Ms. Kate Marie turned 11 months old on January 1st, and here are the photos to prove it.

Her birthday falls on Superbowl Sunday this year, so we scheduled her party for the day before to avoid scheduling conflicts for our guests.

The theme of the party is cupcakes, because Kate is a little cupcake. Or cupkate.

Unbeknownst to me, Tammy had ordered a giant cupcake tin from Williams Sonoma for party cake making purposes. As soon as she opened the box and I saw what was inside, I knew what had to be done. I pushed Tammy into the wall, ripped it out of her hands, drove down to the grocery store to pick up some ingredients, and came back home to make a cake.

I overdid it on the food coloring, and the pink buttercream frosting turned out a little more salmony than I was hoping for. This was just a practice run though, so the actual party cake will be much pinker!

I’ve eaten my way through about half of this thing so far, and believe me when I tell you that when the recipe says “Serves 16″…that’s a fair estimate.

I don’t like to discuss politics and I don’t get all worked up over things like elections.

But I will say this – It’s nice to finally have a president in office who knows how to use a computer. That’s never really happened in my lifetime and it makes Obama seem more like a normal American and less like a politician.

Behold the power of punctuation!

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

I really hope you take the time to check this out, “Friend”.

All ten parts of the web-exclusive BSG episode, “The Face Of The Enemy” are online now, so you can watch them all back-to-back. It’s a set up for Friday’s premiere of the last half of the final season.

Friday’s episode runs long, so make sure you set your DVRs accordingly!

Over the weekend Kate taught herself a new trick.

She discovered that if she shoves her pointer finger and middle finger far enough into her mouth at the same time…that she’ll barf.

She finds this to be hilarious, both before and after.

She’ll walk over to me with those fingers in her mouth, and I stiffen up and go “KATE! Take those fingers out of your mouth right now!” She’ll smile and laugh, and then her face will get red and she’ll go “KAAUUHKK KAAUUUKK” as she dry-heaves (or barfs) right in front of me.

I then grab my own face in absolute disbelief and horror and yell “Oh god KATE what the hell are you DOING?!” to which she can only laugh hysterically and issue a crazy yelp as she runs away from me!

I’ve caught her with her fingers in her mouth and I’ve grabbed her arm and yanked it outta there, but only makes her laugh harder as she fights me to shove her hand back in her mouth.

She did this about half a dozen times over the weekend. I have had to clean the carpet and change her outfits several times over the past 48 hours. It was funny the first time, but now it’s just making me mad! Bulimia starts at 11 months now? Come on!

Disneyland Dream is some guy’s home movie of his family’s trip to Disneyland. They filmed it back in 1956, a year after the park opened. It has inexplicably been entered into the National Film Registry for preservation alongside the likes of feature-length films like The Terminator and Deliverance.

You can stream or download it free from The Internet Archive.

Steve Martin grew up in Garden Grove and worked on Main Street selling guidebooks as a kid. When he heard about this film he watched it to see if he was in it. Sure enough, an 11 year old Steve Martin shows up at 20:20.

He even contacted the guy who made the film to say hello.

Here are some paparazzi photos of Steve Martin and Martin Short frolicking on the beach because they are funny.

And if you haven’t already, you should register to get a free ticket to Disneyland on your birthday this year. That’s a $69 value, and Disney is not in the business of giving much of anything away, ever, so you should jump on it.

It’s getting harder and harder to find easy listening music played in public nowadays. When’s the last time you saw an elevator that played music? You used to be able to hear easy instrumental versions of popular music played in grocery stores, and you still can if you look hard enough…not at high-class joints like Ralph’s or Vons of course, but there’s still a few places like Stater Bros that carry the torch.

I read this on the back of a Living Strings LP from 1977 and it made me smile-

“For those of us who like our music sweet and gentle – the Living Strings albums are balm for sore ears. We have been commanded to ‘shake our booty’ and whined at to ‘play our funky music’ …which has left our musical souls cringing from the amplification of it all. Over the past couple of years the ‘Charts’, before which the execs of the music business salaam each week, are coming up with more and more ‘good music’ winners. The Living Strings Orchestra can always be relied upon to cull the sweet from the screamers and that is what we have here. A collection of hits that are sweet-and-gentle and singable…that have the magical warmth of a good song that is today’s hit and tomorrow’s evergreen.”