Hey, folks - again, apologies for the long layoff. It just seems like Facebook has taken so much of the wind out of the blog's sails -I communicate with pretty much everybody that way, and update videos there and give quick news items out and post photos...The blog seems strangely quaint and antiquated. But somehow I don't want to let it go; I like to write, I like to have it out there, like the traps I used to lay for muskrats and foxes, and then occasionally forget about, only to find them, months later, with a skeletal muskrat disintegrating in them. The blog lies out there in the ether, waiting to be stumbled upon or remembered by someone who knows me, and I'm sure somebody occasionally checks it out. I'm attached to it; it's a sentimental space. So I'm keeping it around.
Though I have to say, by the time I have time to sit and write on it, most of what passes for news around here has been communicated. So I wind up painting some particular event in vivid colors. Perhaps that's the tack I should take: it's an outlet for intensely-seen events, things I found moving or which piqued my interest, which I then share in a detailed way. Like what? Oh, I don't know - I could paint for you our Christmas Eve morning.
Rolled out of bed late (for me) - 8:05, which is pretty typical for a weekend day - and found the fire roaring in the woodstove, thanks to the little lady of the house. Well, the larger of the little ladies. Very cozy scene - breakfast had been had by all but me, the pets were lounging by the fire. I dedicated myself immediately to eliminating a minute of footage from the ping pong video in the previous post - I had shown it to Janneke the previous evening, and we both agreed that it had dragged a bit. Didn't take me long. Q watched and approved, but T was uninterested, rapt as she was in a particularly thrilling episode of "Max and Ruby". TV on Christmas Eve?! Yep. We're sometimes that sort of folk.
Mid-morning, the four of us piled into the car to take Clarabelle to the Cole Fields (unofficial) Dog Park, either to let her run in the woods, should there be no hounds about, or to let her cavort and canoodle with her own kind. The kids brought along their plastic toboggans, knowing as they did of the steep path that leads from the football practice locker facilities down to the fields. I didn't think there would likely be much snow to slide on, but I figured, hey, let them have their illusions.
Not a soul around when we arrived - the top of the hill, where the road goes down to the fields, had a sign that said "Road Closed for the Winter". But there was hardly any snow, and the brand-new VW SPortwagen war mit den Schneeraeder ausgerustet. (Sorry - it's hard to talk about the VW ohne dass mein Gehirn sich wieder nach dem Deutschen kehrt.) So, we rolled down the hill, snow tires and all, damn the torpedoes, and parked, then dragged the toboggans back across the field to the slope.
Which turned out to be pretty darned rocky. While the kids scrambled to the top, Janneke and I hand-scooped snow to protect them onto the most up-jutting of the rocks, and they did a few runs without major incident. Clarabelle sprinted up and down after them, her pseudo-dwarfish legs bouncing in that odd, rubbery way she has when she's gamboling along. To me, her legs really look like they have the basic architecture of Basset Hound legs - odd little subtle out-turnings and in-turnings at the joints, high and bulgy, compact musculature - but they're long and quite quick. But that little boing-boing she does, particulary when she's slowing down at the end of a sprint, is the most adorable thing, and I love to watch it happening and ponder whether it's a function of her unexpressed dwarf genes, her rubbery puppiness, or just the way that sort of running works.
Walking around looking for easily-picked-up snow to throw onto the rocky parts of the sledding path, I decided I'd head to the pond, since the vast quantities of uninterrupted snow could be easily scooped into the sled that wasn't in use and hauled wherever necessary. And as I scooped, I was struck by the very fine quality of the ice beneath the snow. "It's too bad we don't have shovels," I said to Janneke. And before long I had convinced myself that the thing to do was zoom back to the house and come back with shovels, and make ourselves a little rink.
Soon all four of us were scooping and shoveling, and in a jiffy we had a small rink cleared. We finally tired out and headed home, but were very excited about the possibilities of the following day. We could spend Christmas skating on our own little rink, with no one else around!
Christmas Eve, Janneke prepared for us a phenomenal meal, with Brussels sprouts, beef tenderloin, and fingerling potatoes. Utterly delicious. Once the kids were in bed, the usual ritual for me and Janneke: Wrapping presents in front of the TV and the woodstove, watching "It's a Wonderful Life" and drinking, Janneke her wine, me the beer I made with Rob Mathews. Just grand. Off to dream land - but not before I had snatched the cookie plate and the milk glass back out of Janneke's hand to replace them by the tree. She's such a fastidious home-cleaner that she'd automatically brought them back into the kitchen. It was a close thing to make sure they didn't get washed and put away.
More later, perhaps - it's starting to feel like a busy day. It's now Tuesday, the 28th, and a few other things have happened - including the Packers dismantling the Giants. It's been a great staycation so far - I feel utterly rested and content. Or as close to it as a guy like me is ever going to get.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Possessed by the Grinch
Dude! What the frag!
So we went to the Williamstown Reindog Parade the other day with Clarabelle. It’s this holiday parade involving a drummer, the local riding clubs, and every dog they can find and dress up as a reindeer. For the first time, we have a dog that’s friendly enough with other dogs to participate, so we got creative on how to make Clarabelle look even more adorable. We dolled up her doggie coat adorably, with little green Christmas tree ornaments all around the edges and red garland looped back and forth across her back, and a tiny mouse dressed as an elf pinned on in the position of a rider. Adorable. But the whole arrangement was pretty flimsy – nothing was bolted on, and every time she rubbed up against something, the ornaments on the fringes would come off. So we decided to take her to the gathering place where the parade was to begin, and wait until the parade started to put it on her.
Turns out, though, the judging all happens while the dogs are standing around waiting for the parade to start. Which nobody told us. So while we were standing there, some person or other was quietly ignoring us because our dog wasn’t dressed up. Just before the parade was to begin, they arranged us all for a photograph on the steps of one of the buildings on the Williams campus, and before the photo, said they were going to announce the winners. “What?!”, I thought. “Winners? We haven’t started yet!”
When T heard that this was happening, she said to me, in a quietly nervous sort of stammer, “It’s OK if we don’t win, isn’t it?” “Of course,” I told her. “And besides, they didn’t even get to see Clarabelle in her outfit. So if we don’t win, it’s only because nobody saw her.” This didn’t calm her, and in fact seemed to make her look a little more upset. So I tried to change the subject.
We had two leashes on Clarabelle, originally so that the kids could walk her on the parade route. But between trying to keep her outfit mostly together by keeping her away from other dogs and people, and fighting through Clarabelle’s constant lunging toward every other dog there was so she could sniff them, the kids just weren’t up to it. She jerked T off her feet during the build-up to the parade, and left Q the dust by jerking the leash completely out of his hands on another occasion. It became clear that an adult would have to hold her. But T had the small leash, and I had the big one, and we marched the whole length of the parade route together.
Toward the middle I cut out the middle man and just grabbed the choke collar, or very close to it, and kept such a death grip on it that she was honking hoarsely much of the time. But what else could I do? She was one giant surge of energy trying to get to and wrestle every dog she saw. And there were hundreds of them, it seemed. T stood quietly with her end of the leash, and at one point actually said, “Dad, I think I can take it from here, she really doesn’t seem to be pulling very hard.” “Well, no, to you, she doesn’t,” I said. “Because my left arm is constantly holding her up off the ground.” It was exhausting.
And the streets were PACKED!, people crowding in everywhere, on both sides, waving at us and grinning, some of them unaware, having not seen us in a while, that we had a new dog. And I’m sorry to report that I was not especially festive as we paraded down the street to celebrate the Holiday That Must Not Be Named. I was exhausted from holding the dog in the air and out away from my side, I was embarrassed by the constant rain of green Christmas tree ornaments we were leaving in my wake, frustrated at having avoided Clarabelle even being considered in the whole goofball contest in the first place, and tired and cold from the long wait and the longer march. I think I had a pained grimace on my face the entire time. T had fun, waving to her friends, and I guess that’s mostly what it’s about, in the end. But boy, it was a long walk.
Once it ended, I stood and pitched all the accoutrements of Clarabelle’s outfit into the garbage can, and then began the long march back to the car. Janneke and T went to see Q perform with the fifth grade band at Images Cinema; I was to take Clarabelle home and then return, hopefully in time to see Q honk his way through a few numbers. But once I’d made the trip back across town to the car, I realized I had no keys. So I marched back to Images, got the keys, and then trudged back to the car again. It’s a good half mile, this little trip that I was doing, between Images and the car. So when I finally did wind up at home, I sat myself down and had a damn bowl of cereal before heading out again.
The event had ended at Images, but Q found me and told me that Janneke and T had gone to Thompson’s Chapel to hear Brad’s choir perform in Lessons and Carols. So we went there for the 4:00 show. The music was lovely, but to be honest, I don’t get this whole idea of sitting in a church, doing church-like stuff (listening to readings, singing, more readings, more singing, a sermon, more readings, more singing, etc), without it actually being a church service. I felt like I was nine years old again, pulling my hair our, waiting for it to end so I could go home. The kids, meanwhile, were just as frustrated – though Q sang the carols and seemed to enjoy at least parts of it.
My patience wasn’t the thickest, either, since I had been up at 4:30 that morning to go hunting. Sat in the woods until 8:00, saw nothing, came home. Story of my sporting life. But now it was 5:20 PM, and I was falling asleep in the pew there. As with most things, I wish I could have done better…Just wasn’t to be.
I’ll try to get some more updates on here soon, but this one took me half an hour to write, and I’m bushed. It’ll probably be a while, honestly. Not that there’s a lack of stuff to write about – bought a car, burnt the pumpkin bread, saw a red fox. Lots of thrilling adventure to relate. Just no time. Take care, brush your hair…
So we went to the Williamstown Reindog Parade the other day with Clarabelle. It’s this holiday parade involving a drummer, the local riding clubs, and every dog they can find and dress up as a reindeer. For the first time, we have a dog that’s friendly enough with other dogs to participate, so we got creative on how to make Clarabelle look even more adorable. We dolled up her doggie coat adorably, with little green Christmas tree ornaments all around the edges and red garland looped back and forth across her back, and a tiny mouse dressed as an elf pinned on in the position of a rider. Adorable. But the whole arrangement was pretty flimsy – nothing was bolted on, and every time she rubbed up against something, the ornaments on the fringes would come off. So we decided to take her to the gathering place where the parade was to begin, and wait until the parade started to put it on her.
Turns out, though, the judging all happens while the dogs are standing around waiting for the parade to start. Which nobody told us. So while we were standing there, some person or other was quietly ignoring us because our dog wasn’t dressed up. Just before the parade was to begin, they arranged us all for a photograph on the steps of one of the buildings on the Williams campus, and before the photo, said they were going to announce the winners. “What?!”, I thought. “Winners? We haven’t started yet!”
When T heard that this was happening, she said to me, in a quietly nervous sort of stammer, “It’s OK if we don’t win, isn’t it?” “Of course,” I told her. “And besides, they didn’t even get to see Clarabelle in her outfit. So if we don’t win, it’s only because nobody saw her.” This didn’t calm her, and in fact seemed to make her look a little more upset. So I tried to change the subject.
We had two leashes on Clarabelle, originally so that the kids could walk her on the parade route. But between trying to keep her outfit mostly together by keeping her away from other dogs and people, and fighting through Clarabelle’s constant lunging toward every other dog there was so she could sniff them, the kids just weren’t up to it. She jerked T off her feet during the build-up to the parade, and left Q the dust by jerking the leash completely out of his hands on another occasion. It became clear that an adult would have to hold her. But T had the small leash, and I had the big one, and we marched the whole length of the parade route together.
Toward the middle I cut out the middle man and just grabbed the choke collar, or very close to it, and kept such a death grip on it that she was honking hoarsely much of the time. But what else could I do? She was one giant surge of energy trying to get to and wrestle every dog she saw. And there were hundreds of them, it seemed. T stood quietly with her end of the leash, and at one point actually said, “Dad, I think I can take it from here, she really doesn’t seem to be pulling very hard.” “Well, no, to you, she doesn’t,” I said. “Because my left arm is constantly holding her up off the ground.” It was exhausting.
And the streets were PACKED!, people crowding in everywhere, on both sides, waving at us and grinning, some of them unaware, having not seen us in a while, that we had a new dog. And I’m sorry to report that I was not especially festive as we paraded down the street to celebrate the Holiday That Must Not Be Named. I was exhausted from holding the dog in the air and out away from my side, I was embarrassed by the constant rain of green Christmas tree ornaments we were leaving in my wake, frustrated at having avoided Clarabelle even being considered in the whole goofball contest in the first place, and tired and cold from the long wait and the longer march. I think I had a pained grimace on my face the entire time. T had fun, waving to her friends, and I guess that’s mostly what it’s about, in the end. But boy, it was a long walk.
Once it ended, I stood and pitched all the accoutrements of Clarabelle’s outfit into the garbage can, and then began the long march back to the car. Janneke and T went to see Q perform with the fifth grade band at Images Cinema; I was to take Clarabelle home and then return, hopefully in time to see Q honk his way through a few numbers. But once I’d made the trip back across town to the car, I realized I had no keys. So I marched back to Images, got the keys, and then trudged back to the car again. It’s a good half mile, this little trip that I was doing, between Images and the car. So when I finally did wind up at home, I sat myself down and had a damn bowl of cereal before heading out again.
The event had ended at Images, but Q found me and told me that Janneke and T had gone to Thompson’s Chapel to hear Brad’s choir perform in Lessons and Carols. So we went there for the 4:00 show. The music was lovely, but to be honest, I don’t get this whole idea of sitting in a church, doing church-like stuff (listening to readings, singing, more readings, more singing, a sermon, more readings, more singing, etc), without it actually being a church service. I felt like I was nine years old again, pulling my hair our, waiting for it to end so I could go home. The kids, meanwhile, were just as frustrated – though Q sang the carols and seemed to enjoy at least parts of it.
My patience wasn’t the thickest, either, since I had been up at 4:30 that morning to go hunting. Sat in the woods until 8:00, saw nothing, came home. Story of my sporting life. But now it was 5:20 PM, and I was falling asleep in the pew there. As with most things, I wish I could have done better…Just wasn’t to be.
I’ll try to get some more updates on here soon, but this one took me half an hour to write, and I’m bushed. It’ll probably be a while, honestly. Not that there’s a lack of stuff to write about – bought a car, burnt the pumpkin bread, saw a red fox. Lots of thrilling adventure to relate. Just no time. Take care, brush your hair…
Friday, September 24, 2010
Resumptive Depressive
Hoo, boy...Another post that begins with an apology. I should just copy and paste the apologies from all the other times I've gone months without posting. But that would be still another insult to you, my reader. S. So, no: I will cook up another one, completely original, and heartfelt this time. Here goes:
Sorry, man.
Anyway, on to the hijinks: Q started piano lessons again today. We give him the summers off, what with travel and all (perhaps more about that later on), but then we start him up again in the fall. In the past, he's grumbled about the lessons on occasion - once, famously, he responded to a question about what he would wish for if he had but one wish. And the thing he said he'd wish for was an end to piano lessons. I kind of jumped on him for that one, if you recall - reminded him that he liked to sit and play, that he was proud of himself for what he'd accomplished, that he laughed with Ed every single time he had a lesson.
But this crisis was worse. He cried - yowlingly, sobbingly cried - when we told him it would soon be time to start the lessons again. "I hate them! I hate it!", he wailed. "You're making me waste all my time on something I don't want to do!"
We told him we would talk about it and get back to him.
In the end, a couple of things turned us toward insisting that he start up again. One is the simple fact that we know him, and that he wildly exaggerates his heartfelt emotions into great, combusting fits. He does it regularly - with physical pain, with insults from other kids, with offenses to his dignity doled out by younger siblings and pets. (Seriously. Pets.) He's a wonderfully sensitive, considerate young boy, who is very, very far from being even reasonably tough. So we have learned to read his hyperbolic suffering jags accordingly.
The second clue as to how to best handle this came last Saturday, when Janneke had to take Q to Caretaker Farm with her. Don't recall why, but he would have had to be in the house alone otherwise. (Soccer for T was involved, I think.) And the whole time he was out there with her, all he wanted to do was nothing. "Want to help me pick tomatoes?" "No." "Want to go to the pond and look for frogs?" "No." "Want to go help those guys who are weeding?" "No." Just plain-ol' laziness. Which led us to the conclusion that more leisure time is not what this particular kid needs right now.
So we decided we would say to him, "Fine. If you want to continue just with the trumpet," (a tactic he had deployed through tears days earlier), "we'll find a teacher and you'll have a lesson once a week with the teacher, in addition to your lessons at school."
Convulsions and explosive yowling. "No! I don't need that! The lessons at school are enough!"
"No, they are not, Q. You don't play the trumpet nearly as well as some of the other kids, because you do, not, practice at home. Why? Because we don't make you - you've got plenty of practicing to do for the piano. If you want to continue the trumpet, fine, but we decided long ago not to enforce practicing with that. Well, if, now, you want to replace piano with trumpet, fine - but the lessons to be learned from steady practice and improvement that you're getting from piano, will now have to come from the trumpet."
More squealing and fussing.
But at some point in here, after a couple of ugly stormings-off, we made the following points to him, in just about these words:
"You absolutely do not practice for an hour every day. It's fifteen to twenty minutes, max. Don't exaggerate. And the lesson you go to is not even an hour long, and it's once a week. Which means that four out of five days, you have from the end of school until five o'clock or five thirty to do whatever you want. That often involves soccer practice, but that's your time. You want to do that, and all your friends are there. Four days out of five, you have no obligations. And on the fifth, you lose, effectively, an hour of your two free hours. That is not very much to ask, and the fact that you act as if it were, shows us that you need to learn that it is not.
"You play your Wii every, single, day. This is very generous of us - you play it in the morning for a bit, and then often in the afternoon. You have plenty of time for goofing around.
"Today is Sunday. It's 10:30 AM. You won't have to go to bed until 9:30 - that's 11 hours. You have NO obligations during those eleven hours. The Packers are on, we're going to watch that, your friend Ethan is coming over - it's one long party for you. A lack of free time is absolutely not an issue in your life.
"All kids want to give up on things that start to seem hard. But part of growing up is learning to accept that sometimes, you have to work at something to achieve it. The fact that you're saying 'I'll keep playing the piano, just without the lessons', shows us that you haven't learned that lesson yet either. Because you won't - you've hardly played it all summer. Having a mentor and a teacher who has expectations is an excellent way to grow as a person. It's our responsibility to help you grow into a person who can do that.
"My mother let me quit piano when I whined about it enough. I was very excited not to have to practice or go to lessons. I still remember the giddiness I felt when Mom and Jayne trooped out the door to go to lessons for the first time and I got to stay home with Jim and Jess. I was so excited! You know what I did?
"I don't either. I have no memory of it. I have no idea what I did with that one little hour every week, with those twenty minutes a day. I wasted them. I got nothing at all out of them. And now I can't play the piano."
He got calmer and calmer as the discourse wore on, weaving back and forth between Janneke and me, his demeanor growing more and more free and easy.
"Fine," he said, without petulance. "OK. I'll do it."
And today's lesson? Fan, tastic. Grinning, laughing, never once complaining when I went to pick him up. It may help that the lesson is on Fridays now, and many kids are out of the Youth Center by late afternoon, off to fulfill weekend plans. But I can't tell you how great it was to watch him playing again, watch him interacting again with Ed, that wonderful man. It just made me sigh and smile and snuggle back into my chair.
Which was really uncomfortable. It's held in a practice hall, after all.
So, enough of that. Here's some visual aids.
That's Clarabelle, responding to some obscene sounds being produced by the wife and the boy. Crazy, crazy stuff.
Speaking of which, did I ever show you this:
T showing off her new room. Can't recall if I ever posted it here. If I did, hey, what's the harm in doing so again? And if I didn't, well, good. Now I have.
And finally, here's a video I made to promote the Spanish Guitar Club at my school. On "Back to School Night", it played on a loop on a TV cart in a lobby area. Thought it was a pretty elegant solution to the simple impossibility of being up in my classroom, greeting parents, and downstairs manning the guitar club table. So there was no guitar club table - there was simply this, over and over:
OK, officially punchy. G'night, Grandma...
Sorry, man.
Anyway, on to the hijinks: Q started piano lessons again today. We give him the summers off, what with travel and all (perhaps more about that later on), but then we start him up again in the fall. In the past, he's grumbled about the lessons on occasion - once, famously, he responded to a question about what he would wish for if he had but one wish. And the thing he said he'd wish for was an end to piano lessons. I kind of jumped on him for that one, if you recall - reminded him that he liked to sit and play, that he was proud of himself for what he'd accomplished, that he laughed with Ed every single time he had a lesson.
But this crisis was worse. He cried - yowlingly, sobbingly cried - when we told him it would soon be time to start the lessons again. "I hate them! I hate it!", he wailed. "You're making me waste all my time on something I don't want to do!"
We told him we would talk about it and get back to him.
In the end, a couple of things turned us toward insisting that he start up again. One is the simple fact that we know him, and that he wildly exaggerates his heartfelt emotions into great, combusting fits. He does it regularly - with physical pain, with insults from other kids, with offenses to his dignity doled out by younger siblings and pets. (Seriously. Pets.) He's a wonderfully sensitive, considerate young boy, who is very, very far from being even reasonably tough. So we have learned to read his hyperbolic suffering jags accordingly.
The second clue as to how to best handle this came last Saturday, when Janneke had to take Q to Caretaker Farm with her. Don't recall why, but he would have had to be in the house alone otherwise. (Soccer for T was involved, I think.) And the whole time he was out there with her, all he wanted to do was nothing. "Want to help me pick tomatoes?" "No." "Want to go to the pond and look for frogs?" "No." "Want to go help those guys who are weeding?" "No." Just plain-ol' laziness. Which led us to the conclusion that more leisure time is not what this particular kid needs right now.
So we decided we would say to him, "Fine. If you want to continue just with the trumpet," (a tactic he had deployed through tears days earlier), "we'll find a teacher and you'll have a lesson once a week with the teacher, in addition to your lessons at school."
Convulsions and explosive yowling. "No! I don't need that! The lessons at school are enough!"
"No, they are not, Q. You don't play the trumpet nearly as well as some of the other kids, because you do, not, practice at home. Why? Because we don't make you - you've got plenty of practicing to do for the piano. If you want to continue the trumpet, fine, but we decided long ago not to enforce practicing with that. Well, if, now, you want to replace piano with trumpet, fine - but the lessons to be learned from steady practice and improvement that you're getting from piano, will now have to come from the trumpet."
More squealing and fussing.
But at some point in here, after a couple of ugly stormings-off, we made the following points to him, in just about these words:
"You absolutely do not practice for an hour every day. It's fifteen to twenty minutes, max. Don't exaggerate. And the lesson you go to is not even an hour long, and it's once a week. Which means that four out of five days, you have from the end of school until five o'clock or five thirty to do whatever you want. That often involves soccer practice, but that's your time. You want to do that, and all your friends are there. Four days out of five, you have no obligations. And on the fifth, you lose, effectively, an hour of your two free hours. That is not very much to ask, and the fact that you act as if it were, shows us that you need to learn that it is not.
"You play your Wii every, single, day. This is very generous of us - you play it in the morning for a bit, and then often in the afternoon. You have plenty of time for goofing around.
"Today is Sunday. It's 10:30 AM. You won't have to go to bed until 9:30 - that's 11 hours. You have NO obligations during those eleven hours. The Packers are on, we're going to watch that, your friend Ethan is coming over - it's one long party for you. A lack of free time is absolutely not an issue in your life.
"All kids want to give up on things that start to seem hard. But part of growing up is learning to accept that sometimes, you have to work at something to achieve it. The fact that you're saying 'I'll keep playing the piano, just without the lessons', shows us that you haven't learned that lesson yet either. Because you won't - you've hardly played it all summer. Having a mentor and a teacher who has expectations is an excellent way to grow as a person. It's our responsibility to help you grow into a person who can do that.
"My mother let me quit piano when I whined about it enough. I was very excited not to have to practice or go to lessons. I still remember the giddiness I felt when Mom and Jayne trooped out the door to go to lessons for the first time and I got to stay home with Jim and Jess. I was so excited! You know what I did?
"I don't either. I have no memory of it. I have no idea what I did with that one little hour every week, with those twenty minutes a day. I wasted them. I got nothing at all out of them. And now I can't play the piano."
He got calmer and calmer as the discourse wore on, weaving back and forth between Janneke and me, his demeanor growing more and more free and easy.
"Fine," he said, without petulance. "OK. I'll do it."
And today's lesson? Fan, tastic. Grinning, laughing, never once complaining when I went to pick him up. It may help that the lesson is on Fridays now, and many kids are out of the Youth Center by late afternoon, off to fulfill weekend plans. But I can't tell you how great it was to watch him playing again, watch him interacting again with Ed, that wonderful man. It just made me sigh and smile and snuggle back into my chair.
Which was really uncomfortable. It's held in a practice hall, after all.
So, enough of that. Here's some visual aids.
That's Clarabelle, responding to some obscene sounds being produced by the wife and the boy. Crazy, crazy stuff.
Speaking of which, did I ever show you this:
T showing off her new room. Can't recall if I ever posted it here. If I did, hey, what's the harm in doing so again? And if I didn't, well, good. Now I have.
And finally, here's a video I made to promote the Spanish Guitar Club at my school. On "Back to School Night", it played on a loop on a TV cart in a lobby area. Thought it was a pretty elegant solution to the simple impossibility of being up in my classroom, greeting parents, and downstairs manning the guitar club table. So there was no guitar club table - there was simply this, over and over:
OK, officially punchy. G'night, Grandma...
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Barefoot Deck Construction In My Dreams
Hey. Well, the insomnia is back. I don't understand it this time at all - I am bone-tired. Or was - just after dinner I was yawning and groaning, dragging myself to those post-dinner chores like washing the dishes and smiling at my children and acknowledging my wife and pretending to listen to people with the very last fumes of my day's worth of energy. But then Chris, Q's friend who was here for a sleepover, got sick around 10:00, and I drove out with Q to take him home. And then I tried to catch a few minutes of Keith Olbermann. And then during a commercial I switched over and found an old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I hadn't seen. (Lame as hell - Wesley frickin' Crusher figured prominently. If that TV hadn't cost us a week's salary I'd have thrown the remote at it.) And then Clarabelle had to go out for one more quick turn so she won't suffer in her crate tonight. And then it was 11:30, and I re-read a couple of portions of "Born to Run". And then I was all wired up, thinking about running.
Because I ran today. Four miles, in one solid loop that didn't repeat itself at all. I've been feeling so fragile lately that I do all my running on a 1.5-mile loop around the house, so that if anything does start to hurt, I can stop and be no more than half a mile's walk from ice and a sympathetic ear. But today, dammit, I was going to go four miles. So I went to Google Earth, mapped out a route exactly that long, and hit the road in the Runamocs.
It was great. I don't try to go fast anymore - I just try to go. Go easy, go light. Just go. Speed will come when my body's ready, when I have slowly built up every susceptible muscle and piece of connective tissue to be up to the job with ease. And in the meantime, I run with an easy joy that doesn't care how fast it goes. Mind you, I do fantasize as I run about the day when I'll once again be able to do six, seven, eight miles. And then about the first marathon I'll run. And beyond that; I do fantasize about going fast. But I don't actually go fast - I just revel in the complete lack of pain anywhere, especially in my feet.
I go barefoot as often as I can. I worked on the deck today (more on that below) for hours and every minute of it was barefoot. I walked the dog around the neighborhood barefoot, dropped T off at day care barefoot. And my feet love it. They love being challenged and stretched with every step, using their muscles in ways that make them interact with the ground. Tomorrow we're going onion harvesting at Caretaker Farm, and I plan to do the whole thing barefoot. Why not? It's bare earth and weeds - the most annoying thing about the dirty work at the farm is the dirt in your shoes. What if you have none? The dirt just rolls off your feet, or pleasantly between your toes. It'll be great.
Re-reading Born to Run, I came across a part where someone who agreed to run the last fifty miles of a hundred-mile race with a Tarahumara Indian runner was struck by the sound they made as they ran. Just a very gentle sort of tap, touch, stroke on the ground, made by their sandals. They didn't pound, they didn't go whap-whap-whap. They treated the ground gently so that it would treat them gently. And it struck me that I have been remarking at that very same sound lately as I run in the Runamocs. There's no scraping, no scuffing. just touch, touch, touch. My feet feel far better at the end of a run than they did at the beginning. It's very exciting and I can't wait to do it again.
Not tomorrow, though. Absolutely not tomorrow. I am not pushing too far, too fast, too soon again.
All that excited thought kept me up. And then the deck! Well, a couple of revelations, first. Here's the biggest one: The Titan Post Anchor. This thing is going to solve every single one of the problems you didn't read about in the last post. The posts are set directly into the wood of the deck, through the decking. Brilliant - I've ordered seven of them for the seven posts I have and will definitely be setting. And then I spent today getting ready to place them. Now I just have to figure out where in hell to get something called a "hole saw".
First, though, before I can set them, I had to trim the edges of the deck to be able to accurately measure where the posts will go. So I did that, with some semi-skilled slicing with my brand-new circular saw. I'm very proud of it - it's this model. I've named it Betsy, in honor of our fallen Wednesday Barefoot Soccer comrade. Not just to honor her, though - Betsy and my new saw have a lot in common. They are both treasured by me; Brad, Betsy's husband, owns an identical model, so she lives in both our hearts; she is precise and exact and causes beauty to be created everywhere she goes; and if you get in her way, she will quickly and efficiently reduce you to sawdust. While making a very strong sound. We evened out that deck nicely, Betsy and I. 'Course, before I could do that, I had to put down the last board. So I did that first.
Now, when I did that, a problem arose. Somehow, I had been hanging all the joists, or at least the ones in the middle, a little too low. Such that this last decking board, which rests on the rim joists, sits a good quarter inch higher than the boards adjacent. Meaning that the spot where I install the posts on that whole side will have one half sitting on the low board, and one half sitting on the high one. There are a number of possible solutions - the Titan Post Anchor comes with washers that you can use to shim up one side or the other to bring it into level. But I'm not going to want a quarter-inch gap on one side (the visible-from-the-picnic-table side) of the post anchor. I could also chisel out a seat for the post anchor in the higher board, but that would then look bad from the angle of the person who walks down the stairs and out into our yard, with the posts quite near eye level. Nor do I like the veeeery visible height difference between that last board and the ones adjacent. I put the board down, and set all the screws, having decided to live with the difference...but now that I think about it in my mind's eye, and picture that damn difference in height and all the problems it causes, I say to myself the following:
"Joe, you gotta pull that board up, trim down the joist a bit, and then replace the board."
I've pulled one board up already - they're made of plastic, so with a little pry bar pressure, they pop right up. Then the screws can just be unscrewed and removed.
How am I going to trim the end joists?
Betsy.
Other news...Heck, you know what? I'm tired now. I think I can go to bed again! Tell you what: If it doesn't work out, I'll come back and tell you all about the nifty parallel I found for our continuing to call Barefoot Soccer "Barefoot Soccer", even though, the next time we do it, people (except probably me) won't be barefoot.
Aw, heck, it won't take long, so I'll just tell you:
It's like people calling two-by-fours "two-by-fours". They're not actually two inches by four inches, and everybody knows it. But they still keep calling them that.
See? Isn't that clever? How I saw that? That those two things are the same? Aren't you proud?
Good night.
Because I ran today. Four miles, in one solid loop that didn't repeat itself at all. I've been feeling so fragile lately that I do all my running on a 1.5-mile loop around the house, so that if anything does start to hurt, I can stop and be no more than half a mile's walk from ice and a sympathetic ear. But today, dammit, I was going to go four miles. So I went to Google Earth, mapped out a route exactly that long, and hit the road in the Runamocs.
It was great. I don't try to go fast anymore - I just try to go. Go easy, go light. Just go. Speed will come when my body's ready, when I have slowly built up every susceptible muscle and piece of connective tissue to be up to the job with ease. And in the meantime, I run with an easy joy that doesn't care how fast it goes. Mind you, I do fantasize as I run about the day when I'll once again be able to do six, seven, eight miles. And then about the first marathon I'll run. And beyond that; I do fantasize about going fast. But I don't actually go fast - I just revel in the complete lack of pain anywhere, especially in my feet.
I go barefoot as often as I can. I worked on the deck today (more on that below) for hours and every minute of it was barefoot. I walked the dog around the neighborhood barefoot, dropped T off at day care barefoot. And my feet love it. They love being challenged and stretched with every step, using their muscles in ways that make them interact with the ground. Tomorrow we're going onion harvesting at Caretaker Farm, and I plan to do the whole thing barefoot. Why not? It's bare earth and weeds - the most annoying thing about the dirty work at the farm is the dirt in your shoes. What if you have none? The dirt just rolls off your feet, or pleasantly between your toes. It'll be great.
Re-reading Born to Run, I came across a part where someone who agreed to run the last fifty miles of a hundred-mile race with a Tarahumara Indian runner was struck by the sound they made as they ran. Just a very gentle sort of tap, touch, stroke on the ground, made by their sandals. They didn't pound, they didn't go whap-whap-whap. They treated the ground gently so that it would treat them gently. And it struck me that I have been remarking at that very same sound lately as I run in the Runamocs. There's no scraping, no scuffing. just touch, touch, touch. My feet feel far better at the end of a run than they did at the beginning. It's very exciting and I can't wait to do it again.
Not tomorrow, though. Absolutely not tomorrow. I am not pushing too far, too fast, too soon again.
All that excited thought kept me up. And then the deck! Well, a couple of revelations, first. Here's the biggest one: The Titan Post Anchor. This thing is going to solve every single one of the problems you didn't read about in the last post. The posts are set directly into the wood of the deck, through the decking. Brilliant - I've ordered seven of them for the seven posts I have and will definitely be setting. And then I spent today getting ready to place them. Now I just have to figure out where in hell to get something called a "hole saw".
First, though, before I can set them, I had to trim the edges of the deck to be able to accurately measure where the posts will go. So I did that, with some semi-skilled slicing with my brand-new circular saw. I'm very proud of it - it's this model. I've named it Betsy, in honor of our fallen Wednesday Barefoot Soccer comrade. Not just to honor her, though - Betsy and my new saw have a lot in common. They are both treasured by me; Brad, Betsy's husband, owns an identical model, so she lives in both our hearts; she is precise and exact and causes beauty to be created everywhere she goes; and if you get in her way, she will quickly and efficiently reduce you to sawdust. While making a very strong sound. We evened out that deck nicely, Betsy and I. 'Course, before I could do that, I had to put down the last board. So I did that first.
Now, when I did that, a problem arose. Somehow, I had been hanging all the joists, or at least the ones in the middle, a little too low. Such that this last decking board, which rests on the rim joists, sits a good quarter inch higher than the boards adjacent. Meaning that the spot where I install the posts on that whole side will have one half sitting on the low board, and one half sitting on the high one. There are a number of possible solutions - the Titan Post Anchor comes with washers that you can use to shim up one side or the other to bring it into level. But I'm not going to want a quarter-inch gap on one side (the visible-from-the-picnic-table side) of the post anchor. I could also chisel out a seat for the post anchor in the higher board, but that would then look bad from the angle of the person who walks down the stairs and out into our yard, with the posts quite near eye level. Nor do I like the veeeery visible height difference between that last board and the ones adjacent. I put the board down, and set all the screws, having decided to live with the difference...but now that I think about it in my mind's eye, and picture that damn difference in height and all the problems it causes, I say to myself the following:
"Joe, you gotta pull that board up, trim down the joist a bit, and then replace the board."
I've pulled one board up already - they're made of plastic, so with a little pry bar pressure, they pop right up. Then the screws can just be unscrewed and removed.
How am I going to trim the end joists?
Betsy.
Other news...Heck, you know what? I'm tired now. I think I can go to bed again! Tell you what: If it doesn't work out, I'll come back and tell you all about the nifty parallel I found for our continuing to call Barefoot Soccer "Barefoot Soccer", even though, the next time we do it, people (except probably me) won't be barefoot.
Aw, heck, it won't take long, so I'll just tell you:
It's like people calling two-by-fours "two-by-fours". They're not actually two inches by four inches, and everybody knows it. But they still keep calling them that.
See? Isn't that clever? How I saw that? That those two things are the same? Aren't you proud?
Good night.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
The Insomniac's Confession
Cripers! Well, since my insomnia is back, and since there aren't any big-ticket news items that might occupy me at this late hour, I find myself once again pretending that there's someone out there interested in the goings-on of our little tribe, and pecking out some updates thereupon. To whit:
The deck progresses. Although I am lately preoccupied a lot more by the "should have"s than by the "should"s. For instance, I think perhaps I should not have bought the Azek railing that I bought. Mostly because I did not properly plot out just how my railing would attach to the rim joists of the deck. Mostly because my deck-building book didn't say I really needed to. You just notch the 4x4 posts and plop them down as you need then along the edge, and string the rails between them.
(Things get pretty wordy and impractically detailed here for a couple of paragraphs. You might want to skip ahead to the parentheses below.)
But then there's the issue of the rail sleeves I bought, which fit nicely over 4x4 posts that are not notched, and which disappear neatly into the decking as they plunge in behind the rim joists they were bolted to before the decking was applied. But I already applied my decking, and did not build any posts in.
Nor could I have, to be fair - the outer rim joist would up being double on one side and triple on another, meaning I would have had uneven and oddly-inset posts had I placed them that way. Of course, now I'm faced with the notion of having oddly incomplete post sleeving, since once the posts drop below the level of the deck on the outside, the post sleeve will stop.
Probably - I don't think I can fit the post sleeve over the bolt heads that will protrude from the lower faces of the 4x4 posts. Maybe I can, but I doubt it. Meaning that I would have to end the post sleeves at the level of the decking, and then surround the bottom of the posts with the joist-covering Azek sheeting I also bought. Which, I think, will look weird. So it's beginning to seem that all my remaining options are going to look somehow weird. Leaving me feeling paralyzed and pressed for time at the same time - the summer is ending, here, and I have no rails on the deck. Or stairs. It's covered, and that looks fine, but it's still not serviceable. And I'm not sure how to go about making it so tomorrow. Beginning to feel like I'll need advice from an expert, and that this expert is going to say "You should have thought this through better", which will make me feel very hot and trembly and sweaty. A feeling I am accustomed to having in association with carpentry in general.
(There - That should be enough of that for now.)
So, on to the other big news, which does NOT keep me up at night. Here it is:
Her name, in case you haven't yet heard, is Clarabelle.
She has now been in Massachusetts for a week and a day, and it's beginning to be hard to picture what it was like before she arrived. But let's not get ahead of ourselves - there's a lot to describe around this enormous happening.
Beginning with the trip the three of us - Q, T, and I - took last Saturday. We hit the road around 7:30 with Hobie's old dog crate in the back of the Subaru (it wouldn't fit in the Prius) and were humming down the highway to Glastonbury, CT, for the next two and a half hours. It was probably the nicest day of the summer - sunshine, high, white clouds, and temps in the upper 70s. The drive went phenomenally well, with kids playing with their games, and with each other, as only good sports who are being driven to a puppy can do. (Part of it is probably due to T being hopped up on Dramamine.) As we approached the target destination, the kids became active exit-searchers, and navigated me safely into the park-and-ride parking lot just off the highway where the local dog rescue group coordinates the weekly dropoff.
Now, this whole business is painstakingly and professionally catalogued on a weekly basis much more completely than I can do here, on a television show called "Last Chance Highway". Here's the short version:
New Englanders spay and neuter their dogs. Southerners don't. This leads to an imbalance of adoptive households and adoptable dogs -the South has too many, the North, not enough. And vice versa. Twenty different animal rescue groups across the South adopt dogs out ot homes in the North, and put the dogs on a trailer that drops them off every single week in their northern end cities, with the families that have applied for them online and been approved.
One of those families, August 7th, was us.
Q and T were excited, but dignified. The show sends a camera crew regularly to the Glastonbury site, and the camera crews must whoop people into a cheering frenzy, because they always appear on TV to be about to witness their favorite rock stars coming off the trailers. We had no such raucous buzz happening for our big day, but there was definitely a lot of excitement in the air when we were there. Just quieter. We were all pulled into a circle to listen to a spiel on getting a new dog, and then the truck and the trailer arrived, about ten minutes early, and before you knew it all sixty or so people were lined up in front of a card table, where the driver had a box of files and would pull your dog and its medical records up for you, nod to another fellow at the door of the trailer, who would disappear inside and then come right back out holding the exact same dog you had been going nuts over in photographs for a couple of weeks and just plain hand it to you.
It was very, very fun and emotional. We were thrilled - she was such a little squirm-butt when she came off, all white-faced and waggy and peeing excitedly as she received her first hugs and kisses from all three of us.
I have worked up some video, in a very quick and dirty version, which is available here.
We walked her around the parking lot a bit, then drove to a nearby Petsmart, probably all of 200 yards from the parking lot where we picked her up. She scoped out a couple of toys and some rawhide bones (the kids were eager to see what she might be most interested in), which we purchased, and then headed over to a school with a playground that we had scoped out earlier. But that quickly got old - Clarabelle (whose name had previously been Demi, but whom I decided I was going to go ahead and name my own damn self) was doing a lot of sniffing and the kids a lot of following, when what I think they had imagined was more of a cuddle fest. Walking around in the sunshine behind a dog that was picking up everybody's leftovers from under the picnic tables was a little too stressful, to tell the truth. And by now it was near noon, so we adjourned to the local Burger King, where we parked the car so that the end gate abutted a slight grassy rise. We opened the gate so Clarabelle could see us as we sat in the grass, arrayed in front of her, eating our lunch as she gnawed happily on a rawhide bone in her crate. It was very idyllic - in fact, it was very strangely so. If you ever get to Glastonbury, check out the strip of grass and trees that forms the border of the parking lot of the Burger King across from the park-and-ride lot. It's far, far more picturesque than such a place has any right to be. And we weren't the only ones to think so - a very sad, shabby, and shaky man, probably nearly 90, looked a bit put out by our arrival; he had been parked similarly to us, tailgate of his pickup drawn up against the grass, in the shade, windows down, playing a harmonica.
But now it was our picnic spot, so he stopped playing the harmonica. But he did do just as we did - he went inside, placed his order, and retired to the breezy shade. I hope he enjoyed it as much as we did.
Two hours and thirty minutes later, with a couple of stops built in along the way, Clarabelle made her debut in our home. It's been fantastic - she is one smart cookie. She's curious about everything, and cocks her head in the most endearing way, eerily reminiscent of Hobie. That was the expression with which she first confronted Skittles, whom the kids brought out into the back yard to meet Clarabelle before we brought her into the house. Best to have them meet on somewhat more neutral territory, we thought (and I had read). This may have helped - Clarabelle took a couple of days to catch on, through some gentle scolding and some acclimatizing, that Skittles is not a puppy, and does not appreciate or respond well to puppy-like invitations to chasing games. Now, a week later, Skittles will lie there and recoil her head as Clarabelle approaches to sniff her - "Really? Are you sure? No...?" - and then walks off again; the cat will look a little indignant at having had to snub yet another offer, but will hardly ever go hide any more. They aren't pals, but they're coexisting.
The kids have had many a lesson on how to walk her by now, and are getting pretty good at it. Though they are starting to see it as a chore, it is a chore they take on with grace and a sense of humor. Although the bulk of the serious walking still falls to me and Janneke - she in the early morning, so far, and myself just before bed. Accidents in the house have been few; successes far outweigh failures. Progress is steady and ratchets continually upward.
That very first Saturday night, I finally managed to find "Last Chance Highway" on the TV, and we all settled in to watch it together. And there they were - the same guys whom we'd seen that morning, whom we'd been puzzled to observe absorbing celebrity treatment, stopping work to pose for pictures with giddy new dog owners, handing out hugs as much as dogs. Now we knew why - these guys all feature quite prominently in the program. The episode we watched was particularly touching, I find - I've seen three installments now - and by the time it ended Q and I were clapping and laughing to watch these happy denouments, and T was asleep on Clarabelle's bed, one arm draped around the snoring hound. The very end image of the video above takes place as we watched the same trailer we'd picked her up from earlier in the day. All very odd and circular - I'm still not quite able to get my head completely around it.
Janneke and I were snuggling with her this evening after watching an episode of Last Chance Highway (I'd recorded it for Janneke, who hadn't seen one yet) and were struck by just how much we love hounds. Hobie was a hound, and we've had a soft spot for beagles forever - but Clarabelle is as houndy as they get. Droopy skin on her head, ridiculous ears, bony hips, black back, a plaintive, howling wail (that we hardly ever hear), and a soul that wants out of life only three things: To follow that smell wherever it might lead; to be hugged and thumped vigorously by a person; and to sleep. Provide them with those three, and they want for nothing. And I think there is much to admire in that philosophy.
There is other news. I'm up to 3.5 miles on my every-other-day runs in the Runamocs. I'm making slooooow and steeeeady progress, terrified of getting injured again. But determined to work my way back up to longer distances - just not caring particularly exactly when I get there. These things - the runamocs - are fantastic to run in. I think it's the perfect middle ground for me between barefootedness and shoditude - I don't hurt myself, but I can't heel-toe pound without pain. So I find a great, soft, short-strided method of locomotion, and all of my constituent parts - particulary the feet - are happy. I'm still spending as much time as I can barefoot, including all of Clarabelle's walks and much of the time I spend working on the deck, and all of my yard-care time. In fact, today we spent three hours in the mall shopping, and I wore shoes, in deference to the expectations of society (and in recognition of the fact that the Runamocs, while great for running in, frankly look stupid). And my right foot, home of my erstwhile plantar fasciitis, began to really throb. I had run this morning, and apparently the isolation and protection afforded my foot by the shoe caused the muscles and tendons to do so little that the got stiff. As soon as we got home, I took the shoes off - and the pain nearly instantly disappeared. I am a convert to this whole barefoot thing - just provided you don't do too much, too fast, without building up to it.
Like Betsy did. She broke her toe last Wednesday in our weekly barefoot soccer match...which I feel pretty responsible for, I have to say. I mean, I didn't write the Wednesday Afternoon Barefoot Soccer Association Charter or anything - it just sort of happened. But I have been the loudest and the most annoying about the whole "barefoot is better" thing. We've done it a number of times now and it's been amazing. But there was something amiss last week - a lot of us suffered what I'm calling "toe crumples", where you catch your toes on the ground and drive over the top of them as they bend uncomfortably forward under the pressure from your foot, the top and back of which continue forward, and the whole business causes you to topple in a heap. I did it three times, all with the left foot, and Brad and a couple of other players did it too. And Betsy broke her toe!, though she can't quite say exactly when it happened. It's her left pinky toe, and she has to stay off her feet as much as possible, and absolutely not run, for four to six weeks. This sucks so much I can't quite bear it.
As for me, though...I remain convinced that I am far, far less likely to be injured in soccer if I wear no shoes. The big injuries I have been susceptible to in recent years have been knee twists, which occur when you have too damn much traction, and ankle turns, which are a result of the bottom of the shoe getting stuck while the leg topples over to the side. And I just can't imagine either of those happening if I have no shoes on. The toe crumples hurt, but they didn't especially bother me - I have short, rounded toes, and they weren't really adversely affected. I don't know - I'll stay barefoot in future games, I think, but we may be encouraging the kids to wear shoes. Even cleats - I can take a rake from a ten-year-old. But we'll see. Janneke, post-bee sting, remains an adamant opponent of the whole endeavor. I for one hope it does not go extinct as an institution. It's not what Betsy would have wanted.
(Though she isn't dead.)
Well, seein' as how I stopped being coherent some five paragraphs ago, I think I'll wrap this up and head off to lala land, if I can. Not sure whether I've thought through everything I needed to, but let's hope. I think I'm resigned to my fate deck-wise, though I do have an idea or two on how to get around this whole post business, and apart from Betsy's foot, everything else is all brightness and sunshine. So I should be less than haunted as I lay back against the pillow and sigh.
Wish me luck...
The deck progresses. Although I am lately preoccupied a lot more by the "should have"s than by the "should"s. For instance, I think perhaps I should not have bought the Azek railing that I bought. Mostly because I did not properly plot out just how my railing would attach to the rim joists of the deck. Mostly because my deck-building book didn't say I really needed to. You just notch the 4x4 posts and plop them down as you need then along the edge, and string the rails between them.
(Things get pretty wordy and impractically detailed here for a couple of paragraphs. You might want to skip ahead to the parentheses below.)
But then there's the issue of the rail sleeves I bought, which fit nicely over 4x4 posts that are not notched, and which disappear neatly into the decking as they plunge in behind the rim joists they were bolted to before the decking was applied. But I already applied my decking, and did not build any posts in.
Nor could I have, to be fair - the outer rim joist would up being double on one side and triple on another, meaning I would have had uneven and oddly-inset posts had I placed them that way. Of course, now I'm faced with the notion of having oddly incomplete post sleeving, since once the posts drop below the level of the deck on the outside, the post sleeve will stop.
Probably - I don't think I can fit the post sleeve over the bolt heads that will protrude from the lower faces of the 4x4 posts. Maybe I can, but I doubt it. Meaning that I would have to end the post sleeves at the level of the decking, and then surround the bottom of the posts with the joist-covering Azek sheeting I also bought. Which, I think, will look weird. So it's beginning to seem that all my remaining options are going to look somehow weird. Leaving me feeling paralyzed and pressed for time at the same time - the summer is ending, here, and I have no rails on the deck. Or stairs. It's covered, and that looks fine, but it's still not serviceable. And I'm not sure how to go about making it so tomorrow. Beginning to feel like I'll need advice from an expert, and that this expert is going to say "You should have thought this through better", which will make me feel very hot and trembly and sweaty. A feeling I am accustomed to having in association with carpentry in general.
(There - That should be enough of that for now.)
So, on to the other big news, which does NOT keep me up at night. Here it is:
Her name, in case you haven't yet heard, is Clarabelle.
She has now been in Massachusetts for a week and a day, and it's beginning to be hard to picture what it was like before she arrived. But let's not get ahead of ourselves - there's a lot to describe around this enormous happening.
Beginning with the trip the three of us - Q, T, and I - took last Saturday. We hit the road around 7:30 with Hobie's old dog crate in the back of the Subaru (it wouldn't fit in the Prius) and were humming down the highway to Glastonbury, CT, for the next two and a half hours. It was probably the nicest day of the summer - sunshine, high, white clouds, and temps in the upper 70s. The drive went phenomenally well, with kids playing with their games, and with each other, as only good sports who are being driven to a puppy can do. (Part of it is probably due to T being hopped up on Dramamine.) As we approached the target destination, the kids became active exit-searchers, and navigated me safely into the park-and-ride parking lot just off the highway where the local dog rescue group coordinates the weekly dropoff.
Now, this whole business is painstakingly and professionally catalogued on a weekly basis much more completely than I can do here, on a television show called "Last Chance Highway". Here's the short version:
New Englanders spay and neuter their dogs. Southerners don't. This leads to an imbalance of adoptive households and adoptable dogs -the South has too many, the North, not enough. And vice versa. Twenty different animal rescue groups across the South adopt dogs out ot homes in the North, and put the dogs on a trailer that drops them off every single week in their northern end cities, with the families that have applied for them online and been approved.
One of those families, August 7th, was us.
Q and T were excited, but dignified. The show sends a camera crew regularly to the Glastonbury site, and the camera crews must whoop people into a cheering frenzy, because they always appear on TV to be about to witness their favorite rock stars coming off the trailers. We had no such raucous buzz happening for our big day, but there was definitely a lot of excitement in the air when we were there. Just quieter. We were all pulled into a circle to listen to a spiel on getting a new dog, and then the truck and the trailer arrived, about ten minutes early, and before you knew it all sixty or so people were lined up in front of a card table, where the driver had a box of files and would pull your dog and its medical records up for you, nod to another fellow at the door of the trailer, who would disappear inside and then come right back out holding the exact same dog you had been going nuts over in photographs for a couple of weeks and just plain hand it to you.
It was very, very fun and emotional. We were thrilled - she was such a little squirm-butt when she came off, all white-faced and waggy and peeing excitedly as she received her first hugs and kisses from all three of us.
I have worked up some video, in a very quick and dirty version, which is available here.
We walked her around the parking lot a bit, then drove to a nearby Petsmart, probably all of 200 yards from the parking lot where we picked her up. She scoped out a couple of toys and some rawhide bones (the kids were eager to see what she might be most interested in), which we purchased, and then headed over to a school with a playground that we had scoped out earlier. But that quickly got old - Clarabelle (whose name had previously been Demi, but whom I decided I was going to go ahead and name my own damn self) was doing a lot of sniffing and the kids a lot of following, when what I think they had imagined was more of a cuddle fest. Walking around in the sunshine behind a dog that was picking up everybody's leftovers from under the picnic tables was a little too stressful, to tell the truth. And by now it was near noon, so we adjourned to the local Burger King, where we parked the car so that the end gate abutted a slight grassy rise. We opened the gate so Clarabelle could see us as we sat in the grass, arrayed in front of her, eating our lunch as she gnawed happily on a rawhide bone in her crate. It was very idyllic - in fact, it was very strangely so. If you ever get to Glastonbury, check out the strip of grass and trees that forms the border of the parking lot of the Burger King across from the park-and-ride lot. It's far, far more picturesque than such a place has any right to be. And we weren't the only ones to think so - a very sad, shabby, and shaky man, probably nearly 90, looked a bit put out by our arrival; he had been parked similarly to us, tailgate of his pickup drawn up against the grass, in the shade, windows down, playing a harmonica.
But now it was our picnic spot, so he stopped playing the harmonica. But he did do just as we did - he went inside, placed his order, and retired to the breezy shade. I hope he enjoyed it as much as we did.
Two hours and thirty minutes later, with a couple of stops built in along the way, Clarabelle made her debut in our home. It's been fantastic - she is one smart cookie. She's curious about everything, and cocks her head in the most endearing way, eerily reminiscent of Hobie. That was the expression with which she first confronted Skittles, whom the kids brought out into the back yard to meet Clarabelle before we brought her into the house. Best to have them meet on somewhat more neutral territory, we thought (and I had read). This may have helped - Clarabelle took a couple of days to catch on, through some gentle scolding and some acclimatizing, that Skittles is not a puppy, and does not appreciate or respond well to puppy-like invitations to chasing games. Now, a week later, Skittles will lie there and recoil her head as Clarabelle approaches to sniff her - "Really? Are you sure? No...?" - and then walks off again; the cat will look a little indignant at having had to snub yet another offer, but will hardly ever go hide any more. They aren't pals, but they're coexisting.
The kids have had many a lesson on how to walk her by now, and are getting pretty good at it. Though they are starting to see it as a chore, it is a chore they take on with grace and a sense of humor. Although the bulk of the serious walking still falls to me and Janneke - she in the early morning, so far, and myself just before bed. Accidents in the house have been few; successes far outweigh failures. Progress is steady and ratchets continually upward.
That very first Saturday night, I finally managed to find "Last Chance Highway" on the TV, and we all settled in to watch it together. And there they were - the same guys whom we'd seen that morning, whom we'd been puzzled to observe absorbing celebrity treatment, stopping work to pose for pictures with giddy new dog owners, handing out hugs as much as dogs. Now we knew why - these guys all feature quite prominently in the program. The episode we watched was particularly touching, I find - I've seen three installments now - and by the time it ended Q and I were clapping and laughing to watch these happy denouments, and T was asleep on Clarabelle's bed, one arm draped around the snoring hound. The very end image of the video above takes place as we watched the same trailer we'd picked her up from earlier in the day. All very odd and circular - I'm still not quite able to get my head completely around it.
Janneke and I were snuggling with her this evening after watching an episode of Last Chance Highway (I'd recorded it for Janneke, who hadn't seen one yet) and were struck by just how much we love hounds. Hobie was a hound, and we've had a soft spot for beagles forever - but Clarabelle is as houndy as they get. Droopy skin on her head, ridiculous ears, bony hips, black back, a plaintive, howling wail (that we hardly ever hear), and a soul that wants out of life only three things: To follow that smell wherever it might lead; to be hugged and thumped vigorously by a person; and to sleep. Provide them with those three, and they want for nothing. And I think there is much to admire in that philosophy.
There is other news. I'm up to 3.5 miles on my every-other-day runs in the Runamocs. I'm making slooooow and steeeeady progress, terrified of getting injured again. But determined to work my way back up to longer distances - just not caring particularly exactly when I get there. These things - the runamocs - are fantastic to run in. I think it's the perfect middle ground for me between barefootedness and shoditude - I don't hurt myself, but I can't heel-toe pound without pain. So I find a great, soft, short-strided method of locomotion, and all of my constituent parts - particulary the feet - are happy. I'm still spending as much time as I can barefoot, including all of Clarabelle's walks and much of the time I spend working on the deck, and all of my yard-care time. In fact, today we spent three hours in the mall shopping, and I wore shoes, in deference to the expectations of society (and in recognition of the fact that the Runamocs, while great for running in, frankly look stupid). And my right foot, home of my erstwhile plantar fasciitis, began to really throb. I had run this morning, and apparently the isolation and protection afforded my foot by the shoe caused the muscles and tendons to do so little that the got stiff. As soon as we got home, I took the shoes off - and the pain nearly instantly disappeared. I am a convert to this whole barefoot thing - just provided you don't do too much, too fast, without building up to it.
Like Betsy did. She broke her toe last Wednesday in our weekly barefoot soccer match...which I feel pretty responsible for, I have to say. I mean, I didn't write the Wednesday Afternoon Barefoot Soccer Association Charter or anything - it just sort of happened. But I have been the loudest and the most annoying about the whole "barefoot is better" thing. We've done it a number of times now and it's been amazing. But there was something amiss last week - a lot of us suffered what I'm calling "toe crumples", where you catch your toes on the ground and drive over the top of them as they bend uncomfortably forward under the pressure from your foot, the top and back of which continue forward, and the whole business causes you to topple in a heap. I did it three times, all with the left foot, and Brad and a couple of other players did it too. And Betsy broke her toe!, though she can't quite say exactly when it happened. It's her left pinky toe, and she has to stay off her feet as much as possible, and absolutely not run, for four to six weeks. This sucks so much I can't quite bear it.
As for me, though...I remain convinced that I am far, far less likely to be injured in soccer if I wear no shoes. The big injuries I have been susceptible to in recent years have been knee twists, which occur when you have too damn much traction, and ankle turns, which are a result of the bottom of the shoe getting stuck while the leg topples over to the side. And I just can't imagine either of those happening if I have no shoes on. The toe crumples hurt, but they didn't especially bother me - I have short, rounded toes, and they weren't really adversely affected. I don't know - I'll stay barefoot in future games, I think, but we may be encouraging the kids to wear shoes. Even cleats - I can take a rake from a ten-year-old. But we'll see. Janneke, post-bee sting, remains an adamant opponent of the whole endeavor. I for one hope it does not go extinct as an institution. It's not what Betsy would have wanted.
(Though she isn't dead.)
Well, seein' as how I stopped being coherent some five paragraphs ago, I think I'll wrap this up and head off to lala land, if I can. Not sure whether I've thought through everything I needed to, but let's hope. I think I'm resigned to my fate deck-wise, though I do have an idea or two on how to get around this whole post business, and apart from Betsy's foot, everything else is all brightness and sunshine. So I should be less than haunted as I lay back against the pillow and sigh.
Wish me luck...
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Long Days of Great Import
Hoooo! What a day! Long, steady, and enjoyable, though there were no really big-ticket items in it. Here's the rundown, as written in an email to Janneke about ten minutes ago:
"Up at the crack of 8:00, out the door around 10:00 to Stop & Shop; from there, here, to put away the refrigeratables, and thence to Caretaker, where we arrived just in time for closing. But we grabbed a few things. Back out the door to Wild Oats and to the vet's, where I bought a bag of Science Diet Puppy Food! Tomorrow we may go to P-field to buy a doggie bed, a little choke collar, etc. We'll see.
"Then back home for lunch, which was eaten heartily; a run to the dump and to buy another 20-gallon garbage can, for the dog food, which is now installed. Around 3:00, Mike from Good Dog Rescue called, and we switched over to the Mungaboo email address. He received the photos, which serve in lieu of a home visit, and we talked about the interview I had done with the foster mom. And he said now he just has to check references, and if all that gets done, then next Saturday we'll be picking her up!
"House cleaning until Kate came, and continuing after her arrival; I started making dinner around 5:30, and we at at around 6:30. Lettuce and shredded carrot salad with a dressing that Q and I liked, but T didn't; cake and chocolates for dessert. We all watched the religion episode of the Simpsons, then went outside for a bike ride that was long & fun. (T fell twice, but she was OK.) Inside, where we watched "Nature" ("The Andes") and ate popcorn; then they brushed teeth and hit the hay. It's now 9:46 PM, and soon I'll go in and tell them it's lights out. (They're in T's room playing "UNo".) I was emptying the dishwasher in order to be able to put all the dirties from tonight into it when I decided I needed a break. So I wrote you this.
"Hoooo! What a day! I'll check the weather tomorrow - if it's hot, we're hittin' the pool. Me cago en Dios y todos los santos.
"Names the kids were brainstorming at dinner (despite being told that we adults (I) would be naming the dog):
"Sunshine
"Biscuits
"Pumpkin
"I have to say, I like them all.
"OK, off to be Mr Responsible. Hope all's well -
"Joe"
So there you have it. Kate is here for a sleepover, and that's going well. They claimed just a little while ago that they couldn't sleep, but I've heard nothing but snoring since. T was upset yesterday because she hadn't fully realized that Janneke was going to be away for a couple of weeks now, and said that she needed to sleep with someone. Q said the same thing. So we all three crowded into the master suite and made a go of it. I slept elsewhere from about 12:00 to 5:00, since I had gotten so many elbows and knees in various tender bits of me and hadn't been able to doze off. But around 5:00 I went back in and lay ON TOP of the covers, with the elbows and knees pinned beneath on either side of me. And slept well 'til morning. That's a good trick - put that one in your back pocket.
Mike, the guy from Good Dog Rescue, did indeed call me today, and it looks like it's all over bar the shouting. They'll call Ronadh and Mark and/or Brad and Betsy, all of whom have been paid off, and then the vet, who has no idea what really goes on here. And then it should be next Saturday! Here's a link to their website - you can see the dogs there that are available for adoption. (I won't tell you which one is the one we're after, but I will tell you that Mike told me that many people - I believe the number 10 was thrown out - have posted a claim on her, but that we're the ones he'd been waiting for for this particular dog, because we have kids.) If all goes according to plan, as I said in the email, come this time next week we'll be cuddlin' a pup! We'll have to drive to Connecticut to pick her up off the doggie Underground Railroad - check out the transportation page, which is cool - probably at the Glastonbury stop, which is the closest to us, I think. (Funny they don't stop in MA. Must be some kind of law agin' it here.) I hauled up the baby gate for the stairs from the basement today, and will probably go get Hobie's old carrying crate when I'm done with this. It's all very exciting.
On the deck front, I will never, ever be able to repay our good friend Matt for the entire workday - The Entire! Day! - that he spent here, basically saving our house from rot and erecting the skeleton of our deck. I helped, but he was confidently in charge the whole time, and gave us any number of things from his house - plywood, insulation, flashing - that he just had laying around. As he was about to leave, I said, "Now, I'll be expecting a bill, Matt." And he said, "Well, don't look for it TOO soon." I'd bet you just about anything he's never going to bill us. But that's OK - I have a counterattack planned. Because I had already invited him and his son Alex to accompany me and Q to the Patriots-Packers game in December. And when we go, and he says, "What do we owe you for these tickets?", I'll say, "I'll send you a bill. Don't look for it TOO soon, though." Which will echo in the halls of human history as the most symmetrical and touching buddy-buddy moment ever. We may just have to clink beer bottle necks as I say it.
Man, I'm beat. I'm off to accomplish a few things and then hit the hay. Take care, brush your hair...
"Up at the crack of 8:00, out the door around 10:00 to Stop & Shop; from there, here, to put away the refrigeratables, and thence to Caretaker, where we arrived just in time for closing. But we grabbed a few things. Back out the door to Wild Oats and to the vet's, where I bought a bag of Science Diet Puppy Food! Tomorrow we may go to P-field to buy a doggie bed, a little choke collar, etc. We'll see.
"Then back home for lunch, which was eaten heartily; a run to the dump and to buy another 20-gallon garbage can, for the dog food, which is now installed. Around 3:00, Mike from Good Dog Rescue called, and we switched over to the Mungaboo email address. He received the photos, which serve in lieu of a home visit, and we talked about the interview I had done with the foster mom. And he said now he just has to check references, and if all that gets done, then next Saturday we'll be picking her up!
"House cleaning until Kate came, and continuing after her arrival; I started making dinner around 5:30, and we at at around 6:30. Lettuce and shredded carrot salad with a dressing that Q and I liked, but T didn't; cake and chocolates for dessert. We all watched the religion episode of the Simpsons, then went outside for a bike ride that was long & fun. (T fell twice, but she was OK.) Inside, where we watched "Nature" ("The Andes") and ate popcorn; then they brushed teeth and hit the hay. It's now 9:46 PM, and soon I'll go in and tell them it's lights out. (They're in T's room playing "UNo".) I was emptying the dishwasher in order to be able to put all the dirties from tonight into it when I decided I needed a break. So I wrote you this.
"Hoooo! What a day! I'll check the weather tomorrow - if it's hot, we're hittin' the pool. Me cago en Dios y todos los santos.
"Names the kids were brainstorming at dinner (despite being told that we adults (I) would be naming the dog):
"Sunshine
"Biscuits
"Pumpkin
"I have to say, I like them all.
"OK, off to be Mr Responsible. Hope all's well -
"Joe"
So there you have it. Kate is here for a sleepover, and that's going well. They claimed just a little while ago that they couldn't sleep, but I've heard nothing but snoring since. T was upset yesterday because she hadn't fully realized that Janneke was going to be away for a couple of weeks now, and said that she needed to sleep with someone. Q said the same thing. So we all three crowded into the master suite and made a go of it. I slept elsewhere from about 12:00 to 5:00, since I had gotten so many elbows and knees in various tender bits of me and hadn't been able to doze off. But around 5:00 I went back in and lay ON TOP of the covers, with the elbows and knees pinned beneath on either side of me. And slept well 'til morning. That's a good trick - put that one in your back pocket.
Mike, the guy from Good Dog Rescue, did indeed call me today, and it looks like it's all over bar the shouting. They'll call Ronadh and Mark and/or Brad and Betsy, all of whom have been paid off, and then the vet, who has no idea what really goes on here. And then it should be next Saturday! Here's a link to their website - you can see the dogs there that are available for adoption. (I won't tell you which one is the one we're after, but I will tell you that Mike told me that many people - I believe the number 10 was thrown out - have posted a claim on her, but that we're the ones he'd been waiting for for this particular dog, because we have kids.) If all goes according to plan, as I said in the email, come this time next week we'll be cuddlin' a pup! We'll have to drive to Connecticut to pick her up off the doggie Underground Railroad - check out the transportation page, which is cool - probably at the Glastonbury stop, which is the closest to us, I think. (Funny they don't stop in MA. Must be some kind of law agin' it here.) I hauled up the baby gate for the stairs from the basement today, and will probably go get Hobie's old carrying crate when I'm done with this. It's all very exciting.
On the deck front, I will never, ever be able to repay our good friend Matt for the entire workday - The Entire! Day! - that he spent here, basically saving our house from rot and erecting the skeleton of our deck. I helped, but he was confidently in charge the whole time, and gave us any number of things from his house - plywood, insulation, flashing - that he just had laying around. As he was about to leave, I said, "Now, I'll be expecting a bill, Matt." And he said, "Well, don't look for it TOO soon." I'd bet you just about anything he's never going to bill us. But that's OK - I have a counterattack planned. Because I had already invited him and his son Alex to accompany me and Q to the Patriots-Packers game in December. And when we go, and he says, "What do we owe you for these tickets?", I'll say, "I'll send you a bill. Don't look for it TOO soon, though." Which will echo in the halls of human history as the most symmetrical and touching buddy-buddy moment ever. We may just have to clink beer bottle necks as I say it.
Man, I'm beat. I'm off to accomplish a few things and then hit the hay. Take care, brush your hair...
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The Deck: Continued...
So, my friend Matt the contractor came by, very generously, and had another look at the deck and at the rot I found under the sliding door. And he said, "You know what you need? You need me here for, like, half a day." Which is exactly what I deeply, deeply hoped he would say.
Pretty much word for word, too - his being there means things will be done correctly; half a day means that it isn't going to cost me an exorbitant amount. He dropped off a hammer (though I do own one), a cat's paw - which looks like this - for pulling nails, and a saws-all, which looks like this. And he told me to remove all the joists and the ledgers, but to leave the rim joists, which form the outer edges of the deck framing, standing.
And I am proud to say that I have almost accomplished it. I will say that the sawzall is about the baddest piece of equipment I've ever run - it thrums with an electric might that is astonishing, and slices through wood and metal like a slow-motion light saber. I felt very manly indeed in the hot sun, shirtless, soaked in sweat, blasting a slice through a 2x10 with that machine-gun-like piece of testosterone candy. Must have put on quite a show for our retired neighbors.
Which is another thing - I've lately been getting more and more cheesed off at the fact that, out of the seven houses that could be said to directly or diagonally abut our own, five belong to retired couples. And those of you who know our street will know: It is a perfect - PERFECT! - street for kids. Little traffic, level for the most part, back yards that are fun to cross through...Perfect.* And we're stuck with codgers everywhere. Now, I like codgers, but I would also like to see a crowd of kids on bicycles swarming past of a summer evening. All I see are my own two. Who are about as cute as a person can get (I refer you to this video), but I think the quality of their lives would go up substantially if they had buddies living nearby. And these folks living around us pretty much only interact with us to complain that Q is bouncing his basketball at 8:00 AM.
Or to accuse them of climbing over the fence separating our yard from theirs and smashing their glass-top deck table, only to have it pointed out to them that during the weekend, when they were away, there was an enormous wind storm, which would explain not only the numerous branches lying about their yard, but the fact that the enormous parasol that ordinarily stands inserted vertically in their deck table, lying forty feet away, and open, against their opposite fence, just might have been the true culprit and not our then-four-year-old-and-two-year-old children.
But I digress. For some reason, the joist hangers - which look like this - on the outer rim joist are a complete b___h to pull out. (That word back there is "bitch".) Perhaps something to do with the boards they're nailed into not being rotten. So around 5:30 this afternoon I called it quits, and will resume nail-pullin' in the morning. I have until Thursday AM - Matt's coming by then to raise holy hell with the deck.
Apparently we've got to replace the sill underneath the sliding door, which is something Matt says he can do with just the two of us and no giant jacks to lift the house up, or even a diminutive green Jedi Master to lift the house into the air so we can insert the new wood. Matt must know what he's doing.
So that's going on...And the dog drama. A litter of pups upstate in NY is adoptable, but sick, so they keep putting off the date when we could come see them. And in the meantime I've fallen for, and applied for, a pup that's currently in Georgia, and can be adopted (sight-unseen, which is a little (but only a veeery little) worrysome) and delivered to the area via a modified horse trailer that regularly makes the trek to bring dogs from the overcrowded "shelters" of the benighted South up to the nearly-stray-free New England States for adoption. Lots of people in town here have done the same, and been very pleased with it. As it stands, I'm not sure what will happen first: Confirmation of the adoption of the very nearly perfect pup from the South, or a trip to see the suddenly-healthy pups up North. It's a race. Both sets of wheels are turning. I will keep you posted.
But I'm thinking a very simple railing for the deck, and right now I'm leaning toward using pressure-treated wood for the decking itself. Cheaper by far than the composite stuff, and it should last a loooong time, given the perfect - PERFECT! - state of all the pressure-treated stuff that was holding up the deck. I mean, some of the joists were double - they had sistered a new pressure-treated joist alongside the original, non-pressure-treated joists. And the originals are gone. Dust. Nothing there but rusty nails that mark where they once hung. But the pressure-treated stuff looks like it was put in yesterday. So it's not like it would be rotting away soon - and splintering and such can be avoided with some basic maintenance. And we're not feeling quite so flush with money these days.
Not that we ever were, but our stretch of my handing Janneke a ton of money I don't need at the end of each month and our savings growing by leaps and bounds has been interrupted lately. Got something fixed on the Subaru, got an appointment to have the brakes on the Prius looked at on Monday, gettin' a dog...Things pile up.
OK, I've probably worked through the insomnia by now. Off to take another crack at dreamland. Hasta la pasta -
Jose
*And for any lurkers who read this and like the looks of our kids, or our neighborhood: Have I talked on the blog about the many guns I have in the house? And my extensive experience in their use? And the fact that I am a fairly intimidating former wrestler, former rugby player, and generally bad-tempered sort who lifts weights and bites through chainsaw blades in my spare time?
Pretty much word for word, too - his being there means things will be done correctly; half a day means that it isn't going to cost me an exorbitant amount. He dropped off a hammer (though I do own one), a cat's paw - which looks like this - for pulling nails, and a saws-all, which looks like this. And he told me to remove all the joists and the ledgers, but to leave the rim joists, which form the outer edges of the deck framing, standing.
And I am proud to say that I have almost accomplished it. I will say that the sawzall is about the baddest piece of equipment I've ever run - it thrums with an electric might that is astonishing, and slices through wood and metal like a slow-motion light saber. I felt very manly indeed in the hot sun, shirtless, soaked in sweat, blasting a slice through a 2x10 with that machine-gun-like piece of testosterone candy. Must have put on quite a show for our retired neighbors.
Which is another thing - I've lately been getting more and more cheesed off at the fact that, out of the seven houses that could be said to directly or diagonally abut our own, five belong to retired couples. And those of you who know our street will know: It is a perfect - PERFECT! - street for kids. Little traffic, level for the most part, back yards that are fun to cross through...Perfect.* And we're stuck with codgers everywhere. Now, I like codgers, but I would also like to see a crowd of kids on bicycles swarming past of a summer evening. All I see are my own two. Who are about as cute as a person can get (I refer you to this video), but I think the quality of their lives would go up substantially if they had buddies living nearby. And these folks living around us pretty much only interact with us to complain that Q is bouncing his basketball at 8:00 AM.
Or to accuse them of climbing over the fence separating our yard from theirs and smashing their glass-top deck table, only to have it pointed out to them that during the weekend, when they were away, there was an enormous wind storm, which would explain not only the numerous branches lying about their yard, but the fact that the enormous parasol that ordinarily stands inserted vertically in their deck table, lying forty feet away, and open, against their opposite fence, just might have been the true culprit and not our then-four-year-old-and-two-year-old children.
But I digress. For some reason, the joist hangers - which look like this - on the outer rim joist are a complete b___h to pull out. (That word back there is "bitch".) Perhaps something to do with the boards they're nailed into not being rotten. So around 5:30 this afternoon I called it quits, and will resume nail-pullin' in the morning. I have until Thursday AM - Matt's coming by then to raise holy hell with the deck.
Apparently we've got to replace the sill underneath the sliding door, which is something Matt says he can do with just the two of us and no giant jacks to lift the house up, or even a diminutive green Jedi Master to lift the house into the air so we can insert the new wood. Matt must know what he's doing.
So that's going on...And the dog drama. A litter of pups upstate in NY is adoptable, but sick, so they keep putting off the date when we could come see them. And in the meantime I've fallen for, and applied for, a pup that's currently in Georgia, and can be adopted (sight-unseen, which is a little (but only a veeery little) worrysome) and delivered to the area via a modified horse trailer that regularly makes the trek to bring dogs from the overcrowded "shelters" of the benighted South up to the nearly-stray-free New England States for adoption. Lots of people in town here have done the same, and been very pleased with it. As it stands, I'm not sure what will happen first: Confirmation of the adoption of the very nearly perfect pup from the South, or a trip to see the suddenly-healthy pups up North. It's a race. Both sets of wheels are turning. I will keep you posted.
But I'm thinking a very simple railing for the deck, and right now I'm leaning toward using pressure-treated wood for the decking itself. Cheaper by far than the composite stuff, and it should last a loooong time, given the perfect - PERFECT! - state of all the pressure-treated stuff that was holding up the deck. I mean, some of the joists were double - they had sistered a new pressure-treated joist alongside the original, non-pressure-treated joists. And the originals are gone. Dust. Nothing there but rusty nails that mark where they once hung. But the pressure-treated stuff looks like it was put in yesterday. So it's not like it would be rotting away soon - and splintering and such can be avoided with some basic maintenance. And we're not feeling quite so flush with money these days.
Not that we ever were, but our stretch of my handing Janneke a ton of money I don't need at the end of each month and our savings growing by leaps and bounds has been interrupted lately. Got something fixed on the Subaru, got an appointment to have the brakes on the Prius looked at on Monday, gettin' a dog...Things pile up.
OK, I've probably worked through the insomnia by now. Off to take another crack at dreamland. Hasta la pasta -
Jose
*And for any lurkers who read this and like the looks of our kids, or our neighborhood: Have I talked on the blog about the many guns I have in the house? And my extensive experience in their use? And the fact that I am a fairly intimidating former wrestler, former rugby player, and generally bad-tempered sort who lifts weights and bites through chainsaw blades in my spare time?
New Room!
On a strictly newsy, unedited, lazy note: Here's T giving you a tour of her newly painted room...
Monday, July 19, 2010
The Deck
So, yeah, the deck. It's been pretty sway-ridden and warped lately, as any of you who have been here recently can attest, and so it was time for it to come down. I had a couple of friends look at it, one of whom is a contractor, and the other, a very experienced deck-builder. And both said the posts were fine and the joists, pressure-treated lumber, looked fine. So it should be a question of simply removing the decking and the rails and re-building those to suit on top of the existing infrastructure. So I did this:
Took about a day's work, spread over two. And I found this underneath:
Still running. Casio digital watch - is it yours, Elliot...?
Yesterday I went out to take a closer look at how the deck was bolted to the house. It looked, to me, at first, as if the deck must have been bolted to the concrete foundation of the addition, but it turns out to have been nailed to the beam on top of the foundation. And the deck ledger, as well as the beam behind it, appear to be rotten. I'll have to have someone who knows what they're talking about take a look at it, but it sure as heck looks to me like that beam's going to have to be replaced. So this might end up costing a fair amount.
Further frustration this morning on the puppy front: The litter we had been looking to go see is still sickly. They said to call back at the end of the week - which is what they said last week. And then it was "Call back Monday". I don't blame anyone - hey, if they're sick, they're sick. Nothing they can do about it, other than provide great care, which they've been doing. But it's a roller coaster for us. We want to get the dog in and get as much bonding / training done as possible before the school year starts again, so the sooner, the better.
Well, off to deal with the house issue. I'm going to see if our friend Matt, the contractor, is in the neighborhood working today. If he is, I'll be stopping over with the beverage of his choice to see if he can come take a look. Keep your fingers crossed...
Took about a day's work, spread over two. And I found this underneath:
Still running. Casio digital watch - is it yours, Elliot...?
Yesterday I went out to take a closer look at how the deck was bolted to the house. It looked, to me, at first, as if the deck must have been bolted to the concrete foundation of the addition, but it turns out to have been nailed to the beam on top of the foundation. And the deck ledger, as well as the beam behind it, appear to be rotten. I'll have to have someone who knows what they're talking about take a look at it, but it sure as heck looks to me like that beam's going to have to be replaced. So this might end up costing a fair amount.
Further frustration this morning on the puppy front: The litter we had been looking to go see is still sickly. They said to call back at the end of the week - which is what they said last week. And then it was "Call back Monday". I don't blame anyone - hey, if they're sick, they're sick. Nothing they can do about it, other than provide great care, which they've been doing. But it's a roller coaster for us. We want to get the dog in and get as much bonding / training done as possible before the school year starts again, so the sooner, the better.
Well, off to deal with the house issue. I'm going to see if our friend Matt, the contractor, is in the neighborhood working today. If he is, I'll be stopping over with the beverage of his choice to see if he can come take a look. Keep your fingers crossed...
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Brief Summer Update
Wow. So, so sorry about the lay-off - I really can't explain myself. Other than the fact that when I have acres and acres of time stretching out before me, and an able steed beneath me, all I really do is climb down and curl up in the clover and take a nap. Which is a very odd metaphorical way of saying that when I have an open schedule, I somehow get a hell of a lot less done than when my time is restricted somehow. By, oh, I don't know, a job, say. And since in summer I don't have one, the whole day is over before I know it and I haven't accomplished much of anything.
Except a lot of recreating. Janneke and I have made it out to the tennis courts at least three or four times (very good, for us), the kids and we have been swimming a number of times, which has taken up entire afternoons, either out at Windsor Lake in North Adams, up at Margaret Lindley Park in Williamstown, or over at the Sand Springs Pool - the only "public" pool in town, which isn't public, but rather private, and which requires either an exorbitant membership fee or an exorbitant daily pass. We've caved in on the passes a few times, because the pool is wonderful, the poolside amenities are great, and the days have been haaawwt.
So haawwt that we spent several of the last few nights downstairs in the guest rooms, where Q still prefers to sleep - though last night T went down there too, and they shared a bed, out of habit (usually we're all down there, and there are only two furnished rooms), but he came back up after an hour or so because T was snoring. And it had cooled down a lot upstairs by then anyway.
And we've been watching the world cup a lot. Here were the get-ups for the final:
(The Dutch also call themselves "cheese heads".) We were disappointed in the outcome, and in the US' showing in the tournament, but all in all, thrilled by the whole spectacle, and inspired, by our friend Magnus and his son Benni, to make plans for the future. Magnus and Benni, four years ago, decided that they would go to South Africa and watch the WC four years hence, and by crackee, they did it, saving up the money over the four years and going the hell over there. So Q and I have done the same thing, and here's the evidence:
Every day I don't buy myself any junk food, I put $5 in there. And every time Q cleans his room top to bottom, he still gets the $5 pocket money he ordinarily used to get, but we also put $5 in the envelope. (If we made him forego having pocket money to save it for an event four years from now, it would probably actually disincentivize him to save anything at all. So we came up with the "matching funds" program.) And he put about 60% of his birthday money in there. So we should have a tidy sum by the time 2014 comes around - and soon, I think I'm going to start learning Portuguese. With Q. Should be fun.
Dude - T beckons. I'm home alone with her this afternoon. More soon - including the big news of the summer: Gettin' a dog!!
Except a lot of recreating. Janneke and I have made it out to the tennis courts at least three or four times (very good, for us), the kids and we have been swimming a number of times, which has taken up entire afternoons, either out at Windsor Lake in North Adams, up at Margaret Lindley Park in Williamstown, or over at the Sand Springs Pool - the only "public" pool in town, which isn't public, but rather private, and which requires either an exorbitant membership fee or an exorbitant daily pass. We've caved in on the passes a few times, because the pool is wonderful, the poolside amenities are great, and the days have been haaawwt.
So haawwt that we spent several of the last few nights downstairs in the guest rooms, where Q still prefers to sleep - though last night T went down there too, and they shared a bed, out of habit (usually we're all down there, and there are only two furnished rooms), but he came back up after an hour or so because T was snoring. And it had cooled down a lot upstairs by then anyway.
And we've been watching the world cup a lot. Here were the get-ups for the final:
(The Dutch also call themselves "cheese heads".) We were disappointed in the outcome, and in the US' showing in the tournament, but all in all, thrilled by the whole spectacle, and inspired, by our friend Magnus and his son Benni, to make plans for the future. Magnus and Benni, four years ago, decided that they would go to South Africa and watch the WC four years hence, and by crackee, they did it, saving up the money over the four years and going the hell over there. So Q and I have done the same thing, and here's the evidence:
Every day I don't buy myself any junk food, I put $5 in there. And every time Q cleans his room top to bottom, he still gets the $5 pocket money he ordinarily used to get, but we also put $5 in the envelope. (If we made him forego having pocket money to save it for an event four years from now, it would probably actually disincentivize him to save anything at all. So we came up with the "matching funds" program.) And he put about 60% of his birthday money in there. So we should have a tidy sum by the time 2014 comes around - and soon, I think I'm going to start learning Portuguese. With Q. Should be fun.
Dude - T beckons. I'm home alone with her this afternoon. More soon - including the big news of the summer: Gettin' a dog!!
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Cincinnati: Growing On Me
OK, so I just sat in Fountain Square, which is very lovely, and ate ice cream while watching "I Am Legend" on a huge jumbotron poking out the roof of Macy's. Steel and glass canyon walls all around me, a beer garden (I did not partake) keeping people mellow, families drawing up chairs and sitting on the edge of the fountain, red-clad Cincinnati Reds fans filtering in after the ball game 5 blocks away to eat ice cream at Graeter's, the well-known (apparently (and deservedly)) ages-old purveyors of artery damage located there, on the...um...East...? side of the square...It was the nicest, warmest, most relaxing way to wind down my evening. Sure beat watching soccer games on TV whose outcomes I already knew. My day went this way:
Up at 7:00 or so, to do some small amount of exercisin' and catch a little South Korea v Greece on the tele. Saw SK score a goal, and headed over to the convention center to work.
I'm pretty sure there are some propietary things I'm not supposed to tell you, but I will tell you this: There are a lot of us, we work at a comfortable pace, we're well-trained and monitored, and we grade consistently. We get breaks throughout the day, and are served a pretty nice breakfast, lunch, and dinner over there. My colleagues are all nice people. There, I don't think the College Board's competitors (who I do not think exist) can glean much from that. I'm doing well - I got a post-it note from my Table Leader today, congratulating me for following the rubric so closely. I stuck it up on my computer screen for all to see...and then took it down again, because it felt kind of weird.
But I didn't throw it out.
We get out at 5:00, and dinner is served until 7:00, so that's when I've been taking my run. I don't know how far I'm running (can't get Google Earth to work on this computer anymore), but I run 'til I'm tired, exploring as I do so. I ran south toward the riverfront, and did a lap around Paul Brown Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bengals. It's right next to the Reds stadium - which is named "Great American Ballpark", and is the second awful name of a prominent thing in downtown Cincinnati, the other being "Fifth Third Bank"". I think I had known of the existence of the bank before coming here, but seeing that God-awful name, displayed in such huge, proud, red letters, on top of a very impressive building, made its silliness all the more evident to me. Once done circumnavigating the stadium (Monday, I think I'll use the lunch break to go buy the kids some Bengals gear at their pro shop, which is open 10:00 Am to 5:00 PM), I trotted out toward an elevated highway nearby, and noticed it had a broad sidewalk along it. The sidewalk appears to have been built specifically to allow rabid Bengals fans (and there are a lot of them - this town loves those hapless Bungles) to stand there and watch practice. The practice fields are located right next to the stadium, and while there are hedges and fences separating them from the direct view of people who might be standing at their level, the sidewalk view from up above is fantastic. You can see everything. Or you could, anyway, if anything were happening there. Not nearly close enough to hear much, other than maybe the occasional whistle (it's quite a busy highway), but the sidewalk is broad and long and plain-ol' designed for dawdlers. I jogged that way and scanned the stadium, a very nice one, and the fields as I went.
The sidewalk and highway then turn into a bridge, which goes to Kentucky. I took it. The Ohio River is really a pretty good facsimile of the Wisconsin, about the same size, if narrower and faster - OK, that sounds dumb. But hear me out: I would say that a roughly equal volume of water goes down both. But the Ohio is narrower and deeper. Is my guess. But since it stormed pretty heavily last night and this morning, today it was a very dirty brown and had a lot of flotsam in it. Some natural, and therefore forgivable, but a lot of it was just garbage. Hey, maybe the rivers that flow through Chicago and Memphis and LaCrosse are just as dirty. What do I know. But this river, and this riverfront, struck me as particularly gone to pot. It's a major city, and it's tried a lot of things - they constructed these two stadia right on the river (and the Reds ballpark, whose name I will no longer utter because it is stupid, incorporates riverboat imagery into its ambience), there are a good number of riverboat restaurants, which seem to be popular, with well-dressed people filtering in as I ran past...There's even a huge levee on the Kentucky side, with a giant steel gate (down when I ran by yesterday) that rises out of the ground in the event of a flood to keep the low neighborhoods on that side dry and safe - yet another piece of evidence that they have tried hard to make this river an attraction. And maybe it is nicer at night, with the lights of the nearby downtown twinkling on its surface as the boats slide past. But during the day, it's pretty grim.
I don't know - It's not THAT grim. But it's not that nice.
Once in Kentucky, I found myself in a hotel district. Cheap, small, perhaps even seedy hotels. I touched a metal grate, just to have had a reason to have come across, and turned back toward Ohio. And I so enjoyed the slow rotation around the stadium and the practice fields, that I touched the guard rail at the intersection that led back to the hotel, and turned around and took one more trip to Kentucky, to make sure that grate was still there.
It was.
I'm really enjoying the way I run here. I don't know how far, and I don't care how fast. I go at a comfortable pace, with my newfound freedom from pain in my feet of my ankles or my knees or any damn thing. I run 'til I'm tired and then I stop, and each time I've stopped, I've been no more than a few blocks from the hotel. I've walked to the hotel both times, showered, and headed out to eat.
Yesterday when I did this, I ate at a little pizza place I found on the way to the stadium. You see, I had run past the stadium earlier, and had noticed that all these baseball fans were beginning to filter in. I asked someone when it started; he said 7:10. I thanked him, jogged / walked to the hotel room, and soon found myself standing and chatting with a young Italian man about the secrets of great pizza as my two slices warmed up in his oven. He told me he'd been living in DC four years ago when Italy beat France in the World Cup final, and that he and all his friends had gone to celebrate...in front of the French Embassy. I laughed long and hard at that.
And then gobbled my two slices as I walked to the ball park, joining an ever-growing throng. I wore my Brewers cap, and thought, Hey! The Brewers and Reds are in the same division! Could it be...?!
Nope. Kansas City Royals. Oh well. I scanned the prices and the sections, and bought myself some damn fine seats, ten rows back behind the Reds dugout. Then I bought a beer, walked to my seat, and settled in.
I had missed the top of the first. I was so close I could see which of the Reds had shaved that morning. Dusty Baker, their manager, came charging out of the dugout to challenge the ump, who'd called a Royals runner safe at first. I saw a home run by the Reds, lustily cheered by all of us; I saw some nifty fielding and a bunt that moved a runner from first to second, and that runner then scored on a single. I sat next to a couple from Indiana who have season tickets; they were there with their son and his girlfriend. She told me they were also Colts season ticket holders; she told me she was gaining weight again because she was trying to quit smoking. She told me the old Riverfront Stadium used to host Reds and Bengals games; she told me about her mixed record of success with Weight Watchers. She told me she'd had a hysterectomy. She told me the stadium was only three or four years old, and that the Reds were currently in first place. I told her I needed to get past her to go buy another beer, because this one I'd just finished had been great.
And I walked to the hotel. I had watched the game through the top of the sixth, and that, my friends, turns out to be all the baseball I can take. I'm really glad I went - I now know a hell of a lot more about Cincinnati, the Reds, and a large woman from Indiana. But the experience wasn't going to get any better if it went on longer.
Tonight after my run, I dashed quickly to the eatery in the convention center and managed to snag a meal before they closed up the buffet line. I sat next to a very nice Spanish teacher from Seattle, who's pregnant and is taking next year off to take care of her baby. We exchanged teaching ideas and travel stories with kids, and stories about trying to raise kids bilingually - her husband is Japanese, and only speaks to her son in that language; she tries to speak to him in Spanish, since they once lived in Mexico for three years, and he is still reasonably fluent. It was a very nice chat.
And then back to the room, where I washed some running clothes in the bathtub, and out the door to find Graeter's and have some dessert. Which led to "I Am Legend". Which is still creeping me out a bit, and the fact that I'm listening to Bon Iver as I write this isn't helping in that regard. I may need to stay up a bit yet.
Work tomorrow at 8:00! Hoping to get another positive post-it note. I hope I can sleep, what with the anticipation and all. Wish me luck!
Hell, who am I kidding. It ain't luck.
Up at 7:00 or so, to do some small amount of exercisin' and catch a little South Korea v Greece on the tele. Saw SK score a goal, and headed over to the convention center to work.
I'm pretty sure there are some propietary things I'm not supposed to tell you, but I will tell you this: There are a lot of us, we work at a comfortable pace, we're well-trained and monitored, and we grade consistently. We get breaks throughout the day, and are served a pretty nice breakfast, lunch, and dinner over there. My colleagues are all nice people. There, I don't think the College Board's competitors (who I do not think exist) can glean much from that. I'm doing well - I got a post-it note from my Table Leader today, congratulating me for following the rubric so closely. I stuck it up on my computer screen for all to see...and then took it down again, because it felt kind of weird.
But I didn't throw it out.
We get out at 5:00, and dinner is served until 7:00, so that's when I've been taking my run. I don't know how far I'm running (can't get Google Earth to work on this computer anymore), but I run 'til I'm tired, exploring as I do so. I ran south toward the riverfront, and did a lap around Paul Brown Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bengals. It's right next to the Reds stadium - which is named "Great American Ballpark", and is the second awful name of a prominent thing in downtown Cincinnati, the other being "Fifth Third Bank"". I think I had known of the existence of the bank before coming here, but seeing that God-awful name, displayed in such huge, proud, red letters, on top of a very impressive building, made its silliness all the more evident to me. Once done circumnavigating the stadium (Monday, I think I'll use the lunch break to go buy the kids some Bengals gear at their pro shop, which is open 10:00 Am to 5:00 PM), I trotted out toward an elevated highway nearby, and noticed it had a broad sidewalk along it. The sidewalk appears to have been built specifically to allow rabid Bengals fans (and there are a lot of them - this town loves those hapless Bungles) to stand there and watch practice. The practice fields are located right next to the stadium, and while there are hedges and fences separating them from the direct view of people who might be standing at their level, the sidewalk view from up above is fantastic. You can see everything. Or you could, anyway, if anything were happening there. Not nearly close enough to hear much, other than maybe the occasional whistle (it's quite a busy highway), but the sidewalk is broad and long and plain-ol' designed for dawdlers. I jogged that way and scanned the stadium, a very nice one, and the fields as I went.
The sidewalk and highway then turn into a bridge, which goes to Kentucky. I took it. The Ohio River is really a pretty good facsimile of the Wisconsin, about the same size, if narrower and faster - OK, that sounds dumb. But hear me out: I would say that a roughly equal volume of water goes down both. But the Ohio is narrower and deeper. Is my guess. But since it stormed pretty heavily last night and this morning, today it was a very dirty brown and had a lot of flotsam in it. Some natural, and therefore forgivable, but a lot of it was just garbage. Hey, maybe the rivers that flow through Chicago and Memphis and LaCrosse are just as dirty. What do I know. But this river, and this riverfront, struck me as particularly gone to pot. It's a major city, and it's tried a lot of things - they constructed these two stadia right on the river (and the Reds ballpark, whose name I will no longer utter because it is stupid, incorporates riverboat imagery into its ambience), there are a good number of riverboat restaurants, which seem to be popular, with well-dressed people filtering in as I ran past...There's even a huge levee on the Kentucky side, with a giant steel gate (down when I ran by yesterday) that rises out of the ground in the event of a flood to keep the low neighborhoods on that side dry and safe - yet another piece of evidence that they have tried hard to make this river an attraction. And maybe it is nicer at night, with the lights of the nearby downtown twinkling on its surface as the boats slide past. But during the day, it's pretty grim.
I don't know - It's not THAT grim. But it's not that nice.
Once in Kentucky, I found myself in a hotel district. Cheap, small, perhaps even seedy hotels. I touched a metal grate, just to have had a reason to have come across, and turned back toward Ohio. And I so enjoyed the slow rotation around the stadium and the practice fields, that I touched the guard rail at the intersection that led back to the hotel, and turned around and took one more trip to Kentucky, to make sure that grate was still there.
It was.
I'm really enjoying the way I run here. I don't know how far, and I don't care how fast. I go at a comfortable pace, with my newfound freedom from pain in my feet of my ankles or my knees or any damn thing. I run 'til I'm tired and then I stop, and each time I've stopped, I've been no more than a few blocks from the hotel. I've walked to the hotel both times, showered, and headed out to eat.
Yesterday when I did this, I ate at a little pizza place I found on the way to the stadium. You see, I had run past the stadium earlier, and had noticed that all these baseball fans were beginning to filter in. I asked someone when it started; he said 7:10. I thanked him, jogged / walked to the hotel room, and soon found myself standing and chatting with a young Italian man about the secrets of great pizza as my two slices warmed up in his oven. He told me he'd been living in DC four years ago when Italy beat France in the World Cup final, and that he and all his friends had gone to celebrate...in front of the French Embassy. I laughed long and hard at that.
And then gobbled my two slices as I walked to the ball park, joining an ever-growing throng. I wore my Brewers cap, and thought, Hey! The Brewers and Reds are in the same division! Could it be...?!
Nope. Kansas City Royals. Oh well. I scanned the prices and the sections, and bought myself some damn fine seats, ten rows back behind the Reds dugout. Then I bought a beer, walked to my seat, and settled in.
I had missed the top of the first. I was so close I could see which of the Reds had shaved that morning. Dusty Baker, their manager, came charging out of the dugout to challenge the ump, who'd called a Royals runner safe at first. I saw a home run by the Reds, lustily cheered by all of us; I saw some nifty fielding and a bunt that moved a runner from first to second, and that runner then scored on a single. I sat next to a couple from Indiana who have season tickets; they were there with their son and his girlfriend. She told me they were also Colts season ticket holders; she told me she was gaining weight again because she was trying to quit smoking. She told me the old Riverfront Stadium used to host Reds and Bengals games; she told me about her mixed record of success with Weight Watchers. She told me she'd had a hysterectomy. She told me the stadium was only three or four years old, and that the Reds were currently in first place. I told her I needed to get past her to go buy another beer, because this one I'd just finished had been great.
And I walked to the hotel. I had watched the game through the top of the sixth, and that, my friends, turns out to be all the baseball I can take. I'm really glad I went - I now know a hell of a lot more about Cincinnati, the Reds, and a large woman from Indiana. But the experience wasn't going to get any better if it went on longer.
Tonight after my run, I dashed quickly to the eatery in the convention center and managed to snag a meal before they closed up the buffet line. I sat next to a very nice Spanish teacher from Seattle, who's pregnant and is taking next year off to take care of her baby. We exchanged teaching ideas and travel stories with kids, and stories about trying to raise kids bilingually - her husband is Japanese, and only speaks to her son in that language; she tries to speak to him in Spanish, since they once lived in Mexico for three years, and he is still reasonably fluent. It was a very nice chat.
And then back to the room, where I washed some running clothes in the bathtub, and out the door to find Graeter's and have some dessert. Which led to "I Am Legend". Which is still creeping me out a bit, and the fact that I'm listening to Bon Iver as I write this isn't helping in that regard. I may need to stay up a bit yet.
Work tomorrow at 8:00! Hoping to get another positive post-it note. I hope I can sleep, what with the anticipation and all. Wish me luck!
Hell, who am I kidding. It ain't luck.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Jet-Setter
That is I. I am sitting at Gate F30 at the Philadelphia International Airport, wearing a Sport Jacket, and tapping away at the keys of a Computer. Everyone walking by is jealous of my obvious status and importance. They gaze at me longingly as they pass and sigh once they've gone by, knowing that now, having had this glimpse of my glory, they'll have to return to their own lives, which will pale in comparison.
Possibly. Although my coolness is probably somewhat reduced by the fact that right now I really, really have to use the bathroom.
Getting to the airport was really very stressful. I had to do a bunch of stuff at school before I could go (I'm not going to be there for the last three days of classes (by the way: I'm done teaching for the year!) or to administer the final exams, so I had to have everything laid out in excruciating detail), which bled over past the end of the school day, and I was almost out of gas, so I had to stop on the way home, and after I grabbed my bags and hit the road, I took the wrong highway in Albany for the airport, and lost probably 20 minutes there, and when I got back on the right track, I remembered that there was construction, and I managed to sniff my way to within very little distance of the airport (I was actually proud of how close I got, quickly, without the benefit of signs indicating the airport, and of the fact that I just plain KNEW I was near it, despite not really knowing the city). It was 5:14 PM, and my flight was at 6:05. All seemed lost!...
But then I safely, though illegally, crossed over to a clothing store, stopped a woman on her way out and asked her how to get to the airport, and she showed me a shortcut. The whole stop took 100 seconds, tops. And the shortcut was made shorter still by my (safely) disobeying two traffic signals. And I still parked in the economy lot, and made it to the gate in time to check my bags and write Janneke an email. I am a Jet Setter indeed. Flouting the traffic law! Urging the shuttle driver on to greater and greater speeds! Sport jacket tails flaring out behind me like the contrails behind an F-16...!
And just wait 'til I arrive in Cincinnati, and there's a guy holding a sign for me. How cool will I be THEN!
'Course, it won't say my name. It will say "AP READER", which I am. I'm going to Cinci to spend a week grading the AP exam. It's a paid gig, which my school has allowed me to do to raise my prestige and skill level as an AP teacher. Never mind that I get great results for my AP students by basically ignoring the test until about a month before they take it. Or that I don't believe in the whole AP racket. I know the test, and I'll be a great grader. And we'll be that much closer to financing our Puerto Rico adventure.
The shape of which is kind of changing on us. The more we think about it, the more we feel like 6th grade is a particularly pivotal year for Q to be missing. There's the 6th-grade musical, there's the year of being the Big Kid in Town before transferring up to the high school building, there's the "Travel" soccer team that he and his pals are probably going to join...So we're thinking that we'll do two serious summers in Puerto Rico, with camps for the kids and lots of interactions with people, for two, three months at a time. And possible return journeys during the year. We want to get them immersed, but a full year away is starting to seem like a lot. Besides, it will be easy-peasy to rent out the house for the summer. Not so much for the year, probably.
T lost her front tooth in school the other day! Oh, yeah - I told you that already. Between that and her bike riding (which, weather permitting, she does every night now), this kid is positively transformed of late. She's independent as heck - something happened the other day at her after-school day care as I was picking her up that I just loved. She's not real big, as you know. And there's another girl there who's probably seven inches taller, though they're in the same grade, and who is a little bratty and pushy. T was showing her a little toy tea pot, which she had just figured out - it has a cup that also serves as a lid. She offered me tea, and when I said yes, she lifted the fup out of its hole and wa-lah!, she was ready to serve. She was excited, and walked over to show this discover to the aforementioned girl. Who started grabbing at the tea pot halfway through T's demonstration. But she didn't get angry, didn't panic, didn't give in, didn't get offended - She just calmly moved the teapot out of her grasp before she could get hold of it, continued with her description and demonstration, and when she was done, the girl said "Cool!" And T calmly, smilingly handed her the teapot and came back over to me. No need to be a victim, or the boss - she just defused the situation and moved on. She is one together little lass.
Man, OK, I reeeeally have to use the bathroom. The Chinese food and two macaroons I had for supper just went right through me, I guess. It's been great, but we jet-setters have a lot on our plates. I'll catch you on the flip side.
(That's jet-set slang for "good bye". Dig?)
Possibly. Although my coolness is probably somewhat reduced by the fact that right now I really, really have to use the bathroom.
Getting to the airport was really very stressful. I had to do a bunch of stuff at school before I could go (I'm not going to be there for the last three days of classes (by the way: I'm done teaching for the year!) or to administer the final exams, so I had to have everything laid out in excruciating detail), which bled over past the end of the school day, and I was almost out of gas, so I had to stop on the way home, and after I grabbed my bags and hit the road, I took the wrong highway in Albany for the airport, and lost probably 20 minutes there, and when I got back on the right track, I remembered that there was construction, and I managed to sniff my way to within very little distance of the airport (I was actually proud of how close I got, quickly, without the benefit of signs indicating the airport, and of the fact that I just plain KNEW I was near it, despite not really knowing the city). It was 5:14 PM, and my flight was at 6:05. All seemed lost!...
But then I safely, though illegally, crossed over to a clothing store, stopped a woman on her way out and asked her how to get to the airport, and she showed me a shortcut. The whole stop took 100 seconds, tops. And the shortcut was made shorter still by my (safely) disobeying two traffic signals. And I still parked in the economy lot, and made it to the gate in time to check my bags and write Janneke an email. I am a Jet Setter indeed. Flouting the traffic law! Urging the shuttle driver on to greater and greater speeds! Sport jacket tails flaring out behind me like the contrails behind an F-16...!
And just wait 'til I arrive in Cincinnati, and there's a guy holding a sign for me. How cool will I be THEN!
'Course, it won't say my name. It will say "AP READER", which I am. I'm going to Cinci to spend a week grading the AP exam. It's a paid gig, which my school has allowed me to do to raise my prestige and skill level as an AP teacher. Never mind that I get great results for my AP students by basically ignoring the test until about a month before they take it. Or that I don't believe in the whole AP racket. I know the test, and I'll be a great grader. And we'll be that much closer to financing our Puerto Rico adventure.
The shape of which is kind of changing on us. The more we think about it, the more we feel like 6th grade is a particularly pivotal year for Q to be missing. There's the 6th-grade musical, there's the year of being the Big Kid in Town before transferring up to the high school building, there's the "Travel" soccer team that he and his pals are probably going to join...So we're thinking that we'll do two serious summers in Puerto Rico, with camps for the kids and lots of interactions with people, for two, three months at a time. And possible return journeys during the year. We want to get them immersed, but a full year away is starting to seem like a lot. Besides, it will be easy-peasy to rent out the house for the summer. Not so much for the year, probably.
T lost her front tooth in school the other day! Oh, yeah - I told you that already. Between that and her bike riding (which, weather permitting, she does every night now), this kid is positively transformed of late. She's independent as heck - something happened the other day at her after-school day care as I was picking her up that I just loved. She's not real big, as you know. And there's another girl there who's probably seven inches taller, though they're in the same grade, and who is a little bratty and pushy. T was showing her a little toy tea pot, which she had just figured out - it has a cup that also serves as a lid. She offered me tea, and when I said yes, she lifted the fup out of its hole and wa-lah!, she was ready to serve. She was excited, and walked over to show this discover to the aforementioned girl. Who started grabbing at the tea pot halfway through T's demonstration. But she didn't get angry, didn't panic, didn't give in, didn't get offended - She just calmly moved the teapot out of her grasp before she could get hold of it, continued with her description and demonstration, and when she was done, the girl said "Cool!" And T calmly, smilingly handed her the teapot and came back over to me. No need to be a victim, or the boss - she just defused the situation and moved on. She is one together little lass.
Man, OK, I reeeeally have to use the bathroom. The Chinese food and two macaroons I had for supper just went right through me, I guess. It's been great, but we jet-setters have a lot on our plates. I'll catch you on the flip side.
(That's jet-set slang for "good bye". Dig?)
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Fafuta!
That's what you call someone, apparently, in that uncivilized backwater where Janneke was raised when THIS happens:
And THIS is what happens when you call someone's mother's native land an uncivilized backwater:
And THIS is what happens when you call someone's mother's native land an uncivilized backwater:
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Barefootin'!
Just a quick note to share the news of the weekend. First of all, the weather was phenomenal - Absolutely perfect. No day too hot, or rainy; a gentle breeze blowing for much of the time...Just peachy. We did a lot of yard work (and I don't just mean me - T and Janneke did a ton of weeding, while Q, on Sunday, the heaviest lift of the weekend, was away all day at a sleepover), including a reclamation project on the gravel path between our deck and the back yard. I've never known quite what to do with it - it's under the neighbor's ancient and decrepit pine trees, so trillions of pine needles fall on it yearly, as well as the miniature laves from their locust tree. None of that can be easily raked or swept away, so it gets ground into the gravel, and becomes soil and muck; combined with the soil under the gravel, it makes a perfect home for weeds, which come up vigorously.
One of our first years in the house, I found a solution that was very labor-intensive, but effective. I made a sifter out of some scrap lumber and quarter-inch wire mesh, and shoveled wheelbarrow-full after wheelbarrow-full into it. I shook out the dirt and the leaves, washed the gravel with the hose, and eventually had a lovely gravel path again. After only two days and enough calories of gravel-sifting to feed Paraguay for a month. I decided early on that it was a fool's errand, but continued, not wanting the guy we'd hired to install our flooring in the basement, to whom I had described my plan, to see it fail. In the end, though, he when all was said and done, he just asked me, "Was it worth it?" And I simply turned away and gently wept.
So I'm ashamed to say that my solution this year involved a lot less sacrifice on my part, and a lot more on the earth's part. I took the hose to it without doing any real shoveling. Eventually, I got a pretty good scheme going - my thinking was that the rocks, which, while small, are still rocks, and were unlikely to be blasted very far by a glancing jet of water across their surface. But the leaves, dirt, and pine needles, when hit, would be blasted farther. So if I just strafed the surface with an intense jet of water, starting at the top of the walkway and heading down hill, eventually I would wind up with a mound of crud at the bottom and a barely-disturbed layer of clean rocks above it. It pretty much worked out that way, in the end, and the walkway looks a whole lot better than it did. But the Earth is one swimming pool's worth of water less whole. Can't win, I guess, no matter what I do.
In gravel walkway maintenance, anyway. In other areas, I'm becoming a very consistent winner. Like in running. yesterday, Memorial Day, we celebrated by taking the whole family (after T's baseball game, where she hit well but got thrown out two times out of three) up to the U-10 soccer field and playing in a pickup kids-and-adults soccer game, organized by Magnus, our friend and the girls' U-10 soccer coach. Not too many people showed up, so it wound up just being Janneke and me, Brad, Betsy, a guy named Jeff, and Magnus and his wife Margaret against all our kids and a few extras who jumped in for fun. The field was big for such a small team, and we all played barefoot - the unfortunate part of that being that Janneke got stung by a bee on one toe, and had to leave the game. (Mostly to go home and cook, as most of the players were coming over to our house for a barbecue.) But the fortunate part is this: I sprinted and raced and zoomed around that field like I was 12 years old! I had NO pain, ANYWHERE! Not in my knees. Not in my hips. Not in my feet. NOTHING! My feet are getting to be so strong and healthy now, and my fitness level is so improved from all the running I'm doing, that I was downright playin' some damned soccer, and suffered no ill effects what, so, ever. In FACT! This morning, and all day long, I have had no residual stiffness or soreness in my right foot at all - quite different from most mornings, when I grimace and wince a bit on my way to the bathroom. The right foot, while painless during my runs, has been pretty creaky after a night's sleep. But yesterday, I must have simply blasted it into such supple pliancy that there's just no trace left of an injury.
I am deliriously excited. I might start going to the grass fields to do WIND SPRINTS, I feel so dang good! A lot of my athletic identity has always been pinned to running - I wasn't tall, or skilled, or especially coordinated. But damn it, I was strong, and I could motor. And now that I can motor again, look out! I may even look into trying to play some kind of dang SPORT!
(Though it would have to be barefoot. Whenever I had to stop quickly on the field yesterday, I would do so with a very fast series of stutter-steps, chopping my feet to brake without digging them so deep into the grass that I would slip or lose control. If I had been wearing cleats, I'd have been able to stop in one smooth, quick CHOP!, and would very likely have snapped something in one or both knees. I am becoming a barefoot evangelist - I had a blast, and would love to start playing ultimate frisbee, but I do know this: It would have to be barefoot. I know my limits.)
Those limits, by the by, are getting more limiting as the years go by. The most challenging one this spring is the allergies. Holy Toledo! I have never had as bad a time as this. The reason is pretty obvious - here's the culprit:
That scum on the puddle at the end of our driveway is pollen. Pollen, pollen, everywhere, crawling down my throat. My only real symptom from the pollen is a cough - a persistent, insistent, itching, cloying cough that lets you get aaaaalmost completely asleep before it shakes you awake again. Oddly, the only time of day I don't cough is when I'm running. I go six miles without a single solitary symptom - 'course, when I get back, I spend five minutes in the back yard hacking up lungs until it sounds to the neighbors like they live on Frat Row at 3:00 AM on a Saturday night. But it's worth it - those 50 minutes of bliss are about the only decent breathing I get done these days. Today seems better than yesterday, but that's not saying much.
The barbecue yesterday, by the way, after the pick-up soccer, was wonderful. Very nice bunch of kids, who needed pretty much no adult supervision the whole time. No squabbles, no conflicts, just lots of interaction and play time. A great variety of ages (T, 6, all the way up to Benni, 12), genders, and interests. Q got to spend a fair amount of one-on-one time with Benni, which made him feel very big and important, and T was being fussed over and cuddled and pulled along from one event to another by an unending succession of older, patient girls. And the adult company was wonderful too - a great end to a great weekend.
Though I now have to really buckle down and plan all the classes for which I will be absent this coming week. I leave for Cincinnati on the 10th to correct AP exams, and don't come back until the 18th. So there are a lot of instructions to leave.
I was staying down here to meet up with the fambly at Q's soccer game in Pittsfield, but I just heard it's been canceled. So I'll do another thing or two here, then head home. Take care, brush your hair,
Joe
One of our first years in the house, I found a solution that was very labor-intensive, but effective. I made a sifter out of some scrap lumber and quarter-inch wire mesh, and shoveled wheelbarrow-full after wheelbarrow-full into it. I shook out the dirt and the leaves, washed the gravel with the hose, and eventually had a lovely gravel path again. After only two days and enough calories of gravel-sifting to feed Paraguay for a month. I decided early on that it was a fool's errand, but continued, not wanting the guy we'd hired to install our flooring in the basement, to whom I had described my plan, to see it fail. In the end, though, he when all was said and done, he just asked me, "Was it worth it?" And I simply turned away and gently wept.
So I'm ashamed to say that my solution this year involved a lot less sacrifice on my part, and a lot more on the earth's part. I took the hose to it without doing any real shoveling. Eventually, I got a pretty good scheme going - my thinking was that the rocks, which, while small, are still rocks, and were unlikely to be blasted very far by a glancing jet of water across their surface. But the leaves, dirt, and pine needles, when hit, would be blasted farther. So if I just strafed the surface with an intense jet of water, starting at the top of the walkway and heading down hill, eventually I would wind up with a mound of crud at the bottom and a barely-disturbed layer of clean rocks above it. It pretty much worked out that way, in the end, and the walkway looks a whole lot better than it did. But the Earth is one swimming pool's worth of water less whole. Can't win, I guess, no matter what I do.
In gravel walkway maintenance, anyway. In other areas, I'm becoming a very consistent winner. Like in running. yesterday, Memorial Day, we celebrated by taking the whole family (after T's baseball game, where she hit well but got thrown out two times out of three) up to the U-10 soccer field and playing in a pickup kids-and-adults soccer game, organized by Magnus, our friend and the girls' U-10 soccer coach. Not too many people showed up, so it wound up just being Janneke and me, Brad, Betsy, a guy named Jeff, and Magnus and his wife Margaret against all our kids and a few extras who jumped in for fun. The field was big for such a small team, and we all played barefoot - the unfortunate part of that being that Janneke got stung by a bee on one toe, and had to leave the game. (Mostly to go home and cook, as most of the players were coming over to our house for a barbecue.) But the fortunate part is this: I sprinted and raced and zoomed around that field like I was 12 years old! I had NO pain, ANYWHERE! Not in my knees. Not in my hips. Not in my feet. NOTHING! My feet are getting to be so strong and healthy now, and my fitness level is so improved from all the running I'm doing, that I was downright playin' some damned soccer, and suffered no ill effects what, so, ever. In FACT! This morning, and all day long, I have had no residual stiffness or soreness in my right foot at all - quite different from most mornings, when I grimace and wince a bit on my way to the bathroom. The right foot, while painless during my runs, has been pretty creaky after a night's sleep. But yesterday, I must have simply blasted it into such supple pliancy that there's just no trace left of an injury.
I am deliriously excited. I might start going to the grass fields to do WIND SPRINTS, I feel so dang good! A lot of my athletic identity has always been pinned to running - I wasn't tall, or skilled, or especially coordinated. But damn it, I was strong, and I could motor. And now that I can motor again, look out! I may even look into trying to play some kind of dang SPORT!
(Though it would have to be barefoot. Whenever I had to stop quickly on the field yesterday, I would do so with a very fast series of stutter-steps, chopping my feet to brake without digging them so deep into the grass that I would slip or lose control. If I had been wearing cleats, I'd have been able to stop in one smooth, quick CHOP!, and would very likely have snapped something in one or both knees. I am becoming a barefoot evangelist - I had a blast, and would love to start playing ultimate frisbee, but I do know this: It would have to be barefoot. I know my limits.)
Those limits, by the by, are getting more limiting as the years go by. The most challenging one this spring is the allergies. Holy Toledo! I have never had as bad a time as this. The reason is pretty obvious - here's the culprit:
That scum on the puddle at the end of our driveway is pollen. Pollen, pollen, everywhere, crawling down my throat. My only real symptom from the pollen is a cough - a persistent, insistent, itching, cloying cough that lets you get aaaaalmost completely asleep before it shakes you awake again. Oddly, the only time of day I don't cough is when I'm running. I go six miles without a single solitary symptom - 'course, when I get back, I spend five minutes in the back yard hacking up lungs until it sounds to the neighbors like they live on Frat Row at 3:00 AM on a Saturday night. But it's worth it - those 50 minutes of bliss are about the only decent breathing I get done these days. Today seems better than yesterday, but that's not saying much.
The barbecue yesterday, by the way, after the pick-up soccer, was wonderful. Very nice bunch of kids, who needed pretty much no adult supervision the whole time. No squabbles, no conflicts, just lots of interaction and play time. A great variety of ages (T, 6, all the way up to Benni, 12), genders, and interests. Q got to spend a fair amount of one-on-one time with Benni, which made him feel very big and important, and T was being fussed over and cuddled and pulled along from one event to another by an unending succession of older, patient girls. And the adult company was wonderful too - a great end to a great weekend.
Though I now have to really buckle down and plan all the classes for which I will be absent this coming week. I leave for Cincinnati on the 10th to correct AP exams, and don't come back until the 18th. So there are a lot of instructions to leave.
I was staying down here to meet up with the fambly at Q's soccer game in Pittsfield, but I just heard it's been canceled. So I'll do another thing or two here, then head home. Take care, brush your hair,
Joe
Friday, May 28, 2010
Smugness
Hey, folks - I just ran six quick, easy, smooth miles, wearing these:
That's right. Swim shoes. The most basic rubber padding available. Hardly even anything you could really call a lace.
My feet love me right now.
That's right. Swim shoes. The most basic rubber padding available. Hardly even anything you could really call a lace.
My feet love me right now.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Photographic Hijinks
OK, so it's feast or famine around here. What else is new. Here's some dang pictures:
T does this with her hat on game days. She takes it off and rubs it in the dirt of the first-to-second baseline. (She usually plays in the outfield, which, when you're six, is right about there.) I'm very curious as to why she might do this - it reminds me of pregnant women who eat great clods of earth, or mumbling homeless people who continually streak their hair from puddles of motor oil. It's sort of ritualistic and compulsive. I mean, look how much she got on there! And this is the amount that survived the ride home in the car, too. God only knows how much she had on there originally.
She did really well yesterday, though - she went three for three, and needed only a grand total of about eight pitches to get her hits. A vast difference between now and when she first began, when she would take 25 pitches and finally, randomly hit it. She's downright plunking them now.
Here's another:
This is Q in the Brandon Jennings jersey I bought him for no good reason, and which he opened in the car on the way home from school today, and which has already brought him much joy.
That's the picture that's in focus because I remembered to use the flash. But in the other one, he looks cooler, or so he tells me. So I'll include that one too:
He's wearing it to school tomorrow. With a T-shirt underneath, though. Never fear.
Here's T on opening day of baseball season, back when she couldn't bat her way out of a paper bag:
And here again, waiting to march in the parade, and apparently having heard Mami say, or seen her do, something scandalous:
Her Grandpa sent her that baseball glove, a year ago, I think. And on opening day, her first game, she took it with her to the port-a-potty, and left it there. We had a hard time locating it for about five minutes. "Oh no!", she squealed. "Grandpa sent that to me special! OH NO...!" These kids' memories astound me.
Here's the whole league, assembled for the opening day ceremonies at Bud Anderson Field.
Which, of course, my kids consistently refer to as "Butt Anderson".
Those apples have fallen pretty nigh, I'd say.
T does this with her hat on game days. She takes it off and rubs it in the dirt of the first-to-second baseline. (She usually plays in the outfield, which, when you're six, is right about there.) I'm very curious as to why she might do this - it reminds me of pregnant women who eat great clods of earth, or mumbling homeless people who continually streak their hair from puddles of motor oil. It's sort of ritualistic and compulsive. I mean, look how much she got on there! And this is the amount that survived the ride home in the car, too. God only knows how much she had on there originally.
She did really well yesterday, though - she went three for three, and needed only a grand total of about eight pitches to get her hits. A vast difference between now and when she first began, when she would take 25 pitches and finally, randomly hit it. She's downright plunking them now.
Here's another:
This is Q in the Brandon Jennings jersey I bought him for no good reason, and which he opened in the car on the way home from school today, and which has already brought him much joy.
That's the picture that's in focus because I remembered to use the flash. But in the other one, he looks cooler, or so he tells me. So I'll include that one too:
He's wearing it to school tomorrow. With a T-shirt underneath, though. Never fear.
Here's T on opening day of baseball season, back when she couldn't bat her way out of a paper bag:
And here again, waiting to march in the parade, and apparently having heard Mami say, or seen her do, something scandalous:
Her Grandpa sent her that baseball glove, a year ago, I think. And on opening day, her first game, she took it with her to the port-a-potty, and left it there. We had a hard time locating it for about five minutes. "Oh no!", she squealed. "Grandpa sent that to me special! OH NO...!" These kids' memories astound me.
Here's the whole league, assembled for the opening day ceremonies at Bud Anderson Field.
Which, of course, my kids consistently refer to as "Butt Anderson".
Those apples have fallen pretty nigh, I'd say.
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