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.

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.

I love going to my in-laws. I can almost understand why some people don’t like their mothers- or fathers-in-law, but that’s not the case in my home. So when we left for their house this weekend, I was in high spirits.

Traveling over Willamette Pass, however, took its toll. It was dark, and foggy, and raining. And I’ve slowly been getting worse at driving at night; I have a hard time distinguishing the lane lines in the wet darkness (specifically during a rainy night). The fog lines were all blurred out from the winter wear on the roads (cinder ash and gravel) and there were times I found myself in the chain-up area thinking I was in the lane. There were wisps and banks of fog as well as the rain. It was a terrifying hour or so as we wound up from Oakridge to the pass itself, then the roads dried out and I didn’t have nearly as much fear.

Coming back was better- we came home during the day and I could see what was happening. Basically, humidity was very high, and there was a fog rising from the snow (the cold snow was causing a fog to rise and become a lenticular cloud). On top of that, the clouds were full and raining on us. The drive was surreal; we had ‘steam’ rising on both sides and from the road and at the same time we had snow falling on us from these clouds. And we had cloud banks (fog banks) across the road at intervals. It was a much more entertaining drive home than it was up into the hills. We have some neat pictures that I’ll upload (sometime).

I had a great time (as always) in K Falls. The girls had a lot of fun with their Grandma and Grampa and their cousins. And they got to go swimming at the Running Y ranch, too. The weekend was a success, but I hope that the roads get better before we go back down.

It’s only been raining for three days, I said day before yesterday, and I’m already depressed. I can feel the long cold claws of that forty pound monkey* sinking into my back. What is it with the winter and me lately? I’m cold and wet almost all the time. I just want to huddle under a blanket with a book and a cat and wait for a sunny day. But I can’t do that — I have things to do, websites to finish, projects to wrap up, dinners to fix, dogs (well, a dog) to walk, kids to play with. All these things need to get done even if I’m cold and wet.

On the plus side, I finally bought new shoes. I’m pretty hard on them but my hiking shoes had a big hole, and in the rain, well let’s just say there’s a reason I was cold and wet. And even thought Ms B’s HR department fouled up some paperwork, I actually had enough cushion in the accounts that the automatic withdrawals went through just fine. This made me feel like a grown up.

Maybe I’ll bring my work computer out of the basement and put it in the living room next to the window. How do other people handle this without wellbutrin or Prozac ?

*I don’t even know if monkeys have claws.

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).

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.