The video is fixed — don’t know why it wasn’t playing, but I just re-“compiled” it and it seems fine.
Update: Some folks tell me the video stops halfway through. I give up on this one…
Rock, Preferably Without the Roll
Soon, J will be flying back to Polska. K and I wanted to take her on some kind of semi-extended semi-vacation before she left, but where to go?
Our trip had several constraints from the beginning
- relatively inexpensive (we are, after all, buying a house),
- relatively close (we don't, after all, have a lot of vacation time), and
- relatively interesting for J.
So we did the logical thing: we went kitsch.
America is filled with kitsch, and the common view from Polska is that "Americans like kitsch." There was only one place that fulfilled all our criteria: Gatlinburg.
But we knew that it would be relatively expensive to do much there, so we sandwiched it with a half-day in Chattanooga and a day in Cherokee.
Our stops in Chattanooga were about as kitsch as could be, in some ways: Rock City
and Ruby Falls.
Very American: take nature, and improve it with sidewalks, elevators, and safety barriers. And above all, make it auto-accessible.
We had fun, though. Rock City brings out the little boy in everyone, and Ruby Falls, while overly theatrical (not to mention amazingly crowded in the summer), is a fairly impressive sight.
Photos of our adventure are available here.
Mill
Swimming II
We’ve been taking L to swimming lessons at the local YWCA. Within a few weeks, we’ve gone from calmly moving her about the pool (“Dig, dig, dig! Kick, kick, kick!”) to dunking her under water after blowing in her face. She doesn’t much like the former, and the latter sets her to screaming more often than not. The instructor suggests that it’s the water running down her face when we pull her back up that upsets her.
Still, we take her regularly and follow the instructor’s advice, on the hopes that it’s the unfamiliarity of it all that is bothering L.
There’s a progress report at YouTube.
That’s Some Ideology
iDontCare
For the last several months, I’ve been hearing more about the iPhone on NPR while driving to work than I really cared to.
The phenomenon is a fascinatingly, achingly-perfect example of our consumer culture. All of the reporting I heard on NPR was about the wonderous technology and gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it.
Or sometimes about people who feel they’ve gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it.
People standing in line; people paying people to stand in line. Lines, everywhere — if reports are to be believed. People waiting to buy; people waiting to try: to the former, “Do you have nothing better to do with your money?” and to the latter, “Do you have nothing better to do with your time?”
I really just don’t get it. It’s a phone that plays music, and accomplishes it without a keypad. Nothing revolutionary. Nothing that turns our conception of the universe on its head. Bohr, Plank, and Einstein would have all been impressed, I’m sure.
Perhaps I’m just one of those “old fashioned” types that thinks a phone that is just a phone is sufficient. My phone is two years old, and if I don’t have to get a new one to renew my contract, I probably won’t, because I just don’t care. It rings; I talk — end of story.
If I want to listen to music, I’ll use my iPod…
Survey Says…
Over the weekend, we made a survey of the property we’re in the process of buying.
And of course, I made a video.
Our House
is a very, very fine house, though without the two cats in the yard…
Perhaps it’s a bit premature, for we haven’t closed yet, but people have asked about what “our house” (though, again, it’s still technically still not ours) looks like…
From the street, it looks a little like a mini-Brady Bunch house. But that’s only an illusion, for this is a coveted “tri-level” home, whereas the Brady’s house was conceptually a bit more confusing…
The back of the house includes a fairly spiffy bi-level deck. There are doors to the deck from both the dining room and master bedroom, making the Friday night cigar tradition a little more convenient.
The back also also includes a fairly un-spiffy outdoor parrot cage (?!?) that will quickly be converted into something. Ideas? Nah, I didn’t think so. It will be one of the first improvements completed on the house…
Yesterday, we spent the day surveying. We learned a few things.
First, it’s hot in Greenville.
Second, the rear property stakes are all but impossible to find. One is at a fence, making a metal detector fairly useless. The other is God-knows-where in the back left corner. Half an hour with a metal detector only turned up the metal eyelets of my boots…
Third, doing surveying with an inexperienced “surveyor” (i.e., me) makes the process a fair bit more labor- and time-intensive.
Fourth, it’s really incredibly hot in Greenville.
And the final thing we learned: working on your own (though, technically, not really) home makes otherwise-unpleasant tasks almost enjoyable.
Update
I don’t think any of us could have anticipated L’s success on the potty chair. In the past ten days or so, L has done her messier business almost exclusively in the potty chair.
So, she’s potty trained, right!? I mean, a couple of accidents, statistically speaking, are fairly meaningless. And the fact that she’s not telling us that she needs the potty chair is a function of her age and development and nothing more. After all, she knows what it’s for — every time you put her on it, she does her best to have a BM.
Well, admittedly, she’s not potty trained in the truest sense of the term, but I think we’ve laid a fairly sure foundation for a quick, painless training when the “real” time comes…
Ron Paul
Ron Paul is Exhibit A in the case of why we need more than two viable political parties. Granted, there’s the Libertarian Party, and that was RP’s party of choice some years ago, but now he’s running for the Republican party nomination — even though most of the Republican party shuns him.
He does seem fairly un-Republican in some ways. His ideas about Iraq win him more applause from Bill Maher than any of the Democratic candidates.
If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. […] They don’t come here and attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They attack us because we’re over there. (Republican candidate debate)
I don’t know of any Democratic candidate who’s talking about blowback and 9/11. It sounds like something out of a Chomsky book, as do his comments about the folly of spreading democracy with a gun.
And yet, Paul was talking to Cobert, he indicated that he’d be more than willing to have a small a government as possible, eliminating various agencies such as the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security.
What he is, in reality, is a real Republican — an isolationistic, small-government, states’-rights, federal-government-butt-out, old-fashioned Republican. The Republicans have strayed so far from their original principles that a “real” one stands out.
Roan Mountain
Over the weekend, we took J to see the rhododendrons on Roan Mountain.
The blossoms were a little past peak, and some of them were already wilting, but it was impressive nonetheless.
Color Blinded
Now that we have a house under contract, K has joyfully jumped into the wide world of paints. We have swatches and brochures and booklets lying all over the place.
Since I’m colorblind, I can’t really offer that much constructive input. After all, I did once buy a dark blue fleece jacket that turned out to be mockingly purple. And I did think for years that my friends’ parents had a gray car, only to learn, after I’d confused everyone by suggesting we take said gray car, that they didn’t own a gray car — it was light green.
Still, I’m glad someone in the family is interested in it.
Even L was taking part in the discussion.
Solids
We've entered the wild, wonderful world of solids,
which means a number of things:
- It takes a little more time to prepare for a feeding;
- Feeding is more labor intensive;
- Post-poop clean-up is more labor intensive; and,
- Preference begins to rear its finicky head.
On the other hand, feeding is more amusing and more conducive to photography.
Cheating?
When I was in Poland the first time, I made a vow: I will write in my journal every single day. I blew that pretty much within the first week, if memory serves. I was in Radom for “Pre-Service Training” with roughly 90 other Americans, and the late nights took a toll, I suppose.
A photo blog of Radom is available here, but it’s all in Polish. Still, gives you an idea of the city.
So I modified my resolution: I will write in my journal every single day once I get to my site. And I did — except, I believe, for one day.
Well, two. Evening I got in late and was bed before I remembered, so I got up to write something — anything — and I think I put down something like “This is just to keep my streak going.”
This time, I came up with something a little better, I believe…
A Day at the Park
Last week, we took the kids in the program — who have been really working hard on their social skills of late and making great progress — to Carowinds, a theme park on the North/South Carolina border.
It had been years since I’d been to an amusement park. And it certainly showed me how much I’ve aged — within about an hour, after having ridden one or two coasters with the kids, I was thinking, “Well, if we were to leave right now, I’d be perfectly content.”
And then one of the kids got the idea to go on the “Drop Zone Stunt Tower.” A tower with seats that pull you up to some relatively impressive height — at least it seems that way at the moment — and then drops you. Fairly simple.
The specs are not all that impressive:
- Tower Height:174 feet
- Maximum Height Reached by Transports: 160 feet
- Length of Freefall Before Braking: 100 feet
- Highest Speed: 56 M.P.H.
- Lift Speed: 16 feet/second
But the overall experience is — weightlessness for just a few moments.
And I must admit that I, another staff, and one of the kids (we split up for a while) rode it more times than we could later remember.
Imagine that — in my mid-thirties and still able to have fun in a park.
Still, I couldn’t help but think the unavoidable, the predictable: I can’t wait until we take L to such places…