Tales from the Hood

But Wait! Christmas Ain't Over Yet!

2012-01-15T21:51:00.000-08:00

I get in trouble when I let warm, fuzzy family holidays go undocumented for more than a month. I'm already irrevocably in the doghouse for Halloween and Thanksgiving, so no point in trying to plea-bargain those, but I might be able to secure probation if I post Christmas pictures before Valentine's Day. The judge is pretty strict about these things though.

Our Christmas traditions follow a pretty predictable cycle year in and year out. Variety may be the spice of life and the genesis for good stories, but in many cultures spice is regarded with suspicion and malice. Some folks look askance at spice -- "Away, you foul up-heaver of consistency!" Salt and pepper are twice as much spice as some need. Our spice-challenged traditions have always involved a Christmas Eve trip to Burbank to visit Stacy's grandparents, followed by the long haul to Agua Dulce for the annual Christmas Eve tamale party. At least it has always been thus. Why should the end of 2011 be any different? (Well, Stacy's grandparents aren't in Burbank any more, for one thing. They are both now in a nursing facility, but it's in Glendale, so that's probably close enough for our purposes.)

Stacy's brother Kyle had a pretty cool idea for a Christmas gift for Bunny and Lefty (a.k.a. GGMa and GGPa). They have established themselves as the sweethearts of the nursing home they are in and have quite the reputation. The staff dote on them and the residents, at least those of them who can remember who they are past breakfast, love them. They are the octogenarian version of the varsity quarterback and his head cheerleader girl. Kyle thought it would be cool to put together a picture book of all their old glory-days pictures to show their friends at the home. He enlisted his scrap-booking fanatic sister to help pull the book together and on Christmas Eve we brought the printed version up to give to Bunny and Lefty. It was really sweet to see Bunny light up as she looked through the book, pointing out certain pictures and giving a play-by-play. Lefty hung over her bed, unsteadily following along, smiling and grunting his concurrence with the Queen Bee's descriptions. I think he learned a long time ago to let Bunny tell the stories. GGMa tires out quickly so we didn't stay long, but it was a nice visit and satisfying to see Bunny with some measure of energy and Lefty unusually clear headed. It was good that we went that Christmas Eve afternoon because Christmas day would bring Bunny's fall that would throw everything into that chaos that is still raging strong.

In previous years our Burbank trip was also Stacy's chance to catch up with all the neighbors on Buena Vista Street. Stacy grew up in a house across the street from Bunny and Lefty, so even when she left the neighborhood to take up with a questionable Southlander like me, she still kept abreast of all the Burbank news. On Christmas Eve, after the stop at Bunny and Lefty's we would usually pop over to Grandma Helen and Grampa Dick's (a.k.a. Mr. and Mrs. Wahler), and then on to see Stacy's childhood across-the-street friend, Chad Becken and his family. Tradition might vary a tiny bit from year to year with visits to Mrs. Shirley Hartenstein, Paul and Madelyn Thompkins, Noreen Mackentie, and Karen Gilbert, depending who was around. The crew has thinned out considerably over the last few years, but Stacy can't imagine a trip to the area without a stop on Buena Vista, even if Bunny and Lefty aren't there any more themselves. So after we left the nursing home we made our Buena Vista pilgrimage, dropping in on the perennially cheerful Helen and belovedly grouchy Dick, and giving our Wassail to Chad and the Beckens another door down.

On Christmas Eve we try to make it up to Agua Dulce before sunset so we can get a hike in over at Vasquez Rocks State Park before they close. This year we dragged our heels and it was full-on twilight by the time we got there. Probably for the best. I always manage to inflict damage on my marriage in Vasquez Rocks.

Of course all the usual suspects gather in A. D. - Grandma, Papa, Kyle, Aunt Claudia, Uncle Brian and Aunt Janet -- but the tamale party is really one of the best opps to catch up with some of the further flung branches of the Harris clan. Gene and Shanna Garno always come in all the way from Diamond Bar - Shanna is Kirk's cousin and she and Stacy are very close. We get to see sweet Helen and Cathy Mires (Aunt Janet's Mom and sister-in-law respectively) who are both always so friendly and thoughtful, and there's usually a fair smattering of cousins in town - this year it was Julie Galan and her daughter G, and the blushing bride Laura Harris, with her fiancee Allan. Kyle's girlfriend Sera was there, and this year even brought Aunt Wendy and Uncle Don from Venture in a rare Christmas sighting.

Cousin G in from Denver. (That's one heck of a horse.)

The second cousin brigade.

N scores some holiday jingle.

Since Christmas was on a Sunday this year, our usual yule morning routine was warped somewhat by our standard church schedule. Never fear - there was plenty of time to overload the kid's rooms with more gifts than we can possibly store.

Some gifts self-destructed after opening them.

As has been our Christmas practice for at least the last two years, the big family dinner was held at our house. There was the four of us, plus Kirk and Lynne, Aunt Claudia, Aunt Joyce and Mr. Jay, Kyle and Sera. We forsook the turkey and ham, going for a seafood menu. Stacy made a really taste cioppino and I grilled a huge salmon steak, ignoring its cries for mercy, until it was dry mealy slab of orange cardboard. Everyone seemed to want seconds of the cioppino. The salmon, not so much.

Uncle Kyle about to be Scrooged.

Kyle and Sera

Papa ponders.

Lynne's Christmas gift.

Papa-claus

Pontiff-claus?

In Living (Room) Color

2012-01-02T10:35:00.000-08:00

I didn't get a whole heck of a lot done over the Christmas break, but I did wrap up a project started over the Thanksgiving break - repainting the living room. When we had our kitchen remodeled our interior designer friend had recommended a better color scheme. She also picked out a living room color to match the new kitchen, since the existing technicolor yellow up against the kitchen cream could potentially induce a photosensitive seizure in the artistically sensitive viewer. The new color is a tannish, greenish off-white, creamy color that my Dad would inevitably describe as "calf sh*t yellow."

The kitchen got painted by our contractor, but the living room was up to us. I started over the Thanksgiving holiday with the priming, getting a lot of help from my friends - OK, a little help from my kid. L actually turned out to be much more careful and meticulous than her usual level of kinetispacial awareness allows. I didn't trust her with the cut in, but she did a tolerable job with a roller and a wide swath of wall.

Priming underway!

Priming complete!

Cut-in!

Well along!

The bulk was done before I had to go back to work after Thanksgiving, but there were a few touch ups and oops-es that required a little yuletide labor. But the New Year sees a completed living room paint job!

Ta Da!!!

It Bears Be-peating

2012-01-02T06:56:00.000-08:00

An overheard conversation between L and N yesterday:

N:	Today is Grandma Donna's birffday. [Grandma Donna lives next door.]
L:	N, today is her birthday!
N:	That's what I said! Today is her birffday!
L:	No, today is her birthday!
N:	Today is her birffday!
L:	Birthday!
N:	Birffday!
L:	Birthday!
N:	Birffday! Aw, L. I can't be-member it.
L:	!!!

Life and Death and Some of the Stuff in Between

2012-01-01T07:09:00.000-08:00

Stacy's grandmother Bunny is in the hospital in Glendale. We drove up a couple of times this week to see her and check on Lefty who has been left alone and lost at the nursing home without her. Since Bunny is in the ICU, the kids can't see her, so yesterday we drove up and installed them at Aunt Claudia's then went and grabbed lunch before heading to the hospital.

We drove slowly through downtown Glendale looking for some place to stop, but the multitude of over-marketed chains lining Brand Ave was depressing rather than appealing and we found ourselves all the way through town to the hospital without finding something agreeable. Knowing there was a little strip up ahead on Los Feliz with a slightly more bohemian feel, we past by the hospital and proceeded on another mile or so. We parked on a residential side street and then Stacy and I walked hand in hand along Los Feliz.

It was a young area, somewhat hippie and multicultural. There was a psychic on one corner, an Indian grocery on another - a pizza joint over there. Palm trees and traffic, and that Los Angeles compact, shabby, single-story disheveledness. I kept expecting to smell incense or pot, but I never quite did. Twenty-somethings jogged past, buff and beautiful, but impoverished because the auditions hadn't been going their way. I don't remember what we talked about, but I remember thinking what it was like to be freshly married, without kids and in a sense free. We could take walks alone and go into bookstores or art galleries. We could hold hands that weren't sticky and were the same size as our own. We could eat at restaurants that didn't serve macaroni and cheese. We could be young and handsome and proudly self-conscious, (rather than awkwardly).

We found a cafe that overlooked a narrow peninsula of golf course that somehow managed to squeeze into the dense LA landscape; we ate on the porch in the warm winter midday. There were young couples and foursomes scattered about; a few couples in their 50's or 60's who looked like they might have spent most of their time in Orange County. There was a guy who was probably thirty sitting behind Stacy talking loudly on his cellphone ignoring his girlfriend. "They're in their late twenties and you're calling them old?" he said into his cell. "Thanks a lot!" A young couple who were in their late twenties sat across the patio from us. They had a blond California boy of about three with them. He was chattering away and reminded me of N. But N's older than that now and some of the fresh cuteness has faded. Stacy and I talked about vacations. How hard it was to go to Maine. How we would like to go on a cruise, but it would have to be Alaska and not the nasty Caribbean, and it would have to wait because we couldn't justify spending all that cash on a trip the kids wouldn't appreciate. Bunny and Lefty went on a lot of cruises, we remembered. But they waited until the kids were gone and they were freed up with both time and money. They went all over the world. We talked about Sweden and Switzerland, how we had wished we had the chance to show the other our old Euro-haunts, but the conversation was pretty much framed in the past tense. We won't get to Sweden or Switzerland now, at least not for a while anyway. Bunny and Lefty had to wait to travel. Lefty is in a nursing home and is often confused and frustrated. Bunny is in the ICU at Glendale Memorial with a broken neck from a Christmas day tumble out of a wheelchair. Lefty misses her greatly. I don't know if she'll ever be able to go back to him again.

We paid our bill, retraced our steps through the neighborhood and found our car. It took us very little time to reach the hospital and Bunny's room. She was half asleep when arrived, stilled drugged-up from a just-completed MRI. She looked like hell - purple and blotched and in a neck brace. As she tried to move she would moan with the pain. We told her about Christmas and how the kids said hello. We found her TV remote control. Her hands fidgeted purposelessly on her chest the whole time. We told her how much Lefty missed her. When we said that a brief smile passed her face and her blue eyes were alive and striking again, and I saw clearly that classy twenty-something I've seen so many old pictures of. We told her she was beautiful and gave her kisses and then left her alone.

Pax Matutinus

2011-12-20T10:14:00.000-08:00

I sit this morning drinking my tea with N on my lap. He is curled up, sleepy and snuggling, his puppy-dog breath a far cry from the toothpaste mint of the previous evening. I sit there and hold him and massage his back and shoulders and give his wild hair an occasional gentle tussle. He keeps his head down, buried into my chest and I can feel him growing as he sits there. His bones quietly stretching and his frame taking on a coating of muscle one thin layer at a time. He fits curled up on my lap, but just barely. What was once a whisper of weight on my lap is now substantial and accruing, gaining momentum and closing the gap with the loud weight of years on my shoulders. His knees and elbows now poke out at awkward angles; I'm cradling a goat kid or a foal. I make a mental note to check his paws - just how big will this puppy get? L will still sit quietly on my lap, but when she does it's like holding a St. Bernard. He sits there silently. He hasn't asked for any tea. He hasn't asked for anything. But I know he's quietly waiting for me to relinquish control of the computer I am working on. He's discovered the game of Hearts and is monomaniacal in his pursuit of it. He will play all four hands, assigning one to each family member, and his squeal of delight when he sticks Daddy with the Queen of Spades can be heard throughout the house. But for now patience endures and he sits there warmly and passively. I half whisper what a special boy he is. He raises his head just enough to reply "I know" without the slightest trace of vanity. As I rub his pajamaed back he wiggles a bit to get my hand to just the right spot. I sit with him there for the next thirty-odd years, then I get up and relinquish the computer.

Aren't They Charmin?

2011-12-10T19:40:00.001-08:00

I finished this painting of my niece and nephew a couple of months ago, but since it was slated to be a Christmas present, I had to keep it under wraps (so to speak). But Fed Ex has done its thing and my sister got it today so I can post it now.

My sister Sue and her husband Victor are super hardcore Auburn alum, and while this painting will make perfect sense to the War Eagles in their inner circle, it probably bears a little explanation to those not well-versed in Auburn lore. After every Auburn victory the crowd spills out of Tiger stadium to Toomer's Corner in downtown Auburn where the victors (and sues) celebrate by launching a few tons of toilet paper into the trees. A cool tradition, so long as you're not employed as a city maintenance worker.

My niece A (10) and nephew G (8) are as rabid fans as their folks and have done their own fair share of tree bedecking.

Music to Our Ears

2011-12-10T17:18:00.001-08:00

N thought Buttercup, our neighbor's pit bull, could use some vocal pedagogy.

It's Always Good to Know the Worker Bees

2011-12-03T22:04:00.001-08:00

L lost Tooth #4 tonight. The tooth fairy found the following under L's pillow.

So she left a response.

I Bet on the Wrong Dog

2011-11-21T09:44:00.001-08:00

Stacy's Mom Lynne is a die-hard dog person. She has been running dogs in agility competitions for years and has got all the ribbons and trophies to prove it. She's intense. I'm not saying she gets carried away or has difficultly separating dog world relality from human world reality or anything, but before I was allowed to propose to Stacy she did make me get a qualifying score in the weave pole event. It wasn't a pretty sight, but hey. You do what you have to do.

Her first agility dog was Ace, a Jack Russel terrier. There have been many other additions to the brood, but Ace was the prototype of canine insanity to come. Ace and I even bonded somewhat. A rather tense and high-strung animal, I'm one of the few people he would let pat him, and on a good day, rub his tummy. Ace is an old codger now - 15+, half bald and all trembly. His time is short. If all dogs go to heaven, Ace is significantly late for his appointment.

Knowing that fateful day, when if finally arrived, would be a hard one for the MiL, I figured I would make a rare attempt to be kind and considerate (and preemptively earn some mother-in-law brownie points) by painting her a portrait of her beloved show dog. I purloined an old photo of puppy Ace and put together the soon-to-be memorial portrait, shooting to give it to her for a birthday present. I was happy with the way it came out.

She seemed to like it too.

But as brilliant as I thought my plan to be, it had a significant flaw that manifest itself only days before I'd finished the painting. I came up to Stacy on the phone one day and she was looking concerned and making comforting sounds to whoever it was on the other end.

"What wrong?" I asked.

"It's Kyle," she said, speaking of her brother. "He just had to put Mom's dog to sleep. Mom's quite upset."

"Ace is dead?" I asked.

"No, not Ace. Charlie."

I bet on the wrong #@%$ dog.

Probably Not As Smart As I Thought I Was

2011-11-18T20:56:00.001-08:00

N's kindergarten teacher let N bring home a dice learning game from school today. I don't think N quite got whatever the rules for the game were, but he had tons of fun this evening tossing the dice and very seriously and deliberately manipulating the little wooden, numbered flags on the toy after each throw. Occasionally he would shriek with satifaction and squeal "I won!" though I never saw any rhyme or reason to what he did and never understood his trigger to celebrate. After a while watching I decided I would inject myself in the name of pedagogy and create a learning moment.

"OK, N, L, we're going to run some experiments. If we throw one die over and over and count how many times each number comes up, which number do you think will come up most often?" "Four!" "Free!" "Five!" "Six!" They had difficulty with commitment. I made them all sign up to a number then had them initiate the experiment. N tossed the die over and over, gleefully calling out the count while I tallied the results. Then L had her turn at the wheel and scores of additional samples were added to the sample space. After nearly a hundred tosses we closed the experiment and performed our analysis. Hmmmm... Not quite what I expected. Seems 6 was a particularly popular number.

Not overly concerned, I upped the ante. "Now we're going to roll two dice. What do you think will appear the most often?" This time we documented our guesses and made everyone take a stand:

N chose 10
L chose 12
Mommy chose 10
Daddy chose 7

L (I was very pleased to note) very quickly pointed out that no one should chose 1. Unfortunately her spot-on logic for why she should avoid 1 was not extended to other related concepts that would have spared her some upcoming humiliation.

And the die were cast!

The results were a lot more comfortable from my point of view, though something mysterious seemed to be happening in the upper registers. (I think N's teacher might be having shady craps games in the teachers' lounge after school.) At the end of it all L was bitter; Mommy and N were suspicious, and Daddy was smug.

As with all important analytical work, documenting your data sets is critical, so I therefore submit our extensive catalog of original research documentation.

Kindling My Displeasure

2011-10-30T15:39:00.000-07:00

I have been an avid, perhaps even rabid fan of the Amazon Kindle since I got one for Christmas last year. But this week an event has transpired to burst my bubble a little. (Note to self: Can bubbles be partially burst? Seems like no... Maybe if it were a multichambered bubble, like a heart, and only one chamber burst. That would tie in nicely with an allusion to a broken heart which would also be appropriate for this tale. Or perhaps I just need to work on the metaphor a little more...)

At any rate I set my Kindle down one evening after my before-bed read and then picked it up again the next evening to continue on and found this!:

Powering it down and back was little help. The bottom half of the screen responded, but the upper part with its smeared ink wave and its amputated Harriet Beecher Stowe left it generally illegible. In my panic I made one of those 11:30pm customer service hotline phone calls which assures you that while your call is important to them, it isn't important enough to staff their U.S. call center at that hour, so you get help from very nice people in Bangladesh or the Punjab provinces. The lady I talked to, whose English was a little bit thick and a struggle to lock on to, was nevertheless very pleasant and walked me through all the secret tips and tricks to hard-boot my Kindle. But love was not to be found. At the end of the day (or rather at the beginning of the next day, by this time), the Kindle was declared a lost cause. Fortunately, it was still under warranty, so she told me that would ship a replacement out to me immediately for no cost. Fair enough. I went to bed that night illiterate, but not inconsolable.

The next day I decided to explore the issue a little further and did a web search or two to find out if this was a prevalent problem. Unfortunately I found story after story about people whose screens crapped out due to torsion or falls or for no apparent reason at all. They seemed to happen quite easily and often. People were anywhere from a few months to a few days into their Kindle experience. From the sample set I looked at, I got a longer life than most! And some were on their third, fourth or fifth Kindle with all their predecessors succombing to the same fate.

I know this was hardly a scientific sampling space - only the people with problems would complain about them, so naturally everyone I heard from had a gripe. The (hopefully) millions of untarnished Kindle users wouldn't post on those forums. But still it seemed a little concerning. The pearl ink technology in the Kindle is such a joy to use, but perhaps it still has some mass production kinks yet to be worked out. I don't like the idea of having to replace my Kindle every six months, and I'm not exactly sure how the imminent expiration of my warranty in December will play into the replacement policy. Got conflicting reports from the websites on that one.

As someone who works to develop new technologies for a living, my heart and good wishes go out to Amazon and hope they figure out any systemic problems and rework them. But I also hope they'll keep me in free Kindles until they can last a few years at a pop.

A Pomegranate Still Life

2011-10-23T07:50:00.000-07:00

My painting productivity seems to have taken a hit lately. It's not that I haven't been painting, its just that I've had too many projects going on at once and they've all been "in progress" with nothing being "done." There is something irritating and unsettling about not coming to a place of closure on something, even if you're not spending an inordinately long time in the process. It's much more satisfying to me to have several things going that are staggered in their "doneness" so that there's a completion point for one or the other in the foreseeable future. Lately all my projects (I've got three in works right now) have kind of lined up in the development time/space continuum -- all pretty much following the same schedule. In theory I could just put one or two aside and concentrate on a single project for a while to get in out ahead, but that doesn't work practically because I can't really work for a full three-hour class on any one painting. Things get too wet and mushy and you just have to switch to another project. I am more or less forced to have at least two things going at once, or waste my class time.

But fortunately the log jam is beginning to break. I did wrap up two of them this week and I've managed to photograph one of them:

This is an original composition using Stacy's china and some pomegranates given us by a family friend (right before Stacy transformed them into jelly). I'm trying to do more and more original work and less copying. I have nothing against copying - its a great way to develop your skills - but at the end of the day, you can't really sell a copy or enter it into competitions, and someday I would like to be able to that. So this is one I pulled together myself. I'm pretty happy with it. I didn't know if I'd be able to pull off the detail in the china, and there are a couple of places where I know I didn't, but overall, it came out better than I'd expected. I sure love still life!

I've got ideas for my next two projects, but I'm always open for suggestions or requests!

Ruls for Daddy!

2011-10-18T20:49:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I've been laying down the law a little too heavy around the house lately. Perhaps I haven't been as nurturing or generous as expected. Perhaps I have failed to notice pain and suffering in our midst, or worse, perhaps I've condoned or instigated it. Whatever the offense, I have evidently been singled out for a protest.

I heard the kids conspiring together back in one of their bedrooms this evening. Eventually they emerged with a list of demands entitled "Ruls for Daddy!" These are evidently my punishment for perceived atrocities.

Ruls for Daddy!

1. Daddy does not play on the computer.
2. Daddy doesn't get to wrap presents.
3. Daddy does not get to make satellites.
4. Daddy can't read books to us.
5. Daddy is not allowed to play soccer!
6. Daddy is inappropriate to do stuff.
7. Daddy is mean!
8. Daddy can't love us!
9. Daddy is not allowed to cuddle.
10. Daddy can't do anything.

I expect they will soon be hanging out on Wall Street demanding that the 1% stop loving them.

It's Not Easy Being Greenie

2011-10-08T18:24:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago our neighbor brought over a bunch of fresh radishes from his garden. Unbeknownst to our neighbor, he also brought over a soon-to-be much loved family pet. A small green caterpillar was nestled up in the produce and on discovery he was quickly transferred to a jelly jar with a cheesecloth lid. I gave him four to six hours, tops, but L and N's love was more nurturing than I'd credited, and "Greenie," as he became known, was well provisioned with samples of every leaf in our backyard. Variety is obviously the spice of life, or at least a general contributor, for in the abundance of delicacies offered, he found a couple that he clearly enjoyed very much. We watched him polished them off day after day and grow quite plump in the process.

Worm Watch 2011!

All seemed to be going quite well until about a week ago. I came home to find the jelly jar sadly empty. "What happened?" I asked.

Stacy, my biology major wife, told me that Greenie had stopped moving a day or two ago. She gave him time, but it was clear he had died. "I just threw him out a minute ago." She pulled open the garbage bin to show me. Greenie was lying on the heap all hard and crusty. At that moment the light of realization flickered in Stacy's eyes, followed by a mad scramble in the garbage to retrieve the cast-off cocoon. This only served to knock it further down into the muck. We pulled aside cantaloupe rinds and empty yogurt containers, paper towels and other assorted unidentifiables until at last we found the identifiable we were looking for. We delicately scooped out Greenie's immobile "body" and restored him to his jelly jar home, reattaching the cheesecloth lid and settling him in a quiet corner on the counter. Or at least as quiet as they get around here. He did look rather moribund lying clunkily on the bottom of the jar, but every once in a while, if you spent the time to watch, you'd notice a little spastic twitch that said that the spark of life had not departed Greenie just yet. Another few days and the twitching stopped and even I began to lose faith - though I could almost be persuaded that the little crusty green thing was a little bigger today that it had been the day before.

On Friday our fretted waiting was over. I came home from work to find nothing crusty on the jar bottom, and something light and feathery hanging upside-down from the cheese cloth. The florescent jade of the caterpillar had faded to wings of a palest green, like hydrangea petals. One wing was out, the other still somewhat curled up in the chrysalis hull. Another day and things were unraveled enough to do a more thorough examination. A quick internet search confirmed that Greenie was now a proud male Cabbage White Butterfly. Unfortunately is appears that his second stowed wing may be damaged or malformed and if so, I revert back to my prior predictions of life expectancy, but Greenie's obviously a fighter and has overcome plenty of challenges already in his short metamorphic life, so who can really say?

WAS

(or some semblance thereof...)

More Dental Drop-outs

2011-10-02T21:24:00.000-07:00

For the last week or so L has been boasting an ever more flexible front tooth. A jiggle turned into a wiggle which evolved into full-fledged flappage. Tonight by dinner it was clear the end was near and none too soon, as everyone was getting a little tired (and grossed out) watching L put her tooth through its many pirouettes, held in place by a micrometer strand of who knows what.

Having lost two teeth previously (amplely documented here and here), one would think L a jaded pro, but this particular instance marked the first time one of the defectors came from the upper echelons of her standing army, so new life and excitement were breathed into the tired regimen.

Snaggle-tooth

N wanted everyone to know that regular brushing
will ensure his teeth stay put as long as possible.

Since the tooth seemed to be rather attached to its lifelong home, and all wobbling aside, seemed to give no clear indication that it was going to speed up its vacating timeline, L and Mommy had to have some serious discussions on assisting nature to take its course. L was unconvinced that any form of external influence need be applied, but Mommy was much more adamant on the matter. The thought of having the tooth lost and swallowed overnight, and the recovery discussions that would no doubt follow, gave her more of a reason to [e-hem] sink her teeth into the argument.

While maternal tenacity and pre-pubescent pluck are generally well-matched contenders, Mommy's insistence was unyielding and eventually L gave up the fight and submitted herself to having Mommy grope around her mouth with a big paper towel. A snag, a yank, a pop and a squeal, and it was all over except the gloating.

All present and accounted for...

A Little ME Time - Of Trinkets, Tide Pools, and Technicolor Yawns

2011-09-25T15:34:00.000-07:00

The end of Pax Kindelis

It was a misty, moisty morning and cloudy was the weather when our final B. H. sunrise asserted itself. For some reason a foggy morning keeps the riff-raff in bed longer, so I was able to secure a good hour or two of Kindle-time out on the balcony before I heard the shuffles within and my budding apprentice photographer emerged with her mother's digital and a smug expression that indicated she'd been using it and wasn't afraid to wield it again.

Photo by the backup camera crew.

Wrapping up a rather dense-packed vacation, checking out of the Wonder View wasn't as depressing as it sometimes is. We settled accounts, made arrangements to stow the Great White Wonder for a few additional hours, then awaited the Bar Harbor shuttle for one last morning hurrah in town.

The Wonder View Inn is a pet-friendly establishment and we had the good fortune to have neighbors on both sides who had brought quiet but very affectionate dogs along with them. L and N had spent a couple of cumulative hours over the course of our trip hanging out on the balcony playing with one or the other of the "puppies" between the balcony bars, with much excitement generated on both sides. At one point an ill-adviced game of fetch on the elevated balcony resulted in L and I spending 30 minutes in the woody undergrowth below looking for an overly enthusiastically returned rubber ball. As it would happen, as we sat waiting outside the lobby for the town shuttle one of our next door neighbors also pulled up to check out. This gave the kids one final opportunity to be bathed in saliva by the large, dopily happy mound of fur in the backseat - a Goldendoodle, a golden retriever/standard poodle mix. A disturbingly cute and good natured mutt.

On every trip of note we are obligated to address the gift-buying fetish that flows down the Harris family line (a line which, not surprisingly, also retrieves the bulk of the gifts purchased). Our morning ambitions were simple and semi-capitalistic - a walk through the kitsch shops and then a final walk by the coast. The trinket acquisitions were done by seasoned verterans and there is very little of interest to report there, other than to note the Bar Harbor could do with a couple more benches strategically placed outside the myriad "Christmas in July" stores.

By the time we were ready for our ocean walk the mists of the morning had mostly burned off, leaving a few rag-tag fog banks hanging out here and there looking rather foolish. There is a well-maintained walking path that weaves its way along the promentory rich coastline for a mile or so south of Bar Harbor. It is host to numerous rose hedges and meticulously disheveled (New) English gardens as it winds its way between the rocky waterline and the high-class blue chip hotels that look down their long lawn noses at us. It is a delightful family favorite.

Cool granite textures

The kids couldn't care less about the Martha Stewart retreats on the land side of the path. They are all about the rocks and ridges and the million teeming tidepools on the water side. Every time we go Stacy, gathering all her inner peace and centeredness, has to close her eyes, commit herself to Providence, and turn the kids loose to scamper on those fatal Maine granite boulders. She will stand off to the side and whimper slightly as she watches (or shields her eyes) as they dart and weave over and through the slippery rocks and crashing waves. Like a veteran returing from an umpteenth combat mission, you can't quite tell if Stacy emerges from these experiences a little more stalwart, or a little more prone to post-traumatic stress syndrome.

The tidepools proved glorious. Many varieties of seaweed were pointed out; many conchs and whelks and periwinkles were gently abused. The highlight was a challenge from Daddy to find a crab in what appeared at first glace to be a lifeless landlocked pool. The challenge was quickly taken up and dozens of unexpected lifeforms were brought to light before the crowning achievement - the coveted crab - was uncovered. The excitement of the victory prompted crab-walks all the way back to town.

Crab hunters on the job.

Ah HA!!!

The remaining vacation hours were a blur of bustle to get home. We drove to Portland and crashed at an airport hotel in prep for an early morning flight out. We got to the airport and our plane on the morrow without serious incident. The only "hiccup" of note occurred as we were taxiing to the runway for our departure out of Portland. The man sitting next to me had seemed a little anxious. I suspect he was a little scared of flying. His tension built until just before we got to the runway. And then...

"Ummm, flight attendent. Can I have a couple of wet paper towels please?..."

Stacy's Shower Wishes

2011-09-18T21:12:00.000-07:00

Stacy's good friend Jen had a baby shower in Washington that she couldn't attend, so...

A Little ME time - The Kayaks vs. The Seaplanes!

2011-09-18T18:40:00.000-07:00

Our hotel affords a fantastic view of the morning sunrise over Frenchmen's Bay, provided you are awake to see it. We were not off that ilk this trip I'm afraid. The sun was well into its workday when I got up. I snuck out on the patio and noticed at once that a big cruise ship had pulled in over night. It would have been more dramatically framed against a flaming sunrise, but it was still a pretty awesome morning view.

Click to enlarge.

L, as is her habit, was up pretty soon after I was so we abandoned the other lug-a-beds and went down to the lobby for coffee and hot chocolate and enjoyed the early morning sunshine on the lobby terrace. On returning to the room after our fine morning refresher, we roused the sleepers and strolled up the hill a bit to the Looking Glass restaurant for breakfast. I'm not usually a breakfast person - tea and coffee are my usual and sufficient staples, but vacations away from home sort of demand it. A few half-eaten pancakes later --I assure you there was no half-eaten smoked salmon omelet! -- it was back to the room to dive into swimsuits and go play.

One of the things the kids remember most about coming to the Wonder View Inn, or at least think they remember most (N has many detailed memories about things he couldn't possibly remember first hand), is the old tire swing down on one of the many lawns. That so trivial a resurrected castaway can provide so much excitement amazes me. After watching his daredevil sister tame the savage beast, N insisted on a turn of his own, but being rather timid of heart, within an oscillation or two he graciously gave over full swing rights to his sister, who, while probably not particularly polite, was nevertheless pleased. N, on the other hand, was perfectly content to gather acorns and lay them out on the picnic table as a feast for the neighborhood squirrels.

The swinging bug effectively squashed, we headed back up the slope to the hotel pool where an additional ration of prepubescent energy was effectively neutralized while Mommy and Daddy suffered greatly in the pool benches.

As surprising a thought as it was to L and N, we actually did not come to Acadia to hang out at the hotel all day. We had bigger plans in mind. We dried off, hopped in the White Monstrosity, stopped in town only long enough to mail a letter and grab some sandwiches, and were off across the island for some outdoor fun in the sun. Our destination: Long Pond and the kayak rentals! Our joy was momentarily deflated when we walked up to the rental stand and saw the "sold out" sign, but as we turned to slump moodily back to the car a lady wheeling two kayaks up from the beach stopped us and said someone had just turned some in, so we could still rent if we wanted to. Many smiles and some parting of cash followed.

Stacy and I rented a kayak and paddled Long Pond ten years ago on our first trip to Bar Harbor together. It was sweet to rent two kayaks this time. I got L up front while Capt. Stacy had First Mate N. Kayaking with a wife who has a vague idea of rhythm and synchronized paddling is a far different experience than kayaking with a seven-year-old who can barely keep from plunging overboard at any time, let alone have any concept of tandem stroking. After about ten minutes of paddle clunking and total drenching I encouraged L to just sit back and enjoy the ride and "leave the driving to us." She complied for a few minutes, but the thrill of wielding a six foot paddle could not be fully surpassed and soon she was back at whacking me repeatedly. Once we decided to make a military march of it ("Left! Left! Left! Right! Left!"), things got marginally better.

Defective kayak. See how low it rides in the back?

Shortly after we put in, while we were still in the thick of the padding coordination battles, a seaplane docked at a neighboring pier fired up. It slowly pulled into the lake threading among the various canoes, kayaks and free swimmers, heading down lake a bit, then turned and began circling back. The kids were fascinated and froze staring at the plane as it approached. I tried to weave left; Stacy tried to weave right; the plane didn't seem to be weaving in any particular direction. Finally Stacy and I agreed on a get-out-of-the-way direction and proceeded thusly, only to have the plane then turn and bear down on us again. Frustrated, we simply stopped and waited it out, hoping the plane would decide what it wanted to do and get it over with. But the plane didn't drastically change its direction and eventually killed its engine. The pilot pulled open his window and pointed us in one direction - the one we originally were heading before he barreled down on us. We swiftly complied. The plane fired up again and soon was again heading down lake, this time at full throttle, and rose up dripping into the sky and flew off over the pine trees. I would spend another two or three paragraphs complaining about what kind of jerk would circle a seaplane around in circles in the middle of a canoeing and kayaking area, but it was cool enough to watch that I won't berate the guy any further.

Evidently Freddie Kruger vacations in Maine too.

Adios! Don't hurry back.

Having successfully avoided being propeller pulverized, we headed our own vessels down lake and took off. (A little less quickly and slightly less elegantly.) It was a beautiful afternoon and lake and surrounding shorelines were stunning. After about a mile we emerged from a narrow neck of the lake into the broader lakebed and the breeze picked up and gave the water a little chop. Our prearranged goal, the far shore about another mile away, took a little more effort on the open lake, but we soon made it to the woody shoreline where we found a few exposed boulders expressly laid out for our lunch break.

Lunch break

The return trip was smooth sailing. I was pleased no one attempted to use us as an aircraft carrier. We got back to the dock and I returned the kayaks while L and N took advantage of the swimming platform and roped off swim area. We let them burn the sugar while Stacy and I once again stretched out by the water's edge and did as close to nothing as the needs of circulation and respiration allow.

Our final major adventure for the day involve a little more driving to Bernard on the far side of the island - home of Thurston's Lobster Pound! The whole extended family went there a couple of years ago when we celebrated Mimi and Grampy's 40th anniversary on the island. You can't get a more idyllic spot. Stacy and I each got our coveted crustacean and I got my mandatory side of steamed clams. I was hoping for great things from the kids, but L and N turned their noses skyward and insisted on a paltry hotdog. L was so disgusted by even the smell of the lobster that she couldn't eat her corn on the cob because it smelled like lobster. I'm not taking this affront to my heritage lightly and put the blame squarely on the thoroughly unadventurous strains of the Harris bloodline.

A pass through Southwest Harbor with its compulsory stop for ice cream, and our day was pretty much done. Back to the Bar! (Which has such a different meaning than it did twenty years ago...) Once settled into the hotel with 100% zonked children Stacy and I sat out on the patio and enjoyed the moon rising over the bay now abandoned by the cruise ship. I probably said something real romantic, and she probably giggled and blushed. She probably put her arm around me and I might even have given her a peck on the cheek. Vacation nights all tend to blend together.

A Little ME Time - Not Just Any Port in a Storm

2011-09-10T07:41:00.000-07:00

The eastern Maine coast is one of the single most beautiful sites in the world. We do whatever we can to steal some time at the coast, particularly at Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, whenever we get to Maine. We've fallen into a beloved family rut of staying at the same hotel, the Wonder View Inn, overlooking Bar Harbor. Sometimes we go as an extended family, sometimes just our little huddle, but we do our best to reserve a day or two of our vacation down east. The final few days of this summer excursion were wrapped up accordingly.

We bid Mimi and Grampy and Grammy Betty a fond adieu, made our Sherman cemetery run, then hit the road for the coast. I don't know if the cemetery set a bad precedent, but as we drove the weather started feeling obligated to live up to the ominous forecasts we'd been dreading and got steadily cloudier and more dreary. We were still safe when we stopped for our quick lunch at a Greek/Italian pizza place in Millinocket, but as we rounded Bangor and abandoned the interstate for the iconic Maine back roads we were greeted with a light but thoroughly depressing bland rain that bode ill for our coastal bliss. When we hit the L. L. Bean outlet in Ellsworth (another vacation staple and one Stacy wouldn't give up under torture) we were joined by every other frustrated coastal vacationer in a hundred mile radius in what was the most insanely packed store I've seen since Black Friday. Everyone was buying rain parkas (including us) and sweatshirts (including us) and was in a generally grumpy mood (including us). After a few minutes claustrophobia began to take its toll, so I took the kids to go wait in the Great White Wonder while Stacy, oblivious to the human onslaught, continued her commercial entertainment.

Fully loaded with L. L. Bean paraphernalia and ready to face the rain (but not happy about it), we turned back onto Maine State Route 3 and proceeded south. Just past Trenton is the little bridge that takes you from the mainland onto Mount Desert Island. As we crossed our anticipation was already peaked, but how much more was it amplified when, as if by throwing a switch, the sun broke through the clouds and the doom and gloom high-tailed it to places unknown! By the time we got to our hotel and got up to our room perched at the top of the hill, we had a bright and sunny Bar Harbor splayed out below us, complete with rainbow. Chocolates on the pillow are nice, but the Wonder View Inn really went all out with the rainbow.

Bar Harbor view with rainbow. (No extra charge.)

Bar Harbor is so named because at low tides a natural sandbar, otherwise submerged, is exposed that runs about a half mile from the town shore over to the small and woody Bar Island. The temporary land bridge is a tide pool wonderland and the island on the far end has a mild trail that climbs to a great view back on Bar Harbor. As many times as we'd been in the area, we'd never actually been out on the bar. Today, however, as we took our first walk from the hotel down to town we found our timing was right and the tide had just gone out giving us several hours to explore. Knowing any commands to the contrary would be utterly in vain, we "graciously" allowed the kids to run and play on the rocky sand and to wade in the placid surf. There is no happier allowance granted a kid who's been cooped up in a car for several hours (no matter how white or wonderful). Seaweed, clam shells, crabs, starfish: All were give the awed attention of a National Geographic exposé. Then normally oppressed N was granted permission to do something unthinkable - throw as many rocks in the water as his heart desired! Such joy! You'd have thought he'd been give the keys to the Great White Wonder.

Slowly we made our way across the bar, abusing sea life and coastal geology all along the way, and found ourselves at the shores of Bar Island. A well tended trail met the beach and at the trail head was a posted a warning sign giving the high and low tide times, lest you spend an unintended half day out on the barren island. Checking the stats Stacy and I was quite satisfied with the three plus hours afforded us and encouraged the kids to come on a hike up the trail. L followed with good will, but N blanched and hung back. We'd explained to him how the bar disappeared when the tide came in, but having no real grasp of time (ten hours is the same as ten minutes to him), he was suddenly very concerned that the oceans would rise up like the Red Sea and swallow the bar and all us procrastinators. Assurances to the contrary had little effect and as we dragged him on with us his terror was real and palpable. Throughout the hike it was "hurry Daddy," and "I think we should go now Mommy." We kept pointing out the handfuls of other unconcerned hikers we met on the way, but N found no consolation in being in the midst of other doomed fools. But reckless daredevils that we are, we continued on our hike and eventually got to the island summit with it's panorama of Frenchmen's Bay and the boat-strewn harbor.

N's tension ratcheted down a notch or two as we began retracing our steps, but was not completely erased until something jarred his attention completely off the subject. L and I were walking side-by-side out front and Stacy and N were right behind us and we were halfway across where the path traversed a little open meadow in its otherwise woody wanderings. L saw them first and squealed delightedly. Three does bounded out of the woods to our left and pranced in full view across the meadow in front of us and into the woods to our right. There was much hubbub! Denied their moose in the northern realms, they gratefully accepted their deer consolation prize. While L and N stood there chattering away in animal-spotting glee there was another disturbance off to the left. A fourth doe, evidently startled by the four of us, had shied back from the main herd when it bounded across the meadow and now stood on the meadow's outer reaches as if trying to figure out how to regain the herd. In a moment she made up her mind and in an instant sprang across the path and followed its predecessors into the woods. An extra helping of kiddie glee.

We were halfway across the meadow when the deer sprang across in front of us

The sun was setting and N had forgotten all about the potentially deluged sandbar when the trail returned us to the shore. There it was, all dry and safe. Buoyed by their woodland adventure our fawns leaped upon the bar and frolicked and pranced from tide pool to tide pool, all weariness, fear and phobia long gone. As we slowly followed the kids on their distracted and meandering path across the bar Stacy and I managed to sneak a couple of sunset kisses and hugs. And then the ocean rose up, threw down its wrathful waves on the bar and sent us all to watery graves. Bummer.

A Little ME Time - Of Missing Moose and Faded Photos

2011-09-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

The handful of scheduled events not withstanding, the majority of the days in Patten were spent unscripted. Free flowing, we stayed up late, slept in late, played a lot of cards and did all those trivial little "back home" things you do when you feel at liberty to spend your time frivolously. Stacy got her Martha Stewart on and boiled up the majority of our blueberries and made a couple of quarts of jam. I stewed some of the rhubarb with some of the blueberries, some onions and garlic and made a pretty dang good chutney that we put over a Kinney farm-inspired pork roast for dinner one night. There were also blueberry and rhubarb muffins one morning as a pancake follow-up.

One night Stacy and I took the kids in Mimi's Outback and went all the way down the Shin Pond Road to the north entrance of Baxter State Park, pulling off on every logging road we passed looking for moose. Our never-fail moose call ("Ma-ma-ma-moooooooooo-sie!") did the unthinkable, however, and failed. Not a moose to be seen. But the pursuit was entertaining in and of itself. We got all the way up to Grand Lake Matagamon where we parked at a narrow beach and watched the sunset while the kids attempted (unsuccessfully) to skip rocks on the lake. A loon somewhere off in the distance was giving its foghorn impression. It was silent, tranquil and beautiful. It was also full of mosquitoes as soon as the sun was gone. Mosquitos take the romance out of things real quickly.

I also found some time to go through a few of Grammy Betty's old pictures and scanned a number I'd never seen before. I love old-timey pictures, especially if the subject is people or places I'm familiar with. Found some great pictures of my Dad as a teenager and some really old ones of my grandfather Norman as a fairly young man on a deer hunt.

My Dad, age 15.

Dad with his kid sister Linda.

Cousin Anita, Mimi, sister Sue, me, cousin Richie, brother Mike.
At Grampy Norman and Grammy Betty's 50th wedding aniversary

Dad and Aunt Marion (far right) at what looks like a hydro dam.

My Dad with his parents and sister Linda at his other sister Marion's wedding.

Grammy Betty and Grampy Norman's wedding.

Anniversary party 50 years later

Grampy Norman (standing far left) on a deer hunt

Grampy Norman with Lobo at the farm. Note the lack of blueberry bushes.

We found time to slip in one more sortee down to the farm for fruit. Grampy, Stacy and I engaged the blueberry bushes again while L and N took to denuding the apple trees. N took copious records of his apple picking conquests.

Eventually our allotted Patten time wrapped up and we loaded up the car to head on to our next vacation destination - a couple of days on the coast in Acadia National Park. We gave our hugs and said our goodbyes and then steered the Great White Menance of the Maine Turnpike down Route 11 toward I-95 and destinations south.

Before we actually hit the interstate, however, we took a quick side jaunt through the town of Sherman. There's a pretty little cemetary there on the other side of town and the last time I was in Maine I was able to find the graves of my great grandfather and grandmother, George and Nellie Perkins, who died long before I was born. Stacy had never seen them, so I took her by. While we were there we noticed something that we couldn't decide was cool or creepy. Right next to the Perkins family stone was one marked Harris, Stacy's maiden name. I guess we were destined to be together for all eternity past and future after all.

On the Home Front

2011-09-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

Our friends the Gnadts gave us a big bag of lemons off their tree yesterday. This morning L and N set to work juicing them and making lemonade. Stacy and I were in various and sundry parts of the house while this operation was going on. L eventually called us out to look.

"What are those green things floating in there?" I asked.

"That's mint!" she answered. Hmmm. Nice touch, I thought. She went on: "And that's basil and that's rosemary and there's some oregano."

I spent some time this morning putting up some shelves in L's room that I'd been procrastinating on. I had way more helpers that was required by labor laws and standards, but the job got done anyway. N in particular found my stud finder and was mesmerized.

"What does this do, Daddy?"

"It finds the wood under the walls so you drill screws into it," I explained. That satisfied him and he ran off to put my Enegizers to the test. A few minutes he came back holding a bunch of screws.

"Look Daddy! There's wood in these screws!" He beeped the stud finder over them to prove his point.

"Well actually, it doesn't look for wood specifically. It looks for density."

Again, N ran off. A few minutes later I get another joyful squawk of discovery.

"Daddy! There's dents in the wall and there's dents in the door. And look, there's even dents in my head!"

Rising to the Occasion

2011-09-05T07:37:00.000-07:00

Stacy and L were pretty violently ill last week with a nasty but mercifully short bout of the stomach flu. The first day I came home from work the girls where groaning in bed and N was sitting merrily at the computer. He seemed to be quite content to rule the roost. A little later on I found this sign L had made for him. "He told me what he wanted me to write," she explained.

A Little ME Time - The Days of Swine and Rooftops

2011-09-04T16:29:00.000-07:00

Now I mentioned previously the two most exciting aspects of coming to Maine - picking blueberries and going moose hunting with the off chance of spotting an elusive moose. There are actually a couple more that rank high on the list. The kids were obsessed, for example, with the idea that they were going to get to spend each night sleeping in Mimi and Grampy's attic. While this was technically true enough, it is not nearly so Jane Eyreish as it may at first sound. When they bought the place Mimi and Grampy converted one of several attics of their 100+ year old Victorian into a fully insulated, walled, carpeted, windowed, even air conditioned bedroom. It is on the same level as all the other bedrooms and has no expose rafters or resident bats. The only thing that hints at its attic past is that the roof gables down two sides, one side of which has a standard dormer window built in, the other some pretty cool skylights. Great for star gazing. We tried not to spoil the romance of it all, and now a couple weeks after the fact, L and N still refer dreamily to their time spent sequestered in the attic.

The other big Maine drawing point is our inevitable visit to Mr. and Mrs. Kinney's pig farm. Sure, the smell is... pungent, but it's a site these city kids can't resist. And I have to admit, I find it fascinating too. The downside is, for the rest of the day, even if you shower and burn your clothes, there really is no doubt in the mind of anyone you meet who you've been hanging out with.

Eventually even L can't take it any more.

Child of the Corn.

Another cool aspect of the Kinney farm is that, once you are done with your porcine pursuits, there is a way-cool garden to explore, an enormous raspberry patch, a railway boxcar doubling as a feed storehouse (and kitten nursery!), and some dogs so happily insistent on cuddling that you can't deny them a scratch or two.

You have to work for the good berries.

Off to explore the garden

N scores a ride on Mr. Kinney's mini-tractor.

Happiest dog in the world meets
the happiest boy in the world.

A Little ME Time - "What's foa Suppah?"

2011-09-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

I'm sure anyone can rattle off Patten, Maine's many claims to fame, but as is usually the case, there is one cultural landmark that symbolizes the metropolis in one fell swoop. Paris has the Eiffel Tower; Rome, the coliseum; New York has Broadway; L.A. has... the 405. Patten, Maine has "Patten Pioneer Days." This week of home-spun festivities serves to annually redirect dozens and dozens of people from their daily grind to joys of community, heritage and cooperation. It is all that one would expect a small town festival to be, and exactly what it should be. There are "steak dinners" at the Masonic lodge, there are "chicken suppers" at the Shin Pond docks, there is a "Taste of Patten progressive dinner" at the the airport's Hanger Sandwich Shop, the Clam Shack and Debbie's Deli. There are historical exhibits and story times at the heritage society. There are craft booths with quilts, carved log art, pies and canned vegetables set up at Patten Academy Park. There is a joint outdoor church service with the Methodist and Pentecostal churches. I guarantee you something was going on at the snowmobile club, I just don't know what. If Aunt Bea lost her southern twang and Andy Taylor gave up sheriffing to become a game warden, they could pretty much slip into Patten Pioneer Days society seamlessly.

We arrived mid-week, so we missed the frog jumping contest and the children's art competition. Sad losses, admittedly, but for us the week always builds to a crescendo culminating in the Saturday morning parade and the lunchtime "Bean-Hole Dinner" at the Lumberman's Museum. Mimi and Grampy are members of the Lumberman's Museum and most of their Pioneer Days labor is invested there. On Friday morning, the day before the dinner, Grampy and I went to the local grocery store and picked up big boxes of reserved onions, molasses, powdered mustard and other must-haves and hauled them out to the Museum. When we got there the prep was well underway; Grampy set to putting up tables and I volunteered to peel onions with an old guy who looked like he would make a career out of it. Meanwhile a crew of a dozen other men filled huge cast iron barrels with water and beans, and dug the round underground cooking pits. The pits were filled with fire logs and the beans were "parboiled" over the flames. Later that evening when the fires had died down to embers the parboiled beans would be combined with their seasonings, lowered down into their pits filled with charcoaled embers, and covered with dirt to cook the night through. As I peeled the onions I tried to strike up a conversation with the old guy I was working with. He was not a brilliant conversationalist. The exchange took the form of me asking random questions in many scattered directions, seeking an in, and him responding invariably with a clipped Maine "a-yah." I rather suspected I'd intruded on his onion peeling turf and that wasn't appreciated.

When Saturday morning broke soft and lazy with it's muggy Maine summer sunshine Stacy and the kids were all amped up. The kids were itching to march down to the park to await a parade that wouldn't start for three hours. It took fresh blueberry pancakes to get them to sit and be still for a small fraction of the wait time. But the parade time arrived eventually. Grampy, with a full day ahead of him, had already departed for the Lumberman's Museum, so it was Mimi, Stacy, L, N and I that meandered the block down the road to the prime viewing spot at the park. (Grammy Betty, who doesn't get out much, simply moved her chair to the bay window so as to not miss the spectacle which drove right by the house.) And soon we were treated to the Patten parade.

The gathering of the faithful.

The theme this year was "Cultures from Around the World." Grampy had said this would be a particularly good year because they had managed to secure not one, but two Shriner's lodges to come out for it - one drove mini-mopeds, and the other mini-go-carts. The go-cart group won the wow factor because they travelled the route with a cheerfully painted Suburban that had a ramp that run up its tail and another that ran down its hood. As the go-carts bobbed and weaved down the parade route they would occasionally form up and take a run at the Suburban, driving up and over the car to the delighted cheers of the onlookers. We were also visited by Egyptians, a bunch of Leprechauns, some Indians (no one ever says "Native Americans" in Maine), and, more true to home, a collection of self-proclaimed "redneck" floats. A visit by a somewhat despondent looking Smokey the Bear and the requisite fleet of police cars and firetrucks rounded out the event.

Leading the charge!

Ride like an Egyptian.

N about to secure a go-cart high-five.

The Hee-Haw brigade.

I strongly suspect Smokey is contemplating suicide.

As soon as the parade was over Mimi hustled down the Shin Pond Road to the Lumberman's Museum. She had coleslaw duty. Meanwhile Stacy and I herded the kids down through the town, stopping at the various ad hoc booths and stands that lined Main Street. At the Red Moose, the only "touristy" store in town and one of the most anticipated highlights of Stacy's visits, we loaded up on postcards and trinkets and moose pajamas. Heading back up the road toward home I swung by the Clam Shack to pick up a cheeseburger dinner for Grammy (plain, no catsup!), then it was back out on the road for the 1/4 mile walk down the Shin Pond Road to the museum for lunch, or more precisely, for the dinner.

In Maine a "dinner" is a vaguely defined word. It can and some times does mean the evening meal (pronounced "dinnah"), but that meal is more commonly referred to as "supper," or rather "suppah." The term dinner implies something out of the ordinary. A special event meal, whether held at noon or 5:00 may be called a dinner, though, truth be told, it is not uncommon to have special "suppers" too. (We arrived too late to attend the United Methodist Women's Spaghetti Suppah this year.) It is very difficult to keep your Maine culinary lingo straight and if you ask what's for dinnah when you should have asked what's for suppah, you quickly reveal your foreign heritage.

The Bean-Hole Dinner is more or less the lynch-pin of Pioneer Days, at least for our family. You don't go to the Bean-Hole Dinner for the latest in baked bean fashions. The beans are, honestly, a little on the bland side, and the biscuits baked in reflection ovens before the bonfire, while cool and pioneery, generally have an order of magnitude more baking powder than they needed. I've been warned to never try the fire-grate brewed coffee and have heeded the advice religiously. No, you go for the whole rustic, awkward, aw-shucks package. You go to watch men who look like bears (as all Northern Maine men do) haul buckets of beans out of the smoking ground. You go to hear the people talk about what they're doing to repair their ice fishing houses. You attend to hear the latest on the University of Maine's football team and hear all the disparaging comments on this new-fangled lacrosse stuff. You go because florescent red hot dogs are absolutely cool. You go because its your peeps and you know you can't understand them, but want to.

This makes him happier than just about anything else in the world.

Don't even think about it.

L in the Lumberman's Museum kitchen house

L and N in the bunk house

They were quite good!

Bluegrass dancing

Those enormous Maine skies...

A Little ME Time - The Blueberries of Destiny

2011-09-01T20:50:00.000-07:00

There are certain childhood memories that are iconic. They hold an exalted place in your collective remembrances that, when you really analyze them objectively, they probably don't really warrent. They may be (and usually are) memories from the more ancient of times, the primordial regions of your mental notepad - times when, perhaps the lack of abundant reference material allowed for an exaggerated sense of wonder or importance. Sometimes, however, these vaulted memories are of events yet to transpire.

L and N had been talking for months about all the fun they were going to have in Maine, so confident of this were they that they might as well have been using the past tense. Two items tied for the title of "most fun they certainly had in Maine at some future point:" 1) spotting a moose, and 2) picking blueberries. As future blog entries certainly have made clear, only one of these iconic memories would have the guts and common decensy to actually stand up and occur.

Once we'd slept enough to justify sitting upright again we grabbed some buckets, kissed Mimi and Grammy Betty goodbye, hopped into the white wheeled wonder, and followed Grampy down to Grammy Betty's farm about 5 miles on the other side of town. Grammy has six or eight of the most transendent blueberry bushes. The blueberries that take up residence on these bushes, like their pre-fabbricated picking memories, seem to deny the laws of science, making mockery of the space-time continuum. They are enormous, the size of small grapes, and rediculously copious. They seem to have found an alternate dimension in which to expand and swell and fill all available space. I'm sure we always just time it right and happen to be in Maine at the peak of the season, but every time I've been up there since the bushes were put in, they have been awash in a sea of blue. It's like one blueberry got on Twitter and tweeted "Everyone at Grammy's house - STAT!" and next thing you know you've got a blueberry flash mob. A blueberry rave.

Blueberry riots.

We contended with the bushes for probably an hour or more, coordinating our attacks and filling several 5-gallon buckets with fruity purple casualties, but dispite our sizeable collection prisoners of war, the bushes admitted to no heavy losses, sending from that alternate blueberry dimension a seemingly endless supply of troops to the front. Eventually bored with such easy pickings, the kids moved on to scaling Grammy's apple trees and tossing down mounds of small, sour, buggy apples. N, feeling the irresistible urge to quantify and classify, informed us later that he picked one hundred and eleven or maybe one hundrend and twelve. Another quick jaunt with a box cutter through an overgrown former cow-pasture yielded an armful of rhubarb stalks. We pretty much had Vitamin C covered for the entire trip.

After our fruit picking frenzy was exhausted we took a walk down one of Grampy's logging roads deep into his woods. The kids were all a-buzz at the prospect of seeing a moose, but still had the wherewithall to be prepared in the event of a ravenous bear attack. To protect against this contingency they loaded their arms with the fruits of their apple picking labors, convinced that these abundant sour, wormy apples would distract any wild, blood-thirsty creature, redirecting their mad cravings for the flesh of small children in a more vegetarian direction. Alas no moose were to be seen, but any squirrel, chipmunk or other woodland creature unwise enough to rear its head as we went by was greeted with a hail of apples "for its dinner."

We don't want to scare the moose!

No bears, but apples at the ready.

Unsuspecting squirrel about to suffer an apple-induced concussion.

Stacy feels a certain kinship with Maine.

Left on the trail for any bears hot on our scent.

A Little ME Time - Night Rovers

2011-08-31T22:03:00.000-07:00

L and N have bi-coastal grandparents, which does not make for easy large-scale family reunions. Bottom line: someone somewhere has to travel. A lot. Mimi and Grampy seem to take the lion's share of the burden, generally coming out to sunny So Cal once a year or so, while we have been averaging a trip back to Maine about every other. One of the undisputed benefits of taking the logistical plunge and making the East Coast trek (by opening your wallet, turning it upside down, and shaking vigorously), is that you truly do get a pretty great vacation out of the deal. After all, Maine's informal state motto, as testified to by highway signs and license plates, is "Vacationland!"

Previous Maine homecomings in 2007 and 2009 had established the battle rhythm requiring a 2011 run. We had originally hoped to make the trip back in June to celebrate Grampy's 70th birthday, but the work/life balance wasn't, and I couldn't really break away until mid-August. Fortunately, rumors I'd heard at work about cancelling the month of August entirely and moving straight into September proved to be unfounded and on Wednesday, August 10 we made the fateful drive to LAX.

Flights into Maine are iffy and pricy. Ideally we'd fly into Bangor and then drive to my folks place in Patten about 90 miles to the north. But insisting on Destination Bangor, the lone outpost in the wilderness that it is, tends to double your plane ticket price over flying into marginally more cosmopolitan Portland four hours to the south. Cheapness being a celebrated family trait, I cobbled together a flight plan that got us into Portland at 1:00 in the morning, where we'd pick up a car and do the northern haul in the wee hours. Surely a five hour car trip after ten hours of air time would be no big deal, right? And actually it didn't turn out to be. The only hiccup ended up being in our favor. When we got into Portland and I went to pick up the car they were all out of the "standard" size I'd reserved. Hertz: "Is it OK if we put you in a fully loaded Cadillac for no extra charge?" Me: "Ummm... OK!" I'm sure we all looked particularly stylish and impressive cruising I-95 through those moose-infested Maine woods at 4:00am in our white Caddy with the sun roof and heated leather seats. Maine gangstahs, a-yuh.

The Wheels of Fortune

More traditional Maine transportation.

Mimi, Grampy and Grammy Betty were still in bed when we pulled up at their farmhouse at 5:00am. We parked the wonder wheels, tossed the suitcases on the porch and staggered upstairs to find the first available horizontal surfaces to collapse upon. OK, so we spent the first day of the vacation flying and the second day sleeping off the excesses of the first day, but hey, you pretty much go to Maine for two things: lobsters and sleep, so no one was complaining.

And Irene, Irene So Far Away

2011-08-27T08:30:00.000-07:00

Come on Irene!

Oh, I swear...

At this moment...

You mean everything.

Aren't You Supposed to Be at the Justice League?

2011-08-23T19:54:00.000-07:00

I haven't seen my son in a while, but in the meantime this mysterious masked crusader has apparently taken up residence with us. He seems to enjoy N's room, knows exactly how to play with all of N's toys, and spends a lot of time fighting both crime and N's sister. I can't wait to see how he reacts when N comes home.

Even masked crusaders need their down time.

Stacy Is Easily Shocked

2011-07-30T19:50:00.000-07:00

Click Photo

Stacy came choking and stumbling into the kitchen this morning in semi-hysterical sobs. I grabbed her before she collapsed and tried to figure out between the tears what was wrong.

"I... I... I... was... electrocuted!" she eventually choked out.

I checked her for signs of transparency and sheet-like attire and finding none, I began to secretly doubt her initial claim to have passed beyond. Nevertheless I got her on the couch so that I could either calm her down, or lay her out with a rose on her chest, as the need might be. After a few minutes of gurgled snorts into my shoulder she was able to compose herself enough to give me the run down.

She had been working in the master bathroom shower with the shower curtain off, cleaning away some tile chemicals she had had soaking on the walls. She was using the hand-held shower sprayer to do the job and managed to get a good heavy stream of water to run out of the shower over the wall and down into an electrical outlet nearby. Our contractor had been doing some work in the bathroom and the lights over the sink had been taken out, so he had left an industrial-sized floodlight plugged into that outlet for our use. Evidently the light started flickering as the wall-tsunami ran past the outlet and within another second the water wave had coated the wall past the electrical outlet down to the floor. That's when she started feeling her feet tingle. In a blind panic she dropped the shower nozzle and sprang out of the shower to come find me with the news of her untimely demise.

After fifteen minutes or so of clutching me on the couch she regained the presence of mind to remember: "I left the water running."

I felt a bolt of electricity surge through me as I sprung up and bounded to the bathroom, there to find the shower nozzle spraying heavenward like a park fountain and an inch and a half of water over the entire floor. A nice foot or so of the carpet in our bedroom was mushy and swamp like. I think I may have drowned.

P.S.: Next time you see Stacy, be sure to compliment her on her new perm.

After the Party I Was Draggin'

2011-07-16T20:33:00.000-07:00

Stacy's second party extravaganza, aimed at all L and N's school friends, had a more medieval, reptilian kind of feel. Fire-belching lizards were the theme and dragon slayers were all the scream. The thermally-enhanced critters had obviously been hanging out in Harbor City - in fact, we even identified a dragon lair in our own backyard! Thankfully we had a host of knights and paladins eager to win for themselves undying glory and honor in following the dragon's trail and undertaking many a quest and endeavor.

The mercenary warriors came to us unoutfitted and unarmed, so lots of prep work had to be done to get an army ship-shape. Swords had to be designed and shields had to be painted and decorated; magic dragon-protecting crowns had to be issued and a mob mentality had to be fostered. (That last part was pretty easy.)

Once the merry band of warriors was assembled and trained, it set out on a heart-chilling quest: the storming of the dragon's lair!

Fortune shined upon the holy horde and they were rewarded with much rich dragon treasure.

After so handily defeating the vile serpent, the band of adventurers undertook many other breath-taking escapades. First they played a horrifying game of "Throw-the-Ring-Over-the-Toy-Dinosaur-Who's-Pretending-to-Be-a-Dragon. Then it was risking life and limb watching a fire-spewing volcano erupt in all its thunderous fury. Then it was back to the castle for cake and ice cream.

Once the burgeoning Beowolves were adequately fed in the backyard mead hall, it was a time of general mayhem and revelry. You can't understand how much you want to party until you've stared a dragon in the eyes and lived to tell about it.

Gracious Queen Florence greets a conquering hero.

Duke Mark and Her Highness R

The dragon-lady and her fairy princess.

The Supreme Monarch grants an audience with a warrior.

The ferocious Harkins clan (we think they are Vikings) made it all the way from
Sweden and survived the dragon onslaught, only to succumb to the foul
man-eating curly willow tree in the back yard. So sad.

The only significant casualty of the day actually occurred before any of the crusaders arrived. L, while helping Uncle Kyle set up out back, managed to take a running face-plant into one of the plastic chairs, knocking one of her few remaining firm baby teeth into the "loose and wiggly" category. The victim was far less amused than her parents were at the discovery of the rather large tooth-gouge in the back of the chair.

Luckily warrior women overcome tears quickly and recompose themselves for dragon slaying pretty easily.

You Say It's L's Birthday? Well It's N's Birthday Too!

2011-07-16T19:21:00.000-07:00

Solar circumnavigations are a big deal in our house. Whenever one of us logs another 585,000,000 miles or so we feel obligated to celebrate. L and N now have 7 and 5 orbits respectively under their belts so parties were called for.

Stacy decided to divide and conquer this year. Two parties - one for family and one for friends. We scheduled the family shindig to align with a trip by L and N's nephew J and his family. Stacy put on a brunch and a sizeable chunk of the family was represented. In addition to Noelia, Bill, cousin J and his new sister A out from Arizona, Gramlynne and Poppa came down from Agua Dulce with Uncle Kyle; Aunt Joyce and Mr. Jay drove over from Monrovia. As usual, it would have taken a full herd of wild Clydesdales to keep Aunt Claudia from the festivities.

N has undoubtedly inherited his Daddy's
smooth ways with the ladies.

Cuddles for Aunt Noelia

Uncle Kyle enduring the usual onslaught.

Playing It Old School

2011-07-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

L and N have taken a trip down Memory Lane. Not their Memory Lane. My Memory Land.

Mud-day, Mud-day, So Good to Me

2011-06-28T20:17:00.000-07:00

Did YOUR school have a Mud Day!?!

N is so lucky. After a year of trying to keep the dirt off them, on his last day of school N's preschool teachers gave up all pretense and opened the flood gates. Or rather the mud gates... Mud, mud and more mud - all for the wallowing.

L, by virtue of having a "Sea Turtle" Room Mom for a mother, got to sneak in an join in the muck and mire. The normally non-dirt-averse kids seemed a little taken-aback at first and reluctantly stuck a toe in here or there. Eventually L took her role as bad-influence seriously and plunged into the pool head first. A drove of piglets followed frantically and soon the pools were bubbling, writhing pits of plastered preschoolers.

End-of-the-day hose down.

Cubby clean-out before the mud bath.

Some rare sibling cuddles.

Additional N-tries

2011-06-27T20:37:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago N and I were out on a Daddy/son errand. We were driving and N asked to play a CD that Stacy kept in the stereo. I don't remember what it was now, but it was something I knew and when it got to the chorus I belted it out to the windshield. On completion of the song I heard a discrete "ah-hem" from the car seat behind me that would have been a credit to the most judicious butler. "Daddy," he ventured ever so tactfully after I encouraged him. "when you do that it makes it sound like I don't want it to sound."

Tonight during dinner conversation Stacy made some reference to something that happened while N was "still in Mommy's tummy." This fascinated him and he wanted to hear more stories of his in-utero days.
Stacy told him how, while he was still in her tummy Daddy used to get right up to her tummy and talk to him. "Really?" he said, amazed. "What did he say?"

Every once in a while inspiration will strike like a lightning bolt from the blue and the perfect response will be on the tip of your tongue with no planning or forethought.

"What did he say?" asked N.

"Clean your womb!"

Go Doyyers, Go!

2011-06-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

N's fifth birthday was last week and L's is a little over a week away, so one of our family birthday treats was to take them to their first L.A. Dodgers game, or the "Doyyers" as the team is affectionately or not-so-affectionately called by the locals. It was something we'd wanted to do for a while, and when we happened to score some tickets at a fund raiser for the kids' school it all came together nicely.

The team has had a pretty dismal season so far with lots of bad press. A Giant's fan was attacked and beaten practically to death on opening day; the celebrity divorce case of the team's owners, Frank and Jamie McCourt and the growing gang presence and association with the team has been dragging the team down in both reputation, attendance and financial stability. The drama as been such a public spectacle that in April baseball commissioner Bud Selig announced that the MLB would be seizing control of the team due to "deep concerns for the finances and operations" of the Dodgers. Given those cheery circumstances and the current 4-game losing streak, Saturday evening we hit the freeway to Dodger Stadium, joining the couple dozen other Angelenos still willing to watch, and caught the 7:10 game with the Houston Astros.

But once you get in a baseball stadium the murders in the parking lot all seem to fade away. Don't get me wrong, the game was truly abysmal (Dodgers died 0-7 to make it a 5-game losing streak), but it was wonderful time anyway. N brought his foam Dodgers hand and L her Dodgers hat and both immediately jumped into the cheering and yelling. Neighbors on all sides were liberally whacked with the foam hand multiple times in N's exuberance. I spent most of the game trying to explain the goings-on of the game to N, which is ironic, given I can't usually tell a home run from a touchdown. By the end of the night he seemed to grasp that a good pitch that the batter missed was a strike, and a bad pitch the batter let go by was a ball. (And while I'm on the subject, N's pitch during "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" was better than anything we saw on the field.) N did have a tough time keeping score though. He kept looking at the digital clock on the marquee and could not be convinced that it wasn't 8 to 32. It seemed the opposing team would score another run every minute, which actually wasn't too far from the truth.

Some particularly memorable moments:
- I got 1.2 sips of my $10 beer before N knocked it down the seats in front of us
- Stacy was particularly amused when the organist started playing music from Phantom of the Opera. A veritable calliope jauntily playing "Music of the Night" at double tempo was something neither of us expected.
- We got one large soda for the kids to share, but I made the mistake of not watching N for 10 seconds and L ended up with bupkis.
- Stacy bought a bag of peanuts from the vendor. Evidently we've never explained to N that you have to shell peanuts. Much spitting and many tears.

As we progressed to the 7th inning stretch, the excitement did not flag, but unfortunately took on that manic, kinetic quality that signifies a way-overtired kid. N was relocated to my lap to spare the neighbors bruises and lacerations. The foam Dodger fist was calmly placed in the beer puddle under the seats for similar reasons. L was thirsty. N was hungry. The Dodgers were losing. And Daddy was still grumpy about his beer. We survived to sing "God Bless America," but then left our Dodger dog wrapper and peanut shell bedecked seats behind and headed for the doors. That's when the tears started in earnest for L remembered that she's seen a cotton candy vendor a kilometer away and decided that was all that could make her life complete.

A city defeated

A Bard, a Brie and a Baguette

2011-06-12T21:02:00.000-07:00

Last night was the formal opening of the 14th season of Shakespeare by the Sea; they presented the first of the year's two selections, "Much Ado About Nothing" at Point Fermin Park in San Pedro. "King Lear" will be assuming the throne in a couple of weeks. Catching the performance was the culmination of many years of pledges and promises.

Every year we have a summer get-together with our good friends Troy and Brittany Martin who live up in the rarefied air north of Monterrey. They travel down to the L.A. area to spend time with Troy's family and work the beaches. (Troy life-guards.) Troy and I are kindred spirits of sorts and have evolved an annual ritual where we sit around with good food, plenty of wine, and mounds of stinky cheeses and discuss philosophy, literature, theology and culture in general. We are very intellectual and it's all very high-brow of us. Now that we're both married with burgeoning families, the event is family-friendly with a lot more food, a little less wine, and a lots of interruptions in the brilliant analysis to kiss skinned knees, to wipe up spilled Kool-ade, and to admire interesting bugs and leaves brought by for our inspection. Thank goodness our kids have adopted the same sick fascination with rank dairy-products, so our get-togethers still feature plenty fruit of the cow.

Every year we have stated emphatically that we needed to get together and go to Shakespeare by the Sea, but every year there's some scheduling snafu that prevents it. Until this year. We finally got to go and get our fill of Elizabethan rabble-rousing, and since it's held in a park at 8pm, there was plenty of opportunity for a pre-show picnic. The Bard and stinky cheeses! What more could you ask for? Forsooth, there is nothing!

Our times with Troy and Brittany are so rare and so fun that we tend to get engrossed in the conversations and forget about all else. We brought a camera to the park with us, but no one had the presence of mind to actually take any pictures. The show runs from 8:00pm to a little after 10:00, so the kids are pretty wiped by the end of it, but it is gratifying to watch the entire brood locked into the show, eyes fixed on the stage, laughing and giggling when everyone else does, and taken-aback when the big dramatic scenes hit. I expected the kids would eventually get bored and sack out on Mommy or Daddy's lap, but the entire Martin/Perkins set were engaged to the merry end. (It was a comedy, after all.) We had some grumps in the church service this morning, but at least the evening went pretty darn smooth.

One additional benefit of the events last night was that when I was picking up the bovine aromatics for the evening, I picked up a few extra hunks of my old Swiss favorites - Emmentaler and Gruyer. Tonight they got shredded and drowned in some exceedingly cheap white wine and two rather suspicious kids got to slurp up the resulting goo on chunks of day-old baguette. N seemed perfectly happy piercing his little bread cubes on his fondue fork and swirling it around the molten lava, but that seems to be the extent of his interest. His plate had a dozen cheesy blobs lying uneaten and forlorn on it when we finally wrapped up the meal.

Funion with the Grunion

2011-06-04T10:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we told the kids they had to go to bed early; we had a big surprise waiting for them that would require them to be up in the wee hours of the night. This of course, insured that absolutely no sleeping actually took place at 7:00pm when we put them down - rather yielding instead a thinly veiled buzz of chatter and electricity bundled under bedclothes. Eventually the appointed hour of mystery arrived and the well-rested children (Not!) were loaded into the car with blankets, jackets and flashlights, and we set off on our way to our surprise destination. L and N were vibrating with anticipation as we hit the Harbor Freeway and drove in the dark down toward the sleeping realms of San Pedro. They didn't quite know what to expect when we pulled into the parking lot of the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium at the shore of the harbor.

California has its fair share of natural profundities. Among the organic oddities are a small silvery fish not unlike a sardine. These fish, the California grunion, are particularly noteworthy for their California swinger sex life. Each spring, for two or three nights following the full or new moon, these otherwise mild-mannered and respectable fish, fling themselves upon the sandy beaches of So Cal where they wile away twenty minutes of slithering, sliding conjugal bliss before making the flop of shame back to the anonymous depths of the sea. (What happens on the seashore, stays on the seashore.) Grunion runs, as they are called, are so precisely timed that they can be predicted to with an hour - it's one of those freaky things of nature where the animal kingdom slyly lets us know that they are much more on top of the situation than we gave them credit for, and that we should be worried because they probably have something else more sinister up their sleeves. (Or scales, as the case may be.)

We got to the site a good hour or two before the predicted run because the aquarium had all kinds of exhibits and demos for the grunion-uninitiated. We saw a movie clearly made in the 50's where the crisp, big-voiced narrator over a jaunty soundtrack described very matter-of-factly, in details that made us squirm like our focus fish, all the gory intricacies of the fishy fantasy, using words like "spawn" and "milt." Feeling a little dirty, we then went through some of the museum exhibits and displays where we continued to fail to shake the imagery from the movie.

In the courtyard awaiting the big event.

One demo held out in the courtyard was particularly fascinating. Each group was given a little baby-food jar with what looked to be a small clump of sand in it. These were sandy grunion eggs, we were told. A volunteer came by with a pitcher of sea water and poured a little in each jar. We examined the brew, which looked pretty much like what a lump of sand soaked in water would be expected to look. "Agitate your jars gently," we were told. The docent demonstrated covering the jar and swirling it, surprisingly ungentlely, for the crowd. "Now look at it." We did and as the swirling sand slowly subsided all of a sudden all these tiny little translucent commas began to spring out and dart around. It looked, if I can harken back to another 50's video allusion, much like the microscope view of what they probably showed you in the much-too-candid sex-ed videos of the day, if you catch my drift. Again, I felt a little dirty, but at least it was a fascinating sense of moral corruption.

Baby grunion.

While we were exploring one of L's favorite classmates, K, and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tanaka, arrived, the meeting having been prearranged by the Mom's earlier that day. While the kids orbited us in celestial frenzy we adults waited expectantly as the night deepened and unspeakable things began happening on the beaches outside.

The Tanakas and the Perkins

A great white, clearly biting off more than he can chew.

Eventually the moment of truth arrived and the docents lead us down to the beach in the near pitch dark. We were lined up on the sand a few feet from the tideline and were told to keep all our flashlights off and our jumping about to a minimum. (We complied with the flashlight part.) They wanted to let the run build, because evidently the fish are a little shy. Wouldn't you be? Every few minutes they said, "OK, turn on your flashlights!" and everyone would flood the beach to be greeted with a scene worthy of Imperial Rome at its most decadent. The beach was full of hundreds, maybe thousands, of small silvery wigglies getting their fishy groove on.

Pretend you can actually see hundreds of silver shapes writhing in utter abandon.

Grunion are evidently considered a delicacy. The spawning season had actually been going on since April, but tonight was the first night in which the fishing season opened for people who actually wanted to catch and eat the little buggers. The law, which restricts the season to June, allows you to catch all you want (provided you have a license if you are over 16), but you have to do so by hand. So there were quite a lot of people there with buckets and a few with napkins around their necks. After the run had built to a peak the docents turned us loose and there was a wild stampede to the beach with folks pulling writhing romantics from their affairs and plopping them into their buckets anticlimactically. L and N and K plunged into the fray with the rest of them and quickly scored handfuls of the shameful spawners. (They were all subsequently spared and told to return to the sea and sin no more.) N was a particularly formidable hunter/gatherer and would dart suddenly off in some dark direction and return back smiling and dripping with his hands full of fish. If we had any video I'd submit it as an audition for the next iteration of The Deadliest Catch.

All in all it didn't take too long for the beach to be cleared of everything except wet sandy children, leaving only the long fussy trudge to our respective cars to complete the evening. Striped and dusted, the kids were piled into their booster seats and covered with a blanket where they relived the thrills and spills of the evening while we waited to escape the parking gridlock. For some reason, probably L.A. county budget cuts, they only had a single parking attendant taking the tickets and parking fees at the front entrance. With hundreds of cars, all jockeying for position, not unlike the sex-starved fauna of earlier, getting out of the lot was a major ordeal. The park rangers, trying to stem a riot, drove through the parking lots announcing that the wait for the gate would be 45 minutes. They were being optimistic. We parked the car, turned off the lights and put back our seats and just watched all the best and worst of humanity unfold in the writhing lines of cars trying to get out of the parking lot 30 seconds earlier than one another. The kids seemed only briefly interested in the social commentary and soon found other more productive things to do with their time.

Bluebells and Greenbacks

2011-06-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

Last year L's school had a fund raiser event and I donated a custom oil painting for their silent auction - I would paint the winning bidder an oil painting of anything they wanted. The painting ended up bringing in $100 and the winner ended up being the parents of one of Stacy's piano students (small world). It took them a couple months to decide what they wanted me to paint, but eventually they found a subject and I slaved away for another couple of months and wrapped it up this week!

Here's the original source picture.

I offered another custom oil painting for this year's auction and this time it went for $125. The winners haven't contacted me yet, so the future subject is still a big mystery. With my luck the winners will probably want a black velvet Elvis.

Hi-Ho the Derry-o - The Farmer in the Hood!

2011-05-29T21:36:00.000-07:00

L's class took a field trip to a farm earlier this year and each child was given a little plant to grow on their own. L got a radish and she planted it in a pot in the front yard where it was watered and fertilized by L, N and most of the neighborhood cats. The day of radish reckoning eventually came and L was pleased to see the fruits, or rather, vegetables of her labors.

WWF Slap-Down!

2011-05-29T08:41:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like a freshly stripped bed for an impromptu

World Wrestling Federation

SLAP-DOWN!!!

It's pretty clear who got his clock cleaned...

See the Sea

2011-05-14T10:59:00.000-07:00

L's Kindergarten class has been doing a unit on marine life. They've been learning about the ocean and all the happy, smiling denizens that live therein. One of her assignments was to pick a favorite sea animal and make a diorama about it. Many of L's little friends chose starfish and clown fish and other cheerful specimen. There were whales and otters and a plethora of other critters of the murky depths. L, however, didn't fool around. Eshewing all sentimentality and gentility, Little Miss Priss immediately chose her favorite sea creature; the ravenous, blood-drenched, sociopathic Great White Shark.

L is focused and no-nonsense when it comes to artwork, so she took it all very seriously. We tried to inject ourselves as all good overbearing and controlling parents do, but she really would not be helped. Daddy was relegated to printing out a cut-out of a shark and hunting in the garage for glue, but that was pretty much the extent of my creative contract. The bulk she did on her own. Once she's done with her nuclear physicist degrees at Oxford, she just might have to take up art at the Sorbonne. (Though I fear her work may have dark and disturbing overtones.)

Not to be allowed to rule the seas unchallenged, N insisted on making a diorama as well. Since his pre-K class is known as the "Sea Turtles" he had no difficulty finding a suitable subject.

A Four Year Old Philosophizes on Life, Death and Abandonment

2011-05-08T21:02:00.000-07:00

I cuddled with N on the bottom bunk a bit tonight when I put him down. This evening, not uncommonly, we had a bit of a philosophical discussion. N has been pondering concepts of mortality, but doesn't seem to be particularly oppressed by it as his sister sometimes gets. His ponderings generally take a stream-of-consciousness type of feel and don't really seem to require much in the way of acknowledgment or comment.

"Daddy, did you know that kids don't know when they are going to die? Nobody knows when they are going to die. When you're 70 or 80 or 90, then you might die. Or you might live to 100 or maybe 200. Or you might live to 1000. Did you know that there are people that lived to 1000? They are all in heaven with God. They lived a long, long time. Did you know that some day you will die?"

He paused for the briefest of moments.

"That will make me have a lot of tears... And they won't be happy tears."

But gazing up at the sheets hanging from the upper bunk he was quickly distracted to another subject and the maudlin moment passed. "Daddy, I've decided on days that L has to go school but I don't, I get to sleep in the top bunk." (L is in full-time kindergarten whereas N goes to preschool on Tuesdays and Thursdays.) "Mommy has put my very favorite sheets on the top bunk and I never get to sleep on them," he explained. "Daddy, what's your phone number at work?" The sudden apparent shift in subject matter caught me off guard. I read out my work phone number a couple of digits at a time, secretly worried that he would actually remember it. He repeated back the chunks as I said them. At the end his face screwed up in consideration. "Daddy, you'll have to write it down for me."

"Why do you need my work phone number?" I ventured.

"Because when I sleep on the top bunk Mommy will forget about me when she takes L to school, so I'll need to call you so you can get me down."

"I see."

L is for Launch!

2011-05-06T22:47:00.000-07:00

Thursday, May 5, 2011 may go down in the annals of space flight. People may look back on that day and recognize a pivot-point in man's conquest of the cosmos. History books will venerate the day and folks will say, "I remember where I was on that fateful occasion!" After all, it was the day that the spark of life was lit in the heart of the world's soon-to-be most accomplished astrophysicist.

Once a year Boeing, like many other megalithic corporations, gets all schmaltzy and family-friendly and sponsors a "Take Your Child to Work" day. They glitz it up good with welcome breakfasts and lots of tot-appropriate classes and whiz-bang demos and goodie-bags, and for one shining day the grey halls of industry are overrun with teeming hoards of colorful youth. Technically L missed this year's age requirement by two months, but my manager, obviously fearing age-discrimination litigation, chose to overlook the fact and allowed me to sign her up. (There was no hope, however, of passing N off as legal.) Never was there a more spazzed out kid as she when Mommy broke the news to her the day before. L would get to go to work with Daddy in the morning and see all the things that go on where he works! A heart-wrenching of equal magnitude on the opposite end of the spectrum was wisely averted by promises to N that he would get to check out of school at lunch time and go up to El Segundo with Mommy to retrieve his sister and have lunch with his Daddy. This, with many promises of workday trips with Daddy in years to come managed to soften the blow.

On Thursday morning L was up at 5:00am with me - much earlier than we had any need to be up - and she presented herself fully bedecked in her finest church dress. She was heavily wounded a couple of hours later when Mommy told her she couldn't wear it and to put on something more business-casual. When the fateful hour arrived Daddy and L proceeded out to the car for the hallowed drive to the aerospace Mecca in El Segundo. Emotions ran high on all fronts. L was thrilled and at risk of hyperventilation. N managed to keep it all together, but the eyes were a little misty here and there. Mommy was maudlin, experiencing yet another of those "they're growing up too fast" moments. And I was stoked to get to use the carpool lane.

My work site has a pretty big campus and L was rather impressed with all the buildings and the security guards at the gates. She knew she'd hit the serious stuff, however, when she got to ride up six stories of a spiral garage to find a place to park. We walked to my home org's main building where they had graciously put on a breakfast for all the visitors. L scarfed scrambled eggs and chocolate milk while watching videos of satellite solar array deployments and Proton rocket launches. She managed to get a thin coating of bacon grease and pineapple juice all over the two-foot wide satellite model that was passed around.

After the breakfast it was off to the demos! The first thing we hit was a demonstration involving liquid nitrogen. We sat on the front row while an engineer explained about how super-cold the liquid was and how it was used to test the satellites at space-like temperatures. He then took volunteers to come and dip things in his drum of liquid N₂ and examine the results. One kid soaked a spongy rubber ball and was amazed at how hard it was when it emerged from its bath. The docent told him to throw it against the wall, and when he did it shattered into a dozen pieces. L kept a small fragment which got all spongy again once it thawed out. At one point they brought out a huge restaurant-sized alluminum mixing bowl filled with a frothy cream and sugar mixture. One of the docents stirred the pot while another poured a scintillating stream of liquid nitrogen into the mixture. Within seconds they were scooping out ice cream for the kids to eat. Eventually L got called up and was given a turn to pick something to freeze. She chose a cut tulip from a bouquet sitting nearby. She goggled up, put on rubber gloves, was given some big old barbecue tongs and a flower. She lowered it down in and a few seconds later pulled out a brittle, frosted tulip with petals that shattered like glass when she touched them. She kept her decapitated tulip stalk with her the rest of the day.

Several other sessions followed: she made an FM radio out of individual electronic components, she learned about composting (and got a small Chinese take-out box of garbage-devouring earthworms to take home), she got to walk the myriad halls of the factory and see satellites being assembled from an observation deck. And, most exciting of all, she got to make her very own mini-satellite out of a mountain of arts and crafts supplies. The four hours flew by and before we knew it, it was time to meet Mommy and N for lunch.

Where does one go for lunch when one has aerospace on the brain? In-N-Out, of course. Now there's nothing inherently high-tech about a Double-Double and a chocolate shake contributes little, if anything, to a day of space-play. It wasn't the In-N-Out in the abstract; it wasn't the In-N-Out, per se, that was the drawing point - it was this particular In-N-Out. This particular In-N-Out is located at the tail end of the north landing runway of the Los Angeles International Airport. (Known as LAX, which is clearly a reference to its security.) At this particular, unique and utterly singular In-N-Out one literally sees the world coming and going; one watches the wheels of civilization move, and considering how close the planes are, its not entirely inconceivable that you might just have a bolt from one of those wheels land in your order of French fries.

After we'd finished our lunch and had our fill of watching some of Boeing's other fine products parade by we packed up and headed out. For me, it was back to work. For Mommy, L and N, it was home to discuss the events of the day. (As Stacy listened to all of the things L got to do she became more and more bitter, wondering when they were going to have a "Take Your Wife to Work" day. "I've never gotten to see a satellite," she moped.)

That evening when I got home we decided to put what L learned to good use. A satellite doesn't just show up on orbit one day. Once the design and building is complete it undergoes months of rigorous and crucial testing. Not willing to trust our luck, we needed to verify that L had produced a flight-qualified product. We took her finely and exquisitely designed satellite and put it through its paces.

Pre-test inspections

First it undergoes grueling Thermal-Vacuum testing.

Then experts are brought in to oversee Random Vibration testing

Testing complete, the satellite is prepped and readied for launch!

Mission accomplished!

A Dry Run at Easter

2011-04-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

Our Easter afternoon plans started out ambitious. We were going to have a bunch of friends over for Easter dinner after church - a couple of families with children and a fine assortment of handcrafted singles had our attendance list up to fourteen, counting us and counting kids. But then the balloon began to deflate. One guy had to work. Another was subjected to familial guilt until he bowed out a broken man to spend the holiday with his family. An emergency gall badder surgery took another family out of action, then L caught walking pneumonia, which effectively drove the last of our holdout invitees running for the hills. So what do you do when you're poised and ready to feed an army, but the army is off fighting other wars? You hold training exercises!

Thoroughly undaunted, we rescheduled everyone for Easter Dinner Part Deux next week, then proceeded to trial run all the recipes we would otherwise have winged. What we could store for a week we shelved, but the bulk of the dinner was executed to plan. The menu was roast leg of lamb with a balsamic vinegar glaze, roasted root vegetables (rutabaga, parsnips and carrots) with rosemary, cold steamed asparagus with a curry dipping sauce, and a small bottle of chilled bubbly. Stacy had also tucked away a special strawberry pie for the occasion. The exercises were both tactical and strategic and many lessons-learned were accumulated during the campaign. For example, asparagus doesn't need 8 minutes in the steamer unless you're actually shooting for something that looks like emerald paste at the end. Similarly 400°F might be the right temp to quick fire a plain ole roast, but it was a wee too hot for a glazed one - lower the temp and extend the time. The root veggies had been peeled and diced the evening before and had sat the night zip-locked in the fridge drenched in olive oil, all of which should have been drained off prior to trying to roast them. But all in all the faux pas were cosmetic and things turned out well.

I wasn't expecting great things from the kids with regard to the lamb - N made a point of mentioning how badly it smelled cooking at least three times (and he had a point) - but when it came time to plate it all up, there was a rather dramatic change of heart. I had timed it to be medium, but the roast was chubby in the center and tapered at the end, so there was actually a fairly nice variety of levels of "doneness" to choose from. The kids, to Stacy's quivering horror, demanded only the bright red pieces that quivered as she did. I thought the first morsel would cure them of that (while Stacy thought it more likely to poison them), but the young tykes showed themselves to be true carnivores and chomped it down cool and red. They both had second helpings; N actually went back to the well four times. (Mary may have had a little lamb, but N's portion was substantial.) Even Stacy seemed pleased with her much more grayish selection.

But everyone agreed the evening standout was the strawberry pie. I'm not normally a strawberry pie person. I've been abused too much at the hands of Marie Calendars and her towering monstrosities of cardboard berries and red rubber glaze. But this was different. Stacy had gone to the farmers market earlier in the week to get some berries and had been thoroughly disappointed with the early season offerings. She was about to abandon the idea when she saw a stand off by itself selling a varietal called "Gaviota" strawberries. They were very pricey, about double what the other berries ran, so she didn't really consider them until the vendor thrust a sample at her. Her later description of the experience made me think of 70's flower children and their stories about first trying acid. She plunked down more jingle than I'd like to think about and came away with a future strawberry pie par excellence. This brings me to a final lesson learned for the Easter dry run: A single Gaviota strawberry pie will simply not cut it for a party of fourteen.

Random Familial Oddities

2011-04-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

Assembling bedroom furniture

Things have been monstrously busy in our household of late. I've been working tons of hours to keep caught up at work and when I'm home our days and nights have been pretty much exclusively dedicated to the bedroom swap and office gutting and all the associated paraphernalia displacement that that brought about. There has been nearly no downtime. I've not posted much as a result, though, certainly, the world has continued to swirl and gyrate around us. As I'm not expecting things to improve in the immediate near term, I figured I'd better take a moment or two to share a couple of quick mini-stories and mildly interesting encounters, lest I forget them in the endless flow through of time. Most of them feature N who has been prolific in his musings and ponderings of late. Enjoy.

N: Did you know that when you go potty, your brains come out? That's the first thing that comes out!

I never realized how prone our house was to volcanic eruptions. They have been ubiquitous of late. Luckily the kids have a top bunk to flee to, which they do quite often. (Evidently Mommies and Daddies are immune to hot lava.) The lava flows, I am told, usually reach 100 feet, but that is not a concern, because N assures me that the top bunk is a "googelin" feet high.

N: Mommy, are hippopotamuses octurtles?

Mommy: Yes, they stay up at night.

I walked down the hall one morning to notice L in the bathroom doing her business tinkling with the door wide open. She was yelling out brusk instructions to N who was in the living room setting up things on a little TV table. "You have to make sure everything is done by the time I get back," she yelled.

"What are you doing?" I asked from my hallway vantage point.

"Playing school. I'm the teacher and N's the principal," she responded.

"I hope the teachers are a little more discrete than this at your school," I observed. "And generally speaking, the principal is the teacher's boss, so he should be giving you instructions."

She thought about this a moment, perched upon her seat of contemplation, and then promptly demoted N. "Then he's a teacher's aide."

N: Daddy, do you make satellites at work?

Daddy: Yes, I do indeed.

N: Is making satellites very hard?

Daddy: Yes, it is very hard.

N: Daddy, you should get used to it, because you've been doing it a very long time. Or you should do something easier.

I recall a similar conversation a month or two ago with my functional manager.

I had my traditional Saturday morning tea yesterday with the kids. Nate decided he wanted his hot tea made into ice tea, so I put it in the fridge and set the timer for an hour. N camped out in front of the timer and plaintively called the play-by-play. "Daddy, it says 5-8! Is it ready? ... It's 5-7! Is it ready? ... " Ten minutes in and he showed no signs of waning enthusiasm.

Everyone I've told this story to asks me why I didn't must put ice in it. Don't really know myself, but for the sake of looking like a rational and engaged father, I'll claim it was to provide an object lesson to teach him the difference between a hour and minutes and seconds. Yeah, that's why I did it that way.

At any rate, I don't know if he has any improved sense of scale regarding our standard units of time, but he has developed an engineering nerd's fascination with timing everything and anything. He made us explain how to set the timer on the stove so that it's "counting down" instead of "counting up" and now he engages himself regularly in timing the minutia of our daily lives. I've realized now that I can't hold him off any longer with the standard "wait a minute" deferral, because he will do exactly that, and let you know just how much you've exceeded your promise.

Perkins Palace of Pancake Pleasures

2011-04-03T08:06:00.000-07:00

L was up at 6:00 with me this morning, so I put her to good use as a short order cook and had her help me whip up a batch of pancakes. The smoke detector only shrieked into the early morning quiet twice, so it was, all-in-all, a successful cooking adventure. The alarm, however, summoned N who complained all teary-eyed about being woken up, but who was nevertheless extremely offended at being told he could always go back to bed.

The pancakes were soon piled on plates with butter and maple syrup at the ready. There were regular-sized pancakes for general consumption; there were a couple of inch wide mini-pancakes for kid giggles, and there was one gigantic Daddy pancake that took up an entire plate. Again, N was offended at not being offered a Daddy pancake. L managed to get a good pint or two of syrup on hers before I caught her. Meanwhile I seemed to be having some sort of isolated memory-loss event with N with regards to buttering his pancakes. I could have sworn that I'd put butter on them twice already, but evidence appeared to indicate the contrary. I sliced off what seemed to me to be a third pat and laid it on N's pancakes and stared it down a second or two to make sure it didn't disappear before my eyes. It did. On the end of N's fork. "It tastes better before it's melted," said N through a mouthful of grease.

The kids agreed that these were the best pancakes ever and N suggested that we "open a house where we make only pancakes and let people come and eat them. Kids wouldn't have to pay anything." I started to point out the shortcomings of a business model that didn't charge the most ambitious customers, but I reconsidered. Maybe we didn't have to charge the kids for the pancakes so long as we charged them for butter and syrup by the pound.

What's Good for the Gander is Good for the Goose

2011-03-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

N was firmly established in a new room earlier this week, but L has been sleeping over every night since her bed was confiscated to build the bunk beds. Today, however, Stacy and I had a chance to make it to Burbank to pick up a brand new bed (brand new to us anyway) from GGma and GGpa. We were able to find a couple of square feet of carpet under all the junk in her room and Mommy attacked it with all the cleaning paraphernalia at her disposal. A few ratched bolts later and L's bed was assembled and ready for the first mount. Celebrations ensued.

We'll see how well N handles having his own room now that his sister isn't there to torment him mercilessly all night.

A Boy Comes Into His Own

2011-03-27T15:56:00.000-07:00

It's a rite of passage long in coming. We've had L and N sharing a room ever since N arrived to cramp L's style. The reason was simple: our dense-pack So Cal subsistence in our 3-bedroom bungalow did not allow for separate kid's rooms while still maintaining the non-negotiable of Daddy's office. The office, affectionately known as "The Cave," was my sacred retreat ground; a place to weather the storms of life and Daddyhood. An enormous desk, a computer, big book cases stuffed with books that were therapeutic, not because I actually read any of them, but because they were just there, radiating wisdom and well-roundedness into the very air, a mini-stereo with an an auxiliary iPod hook up - all contributed to the man-spa, the shrine, the anointed place of otherness.

Anointed places of otherness don't stand the test of time very well.

I've known for a while my days of retreat and reinvigoration were numbered. As the kids have grown, so have the frictions. By inflicting crampedness on the two smallest members of the family to buy a little breathing room for the largest, we'd given ourselves ever-diminishing returns. First of all, the room they shared had become a perpetual disaster area, looking much like the aftermath of a sizable tsunami. (After all, who wants to clean up their 99 lbs. of scattered toys when their sibling's 3 lbs. are distributed through-out?) And second, bedtimes were stretching like summer sun towards a solstice as the chit-chat, rough-housing and the occasional song-fest would leak out of the room for several hours after lights-out. Stacy and I knew Abraham and Lot would need to part ways. We understood our little zygote would have to undergo binary fission. We who had become one were grimmly aware that the one would need to become two. We just didn't want to... OK, I didn't want to give up the man-cave.

Sorting - yeah, sure they are.

We whole-heartedly acknowledged the need to separate the two, and I was able to pretend for a while that we were actually serious. Denial was quite easily accommodated. In the spirit of progress toward our goal, we kicked off a remodel to add an office nook to one end of the kitchen. The never-ending project was the perfect mechanism to suggest that I was moving forward with the inevitable while actually maintaining the comfortable status quo for months and months. But alas, even eternal kitchen remodels reach a point where you can't pretend any longer and have to admit that you really could dissolve the office and separate the rooms now if you tried. After that I had to resort to the "need a good long weekend" excuse, which is always a guarantee of a couple more months of man-cave. But eventually, last week, I had the unfortunate inconvenience of working shift-work over the weekend and flexing the following Friday off. Presto! A three-day weekend. My excuses had run out. Time to divide the nations. I now know how the president of Yugoslavia must have felt.

Nothing that is intended to increase the overall level of organization gets to the goal directly. Fighting entropy is an inevitably non-linear proposition. In order to make things nice and tight and neat, you have to undergo a small natural disaster in the process. Rooms have to be gutted, bed's have to be decomposed, mattresses have to be stashed in the most ludicrous parts of the home, and the entire shifting maneuver has to take on the logistical planning of a multinational NATO operation. The commander of forces has to ensure that the native populace, though eagerly willing to assist in any and all of the tasks at hand, are suitably quarantined to prevent collateral damage. And believe me, the native populace will be exceedingly excited.

One of many "temporary" dumping grounds.

And there is no such thing as a surgical strike. One does not move in, engage in bedroom shock and awe, and walk away, mission accomplished, in a day. The rebuilding of the infrastructure will take days, weeks or months. Our living room, kitchen, master bedroom and assorted hallways are littered with the refuse of life looking for a good box or drawer to call home. And much is MIA. I have yet to figure out where my stapler is, and imagine that it will be found by the local citizenry and put to dubious use long before I stumble upon it. But the deed is done, or at least irrevocably initiated, and we are committed to the long haul. I will not be so presumptuous as to provide a timetable for the ending of hostilities against the axis of evil (entropy, overcrowding, and inter-sibling aggression), but we are signed up to see it through, at least until we go stir-crazy amid all the junk and haul it into the backyard for a glorious bonfire.

The initial ascent

In Xanadu did Kubla-N a stately pleasure dome decree

The sound sleep of a man with a sense of establishment.

When Children Fend for Themselves

2011-03-20T08:33:00.000-07:00

Stacy and I got home from a concert pretty late last night,* so we were dragging a little bit this morning. The kids were up bright and early with their usual vivacity and we could hear them puttering away in the kitchen. The usual clinks and bumps emanating from the area didn't concern us; we usually trigger on crashes of shattering glass or blood-curdling screams. Eventually I dragged my bedraggled self out of bed and staggered Frankenstein-like to the kitchen. The kids had made their own breakfast, I noticed at once. (Not unusual.) L had toast with peanut butter; N had toast with jelly. (Not unusual.) But there was something weird, something most unusual. I looked again at their jelly and peanut butter toasts and found they'd taken some culinary liberties with the traditional recipe. Both kids had covered their condiments with big ole slices of salami.

"N didn't like it at first," said L, "but now he loves it." N nodded his agreement.

"Mine looks like a car," N pointed out, showing me his toast, carefully gnawed upon to leave two large salami wheels.

*"Great Big Sea" - an incredible Celtic/Folk/Rock band from New Foundland, who give a pretty fantasic concert by the way!

Our Thoughts Are With Japan

2011-03-13T17:13:00.000-07:00

Lip-syncing to the Furniture

2011-03-06T19:43:00.000-08:00

L, who, much like her father, is the physical embodiment of grace, poise and dexterity, decided this afternoon to take a flying leap at an end table. She assaulted it head on, choosing to spring her attack on the defenseless sharp corner edge using her fearsome and awesome lower left lip. Much to everyone's surprise, L came out the worse of the two. What must have been two gallons of blood and three urgent-care hours later, all we had to show for it were some somewhat morbid spots on the carpet and a rather lop-sided fat lip. No concussion. No skull fracture. Not even a creepy stitch.

I felt extremely gypped. Given the amount of worry-capital we expended mopping up her mouth and looking into securing a medevac helicopter, we should have gotten a better emotional payout. Now don't get me wrong. I don't want life-scarring debilitation or horrific maiming. No, that would be extreme. But when you spend three hours in an urgent care waiting room with a melting ice pack made from paper towels and congealed blood, you want to know that your time and worry have been well-spent. You need a viable souvenir. Something mildly traumatic, perhaps, but essentially fully-recoverable. Ideally, a severed-but-surgically-reattached small toe or something like that, but such rewards are few and far between. And anyway, we knew that was too much to ask, since, of course, her shoes were inconveniently on at the time. But we sure would have been pleased with a nice dozen or so loops of catgut running the full span of her lower lip.

This Charge I Entrust to You

2011-02-27T16:28:00.000-08:00

In general I tend to keep both Church and State on the sidelines in this blog. I'm not a particularly confrontational person and public debate, be it religion or politics, has never been my thing. If pressed unrelentingly I will 'fess up my general leanings, but, right or wrong, I rarely feel the urge to take the initiative. But this Sunday has been so special in the life of our family and our church that it would be somewhat historically remiss of me not to chronicle it in some fashion.

Our church, Grace United Reformed Church, celebrated our twelfth anniversary this Sunday. That in and of itself is a significant milestone. But we almost forgot the anniversary and the reflection on our past in light of the events of the day and their implications for the future. Last month, after several months of consideration, our Elders Board (our "Consistory") issued a calling to a recent seminary graduate, Mr. William Godfrey. Mr. Godfrey accepted the call, and this Sunday, in a wonderfully rich and meaningful service, our church ordained him as Minister of the Word and Sacrament. Mr. Godfrey is now the Reverend Godfrey and has taken on, quite literally, the mantle of service as co-pastor of our congregation, along side our veteran, Pastor Greg Bero.

This has been the culmination of several months of preparation where Mr. Godfrey has been preaching and serving in our church in an internship of sorts to see if the fit was there. It was indeed and our family, along with (I am convinced) the entirety of our church congregation, have grown to love and appreciate Bill immensely. We are ecstatic to have the day finally arrive to welcome Bill formally into our congregation. We've been richly blessed and we are looking forward to the next dozen years with Pastor Godfrey helping chart the course.

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here am I! Send me.”

-- Isaiah 6:8

These Are the Voyages of the Dawn Ship Treader

2011-02-26T21:32:00.000-08:00

Tonight we finished Book 3 in the Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This has always been my favorite of the Narnia books, so I particularly enjoyed reading it to L and N. Their hands-down favorite throughout the book has been Reepicheep, the honor-obsessed mouse with a Napoleon complex. They would always laugh heartily whenever their diminutive hero would come out swinging. I found it amusing because in all my previous reads I had always loathed the character, who seemed to represent only arrogant machismo and bravado to me. But as I've read it this time and I've watched the kid's reaction to him, I've somewhat softened my antagonism toward the good mouse. I would no longer like to see a cat make a nice meal of him, but I still wouldn't mind seeing Reepicheep get a good, if not fatal, feline thrashing from time to time.

Mission Impossumable

2011-02-26T10:12:00.000-08:00

I got home from painting class around 9:15 on Thursday night, slow and sleepy. It had been a long day prior to class, so I was not the most alert or quick on the uptake. That's why it took a couple of minutes and several passes between the house and the car unloading my stuff before I realized what was clearly in my field of view the whole time. Perched upon the power line running the back line of our yard was an interloper. An operative! A clandestine agent bent on some secret reconnaissance! It had frozen in place hoping (and almost succeeding in that hope) that I would not observe his skulking silhouette. A spy! A spook! A mole! (OK, maybe not a mole in the strict sense of the word...) Clearly an undercover asset of considerable skill, he employed the famed death-freeze which would have been entirely convincing, were rigor mortis not quite so incompatible with tight-rope walking.

I sensed a challenge had been issued. I'm not exactly sure how I sensed this, but I knew nevertheless that, had there been a gauntlet high upon the wire, it would have been thrown down on the roof of garage for me to have to pick up the next day. One shady creature of the night had identified another and there wasn't room in town for the both of us. I fixed on him for a half hour or so with my bleary end-of-the-day-glare, and he watched me back through eyes clouded with faux-death. Neither budged. For all our immobility, our stares were piercing and violent. We locked and held. And no one flinched. Well, not at first... OK, do you know how boring it can get playing a stare-down game with a possum? Finally I realized that I have more that I want to accomplish in life than being Alpha-dog to a marsupial, so I caved and went inside. As I closed the front door I'm convinced I heard a self-satisfied hissing chuckle and in that brief moment I reconsidered whether all my other life ambitions really shouldn't have been sacrified to teach the little rat a lesson.

¡Burritos Parmigiana!

2011-02-19T18:55:00.000-08:00

We originally planned to go out to dinner tonight, but a lovely lazy rain-soaked afternoon dissipated our desires to be out and about. But this put Stacy in a conundrum: What to do for dinner? We just got back from a family vacation (which in and of itself is another grand motivator to eat at home), and we hadn't had a chance to restock the fridge, so a readily-prepareable dinner wasn't immediately obvious. She called me in and we perused our ingredient options - far more condiments than content. We eventually settled on an unorthodox, but decidedly multicultural plan: Italian sausage burritos! We boiled up a frozen package of sausages, sautéd some garlic and lonely red onions, then wrapped them in some old tortillas with a dab or two of sour cream.

Skepticism abounds.

I know this wasn't the melding of great culinary traditions. It will never be hailed as an Italio-Mexican version of the Camp David accord. We realize that we won't be publishing the next best-selling cookbook phenom. (Burritos, Prego!) What it was was a quick and dirty dinner which turned out to be quite tasty. We may actually have to forget to grocery shop again soon.

恭喜發財 - Or Rather, "Congratulations and Prosperity!"

2011-02-12T18:28:00.000-08:00

No one can say the men of the Perkins family aren't culturally adventurous! A week or two ago N's preschool celebrated Chinese New Year with more activities than you could shake a chopstick at! They had their special lunch, a traditional New Year's parade with drums and costumes, and then, of course, the resoundingly reptilian climax to it all - the precession of the dragon!

N was heavily involved in all the festivities, even taking a turn at the dragon helm! Tremendous and terrifying, I have no reason to doubt!

Meanwhile a few L.A. basin municipalities away I was privy to a very authentic New Year's Dim Sum with a big group of co-workers. It was an adventure not for the squeamish. No Panda Express here! Among the delicacies being pushed around on little carts were stewed chicken feet, pickled seaweed, and dried, chopped up, and reconstituted jellyfish. I actually liked the seaweed, which actually had a noodle consistency and texture. Though I won't be seeking it out the next time I'm at Rice Queen, I was able to sample a few morsels of the jellyfish. I was expecting the texture to be seriously weird, and it was, but not in the weird way I expected - it was actually somewhat chewing - more calimari than jelly-goo. Having conqueored seaweed and jellyfish, I rather was proud of my cultural excursions, so I didn't feel too bad about telling the chicken feet to cross the road. Don't ask why.

Rosalynn, Eric, me and Vera, and yes, that is the celebrated seaweed!

There were also, of course, dozens of other offerings of various degrees of non-Westerness, and most of the were really pretty fantastic. I think Stacy would enjoy doing this sometime, but this place was really old school, and I'd be a little afraid of going there all by our lonesome. There's something to be said about eating jellyfish when you know it's jellyfish. I would definitely be a little more daunted by an untranslated mystery lump.

We whities were few and far between!

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

So What Kind of Shoes Does One Wear with Shingles?

2011-02-09T21:48:00.000-08:00

OK, I've heard it isn't a great idea to suggest that a certain dress makes a woman looks like a house, but what about a roof?

Stacy has been bequeathed a number of dresses recently. The story behind how she came to get these dresses is so thoroughly bizarre that I don't quite have the gumption to put it down in print. It will take a lot of prodding and probably a considerable amount of hard alcohol to get to the point of ever willingly publishing those tawdry details.* (Let's just suffice to say that hanging out with the generous gift-giver could prove to be a real drag.) So I shall set aside for a moment the nefarious tale of how we came across said dresses, and instead, jump directly to the haute catwalk modelling of them that Stacy afforded me this evening.

*I prefer Scotch, if anyone's wondering.

The first piece of art is, well,... rather structural. It has an, <ahem>, layered look that speaks of... warmth, shelter and protection from the elements... Oh, heck, she's wearing a roof! It's really that simple: a roof. Complete with shingles. Someone should sew on a few gutters and a companion water spout.

1-800-STARVE-FAST: If it worked
for me, it will work for you!!!

Then there is the dress fit only for an "after" shot.

Cinco de Mayo is in the can!

OK, this one isn't absolutely horrendous. We do live in LA, after all, so she might get some use out of it.

Oh my Goth!

Stolen from the set of Tim Burton's latest project:

Better dead than red.

I'm honestly lost for a comment.

Teeth for Two, and Two for Teeth

2011-01-30T21:26:00.000-08:00

At some point I'd like to think that pearls of wisdom will drop from my children's lips on a regular basis. For now, however, we are contenting ourselves with falling chunks of dental enamel. Half an hour after bedtime L came scurrying out all a twitter, sporting a newly widened gap in her pearly whites. Tooth #2 made a break for it. This one didn't give as much lead-up drama as the first. While eating dinner earlier this evening she had taken a bite and given a quick squeal of pain; she opened her mouth to show her previously slightly jiggly tooth was now flat out floppy. So this one we sort of expected. That didn't abate the excitement, however. Giddy girl was bouncing around as if she'd won more than just the incisor lotto. Such excitement is highly contagious, so soon her as-of-yet fully-toothed brother was out of bed to join the celebration. Quick phone calls to Uncle Kyle, Poppa and Aunt Claudia helped channel the enthusiasm. She's back in bed now, but I expect we will be waiting quite a while before we hear any snoring.

I suggested to Stacy that the Tooth Fairy might leave a note thanking L for the second tooth, and letting her know she'll be back tomorrow with some pliers for the rest of them.

Thpreading the newth.

The Days of Wine and Mimi - Part 3

2011-01-29T13:08:00.000-08:00

Christmas makes you feel emotional
It may bring parties or thoughts devotional
--"Silver Bells" by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans

For millions of Americans it can also lead to crippling stress, acute depression, and mind-numbing despair. We try to walk a middle ground in our family.

"Jazz Hands!"

Our children seem somehow to have been conceived and born without that gene that causes them to wake up at 2am on Christmas morning. I don't regret it. It's rather nice to, even on Christmas, get up alone and have a kitchen and a pot of tea to myself for an hour or two. This year my morning reverie was happily accompanied by early-rising Mimi and we swapped out strong coffee for my sissy tea. Late nights make for pleasantly lazy mornings and it was way beyond what would have been construed as a decent hour in my childhood before the first bleary-eyed, dopey-faced, stiff and staggering kid made his/her way out from the bedrooms.

Eventually we rounded up the entire crew, got a putative breakfast into them, and launched into the Christmas morning gift assault. Daddy and Grampy traded off gift-giving responsibilities (a big deal in our family), until L and N could contain themselves no longer and staged a coup d'état and jointly ascended to the role. As usual the haul was excessive and somewhat troubling, considering the depressing and constant downward trend of our open-to-stuffed living space ratio. I secretly planned a purge of all vintage 2009 gifts.

After the gift-giving had reached its opulent conclusion, Stacy and I turned to prep for the evening dinner. We were hosting the extended family with beau coup to do to be ready to chew. Vegetables were hacked to bits, turkeys were offended, cranberries were set a-stewing. Appetizers assembled, desserts designed, sides and staples slopped together. As usual, however, a little work breeds a little rest, and the beds and pillows were not entirely forsaken.

The appointed festive hour descended at last and our guests began trickling in. Aunt Claudia brought GGPa. Aunt Joyce and Mr. Jay joined us from Monrovia. Kirk and Lynne came down with Uncle Kyle, who was much-anticipated by L and N, and who probably had not fully recovered from their attacks of the previous night. The food all ended up coming together successfully, the table was set, whereupon we set in!

After that it was play time, and oh, yeah! More gifts! (OK, I am the height of hypocrisy, because I was over the moon with the Kindle Kirk and Lynne got me.)

We rarely get GGPa down to our place, so it was especially nice to have him there.

Eventually the food, gifts and revelers were exhausted and we were able to drop the kids on mattresses and hit an easy chair ourselves -- to sit, perhaps to dream.

The Days of Wine and Mimi (and Tamales) - Part 2

2011-01-29T10:55:00.000-08:00

Christmas in our household is parsed out between families. Stacy's extended family has always huddled together on Christmas Eve for a traditional tamale party. I suppose that is a California thing, or at least a Mexican cultural influence. I'd never heard of tamales being associated with Christmas Eve prior to moving out West. Though the Harris family party has changed venues from time to time, it always draws a large crowd. This year it was at Stacy's parents' house up in Agua Dulce and it drew aunts and uncles and cousins and neighbors and friends from far and distant reaches - and, this year of course, Mimi and Grampy from probably the furthest far and distant reach.

The party is an evening affair, but we always set out considerably early so that we can do a bombing run of Burbank and rain down a hail of visits on all of Stacy's elderly buddies. (I think Stacy has more friends over 60 than under.) Grandma Bunny (a.k.a GGMa) was too frail to be physically up for the party, so we spent some time visiting with her at her convalescent home. It had been several years since Mimi and Grampy had seen her. From there we hit Stacy's old neighborhood and paid a visit to my favorite pair of Stacy's honorary grandparents (she has many), Grandma Helen and Grandpa Dick Walher who've spent the last billion years living in the house next to GGMa and GGPa, across the street from the house Stacy grew up in.

I've long held that as you age you generally become a personality prune - that is, your personality distills and condenses and you become a much more gooey, concentrated version of who you were when you were younger. If you were witty and playful, you will be that lovable old man with the twinkle in your eye. (I think of GGPa.) If you were mean-spirited and conniving in your youth, you will be insufferable in your seniority. (I decline to cite any examples.) If you were warm and nurturing and pleasant, you will be a pearl. Grandma Helen is such a pearl. She has been a true and sweet friend to Stacy every since she can remember. Although she has attained the venerable age of 89, her health through out the years has been troublesome, and at times she has been quite ill and afflicted. But Grandma Helen's mellow and pleasant disposition has never wavered; she will acknowledge when she's not feeling well or having this difficulty or that, but it is never a complaint or a veiled ploy for sympathy. She is invariably sweet and humble and pleasant, and both Stacy and I have committed ourselves to aging to her example (however contrary that may be, in my case, to my prune theory).

N collecting sugar.

From the Wahler's we headed due north and got to Agua Dulce well before the party with an hour or so before sunset. We gave Kirk and Lynne preliminary hellos, settled Mimi and Grampy into some comfortable couches, then L and N quickly laid hold Stacy's brother, Uncle Kyle, and dragged him, struggling but helpless, into the car for a quick run over to Vasquez Rocks State Park for a sunset rock climb. The rocks are so beautiful at twilight and scrambling up the rocks is so much fun that this has become somewhat of a tradition with our immediate clan. The kids love it, it's a wonderful way to get some fresh air, and it builds strong and healthy marriages. OK, maybe not so much that last part. I suppose I should pause to relate how this very adventure the previous year nearly ended in divorce and a nasty custody trial...

[FADE OUT]

[FADE IN: Christmas Eve 2009, Vasquez Rocks State Park]

Everything started out much the same as before (or rather, later). We got there while the sun was low and immediately hit the rocks. Stacy, as you may recall, has a decided fear of heights, especially when her children are involved. She counselled us (me) to keep to the low, flat areas, and under no circumstances attempt to ascend the heights with any of her progeny. I wanted to be compliant, really I did. I wanted peace and harmony to reign. Really I did. But that call of the wild — it's a nasty and insidious thing. And it was that daughter she gave me who told me to do it. I really had no say. I had no choice and therefore cannot be held culpable.

L, ever fearless, kept climbing higher and higher, bringing me along for the ride. Soon Mommy, who was on the low-down with N, became uncomfortable and suggested we slowly climb back down. But L wouldn't hear of it. (She's so disobedient.) She kept going higher and higher still and forcing me to go along with, totally against my will, of course. Stacy's panic attack escalated, but L would not be deterred - ungrateful child, and she kept taking me further and further up the monolith. Finally, unwilling to be witness to her child's sure demise, Stacy grabbed N and ran off to weep at the ranger station, pausing only to yell something up at me that sounded a lot like "If she falls to her death, you'd better go with her!" I probably mis-heard her.

With Mommy's conviction no longer reigning down on her, L was even further embolden, and though I pleaded with her mightily, she would not be persuaded and dragged me, crying my protest, to the very pinnacle where we were treated to some pretty amazing vistas - not that I enjoyed them or anything, in my abused, hostage state.

Finally relenting, L directed that we make our way back down the rockside. Mommy was nowhere to be found, so we got in the van and drove to the range station. The sun had started it vanishing act, so that is probably why it felt so suddenly and unbearably chilly when I opened the door to let in Stacy and N.

[FADE OUT]

[FADE BACK IN TO PRESENT]

L had evidently learned her lesson from last year, because she stayed reasonable perched and did not make any attempts to put her father in abject danger. With Uncle Kyle there to act as additional child protective services, Stacy was able to somewhat bypass the heart palpitations and sporadic squawking outbursts of panic. I think she purposely hid the camera, however, to ensure no temptations for aerial photography, so unfortunately there is no record taken of the 2010 event.

Stacy with new first cousin, once removed, E.

We got back to Kirk and Lynne's and the party was soon on with Harrises and Harris-add-ons arriving by the vanload. Stacy is very close with all her cousins and was very happy that most of them, amid the myriad aunts and uncles and other assorted relations, were able to be there with their kids: Julie Galan was there with her daughter G, though pilot/husband Carlos was off somewhere in the wild blue yonder. Kelly Hurt was there with her fighter pilot husband Steve and their son B and daughter E. (They seem to like pilots in this family.) Laura Harris was there with her boyfriend Allan, who is a kid at heart. Only cousin Carrie Wilson and her husband Keith were missing. It was a rare and valuable chance for L and N to visit with their second cousins. And yes, I am one of those sanctimonious people who know precisely the difference between a second cousin and a third cousin twice removed, and I look down my nose at those who don't. So there!

Alphabet soup: L, E, B, G and N.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
plotting their next heist

The kids all hit it off immediately. N was particularly drawn to his cousin B. (OK, his second cousin.) The two would follow each other loyally through Kirk and Lynne's sizable estate and whenever they would happen to separate, parents were assaulted with an unending barrage of "Where's N?" or "Where's B?" N also easily met his quota in the sugar department. N seems to have a thing for the ladies; he isn't shy about the hugs and kisses. He identifies his target, goes in quick, and hugs long and deep. I'm not sure what this bodes for his future. He will either end up being a very kind, considerate, compassionate young man, or he will end up being brought up on charges at a very early age.

As usual, it was a late night when we finally loaded all the weary children, Grampys, and Mimis into the minivan and made our way home. Even the promise of Christmas morning couldn't keep folks awake. Fortunately I was only tasked with carrying L and N to their beds. The rest were on their own.

I'll Habeas Your Corpus All Right...

2011-01-25T18:06:00.000-08:00

"ENOUGH!" I yelled, that little muscle in my temple pulsing like a Morse code beacon. "There's no more running, and there's no more screaming. Do you understand?" It had been a long day and L & N were doing their best to extend the evening as well. While I momentarily had their attention I sought to seal the deal. "I want a test for understanding," I said. "N - what did I just ask you?"

"No more running and no more screaming," he said a little cowed.

"Good. L - what did I just ask you?" She gazed up at me with a mildly inquiring look as if I'd just caught her attention. I envisioned her sliding a pair of glasses a little down her nose as she flipped casually through a few legal briefs.

"No running. No screaming," she repeated. "But," she stepped up to the bar, "if we scream, and you can't hear us, then it's OK, right?" She looked up from her dossier. "And if we don't run, but we walk really fast, that's OK too, right?" She made a few quick illegible notes on a subpoena or something, then looked up at me blankly, awaiting the verdict.

"The court accepts the conditions of the plea," I said, not really knowing what options the court really had. "Case dismissed."

She and N walked off (very quickly) while I immediately jumped on the web to check out the Harvard Law School admissions policies.