Category: Family & Home

Posted on

Outer Space

Miles-Barnacle 30 minutes before bedtime, Miles (pictured cross-eyed, balancing large barnacle on head) announces to me that, no, we aren’t going to start listening to Cinnamon Bear as planned. He’d just remembered that he’d made plans with four of his kindergarten pals to travel to outer space on Monday, and that he needed to get ready. Thus began a flurry of preparations, including:

– One scuba diving flipper (made from an empty Kleenex box) [check]

– One piece of maritime artwork featuring a glued-on wooden sign reading “The Brain,” accompanied by a hastily scrawled diagram of a human brain [check]

– One pair of binoculars made from two toilet paper tubes lashed together with blue masking tape [check]

– One small flashlight [check]

– One space helmet, made by widening the opening of the aforementioned flipper [check]

– One compass (real) [check]

Should be quite an adventure.

Update: This morning Miles added a pointy stick “for poking out alien’s eyes.” We suggested that it might be smarter to bring aliens back for scientific study, and he agreed. Ditched the pointy stick. Once he arrived at school with his bags of gear, his teacher got curious and wanted to know what time he was departing. “I’ll probably blast off at snack time and get back to earth at lunchtime.”

Music: Marcus Carl Franklin :: When the Ship Comes In
Posted on

Earthquake Preparedness and Guns

Over the past year, we’ve mostly filled a large rolling plastic trash bin with earthquake supplies. First-aid kit, blankets, lots of water, hand-crank radio, emergency rations, etc. The wheels on the bin are so we can drag it along with us if our area is evacuated (we live pretty close to a major fault, on soil subject to liquefaction). We’ve got a few more things to add, but are mostly ready.

Recently a friend of ours asked whether we had a gun in our kit. A gun? A friend of his who lived through post-Katrina said that after a couple of weeks of no public services, people who had supplies but no guns were sorry they didn’t.

As you can guess, guns aren’t my bag. What happens when someone with a gun approaches and asks for our water? Am I supposed to have a gunfight with them? I’m more inclined to give them the damn water and drink from the reservoir left over in our home’s water heater. But it’s hard to imagine what actually living through that kind of Mad Max world would actually be like, and how my thinking might change in that kind of situation.

What about you? Is your disaster kit ready? And does it include firearms?

Music: Screaming Headless Torsos :: Smile In A Wave (Theme From Jack Johnson)
Posted on

Words and Numbers

Miles is just beginning to read in earnest. Had a classic first reading experience with him last night, working our way through the first few pages of Green Eggs and Ham (couldn’t ask for a more textbook test harness). Interesting to be reminded of how deeply we’ve internalized the arbitrariness of our language, and how profoundly the unintuitive bits strike someone just learning our non-rule rules for the first time.

Capitalizing on the words and spelling patterns he’s learned so far, M wanted to know why “do” isn’t spelled “doo,” why “edge” isn’t spelled “ej” and was pretty peeved about the seemingly random presence of silent “e” (not to mention the silent “l” in “would”).

Numbers always make sense, but languages only make sense when they feel like it.

But why???

How can you explain such a thing to a 5-year-old who barely knows what history means, let alone the migration of cultures and evolution of languages? Those are even harder to explain than the fact that the “b” in “lamb” is slightly less subtle than the “b” in “subtle.”

I do not like them in a boat, I do not like them with a goat. I do not like them, Sam I am.

So we’re ditching English around the house and doing immersion Esperanto instead. And we’re switching our keyboards to Dvorak. OK, that’s a joke, but this is serious: Miles’ school teaches only the metric system, from kindergarten on. Admirable, or not so much?

Music: Elvis Costello :: Let Him Dangle
Posted on

Your Average Stud

Studfinder Veteran’s day… us gubmint employees got the day off. Felt more poignant than usual since Amy and I have been working our way through The War… slowly. Painful and fascinating to watch, learning so much.

Hung a 70-lb. TV on a 50-lb. wall-bracket today, finally eliminating the hideous shiny plastic stand it came on and getting it 12″ farther back from the couch. For a weight like this, hitting the studs was of paramount importance, couldn’t risk missing. Unfortunately, thick lathe walls and multiple repair jobs over time* resulted in getting lots of false readings from the electronic stud finder. For a while there it seemed like chaos, and I was beggining to consider fishing for it, though I didn’t relish the thought of having to patch it up later.

Each time I got a reading for the edge of a stud, I made a mark on the wall. After a while, I had about 40 tiny Xs dotting the LR wall, and noticed a pattern starting to emerge. While no single mark was reliable, in the aggregate I was starting to see implied vertical lines on either side of a 2″ space.

This got me thinking… when placing a geocache, it’s really important to publish accurate coordinates. But marking a single waypoint is inaccurate by definition, since the satellites and the earth are constantly shifting in relation to one another. The first cache we placed, I did the “bee” dance, walking out 30′ and returning repeatedly, marking the spot again and again, then finally plunking down a waypoint in the middle of the cluster to represent the average reading. That worked OK, but later discovered there was an “average waypoint” feature built into the GPSr – set it down in one spot and let the earth move while it takes a reading every few seconds. Let it do that for 200 or so readings, hit Stop, and you get a dynamite average. Conclusion: The world needs an electronic stud finder that does automatic averaging. Just drag the finder randomly around on the wall for a few minutes and let it report well-averaged stud edges.

Aside: Got my stitches out today – hand’s doing well, but will probably have a nice Frankenstein jag in it for life. At least it’s fully mobile again.

* Have I mentioned that when doing wall repair recently (earthquake cracks), I discovered that the living room had once been painted top to bottom with gold glitter paint? I love trying to imagine what the rest of the room must have looked like at whatever point in history that might have been.

Music: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins :: I Love Paris
Posted on

Oak Hymenoptera

Milesoak     Milesoak2

By the grin on my face, you’d never guess I just got 14 sparkling new stitches in my right hand.

Headed out for Crockett Hills Regional Park with Miles on a gorgeous November morning – felt like late spring, amazing day. Halfway through the day, arrived at a cache under a giant oak … which we just couldn’t nail. Knew it was a tiny camouflaged micro, but it wasn’t about to give itself up. The clue was “Oak hymenoptera,” which of course was all Latin to me, so called Amy for a lifeline. She described a fungal growth related somehow to hornets or wasps. OK, the tree had its share of tumors and testicular outgrowths, and I searched them all while M ate cashews and an apple from his perch in the tree. But this one just wasn’t willing to be found.

A bit bummed, we moved on. Had intended to do a big loop around the park, but suddenly found ourselves at trail’s end. Realized we’d have to cross a road and hop a fence to continue our circuit – either that or hike two miles back the way we came and miss caching half the park, so went for it. Lifted Miles easily over the barbed-wire fence, then went to get myself over. OK, know this: I like adventure, and I’m not what you’d call “risk averse,” but I don’t think I do dumb things at the expense of safety. Studied the situation carefully to make sure there were no alternative crossings, then carefully got my feet into position on the top rung of the fence. Intended to sort of do a light vault over and spin down to the other side (this was only a 5-foot fence).

Continue reading “Oak Hymenoptera”

Posted on

Like a Bonk on the Head

Milessako     Patrickjacksonmiles

Miles was the baddest cutest little Sheriff for Halloween, finally getting some mileage out of the cowboy outfit I brought back for him from Texas earlier this year (SXSW). Seen here with friends Sako, Patrick and Jackson at school. Went out with him tonight and he cleaned up (of course), even though he’s still so closed-minded about food that he refuses to try candy (what he doesn’t know is great for him!) His dentist is offering a buy-back program, giving kids $1/lb for the candy they collect, so he was mostly interested in racking up the weight (though I confess to having stolen one of his Abba Zabbas).

Unrelated: In the car on the way to grandparents house over the weekend, Miles suddenly says, apropos of nothing: “Sometimes life feels like a bonk on the head.” Followed shortly after with “I’m not listening to you because you have worms crawling up your nose.”

Five is golden.

Music: Amy Winehouse :: Back to Black
Posted on

Wishes

Walking out of the Lawrence Hall of Science with Miles today, after enjoying the brand new Wild Music exhibit, all about sound and the environment (M liked the hydrophone tank the best), we stopped at the fountain to throw in our pennies and make some wishes. Miles volunteered that he wished that he would “grow up to be a great thinker.” This took me totally by surprise, since I had no idea this noble goal was even on his list (his previous career ambitions have included garbage man, artist, and daddy).

Five minutes later, driving home in the car, he suddenly says, in a kind of sad little voice: “But wishes never come true, right Daddy?” Great, my kid’s a closet nihilist. Of course we had a conversation about working hard for what you want, etc. But in the course of our little talk, it became apparent he was talking about something else entirely. By “wishes never come true,” he was referring to the physical act of throwing coins in a fountain, not wishes in the abstract. He just meant that our coins had nothing to do with whether our wishes would come true. Turns out he was just mythbusting in a five-year-old way, not being a sadsack after all.

Faith restored, and a good chuckle.

Music: Ivan Boogaloo Joe Jones :: Sweetback
Posted on

Wooden House

Wooden-House-M Over the past couple of months, Miles and I have been toiling in the garage in the evenings after dinner, working on simple construction projects. He’s getting his first opportunities to work the vice, pull the trigger on the electric drill (which I hold), run an orbital sander, help with the hole saw, screw screws, hammer nails, etc. His favorite tool, unsurprisingly, is the vice. At one point I was tweaking on the teensy hinge screws and looked over to find him cranking down on a tube of Gorilla Glue – had the thing torqued to the breaking point. Another half turn and it would have blown sky high. Which at first sounds like a total mess, but on further thought would have been an absolute disaster – glue in his hair, possibly his eyes, him rubbing his hands all over the place to get it off, making everything worse. He put so much work into this little house. Honestly, it doesn’t get used that much, but the process was wonderful for both of us.

Music: Fela Kuti :: 2000 Blacks Got To Be Free
Posted on

Big Cat Dream

Usually it’s tough to get Miles to tell us about the occasional nightmares that wake him up in the middle of the night, and we’re left wondering what manner of unholy terrors occupy the subconscious of a 5-year-old. But this morning, he was intent on making sure we had every detail. First thing this morning, he arranged two chairs facing each other, sat me down, and relayed his dream from the previous night:

First, Mommy gave me a package of Playmabile toys*. And then the Playmabile toys came to life. And this adventure all started in Minnesota, looking down a hill. And then I saw a lady driving a truck. A yellow truck. And then I said “Hi lady!” And then the lady said “Hi little boy!” The lady had a kid in the truck with her. And they were hunting for a jaguar. And then I decided to hunt with them. And then so I creeped in to the misty forest and there were lots of branches. And then I met up with the lady and the kid again and we saw animals that didn’t want the jaguar to eat them. And then we saw the jaguar and we got fed up with it. We got super mad at it. And then the animals were super scared. And then we were trying to find ways to fight with the jaguar (it was still alive) and so we got fed up with it again and we fighted up with it again. And then we stepped on it and crushed on it and then it was finally crushedly dead (get it? because it got crushed by our feet!) And then the animals were just walking and singing. And this is the part where the Playmabile toys went back to being toys and the lady and the kid also turned into toys and also the animal and the jaguar also turned into toys. So now everyone was a toy and I tried to stuff them into my toybox but they wouldn’t fit and then I saw that my trains were under my green bench so I thought I could put my Playmabile toys on top but I could only could put half of them in because that’s the end of my dream.

* He always says “Playmaybile” rather than Playmobil – we don’t correct him; it’s too cute :)

This naturally led to a discussion about how Steve Jobs is in the habit of saying “Jagwire” rather than Jaguar, and all about the big cat naming convention, which got him wondering whether OS X would have to move to big dogs when the big cats ran out. Which naturally led to him right-clicking all over the place and deleting some of my bookmarks. Then he told us he wants to go to Prague because he likes the castles.

Music: Yabby You :: Zambia Dub w/Jah Walton
Posted on

How to Pack a Weekend

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been repairing earthquake cracks in the living room with mesh tape, Flex-All, and stucco. In the process, digging through previous generation’s layers of accreted paint, realized for the first time that our living room was once upon a time coated in gold glitter, top to bottom. Trying to visualize this former hey-day, and the shag rugs and chandeliers that must have accompanied it.

Friday moved everything to the center of the room (including 300 lbs. of LPs and a 1950s capiz shell console) and went at it with the orbital sander. A little detail work with Crawford’s spackling paste, then out for a couple of beers with a friend. Saturday up early, friends took Miles for the day, and Amy and I dug in on a long-overdue paint job (we’d never loved the chiffon yellow LR paint we inherited, but over the past year it had started to make both of us nauseous). Six hours later it was a more mature “Woodwind” (named, I think, for the color of the bamboo reeds in saxes and clarinets), and looks FABulous. We’re so stoked.

Saturday night, off with another friend for a mind-blowingly good sushi dinner, then off to see Martin, Medeski and Wood with John Scofield at the legendary Filmore Auditorium. Amazing 3-hour show (will write it up for Stuck if time permits) left me inspired and exhausted.

Today up early again to touch up the baseboards, then get ready for Miles‘ fifth birthday, at Head Over Heels gym, where circus performers train. M’s friends had full access to trampolines, trapezes, a deep foam pit, balance beams and an obstacle course of misc. gymnastic equipment. This is the third year running we’ve had his birthday party at the same gym. The kids dig it, why mess with a good thing?

One of his friends, whose mother is way into letterboxing, put together a multi-stage geocache for Miles, so after an afternoon wrangling tiny Playmobil parts, he and I took off to discover it. Such a cool, thoughtful present, with hand-drawn maps and clues, and plenty of places to play along the way. Amazing.

Returned home in time to start putting the LR back together, do some grilling for dinner, and get the DVR hooked up in time to record the start of Ken Burns’ The War.

Life is rich.

Music: Don Preston :: Ode To The Flower Maiden