Welcome to my virtual home. This is where I keep my blog (which I've decided to call a "journal" because I think it makes me seem more intelligent) and various other things that, for one reason or another, I've decided to make public. Have a look around, you're welcome to anything in the fridge. Try not to break anything.

Recent Babblings

Living in Southern California, the kids lament the fact that they've never had a snow day off from school. "It sounds like so much fun!" they wail lamentingly. "Other kids get to stay home from school and play in the snow and we just have these stupid, sunny, 76 degree days over and over." Some of their lamentations are hard to understand, much like my overuse of the word "lament."

Having spent half of my youth in a place where it did snow every once in a while, I have a hard time sympathizing. I never found snow days to be all that fun. If it snowed enough for a school to close its doors, when their funding depended on having students in their classrooms as much as possible, then you could bet it was probably pretty miserable outside. But it's hard to break a romantic notion of a thing with nothing more than old-man complaints about said thing. Some things you just need to experience, and the kids had never experienced snow. All of which is to say, we took them up a mountain so they could get some time in the snow.

We actually hadn't planned on it. We were just taking a short trip for Spring Break, this time out to Palm Springs. "But," I hear you say, "you said this was a story about the snow. Palm Springs is famously the desert." You are quite correct, wise reader. But it is also home to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway that will take you a good mile and a half up the side of a mountain and there, my friend, you sometimes find snow.

I was as surprised as anybody. It's not winter, after all, and even if it was the top of a mountain, it was a mountain in the middle of the desert. I thought we'd be able to go for a nice hike on the mountaintop, see some nature, maybe grab a nice meal, that sort of thing. I wasn't prepared to find a good foot of snow covering everything at the top, evidenced by how we were dressed, which is to say in street clothes.

The kids would not be kept away from their first chance to play in real snow, however. To seal the deal, on our way into the lightly wooded area that surrounds the tram stop on top of the mountain, we passed a family that was on their back in and they gave us their sled, a cheap foam thing they didn't want to haul back down to their car, but to the kids it was the most valuable thing we owned, at least for that afternoon.

We had some good fun for a couple hours, tromping through the snow, hunting down good sledding hills, and keeping a close eye on Secondborn who was spoiling to start a snowball fight. Eventually, however, both kids started to realize some hard truths about snow: it's hard to walk through (Secondborn got particularly frustrated with how often they fell), eventually soaks through everything, and it's cold, colder than you think. By the time the Wife and I suggested that we head back, they were both ready to go. We grabbed a late lunch in a mountaintop chalet-style restaurant and both kids agreed that while the snow was fun to play in, "You get tired of it pretty quickly."

The rest of the trip was equally pleasant: we revisited a zoo we'd been to before and enjoyed, went to an artwalk where we bought a piece of art glass that's sitting in our living room now, and joined what seemed like the entire population of the Coachella Valley at a street fair in downtown Palm Springs. On our way out of town, to round things out, we walked through an art museum and took the long way home through Anza-Borrego State Park to see the wildflowers (we were a couple weeks late to see peak bloom, unfortunately) and a quick visit at the Grandparents' house, capping the week off with a day at the Renaissance Faire.

With all that, I think it will be the day in the snow that the kids will remember most, and maybe the next time they feel like lamenting the fact that they'll never get a snow day, they'll remember their time in the snow and not feel too bad. Probably not, though. The best part of a snow day, after all, was never the snow, it was not going to school. Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind a snow day once in a while myself.

Firstborn is staying home from school today. Not due to illness or injury, but for a "mental health day." If you don't know, a "mental health day." is a not-so-new term for the quite-old practise of taking a sick day off work when you're not actually sick, you just need a day off. I can remember having jobs where I would need to feign an illness when I wanted to take such a day off. I would usually just claim to have explosive diaherria: relatable, plausible, never any follow-up questions. These days, I can simply tell my boss that I'm taking a sick day and not explain further. I get my work done and he trusts that I know what I need to do. It's better that way.

That's how it's been with Firstborn and school: we haven't needed to stay on top of them to make sure their work gets done, they manage it on their own perfectly well in most cases. So when they said they wanted to stay home from school, despite being fully capable of going, because "Ugh, I just need a day off," the Wife and I were mostly amenable. Mostly. You see, for the first time in their scholastic career, Firstborn has started to struggle. In one class in particular.

They were always plenty smart--I'm sure I've bragged about it before--and school's been more or less easy mode for them until this year. Part of me smirks a little about it. I've been trying to warn them for years, as a former student who also didn't find high school all that challenging: it always catches up to you. No matter how clever you are, you can only slide by on your smarts alone for so long before you reach a point where you actually need to do some work. Study, even. It happens to every gifted student. This year, it happened to them.

Despite my early hopes that Firstborn might turn out to be a True Nerd (tm), they've grown up to have no love for most traditionally nerdy things, including most "hard" sciences. This year brought on AP Physics and it is proving to be their Waterloo. Conceptually, they get most of it, but as a matter of practise, it's been very challenging. Or, as they put it, "If it weren't for all the math...." Their grades have been anything but encouraging.

This brings us to a quick aside, an issue with the convergence of modern technology and our kids' lives: it's too easy for us to know too much. In this case, it's a matter of the Wife having easy access to an information portal that can give her up-to-the-minute updates on grades. That kind of access is a double-edged sword. Sure, it can let you monitor trends, let you be better able to intervene before things get out of hand, all that. It can also make you focus attention on blips that aren't worth your time. That's what happened with us: for a couple days, Firstborn's grade in Physics was entirely unacceptable, bad enough to make us start wondering if we needed to take action, but that turned out to be an abberation, one that disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. It was probably something we never needed to worry about, much less even know about.

It made me think about what my parents knew about my grades, lo those many years ago, versus what I knew. I was always aware when I'd botched a test or gotten a subpar grade on a paper, and I could ask a teacher what my current grade was if I was concerned. My folks? They knew what was on the report card at the end of the semester and that's it. The final result, nothing else. They didn't have to see how the sausage was made, and that worked out for them and for me.

That's probably why the first time I asked my mom to take a day off from school she was fine with it. I managed my schoolwork on my own and the results were always good, so when I asked for permission to just stay home one day and read, she only asked if there was anything happening that I would miss and not be able to make up (there wasn't) and she requested that I make a show of heading off for school, then come back after my brothers and sisters had left so they wouldn't know what I was up to (which I did). I always appreciated her trust in me to be able to handle my life and, looking back on, I think she understood that giving me room to do things like this and even make mistakes while they were generally low stakes.

In a lot of ways, Firstborn is a lot (too much) like me and I can't help but figure if it worked for me, it will work for them, too. So when the Wife and I were discussing their request, my impulse was to ask them if there was anything happening at school that they couldn't make up and to tell them to keep it quiet so Secondborn didn't know what they were up to. But there was that recent blip in their Physics grade that we had to consider. Yes, it had gone away--the grade as it stands today is quite acceptable--but it had happened, and if their position in the class was so fluid that it could jump up and down so dramatically, was missing a day a good idea?

In the end, of course, we decided to let them have their day off. Maybe it will turn out to have been a mistake, but their mental health seems to have benefitted greatly for it so I don't think we'll regret it. And even if it does turn out to have been a mistake, it's a good time to make them. No one's life has been ruined by a subpar grade in high school Physics, but high school seems like a great time to learn more about your limits and about how to manage your relationship with what's expected of you and what you need for yourself.

Besides, I'm just happy that they feel comfortable coming to us with an honest request instead of pretending to have explosive diaherria.

Last month, work instituted a hybrid work schedule. I'd never worked in the office for this employer, having been hired during the pandemic and thus been remote for two years, and I wasn't really sure how I felt about having to go back into an office again, even if only for a couple days a week. I didn't see the need nor the advantage. I could work perfectly effectively anywhere, why should I go to a specific building to sit in a specific chair?

I didn't want to do it--I even updated my resume and checked out a few job postings--but I decided to give it an honest chance. One of the reasons I took this job, after all, was because the office is less than a mile from my house; on a nice day, I can and do walk in.

And...it's not that bad? I mean, it's a nuisance to have to go down there when I could just as easily do the exact same job at home, but that's about the worst I've been able to say about it.

Then today, as I went down to the parking lot to get in my car to drive home (it's been raining here, so I drove), there was a flier for a local gym stuck in my door and I remembered, oh yeah, that's why I hate leaving the house. That's where all the people are.

I'm not saying that I'm about to start job hunting again because of this, but I'm not not saying that either.

I've probably mentioned before that the Wife and I try to get out for lunch together once a week on days that we both are working from home. It's just a thing we started doing because it's nice to do couple things that don't involve the kids and, frankly, because I like restaurants.

Every now and again, we also slip out in the afternoon to grab a cup of coffee. What usually happens is one or the other of us feels the itch, or just needs to get away from work for twenty minutes lest we run screaming, head first into a window, so we casually inquire whether the other has any meetings coming up, which is the signal that it's coffee o'clock.

Now, there's not a Starbucks or Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf or Peet's or anything like that within walking distance (that's a little bit of a lie, there is a Starbucks, because of course there is, but it's in the local grocery store and I'm only so-so on their coffee anyway), so we go around to one of the local cafes. This time, while strolling around trying to figure out where to go, we found to our delight that a favorite bistro of ours, which had been closed for months for remodeling, had just reopened, so we popped in there.

We'd been there enough to "know" the owner, which is to say that she recognized our faces even if she doesn't know our names. We chatted with her about the remodel and the new items on the menu for a bit and while we talked we decided, what the heck, let's go ahead and get a couple crepes to go with that coffee and turn a twenty-minute foray for coffee into a full-blown European-style tea time.

And as I sat there, spreading jam on my crepe and sipping my coffee out of one of those wide, shallow white coffee cups that's nearly big enough to stick your whole face in, I thought, "How bougie is this?"

The Wife and I have talked about it before, how amazed we both are to look back on our younger years and how much we struggled and compare them to now, when we've finally gotten a little comfortable. There's a whole 'nother rant in there, several of them in fact, about the various evils in our society that are designed to keep the working class down, but I don't feel like spoiling a happy memory with that right now. We did count our blessings in that moment, though, and lament that moments like this were the exception, not the rule. Not just for us, but for everybody. Everybody should be able to have their version of crepes and coffee in the afternoon and have it feel normal, not bougie. That would be a better world.

Let me start off by saying flat out that you should not, under any circumstances, take advice from me. In addition to not being very bright, I'm generally terrible at most things, including relationships. Proceed at your own peril.

Having said all that, I think I've figured out one or two things. I mean, I would think that--see the previous statement regarding my intelligence--but experience has convinced me that I'm on to something with this one. Yes, the plural of anecdote is not data, but still...y'know what, I'm already getting bored with this bit, so I'm just going to drop it and charge straight ahead.

The other morning--let's say it was Tuesday though it probably wasn't--I came downstairs. It was early; the Wife had gotten up for work first and, after she'd finished with the bathroom, I'd gotten up to shower and get ready for the day. The kids were barely stirring yet and I found the Wife sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee, just enjoying the silence.

Now, to understand this next bit, you have to know how the Wife and I split up our domestic chores, in this case the kitchen. Neither of us particularly likes planning out the week's meals, cooking them, or cleaning up afterward, so rather than just settle on it being one of our job, we take it in turns: one week she does it, the next week I do, and so on. On your week, you take care of all of it: you plan the week's meals, you do the shopping, you prepare everything, you clean up everything. But you do it all knowing that next week you're off. It's like a vacation, to the point that we each pass the baton on to the other with a bit of celebration. Sometimes, dancing is involved.

Now, this was the Wife's week, so when I came down and wished her a good morning, I couldn't help but notice that while she sat there with her cup of coffee that the dishwasher had not yet been unloaded. And, indeed, yesterday it had gone unloaded all day, only getting done after she'd gotten home from work.

On my weeks, I have to unload the dishwasher in the morning, almost first thing (though not actually first thing; the Dog insists that she be walked before anything, including my first cup of coffee). Letting the dishes sit in the dishwasher too long makes my brain itch. But it wasn't my week, it was hers, and she could do things her way. That was fine.

But you know how when somebody is doing something that just seems wrong to you? It's hard to not say something in times like that. And here's where my advice comes in: don't. Resist that urge and keep your mouth shut. Take a step back and consider what's going on for every angle.

For example, the Wife was sitting there, in the calm of the morning when nobody was awake yet (or at least when nobody was downstairs), seeming very much at peace. It reminded me of a similar time that I take regular advantage of: after everybody has gone to bed.

The kids generally turn in between 8 and 9 (Firstborn, being very much a teenager, sometimes pushes it to 10) and the Wife stumbles up to bed around 9:30 or 10, whenever she wakes up after having fallen asleep on the couch. This leaves me alone downstairs for as long as I want to stay up.

And here's the thing: I'm often tired by then, too. I have to get up for work in the morning and I know I really should get into bed earlier. But there's a kind of magic in being the only one awake. You're finally, truly, alone. No one is making any demands on you and you finally feel like you can actually relax. To be clear, when the Wife or the Kids are around, it's not like they're making unreasonable or even unwelcome demands on my time or attention. I like being with them and do not resent those demands on my time and attention in any way, but they are still demands on my (increasingly limited) internal resources. For me, the way I recharge those resources is by being alone, no demands whatsoever, just me and whatever I want to do.

I thought about when I saw her sitting there, alone in the still of the morning, with her coffee and realized that maybe that was her time to recharge, or whatever the equivelant is for her. I'm quite introverted, so time away from people is important to me, but she's not. Still, I think it's the same for her, and for all of us. Sometimes, we need to be alone, free of the demands of others, even if only for a little while. You can only truly be with yourself when you're alone.

So yeah, there's my advice: before you get upset about something your significant other/kid/friend/whatever does, try to see it from their perspective. That's probably the most trite advice you'll ever hear, but everybody says it because once you start doing it, you discover it works.

Oh, and take advantage of your opportunities to be alone, be it in the still of the morning or the quiet of the night. That's good for you, too.

So I took an unplanned vacation there, it seems. It wasn't that I actually took a vacation; saying it like that makes it sound like I got sick or broke something and was forced into inactivity. Nope, just alternately busy and generally uninspired. Heck, I'm only jumping on now to tell you a bunch of boring stuff because I feel like getting something in before the year closes out.

So, how 'bout them holidays, huh? They sure did come and go, didn't they. Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas were all fairly typical here. The kids went trick-or-treating, even Firstborn, who quite reasonably figures that in the absense of any good parties to attend, turning down free candy is just crazy. A couple of their friends came over and, together, the three of them dressed up as characters from an obscure (to me) anime, which cracked them up. One person out that night recognized their costumes, however, which they found oddly validating.

I can't say I know for sure why they wanted the candy, though. Here it is two months later and 80% of it is still sitting in the kitchen, tempting me every night when my sweet tooth perks up. I'm probably just going to start eating it when nobody's looking, just to see how long it takes for them to notice. For science, of course.

Not much to say about Thanksgiving. Went down to the in-laws who prepared a perfectly fine meal, watched some football, and stopped by a disappointing city zoo on the way home the next day.

Christmas was equally standard, though this year it fell on a Monday, which was especially aggravating. Somehow, it amplified that feeling we all get that the holiday sneaks up on you. I think it's because it essentially eliminates that last weekend, so you think it's there, that you have more time to get things done, but that's just a mirage.

Somehow we managed to pull the day off. The kids got a satisfactory haul of gifts and all that. We'd wanted to make a trip north to visit my mother, but that ended up being too much to pull together. Soon, Mom, I promise.

The other day the Wife and I celebrated our 25th anniversary. That's apparently the silver one. Sounds like it's supposed to be a big deal. So did we celebrate in some kind of grand, elaborate way?

Nah.

What exactly we did isn't really important. We both took the day off work and did little things that we enjoy together. Stole a few quiet moments of pleasant normalcy. A more romantic version of me might call it everyday magic kind of stuff, but it's the "everyday" part that deserves emphasis.

I think a younger me, as difficult as it is to remember what he was like, might have sneered at the whole notion. "Your 25th anniversary is supposed to be momentous. It should be an event! You can't spend it just walking the dog, getting coffee in a diner, and watching TV on the couch!"

Well, younger me, that's not what we actually did, but why not? That sounds quite nice. Maybe it seems a little humdrum, but isn't the point of the hustle and bustle of dating, all the big gestures and grand events, to find somebody you want to spend the rest of your life doing the humdrum with? A night on the couch might not be as exciting as a night clubbing, but I suspect the people out clubbing are hoping, one day, to find somebody to spend their nights on the couch with. That's kinda the point of the game. Well, from where I'm sitting, we've already won that particular game. What better way to celebrate our victory?

Besides, we were too tired to plan anything elaborate. 25 years married also means 25 years older. It's a miracle we didn't just take a day off to nap.

This one has been a tough one to write, for a variety of reasons. A little while ago, the Wife's best friend, her maid of honor at our wedding, and Firstborn's godmother, passed away. She was young, barely older than we are. It was cancer, one that was stubbornly resistant to everything they threw at it.

I met Michelle a long time ago, when I was still young and me and the Wife were just taking the first, shaky steps in our relationship. She was one of a group of friends from the Wife's high school days that I met and, don't tell the others this, the only one that didn't annoy me. That made life a bit easier ("Oh, you want us to go hang out with your friends? Which ones?" Well, at least Michelle will be there to balance the others out.).

You'd think, after all these years and with all the significant life events she was a part of, that I'd have a whole slew of stories to tell about her. And I tried to come up with some, I did, but nothing seemed quite right. And then I realized something: that might have been by design. Let me explain.

We saw Michelle just a few days before she died. We dropped in for a quick visit while we were in the area visiting the Wife's parents. We knew she was tiring easily, so it was just going to be a friendly, "Hey, how are you doing?" sort of thing. A pop-in.

Almost immediately, the Wife and I sensed that things were worse than Michelle had been letting on. She was a shadow of herself, listless, faded. I had an almost immediate, uncomfortable association with the last time I saw my cousin, years ago, just before she died of breast cancer. The feeling in the room was the same.

Later, the Wife would remark on how surprised she'd been to see Michelle doing so poorly. She hadn't given even the slightest hint that things had gotten that bad. If you only had her communications to go by, just the texts and emails and phone calls, you'd never know that she felt worse than after getting a flu shot.

And that's what I realized about Michelle while trying to think of a story to tell: she was certainly a great friend, but she was also a private person, one who was always looking to help more than be helped. The stories I know about her, the ones that stand out, are of her doing for others.

This might be illustrated best by something the Wife told me happened during the memorial service. Michelle was very good with her hands; sewing, arts, crafts, she excelled with them all. At the memorial, one of their friends got up to say some words and, while doing so, asked how many of the assembled had something Michelle had made for them. Nearly every hand went up, dozens of them, probably representing hundreds of hours of work, yet surely a fraction of the total time she'd spent doing things for other people, making gifts and the like, touching their lives.

All that time, of a life cut so short. I can't help but wonder, if she'd known how little time she had, would she have chosen to spend it differently. I doubt it.

For a couple minutes there, it looked like the Los Angeles area might get hit by a hurricane for the first time in, well probably not forever, but let's go with recorded history. For all I know, dinosaurs running around in what would become California dealt with them all the time. Anyway, it doesn't matter because by the time the storm reached us, it lost power and was downgraded to a tropical storm, and we've had at least one of those, albeit not in more than 80 years. So still an event.

There was a bit of hullaballoo leading up to landfall. Fire stations were passing out sandbags to anybody who wanted them, bottled water started disappearing from the grocery stores, and people like me thought about the projected wind speeds and looked a bit worriedly at their fences. The kids, meanwhile, were getting a bit hyped.

I guess when you have no real concept of how much destruction even just a moderate windstorm can cause, something like a tropical storm can sound quite exciting. There's even a bit of romance in the imagery of watching nature howl and wail outside your window while you watch, safe and warm, from in your home. They were actually looking forward to it.

The Wife and I, remembering the last time a high-wind storm blew through, were less enthused. We tracked the storm for days leading up to the big event, nervously watching its speeds, rainfall, stuff like that. We wondered how the new house was going to stand up to the beating it was about to get.

And then the day arrived and it was a big nothing. Somehow the storm split in half or something as it made its way north, so the coast to the west of us and the desert to the east got drenched, but we got rained on and...that was it. A lot of rain, but just rain.

The Wife and I were relieved. The kids were disappointed. Especially when they found out that several school districts around them canceled classes for the next day but they still had to go.

We took the kids to visit my mother recently, a trip that has become something of an irregular annual tradition. Enough so, in fact, that we have started to pick out favorite places to stop along the way after having tried several options, like breakfast at the Black Bear Diner in Arvin just past the Grapevine and the Chaffee Zoo in Fresno. It was a pleasant trip with the added bonus of my sister coming out to visit at the same time, so the kids got to spend time with not just their grandmother, but also their aunt.

There's a thing about my kid sister (well, more than one, but let's stay focused) that I'd forgotten and it's that she grew up with me as a big brother. I think she probably looked up to me like any younger sibling might do and picked up a few of my poorer habits, one of which is showing affection through teasing. It can be difficult to know how to take her, and sometimes she can go too far. Not unlike me.

I joke sometimes that if I met me, I'd probably hate me. This isn't to say that I hate my sister, quite the opposite. Firstborn, however, came away with mixed feelings.

I probably should have done a better job of warning the kids about what to expect, but some things you just forget and have to relearn. And while it only took me a few minutes, it took the kids a day or so to realize, "Oh, she's like Dad," and figure out how to take her.

I had another lesson to relearn a few days later when we were returning home. We took the coastal route so that we could take the kids to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We were last there more than a dozen years ago when Firstborn was still small and was still an only child. It was as good as I remember it, but it was also something I'd forgotten about: crowded. Very crowded.

I'm not great in crowds. It's like I have a limited amount of human contact I can take before I start to get twitchy. That can come from being around a few people for extended periods or it can come from being around a whole lot of people for just a little while. This was very much a case of the latter and after about an hour, I was ready to jump out of my skin.

It had been a while since I'd been in a situation like that; I'd forgotten how it affects me. It's almost like a panic. I guess you could say I didn't care for it. Maybe I'll be lucky and it will be a while before I have to relearn that one.

So, been a little while since we've chatted. Let me catch you up with what's been going on the past couple of months.

Secondborn finished his baseball season. The one hit I described previously ended up being his only hit as he got beaned in the next game and as a result basically bailed out of the batter's box on nearly every subsequent pitch for the rest of the season.

Having said that, his team took first place in their division and all the kids got huge, gawdy championship rings as if they'd won the World Series.

Firstborn, meanwhile, wrapped up the school year by taking on soundboard duties for the school's production of Little Shop of Horrors. It was the biggest tech responsibility of their young career and, thankfully, everything went smoothly.

Speaking of school, both kids did exceptionally well, Firstborn marking straight A's and Secondborn scoring the elementary school equivelant of the same. In a tradition passed down at least one generation, I gave each of them a hard time for those little things that were less than perfect (A-minuses, that kind of thing), though unlike my own father, I make sure they each know I'm not serious.

Summer has begun and that means camps. Secondborn has already completed a science camp that combined robotics and a mystery they had to solve (who stole their robots!?) and a cooking camp. Firstborn, meanwhile, has joined a production of Footloose the Musical in which they'll be playing the role of "Cop" as well as filling in the ensemble. The rehearsal schedule has been aggressive, but the show is coming along and they're starting to look forward to performing it.

As for me and the Wife, we continue to plod along. What can I say, we're dull.

Secondborn has been playing baseball this year. It's his second full season and, playing on a team full of kids who have three and four more years experience than he does has been tough. He's not the best on the team at anything really and he knows it, which is difficult for a kid with a perfectionist streak.

He tries, I'll give him that, though too often only as much as he needs to in the moment. As with many things, he wants to be good, he's just not sure he wants it enough to put in an excessive amount of work. So, a normal kid.

For most of this season he has stood in the outfield chasing down the occasional ball that made it in his direction and standing at the plate stock still, partially in fear of getting hit by a pitch and partially in the hopes of drawing a walk.

Well, last night he got his first hit of the season, smacking a fastball down the third base line. The kid playing third managed to knock it down, robbing Secondborn of extra bases, but that hardly made a difference to him. He jumped up and down on first with so much excitement, you'd think he'd hit it to the moon.

I've been the official scorekeeper for the team this year, so I spend most games at the fence near the dugout, and have gotten to know the coaches a little. After the inning was over and the kids were taking the field, the coach, who had been working patiently with Secondborn all year, came over to me and said, "Pardon my language, but that was #$%^ing awesome!" (for the record, that was the first time I'd ever heard him swear) and I could see quite clearly that it was those moments that he coached for. The team was winning their game and a lot of his other kids had gotten hits, but that one made his entire night.

I don't know if Secondborn is going to get another hit this season. I hope that this success gives him more confidence going forward, but even if that doesn't translate to much success, at the very least he'll have this memory, hopefully forever.

Three years ago I planned a spring break trip for the family. Firstborn was on the brink of being a teenager and Secondborn was getting old enough to enjoy an extended trip. Everything was in place: we'd picked out a city (San Diego) to spend a week exploring, booked a hotel room, and bought tickets to a few things we knew we wanted to do, leaving space in the plan to improv. We were all set.

That all went up in smoke, of course. Three years ago (has it only been that long? feels like decades) was the start of the pandemic, and I remember sitting down with the Wife one night, just a few days before we were to embark, and saying, "I think we might have to cancel the trip. I don't think it's safe to go." It sounds a little crazy now, but at that time things were just starting to snowball and we all really did have some hope that things were going to going to start to subside any day.

Oh, blissful naivety.

Well this year we finally took that trip. Same city, same basic itinerary, just three years later, and in a lot of ways I think the delay worked in our favor. For example, take the hotel. I found a place that had a suite-esque split room for families: a king-size bed in the front room and in the back a set of bunkbeds. Both "rooms" had their own TVs, dressers, etc, and the kids were quite content to hang out in their own space whenever we were there. We didn't spend a lot of time at the hotel, but when we did, it was restful. The kids shared the space peacefully and I'm not sure they would have even just a few years ago.

We were also able to do some things that might not have been as successful three years ago. We could stay longer at places we visited, like the SD Zoo for example, without either kid wearing down from being out too long or just being on their feet too much. And some stuff we did, like go karting, would have likely been off the table back then.

Does this mean the trip was better now than it would have been then? Not necessarily, of course. We would have done different things and had different experiences. It might have been entirely awesome. I'm fairly certain it would have been full of treasured memories, just like the trip we actually took was. But we'll never know, and that's a little sad.

Taking that trip three years later did drive home how few of these we realistically have left. Firstborn will be off to college soon and Secondborn won't be far behind. We won't wait three years for the next one.

A little less than two years ago, I told you about an old friend who died. I told you how we'd been tight in college, how we'd fallen out later, and how we sort of reconciled eventually, though not really. I mentioned a few of the things we had in common that helped us bond. One thing I didn't mention was our mutual love for the NCAA men's basketball tournament (aka March Madness).

Briefly, throughout college and then for the years that we shared the rent on a townhouse, he and I watched as many March Madness games as humanly possible. We would each fill in a bracket every year and tape them to the wall. We'd argue about what the ideal tournament team was, with me favoring outside shooters and him evangelizing for inside bigs. We each took a perverse pleasure in seeing the other's bracket get busted, especially (deliciously) when it was on a game that we'd called the other way.

Even after he and I had started drifting apart, March Madness was always still something we had. This is the second tournament since my friend's passing and, for some reason, I've been feeling it a bit more keenly than the first. Then I realized why. It was because of Purdue.

If you don't follow college basketball or know much about the March Madness tournament, here's how it works (at least, for what's important for this story): 64 teams get into the tournament and those teams are divided into four pools of 16. Each team in a pool gets ranked, 1 through 16, with the #1 seed being the likeliest to come out on top and the #16 team being the extreme longshot. Then, in the first round, those teams face each other in a kind of top-to-bottom fashion: the #1 seed plays the #16 seed, #2 faces #15, #3 vs #14, and so on.

You might be thinking that it hardly seems fair to the #16 seed, and you'd be right. In all the years that the tournament has been going on, a 16 seed has only beaten a 1 seed once. Indeed, until a few years ago it had never happened and was generally accepted as being so unlikely as to be impossible.

Well, this year it happened for a second time. Purdue University came into the tournament as a 1 seed and they were facing some school called Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU). Purdue came in with a great team, including one of the best centers around (a kid listed at 7'4") and FDU was a scrappy bunch of smaller shooters (FDU's average height as a team, if I'm remembering correctly, is a paltry 6'3", the smallest in the tournament this year). The game should have been a blowout, not the nail-biter upset that it turned out to be.

I realized a short while after watching that game that it had made me a little sad and I couldn't figure out why. It was a great game and I love an underdog story as much as anybody. I don't have any particular love for Purdue or anything like that (I'm not even sure I know what state it's in), there was no reason for me to feel anything for that game other than disbelief. Then it hit me: that was exactly the sort of game he and I would have argued about. I just know, were he still alive, that he'd have had Purdue going deep into the tournament, maybe even winning it all, and I would have picked FDU for the upset just to mess with him. This would have been a year that I would have been able to really rub in his face.

Hell, this could have been the sort of event that gave us something to talk about again. Something that gave both of us an excuse, a way for us to try to rekindle our friendship. An excuse I can't use. An excuse I should have never needed.

The Wife's brother and family were in town visiting recently, including their three children. The kids were happy to have cousins around, Secondborn especially so since two of them are around his age. I sometimes forget how hard it is to be the youngest person in the room, much less always the youngest.

When I was his age, I was surrounded by cousins. My dad was one of six children and all but one of them lived in or near our hometown. They all had multpile offspring, so I not only had nearly two dozen cousins within ten miles of me at any time, two of them, both also boys, were also my age.

The three of us were constant companions for years until I moved away. It was easy to underestimate how much it meant to always have a playmate available, somebody your age who you got along with who was going to be at whatever family gathering you were dragged along to, somebody who was both friend and family and who was always on your side.

Seeing Secondborn with his cousins reminded me of all that. For a brief day and a half, he was in hog heaven. They played almost nonstop, each of them seemingly inexhaustible.

Then they had to leave.

Secondborn was a little mopey, but I figured he'd be fine. Of course it was sad for the fun times to end, but that's just the nature of things. Nothing lasts forever and he's old enough to understand that. Then it was time for baseball practice and he just didn't want to. He didn't say as much, but he's been perfecting his passive-aggressive moves and it was clear he was trying to get one of us to suggest it.

This is a behavior I've been actively trying to discourage, usually by refusing to acknowledge it at first then, once he's realized that it's failed, explaining to him that a better approach might have been to be more direct and simply come out and say what he's feeling and wants. So we went to practice and he sighed and moped the whole way. When we got there, I gave him a little pep talk to encourage him and sent him out to warm up, whereupon he walked (slowly) out to the field and promptly started to cry.

My parenting methods are not always great.

I trotted out onto the field, explained the situation to his coach (who was sympathetic), and pulled him aside to talk about it. We had a long chat about being sad and how that was OK, but also how some times, you needed to set some of that sadness aside so you could focus on what was happening in the moment and, later, when you had some quiet time, you could talk about what was making you sad and that could help you be less sad. I don't know how you explain to a kid how to process emotions and the importance of not letting them incapacitate you (when that's possible, and it isn't always), but I do know that he (begrudgingly at first) started to participate in practice and, by the end, was mostly back to normal, so I guess it sort of worked.

I think it helped more that the team got their game jerseys at the end of practice. That really perked him up. Father-son chats are one thing, but that can't really compare with getting swag. I'll have to remember that next time. Might help me step up my parenting game.

When last we met, the Wife was getting over a mild bought with Covid. That's well past us now and we're all none the worse for wear. Since then, Christmas and the New Year have come and gone, and somehow I failed to remark on either of them, or any of the other things that happened during the past month. I will try to rectify that now.

Before Christmas, we made a goal of visiting a bunch of the light shows set up in our area. We've gone to one or two every year for a little while, but they proved so popular with the kids that we decided to try to hit them all this year. Two were at botanical gardens, one was at the zoo, and the fourth was a nighttime visit to Knott's Berry Farm to see the park all lit up. We walked around, sipped hot chocolate and mulled cider, oohed and awed at some spectacular sights and even played on some of the installations that were interactive. Apart from being a bit cold at times, it was well worth the effort. I suspect it will become an annual tradition.

Christmas itself was typical for us: morning unwrapping gifts, then breakfast and a drive to the grandparents' house for round two. Along the way we listened to Patrick Stewart's reading of A Christmas Carol like we do every year and discovered that the kids, despite the fact that both generally do their own thing during the drive (usually headphones on with music or a game), have absorbed the performance more or less by osmosis and can quote large parts of it. I've often wondered, when they're older, what sorts of things about their childhoods they're going to look back on nostalgically. I wouldn't be surprised if one of those things is "that guy from Star Trek" reading Dickens.

The kids had a weird winter break schedule this year, starting just before Christmas and running nearly to mid-January. We weren't able to plan any kind of road trip or anything this year, but hoped to do some day trips around the city to amuse them. It turned out Mother Nature had different plans, and those plans included dumping buckets of water on us for days at a stretch. We managed a few indoor activities, including "adventures" to a couple out-of-the-way but large malls so the kids to spend their holiday gift cards, but there was a lot of shaking of fists at the gloomy sky.

New Year's was similarly uneventful. Both kids determined to stay up until midnight to ring in the new year and, since we often have to chase both of them off to bed, it's not much of surprise to say that they did. Amusingly, the highlight of the evening for Secondborn was getting to see Duran Duran sing a couple of their songs live on TV just before the ball dropped, as he has decided that they and Depeche Mode are his favorite bands. It's possible the Wife and I listen to too much 80s music around the kids, but we could have worse faults. I personally consider this turn of events to be a complete success.

I'd like to tell you that my New Year's resolution was to be more diligent about posting here, but that would be a lie (it was actually to do more to take care of my health, to which end I have already been to see my doctor; we were both pleasantly surprised to find the other still alive and relatively hale). But I'll still try. Or at least, I'll tell you that I'll try, and that's almost as good. Well, it's better than nothing. Barely.

Here's to barely better than nothing! Bring it on, 2023!

The Wife has covid. We've been pretty lucky so far, avoiding the disease for the most part for what, three years now? Firstborn had a mild case a while ago but it passed in a few days without much disruption: living with a teenage who's been quarantined to their room for a few days is a lot like living with a teenager the rest of the year. Not much to it. It's a little different when you have to quarantine one of the parents.

Our first concern was whether it had been passed on to any of the rest of us, but thankfully we all tested negative. We are also fortunate to have a spare room, complete with a sofa bed and TV, to lock the Wife away in while she recovers. All things considered, we were in pretty good shape.

I should also say at this point that it's been a mild case and the Wife is more or less recovered now and is just waiting for a negative test before she rejoins the rest of the world. She's fine, if a touch stir crazy.

I, on the other hand, am about at the end of my rope keeping the house running solo. The weekend was fairly mad, between shopping and performances (Secondbord was in a production of Willy Wonka as Grandpa Joe, so a moderately important role and Firstborn was satisfying their tech hours requirement by working as a stage hand). As the sole parent available, I needed to get both kids ready and fed ahead of each performance, which I also attended, and then bring them home. Add to that all the little chores that keep a house running, both mine and the Wife's (y'know, dishes, laundry, etc) and I was running nearly nonstop.

It got a little better as the week wore on, not only because there were fewer extracuriculars to manage, but also because I was able to lean on routine more. And maybe I just started letting less essential chores slip. That might have happened, too.

After ten or so days of that, all I can say is that I'm amazed at single parents. I don't know how y'all do it, but I tip my cap. As for me, all I can say is as soon as the Wife is back in action, I'm going to hide somewhere dark and quiet and have a nice nap. Shouldn't take more than a week.

The Wife and I recently marked an anniversary. It was a big number, but not one of the Big Ones (tm) that make people go, "Oooh, what's your secret?" or some other inane thing (close, though; we'll have to put up with that nonsense next year). All the same, I felt like doing something a little extra this year.

After talking it over a bit, we decided to take a weekend trip to San Diego. We'd stay at a swank resort, eat gourmet meals, walk through a posh beach town just outside San Diego proper, visit one of the oldest indepedent bookstores on the West Coast, stroll along the beach, indulge in delicious but terrible-for-you desserts, and spend a whole day exploring the world-famous San Diego Zoo, a place we used to go to regularly early in our marriage, but to which we had not been in more than a decade. Oh, and we'd bring the kids along, too.

Up until the end there, it all sounded pretty romantic. And probably it would have been. There was definitely a version of that plan where we left the kids with their grandparents, who live not far from San Diego, for the weekend and did all that by ourselves. And that would have been great, too.

But we talked about it and decided against, and if that sounds strange, well, I can't really argue. The thing is, First Born has started doing college research. It's the right time for that kind of thing, of course, and even though college is still a few years away, we both know it's going to be here before we know it, and that's made us eager to create as many memories with both of the kids as we can while we're all still together. So while a romantic weekend alone to celebrate our anniversary sounded great, all the same stuff turned into a family excursion sounded even better.

And y'know what? It really was. Yes, we spent too much money (pro-tip: upscale resort/spas are only worth the money if you're actually there for the resort/spa stuff), but both kids thoroughly enjoyed themselves and the Wife and I got memories we'll treasure forever. There will be time enough for weekends alone. Heck, soon enough they're all going to be that way.

The other night, Secondborn came into our room in the middle night, upset by a bad dream. He didn't want to talk about it at the time, but later he revealed that had been about the Wife and I dying. We also learned that this was something of a recurring dream.

My first instinct was to tell him that, still being relatively young (well, OK, at least not yet too old), the only way both of us were going to die at the same time was due to some kind of catastrophe, like a house fire or something, and if that happened odds were that he was gonna die with us. So he had nothing to worry about! Problem solved.

I did not tell him that, though. It took a great deal of restraint, let me tell you. I mean, I know that doesn't sound funny in text like that, but I think I could have made it work. It's all in the delivery. There was definitely comedy potential there and it's hard for me to let something like that go by. But I did. For his sake.

I await my Father of the Year award.

Several days ago, I heard a report on NPR about a strange phenomenon: suspected foreign actors calling in hoax reports of active school shootings in an apparent effort to elicit an armed police response and, possibly, chaos and even death. Like, I suspect, anybody who just read that sentence, my reaction was a mix of bewilderment and revulsion. It rattled around in my head for a couple days before eventually leaving me in peace.

Until the other day, that is, when the Wife and I got text reports from Firstborn's school that a report of an active shooter had been reported on campus and local police were on the scene. The report was careful to make it clear that this was almost certainly a false alarm and that apart from the call there was no evidence of a shooter, but the school would be locked down while the police cleared the scene all the same.

My first thought was of that NPR report, of course, and I relayed it to the Wife as an assurance that it was almost certainly a hoax, which it would soon revealed to be. Follow up reports from the school district even cited reports like the one from NPR and revealed that the person who called in the threat had an unidentified accent. In the end, it was all a senseless act by an unknown person to, I can only presume, terrorize students and their parents and community.

And the thing is, it kinda did exactly that. I felt a good degree of certainty, during the event, that it was a hoax. I texted Firstborn for updates on what was happening around them (in short, they were at lunch, the police showed up and told everybody to return to their classrooms, they ended up in a different classroom because they couldn't access the one they were in prior to lunch, and they just sat on the floor for an hour playing games on their phone) and monitored local chatter as much as I could while trying to distract myself with work. I knew that every minute that passed without incident made it more likely that it would turn out to be nothing, that no news was progressively good news.

And yet, it occupied my mind for a couple hours one afternoon. I couldn't think of anything else, even knowing that there was no there there. A frustrating feeling of helplessness was overwhelming, but more than that was anger. Anger that somebody would do something like that, sure, but also anger that our culture has become so broken that one stranger can easily turn it against us. Because that's the worst part of the whole thing: it could have been real. Easily.

I don't have much a joke to end on. Sorry about that. I guess I can leave you with this: when talking to Firstborn about the experience, to make sure they were OK and everything, I just asked point blank at one point what the worst part of it all was. I guess I wanted to give them a chance to open up about and lingering trauma or psychological damage, anything they might want to get off their chest. The response? "Sitting on a floor for an hour. That really starts to hurt after, like, the first five minutes."*

* It's not lost on me that the implications of this are just as horrifying as anything. We're apparently raising a generation that can be blase about something as terrible as massacre, but then again, speaking as a Gen Xer, I'm the product of a generation that was raised to be pretty blase about nuclear annihilation, so I guess I get it.

Secondborn turned ten the other day. We know because for the two weeks leading up to it, he started every day by telling us how many days were left. "Eight days until my birthday," "Six days until my birthday," and so on. As if we were going to forget.

Maybe we'll forget eleven or twelve, I teased him, but not ten. We're humans; we like round numbers like ten. They fit in our brains better. For the record, he was not amused by the suggestion that we might forget any birthday, so I think I inadvertantly assured that he will repeat his daily reminder routine for the rest of my life. Sometimes I'm my own worst enemy.

A side effect of our brain's relationship with certain numbers is that those numbers feel more significant to us than the others. Turning ten is no more important than nine or eleven, but it's the one we mark as a milestone.

The "we" in that statement, I suspect, is more the parents than the kid. Secondborn was excited for presents and those come with every birthday. For us, however, this was our youngest reaching double digits. Lots of things make me feel old these days (most recent thing: if I sleep in the wrong position, I wake up with a random ache, usually in my back or shoulder, which is just plain nonsense; you shouldn't be able to hurt yourself sleeping), and I expected that one to earn a top spot on the list.

The funny thing is, it really didn't. Maybe I already feel as old as I need to based on all the other things, but I think part of it is Secondborn himself. In a lot of ways, he's just getting easy to parent.

I've complained about parenting struggles plenty, I'm sure, so I won't belabor it, but one of the refrains the Wife and I keep telling each other is, "It will get better." And, incrementally, I think it has. Make no mistake, there's still a lot of work to be done, but in the last few months it's like a number of things have just started to click.

Example? Sure: The other night, we took the kids out to dinner like we are wont to do most Saturdays. Secondborn brought his Switch with him because he gets bored between the part where we sit at the table and the part where his food arrives. For months now, we've been trying to teach him to respect the server by putting the game down and looking them in the eye when ordering. It's been a frustrating journey, but recently he's been pretty good about hitting pause, putting the game down on the table, and speaking directly to the person taking his order.

Now, I would have preferred to have just explained it to him once and see some immediate progress, but I have to acknowledge that it's been a much shorter path than it would have been even just a year ago. He's maturing and, as a result, he's becoming much less draining to parent. It's helped immensely.

Of course, now he's making noise about wanting his own cell phone, so I don't expect it to last.

When I was a kid, some-odd hundred years ago, people used to say that they needed something like they, "needed a hole in the head," as a way of indicating that it was just about the last thing they needed. I don't know if people still say it; it's just a saying that popped into my mind recently. Probably because I have a hole in my head.

I mean, we all have a few holes in our heads, don't we. I suppose the saying should actually be "extra hole in the head" (and, to be fair, maybe it is and I've always just heard it wrong) to account for the ones that are already there and which you do actually need. A few of them make stuff like eating and breathing possible, and I think we can all agree those are generally good.

Well now I have an extra one, and it's an annoyance. The story goes back a bit and I don't want to bore you any more than I already have, but I have a history of minor problems with my ears: the odd infection here, wax build up there (and there, and there...the wax thing has been a chronic issue). I mentioned the tinnitus earlier. At one point, my doctor informed me that I had a perforation in one eardrum. Since those usually heal on their own, we decided to just keep and eye on it and it seemed to do exactly what it was supposed to.

Only it didn't. Maybe it healed a little, enough to hide from a visual inspection anyway (and more than one doctor has peered in there and not seen anything), but apparently not completely. This becomes important in a minute.

A quick aside: we recently had a bit of a medical emergency in the extended family, something that wasn't exactly life-threatening or anything, but still alarming enough to make the Wife and I talk about certain things. She suggested that we make a pact that we would tell each other about whatever unexplained symptoms we might experience and, especially in my case, start being more frank with our doctors.

So that brings me to a recent visit with my doc. The Wife was correct to assume that I'm not usually forthcoming with doctors. My approach has always been more of a, "if they don't detect anything wrong with me, I must be fine," game where, if asked about something I would answer honestly and fully, but I rarely offered much information unless it seemed especially pressing or important. I told myself that everybody experiences weird and inconsequential things, random aches and pains, as a part of being alive and there was no reason to go trying to chase down the whys and wherefores for all of them. They tend to have a way of resolving themselves anyway.

Well, I find myself in my doctor's office for a routine check-up and he asks if there's anything going on. Ordinarily I would have said "no," but this time I'm thinking about the pact the Wife and I made, so I mention a sort of irritating jaw pain that came on a couple days prior. I note that it seemed to have peaked and was either getting better or, at least, not getting worse, and that I grind my teeth at night (or, more accurately, chew up a mouth guard) so it's probably just muscle strain, but he's got to check everything out (including doing a quick check for palsy or something) and in the process notes that I have some wax build-up in my ear. Well sure I do, I always do, but he figures we might as well clear that out since it could be related.

Now, in a doctor's office when they say they want to clear the wax out of your ear, it means putting a few drops of something in there to soften things up then shooting a stream of water down your ear canal to flush everything out. I know because I've had it done several times, usually with no ill effect.

This time, however, the first blast of water into my left ear hits something in just the right way and busts through the eardrum. That old perforation must have not healed all the way and now it's torn open even more. I saw an ENT specialist and it's his opinion that it probably won't close up on its own. The original wound is too old. Worse, the perforation is positioned in just the wrong spot for conventional treatments (it's right on the malleus), meaning that the only possible procedure would be a fairly extensive surgery that doesn't even have terribly good odds of fixing anything and might even make it worse.

Fortunately, while I've lost some hearing out of that ear, it doesn't seem to be too much. Mostly it just feels a bit strange and, I suspect, is messing with my sense of equilibrium a little. I'll have to take a hearing test soon to see if there's appreciable damage there, but even if there is, there doesn't seem to be much that can be done about it. Just another thing to learn to live with.

On the plus side, I can ignore the Wife and Kids and get away with it because, "Sorry, didn't hear you, hole in my ear." Except those times when I actually don't hear you, Wife and/or Kids, in case you're reading this; that's totally a thing that happens and I'm absolutely not just making it up.

The Wife took the kids across the country to visit her brother for five days last week. Having only recently started a new job, I didn't have a lot of paid time off to play with, so we decided I'd just stay home with the dog. They're home now, but I thought I'd reflect a bit about a few of the things I learned from spending nearly a week home alone.

The first one isn't really a thing I learned as much as a thing I realized: I have never actually lived on my own. I've been home by myself, of course, but I've never lived alone: I went from home with several siblings to college and dorm life; after graduating I always had at least one roommates until the Wife and I got married. Somehow I skipped over the place-of-my-own phase.

Now, if you know me at all, you know that I like my solitude and I figured that would translate into me absolutely loving living on my own, even if only for a little while. Which brings me to the first realization: I like everything about it that I thought would, but there's something ever-so-slightly unnerving about it, too. I didn't expect that.

I'm not sure exactly how to explain it. It's the quiet, it's not quite right. There's a different quality to the quiet of a place when you know that it's not quiet because nobody is making any noise, rather it's quiet because there's nobody around to make noise in the first place. That's not so profound; I suppose everybody's experienced that. What was new to me was how much the strangeness of that increased as time went on.

Fortunately, the effect of that wore off after a while. I was alone just long enough to start to adjust and the strangeness plateued, and maybe even started to recede a little. That let me think about other things I noticed about being on my own without being constantly creeped out by the stillness in the house.

For example, I'm a lot cleaner when I'm on my own. I mean, obviously there's less to clean up when there's only one person making the mess (I know, amazing observation. "What? You're saying that one person makes less of a mess than four? I wonder by how much? Somebody should do a study!"), but there's something else. More than once I found myself cleaning something random just to have something to do. Being alone gets pretty boring.

In the same vein, I tackled a few small jobs around the house that have been ignored for months now, little things that took less than an hour each that I'd been meaning to get to, but somehow never did. Partly this was to combat boredom, too, but also partly because they were just easier to do when there was nobody around to get in the way, even the one I really shouldn't have tried to do by myself (about halfway through that one I realized I could have really used a second set of hands, but by then it was too late so I had to get inventive; it worked out in the end).

I did other things by myself that I wouldn't normally do. Went to a movie solo for the first time, for example, and went out to breakfast alone, on a workday, no less. I'd always wondered what it would be like to be one of those people who grabs a bite in a diner on the way into work and now I guess I know: uncomfortable. It wasn't so much being in a restaurant alone, it's that a restaurant breakfast is much bigger than I'm used to on a typical work day, when I spend most of my time sitting in front of a computer, so I spent most of that morning feeling like there was a bowling ball in my stomach.

I also learned that I seem to have a minimal amount of annoyance within me that I have to express or, I don't know, I'll have a stroke or something. Usually I just snark at the nearest family member and that's enough to maintain balance, but without that release I had to resort to alternatives. I snipped at the dog a lot, for example; she seemed to be happy just to be getting the attention. When I left the house, I sneered at people around me who were being nuisances, even if innocuous ones. At one point, I told the door to the garage that it was starting to get on my nerves and that it better shape up or else. Why, you ask? It knows what it did.

On balance, I suppose, what I learned is that I, like anybody I suppose, am a creature of habit, and while I enjoyed the disruption, I was ready for a return to normalcy by the time everybody came home. All the hustle and bustle of a full house, after nearly a week of eerie stillness, was very welcome...for a few hours anyway. Then I couldn't help but wonder what all these people were doing in my house.

So, after more than two years of dodging a global pandemic, we finally had an infection. Firstborn, who has been keenly interested in drama lately, especially musical theater, joined a local production of a licensed musical about a month ago. The practice schedule was fairly grueling, five to six days a week and often six to seven hours a day. Those kids were spending a lot of time together, and on balance it was a very good experience.

An outbreak was obviously more than just a possibility. I don't know the exact number, but I'd guess there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 people in that theater, day after day, dancing and singing and sweating shoulder-to-shoulder. It would only take one person to bring the virus into that bubble to devestate the entire production, and that's exactly what happened, just a few days before the first show.

It rolled through the troupe in a textbook manner. First there was the announcement that one person had tested positive and that everybody should get tested. That's when we discovered Firstborn was positive and started isolating them. The next day the number affected was a handful, the day after that more, and the day after that, who knows. We weren't getting actual numbers from the producers, but it's hard to keep a lid on something like that and before long it was clear the production was in trouble.

Somehow they managed to stitch together that first show. Firstborn was still in isolation and couldn't participate, and apparently there were several understudies thrust into action and more than a few parts shuffled around to ensemble players, but the show must go on and all that. They tried to get a second show on the stage, but in a clear indication that the whole affair was cursed, the lightboard (that is, the control board the techs use to operate the stage lights) fried halfway through. The rest of the shows were canceled and, I assume, and exorcist was called in.

Firstborn's illness was mild; nothing more than a sore throat and a bit of congestion. They were fully vaxed and boosted so I'm sure that played a role. They've had worse colds and made a full and quick recovery.

Incredibly, the rest of us managed to avoid catching it. Our isolation measures were fair, but hardly stringent: Firstborn stayed in their room except for meals (so, perfectly normal teen behavior) and we ate those meals on the patio. I honestly expected at least one of us to get it next--I was almost resigned to it in fact, thus the mediocre isolation efforts--so I can only chalk it up to luck that we didn't.

I guess I'll take whatever luck I can get, but it was a good reminder that things aren't hopeless, not exactly. I realized that, after all this time living under the constant threat of the disease, I had sort of given up. Nobody can stay perfectly vigilant all the time for an extended period, of course. It's too much, mentally, physically, even spiritually, to put up with. Eventually, you start to let your guard down. It's probably impossible to do otherwise. But my vigilance had eroded, bit by bit, so much over the years that I realize I had almost given up entirely.

Every once in a while, you need a little kick in your complacency. I don't expect that we'll return to the extreme efforts of the early days of the disease (I still laugh a little at everything people--including us--were doing back then), but it won't hurt to remember to bring my mask more, to avoid crowds that's it not particularly important to be a part of, stuff like that.

Just thought I'd pop in and share a couple small updates, little things that have gone on around here that didn't compel me to create their own post for (though probably I should have, just for the heck of it). For example:

A Dog's Backstory

We're still trying to figure out the new dog, who's been with us for about four months now. She's terribly sweet and very excitable (at times, too excitable), but every now and again we get a hint of what her life was like before we found her. For example, I think I mentioned that she'd been previously chipped and had clearly been trained. Somebody had put some time in with this dog, though maybe not all of it good time.

She flinches at specific motions, which is concerning. Once we were on a walk and I stopped to pick up a copy of the free weekly newspaper that had just come out. After reading the headlines on the front page, I folded it up and carried it in my off hand. At one point, I must have raised my hand, to stratch my head or something, and she caught the motion out of the corner of her eye and immediately hit the ground. It took me a second to realize she thought I was going to hit her, which was deeply sad. I expect that things like that will diminish over time the more she's with us and we, y'know, don't hit her and stuff, but for now all I guess we can do is reassure her that she's not in any trouble when she reacts like that and hope it gets better.

Another curious thing is her seeming concern every time I go to the bathroom. She might be napping on her bed and I'll get up to relieve myself and when I come out, she'll be laying right in front of the door, as if waiting for me to come out, concerned. She'll get up when she sees that I'm all right and I'll give her a little pat on the head, but I can't help but wonder what happened to her previous owner in a bathroom that makes her do that. Maybe he had a heart attack and died on the toilet (not that I would wish that or anything, but given that I've already decided he was a dog-beater...).

I don't know what makes me think things like that.

Pancakes and lost teeth

The other day we went out to breakfast and a sudden, shocked look came across secondborn's face. He shuffled over to the Wife and opened his mouth, pointing at a tooth that had been loose for a while, and we could see that it was now hanging on by a thread. Apparently he'd been wiggling it with his tongue (like everybody has done since the dawn of time) and popped it out of the socket and it was only holding on by the bit adhering to the gum. "Can you pull it out?"

"Well, not here!" the Wife exclaimed, which seemed correct, so I took him to the bathroom and, with a gentle tug, pulled the thing free. He smiled a bloody little smile, much relieved, and after washing up, we went back to our pancakes. He insisted on showing the waitress, who was good enough to seem interested instead of grossed out, and while that might not have been the weirdest way either kid lost a tooth, it at least had the benefit of being immediately followed up with syrup.

Perforated eardrum

It appears that I have a perforated eardrum. I went to see my doctor about a different matter the other day (I was actually there for a six-month follow-up to my annual visit, but brought up a weird twinge I had just started feeling in the neighborhood of my jaw) and he noticed some wax buildup in my ears and figured might as well do the easy stuff first and ordered an ear lavage. I've had a few of these done in the past and even have some stuff at home to do them myself when I feel a ear getting plugged up (it's that chronic a problem), so I didn't object, but when they squirted the water into the left ear it seems to have torn my eardrum (more on that in a minute) as I distinctly felt some of it hit the back of my throat. Awful, right? I probably should have put a content warning at the top of this post.

Anyway, I went back after a couple days after my ear had a chance to dry out and it wasn't feeling any better, which is when the doctor saw the tear in the eardrum. I admitted that I suspected as much, seeing as after the procudure when I went to blow my nose I could feel air blowing through my ear. The thing is, I've had a tear in that eardrum before and the air thing has happened before. It's possible that I just have a weak point in my eardrum that never quite heals all the way and every now and again something will come along (pressure change, a violent squirt of water, whatever) that aggravates it.

My doctor put through an "urgent" referral to the ENT in our insurance group, I guess hoping that it push my through to the front of the line in his office. The earliest they can see me is in two-and-a-half months. So, yeah, that's not great. We'll see if there's another ENT I can see, but in the meantime, I have an extra hole in my head, which, let's be honest, sounds about right.

Firstborn turned 15 the other day. That's not your typical milestone birthday--it's no 16 or 18 or, for that matter, not even a 13--but it felt like one and it took me a little while to figure out why.

In lieu of a party, a couple friends came over and, as a group, they all went to a small carnival that the city was hosting to celebrate its founding (I want to say it was the 130-something anniversary of that event). We bought all of them wristbands that would get them full access to the rides and games, let them have some money for snacks, and pretty much cut them loose, admonishing them to stay within the few blocks of the carnival and the surrounding downtown area but otherwise letting them run free.

The Wife and I had been talking about doing that sort of thing for a few months, figuring out different ways to let Firstborn exercise some independence while mitigating any associated risk. We had a small trial run a few weeks earlier when, after taking their first AP exam, they joined up with a group of classmates at a restaurant in the mall for a celebratory lunch. That was a huge success: the kids seemed to love just sitting around a table, jawing for a couple hours, ordering their own food, dealing with the server on their own terms, and being responsible for settling the bill without their parents there to just drop a credit card on the table.

The carnival excursion was an extension of the idea, played out over the better part of a day instead of just a lunch. They negotiated group dynamics and did whatever they did. We don't really know what that is; despite our parental instincts, we made a point of staying out of their way (it gave us a chance to shower Secondborn with some attention, which they always crave). What we do know is that the outing was a huge success and Firstborn immediately started planning for the next time.

And that, you've surely guessed by now, was the answer to what made the Wife and I feel this birthday so keenly: our baby was growing apart from us. That had been happening for some time, of course, but it's one thing to know that your kid has a life all their own when they're at school or whatever, and it's a different thing entirely when a key component to them having a good time is that you're not there.

It's almost unforgivably cliche to get maudlin thinking about the times when, as a small child, your kid wanted to do everything with you all the time, when you were the center of their universe and they not only needed you, they wanted to be with you, too. In a lot of ways, we're lucky: even if they don't need us as much anymore, Firstborn has not (yet) gotten to the point that they don't want to be around us at all. In fact, they're still enthusiastic about most family outings and, I think I'm not far off in saying, like hanging out with us.

Just not necessarily all the time. And I'm very much aware, based on the previous paragraph, that I have nothing to complain about; please believe me when I say that I'm not. Our kid still likes us, still talks to us. We're blessed and we know it. But they're still pulling away, even just a little, like they all do, and I don't imagine that ever doesn't hurt.

I'm aware that this has all been a long-winded way of saying that, on the occasion of Firstborn's birthday, we observed that they're growing up. Sorry to have taken up so much of your time using lot of words to state the incredibly obvious. I can only beg your indulgence; it's my first time around this particular block.

My godfather died a couple weeks ago and I've been struggling to process it. Not because we were particularly close, but rather because we weren't and maybe we should have been.

"Should" is probably the wrong word there. In addition to being my godfather, he was also my uncle (my father's older brother), and when we knew each other, I was a little kid. The only thing we had in common, for all intents and purposes, was his son/my cousin, who was my age and who was essentially a brother to me growing up.

I spent a significant percentage of my childhood at their house, for several reasons. First, it was around the corner from my elementary school, so my father dropped me off there every morning on his way to work and picked me up from there when he came home, at least until I was old enough to ride my bike across town instead (back when an eleven-year-old was "old enough" to bike several miles through traffic twice a day). I rarely saw my uncle/godfather on those days, though, usually just to say "hello" as he went out the door to work.

Their house was also strategically located for me and my numerous cousins. For one thing, it was the top of a cul-de-sac, which made it a good place for all of us to get together to play on a weekend or during the summer when we were little and house-bound since the street got no traffic. For another, it was just a couple blocks away from my aunt's house and she had a pool that we spent the majority of every summer in. So, pretty much from the time that I could walk, their house was a gathering spot for a lot of my extended family.

It's probably not surprising when I say his house was the site of many family gatherings. There would often be upwards of twenty or thirty of us gathered in and around it, and on those occasions you could generally find him in one of two places: manning the bar-b-que or puttering around in his garage. While the kids ran around like a gang of hooligans and the other adults mingled about chatting and catching up, he more or less kept to himself, trusting my aunt to take up the role of host (something at which she excelled).

Speaking of keeping to himself, he also owned a piece of property out in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing on this property but trees and an old picnic table and about once a month or so he'd go up there and just, I dunno, be there. Just get away from it all. Sometimes he brought me and my cousin, which sounds like it would be terribly boring for kids, but since it meant we got to shoot BB guns, we were always excited to go.

I remember once when my cousin and I were prowling around the woods there, picking random targets and shooting at them ineffectively. For some reason, we were convinced we could shoot the leaves off trees, which sounds pretty spectacular when you don't really understand how the physics of something like that makes it nearly impossible, so they were our favorite target. One time, while shooting at a leaf, my cousin hit and killed a small bird that we hadn't even seen.

My cousin was so upset when he realized what had happened that he cried the whole way back to that old picnic table where my dad and uncle were sitting. I remember my uncle soothing his son with an awkward mix of compassion (hugging him until he calmed down), logic (reassuring him that it was entirely an accident and not his fault), and humor that fell flat (at one point suggesting that a hunter ought to eat what he killed and recommending that we go find the dead bird). None of those things would have worked on their own, at least not the way he delivered them, but the unique way he combined them was effective. My cousin was sufficiently soothed.

And it was in the process of digging up memories like these, and scores of others, that it hit me. Seeking isolation, extending hospitality to family and friends while leaving the actual role of host up to his wife, awkwardly yet somehow effectively parenting his children through difficult times. Families have a tendency to say silly things like, "Oh, you take after" and then name some distant relative, as if that's how things work, when the truth is some people are simply similar, and I can't help but wonder, had I known my uncle/godfather as an adult, how similar would we have found ourselves? Because the way he is in my memories is a lot like how I am now.

Realizing that made a small part of me sad. I might not take after my uncle godfather, but that doesn't mean that we weren't similar in poignant ways. Was there a figurative trove of wisdom he might have been able to impart on me, specifically? I mean, not actually me, but somebody like me who would talk to people or whatever it is they do.

That's when I realized what was making me sad, not that I had forever lost the specific opportunity my uncle godfather represented, but that, thanks to my broken nature, all of those opportunities will slip by me. I could try to convince you that I was resolving to change my ways, but let's be honest, old dogs and all that. I'm a lost cause.

Firstborn, on the other hand. I see a lot of myself in Firstborn, a lot of the same things I saw in my uncle godfather, and there's still time for them. Now I just gotta come up with some wisdom to impart.

About a month ago, we got a new dog. I know, I should have told you sooner, but I've been busy (I'm sure I've complained about how crazy my schedule gets when we're getting ready to ship a new release at work? Well, it's that time again. New job, same old story.).

Anyway, we have a new dog. We adopted her from our local shelter and, when we went there, we had specific ideas of the kind of dog we were looking for, though it wasn't what you might think. We weren't looking for a specific breed (you don't go to a shelter for that anyway) or even a specific size (though definitely "not too big" was a concern, given our limited backyard space. Really what we were looking for was a hard-luck case.

The Wife and I both volunteered at a shelter when we were young and childless and unable to adopt a pet anyway, so we couldn't be tempted to take them all home (not true, of course; we were tempted all the time, we just couldn't go through with it). In our time there, we saw many animals come through that we knew were wonderful animals that just didn't stand a chance. They were either too old or a misunderstood breed or whatever. All of the volunteers learned to recognize them, and we were all especially happy when we were proven wrong (you were always happy to see an animal get adopted, but you pulled harder for some than others; the puppies were going to go, you didn't have to worry, but you put a little effort in selling that sweet four-year-old Rottweiler mix who would lick your face right off if you let him).

Fortunately, if you want a hard-luck case, the shelter is the place to go (it's the place to go regardless; if you're thinking about getting a pet, go there first, please). We saw three or four who fit the bill right away, and after talking to a couple of the volunteers there who gently pushed us toward one sweet little girl on the list, we agreed on a sort of order. The Wife and I both knew what it meant when volunteers try to sell you on a dog (we'd both done it), so we decided to meet that one first.

While we were waiting in line to arrange it, however, the couple in front of us (they literally got in line 20 seconds before we did) asked for the paperwork to adopt the same dog! They'd been to visit her the previous day, but weren't able to take her home then and the shelter doesn't put animals on hold, so they were relieved to find her still available. We joked with them that we were about to ask about the exact same dog, but we were happy she was going home with somebody, so good for them.

The second dog on our list was a female Pitbull mix, about three years old and marked as needing to go to a single-dog home. That was a lot of marks against her, but, like all pitties who aren't conditioned to be mean, she was sweet and friendly and about as enthusiastic a dog as you'd ever seen. We loved her in an instant and took her home that day.

It's been about a month now and we've learned a few more things about our Agatha (as is our way, we named her after a favorite author, in this case Agatha Christie). For one thing, she definitely used to be somebody else's dog. Not only was she already microchipped (though the info associated with her chip was out of date, so the shelter hadn't been able to locate her previous owner), but she was also clearly trained before. She came to us housebroken (though there were a few accidents the first few days), she knows "sit" and "down" and possibly other commands we haven't discovered yet. It's not surprising; she's terribly smart. She wants nothing quite so much as to sit in your lap, completely oblivious to the fact that she's nearly 50 pounds and doesn't really fit in a lap. She very, very much wants to chase every squirrel and would very much like to meet every other dog and even every other human she encounters, though we haven't let her do either (that "single-dog home" recommendation from the shelter wasn't because she was aggressive with other dogs, but she didn't really seem to get along with them either, so we're holding off on that for a while). Oh, and she's quite afraid of cars. Being in them, hearing them, whatever. She's not a fan.

That made the first few days walking her an adventure. Being a dog in the big city, she was just going to have to get used to hearing cars drive by, but for those first few walks any engine-like noise sent her scrurrying away. Fortunately, we've been able to help her start to get over it through a sustained program of desensitization (not avoiding, and sometimes for short periods seeking out, high traffic areas) and reassociation (giving her treats every time a car goes by). It's worked remarkably well. I suspect she will take to additional training extremely well. I hope so, at least. Because if not, she's eventually going to tear my arm off trying to chase all the squirrels in our neighborhood.

Every now and again, I run across a bit of writing wherein the writer manages to tell you everything you need to know about a character in an incredibly short period of time. A page, a paragraph, even a sentence. I'm always amazed at that.

There's a commercial on TV these days, an iPhone commercial called "Run Baby Run" (if you don't know the one I mean, it's this one) and I'm going to tell you that, were she still alive, it would be my maternal grandmother's favorite thing in the world. Every time it comes on, I hear her laugh, somehow both hearty and raspy, and so honest that it warmed your soul to hear. That's who my grandmother was: that laugh, taking utter joy at that sort of thing.

Well, that and one short story: when he was a teenager dating my mom, my dad dropped by the house to pick her up for a date and she was still getting ready, so he made some kind of offhand remark and my grandmother picked him up off his feet (Grandma was six feet tall), pinned him to a wall, and suggested that he might not want to disrespect her daughter in her house again.

I don't really know why I told you all that. I guess I just miss her, but the next time you see that commercial on TV, imagine a 70-something year-old woman having the time of her life watching that little scamp running around that house. It won't be your grandmother you're imagining, but I figure it can't hurt.

I was just talking about Secondborn's participation in a school play. He had a role with lines and everything and he was taken with it, immediately announcing that he wanted to be in the next one and even the one after that. He didn't even know what the next one was going to be; he didn't care. He'd been bitten by the acting bug.

Meanwhile, in 2020 we tried to get him into our local Little League. He was on a team and they had a few practices and then...well, you know what happened next. It happened to us all: everything stopped. We all hoped that it would be short-lived, that maybe the kids would be able to squeeze in a partial season or something (oh how naive we were), but of course that never happened. So when we were able to sign up this year, he was eager to get back at it.

He had "try outs" a couple weeks ago (and I put that in quotes because, of course, no kid was going to turned away; the try outs were just to make sure the teams ended up balanced, not to actually qualify to play) and was assigned to a team a few days ago. The coach called and left a message to tell Secondborn that he'd pick him for the team and that he was looking forward to the season. Secondborn puffed up with pride: he'd been picked for the team! His first practice is tomorrow and he's really looking forward to it.

The problem arose when the next school play was announced (School House Rocks this time!) and, since we didn't know anything about their respective schedules apart from the fact that there would almost certainly be conflicts, we had a tough decision: try to do everything and run the risk of overscheduling him, or pick one to skip. I wasn't really sure how he would react to either decision and even though no responsible parent lets something like that dictate their decisions, I doubt there are many for whom it's not at least a consideration. And that's not to mention us not wanting to have to run him around from baseball practice to drama practice night after night.

We ultimately decided that we didn't want to put him in a position where he could only partially commit to two things; better that he fully commit to one (or, as I may or may not have put it, "Why have him half-ass two things? He should whole-ass one thing."). What's more, he had already obligated himself to one, so we decided that's what he should do.

To our surprise, he agreed completely. He felt that, since the Little League coach has already picked him for the team that he should stick with that. He hasn't met his team yet, but he doesn't want to let them down. So a win-win: not only is Secondborn inclined to honor his obligations, but we're not going to have to run around like maniacs for the next couple of months.

Secondborn was in a play this past weekend. I probably mentioned the play he was in last year, right? Yeah, I must have (oh, right, here it is), but to recap quickly, it was a production of 101 Dalmations for kids and he was a puppy in the ensemble. He had a lot of fun with it and was immediately on board for this year's production: Cinderella.

Much like 101 Dalmations, Cinderella had an ensemble (mice instead of puppies), the purpose of which is to make parts available to every kid who wants to participate. Each play might only have a handful of speaking parts, but the ensemble could be as big as it needed to be. Everybody could get on stage.

Secondborn was initially cast as part of the ensemble, which disappointed him a tiny amount, but he understood that speaking roles typically went to older kids who had shown they were responsible enough to take it seriously, learn their lines, etc. We assured him that if he stuck with it, he'd get a speaking part one day, too.

That day turned out to be later that week as the director came to him and asked if he wanted to have the part of the king. It seems the kid originally cast had to drop out or something, and Secondborn was the next choice for the role. He jumped at the chance, promising that she could trust him to memorize all his lines and everything.

It was a good part for him to cut his teeth on: limited stage time (all his lines were in the second half) and a manageable number of lines. Plus, the role was a bit comedic, a good-natured goof you couldn't but love even while you laughed at him, much like Secondborn himself.

They practiced for weeks. He walked around the house singing the songs to the point that all of us got "Bippity Boppity Boo" stuck in our heads. He ran lines with his grandfather, who gave him tips on his delivery. He assured us he was as ready as ready can be, but of course, like parents do, we worried. Would he get stage fright? Miss a cue? Flub a line?

We needn't have bothered. He not only nailed every line, he was one of the few kids who delivered them (as opposed to simply saying them). And he had a ball. He's already talking about next year's play.

I find it truly strange that not one but both of my kids have gotten into the theatre. I was in a play in elementary school--I'm sure most kids are--and I liked most aspects of it, just not so much the actual performance part. I've never had any interest in being the center of attention (or even center-of-attention adjacent), so how I managed to spawn a pair of would-be actors is beyond me. Must be the Wife's genes.

But hey, if they like it, all I can say is, "All hail the King."