The 1st Annual Weekend Roundup Awards (the Roundies)
Every weekend when I am not too lazy to let it slide, thekchorns.com posts a Weekend Roundup, succinctly summarizing the events of the weekend, from the banal to the sublime. At its best, the Weekend Roundup provides a snapshot of a unique moment in the life of a Midwestern family at the beginning of the 21st century; at its worst, it is dishwater-dull, a rote recitation of uninteresting events, typically accompanies by photos of same.
The latter, as you might expect, is much more common. Nonetheless, each weekend features several moments of transcendence, moments that can truly be considered The Best.
The nominees for Best Moment of the Weekend of February 20-22 are:
- Staying Up Until 1:30 Saturday Morning Watching TV
It’s an ironclad law of parenthood: if you stay up until all hours of the night watching Battlestar Galactica and Step Brothers, a child is guaranteed to wake up sick at 5:30 am. (She got better.) - Maya Playing Her New Wii Game
We finally found a Wii game perfectly suited for Maya’s age and personal tastes: “The Littlest Pet Shop.” Cute animals, little games, playing dress-up… it was all we could do to get her to put the Wiimote down to eat or go to the bathroom. - Watching Tropic Thunder with my bud Jimmy
What can I say? It made me laugh. - Reading Charlotte’s Web with Maya
We’ve been reading this, a chapter a day, for a couple of weeks now, and today was the Big One where (spoiler alert!) Charlotte dies. - Sunday Night Dinner with the Crows
We had this.
It is, of course, an honor just to be nominated for Best Moment of the Weekend of February 20-22. And the Roundy goes to (drumroll, please)…
Reading Charlotte’s Web with Maya
It was a tough call, especially when the Best Moment of the Weekend involves making a five-year-old cry. But seeing her tear up when Charlotte died… it moved me. Heck, I’ll admit it, I teared up a little myself, and I knew it was coming. When I was a kid, Charlotte’s death made me cry. It made Shannon cry. It made Steven cry when we read it to him a few years ago. But it’s not the tears that make this the Best Moment; it’s the feeling that we, as a family, have something in common. Sure, it’s love for a fictional spider in a decades-old children’s book, but it’s a connection all the same. The Kansas City Horns–the whole family–are a sentimental bunch of saps.
Good night, America!
You say it’s the Weekend Roundup’s birthday? It’s my birthday too, yeah
And because it’s my birthday, I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. I’m pretty sure that’s the law. On February 15, Price Horn gets to tell one and all: “You are not the boss of me.”
So if I don’t want to write a Weekend Roundup, you can’t make me! Go ahead, try. Use the magic of the Internet to force me to do it. You can’t, can you? It is because the technology simply does not exist yet. In another 15 to 20 years, maybe. But not today! Not on the 38th Annual Price Horn Appreciation Day!
So if you want an account of the birthday party we attended Friday night, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Check the society pages in the paper? Look for something about Rishab, the youngest son of our friends Umesh and Manisha, turning three. Look for photos of birthday chaos that may or may not feature our own kids. (Our kids will probably be easy to pick out.)
I don’t know if the story will mention the fabulous Indian feast we were served at the party. If it doesn’t, it’s a shame, because you won’t know how awesome it was. Your loss!
Also, because I’m not writing the Weekend Roundup, I won’t talk about Valentine’s Day, aka The Made-Up Holiday for Suckers. Everybody already knows we don’t do The Made-Up Holiday for Suckers ’round here, on account of the name. But we do give in ever-so-slightly and give the kids a little something, like candy and heart-shaped donuts.
Just as long they only associate the Made-Up Holiday for Suckers with candy, not love, right?
Not that I’m going to write about that. I’m not doing a Weekend Roundup, remember? So I won’t talk about how The One and Only Tom came over on Saturday with his sister Kim, nor how I prepared a Mexican Feast for them. Plus, you’ll be spared the sight of the White Trash Birthday Cake we whipped up from a store-bought cookie cake. Shannon spelled out birthday my name and age with Raisinets.
At least, she told me they were Raisinets. They look for all the world like she trained a rabbit to do the ol’ squat-n-squeeze in a remarkable pattern. The latter would be more interesting, frankly.
But enough of my not writing a Weekend Roundup! It’s my day and I’ll not do whatever I don’t want. I won’t tell you anything, for example, about the Sunday evening Special Dinner Celebration! Because 1) I don’t feel like it, and 2) it hasn’t happened yet. So you’re out of luck there, Skippy.
I can call you “Skippy” because it’s my birthday. Check it, Skippy. It’s the law.
Lock your windows, hide your children… it’s the return of the Weekend Roundup
The rambling anecdotes about laundry and vacuuming… the tales of going to the grocery store and the mall… the photos of us doing nothing of note… You guessed it, sister. We’re back, baby! After a hiatus of, I don’t know, six weeks? Did anyone even notice I stopped doing them? Not that I can tell. No comments, no e-mails, nothing. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard a massive sigh of relief from the local collective unconscious the first week I let the Weekend Roundup drop like a hot potato. Well, nuts to you, collective unconscious! The Weekend Roundup is back, and it’s… well, not better than ever. Not any worse, either. I guess I can say that the Weekend Roundup is back and it’s as the same as ever? That’s kind of grammatical, right?
Oh, the humanity!
After all that buildup, I wish I had something more interesting to say about the weekend. It was the usual mix of the drearily banal and headache-inducing busy-ness, with a few high points mixed in. We’ll skip the banal and the busy (the laundry folded, the movies watched, the garages cleaned) jump right to the high points.
Which leads us to the 2009 Father-Daughter Dance at Maya’s school. Yes, it was time for all good fathers to step up and show their daughter how a gentleman is supposed to treat a lady during a night on the town. And, since no good fathers were around, Shannon asked me to go (rim shot). Maya got all dolled up and I got as clean as I could muster.
We met Maya’s friend Mackenzie and her dad Mike at Wasahi, a local teppanyaki/sushi place, for dinner and a show (the show being all the shrimp-tossing, grill-banging, onion-volcano-creating rigmarole that goes on during the cooking of the dinner itself). After that, it was off to the dance, which consisted (mostly) of the guys hanging around at the back of the room…
…while the girls danced up a storm…
… and otherwise had fun.
So, as my friend Rich sagely pointed out, it wasn’t that much different from every dance we attended in junior high school. Still, the girls at least pretended to have a grand time and the old men who brung ‘em did their best not to look like fools doing the Cha-Cha Slide.
The latter, as expected, failed miserably.
Saturday was bright and beautiful and mild (an unseasonable 70 degrees in February!), a perfect day to waste away inside playing video games and cleaning. Nonetheless, we decided to (sigh) go outside and enjoy the sunshine and all that. Our destination of choice: Penguin Park, a Kansas City landmark so named because of a giant penguin statue that I didn’t even bother to photograph. Still, it was a fabulous day, and the park was packed with kids playing…
…puppies jumping (this is Theo, a pug/beagle mix)…
… and kids anxiously and pensively waiting for a chance to just go home and play video games.
The fine weather was not to last, though. A chill wind started a-blowin’ come Sunday. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like it was 30 below with blowing snow and hail. But you needed to wear a jacket to go outside, and that was sufficiently winteresque to drop a gray blanket over the city and drive everyone back inside. Suits me just fine. I got TV to watch, brother, and all this sunshine and warmth and joy just gets in the way.
Is this thing on?
In case you care: yes, we are all still alive. Mostly.
I know, I’ve kind of let this blog slip over the last couple of months. Thing is, life in the Kansas City Horns household has been flipped upside-down of late. Shannon had major surgery in St. Louis and had to spend a couple of weeks recuperating over there. This left moi as the Inadequate Single Parent for a while, and frankly, it was all I could do to keep the kids in clean underwear. Even now that Shannon is back home, she’s still not 100 percent, and thus it’s been hard to carve out time for this blog.
That said, I’m going to try to get some generic photos and some essentially meaningless content up here in the next few days. Better than nothing, right?
Here, I’ll start by posting a photo of my desk at work.
No one has asked to see it. Knowing that I have an unhealthy obsession with calendars doesn’t change your life one bit, does it? No, it doesn’t, and you’re welcome.
The Kansas City Horns: Pointless Posts a-Plenty!