I took a break from my normal porn this week to indulge myself with a little bit of today’s most popular porn, a book by the name of Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s a purportedly wild fuckfest involving a rich guy and a naive narrator. What more do you need? Obviously not a story-line. Genital fondling will have to do. I normally would give you a spoiler alert, but in order to spoil a story, you must first have a plot.

This morning I walked over to Daybreak Church of Marketing and Graphic Design in Hudsonville, Michigan, because they invited porn star Ron Jeremy to endure scrutiny and judgmental looks from parishioners. I really went because I wanted to get my picture with him, but he was busy doing a press conference for the local stations after the first service. I ran into a couple other people who also came only for an autograph or picture, and we were told by a church employee that we should wait for him up at the front left of the church where he’d be happy to oblige his fans.

The next big adventure in our lives is well underway! My wife is now six months pregnant with our first child! Life has lately been revolving around nothing but preparations for our little bundle of joy. We’ve been painting, researching, registering, quizzing other parents, and eagerly awaiting early January when we our pending daughter makes the transition from physical parasite to financial parasite. A few weeks ago we got the ultrasound, and everything seems to be quite normal; boring, as the doctor put it.

I have no freaking clue how to win it, but my friend Josh and I did just that. More precisely, we took first place in the Men’s division and third place overall. It was an accident, I swear. We were only trying to have fun and would have been happy if we were the next-to-last group. I was only hoping that my bike didn’t break down out of disuse and that I wouldn’t be attacked by a sudden and inconvenient need for a bowel movement.

My mom recently burrowed into a cedar chest she obtained from my grandmother to find loads of random ephemera: Queries into our family tree, various letters, wills, coats of arms, and newspaper clippings. Some of it confirmed stories vaguely hinted at some time ago, like the time one of our great great etc. grandfathers saved the life of Theodore Roosevelt from a rogue and crazy horse. It was during a parade in which the president was sitting idly in his carriage, when a runaway horse came bolting straight at him through the crowded street.

It turned out to be a mostly clear evening to watch the Transit of Venus. Jen and I went to Holland State Park so we could watch from the beach and I brought my trusty binoculars and cardboard so I could magnify the sun without burning my retinas. It worked pretty well, though during the next transit, 105 years from now, I think I’ll invest in a tripod to mount the binoculars because holding it by hand is a bit too shaky.

Jen and I and the dog took a week off to head down south. There wasn’t much of a plan beyond finding a cabin in the woods for a few days and then poking around the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Appalachian Trail for a bit. We didn’t do much serious hiking; just the few-miles-out-and-back walks in the woods to see some waterfalls and overlooks. We managed to find a great cabin south of Asheville that was nice and cozy, and could actually have fit another half dozen people.

I’m sitting here at the Kia dealership getting my oil changed (for only $20!) and I just ran into the guy who sold us our new car in January. I jokingly asked how his finger was to see if he remembered me. He did. You see, when we were first looking at cars, we were narrowing it down and he was showing us the interior of a Hyundai when I slammed the poor schmuck’s fingers in the car door.

The National Kidney Foundation came by today to pick up my Jeep. They've got a donation program where you give them your car and they give you a sack full of human kidneys in about thirty days, after they auction off the vehicle and convert its value to kidney currency. At the going street rate, I'm expecting one, maybe two pillow sacks full of kidneys. I probably won't keep them.

Piper spontaneously developed a new and unfounded fear this past week as Jen and I were watching The Time Traveler’s Wife. She wasn’t frightened by the complexity of the narrative, or by pondering the nature of the lead character’s debilitating temporal handicap, or even by the thought of knowing the time and place of your own death. No, it was the mundane explosion of an on-screen firework which startled her from her sleep, awakening her to an entirely terrifying world in which nothing would ever be the same; a world dominated by a big-screen TV and loud, unearthly noises emanating from the walls.