In A Pod

With me having a cold this week, Rachel gave me an evening or two off. So, I got into bed with Ellis and we enjoyed ourselves together, seperately. He is watching The Lorax here while I catch up on Paul Krugman's blog. 

Later, during our repose, Ellis decided to play one of his favorite games: poke daddy in the belly button. After a successful jab, I hold me hand over my belly button and he keeps pushing it away and trying to poke me before I can get my hand back. Of course, I am faster than he is and he only wins when I let him. Usually, he attempts brute force or using two hands against my one to win, but for the first time, he attempted to actually trick me. After a few seconds of trying the old way, he stopped and looked at the night stand and said, "Daddy, have a drink of tea." I played along and he gleefully jabbed me in the belly as soon as my hand was tied up with the cup of hot tea. 

Sunday Soliliquy

After his banana, but before we got out of bed, Ellis informed us, "I wanna tiny bagel. I can't wait to bite it, but I need to have keeem cheese."

The Book of Kell(s)

This week George Kell died at his home in Arkansas. There have been plenty of remembrances and some awful imitations of his broadcasting style. Never as famous as Harry Caray and never as sloppy or ridiculous either, along with Ernie Harwell, George Kell provided much summer entertainment and education. A much respected 3rd baseman, with 10 All-Star Teams and a batting title to his credit, he waited until 1983 to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, when the Veteran's Committee voted him in.

Two particular stories about George Kell made an impression on me . In the first, Joe DiMaggio broke his jaw with a line drive, and Kell didn't pass out until he had made the force play at 3rd. Most of my appreciation for this story at the time derived from my own head's tendency to attract baseballs. It was nice to know that even big leaguers got busted in the head from time to time. I don't know if George Kell's dad chewed his ass over it or not.

The second story, often repeated, was his choice to take his last at bat in the 1949 season when he could have sat down and been guaranteed the batting title, knowing that Ted Williams had had a bad day and fallen fractions of a point behind. Kell's manager tried to take him out, and he refused to win that way. In the end, it didn't matter, as he ended his season kneeling in the on-deck circle, the third out recorded by the guy who batted ahead of him. He only struck out 13 times that season. The next year he played 157 games and only committed 9 errors, a terrific stat for a 3rd baseman. He hit a shade under .300 in his final season, by no means the numbers of a faltering former star, but had made up his mind that it was time to go home and stay, and he did.

The 1984 season was somewhat charmed for the Tigers. They lead the AL East wire to wire and I think they went about 35-5 to start the season. In those days, only a select few games were on TV, making them an event worthy of Red Pop and chicken gizzards.  Along with Ernie Harwell, Kell narrated my summer.  Local radio stations played many of his calls from that 1984 season this week in remembrance. I can't believe I am old enough to say that it reminded me of simpler times. No talk of steroids. Maris's record was seen as untouchable and a homerun hitter was anyone who managed 25 in a year. In retrospect, the thing that made it simple and special was that it was the last summer when I wasn't in a terrible hurry to grow up.

Thanks and Good Healin'

Ellis got his green (biodegradable after a year) birdhouse from Aunt Carol and last weekend we put it up in our shrubby backyard. In honor of his recent injury, he decorated it with the stickers he received during his many, many hospital visits.

Grandma, Catherine and Spring Came to Town

Nearly two weeks ago, Ellis got to have Grandma and Aunt Catherine all to himself. He didn't waste the chance. 

Bonded (no pictures)

The boat work continues. In addition to reconditioning the inside, we have turned her over and begun to prepare the outer hull. Because the boat is old this involves driving small pieces of stained cedar into all of the gaps between planks and then planing them smooth to match the surface. 

While it is not a traditional boat technique, we have decided to then use bondo (yes the car stuff) to fill other small gaps. Once sanded, this gives us the smoothest possible surface for applying glass fabric. The hull is about halfway through this process. It is coming out smooth enough that we could go for a more traditional look and forgo the urethane tough-cote.

Once this is  finished, we will roll it back over and replace the last missing pieces of planking near the gunwales.  Once that is done, we will do up the rest of the woodwork, put in the seat risers and then go ahead and do the first coat of glass. That will be the decision point on the urethane tough-cote.

Much recent effort has gone into getting a motor. The one from the farm was missing two important parts. One acquired for $10 and the second I think I can get soon from eBay. (The guy who has it has been in the hospital and hasn't been feeling well enough to get listed.) I also bought an entire second motor from a guy in Blissfield. It is in very good shape. The recoil needs some work, but otherwise it is ready to run. Externally, the motors are almost entirely the same. The insides though are quite different with the one from the farm coming before a major revision and the one from Blissfield coming after. Part availability will be better for the Blissfield motor as well so it will be the A motor and the farm motor will be the second stringer, as long as we don't find any new problems.

Now that the work is shaping up, we have more of a plan as well. The boat istself will be entirely done in the next months. The old seat risers will be restored and installed. The seats themselves will be the old seats and we will make new fancy seats as a next winter project. Similarly, both motors will be restored to good working order. Any cosmetic work will be held off until next winter when we can take the time to find proper paint colors and decals etc. Splitting the work this way insures that we get the boat out fishing the soonest and frees time to work on the third and final component: the trailer. Because the boat is narrow and relatively light, any trailer will require some modifications to transport the boat. Since we also will be going cheap and cleaning up whatever we get, we need to get going on this soon, since we won't be fishing if we can't get the boat to the lake.

When it rains...

When the universe decides to shit on you, it usually has diarhea.

Our 6 month old desktop computer is on the fritz. I am pretty sure the hard drive has some bad sectors that interfere with the operating system loading. So I booted Linux from a CD and recovered what I could from the hard drive then I loaded Ubuntu's Linux implementation with the idea that I would then run Windows inside VirtualBox...but, on the first shutdown, Linux failed and reported bad drive sectors, confirming my suspicion. Tonight, I got on live chat with Dell to demand satisfaction. After a lengthy explanation of what was wrong and then defending using Linux, our conversation ended thusly:

Agent (CEBb_Maureen_183670): "can you please try to reinstall it with the OS cd it came with"

Henry Schek: "I can but I will have to come back to chat"

Henry Schek: "because it will take a while"

Agent (CEBb_Maureen_183670): "sorry about this, we have a policy that we can only help cust about possible software issues if the software is the same"

Agent (CEBb_Maureen_183670): "io know that this is a hardware issue, but you diagnosed it with wrong OS"

yes, yes, of course there has

Yesterday, almost a week after his elbow injury, Ellis finally returned to daycare. He's had 4 doctors appointments since then, meaning a lot of rearranging our work schedules and getting help from family for us. The orthopedist read Monday's ultrasound yesterday and found it to be consistent with a ligament tear. Thus, her recommendation to achieve the fastest healing is for Ellis to get a cast this afternoon. After 3 weeks, they'll do another ultrasound to make sure it's healing and if not, we'll have to consider surgery. Ugh.

Inevitably, then, we found this in Ellis's daycare "mailbox" at pick-up time yesterday.

Very Rare Indeed

Rachel caught this photo of a rare Michigan micropygmy bear running across our backyard. 

Since few believe in their existence, they have never been protected as endangered. Their meat is rumored to taste like squirrel. 

In for a penny, in for a pound

I have been resistant to unveil this project in so public a space, but here it goes. A few weeks back I asked my friend John who builds wooden boats, about kit boats. He said, "Why do that when I have a 1935 Square-Stern Old Town in the shed that you could restore in my shop?"

Now with a couple of Saturdays of work into it and a plan and wood that is coming back to life, I figure it is safe to start the series of posts on this canoe. Yes, despite the square stern, this is a canoe. I might call it a boat from time to time, and one great advantage of a canoe of this type is that it can be rowed or take a motor like a boat, but is distinctly a canoe. It turns out that wooden boat people are sticklers about calling shit by the right name, colorful modifiers are, however, allowed: Question: "Do we need to sand the keel?" Response: "No we don't need to sand that, and it is the f*&$%@g skeg." Look up keel and skeg and you will understand how easy it would be to interchange these two words.

For the sake of posterity, I want to record as much of the history of the boat as is known, and I will start that in the next post. Subsequent posts will contain more details of the restoration as well.

Here is how I know this project was meant to be: John suggested that I find a 1950's era Johnson 5 hp motor (much like this one) to go with it, and, and the very first person I asked, Mike (father-in-law), had one laying around at the farm. 

This is what the ribbing looked like after 20 years upside down in a shed. 

After some cleaning with mineral spirits, the color evened out a bit and the redish tone came back.  The light coming through at the bow is due to the fact that the bow needs rebuilding.

Ellis and Rachel got into the act this weekend. Here Ellis is helping sand the rib tips where we will put new planking in the next coupld of weeks. He is doing pretty good for being one armed. He was quite sure that the color of the sand paper mattered and that the job he was doing was, "getting the sand off". 

The last thing we did this weekend was hit it with a reconditioning mix to get the wood to swell a little and start the process of refinising the inside. The shininess is a bit misleading as everything is very wet and this stuff takes some real time to sink in and dry, but the color is representativ. If you notice, the bow is put back together in this picture. There is still some work to do to shape that piece of mahogony in there. John made that piece 20 years ago and somehow kept track of it over the years.

Finally, at the risk of hanging myself out to dry, I found a picture of a very similar boat that was redone a couple years ago. I don't care for the colors and the inside appears to be painted. Notice the motor is very similar to the one we will use. The bulges are called sponsons and provide buoyancy that increase secondary stability.

wanna paink wid me?

Good grief it was a long week last week! And it's been even longer since I put a post up here. Good thing Trey's been picking up the slack. It's actually starting to feel a bit like spring here...actual Michigan spring, that is, still cold but raining so much the ground is squishy and a small river is running through a backyard. So, on the second full day of rain this weekend, we got desperate enough for indoor activities to break out the watercolors.

Ellis's Aunt Bridget got him this sweet easel and loads of art supplies for Christmas. He's been enjoying the chalk- and dry-erase- boards for a while now. And had used the paper roll with colored pencils, but the paint hadn't yet seen the light of day.

Though Bridget's full gift package seemed to include about 486 different colors of paint with coordinated "spill-proof" cups and lids, we started with a modest selection of the three primary colors. This actually worked perfectly since there 4 slots in the tray, which actually did help in preving spills and we even had a spare for the rinse water, which Ellis sometimes remembered to use. Ellis made a mercifully small mess with the paints and his technique even progressed during the session- evolving all the way from scores of vertical lines to scores of horizontal lines to some tentative attempts at squiggly waves.

The End of a Very Long Week

Today's Schedule:

7:30 Leave home.

7:45 Hand keys to parking valet at...every cent of the $5 was worth it.

8:00 Get to the orthopedic clinic, immediately redirected to radiology.

8:05 Arrive in radiology, learn that the x-ray order hasn't arrived.

8:05-9:00 Watch people who arrived after us get x-rayed before us, because our order came in later.

9-9:05 Get x-rays.

9:05-9:30 Wait to see othropedic surgeon.

9:30-9:50 Wait in the examining room

9:50-10:00 See surgeon.

10:00 Head back to radiology.

10:00-10:25 Find Sponge-Bob to be pretty damn funny.

10:25-10:30 Get x-rayed some more.

10:30-10:35 Back to orthopedics.

10:35-10:40 See doctor, learn that we need an ultrasound.

10:40-11:00 Wait for radiology and orthopedics to conclude their pissing match.

11:00- Back to valet, back to truck back to home.

Bottomline: He isn't in lots of pain anymore, but he still won't use the arm. Working hypotheses:

1. He is gun shy because yesterday it hurt a lot to move it.

2. There is some lingering soft tissue injury.

3. The ligament might still be slightly dislocated.

So now we have to have an ultrasound. Scheduling this was perhaps the most infuriating part of the trip. The surgeon ordered the ultrasound. At checkout they tried to schedule it and the message back from radiology was that we could have the first appointment of the day on April 13th. I told them I didn't really think that was what the surgeon had in mind, and radiology said, "well that is the day we can do it." I suggested sending us to another clinic, no dice. I got pissed and suggested I could enlist him in the army, let him fight a war and get the ultrasound at the VA hospital before April 13th. (They didn't find this to be funny at all.) Then the surgeon conferred with the lady and the lady called someone different in radiology, who questioned the surgeon's order! And finally, we have an appointment for Monday. I am praying the kid will start using it before then so we can get this house back into a routine and so I don't have to follow him around carrying the armload of shit that he can't carry.

By the way, the doctor said there is certainly nothing really bad wrong. They just want to look at the soft tissue with the ultrasound because that kind of injury is really easy to reinjure and we will need to keep in immobilized for a while to make sure it is all better.

Nursemaid's Belbow

Ellis had a bit of a freak accident today at school. The Urgent Care doc said he had Nursemaid's Elbow.

The doctor did the maneuver on him and he is better, but it wasn't the miraculous recovery that sometimes happens with this condition. The scenario was pretty much as described in the link above. X-rays showed no fracture, but if he isn't using it in the morning we have to go back. The doctor mentioned how articulate Ellis is for his age which is just a small compliment, but when you consider she could have questioned us about whether we were abusing him, the delta is pretty big. Ellis had his first Flavor Ice* today, in fact his first two, and they were only the first two of four popsicles.

In other Ellis news, I built him a tent with his Cranium Super Fort set and now he is insisting on sleeping in it. He was so tired after the pain and missing his nap today that after reading he had me tuck him in all the way and give him his Keyores*. I bet he was asleep in 10 minutes and that almost never happens anymore. 

*I got immense joy from this site. We always preferred Otter Pops when I was a kid. 

**This is what he calls his three Eyeore stuffed animals. Poor Boo(his hot water bottle containing cow) has been kicked to the curb.