Category: Family & Home

This winter has been an ongoing battle against under-house moisture and in-house mildew, in part due to the previous owner allowing gutters at a corner of the house to spill their load next to the foundation for years. We’ve been jamming on the beast, installing vapor barriers under the house, caulking baseboards and floor cracks, repainting closets with mildew-resistant paint, ripping out the strange 1940s built-in shoe racks that had warped and were letting in-wall air into the house… a brutal seek and destroy mission.

Fixed the corner gutter a long time ago, but gutters in general are slip-shod — four mismatched systems assembled over the years, held together with bailing wire and chewing gum. Finally decided it was time for new ones.

Gutter Dude claimed that his gutters were “seamless.” I wondered, since one length of the house is almost 60 ft., could they have a truck long enough to bring in seamless gutters? “We make them on the spot,” he claimed, “With your choice of paint already baked in.” Huh? Today it all made sense — they arrive with a trailer rig bearing a big roll of colored aluminum ribbon, and press it through a creasing machine to exact lengths. Simple and brilliant.

Miles and I built a Lincoln Log cabin, and he decided it would be a good place for some of his people to live. Tough to make them stand up, so he started piling them all in. When the top of the window frame was reached, M peeled the roof off and filled the house the rest of the way up, then replaced the roof. Choc-a-block. Naturally, any sympathy he felt for the overcrowded living conditions was overshadowed by the irresistible temptation to kick the whole thing over in a shower of wood and plastic the next morning.

While on a walk on the Berkeley Pier today, Miles took his first picture… this modernist interpretation of his own shadow. He then flat-out refused to take a picture of me. “No, Daddy — picture time has ended!” No further explanation requested or offered, but I’m not taking it personally.

For some reason, he’s been fascinated lately with the wrinkle in my forehead, and today objected that he couldn’t see his own wrinkle. “You don’t have one,” said Amy. “You have to earn your wrinkles over time.” “No!,” answered Miles, “People don’t earn wrinkles, they earn stickers!” (referring to our “eat a good dinner” incentive system).

He’s been living with a doozy of a head cold lately. A week ago, trying to get him to take medicine when sick … you’d think we were trying to yank teeth out of his head. Then, suddenly one evening, he actually asked for his medicine — seemed to have made the causal connection between it and feeling better. And last night, after eagerly gulping down a tablespoon, he boldly informed me: “Daddy, medicine is my favorite food!”

“Daddy, guess what? I made Plato* a web-site dinner.”

“Really? What does it taste like?”

“Butter.”

“What did you make it out of?”

“Flour.”

* Our cat.

Miles visited the Discovery Science museum in Sausalito today, at the foot of the Golden Gate bridge. Outside, found himself a hollow log to play in. He’s looking like such a big boy to me lately. The baby in him is starting to seem like a distant memory — one I find myself not ready to let go of just yet, as much as we enjoy every step in his personal evolution.

About a month ago, we decided Miles was old enough to have a pet, and got him a small fish tank, a goldfish, and two zebra danios. He named the goldfish “Emo” and the danios “Wipey” and “Dipey.” He’s enjoyed having it in his room, feeding them, gazing into its glow at bedtime.

Today, when he was supposed to be napping, he started calling us urgently: “Mommy Daddy, come see what I did!” We walk in and find the tank clouded milky pinkish white, totally opaque. He had dropped three whole canisters of Play-Dough into the tank, thinking Wipey and Dipey would enjoy playing with it. But Play-Dough slimes to sludge within seconds upon contact with water. We transferred the fish quickly to clear water, but all three were dead within half an hour, their gills probably clogged. M took it pretty well considering, but also understood his responsibility. A sad afternoon.

Speaking of emo (with a small “e”) but apropos of nothing: How To Be Emo (21 mins, QuickTime).

There are a lot of exciting “firsts” for a new parent: Experiencing the sound of your child’s first word, their first steps, first time they eat with a spoon, first time they tell a joke, first time wearing “big boy” underpants, first dream, first drawing… but what can possibly compare to watching your child use a mouse all by themselves and navigate the web for the first time?

Tonight Miles grokked the causal relationship between moving your hand over “here” and the cursor moving across the screen “there” and was able to surf all by himself from the Jay-Jay site to the Arthur site, then from there through a whole stack of Arthur trading cards (which was kind of odd, since he’s not into Arthur at all).

Clicking was kind of tough – I had to hold the mouse in place while he pushed the button, to avoid accidental dragging. But he was positively beaming and giggling, and so was I.

Over Thanksgiving, mom finally asked brother and me to get all of our remaining stuff out of her basement and garage. Felt like a character in a Tom Waits song going through all the things I, for whatever reason, felt sure 25 years ago that I would want to see again one day. Haven’t yet finished wading, but a quick laundry list of dusty relics, circa 1978-1983:

• Bag full of punk rock, new wave, and dada buttons and badges (I actually owned a badge-a-matic badge maker for a while), though only about half the stuff in this bag is homemade.
• Brutally embarassing daily journals from my year in Australia, 1983. Hardly seems like these words came from my own mouth. Am I still me? Equally embarassing box of love notes to and from random girls.
• Boxes and boxes of sealed-but-dusty MAD Magazines, plus comics: Howard the Duck, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Flakey Foont, Mr. Natural…
• Reams of output from a junior high mechanical drawing class, including this worshipful rendering of the Pioneer SX-450 stereo amplifier, mysteriously dated 5/18/20 rather than 5/18/80. Probably an early example of the same kind of inexplicable screw-up I’m famous for today.
• Box of Boy Scouts and Indian Guides merit badges, medallions, belt buckles, headbands, and wood-burning experiments.
• Piles of early 80s Surfer, Surfing, and Thrasher magazines (yesterday hauled these down to the surf shop I used to work at and gave them to the current employees, who were “way stoked”).
• Boxes of class papers from high school with mortifying titles like “Toe jam through the years, or the rise and fall of communism” (Got an A on that one, which says more about my teachers than about me).
• Hand-made ceramic tennis shoe in black & white, with real shoelace. Hand-made ceramic “anarchy A” glazed in bright orange.

The task now is to trim the pile to just a couple of boxes, which guarantees an entire weekend shot. Such a sentimental fool.