Thursday, January 10, 2008

Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

If you managed to read the one-liner that comprised my last post, then you know that Lily was out of town for a week. Luckily for me, Mr. Jesse Clark was so extremely gracious as to fly down to Los Angeles to help me keep Mr. Judah Gardner alive until Lily came back.

And on one of the days that Lily was gone and the three of us boys were just hanging around the apartment, I heard Judah in another room saying "broken" over and over. I walked toward his voice to find him sitting near an outlet in his room where his truck-shaped night light used to reside. Except now he's got the truck part in one hand and the light part in the other. And like he said, it's "broken".

As I fully intend on shopping for a similar night light the next day - but it doesn't happen - I take an old night light in the hall that emits a lower level blue-ish light and I stick it in his room. Fast-forward to about 3:30 am and the little bugger is screaming bloody murder and waking his dad up and probably his uncle Jesse up as well. Experiment failure noted.

Next day I decided that the blue-ish light ain't gonna work, so a trip to Target was planned. An outing for the boys. Except that we barely made it into the parking lot before it became painfully clear that we weren't going to move, much less find a spot to park in. Actually it took Jesse making that painfully clear to me, and we agreed that I should just get out of the car and go in to buy the night light while Jesse and Judah found a parking spot.

I hurriedly go inside and pass all the schmoes who don't have somebody parking their car outside, and I head for the kid's section. On my way there I realize that I'm not really sure that's where the night lights will be sold. I briefly consider shoplifting the night light, because I know it's going to be a bitch to get out of here with my sanity. There's a Target employee nearby trying to act like she's working, so I ask her where the kid's night lights are. Her face assumes the look of "I don't have any idea", but she points me toward housewares. No dice.

Then it's a trip back to the kid's section, where I find another Target employee trying to act like she's working, and I ask the same question. She's more confident and she tells me "aisle N6". I go to N6. No dice. I wander around looking for anything resembling kids night lights until I find the flashlight aisle, and there are some night lights there. Not exactly the truck night light variety, but I find a nice star-shaped metal light that, from the picture on the box, emits a nice warm glow. Done.

After making my way through the riot-inducing Target checkout, I walked out the doors and spotted our car right near the entrance. Perfect. Jesse told me that he didn't see a single open parking spot the entire time.

When we got home, Jesse took the initiative of installing the star-shaped night light. As far as I can remember, I heard him say "looks great" and then "aw fuck". Apparently after he plugged in the light, he tried to adjust the metal star part and it broke away from the light part. Broken like it's a cheap piece of shit and it wasn't going to be anything other than a cheap piece of shit without an entire tube of crazy glue.

Well Jesse was again so extremely gracious as to get some scotch tape out and tape the hell out of the original truck night light and get it back into working shape. I plugged it back in. That night the boy slept soundly the entire night. Thanks Jesse!