Frenzied Daddy

Finished This Book is OverDue on the train recently. I liked what it had to say about librarians as being guides / technological sherpas even in this century. I like librarians; some of my best friends are librarians. And I learned that there are a bunch of niche research libraries, on small topics like “dogs.” — A library on Dogs (where it might be three shelves in your neighborhood library.

But something it touched a glancing blow on was education. Specifically, the chapter had to do with how this particular program in Rome is teaching third world people to be cyber librarians. In a long conversation about ALA formats and a site they recommend for storing your references so you can switch formats easily, and how these people from all these different countries were working together, was a passage that really made me think about something I worry about anyway.

What’s the point in making my kids learn to do graphing and visualizing a graph from an equation when we have great sites like wolfram alpha to do it for them? How can I repeat my father’s lessons of “you do it until you don’t need the calculator and then you can use the calculator?” (which I believe formed a lot of my personality), but in the 21st century? I do worry about this- why else would Miss B’s seven times math tables be so weak?

The glancing blow in this chapter was something along the lines of “If you imagine that teaching now is the teacher at the front of the room laying out information for the students to remember and regurgitate, you’ve already failed. Education these days revolves around collaboration and creation.” (paraphrased because I’ve taken the library book back to the library). This was very reassuring to me because I do imagine, especially with math, this older format of learning. I can totally see someone (maybe Miss B) doing five to seven parabola graphs, then a group of students doing 30 or 40 in wolframalpha of them to see if they can start recognizing patterns. And it’s reassuring to me that she ( and they ) could actually learn this way.

(why yes, that is an affiliate link for that book. Go to Amazon.com if you disagree). It was an interesting book but doesn’t really talk about this topic).

One of the things I like to believe I have in common with my Father in Law is an enjoyment of state history – in the form of stories and places. I enjoy knowing more about people like Mercer and Pettygrove. I think he’d like this book. I usually read fantasy and science fiction of varying degrees of technical depth, so picking this up was kind of unusual, but I might find myself getting more of these sorts of things as I grow up. This is the sort of tale I enjoyed listening to when I lived in Anchorage. The name of the storyteller slips my mind at the moment, but he told some pretty good anecdotes about the gold rush.

This book starts with a biographical introduction – about Stewart Holbrook, who was a logger on the East Coast who had some money and decided to see what Vancouver was like. So he hopped a train, came out west, and fell in love. He cashed in his return ticket, did some logging and then sort of fell into writing as a living. He was a prolific and voracious reader. He moved to Portland because of the library (in 1923). He wrote 3,000 to 5,000 words to day on a typewriter. He’s quoted in the introduction as signing off on a letter to a friend with “I’ve got to write 3,000 words about Automobiles before I go to bed tonight. Think of that — writing 3,000 words about horseless carriages — and pity him who has to do it.” He was a defender of the phrase “skid road” (not skid row) … and don’t get me started on his paintings.

The book, after the introduction, consists of some of his writings-about twenty articles, including an article on a cattle baron, another on the Tillamook fire, and another on the communists in Aurora (outside Canby). His writing is gripping – I really liked the story about the Prophet Joshua, you’d have to read it to believe it.

Yeah, that’s an amazon affiliate link hiding around that picture. If you want to avoid the link, just go to amazon.com. It’s a good book, and I’d recommend it to people like me who like to know a little story behind the place.

This Comic has me dwelling on a mistake I made. One of many, but I’m learning from them.

About a year and a half ago, I managed to get a US Bank account overdrawn to the tune of about $1000. Yeah, I was impressed too. It was my business account for Argh WebWorks. I went in to the branch where I had opened it in order to talk to someone about how to close it and pay it off. I didn’t get the “small business specialist’s” name but his advice was simple. “Ignore it,” he said, “and it will go through internal collections, they’ll knock a bunch of fees and then send you a bill for the remainder. I asked him how much I could expect to wind up paying; he said he didn’t know. I asked him why not just hook me up as if it were a $1000 loan, and I’d make monthly payments. He said he was trying to save me money and that they had no mechanism for that sort of thing. He couldn’t give me a number for “internal collections.” Nothing.

It wouldn’t stand up anywhere- “I went into the branch and they told me to let it go through collections. No, your honor, I don’t remember the guy’s name. No, I don’t have a record of our conversation. No, he didn’t promise anything.” Yeah, that’d go really well. And I can’t deny that I owed them the money, obviously I wrote some bad checks and then fees compounded on fees and one nasty situation rolled into another one. I just wanted to shine the light of the sun on it so the mold couldn’t grow any further. The mold stopped growing on it when I told them to close the account.

So, now it’s a year and a half later, and I’ve finally made the last payment on it. It was still about $1000. Nothing was taken off, not that I believed that would happen. “Internal US Bank Collections” didn’t even bother sending me a bill, they just sold it to a collection agency. The collection agency promises that they’ll have the CheckPoint systems block taken off my records so I can open up a new account (at the credit union, thank you for asking). I’ll be checking later this week.

So yeah, don’t hire lawyers that are barred from courtrooms and don’t listen to Small Business Consultants who can’t help you.

Why yes, I am a little bitter. But not enough to claim it’s not my fault.

Hey if I’m going to buy fruit juice for the girls for summer drinks, I just need to avoid high fructose corn syrup, right? Wrong! I need to print out that list, because an astonishing 125 out of 146 tested fruit products (juice and snacks) had lead in them!

Living in an older house, I worry about lead. And now to learn that 85% of those kids’ drinks and snacks had lead in them — just terrific. Everything from BeechNut to TreeTop and even Trader Joes had lead in it.

I’m going to have to buy a juicer. How do you make cran-grape out of cranberries and grapes? That’s a lot of juicing.

I don’t think any of us (us in the family, not us in the world), really appreciated Ms Plank until this year. Ms Plank is the band teacher who has been teaching Miss B the clarinet for the past three years. For Miss B, this has been a chore. For us, it’s been a chore of “making” Miss B practice, and a chore of going to concerts.

( She’s gotten a lot better. )

Now that we’ve decided to transfer Miss B to a school without a band program and to let her stop taking band, I’ve been looking at what Ms Plank does- she’s there from an hour before school to work with a group of Jazz students. She takes them to competitions (and they place HIGHLY). She goes to the elementary “feeder” schools (where Miss B met her) and teaches kids there. She organizes concerts.

There was a guest conductor at the last concert and he reminded us that Miss B’s schools is an oasis of music here in PPS. And with PPS’s changes, budget shortfalls and redesign, I’m kind of worried about music as taught to our kids in schools.

But Miss B is going to a new school where she won’t be taught music. And after looking over all the benefits of teaching kids music (everything from improved scores in general, to improved math scores, to team-building, to humility and devotion), I’m wondering if, if I want to keep this learning going (or have Miss K learn the same things), if I should consider finding a music tutor or if I should just trust church choir to teach them these things?

and of course, if I even should worry about it. I mean, music classes?

Hopefully this change in the weather sticks around a while. The rain, the constant drizzling punctuated by the hammer strikes of thunderstorm drops — has been getting to me. I need a variety. I thrive on a variety. That’s why I’m here in the Pacific North West.

I don’t remember the last game K actually got to play; it must have been two weeks ago. It’s been wet and windy for way too long. And it’s reflecting in my work; I’m snarly and lethargic. Well, more so than usual. And hyper-critical of myself. Ms B took me to task last night for taking my faults too seriously and ignoring my not-faults. She’s good to me like that. She recommended I go back to taking my medicines but since I’d have to get them refilled first and then it’d take a couple of weeks for them to kick in, I suspect my plot of starting to go for walks/runs again would do better.

Anyway; it’s been a crummy couple of weeks. More wet than even I like, and I’m hoping for some grey skies.

Took Perrin to the Vet today. He couldn’t make it in last night from the yard, and this morning didn’t want to go out again. His hips were hurting pretty badly; he wasn’t eating, couldn’t walk. I didn’t notice how much he was drooling or panting when I made him move; by the time we got to the vet his pain was obvious. And he couldn’t walk on their slippery floor. A couple of injections later he was pain free.

Hard to convince myself his pain wasn’t my fault. I could have taken better care of him.

But I’m trying to remember that we had a great 10, 12 years with him. He came from the humane society, and if we had taken him back it would have been his third strike. We always said he knew this, because all he wanted to do was please us.

Sorry, can’t type; eyeballs are all sweaty.

Miss K got herself signed up for little league this spring. Well, ok, we signed her up, she didn’t have much to do about it. She loved her soccer class last year (was it last year?) and we’ve been anxiously waiting for another chance for her to run around playing some sports.

She’s not totally convinced yet. We’ve had about five practices and two actual games. She’s playing T-ball. Both games. someone has run into her. She didn’t like having a collision. And she’s not happy about having to wrestle the other kids for the ball. I mean, one kid hits the ball, it goes wobbling and bouncing through the infield and seven of nine kids on the team run for the ball and dogpile on it.

Not big on playing their zones. That’s ok, I wasn’t either One of my biggest team-sports failings.

She gets a turn to hit the ball off the tee every inning of three innings. And then she gets to run around the bases, but she has a hard time remembering to pay attention and run around the bases when the other kids hit their ball.

The whole team, though, is funny. Like friday night, when the ball went into the outfield, and five kids all “fell over” and put their legs straight up while they were chasing it. And today, when one of the at-plate team members kept leaving his base and instead of running to the next base he tried to catch the ball (in the pack of little leaguers).

I don’t know if K is having fun, but I sure am.

I really liked my doctor over in northeast Portland when I started seeing him. He was youthful, chipper, he took some great photos up in Forest Park. And he was more or less in my mothers’ neighborhood, so a trip to the doctor could be easily combined with a short visit with them.

Then I managed to smash a fingernail. I don’t remember how it happened, but I hadn’t done it before, and I kind of wanted him to look at it and say “oh that’s normal.” I also needed to check on my allergy meds. So I made an appointment. When the day came to visit, I showed it to the receptionist, who was about five years older than me. Her response was kind of a condescending “Oh, honey, I think you’ll live.” I mean it was a smashed fingernail, it was growing out, right? I knew it was going to grow out but I just wanted be seen. It was my money, right? I saw him and he looked at it and said what I imagined he’d say, and our lives went on.

Then came the day a few weeks after I got my shoulder pulped at SCA fighter practice. My pauldron flipped up and the other fighter plowed full force into my shoulder. It got really purple and black; one of those big, deep tissue bruises that I’m sure you’ve had too (You can see a brief shot of this kind of bruise in “Whip It” directed by Drew Barrymore). I’d had some, usually on my butt cheeks, but as this one healed it felt kind of gritty inside the muscle. And while I knew it was going to take a while to heal, I wasn’t sure on the pattern; was this “grit” inside the muscle normal? Were they clots? Clumps of muscle? I didn’t know, so I made an appointment.

Yeah, he was impressed at the bruise but totally shocked that I let someone do that to me. His response was along the lines of “yeah it’ll take 4 to 6 weeks to heal a deep tissue bruise like that, now go away because you’re scaring me.” Not particularly helpful, and he didn’t seem to think the “grit” was important. For the record, it hurt like hell for six months and I could still feel it a year later. I still thought of him as my doctor, but for the record we were no longer within the “honeymoon.” No matter how cute his assistants were.

The real severance came when Ms B and I were pregnant with Miss B. Yeah, 13 years ago. Ms B and I went to the doctor and had an interview- the place is a Family Medicine place, and we were looking for a pediatrician. And while I don’t remember exactly he said, he was pretty condescending to my wife and to my unborn daughter. At that point, I reflected on all the other times we had talked and suddenly it was in a different light. We never went back, and found a great pediatrician at OHSU (and followed her to Evergreen Pediatric in Vancouver), then I started going to SWMC for my doctor appointments.

So there’s a reason to be polite to your customers Video not required.