The Price of Procrastination

Gaw-lee!! It's Huell Howser!

2010-04-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

I sent Huell Howser an email asking him if he'd like to come to a meeting of the Glendora Historical Society and give a presentation about his efforts in documenting California's history. I didn't expect a response, and I never get one from celebrities I've contacted in the past (I did speak with Ryan Seacrest on the phone once, but that was before American Idol). Much to my surprise, Huell actually called me. Below is the message I discovered on my phone later that day.

It’s Church, For God’s Sake

2009-12-27T16:34:00.000-08:00

I don’t consider myself a very religious person, as in I don’t ask for God’s opinion as to what to do and I certainly don’t consult a man of the cloth when it comes to life’s decisions. I believe that there is a clear-cut moral difference between right and wrong, and that there are consequences for making mistakes… and redemption for the truly penitent; there is a Devil, there is a God, and you’ll certainly go to Hell if you don’t follow the rules…but Hell isn’t in the center of the Earth; it’s probably closer to Heaven. I don’t believe in reincarnation, so I can’t be Buddha. I don’t believe anything written by Joseph Smith, so I can’t be Mormon. I don’t believe in supporting child molesters, the organization that defends them or the dogma of Catholicism, so I can’t be Catholic. And frankly, I have trouble believing Bible stories (how was Joseph okay with the fact that he married Mary and she suddenly became pregnant without him “knowing” her? Imaging that happening today. Genetically, how was Adam and Eve able populate the world?).

Anyways…

I was born Methodist, raised Presbyterian and married Catholic. Relations high up in the branches on my father’s side of the family tree are Jewish and probably Baptist equally high on my mother’s Germanic side. Throw some Muslim/Islamic into the mix somewhere (my folks just shuttered) and I’m quite a religious mutt, spanning the gamut of orthodox faiths.

On what pew do I hang my hat?

To put it bluntly, however, I don’t believe in organized religion any more, i.e. church, so that rather settles it. I’d like to; well, I think I’d like to, which makes me think that I should, and maybe I haven’t found the right one yet or I’m feeling guilty that I don’t.

Funny enough, there’s no word for people like me. Atheists believe that God doesn’t exist; agnostics don’t believe in anything they can see or touch; theists believe in a god, but not necessarily the God. Where do I fall in? Don’t get me wrong. I believe in The Church, as in a set of guidelines that will protect my everlasting soul from the torments of a fiery afterlife, but I don’t believe in the church, as a building created by a board of directors, a financial planner and a group of parishioners who need to attract an audience as a way of perpetuating a business in the shadows of the cross. It all seems sacrilegious and rather blasphemous.

Either way—any way—every time I step foot inside of a church, a wave of cynicism floods over me. Most of the people around me live a common life of general sin (of the Seven Deadly variety) and yet feel completely absolved come Sunday morning, a free respite to continue doing what you do and to not acknowledge any changes for the better. This happens because someone who went to theology school said so. These same sorts of people honk at others to hurry up as they’re leaving the church parking lot; there’s no need to follow the rules outside of church, right?

When Kara suggests that we should go to church, for the good of ourselves, for the good of the kids, for the good of the community, or for the good of whatever, I always groan a little inside and immediately hope she forgets the suggestions or we find something better to do that Sunday morning… or I’ll offer to let her sleep in, which is much more appealing than going to church. It’s subversive, sure, but at least I don’t have to sit in a building where someone tells me a Bible story and then asks me for money.

When did Jesus get so poor?

Kara said that an important part of Christmas for her was a trip to church on Christmas Eve, and as much as I relented, I didn’t put up too much of a fuss because it did sound nice. After all, she gave up on going to St. Matthew’s here in town, because we got dirty looks from one of the ushers that one time when a year-old Natalie threw a Cheerio into the main aisle…why weren’t we in the “Family Room” with the rest of the unbaptized kids his eyes glared. Well, church is for family, Kara glared back. The next time we went there, Matthew and I spent most of the service running around the church grounds, because he sits still in church about as good as a rabbit on a hot griddle. Since then, we haven’t been back, and I’m not too upset about it. I’d sooner avoid a Catholic church altogether. All the kneeling and the chanting… there’s nothing more annoying than having someone reciting the Lord’s Prayer three inches from the back of your head because you don’t feel comfortable kneeling to follow the doctrine of a religion you know nothing about, besides the fact that the Pope is as nearly a god as you can get and he’s worshiped as much as the real thing. I don’t kiss rings, and I won’t call anyone father unless he is my dad.

But it’s not all bad by comparison.

I’m sure there are a couple more Catholic churches in this town, but we haven’t yet tried them or found them, and that leaves only a couple of other possibilities, all within a half-mile of the house, which is nice. There’s the church that Matthew goes to pre-school at, which seems nice, but each time we go in there—just recently for Matthew’s debacle also known as the WWF Takedown Christmas Recital—I feel as though we’re sitting in a dark conference hall at a hotel, about to listen to a presentation on how to make more money buying and selling real estate.

Next on the list is The Big Church, Crossroads Church, the behemoth that comprises an entire city block, probably a 20-acre complex of buildings, parking lots, schools and open fields for expansion. It’s Christian, sure, but I don’t think they’re too picky with what comes through the door. As long as you have a beating heart in your chest and 10 percent to tithe in your pocket, you’ll get a slap on the back and a gracious “welcome to the flock, brother” as they pass you the shiny brass plate.

It was here, on Christmas Eve, that I had my last stand with churches, where I finally gave up on organized religion, where I lost faith in those whose job it is to save my soul. I decided that I was better off on my own, that my conscious seems to be much clearer if I’m left to my own beliefs. My soul doesn’t need saving, thank you very much, as my relationship with the Creator is on just wonderful standings.

So, we were going to church for Christmas, just like the other 90 percent of the population who chooses to get some religion twice a year—Christmas and Easter. Half the point is to enjoy the splendor of the holiday, to restore some Christ in Christmas and to understand that without Him, there’d be no Christmas. Of course, don’t get me started on the fact that Jesus was born in the Summer (Jesus’ parents came to Bethlehem to register in a Roman census, and such censuses were not taken in winter, when temperatures in Judea often dropped below freezing and roads were in poor condition) and Christmas was started to combine two celebrations, the ancient pagan festivals of the great Yule-feast of the Norsemen and the Roman Saturnalia… and it wasn’t decided that Jesus was born on December 25 until 400 years after he died… and they didn’t call it Christmas until around five hundred years after that. Essentially, Christmas was a religious takeover of a pagan holiday by the Christians to further spread Christianity. Quite ingenious, really.

At any regard, it doesn’t change the fact that I own two suits (black and dark green), a dozen pre-tied ties and a sport coat, all for the prime purpose of going to church. I don’t wear the green suit for the sole reason that it fit me, perhaps, 15 years ago and I haven’t had the guts to try it on again—or I’ve had too much guts to try it on again. That leaves the black one, my marry ‘em and bury ‘em suit, an all-purpose “little black dress” for a variety of occasions mostly held inside a church. I got my last two jobs in that suit, saw many friends get married and several people greet the afterworld in that suit. It has served me well since its debut at my 10-Year Class Reunion eight years ago, and I get to wear it maybe twice a year.

Nevertheless, a full black suit is too much for church, just a shade lower than a tux, so I settled on the sport coat and a tie. Green for Christmas. If it wasn’t so cold out, I probably would have gone with just a shirt and tie, the lowest denominator for church attire, in my opinion. When I was in high school, I attended church with some regularity, for many reasons, one main one was that nice girls attended church and if you want to meet a nice girl, at church they were plentiful. One bright Sunday morning, I appeared in the living room wearing jeans and a button-up shirt, ready to visit God’s house. Needless to say, that didn’t fly with my folks, as much as I protested that everyone my age dressed this way and that I would be out of place if I were to put on a tie and a nice shirt. I don’t remember if I went to church that morning or not, but if I did, it was in a tie and a nice shirt.

Many years later, that lesson stuck with me, and today I believ, if you’re going to church, even if it is to scrub the toilets, you do so in a tie.

I had never been inside Crossroads before, but I’ve been inside lots of big churches. There were greeters passing out candy canes to the kids and everyone was wishing us a Merry Christmas (in itself a relief from the normal and all-inclusive politically correct “happy holidays”). It felt good, warm and inviting. We were going to church! Yet, that wave of welcome soon ended when we passed the coffee shop on the main patio… and the long line of people attached to it. It if I had any good feelings about church left after that, they were soundly decimated upon entering the “sanctuary room.” There wasn’t a pulpit. There was a stage. There wasn’t a choir. There was a rock band. There wasn’t a wall bristling with brass or copper pipes attached to an organ. There was a sound booth and two cameras on a riser toward the back. There weren’t pews. There were movie-style seats…each equipped with cup holders. Cup holders! Cup holders for the coffee they were selling outside. Cup holders so you could put your water bottle or Coke or baby bottle in while the service was going on.

Oh, and there wasn’t a service planned. There was a concert.

Forget finding a Bible or a Hymn book on the back of the seats. There weren’t any. Neither were there prayer cards, those little pencils, or tithe envelopes to modestly conceal your offering. They were gone. Instead, peer pressure came in the form of cash only when the shiny brass plates were Frisbee’d from aisle to aisle. Throw a $20 in there, pass it down the row and my $5 pales in comparison. Does God love me one-quarter as much as you? The church would like me to think so.

The “service” started about three or four minutes late. We got there about 15 minutes to five, enough time to find an empty row of seats in the stadium seating section, where I could get a good look at the vast room slowly filling with the masses of humanity. Walking in, I noticed lots of button-up shirts, sweaters, jeans, a few in shorts, some in sweat pants and t-shirts. The younger kids were in jeans and skater-style t-shirts, some with hats (inside). Among the people around me, I was the best dressed, which I found disappointing… and when we sat down, I took it to find anyone else wearing a tie. I was accepting ties only. If you were wearing swim trunks and flip-flops but with a tie over one of those tuxedo t-shirts, I counted you.

I saw four people wearing a tie besides me. Only four. One was in the group of people I’d call a choir but you couldn’t hear because of the band. One was the drummer in that band. One was an usher, an older man who guided people to their seats after it became crowded. And the other was just another poor slob like me with old-fashioned out-of-date ideals.

But the building holds 2,000 people. One person out of 500 felt that church on Christmas Eve, the eve of the (accepted) birth of our savior, was a good enough reason to wear a tie. To everyone else, it was just another day at the show… and that’s exactly what it was, a spectacle that probably Jesus himself would walk out on.

The first 20 minutes consisted of music, 20 solid minutes of guitars, drums, keyboards and singing similar to a hair band of the 80s, something like Stryper (a Christian rock band that gained some fame during that time). They sang “Come all Ye Faithful,” “Silent Night” and a couple other traditional Christmas carols, only sped up with a rock twist to garner the young crowd. The tie-clad drummer was wailing away behind a sound wall, while a camera crew crept around the stage to get some close-ups for the JumboTron behind them and the three other giant TV screens positioned around the room. And everyone had to stand. The lead singer asked that we all stand while they played. But why? Why did we have to stand for 20 minutes while they invaded our ears with twangy solos, hip drum fills and fitful keyboard riffs? Reverence? Reverence to what? Rock and Roll?

The people behind us sang along. Either they were the truly faithful and saved or they could read well, as the words to the song were not only splayed across the giant screen but also called out by one of the band members… “Okay, now we sing ‘Come and behold Him.’” For starters, I was bored, but also, I was a bit put off. If I wanted to hear a rock band’s rendition of “Silent Night,” I would have gone to an Aerosmith concert.

Call me old fashioned, but a choir should sing Christmas carols—as much as I don’t even like Christmas carols—or a group of people walking down the street to the annoyance of their neighbors should sing Christmas carols. What happened to tradition? What happened to ritual and custom of the King of all Holidays?

And what happened to the choir? It looked like they pulled two dozen people out of the audience and onto the stage to sing and dance.

When that finished and we were allowed to return to our seats, a couple of people were baptized in a wading pool above and to the left of the stage. I’m okay with that, because it was a full dunking instead of merely splashing some water on their forehead, but I assumed that a full-fledged baptism should come at the hands of a representative of God, specifically a pastor of some sort. Those that did the dunking were family members and that just didn’t seem official. And they could have removed the chlorine float from the pool first, but I’m just being picky.

We all applauded, and in situations like this, I rarely contribute much to general applause.

Then came the front man, the youth pastor, with his squirrely new-born daughter in his arms. I only know who it was because they flashed his picture and name on the JumboTron behind him. Like I said, there was no pulpit, so he wandered around in front of the stage with a head-set-style microphone to amuse the crowds and prepare us for the head pastor. He was the warm-up guy to the headliner, the opening act. He told a couple of stories about the church’s youth group, a few jokes to make us all seem like this was just a small gathering of friends in someone’s living room.

Then the band played again. Some song of some sort that everyone seemed to know except for me. We had to stand again, which was becoming as cumbersome and exasperating as having to kneel. At this time, I saw something that I found most irritating, something that hard-core Christians do during music that, to me, is the ultimate sign of religious idolatry and spiritual extremism. They raise their hands up, not really straight up as if they’re being robbed at gun point, but more outwardly as if Hitler was walking by: Palms facing out, arms outstretched in awestruck worship. Some had both their hands up and their head held back, swaying to the music, while others held out a hand and placed the other over their heart. In my opinion, it’s disgusting, but I watch too many World War II documentaries not to make the association, and suddenly, I’m surrounded by Nazis and Adolph himself is about to enter and give one of his riling speeches.

We’re nearly 40 minutes into this by now. I’ve heard music and some news about the church’s various services, youth members, couples retreats, etc. Finally, the pastor comes to deliver the main sermon. I’m not sure because there’s no program. There’s no list of hymns to follow the course of the evening’s events. There’s just the band and a rag-tag collection of men and women singing behind them that, like I said, is considered to be the choir but I can’t hear a word they’re singing over the drone of the lead guitar, the high-pitch of the solo and the rat-tat-tat of the drum kit, not to mention pious Paul singing his heart out behind me.

The collection plates are shuffled down each row, and as Kara dumped our $5 into the plate filled with $20s, I was wondering how much of my money went to film, the electric bill for the sound mixing board, microphone cable for the keyboardist, brooms to sweep up the Cheerios the little girl three rows in front of me was eating off of the floor, and high school expansion buildings scheduled to fill the northeast acreage.

Anyways, the pastor finally enters—frankly, I had forgotten we were in church—an older man in his mid-50s, black hair, black short cropped beard in nice slacks and a plaid shirt (no tie either). He also has a headset-style microphone on and the only thing that dwarfs his stentorian voice booming throughout the stadium is the size of his head on the JumboTron behind him. He doesn’t stride up to the pulpit with a Bible in his hand, nor his he wearing a traditional flowing robe. Instead he approaches a café-style table, one of those waist-high round chrome tables you’d find in a coffee bar or tea house. On it sat a glass of water, similar to a stool and water I’d expect to see on stage at a comedy club.

He doesn’t talk about Christmas either. He doesn’t mention the holidays as far as I remember. At this time, it dawns on me that there are no Christmas decorations inside the main room at all. Besides the giant Christmas tree on the patio that shades the money-changers inside the temple… ahem, I mean the coffee kiosk, there is no sign of Christmas at all. What gives? Everyone was full of Merry Christmases until we got inside.

What exactly is he saying, really? Not much. He told some stories about a Christian retreat he recently went on, a story about a woman who decided that instead of trying to remove an ugly rock from her backyard, she’d polish it instead (and in doing so, she ruined her wedding ring on the rock, thinking the flakes of gold she saw on the rock were going to make her rich). The only thing that made sense was how people lose faith in prayer when they think God isn’t answering when nothing in their lives change. Instead of not answering their prayers, God actually is. He’s saying no. Other than that, his sermon lasted about 15 minutes. What came next was the commercial, and you always have to leave time for the commercials.

We prayed. He told us we were about to pray. He said we would do a regular prayer (not the Lord’s Prayer as I expected) and then we’d do the “let Jesus into your life prayer.” I’m okay with that. I’ve done it. I did it again. But, the part that bothers me is the timing. We’re a captive audience, fresh meat for the offering plates, the unusual visitors to church, so they took advantage of the situation to bring a few more into the flock. Do you like what you see? Why not join? Why not become one of us. Just pray with us and—get this—join us in this separate room for a few minutes until the end of the service. At which time we’ll pass out some literature about the church and what it offers. We’ve sold them! And this was the real message of church, a not-for-prime-time televangelism like all the ones I’ve rolled my eyes at on TV or scoffed at over the years.

And here I was a part of it.

We were free to go. The concert was over. The spectacle complete. Jesus quite shamed and embarrassed by what passes for church, I’m sure.

Of course Natalie liked it. Matthew was happy to leave, saying at the end, “Does this mean we can be loud again?” But later, Natalie remarked that they had to get ready for another show…and that was exactly what it was. A thinly veiled guise of rock music and friendly chit-chat masking a whispered religious message.

Me? I just want my five dollars back.

Michael, the Nerd

2009-10-22T00:16:00.000-07:00

This semester I’m taking a couple of electives I really don’t need. Since there are budget cuts across the country, the college has slashed its normal schedule and dumped a bunch of classes. So, for Fall, the pickings were slim, which is why there were nearly 50 people packed into a room built for 25 on the first night of class. It’s a blueprint reading class, which I have always found fascinating, but I’ve also discovered it is the easiest class I have ever taken in my life.

Our first test was a couple of weeks ago. The instructor gave us a photocopy of the side of a house, showing all of the various framing parts, rafters, headers, etc., and we had to fill in the 36 different parts. It was easy, especially since he gave us the very same paper two weeks prior with the parts clearly labeled and the caveat that we will be tested on this very thing without changes. The test took me all of five minutes.

The thing I hate about this particular class is that it is being taken by construction workers. On the first night, we had to each stand up and tell a little bit about ourselves—which is death to me—who cares who anyone is and why they’re there? Well, the majority of the people in the class are in the construction industry, from plumbers to roofers, who have fallen victim to the hard times of the economy and are looking to either change professions within the construction industry or to better their knowledge of their current field so they can advance.

I’m the only architect, but the part I hate is that I think I’m the only one who doesn’t smoke. The classroom smells like a bar. When the instructor calls for a break, the room empties for 15 minutes save for a few souls like myself. When everyone returns, the air conditioner’s filter goes into double-time and I can feel my eyes start to sting. Kara’s complained that I smell like smoke when I come home.

At any rate, I sit there, count the instances the instructor uses the word “okay” and “you understand” thinking I could be elsewhere, just before we have to pile into group work.

One of my biggest anxieties about being with strangers is the moment someone in charge announces that we’ll be doing a lot of group work. I detest group work, and on previous times have related how it is always someone that gets screwed during the assignments. Someone always does the lion’s share of the work, and since I’m not one to hand my fate (and grade) over to a stranger, I’ll step up and take charge. I guess I wouldn’t mind it so much if the instructor created the groups, but they never do. In this case, he counted the number of people in the class (45 on the second night, 20 more than normal, he said) and told us to break up into groups of four to five people.

My stress level rose at that announcement. Acceptance is always a challenge for me. Not really an obstacle, but more of a blockade. I enjoy being accepted by others, and the moment I’m supposed to be placed in with a group of strangers of my own choosing, I have misgivings about myself. I know, it’s stupid and a little pointless, but how am I supposed to pick a group of people. I instantly picture everyone else in evenly numbered groups of four with me the odd man out.

This particular night, I sat in the second row, just to the right of the middle of the class, decidedly one column of desks over from being directly under the video projector that hangs from the ceiling. There are three reasons for this: 1) My angle is just right that nobody blocks my view of the podium where the instructors stand to lecture, and I won’t a head in front of me when a movie or PowerPoint is played—there’s nothing worse than hearing a speaker without seeing him or watching half of a movie; 2) If there’s an earthquake, I won’t be killed by a falling projector (I’m practical that way); and 3) I won’t be responsible for adjusting the volume on said projector. My other class, which meets on Tuesday nights is in this same classroom, and the instructor is admittedly not good with computers. The first movie she played (the computer is hooked up to the projector) had the volume turned up all the way, and since I was sitting right under the projector, she asked me to stand on my chair—in front of everyone like a nude model in art class—and turn it down… I’m just glad I was wearing clean pants. Plus, I was sitting behind a guy with the largest head in the western hemisphere, so I only saw around 30 percent of the screen.

Because of this, I moved over one column for the next class, making this new seat my own, and I get to class early enough that nobody else is ever sitting there. The move put me right behind a chain-smoking ex-Army sniper who roofs houses for a living and is taking this class so his boss “won’t jerk him around.” His words. Really, he’s a nice guy when he’s not talking.

Just after being tossed to the wolves and asked to form our groups, you could feel the thick pall of hesitation among everyone in the class. I mean everyone. I observed it keenly because I am very much in tune to abstract and uncomfortable social situations. Being a people watcher will help you see feelings instantly shared by groups of people.

When the instructor put the period on his sentence, nobody moved a muscle for approximately two seconds. Count that out… one… two… long seconds of silence… Then papers and books rustled and desk legs began to screech on the linoleum tiles.

Who am I supposed to group up with? After the first night of class, I came home just at the kids’ bedtime, so I went upstairs to kiss them good night. Natalie asked me how my class was (we’re kindred spirits because we’re the only ones in the family currently in school—at the time) and if I made any friends. It was cute. She asked me if I liked my teachers and if I had any homework… all things we asked her when she first started school. Well, by the third week of class, I had spoken to exactly zero people, and here I was supposed to integrate myself with three others to form some sort of club for the next 14 weeks.

Luckily, the solution was solved for me seconds after it was presented to me. The ex-sniper turned around and held his hands out to his sides in an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders that said, “You, me, why not?” I answered his silent invitation with a, “at least we won’t have to move our desks.” The guy behind us began to shuffle his desk our way, asking rhetorically, “Mind if I join?” Who were we to say no. “Sure,” the ex-sniper announced, clearly our leader.

And we got a fourth too. The fourth guy didn’t say a word. He just happened to be sitting next to me, and by that very act—contributed by no action of his—he completed a rectangle of desks, making for what could have been a nicely laid-out Bridge game.

The fourth guy—just a kid probably fresh out of high school—turned his desk perpendicular to the column and settled back down into his seat. Thin-framed glasses were perched on a long nose that jutted out from his thin face. He had jet black hair tussled on top of his head, random acne on his cheeks and a turned down mouth. He was skinny to the point of being lanky: all legs and arms with bony hands. He glanced approvingly at his three new compatriots, as the ex-sniper unrolled a multi-page house plan that took up all four of our desks. We huddled over it like we were in an action movie in these plans were our only way out. The spine of the roll faced the kid, and every time the ex-sniper lifted a page to see what was on the next one, instead of rolling against itself (which is what the plans wanted to do) he held it up in front of the kid’s face, which I thought was exceedingly rude.

At the same time, I wasn’t too surprised.

We were supposed to answer about 20 questions based on what we found in the plans, things like locations of junction boxes, the pitch of the roof over the garage and what classification of wood was needed for the floor joists. Some were difficult to find, but since the ex-sniper was a roofer by trade, he had the most experience working with plans. Of course, he seemed that he loved a good tangent too. The guy that was sitting behind me, a Hispanic kid probably around 20, just wanted to get the assignment done. He volunteered to write down the answers to the questions, because it was decided that he had the best penmanship; no, we didn’t test each other for it, we just took each other’s word that each of us wrote like a flailing chicken and he was the lesser of us all.

I don’t remember his name and there’s nothing remarkable about him to give him a nickname here, but he would read the question, the ex-sniper would profess that he knew where the answer would be and he would flip through the pages, making sure to hold them up in front of the kid’s face, per the usual. Even if we found the answer or not, the ex-sniper would drift off on a tangent about something very much unrelated to the current question… or the next question, or any of the questions for that matter.

The question would be “How many anchor bolts are used in the foundation under the kitchen?” and we’d dutifully flip to the appropriate page and the ex-sniper would pour over the drawing, searching for the answer. He looked with his hands, which is especially annoying because he had big hands (roofer, remember?) and nobody could see anything on the page but his giant hands. Then he’d find a tangent. He’d see something on the page that made him think of something completely different, like rafter braces, and then we’d need to find the page that showed us rafter braces.

Since we’re all strangers, nobody can tell him to zip it so we can count anchor bolts in the kitchen. We’ve got to find rafter braces, and when we did, the ex-sniper (and I don’t know how he could have possibly stayed quiet enough to kill anyone) would give us a little lecture on rafter braces. After all, he’s a roofer, right? I could tell the Hispanic kid was reaching the end of his nerves. He wanted to answer the questions, and when we were completely, we could leave for the night… but we couldn’t go anywhere as long as we were talking about rafter braces. He looked at me and barely rolled his eyes without being obvious, and I would announce, “What’s the question again? Oh yes, anchor bolts. What page were they on?” It would get us on track again until something else came along.

Meanwhile, the kid didn’t say a word. The whole time, he didn’t speak, didn’t offer to help with the answers and he only seemed to feign interest in the assignment at all. I didn’t give it much thought. Some people don’t care about things and I figured this kid was someone who would rather be somewhere else and is only going to college after high school because his folks are making him or it seemed like a logical progression in his life. Maybe he was an art major and his enrollment was a mistake, so he’s biding his time until admissions straightens it out. Maybe he’s not even in class at all and just came in off the streets to get warm and be in the company of strangers.

Twice as long as it should have taken, we finished the assignment, passed the paper around the group so everyone could write their name on it, turned it into the instructor and unceremoniously parted for the night. The ex-sniper and I walked to our trucks together (of course he drives a truck… ever see an ex-sniper driving a Prius?), and we absently and uninterestedly talked about guns and the Army. I may have mentioned what I did for a living too; I don’t recall.

The other two guys vanished into the darkness.

I missed the next class because of my hunting trip, but the following week—last week—it was just me and the kid. The Hispanic guy and the ex-sniper were absent, and for some reason, we reviewed the answers to the page we had done two weeks prior. So, our group was two, this kid and me.

I found out his name is Michael, and when I was a senior in high school, he was a newborn baby. It not only made me feel old but it made me wonder at how young he was. I am nearly twice his age, and yet here we were, sitting side-by-side in a temporary building in the corner of a college campus on a Monday night trying to find out the dimensions of a the foundation footing for a recycling center. We sat there for a while, and I started to ask him questions. He seemed perfectly fine sitting in silence, not talking to anyone, not having to engage a stranger such as myself. But when I walked into class that night and saw him sitting at his desk, reading a graphic novel (picture a comic book with a spine) and remembering that he hasn’t said a word in the four weeks I’ve known him, I decided to see what made this kid tick.

Of course, there was no question about it. Michael is the quintessential nerd. Not Anthony Michael Hall nerd from “The Breakfast Club” nor the Robert Carradine nerd from “Revenge of the Nerds” but somewhere in the middle. He had the glasses, the acne, the willowy physique and he even had a slight speech impediment, one similar to Christopher Mintz-Plasse who played McLovin in “SuperBad.” It was slight, some words were slurred and others stumbled upon, almost if he spoke a foreign language primarily…but there was no way this pasty white kid came from anywhere but here.

I went for the obvious, breaking the ice by asking about his graphic novels, and I feigned that I didn’t know what made them different from comic books. He seemed interested in sharing his opinions and how his friends got him interested in reading them a few months ago. When he said he had friends, part of me didn’t believe him, and I expected that next he would tell me he had a girlfriend who was a model who lived in Canada. But then I caught myself… of course he has friends, but it didn’t fit into the box I had already built for him. My quintessential nerd character has no friends, only online associates, and I kicked myself for that one.

After that, talking to him was like pulling teeth. I asked him about what happened the week I missed, and he simply said nothing, as if they all arrived to class and sat staring at the walls for three hours before going home. Nothing. The end. We started to work on the assignment, and he told me several times that he was probably wrong in his answers—which he wasn’t—and that he enjoyed working in the group but was happy to answer the questions without help.

My nerd paradigm I had been building for Michael was falling apart, and then I began to question what really makes up a nerd these days. When I was in school, I’d like to think that we didn’t have nerds at our school, but maybe my memory is selective. I’m sure we did, and I’m sure I brushed onto their fringes from time to time, if not completely falling into their ranks. I didn’t look the part, but I played the role all the same. I studied, followed the rules and got good grades. I didn’t wear fashionable clothes nor was I the captain of the football team… but I was friends with the guy who was. Also, I was friends with those in the audio-video club and I was president of the ecology club… and I was in Key Club, nerdy things all.

When I was a senior, a friend from Boy Scouts, David Phipps, was a freshman. He was a nerd, for certain. He was the quiet engineer type, always working out a problem or inquisitively discovering a solution to something. I liked David a lot (in fact, I just friend requested him on Facebook) as he was always very thoughtful and polite. Michael reminds me of the David I knew back then in a lot of ways.

I don’t know what it is, but my new project is to befriend this kid. He’s got plenty of friends, I know, so I’m merely deluding myself into thinking I’m doing him any good, but he seems like the most interesting person in class. Probably because he doesn’t like to talk to anyone, would rather read a comic book and has very little to add to a group dynamic.

As for the class? I’ll ace it, for sure, so I’m not too worried… after all, at least I know what a rafter brace is, right?

Matthew and Me In a Rut

2009-07-30T20:57:00.001-07:00

I’m beginning to feel bad for the boy. Since Natalie started school a couple weeks back, she is gone from before he wakes up until about 4:30 every day. This is the first time Matthew has been without his sister to play with (and torment and torment some more) the entire day. Last year, it was acceptable because she was home by 12:30 and it was only a couple of hours without her. Now, when she comes home, she’s not surprisingly tired, but Matthew just wants to play with her and craves her attention. Being that he’s related to me, his way of playing is to bug her to tears until she bans him from her room in a raging fit.

As well, all day, Matthew has found in me a surrogate Natalie, as someone who he can tell jokes to, laugh with and play games with. He loves me. How do I know? He tells me all the time!

Unfortunately, some days I have to work during the day, as there are meetings to attend, phone calls to make, files to edit, emails to respond to and a host of little things that have to be done. Not all day, mind you, but there are a few times during the day that I have to be in the office for an hour or so at a stretch. This means that Matthew is up to his own devices during that time, something I know he must find dull and boring.

When I was a kid, I enjoyed the time alone. I could make my own rules; I didn’t have to share; and I never had to adjust my game for someone else’s ideals and suggestions. Matthew is not that old yet, so he still loves the interaction with other people. That’s all well and good on most days during the week when I can postpone many of my responsibilities until when Kara comes home, but on those certain days… Thursdays in particular… he sits around the house while I attend conference call meetings and take care of work things that have to be done during working hours.

He usually watches TV downstairs, which is great because there are no noises when I’m on my phone calls, but ever now and again, he’ll spread out his toys in the bonus room outside my office and play away. Some days, in fact most of last week, he would spend a couple of hours on the Internet playing games on Playhouse Disney, Noggin, PBSkids, or Nick Jr. He’s entertained for hours.

But lately, I feel like he is bored. More importantly, I feel like I’ve been neglecting him, pushing off my responsibilities as a father to him and his primary care provider during the day for my work responsibilities that I can take care of later when Kara comes home.

Granted, “neglect” is a strong word, and it isn’t as if I leave him in the closet while I go out to a bar and tie one on. It is just that sometimes he’ll spend a couple of hours by himself while I’m putting out a fire at work or handling an important meeting, and I’m feeling guilty about not spending as much time with him as I’d like.

He’s such a happy boy, too. He doesn’t ask for much, just that I get off the phone and come play a game of HoneyBee or Fishes or Don’t Break the Ice… the list goes on.

Also, we don’t normally go anywhere during the day. We have all of this time during the day, time we could be spending out somewhere, even if it is at the store or the library. Something just the two of us together could do.

Oh, but you’re saying that he won’t even remember any of this period of his life. He’s only three years old and he won’t recall the day-to-day activities… but I will. I’ll remember that I stayed up until three in the morning on Tuesday night because I had 30 files to edit, and the next day, I spent the whole morning dozing on the couch while we watched TV. That’s just an extreme example, but not an atypical one, as sometimes my work does keep me up until the small hours of the morning. I’m one for a good deal of sleep, and if I don’t get a full compliment of at least seven, I’m nearly useless the next morning.

So, where does that leave Matthew? Bored, I’m guessing. He doesn’t know what the word means or how those feelings equate to him running around the house looking for something to get into, but I can see it.

Basically, we’re in a rut. I like to stay close to home because I don’t want to miss a phone call or an email for work, and frankly, I can’t think of anywhere cool to go that doesn’t cost a fortune. We spend the day in our pajamas, me in the shorts and t-shirt I was wearing since I last showered, and we have nothing to do, nowhere to go, no friends to visit and nobody to visit us. We need a class or a sport, an activity to give us a break from the monotony.

The worst thing about all of this is that there isn’t much time left. In September, Matthew will be in pre-school three mornings a week… and after that, half days at Kindergarten all week, and then the first grade all day every day of the week! Pretty soon he’ll be in high school and college and married on his own with his own family.

Okay, after that, who started humming “Cat’s in the Cradle”? Raise your hands. I know, I know… I just packed the next 25 years of his life into the span of 50 words, but there’s a kernel of truth here. Regardless of the relevance of time, life doesn’t slow down and if I don’t take the time now to selfishly cherish the moments I have with my son, to build a foundation of loyalty and trust, who will avenge my death. No, just kidding. How will he be around me if I don’t foster this relationship at an early age? Distant and secluded?

I want him to be able to tell me anything, and he should be able to, because it is my job to make sure he follows along the correct path and does the right things for the rest of his life.

It starts now. It starts with trips to the library and to the store, or hiking or camping or maybe just kicking a ball around in the backyard… but it’s got to be something. I just need to get my lazy ass off the couch in the mornings and make it happen regardless of how few hours of sleep I got the night before.

Tomorrow, we’re going to the Splash Park, so that should be fun. I’ll take pictures to show him when he’s older and has forgotten.

The Accident

2009-07-30T20:55:00.001-07:00

Do It Yourself; Nobody’s Stopping You

2009-07-22T14:53:00.001-07:00

I consider myself a do-it-yourselfer. If it is a construction project or a repair of some sort, I’ll attempt to tackle it on my own. I replaced the washer, the dishwasher, microwave and water heater (which I’ve dulled you all to butter knife quality in the past). The results aren’t always what I wanted or expected, but sometimes I can even surprise myself, like when I wired the lights on the patio or when I hooked up the electrical connection for the fountain on the porch (or the railing I built).

This is the before picture.

We moved into this house almost four years ago this August, and when the ink on the title was still wet, I had wanted to tear down the wall that separates a downstairs fifth bedroom with our living room, which I had always considered to be on the small side. With our enormous sectional couch that worked well in the old house, there is left little room for spreading out. In addition, the other room, was mostly useless. The kids would play on their train set in there and I had my drafting table set up in the corner, but other than that, nobody ever went in there unless they needed some quiet time to do homework or run Thomas around the tracks.

The big plan for the room was to tear out the walls, remake the fireplace with some natural stone work and a mantle, install a giant flat panel TV on the wall and fill in the original TV nook with shelves, paint the walls and add in new carpet. The only thing on my list of things that needed to be done that I was going to hire out was to replace the carpet.

The rest I could do myself and I budgeted about $6000 for the whole project, the bulk of which would be for carpet and the entertainment package. The first thing I had to do was tear down the wall!

What stopped me from tearing out the wall was myself… and Kara (more on that later). I don’t know much about actual construction methods of houses, so I had no idea if the L-shaped wall was load-bearing or not. I tried to contact the builder, but they never returned my calls… and the city won’t allow copies of the house plans without permission from the architect, and since I haven’t had that class yet, what good would it do me to look at blueprints.

I asked a couple of the neighbors over the years who have the same style house as ours. Some of the original owners told me that it was an option not to have the fifth bedroom downstairs and to have the big open living room. We visited a family down the street that had the option… but why did it cost more not to have those walls there? You’d think it’d be cheaper not to build a wall and instead leave it open. Was it because they had to shore up the framing underneath the upstairs to compensate for the missing wall? Were there extra load-bearing studs in the walls that are not in mine? They kept referring me and my questions to a guy around the corner who reportedly had the conversion done (he did it himself as it turns out). The people that live there always seemed so unapproachable, sort of hillbilly hicks stuck in the big city, always scowling at everybody and kicking the tires on their lifted trucks. The yard was run down and blank and the house sat faded and a little neglected… not the sort of situation you want to take advice from. Plus, every time I’d drive by, I’d only see the guy out in front of his house when I was late for something.

Finally, on Halloween, when the kids rang the bell, I got the chance to ask about it. As it turns out, they’re a little white trashy, but seemingly nice people. They invited me in and I hobbled (remember, Elsa got out that day and I pulled a muscle running “with” her) around their converted living room admiring his handiwork.

This is the during picture.

He assured me that the walls weren’t load bearing and that if I pulled them out, it would be an easy job. Here we are, eight months later and I finally took the leap…and even that took four months.

I was supposed to tackle this project in February, but work threw me a curveball and I ended up having a full schedule for the month. So, I put it off until June, the next month Kara had off. But every time I said, “So, this is the weekend… I’m going to finally tear down the wall,” Kara would expel that worried little whimper of uncertainty, probably picturing the same predicament that I was: Matthew’s bedroom plummeting into the middle of the living room as soon as I knock out that last stud. And, something always came up, a birthday party, working in Kara’s classroom or a trip to IKEA prevented me from starting it. I was beginning to suspect that Kara was sabotaging my plans, always suggesting that I call in a contractor or some professional to take care of it for me.

Frankly, it goes against my grain to pay for something that I’m capable of doing myself…or at least I something I think I’m capable of doing.

So, I bought a crowbar on Monday, and on Tuesday began what I affectionately referred to as “screwing up the house.” Since I watch a lot of home improvement television, I had in my arsenal a few tricks to make it easier, but I was surprised how quickly the drywall pulled off of the framing. It took about three hours to strip the walls bare, from first hammer blow to clicking off the vacuum. Additionally, I found it to be quite a stress reliever. How many times have you wanted to put your fist through the wall? For me, lots of times, and that day I got to give it a try…but I used a hammer instead.

I opened the window and chucked all of the debris onto the side yard, and it made quite a pile. Tomorrow, the second barrel of drywall goes to the curb and I estimate it will take two more. Once done with the drywall, I was left with the exposed wires, two light switches, three electrical plugs and a couple of speaker wires and a coaxial cable in the wall.

Day Two dawned… well, it dawned with me still sleep, as I didn’t get started on the second part of the project until around 11am, and this was the hesitant part, as it’s the studs that really hold up the wall.

I killed the circuit, and of course they’re not marked on the panel so I had to throw each one to find out which one was for the living room and the fifth bedroom. Yes, it was the last one! I cut all of the wires, took out the switches and electrical boxes and began pounding on the two-by-fours with a four-pound hammer.

This is the after picture, but before the electrician and the drywaller showed up.

I thought it would be hard, but this was easier than pulling off the drywall. All it took was two or three whacks with the hammer and the stud slipped off the toe plate. However, overzealous nailing made some of the other studs, especially the ones that make up the header over the door and at the corners especially difficult. Was eight nails really necessary within two square inches of each other?

Once the wall was down and the debris cleaned up, I was left with a series of holes in the ceiling and the walls… plus a bunch of wires that made less sense severed than they did connected. There were three plugs and four wires, one leading to each plug, one from one plug to the other and one from the light switch to the plugs.

I connected the wires I thought needed connecting, what made sense to me, flipped the circuit breaker and nothing happened. Like I said at the beginning, I’m all about doing it myself, but some things go beyond my scope of skills. Time to call in a professional, and I figured that my schedule would have to be reworked, thinking that there’s no way I could get an electrician out here any time soon. However, I called a reference from an old coworker and they scheduled me in for Monday morning. It took him two hours to rewire everything and add in an additional plug in the middle of the wall to hid behind the big TV, something that would have taken me two days, some mild shocks and several trips to Home Depot… and then to have the rest of my life listening to Kara bemoan stories of fire due to faulty wiring.

It was much easier on my sanity to have it done professionally. Meanwhile, we discussed a change in the plans. Do we really need another big TV? The one I wanted (a 55-inch) cost nearly two grand, not to mention the surround sound system, another thousand, and the installation of the wires in the ceiling and the speakers on the walls. That was a huge expense that we probably didn’t need to undertake, especially considering that August through December are the expensive months (Aug: car insurance; Sept: house insurance; Oct: vacation; Nov: car registrations; Dec: Christmas and property taxes). There’s a lot of money going out, and plus, we have two TVs that work perfectly fine.

So, without the extra money that I needed to save my doing all of this work myself, my DIY mantra lost some steam. It started with the electrician. I paid for his services, so why bother doing the rest of this myself. I hired out the hanging of the drywall patches and the painting of the room… and the last step will be laying down the carpet.

And then we can sit around and complain about how a nice new couch would look better in our nice big new room than this old ratty one we’re sitting on. All the while, we’ll be shouting at the kids, “Eat it in the kitchen!!”

Costs:
1. one crowbar: $8.00
2. electrician: $324.00
3. paint: $40.00
4. drywall patching and painting: $750.00
5. carpet (375 sq.ft): $1,875.00
Total cost of project: $2,997.00

I told Kara I’d have the whole thing done on time for Natalie’s birthday on August 28… but it looks like I’ll be about a month early!

Oh, since I like hearing stories of people finding treasures behind the walls of their houses (I was glued to the TV as a kid when I watch Geraldo Rivera uncover Al Capone’s vault…and subsequently disappointed), we decided to put into the ceiling a time capsule to share with someone in the future what it was like to live in 2009. We put pictures of us, a copy of our bills (mortgage, electric, gas, etc.) and a couple paychecks, some coins, movie stubs, event tickets, LA County Fair ticket, a winning lottery ticket, some brochures of places we’d been, receipts for the grocery store and a couple of magazines. Accompanying it is a letter explaining who we are and how we came to live in this house, and I’m excited to wonder who might find it tucked up in between the ceiling and the second story.

Right now, the drywall is being screwed in place and the seams taped and plastered… we’ll never see it again. But here is where it is sitting, just beyond three magazines we subscribe to here (Architectual Digest, Car&Driver and Fortune Small Business).

So, as to the notion of doing it myself, sometimes, I figure my time is more important than money. Can I tape and mud drywall? Sure, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out, but why not sit up here at my desk getting some work done while it is handled for me downstairs.

Plus, I got to remove the wall with a sledgehammer, which is what I really wanted to do all along!

Natalie's Kindergarten Promotion

2009-05-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

Behind the Sage Green Door

2009-04-21T01:19:00.000-07:00

Both you and I could escape a long drawn out story about how much of a memorable experience we had on Saturday night at Disneyland’s exclusive Club 33 by doing one of those corny MasterCard commercial clichés that lists how bloody expensive each item turned out to be but the end results were “Priceless.” It would be cute and clever and work on many levels because of the coincidence of my last name and how the experience of going to Club 33 could very well be a one-in-a-lifetime experience for Kara and I… but frankly, summing it all up in a few words with a couple of pictures would go against everything I believe in. Plus, you’re not getting off that easily. Here is a picture of Kara in front of the sacred door.

Everyone reading this is aware of Club 33, and if you’ve ever stood outside the Blue Bayou, just to the right of Pirates, wondering if they might be able to squeeze you and your family of seven in at a five-thirty spot for dinner on a Saturday night during a three-day weekend may well have wondered what was that mysteriously looking door emblazoned with a most regal Club 33 logo on a fancy placard. It seems that only the fancy dressed folk were allowed admittance after, perhaps, pushing a hidden button and whispering a secret code. And when the door was opened, you could only glimpse over the hostess’s shoulder into a most splendorous of rooms draped in velvet and mahogany…just for a second, until the door was unceremoniously closed and you were shut out, back into the reality that the Blue Bayou hostess is laughing incredulously at you for even thinking of eating there without making a reservation at least a couple of weeks in advance.

You thought you were trying to eat at the nicest and most excusive restaurants in all of Disney’s great kingdom… but you were wrong. When you found out what Club 33 was all about, the bar had been raised. You had your sites set higher.

That was me. That was me many, many years ago, with the allure and secrecy of Club 33 was first presented. This is long before the Internet, so the access to insider information was impossible to discover, unless you knew someone who had actually been there. As a teenager or earlier, I knew exactly squat. So, it remained a mystery. Was it Club 33 because Walt Disney only allowed 33 members at a time, 33 of the greatest leaders in the free world could meet and dine with Walt Disney? Was it called Club 33 because it was 33 years between the time Disney started working on Disneyland and when he died? (It isn’t, of course, since he started planning Disneyland in the 40s). But there are a couple of other theories which hold some water: 33, when turned on its side look like MM, which could stand for Mickey Mouse; Walt’s favorite number was three; his daughter was born in 1933. Who knew, but I wanted to find out.

Years passed and I grew no closer to getting behind that mirrored Club 33 crest than when I first thought about it. Meanwhile, one of the girls behind the wine bar at the hotel would regale us with tails of Club 33 (she was dating some exec), only whetting our desire to visit.

Then you forget about it. You grow up, maybe, move on to life’s daily grind. Suddenly, out of the blue, an email arrives with an invitation to go behind the sage green door (as an afterthought, I added "sage" here so as not to confuse my story with that of the classic adult film of the same title).

One of Kara’s high school friends happens to be a fraternity brother of mine; in fact, I met Renato before I met Kara, and she had known him long before she knew me, of course. He and his wife Ester are big fans of the Magic Kingdom, and they have just as many scratches on their Annual Passes from frequent swiping as we do (though we are currently between Passes right now). Another fraternity brother, Jeff, is a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals, and he is one of the few individual members of Club 33 (most are corporate members and used by more than a few executives), and I had no idea he was a member. Both Jeff and Renato are on FaceBook, where Jeff noticed Renato’s frequent postings of Disneyland related photos and updates… he’s there with his family all the time… and he asked Renato if he’d like to dine at Club 33, a highly coveted invitation, as you can only eat there if you are a member or know a member well enough to make reservations for you. On the balcony overlooking the commoners, Kara and I pose for a picture during the fireworks show. We were told by the waiter, that the view isn't what it used to be thanks to all of the trees that grew over the years... he said people complain to Michael Eisner's office all the time to have them cut down.

Needless to mention in this story is that Renato jumped at the chance… but then who would they bestow the other two coveted spots to? They created a criteria of people who they wanted to accompany them and I’m told the list was short. They had a three-point roll of conditions: 1) For starters, they had to be people they’d actually enjoy dinner with; 2) They had to be able to afford it (and in this economy that narrows it down quite a bit); and 3) They had to be people that would appreciate it for what it is.

As it turns out, Kara and I fit the bill most perfectly (as we are most delightful dinner guests). Funny enough, at first, reluctantly, I had to turn it down, as criteria Number Two became a big factor. Since we are between Disneyland Passes, I assumed we would have to of either bought at ticket to get in (at $69 each) in order to eat there or renewed our Annual Passes (at $200 each), both options seemed like a misappropriation of funds in the post-Obama 2009 Household Budget. It would have made for an overly expensive meal, but Renato called me and clarified that admittance to the park is included with the reservations. After dinner, Kara standing in the main dining room with the bar and upstairs foyer in the background.

We were in.

Now, what to wear? Normally, I’m not one for fashion, and although I enjoy looking nice, I don’t go out of my way to buy expensive clothes and the current trends. As long as I’m covered in all the right places and the colors match as best as I can tell, I’m good with it. Because of this, my options for fine dining are limited to two nearly opposite sides of the spectrum: shorts and sandals or a full black suit. The various websites I consulted advised business casual, but I felt uncomfortable not wearing a tie, as Club 33 seemed like a place that you’d wear a tie to. If I was going to wear a tie, I had to wear a coat… and the only coat I had was the one nicely paired to my suit pants. That wouldn’t work, as a suit is too dressy for an amusement park.

Soon after Easter, I noticed a significant swelling around my middle, coupled with the fact that simultaneously, all of my clothes have inexplicably shrunk on the hangers, the pants I planned to wear no longer fit. So I hit the streets, walking and running about four miles each day in the hopes that Easter would work its way out of my system and that I’d drop 10 pounds or so, just enough to fit into my comfortable khakis and a nice button-up shirt. Well, after four days of exercises and a somewhat muted diet, I gained two pounds!

I couldn’t suck it up any more, so instead I bit my lip and forked out for the size 38 waist pants. While I was there, I saw a nice sportcoat they had in my size (46-long in case anyone needs any Christmas ideas), so I got that too.

I was all set, wearing three layers of clothing on the first 90-plus-degree day of the year, wouldn’t you know!

At about 5:30, we arrived at Guest Relations and picked up our complimentary admission tickets (that says Club 33 on them!) and since we didn’t want to walk around in the park on this especially packed day (we parked on the top level of the structure… I had never seen the top level of the parking structure before, and they weren’t taking the usual $11 parking fee either)… anyway, since Kara was wearing attractively strappy shoes that looked good but functioned like thumb screws, we decided on sitting out the crowds at our favorite watering hole, The Wine Cellar. Our table with the Villacortes.

With plenty of time to spare, we made out way into the park and over to the Magic Door, where we took a couple of pictures and saw a few other parties anxiously awaiting their turn through Disney’s most secret of places. There were a couple of little girls about Natalie’s age, all wearing their Sunday best no doubt, excitedly and perhaps impatiently waiting their turn. An older man stood next to me and asked if I was going in there, and the way he asked it was akin to him asking me if I was going to storm the beach at Normandy. I replied with determination, “Yes, I’m going in there.” He wondered out loud to me, “How does one get to go in there?” There was only one answer I could tell him: “Either you have a lot of money or you know someone that does… and we defiantly don’t have a lot of money.”

We met up with Renato and Ester, and at the precise time—a few minutes early actually—he lifted the secret cover on the brass call box, pressed the secret button and announced our arrival.

The door opened. We were in.

I won’t give too much away, lest I ruin the experience for anyone who is lucky enough to follow in our footsteps. I enjoyed how ornate it all looked. We rode in a quite compact elevator… ahem, excuse me, a French lift, to the second floor, where we passed the Trophy Room, so named because it used to have animal trophies on the walls. In this room is where the famous vulture resides, famous for being equipped with a microphone so that it could interact with the guests. Pictures on the walls so show some dignitaries and their visits. There was a beautiful phone booth that came from one of Disney’s movies, and a small marble table from Mary Poppins.

Our table was in the northwest corner of the restaurant, with views onto Rivers of America from the balcony. Unknown to us at the time, we were actually not over the Blue Bayou as we suspected, but instead, we had so twisted and turned a few times through the Club that we were sitting right over Café Orleans facing Rivers of America. This picture is of our table taken from out on the balcony.

I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have, and I felt like a goofy tourist (no pun there) every time I did take it out, as if it was the first time I’d been out of the barn. I didn’t take a picture of my dinner, like I would have normally at any other restaurant, and I didn’t take a picture of the menu, like I should have (hell, I came close to taking the menu). For that, I’m a little disappointed, as more pictures would have been nice mementoes; however, to better illustrate your possible lacking imagination or my inability to properly describe the scene, Google it, as there are countless pictures of the Club much better in quality than I'm able to take.

I started with local field greens, candied pecan, summer melon vinaigrette salad that was only $8, a glass of Zinfandel that was probably around $15, but I should have ordered the caviar instead (it just seemed like a good place to do that). One of the waiters arrived at our table every time I so much as sipped some of my water, to make sure my glass was topped off. I probably had five glasses of water to replace what I lost under my three layers and a most unforgiving sun that day.

During our meal (I had the boneless ribs) we ventured to the balcony to watch the fireworks and to look down on the regulars on the streets below, feeling very much like royalty. Dinner lasted almost three hours, as they took their time between courses, but it wasn’t like we were in a hurry. Frankly, I could have stayed there all night. It was very elegant, very accommodating and very much worth it. I had some sort of fruit tart for dessert, shown here in the picture. I should have picked the cheesecake, but I wanted to try something different.

The bill for the four of us came to just over $350, and since Kara and I had the wine and I finished dinner with a nice 20-year tawny Port I can’t normally justify buying, our portion was $190, plus a $30 tip (each).

Yes, it was worth it, just to say that we got the chance to go to an exclusive club that few people get to go. Of course, I hope we get asked again!

Afterwards, Kara and I took the opportunity to go on the Indiana Jones ride, as it has the tallest height requirement in the park and we wouldn’t normally get to go on it with the kids until they grow a bit more. It was five minutes to midnight and that was the closest ride.

Kara and I were home just after 1am, still full. It was a most enjoyable evening, and I’m glad we had the opportunity.

Sport coat and pants: $160.00
Kara’s new blouse: $25.00
Pre-dinner wine: $38.00
Dinner and dessert: $220.00
A night at Club 33: Priceless.

See, corny isn’t it?

The Economy On Ice

2009-04-06T15:47:00.000-07:00

Let’s just get it out of the way upfront: I don’t like children. Sure, I love my own, and all of the children of my immediate friends and family, but that’s pretty much where I draw the line. All the rest are just annoying bags of irritating puss and misguided energy. I couldn’t be a teacher for anyone under the age of 16. I wouldn’t do well as a playground monitor or a child care supervisor, and I would probably get fired an amusement park for flicking kids in the backs of the their heads.

But, let’s take it a step further: I don’t think I like adults that much either, and I especially abhor parents. Now, wrap that up with fact that I spent Saturday afternoon with an arena full of them and you’ve got the background for today’s story.

There are certain things you do and don’t do in public. At least, that’s how I thought the world ran. You say sorry when you bump into someone. You clean up after yourself. You keep your hands to yourself. And most importantly, you don’t do anything to either cause inconvenience to your fellow citizens or do anything that is inconsiderate.

The funny thing lately is that, perhaps as I get older and more impatient to the shenanigans of the latest batch of malcontents that seem to have infiltrated every corner of society like a sour tasting jello- mold, I seem to see more and more inconsiderate people selfishly disregarding the civilized politeness that our grandparents promised us when they won World War II.

And most of them are parents (or at least court-mandated legal guardians).

Case in point: Disney On Ice presents “A Disneyland Adventure.” The tag line says: “Join your favorite characters on a trip through the park and thrill to “incredible” excitement when everyone’s favorites superhero family shows up to save the day!”

[As an aside here, I’m troubled by the awkward wording of the above tag line. I’m okay with a double predicate sentence and I’ll even let them skate—pun intended—on the fact that they’ve used an understood subject (you) for both verbs, but what bothers me is the way they used “thrill” as a verb. I’m not saying it’s wrong; I’m just saying that it is an archaic use of the tense and it makes the sentence awkward. They should have added “you will” before thrill.]

Anywho, the premise of the show was the story of the Incredible family (from the Disney movie The Incredibles) on their vacation to Disneyland, where they would suppress their superpowers and try to blend in with the rest of the crowd. Unbeknownst to them, and fantastically coincidental, was that Syndrome was also paying Disneyland a visit with the idea of taking over the Magic Kingdom and creating his own evil, yet profitable, them park.

Ninety-nine percent of the people that paid $15 a ticket to see the show arrived on time. The show was starting at 3:30 and we arrived in the parking lot just before 3:00. Already, there were substantially lengthy lines of jumbled people at all four corners of the Citizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario waiting to get in. We had enough time to achieve a false sense of security by the people half-heartedly peeking inside women’s purses for IEDs and dirty bombs, to take a few pictures of the kids, to get gouged at the concessions stand for two bottles of $3.75 water (it is filtered through gold, I’m told) and to make our way to the polar opposite corner of the building from where we came in, of course. And, after all that, we still had 10 minutes to spare. Ten whole minutes to admire the steepness of the arena sides, the elevation we were at and how big the building is.

The kids settled. An announcer’s voice boomed through the arena announcing that the show will start in 10 minutes… then five minutes…. then three minutes. The seats in front of us remained empty as did the row in front of it. I thought, good, for once, I can watch a show without someone sitting on my lap because some Neanderthal with an oversized head and a 10-gallon hat decides to sit in front of one of the kids.

The lights went down, the ice glowed with a cool array of Disney-approved (and probably trademarked) colors…the show was going to begin. The little girl sitting in the row behind us and three seats down to my left excitedly kicked the back of the chair in front of her. She’ll stop. Don’t worry. Her mother will notice, or the girl sitting in the chair she was kicking will complain.

Just when I thought the seats would go unused, a family of five or six appeared through the darkness of our section’s access tunnel. The show had just begun. Mickey Mouse and friends had taken the ice, singing and skating to the sounds of Main Street, telling of the glories of Disneyland. The first family wasn’t too inconsiderate. They appeared as though they regretted arriving late, that there was an accident or some incident completely beyond their control. Okay, a head briefly in the way as you sit down two rows in front of me isn’t that bad. You’re reprieved.

A full 15 minutes goes by. Now, we’re introduced to the lip-syncing and skating characters of the Incredible Family, and we’ve got a plot (trip to Disneyland, incognito, etc., etc.). We have a vested interested in the outcome. We’re hooked. We’re enjoying it.

What appeared next through the darkness of the access tunnel was what looked like two families, at least three or four women and a half-dozen kids that came in two irritating waves. What wasn’t immediately apparent was that they were related—or at least knew each other—but what was immediately galling was that the first wave sat in their assigned seats, by the aisle, while the second wave, who followed right afterwards, had to slide their way past the first group to their seats.

This, of course, we predicated by three or four minutes of them standing in the aisle while they studied their tickets, collected together their children and spoke loudly in Spanish. All the while, we’re trying to enjoy the show. Sit down. Shut up. There are dozens of people affected by your lack of consideration, the fact that you couldn’t trouble yourself enough to collect your tribe together, leave your duplex, pack them into your oxidized dark green middle-90s Dodge Astro Van, find a place to park and herd them into the arena by the time the show starts.

Now, my $15 ticket, and the tickets of my family and those around me, are worth less because our experience has been suspended, my enthrallment by the magic of Disney, my “thrill to the incredible excitement” has be interrupted by your discourteous reality. Just sit down. Just shut up.

The dust settles. Everyone is quiet. The show itself is quite loud, masking those little irritants that plague me, so I’m not completely distracted by the constant talking, the little girl kicking the seat behind me, the kid in front cackling obnoxiously, and the rustling of food wrappers and toy packages.

Who buys that much stuff for their kids? I’m going to call it stupid-rich as the original phrase is offensive and doesn’t exactly apply here. They must have spent $200 to go see this show. They bought sodas, boxes and bags of popcorn, some sort of box full of something and a couple of those whirling lighted toys. The noise of a half-dozen people eating right in front of you is like a hundred nails on a chalkboard to me. Not to mention the two girls who went to get it.

I had never seen these two girls before. One was Mexican and the other was white, and if you had pushed either one, they would have easily rolled all the way down to the ice. They were loaded with arms of food as they plodded their way up the stairs. I assumed they were going to sit behind us somewhere because there was no room in front of us, and thank God. I would have had to of held Matthew up by his ankles to see around them if they sat next to each other.

Instead, they stopped at the aisle in front of us and unloaded all of the food. They stood their for a while, maybe a minute or two, chatting, before they went back down the stairs. Then, about 10 minutes later, they appeared out of the access tunnel to our right, on the other side of our section. They climbed the stairs to the row behind us and stood there for a minute or two, chatting, before making their way back down the stairs. Where they lost? Did they even have seats? Then, a few minutes later, they’re treading back up the stairs on our left, and I don’t know how they did it, but they managed to squeeze themselves into the row behind us to find their seats almost exactly half-way between the two aisles. For me, there as negative space for my knees, as they stuck out beyond the backrest of the seat in front of me, and if anyone wanted to pass, I would have had to stand on my seat for them to get by.

After that, all was mostly quiet, but I was plenty pissed. Then an intermission… and we got to start it all over again. Guess who didn’t have the courtesy to get back to their seats in the 15 minute intermission? That’s right, the family of the year.

So, if it wasn’t for the people, I would have had a wonderful time, which is why I now hate people, their children and any public event where either of the two might attend. People are selfish and inconsiderate; they need manners, lessons in the politeness of society and a freakin’ alarm clock.

When I own an arena, the doors will close when the show begins. If you don’t have the decency to make it on time, your tickets will be refunded and you will be told to have a good day, as we point to the sign that says “we refuse service to anyone.”

Meanwhile, as I was watching the show, I decided that the whole Disney On Ice is a parody of the economy and the current administration. To me, it became, “The Economy On Ice.”

Here’s how (you may not appreciate this, having not seen the show but I’ll do my best to explain):

Syndrome and his familiar round robot enter the scene and capture Mickey and Minnie (which upset Matthew most of all). Meanwhile, the Incredible Family is visiting various theme ride, like Pirates, Jungle Cruise and the train ride. But, all of these rides, including the details of Main Street, where styled like their were in the 60s. It was Disneyland of old, including valet parking (which I don’t think they even offer at DL, ever). Syndrome, who is a robot himself, has reprogrammed the animatronics on each ride to cater to his evil whims. But what about Syndrome, the robot? Who built him? Why? Where does he come from?

The Disneyland they depicted in the show represents the good life. As always the good life is without trouble, lacking worry and is completely carefree. It is a good economy, happiness, a low interest mortgage within the buying means of the general populous. It is the one-income family with two cars in the garage and good jobs aplenty. Mickey and Minnie represent the mortgage companies, dare I suggest it fits to well with Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac… but it does. They’re borrowed money. We go to Disneyland to see Mickey and Minnie, to experience the lifestyle they have built for us there.

Meanwhile, along comes Syndrome, a soulless robot bent on destroying the happiness provided by Disneyland by sabotaging Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, abducting them and taking over everything for his purpose. Who is Syndrome? Hedge fund buyers, AIG, SEC? Any organization that made money on the inappropriate home loans.

We introduce The Incredibles, a family of superheroes that is above the law. They go on the rides and do things that nobody else is allowed to do (like break the rides, for example, and become the grand marshal of the daily parade). They’re Congress, a mostly self-appointed heroes that seems to be there for the good of the common people, fighting evil, etc.

But who else happens to be at the park that day too? Why, it’s FroZone, one of the last superheroes left, and the best friend of Mr. Incredible. Interestingly enough, he swoops in periodically during the climax of the show to “save the day,” but really doesn’t do a whole lot except for come up with witty lines and fancy skating. He’s Obama.

Now, we’re at the climax of the show! Mickey and Minnie are prisoners of Syndrome and an epic battle is about to commence between him and the Incredibles. At Syndrome’s command, all of the Storm Trooper look-a-like soldiers from Star Tours are fighting the Incredibles, and they just can’t seem to win. The economy is getting worse. The soldiers keep coming, and Syndrome is howling manically. Congress isn’t effective at fighting the worsening economy, and the happiness of the people and their money seems doomed. In skates Obama for some pithy remarks and some fancy skating. He suggests that the people in the audience, the average citizen who has paid for the privilege of seeing the show (let’s not discuss how many people snuck in without paying), do something about it. We have to fight the soldiers. We have to sacrifice and take action to make the soldiers behave. Congress can do nothing. The problem is too big for them, and Obama can only come up with a hare-brained scheme that involves us pointing to one side of the arena and then the other side to confuse the soldiers. We’re supposed to confuse the economy into behaving, which is a lot like spending money when you are getting taxed heavily.

Meanwhile, after the soldiers are abated, Syndrome is still at large, and the Incredibles go in for the final assault… but they really do nothing but skate around in circles and complain how difficult it is. In comes FroZone, who immediately assesses the situation without having to talk to anyone about it. Again, another idea. He doesn’t suggest that the Incredibles actually do anything, nor does he suggest that they try a different approach. He turns to the audience.

Obama doesn’t ask Congress for a different level of spending, nor does he suggest that Congress adjust the way they normally operate. He turns to the people to again burden the load. Obama suggest that we all wish really hard for the economy to get better. We get mentally taxed to wish that Mickey and Minnie will be released, that home prices will rise and that the dollar will gain in value.

It’s not bad enough that we had to take the effort to battle the economy with no help from Congress, but now we have to bailout all of these companies too. We have to become The Incredibles and destroy Syndrome because the real Incredibles and FroZone were unable to do the job, one that we relied on them to complete.

So, here we are at the end of the story. And you know what is especially upsetting? Once Mickey and Minnie Mouse were set free, who got the credit for saving the day? That’s right, the Incredibles, when all they were capable of was some aptly timed remarks and some fancy skating.

Thanks Congress for the fancy skating. How much money does Syndrome want from us to go away this time? And who is to say he won’t return? All FroZone did was freeze him, which Obama will find out, frozen things will eventually thaw out in time for our kids to pay for them.

Nice show.

I Can AutoCAD

2009-03-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

In furthering my educational goals of sometime in the future obtaining a Master’s Degree in Architecture, a couple of weeks ago, I started my second year and fourth class at Riverside Community College. Yes, I’m taking it slow. Well, because I have a full-time job, I’m a full-time stay-at-home dad and I have a host of other interests that demand some of my time.

In fact, I’ve got a list of 36 things I’d like to take care of sooner than later, anything from sending some letters, doing yard work and cleaning the bathrooms to selling a few things, washing the dog and hanging up some garage lights that I’ve owned for six years and are still I the box. So, life is full and right now, I’m doing Number 28: download AutoCAD software for my latest class, ENE-30.

CAD stands for Computer-Aided Drafting, which basically makes a drafting table and pencil completely obsolete, as the trick to mastering the program is merely point and click…and there’s no math involved, which is nice for someone who doesn’t really care for that sort of thing.

The class is on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:00 until 9:45pm, but as is typical, I don’t think anyone in class has ever stayed that long before. I’m usually home by 8:30 at the latest, and for the first couple of weeks, the class has been remarkably easy.

The makeup of the students and the feel for the course, attitude of the instructor and the level of complexity in this class is exactly what I thought returning to college would be like. I thought it would be more serious, more difficult and more structured.

My entry-level drafting class I took last year was attended by a mix of kids, mostly slack-jawed teenagers misguided about their future and unsure about their present. Last year, I wrote extensively about the immaturity of those kids and their inexperience with how the school system works (ie diligence and determination, deadlines, etc). With one exception, I was the oldest person in class and enjoyed a higher level of camaraderie with the professor because of that fact. My A was solidified soon after class started.

A similar experience was felt in my second class, an online historical survey of various periods of architecture: I tried to add the class in the previous semester but it was full. A month later, the professor emailed me and asked if I’d still like to add it, as she wanted people in the class that were motivated to succeed, suggesting that I was that right person. Since I was a little apprehensive about taking an online class (back in my day, there was no such thing), I met with her to get some details. We had a nice hour or so chatting about a wide variety of things, partially solidifying my A in that class as well. As an aside, I don’t think I enjoyed the online experience because I seem to do better in a classroom setting. If I want to learn something by myself in my own office by reading a book, I don’t think I need to pay $120 (plus the $90 for the book) to do it; I’ll just start reading one of my own books. I missed the interactive conversations and debates normally found in a real classroom.

My next class, the intro to art class, which you saw many examples of my inability to draw anything with any sort of exemplary skills, was fun. It was the antithesis of what I thought college should be like. We called our instructor by her first name and it was filled with the largest collection of ne'er-do-wells to ever assemble this side of a comic book convention. But everyone was friendly, as it was a class designed around peer evaluation, so we would have discussions about our art and the methods to accomplish each drawing. Before class would start, since I’m wildly punctual to the point of being too early, the instructor and I would chat candidly about the dumbasses in our class…. To top it off, I was three years older than she was! She emailed me at the end of the class: “To avoid any suspence [sic] but as I am sure you already know your grade in my class is an A, one that you definately [sic] earned.” Note the misspellings.

This class, Engineering 30, Introduction to AutoCAD, is just the opposite. Each of us sit at our computers click and clacking away at our drawings while the professor (whom we can call by his first name) does his best to sound like Bill Cosby. There is very few interaction between the students and I talk to nobody.

The first day of class we were all guaranteed to at least get a C grade if we didn’t take any of the tests and didn’t turn in any of the assignments. This was a confusing concept until he explained that there are some people just taking the course so they can do better at their jobs, or as he said, so they don’t feel like they’re “getting jerked around” by their coworkers who know AutoCAD.

The first day was a madhouse. I got there early, as usual… too early as it turns out. My big hang up when starting a new class is finding a good place to sit, and then keeping it. I hate having someone plant himself at my desk on the second day of class if that’s where I’ve nested. There are 32 computers in the classroom, but there ended up being around 55 people in the class, around 15 of them wanted to add… and the professor added them all! However, he made it clear that they were second-class citizens in his class. Those that registered first had all of the rights to everything, desks, computers, handouts and chairs. The add-ons, as he referred to them, had to wait to see if anything was left over. He said that they could bring in their own computer… and chair… and desk to do the work. To make it nice for me, so I don’t have to go early to make sure I get my “regular” seat, we assigned computers. However, if I decide not to show up, the second-class citizen add-ons can’t take my seat for an hour after class starts.

So far, he’s talked us through the first 10 drawings, which were pretty easy, as I consider myself fairly computer literate. With the help of a couple of people, a book and a lot of messing around, I taught myself how to use Quark, Excel and Photoshop to a fairly competent level, so I figured AutoCAD 2009 would be no different. And it isn’t. If you can’t figure out how to do something, just press F1 (Help) and it will tell you. The beauty of the program is that there are several ways to do any one thing. If you want to draw a circle, there are about 10 ways to do it depending on what you have to start with.

Today, Number 28 on my list of things to do is supposed to save me some time, so I don’t have to spend so much of it in class. If I can download a free version of AutoCAD 2009 from the manufacturer (they offer it for a year), I can do all of my drawings at home and I won’t have to spend it in the lab. Win-Win.

So far, I’ve tried three times to successfully download and install this software and it hasn’t worked each time. It takes about two hours to download it to my computer and another half-hour to initialize it (when it tells me it can’t for whatever reason), so I’m getting a little frustrated. I’d just go out and buy it if it weren’t so bloody expensive. With a student discount, I can get it for around $2K… not really in the budget.

So, I’m stuck here, trying to download it from the site!

Meanwhile, I have to go to class and do it the hard way, each day learning something new.

The Saddest Thing Ever

2009-03-17T22:48:00.001-07:00

I came home from class today to find this sad little note.

Natalie's betta fish had died several weeks ago, but Kara said Natalie was thinking about her this morning, which inspired her tribute.

It says: "With out you i'm a fish out of water Yor the only fish for me. You changed my life for a long time. my life jist is int the same."

What a sweet little girl.

Hollyweird and a Bottle of Urine

2009-02-25T21:28:00.000-08:00

Normally, I avoid Hollywood. In fact, if you consider the greater Los Angeles area to be nothing more than a cess pool, then Hollywood is the drain through which sifts all of the bile and excrement therein. The streets are paved with gold, tinseltown, the Magic City, etc., is the same as calling Greenland Greenland. There’s nothing green about Greenland; it is as covered with snow as Hollywood is covered with filth.

But Natalie wanted to see some stars and she wanted to see the magical place all that is glorious about television and the movie industry calls home. Specifically, she had a vision of Hollywood that was probably similar to that of most Midwesterners who have never been outside their hometowns: Lavish splendor and opulent grandeur peopled by those that Robin Leach would lovingly refer to as “the rich and famous.” Fancy cars filled with Jewish movie moguls chatting on their cells phones with the movers and shakers of the Silver Screen. And we would definitely see Demi Lovato, Natalie hoped. That and “Dancing with the Stars.” I’m not sure where we’d actually see “Dancing with the Stars” and Natalie wasn’t too specific, but if we went to Hollywood, we would surely see them.

I hated to dash Natalie’s hopes before we left the house, but I found her innocence too charming to tell her the truth. However, before we left this morning, I showed her the Google Street View of where we’d be headed— Grauman's Chinese Theater (of course)—and I described Hollywood to the kids as being dirty. That didn’t tarnish the stars in Natalie’s eyes. We had to wait until we got there for that.

Before hand, we decided on some real culture instead of merely witnessing the plight of the homeless, the insistence of the flyer peddlers and the antics of the street performers, and that took us to the La Brea Tar Pits. For starters, the idea of digging up bones of long extinct animals is cool, but since the first chapter of my new book discusses such things, I figured it would be a great field trip for me to collect some research about the subject.

Kara and I hadn’t been to the tar pits in years, but it still looked pretty much like we had remembered, except this time, many volunteers where slumped over their desks in the lab room painstakingly scraping 10,000 years of muck and grime off of a fully intact wooly mammoth affectionately named Zed. Last time we were there was while we were dating about 15 years ago. We could only afford to pay to get in and buy one little souvenir, a small rubbery wooly mammoth that is supposed to fit on the end of a pencil. We placed it up on the doorsill of Kara’s bedroom in her apartment, and it has been on the doorsill of every bedroom of every place we’ve lived since—it’s there now.

The kids were fascinated by the skeletons and they especially liked the giant sloth being attacked by the saber-toothed cat (they don’t call them saber-toothed tigers anymore). We went outside to see Pit 91, a nearly-100-year-old dig that has produced the vast share of bones in the collection, nearly three million.

Getting to Hollywood proper from the La Brea tar pits is fairly easy, and since I enjoy avoiding left turns in unfamiliar places, a right turn on Fairfax and another right on Hollywood Boulevard took us right downtown. As luck would have it, a parking spot opened up across the street from Grauman's, as I had visions of circling the block a dozen times before being forced to pay $20 to park in a garage somewhere. Especially considering that we weren’t planning on staying very long… how long does it take to see some footprints in the cement.

Opening the door of the truck, I remembered why I hate Hollywood: the noise, the commotion and all of the business… oh yeah, and the dirtbags swirling around like diseased rats in the bilge of a ship hauling manure. We got to meet one, a red-eyed black guy who nearly insisted that we come over and see his wonderful van that shows hapless tourists the houses of the stars. While I was locking the truck and examining the traffic cone I had parked my front tire on top of, he was trying to convince Kara to visit the booth. I had to shake his hand, which made me immediately want to wash it, and if he is going to talk to people up close, perhaps a breath mint would be in order, at least something to cleanse the stink of bourbon from his breath.

After shaking him, we made our way across the street to the footprints and the stars in the sidewalk. We only had 40 minutes because that’s all the change I put in the meter, which was fine by me; the sooner we would leave the better it would be.

Of course, the front of Grauman's is littered with dressed up characters all charging money to take their picture with them. There was Batman, Snoopy, Tigger, some kind of dominatrix cop, a cross between Wonder Woman and Eon Flux, SpongeBob Squarepants and I’m sure a couple more that I didn’t see.

The whole time, I felt like I needed to be on guard, and I hate that feeling. We’re sounded by two kinds of people: tourists and predators. There are those people busying themselves by marveling at the footprints in the cement or the stars on the sidewalk, and then there are those interested in taking their wallets or stealing their purses. Perhaps a person or two was interested in just walking by to get to a lunch meeting, but everyone else was either the wolves or the sheep. I didn’t want to be either.

Natalie didn’t too. As soon as we got out of the truck, a nervous pall crashed down on her and she didn’t let go of my hand the whole time we were out there. I’m sure it didn’t take too long for her to figure out that the Hollywood she imagined was certainly different than the Hollywood she saw. My only caveat to our trip was this: Don’t talk to anybody. It’s not that Hollywood is a scary place, and it isn’t as though we were in a rough neighborhood, somewhere in the ghetto or anything. It partly the unknown, the commotion and confusion of “the big city” and the fact that I really despise most all of the people I saw that makes me uncomfortable. If there is one thing I don’t like, it’s being uncomfortable.

There is some lavish mall next to the theater and we walked around that for a while, and I took a picture of a couple of giant elephants in the architecture that I’m sure my friend Tris will be able to tell me about, but after that, we asked Natalie if she had had enough. She sheepishly replied that she most certainly had.

So we wandered up the street to the next intersection (Highland) to look at all of the stars on the sidewalk… none were too photo worthy except for Sons of the Pioneers, but some tourist was standing on it to take a picture of her husband in front of… nothing really. He was standing in front of a palm tree. They were Asian, and I’m sure they’ve seen a palm tree before, so she must have just be a poor photographer.

We piled everyone back in the truck, breathed a sigh of relief that I didn’t need to use the buck knife in my back pocket, eased the truck’s tire off of the traffic cone and pointed it toward the 101. Then we sat in traffic for about 45 minutes until we could get to the 5… then we sat in more traffic.

Then Matthew said his famous five words: “I have to go potty.” There was no place to stop, of course, being somewhere around the vicinity of Olympic Boulevard. I suppose we could have ventured off of the freeway in search of a gas station or a fast food place, but how many horror movies have you seen that started out that way? Instead, we used the trusty, pee in an empty water bottle method. We had several in the truck, most from our bag of snack food we brought with us. I pulled off the freeway at the next exit and parked in some small residential neighborhood. Peeing in a water bottle is pretty easy for boys, which is probably Reason Number 325 that it’s good to be a boy.

Back on the freeway, traffic lightened up as we approached the 57, so we veered up to the Brea Mall for dinner at Red Robin. Before we left, we made sure the kids went to the bathroom. On the 91 freeway, there is a certain stretch of road, about five miles worth, where there are no exits and no way off the freeway if you run into any trouble of any kind. You either have to pull over and wait for help or keep going and figure it out on the way. We were merely 20 minutes away from Red Robin, just about 15 miles more to go until we were home, right smack dab in the middle of that empty stretch of freeway when Matthew says: “I have to go to the bathroom.” My awesome parking space is blocked by the head of the guy behind Kara holding the sign.

I thought he was kidding, of course, because he had just gone. However, I flipped on the cabin lights and his face was crinkled and his legs were bouncing up and down like he was riding a bicycle. There was no other option but to pull over and break out another empty water bottle. It was dark outside by this time, so nobody would see what was going on. I flipped on the hazard lights and put the right side tires up on the dirt embankment next to the freeway. Kara unbelted herself and got Matthew out of his seat. While she was doing that, she handed me a water bottle which was about three-quarters of the way full. It was dark and I sloshed the water around inside the bottle deciding if I was thirsty. I had three or four Diet Cokes at Red Robin, and sometimes the salt in the soda makes me crave some water, and every now and again, a cold bottle of water just hits the spot. I held the bottle in my hand. It was still rather cool, especially after sitting in the car all afternoon, so I unscrewed the top, making up my mind if I wanted to drink enough of this to make room for Matthew. Really, how much of the bottle could he fill? Kara didn’t say anything about the bottle except for “do you think there’s enough room,” which led me to believe that she wanted the bottle emptied, or at least partially emptied, so Matthew could fill it.

I wasn’t thirsty enough to drink three-quarters of a bottle of water, so I opened up Kara’s window, reached over and dumped out the contents of the bottle. I splashed it around a little bit, trying to sling some of it up onto my side mirrors, remembered that I had gotten them muddy last week while driving up the canyon in search of Indian artifacts in Glendora. But there wasn’t enough left in the bottle to reach the mirror and all of it ended up in the dirt next to my truck.

I handed the bottle to Kara and Matthew filled it… at least a couple of inches of it. After losing the cap between the seats and a tense moment of thinking we’d have an open bottle of urine in the truck, I found it, capped the bottle and put it in the cup holder furthest from me (and the one I’d least likely ever use).

Everything was right with the world again and we rejoined traffic toward home. Laughingly, I remarked to Kara: “Great, now we’ve got two bottles of pee in the truck.” In the darkness, I saw her look at me quizzically. “Why, what did you do with the other bottle?”

“What do you mean? I didn’t touch it,” I replied, explaining that she had left it somewhere in the back seat. I assumed she tightly capped it and put it in the door pocket so it would stay upright.

“No,” she said, to my horror. “That was the bottle I handed you!” Without explanation, she had handed me a bottle of Matthew’s urine, mixed with about a half-bottle of water.

“Are you kidding! I almost drank that!!”

Laughter was shared by everyone, everyone that is except for Matthew… who then exclaimed: “Mommy, I have to poop.”

We raced home through traffic, through the sounds of his struggling grunts from the back seat, through the pleas of finding a bathroom, and through the agony of his pitching legs and squirming body.

There was no bottle in the truck big enough to handle that.

Luckily, we made it just in time, as I raced into the driveway and he ran into the house!

Such a fitting end to our adventure in Hollywood. Perhaps we’ll never have to go again; and just wouldn’t that be nice.

It's Been Quiet

2009-02-23T01:48:00.000-08:00

My apologies for not posting anything of interest lately... or anything at all for that matter. I've been working more this month than in the last three years. Plus, frankly, there has been nothing worth writing home about, especially considering the fact that if it were interesting, odds are good one or two of the five of you who read this was there to see it first hand. Writing about it would seem redundant.

Perhaps I'll find a muse tomorrow. Start holding your breath... now.

Consider Yourself Lucky

2009-01-28T00:56:00.001-08:00

Life gets me down sometimes. It probably has sometime for everyone reading this…and everyone you may know. I get tired of the drag. I grow weary of the struggle, the scraping, the uphill battle to succeed; because that’s what it is all about, success and happiness. They seem intrinsically bonded together in this life, as you can’t have one without the other—or so we’re led to believe. But it is life as a whole—the big picture—that seems so dreary at times.

Life is always hard, unfair, silly, sometimes pointless and most times quite pedestrian. We spend all our times eking out fame, fortune or fortitude and spend so little time with the rewards. The good guy doesn’t always win; nice guys don’t finish first; politeness, integrity, chivalry, courtesy… all anachronisms, antiques of a fictionalized society we’re led to believe existed in some previous generation before we were alive. But it was just like it is today as it was yesterday: Nothing changes but the names and our access to the information. If you think about it too much, the toiling through the days, months and years, justifying the heartaches and hustle in spite of the happy moments and cherished rewards, it can be down right depressing.

The moment we are born, they say, we begin to die. Our time here is fleeting, only for a brief moment are we on this earth to make an impact, change its face for the betterment of those to follow. We live so that our children can live. But why? What for? Where will it lead, and when will it end?

It’s the human condition, I’m told, to survive and persevere through life’s many, many obstacles on our way to that mysterious fruitful reward. We don’t know what it is, but we have been taught since early childhood that it will be good to those that have earned it.

That is why life is hard.

But really? Is it? If you look around at your life, what you have, what you could have had and what you may get sometime, is it that tough? Did you have to kill your dinner today? Was there any part of your morning where you thought you might die? Was there a physical struggle for survival in the elevator to your office? Did you get a flat tire, the fax machine quit working, the button on your favorite jacket rip, or are you a little under the weather? Does that make life hard?

Have you ever really taken a close look at your life, at the one thing beyond it all, the root of your life? If you do, you might see something I just discovered.

I consider myself lucky.

Damn lucky, really… and every day I take that stroke of luck for granted. My one great instance of luck, and that is all I can call it, pure luck, is the one greatest thing that may ever happen in my life, something that has laid the foundation for my entire existence on this planet and maybe beyond.

And I had nothing to do with it. I’m lucky that I was born me.

In the face of a shrinking planet, where I can witness the lifestyles of people across the globe on a whim via the Internet, we are constantly barraged with information about the world around us. News stories of wars, famines, atrocities, poverty, heart-breaking accounts of suffering and indignities any previous generation before us could never be able to witness the way we have to flood us each and every day. The news tells us about a school getting bombed in the Gaza Strip. YouTube shows us the first account video of refugee camps in Africa. Flickr gives us personal pictures of the slums of Rio. You can’t get away from it.

Look around too hard and all you see is hate and crime and drama, life unfolding before our eyes in the most horrible of ways. It can be psychologically scarring to be objected to these things time and time again. What good is knowing about the man in LaHabra tonight who killed his entire family because he lost his job? Does that make me a better person?

I decided to go to bed early tonight, which is never a good idea because I always lay there for a couple of hours thinking too much about everything… if that’s possible. And it dawned on me like a truly epiphanical moment, where a staff of light broke through the ceiling and filled the room with clarity: I take my own life for granted… literally; I’ve ignored the hidden fortunes my life has given me, basically everything about me for the last 35 years. And here I am, lucky as can be, not appreciating who I am, what I am, where I am and what brought me here.

I could have, very easily, been somebody else, somebody completely different than who I am.

In the broadest of strokes, I’m lucky for being born. I’m lucky to be alive. I could have ended up in a bio-waste bag at an abortion clinic. I could have died from a rare disease before emerging from the womb. I could have had the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck and choked to death before taking my first breath. My mother could have smoked, drank, did drugs or got into an accident while she was pregnant. Any number of things could have happened and do happen every day to mothers and babies all over the world.

I’m lucky to have been born in the United States. Say what you will about it, it is still one of the greatest nations on earth, the land of opportunity and the candle holder to democracy and freedom. It is a world superpower that leads in industry, economy (well, now not so much) and prosperity. What are the chances I would have been born anywhere else? There are almost seven billion people on this planet, but only 300 million of them live in this country. The odds that I could have even been born here are small, only about 1 in 50, but here I am.

I’m lucky that I was born to caring parents. I could have ended up in foster care. I could have been sold on the black market in India. I could have been dumped in the toilet of a high school locker room (we’ve all heard the stories). I could have been abandoned on the steps of a church. Or, like a lot of people, I could have been born into a family that despised each other and everything else…what damage does an environment like that do to an impressionable mind?

I’m lucky I was born in California. This isn’t to be disparaging to anyone born anywhere else in the country, but I say this because I could have been born in Appalachia in the 1850s. I could have been born in a covered wagon in the 1870s. I could have been born in the slums of Detroit in the 1960s. Instead, I was born in the Land of Sunshine, in the state that most people envy during the winter and that’s lots of people strive to visit or to live. I can surf in the morning and ski in the afternoon (if I did either of those things). The end result of Manifest Destiny, we introduced hundreds of items into mainstream culture, from the birth of the movie industry to the mainstay of many agricultural products that can only be found in California. If the United States is the land of opportunity, then California is the state of opportunity.

I’m lucky that I had a good childhood. Any number of things could have happened to me in the first years of my life. I received a good education. I played sports, learned to swim, had grandparents, and joined the Boy Scouts. I went to college. My home life was excellent. I was nurtured, encouraged, praised, taught, formed and shaped into a person of value to this society. I had friends growing up. I am mentally stable, normal, almost typical.

I’m lucky that was born in the 20th Century. Imaging living in the Colonial times. Imagine threshing wheat or having to read by candle light. Imagine working in a textile factory at the age of eight or in a coal mine, or having to give up grade school because you’re needed on the farm. Imagine being born in a gold mining camp, without medicine or modern science. Two years ago, Natalie contracted Scarlet Fever… a hundred years ago, it would have killed her.

All of these things add up to me, and not only am I lucky that they did, but I’m grateful too. Does that make me an elitist or overly arrogant that I wouldn’t have had a good life if I were born in a Bosnian concentration camp or to alcoholic parents in the Ukraine? What would life be like for me if I were born a Somalian in the slums of Mogadishu, or if I was the unwanted bastard child of a teenage prostitute in Thailand? I didn’t live an uneducated life in the backwoods of 1920s Tennessee, and I wasn’t subjected to the constant life and death struggles most kids face in third world countries. Of course, it doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t have grown up to be a happy productive person… I just wouldn’t have been the me you all know.

I am me.

The seemingly insurmountable odds were stacked against me becoming me, but here I am, an American in the 21st Century with all the opportunities and benefits that comes with it. I have a beautiful wife, two great kids, a house, cars, a good paying job (so far), friends and family. We’re not living during a crushing depression (yet) or a demobilizing war. No armies are poised to attack our cities and I don’t fear for my life when I leave my front door. I enjoy order, civilization, a society that, overall, respects each other and our individual goals and ambitions.

However, with my epiphany comes the sorrow I feel for all those people around me that not only take their lives for granted, but for the ones that waste them.

Feel lucky that you are you. You might not know how good you have it.

The Economy, Hitting Home

2009-01-22T14:19:00.000-08:00

You hear of nothing on the news and read of nothing else in the paper (online, that is) but how hard the economy is, how many people are out of work and how much of the country is spinning out of control. Car companies are bottoming out, housing prices continue to plummet and the unemployment rate is the highest its been since the early 80s.

My main client, which accounts for 95 percent of my income, has tightened up their drawstrings, and the trickle down has now affected every contractor on my level including me. Our contracts changed drastically this year which means I will be earning less than I did last year unless I work twice as hard. It is as if the small raise I got last year never happened. In addition, accountability has risen to ensure that every penny they spend is earmarked to a specific step of a specific project.

It was the last straw for me and our current way of living. I had had enough of seeing our money blow out the window every time someone opens the front door.

Even before this came down the pike, I promised that the year 2009 would be a tight year. The writing on the wall is that the world’s economy isn’t done scraping the bottom of the barrel yet and that it will get worse. I’m not sure what that means or where it will go, but I for one don’t want to get stuck out in the cold for not preparing. Our savings accounts are at the lowest they’ve been in a couple of years and I’d like to build those back up as quickly as possible.

I heard interest rates were extremely low, so I called a trusted mortgage broker who told me that I couldn’t refinance my house because it is worth less than what I owe. How depressing that my house is worth half of what I paid for it…but at least it is only on paper. Unlike a lot of people, I’m making my payments, which seems to not be doing me any favors. I called the bank that handles my mortgage a couple of weeks ago to see about modifying my loan to get a more favorable rate or a lower payment with a different program, and I was told that as long as I’m able to make my payments, they won’t help me. Which, if you think about it, is wrong. I’m one of the ones that is preparing for the worst and they won’t even talk to me until I start skipping payments.

Sometimes it is frustrating to be responsible, and I wonder why is it worth it and what’s the reward? My FICO score is at the top one percent of the country and I can’t be considered for a loan now because all of the dumb asses at the bottom of the list didn’t understand their mortgage contracts and have screwed it up for the rest of us. Everyone blames the greedy unscrupulous corporations for taking advantage of the little guy, and that maybe partly true, but if you’re signing your name to a 50-page document that’s in a language you don’t read and you really don’t know what it is you’re signing, you deserve what you get. I have little sympathy for shortsightedness and blind trust of strangers who will make money on your signature.

Anyways, for the last couple of years, spending at this house has been on par with the government. If we had it, we spent it and we asked for more. We even over spent into a deficit using the American Express card. Sure, we have a host of savings plans that I’ve instituted, from a dollar a day going each of the kids’ savings accounts and five dollars a day going to one for Kara and I (along with some automatic mutual fund payments each month) but every other dollar in the checking account was fair game for anyone to take and do what they like with it. I saved what I need to make the property taxes and I try to squirrel away as much in savings as possible, but most times it was very little.

We irresponsibly sucked too much of it away with little or nothing to show for it.

Do you want to buy an insulator collection and then not know what to do with it? Sure, go ahead. Do you really need a dozen new books to add to the 1500 you already have? Why not? Let’s go out to eat for the fourth time this week; it’s only $50 for a family of our size. New shoes, shirts, 15th pair of jeans, telescope, tires/wheels for the truck, toys, games, wine—my God the wine—and who knows what else?

One night, as the year drew to a close, I got to wondering what 2008 looked like from a financial perspective. Impartially, as an amateur accountant, what did we spend and where did we spend it? I built an Excel spreadsheet and dragged out the bank statements, the bills, the receipts and our online spending accounts and added them all up.

It took me two days to calculate and I was floored at the results.

I’m running a small country here. Last year, it cost us $97,000 to run this house. That is equal to 18 cents a minute. Every minute that went by, all 525,600 of them in 2008, cost me 18 cents.

Twenty-five thousand dollars of that went to groceries, Target, WalMart, Trader Joes, haircuts, PTA dues, party supplies, clothes, trips to Disneyland. We spent $600 at amusement parks last year (not including our Disney passes, which was another $700). We spent $2379 eating out at restaurants, $1693 on clothes, $497 at WalMart, $1037 on camping supplies, $2350 in ATM withdrawals.

What have to show for it? Pictures that we rarely look at? Souvenirs we’ve misplaced or lost interest in? What a waste.

This year will be different. Kara and I have banded together and put our collective foot down to stop the hemorrhaging.

We’re not going to spend $425 on party supplies or $276 at Toys-R-Us. We’re not going to spend any of it because we don’t have to. Those things aren’t necessary. The kids have enough toys, and gifts will only be dispensed on holidays and birthdays. No more will treats be purchased merely because they really, really want them or that they’ve been extra good. When I was a kid and wanted something, I never got it. My parents always said, “We can’t afford it,” or a simple “no.” That’s not to say it paid off at Christmas time, because it did, but that’s what makes those holidays so special. You wait all year to get the things you been wanting to get, instead of having a steady flow of new prizes and gifts and toys each month.

My new mantra isn’t “I can’t afford it” because that would be lying. It’s “I don’t want to afford it.” I don’t want to spend $12 on another stuffed animal for Matthew because he doesn’t know where the other 25 of them are, and I don’t want to fork out $15 for a doll for Natalie because she is still in the flavor-of-the-month mentality when it comes to her possessions. She has some favorites, but there is just too much already for her to play with that I’m sure it is overwhelming her. There are toys in her room she hasn’t seen since she got them, I’m sure.

I have enough socks and shoes. I have four pairs of jeans and a closet full of clothes, which is more than enough. I’m not into fashion, so why should I pay for it? We don’t need random office supplies, as I avoid printing anything and try to cut down on postage, if at all. We don’t need CDs and books (spent $286 on those last year), as you can find most music for free online. We certainly don’t need to go on any trips, as the monthly excursions with the trailer is enough (add them all together and it is as if we went on a two-week vacation!).

The State of California is cutting down its spending by 10 percent (yeah, right), and I’m going to aim for 25 percent. At the end of the month, I want to see 25 percent of our income still in the bank. I don’t think that is too much to ask.

We work too hard to waste our money on things we don’t need, and I’m sure it isn’t just me. American society seems to be that way. We are judged on our performance on Black Friday or the Christmas season’s spending. Why? Is it because we are guilted into buying stuff in the ploy that it helps the economy? Maybe we should stop importing crap from China so we don’t feel compelled to buy it for the good of the world’s economy. If you have to buy something, buy it locally, buy it from Americans, and above all else, buy quality (which isn’t always American, sadly).

Then there’s money spent on running the house that is a must, without it, there would be no house. This includes, the mortgage, insurance, property taxes, car registration, phones, gas, electricity, the trailer, etc. This is the bulk of what we pay each month/year, money that we can’t get out of paying unless we drastically change our lifestyle. And that isn’t too likely.

Now, what about the things that we do need and the things that we have gotten used to needing? Groceries for one is an obvious necessity. In 2008, we spent $4149 at Albertsons, $2036 at Sam’s Club, and $1003 at Trader Joes. That’s $7188 on food, or roughly $138 a week. And there’s never anything for me to eat in the house… if there is, it doesn’t last long.

We have fancy cell phones and a high-speed Internet connection, access to Netflix and a decent satellite package for our TVs. I’m quite used to having those things and I don’t think I’d like to do without them. Sure, we could drop our Netflix down to one movie at a time and save four dollars a month and I don’t really need a cell phone—as nobody calls me but Kara—but we’ve had them for so long, picking up my keys and wallet without grabbing my cell phone would feel weird.

I’ve got a guy that prepares my taxes for me and I’ve got a guy that tells me how to prepare for retirement (like that will ever happen), but other than that, I don’t need a gardener or a maid or a cleaning lady or a nanny. We don’t hire someone to clean our carpets and I don’t take many things to the dry cleaners. Nothing gets delivered regularly like bottled water or propane, and there’s nothing at the house that needs service, like a soft water system or a pool. I’m happy for this. We don’t have car payments or student loans to pay off. We have no revolving debt or high-interest credit cards hanging over our heads. We worked hard over the years to get rid of all these things in our lives, and I’m proud that we don’t.

The only service we have is a pest control guy who sprays for spiders, and as soon as the mid-year is up, I’m going to cancel it. Last time the guy was here, he told me that the chemicals he uses are the same as the those you can buy at Home Depot. The only difference is the staying power. Theirs lasts three times as long.

For the last six months or so, I’ve noticed a steady influx of crab grass and dandelions sprouting up on my front and back lawn (it doesn’t help that the kids like to blow the “bubble flowers”). It’s been bothering me for the sole reason that I want my lawn to look nice. It’s still green, which is better than some of the dead lawns in front of a couple foreclosed houses in the neighborhood, but it isn’t lush and nice. I mow it regularly and that’s about it aside from sprinkling some fertilizer on it now and again. I don’t pretend to be a good gardener. A salesman came to the door from TruGreen yesterday, one of those fertilizer services that, for $40 each visit—every six weeks or 10 times a year—they would make sure our lawn is the best it can be. He told me that I have good grass but it is just sick and need some help.

I was frank with him. I told him it would have been a service that I probably would have taken advantage of a year ago, but now that the economy being the way it is, I consider lush green grass a luxury. I was happy with its current hue and that digging out dandelions isn’t that big a deal. Plus, the healthier it is, the more often I’d have to mow it! I was surprised, but he understood and left.

What it comes down to is that we’re consumers and I’m tired of it. We buy produced goods and use them, wear them out and buy new ones…or buy new ones because the old ones don’t look as nice as the new ones. For example, my hair brush. I had this red hair brush for years. It had chew marks on it from the dog, the bristles were kind of frayed at the ends and I throw it in with the wash when it needs cleaning. I liked it. It worked well, and I only used it when my hair got to a certain length, which is usually a couple of days before I get it cut. But I decided that I needed a new one, so I had Kara get one for me when she was last at Target. It’s by ConAir, if that means anything to anyone, but it isn’t as good as my last one. Every time I use it, I feel like I’m brushing my head with a horse brush. The bristles are fine and really close together, parting each hair away from one another on my head. I don’t like it, so I rarely use it, and when I do, I wish for my old one back.

It is things like this that will change for 2009.

We’re going back to the motto of our grandparents of the Great Depression: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

Mostly, I plan on doing without.

Wish us luck.

Resolve Not To

2008-12-31T16:09:00.000-08:00

New Year’s resolutions are nothing but cruel tricks designed to lead you down the path of failure. We place so much faith on the flip of a single page of the calendar. Three hundred and sixty six days come to a close today. At this decidedly arbitrary point in space, the earth slowly prepares for another journey around the sun, and we tack up on the wall a unmarked 12 pages of dates and months to mark the seemingly sluggish passage of time, sighing to ourselves, much in the way we did last year, that December 31, 2009, seems so far away.

Perhaps only in our minds, the unsullied new year has such promise. Midnight tonight, change will stand on the threshold and convert our lives into something magical…all because we merely say it will.

This promise of change, a trick on the concept of tradition, the mundane repetition that sometimes blankets our lives with the smothering of dull duplication will never end because we get a new calendar. The last 12 months have been the same cycle: Go to work, eat, sleep, go to work. From the big picture, each day seems to be a mirror of the last and a reflection of the next.

Alas, when the new year comes around, wrapping up so nicely the holiday season with a smart little bow and a cheerful party, typified by a song nobody knows the words to (and those that do don’t know what they mean), we are offered the chance to renew ourselves with a promise of change. This year will be different; all of the dreadful things that happened last year are finally relegated to the past memory.

We promise those around us—announced usually after a couple of drinks in a round-robin game of “What’s your New Year’s resolutions?” and then desperately try to convince ourselves that we’ll somehow become better people: We’re going to lose weight. We’re going to work harder. We’re going to be more optimistic (my personal favorite). We’re going to take advantage of every fleeting moment in the hopes and dreams that we can eek out more meaning and more excitement in our lives. We’re going to save money. We’re going to the gym and finally get in shape. We’re going to better ourselves in some way that will add pleasure, accomplishment, pride and a sense of significance to our existence.

It’s mostly selfish too. We never resolve to be nicer to other people, or to donate our time to charity. We would never give up the dream of self-improvement.

All of this is leveled down upon us with a pop of a cork and a countdown to midnight, the revelry of friends and family, the enthusiasm for what the new year will bring… the unknown… the one time we are allowed to look into the future and dream about the possibilities contained within the next 12 very short months. The deception has begun: The change of the calendar brings with it a guilt that we too should change something about ourselves, whether they be lofty goals or trivial particulars, and soon we find that resolutions, though maybe full of good intentions, are also loaded with disappointment and disillusionment.

The year changed so easily, why can't you? You’re standing in the middle of a New Year’s Eve party as the clock steady clicks off the few remaining minutes until 2009 and you are faced with a conundrum. What needs changing about you? It’s funny, but that’s not the question you should be asking. Instead, you should ask yourself, why do I need to change? What in my life am I doing that I shouldn’t and what can I do about it?

The singular problem with resolutions is that they are often doomed by their own ambitiousness, as the desire to find a quick salve to simmer your shortcomings and sanctify your all too lofty dreams of perfection becomes your eminent downfall. Unrealistic goals are a quick way of setting yourself up for failure, defeat letdown and the crushing depression that usually follows . Failure is hardly a way to start the year, so you find patronizing excuses to step out from under the guilt.

Sooner than we can say February, we’re back to the old routine again: eat, sleep, go to work, pining for the weekends and the big plans, the future endeavors that will eventually change everything. The procrastination. The what-ifs. The maybes. The mights. The “everythings” never come because we never want them to; the status quo is such for a reason, and we fear change even the slightest fraction. Complacency is comforting, consistency offers a regular menu of steady predictability, and if the current situation is acceptable—regardless of whatever colored glasses you see it through—then why change it?

This becomes February’s argument against December’s promise of improvement. If you lose weight, you’ll have to buy new clothes; what’s one more piece of pie? I’ll start my diet tomorrow. If you save money, you won’t have any fun; but I just need the latest fashions, the matching purse or the Wii attachment. If you be more optimistic, you’re only hiding from reality (again, my favorite). If you stop and smell the roses, you’ll miss out on the race, and we’ve trained ourselves to believe that winning The Race is the most important thing in life, the ultimate “keeping up with the Jones.” Ah, February, you cold temptress, locked still in the shadows of winter, depressed, recoiled, inconsiderate of our dreams of betterment and progress. The last month of winter, the month of the dead, just before spring.

Soon enough, come March, you’re enjoying the routine of November all because you tried to fool yourself into thinking that a party with some champagne, a giant ball on top of a building and Dick Clark’s bland successor Ryan Seacrest in Times Square, is going to change your life… because you merely said it would. You made a declaration, a resolution. Essentially, you made a promise to yourself and others to change something about yourself without having the slightest idea how to accomplish the task.

Success does not come from thoughts or promises or resolutions, regardless of how much faith is bundled up with them. Success and change are the results of action. Going to the gym involves getting up off the couch. Saving money means you don’t need that Starbucks, regardless that the commercials say you do. And savoring every moment so you don’t miss out on life can only come if you are out in life making those moments. If you say you’re going to lose weight in 09, start by eating less, taking the stairs, walking around the block. You want to save money? Draw up a plan of action, a budget that is realistic. Include those items you normally buy, but just don’t buy as much of it. And, if you’re like me and you plan on being more optimistic, start by seeing the light side of life. Not everything is doom and despair.

Remember this: Just because your house has a window, it doesn’t mean you have a good view, and just because you told yourself at some party tonight that your life is going to change just because you demand that it does, that doesn’t mean it automatically will unless you start down the road toward your goals. The only thing that can free you from the bonds of the mundane and the boring commonplace that may have been 2008 is yourself.

Of course, imagine if everyone had one resolution they actually stuck with for the rest of their lives, with a new one added each and every year thereafter. What a great world this would be. Regardless of what you do this year—get poorer, fatter, richer, or better—make it a good year for yourself and those around you.

And you don’t need a resolution to make that happen.

Happy New Year!

The Transformation of Dana

2008-12-28T16:56:00.000-08:00

In the darkness of the club, with the Christmas-like rope lighting silhouetting her against the shelves of liquor bottles above the bar, Dana looked a lot like Jaime Lee Curtis—or maybe if Jaime Lee Curtis had a less-famous sister: tall with short spiky fake red hair and a long, oval face with a sharp nose. How exactly she walked around in high heels as high as they were was as big a mystery as why she wore a low-cut tight-fitting shirt on a cold winter night.

She was probably about 47 years old, but maybe the low light made her look older. She said her name was Dana, but the band introduced her as Maria and she kept calling me Brian. She was the only waitress working a room of about 20 tables that eventually filled up as time drew near to the appearance of the headlining band, B.B. Chung King, a creatively interesting Asian man in a cowboy hat who plays the blues. Our first interaction with her was gruff, rather like Flo would treat someone at Mel’s but without the laughtrack or the harmless lighthearted banter. It was a curt abandonment of all niceties normally associated with customer service.

Kara and I had dropped off the kids at my folks’ house for the evening with the idea that we would meet up with long-time friends Scott and Melanie for Scott’s 36th birthday celebration at the Arcadia Blues Club on Huntington. They said meet at 8pm; we got there around 7:30 and parked right in front of the place, which isn’t normally a good sign. I expected it to be crowded, packed to the gills with finger-snapping, head bobbing, beret wearing neerdowells with a penchant for good music all waiting for a break so they can cram out into the alley for a cigarette.

A good movie that I occasionally enjoy is “The Glenn Miller Story” with Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson, and the scene that always gets me delighted is when Stewart and Allyson go to that club where the blues and jazz legends have miraculously assembled to have an impromptu jam session which lasts well into the morning; one part even shows June Allyson falling asleep. The music is ruckus, wild, unpredictable and great, but the scene is partially distracted by the rotating colored lights added afterwards. That’s the blues/jazz club I’ve always envisioned going to, but I doubt one like that even exists.

The Arcadia Blues Club is rather a misnomer. It isn’t really a club, in the sense that it is an esthetically pleasing spot that is open late at night that offers a wide variety of food, drinks and entertainment, including dancing... but it was more of a bar: they did play blues and it was in Arcadia, so I guess two out of three isn’t bad. For starters, the entire room was painted black—floor to ceiling—and not a single light was on anywhere except over and around the bar. There were few things in the club that gave the impression you were going to hear blues. I think there’s a treble clef on the wall and perhaps a poster of a blues festival that has long been forgotten. In a room off to the left of the bar was a few unoccupied pool tables and a variety of doors that I assumed led to a kitchen and/or the bathrooms. When we got there, it was quiet, except for some low background music and the sound of a half-dozen people talking and eating dinner.

The man at the door reminded me of smaller version of Dolph Lundgren, the Russian from Rocky IV, and through a very thick Soviet accent that sounded more like he was going to line us up and shoot us as spies, he welcomed us to the club and asked for the cover charge. I despise paying a cover to get into a bar, as it just means that I’ll spend that much less money on drinks or food, but since I hadn’t paid a cover in about 15 years and it was for a good cause (Scott’s birthday), I forked over the $20 for both Kara and I. He explained something about a drawing, gave us some tickets, and it sounded more like tickets to the breadline. We parted confused. There was another blonde that flitted back and forth from the bar to the front door, but that seemed to be her only purpose, that and she placed these little battery-operated flicker candles at all of the tables, so out of the corner of your eye, it looked like those flashing construction signs by the side of the road: She didn’t look like she worked there but she also didn’t look like she would voluntarily go there, rather that someone was paying her to make sure the guy at the door had a plate of food and a refill on his drink about every 10 minutes.

Picking a table at a bar is a complicated experience. We had a lot to choose from which made it all the more difficult. You first need to evaluate what sort of sound system will be later pummeling your eardrums and convulsing your heart and then you need to discover the access points. Will the space become so densely packed that I’ll have to crawl under the tables and over people’s laps in order to get to the bathroom, or will we be so ensconced in the crowds that even a waitress with the tallest of heels and spikiest of red hair will never be able to reach us? I had never heard of this band and I had no idea to what level a following he had waiting for him to play, but I had no idea how many people were supposed to come…nor who. I didn’t want to sit in front because the possibility of deafness becomes greater the closer you sit to the speakers, and I didn’t want to sit in the back because the darkness would overcome us all and we wouldn’t be able to recognize our own hands in front of our faces. Somewhere in the middle will do.

I scanned the room and not surprisingly, we were the first to arrive. There were a couple of tables up front that were reserved for names that seemed unlikely to be part of our party (plus reserving a table isn’t part of Scott’s M.O.), so we pulled together two tables with the combined seating of eight… if more than that show up, we could easily harness in a few more chairs.

Then we met Dana, looming over us like more of a teacher behind the squat rectangular glasses perched on her pointed nose than a waitress. She didn’t say her name right off; she barely said anything but, “What’ll ya have?” Apparently the friendly greeting was the Russian’s job at the door. I was certain she had tattoos, something like a rose on her shoulder with big thorns to symbolize her ex-husband and unrequited loves or a skull on her inner thigh warning all who venture too close. I got a Sam Adams (always start with the best beer on the list and go down), and I probably would have cringed if I had known the price—a single bottle of beer lately seems to be the same price you would pay at the grocery store for the whole six pack, and somehow we’re okay with paying it. Kara wanted wine, and Dana informed us in no certain terms that they offered Chardonnay, Zinfandel and Cabernet, essentially white, pink and red. And only because I had fallen for the trick before, I asked to clarify that the “Zinfandel” she spoke of was in fact a white Zinfandel, which it was. Kara ordered the Cab instead.

It is always my policy to be friendly to the staff of a bar. It ensures good service for one and for another, and you might just play your way into some perks. For example, I went to the Wood Ranch restaurant on an especially rainy night a few days before Christmas to pick up a gift certificate for Natalie’s teacher (Gnat said “Ranch Wood” was her favorite restaurant), and while I was there, I took the opportunity to have a glass of wine and enjoy the Christmas camaraderie of strangers. Since I was by myself, I chatted up the bartender, who looked like he could have very easily been a Joel or a Jeff, what with his youthful unshaven face and that glint of enthusiasm he still had left for his job. He poured a jack and soda by mistake and slipped it next to my Ravenswood Zin instead of dumping it out. It’s things like this that earns a 25 percent tip from me. Am I a big fan of bourbon? Not especially, but it was a nice warm drink on a cold rainy night.

So, back at the ABC, I asked Dana if she expected the place to get crowded. It was an innocent question that I hoped would spark a brief conversation, at least putting us and our future table mates in her good graces for the duration. At the very, very least, it would make us familiar to her and not just some group of hobos off the streets. In a brusque voice from over her shoulder as she trekked back to the bar, I got a one-word answer, “No,” as if I asked if we could borrow her car to transport manure. So, that’s how it was going to be? Oh well, so much for good service, but I was starving all the same, which was a mistake not to take care of that earlier. Since we don’t go out to these places very often, I wasn’t entirely in sync with the usual practices of preparation for a night out…at least back in the college days, we’d have a few drinks and dinner somewhere else to not only save money but to get good food. Usually bars are known for two out of three things: good entertainment, good food and good drinks—you can usually pick two but you’ll never ever get all three. We thought I should wait for everyone to get there first because someone else may be eating too and I didn’t want to be rude, but by the time my Sam Adams arrived and I was half-way through it, food became a priority.

I ordered the Club. That was it. That’s all I had to say apparently. “I’ll have the Club.” Dana turned away abruptly, giving me the impression that I’ll get it however they make it and I won’t get a choice in the matter. And I should feel lucky at that.

In unknown situations and new environments, I always order the Club. You can’t screw up a Club sandwich, and the likelihood of getting food poisoning from something so simple as deli meat and bread is much smaller than if I had gotten, say, ravioli and cheese or anything else they offered. However, the choices of food wasn’t that great either. You can get a salad, fish and chips, the club or a hamburger. They did have an array of desserts, which seemed unusual. Who thinks of tiramisu at a bar?

Our two will be good entertainment and good food, it appeared.

Meanwhile, a lanky guy in a bright red shirt who would have looked more at home behind a computer terminal at an IT company than on stage at a blue’s club began adjusting the instruments, paying particular attention to the drum kit, which seemed to be in complete disarray. Who would put it up there and not know that the high-hat goes on the left and the rest of the symbols on the right? It seemed odd that he would have to organize the whole thing merely 10 minutes before he was supposed to play. But I just wrote him off as a roadie, or at the very most, the sound check guy.

Dana returned frequently, which was nice, but there wasn’t that many people there yet to make it surprising. What else was she to do? Stand there and fume? She got a lot of that in too. On the back of the menu, they had a few specials, one of which was Pabst Blue Ribbon beer for only two dollars, which is probably $1.99 more than necessary. She tried to talk me out of it, claiming that it was nasty, but since I never had one, I insisted. She stomped toward the bar to retrieve it with a disappointed look on her face and returned a lot longer than it should have taken to open a beer can (yes, can!). Along with it, I got the Club. It was plopped down in front of me with little ceremony…and my request for some mustard bounced off of her back as she stomped away.

The tall lanky guy in the red shirt made his rounds around the room asking the few people there what sort of blues they were interested in hearing, and when he got to our table, he introduced himself as just “Bobby.” He was friendly and I liked the attention, so he must be the owner or at least the manager. Since we had never been to a blues club, I told him that any sort of blues would be good blues to us, as I had no favorite tunes that came to mind. I then put my foot in my mouth, by first asking if he owned the place. He said he didn't, which turns out to not be the truth. Doing a little checking, Bob Darhms, a longtime drummer from blues-infested Chicago, is the principle behind Red Entertainment, Inc., which is the company that owns not only this club but also Yesteryears in Pomona.

Modestly, he was just Bobby, the drummer. Oh, in that case, I will further shove my foot in my mouth and ask the origin of the B.B. Chung King band name. Again, making conversation, perhaps learning something new about the act we were about to see, and if I know one thing, it’s that people like to talk about themselves. Well, apparently, this Bobby was the Bobby from The Bobby Blueshouse Band, the Arcadia Blues Club house band that plays every Friday and Saturday night. Who knew? You’re right, probably everyone in the room. Perhaps I hurt his feelings by not recognizing him, but really, he looked like a guy that would fix my computer at work. However, if I squelched his pride, he recovered quickly and explained that B.B. Chung King didn’t come on until 10pm. He even showed me the flyer on our table that made no mention of the time!

Yikes. Ten! That’s Post Meridian, right? That’s a long time after Kara and I usually start making our way towards the bed for the night, especially during the hectic holidays. We were hoping to be pointed toward home by that time, as we ignorantly assumed that the headliner would start playing at 8pm. Again, we’re out of practice. Two hours of blues sounded like, to us, a full night of entertainment, and since we assumed the kids would have trouble falling asleep at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, the carnage wouldn’t be that bad by the time we arrived to retrieve them at 10pm.

So, there’s now two full hours of the Bobby Blueshouse Band that we’d have to endure before hearing the headline band that we paid to see, and by his first offering, I wasn’t wholehearted impressed. If I ever start playing in a blues band at a blues club one day, remind me to start the night out with a swinging tune instead of something I’d likely hear at a New Orleans funeral procession. I was bored. I’m not going to say they weren’t talented—the bass player who felt compelled to keep his Bluetooth in his ear the whole night (perhaps his wife couldn’t make it and she wanted to hear him play) was fantastic and I especially enjoyed the trombone player—but it didn’t seem like they had been playing together for very long. The changes were loose and the songs mostly petered out instead of smacking us in the face, earning a half-hearted applause from the sparse and scattered crowd.

Around 8:30, Jeremy Dover and his date came in. I wasn’t expecting him and since it was dark, I let him wander around the room for a while before I made sure it was him. Then Scott, Melanie, Scott’s two cousins and one of their dates showed up as well. With the table full, we were ready for blues. The band improved drastically, and since they had no official warm-up period before they just started to play, I guess they just needed to sync up and feel the vibe, which they most certainly did.

Jeremy called across the table to Kara and I: “Don’t worry, it gets better, much better. B.B. Chung King’s music will tear your face off.” I know why he tried to prop us up, because we were just sitting there listening to the music, unlike everyone else who were offering up cat calls, whistles and ovations of cheers to the solos and the riffs that stood out amongst the rest. Perhaps he thought we didn’t care for the music and weren’t enjoying the sounds, which is far from the truth. What Jeremy didn’t know is that I internalize most public displays of excitement or emotion; for whatever reason—embarrassment, shyness or introverted reservations—I rarely express enthusiasm for anything. That shouldn’t be translated into me not having a good time. I was. The music was great, as good blues music is one of my favorite genres; however, if Jeremy could have seen my foot tapping along or my hands bouncing off the back of Kara’s seat, he would have seen how much a good time I was having. I just don’t show it too often.

While all of this was happening, an interesting thing occurred that perhaps only Kara and I were able to witness; that was the silent transformation of Dana. What was once cold and disinterested, turned to delight and engaging. The stomping to the bar with mono-syllabic grunts and impartial suggestions converted to interesting and enthusiastic activity. Was she now dancing!?! Yes, she was at the bar doing her best Ginger Rogers, all by herself. When I followed a Pabst with a Heineken, she laughed that I was “all over the place.”

Arriving at our table didn’t involve a turned down lower lip and a flittering glare over the top of her glasses with her arms akimbo, but instead she sashayed and cavorted toward us with a swing of her hips and a boogie in her step. Then she took your order. From where did this other Dana come? Did her twin show up for the second shift? Did Jamie Lee Curtis actually clock in and take her place, researching a roll for a movie? The night and day was fantastic, and nobody noticed because the Dana they had met wasn’t the same Dana we had met.

Was it us? Did we look like water-drinking, salad-eating no tippers who take up space at the tables and mooch free music off the band. Or was it the music? At first, she resembled a typical bar maid hocking drinks in a nonchalant mood indifferent to anyone and everyone, perhaps hardened by the world, downtrodden by the unforeseen twists in her life. But after the band got started, after the place eventually filled to semi-capacity—at least most all of the chairs were occupied by maybe 50 or 60 people—only then did she morph into alter-Dana, the cheery upbeat Dana that was dancing in front of the stage with the soul-saving “preacher” who washed away our sins and blew a breath of hope into our lives through the a few covers from The Man in Black. He was about 65, wore a round brimmed felt hat and the only thing that shined on him was his smile, the glint from his round-rimmed glasses against the lights and the cross around his neck. Before he got up on stage, I noticed he was by himself, sitting at a table by the wall, unassuming in the darkness as just another patron in from the cold to hear some music. Then he bound up on the stage, belted out two or three Johnny Cash songs with about a 10 minute sermon sandwiched in between, during which time he did a little soft shoe on the dance floor, soon joined by Dana…our surly waitress Dana turned carefree fairy alighting about the room.

My friend Heidi made a surprise visit, exclaiming that she had never before been inside of a bar, which made for a good laugh. It was through her that I learned Dana’s name, because she asked her what it was, but I was confused when the first band, capping off their final set, gave credit to the various people who made it happen, one of which, Bobby announced, was Maria the waitress. At that point, I wasn’t sure who was wrong.

By the time the second band set up and began to play, Kara and I were tired, plus we had to look forward to picking up the kids and another 45 minutes back to our house. It was almost 11pm by the time we left. I cashed out my tab, to which Dana called us sissies for not being able to stick around for the rest of the show…and by the quality of music B.B. Chung King was cranking out, I wished he had started earlier so we could hear more of it.

We had a good night. We stopped at The Hat to fill that void the Club couldn’t reach and when we got to my folks’ house around 11:30, the kids were still awake and waiting for us with bloodshot eyes and zombie-like motions. It was as late as they had ever stayed up and I’m surprised they made it that long. Oh well, they had a good time with Grandma and Grandpa.

Natalie was snoring by the time we were down the street and Matthew soon followed. We didn’t hear from either of them until about 9am this morning, and needless to say, today became a lazy movie-watching, game-playing day.

In the end, it was very interesting to watch someone’s personality transform from one of malevolent resent and bitterness to one of goodwill and frivolity to all, and what was remarkable was that there was no clear evidence of what made it happen. It reminded me of “When Harry Met Sally.”

“I’ll have what she’s having.”

Speechless (then some art)

2008-12-19T23:45:00.000-08:00

I don’t know that I’ve had much to say in the last couple of weeks. There has been nothing in my life, or the lives of those around me, that warrant any explanation. It has been status quo for a while now, with nothing out of the ordinary. Sure, we’ve had dance recitals, camping trips, Disneyland adventures and birthdays, but anyone who reads this nonsense was probably there and knows all that happened (or didn’t happen however the case may be).

So this leaves me with rants (I rarely rave, nobody wants to read a rave). Frankly, I haven’t any. Sure, the California government is screwing us once again. Sure, we’re going to have a socialist in the White House bent on redistributing my wealth. Sure, everyone is two paychecks away from the breadline and on the brink of financial ruin the likes of which the last three generations have never seen. And sure, China is slowly taking over the world one crappy kid’s toy at a time…

But you know all that.

That leaves me with personal rants (again, nobody wants to hear good news, right?). I just don’t have any, any I’d like to share that won’t make me look like a total jerk. On the other hand, I finished my art class with a resounding A; but that’s good news, right? I may post my last three drawings for your consideration, but since two out of the three are pretty good (in my unbiased opinion) I can’t really make too much fun of them. That just leaves me showing off, something I despise. I could tell you that work is going well. I’ve added a client, some new quasi-religious magazine that I’m writing green articles for (you know, eco-everything, recycle your urine, global warming, buy Chinese-made light bulbs, etc.), but I’m getting paid peanuts in the hopes that the magazine will become successful… I’m not holding my breath. It keeps me fresh.

I’m going to officially start work on my Opus Glendora book. For the last year, I’ve been collecting information, photographs, documents, etc., and now I’m going to spend one night a week at the library doing grassroots research, formulating an outline, page counts, layouts and style sheets for the final project. In January, I’ll have exactly two years to pull it together, and that may sound like a long time, it will go rather quickly as I try to fill a 250-page 12x12-inch coffee table book. Yes, my plans are grand, and they will, no doubt, change as the years go on, but I’ve got to get started on it. Of course, I’m still waiting for City blessing, but I’m not going to wait for it and it won’t stop me from doing it.

Bleck, like I said… I got nothing for you tonight. Sometimes you’re on, sometimes you’re not, but I just felt as though I hadn’t said anything in a while and you were getting bored clicking here and finding nothing new or interesting.

I hate to leave you with nothing.

Maybe I’ll post my last three art pictures instead. How dreary.

This first of the last three drawings is on par in difficulty as the collaged crayons I posted a couple of weeks ago. We had to take a photo of a group of things, and since I didn’t know what we’d do with the pictures, I ignorantly took difficult-to-reproduce pictures. The one that the instructor chose for me was a nice picture of a group of bolts piled on one of the granite rocks in my backyard (shown at the right). This picture, as well as 35 others were taken the first week of class with a promise that we'd use them later for future assignments. If I had known I was going to use it for this, I would have used something with flat sides.

For this drawing, we had to increase the photo’s ratio to fit on our drawing paper (18x24), sketch it out and then shade in the values of the photo using only straight lines. As the assignment was designed, the darker the area, the closer the lines would be, convincing the eye that there is less white space therefore less light in the image. The drawing itself took forever, only because I took a picture of something difficult and complicated and then I dragged my feet in doing it. The end result is thousands of lines in irreversible black Sharpie that resemble the various shades and shadows of a bunch of bolts.

Before you click on the drawing and get an upclose view, realize that the farther back you are, the better the drawing is supposed to look, better is the effect of the exercise. Nobody stands up close to Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" and wonders what the deal is with all the dots. It is a case of too close to the trees to see the forest, or in this case, too close to the lines to see the bolts.

With a failed attempt at a self-portrait behind me, we moved onto the next phase of self-portraits, this one involving a skewed version of a self portrait. We were required to bring in something reflective, like a spoon or a silver dish, something that wouldn’t give back a clean reflection (like would a mirror). I immediately chose a hubcap off of one of my Beetles, and because I have a half dozen or so in various places in the garage (ranging from pre-war to Rabbits), not necessarily on the cars themselves, they were readily available and fit the bill. Simply enough, we had to draw what we saw in the reflection… too bad I had to be in the drawing otherwise I would have been more pleased with the results.

In the drawing you can see the windows and walls behind me, the ceiling with its exposed beams. In front of me are my pencils in their case, my eraser and pad of paper (with the drawing that I’m doing IN the drawing that I’m working on). It was fun to do because you really couldn’t make a mistake as all of the elements are abstract and there were very few straight lines.

Intially, the final drawing didn't seem that difficult. We had three classes to work on it and nearly two weeks to finish before it was turned in on the last day of class, December 15. Again, we had to take a black and white picture of something that had a range of values, from complete black, through the range of grays and into white. At the last minute before class, I dragged a six-foot length of chain from the garage and took a picture of it on the patio cement (see right). I felt it was a pretty cool picture, nice and tight, well detailed, showing most all of the 64 links of the chain. Who knew that it would be my downfall.

We got to class and the assignment was announced that we would be doing pixel work, meaning that we would draw a pixilated version of our photographs. I was ambitious, thinking that I could do it easily enough. After all, we had nearly two weeks to finish it and I only had to color in an 24x18-inch piece of paper. How hard could it be?

The idea was that we would map out a grid of lines on the picture and the blank paper, one-half-inch on the picture would equal a full inch on the paper. After doing that, take each half-inch square on the picture and shade in the color value on the paper. If the square was white, do nothing, but if the square was black or a shade of gray, you’d have to shad in that square whatever the appropriate value was.

That’s all well and good, but what if the half-inch-square on the picture contained two shades? Or more? What then? Well, for those squares, they’d have to be broken down into quarter-inch squares… and some of those on my picture needed to be halved further into eighth-inch squares. For my particular photograph of the roughly 64 links of chain, there were certain details that needed to be tended to, namely the rounded edges of the links. Every link of chain has eight corners, which means I needed to contend with 512 corners, and each side of each link had three basic values, dark in the shadow, gray in the medium light and light gray in the full light. That means, that I needed a level of detail unlike anyone else in class, nearly 1,550 different areas of shading. When I finished making my grid down to the detail described above, I had 5,984 little squares on my paper that all needed attention; they all needed some shade of gray, as there were very few squares that were completely black or white.

I gained empathy from my fellow classmates and the instructor when I started work on it. At the end of the three-hour class, I had only shaded in roughly 300 of these 6,000 squares, and what resulted looked nothing like a length of chain. Furthermore, I would consistently get lost, having to plot my position from the photo to the picture was difficult, constantly counting squares to make sure I was on track.

At the end of the second class on this assignment (on December 8), making very little progress, I calculated that it would take me another 70 hours to finish. With my work meetings Tuesday night and all day Wednesday, Matthew’s birthday party on Saturday and Natalie’s dance recital on Sunday, I wouldn’t have that kind of time to finish it. Rather than disappoint myself and my instructor in turning in an incomplete assignment, I decided abandonment was my best option. I even asked, “Given that I got an A on every assignment in this class, what would my final grade be if I didn’t turn in the final? She wouldn’t answer me, but gave a smile that told me what my grade would have been. In the end, I didn’t want to take that route, to bow out on the easy road, so I found another picture and started over.

My search was for something relatively easy. Sure, I was going to get an A no matter what I did, so I didn’t want to kill myself pulling a drawing together. I found this picture of a P51, one of my favorite fighters from World War II (that and the P40). It still took about six hours to draw what you see here, and the reason it looks the way it does is because the whole drawing is made up nothing more than little squares. I didn’t actually “draw” anything, but instead shaded in square after square, about 1,000 of them for this drawing.

It turned out pretty cool, but I would have enjoyed it more if I was able to draw it conventionally. Either way, I got an A on the drawing, an A on all the drawings, and an A in the class. Since I send a Thank You note to every one of my instructors at the end of each course, she emailed back that I obviously aced the class.

I can’t say that for many of my other classmates, most of which didn’t even bother to turn in all the drawings. The guy I befriended that sat next to me, did a couple of his B drawings over again so he could assure himself an A, but the best artist in class—the one that continually blew everyone’s art out of the water (his pixel drawing looked like an actual photograph, it was disgusting)—hadn’t turned everything in by the last day. He probably got an A based solely on skill alone, but I would say that’s it. Everyone else was B or lower, I’m sure.

Again, this is one of those drawings that doesn't look good upclose. If/when you click on the larger version, it will look like a six-year old did it with a crayon, when in reality, each mark you see on the paper is either a little square all to itself, a much larger square no bigger than a half-inch or a series of squares connected together.

The last day of class we had a potluck and drew what is referred to as an “exquisite corpse.” When I saw it on the assignment sheet, I just assumed it was a fancy Latin-esque way of saying the class was over, i.e., beautiful death, nice ending, etc., but an exquisite corpse is a method of drawing that involves everyone in class. We each started drawing anything we wanted on a piece of paper and after a few minutes we rotated drawings, passing it to the right for the next person to add something. The intention was that by the time it made its way around the room and all 15 of us that were in class had a chance to add something, it would be a completed drawing. However, it only elucidated what level of twisted individuals make up a community college art class. So much so that I won’t show you the results. They didn’t make any sense to me, and since nobody was graded on the exorcise, nobody put too much effort into it. My best contribution to someone’s drawing was the addition of an outhouse under a tree with a panicked arm reaching out of the door for a roll of toilet paper just out of reach.

We ate, we drew, we left. My 4.0 is still strong. I am forcing myself to take the Winter semester off because of two reasons: 1) There are no classes I can take that I need that fit into my limited schedule; and 2) Winter and Summer are compact semesters, only lasting six weeks, which means that most classes would be three nights a week and that’s a lot of time away from the house.

In the meantime, I’ve got a book to start writing and researching. My alter life as an artist is now officially over.

Our Christmas Tree

2008-12-14T21:34:00.001-08:00

Into the woods with a saw in hand,
Christmas trees scattered across the land.
We searched for the right one, row after row
The one Gnat picked had a heavenly glow.

She gave it a hug, its needles were prickly,
Matthew pet a branch and said it was tickly
We all agreed, raised hands cast our vote,
It was the best, without exception or note.

Finally the time came for Dad to chop it down,
We packed up the truck for the trip back to town.
Our hands were sappy and the truck smelled of pine,
We sang Christmas Carols to pass the time.

Dad strung up the lights, some twinkle, some don’t,
The tree should stand straight, this year it just won’t.
The kids place the ornaments, mostly with care,
Some broke, some fell and some branches left bare.

The room was aglow when we plugged in the strings,
The radio played as some old crooner sings.
We finished the tree and it was quite a sight,
Now we just wait for Santa’s annual flight.

Merry Christmas!

Movie Night

2008-11-29T22:10:00.001-08:00

Car Trouble

2008-11-29T21:22:00.001-08:00

Cleaning the Kitchen (in two parts)

2008-11-26T15:14:00.001-08:00

The Poker Party

2008-11-25T20:19:00.000-08:00

Me, Myself and I

2008-11-25T17:06:00.001-08:00

Self Portrait

2008-11-24T00:45:00.001-08:00

Does the drawing on the left look anything like the picture on the right? No? It should. No, I'm serious. It's supposed to be me, but I don't believe it either. There's no way that's me, and what scares me is that I don't know who it is. If anyone recognizes the man in this picture, please let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.

Besides the April 1, 1943, cover of the Saturday Evening Post (the April Fools cover), one of my favorite Norman Rockwell paintings is "Triple Self-Portrait," showing him painting himself as a dashing man with a pipe, when in reality, the mirror next to his easel shows an aging man with glasses. It comments on how we as people fool ourselves into believing we are more than we really are and that we always try to put a pretty face on reality.

Well, that’s the motive I was going for too when I worked on my self portrait tonight. I wanted to draw a picture that actually looked better than I think I do, but the whole thing backfired on me. I don’t know who I drew, but whoever it is, he looks nothing like me. Like Rockwell, I even used a mirror, but translating what I saw in the mirror to my hand and the pencil is a talent that is best left to the professional artists and those caricature drawers at the county fair.

You may begin laughing directly at my lack of talent and the fact that I have to hang this up on the wall in front of the whole class and try to convince them all that I was actually looking at myself when I drew it and not some raving lunatic in an asylum.

For starters, my beady eyes are too close together and have that all-too-familiar look of evil in them, especially that squinty left one. Am I wearing eye liner? The grin looks remorseless, like I just ran over your dog in the street and I aimed for it, and there’s a canyon-sized crease on the cheek that must be the result of getting kicked in the face by a mule. My nose is too small and pointy, crooked toward the top, and my right ear looks like I’ve had a long career boxing and I wasn’t much good at it. My face has marks on it like I’ve been wearing a particle mask for too long, and look at the double chin…nice. Let’s not forget to mention that I’m wearing a giant shirt that’s all stretched out in the collar, which is rock solid stiff from starch and makes me look as though I’m poking my head up through a hole in a fallen tree.

The only thing I think I accurately depicted was the hints of a receding hairline, my ever deepening wrinkles around my eyes and the dark circles from lack of sleep. The white glow around my head, like I’m the messiah, gives it a nice touch, don’t you think?

File this under: Keep Your Day Job, Ryan

Serenity and Sunshine

2008-11-23T02:39:00.000-08:00

We lock ourselves away in our castles, pull up the drawbridges and man the ramparts against the unusual, the unforeseen and the unexpected. We’re clouded by the norm, that safe feeling of status quo we all feel so comfortable having weighted down on our shoulders. I don’t even think about it anymore, until today at least, that we mire in a routine of activities only because they achieve a desired and predictable result; what worked for us yesterday is bound to do the same today and probably will tomorrow. In expected events there’s shelter from the storms of capriciousness, what strange things may come if we no long follow our own footprints down a familiar path?

The average weekday goes like this: I wake up, spend the morning in the house with Matthew, pick up Natalie from school, eat lunch, wile away the afternoon until Kara comes home. Then dinner, baths, work, Internet wastefulness, TV, sleep… sleep that merely acts as a buffer, a bookend, to the infinity of stagnation. It’s comfortable, safe, well rehearsed, practiced and unsurprising.

Today would have been no different, except that it started with me waking up on the couch with the blue glow of the TV filling the living room. I wasn’t sure where I was for a moment, and the clock was in those single-digit numbers that is almost too late to go back to sleep but too early to get up for the day. Much like most nights, I have trouble sleeping. My mind races, cluttered with the what ifs and the could haves, what haves, and what might be. I run through the events of my day and what might be expected of me in the next. I plan. I debate. I’ve even tested myself with complex math problems. I think about songs I like, movies I’ve watched and books I’ve read. Everyone’s asleep, so I share these things with myself. I stare at the ceiling fan whirling in the darkness, glancing over periodically to watch my alarm clock march up towards midnight only to fall down the other side towards sunrise.

Finally, I sleep. Morning comes and I drag myself out of bed, regretting my conscious, cursing my own brain for not doing what’s best for my body. I’m a zombie, the walking dead expected to function responsibly, rationally. Sometime between “Higglytown Heroes” and “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse,” I nap with Matthew usually sitting in what he calls “the triangle,” that space on the couch my bent legs make when I’m laying on my side.

Today was different. Though I didn’t get up until 10am, my head rang and rattled like marbles in a jar and everything was bright, crisp, the kind of sharpness found in Autumn. Kara suggested, while she was at the movies, that I take the kids out so they could ride their bikes for an hour or so, to get a little more exercise and some fresh air.

I didn’t want to. I never want to. I don’t like the outside, and the older I get, the more agoraphobic I feel, the more of a challenge it is for me to step outside and do things I wouldn’t normally do. Why? I don’t know. A fear of the unknown, change, the environment, placing myself and my kids in possible harm’s way… the noise, the constant confrontations with strangers and the asinine things I always see them do.

Mostly, I fear for the safety of my children. It sounds foolish, I know, especially since it is my front yard, my street, my driveway, but as a pessimist, I’ve taught myself to think about the worst case scenario and how likely it will happen. Bad things happen everywhere, and I think that I am always on the verge of stepping on a land mine at any moment. Because of this, I create boundaries, solid structural boundaries the help maintain order for me, help define the rules. They can’t go in the street. They can’t go past the neighbors’ walls on either side of our house. But why? When I was that age, I’m sure my parents were perfectly fine with us running around the street with little to no supervision, and there is a girl Natalie’s age that lives five houses down the street who is always trolling the neighborhood… I don’t think anyone knows where she is on most afternoons, but I won’t let the kids out of my site when they’re playing in the front yard.

Is this my fault? Am I being a good parent? Maybe too good of a parent that I’ve circled around to an overbearing parent? Matthew’s nearly three, so he really doesn’t count in this discussion—as I’d still watch him like a hawk—but the little girl from down the street asked if Natalie could play in front of her house and I said no. Natalie didn’t debate the matter, she didn’t say anything, and I don’t think Natalie even wanted to, as she likes to be home (she even likes to play inside more so).

Did I create that?

While they were riding their bikes back and forth from the driveway of one neighbor’s house, past ours to the driveway of the other, I dragged one of the chairs off of the porch and set it up at the edge of the grass so I could clearly see down both ways of the street. I brought a book with me, thinking it would be a nice time to get a little reading done, but I could hardly read a paragraph without glancing up to make sure everything was clear, that no child abductors were prowling around, that no stray dogs were tugging on Matthew’s legs or that they minded the limits of the boundaries.

When they got tired of riding, both Natalie and Matthew got baskets and began to collect the falling leaves from the trees in our front yard. It being Autumn, they are all aglow with reds, oranges and purples. Since I was still sitting by the sidewalk, they were playing on the grass and porch behind me. I couldn’t stand not seeing what they were doing, not being able to observe their activities, lord over their well being. Not because I enjoy the laughter of my children and I’m delighted to see them have so much fun doing something as simple as collecting a basket full of leaves, but I wanted to make sure nobody was jumping off of the wall or getting to close to the spike-bristled palm trees or climbing on the several boulders in the yard.

I try everything in my power to keep them from getting hurt that I almost see myself as stifling their fun day even when the possibility of injury is so far removed from actuality that it only resides in my negative and distrustful mind.

That is what I stay up late brooding about. There’s a book for people like me and here it is. I’ve read it so many times over the years, ever since I was a kid (it came out in 1976). A lot of it I can relate to, and a lot of it haunts me; either I'm the way I am because of the book or I like the book because of the way I am.

However, as you can see, the kids had a blast outside today. We stayed out there for about four hours, until the sky grew purple and the air cold.

So, why don’t we do it more often?

The Black Weirdos

2008-11-19T21:42:00.000-08:00

Oh yes, as Kara mentions in a comment to my Halloween post, I forgot to mention Matthew's run-in with the black weirdos.

I think he tries to be as verbose and garrulous as Natalie, but some times, when he can't quite think of the phrase he wants to say or something he may have just heard, he'll either make up something pretty close or just completely coin a new phrase altogether.

While making our short route around the immediate vicinity of our neighborhood, we stopped at one house just around the corner from ours. It was nicely decorated for the holiday. Matthew and Natalie go up to the door by themselves, as Kara and I wait at the curb, and while Natalie is ringing the bell, Matthew suddenly shouts out, "There's black weridos!" or "I see a black weirdo," something to that effect. He bolts around and quickly makes his way back to us. You see, a "black weirdo" to him is a Black Widow spider to the rest of us, one of those unfortunately side effects to living in a semi-desert climate. Whether or not there was actually a Black Widow spider--a real one--on the porch is unknown, but it was probably a decoration of some sort.

However, the door opens to the house, and Natalie, by herself, is greated by African Americans. Of course, I had to bite my cheek to keep me from laughing too hard.

I can only hope they didn't hear what Matthew had said. Because really, black weirdos are just Black Widows to our little two-year-old!

**The picture above is Matthew taking a rest. He was waiting for Natalie and said, "I'm just going to sit down here," on someone's driveway.

Chasing Boys

2008-11-19T14:53:00.000-08:00

Natalie has discovered a new game at school, a very simple concept that has probably been around for generations: chasing boys. It’s the two words a dad doesn’t want to hear, but since I remembered being chased by girls in elementary school—and seriously not wanting them to catch me—it doesn’t concern me too much.

I suppose activity such as this was bound to start happening, but it is all innocent and fun.

This is really the first time in her life that she has spent any lengthy amount of time with boys and perhaps their novelty is interesting, but it is fascinating to watch her perception of the world develop and she starts to understand more and more about how to interact with other people and what is expected of her. How exactly she came to start this game is unknown but I suspect it originated with a new friend she meet a couple of weeks ago, Annette or Analese or something, because soon after she announced her new friendship, boy chasing became all the rage.

When Matthew and I pick up Natalie from school, there is that idle 10 minutes I have to wait until the teachers let out the kids, and during that time the other moms and I exchange passing pleasantries about our kids and school life. A couple of weeks into the school year, one of the moms told me that her son thought Natalie was “hot” and I noticed that he would always say good bye to her after school. Lately, another little boy has been yelling good bye to Natalie from across the front yard of the school, and when he can, he’ll run on ahead of his mom to give Natalie hug. Today, he must have noticed Natalie collecting leaves—as both Matthew and Natalie find some interesting leaf to take home with us most every day—and he ran up behind her and presented her with a nicely colored plum leaf. It we were in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and there was snow on the ground…and it was 1910, it would have been a Norman Rockwell painting.

It was pretty cute. She said thank you rather nonchalantly and elusively went about her way.

But chasing boys, that’s where the excitement is. Once in the truck and on our way home, I asked her how her day was, and she never tells me anything academic, unless it is a new library book or if they went to the computer lab. Instead, she exalts upon me her exploits on the playground and her new favorite pastime.

“What did you do today?” I asked, expecting to hear that she learned about a president or that she wrote a letter to Santa (in public school?) or that she can now properly use the quadratic equation. Instead, I hear this:

“Chased boys!” she exclaims with a gleam in her eye!

“What did the boys do?” I asked.

“Oh, they ran.”

Up until today, she hadn’t caught any, as she says they’re very fast and “tricky,” but I still ask her every day what she’ll do if she catches one. Today was that day.

“Today I caught one!” Natalie announced excitedly.

“What did you do with him?”

“Let him go.”

So, it appears the thrill is in the hunt, which is good to hear, but it is also fun and exciting to hear that she is having such a good time at school, that she is well adjusted to the schedule, that she has many friends and appears to be well liked by everyone. The social aspect of Kindergarten was my biggest worry, as I knew that she could handle the work with no problem.

Because let’s not forget that she’s at the top of her class. I mean that literally. She’s in a reading group all by herself because nobody can read as well as she can. It’s her and the teacher reading books for second graders.

On the playground, it’s every boy for himself, so I’ll pick up worrying again when the boys start to chase her.

It Was Halloween!

2008-11-18T18:48:00.000-08:00

I know, I know. Halloween was, like, so two weeks ago. I’m sorry for the delay, but as you may remember, Halloween is my least favorite “holiday” on the calendar. Sure, you get to dress up like someone else and you get to act like an idiot, and sure, strangers come to your door begging for food (and we allow it) and the whole thing is sponsored and endorsed by the Devil, et al…. but I’m just not a fan of the pomp and spectacle of the night, the bravado entitled to those that dress up a super heroes and the fact that my neighborhood gets overrun with minivans hauling kids from the other neighborhoods. If there’s a bah humbug for October 31, then I’ll happily accept the title and wear a little badge, ensuring others that they shouldn’t wish me a happy Halloween.

The kids like it, however, which makes it fun for me, but I think they could even do with out it. For starters, Natalie doesn’t like chocolate which immediately cuts out about 90 percent of the possible loot, and Matthew still doesn’t get the concept. The first couple of houses, he didn’t say much, perhaps not convinced that he would get free candy by only saying “trick or treat.”

After only a few houses, they were ready to come home and greet people at the door.

For the house, I usually don’t do anything. Yes, we have a carved pumpkin sitting out…three actually, but that is usually it. For some reason, on Halloween (before I hurt my leg), I got it in me that our house needed a fog machine. Before picking up Natalie from school, Matthew and I went down to the “Party Store” to see about buying one. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I was going to settle for the cheapest one they had. But once I got in there, they were having a 50 percent off everything sale, so the most expensive fog machine was selling for what I would have paid for the least expense one on a regular day. Win-win! Even the manager was surprised that HQ put everything on sale, as he told me they usually just store until next year what doesn’t sell.

I plugged a green light bulb into the porch light and fired up the fog machine. It didn’t really roll fog out on the ground like I wanted to, like dry ice would have done, but it still had for an interesting effect: a green haze permeating the whole front yard.

We spent a considerable amount of the evening carving our pumpkins, even though we already had two of them rotting on the porch from our camping trip early in the month. The kids brought out every pumpkin they could find, from the ones that Grandma and Grandpa had planted and harvested for them all the way down to the decorative squashes we bought at the pumpkin patch. We convinced them to only carve the big one and draw faces on the little green ones and spare the others so we can keep them for Thanksgiving.

They got their costumes on and we hit the streets in search of candy!

Above are some pictures of All Hallow's Even (and no, that’s not a typo).

How long do you think these two pumpkins will last? Some would say the answer to that question is that they've already passed their expiration date, but I say if you can still tell they're pumpkins, they're still good.

Look foward to seeing them on Christmas!

Lincoln Makes the Grade

2008-11-16T20:08:00.000-08:00

So, we’ve established that all you have to do to get an A in an art class is to try as best as you can. Even if you completely screw up the assignment, not pay attention to the directions and turn it in weeks later than you should, you will still get an A. If so, if that’s true, how is it that several people in my class are failing? Honest-to-God F grades in the grade book. I saw them myself, written in pen and snarling on the page next to people’s names.

We had a mid-term review, where we discussed our progress in the class and went over our grades. I’ve received an A on every project I turned in, which is all of them to date. I’m not sure why I’ve always earned an A, but I have, even though sometimes I don’t think I should have. The guy sitting next to me that I’ve befriended (he’s the one that text messages his girlfriend in Hawaii every 30 seconds) was surprised that I had received only As, whereas he had earned a couple of Bs and has, in my opinion, done comparable work. Then again, I’m no art instructor, so maybe not. While I was being shown my grade, I scanned down the list and noticed all of the other grades of my fellow classmates. There was only a handful of As (my text friend was one of them still) and the rest were grades lower than that, including the big F.

I don’t know who the F-earners were by name, but I could pick out the recipients in the room just by looking around. There’s a guy that sits near me that does near nothing the whole time; sure, he has his pad of paper out and his materials, but it sits and stares into the middle of the room for long periods of time. He’s failing. No question about it. That loud girl that talks too much and bugs most people (including the instructor she admitted last Wednesday) dropped the class because she was failing. It helps if you actually attend the class. I didn’t know you could drop this late in the semester, but the instructor was glad to get rid of her… and her five email-a-day habit. That’s too much time to spend on a student with too much emotional issues, the instructor told me before class and I’d have to agree. When I was in college the first time, we didn’t use email as a reliable source of communication, but I’m sure there should be some sort of rule that you don’t email the instructor any more that three times the whole semester…and don’t write a book. Make is short and sweet.

We had a few assignments in the past week that I would like to share, as I have done in the past. As well, please feel free to make as much fun of them as possible. I’m not an artist and I don’t plan to be; therefore, you are not obliged to compliment me in a ruse to encourage my education and career choice. However, of the whole group of all of my assignments, I’m fairly happy with most of these.

This first picture is just a run-of-the-mill flowers in a vase done with pencil. Nothing special. We were supposed to have four flowers in a vase, so I went to Albertson’s and bought a bouquet for the house, stole this collection of flowers and penciled them up in about a half-hour. It was done on the day it was due, as that was the only time I could allow to work on it, so the kids got out some paper too and gave it their best shot too. I’m not to thrilled with it, and I expected to get a lower grade, as it was quite clear to even me that I did a half-assed job on the assignment.

I walked around the room and looked at some others on the day it was due, and the resident Picasso in the room, the one that sets the artistic creative bar for all of us to try and reach drew a picture of dead flowers in a Starbucks cup. Not only did it have a poignant message that Starbucks coffee will kill you, but it looked like a black and white picture of actual flowers in an actual Starbucks cup, like you could reach out and take a drink of the flowery coffee-water. It was disgusting, and then put mine next to it, it looked like doodlings from the Ward E in the mental hospital. All of us psychos and schizos were glad she doesn’t grade on the curve.

On the other hand, total cost of this A was around nine dollars, but we got to enjoy the flowers all that week.

This next assignment was probably the most time consuming of them all so far. It was a multi-stage project that took me a couple of weeks to pull together, on top of which I was absent from class due to the hunting trip in early October, so I got a late start. We each had to take six pictures of six different items in a pile. I used Crayons, saw blades, bolts, wine corks, building blocks and Legos for the subjects of my pictures, and the instructor picked one of them for me to use (see below right). She picked the Crayons, the one I was hoping she wouldn’t have picked.

We were then supposed to paint three sheets of paper with different values of ink, going from stripes of light to dark, much like a graduated shade from one side of the paper to the other. Then, we each had to draw out our picture, increasing the scale from one inch on the photo to two-and-a-half inches on the paper. After drawing it out, I had to collage the Crayons using the inked paper. But that wasn’t so easy either, because I had to trace each section of the different shades on the Crayons on tracing paper first, cut that shape out, transfer the shape to the inked paper and then cut out that, finally gluing it to the main drawing. I’m tired just writing all of this.

Needless to say, I was two weeks late on the assignment, mostly because I dreaded to do it, but I still managed to pull out an A, despite the blatant violation of the syllabus that states a project will lose one grade for every day that it is late. I’m not sure why I was cut a break, but it probably has to do with the fact that I’m the same age as the instructor and she likes to commiserate with me before class (for all of you people out there who just raised a disapproving eyebrow, commiserate means to empathize). So, is it very good? No, it isn’t. I’m not pleased with the outcome of this project, and Kara put it best: “It sort of looks like Crayons.” Emphasis on the “sort of.”

The class before Halloween was rather a free-for-all. We were allowed to use any medium we wanted (even mixed, which is what I did), as long as we stayed as true to the subject as possible; meaning, she wanted it to be spooky, as Halloween appeared to be her favorite holiday, something that probably holds true for most artists. The instructor brought out a bunch of various items that were Halloween related (and some of us in the class brought some thing as well) and we were supposed to put them together in an interesting way. Some of the items were a full-sized medical-grade skeleton, some severed fingers, various pumpkins, some sort of witch, a bunch of maze (those were mine) and some Halloween knick-knacks. My first idea was to have the skeleton holding its own head in a very Hamlet-esque “Yorick, I knew him well” sort of way, but I thought I’d get dinged points if my drawing was too sparse with not enough on the page. After I abandoned the idea early on in the project, I shared it out loud when the instructor was asking people what ideas they had…and by the end of the class, someone had drawn that very thing. She liked it, of course, because it was minimalistic, which is being sparse and not having much on the page, but in an artistic way.

So instead, I cobbled various items on the table together to form this ghoulish mosaic of morbidity. Frankly, I was surprised that the skull came out so nice, and not to pat myself on the back too much, but I didn’t think I could do a face; albeit without skin, but it is still a face. I know, you’re asking yourself, “What’s with the giant eye?” Believe it or not, that’s a giant eye the instructor uses as an end table lamp in her house! That’s all year long, mind you. Above it is the shuck from one of my mazes I brought, and the skeleton’s arm and hand is resting on the eye. The pool of blood dripping off of the table ruined the drawing for me, and I knew it moments after I added the red, as it isn’t realistic looking at all. As long as you only look at the skull, you may like this one.

This next drawing was my favorite one to do. Again we were given free-reign to do whatever we wanted to do as long as our drawing showed some sort of perspective, depth to the picture, that the objects are coming from or going off into the distance. I remembered doing these sorts of drawings when I took an art class in the Sixth Grade, and I also remembered them being particularly fun. I chose a city view because I want to be an architect and I knew that I could do a good job with it as long as I could keep all of the lines straight. I especially enjoyed adding all of the details, the signs, little dumpsters behind the liquor store, the park on the corner. I got ridiculously tired of drawing windows so I wiped out a few city blocks and added the ocean on the left and the mountains on the right. The affect made for a nice little sea-side city and also forces your eye to follow the perspective to the end of the street in the distance. Notice I spelled “Bancroft” wrong. Silly me.

I was really worried about this next project. It was done in unforgivable ink and we could only use our fingers. Chuck Close pioneered this type of art back in the 70s, and you can Google him to get his story, which is quite remarkable…and I won’t show you any of his stuff here because it will make mine look like it was done by a third grader in detention. The idea is to use dabs of ink in different shades to produce a portrait. Like an ink-jet printer, the farther back you get, the better the image looks.

We were asked to bring in a portrait of someone, and I didn’t want to bring in one of my family for fear of butchering them so badly that they would be unrecognizable when I returned home, so instead I decided to bring in a picture of my favorite President (below right). Also, since class was on Election Day and I was pretty sure of who was going to win, I thought I’d paint a picture of the man that made it possible for Obama to even run for the office.

Don’t look too closely however, otherwise you may see my finger prints, but I was surprised that it turned out as good as it did, especially considering that once you put down ink on a page, that’s it, there’s no second chance to get it right. Note how nicely I was able to get the lapels of his coat to stand out, but see that I set his eyes too close together. For best results, get up and stand on the other side of the room, and it may start to look more like Lincoln and ironically less like abolitionist John Brown.

The end of the story is that I got an A, but all the while I was doing it, I was thinking of a quote that Lincoln said that seemed so appropriate: “If I were two-faced, why would I wear this one?” Abe, you card.

Dance With Me, Daddy

2008-11-16T17:17:00.001-08:00

Admittedly, when news first came home of a father-daughter dance at Natalie’s school, I was a little apprehensive about going. Last time I checked, I wasn’t big on dancing, at least not without a couple of drinks in me already, and I doubt there’d be a bar at an elementary school. And as much as I don’t enjoy the company of strangers, I was a little nervous about what would happen. Would they call all of the first-time dads to the stage and make us try to hula-hoop, or would we all just get pointed and laughed at?

But boy oh boy was Natalie excited about it, so I became excited for her and readily signed up to go. I chalked it up to just one of those things you do for your daughter, and the closer the date came, the more I was looking forward to going. After all, it isn’t ever day that a daddy and his daughter get to spend some good quality time together, especially when we’re all so dressed up.

As it turns out, I learned something on the night of the dance. I thought I knew Natalie pretty well, but apparently I didn’t.

About a week before the dance, Natalie had to find the perfect dress, which she did, and she needed the perfect shoes to go with the perfect dress, which we found…and her hair had to be done up just perfect, which it was… and she needed flowers in her hair, which there were.

And I needed to wear a tie, of course, Natalie told me. I don’t wear a suit all too often anymore. Well, make that: I’ve never had to wear a suit too often in my life. I’ve always had casual jobs, which keeps my suit collection at a minimum. I have a couple of them, but my suit of choice is my black, all-purpose single-breasted one. I can laugh at a wedding, reminisce at a reunion, be confident at an interview and cry at a funeral, all in one outfit that will never go out of fashion. It’s perfect, a man’s equivalent to the little black dress; just change your tie, and since I was getting tired of my tie selection, I decided that a new shirt-tie combo added to my wardrobe would only expand the possibilities.

It took me a considerable amount of time to find a tie and a shirt that I liked and that matched. I had a fool-proof system for buying a new shirt and tie, but I was foiled by the disorganization of Kohl’s, those bums. They have a pretty decent array of shirts and ties and their prices are reasonable, but the thing that really draws me there is that some thoughtful employee always arranges the shirts with ties that match that particular shirt. So, if I need a green shirt—which I did—on top of it would invariably be a greenish tie that would match. Whoever’s job that was, I was always quite pleased with their selections, making the shirt/tie buying experience that much easier and quicker for me.

This time, not so much. For starters, I like a certain brand of shirts. I know they fit well, hold up in the washer and keep their original color, but they had all of the sizes mixed together…and what the hell would I want with a fitted dress shirt? If my clothes are remotely tight or even mildly snug, it feels like someone’s strangling me to death. I found the color I wanted, the brand I liked, but it had button-down collars. The fitted version of the same size/color/brand didn’t. And I didn’t like anything else, so I had to settle with, in my opinion, not very fashionable button-down collars…so don’t laugh.

When Natalie came home from school on Friday afternoon, she immediately wanted to get ready, even though we wouldn’t be leaving for six hours. She spent the afternoon on pins and needles waiting until it was time to get ready, and when Kara came home, the house was all a flurry with activity, like we were going to the prom… and I guess to a five-year-old, we were.

Of course, she looked beautiful (nobody commented on how I looked!), and when we got to the dance, she held my hand all the way into the auditorium. We talked about some of her friends that would be there and how we were going to dance to the music. Natalie said, “This is going to be the best night ever!” and I couldn’t agree more.

Once inside, we got something to eat (a local taco place catered), sat down and watched the room slowly fill up while I ate (Gnat didn’t want anything). Natalie was impatient for me to hurry up and finish my tacos, so I wolfed them down as quickly as I could so we could get out on the dance floor and get started. We spotted one of Natalie’s friends, and since I knew her dad causally from picking up the kids after school, I had someone to talk with while the girls chased each other around the dance floor with big red and silver balloons they had found. Natalie was having a great time.

Natalie lost the flowers in her hair, but it was okay as I carried with me spares to put in before the pictures. The lights in the room were partially on still, and the music wasn’t that loud. Most of the other daughters/dads milled around, eating, talking with each other, and some of the girls were running around the floor too.

The evening began to ramp up. The lights dimmed more and the room filled with people, a lot more than I expected. Our time came to take pictures so we got in the long line. Natalie leaned against me and had a sad look on her face. I asked her what was wrong, and she replied that she was tired. Tired? We had only been there for 40 minutes! Meanwhile, she still had the two balloons she found, the red one and the silver one, and she seemed very attached to them.

While we were in line, they played the first slow song of the night, and I was wishing that we weren’t in line, that we were out there dancing…because that was the purpose, and I figured the slow songs to Natalie would be more meaningful to her, as it would have been to me.

After pictures, she wanted to get a bottle of water and sit down for a while, take a rest and enjoy a cool refreshment. She didn’t seem to enthused to be at the dance any longer, as if it was over to her. She kept asking me what time it was, saying that it was a “sleepover” night, the one night a week when the kids gets to sleep in our room on the pull-out couch. I was rather disappointed, and my feelings felt a little trampled, as if she wasn’t having fun and it was somehow my fault.

We sat at a tables while she drank her water, and then “The Chicken Dance” came on. Now, let’s get something straight right from the beginning: I hate “The Chicken Dance.” I hate it with a passion, so much so that I forbid the DJ at our wedding to play that song no matter how much money he was offered. It’s just plain stupid, and it makes everyone doing it look like a complete idiot… but Natalie likes it (Matthew too). The song is on a mixed CD I made for the kids when we went to Yellowstone last year, and so I’m forced to hear that song probably two or three times a week—more than any one person should have to. But I knew I could get Natalie out on the dance floor and dance with me, if I started doing “The Chicken Dance.”

So I did. And she was surprised, because she knows that I won’t do “The Chicken Dance.” I’ve been asked countless times while the CD is playing. No chicken dance for me. But on Friday I did, partly to get Natalie out what I thought was a little shell of shyness and partly because I knew she’d get a kick out of me looking like a complete idiot.

But there, that night, I looked like everyone else. Picture 300 dads mostly all dressed in suits, standing around, doing “The Chicken Dance,” and since all of the daughters were overshadowed by their taller dads, it looked like a room full of dressed up dudes clapping their fingers together, wagging their arms and wiggling their tails. Utter stupidity, but it worked. Natalie was tickled pink.

After that song ended, another one came on that neither of us knew (some High School Musical song no doubt), so Natalie said she wanted to finish her water and take a rest. We returned to the table, sat down and looked like a few other forlorn dads/daughters who don’t like to dance and who aren’t really having a good time.

I was getting slightly tired of carrying the balloons around all night. Why did we need them? Why can’t we get rid of them? Tears came to Natalie’s eyes when I suggested that we leave them somewhere and go dance. No, we were keeping the balloons, but I did suggest that we get rid of one and keep her favorite, the red one. She agreed, but I couldn’t get her back out on the dance floor, and she told me she was ready to go home. It was 7:15. I didn’t understand. Wasn’t she having fun? Yes, she was having fun, she said, but she was tired.

The DJ made a call to have all of the fathers and daughters come out to the middle of the dance floor for an air guitar contest, and that most certainly isn’t my cup of tea, but I convinced Natalie to go out there with me. At that point, I could have given a crap what anyone thought. I knew exactly two people in the whole room, and Natalie was one of them, so if there was an air guitar contest, I was going to win it.

They played “Don't Stop Believing,” by Journey, which is on my Top 100 songs of all time (again, don’t laugh), so I sang along with it while I danced with Natalie. All of the fathers sang the song to their daughters, per orders from the DJ, and when the guitar parts came, we rocked! Natalie thought it was hilarious, but I could see that little spark of “Daddy, you’re embarrassing me” in the corner of her eye.

After that, all of the daughters were called to the front of the dance floor while the dads were “given a break.” Natalie wouldn’t leave my side, and I didn’t want her to. There were only two other girls from her class at the dance, and although a dozen older girls came up to her to say hello (no doubt girls from Kara’s class), I wouldn’t feel comfortable with Natalie lost in a mosh pit of satin and lace. They played a song from “Camp Rock,” arguably Natalie’s favorite music right now, and we danced to it. Natalie was all smiles, but when it was over, she wanted to leave. That was it, she was done. I was hoping for a slow song. I actually wanted to dance more—which is rare for me—but she wanted to go home.

I knelt down and asked her if she wanted to go get some ice cream. Her eyes lit up and we turned to leave.

We were the first people out the door. One of the PTA ladies asked us, “You’re not leaving yet, are you?” I said yes, and she ran back inside to get our party favor, a nicely themed frame to hold our picture that we took. The parking lot was full of cars, and there was only one other couple leaving after us, so I didn’t feel too bad.

At the time, I didn’t understand why Natalie wanted to leave. I couldn’t possibly imagine that she had fun. We went to Golden Spoon and she was cheery and happy, which didn’t make any sense; we could have saved all the time and trouble and just gone out to get ice cream in a suit and nice dress.

But then the more I thought of it and the more Kara and I discussed it later that night, the more it occurred to me. She’s only five years old, something I tend to often forget, especially since she is so talkative and mature in her conversations. She’s not interested in dances and loud music and the commotion of 600 people packed into a school gymnasium. Like her father, she’s rather introverted, happy to stay out of the limelight and on the fringes of the pandemonium, and I thought the whole evening was a wash, a waste of time and money because there was no way she had a good time.

When we made it home, she had nothing but good times to share with Kara. How we danced and ate food and played with balloons and saw her friends… It took me longer to find the tie than the length of time I wore it (truth be told, I couldn’t tie it right so I just wore another one), but she said on the way in the house, “It was wonderful!”

I just didn’t get it. We danced to two and half songs, stood in line for 20 minutes to take pictures, sat and watched the limbo contest for 10 minutes while she drank her water, and were home 90 minutes after we left…and that included the stop for ice cream! How could she have had fun?

And that’s what I didn’t understand. The fun part was dressing up, getting ready, and the anticipation of going to the dance. It was the journey, not the destination. Fun to her was running around the dance floor with the balloons, chasing her friends, and when I looked back on the evening, that was when she had the most fun. That was the dance to her, that was what made it special to a five-year-old, dressing up and feeling special, holding your father’s hand and going out to a special event for just the two of us…and I guess that’s what made it special to me.

The fact that I learned about another facet of Natalie’s personality is just icing on the cake…which I was hoping they would have had at the dance.

I only have five more father-daughter dances to go while she’s in elementary school, and after that, I probably won’t be cool enough to dance with until her wedding day.

Maybe we’ll stay longer next year.

God Will Give Me a Pogo Stick

2008-11-16T15:40:00.001-08:00

It seems that Christmas is coming early this year, as it seems it arrives earlier than it did the year before. Soon enough, we’ll only have to cook one turkey on Thanksgiving and there’ll be leftovers for Christmas. We went down to Dos Lagos last night and witnessed the longest, most drawn-out tree lighting ceremony ever…and all they did was flip a switch, but we had to wait for the emcee, Santa himself, to give his approval. Apparently he was stuck on the freeway, and when they announced that, I wondered how many kids looked up at their parents, and through innocent eyes, asked, “Why doesn’t he just fly here with his reindeer?” And since it was only 80 degrees out, which puts only a few people in the mood for Christmas, I’m surprised Santa didn’t collapse from heat stroke in his giant suit… and it explains why he was walking so slowly.

But then after they flipped the switch on the giant tree and all the twinkley lights made the crowd go “ahhhh,” he was taking Christmas wishes from kids in front of Victoria’s Secret, which would be the first place I would have thought to mix Santa and children on a warm Friday night.

All of the stores are decked out with that one sections that smacks Old Saint Nick right in your face without actually saying Christmas; it’s all “Happy Holidays,” a well-dissolved blanket greeting that will certainly not upset anyone who celebrates one of the non-holidays this time of year. Do you know anyone who doesn’t celebrate Christmas? And if you do, are they frequently offended by seeing the word Christmas? Odds are good they aren’t. Anyways, as my frustration with PCC (Politically Correct Consumerism) rises as we get closer to Christmas, I’m sure I’ll have more to add on this topic.

A couple of years ago, Natalie’s Christmas wish list resembled a phone book, and I don’t know how many times I answered “Put it on your Christmas List” when she saw something she wanted, knowing full well that she would soon forget about it by the time the next commercial started. And that’s okay. I was good with it, because I remembered as a kid getting the Winter JCPennys catalog and pouring through the toy sections creating the perfect playroom amassed with piles of Christmas loot. Today, as it was back then, that will not happen. Natalie and Matthew know nothing of prices and economies and bills and all of the joyous taxes our new exalted leader will bring us next year…and I’m a little sad that I know all too much about those things and have to deal with them on a daily basis.

Natalie slowly slipped out of that phase, and now she just circles stuff in the myriad catalogs that flood our mailbox this time a year. Really, how many American Girl doll catalogs do we actually need? The one last week was good enough, and Natalie’s getting carpel-tunnel syndrome circling all of the dolls she wants…but I don’t see her as the greedy type. On Halloween, she had more fun giving out candy at the door than she did getting it; perhaps it is because she doesn’t much like chocolate and that’s all that is really out there (we gave out pencils one year…I’m surprised we didn’t get egged).

And just when Natalie is out of that greedy Christmas-is-for-getting stage, Matthew is easing on into it. There isn’t a commercial that goes by his view that doesn’t contain something he doesn’t want, and watch out if get between the two of them when the Mattel, Hasbro or any number of toy catalogs come into the house.

So, recently, Matthew has been saying “I want that” to everything he sees. My answer? It’s the same as it has always been: “Put it on your Christmas List,” and since his birthday is 10 days before Christmas, I get to change it up a bit by alternating to “Put it on your Birthday List.”

The other night while we were all in the car heading somewhere, Matthew, perhaps tired of hearing the same answers over and over, says to himself, “God will give me a pogo stick.”

I didn't know he knew what a pogo stick even was, much less God's ability to give him stuff. I hope he's not too disappointed when that doesn't show up.

I am Icarus

2008-11-02T19:39:00.000-08:00

A handful of years ago, during Easter dinner, I had to sneeze. It’s not unusual since a lot of pepper gets thrown around at our family dinners, but since I was being polite and didn’t want to sneeze straight forward, hence towards everyone else, I turned my head and sneezed away from the table. I’ve never felt such pain, as it was the first time I had ever wrenched my back, and it was like someone had gouged me with a dull spoon; it was so bad that tears came to my eyes instantly and Kara had to drive us home later that night because I could barely sit up straight without wincing. I hobbled around for a solid week, hardly able to get up off the couch without blinding pain, and it was nearly impossible to stand up completely straight.

Since then, I have done that again on two separate occasions, each time, I’m reminded that the flexibility and elasticity of my youth is a thing of the past.

On Halloween, I was reminded of the fleeting mistress of youth yet again.

Sometimes Elsa gets out, and though she usually listens to what I say, the siren song of freedom and liberty is too much an elixir to quell in her canine brain. I’ve mentioned it before and it is usually no big deal when she does get out. She roots around the neighborhood for about 10 minutes, visits a few penned-in neighborhood dogs (avoiding the really barky ones), realizes that there are far more interesting things going on in the house and comes back. No problem. This time, it was Halloween and it was nearing dusk, about the time spooky kids and ghoulish beings inhabit the streets, along with parents not paying attention while they drive and not to mention lots of chocolate.

To avoid any problems this time, I decided to go after her, not that it would do any good, as “the chase” to her is all part of the game and it makes her go farther. What I wanted to do was to get in front of her and steer her back towards the house, kind of corralling the doggies, if you will, while avoiding any implication that this is a game and we’re having fun. I had a fog machine to figure out and fake spider webs to add to the porch.

I knew she would run across the street and pay a visit to Traveler, a little Corgi…or some similar ilk of smaller dog that barks constantly when his “parents” aren’t home. While she was doing this, I kept on down the sidewalk, walking past her, hoping to cut her off and convince her that she belongs inside… plus, on Halloween, she gets to go with us trick or treating, so I don’t know what she is complaining about.

Anyway, she saw me…and the game was on! She took off running and for some reason, so did I, even though I knew it was the worst thing I could do to convince her to return to the house. I didn’t have shoes on and the asphalt was rather rough, but my feet are pretty tough too and I didn’t notice that I was scratching up my feet in the process. As soon as I hopped the grassy parkway onto the sidewalk, Elsa and I were right next to each other, and she looked over at me with a playful look in her eyes, tongue hanging out of her mouth. Then she started to really run—tail straight out, ears back, mouth now clamped shut in concentration—with long strides and her head down.

For whatever reason, I poured on the coals and tried in vain to keep up with her, knowing full well that was impossible and she started to slip away.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy running, always have, ever since I ran cross country and track in high school, all of the competitions and the accolades therein. When you get good at it, which means you’ve passed the “I’m out of shape” phase, it becomes easier, something that’s almost relaxing and fulfilling. Rhythm and strides, breathing and hearing your heartbeat in your head and the pounding of your feet on the pavement, one foot after the other. You fill your lungs with more air than you ever thought possible and your brain begins to feel the extra oxygen stimulating it into a semi-euphoric state.

Again, I’m not sure what brought this on, but I started to run as fast as I possibly could, as fast as I knew how to make my legs work, which over short distances used to be about 15mph when I was in excellent shape (back when my quarter-mile time was always sub-60 seconds). However, who knows what an extra 50 pounds of fat has cost me over the years, but I was running pretty fast; I knew I couldn’t do it for very much longer, so I savored the moment. My arms were pumping high up into the air and my legs seemed to work on their own with long, quick strides; everything was quiet around me except for the slight whistling of the air rushing past my ears and the clapping of my bare feet on the sidewalk. Since I was concentrating on catching Elsa, who was continuing to pull steadily ahead, everything around me became a fast moving blur like looking out the window during a car ride.

For a few moments, I felt good, really good. I could start to feel a small burn in the backs of my arms and my calf muscles began to stiffen because, of course, I didn’t stretch before this impromptu sprint. But over all of that, above the physical strain of sprinting, of pushing your body a lot farther than it has been pushed in a great while, my mind felt good like I had suddenly escaped the daily pressures of life, the stress of the days and the worries of the nights. I had been liberated, not as if I was running from something but because I had something to run towards, like in those spiritually enlightened movies with the message that you can overcome any obstacle: There’s always a scene that has the main character running at top speed, with abandon, for no reason, and as he does so a brilliant white light showers down around him and the movie transitions into a new direction. That was me, surrounded by the brilliant white light of redemption, saved from the recidivism of old age and its inevitable doom.

Maybe I felt young again. Beyond all the gray hair and those love handles that came out of nowhere or the soreness in my back when I wake up or the fact that I can’t stay up all night, the morning be damned…I had become Icarus, donning my wings made of wax to escape the labyrinth. As we get older, our fathers don’t exactly tell us not to fly too close to the sun, but let’s just say that I don’t ever recall a time seeing my dad sprint at top speed, which should have told me something about becoming older.

Thirty-five is a magical age: I’m young enough to be guiled into thinking I can do anything, but old enough to realize I shouldn’t. It was right then, right in the middle of feeling invulnerable and untouchable, right before I could just reach out and grab my share of the white brilliant light of the sun, there was this popping sound that came from my right leg.

I felt it; I even heard it. It sounded similar to someone opening a bag of chips with their fist, ironically like the breaking of the sound barrier. I couldn’t stop fast enough, and with every decelerating step on that leg, the pain grew more intensely until I was hopping on my left foot and using my right toes only for balance. To hell with the dog. Let her eat some hapless trick-or-treater and end up in the pound. See if I care now. I started limping back towards the house, letting the dog figure it out on her own.

But then Elsa got into a fight with a Boxer she met a few weeks ago. I heard the snarls and the Boxer’s owner demanding that it heel. If there’s two things I’ve tried to teach her, it’s never to play cards with a Cheetah and never get in a fight with a Boxer. Damnit. I hobbled to the last house on the street and grabbed Elsa by the scruff of the neck while she was occupied with trying to get her jaws around the jugular of this dog, who was half her size I might add. It wasn’t serious fighting and I could tell the two dogs were just sparring, like puppies do. But still, I was pretty pissed off that I had hurt my leg, and not because I was doing something I probably shouldn’t have done, but because I was doing something I’ve done a thousand times without incident. That, and at this stage in my life, I’m beginning to feel mortal, far and removed from that immortality you feel when you’re 19 and that feeling that time will never take you, things will always remain the same and life will be full of the kind of adventure you’ve been preparing yourself for since you were 10.

Elsa had had enough too. I yanked all 90 pounds of her off of the ground by the back of her neck and she got the message and trotted home, maybe content that her adventure was so exciting. She saw some old friends on the street, got to go farther than usual, and got to see her master run like one of her kind… except he doesn't run very far, or very fast, or very good for that matter.

For the past couple of days, walking has been a chore. I can take a step as long as I don’t extend it too far forward or too far backwards. Forget about touching my toes, which makes it difficult to dry my feet after a shower, and there’s no way I can give the dog a swift kick for making me run after her.

Actually, it is feeling better today, despite the fact that it is physically sore to the touch, the whole area about the size of an open hand halfway up the back of my thigh. I tore it, ripped it, sprained it, pulled it, or strained it…I don’t know; I barely passed biology in college, but I do know this:

If you’re going to fly too close to the sun, at least wear sunscreen.

*The picture at the beginning of this page is me (surprise). It was part of the team picture for the Glendora High School Cross Country team in the Fall of 1988. I was 15 years old.

Bart, Bart… er, Bark, Bark

2008-10-23T00:07:00.000-07:00

Tonight’s art class project was the most nerve wracking, as just the very act of beginning it set a tone of trepidation swirling through all of my fellow students. “Here I go,” “Wish me luck,” and my personal favorite epitaph of the night, “There’s no going back now,” were words spoken by almost everyone before starting.

There was no eraser, no do-over, and no second chance. If you made a mistake, you had to fix it creatively or live with the error. Of course, I’m referring to scratch sketching, the time honored tradition of not adding a material to a piece of paper to create a picture but the act of taking away material from the picture.

The paper is specially coated with India Ink and our job was to scratch away that layer of ink to expose the white paper below. In doing so, a picture would form. The subject matter was our pets, and even though we had a whole two days to obtain a picture of our pet—the instructor would have settled for a picture of any sort of living animal—there were five people who couldn’t bother themselves with finding an appropriate image. Instead, they had to scrounge through the magazine pile for something. Such deadbeats; why are artists such flakes? Do they not have the same purpose and outlook on society as the rest of us?

At any rate, snapping a shot of Elsa is as easy as snapping your fingers. As you can tell by the above photograph, she is quite photogenic and very happy to sit for me, provided nothing else is going on in her life that day. She sat and panted, panted and sat while I snapped away a half-dozen possible shots (I went with the last one, as I usually do, because it is always the shot that satisfies me enough to stop shooting pictures—and sometimes I nail that feeling on the first spring of the shutter).

As luck would have it, having a mostly black dog made my job that much easier, as there was little material to remove from the page, unlike a few of my classmates with the white dogs (the guy next to me had a ferret).

The hardest part of the whole project was the first few scratches. Our tools looked like miniature trowels, with a pointed part that sloped down to wider scoops on the sides for scraping. But where do you start. Before me was a black sheet of semi-shiny paper and a color picture of Elsa, with the idea that I have to make one look like the other.

The only thing you can do is just take the plunge, dive right in and hope you don’t screw it up. I started in the center, with Elsa’s left eye and scratched away everything else in relation to that one eye. The results were pretty cool, and once everyone got into it, the whole room was silent (it helped that the girl that doesn't shut up was, once again, absent) and enthralled by our work.

Frankly, I’m impressed with the results, surprised really, as if someone else had done it and not me. It actually looks like Elsa, which is the first step in producing art, that your projects look like the subject. Thought it isn't perfect, I'm especially pleased with her left eye, how it looks pensive and somewhat forlorn.

In projects past, I seemed to have always forgotten that important step...which is why I have eggs that look like balls.

The ironic part—or coincidental if you don’t believe in the currently accepted definition of irony, thank you Alanis Morissette for screwing that up—is that while I was pining over the picture of Elsa for three solid hours in class tonight, apparently she was running around the yard, tripped and twisted her ankle. She’s been limping around here all night, but after watching all the young pups melt the snow in the Iditarod on the Discovery Channel tonight, she seemed to pep up a bit.
After all, she’s only 50… and she has a nice portrait of her too.

Putting the Art in Dartboard

2008-10-22T00:58:00.001-07:00

Just when you thought you’ve run out of quality one-of-a-kind artwork to help your aim at the dartboard, included below is a new batch of art projects in the continuing saga of my art class. So, print them out, put them up and happy darting!

Just to keep you generally updated on my progress in my art class, it appears as though the art is getting more difficult. At least it seems that way, as the projects are taking longer and they are becoming more complex. I’m not sure if there is a progression of styles we’re following or if there is a system to our learning, but now we seem to be spending a great deal of time on shading, something I’ve always enjoyed.

And, as the weeks go by, my status of being the guy in class that doesn’t most suck at art is being challenged, as more and more people just fade away. It’s amazing. At the beginning of class, on the first few nights, you couldn’t wrestle away from anyone an available chair to sit in. Now, here we are several weeks into the course, and I can spread my paper out on two desks, kick my feet up on three stools and knock over a couple more just for sport…and nobody has to sit on the floor. There are maybe 10 people in class, which means that they are all serious art students; translation: they’re pretty good at art, even that girl that won’t shut up and the kid that keeps texting his girlfriend in Hawaii every 30 seconds. This means that, as more and more people drop the class (one woman confessed that she couldn’t take the class anymore because her was being foreclosed on and her whole family was living in a Motel 6), the likelihood of me being the worst artist in the room increases. Soon, I’m sure, I will take the top honors; lucky the instructor grades on effort, and I think she likes me. I usually get there early and we commiserate on the deadbeats in class that have comprehension difficulties. Why would she have to explain the same thing three times because people don’t get it. And don't get her started on the guy whose girlfriend did an art project for him... during another art class, as if the instructors don't talk to each other and know what the others are doing.

Oh well, on with the masterpieces.

This first one is, of course, an egg. You knew that, right? What? You thought it was a ball. That was my trouble too, but it is clearly an egg. Before us, the instructor placed a handful of eggs on white sheets, and they were placed rather haphazardly, so lucky me, all of the eggs on my side of the room, the pointy parts that is, were facing away, looking rather like balls instead of eggs. This one was shaded with charcoal and newsprint, and you can call it a ball if you’d like. On the back of this page we drew three eggs in a cut-in-half egg carton, but mine turned out looking more like three bald men standing in line at the bank so I won't show it to you. Consider yourself fortunate that you won't feel compelled to send me an obligatory "nice art" platitudes.

The next one I was rather proud of. It is a charcoal contour line drawing of my truck’s dashboard. It was pretty fun to do and relatively easy. Instead of sitting in the backseat of my truck for a couple of hours, I snatched a shot of a Ford interior (this is the XLT Lariat interior, for you sticklers), printed it out and drew it up. I enjoyed doing the details of the radio, and notice it is set to my station of choice…that or it’s twenty to seven in the morning. What I enjoyed most was the little A the instructor printed on the back.

What nightmare did this drawing fall out of? Where on earth would anyone collect all of these things together for hapless students to draw? It is almost one of those drawings in those old-timey magazines that have you search for certain items, like find the clothes pin, etc. What we had to do was incorporate a new item into our drawing as they were brought out before us. One of them was a piñata (it's the red and yellow wedding cake thing in the middle), so it made perfect sense to me to have all of these items coming out of the piñata, and the whisk is acting like the bat. I was shocked that no other student made this connection; I figured there would be 20 pinatas with junk blowing out of them. There’s an inflatable bird, a bottle with a leaf sticking out of it, an ornament, some sort of detergent box. My favorite element is the lamp lying on the table, and of course, it goes without saying, the A on the back was nice too. She even pinned it to the board and took a picture of it; now, whether that picture is going in the “good” pile or the “don’t draw like this guy” pile is not readily known, but you can draw your own conclusions. The drawing was done with Sharpies and pastel chalks.

This drawing came as a result of a class I missed because of a meeting I needed to attend. Since I wasn’t there to draw it, I had to assemble a bunch of variously shaped items of differing heights and draw them. The point was to make lines all over the page, marking the widths and heights of each item so it can be compared with all of the other items. This helps us with perspective, placement and point of view (the three Ps of art, I guess… don’t quote me, I just made that up, considering perspective and point of view are the same thing). My friend Brian will be happy to see that I drink Arrowhead water, and my sister in law will be pleased that the wine is from Weins, and my folks will be pleased that I’m reading a book they bought me for Christmas one year… but what exactly is Del Monte plastic cups? Why are they cherry flavored and why only 16? I don’t know, folks, but I can tell you that I got tired of lettering the boxes. The teacup was the most difficult thing to do as it was round. When I become an architect, I will only design rectangular buildings, so the Guggenheim is completely out of the question. This was graphite pencils of various hardness (I’m partial to 3B, which is a pretty soft lead).

The last two I did this last Monday night, a rose and some dying daisies or mums. I’m not sure, they were wilted and curly, but it was clear that they hadn’t been watered in a while. They’re both pencil base, but the rose is shaded with charcoal while the daisies are shaded with pencil (5B). I enjoyed playing with the shades to give the illusion of light, but on the rose I was disappointed with the fact that I think the outer pedals are rounded up too early, giving the impression that they are fanned out more than they should be. However, I especially like the daisy on the left. I did that one last, so I had a better idea as to what I was doing with the light.

On Wednesday we are delving into drawing our pets with a method called scratch… something-er-rather. I don’t remember. Essentially, we are taking these special ink boards and scratching them with a metal pins (picture a fancy nail) until they look like a dog. Equate it to this Elephant Joke: How do you carve an elephant? Easy, take a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant!

That killed me as a kid.

Oh, but the real punch line to the joke is that I didn’t even have to take this class! Yeah. It’s not funny, well, a little bit, but I wasn’t paying too close attention to my course requirements when I registered this fall. This art class is part of a list of electives, on which are classes more geared toward my major like Civil Engineering Drafting, Three-Dimensional Design, Materials of Construction, etc. I only need three units to satisfy my elective requirement and ART-17 is it. Oh well. It’s been fun. Enjoy.

My Insulator Collection

2008-10-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure what attracts me to old insulators, but I've always had a fondness for them. They’re easy to obtain and plentiful, but up until today, I’ve only had one, an emerald Hemingray Jason and I found while climbing the mountain behind my parent’s house. I used it as a door stop when I lived at home, and I’ve always had it somewhere in my office; right now, it sits upon my bookshelf, where I can not only admire it for what it is, but it is a relic of my childhood, when finding some strange glass object was like diving on a sunken ship and discovering a treasure chest full of gold.

There’s something about them that attracts me to them. Maybe it’s the combination of the beauty of craftsmanship and the evolution of commerce, or perhaps they are a reminder of progress, a tribute to industry, something that harkens back to a time when connecting the country, joining the two coasts in voice, information and electricity was paramount. In the age of cell phones and underground power conduits, they’re an obsolete artifact of a forgotten time. I doubt the average person on the street would know what they are… but then again, the average person on the street is a moron who doesn’t know much of anything.

Either way, I have about 150 of them now, ranging from small brown porcelain ones up to a five-foot monster, all bought from CraigsList from a woman in El Mirage. Until this morning, I didn’t know where that was, but if you go as far as possible away from all civilization, water, stores, paved roads, sewer systems and the conveniences we take for granted (like houses with foundations and without wheels), then you’ll be in El Mirage. Her directions said it was near Phelan, as if that was helpful; where’s Phelan?

My journey began last week when I noticed a large insulator collection on CraigsList, and since I’ve been trying to no longer be impulsive (you know, with the recession and all), I shelved the link and waited that little cooling off period, figuring that if they were still available in a week, then perhaps I was destined to own them. The listing said “High Desert” which could be anywhere over the hills, and that probably kept a lot of people from taking advantage of the deal. I talked the lady down roughly 50 percent of the original asking price, putting the price around 75 cents each, which is well worth it, given the prices of these things that I’ve seen on eBay and other insulator collector sites. They have been going for about $5.00 each if you come across a small collection, but people think that just because they’re old, they’re worth something.
It took 70 minutes to find El Mirage, and once you get out that far from the “big city,” I guess they no longer feel the need to use street signs, so I had to guess, to feel my way up through the Joshua Trees, sand and expansive horizons.

The house was exactly like I pictured it would be, a double wide set out on the sand and surrounded by what was probably large weeds that resembled trees. There were seven cars in the yard, no plants, a barn of some sort and an old tractor. I pulled into the dirt driveway and parked next to the front fence, which turned out to be the main fence that surrounds the inner yard, which was dirt too. In the sand lay a pit bull, which didn’t look entirely thrilled that I was near him, especially since I had to stand there and figure out how to get from the driveway to the house, since the gate to the front door was not only locked but “sealed” with a red leash tied around the posts.

The pit bull, who looked like he only had one eye, gave me the stink eye as I allowed him a wide birth as I picked my way through the cars to the back fence, which hung open. That’s when I was greeted by the flies, hoards of them. There was no direct source, but once I stepped up on the porch, there was a bowl filled with dog food, the surface of which seemed to move when I came near. The backyard beyond the porch was littered with rocks, bricks, broken bottles (old ones too), an alarming number of cow skulls and a variety of lawn furniture, all slowly sinking into the sand along with the weeds and a smattering of pavers.

I knocked. The metal door was partially open and beyond it heard a baby cry and someone’s voice yell something unprintable. I wished I had brought something to defend myself, as it seemed that at any moment a banjo would start up and someone behind me would inform me that I had a pretty mouth and I should start squealing like a pig. Instead, another dog, a black mutt that looked part Sheppard and part “other” snuck up on me and started sniffing my leg. When I turned to see what it was—half expecting the pit bull looking to which part he was going to chew on first—the poor dog ducked his head and skittered off of the porch with his tail between his legs. I held out my hand to regain his trust and he hesitated before slowly investigating my outstretched fist (I never hold my fingers out to a strange dog—I’m partial to them).

I knocked again, this time on the aluminum door frame, and much louder. A chesty Hispanic girl of about 18 answered with a baby on her hip and a disgruntled look on her face, probably wishing she had put on the rest of her shirt before she answered the door. I asked for who I came for—still not sure that I even had the right house as there were no numbers on it—and she told me, “yeah, sure, hold on,” and then disappeared into the house.

When the woman that was selling the insulators came to the door, she was exactly as I expected her to be: About 50, with black hair framed in gray, face deeply wrinkled and wearing too much eye makeup. An unlit cigarette dangled from her tightly pursed lips, and after her greeting she said something I had hoped she wouldn’t: “Come on in.” I desperately wanted to say no thanks, I’ll wait out here, where someone can hear me scream, but I followed her through the door, not sure if I should close it behind me or leave it open as an escape route.

She apologized for the mess and I excused her with a “that’s okay.” There was a kitchen to the left with a blonde girl in too-short shorts doing dishes, who didn’t care to bother turning her head to regard a stranger in her house. On the right was a darkened family room. The TV was on too loudly and a man was sitting in a lounge chair watching some kind of wrestling; he too disregarded me. Finally two other men, both about 25-years old, appeared and the one with the tattoos and glasses said “howya doin?” in that manner that suggested he’d sooner kill me than ask me if I’d like something to drink.

Through the kitchen/family room and around the corner to the front of the house and near the front door was a room that would be the living room, but it was about the size of a guest bathroom and filled with clutter. She explained that she was going to start an antique shop but “that didn’t work out too, as you can see.” I couldn’t.

In the center was a wagon filled to the brim with the insulators. There were no boxes and I didn’t bring them, assuming that they’d be in boxes already. The woman said it was her step-father’s collection and that he had died in February… so why no sell off some of his stuff. There were no boxes because all of the insulators had been scattered around the yard, and she had collected them up like Easter eggs one afternoon. The story goes that her step-dad was a fireman who would pick up these insulators while he was on duty fighting fires in the area, and had done so for the 50 years of his career.

She asked the blonde in the kitchen to go find some boxes and the tattooed son with glasses came into the room, saying, “There sure is a f-word load of them, ain’t there ma?” She agreed, apparently not fazed at her son’s flagrant use of the f-word, then asked, “Where are your smokes?”

Once the boxes came, I couldn’t load them quickly enough. I carted them to the back of the truck, and the woman asked, “Do you want the big one out back?”

Huh?

“You must not have seen it when you came in, as there’s a cow skull on it, but you can have it if you’d like.”

Turns out, the one she was speaking about was some sort of electrical insulator from those high-tension towers. It was made of porcelain but probably weighed 75 pounds. Hey, growing up my family had a series of mantras, one of which is: “If someone’s going to give it to you for free, take it and then figure out what to do with it.” So, I strained myself first prying it out of the sand (as it was set up like a monolith in the middle of the debris) and then hobbling it to the back of my truck.

With sand in my sandals—I should have worn better shoes—and dirty hands, I drove the 80 miles back home with three boxes spilling over with insulators of all descriptions. Once home Natalie and I went through them all, segregating them into piles of completely broken ones (about 12), significantly chipped ones (about 20) and ones in perfect condition or with very slight damage (about 100). Most were dusty, some were dirty, some caked on soot from forest fires while most of them were in excellent condition, gleaming as if new.

I took pictures of the individual ones that were unique and grouped them by manufacturer and then by color (at Natalie’s insistence). The majority of them are Hemingray and Whitall Tatum, which I’m guessing were popular manufacturers, but there were a bunch that I had never heard of before: McLaughlin, Armstrong’s, Brookfield, Maydwell, H.C., LAPP, Superior, PP, Joslyn, Locke, Chance, REN, Continental Rubber Works, Amtel & Tel, Richard Ginori…and three of them were made by Pyrex. The colors are amazing, from crystal clear glass to amber, blue, green, yellow, red and two are even purple (Gnat’s favorite, of course). Some are glazed with a brown that makes them look almost artsy, and one is made of Bakelite and two others of rubber. There are two large ones, like big glass bowls, one glazed brown and the other a clear glass (though the base on the clear one is broken).

So, now what?

Well, I’m genetically predisposed to display them somehow. I’ll work on that, but in the meantime, I’m going to do my research and see what I have. Who knows, I might have in my new collection the rarest insulator ever, something worth a small fortune. I doubt it, but I’m sure the collection is worth much more than I paid for it.

Before I left, the lady that sold them to me asked, “Do you have a lot in your collection?”

My reply: “I do now.”

Next, I’m looking for a barbed wire collection and I think my life might just be nearing complete… so if anyone knows of any…

I think I just heard Kara groan…

Hey, I Don’t Entirely Suck at Art

2008-09-26T16:00:00.000-07:00

Who would have thought it? Granted, I’m not going to win any awards and there are high traces of suckitude in my art, but so far, it’s been nothing but As. In fact, during class, we have to periodically get up and make a lap around the room to look at the progress of other people’s art, and I’m happy to say that there are other people in the class that suck at a higher level than I do. I mean, really, there are some people that shouldn’t be taking art at all. It’s like “American Idol.” How can you possibly imagine that you can sing?

I thought I would be one of those people whose art the instructor tears off the wall and tramples into fibers so no innocent eyes would befall upon it and forever be ruined. I pictured her walking around the room, criticizing our art with a cigarette at the end of one of those long thin holders perched out of the corner of her mouth, muttering to herself through wisps of smoke, “Crap, crap, crap…” Then getting to mine, clutching her chest and falling over dead with gray matter oozing from her eye sockets. (I bet that paints a picture for you, doesn’t it?)

You may remember my trepidation about taking an art class, especially from someone who hardly ever picks up a pencil bent on creativity, and I figured it would be difficult to do. Granted it isn’t easy. Before each and every drawing, I stare at a blank sheet of paper with hesitation on where to begin, but in the end, I’ve been pleased with my abilities and the results. Some of it as you will see, however, is just awful, plain awful.

Some of the messier stuff we have to do for homework—India ink, pastel chalks, etc.—I do out on the patio on our old kitchen table, as the best way to clean spilt India ink out of your carpets is with a utility knife and creatively placed furniture. Which explains the picture at the top of the page. And the wine? What pretentious artist wouldn't have a glass of wine nearby?

Remember, when you look at these, I’m no Picasso, so be kind.

For this first one, we had been drawing sketches of fruit in block form, meaning that we divided up the fruit into blocks based on how the light was hitting it and our perception of the shape. I didn't fully get it, but after I had done a pear, the instructor used my sketch as an example to show the class, so I must have been doing something right. After that exercise, we had to draw our hand in the same manner, and since I was looking at my hand holding a pencil, it seemed easier to draw. After drawing it in blocks, we had to round over the round parts and shade in everything else. Given that I've never really drawn life forms before, I'm rather proud of it. Of course, it is an example of art not imitating life, as I rarely hold my pencil this way. Furthermore, I rarely hold pencils at all.

Below was one was one of the first drawings we did on the second day of class. We had to draw two angles our shoes without lifting up the piece of charcoal. It was difficult to do, until I found out we could lift up the piece of charcoal. It's called contour drawing. I should have worn nicer shoes to class, however.

This orange we did on the first day of class. We had to draw the same fruit seven times using a variety of medium and a bunch of different angles, from ink and pencil to charcoal and collage. Out of my seven, this is the only one I think actually looks like a piece of fruit. The others look like pieces of something else... It is colored with a Sharpie marker base and a pastel chalk overlay, which gives it a nice soft orangey appearance.

This one took a while. It is done similar to the orange above, but on a much larger scale. In the center of class was a jumble of boxes on a table and we had to sketch it twice. The first one had to be colored by Sharpies and shaded with chalk while the second one had to be shaded with India ink. I'm working on the ink version in the picture at the top of this page, and I think it turned out better than this one; However, I got an A on both, which solidified my hypothesis that you can get an A on anything if it shows you at least spent some time trying to do the assignment, regardless of its outcome.

This is the backpack of the guy who sat next to me in class the same night we did our shoes, as it is also a contour line drawing done in charcoal. We had some extra time so I also did my keys. That night, he brought absolutely nothing to class, not a stitch of paper nor a splinter of a pencil. What was the point of him being there? To go outside every few minutes and smoke a cigarette, which I think covered up the stench of his multiple bong hits before he came to class that night. I haven't seen him since, and I've often wondered what was in the backpack.

As a warm up to the hand exercise we worked on the other night, after the fruit, we had to sketch this plaster mold of a hand holding a ball. Yes, it was a human hand thank you very much, and I know mine turned out to look more like a cross between an ape and an android, with a SpiderMan wrist. You can make fun of this one if you like, as Natalie just did, calling it a skeleton hand as she chortled from the room. Nice ball though, right? Right? Um, hello...

Maybe I'll post more when I get them. I did a drawing of the dash board of my truck that I'm actually proud of. We had to put them up on the board in front of the class so everyone can compare their drawing with everyone elses and with the exception of one other guy--who can't draw a bad picture--mine was the best one... at least that's what I felt.

Elsa Goes to the Vet

2008-09-20T00:39:00.000-07:00

I’ve always had trouble with the word vagina, ever since I first found out what exactly it was in my single-digit youth. It’s so personal and clinical, I still have trouble saying it in casual conversation…and one of my good friends is an OB-GYN doc too. I don’t think I’ve had a conversation with him in the last five years that didn’t have the word vagina in it somewhere. Multiple times if it was an especially good story. Vagina. It’s one of those words you whisper to someone else, a confidant, someone you trust that can understand that you don’t mean to be sophomoric when you’re saying it. Don't worry, you want to assure them, there’s no punch line.

Only a few times in my life have I been forced to say it aloud, where I couldn’t skirt the issue and call it something else without sounding like I was in the third grade. I’ll save you the embarrassment of the stories, but needless to say I still felt foolish uttering the word vagina, like it was a racial slur only the people of that race are allowed to use. A man can’t say the word vagina outside of a doctor’s office; that’s a woman-only word.

Maybe I was just immature, but as a kid I had a theory that sometimes words are spelled symbolically; if a word was a true word with a pure definition, all the letters would look like what the word was describing. My go to example when I was 12 was boobs. How many round letters do you need in one word to describe something that is inherently globular in form? Now that I’m older and rarely giggle when someone says boobs, one of my go to examples when describing my theory is “stilt.” See how tall all of those letters are.

Along those same lines, when I looked at the word vagina in capital letters—VAGINA—all I saw were legs. The V, upside-down legs; the As, legs. The G in the middle? Think Gräfenberg and you’re spot on. The I? You know what that is, don’t you, right next to the N, more legs. I imagined Freud would have been interested in speaking to me, but like I said, perhaps I was immature…which is why I don’t bring it up anymore. It doesn’t change the fact that I have difficultly even saying the word vagina in regular conversation. And I’m 35 years old for Christ’s sake.

I know what you’re thinking: Ryan, you’ve said the word vagina like 15 times already in the space of four paragraphs, so you obviously lack some kind of mental hang up when it comes to saying it. Ah, but you’re wrong, I’ve written the word vagina. You’ve said it. That little voice inside your head that says each word “out loud” while you read it on the page, that’s not my voice. That’s yours. It’s a loophole.

Anyways, I was faced with this conundrum a couple of days ago when I had to pick up the phone, call the vet and set up an appointment for Elsa, who, for the past month or two, has been spending an inordinate amount of time, licking herself… you know… down there…

I clarified the problem to the receptionist who answered the phone. “She’s been licking herself excessively,” I explained and then let it go at that. That’s all she needed to know. Who cares where she’s been licking herself, but instead, let’s focus on a lot of tongue work on a very concentrated part of her body that’s now causing her physical discomfort.

“Has she been licking her paws?” she asked, apparently dogs do that enough to make an assumption.

“Ah…no…” There it is. There’s the moment. I’m going to have to say vagina to a total stranger. A woman, no less, who’s going to scowl on the other end of the line when I say it, thinking that I don’t have the proper clearance to utter such a word. I’m no doctor. I’m just a man, so what gives me the right?

I sighed, and with a flash, thought of something that might work. “No, she’s been licking herself where dogs usually enjoy licking themselves.” Enjoy? I slapped myself in the forehead. Enjoy!?! Apparently I was thinking of the off-color joke that if I could lick myself like the dog can, I’d never leave the house. I know, it’s funny after a couple of drinks (and a dog licking himself usually needs to be present), but “enjoy” wasn’t part of the plan. I winced, probably sounding just like a third grader.

At least I didn’t have to say the word vagina. Phew.

So, poor Elsa. When she wasn’t licking herself, she was either thinking about licking herself or had just finished licking herself, and we had waiting too long to take her in, hoping the problem would take care of itself. Life is busy at the house and sometimes the poor dog gets brushed to the back burner. Meanwhile, she is beginning to sit down with ginger care, and sometimes she would whine for no reason; all the while, Kara and I kept saying that we needed to call the vet for an appointment.

On Wednesday, Matthew and I took a very nervous and palpably tense and shedding German Sheppard in my truck to see the vet. She’s no stranger to the vet’s office. When she was younger, she had a form of mange that required weekly treatments at a special dermatological veterinarian in Irvine…and yes it was as expensive as it sounds. However, Elsa chatters her legs together when we push through the front door, apparently smelling the fear of a thousand dogs before her, that antiseptic pall mixed with a slight tinge of urine, drool and death. Elsa knows, the moment she steps paw inside the door, that many a fellow animal has not returned from within the deep recesses of its halls.

Once in the waiting room, she paced the floors with a worried look on her face. As I eyed the longevity and lifespan chart, gently trying to reassure her that it will all be okay, she probably wondered if she was here for the $35 shot and the peaceful sleep.

Not to be. Instead, how about a $560 anesthetic, a blood sample, a snappy Brazilian wax job, some horse pills, a tube of ointment and a new lampshade for your head? That sounds like a better deal.

We had to leave her there for the day. The good doctor tried to examine the area, but Elsa wouldn’t have anything to do with it, and I heard piercing whines come from the secondary examination room in the back of the office. She is very trusting of me. I can usually get her to lie down for a look-see with just a couple of encouraging words (if only most people’s love life was that easy), but inside the fortress of doom that is the vet’s office, she’s on guard. Nobody’s going downtown and still keeping all of their fingers, doesn’t matter what kind of medical degree you’ve got on the wall. The solution was to knock her out so he could shave the area and examine the problem.

As it turns out, Elsa’s got a little extra skin down there, like a pug with an extra fold of skin on the outside of her vagina…hey, the vet said it first. When she goes to the bathroom, some of the urine gets trapped in that flap of skin and, urine being what it is—mostly caustic ammonia—starts to irritate her. A dog’s solution to irritation and injury is to lick it. Unfortunately, what Elsa lacks in reason, she makes up for in zeal, because she licked herself completely raw. Hence the whimpering.

The temporary salve to the problem is antibiotics and the above-said ointment, which looks like little more than Vaseline in a tube. The permanent solution is cosmetic surgery to remove the extra skin, and imagine my surprise when the vet had said he’d done it before. It takes about a half hour and costs around $500 bucks. It seems, everything on Wednesday cost $500. I guess you keep a doctor from the greens, it’ll cost you $500.

Elsa emerged from the examination room later that afternoon with a lampshade on her head. She looked embarrassed, and I was embarrassed for her. Her head was hanging low, still groggy from the anesthetic, but mostly shamed by the contraption around her neck. I had them remove it. It was foolish to think that a 90-pound dog was going to patiently sit around the house with that on its head. She’d have it off and shredded in a matter of minutes. Plus, she barely fit in the backseat of the truck as it was, and she definitely wouldn’t with that cone of degradation dragging her down.

Elsa spent the rest of the day humiliated, feeling sorry for herself in a crumpled heap halfway up the stairs on the landing. Every time I went to pet her to make sure she wasn’t licking herself or to see if she was doing okay—yeah, I felt bad for what she had to go through—her eyes would sink to the floor and her ears would fold back. I escorted her outside to go to the bathroom several times that afternoon, but she would go to the grass and just sit down, slowly. It wasn’t until Friday morning did she actually take care of it. And I stood there and I stood there and I stood there. Natalie came over to the sliding glass door and asked me what I was looking at. “Elsa peeing,” I answered. Okay, she may have thought. When in Rome. So, we both stood there for about 30 solid seconds, watching an uninterrupted stream come out of the back of Elsa, like someone had left the garden hose on. It took so long, she even got tired of squatting, and instead stood back up and lifted one leg like a male dog.

Since she’s returned from the vet’s office, she’s been sitting differently too. She has only once or twice laid down on her side, but instead insisting on sitting on all fours, Sphinx-style as I like to call it, constantly shifting around, clearly uncomfortable.

But it’s not over for her yet. We still have to apply the cream, which is supposed to help heal the raw skin. Of course, she hates it and all we have to do is just show her the tube of ointment, and she quickly makes her escape to the stairs where she thinks she’s safe. Though she eventually allows us put it on her (it’s Kara’s job because she’s not strong enough to hold Elsa down), she’s sensitive in that area…you know…down there.

Vagina! There, I said it.

Hippies Take Art Classes

2008-09-04T23:23:00.001-07:00

I had no idea. Really. I just assumed that I would be surrounded by the usual community college students I have frequently seen rambling around the campus, but as soon as the desks began to fill in my new class (beginning drawing) did I realize that there is this subculture of weirdoes that lurk in the cracks of the school.

Where are these people during the rest of the day when not admiring abstract art? Probably sipping espresso, listening to jazz fusion while reveling in the confidence and wisdom of Jack Keurack.

I was the third one to arrive to the classroom. The teacher was already there, one of those young women with short scattered hair, not married, probably has some cats at her apartment, which would undoubted be littered with random examples of her favorite kinds of art, that which makes you think about what kind of degenerate you really are. A Georgia O’Keefe book sits on the hand-painted coffee table, and she is quite proud of her Native American tribal masks that were made in China.

She passed around the syllabus to us three and to each person as they walked in the room. One of my new school-related pastimes is to observe the hesitation and insecurity of students as they walk into a room full of empty desks. The desks were elevated tables set in a large square with about six or eight desks in the middle of the square. Where do they sit? Invariably, for the men, the urinal rule applies: If someone is using the first urinal, you use the one furthest from him, and you are only allowed to fill in the gaps when space allows. Women, on the other hand, group together… for whatever reason the women don’t like to sit alone. Generally, nobody sits next to anyone, however, until they have to, and when the room filled up so much that some people were forced to either stand along the wall or sit in the middle desks in the middle of the room, I was surprised how many chose to stand. It was as if the game of duck-duck-goose forever scarred us from sitting in the middle of a group of people.

During this, I took a look at the four-page syllabus. It was very specific. You only get two unexcused absences until you are dropped from the class…and excused absences will only be counted if it is a medical problem or a funeral, which seem to go hand-in-hand in my book. The more I read the syllabus, the more I decided that the teacher should have paid a little more attention in English class. It said we shouldn’t turn in artwork with tares on it. What’s a tare? Isn’t it some sort of vine? The dictionary says that it a tare is a vetch, and I just love it when the dictionary defines a word with another word I don’t know. It’s like buying 10 dimes with a dollar. Yes, a vetch is a vine.

I understand that sometimes punctuation is a nuisance and mostly unnecessary, but there are a few little marks that help the reader make sense of what you’re trying to say and to have a college-level syllabus peppered with errors (not just typos) seems a little unprofessional. A complete sentence helps. Oh well, my temptation to take a red pen to the four pages while I was sitting there was checked; I imagine it isn’t a good idea to point out a teacher’s fallacy on the first day of class. Especially if the tone of the syllabus was one of totalitarianism, tyranny and despotism.

The classroom began to fill up. The demographics of the people entering the room was a far cry to the engineering class I had in the Spring; I don’t think I remember the last time I saw so many different hairstyles, tattoos, piercings and strange clothing. One guy looked as though he had touched one of those silver electromagnetic spheres that makes your hair stand completely straight out, liked it so much, and decided to carry one around in his pocket all the time. I don’t think any two hairs on his head were touching each other.

One young kid sat down next to me with a binder-type notebook in front of him, and drawn on it in stick-figure style was what he later referred to as an Asian walrus. When he brought it to the attention to the class and the teacher (she had asked if anyone had any strange animals that they’d like to bring into the class as a subject), everyone thought it to be wildly funny. When did I lose my sense of humor? Oh yes, I remember now, when I moved out of my parents’ house and started to pay a mortgage each month. That’s right.

The teacher, whom we are allowed to call her by her first name, decided to allow everyone who walked into the room to add the class, which pushed us well over our body-to-desk ratio… so if everyone shows up on Monday, someone’s going to have to draw on the floor. Of course, that won’t be me because I’m punctual. Which brings up another thing. It’s the first day of class people! Why are you late? Where have you been that you couldn’t get to class by 6pm? Seriously, there were probably 10 flakes that came in late, fumbled for a syllabus, wrung their hands until they were shown an available desk and then made a bunch of noise. One girl slapped her notebook down on the desk so hard it was as if she was killing a cockroach, and another guy didn’t pick up a metal stool to move it but instead dragged it across the concrete floor with that vibrating, squeaking, scraping noise. Gah!

The class was short. The teacher went over the syllabus, which I was delighted to see that each day of class was outlined with specific tasks that we will accomplish that day. On the back was an impressive list of things we had to buy (with some misspellings) and since there was no required textbook, we should be saving some money buying some supplies that we will undoubtedly use in future arts classes. While she was going over the list, offering some advice, one girl, who looked as though she just walked through her high school commencement and wanted to get a jump on “real life” but her parents demanded that she go to college (read: she doesn’t really want to be there) started spouting off. The teacher said that classroom participation was a plus to our overall grade but I don’t think the spirit of the rule was meant to be taken so far.

The teacher showed us something she kept referring to as a “stomp,” and it even said “stomp” on the syllabus. I have no idea what it is or what it is used for, but apparently a “stomp” is a wooden stick used in adding shadows and blends to charcoal drawings and art made with chalk. It wasn’t until I got to Michaels after class that it is actually called a stump not a stomp, and I would have thought that an art teacher would have known the difference; to give her the benefit of the doubt maybe she’s never seen the word written down and the only person to actually ever say it to her hand some sort of speech impediment and couldn’t pronounce a long o sound.

Anyway, the teacher says that the most difficult thing to find on the list would be this “stomp,” and the girl announced, “I know where you can find them.” That’s it. “I know where you can find them.” There was silence as the teacher looked at her, waiting to finish, waiting to continue…waiting to tell us where we could find them. After about five seconds, during which time the girl never looked up from the syllabus, on which she seemed to be scribbling furiously with her pencil and then erasing just as frantically, the teacher had to end the suspense and ask her where we all could find them. Please, end the mystery. Freakin Michaels. Cripes!

A few minutes later, out of the blue, the same girl asked for a new syllabus, because “I scribbled all over mine.” Artsy people are freaks. On top of which, for one I’m not the oldest person in the class, not by a far shot, as there is a man there that’s got to be double my age, easily, and another woman who probably had grown grandchildren.

So, I don’t know about this class. The other two classes I’ve taken, I’ve had supreme confidence that I would get an A, no problem. However, this one might be a challenge for me because I suck at drawing. I mean, I can draw a building. I know perspective and I have a great eye for space, angles and concepts, but take away my ruler and I got nothing. Everything in this class is going to be freehand. Our first working class (next Monday), we’re drawing fruit. This will be interesting, but I just hope that she grades on attempt rather than skill.

As for my fellow classmates, the whole eclectic gaggle of weirdoes and oddballs, I find it funny how they all collect together in the art class. Wish me luck.

Natalie Becomes Tall Enough

2008-08-28T22:45:00.000-07:00

Most of the big rides at Disneyland are for kids over 42 inches tall (for some it is 40 and I think the Matterhorn is only 36), and Natalie's been over 40 inches tall since last Christmas... but she's never been tall enough, if you get what I mean.

Perhaps there is a certain rite of passage parents need to go through to accept the fact that their children are getting old, growing up, and being able to handle more of what life can throw at them. They take their first steps, their first bumps, their first disappointments, their first joys…each time, growing stronger, wiser and more able to withstand the journey to adulthood.

For us, one of these little rites of passage has been the “big” rides at Disneyland: Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Splash Mountain. She had to be 40 inches tall to ride any of them but she’s never had an interest in going on them until today…partly because it is her birthday. We are usually emboldened on our birthday or days where we are made to feel special.

Once we got into the Disneyland proper—we made a stopover first at California Adventure because Natalie’s teacher has a fun job in one of the parades and she wanted to see her—we bee-lined to City Hall to announce that it was Natalie’s birthday. They gave her a button with her name on it, and every cast member we came across—and some random people too—wished her a happy birthday. She beamed.

One thing she wanted to do was ride Splash Mountain, now that she was tall enough (you have to be 42 for that one), and before California Adventure closed and the hoards from that park filter into Disneyland, we got in line, which was a brisk 20-minute wait.

Of course, Natalie loved it…and I think I was more worried about her falling out on the big drop than she was, but that’s just the worried parent in me. In the picture—they take snapshots of each boat…er, log, as it plummets down the final fall—Natalie has her hands thrust into the air with an ecstatic look swept across her face, and I’m the one holding onto her like she’s suddenly going to flip into the air and fly away.

It’s funny how protective I can be sometimes. But then again, she’s only going to be five years old for another 364 days.

We’ve got to make them count.

**The picture above is Natalie and I before Splash Mountain started…and yeah, we got soaked!

Fountain of Joy

2008-08-26T22:17:00.001-07:00

I love the sound of running water. That is, running water in a natural setting; a leaking faucet or someone who leaves the water running while their brushing their teeth makes me gnash mine together at the sound of liquid money swirling down the drain. However, a brook, stream, river, waterfall and even a fountain is like the sweet melodic sounds of Mother Nature singing me to sleep (a bit much?).

For the past six or seven months, I’ve been in the market for a fountain, something to add to the front yard to delight our guests as they approach the front door. Plus, I figured I could open the window in the front room and hear the trickling water waft throughout the house. Target had a fountain I liked. It wasn’t too ornate, quite plain really, and was a single tier fountain, meaning water drained from only one level into the main basin. It was about four feet wide and maybe five feet tall; However, it was also $400! I don’t want to make payments on it, so I searched CraigsList and eBay for comparable fountains that might be much cheaper. I found cheaper ones in the $300 range, but they were gaudy: naked mermaids, pineapples spewing water out of their tops. Plus, all of the fountains I saw were giant, over-dominating concrete structures that the ancient Greeks would marvel.

Since I only have so much space in the area I want to put it (to the north of the porch), I didn’t want something that would look too large, out of place, and become the main focus of the yard. I wanted it somewhat hidden out of sight, something you would hear before you see it. For the past six months, I found nothing that got my attention, nothing in my price range that I wanted to pay, and nothing that I would settle on, except for the one at Target…

Every time I would go there, I’d see it in the corner of the garden section, that $400 price tag mocking me. That is, until last Friday. Taking a pilgrimage to the MotherStore for Matthew’s diapers (each box I hope is the last), I saw the coveted 50-percent-off sale tag on “my” fountain. Of course, I inquired. The price was slashed to $199, and Vince, the garden-supply guy that I always see working the register (he used to work for HomeGrocer.com if that recalls any painful stock purchases) said I could get an additional 10 percent off of that. As well, he’ll scour the back room to see if he could locate any more parts from other fountains, and he returned with an extra water pump, which is nice to have.

I was tickled to get a 50.25 percent discount ($400 marked down to $199) and then get an additional 10 percent off of that. Now I’m not a mathematician, and I don’t consider myself a good shopper, but I think something originally price at $400 and marked down to $179.10 equals a 65.225 percent discount.

And there was a time I was tempted to buy it at full price. But I guess timing is everything, as someone else was taking advantage of the savings too, buying a nice fire pit, originally priced in the $300 range for only $89.00. My advice to you is if you’re looking for something outdoorsy for your house/yard and you see it at Target in March… wait until late August for their end-of-summer sale. It is well worth it.

So, once home, I went to Home Depot and bought some pea gravel and a few concrete blocks, as I wanted it level (gravel) and elevated slightly, about a foot off the ground. It assembled easily and once I plugged it in and leveled out the top tier, it worked like a charm.

What’s left is to plant a ring of bushes around the base to cover up the elevating blocks and I need to wire a new plug so I can get rid of the extension cord that is currently snaking across the porch and doorstep. While I’m doing that, I may hook it up to a timer so it will come on in the morning and go off at night.

For once my usual impatience impulsiveness didn’t get the better of me and I waited until it went on sale, saving a couple hundred bucks!

The Zoo, Up Close

2008-08-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

We got a rare treat while at the San Diego Wild Animal Park last weekend. While we were idly admiring a rambling brook and I was gassing on about how it would look cool in our back yard, a cheetah appeared out of nowhere...on a leash. Apparently, he was out walking his dog. That's right, the cheetah's dog. At that zoo, they provide pet dogs to all of the cheetahs to keep them calm in loud situations, as the dogs are more than likely to check out a disturbing noise rather than the cheetah's inclination to run (that's what cheetahs do, we were informed, at zero to 60mph in a little over three seconds...try doing that in your car).

They walked the cheetah and his dog to our side of the brook and right by us--I could have reached out and touched him--and he hopped up on a big flat rock in front of us and purred, deep tremulous and heavy purrs like a small engine. Of course, they constantly reminded us not to move, to keep our "feet planted," which gave me a sinking feeling that it wouldn't take much for this 150-pound cat to shred us all like pulled pork, especially after getting a look at the size of his feet and knowing that somewhere tucked above those giant pads were five razor-sharp talons. But it was okay, I reassured, cheetahs can jump nearly 20 feet and we were only five feet away; the cheetah would jump right over us. I learned that lesser-known fact from the Jungle Cruise.

It was the highlight of the day.

*In the video, it shows Matthew not even looking at the cheetah, but he was. Something shiny distracted him, apparently.

Refinance Your Nightmare

2008-07-16T00:24:00.000-07:00

It seems that on everyone’s lips these days is the mortgage crisis, followed by a lot of hand wringing from the socialists who want to have the government bail out ignorant morons because they didn’t do their research or understand what they got themselves into when they signed for the loan.

It is real simple. You have a loan program, an interest rate, a principle amount of the loan and your income. The idea is to make the interest rate the lowest possible so more of your income goes to paying down the principle. This is all done through an appropriate loan program. My favorite loan program to hear about is the negative amortization loan, where you pay less than you should each month, and the difference is just piled on top of the principle. For example, your interest on a $300,000 loan is 6.0% and your payment is only $1500. However, to make a principle/interest payment, you should be paying $2200, but you don’t have to. With a negative amortization, that extra $700 you should have paid just goes on top of the $300,000. So, in the second month, you now owe $300,700.

You can see where this is going. By the end of the first year, your loan is now $308,400...plus interest!

Who would sign their name on this?

At any rate, just last Friday morning, I forced shut the book on an attempted refinance that would have turned out to be a bad deal for us. The funny part is that we would have signed the papers that day, after a four-month-long struggle with the loan officer and a series of unfortunate events, each one a slap in the face to wake up to the fact that I was getting screwed.

I didn’t notice any of those attention getters until Friday… the very last day.

What if I had waited until Saturday when it was too late?

One of my very favorite movies of all times is “Double Indemnity” (no, the 1944 version). You know, Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson…they kill the husband for the insurance money. At any rate, Robinson’s character, an insurance adjuster/investigator talks about this “little man” in the pit of his stomach that ties him up in knots when something about a case seems wrong. That’s exactly how I felt on Thursday night, something seemed amiss.

Four months ago, at the advice of our financial planner, I contacted a loan officer to see about getting the house refinanced. We are currently in a 5/1 ARM, meaning we have a five-year fixed-interest-only loan that will turn adjustable in the sixth year. We have two years left on the loan, but I thought it would have been a great time to refinance out of that loan and into something more stable, a nice 30-year fixed-interest rate that would set us for the bulk of our lives.

The problem with mortgages is that any loan over $417,000 is considered a “jumbo loan,” meaning that it has a larger risk to the loaning institution. That risk involves a higher interest rate, and since I’m all about paying the least amount of money possible, I actually came up with the suggestion of getting two loans, one to pay down the principle to under $417K so we could get a normal conforming loan with a lower interest rate.

The loan officer exclaimed that it was the perfect time to refinance as--just out luck--interest rates took a sudden dip, something we wouldn't see for a few years.

At this point, we started the paperwork, and thanks to irresponsible loan officers who would have given a loan to anybody with a pulse, now the underwriters demand everything just under a urine and blood sample from prospective loan clients. I was told that, for someone with such impeccable credit, the process is still quick and easy and that we would be done in about a month... 45 days at the latest.

Then it started to drag. The company we were working with got accidentally deleted from the bank’s files because it shared a name similar to another company that went bankrupt. Therefore, all of our paperwork was lost and we had to resubmit it. But don’t worry, Ryan, we’ll knock off $500.00 from the closing costs… great. He said it would take a day to get back on track, but it took nearly two weeks until I heard from him again.

If I had sent him any money, I would have thought they he ran off to Vegas with it.

Each time something like this would happen, our loan officer would call me out of the blue and start the call with “I’ve got good news and bad news…” The funny thing was that there was never any difference between the two. The good news was always expensive and the bad news was a change in plans that would cost me money.

The main plan started out that we wanted to pull out $10,000 from equity to make some improvements on the house. No problem, we were told. Let’s just get an appraisal and see what your house is now worth. Oops, it seems as though the value of your house has gone down and when compared with the amount of money you’d like to borrow, it seems you fall below some sort of magic loan-to-value percentage that would make it impossible… never mind that you have never been late on a payment, nor that your FICA score is 770, so close to perfect that you can smell what perfect had for breakfast—like top-one-percent-of-the-nation’s-people perfect—never mind that… your house, according to some random guy who came and did some measurements and gave it a once-over (for $350), is not worth what you paid for it. Well, I knew that, as anyone who watches the news at night knows the bubble burst and the housing prices have fallen.

A couple of weeks pass, during which time I was assured that the loan would fund in several days. I was told not to pay my mortgage for May because they would just have to send it back to me after the loan funds…that and you won’t have to pay two months of your current mortgage, because this new loan won’t go into affect until June… then August… then September. Each time the date got pushed back for myriad reasons, I had to juggle a barrage of calls from my current bank wondering if I had plans of paying them any time soon. At one point, I was 25 days late on my mortgage. I laid awake at night, not counting sheep, but counting my FICA score plummet to that of a college student’s.

Meanwhile, Kara’s faith and trust in this loan officer’s ability to deliver us into a good deal was beginning to wane. My description of him—a GQ model with a metrosexual flair for high fashion, snazzy trendy hair styles and fast cars—wasn’t winning anyone any points. At one point, Kara got involved in the process, and although I’m not normally a sexist person, but there are times in life and relationships where the man has to take care of things. When you’re mowing the lawn or figuring out why the car is leaking oil or dealing with a disrespectful clerk at the store…and when you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars… I want to be the one that takes care of it. I know the term no longer means what it used to, but it’s the man of the house’s responsibility, one of the only ones left over from the pre-feminism movement.

However, she was dissatisfied with the delays so she called the loan officer and kicked the spurs into him, so to speak. Secretly, I do love Forceful Take Action Kara! It did garner results, but it only meant that he called me more frequently, and the more frequent the calls, the more frequent the bad news and ever changing developments.

Okay, what next? No money out… at least we’re getting a good interest rate, 5.7%, only 0.3 more than we’re paying now and a good portion of it will go to the principle. I was assured, nay, promised, that if there were any further difficulties, any delays, any cancellations of the plans or changes in the directions that would push us passed the point that the interest rate could no longer be valid, that my loan officer’s company would pay down the difference. In essence, we were guaranteed a 5.7% loan come hell or high water.

Yeah, about that… it seems that since we had a couple of delays, the bank wants another appraisal, but don’t bother yourself by getting one; the bank will send somebody by and take it. And by “send someone by,” they mean that literally. Somebody drove by the house—I didn’t even see them and I see everyone that drives by—and made a judgment. Yes, you thought your house was worth nearly $100,000 less than what you paid for it, try $150,000. And there’s no way we’re giving you a loan at 5.7%, or a loan at any interest rate for that matter. Better luck when the government bails out Fanny Mae next year.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” the phone call began. The bad news is that the bank canceled your loan because of the magical loan-to-value ratio fell below some threshold that makes underwriters nervous. The good news, the loan officer told me, is that I thought this might happen, so I farmed out your loan to another bank that agreed to do it… for 6.6% interest rate. It only means your month payment would go up nearly $200.00.

I reminded him that he said he would pay down the difference so we would get a 5.7% loan. Well, funny thing about that promise is that it doesn’t hold up when it becomes financially imprudent. To buy down a loan from 6.6 to 5.7, I was told, would be cost prohibitive so they wouldn’t do it. In fact, he even alluded that it was impossible to do, but they would buy it down to 6.3%. I was told that they were now doing the loan for free, but since loans and finance and interest rates all fall under the spells of the black arts, it was a hard notion to swallow.

Doing the loan for free? All of these people? Your underwriters, your assistants, your boss, the bank’s people, the insurance people, the appraisal people, the notary public people… all for free? I had a tough time believing that. Nobody works for free, I don’t care what kind of two-sizes-too-big heart they’ve got… But furthermore, I don’t trust a guy doing anything for free, especially one who has a new Porsche Carrera sitting in the parking lot outside his office with dealer tags still on it and one who brags at the first time I met him that he just bought a new boat.

He’s turning a dime off of somebody… and that somebody was me. Let’s break it down: I’m not getting money out. I’m not getting the interest rate that I wanted. I’m paying more money over the course of the loan than I am now. And… I’m late on my current mortgage, something their collections center reminded me of on a daily basis.

How could it get worse? And how much more would I take?

“Hello Ryan… I’ve got good news and bad news… which do you want first?” At that point, it didn’t matter, it was all bad news, as he wouldn’t have called me otherwise. “The good news is that we are ready to fund this loan,” something I had heard three times before so I wasn’t going to hold my breath. “The bad news is that you need to come up with $3000 to pay the back interest on your current loan.”

It seems as though he didn’t do his homework to check my current loan to see what it would take to pay it off. Apparently, interest accrues daily—duh—and the two months that I would have “off” from paying my mortgage until my next one kicks in needs to be paid. Usually, it is rolled into the body of the loan so you don’t have to come up with it. Whether he forgot, didn’t know or just didn’t think of it is a mystery, but however you stack it, $3000 would get sucked from my savings to make up the difference.

“Also…” he added.

I love alsos when we follow bad news. Also, since we’re refinancing within 90 days of renewing your homeowner’s insurance policy, they need that money too. So, the following day, I needed to wire $4,030.00 to escrow the following morning in order to finalize the transaction and begin signing the paperwork, but do you know what bothered me the most at that point? Not the money or the interest rate or the inconvenience of having my life and finances on hold over the coals for the last four months, but the fact that my damn bank was probably going to charge me some extraordinary fee to make the wire transfer.

And the kicker to the story here is that something else should have been bothering me. You know that point in any procedure, be it a dentist appointment or a colonoscopy, that you just want it to be over, even if it means making an unwise decision. I was there. I was at that point that I was willing to decimate one of my saving’s accounts in order to make this loan happen, as if it was a challenge I was trying to overcome.

He sent over the wire instructions and I held it in my hand, staring at the escrow account number… and then it dawned on me. That “little man” in the pit of my stomach began to scream that something wasn’t right, that I was being taken for a ride.

I fretted all day, at one point, I think I even caught myself physically wringing my hands in vexed anxiety. Later that night, Kara and I made a list of pros and cons to the benefits or detractions of refinancing.

There were no pros, and Kara suggested I call Jason’s mother-in-law, a loan officer who helped us finance our first house. Why we didn’t think of it sooner is a mystery to me. Maybe it was blind loyalty to strangers whom we felt we trusted or whom we listened to what we wanted to hear, but what we were hearing wasn’t the truth.

The morning we were due to sign the papers, I received a phone call from the notary public to schedule a time to “sign the docs.” I let it go to voicemail because I wasn’t yet ready to deal with the decision. Instead, I called Jason’s mother-in-law, and we had a long chat about what an idiot I was.

The long of the short of it, my eyes were finally opened. I could see the light, like a blind man healed! Why would you, she asked, increase your interest rate for no reason? She could understand if I needed to get money out (which I wasn’t) or if my loan was about to mature (which it wasn’t for two more years), but since I wasn’t making any changes to the structure of the loan, except for the interest rate, why would I do that to myself.

And after all of this struggling, fretting, fussing and hassle, it came down to the simplest of solutions: “If you want a 30-year-fixed loan, then make your payments like you have one.”

It was that easy. She stressed, “I would strong advice you not go through with this.”

It turns out that when you need to make a Porsche payment, your judgment to do right by your clients and to give them a package they could live with, falls by the wayside.

I sent him a polite letter in writing that we’re backing out of the deal and I pointed out why I felt it was in our best interest not to refinance at this time, but the message didn’t get to the notary public who seemed shocked that someone would have the nerve to cancel right before setting pen to the dotted line.

This morning, the loan officer called me to reconsider, which only proves that they were making money somehow on this deal. He tried to make me feel bad that so many people put hours and hours into this deal “working for me,” but I wouldn’t fall for that.

Then, as if by magic, he waved a wand and told me that interest rates are back down to 5.7%! Imagine that! Last week, I couldn’t have saved the bank managers life and got a 5.7% loan, but this week, the voices of fates have blessed me with such a change in fortune.

Nobody tries that hard to get me to sign if they weren’t making money.

What a wonderful life lesson for me this has all been, but the one last spark of good news to come out of this. On that Friday afternoon I got a letter in the mail from the county’s tax assessor’s office to inform me that my house had been reassessed for the next year’s property tax and they’ve dropped my value, which means I’ll save about $1,700 on my tax bill this year. It seems as though they didn’t use the assessment I paid for, but the lesser value derived by the bank’s drive-by assessment!

That, indeed, was the silver lining.

I'm Goin' to Moe's

2008-07-13T23:13:00.000-07:00

In one of my favorite shows, "The Simpsons," every time Homer gets into trouble or something bad or unpleasant happens at the house (usually from his doing), he abandons the situation by announcing that he's going to Moe's, a bar. I don't have a Moe's to go to when I want to escape the house, but there is a Home Depot that "huddled masses, yearning to be free" can go... and I've been wanting to go there a lot lately.

Today was a good example.

We've been working on potty training Matthew for a few weeks now, not consistently, but as off and on, about the same as Matthew is enthusiastic for the procedure (which he isn't). He likes to wear pull-ups and he likes to wear his new underwear, and I thought he understood the concept of how the toilet works and what he needs to do when he feels like he has to go to the bathroom.

In fact, there was a time for a while that he would try to go about 10 or 12 times a day. Every time I didn't know where he was, I'd always find him in the bathroom with his pants in the hall, his diaper on the bathroom floor and him sitting there patiently waiting for something to happen. When I'd walk in, he'd usually look at me and say, "Privacy, please."

Lately, his interest in using the bathroom has waned, and I really can't blame him. When you can take care of business right there in your pants, no matter where you are or what you are doing, why bother with figuring out the toilet? It's probably just a hassle for him.

Today, I spent the majority of the day hacking down the weeds in the planters between the patio and the grass. I pulled up all of the plants too and pared them down to manageable sizes, adding a layer of landscaping cloth in the planters to keep future weeds from sprouting through. I wanted to alternate with different color wood chips and a couple kinds of rocks, as it adds a little color to the backyard. It just proves that I watch too many home improvement shows on HGTV and DIY.

Kara had gone off to run some errands, so I was in charge of the youngin. Natalie was all to happy to help me dig in the dirt and Matthew quickly grabbed a shovel to search for worms (when he found them, he made sure they were sufficiently covered so they can go about their business.

Before Kara left, she put him in a pair of his new fancy underwear, which he was quite elated to show off. Because of this, I was adamant about making sure that he told me if he had to go to the bathroom, explaining that he is in big-boy underwear and big boys don't pee in their pants. Well, he assured me in no uncertain terms that he didn't have to go to the bathroom right then and that I'd be the first to know if he did.

All was going great for the first couple of ours. Kara came home about the time that Matthew was returning from the garage with a cup of water. As he was standing there telling me about all that he had to go through to the get the water (the paper cup was in the pantry, while the water--in a Arrowhead bottle--was in the garage fridge), he took a drink, spilling it down the front of his shirt, which is pretty normal.

"Hey, you're spilling your water," I told him. "You're getting it all over you."

"I have to pee," he announced. "I am peeing."

Sure enough, the cup was level and "liquid" was still draining down his leg and puddling under his toes. Matthew giggled. My solution was to pull off his underwear and hose him off on the lawn, but Kara intervened and took him inside to get cleaned up. I'm sure he would have loved the hose though.

A few moments later, he was back outside, naked from the waist down playing with some toys on the patio. I suppose Kara thought it was just easier to send him outside without any pants on, just in case he did it again, there would be less to clean up.

Sure enough, as I was grabbing my keys and wallet, Matthew comes in the back door to announce that he had pooped "outside the house," which he thought was just hilarious. Kara thought Matthew had said inside the house, so as she was looking around the kitchen table for it, I quickly discovered smack dab in the middle of the patio.

Hey, Kara sent him out there without any pants on, she can face the consequences!

Me: "I'm going to Home Depot!"

And I did. I needed wood chips and some river rock.

Of course, after a full-day's work in nearly 100-degree weather (with some kind of strange high humidity) half of my planters look really nice; I didn't have the energy to do the other side.

No Drive-Thru? No Problem

2008-07-12T21:23:00.000-07:00

After barbecuing dinner (delicious buffalo burgers for me, cow carcass for the rest of my unadverturous family), we went down to Dos Lagos a few miles across town to walk around the lakes and look at the shops.

We were in Gymboree looking for a pair of kahki pants that Natalie could wear her school shirt with when suddenly I heard this big crash, like someone dropped a tray of plates...and then the tray, and then all of the other trays. I stepped outside (because I was right by the door) in time to hear a random guy walking by the front of the store exclaim an explicative at what he was looking at.

I followed his eyes to find the back end of a Mercedes sticking out of the front of a store, definately not something you see every day. As a matter of fact, it was quite a surreal site. The yellow lights of the security truck were flashing, soon joined by a police car. People began to gather around, some ran to get a closer look or maybe to offer some help.

Kara paid for the shorts and we made our way down to the ever growing crowd surrounding the car and the shop. The Mercedes, one of those expensive SUVs, had plowed its way up the curb, across a 15-foot sidewalk, through the front windows of the shop, knocking over one of the main support pillars, bending in all of the metal frames of the windows above the front doors and smashing out most all of the glass. The kicker was that the store, Z Galleries--one of those places to buy high-end knick-knacks you realized you don't need by the time you bring it home--is probably the most expensive shop in all of Dos Lagos. And Mercedes don't grow on the cheap trees either.

On the bench outside the shop was a family of four, trembling and consoling each other, probably half happy they weren't hurt and probably embarrassed to be attracting so much attention. It could have been infinately worse, given how crowded Dos Lagos was tonight (there are Jazz bands playing there this summer), and it only would have taken one person not paying attention and not expecting to get plowed down by an SUV while in the store to make this story into a tragic one. Instead, it is somewhat humorous.

How the woman who was driving managed to get the Mercedes so far into the store is amazing, but the store's facade looked as though it would come down at any moment. The police started to baracade off the area, and there were plenty of people taking pictures.

Wouldn't you know it: The one day I forget my camera, something unusual happens. Instead, the picture at the top is just a random one to give an idea of what Dos Lagos' sidewalks looks like.

My Baby’s in Kindergarten

2008-07-10T20:39:00.001-07:00

How did this happen? Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was changing her diapers and teaching her how to hold a spoon? I remember watching “Baby Einstein” with her in my lap, babbling at the shapes, sounds and colors. Didn’t we just bring her home from the hospital a couple of days ago? She can write her name, read most anything put in front of her and carry on a meaningful conversation about a wide variety of mature topics. What has happened? She’s impetuously inquisitive, steadfastly insistent, definitely independent and growing more defiantly stubborn by the day… and she’s also growing up.

This week, on Monday, she started Kindergarten, something she’s been looking forward to for the past few weeks, as we’ve built it up to be an exciting change in her life, a step up to the big leagues, real school where there are rules, orders, work, and social structures.

On her first day, she left the house with Kara and Matthew and I followed about a half-hour later. When we went over to the Kindergarten area, Kara had to leave to attend to her class, so that left the three of us to face the hordes of parents and unwitting children alone. Natalie immediately scampered off towards the playground as soon as we went in the gate, but I could see the hesitation in her actions. She’d skip out a few feet, then stop, look back at me to make sure I was still there, and then continue.

During orientation, she had meet another little girl, Molly, who helped her with her hat (it was crooked, and Molly straightened it), which is all it takes to garner Natalie’s allegiance. So when she saw Molly, she ran over to her to reacquaint herself. I don’t know if Molly didn’t remember, or if she was caught up in the excitement of the moment, but she soon trotted away, leaving Natalie standing in the middle of the playground by herself.

I wish I could have read her mind. She didn’t seem to care, or she didn’t understand what it means to make friends or how to do it, because she soon caught up with Molly, who was then standing with another girl. Natalie completed the triangle and the three girls stood and talked for a moment or two. The third girl pointed to Natalie’s dress and by her expression, made a compliment, but then the triangle soon broke up, each girl going their separate way.

Natalie spent much of the 15 minutes by herself, flitting from one area of the playground to the other, but she had on her face always a look of complacence, as if she was there to make friends and was trying to look as friendly as possible, as appealing to as many of the kids as she could. Then again, I don’t think she knows what that means, nor does she know how, exactly, to be a friend. Sure, she’s had friends before at other places, KinderCare, her preschool and defiantly, outside of school (I think she might marry Nathan or Grant!)… but this is the big time. Friends you make here might just last the rest of your life.

The bell rang and I had to leave her. She lined up with her class (actually, she got in the wrong line and I had to set her straight) and filed into the classroom.

Now, I’ve left her before, and before it was much more heart-wrenching than this, but this is the first big step toward the rest of her life. Last year, it was just preschool—come and go as you please—take the day off, don’t go. We paid to for her to be there… now we pay for Natalie to be in school, but it’s out taxes that are finally being put to good use. Plus, it’s the law. Kids have to be in school.

I think the big fret I’m dealing with is two-fold. One, I want her to be glad to go to school, because if she is soured on the experience this early, it will be more difficult for her to adjust to the next 18 years of her life in academia. The second one is that I want her to be socially stalwart, to be able to stand up against the trials and tribulations that swirl around a typical school yard. She’s only four, nearly five, but on the young side for her year. While most kids will be driving their sophomore year, she won’t until that following summer.

My big worry right now is that she’ll make a friend, and I’m sure she will. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in Kindergarten.

I just want her to be well adjusted and happy, and based on some stories that she has shared about some of the other kids she has met, she’s doing just fine.

My Next Class Begins

2008-07-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

So, I’m an idiot—you probably knew that—but to what extent was a mystery until just yesterday. The next class I registered for is an online class, ARC-35, History of Architecture, Beginning to Gothic. I’ve never taken an online class before and I had no idea how they even worked, nor could I get over the fact that I didn’t have to actually go anywhere or see anyone. However, the thought of doing just about everything in my life wearing shorts and a t-shirt while sitting in the comforting confines of my house in front of a computer is appealing (and is becoming quite a theme) so I signed up for it.

With obscene amounts of trepidation, I contact the professor just after registering for the class and went down to the campus for a meeting with her to discuss how all of this online business properly functioned. I needed to know how the system worked, how the course would function and what I was expected to do. The one question I didn’t think to ask was, “How will it start?”

Classes officially began last Monday, the 23rd. On that day, nothing happened, no email, no stork delivering a telegram, no nothing. I assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that I would get some sort of confirmation from the professor as to what would happen, a welcome note perhaps, or a here’s where you should begin message on the phone. But the sun set on that Monday without a word from anyone.

Last time I went to school, the Internet was just an infant, untrustworthy and certainly not nearly mature enough to be held responsible for this sort of activity. All it could do was chat, tell some old news and trade back and forth doctored pictures of topless movie stars.

This is all new to me, and I started to feel as though I was becoming an old dog surrounded by trainers with new tricks. Either I curl up on the porch and start counting down the days to the final ride to the vet or I get up see what its all about. I started with the former but ended with the latter.

On Tuesday, I sent an email to the professor, pleading ignorance and confusion (again), with a “hey, is anyone out there?” message. She never emailed back, probably assured that she had already answered all of possible questions to quell any confusion on my part… again. I check and rechecked my school schedule, which is online, and lamented that maybe I was dropped because I haven’t yet paid my fees for Summer semester. Then I waited… and worried… and waited, that is, until last night.

After watching “The Mole,” the single greatest television reality-based game show ever to exist (though I do miss the now famous CNN anchor Anderson Cooper), a thought occurred to me: To find out information about an online course, why don’t you go online?!?

It never dawned on me that in order to begin an online class, that I actually needed to go online to a website, say the school’s site, and look for a place aptly named “Online Courses,” type in my student ID and begin taking the class. It was all set up for me and waiting, a calendar, assignments, the syllabus…did I mention assignments that were now late?

There, I found an email from the professor saying that I have one more day until my spot was filled by someone else on the waiting list unless I get started. Needless to say, just after 1am, I began my first assignment, study of Mesopotamian architecture…sweet!

When I finally made it to bed last night, well, this morning, I couldn’t sleep because of the initial excitement of starting a new class, and a history of architecture class at that! There is so much to do—I’ve already read the textbook—but I get to visit some buildings, write a term paper and some reports, take tests and play online class games. I’m stupidly giddy about really getting started! Teehee!

I just wish I would have been this thrilled at education the first time around. I maybe would have been a better student.

My First Class Is Over

2008-06-30T00:54:00.000-07:00

I so got an A. I’m not going to say it was a snap, an easy A, but I earned one nonetheless because I worked diligently, paid attention to the details of my drawings and did most all of the extra credit.

It was a good learning experience for me—a nice first class—but the most important thing I learned during the three months is patience. Usually, I like to rush through a project just to get it done, as I am very impatient when it comes to the completion of a task; however, with mechanical drawing, if you rush it, you’ll make mistakes, as there are not only measurements and calculations you have to do to draw a successful design, but since it is a mechanical drawing (as opposed to a computer-aided drawing), I had to worry about pencil size, lead width (0.3, 0.5, 0.7, or 0.9mm leads, which all have individual purposes), line thickness and format, not to mention a proper interpretation of the assignment. You have to plan ahead to make sure the drawing looks good on the page, centered, aligned, properly dimensioned, and that the views used to interpret the drawing are the correct ones to use.

We had about 25 assignments to do, including a paper, 10 quizzes, five extra credit drawings, a written final, a final drawing and a group project.

By the end of it, I was pretty tired of going to class at night. I have a fairly nifty drafting table setup here at home and I could easily do all of my drawings and assignments outside of class, so actually attending class was something of a bother, unless there was a quiz or preparation for the dreaded group project.

And the whole semester came down to that, the group project that we had to present in front of the class on the last day of the course. Now, most of the kids in class had never been to college before, and since this is an entry-level course, it was a lot of their first classes. Needless to say, there was a hefty dose of high school mentality handed around by most of them…and believe me, it showed.

For starters, group projects suck. If you have four people in your group, the workload will invariably break down as follows: Person One will do 60 percent of the work; Persons Two and Three will do 19 percent of the work each; while Person Four will do two percent, which usually amounts to scribbling your name on the report seconds before it should be handed in.

A lot of the kids in the class work during the day, which is why they are taking a night class, but as one of the oldest people in the class (actually, I found out, I was the third oldest), I probably hold down the most career-like job. Therefore, I was the one that took on the group project in the same manner I would take on any job that I was getting paid for: The more anyone in the group does, the less everyone in the group has to do. That might seem contradictory, but it isn’t. If everyone does a little bit more, the project gets done quicker and it looks that much better.

The project itself was exceedingly simple. The professor divided the class in half, an engineering group and an architecture group, giving each of the groups a single assignment, and since my ultimate goal in this whole endeavor is to come out the other side with an architecture degree, I chose the architecture group, naturally. The engineering group had to design a gutter, sewer, urban rainwater runoff treatment plant, while we had to design a Japanese teahouse and 2.5-acre garden surrounding it. A snap.

Because of a meeting of the historical society I am Vice President of, I missed the initial brainstorming of our group…and you’d think that I would have missed a great deal, as the purpose of that meeting was to come up with ideas, divide up the duties and assign the designs of all of the main structures of the teahouse and the garden. Of course, you’d think that’s how it would have gone, but when I returned to class that Wednesday, nothing had been done.

Needless to say, I took charge from the guy they had given the reins to and started doling out the assignments. I treated it like a business, made everyone report to me via email on their progress (back in my day we had to use the phone, but as an English major, I had very few group projects, thankfully) and I didn’t just stand back and look wishy-washy when decisions had to be made. I spoke up.

When responding to a choice of assignments, most everyone in the group said, “I don’t care. Whichever one you want me to do. I don’t mind.” You’d think that would come across as indifference, but it’s not. It’s indecision, indecisiveness, the wavering uncertainty of youth… a lack of confidence. Screw all of that. I’m not going to sit around and have my grade affected by a bunch of 18-year-olds who can’t make up their mind.

I doled out the assignments and kept on them over the course of the two weeks we had to do the project. Of course, given my personality traits that I’d rather do something myself than allow someone else to mess it up (it exemplifies my lack of confidence in most people, so be flattered when I allow you to do something, as it means that I trust that you can do it), I volunteered to put together the final 40-page written report, the 60-frame PowerPoint presentation that we used to present our design, do the main overall layout of the garden (it’s pictured above) as well as design the main gate to the garden (I even did a scale model of the gate too).

Why so much? Again, the PowerPoint presentation, the report and the main layout were the focal points of the presentation, and I wanted them to be their best. I didn’t know these kids or what they were capable of; I had seen some of their drawings in class and I wasn’t too impressed, plus, I figured that most of them would wait until the last minute to do it… and that’s not what my second go around at an education is all about. I am in it for the A, and I wasn’t going to lay that in the hands of kids who couldn’t care less about passing or failing.

Of course, there were a couple of outstanding designs, and I’m not going to say that I was the best draftsman in the room (because I wasn’t), but I held my own with scores of nines and 10s on the assignments (with one eight).

But there is always those ones that don’t want to do anything…remember the percentages? There were eight people in our group. Me and another guy did a lot of the work. I took care of all that I mentioned above and he single-handedly designed the entire teahouse itself. Four other people did exactly what they were supposed to do, no more an no less, while the last two did virtually nothing. One was even Japanese for God’s sake. He could have helped with the pronunciation of some of the words, but he didn’t.

In order to put together the report and the PowerPoint, I needed each person to write a couple of pages about their design, what inspired them to choose the materials, the look, the features, etc., as well as provide me with scans of their drawings to include in the PowerPoint. Each person was going to present his/her drawing with the PowerPoint and basically explain in detail the reasons behind making their structure look as it did.

For me, it was real simple. In fact, I cut out a bunch of stuff. Like I said, the final report was 40 pages long, but I received a total of six of those pages from the other seven members of my group. The other 34 pages came from me. The two that did nothing the whole time, of course, didn’t write anything.

One of the slackers didn’t show up for class for most of the two weeks we worked on the group project. I saw her once or twice, and I didn’t even know her name or if she was still enrolled in the class or not, and because of that, I gave her the least crucial portion of the project: to design the waterfall (which has a host of traditional meanings in a Japanese garden). I figured if she didn’t do it, we could get away without having to discuss it in our presentation.

The class before the last day, she handed me her drawing… and I couldn’t tell what it was. I mean, she was assigned the waterfall, but what she handed me looked more like the designs for the small intestines. “I did it really fast this afternoon,” she told me quickly. It was crinkled like she kept it in her pocket all day, and she had written a bunch of phone numbers on the back…it’s vellum, you can see right through it. In short, it made no sense, it didn’t follow the theme of the garden and it wasn’t Japanese in the slightest. Oh well, I put it in, because that’s all I could do. I was going to put on my career hat, play the managing editor and tell her to do it again, but if that’s the level she wants to work at, I’m not getting paid to stop her.

It must have been difficult to live with me for the five days or so before the presentation, and I owe a lot to Kara and the kids for staying out of my hair during that time. It seems that, if I wasn’t sleeping, I was in my office, writing a report, drawing the garden’s overall design, designing the main gate, working on the scale model or piecing together the PowerPoint… not to mention my regular day job!

I wasn’t surprised that, on the day of the presentation, the girl didn’t show up. I hadn’t received any copies of the other guy’s drawings or his section for the report, and I hadn’t even heard from the girl. Class started at 6pm and she wasn’t there. I went through the PowerPoint with the rest of the group, so everyone knew what frames they had to work with and what they needed to talk about… and she hadn’t yet arrived to class. Our presentation was first, but we didn’t start until after 7pm, and as I was introducing the group—just after I explained that we were missing the girl, she strolls into class and joins us up front.

Of course, I did the lion’s share of the speaking, talking about the history of Tea in China, how it migrated to Japan, the very involved and ritualistic tea ceremony, the difference between gardens in Japan and the west, namely the U.S. and finally the main gate to the garden. Everyone else followed. While this was happening, I told the slacker girl the order of the presentations… and she told me that she didn’t know what to talk about. I said, “talk about the waterfall, you know, your drawing.” “What should I say?” So I gave her a few suggestions based on what I had read and researched about Japanese gardens and what had soaked through about waterfalls (excuse the pun), and she started to write it down! Verbatim. She had me say a few things a couple of times so she could transcribe them, and I found it very sad that she didn’t know how to spell “environment,” “verify” and another obvious word I can’t rightly recall. Granted, I’ll be the first to admit that I spell restaurant wrong every time I try and February always throws me for a loop, but how did she graduate high school if she can’t BS her way through a two-minute spiel about a simple three-tier waterfall?

She stood there and read from the scrap of paper on which she had scribbled my suggestions. When she was done reading it, she stepped down, never once mentioning her drawing or anything remotely close to what she had attempted to design.

Sometimes I weep for the future… but one thing really pissed me off at the end of it all. We had finished our presentation, a few of the students and the professor asked a couple of questions (which nobody could sling the answers but me…like “Why did the Japanese place such importance on their gardens and teahouses?”) and we were all stepping down off of the riser to return to our seats. I had the report in my hand and I was going to drop it off at the desk the professor was sitting at. The slacker girl and I were walking down the aisle together and she said, “Oh, is that the report?” taking it from me to give it a quick thumb through. Then she said, “I’ll give it to him,” and without so much as a pause she quickly scooted over to his desk and turned in the report.

One she had nothing to do with. Now, I don’t want to sound like George from “Seinfeld,” but I didn’t like her getting credit for anything to do with the report. By the very fact that her name was on it and the evidence that she was the one that handed it to her, she received the ultimate credit for doing the most work on the report. The professor has no idea who wrote the 36 other pages, and since her name is nowhere to be found aside from the cover, he probably assumed she did it all.

I was going to say something after class, but I figured it was a waste of time. My A was nailed down, and if it helps that girl get a slightly better grade (I don’t see how she could possibly have passed), then so what. It was my inadvertent good deed for the day.

I just hope she learned a lesson.

One funny thing happened right after class (funny to me anyway, as it well illustrates the age difference I experienced between myself and the rest of the class). In our group was this one young couple, boyfriend/girlfriend, who were so joined at the hip that she shared one desk for most of the class. Jennifer and Johnny (he didn’t answer to John… just Johnny! As in, “I did it for Johnny!”). They’re both blond and disgustingly cute together, one of those couples that look like brother and sister until you see them kiss and you get that little bit of vomit rise up in the back of your throat, making you think their actually from West Virginia until you find out they’re not actually related. Anyway, we were standing around saying good bye, and I thanked the two of them for all their work on the group project. Jennifer said, “No, we should thank you, as you did most of the work.” Then she added in a squeaky Valley Girl-esque tone. “You're so awesome!” I think if she had to have spelled that out, it would have been Ur soooo awesome! As if I was a bouncer and just allowed them to come into a really trendy club or if I let the Hollister store stay open five more minutes so she could get a new cell phone cozy. Apparently awesome is a high form of praise to the Y-generation, especially since a host of other words may very well have sufficed.

Well, I thought it was funny. And on that note, my first class ended. Afterwards, as if we were the city champs in youth soccer, we had a pizza party at the local pizza place just off campus.

I think I was the only one there that was old enough to buy myself a beer.

Ah, kids.

Fly Watch: Day Three

2008-06-29T18:29:00.000-07:00

I would have never believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes and experienced it for myself in these last three days. Flies. Hordes…an infestation, like Hitchcock’s Birds. I walked quietly downstairs a few mornings ago to be greeted with dozens of black specs lounging lazily on various windowsills and baseboards in various rooms of the downstairs.

They didn’t move, not one twitch of their hairy legs, just stared at me with their 50 eyes each. Why were they there? How did they come in the house? Why were they just sitting there?

The only thing I could do was arm myself, and for the first few, it was easy to smack the life out of them. They bunch up, so swinging into a group results in several casualties per strike, but then it was as if they could communicate. As soon as they saw me, they’d not only scatter, but they’d regroup.

Twelve turned into 20. Twenty to 50. Fifty to 100. Soon, I would clear a windowsill of a dozen flies, turn my attention to another windowsill in another room, and when I returned to the first sill, they’d reinforced, organized and concentrated their efforts.

But for what?

They all seemed slow, mature, grown up flies with little energy or any desire for self-preservation. Huddled in the corners of the windows, they congregated as if ready for a counterstrike.

I upped my weapons, pulled out the Dyson and began sucking them up by the handful, pulling them from the skies as they tried to flee. It worked well and I soon gained the upper hand in the battle, as it was one of attrition. Their numbers dwindled before nightfall, but come sunup, they had returned in greater hoards than ever before, inundating the windowsills in numbers I would have—up until then—only imagined.

Where had they come from? Where were they coming from? Why here? Why now?

Two days prior, we had our first appointment with the pest control to spray the outside of our house for spiders and ants. We had come across several black widows lately and a dozen egg sacks in the rafters of the porch and patio, so we figured it was time to call in the professionals for a scheduled spraying.

The following day, every fly within three houses of ours decided that it was too hot of a fly zone to remain outside, so they found their way in. But how? All of the windows are now shut. The air conditioning is on, making the house positively pressurized, but yet, they still find ways in.

I pulled the couches away from the windows in the living room and for 20 minutes, I stood their watching the windowsill, the dirty windows and caked-on screen for any signs of break ins. There were none. I walked away for a few minutes, and by the time I had returned, there were three flies sitting there, mocking me, laughing perhaps.

They were sucked into the vacuum and probably beat to death by the dead bodies of their fallen comrades. It is a fitting penalty for invading my house… but then I thought, to my horror, that they weren’t coming in the house… that they were already in the house, hatching from God knows what and who knows where.

I tore apart the ground floor of the house. Everything that didn’t belong downstairs was put in a laundry basket and dumped in a big pile upstairs. I moved all of the couches, chairs, tables and knick-knacks, half expecting to find a maggot-covered piece of half-rotting hamburger that Matthew hid because he didn’t want to eat it…maybe a month ago. Or perhaps Elsa couldn’t make it outside quick enough and I had yet to find it, hidden under some random end table.

I vacuumed, I washed down the windowsills, I swept the cobwebs from the corners of the rooms. I sat and watched. The flies kept coming. It’s not like we live in a slaughterhouse or in a barn with cattle; this is a residence where people live, relatively clean people, so why would they want to stay here?

The only thing that makes sense is that they’re lethargic, slow and seemingly sick. They sit on the sills in vast numbers unable or unwilling to fly away, and if they do, they’re slow, fat and easily sucked out of the air and into the vacuum.

It’s been three days now, three days of the constant struggle, me against the flies. I tore apart the family room, pulling out every piece of furniture that wasn’t nailed down, the couches, tables, pictures, lamps… I even empted out the cabinet under the TV. I dusted, I washed, I rinsed, I wiped. I vacuumed the ceiling fan, the fireplace, the couches. I washed the windows, the hearth, the back of the TV, the glass in the pictures on the walls. There was nothing, no source, no obvious entry point, no obvious Mother Fly sitting under the cushions of the couch squeezing out dozens of flies by the minute.

In the past three days, I have killed at least 250 flies… in our house…IN OUR HOUSE.

What the hell is going on?

The infestation seems to have subsided, as I’m only seeing one or two every couple of hours instead of dozens. The family room has never been cleaner. Tomorrow is the kitchen… same thing. No surface will remain untouched. No fly will live.

When all of this is over, at least the house will be spotless and I can avoid Kara’s “Let’s get a maid” conversation.

Matthew’s First Roller Coaster

2008-06-27T19:54:00.001-07:00

Most every night before Matthew goes to bed, he likes to watch videos on YouTube of various roller coasters. First it was any random roller coaster from around the world, one from Japan, some from here in the states (places we’ve never been) and a few in Europe. He started to name them by their color or the manner in which they were themed (“the red roller coaster” or the “the animal one”). He enjoyed it especially when I would make my office chair mimic the actions of the roller coaster; if the coaster banked to the left, I’d lean the chair over to the left, or if it climbed a hill, I’d recline the chair way back. Giggles of delight were had by all.

Right when he tipped the yard stick at 34 inches, we tried to take him on the little 32-second roller coaster at Disneyland’s Toon Town, the one made for older toddlers. For the longest time, he wanted no part of it, until one day he acquiesced to join us. He made it all the way through the line without so much as a negative word; he even thought it was funny when the coaster would zoom over his head while we were waiting, all the while Natalie offered him words of encouragement on how fun the ride is.

When we got to the front of the line, and as Kara was stepping into the ride, he began to profess how he might have just been kidding about wanting to go on it, assuming that we wouldn’t take him seriously about making him go on the ride. So Kara stepped through and waited for Natalie and I to go on it. I guess we should have forced him to ride it, because he would have probably enjoyed it, but there’s that little chance it would have scarred him for life, turning him into a raving lunatic sometime later in adulthood.

We decided to wait until he was ready… and that day came two days ago.

Now don’t get me started on the extreme suckatude that Lego Land is or how disappointed I am about paying $60 each to get into a filthy, over-crowded, inefficient and ill-planned “amusement” park where there is absolutely nothing to offer anyone over the age of six but the bill for it all. I had been wanting to go there since it opened, as it is on the list of motivations for even having children (right below tax write-off), so once I had the chance to visit the Mecca of the building-blocks toy I have loved since I was old enough to know what to do with my opposable thumbs, I had perhaps built it up to be the be all and end all of amusement park experiences. Let’s just say that we won’t be going back and we can leave it at that.

Anyways, poor Matthew, who has been getting the short end of the stick around ever turn lately, was at that magic age and height combination to not be able to go on any of the cooler rides. He’s an eighth-inch shy of 36-inches tall now, which qualifies him for most anything there (save two) but he falls under their four-year-old rule which disqualifies him for most of the rides he pointed to and with hope in his voice said, “Can I go on that?”

The answer was usually no… and then watch as your sister enjoys it. Well, towards the end of the day, we realized that, although he was having a good time, he wasn’t getting to do anything that he really wanted to do, especially after witnessing the final straw of watching his sister go on The Dragon, a knight-themed roller coaster that Natalie exclaimed (in front of him, of course), that it was her favorite thing at the park. At that point, and all the times he tried to sneak away from Kara to get in line, he was probably feeling a little slighted, so Kara scoured the park map to find him something he could go on… and it was quite a treat for him, as it was “The Coastersaurus,” a pretty quick roller coaster for little tykes.

Let’s just say he loved it. As we were waiting in line, he marveled at the roller coaster as it shot overhead, and he was giddy with excitement as we queued up for our turn, all the while excited that finally, finally, he was going to get to go on something he wanted to go on.

As far as the ride is concerned, it was only about 30-seconds long, but you get to go through it twice, and it rivals the Toon Town roller coaster in speed, turns and excitement. Given its length, I took pictures of him throughout the ride, totalling six, from the time we sat in the cars waiting to depart until the time he became confident enough to throw his arms up in the air like a true roller coaster aficionado.

Interspersed here are the six images, spanning the ranges of emotions from excitement, elation, and exhilaration to trepidation, fear and bravado. The first picture at the top of this page speaks volumes as it was taken on the first big drop after leaving the station, and by the time we had made it around another lap, he was thrilled to be on the ride, throwing caution to the wind and his hands in the air.

It was, after all, Matthew’s first roller coaster… and he rode it in high style.

Camping During the Fall

2008-06-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

We joined a camping group last month, a local organization that has about 50 rigs (old campers call their truck and trailer combos rigs; it’s quaint, so I’ll use it). Us joining was at the suggestion of an acquaintance of mine, one of my past Park Watch partners. We spent four hours a week together and formed a pretty good friendship that is mostly now continued via email. Since they live in town here, we see them upon occasion, and since John is cynical and snide, I took to him immediately, and when he asked us if we would like to go with his family to Idyllwild on a campout, we jumped at the chance.

For starters, we haven’t yet camped in the forest, and it was nice to escape the triple-digit weekend people would have to suffer through down here and instead enjoy the mild temperatures of a higher-altitude climate.

Since Natalie’s graduation from Pre-School was on Friday, we decided to hit the road Saturday morning and stay until Monday, which worked out nice. We avoided all of the out-of-town traffic on the 91, 60 and 10 freeways and we hardly saw a soul on the 20-mile trek up the steep and winding 243 to Idyllwild. We took it slow, as my truck isn’t too appreciative of being saddled to the trailer and climbing 6000 feet into the mountains, but we made good time, as it took only about 90 minutes to arrive in the little town of Pine Cove where the campsite was (about three miles from Idyllwild).

The air was fresh and clean; the trees tall and green; and it was quiet, silent except for the birds and the breezes rushing through the pine needles. In preparation of Flag Day (yes, some of us prepare for it!), I built a flag holder and attached it to the back ladder of the trailer and bought a new American flag just for the trailer… I didn’t want to take my fancy new 13-star Betsy Ross flag I just bought for the house. Natalie can read now—at least she can figure out most of the words—so when she noticed that Saturday was Flag Day and after I explained what Flag Day was—she insisted that we celebrate it by putting up a flag at our campsite. I took some PVC pipe, drilled two holes in the ladder and attached it with some small carriage bolts, adding a 45-elbow and another small length of PVC to make the flag hang properly.

The first order of business after arriving at the campground Saturday morning was to hang the flag. We ended up with a pretty good site, one of the only two in the whole campground that has a sewer hookup. It meant that I didn’t have to pay for the truck to dump my tanks or wait in line at the dump station on the way out if it was crowded. Our site was up the hill from a little country store and the campground lodge, which had a bunch of games and a couple of televisions… but the operative word in that sentence is “hill,” as the campground was on the side of the mountain and everywhere you turned you were marching up an asphalt-paved hill or picking your way down one. Since it took me a couple of attempts to back the trailer into our spot, I’m surprised how some of these people were able to shoe-horn their rigs into some interesting places. My hat’s off to their skills as a driver.

We settled in, set up the trailer (awning, outside carpet, chairs, TV, antennae, water line and electricity), and when I thought everything was up and running, we lost power. The trailer went completely dead. I pulled off the electrical panel under the fridge and saw that we tripped a circuit breaker, the 15-amp one for the fridge and the trailer’s electrical plugs, but that didn’t explain why the microwave wasn’t on or why the outside light didn’t work. The main electrical box outside—where you plug in the trailer—had two big plugs and two regular plugs. Next to one was written “Dead,” which didn’t bode well, and every time I plugged into the second one, it made a little sizzling sound, like bacon… and I just assumed that wasn’t good either. Electricity would work for a few minutes, then stop, then blow the same circuit breaker.

Not being an electrician, I assumed the main box wasn’t working properly, so I grabbed my extension cord and patched into the main electrical panel of a rental cabin just up the road. Everything then worked fine. When we took a walk, I stopped into the main gate “Ranger Station” and let them know that it wasn’t working properly, and by the time we had returned from our walk, there were two men fixing it—I was impressed by their timeliness.

On the schedule for the first day was some time at the pool, a trip into “town” and then we would sit by the bonfire listening to some music at the campground’s amphitheater. It sounded nice and relaxing. In town, we ate at a Mexican restaurant, which gives Kara a better feeling of being on vacation and not so much like she has to do all of the household chores. It was good food, and I later learned from John that the owner used to be a popular chef in Chicago. After a heart attack, his doctor said to relocate to a more relaxing environment or start planning your funeral, so he came to Idyllwild and opened a Mexican restaurant, one of those holes in the wall that looks as though you’d get tetanus if you accidentally brushed up against the table the wrong way.

We walked around the little town, which had an eclectic collection of gift shops, cafes and art galleries. We got suckers for the kids and then headed back to camp for an early evening swim in the icy frigid pool…it wasn’t that bad once you got used to it. The kids loved it; well, Natalie more than Matthew, as he complained about being cold and spent some time all wrapped up in a towel shivering in a chair while Natalie splashed around in the pool.

After about an hour, the sun was beginning to set and we decided to head back down the hilly roads to our trailer…which ended up being worse that going up the hills. Because it was getting somewhat chilly and because it is what I normally do when the kids get out of the bath, I wrapped Natalie up in a six-foot pink striped towel. It went over her head and around her body a couple of times, and I tucked it in the sides so she would stay nice and toasty for the walk home.

Who knew she couldn’t walk very well in it?

I picked up Matthew and carried him, while Kara grabbed the floaties and fun noodles and walked with Natalie. About halfway down the biggest of the hills, I thought I heard Natalie start to laugh, but by the time I turned around and saw her face-down on the asphalt, I knew she wasn’t laughing, as a pitched screaming cry emanated from her. Kara immediately picked her up and when I got back up the hill to them, blood was pouring out of her mouth and nose.

She had tripped in her flip-flops, and since her arms were wrapped up in the towel, there was nothing stopping her from smacking her face on the ground. Her lip puffed up instantly and I started to check her teeth, hoping and praying that she didn’t do any permanent damage to them (as it could even affect your adult teeth—I chipped a tooth in the third grade and it still bothers me to this day)… but where was all the blood coming from.

Kara stuffed the towel in her mouth and carted her down the hill. Natalie cried the whole way, understandably, as it probably hurt like hell. Once back in the trailer, we examined her more closely and it looked as though she got a puncture above her gums and under her lip. How she could have been punctured there was puzzling, and once we got some ice on it, she seemed to calm down considerably.

Kara wanted to take her to the hospital, of course, and I wanted to wait and see what happened, of course, for the sole reason that it was getting dark out and we had to navigate a treacherous mountain road down to any hospital. That, and it didn’t seem that bad to me… once all the blood was wiped away, I mean.

However, the tears in Kara’s eyes and that “I need to save my baby” tone of her voice won out over my caution for heading out into the unknown, looking for a hospital that might not be out there.

We stopped by the “ranger station” at the front gate of the campground and asked the ranger on duty for his advice. He suggested that we go to the fire department just at the base of the hill (on the corner of the 243 in Pine Cove) and ask them to check her out. When I asked him if they do that sort of thing, his semi-comical response was “hell yeah.”

So we pulled into the fire station and summoned the three firemen on duty. They were watching the Angles game, and while they filled out some paperwork, one of the firemen checked her out. Matthew, of course, was acting like his old self, jumping around like a frog and saying “ribbit!” to anyone and everyone, completely oblivious to the situation or Natalie’s turmoil. To calm the kids, the firemen took us on a tour of the station, showing us the fire trucks and where they lived upstairs. It was pretty cool to see the inner workings of a fire truck, and through a swollen lip and sore mouth, Natalie agreed that it was pretty cool.

We sat on the couch and watched the Angles game while they called around to find us a hospital to go to. One fireman said, yes, go to the hospital just to be on the safe side, while another one said that he’d wait to see how she looked in the morning… so we were back to square one until the third fireman, who was married, suggested that the wife should win in decisions such as these.

So, in short order, we were headed down the mountain toward beautiful Hemet to the Hemet Regional Hospital. Saturday night in the desert town of Hemet, where anyone with a pulse an get a lone for a $150K house, I wondered what delights we would soon discover in the waiting room of the emergency facilities. At the very least, I expected a lot of gang members and elderly, the general population of Hemet, but I was surprised to find only a few of each.

The cops only had to come once, and that was to calm down this irate woman who felt like she wasn’t being treated fast enough because she was black. She kept complaining that she was going to have a stroke because it ran in her family, and I kept wishing that she’d get on with it. Stroke out and shut up about it already. All you are is a foul-mouthed racist…and the cops told her exactly as much, when I followed them outside with her. It was better than what was on TV.

The whole ordeal took just over two hours, a lot shorter time than I expected it would. Kara later told me that one of the firemen related a story to her about his wife having to go there for some reason and it taking seven hours. I’m not sure what I would have done with myself after seven hours, but I’m sure it would have involved the cops and me sitting out on the sidewalk yelling profanities that I wasn’t being treated because I was white…

But hospitals have a way of teasing you, repeatedly taunting you into thinking that you’re about to be treated by competent medical staff and then pulling the rug out from under you again. First, you have to fill out a form that announces your arrival and reason why you’re there and slip it into a slot…and then you wait along with the other dregs. After about 45 minutes, they call you into this small room, and when they did, I thought, hey, this isn’t bad at all. We will be back up the hill by 10pm and in bed at a decent hour. But no. They just wanted to take Natalie’s vitals and fill out a form or two about how she is fairing. For kids, they show a series of smiley faces, about six, each one progressively more sad until the last one is completely crying, and the nurse asked Natalie which one she most felt like today. Of course, by then, the only thing really wrong with Natalie was a big fat lip and a few scrapes on her nose and chin and maybe some soreness in her mouth; it took us an 45 minutes to get down the hill and we’d been sitting in the emergency room for another 45 minutes…Natalie, by then, was in good spirits so she pointed to the insanely happy face because she had had a really good day camping and playing in the pool. I really don’t think she understood the question.

After that, they shuttled us back out to the waiting room to wait some more. I asked how long it might be—as if I was waiting for a table at a restaurant—and she said it could be five minutes or it could be two hours. Grumbling, we sat down to wait again. But after only 15 minutes or so, they called us again… and again, I thought, wow, we didn’t have to wait too long. Okay, we might be back up to the campsite at 10:30 and still in bed at a decent hour.

However, they called us into this very tiny room, one just big enough for a chair and for me to stand. It looked as though we were visiting a prison because thick Plexiglas separated us from this giant woman who filled out all of the admitting papers, took our ID and insurance papers. Again, we were shuttled out to the waiting room, and when I asked again how long it might take to see a doctor, she honestly said she didn’t know.

So we waited…again… and I don’t know how much time went by—that’s when the irate black woman started demanding racial equality, when one of the guards (who was Mexican) complained that she shouldn’t be playing the race card. This is 2008 he reminded her. That’s when the cops came.

Matthew was getting a little restless. He slept on the ride down the mountain, and laid awake peacefully in the stroller while we waited, but by then, he was tired of sitting in the same spot seeing the same things and hearing the same sounds. He wanted to get out and explore, complaining that he wanted to go home and that he wanted to get back to the Tango (our trailer). I couldn’t blame him, and he was being really good the whole time.

They finally called us back into the emergency room and we plopped Natalie on a bed, waiting for the doctor or nurse to give a prognosis. Meanwhile, another nurse brought a suture cart in case they had to stitch up what appeared to us to be a hole in her gum, and she proceeded to fill our hearts with fear by explaining that suturing up small children, especially in hard-to-reach and highly sensitive places, is difficult and especially painful. So much so that they only allow one parent—the emotionally stronger of the two (which would have been me that day)—to stay with Natalie and that they would be forced to restrain her so she doesn’t wiggle and mess up the stitches.

I couldn’t see that going well for anyone, so I was preparing an argument against stitching up her gum: it was a small hole, who cares if it scars as nobody would see it, etc., etc.

A honest-to-goodness doctor finally arrived and told us a bunch of stuff I already knew: that it is a small wound, that the mouth heals incredibly fast and nobody would see it if it scarred. One thing, however, we didn’t know was that it wasn’t a hole at all. What had happened was that she tore her frenulum, that little stringy piece that attaches your lip to your mouth, similar to the one that is on the bottom of your tongue. He said that it tears easily in childhood injuries and that it would heal quickly. He issued some antibiotics and sent us on our way.

One nice thing happened though. The nurse that gave us the antibiotics said that she had to make up an entire bottle of the solution in order to dole out a little cup of it to Natalie, and since she had to throw away the bottle afterwards, she would rather give it to us instead. It was one of those situations where she was going to set it on the table and turn around… if the bottle was missing, it was missing and there was nothing she could do about it. Of course, she did remind us that it needed to be refrigerated.

By about 11pm, we stopped at McDonald’s for some well-deserved ice cream for the kids and headed back up the hill. Natalie and Matthew were dead to the world by the time we reached camp, so we piled them into their unmade bed with their clothes on and we went to sleep.

The rest of the weekend was thankfully uneventful. It was nice and relaxing. Natalie didn’t complain about her mouth at all…well, she did once when she ate something acidic. She had a fat lip and some bruising on her chin and nose, but that’s it.

Other than that… it was a nice campout. Above are some pictures of our experiences.

WTF, Walt?

2008-06-17T21:21:00.000-07:00

Nothing beats the excitement of an energy-filled car ride to Disneyland, especially if you haven’t been in a while. It’s a Tuesday, barely into Summer, and since our passes black out for a few weeks during the busy Summer, we thought it would be a great idea to hit the Magic Kingdom one last time until Fall.

Apparently, so did a lot of other people.

We assumed it would be busy today, as it is the start of Summer; school’s out, and all of those people clutching their newly minted diplomas and shouting, “I’m going to Disneyland” when asked what they are going to do with their lives after graduation, did exactly what they said they’d do: They went to Disneyland, today.

The family got up early, and early for us means that we were out the door around 9:45, trying to avoid the freeway traffic from the regular working stiffs, but getting to Disneyland before it got too crowded. I hoped that the heat would keep most people away, but oh how I was wrong.

Sometimes, you don’t even realize that it is going to be a stampede at Disneyland until you’re in the gates and standing in a two-hour line for a thirty-second ride. You start to look around and see that the throngs of crowds are elbow-to-elbow in one swirling sea of humanity. Then you ask yourself, “what am I doing here?” and promptly leave and give it a try another day.

This time, it appeared obviously crowded as soon as we got off the freeway… at Ball Avenue, three miles from Disneyland. The left lane packed up early, and so we sat there and sat there and sat there, creeping our way toward Harbor Boulevard, then up the hill over the I5 Freeway and slowly down the other side toward Ox Road, where the employees turn left.

By this time, I was in the right lane. Looking over the top of the cars in front of me, I surmised that I needed to be in the left lane in order to make the left turn from Ball Avenue onto Disneyland Drive, as there were two left-hand-turn lanes but both of them originated from the left lane on Ball.

I turned on my blinker, and as I suspected, especially after sitting in about 35 minutes of traffic waiting for this moment, nobody let me in. Then, the left lane moved forward as the light at Ox Road and Ball Avenue turned green, allowing for a few people to sneak through the intersection to the other side. As that happened, a space opened up in front of the car next to me, so I took it, nosing my truck into the spot. It wasn’t like I cut off the person next to me; just took advantage of the fact that she was a little slow on the gas pedal. As I began to straighten out, the lady guns her car, jerks around me on the left and tries to get back in front of me again, pulling her car into the left-hand-turn lane that goes to Ox Road (where the employees turn).

Well, folks, I consider myself a patient man, not one to easily rile or one that is quick to lose his temper, but after 35 minutes of sitting bumper-to-bumper in traffic and only going a short distance, I was not going to be overtaken by some arrogant mom in her Tercel.

I laid on the horn, for about three seconds (which is a long time in car-to-car communication) and threw my hands up in the air at her in a double-fisted objection to her existence. I’m sure I swore, partly because what she did and the suddenness that she did it, startled me. I wasn’t expecting to be abruptly passed, especially since I didn’t do anything to make her take defensive maneuvers. Sure, if I had cut her off and she had to slam on the brakes in order to avoid slamming into me, I can see how she’d be upset. I would too. But she wasn’t moving quick enough and I took advantage of the open spot.

So, she’s next to me, slightly ahead and trying to edge her way back into the lane in front of me, partly in the lane and partly in the turn lane. I stomped on the gas and put my mirror right over the top of hers. It wasn’t going to happen, and I’m sure at that point, I would have caused an accident before letting her get in front of me.

I was about to roll down the window and let her know what I really thing of her and her driving… but I stopped. I didn’t do it nor did I do anything else because she had her daughter in the car. One of the many things I cringe to see or hear is someone getting demeaned or humiliated in front of their kids. So I let up, but I would be damned if she was going to get in front of me, regardless.

She sat there next to me until the turn-lane light changed, and instead of continuing the battle with me, she turned left onto Ox Road (where the employees are supposed to enter). A few minutes later, I saw her car appear on Ox Road, facing me, preparing to turn left.

As she sat there, I knew she wasn’t done with me… and I completely predicted what she did next. As she turned the corner, she glared over and gave me the finger. It was hilarious! I always find it funny to be flipped off, especially for something that wasn’t my fault. So I did the only thing I knew to do that would piss her off for the rest of the day: I laughed. Big, open-mouth laugh.

But if you think that’s how our morning at Disneyland turn out and that’s the end of the story, you’re sorely mistaken, as it went downhill from there… if that’s possible.

Finally, we were blessed by the Disney gods to make the left-hand turn onto Disneyland Drive. From there, the road splits into two destinations: the left lanes swing down and around to the parking garage for Disneyland itself, and the right lanes go up and over to the hotel parking lots. Normally, we would want to be in the left lanes for the garage because we were going to Disneyland, but for some reason, they had those lanes blocked, for reasons which I assumed were because the park was so crowded that the parking garage was packed to the gills.

Okay, so where are they going to send us? To the hotel parking? That seemed unlikely, but it was were the cones routed us. Up and over the hill to the east of the parking garage, the two lanes that service the Disneyland Hotel were merged into one lane for the right-hand turn onto Magic Way. Then I assumed they were going to route us into the back way, a one-lane alternate entrance into the parking garage from the south side. There were no signs directing us that way, and when you’re all going to the same place, a herd mentality takes over: just follow the car in front of you and soon we’ll be following each other in line to Space Mountain.

Nobody turned left from Magic Way into the Downtown Disney and Hotel parking lots, as it seemed that everyone around me was veteran Disneyphiles, all well versed in the various parking situations at the Magic Kingdom. Only a few cars turned left, which made sense because people go to Downtown Disney to shop. The rest went straight, along the road to the backdoor entrance to the parking garage… or so we thought.

That small entrance was blocked, closed, and we all ended up on Walnut Avenue, the western-most outside boundary of Disneyland… outside Mickey’s four-fingered grasp. What now?

I felt abandoned. They shuttled us away from the normal entrance to the garage, led us to the alternate entrance and never bothered to tell the guy responsible for it to open the gate. Instead, we ended up pushed away. I flipped a U-turn and went to the next logical place, the Downtown Disney and Hotel parking, thinking that they were opening that lot up to normal park goers. It turns out that they weren’t. It was taking tickets as much as any other day, but the lanes were thronged with similarly confused and befuddled visitors, all inundating the one poor guy stuck at his post, dealing with packed lines, malfunctioning gates and endless questions all with the same theme: “Why am I here?” and “Where do you expect me to park?”

I was surprised when his answer was “I don’t know, but you can’t long-term park here. You’ll have to turn around.” So, this is why this post is called “WTF, Walt?” I would like to think that Walt Disney would have never let something like this happen. Perhaps I’ve deified Walt or maybe I have an out-of-whack perception of the history of Disneyland and/or Walt Disney’s value of his guests.

We decided to leave. After all that, we decided that it wasn’t going to be worth it to even venture into the park to see what the lines were like.

But what to do? Go home? Do something else? We decided to go to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, which is why there is a picture of an aquarium and not giant mice.

And boy was it nice. Instead of spending $58 to get the family in for a one-time visit (plus $7 for parking), we bought a year-long family pass for $125 which includes discounts on food and souvenirs, special passes to other events and free parking. Sweet!

A good day was had by all.

Matthew, the Pirate

2008-05-27T17:17:00.000-07:00

Matthew loves Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland, but he doesn't like to go on it... He'll say no every time I ask him if he wants to go on it, and since I enjoy the 14 minutes of solitude, peace and quiet to rest from tromping around the park all day, pushing 70 pounds of stroller, I'll make him go on it. He'll complain a little in line that he doesn't like the "Pirate ride," that is, until he gets in the boat and is lulled into submission by the fireflies and the twangy "Old Susannah" on the banjo. He especially loves the two initial waterfalls.

Lately, every thing he picks up has been going on a simulated "Pirate ride." For example, last night, each spoonful of frozen yogurt from Golden Spoon rode up a ramp high above his head, then came crashing down into the waterfall with a piercing scream of delight before it could go into his mouth.

All the while, he was quietly chanting in a low piratey voice: "Dead men have no tails..."

Natalie's Wit

2008-05-22T13:47:00.001-07:00

I'm very happy that Natalie is developing a sense of humor similar to my own. It seems that snarky sarcasm is genetic.

Today, Natalie gave me a great example.

We were looking through a book of letters that she put together at school, and each letter has an animal associated with it that she's colored in and glued to the book. We were talking about our favorite animals, and when mine wasn't represented in the book (buffalo), she asked for a few backups. I saw centipede, so I claimed that one as a favorite animal.

Then I asked her how many legs does a centipede have, and without so much as a pause, she fired back, "More than it needs."

I thought that was hilariously witty and her timing was excellent. Good for her.

Things like this make me look forward to future conversations with her!