Frenzied Daddy

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 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.

I’m not happy with the whitewashing of Huckleberry Finn with the removal of the word “nigger.” It’s one of those topics, though, on which I don’t talk much; I don’t want to give the impression that as a white middle aged guy I know everything about how that word in particular and racism in general. I don’t. However, I think it’s an important word when it’s used in context. The word shows up again in another book often read in High School though, it shows up in To Kill A Mockingbird.

“Do you defend niggers Atticus?” I asked him that evening.
“Of course I do. Don’t say nigger, Scout. That’s common.”
“’s what everybody else at school says.”
“From now on it’ll be everybody less one.”

(shamelessly stolen from Art of Manliniess)

I think that word belongs there too. For two reasons; first, it’s actively discouraging the word. Second, because it actively adds something to the passage.

I think it’s important in Huck Finn too. It’s not satire; that’s completely different. Some people say it’s local patoise, local flavor, it’s a word they would have used. I say, Mark Twain used this word because he knew that couth mouths like ours would find this word distasteful, and he was trying to make a point about Jim and people’s assumptions they make when you describe someone a certain way.

Don’t forget, Mark Twain said that “word choice was the difference between Lightning and Lightning Bug.”

We ran into a couple of friends of ours a few weeks ago, and met their kids. That is, Miss B and Miss K met the kids, Ms B and I spent most of the time talking to the grownup parents. And as we were driving back, Miss B said something like “I like them, they’re really nice kids.” I happen to really like these friends and I could see kind of lines in my head between the parents and their kids. So I said something like “Oftentimes, great kids are the results of great parents.”

Sent a shiver down my back.

Our kids are, well, fantastic. Lots of people tell us that our kids are fantastic. It is extremely difficult to do my normal meek and mild thing after blindsiding myself like that.

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.

The kitchen cabinets in front of the sink are messed up. Basically they’re cut from one hunk of plywood. There’s a square “C” and then the center of the “C” is cut in half. Then the whole thing is turned on its side, so the two doors are part of the plywood. The main problem with this is that on both sides of the “C” the hinges have caused the wood to split, and so the cabinet is difficult to open or shut and always feels like it’s going to fall off. Basically I need to replace this front piece, I don’t think reinforcing the wood and using wood putty will do the job I need it to.

Also, the part above the doors is a separate hunk of wood; there’s a seam where it meets the side parts.

It might be easiest to replace this if I cut a new top part, new side parts and attach the side parts back to the top part with those metal brace things you can get to brace wood pieces together. That might be how they did it in the first place, although without the braces. Then re-add the cabinet doors. Although I’d be losing a bit of wood due to the saw blade turning the wood to sawdust in the cut, I think I can accomodate that. However, it wouldn’t give an easy way to keep them closed (I could add those magnetic closers at the top I suppose.

What do you think? Do I need a new tool to fix this?

My favorite joke this year has to be “yeah well in 10 years we’ll be looking back with 2020 hindsight.”

With Miss B turning 13 this year, gifts from relatives have changed dramatically. People have stopped asking me what she wants, have stopped shopping from her Amazon wish list, and have started giving her cash. I’m not sure what I think of this new trend. On one hand, it’s great for the giver and for the thirteen year old. But on the other, it’s annoying to hear “please drive me to Barnes and Noble” when I can barely consider getting myself a haircut. Is that why the cliche for parents is to resent the incessant requests for driving your teenager somewhere? Because the parents are jealous of having some money to spend on yourself? Hmm, maybe more research is required

I’ve also been considering a few things. As Ms B gave me her old iPod when hers got upgraded, I’m listening to more music and even some neat podcasts. I could totally do a podcast — maybe I should give it a shot. But I’m sure it’d be difficult coming up with interesting content for it. On the otherhand, maybe I should read kid’s books and podcast those (hey Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel would be a fun little book to read), for .. uh, kids to read along with. Yeah, I know it’s a dumb idea. I’m just not sure where to take it… ESL, maybe?

This is the most lights I’ve put on the house in … Well, ever. There’s a strand along the roof, one in the window, one on the Japanese Maple and even a little net of lights on the Rhody in front. Not to mention the tree.

Oh, Krampus, the tree. We went up to our new favorite lot; ($20 per tree, u-cut) SkyLine Tree Farm. It was surprisingly muddy; I should have worn shoes with better traction. I slipped and … “got mud on my butt” is an understatement. It was still wet an hour later and when I got into the car I sat on my coat. I fell on my hand and after the mud treatment my palm is nice and soft.

finally we settled on a tree. It was cute, and about 8 feet tall. Nice and bushy Noble Fir, with places for bigger ornaments. A great little tree. I crawled under the branches and got to work with the tree saw. And worked, and worked. The wii fit wasn’t much help. I was laying down to get to the trunk, so my angle of attack wasn’t so great and my shoulder still hurts (two days later) from having to hold the saw up. The tree was very wide down at the base and after forty five minutes of sawing I realized the cut was all twisted and wouldn’t match up anyway.

Ms B gave me permission to start again; so I went up a foot and cut it again. It only took about 15 minutes after starting that cut. Tied our kill to the roof of the Ford and drove home.

When we got it home, we realized a flaw in our plan. The base wasn’t long enough to touch the bottom of the stand while the branches sat on the ring at the top of the stand. After trying to “just screw it in” (the cats knocked it over) and then trying some blocks under the tree to hold it up (Ima gonna put this tree up on blocks in my yard and fix it right up) (the cats knocked it over again), Ms B decided that a straight, shorter tree with fewer branches was better than a taller tree tilted at at 45 degree angle. Honest, I thought the angle tree was nice. But I pulled it out and lopped off the ring of bottom branches with the circular saw.

Now, it’s about 6 feet tall and actually kind of cute, in a “why did we buy a 4 foot tree” sort of way.

The kittens adore it, but most importantly, the girls love it. With the lights on the house, it’s been pretty fantastic. Now I’m ready for hibernation- I’m tired and sore and my knuckles are all scratched up.