Hey.
Y'know, I just watched a commercial for sticky denture goo. It's the one where people with dentures mug for the camera about their distaste for certain qualities of the brands they won't be patronizing anymore. There's a shot of three women singing along to "Bye Bye Love". Except they've changed the words, and now it's "Bye bye, paste".
Then there's another shot of a guy making an "ick" face as he sings along to "goodbye stickiness". Or some such.
And, y'know, I get that they're trying to appeal to denture wearers. And that denture wearers tend not to be the youngest people. But...Certain standard advertising tactics, like making idealized versions of your potential customers appear jubilant because of their decision to use your product? Making them giggle and pose half-self-consciously in spontaneous-looking photo-shoot-type hug-fests in summer settings in bright clothes...That...doesn't really work with old people. First off, the idealized versions of people in general aren't old. In Fake TV Land, they're all young and thin and have perfectly symmetrical smiles, because that way consumers get to pretend for a moment to be those people. And I don't want for the shortest of moments to be any of the people in these ads. And older people don't dress that way, in that primary-color-jumper-and-vest combos, and if they do, it can look kind of weird. Like a ninety-year-old guy in a sideways baseball cap and a Chicago Bulls jersey. It's just not dignified. Not that I really want to buy any denture paste from anybody at all, but if I ever do, I'm going to be less likely to buy it from someone who almost mocks my age by depicting my idealized self as a somewhat addled simpleton wearing age-inappropriate clothing.
Y'know what else? Kelly Ripa needs to go eat a cream puff or six, and then not throw up. Or jazzercize. She's so damn skinny she looks like a leather Bionicle.
In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm kind of moping lately. Janneke and T are in France, and Q is spending all day at robotics camp. Leaving me with a lot of time on my hands.
Which I manage to use, I guess. I've been swimming for exercise again, which causes nothing at all on my body to hurt. And I can't say that about any other kind of exercise, I don't think.
Not even yoga, turns out. My right wrist is killing me. Been doing an hour of yoga Mondays and Wednesdays with Ronadh, and I love it. I come out of there feeling absolutely great - all the soreness from running goes away, and I feel two inches taller. (Not cumulatively, though. Otherwise I'd be 6'2" by now.) But all the leaning on my palms has caused my old achy right wrist to rear its head again. That stinks. I love yoga. Maybe I have to go get the wrist injected again.
And I've been editing videos. Got a lot of footage from the last several months, and so far I've done Q's soccer video, a video about Christmas last year, and now one about our Team Trivia squad, "Milk of Amnesia". (Which looks a lot better now than when you saw it, Brad, Betsy, Ronadh, and Mark.) And I manage to keep Q fed and clothed and off to camp on time, and to dress and clean myself. I keep Skittles brushed, the floors vacuumed (mostly), and the grass cut.
But largely, these are spasms of activity that interrupt my moping. The house is just so damn big and empty without Janneke and T. I don't get it - Janneke claims to have a grand old time when I take the kids away. Getting tons of stuff done, going out with friends, bla bla bla. I watch Keith Olbermann and wonder why the heck I don't feel like playing guitar, which I swore I was going to do so much of this summer and now have time to do. It's weird.
In the evenings it seems stilted and uncomfortable to just sit across from each other in silence and chew, so Q and I have been watching Fox Soccer Channel while we eat. And there's an on-demand kids' channel on the local cable package, and Q will ask to watch an episode of "Destroy Build Destroy". And I'll usually cave. Sometimes we'll go outside and play basketball, and last night was "Wipeout" night. And tonight, we discovered a telenovela on Univision. It's called "Un gancho de amor" ("A hook (as in boxing) of love"), and he was laughing out loud at some of it. Mostly at the slightly overweight, greasy former boyfriend character who farts and wears loud shirts and blurts out "Bueno, sabes, mi amor, es que...No me importa" in a half-sympathetic, half-impatient whine when someone starts confiding in him. It was really fun - they talk full-on fast, and he had no problem following anything. It was actually a revelation, and I'm going to have to see if this is a once-a-week thing. (Though they tend to be every day, in my experience.) And then, after his TV stints (which, Janneke, he does not always have (oh, who am I kidding - she never reads this)), he tends to go to bed happily after some very pleasant story-reading. So we're good. But...I'm just not a good solo act. Can't find my marks, can't keep time on my own, I go flat all the time...I droop and sag like a pasta sawhorse.
Oh, well. Keith Olbermann is on - I'll just grab the remote...punch in "49"...sit back...
Guest host.
Jeepers...It just gets worse and worse.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Addendum
Wow - The steel trap that is my mind just gets rustier and rustier. And so I've had to come back and finish off the relating of the Great Trip South and Back Again, because I had neglected to tell you about the final chapter: The Return Voyage.
We loved Waynesboro, Virgina so much (and I'm not being sarcastic - it's a delightful place, with a clean, affordable Best Western with an indoor pool, exactly halfway between Birmingham and Williamstown) that for the return trip, we decided to have it be our rest stop again. Even though we weren't going straight home: we were planning to spend a day with my brother Jess, his wife, Stephanie, and our kids' eldest Johnson cousin, their son, Jack.
They don't live in Waynesboro. They live in Waldorf, MD, a suburb of DC - which, Mapquest informed us, is twelve hours from Birmingham. Too dang long a drive, we said. Mapquest then informed us that it was three hours from Waynesboro - and that Waynesboro, as we had previously known, was nine hours from Birnimgham. Ergo, we would lose absolutely nothing, time-wise, if we went to Waynesboro on Day One, stayed the night, and headed out bright and early the next day to arrive in Waldorf.
And so it came to pass: another night in Waynesboro, where we ate at a lovely local Italian restaurant (owned by an Argentine, whose niece was the hostess, and who confirmed for us that Argentina is not the place to go if we plan to spend a year abroad - too many kidnappings), and then hit the hay. (But not before picking up dessert at Arby's, a restaurant I had had a hankerin' for for a while, but which circumstances on the highway had prevented us from patronizing up to then. The kids had shakes for dessert. I had a roast beef sandwich. And, by the way, of the 10 or so patrons and staff we saw there that day, 9 were on the verge of morbid obesity. Just saying.) Up and at 'em the next day, and the drive went through at least three Civil War battlefields. Can't name 'em off the top of my head, but I recognized all of them. Weird - sooo long ago, the landscape totally transformed since then, but that's the place. Saw several roadside shacks that hawk battlefield gear, probably dug up with a metal detector. And so on towards Waldorf, though we got stuck in some traffic because of a big-rig wreck. Chemical spill, so we gathered; news helicopters circling overhead, the whole bit. Got some great advice on how to skirt the blockage from the patrons and staff at a stripmall hairdresser's, and then cruised on to Waldorf.
Auntie Stephanie received us, and Uncle Jess and Jack came home in the afternoon, and the kids got on great. T charged around the yard in Jack's battery-powered car - not, by the way, fantasizing about being a race car driver, or a getaway car driver, or, even, as I would have hoped, a postapocalyptic gasoline pirate. (Still thinking about Georgia, I guess.) Nope: T was going shopping. Frankly, I expected better.
Jack is a ball of fire, running pretty much everywhere he goes. And not slowly, either. He also seems to be built on a par with his cousin Liam, whom the Packers should draft, like now. Those boys are going to be tanks - add Jack's stoutness with his need for speed, and soon Jess and Steph's lovely house is going to be sporting some Jack-shaped holes in a number of its walls. Quite the talker at 3 years old - answers every question with a complete sentence: "Yes, I do." "No, they aren't." "Yes, she is." "No." (Ooh- Wait! Maybe he's not going to - ) "...it's not." He wasn't shy with us or the kids, but he was a little reserved - I managed to extract a hug out of him when it came time to go. But it took some work. Not surprising - last time I saw him, or he saw me, he was a baby. And, to be honest, I was just out of rehab at the time, weighing only about 120, and still hadn't had my facial tattoos removed. Didn't have my prosthetic nose yet, either. So if he has any memories of me, they probably aren't pleasant. Time flies, boy...Man! How does that happen...!
Anyhoo, we spent the afternoon playing football in their green and happy back yard, ordered in pizza, chatted until bedtime, and then off to dreamland. But not before Q chimed in that he liked both their house and the Pajaros' in Birmingham more than ours, because the Pajaros had had a pool, and these guys had a pool table. Nice. Good to see those guys, even if only for a bit - it had been a while. We always seem to miss each other back at the ranch in Wisconsin.
Out like a rocket the next morning for seven and a half more hours of drivin'. Up!, Up! we went, and as we moved northward certain things started to disappear. Cracker Barrel, Waffle House...Civil War battlegrounds (which sparked a fascinating conversation with Q, still continuing in fits and starts to this day: "Why are there no Civil War battlegrounds where we live?" Think about it - that's a complicated answer), armadillo roadkill. And African-American men on motorcycles. Strange - Saw a lot of that in the South, Maryland and Virgina in particular. Up here? Honestly, just about never.
New Jersey. New York! VEMONT!
MASSACHUSETTS!
Ahhh. Richer and wiser for the experience, but happy to be back.
Here endeth the reading.
We loved Waynesboro, Virgina so much (and I'm not being sarcastic - it's a delightful place, with a clean, affordable Best Western with an indoor pool, exactly halfway between Birmingham and Williamstown) that for the return trip, we decided to have it be our rest stop again. Even though we weren't going straight home: we were planning to spend a day with my brother Jess, his wife, Stephanie, and our kids' eldest Johnson cousin, their son, Jack.
They don't live in Waynesboro. They live in Waldorf, MD, a suburb of DC - which, Mapquest informed us, is twelve hours from Birmingham. Too dang long a drive, we said. Mapquest then informed us that it was three hours from Waynesboro - and that Waynesboro, as we had previously known, was nine hours from Birnimgham. Ergo, we would lose absolutely nothing, time-wise, if we went to Waynesboro on Day One, stayed the night, and headed out bright and early the next day to arrive in Waldorf.
And so it came to pass: another night in Waynesboro, where we ate at a lovely local Italian restaurant (owned by an Argentine, whose niece was the hostess, and who confirmed for us that Argentina is not the place to go if we plan to spend a year abroad - too many kidnappings), and then hit the hay. (But not before picking up dessert at Arby's, a restaurant I had had a hankerin' for for a while, but which circumstances on the highway had prevented us from patronizing up to then. The kids had shakes for dessert. I had a roast beef sandwich. And, by the way, of the 10 or so patrons and staff we saw there that day, 9 were on the verge of morbid obesity. Just saying.) Up and at 'em the next day, and the drive went through at least three Civil War battlefields. Can't name 'em off the top of my head, but I recognized all of them. Weird - sooo long ago, the landscape totally transformed since then, but that's the place. Saw several roadside shacks that hawk battlefield gear, probably dug up with a metal detector. And so on towards Waldorf, though we got stuck in some traffic because of a big-rig wreck. Chemical spill, so we gathered; news helicopters circling overhead, the whole bit. Got some great advice on how to skirt the blockage from the patrons and staff at a stripmall hairdresser's, and then cruised on to Waldorf.
Auntie Stephanie received us, and Uncle Jess and Jack came home in the afternoon, and the kids got on great. T charged around the yard in Jack's battery-powered car - not, by the way, fantasizing about being a race car driver, or a getaway car driver, or, even, as I would have hoped, a postapocalyptic gasoline pirate. (Still thinking about Georgia, I guess.) Nope: T was going shopping. Frankly, I expected better.
Jack is a ball of fire, running pretty much everywhere he goes. And not slowly, either. He also seems to be built on a par with his cousin Liam, whom the Packers should draft, like now. Those boys are going to be tanks - add Jack's stoutness with his need for speed, and soon Jess and Steph's lovely house is going to be sporting some Jack-shaped holes in a number of its walls. Quite the talker at 3 years old - answers every question with a complete sentence: "Yes, I do." "No, they aren't." "Yes, she is." "No." (Ooh- Wait! Maybe he's not going to - ) "...it's not." He wasn't shy with us or the kids, but he was a little reserved - I managed to extract a hug out of him when it came time to go. But it took some work. Not surprising - last time I saw him, or he saw me, he was a baby. And, to be honest, I was just out of rehab at the time, weighing only about 120, and still hadn't had my facial tattoos removed. Didn't have my prosthetic nose yet, either. So if he has any memories of me, they probably aren't pleasant. Time flies, boy...Man! How does that happen...!
Anyhoo, we spent the afternoon playing football in their green and happy back yard, ordered in pizza, chatted until bedtime, and then off to dreamland. But not before Q chimed in that he liked both their house and the Pajaros' in Birmingham more than ours, because the Pajaros had had a pool, and these guys had a pool table. Nice. Good to see those guys, even if only for a bit - it had been a while. We always seem to miss each other back at the ranch in Wisconsin.
Out like a rocket the next morning for seven and a half more hours of drivin'. Up!, Up! we went, and as we moved northward certain things started to disappear. Cracker Barrel, Waffle House...Civil War battlegrounds (which sparked a fascinating conversation with Q, still continuing in fits and starts to this day: "Why are there no Civil War battlegrounds where we live?" Think about it - that's a complicated answer), armadillo roadkill. And African-American men on motorcycles. Strange - Saw a lot of that in the South, Maryland and Virgina in particular. Up here? Honestly, just about never.
New Jersey. New York! VEMONT!
MASSACHUSETTS!
Ahhh. Richer and wiser for the experience, but happy to be back.
Here endeth the reading.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Jiggety-Jog
As in, "Home again, home again".
What a long, strange trip it was. You know about the first leg - down to Virginny, and then onward. The "onward" portion is what I shall herewith relate.
Our second nine-hour driving day was a long one. I mean, it was exactly as long as the other one, but it felt longer. We were pretty darn punchy by the time we actually rolled into Alabama. The geography was very interesting to observe, by the way - there is a clear geologic distinction between "middle-south", Virginia, and "deep south", or Georgia-Alabama. I can't totally put my finger on it, but things felt very different as we rolled out of the Virginia mountains and into the Georgia mountains.
The cities took on a very different, more-industrial tinge. And the highway that cuts across the far north-west corner of Georgia, basically serving only people who want to get from Virginia to Alabama, is downright post-apocalyptic. Grass that's been allowed to get two and three feet high in all the medians and on the shoulders, oddly purplish-grayish pavement, which, while not terribly bad to drive on, just plain seems unfriendly. And blown tire parts everywhere. That's another line you cross going south: The "nobody-picks-up-the-blowouts" line. Could be that they don't pick them up, could be that they have a hundred times more of them and the boys from the highway department just can't keep up. Either way. You expect every 18-wheeler to be sporting barbed wire and turrets manned by men in shoulderpads, firing crossbows.
Had me some goobers in Georgia. Boiled, salted peanuts in the shell, sold out of a crock pot in a gas station where I damn near bought me a twelve-dollar cowboy hat. I thought the goobers were kind of good, though Janneke thought they looked like cigarette butts floating in a piss-soaked toilet. It is a testament to my manhood that I kept right on eating after that observation.
Before I get to the family business that took place (there was much, and it was grand), I'll give you some general observations about my first trip to the Deep South. Alabama: It is hotter, and humider, but very strangely, it suffers from far fewer mosquitoes. The geography of northern Alabama is very mountainous - I say "very" because I expected it to be flat. Which shows my level of ignorance. Birmingham: Every building there, except the plain on which the city center sits, and in the flattish "village" centers that surround the heart of the city, is very, very hilly. So hilly that almost no one seemed to have a proper yard. They've kept their houses from washing away by leaving practically all the trees standing - it seemed we never saw a house that wasn't deeply shaded and protected by gorgeous stands of lush, full trees. It feels like a jungle sometimes, except that the roads are gorgeously maintained - honestly, I don't think I saw a pothole in all of Birmingham (not that I saw all of it) - my sister-and-brother-in-law do quite well, so it was a better part of Birmingham that I mostly got to see, but even so, no matter where we went, things seemed to be well-taken-care-of.
"Why did this surprise you?", my deep-south friends might well ask me with indignation. That is, they might, if I had any deep-south friends. Well, I'll tell you why: It's by far the poorest region of the US. It regularly outdoes the rest of the country in obesity, ignorance, racism, and hyper-religiosity. (I hereby declare. Though I'm sure I could back those assertions up with some numbers, if I had the inclination.) I expected that to color the whole place to some extent, and in Birmingham, it absolutely did not. You couldn't tell you were anywhere other than a prosperous, tastefully-laid-out upper-class neighborhood or suburban center. Where people talked in ridiculous accents.
(OK, I said that for comic effect. I absolutely do not consider their accents to be ridiculous. They are just as valid and historically justified as any accent, be it the flatness of the midwest, the broadness of the upper east coast, or the drabness and reservation of an English toff.)
(But they do sound funny.)
I also noticed some things with regard to race. We went at one point to a baseball game (the Birmingham Barons, the same minor-league team where Michael Jordan stank it up), and I had a good amount of crowd-watching. There were pee-lenty of African-Americans around - probably close to half the attendees. And I never saw one interracial couple. Not once. In Berkshire County, I truly think it would not be possible to walk through the mall, or go to a high school sporting event, or go to one of the miserable county fairs they have here for random reasons in the summer, without seeing one. None there at all.
Not that they don't interact - my nieces and nephews there appear to have a host of black friends from school. But it was peculiar, this race thing, at least in the eyes of a Northerner, in a lot of other ways - for example, in the Piggly Wiggly, I noticed that apart from the manager, absolutely all the checkers and bag boys and shelf-stockers were black. On my first trip - and, you know, it wasn't even true then. There was one white woman working there on my first trip. So, probably 13 out of 14 employees were black. On subsequent trips, I noticed a few more white employees. But easily 85% were black. Interesting - go to a situation where there will be big groups of people earning little money in Alabama, and the vast majority of them will be black. Go to places where you'll see big groups of wealthier people, and most of them will be white.
"Why should this surprise you? That's true in a larger sense in the rest of the US as well." I don't know - Maybe it shouldn't surprise me. Maybe. But it was different there, I think. Could be that it wasn't really - maybe I'm projecting. But I don't think so. In Berkshire County, for example, you get waited on in the fast-food restaurants by people of any color. Granted, there are far fewer blacks in Berkshire County, but that almost makes the observation more interesting. The argument would go that we have fewer blacks in our low-paying jobs in western Massachusetts, not because blacks are more prosperous here, but because there are fewer blacks. Thus implying, I suppose, that wherever you find lots of black people, they will be doing low-paying jobs, and ergo, it's logical that the checkout staff in Piggly-Wiggly in Alabama should be black? That doesn't square with me either. I mean, it may mathematically be true, but I still find it objectionable that it be so. And so maybe the truth is objectionable...? Perhaps it's just the numbers that struck me. No more prosperous in the South than here, but far more of them. Which made it that much more evident to me that the economic state of African-Americans in this country is by and large very bad.
Surprising? No. But what it points to is the way in which it is possible for me, given where I live, to sail through my day without being consciously aware of that. It isn't something I'm reminded of at every turn. Maybe I'd be better off, in terms of my awareness of the state of my nation, if I were more aware of it. And maybe as a nation we'd be better off if everybody had the sort of tiny, daily "Katrina" moments that would bring this into sharper focus. By that I mean the shock - Shock! - that so many of us, including me, felt when we saw the images of the Katrina destruction and saw that 97% of the victims were black. And we said to ourselves, "What the hey?" Unlike most Republicans, I don't feel that seeing this fact is racism. To paraphrase Dennis Miller, "Pointing out that the victims were almost all black is not being racist. It's being minimally observant." And there's a lot of useful information we can glean from that. "Hey," we should say. "How come, when we evacuate, we leave all the black people behind?" Shouldn't that merit some conversation, at least? I mean, if they had all been wearing cowboy hats, I would have expected someone to say, "Hey, let's try to sort out this cowboy-hat-equals-left-behind phenomenon."
If, every day, dopes like me were forced to observe, "Goodness, look at that. Just about all the lowest-paying jobs are taken up by black people. What's the deal there?", maybe we'd be voting differently.
Anyway...Lots to think about.
So much for Alabama. The family: Octavio and Dominique were as generous as hosts can possibly be. We had the downstairs...um...south...west...?...corner of the house to ourselves. We could close off two doors and have a hallway with our bedrooms and the kids' room, as well as our bathroom, in isolation from the rest of the bunch, or could open it up and let the sunshine in. We had our own door to the back yard, where the swimming pool beckoned.
And Q and T answered the call. Daily. Several times, for hours at a time. T, by the way, learned to swim on this trip! She had been using a life vest for a while now, but at one point, she asked if we could try without it, and then she was managing to stay afloat for a few seconds, then she was lunging from the side of the pool out toward us, and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she was dogpaddling her way across the whole pool. It happened really, really fast, and the fact that every time she did it she got thunderous ovations from her gorgeous, beaming, cool-as-can-be teenage cousins can't have hurt in the motivation department.
Gorgeous and cool they all were, too. Flavia in particular, as far as T was concerned - the two of them just click. Flavia wasn't just resigning herself to be the babysitter, either - she genuinely enjoys T's company, and the two of them were impossible to separate. Not bad, considering the nine-year age gap. We kept on trying to rescue Flavia from having to spend too much time with her, but every time we did she'd look at us like we were crazy.
Q, meanwhile, played a lot of video games with the Alabama boys, Stefan and Adrian, and did a lot of pool time with them as well. But I think the biggest revelation of the trip was Oscar and Oliver, the Belgian cousins. (though they will insist that they're Dutch, as that's what their passports say. But they're from Brussels.) We'd only met them once before, also at Octavio and Dominique's, but it was in Florida that time, and it was in 2004. Now Oscar is 21 and Oliver is 19, and they've matured into some fantastically sound, bright young men - with a lot of "chispa", as they say in Spanish. Spark -- Creativity, a knack for finding the fun in any given situation. I've never seen people who can think of so many things to do with pool toys. There was this basketball hoop that floats on the water - basically an inner tube about 20 inches in diameter, and another one about 14 inches in diameter, separated and held together by three inflated rods, making for an overall shape between a cone and a pyramid. It floats in the water and you throw things into it. But Oscar and Oliver put it on as if it were a vest, their heads poking out the little inner tube, the larger one around their waists, and dove off the diving board with it on. Hilarity ensues - they don't quite get their feet completely into the water before the buoyancy of the thing shoots them back up and they land, sputtering, on their stomachs. And then Oliver decides to see if he can swim to the bottom while wearing it, starting from a standstill on the surface. He drives and pulls and pushes himself downward, but his legs, trying desperately to get some purchase, kicking in perfect swimming motions, simply wave and flail in the air above the surface. I have not laughed that hard in years.
Oscar and I took a couple of jogs on a lovely walking path in Birmingham while we were there. It's a mile or two from the house, and we would drive there in the morning. Just about every single foot of it is shaded (due to Birmingham's aforementioned love of trees), and it's probably two miles long. So we would go the length of it and back. He's 21, remember, and quite the field hockey sensation back home, as his his brother. So even out of shape, as he claimed to be, he kept me going a little faster than I probably would have otherwise. Besides which, we talked the whole time every day we went, about careers and family and the legal system in both countries. So I didn't get quite the distance I usually would, but it was easily as much of a workout.
Their Mum, Megs, was there as well, and it was great to get to know her better. We went to Six Flags at one point, near Atlanta, and I drove Dominique's suburban back from there with Megs in the front seat, and we had a great two-hour conversation. About her boys, about child rearing, about everything. (By the way, the exploded-tires-littering-the-highway phenomenon is much more pronounced in Georgia than in Alabama. At one point Megs asked if we had crossed into Alabama yet. I pointed to three or four tire husks and said "Not yet." Tongue-in-cheek, of course - but I turned out to be right.) It was the best chance I've gotten to know her since we met, and I feel much more connected now. It's hard when your extended family is spread across a couple of continents. Of all the sisters, she's the one I've known the least well, and it was a lot of fun to catch glimpses of each of the other three in her mannerisms, turns of phrase, sense of humor. Amazing how well you get to know the in-law side of your family after eleven years of marriage.
I also got to know Octavio a lot better. Driving around Birmingham with him to pick up Stefan from a drum lesson (Stefan has added the drums to his list of instruments he plays - it's now guitar, piano, drums; Adrian, meanwhile, played saxophone with Stefan's band at a party while we were there), Octavio showed me "the view", which refers to a short stretch of street atop Birmingham's probably-highest ridgeline, a gated-at-night-time community that has an unbelievable view of the city center and the hills beyond. There's a lot to be learned about Birmingham - its civil rights history, its industrial history (it still has active coal mines), all kinds of things. They really have found a great niche for themselves there. Octavio gave me some of the inside scoop on what it's like to essentially have two jobs - one teaching and researching at the university, and the other performing surgeries at the hospital. He was called out two or three nights in a row for emergency surgeries while we were there - transplants and such. When we got home Janneke and I started wondering if you could put a number on the lives he's saved over his career. It's got to be in the thousands.
I, meanwhile, had my status as the family "animal guy" cemented more fully. A while ago, a bird crashed into their window and lay there, stunned; they Skyped us to show us the bird and ask what I thought, having just gone through the incident with the falcon that crashed into our window. I turn out to have the reputation of being the guy who knows the most about animals in the family. (The bird eventually just recovered and flew away.) So when someone called out in dismay, "There's a dead animal in the pool filter!", someone else responded, quick as a flash: "Get Uncle Joe!" So I would come running and examine the creature.
Every time it happened (three times - once, with two bobbing there at the same time), the animal in question was a shrew. (I misidentified it as a vole at first. I had the labels mixed up in my head. I knew what it was - insectivorous, voracious, tiny ears and eyes, related to moles - but said the wrong name at first. Voles are to mice what hares are to rabbits.) The pool filter slurps out floating, dead insects and spins them lazily in a basket just outside the edge of the pool; the chamber this occurs in is covered over by a piece of stone with a hole drilled in the center to facilitate the lifting-out of the stone, followed by the basket, which can then be emptied. What appears to happen is that at night, the shrews stray near, and the scent of many accumulated, large, fleshy insects wafts out of the finger-hole. They love holes, particularly holes filled with insects, so they crawl in - and plop!, into the water and the basket, where they eventually drown.
So Octavio gets called out in the middle of the night to harvest and transplant hearts. I get called from my seat at the patio table to walk into the woods and shake dead shrews out of a plastic basket.
We both do what we can to make the world a better place.
Here's some evidence:
WIndow of the information center at the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Which appears to have fallen on hard times - 80% of the complex is unoccupied.
Inside, though, lots of fun to be had.
By kids of all ages.
Kids at the first rest stop we found on the Blue Ridge Parkway. You absolutely must go see this place.
Coppa...cubbuh...cummumma....
Friendlier denizens of the Virginia woods, also on the way up Humpback Mountain.
Q at the summit of Humpback Mountain.
Kids in the rocks. They love rocks.
There are a lot of them up there.
Birmingham: Guess who thought of lifting Q up to do this? ...Oscar and Oliver.
Here's T and Oscar. Not sure why, but we weren't so into picture-taking on this trip. "Enjoying" more than "documenting" the moments, I guess. Though I understand we got some great pics from Dominique.
Who at one point was attacked by a koala.
T and Megs, talking South African politics.
Dominique and the kids at Six Flags, about to ride the log flume.
T about to eat the log from the log flume at Six Flags.
Uncaptionable.
What a long, strange trip it was. You know about the first leg - down to Virginny, and then onward. The "onward" portion is what I shall herewith relate.
Our second nine-hour driving day was a long one. I mean, it was exactly as long as the other one, but it felt longer. We were pretty darn punchy by the time we actually rolled into Alabama. The geography was very interesting to observe, by the way - there is a clear geologic distinction between "middle-south", Virginia, and "deep south", or Georgia-Alabama. I can't totally put my finger on it, but things felt very different as we rolled out of the Virginia mountains and into the Georgia mountains.
The cities took on a very different, more-industrial tinge. And the highway that cuts across the far north-west corner of Georgia, basically serving only people who want to get from Virginia to Alabama, is downright post-apocalyptic. Grass that's been allowed to get two and three feet high in all the medians and on the shoulders, oddly purplish-grayish pavement, which, while not terribly bad to drive on, just plain seems unfriendly. And blown tire parts everywhere. That's another line you cross going south: The "nobody-picks-up-the-blowouts" line. Could be that they don't pick them up, could be that they have a hundred times more of them and the boys from the highway department just can't keep up. Either way. You expect every 18-wheeler to be sporting barbed wire and turrets manned by men in shoulderpads, firing crossbows.
Had me some goobers in Georgia. Boiled, salted peanuts in the shell, sold out of a crock pot in a gas station where I damn near bought me a twelve-dollar cowboy hat. I thought the goobers were kind of good, though Janneke thought they looked like cigarette butts floating in a piss-soaked toilet. It is a testament to my manhood that I kept right on eating after that observation.
Before I get to the family business that took place (there was much, and it was grand), I'll give you some general observations about my first trip to the Deep South. Alabama: It is hotter, and humider, but very strangely, it suffers from far fewer mosquitoes. The geography of northern Alabama is very mountainous - I say "very" because I expected it to be flat. Which shows my level of ignorance. Birmingham: Every building there, except the plain on which the city center sits, and in the flattish "village" centers that surround the heart of the city, is very, very hilly. So hilly that almost no one seemed to have a proper yard. They've kept their houses from washing away by leaving practically all the trees standing - it seemed we never saw a house that wasn't deeply shaded and protected by gorgeous stands of lush, full trees. It feels like a jungle sometimes, except that the roads are gorgeously maintained - honestly, I don't think I saw a pothole in all of Birmingham (not that I saw all of it) - my sister-and-brother-in-law do quite well, so it was a better part of Birmingham that I mostly got to see, but even so, no matter where we went, things seemed to be well-taken-care-of.
"Why did this surprise you?", my deep-south friends might well ask me with indignation. That is, they might, if I had any deep-south friends. Well, I'll tell you why: It's by far the poorest region of the US. It regularly outdoes the rest of the country in obesity, ignorance, racism, and hyper-religiosity. (I hereby declare. Though I'm sure I could back those assertions up with some numbers, if I had the inclination.) I expected that to color the whole place to some extent, and in Birmingham, it absolutely did not. You couldn't tell you were anywhere other than a prosperous, tastefully-laid-out upper-class neighborhood or suburban center. Where people talked in ridiculous accents.
(OK, I said that for comic effect. I absolutely do not consider their accents to be ridiculous. They are just as valid and historically justified as any accent, be it the flatness of the midwest, the broadness of the upper east coast, or the drabness and reservation of an English toff.)
(But they do sound funny.)
I also noticed some things with regard to race. We went at one point to a baseball game (the Birmingham Barons, the same minor-league team where Michael Jordan stank it up), and I had a good amount of crowd-watching. There were pee-lenty of African-Americans around - probably close to half the attendees. And I never saw one interracial couple. Not once. In Berkshire County, I truly think it would not be possible to walk through the mall, or go to a high school sporting event, or go to one of the miserable county fairs they have here for random reasons in the summer, without seeing one. None there at all.
Not that they don't interact - my nieces and nephews there appear to have a host of black friends from school. But it was peculiar, this race thing, at least in the eyes of a Northerner, in a lot of other ways - for example, in the Piggly Wiggly, I noticed that apart from the manager, absolutely all the checkers and bag boys and shelf-stockers were black. On my first trip - and, you know, it wasn't even true then. There was one white woman working there on my first trip. So, probably 13 out of 14 employees were black. On subsequent trips, I noticed a few more white employees. But easily 85% were black. Interesting - go to a situation where there will be big groups of people earning little money in Alabama, and the vast majority of them will be black. Go to places where you'll see big groups of wealthier people, and most of them will be white.
"Why should this surprise you? That's true in a larger sense in the rest of the US as well." I don't know - Maybe it shouldn't surprise me. Maybe. But it was different there, I think. Could be that it wasn't really - maybe I'm projecting. But I don't think so. In Berkshire County, for example, you get waited on in the fast-food restaurants by people of any color. Granted, there are far fewer blacks in Berkshire County, but that almost makes the observation more interesting. The argument would go that we have fewer blacks in our low-paying jobs in western Massachusetts, not because blacks are more prosperous here, but because there are fewer blacks. Thus implying, I suppose, that wherever you find lots of black people, they will be doing low-paying jobs, and ergo, it's logical that the checkout staff in Piggly-Wiggly in Alabama should be black? That doesn't square with me either. I mean, it may mathematically be true, but I still find it objectionable that it be so. And so maybe the truth is objectionable...? Perhaps it's just the numbers that struck me. No more prosperous in the South than here, but far more of them. Which made it that much more evident to me that the economic state of African-Americans in this country is by and large very bad.
Surprising? No. But what it points to is the way in which it is possible for me, given where I live, to sail through my day without being consciously aware of that. It isn't something I'm reminded of at every turn. Maybe I'd be better off, in terms of my awareness of the state of my nation, if I were more aware of it. And maybe as a nation we'd be better off if everybody had the sort of tiny, daily "Katrina" moments that would bring this into sharper focus. By that I mean the shock - Shock! - that so many of us, including me, felt when we saw the images of the Katrina destruction and saw that 97% of the victims were black. And we said to ourselves, "What the hey?" Unlike most Republicans, I don't feel that seeing this fact is racism. To paraphrase Dennis Miller, "Pointing out that the victims were almost all black is not being racist. It's being minimally observant." And there's a lot of useful information we can glean from that. "Hey," we should say. "How come, when we evacuate, we leave all the black people behind?" Shouldn't that merit some conversation, at least? I mean, if they had all been wearing cowboy hats, I would have expected someone to say, "Hey, let's try to sort out this cowboy-hat-equals-left-behind phenomenon."
If, every day, dopes like me were forced to observe, "Goodness, look at that. Just about all the lowest-paying jobs are taken up by black people. What's the deal there?", maybe we'd be voting differently.
Anyway...Lots to think about.
So much for Alabama. The family: Octavio and Dominique were as generous as hosts can possibly be. We had the downstairs...um...south...west...?...corner of the house to ourselves. We could close off two doors and have a hallway with our bedrooms and the kids' room, as well as our bathroom, in isolation from the rest of the bunch, or could open it up and let the sunshine in. We had our own door to the back yard, where the swimming pool beckoned.
And Q and T answered the call. Daily. Several times, for hours at a time. T, by the way, learned to swim on this trip! She had been using a life vest for a while now, but at one point, she asked if we could try without it, and then she was managing to stay afloat for a few seconds, then she was lunging from the side of the pool out toward us, and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she was dogpaddling her way across the whole pool. It happened really, really fast, and the fact that every time she did it she got thunderous ovations from her gorgeous, beaming, cool-as-can-be teenage cousins can't have hurt in the motivation department.
Gorgeous and cool they all were, too. Flavia in particular, as far as T was concerned - the two of them just click. Flavia wasn't just resigning herself to be the babysitter, either - she genuinely enjoys T's company, and the two of them were impossible to separate. Not bad, considering the nine-year age gap. We kept on trying to rescue Flavia from having to spend too much time with her, but every time we did she'd look at us like we were crazy.
Q, meanwhile, played a lot of video games with the Alabama boys, Stefan and Adrian, and did a lot of pool time with them as well. But I think the biggest revelation of the trip was Oscar and Oliver, the Belgian cousins. (though they will insist that they're Dutch, as that's what their passports say. But they're from Brussels.) We'd only met them once before, also at Octavio and Dominique's, but it was in Florida that time, and it was in 2004. Now Oscar is 21 and Oliver is 19, and they've matured into some fantastically sound, bright young men - with a lot of "chispa", as they say in Spanish. Spark -- Creativity, a knack for finding the fun in any given situation. I've never seen people who can think of so many things to do with pool toys. There was this basketball hoop that floats on the water - basically an inner tube about 20 inches in diameter, and another one about 14 inches in diameter, separated and held together by three inflated rods, making for an overall shape between a cone and a pyramid. It floats in the water and you throw things into it. But Oscar and Oliver put it on as if it were a vest, their heads poking out the little inner tube, the larger one around their waists, and dove off the diving board with it on. Hilarity ensues - they don't quite get their feet completely into the water before the buoyancy of the thing shoots them back up and they land, sputtering, on their stomachs. And then Oliver decides to see if he can swim to the bottom while wearing it, starting from a standstill on the surface. He drives and pulls and pushes himself downward, but his legs, trying desperately to get some purchase, kicking in perfect swimming motions, simply wave and flail in the air above the surface. I have not laughed that hard in years.
Oscar and I took a couple of jogs on a lovely walking path in Birmingham while we were there. It's a mile or two from the house, and we would drive there in the morning. Just about every single foot of it is shaded (due to Birmingham's aforementioned love of trees), and it's probably two miles long. So we would go the length of it and back. He's 21, remember, and quite the field hockey sensation back home, as his his brother. So even out of shape, as he claimed to be, he kept me going a little faster than I probably would have otherwise. Besides which, we talked the whole time every day we went, about careers and family and the legal system in both countries. So I didn't get quite the distance I usually would, but it was easily as much of a workout.
Their Mum, Megs, was there as well, and it was great to get to know her better. We went to Six Flags at one point, near Atlanta, and I drove Dominique's suburban back from there with Megs in the front seat, and we had a great two-hour conversation. About her boys, about child rearing, about everything. (By the way, the exploded-tires-littering-the-highway phenomenon is much more pronounced in Georgia than in Alabama. At one point Megs asked if we had crossed into Alabama yet. I pointed to three or four tire husks and said "Not yet." Tongue-in-cheek, of course - but I turned out to be right.) It was the best chance I've gotten to know her since we met, and I feel much more connected now. It's hard when your extended family is spread across a couple of continents. Of all the sisters, she's the one I've known the least well, and it was a lot of fun to catch glimpses of each of the other three in her mannerisms, turns of phrase, sense of humor. Amazing how well you get to know the in-law side of your family after eleven years of marriage.
I also got to know Octavio a lot better. Driving around Birmingham with him to pick up Stefan from a drum lesson (Stefan has added the drums to his list of instruments he plays - it's now guitar, piano, drums; Adrian, meanwhile, played saxophone with Stefan's band at a party while we were there), Octavio showed me "the view", which refers to a short stretch of street atop Birmingham's probably-highest ridgeline, a gated-at-night-time community that has an unbelievable view of the city center and the hills beyond. There's a lot to be learned about Birmingham - its civil rights history, its industrial history (it still has active coal mines), all kinds of things. They really have found a great niche for themselves there. Octavio gave me some of the inside scoop on what it's like to essentially have two jobs - one teaching and researching at the university, and the other performing surgeries at the hospital. He was called out two or three nights in a row for emergency surgeries while we were there - transplants and such. When we got home Janneke and I started wondering if you could put a number on the lives he's saved over his career. It's got to be in the thousands.
I, meanwhile, had my status as the family "animal guy" cemented more fully. A while ago, a bird crashed into their window and lay there, stunned; they Skyped us to show us the bird and ask what I thought, having just gone through the incident with the falcon that crashed into our window. I turn out to have the reputation of being the guy who knows the most about animals in the family. (The bird eventually just recovered and flew away.) So when someone called out in dismay, "There's a dead animal in the pool filter!", someone else responded, quick as a flash: "Get Uncle Joe!" So I would come running and examine the creature.
Every time it happened (three times - once, with two bobbing there at the same time), the animal in question was a shrew. (I misidentified it as a vole at first. I had the labels mixed up in my head. I knew what it was - insectivorous, voracious, tiny ears and eyes, related to moles - but said the wrong name at first. Voles are to mice what hares are to rabbits.) The pool filter slurps out floating, dead insects and spins them lazily in a basket just outside the edge of the pool; the chamber this occurs in is covered over by a piece of stone with a hole drilled in the center to facilitate the lifting-out of the stone, followed by the basket, which can then be emptied. What appears to happen is that at night, the shrews stray near, and the scent of many accumulated, large, fleshy insects wafts out of the finger-hole. They love holes, particularly holes filled with insects, so they crawl in - and plop!, into the water and the basket, where they eventually drown.
So Octavio gets called out in the middle of the night to harvest and transplant hearts. I get called from my seat at the patio table to walk into the woods and shake dead shrews out of a plastic basket.
We both do what we can to make the world a better place.
Here's some evidence:
WIndow of the information center at the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Which appears to have fallen on hard times - 80% of the complex is unoccupied.
Inside, though, lots of fun to be had.
By kids of all ages.
Kids at the first rest stop we found on the Blue Ridge Parkway. You absolutely must go see this place.
Coppa...cubbuh...cummumma....
Friendlier denizens of the Virginia woods, also on the way up Humpback Mountain.
Q at the summit of Humpback Mountain.
Kids in the rocks. They love rocks.
There are a lot of them up there.
Birmingham: Guess who thought of lifting Q up to do this? ...Oscar and Oliver.
Here's T and Oscar. Not sure why, but we weren't so into picture-taking on this trip. "Enjoying" more than "documenting" the moments, I guess. Though I understand we got some great pics from Dominique.
Who at one point was attacked by a koala.
T and Megs, talking South African politics.
Dominique and the kids at Six Flags, about to ride the log flume.
T about to eat the log from the log flume at Six Flags.
Uncaptionable.
Monday, July 6, 2009
High-Altitude Fabulousness
Holy cow, what a fulfilling day of familial fun. Crazy, crazy good day. Where to begin, I wonder.
Up at the crack of 6:45 to don my running clothes and hit the streets. We're in a strip mall-type area on the edge of Waynesboro, which we'll never truly enter, and there are absolutely no sidewalks anywhere. Pedestrians do not exist in the mind's eye of the Waynesboro city fathers. I mean, nothing. There was about 100 yards of sidewalk on the street in front of an elementary school (which is basically sandwiched between a Home Depot and a Ruby Tuesday's), probably the result of some obscure by-law dating from the same era as the laws that made 'em let the coloreds into the dang schools in the first place. That was it. All day in Waynesboro, we saw a hundred yards of sidewalk.
I ran 25 minutes in one direction and 25 back, and after jogging in the ditch for a while I took a right at a stoplight and hit a residential neighborhood. Quite nice, ranch homes, seemed a lot like he gated community where my sister in law and her family lived in Florida, but it wasn't gated. It had a golf course snaking through it, which also made it feel tony and private, but it truly appeared to be public. After fifteen minutes or so I can to a public park, which held a swimming pool, softball fields, several open-air performance spaces...it was truly lovely. A gorgeous municipal park. Say what you will about these sidewalk-hatin' Southrons, they build and maintain a mean park.
Back to the hotel, breakfast (I had two bananas - feeling kind of portly lately), and then we hit the road. The lady at the front desk had said "Ain't but one way to git to the poark. Git on 64 and git off at exit 9. You're raht thurr." So we got onto Highway 64, headed east, and promptly saw a sign for exit 95. Turns out, in Virginia, the words "nine" and "ninety-nine" are indistinguishable. Kind of like "there" and "their". Must be hell at auctions.
So we got off at exit "nahahaha", and sure enough, we wound up right at the entrance to the park. Stopped at the visitor center and were informed that there were a number of accessible areas for the kids, including a place 6 miles south on the Blue Ridge Parkway that included a museum of mountain life and a mountain ridgetop called "Humpback Rock" that they'd be able to hike to. Off we went.
This dang Blue Ridge Parkway thing is the eighth wonder of the frickin' world. It snakes along the mountaintops, with a top speed limit of 45, peppered liberally with ab-so-lute-ly spectacular overlooks and hiking trails all along its length, and keeps going south through Virginia and North Carolina for FOUR HUNDRED SOME MILES! How in God's name did I have no idea this thing existed? It is fabulously maintained, incredibly picturesque, and FOUR HUNDRED MILES LONG! It must be paradise for cyclists. I know the motorcyclists love it, as we saw a lot of them, but not nearly as many cyclists as you might think.
(By the way, for you motorcyclists out there: If your engine is loud, you suck. You. Personally. You are an inconsiderate and obnoxious jackass. There is no reason for your damn muffler to be so loud - it's not keeping you safe. If it were, those BMW bikes and Honda Goldwings would be deathtraps, because they make so little noise I think it actually gets quieter in the vicinity when they pass. All you're doing is slowly poisoning the day of every single person you pass on your merry Piss-Off Tour every summer, ruining the scenery with your horrid machine noises, mile after mile after mile. You are a prick, Loud Bike Owner, and I hate you.)
Anyhoo, we went and saw the museum, which is an actual 1800's cabin thats got three people working in it, and they are the loveliest, most open and warm people you can imagine, engaging kids with Jedi mind tricks that make them grin as they sit and play a dulcimer, weave at a loom, play graces, and prowl about a cabin wondering where they'd have slept had they been raised there. We were at the cabin nearly an hour, and the kids left a little reluctantly. Just fabulous people.
On across the parkway to the trail leading up to Humpback Rock. Q was a little whiny (only a little), and T is an absolute mountain goat. Both scampered happily most of the way - Q, at one point, got everyone's attention because he'd seen a snake in a stump. We took pictures, watched for probably a minute and a half - it never once moved. Gorgeous. And later on I spotted a doe, thirty feet away off the trail; we all watched it eat a while and thrilled as it walked within ten feet of us before sauntering off to look for more to eat. Beautiful.
And the view from the top of the mountain, perched as we were atop crags that were the most majestic things our two kids had yet seen in their lives, was perfect. We ate a light lunch, and walked back down.
Where the guys working on the fence near the parking lot looked at our photo of the snake and told us it was a copperhead. Totally deadly.
I came to a few minutes later, let the rangers and workmen help me to my feet, and then we all walked wobbly-kneed back to the car for another hour and a half of the Parkway. We trooped south to look at a waterfall, which turned out not to be worth the trip at all, in and of itself - but every single fifty-yard stretch of this parkway is so gorgeous you just can't feel like time there is time wasted. We got out of the park and back to Waynesboro around 3:30.
Picked up some popcorn chicken and drinks at KFC and hit he park I'd found this morning for some jungle-jim climbin', football tossin', soccer ball kickin', and all-around fun in the sun-havin'. (It had been about 70 degrees up on the Parkway, but it was 82 down in Waynesboro.) Whereupon we retired to the hotel and hit the pool.
Q swam more fiercely and aggressively today than I had ever seen him. He went the whole length of the pool without taking a breath! Which, if you know Q, is a real feat. He's never been that into swimming, let alone anything that requires physical danger or discomfort, but he was all over it today. Working on his crawl, working on underwater strokes...Great. And T! She is so much braver than Q was at her age. Jumping into the pool on her own (with a life vest), standing tippy-toe without a life vest in the three-foot end of the pool so she could practice her strokes (she can't swim as it stands), holding her breath under the water for as long as she could...Great fun. So glad we picked this hotel.
Applebee's for supper, which was clean, predictable, and inexpensive. And then back to the hotel, where we are all on the verge of collapse. A very good, full, unhurried day. Vacation is good.
Hitting the road tomorrow - this time Tuesday I should be writing this from Birmingham, Alabama (or, as T puts it, "Burping Hampster, Alabama"). Wish us luck.
I'll post the pictures as soon as I can turn my camera on without going into anaphylactic shock at the thought of the two or three photos of a co...a cop...copper...cuppamuh...cubbuh...cup....
Excuse me. I have to go lie own.
Up at the crack of 6:45 to don my running clothes and hit the streets. We're in a strip mall-type area on the edge of Waynesboro, which we'll never truly enter, and there are absolutely no sidewalks anywhere. Pedestrians do not exist in the mind's eye of the Waynesboro city fathers. I mean, nothing. There was about 100 yards of sidewalk on the street in front of an elementary school (which is basically sandwiched between a Home Depot and a Ruby Tuesday's), probably the result of some obscure by-law dating from the same era as the laws that made 'em let the coloreds into the dang schools in the first place. That was it. All day in Waynesboro, we saw a hundred yards of sidewalk.
I ran 25 minutes in one direction and 25 back, and after jogging in the ditch for a while I took a right at a stoplight and hit a residential neighborhood. Quite nice, ranch homes, seemed a lot like he gated community where my sister in law and her family lived in Florida, but it wasn't gated. It had a golf course snaking through it, which also made it feel tony and private, but it truly appeared to be public. After fifteen minutes or so I can to a public park, which held a swimming pool, softball fields, several open-air performance spaces...it was truly lovely. A gorgeous municipal park. Say what you will about these sidewalk-hatin' Southrons, they build and maintain a mean park.
Back to the hotel, breakfast (I had two bananas - feeling kind of portly lately), and then we hit the road. The lady at the front desk had said "Ain't but one way to git to the poark. Git on 64 and git off at exit 9. You're raht thurr." So we got onto Highway 64, headed east, and promptly saw a sign for exit 95. Turns out, in Virginia, the words "nine" and "ninety-nine" are indistinguishable. Kind of like "there" and "their". Must be hell at auctions.
So we got off at exit "nahahaha", and sure enough, we wound up right at the entrance to the park. Stopped at the visitor center and were informed that there were a number of accessible areas for the kids, including a place 6 miles south on the Blue Ridge Parkway that included a museum of mountain life and a mountain ridgetop called "Humpback Rock" that they'd be able to hike to. Off we went.
This dang Blue Ridge Parkway thing is the eighth wonder of the frickin' world. It snakes along the mountaintops, with a top speed limit of 45, peppered liberally with ab-so-lute-ly spectacular overlooks and hiking trails all along its length, and keeps going south through Virginia and North Carolina for FOUR HUNDRED SOME MILES! How in God's name did I have no idea this thing existed? It is fabulously maintained, incredibly picturesque, and FOUR HUNDRED MILES LONG! It must be paradise for cyclists. I know the motorcyclists love it, as we saw a lot of them, but not nearly as many cyclists as you might think.
(By the way, for you motorcyclists out there: If your engine is loud, you suck. You. Personally. You are an inconsiderate and obnoxious jackass. There is no reason for your damn muffler to be so loud - it's not keeping you safe. If it were, those BMW bikes and Honda Goldwings would be deathtraps, because they make so little noise I think it actually gets quieter in the vicinity when they pass. All you're doing is slowly poisoning the day of every single person you pass on your merry Piss-Off Tour every summer, ruining the scenery with your horrid machine noises, mile after mile after mile. You are a prick, Loud Bike Owner, and I hate you.)
Anyhoo, we went and saw the museum, which is an actual 1800's cabin thats got three people working in it, and they are the loveliest, most open and warm people you can imagine, engaging kids with Jedi mind tricks that make them grin as they sit and play a dulcimer, weave at a loom, play graces, and prowl about a cabin wondering where they'd have slept had they been raised there. We were at the cabin nearly an hour, and the kids left a little reluctantly. Just fabulous people.
On across the parkway to the trail leading up to Humpback Rock. Q was a little whiny (only a little), and T is an absolute mountain goat. Both scampered happily most of the way - Q, at one point, got everyone's attention because he'd seen a snake in a stump. We took pictures, watched for probably a minute and a half - it never once moved. Gorgeous. And later on I spotted a doe, thirty feet away off the trail; we all watched it eat a while and thrilled as it walked within ten feet of us before sauntering off to look for more to eat. Beautiful.
And the view from the top of the mountain, perched as we were atop crags that were the most majestic things our two kids had yet seen in their lives, was perfect. We ate a light lunch, and walked back down.
Where the guys working on the fence near the parking lot looked at our photo of the snake and told us it was a copperhead. Totally deadly.
I came to a few minutes later, let the rangers and workmen help me to my feet, and then we all walked wobbly-kneed back to the car for another hour and a half of the Parkway. We trooped south to look at a waterfall, which turned out not to be worth the trip at all, in and of itself - but every single fifty-yard stretch of this parkway is so gorgeous you just can't feel like time there is time wasted. We got out of the park and back to Waynesboro around 3:30.
Picked up some popcorn chicken and drinks at KFC and hit he park I'd found this morning for some jungle-jim climbin', football tossin', soccer ball kickin', and all-around fun in the sun-havin'. (It had been about 70 degrees up on the Parkway, but it was 82 down in Waynesboro.) Whereupon we retired to the hotel and hit the pool.
Q swam more fiercely and aggressively today than I had ever seen him. He went the whole length of the pool without taking a breath! Which, if you know Q, is a real feat. He's never been that into swimming, let alone anything that requires physical danger or discomfort, but he was all over it today. Working on his crawl, working on underwater strokes...Great. And T! She is so much braver than Q was at her age. Jumping into the pool on her own (with a life vest), standing tippy-toe without a life vest in the three-foot end of the pool so she could practice her strokes (she can't swim as it stands), holding her breath under the water for as long as she could...Great fun. So glad we picked this hotel.
Applebee's for supper, which was clean, predictable, and inexpensive. And then back to the hotel, where we are all on the verge of collapse. A very good, full, unhurried day. Vacation is good.
Hitting the road tomorrow - this time Tuesday I should be writing this from Birmingham, Alabama (or, as T puts it, "Burping Hampster, Alabama"). Wish us luck.
I'll post the pictures as soon as I can turn my camera on without going into anaphylactic shock at the thought of the two or three photos of a co...a cop...copper...cuppamuh...cubbuh...cup....
Excuse me. I have to go lie own.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Food! Glorious food!
Q and T are asleep in one of the queen-sized beds, Janneke sits and reads the New York Times in the other, and I sit and do this, on the free wireless connection in our hotel room in Waynesboro, VA. We are halfway to Alabama, and we are going to take a breather here for a day before diving back into the car.
A place where our two tykes do remarkably well. Nary a squabble today in 9 car-hours (10 clock-hours) of driving. It helps, of course, to have video games, magic electronic talky-books, DVD players, snacks, and limitless patience on the part of at least one parent. Well, OK, we have everything but that last one. But patience was hardly needed - they were just super. And only at the very end did we do any sort of wrong-turn-type brain freeze - Pulling off the highway, Mapquest directions fluttering to the floor, their purpose served, literally looking at the front of our hotel, eagerly awaiting the turn into the parking lot, we held out our arms in anguish as the intersection we had turned into became not the portico of a Best Western, but rather the return ramp onto Highway 64, this time heading north. Three miles and a recovered directions sheet later, we pulled to the same intersection, drove carefully through it, and THEN turned left onto DeWitt Boulevard, followed quickly by Apple Tree Lane. Disembarked, checked in, changed clothes, and hit the pool (Q, T, me) and the fitness center (Janneke) for our pre-supper wind-down.
We walked to the Cracker Barrel restaurant next to the hotel (frustrated by the lack of a sidewalk linking the two) on my insistence. We've never eaten there! It'll be a new experience - not like going to the KFC four hundred yards further up the strip! Look at the parking lot - it's full! The menu looks great! Let's try it!
Turns out, though, there is a very large machine at the back of every Cracker Barrel restaurant that sucks all the flavor out of the food before they serve it. Another gizmo injects fat, sugar, and salt into the damp, squishy husks of what used to be perfectly good ingredients, and then they truck it out to be devoured at the troughs by hordes of fleshy, gap-toothed, God-fearin', kid-smackin', sleeveless-T-shirt-wearin', Wranglers-seam-bustin' Southerners. Who are very polite.
(The flavor they suck out of the food, by the way, is loaded into tanker trucks and shipped to a factory in Georgia, where it's refined and put into tubes and distributed nationwide as fireworks.)
Tomorrow, we'll hit the Shenandoah National (and not State, Janneke, for the umpteenth time) Park for a day of hiking in the mostly-sunny, high-of-82-degree glory that will be July the 6th. We'll top off the day with another visit to the pool and a shame-faced slink straight past the Cracker Barrel and off to another bright star in Waynesboro's culinary constellation.
Applebee's.
A place where our two tykes do remarkably well. Nary a squabble today in 9 car-hours (10 clock-hours) of driving. It helps, of course, to have video games, magic electronic talky-books, DVD players, snacks, and limitless patience on the part of at least one parent. Well, OK, we have everything but that last one. But patience was hardly needed - they were just super. And only at the very end did we do any sort of wrong-turn-type brain freeze - Pulling off the highway, Mapquest directions fluttering to the floor, their purpose served, literally looking at the front of our hotel, eagerly awaiting the turn into the parking lot, we held out our arms in anguish as the intersection we had turned into became not the portico of a Best Western, but rather the return ramp onto Highway 64, this time heading north. Three miles and a recovered directions sheet later, we pulled to the same intersection, drove carefully through it, and THEN turned left onto DeWitt Boulevard, followed quickly by Apple Tree Lane. Disembarked, checked in, changed clothes, and hit the pool (Q, T, me) and the fitness center (Janneke) for our pre-supper wind-down.
We walked to the Cracker Barrel restaurant next to the hotel (frustrated by the lack of a sidewalk linking the two) on my insistence. We've never eaten there! It'll be a new experience - not like going to the KFC four hundred yards further up the strip! Look at the parking lot - it's full! The menu looks great! Let's try it!
Turns out, though, there is a very large machine at the back of every Cracker Barrel restaurant that sucks all the flavor out of the food before they serve it. Another gizmo injects fat, sugar, and salt into the damp, squishy husks of what used to be perfectly good ingredients, and then they truck it out to be devoured at the troughs by hordes of fleshy, gap-toothed, God-fearin', kid-smackin', sleeveless-T-shirt-wearin', Wranglers-seam-bustin' Southerners. Who are very polite.
(The flavor they suck out of the food, by the way, is loaded into tanker trucks and shipped to a factory in Georgia, where it's refined and put into tubes and distributed nationwide as fireworks.)
Tomorrow, we'll hit the Shenandoah National (and not State, Janneke, for the umpteenth time) Park for a day of hiking in the mostly-sunny, high-of-82-degree glory that will be July the 6th. We'll top off the day with another visit to the pool and a shame-faced slink straight past the Cracker Barrel and off to another bright star in Waynesboro's culinary constellation.
Applebee's.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Continued Progress
Hey, folks - July 3rd, night of the big sleepover. Jay, Chris, and Henry are here, watching "Eragon" in the living room. Their sleeping arrangements are set:
...The inflate-a-beds are in it, the sleeping bags are arrayed, and T is off in another room, watching a far less scary film. Not even sure what it is - Oh. Janneke just told me. "Kit Ketteridge", I think is what she said. From the "American Girl" doll series. Big fun. Here she is:
And here are her sleeping arrangements:
And here's the latest update on the project that has you all on the edges of your seats:
1,100:
Lots of last-minute stuff had to be done for this sleepover. We realized that one of our inflate-a-beds was a thing of the past, having been tossed for repeated leakages; neither of us had realized it until today. So we (I) had to charge out to the hardware store and buy another one. And on the same trip, I picked up the pizza.
1,200:
I'm probably going to go down in local 3rd-grade lore as the strictest and meanest Dad in Williamstown. We had some spitting happening at pizza time, which I put a stop to, and some backtalk at the same time, which I also brought to a close. And then there was the negotiating that resulted in permission to play flashlight tag between the end of the movie and the entry to the tent, during which I told them the history and future use of my compost pile, and made it blindingly clear that it was absolutely, positively off-limits. A couple of the boys, at different points in my speech, turned to other boys, bored, and began to talk, and I brought a fairly gentle end to that as well. No one was injured, but I think I might have taken a little bit of the air out of the proceedings. Which isn't a bad thing: there was decidedly too much air in it at the time.
1,300:
T and I brought Skittles to the boarding facility this afternoon. It's a lovely place, and she'll have quite comfortable digs and daily fifteen-minute play sessions with a staff member (twice daily every other day, which cost us $5 more per day). When she got out of the pet carrier, she curled up in the arms of the staffer and immediately began to purr. That was a great sign that she'll be happy, but I have to say, it also kind of made me grumble. Didn't seem nervous or upset at all to be getting put away in a cage. She's a very dog-like cat, but in the end, she's still a cat, I guess.
1,400:
On the way down the driveway, having dropped her off, I asked T if she was thirsty and would like to stop and get something to drink. I didn't get an answer, so I asked her again. Still nothing, so I lowered the music and looked in the mirror - and saw her lower lip jutting out as she began to shake with sobs. She was very unhappy to be without her Skittly-Bittly. But I tried to cheer her up by talking about how cool it will be to get back in a couple of weeks and see how much taller and longer and thicker Skittles will be. She was kind of into that, but some snuffling still continued all the way home.
1,500:
Movie-watching, by the way, has pretty much disintegrated out in the living room. They're play-acting that they're people from the Indiana Jones movies, with guns and cat toys, while "Eragon" drones on in the background. Part of me wants to offer to turn it off, but another part says "Y'know, they're staying out there until the cool parts come on. The movie is containing them, and allowing you to do this." I think I'll listen to that part.
1,600:
I'm filming a lot of little shots of the birthday party, but I'm afraid of going out there to film any of this. Don't want to encourage them, though. And now the two least-interested in the movie have gone back to Q's room to play with Legos. Meaning they're going to make as big a mess as they possibly can - which will make it all the more difficult to hide my smile when I inform them that they have to clean it up. Call me a party-pooper, but Q has several friends (two of whom are here) who actively try to make as ridiculous a mess as possible and then sneak out the door with their parents without having to tidy up. That's not going to happen tonight, believe me.
1,700:
Am I a jerk? Maybe. But honestly, there needs to be some civilizin' done on some of these fellers. And I'm the man for the job...But, speaking of politics, one of the birthday presents Q's getting this year from his Auntie Jayne, who had asked me to let her know what Q might like, but back to whom I had never gotten (sorry, Auntie Jayne; thanks, Auntie Jayne!), is a ticket to go see an MLS game in Boston. Revolution vs. the Los Angeles Galaxy. Beckham theoretically plays for them, and would be back by the day of the game (August 8th), but I fully expect him by that time to have wriggled his way free of MLS and be playing in Europe again. But what the heck, it'll be fun for us. Better soccer than we're going to see anywhere else.
1,800 (I scraped away the chips between the last one and this one):
We started brushing Skittles daily these past few days, and the difference is unbelievable. She's so soft and fluffy now - we go through a lot of treats, drawing her near and trying to get her to associate nice things with the process (which, by itself, she isn't fond of), and she suddenly even seems cleaner. I would never have thought I'd like having a long-haired cat - time was, I'd have thought of it as an effete pomposity. Something people like us didn't do. But now, I figure, Hey, what's wrong with paying attention to your pets every day? Keeping them trained and happy and tractable? What's wrong with celebrating the loveliness of the tail of a well-brushed Maine Coon as she slinks about the place, looking for the kids, intercepting soccer balls as if they were giant mice?
Nothin', that's what.
1,900:
OK, I've had enough. I'm off to suffer through the last hour or so of the birthday party before they head out to the tent, hopefully never to be heard from again. Until morning, that is. When we eat the waffles.
...The inflate-a-beds are in it, the sleeping bags are arrayed, and T is off in another room, watching a far less scary film. Not even sure what it is - Oh. Janneke just told me. "Kit Ketteridge", I think is what she said. From the "American Girl" doll series. Big fun. Here she is:
And here are her sleeping arrangements:
And here's the latest update on the project that has you all on the edges of your seats:
1,100:
Lots of last-minute stuff had to be done for this sleepover. We realized that one of our inflate-a-beds was a thing of the past, having been tossed for repeated leakages; neither of us had realized it until today. So we (I) had to charge out to the hardware store and buy another one. And on the same trip, I picked up the pizza.
1,200:
I'm probably going to go down in local 3rd-grade lore as the strictest and meanest Dad in Williamstown. We had some spitting happening at pizza time, which I put a stop to, and some backtalk at the same time, which I also brought to a close. And then there was the negotiating that resulted in permission to play flashlight tag between the end of the movie and the entry to the tent, during which I told them the history and future use of my compost pile, and made it blindingly clear that it was absolutely, positively off-limits. A couple of the boys, at different points in my speech, turned to other boys, bored, and began to talk, and I brought a fairly gentle end to that as well. No one was injured, but I think I might have taken a little bit of the air out of the proceedings. Which isn't a bad thing: there was decidedly too much air in it at the time.
1,300:
T and I brought Skittles to the boarding facility this afternoon. It's a lovely place, and she'll have quite comfortable digs and daily fifteen-minute play sessions with a staff member (twice daily every other day, which cost us $5 more per day). When she got out of the pet carrier, she curled up in the arms of the staffer and immediately began to purr. That was a great sign that she'll be happy, but I have to say, it also kind of made me grumble. Didn't seem nervous or upset at all to be getting put away in a cage. She's a very dog-like cat, but in the end, she's still a cat, I guess.
1,400:
On the way down the driveway, having dropped her off, I asked T if she was thirsty and would like to stop and get something to drink. I didn't get an answer, so I asked her again. Still nothing, so I lowered the music and looked in the mirror - and saw her lower lip jutting out as she began to shake with sobs. She was very unhappy to be without her Skittly-Bittly. But I tried to cheer her up by talking about how cool it will be to get back in a couple of weeks and see how much taller and longer and thicker Skittles will be. She was kind of into that, but some snuffling still continued all the way home.
1,500:
Movie-watching, by the way, has pretty much disintegrated out in the living room. They're play-acting that they're people from the Indiana Jones movies, with guns and cat toys, while "Eragon" drones on in the background. Part of me wants to offer to turn it off, but another part says "Y'know, they're staying out there until the cool parts come on. The movie is containing them, and allowing you to do this." I think I'll listen to that part.
1,600:
I'm filming a lot of little shots of the birthday party, but I'm afraid of going out there to film any of this. Don't want to encourage them, though. And now the two least-interested in the movie have gone back to Q's room to play with Legos. Meaning they're going to make as big a mess as they possibly can - which will make it all the more difficult to hide my smile when I inform them that they have to clean it up. Call me a party-pooper, but Q has several friends (two of whom are here) who actively try to make as ridiculous a mess as possible and then sneak out the door with their parents without having to tidy up. That's not going to happen tonight, believe me.
1,700:
Am I a jerk? Maybe. But honestly, there needs to be some civilizin' done on some of these fellers. And I'm the man for the job...But, speaking of politics, one of the birthday presents Q's getting this year from his Auntie Jayne, who had asked me to let her know what Q might like, but back to whom I had never gotten (sorry, Auntie Jayne; thanks, Auntie Jayne!), is a ticket to go see an MLS game in Boston. Revolution vs. the Los Angeles Galaxy. Beckham theoretically plays for them, and would be back by the day of the game (August 8th), but I fully expect him by that time to have wriggled his way free of MLS and be playing in Europe again. But what the heck, it'll be fun for us. Better soccer than we're going to see anywhere else.
1,800 (I scraped away the chips between the last one and this one):
We started brushing Skittles daily these past few days, and the difference is unbelievable. She's so soft and fluffy now - we go through a lot of treats, drawing her near and trying to get her to associate nice things with the process (which, by itself, she isn't fond of), and she suddenly even seems cleaner. I would never have thought I'd like having a long-haired cat - time was, I'd have thought of it as an effete pomposity. Something people like us didn't do. But now, I figure, Hey, what's wrong with paying attention to your pets every day? Keeping them trained and happy and tractable? What's wrong with celebrating the loveliness of the tail of a well-brushed Maine Coon as she slinks about the place, looking for the kids, intercepting soccer balls as if they were giant mice?
Nothin', that's what.
1,900:
OK, I've had enough. I'm off to suffer through the last hour or so of the birthday party before they head out to the tent, hopefully never to be heard from again. Until morning, that is. When we eat the waffles.
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