Problem Solving

Prison.

My wife isn't the complaining type, not even a little bit. When people tell her that she's lucky to have the best husband in the world she tends to agree. She sings the praises of my cooking and my childcare and sometimes my cleaning. Not too much on the cleaning. If she were a glass half empty type of gal she could easily turn those compliments about me around and find things about me to shoot down. I looked at the cup on the floor this morning and contemplated this.
Like all houses we have bugs. Spiders are the creepiest, but at various times of year we have other visitors as well. Right now we have a series of seemingly identical black beetles that will make their way across the living room, from one side to the other, and disappear. I don't know what they're doing or where they're going but they seem to be harmless. My inclination would be to just let them be, but everyone else in the house seems to think that they should be put outside as part of our humane bug removal policy. It's a simple process really. Just place a cup over the bug, place a piece of paper under the cup, and carry the bug outside where it belongs. Generally this job falls to me but sometimes I'm busy and I don't make it all the way through the process. Yesterday my son saw a beetle and demanded that it be trapped. He's five now and I told him I thought it was high time he start trapping his own bugs, but he said it was a daddy job. I was getting everyone ready for school at the time and figured that if I took a second to trap him under a cup then I could just pitch him outside later. The heart of the problem was a bug crawling across the floor. Now there was not a bug crawling across the floor. A large part of me felt that the problem was solved.
Last night my wife came home and eyed the upside down cup in the middle of the floor and shrewdly asked about it. I hastily explained that there was a beetle under it and I'd get it later. Of course I did not get it later. In fact later, after the kids went to bed, we were watching TV and another beetle had the bright idea to crawl across the floor. I got up, and moved the cup, and now I had two beetles trapped. My wife suggested that I put them outside but it was cold and I didn't have a piece of paper at hand and I felt that since I had once again solved the problem immediately at hand I would be fine until the morning. This has turned out to be true. In fact, I haven't quite gotten around to putting them outside even yet. You see, the cup in the middle of the floor hasn't become a problem. When it's time to pick up the living room I imagine it will be, and then I'll solve it.
I do believe that I married well.

Bloody Foot

You come walking up to me
Your foot a bloody red
I ask in horror "What did you do?"
"I don't know" you said

Were you cut by a shell or a rock
Or bit by a bear or a whale?
"I stepped on something sharp" you said
"While running down the trail"

Come here my boy, I'll patch you up
And send you off for fun
But next time be more careful
And watch out where you run

You stop fussing very quick
And ask me on a whim
"Does my giant bleeding foot
Mean that I can't swim?"

Pit Crew

High quality pit crew.

What a fantastic weekend. For the first time ever I was able to bring one of my kids on a racing trip with me, and it was a pretty special one. A few months ago while rallycrossing with the local group I met a really nice guy who usually rallycrosses in Louisiana. He was over playing with us as a way to spread good will and to invite us to come drive with him and the loony rallycrossers from the New Orleans area. An event finally came up that I could attend and I got the OK to bring my oldest daughter.
Most of my racing trips are just day trips. The drives to and from are a couple of hours at most and I'm usually home by bed time. New Orleans is 7 hours away though, and adding 14 hours of drive time to a full day of playing in the dirt was a little beyond what I thought I could do. I talked to my wife and we decided that it would be a super special daddy-daughter weekend if we were to drive to New Orleans and stay overnight in a hotel and then race the next day. We would get a lot of time together to talk without having to fight for attention with three other siblings. That's what we did, and it was great.

Happy girl and a fun weekend.

The only downside to the weekend was the four days of rain leading up to the event. The ground the course was on was muddy and slippery and pretty much un-raceable. The best you could hope for was to make it through the course without getting stuck, which not everyone did. Cars got stuck and cars broke and none of the driving was particularly fun. It was a race weekend, and the racing wasn't great, but the weekend still was. We changed tires together and my daughter was able to ride along with me when it was time for me to make my runs and we had a ton of time to just hang out. We were able to talk cars for the first time ever, which was a pretty cool thing to do. In one weekend she's gone from identifying cars only by color to being able to tell a Mustang from a Camaro and being able to tell you why it's important to tighten lug nuts in a star pattern. Not bad for a ten year old girl who loves sparkly things.
Like I said, it was a great weekend. I'm already checking the race schedule to figure out when we can do it again, and trying to figure out how I'm going to be able to give everyone a turn going on race weekends with daddy when they're all big enough. I can't wait until they can drive.

A Fence for the Fence

Not a whole lot of time to write today. I'm installing a fence for the fence. You see, our dog has now taken to climbing over the fence in the yard. I tried installing electric fence around the part of the fence she was going over but she just moved to a different part. Maintaining that much electric fence is a serious chore so I broke down and bought one of the invisible fence thingies. For the time being is seems to be working. I'm not certain that she quite has a grasp on the concept that she's not supposed to go near the fence but she seems pretty afraid of the gate, so that's a start.
I've included a picture of her sledding with my wife to show that she's not a completely horrible dog. There are times when it seems like a good idea to not give her away. There are days that she's walking a thin line though.

Shooters

Over vacation we visited a variety of houses. During those visits we played with a variety of people and with a variety of toys. One of the very favorite people we visited was my niece, and one of the very favorite toys she played with was the nerf gun. She hadn't had a whole lot of nerf gun experience before this day, but she took to it like a duck to water. Aiming and pulling the trigger were second nature and all she needed to be able to shoot over and over was a willing big person to cock it over and over and over. She found that person in my wife. They had a great time. My wife also showed her how to lick the suction cup on the end of the dart to get it to stick better. My niece decided that if a little spit was good than more was better and we ended up with a pretty slobbery window by the end, but it was worth it. Cock, lick, load, aim, shoot, retrieve. Do it again and again and again. That's what I call a good time.

Christmas Vacation

We just finished our Christmas vacation
It might be the best that we've had,
Whoever decided to call it vacation
Sure wasn't a stay at home dad!

Beyblades and Mavericks

On our recent long drive we saw a lot of stuff. For me, stuff means cars. Lots of cars driving of course, but lots of cars sitting in yards along the road as well. One interesting car that I saw was a Ford Maverick. Probably a '79. It was sitting on blocks with the wheels off, but it looked pretty good. Not many of them around any more so I pointed it out to my wife. She had no idea what it was so I told her about it and what engines it could have had and just what I generally knew about this fairly obscure car. She turned to me and asked: "When are the kids birthdays?" This was a strange question and quite frankly felt like a trap. In truly heroic form I rattled them off and got every one right. Feeling like I'd dodged some sort of mysterious bullet, she then asked: "What years?" I had to admit that I had no idea. Well, I had a vague idea and could have worked it out with some math, but I really didn't know. I did not dodge the bullet after all.

My wife wondered how it was possible that I could remember a full page of information about some fairly obscure car that I'd never even sat in much less owned, and then I couldn't remember my kids own birthdays. It was a fair question. I do not have an answer.
A bit later in the week there was some present opening and a certain young boy tore away some paper to reveal a set of Beyblades. If you don't know (and I didn't) a beyblade is a top. It's a top with a launcher and interchangeable parts that is supposed to battle with other tops for supremacy of something. I'm still not clear what. They're pretty cool tops, but they're just tops. The kids love them. They know what powers they're supposed to have and whether they are offensive tops or defensive tops and the significance of spinning clockwise or counter clockwise. They have beyblade battles. They change out the parts to try and gain and advantage. They talk about them constantly. I finally broke down and asked them if they realized that they were just playing with tops. "They're not just tops daddy, they're beyblades!"
That's when my wife reminded me of the Ford Maverick that she used to trick me into feeling like an inadequate father. To her it was just a car. To her, most cars are just cars. To me they're all individual and special. Maybe beyblades are as awesome as my kids say they are and I just can't see it. I suspect that this isn't the only time this is going to happen. As my kids grow older and become teenagers I'm looking forward to wave after wave of things that I don't get. When that happens, I've just got to remind myself of that old Maverick up on blocks and grumble about 302's and positraction.