Snow Day

It finally snowed. We were a bit worried there for a while. When you travel 1200 miles to play in the snow and there's no snow, it's not fun. We didn't get a lot of snow, and it didnt' stay for long, but it was enough. Enough for snow men and a snowball fight (which I totally won, it's good being the dad) and sledding and snow angles. It was finally slick enough for my son to do doughnuts on Papa's four wheeler which he'd been talking about constantly for months. The dog was slightly terrified of it at first but soon decided that her imaginary hunting was even cooler in the snow. Even she had a wonderful time.

Snow Angel

The kids only really get this one opportunity each year to see and experience snow. The little snow that we get in East Texas doesn't stick, so it doesn't count. Seeing snow fall isn't the same as playing in snow. My inlaws maintain a huge stock of winter clothing just for our visit. They have cast off boots and coats and snow pants and mittens from all over town. Years ago we started with small sizes and we've worked our way up over the years. When we go everything will go back into the bin and into the attic to wait for us next year. We'll go back to Texas and the kids will tell their friends at school about this wonderful season of legend. Winter.

Books for the last two weeks:
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Evolution of Useful Things - Henry Petroski
Brave New World is considered a classic that nobody ever made me read in highschool or college so I thought I'd give it a try. It is a good story, and I mostly liked it. When I read it though I couldn't get over the idea the Huxley was a whiney kid who just kept telling you how important his ideas were and how bad human nature is and why won't you just listen? I can't tell if my first view of this is correct or not. It's possible that this book has had a large enough impact in the past (it was published in 1932) that it's cynical ideas about human nature and technology have become integrated enough into popular culture that they seem like old hat and not worth really whining about to quite the degree that he does. I suspect that the book was pretty shocking in 1932. I'm going to read it again in the future and see if I feel the same about it.
Useful Things, oh Petroski, how I want to love your books. The subjects are near and dear to my heart. I want to become fully engaged and not put them down, but I can't. In large parts of the book I feel like I'm reading a technical paper. That's fine when I'm actually reading a technical paper, but it makes reading a book a tiring process. Petroski does what he says he'll do and he really does go into the history of useful things like paper clips and needles and forks and those histories are interesting. I drove my family nuts at dinner with a 5 minute description of why forks are like they are and how they got that way. For that I'm forever grateful. I'd love to sit down with Petroski and buy him a beer and chat. I'm not sure I'll be picking up more of his books though.



Hot Cocoa

Winter and snow and hot cocoa. They cannot be separated. One is cold and wonderful, the other warm and delicious.

Hot Cocoa - From the Hershey's Cocoa Container
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa
Dash salt
1/3 cup hot water
4 cups milk
3/4 tsp vanilla
Mix the sugar, cocoa, salt and water. Heat over medium heat until boiling, stirring constantly. Boil for two minutes, don't stop stirring. Add milk, heat to desired temperature, still stirring. Don't let it boil. Boiling is bad for the milk. You just want it warm enough to be enjoyable as hot chocolate. Add vanilla and stir. Add marshmallows, whipped cream, a little chocolate syrup on top, whatever strikes your fancy. Enjoy. Makes 6 or so servings of hot cocoa that is way better than any instant you can buy. If you have leftovers, never fear, you can put it in a container and put it in the fridge. You have just made outstanding chocolate milk.

If you live somewhere cold, go outside. Go sledding or skiing or throw a few snowballs around. Drop down and make a snow angel. Getting cold and then warming up with hot chocolate is one of the best parts of the season. Savor it.

Hot Dog

My wife has a sore back.
My wife has a dog that loves her.
My in laws have a hot tub.
My wife can either be in the hot tub to ease her aching back, or she can be with her loving dog for a calming lap sitting and petting session. She cannot have both of these things at the same time.
Continuing my theme of giving human voices to animals, I think the dog's internal dialogue went something like this:
I'm lonely.
I wish I could sit with the nice lady.
Where is the nice lady?
Oh, she's over there.
I've never seen her there before.
I'll just hop up on the chair to have a look.
She looks lonely like me.
I'll just hop up there and climb on her lap.
OH MY GOD!
WATER!
I HAVE TO GET OUT!
I'll just step there!
OH MY GOD!
WHY ARE THERE BUBBLES NOW!
HELP ME!
Thank you for turning off the bubbles.
Can I get out?
Why not?
Why are you calling the grumpy guy? He's not going to like this.
Why is he laughing?
Where is he going? Isn't he going to help? I just want to jump out.
Why is he taking my picture? What's wrong with him?
Oh thank god, he's lifting me out.
He's drying me off.
Thank you grumpy guy.
I don't know what happened, but I swear, I will never jump in there again.
Unless I forget.
Where is the nice lady?

Tee-Tee Cakes

Due to a unique birthing schedule in our family Christmas day is followed by three straight days of birthdays. To compound the insanity of celebrating four days in a row (five if you include Christmas eve) we have rather elaborate birthday rituals. We are at least four generations into this on my wife's side so there's nothing I can really do about it at this point. The birthday person gets such benefits as choosing the menu for the day (all meals), the type and size of cake, and other family recreation for the day. The house gets decorated with ribbons and signs and balloons designating the chair of the birthday person. We also create elaborate multi step scavenger hunts with rhyming clues leading to presents for those that wish to have a challenge on their special day. Honestly, there is so much to write about, that I need to break this post up into several posts that will explain bits and pieces of it as further birthdays happen.
To start things off, I'll explain the concept of tee-tee cakes. We always have two cakes at birthdays, one for the family, and one for the birthday person. The family cake can be as large and elaborate as the Great Wall of China (a project involving three 13x9 cakes extending over 4 feet long) to something as simple as a round double layer cake frosted and decorated as directed. The personal cake is always made in a round 5 inch pan and frosted as directed. These small cakes were christened tee-tee cakes some years ago by a toddler and have more or less held onto that designation. As a parent they are a spectacular way to get those all important pictures of a baby eating cake. As a kid, well, you get your own cake, how awesome is that?

Why Santa, why?

I wonder about this Santa guy, I really do. He's usually right on, gets mostly what you want (maybe too many socks) knows what colors you like, and is pretty lenient with the whole naughty/nice thing. He's always on time, does a good job wrapping and does a good job with fairness. All of that is great. The other thing he does, which was awesome as a kid but is terrifying as a parent, is get you things that your parents never would. As a kid it was things like BB guns and video games and boxing gloves. This year Santa hit a new high by bringing my son a pair of jumping stilts. This is something that I would clearly never buy my son. Even with good health insurance, these seem like a terrible idea. Who even designs these things? Who decides that what they really need to do to have fun is be 12 inches taller and bouncy? Who then decides to make them for children? I'm not admitting who first saw them on a youtube video and said "Look at these!" and put the idea in his head. It would be too easy to asign blame if I did. He's really a coordinated kid, he learned to ride a bicycle at three and holds the house pogostick record at over 1000 bounces. It's probably fatherly pride thinking that he's unusually coordinated, but he's like a different species than I was at that age. Or still am at this age to be honest. If ever I've met a kid who could use these, then it's him. Even with all of that he was pretty nervous  when staring to walk on them and was leaning pretty heavily on me. He wasn't sure he was going to be able to figure them out. That quickly melted away and within 10 minutes he was not only walking around in them, he was running. At this point his only limitation is his weight. He's at the bottom end of the weight range for them so he doesn't get much bounce. That's probably ok. They're good for up to 110 pounds and I can imagine that things will get much bouncier and crazier as his weight and athleticism increases.
Maybe, just maybe, I can understand what Santa was thinking when he had his elves make up a pair of these for my son. In the future though, he should really include a map to the hospital with gifts like this.
I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas.

Oh Christmas Tree

According to the National Christmas Tree Association, American families bought 27 million Christmas trees at a cost of $928 million dollars in 2010 (the last year for which data is available). Almost a billion dollars on trees that were grown for 5-15 years just to be cut down and used as an oversize living room centerpiece for a month or two. Worth every penny I say.

I spent six summers of my misguided youth pruning Christmas trees. Lovingly shaping that year's scraggly growth into the perfect cone. Fighting against double tops and crooked trunks to make a tree that would cause a family to lovingly look upon it and say "can you believe they just grow so perfectly?" The tree pruner, the hidden hero of Christmas. Because I personally shaped tens of thousands of trees over the years, I have a pretty good idea of what a good tree looks like. I'm a hard man to please and sort of a miserable one to accompany on a tree hunting expedition. On the small tree farm we visit near our house I usually check out every tree multiple times before making my choice. We hike around and around in circles before I declare one the perfect tree and cut it down. We then drag it back to the truck like the trophy that it is, cheering wildly over our kill. We have a dark secret in our family though, our tree will never see Christmas!

We celebrate Christmas with relatives 1200 miles from our house. A journey that long requires a long stay to make it worthwhile, so we have to take the tree down before we leave. It's a little weird getting a tree right after thanksgiving and taking it down before it ever sees a present, but it makes our home happy. We get to hang up ornaments made at school and given from relatives. We get to turn on Christmas carols and wrap the lights around the tree. We get to yell at the dog to stop drinking the tree water. If we missed those things, if we just relied on someone else's tree for our Christmas joy, we really would be missing out on part of Christmas. It might not make a whole lot of sense, but it does make a lot of people happy.

No post tomorrow, family time.

No book reports this week either, I'll get to them next week.

Have a very Merry Christmas.

Fake Kabobs

This is more of a story about how an engineer thinks of cooking than actual cooking itself. Come along for the ride. If you think that math and cooking should be separate, and you have no desire to look into how my brain works, just skip ahead to the picture.
I like kabobs. Any meat on a stick cooked over an open fire is ok by me. They are sort of a pain to cook though. I can understand them if you've just butchered something and you have bits of meat laying around and you need to do something with them. By all means, stab away and get to cooking. But if you live in a world where you buy your meat at the store, you usually end up buying a big piece of meat, cutting it up, and reassembling it on sticks to cook. I've done this a lot, but I eventually had to ask myself what's the point? Why are kabobs better than just cooking a steak? Why are they worth the work? Surface area, that's why. The outside of a steak is always the best part and by cutting the steak up before you cook it, you gain a lot of surface area, and thereby, a lot of extra flavor.
So let's do a math problem, engineering style. You start with a piece of meat that is 4 inches by 6 inches by 1.5 inches, perfect for two hungry people. You have a surface area of (6x4)x2+(6x1.5)x2+(4x1.5)x2=78 square inches of perfect flavor on the outside. Now, if you cut that meat into strips half an inch wide, and 1.5 inches long so you get rectangles 1.5x1.5x.5 perfect for kabobs, you increase your area by (6x1.5)x7+(4x1.5)x3=81 square inches. You more than double the surface are from 78 to 159 square inches! More than twice the yummy flavor! No wonder I love them so much. It almost makes it worth all of the spearing to get them on the little kabob sticks. Almost.
I wondered though, what if I just left them in the 6 inch strips, what if I didn't make the final cut? Then I could just lay them on the grill and they wouldn't fall through and I wouldn't have to spear them. How much would I be giving up? Only the area of the final cuts which is (4x1.5)x3 or 18 square inches. This brought me down to 141 square inches, not quite double the flavor are of my original steak and only about 11% less than if I went through all of the real kabobing work. That's a cost benefit analysis I can get behind.
I've stopped spearing my meat on sticks, so I'm not actually making kabobs any more. I'm just marinating and cooking meat. They still sort of look like kabobs, and they taste like kabobs.They're fake kabobs.

Impress your friends and teach them geometry!

Midwestern style Fake Kabobs

I want to first apologize to all real kabob cultures. Those of us from the Midwest don't flavor our kabobs in any way that makes sense. We use Italian dressing. It's yummy. Sorry about that.

Chuck roast, about 1.5 inches thick, cut into 1/2 inch strips.

Italian dressing.

Put the meat in the dressing for 2-5 hours. Take the meat out. Cook it on the grill. Be amazed that such a simple meal gets compliments. Bask in those compliments.

You can use any Italian dressing that you find at the store. I make mine. Not because I feel that making it is necessarily better, but because it's easy and I always have the stuff around. Italian dressing is nothing more than vinegar, water, oil, sugar, salt, and some other spices. Sometimes I use an actual recipe, sometimes I just throw it together in amounts that make sense. If you've never made Italian dressing before I suggest searching the internet for a recipe, it's easier to accidentally make it bad than good.

If your kids ever struggle with their geometry and complain that they'll never use this stuff in real life, just point them over to this post. Life doesn't get any more real than this.



Kittens

When we first moved into our house there were a lot of stray cats around. Feral cats is probably the more accurate term. They didn't want anything to do with you, didn't want you near them, were truly wild cats. Even knowing that, we always talked nice to them and tried to befriend them for no reason that makes any sense. I suppose it's the same instinct that has me talk nicely to squirrels when they're on the path in front of me when I run. "Move over little squirrel, I don't want to smush you," I may have problems with anthropomorphising animals. A few times though, we did have cats that responded to us in a way that indicated that they understood that they were cats and we were humans and we could be friends. One of these cats was Heroin Cat. She was a very small grey tiger cat that had some significant psychological problems. She could never resolve her conflicting feelings of absolute terror at the sight of people and her undying love for anyone that showed her affection. As a result of this inner turmoil she would run up to you and then run back and then meow and then run back and then rub against your leg and then run away all while shaking like she was on day three of significant drug withdrawl. That's how she earned her name. We thought of her as a street cat down on her luck who was just trying to keep clean. She was Heroin Cat.

Hanging out in a pile of car parts.

Like many disadvantaged girls in her position, she ended up knocked up. She got rounder and rounder and her running became slower and slower. We put some old towels on the old couch in the garage she had been sleeping on to try and make her as comfortable as possible. We checked every morning to see how things were going. One morning we found her there in the garage with two babies on the couch and two off, looking very very confused about what she'd done and how to reunite her brood. We moved them all to a box on the floor to prevent any more gravity induced separations. The kittens grew and became very friendly. The garage and the yard were their playground and they prospered. We handled them every day and they were always very excited to see us. In fact, that was their downfall.

After about eight weeks, Heroin Cat disappeared. Maybe she thought she'd done all she could for the kittens, maybe she heard about a big score and it all went wrong, we'll never know. It didn't seem to bother the kittens too much as they were thoroughly in love with us. They were always there when we opened the door and were always excited to hear the car drive in. They were so excited in fact that they'd run to the driveway and force me to stop so I didn't run them over. It was annoying but they were cute. Until they got too fast that is. I'd drive into the driveway and close the gate. I'd pull forward and not see any kittens, or I'd see them playing by the garage. Knowing I was in the clear, I'd pull forward. Only after I'd parked I'd find that a kitten had done a sneak attack on the car and I didn't see it. We lost three of the kittens that way and each time it was horrible. I tried to console myself with the knowledge that I did everything I could, I did watch, I did pay attention, but if you can't see them, you can't know to stop. It worked fine on an intellectual level, but my heart broke a little each time.

Once there was only one kitten left, it became a little less sure of itself, a little less friendly. It was only a few more weeks before that one disappeared too. Not under a tire this time, but to a neighborhood dog or an owl or one of the other maladies that made being an outside cat in our neighborhood such a precarious existence. I like to think that during those months that we had Heroine Cat and her kittens around we made their lives a little better, a little happier than they might have been. They certainly did that for us.



Lunch Tacos

It's possible that my three year old is a genius. I know lots of parents think that about their kids, and the mere act of declaring it to society virtually guarantees that your child is not, in fact, a genius. There's some sort of law of bragging going on. Even though I know that I'm probably dooming my son to a life of mediocrity, bear with me.


Make this, it's wonderful.

One of the staples of lunch at my house is tacos. They're not really tacos. Tacos have a lot of variety in their native lands, but not this much. We cheat the culture of tacos and declare that anything made on a tortilla is a taco. We do eat actual tacos with taco meat and cheese and lettuce and all things considered taco, but we also eat peanut butter and jelly tacos, nutella tacos, turkey and cheese tacos, and honey tacos. The kids are always trying different things to see how they taste and quite frankly, I suspect, to see if they can weird me out to the point where I refuse their request. The weirdest taco they consistently call for has to be peanut butter and Kraft American cheese. They claim they love it. It's weird.

So the other day when I had a request for nutella and blueberry jelly, it didn't even phase me. I didn't think much of it until my son was too full to finish his second one and left two bites on his plate. I don't like blueberries, not even a little, but I hate to throw food away so I popped it in. It was fantastic. Just an absolutely brilliant combination of flavors and textures. The boy had hit a jackpot. I doubt he meant to concoct something so incredible but he did.

He might have more in him, or he might have hit his culinary peak at the ripe old age of three, but he has left his mark on the world of food.

Art Student

I just got a new lens for my camera and I'm very excited. I've pretty much always just had point and shoot cameras. They work fine, you push the button and you get a picture. It can be better or worse depending on the camera, but you could never tell who shot the picture. The camera did all of the work, made all of the decisions, and there wasn't much you could do to change how the pictures were taken. Two months ago I bought a Panasonic Lumix GF-3, which is a fancy schmancy micro 4/3 camera where you can change a bunch of settings on the camera and you can even change the lenses. I played with the settings a fair amount and read some articles and advanced my knowledge of photography a bit, but I'd hit a wall and I wasn't really happy with what I could do. The camera was too damn smart. It wouldn't let me push the shooting parameters into inappropriate territory and see what happened. What to do?

I bought a very cheap lens, so cheap that the box says 'toy lens'. The lens is all manual and I actually have to tell my camera that it's shooting without a lens to even make it work. I control the aperture (how big the hole is that lets in the light) and the focus all by myself. I still let the camera decide how long the exposure needs to be because it does a really good job, thought I could do that too if I wanted too.

 So now I'm taking pictures like an art student. If you bought a camera that took pictures like this you'd call it a piece of junk and return it. I'm messing with depth of field and composition and all of the stuff that you'd hear pretentious art students talk about as they smoke their hand rolled cigarettes and complain about how society doesn't appreciate their vision. I do think that talented photographers are talented, but I also think that most of what separates their pictures from the snapshots I've shot all of my life is good equipment and a knowledge of how to use it. I think this is true of most things by the way, whether person is a photographer or a mechanic or a steel fabricator. The knowledge of most professions is open to most people if they want to chase it down. I really like to chase it down, at least to a point. So feel free to complain about the silly photos I'm posting for a while until either win a Pulitzer for photography or get it out of my system. I'll probably tell you that your criticism is wrong, you just don't understand my art.

Under the Hood

Every road trip really starts with a check under the hood, and that job usually falls to the man of the house. Basically you're checking fluid levels. Making sure that everything is where it should be. There's not really much else to do under there, it's not like you're going to notice the alternator is falling off or anything. If it's visible to the naked eye when you open the hood, then something has gone terribly wrong. I do it anyway and it gives a sense of security to the whole undertaking. There are some modes of transportation that legitimately warrant a walk around before a trip. I like to imagine myself checking the shoes on my horse or the rigging on my schooner or the propeller on my plane. Those all seem more constructive than checking the wiper fluid. Everything checks out, my stamp of approval has been given, the journey may commence. It's serious business.

Looks good.

A friend of my wife told her yesterday that he's always nervous when our family makes a cross country trip. If something terrible happens, it happens to the whole family. It's a concern I suppose. If we split up then theoretically some of us would get caught up in whatever catastrophe unfolded and the rest of us could just come upon the scene later. I do kind of like the idea of a convoy.  We'd need CBs of course. And cool names, like Big Daddy and Mamasita. I'd have to say 10-4 and Roger a lot. This sounds much cooler to me than to my wife. I volunteered to drive separately by myself to test out the convoy theory. As usual, my wife didn't think my idea was quite as awesome as I did. I was really quite excited about it. Hey, I'm just looking out for the family here.

Juggling fool

I juggle. I really like juggling. Someday I'll write a post all about the path I took learning to juggle and how it opened me up as a person. Today, I'm going to explain that picture over there and the cut on my chin and how I managed to cut my face three days before my wife's company Christmas party. The only day of the year where I get really dressed up and leave my kids at home and work hard to impress my wife's coworkers. With a cut. On. My. Face.
When you get a cut on your elbow or shin or finger you just put a bandaid on it and go about your life. Unless it's a pretty epic cut, nobody even notices. When you get a cut on your face, people notice. Anything bigger than a shaving nick compels people to start a conversation about it. It would really be ok if I could just explain that I was saving my family from a bear. Or perhaps that I was hit by a piece of flying automotive trim as I pried open a car door with my bare hands in order to save a woman and her small child after an auto accident before their car exploded. I'd even settle for being hit by shrapnel from a stray bullet when I was stopping a robbery in progress at the grocery store. All of those would be awesome excuses for the cut on my chin. With what I'm facing, I'd even go with something like falling off a ladder while stringing Christmas lights. Not awesome, but at least a touch, a hint, of manliness.
But no, I have a cut on my chin as a result of a juggling accident. I wanted to learn how to juggle clubs last year but was too cheap to buy them. I decided that I could just cut pieces of PVC pipe to length and juggle those instead, after all, before clubs, jugglers used to juggle plain sticks. It actually works great and I've learned to juggle them quite well. Their only downside is that the ends are a bit sharp and it hurts when they hit you. In the beginning this compelled me to wear shoes when I juggled, but I've gotten good enough that I don't even bother with that any more. I've gotten a bit cocky about juggling safety, really. So the other day when I was trying to match a double flip with one hand with a behind the back/over the shoulder throw with the other, I was quite surprised to find myself all crossed up and hit squarely in the chin with a fast moving piece of PVC pipe. I put my hand on the owie and came away with blood, confirming that yes, that was going to leave a mark.
So tonight, when I'm all dressed in my suit, with my new Santa Claus bow tie, next to my beautiful wife, someone is going to ask me why I have a cut on my face.
"Juggling accident."
It's going to be a fun night.

Books I finished this week:
The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine, MD
The Male Brain, Louann Brizendine, MD
Dr. Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist at UC San Francisco and the founder of the Women's and Teen Girl's Mood and Hormone Clinic. She's got some serious credentials and is the rare academic who can talk about a subject that she's an expert in on a level that normal people can understand. The books are awesome. Male and female brains are different, structurally and chemically different. Boys and girls, men and women, aren't actually the same, mentally, despite what we've all been told. There is a big difference between the sexes being equal, which they are or should be, and being the same. I think those two concepts have gotten very mixed up. These two books go through the development and differences between the female and male brain from conception through old age. It covers the hormones that drive the structural changes that start in the womb and continue into adolescence and all the way to death. It probably won't tell you anything about yourself that you don't already know, or about your spouse for that matter if you've been paying any attention. As a dad though, it will help you understand the mysteries of adolescence that your kids have coming up. Whether it's the mysteries of teen girls that you never did understand, or the confusing times that you lived though. You get a better feel for what's happening to their brains and why. It might not make it easier, but hopefully it will provide a bit of insight when your teen starts sleeping until noon or no longer wants to speak to you. As a husband, it will also confirm that your wife is actually a different human day to day, and there's a logical, biological, reason for that. These books are a quick read, I got them on Friday and was done by Sunday. I don't think I can recommend them enough, put them at the top of your list. Whether you're a man or a woman, you'll come away with a new understanding of the other sex as well as your own.
Edit of the book review: My wife read The Male Brain and now she's running around hugging our sons as much as she can before they're repulsed by her touch. The book has given her quite a complex. Not sure how that's going to work out. 

Buckeyes - my wife loves me

Spouses show their love in different ways. Some with expensive gifts. Some with lavish travel. Some with heartfelt poetry. My wife shows me she loves me by making me Buckeyes every Christmas.

Buckeyes
1 1/2 cups creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla
4 cups powdered sugar
6 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips or the chocolate of your choice
2 tbs shortening

Cover a cookie sheet with waxed paper. Mix the peanut butter, butter, vanilla and powdered sugar to form a smooth stiff dough of sorts. Shape the dough into 60-120 small balls and put them on the cookie sheet. Size them somewhere between a shooter marble and slightly smaller than a golf ball. The size is really up to you, I like them small so I can just pop them in my mouth and not feel like too much of a glutton. Melt the chocolate and shortening together over a hot water bath, stir until smooth. Take the chilled balls out of the fridge and harpoon them with a toothpick one at a time. Dip them into the melted chocolate and return to the wax paper. Return to the fridge for a half hour to set up. You probably don't have to keep them refrigerated but I like to. I think they're better that way.

You could probably technically consider these some sort of no bake cookie. Though, with no flour in sight, that might be a stretch. Really, they're a candy, sort of a home made peanut butter cup. They're delicious and I love them. My kids keep calling them buckyballs. I think it's because I recently tried to explain that carbon has a bunch of different allotropes. That is, the same element can have radically different qualities depending on how it is arranged, even though it's still the same stuff. Carbon is still carbon if it's a diamond, or graphite, or Buckminsterfullerene, (more commonly called Buckyballs) it's just arranged differently. My kids understood diamond and graphite, but I sort of lost them on Buckyballs, or C-60. I tried and tried to explain it to them, but they just couldn't picture it. From now on when I'm having trouble getting a concept across I'm going to say "It's like I'm trying to explain Buckminsterfullerene to a five year old here!" I could make buckeyes myself, but if I did that, how would my wife show me that she loves me as much as she does?

Patty - our dog

Last November, on a Sunday, my wife and I took the kids for an innocent hike in the woods. The idea was to run them around for an hour or two and show them nature and have an enjoyable family experience. Bring them home, feed them lunch, put the little kids down for a nap and achieve a few hours of peace in the afternoon. Family bonding and recharging for the coming week. It was a great plan. Instead, we got a dog. 

We did go for the hike and we did have a nice family day in the woods. On the very last section of the trail as it loops around toward the parking lot, you could almost see the truck, the kids ran ahead and then yelled back to us. They had found a dog, and she was just laying there, rolled on her back. If they moved away from her she would get up and take a few steps to get close to them and then roll over again in a spectacular sign of submissiveness. When my wife and I got there she was still upside down, and very very skinny. It was immediately clear that eating had been on her doggy to-do list for a while and she hadn't been able to get to it. She was alone, in the forest, a long way from anywhere, no collar, starving. The intellectual part of me wanted to walk on by, maybe check for her skeleton in a year as an example to the kids that dogs aren't quite like wolves in their survival ability. That's what my brain wanted to do. My wife, who is the greater part of my conscience, wanted to take the poor starving creature home. I met half way and said that if she followed us then we could take her. Nobody was happy with my compromise, especially when she just laid in the path with sad eyes as we faded into the distance. It wasn't clear if she was too weak to walk, or if her spirit was just too broken. I suspect that she had come to accept her fate as being abandoned by humans. She was wrong. We all turned around and my wife picked her up and carried her back to the truck. I tried to stay as grumpy as I could, but I was as willing a party in this as anyone.

At this point in the story I feel like I need to explain that I actually do like dogs. I really like dogs in fact. Dogs are nice and they wag their tails and they snuggle with you and love you unconditionally and can truly make a dark day sunny. I just don't want one. Dogs are great for kids, they teach them responsibility and how to treat animals with respect and to take the care of an animal seriously. I still don't want one. Both of my parents are veterinarians, I grew up with, and taking care of dogs. We always had dogs. I had 'my own' dog when I was a kid. A beagle who was my best friend and who went rabbit hunting with me every chance we had. I've had my fill of the responsibilities and time commitments of dogs. I want to leave for the day, or two days, or a week and not have to worry about either finding someone to take care of them, or taking them with me. I don't want to be on a trip and have to leave someone in the car with it running with the AC on so I can go into the store without the dog dying of heat stroke. I want to be able to go to the beach and not have to pick up poop. I don't want a dog. I know what it takes for me to be the kind of dog owner I feel like I need to be, and I do not want a dog.

So now I have a dog. I'd love it if this was one of those stories where the dog was perfect and we all lived happily every after. She's not perfect, and we continue to live tenuously ever after. At first she only sort of understood not peeing in the house. We sorted that out for the most part in the first few weeks but it took her months more to learn about going pee before bed. She didn't really want to go outside when she thought it was bed time. When you tried to convince her to go out, she got suspicious and then was way too paranoid to pee. Which brings me to her next problem. She has some serious male authority figure issues. If I even talked to her sternly, she'd roll over and pee on herself. Yes, I know this is a sign of submission and it's involuntary on her part, but she still peed all over herself every time I tried to discipline her. This meant that if she had an accident during the day, and I pointed out to her that it was bad, she would compound the issue by flipping over and peeing. Of course she was stuck to the floor and I couldn't get her to stand and walk outside, so I had to pick her up which only terrified her more and she dribbled a trail of pee all the way to the door. It was great.

After a year,  things are pretty well sorted out, she knows to ask to go outside, even if she is subtle and timid about it. She knows to ask to come back in, and she's much more vocal about that. I can talk her into going outside without her peeing all over me in terror and my wife and her have a great evening routine where she goes outside and pees immediately. She's fantastic with the kids and my wife loves her. She and I still have a cautious friendship. She can't entirely trust men. We've concluded that we found her in the woods because someone dumped her there. She had a very bad relationship with whatever male she was living with and will probably never be completely able to get over it. 

I still don't want a dog, even this one. I've tried and tried to give her away, but no takers. I think this is mostly because whenever I try, my kids and my wife all yell "nooooooooooo". So we're pretty much stuck with her. If you have to be stuck with a dog, I guess she's not too bad.

Christmas Cookies

Sometimes baking is about the food, and sometimes it's about the experience.  Christmas cookies are firmly in the second camp. In fact, they're so far into the second camp that I don't even think it's necessary to put down a recipe. Christmas cookies transcend recipes. There are good sugar cookie recipes, and there are better sugar cookie recipes and there are even great sugar cookie recipes. You can even buy sugar cookie dough in a can, and just this one time, I'd approve. You need cookie cutters, but don't worry too much about having a lot. If you have the basic Christmas tree and snowman and candy cane you're set. Pick up a few more at summer garage sales for cheap. It's pretty easy to get more shapes than you know what to do with before long. Roll your cookies, cut them out, bake them and let them cool. Buy frosting or make it. I will say that homemade butter cream frosting is much better than anything you can buy, so I do think it's worth the few minutes to make it. And you need sprinkles, so many sprinkles. You can't have too many sprinkles.

Butter Cream Frosting, for everything, but especially for Christmas Cookies.
From Betty Crocker's New Cookbook
3 cups powdered sugar (sifted before measuring for super smooth frosting)
1/3 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 to 2 tablespoons milk
Mix powdered sugar and butter in a medium bowl. Stir in vanilla and milk. The more you mix it and the more air you add, the smoother it is to spread. Divide into smaller bowls and add food coloring for your blues and greens and what not. This recipe is also for frosting for cakes. It will frost a basic single cake or a round double cake. It's the best frosting for everything. You could frost your cat with this and it would be delicious.

We had 8 children between the ages of 3 and 11 making cookies in the kitchen this past Sunday. We frosted a double batch of cookies with a double batch of frosting. It was sugar fueled artistic chaos. It's as much fun as coloring Easter eggs but the payoff is greater, cookies are even better than egg salad. Christmas cookies are about the tradition, the gathering, the sending cookies to friends and loved ones. Co-workers of my wife's always love cookies that are clearly hand made by children, even if it means picking more hair out of the frosting than you typically have to with store bought cookies. Quite frankly, Christmas cookies are one to the best parts of Christmas.
I'm the Scroogiest person in our family and even I love Christmas cookies. Make them, eat them, love them, remember them always.

Continuous Snuggle

Since I was about 10, afghans have never quite been big enough. They would stretch from your toes to your chest or your knees to your neck or if you put them at a diagonal and stretched them you could sometimes get all of you under them, but it was work. Taking a nap on the couch in winter was always an exercise in tucking the scant edges under you so you wouldn't be woken up with cold toes or elbows or an icy butt. If there were two people on the couch you were forced to snuggle or fight for warmth. Snuggling is ok, except for when you're 12 and your sister is 10 and punching her and stealing the afghan and leaving her to freeze seems much reasonable than sitting next to her. If there were more than two people, forget it, someone was going to be cold.
Since I didn't knit as a kid, this was something I couldn't fix, afghans were just too short. It was like wishing for a bigger bedroom, or a bigger back yard, or a turbocharged go-kart. You knew all of those things were theoretically possible, and when you were a grown up, you'd have them, but for now it was all just wishing. Well, I'm a grown up now. I have the biggest bedroom in the house, because I built it. My backyard in Texas isn't so big, but the one in Michigan is big enough that I need to carry a compass so I don't get lost. I don't have a turbocharged go-kart, yet, but plans are in place. As for the Afghan, I've fixed that problem too.

Warmth for all.

I first learned to crochet simple stitches when I was 8 or 9. I made a few washcloths and left it at that. It was fun but washcloths are small and afghans are big and my attention span was much closer to washcloth size than afghan size. It wasn't until a few years ago that I decided to dust off the hooks and get back to work. I didn't start with the intention of making a huge afghan, it just turned out that way. I searched on youtube for videos on how to crochet and learned a bunch of different stitches. The one I liked best is the tunisian stitch. The stitch is very repetitive and very orderly and really appealed to my engineer brain. I learned the stitch and made a doll afghan, it was fun. Working the tunisian stitch for a hour was like meditation, very calming. I also learned to knit and made a few test panels in the hope that I could knit an afghan and socks and a sweater and possibly a car cover. Sadly I  found out that my non functional index finger (long story) made knitting difficult. I pulled out my tunisian hook and decided that I was going to solve my long running afghan problem once and for all. No longer would I be a slave to old ladies and their tiny afghans. I would make a giant manly afghan.
It took me 13 skeins of yarn. It's seven feet by five and a half feet. It will cover the whole family at one time when you cram us all on the couch for a massive continuous snuggle. You can take a nap under it and have so much extra warmth around you that nothing gets cold. Nothing. It took me somewhere around 120 hours of crocheting to finish. This time was spread out over a year and a half. I could have done it in much less time but it's hard to convince yourself that you want to flop an ever growing afghan on your lap and get some work done when it's hot out, and it's hot out a lot in Texas. Which begs the question, do I really need a super awesome afghan in Texas? Yes, because now that I'm the dad I control the thermostat in winter. In true dad fashion I grumble and turn it down and tell everyone to put on a sweater. The cold season may be short, but in our house,  I make sure that it is felt by all.
I might have made the greatest afghan ever. Serously, ever.
Come and visit and snuggle under that sucker and tell me I'm wrong.

Recovery

A few weeks ago I went off to the woods to spend time alone. I do this every year during Michigan's deer season. It's sort of about hunting, but it's more about resting and resetting my brain. It really only takes two days, and then I'm quite recovered from anything that may have happened in my life in the last year. At the end of the third day I'm feeling lonely. By the end of the fourth day I'm desperate to return to my wife and kids. Some guys go to Vegas with their buddies or on a fishing trip to Canada or rock climbing with friends. We all recharge in our own way, being alone in the woods is mine. I'm very grateful that my wife understands and encourages this. I return calm, serene and ready to be the ultimate zen dad.

Sunset over the lake. Day 1, calming. Day 4, tears.

It never lasts. By noon on the second day after my return I'm as tired and haggard as I was the day before I left. Four days of vacation got me two days of peace, two days of loneliness and just over one day of fully rested parenting. Why bother? If you look at the schedule, it looks like I need a three day 'work week' and a four day weekend all by myself. Instead I get a 361 days of work and four days of weekend. This seems sub-optimal and perhaps a nice recipe for insanity. I think the whole point of this yearly exercise, for me, is that it's important to know that recovery is possible. No matter how my day has gone, I'm only 4 days of time from desperately missing these maddening little people. Some days it feels like this job of parenting will never end. Arguing children and endless streams of dishes and laundry extending to infinity. These four days let me know, every year, that it will end, and when it does, I will miss it dearly.

Success

Nobody really wants to suck at life. Whatever we choose, or wherever we find ourselves to be, we want to be good at it. For most guys the metric is pretty standard, you want to have a good job and take care of your family. The good news is that it's all relative, if you're doing as well or better than the people around you, you're doing well. Most people don't need the million dollar bonuses that Wall Street bankers make, unless your circle of friends includes those people of course. We're pretty happy if we can make a living and aren't at the bottom of the pile that makes up our lives. The bad news about this metric refers to stay at home dads, and me specifically. If you don't have a job, a career, a stick to measure yourself and for others to measure you with, then how do you solve the riddle of success? One might argue that it doesn't matter, that if you are comfortable then you can be happy where you are without judgment. That's all well and good, but that's not how we're built at people. We all strive, we all want just a little more, just a little better, it's human nature.

So how do you measure? How do I measure? In another 20 years I'll be able to look at my kids and see how they're doing and use that as a sort of a measurement. I don't really believe in that though. I think that most of parenting is just providing a good stable loving environment for children to develop in. I don't get to decide how my kids are going to turn out, I just get to provide an environment where turning out good is easier that turning out bad. They have to make the choices and do the work themselves. You can't force someone to be good. If you could then prison, or for that matter, youth homes, would be churning out perfect people day after day. They don't. So if I can't really make my kids good, if their success is their own and not mine, where does that leave me?
It leaves me trying to be a better person, a better man, and finding a metric to judge that by. It leaves me with small victories and the joy that I can find in them. I've been running and reading books when my youngest is in preschool lately. With the recent trend toward cold, the running has become easier and sitting on a bench reading has become harder. When it's below 45 degrees it's hard to sit on a bench and concentrate on fine literature. Yesterday I took that to the logical conclusion and decided to run 10 miles. This is my longest run in over 3 years. It felt good. Really good. Being able to go out and run 10 miles and feel good the next day is a fine metric of measurement. Success. After that I was practicing cartwheels to warm up for practicing hand stands. I decided to try a one armed cartwheel. No real reasoning behind this, but I was on a roll. Success. Sort of, it's wasn't a perfect cartwheel, but hey, I'm 36 and just did my first one armed cartwheel. Awesome. Then at nap time I couldn't get into Brave New World so I decided to print out the sheet music for Jingle Bells and see if I could learn it on the violin. After half an hour I could play it through by sight and almost by memory. Sweet! To top off the day I managed to fold two loads of laundry in the lulls of making dinner and getting the kids ready in time to go to the third grade music concert that my son was in. It was truly a superman day. Ran 10 miles, did a one handed cartwheel, learned Jingle Bells on the violin, and accomplished all of my daily domestic tasks. That's success. That's success I could feel.
I may not be driving an expensive car that I can show off or have the biggest fanciest house in the neighborhood, and if I was doing that, it would be the result of my wife's success, not mine. For today thought, I feel like I can judge myself against any man and come out feeling ok about my life. Small victories, big happiness.

Books I finished this week:
The Pencil: A history of design and circumstance, Henry Petroski
No Blade of Grass. John Christopher
The Pencil is an interesting book. On the surface it's about pencils, and it is, but the author takes you farther than that. He takes you into the process of engineering. The change through time from advancements being made by craftsman and scientists in their separate realms to the combining of them in the new career of engineering. The economics and practicality of making stuff. You can make the best pencil in the world, but what good is that if it's too expensive to buy? You can make a truly cheap pencil, but what good is that if it sucks so much that nobody wants it. This is true of pencils, but it's true of everything that is made as well. It's not always the easiest read and you probably have to be interested in esoteric things in general to really get into it, but it's worth a look.
No Blade of Grass is awesome. Post apocalyptic fiction written in 1956 England. There's a plant virus that kills grass. First just rice in the far east, but eventually all grass in the world, and along with it, all of the cereal grains that make up a majority of the world's food supply. It's clear that the human race will survive, but 70-95 percent of them will starve before it happens. It's a story of society rapidly breaking down, of men and women changing. In days people change from civilized to brutal as they try to secure a place to stay alive. Some end of the world fiction is entertaining, this is the kind of writing that makes you shop for guns when you're done. You know, just in case.
Highly recommended if you can get a copy. Sadly it's out of print. You can borrow my copy, but I need it back when you're done.

It's all Gravy

Gravy is something that every man should know how to make. It's resource utilization at it's finest. You take the fat and broth from meat you've roasted, add a little flour, a bit of milk, and make a sweet nectar to put on potatoes. This is a vital life skill. Making gravy is very similar to making cheese sauce in that it's really nothing more than a roux based sauce. 

Gravy

Very very careful. This is important

Take the drippings from your roasting pan and pour them off into container to rest and seperate for 10 minutes or so. You want that layer of fat that floats to the surface.  Using a turkey baster, suck just the fat off the top of the drippings. This is a careful task and takes a little practice, it's a skill worth learning. Take the fat and put it in another measuring cup. I usually expand the volume of this recipe proportionately to take advantage of all of the fat that I can scrape off the drippings.
For two cups of gravy:
1/4 cup fat (drippings plus enough butter to
make the difference)
1/4 cup flour
1 cup defatted drippings
1 cup milk

Put the fat in a sauce pan over medium heat and head until sizzling. Add flour and cook for 1-2 minutes. Add the drippings and stir, add the milk and stir more. Stir gently until the mixture comes to a boil and thickens. Season to taste. Gravy will continue to thicken as it cools. You can make gravy out of just about anything you roast. We make it from chicken and duck and turkey and beef. Venison usually doesn't have enough fat, so you have to add more butter. You can make it from a pork roast, but it's slightly odd, I'm not sure why. I've even made it from ham just to try it but the flavor is so intense that nobody thought it was very good. When we make it from fowl we boil the neck and the giblets and cut them up and add them. Giblet gravy is good.

So take charge of the gravy this holiday season. When done right, it adds so much to the meal. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, is impressed by a man that can make a world class gravy.

Schmat

Today I'm starting a weekly Wednesday feature on pets. I'm going to go through pets we have, pets we've had, and animals that have lived with us in some way that might be loosely interpreted as being pets. I'll keep this up until I run out of animals. I might even go into my childhood, which is where I keep the really weird pets. This is story telling, and it's gong to take a while. 

We'll start with Schmat. She's the first pet my wife and I got as a couple and, because she's still hanging around, is also the pet we've had the longest. For some reason, I'm unable to have a normal story about getting a cat. It's probably because my parents are veterinarians and vets never get cats by normal means. They're always found in a ditch covered in ants or hit by a car with a broken leg or found in an abandoned car with a pile or kittens or brought in with a grub living in their eye. Every cat has a story, and Schmat is no different. After moving to Texas my wife (not yet my wife) wanted to get a cat. Our apartment allowed cats and I had always lived with cats so I wasn't violently opposed to the idea. That's all it took. The next thing I know, my mom is keeping an eagle eye open for nice little kittens brought into her office with some malady or another and no owner to pay for them. Schmat was brought in after being hit by a car at about four months old. She was dragging a useless front leg. It wasn't broken, it had nerve damage and was just hanging there. You can't just leave a numb leg hanging like that, they drag it around and it gets sores rubbed into it and it gets infected and bad things happen. If they don't regain control of the leg, you have to amputate it. It's not so bad really, three legged cats get along just fine, I've known more than my fair share of them and they have all seemed just fine. After a week of hanging out at the office Schmat became one of the lucky ones who heal instead of becoming a cat named Tripod. All three legged cats are named Tripod. 

Now we had an exceptionally nice kitten with four legs to come live with us. The only problem was that she was in Michigan and we were in Texas. That Christmas I had to work so my wife went home to visit relatives without me. She got a carrier, got the cat from my mom, and brought her home. In this story, flying a cat across the country is the boring part. Mostly because we flew the cat legally and all went well. The story of my sister flying week old kitten in the pocket of her sweatshirt to New York while occasionally slipping it a bottle to keep it happy is a much better story. Those were the days before body scanners and pat downs. The good old days of smuggling kittens.

You might think that the story ends there, Schmat comes to live in Texas and we all live happily ever after, but no. Schmat decided to be a real cat and scratch things. A lot. We tried all of the conventional measures like sticky tape and spray bottles and providing appropriate surfaces to scratch on, but no, she wouldn't stop. We could have let her be an indoor/outdoor cat but doing that in our part of Texas is sentencing her to a premature death by loose dog or owl or car or any of the other dangers in the neighborhood. We liked her and wanted her to live, so we decided to declaw her. Again, this shouldn't be an interesting story, declawing a cat, but as I said, both of my parents are vets which means that nothing is ever normal. When I mentioned to my parents that Schmat needed to be declawed my dad just said "wait until I come down and I'll do it". So I did, and he did, right on the kitchen table. So now I have a hit by a car cat transported 1000 miles on an airplane (because there's clearly no suitable cats in the whole state of Texas) who was declawed on the kitchen table. Done, right? No. 

Another time when my dad was visiting he casually mentioned that Schmat should have her teeth cleaned, they were pretty yucky. Vets kids are the worst people in the world about actually taking their pets to the vet. Instead of making an appointment we call our parents and have them send us flea medicine or wait for them to visit and perform minor surgery in the kitchen. We hate going to the vet. My wife doesn't have those hang ups so she made the teeth cleaning appointment. When we got her back we found out that when we brought her in, she only had about half of her teeth left (who looks in their cat's mouth?) and when they tried to clean them, the rest of them fell out, all but one. (That one fell out later) That's when we learned about stomititis, when a cat is allergic to their own teeth and they just fall out. This is a real thing, honest. We felt pretty bad though and bought her soft food and everything. Of course she refused to eat soft food, even once, and insisted on gumming her hard food and swallowing it whole. Have I mentioned how she prefers to eat? She takes her paw and flicks food out of her bowl one piece at a time and then eats it. I think she feels like she's hunting if she does it that way. She's so weird. Anyway, now we have a toothless declawed cat. She's a riot to play with because she doesn't have any sharp parts, unlike most cat's who are just a collection of sharp parts loosely held together with fur. She's like playing with a live stuffed animal. It's fun. 

I could keep going about Schmat. About how she jumps into bags when you pack for trips. If you open a bag, turn around to grab clothes and then turn back, there she is, sitting in your bag. Even if you just saw her sound asleep in the other room, she'll be there. It's like the magicians silk hat, but with a cat. And then boxes, and her rubbing on every book I've ever read as I'm reading it an so much more. I need to stop though, because I'm writing a post about Schmat, not a book. 

I hope this gives you an idea about pets and their stories around here. If you ask me if I have any pets you had better get a drink and find a comfortable place to sit, because I've got a story. A long story. A lot of long stories in fact.

Stories 1: Alaskan Salmon

This blog came about because people kept telling me that I should write a book about parenting and adventures in general. Apparently they enjoy my story telling. The problem is that my brain is very non-linear. I start thinking about one thing and then something distracts me and I'm off in another direction. I'm not ADD, but my story telling is. In a group this works out great because new subjects constantly come up and people seem to enjoy that. If I wander too far then I get an uncomfortable silence and reign in my weirdness. There's nobody to reign me in when I write, which makes writing on specific subjects very difficult. I've decided to let a few of these stories out into the wild so I can let my brain really run. I'm hoping it will be good for me as a writer and will maybe let me focus when it's necessary.  This first story started for the usual reason, because I'm an idiot.

Three of my four kids are in fall soccer. The kids all have fun and are presumably learning something positive. Part of participating in soccer is bringing a drink and a snack for after the game. Everyone on the team takes a turn and usually there are enough extras so that my little one can mooch from at least one of the teams. We play games on Saturday and the day can start as early as 9:00 and end as late as 2:00. We're often there for the whole five hours. Last weekend was a particularly sticky treat weekend. Gatorade and fruit rollups and all sorts of Halloween candy was given out. By the time I was loading everyone up, my youngest was a sticky mess and I really wanted to wipe him down before he got the truck too sticky. I set the cooler in back of the truck and walked him around to his seat and wiped him down with baby wipes. By then the three other kids were fighting about something so I had to restore order and get in the truck and head home to get them lunch. Three stoplights and a few corners later I noticed that the little light for my backup sensors is on indicating that the parking assist is off. This leads me to the conclusion that I'm an idiot and didn't close the tailgate. I stop and confirm that I'm an idiot and the cooler has been jettisoned somewhere between there and the soccer fields. Not a huge issue, I'll just to back and pick it up as long as I didn't cause and accident with it. I spin around and head back and it's gone. Somebody snagged it in the 3 minutes between when it fell out and when I got back. I don't blame them, it's not like you can look at a cooler and get a good feel for how long its' been on the side of the road, you just see one and think FREE COOLER! and pick it up. Now, losing the cooler is a bummer, but it's not a tragedy. The tragedy is that I left my coffee cup in the cooler and lost that too. It was a stainless steel travel coffee cup that Ford sent me after I bought a brand new Focus in 2001. It said FOCUS on the side. I loved that coffee cup. Losing it made me sad. Now I need a new coffee cup.
I have a few other travel cups around, though I don't like any of them. I use them in the truck, but they suck around the house. Around the house I use a Ball jar that came filled with canned salmon from a trip to Alaska. It was sent back to Texas with me by a guy named Scott. Scott was part of the famous duo of Scott and Danny who showed us around Alaska for a week. They helped us find places to moose hunt, they helped find us a place to fish for salmon, and they let us on an epic four day journey into the Alaska bush. That journey started with a 2 hour boat ride in a very solid boat with a very questionable motor. It then had a two day uphill hike into the mountains including a river crossing that was accomplished by sliding across a wire suspended over a 30 foot deep gorge. You sat on a piece of pine branch attached to the wire with an ancient looking steel carabiner and an old what looked like an old piece of water ski rope. Living through that wasn't a guarantee. Then we hunted for two days and Scott shot a smallish bear that we then ate for two meals a day so we wouldn't have to carry as much out. I declined to shoot a HUGE black bear sow because she had two cubs. I felt very good about not shooting her, but man was she a beautiful bear. I knew immediately that it's unlikely that I'll ever get a chance to shoot a black bear that big again. During this whole ordeal Scott and Danny smoked pot like they were semi-pro pot smokers intent on moving up to the big leagues. It never seemed to affect their friendly and social personalities, probably because they were stoned for every second that I spent around them. Scott was a seasonal commercial fisherman who worked maybe 6 weeks a year. This gave him enough money to afford his lavish lifestyle of living in an old 5th wheel trailer in the woods. I really do mean in the woods. I think he had to cut down a total of three trees to be able to cram his trailer back off of a two track road. Scott didn't do any yard work. Amazingly, Scott had a girlfriend who lived with him in his trailer in the woods. Danny was a sometimes bass player in local bands. Oh, and he was hispanic and talked exactly like Cheech, which was sort of surreal when he was skinning a bear on top of a mountain in Alaska. Danny lived in a single wide trailer with some very creative, though structurally questionable, additions on it. He kept a loaded pellet gun next to his couch to shoot mice in the winter. The mice had developed a sort of super intelligence and were very difficult to trap by conventional means so he had to resort to shooting them while watching TV. Danny had a wife, which is maybe slightly less amazing than Scott's girlfriend, but amazing none the less. Scott and Danny were great guys and insisted that I take home a couple of jars of their home canned salmon. I'd love to tell you how it tasted but I was never sure about the quality of the canning job. Eventually my wife and I agreed to pitch the fish and keep the jars to use as glasses. I hope that somehow through the wonders of the internet Scott or Danny end up reading this post and sending me a message. I do hope they're doing well.

And that, my friends, is how I start a story about forgetting to close the tailgate on my truck and end up talking about bear hunting stoners in Alaska. Feel free to point out in the comments whether this story made your more or less likely to ever check my blog again.

Sand Boat

Kids need a sand box. They say it's for things like fine motor skills and creative play. It's really because kids like to play in the dirt, and sand is cleaner than dirt. It's really like dirt with all of the dirty stuff washed out of it. I approve of sand.
When we bought our house it came with several bonus features. These included a garage full of stuff, traces of glitter on every available indoor surface, eau de cat pee, and two dead boats. The stuff in the garage was useless, even for me. The glitter is still around in trace amounts even after sweeping and painting and replacing almost all of the floors. The cat pee smell was eventually cleaned up. One of the boats went away, but one stayed and became the sand boat.

Everybody loves the Sand Boat.

When I was a kid our sandbox was an old steel row boat. It sat out under the old willow tree and was filled with stolen sand. The sand was allegedly stolen from protected sand dunes by shoveling it in the side door of a VW bus. I don't think the dunes ever missed it and we enjoyed it much more as kids than the dunes ever did. The old rowboat didn't require any conversion to a sandbox. It was just dragged into place and filled with sand. That's the advantage of a flat bottomed boat. The boat we had to work with was a 15 foot fiberglass runabout with a fairly deep hull. I had two choices. I could have dug a hole to sink the boat in the lawn, or I could cut the bottom of the boat off to make it rest flat on the ground. I chose option two, mostly because I got to cut up a boat with a sawzall, which was pretty fun. A little measuring and cutting and figuring and cutting a little more to make it better and we had a boat that looked like it was 'floating' on the lawn. We carried it over to one of the abandoned cement slabs that our property so wonderfully contains and set it down. A little fiberglass work to seal up some holes and a new paint job and it was ready for sand. This time the sand was purchased, mostly because there aren't any sand dunes nearby to steal it from. We filled it up and have had quite a few years of sand box playing.
I'm hoping that through some quirk of fate, one of my own children can someday find an old dead boat to turn into a sandbox for their children. It's quite likely that we could become the first three generation sand boat family.

Every Day?

Would this be as much fun if we did it every day? Would we laugh as hard and would it mean as much? I'm not sure. I do know that these days are fun and I'll miss them when they're gone.

Short post today to make up for the very long one yesterday. Remember to play this weekend.

I can't have nice things.

My wife said she'll buy me a Corvette. I think she's serious. A Corvette would be fun. I can't get one though, and at times I'm pretty sure that I don't want one. It's complex, I'll try to explain.
First and foremost are the guineas. I can't get them to understand that cars are not for exploring. They can climb in their coop. They can climb on the swing set. They can climb on the garage. They can NOT climb on the cars. They scratch the cars and they poop on the cars. This is, in general, not good for the cars. It makes me angry and I yell at then and throw things at them and they fly away. They I go inside and they have no correlation between me yelling and them being on the cars (even though that is the ONLY time I yell at them) so they fly back up on the cars. I can't hardly blame them, tall things are fun and they don't have the mental capacity to figure out cause and effect. They are what they are. I can't bring myself to kill them just for a car. That seems really greedy. Yes, they're the dumbest things capable of locomotion, and no, they wouldn't know or hold it against me if I ate them. They're only $3.60 each, so it's not like I'd be destroying a huge investment. We've sort of made a pact though, they eat ants and bugs, and I keep them alive. A deal is a deal. So, as long as the last two guineas stay alive, no new car, no matter what. Bummer.

I'm glad it's only my truck. Sort of.

The second part is more complex. It's about money. I don't make any of course. My wife always refers to the money she makes as "our" money. When it comes to groceries or bills or savings I tend to agree. When the purchase crosses the line to something that only benefits me, like a Corvette, I feel different. My wife works hard. She's smart. She works in an office which is something that I've tried and have come to the conclusion that I really don't want to do that for any extended period of time. I'm not sure that I want to do anything for an extended period of time. Parenting isn't like that. It always changes. Your babies grow, your responsibilities change. I can tell you almost to the day when all of my kids will be in school all day. I can tell you to the month when my oldest is likely to leave home for college and when my youngest will follow leaving the next empty. I'm not wishing for these things to come faster, but I know when they'll happen and how that's likely to affect what I do. But an office job? Knowing that I'll sit in front of a computer every day for 49 weeks a year until I'm old? That's too much for me. So I really really respect the fact that my wife not only handles it, but seems to like it and earns everything our family needs as a result. As much as she claims that I help her to be able to do her job, she's the one that does it. She earns it. It feels wrong to spend her efforts on things that are really nothing more than entertaining to me.
That brings me to the third thing. I know that the rush of getting a new Corvette would wear off. After 6 months, or a year, or five, it would just be a car. A fast car, a pretty cool car, but ultimately, just a car. I'd have to pay insurance on it and eventually buy another set of brutally expensive tires for it. It would depreciate, thousands of dollars a year. For that money I'd feel like I had to drive it. It would become something else in my life that demanded my time and effort. I'd start to resent it. I'd forget the joy that it brought me at first and only think of the other things I could have bought with that money. Or if I bought nothing, the money I would have saved to help with a more secure retirement. One purchase, one Corvette would never be enough, I'd have to get a new one whenever the new model came out. Maybe Corvettes wouldn't be enough, maybe I'd have to move on to Ferraries to get my rush. I'm finally old enough now.... maybe that's not right. I finally have enough experience to know that heading down the road of more, and more expensive, posessions will bring happiness, but only in small packets. Often in ends up bringing as much, or more, pain and anxiety as the happiness. You can't win. In the book I review below there is a quote: "The idea that just one more dollar, one more dalliance, one more rung on the ladder will leave us feeling sated reflects a misunderstanding about human nature - a misunderstanding, moreover, that is built into human nature; we are designed to feel that the next great goal will bring bliss, and the bliss is designed to evaporate shortly after we get there." This is the reality of being human. We strive, we accomplish, we desire to strive more. I'm not sure that always longing for a Corvette will in any way make me happy, but I do know that actually getting one is very unlikely to make me happier in the long run.

The book I finished this week:
The Moral Animal, why we are the way we are: the new science of Evolutionary Biology
Robert Wright
Why are people the way we are? Why do we love and fight and strive and feel guilty? Why do we have a sense of self and a desire to be liked and a universal sense of spirituality? All of this is part of being human, it's part of how we evolved as a species, and if it's there it was probably beneficial to us passing on our genes to the next generation. Wright looks at much of what is universal about humans and discusses how that did, or might have, evolved in the world of small family groups that we were born into for the million years or so up until very recently. A sense of striving can lead to more success which can lead to more chances to mate and an increased ability to raise your kids. You have more babies and more of them grow up to make babies if you're more successful. The desire to be successful is a very useful trait. The same with love of family, guilt and so much more. It's a fantastic book, and though I don't agree with all of his conclusions, it's well worth the read. It gives you knowledge that allows you go question your own motivations, like wanting a Corvette, and allows you to sort out why those thoughts are really there. A new Corvette would be awesome, so I'd be awesome, so I'd be more likely to have more babies. Except that I'm happily married and and can't have any more babies. So if I can consciously pull off that motivation, what's left?
This book is well worth reading?

Cranberry Sauce

Thanksgiving is the one time of year that people really embrace homemade food. Turkey from the oven. Homemade pies. Peeling and mashing real potatoes. Stuffing inside the bird. People make real food and I salute them for that. So I wonder, why is it that the easiest thing to make is the one thing that everyone buys in a can? I'm talking about cranberry sauce of course. I didn't even know you could make cranberry sauce until a few years ago. Theoretically, of course, I knew somebody somewhere in a factory took cranberries and tuned them into the burgundy gelatanous mass on the plate. But I never knew anybody that actually made cranberry sauce. Every other thing on an elaborate table set out to feed in excess of thirty people would be made lovingly from scratch, and there, in the middle, would be that wobbly cylinder of taste sitting on a plate.
I'm here to tell you that making cranberry sauce is the easiest thing that you'll make for your holiday meal. On top of that, with a few additions, it can be better than what comes in a can. "Better than from a can?" I hear you crying from across the land, but it's true. Of course, the fact that you can actually buy cranberries in the produce section at thanksgiving lets me know that we're not the only ones who make this, but a quick google search tells me that at least 72 million cans of the stuff are sold for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, so quite a few people are buying the stuff.

Cranberry Sauce
1 bag of cranberries (probably 12 ounces)
1 cup of water
1 cup of sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp vanilla

Rinse the berries and pick out any stems or berries that look wrong. In a small sauce pan combine the cranberries, water, sugar and cinnamon. Over medium heat bring the mass to a light boil and keep in there for 10-12 minutes for a cranberry sauce. For something more like the firm goo that comes in a can, boil for 15-18 minutes. Boil it longer and it will set up more is the theme. When you pull it off the stove, add the vanilla and stir it in. Let it cool as you get everything else ready and enjoy. 


Here is the part where I admit that although I really love the taste of cranberry sauce, I can't eat it. If you could make cranberry sauce candies I'd carry them around in my pocket an eat them all year. The taste is fantastic, it really is. The texture though, I just can't handle it. When I try to eat it I vacillate between rapture over the taste and retching over the mouth feel. I still suggest that everyone make it though, if you're going to have it at your table, you might as well have something that is truly fantastic.