the boy
Looking Glass Sunset
Conestee Re-Visit
Fall Soccer
Evening Walkathon
Saturday
Helene-Free Friday
We are fortunate indeed that I could even think of titling today’s update “Helene-Free Friday.” I guess it’s not entirely accurate: the Boy and I did go out and get an enormous bit of wood that we’ll use as our chopping block in the future, but other than that, Helene didn’t impact our day that much.
Other than the fact that we still have friends family staying with us.
Of course, we’re more than glad to help those we love, but it does come with certain advantages to us: three Polish women can make a batch of pierogi (we had leftover mashed potatoes from last night — what else would we do with them?) in almost no time at all.
Most of the evening, though, we spent getting ready for our Chicago trip. We fly out at 6:30 tomorrow morning and arrive back here at 9:30 Sunday. We’ve got our walking tour planned for tomorrow,
and Cocia M is ready to take E for his early game tomorrow morning.
Tuesday After the Storm
Our street has been blocked since Friday morning when Helene took down the tree I’d expected to fall for at least five years.
“When are they going to take care of that?” L asked. “When are they going to get rid of that tree,” E asked. The answer was simple, like so many things in Helene’s wake: “I don’t know.”
We kept reminding them about fortunate we are: we had power back the same day we lost it. We never lost water. We have a home that “flooded” with about two inches of water at most, and in the basement, where we’d already prepared for just that much flooding.
Today, though, the linesmen began working in our neighborhood. They took care of the broken power pole behind our house and cleared the tree blocking our road (though that was the city’s work, I guess).
And we decided it was time to do some exploring. We headed back along the creek that we’ve always called our adventuring area. There was a waterfall there that spilled over some rocks and enormous roots of two trees that towered over everything.
Those two trees, however, were casualties of Helene. Minor casualties, to be sure: they were tall enough to take out a bit of fencing in a backyard on our street, but that’s nothing compared to the death toll that’s in the Carolinas.
Heading back home, we noticed another change: without the enormous tree that was hanging over our street (and the blocking our street), our street looks a lot different.
It’s not the only thing in the south that looks different thanks to Helene.
Reminders
The dump truck was a highlight of a birthday some years ago — his fifth? sixth? seventh? It was all he was dreaming of, and he loved it so.
Then he outgrew it, and K thought of using it for a planter. She had a potted plant in it, replaced every now and then, for a couple of years.
Now it sits by the side gate of our fence, neglected and forgotten until I walk into the yard, happen to glance back down.
Game Day
Hike
We headed to Paris Mountain State Park today for a warm-up hike for the coming fall hiking season. E and I, we prefer mountain biking. K enjoys it as well, but she prefers hiking, and she’s got a goal for this season: the Dismal Loop. Today’s hike was much less daunting:
We tried to talk the Girl into going with us, but she was intent on studying at the library. Of all of us, she definitely has the most negative opinion of hiking.
We’ve been to this lake several times, and we’ve even got pictures of L tottering about the place as a toddler.
The Boy managed fine, but he’s insisting that he’s outgrown these hiking boots — which he wore daily just this summer at Scout Camp. Is it possibe? And they’re the Girl’s boots, not his own boots.
Two signs of how our kids are changing: our daughter elects to go study at the library (I’m sure there was a fair amount of socializing as well — that’s how I studied at the library in high school), and our son is approaching full size with alarming rapidity, with a full-size appetite developing and a full-size teenage attitude emerging.
We decided to come head back next Sunday, and the Boy and I will ride while K takes the dog for a walk. The Boy, by the way, now rides K’s mountain bike whenever he gets the chance.
So that means we’re also looking for yet another bike for him. He’s not quite outgrown his bike physically, but he’s already putting demands on it that the poor bike can’t handle. He’s broken a chain once and gotten more pinch-punctures than I care to recall.
Once we got back and had some dinner, K did what she always does: she found some chore or other she felt she should have accomplished ealier and gets to work.
I graded articles of the week for my honors kids and snapped a picture of K, noticing once I’d converted it to black and white how awful our front yard looks.
Soup
Polish cuisine, in my experience, is centered around soups. I’m not a culinary expert or anything of the kind, so this is undoubtedly my personal preference coming to the fore: what has always caught my eye (and my tastebuds) in Polish cooking has been the soups.
Barszcz z uszkami is a treat beyond treats: we only have it once a year because the uszki are so time-consuming. It’s one of E’s favorites.
Żurek is such an odd-ball dish for Americans: soup made from a base of fermented rye flour? How weird. And how utterly delicious. It’s one of L’s favorites.
Ogorkowa? Pickle soup? “Get out!” was my first reaction. Who the hell makes soup out of pickles?! It’s absolutely perfect.
K likes most Polish soups, but she probably agrees with L and E that a simple rosół is the best. Babcia always makes it for us as our first dish in Poland, and a gentle, easy broth like that is the perfect thing after traveling.
And then there are the other: koperkowa, chłodnik, kapuśniak — the classics. But there are a couple of soups that stand above them all for me: flaczki (not because I love it so much — I do, but it’s not a favorite — but because I only get it in Poland: K absolutely is not a fan) and my hands-down favorite, kwaśnica. Not so much a Polish soup as a regional highlander soup.
We usually stick to soups in the winter and give them a break in the summer: having the stove on that long really warms up the house, and we want lighter meals in the summer. Except for rosół and koperkowa (none of us is really a chłodnik fan), the soups disappear.
Until the Girl asks K to fix that one soup — you know, with the potatoes and bacon bits.
And so we had for dinner a soup I have always thought of as a winter soup.
“We should do kwaśnica,” I will say some time in October or November.
“No, it’s not cold enough yet,” comes the reply.
But all our Girl has to do is ask for kwaśnica, and it can be 90 degrees outside, and K will not hesitate.
Saturday
Fall 2024 Soccer Season Starts
Backyard Badminton
First Day 2024
Last year’s first day — exactly one year ago — was a little strange. In here, I wrote it was a good day, but that was not entirely true. My two on-level classes were, in a word, hyper. Several students were immediately chatty, immediately disruptive, and there were several more students who fed into that. There was a bit of attitude at times, and while I tamped it all down quicky, it didn’t seem to bode well for the rest of the year.
I was right.
Last year’s eighth grade was tough. We’d heard they’d be tough from sixth-grade teachers; we’d heard they’d drive us to insanity from seventh-grade teachers; and we saw the difference immediately.
Most eighth-grade classes are pretty calm at first. Most eighth-grade students are reasonably relaxed those first days, trying not to push boundaries, trying to make a decent first impression. Those kids (rather, many of them) did not do this. And it was a harbinger of things to come.
“This year’s kids are better,” everyone said. We met them all today, and I would have to agree: a night-and-day difference.
One less stress.
Our kids started school with the usual excitement: the Girl is starting her senior year (how in the world is that possible?) while the Boy is starting seventh grade (how in the world is that possible?).
“Enjoy your last first day of school,” I said to her, though that’s not quite accurate. She’s planning on going into bio-engineering, and she’s already accepting/planning on getting a doctorate, so she has plenty more first days of school.
As for the Boy? A snippet of a conversation from a couple of weeks ago says it all: “You have to pay for college?! You have to pay to sit in school?!”
Band concert
Here’s a video of the Boy’s spring band concert.
Saturday
K spoils us — she really does. We all get up to freshly made racuchy topped with homemade blueberry preserves. Why? Because we asked for it? No — because K just wanted to do something nice for us.
In return, L trimmed some of the hedges at the side of the house. To be honest, it wasn’t really in return: K asked her, and L obliged. I’m not even sure she had any of the racuchy because got up late and ended up going out for lunch with her friend.
“But I’ll gobble them up later,” she assured me.
They’re still in the fridge.
Still, the Girl did the trimming, and even put aside her teenager I-know-everything-why-in-the-world-are-you-explaining-this-ness and let K walk her through what she wanted.
In the afteroon, Ciocia M came for a visit (her girls — L’s and E’s cousins for all intents and purposes — are still in Polska) and we went for a walk in our favorite park.
A lovely day, in other words.
In the evening, we watch some replays of Olympic events — beach volleyball, swimming, gymnastics, the individual time trial, and some tennis.
Friday Insanity
I’ve had the matchingtracksuits.com domain registered through the same company for as long as the website has existed, which is around 19 years or so. I’ve had the actual website hosted at a few different providers, but for the last few years, I’ve used Host Gator because their cloud VPS hosting is a good value for all I do online. I also have my school site hosted here (ourenglishclass.net) as well as a Moodle installation for class content (no URL provided because only students have access). I decided it’s about time to move the domains to the same company that provides the hosting (it made sense to keep everything consolidated), so a week ago, I began the process of changing domain registrars for two of the three domains we have (kingary.net being the third). It finally went through today, and much to my surprise, it broke the two websites. Completely. And totally.
So I spent most of the day going through using phpMyAdmin to move all the necessary records from one MySQL database to another. One of the tables has 519,000 rows. Another table has a more modest 49,736. But the catch is this: I had to do massive search-and-replace operations on every table to make sure it would continue working when moved everything to the new database that now runs this site.
The upshot is this: while the site might not look all that different than it did 24 hours ago, what’s going on under the hood is completely different. It still uses WordPress, to be sure, but it’s a totally different installation in a totally different directory with a totally different database.
That was the day portion of Friday.
The evening was so much better. We took K out for her birthday dinner: she chose pho, which we all love. When we came back home, we played a family game, something we’ve never played before: a Polish game called Pytaki.It’s likely made with younger children in mind, but the premise is as simple as can be: there’s a bag of questions from which you choose a random question and then talk about it. They’re questions that show you how well you know the other people (one for K was, “What is the best way to make the person on your right happy?” she answered immediately: “Cigar and whiskey.”) or give you a chance to share a little about yourself (“What’s your favorite movie.”) Some where about family history, like “How did your parents meet?” A lovely game that we played for an hour and led to a lot of much-needed laughs.
Sequence
“Let’s play a family board game tonight!” the Boy declared. The Girl was at track practice, and the three of us were going to head out for a mountain biking adventure before it began raining. But the Boy still wanted to do something together.
He wanted Monopoly (as always); we agreed to play Sequence.
It’s a game we’ve played a lot over the years, and somewhere, I have a picture (and a post) of us playing it with Nana and Papa.
Perhaps this will be a game we play together when the kids come back home for a visit…