Frenzied Daddy

So, I’m standing here, at Bipartisan Cafe at SE 79th and Stark. Miss B is reading from her comic book here; it’s an open mike with a program called “writers in the schools.” there are a lot of people to read here and a lot of supporters.

At Cleveland High, I was a writer, I ran the literary magazine my senior year (with Terri Hughes). I took an extra class after school across town at Benson. Both years, I went to the U of O for a writing symposium. I wrote lots, both prose and poetry. But I never got a chance to read my writings out loud like she is tonight.

I’ve been worried about how supportive this school will be, of her confidence in her art. We talked at the teacher conference about her talent and how the teacher is so impressed with her. But watching this and seeing this, I’m finding myself jealous of this experience and happy with our choices.

Well, you knew it was going to have to happen; we got a puppy. About three weeks ago, in fact. The Humane Society got several shipments at once of what they thought were Border Collie (mix) puppies, so we went over to take a look. We brought home “Thurston,” who they figured was a border collie mixed with some sort of hound. The vet says more “pointer” than hound, especially since he doesn’t bay like hounds do, and the way he stands. He’s smart like Perrin was, kind of sneaky like Honor was, and a ball of wild energy like a puppy is. He’s a lot of fun, and I’m sure I’ll post pictures. We’ve renamed him to “Akamaru” (Aka for short), who is some mangy manga dog.

Miss B is surprising us all with trying out for her high school’s performance of Pirates of Penzance. Don’t know how she did, but the tryouts were this week. Also this week, she brought home the “Battle of the Books” team permission form. Sounds great! She’ll have to read some non-fantasy stuff too.

Miss K had a special reading at her school yesterday. She read a story she wrote about growing and harvesting tomatoes and how proud she was of herself for tending them. I didn’t make it- I was buried at work. Had a client whose website was going live and it needed too much TLC for me to go running off. But I’m going to try to make it to her Winter performance; the classes are all singing rather than doing a play. Once during the day and then again in the evening.

And we bought a new car. A used car. Ms B’s car died on Thanksgiving, on her way home from work. It just stopped working. We found out later that it was the timing belt, a normal maintenance item that when it breaks, it breaks the whole engine. We bought a 2003 VW Jetta Stationwagon from Wentworth Chevy. I’m pretty happy. I’m very happy with the loan from First Tech CU- it’s 3.74%! (with a 1% discount for paying via automatic withdrawal). I took extra joy from that with the advertisement today of car loans “at less than 13 percent interest). Well, that’s something else.

Anyway, hope all is well in your lives.

Miss B’s first high school quarter is coming to a close, and I can say – EdBox is great, but it’d be greater if the teachers would update it more regularly. It’s a whole lot better than just guessing as to whether her work is done or not, though. Overall, I’m pleased with her grades. She has a couple of weak spots that EdBox is helping us track down, and one of those is the reason I’m sitting in Starbucks far from my normal haunts while she spends her Saturday morning at the school doing biology labs.

I’m trying hard to be the “awesome uncle” but my sister in law upped the ante. I’m sending my nephews and niece holiday cards, and sent out Halloween cards. Imagine my surprise when the girls got cards from their new nephew Dylan. Imagine my further surprise when each girl found a five dollar bill inside their card. I was shocked! And soon, I’ll be broke. Thanksgiving is coming. I bet I could fit a whole turkey into the card this time.

Miss K had a good time at her school’s literacy fair. She went to the book fair, ate Round Table pizza, made some comic strips, met a librarian from Multnomah County Library, and won a (scary) book. She spent her “Halloween money” on a Pokemon black/white catalog book. She was unhappy that I wouldn’t let her pack a lunch on the way out the door to school on Friday. Apparently it’s hard to carry both her book and the lunch tray. But I didn’t want to be late to school; we’ll work that out next week. Miss K also won a “respectful” award at her school’s award ceremony. Sometimes the “word of the week” at her school smells slightly of brainwashing, in an Orwellian sense, but some of those kids could use some washing. Last week’s word was “Volunteer” and this week’s was “Character.” She and I trick-r-treated in our neighborhood. She dressed up as a vampire woman, but because she mislaid her teeth, it was just a pretty red and black dress. She got the traditional bucketful of candy.

Miss K has been remarkably clingy this week. I waver between enjoying it and wanting my own space. Usually when I come home, I need my own space. Miss B, not so clingy.

Ms B had a day of Jury Duty this week and was released about lunchtime. I met her for lunch before she went home. It was very nice to sit and eat with her, even if we ate in the mall’s food court. She is angling for me to clean the house today and move the Xbox and PS3 upstairs so they get played with more. The basement is so dark and cold. This is tempting, but the obvious spot for them (at least until after Christmas) is our bedroom, where everyone congregates. I made the tactical error of offering to move our bedroom stuff to the (smaller) living room and then we could use the bedroom as the living room and just come in / go out through the back door. And hey, why don’t we have the Christmas tree back there too. Unsurprisingly, she thought the first idea was silly. Surprisingly, she could get behind the second idea. Whoops.

I’ve run twice this week and plan to either run tonight or tomorrow morning. I’m running 4 ten minute intervals, and my route takes me around a loop on the sidewalk. I’m not running on the (dark) bike paths or down the middle of the street. But it’s cold and wet. Hopefully I’ll keep my motion going through the winter.

And the best news of the week was that Grampa R is out of the hospital and healing at home. So glad he’s ok. I like him a lot.

It’s no secret that the economy here in the US is pretty damn pathetic. Being out of work for 2 years is “the new normal.” That’s not right. So Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, is working on something intriguing. They call it “community investing in America” – but it’s not investing, really. What the Starbucks Foundation is helping organize is people donating five bucks or so to a general fund that’s used by community lenders to help businesses. It’s not investing, because we (the investors) aren’t paid dividends. However, it’s an intriguing plan, and I expect to donate $5 myself.

Here’s what BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone says:

In a nutshell, Starbucks is donating five million dollars to seed a fund at the Opportunity Finance Network for capital grants to local lenders who fund small businesses that make a difference. Businesses like Zonia Torres’s overnight day care in San Francisco and like Nicholas Kujawa’s housing units and fresh local market in Butte, Montana — these are my favorite examples as a former single mom who had to figure out how to work nights occasionally, and as a Montanan who watched the towns of Butte and Anaconda suffer when local mines declined.
source

To learn more, you can visit the CreateJobsForUSA website, and particularily today, you can listen to a conversation with Mr Schultz – 11AM Pacific or 2PM Eastern, you can call 877-698-0629 and use conference code 23564006. It’ll be a short conversation, and you’ll only be able to listen, but it should be interesting.

So, anything new this week?

I’m still running. About 3.5 miles three times a week. Right now, I’ve changed from doing one monolithic run for 36 minutes to four ten minute runs. That’s helping me stay mostly on track and keep my speed up. I think I wasn’t pushing myself hard enough for the leisurely pace of 3.5 miles in 36 minutes. (and when I did, I burned myself out too quickly). In fact, my most recent runs were 4 miles long. A little secret is that these 4 10s are the same as the first week of the “Bridge to 10K” — which I’m not super interested in (because it’s running for an hour) but if it gets my speed on the 5K down, that’s good. I’m going to do these 10s for at least this week and maybe next week do 3×15 minutes.

Miss K’s done with fall soccer. We’re talking about indoor soccer through the winter but we need to look at our schedule. It’s only one day a week, but the schedule we’ve been on has slowed us down on other fronts. But she really enjoys running around kicking the ball- and last game, she quite nearly ran the entire field and scored (but was blocked at the last moment).

Miss B’s grades continue to improve and her studies at the high school are interesting her; in particular German and Fine Arts. I’m hoping Biology and Geometry start engaging her soon. She’s not finding the English as challenging as she would like.

Ms B and I decided to skip the gym membership as we head into winter, and plan to get our Weight Watchers memberships back. The weight loss requires more focus and feedback than the continuing running (both are about equally as important overall).

We had a scare with my father in law, but he’s out of the cardiac-care unit and is recovering in a hospital room. He should be moving home this week.

This weekend will be my last run for the Couch to 5K program.

In short, I’ll be done. It’s been nine weeks (ten weeks) of running. I can run about 2.5 miles in about 30 minutes. Next Sunday is my first ever 5K run, it’s the Komen “run for the cure.” And next month is the “Run Like Hell” zombie run. For the next few weeks I’ll be working on raising my pace to a 10 minute mile and increasing my distance to the 5K (3.4 miles). After that, well. I’m not sure; it’s pretty easy to get an hour three times a week to run but an hour and a half is kind of pushing it. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll do hour runs twice a week and then once on the weekend do a longer distance.

And two fingers up for my 7th grade gym teacher. He rode my case pretty hard- I couldn’t do a mile in an hour in 7th grade. I think I frustrated him. I know he frustrated me, between yelling at me for not being able to run and having to keep stopping to “tie my shoes” and telling me that swimming will be easier (it wasn’t, but at least I was less sweaty).

I really enjoy biking and swimming – I flirt sometimes with the idea of doing triathlons. But I’m not a serious kind of guy.

I was considering doing something nice for myself when I finished this program but I’m discouraged from that now. I thought about an iPod touch but really, my phone with Pandora is doing me pretty well. Maybe I’ll just buy a shirt or something. It hasn’t really done much for my weight loss; I’m still at 212, which is still down the 25 pounds I lost with Weight Watchers.

Ms B is also doing the C25K but had a setback with her bronchitis. She’s run a few times since then and we’ll get her to the 9 week mark too. I really enjoy spending that time with her.

I was talking to Pat yesterday and we were talking about the C25K program (which he’s finished and is working on the B210K). I told him that sometimes at the end of a week’s set of workouts, it was difficult to decide whether to move on to the next week or do the week over and get more confident at it. He replied that he had been reading (the trainer for Steve PreFontaine) and that coach had said something about working at your competence, not necessarily at your confidence.

That’s true for running, for your career, pretty much for anything that you’re levelling up at. It was inspiring as I burned through today’s run, the last run for week 4, and I ran harder during it than I probably should have. Finished it, though. I can tell that I was running harder than usual because when the podcast lady (Laura) came on and said “if you’re exhausted, just slow down a bit and but keep running” – I actually could slow down. When I was running before I was reading John Bingham, “the penguin” who allegedly had a slower running speed than his walking speed, so usually “slow down a little” doesn’t mean anything.

Here’s another quote for you: http://quittingadderall.com/running-with-bruce-lee-quote/

It’s the eighth time that Miss B has been sent to summer camp. Well, overnight camp at this particular camp- she had a few years of Zoo Camp and the like, day camps. And it’s Miss K’s first year sleeping at camp. We’ve gone and made them go the same week.

And in my opinion, the weather’s been unkind. Not hot, that was one extreme; so, no, it hasn’t been 100+ degrees. Miss B played in the water all that week, when it happened. Also the camp is under old growth trees and is pretty shady. It’s been cool, about 70 degrees and damp. It rained yesterday, it looks like rain today. It’s supposed to be mid-70s and only partly cloudy by Friday, and Saturday morning their camp is over.

I’m probably worrying too much. Miss B spent a lot of time building up expectations in Miss K’s mind, and I expect them to be unmet. It’s hard to sleep outside by the river when it’s raining on you. But Miss K is pretty resilient. On the other hand, she can be pretty rigid when she expects something to be a certain way. But no calls or anything yet, and it’s half through already.

The house is quiet without them. Still.

Miss B is up to her eyeballs in Algebra One. She’s having a hard time getting good teaching from her teacher. Our friend Mr I is also having troubles, in Trig. I have to admit, I’ve always enjoyed math, and enjoy being asked to help them. I hated my senior year math teacher, though, Mr Keupker.

Mr Keupker was mean. I don’t mean that in a whiny sense- he would walk around the eight seniors taking Calculus and say things like “Why are you even in this class. You can’t do this.” It really bugged me that he said this to Michelle (last name redacted for her privacy). I had a crush on her and knew that she was smart- she was taking classes that I was taking, and hey, I was smart.

Let’s be honest, I was a high school boy. I was a walking sac of hormones. I had crushes on half the girls in my classes. But two of my special affections were Michelle and Heidi.

To my delight, Michelle asked me to come over to her house and give her a few calculus tips. She was way out of my league, but I was more than happy to swing at any pitches she offered to throw. I biked over to her house one evening when I didn’t have to work, and we went to the kitchen table to talk about Calc. Her parents were out, and it was just us.

She offered me something to drink; she said “A coke, or maybe a beer.” Maybe she was offering to impress me, or test me or something. But my thought was “hey I drink beer after work. I can show how mature I am” and opted for the beer. She talked me down to a coke, which was ok too – I was just happy to be there. I wanted her to show up Mr Keupker, but she was starting to believe the things he said; “I’m not really smart.” I hate hearing that, especially from someone taking Honors Calc, Honors English and Physics.

I should have gone with the coke in the first place. And made myself memorable by saying “No, no beer for me. We’re here for Calculus, and I never drink and derive.” But I wasn’t quite that subtle in High School.