Powder Hounds!
Hmm...Not much of a greeting. It's the name of the restaurant up at Jiminy Peak, but it doesn't really work as the lead-in here. Let's see - Janneke, c'mere a minute. Can you us your particular genius to warp this into something I can use at the outset?
"Let's see," she replies. "First, I'll have to go several days without thinking of it. Then, I'll have to try to call it up from memory on the fly, sticking the particularly-shaped stick that is my vague notion of the place into the vat of information that makes up my mind, stirring it about, then drawing it out again and see what's gotten tangled in its branches. So let me go off on a conference. Call me long-about Day 3 and ask me about the restaurant."
Done. Ready?
"Yep. Here goes:
"'The Pound Dog'. Is that good?"
Not really, sweetie. Try again.
"Hmm...'The Quarter Hounder'?"
Nope.
"'Hounderbout'?"
'Fraid not.
"The 'Howdy, Pardner'?"
Bingo. Thanks, sweetie.
(Ahem.)
Howdy, pardner!
Big weekend at the Johnstadt household. Friday night, Q had a basketball game, which we all attended. The rubber match between the two Williamstown teams that make up half this little four-team league. Q, on the one hand, had a fabulous game, with lots of people coming up to him to commend him for his ball-handling skills. Twice, independently, friends remarked about how Q was the only one out there who seemed unafraid to use his off-hand. (I was going to say "his left hand", but Alex is left-handed.) He drove the lane just about whenever he wanted - he would stay at the top of the key and start one way, then the other, and when the defender over-committed, zing!, in he would dart to lay it up.
Note I did not say "in". He finished the night with no points, and his team lost for the first time this year.
He wasn't the only one. A few kids on his side were off - by the time the first team (which plays exactly half the game, always, regardless the situation, because Q's coach so totally rocks) left the floor halfway through the first quarter, they were down 10-0. And by the time the second team walked off at the end of the first, it was 15-0. Everybody was getting to the hoop, but nobody was scoring. Weird.
So Saturday afternoon, long about 1:00, when the kids were going a bit stir crazy in the house, I offered to take them to the gym, where they could run off some steam.
And practice some lay-ups.
The one-street "downtown" of Williamstown was jammed with cars, though, and I started to worry about whether we'd be able to get to a gym. Very often in these little college towns, they will have these orgies of athletics, where suddenly every varsity team from some college or other piles aboard buses and invades the burg, and there are seven different varsity sports being contested at the same time all over campus. Chartered buses were parked near the skating rink...It didn't look good. But we went in anyway, with our sneakers and balls in our big-ol' Target bag, and walked to Lasell Gym, the one where you can usually get a backboard.
Full. Two wrestling mats and several varsity teams. Crumbs.
Off the three of us trundled, through the little skyway that passes through the squash courts. Which were teeming with people who were intently watching a match below, clapping vigorously and re-crossing their legs.
(And by the way: Squash fans and players, in this very small sample I've observed, are the WASP-iest of the WASPy folk you ever see at this WASP-y college. They just all seemed to be particularly...what, I don't know - Thin, reserved, lanky, well-to-do, straight-haired; slightly and tastefully overpriveleged (bringing their dog (an impeccably groomed black Labrador) indoors, for example, to watch the match, with no fear of being asked to leave it outside), covered in J-Crew Catalogue-looking clothes that are actually of some make that I'm far too Midwestern to even know about...Whale belts, say. I didn't think to look, but I'd bet money there was more than one whale belt in there. (Which you can read about in a quick and informative article here.) It was actually a little creepy. I hustled my genetic-grab-bag, Midwestern-inflected children through and continued toward the main gym.)
So on we trundled - toward the pool, whence we could see lots of people going in and out of the observation deck. Swim meet fever. Hoo-boy...We sighed as we walked toward the pool, knowing that this same skyway also looks down into Chandler Gym, where we fully expected to see a basketball game.
Nope. Absolutely empty.
Two minutes later we were charging around in there like there was no tomorrow - T with her big blue Dodgeball-style ball, and Q with his basketball, probably overinflated. (I had just pulled it out of the athletic bin on the deck, and it's about 5 degrees out. So I had pumped it up, maybe a bit too much.)
Q shot around a while, with no direction, but then I told him I thought he was putting it up too late on layups. I challenged him to stop dribbling no later than the line demarcating the outermost edge of the second "stall" where players stand while waiting for a free throw to be shot. At first, he thought it was impossible - but then I worded it differently. "You've still got two steps. Stop dribbling before here, and take your two steps starting here." He tried it - and laughed out loud at how easy it suddenly was to make a lay-up.
Then he asked me to play him one-on-one.
I made him do ten such layups first.
And then T and I did some bounce passes and catching with her ball; then I used my watch to time them as they sprinted across the gym floor. And then we went to Brad and Betsy's.
Needed to borrow some Blu-Ray discs, you see, because I just bought a Blu-Ray player, and it appears to be a piece of crap. Won't play any Blu-Ray discs at all - not only the ones that were just released, either, which was the half-arsed excuse the woman on the phone gave me when she talked me through to the point where it became clear that, yes, I did so have the latest version of the software ("firmware", they call it) loaded onto the damn thing. Be sending that back soon.
Saturday night, Q went to a birthday sleepover, and T and Janneke and I went out to have dinner at the home of Don and Bridget, proprietors of Caretaker Farm. They just got back from 2 months in Chile, and we wanted to pick their brain about how it had gone. Although it turned into us telling them about our hopes and plans for our own year abroad. Which is a testament to their coolness - they are so interested in others, and so good at making you feel at home, that you wind up talking about yourself a lot. Or maybe I'm just a self-centered jerk.
"'Maybe'?"
That'll do, Janneke.
Back to the ranch, where Janneke and I watched Michael Clayton. Two big thumbs up. Very enjoyable film, and all the more evidence that the rhythm and lifestyle we've found for ourselves is really very well suited to the people we are. I want nothing to do with the sort of life they depict there...You just have to see it. George Clooney is the best - The guy has everything, but you just can't dislike him. He is so, good at what he does. Fabulous picture.
Snoozed, we did, until 7:30 or so, when T's antics woke us. Grabbed her and dragged her to our bed for some Sunday-mornin' hijinks, and then I went downstairs to run on the treadmill. It's cold out - I'm not going out there unless I have to. (Because I, as my friends in fourth grade would have told you, am a sissy. Only they wouldn't have said "sissy", because I was in fourth grade in 1979, not 1959.)
(Which absolutely freaks me out: When I was in fourth grade, it had only been twenty years since the days of Edsels and greased hair and drag races and sock-hops. Only twenty years! Do you know what I was doing twenty years ago? I was 21 years old! I was in college! Half of you were there! (Assuming someone other than my mother-in-law is reading this. Hi, Monique!) My God...! Tell me the existential gap between 1959 and 1979 isn't five times larger than the one between 2010 and 1990. I dare you.)
Anyway, I went to pick Q up from his playdate around 10:00, but the hosts invited him to continue the day on the ski slopes. Which would mean that T wouldn't go - so I had to take her up, just to make things even. Woe is me.
And despite it only being 18 degrees or so, it really wasn't bad at all. The wind was very slight, and the sun was bright. T and I got in three good runs, then met up with Q and his pals and collected him to take him home.
Where we had time to shower and change before heading out to Coyote Flaco for my birthday dinner. It was super - the kids had made me a card, Janneke had made me a cake...Fantastic. Simple, warm, heartfelt, joyful well-wishes from the three most important people on Earth. (Well, three of the four. Let's not forget about Mr. Clooney quite so soon.) I am a lucky man.
Couple of series of the Pro Bowl (Q wanted to watch it - I tried to talk him out of it, but if the argument was tennis, it was a straight-sets ass-whuppin'. "But, Q," I said, "it isn't much of a game. It's just an exhibition. Nobody really cares, and they don't play hard. Besides, everybody who's in the Superbowl isn't playing." "I know, but I've never seen it. Not once in my life." Game, set, match.), and then to bed. For the kids, anyway. Janneke then sat down to watch Masterpiece Theater (has there ever been one in which there is not a dance scene, filled with meaningful glances as men in high-waisted pants strut like roosters beside a marriageable teenager...?), and I donned my cape and mask and high boots for a night patrolling the skies.
Whoops - not supposed to say that out loud. You didn't hear it from me.
BANZAI!
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Yllacigolonorhc Sdrawkcab!
Backwards go, shall we?
Got home around 8:45, and the kids settled in to do some drawing and have some dessert. In front of the budding fire in the stove, drawing afterward at the coffee table, Q reprising the style - forceful, graceful, stark, but soft and subtle - of the drawing he'd done earlier in the day for his homework, T drawing plants and animals and showing me in narrative form just how one goes about making bubble letters. And it struck me that bubble letters might be a very gendered thing - I know relatively few guys who can do them well, but almost no women who can't. And here's T doing them like a pro at 5. Off to bed just thereafter, whereinto they tumbled gratefully.
Because they had been falling asleep in the big booth where we had dinner, at the '6 House out on route 7. Pub fare - the kids had spaghetti and meatballs and grilled cheese, respectively in reverse order of birth. Good place, fine food, great service, nice, roomy yet cozy atmosphere. There's a shelf midway across the big dining area with magazines on it; the kids got squirrelly right before the food came, so we collected two National Geographics and had the kids find their favorite pictures in them. T's was from 1978.
When I was 9 years old, just like Q. But when I was 9, I couldn't ski. Q sure can. We had just come from Jiminy Peak, where we had taken advantage of our passes - which are no good on holiday weekends...until after 3:00. So we shot up there around 2:30, and by 3:30 we were zishing and zhushing down the mountainside. T goes pretty damn fast now, such that whoever pairs up with her for the descent is no longer relegated to smiling and oohing and cheering through a loooong descent. She boogies to the bottom now, with no rest. But Q! On one of the runs he and I went down...oh, I can't remember the name of the run. But it was the two of us, and we zoomed down that thing, sliding up the edges of the run and catching air, as I believe the teenagers call it, off the moguls, and for the first time since we took up this crazy suicidal hobby I found myself whooping out loud for joy. We high-fived at the bottom and caught our breath. What a hoot! We did a total of five runs, with a break after the second one for hot tea (Janneke), cold tea (me), and chocolate milk (James Garfield and Martin Luther King).
Whose day it is tomorrow, and of whom Q spent part of the early afternoon drawing a portrait for his poster. It's the same one he reprised later in the evening. I cut out a thirteen-by-ten bit of graph paper and framed a photo from a book and blew the scale up so that Q is able to transfer it pretty faithfully. It took some grumbling and tears on Q's part, and some teeth-grinding on mine, but we managed to establish a good working relationship where I give him pointers and show him how to see the drawing. It can really come out great when it all comes together. Behold:
But come together it did not for me at lunch. I was just not hungry, so I sat with the other three as they munched and worked on the fire, which was sputtering for some reason. Didn't get the driest of firewood this year again - our firewood guy is about a fifty-fifty prospect in terms of quality wood.
And the reason I was not hungry is that I had made pancakes and bacon for breakfast, at the request of the kids. The bacon was from Caretaker Farm - whereto I recently heard that our friends Don and Bridget, proprietors, have returned from two months in Chile. We'll have to pick their brains. They're going to be invaluable, advice-wise, for our own junket abroad, tentatively set for 2012-2013. I feel confident about their advice - they sure raise fine bacon, anyway. That must be said.
It was a late breakfast - I didn't roll out until after 8:00, and neither did Janneke. Which, if you know Janneke, you probably don't believe. But it's true: we were wiped. Because the night before, we had had a very wonderful, long, warm evening with our friends Brad and Betsy, whom we hadn't seen since before Christmas. We got completely full on both wine and cheese, since we had cheese fondue for dinner. (The grown-ups, not the kids - they all tried it, and to a man were unimpressed. Which is why they got french fries and Quorn nuggets.) We discussed the past and made big plans for the future (involving Christmas in Puerto Rico and Janneke learning to play the drums and Betsy, the bass, forming the rhythm section for the band Brad wants to start, where he and I will share frontman duties - my humble name suggestion: "Püp von Dü"), and didn't say goodnight until damn near midnight. By the time the smoke had cleared and it was time to clear away the evening's detritus, we had pretty much ruined four bottles of wine and at least one beer. No head trouble this morning for me, though, because I remembered the most valuable lesson I ever picked up in my years at University: Drink at least three full, large glasses of water before going to bed. I practically cartwheeled into the kitchen this morning to take care of my fatherly pancake duties- no hangovers for me.
Though had I actually tried to literally cartwheel, I'd have collapsed into (and, given the sheer volume of cheese fondue still working its way through me, quite probably through) the drywall in the hallway, because my back was a complete mess. The previous afternoon, you see, Q and I had wheeled thirteen wheelbarrows (well, actually, one wheelbarrow thirteen times) of firewood into the garage. It was one of the most pleasant little whiles I recall with Q over the last few months - we talked politics, aging, global warming, and Martha Coakley. But pushing that wheelbarrow through slippery snow and up a slight rise while it was heaped high with firewood must have called upon my back to contort in some pretty extreme ways, because even now I'm a little hunched and gingerly.
Which probably means I should get to bed. MLK day tomorrow - gotta be at my best to make sure that poster gets finished. (By the way, for a good long time there, Spellcheck knew that "Sdrawkcab" was up to no good. But it deemed "Yllacigolonorhc" to be perfectly acceptable. Must have stunned it into silence.)
Got home around 8:45, and the kids settled in to do some drawing and have some dessert. In front of the budding fire in the stove, drawing afterward at the coffee table, Q reprising the style - forceful, graceful, stark, but soft and subtle - of the drawing he'd done earlier in the day for his homework, T drawing plants and animals and showing me in narrative form just how one goes about making bubble letters. And it struck me that bubble letters might be a very gendered thing - I know relatively few guys who can do them well, but almost no women who can't. And here's T doing them like a pro at 5. Off to bed just thereafter, whereinto they tumbled gratefully.
Because they had been falling asleep in the big booth where we had dinner, at the '6 House out on route 7. Pub fare - the kids had spaghetti and meatballs and grilled cheese, respectively in reverse order of birth. Good place, fine food, great service, nice, roomy yet cozy atmosphere. There's a shelf midway across the big dining area with magazines on it; the kids got squirrelly right before the food came, so we collected two National Geographics and had the kids find their favorite pictures in them. T's was from 1978.
When I was 9 years old, just like Q. But when I was 9, I couldn't ski. Q sure can. We had just come from Jiminy Peak, where we had taken advantage of our passes - which are no good on holiday weekends...until after 3:00. So we shot up there around 2:30, and by 3:30 we were zishing and zhushing down the mountainside. T goes pretty damn fast now, such that whoever pairs up with her for the descent is no longer relegated to smiling and oohing and cheering through a loooong descent. She boogies to the bottom now, with no rest. But Q! On one of the runs he and I went down...oh, I can't remember the name of the run. But it was the two of us, and we zoomed down that thing, sliding up the edges of the run and catching air, as I believe the teenagers call it, off the moguls, and for the first time since we took up this crazy suicidal hobby I found myself whooping out loud for joy. We high-fived at the bottom and caught our breath. What a hoot! We did a total of five runs, with a break after the second one for hot tea (Janneke), cold tea (me), and chocolate milk (James Garfield and Martin Luther King).
Whose day it is tomorrow, and of whom Q spent part of the early afternoon drawing a portrait for his poster. It's the same one he reprised later in the evening. I cut out a thirteen-by-ten bit of graph paper and framed a photo from a book and blew the scale up so that Q is able to transfer it pretty faithfully. It took some grumbling and tears on Q's part, and some teeth-grinding on mine, but we managed to establish a good working relationship where I give him pointers and show him how to see the drawing. It can really come out great when it all comes together. Behold:
But come together it did not for me at lunch. I was just not hungry, so I sat with the other three as they munched and worked on the fire, which was sputtering for some reason. Didn't get the driest of firewood this year again - our firewood guy is about a fifty-fifty prospect in terms of quality wood.
And the reason I was not hungry is that I had made pancakes and bacon for breakfast, at the request of the kids. The bacon was from Caretaker Farm - whereto I recently heard that our friends Don and Bridget, proprietors, have returned from two months in Chile. We'll have to pick their brains. They're going to be invaluable, advice-wise, for our own junket abroad, tentatively set for 2012-2013. I feel confident about their advice - they sure raise fine bacon, anyway. That must be said.
It was a late breakfast - I didn't roll out until after 8:00, and neither did Janneke. Which, if you know Janneke, you probably don't believe. But it's true: we were wiped. Because the night before, we had had a very wonderful, long, warm evening with our friends Brad and Betsy, whom we hadn't seen since before Christmas. We got completely full on both wine and cheese, since we had cheese fondue for dinner. (The grown-ups, not the kids - they all tried it, and to a man were unimpressed. Which is why they got french fries and Quorn nuggets.) We discussed the past and made big plans for the future (involving Christmas in Puerto Rico and Janneke learning to play the drums and Betsy, the bass, forming the rhythm section for the band Brad wants to start, where he and I will share frontman duties - my humble name suggestion: "Püp von Dü"), and didn't say goodnight until damn near midnight. By the time the smoke had cleared and it was time to clear away the evening's detritus, we had pretty much ruined four bottles of wine and at least one beer. No head trouble this morning for me, though, because I remembered the most valuable lesson I ever picked up in my years at University: Drink at least three full, large glasses of water before going to bed. I practically cartwheeled into the kitchen this morning to take care of my fatherly pancake duties- no hangovers for me.
Though had I actually tried to literally cartwheel, I'd have collapsed into (and, given the sheer volume of cheese fondue still working its way through me, quite probably through) the drywall in the hallway, because my back was a complete mess. The previous afternoon, you see, Q and I had wheeled thirteen wheelbarrows (well, actually, one wheelbarrow thirteen times) of firewood into the garage. It was one of the most pleasant little whiles I recall with Q over the last few months - we talked politics, aging, global warming, and Martha Coakley. But pushing that wheelbarrow through slippery snow and up a slight rise while it was heaped high with firewood must have called upon my back to contort in some pretty extreme ways, because even now I'm a little hunched and gingerly.
Which probably means I should get to bed. MLK day tomorrow - gotta be at my best to make sure that poster gets finished. (By the way, for a good long time there, Spellcheck knew that "Sdrawkcab" was up to no good. But it deemed "Yllacigolonorhc" to be perfectly acceptable. Must have stunned it into silence.)
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Mirror Images
Fascinating dinner conversation. I'll condense it into a monologue by T. This is a pretty accurate rough translation:
"I keep thinking things that I don't want to think. Like, if I touch my right cheek with my right hand, I feel like the left cheek is going to be sad because it didn't get touched. Then I think my left hand is going to be sad because it didn't get to touch anything, so now I have to do it again with my left hand. I don't want to think these things because it just makes me tired because I keep touching and touching and touching. I'm trying not to think like that, but I just keep doing it. Sometimes when I feel like there are strings on my left hand that are making me want to move it, I pretend there's a knife in my right hand and I cut the strings, but then I think, Oh, no, the knife wasn't sharp enough, I have to cut it again. And I cut it again and again and again...Ugh!"
Wow. I remember very specifically how I was similarly limited as a kid. Only with me it was with left and right feet - I had this obsession with always keeping an even number of steps on each foot, equal time spent leaning on each foot; always start the stairs with the right foot - that's the odd-number-steps foot - and end on the even-number foot at the top, even if that means you have to take a stutter step on the landing or skip a step at the end. And the extra pressure on that foot caused by leaping over a step could be offset by quickly swinging the other leg around and bending the knee of the left leg so that you wind up in a forward-lurching, but still upright, crouch at the top step. It was an acrobatic move that I tried, probably unsuccessfully, to make look as natural as could be. I knew exactly how many stairs there were in every set of stairs I commonly had to go up and down - our schools, our church, the store, the house, Snapping fingers - snapping on one hand meant I had to snap the other too.
It's like I was watching myself at the age of five - only this five-year-old felt perfectly comfortable bringing it up as a topic of conversation, expressing her frustrations, certain that we would not only listen, but offer suggestions or sympathy. That, I don't remember as a kid. I actually suspected I was slowly going crazy, but couldn't talk to anyone about it. Not that I had specific fears of how anyone would react - it just did not occur to me that anyone would care about my inner life. I knew, somehow, bone-deep, that speaking of such things was taboo, that I would be annoying people by bringing it up - not to mention cluing them in on what would surely be seen only as yet another sign, another confirmation, of my weirdness. So I never told anyone.
Of course, my vast experience in this area did not mean that I had a whole lot of advice for her. I was just making it up on the spot. What I said was that if she didn't want to feel that way, she could say to herself, when she felt compelled to do something, "I'm going to do JUST the opposite. I'm going to rub that right hand all the more into the right side of my cheek, just to show the world, and myself, that it doesn't affect anything at all." We all want the world to be just so, I said, orderly and neat. And it isn't. Sometimes our minds want us to feel that things are all neat and predictable, because things would be easier that way. But you can still be comfortable in all the discomfort of the world. Loose and jangly and off is a nice way for things to be, once you get used to the idea that they're supposed to be that way. If you learn that things aren't always perfect, but are still very, very nice, maybe your mind will calm down and stop wanting it ALL to be even."
I don't think she was fully listening to all of that, because she just said "Yeah" at the end and changed the subject. But I hope at least she felt that she had been listened to.
"I keep thinking things that I don't want to think. Like, if I touch my right cheek with my right hand, I feel like the left cheek is going to be sad because it didn't get touched. Then I think my left hand is going to be sad because it didn't get to touch anything, so now I have to do it again with my left hand. I don't want to think these things because it just makes me tired because I keep touching and touching and touching. I'm trying not to think like that, but I just keep doing it. Sometimes when I feel like there are strings on my left hand that are making me want to move it, I pretend there's a knife in my right hand and I cut the strings, but then I think, Oh, no, the knife wasn't sharp enough, I have to cut it again. And I cut it again and again and again...Ugh!"
Wow. I remember very specifically how I was similarly limited as a kid. Only with me it was with left and right feet - I had this obsession with always keeping an even number of steps on each foot, equal time spent leaning on each foot; always start the stairs with the right foot - that's the odd-number-steps foot - and end on the even-number foot at the top, even if that means you have to take a stutter step on the landing or skip a step at the end. And the extra pressure on that foot caused by leaping over a step could be offset by quickly swinging the other leg around and bending the knee of the left leg so that you wind up in a forward-lurching, but still upright, crouch at the top step. It was an acrobatic move that I tried, probably unsuccessfully, to make look as natural as could be. I knew exactly how many stairs there were in every set of stairs I commonly had to go up and down - our schools, our church, the store, the house, Snapping fingers - snapping on one hand meant I had to snap the other too.
It's like I was watching myself at the age of five - only this five-year-old felt perfectly comfortable bringing it up as a topic of conversation, expressing her frustrations, certain that we would not only listen, but offer suggestions or sympathy. That, I don't remember as a kid. I actually suspected I was slowly going crazy, but couldn't talk to anyone about it. Not that I had specific fears of how anyone would react - it just did not occur to me that anyone would care about my inner life. I knew, somehow, bone-deep, that speaking of such things was taboo, that I would be annoying people by bringing it up - not to mention cluing them in on what would surely be seen only as yet another sign, another confirmation, of my weirdness. So I never told anyone.
Of course, my vast experience in this area did not mean that I had a whole lot of advice for her. I was just making it up on the spot. What I said was that if she didn't want to feel that way, she could say to herself, when she felt compelled to do something, "I'm going to do JUST the opposite. I'm going to rub that right hand all the more into the right side of my cheek, just to show the world, and myself, that it doesn't affect anything at all." We all want the world to be just so, I said, orderly and neat. And it isn't. Sometimes our minds want us to feel that things are all neat and predictable, because things would be easier that way. But you can still be comfortable in all the discomfort of the world. Loose and jangly and off is a nice way for things to be, once you get used to the idea that they're supposed to be that way. If you learn that things aren't always perfect, but are still very, very nice, maybe your mind will calm down and stop wanting it ALL to be even."
I don't think she was fully listening to all of that, because she just said "Yeah" at the end and changed the subject. But I hope at least she felt that she had been listened to.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Hoo-boy
Happy new year.
Man oh man, what a long time it's been! Seems like every post I write here lately is an apology for the lack of posts. Might as well try to figure out just why that may be happening.
Mostly, I think, it's to do with having taken up the guitar more lately. If I have a half hour to spend these days, that's how I've been doing it. I had been taking lessons, down in Lenox, once a week; but what with the saving we've been trying to do - both for a possible year abroad, and against the possibility that some of my students going to Ecuador in February might need some financial assistance - $40 a week started seeming like a lot. And so I decided to try to do half an hour a day on my own, and improve that way. It's been working out pretty well, all told - though I didn't bring the guitar along to Wisconsin.
Which is where I was until pretty recently. On December 23rd, the four of us drove to Albany and jumped aboard the Amtrak train to Chicago. Huge, huge fun it was - I absolutely love sleeping in a train. And so do the kids. We had two double sleepers, right across the little hallway from one another, and a wee one took the top bunk in each. Dinner on board, breakfast on board, off the train in Chicago by 10:00 AM the 24th. If I can recommend anything to anybody, it's not to check bags. They took a dang coon's age for some reason to come off the train on the way west. Coming back east, they were off almost immediately - although we were not. More on that later. (Maybe.)
Christmas at the Johnsons - first time the entire tribe on that side of the Johnstadts has been together since Mom's funeral. And nobody took a picture! We weren't all there for too terribly long - Jim and Sarah brought Liam and Finley over on Christmas day, and so we had probably eight or ten hours of wholeness. Shoot, we didn't even line up all the cousins for some snappin'. I don't know what we were thinking...But it was nice. Jess and Stephanie left a day or so later, and then on the 27th, Janneke had to fly to Philadelphia for a conference. And that was mostly that for the big reunion.
I drove Janneke to the airport in Madison, and she tried like crazy to get me to dump her in the drop-off lane and bail, preferably while peeling out. But I insisted. What if something goes wrong, I said? What if a flight gets canceled and you have to stay overnight? At least I'll be here to drive you to the hotel. Finally, with much eye-rolling and gesticulating, she acquiesced, although the entire walk from the parking garage to the terminal, she stared holes through me and flipped me an erect, insistent bird, occasionally changing hands as fatigue would set in. I cowered inwardly and tried to resist the temptation to reach up and wipe away my hot tears. Didn't want to give her the satisfaction.
Turns out, I was right to have worried: Janneke's flight from Madison to Milwaukee was a go, but the flight from Milwaukee to Philadelphia was canceled. The only way for her to get to Philly that night was if somehow she could get to Chicago in the next five hours.
We drove to Chicago. Janneke said nothing the entire time. Unless you count a three-hour-long double bird as speech.
Portions of the above may have actually happened differently - I don't recall. But it was really a fun adventure, the two of us in the car for so long. We had dinner together in the airport, and then I turned on my heel and hit the road for the five-hour drive back to Gays Mills. The kids were with Auntie Jayne and Grandpa the whole time, and Auntie Jayne was brave enough even to bathe them. No mean feat - those kids get madder than polecats when they're wet. But she held up admirably.
Saw "Avatar" out there with Auntie Jayne and Q; Janneke saw "The Princess and the Frog" with T, Auntie Stephanie, and Jack. Guess which of us won the coin toss.
That actually might be kind of hard to do.
Back on the train - the way East is longer, and I have all but always done it without Janneke, so it gets a little old. The kids are a bit stir crazy by the time we roll in to Albany at 2:40 PM - especially after the last half hour of the trip, in which we were sitting on the rails at the station while they disconnected the Boston-bound portion of the train. Seems like they could have organized it to let us off first, but they didn't. Doubly frustrating for Janneke, who didn't know what to think, just stared at our train from on high and fumed. And flipped the bird.
Back to work, back to the usual grind. It's great to be home, it was great to be away...Just trying to catch up on some sleep, really. And get some more guitar in - there's another school talent show in February. I'll have to outdo last year's performance. Which won't really be a very high bar, believe me.
I have spent the last ten minutes creating a bit of a recent highlight reel for you - Y'know what else? I think I OD'd on the computer there over the summer and the early fall. I was working on so many home movies - I have one from last April's visit to Gays that's more than half an hour long. And I just got sick of it. That might also have contributed to keeping me away...Anyway, here's a quickly-slapped-together video for you T and Q addicts, with a little Skittles thrown in:
And here's Q with his basketball three-on-three team, the Baconators, winners of the tournament:
My heart soars like a hawk.
Man oh man, what a long time it's been! Seems like every post I write here lately is an apology for the lack of posts. Might as well try to figure out just why that may be happening.
Mostly, I think, it's to do with having taken up the guitar more lately. If I have a half hour to spend these days, that's how I've been doing it. I had been taking lessons, down in Lenox, once a week; but what with the saving we've been trying to do - both for a possible year abroad, and against the possibility that some of my students going to Ecuador in February might need some financial assistance - $40 a week started seeming like a lot. And so I decided to try to do half an hour a day on my own, and improve that way. It's been working out pretty well, all told - though I didn't bring the guitar along to Wisconsin.
Which is where I was until pretty recently. On December 23rd, the four of us drove to Albany and jumped aboard the Amtrak train to Chicago. Huge, huge fun it was - I absolutely love sleeping in a train. And so do the kids. We had two double sleepers, right across the little hallway from one another, and a wee one took the top bunk in each. Dinner on board, breakfast on board, off the train in Chicago by 10:00 AM the 24th. If I can recommend anything to anybody, it's not to check bags. They took a dang coon's age for some reason to come off the train on the way west. Coming back east, they were off almost immediately - although we were not. More on that later. (Maybe.)
Christmas at the Johnsons - first time the entire tribe on that side of the Johnstadts has been together since Mom's funeral. And nobody took a picture! We weren't all there for too terribly long - Jim and Sarah brought Liam and Finley over on Christmas day, and so we had probably eight or ten hours of wholeness. Shoot, we didn't even line up all the cousins for some snappin'. I don't know what we were thinking...But it was nice. Jess and Stephanie left a day or so later, and then on the 27th, Janneke had to fly to Philadelphia for a conference. And that was mostly that for the big reunion.
I drove Janneke to the airport in Madison, and she tried like crazy to get me to dump her in the drop-off lane and bail, preferably while peeling out. But I insisted. What if something goes wrong, I said? What if a flight gets canceled and you have to stay overnight? At least I'll be here to drive you to the hotel. Finally, with much eye-rolling and gesticulating, she acquiesced, although the entire walk from the parking garage to the terminal, she stared holes through me and flipped me an erect, insistent bird, occasionally changing hands as fatigue would set in. I cowered inwardly and tried to resist the temptation to reach up and wipe away my hot tears. Didn't want to give her the satisfaction.
Turns out, I was right to have worried: Janneke's flight from Madison to Milwaukee was a go, but the flight from Milwaukee to Philadelphia was canceled. The only way for her to get to Philly that night was if somehow she could get to Chicago in the next five hours.
We drove to Chicago. Janneke said nothing the entire time. Unless you count a three-hour-long double bird as speech.
Portions of the above may have actually happened differently - I don't recall. But it was really a fun adventure, the two of us in the car for so long. We had dinner together in the airport, and then I turned on my heel and hit the road for the five-hour drive back to Gays Mills. The kids were with Auntie Jayne and Grandpa the whole time, and Auntie Jayne was brave enough even to bathe them. No mean feat - those kids get madder than polecats when they're wet. But she held up admirably.
Saw "Avatar" out there with Auntie Jayne and Q; Janneke saw "The Princess and the Frog" with T, Auntie Stephanie, and Jack. Guess which of us won the coin toss.
That actually might be kind of hard to do.
Back on the train - the way East is longer, and I have all but always done it without Janneke, so it gets a little old. The kids are a bit stir crazy by the time we roll in to Albany at 2:40 PM - especially after the last half hour of the trip, in which we were sitting on the rails at the station while they disconnected the Boston-bound portion of the train. Seems like they could have organized it to let us off first, but they didn't. Doubly frustrating for Janneke, who didn't know what to think, just stared at our train from on high and fumed. And flipped the bird.
Back to work, back to the usual grind. It's great to be home, it was great to be away...Just trying to catch up on some sleep, really. And get some more guitar in - there's another school talent show in February. I'll have to outdo last year's performance. Which won't really be a very high bar, believe me.
I have spent the last ten minutes creating a bit of a recent highlight reel for you - Y'know what else? I think I OD'd on the computer there over the summer and the early fall. I was working on so many home movies - I have one from last April's visit to Gays that's more than half an hour long. And I just got sick of it. That might also have contributed to keeping me away...Anyway, here's a quickly-slapped-together video for you T and Q addicts, with a little Skittles thrown in:
And here's Q with his basketball three-on-three team, the Baconators, winners of the tournament:
My heart soars like a hawk.
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