Serendipities of a Distracted Mind

Nutcracker Weekend

2006-12-19T07:23:00.000-08:00

My daughter is a dancer. She is a beautiful graceful dancer. I take no credit for this. To say I lack grace is an understatement. I have broken my ankle walking down stairs, and torn all the ligaments in my knee watering the lawn. I am grateful she has that talent, most of the time.
However this weekend was Nutcracker Sunday. I use the term both to refer to Tchaikovsky’s ballet and as a crude reference to the behavior of the females in my household before up to my daughter’s performance in it.
I have to say that this year’s version was not quite as bad as last year’s. Last year she played Clara, one of the leads, and it was a pretty intense preparation. This year she played one of the kissing dolls and the lead Marzipan as well as several other dances.
When I refer to preparation, I am mainly referring to the work of Christina, the daughter and my wife, the mother of said fifteen year old.
There is the learning and rehearsal of the dance, which to the uninitiated would seem like the difficult part. However there is also the matter of shoes, costumes, hairdo, makeup, transportation, and tickets.
Aside from being the driver for rehearsals I have almost no role in the dance part, Christina handles that well. Each of the other matters do involve me in one way or the other.
First the shoes. Ballet requires two kinds of shoes, the soft ballet slippers that are featured in the cutesy décor of little girl’s bedrooms. My job with those is to find them. For each most rehearsals I hear ‘Where are My ballet shoes’ and in my omniscience I can usually locate them in the car, the closet or the shoe cubby. The second type of shoes are pointe shoes. These have hard toes and enable the dancer to stand on her tip-toes These are held on the foot by ribbons. Now, unlike most footwear that come ready-to-wear, pointe shoes have to have the ribbon sewn to fit each dancer’s foot. Many shoe manufacturers include a special needle and thread to do this. My job is not the sewing. It is finding the needle and thread that inevitably gets misplaced. Somehow, although I have never used them it becomes my fault when they are lost.
Next are the costumes. The costumes for group dances are from the dance studio. They do not always fit. So there is more sewing, and hemming. The show was Sunday night. My wife was up sewing Saturday night until midnight at which point she said to me, “You have to go to the store early and get light hemming tape. The stuff I have is too heavy. ” Now I know what hemming tape is so I said sure, as soon as Walmart opens I will be there.
And I was there, and went to the craft section, and looked at the hemming tape there was regular hemming tape, heavy duty hemming tape, and then I spotted ‘Ultra Light’. I beamed. I would get this right. So, I rushed home, and opened it and looked at it. It was hemming web and looked like plastic wrap and looked too permanent. My wife looked at me with that. ‘You are utterly hopeless’ look. I would see a lot of that by the day’s end.
I woke my daughter up with a cheery ‘Good morning’ and was greeted in return by a grunt and groan.
Christina went to the bathroom and came out and gave me her version of the ‘You are utterly hopeless’ look. “Dad, I asked you to get me conditioner” she waved a plastic bottle at me.
“I did, I even got you ‘happy hydration’ just as you told me.

“THIS is shampoo and conditioner in one. I can’t use THIS” she sighed.

“I will get conditioner when I go back to the store”, I told her, “I know you will need something else.” To be continued..

Steel Tango Part 4 - Health

2006-11-20T08:38:00.000-08:00

We went back to the steel mill on Tuesday morning. It was a lovely spring day. We were ready to work. But wait. Were we healthy enough to work in a steel mill with extremes of temperature and the aura of sulfurous fumes drifting through the air. We had to be given a physical exam. My Spanish is not too good. I was laughed at back in the seventies in Madrid when I tried to buy train tickets; and that was when my Spanish was better. I puzzled out the questions, and deciphered the pantomime enough to answer the questions and then get an EKG. Apparently I was fit for the job. I wondered why they made it so difficult to allow someone to solve their problems. Perhaps they truly were concerned for my well-being.
We passed through security, with a bit more scrutiny this time. I am used to security checks by now. I am always the ‘random’ person in the airport who has to be thoroughly searched and wanded. I know without looking that my boarding pass will have SSSS stamped on it and I will be singled out. I am used to the stares of fellow travelers who know I must be a terrorist. This time was easy. They checked our passes, our PC cases, wrote down the serial numbers and we were on our way.

Steel Tango Part 3 - Meat

2006-11-20T08:31:00.000-08:00

We survived and actually became inured to brushing other vehicles. I no longer winced passing within two or three inches of other cars. I did learn that any card would work since it is not electronic but that was not until later.
Once we were settled into the hotel we went to dinner. Now, dinner begins at 8:30 PM. No one eats before then. We went to one of the two restaurants that our man in Argentina would recommend in that town and had our first Argentinean meal. Argentines eat meat. That’s it, meat, and beef at that. The best beef I ever had, and inexpensive, but just meat. You can order a side order of potatoes which I did, but as far as green veggies go, they were nowhere to be seen. So we had beef, filet mignon, and French fries. It was delicious. The meal was followed by ice cream. I could feel the cholesterol rising. At lunch throughout the week we went to the other restaurant, and instead of filet mignon I had grilled sirloin. This was repeated all week, with one exception. I had chicken once, and added fruit to my breakfast, for health reasons.

Steel Tango Part 2 El Commandante

2006-11-09T05:44:00.000-08:00

We went easily through security and to the meeting. There were four of us from my company, two Argentines (I will call them Martin and Eduardo, just to protect their identity, they are absolutely wonderful men, among the most hospitable I have met.), a Frenchman, Pierre (brilliant, warm, great guy) and myself (no comment). We were meeting with the project leader, Luis. Now it is important to remember the purpose of our visit. We were here to fix problems arising from changing the software that controls a steel rolling mill. This facility has ovens that heat huge slabs of steel to over 1000 degrees C and sends them down a line to be squashed to about one eighth their original thickness. Of course they also get much longer. It is awesome, in the original sense of the word. Well the software controls the machines that do all this, so when there is a problem it can be in LuisÂ words ÂcatastrÃ³ficoÂ.
Luis was dressed in a khaki uniform, the standard for professionals who work in the mills. I immediately, in my warped mind, gave him the nickname ÂEl CommandanteÂ (see photo of Luis in his spare time). He would smile once in a while but behind it there was always an implied Âyou better fix it now.Â
We also met with his boss, a dour man in a suit and tie who appeared to be suffering from chronic indigestion. We assured them that we were on the case and would be back bright and early the next morning to perform all kinds of wonders.
Then we went to town, to our hotel. I am not exactly sure of what I was expecting in the city we went to. I knew it was about the same size as the city I live in and I had seen it more or gogglen Google Earth. But let me just say I was unprepared. I will call the city San Miguel. Downtown is about ten miles from the steel mill. The road there was a two lane highway, with three lanes of traffic. I sat in the backseat. I prefer the backseat because the driver canÂt see my white knuckles. We passed many cars from the 60s I think the best image would be the atmosphere from ÂThe Last Picture ShowÂ. I was fascinated. There is no idea of zoning or front yards so auto body shops were abutting upper-crust houses and car dealerships were cheek bybarbecueth barbeque shacks.
When we got to downtown proper Martin just went straight through each intersection, as did all the cross traffic. I put my trust in him and Dios mio.

Steel Tango, Part 1

2006-11-08T08:20:00.000-08:00

One of the nice things about my job is that once in a while I get to travel to far away places. One of the bad things about my job is I get to travel to far away places. Last week I went to Argentina.

I work for a global corporation that does industrial automation. This is the reason why it is sometimes less-than-perfect in traveling. Most places where they have heavy industry are not the same places where tourists flock. So for instance if I were to travel to the States I would not normally be called into Honolulu or San Francisco or New York City, but more likely Detroit, Toledo or Flint.

So it was this time. I took the 11 hour flight to Buenos Aires, and it would have been great to stay there. I felt very ‘New York’. But, no, I was picked up by a company colleague and whisked to the Argentine Immigration Bureau. It appears that while you do not need a visa to travel to the country you need to pay for a ‘work’ visa to contribute to their economy. There was a French engineer also sent there to solve the problem and we got a taste of Argentine bureaucracy. My company had hired an ‘expert’ to facilitate the process but it still took two and a half hours to receive the stamped sheet of paper that said we could work there.

Once we were legal, we headed out to the site. It was in a mid-sized city 250 Km from Buenos Aires over the flattest land I have seen, and I have been to Indiana. It was interesting, for the first twenty minutes. Then I realized that all cattle farms look alike and the occasional sheep or llama ranch was not enough to vary the view. I dozed on and off until I was jolted awake because we were on a pot-holed dirt road. I was informed that since we were in a hurry (we had a 3:30 meeting scheduled and it was 5:00 PM) we were taking a short-cut. And sure enough 15 bone-jarring minutes later we pulled into a gleaming modern office building, with lovely blooming violet jacaranda trees (see photo, actually the tree in the photo is in Buenos Aires). Just from the sulfur scent overwhelming what I assumed were the floral overtones I know this was the only gleaming modern building on the site.

Nobel Prize 2015 - Male's Missing Sense Discovered

2006-10-03T07:11:00.000-07:00

It is the time the Nobel prizes are awarded. I know there is no prize for Psychology, (the prize committee has always stretched the Medicine prize to cover a lot of territory) but perhaps one of you budding young neurophysiologists is looking for a Nobel-worthy project. I believe I have found one.

We know there are differences in the brains of men and women, but they are subtle and not very remarkable. This is because we males have been dense and disbelieving. Women must actually have the facility to read minds. I know that stuff is for the left coast, new age, para-psuedoscience crowd but the evidence is becoming overwhelming.

Take this past week, and just one female in my life. I think the mind-reading faculty is most evident in teenage girls, or at least they do not have the fully developed facility to hide it that adult females do.

My daughter is 15. She is very active and besides being an honor student, is an exceptional dancer, and now is involved in drama at school so there are very few nights where we get to sit down and eat as a family but that is the topic of another rant. This means she comes home any time between 6:30 and 9 PM most days. She is hungry, naturally, and her first activity upon arrival home is to open the refrigerator and look for food. Those of you who have teenagers know the second activity is to exclaim “There is nothing to eat.” This is a required response, whether the cupboard is bare or I have just returned with $200 worth of groceries. Now this is where, as a male, lacking the ability to read her mind I invariably respond “What would you like to eat?” Then comes the look, not quite a rolling of the eyes but a definite look of disdain for a lower creature on the Tree of Life. I realize that is when the mind-reading ability should come in to play, and she obviously doesn’t realize I am incapable of it.

Now this scenario played out to an extreme last Thursday. The lovely girl was harried, overworked, frazzled, a very volatile state for a fifteen year old female. To compound the danger, the food situation was rather low. Not that we were in danger of famine, but the choices were limited to maybe the menu of a good size diner. However, she was not interested in any of the choices available, naturally.

My lack of anticipating the dietary needs of the young lady put her into the funk that only a fifteen year old female can feel. My heart was broken, again. As it was I had to go out to the store for something completely unrelated to he dinner, namely my own ice cream. I magnanimously asked the princess if I could get her something to eat. After a few perfunctory huffs and puffs, she consented to allow me to get her ‘a sandwich from the deli’. Now I am not a total idiot, I could smell trouble. To forestall the inevitable “You KNOW I don’t like…”

I asked, innocently “what type of sandwich?”

“Anything, as long as it doesn’t have anything gross..”

This was a sure recipe for failure. So I pressed her gingerly, “And by gross we mean..”

“You know, like tomatoes”

“Perhaps a chicken pesto panini like your brother brought you the other day?”

“You KNOW I hate pesto.”

Well, perhaps I did, at one time know that.. but I have no recollection. I did know she was not partial to green things in her foods.”

Well I went to the store, perused the sandwiches, and settled on a chicken caesar panini. This was well thought out. She only likes one type of salad, Caesar, and she has ordered a Caesar salad out, as a meal. This was safe. I was almost sure. But just to be certain, I picked up one of those ready to heat up lasagna dinners. I KNOW lasagna is her favorite eating out dish.

Feeling secure again in my role as provider I brought the two items, as well as my own ice cream, home. Smiling I presented them to the lady, expecting at least a noncommittal grunt.

“What were you thinking Dad? A sandwich made out of salad? Lasagna from a grocery store?” You should know..”

And there it is. I should know. And therefore I am encouraging all the young ambitious scientists looking for a Nobel prize worthy goal. Please find out how I can know. If we are expected to know there must be a way.

Dendrochronology, say what?

2006-09-15T06:16:00.000-07:00

I love to read, and my reading tends to be eclectic. I read a number of books at once and to be honest I rarely finish a book. This is for two reasons. The most common is I lose interest. There are people who will pick up a book and trudge through it even if they do not like it. I have no idea why anyone, reading time is too precious. The other reason is that if I really like a book I hate for it to end. I understand this is an absurd reason, but I figure I will always come back and finish it someday.

The books I read can be on almost any subject. I often get ridiculed for the books I read. My wife thinks I am weird in this. She has made fun of my reading books on soils (I am a Bronx native, I figure you never know when you have to determine the appropriate crop for the soil you have, but I guess the odds are rather high against using that knowledge), rats (a great book on the rats of Manhattan) and almost any non-fiction book I read.

However every once in a while some of the esoteric knowledge I have picked up comes in handy. Last night, for example, I was helping my daughter with here homework. The topic was archeology. I am by no means an expert in the field, but I have read my share of books that touch on the subject and she needed some methods of dating archeological artifacts. She, brilliant young woman that she is, had gotten the obvious ones, and she asked me for anymore. Well, from somewhere deep in the recesses of my cluttered brain I blurted out "Dendrochronology" . I even astonished myself. She looked at me and started to laugh as I explained how scientists used tree rings to get the exact date of things from fairly far back in the past.

Sometimes, and you never can tell when or where, our ‘useless knowledge’ may come in handy, if only to persuade your teenager that you are not as dumb as they think.

We don't look good in black hats.

2006-09-08T07:58:00.000-07:00

I remember when we were the good guys. I grew up in the 1950s just after we saved the world from the AXIS. We were proud to be Americans because we did the right thing in the right way.

It was the height of the Cold War. America stood for the rights of man, we fought against the abuses of ‘godless communism’. In Russia we knew people were being spied upon by Big Brother, they were being taken from their homes in the dead of night and being tortured in concentration camps for their religion and charged with being enemies of the state, .

We were horrified by this.

We would never do such a thing.

But now, it seems we do.

Agents rounded up hundreds, if not thousands of American citizens, because they were practiced Islam. No one was told why or where they went.

Our President is trying to authorize torture of ‘enemy combatants’.

American citizens are having their phone conversations spied upon.

I ache to wear the white hat again.

Carpe Futurum?

2006-08-17T06:23:00.000-07:00

My daughter is switching high schools, for a number of reasons most of which have nothing to do with the quality of education she has received in her present school. She is an excellent student. (I take no credit for any of her good qualities, nor any blame for her not-so-good qualities.) When she was registering and selecting courses for this coming year we had to think of how many honors courses she should have. She wanted all of her courses to be the most challenging that were offered. Now, I know she could handle that but she also has about 10 hours a week of dance classes with much more at the time of shows and recitals. I also know that she is a teenager and her social life is not unimportant. (I hesitate to say it is her highest priority but it was mine.) Because of a number of factors she was not able to get all high honors courses and she was very disappointed, but I was not.

One of the reasons she gave for wanting the most difficult courses was that it would help her get into a better college. I had a problem with this. I was a high school

teacher for a large part of my life and this has colored my thinking but I have come to the firm conclusion that many, if not most of us spend a great deal of our life preparing for the future. We structure our education so that we will be able to be accepted into a good college. College now has become a preparation for a good job. It is even the stated goal of some colleges that they are preparing students to meet the demands of our economy.

I think we have gotten warped. We spend all of our presents for a future which, from my experience is elusive and unpredictable. We lose sight of the day we have. Life is not what is ahead, life is for the living now. School, all of it, from pre-school through post-graduate is for learning, and ideally it should foster a joy and exuberance in the pursuit of knowledge itself. Each year of school should be lived for the experience it is, the failures learned from and the accomplishments celebrated for what they are, not for how they will look on a college application. I believe if we encourage this, not only will our children and society be happier, but they will be prepared to embrace what to future holds, and shape it to fit them rather than having the elusive future shape them into neurotic anxious beings.

2006-08-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

Virtually every day I drive past what we used to call a reform school. It is the New Hampshire Juvenile Detention Center. It is actually located on a beautiful site on the Merrimack River. But this is not about justice, or rehabilitation, it is about the weakening of our language. The institution is being expanded and they have a sign out by the road giving credit to the various politicians who are responsible. I have never gotten past reading the tile because I am alternately amused and discouraged. The sign “reads ‘Architecturally Secure Facility For Juveniles”. I think if I were ever arrested I will just tell people that I was travelling to an Architecturally Secure Facility. This is right up there with ‘attitudinally challenged’ for short, but it is not as dangerous as ‘collateral damage’ for dead women and children.

The Customer Is Mostly Always Right

2006-08-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

I have worked for the same company for a long time. Normally it would seem to be mind numbing, but I have gone from software technician thorough development engineer, to technical support engineer and now I am what they call a product support engineer. That means I get the problems that no one else wants. My company does industrial automation, so I get called when a factory goes down or an oil refinery stops, or a city’s water supply slows to a trickle. I have to get them running one way or another and, with the help of many very smart people, I do. I love working with people; they are a source of wonder. They are usually very cooperative, and grateful but they are also sometimes not at their best.
When I was in tech support I dealt with engineers from all over the world. They are very intelligent but sometimes, perhaps due to stressful conditions they can lose sight of reality.
As an example one February I got a phone call from the Northwest Territory in Canada. It was an engineer working in a gold mine. Now, maybe it was the cold, or the long dark nights but he had a strange question.
I will call him Jacques, (because I am not sure of his name but he was a French-Canadian.). Here is how the conversation went.
Jacques: “Hello Mike, we have been having a problem with one of our control sheds out on the tundra. It is about a half mile away from where we are and the machinery keeps shutting down.”
Me: “It just shuts down? For no reason?”
Jacques: ”Oh no. It shuts down because of the cold. It gets to minus fifty, minus-seventy out there.”
Me: ”Well our stuff is not specified to that temperature, It will shut down much before it gets that cold. Isn’t the shed heated?”
Jacques: “I know that, and there is heat out there. But the shed door keeps opening and the heater can'’ keep up then. That is what I am calling about. Can you guys figure out a system of control that will detect when the door is open so we can send someone out there to close it? Or better yet get a motor to close the door when it happens?”
Me: “Welllll we could, but it would be very expensive. Why does the door open?”
Jacques: “The caribou nibble the wire that is holding the door closed.”
Me: (after a long incredulous pause.) “Have you tried a padlock?”
Jacques (After an even longer embarrassing pause) “Errr, Nevermind”

Murphy Rides Shotgun, part 2

2006-07-18T16:53:00.000-07:00

Well, it was miraculous, five minutes later my wife came downstairs in a beautiful black dress, with perfectly coordinated pearls and earrings. She was ready. At least I thought she was completely ready. She was dressed to kill. And she was ready to go. My son was ready. My daughter was ready. It was only 9:45 AM and according to Mapquest it would take 2 hours and 44 minutes to get there so we had actually a minute to spare.
Mapquest, however, has times based on a utopian, no traffic, no rest stop, and no road construction universe. I had to admit the first half-hour through New Hampshire was close to that. There was traffic and it was moving very well at ten miles an hour above the speed limit, and that velocity kept up even going through the one urban area where the limit dropped to 50 mph. This meant that all the traffic, and I mean every car was cruising along twenty-five miles per hour over the limit. I believe that posted speed limits must be only a suggestion. We flew down to Massachusetts. Then we hit the non-utopian real world. Now, one would think that on a hot summer Sunday most traffic would be headed to the beaches and since we were going in the opposite direction, we would have the road to ourselves. However I think that the Commonwealth has a law that requires 75% of vehicles to be on the road at any one time so we were part of a vast slow westward migration. Any time we gained, in New Hampshire was lost and a good bit of time we hadn’t gained went by the Massachusetts wayside.
We then opened up as we crossed the Connecticut border. (Connecticut doesn’t have such a law). We actually were able to cruise quite handily down from Northern Connecticut through Hartford. Much of this can be attributed to the astute judgement of me, the driver. There was the temptation to use the high-speed express lane for cars with more than one passenger. But, having driven thousands of miles of single lane travel in NH, I remembered a little known corollary of Murphy’s law ‘If one is on a no passing highway, one will attract in front of them a vehicle going ten miles an hour below the posted limit’. Sure enough. There was a line of cars in that lane going 50 mph behind an ever-so-cautious elderly couple in a Coupe De Ville. I was congratulating myself on this bit of genius when my wife said. “ I need a bag to go with this dress, so if you see someplace…” See someplace? Cruising on an Interstate at 75 mph there is little chance to see a quaint little boutique on the side of the road. I nodded, and continued.
We reached the exit for our destination at 12:47PM. Not bad at all. And it was along a shopping strip. This was indeed the height of Serendipity. We drove past the restaurant where the party was being held and my ever-astute daughter had to point out the people entering with the words “Oh My God, Mom. You are so overdressed.”
My jaw dropped. The center didn’t hold. The bottom fell out. I turned to my wife and she said, “Turn in here, there is a Marshall’s and a Kohl’s.” My daughter informed me that she needed lip-gloss. Why she didn’t need it before now is one of the mysteries I am looking forward to having answered in the afterlife. She also informed me that she had a headache and needed migraine medicine. There was also a supermarket in this glorified strip mall. I did as instructed. I dropped my wife at Marshall’s, and my son and daughter at the supermarket and parked. Lo and behold, ten minutes later they were back. My wife was impeccably attired in what was probably a several degrees more casual dress, (it was still in the ‘dressy’ category to me), And daughters lips were probably much more glossy than they had been. I use the photographic method of judging lips, either matte or glossy, which apparently is too crude a standard. I turned to daughter. “Did you get migraine medicine?” I got the “do you expect me to do everything” look, and so I re-entered the supermarket for the medicine. After marveling at the casual laid-back method of the cashiers I emerged and entered the car and pulled out. We arrived at the shindig at precisely 1:15PM and since it was a typical Italian affair we only missed the hor devours. Not bad. This meant we still had the antipasto, the salad, the pasta, the prime ribs with potatoes and vegetables, the cake with coffee and the pastries with espresso. I considered it a triumph.

Murphy Rides Shotgun

2006-07-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

I hate being late. I am notorious for getting work done at the last minute, or not completing things on time, but I really dislike being late for people and events. However I live with three other people to whom it does not seem to matter. They are always rushing out the door. And two minutes past the last minute. If it is a family event, I am often warming up the car reading a book while they are chaotically looking for things and tripping out the door.
Yesterday was just such an occasion. My wife is Italian, born in Italy. She is part of an extended family. Now, My family is large. I have a ton of first cousins, most of whom I know their names. Some of them are fairly close, but I have to admit some of them I have lost touch with. Not so with her family, third cousins, fourth removed are deep in the bosom of the family. Along with this familial web comes many milestones, baptisms, weddings, graduations, and anniversaries. We had to attend such a function yesterday, in Connecticut, three hours away from here.
Since I know what happens, and since the party began at 12:30 PM I told people to be ready at 9:00 AM. In my naivete, I assumed that the half-hour cushion would be sufficient, and things seemed to be going well. I had awakened early, made sure my son’s clothes were ready, showered, shaved. I even went out and filled the car with gas, bought Dramamine for my daughter, candy, and gum for the road. I was almost hopeful that, for the first time we might actually do it. Heck, we might actually leave early and be able to relax on the ride down. Now, Murphy and his law were constantly flitting in and out of my field of view, and I knew something would go wrong, but it seemed that whatever it was would be minor, and I had out witted Mr. Murphy this time. (I have never gotten a good view, so I am not absolutely sure Murphy is male, but I will go on that hunch).
The first hint of something wrong was when my wife came down the stairs carrying her dress. It looked beautiful, dressy, covered with a lace material. I knew it looked good, and it seemed fine to me but my wife is a perfectionist, to say the least. My daughter, who was already dressed and I thought stunningly, looked at her mother’s dress and said, “I am way too over-dressed if you are going to wear that!”
This should have set off five-alarm warning bells, and I did begin to feel the first rumbling of panic. But we were running ahead of schedule, and I knew the lovely daughter had a back-up dress so when she got it, and put it on, and looked just as fantastic as before I shrugged off the fears. I must digress here just to admit that the second dress appeared exactly as formal as the first. But I have learned a thing or two and didn’t voice this obviously ignorant opinion lest I be subject to the rolling of eyes and dismissive sneer that only a fifteen-year-old can inflict.
Meanwhile my son had showered, and donned his suit pants, and had taken the white shirt that I have ironed early and slipped it on. No sooner had one arm been enveloped by the crisp brilliant white sleeve than he grumbled. “These sleeves are way too long, I can’t wear this.” My jaw dropped. Surely this could not be my offspring, the fruit of my loins, the carrier of my genes. Here was the son of a man who had attended his sisters wedding in corduroy beige pants, a tan sport coat and an orange shirt with a bunny pattern, the firstborn of the man who had such a sartorial touch with rope belts, and uneven cut-off jeans that one of his college professors christened him ‘Oleg’ after the designer Oleg Cassini, I looked at him and he said. “I need another shirt.” I replied, but Brian, you will have your sleeves rolled up, it is going to be 95 today. I got the ‘What planet are you from?” look in return, and his mother reflected the look and said, “There is a pink shirt in his room that you can iron. “
Ok, I reassured myself, I can do that; it will only take five minutes. And it did so I smiled and handed him his perfectly ironed shirt with a smile even as I wondered why he wasn’t the one doing the ironing but was rather engrossed in a video game bare-chested, sockless, and unshaven. I pointed out to him that the most logical method would be to shave before donning the shirt. He looked at me with the amazed look of discovery that is only seen in the eyes of a scientist who has made a Nobel Prize breakthrough.
My wife meanwhile had brought he dress to the ironing board for ‘just a quick touch-up’ and I had gone upstairs to check on the lovely daughter. There was no great cause for concern; she asked me if the pair of earrings she was holding to her earlobes looked ok. I responded that Cleopatra herself would couldn’t have chosen better, and got the other planetary look from that quarter. But all was ok; at this rate we would still be out of the house between 9 and 9:30 and would be among the early arrivals.
Then I heard the scream. Screams are not a good thing in any situation, (well, maybe in one or two) but this was definitely not the scream of one lost in ecstasy. I ran down stairs and looked at my wife, standing over what could have been a fresh-killed corpse. She had been distracted and had pushed the iron through the lace ripping a three-inch gouge in it. I was dumbstruck. Murphy could be heard belly-laughing in the background. Here was one of his masterpieces. I looked at my poor distraught wife wordlessly. She looked up at me and muttered, “Maybe I can fix it.” I thought to myself, “Maybe we will just miss the milling around before the first course.”
My wife is inventive and resourceful but even she, after fifteen minutes of futile attempts with glue-gun, hemming tape, needle and thread and other assorted crafting tools, admitted defeat. And looked at me and asked, “Now what can I wear?” This is one of those wifely with no correct answer, like “does this make me look fat?” I shrugged mutely, knowing that I hadn’t a clue as to what the possibilities were. Like most husbands I only had a vague idea that my wife had some clothes I would consider ‘dressy’ and some I would consider ‘not so dressy’. She realized her idiocy in asking me rather than the wall and stormed upstairs.
I resigned myself to defeat and looked at the clock. If she could miraculously find a dress that suited her, and nothing else disastrous occurred, and I was able to fly down the highways at a steady eighty miles an hour we could get there in time to be the next to last stragglers.
(to be continued)

Reincarnation ain't all its Cracked Up to Be

2006-07-06T12:29:00.000-07:00

I have a son. He is now 19 and between Freshman and Sophomore year in college. I am a victim of the mother’s curse. “I hope your kids are just like you”. It is uncanny and terrifying. He is smart, charming, witty and totally exasperating. He is half way through his summer vacation and still looking for his summer job. Well, as he tells me every day when I force him off his butt to go out looking, “Padre, (for some reason known only to him I am his Padre) I have a job.” That is, he is still officially a part-time Pharmacist Technician at a large supermarket here, but they haven’t given him any hours since they cut back in February. So he will dutifully go out and fill in an application and be exhausted from the effort. I have a sneaking suspicion that he writes, under the entry for other interests, “Sleeping, renting out on-demand movies using my father’s money and eating”.
Of course those are not his only interests, he does like going out, playing his bass and guitar, oh and did I mention sleeping? He can write, and act, and do pretty much anything he puts his mind to. If he would only. I feel like I am living my life over, and it is as exasperating.

Father of a teen

2006-07-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

I became a father at forty. That’s when my son came into the world. My daughter was born four years later. That is when I figured out, that I might be too old for fatherhood. She spent the first 28 days of her life in neo-natal ICU. She was impatient to get out and see the world and didn’t wait for her digestive system to develop. So for the first four weeks of her life she was fed from a bottle through a tube in her nose. It was mother’s milk but the delivery method was unorthodox. It was during one of those feedings when she was nestled on my forearm looking up at me that I was struck with a cold chill. I looked at her and realized one day she was going to be a teenager, not only that, but a teenaged GIRL. I wiped the cold sweat from my forehead and then had a moment of relief, a plan developed. I would almost be senile by then. If I could work it correctly, I could start my second childhood and work my way backward and meet her at aged eight. She would think I had boy cooties, and I would think she had girl germs and we could at least coexist. Then by the time she was 13 I would be smiling, and drooling in a rocker in the corner.
However, it didn’t work out that way. She got to be eight, and was a terrific kid, a gymnast, honor student, and fun to be with. Then came the dark ages, I think it was around eleven, but my memory has been tampered with. She gave up gymnastics for dance. That was ok, dancers are cute. I could take all kinds of Dega-esque photos of her and become rich and famous. But along with dancing she became possessed by a demon. This is not an unusual demon I found out, It pretty much possesses every tween girl, or so their pale shaking parents tell me.
Now, Outwardly, in public, there is absolutely no sign of her inner demon. She is beautiful, dances like Terpsichore, and is if anything a more outstanding student. She is helpful, kind, witty and everything in the Boy Scout oath. It is at home where she changes from Beauty to the Beast. She is not bipolar, because bipolar people alternate between highs and lows on a period that is longer than hourly. She can be Daddy’s little girl, all light and cheer and before I can adjust to the saintly lady she has transformed into a creature from the depths, full of darkness and vitriol.
I know it is not an uncommon phenomenon, and I am told that young women grow out of this possession, but by then I will be drooling and shaking, and I am certain I will not be smiling.

Less than Bird Brained?

2006-06-30T04:36:00.000-07:00

There was a report yesterday on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered about a study of migratory Arctic birds. It seems that with earlier spring times the birds are migrating north earlier. This is a case of the early birds catching the worm, or rather the flies and mosquitoes that hatch earlier than they used to. Now, this is puzzling, How do the birds know that spring will arrive earlier? I am fairly certain that they are not wired up to weather.com, and contrary to what some would say I do not thing the Intelligent Designer is whispering in their ear. (Sort of the inverse of “a little birdie told me”. The best explanation is that in the relatively short time that the climate has been warming up the birds have evolved through Natural Selection. That is, the few birds that have migrated earlier have gotten the lions share of the insect feast and so have been more successful in raising other early birds. While this is still not the final word it does present a question to me.
If even the birds realize the Earth is warming up, and have changed accordingly, why can’t our politicians here in the US realize it? Perhaps it has something to do with those politicians oil connections? Oh, I am sure I am just being cynical and paranoiac. There can’t be any connection between the two.

About Me and My Mind

2006-06-29T16:35:00.000-07:00

I have been mulling over whether to blog or not for a few years now and being who I am, mulling over is a euphemism for procrastination. I have what is now called Attention Deficit Disorder, or ADD and procrastination is one of the hallmarks of this advantage. It can be an advantage once one realizes the possibilities that it opens up for one who is ready for it.
This is not to deny the disadvantages of the condition. As I was growing up and in school there was no diagnosis for ADD and I was told that I was 'lazy', 'an underachiever’ and 'not living up to your potential'. And I was a bit of all of that. But I was fairly intelligent, and a fast learner so anything that did not require a concentrated, self-disciplined effort, like homework, came easily. I learned by reading, and listening so I did well on final exams and standardized tests so while I was never a high honor student I was better than scraping by.
All of this is by way of explanation for the title of this blog. I have learned many things by my late middle-ages (not necessarily dark ages), and a lot of what I have learned has been by following distractions. This blog is intended to be a collection of those gleanings, as well as my observations and opinions.
It will be an eclectic gathering, of humor, family life, work, politics, and whatever else flits through my consciousness long enough for me to contemplate