Quote of the night

If I ever become a professional pumpkin carver, it means something has gone unbelievably right or unbelievably wrong.
-Trey

It's the economy stupid

Rachel has been suggesting that I should no longer listen to the news on the radio with Ellis present. I had thought until today that he wasn't really paying a whole lot of attention. But, mere moments after the NPR update discussing the further fall of the stock market, Ellis called out, "conomy, conomy, conomy." Guess I have to listen to Dan Zanes in the car now.

Should I just get back in bed?...Oh yeah, I can't

By 7:30 this morning, Ellis had kneed me in the nether regions, puked on me, screamed one inch from my ear, and pooped on me. Right now he is coming toward me with a fireplace tool...gotta go.

Preparations Begin

Tonight, we made Mexican sugar skulls for our Halloween party. The plan is to decorate them with our guests. Ellis particularly enjoyed pressing the mixture of sugar and meringue powder into the molds:



He enjoyed "tidying up" the left over mix even more:

Could he be any sweeter, literally:

Clean what? How?

Today I dragged my dad to the home improvement store with me to help me make some decisions about adding an outlet in the basement to supply the kegerator with power. I felt a little bad about it because I didn't call or anything, I just showed up at his house and pulled him out the door, and I had a list with many eclectic items from far reaching ends of the big box.

After about half an hour in the store, I really did start to feel bad. But then I looked at my dad walking around the store, really searching for something whose location I had already determined by asking someone, and my mind flipped back to an earlier time. Suddenly, I realized this was revenge. When I was 13 or so, the worst question you could hear on a Saturday morning was, "Hey, either of you kids wanna make a run with me to Home Depot."

Generally, the impetus for such a trip was either a languishing project or a sale on something my dad might have been wanting for nearly 25 years. If a project was in the offing, getting in the car signed you up for the duration. If he instead conisdered purchasing a tool without an immediate use, things were far worse as he agonized over the mid to high-end one on sale or just waiting and getting the cheap one when he needed it. This often took 3 hours. It wasn't like he walked in holding the issue of Consumer Reports that had covered random orbit finish sanders and wanted to compare them in detail in person. Instead it was just agonizing over the money and usually going home without whatever he came for.

The reason he may have been wanting that tool for 25 years was because of a system he used when younger to avoid spending. You may be familiar with the tattoo rule: save up the money, pick what you want and then wait one year. If you still want the tattoo, get it. When my dad was single, he didn't allow himself to have a checkbook, which resulted in a version of the tattoo rule. For any purchase over and above the cost of lunch, he didn't have the cash and would have to go to the bank. There were no ATMs or credit cards in those days, so he could hardly buy a damn thing on the weekend. When he did find something he wanted, he usually could talk himself out of it by the time he sprang some cash from his bank account to buy it. The result was a lot of time thinking about buying stuff and very little of it getting bought.

If a project was in the offing, the rest of the day was a crap shoot. Here are a few examples, each deserving an entire chapter:

• One time, we painted the underside of the roof deck in the attic with bleach, to kill mildew. We did this on a Saturday in July and both of us nearly died up there. The attic had no floor boards, just rafters with exposed fiberglass insulation. We each had a little scrap of plywood that we scooted around to stand/lie down on as necessary. A pre-Upton Sinclair meat packing facility was probably a better working environment.
  
• After my freshman year of highschool we redid the upstairs of our house, elminating some knotty pine paneling and ancient wall paper. Since I didn't have a job, I had a list every day of what to do. It was never fun like, "Peel off remaining wall paper" or "go ahead and try putting the trim on the new window by yourself." Instead, every item was to clean something that he would immediately dirty on his next day off. There was a small crack behind the removed baseboards where the plaster didn't reach the floor boards. All manner of crap got trapped in that space that we would eventually cover back up with the baseboard. Yet, each day, my list included "scrape out crack with vacuum and screwdriver." Just leaving this week's dirt in there would have kept next week's from getting in, completely elminating the need for the screwdriver.
  
• Regularly he would get the cleaning bug and enlist one of us. Upon enlistment we were issued a toothbrush. While he attacked the big surfaces with reasonable sized sponges, we were given a small patch of filth appropriate only for a toothbrush and told to turn it into paradise.
• During the remodel, removing the three layers of 75 year old wall paper below the paneling was an especially harrowing time. We rented a steam box and therefore were on a clock, working late into the night on several occasions to avoid having to rent it for even one extra day. Once the wallpaper was off there was 75 year old glue, which my dad attempted to dissolve with triple-the-recommended-strength TSP. As with many of his cleaning endeavors, he attacked a section of wall by "laying down a good thick layer" with some giant brush or sponge and letting it soak for a couple of minutes. Then he scraped the glue off in one foot sections with a big putty knife. Amazingly, he was able to do all of this while micromanaging me, in the corner, with my trusty toothbrush.

Tomorrow, he is coming over to help me add that outlet. It has been sometime since we have done something like this together and I don't know what to expect. It really is a one man job, and my dad, an electrician, is the one for it. Plus, I am not a skulking teenager anymore. I might end up helping in some capacity but I can't imagine how to work in a toothbrush. If I do I'll let you know.

In real-time

This was taken just moments before Rachel got home from her trip. If you can't tell we got bored with play-doh and other mom-approved activities, so we carved a pumpkin lantern with the drill, after having a couple of beers.

After the carving, Ellis returned to his artwork, enjoying the soft yellow light cast by his new lantern and your reading what I did. Now I better get dinner on the table.

The new title is a prophesy

With Rachel away it does seem that we are having an especially high level of entropy around here. All in all though, we are keepin' on keepin' on.

Ellis asks where mommy is morning and night but is relatively satisfied with the answer, "she is on a trip to Toronto. She will be back Friday." Tonight at bed he even said on his own, "Mama go ona tip, coma, come a back home to house, back home Fieday, yep!." Note that this also marks a first with the use of "yep". Normally yeah and yep are waah and wep. Rachel will be sad to have missed this milestone. I take his ability to deal with mommy being away so well as a sign that he feels quite secure in life and that makes my month.

When I got to his school today, he was in what they call the "large motor area" and a couple of the biggest infants were in with the toddlers. One infant had crawled up onto this little climber designed for stair practice and Ellis was hiding around the edge of the thing and popping up to make her laugh. Well ok, he was making himself laugh pretty hard too. Then we had dinner with my buddies Eric and Dan and Ellis was a perfect gentleman, only asking to sit on my lap for the last 10 or so minutes of a boring one hour visit. When we arrived he even told me what he wanted, "I nee a dip daddy." and then sat down next to Eric and waited for me to bring his food.

For those of you thinking, "yeah well Ellis probably looks like dirty kid this week", you would be wrong. In Ellis' own words, "no skub me daddy, no mo' skub ma face."

the great white north

Back in the early days of graduate school, I always thought that traveling for work sounded exciting and grown-up. What an idiot I was.

I'm in Toronto now for a work-related medical conference and hating being away from Trey, Ellis, and home in general. Also, apparently, I have to dress like a respectable person-- ironing? eye make-up? jewelry? Ack! I'm drawing the line at blow-drying my hair.

After living in Germany, Canada seems like a strange mix between Europe and the US. They have the metric system and colored money but also giant vehicles and a roughly Midwestern landscape. The mix of stores also contributes to this impression: Mobilia and Linens and Things, what the heck? Toronto also has the most strident recycling system I've seen since we left Germany. Unfortunately, Americans, even highly educated ones (well, MDs, anyway) don't seem to be grasping the system too quickly. I observed one throwing a piece of gum in "plastics" even though the list of things to be thown in "biodegradable" was printed right on the can : food scraps, used napkins, GUM!

At least this trip has finally forced me to gain a rough idea of the relative locations of the Great Lakes. I was clear on Lakes Michigan and Superior, but had to, embarrassingly, repeatedly consult the map on the drive up here to ascertain what body of water we were crossing or driving alongside. Pathetic, people.

Photographed

Today Ellis passed through another gate on his way to adulthood: his first school picture day. In practical terms this meant that he ate breakfast in his coat so as to protect his shirt and we combed his hair before sending him off to school. I have no idea how it turned out, but my guess is that it made him hungry and tired because his lunch was totally gone and he took a long nap.

This got me thinking about school pics and how stressful that day seemed. Trying to keep myself looking decent until the picture was taken left me exhausted. I always felt bad for the kid whose parents hadn't remembered that it was school picture day. This kid was a kid who often came to school terribly dirty or in the same shirt all week. But, the neglect on picture day seemed to say to me that the kid's parents couldn't even manage a special occasion. It was even worse when dirty-kid was a girl because there are no nastier beasts than a herd of 11 year old girls.

The day the pictures came was always a surprise. We would come in from afternoon recess and the teacher would have an arm load of picture envelopes. There were always a couple of kids whose envelopes were missing. Dirty-kid of course had no envelope because his parents and forgotten. And then there was always one envelope for a kid who was no longer in the class. This was usually a kid that hadn't been in the class the previous year and most of us had forgotten him by the day the pictures showed up.

The orphaned pictures upset me because in my 7 year old brain it meant that this kid's parents didn't care to preserve the memory. Now I know that an envelope of pictures wasn't even a remote concern of those families. Either that family was transferring so one of the parents could take a promotion and a new portrait of Johnny was no problem or they had been chased because a divorce was final or they were foreclosed or the kid had to go and live with Grandma.

Anniversary Sunday

Today was our anniversary and to celebrate, Rachel got the afternoon to herself as Ellis and I headed to an apple orchard with friends. We both enjoyed a spic-and-span car courtesy of Rachel's hard work. Ellis picked and ate his fill at the orchard and fell into a deep sleep on the way back home and then slept for another 2 hours.

Finally, we woke him up and all three of us went out to dinner for our anniversary. I had suggested that we leave him with my dad, but in the end he was pretty much an angel excepting the last two minutes. We had the Korean barbecue for two (thin beef, beef cubes, chicken, shrimp, mushroom, sweet potato, corn and onion) where they bring you the raw meat and you cook it yourself on a special grill at the table. This meal is typically delicious and is also a food safety freak's worst nightmare. Not only do the flesh of three animals all come to you on one plate, their juices mingling, but that juice is on the veggies and you only get one pair of tongs, which you can't help but accidentally use to touch raw meat and then cooked meat that you are about to eat.

Good Korean restaurants make a big show of a bunch of little side dishes and Rachel really likes this. Our meal came with eight: kimchi (fire cabbage), smooshed potato stuff, jicama salad, scallion salad, pickles, broccoli in peanut sauce, unidentifiable #1 and unidentifiable #2. Plus we got a shrimp tempura appetizer and some sushi. After the first round of grilling, Ellis was pointing to and telling me what to cook next from the raw plate. He really like the thin beef and absolutely loved the white rice. He also hogged down the corn. The most fun though was watching him try to use the chopsticks. After a quick failure the grown up way, he converted to a non-traditional salad tong grip, which he used successfully to serve food to his plate which he pretty much just ate with his hands.

We did end the evening with Ellis spilling his drink and putting the paper sushi menus and chopstick wrappers in it. But we had already paid and left a good tip. Rachel and I used to prefer cooking at home to eating out in almost every case, but now, not having to clean that crusty grill or wipe up the kid mess is well worth it, especially considering that I ate so much I am having trouble breathing.

guests, expected and not

One of Trey's former labmates, his wife, two year old son, and father-in-law all came over for dinner tonight. We used to have people over for dinner often, but it seems like more work since Ellis has been around. In reality, it's less work since we've lowered our dinner party standards. We often used to do appetizer, fancy roasted meat, multiple side dishes, and elaborate pastry dessert. Tonight we had pizza made on the grill and pineapple upside-down-cake and our guests brought a salad. Perhaps we've just accepted that a low key, homey supper is nicer and less stressful. More likely, we are on a down-hill slide of laziness and by next July, an appropriate "dinner for company" will be a bowl of cold cereal and a can of mandarin oranges.

We managed to get a few other things done today, including some preliminary work on getting the garage to the point where we could, you know, park a car in it. Shortly before our guests arrived, Trey looked out the window to check on Scout and found she had morphed into a Bischon-Frise, complete with two gauzy purple bows above her ears. Okay, no, turns out what really happened is that I left the garage doors open and a dog wandering around the neighborhood found her way into our yard. Trey reported to me that he thought it would be best to "capture" the dog (i.e., shut the garage door and keep her in the yard) and just call her owner's number from the tag, since she was clearly not a stray and very likely lived nearby. Unfortunately, nothing is as simple as it should be and he continued relaying the story to me.

Trey: Well, I called the number, but it turns out it's a rescue dog. The number on her tag belongs to the rescue agency coordinator. She was in her car and couldn't tell me who the local foster-owner is. She didn't even know which dog this might be. She told me to get out a pen and check to see whether the dog was male or female.

Rachel: That is NOT how you check whether a dog is male or female.

Turns out the pen was really to write down another person's phone number. Fine. Ellis was quite happy to have a second dog to chase around, but the dog was too terrified to be much fun. "Holly" refused to be calmed by even Ellis's most gentle pets and soothing "hi, poochy, hi, poochy, hi, doggie." She even rebuffed his Beggin' Strips advances. Well, he had to learn eventually that not all dogs are as robust as his beloved Dout.