Sunday Orthography, Bugs, and Monopoly
playing
Playdate
Out Back
Late June Wednesday
If it’s late June and we’re in Poland, we might be celebrating Babcia’s birthday in one form or another. Probably not a lot of celebrating happening the day of it (at least not until later in the day) as Babcia, lacking any social media whatsoever, spends the day talking to people who phone her with birthday wishes.
As it is, we simply got everyone up early and phoned ourselves. It was hard to get through, though. Everyone loves Babcia.
If it’s late June and we’re not in Poland, I’ll probably be on the back deck, applying water sealant.
And of course, there’s the evening game of hearts.
Two nights in a row — how do I do it?
A Perfect Day
In the morning, a bike ride. The kids don't really want to go, but it's supposed to rain on and off throughout the day, and they need exercise, so I all but force them. L fusses about one thing; E has a wreck (due to his own carelessness) and ends up fussy for some time; I fuss about their fussing. It's easy to get caught up in the negative and let it chart the day's course for you if you're not careful. Not deliberate.
So I try to make things a little more careful, a little more deliberate. We get back and spend a fair amount of time, just the three of us, working on our bikes' brakes. They're all squeaking and squawking like feral hogs tied to deranged cats. For each bike, we loosen everything -- cables, brake pads, centering screws -- and recalibrate everything. As we're working, I like to think that the kids are enjoying learning something, but I'm not sure. In fact, I rather doubt it. But there's still some value in this, even if it's just spending time together solving a problem.
After dinner, the Girl decides she wants to play Hearts with Papa, K, and me. E is across the street playing with neighbors, and he's not able to follow a game with tricks and trumps just yet, so we play just the four of us.
We play eight hands, and in a surprise -- I never win at games -- I destroy everyone. L is the nearest to me, and she has almost double the points I have.
After the Boy comes in, he suggests War -- he's just learned it, and he likes it. One of two card games (Uno being the other one) that he enjoys.
I take the opportunity to take a few pictures. In the end, I can't decide between three action shots, so I include them all. And the other two shots? They're winning hands the Boy is particularly proud of. In the first one, the Girl gives him rabbit ears; in the second, he's wised up.
Once I put the Boy to bed, I grab L and take her down to watch a movie. It's the second night we've done this. Last night, I showed her The Help. It's a good sign when she wants the movie paused when she leaves to get a snack; last night, she paused it herself. Tonight we watch a quirky British romantic comedy, About Time. It's about making the most of life by looking at each day as a treasure. We all need to be reminded of that from time to time, especially a thirteen-year-old and her cranky father.
A Ride and the Creek
In the morning, a ride with the kids:
In the afternoon, some creek play.
Playing in the Creek
Day 74: Rainy Dickens
Another Rainy Day
We are sick of the rain. Simply sick of it. Every day for the last — how long has it even been? A week? Day in, day out, at some point during every single day, it rains. The air is heavy and moist, and it’s just not a pleasant experience — though it could be worse with all the flooding others are getting.
Today, we finally got outside in the afternoon. It was muggy but sunny. What else could we do but head back to our new fort location and work on it. Doing what exactly? Well, chopping things down.
Some things were much easier to chop than others. The mushy, termite-infested stump we discovered to be such a few months back when I gave what appeared to be a 10-foot stump a push and broke it off about two feet from the ground — that stump is quite solid a little further down.
Of course, the sprinkles that filled the morning and early afternoon and kept us inside came back with friends in the early evening just as we got back from our walk.
I took a few experimental shots — long exposure. Long exposure for daylight pictures. The above image was about 15 seconds. I don’t know what I was hoping to accomplish — get streaks of rain in the image, I guess — but it just turned out to be a bland shot of our front yard.
Later in the evening, we tried it inside. When I explained what a long exposure inside would do, the kids thought it was a very unique idea. “Make us ghosts!”
Done.
Dickensian Commonalities
I’ve been listening to Dickens’s Dombey and Son on Spotify this week — the first time in close to 20 years that I’ve read a new (to me) Dickens book. One of the things that I’m enjoying most is the simple pleasure of discovering new examples of Dickensian acerbic wit, like this:
After the lapse of some minutes, which appeared an immense time to little Paul Dombey on the table, Doctor Blimber came back. The Doctor’s walk was stately, and calculated to impress the juvenile mind with solemn feelings. It was a sort of march; but when the Doctor put out his right foot, he gravely turned upon his axis, with a semi-circular sweep towards the left; and when he put out his left foot, he turned in the same manner towards the right. So that he seemed, at every stride he took, to look about him as though he were saying, “Can anybody have the goodness to indicate any subject, in any direction, on which I am uninformed? I rather think not.”
Add to that a classic Dickensian name — can there be a more inept educator than someone named Doctor Blimber? — and it just brought out of me a loud laugh.
I’m discovering too that this is another example of Dickensian exposes on the Victorian view of children, which often enough bordered on abuse. And as always, Dickens does it with a flourish of humor that still has enough darkness around the edges to make the reader shudder just a little at what the child must be going through.
Poor Paul Dombey, at six, has been deposited at a boarding school in an effort to make up lost time in his education due to his generally ill condition. The headmaster, Dr. Blimber of above, is known for instilling in the children a thorough knowledge of Greek and Latin grammar and little else and of assuming that he’s aptly prepared his pupils for the challenges of life. Paul, on his second day of school, is given a pile of books to read and master. He does the best he can with them:
‘Now, Dombey,’ said Miss Blimber. ‘How have you got on with those books?’
They comprised a little English, and a deal of Latin—names of things, declensions of articles and substantives, exercises thereon, and preliminary rules—a trifle of orthography, a glance at ancient history, a wink or two at modern ditto, a few tables, two or three weights and measures, and a little general information. When poor Paul had spelt out number two, he found he had no idea of number one; fragments whereof afterwards obtruded themselves into number three, which slided into number four, which grafted itself on to number two. So that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic haec hoc was troy weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three times four was Taurus a bull, were open questions with him.
‘Oh, Dombey, Dombey!’ said Miss Blimber, ‘this is very shocking.’
‘If you please,’ said Paul, ‘I think if I might sometimes talk a little to old Glubb, I should be able to do better.’
‘Nonsense, Dombey,’ said Miss Blimber. ‘I couldn’t hear of it. This is not the place for Glubbs of any kind. You must take the books down, I suppose, Dombey, one by one, and perfect yourself in the day’s instalment of subject A, before you turn at all to subject B. I am sorry to say, Dombey, that your education appears to have been very much neglected.’
‘So Papa says,’ returned Paul; ‘but I told you—I have been a weak child. Florence knows I have. So does Wickam.’
‘Who is Wickam?’ asked Miss Blimber.
‘She has been my nurse,’ Paul answered.
‘I must beg you not to mention Wickam to me, then,’ said Miss Blimber. ‘I couldn’t allow it’.
‘You asked me who she was,’ said Paul.
Bear in mind that Paul at this point is six years old. “How is your Latin grammar?” asks the headmaster. “I am sorry to say, Dombey, that your education appears to have been very much neglected,” declares his tutor, the headmaster’s daughter. Just what were they expecting of a six-year-old boy?
Day 72: Reflection and Time Together with a Tripod
Reflection
I titled the post “Heading Out.” It comprised one single picture:
The Boy and I were going out for a Sunday-morning ride. We rode about our neighborhood, the neighboring neighborhood, up to his school, back — a typical ride for us. If there were any puddles I would have had to tell him not to ride through them.
We got back sweaty and satisfied, and after a shower, we had lunch with Nana and Papa and then I headed out to photograph a special ordination Mass for a deacon in our parish, Deacon Richard — now Father Richard.
At some point during the afternoon — I don’t remember because I wasn’t there — Nana went to sleep. K must have texted me about it because I remember thinking, “Well, we gave her an opioid — she always goes to sleep after that.” The Mass ended and the reception began, and after an hour and a half of the reception, K texted me that I should probably come home. “It doesn’t look good,” she texted.
Still, I wasn’t worried. “She’s just asleep. The opioid’s effect will wear off and tomorrow morning she’ll be just as good as new.”
That was May 26, 2019. She passed away sometime in the early hours of May 27. We’re not exactly sure when even though the death certificate has the time the hospice nurse came and checked: 7:30.
“Tomorrow morning she’ll be as good as new.”
I’m not sure how I could have been so blind other than to suggest it was self-deception out of a sense of self-protection. A lot of “self” in that.
“Can we have some time together?”
The Boy asks me every day, “Can we have some time together?” On the one hand, that makes it sound like I don’t spend a lot of time with him. “Poor kid — has to ask his father to spend time with him.” It sounds positively Dickensian. On the other hand, that shows how conscientious he is about spending time with me: he wants to make sure the day doesn’t slip by without us doing something together, and that has happened.
Today, I had some work to do, though, after I completed my school responsibilities (only three more days) and before I could play. The Boy is always eager to learn how to do something, so I invited him along.
Spraying for pests suits him, I think.But then again, you do have to be somewhat systematic — follow a pattern, a plan, a path. You can just spray here, spray there. You have to make sure you have even coverage over the whole area you’re hoping to affect. Much like with mowing, then, I let him work but often took back the equipment to hit a spot he’d missed.
After the work (“Is this our time together?” the Boy asked, concerned), we went back to our favorite spot in the creek and discovered, much to our surprise, that the island we use to assist in crossing the creek was gone. The last flood must have washed it out completely.
We also started planning our next fort. We might get a little less primitive this time. We might even use some 2x4s.
Tripod
I took the camera and tripod out with us today and set the camera to take a picture every minute.
Why didn’t I do that before? I don’t have many pictures with the Boy when we go on these adventures. It’s a simple way to solve that problem.
One can also reverse-mount the tripod and take some pictures otherwise impossible: three-second exposures at water level. That type of thing.
Day 71: Playing and Counting
Games We Play
This morning, E and I decided to play a game we hadn't played in ages: Pentago. It's a simple concept: Get five marbles of your color in a row. But the challenge is that each of the four nine-by-nine quadrants can be rotated. It's a great game for the mental manipulate of objects because players have to turn those quadrants in their heads and make plans to try to surprise their opponent with an unseen 5-row connection.
At first, the Boy just tried to connect five in a row. I showed him quickly how easily stopped that could be, and how I could simply build on my efforts to stop him and create my own row with a twist here or there. Then he got it.
Did I "let him win"? Well, not so much. Once he figured out the importance of the twist, I played a while without really paying attention to anything other than his obvious efforts and he sneaked one or two by me.
After each game: "Can we play again?"
In the afternoon, the kids brought the old Rummikub satchel out: "Can you teach us how to play this?" they asked.
Indeed -- I could barely remember myself. Something about runs and threes- and fours-of-a-kind. That was about all I could remember, and there were no instructions in the game.
It's moments like that which make me really appreciate YouTube. A quick search, three minutes of watching the video, and off we went, playing a game I hadn't played in decades.
I last remember playing it in Nashville with Uncle N and Aunt L over the Thanksgiving weekend. We might have played it the last time we were there for Thanksgiving, which would have been 2005. Though we could have just played dominoes and Uno -- that's all I have photographic evidence for:
Uncle N passed away less than a year later from ALS, and we never went back there for Thanksgiving. So it might have been even longer since I played Rummikub. At any rate, the kids loved it. The Boy, less so because he couldn't see all the combinations and such. L, however, fit into the game perfectly: that type of kombinowanie is just what she does best.
Yesterday
We watched last night the 2019 film Yesterday, in which a failing musician somehow enters an alternate reality in which only he knows anything about the Beatles. He subsequently recreates their catalog as his own. As expected, there are lots of Beatles songs in the film.
"Is that a Beatles song?" L asked as one started.
"Is that a Beatles song?" E asked with the next one.
"Yes, they're almost all Beatles songs," I explained.
"How many songs did they write?!" the Boy asked incredulously.
As a result, we listened to a lot of Beatles music this afternoon. They kind of liked it -- we kind of encouraged them.
It did inspire some musicality from them. The Boy has a little guitar that he suddenly became interested in. However, it is missing strings, so I suggested he play my mandolin, which I bought in high school because R.E.M. had released Green, which featured the mandolin on a number of tunes. It's a $100 plywood job that's a perfect size for him.
Tonight, I worked with him on some basic ideas: pressing down strings just behind a fret to change the pitch. Chords? They're a long way off. (Besides, I can only remember four or five chords on a mandolin.)
The Girl, who has been toying with a ukelele from time to time, gave it a try only to be shocked at how very different it was tuned from her uke. (When she first got the uke, I was surprised to find that, like a five-string banjo, the highest string is actually in the position where the lowest string is for most other instruments. They both just have that one out-of-place string that always gives me fits.)
We'll see how this develops, but hopefully, the interest will remain.
When do I stop counting?
When is this quarantine officially over? When do I stop prefacing every post with "Day X"? I started the first day we were supposed to go to school and yet didn't -- March 16.
Yet because we don't have any coordinated national approach and since every state is easing restrictions step-by-step, there's really no firm date for me to stop doing that. When we head back to school on a normal routine? (Will we do that in the fall?) I've decided that the most logical date to stop doing that is June 4, which would have been the last day of school were this a normal year.
On the other hand, I'm fairly certain that we will see an enormous uptick in cases after states have eased these restrictions. Just look at Cocoa Beach in Florida this weekend:
It's concerning, to say the least:
On the Sunday talk shows, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said she was "very concerned" about scenes of people crowding together over the weekend.
"We really want to be clear all the time that social distancing is absolutely critical. And if you can't social distance and you're outside, you must wear a mask," she said on ABC's "This Week." (Source)
If we have an explosion of cases, the very thing we were trying to avoid, then this entire 70+ lockdown will have been for nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Are we smarter than that as a species? Most days I have my doubts.
Counting
I'm on a run: I've never posted so many consecutive days on this site. Not even close. I've posted daily since December 21, 2019. Counting roughly, that's 130+ consecutive days. Why? Why not?
Not only that, but for the month of May, I've written an average of 1,047 words a day. That's like my journal writing when I first arrived in Poland and everything -- everything -- fascinated me endlessly.
Of course, I have cheated a few times: I included long quotes from books I'm reading, in part because I was honestly interested in writing a little something about them, in part (at least once) because I just wanted to reach that arbitrary number (like I just did in this paragraph). One thousand words. At least. Every day.
I can't possibly keep that up. The quarantine is helping with that. But daily posts? Could I make it a full year? Probably. Will I? No idea.