Friday Four

Editor's Note: This one will be short, sweet, and link-free: My daughter has been up sick all night and duty will be calling again soon... Tomorrow's post, already partially written, may be shorter than usual for the same reason.

1. We'd been in Boston, and out of the distribution territory for the Spoetzl Brewery for so long that it didn't even occur to me to look for Shiner Bock at the grocery. I was pleasantly surprised to find that old favorite on the shelves here in St. Louis recently. (Hey, not every beer I enjoy is over-hopped or has a name like "Modus Hoperandi".)

2. At some point, my wife bought the children's book Super Dad for Pumpkin, but it was only after we reached St. Louis that it was readily available to her (read: unburied). She's been bringing it to me to read to her and then sitting on my lap quite a bit over the past couple of days.

3. We have a back porch at our new place and winter won't last forever. I plan to try my hand at some St. Louis style barbecued pork steaks some time this spring.

4. Pumpkin has been laying lots of new words on us lately: apple, man, woman (as "wowo"), and dungeon ("dugadug"). "Dungeon?" you might ask. That's what I have been calling the basement, where the washer and dryer live. Nothing gets past my baby girl, and she likes to go down there with me, so she started asking me to go down there. I might have missed what she meant, but she pointed to the door a couple of times as she said it.

-- CAV