After a fantastic weekend that included working around the house and a great dinner with friends on Saturday and a lazy Sunday that started with blueberry pancakes and continued with naps (the wife upstairs and Gavin and I on the couch during the Browns disaster), we spent early Sunday evening carving our annual Halloween Jack-O-Lanterns. They now guard the front porch of our house. The wife and Gavin’s design is on the right. Mine on the left. Happy Halloween week.

Can’t wait for this. Melt, the incredible west-side eatery, is opening its eastside location mere blocks from our house here in Cleveland Heights. My favorite plate: The Big Popper. Here’s a pic from Yelp: http://tinyurl.com/yk2s6r4

A haunting shot of the corner of 21st and Chester on the way home from work and verses from The Beleagured City by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

I have read, in the marvellous heart of man,
That strange and mystic scroll,
That an army of phantoms vast and wan
Beleaguer the human soul.

Encamped beside Life’s rushing stream,
In Fancy’s misty light,
Gigantic shapes and shadows gleam
Portentous through the night.

So the boy’s getting bigger by the day (and much more flexible) and has been showing us his frustrations about wanting a big-boy seat. This was his latest protest during lunch today. And yes, the mismatched socks prove that daddy dressed him today.

After years of having The Wife make me the “best apple pie ever” (TM) on special occasions+holidays, I turned the tables tonight for our 8th wedding anniversary and made my first-ever pie. Can’t say it was as good as the ones she makes, but I can say she liked it. So, here’s to eight years of marriage … Cheers!

Something about the iPhone is just mesmerizing, even for an almost-19-month-old (it lights up and makes noise, which is why daddy likes it). Here The Wife gives Gavin a short tutorial on the proper way to use her iPhone while waiting for a table at our favorite pizza place, Dewey’s. May we suggest the Bronx Bomber with a Southern Tier IPA? (And yes, we had a baby at a bar. But, that shirt is the greatest).

After many years of waiting between shows (the last ones were in the late ’90s), I finally got tickets for Springsteen. I’ve been three times to see him+the E Street Band, but this will be special because it’s The Wife’s first show. As old fashion as I am, I couldn’t gamble on getting good tickets online, so following a trick I learned from my friend Greg Pederson, I went to the least-likely-to-be-busy ticketmaster retail outlet and stood  in line. As you can see, it worked out beautifully.

It’s a rare Friday night that I can get out of the office to have dinner with the family. So, Gavin, The Wife and I headed out to our one of our favorite dinner spots: Los Habeneros for margaritas and Mexican food. Gavin skipped out on the margaritas, but chowed down on a cheese quesadilla while reading one of his favorite book.

Good-friend-to-all and Plain Dealer photographer Bill Kennedy passed away recently after a long battle with cancer. While I only knew him for a short time, he treated me as if we’d known each other for ages. And I’m not the only one recently to say that his drawn-out salutation “Hey buddy!” has been painfully missed these last few weeks. Sometimes it seems as if I’m going to hear that when I walk down the hall (followed by a lengthy conversation about our blues guitar heroes such as Elmore James or Blind Lemon Jefferson). Anyway, he keeps sneaking into my thoughts this week. This is a little sign they passed out at his wake. Our photo editor Jeffrey Greene has it taped to his monitor at work.

I won’t be getting much reading (or anything else) done any time soon. Happy belated birthday to myself. And yes, I’m a nerd.