The Kind of Change I Can Believe In

A few years back I purged my library and donated everything I saw no future use for to CHKD.  I am glad I did it, the wife is glad I did it, and the load-bearing members of my home positively rejoiced that they needn't be troubled anymore by a literal ton (jeez…) of literary garbage pressing down on them.

I am even happier, though, that I had the foresight to keep my Calvin and Hobbes collection.  Over the past couple of months our five-year-old has been going through them and really enjoys the cartoons (well, the ones he can puzzle out, anyway), and he is over the moon that he and Calvin are nearly the same age.  He reads the books in the truck on the way in to school and he is finishing up the fourth one in the series now, I think.

One thing he loves is the Transmogrifier (oh, go to hell, spell-check… it’s a word) whether it was the cardboard box version or the portable gun version.  It was only a matter of time before he made his own.  His is cat sized, of course.

 

If you are stumped about the tag on the middle left hand side of the box, don’t feel bad - I had to phone a friend for that one, too.  I’m like “Why would he want to turn the cat into a Led Zeppelin album or that one gibberish-y mid-80s Phil Collins song I now have stuck in my head”?  I really don’t care if that last sentence means absolutely nothing to you.  It’s not all about you, you know.  The sentence stays.

Some people…

In any case, it’s supposed to say “zombie”.  The huge black dot at the end is his way of covering up a mistake with a period.

Please. Allow me.

I was thinking the other day about a phrase my father used to use when I was a kid.  When he was about to attempt something he thought was particularly amazing, he would say “you will notice that at no time does my hand leave my wrist”.  Since he was not one for coining phrases, I was curious as to where he got it.  I asked Google, and Google told me that Yahoo Answers had this unrelated entry:

Yikes! How do you answer that one? I came up with these five things.  I am open to further suggestions.

1. Consider setting up an appointment with your doctor. He/she may be able to give you advice on convenient fracture points. While you are there, a simple blood test will be able to tell if you suffer from acute X-manism whose symptoms include above normal bone density or rapid bioregeneration. 
2. What are you hitting it with? If you are trying to punch it or karate chop it broken, you might be doing it wrong.  In the past I have had to have a friend or neighbor shatter my stubborn ulna using the blunt end of a standard garden maul. Hope this helps!
3. This is not a forum for med students to get people to do their homework for them. Study harder!  :(
4. Have you tried reckless horseplay with friends on a trampoline even though your mom told to to be careful, like, a million times? That usually does it, but you might run the risk of cracking your skull wide open or putting out an eye as well.  
5. Go full-on After School Special. Win yourself a football scholarship to Stately State then brag to all your friends about how awesome of a quarterback you are. Allow your personality to change for the worse and really alienate all of your former buddies. When they complain, tell them they are just jealous and let them know that, while they are spending the rest of their lives pouring pig iron in the old mill, your picture will be plastered all over Wheaties boxes. After the universe breaks your throwing arm as payment for your hubris (losing you your one chance to make it big) you can crawl back to your old acquaintances and beg them for forgiveness... And maybe, just maybe, you’ll learn a job at the mill isn't such a bad life after all as long as you have friends.

Anyway, after a little more searching I found out the real answer was most likely from the movie Cat’s Eye.  Since that Stephen King flick came out in 1984 I must be misremembering the timeframe by a good five years or so or I am missing an earlier reference.  Hmph.  So it goes.  

I wish the arm-breaking guy the best in his endeavors.  Also, nice job on the ad placement, whoever.  Well done.

I Can See Clearly, Now.

I’ve always prided myself on the thickness of my corneas and I often try to work them into conversations whenever I can - job interviews, hitting on girls at the gym, etc.  During a routine exam my eye doctor told me that since my vision had remained stable for so long and my corneas were thick enough so I was deemed a good candidate for laser surgery.  My well-founded pride suddenly became something I could actually leverage without so many strange glances or restraining orders being shot my way.

So, after over three decades of having to deal with glasses and contact lenses I finally pulled the trigger and got my eyes done last week.  I couldn’t be happier.

Although I wanted to have perfect sight in both eyes my optometrist convinced me to leave my non-dominant eye slightly under-corrected to preserve my close-up vision for a longer stretch than would have been probable otherwise.  I know I will need reading glasses someday - it’s not a matter of “if” but “when” - so having less than flawless vision at a distance seemed like a reasonable tradeoff if I can push the “when” out five to ten more years.

The doctor gave me some lenses to simulate the effect of the proposed changes.  One contact had full (including astigmatism) correction and the other was a couple of notches under 20/20.  One reason for this was to “manage expectations” - I guess some folks think that laser surgery will grant them the same visual acuity as if they had been bitten by a radioactive eagle or something. It was also to see if I could adapt without headaches, vertigo, or other complaints. I wore them for a few days before deciding that this would definitely be the way to go.  

I had worn contacts for about 20 years so I was used to that bit.  I had never had contacts that corrected for astigmatism before, though, and I always asked the doc to keep both the lenses the same so I didn't have to deal with left-eye, right-eye hassles.  I wasn’t too sure what to expect. I wore these test contacts for a couple of days and it turned out everything was just fine.  The worst thing I could say about the intentional mismatch is that the world looked like I was viewing it through contacts that were a couple of days old instead of though ones that were fresh-out-of-the-box.  Maybe a better description for those of you who don’t wear contacts is that the effect was pretty much the same as the difference between looking out your car window with the glass rolled up and the glass rolled down.  You can tell there’s… something there… but that “something” is not really “there” unless you want it to be “there”.

The doctor set up the date for the procedure and I called to finalize the scheduling and the payment schedule.  The super-friendly and efficient lady on the phone giving me all of the info told me I would be getting an additional 20% off of the normal price of the procedure thanks to, and I’m not kidding here, their “March Madness Sales Event”.  I’m pretty sure they could have called this discount virtually anything else and it would have been infinitely less off-putting. “I’m Crazy Eddie, and the way I fire high-precision lasers into your eyeballs is INSANE!!” is the vibe that gives off, you know?

The pre-surgery package with all of the “SIGN HERE”s and “INITIAL HERE”s came in and it listed the usual terrifying disclaimer CYA stuff all medical paperwork comes with in this idiotically litigious world.  Side effects may include chronic diarrhea, persistent Tourette’s-like outbursts, acute skin failure, and catastrophic ocular explosions whenever it rains - stuff like that.

The documentation also advised eating lightly before the operation and to wear comfortable clothes like “a sweatshirt and pants”.  PANTS!?  What is this, Nazi Germany?  Here I am thinking I could get a vasectomy thrown in as a “twofer” (it IS March Madness, and they DO already have the laser warmed up, after all) and these fascists insist I wear pants.  This stupid country…

The day of the surgery came and we drove to the facility.  An army of smiling, pleasant, and efficient workers took my paperwork and did the stuff they needed to do with it.  After a short wait I had my eyes re-scanned and I met the surgeon.  He went over all the stuff that was going to happen and described the tools they were going to use and the sensations to expect (a slight pressure here, a buzzing sound indicating the laser was self-calibrating, a green blinking light there, etc.).  The speech was practiced - he had clearly done this a billion times.  The speech was NOT bored or arrogant. It was calming and friendly.

They gave me a little blue poofy hat and told me to put it on which I did unquestioningly.  I’m sure the cap serves a purpose but I really couldn’t tell you exactly what.  Hell, I suppose they could have told me to put on a rainbow wig, a red clown nose, and some big floppy shoes and I would have robotically complied as well.  

I removed my glasses for the very last time (wow…) and handed them to the doctor’s assistant. 

They led me into the brightly-lit and super-clean OR and it was a lot to take in.  The machine looks a bit like a cross between a massage table and an MRI scanner.  They took my info again to make sure I was the right person, told me once again what to expect, and they asked me to lie down.  They elevated my legs slightly and moved the table into position under the laser.  

As I was lying there allowing myself to come to grips with the fact that this was really, really, really going to happen it occurred to me that my optometrist wears glasses. I never really noticed before that instant…

A fan kicked on.  “Hold still for eight seconds,” I heard the surgeon say.

When someone tells you to “hold still for eight seconds” because they are about to cut into your eye, you obey to such a level that light switches appear wishy-washy by comparison.  I was a Zen… Freaking… Master. My autonomic nervous responses were willfully disengaged and a team of sadists armed with Tazers and branding irons could not have caused me to wiggle a fraction of a micron.

After the preparatory incisions (eight seconds per eye), the ablation work commenced. My role was to just stare straight ahead at a blurry green blinking light. Eight more seconds for one eye and twelve for the other (correcting for astigmatism takes a bit longer).  After each eye was corrected the cornea was “painted” closed and each brush stroke made the little green light clearer and clearer and clearer. I mentioned that the surgeon prepared me for all the sensations I would experience - what I would feel, what I would see, what I would hear.  He didn’t tell me about the smell.

You see, your cornea contains many layers of a transparent collagen.  Collagen is the same sort of material found in your fingernails and your hair.  So, as a laser is vaporizing tiny parts of your cornea some of that vapor escapes into the room.  The exhaust fan I heard kick on does double duty of preventing smoke from interfering with the optics and preventing everyone in the room from puking their guts out all day long.  

Of course, now you have this image of smoke billowing from my eye sockets and three or four techs standing at the ready with fire extinguishers in hand.  Yeah… at hilarious as that is, it’s a gross exaggeration.  I have a very sensitive nose and it was a barely perceptible whiff but it was there and, once smelled, it couldn’t be un-smelled.  

During my post-op exam I asked the doctor about it since at the time I didn’t know about the collagen thing.  He said “Oh, yeah.  I never told you about the smell.”  Frankly, I don’t care if this was an oversight or an intentional omission.  The surgery would probably not be as popular as it is now if “NOW WITH 30% LESS SMOLDERING HAMSTER ODOR” was the tagline in their ad campaign.

Immediately after leaving the OR and before my post-op exam I gave my new eyes a try.  I was told to expect things to be blurry and then gradually clear up over the day and finally stabilize over a few weeks.  Things were blurry but WAY better than my uncorrected pre-op eyes were.  By the time I reached the parking lot (45 minutes had passed at this point since my pre-op exam) my vision improved by an order of magnitude.  I “wowed” my wife by letting her know on a minute per minute basis which traffic signs I could read and which I could not read as she drove me home.  Not annoying at all, I’m sure.

By the time I got home 45 minutes later, far away street signs were clear enough - not perfect, but clear enough - to make out.  I took a nap and when I woke up it was though I had fallen asleep in my contact lenses.  During my follow-up exam the next day - which I drove to myself -  I scored better than 20/15 under ideal lighting conditions.  Mind you, this is with one eye slightly under-corrected.

I see better now than when I was nine.  There are no words.

I sleep with these foam and plastic goggles now to prevent myself from rubbing my eyes unconsciously at night.  They are shaped a bit like ski goggles and are a lot more comfortable than they look.  It sucks but its only for a little longer and it beats the alternative of one of them dog cone things I guess. I need to wear them for a just few more days, then that will be that.  Oh, I am also forbidden from doing anything dusty like yard work or cleaning the litter box for two weeks which is absolutely heartbreaking as you can well imagine.

I will even be allowed to go swimming with my son after a couple of weeks.  That is going to rock.  Before, I had the choice of a) feeling my contact lenses lift off my eyeballs and gently float away or b) not wearing contacts and hoping to God that the pink fuzzy thing I was reaching for was, in fact, my child and not someone else’s.

It’s been a few days and I still can’t believe I finally went through with this, even though the evidence is right there on the forever-to-be-unwatched DVD of the surgical procedure they gave me as I left the facility.  After I post this I am going to go through all of my old eye stuff and chucking what needs to be chucked and donating what can be donated.  It’s a chore I look forward to with relish.  

If you are on the fence getting this done, do it.  It is totally worth it.

So... It Has Come to This...

Yep.  We got a cat.  

Here's the situation.  The wife is allergic to pet hair and/or dander and her symptoms vary quite a bit depending on the duration and the dosage.  In a clean, open house for a couple of hours where there is a cat or dog - no worries.  A closed-off area with multiple animals (pet store, shelter, etc.) is more of a problem but OTC medication can handle that for a while.  However, if you own more furry animals than you have, say, soup spoons there isn't enough Claritin in the world where she can come within fifty yards of you... Not that your primary issue is "too many hangers-about", anyway. 

So the allergies were the "immovable object" in the way of getting a pet. All the other reasons, though valid, were negotiable in one way or another.

The "irresistible force" in this case were the relentlessly consistent requests from the boy to get a cat.  Oh, this wasn't a never-ending whiny pleasepleaseplease-fest - that would have resulted in no-cat-ever-ever-ever.  Since he turned two, he had requested a pet from any magical spirits who are known for their ability to grant wishes - Santa, coin-filled fountains, extinguished birthday candles, etc. Occasionally, he would insert his wish into mealtime or nighttime prayers. I’m guessing it averaged out to maybe one request every three months or so. 

The rarity of the requests combined with the constancy of them was tough to hear. The fact he had clearly made peace with the fact it was probably never going to happen was, frankly, heartbreaking. His demeanor was "I'm cool with never getting one, but it doesn't hurt to try". This is the same attitude most of us have when we go to buy lottery tickets. We know it's very nearly pointless... But maybe, just maybe it isn't. 

In this way the immovable object was completely obliterated. The wife was very accepting of this fact. 

She rocks.

So where to get one?  At first, I thought it would be pretty easy. I mean, it's a kitten, not a zebra or a dolphin or something. But it seems that boxes labeled "FREE KITTENS" have gone the way of the lemonade stand.  Dealing with the Crazy Cat Lady at work (there's always one) is a non-starter unless you relish the idea of enduring Torquemada-style Q&A sessions about your fitness as a pet owner, complete with site visits (yep...). Pet stores here don't carry non-specialty felines. 

So Animal Shelter it was. I went on a Saturday to do a little recon so I could get a good idea of what they had in stock (I had never been to one before).  Because I'm ever-so-wacky, I was toying with the idea of walking in, looking around, and answering the inevitable "Can I help you?" with "Well, the wife and I were thinking of grilling out tonight..." and letting the sentence simply hang there. 

I didn't do that. I could see immediately upon walking in that the people who work there are some dour, dour folks and would have had little to no appreciation for my unique brand of relentless zaniness. I can dig it. These people probably see some pretty screwed up stuff on a daily basis so they have every right in the world to regard anyone who walks through the door with a certain amount of suspicion.  They certainly didn't need this guy throwing confetti around and dousing them with seltzer water, as it were. 

The shelter was clean and spacious, the animals seemed healthy and friendly, and the people there were professional, courteous, and patient with my idiotic questions.   They told me all the animals were either spayed or neutered (that's good), the cats were all litterbox trained (even better!) and that most of the cats have had been checked for feline leukemia and AIDS (Jeebus!  Those are things!? Man, it's a miracle anything on this stupid planet is alive.).

I thanked them and told them I might be back the next day. 

The next day, after clearing it one last time with the wife, we all piled into the car. About ten minutes into the twenty-minute ride the five-year-old piped up and said "This isn't the way to Wal-Mart."

"Yeah, I know. We have to go to a different store first," I replied. 

"A toy store?" He asked hopefully. "No, dude. Just a different kind of store,” I replied.

We pulled up and got out. He stared at the sign for a bit and asked "Animal shelter? Why are we at an animal shelter?"  I said "C'mon... Let's go in."

The folks who worked there smiled in recognition as I came in and I put my finger to my lips. They nodded and the boy and I walked into the room with all the cats. He looked around with an expression I don't think I have ever seen on another person's face before just then. It was a combination of hopefulness, trepidation, shock, love, and a tiny bit of the special dread we all get the microsecond we realize our alarm clock is trying to shake us out of a wonderful, wonderful dream and dump us back into the real world.

"Ok. Choose." I said. 

"REALLY?!?!" he screeched, happy beyond measure. "I can really have one?"

"Yep. Any one you want."

"And I can bring him home today?", he added, unnecessarily suspiciously, in my opinion. 

I nodded. 

After a bit of walking from one cage to the next looking at his potential buddy-to-be he asked "Do you think..."

"No. Just one," I said, smiling.  He smiled back. We know each other well. 

Eventually he settled on a little 4-month-old orange and white one of absolutely no pedigree whatsoever.  Awesome. 

The lady behind the desk placed the cat into its carrier and started telling the boy about how to take care of a cat. "Remember, you need to feed him and give him fresh water once a day."  Our son nodded happily and said "Yeah! We don't want to happen to the cat what happened to the birds!"

My eyes popped and my jaw dropped and I just stared at him in horrified disbelief. All sound halted and the lady behind the desk locked eyes with me. After the longest two seconds ever she said "Oh. These were outdoor birds, right?"  I said "Oh, God, yes. Of course. We built a bird feeder a long time ago, you see. We ran out of seed eventually, and... And we just never refilled it.  I mean, he knows that outdoor birds get their food from all sorts of places..." All the while my brain is screaming "DUDE! What the hell is the matter with you!?!"

Satisfied our house wasn't replete with cages upon cages filled with the desiccated remains of a thousand luckless budgies,  we were allowed to leave with the cat.

We got it home and I retrieved the supplies I had hidden in the garage earlier that morning - food, scratching posts, toys, litter box... You know - cat stuff.  We opened the carrier slowly and it hopped out, utterly shocked. After I showed him where the litterbox was, he ran and hid under a recliner. 

We didn't see much of him over the next two days but the food dish was emptying as expected, and the litterbox was filling as prayed for. 

His shyness was eventually bribed away with treats and now Rocket (because he's fast like a rocket, see) has run of the place with the exception of the bedrooms on the second floor. He sits like a sphinx each night outside the closed hallway door, dutifully keeping watch over his new family ensuring we all sleep well...

Until about 4:45AM, that is, cuz, damn, people, enough's enough, come pet me or somethin' I'm boooooored!  MEOW MEOW MEEEOOOW MEOOWW Oh wow,… This foyer is super echo-y! Delightful! MEOOWWERR! MEOW! MEEOOOWWWW! yep any minute now I'll be rewarded with food and petting... MEOW! MEOOOWWW... 

Board Game Project

Sorry for not posting in a while.  The usual excuses apply - kid, work, projects, writing, working out, etc… Actually doing stuff is stopping me from documenting that stuff.   I would hire a minstrel to follow me around recording my adventures in song but that’s super expensive and, besides, the last guy killed himself out of boredom: 

“Oohhh, now harken to the tale of a man in a cube.  

He stared out the window for thirty minutes and two.  

Um… He heated up his lunch and then answered his mail… 

Then he filed some paperwork… Uh… Wassail! 

You get the idea.  I guess I could post a never-ending stream of pics of our cat - this is the Internet, after all.  Oh, yeah, we have a cat now.  His name is Rocket.  He is orange and white. He’s a rescue.  He’s the cutest widdle thing I ever did see!  Yesh, he is!  Yesh, he issss!  Who’s a cutey-patootie?  That’s right!   You are!  Whassa boody poody misser kitty cat?

Ahem… that is… Go Seahawks! [Whispers: More on the cat in another post.]

To the real point of this post, now. How do you tell your five-year-old that his idea for a board game, for lack of a better word, sucks?  There he is, breathlessly going over the paragraph-length rules of each and every one of the, like, twelve thousand thumbnail-sized spaces of his creation - four sheets of sloppily taped together printer paper with a huge meandering, incomprehensible loop on it - when I realize that all of a sudden the noise has stopped.

“Oh… What?”, I said, blinking my eyes back into focus.

“I said ‘Do you want to play my board game with me?’”, he said. “I think it’s pretty good.  Maybe we could sell it.”

So what do you say?  I am pretty sure the correct response is not “Pfft, no. You’re wrong, it’s terrible.  I mean, pretty much every other completely illegible square is either some kind of instant death or Go Back to Start.  Unless you are trying to market some artsy metaphor about the futility of existence or something you may want to reconsider the playability of this thing.  Also, who the hell taught you how to use Scotch tape? It looks like a stroke victim with ADD assembled this while in the middle of a seizure.  Now quit crying and get me another beer.”

I’m not sure what the correct response is.  If this was the first one he did, then "Sure, let's do it!" would be appropriate.  Maybe even for the second.  But this was about the fifth one.  He clearly wants to create something fun, he wants to share it with others, and he wants to make a little extra scratch on the side.  There is no part of that I disapprove of.  

The “storm” last week kept him out of school for three days we needed something constructive to do while warming up in between bouts of sledding, building a snow fort, collecting icicles, and doing other outdoorsy stuff like suffering from hypothermia and cursing under our breath.

Perfect excuse for a project.  Why not make a board game? It had to be simple, playable, and made from the stuff we had on hand.  Whether it was fun to play or not was fairly subjective and totally unimportant.  

I had a 16 x 16 inch piece of oak plyboard and forty poplar dowel disks in the garage leftover from an abandoned checkerboard project... stupid local hardware store didn't have red paint of any kind in quantities less than half a gallon.  I also had a set of gaming dice (shut up) that I figured would come in useful.  We grabbed the craft box, some construction paper, the BoogieBoard, and my sketchbook and the family got to work.

"Okay.  First thing's first.  What should we name our game?"

"Umm.. Zizzy!" he said.  

"Uh... Ok, 'Zizzy' it is.  What kind of game is Zizzy?  Should it be a..."

"Wait!  Let's call it 'Zombieland'.  You know, like Candyland but with zombies."

"Maaaannnn... This stupid decade," I thought to myself.  Out loud, I said "Ok, sure, 'Zombieland' it is.  Let's stick with that.  Choose some sheets of construction paper and cut out some shapes.  Make them kind of big because we are going to have to write on them."

As we cut out the shapes we hashed out what some of the spaces would say.  The wife was insistent that one of the shapes should be a heart.  That took a little thought but, in the end, think it turned out to be one of the more interesting spaces on the board.

Thirty-six of the poplar pieces became magical amulets that could repel zombies and the other four became tokens.  The gaming dice were replaced with standard red and white dies.  A crocodile-filled moat and island were created and two bridges and a leaky raft were thrown into the mix.  Some artwork was printed out and glued to the poplar pieces and voila - two two-hour days and it was time to play.

Each person starts out with four zombie-repelling amulets and the goal is to be the last to die.  Sort of like Monopoly.  I tried to make sure that the rules and spaces were set up so that, statistically, people would run out of amulets and the game would be over somewhat before the heat death of the universe.  This makes the game very much unlike Monopoly, hence its appeal.

The first two two-player games went as planned.  The boy won once and I won once.  The games were about 30 minutes long.  Sweet.  Great balance.  Let's get mommy and see what a game with three people is like.

Sigh.  About 90 minutes in, we discovered that with three (or more, probably) people that the game turned into a never ending merry-go-round of trading amulets back and forth.  It was time for several rule changes.  Not everyone agreed with some of the changes and good points were made on all sides like "That's stupid" and "Well, I think your idea is stupid" and in the end it was decided that a manual was needed to prevent future friction.

Two hours later a manual was created and a coat of sealant was added to the pieces and the board and now we have a shockingly playable game, albeit one with, like, the least-inspired-sounding name imaginable.  We are probably treading on any number of copyright laws even using it, but, hey, we're rebels like that.

I was going to post the text of the believe-it-or-not-four-page manual but this article is way too long as it is.  Tell you what...  I'll add it anyway.  You can check it out if you like after the alleged jump break below.  Enjoy!

Yet Another Small Project

I spent the three-day weekend sick (stupid cold) but not too sick to knock out a small project with the boy.  Like the sailboat project, this one was initiated by the five-year-old asking if we could build something in the garage.

He wanted to build a toy rocket but changed his mind to a jet because “a rocket would be too hard”.  I nodded, not in agreement, really… just movin’ the conversation along, you understand. I gave him the BoogieBoard and told him to sketch up what he wanted. After a bit he came back and described all the pieces and parts of his design to me.

About a million years ago, Mad Magazine put out an article about what toys would look like if they were faithfully reproduced (non-Euclidean geometry, misspellings, the works) from children’s drawings.  It was awesome and it still makes me laugh to think about it.  His drawing looked a lot like the “Jet Airplane” from this old article.

I got out my planning book and copied his sketch into it (well… I copied the idea of the sketch into it, anyway) while asking him dimensions and colors and making sure he knew what materials and tools we had on hand.  After a bit we had a basic design that looked like a Space-Shuttle-slash-Concorde hybrid, although a lot more heavily armed than one would normally expect of a passenger airliner:

“Ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking.  Thank you for flying Kindergartener Airlines.  I apologize for the incredibly loud, grindy, and sparky takeoff.  You may have noticed that, while we possess the most advanced weaponry ever envisioned on a domestic airliner, we are not actually equipped with landing gear. Sadly, all of your luggage and many of your pets have dropped out of the resultant hole that was ground into the bottom of the plane as our rocket engine violently forced us across the tarmac. Again - our apologies.  Our flight from Norfolk to Atlanta will consist of seventeen minutes of non-stop hypersonic barrel rolls and loop-the-loops. Those of you that do survive the crushing g-forces will be required to assist the crew in dumping the remaining fuel and ordinance somewhere over northern Georgia before we slam this bird like a lawn dart into whatever runway happens to get in the way of our primarily ballistic flight path.  May God help us all.”

I had him go out to our wood stock and identify the pieces that we would need for the fuselage, wings, rocket engine, and… umm… air-to-air missiles (none of this “circling the runway waiting for clearance from the tower” nonsense for this fella… no sir). The main body is spruce, the rocket engine is yellow pine, the missiles are poplar, and the wings are aspen. Like you care…

I tried to get him to paint the pieces before assembly but he said he wanted to glue everything together first.  Impatience, really, but a good opportunity for a teaching moment.  While the glue was drying I had him get out the sailboat we made a while back and paint it without giving him any instructions.  After a while he started to complain that everything “was getting all messed up”.  He uses brushes like most five-year-olds do (paint brush = soup ladle) and the quality of the job reflected that.

“No worries, buddy,” I told him as I wiped off the blobs and evened out the color swirls.  “This is just the base coat, so it doesn't have to be perfect.  The second coat will look better - I promise”.  That cheered him up. I said “See… painting the small stuff first before we glue it makes everything come out nicer.” He shot the jet the worried glance I was expecting so I showed him the roll of painters tape I was holding. “For the jet we are going to use this stuff so paint doesn't get everywhere.  Next time, we will paint first.”

So “Paint before assembly if you can” and “How to use painter’s tape” are now in his mental toolbox.  I hope he uses those tips as he grows and builds more and more complex stuff with less and less help from me.

He loves the jet (and the boat, now that it has been “professionally” painted) but he said something about it that neither the wife nor I can quite figure out.  He says the jet is piloted by Martin Luther King Jr. because “stripes are Martin Luther King’s colors”.  He couldn’t explain why those colors in particular belong to MLK.  A quick web search really doesn't answer the question, but I might just be missing something.

Any ideas?

Happy (Belated) Epiphany Day!

I usually start the new year sharing a list of resolutions and goals with folks that stumble across this blog. Why do this? I'm not really sure. Apparently, one of my hobbies is to advertise my shortcomings, insecurities, hopes, and dreams to as broad of an audience as possible because, hey, saying out loud that you'll do something is just as good as actually doing it, right?

Umm... Right?

Sigh. Fine. I figured you'd be that way. You used to be cool, man.

Well, then, this year my main resolution is to stop lying to myself. Yep, it's a logic bomb powerful enough to disable any number of evil/misguided Star Trek AIs, but there it is. You don't like it, hey, that's on you, brother.  I ain't gonna learn Chinese, I ain't gonna completely master Pour Some Sugar On Me on the guitar, and I ain't gonna try out for the Duke basketball team.  I mean, of course I could totally succeed at any of these things if I really wanted to... It's just that those grapes are probably really, really sour anyway, so, you know, why bother?

What am I going to do? Pfft.  Who knows?  I guess while I have the time and energy to do so, I continue the filtration of stuff that I have found useful to collect in my skull over the decades into two piles: Useful Things and Trivia.  It's harder and more time-consuming than you might think - after all, my Trivia pile is about 1,000 times bigger than the other one.

Yours is, too…

You know, I’m going to stop this post right here and now.  Although you can’t see them, right now I am staring at three more paragraphs of borderline pretentious garbage festering right below this sentence.  I am not happy with them. I worked hard to get them ready for yesterday’s “deadline” but no matter how much I polished, it still felt like I was going to circle the runway for another 500 words before my point finally congealed anti-climactically somewhere in the middle of the seventh paragraph.

Negative?  Not at all! You see, appropriate to yesterday’s holiday I have had an epiphany: I can take one of these ill-formed paragraphs and massage them into a short book that should basically write itself.  

Books don’t write themselves, however, so I am forced to take a short leave to get this idea out of my head and onto “paper”. It might lead nowhere, it might lead somewhere, but I have to find out and I need time to do that.  A week to ten days should be enough to figure out if I can press on with it, shelve it for later, or simply shrug it off and just circular file the whole thing.  I told my editor in December I would have something for her by the end of this month.  I hope this counts.

So that’s it for a while.  I’ll post if interesting stuff crops up between now and a week or ten days from now - puzzle solutions, Rook travel bug updates, that medium-sized asteroid headed this way is finally detected by backyard astron… Ah… Yes… Ahem… Perhaps I’ve said too much…

Anyway, I don’t want to take my short hiatus without leaving with something so here it is: Yesterday, I discovered I had just earned my 2,000-day badge as “dad”.  How’s that for an epiphany?

More later.

Welcome to 2014, Everyone!

Jeesh... that looked a heck of a lot better before uploading it... Not a promising start.  Nonetheless, I still think that the guy from the Island of 1,000,000 B.C. would have either worshiped the talking reindeer, killed him and eaten him, or simply ran away instead of singing a song and offering to help find the big-eared kid.  No?  Yes?

Happy New Year, Everyone!

The Majestic Suffolk Seaboard Coastline Trail

A couple of days ago I went geocaching along the Suffolk Seaboard Coastline Trail. I didn't have very much luck finding anything (2 for 6, I think), so I took advantage of the outing to document some of the more eye-catching flora and fauna instead. Enjoy!

Immediately upon entering the trailhead I was greeted by a herd of Spotted Used Mattresses, sunning themselves majestically just southeast of the main path. I did not want to pass up a rare opportunity to photograph them in their natural habitat, but I made sure I was careful not to startle them to avoid interfering with any willomying and flolloping they might be engaged in. 

This flock of Bud Light Tall Boys was probably drawn to the area to feed on the ample offering of broken glass and shattered stereo speaker casings left on the manhole cover in the foreground. 

A cluster of Abandoned Sofa Sets and North American Armchairs stood shyly off to the left of a side trail and waited for me to pass.

This Broken Plastic Bin was caught bathing and slowly sinking into one of the many fetid still-water pools alongside the main trail.

I was fortunate to snap a pic of this clutch of Sofa Cushions while their mother stood a few yards away.

A Discarded Children's Swimming Pool stands guard five yards off the main path, precisely where I had spotted it six months before. This time, however, it was joined by a Disintegrating Lawn Chair and the remains of a Girls Vinyl Lunch Bag (not shown).

A Bright Blue Gas Can in repose. 

A gaggle of Balding Automobile Tires takes turns sipping stagnant ditchwater.  The Deflated Basketball must wait its turn.

A solitary Collapsed Plastic Chair sits on its rusted, crumpled legs.

Out of respect for their holy culture, I blurred out some of the more… umm… poignant writings the natives left here.  My translation may be off slightly but it suffices to say that, whoever Justin is, he is not beloved by all. 

Several outcroppings of Discarded Roofing Shingles line the path, beckoning travelers closer with their promise of flattened bicycle tires and tetanus.

Overall, I was very impressed by the level of abject neglect that has been achieved in the short period of time this trail has been open to hikers, bikers, and illegal hunters.  Space and good taste prohibit me from listing all of the interesting things I discovered along this 1.5 mile pin-straight trail segment, but I encourage everyone to don some blaze orange biohazard suits, come on down, and start their own photo-journal. After your visit, be sure to thank the Suffolk Department of Parks and Recreation for a job well done!

Personally, I can't wait to see what the next ten miles of this trail is going to bring!

Rook Update II

Well, it turns out the little rook I carved a dozen years back that lived out its life in various junk drawers and finally placed in a Geocache two autumns ago is once again on the move (click here for the previous update).

You can get more detailed info at geocaching.com and searching for item TB56TVF.  If you sign up for a free account, you can also see a map.  Here is a summary of its travels to date:

• 10/2012 - Dropped off in Hampton, VA
• 11/2012 - Found and taken to Washington D.C.
• ??? - Sent to Seattle, Washington (made into Travel Bug here)
• 06/22/13 - Released into the wild
• 06/23/13 - 08/22/13 Bounced around a few caches in the Seattle area
• 08/23/13 - 11/03/13 - ???
• 11/04/13 - Arrived in Germany
• 11/06/13 - 11/24/13 Bounced around a few caches around Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
• 12/06/13 - 12/08/13 Taken from cache to cache in the London, England area in search of a new home (Soooo close to its goal of visiting castles in Scotland)
• 12/08/13 - No suitable caches were found, so it was returned to the cache in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
• 12/08/13 - 12/25/13 - Sitting and waiting…
• 12/26/13 - Picked up.
• 12/28/13 - Placed in a cache in the Canary Islands, Spain.

Current Location: N 27° 45.050 W 015° 34.390 (map)

Total travel distance since its release date: 7783.1 miles.

Thanks to all the cachers out there helping to move it along, and thanks to ReesaRice for including me in its adventure!  

Cheers, everyone!