It’s time to get your tickets! Tuesday February 6th at 8:00PM Loaded Gun Theory is bringing you “Loaded Gun Theory presents: A Special Live Taping of The Freddy Argyle Show!”

Argyle has been hosting his near-weekly talk show in his home-studio for the past eighteen months and will bring his unique brand of “investigative interviewing” and “charm” to FronteraFest in an intimate and revealing chat with a real-life Austin hero.

With Al Im at the typewriter, Anna Ford on the directing bongos, and starring Al Im, Ian LeClair, Julie Winston-Thomas, E.D. Harrelson, and Beth Trumpey. You don’t want to miss it!

Tickets can be purchased online at the Hyde Park Theater website or to go directly there:

http://4thwalltickets.com/store/show_by_tags?tags=Short+Fringe

You should probably get them early. Now that they have online ticket sales, shows have been selling out quickly.

Ahh, what fun. Why there’s Stella waiting for Roxie to finish eating so she can horn in on the food. Shortly after this Stella took a bath in the dogs water bowl. I didn’t really expect that the first thing Stella would do with her new crawling skills would be eat dog food.

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Comments

Holmes (http://the-holmes.blogspot.com)

2007-01-26T17:25:05.000Z

…one of Henry’s favorite games is definitely “Dehydrate The Dog.” Elliott is lucky if he gets to eat a meal in peace.

Kate (http://katiekatworld.blogspot.com)

2007-01-26T21:30:39.000Z

Waiting until the time was right to finally steal their food. How does she know what’s good yet? She hasn’t tried it yet. Now, if she continues, we might all need to intervene. love that baby!

Ok, so I can already see this is going to be long and rambling. So I missed the State of the Union address because I can’t listen to the President repeatedly loose his train of thought for longer than a sound bite. So I was shocked to read that he said this:

“After her daughter was born, Julie Aigner-Clark searched for ways to share her love of music and art with her child. So she borrowed some equipment and began filming children’s videos in her basement. The Baby Einstein Company was born, and in just 5 years her business grew to more than $20 million in sales. In November 2001, Julie sold Baby Einstein to Walt Disney Company; and with her help, Baby Einstein has grown into a $200 million business. Julie represents the great enterprising spirit of America. And she is using her success to help others, producing child safety videos with John Walsh of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Julie says of her new project: “I believe it is the most important thing that I have ever done. I believe that children have the right to live in a world that is safe.” And so tonight we are pleased to welcome this talented business entrepreneur and generous social entrepreneur, Julie Aigner-Clark.”

Are you kidding me? Baby Einstein? One of the other heroes threw himself on top of a man trapped in the path of an oncoming subway and saved his life. Another was a heroic soldier from Iraq? A hero is now someone who starts a company that cynically builds upon parent and grandparents desire to have an intelligent child then sells out to Disney? A company that sells DVDs for babies and toddlers even though the American Council of Pediatrics recommends no TV for children under age 2, and states “Too much television can negatively affect early brain development.”?

Baby Einstein is the main reason that most children’s toys suck. If you try to buy baby toys you’ll notice that for some reason kids will still gravitate towards the old standards (popcorn popper vacuum cleaner, box of blocks, telephone on a string). Most of the new stuff only seems to work in so far as it makes noise or is good for banging on the floor. I mean really, you’re telling me a baby is going to learn to read the words for red in 3 languages off the side of a block? And I’m not the only one who feels this way. None other than Matt Damon’s mom (Nancy Carlsson-Paige) also generally lists Baby Einstein’s toys as being age inappropriate and potentially harmful. She lists them in the same report as everyone’s favorite hoochie-doll - Bratz.

Of course now that they’ve been endorsed by President Bush I’m sure we can be confident that they are not only retarding our children’s intellectual growth, but also completely coated in lead paint.

On another front. I’ve been invited to a basketball game with the men from my church. My sister and brother-in-law are coming in to town so I can’t go anyway. I feel bad though. I know I need to do stuff on my own away from Julie and Stella. Julie’s very good at this. I’m not so good. And I do enjoy basketball. But I dunno. I always feel weird at men only activities. I guess this is a by product of growing up with 3 sisters. I dunno. But I should get out more.

Oh, if anyone’s interested in beta-testing the ticketing site I’m working on, it’s online at http://www.loadedguntheory.com/ticketing/. Let me know what you think. And please feel free to send me CSS fixes. Oh, and anyone can think of a good domain name for it, let me know. I can’t find anything that isn’t taken. Julie and I were brainstorming last night, and yahoo domains reported that myboxoffice.com wasn’t taken. We were really excited. Then yahoo domains crashed every time we tried to buy it. So I checked another site. They had it marked correctly as taken. Yahboooo!

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Comments

mcoker (http://www.phat32.com)

2007-01-26T03:22:08.000Z

That’s awesome!! cometothetheater.com gettheatertix.com buyplaytix.com I dunno if that’s anywhere near where you wanted to go with it

Man. Stella the past few days. Since Friday she’s been picking up about a new skill a day. It’s insane. It’s like she’s been procrastinating picking up any of these things and has suddenly hit her deadline. So for those keeping score at home, since last Friday she now can:

play peek-a-boo by herself
crawl
give hugs
clap her hands
stand and shuffle a bit

I especially liked getting home from work last night and getting a big hug from Stella. I think that’s my favorite skill of all.

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Comments

mcoker (http://www.phat32.com)

2007-01-25T05:51:14.000Z

You’re like a human tube of toothpaste. Except when she squeezes you, love comes out :-)

So Stella started crawling this weekend. She’s a bit behind on this. Being the lazy baby that she is, she hasn’t really even been practicing to crawl. We’d almost given up, and decided that she’d walk before she crawled. But on Friday she made one or two tenative lunges, a few more Saturday, and yesterday she just started motoring. It was like a fun party trick yesterday. This morning was a different story.

I take her into the bathroom with me when I shower. She has a pile of toys that she plays with, and she’s been happy with this arrangement for many months now. This morning realizing that she could move I picked everything that was not child safe off of the bathroom floor. She immediately headed behind the toilet and pulled off the white caps that cover the bolts that anchor the toilet to the floor. I took it away from her and put it back on. She went right back and picked it back up again. I took it away and put it on the counter. She went back behind the toilet again, but realizing that the water pipe was actually attached to the wall, she eventually became bored and went back to her stack of toys. I started my shower.

When I started getting ready she watched with keen interest when I opened my drawer to get out my deodorant. She immediately acquired this skill and started opening and closing my lower drawer. Slamming it into my shin. I took her out of the bathroom to put some clothes on. I have another pile of toys in our bedroom to keep her entertained while I do this. She immediately crawled over to our fan and was pulling on the power cord. I picked her up and faced her another way. She crawled after Roxie and started pulling on her paw. You could see the fear in Roxie’s eyes. She booked it out of there.

All this happened in 45 minutes. I really feel sorry for Julie today.

Julie’s mom is in town to arrange some details of her retirement, so we got to go out to a movie last night. We ended up seeing The Children of Men, because Julie thought Pan’s Labyrinth would be too scary. I had to apologize afterwards. It’s incredibly intense. You know that kind of hyperventilating you do when you’re crying? I realized at one point I was doing that just from the incredible intensity of the movie. It’s like no other sci-fi movie I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t detect any CGI in the movie. Which is even more impressive when they have all these long 1 shot action scenes. And they had Banksy artwork all over the place which was very cool.
I will warn you though. I would rate this up there with Schindler’s List for intense hard to watch movies (although this one is a little less depressing). Going into it I thought the following analogy would hold true:
Return of the Living Dead is to 28 days later as Mad Max is to Children of Men. I was off by a lot.
Oh, and on Saturday we had lunch with Jonathan, Lady-A, and Little-E. It was a lot of fun. Little-E is incredibly articulate and was coming up with all sorts of interesting ideas. I can’t wait until Stella gets to that age. Their imaginations are incredible. I didn’t show them the reservation software I’m working on. It’s coming along really well, but it’s not quite ready for people to use yet. I showed it to my dad last night and he was really impressed with the design. I should probably get Coker and Ellie to give it a once over. I’m sure they’d find 1000 things I’ve missed. But right now I’m just working on solidifying the 1.0 features, adding lots and lots of help, and making sure all the form validation works well. Hopefully I’ll have an announcement on that soon.

But Stella’s crawling! So who knows what my life is going to look like from here on out.

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Comments

Holmes (http://the-holmes.blogspot.com)

2007-01-22T19:37:22.000Z

I feel your pain/joy. The more mobile Henry gets, the more he gets into EVERYTHING. You can look forward to climbing now.

Jonathon (http://flailingmyarms.blogspot.com)

2007-01-23T17:28:30.000Z

Glad to hear Stella’s turned the corner and is officially mobile. We’ll have to talk tickets soon.

Tim (http://www.loadedguntheory.com/blog/director/listblog/tim.html)

2007-01-23T17:51:44.000Z

Yeah, we definitely need to talk tickets. It’s getting very, very close to done. I’m basically just working through testing, and finishing up some help text and wording stuff. I really want it to be as self-explanatory as possible. I also want to move it out to its own hosting server since that will make some changes to the way things work (mainly that you’ll get a nice URL ). I’m thinking by the end of the week you’ll be able to setup a show.

Elli

2007-01-27T15:43:37.000Z

You can always give me a shout if you need some QA magic ;-) I don’t know if you’ve heard this but I’m starting a new job on Monday. Weird. Hope you’re doing well!

So I’m reading Ain’t It Cool News and I come on this story:

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/31233

And I’m thinking, hey that place looks familiar, although I’m sure that it’s just because I’ve seen the movie. Then they mention where it was. Yes folks. I had my prom in the set for Logan’s Run. It actually looked more like the movie, and less like the modern day pictures.

The area where all the people are congregating is where we danced. All the tables were just below what is shown in this picture. Wow. How sad that they tore it down. It was a really beautiful building. If a bit weird with its escalators and offices/not open to the public store fronts.

Feeling Good today. On Sunday I woke up to take care of Stella at 7am, and was just completely run down. When Julie woke up, I decided to go back to bed rather than go to church. She and Stella went without me and I slept till after noon. I still feel good today, so obviously that was the correct choice.
Stella’s been sleeping a little wonky, but otherwise we’ve been having quite a bit of fun. She gets to be more and more of a goofy person every day. She’s started waving at us, and mimicking what we say. And she slouches just like me. Horribly. It’s like she’s a liquid trying to drip out through the leg holes of her high chair. I can see now why my parents were dismayed by this. It must be genetic dismay. I mean there’s no logical reason why this should bother me. Especially since I slouch all the time myself.
We lost our Internet again this weekend. That means we lost our phone also (since we’re using Vonage). This also means that mail for Loaded Gun Theory backs up. It’s all supposed to get delivered eventually, but I worry sometimes. Our cable modem was completely fried this time. No power lights. Nothing. That’s the second cable modem that Time Warner has replaced in a month. This cannot be cheap. You’d think they’d get higher quality parts. Then because we lost channels every so often I had the service guy look at our cable box, and he ended up replacing our DVR too. Everything works beautifully now, but I think we’ve had Time Warner out 3 or 4 times this year and they’ve replaced 3 pieces of hardware. Their profit margins are far too high.
I went running last night with Julie, and I went running with Stella this morning. It’s the first time I’ve been running in like 3 weeks. That whole exhausted problem I was talking about earlier. My first mile was 9’5”, my second was 10’35”. So not bad for not having run in a while. I still really want to get to 8’ though. Ahh well, I’ll keep plugging along. Hopefully, I’ll set some new personal records during the SunStroke 5ks this summer.

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Comments

Travis (http://the-holmes.blogspot.com/)

2007-01-12T05:58:19.000Z

Getting back into anything resembling an exercise routine since the holidays has been most difficult. Maybe as all the yummy winter ales start disappearing from the shelves it’ll get easier.

On February 6th Loaded Gun Theory will present a special live taping of the Freddy Argyle show as part of Frontera Fest. This special event springs from the fetid mind of Al Im. The show starts at 8pm, and tickets go fast so watch for them to go on sale at http://www.hydeparktheatre.org/!

Sigh. Christmas is over. I’m back at work. It was quite a lot of fun while it lasted though. Last Thursday we were supposed to hang out with the Flarsons. That didn’t happen because Julie and Stella were sick. We stayed in and watched TV instead. It was pretty nice. On Friday we had our Christmas at home. I made Julie gingerbread pancakes for breakfast and we opened gifts. I only got Julie a few stocking stuffers because we had gone out ring shopping the week before. We got Julie an “upgraded” engagement ring. While the one I got her in college while working 28 hour weeks at Dell was nice, it was kind of fun to get something new.

Julie got me some cool stuff including a pocket knife and Katamari Damacy. She also attempted to get me some new pots for the kitchen, but we found out that the rebate had expired and they were definitely not worth the price without the rebate, so we’re going to return them and look for something better. Stella fared a lot better opening presents then she had a few weeks previously with my family. She seemed excited about showing off her new ability to take objects out of bags. Julie put a lot of Stella’s stuff in bags and she was able to pull them out. She wasn’t really very interested in them once they were out, but she’s 9 months so we’ll take what we can get. She got some awesome new blocks, and lots of outfits, and some books. We were going to go out to Johnson City to see lights, but Julie and Stella were still feeling crummy so we went to Central Market, got a frozen pizza, some wine, and stayed in and watched 12 monkeys. ‘Cause our life is exciting like that.

On Saturday we got up and assembled the roughly 2 tons of things we have to bring with us to take a baby and 2 dogs to Houston for Christmas. We got out of the house by around 2 and had an uneventful trip. We had some excellent brisket for dinner, and then slept. Because we’re still really exciting like that. Stella at this point had started crying from about 2am on in her sleep because she couldn’t breath. We were pretty tired. On Saturday I did a pathetic 2 mile run around the track by Julie’s parent’s house. It was supposed to be a 5 mile run, but I’m not running as often due to Stella’s erratic sleep schedule. That afternoon we went over to Christine and Brian’s and had a wonderful dinner with them. Stella LOVES her Uncle “Roger” (Brian). To the point of almost making a parent jealous. It’s crazy. We got back that night and Julie’s parents made us dinner also. Which I ate. Because I’m a glutton. That night we figured out that putting Stella to sleep on her back stopped the crying jags. Which was awesome. Although it only afforded us one night of sleeping in with Julie’s parents taking care of Stella in the morning.

Monday was Christmas. Julie’s brother Keith had spent the night so we got started on opening presents fairly early. We’re back to taking a long time, because Stella takes a fair amount of time to open presents. Yet again she raked in the gifts. Julie’s parents were exceedingly generous this year. I got a PS2 and Julie got a new digital camera she had her eye on. I have this feeling they spent the same amount on Stella. Which is a little scary. But they love her to pieces. It was a really nice trip, and Julie and I had some nice conversations with her parents. Christmas evening we drove back to Austin. We’d been having such a pleasant time that we didn’t want to go, but I wanted a full day at home before I started work again.

Yesterday we did a little mad cleaning, and went on a walk at Mary Moore Searight Metropolitan Park. They have one of those cool things from the eighties where there are stations along the trail where you can do all sorts of ridiculous calisthenics. I totally want to start running there. Except I cannot justify regularly driving my car to go running. That’s just ridiculous. We ate dinner at Austin Pizza Garden and then watched Little Miss Sunshine. That was an awesome movie. Probably the best I’ve seen all year. The Devotcka soundtrack was a perfect fit. I don’t know if I’d call it a comedy though. I spent far too much time teared up.

Ahh well, back at work. Closing bugs. Fun. At least it’s only a three day week, and Julie’s mom is coming down to take care of Stella so we can participate in New Years festivities.

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Comments

BeanBean

2006-12-29T00:52:27.000Z

So if it makes you feel any better, I get a little jealous of Stella’s Uncle Roger love too. :) I have the most wonderful picture of her with her hand on your back though as you put on your shoes. She looks so calm and peaceful and that only happens when babies know they are loved and safe. So don’t worry, you are her rock. Love you!

So, I was driving out to the park to go running this morning. We’re in Houston and I have to drive to run here. They have no sidewalks to get to the park. It’s Houston. As the park came into view I almost remarked out loud, “There’s no soccer games and no one running today.” Only I realized that Stella wasn’t in the car, and I would be talking to myself. I realized that Stella gives me an excuse to chatter about whatever’s in my head. It’s hard not having that excuse.

It was pretty cold and there was some light rain on the run. All the geese were standing on one leg with their heads tucked under their feathers. As I made one trip past their pond a goose did a beautiful arabesque, swung it’s wing out gracefully, and tucked the extended leg under the wing. And then went to sleep. On one leg.