Monday, October 31, 2011

Halloween! Halloween! Halloween!

IT'S HALLOWEEN!
I'm very excited. I love Halloween. My kids love Halloween. They were bouncing off the walls this morning which wasn't actually very cool because they took it too far, but the being excited part is great. My 3 year old woke me up by asking me "daddy, guess what day it is?" He was very excited.
What's so great about Halloween? Candy, of course, but also running around in the dark, dressing up, getting to stay up later than makes sense on a school night, getting to have a piece of candy for desert every night for the next week! It's all awesome. The buildup to Halloween is awesome too. We start talking seriously about costumes at the beginning of September. They go back and forth and think of ideas and steal their siblings ideas and fight about it and get ideas from books and TV and each other. By the first weekend in October final decisions are made and we shop for materials. Cutting out and sewing takes place in the evenings and on the weekends. One by one the costumes get fitted and finished. If you are in preschool yours gets done early for the costume parade at school. If you're older or younger they yours might still be getting worked on the night before. Finally they're all done. Everyone transforms into what they wanted to be. My children still think the costumes are even more awesome than they imagined them. They're so sweet.
This year we had a Victorian era vampire, two bats and Batman. There was sort of a theme going on.

This is what cars saw, I'm such a bad father.
The downside of the theme is that everyone was wearing black. Largely all black. For trick-or-treating at night. Good thinking there dad. Make all of your kids invisible to passing cars. After I saw everyone dressed up it occured to me that I really should have dressed up as a light house or an air traffic controller with those light up cone thingies or just a big flashing road sign that said PLEASE DON'T RUN OVER MY KIDS! I'm quite sure that I broke several rules of Halloween dressing with the all black, but the kids did look great and they had a great time. This was the first year we were able to just trick-or-treat without being slowed down by someone with very short legs who just didn't understand what we were doing. Everyone understood, everyone hustled to the next house, everyone mostly stayed out of the road and we all made it back home safely. Later in the week I'll explain what a family that doesn't really eat sweets does with 15 lbs of candy.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Epiphanies in toilet cleaning.

Cleaning the toilet is a funny thing. Not actually funny of course, just funny to talk about.
I understand that a lot of people hate cleaning the toilet because they think it's yucky. I've had the luck (if you want to call it that) of rich and varied life experiences that have re-calibrated what is yucky to me. I won't go into detail but let's just say that cleaning the toilet doesn't even make my yucky list. Not close. I don't readily share this information though. As soon as you admit that toilets aren't that gross then everyone wants you to clean them. All the time. It's not that I don't want to clean the toilet, I just don't want to clean anything that I don't view as necessary. Which brings us to the question, what is necessary?
Daily is certainly overkill. At least I hope it's overkill for a residential toilet, if it's not then I don't envy your life. Monthly is probably not frequently enough. Probably. So how often? Once a week? Is it really dirty? Really dirty? Every two weeks? When are my inlaws coming? Maybe I'll just think about it. Ah, my wife got fed up and cleaned it herself. Looks great. Maybe it was dirty.
That has been the general mode of cleaning in the relationship. She has usually decided that the toilet needs to be cleaned before me, and rather than nagging (have I mentioned how awesome she is? I love her so much) she just does it herself and holds in the rage until is subsides. That is until recently when were having a conversation and I let it slip that I didn't understand why people were bothered by cleaning their own toilet. Nothing gross about it. I could tell instantly that I'd made a mistake. After 10 years of marriage she might have been less upset if I'd admitted that I had a secret second family. She can only hide so much rage, a little peeks out around the edges.
So I messed up. The toilet is now mine, forever. The question is not Do I clean it? but rather How do I make myself want to clean it? Depending on how old your toilet is, what your water is like, and how the toilet has been cleaned in the past, you might have a buildup of scale in the very bottom of the bowl. It' s not clear porcelain as far as the eye can see. I've seen this in quite nice clean homes so I don't feel bad about it, but when I got right down to it, it bothered me. I could clean the toilet, but I couldn't really get it clean. Time for research! All of the hippies online swear by vinegar as a toilet cleaner. They say that it disinfects, helps remove scale, and is kind to septic systems and the planet. Worth a try. I found a technique that is quite a lot like winterizing toilets in a summer house or RV. Here is.
You need to do this when you've got at least a few hours when nobody is going to need the toilet. Easier if you have more than one toilet. Otherwise I suggest right before bed when everyone is done for the night. 
1. Scrub the toilet with a brush. Try to do a good job if you can.
2. Turn the water off at the wall valve. 1/4 turn valves are awesome.
3. Flush. Hold down the handle and let all the water get out that can.
4. Plunge out excess water or just scoop it out. You want to do this because the more water you have, the more you dilute the vinegar you pour in. You want as concentrated a solution as you can reasonably get, so you want as little water as you can reasonably can get.
5. Pour in somewhere between a quart and a half gallon of vinegar. The more you're trying to fix, the more you use.
6. Dip your brush in the vinegar in the bowl and scrub more, up around the rim, get it all clean, you're disinfecting now.
7. Pour a bit of vinegar on a paper towel and clean the seat and everything else that needs to be cleaned.
8. Wait. Wait overnight if you can. The vinegar is breaking apart the scale.
9. Brush out any loosened scale, or if you're adventurous and want to be more effective, use a scouring pad to clean off as much as you can.
10. Turn the water back on and go about your life.
I've been doing this for a bit over a month now. My 25 year old toilet is almost spotless porcelain all the way down. I've taken a chore and turned it into a quest. I clean on Friday nights and I look forward to defeating a little more scale, revealing a little more porcelain, every week. When I finally get it clean I'll work at keeping the scale at bay, like a king who has repelled the barbarian hoards and now works to keep his kingdom safe.
Turning toilet cleaning from a task that I didn't really want to do into a task that I look forward to has been quite an epiphany in my own psychology of cleaning. Now if I can only find a way to discover the hidden joy of sweeping.

Friday, October 28, 2011

Sick Day

Being a sick stay at home dad is always interesting. When you have little babies especially. When my wife would get sick while she was breast feeding she could lay there in misery with a baby attached to her boob knowing that she was passing antibodies onto the cheerily flopping infant. When I got sick, I had to hold the baby just as close for feeding, but I wasn't doing anything as positive. The best I could hope for was to kiss my wife as much as possible so that she maybe she would get sick before the baby and pass on the antibodies so that I wouldn't end up with a sick baby. This is a morally reprehensible strategy, I admit, and in the best case scenario I now had a sick wife instead of a sick baby which isn't actually that great. Especially with her giving me evil accusing looks about how I got her sick. With the exception of the baby, there were no winners.
The thermometer does not confirm my illness, clearly it's broken.
It's sort of better now that the kids are older, except that they have wider exposure to illnesses. I have to deal with the illness that are going around two different school systems 20 miles apart. Most of the kids that go to preschool with my youngest have older siblings in a different system than my three older kids. My preschooler is acting as a disease vector connecting two populations. What a trooper. At least when they do get sick they're a bit easier to take care of. It's easier to comfort a 6 year old with Sesame Street and a warm blanket than it is to comfort a nine month old. It just is.
But what about when daddy gets sick? Not much you can do really. Things still need to get done, and you still need to do most of them. Still need to get the kids ready for school, still need to get them there. Still need to feed them. You just can't ignore these things. Where is my wife during this you might ask? Well, I need to be almost dead before I even think about letting her stay home. Forget about asking, that doesn't happen, not my style. She would actually stay home to take care of me long before I'd let her. I need to be stuck on the toilet sick before I can even begin to accept help. She is wonderful and takes over the evening stuff though, which I gladly accept, so I can rest. Bath time turns into daddy is curled into a ball on the couch time, which often looks to the kids like daddy is a trampoline time. Resting is hard.
Whenever I'm sick I think about the good old days at work when I could actually just be sick at home and not go to work. Then I remember that when my wife is sick and she stays home, she does that with me and the kids at home. I'll be the first to admit that being at home is often less restful than being at work. I can vividly recall the times when my clearly sick wife has stood in a haze trying to figure out if she'd get more rest at work or at home. It comes down to being nice and trying to reduce infecting her co-workers more than getting actual rest at home. Perhaps it's not so bad being a sick stay at home dad, at least I'll keep telling myself that until I feel better.

Books this week:
The Map That Changed the World, William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology - Simon Winchester
I think this is a book for geologists. Geologists that like the history of geology. That's probably a pretty small audience but for us select few, it's quite a good book. Geology is such a young science that we forget that we didn't even know how to map rocks until William Smith showed us how in 1815. We didn't even know about plate tectonics until after World War II. Considering what a huge economic impact geology has on society through mining and oil exploration, it's astonishing how much we've seemingly just figured out. William Smith was one of those great figurers, and has an interesting story to boot.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Pizza: Sourdough 2

Once you have a sourdough starter, it's time to make something. One of my favorite breads to make is pizza. Pizza? A bread? Yup, it's just a flat bread covered with yummy stuff. Easy to make, easy to eat, oh so good.
Pizza - adapted from no recipe anywhere, makes 3 pizzas from 10-14 inches.
4 cups flour
1 3/4 cups water
2 tsp salt
Either 1/4-1/2 tsp yeast or 1/4 to 1/4 cup sourdough starter.
The night before you want to make pizza, mix everything in a bowl. This is a pretty slack dough so it will be sticky. You don't really need to knead it per se, but you you want to incorporate all of the flour so you don't have any hard little unincorporated flour chunks left over. Cover the bowl with a plate or plastic wrap and sit it on the counter. Leave it there. In the morning you can turn the dough if you want. Or not. By dinner time your bowl of dough will be bubbly and huge. If it's not, then you need to add more yeast/starter next time or put the dough somewhere warmer. You want you dough quite lively, it tastes better. When it's time to bake the pizza preheat your oven as high as it will go with a pizza stone in it. You can probably make these without a pizza stone, just on a cookie sheet or pizza pan but I don't. I'm a pretty simple guy in the kitchen, I don't need many gadgets, but a pizza stone is worthwhile. Anyway, as the oven is preheating, divide the dough into 3 pieces and set them on the counter to relax. Once the oven is preheated, tear off a piece of parchment paper that's big enough to make your crust. Spread the dough out on the parchment paper to get it into a roundish shape. The sticky dough will stick to the parchment paper and this will help keep it from trying too hard to form back into a ball. Slide the parchment paper on the back of a cookie sheet (or a peel if you have one) and slide it onto the stone. Cook it for about a minute. Pull it out and flop it on a wire rack and peel the parchment paper off, reuse the paper for the other two pizzas. Now put your sauce and cheese and meat and veggies and whatever else you want on the crust. Ease the pizza back on the back of the cookie sheet and slide it off back onto the stone. Bake it until it's done. Everyone knows what a done pizza looks like. Probably 6-10 minutes. Now do it twice more and you have 3 pizzas. From the time I turn the oven on to when I pull the last pizza out, it takes me about an hour. It's not the easiest meal to make, but it's one of the yummiest.
The yeasted version and the sourdough version have a slightly different taste and texture. It's worth it to make them both at some point. 
I realize that this recipe, though it has only 4 ingredients, has quite a few steps and I'm not including pictures of any of them. If anyone ever wants to see the whole drawn out process I'd be more than happy to do that, just leave me a message in the comments and I'll make a bigger post for you. The quality of pizza you can make in your oven at home is worth putting time into. With the exception of the pizza that comes out of my sister's giant wood fired oven, my family doesn't like pizza from anywhere else. That's about the best compliment you can get.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Timing

When I first had kids everyone told me to enjoy them while they were little and I didn't have to run them around. I'm starting to realize what they mean, though it's not too bad yet. My busiest day goes something like this:

6:00 - Kids awake - my wife is so so wonderful.
6:10 - I get up. Breakfast for the kids is already underway. This is why my wife is so so wonderful.
7:30 - Load up the car for school.
8:50 - Drop the kids off and head to preschool.
9:20 - Arrive at the park near preschool to kill a few minutes on the slides before preschool starts.
9:45 - Drop off at preschool and go for a run.
12:00 - Pick up from preschool and head home.
12:25 - get home and make lunch
1:10 - Get my youngest bed for a nap.
2:00 - Play the violin for half an hour.
2:40 - Load up to pick up the big kids from school.
3:05 - Pick them up and drive home.
3:20 - Start the oven for pizza, has to heat to 550 for pizza.
3:45 - The first pizza in the oven.
4:00 - Second pizza in the oven and kids to start very early soccer night dinner, they always eat pizza fast which is why soccer practice night is also pizza night.
4:30 - load up to head to soccer practice, one practice at 5:00, two at 6:00.
7:20 - Get home, two little kids in for a quick bath, two big kids then get showers, everyone in PJ's brush teeth read a book.
8:00 - Tuck in for the night.

This is my busy day as I have preschool and soccer practice on the same day. That makes both my morning and my evening packed. No other day is like this, thank god. If I had to do this five days a week I'd melt into a sobbing ball. By the time I have multiple things going on multiple days in the afternoon, everyone will be in school all day and the mornings will loosen up. It will all balance out. I hope.
The biggest thing about a schedule like that is making sure that you're on time. Somewhere along the line I learned that if you're not at least five minutes early, you're late. That's still how I do things and I always impress that on my kids. There was a pretty significant correlation between those students that showed up to class on time in college, and their grades. Not a perfect predictor of course, but pretty significant.
The single best thing I do timing wise is dinner. My wife usually gets home around 5:30. Sometimes later, sometimes after 6:00. She is awesome and tries to give me a heads up when she thinks her timing will be off so I can plan accordingly. Sometimes this works, sometimes dinner has been cooking for an hour already and there's nothing I can do to slow it down. When everything goes to plan though, when it works perfect, when I'm just finishing plating the food as she walks in the door, it's incredible. To be able to hand her dinner fresh and hot at the exact instant she gets home is such a wonderful perfect thing. People always make fun of the 50's pictures showing a happy wife with a hot dinner as her husband walks in the door. The say that life was never like that and it never was or will be a realistic image of a stay at home spouse. I say they're wrong. When it all comes together perfectly, it's like scoring a touchdown. I feel like doing a celebration dance. My day's work has come together with perfect timing and I am, however briefly, a champion.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Lunch #1

I love lunch as a stay at home dad. Sure, there's all of the work that goes into getting lunch ready for the 1-4 kids that are home at any given time, and having the dishes to wash, and the fact that I almost never eat my food until an hour after I start, but that's more than made up for by being in the kitchen. Unless you're a chef, you're generally not in a kitchen at lunch time. Your choices are then split between bringing or buying a lunch. If you buy it, you are at the mercy of whatever is cooked at the places around you for whatever prices they charge. If you bring it then you are stuck with cold food, or in the best case scenario, something that you can heat up in a microwave. That's no way to live.
When it's lunch time for me, I have a full kitchen and access to leftovers. It might be wrong to cook extra food just so I can have it for lunch, but I do. I do it all the time. Veggies are re-cooked in a pan with bacon grease and cheese and eggs. Meats are stir fried with veggies and rice or sliced thin and put on a fresh grilled cheese sandwich made with homemade sourdough. Cabbage is sauteed in sesame oil and added to everything. Sometimes I just look in the fridge and let my imagination go wild. When I cook dinner, I cook for the family, when I cook lunch, I cook for me.
Through time I'll post some of my lunches, just for fun. It's amazing what a wonderful feeling it is when my lunch gets done right when it's time to tuck the kids in for a nap. They go peacefully to sleep and I sit down to a wonderful quiet meal. Book in hand, warm food on my plate. A moment of bliss. I often imagine that this is what life will be like when they're all grown and gone. I'm sure I'll miss them, but eating a fine meal in silence will never get old.
Today's lunch is a pair of grilled cheese sandwiches on sourdough bread. The have muenster cheese and thin sliced roast pork on them. As a side I have green beans sauteed in bacon grease, topped with a bit of pepper and fresh grated muenster to top it off. It's fantastic.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Bright Ideas

When we added on a second story to our house a few years ago my wife called about building permits. We were fairly shocked when we were told that we couldn't get one. Not because they didn't trust us to do something like major structural work ourselves, but because the didn't issue them. We live in a world of unregulated building and remodeling. There are codes, but nobody to check them. You're on you own, just don't do anything stupid and burn down your house.
This was initially pretty shocking. Then we really started to look around our neighborhood. The guy who had a pretty significant addition built onto his travel trailer? Probable didn't get a permit. The second story bathroom that had the waste stack running on the outside of the house? Probably no permit for that. The family with the second story addition to their single wide complete with massive porch cantilevered over the duck pond? Nobody anywhere would issue a permit for that. Ever. So yea, if we followed sound building practices, we were in the clear.
I continue to use that common sense approach to my remodeling, both finished and in progress. Take for instance the issue of transitional lighting in the bathroom. I couldn't install proper fixtures because I needed to do work around the boxes. Make the drywall pretty. I couldn't just use a floor lamp for lighting because my wife would have killed me, perhaps by tipping the lamp over into the tub while I was in there to make a point about how unsafe it would have been. Perhaps. So I went to the hardware store and wandered the lighting section for a while to find a solution. After several hours of peaceful contemplation I picked up a cheap wired bulb socket. Two wire nuts later and I was done. Very inexpensive transitional solution. I have the light I need to do the work it took me years to do, the light isn't in the way of the aforementioned work, and my wife is happy as a clam because when she flips the switch, the light comes on. She can just not look up and can go on pretending that she isn't bathing in the middle of a multi-year construction project. Problem solved.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Guts

Can I help?
We love holidays around here. Love them. One of my favorites is only days away. The holiday of limitless imagination. Halloween. The biggest part of Halloween is costumes, and don't worry, I'll write a lot about that in the next week or so. We're still sewing this year's crop.
Today I want to talk about pumpkin carving. I find it fantastic that for this one holiday a year, so many people eagerly become amateur sculptures. I can't seem to find a number online for how many pumpkins are carved each year, but the holiday crop is quoted as worth around $100 million. I would be surprised if we spend more than that a year on sculptures produced by actual artists, and here we are carving crude faces that will wilt and rot in a matter of weeks. And we love it. This holiday, more than any other day of the year, causes millions of people to stare at a gourd, and try to figure out how to make it happy, or evil, or sinister or any of the other emotions that it's possible to convey with an orange sphere lit from within. This is probably the greatest collective wave of creative energy that sweeps through our country each year. Honestly, how many of you out there create art, and carved pumpkins are art, at any other time? My dear wife, the typical engineer if ever there was one, is entering a pumpkin carving contest at work. A group of adults sculpting for money. Fascinating.
I'm helping.
 When the middle of October rolled around nine years ago, my first baby was 7 months old. Some people would say that the first Halloween doesn't count. Your baby won't remember it and can't eat the candy anyway, so why bother? Most people do it for the cute costume pictures. Those are ok, but I don't do it for the costume pictures, I do it for the pumpkin carving pictures. My daughter is cute in hundreds, if not thousands of pictures, but in only a select few is she cute while chewing on pumpkin guts.

Friday, October 21, 2011

The Paper is Greener

I love to keep up with local events. What's going on in the community, local political squabbles, high school sports, obituaries, bake sales, the usual stuff. The best way to keep up is the local paper, which is why I have a subscription and eagerly pull it out of my mailbox every week or so. Sometimes it's every other week. Sometimes I get this week's paper before last week's. That's not the fault of the paper or of any local delivery service. It's because my local paper comes from 1400 miles away.
Much to the loneliness of my wife, the kids and I spend our summers a loooooong way north of where we live. I feel incredibly lucky that we're able to do this, and I'll talk about it more as summer approaches. In fact, I probably won't be able to talk about much else. I get very excited. 
You might wonder if I keep up on local events where I live. Not really. I sort of keep a general eye on politics and goings on in Houston, which is the big city, but not local stuff. After 10 years I still feel, not like an outsider, but like someone who's just passing through. I don't feel that connected to a political and cultural system that I have every intention of leaving, and that's probably not a good thing. I do vote locally, though I don't feel that it does much good. The guy with the R next to his name is going to win it seems, regardless of what he says. Even if I agree with him, that's a little disheartening, it doesn't feel like real democracy. It gives me something to think about though.
So I keep up on the town where I spend my summers and send most of my tax money. Close to where I spent the first 24 years of my life, where I still feel a cultural connection. If things go as planned, we'll be here just a bit longer than that before we turn around and head north again, a long period migration involving moving trucks. There's a chance, I will admit, that by then I will have become as culturally assimilated to my home here as I was to my home there when I left. My children are growing up here, they are Native Texans, I have to keep reminding myself of that. Their home, their culture belongs here as much as mine still belongs 1400 miles north. Inevitably at least a few of them are going to stay around here, so I'm still going to be attached to the community even in my old age whether I want to be or not. I should start getting a paper here too, but I'll probably wait until they need to ship it 1400 miles north before I'm really interested. The paper is always greener on the other side. Or something.

Books I finished this week -
At Home, A Short History of Private Life - Bill Bryson
The Bagel - The Surprising History of a Modest Bread - Maria Balinska

At Home should have been titled 'More cool stuff that Bryson knows'. It's loosely based around a walk through the house but it rambles. It rambles so much. That's so much of what makes it awesome. Bryson wanders far and wide through England and the U.S. and all over the planet and it's people and their history. If you like 'Brief History of Everything' then go grab 'At Home' it's sort of like an extra 19 chapters of fantastic writing.
The Bagel is not what I expected. It was more of a history of Jewish Poland and its peoples from 1200 through immigration to the U.S. and their lives here. It mentions bagels, true, but only tangentially to give the story a bit of cohesion. With the exception of maybe one chapter, she could have written the book just as well without including a bagel in it anywhere. That's not to say that it's not a cool book, I learned a lot that I didn't otherwise know. We didn't cover a whole hell of a lot of Jewish Polish history in public school in the 80's, so it was interesting. Just know that even though it's a quick and interesting book, it might not exactly be what you expect when you see it on the shelf.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Roux the Day

Roux  is a cooked mixture of flour and fat. It's used to thicken stews and soups and gravy and all sorts of sauces. Roux makes the world a creamy saucy wonderland. Most importantly, roux is easy and requires nothing that you don't already have in the kitchen. Lets start with a cheese sauce, mostly because it's yummy and goes great on vegetables that small mouths might not otherwise want to eat. 

Sauce Mornay (Cheese Sauce) from Mastering the Art of French Cooking - Julia Child
(with slight modifications to make it cheesier)

2 Tbs butter
3 Tbs flour
2 cups warm milk (heat it in the microwave until it's warm)
1/4 tbs salt
1/2 - 1 1/2 cups grated cheese of your choice, the flavor and degree of cheesiness is up to you
garlic salt, pepper, nutmeg, whatever other spices sound good to you

Heat the milk so it's warm and ready. In a thick bottomed sauce pan heat the butter on medium heat until it's bubbling. Add the flour and mix until you have a bubbly paste. Keep mixing it around for 1-2 minutes. You don't want things so hot that the butter starts to brown, if it does then you're still fine, the flavor will just be a little different, but you do want it cooler next time. Add the warm milk all in one go. Stir, and bring the mixture to a boil. It will thicken. It's magic. Add the cheese slowly while stirring, taste as you go along, get it right where you want it. Now add any other spices. I like garlic salt and pepper. Julia recommends a pinch of nutmeg and a pinch of cayenne pepper.
Serve over anything that's good with cheese on it.

Once you've got this down, you're on your way to being the gravy guy at Thanksgiving, and a general master of thick hearty soups, stews and other stick to your ribs cold weather manly food. The only difference with gravy is that we'll shift from butter and milk, to the fat from the roasting, and the de-fatted drippings. Stay tuned, the next time I roast a chicken, I'll take that liquid that left in the bottom of the pan and turn it into a wonderful nap inducing gravy.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

I'm with the band-aid man

I sometimes find it surprising how often I have to deal with blood. I know I shouldn't, I do remember how much I skinned my knees and cut myself as a kid. I was either bleeding or scabby for most of my childhood it seems. A quick check at the soccer games last weekend revealed that a fair number of the 5-12 year olds running around were too. So if everyone gets bloody now and again, why am I frequently the only one with a band-aid?
When my kids were little I started carrying bandaids in my wallet. There are a lot of shapes and sizes of bandaids and it was hard to pick what was best to carry. So, being the nerd that I am, I researched it. I came across an article that claimed that knuckle bandages were by far the best. They backed it up with pictures of them on knuckles, finger tips, elbows, knees, heels, and a forehead. Seemingly anyplace you could get a cut, you could patch it up with a knuckle bandage. Knuckle bandages are sort of hard to come by though. If you buy a mixed box of bandaids, you get maybe two in a box. I couldn't find them locally so I ended up buying them in boxes of 100 from Amazon.com. I'm on my second box now. I've patched up my own kids plenty of times. I've also patched up other kids elbows and knees as nobody ever seems to have a way to stop the bleeding during a soccer game. I've given them to my wife and daughter when a pair of very lovely but uncomfortable shoes rubs a heel raw. I gave one to a very grateful woman who had stubbed her toe getting out of an elevator at the museum. She was standing there bleeding, not too much, but enough that she thought her museum trip was over. You can't just go walking around leaving a trail of blood after all. I handed her a knuckle bandage and when I saw her later in the day she was quite grateful that her day had been salvaged. These suckers are useful.
Not that I think of myself as some kind of hero here. We're just talking bandaids after all. These are for very minor wounds that are at the most an inconvenience. I do have red cross first aid and CPR training, though I should get a refresher course when the kids are all in school. Everyone with kids should really have that training, just in case. I've never had to use any of that training though, except on myself, but that's a whole other story. Actually a couple of stories. God, that sounds bad.
For minor injuries, it really pays to have a couple of band-aids shoved in your wallet. It's simple and cheap and provides a pretty incredible amount of convenience and comfort for those that need them.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

D-A-D-D-Y needs C-O-F-F-E-E

I don't remember my first pop. Or soda, or whatever they call it in your part of the world. I do know that by the beginning of high school it was basically the only form of liquid I consumed. Well, that's not completely true, I did have milk with cereal and I dunked oreos in milk, but if I got something to drink then it was pretty much always a pop. This continued through college where the poverty of student life reduced me to drinking Fago Moon Mist. It's a generic mountain dew, about 2/3 the price, and as I was getting about half my daily calories from drinking it, the savings was significant. As a real grown up I sort of switched to coke, but only because they had free cokes in the fridge when I worked in an office. Free is my favorite flavor. I often wonder what miracle of metabolism and luck enabled me to not become a 400 pound toothless diabetic. 
Over the last few years, I've quit. It's pretty clear that drinking half of my calories as corn syrup probably isn't a good long term strategy. That, coupled with the fact that I didn't want my kids to have pop as their default drink like I did, led me to this decision. So I quit pop, but I can't seem to quit caffeine. I need caffeine to feel normal. I bet that's not a good thing either come to think of it. If not pop, then what? I drank tea for a while, and still do sometimes, but I've settled on coffee. Coffee is what makes the day possible. Coffee is life.
Although I've grown to love coffee, I really don't like making it. Not in a coffee maker anyway. You've got a really cool process of hot water leaching out the glorious caffeine and flavor and what not, and you can't see it. It's usually hidden behind shiny black plastic in modern coffee makers. It's the most scientific thing I do every day, and I feel like I'm missing out on the action. I used a stove top percolator for a while, and I do like it. You can see the bubbles bubble up and get darker as the brewing happens, it's cool. But I have an electric stove so boiling water is an exercise in frustration. I finally settled on using a funnel and a filter. It's a lot like the coffee cones that you can buy, but it's just a funnel. I could spend the $5 to buy a coffee cone, but a coffee cone is a one hit wonder. All you can do is make coffee with it. I can also funnel things with my funnel, so that somehow makes it better. I really wish I had a better way to heat up water though. I don't remotely have the patience to deal with an electric stove in the morning, so I use the microwave. It works, and I love the idea of an alternating electromagnetic field making the water hot, but it's missing romance. I keep thinking of an aparatus that would use a bunson burner and a coil of copper tubing and some flasks and......some other mad scientist stuff. I really want to feel like I'm creating life in a lab first thing in the morning. That would really get things off on the right foot.
If anyone can think of a really elaborate mad scientist way to heat water for coffee, let me know in the comments, I'm in the mood to build something really silly in the kitchen.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Awe and Terror

At nearly 36 I keep thinking that I'm coming to the end of surprise. Not that people or events will cease to surprise me, having four kids will cure you of that notion, but that the the world's wonders have pretty much revealed themselves to me. At least in the vicinity right around me. My house, my yard, my community. I've been here for over 10 years now. I've walked out my front door thousands of times, what is there new that I could see? So when it happens, it reminds me that the world is most likely cooler than I will ever know.
Every white patch, a kingdom. 
This morning I was opening the gate (that keeps the dog and guineas in) to drive the kids to school and I was annoyed to discover that someone had discarded trash in my yard. Too many people throw things out of their car windows and too much of it ends up blown in my yard. It's really annoying. But wait, that's what I thought it was because my brain didn't really figure it out, it just sorted though things I knew and applied one of them to the situation. I think we do this a lot and miss some pretty cool things. The things we don't know are often more interesting than what we do know.
Trampoline of Death
As I kept looking (this happened in just a few seconds) it was pretty clear that I wasn't seeing garbage. What was it then. Oh my god, those are spider webs. Lots and lots of spider webs. 30, 40, 50 of them? Holy cow. Spread out on the ground like little trampolines waiting to catch bugs that fall or wander onto them. They were mostly flat with a tunnel that I presume held the maker waiting to pounce. I didn't check. The reason I could see them all was because of a very heavy dew today. The invisible world suddenly became visible. How often is my lawn covered in webs? How many spiders live here anyway? After 10 years there is a lot that I don't know about my own lawn. I really don't know what's going on within my one fenced acre. Understanding the world seems a bit overwhelming today.

I asked my kids to look out of the truck windows and try to figure out what they were. They did it in not much more time than it took me. It's not that they didn't know, but that they didn't notice. They were all a bit creeped out by the notion of that many spiders living on the lawn. The ability to experience awe, and a little bit of terror, just by looking at my lawn makes me awfully happy to wake up and share the day with my kids.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Inside Trike

We have few toys that are less appropriate, or more awesome, than our inside tricycle. I bought it when my daughter was about one and half. Uncharacteristically of me, I bought it by myself. I can count on one hand the number of times I've done this. Usually, just the fact that I think something is a good idea is enough warning to me that it's probably not actually a good idea. It's at least an indication that I should run it by my wife, which in this case, I failed to do.
It occurred to me on that fateful day that we had a very smooth living room floor, but a very rough driveway. It was much more likely that my daughter was going to be able to learn to pedal someplace smooth and easy, than someplace bumpy and tough. Learning to pedal is one part of learning to ride a bike and teaching you child to ride a bike is one of those parental rights of passage. Besides, when I was a kid, we had rollerskates for the basement, so a tricycle for the living room was a small leap. It made perfect sense.
All of my kids have learned to pedal in the living room. They've pushed, pulled, towed and chased each other around with it. They've ridden in diapers and pajamas and princess dresses and capes and completely naked. My son could thread the trike, at full speed, through a gap between the couch and the desk that was less than an inch wider that the rear wheels. I measured. And he could do it over and over and over and never hit. They learned to slide sideways on the low traction floor and to spin out completely. They've shared nicely and they've fought bitterly and had it taken away for a week at a time. The two older ones have finally, very reluctantly, outgrown it. They've moved on to real two wheeled bicycles outside. They miss it though and have frequently asked if we can get a bigger inside bike. So far we've declined. It's hard to head down that road. Once we get a bike big enough for a 10 year old, we might as well get one big enough for Daddy. Whenever I suggest that, I get a look from my wife that lets me know that this idea, which seems really good, actually isn't.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Bits and Pieces

Before my first baby was born I became interested in Rally Racing. This is simply driving road legal cars as fast as you can on dirt roads that have been closed for the event. People prepare their cars, they get together, they pay their money, and they race for a lot of fun and a very very little glory. It's quite an accessible sport, provided you have the time to participate, and the money to put a car together. As with most motorsports, it's widely agreed that it's cheaper to buy a car that's already built than build one from scratch.
I decided that I wanted to do this and met a few people involved in the sport. One of them had purchased an older car and taken it apart with the idea of improving a few things before racing. Life got in the way, and he had a completely disassembled car in his garage that he didn't want any more. Did I want to buy it? Do I have more confidence than skills? Of course I want to buy it! Even my wife thought it was a good idea, though I think that she thought that the idea of me being happy was more important than my having a race car. Bless her. 
The car literally came to me in boxes. It was a shell, and stacks and stacks of parts. The engine was torn down almost to it's very last nut and bolt. The rotating assembly had been rebuilt and put in a bag. Basically, that means that I had a block with the pistons and crank in. This was as far as I'd ever even seen an engine taken apart. The pile of parts also contained the shop manuals for the car. Drawings, and instructions and specifications on how to take the car apart and put it back together again. I'd bought the worlds biggest Lego set. It was sweet. 
The car came home not too long after the baby was born. That car was my saving grace. Although I'm pretty satisfied with my job hanging out with my kids all day, it wan't always so easy. Taking care of an infant for the first 8 months or so was mentally tough. The work wasn't hard, but the almost endless sitting was. And I was stuck. Stuck close to home for warming bottles, stuck only doing things around the house that I could do holding a baby, and occasionally having the feeling that many new parents have, stuck here for a minimum of 5 years. Doing this. Taking care of a baby. Oh my god. Don't worry, those thoughts were fleeting and rare and I was still much happier at home than I was behind a desk, I'm just making sure that I'm not sugar coating the whole experience for anyone. My first baby was mentally tough, all the rest have been easier. 
I don't know what other stay at home parents do to reset for the next day. The rally car did it for me for quite a while. My wife would get home and I'd give her a kiss and head to the garage. Turn the radio on and put stuff together. Work was slow, that was ok, this was more about doing the work than finishing the work. I didn't work every night, my wife needed me too and I tried to make sure that I found balance. Sometimes I was better than others. I eventually got the car together. It started. It ran, it drove and passed Texas state inspection. In total, I put about 20 miles on it. 
I never raced the car. Part of it was money. Even though Rally racing isn't expensive as far as motorsports go, it's not cheap. We could have found the money, but it would have been hard. Part of it was time. I needed those evenings to myself. To be myself. To let myself change into a stay at home dad at a rate that I could handle. By the time the car was together I discovered that I needed to be home as much as I once thought I needed to be away. The idea of leaving my family for 5 days to head across the country to race was too much. 
So now I have a dead race car in my driveway. East Texas is hard on cars that just sit. They decompose as you watch. I doubt that the car will ever run again, and that's ok. I'm still reluctant to get rid of it though. Every time I see that car, I think of that time, of my wife supporting me as I grew into the job of being a stay at home dad. Those bits and pieces put me together as much as I did them. 

Books this week - 
The Bridge To Literacy, John Corcoran
A History of the World in 6 Glasses, Tom Standage

The Bridge to Literacy was, ironically, a pretty tough read. The author was trying to make a point and spend a lot of time hammering it home. Too much for me sometimes. I did learn a lot about the modern state of literacy and how the testing for it has helped lead to and influence No Child Left Behind. I think I understand more where legislators were coming from when they wrote the laws. I picked up this book because I expect I'll be working on literacy in some way when my kids are all in school. 

6 Glasses was just a fun read. It loosely covered the history of beer, wine, distilled spirits, coffee, tea, and Coke. Within the history of each is a bit of the history of the world. It gives you anther lens to view the events of mankind over the last 5000 years. It's a good time. 

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Yeast Farming: Sourdough 1

Yeast. Single celled fungi. Amazing little beasts. They give us beer and wine and bread, without which much of civilization might not have happened. At least it would have happened much differently. We've been using yeast for well over 4,000 years, but we've only known that they exist since Anton Von Leeuwenhoek and his microscope first saw them in 1680. Before then brewers and bakers just knew that they had to keep a little bit of the last project around to fire up the next one. Some people consider yeast the earliest domesticated organism. The first thing we farmed, we couldn't even see.
I think I'm going to need a smaller tractor. 
Before 1780 you couldn't buy yeast to bake bread. You had to capture it yourself in the wild or beg or borrow or steal someone else's. Everybody's yeast is the same, and it's a little different. A big part of that is because the collection of microscopic stuff that lives in your house is different than what lives in mine. The yeast is specially adapted to your climate. That's one reason that San Francisco sourdough is so good, their local wild yeast is awesome. The more you bake, the more yeast you have just hanging around. Flour, fruit, sugar, it's all food to yeast. The natural variety, and convenience, is what initially let people to desire commercial yeast. They wanted bread to be consistent. Consistent from house to house, bakery to bakery, and season to season. Remember, baking wasn't always considered as much fun as it is now. Raising yeast is much more like very very small scale farming than baking. It's a bit of a pain in the ass.
With that in mind, a lot of bakers wish to try baking sourdough bread. It's considered somehow more magical than regular yeasted bread. To be a true baker, you raise your own yeast. Really though, sourdough is nothing more complicated than using wild yeast instead of domestic yeast. Imagine buffalo instead of cows. Capturing and raising a sourdough culture isn't much more difficult than keeping, and cycling, a flour and water mixture until a large enough population forms. There's already a few yeast in your flour, a few in the air, a few on the counter, you just need one of them and time. This article is as good as any at describing how to capture and raise your yeast. I've used his method with success. I've also used a method that utilized fruit juice or vinegar to make your yeast farm more acidic. The idea is to promote an ideal environment for your yeast to grow. I'm also a month into trying a method that I haven't read about but I doubt is new. I'm trying to colonize a batch of domestic yeast with wild yeast.
Normally, when I make pizza or bread, I use a poolish. It's nothing more than a fake sourdough starter. I mix yeast and flour and water and let it sit overnight to make the equivalent of a sourdough sponge. Except it's not sourdough, because the yeast are wrong. It's still delicious, but not the same. That got me to wondering. When you make a sourdough sponge, you just save a bit of it out, mix it with some flour and water and save it. That's you're starter for next time. What if I did that with my domestically yeasted sponge? Would I just continue to grow the same yeast over and over, or would the local wild yeast infiltrate the starter and take it over? It was clearly already an ideal environment to grow yeast in. So that's what I did. It seems to be working. My bread is changing with every loaf even though the recipe is staying the same. The flavor is changing and the texture of the bread is changing. It's getting really really aromatic and chewy. I really wish I had Von Leeuwenhoek's microscope and the knowledge to be able to watch my little yeast farm evolve. For now though, it's just as much magic as it was for thousands of years of baking. Save out a little piece of dough, take care of it, and make good bread next time.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Light Training

I find it slightly odd that we strive to potty train our children in a world that doesn't fit them. They're too small to pull on and off their clothes without help, too small to sit on the toilet without it turning into a diving expedition, too small to wash their hands, and too small to turn the light on and off. They're basically too small to do anything but the actual act of going. No wonder it's sometimes a difficult process. 
We help things along with stools and potty seats and letting them wander around all day in just their underwear. This gets us through everything but the lights. There doesn't appear to be any standard for the height of a light switch, though consensus has it between 48 and 52 inches measured to the top, center or bottom of the box. Quite a lot of variation, but not enough for hardly anyone of potty training age to reach. They could use a stool of course, just like for the potty and the sink, but then you either have a bathroom filled with stools, or you have a toddler playing bumper cars with the stool as they push it around. Neither option really makes the world a better place. 
When my oldest was potty training I made a light switch extender. It's nothing more than a 12-18 inch piece of dowel with a hole drilled in it. You then drill a small hole in the light, switch and tie them closely with any convenient string you have lying around. You don't even have to take the switch apart to do it as long as you have a slim drill. Now the just grab the dowel and push or pull as needed. The best part is that when your kids get big, you can just cut the string and you have a normal light switch again. Nothing to replace, just one snip and you live in a grownup house again. 

I've also put these on the kids bedroom light switches to silence the cries of 'Daddy, can you turn on my light?" Not that I don't want to help, I do, but not 400 times a day. Their biggest benefit though, has to be in potty training. When they're first learning, this is something they can do themselves, every time. Turn the light on, turn it off when you're done. You can't always get them to do what they need to do in the toilet, but the light switch will work. 

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Pork Roll Up

This is a pretty fancy way to make pork loin. Fancy, but not really much harder than just roasting it.
First you have to look at your pork loin and do some visualizing. Look at the end, the round part. Imagine, if you will, a letter G on the end. Now imagine that you are going to use a knife to unwrap that letter G. You want to cut a flap about a third of the way through the pork lengthwise. Now flop this over and cut down the next third. Now cut back the other way. It's awfully hard to write out but much easier to visualize. It's just like a fruit rollup, you're trying to turn a round tube of pork into a big sheet of pork.
Once you get that done, there are lots of different ways you can fill the pork loin, this is the one I used this time, no recipe, just stuff that I know tastes good together.

7 oz spinach blanched and chopped (blanching is just dunking in boiling water for just a second, until it wilts, then pull it right back out)
1/3 lb breakfast sausage cooked
4 pieces of bacon, cooked
1/4 cup shredded mozzarella cheese. (shakey cheese from a can works fine)
Chop and mix it all up.
Spread it on the big slab of unrolled pork loin and then roll it back up. I have these really cool silicon snake thingies that I use to secure the pork roll. You can use cotton kitchen twine as well. You do need to secure it though or it will try to explode.
Now roast it just like a normal pork loin, salt, pepper, 325 for 1.5-2 hours, until it reaches 170 degrees. Let it rest for 15 minutes then slice and serve.

Once you get the hang of unwrapping the pork loin this is a really easy meal to make. With different fillings you can add a lot of different flavors. So really, with just one technique, you have a bunch of different meals. It's also fancy enough that you can serve it to your inlaws or your wife's boss and look like a cooking god. Sometimes it's important to keep everyone fed and alive. Sometimes it's important to be awesome. Use your power wisely.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Pushing Laundry

Sisyphus was a mythical greek king who was punished by the gods for being a jackass. Every time they tried to punish him he tricked his way out of actually receiving the punishment. Finally the gods had had enough, and they punished him by making him roll a boulder up a hill all day. The next morning he would wake to find it back at the bottom. He then had repeat this task. For all of eternity.
Sometimes I feel that I am the Sisyphus of laundry. I do laundry every other day, and no matter what, the laundry basket is never empty in the morning. Ever. I'm not sure what trickery I did to deserve this punishment by the gods. I suspect that it has something to do with leaving my socks wadded up in the laundry as a kid. Sorry mom.
I'm far from perfect at doing laundry. I almost never separate colors from whites after they've been washed a few times. By then we've gotten past the real bleeding phase, and yes, my whites suffer from this. Almost imperceptibly my laundry tends toward a neutral grey. The colors fade, the whites darken, my laundry attempts to achieve a perfect balance with itself. It's very spiritual. Alas, nothing ever lasts long enough to get there. It's taken off it's path to enlightenment by stains or tears or just growing out of it. I sometimes wonder about the reincarnation of shirts.
Today I get to play full on Martha Stewart. My wife bought a beautiful white cotton sweater. I do have to separate the colors out with this one. I aslo have to block it dry. For anyone unfamiliar with blocking a sweater, that means that you have to take it out of the washer without drying it. You then have to lie it down flat on a towel and organize it so that when it dries, it's the right shape and size. Martha would have you measure the sweater first so that you lay it out in the perfect dimensions, but that's taking it too far, I'll just eyeball it. This seems like a lot of special work for just one sweater, and it is, but it's worth it if your wife looks good enough in it. It's worth it.
So today I'll do laundry. Tomorrow morning when I wake, it will be there, dirty, at the bottom of the hill, waiting for me.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

March

A month after my last baby was born, my wife was tired. So tired. She had gone back to work after three weeks, as was her tradition. With me at home to watch the newborn, working short days helped a lot with her sanity and we had a pretty good system. I finally got to get in the groove of feeding and taking care of the baby, and she was sane and happy and tired. Our babies were always up every hour or two at night so she wasn't sleeping much at night, at a month out she was still really recovering from birth, and when she got home, the other three kids really really wanted playing with mommy time. I could tell that she was near the breaking point that Sunday, so I announced that I was taking the three big kids hiking.
This was the end of January and even in Texas, it wasn't warm. It was about 55 and drizzling, perfect hiking weather. We headed north to the Sam Houston National Forest to hike a section of the Lone Star hiking trail. The trail stretches for 130 miles East to West north of Houston. We've hiked most of the eastern half piece by piece starting at different trail heads. This day we just picked one and decided that we'd hike until we were tired, turn around and hike back. I wasn't sure how far we'd get, our party was one tired daddy, a two year old, a 4 year old and a 5 year old. Did I mention that it was lightly raining? How could this be anything but a memorable expedition?
We made it about a mile and a half before I had a mutiny on my hands, even carrying the two year old for much of the hike. I placated the troops with a stack of goldfish. This is when I taught them the trick that I learned watching Forest Gump. If they sat with their backs to each other then they wouldn't have to lay in the mud. Bubba was a smart man. We finished the fish and headed back. It was a long walk back but at least the rain stopped. There was some doubt that we were going to make it, not by me of course, but I was starting to make some very odd insect analogies before we were done. What has six tired legs and an incessant whine?
If we sit back to back, we dont' have to eat goldfish in the mud. 
By the time we got home mommy and baby had slept nearly the entire time and were well rested. The other three kids ate lunch and then all fell asleep for a long nap themselves. That let the baby and I hang out while mommy had her first chance in a month to just chill. I was briefly considered a god. Until the kids got up and we started finding the ticks. So many ticks. It was something like 17 ticks between the three kids. We all had the heebie jeebies for about a week. There were no infectious diseased involved so it ended up fine but it did put a damper on the memory of the hike.

I thought it would be remembered as wonderful a day of bonding with daddy in nature while mother and baby bonded at home. It was actually remembered as a 4 hour tick collecting death march in the rain.... while mother and baby bonded at home. Perfection is such an elusive thing.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Turtles

I love turtles. Love 'em. Not sure why. I suspect it has something to do with their approachability. In the water, they are amazing secretive creatures, you can't get close to them. On land, even a clumsy kid like me could pick them up with ease. I couldn't outrun anybody, but I could outrun a turtle. I caught them as often as I could as a kid. I still do. I'm embarrassing to take golfing. I sprint from water hazard to water hazard checking to see if I can get a hold of anything. Catching one on the fairway is awesome. Then I get to pick them up and carry them back to the water. My wife tells me that this is bad golf etiquette or something. Turtles are, quite frankly, the best part of golf.
When you have something that brings you great joy, it's easy for your kids to pick up on it and you end up 'passing on' that love of it. I hope everyone has something that makes them smile so much that it rubs off on your kids. Whether it's baseball or cars or golf or books or something simple like turtles. Even if your kids don't end up with your particular passion, at least they know that in the world of grownups, there is still great joy and wonder. With joy and wonder, we can conquer the world.

Books I finished this week:
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Quantify! A Crash Course in Smart Thinking - Goran Grimwall

Short History is awesome. Just awesome. It is what it says it is. It goes over chemistry and physics and astronomy and geology and biology. All of it is in an amazingly readable form. You go from the big bang to the formation of earth to the formation of life to modern humans. From quarks to atoms to chemistry to the size and composition of the cosmos. I can't recommend this book enough. I'm so enamored by some of the topics that I'm scanning the bibliography to learn more about them. I'm such a nerd.

Quantify! isn't very good. It's covers some good concepts but they are either covered so simply that you don't really get anything out of them or he falters and has to pull out an equation. The subject material is different from Short History, but the gap in the two authors abilities to really explain their subject matter is stark. I hate to not recommend a book, I love books, but something better must be out there if you want to understand mathematics in the world around you. I'll do some searching and see what I can find.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Double Beet Loaf

Why does meatloaf get such a bad rap? Is it because people make meatloaf that sucks? You don't have to. With one very very simple substitution meatloaf become delicious. So good in fact that this week when it was time for my 9 year old to make dinner, it's what she chose.

Meatloaf - Adapted from Betty Crockers New Cookbook

1 lb ground beef
1lb sausage
     This is where I deviate from the recipe, it calls for 1.5 lbs of beef. I find that if I use one pound of been and one of sausage then the world is a better place and the meatloaf is a bit bigger. I prefer to use a ground turkey breakfast sausage but the sky is the limit when it comes to sausage choices. Go with what you like. Explore the world of sausage.
1 cup milk
1 tbs Worcestershire sauce
1/4 tsp dried sage
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground mustard
1/4 tsp pepper
1/8 tsp garlic powder or 1 clove fresh chopped garlic
1 egg
Bunch of bread. The recipe calls for three slices torn up. I usually put in between 3-8 bread butts. When we're done with the loaf we throw the but in the freezer. When we have enough, we make meatloaf.
1small onion chopped or 1 tbs dried onion, I generally use dried.
Ketchup or BBQ sauce to cover the top if you like

Mix everything except the ketchup in a bowl and put it in a bread pan. Cover with ketchup or BBQ sauce if you want. I like to keep it plain, the 'crust' is the best part. Bake at 350 for 1 1/4 to 1 1/5 hours, until it reached 165 in the middle.

Yes, I do have a dishwasher.
My 9 year old made this last night. She also 'made' frozen peas and cleaned up after dinner. That work earned her $2. She and her brother are given the chance, every other week, to plan a meal, make the menu, and make a list for me to take to the store. Then they prepare the meal and clean up after it and in return they get the extra $2 in their allowance for the week. I can veto any meal idea if we've had it very recently or if I think it's horrible. They don't get to choose mac and cheese and hot dogs. It has to be real food, real cooking. I tell them this every time they cook, "by the time you leave home you have to know how to cook 10 dinners and be able to plan and shop for them." Learning how to bake breads and cakes and cookies is bonus material. No matter what else happens, at least they won't starve for lack of skills.
I've also done the math. If I can eventually get all four of them making dinner then daddy will have more time to chill. It's good to be king.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Beards

Personal grooming is, firstly, personal. We all have different ideas about what makes us look awesome, and those ideas change through time. Anyone who disagrees just has to look back at their school pictures from when they were about 14. You dressed and groomed to look as good as you could that day, you thought you looked awesome.That's funny.
One thing most of us didn't have to do that day was shave. That came in the next few years. I find it odd that when women get their main secondary sexual characteristic they (can) wear clothing to display them to the world. Men, at the first sight of our main secondary sexual characteristic, immediately shave it off. And we keep shaving it off for years, many for the whole rest of our lives. Women get boob jobs to look like super versions of women. Men shave to keep looking like they haven't hit puberty yet. Weird. It's probably because boobs are actually useful for attracting a mate and feeding babies, and facial hair is just decoration. Beards may have some evolutionary purpose, but we're quite beyond that now. Not shaving probably has some level of disadvantage as far as reproducing goes in modern society. This comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal pretty much sums it up: Beards
That said, growing a beard every now and again is awesome, even if it's not a very good one. I think that many of us would be second or third or fourth day shavers if given the choice. When we work though, we have to choose between every day and never. If you don't shave for a week, your boss will have a talk with you about your appearance. If you don't shave for a year, it's a fashion choice. That's why I grew my first real beard. There was no way I was going to shave every day, so I just stopped. Even though I grow a pretty mediocre beard (to be kind) once I was clearly headed down that track, it ceased to be an issue. Awesome.
When I became a stay at home dad I actually started shaving again, because I could do it on my own schedule. I still grow a beard every now and again, just because I can. Right now I'm growing one as part of a Halloween costume. This is another case where being a guy is pretty cool. I can stop shaving for two months with the excuse that I need it for a costume and everyone just seems to accept it. I can't imagine that a woman would get the same level of acceptance if she stopped shaving her legs for two months with the excuse that she was going to dress as a werewolf. That would be a cool costume though. I don't actually even need a beard for my costume. I just need a mustache. I'm growing a whole beard so I can 'change into' a mustache on Halloween night.
As a stay at home dad, I can't really encourage anyone to get sloppy with their appearance. You still have a wife, and having her attracted to you can only be a benefit. But I do encourage you to have a good time with your freedom of appearance. Maybe grow a beard, just for fun.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

I Scream for Yogurt

Home made ice cream is awesome. Getting an ice cream maker and learning how to really make a good batch of vanilla or chocolate will change your life. It might also change your pant size, but it's oh so worth it.
This isn't about ice cream though. Ice cream has the eggs and the mixing and the cooking and all of the stuff you have to do before you start to make it cold. It's awesome, but it's exhausting. I just don't have time for it most days. I'm pretty sure that's why my pants still fit. What I do have time for is frozen yogurt. Making frozen yogurt is frighteningly simple.

Vanilla frozen yogurt:
Plain vanilla yogurt
sugar
Blueberry Frozen Yogurt. Yummy.
vanilla

Add ingredients in accordance to taste, there's no wrong way to do it. Swirl around in an ice cream maker until it's all freezy. Add toppings, fruit, syrup, chocolate syrup, chocolate chips, granola, or just eat it plain. And you do have to eat it all, so be careful how much you make. If you put the leftovers in the freezer it will freeze hard enough that you'll need industrial machinery to eat it, or let it thaw. Then it's not really frozen yogurt any more, is it? Without the action of the eggs and the cream and all of that other good stuff, it doesn't stay soft like ice cream does. It's just so easy to make, and if you go easy on the sugar, healthy, that you should make it. A lot.

Monday, October 3, 2011

My Two Cents

When you're a stay at home dad, you are by definition a one income household. The experts say that ideally, in a two income household, you should be able to meet your bare bones expenses on one income in case one person loses their job. If you only have one income, you're playing a different game. You need a different method of filling the gap, you need an emergency fund. How much you need is up to much debate. The stability of your wife's job is a big factor. How likely is it that she's going to get canned or quit or have the company fall into a hole? If something happens is it likely that she's going to be able to find another job? If she has her arm chopped off in a horrible industrial accident, will you be able to find a job while she convalesces and learns to open jars with her teeth? There's no hard number that works for everyone, but at a minimum you should be able to meet emergency expenses. If your furnace goes out or you have a trip to the emergency room or you car disappears in the night, you should to be able to make it without sinking. Living paycheck to paycheck works, but it's stressful in the best of times. When the worst of times come, it's bad.
On that note, a budget is a good idea. You may or may not need to track every expense, but you should at the very least know for certain how much money comes in each week or month, and how much money goes out.  If you're a scientist, it's basic mass balance. You can't cheat a mass balance equation. If you need to save, make it a part of your budget, just like the house payment or groceries.
College funds and IRA's and investing strategies are all good things to think about, but if you have less than one years pay saved, you probably don't need to be thinking about following the market and day trading. The payoff at that level is just too small, controlling expenses is a much better use of your time and energy. For example, the general rule of thumb is that you can withdraw 4% of your retirement savings a year and have the savings last as long as you do. Quite a lot of leeway in that, but for an example it works. So, in order to save enough to pay $100 a month for cable, you need $1200 a year. If you work a little math, you see that you need to save $30,000 to pay for your cable in retirement. The average household income is around $46,000. The average household would have to save 2/3 of one years worth of income to pay for cable in retirement. I don't like cable that much. What this really shows is that it's often easier to keep control of expenses than to accumulate savings, especially when you're young and poor. 
Early Retirement Extreme is a wonderful site, especially the early posting. It should make you think about your relationship to money and spending. Really, the most useful thing you can do as a stay at home dad is not to screw things up. Don't spend too much. Don't buy things to make yourself feel better. If you don't feel manly taking care of babies, having a corvette sit in the driveway while you take care of babies probably won't make much difference. Being responsible and knowledgeable with the money that your wife makes shows respect for her effort. It's amazing how much that can be worth.
Just my two cents.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Bag Boy

Yesterday I was observing a gaggle of women out with their toddlers. Each had a stroller and a bag big enough to hike the Appalachian trail. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm a guy, but I don't get it.
I'll excuse the strollers for now and rant about them later, for now let me focus on diaper bags.
If you have a child in diapers, you do need some way to carry spares. Babies are notoriously unpredictable and some things can't wait. It's just not cool to let your baby wallow in their own filth when out in public. You need to fix that. What I don't get is carrying enough supplies to outfit a baby expedition for a week. You're out for what, an hour, two? Even if you're out all day, breakfast to dinner, you're just not going to go through that many diapers. Think about a day a home, if you don't go through 30 diapers in a whole day, they you certainly don't need to carry that many on a trip to the store. In fact, I'd argue that you don't need to carry your diaper bag into the store at all. Leave it in the car. After the first month of parenting that's what I did.
A typical trip to the store (if you're a guy) has you inside the building for 30 minutes, tops. In that time anything can happen, but as a parent you usually have a pretty good idea whether the flood gates have recently opened or if you're awaiting an avalanche of stink. If you have a pretty good idea that you're in the clear, leave the bag in the car. 99 times out of 100 you won't need it. The quality of your life will improve dramatically.
Unless I was far enough away from the car that a trip back would be a pain, like at a baseball game for instance, I never brought a diaper bag in anywhere. I always said that if things got that bad, I was abandoning the expedition and heading back to the car for supplies. It drove my wife crazy but eventually she saw where I was coming from. I don't think it's that men don't like carrying giant purses full of baby supplies, we just don't think they're necessary in the same way that women do. If I can tuck a diaper and four wipes in my back pocket, I'm ready for most anything that is going to happen between now and when I need to feed the baby next.
Of course that's the hole in my theory. Our babies were breastfed. So I either had my wife with me or the watch was ticking between when I left home and the time I had to get back to the freezer and bottle warmer. I didn't need to pack for an expedition because I never went on one. My trips out with little babies were more like astronaut missions outside the ship. Breast milk is just too precious when you have to rely on another person's boobs for it. The supplies I needed for the survival of my crew just couldn't be practically transported. I'm betting that bathroom facilities in a space suit have some correlation with the lack of food available. And maybe that's it, maybe mothers need more because they have the potential that a short trip could lead to an expedition. If you're carrying an automatically replenishing supply of food on your chest, then the world is a different place. Maybe those moms I saw were heading from the park on an epic journey and I just didn't realize it.
I doubt it though, I think they just like carrying a huge purse.