Frenzied Daddy

Last Thursday and Friday, Ms B got to see my morning ritual. Wake up Miss K, try to put clothes on me while she screams at me and tries to stop me. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so tiring. This is why when there’s someone else home I try to get them to get K ready for school. I think she and I are sort of locked into the same story every morning. She’s trained to throw an unholy fit, I try to keep my balance and eventually just start yelling, as I’m trained to do.

Ms B’s response was “Wow. Miss B didn’t do that…” Uh, yes, honey, she did. Kindergarten for both the girls was a horrible “get out of bed” time. And isn’t really a whole lot better when Miss B’s in 7th grade. It’s why I started the rule of “If you want to be on the computer before school, you need to be dressed, washed, and ready to go.” I don’t know what I’ve done to make it so bad, but I hate getting them out of bed.

What I have done is offer to take them to school in their pyjamas. (“offer” isn’t a strong enough word… threaten.. is more like it.) I got as far as getting B buckled into the car one morning before she finally decided that I was serious.

I know that at least part of my problem is that I wake them up suddenly, then they get thrown into clothes and rushed out of the house without so much as a good morning. So that’s my goal at least this week; to give miss K some “wake up” time. Ms B sometimes wonders why I like it so much when they go to bed “early.” — I think that they don’t get enough sleep, which leads to this too.

On the plus side, I only have a few more years of dragging them kicking and screaming out of bed. We should make the most of it.

Hope all your Easters are great. We’re not celebrating this year; most years I try to get egg dying kits and get the girls some chocolate, then hide the eggs in the yard and they can go find them. We worked through this with Miss B and then a few years with Miss K.

But you know something? They don’t eat the eggs, the eggs just sit, lonely, in the fridge waiting for some delicious egg salad to be made. I eat the egg salad. And the eggs. And I’ll eat the chocolate. They don’t need me to buy more chocolate, there’s almost always more in the house. Every year, we’re appreciative of the grandparents who send/deliver easter baskets. And I try to live up to what I think I “should” be doing. Well, let me tell ya, I’m not doing that any more.

I don’t know what would fill the place in our hearts where the stone rolled away from the cave where Jesus lay. Maybe Shaun of the Dead? OR some other fun zombie movie (can’t be too scary, Miss K would throw a fit). And next week I’ll make sure to pick up some Easter Candy. I hear Ms B likes the malted milk eggs.

Have a great Sunday, and try to stay at least partly dry. And watch for the risen dead.

No game tomorrow. Well, with the rolling thunderstorms, hail storms, and buckets of rain, I’m sure you’re as shocked as I am. Oh, sure, it’s 40 degrees outside, and the rain is torrential, but surely my kid wants to get as muddy as the pro-ballers get.

Doesn’t she?

And don’t worry; I’ll be uploading photos as soon as I get some. Some great photos of her hitting a ball and running around in the mud.

I generally say that I don’t have Seasonal Affective Disorder. I like rain, I like sun — I like the mixture of the two, about three days of one, then about three days of the other. I say “about” because I like the unpredictability. However, it’s been getting harder and harder to keep my sunny disposition the last few winters. Part of it is the cold. I think as I get older and more acclimatized to how Ms B likes to keep the house (80 degrees? Really?) that stepping outside into 40, 50 degree weather gets more difficult. Or maybe my fur’s just thinning.

So what do I do to keep my head up when it’s cold and wet outside? Well, I’ve been off my meds for a few months now; the Prozac and the welbutrin. And I’m reluctant to go running in the wet. I’ve never been very good at indoor mechanical exercise (the elliptical or the rower), it just seems pointless. At least with running I’m “going somewhere.” So what I am doing is trying to eat more vegetables and drink more (vitamin D fortified) milk, and I’m taking the stairs at work.

I’m breaking work projects down into four hour blocks and feeling “accomplished” when I get them done. Small goals, quickly iterated over.

And I’m planning to get my bike fixed, and I’m waiting until it’s a little drier to start running again. Small goals, small successes and hope. That’s how I’m fighting depression.

How are you doing it?

You know, it’s hard to keep my momentum when 75% of my comments look like “nice blog. Btw, visit hot-viagra.com!”

Trying something new this year. Miss K has been signed up for t-ball, You might remember that Miss B tried baseball too and hated it. Miss K is different; she’s a different kid. She’s taking to that teeball like, um, a cat takes to tunafish. Run around? Hit a ball? She’s delighted.

I’ll have to post some pictures.

On the other hand, Miss B is thrilled that I’ve purchased tickets to Kumoricon. She thinks she’s going to sew a costume and cosplay. But if she’s going to sew a costume it’s going to be straight construction of a t-tunic and trews. Maybe some pretty trim. Cosplay; faugh.

In a semi-related thing, the girls got cheap foam swords from Michaels’ craft store and beat the snot out of each other with them. I had to take them away and show them the wrist snap and how to lunge. Now we have a broken sword and I think replacing it with boffers would be a good idea. Anyone remember the particular width of the inner pipe in a boffer construction?

I strolled into the house today after a long day of slaving over a hot keyboard. I was all fired up to make stirfry wraps for dinner and then get back to work in my basement, slaving over the hot keyboard again. Until I met up with the girls.

Ms K immediately asked me what time it was. (“uhhh six.”). She panicked and started to babble. Ms B lifted her head and said “Miss K has an art show tonight at her school.” Whoa? One of the nice things about Miss K going to the neighborhood school is that it’s ..well, in the neighborhood. So I could turn to her and say “Well, what time is the show?” And I hear that it started at 5:30. I think to myself “It’d be nice to say yes more often. And how long could it take, anyway?” So I say “Let’s go!” Miss K runs to get her shoes and her jacket on. She was all fired up. Ms B says “It’s something about ‘paint mumble bumble’.. there’s a flier on the table. I don’t mumble bumble she has any mumble in the mumble.” By the time Ms B got these three sentence fragments out of her mouth, Miss K had her shoes on and was waiting expectantly by the door. Miss K said something about “we can make art.”

With no knowledge at all of what I was getting in to. But I figured I had a check if they wanted money — we could figure it out. K and I parked back around by the cafeteria where we usually go to drop her off in the mornings and she pulled me feverishly to the front entrance. We walked in, where Miss K was greeted by name. Everybody knew her and was delighted to see her. They give us pizza tickets and we go have pizza, soda, cookies and salad. Then they give her a bag of art supplies: pencils, crayons, water colors and a Strathmore notepad. Then they give her some raffle tickets with her name on them and we take them over to the gym where there’s art on the walls. Real art in frames, or not – photographs, paintings, sketches, blown glass, pottery. There was some really amazing stuff. Her instructions were to put her raffle tickets in envelopes for different pieces, or all for one, or whatever she wanted.

There was enough art for all the kids there; a raucous crazy bunch of kids.

She put all five tickets on a nice mosaic peace sign hanging, and we went back to the cafeteria where we made some more art (we did some landscapes with paper scraps).

Later, they gave Miss K the mosaic to take home – the first “official art” she picked out herself and brought home.

It was a neat evening. I’m glad I said yes. Of course, now, I feel like I should be working and not telling you about all of this; but that’s ok.

When I was a wee lad, I wanted, no, I needed a calculator. And my dad, in his infinite wisdom, said that he didn’t have a problem with me using a calculator.

If I didn’t need one.

So I memorized multiplication tables, played with numbers, developed a whole brain toolbox around how to play with numbers and get them right. I even developed the pattern of seeing two possible ways to get to an answer and making sure they lead to the same answer. For instance, if “x squared” is 144, I knew the multiplication table and can see 12×12 on one side of my inner vision, and on the other I knew that 12×2 was 24 and 12×10 was 120, so I could add those together and get the same numbers. Or on a multiple choice test, I could use one of those two ways to quickly get into the right range, and the test answers were usually pretty far off from one other, I could quickly narrow down the options.

Eventually I didn’t need that calculator although it was still faster, so I used it. Especially for things like adding up long sequences of numbers. And then I hit algebra and geometry and algebra 2 and even calculus. I spent hours — yes hours on pretty graphs for my solutions, finding the best answer, making hyperbole graphs, drawing sin(x)*tan(x) graphs. I probably used the most colored pencils of anyone in my high school who was not in the Art program.

You remember those days. Well, pretend that you do, ok?

Ms B had to take a statistics course for nursing. And for that, she needed a graphing calculator. You plugged in the numbers and it drew out your graph on its little LCD screen. Fascinating! A ten minute graph now took ten seconds. Well, at least she knew how to do the graphing, right? But her math wasn’t my responsibility and whoa, that little calculator was pretty neat too. She could look at the black on grey output and compare it to her paper and see that she had the right idea.

And now I’m reading The Talent Code and learning about focused practice, repetition, ironing out the errors, and myelin, and how long myelin takes to wrap around a “brain circuit,” and how that wrapping affects what we see as talent. Which is about a 10,000 foot view, sure, but you can see that I did a bunch of math practice, then people claimed I was talented at math. A direct relationship as it were between practice and talent.

I want to share this with my kids. And I considered putting Octave on the computers so they could see the glory of these cool graphs that equations make, but only after they build a few hundred themselves. I want them to have the practice behind the glory that is math. I tried to describe the formula of conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit as a graph line to Miss B the other day but I’m pretty sure she tuned me out. (Yeah yeah, the slope is 5/9 and it’s offset by 32 blah blah blah). (Actually what I was trying to do was show her how to answer the question from her current knowledge… 0C=32F,100C=212F so what is 80F in C?).

But, like my dad, I could filter their tools by their practice level.

And then, because of a silly post on reddit.com, I stumble across wolfram alpha. Goddamn, wolfram alpha. You want to see the graph for Celsius to Fahrenheit? Here ya go:
actually this is F to C but you see the line?

Oh, and did you want a sine wave?

Neat. How about three dimensions ?

(note: I had a hard time building an ellipse because Wolfram kept changing the X axis so my ellipse would be circular. She’ll have to watch that.)

And here I was worried about the girls searching for porn? Porn is tame compared to the damage they could do with this — why bother to learn something hard if goddamn wolfram alpha (and I think I’m going to add that adjective to it every time I say that) will just jump in and do pretty graphs for the girls.

What do you do to filter this out of their possibilities? Look — you can e’en do this on your iphone!!

(ps: here’s the link I followed to G.W.A. )

So, for reasons I won’t go into, I had to come clean with my daughter this morning.

“Honey, the only reason I had kids was for science fair projects. I go to Michaels’ (arts and craft supply store) and just pick up and hold the solar system model packages, and then put them back on the shelf. And I do it again with the dioramas. I just want to make science fun; and I can’t.”

Hopefully I put enough pathos into my delivery (These are real tears!!) that it sank in. I’m the guy who took three AP science courses his senior year in High School. I’ve had some fan-fricking-tastic science teachers and I loved the stuff; chemistry, biology, physics, even the geology we did for the “Natural History of Oregon” class. Ms Dexter, Mr Carlsen, Mr Sauer, I’m lookin at you. On the other hand, Mr Keupker (AP Calculus) can go jump in the Willamette.

I told her we could split up water in to H2 and O2. She thought that meant just boiling it (no). And I described how we could do it and then demonstrate that these were those specific gasses. We talked about some other science projects she could do in the two weeks she has remaining before this project is due. We talked about how to find out what her teacher is expecting, and that I wanted his rubrick to come home with her tonight.

Do you know any good science fair projects? Have any good science stories?

My favorite might be telling Peter Gunn to “hay feel this little white pellet… feel that slipperyness? (it was Sodium Hydroxide) … That’s your skin dissolving. You might want to wash that off…” … No, wait, that’s not my favorite.

How do I tell the universe that it’s ok, I’ve learned that lesson and could we please make this less painful? Specifically finances. I keep shouting on the inside but nobody’s listening!