Dwyeropolis

Not so much fun: spending a half-hour in the automated customer service line with TimeWarner Cable, pressing the buttons I’m being instructed to press if I want to disconnect my service, only to get sent to the sales department, where I’m very politely told that they can’t help me but will connect me to the department that can.  By which they mean dumping me back into the automated system, where I again press the correct buttons and get sent to sales, where I’m again politely told that they can’t help but will connect me to the department that can, and so on.  After this happened three times, with yours truly offering increasingly desperate insistences that I *am* pressing the correct buttons and that just sending me back to the computer switchboard won’t help, I hang up and try the website, where my only option is to fill out a pretty generic inquiry form.  I’m told I should expect a response within 48 hours.

ConEd, at least, made it quite easy to discontinue my service.  So that’s something.

…but Texas wants her anyway.

Ready to depart for Pru’s first ever-trip to Texas.  It will be a three-way reunion:  Sarah’s 10th high school reunion, a Horney family reunion, and my long-awaited reunion with Whataburger.

Are we excited?

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Last stop for DTaP!

For those of you keeping track, here are the scores from today’s 8-month check-up.

Height: 28.1  inches (90th percentile)
Weight:  19 lb 0 oz (75th percentile)
Head circumference: 44.9  cm (87th percentile)

Does Pru look more like her mom or her dad here? Anyone?

In an hour or so, we’re off for Albany, to check out our new apartment and store some stuff (old baby clothes, etc) that we won’t need for the next few weeks.  If y’all are very, very good, there may be some pictures in it for you.  In the meantime, a very happy Venezuelan Independence Day to you all!

Some Independence Day fun:

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Watch out Williamsburg:  there’s a new hipster in town, and she’s armed with an appropriately vintage hoodie (and a love of the oeuvre of Wes Anderson):

The hoodie in question used to be Sarah’s from when she was a baby:

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A question (perhaps for our Irish readership):  did the Provisional Irish Republican Army field provisional quartermasters?

As today is Father’s Day, I will provide an interesting piece of patriarchal trivia:  Did you know that Ronald Reagan was the last U.S. president to not be named after either his father or his grandfather?

George H. W. Bush was named after his maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker.

William Jefferson Clinton was named after his birth father, William Jefferson Blythe, Jr.

George W. Bush, though not a junior, was clearly named after his father, George H. W. Bush.

(Reagan is also the last president whose father doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page.  Coincidence?)

Interestingly, this trend will almost certainly continue through 2008, since both major-party candidates (Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. and John Sidney McCain III) and the leading minor-party candidate (Robert Laurence Barr, Jr.) are all named after their fathers.  If you’re interested in breaking the trend, note that neither Ralph Nader or Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin are juniors.  (I wasn’t able to determine whether they’re named after their respective grandfathers.)

Since all you really come here for are cute baby pix, I have included a picture of Pru decked out in her Flag Day best after the break.

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In case you weren’t aware of it, there is a lot of fun (and insanity!) to be had here, here and here.  If I didn’t have a baby, you now know what I’d be doing during the long days in Yankeeland.