Hi folks, Max the singing jeweler here…(I wonder if Max has a Wikipedia page. He should.) Thought I’d give you an update on the whole bird situation.
Y’know, they’re not around in the same numbers they were. I switched to another brand of small seed – in fact, I went a few days there without any small seed in the one feeder. Just sunflowers in the big one. That seemed to be the big draw anyway – mostly with the small seed, they just flipped it on the ground. The place is littered with all the millet they’ve tossed aside in search of the higher-quality grains. I just can’t bring myself to pay for the really good stuff that they go nuts over. So they must have learned that there wasn’t that much of interest and decided to look elsewhere. It’s hard to tell if this new brand is not popular, or if I have to build my rep back up. But the thing is that the sunflower seeds never went away – that was always kept full. But it’s emptying out at probably half the rate it used to. Maybe it’s the time of year. Are grackles migratory…? Because I swear, some days that was 90% of my business. And if the grackles are gone, that explains it. Should leave more room for the woodpeckers – who seem to be a lot badder than the grackles. They’re especially vigorous, I find, the woodpeckers – just seem stronger and more robust, more filled with surges of energy and life, than just about any other bird back there. Kind of like wolverines – always on the move, always looking like they’d just as soon run fifty miles or kill a caribou as scratch an itch. Boundless energy. I like woodpeckers. There’s a woodpecker blend one can buy, but it costs an arm and a leg.
So I’m working on the family video. Damn thing’s over 40 minutes long as it stands, just raw footage. I’ll have to just start whittling out the trash and see what it cooks down to, then see if I can come up with any narrative tools to move it along. Or maybe break it into three so each one will fit on Youtube. Gotta get me a DVD burner one of these days. Christmas list, if anybody’s taking notes.
Being separated from Q in terms of sports has worked out swimmingly. He’s been much more enthusiastic in practice of late, Janneke tells me – and this after already losing all signs of whininess or pouting as soon as I disappeared over the horizon. He’s become very spontaneously affectionate with me, and regularly sits down with a smile to say “Podemos hablar sobre los animales?” Something he hadn’t done for a long time. I think he has me categorized in a much more firmly “Papi” place now. It’s much more comfortable for both of us. Although yesterday, as he was telling me about practice, where he scored two goals and had what Janneke says was a very precocious and well-executed assist, and he told me that he had gotten around Brady by doing the move that I taught him. Not so much a move as a strategy – move to the right, and when the defender commits so much to that direction that it’ll be difficult for him to go the other way, break quickly left and get around him. A general sports kind of tactic – and he said it worked to perfection. What a good listener!
Although I did notice the other day that his shoulders were uneven. The right one rides considerably lower than the left – a centimeter or so, I’d say. I didn’t like it, and went on line, and found immediately documents all over the place that said “Around age 8, scoliosis can begin. Look for such tell-tale signs as uneven shoulders.”
I came to a few minutes later, blinking up at a circle of bewildered students. After I changed my pants and stopped hyperventilating, I dashed out of the nurse’s office and sent the link to Janneke, who immediately made an appointment for that afternoon. Q was more than happy to go when he found out it was to examine his back and his shoulders, since that would mean there would be no poking of anything into any orifices. He hates that.
And the doctor gave him an absolutely clean bill of health. Straight back, even leg length, strong muscles and bones all ‘round. Just got a droopy shoulder, which isn’t uncommon and which often goes away. Or doesn’t, and as long as it doesn’t hurt, so what. Big relief there. I told Dad, and he said he thought it was because of the pitching Q was doing in the spring. Typical of Dad: he says it, you guffaw and snort. And then an hour later, you drop the newspaper from in front of yourself, re-cross your slippers on the footstool, slide your pipe to the other side of your mouth, and say, “Well, heck-fire but if that doesn’t make some kind of sense…Good ol’ Pap!” Then you give a gruff head-tousle to your adoring Irish setter, chuckle softly to yourself, and go back to your paper, as the camera pans up to the mounted moose head that hangs in the shadows above you.
Been Skyping. Couple of times with Auntie Jayne, couple of times with Tia Dominique, once with the Bidis, with Tante Meggie as a bonus. And the kids are already pretty well jaded to it. Our connection has been getting slower and slower – I think it’s the DSL, but I’ve been filling up the memory here with all these video projects too. Could be that. Which doubtless makes me sound stupid to all you tech-savvy whipper-snappers out there. Well, laugh now, ‘cuz you’ll be crying at the funeral.
T and I took a good forty-mminute ride on the Burley piccolo the other day, and halfway through she informed me that she was going to close her eyes and sleep a while. So I talked frenetically to her the whole way, cajoling her into singing songs and asking her lots of detailed questions to keep her awake until we got home. Jeepers, she gave me a scare there. Thank goodness she told me rather than just drifting off and slumping to the ground. Guess it's not as much fun back there as she led me to believe it is.
All right, that’s it. Back to the videos. Labor of frickin’ love and all that…
Friday, September 5, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
Tuppence a Bag
Wow! It has been a LONG time...! It reminds me of what happened a couple of years ago. I had put up a bird feeder in the back yard, and had built up quite a following, bird-wise. I had hordes and hordes of finches and such always swarming about, livening everything up. And then, somehow, I stopped filling the bird feeder.
I don't know what happened - if I lost interest, or just ran out of seed and kept forgetting to get more. Doesn't matter, I suppose - as far as the birds were concerned, there was just no reason to come back. So they didn't.
Even after I filled the feeder again. Weeks and weeks, and then months - and the feeder didn't get any emptier. I NEVER saw birds back there. It finally got to the point where the birdseed was so wet from staying out there in the rain that it sprouted and rotted in there, and the whole thing became a festering toxic mess that probably killed any birds who might have happened onto it. Through an extended period of neglect, I had wrecked a perfectly good thing.
The blog, of course, is the birdseed. And you, my dear readers, the birds.
But 90% of you were here for the weeks when I didn't write anything, so you know exactly what was going on. And the rest of you are about to find out. I'm in a bit of a dead zone here, time-wise - I'm back from work and errands, it's the first day the kids are back in day care, and Janneke and her mother are still at her office, where they're moving her in to her new space. So I take a few minutes to write the briefest of updates.
First, the visit: Janneke's mother, her sister Sonja and her husband Christophe and their kids, Natasha and Steven, as well as Janneke's sister Dominique and her husband Octavio, and their four kids: Milena, Adrian, Stefan, and Flavia. All in the house for all waking hours, unless we were out having fun.
Crazy busy, super entertained, and happy as clams swimming in the great hot sauce that is family. Many, many photos were taken, most of them, luckily, by someone much better than I at photography. (Which is to say: anyone at all who is not me.) Here are a few:
The three sisters at Coyote Flaco, a popular local Mexican restaurant, run by an Ecuadorian. What a great evening that was.
Almost everyone who came, plus the natives. Octavio is the only one not in the photo. (He wasn't here as long as the others, having places to go and things to do. Don't worry: No one forgives him.)
There were many fun activities - bowliing, both candlepin and standard; ping pong (at which the non-Massachusetts members of the tribe excel to a much greater extent than those of us who live here year-round); white-water rafting; vegetable-picking; backyard soccer galore; and lots and lots of Olympics on the telly. It was just plain loads of fun, and I cannot, in this brief update, do it nearly sufficient justice. But I have to admit that the motivation for so doing is low, since almost everybody who would care to see the details, was present. And there's the time constraint. But rest assured, it was much nicer than this telling.
So there you are, birds. A handful of seed. Please feel reassured and return often, for I promise to be more consistent in the future. And you should know, that in the actual, non-proverbial backyard, the birds have returned. I am about to go and refresh their larder now. Besides which, the robins on the front porch are about to fledge their second batch of youngsters, which grew up while the family was visiting. So we've turned into a veritable bird sanctuary again. You see? Dreams CAN come true!
I don't know what happened - if I lost interest, or just ran out of seed and kept forgetting to get more. Doesn't matter, I suppose - as far as the birds were concerned, there was just no reason to come back. So they didn't.
Even after I filled the feeder again. Weeks and weeks, and then months - and the feeder didn't get any emptier. I NEVER saw birds back there. It finally got to the point where the birdseed was so wet from staying out there in the rain that it sprouted and rotted in there, and the whole thing became a festering toxic mess that probably killed any birds who might have happened onto it. Through an extended period of neglect, I had wrecked a perfectly good thing.
The blog, of course, is the birdseed. And you, my dear readers, the birds.
But 90% of you were here for the weeks when I didn't write anything, so you know exactly what was going on. And the rest of you are about to find out. I'm in a bit of a dead zone here, time-wise - I'm back from work and errands, it's the first day the kids are back in day care, and Janneke and her mother are still at her office, where they're moving her in to her new space. So I take a few minutes to write the briefest of updates.
First, the visit: Janneke's mother, her sister Sonja and her husband Christophe and their kids, Natasha and Steven, as well as Janneke's sister Dominique and her husband Octavio, and their four kids: Milena, Adrian, Stefan, and Flavia. All in the house for all waking hours, unless we were out having fun.
Crazy busy, super entertained, and happy as clams swimming in the great hot sauce that is family. Many, many photos were taken, most of them, luckily, by someone much better than I at photography. (Which is to say: anyone at all who is not me.) Here are a few:
The three sisters at Coyote Flaco, a popular local Mexican restaurant, run by an Ecuadorian. What a great evening that was.
Almost everyone who came, plus the natives. Octavio is the only one not in the photo. (He wasn't here as long as the others, having places to go and things to do. Don't worry: No one forgives him.)
There were many fun activities - bowliing, both candlepin and standard; ping pong (at which the non-Massachusetts members of the tribe excel to a much greater extent than those of us who live here year-round); white-water rafting; vegetable-picking; backyard soccer galore; and lots and lots of Olympics on the telly. It was just plain loads of fun, and I cannot, in this brief update, do it nearly sufficient justice. But I have to admit that the motivation for so doing is low, since almost everybody who would care to see the details, was present. And there's the time constraint. But rest assured, it was much nicer than this telling.
So there you are, birds. A handful of seed. Please feel reassured and return often, for I promise to be more consistent in the future. And you should know, that in the actual, non-proverbial backyard, the birds have returned. I am about to go and refresh their larder now. Besides which, the robins on the front porch are about to fledge their second batch of youngsters, which grew up while the family was visiting. So we've turned into a veritable bird sanctuary again. You see? Dreams CAN come true!
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Just lucky, I guess
Granny's here! She arrived Thursday night, rolling in pretty late (1:30 AM) with Janneke, having been awake for over 24 hours on her long haul fro Geneva, and has since claimed, in the three nights she's been here, that she's never slept so well. She's in Tess' room, up on the Big Girl Bed, so I guess it's to be expected. The kids have been loving having her here - in fact, Quinn half wanted to skip his last day of soccer camp so he could stay home and hang with Granny. But we said he should go, because we were going to show up toward the end of the day and watch a couple of games. This convinced him.
But you can't blame him for wanting to stay home and do stuff like this:
And we did show up and watch two games, during which time Quinn was aggressive, assertive, and very skilled. He scored a goal and assisted on another, and was easily his team's defensive MVP, shooting from one end of the field to the other, as has become his style. And at the end, they had their awards ceremony - and Quinn won the award for best attitude on his team for the second consecutive week. A film of the event exists, but Youtube isn't uploading it very happily today, so it may pop up later on.
He's crazy about soccer now, and I'm fijnding all sorts of videos on Youtube for him to watch. One on Johan Cruyf, the great Dutch player, after whom a move in soccer has been named. I'd not heard of him until a year or so ago, and his story is fascinating - and his style of play is really fun to watch. Going to try to keep Quinn's interest level up. He's playing on a third and fourth grade travel team this fall, and his new-found courage on the pitch should serve him well. The last piece of the puzzle is the ball-handling skill, where he still lags behind some of the other kids. Hope he sticks with it, honestly - football is just not a sport you play your whole life the way soccer is. Oh, and also: I'm going to be an assistant coach on the aforementioned soccer team! Probably won't involved too much thinking. Just the amount that needs to be done to let players know that screaming for your teammate to pass you the ball when there are three players between you and him isn't the best of ideas. That sort of coaching, I got covered.
Tess is fascinated with the movie "Howl's Moving Castle", another from the director of "Kiki's Delivery Service". It's really a fantastic movie, with no violence (or almost none), a plucky young female protagonist, and a lot to say about life, all told through the most vivid fantasy world you can imagine. The guy is an incredible font of ideas. I'm sure we'll end up owning the film soon.
Ran twelve miles yesterday! Magnus and I spent six minutes shy of two hours on the road, chatting pretty much the whole way. It's been neat, getting to know him better. He's in Iceland for a few weeks now, so I'll have to keep up the crusade on my own. Shouldn't be too difficult - running every other day and keeping the pace reasonable means I actually enjoy it. Since it doesn't hurt - knock on wood, no injuries yet. Come on, calves! Hang in there!
Back to the day - updates as time allows, what with more relatives arriving in the next few days. The first is Milena, tonight!
Here
But you can't blame him for wanting to stay home and do stuff like this:
And we did show up and watch two games, during which time Quinn was aggressive, assertive, and very skilled. He scored a goal and assisted on another, and was easily his team's defensive MVP, shooting from one end of the field to the other, as has become his style. And at the end, they had their awards ceremony - and Quinn won the award for best attitude on his team for the second consecutive week. A film of the event exists, but Youtube isn't uploading it very happily today, so it may pop up later on.
He's crazy about soccer now, and I'm fijnding all sorts of videos on Youtube for him to watch. One on Johan Cruyf, the great Dutch player, after whom a move in soccer has been named. I'd not heard of him until a year or so ago, and his story is fascinating - and his style of play is really fun to watch. Going to try to keep Quinn's interest level up. He's playing on a third and fourth grade travel team this fall, and his new-found courage on the pitch should serve him well. The last piece of the puzzle is the ball-handling skill, where he still lags behind some of the other kids. Hope he sticks with it, honestly - football is just not a sport you play your whole life the way soccer is. Oh, and also: I'm going to be an assistant coach on the aforementioned soccer team! Probably won't involved too much thinking. Just the amount that needs to be done to let players know that screaming for your teammate to pass you the ball when there are three players between you and him isn't the best of ideas. That sort of coaching, I got covered.
Tess is fascinated with the movie "Howl's Moving Castle", another from the director of "Kiki's Delivery Service". It's really a fantastic movie, with no violence (or almost none), a plucky young female protagonist, and a lot to say about life, all told through the most vivid fantasy world you can imagine. The guy is an incredible font of ideas. I'm sure we'll end up owning the film soon.
Ran twelve miles yesterday! Magnus and I spent six minutes shy of two hours on the road, chatting pretty much the whole way. It's been neat, getting to know him better. He's in Iceland for a few weeks now, so I'll have to keep up the crusade on my own. Shouldn't be too difficult - running every other day and keeping the pace reasonable means I actually enjoy it. Since it doesn't hurt - knock on wood, no injuries yet. Come on, calves! Hang in there!
Back to the day - updates as time allows, what with more relatives arriving in the next few days. The first is Milena, tonight!
Here
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
T = Dustin Hoffman
Well, it's past midnight on a weeknight, so of course I can't sleep. And I figured I'd slap some updates on here:
The other day T was asking someone how long something or other was set to happen. Actually, I think she was asking Flavia how long she would be staying when she came back. "Two weeks," came the reply. "Oh, so fourteen days," T says, and continues eating her pudding or whatever the hell she was doing.
A few seconds passed, and then I addressed those assembled, looking back through the fog of the intervening time and reassessing what I'd seen, asking, "Did she just multiply seven by two in her head?" "I think so, yeah," came a few responses.
So Q asked her, "T, what's seven times two?"
"Um...Twenty-five."
So the Rain Man thing comes and goes, it seems.
Soccer update: I showed up around 2:00 to watch the tail end of Q's soccer day, and saw the entirety of Argentina (Q's team) versus Costa Rica. Costa Rica was previously undefeated - but then Q fired an opposite-corner left-footed goal off a steal, and Argentina won, 1-0. As soon as he'd scored it, he sprinted around the field with his index fingers high, arms spread wide, and baby-blue tee shirt pulled up over his head.
Nice to see they're choreographing the celebrations.
The other day T was asking someone how long something or other was set to happen. Actually, I think she was asking Flavia how long she would be staying when she came back. "Two weeks," came the reply. "Oh, so fourteen days," T says, and continues eating her pudding or whatever the hell she was doing.
A few seconds passed, and then I addressed those assembled, looking back through the fog of the intervening time and reassessing what I'd seen, asking, "Did she just multiply seven by two in her head?" "I think so, yeah," came a few responses.
So Q asked her, "T, what's seven times two?"
"Um...Twenty-five."
So the Rain Man thing comes and goes, it seems.
Soccer update: I showed up around 2:00 to watch the tail end of Q's soccer day, and saw the entirety of Argentina (Q's team) versus Costa Rica. Costa Rica was previously undefeated - but then Q fired an opposite-corner left-footed goal off a steal, and Argentina won, 1-0. As soon as he'd scored it, he sprinted around the field with his index fingers high, arms spread wide, and baby-blue tee shirt pulled up over his head.
Nice to see they're choreographing the celebrations.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Sport-O-Rama
Hello again, sports fans, and welcome to another installment (that word really has two "l"s?...) of Wonderboy, starring Q Johnstadt. This week's sport? Soccer!
Actually, it was last week's sport, too. Q spends Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 3:00, at the Soccer Academy on the Williams campus. There are probably sixty kids at this week's session, and there were around a hundred at last week's. Q is one of maybe thirty holdovers. He's playing in the lower division (you have to be at least 8 to attend, and he turned 8 quite recently), and last week his team was Spain, coached by a young man named Joe who, I think, plays for Williams. The shirts they got were red, and I wrote "JOHNSTADT" and a big number 8 on the back. They would play other countries and at the end of the week, one of them would win. Last Friday they announced that Spain was tied with Sweden, but that Sweden won the tiebreaker because they scored more goals. Q was pretty heartbroken.
But that was soon remedied, because each country gave out a medal for "Best Attitude", and Q was last week's recipient. In his presentation speech, Joe said, more or less, "It seemed like everybody on our team wanted to play center-forward, but we had one player who was happy to play anywhere. 'Who wants to play goalie?" 'I DO!' 'Who wants to play center back?' 'I DO!' And that voice was always Q's." He was ever so proud, as was I, standing back behind the bleachers where the end-of-camp meeting was being held. I was chatting with the fathers of Q's friends Eli and Brady, who were on other teams.
And who each also won the "Best Attitude" medal for their teams. It was a very weird moment, as each of us congratulated the other men on our sons' performance. In a sea of probably 130 parents, we all happened to be standing together. I can't quite figure it out - seems there must be some significance. But maybe not - like those parades of some not-normally-social insect I remember reading about that occasionally marches in columns that are hundreds of yards long, rivers of them, heading off in a direction for a purpose no one knew. Turns out it was a drought, and they were all trying to cannibalize each other, while avoiding being cannibalized, and that tension between the two desires shook out, in a sort of brownian motion, into a parade to nowhere. Maybe it's like that. Somehow.
ANY-hoo, Q is back in soccer practice this week, and is really enjoying it, though this week his team appears to be less of a powerhouse. He didn't score any goals today and his team played to two ties and a loss. I tried to buck him up by telling him that you can often learn more, and improve yourself more, by playing on a poor team than on a winner. That seemed to help him cope.
Though it was also probably the fact that we were getting closer and closer to the Willliams College Pool, a facility to which all campers are entitled access after each day's practice. Very few take advantage, but Q insists on it - and after running for miles in the sun for six hours, he deserves it. So we always go, he and I, and take a dip. His swimming ability has skyrocketed lately - he does a proto-freestyle crawl, and also fires himself off the side of the pool and dolphin kicks for several seconds. And he asks me about Michael Phelps a lot. Must be watching some commercials here and there about the Olympics. Which should be fun to watch - I hear the air is so bad in Beijing that you can actually sometimes unexpectedly inhale turds. Should make for an interesting marathon. i think the helicopter shots might not be as effective as they were in, say, Sydney.
T, meanwhile, continues to charm and amaze. She and I took a bike ride after supper on the Burley Piccolo while Q played ping-pong with Janneke, and she went into a very long and detailed narrative about why it was that one should never live close to a farm. I didn't really follow the logic, but it was so heartfelt and supported with so many strangely unintelligible details that I felt quite convinced by the end of it.
We have painted a room orange and cleaned out the basement in anticipation of the arrival of the van de Stadt side of the family (or most of them) in the coming days - Monique arrives Thursday, and three days later, I think, come the Chipi-Ripis from Alabama, followed in quick succession by the Bidi-Boos aus der Schweiz. Most are staying with us (two in the aforementioned orange room), but a few are going to be billeted in the house of Magnus and Margaret, who live up the street and who will be away for the length of the families' visit. So let's have a round of applause for Magnus and Margaret!
Magnus, despite his name (it's not his fault - he's from Iceland), is a nifty guy, who, having seen me doing some jogging around the neighborhood, invited me to go on a ten-mile jog with him and his brother last Sunday. He's training to run in the NY Marathon. I laughed, and then accepted.
I had never run that far before (10K was my previous max), and it was downright pleasant! We rolled along at a little more than nine-minute miles, and I tell you, this whole "Chi running" thing is working out wondrously. (Aside to Jim: I just had the book sent to you. It's going to change your life.) I haven't been hurt running in...Damn. Shouldn't have said that. You know the next time I run, my knees are going to spontaneously combust. It's now absolutely bound to happen.
Ah well, it was good while it lasted. I ran non-stop for damn near two hours on Sunday, and am none the worse for wear! In fact, I used the nifty mapping tool that Magnus and Brad told me about on Google Earth to map out a route that would be precisely 6 miles, and ran that bastard this very day, once again at nine minutes a mile. Feeling great! Sassy, even! Y'know what, actually? I can't BE injured! Come on, universe! Injure me! I dare you! You can't stop me! To quote my favorite politician: "I am a f***ing steamroller!"
Ten points to the first reader to tell me who this politician is...
Actually, it was last week's sport, too. Q spends Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 3:00, at the Soccer Academy on the Williams campus. There are probably sixty kids at this week's session, and there were around a hundred at last week's. Q is one of maybe thirty holdovers. He's playing in the lower division (you have to be at least 8 to attend, and he turned 8 quite recently), and last week his team was Spain, coached by a young man named Joe who, I think, plays for Williams. The shirts they got were red, and I wrote "JOHNSTADT" and a big number 8 on the back. They would play other countries and at the end of the week, one of them would win. Last Friday they announced that Spain was tied with Sweden, but that Sweden won the tiebreaker because they scored more goals. Q was pretty heartbroken.
But that was soon remedied, because each country gave out a medal for "Best Attitude", and Q was last week's recipient. In his presentation speech, Joe said, more or less, "It seemed like everybody on our team wanted to play center-forward, but we had one player who was happy to play anywhere. 'Who wants to play goalie?" 'I DO!' 'Who wants to play center back?' 'I DO!' And that voice was always Q's." He was ever so proud, as was I, standing back behind the bleachers where the end-of-camp meeting was being held. I was chatting with the fathers of Q's friends Eli and Brady, who were on other teams.
And who each also won the "Best Attitude" medal for their teams. It was a very weird moment, as each of us congratulated the other men on our sons' performance. In a sea of probably 130 parents, we all happened to be standing together. I can't quite figure it out - seems there must be some significance. But maybe not - like those parades of some not-normally-social insect I remember reading about that occasionally marches in columns that are hundreds of yards long, rivers of them, heading off in a direction for a purpose no one knew. Turns out it was a drought, and they were all trying to cannibalize each other, while avoiding being cannibalized, and that tension between the two desires shook out, in a sort of brownian motion, into a parade to nowhere. Maybe it's like that. Somehow.
ANY-hoo, Q is back in soccer practice this week, and is really enjoying it, though this week his team appears to be less of a powerhouse. He didn't score any goals today and his team played to two ties and a loss. I tried to buck him up by telling him that you can often learn more, and improve yourself more, by playing on a poor team than on a winner. That seemed to help him cope.
Though it was also probably the fact that we were getting closer and closer to the Willliams College Pool, a facility to which all campers are entitled access after each day's practice. Very few take advantage, but Q insists on it - and after running for miles in the sun for six hours, he deserves it. So we always go, he and I, and take a dip. His swimming ability has skyrocketed lately - he does a proto-freestyle crawl, and also fires himself off the side of the pool and dolphin kicks for several seconds. And he asks me about Michael Phelps a lot. Must be watching some commercials here and there about the Olympics. Which should be fun to watch - I hear the air is so bad in Beijing that you can actually sometimes unexpectedly inhale turds. Should make for an interesting marathon. i think the helicopter shots might not be as effective as they were in, say, Sydney.
T, meanwhile, continues to charm and amaze. She and I took a bike ride after supper on the Burley Piccolo while Q played ping-pong with Janneke, and she went into a very long and detailed narrative about why it was that one should never live close to a farm. I didn't really follow the logic, but it was so heartfelt and supported with so many strangely unintelligible details that I felt quite convinced by the end of it.
We have painted a room orange and cleaned out the basement in anticipation of the arrival of the van de Stadt side of the family (or most of them) in the coming days - Monique arrives Thursday, and three days later, I think, come the Chipi-Ripis from Alabama, followed in quick succession by the Bidi-Boos aus der Schweiz. Most are staying with us (two in the aforementioned orange room), but a few are going to be billeted in the house of Magnus and Margaret, who live up the street and who will be away for the length of the families' visit. So let's have a round of applause for Magnus and Margaret!
Magnus, despite his name (it's not his fault - he's from Iceland), is a nifty guy, who, having seen me doing some jogging around the neighborhood, invited me to go on a ten-mile jog with him and his brother last Sunday. He's training to run in the NY Marathon. I laughed, and then accepted.
I had never run that far before (10K was my previous max), and it was downright pleasant! We rolled along at a little more than nine-minute miles, and I tell you, this whole "Chi running" thing is working out wondrously. (Aside to Jim: I just had the book sent to you. It's going to change your life.) I haven't been hurt running in...Damn. Shouldn't have said that. You know the next time I run, my knees are going to spontaneously combust. It's now absolutely bound to happen.
Ah well, it was good while it lasted. I ran non-stop for damn near two hours on Sunday, and am none the worse for wear! In fact, I used the nifty mapping tool that Magnus and Brad told me about on Google Earth to map out a route that would be precisely 6 miles, and ran that bastard this very day, once again at nine minutes a mile. Feeling great! Sassy, even! Y'know what, actually? I can't BE injured! Come on, universe! Injure me! I dare you! You can't stop me! To quote my favorite politician: "I am a f***ing steamroller!"
Ten points to the first reader to tell me who this politician is...
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
What I Do
I throw back my head and howl like Chewbacca did when the doors closed at nightfall on Hoth, with Han still unaccounted for.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Brett Frickin' Favre
Well, there’s a call from a longtime reader for my thoughts on the Brett Favre saga. For those readers who are European (or who have lives that are fulfilling enough on their own without requiring any input at all from professional American football), here’s the basic deal:
Brett Favre played his entire career, except for his rookie year, with the Green Bay Packers. He played something like 16 years for the Green and Gold, and broke all the career passing records that mean anything at all. He won a Superbowl in Green Bay, played in another, and last year took us to within a drive of a third. And at the end of the year, after a few months to think it over, he held a press conference and tearfully said farewell, saying he lacked the fire in the belly for another year on the gridiron. He had thought about retiring for a couple of years – the Packers had to all but beg him to come back for the last two, especially after failing to sign Randy Moss, a wide receiver who might’ve done for us what he did for New England this past year. But we didn’t sign him – our general manager, Ted Tompson, thought we could spend the money better somewhere else, since we already had a solid corps of very young wide receivers with huge potential. Brett didn’t like it, but he came back, and proceeded to have one of his best years ever with these youngsters catching his passes. But he was too mentally tired to go through it all again – the preparation, the training camps, the time away from family, all for another year that, given this year’s success, will be seen as a failure unless Green Bay were to win it all. He couldn’t face it any more, he said; he had no more to give, he said. So we all shed a tear, tossed back a Leinenkugel’s, and waved goodbye as he receded into the distance, bound for the backwoods of Mississippi whence he had originally sprung.
We moved on in Green Bay. The Packers have a young quarterback they’ve been grooming for a few years to be Brett’s successor, and they drafted young quarterbacks to provide him with backup (and a possible future should he not work out). We’ve got the youngest team in the league, even more so now that Brett’s no longer bringing our average up. (The guy is 38.) And we went 13-3 last year and almost made the Superbowl. There’s nervousness in Wisconsin, but a lot of excitement, too. After all, Brett left a crucial game this year with an injury, and Aaron Rodgers, his heir apparent (hey – just thought of his nickname: “Heir-on Rodgers”. But it only works in print…), came in and lit the place up. He scrambled like only a young, fast quarterback can, he threw well, he showed no fear of contact…People got excited about the future. And we’re still riding that nervous wave into the new year. Training camp’s just around the corner!
And then Brett called up in July – July! – after spending some time among the crawfish and the gators, and said, “Hey, I changed my mind. I want to come back and play again.”
The Packers are in a fix. He has two years left on his contract - if he plays anywhere, it must be in Green Bay.
Unless we were to trade him - but who would give up what he's worth, when he only has perhaps 3 years left?
We could bring him back to the team as our starter - and watch Heir-on Rodgers say, "OK, guys, at the end of this year I am gone. My contract is up, and I won't play where they jerk you around like that." Years of training and big-time salary down the tubes.
Or we could bring him back as a backup, paying him giganto-money (hey, he has a contract) to hold a clipboard.
Or we could unilaterally release him and allow him to sign anywhere he wants.
Like Minnesota? Like Chicago? Who are both in our division? Whom we play twice a year? Who are both a quarterback away from being really, really good? Why on Earth would we do that? We are under no obligation to do it.
There are no good options. All brought about because the petulant Favre cannot be taken at his word, arrives at life-altering decisions that are complete opposites of each other every six months.
How did this happen? How could this guy suddenly turn into such a psychotic infant? How could he be so willing to toss his legacy into the toilet, becoming the same laughing-stock as Reggie White was in his final year(s?) in Carolina? Or Joe Namath in - Where the hell did he play again? Or Johnny U in San Diego? Or (forgive me, Christian) Joe Montana in Kansas City...? Well, my brother Jim called me the other day, and he summed it up well. He blames it, symbolically, on Ricky and Rodney.
Ricky and Rodney are two of our cousins from Gays Mills, my home town. My uncle Judd’s boys. Judd and my own father are brothers, but they are very different. Dad got out of the Kickapoo valley a little bit, saw the world, preferred to bring home a salary from outside while trying to build up a land, cattle and timber empire based on the family farm. It didn’t all work out the way he would have liked, but he’s a real leader in the community, somebody people look up to and / or resent. But everybody respects him – he’s something of a force of nature. Dashing and athletic as a young man, sparkling eyes and a sharp wit…He is the aging King of the Ocooch Mountains. Think Little Joe from Ponderosa, then project him forward to age 80 and cross him with Theoden. Only grumpier.
His kids are smart-alecks who didn’t grow up on the farm, but near it; we know it well, but we didn’t get submerged in it, and we all left the Valley for careers elsewehere. To the rest of the world, we may seem like rednecks, or like members of a lost tribe - people who know their way around the woods, have known what blood on our hands feels like, and aren't afraid of large animals. Someone exceptional out there in the concrete jungle. But to Ricky and Rodney, we’re the soft cousins they think of and shake their heads, smiling at our citified ways.
Uncle Judd is Hoss, only far less jocular. He ran the farm while Dad worked outside the state. He’s a big, big man, with a lantern jaw and a voice as gravelly as Clint Eastwood’s and as deep as James Earl Jones’. He’s quiet, brooding; he stayed on the farm his whole working life, except for some time in WWII. (The thought of Judd at war makes me shudder. It would be a lot like that Iron Man movie.) He is permanently dressed in overalls and engine grease, and his jaw has only gotten bigger with age. As Dad put it, when asked to describe a young Judd: “That was a hell of a man.”
His son Ricky is probably fifteen or twenty years older than I am, and if he and I were to drop the gloves, the result would be laughable. He is, according to Dad, hands-down the strongest human he’s ever known. He has a handlebar mustache and walks like a lion, muscles absolutely everywhere – none any bigger than they need to be, all hard as iron. As far as I know, though, he’s all but never done any exercise on purpose. He gets a truck out of the mud and fixes a tractor and wrestles a steer to the ground before breakfast. He dances on pool tables and breaks pool cues over people’s heads; he walks the hills deerhunting at the age of 55, carrying a rifle and smoking a cigarette, as fast as I could run them in gym shorts at the age of 19. He may have graduated high school – I would wager that he himself isn’t even sure. He stood in the parking lot of Michael's Pub and watched his son get beaten bloody in a fair fight. he took no action at all, standing honorably by. And when the worm turned, and his son started to get the upper hand and lay it on the opponent, and the opponent's relatives moved in to stop it, Ricky shook them by the collar and said "It was alright to watch him deal it out, so why don't you stand back and watch him take it. Unless you want me to bring the fight to you." He is as redneck as they get – so redneck that he would never think to call himself one.
Rodney has the same face, the same mustache, the same endurance. He’s a more sardonic and sarcastic shadow of Ricky. He builds fences through the woods in the summer for a living; he is immune to briars, burrs, blackflies, mosquitoes, and the charms of women. He’s made completely of leather, but with Dad’s twinkle in the eyes. He knows the Kickapoo Valley, and that’s about it; he makes jokes about the outside, keeps it at arm’s length, shakes his head in disdain at the stupidity of the world beyond Crawford County.
They are fiercely loyal to their family, protective of those they care for, unafraid to speak their minds on anything at all, unaware of any reason why the fact that their opinions might be less than completely informed should temper the enthusiasm with which they hold them. They brood over beers and reach decisions that are immutable, hold tight to them until their dying day. They might not know much about the subject at hand, but they know what they think about it. And if their cousin Joe tries to argue with them, they laugh and slap a hand like a catcher’s mitt on his back and say, “Does everybody who goes to Madison come back a weirdo?”
And this is what Jim said about Brett Favre’s decision to come back:
“Brett goes back to Mississippi and gets all his career advice from Ricky and Rodney.”
ADDENDA:
Naught to do with Brett, but two things I also want the world to know:
I was reading "Stina's Visit" to Tess yesterday. There's a part where one character says of another, who is content to be where he is: "He says it's like living in Paradise." Tess usually says at that point, "Yo quiero vivir en Paradise." (I want to live in Paradise.)
I usually respond, "Sabes, yo creo que mas o menos ya vivimos en Paradise." (Y'know, I think we pretty much already do live in Paradise.)
Yesterday she screwed up her face when I said that, recoiled and looked at me like I was crazy. "Nosotros no vivimos en Paradise! Esto no es Paradise!" (We don't live in Paradise! This isn't Paradise!)
A moment of thought - then: "Tal vez Wisconsin es Paradise..."
(Maybe Wisconsin is Paradise...)
And the other:
The birds living on our front porch mean that we go in and out through the garage door. At night, I walk the dogs, then come in, and let them into the kitchen; then I stand there in the kitchen doorway, with the garage light on, and hit the button to close the garage door against the night. Often it's the first time it's been closed all day. And I stare through the garage at the door coming down, wait through the ten or so seconds it takes, and when it touches the floor, finally completely closing out the darkness, I do something.
The question, to those of you about my age, is this:
What do I do?
First one to guess wins a prize!
Brett Favre played his entire career, except for his rookie year, with the Green Bay Packers. He played something like 16 years for the Green and Gold, and broke all the career passing records that mean anything at all. He won a Superbowl in Green Bay, played in another, and last year took us to within a drive of a third. And at the end of the year, after a few months to think it over, he held a press conference and tearfully said farewell, saying he lacked the fire in the belly for another year on the gridiron. He had thought about retiring for a couple of years – the Packers had to all but beg him to come back for the last two, especially after failing to sign Randy Moss, a wide receiver who might’ve done for us what he did for New England this past year. But we didn’t sign him – our general manager, Ted Tompson, thought we could spend the money better somewhere else, since we already had a solid corps of very young wide receivers with huge potential. Brett didn’t like it, but he came back, and proceeded to have one of his best years ever with these youngsters catching his passes. But he was too mentally tired to go through it all again – the preparation, the training camps, the time away from family, all for another year that, given this year’s success, will be seen as a failure unless Green Bay were to win it all. He couldn’t face it any more, he said; he had no more to give, he said. So we all shed a tear, tossed back a Leinenkugel’s, and waved goodbye as he receded into the distance, bound for the backwoods of Mississippi whence he had originally sprung.
We moved on in Green Bay. The Packers have a young quarterback they’ve been grooming for a few years to be Brett’s successor, and they drafted young quarterbacks to provide him with backup (and a possible future should he not work out). We’ve got the youngest team in the league, even more so now that Brett’s no longer bringing our average up. (The guy is 38.) And we went 13-3 last year and almost made the Superbowl. There’s nervousness in Wisconsin, but a lot of excitement, too. After all, Brett left a crucial game this year with an injury, and Aaron Rodgers, his heir apparent (hey – just thought of his nickname: “Heir-on Rodgers”. But it only works in print…), came in and lit the place up. He scrambled like only a young, fast quarterback can, he threw well, he showed no fear of contact…People got excited about the future. And we’re still riding that nervous wave into the new year. Training camp’s just around the corner!
And then Brett called up in July – July! – after spending some time among the crawfish and the gators, and said, “Hey, I changed my mind. I want to come back and play again.”
The Packers are in a fix. He has two years left on his contract - if he plays anywhere, it must be in Green Bay.
Unless we were to trade him - but who would give up what he's worth, when he only has perhaps 3 years left?
We could bring him back to the team as our starter - and watch Heir-on Rodgers say, "OK, guys, at the end of this year I am gone. My contract is up, and I won't play where they jerk you around like that." Years of training and big-time salary down the tubes.
Or we could bring him back as a backup, paying him giganto-money (hey, he has a contract) to hold a clipboard.
Or we could unilaterally release him and allow him to sign anywhere he wants.
Like Minnesota? Like Chicago? Who are both in our division? Whom we play twice a year? Who are both a quarterback away from being really, really good? Why on Earth would we do that? We are under no obligation to do it.
There are no good options. All brought about because the petulant Favre cannot be taken at his word, arrives at life-altering decisions that are complete opposites of each other every six months.
How did this happen? How could this guy suddenly turn into such a psychotic infant? How could he be so willing to toss his legacy into the toilet, becoming the same laughing-stock as Reggie White was in his final year(s?) in Carolina? Or Joe Namath in - Where the hell did he play again? Or Johnny U in San Diego? Or (forgive me, Christian) Joe Montana in Kansas City...? Well, my brother Jim called me the other day, and he summed it up well. He blames it, symbolically, on Ricky and Rodney.
Ricky and Rodney are two of our cousins from Gays Mills, my home town. My uncle Judd’s boys. Judd and my own father are brothers, but they are very different. Dad got out of the Kickapoo valley a little bit, saw the world, preferred to bring home a salary from outside while trying to build up a land, cattle and timber empire based on the family farm. It didn’t all work out the way he would have liked, but he’s a real leader in the community, somebody people look up to and / or resent. But everybody respects him – he’s something of a force of nature. Dashing and athletic as a young man, sparkling eyes and a sharp wit…He is the aging King of the Ocooch Mountains. Think Little Joe from Ponderosa, then project him forward to age 80 and cross him with Theoden. Only grumpier.
His kids are smart-alecks who didn’t grow up on the farm, but near it; we know it well, but we didn’t get submerged in it, and we all left the Valley for careers elsewehere. To the rest of the world, we may seem like rednecks, or like members of a lost tribe - people who know their way around the woods, have known what blood on our hands feels like, and aren't afraid of large animals. Someone exceptional out there in the concrete jungle. But to Ricky and Rodney, we’re the soft cousins they think of and shake their heads, smiling at our citified ways.
Uncle Judd is Hoss, only far less jocular. He ran the farm while Dad worked outside the state. He’s a big, big man, with a lantern jaw and a voice as gravelly as Clint Eastwood’s and as deep as James Earl Jones’. He’s quiet, brooding; he stayed on the farm his whole working life, except for some time in WWII. (The thought of Judd at war makes me shudder. It would be a lot like that Iron Man movie.) He is permanently dressed in overalls and engine grease, and his jaw has only gotten bigger with age. As Dad put it, when asked to describe a young Judd: “That was a hell of a man.”
His son Ricky is probably fifteen or twenty years older than I am, and if he and I were to drop the gloves, the result would be laughable. He is, according to Dad, hands-down the strongest human he’s ever known. He has a handlebar mustache and walks like a lion, muscles absolutely everywhere – none any bigger than they need to be, all hard as iron. As far as I know, though, he’s all but never done any exercise on purpose. He gets a truck out of the mud and fixes a tractor and wrestles a steer to the ground before breakfast. He dances on pool tables and breaks pool cues over people’s heads; he walks the hills deerhunting at the age of 55, carrying a rifle and smoking a cigarette, as fast as I could run them in gym shorts at the age of 19. He may have graduated high school – I would wager that he himself isn’t even sure. He stood in the parking lot of Michael's Pub and watched his son get beaten bloody in a fair fight. he took no action at all, standing honorably by. And when the worm turned, and his son started to get the upper hand and lay it on the opponent, and the opponent's relatives moved in to stop it, Ricky shook them by the collar and said "It was alright to watch him deal it out, so why don't you stand back and watch him take it. Unless you want me to bring the fight to you." He is as redneck as they get – so redneck that he would never think to call himself one.
Rodney has the same face, the same mustache, the same endurance. He’s a more sardonic and sarcastic shadow of Ricky. He builds fences through the woods in the summer for a living; he is immune to briars, burrs, blackflies, mosquitoes, and the charms of women. He’s made completely of leather, but with Dad’s twinkle in the eyes. He knows the Kickapoo Valley, and that’s about it; he makes jokes about the outside, keeps it at arm’s length, shakes his head in disdain at the stupidity of the world beyond Crawford County.
They are fiercely loyal to their family, protective of those they care for, unafraid to speak their minds on anything at all, unaware of any reason why the fact that their opinions might be less than completely informed should temper the enthusiasm with which they hold them. They brood over beers and reach decisions that are immutable, hold tight to them until their dying day. They might not know much about the subject at hand, but they know what they think about it. And if their cousin Joe tries to argue with them, they laugh and slap a hand like a catcher’s mitt on his back and say, “Does everybody who goes to Madison come back a weirdo?”
And this is what Jim said about Brett Favre’s decision to come back:
“Brett goes back to Mississippi and gets all his career advice from Ricky and Rodney.”
ADDENDA:
Naught to do with Brett, but two things I also want the world to know:
I was reading "Stina's Visit" to Tess yesterday. There's a part where one character says of another, who is content to be where he is: "He says it's like living in Paradise." Tess usually says at that point, "Yo quiero vivir en Paradise." (I want to live in Paradise.)
I usually respond, "Sabes, yo creo que mas o menos ya vivimos en Paradise." (Y'know, I think we pretty much already do live in Paradise.)
Yesterday she screwed up her face when I said that, recoiled and looked at me like I was crazy. "Nosotros no vivimos en Paradise! Esto no es Paradise!" (We don't live in Paradise! This isn't Paradise!)
A moment of thought - then: "Tal vez Wisconsin es Paradise..."
(Maybe Wisconsin is Paradise...)
And the other:
The birds living on our front porch mean that we go in and out through the garage door. At night, I walk the dogs, then come in, and let them into the kitchen; then I stand there in the kitchen doorway, with the garage light on, and hit the button to close the garage door against the night. Often it's the first time it's been closed all day. And I stare through the garage at the door coming down, wait through the ten or so seconds it takes, and when it touches the floor, finally completely closing out the darkness, I do something.
The question, to those of you about my age, is this:
What do I do?
First one to guess wins a prize!
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