I don’t want to add any information that Hannibal isn’t comfortable with, so I’ll just say with this plus the move, I’m super overwhelmed.

Guest blog by: Hannibal Tabu (my husband)
Original Post can be found here

As of this writing, I am at a medical facility, torso covered with electricity-enabled adhesives. I am told that I have a “ventricular arrythmia,” an irregular heartbeat based in the rough neighborhoods of my cardiac city.

WHAT? Yeah, it freaks me out too. I was among the healthiest people I know. No booze, no cigarettes, no red meat. Fairly regular walks and what have you. Fairly low sodium intake. Weird.

On Sunday, I got out of bed to get my youngest some almond milk. I felt my heart beating like it did when the regional spelling bee was on the line, but I had no immediate reason to be nervous. Ignoring it, I went about my day — lugging things down from the attic, packing, parenting, et cetera. Even saw a great EcclestonDoctor Who episode (I’m late to the party). At 11 PM, lying down to sleep, my heart jumped and jagged like a car engine that’s threatening to stall. I asked my wife to put her hand on it, causing her to run for the girls’ stethoscope. “You need to go to the hospital.”

Getting rushed past the waiting crowd was weird, but in I went for chest x-rays, EKGs and more to discover something, somthing that may have been there for years, was awry in the core of me. Something new, past the regular misanthropy and madness.

An overnight stay on atavan gave scant slivers of sleep. An afternoon angiogram is on the agenda, while my non-stop job will have to churn on without me, maybe for a month, if one cardiologist is to be believed.

SERIOUSLY, WHAT????? The bottom line is I’ll be okay. It’s very early detection, it’s “wholly fixable” and everybody here is treating it like a simple instance. I’ll be home with my ladies this weekend.

What’s funniest is that 90 percent of the things they thought would be the cause — smoking, fried foods, drinking, et cetera — were not relevant. My cholesterol and blood pressure are fine. Ditto blood sugar, and there are no signs of infections or foreign biohazards. Only worry — which I absorb through waves of second hand stress from half the people I know — stood as a red flag. I will have to try more exercise to offset the toxic energies floating around me.

Mostly it’s just a random accident of chance, the spin of some cosmic roulette wheel. Funny old life.

JUST IN CASE: There is a mathematically insignificant chance that something untoward might happen to me. If that’s the case, I want all my intellectual property turned over to Chinedum Ofoegbu (my wife has the passwords), and for his work on my work to be overseen by Vince Moore, Geoffrey Thorne and Brandon Easton. Any and all gross profits are to be divided evenly between my daughters, returning 45 percent of said profits to Ofoegbu, Thorne and Easton.

Not that any of us expect this to happen ..

DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! Since 1 AM, a loud chime from a Phillips Intellivibe heart monitr has relentlessly sounded whenever my heart does something unusual, or I think about …

• my numerous writing deadlines, as I am poised on the precipice of greatness but with little time to achieve it
• my day job
• moving
• money
• making sure my daughters will be okay
• making sure my overworked wife will be okay
• why the end of the modern Battlestar Galacticasucked SO MUCH!

… as it does now. A head-splitting reminder of my inability to relax. 20 percent charge on my iPad, heading for traffic and dye in my arteries, I’m just trying to breathe easily and become still waters, so I can flow to refresh my wife and daughters — and hopefully you — for many decades to come.

… BUT IF ONE WERE SO INCLINED … If you have a jones to do something to help me, you could use the Gumroad link and buy copies of my novels, The Crown: Ascension or Faraway, as most of that money goes right to me (well, right into feeding my kids anyway). If you own it, buy a copy for a friend. All good.

Now, to try to get Netflix going on my phone …

Wednesday is comic book night, so we did it before reviews, and it was amazing! The sex has gotten much longer, because of all the practice. It’s way more interesting, and it is truly therapy. The morning after, Hannibal was sleeping like a baby. He usually doesn’t get to go to sleep on Wednesday nights at all. He gets in bed at about five or six in the morning after writing all night. I couldn’t bring myself to wake him up and demand sex before he commuted forty minutes away to Pasadena to work his nine to five. That’s just wrong.

I never expected that we’d actually hit the goal of doing it twice per day, but aiming high always guarantees more. This is definitely more! I’d say we were doing it about 2-3 times per week before. I’m very spontaneous when it comes to sex, and I’ve always been against planning it. This activity is helping me be able to feel natural with sex that is sometimes planned. It can still feel organic even though I know it’s going to happen. The more I do it, the more I think about doing it. I’m sure I’m spreading sex vibes all over the city this month. Ha!

Fuss is testing Mooch at every turn. She’s also trying out some of the hitting she learned at the daycare while Mooch and I were overseas. I’ve been working on tools for Mooch to use to redirect her sister, get her to express her feelings another way, and divert her sisters attention. Sometimes it works. A lot of the time it doesn’t.

Pretending to be innocent

At the annual swap that Mooch’s school holds each year, she got something really awesome for her sister. The fact that she even thought of her sister when free stuff was involved is indicative of her character. Mooch is sweet. Well, after her sister hit her once every day for the past week, she decided to withhold the Melissa and Doug Pizza Party set that she got for her. When Fuss’ behavior towards her sister turns around, Mooch will give her the treat.

Since babysitting funds are in short supply, Hannibal and I have opted to go out separately a lot of the time. I took Mooch to see Fela while he put Fuss to bed. I went to Wives Club while he took the girls to ballet. Gosh, I went out a lot last weekend. I think it’s his turn this weekend. He has a lot of deadlines coming up, so he’d probably prefer to write.

Me and Mooch at Fela

I’ve confirmed that we are moving again, so that’s exciting, because I have no idea where we’re going. I started packing today. For some reason, when you’re having sex twice per day, none of the dumb shit bothers you. I’m joyful and hopeful and going with the flow.

Mooch and Fuss’ techniques for dealing with stress and frustration.

The Tabu’s are boldly going where no married couple has ever gone before. Okay, well maybe a few of you have. Anyway, for the entire month of May, we will attempt to engage in coitus twice per day. With our busy schedules, this will mean some morning quickies as well as some late night love making.

We want to see how if affects overall mood, work ethic, attitudes towards the kids, general closeness, etc. I will write about the effects in the Marital Mondays blog posts (not the Team Tabu Updates) every other week, and let you all know how it is going. A few couples in our marriage group on Facebook will be participating with us (well, not in the same house, of course), so if you and your spouse want to join in on the fun, we’d love to hear about it. Let me rephrase that. I’d love to hear about it. Hannibal prefers to hear as little as possible about other people’s sex lives. Ha!

Performer Swag: Flowers, toys, and hair flowers

Friday was Staff Appreciation Day at Mooch’s school, so we had a visitor for homeschool. He was an absolute delight. We sang songs, learned about the weather, heard a story in Spanish, and did mat activities. After lunch and nap, a few hours at the nearby park tired them out.

Hannibal and I have been playing board games and watching our favorite shows to take our minds off of all the house hunting and paperwork we’ve been doing lately. I’ve also been researching unschooling more, and he’s been writing books and scripts non-stop.

This is our lives right now.

Oh, P.S. Guess who got me to put my tap shoes on? The only prospective student who could …

Tapping with Fuss

*No Tuesdays with Mooch & Fuss tomorrow. Mooch is shooting something in Sherman Oaks, so we won’t have time to film or edit.

For one of our four indoor date nights last week, we played Star Wars Epic Duels, and I loved it! That’s because I whipped Hannibal’s booty at it. Emperor Palpatine was my dude! My favorite thing about this table top board game is that I didn’t have to know a lick about Star Wars — just good old strategy.

The night was reminiscent of our first date, where we played Pente (my favorite game ever on the planet). I beat him at that, too. Then I used my eyelashes and bargaining skills to bribe him when Scrabble wasn’t going my way. Good times.

Our relationship was built on a foundation of sweat, spirit, smiles, and sex. We work hard, but when we take the night off, we play. Our current schedule has us working three nights out of the week, and connecting (on many levels) for the other four. I usually design and blog on work nights, and Hannibal writes and promotes himself at the same time.

I’m really proud of his publishing push this year. He has released The Crown: Ascension (sci-fi) as an e-book with new bonus chapters. His sci-fi prison thriller, Faraway, is also now available in e-format. Hannibal is the 2012 Top Cow Talent Hunt winner, and his work has been published in Steamfunk, an Anthology.

 He is on a publishing mission — currently writing the sequel to Stranger Comics’ Dusu: The Path of the Ancient. Planning pays. That’s novels, comic books, and anthologies all in the first three months of the year. Oh, he writes poetry, too. Okay, I’ll stop bragging. I just thought I’d take a moment to show my support.

I sat down with Mooch Thursday to discuss the way she’s been skipping her vocal and ballet home practice. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to practice or stretch. Her schedule is just very hectic with auditions and is always subject to change.

Instead of helping her write a rigid schedule with times on it like she has for the morning, I told her to make it coincide with things that happen every night. For instance, her sister takes a bath every night like clockwork. If this is the time Mooch sits at the keyboard to practice vocals, she will have a built in trigger. Then she does her ballet stretches while Fuss is getting lotion and a book. It has been working like a charm! She hasn’t missed a day of practice since we started Thursday.

Hannibal and I caught up on television this Saturday and Sunday nights. We currently watch Scandal, The Following, The Big Bang Theory, and Revolution together. There are other shows I’ve fallen off of that he still watches while he’s doing comic book reviews on Wednesdays (Community, Raising Hope, etc.). We normally discuss the plot elements afterwards.

My ankle is healing. I’m off of crutches now, but I have a small lace up support boot that fits into my regular shoes. I’m getting a little swagger back. I called myself “trimming my ends” while driving last week, so my hair cut is interesting and much shorter than I planned. When I wear it curly, it’s okay, though.

At nap time, I now leave Fuss alone, and she just goes to sleep. I used to work right next to her while she slept, but the typing was making her rest less than satisfactory. Now I can be as noisy as I’d like.

She also decided a couple of weeks ago that she wants to try auditioning. I set her up a webpage, got her a meeting with Mooch’s agent, and now she’s ready to go out. I didn’t pay for professional headshots. I just shot them myself outside with my Canon. They change too often at this age to pay upwards of $300 for pictures. We’ll see if she enjoys it. She hasn’t even been on her first audition yet, but she loves shooting Tuesdays with Mooch and Fuss.

P.S. Team Tabu made carrot cake together yesterday. Fuss greased the pan. Hannibal made the cream cheese frosting, and Mooch and I made the cake. It came out great!

Unfortunately, we’ve received a lot of news in the past two weeks — news that means changes for the fame. Fortunately, my second favorite thing to report is that we’ve been through much worse, and we are confident we’ll get through all of this. We just aren’t thrilled about it, and that’s real. Change means work. The first year of marriage was a lot of work, and years two and three we got progressively closer. Year four we coasted on the work we had done — finding comfort in ritual, finishing each other’s sentences, shouting out punchlines simultaneously, and supporting each other the best way we could at the time.

This fifth year will require more of us. We will probably moving within the next three months. Again! I still have three more weeks in a cast. My father’s time is running out, which means paperwork, lawyers, wills, trusts, etc. Hannibal has been stressed at work for over a year, and he’s doing extra at home.

On the bright side, the kids are both much older and quite helpful. Mooch makes breakfast every single morning. Steel oats, eggs, waffles, pancakes, omelets and hashbrowns are all things she is capable of preparing. Fuss does her laundry, sweeps the floor, makes her own snacks and sandwiches, cleans the sink, wipes her table, and dresses herself now. For all of these things, we are very grateful.

We’re trying to stop saying we’re tired all of the time, especially in front of the kids. Fuss is starting to say it, too, and that’s not good. It’s true though. We’re exhausted. I hope to report better news soon.

Here are some pictures of homeschool. For more homeschooling ideas and documentations, click here.

Smelling Bottles