Sand Holes

Some people build sand castles. We mostly dig sand holes. Big sand holes. Huge sand holes. Then we fill them back in. It's not very artistic, but it's fun. Burns energy. Tires people out. Mission accomplished.

June 25th

I well and truly love my wife and today is a good day to tell her that. We've been at this marriage thing a while, and I'm still as happy today as I was at the beginning. Maybe happier.
Love you lots.

Swimming

Put them in the water. Put them in the water every day. Give them a little instruction. A little egging on from siblings. Some gentle coaxing from parents. They'll figure it out. They always do.

Walkway

You can't touch the water until Daddy gets there. It's a rule.

Baby Ditch Bird #6

Well, our baby Yellow Crested Night Heron isn't a baby any more. It spends it's days and nights outside. It hunts and it flies, though neither of them well. It's been chatting with the other herons in the yard. Most importantly, it finally convinced my wife to like it.

Hunting in a small pond. Very small.

I've been doing pretty much all of the feeding up until the last week or so. Because it's summer and because I get to sleep in a bit, my wife has been feeding the bird in the morning. She takes the food out and calls to it and it flies down from wherever it is in the yard. The swingset, the roof, on top of my truck, it comes gliding in for breakfast. Finally my wife can enjoy a caring relationship with the bird without having to worry about touching it. That makes her happy.
We'll keep feeding the bird twice a day as long as it wants to eat. I acknowledge that by raising the bird and taking it out of it's natural environment I may have altered it's ability to hunt a bit. I have watched it eat bugs out of puddles and off of the lawn, so I know it's learning by itself, but there's not a whole lot of motivation to go hunt frogs when you can just wait for dinner.
We've pretty much done it. We rescue a helpless chick, fed it, raised it, and released it. It's functioning as a wild bird in the same way that a song bird that eats birdseed from a feeder is wild. It gets supplements from humans, but other than that it has to make it's own way in the world. The other day I counted six adolescent herons on my lawn and another four adults in the trees. Keeping Baby Burr alive isn't going to matter much to the bird population in my area, but to the bird, it's the difference between life and death. If there's any lesson to take from the effort that we put into raising this bird it's probably related to that. I don't think that being a stay at home dad is going to have any real impact on the world. Wars will still happen. Taxes will still be paid. College will still be expensive. All of those things would happen if I stayed at home or if I put my kids in daycare. To my kids however, I think the decision to hold them every day for naps when they were babies is significant. I think that making a healthy dinner for them every night is significant. I think being there at 3:00 to pick them up from school and help them understand their homework is significant. I'm not affecting the world, but I am affecting four lives. That's good enough for me.

Sill Work

Somewhere around nine years ago I replaced the old broken windows in the first story of our house. The first floor of our house is constructed of reinforced concrete. Not, just the foundation, but the walls. Six inches of concrete with a webbing of re-bar. The house is basically a bunker, which has it's good points and it's bad points. One of those good/bad things is the thickness of the walls. You have 6 inches of concrete, then a stud wall, and then the wallboard. Even after you shove a window in the hole, you end up with window sills that are almost 10 inches deep. Every widow on the first floor feels at bit like a porthole and sometimes I feel a bit like a medieval archer looking for enemies, but every window is also a shelf, a big shelf. Shelving everywhere, it's handy.
In the bathroom, the window is right next to the sink, which is convenient. We use that space to hold toothbrushes, hairbrushes, razors, mouthwash, and whatever else seems too troubling to put in the medicine cabinet that is right in front of our faces. We've always set things there, it just seems so natural. We've only had problems with this system two times. The first was when we first replaced the window. The old sill came out and was not immediately put back. The wide span was covered by a 2x4 right next to the window, and a 2x4 right next to the wall, and about 4 inches of space in between that dropped off into the black hole of the interior of the wall. After the second toothbrush went on a journey never to return, I was instructed to put a temporary board in place of the sill so we would stop losing things until I had the time to put a proper sill in place. I did that, and it temporarily stayed there for nine years and worked splendidly. The second problem related to the same gap around the window, but the gap on the sides. Like all houses in east Texas, we have the occasional roach. Not too many, but a few. We've put out roach motels but they've proven ineffective due to the lack of imagination on the part of their designers. Nobody seems capable of designing an opening big enough to allow for our roaches to get in. The tasty poison is there, and the roaches want to eat it, but they're shut out by their sheer bulk. It's a sad state of affairs. Because they can't be trapped by conventional means, they sometimes decide to crawl out of the walls and sit on the temporary sill, surrounded by toothbrushes and razors and what not, and look longingly out the window at the night sky. My wife wakes up early, flips on the light, and everyone has a terrible morning. It's an unfortunate clash of cultures, one that I was recently instructed to stop.
I've finally done it. I bought the wood and got out the saw and the nail gun and spent the few hours getting it all into place. It's been a bit of a pain not having that shelf to put things on for a couple of days, but I suppose it will be worth it. I'm priming the wood today, and then we can go back to using that space for proper storage. Shockingly, my wife is happy. She has the rare ability to wait out my procrastination with out wanting to smother me in my sleep. She doesn't seem to see the nine years of a temporary sill and the countless star gazing roaches in their wonder of the infinite distances of space. No, she sees a well made finished product and she's happy. To many, this is inexplicable, but I don't see a nagging wife, I only see patience. She doesn't see the maddening procrastination, only the beauty of freshly painted roach proof boards. We have found joy in each other where others would see anger.
I'm not sure that I believe in the idea that there is only one true love out there for any given person. That seems like a stretch. I do know that every now and again, through luck or fate or whatever it is, two people can come come together in a way that makes the fairy tale feel pretty damn real. It's nice.

Summer Schedule

Well, I've given it a lot of thought and I'm going to change my posting schedule. For the past nine months or so I've been trying very hard to post six days a week. For the most part I've been successful. When starting a blog that you hope that somebody will read, content is a big deal. You don't want someone to read half a dozen posts, love them, and then run out of things to read. You also don't want your posts to suck so that they read only one and go away, but that's another issue. Now I have content, I have stuff for you to read if you want to. There are 44 posts about food and cooking. There are 26 posts about my adventures with pets. There are more posts than I can count about the general day to day life of a stay at home dad.
That's what I really need to do right now, just hang out and be a dad. When school is going I have some built in down time to sit and write. With school done the schedule become sort of soggy and I find myself at the end of the day never having had enough of a block of time to write. It's stressful. Because of this I'm going to pull back for the summer. There will still be posts, but only two or three a week. Most will be short and archival in nature. I'll still be writing, but instead of writing on the computer, I'll be taking notes on paper. I'll get some ideas down and organized, so when my life returns to structure in the fall, I'll be able to not only improve the quantity of content on this site, but also the quality.
Have a wonderful summer and please check back once or twice a week if you can. Enjoy the summer days, and if you're a stay at home dad, enjoy the extra time with your kids.

WHAT!

School is out and rather than finding myself with oodles of free time like my kids, I find myself with oodles of stuff to do. I'm considering changing my posting schedule to more accurately reflect the time I have to commit to writing things down during the summer. I'll get back to you on that.
In the mean time, I'd like to present photographic evidence that my youngest son has never listened to me. I will someday use this as evidence of something.

ETC: Pick Your Own

Close to us is a blueberry farm that operates on the self pick model. Most farms grow their product and harvest with machines or with hired labor and then rely on re-sellers, stores, to get their product to the public. I imagine that over the long haul this is the most efficient model as it's widely followed. There are a few farmers though that sell you not only their crop, but the experience of picking it yourself. We pick blueberries, but there are also strawberries, apples and various other fruits that we could pick. I kind of wish you could pick cows like this. Look over the herd, pet a few of them, decide which one you want to eat and then take them to the butcher. That would be more fun that just picking steak in the store, but I digress.
We've been taking the kids to pick blueberries for about six years now and it's always been a good time. The particular farm we go to is organic, which I'm usually ambivalent about, but when the little kids are shoveling berries straight from the bushes into their months as fast as they can, it's a good feeling. The picking used to go slow as we spent as much time corralling kids as we did picking. The sessions were also short. We could pick for as long as it took kids to fill up and start feeling sick to their stomach (don't worry, eating berries is encouraged by the management). This year though we really got in the groove. The berries were fat, the kids are getting big enough to contribute to the poundage, and the weather was perfect. We came home with 26.5 pounds of berries. That's a lot of berries. We might have gone slightly overboard. We ate about half of them and froze the other half. We'll enjoy them through the rest of the year.

With a little bit of internet searching you can probably find someplace near you that will let you pick your own fruits and enjoy them. There probably won't be much cost savings when it's all said and done, but you get to show your kids where their food comes from. Real apple trees. Real blueberry bushes. It's fun and instructional and I highly recommend spending half a day out picking your own.

Baby Ditch Bird #5

Well, the Yellow Crested Night Heron is still with us. I've decided that it's time for it to try and stay outside at night. It can sort of fly a little, it hunts bugs, and it's been consorting with other herons. Add that to the fact that it is a night heron, and they're mostly nocturnal by nature, and it just seems right.
This decision has nothing to do with the birds new mobility. Nothing to do with it wanting to roost on the table right after it eats it's night time snack. Nothing to do with pooping on a stack of mail. Nope, it's just because I feel it's ready to be a bit more wild. Really.

Brussels Sprouts

Brussels sprouts have a bad rap. They're one of those things that foodies seem to like, but normal people hate, and it doesn't have to be that way. They can be tasty and easy to prepare, really. First a little background because Brussels sprouts have a cool history.
Brussels sprouts may go as far back as Roman times, though they were probably modernized in Belgium in the 1300's. That's why they're Brussels sprouts by the way, not Brussel sprouts, which is what I thought they were when I was a kid, they're named after Brussels Belgium where they were grown and became popular. They came to the U.S. with French settlers to Louisiana, which might make them sort of a Cajun food. That's pretty weird if you know anything about Cajun food and Brussels sprouts. They're related to cabbage and broccoli and kale and all of those other green leafy things that we love to eat. Enough history, on to the cooking!
There are a few ways to cook your sprouts, but this is the method that I've settled on through some reading and much trial and error. Most people, and most methods, over cook the sprout and it gets mushy and that's not good. You want them to be cooked, but still a bit crisp, it takes practice and it's worth it.

These are good. Honest.

Sauteed Brussels Sprouts
1 lb brussels sprouts (or whatever you want to cook)
2 tbs or so of bacon grease
a dash of garlic salt.

Start by cutting the lumpy end off of the sprout. This will also release the outer layer of leaves, pitch both of those. Heat up a pot of water to boiling and throw the sprouts in for one minute. Drain them and run them under cool water. Cut the sprouts in half lengthwise, if you boiled them too long they'll be cooked all the way to the center, you don't want that. You want them to be cooked only about 1/3 of the way in. They should still feel crisp when you cut them. Throw your bacon grease in the pan and heat to medium high. This is why we're using bacon grease by the way, more that it's delicious flavor, is it's high smoke point. If you don't have bacon grease (and I feel sad for you if that's the case) then you can use half veggie oil and half olive oil. If things start to smoke then turn down the heat until they don't. Sprinkle the garlic salt in the pan and place the sprouts in the pan cut side down and let them sizzle, checking them every minute or so until they brown. Serve warm and enjoy. If you like, sprinkle some Parmesan cheese over them, it's delicious. If you try this and don't like it, don't give up, there are other ways out there to cook Brussels sprouts, you just need to experiment until you find one you like. I do hope this is the one you choose though, I think they're yummy.

She Threw A Shoe

Unshod

When you've got horses you need to keep them shod. When a horse throws a shoe then you've got to call the farrier and get things fixed. Life with cars is fairly similar, except when a horse throws a shoe, it involves the loss of nails, and when a car does the same, it often involves picking up nails.
That's the case with my wife's truck right now. We noticed that one tire was a bit low, not too low, but enough to initiate an inspection. I found low pressure, and a nail. A very very slow leak, but one that needs to be fixed. With an extra car at home now I just pulled the wheel off her truck in the driveway to take it in to get repaired. I could have just driven there in her truck, but this way I can drop the wheel off and take the kids to the library and the store and kill time doing things other than knocking over display tires. It's a good system. Getting tires fixed and changed is a good stay at home dad thing to do. It involves lug wrenches and bottle jacks and jack stands and breaker bars. Good man stuff.
When I loaded her tire into the back of my truck I looked at it more thoroughly and I noticed that it actually has two nails in it. That got me wondering if there is some weird cyclic world of nails where they get hammered into a hoof, then thrown and tossed onto a road where they complete their life cycle by flattening tires. It wold be some sort of karmic pay back for automobiles replacing the horse. That's probably not happening, but it's interesting to imagine a world where it did. It would also explain the two nails thing. They sent in an attack and it failed, so they sent in reinforcements. Glad we caught it, who knows what might come next. Terrifying really.

Step Back

Hey dad, watch this!

Every now and again I put forth the effort to step back from my life and take a look. By definition, I'm always looking out from my life to the rest of the world. It's hard to separate myself from the day to day and see what someone else would see when looking in. It's a good thing to put forward the effort to practice this sometimes in order to properly frame things in my life. What would I think of my life if I met me? What would I think if younger me met current me?
What have I come up with? Things are going pretty good by any metric I can use. Not going to toot my own horn or anything, but whether I'm looking in or looking out, things are good. School is done, summer is here, the kids are happy and I have a new washer and dryer. If there's something in the world that could make me happier, I don't know what it is. The summer after my senior year of high school, I don't think I would have believed that a new washer and dryer would be the highlight of my week, probably my month, maybe my whole summer, but there you have it. Life is unexpected. Life is weird. Life is good.

Girls Day Out

The girls had a girls day out today. They bought new bathing suits and shoes and who knows what else. I'm a boy and I wasn't invited, so I guess I'll never know the truth of what really happened. They decided to use the shoe measurer to get their proper sizes. I'm not entirely certain, but I think if you can fit both feet in there then you're a size two. I think that's how it works. Maybe there's a reason no boys are invited.