on like popcorn

Moving, Pictures

2010-03-06T20:46:00.006-05:00

After the most unceremonious blog outage in personal history, I return with a batch of Holga pictures and a new link for you:

http://colindullaghan.com/blog/

That's where you'll find my posts from now on, since I've decided to switch to a WordPress blog with more features and fanciness.

Here I feel inclined to rhapsodize about all the good times On Like Popcorn and I have shared, going back some five years, even. But there's no need. All those old posts are right there at the new address, down to the last inconsequential comma. All your comments are intact and everything.

So it's all the same, really, except that I hope to start updating more often again, and I also hope if you were kind or amused enough to bookmark this site in the first place that you'll now take a moment to bookmark the new site as well.

I promise to try and have something interesting to say somewhat regularly. See you over there.

To sign off, here's one last batch of Holga pictures - all taken during our vacation to Beaufort, South Carolina a few weeks ago. (They'll also be at colindullaghan.com, naturally.)

Enjoy.

The Holga, She Still Goelga

2010-01-06T22:55:00.002-05:00

From time to time now I seem to end up with a mysterious line through the center of my pictures, but considering I've now taken dozens of rolls of film with what basically amounts to a plastic toy, it's kind of amazing that the darned thing works at all.

In fact I'm a little surprised it hasn't just disintegrated into little shards of hipster optic detritus. I'm still really liking shooting with the Holga, though. I hope you're similarly enjoying the results.

My Top (Okay, Only) 5 of 2009

2009-12-31T19:44:00.003-05:00

I'll admit it: We don't get out much. You see, we had this daughter back in February, and that more or less monopolized our 2009 to the exclusion of much in the way of media and entertainment.

(I understand there's a big fuss about vampires, provided they're young and attractive, and also Kanye West had a breach of etiquette of some kind, and apparently Tiger Woods ran into some marital difficulties.)

But we did still manage to eke out a few movie nights and music purchases this year - just enough to scrape together a Top 5 list for each. And, tell you what, just because it's 2009 and everything, at least for a few more hours, I'll list our top 5 items in a category that was new to a lot of us this year, and hopefully not too irritating yet: iPhone "Apps."

Oh, but you'll have to look past the fact that most of our films and albums weren't technically released this year. In fact, a few are downright crusty and aged. But we still *saw* or *listened to* them during the last twelve months, so I say it still counts.

Feel free to comment on any you liked as well, or just to tell me I have terrible taste.

I know, I know.

Movies
1. Fantastic Mr. Fox
I have a hard time seeing how you could not love this movie. Every frame is a painting, and every scene's dialogue is at least a pretty good prose poem. Some folks who are smarter and pickier than I am said it didn't do anything for them, so maybe I'm just a sucker for George Clooney and Meryl Streep. And artful cussing, that too - using the word "cuss" instead of actual, you know, cusses.

2. Pan's Labyrinth
I just saw this a couple weeks ago, during the inaugural meeting of our local small town Indiana film club (motto: "Hey ya'll, watch this") and was pretty blown away. It's dark, and deep, and beautiful, and you can't tear your eyes off the screen - even when you want to.

3. The Proposal
Now, those first two I saw while sneaking out of the house and leaving Lope to cope with Veda. The majority of the time, friends, I'm not nearly that jerky and instead stick around and help out. Which means that any movies I see are ones that she wants to see too. Which means some of them are, ahem, "chick flicks." (She may be a dizzyingly talented artist and the famousest Dullaghan in this household by a longshot, but she's still a girl.) Anyway, this one was pretty good. Betty White... you gotta love Betty White.

4. The Proposition
Remember before, when I was saying that stuff about Lope and chick flicks? Forget it. I just remembered, while searching for The Prop...osal (similar starts, you see) that she and I got this from Netflix several months back, and it was brutal and poetic and as manly as a hank of chest hair soaked in diesel fuel. Can't say I *enjoyed* it, per se, but it is really good, and I did see it in 2009, which puts it in select company. The TV version of Sweeney Todd (Ray Winstone, not Johnny Depp) was also excellent and fits a pretty similar description. That one came on the cable box one morning while I was waiting for Veda to wake up again.

5. Groundhog Day
Oh man, Groundhog Day. You've seen it - everyone has. In fact, a host of religious leaders have acclaimed it as enlightening and spiritual. We saw it again the other night, bearing that in mind, and I'll tell you - it holds up well.

Music
1. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Original Soundtrack)
See how I never mentioned how great the music was in this movie while I was gushing over how great the, uh, movie was? That was so I could save my gushing for here. I find it amazing that these songs can add so much to the film and yet stand so well on their own. The Bobby Fuller Four song that played over the credits had me feeling so good I was ready to jump up, slap the projectionist and demand that they replay the movie all over again.

2. Elizabeth Mitchell - You Are My Little Bird (2006)
Another non-new release (my little way of guaranteeing my 2009 lists don't match anyone else's), but worthy of inclusion on just about anybody's favorite album list. Especially if you've got kids. Ol' Elizabeth (she could be 25 for all I know) has the voice of your favorite aunt, or Sunday School teacher, or just that person you overhear singing to herself in the grocery store, and you absentmindedly follow her clear through the produce and into the cereal aisle before realizing you forgot to pick up pickles or anything else. She also picks really good songs to cover, in my opinion, including numbers by Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and, ahem, Burl Ives.

3. Explosions in the Sky - The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place (2008)
This I love because, well, because it's awesome, but also because I got it on the expert recommendation of the dude behind the counter at the world's best music store. I said I liked "electronica, but played on real instruments," and from that sub-par prompt he pulled out this. "Like Sigur Ros without words," he told me, rightly.

4. Sapient - Letterhead (2008)
Also purchased at Luna, and arguably because it was at Luna. You see, the opening track has this huge, thumping, exciting beat to it, and since I was previewing it on the record store's headphones (instead of my tinny laptop speakers), I really "got" it. The rest of the album has proved similarly thrilling, even if it's not the type of thing I ordinarily listen to anymore.

5. Bobby McFerrin - Medicine Music (1990)
That's right. That would in fact be a two-decade old album on my Best of 2009 list. But, like I said, it's new to *me,* and it was available really cheaply used, and Penny said we would like it. We did. Veda too. Rare is the day that cannot be made better by a playing of these songs.

Honorable Mentions:
Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest and
St. Vincent - Actor
Both excellent, and both recommended to me by my hippest friend (everyone should have a Ryan in their lives, but don't go trying to poach mine), but nudged out of the Top 5 because they didn't get as heavy a rotation here at the house as the others, and because they're both already on everybody else's '09 list, because they're that good.

iPhone Apps
1. Google
Ought to come with every iPhone. I hope non iPhone people (Blackberries? Droids?) can have it too, because it's why smartphones were invented, as phar as I'm concerned. Want to know something? Ask your phone. Your words will come up in the window, you'll hit the button, wait a second, and then you'll know.

2. Remote
Apple actually makes it - gives it away free, matter of fact - and if you play music from your computer through speakers (or through your house stereo via Airport, like we do), it's the ultimate party trick/actually useful service. Even shows you the album art of whatever songs you're playing, and lets you turn the volume up or down, in addition to skipping tracks at will.

3. Toy Camera
Takayuki Fukatsu makes the best, easiest way to take amazing photos with your phone. He just does. I don't know if he does anything else, like darn socks or play Reveille or anything, but he's so good at this one thing I'm fine if he doesn't.

4. Bloom
Courtesy of ambient pioneer Brian Eno and musician/software designer Peter Chilvers, This one is... uh... I'll just let the creators describe it."Part instrument, part composition and part artwork, Bloom's innovative controls allow anyone to create elaborate patterns and unique melodies by simply tapping the screen." And they're right. Also good for mesmerizing infants.

5. (tie) Pandora/Slacker
Don't like any of my Top 5 albums? Great! Just get either of these free applications, to access their free service, and hear free songs based on whatever you *do* like. A lot of which you may not have heard before. Funness ahoy.

Honorable Mention:
Kids Jokes
Ever wish your phone was a wrapper from some Laffy Taffy? Now it can be. Click the button and see the latest jokes for kids, *by* kids. They send 'em in, somehow. My favorite so far, and what earned it the mention here:
"What did the fish say when he ran into the concrete wall?"

"Dam."

Dam. Thanks for reading my list, friends, and I hope you found something worth investigating. Pretty much everything on here was something I only knew about because somebody else was nice enough to clue me in, so it's the least I could do to return the favor.

Happy New Year's.

Merry Christmas 2009

2009-12-25T13:13:00.006-05:00

A little backseat holiday caroling from your little friend Veda.

Enjoy, and if I don't talk to you before New Year's, have a happy start to 2010 too.

Now it's time to get back to more merriment and food and gift-giving and food and family togetherness and food.

Merry Christmas!

Advertising May Not Be the Highest Art Form, But It's the Best-Funded

2009-12-18T09:27:00.003-05:00

I tell people I write ads and they kind of get uncomfortable. They don't know what to say; it's like I just confessed to torturing kittens for a living. But not all ad people are smarmy hucksters, you know?

The guy who stencils casino urls on the sweaty shoulders of boxers? Not me.

The one who clutters up your commute with hideous billboards bearing messages that amount to "made you look"? Not me either.

Whoever is making beer ads full of jiggling, bikini-clad narcissists, or packaged-goods commercials featuring the stereotypical slackjawed husband and the disgusted, but brilliant wife, or all those Axe ads that demean everyone involved, on both sides of the tv screen - I claim no responsibility for any of it.

I hate all that stuff at least as much as you do. (Even more, I'd wager. But not at GoldenPalace dot com, because I hate their stupid ads.)

I've been in this business over ten years now, which feels weird to say, but it's true. And the people I've met and worked with aren't interested in hijacking your attention with some sleazy promotion. We really just want to tell our clients' stories in the most interesting and compelling way possible. To cut *through* all that crap people *think* we do - using smart, considerate, useful messages that (naturally) stand out beautifully.

Yes, there are a few of us who are go-for-the-throat salespeople, and would gladly take the consumers and shake them upside down by their ankles until the change rained from their pants pockets, if they thought it was a "viable communications strategy," but they're the spurned rarity in most agencies I've worked with.

(In fact, while a lot of us, myself included, are really impressed with the cleverness of a recent restaurant's campaign called "Expenseasteak.com," which lets you forge receipts for business purchases like staples and copy paper so you can actually spend company money on lavish lunches at the client's eatery, a good many of us - myself included - think it's actually not advertising at all, but something else altogether. Like, oh, fraud.)

But I'd been waiting for an example of how real ad people think about the work they do, because I knew that without some kind of evidence it would probably sound more like I was just defending my livelihood and trying to justify all the mental mugging and kitten-torturing I really do all the time.

Moreover, I knew that hearing ad people talk about what they're doing as though it were art, when really it's just "some stupid ad for face cream," (just as an example) could sound pretentious and self-deceiving. And in truth, it kind of does.

But it's real, I tell you, and nowhere have I seen that made more evident than in this video. It's a gorgeous piece of filmmaking, done by devoted, talented folks who really wanted to put something beautiful in the world. And they did it, just to prove my point, on behalf of "some stupid face cream."

Otherwise, who would have paid for it? And paid for the tv time so you could see it? Nobody, that's who.

So even though, yeah, there's a logo and a product shot at the end of this, the point is (or can be seen to be) that we get to see something pretty for thirty seconds instead of something stupid. Something we wouldn't have gotten to see before. Because somebody cared about what they were making, and not just shaking the change out of your pockets.

And I say, if you're in the market next time and you need some face cream, you should consider getting this kind. These guys paid for something you liked. (Assuming you did like it, of course.) And next time you want to buy, oh, body spray, I think you should consider *not* getting the kind that paid for something you hated.

It may be a flawed model for consumership, and there are a lot of other factors that could and should play into a buying decision, but voting with your dollars is in my opinion a good start.

We get to participate in a form of modern-day art patronage, just by pulling something off a shelf at the megamart. Which sure beats being shaken down for our change.

Don't like the ads? Don't buy the stuff. Eventually, the manufacturer will make the connection and stop cluttering up the world with dumbness. (Unless everyone else likes the ads but you. It's a democracy, of course.)

And please remember that we aren't all out to get you. Some of us are trying to tell you something that could make your life easier or more enjoyable, the only two noble efforts there really are.

Vedaminute, 11.22.09

2009-11-23T19:06:00.003-05:00

There are other good videos from this weekend, including one in which Tom proposes to Niki, and she accepts, at the Marine Corps Ball Saturday night, but I'm not sure they'd want me posting that one just yet. So we'll just stick to the basics for now.

Veda, crawling, cutely.

I Wanna Be Illustrated

2009-11-17T00:10:00.005-05:00

-Not sedated, mind you. Illustrated. And preferably by whoever used to do the covers of Time magazine in 1939.

To browse that particular publication, you'd picture former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, noted public servant, statesman, businessman, art collector, and philanthropist, as looking about like this:

Poke around a little further, though, and you get this picture of the man:

Still a dapper gent, don't get me wrong, it's just that he seemed to have lost a little of that matinee-idol quality in the transition from paint to photo.

Makes you wonder what that artist could do with your ugly mug, don't you think?

Germans in the Woods

2009-11-13T15:53:00.002-05:00

It's a little late for Veterans Day, but I just watched this two-minute movie, created by Rauch Bros. Animation in collaboration with StoryCorps, and had to share it.

Here's the summary from StoryCorps: "86-year-old WW II veteran Joseph Robertson remembers a German soldier he killed at the Battle of the Bulge."

Apologies if you can't view it in this post; try clicking the post title to link to the page where I watched it.

Germans in the Woods from Rauch Brothers on Vimeo.

Such a Nice Girl

2009-11-05T15:37:00.008-05:00

Before Veda was born, and even since, one thing that's been on my mind a lot is how she'll "turn out."

I'm interested to see, of course, even though I do get a little squeamish about how I might affect the outcome. It's much easier to imagine yourself sitting back and beholding this little person sprouting up into a full-blown human being without your interference, you see - anytime it occurs to you that you, personally, will have a hand in the process it seems almost terrifyingly certain that you'll screw it up.

I'm sure this is universal among new parents, too. Your baby is just perfect the way she is, of course, and somehow getting even perfecter every day. (Mainly because she doesn't know what incredible goobers she landed as parents.) When the day comes that Veda can observe what I do, how I approach this task of living life, and take little baby notes, hoo boy. It's all downhill.

(Even the word "task," just there, felt like a wrong turn. Shouldn't I have said "opportunity" to live life? "Gleaming, shiny, blessed exalted lottery prize of consciousness"? But no, I go with "task." Arduous, agonizing, ugly obligation. Way to go, Pop.)

Can you imagine when she's able to ask me questions, and solicit my opinions on worldly matters such as justice and literature and how much jelly goes on a PBJ? Oh man. All I can say is, enjoy your ignorance while it lasts, little one.

***

Sometimes you're afraid to even make predictions. After all, before I'd even met Veda, I was on record as hoping she'd be happy, and here nine months later, what do we have? A little girl who draws comments from strangers: "Such a happy baby!"

Stuff's spooky, man. What if I'd hoped wrong?

I like the happy thing, though. I say we keep going with it. Even if that's the only quality Veda is ever noted for, fine. Her name means "knowledge and wisdom," which are also nice to have, but you can do without either, in my experience. Even when we were naming her, I felt a little peculiar about, you know, deciding someone's destiny and all. I actually ran across a picture of a couple of Vedas on a baby names site, and was happy to see that it still left a pretty wide range of personalities she could one day embody.
Lotta leeway there.

I momentarily thought it would be funny, a while back, to go the other direction and try to point out characteristics I hoped she *wouldn't* have, especially if I could name celebrities who fit the bill, even including unflattering pictures if possible.

But I quickly ran into trouble there. It turns out that most people have some redeeming qualities, encouragingly enough, and I honestly had a hard time finding *anyone,* obvious folks like Hitler and Stalin excluded, who I could say is or was such a failure as a human being that I prayed my daughter never resembled them.

It's actually a pretty awful thing to say. About anybody. Especially celebrities, you could argue, since you don't even know them that well. Plus they've got parents too, and you just know some of those moms and dads already shake their heads when they think about how their little boys' and girls' lives are going, so why pile on?

And besides, I may be Veda's dad, but who am I to say how she should or shouldn't be? I want her to be happy, yes, but free too. If I could click a button and ordain her fate right here and now? No way. As I thought about it, I pictured her as a 16-year-old one day, in 2025 (!), browsing her floating hologram web terminal, and finding an ancient post by her dumb ol' dad, saying he was crossing his fingers she didn't turn out, oh, to play the accordion.

She'd eye the virtual screen with horror, read and re-read the words, then cast her saddening gaze over to the pearly white music case leaning against the wall by the corner, and vow never to play "Beer Barrel Polka" again. Ever.

I just can't do that to her.

So what I settled on instead were circumstances I hoped never to see her in. That seemed safe enough. "Love the sinner, giggle at the sin," right? Finally, the funny pictures started to fall into place. Right away I noticed several snapshots I hope never feature Veda's face in them:

Again, these may all be fine, decent individuals, at least some of the time, once, maybe, but I think we can all (even these people's parents) agree that Mistakes Were Made in the events leading up to these photographs. And they're mistakes I'll do my best to prevent happening to my daughter.

I'll also refrain from making any political statements, but will say that I hope Veda is never captured making this face during the swearing-in of her successor to public office.

Overall, she's basically free to be whatever she wants, as long as it makes her happy and doesn't land her on a celebrity mugshot website. Unless, of course, she got arrested for, oh, I don't know, conscientious objection or something. Something virtuous and principled.

Preferably without a swastika tattooed into her forehead, though.

A dad can only ask for so much.

***

Basically, little one, just don't turn out like Carl Panzram. This charming fellow was described as "rage personified" -- by himself, in his autobiography -- and is said to have told his executioner, right before he was hanged for the murder of 22 people, "Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could kill ten men while you're fooling around!"

Ah, no.

But if, on the other hand, Veda as a young woman takes a liking to music, and makes incredibly charming out-of-genre covers of current pop hits, well, so much the better. Consider that particular choice of actions Officially Dad Sanctioned.

No-Goodniks

2009-11-02T20:18:00.008-05:00

A few things to bear in mind if you decide to go as the cast of Rocky and Bullwinkle for Halloween:

- Almost nobody knows who Rocky and Bullwinkle are. The show went off the air in 1973, it says here, so actually I'm not entirely sure how I even know about them.

- Even fewer people know who Rocky and Bullwinkle's nemeses are, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale.

- When dressing up like Boris, bear in mind that it helps to be short and swarthy, only with sheet-white skin.

- When dressing up like Natasha, bear in mind that a purple dress and high heels don't provide much protection against October weather, especially in contrast to Boris's overcoat. This will make trick-or-treating less than appealing.

- When dressing your 8-month-old up like Rocky the Flying Squirrel, bear in mind that a costume built for dogs is actually pretty perfect, since it doesn't constrict the poor child very much and allows her cute face to be seen clearly.

- When dressing your dog as Bullwinkle, forget the white gloves and just go with clip-on antlers. Where were you going to find gloves that size anyway?

- Overall, if your family costume is this complex, involving multiple species and props such as a black-spraypainted 12lb. shot-put, try to get a plain background for the photos. Otherwise you can't see the bomb very well, or the antlers, and you kind of just look like a bunch of weirdos.

Happy Halloween, though!

Next Up, Blogging

2009-10-21T19:58:00.003-04:00

Veda may have said her first words tonight, if this counts – we were heading out of the restaurant, and Penny told her to say "bye bye."

After a few moments' hesitation, Veda waved her little arm and said, clear as a bell, "Buh-baaah..."

We were flabbergasted and got so excited we accidentally scared the poor kid. She did it a few more times as we buckled her into her car seat.

She's going to make a great flight attendant someday.

Or a sheep.

At Your Fingertips

2009-10-18T20:26:00.003-04:00

I just got done unloading and loading the dishwasher, then doing the same thing with the washing machine, then wiping down the sink and the countertops and bringing in Vince, who had been sitting placidly on the porch for quite a while but suddenly tore off into the bushes, barking and growling and all agitated about something. He came back in as Captain Muddypaws, of course, and had to sit still while I cleaned him off, and then I threw away the paper towel and gave the kitchen one last glance and headed in here to write this.

And the whole time, I was thinking about getting online. It occurred to me shortly after I started the dishes that there was something good I could be looking up on the web – the original animated clip of Where The Wild Things Are, from the 60s or 70s I think, mentioned in some article I read yesterday (online, naturally) and now suddenly urgently interesting.

I also wanted to take a dish/laundry break to grab my computer or phone and browse the pictures Penny's sister took at her concert last night. I know she got them off her camera this afternoon, and surely has posted them to her Facebook account by now.

But I kept on cleaning. At first it seemed like way too long to wait, you know, and I figured maybe I'd take a break after the dishes but before the laundry, and look up all that stuff I was so instantaneously curious about. In the end, though, I was able to hold off until the whole job was done.

And that, as I thought it might, made the Wild Things clip and the concert pictures much more exciting in my mind. Five or ten minutes' delay – just long enough to start a new load of laundry – got me giddy (okay, maybe not *giddy*) with anticipation.

And I got to thinking about how it came to be this way. The giddiness, mild as it may be, is clearly a result of my having more or less nonstop access to the Internet. Mostly I'm home, and other than that I have my iPhone, unless I'm in a pool or something, which only applies about .5 hours a week. So anytime I want to know something that can be known by consulting The Ether, I pretty much do.

After all, it's free, right? Well, "unlimited," I should say. I pay the same amount for access whether I get online or not. So there's really no reason – no financial reason, anyway – not to indulge my curiosity the moment it surfaces. And, as Lope would be the first to tell you, that's just what I do.

For a moment, though, as I sorted whites from darks and emptied lint and blotted paws, I resisted. This time.

And now that I'm done with the tasks, and tapping away online, have I looked up the video clip, or the concert pictures? Nope. Instead I went right here and wrote this. Because that other stuff will be there when I get finished.

I had a feeling I'd knock this little observation right out of my head as soon as I jammed something else in. Which I'm trying not to do so compulsively.

Sort of.

Attack of Mom

2009-10-17T22:53:00.002-04:00

Attack of Mom
Originally uploaded by This Guy Colin

Veda is besieged, happily, by Lope.

I Took Your Advice

2009-10-13T15:18:00.013-04:00

Okay, so maybe it was time to get out and get some fresh air. So this weekend, that's just what we did.

We sat out on the sidewalk on a pool float and looked at all the leaves...

And went to the coffee shop to hang out with some little friends...

Even had a date on Friday night, at our favorite local restaurant Cerulean, thanks to ace sister-in-law and emergency babysitter Brittany.

We got to go for a hike in the woods with Vince...

And go to Mentone (see, it says so right there on the right) for a baby shower for Veda's new cousin Elijah.

There we got to eat cake, and see relatives,

...and even play a little football out in the field right across the street.

On Sunday we went to Elkhart - way out of this little town of ours, to an, um slightly bigger little town - and have lunch with different relatives at Panera bread, where Penny's towering uncles quipped that they'd never eaten at anyplace like this, and I asked "like what?" and they said, "healthy."

And on Monday, in honor of Columbus Day, we voyaged waaay out into uncharted territory and went back to Elkhart/Goshen. That's where the apple orchard is, and that's where Veda got her first experience with heavy farm labor, which we plan to make a big part of her life from now on. We even got to bring Grandpa along, who drove all the way up from South Carolina and made Veda smile pretty much nonstop. He got a bunch of Indiana produce to haul back south with him.

...All of which was a lot more fun and enriching than, you know, staying home and calling your relatives Nazis. Makes for better pictures, too.

Rainy Day Activity Idea

2009-10-09T15:30:00.004-04:00

So I get a nonstop stream of hardcore emails from my Fascist uncle, right? Really fantastic stuff, like bald-faced lies about Obama and death warrants and gun bans and the like, and these awesome, hateful, fearmongering screeds about godless bureaucrats and worthless poor people. It's pretty outstanding.

But they're really piling up in my inbox, and starting to smell. And I figured there must be some alternate use for them, like how Martha Stewart could always make elegant formal wear out of used coffee filters and stuff. I always wished I was that resourceful.

So here's what I've got: (You can do this at home, as like a craft project with the kids. Just, um, wrap your computer mouse in papier-mâché or something.)

1. Find the latest/greatest/most offensive email you've got lying around.
2. Select all the text, and copy and paste into a new Word document.
3. Do a "Find and Replace" function, replacing every instance of "Conservative," "Realist" or "Hardworking American" with "Good German."
4. Once that's complete, replace all instances of "Liberal," "Secularist," "Immigrant," "Muslim" or "Welfare Recipient" with "Jew." (You can also do a Pelosi/Satan switcheroo for added authenticity.)
5. Select and copy all the new text, and place into new email.
6. Reply to all.

Let the fun begin!

The Wheels on the Bus Go... CRAZY

2009-10-07T20:50:00.004-04:00

That's one messed up bus we're singing about in that song, you know?

I mean, you've got the wheels doing their thing, of course: 'Round and 'round; 'round and 'round. All over town.

And that's cool. Otherwise we'd have stranded passengers waiting forever, hoping to get picked up or dropped off by a completely immobile vehicle, and nobody wants that.

Then there are the wipers, swish-swish-swishing, and I'm fine with that too. Swish swish swish, swish swish swish. It could be raining. That's a real possibility. Wiping makes sense.

The problems start with the horn, though. If the horn on the bus goes "Beep, beep, beep; Beep, beep, beep; Beep, beep, beep" (and they do this "all over town," mind you), then I've got to ask, "What's the emergency?"

A single honk would probably suffice, no matter what the roadway issue might be - especially with that mondo bus horn the driver is packing. You've heard the horn on one of these things before, right? They reach up and yank that cord, man, and it's like the trumpets of Odin just let loose in your skull.

"Beep." Yeah, right. It's probably more of a "BLARE BLARE BLARE OH SWEET BISCUITS AND APPLE BUTTER WHAT JUST HAPPENED I THINK I PEED" for the poor pedestrians, right? None of this discreet "beep beep beeping," no sir. This thing is downright terrifying. Some maniacal driver deafening bystanders, nonstop, for no discernible reason. Great.

Even if there were something truly exceptional to honk about, honestly, like, say a wounded manatee had somehow beached itself in a busy intersection, and we needed to notify authorities both transportational and environmental, I still think just a couple of horn blasts - or, come on, now, a simple call over the CB radio, driver - would get the job done.

"Yeah, this is bus 973. We've got a sea cow down at Anderson and Park. Yep. Send the Sierra Club and a front-loader." Presto. Problem solved. No need for violating noise ordinances "alll over town."

Sheesh.

Plus, don't forget, this nut is making the doors go "open and shut" at the same time, more or less nonstop. And that's happening all over town too. In the rain. Is he trying to make the entry steps slippery? Does he want us to slip and fall and fracture our patellas? You have to ask.

It's really no wonder that the babies on the bus are going "wah wah wah," when you think about it. Incessant crying? Of course! The circumstances warrant it! Here you are, just a tot, thinking you're making some uneventful jaunt across town, making use of your public transportation infrastructure, trying to get out there and mingle with a different sort of crowd, and what do you get? A horn-blowing psychopath, tearing down Anderson Avenue, in the rain, ramming manatees, with the freaking DOORS OPEN. And shut. And open. And shut. "Wah wah wah" is right.

Those mommies on the bus - you know the ones I mean - telling these poor babies to "Shh shh shh" should be ashamed shamed shamed. That's a perfectly natural response to a crisis situation. To tell you the truth, I want to cry just thinking about it.

But I suppose it's all the same to the driver, this loonball. What's his story? Where's his reassurance to his understandably panicked passengers? How does he comfort their fears as the wheels go round and round, thumping over endangered ocean life like there's no tomorrow? Just what does this sick individual have to say for himself?

"Move on back, move on back, move on back."

I'm telling you, you're better off hitching a ride with the itsy bitsy spider. At least he has the good sense not to travel in a downpour.

The Five Stages of Summer's End

2009-10-05T17:36:00.004-04:00

1. What? It's supposed to get down to 40 tonight? 40? And only up to what tomorrow? 55? That's ridiculous. I bet it'll still be nice. I'm still gonna wear shorts.

2. [later] It's forty friggin' degrees out right now! This is crap! Completely unfair. I hate that weatherman.

3. Just one more month of nice weather. C'mon. Three weeks. I don't want to put the bikes up just yet. A week. We can have a week, right? One measly week. If - no, when it gets warm again after this weird fluke cold snap, I'm gonna get out the bicycle and ride around the park. Swear.

4. Ah, who am I kidding? Winter's here. Fantastic. Might as well roast some flippin' chestnuts over an open flippin' fire right here. I can feel the frostbite setting in already. Whatever. I don't even care. I told you summer was over.

5. You know, chestnuts actually sound pretty good, though. And hot chocolate? I mean, now that there's that nice autumn chill in the air, I can definitely see the appeal. It'll be cool... we can go to an orchard, get some apples... ooh, and pumpkins! We'll totally carve some pumpkins. And I really like some of my winter clothes. That coat I got last year on clearance - where did I put that awesome thing? Is it with the sleds?

Takayuki Fukatsu Improved My Weekend

2009-09-28T16:42:00.002-04:00

This weekend we went to Indy and took Veda to the zoo for the first time ever. Penny had a hunch the little one would like animals, since Veda laughed hysterically at her Aunt Lauren's horse-sized dog, and this hunch was proven correct. We all had a great time watching the lemurs, and the donkeys, and the Scottish Highland Cow, and especially the goats. (They were very nice and let Veda pet them, even when she tried to poke their weird rectangle-oval eyes out.)

We also got to go out for Thai food, which was a risk for Mom and Katie, since neither was sure they'd like it. Fortunately, the dishes we ordered were indisputably tasty. After that we got to head over to a party - a bona fide party, with adults and everything - and catch up with friends we've known since the dawn of time.

Unfortunately, my sister was there (well, that part's not unfortunate), but she roped me into a game of Beer Pong (I know, I know) in which we got skunked by the opposing team. That meant we had to drink all the beer on our side (some of which had been seasoned with ping-pong-ball residue, mmm) and that I ended up with a headache the following morning, because I am old.

Still, that next morning we got to have lunch with some friends we've known only since the Precambrian Era, not quite the dawn of time, and enjoy delicious waffles. So that was fun.

And then we drove our waffle-stuffed, headachy selves back up to Winona Lake, pausing outside Roann, Indiana when we noticed Penny's sister Brittany sitting next to a river. This was not something you ordinarily expect to see on that particular stretch of road, so we turned around, pulled over and discovered that Britt and the rest of the family had been kayaking that morning, and were just now getting ready to have lunch at a nearby diner. So we did that too.

Then we met back up at Penny's mom's house for a little while, during which time Veda barfed on Penny's arm and I tried to keep our niece Gianna from jumping into a fountain. Good times.

But all throughout, I got to play with my latest favorite toy, which is the QuadCamera application for the iPhone. Whoo man. The iPhone doesn't have a particularly great camera, really -- not much better than any other cell phone, I don't believe, and actually worse than several. But it has that most prized and essential feature, which almost all other cameras lack, which is that you have it with you most of the time.

So this application, conceived by Mr. Takayuki Fukatsu, effectively makes the iPhone's mediocre camera *fun-ly* mediocre, much like my beloved Holga, and takes a series of photos in rapid succession, which are then conjoined in a fun, mosaic-looking collage that actually resembles some Holga shots.

It made me look at everything a little differently, which is just about all you could ask of a camera (especially a phone-camera application that cost less than a cup of coffee), and it made an already great weekend even more enjoyable.

Thanks, Takayuki.

Make Room

2009-09-23T15:44:00.004-04:00

Just doing a little I.T. admin around the house here, trying go gauge when we'll need to get a new external hard drive to house all Penny's projects, plus all the music and photos we steadily add to the digital stockpile.

Noticed an interesting phenomenon, involving a sudden spike in disk consumption right around February of this year. It would seem something caused us to start taking a lot more pictures...

(Incidentally, I predict that as Veda starts walking, talking and taking over small countries with the power of Raw Cuteness, we'll shoot even more photos - and especially video - than we already do. A new 1.5TB drive, which we'll need here in a few months, should fill up by the time she starts kindergarten.)

Vedaminute, 09.22.09

2009-09-22T20:33:00.001-04:00

Vedaminute, 09.22.09
Originally uploaded by This Guy Colin

Teething is no fun. Well, unless you have a rubber shoe to help you through it... (Make sure your sound is on.)

Vedaminute, 09.15.09

2009-09-15T11:21:00.002-04:00

Vedaminute, 09.15.09
Originally uploaded by This Guy Colin

Maybe it'd be fun to post a little one-minute clip of Veda every day, or at least every day I think of it. This Flickr Pro account should let me, I think, and hey - it's not like she has any trouble supplying sixty seconds' worth of cuteness each day.

Calculated Guesses

2009-09-13T17:32:00.009-04:00

The newest version of iPhoto is pretty impressive. In addition to cataloging our whole library - that's about 33,000 photos and counting, plus another 4,000 or so movies - and letting us quickly flip through six years of images, it uses face recognition software to group your shots by who's in them.

Of course, you have to teach it what your friends and family look like at first, with a couple of rounds of labeling folks the old fashioned way, but after that the program really seems to get the hang of it. After just a few minutes it can identify your loved ones much faster than even you could (...if not quite as reliably).

I mean, think about how long it would take to go through thirty-freakin'-three thousand images, looking for, say, one of your awesome uncle Mark. This way you just find a couple, tag 'em as such, and ta-da: dozens more potential pictures for you to either confirm or reject. And most of those results will feature the sunny grin, the curly hair, the distinctive mustache that mark Mark. A few may be off, but that's part of the fun.

It's getting pretty good at spotting Penelope.
Part of that may be because it has 2,037 confirmed Lope-pics and counting, but still -- wearing sunglasses, reflected in a mirror, through a car window, sipping a mocha latte, making funny faces, out of focus, in the dark, whatever -- it always seems to guess that it's Penny.

On me it's a little less certain. Maybe it's just that I have less distinctive features than she does, or perhaps that I'm not in as many pictures to begin with, but iPhoto continues to mistake me for some pretty unlikely candidates.

For instance, I have a hard time seeing how I resemble an elderly Asian man. Or former president Bush. Or a truck tire. But algorithms don't lie, I guess, so on some level I apparently do look somewhat like Tony Dungy. Aside from his Super Bowl ring, among other traits.

Alright.

I have to give credit for one thing, though: By round 3 of identifying Veda, iPhoto mainly mistook her for just two people -- me and Penny. Which stands to reason. I'm kind of surprised it can I.D. babies at all.

So if you think I've got some photos of you in my library, rest assured that I'll soon find them all. And I can chart your hairstyles over the years at the click of a button.

Or even, with no personal offense intended, compare you to a truck tire.

Computer says it, so it's got to be true.

Hit By a Comparison

2009-09-03T12:55:00.004-04:00

I don't know about you, but I love hearing the same joke twice.

I really do. I have this penchant for deconstructing jokes, which I understand is never a good idea (E.B. "The Man" White said it best: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”), but I just can't help myself.

So I figured what might be funnier than explaining comedy would be just sampling two flavors of it.

(Fortunately, it's not two versions of the exact same joke, but two riffs on the same topic: being hit by a car. That should be a little more interesting to the casual bystander.)

Both are YouTube clips, which are legal to post here, but I recommend just listening to the audio of each. The video element doesn't add much to stand-up comedy in most cases, in my humble opinion.

We'll go in chronological order, so the first will be Eddie Murphy from 1982, and the second will be Dane Cook from 2005.

Both are hugely successful comics, though neither of these guys are technically part of the comedy pantheon, so I think it's a reasonable comparison. (Eddie probably gets a little more respect among comedians than Dane does, though. His early routines got criticized for being a dumbed-down version of Richard Pryor's stuff - which Eddie acknowledged by admitting Richard was his hero - while Dane's comedy draws flak for being more theatrical than cerebral, and he runs around on stage yelling a lot. He's also accused of plagiarizing jokes from Louis C.K.)

Hey, and both are pretty profane, just so you know.

1:

2:

So which is funnier to you?

On the Meaning, Purpose and Nature of Cuteness

2009-08-29T22:17:00.006-04:00

Define "cute." Go ahead. I'll wait.

It's kind of like... uh, pretty, but in a wholesome, innocent way. And boys can be it too. For a while. Old boys -- men, I guess -- can't really be cute, or at least can't be called it, but women can. Girls too. Girls especially. Beautiful? No, that's something different. "Tiny" isn't quite it either. Man, there was a tiny spider crawling on my sunglasses the other day when I went to put them on, and it wasn't cute at all. At all. The ebola virus is pretty compact as well, I'm told.

But yeah, we're on to something. Pretty *and* little. And non-threatening. Very important. "Exquisite..." hmm, maybe. Nah. It's like that idea, but on the opposite end of the fanciness spectrum. If "exquisite" is a gourmet truffle with coffee liqueur, "cute" is a strawberry cupcake.

I guess you just know it when you see it. "Things That Make You Go 'Aww'" was going to be my original title for this little rambling, but I was hoping to stay a little more scholarly-sounding than that.

How is it that we all have full use and mastery of this word, yet nobody really knows how to define it? A mystery for the ages, no doubt. "Cute." Kyoot. You know, that "things that make you..." definition might be the best we're going to get. Cuteness could be serviceably defined as the quality belonging to anything that elicits instantaneous and otherwise inexplicable affection.

"Cuter than a pail of kittens" was the phrase bandied about in the crime thriller we just watched the other night. And they weren't even talking about a baby, or a panda, or a virus or anything else that might fit our earlier attempt at a description -- the cute item in this case was actually a plan to rob a cargo jet of some Swiss gold bars. Not that small, this plan, nor particularly aesthetically appealing. Especially not with Gene Hackman at the helm. (Sorry, Gene. You're still probably the most effective living actor in modern cinema, if that's any consolation.)

So a scheme can be cute, but Gene Hackman cannot. Nor a truffle, nor a death spore.

The local newspaper is running a "Cutest Baby" contest, of course, and this being 2009 and all they've got online voting and everything. Log in, browse some babies, place your votes. Winner gets a savings bond, or a Babies Backward R Us shopping spree, or something like that. It's too late to enter Veda this year.

I saw the other contenders, though, and it's a formidable field indeed. There are some devastatingly cute kids in this region, by the looks of it. Our friends -- you know what? I was going to rattle off the names of some of the cute kids our friends have produced so far, but now I'm not going to. I'd surely leave one or two out, just by sheer forgettance, and the parents could feel rightly jilted.

Folks are funny like that.

Then again, I had somebody comment on Veda being cute just this morning, and I didn't really know what to say. She is, of course -- the most radiantly adorable human being who has ever been born to anyone, anywhere, ever -- but it's still kind of strange thing to hear. People say it to moms and dads almost as a pleasantry; it's like complimenting someone's wallpaper. "This floral pattern is just lovely, Bernice. I never would have thought to paper right over the brick like that. Gives each begonia just that little bit of texture. Hey, baby's cute too."

"Thank you very much, Glenda." That's what you say -- you thank people for saying your baby's cute. It's not intended this way, I know, but when you think about it it's almost like you're acknowledging their politeness, and by extension their insincerity, by thanking them. "Thanks for saying my kid's cute" could imply that the kid actually *isn't*, and you both know it, possibly because he looks like a little Gene Hackman, but that you sure do appreciate this bystander pretending otherwise.

"Yeah, I know" is no good either, though. (Despite that fact that every parent *does* know.) It's just a little too smug, a little too self-satisfied for common discourse. But why is that? Why is it rude to smile and nod at someone who called your kid cute and simply affirm that you agree?

I'll tell you why. It's because babies are seen as miniature people. Scale models of their parents. And saying someone's kid is aesthetically appealing, eliciting that good ol' instantaneous and otherwise inexplicable affection, is generally interpreted as a compliment to the parents as well.

This is horseshit. Just because someone thinks my baby is cute doesn't mean they think I am. Not by a longshot. (Even though people do sometimes say in their next breath, "she looks just like you," which I'd say is a come-on by any standard, yeah?)

Yet still it's treated -- responded to, anyway -- as flattery for the folks. Like making a fuss over a fancy hat or something. "Hey, cute baby." "Oh, goodness, this old thing? It's kind of you to say so, but I don't believe it for a second. Poor soul's probably still covered in dust from the attic. Thanks all the same."

So is that why all those parents entered their babies in the Cute Contest? To make themselves feel more attractive? As if a victory there will confirm their pulchritude in print -- a solid bullet point they can then rush to add to their resumés?

"Let's see here, Mr. Robertson. Looks like you've got ten years' experience, two advanced degrees and -- hold on a minute -- a cute baby too? My goodness, why don't you just hop around here and take my desk until we can find you something nicer. I should have hired you the moment you walked in, flashing those wallet portraits so prominently. Quite a find you are."

Probably not. No, it's probably more the case that you thank people on your child's behalf. It's not like Veda can say "thank you" yet -- the little ruffian's manners are deplorable -- so it's up to Lope or me to respond for her. That makes more sense.

I'll tell you what I want to say, though, particularly now that I've given it some thought. "Glad you think so." And here's why:

I think I've figured out the purpose of cuteness. The whole point. Yep. Defining it may still be tricky, and the "how" remains a little sketchy, but I'm pretty sure I've got the "why" nailed down.

It's not to impress the neighbors. And it's not to prove that you, too, the parent, were one day fun to look at, despite your current state of decay and disrepair. It's not even to guarantee the baby's survival, a theory I've heard propounded on more than one occasion. (Think about it -- it kind of makes sense that Veda's big eyes, chubby cheeks and infectious smile would keep us from abandoning her to the wolves, until you realize she's way too cute for that. To avoid getting jettisoned, she'd only need to be about a sixtieth as cute as she actually is, and I just don't buy into this kind of evolutionary overkill. Cute can't be a defense mechanism; it's more like a charm that fills every cell of your baby and mesmerizes anyone who comes too close.)

Cuteness isn't to win you a Babies Backwards R Us loothaul, either.

No, I think it's the simplest, oldest motivation in the world that explains babies' cuteness. It's to make other people happy. Some people were put here on Earth to bring joy and contentment to the humans around them, and I think babies do it better than just about anyone.

It reminds me of that quote I loved so much a few years ago and talked about in an earlier post. "Live in an endeavor to fence against ill health and other evils of life by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles, but much more when he laughs, it adds something to this fragment of life." (- Laurence Sterne)

Yep. That's Veda's job right now, and she's extreeeemely good at it. So I'll probably keep thanking people when they say she's cute, but really I'll be thinking, "Way to go Veda! Another satisfied customer!"

And she'll look up at me and smile, and I'll melt all over again. I still can't really define it, but I know that's just how these things work out.

Ninth Street Courtship

2009-08-29T16:47:00.004-04:00

Just got back this Holga picture, taken from the bottom of the street by our house. I'll admit the sepia tone is cheating a bit, but doesn't it look like this could have been discovered tucked inside an old bureau or something?

If you ignore the lightpost, I mean?

Not sure who the two people are, either, but I sense a budding romance.

In other news, Brittany (our little sister) starts college at Grace (at the top of this hill) this week, and today's move-in day.

It's really fun to help her get situated. Penny's pretty unstoppable with ideas for how the girls should configure the room.

You Do, Unfortunately, Tube

2009-08-21T07:32:00.003-04:00

Have you noticed that YouTube comments are pretty much the bottom of the barrel in terms of incisive commentary and human compassion?

Here we have these people, in this free online community, sharing clips from and of their lives, with the whole world, with no personal gain in sight, and what to they get? Bombarded with comments from anonymous morons who were hoping instead for boobs or explosions, and are now angry that said attractions were not provided.

I'm all for open public discourse, sure, and freedom of expression, certainly, but the more I browse YouTube, the more I think there should be a comment-screening device built in there, somehow. Call me a fascist.

I don't care if it's the person who posted the video approving the comments before they go up (which would water the site down a lot, though, I'll admit), or a site administrator filtering out gibberish and personal attacks (very time-consuming, no doubt), or even something like what I see on Amazon, where after each user review of an item there is a choice for you to indicate "Was this review helpful to you?" [YES] [NO]

Furthermore, to praise Amazon for a second, people can comment on other people's reviews, so if some guy says a diesel-powered chicken scalder is crappy and you happen to personally love it, you're welcome to chime in and respectfully opine "I think you must have been using this product incorrectly, Featherfire62. The "fricassee" setting is only for birds of 6 lbs or less, and only with non-mineral-based oil baths."

For example.

*Then,* (if you're still following this increasingly disgusting thread of Web 2.0 discourse), site visitors who see your comment on his review can confirm whether your comment was worth reading or not.

See, it says right there on the site:
"Do you think this post adds to the discussion?" [YES] [NO]

Visitors can then go further an choose to ignore your posts in the future, if you're really annoying, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Comment moderation -- of some kind -- on YouTube, please.

If Amazon does it, and we can have a more enlightened discussion about which friggin' toaster works best, surely we can elevate the discourse about video clips.

*****

Man, do I ever sound cranky! In truth, it all started with a series of videos by a guy I know, the guy who bought my old V8 Volvo, actually, in which he destroys (under orders; he's a dealership mechanic) cars traded in under the Cash for Clunkers program. It's hard to watch, admittedly, especially for a car lover (particularly one who has an almost pathological aversion to waste), but it would also be hard to argue that any of the comments "add to the discussion."

That, combined with some less-than-constructive comments on stuff I've personally posted on YouTube, have made me wonder why that particular community is so hostile and reactionary.

Not that I'm not an old fart and curmudgeon of the highest order... I am.

But just end on an up note, I'll paste in here a video I just watched this morning, featuring an elderly couple who are still so in love that they play games in which the winner gets a kiss from the loser. And they cheat at it.

It is, as our friend Brooke would say, "kind of awesome," and in stark contrast to the majority of what I've run across on the site. Maybe I just don't look in the right places.

(Oh, but to further my point, I'll note that in the margin of this video someone has posted a link to another one, titled "Old Ppl Makin Out," complete with comments from the peanut gallery about -- sigh -- grossness and throwing up.)

Still, there is this:

Ride the Dixie

2009-08-18T13:35:00.003-04:00

On Sunday, we met our friends Rachel and Kendal up in North Webster for a ride on "The Dixie," Indiana's oldest sternwheel sightseeing boat.

I think Veda liked it.

As Cosmic As You're Likely To See Me Get

2009-08-17T14:39:00.007-04:00

I saw this amazing photograph in an article this morning and was so intrigued I had to read the whole thing, plus comments.

Taken by a fellow by the name of Ben Long, the pic depicts Monument Valley at midnight, and everything you see in the picture was illuminated only by the light of a full moon.

It was a little tricky to set up, explained Ben in his article on taking such pictures, because your eyes can't really see what the camera is pointed at. Even once your eyes adjust all the way, the mesas and buttes in the distance are still just "vague forms," in Ben's words.

In fact, the camera can't really "see" the scene either -- at least not at first. This particular exposure was for 10 seconds (your average snapshot is over in 1/400th of a second or so), because that's how long it took for the camera to gather enough light.

And the results -- what you're seeing here -- don't look real, do they? That doesn't look much like moonlight to me. Too orange-y. Too warm. Looks more like a dim sunset, if anything. Somebody in the comments section of Ben's page complained that the photograph seemed "artificial."

Someone else explained, helpfully (to me, anyway) that of course it looks like sunlight on that tree and hillside -- it is. That's light from the sun, reflected off the moon, reflected off the hill and bounced back into Ben's camera lens.

"Whoa," I thought.

The way that scene looks up there at the top of this post is actually more "real" and authentic than the way you think a moonlit park ought to look. This is what it looks like when you can actually see it.

And "seeing" it, in this case, requires watching for ten whole seconds - four thousand times longer than we usually do - and (here's the tricky part) somehow seeing it all at the same time.

Not a representative sample, not a cluster of images, not a sequence, but all of it. Now.

Can you imagine what the world would look like if you didn't have to behold it moment by moment? If you could really see it all, now? I can't really wrap my brain around that, but it sure is intriguing.

Look at the results when ten measly seconds of some distant dirtpile are compiled into a single frame. Marvelous. Project that, then, to being somehow able to see a whole day, or a year, or a lifetime, at once.

It sounds absurd. But you gotta figure: Film can do it. A sheet of plastic coated with an emulsion of silver halide and gelatin. Eastman Kodak busted it out more than a century ago.

And surely somebody, somebody wise, has managed the same trick. To look at, say, a snack of tuna-fish sandwich with spicy mustard and slices of colby cheese, on toasted whole wheat bread, and see/taste/smell/feel/hear the whole lunch in its entirety. (I don't know about you, but I bet it would freak me out.)

You notice that older people always seem to have such amazing "perspective" on things, right? As we accumulate experiences, succeed and fail, witness a ceaseless cavalcade of comings and goings, I suppose we do begin to get a sense of the "big picture."

Sort of. But even the wisest old geezer -- the one I hope to one day be -- overlooked a few moments. It's not all in there.

And maybe it's not supposed to be. Perhaps, as you might be saying, "life is meant to be just 'moments,' Colin. Jeez." Different moments, everything from deliciously languid hesitations before kisses to disorienting flashes just before the car hits the utility pole, but just those fleeting instants. That's what we get.

But I don't know.

Take another look at that moonlight photo and tell me it's not apparent: We're missing a whole lot of the big picture. Pretty much all of us.

And I'm willing to bet it's got something to do with this habit we've gotten into of only seeing one thing at a time.

*****

Then again, it's worth considering that even if we could all be human time-lapse cameras, we still couldn't see everything. As your friend and mine, Amos Vogel, likes to say:

"What we know of the world comes to us primarily through vision. Our eyes, however, are sensitive only to that segment of the spectrum located between red and violet; the remaining 95 percent of all existing light* (cosmic, infrared, ultraviolet, gammas and x-rays**) we cannot see. This means that we only perceive 5 percent of the "real" world."

At best.

* I think he means "electromagnetic radiation," not actually light, though if you slap that other stuff on the ends of the spectrum, like radio waves, brain waves, gravity, cosmic microwave background radiation and so forth, our percentage of perception slips to more like .0005% - more or less like seeing the Louvre through a keyhole pointed at the corner of the frame of one picture.

** And so forth

*** Hey, and check these out too, while I've got you here. A few more moonlight long-shots from Flickr, each more surreal -- but real -- than the last.

So, Yeah

2009-08-14T09:44:00.003-04:00

You know when you're dorking around with your Holga camera, scampering all over county fairs and train cars and up to the top of curly slides?

And you know how sometimes the local camera shop doesn't have any 120-medium format film in stock, just some *220* stuff with twice as many exposures, but no paper backing?

And you know how you then load the film into your toy camera and realize that the little red plastic window on the back -- the one that usually shows you what exposure you're on -- is now going to ruin your film because there's no paper backing to protect it?

So then you're at the part where you of course tape a piece of paper over the window, so as to keep light from bleeding through the red plastic and onto all your pictures.

The thing is... don't use a white piece of paper.

That doesn't, uh, really block light, you know.

However... once you've made this critical error, and noted with dismay the nasty stripe that runs through your entire, double-length roll of film when you pick it up from the camera shop...

For some reason once you scan the film and get it into Photoshop, if you convert it to black and white and then apply a "Blue Filter" in the program, it comes out looking pretty decent again.

Who knows.

Those Robber Barons at McCormick

2009-08-10T10:20:00.004-04:00

Trying to pick up some nutmeg at the store the other day. Hoping to get Penelope to make this zucchini bread she keeps promising us.

Threw a minor hissy fit about the price of the various jars of nutmeg in the spice aisle, then realized how poor my chances would be of ever procuring nutmeg on my own in the wild, without the benefit of supermarket shelves and clearly marked aisles and distribution networks and so forth. I don't have the faintest clue what the plant even looks like -- it could be cute, green and leafy or forty tall with purple spikes for all I know.

(Chances are, in these straitened circumstances I'd probably end up grating deadly nightshade into whatever I was baking, or just foregoing the spices altogether and letting my wilderness muffins turn out bland. Shame.)

Anyway. After that observation, a few dollars for a token quantity of this mystery spice from a faraway land didn't seem so unreasonable, but this still did:

(See image of "Rubbed Dalmatian Sage" for the princely sum of $5.25)

...Allow me to spit out my sand-and-poison-sumac cupcake with bark chip sprinkles to comment thusly -- What?!

Okay even if there weren't sage already growing three doors down behind my neighbor's house, you'd still never catch me paying these kind of outlandish prices for spices.

Eight and a half bucks per ounce? For that kind of bread, buddy, I'll run over to the fire station and wipe down the poor canine myself.

Rubbed Dalmatian Sage. Right next to the little jar of three -- count 'em; three -- Madagascar Vanilla Beans that are evidently worth $6 apiece. They'll just sell you anything these days, won't they?

What's Three Months, Give Or Take?

2009-08-08T21:00:00.003-04:00

I realize I hadn't updated the Veda pictures in, oh, half the kid's life. It's been a busy summer, I guess, and uploading stuff to Flickr is a lot like posting new stuff here -- it's hard to argue that it's important enough to force Penny to babysit.

Picture Lope in one room, wiping barf off her sleeve and jumping up and down and dancing trying to entertain lil' Boogie, while I'm in the next, quietly tapping on my laptop. Kind of a jerk move on my part.

But eventually, over the course of several evenings and mid-day naps and being up late at night while Veda was sleeping but I couldn't, I managed to get 'em all posted.

It's quite a relief, and fun to look back at all the stuff that happened this summer -- all the stuff that kept us too busy for quiet tapping on laptops.

Click here to see the whole shebang.

A Smile and a Memory

2009-08-05T20:31:00.004-04:00

It's been one year today since Alison died. A lot has happened since then, and it still makes me sad that she never got to meet Veda -- not on the outside, anyway (She did say hello through Penelope's belly once or twice, which was fun), but I can say that now I'm back to smiling when I think of her... most of the time at least.

The memory that made me smile today was this one.

We're grilling hot dogs, a few summers ago. (This was before Penny and I went vegetarian, but after A-Rod -- what I always liked to call her -- had been diagnosed. She was in a round of chemotherapy, most likely, or perhaps just on her incredible regimen of pills and potions, and feeling pretty okay, all things considered.) We're bringing in the 'dogs from the back patio, and somebody notices that the last one got pretty overcooked. It's just a black little squiggle, really, there on the plate, and while Tom and Penny and I start looking at each other and debating who's to blame, I comment that I read an article recently, on just this topic.

"Apparently it's bad news," I say. "The article said something about the nitrates or something, the synthetic whatevers are in hot dogs, that when it gets scorched on the grill it forms these compounds that are supposed to give you cancer."

Without missing a beat, Alison says, "Oh, well then give that one to me. I've already got it."

I laughed so hard I almost spilled my beer.

*****

I miss her still, but today I'm smiling. Good one, A-Rod.

Open Questions

2009-08-04T14:45:00.007-04:00

Here's some stuff that's been zinging around in my head lately. It's all things I wonder about, and unfortunately they're all the sort of inquiries Google's little help with.

1. What will be different for us because Veda's a girl? So far the main distinction I've noticed is that Penny seems positively gigantic. Seriously, after giving little V a bath and putting her to bed, one look at a pythonic Lope leg or arm sticking out from under the covers is enough to make me do a doubletake.

Preliminary Guess: I'll be more protective of her than I would if she were, say, Victor instead of Veda, but I'll probably, and ironically, end up urging her into sports and leadership and other "boy" activities more rigorously than I would if she were an actual fella.

2. Do some people inherently find a career and stick with it and like it indefinitely, while others tend toward cycles of fascination, immersion, mastery and restlessness? Is it that the F.I.M.R.s just haven't found the right career for them yet? Or are they just innately restless?

Preliminary Guess: Some folks *are* innately restless, and it may be something you can overcome, or alternately that you can parlay into a strength, like Steve Jobs. Or perhaps the true task is just to find new ways to challenge yourself in whatever career you're in, speaking of Mr. Jobs...

3. In ten years, what will I regret most about how we're living circa 2009?

Preliminary Guesses: Not traveling enough, not visiting friends enough, not leaving the house enough, not taking up heroin (just checking to see if you're still reading)

4. Will we ever again get enough sleep?

5. When my radically conservative relatives forward me emails about the sky falling and the president converting us into a Socialist republic, are they envisioning, like, Russia? Or is it something more like Sweden, where the standard of living is actually higher than ours? OR, are they just being, well, conservative, and resisting the idea of our society changing at all?

Postscript Subquestion: Is it true what the radio guy said this afternoon, and that the European models of nationalized health care and fiscal oversight won't work for the United States because Europe is a declining society and ours is still growing?

6. What does it do to my life to have it be sort of an "open book," as it were? Between this site and Flickr and Facebook (and Google, come to think of it), pretty much anybody could find out more about how I and my family are living than I know about some of my closest friends. It's become this way over a course of several years, and I never gave it much thought or conscious decision, so I'm suddenly mildly concerned what the effects are/will be.

Preliminary Guess: It's no biggie, just a handy way to chronicle what happens in this life we're leading, and makes it easier for friends and relatives to keep tabs on us. Still, someday I imagine I'll run into an old classmate or someone I've not spoken to in years, and they'll say something mildly offputting like, "Hey! You cut your hair!"

7. And what about all those pictures I take? Do they enrich life or distract from it? Would a cherished handful of family portraits actually mean more to me than the 100 gigabytes of pixels stashed on the hard drive downstairs? Goodness knows I'd probably look at them more often...

Preliminary Guess: The only pictures that will endure and ever get viewed, beyond a half-hearted flip-through several years down the road (when I'll likely have to cobble together some wires and vacuum tubes to even view the archaic "Jpeg" format on some moldering antique firewire disks) will be the ones I've posted here or on Flickr, or the Holga pics.

8. What's the best way to raise a strong, good person and answer your kid's inevitable Big Questions if you don't want to tell them the same stuff you heard in church as a kid?

Preliminary Guess: I got nothing here, people. But I'm working on it.

8. Do all people secretly wonder about stuff like this, or are some folks just blessedly, blissfully simple-minded? If so, where do I sign up to be in that category?

BONUS QUESTION
(For our older readers) Which came out first - Neil Diamond's 1972 hit "Song Sung Blue" or the anti-dandruff shampoo "Selsun Blue"? I'd really like to know, and the internet is mum on this matter so far. Veda and I looked into the matter already.

Out and Back

2009-07-25T06:32:00.006-04:00

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Top Thrill Dragster is a steel, hydraulically-launched roller coaster located at Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio. It was the first "Strata Coaster," loosely defined as a complete circuit coaster that is between 400-499 feet tall. It was built by Intamin AG and debuted to the public on May 4, 2003. It is one of only 2 stratacoasters in existence, the other being Kingda Ka (2005) at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey.

Due to aviation safety concerns, for the purpose of warning air traffic, the tower is equipped with four dual strobes: three mid-way up, and one on the highest point on the coaster.

While you're waiting in line to ride the Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point, you have the chance to watch the process happen to lots of other riders ahead of you. They sit there on the starting line, listen to the sound effects of a massive engine revving up, freak out in some cases, then suddenly launch forward at tremendous speed and soar up to the top of a huge platform that towers over Lake Erie. After that the car turns left a bit, pauses for a brief moment and then zooms back down to the ground, twisting and plunging earthward at a completely vertical angle. Then it speeds into the station again, about 17 seconds after the whole thing started, and all the riders grin and shout and turn to one another, laughing and gaping in disbelief.

You see all this happen, dozens of times, in the staging area for the ride as you wait your turn.

But when it actually happens to you, you're not even remotely prepared. It's still completely overwhelming -- the experience is literally more than your senses can handle, and as you shoot toward that tower and the lake beyond it at 120 mph, struggling to keep your eyes focused as the track bends up and carries you to twice the height of Niagara Falls, all you can do is scream.

You yell the whole way back down too, eyes wide in disbelief, arms waving, fingers numb, whole midsection of your body clenched tight as you brace for impact. And when it's over, you're just like those people from before -- no longer the cool, bored-looking guy standing in the queue, pretending not to notice the many other people standing within arm's length of you (always an absurd charade, in my opinion, like staring ahead in an elevator and politely ignoring each others' existence). No, now you want to share your experience with everyone, and can scarcely contain your joy as you wriggle around in your seat, shifting against the restraints and smacking your co-riders on the leg. "Man, that was really something, wasn't it?" you cry, adjusting your hair and looking around wildly. It's almost like your brain is desperate to find something else to marvel at, some release for all this energy. You look over at the people still waiting to ride and want to scream to them that it's worth it! ...That it's amazing! ...That there's nothing else like it in the world! In some cases, you actually do. But most of them are still cool, still composed, still playing the elevator game and waiting for their turn.

*****

It's an "out and back" coaster, in thrill-ride parlance, and that means that when it's over you're right back in the station where you started. In the case of Top Thrill, there aren't even any zig-zags or figure eights or loops of any kind along the way -- it's out, up, down, and return. A simple loop.

And because of the scrambling my brains received courtesy of the Dragster, as well as the preparation leading up to it (the four-hour drive to Sandusky, the packing, the leaving when it's still somewhat dark out just to get there in time to ride all the rides you possibly can, the hustling through the rain when you first arrive, hoping it will let up so they'll reopen some of the cooler stuff soon...) I actually forgot to call my friend Ryan on his son Simeon's first birthday.

It wasn't until almost 10 p.m., on the way home, that I finally remembered to call. And of course by then it was too late, so I sent a text message -- a measly clump of characters in a cell phone window, like you'd use to remind somebody to pick up English Muffins at the grocery -- to congratulate my friend and his wife and their son on a whole year of adventure and discovery.

Pathetic.

But here, a day or so later, I'm starting not to feel so bad. Because when I started to think about this first year with Veda, who is already almost six months old herself, and thought more and more about the Dragster, which is over so quickly but so packed with amazement and so astonishingly effective at changing you completely from beginning to end, I started to think maybe I was still celebrating Simeon's birthday after all.

I'll bet that on Thursday, after whatever hat-donning, cake-smearing adventures the little guy had on his big day, the three of them came home to the same pretty house on the same little street, behind the same little gate that stood there and swung open on the day they came back from the hospital. On, or perhaps a few days after, Simeon's original Birth Day.

The same house, in fact, that Ryan and Sarah must have left behind as they sped off toward the hospital, clutching bags and checking checklists and assuring each other that one of the two of them locked the door behind them.

It's one year later now. (Give or take.)

They're right back where they started.

But so different.

And it all went by so fast.

But the joy still glows inside them.

And they're bursting to share it with the rest of the world.

And now there's one more person to glow and burst alongside them.

Congratulations.

And Happy Birthday, Simeon.

32

2009-07-19T22:10:00.006-04:00

[I started this a few days ago, hoping to finish it before my actual birthday today]

*****

As I approach the age of 32 here in the next week or so, I guess I'm supposed to be feeling depressed about it.

"My best years are behind me," supposedly, and it's true that my body isn't as indestructible as it once seemed, my presence is unwanted at all the coolest parties and nobody speaks anymore about my friends' and my fabulous "potential." Oh, and for a long time now I've caught myself referring to the students at the college near our home as "kids."

"Honey, be careful backing up the wagon when you leave, okay? The kids are out skateboarding down the park steps again, and I'm afraid one might just ollie-grind himself right into the back bumper."

But I feel about this birthday like I have about the last several – excited for the chance to get together or hear from friends and family and nonchalantly pleading in my head that I get all the cool stuff people talked about getting me. [Postscript note: I did, and then some]

Mainly, though, I feel relief.

Another year in the can. This 32nd tally mark on the wall represents one more year of discoveries, realizations, adventures, conversations, meditations, arguments, reflections, jokes, greetings and even losses. And all that stuff I got to have happen to me, or through me, depending on how you look at it.

*****

[Picking back up now, tonight, following an awesome birthday weekend with the family(s)]

Not all of that was stuff I'd want to do again. Some of it hurt a lot. I wish some other people were as lucky as I've been, and got to be here with us to talk and laugh and look around and wonder what it all means.

Still, as I look back through the memories and moments from July 19th, 2008 to right now, I can't help but give thanks for that time. For all the time I've had so far, really. I did nothing to deserve it, and it's been much more than I ever could have imagined.

In fact I may even have to quote a movie that isn't even one of my favorites, though it does have its high points. From American Beauty, in the end where Kevin Spacey (who has been almost unbearably cynical and smarmy throughout most of the film so far) suddenly comes to a postmortem revelation, drifting away from his body after being shot to death by a neighbor over a misunderstanding. At first it seems sort of absurd and overdue ("What? Now you get it?"), but as he builds, flipping back and lingering over scenes from his life, I think it starts becoming sort of timeless and transcendent:

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me. ...But it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst...

"And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but... gratitude ...for every single moment of my stupid little life..."

Gratitude. That's what I got for my birthday this year. Mom and Katie gave me clothes, and friends gave me phonecalls and Facebook messages, and Penny gave me a wonderful book of coupons redeemable for things like motorcycle rides together and adventures of my choosing, to be used whenever I like.

But everyone ended up giving me the same thing, and I love it. Today I feel thankful to be here. Even more so.

Best gift there is.

Oh, one other thing: This year, for the first time, I understood why Mom always gets so excited about my birthday. If you think it's a relief and a thrill to see yourself complete another year here on earth, and all that can be contained in those 365 days, imagine how good it feels to watch your kid do it.

I can't wait for Veda's half-birthday next month.

Time To Eat!

2009-07-18T14:42:00.001-04:00

*****

Jean Shepherd is My Hero

2009-07-11T15:40:00.000-04:00

Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories: And Other Disasters by Jean Shepherd

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Laugh-out-loud funny stories from a master, in my opinion. Nobody does tongue in cheek gravitas applied to kid life better. Favorite story so far is "County Fair!", but they're all pretty similar. BONUS: In just about every one, someone seems to throw up.

View all my reviews.

Alaskans, Wake Up!

2009-07-08T08:29:00.004-04:00

Take note: as a good many email forwards and signs on local bulletin boards may have told you, today represents a momentous occasion, chronologically speaking.

Just before 5 a.m. today, if I'd have been fully conscious (I'd actually just drifted back off to sleep, after Veda helpfully tried to wake me for the occasion) I could have noted the time and date here as reading 4:56 on 7/8/09.

And, as those many emails and tacked-up signs reminded me, "THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN."

Now, we could get into a very interesting discussion about how arbitrary specific clock alignments are, the counting having begun at an indeterminate point of origin that isn't even universal among humankind, or how well the all-capped statement above could apply to every event, including me writing this and you reading it, but... there's no time!

If you're currently living (and sleeping) in Alaska or points west*, wake up! You've got about fifteen minutes, by the clock on my computer here, to rouse yourself and your drowsy cohorts to celebrate this momentous event.

Remember, THIS (And this, and this, and this) WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.

* Dang. I'd initially hoped I had plenty of time to notify our friends in Australia -- mainly just Leonie; I don't really know too many others yet -- but my world clock tells me it's already 10 p.m. there by now. Ah well, we can still throw a party tomorrow for 4:56 07/09/09, right?

The Generous Swerve

2009-07-05T21:47:00.005-04:00

After she'd handled a particularly tricky bout of getting Veda to sleep this evening, I offered Lope a little apple pie à la mode. When I cut the slice, I noticed that I must have really wanted her to have a nice treat -- you can kind of see where my knife-edge swerved a little deeper into the pie as I carved out from the center. A few more crumbs of richly deserved crust and cinnamon-flavored apple for good ol' Lope.

In-The-Middleness

2009-07-02T16:29:00.008-04:00

Penny and her mom, Sept. 1977

Veda and her mom, June 2009

"...there is the unmistakable in-the-middleness that parenthood illuminates for you -- the realization that you might not actually be the center of the universe after all, but that it *does* surround you, in time as well as space ... You see that just as sure as this little being came from you, you came from someone else yourself. The honor then becomes not that you started or finished anything, but simply that you get to take part..."

Photos From When Veda Was Just a Baby

2009-07-01T17:01:00.004-04:00

Yes, now that Veda's officially four and a half months old (which, incidentally, is my favorite number, and I meant to celebrate when she was four and a half weeks old, since after this my next chance is when she's four and a half years old, in August of 2013, and I hope to be around for her 4.5-decade commemorative gala as well), it's fun to look back and see what she looked like waaay back, uh, twelve weeks ago. (Trust me; if you've got somebody this young in the house, a lot happens in a dozen weeks.)

I must also point out that I didn't take these; these are the pictures from Veda's photoshoot with the magnanimous Jessica Marvel, who graciously offered her photography talents as a world-warming present to our daughter. (We have housewarming parties when you move into a new house; why not world-warming?)

Anyway, thanks again, Jess! Come back anytime!

My Meditation Instructor

2009-06-29T21:37:00.004-04:00

Today I drove down to Indianapolis for a meeting. It's about two and a half hours from my front door to that of my coworkers, and always a good opportunity to catch up on some thinking.

Sometimes I listen to the local NPR station on the way out of town, then pick up the Indy affiliate as I get close enough to the city that it comes in decently. Other times I just listen to CDs, preferring to hear familiar songs instead of world events. Sometimes I drive in silence, but not often.

I've taken to running the GPS as I drive lately, even though I know the path well. And I like seeing when the device expects I'll arrive, even though on this particular run I always seem to better the estimated time by half an hour or so. (I suppose it's because my preferred route is all two-lane roads through small towns, and the open stretches between each town provide an easy opportunity to cruise a few mph above the posted limit. The car I take -- an elderly Acura handed down from Mom -- fairly glides down these threads of pavement, though I'm not much of a speeder, really. Usually I just go 8 or 10 over, give or take, preferring to take in some of the scenery and enjoy the wide, flat fields out my windows.)

My phone is also on, of course, awaiting any news from home about Veda, or Penelope, or I suppose Vince or the cats, though there's rarely anything to report with those guys. Or, you know, work might call.

And there are the windows to mess with, plus the sun visors, and this car happens to have a sunroof which can be powered into whatever position you like - open, closed, tilted, whatever. It's all quite comfortable once you fiddle with the electric seat motors and get into position.

And, of course, since it's a work day I'm also jotting things down from time to time as I drive -- pressing my paper against the steering wheel as I scrawl down whatever phrase or idea seems promising enough to transcribe later. On the passenger seat sits my reference materials: printouts from my coworkers' emails, client-approved briefs, research dug up by astute account folk.

So really, while driving oneself down open highways between the city where one lives and the city where one grew up and knows like the halls of his house (I'm actually not that familiar with the back of either of my hands, so that aphorism doesn't quite apply) would seem like a simple task, I've managed to complicate it with perhaps a dozen different distractions -- an assortment of stuff to adjust and record and connect and propose, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

At one point I was steering with my left knee while using my right hand to pick up the phone (Lope was calling, asking when I'd be home) and my left hand to turn down the radio, and wishing I had an extra finger to deactivate the cruise control since the truck in front of me had signaled a turn and would soon be slowing down, all while eyeing the GPS and planning to have it route me to the nearest gas station. (The gauge was reading pretty low.) My papers were slipping and blowing around the cabin, brushing up against the water bottle I'd filled and brought along for the journey.

I didn't think of it at the time -- all I thought was something like, "What a pain in the ass; I hope this call is important" -- but it was really a blown opportunity for me to place myself in the moment and focus on one simple task: driving the car. Even driving the car and taking the call would have been okay.

But I insisted on jumbling things up with three electronic devices, two mental tasks (listening to music and brainstorming on client work) and a host of mechanical dials, knobs and sliders. Here I drove five hours today through pretty Indiana countryside and damn near missed it.

And I thought of this phenomenon later this evening, while Lope was out at Yoga class and I was putting Veda in bed for the night.

(I know it's not really tucking her "in" when there are no real covers, and all you do is place her gently onto the crib mattress and align her stuffed animal beside her head, hoping she'll nuzzle in and drift off, but I really don't like typing the phrases "putting the baby down" or "putting her to sleep." Both sound far too euthanasiac for my taste. Though I suppose "putting her down" could simply involve insults, like "You can't read!" and "Your algebra skills are sorely lacking!" It's difficult to see how this would facilitate sleeping for anyone.)

She was pretty tired, and had finished her bottle -- well, turned away from it a couple times in a row -- so I was singing to her on my shoulder, patting her little bottom in time with the music. Gradually, gradually, she was letting go of the day and laying her head down on the burp cloth I'd strategically placed over my shirtsleeve. Her eyes were closing, and I could feel her little legs stopping their twitching and kicking, as her fists unclenched and arms started to swing lazily at her sides.

I thought about the sun still coming into the room -- It was only 7:30 or so, but bedtime is bedtime -- because I had neglected to lower one of the shades all the way. I thought about the fan blowing on us both, the air conditioner I'd set to just circulate air instead of refrigerating it, now that the house is all opened up for this week's temperate weather.

I thought about the bottle and how much was left, wondering where we stood on the continuum between so much drank that she really needed to burp and so little drank that she wouldn't be able to sleep very long. (When she turns away, bottle time is over; that's just how it goes.)

I thought about the clock I couldn't see in the next room, wondering if it was time for Lope to come back from Yoga or if she'd only been gone a little while. I wondered when Veda had gone down to sleep here in the room, so we could at least attempt (though it never works) to guess when she might be awakening next.

I thought about the emails I hadn't checked yet, having been away from my computer most of the day and unable to connect to the office network.

I thought about this blog and whether I could or would post it or not, wondering whether there was anything interesting to say today.

And then, at last, I thought about what Penny had said in the car yesterday, as the two of us discussed happiness and I apparently forgot something I must have read a thousand times before.

"Well, you know what the key to happiness is, right? I mean, everybody says it." She looked up into the rearview mirror, making eye contact with me from the back seat where she sits beside Veda.

"No," I said, shaking my head after a few moments' thought. If everybody's in agreement on this, I ought to know, right? But I didn't.

"Living in the present moment," she said, and went back to amusing the little one. "If you can do that, you can be happy."

Ah yes. I remembered now. I'd read that somewhere too, and thought to myself, "Well, fantastic. I can do this incredibly important and impossible thing -- attain happiness -- by just doing this other incredibly important and impossible thing and somehow 'living in the present.' Lot of help this book is."

Still, for a moment the task wasn't difficult at all. I rocked Veda, and breathed in deeply for each soft verse I sang to her, and exhaled slowly as the words floated out. I looked down at her face, watching for the pretty pale eyelashes to bat back open, watched her eyelids twitch gently as she drifted off. I listened to the fan as it blew from the window onto our skin, cooling us a little and drying the damp sweat where her skin laid against mine.

She was asleep enough to try laying her down in her crib. But I hesitated.

Why rush, after all? Penny wasn't due back for a while, I knew -- even though I hadn't checked the clock since I came up the stairs. And Veda had all night to sleep; this was hopefully just the beginning of a good long snooze. As soon as I was done here it would be back downstairs to check emails and confirm meetings and delete spam, etcetera etcetera etcetera.

So I stayed. There in the rocking chair. In the darkened room, not too dark with its one still half-opened shade. With Veda breathing deeply and ever more slowly on my chest. Listening to my sung verses fade into whispers, then just long breaths. Feeling the rocking chair slowly drift into stillness, its repetitive motion no longer needed. And I sat there. We sat. Stayed. Listened.

Felt.

It undid all the miles of fidgeting and projecting and reflecting, just those few moments there in the room with Veda. And though I knew that in a bit I'd be laying her down, hoping she wouldn't wake up and cry and start the difficult process of going to sleep (she did), and though I knew that in a few years I'd be miles away from these days of soft rocking and repeated lullabies, and looking back happily if with a bit of sadness over what had come and gone, I didn't think much of either of those things. Not at the moment.

I was able to sit with her and just be calm, and just be there. Then.

It was a gift she gave me, I think, and it was just what I needed, and greatly appreciated.

And I was able to post that blog after all.

Where To?

2009-06-23T16:47:00.005-04:00

I may have mentioned that Tom and I had awesome maps to use during our motorcycle expedition. Each county got almost its own whole page, so that the state was broken up into a few dozen chunks that fit easily into the clear pockets in our tank bags. But there were still occasional moments of confusion and disorientation, as you might expect. Fortunately, in those cases we'd sometimes luck out and spot a helpful sign, just in the nick of time.

An Infallible Quest

2009-06-20T21:14:00.018-04:00

"Do you see any rocks in there?" I ask, watching the teenaged boy dredging muck out of the lakeshore near my house. I am preparing for a trip. He is likely earning minimum wage this morning, making the beach more amenable to toddlers and tourists. "Big ones," I clarify. "Rocks big enough to hold in your hand." Through the clear water I notice that the bottom is totally lined with tiny pebbles, explaining why he seemed to roll his eyes at first. ('Does he see any rocks in there?' What a ridiculous question. There must be millions.)

A few moments pass, then after some prodding and searching he hands me a small, smooth black rock with a chip out of one end. Its surface is slick in my hand, and little drops of Lake Winona fall into the grass as I head back to the car. I've got the last thing on my list. I'm almost ready to leave.

*****

For the five days between June 5th and June 9th, 2009, Tom and I set out on our motorcycles to see what we could see.

We'd originally planned to loop Lake Michigan, coming up from the bottom around the right side, then over into Minnesota and back down through Wisconsin, but at the last minute we elected to go south instead. Better weather this way, we figured, and less likelihood of having lake-effect winds blow us into oncoming traffic.

The closest thing we had to a destination was Mammoth Cave, in lower-mid Kentucky -- only a few hours away according to Google but a good deal more distant when you embrace Tom's and my staunch No-Freeway road trip philosophy. After all, who wants to just charge down the superslab, tunnel-visioned and 18-wheeler deafened and only trying to reach a destination? Not us. Plentiful side excursions to small towns, scenic overlooks and natural wonders turned Google's quick jaunt into a thousand-mile round trip which neither of us (nor our butts) will soon forget.

Which was, of course, the point: Though we aimed our front wheels in the general direction of the cave, we knew well that all we were really looking for was adventure. A generous amount of zig-zagging and side-tracking on the way was precisely what we had in mind. Besides, we figured that interesting things -- the ones you might seek out from the beginning, if only you knew about them -- would kind of just present themselves.

And sure enough, our mission was technically accomplished just a few miles from Tom's house, when we got stuck in traffic near the Mt. Comfort airport just long enough to marvel at F-18s swooping through the sky -- the grand finale of an airshow we just happened to be passing by. As we coasted to a stop behind endless rows of event traffic, five of the jets burst from behind a clump of trees in the distance and exploded across the sky like black-streaked fireworks. I don't know about Tom, but I felt awfully fortunate, and momentarily wished I had a control stick instead of handlebars. Also that these pesky tires didn't have to stay planted on the concrete all the time.

After that we saw a dead cow lying in a field, a black cat darting across the road in front of us, and thankfully no other troublesome omens before pulling into a small town for lunch. I wish I could remember the name of the place -- or the restaurant -- but it was appropriately dive-y and smoky, and we could tell that in addition to looking like space aliens in reflective cordura suits we were probably the only people in there who didn't go to high school together. I did get a photo of the "Wigwam" beside it, though, and for some reason just really enjoyed seeing that word engraved in stone.

By nightfall we had made it to Nashville, Indiana, regionally known for the beautiful autumn colors on the many trees there. Being that it's not exactly Fall right now, traffic was light and we had a great time flying -- slowly, mind you -- through the park on our earth-bound aircraft. There was just enough time to get some provisions at a local grocery before heading back to our campsite in Yellowwood State Forest, where we bedded down for the night right there under the stars and swaying treetops, their leaves still a boring-old green that looked plenty beautiful to me.

In the morning we awoke early, and freezing, and I'm fairly sure those two phenomena were connected. Tom had assured me that sleeping in only boxer shorts would be my warmest option inside the military-grade sleeping bag, which is probably true but does make for a bracing encounter with the morning air when it comes time to get up.

As we departed Yellowwood and forged westward, eyes peeled for a good place to stop for breakfast, I got to seem knowledgeable and prescient by swerving us into the Scholar's Inn in Bloomington. A great cup of coffee and a vegetarian omelette cannot taste better than when you've just woken up freezing on the forest floor.

There's a lot to see in Bloomington, of course, but over the breakfast table Tom and I had laid our plan: the Greene County Viaduct. An old tour book I'd brought described it as "breathtaking," but had neglected to include a photo, so we figured we'd better go find this thing, supposedly located somewhere between Solsberry and Tulip, Indiana, and perhaps take a picture of our own.

And breathtaking it was: two thousand feet of rusty iron, stretching between two sides of a vast river valley and soaring 150 feet above the amber farm fields. Our navigation skills were put to the test just tracking it down, I'll admit, and Captain Kline actually had to do some shrewd reckoning to determine where exactly this thing had to be. We got to meet some locals out for a joyride on a pack of 4-wheelers, though, including a couple of young boys who were bent on riding up the trail to the top of the bridge.

One decided his best chance was to "borrow" his dad's 4-wheeler and take on the mountain. His plans were quashed by the dad, though, who ran over to the revving machine, laughing the whole way, and lifted the back end enough so that the boy could only spin his wheels. "You're not taking my 4-wheeler up that hill!" he told the kid. "Why not?!" the kid shot back. "Because you're a peckerhead!" was the answer the dad gave, and Tom and I both burst out laughing, right there under the ancient iron landmark in the middle of nowhere.

Once we'd had our fill of viaducts, and I'd taken a satisfactory amount of pictures using my rickety plastic traveling companion -- a Holga camera with which I was determined to shoot one 12-exposure roll per day, we figured we'd probably better get moving southward toward Kentucky.

This route took us within spitting distance of the West Baden Springs Hotel, though, and seeing as its massive unsupported atrium is proclaimed the "Eighth Wonder of the World," well, we didn't see much choice but to stop in and have a look at that too. As a bonus, we discovered more good coffee -- not to mention pistachio ice cream -- in the hotel's cafe. [You can see pictures of all this stuff on my Flickr page, naturally.]

After that it was high time we made a break for the Ohio River. Evening was fast approaching on Day Two of our Mammoth expedition, and here we were, not even close to being in the correct state for our destination.

No stinking schedule was going to shove us onto the main highways, though. We've still got our standards. Two-lane blacktop threaded us south from French Lick almost to the border, at which point we veered east on the Ohio River Scenic Byway and flowed alongside the water for miles and miles. The road runs just about parallel to the vastly inferior Highway 64 (See Tom for a succinct summary of that particular stretch of blandness) but follows the contour of the river through hills and valleys, in which the coolness of the air drifts up over you and fills your helmet like a happy sigh.

Highway 62 -- also known as the Byway -- would be a treasure even if it didn't take you to Leavenworth, Indiana, where a wonderful restaurant sits right on what must be the prettiest bend in the river's 981 miles. We dined on fresh-baked biscuits and homemade preserves and waited for our food to come, watching barges inch down the river outside the restaurant window and discussing railroad trestles, world wonders and where our adventures might take us the next day.

"Kentucky," you might have guessed. Day Three found us finally crossing the bridge into the Bluegrass State just south of Corydon, and searching in vain for a detailed road atlas in upwards of six roadside stops, including gas stations, auto-parts stores, drug stores, a hardware store and a supermarket. We'd had these fabulous county-by-county atlases of Indiana, you see, and we couldn't imagine getting by without them. But all we could turn up now were flimsy state maps, so we did the best we could and weaved our way southward along secondary (and tertiary, and occasionally perhaps quaternary) roads, observing stuff like horse farms and salvage yards and signs offering free donkeys.

And that's how we got Pedro.

Just kidding. But near there we did stop in a small town that seemed 2/3rds abandoned, and I dutifully dragged out the Holga and snapped a few more pictures toward my roll-a-day goal. There was just something about looking through the glass windows and doors of a storefront on a building whose roof has long caved in, and seeing all the little weeds and trees growing up through the rubble where once must have stood barber's chairs, or hardware, or dental floss display racks, (or perhaps decent state maps, I suppose) that more or less required that I take a picture.

By the afternoon we were riding our motorcycles onto the ferry and into Mammoth Cave Park. It's a little disorienting but thoroughly fun to straddle a bike as it floats across a river, and, even better, once we were inside the park the road got fantastically curvaceous and lined with trees. Wild turkeys loitered along the shoulder, turning their pretty heads momentarily to see the two space men coast by on their overstuffed contraptions.

A good-sized hike along the Wet Prong trail showed us miles of forest wrecked by last winter's ice storm, then a still and peaceful creek bed, criss-crossed with rutted horse tracks. Once again, we'd headed out in search of nothing in particular, and managed to find it without any trouble at all.

On the walk back to the bikes I thought a lot about how much Nature we'd encountered in just the few days of our trip so far. From the black cat to the dead cow, to the wild turkeys and the jumping fish, and the random dog who wandered through our campsite at Yellowwood, sniffing around for handouts, and all the bugs who'd smacked into our helmets so far, and the deer we'd seen crashing through the underbrush dangerously close to the road, reminding both of us of Tom's accident last fall. We slowed down considerably after that. We saw free donkeys and strange-looking plants (see photo) and we saw what seemed to be wild pigs, which are sort of startling when you spot them rooting through the tall grasses, initially seeming like humongous feral rodents before your barnyard biology knowledge kicks in. "Pigs," you think to yourself. "Must be somebody's pigs."

I'd even include the two sport bike doofuses we met alongside a sharp curve in Brown County, one covered in mud alongside his equally coated crotch-rocket, having somehow miscalculated the turn and plunged handlebars-first into a mucky drainage ditch. (Both were okay, so we just hosed off the hapless guy's face shield with Tom's drinking water, irritated them by photographing their mishap and moved on.)

Nature -- living things, doing things, everywhere we'd turned. It shouldn't have surprised me, but it did a little bit.

When we got back from the hike we were both pretty hungry, and thirsty, and we both agreed it would be a good idea to see if we could find the park's hotel. Again, success. The room was small and the decor exactly what you'd picture in a national park established in 1941, with infrequent if any updates since then. I really liked it. The hotel restaurant was featuring cherry cobbler ala mode, and I did my best not to freak out openly.

That night, in our tiny paneled headquarters, Tom and I discussed our descent into the cave. Mammoth Cave got its name not for featuring the bones of mastodons or anything like that, but for being three times bigger than any other cave in the world, and featuring more than 360 miles of caverns and tunnels to explore.

So we had to do a little thinking.

It came down to a tour lit by lanterns only, which sounded fun, and a briefer "Grand Avenue Tour" that hit many of the cave's highlights, and one more: The Wild Cave Adventure. Six hours underground. Between five and six miles of distance covered, through some of the tightest, gnarliest, steepest, trickiest and most amazing sections in the whole cave system. We were in.

It turned out that we were the only ones in, actually, save for one incredibly cool 60-something fellow who works in a shipyard in Maine. He was relieved that we signed up; otherwise they were going to have to cancel the tour. So we and Mickey and our two guides, Heather and John, slammed shut the door behind us and descended into the dark about 10 am, and didn't emerge until almost dinnertime.

Down there we saw just as much nature as we'd seen before, only darker: soaring cathedrals and bottomless pits, and blind cave crickets and impassable passageways, and uncountable snug squeezes and sheer walls, and we even crossed paths with a bunch of regular folks -- the ones who took the regular tours, for sane people -- right around lunchtime. They turned from their sandwiches and fruit juice cups and stared at us openly, as Tom, Mickey, Heather, John and I trudged past all covered in cave dirt and sweat, a couple of us still blinding passersby with the lamps on our helmets, having gotten too exhausted and exhilarated to remember to turn them off. It was, as the brochure had promised, an Adventure.

And then it was time to ride home.

We decided to set our course so we'd cross back into Indiana at Madison, a beautiful little river town that Charles Kuralt demanded be "sealed in plastic and never disturbed." I don't think the local chamber of commerce was quite able to pull that off, but it does remain an awfully charming place to visit and spend a few hours. Especially if you haven't just squirmed through six miles of wet rocks, then ridden a couple hundred miles on a motorcycle. Instead, Tom and I took in the sights from a slow coasting pace, then pressed on to Clifty Falls Park, where we planned to camp for the night.

Alas, we arrived well after 11 p.m. and the campgrounds were closed. The whole park was closed, truth be told, but the guy at the gate seemed sympathetic to our cause, and after I offered him some bug spray to combat the swarm of insects attacking his booth he agreed to wave us through -- as long as we headed straight to the hotel and didn't make much noise to get him in trouble.

At that point, as it was approaching midnight and I still needed to more or less cross Indiana lengthwise the following day, a hotel room sounded pretty darn good.

We crashed at the Clifty Falls Inn -- really nice, by the way -- and fell asleep dreaming of dark caverns and tight tunnels and startled tourists and sleepy river towns. Tom did, at least -- as I undressed to get ready for bed I noticed Nature burrowing into my upper thigh, apparently having been sucking blood since the day before, when it must have gotten to me during our hike.

That night in the inn I spent about an hour trying to research tick removal, all while pawing at my skin and singeing my leg hair with Tom's campfire lighter and swiping a shaker of salt from the hotel restaurant. The salt didn't seem to affect the tick much, for the record. Eventually I got him out, though, and slept harder than I can remember sleeping in a long time. I couldn't decide whether to chalk it up to exhaustion or blood loss.

From there it would be a fairly straight shot back home. After breakfast we took a quick ride and a hike through one of the park's trails, and I got a great photograph of a big gooey slug, and and accompanying video of him that very much looks like slow-motion, but isn't. More nature.

We didn't have quite as much time to weave and wander during this leg of the journey, since the park is a good six-hour ride from my house and I was really looking forward to getting home and seeing Lope and Veda.

Still, we stayed off I-74 and I-69, and got to see some more interesting stuff, like small towns that time forgot, or perhaps that Charles Kuralt finally did manage to sneak in and hermetically seal. There was the tree growing out of the courthouse in Greensburg, as you may have heard, and a buffet lunch outside some small town, with a seemingly endless row of dishes that all seemed like the specialty you hope your favorite aunt will bring to the family reunion.

By the time I finally got home, Penny was out on the upstairs porch with Veda, waving to me. Vince sprinted down the stairs to say hello, and I peeled off my riding suit with great relief, my head hurting a little and eyeballs still buzzing in their sockets from too many hours of stimulation.

It felt good to be back. Veda seemed to have missed me somewhat -- maybe just wishful thinking on my part, but I sure liked holding her again. It took a while for me to get the opportunity, though, since Lope had put herself in full-on Robomama mode during the five days I was gone, and had her Systems in place and everything to take care of our daughter without any outside assistance. I practically had to tie her up just to get her to let me help again.

And that was it. The journey had come to an end, and all that remained was to unpack the bike and develop the film and settle my mind and to, eventually, tell the story.

Which reminds me: I almost forgot. Back that last night of the trip, as Tom and I crossed the river back into Indiana, I'd stopped there on the bridge for one more mission. I tossed my smooth black rock out over the railing and listened as it fell down toward the water. I'd put a little piece of Lake Winona into to the Ohio River, and finished what a glacier must have started millions of years ago.

And as the rock fell through the dark night and plopped through the river's surface, drifting down toward the murky bottom, I like to think it passed some interesting stuff. Perhaps a sunken barge, or the roots of ancient trees. Maybe it lodged into an old shoe somebody lost, decades and decades ago. Maybe it got carried on a current a few miles downstream, flipping and swirling as the swift water flowed past. Or maybe it just sank straight down, and nestled into some soft brown mud at the very, very bottom, where it will rest for perhaps another few million years. I'll never know.

But either way I'm sure it was an adventure, and it was really fun to confirm, once again, that no matter where you go, or what you do, whether you head south from your driveway on twisty two-lane roads or down into the ground along slippery dark passageways, or even down into the Ohio River, flung by somebody who had you fished out of a quiet lake only a few days before, if you're out looking for nothing in particular, you're absolutely guaranteed to find it.

Veda Saves Mankind

2009-06-16T11:55:00.005-04:00

So the other day I was telling Veda that she should really stop crying, because if she didn't I would have to tell everyone I know that this whole baby thing isn't all it's cracked up to be, and then *they* would tell everyone *they* knew, and so on and so forth until next thing you know word gets around and nobody's having babies at all.

Widespread abstinence. Zero population growth. The demise of the human race.

Real nice, Veda.

I don't think she really bought into my line of reasoning, though, because although she did eventually stop crying and finally went to sleep, it honestly seemed to have little to do with my apocalyptic threats and more to do with my figuring out how to adjust the light/temperature/sound/etc in her room, as well as the food/burps/fluids in her body. That always does the trick.

Still, just yesterday she seemed to be making efforts to preserve our species through her own estimable personal charm. And it totally worked - watch this video, featuring Lope pretending to sneeze and Veda finding it absolutely hilarious - and see if it doesn't make you like babies a little more.

Then go forth, friends, and reproduce with impunity. You've got my endorsement... and Veda's.

Cutie Patootie

2009-05-28T21:46:00.004-04:00

For whatever reason - and I don't think we're unique in this respect, either - Penny and I seem to give our daughter nickname after nickname, and all of them seem to rhyme. It's fun every time, but the really fun part is how easily different baby character traits align with various female names.

(If you happen to have a son, you'll have to let us know if boy names work as well for the impromptu rhyming nickname. Somehow I doubt it.)

For example, when hanging out with Veda, you have to watch out these days because although we don't see any teeth yet, she's suddenly and now frequently Drooly Julie. And that's fine; we're well supplied with bibs and burp cloths, but you also have to watch out for her to become Messy Bessie, or eventually even Dirty Gertie. (If Farty Marty makes an appearance, you know the clock is ticking.) Pretty soon you'll have to change her, which she kind of enjoys on account of the opportunity to be Nudie Judy. (We're planning on teaching her discretion at some point in the future. For now we just giggle alongside her.)

After she's changed, though, it might be a good time for her to take a nap. Keep an eye out for Snoozin' Susan there, followed perhaps by Snorin' Lauren. Either one is better than what you get if she needs a nap and hasn't had one - nobody's a fan of Yellin' Helen.

But in the end, we all want the same thing. A visit from Smiley O'Reilly. And even though this particular nickname doesn't correspond to a *first* name, technically, ol' Smiley's just so charming that you don't hardly mind making an exception.

Sadly, Only One Veda Pic

2009-05-27T11:22:00.003-04:00

Sorry to disappoint the grandmas here, but I had to post this latest batch of pictures from my Flickr page. They're the Holgas from the last few months, and I really, really like a few of 'em. (More to come, since I also uploaded a bunch of cell phone pics that I liked too.)

Thanks again to Ryan for letting me use the camera.

Where Do Babies Come From?

2009-05-26T19:03:00.004-04:00

The other day Penny's mom told me something I didn't know about hydrangeas.

"They're great bloomers," she said, (I knew that part) "But it's tricky to get them to bloom in blue around here. The soil's not very acidic."

What? I always thought the color of the flower was built right into the seed; didn't you? It made me think, as most things do these days, of Veda.

She's forming a little personality now, you see, and it's pretty thrilling. Each day another little aspect emerges. Sometimes you can even notice it in the pictures I take.

So I've just been thinking a lot about how much of that spark - that interest, that determination, that... Veda-ness - is being created and how much is being revealed right now.

Is it the seed or is it the soil? And what about the water and sunlight, which seems to be where we come in these days?

Our New Dog

2009-05-17T21:37:00.006-04:00

Vince is the best. He's friendly, he's sweet, he listens, and he's up for any adventure. It's no stretch to say he makes every day of our life better.

But he's been feeling a little down lately. For months now, Vince has seemed a little less sprightly, a little less excited, a little more melancholy. He's been slower to wake up in the mornings. He started taking the stairs one by one, pausing on each step on the way down to get his bearings. He started needing help jumping up into the car. When we went on walks in the park, he wouldn't really run, no matter how enthusiastically I darted around him. "Come on, Vince! Let's go! Vince?"

No, he just padded on down the trail -- taking his time, sniffing plants and whatnot. Catching up to me in due time. It took a squirrel sighting to get him really moving, and unfortunately there aren't too many of those in the wintertime. Also, the fur started disappearing from the top of his nose, leaving more black and less tan on his little face. Getting older, we guessed.

Oh, and his stomach seemed to be bothering him. More and more nights he'd wake us up wanting to go out, and we learned after his first accident -- which humiliated him -- that we'd better honor his request. We started watching him closely as he sniffed those plants and things on the trail, making sure he didn't nibble on them at all, and forbid all the friends and relatives sneaking him any people food. Some would anyway, and sure enough, poor Vince would suffer diarrhea later that evening.

And that's okay. Like I said, he's the best. If it's time for him to get older, it's time. And he did just turn six this month. We were prepared to bear with him as his systems started letting him down, and make whatever adjustments were needed to keep the little guy's life as good as possible.

We switched his food to a probiotic mix. Made sure he got regular walks, but not long enough to make him tired. (For the record, I never really did see him tire; he just wouldn't be hurried is all.) I called a couple places for quotes on carpeting the staircase. And when he needed help up into the back of the car, we of course bent down and gave him a boost.

The diarrhea thing was bugging us, though. Aging is natural, but there's no need for the poor guy to have to squat out in the cold and rain ten times a day. And it can't be good for him, either.

The vet recommended an antibiotic, which seemed to clear up his problem temporarily, but it always came back. Some thought he might be anxious over the new baby's arrival, but he would sleep peacefully beside her crib since the day we brought her home.

Eventually the theory was raised that old Vince had a gall bladder deficiency. The vet wanted to run some tests to check, and even though we had no idea what could have caused such a deficiency and were afraid to ask what treatments are available, if any, we took him in to have some blood drawn.

We're still waiting for the gall bladder results, actually, since those have to be sent out of state for testing, but a few hours after the visit the vet called and said his thyroid wasn't working right. She said we'd still keep an eye out for the other test results, but in the meantime we could put him on a veterinary thyroid medicine called Soloxine. It's one tiny little .5 milligram pill, twice a day.

He's a new dog.

Like I said, we still don't know what caused the problem or even what else might be wrong with him, but the Soloxine was the closest thing to a miracle drug I've ever encountered. On his 6th birthday he acted more like he did on his 1st (well, maybe his 2nd; he's not *quite* a puppy again), and every day now he's more eager to play, to run, to go outside *without* needing to and, yes, to jump up in the back of the car to go for a ride than he has been for a long, long time.

I know he's still getting older, and I know that one day he'll have problems that can't be solved by a little white pill. And I also know that he's just a dog, and that plenty of people are dealing with much more serious issues than a sick pet or an upset tummy.

But Penny was telling me the other day, as we were discussing what kind of parents we are and will be, about a mom she knows who likes to celebrate as many occasions as possible. Holidays, birthdays, Summer Solstice -- for her it's all cause for a big to-do. And I like that. I think too many happy moments come and go unacknowledged for most people, in most lives, and I'd like to do what I can to rectify that in ours.

And besides, despite the comparative triviality of the situation, we're still incredibly grateful to have our "new" old dog back. And we're still incredibly happy for him. He must be feeling so much better.

One of my favorite things he does now is the I-Wanna-Go-Outside Dance. He's gone from Eeyore to Tigger, by Lope's summation, and it's just nice to watch his love for life grow too big to fit inside the house, daily.

So to celebrate this new enthusiasm, and the restoration of Old Vince in a new way (even his nose fur is coming back now), thanks to the Lake City Animal Clinic and the makers of Solozine and the plain old gracious whims of good fortune, I made a little compilation of some of Vince's greatest recent hits.

It's him, asking to go out, running through the grass in the park, and being "walked" (sort of) by Grace, the 3-year-old daughter of a friend of ours. And it's Mr. Vincent at his (new) (old) (wonderful) best.

Enjoy.

music made possible through the unwitting courtesy of Franz Ferdinand

Click!

2009-05-13T20:43:00.006-04:00

Even if you don't count me writing this blog (a momentous occasion indeed), there's a lot going on right now. It's always this time of year that makes me feel that strange combination of exhilaration and panic, as Summer starts rolling along and the days get nicer and nicer more often and I simultaneously sense that on the one hand, there will be so much to do and, on the other, so little time in which to do it.

The sands of time are ever slipping through our fingers, homeboys and girls.

Why, just the other day, when Penny's mom pulled off an impromptu weekend camping trip for the family, and casually mentioned that she might like to do this *every* month, I raised an eyebrow, prompting her to point out that this would actually only be four more times. Four. After that, Fall will be back upon us. Four more measly chances to add to the precious trove of cherished family memories. Or not. And so it goes.

So I figure the least we can do is acknowledge this juncture, to at least take a moment to inventory the many intersecting occurrences going on as we speak, and to try and immortalize them in this very next paragraph. Or two.

Sunday was Mother's Day. That was fun. It also happened to be the official Frost-Free Date for our part of the country, a date eagerly anticipated by many a gardener -- us included. The Saturday before that was our 5-year Anniversary, though neither of us really posted anything about it this time. (It was great though, I assure you. A quiet date night with sushi and a mindless movie. Perfect.) Obama's been in office about 100 days now, which is kind of a historic occasion as well, and our dog Vince turned 6, which I still can't believe the media didn't cover. The cats, being one year senior to Mr. Vincent, are now 7.

What else? I'm sure you have your own little milestones, or not-so-little. I hate to leave them out of this, but I can't really not. I know our friends Ryan and Sarah have lost a couple of grandparents very close together very recently, and I'm sad for them. My sister Katie gets to go to New Orleans for the first time in a few days, and I'm happy for her. Our friends James and Jessica just got back from there, so I'm happy for them too. Penny's sister Lauren is about to celebrate her daughter Gianna's first birthday, and I'm downright ecstatic for them both.

So many noteworthy occasions.

Perhaps the one looming largest in our lives right now, or at least the one affecting it most dramatically day-to-day, has to do with Veda. She's officially three months old today. One quarter of a year.

New parents are told of this day in near mythical terms -- the moment at which "it gets a lot easier." At three months, they tell you, the baby will be more alert, more playful, more able to be reasoned with (well, comforted, at least) and more fun.

And I'm happy to tell you that in our case it's all proven true. Veda laughed for the first time the other day, and the second time yesterday, and the third time today. My goodness, my friends, it almost collapsed us. I myself laughed and cried at the same time, which doesn't happen every day.

So that alone is probably worth jotting down. She smiles now, and maintains eye contact, and notices things. She'll stare at the lamp in the living room for a good five minutes, just grinning and studying its shape. We think those two are going to be great friends.

"Well, is she sleeping through the night yet?" we get asked a lot. No, not so much. She still gets up a couple of times, usually around 2 and 5, but let me tell you this: she goes to sleep around 8 or 9 and wakes up around 6 or 7. Pretty much every day.

This consistency is a tremendous relief to Lope and me. Just to be able to get into some sort of schedule, rather than being on Constant Baby Alert, is such a load off that we hardly even mind the early-morning feedings. (Well, *I* don't. Lope, being much more parentally inclined and vigilant, still sleeps fitfully most nights and wakes up at the slightest stirring from Veda's room. I, jerk that I am, snooze right through it. Sorry, Lope.) We're just getting used to it, I guess, and you never really get used to the other way -- around-the-clock, mega-intense, oh-god-what-day-is-it new parenting.

Today is Wednesday; I know this for certain.

And it does seem to be "going by so fast," which is the other assurance everyone offers you. They say to enjoy these days while they last, and we're doing our best to do exactly that. It's hard to believe we're three months in already.

I actually remember the last few days of Lope's pregnancy, when she and I would walk (slowly) around the park and discuss what was just around the corner. I remember agreeing -- after an extended period of disagreeing -- about the upcoming event. She'd been saying she was ready to get this baby out, and I could certainly see why. She was swollen; she was tired; she wanted to meet our new daughter already. I did too, but I couldn't tell Penny I was ready yet. I made some lame point about how I wanted the baby to come soon, but not right this minute, because I still didn't feel quite prepared enough. And I told her that while Veda was still inside her, there was no way I could screw the poor kid up yet. Which was kind of reassuring.

Of course, Lope and I both knew that you never really feel "ready," at least not in our case, but we did agree on the feeling of *anticipation.* I *was* looking forward to the birthday, but with equal parts excitement and dread.

"Everyone says the first three months are hell, Lope. Everyone who's ever had kids. How could I be in a hurry to go through that?"

"You should be in a hurry because the sooner it starts, the sooner we can get through this."

And she was right. From then, I started feeling much better. It finally made sense in my mind that, no matter how hard those first 90 days were going to be, they, too, would pass. And that we really could do it, despite my personal doubts, because everybody's parents do it, or the six billion people who are alive now, well, wouldn't be. I changed my tune.

"Okay, Lope," I think I said, "Let's do this. It's not like we're going to change our mind or go back now, and stalling won't do us any good, so you're right: Let's just man (woman) up and *do* *this.*

And we did.

I'm proud of us. Mainly of Lope, I was going to say, since she's been easily the more amazing of our little twosome, taking on primary responsibility for Veda from Moment One and letting me fall into sort of an Assistant Coach role -- you help out as much as you can, of course, but it'd be silly to take credit for the team's wins -- but actually I have to say I'm equally proud of both of us. This was really hard for me.

I'm not a natural parent. I don't feel like I was well prepared for this challenge, and I wouldn't say that I met it with skill and aptitude at every turn. Not at all.

But I did it. 90 days down, the only first three months of parenthood I'll ever have to go through, done. I've been looking forward to this day for a long, long time.

So that's one more milestone to observe in this first part of May, 2009. Here we are, almost 32 years into my life, perhaps a few more into yours, perhaps a few less. (Only 6 into Vince's, so don't feel bad if you're a little behind.)

Five years into our marriage. Point-two-five years into Veda's life. And into Obama's presidency. And a day or two into planting season in Indiana.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it all.

But I know what I *did* make -- this post -- and I feel pretty good about that too. Glad to get it all written down.

And I'll finish with a snapshot of some pertinent facts about Veda's life so far, courtesy of a fun Excel spreadsheet (you'll never hear that phrase from me again) sent to me by my sister this morning.

You just put in your birthdate, which I suppose would be where you started, and it tells you where you are now. Then you gape in amazement that, for example, Veda's heart has beaten more than nine million times so far. And that she's got about 17,000 workdays ahead of her before retirement. (We'll see if we can't do something to shorten that for her a bit.) And that she shares a birthday with Chuck Yeager, easily a top-ten candidate for Coolest Human to Ever Walk the Planet.

It doesn't list things like diapers changed (about a thousand, by my reckoning) or giggles so far (three, and counting), or blog posts (16, and -- sure enough -- counting) or Flickr pictures uploaded (196, plus 21 or so videos), but I still thought it was pretty fun.

If nothing else, it's an interesting snapshot -- the click of a shutter, the posting of a blog, the processing of an Excel formula -- corresponding to a moment in time. The way things are right now.

And from where I sit, there's not much more you can say about anything besides that. But fortunately, that still leaves us with plenty to consider.

Involuntary Immersion

2009-05-06T22:05:00.011-04:00

Haspin Acres, in scenic Laurel, Indiana, bills itself as "750 acres of wooded hills and trails for your use and enjoyment," and welcomes "anyone who is looking to have a great time being safe and getting dirty!" This is an accurate assessment of the offerings, since the hundreds of miles of trails and two -- count 'em, two -- motocross tracks, complete with jumps and everything, ensure you'll have fun and the one -- count it, one -- big creek running through the center ensures you'll get dirty.

Tom and I arrived on Sunday at around 1:00. Last year, we brought my bike as well, and Tom's was wearing street tires, but this time we wised up. Pulled in with a knobby-shod Suzuki DR350, mounted to the back of a Chevy Trailblazer support vehicle, complete with two toolboxes and a cooler stocked with ice water. Stepped out of the truck in a shiny yellow Aerostich suit, stuffed to the gills with impact-resistant padding and abrasion-resistant fabric panels. You'd have thought we knew what we were doing or something.

After seeing me ride off for the first couple yards, though, you'd have known different. It was my first time on knobby tires, and darn near my first time on real dirt. So unlike the indestructible pre-teens who zoomed hither and yon astride their purpose-built, featherweight dirt bikes and 4-wheelers, many dressed only in shorts and a tank top plus sneakers and a helmet, I proceeded with caution.

The ruts and channels in the battered surface of the park bore little resemblance to even the worst paved road you ever drove on, with random criss-crossing grooves a foot deep or more, and with every application of the throttle I had to decide whether to dodge the next rut or ride in it. All while dodging trees and branches. In unfamiliar territory. On completely unmarked trails. Some featuring blind turns and two-story drop-offs. Or jeep-sized mudpits (see picture of what happened to somebody else) with the consistency of tar. And a section called "Devil's Backbone."

I was exploring alone, as well, partially because Tom and I were taking turns on the bike, having only one truly dirt-worthy mount between us, and partially because Tom -- in a completely uncharacteristic equipment oversight -- forgot his helmet.

So while Captain Kline headed out to town in search of some cranial protection, I wandered the woods on the DR. I kept seeing other riders in the distance, or sometimes buzzing past in big dusty herds, and couldn't help noticing they were all covered in dirt. And though I was having a lot of fun testing my skills on ever-steeper and narrower paths, crawling up root-strewn ascents with my newfound knobby-enhanced traction, I was gleaming clean still and knew I wouldn't be doing any hardcore mudding like those guys.

No, thanks, I'll just stick to the dry trails and the high ground, ambling around by my lonesome until Tom gets back for his turn. No sweat.

After about 45 minutes, of course, I was hopelessly lost. Having fruitlessly flagged down a line of ATVers in hopes of being pointed toward the entrance ("No, we don't really know either. We just ride.") I got myself stranded in a low-lying bowl of dirt, into which three or four tributaries of the creek seemed to flow. Every way out except the way I came in would involve fording a stream at least a foot wide, something I wasn't sure the DR or my riding skills were up to. And the way I came in was too steep for the bike to climb -- it had been almost too deep for the brakes to even slow the bike on the way down.

But what are you gonna do, you know?

I assessed the most welcoming approach and gassed the bike in that direction. I had to thread the tires between a couple of muddy pools, which didn't seem to present much difficulty. What would be tough was to get up enough speed to make it up the hill and out.

This turned out not to be an issue, though, since I lost traction somewhere between the puddles, tried to put a foot down to steady the bike, realized I'd just stepped into maybe 20 inches of mud and splashed down into said puddle -- bike, suit, helmet and all.

The funny thing was that it didn't hurt at all: the mud was so forgiving it was like falling into bed. Except that once I had done it I was lying on my side with a running motorcycle on top of me. (Pretty though it may be, in its own, battered and brutal way, it turns out I *would* kick that Suzuki out of bed. If I could.) I struggled to get the bike upright, my feet refusing to budge from the muck. It took half my strength just to extricate myself, leaving little to use in the wrestling match against 300 lbs of slippery metal and plastic.

I half worried someone would come by and see me, and half worried they wouldn't.

Eventually, though, through sheer desperation I think, I managed to get it back up on two wheels again. And somehow I swung a mud-caked leg back over it and it miraculously started right back up and we scaled the wall of dirt to ride back out of my predicament. My entire right side was saturated with creek sediment, as was the bike's bodywork, frame, handlebars and slowly steaming muffler. Sorry, Tom.

What I noticed, though, was what a relief the fall had been. Now that I'd gone down, now that I was dirty, I had nothing left to lose. (Well, my life I suppose, if I were to foolishly plonk off the crest of one of those ravines or something, but it's no good to dwell on these things.)

After I was dirty, the ride was even more fun. I knew what it felt like to topple, and had mastered my procedure for righting the bike, and even learned a little about some on-the-bike techniques for avoiding spills in the first place. (Dragging the back brake, for instance, lets you go a little slower while still keeping the engine revving and the suspension settled, making long, bumpy descents and tight turns considerably easier.)

By then Tom was almost back, though, so I eventually found my way out. My secret: just keep looking for bigger and bigger trails (the path *more* traveled by, as it were -- sorry Robert Frost) and don't head down into any more gulches.

The mud was drying in my leg hair, gluing my socks to the skin. Owie.

But once I got back Tom was ready to go. Fearless Thomas hopped on, sped off and proceeded to discover parts of the place I didn't even notice on the map. He jumped the edges of hills, checked out the motocross track and even crashed the bike quite spectacularly, flipping over the handlebars and rolling in the dirt like he was born to do it. Here's a picture from right before it happened, when he's landed the poor bike and compressed the suspension all the way:

(You can even see the waterproof videocamera mounted to his handlebars -- it's that black cylinder that looks like an enormous half-smoked stogie.) And, perhaps most heroically of all, he got video of the whole incident:

And after that I noticed *he* was having a lot more fun too. The crashes didn't make us meeker or more cautious; if anything they showed us that going down doesn't kill you and a little dirt never hurt anybody.

Which is what made me think about, of all things, Veda. I remembered being so scared of her at first... so worried she'd cry or squirm or just shatter in my hands that I could barely exhale until Penny took her. But now that she's almost three months old (three months old!), I know I can play with her until her "talking" takes on a certain frustrated tone, and I can carry her a certain way to prevent barfage, and I know that smiling at her now will usually make her smile back. So I get to play with her.

Something could go wrong, of course... she could cry in such a way that I couldn't stop her in time, and escalate into a full meltdown. She could barf all over me anyway, despite my occasionally nice clothes and hesitance to twirl her around my head until she's had at least one healthy burp, or she could squirm suddenly and almost make me drop her.

All those things are possibilities. But now that most of them have happened, and I had a chance (well, no choice, to be 100% accurate here) to figure out how to deal with each calamity as it comes, there's a lot less to worry about, and she's a lot more fun. If she freaks out I'll try holding her across my chest with her arm down under mine and her head lodged into my inner elbow. If she barfs I'll carry her upstairs and clean her up and change her clothes. If she squirms I'll have anticipated it and will have a secure grip on our fragile little squirt already.

It'll all work out just fine.

The bike will start back up again. The baby will calm back down again. If you fall down you'll get back up. And, dirty as you may be, you'll continue on down the trail.

Now, I'm not likening my daughter to a 1997 Suzuki on-off-road bike. For one thing, the sounds that come out of her tailpipe are distinctly quieter and more effeminate.

But I will say that off-roading is at least a bit like parenting -- it's scary at first, until you just try it, and then it's still challenging but actually kind of fun in its own way. And the better you get, the better you feel.

Oh, and there's a good chance you'll end up covered in something you never intended to touch. But you know what? You'll live. You might even enjoy it.

Thanks for the outing, Tom. And the lesson. (Oh, and the coolest picture of me ever taken. That was a nice bonus too.)

A Momentary Blip

2009-05-04T21:05:00.003-04:00

I'm really glad whoever invented this Blip thing was smart enough to make it work so well.

It's essentially Twitter for songs, which means it's essentially a receptacle for all your little disposable notions, all of which can now be shared with the world at large at the click of a button. The fun of it is that you can think of a song you're singing to yourself, find it in the database and then "blip" it to all your friends so they can hear it and sing it to themselves too. After all, if the immortal Don Gardner's "My Baby Likes to Boogaloo" is stuck in your head -- and it should be -- why shouldn't all your friends get to experience the hoarse bellowing and crash-smashing drums too?

Plus you get to write little commentary about why you like the song or why you thought of it (the crash-smashing drums, I'll bet), and these comments are kind of a fun modern-day equivalent of the liner notes we used to make in our personalized mixtapes back in the day.

(I realize now that by referencing Twitter and mixtapes in one entry, I've effectively lost 99% of the potential audience who could be reading this. But if you're one of the folks in that narrow sliver of an age bracket who knows what both are, hey -- read on and enjoy!)

Another great thing about Blip is the "re-blip." Here you can hear a song a friend of yours liked and essentially say, "Hey! Me too!"

Then you click the appropriate button and your pal's recommendation of, say, Sir Mixalot's paean to fast-food baked goods, "Buttermilk Biscuits," is now *your* recommendation as well, and will appear on your website for *your* friends to click and enjoy too.

And this is what I'd like to do right now. Not with a song, though, but a blog.

Veda's getting older now, you see, which I realize sounds ridiculous to say about someone who wasn't alive before the Obama administration. But aging she is, nonetheless, and as I've watched her outgrow clothes and car-seat cushions and certain behaviors over these past few weeks I've found myself growing a bit wistful. Which is funny, I know.

But I really like how my sister-in-law Lauren expressed this thought, so rather than expound on it right now I'll just, uh, Blip you right over to her post from last October, when her daughter Gianna was about five months old and she felt this feeling and covered it quite beautifully. Just click her name there, and that should suffice.

Happy reading. Hey, and happy almost-first Birthday, Gianna!

14 Things Nobody's Bringing To Your Baby Shower

2009-04-28T17:45:00.008-04:00

We've learned a lot over these past ten weeks since Veda's birth, to say the least. And not just vocabulary expansion, either. (Though I'll admit that terms like Meconium, Vernix, Boppy, Bumbo and Receiving Cloth were certainly new to me. Still not clear on what Thrush or Brickdust are, and not inclined to find out unless I have to.)

Among the new discoveries has been a host of what I'd call "Parentools": stuff you never really needed, or never needed in quite this way, until having your first kid, and then you need them intensely.

And of course every parent has his or her own list, and I imagine they all enjoy sharing it as much as I'm enjoying sharing mine with you. Makes me feel like I know what I'm doing, you know?

Furthermore, on the off chance that you actually are expecting a baby in the immediate future -- we've got a few friends who happen to fall into just this category -- this list could prove not only interesting and (ideally) entertaining, but useful as well. I can personally vouch for the usefulness of just about everything on it, and I can almost guarantee you that no one, as I said, will buy you any of it for your baby shower. (Which is understandable. Cute little "onesies" -- another vocab word added to my lexicon here of late -- are just too much fun to give instead. An industrial-strength set of hearing protectors admittedly seems to lack whimsy by comparison.)

So here goes. (Note: this originally appeared as a shopper's guide on Amazon.com, which explains why all the items are available through that site. You can access the list, in fact, by clicking on the title text of this entry.)

Peltor 97010 Ultimate 10 Hearing Protector
The product that spawned the whole list. After those first couple weeks of deafening shrieks in our ears, courtesy of our beautiful new baby daughter, I finally headed down to the basement with an idea: Why not try the hearing protectors I use while running the table saw, lawnmower or other high-decibel devices?

At first it seemed silly, and possibly wrong, but my wife and I were quickly converted. They're amazingly effective and much more convenient than earplugs. I haven't measured with an SPL meter or anything, but I'm pretty sure our daughter's change-my-diaper-right-this-minute cry at just a few inches from your head is at least as loud as our 16-hp riding mower in an open lawn. So there's a definite need.

And here's the thing -- this device will protect your hearing, yes, improving your chances of being able to carry on a conversation with your kid as old age approaches, but it'll also protect your sanity. Ask a drill sergeant; it's a challenge to perform any task well with a person yelling in your face. And when your baby is upset over, say, a dirty diaper, it's critical that you do the job as quickly and efficiently as possible, soldier. Which is a lot easier when you can think straight.

Some parents may say this is callous and cruel. In fact, we hesitated to tell our friends about our little discovery, but shielding oneself from the full blast of an infant in distress is just good sense. You can still hear everything perfectly clearly through the earmuffs we keep on a little peg by the changing table; just not with such ferocity. Takes the edge off. Makes it easier to sympathize and read your baby's face, instead of wincing from the wall the sound she's generating.

So aside from looking a little silly, everybody wins -- you get presence of mind without pain and suffering, and your kid gets parents who aren't panicked or peeved. Or deaf. I just wish they made them in baby sizes, for protecting the little one as well.

Keep them around for when she first discovers Alanis Morissette.

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Camera Lens
A snap-happy parent's best friend. Add this lens to your Canon digital SLR (There's one for Nikon owners too) and take easy, amazing pictures of your brand new offspring. I can't explain precisely how it manages this; for that you should consult Bob Atkins's website, as I did, but my understanding is that its lack of a zoom allows it to have great glass inside for a low price, and that great glass, in turn, allows you to take sharp, accurate photos of your little one in very low light -- which happens to be most of the photo opportunities you'll get. No using a flash to floodlight the poor child and make her look like a tiny fugitive, and no explaining to her that you bankrupted her college fund to purchase a megabucks camera kit.

As a bonus, the 50mm size on most cheaper dSLRs (like our Rebel) makes for a nice, intimate range of focus. It's far from a wide-angle; leaning over the crib will result in a gorgeous, frame-filling portrait of your little angel's face, snoozing peacefully or looking up in wide-eyed wonder. And you can take all the credit for the resulting picture. *I* certainly do.

Save your zoom lens for later, when you're shooting from the sidelines of a soccer field or dance recital.

Chaney Instruments Digital Alarm Clock with Green LED display
A big, easy-to-read clock is essential for learning your baby's schedule. Knowing when she last ate -- or emptied -- makes anticipating her upcoming needs much, much easier, and as more and more of us these days forgo wristwatches in favor of checking our cell phones to see what time it is, know that you won't always be able to reach the phone or fish it out of your pocket. Rig up one of these oversized, backlit bad boys in the room where you spend most of your time and watch your parental rhythms fall into place. (Kudos to my friend Larry for pointing out the necessity of this item. His daughter was born a few weeks before mine, and when he called to check in on us his first question was whether I had a watch or not. When I answered in the negative, he swore to send me one immediately.)

Maxxima MLN-10 LED Night Light With Sensor
You won't suddenly become scared of the dark as a new parent; don't worry. It's actually the opposite -- in the middle of the night as you creep across the floor to change your baby or feed her, the last thing you'll want to do is flip on the overhead room lights and wake everyone up. Array some night lights, or dim bulbs in your usual household lamps, to facilitate low-lumen mobility.

OCEAN WAVES (Sounds of Nature Series) Much like the night lights, this item is all about creating a peaceful environment for the new baby. The soft, rhythmic crashing of waves can help lull the little one to sleep, as well as gently masking any potentially disturbing background noises once she's nodded off. (For instance, the sound of furtive typing as Dad jots descriptions for an Amazon list.) We actually got an MP3 download from Amazon for 99 cents, if I recall correctly, but you can buy the whole disc if you want.

Sweet Dreams Contoured Sleep Mask with Earplugs and Travel Pouch - Black Having a newborn in the house is a little like taking a cross-country train ride. The scenery is amazing, but you can't really go anywhere. And since you'll be sharing your cabin with a new little person who hasn't been acclimated to your existing sleep schedule, you'll want to grab every opportunity to sleep when you can -- when the baby is sleeping. Even when that's in the middle of a bright, sunny afternoon.

Fisher & Paykel Intuitive Eco Top Load Washer The statement below is an understatement:

You'll also be doing more laundry than usual.

An energy-efficient washing machine -- one that can automatically adjust its water usage for differently sized loads -- will lower your utility bills and offer you the freedom of just tossing a few recently soiled items in for an emergency cleansing. No need to wait for more stuff to get dirty (though it certainly will). We love our Fisher & Paykel top-loader pair. We doubt it loves us back.

Canon Powershot A1000IS 10MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom (Grey) This? This meager mini-cam as the mighty, dad-ly, big-and-bad-ly video rig? Yep.

I looked at lots of high-definition, mega whiz-bang digital video cameras, and it would indeed have been really sweet to capture our new baby daughter in full 1080p glory, no question.

But ultimately... even "1080p" is going to sound hilariously antiquated by the time our daughter starts school, and the best camera at any given moment is always the one you have with you. So I stand by my choice of a cheap, high-quality pocket-sized point-and-shoot with a built-in Movie function. 640x480 clips look pretty good on a DVD for the grandparents, and are easier to email anyway.

Sapporo Ichiban Ramen, Original, 3.5-Ounce Packages (Pack of 21) Just kidding. Do not give anyone ramen noodles as a shower gift. But the fact remains that new parents don't have much time for cooking. So if you can track down some really good instant meals -- it's tricky, especially when shopping for someone else -- or, better yet, cook something yourself and deliver it ready-to-heat, you'll have a friend for life. Our doula, for instance, showed up when our daughter was only a few days old and was carrying a spinach quiche, black bean soup and raspberry scones. All homemade. Mom brought us spaghetti casserole, chocolate cinnamon cake and other treats. For days to come we sang both their praises, always with our mouths full.

Bonus Items

There are, of course, many other fantastic things to give someone to help ease the transition into parenthood, but unfortunately many of them aren't sold on Amazon.com. Some of them, in fact, aren't sold at all. Maybe someday.

- A Flickr account, for sharing pics with far-flung and impatient relatives. Who has time to print and mail anything these days?

- An iPhone, which my wife now swears by as the key to stationary-parent communication. Baby in one hand, internet/email/texting in the other. It's a beautiful thing.

- Time. If only there were a few guaranteed back-to-your-old-life hours in each day, in which you could catch up on work, grab a shower, go see a movie without having to turn on the subtitles because you can't turn up the volume without disturbing the baby, clean up the house -- what, did a bomb hit in here? -- this new-baby stuff would be a lot easier to cope with. Alas, it's more of a total-immersion experience.

- Patience. There may be parents who never, not once, not even for a split second, forget that their howling baby dragon is actually just a helpless little human being, and never take it personally or get frustrated when they're unable to calm their child for hours on end, and never need to resort to witless tactics like earmuffs and ocean sounds and light-blocking eye masks. There may be those parents somewhere. But not in *this* house. We could all use a little more patience, whether we have a brand-new person in our charge or not. Too bad it can't be sold or bought. Earned, though, and grown, I think so.

- An Amazon "So You'd Like To..." List. Lastly, I think every new mom and dad breathes a sigh of relief when they first hear themselves dispensing parenting advice to someone even more clueless than they are. Pretending you know what you're doing -- and are even remotely qualified to offer tips to others -- is not only fun, it's a comfort and a privilege I wish for everyone. New parents and nonparents alike.

I hope this list helps you out.

Veda At Eight Weeks

2009-04-13T09:12:00.001-04:00

The little one learns her best trick yet: smiling.

And That's At Two In The Morning, Folks

2009-04-10T07:14:00.007-04:00

Early this morning, as happens most mornings, Lope woke me up to tell me something about Veda. Usually it's that she's hungry, or fussy, or needs to be changed (Veda, not Lope), so this time I figured was in one of those categories too.

This assumption turned out to be greatly helpful to me, since Penny phrased it in a way I hadn't heard before.

(Whispering in the dark) "Babe... I think she's ready to eat." (This part was normal.) "...I'd change her first, so it's smooth sailing."

I stood up from the bed and started feeling my way over to the bassinet, simultaneously trying to wake myself up and decipher what Lope had just said. It was hard to hear in hushed-baby tones, you know, and there was no chance of lipreading or anything, and besides I had only been awake for about a second and a half when she said it.

My best guess was that she said "moose ailing," which was an interesting topic for Lope to bring up in the middle of the night, but my groggy brain soon pieced it all together:

Veda had been cooing and grunting in her sleep like she does, making little noises preceding actual cries of hunger. And tonight, for whatever reason, those noises sounded to Lope like a, well, like an ailing moose.

I can see why you'd want to notify your spouse about that. (Though I'll admit I had no idea what I was supposed to do about it.)

A couple more steps toward the bassinet, though, in the room in the dark in the middle of the night, my theory started to fall apart.

What does Lope even know about moose sounds? She grew up north of where I did, I'll grant you, but not in the tundra, I don't believe. And I seriously doubt she had much exposure to moose or their sounds — certainly not enough to identify them in her sleep.

Besides, it wouldn't be like Lope to compare Veda to anything unflattering. I remembered getting glared at for likening the little one to a baby dragon, just yesterday in fact, and Lope calling our daughter a moose just seemed way out of the question.

So I started cross-referencing similar phrases and sounds. Lope's tooth is wailing, perhaps? A broken filling or other dental emergency would be bad indeed, but it would also be awfully colorful phrasing for 2 a.m., and probably would have been whispered with a little more severity.

Our youth is failing? It's true that I'm getting a little round in the midsection, yes, but surely she'd prefer to talk about that some other time.

She wants me to buy her a ukelele? No, that can't be it. That was *me* that wanted a uke. We talked about it the other day.

None of my theories were panning out.

Finally I got it: Smooth sailing. Of course. She was advising me to change Veda's diaper before giving her the bottle, so that after the little one fell asleep during the feeding we could go straight back to bed. That made a lot more sense. I was pretty pleased with myself for my half-awake detective work.

Still, though, once I had changed the diaper and fed the bean and rocked her back to sleep and deposited her safely back up in her bed, I couldn't stop thinking about my initial idea as I lay there in the dark.

Veda making sounds like a moose ailing. What would that even be like?

They Also Grow Up To Print Pamphlets, I Bet

2009-04-04T08:08:00.003-04:00

You get a lot of printed materials in the birthing classes for first-time parents, all of it filled with helpful and instructive -- and often extremely opinionated -- information.

We left each week's class clutching a new folder of photocopied data on why we'd be dooming our daughter to a life of squalor and dereliction if we failed to follow each recommendation to the letter.

So far we've whiffed on, I'd say, two thirds of what the nurse instructors said we absolutely had to do, and Veda seems just fine. But I'll be watching her closely for symptoms of brutal neglect and crippling parental ignorance; don't you worry.

Where Does All The Milk Go?

2009-03-31T20:02:00.006-04:00

Just a few numbers I ran to find out what Veda does with all this milk we pour down her.

For a Guy Who Writes as Much as I Do, You'd Think I'd Be a Better Lyricist

2009-03-26T04:02:00.004-04:00

[Sing to yourself, as softly as possible]

Hush little baby, don't say a word.
Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird.

And if that mockingbird don't sing,
we'll check the store's return pol-i-cy.

And if that manager won't help,
we'll get a new bird off his shelf.

So now we're a pair of aviary thieves,
with telltale feathers poking out our sleeves.

But on the way to the parking lot,
we'll check to see what we have got.

And if that birdie turns out mean,
We'll set him free and flee the scene.

But if he tries to peck our eyes,
we'll pelt him with old french fries.

And you know how hard those can get,
A rain of pain on our ex-pet.

And if our car doors won't unlock,
We'll sprint away in our shoes and socks.

And if that pesky bird gives chase,
Um... I'm not sure what to sing in this place.

I wish I knew how the real lyrics go,
I'd check online but it's too slow.

And you're almost about to sleep,
I hear only some quiet peeps.

So I may research this a little later,
and quit assaulting wildlife with stale taters.

We should have stayed in that pet shop,
and by now our story would have stopped.

A real parent would have known this song.
...I made it up as I went along.

I'm slowly starting to realize,
how much parenting is improvised.

Veda, Somewhat Late-A

2009-03-19T16:55:00.003-04:00

She's still cuter than ever. And with no hair on the top of her head, she's like an adorable little Benedictine monk!

Beautiful Needle, Blessed Haystack

2009-03-08T22:28:00.005-04:00

Yesterday morning, about 3:30 or so, the breast pump broke. I was bottle-feeding Veda while Penny was just starting to pump -- yes, it seemed convoluted to us as well, but that's our system for you -- and the reassuring chug-chug-chugging of the pump motor suddenly fell silent. Penny looked up, her bosom heaving and growing increasingly painful, while Veda paused momentarily at the realization that no more milk was being added to her stockpile. I, in turn, started assessing the problem.

We do not live in a major metropolis. We used to, on more than one occasion, but for the moment we're nestled nicely in a modest town of about 4,000 souls, continuous with a slightly larger city of 12,000 or so. This, while imparting an undeniable charm to the vicinity, does limit one's options for attending to a fallen breast pump at four in the morning.

Fortunately, I was coherent enough, even at that hour, to perform a little troubleshooting. Most likely, I reasoned, the problem was not in the pump itself but the power supply -- the little wall-wart box you plug into the socket. Maybe it just burned out, and a new AC Adapter would put us back in business.

But where to get one? This town is tiny, to be sure, but we do have a Wal-Mart. Of course. I wasn't sure of the store's hours, though, so I quickly looked up the number online and dialed to check.

Well, it rang. And rang. And rang. I pictured groggy floor sweepers, riding their hissing contraptions across all those acres of white linoleum, either not hearing or actively ignoring the telephone. But I needed an answer, so I hung on the line.

On about the ninth or eleventh ring, a tired voice answered, "Hello?" Immediately I knew something was wrong.

"Um, is this Wal-Mart?" I glanced over at the digital clock, reading 3:50 or so. "I'm, ah, I'm really sorry if this is a wrong number."

"That's correct" said the groggy person on the other end, and hung up. Oh man. Sorry about that, buddy. I double-checked the number on the site, and it must just be posted wrong. I dialed it right.

Eventually I found an alternate number and verified that the store was open. I sped over, pump and power-supply tucked into my sweatshirt's front pocket, and strode on in. The electronics department was empty, as was the majority of the store -- save a few of the floor sweepers I'd envisioned.

I did find an adapter of the proper voltage, current and polarity, and began to head for the registers. Just then, one lonesome bearded fellow about my age, who must have drawn the short straw when shift assignments were drawn up, appeared around the corner.

"Hi, can I help you?"

"Hey there. I hope so. I've got an out-of-commission breast pump at home, and it's kind of an emergency." I looked down, noting his wedding ring, and added, "I don't know if you know much about engorgement, but it's not something you want happening. I'm really hoping this adapter works."

The guy said he didn't have any kids yet, but that he actually did know what I was talking about -- he used to be a dairy farmer.

"I bet your wife isn't complaining as loudly as the cows did" he said, and we both laughed a little. He kindly cut open the impenetrable plastic packaging and unraveled the various cords therein. We checked to see if the pump worked with the new adapter, and it would -- as long as somebody held the plug tightly in the socket. I figured I could do just that, and rig up some more secure system later. I thanked him and departed, swinging by the maternity section to grab a manual breast pump just in case.

On the way home, where I connected the new universal adapter and confirmed my initial hunch -- we were back in chug-chug-chugging business before long -- it occurred to me that this was something of a feat of modern survival. It didn't involve rappelling down into a canyon or choking down a dung beetle or anything, like that awesome lunatic Bear Grylls or anything, but it was a feat nonetheless.

In the dead of night, in still fairly unfamiliar territory, and with resources limited to an internet connection, a car and a credit card, I'd essentially field-repaired a specialized piece of equipment in under 40 minutes. As I thought about this, I tried to estimate how vast an area I'd had to consider for my initial search as compared to the really very tiny precise location of the adapter. (I checked just now; of the county's 554 square miles, I'd correctly drilled down to a parcel of about ten square inches -- one 222,402,723,840th of the total area -- that contained the part we needed.)

And as I thought more about this accomplishment, so ordinary on the face of it but in truth a marvel of 21st-century societal convenience, it occurred to me that this was still really nothing. Not in comparison to the feat pulled off a few weeks ago.

You see, out of nowhere, Veda came into our lives. And of the observable universe's 93,000,000,000 light years of space, what were our chances of ever locating the 20-inch-long, six pound, five ounce little person who would puff up our hearts with immeasurable joy? Practically negligible. It would be like picking the exact right quark out of the right electron in one single particular atom of the Empire State Building. Tripping over the exact grain of sand you were looking for, out of all the beaches in the world. Not a chance. And yet here she is. (Along with her mom -- only slightly larger in cosmological terms, and whose path was just as miraculously intersected with my own.)

So in retrospect, lining up the electrical adapter that re-secured Veda's food supply and Penny's comfort wasn't so impressive after all. It was but a dim shadow of the herculean effort put forth by forces I'll never understand but will eternally appreciate.

I did get to hear some cow jokes at 4 am, though, and that has to count for something. Don't you think?

Veda, Comin' At Ya

2009-03-07T13:25:00.002-05:00

Several dozen more photos of the little lady, now that she's all of three weeks old. At this rate, which is around ten photos per day -- and these are just the selected "keepers," you understand -- we should be approaching 20,000 Veda images by the time she starts kindergarten.

Hush, Little Baby

2009-03-03T02:00:00.004-05:00

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"

- K. Vonnegut

Parenthood so far has got me feeling philosophical. For one thing, there is the unmistakable in-the-middleness it illuminates for you -- the realization that you might not actually be the center of the universe after all, but that it *does* surround you, in time as well as space. And further, you see that just as sure as this little being came from you, you came from someone else yourself. The honor then becomes the fact that you somehow get to take part, not that you had (or have) a hand in making things the way they are. Humility, if not hilarity, ensues.

The prevailing and recurring challenge of early parenthood to me, though, is a familiar one in philosophy: the Problem of Evil. It's a thorny issue for theologians and plain folks alike, since it can be argued academically as well as observed intuitively: bad shit just seems to happen sometimes.

Like what? Oh, like inconsolable crying that goes on for three hours. For example. Let us assume Veda is a good person, who has had only eighteen days on Earth so far to swindle the elderly or scheme for power or punch a kitten, and has done nothing of the sort. If she's the embodiment of innocence -- and I'm inclined to say she is -- then what business does she have yowling at the top of her tiny lungs 'til the cows come home? And what have we, her parents, done to deserve the anguish that accompanies watching your beloved offspring writhe in distress on a regular basis?

It's only natural to wonder, I think. And last night I found myself proposing a few theories to help make sense of the shrieking and carrying on that filled our darkened bedroom, where ordinarily we'd be sleeping peacefully at this time of night. (In Buddhism you would call this mystery "dukkha," which is most often translated as Suffering, but is said to mean more accurately "disquietude.")

So what of Veda's crying, then? Why must it happen? And in answering that, let's explore both the cause and the purpose, as both seem to provide valid responses to more or less every "why" question.

Here was what I came up, starting with purposes:

- It's for a good cause. The ends justify the means. One day we'll have a delightful and inspiring youth to share our lives with, as opposed to a screaming beauty who can barely make eye contact but is exceedingly talented at ruining our nights. And maybe we'll appreciate it all the more since we've been through this.

- It's a challenge to make us stronger. A newborn is almost specifically designed, it would seem, to test one's patience. She's deafening and unreasonable and at times seems almost sadistically demanding, but she is also tiny and fragile and impossibly precious. So she'll drive you crazy, but you can't walk away. At the end -- again, the end -- we'll be those unflappable, confident parents who can take on anything. Maybe.

(now for the causes)

- It's the way of nature, and a flaw of design. Because humans evolved to walk upright, our hips reconfigured in such a way that our babies must be delivered at a time that is technically premature. What counts today as a "full-term pregnancy" is not equivalent to a full gestation period in other animals -- whose young, as we know, can often see, move and even walk shortly after birth. Thus, the burden of a helpless infant is the price we pay for bipedal mobility. I read this once; I swear.

- It's payback. We ourselves were this outrageously dependent on someone else in our babyhood; it's only fair that what went around should come back around.

...and lastly, most likely (and least reassuringly) of all,

- There is no reason. Babies are difficult because of their biological status; the planet we inhabit can only sustain certain kinds of life, and this is the lifeform we've become: one with a tempestuous beginning as well as a strong and mysterious drive to put ourselves through this same ordeal as adults, but this time from the other end of the bottle. To preserve the species, we are programmed to take on what we know in advance will be "the toughest challenge of all," and are in fact programmed to do it again, even once we know firsthand what's required.

Now, this last possibility strikes me as, like I said, the most plausible. Our efforts to put the crying of an infant in some sort of cosmic perspective are pretty much just folly and self-delusion -- in the end, the theory would say, It's Not About You. And that's also about where Buddhism would leave you, I think. It is our craving for order that makes us suffer the wailing of our children, rather than just accepting and addressing the problem. It is what it is.

If we understood that it's nothing personal, and babies just cry and the phenomenon has no obligation to make sense to us, we might be able to gain freedom from the suffering it causes us. Which sounds awfully nice.

*****

From last week's Newsweek - the Feb. 23, 2009 issue, in the article "Who Says Stress Is Bad For You?":

Who tends to be least resilient?
A. People who are insecure
B. People who are happy
C. People who are sad
D. People who are self-focused

The answer, according to the article, is D. "Egocentric or self-focused people are more likely to take things personally. And the extent to which people take things personally affects their ability to be resilient." It goes on to use this principle to explain why you'll bounce back better from, say, having your house hit by lightning and burned to the ground than you might from being mugged in a parking lot. Even if the loss is greater -- all your worldly belongings versus your wallet -- you're less likely to dwell on it and blame yourself, so you get over it faster. Thus, cultivate a worldview that sees more lightning strikes and fewer anti-you-in-particular attacks and you'll be a lot better off.

When you're trying to feed your child who won't stop screaming, despite the ample presence of food, though, this is somewhat difficult.

*****

In the end, I think it's safe to say that much of the reason for parenthood being so challenging to us is, well, our insistence on finding a reason for parenthood being so challenging to us. So in a way I regret picking up the computer the other night and making my list to begin with. Hush now, Colin.

But on the other hand, it was what I was compelled to do, and now it's done. Like I said, it's only natural to wonder.

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand

As You Wish, Little One

2009-02-26T17:36:00.005-05:00

After a couple close calls in the famously forbidding Fire Swamp, Westley, formerly known as the Dread Pirate Roberts, offered the following sage reassurance to Princess Buttercup, who was growing doubtful they'd emerge alive:

"No, no. We have already succeeded. I mean, what are the three terrors of the Fire Swamp? One, the flame spurt — no problem. There's a popping sound preceding each; we can avoid that. Two, the lightning sand, which you were clever enough to discover what that looks like, so in the future we can avoid that too."

And this afternoon, as Veda swings contentedly in her swing, enjoying a full belly of Mom's milk and the soothing repetition of both the swing's motor and the Juno soundtrack on the stereo, I too am reassured.

For what are the three terrors of the Newborn? One, the Persistent and Maddening Cry. Well, in the past two weeks Penny and I have encountered that on several occasions, and had ample opportunity to learn how to overcome it. Changing her diaper seems to work well, even if it does temporarily worsen the screaming, as does holding her in my arms and climbing the stairs several times, and if that doesn't work there's always music, or dancing, or both, or the pacifier, or swaddling her tightly so she feels secure, or trying to feed her again, or burping her, or softly singing old rap lyrics in her ear. Between these many resources -- and calling in the Grandmas when necessary -- we can almost always get The Cry under control, so no worries.

Two, the Mind Bending and Disorienting Sleeplessness. This is another formidable foe, indeed. But it's one Lope and I have encountered repeatedly, Lope in particular, and again we have developed methods for dispatching it. Taking shifts is probably our foremost tactic, with me borrowing Veda for a few hours each morning so that Lope can get some shuteye without a baby on her chest. We also employ the Sleep When The Baby Sleeps strategy, recommended by everyone, ever, and of course Lope avoids caffeine at all cost before breastfeeding, and on top of all that a little white-noise generator that sits at the bedside seems to work wonders for all three of us, the little one included.

So there you go. The terrors of the Newborn, vanquished. We've already succeeded. But what, you ask, about the B.M.O.U.S.es? Bowel Movements of Unusual Stinkiness? I don't think they exist.

*Note: Not that I see myself as dashing Cary Elwes and Lope as my hapless rescued princess in this scenario. Not at all. If anything, she's the one scaling the Cliffs of Insanity and outwitting dastardly evildoers in a heroic black mask, while I fumble around with ill-fitting baby clothes and struggle to dodge sudden streams of pee.

A Fun Morning With Veda

2009-02-26T09:00:00.002-05:00

We're letting Mom sleep a little bit right now, playing in the light by the window, making some coffee and listening to the latest Weepies album. But she wanted to say Hi, so I told her I could probably type one-handed.

More Veda Than You Can Shake a Breast At

2009-02-22T15:38:00.003-05:00

Why have I taken so long to update the blog and tell you what Veda's up to? I've been too busy taking pictures of her, that's why!

(She's wonderful, by the way. See for yourself. This is the whole story of her birth, from labor to coming home. That first one is Lope hiking in the snow, a few days beforehand.)

Veda, Post One of a Squillion

2009-02-16T13:58:00.004-05:00

She and Penny are napping in the recliner right now, both dreaming by the looks of their eyelids. Me, I'm tapping quietly on the laptop, looking through the massive folder of pictures and video I took at the hospital -- so many pictures, in fact, that I had to put them all on this computer so I could empty the memory card and start again.

Part of the problem was that I could never tell when to stop filming. Every moment seemed too perfect to let slip by. This one was Penny holding Veda while my mom watched happily. The file information shows it having been taken at 8:31 on Friday, making the little one about two and a half hours old here.

We Are Three

2009-02-13T09:36:00.004-05:00

At slightly after midnight, Penny started having contractions. Severe ones. She doubled over in the bed and had to get down on her hands and knees, while I rubbed her back and stroked her hair.

At slightly after one, we called Brooke, the doula, and woke her up. The contractions were only a few minutes apart, it seemed, and we were wondering when it would be time to go to the hospital.

At slightly after two, it was time. Brooke held Penny and swayed through a few more contractions while I threw our pre-packed bags into the car and warmed it up. Penny wobbled down the steps to get in, shivering and deep-breathing and contracting.

At slightly after four, she got to start pushing. She gripped my hand and Brooke's, and bore down hard, trying to squeeze the baby out after a full-term labor without a drop of anesthesia.

At slightly after five, the doctors said the baby wasn't moving down like she should. They scheduled a C-section and we waited for the team to prepare the operating room as Penny still suffered through contractions in vain. Brooke and I consoled her for having gotten through an amazing and perfect natural delivery that couldn't quite be finished.

And at 5:52 am, there in the operating room, we heard our daughter cry for the first time. I ran to the baby-warmer as the nurses cleaned her off, snapping pictures so I could go back up by Penny's head and show her what she's made.

Right around 6:15, the doctors said our baby had inhaled some fluids during the delivery and could develop trouble breathing very soon. They said she would have to go to Fort Wayne without us, to the neonatal intensive care unit. I had to go and tell Penny that she wouldn't get to hold the baby she just brought into the world -- not for 2, maybe 3 days.

Around seven, in the nursery, the nurse and I looked at each other and thought together, "she doesn't look that sick." When the ambulance crew arrived from Fort Wayne, we asked them to reconsider taking her. She was pink, and peaceful, and we said please.

After studying our baby's chest x-rays, the neonatologist agreed, and one of the nurses told me she could stay. I hugged the woman, whose name I do not know.

And just now, I gave little Veda Katherine Dullaghan her very first bath, after Penny gave her her very first breakfast, and it was all completely, absolutely, wonderfully worth it.

Snapshot For Now

2009-02-11T15:44:00.005-05:00

No baby yet. Just let me get that out of the way right now, and you can continue on your web surfing as planned.

But meanwhile, thanks to Wordle.net, I was just now kind of able to do what Wee suggested a few days ago: create a cloud of words found on this site. It's not clickable, sorry to say, (for that I inserted a long list at the bottom of the page), but it does reflect the things I talk about most often, and even kind of looks like a peanut to boot.

I had no influence over that.

And I figured I'd better post it now, before the baby is born -- and named. Pretty soon I have a feeling one new word will soon be dominating the content of my posts, not to mention my life.

While we wait, I urge you to go to the site and make your own.

Modern Advanced Birthing Techniques

2009-02-09T21:52:00.003-05:00

There's no shortage of reasons to be afraid of what's about to happen to Penny and me.

In fact, we've been mentally categorizing the people we know and who offer their support and advice to us into a couple of handy categories. There's the "Babies are Terrible" camp, in which people seem to really enjoy telling us how utterly and thoroughly our lives will be destroyed by the arrival of this child. That's most everyone you run into at the grocery store, the post office, baby showers, and so forth.

Fortunately, there is also the "Babies are Wonderful" camp, spearheaded by Ryan and Sarah Noel but consisting of a few others (Val and Aaron spring to mind) who we greatly, greatly appreciate. And these folks say things more like what's in Ryan's email from back in September, which I of course saved: "I had the most wonderful day with Simeon on Saturday. Sarah took off in the morning, so it was just us boys. I made him smile and he made me smile, a lot."

The most interesting thing about the BaT and BaW camps, at least that I've noticed, is that they tell the same stories. Seriously, the plotlines are universal; all that varies is the tone.

One person could be telling us about garment soiling in these terms: "Love and all that other rubbish in theory is tested daily. And not the movie kind of love story - the ugly, 'Oh my god please hold this child while I go clean shit off my shirt' love, or 'Please take the little one now because I can't take her screaming any longer' love..." [actual excerpt from an email I just got last night]

...While another parent can describe his son smearing rice cereal all over himself and the premises instead of eating it and all you hear is the smile and the love in Dad's voice.

I imagine all parents jump between camps multiple times per kid, if not per day. And I'm certainly trying to be realistic about the challenges and frustrations awaiting us, especially in these first few weeks to come.

But overall I'm trying to look forward with more anticipation than anxiety. We've studied up, taken the birthing classes, read the books and the articles and the websites and listened intently to everything other parents have to tell us, both good and bad. We're as ready as we're going to get.

And one other thing that's really helping tonight, knowing that at any moment Penny could give me that look and we'll know our daughter's birthday is here, is this little video. It's Penny, as you might have guessed, about eight months pregnant in a sporting goods store, trying out the inversion table to see if it works on her back pain.

Each time she tilts back beyond horizontal, she giggles uncontrollably. No one knows why. And it's such a simple thing, really, being upside down, that it reminds me how amidst all the complexities and contingencies of delivering and caring for a baby, it really all comes down to some very basic ideas.

Joy.

Gratitude.

Compassion.

Love.

(For comparison's sake, it doesn't hurt that I figure Penny's laugh is good indicator of what our daughter might sound like.)

A lot can go wrong during parenthood, and a good amount of it inevitably will. But some things we can rely on, like the fact that we will get better at it as we and the baby get to know each other better. And that loving our baby without end will come naturally and will carry us through a lot. And that there is a whole circle of friends and family who will support us along the way — whichever camp they're in.

And I've already got my plan for difficulties with delivery: just tilt Penny's bed back.

ODB! You Shouldn't Have!

2009-02-07T11:24:00.001-05:00

Thanks, ODB!
Originally uploaded by This Guy Colin

Imagine our surprise this week upon receiving a package in the mail from Ol' Dirty Bastard. I mean, us -- a writer and artist living in the middle of Indiana -- getting mail from an illustrious and deceased member of the Wu-Tang Clan! it boggles the mind.

I noticed he even addressed it with his most well-known moniker, which means a lot. I don't see us getting quite so worked up over taking delivery of a box from, say, Dirt McGirt, Dirt Dog, Big Baby Jesus, Osiris, Ason Unique, Joe Bananas, The Man of All Rainbows, Prince Delight, The Professor, Rain Man, Peanut the Kidnapper, Hasaan or Freeloading Rusty.

I also would have expected it to have come from Staten Island, rather than Edison, New Jersey, but I see that Edison's only about a half-hour's drive from the storied island of the Wu-Tang's 36 Chambers. It stands to reason he may have another Chamber stashed across the Richmond Parkway bridge somewhere I suppose.

We were most thrown off, though, by the box's contents. Here I had my fingers crossed for the lost ODB album, some unreleased recordings or may be some gold teeth, but it was just a digital camera I'd ordered from the internet.

Ah well. Still a nice gesture.

Standing By, Peeking Through

2009-02-05T15:46:00.008-05:00

The baby could come any day now.

And while my wife creates amazing art that embodies peace and patience and gentle maternal welcome, I pass the time by tinkering with electronics. After setting up Penny's new scanner and checking out the baby monitor and charging all *three* of the spare batteries we have for the new camera -- just in case the baby needs to have her picture taken for hours on end, you understand -- I decided to compare all the cameras in our stockpile. Now we can tell what kind of pictures to expect from each device, even though it's sort of a forced comparison: I set every camera to full-auto, and didn't adjust any of the jpegs once I had them in the computer. And, of course, not every photo we take will be a medium shot of our living room in the early afternoon, but it's still interesting.

The battle between the two ultracrappy contenders -- my computer's webcam and my cell phone -- was handily won by the Nokia. Its larger image actually had some semblance of detail, even though its bluish tint is considerably less flattering than the iSight's pinkening.

In the midrange, my mom's ancient Canon A70 (she pitied us for lacking a functioning camera a couple months back, and let us use her old one) took on Tom's Kodak M883 (ditto) and our new Canon SD1100, which I broke down and ordered to replace our *old* Canon SD1100 that got dropped on the tile floor and was done for.

And just to see what it would look like, I took a picture with The Big Camera, as Penny and I have come to call it -- the Digital Rebel XT.

Now, I figured the DSLR would take such a better picture that it would make the compact cameras look like cracker-jack toys, but that wasn't the case this time. Maybe it was just because the wide-angle lens captured more of the living room and its sophisticated light-metering decided to capture the details of the trees outside the front window, but the overall image came out pretty dark, comparatively.

In my final analysis, as we wait here for Lope to go into labor at any minute, the surprise winner was the SD1100 -- the little booger that fits right in your pocket. (We plan for one of us to keep it with us most of the time, while the other one carries Tom's Kodak.) Its image looked clearly the best of the point-and-shoots, to my eyes, and arguably the best of all six.

Good thing, too, since you'll soon be seeing lots of pics of our daughter taken with that camera... and (who am I kidding?) every other imaging device within reach.

I think we've got our bases covered.

*If you're scoring at home, the slideshow goes in this order: iSight, cell phone, Rebel XT, A70, SD1100, Kodak.

Blank Dullaghan

2009-02-05T00:12:00.002-05:00

The way I see it, there are three ways to pick a name for your kid. You may have others, but we narrowed it down thusly:

People. You can choose the name of some historical figure you admire. I thought of Marie Curie right away, but then remembered that she died prematurely of radiation poisoning as a result of her scientific studies. Joan of Arc sprang to mind next, but she met an early end as well. Rosalind Franklin, same, and Helen Keller, well, not exactly, but hers was still not the life most of us would wish for our daughters. (Funny, though, that we have no problem imagining our*selves* in the great and tortured lives of history's heroes — I, for one, would be honored to have been named after Abraham Lincoln — yet we hesitate to sentence our *kids* to those folks' fates.) In the end, I concluded that heroes aren't such a bright place to start after all. I'd like a nice, peaceful, happy existence for our little one, and it's hard to get too famous doing that.

Ideas. You can go by meanings, and choose from names that are said to equal the traits and experiences you envision for your offspring. I went with "happiness," since that was the quality I found lacking in the historical figures, and came back with "Gay" (naturally), "Gioconda," "Manuia," "Yue," "Takwesha," "Farrukh," "Felicia" and "Dedwydd." All are said to have meanings equal or similar to the concept of happiness, and would accordingly bode well for little Ms. Dullaghan. But still. "Takwesha"? "Dullaghan"?

Words. There are certain words in the English language, and in others of course, that are just plain pretty, regardless of their meaning, and those might be good inspiration for the word you're bound to repeat thousands of times over the next several decades. "Sycamore," for one, has been declared by a noted poet to be the most intrinsically beautiful word in our language, and I suppose that's hard to argue with. Tolkien was in love with "cellar door," which does roll off the tongue quite nicely, and I've heard cases made for the beauty of the words "Beautiful," "Bobolink," "Halcyon," "Gossamer" and "Gonnorhea." Ah, no. Mellifluous, yes, but I'm not calling my daughter a venereal disease. It sets a bad precedent.

So that leaves the simple process of elimination, which is slow going. Any baby book on the market will array for you some 10,000 potential names for your child of either gender, and just going from A to Z with a highlighter gets really boring, really quickly. Most sound bad with "Dullaghan," let me tell you right now, and before long "Ava" starts to sound a lot like "Emma," and "Anna," and so forth. You circle several on the first few pages and realize you'll still have hundreds to choose from by the time you get done, which may not be until the kid is in high school.

It'd be great if you could get to know the child and choose something that reflects her personality, but there's the rub: you have to name her before you know her. And you have to live with the possibility — some would say certainty — that your choice will come to *define* her personality as she grows up. So you'd better pick something you not only won't mind hearing yourself say, but watching your daughter *be.* No pressure.

Fortunately, Lope has had some great ideas, possibly because she had better methods of deciding than mine, and we've got it narrowed down to a couple now.

We'll let you know how it turns out. I can tell you this much, though: it's not gonna be Takwesha.

Best Kernels of Popcorn?

2009-01-27T12:42:00.006-05:00

I have a request for you.

I'm working to update my site, and one of the additions I'd like to make is a sort of "Best Of" list to highlight some of the more memorable posts. You know, just in case somebody visits, sees something he or she likes then wants to browse, but isn't quite prepared to sift through 4 1/2 years of me blabbering about nothin'.

So if you could, I'd appreciate it greatly if you'll take a second to just think back and tell me a few of your favorites. You can use the search box in the upper left, there, to help jog your memory.

("You know, I kind of liked the one where he talked about cats who sail the ocean. I'll just put in "ship's cats," and... *poof*! There it is.")

Like the one where I boldly proclaimed that people are smart? Well, there it is, three years ago, just waiting for you.

Just, you know, take the same approach to choosing that I use when I'm updating my portfolio: pick the stuff you'd like to see more of.

You can let me know in the comments or via email what you come up with. And if you can't find the one you want, or just don't feel like looking, well, just let me know in the comments or via email and include a few clues, and I'll try and track it down for you. It's your big chance to shape this site for years to come!

Then, somehow, I'll get Penny or somebody smart to tell me how to add this exciting new feature to the site.

Thanks majorly, you guys. Nobody's very good at picking his best work, I don't think. And I'm no exception.

I'm looking forward to seeing what you choose.

Being Pregnant, Lesson One

2009-01-24T18:01:00.005-05:00

First, you'll need an actual pregnant woman (APW) for reference. 9 months along or so, if you can find one in such a state.

Check.

Now, take your APW for a walk and observe her techniques. A mile or so through some snowy woods should suffice. Make a mental note of her huffing and puffing, frequent pauses, and overall poky pace. Help her along when needed. (It goes without saying that you should be thanking her profusely for agreeing to go on the walk in the first place.)

The following day, locate a burden approximately equivalent in size to the burden carried by the APW. If she's bearing, for example, an additional 40 pounds, try to obtain an object as close to this mass as possible. (Technically, you should size it up so your extra weight is the same percentage of your original size as hers is to hers.)

Check. (Sort of. A standard cinder block, which I can only assume this is, weighs 29 lbs. To be as loaded down as Lope, I'd have needed 51. But I don't know if the backpack straps could have withstood that.)

Fasten the burden to the front of your body and attempt to stand upright. Situate the straps so the weight is roughly centered on your abdomen, and proceed to the woods. Cover the same trails you walked with the APW the day before.

Huff.

Puff.

Take embarrassingly frequent rests, during which you receive strange looks, but no commentary, from passersby. Nobody wants to ask the guy with a cinder block on his chest what he's up to.

Notice how badly, and quickly, your lower back hurts. Observe the constriction of your lungs -- almost as if a great weight were pressing down on them, which it is. When you approach even the slightest downward slope, maintain intense awareness that you can't see your feet, and that your top-heavy weight distribution makes you a decent analogue of a pack mule or a dump truck.

See how far down the ground suddenly seems, and what a pain it would obviously be to get back up if you fell.

Become suddenly thirsty, and start looking for a patch of fresh snow to consume.

Sigh with disappointment at how far away all the snow on the ground is, and resolve to find some that has settled on a more convenient smorgasbord. Preferably waist-high, at minimum.

Greedily shove the snow into your face, panting to melt it quickly in your mouth and gulping down the freezing hydration. Forget to brush it out of your beard, where it will quickly refreeze in the 18-degree air.

Waddle further down the trail while bending slightly backward, trying to balance the downward pressure constantly threatening to drag you to the ground.

Remove hats, gloves and other clothing now causing you to overheat from the extra effort.

Resolve to finish the walk despite the surprising difficulty and unpleasantness, because what are you, some kind of a wuss? Your pregnant wife did this same circuit, just yesterday! Carrying more weight than you are!

Arrive back at the car sweaty and exhausted, setting down your temporary pregnancy with an immodest heave onto the passenger seat. Fly backward from the car and wobble around the parking lot, suddenly unencumbered by the 29 lbs you bore for a whopping half hour. Marvel anew at the feat being accomplished on a daily basis by millions of women all over the world.

Go home and rub your wife's back.

Well.

A Post as Boring as Using Yesterday's Newspaper to Clean Vanilla Ice Cream Off the Cloth Seats of a Beige Minivan

2009-01-23T20:39:00.006-05:00

I just love hyperbolic colloquialisms. The more colorful and unnecessarily lengthy, the better. In fact, I'll dispense due credit here to one my mom says was authored by my dad, which reportedly went as follows: "As useless as a pregnant hippopotamus in a snowstorm with four trick knees."

That's pretty good.

In fact, before I go on here with what I was going to talk about in this historically boring post (which for some reason you're reading anyway), I have to toss in one more doozy, courtesy of Ernie the Pressman, who my friend Aaron knew a while back. Ernie would deploy this gem of wordsmithery in describing any difficult assignment which nonetheless had to be completed. Aaron never forgot it, and neither have I: "It's gonna be like putting a wet noodle up a wildcat's ass."

Oh man.

See what I mean about the necessity of the word "ass" in any unpleasant simile? But like I was saying. I think the reason I like these things so much is this: Fecundity. The quality of "producing or [being] capable of producing an abundance of offspring or new growth; fertile"

It's in these funny and unforgettable sayings that we see the richness of our language. It's cold; it's hot; it's boring; it's useless -- these are incredibly run of the mill complaints people make, in all places, in all times. And despite this commonality of sentiment, or more likely *because* of it, there always seems to be somebody around who can find a new and spectacular way to say it.

They say the Inuit people have 27 words for snow? I say a modern-day office drone has 27 synonyms for "unnecessary meeting" ("Time Vortex" being my current favorite).

It truly seems that the more universal and unremarkable an emotion is, the more innovative and ingenious our phrases for it.

Do you watch Sportscenter much? Me neither, but in college I had a roommate who seemingly could not get enough sports information into his brain at any given moment. Dave could have been reading the Sports section in the bleachers of Yankee Stadium during the World Series, with a live television feed of the NFL draft going directly into his medulla, and the guy would still have been asking if you saw last night's hockey game.

I used to watch a lot of Sportscenter.

Fortunately, it was easy for a non-sporty dude to get into: it's pretty much just the highlights. Every morning and night, the Sportscenter anchors would sit behind their desks and replay for you all the notable plays and moves and hits and bogeys from the previous day's games. And Dave and I would sit and soak it all in. I didn't know half of what was going on for the first several weeks, of course, but I liked it anyway. One of the first things I noticed was the anchorman lingo.

You see, the show had to go on, despite the fact that each feat of sporting excellence (or ineptitude; they showed bloopers too) was strikingly similar to whatever dunks and threes and touchdown boogying they had broadcast the day before. There are only so many ways to say Michael Jordan is good, right?

Wrong. The Sportscenter anchors seemed to have an inexhaustible well of alternative phrases for athletic excellence, and I had reason to believe the guys were making them up themselves. Now, some were almost too easy, like Trey Wingo's remark when a goalie made an especially skillful save: "None shall pass!" ...Or Stuart Scott's trademark capper on almost any player's highlight-worthy performance: "Cool as the other side of the pillow."

But here are a few more favorites, just to give you a taste of what you were missing if you didn't have the good judgment to room with Dave yourself:

[when somebody does something good]
You can't stop him; you can only hope to contain him.
He eyes it. He tries it. He buys it!
And he takes the ball and does that nifty little shot where he forces it through the rim.
Right into the clown's mouth. [golfing highlight]
And with that you get eggroll.
He hit it over some fencing they had set up in the outfield.
He/she hit it into a hole in the ground. [ditto]
We're gonna show it again, cause we have editing equipment.

[when somebody does something not so good]
Only Barnes and Noble lets someone stand around longer doing nothing. [when a baseball player strikes out looking]
I can read his lips, and he is not praying.
He will drool the drool of regret into the pillow of remorse.

[either way]
Mister Dictionary has failed us yet again.

The thing was (Is? Do they still play Sportscenter on TV? Sorry, I graduated a few years back and all...), Mister Dictionary never failed them. No matter how many times you watched it happen, there was always some new way to say Shaquille O'Neal scored a slam dunk. (My favorite? Kenny Mayne's: "He's tall.")

It's kind of like my favorite comic strip, Dinosaur Comics. The same characters, the same props, the *same* *exact* *panels* every day, and still Ryan North seems to manage an infinite variety of possibilities for the strip.

Not too much in the way of colorful and regionally specific sayings, but it's got everything else I look for in a website: philosophy, linguistics, incisive exploration of the dynamics of interpersonal (or dinosaural) relationships, and tiny elephants affected by island dwarfism.

And it goes without saying how much I love "Yo' Momma" jokes. (Personal favorite there: My friend Lamont's coup de grace, which ended the showdown between him and a lesser Yo-Momma slinger. He had to stew on this one for a moment, but then masterfully blurted, "Your mom is so big... we're inside her right now."

So whether it's sports highlights or constrained comics or implausibly novel parental insults, I'm a fan. (I also go in for endless covers of the same song, but I've stopped making whole albums of, say, "Hey Jude" or "Time After Time" in their various iterations, mainly because it drives Penny completely bonkers.)

It probably tells you a lot about the way my brain works, I suppose. I may be the only ad writer alive who, when coming up with a new campaign, starts with the billboard: How many different ways can we say this in seven words?

I like boundaries. I like rules. But only because I love thinking up ways to break them. And I love seeing how other people have broken them just as much. I'll close here with an inspired simile from another comic, recommended by Ryan North and which I also enjoy on occasion: Achewood.

"The man is so old school he drives a yellow bus with gothic arch windows!"

The Opposite of Digital Photography, Part Two

2009-01-21T22:46:00.007-05:00

Right now on my desk sits the owner's manual for a Canon Digital Rebel XT. The book is maybe a quarter of an inch thick, listing in exhaustive detail how to use this camera's innumerable features -- from selecting the metering mode to cleaning the CMOS sensor. Not that I know what any of this means.

Four full pages are devoted to Safety Warnings and Handling Precautions, six to Nomenclature of the camera's various parts. By a conservative estimate — my own — it would take me roughly a year to become familiar with all the camera's various features and technological advancements. And I still wouldn't have any real photographic training.

And yet, and yet, I'm momentarily (and once again) more interested in a device that is decidedly less sophisticated than the Canon's neck strap -- a Holga 120S. Plastic lens, plastic body, rudimentary focusing ring, fixed aperture, fixed shutter speed. Oh, and it leaks light. It's a toy. In fact, as I said before, it's almost impossible to take a really "good" picture with a Holga, though many folks have come a lot closer than I have.

There's just so much uncertainty. It's difficult to even wind the film in the darned thing, let alone frame your subject with any degree of precision. You have to peek through a red plastic window on the back to know how many pictures you've got left. And you can only take 12, at least the way I loaded it, but it's with medium-format film that produces fun, square images and a lot of detail in the oversized plastic strip that comes back from the processing lab.

So why's it so fun? Probably because of the uncertainty. The adventure and discovery of snapping pictures with a piece of equipment that guarantees you imperfection and not much else -- well, that makes up for a whole list of inconveniences you'd be forgiven for assuming were outdated by now.

For example: I had to tape the film to the spool before it would wind in the camera body. Can do. I accidentally took one picture on this last roll with the lens cap on, and then advanced the film before noticing my mistake. Ha. I still had a few more pictures to go. When we flew to Florida, I had to have airport security wipe the camera down with their special little cloths instead of running it through their x-ray machine, which I imagined would have wrecked the film inside. Not a problem. When I get back the negatives from the photo lab, I have to scan them on Penny's computer -- using probably three thousand dollars worth of equipment to look at three dollars worth of film. And yet instead of irritating, this only amuses me.

And the results are so rough, so low-fi, so... analog, that you just can't help but love 'em. They make it look like your life is a whole lot more artful, I tell you. Where's the page in the Digital Rebel manual outlining *that* feature?

Now, I know there are Photoshop plug-ins that allegedly achieve this same look from a pristine digital photo. But I don't want to see them. For now I'm very satisfied making use of my antique piece of crap camera, (graciously provided by my friend Ryan, who's taken some outstanding images with it). It's really enjoyable to contract the services of something that has been obsolete since before I was born.

Now, if only I could find some discount expired film to go with it.

(And figure out why all my pictures come out blue. That part's actually getting a little annoying.)

You can click HERE to enjoy a few more.

C.O.L.D.

2009-01-16T19:48:00.005-05:00

Lope and I have been taking birthing classes for several weeks now, and it's been an eye-opening, and occasionally eye-shutting, experience.

I've seen some things that caused me to lean forward in fascination, like the explanation of how the husband can use massage and breathing techniques to help distract the mother from difficult contractions, and I've seen some things that caused me to momentarily wince and turn away. Like the sudden naked strangers on the video our instructor screened for us in Class 3. You gotta warn a dude about stuff like that.

Picture a dozen quiet couples, all scared shitless, sitting in a medium-sized, fluorescent-lit meeting room in the basement of a hospital administration building on Wednesday nights. All have expressions of inquisitive cluelessness. Most are clutching the pillow we were instructed to bring, but are entirely unsure how it will be used. The seats toward the rear of the room fill up first. Up front is a nurse, Leigh, who tells us about typical and exceptional deliveries she's seen, and what to expect and what to be concerned about, and even helpfully demonstrates different postures we can use during labor to help facilitate the baby's descent down to and through the birth canal.

My favorite part was probably Leigh's repeated slam-dunking of a well-worn doll through a plastic pelvis, showing us again and again how a biological feature on the front of a woman's skeleton allows the hips to spread ever so slightly as the head shoots by. It was very apparent why the baby needs to be facing the right position (backward -- who knew?) to navigate the convoluted path. If she's appropriately head-down but facing front ("sunnyside up" in obstetric parlance) it's much more difficult for her neck to accommodate the descent, and the back of her head will place excruciating pressure on Mom's tailbone.

Last week we got to see one of the actual delivery rooms. The bed more or less amazed me, I'll admit. Darn thing converted from a fairly normal-looking hospital bed to a full-fledged, floodlit birthing throne in a few quick maneuvers, complete with an opening in the front of the seat and a bright red plastic trash bag rigged down below to catch, you know, things that emerge but are not the baby. Leigh hopped right up and showed us how to orient our legs and torso for maximal gravitational assistance and non-fatiguing (well, relatively non-fatiguing) pushing.

Penny, it's safe to say, was less impressed with this wonder of modern hospital furnishings. I'm not sure if it was the resemblance to an electric chair that got her or the plethora of blinking, hissing electrical connectors and hoses sprouting from all points on the perimeter. Come to think of it, it may have been the twin thousand-watt floodlamps mounted in the ceiling above the bed/chair, all set at the flick of a switch to illuminate your hoo-hoo like it just escaped from Alcatraz.

Me, I just paid close attention to how to rig the cross-bar, and where are the buttons for inflating the lumbar support, reclining the various sections and notifying the nurse.

Way back in one of the first classes, long before transformer furniture and naked stranger videos and expando-pelvises, Leigh taught us something that stuck with me right away and has resurfaced much more than I'd expected. It's something that I can already see coming in handy in life beyond the birthing process, which is why I'm excited to share it with you now.

She said to remember these four things about labor pain, which are easy to remember because they correspond to the letters in the word itself. Sort of. (The adjectives are a little forced, but you still get the drift.)

P. - Productive. This pain is *for* something, and at the end of it there will be a result which is pretty fantastic.

A. - Anticipated. You knew this was coming, and you've (ideally) taken appropriate measures to prepare for it, such as teaching your doofus husband how to rub your back in a way that's more relaxing than annoying.

I. - Intermittent. It's not gonna go on forever. Contractions are finite, and in fact we're not even supposed to go to the hospital until they're at least one minute long, five minutes apart and continuing for one hour. (5-1-1, Leigh! I remembered!)

N. - Normal. This is helpful to remember in particular, I think. When you hurt, one prominent and urgent risk is that panic will set in, which doesn't do you any good at all. Your body is loudly transmitting the "SOMETHING'S WRONG" signal; if you can override it by remembering that everything's actually *right*, you'll be in much better shape.

That's what Leigh told us about labor pain. And as a handy mnemonic device, I bet it's stuck in the heads of more students than just Penny and me. Repeatedly, it's proven to be an instructive reminder of the nature of most discomfort we encounter in life.

Not all, of course -- when I accidentally stabbed a Phillips-head drillbit through the side of my thumbnail a few weeks back, it didn't Produce anything except a small bloodstain on my sister's hallway carpet, I hadn't Anticipated it at all, or I'd have moved my danged hand, and it (thankfully) wasn't a Normal occurrence. It *was* Intermittent, though, and the pain subsided after only a moment of blinding confusion and settled into a nice, comforting throb for the remainder of the day.

Most pain, I maintain, fits Leigh's ingenious acronym. This current cold weather, for instance, is a natural, normal event which was predicted by Skytrack Weather 13 or whichever digital forecasting whiz-bangery you've got in your area, and which surely serves some meteorological purpose (making sure all the hibernating animals stay *way* asleep?), and which, sure as June, will be out of here soon enough.

So just keep telling yourself that. Step outside, feel the subzero chill blast you in the molars and say softly, through insta-chapped lips: It's cool. I got my gloves, I saw this coming, it's just nature taking its course, we need this if we're gonna go ice skating on the pond later, and This Too, Shall Pass.

P - A - I - N.

I hope it helps you out sometime.

Nesh

2009-01-15T17:44:00.005-05:00

Well, it's become absurdly cold here and elsewhere, for reasons I don't fully understand. I assume it's got something to do with us just returning from Southwest Florida, where it was 80 degrees and I was enjoying the warm sun on my face not 36 hours ago. My friend Ryan and his family just got back from Hawaii as well, so I'm basically forced to draw the conclusion that the Midwest is punishing us both for leaving.

It's negative two out right now. Two below zero. That's not counting windchill, and not the coldest it's been here this winter, but it's plenty cold enough. I shoveled the front steps and felt frostbite setting in on my fingers within about five minutes. With gloves on. The tips of my ears stung when I came back inside, as they simultaneously decided not to drop off my body after all, but to restore blood circulation and give it one more go.

It is, for further reasons I don't fully understand, colder here today in northern Indiana than in Iceland, and about like the weather in Vladivostok, Russia. Even *saying* the words Reykjavik and Vladivostok makes me shiver a little.

This inhospitable weather, I tell you, is so frigid that the antifreeze squirters on our car, which spray freeze-proof fluid onto the windshield, somehow froze over. Cold enough to dissuade Vince from wanting his daily walk. Sufficiently cold, friends, to momentarily shake one's faith in the Earth being an inhabitable planet. There's no wind today, but when there is and the temperature is this low, I walk outside and feel the frigid air whip against my skin and I swear I hear mother nature yelling in my ears, "NO!"

So I go back inside.

But it's a perfect day, I think, for looking up hyperbolic colloquialisms online. This is, admittedly, a common pastime of mine, but today these colorful sayings really come in handy. And the weather suits a review of such delights, don't you think? To get us started, here are a couple of my favorite sayings regarding harsh winter weather:

"It's colder than a well-digger's ass in the Klondikes!"

(I love this one especially. The rhythm of the W in well, how it forces you to flare open your mouth in a blurty, unflattering fashion, followed by the superlatively appropriate K in Klondike, would be understood as a label for unpleasant climate conditions even if your native tongue was Swahili.)

"There's snow up to a tall Indian's ass!"

(This one I heard from a friend who used to work with an old pressman in a printing operation, and this colorful codger was apparently full of sayings like these. My favorite aspect of this one, aside from its inclusion of the word "ass" -- a staple of cold-weather sayings, you'll note -- is the complete irrelevance of the Indian. The "tall" item in question could have been a moose, or a giraffe, or even a telephone pole. But the pressman made it an Indian, thus making his saying immortal.)

Now, you might have expected me to bring up the one about it being "Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey", but to be straight with you, it's not a personal favorite. It's profane, yes, but I've heard the convoluted tale of its origins too many times, and scoffed in every instance. You too may have sat through this one already, how it's *allegedly* an old naval term regarding the brass plates called "monkeys" on which iron cannon balls were stacked. At low temperatures, the story goes, the iron would contract at a different rate from the brass and the stack of ammunition would come tumbling down onto the deck. Yeah, right.

I did also like Outkast's inspired simile, "cooler than a polar bear's toenails," but that referred more to being "cool" than cold. Nobody's cooler than those two, to be certain, but since they live in Atlanta I have my doubts whether they know much about chilly weather.*

On this harsh day, then, I'm electing to stay inside and request more of these sayings. Cough 'em up.

There's really no great clearing house for the kind of hyperbolic colloquialisms I'm after, at least not that I've yet seen, though you do turn up a few here and there online. In all honesty I've come to believe there's no better source than, well, old people.

There's just no substitute for someone who's been around awhile, particularly if they grew up in a fairly rural area, away from the homogeneity of cities. Or perhaps in a very specific pocket of a big city, a neighborhood with a distinct character, you might say.

So if you happen to be one of these prized people, please: share your treasures. And if you're lucky enough to know one, think back -- how do they say it's cold out? I have a feeling there are as many expressions for this as there are neighborhoods north of the Equator.

A call to your grandparents or great aunts and uncles may be in order. I'll wait here until you get back.

* Do polar bears even *have* toenails? Ah yes, I suppose the claws would count.

New Year's Retribution

2009-01-05T20:14:00.004-05:00

I get a bad rap as a nice guy, but really I'm a monster. Oh sure, you may *see* a kind and considerate person on the outside, but boy, get on my bad side and you'll unleash a ruthless fury of Keyser Sozian proportions.

Only not really. I've noticed that most folks, for whatever reason, like to think of ourselves as secret bad-asses. Not the noisy, belligerent biker type, who picks fights for the fun of it, but a *secret* bad-ass: Chuck Norris in tennis shoes instead of boots, perhaps, or Slightly Soiled Harry.

In every household, there are favorite family stories of kindly grandmothers who nonetheless became beasts at opportune moments, shy retiring youth ministers somehow able to summon a tsunami of malice in an instant when provoked.

I think I see why. These bits of lore make good stories because of the irony, the surprise. The "mouse that roared" is a familiar and humorous archetype, reminding us "nothing is as it seems" and there's always potential for people to do what you'd least expect.

And that's cool. Theoretically. But this year I've been thinking about whether that's a good thing or not. I'm thinking now that glamorizing vengeance might be, oh, a little less than healthy.

Perhaps we should look at our potential to inflict harm as something to work against, not brag about. So in 2009, that's my plan. And if you'd like to join me in this effort, go right ahead.

Put aside the fantasy that your everyday, compassionate self is just a thin veneer. If everyone who knows you considers you more or less kind, gentle and non-sociopathic, you may as well just admit it: you're a decent human being.

And this year, I say let's embrace it.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-25T07:52:00.003-05:00

This one's largely for our friends Ryan, Sarah and Simeon (Noel), but it goes for you just the same.

Winter in Winona

2008-12-23T14:33:00.002-05:00

Sucky Fugitive
Originally uploaded by This Guy Colin

Before we head out for the holidays, here are a few pictures from around where we live, mostly from my walks in the park with Vince. It's really pretty here, and quite a contrast from South Carolina, where we spent our last two winters, but I must say it never got to 30 below with windchill in Columbia.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy. Click right here to see the whole set.

Strategic Grill Alterations

2008-12-21T19:50:00.007-05:00

Okay, so I was getting some complaints about the beard. While I, personally, kind of liked it, and had gotten documented compliments from some old guys in the diner ("Looks good on you," one elderly gent was heard to say, while the other said, "Like a handsome Alaskan fisherman." Needless to say, I decided to pick up these men's lunch tabs, for life.), the time just came to trim it back somewhat.

Here was the primary catalyst: Lope. She used to really like it, she said, but then she said she couldn't kiss me anymore. All she got was a faceful of fur. Understandably offputting.

So, even though it was my best bet for getting a role in a Christmas play as a wise man (I got no problem putting flour in there! None at all, Mr. Casting Director!), and even though it was a reasonable defense against the wintry climes that today reached down to 30 below with the windchill, I headed into the bathroom with the trimmer and the shop-vac. (Gotta clean up the little tiny hairs when I'm done, of course.)

And in the end it worked out fine. It's shorter, but still there, though not nearly so red anymore. For some reason it only looked red when it got really long, prompting my own Dear Sweet Mother to say I looked like Yosemite Sam. My sister, who reads a lot of US Weekly, was no big fan either.

Phooey.

Seemed like everywhere I turned (except the diner) I'd encounter resistance to the majestic outcropping. People, my rockin' cool 5-year-old nieces included, would point to old pictures of me and say how much better they liked me without the beard. "Look at this one," they'd say. "You look so handsome. So young. So clean cut." I wanted to point out that I *was* young and clean cut in those pictures -- a mere lad of 29 or so -- but have you ever tried arguing with a 5-year-old?

Oh yeah - and last time I saw Tom, I practically had to flee his house before the dude forcibly shaved my face himself! He just kept looking at me and shaking his head. "Dude... that beard's got to go." I tried to laugh it off, but I knew he was mentally calculating how many steps it would take him to get to the clippers in the bathroom, and how effectively Penny could pin me down in her pregnant state.

Well, fine. I know what you people are after. You just want me to look like those pretty fancy boys on the television set! I'm supposed to fit the Ken-doll mold of every other metrosexual nancypants on channels 3 through 111. My appearance is unacceptable if it doesn't conform to the appearance standards applicable to my specific age group and social class. Whatever.

It's done. I went from this:

To this.

Happy now?

Tauntaun Hormones

2008-12-15T13:27:00.003-05:00

Yesterday Penny said, "You know that scene in Star Wars, where Luke Skywalker cuts open that animal thing and climbs inside to stay warm? That's kind of what I want to do to you."

I decided to take it as an affectionate urge, rather than homicidal.