Frenzied Daddy

Coming down to the last week before Christmas. It’s a secular holiday in this household – more fun because of the music (I happen to really love Christmas Carols) and more fun to have an excuse to give presents to people. Of course it’d be more fun if they weren’t expecting these gifts, but a guy’s gotta go with his strengths.

Christmas puzzles me. For eleven months of the year we tell our kids not to be greedy and that we don’t have the money to spend on this trinket or that video game. But then, the last month of the year, we tell them to tell the world what great things they want. I’m sure it confuses them too. I wonder, though, what would happen if we established about a seventy dollar budget per month to buy trinkets and games throughout the year, and then downplayed the presents in December.

It also puzzles me because of the threats- “I’ll take back all your presents!” or “I’ll tell Santa you’ve been a bad kid!” (Never mind that he’s watching, and he knows if you’ve been bad or good.) Obviously the kids believe this, more or less, but why? I mean, we wouldn’t really take their presents back, would we?

I find myself, though excited, somewhat ambivalent about Christmas. I’m human, I’m allowed to have complex emotions. We have a gorgeous tree from Skyline Tree farm, some lovely presents under it. Some more presents in the mail.

I’m glad the kids will be having a great Christmas.

And I hope you have one too.

Miss B came home with a worksheet for a trebuchet. Totally excellent. We’re going to build it in the backyard and lob things at our neighbor.

Uh, I mean, no we’re not.

It’s due 11/15. I told her that we needed some diagrams of what it was supposed to look like so we knew how much wood or rope to build. It’s only supposed to throw a small hackey-sack item about ten feet, so it’s not getting strapped to the roof of the car. Yet. I may build a scale replica in 3:1 scale.

So she drew this out, but it didn’t have what I wanted, and here’s where it gets sticky. If it lobs a hackey sack ten feet, what angle does it lob it at, and how hard does it lob it at? And how much of this is math/engineering she should know at eighth grade? I figured this; she should be able to take the mass of the counterweight and the different lengths of the lever in order to figure out if it’ll lift the sack. And how hard it will lift it. Then she’ll need the arm (lever) to swing in a circle then stop, and she should be able to figure out the angle of release. She might be able to (assuming a frictionless world) figure the velocity of the sack at release, but it’ll take calculus, won’t it, to determine the change in the velocity relative to the ground, so she knows how far it was thrown?

I think we’ll wind up doing a bunch of trial and error launches, but it’d be neat to figure out how the math works.

I’m sitting beneath a tree at Portsmouth Park watching Ms K at soccer practice. It’s nice to watch her, reflect on how much she’s improved over the last month, an examine my own life to see if I can see any improvement over the same span of time.

I always wonder if I stagnating at work; I’ve been writing php websites for ten years and sometimes it seems like I’m doing the same things over and over. My work life is full enough that i haven’t had time to learn much about HTML5 or some neat CSS3 tricks. But on the other hand, I’ve been stretching and learning more about project management. Basically the interface between the client and the programmer. It’s a similar role to my normal one of main programmer but there’s less context switching, both for me and for the programmer on the project. This is good because they can stay in their flow state and keep chugging through the work.

It’s a challenging role. And when I come home, I’m learning that the family doesn’t really want me to just run into the kitchen and start their dinner. Sure, they’re hungry, but they want to see me too. That’s nice because if I go spend some time with them first, I feel less like I bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and then go hide in the basement and try to make more bacon. I feel less frustrated, less heavy, when i can get those few moments of chatter.

Speaking of “less heavy” both Ms B and I are giving Weight Watchers another chance. It has been about three three and we’ve each lost almost ten pounds. Most of it for me has been the portion size, and maybe less snackery. I was already eating at the food carts less… Delicious food but a little more than i want to spend every day (and a little more food than i should eat, as I realize now). My favorite cart is probably Built to Grill – they serve some fantastic authentic italian pasta and sandwiches. I think I can hit there about once every other week, though, and eat things that don’t have cream sauce.

Miss K’s doing a drill where they bounce the soccer ball on their knees. Its a nice evening, as the sun goes down, its not raining, and the park is filled with happy yelling kids. Kind of relaxing, though its not very soccerish. There should be more rain and mud. I guess we’ve got about three more weeks to get that.

It’s good to reflect now and then. I wasn’t to sure until i sat and started thinking about this that I’ve been doing enough lately.

Well now, that was great. We arrived at about 7 for the 7:30 show and went down to the preshow on the Rose Garden floor. Wee walked quickly past the concessions because we’re saving our cash for tomorrow’s trip to Kumoricon.

The pre show had us enjoying some acrobats, the hat tossers, the stilt guys and Miss K even got a tattoo! But the real show arrived at 7:30, by a fascinating coincidence the same time grandmas showed up with their authentic hot dogs!

In the first act we saw an elephant, a whole lot of acrobats, and some clowns. I wasn’t sure how they were going to top this for the second act, but the motorcycle sphere of doom, the elephants, the tigers and more amazing acrobats sealed that deal.

The kids’ eyes were shining, their mouthes were agape. I bought some $12 cotton candy and stuffed it into their mouths. They had a blast.

After the show, Miss B and her mother compared notes on the acrobatic guys’ sixpacks while I carried a tired Miss K back to the car.

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?