Monday, August 10, 2015
The Daily Paragraph -- Unwanted Bills
For the second time in about two and a half years, we received a single greasy dollar bill in the mail in an envelope with no return address. Last time I didn't think much about it, but Duckie was pretty freaked out. My rationale was that a friend sent us the money to compensate us for feeding a parking meter on his behalf. Receiving the second dollar in the same fashion pretty much put a knife in the heart of that little fantasy. I decided not to take any chances this time. I opened the letter in the backyard wearing a pair of disposable nitrile gloves, and once I confirmed the contents (one dollar, no note) I crumpled everything up and tossed it in the trash. If this whole exercise is a joke to somebody, I don't get it. If it's a game, I don't know the rules, and I don't want to play. If it's a mistake, well, it's weird and I still don't get it. The final option is that we're the beneficiaries of the oddly generous actions of a nut job. In any case, I'd like it to stop.
Friday, August 7, 2015
Daily Paragraph -- Some Dogs Names
Some dogs I have known: Squeaky, Whiskey, Kahlua, Phoebe, Belle, AJ, Barney, Fletch, Bailey, Nugget, Cooper, Toby, Meekah, Dilan, Murphy, Kaya, Puff, Duke, Archie, Eliza, Eddie, Jasper ...wow! I'm really surprised that's all I can think up. I know there were lots of others, but I just can't think of their names. I guess friends' pets' names are just one of those things you lose as you get older.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Daily Paragraph -- Ending Up in Stitches
By the time you've reached your forties, chances are good you've had stitches a few times depending on how accident prone or unlucky you've been. I can think of four sets of stitches I've had in my lifetime. I think that's a pretty low number, especially for someone who spent a number of years being a teenage boy.
My first set of stitches resulted from a yardwork accident in 1989. I was trimming some hedges with a set of electric clippers that had once belonged to my grandmother. It wasn't equipped with any of those fancy-schmancy safety switches that folks are so fond of these days. If you turned on the clippers and then let go with one hand, they just kept running. They were generally indifferent to what you then did with that free hand. And the clippers didn't come with any of them protective guards, either. If you recklessly let your free had drift toward chattering blades, you wound up with a chunk of your index finger popping out of the skin like a lump of bloody meatloaf. And that's what happened to me. A mostly pointless trip to the Penfield Volunteer Ambulance followed by an off-hours trip to see Dr. Nazarian later, and I had my first set of stitches.
My second set of stitches resulted from my wisdom tooth extractions when I was 19. I had all four taken out at once, and per standard practice, the gum holes were sewn up afterward. I think those stitches all dissolved, so maybe they don't count.
My third set of stitches were needed to close up a slice in my forehead I received by bumping into jagged wall of rock in a gorge in Ithaca one summer during college. I was edging my way up a waterfall when it happened. It was shocking at the time. I thought I gently tapped the wall, but when I reached up to check on it, I ended up with a handful of blood. The total stitch count was low, but I was still surprised that I needed them at all.
The last set of stitches came from a lab accident at Exelixis more than a decade ago. It was classic glassware handling mistake. Any smart chemist will tell you never to use too much force to connect two pieces of glassware together or pull them apart. I forgot that one day and ended up with a nice little laceration in my thumb. Again, not a lot of stitches but enough to drive the lesson home. It could have been worse, though; I knew I guy in grad school who severed a tendon with a similar lapse in caution.
All told, I've been lucky, stitch-wise. I'm not going to tempt fate by speculating future sutures (hey that rhymes!).
My first set of stitches resulted from a yardwork accident in 1989. I was trimming some hedges with a set of electric clippers that had once belonged to my grandmother. It wasn't equipped with any of those fancy-schmancy safety switches that folks are so fond of these days. If you turned on the clippers and then let go with one hand, they just kept running. They were generally indifferent to what you then did with that free hand. And the clippers didn't come with any of them protective guards, either. If you recklessly let your free had drift toward chattering blades, you wound up with a chunk of your index finger popping out of the skin like a lump of bloody meatloaf. And that's what happened to me. A mostly pointless trip to the Penfield Volunteer Ambulance followed by an off-hours trip to see Dr. Nazarian later, and I had my first set of stitches.
My second set of stitches resulted from my wisdom tooth extractions when I was 19. I had all four taken out at once, and per standard practice, the gum holes were sewn up afterward. I think those stitches all dissolved, so maybe they don't count.
My third set of stitches were needed to close up a slice in my forehead I received by bumping into jagged wall of rock in a gorge in Ithaca one summer during college. I was edging my way up a waterfall when it happened. It was shocking at the time. I thought I gently tapped the wall, but when I reached up to check on it, I ended up with a handful of blood. The total stitch count was low, but I was still surprised that I needed them at all.
The last set of stitches came from a lab accident at Exelixis more than a decade ago. It was classic glassware handling mistake. Any smart chemist will tell you never to use too much force to connect two pieces of glassware together or pull them apart. I forgot that one day and ended up with a nice little laceration in my thumb. Again, not a lot of stitches but enough to drive the lesson home. It could have been worse, though; I knew I guy in grad school who severed a tendon with a similar lapse in caution.
All told, I've been lucky, stitch-wise. I'm not going to tempt fate by speculating future sutures (hey that rhymes!).
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Daily Paragraph -- Rumplestiltskin Redux
The following is a story I told my son today. He made me tell it three times, each time interrupting more frequently for different embellishments. The bedtime version was fundamentally incomprehensible. Anyway, here's a moderately coherent telling for your perusal:
Theo was five years old, and he rode the bus every day to kindergarten. One day, Theo met a small man in a green suit on the bus. The man told Theo his name was Rumplestiltskin and that he was a leprechaun.
"What do leprechauns do?" asked Theo.
"We hide treasure," Rumplestiltskin answered.
"Can you tell me where you hid some?" asked Theo.
"Oh no, I can't do that. That would be cheating," Rumplestiltskin answered.
Theo decided that he was going to try to guess where Rumplestiltskin might have hidden some treasure. He noticed that the little man had pamphlet from the Upper Noe Recreation Center in his pocket and that his shoes were covered with sand. Theo connected the dots and said, "I think you buried some treasure in the sand box at Upper Noe Rec Center."
"I can neither confirm or deny that," said Rumplestiltskin. "But I can tell you that if you find some of my treasure, you have to share it, or it will disappear."
After school, Theo convinced his dad to take him to the Rec Center, and they started digging away in the sand box. All the other kids in the playground thought they were crazy, except for one boy who decided to help.
After a few hours of digging, Theo heard a clunk as he jabbed his shovel down into the ground. He and his dad and the other boy cleared away some more sand and uncovered a big wooden box with the name Rumplestiltskin written on it in gold. Anxiously, they opened it up and found it was full of Rescuebots!
Theo was thrilled, and he wanted to take them all home for himself, but then remembered what Rumplestiltskin had said and realized he needed to share the toys so they wouldn't disappear. So, he gave one Rescuebot to the boy who helped him dig up the treasure, and the next day at school he gave most of the rest of the Rescuebots to his friends, keeping only one for himself.
Sure enough, the Rescuebots never disappeared, and Theo found that sharing them with others was more fun than hoarding them and playing alone anyway.
The End
Theo was five years old, and he rode the bus every day to kindergarten. One day, Theo met a small man in a green suit on the bus. The man told Theo his name was Rumplestiltskin and that he was a leprechaun.
"What do leprechauns do?" asked Theo.
"We hide treasure," Rumplestiltskin answered.
"Can you tell me where you hid some?" asked Theo.
"Oh no, I can't do that. That would be cheating," Rumplestiltskin answered.
Theo decided that he was going to try to guess where Rumplestiltskin might have hidden some treasure. He noticed that the little man had pamphlet from the Upper Noe Recreation Center in his pocket and that his shoes were covered with sand. Theo connected the dots and said, "I think you buried some treasure in the sand box at Upper Noe Rec Center."
"I can neither confirm or deny that," said Rumplestiltskin. "But I can tell you that if you find some of my treasure, you have to share it, or it will disappear."
After school, Theo convinced his dad to take him to the Rec Center, and they started digging away in the sand box. All the other kids in the playground thought they were crazy, except for one boy who decided to help.
After a few hours of digging, Theo heard a clunk as he jabbed his shovel down into the ground. He and his dad and the other boy cleared away some more sand and uncovered a big wooden box with the name Rumplestiltskin written on it in gold. Anxiously, they opened it up and found it was full of Rescuebots!
Theo was thrilled, and he wanted to take them all home for himself, but then remembered what Rumplestiltskin had said and realized he needed to share the toys so they wouldn't disappear. So, he gave one Rescuebot to the boy who helped him dig up the treasure, and the next day at school he gave most of the rest of the Rescuebots to his friends, keeping only one for himself.
Sure enough, the Rescuebots never disappeared, and Theo found that sharing them with others was more fun than hoarding them and playing alone anyway.
The End
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Daily Pargraph -- Dubious Video's for Three Year-Olds, Volume 1
Recently, Theo has gotten attached to a new song that has been getting some play on the radio stations we play on our commute to preschool/work. The song is "Ex's and Oh's" by Elle King, and it's actually a rocking little pop tune. I like it. Of course, as a child of the internet era, Theo craves visual stimulation when listening to music, so we have also watched the video on youtube at home. It's right on the border of what I think is okay for him to watch, mostly because he is unlikely to understand it. If he could wrap his mind around the actual contents, I would probably try to steer him away from it. The song and video have a thematic link to Olivia Newton-John's early 80s cheese-pop classic, "Let's Get Physical" -- lyrical innuendo accompanied by images of beefcake. Olivia wanted some fella at the gym to let her hear his "body talk, body talk", while Elle croons that her pumped studs "always want to come, but they never want to leave". The lyrics are sure to fly over my three year-old son's head, but I'm not sure how to think about the beefcake. I suppose it's not really that different from watching Katy Perry parade around the jungle in an animal print tube top and a grass skirt in "Roar!", another favorite Theo jam from a couple months ago. Meh, they're all better than Barney.
Monday, August 3, 2015
The Daily Paragraph -- Seveneves and Wet Hot American Summer
Yesterday I finished reading Neal Stephenson's latest novel Seveneves, and I also completed a weekend long binge-watching of the Wet, Hot, American Summer reboot series. Two pretty impressive accomplishments for one day. I'm really struggling to come up with some parallel that will tie both achievements together in one tidy little bundle. It's a stretch. Seveneves is a 860 page novel about the survival of the human race in space after the moon randomly blows up, breaks apart into millions of little asteroids which crash to the earth setting the atmosphere on fire over several thousands of years. Seven billion people die. It's a real pick-me-up. The Wet Hot American Summer reboot, is a goofy cheesy absurd series in which a collection of A-list comic acting talent in their late thirties and early forties reprise their roles as teenage camp counselors which they were too old to play when the original movie came out fifteen years ago. Silly, silly, silly. I admit it. I laughed...out loud...a bunch. In the end, the only thing the two things have in common is me. I have a long-standing history as a Neal Stephenson fan. I think I've read every novel he's written, and I don't know the last time I read a book of fiction that wasn't his work. Ten years, maybe. I've also been following much of the cast of the Wet Hot American Summer for years as well. The creators of the show were on the early 1990s MTv sketch comedy show The State, which I loved and own on DVD. So in the end, the connection is devotion on my part...and the fact that I happened to express it at roughly the same time for both. Yep. That's pretty weak.
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
The Good Guys Beat the Worst Guys 4 to 1
On Saturday, my family finally made it over to O.co Coliseum (or OcoCo, for short) to catch our first, and potentially last, A's game of the season. You see, Major League Baseball games are not events scheduled with preschoolers in mind. Day games fall right at nap time, and night games, well, they're night games. Anyway, Saturday's A's game had a start time of 1 pm, and we decided to take our chances.
The A's were facing their rival, the dreaded Los Angelheim Angels --easily my least favorite team. These days I've taken to calling them the Porsche Cayenne of baseball (ie, they're expensive and high-performance, but they're also ridiculous, ugly, and fundamentally pointless). The day before, the Angels had managed to come back from a 7 to 2 deficit to beat the A's 12 to 7, so I was actually not very optimistic about our chances.
We arrived early, which made sense for two reasons: 1) we were likely to leave early to accommodate a potential very sleepy three-year old, and 2) because the first 15000 fans to the game were to receive a Sonny Gray gnome with a solar-powered glowing baseball (I'm not going to try to explain that --it's too much). After we got our gnomes and checked out our seats, we went straight to the A's Fun Zone, the children's place space on the second level behind the concession stands. It's not much of a place space, really. It has four coin-op mechanical rides (two were broken for much of our time there), a small mediocre play structure, and some random toddler toys (mostly lawnmowers, for some reason). I would generally rate the space as inferior to our local playground, but I think Theo considered about a hundred times better than actually sitting in our seats to watch a baseball game. We spent a lot of time there.
I went off to buy us lunch, and we were back to our seats before the first pitch. I forced Theo to stay there for two whole innings, during which the A's manufactured a run. Then it was back to the Fun Zone for us for the next two innings. Theo spent much of that time running to the play structure for a trip down the slide and then climbing up on a broken coin-operated elephant, because, hey, why not?
I convinced him to head back to our seats by the top of the fourth inning. He still wasn't into the game, so Duckie got out her phone and turned on Netflix. Theo watched Curious George instead of watching the A's and Angels fail to score any runs for the next couple innings. Arguably the right choice.
Then, in the top of the sixth, Angels superhero Mike freaking Trout, tied the game off a single by Erick Aybar, and I was expecting things to get ugly. But A's pitcher Jesse Hahn locked things down, and no more damage was done. And better than that, the A's strung together some hits in the bottom half of the inning and ended up with a three run lead. In fact, they hit three consecutive doubles -- the first with a man already on base. It was pretty great. Theo even managed to clap along with the crowd and give us high fives.
At the end of the 6th, we decided it was safe to leave. I didn't want stick around to watch the Angels come back, and if the A's blew the game open later I wouldn't have felt bad for missing it.
Theo watched Duckie's iPhone pretty much for the whole walk out of the stadium to the car. He once yelled at the crowd for being too loud because he couldn't hear his videos. We stopped by a souvenir stand on the way out so I could buy a new A's cap (a more traditional one, this time), and we drove home. Theo fell asleep in the car, the iPhone blaring away in his hands.
As it turns out, no further runs were scored that game. Somehow, I was at my seat every time a runner crossed home plate, despite missing two full innings hanging out in the Fun Zone and leaving after the sixth. I rarely get that lucky when it comes to watching sports.
The A's were facing their rival, the dreaded Los Angelheim Angels --easily my least favorite team. These days I've taken to calling them the Porsche Cayenne of baseball (ie, they're expensive and high-performance, but they're also ridiculous, ugly, and fundamentally pointless). The day before, the Angels had managed to come back from a 7 to 2 deficit to beat the A's 12 to 7, so I was actually not very optimistic about our chances.
We arrived early, which made sense for two reasons: 1) we were likely to leave early to accommodate a potential very sleepy three-year old, and 2) because the first 15000 fans to the game were to receive a Sonny Gray gnome with a solar-powered glowing baseball (I'm not going to try to explain that --it's too much). After we got our gnomes and checked out our seats, we went straight to the A's Fun Zone, the children's place space on the second level behind the concession stands. It's not much of a place space, really. It has four coin-op mechanical rides (two were broken for much of our time there), a small mediocre play structure, and some random toddler toys (mostly lawnmowers, for some reason). I would generally rate the space as inferior to our local playground, but I think Theo considered about a hundred times better than actually sitting in our seats to watch a baseball game. We spent a lot of time there.
I went off to buy us lunch, and we were back to our seats before the first pitch. I forced Theo to stay there for two whole innings, during which the A's manufactured a run. Then it was back to the Fun Zone for us for the next two innings. Theo spent much of that time running to the play structure for a trip down the slide and then climbing up on a broken coin-operated elephant, because, hey, why not?
I convinced him to head back to our seats by the top of the fourth inning. He still wasn't into the game, so Duckie got out her phone and turned on Netflix. Theo watched Curious George instead of watching the A's and Angels fail to score any runs for the next couple innings. Arguably the right choice.
Then, in the top of the sixth, Angels superhero Mike freaking Trout, tied the game off a single by Erick Aybar, and I was expecting things to get ugly. But A's pitcher Jesse Hahn locked things down, and no more damage was done. And better than that, the A's strung together some hits in the bottom half of the inning and ended up with a three run lead. In fact, they hit three consecutive doubles -- the first with a man already on base. It was pretty great. Theo even managed to clap along with the crowd and give us high fives.
At the end of the 6th, we decided it was safe to leave. I didn't want stick around to watch the Angels come back, and if the A's blew the game open later I wouldn't have felt bad for missing it.
Theo watched Duckie's iPhone pretty much for the whole walk out of the stadium to the car. He once yelled at the crowd for being too loud because he couldn't hear his videos. We stopped by a souvenir stand on the way out so I could buy a new A's cap (a more traditional one, this time), and we drove home. Theo fell asleep in the car, the iPhone blaring away in his hands.
As it turns out, no further runs were scored that game. Somehow, I was at my seat every time a runner crossed home plate, despite missing two full innings hanging out in the Fun Zone and leaving after the sixth. I rarely get that lucky when it comes to watching sports.
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