Queen Grandma

When I saw pictures of President Obama towering over the Queen, I got the strangest sense of deja vu. She is a ringer for my late grandmother. But then I imagine that Lizzie resembles a lot of people's grandmothers and maiden aunts.

And what's up with Obama giving Her Majesty a glorified mix tape? Just because he's from Chicago does he think he's Rob Gordon?

Rest In Peace

My sister-in-law passed away yesterday. She had just turned fifty.

My wife never knew her sisters growing up. Her parents divorced when she was born and her father had custody of the two older girls. Her mother remarried an American and the three of them moved to the United States when she was seven. Two years later, South Vietnam fell and the country was reunited but the family was permanently divided.

In the early 1980s, the oldest sister was allowed to immigrate to the United States. In what I think is one of the great melting pot stories of this country, she met a Cuban Marielito in English class at the local community college and got married.

The middle sister chose to remain in Vietnam. In 2005, our family took a nine-day trip to Vietnam, in part to meet the missing sister. She lived near the center of Saigon (nobody really calls it Ho Chi Minh City) in a four story townhouse with her long-time boyfriend. Because of their jobs, they both spoke broken but passable English. Their neighborhood was full of shops and restaurants and they had two fairly worn scooters that are the ubiquitous form of transportation in Vietnam.

She seemed happy and her life was comfortable. Like many Vietnamese, she and her boyfriend were reluctant to talk about events during the more authoritarian decades of Communist rule, but life has improved immensely over the last decade. Their townhouse which was a standard size for the city was big enough for a family of eight or more but they shared it with just a couple of dogs.

We saw them twice. The day we arrived they took us out to dinner at a fancy Chinese restaurant. Near the end of our trip we spent an evening at their house where we talked and ordered talk-out food from a local market. While the house had a small kitchen that Nixon could have impressed Khrushchev with, we were told they, like many Vietnamese, ate out a lot because it is just as cheap as cooking for yourself.

Shortly after our visit, the sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She has spent the last year traveling back and forth to Singapore for treatments not available in Vietnam, but it was a losing battle. My wife’s mother went over last week to comfort her in her final days.

The loss, like that of any close relative that leaves too soon, is heartbreakingly tragic. My wife never knew her sister, but she always represented a path her life could have taken but didn’t. Our journeys in this world are often punctuated with forks where events could have changed everything radically. My wife's childhood move to the America was one of those. Because of her sister, she will always have one thread connecting her back to the country that she only has a child's memories of. We will always remember her sister and cherish the one brief moment of connection we had. May she rest in peace.

Family Fotos

Pictures of my son always go over well, so today I'm going to up the ante and post some photos of the largest gathering of the yellojkt clan since my Grandmother's funeral. The occasion was my son's graduation. We talked my aunt who has an old farmhouse in northeastern Maryland to host a graduation picnic on Memorial Day weekend. I then got relatives from both sides of my family to make the trek from Florida to Massachusetts up for the event.

One of our guests was a semi-pro photographer, so we made him sing for his supper and he composed and shot some great group portraits.


The first is my wife, my son and myself. My wife has been wanting a current shot of the three of us and has made all sorts of reprints from wallet size to 5x7s of this shot.


This picture is my side of the family and includes in no order: my father and mother, my brother, his wife and their four kids, two uncles, two aunts, a cousin, that cousin's wife and their adorable girl (who is the subject of one of the most viewed Foma posts ever).


On my wife's side of the family, we have a much smaller crowd consisting of her mother, brother, her brother's wife, and our niece. In this picture we have represented genetic stock from the following countries: Ireland, Scotland, Germany, France, Spain, Cuba, Vietnam, China, and Japan.

While I haven't supplied enough information to fill out a full genealogical chart, this provides a good start at keeping track of the various relatives that keep things interesting.

I was so excited to get so many family members to all show up in one place on one day. It's good to have family willing to celebrate the happy milestones as well as the sad. And this was a happy event indeed.

Accepted!

National Blog Posting Month Day 10

My son played his last half-time show with the school marching band last night. Before the game we brought over to the band room a fat envelope from Georgia Tech. The contents of the letter weren’t much in doubt because the words “Congratulations! You’re a Yellow Jacket!” were emblazoned across the front.


After his victorious scream, he said to me “Now I have a safety school.” He does that just to tweak me, but I take it in stride. There are worse places he could go. The timing of the acceptance sharpened the sense of finality as his four years in the marching band and my career as a band parent end. The game was played in cold drizzle, but we proudly walked him to mid-field for the Senior Night recognition. Tomorrow we have to report to the school by five a.m. to head to Allentown for the final competition of the year.



And then the rest of the year is all endgame. As parents of an only child, every milestone is a first and a last. We won’t be going to ChainBarAndGrille after a high school football game ever again. I play it cool as we plan where to hang the HDTV in his room when he leaves, but we are going to miss him.


He’s already making the transition from high school to higher pursuits. Every year the band plays a prank on the band director. This year, they hid all the band trophies and replaced them with the ubiquitous gimme seat cushions the band keeps getting. The posted a picture of my son in his school color duct tape sports coat blaming him. He wasn’t there to defend himself because he was out giving a report on the carbon nanotube research he is interning for. There’s a metaphor there that I just can’t make through my tears.

New Bytes

There is so much nutso stuff in the news that all I can do is bullet-list the highlights:

• Everybody is talking about the PsychoKiller Astronaut. My dad is a fighter pilot and those guys (and obviously gals now) aren’t sane. My father is the obvious exception (Hi, Dad!). They all talk with their hands and swoop them around in formation to describe their dogfights. You risk your life walking through a cocktail party of pilots. I used to sneak looks at “log books” where they would brag about their exploits in and out of the cockpit. Top Gun and The Great Santini only scratches the surface of the machismo in a squadron lounge. And these guys form the pool of applicants that get to fly shuttles. While Lisa Nowak was a mission specialist and not a shuttle pilot, she has extensive test pilot experience as told on her official bio. I think the problem with the psychological screening process is that the sample population of potential astronauts is skewed to begin with. Normal is a very relative term.
  
  
• All the news reports discretely mention that Lisa and her erstwhile paramour were never on the same mission. The “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” implication is that they are not members of the Zero-G Club. At least not with each other. A Slate article debunks the urban rumors about sex in space and plays up the inconvenience and uncomfortableness of the space shuttle. That has never stopped all those frequent fliers from hogging the airplane lavatories just to have a story to tell. Even on firm ground, I don’t think comfort or lack thereof has ever stopped anybody from trying out a shower stall or a too small Jacuzzi. Just sayin’.
  
  
• I nearly got called for jury duty for a trial where a guy hid in the bushes and whacked his estranged wife with a machete, sending her to the hospital. That story got buried in the metro section because plenty of people do crazy violent stuff all the time. What part of Nowak’s story merits wall-to-wall OJ (Capricorn 1 allusion intentional, courtesy of bc) coverage? Astronaut? Woman astronaut? Diaper? Besides the high schadenfreude quotient, why should we really care about a transcontinental NASA catfight? It would be a different matter if there were video of the attack and it happened in a mud filled pond.
  
  
• The new federal budget is out and we are going to spend half a trillion dollars next year on defense. The share for my family of three is about five grand. Our share of the National Park Service budget is twenty-five dollars, and that doesn’t count the fifty dollars I spent on an annual pass this summer visiting the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Rocky Mountain National Parks. While I support our troops, I have to ask myself what was the better value.
  
  
• The Coalitional Provisional Authority (the incompetent Americans that ran Iraq before we turned it over to incompetent Iraqis) lost over five billion dollars in cash. We’re not talking accounting error here. We’re talking over 300 tons of small bills. For perspective, we could have tripled the Park Service budget with the money that literally fell off the truck in Iraq.
  
  
• I’ve said before that the celebrity I most resemble is Ron Howard. I think my sister bears more than a passing resemblance to Anna Nicole Smith. I hope she takes that as a compliment. You judge for yourself.

By celebutard standards, even Lisa Nowak is sane compared to Anna Nicole Smith. Anna Nicole won the All-Time Super Bowl MVP Award in Gold-Digging, and I don’t begrudge her that, but the karmic payoff has finally proven fatal. Let’s hope she finds peace where ever she is now.

Multi-Culti Mix-Ups

Two very different articles in the Washington Post this weekend set my mind making connections about race and education. The first was an anecdote by Soledad O’Brien. When her parents were dating while attending Johns Hopkins here in Baltimore they were constantly refused service at restaurants because they were an inter-racial couple. That her mother was black came as a complete surprise to me. I have been ogling watching Soledad since her days as geek eye candy on MSNBC’s The Site. She is now the morning co-anchor on CNN and you have to read pretty deep into her official bio to learn she has been featured by both Essence and Irish American Magazine. That O’Brien surname comes from her Irish-Australian dad.

It turns out that a lot of celebrities are multi-racial. The interminably long Super Bowl preshow featured Hines Ward who has a Korean mother. Many public figures we tend to associate with one race or another actually have much more complicated and interesting ancestries than fit into the random pigeonholes we have established. This website has a rather eclectic list of just a smattering of famous people of mixed race heritage.

Race wouldn’t matter, but people still make decisions based on the ethnic make-up of areas. An article titled "How Not To Pick A School" in the Washington Post Opinion section was perhaps the most nuanced and comprehensive article I have ever read about race and performance in public schools. Brigid Schulte defends her decision to send her kids to a public school where her kid would be in the ethnic minority. She quotes some researchers that note:

White students are the "most racially isolated group of students" in the country, with the average white student attending a school in which only one in five students is of another race.

That can’t happen in my son’s school district. The most lily-white high school in the county is only 71% white and the system regularly posts the best scores in the state. My son’s school brags that they have the most diverse student body in the county. The ethnic demographic breakdown is as follows:

White: 48%
Black: 30%
Asian: 14.5%
Hispanic: 7.5%

Where does my son fit in on this scale? I am about as “white” (or European-American as I prefer to call myself) as anyone can be. I am a blend of Irish, German, and Scottish, all very pale people. My wife was born in Vietnam, but she keeps finding more and more ethnic Chinese in her background. My son doesn’t look identifiably Asian, particularly when in a group like the Math Team. On the other hand, nobody is going recognize him as a son of the Old Sod. Nonetheless, the recessive red hair and blue eyes are in his DNA and could reappear some generation down the line.

It makes me very mad when forms asking for demographic information are not multiple choice. If he answers “Asian”, then what am I, chopped liver? Several years ago, I read a news story about another local school district where two Asian girls were denied a transfer to a magnet school because it would lower the “diversity” of the school they currently attended. Nobody is handing out money to Asian kids to attend college and some very prestigious universities have been caught with informal quotas against Asians. For these arbitrary reasons, I have my son say “white” on forms that make him choose one or another.

Even the word “Asian” is astoundingly broad. Howard County is a mecca for Korean immigrants because of the quality schools. There are also substantial Chinese and Indian communities in the area. According to a 2005 study, the top five foreign languages spoken in the county are Spanish, Korean, Chinese (three different dialects), Urdu, and Vietnamese.

The quasi-city of Columbia was one of first deliberately integrated developments in Maryland. As a result of the aggressive integration, inter-racial couples and their offspring rarely raise an eyebrow in this area. I have no idea how these kids fill out their ethnic check boxes either. My guess is many just skip it altogether.

Call America a melting pot or a mixing bowl or whatever you want. When you put different groups of people together the boundaries blur. We are all more alike than we are different. Hopefully someday the differences that separate us will disappear. My son is proud to be of mixed heritage and I am proud of him.

Updated (2/6/07): I updated the ethnicity percentages to match published 2005-2006 school year information.

The Perfect Score

Desmond Rhodes: [trying to explain why SAT is racist] Who created the test? Rich white guys. Who scores the highest on the test?

Roy: Asian chicks. Middle class Asian chicks that watch less than one hour of television a day. They can't drive, but they can take the shit out of the SATs.

My son is taking the SAT today. He should do well because he is pretty good at taking tests. That is why we were surprised when he got his PSAT scores earlier this month. While I thought the scores were okay, they were actually lower than what he scored his sophomore year.

PSAT results are much more open than when I was in school. They actually tell you which answers you miss and which topics you need to study more. I looked a little deeper into the points to figure out where he had stumbled. Here is the breakdown on the math portion, which should be his strong suit:

8 of 11 easy questions
15 of 16 medium questions
11 of 11 hard questions

That’s right, he got all the hard questions right, but flubbed several easy questions. That shows he was careless and not stupid. I don’t mind him getting the score that reflects his ability. I just don’t want him to leave any points on the table.

I went into Parental Pep Talk #12: “These are high stakes tests and you should take them seriously. Check your answers. Don’t make foolish mistakes. Blah, blah, blah…” I watched his eyes roll back a full 180 degrees like only a teenager can do.

So I fell back on the one parental method I knew worked: Bribery. We use it a lot. For a perfect report card, we buy him a steak dinner at the restaurant of his choice. I’ve eaten at Frankie and Johnnies so much, I’m sick of the place. Time to move on to Peter Luger’s.

I made him a little offer. I would pay him one dollar for every point over 2000. For those of you that haven’t been writing checks to College Board in the past year or two, the SATs now include a writing section which is a combination of multiple choice questions and an essay. This section is worth another 800 points, bringing the top SAT score up to 2400.

Since my son, like his dad, is a math-wired person, this stacks the SAT deck against him a little more. I’m not worried about losing four benjamins. I tried to talk him into a penalty if he tanked, but he wasn’t buying. I’m just glad he is motivated, no matter how superficial the reason. If it works, it will have been a good investment.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Am I a bad parent for paying for performance? Do you pay for grades? If so, what is the going rate?

Update (2/15/07): I owe him $80, and he didn't leave any money on the table in the math section.

Rocket Dad

Marching band season is over. My son’s band had its last home football game awhile ago. At the regional competition they placed fourth out of fifteen in their division. I thought my weekends were now my own. Wrong. This weekend was the start of the rocket club season.



A few years back, the National Association of Rocketry started the Team America Rocketry Challenge for school-aged kids to develop more interest in the hobby. That rocketry is tied to math and science makes it an easy sell to schools. Civil Air Patrol chapters and Explorer troops also enter.

For the competition, each team must design and launch a rocket that reaches a specified height and the flight (including the parachute landing) must last a certain length. This year the goals are 850 feet and 45 seconds. Oh, and the rocket must hold an egg which has to land unbroken. When the team has it perfect, they have only two launches they can submit to the competition to qualify for the national championships.

To get the kids going, the faculty advisor has them each design and build their own rocket first. My son built one about 2-1/2 feet tall that holds two rocket engines or “motors” as the jargon calls them. A local rocketry club has launches once a month at a local park. The club lets the students use the club's launchers for test trials.

On my son’s first launch, the rocket lost its parachute and plummeted to the ground. The rocket landed mostly intact, but the egg was nothing but a runny orange mess inside the rocket body. The second launch, which is the one in the video, with a borrowed parachute, went straight up and practically landed right back on the pad.

How does this affect me? It means I must now a bunch of Saturdays between now and April hanging around the various rocketry sites while the kids fine tune their rocket design. All you soccer moms and hockey dads think of me as your kids are playing their indoor winter sports while I spend the frigid weekends of the next few months keeping my neck craned up watching out for falling rockets.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What sort of whacky activities have your kids dragged you into? Or, if you don't have kids, what have you forced others to watch you do?

HalloTeen

When is someone too old to trick-or-treat? Not at sixteen, according to my son. And according to the Washington Post, he’s not alone. It seems like kids old enough to drive still like to go door to door for free candy. Here is a quote from the Post:

Call them greedy, call them intimidating, call them the unwelcome elephants in the Snickers factory, but the teenagers who inevitably appear on Halloween doorsteps are grasping for more than a fistful of sweets.

"When you're our age, it's like it's cool again to go," explains Anna Karnaze, a 17-year-old junior from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, who went as a toilet-paper mummy last Halloween and plans to trick-or-treat as a pirate tonight.

According to my kid, it’s all about the free candy. Never mind that the scene is as social as much as it is greedy. I used to be the parent in charge of walking him around until middle school when he started venturing out on his own. Tonight he took the car to a friend’s neighborhood. We just warned him not to trick and drive.

He at least bothered to dress up. The jester’s hat and pirate shirt came from the Renaissance Fair, so he’s getting good use out of those impulse purchases. He also did his own make-up. That shows he has some pride.

Judging by the kids that have knocked on the door tonight, he’s not completely out of the demographic. This year’s crowd is skewing older, but so far most of the costumes are pretty good. It’s later in the evening when you get the lazy stragglers.

And best of all? Tonight we are giving out the leftover candy he got last year but never bothered to eat.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: How old is too old?

Bonus Cuteness: Every year we dress up my dog so he doesn’t scare the little kids when he greets them at the door. And the costume? A yellow and black yellowjacket, of course.

Chinese Diplomacy

This week we are playing host family to an exchange student from Beijing. As part of an effort to expand the teaching of Chinese in the United States, my son’s school has been trading visits by administrators between our school and a similar one in China.

As part of the next level of exchanges, five Chinese students are spending a week shadowing regular American kids as they go about their day. In my son’s case, that includes his typical weekly schedule of two marching band practices, a math team competition, a meeting of the rocketry club, and a band festival. Since our student listed math as his favorite subject, this should be a good match.

One of the first things our student said is “My English is not very good.” Well, it’s infinitely better than my Chinese, so we have to stick with English. When we talk to him, we try to explain things a couple of ways until some of the words we use sound familiar. His favorite word is ‘Oh”, so we are not quite sure how much of what we explain sinks in. When he really needs to get a point across, he’ll resort to a little pocket electronic translator.

My wife is in charge of debriefing and interrogation. So far, we know that his dad is a chemistry professor and his older brother is a high school teacher. He also has a little sister, so that sounds like a big family by modern Chinese standards. His textbooks in China are a fraction of the size of my son’s backpack-busting monstrosities. Their school day runs from 7 am to 5 pm and school vacation lasts about two months. He also understands the universal language of teenagers, video games.


The students and their teachers arrived Sunday afternoon after spending two days in LA sightseeing. To give him the full American home experience, we cooked a dinner of hamburgers and macaroni and cheese. After demonstrating the proper assembly of a hamburger on a bun, he took quite a while to make it all the way through a Trader Joes quarter pound buffalo burger with cheese, topped with lettuce and a tomato slice. My son occasionally polishes off two of these, but our Chinese friend thought just one of these was an awful lot of meat.

That may be the last home-cooked meal we give him. Our on-the-go weekday schedule tends to include a lot of fast-causal food like Quiznos and Chipolte. We’re not sure he’d be up to a full-sized burrito. Some things are just cruel to inflict on visitors from another country.

Breakfast today was toast and jelly, which he made into a sandwich, following the example of the hamburger from the night before. As we turned the corner on the way to school, his “Oh” seemed genuinely impressed with the size of the average American suburban high school.

A week is almost too short of a trip for this sort of thing, but we hope to give him and the other students a fair look at the life of typical American teenagers. We intend to get to a grocery store, the mall, and a night at the movies. We have tickets to a jazz concert by my son’s saxophone teacher and the whole group will spend a day doing all the touristy stuff in DC, then they are back to Beijing. Hopefully some American students will return the favor and visit there this summer. All the parents involved with the program have already volunteered to chaperone.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What should a visitor from China see to get a true impression of typical American life?

Why My Dad Flies

Career military life is no picnic. I am an eyewitness to that. We lived at six different places between when I was born and when I graduated high school because my dad’s career as a pilot demanded it. Despite all the moving, I don’t think our life was any better or worse than any of the other suburban middle class families we always lived around. I know a lot of children of civilians that moved much more often than I did. And I can't say I ever truly wanted for anything I genuinely needed.

Why did my dad do it? Simple, he loves to fly. He was an F-4 Phantom II fighter jock through and through. In junior high, my friends and I would drop in at the squadron building and mooch sodas. The only price was having to watch grainy gun camera footage from his latest exercise.

My dad served a year in Vietnam and had friends shot down and taken POW. Before the Shah fell, he delivered an F-4 to the Imperial Iranian Air Force and brought home an impressive samovar. I like to call him has an Iranian gun-runner, which is only true when taken entirely out of context. He also had a one year unaccompanied tour in Korea while I was in tenth grade. All my friends thought my mom was a single parent, which in a way she was.

When he was assigned to fly a GSD (Gray Steel Desk), he used his GI Bill benefits to get a commercial pilot's license. On his last tour of duty in Hawaii, he moonlighted as a pilot for an island hopper service. As soon as he was retired, he drove cross country and interviewed at every airline and eventually got hired by TWA, where he flew 747's and 727's for another ten years.

When he was laid off from TWA for six months, I hooked him up with a pilot buddy of his I had met who ran a small courier flying service. Now that he is truly retired, he owns a vintage Stinson Flying Station Wagon (flying VW Beetle would be a more accurate size comparison), which he takes to flying shows. He has shown it at Oshkosh, and he volunteers at Sun-N-Fun in Lakeland every year. On the weekends, he flies the tow-plane for a soaring glider club.

He has spent his life doing what he loves and raised three children at the same time. What more can a man ask for? And what better dad could a son have?

For stories about dads and roadtrips, read Joel Achenbach’s Father’s Day post. Be sure to read the follow-up stories and anecdotes along with the usual foolishness and fooforaw in the Boodle (comment section for you non-Achenoscenti). I even contributed one tale.

Memorial Day Prayer

I always get Memorial Day and Veterans Day a little cross-confused. Veteran's Day is to honor those that have served our country. Memorial Day is to honor those who have died in the service of our country. My grandfather fought under Patton in France and my father flew an F-4 in Vietnam. I am glad I honor them on Veteran's Day rather than Memorial Day. I am lucky that way.

I recently ran across a piece of Vonnegutia that I had never heard of before called "Tick Tock". It is a short CD where a musician named Simon Heselev has composed music that runs under Kurt Vonnegut reading a passage from Slaughterhouse Five. The passage is the part where Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and watches a World War II documentary in reverse and giant planes suck all the flame from burning buildings into small metal containers and the containers get sent back to the United States where all the fuel is taken out of them by hard working women so that the ingredients can be buried deep in the ground where they can do no harm.

I pray for the day when we can do this for real and nobody has to die in defense of their country. Until then we must remember that there are causes worth dying for and we must honor and remember those that do.

Marching Orders

You never quite know where life is going to lead us, but the one role in life I never thought I would have is Band Parent. When I started my family, I knew I would be dragged into all sorts of activities. I believe in being involved with my son’s activities. Heck, I spent four years as a Cub Scout Assistant Den Leader, which is the lowest rank you can have in Scouting and still get to wear the spiffy uniform. I just never thought I would be involved in a marching band.

In high school I knew lots of band geeks and even dated a few musicians. I, however, have no musical talent whatsoever. I get banned from humming at work. The threat of karaoke night draws laughs and veiled threats from my family.

I love music. I appreciate musical talent. I just have none of my own, so my son didn’t get any from me. My wife is the only Asian I know that has never been forced to learn an instrument, so any latent ability in her is undiscovered. Musical talent was the last thing we expected to find in any mixture of our collective DNA.

We thought elementary school band would be a good way to round out our son’s scholastic experience. For those unfamiliar with the genre, elementary school bands sound like kids throwing rocks at very sick cats that have been tied up in large burlap bags. They usually sound better tuning their instruments than actually playing them. Still we went to the concerts and even have a few performances on videotape just in case any of the other kids ever become famous pop stars and E! needs embarrassing footage for a Behind The Music rip-off.

In middle school we started paying for weekly private lessons with a teacher that unbeknownst to us had a really good jazz band on the side and had former students go on to become professional recording artists. We feel like we’re paying Lance Armstrong to teach our kid to ride a tricycle.

Two years ago we showed up for parent night for the high school band and foolishly volunteered to help out moving equipment. Now we chaperone trips, put plumes in hats, sell all sorts of crap, and generally write off every weekend between August and November. Here is what the past few days have entailed:

Thursday: Pick him up from the twice weekly 6 to 9 band practice.

Friday: Attend football game. Push percussion equipment on and off the field at half time. Go to Bennigans after the game because they donate 15% of our sales to the band.

Saturday: Take him to another special practice and then load all the equipment into a rental truck.

Sunday: Wake up at 5:30 am so we can get him down to the school for a 2-1/2 hour bus ride to a competition. We carpool with another band parent to the competition so I can drive the lawn tractor that tows the percussion equipment on and off the field. We return home after 8 pm that night.

Monday: Band Booster meeting: Time to start planning the Spring trip to Orlando.

Tuesday: Set up the school cafeteria for the end of the season pot-luck dinner. Ate lukewarm lasagna and KFC chicken while listening to the students give each other awards like Loudest Belcher and Biggest Wedgie.

Now that marching band season is over, my son is rehearsing every night this week as part of the band for a community theater musical. He is also thinking of joining the afterschool jazz band and the indoor drumline. I don’t know what those entail, but I’m sure it affects my Shell card.

I love that he is involved in something that is only about the fourth dorkiest thing you can do in high school, but I just try to keep some ironic detachment about my own complicity in all this.

I know I am getting no sympathy from the Bloggin’ Moms (and Dads) out there with three kids who each have four activities. One kid with one activity would be their idea of heaven, but a golf shirt with a school logo on the front and “Pit Crew” stitched on the sleeve is definitely not anything I ever imagined in my wardrobe.

So go ahead and top this and tell me what part of your life is a completely random non-sequitor for where you thought you would be?

Technorati tag:hummingbird rump, band, parent, teenager

100 Things About My Dog

By a nearly 2 to 1 margin my readers are more intersted in my dog than me. By popular demand, here is more than you need to know about my pet. I would rather talk about ME, but vox populi has spoken.

1. My dog is an English Cocker Spaniel.
2. English Cockers are larger than American Cocker Spaniels
3. but smaller than Springer Spaniels.
4. He weighs about 30 pounds.
5. His name is Chessie
6. which is short for Chesapeake.
7. He was named by his previous owner who discovered he was allergic to dogs.
8. I adopted him from his previous owner when he was about five years old.
9. That was over six years ago.
10. He is AKC registered.
11. But he has a bad underbite which would disqualify him from being a show dog.
12. He has also been "fixed".
    
    
13. I had an English Cocker Spaniel a long time ago that I had to give up when I moved for work reasons and couldn't find a place to rent that accepted pets.
14. Adopting Chessie was karmic atonement for giving away my other English Cocker Spaniel.
15. My other cocker spaniel was named Sunny, which is short for Sunshine,
16. because he was tan.
17. Chessie is roan,
18. which is black, gray, and white with blueish highlights.
    
    
19. Chessie does not get along with very small children or puppies.
20. They are too "bouncy" for him and he snaps and snarls.
21. We had to quit taking him to dog parks because he would guard me from other dogs.
22. Larger calmer dogs he gets along with fine.
23. Except for my neighbors golden retriever.
24. Chessie snapped at him as a puppy and the retriever has held a grudge.
25. Chessie gets along with the three other golden retrievers in our neighborhood.
    
    
26. I walk Chessie twice a day.
27. The morning walk is at 5:30 am.
    
28. The evening walk is around 9 pm.
29. He gets let out for just a couple of minutes a few times a day in between.
30. We walk for one mile.
31. Half a mile if we feel lazy, are pressed for time, or it starts raining.
32. On weekend mornings we walk to the neighborhood school which is 1.5 miles round trip.
33. I let him run off leash on the school grounds.
34. I give him glucosamine for his joints.
    
    
35. Our neighborhood has four pet waste trash cans.
36. They do not keep the rolls of spare baggies stocked.
37. I subscribe to two newspapers so that I never run out of "pet waste" bags.
38. On our walks, when we get to one of the trash cans Chessie tries to turn around.
39. He thinks he is done with the walk at that point.
40. I have to drag him past the trash can and then he will walk the rest of the way just fine.
41. He tries to eat the food he finds on the ground.
42. Like french fries, biscuits, and chicken bones.
43. I just take the food away from him.
    
    
44. Chessie hates getting wet which includes rain and baths.
45. If he gets wet, I have to chase him around the house while he barks at me.
46. I don't know if he can swim.
47. I don't think I'll ever find out if he can.
48. He loves to play in the snow.
49. He likes to eat snow too, but not the yellow snow.
    
    
50. Chessie has a few personality quirks that my wife calls "neurotic."
51. He has to be in the same room I am in.
52. If there is a closed door between him and me he will howl until I let him in.
53. If he is in the same room, he will go asleep and nothing will bother him.
54. And I do mean nothing.
    
    
55. Sometimes after I shower, he will come in and lick the water off of my knees.
56. I find that a little creepy.
57. Chessie eats used Kleenexes and other soiled paper products.
58. My wife finds that VERY creepy.
    
    
59. He is very playful and active for a dog his age.
60. We have a lot of rabbits in our neighborhood that I let him chase.
61. He never catches them.
62. He never even comes close.
63. Plenty of times he runs in the wrong direction from the rabbit, if he sees the rabbit at all.
64. He does not fetch anything.
65. The only game he plays is tug-of-war.
66. He's real ferocious for about five minutes, then it bores him and he quits.
67. He likes having his belly rubbed.
68. and his ears scratched.
69. He is prone to ear infections.
    
    
70. When the family leaves the house, we give him a rawhide treat to chew.
    
71. If he sees us getting ready to leave, he runs to the stair landing and waits for his treat.
72. He will dance or roll over for a treat.
73. Other times we give him ice cubes as "treat."
74. When he hears the icemaker, he runs to the kitchen and begs for an ice cube.
    
    
75. He howls when he hears the garage door open.
76. Most other times he just whimpers until he gets what he wants.
77. We started letting him on the bed and furniture.
78. But he whimpers until we give him permission to jump up.
79. He also needs permission to drink from his water dish.
80. And to eat dinner unless he is really hungry.
    
    
81. He only eats when other people are eating.
82. He will skip meals if no one is home.
83. He does not like dog food very much,
84. but he has a sensitive stomach, so we don't let him eat table scraps.
85. He loves to eat broccoli stalks, green beans, squash and other vegetables.
86. If he hears a knife on a cutting board he will come whimper until you give him some carrot or broccoli or green bean stems.
    
    
87. He doesn't wear a collar in the house.
88. Because the rattling of the dog tags wakes up my wife.
89. He has three dog beds in the house.
90. Four, if you count the old bath mat under the desk.
91. He also sleeps on our bed, the sofas, the stair landings,
92. and the floor between my wife's side of the bed and the bathroom.
93. which is not a safe place for him to be in the middle of the night.
    
    
94. Everyday when I get home, he runs to the door and likes my face very enthusiastically for a long time.
95. He doesn't do this to anyone else in the family.
96. My family corrects me if I call him "our dog".
97. They correct me and say he is "your dog."
98. There is no more loyal devotion than the unconditional love of a dog.
99. If I ever get divorced, I get custody of the dog.
100. My wife insists on it.
     

More Cute Baby Pictures

In the random jump cut movie that is my life, the morning after I spent the evening photographing costumed otaku, I piled the family into the car to go to up to my adorable little cousin's (once removed) pre-baptism celebration picnic. This branch of my family is prone to celebrations at the drop of a hat. Graduations, birthdays, weddings, babies. Anything that can be celebrated with a party and a cooler of cold beer will be memorialized.

My aunt and uncle have a weekend home less than 90 minutes from my house and I see them more often my own parents. I have been mooching Thanksgiving off them for years. I bake a few pies and then show up with my way-too-small-for-a-turkey-just-for-us family and have a good time.

My cousin lives in a hitherto unknown-to-me corner of Pennsyltucky about 200 miles from my house. I won't say it was in redneck territory, but you pass an ATV drag strip on the way to his house. With bad summer traffic that translated to 5 hours up and 4 hours back. All for some free food, cold beer, and a photo-op with the newest member of the family. Still, it was worth it.

I will often say, "I have travelled farther for less." I think nothing of daytripping to Philly for an excuse to go to Tony Lukes for pork cheesesteak with brocolli rabe.

Sometimes the trouble of a roadtrip doesn't payoff. We have all had trips where you seem to get there just to turn around and wonder why you came. My worst trip was in college where I drove two hours to go to a wedding that lasted 15 minutes tops. I'm not even sure the bride and groom came to a complete stop as they recited their vows when they passed the front of the congregation. And then we found out we weren't invited to the reception. It was a Baptist wedding, so we weren't expecting a lot. Just some juice and cake in the church basement. Instead, nada. Needless to say those people aren't on our Christmas card list.

So to the peanut gallery: What is the farthest you have travelled for the least satisfaction? Anything counts. It's the lowest pleasure to travel time ratio that counts.

Cute Baby Pictures

If you are here as the result of a Yahoo search for "cute baby pictures", please read this post first and then use you back button to return to this post. Thanks.

We live by lots of foma, the little untruths that help us through the day. Many we are not even aware of. One foma in particular, though, is essential to our survival as a species. It is "All Babies Are Cute." They better be. They wouldn't live very long otherwise. They are blobby, whiney, needy, and prone to ejecting material from at least four different orifices.

But we love them anyways. And we think that at least most of them are cute. The one pictured here is particularly cute. Mostly because it probably has some genetic information in common with me. It is my father's sister's son's daughter. That makes her my first cousin, once removed, for those of you without Rainman-like skills at manipulating family trees.

Neoteny and the human response to cuteness would definitely explain the prevelence of "cats in sinks" pictures on the web. Stephen Jay Gould famously explained that even cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse "evolved" to become cuter and more likeable. Several years ago, Hanna Barbera and company took this to heart and Saturday morning cartoons were over run by "{insert source cartoon} Babies" including Flintstone Kids, Tiny Toon Adventures, and most cynically obvious of all, Muppet Babies.

Everything can be taken to an undesireable extreme. No amount of neotenic cuteness can ever excuse inflicting the world with the unbearably obnoxious Scrappy Doo.

Update (8/24/08): The Stephen Jay Gould link went bad so I replaced it with another one. The Mickey Mouse essay also appears in The Panda's Thumb.

Technorati tag:hummingbird rump, Stephen Jay Gould, cute, baby, Scrappy Doo, cartoon

Hospital Ordeal Over

My son is home from the hospital after nearly two weeks for an appendectomy and the resulting complications. During that time, I spent about every waking minute either at the hospital or at work. The Medical Industrial Complex is a strange sub-culture that defies explanation. I'm jsut glad it is over with for now.

One of the first things he did was post to HIS blog on Xanga. This blogger site seems unduly populated with graphic intensive teenager blogs that all cross link to each other in a garish melange with video, music and blinking lights. Some of these are nearly unreadable both content-wise and sheer sensory overload. To each their own.

Up Your Nose....

Thursday night, three nurses tried to shove a rubber tube into my son's stomach through his nose. They failed largely because this in not a procedure that can be done without the subject's cooperation, and after the second failed attempt, he wasn't letting them have another try. The next morning a much gentler doctor succeeded. Since then the hose has been adjusted several times and remains in place.

The nasogastric tube is meant to relieve the paralytic ileus
that resulted from his emergency appendectomy. He has spent over a week without food and will be hospitalized until his condition relaxes and he can eat and digest solid food.

Matt is Recovering

My son Matt had his appendix removed Monday night, actually about 2 am Tuesday morning, in an emergency appendectomy. I guess there is not such thing as a routine or elective appendectomy. He is recovering quickly and is showing a strong independent streak already as he walks laps around the pediatric ward towing his IV.