Things going well

Daughter Two gets to keep the room and roommate she's already come to love. Nervous about course planning - why should she be different - but otherwise settling in nicely at MIT.

Daughter One is spending her birthday helping a friend from college settle in as an intern at Disney. She gets to have one of her besties with her on her special day with unlimited access to Disney properties. I'm jealous!

Dogs are thrilled to have us home (it's nice to be needed). Large Dog upchucked in my honor.

Wife has decided to keep me.

More ideas than time to write in the last week, so there will be many good things to come from the Briarpatch.

Bloggus interruptus

All well with the Bellevue McDermotts. Not to worry about us. Our experience with Irene has been relatively mild. The folks from MIT and the Marriott have been just fabulous. Mary was able to find an open Target and cabbed there with Daughter Two to get the last necessities for the dorm room.

We fly home tomorrow (fingers crossed for flights going out of Logan) arriving late, so expect to continue blogging Tuesday - Wednesday at the latest.  Hope this finds all of my thousands of readers well and happy.

As the storm approaches!!!!!!!!!

Sitting in a hotel room in Cambridge, MA waiting for Hurricane Irene to hit, I thought I should come up with a title for this epistle that was as unnecessarily foreboding as the news headlines on the TV. How did I do?

It’s Saturday morning and the hurricane is supposed to hit the Boston area tomorrow. We came here for the parent orientation and campus move-in of our newly-admitted MIT student. Since all the main events for tomorrow – the main event day – have been cancelled due to the state of emergency, we’re using today to get the necessaries accomplished and then get in whatever looking around we can before the campus shuts down.

-Later-

So, Mary and I basically had a low key vacation day today, dropping off Daughter Two's stuff with her roommate, then walking around half soaked checking out the campus and environs. What a wonderful place for Daughter Two to go to school! She and her cohort are back from their pre-orientation trip and safely in the dorm.

Not to worry, will continue blogging tomorrow. Too pooped to pop at the moment.

Erosion of marital roles

Mary and I fly out tomorrow night to transport stuff to our daughter's college. We will have house-sitters here during our absence. Mary is thinking that maybe I should contribute to the house-cleaning and other non-packing-my-own-stuff preparatory activities.

I have to wonder, whatever happened to the concept of women's  work? Has the world gone crazy?

More about stuff

Many moons ago, when Daughter One and also Daughter Two were small, our house was burgled. It was a traumatic experience that made us feel violated just like in the books and movies. The worst part was the few things they took that were irreplaceable. Mary’s name necklace from her grandmother. I think that was the big thing.

I hope we’re never burgled again but if we are, I’m hoping that the burglar’s shopping list at least roughly parallels my list of stuff that’s sitting around here gathering dust:

·         DVDs of movies we didn’t like the first time;

·         About half of our Christmas CDs;

·         All the underwear that no longer fits my ample caboose;

·         Speaking of clothes, tees that fit the mid-twenties me;

·         Our old, old silverware;

·         Half of what’s in the downstairs closet, and I don’t care which half;

·         Every single thing that we bought on sale, thinking we’d need them someday and then never did;

·         The countertop appliances we don’t use;

·         Half of my coats, but I get to pick which half;

·         The nastiest eight of the dogs’ chew toys;

·         The two-thirds of our board games that no one ever plays;

·         All the out of focus photos, which is to say, the ones I took;

·         The broken shovel that even I don’t know why I kept;

·         The small dog (DO NOT tell Daughter One);

·         About nine of the dog leashes;

·         Speaking of dogs, Sam’s ashes – I still love that mutt and I think he’d get a hoot out of some low life opening the beautiful box to find a bag of ashes and bone chips;

·         The old barbecue;

·         The electric car that we got from a garage sale and which Daughter One played with precisely once;

·         The box of tuna helper that’s so old, neither of us will admit to ever having purchased it;

·         All the dandelions they can carry.

They should be able to get a good garage sale out of this much stuff. Chances are, we wouldn’t even press charges.

Dog love

The small dog clearly believes that its quota of loving actually increases as the number of permanent residents in the house decreases. I don’t know how she understands the concept of inverse correlation. Heck, I’m not sure I understand the concept of inverse correlation. But she does.

Daughter Two left only yesterday and now the small dog insists on pawing us ad nauseum, being patted constantly and staring at us with the rapt attention that is only possible when absolutely nothing else occupies your mind.

 I swear she can be sound asleep on the far side of the room but if you so much as turn your  head, she’s on you, licking with the tongue that knows no restraint, the whole back third of her gyrating in a wriggling cross between a tail wag and a drunken shimmy. And it’s getting worse as the night wears on.

Large dog mostly sleeps, so the data on him are inconclusive.

A message from Daughter Two

So, Daughter Two arrived safely in Cambridge, MA. She met up with a bunch of other new MIT students and collectively they got all their stuff from the airport to the school. (Okay, not really ALL her stuff, but I’ve already sort of covered that in an earlier post.)

We know for sure that she made it to campus and met her new roommate. We know for sure, because our several questions along those lines were collectively answered by a single text that read, in its entirety: “Yup:).”

Coming from Daughter Two, this translates to mean “I am here and safe, enjoying meeting people, love my roommate, had help getting my stuff from the airport to the dorm and don’t really want to take the time to converse with parents for the moment. I love you and am struck at this pivotal moment by how fantastic you have been as parents and how fortunate I am to have grown up in your household. I have eaten and taken my medication and am keeping hydrated. Please don’t worry about me and understand that I am intent on making good use of my first few days here. I will be in touch in more depth and breadth later, perhaps tomorrow. Meanwhile, know that you are in my thoughts and that I will always hold you in my heart. Love always, Daughter Two!”

It’s sort of a code. You’d have to know her.

Cupcake wars?

Daughter Two leaves for college in the morning.

She brought special gourmet cupcakes home for desert.

There are four cupcakes but only three people in this house this evening.

I have to wonder if Daughter Two has retribution on her mind, this being her last chance for awhile and all.

(For those of you who don’t understand the reference, you may want to peruse “An errant cupcake” from  January 24^th.)

Melancholy moments

Forgive the alliterative title; I couldn’t resist. I promise it’s appropriate.

Less than 48 hours from now, Daughter Two will be ensconced in her dorm room, already developing a history with her roommate, already shifting her cultural center of mass from our home to her college. She has worked her last shift at the shoe store, hugged her friends, packing is well along (or so she says). We’ve taken our last pre-college paddle and eaten the kayakberry  pies that resulted from the last picking expedition with Pat and Patty.

We’re thrilled for her and vicariously through her and can’t wait to see her in her new normal when we go for Parents’ Orientation next week. But of course, by then the Rubicon will have been crossed. We’ll be on the outside looking in. We’ll love what we see but still, a spectator is not a participant.

Still, I can’t wait to see her off. Is that irony or paradox – I’m never sure?

Advice to parents whose kids are NOT leaving this month for college: All those things that you want to do again before your child ceases to be a child – do them now.

A matter of priorities

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has announced that immigration officials will begin reviewing potential deportees to establish priorities for review. " Immigration judges will be able to more swiftly adjudicate high priority cases, such as those involving convicted felons.” This in a letter sent to 22 senators today.

She goes on to say that "it makes no sense to expend our enforcement resources on low-priority cases, such as individuals... who were brought into this country as young children and know no other home."

Hm-m-mm…

So, on the tenth anniversary of 9-11, we’re finally getting around to targeting convicted felons for deportation? And 125 years after the Statue of Liberty began inviting the poor and downtrodden of the world to our shores, we’re just now going to give less objectionable asylum seekers such as children an easier nod?

So, I have two questions:

1.    Why on Earth are we not already targeting felons for the old heave-ho?

2.    When has it ever gone against our grain to welcome those just looking for a fresh start? Or kids needing a fair shot at life?

The Irish weren’t always entirely welcome, Africans were once entirely too welcome for their own good, and while we look on Canucks as our wink, wink, nudge, nudge step-siblings from mother England, we see the Mexicans and First Nations as second class peoples to be sequestered. Our priorities have been screwed up for a very long time.

OF COURSE, we should prioritize certified jerks for early departure! But perhaps we should have done so quickly and quietly. I’m thinking that announcing we’re just now realizing that not all immigrants are equally desirable is more than a little embarrassing.

P.S.: Just in case this is read by anyone at DHS, let me make my thoughts clear: kick out the crooks and embrace the kids. Call me when you have a difficult choice to make.

Stuff

Mary is helping Daughter Two prepare for the move to college. This apparently involves a significant amount of shopping.

I’d have thought with the great piles of unused stuff we have sitting around the house in various drawers and bins, everything a college bound daughter could need would be right here for the taking.  This turns out not to be the case.

I’d have thought that with the daughters moving on with their lives, the household would experience a net decrease in the amount of stuff we stumble over during the course of an average day. In my dream world, they would take significant amounts of what I’ve come to think of as their stuff with them to college and on into their future worlds. It would appear that I’ve harbored some unrealistic expectations. 

It seems that moving to college and beyond involves the accretion of great whomping piles of completely new stuff. Stuff that is in some ways similar to their old stuff but sufficiently different to require time-and-space-consuming adventures in the acquisition of entirely new stuff.

The old stuff will be left behind.

With me.  And Mary.

And the dogs.

And of course, our stuff.

(Editor’s note: Mary informs me that this is not an entirely accurate rendering, that in fact, lots of the existing stuff is being recycled as college stuff. Yes, dear.)

The line for the consulate

The building in which I work includes a consulate.  Two days per week, a line forms in the lobby of people waiting to be taken upstairs to conduct their consular business.

Usually when watching a crowd, I can’t help but run scripts in my mind, imagining back stories for each of the people. But this time, I can’t. Or at least, I won’t.

These folks are waiting to meet with officials who can make their dreams come true or dash them. Whatever reason they have for waiting in this line is intensely personal and I just can’t violate that privacy, even fictionally.

Most of them look at me as I walk by wearing business casual. I’m not stopped by the guard and I have a key card dangling from the loop around my neck. Clearly, I have access. Is it to the consulate? Am I maybe the person to whom they will plead their case later this pivotal morning?

I wish I could help them. I always feel the heart tugs when talking about persons caught by borders. Seems like such an artificial way to screw up lives.

One lady near the head of the line beams a smile at me that almost stops me in my heels. I think I’d like her back story.  

I hope all these people get what they came for. I’m lucky. I have a key card.

A great hike

I went for a hike today with my wife, brother and sister-in-law. We wended our way through deep coniferous forest along a rushing creek to a really gorgeous waterfall.  It was about a two hour hike in very warm weather but almost totally shaded.

We met lots of nice folks along the way including Amy, Daughter One’s fifth-grade teacher. She was one of the shining lights in our daughter’s education and it was so nice to see her with her husband and children and dog, clearly enjoying the day as much as we were.

This creek is a place where I spent a lot of time as a kid, and it’s pretty strongly identified in my psyche with some of my best memories of growing up. More recently, it’s a place we used to go when our daughters were young. One of my favorite family pictures was taken on the trail with the creek in the background.

This is the place where I gave myself my worst ever ankle sprain while performing in an ill-advised Cub Scout skit and where I was first given a job I would be in charge of (working on the trail). It was where I learned to make a fire without matches and where I accepted that there’s nothing inherently dangerous about nighttime.

My ashes will be scattered here. That’s assuming I’m not taken up bodily in an alien ship. And unless my survivors prefer another disposition (don’t want to put extra stress on a hard time). My brother does NOT get a vote!

This was a very special day that I could never duplicate and wouldn’t want to try.

The tardy blogger

Yes, dear readers, I know I'm behind in my postings. By way of explanation if not excuse, My brother and sister-in-law are visiting - their last visit before Daughter Two begins her new life at college. I've decided that family comes first and I'm devoting every spare minute to this family time.

Okay, that was the public  explanation. Here's the real one:
Pat annd Patty like to do a lot of physical activity. Between kayaking and hiking, I expect not to have the energy to blog for another couple of  days.
I'M TOO FAT!!!

Paddling the locks

Spent the evening paddling from Lake Union to Golden Gardens with Daughter Two. Paddling into the sunset, through the ship canal, the Chittenden Locks, past Madrona and around the head to Shilshole is about as fine an urban paddle as you could devise. Five miles of friends and cool stuff to look at.

I loved the locks, loved the paddle overall, and it was a very special evening with my daughter.

Unfortunately, there was the little matter of her hitting me in the face numerous times with her paddle spray. Particularly when we came through the eddy area by the fish ladders, where the water was covered with some extremely suspicious scud. For some reason, she seemed to splash more when we were in the crappy water.

I love her anyway. This was a good evening.

It’s all for my honey

I read on the news that it’s becoming fairly common for couples to have “snoring rooms” installed in their new or remodeled homes. That’s a special room where the snorer goes to sleep, thus leaving their partner free to enjoy a peaceful night’s sleep. Speaking as one who has occasionally been accused of emitting gentle nocturnal ululations, this seems like a reasonable approach to staving off marital meltdown. In fact, I’m so convinced of the merit of this solution, I’ve begun thinking about a design for our snoring room.

With Daughter Two going off to college and Daughter One already there, I have the perfect place in mind.  They won’t be using the downstairs rec room anymore. As a service to my dear wife, I’m going to redesign it as a snoring room. It will of course require some better sound insulation. That and the separation of a floor should leave Mary free to slumber without interruption.

Oh, and better carpeting. Just for the sake of noise abatement, doncha know.

Since I’m doing this primarily…er, make that entirely…for the sake of my beloved, I’ve decided to add other features that will make her life easier:

·         In order to save her the sound of running water, I’m going to put in a refrigerator with an ice maker so I can get midnight drinks without waking her.

·         And of course, a microwave so I can make popcorn with which to wash the water down.

·         I can’t always get to sleep right off, and the TV in the family room is too loud in the master bedroom, so I’ll bring in my own with earphones to avoid waking her.

·         I should probably move some bookshelves in there so I’ll always have something to read, helping me drift off without disturbing the peace.

·         If I’m going to read, I guess I should really get a Barcalounger.

·         Oh, and foosball. I really like foosball.

·         And maybe one of those foot massager things.

Some husbands would merely roll over on their sides. Not me, not for my baby. She deserves more, and I intend to give it to her.

The results of partisan politics

The United States of America today lost its AAA credit / bond rating.
Thank you, Tea Party!
It turns out that scorched earth may not have been your best approach.

Question of the day

Seriously - is there anyone in the world who WOULD eat yellow snow?

Home renovation

One of my all-time favorite things we’ve ever done with the kids came about thanks to This Old House. You know, the home renovation show. We’ve watched it on and off for years. I even met Norm at a woodworking convention once.

But, I digress…

In an episode many moons ago, the interior design of a home for a young family included a wall painted with this special paint so the kids could use it as an erasable canvas. We didn’t have a wall to spare for muralizing but we did have a kitchen wall we intended to rip out in the course of our own home remodel.

The day before demo, we assembled every marker, pen, pencil and paint stick in the house, a step ladder for Daughter One and a stool for Daughter Two. We stacked all the supplies in close proximity to the soon-to-be-ex-wall.

I wish you all could have seen the faces on our daughters when it sunk in that they had a whole day and carte blanche to deface that wall in any way they considered artistic.

That was a good day.

Chicken soup

I am making chicken soup.

It did not actually start out as chicken soup. It started out as a really nice roasting chicken. My relative (okay, absolute) inexperience in the fine art of rotisserie roasting transformed it into a lump of baked chicken meat completely encased in chicken-skin charcoal.

Hey, I started out a mediocre singer and ended up a pretty fair business consultant.  So, why shouldn’t the worst roast chicken in history be transformed into a truly decent chicken soup?

So, I boiled down and picked the carcass, chopped onions and carrots and celery, cut up the surviving chicken meat and set the whole shebang to simmer. And now, after just an hour or so, it’s starting to smell really heavenly.

Tonight there will be no roast chicken for dinner. But tomorrow night, chicken soup!

My web is back to center.

UPDATE 7 Aug, 2011: The soup was one of the best I've made. I'm taking credit, even if it was an accident!

Preparing for college

We spent a portion of tonight helping Daughter Two make a list of the things she needs to get done in order to prepare for college. Now, the discussion is done and I’m loathe to open it up again as it was not a particularly pleasant discourse. On the other hand, it does seem to me we’ve forgotten a few small things we should have accomplished before now…in some cases, long before now.

I’ll share them here so that those of you whose daughters will be going off to university in years yet to come might benefit from my belated brilliance and do a better prep job with your daughters than I have with mine:

1.       Get the  girl her own whoopee cushion and teach her to hit a high E while looking nonchalant.

2.       Gather up all of the Friends and Gilmore Girls DVDs in the house and tape them together in preparation for sneaking them into her bag. When the daughter leaves, her chick shows go with her.

3.       Provide her with subliminal / nocturnal training in the desirability of staying away – far away – from boys.

4.       Buy her a copy of Job – A Comedy of Justice by Heinlein.

5.       Pre-ship the annoying little dog so it’s waiting upon her arrival. Nice surprise for her, reprieve for the annoying little dog.

6.       Record my voice yelling “What the hell!?!/!” and “Emma, hand me that shotgun!”  Also, a loop track of our Great Dane barking madly. These will come in handy when she hears someone outside her door at night. Or when one of the afore-mentioned boys approaches at any time.

7.       Go through her closet and drawers, and donate any item that when worn as intended would leave any skin uncovered from collarbone to ankles, wrist to wrist. (You may need to provide funds for her clothing replenishment trip to OshKosh or Home Depot.)

8.       Find an apartment near campus from which I can conduct nocturnal patrols.

9.       Make several preliminary trips to the campus, during which I make friends with several of the more conservative campus cops. Ask them to take good care of my little girl.

10.   Buy her sensible shoes. Donate all her other shoes to daughters who don’t have caring fathers.

11.   Cover her luggage with Barbie stickers.

12.   Cover her laptop in Barbie stickers.

13.   Procure two full sets of Barbie bedding.

I’ll think of more but for now, this is a good start, no?

Our tax dollars at work

On the way back from the supermarket this evening, I was delayed by a tie up in a major intersection. The tie up was caused by an apparently stalled car in the intersecting turn lane. As I pulled up, a cop was parked behind the stall with his emergency lights going. As I started through the intersection, I realized the cop was trying to get into the car and the driver was slumped sideways.

By the time I pulled into the gas station, another driver had handed the officer a crow bar and one of the car windows bit the dust. The officer and his helper pulled the driver out of the car, at which point his car started rolling forward. So the officer dove into the car to jam it into neutral and get it stopped.

By now, the helper had the unconscious driver laying on the pavement. The officer checked the victim for a pulse and ran to get the defibrillator out of his trunk. By the time he had returned to the man’s side and checked his pulse again, the first fire unit was rolling onto the scene. Without anyone shouting orders and in a calm, unhurried but efficient manner, the responders evaluated the victim’s condition, administered oxygen, directed traffic, brought in the paramedic ambulance, strapped the victim to a gurney, communicated his symptoms and treatment to that point, and prepared for transport.

The ambulance took the guy away, the fire truck headed back to the station, and the original cop headed off to another call. The second cop on the scene blocked the lane with his car, turned on his lights and started writing a report while he waited for the tow truck.

All of this happened within very little time. Maybe ten minutes, from the guy passing out to riding off in the ambulance on his way to the hospital. I was impressed.

Make no mistake, there was a lot of luck involved here. Most people can’t count on collapsing in front of a police cruiser, and many cops operate in areas where they would never be within a quarter mile of a fire station and a half mile of a paramedic base. But fortune can cut either way. And those resources were where they were because we as a community came together years ago and decided this sort of first responder infrastructure was worth paying for.

There are a lot of arguments flying back and forth just now about how we organize ourselves to provide for the common weal. I won’t go into the arguments per se. But from my point of view, today everything came together the way we intended.

When we passed the Medic One levees, we couldn’t know this poor schlub would need them so badly tonight at the intersection of 150^th and 38^th. But it was precisely the sort of outcome we would have hoped for.

Sometimes, taxes don’t seem all that bad.