The Weekend So Far

What a crazy weekend it's been so far. Where to begin...

After everyone was free of all their workday obligations yesterday, we all went to Brad and Betsy's for Manhattans, conversation, dinner, and a movie. The kids watched the movie, and we ate the dinner. Great time. We invariably have a great time with those guys, and last night was no exception. Home by 10:00 or so, where we dumped T into bed and giggled with Q through the brushing of teeth and such. Excellent evening.

We watched "Spirited Away" this morning instead of cartoons. Janneke and the kids had seen it at some point, but I never had, so Brad sent it home with us. It is absolutely stunning, both visually and in terms of the sheer power of the creator's imagination. I'm always amazed by people like that, who seem to simply gush ideas, and create worlds that are completely new. Or seem it, anyway. Nice morning.

Janneke off to do the shopping with T, and Q and I to stay at home and begin to clean the house. We got a lot of cleaning done - places where we ordinarly don't get to on a weekly basis. It's nice to be in a clean house, though we didn't get it top to bottom.

I then went to run some errands - but before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this story:

Thursday I went to pick up the shirts for Team Trivia Night. We had "Champions 2006, 2007" stitched onto the left shoulder of each shirt. Ronadh only agreed to go along with it if, should we lose, we agree to dedicate the right sleeve to the list of years in which we lose. And it shall be called "Losers", with the appropriate years below. I am psyched about that. But not as psyched as I am about the possibility of the three-peat. So I got to the store where we had them done at 2:50. They close at 3:00. The door was locked, and there was a sign on it: GONE ON VACATION UNTIL APRIL 7.

Team Trivia Night is April 5th.

I stood there on the street in North Adams, fists clenched, slowly turning green, my shirt and my purple pants beginning to bulge at the seams, and screamed the worst swearword I know to the heavens. Repeatedly. Then I screamed it again, and then a few more times. I also spun around, firing wild punches into the air, and jumped up and down and stamped my feet. When none of this changed the situation, I tried it all again, in a different order. Which didn't work either.

Then I drove to my doctor's appointment, screaming more in the car. Pretty much just that word, louder still, somehow. People in cars next to me at stoplights, separated from me by ten feet and two windows, jumped when I did it and stared at me. I stomped in to the medical building and registered with the doctor, and asked to use their phone. (We are the last American adults without cell phones, Janneke and I.) Janneke answered her office phone, and I told her in profanity-laced Spanish what had happened, and asked if she would please call him and leave a message to see if it might be possible for him to open the store up one more time before he leaves for Calcutta. And that if he didn't, I would murder him.

But a few minutes later, as I glowered in the examination room, waiting for Dr. Namkoong to come and look at my thumb, it ocurred to me that the lights had been on at Tunnel City Printing. If he went on vacation and left his lights on, he's an idiot. And he hadn't struck me as an idiot. Perhaps he was still there after all.

I drove back to the store after the doctor saw me, and the door opened right up. I must have uttered a hoarse yelp of happiness, because the proprietor, who had received Janneke's message, smiled at me from around the corner in the back of the store. "I wouldn't do that to ya," he said, and pointed at the counter, where the bowling shirts awaited me in all their turquoise glory. He's a one-man operation, and he'd had to step out to go to the bank.

In the end, then, it all turned out fine. He's a pretty interesting guy, with lots of dirt on local politicians and a native's view of North Adams' steady decline over the last thirty years or so. We stood there and talked (he talked - I hissed and screeched with my shattered vocal cords, but managed to be understood) for probably ten minutes, and I wished him a good vacation.

I'm still hoarse and coughing from my screaming. Which is a just and proper punishment.

So fast forward to this morning again. After Janneke got back from shopping, I ran off to do some errands - a run to the dump, the bank, the post office, the pharmacy, Wild Oats. And to drop off two books Betsy loaned me, as well as their uniforms for the aforementioned Team Trivia Night. Ronadh's coming to brunch tomorrow, so I can giver her theirs without having to leave the house.

Damn...It's late. Here's some AV fun to reward you for reading this far in without switching over to "Tunak Tunak Tun" on Youtube. (Which you really should go see, as soon as you're done here.)



Hobie in his new collar. He's got a gouge that needs to heal, so until it does, this is how he rolls.



T and her bunny ears, made at daycare. By the way, here's some T bilingualisms from recent days:

"Papi, ahora en la escuela estamos learning about mummies."

"Te acordas, Papi, en esa pelicula, los parents de esa nina estaban turned into pigs."

"Mami, eso es enough para postre?"

And she and Q, today, were speaking to each other in a language they're making up. Maybe they're just ditching the whole language thing completely and striking out on their own. God bless 'em, I hope they make it.

And, finally...it's time to see just how T and Q react to seeing the Lawrence Welk show, which you can see on the TV screen in the background. As you watch the video, see if you can see what technological advancement we've recently made.



That's right: 3-D. You are wearing glasses, right?

More Interviews

Hey, folks - If you want to hear T explain, in Spanish, just why she does (or doesn't...? or does...?) want to read a story to us, or if you're curious as to just what sort of magazines Q reads at night, you have but to hit the button below. The volume might not be very good - I had it cranked and it still was a bit dim. But give it a whirl, what the hey. Don't cost nothin'.

Art, Sport, and Chicanery

Goodness gracious, the world keeps spinning 'round and our lives just keep pumping out the thrills, like a great, enchanted, inexhaustible pasta machine. Only the pasta is the thrills. You know what I mean.

There's so damned much to get to in this three-headed entry. We shall begin at the beginning:

Art

We brought the kids' sense of aesthetics and culture into attunement by going to see "Horton Hears a Who" Friday night in Bennington. Thumbs up from all, though the adults did squirm a bit at some of the tacked-on conventions in the middle. The wee ones enjoyed it thoroughly, and there is something, I have to say, about the people in Bennington, Vermont. Because not once did anyone cheese me off during the whole of that film. No yakking, no cell phones, no rudeness of any sort, form patrons or staff. Well done, Vermonters. You are, as your license plates proudly proclaim, most definitely "Not New Yorkers".

Here's a piece of art that Q did. It's an oryx, which fascinated both Q and me in a National Geographic special I taped off PBS the other week. The oryx's incredibly long, seemingly exaggeratedly so, horns, which I had always thought must be mostly adornment, since they could so obviously not be effectively used for fighting, turned out, in the video, to be exactly the right length for chasing a lion away once the lion has grabbed the oryx's hindquarters. They shake their heads in a generally backwards direction, and the lion instantly lets go. He cranked this one out from memory just before bed the other day. I love in particular the way its eyes are all the way up at the top of its head, which, if you look at large antelope, is really quite a good observation:



See what I mean:



The following day (I think), Tie turned Q's art over, and, on the other side, blew all our minds with this:



I'd never seen her do anything NEARLY as representational as this. Her figures tended, up to now, to be fairly amorphous blobs with attached blobs for hands and feet, each appended by appropriate numbers of finger-type blobs. But this just blew us away. I wanted a shot of her holding it, and this is what I got:



The concept was somewhat lost on her, I think.

Sport

On Thursday, Q, who is going to play Cal Ripken baseball for the first time this spring, went to the "tryouts", where they see if any of the kids who played on the lowest level ("rookie league") could play in "AAA", where the kids do the pitching. Here's some evidence of that episode - it's not exactly an "action" sequence, but rather more of an "it-seems-very-likely-that-soon-we're-going-to-see-some-action" sequence. But, hey, when you hire a simpleton as your cameraman, that's the sort of thing you're going to get:



The whole business was two hours long, from 5:30 to 7:30, which sliced right across the peak supper hour for pretty much all of us and cut down on the energy level of the parents who were standing around for that entire time, watching our kids have varying amounts of success. Q was pretty much the only kid there who didn't play baseball last year, and even so, he held his own quite well, particularly at the "catch a fly ball and fire it to home plate" station. Very accurate and powerful long-distance thrower. He'd never been coached on grounders, but he still picked it up pretty well, as can be seen here:



Batting was a real problem for him. He can swing a wiffle bat like nobody's business, but had literally never tried to bat with a big, heavy aluminum one before. So that didn't go too well. Hey, if he plays on the rookie league team, he'll be one of many, many seven-year-olds there. He's psyched to give it a go, either way.

In other sporting news, pagans around the globe today celebrated "Easter", a quaint holiday commemorating a magician's return from the land of the dead, symbolizing the rebirth of the flowers and birdies each Spring, with outdoor games of fertility. So we sallied forth to play along this AM, with eggs provided by a very good sport of an Easter bunny, whose husband had spent the previous night boozing it up and playing cards at a birthday party:



Sorry - you were probably expecting a picture of the boozing-it-up. We were very careful not to allow photographers in. Though it was also related to Sport, in that I successfully introduced euchre to the Berkshire Hills. It should now spread like a virus from person to person, infecting them through the euchre pods I left scattered about the room where we played.



It's all going according to plan.

T and Q both proved to be very astute hunters of eggs. Q saw a flash of teal and charged off to the right to corral one, but T followed her instincts to the birch tree, well-known as a preferred haunt of the Easter Bunny. Watch as her eyes, quick and darting like those of a mongoose, seize upon a well-hidden egg:



Later this morning, I continued my sporting day with a vigorous workout achieved by moving the rest of the wood from the pile in the back into the garage, and received a lot of help from T, whose payment was to be allowed to ride in the empty wheelbarrow back to the woodpile after each successful transfer. As she stood there beside the wheelbarrow in the garage, with the light from the open overhead door and from the window lighting each side of her face, I thought it lovely, and had her freeze while I snapped up the camera:



Can you blame me?

Chicanery

We were invited over to Jennifer French's home this afternoon for some Easter cake, and had a very nice visit with Jennifer, her fiancee Paul, and their little Cocker Spaniel, Daphne. Here she is:



OK, that isn't actually Daphne. It's an image I stole (that's right, stole) from a website that advertises dog grooming services. But Daphne looks exactly like that. And she loved our kids, despite the fact that they refused to call her Daphne, and somehow settled on the name "Genevieve". But they romped and hugged and cuddled and called her, and rolled and bounced balls for her, and otherwise squeezed every tail-quiverin' ounce of lovin' they could out of the only friendly dog they've seen for weeks. And at one point, as Genevieve, holding a bright orange ball, darted between them across the doggie bed where both children were kneeling, T' eyes met Q's, and T said, her face aglow with giddy anticipation, "Q, remember? Tonight Mami's going to make a special Easter dinner!" Whereupon they embraced each other tightly, Daphne squirming and writhing in a cuteness seizure between them. There was not a more sacharine sight anywhere to be had on Earth today. It's true, I checked the meter. There were twins in identical pink dresses holding hands and smooching each other with lollypops on a teeter-totter in France; in Latvia, a kitten and an aging hen snoozed atop a grizzled old donkey in the straw at daybreak. But there were no cocker spaniels present in either situation. Genevieve put us over the top.

But it was all a lie. The cake party went so late that the great alliterative Easter dinner, of pork roast and pea pods and potatoes, was postponed until Tuesday. We shamelessly led them down the primrose path and then jerked the doggie bed of our promise out from under their adorable little cocker spaniel embrace.

And this was not the only chicanery of the weekend.

Due to some delicate interpersonal community politics, I'm unable to relate to you here a very juicy and entertaining anecdote regarding a kindness Janneke did for someone we know, and the way in which it transformed our Saturday morning. It could find its way around through the grapevine and wind up offending some people, whom we really don't want to offend. So you'll have to just ask me some time about the budding door-to-door salesmen who were in our house for an hour and a half, trying to get us to plop down $2000 or so for "The Rainbow".

Which, as Q and T will attest, really is a hell of a vacuum cleaner.

T Addresses the Media

There have been a lot of questions lately regarding Raggedy Andy and Elmo and the sordid love triangle they're all a part of, as well as things Tess does or doesn't say to her friends, the politics of bilingualism, and the reasons why she likes certain people so much. So T sat down with Channel 18's own Joe Johnson in our Williamstown studio to set the record straight. If you're one of her many fans who are dying to hear the latest vocal offering from this diva of daycare (or if, perhaps, you're simply willing to sit through a very low-quality recording of wildly varying volume just to indulge me while I experiment with how to do this sound stuff), then your wish has come true:

I Opened The Window and In Flew...

...Enza. Which is what I got. And believe me, it is a hateful thing to have. I slept away most of Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and was pretty miserable all Friday and Saturday night. But I did manage to dope myself into a presentable state for a Saturday night adult dinner that we didn't want to postpone. Other than that, though, I was pretty well out of commission all weekend. Still, things did happen. Among them, these:



T selected from her closet an ensemble that will long be remembered, above all, for its subtlety.

That was Friday evening, I believe, before we settled in for pizza and movie night, and the movie this week was "Akeela and the Bee". I was skeptical, thinking it would be over the kids' heads, and, frankly, a feel-good movie about a spunky 11-year-old that wasn't animated wasn't exactly what I was in the mood for. But I rolled my eyes and settled in.

And I loved that movie. So, so, SO well done, raising so many important issues that are great to talk to kids about, doing so in a subtle-enough way that you can sort them out in the interludes between scenes. Q was shouting out letters for Akeela at the end, T was cheering like crazy...Just a fantastic family film. We may end up buying it, just because I like to reward excellence, and excellence that accomplishes important work, wherever I find it. Even if it means rewarding someone who's doubtless already a millionnaire many times over.

T went along with Mami to do the shopping Saturday morning, and clamored at Stop & Shop for some fingernail polish. Janneke, adopting my favorite strategy, caved, and T is pleased as heck with the way they turned out:



Here's the close-up, where the glory of Janneke's manicure skills is made blindingly manifest:



Even we who are sick must live in clean houses, so I tipped Mongo over and vaccuumed underneath him. Q and T, of course, being children, were contractually obligated to pile up Mongo's cushions around him and make a cave, undignified as Mongo himself might find the whole procedure. (And he does.) The results:



We had a team meeting Saturday night for Milk of Amnesia - Brad and Betsy and Mark and Ronadh came over for dinner, which was delicious, even if I do say so myself.* Dessert involved whipped cream, and the wee ones enjoyed the cleanup process:



Flattering shots of both, I know.

Before they were sent packing off to bed, Brad sat down with Q and showed him how to jam the blues:



We adults, hopped up on Theraflu and Excedrin, played ping-pong late into the night, but toward the end there my teeth felt itchy and I think I was actually hallucinating. I probably should have called it an early night, because I was pretty miserable today. So Janneke took the kids (and Colton, Q's friend from school) skating this afternoon, while I stayed at home, recuperating. But Tie took ill and had to come home with a stomach ache. So the boys finished out their play date with some hand-to-hand combat. Hit the "play" button on the music embeded below the video player, then hit the "play" button on the lower left hand corner of the video. It's a mind-blowing experience.





You can see me in the background there, with a pouting papoose perched on my paunch. Which asserted its primacy over the rest of my physique when I got down on the floor and tried to show the boys how to do a fireman's carry. Just can't bend over and roll around like I used to. Between the bad thumb, the flu, and the general decrepitude, it was a pretty uninspiring lesson, which should pretty much seal the deal on whether Q (or Colton, for that matter) ever goes on to wrestle. Or, frankly, to acknowledge me in public. Old, stiff, sick...Quite a figure I cut these days. I tell ye, that Janneke, she's a lucky gal.


*(Those of you with even a passing familiarity with our family will recognize the passage referred to as a joke. Congratulations to Janneke on another spectacular meal.)

Spring Is Springing

How do I know? Because spring training has begun:



And because my body is breaking down again. Got an inflamed tendon in my right thumb, making for some difficulty in typing. And explaining the gizmo my hand is encased in, as I show my contact lens to my astonished offspring:



Wait 'til I pop out my false teeth. That'll freak 'em out.

Thundering Normalcy

Rainin' down on us like lead bricks of joy from Heaven.

Janneke was away in Amherst, MA, for the weekend, participating in an alumni get-together based around requiems, a subject that interests her greatly. The kids were very glad to see her come through the door this morning - Papi can be a bit Prickly when Mami is MIA. But we all made it through.

My strategy, when Janneke is away, is to cave in on everything. So Saturday we had pancakes in the morning, and then settle in for some TV and snugglin'. Which we followed with a trip to the mall, where I bought two new shirts for m'self, and let Q blow some of his pocket money on a nifty Lego attack vehicle. T was satisfied with a new batch of Barbie clothes. We then sat down in the food court, where Q had Hawaiian pizza from Pizzatella, while T had the pepperoni. Me? Big Mac. Remember the strategy? That's right: Cave 'til it hurts - be it to the children, or to your own inner gluttonous pig. It was all part of the plan.

As we sat there and ate, I praised them up and down about how well-behaved they always are on these trips. They don't cause any trouble, they listen to me when I need them to do something, etc. They nodded in agreement. T, though, did shrug and look up at me with her saucer-sized eyes and say, "Pero, a veces, hacemos desastres." (But, sometimes, we make messes.) I had to admit that that was indeed often true.

Supper was more difficult. Q is forgetting his table manners a lot, and laughing even more when it's the worst thing he could do (like when Tie is playing with her food. He laughs, she sees that she has brought this about, and tries to repeat the action that caused it as often as she can for the duration of the meal). So we had a bit of a meltdown. But we kissed and made up afterward, and they piled into bed pretty happily.

Did some cleaning around the kid-feeding and such, but I was able to do a lot more of it once Janneke came home again. I must have thrown away thirty pounds of toys today. Anything in their rooms that was a partial toy, part of a lost set, broken, cheap, old, unused, or had ever been acquired as a bonus in a fast food meal, either got tossed into the trash or brought downstairs to await its eventual transfer to Goodwill.

Janneke has a lot of nifty thoughts around pacifism that she came away from her trip with. We had a chat about it as we readied the kids for bed. Janneke thinks war should be universally abhored the same way theft, murder and rape are on the smaller scale of societies, because it's so obviously bad for all concerned, at least in the long run. I think that, while that isn't untrue, it won't happen, because there is no authority to which countries must bend, so they do as they please. And it pleases them, often, just as it often pleases individuals, to behave badly, taking what they want by force. The only impediment is that a country has to do some convincing, talking enough of their population into a war to make it seem justified. And the countries around them are fools if they don't prepare against that bad behavior. It's "Lord of the Flies" on a global scale, despite how civilized those same countries might be inside, on the interpersonal scale. It's an interesting discussion.

Despite the impression that this retelling may be giving.

She also came home with tangibles - two new pairs of shoes for T, and a football and a soccer jersey for Q. (I got squat.) So he and I played some catch in the living room this evening as we talked about killer whales, octopi, and wolves.

Pretty good weekend. Keep 'em coming, please. Another hundred years should be enough for now. After that, we'll see. Maybe I'll be tired of it by then.

One Small Step...for a Man...One Giant Leap...for Packerland.

Is how I see the retirement, today, of Brett Favre. We'll miss you, Jughead.

The Favre is dead.

Long live the Rodgers!!!

So I promised you some photos and such a while ago, and here they are:



Our hotel, the Hotel San Francisco de Quito. Gorgeouos.

One of the things students were supposed to look for in Quito was political graffitti. (They had followed Ecuadorian elections and immigration issues all last year, and this year are studying left versus right, politically, in Latin America. So I figured they'd be able to tell it when they saw it.) Here are some examples:



"Petroleum and Copper (Make) Ecuador Poorer" (rhymes in Spanish)



No caption necessary. (So why did I put one...?)



"Ecuador Will Never Be A Mining Country" (What with the skyrocketing prices of copper, there's a lot of exploring and incipient mining going on in Ecuador)



My students in Mindo. What a great bunch.



I like this picture a lot. Luis Narvaez, best guide in Mindo, and his son, and me. A student (Sara S) took it, and gave it to me on a disk (along with most of the other photos you see here), and it warmed my heart to think of her thinking of me and these two in the same frame.



Here's Luis and his son from the front. The guy LIVED on that cell phone - it's how he organizes his whole business. The cell tower just went up in Mindo 3 years ago, and they are taking full advantage of it, believe me.



What a great eye Sarah has.



The boys (Matt, Ernesto, and Shyam) and their friend Guillermo, in Guillermo's dad's restaurant (the father also being a very good, new friend, as well as having the name Guillermo). This friendship came into being with absolutely no help from me what, so, ever - a fact that makes me so proud I could pop.

And now, a story.

In 1990, Christophe Haering visited Janneke van de Stadt in an apartment in Groton, MA. Almost immediately upon arriving, he attempted to wash a plate, but succumbed to the slipperiness of the soapy water and dropped it into the sink, whereupon a large crack developed, going almost halfway across. The plate survived, and Christophe, scolded vigorously by his wife, hung his head in a mixture of relief and shame.

The plate did, of course, break.

Yesterday.

That is to say: Eighteen years later.

Here's the evidence:



In other news, two young scamps rewarded their Papi for arriving safely from South America with a vigorous massage, of both shoulders and scalp:



Took a shot at drawing T last night, and came this close to packing it in in frustration after two minutes. But I stuck it out, and it turned out to be acceptable:



And finally, here's Tie, "helping" me to shovel the driveway:



Q has been playing the piano a lot lately. He has his second lesson tomorrow. Recently he asked Janneke to show him how to play the first part of a Bach piece she's been tinkering with, and he got the melody down quickly. Tonight, when I got home and was building a fire, I heard Janneke playing it, quickly, and talking to T at the same time. I wondered why she was playing if she was also answering a question from Tie - and then I heard her move into the kitchen. The music continued. I walked out from the living room, confused, and looked wide-eyed at Janneke, who smiled, fully appreciating my shock - He was playing both the melody and the rudiments of the left-hand accompmaniment, together! Janneke said that this morning, after I'd already trudged off to the salt mines, he asked her how to do both hands at once, and now he does it so fast and rhythmically that I was absolutely sure it was Janneke.

To those who would accuse me of being over-exuberant about a really relatively small accomplishment that doesn't necessarily indicate vast, untapped veins of talent, I say this:

A greater problem, in my experience, is parents who are under-exuberant.

And to those who say that I have mis-spelled "exuberant":

Please go somewhere quiet, and eat a turd.

Home Again, Home Again

Jiggity-jog. One week ago today, I was talking to my friend Elenita in the downstairs central garden of our hotel in Quito, while my students swarmed over the Old City in groups of not less than two, hanging out with some of the friends they had made and doing some last-minute sight-seeing and shopping. Not to brag, but I do have to say: I got none of them killed. And they seemed to really take advantage of the experience and settle into the language, the culture, the surroundings, in just the way I had hoped. Special bunch of students.

But it's good to be home. Had a linigering, almost-blossoming bug that I seem finally to have kicked, and now it's back to the regular routine of school and home without worrying about planning the trip, or simply worrying about it. Janneke came and picked me up at the school when we got back, and Q scurried out of the car to run up and hug me. All he said was "Papi!", and then we stood there, squeezing. It was very nice.

T was asleep in the car.

One week of normalcy under my belt, and I have to say: Me likey. The kids were great for Janneke while I was gone, and I keep hearing about things that happened in those nine days that I didn't know about. Movies they saw, jokes that were played, accidents, adventures...Weird not to be around for those.

Q is enjoying a playdate with his friend Alex B right now. He and Alex get along super, super well - it's been 3 hours, and not a single cross word has been fired in either direction. Solid kid. I spent the morning taking out 3 weeks' worth of garbage, bringing in wood from the back yard to the garage, buying a couple of birthday presents for upcoming parties, and cleaning the house. And now I'm doing this while T sleeps in the car (she went to a birthday party this afternoon, and I'd love to show you a picture of her get-up, but I left the cable for uploading pics at school, so you'll have to wait) and Janneke does her workout on the treadmill downstairs. We'll switch in 15 minutes or so. Although I'm pretty sleepy, I had better get one in - Janneke made oatmeal bars today, and I've put away four of them so far. Gotta run them off.

Q and T were in the car coming home from daycare on Friday, and agreed to play "House" when they got home. "You can be the Mommy," Q said, "and I'll be the older brother, and we'll take care of the babies."

"No," T said, "You can be the older brother, and I'll be the older sister. And we'll pretend the Mommy died."

Been watching a lot of Disney flicks, have you, T...?