training wheels have been retired and she’s off and running solo on two wheels. I still have to give her a little push to get her started every few tries, but once she’s going she’s going strong.

We’ve been working on this off-and-on for a little while now, but she has suddenly become extra motivated by a motocross riding school I found recently. When I showed her what she could be riding there (a little Honda XR70) and explained that she’d have to be able to ride sans training wheels before we could sign her up… Well, that was all the incentive she needed. We hit the parking lot, took off the training wheels, and I did the run-beside-her-while-holding-her-up thing maybe three times, and then she was riding solo. She wants to take that class in a big bad way.

She also wants her own motorcycle bad. We give her an allowance and she is always brainstorming jobs she can do for money, and every penny she gets goes straight into the piggy bank. She’s saving for a motorcycle. She has been resolute about this for months now. It’s not a passing fancy; she really wants to get a motorcycle.

I think I’m raising a biker chick.

Cool.

Listening to the new John Mayer CD Heavier Things here at work. This is the song that’s making me have to hide the fact that I’m tearing up:

Daughters
John Mayer

I know a girl
She puts the color inside of my world
But she’s just like a maze
Where all of the walls all continually change
And I’ve done all I can
To stand on her steps with my heart in my hands
Now I’m starting to see
Maybe it’s got nothing to do with me

So fathers, be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too

I’m told we’re going to have a new kid in Zoe’s class this year, whose mom has figured prominently in my (and millions of other guys’) fantasies over the years:

I think I’m going to be a lot more involved in school this year. I wonder if they need another Class Dad?

I’m websurfing in my home office when I hear a commotion in the kitchen. I can’t make out the words but Zoe is sobbing — something awful has happened. I come flying out of my office, heart racing: “What’s wrong?!? What happened!?!”

Zoe is grinning, being a goof, parading around with her kitten Sparkle draped across her shoulders. “I have a loaded Sparkle and I’m not afraid to use it!” she declares.

Oh. Reach for the defibrillator paddles…

Okay, after the last entry I just had to break out the scanner. This is a scan of my favorite of all the notes Zoe has left out at night. It’s instructions, with diagram, of how she wants me to fill her Camelback bag with water and chill it in the refrigerator overnight. I love how specific she is that it goes in the fridge, NOT the freezer. I found it on the floor leaning against the wall outside the kitchen, arrow pointing toward the fridge.

This one’s definitely going in the Memories Folder. I’ll show it to her Prom Date 11 years from now.

Zoe has a very strict bedtime of 8:00 pm — she has to be in bed by 8:00 or else– Or else it might be a little later than that. 8:30, maybe. Or perhaps 9:00. Certainly no later than 10:00. 10:30, tops.

Whatever time it is, though, once she’s in bed she’s In Bed and must not leave her room. The loophole is that she can leave her room only if she’s 1) bleeding or 2) on fire — which has since been negotiated to include 3) if she has to go to the bathroom or 4) she sees a Bad Guy. (You’d be surprised how many Bad Guys we have lurking about.) The end result of all this is that she usually only ventures out five or six times a night.

Since the myriad excuses she offers when she gets caught outside the wire are now falling on deaf — and angry — ears, Zoe has added a twist: she leaves signs out for us. Written up on construction paper in multi-colored crayon with glitter glued on for accessorizing, they’re usually pretty cute and sometimes funny.

Tonight Beth and I were working in our offices on the opposite end of the house from Zoe’s room, and as I headed for the kitchen I found a sign waiting for me on the floor in the hallway: “Mom Dad I not sleepy at all OKOK.” Pretty cute, I thought, so I headed to Zoe’s room to give her a kiss and tuck her in again.

“I not sleepy” girl was out cold, snoring like a lumberjack.

We bought a tent on sale from Big 5 a few months ago, I have no idea why — I think I had malaria and was suffering from a fever of 108 and had this vision of a family outing in the mountains, sitting around a campfire and roasting marshmallows, pointing out constellations in the night sky to Zoe, cooking a hearty breakfast in the morning over an open fire… Camping, in other words. But I forgot that Beth doesn’t do camping. To Beth, camping is staying in a hotel that doesn’t feature round-the-clock room service. To Beth, the Great Outdoors is just that: Great. Outdoors.

So we have this tent we’re not using. Well, for Zoe, this is just WRONG. We have to go camping! Now! And if all the campsites in the area are completely booked through November, well we just have to go camping now anyway!

So tonight Zoe and I are going camping. In the back yard. We’ll be eating donuts in the tent later, and then I’ll tell her a ghost story (“…but not too scary of a ghost story, okay, Daddy?”) and then we’ll bed down for the night under the stars of suburbia. She’s so excited she can hardly stand it. I’m… Well, resigned is a good word for it.

Somehow it just doesn’t feel like camping when you have to make sure the sprinklers are turned off before you set up the tent.