The Rundown

Another week, another weekend, another post for the ol' blog. Just like our Founding Fathers intended.

Friday night we all watched "Beethoven", the '90's hit about the lovable Saint Bernard - with a special guest appearance by the actor from "The Ugly Dachshund", playing the evil veterinarian. The kids loved it, and even I enjoyed it, even though Charles Grodin was so strangely self-conscious and oddly dressed throughout. And that hair can not have been real. But a good time was had by all.

Up and at 'em for a run with my friend Magnus from up the street Saturday morning. We probably only did 4 miles, but it was good for us. And the rest of the morning was spent on chores - at least at my end of the family spectrum. I took the garbage to the dump, brought firewood in from the back yard, raked the front yard, and started pruning the trees that grow at either corner of the front of our house.

I've had a hankerin' to prune ever since the Peace Corps, when my friend Dave and I went to an Ecuadorian Agriculture Ministry demonstration farm and learned about how and why one prunes apple trees. But I hadn't really done it, and these two overgrown shrubs were really getting out of hand. So I took some shears and a bow saw and went to town. By the time it was over, both had been reduced in size by at least 20 percent (probably closer to 30 on the other), and were sporting several branches tied with string to encourage them to grow in ways that will more fully round out the overall aspect they present. It was very satisfying. Of course, I got very little house cleaning done because of it.

At noon we trooped over to the Elementary School playground for a picnic. Met up with Betsy, captain of Milk of Amnesia, and her two kids, and had a grand time. Funny - Q says that soccer is by far his favorite sport, but when we go out to frolic in the spring air, and he has access to every ball we can stuff into a duffel and bring along, he never chooses to kick the soccer ball. We shot hoops, played catch with a baseball, played catch with a football - and I had to cajole him to do 50 passes with me with a soccer ball. It was like pulling teeth. T, meanwhile, was on the basketball court with Mami playing with the "Balzac": a gigantic balloon (3' across) inside a fabric shell that lets it withstand all sorts of rough treatment. It's really fun - you can bounce it and kick it fifty feet in the air and bounce it off your head when it comes down. And this, if you're four years old. Good times. And I got sunburned for the first time in 2009. Huzzah!

Came home and bundled all my trimmings from the first round of tree pruning into a huge wad with a piece of rope, dragged them into the back of the Subaru, and made it to the municipal dump five minutes before it closed. I was pretty proud of every aspect of that little run. Except the very end, when I tore the end of my ring fingernail off my right hand. I was furious - just the night before I had been practicing the guitar and thought, "Wow, so THIS is what it feels like when your nails finally get just long enough to do their duty." It was like butter. And then, poof!, the very next day, the dream is dead. The rest are still good, so this Friday, when I play in the Lenox Memorial Middle and High School Class of 2010 Talent Show, you'll hear this lovely three-note series followed by a dull "thwank" and know just which finger I'm using. Should be a great show.

I ran again with Magnus this morning, mostly because I know that during the week, I just don't get time to do it that often. And it was a mistake. I mean, we both made it, but I talked to him just now and he is feeling pretty stiff and brittle. And so am I. We are old, old men, who don't recover nearly as well as we used to. Even so, he's pretty much talked me into running in a half marathon in June in Lake Placid. I have tentative approval from the missus - we'll probably make a weekend of it. Never been up there, and there should be some warm-weather fun to be had. Probably pretty good hotel rates, too, since summer will not have started for most people around here. We're going until the 25th or some damn thing, I think.

Today we went ice skating in North Adams, and for some reason the chiflados were out in force. Florida, MA has the reputation of being filled with inbred hillbillies, and I think two separate tribes of them were flooundering out on the ice and laughing through buck teeth today. They were everywhere, mouth-breathing and wheezing like there was no tomorrow. We managed to stay safe, while Q and his friend Colton (who came over for lunch and a playdate) zoomed around the edges and T stayed mostly in the center, doing delicate turns. Nobody was that into it today - I was sore from all the running, Janneke's feet have been suffering in her skates of late...It ended mercifully at the appointed hour, and I think we all had more fun watching the zamboni clean the ice for the figure skating club than we had in an hour and a half of skating.

Back home, where Colton's dad came to pick him up and we settled in for some late-afternoon dog show watchin' on ESPN2. There were bull terriers there, and Janneke was expressing a lot of glee upon seeing them, so I felt it was really time to break it to her: I don't think we can get one. Everybody you talk to about these dogs says "Do not keep them with non-canine pets", "will not be trustworthy with cats", etc. etc. And Skittles is just so deeply entrenched in our little family now. I mean, as this dog show was happening, this is what was going on:



You're going to bring a potential cat-killer into that little vision of paradise? Janneke very quickly agreed (which floored me) and started tossing out some of her other favorites for consideration. She and I repaired to the kitchen where I read the pros and cons of each from the Internet (always 100% reliable on everything):

Dachshunds: Easily injured by children and often intolerant of them.
Schnauzers: They like children, but don't always respect them. Incidents are not uncommon.
Miniature beagles: They like children, get on fine with other pets. Bingo!

This is Janneke's choice (I "chose" Hobie, so it's her turn), otherwise I'd have been tossing out ideas as well. But I have to say, if this is what we stick with, I'm going to be pleased. Heck, if it were my choice, I might have gone this way all by myself. I may even have talked her into getting two, since lots of websites, and Temple Grandin's new book, all concur that if a dog is going to be left at home for considerable periods of time, it's best to have another one. So, I don't know if I'd have gone out of my way to make it happen, but if I'm going to have the beagles anyway, let me tell you: I am going to hunt rabbits.

The dog show, by the way, was totally bogus. The miniature poodle won best in show. Which, obviously, is bullshit.

Q ended the day on a down note when we realized that we'd forgotten to take him to pick-up soccer at 6:00. It was now 6:45. He burst into tears and was snotty and short with us almost all the way up to bedtime. And he also wasn't pleased that our plan to ski tomorrow evening is making us point to the fact that he appears to have lost his snowpants somewhere along the way. But he went to bed pretty happy in the end, having had a long talk with me about foxes, and then having read a few chapters of a very funny book about a boy and his pet gecko with Mami.

I, meanwhile, was with T in her bedroom, trying (after Janneke had already put in a good 20 minutes) to get T to accept the fact that her violent, screeching tantrum about whether or not anyone was going to help her put her toys away had already cost her the nightly story and would soon, if it continued, cost her snugglebug as well. (Snugglebug being the institution wherein parents lie with children until they fall asleep or for five to ten minutes, whichever comes first.) Hoo, that was a toughie. But she finally went down with a crash, and we were free.

I called Magnus to see if they could loan us some of Benni's (their sixth-grade son) snowpants, and they said they could. So since they live 200 yards away, I walked Hobie over there and collected them.

And scored on multiple levels: They happened to have two "ski for a day free" cards from Jiminy that they aren't going to use this year. Cha-ching! Just saved $70! And they told me that pick-up soccer had been canceled tonight - so Q had missed out on nothing! In your FACE, Q! And finally, talking of Q and soccer, Benni, who plays in the pick-up games on Sundays, opened his eyes wide and said, "Q is GOOD! Man, for a third grader?! He's right in there with the big kids."

And this from Benni, who is an amazing athlete. Evidence:



OK, that's going to have to do it. I have hundreds of things yet to do, but unfortunately for most of them, #1 on the list is "Go To Bed". So they're gonna have to wait. I leave you with this:



T playing Q's Gameboy while I practice the guitar. For the record: I sat there first.

A few updates

Can't believe I'm sitting down to do this at 10:55, but darn it, there's news to get out, and tomorrow's another day of the world not knowing that:

Milk of Amnesia is now 3-1.

Second place the other night. Which, really, was the best possible outcome. We don't have to wonder for another year whether people hate us. Because we know that they do - but we know that their hatred is tempered by having seen us fall. And that hatred is still kept alive by the knowledge that we are still smarter than all but one table-full of them.

I could list a lot of questions we got right and questions we got wrong, but...Well, there's no but. Here are a few:

Nicholas Breakspear was the only Englishman ever to become...what?

Which rocker was known as the "Motor City Madman"?

Only one Berkshire County town supported Thomas Jefferson in the 1800 election. When he won, they sent him a gift of...what?

Who wrote the Windows 95 startup music?

Answers (DON'T LOOK DOWN IF YOU'RE STILL WONDERING):






Pope. (We were wrong.)
Ted Nugent. (We were right.)
Cheese. (We were right.)
Brian Eno. (We were wrong.)

And so on. We got the final question right, in which we had to put these events in chronological order:

Discovery of Dead Sea Scrolls
Prohibition began
"The Great Gatsby" published
The Titanic sank

...and two more that I don't recall right now. But we nailed it. Still, we only had 64 points, and the other team had 78. I don't know anything about them, other than that Betsy works with one of them, that one of them is a rabbi, and that next year, they are going down.

Oh - I also know that they rock. Because they say they're getting shirts next year, and want to know the name of the website. Which, in case Brad is reading, is this:

www.bowlingconnection.com

We had an absolute blast. I think next year the trophy will be brought back with our jersey intact - but their jersey over the top of it. Which I think would be way, way cool. Soon I'll have to get "LOSERS 2009" stitched on our right sleeves. Oh, the ignom...in...ity...?

Other news: Skittles went to the vet today regarding her goofy walk (arched back, stiff back legs) of late, though it's been getting better, and X-rays revealed that she has a slipped disk! Two of her vertebrae are rubbing against each other. Could have happened here, could have happened before we got her. So we're trying out a pain killer, which we could give her three days on, three days off (cats don't do well with anti-inflammatories, apparently), though honestly, she seems perfectly fine now. Or as fine as she's going to be - still not leaping up onto anything, but scampering everywhere. She's hopefully in for a long life with less pain because she'll make fewer trips up and down the stairs - we moved her food upstairs, but after an experiment with the litterbox where she knew where it was, just wasn't using it, and continually prowled the spot where it used to be, and looked like she was antsy to drop a little stink bomb, we caved and moved it back down. She uses the food where it is, but the box has gone back. Hopefully having food upstairs will mean fewer trips...But she should be fine going up and down now: The carpets on the stairs have been duct-taped down, and since that happened, she hasn't fallen once. And the arched back and stiff legs have been gone for a couple of days.

All right, off to bed. 5:30 AM comes awfully early. Good night, and good luck.

Dr Doolittle

That's the title of what had to be the most painful movie-watching experience I've endured for the sake of my children, who seemed pretty well rapt throughout. And it was painful - the songs were weird, strangely keyless warbles about nothing, inspired, apparently, by odd bits of dialogue that popped up randomly, as if there had been a contractual obligation to sing every seven minutes or face fines.

But I bring it up now because I am doing very little. And the reason? My animals. I want to get some photos up. First, to illustrate the changing colors on Skittles:



All that brownish tinge up toward her shoulders and head, noticeably different from the rest of the coat, is getting sparser and sparser. I think it's falling out, leaving her the color that the rest of her is. Here's another look:



Up around her ears - see how it's a bla, colorless sort of brown...? It reminds me of the dead, hollow, greasy hair that used to come off Dad's outside hounds in clumps every spring.

Speaking of decrepit hounds, here's one:



Hobie doesn't find the sunbeam or the glow of the stove to be quite warm enough. But together...! That's age for you. If he could, he'd be wearing sweat pants and a bath robe pretty much all the time. (Heck, though, so would I.) If you look closely, you can see Death, lurking around in the reflection on the stove door, checking his watch, tapping his foot. I shouldn't say that - he's really very healthy for such an old dog. I think I'm just preparing myself for life without Hobie. We had a big tickle-fest happening this evening, and sure enough, he waltzed over and stuck his snout in the middle of the action, growling playfully, wanting me to knock him around like in the olden days. I gave him a few shakes, and it was like old times. Strange. I've had him longer than I've been with Janneke.

And there you are. No kid updates, no big news - other than that Team Trivia has come and gone, and that we achieved the absolute best possible outcome.

More on that later...

Foreshadowing

The week leads to the weekend, when the interesting stuff happens. Which is the thing that I am going to write about beginning.....Now.

I took Friday off school to go to an eye doctor's appointment. (The only appointment I could get was at noon, and it's an hour's drive back from work to the eye doctor's. So I could essentially have taught two classes, for which I would have been docked a whole sick day anyway. So screw it, I stayed home.) And for the heck of it, I kept T home, too.

Well, not so much for the heck of it. T, along with two other kids in her class, had been sent home on Wednesday with some uninvited guests of the parasitical sort. (No big mystery where they came from - one of T's little buddies who went home has an older brother who recently had a bout, and whose hair looks a lot like mine these days as a result.) And upon checking Q, he turned out to have been infected as well. So we did the whole wash-everything cycle, got the DDT shampoo from the drugstore, the whole bit. Lots and lots of laundry and vacuuming, lots of scrubbing and rinsing...Such fun.

Thursday morning, T still had a couple moribund ones, which Janneke eliminated with another early-morning shampoo, followed by another in the early afternoon, just to be sure. And Q never showed another sign of them. What a trial - luckily, nobody else ever had them, and we appear to be over the hump. But what an ordeal.

So that contributed to my keeping T at home with me. I was able to monitor her well (nothing ever showed up), and there was no danger of re-infestation from the children at school; meantime, the daycare would be kid-free for 2 days over the weekend, and the books tell you that that's the longest they can survive out in the world. So I kept her to myself. We waved goodbye to Q as he walked out to the bus (I filmed him standing there kicking at the snowbank as he waited, and thought it would be cool to have footage of him getting on the bus during a normal, not-first-time-ever kind of way; so I resolved to stand there and film him all the way to pick-up. But it got to be long, and I thought, I should just get a box and set the camera on it and come back for it when he's gone. So I walked three steps to look for a box and heard the bus come. Razza-frazza-furga-sumba-frizza...)

Then it was just me and T. I puttered around the house in the morning, then drove to my appointment, during which T waited out in the little play area they have, with the typical 1959 jigsaw puzzles, half-clothed action figure dolls and three-wheeled plastic cars in a dingy tin bin. She ignored all that and drew and colored while I was inside, getting checked for further decrepitude. None happening, as it turns out - my prescription will remain unchanged. And when I came out, T was happy as a clam, except that she couldn't locate the bag of Ritz Bitz I had bought for her earlier. This upset her mightily, because there was one left in the bottom of the bag that she had been saving for Mami. I located it on the floor (the bag, neatly folded - not the actual Ritz Bit), and all was well.

She has been so into that lately - making sure everybody gets some, sharing things when no one asks her to...She'll walk across the living room with a carefully dipped carrot stick five or six times whenever we have a pre-dinner snack dish, or collect Skittles into a bundle and bring her to you on the off-chance you might be itching to hold a cat. Q will be bouncing on the furniture and land wrong and sit there crying, holding his knee - and T will spring into action, run out of the room and return less than a minute later with a cool glass of water for her brother, who thanks her and drinks it down while T strokes his hair. If I saw it in a movie about a family, I wouldn't believe it. I'd say, "No way that ever happens. Siblings hate each other! I know this! Um...That is to say...I've read that it is often so in some families that are not mine!"

Moving on, T and I went straight from the eye doctor to Mcdonald's, beacuse I am (1) disorganized, and thus did not have a pre-fabricated lunch ready for when we finally left the optometrist's at 1:00 and (2) a pushover. I had a fish sandwich and T had a happy meal, devoured with much gusto. And one of my former students at BArT was working there, and said hello to me. There are things to be said about that, but I think that I won't say them.

Off to another optometrist's, on Main Street in North Adams, whose service I find superior, but who is not covered by my insurance for the actual appointment. And there T gave her opinions on a number of frames before I settled on the one she liked the least and ordered me up a pair. T was upset that I didn't want the black mountaineering goggles she had so coveted. And I couldn't actually give her a non-lame reason why I wasn't buying those. Years from now, I'm sure I'll regret not having listened to her...

Q never came home Friday night, because he had a sleepover at his friend Owen's house. And we had organized another little event where one of T's friends would come watch a movie with us, but because of the whole lousy situation (you know what I mean), we decided not to have him over, and it was just the 3 of us, watching the hastily-checked-out "HUnchback of Notre Dame" because instead of the children's movie we had expected to find in the mail from Netflix, "Yentl" had shown up. And we quickly surmised that it would be less of a hit with out nearly five-year-old.

Boy, the sexual not-quite-completely-"under" undertone to that particular Disney film is pretty uncomfortable to watch. They had to make Esmeralda more sexual than most of the Disney princesses you see, but man, some of the poses they put her in - particularly the sequence where she's a vision dancing seductively in the fireplace of the lust-crazed constable who's pursuing her - belong on certain Internet sites that are pay-only. (I've read.) And I have a problem with the way Quasimodo smilingly puts Esmeralda's hand in the hand of Phoebus at the end, accepting his lot as a freak who deserves no love. But what should I expect? I recall seeing the trailer for the movie and thinking it was an "Onion"-like false trailer, that Disney couldn't possibly touch that story. It'd be like giving Moby Dick a happy ending, wouldn't it? Although I confess I have never read the actual novel. Probably should.

Soon as I finish "Williamstown 1753 - 2003: The First 250 Years". Team Trivia is less than a week away, after all.

This morning, Q came home and then the two of them played outside pretty much all the late morning and the early afternoon, climbing in our decorative shrub trees and making bows and arrows (bows, anyway) out of sticks and twine. T got stuck in a tree at one point, falling so that she was hanging from one bent knee, unable to extract herself; Q came running in to fetch us, and janneke went limping toward her shoes, saying "I can't get out there fast enough!" I had thought Q's tone seemed pretty jovial, but suddenly I imagined her hanging in a way that had her strangling, and I ran outside and around the corner in my socks. I found her, airway clear, scared and stuck, and pretty easily extracted her, but man!, crossing snow, then wet mud, then snow again is about the coldest thing you can subject your tootsies to. Took me a while to recover.

After lunch, we played a "Doctor Who" boardgame based on chocolates that Ronadh had brought back for us from Ireland, and then we were off to the Clark, where we perused the Tholouse Latrec (which I have spelled wrong on purpose to be post-modern and ultra-hip) show, and where Janneke provided the kids with paper for sketching on. And here are some of the results - Looking at this:



...T did this:



And looking at this:



...she did this:



Sorry about the quality of the in-house images, but it's getting pretty late, and quality control has gone straight in the crapper. Pardon my French.

From there, off to the park at the elementary school, where the kids did a little bit of swinging and scampering while I charged off to the library to pick up the aforementioned "Williamstown" book. They got cold quickly, so we came back home, and soon thereafter it was close to 6:00, so I had Q change his clothes and drove him off for Sunday evening pickup soccer in the elementary school gym. I went home again and came back to pick him up around 7:10, arriving with enough time to watch him play for a little bit. They were doing "score and keep playing", where squads of different colors would take the floor and play a sudden-death game. Losers leave, winners stay out. Q was on the white team, and he saw me after losing and trotted over to sit beside me.

Great black horned demons swelled up inside me and forced me to say a few things like, "You can't be afraid of them. You're playing off them too much. Go get 'em! You need to be more aggressive."

He took it well, and then went back out, and absolutely tore the opposing team up. He shot twice on goal, scored a number of take-aways, ran any number of players down - and this with almost everyone on the court a fourth, fifth, or sixth-grader.

I know I shouldn't tell him these things. But then, when I do, he goes out and kicks ass!...Idunno. I'm going to hell. That's about all there is to it.

Home to supper and to bed, T crashed out and asleep before even getting to say goodnight to anyone, Q showered and sweet after a sweaty early evening. And Janneke, literally, in a wheelchair. She appears to have been favoring her foot as she walked on the treadmill today and it is now so sore that I jokingly offered to bring up the wheelchair that I'd grabbed out of the neighbor's "Free" pile for use in future filmmaking. And Janneke took me up on it. So she's got one foot up and is reading for tomorrow, and I sit here on the couch beside her, doing this. Ah, the lives we lead. Maybe tomorrow, if we play our cards right, we can work in some knitting. Perhaps guitar practice - but only if I'm very good between now and then.

Which we all know I will be.

Fast forward forty years, and hopefully we'll be in the same house, with the same wheelchair, doing the same thing. That would be a pretty darned lucky thing.

Man, I have had it. Daylight savings should be abolished - I have no earthly idea what the hell time it is, or should be. Or at least, I should be allowed to spend the three days after we switch the clocks ahead in a drug-induced coma. Those are the choices: Abolition, or accommodation. Either way. You choose, Society. I'm a reasonable man.