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

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

The Favre is dead.

Long live the Rodgers!!!

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



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

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



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



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



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



My students in Mindo. What a great bunch.



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



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



What a great eye Sarah has.



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

And now, a story.

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

The plate did, of course, break.

Yesterday.

That is to say: Eighteen years later.

Here's the evidence:



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



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



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



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

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

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

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

Please go somewhere quiet, and eat a turd.

Home Again, Home Again

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

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

T was asleep in the car.

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

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

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

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

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

Hero Worship

Got a lot of it going on around here lately. Here's the evidence:



For those of you out there looking for a(nother) reason to laugh at me, here's some ammo: I've owned the digital camera I use for these pictures for a year or so. And I just figured out how to erase all the pictures on the card at once tonight.

Gotta buy a card reader for the trip tomorrow. Much purchasing has been happening...Off to bed. Three-quarters of the way through "The Subtle Knife", and I'm enjoying it mightily.

And in other hero-worshipping news, Monique has made a discovery that elevates her further into heroine status in my book, because this is just so cool:



Lucky, lucky you, Monique. It's nearly as cool as Asphenia.

Whom Janneke, because of certain unique talents I posess, has dubbed "Asphyxia".

Chao!

Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens

So say the Talking Heads. And I agree. It was a fine weekend, and we had no social engagements whatever. Almost had one, but Janneke begged off, citing a need to just be at home, and called Brad and Betsy to tell them - and was told by Betsy that it was a relief, as she had also had a hunger to hunker. So we settled in for some long winter's naps and such.

Observe:



T making a face. That's about as heart-pounding as it's going to get.

We did get some snow this morning, and this is what it looked like:



Then this afternoon, I offered to take the kids to the Williams College gym and let them run around and shoot hoops. But it turned out there was a wrestling match, so we watched that until it ended, and then Q got to shoot some. It went a little something like this:



The wrestling match was very compelling. Willilams vs Wesleyan, a grudge match if ever there was one. Williams was ahead by 3 when the heavyweights wrestled, and going into the third period, the Williams guy was ahead, one to nothing. Very closely fought match. And toward the end, the Wesleyan guy reversed our man and pinned him. So Wesleyan won. I found myself shouting encouragement, clapping, and jumping and covering my head in anguish at the end. I'll have to make some more of these next year. This, apparently, was the last match of the year. Q got excited too, doing a lot of cheering, and I was explaining things to him throughout as he cocked his ear toward me and nodded, taking it all in. At one point he tugged on my sleeve, excited, it seemed, and said "Papi! Yo NUNCA voy a hacer esto!" (Daddy! I'm NEVER going to do this!) Hey, the kid knows himself well. Some of us just haven't got that inner anger and inherent toughness that are pretty much indispensible if you're going to practice hand-to-hand combat two hours a day for half the year. (The other prerequisite for wrestling, which also eliminates Q from the grappler ranks: A complete lack of talent for basketball.)

One of T's friends was there (his dad is the wrestlinig coach), and they ran around together during and after the match, along with his older brother, who's in Q's grade. I also talked to their mother, and grandparents, who speak Spanish, and had overheard me talking to (scolding, actually) one of the kids. One is Latina from Brooklyn, the other an Ecuadorian. They were interested to hear about my upcoming trip - Ah, yes. The trip. And my heart DOES begin to pound! Huh. Guess it's exciting in a different way around here. A kind of sleepless way.

At home, I parlayed Janneke's upset at my impending departure into a foot rub. This inspired the children:



Q gets Tie's feet...



And then they switch.

And so endeth another weekend. I randomly checked out another family's blog the other day - I hit the "Next Blog" button at the top of my dashboard for these blogs, and met a family of basketball-coaching Christians. And I have to say, their blog does not rock in the slightest. Their entries have titles like "At The Game", "Jordan's First Haircut", and "The Best Banana Bread Ever". Bush-voters, flag-wavers, SUV-drivers, mega-church-goers...I should start trash-talking them, leaving comments on their blog, mocking them. It would be a continuation of the eternal struggle: wrestlers versus basketball players (OK, Q, T, and Janneke aren't wrestlers, but I am), Christians versus atheists, tall versus short, darkness versus light. (We're "light".) Then maybe one day we could meet somewhere for a rumble.

When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way...

Russian and American Drama

Howdy! Some of Janneke's students performed some sort of folktale at the college the other day, and we all went along to cheer them on. The whole bloody episode was in Russian, however, which meant a lot of guesswork on my part. Here's what I was able to piece together:



Yuri and Boris needed to buy a washing machine. "We shall ask the women their council", said Boris. "Verily," said Yuri.



Meanwhile, the women - Katiushka, Svetlana and Geraldine - were skipping rope in the forest. "Huzzah!", they said. "Huzzah, and hark! Here come the men-folk!"



Having spoken with the men, they ran to see Wise Olaf the Norwegian. "Where can we find an affordable washing machine for our beloved menfolk, o sage of the fjords? For, lo: Their breeches are filthy!"



The question so puzzled Wise Olaf, that he fell totally silent in deepest thought, and remained so for three whole days.



Finally, a stone dropped from the moon and struck him on the shoulder - whereupon he turned into a cat and devoured Yuri and Boris alive, to punish them for their impertinence.

Or something like that.

In other news, Q is at least as fascinated with the new piano as he used to be with the electric keyboard Janneke had had for decades. He seems to like the much richer and more powerful sound enough to offset the strange inability this one has with regard to becoming a harpsicord or a Supertramp-type electric piano. Here he is, enjoying it:



The man who might give him lessons is still considering it. We're very hopeful.

Having a hard time sleeping lately, nervous as I am about my upcoming trip to Ecuador with 11 students and 2 adult chaperones (excluding myself). It's excitement, it's that nameless, empty worry that there MUST be something you've forgotten to do. But no - the bus is paid for, the plane tickets are paid for, the hotels are reserved, students have signed all their forms and turned in all their money...I didn't sleep until 3:00 last night. Perhaps some ping pong will put me in the right frame of mind. Worth a try. I will leave you with some stirring footage from tumbling.



G'night!

Chocolate Karma

Hey, folks - thought I'd share this gem with y'all:

Hobie got an ear infection, and I took him to the vet last week. The vet gave me a bottle of anti-ear-infection goo, and another of ear cleaning solution, each opened for the first application and adorned with Hobie's name stuck to it on a printed label. When I got home, Janneke's eyes got big and sort of became all I could focus on as she talked about how we already had a bottle of the ear cleaning solution from the last time Hobie got an ear infection, and that she had reminded me before I left not to let them sell me another bottle, and how I never listen to her and a bunch of other stuff I didn't really register. So the next day, Saturday, I was to try to return the bottle of ear cleaner, despite its having been opened and labeled.

So Saturday I launched out into the world with Q to run a whole slew of errands, starting with a trip to Wild Oats to buy a bunch of organic food or something Janneke had said that I don't really remember. I had no cash, and so was going to pay for it on the credit card. Q, on the way to the register, asked if he could have a snack. It was 10:00 or so, and he'd been up since 7:00, so I said sure, he could pick one out at the counter. Of course, this was Wild Oats, and everything they have in their snack aisle is pretty high-fiber and low-sugar and has no preservatives and is otherwise completely unattractive to eight-year-olds. So after a few minutes staring at the aesthetically complicated labels that project such values as fair trade, colonic robustness, and a general wholesome earthiness, but not so much cheap deliciousness, Q gave in and said "I don't really want a snack. That's OK." I paid with the credit card, and away we drove.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, Q said, "Can we stop somewhere else and get me a treat?" This annoyed me greatly. I didn't go into the whole "I have no cash and I don't want to rack up a bunch of 89-cent charges on my ATM card" and all that, so I just said, "No, Q, that was it. You had your chance, you had all the time in the world, and I'm not going to stop the car and do a whole in-and-out at a separate business just so you can have a snack that you already said no to. Forget it."

Three seconds went by. Q said quietly, but with confidence, "You don't have to say it with that tone."

I looked at him in the rear view mirror for a second, and irritation turned to admiration. I said, "You are right. I'm sorry. That was completely unnecessary. And you know what else? Thank you for telling me."

And moments later we were standing at the counter at the vet's, pleading our case, and within seconds the assistant said, "Sure, no problem. We can just credit it back to your credit card. Or would you prefer cash?"

I smiled a big smile. "Cash, please," I said. And drove straight to the gas station, where we walked in solely and explicitly so that Q could plunk down some hard American greenbacks and buy himself a bag of corn syrup and Red Dye #2.

What goes around, comes around.

Here's some photos:



Q shows off his silverware form



T demonstrates proper form when using the straw



Our new baby, delivered today! Bought it from Brad and Betsy, who have upgraded, piano-wise. Looks and sounds great!

The Birthday Boy

That's right, folks: I am exactly 39 years old today, and I don't look a day over fifty. Hey, some of us are blessed, genes-wise. The day got off grandly - standing in the bathroom, putting in my contacts, and the phone rang. Snow day! Back to bed, contacts and all.

Didn't really matter, because Q was there, and T woke up soon thereafter, so we all hung out there a while and giggled about the weather.

Kids off to school, Mom off to work, me back to the ranch for some snoozin' and exercisin'. Good times, good times.

The kids' daycare was closed early due to the weather (freezing rain), so I had to pick them up around 1:00. Brought Owen home with Q so they could entertain each other.

Which they did until 4:00, when I left for an appointment. And when I got back at 5:00, preparations had been made:





And when I opened the door, they unleashed Hell:



It was a birthday ambush never to be forgotten. All Q's idea, from what I understand - T had been struggling mightily for a few days to keep the secret. I had heard her mention some balls that would be thrown, but hadn't put it all together yet. Thought maybe Janneke had gotten us all seats for Cirque du Soleil. I'm actually pretty glad to be disappointed on that one.

Q passed the time between ambush and supper running imaginary screen passes for touchdowns, unlike a certain football team I know, whose schedule is wiiiide open on Sunday:



Movie night ("Because of Winn Dixie"), halfway through which we stopped to eat birthday cake. T, of course, as she does with most things in life, found a way to be terrified:



Now I settle in for some bloggin' and, hopefully, if I play my cards right, I can celebrate my not-quite-completely-over-the-rear-horizon youth by partaking in my favorite Friday night pastime: Early bedtime.

Long live rock.

By the way - regarding daemons: