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Day 75: Awards

Friday 29 May 2020 | 0 Comments

Today was the last day of the school year. Were it a normal year, we would have had three more half days. They're useless for instruction: we've already completed grades, and what can you do with half days? Students clean out their lockers, sign each other's yearbooks, have field day (or in eighth grade's case, eighth-grade day, which differs from field day only insofar as the PTSA feeds the kids at the end of it all), and sundry end-of-the-year things. I use that time usually to pack up my room: I have lots of kids, empty boxes, and books -- they make short work of what would take me a couple of hours. Were it a normal year -- but it wasn't, and three half-days of online instruction when a normal day of online instruction means thirty minutes of work per class -- well, it just doesn't make sense, and much to my surprise, the district realized that and basically thought like teachers for a change.

The Boy's teachers had an awards day Google Meet -- a very sweet thing for them to do. They recognized academic achievements like the A/B honor roll. When they began talking about it, I asked E if he thought he as on it.

"I don't know."

Indeed, I didn't either. I knew he'd struggled mightily with a few things, and he was able to finish tests only because the teachers allowed him extra time. "I have to pay for it with less time on the playground, because that's when I finish," he once explained, "but that's okay."

But there was his name on the list, and there was a big smile on his face. High fives from everyone.

Is it a bad thing that I honestly had no idea whether or not he'd made the honor roll? I don't think so: in second grade, grades appear for the first time. Everyone's getting used to them. They're not meaningless, but they're not all that important, so I never really worried about his grades. I don't quite think it was the same for K, but she never made a B (or 4 in the Polish system) even in her worst nightmares, so she put a little more weight on the grades. And to be fair, aiming high is always a good habit to develop. It's not that I wanted him to settle. It's just -- well, it was second grade. I don't remember a thing from second grade.

At the end of the program, they gave every single student a special award: most likely to -- superlatives, in other words. E won "Most likely to win an episode of Survivor." The other day during a Google Meet, E showed everyone his survival kit and told them a little about our adventures. That was what stuck in the teachers' minds, and it was a cute award that just made E's day.

What superlative would I give him? Sometimes, with his sensitive nature and keen sense of right and wrong, I think he's most likely to have his heart broken in as many ways as one can imagine. He sometimes gets so frustrated with others' unwillingness to follow basic rules. "That's just not nice!" he concluded many stories about some tragedy that befell him in school. This is not to say that I assume he's always an angel: many of our conversations involved me trying to help him see how he could have been nicer. Still, he's a very by-the-book fellow, and it upsets him that others aren't.

Maybe "Most likely to brighten someone's day." He can sure do that, but that requires a bit of familiarity. He's not entirely comfortable approaching, say, a lonely kid on the playground that he doesn't know but who might need someone to play with. The unknown -- he's not keen on that.

Maybe "Most likely to be an engineer." He does love building things.

Or just "Most likely to make his family proud."

As for the Girl, she got the good news that she definitely made it into geometry and English I Honors. That means she'll be taking the course that I will teach exclusively next year. Were she a student at our school, that might cause problems: I wouldn't want to stress of grading my own daughter.

For me, what's more impressive is the geometry. I didn't take geometry until tenth grade. She's two years ahead of me.

She was worried about the possibility of not making one or both of those classes. Being a teacher and knowing how things often work behind the scenes, I knew it was unlikely. But I also knew that no "behind the scenes" would be necessary: she's worked very hard this year, and she's make sure that her grades are not just good grades but reflections of her actual understanding. She and K spent many an hour going over this or that algebra trick, and it all paid off.

So congratulations to both our kids!

Day 71: Playing and Counting

Monday 25 May 2020 | 0 Comments

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.

Day 1: Achievement Gap

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.

Day 70: Flood

Sunday 24 May 2020 | 0 Comments

It started raining around two this afternoon, first sporadic rain with fat, lazy drops, then steady rain, then torrential rain.

In the past, such rain worried me because of flooding in our basement. With the leak in our roof, I now have different concerns. As the storm grew and the wind blew harder, I wonder whether or not I'd secured the two tarps protecting our roof well enough to keep them in place with such a storm. There was really nothing I could do about it at the time, of course: it would not have been remotely safe to head onto the roof in a storm to put down additional weight to keep the tarps from flying off.

In the end, my worries were for nothing: the tarps stayed in place; the sump basin didn't even have much water in it, so the basement wasn't even close to being threatened.

Yet we still had a lake in our backyard: the creek didn't crest but we had essentially one big puddle in the lowest part of our yard, so after we finished playing a game ("Ticket to Ride" -- I never play to win; I play to block other players -- you can't lose if you're not trying to win!), E and I struck out to see what was going on in the neighborhood.

We weren't prepared for what we found:

To begin with, there is a house basically in a hole that has an enormous backyard -- I thought it was a park when we first moved here.

The road that goes by it was closed because their yard, which is in reality just a drainage basin for the surrounding community, was completely flooded.

Completely.

So much so that the culvert under the road was completely submerged, creating a whirlpool as the water tried to drain.

We stood in the road looking at the whirlpool, right at the edge of the water. We're past the time of E asking questions like, "Daddy, what would happen if I fell in that water?" He knows. He likes to show he knows. "Boy, Daddy, if I fell in that..." and his voice trailed off for effect.

It gave me a little shudder, the shudder of a parent having nightmarish visions of the worst possible outcome. Once such thoughts enter my mind, it's hard to shake them. The Boy seemed to realize that. "Come on, Daddy, let's go back to the other side.

All that water -- undoubtedly the worst flooding we've seen there. It was still nothing compared to what we saw later, downstream. We walk by here almost every night -- it's K's favorite walk.

The creek that was forming the whirlpool earlier joins with another creek at this point, and the two completely covered the flat land around it.

We headed back home, still having fun on the way.

In the evening, we went for a walk to show the girls what it looked like. Of course, most of the water had subsided, but there was still enough to be impressive, and just enough to enjoy safely.

Day 69: Training, Cleaning, and Reading

Saturday 23 May 2020 | 0 Comments

Our pup has come a very long way. I thought, when we got her, that since she’s a border collie (smartest breed on the planet, right?), things would be easy. She’d be easy to train, easy to control (after all, you can get those dogs to do the most amazing tricks herding sheep), easy to house-break — just easy. But it turns out that BCs are too smart for their own good: it makes them a little stubborn at times. And that describes our Clover perfectly: stubborn, stubborn, stubborn. But we didn’t give up on her: we took her for some obedience training, we left her a couple of times for one-on-one days with a trainer, and for the last year, things have been going great.

Now, we have a few tricks with her.

You can, for instance, drop a piece of the most tempting meat in front of her and she’ll just sit down at it, shifting her gaze from the meat to you and back to the meat, a pleading look in her eye, and she won’t touch it until you tell her, “Eat.”
In the morning, you can open the door and tell her, “Siusiu,” and she’ll go out and immediately relieve her self and come back inside.
You can call her and she comes and sits beside you.
If you want her on the other side, just say “Other side” and she’ll switch sides.
You can tell her to stay and then kick ever her most beloved ball and she won’t go darting after it until you tell her “free” or “go get it” or “release.”
“Heel” means “heel.”
When you’re taking her for a walk and stop moving, she sits — sometimes immediately, but usually after a bit of hesitation. (There’s that stubbornness.)

For her birthday, though, we got her an agility course. The Girl began training her yesterday. It was fairly simple: she figured out that she had to jump over the bar, had to jump through the hoop. Easy-peasy. She looked up at L like she looks up at me when we go for a run: “Was that supposed to be a challenge or something?”

Today, the Boy got in on the fun. He had a little difficulty getting her to jump without a leash on her to guide her, but soon enough, he’d worked out his own way of bribing her with a little treat.

My Ántonia

I finished reading My Ántonia today — or rather, listening to it on Spotify. I first read that book in college, and it astounded me, particularly one quote: “Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” More than O, Pioneers! (the only other Cather book I’ve read), I really connected with the sense of nostalgia that pervades My Ántonia. That’s why I remember that quote almost a quarter of a century later: I read it shortly after some emotionally traumatic losses (not deaths, just losses) in my life, and I was wallowing in nostalgia about those lost relationships.

I had forgotten, though, about the ending:

This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

“What a little circle man’s experience is.” What a lovely notion, what a great truth.

Returning to Dickens

“What to listen to now?” I thought, as I finished the Cather novel early in the day and still had plenty of outside work to keep me occupied. Much of the morning I spent cleaning rocks. Yes, cleaning rocks. The drainage trough (for lack of a better term) I made at the base of our driveway has, over the years, become more and more clogged with dirt. Now instead of wicking water away from the drive, it just serves as a barrier and makes it puddle water. What’s more, with all that dirt, weeds had a great place to grow. So I pulled out all the rocks down to the landscaping fabric, washed the dirt off the rocks, and put them back. (Coronavirus quarantine has lent itself to long-ignored, not-necessarily-critical projects.) Anyway, I was still working on the rocks and the book finished.

Spotify is sort of hit-or-miss with audiobooks: there’s very little (that I’ve found) that’s relatively recent, and a lot of the older books are actually in translation — lots and lots of German audiobooks I’ve found.

When I lived in Poland, I had some difficulty finding affordable English-language books. Penguin Classis, though, were plentiful and relatively cheap. That’s how I read almost every Dickens book in the space of three years. There are a few that I never found, though, and I thought today might be a good day to return to Dickens.

I hadn’t really read him in almost twenty years. I teach Great Expectations some years to my English I Honors students, but that doesn’t really count: the last year I taught it (two years ago, I think), I didn’t even read it with the students.

So today I began Dombey and Son. I’d forgotten how clever and witty Dickens can be, and how gifted he can be at beginning a novel. Think of his most famous, A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Or my personal favorite Dickens beginning, which I’ve mentioned here before, Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Dombey, though, has a clever opening:

Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.

Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance, to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet. On the brow of Dombey, Time and his brother Care had set some marks, as on a tree that was to come down in good time—remorseless twins they are for striding through their human forests, notching as they go—while the countenance of Son was crossed with a thousand little creases, which the same deceitful Time would take delight in smoothing out and wearing away with the flat part of his scythe, as a preparation of the surface for his deeper operations.

Of course, Dickens can be tiring with all his subplots and sub-subplots (after all, the longer he stretched novels, which were always published in syndication in magazines, the more money he could make from a given book), but I’m thinking he’ll be a lot easier to listen to than read.

Day 68: Training Death and the Maiden for Exploring

Friday 22 May 2020 | 2 Comments

Death and the Maiden

My friend M grew up on a farm with his grandparents. His father passed away; I never really knew what happened to his mother. But from the time I met M, he lived with Ma and Pa as he called them, and as I came to call them.

Their farm was just outside the city limits, a place in the county that felt so different and distant from my suburban, cookie-cutter neighborhood that I felt I might be in a different state. In a different country.

We spent a fair amount of our time there shooting .22s and shotguns. We'd shot at birds and usually miss. We'd shoot at squirrels with the .22s and miss; we'd shoot at them with the shotguns and, well, it wasn't pretty. We were stupid -- what can I say?

One Sunday afternoon in 1990, just before I started my senior year of high school, Pa gave us a task. "There are raccoons that are just givin' the garden a hard time. How about sittin' up on the hill above the garden and seein' if you boys can take care of the problem?" He needed to say no more. We took a bottle of Mountain Dew, Pa's double-barrel 16-gauge shotgun and Papa's bolt action 20-gauge (a bolt-action shotgun? really?) and took positions on the slope just behind the garden.

About an hour before sundown, the raccoons made their way into the garden. We waited until they were among the cornstalks, reasoning that they would sustain the least damage from stray pellets, then fired away. Papa's shotgun had a two-shell clip and held one in the barrel. I discharged those in short order then reloaded as quickly as I could. M fired one then the other barrel, broke the gun over his knee, tossed out the spent shells, and was firing again before I knew it. I think we reloaded twice. M might have reloaded thrice.

All told, we killed three raccoons that afternoon and earned the gratitude of both Ma and Pa. And we had a hell of a good time.

I've long ago lost touch with M. I last saw him in 1998 during the summer I came home after two years in Poland and one more year waiting. He'd made some bad decisions, and the place of our meeting was something out of an O. Henry short story. After that, we corresponded a few times, but the last we communicated was in late 1999.

That was almost thirty years ago now, and I still think back on that day fondly. Not because of the death we dealt but because of the innocent friendship lost. I don't feel guilty for killing those 'coons, though: they were doing real damage to the garden, and we took care of the problem in the country-folk way. Sure, we probably could have trapped them and released them somewhere else, but Pa was not a sentimental man, and he would have regarded that as a waste of time.

Years later, I thought of this day when I read the poem "The Early Purges" by Seamus Heaney:

The Early Purges

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, 'the scraggy wee shits',
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
Of the pump and the water pumped in.

'Sure, isn't it better for them now?' Dan said.
Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens' necks.

Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, 'Bloody pups'. It makes sense:

'Prevention of cruelty' talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

Today, the Boy made his first kill. Birds were in our blueberry bushes, and the Boy had his bb gun. Somehow, he was close enough that one shot dropped a robin that was making an evening snack of our still-unripe berries.

The Girl was furious about it. She was literally in tears, shouting at him that he had no right to kill an innocent bird that had done nothing to us.

"In this time of the pandemic, we have to share," she muttered as we ate dinner -- fish our neighbor caught a couple of weeks ago when the governor let boat ramps open again before reclosing them due to a general failure to follow the newly-established guidelines.

I didn't point out the obvious irony, nor did I point it out when she popped chicken nuggets into the toaster oven for her evening snack.

Training

The other day was Clover's birthday. I think it was her birthday. L insists -- positively and passionately insists -- that it is the 21st of May. Or the 20th. Or maybe it was the 19th. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about her certainty. But we celebrated Clover's third birthday this week nonetheless by getting her an agility course.

She's already got a few new tricks up her, well, I guess tangled in the long hair on her hindquarters. (Cliches sometimes break down, I suppose.)

Exploring

E talked K into doing a little exploring after dinner. While K was still in her good clothes.

He was keen to show her how the plastic box his survival gear came in is, in fact, watertight.

Day 66: Morning Ignorance of the Below and Above

Wednesday 20 May 2020 | 0 Comments

Morning

The morning, post-breakfast ritual during this time of lockdown and isolation:

The Boy works on his schoolwork. We try to pace it: whatever’s going to be more challenging for the day we tackle first. Lately, things have been fairly balanced: everything has been much easier, in short. Still, old habits persist, and he’ll start fussing if he gets the slightest bit frustrated some mornings.

Today, we made it through everything fairly quickly with minimal fussing.

Papa often takes a nap. He doesn’t necessarily intend to take a nap — he’s just comfortable, full, content, watching television or listening to a book, and what else is there to do?

K works on emails for her real estate clients. She’s trying to work two jobs now. We all tell her that she needs to focus on one or the other. We know which one she’d like to focus on. We also know that that job doesn’t have a set pay schedule.

I am usually either helping the Boy or working on my own school work downstairs. Or as in this case, taking pictures.

The Girl — well, she does what a teenager does best.

Below

Ever since we had our first flood in the basement several years ago, a heavy rainfall makes me just a bit nervous. I look at the puddles forming in the backyard. I check the weather. I duck into the crawl space to look in the sump pump basin. I repeat the cycle. I worry, worry, worry. Until our big flood in February, I’d gotten to the point, though, that I really fretted very little. It had gotten a little wet but it hadn’t flooded flooded. Still, I’m always probably going to be a little worried about water coming up from below, the hydrostatic pressure building to the point that it forces water through the smallest of cracks and starts filling our basement again. It will happen. And though I have taken steps to remediate the situation, there are no more steps I can take that don’t involve massive work and a sizeable fiscal commitment.

Option 1

Our neighbor up the street had a drainage system put in his basement recently: around the entire parameter of the basement, workers busted up the concrete and the applied perforated drain pipes that lead to a central sump pump. It was a five-figure job.

That might be the next step if the basement continues flooding. It’s the type of job that, having the summer off every year, I’d be keen on tackling myself. At the very least, I could rent a jackhammer and bust up the concrete and dig down to the footer, cutting the cost significantly, I would think. Or at least hope.

Option 2

The other option: when we pull out the landscaping front of the kids’ bedrooms, I could dig down to the footer there and re-seal the foundation, perhaps installing a French drain system there while everything is dug up.

And Above

I was playing pool with a friend in the basement probably almost decade ago when water started pouring onto the pool table. It turned out that the shower pan in the master bathroom had failed.

Count Me Out, In

We ended up renovating the whole bathroom as a result.

There was one other time when the water came from above instead of below: somehow, the water came in between the upstairs deck and the door sill and started dripping from the top of the door in the basement. I never figured out what caused that, but I caulked well around the door and it never happened again.

But most of our experience with water entering the house comes from below.

But tonight, the Boy was getting ready for his bath when he looked up and asked, “Daddy, is that a leak?”

Shit.

I went to get a chair so I could reach up and feel the dampness I knew would be there. Still, as I walked to the Boy’s room and returned with the chair, I found myself thinking, “Please, oh please just be a dark spot on the ceiling that I’ve never noticed though we’ve lived here almost thirteen years.”

I looked carefully at where the stain was and realized quickly what had likely happened: the roof vent flashing had somehow failed. Perhaps it had gotten cracked. Perhaps it was torn. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

“Maybe it’s just running down the sewer vent,” I thought.

I climbed on the roof to see if anything was amiss. “Perhaps the hail we had a few days ago damaged something and insurance will pay for an entire re-roofing job,” I thought both hopefully and sickeningly. Examining the flashing, I couldn’t see any sign of compromise. We covered it with some plastic and hoped for the best.

Still, I needed to check in the attic to see just how bad the problem was.

I don’t really know if that’s bad or not. Part of me says, “That’s horrible: it’s bad enough that it’s saturated the ceiling sheetrock enough to make a stain.” And yet, I really don’t know.

So tomorrow we’ll call the insurance adjuster and a roofer to see what they say.

When I got back down and talked to K about what I found, the Boy discovered my boots and couldn’t resist.

Later in the evening, K thought the spot is damper than it was earlier. We decided to go all out: we brought out the two tarps we use for camping, overlapping one with the other so that water can run under the tarp, weighing the whole thing down with bricks and cinder blocks. And doing all this in a light rain. At 10:30.

Lightroom Revisit

In August 2003, K and I rode our bikes south through Slovakia to Hungary to spend a week in Budapest. When we returned, we rode to Sturovo, a town in southern Slovakia, where we caught a train to Zilina, where we waited for another train to Trstena, just across the border from where we lived in southern Poland. We had to wait in the Zilina train station for most of the night to catch the 5:00 a.m. train to Trstena. This guy was waiting for a train, too.

This is one I’m particularly pleased with the Lightroom reworking. The before-and-after shows how much of a difference it makes to do selective editing:

Day 62: Camping in the Backyard

Saturday 16 May 2020 | 0 Comments

We’ve gone camping as a family quite a few times: Stone Mountain, Deep Creek, Lake Jocassee, and Huntington Beach come immediately to mind. Memorial Day was always a great weekend to go camping, and we went most often to the beach. But then life got complicated, family got sick, schedules changed, and responsibilities grew so that now, even if there weren’t a pandemic to worry about, we would not be able to go camping as a family for quite some time. For how long? We really don’t know.

The Boy, though, wanted to go camping. So we did the obvious thing last night: we pitched a tent in our backyard and spent the night in it. There — camping.

Well, not quite. We took our pillows down with us. Somehow, we never remember to bring our pillows — or any pillows really — when we go camping.

Also, I went in to get E’s blanket in the middle of the night when I woke to find him only barely covered with the sleeping bag because he was sleeping under it instead of in it.

And we didn’t have to strike camp this morning. We just left it up, thinking we might go camping again.

Finally, and most significantly for me, I took a shower without flipflops this morning.

Yesterday afternoon, we also put up K’s new swing. It’s hanging a little wonky now, and I didn’t have a chance to figure out today why, but it’s there. And the dog even likes it.

As for today, other than the single picture from this morning, I never had occasion to take out the camera. Who wants to see pictures of bathrooms in the midst of weekly cleaning or the crawl space as I examine the water pipes to try to figure out why they’re banging and knocking?

Day 60: Eighth Birthday

Thursday 14 May 2020 | 0 Comments

A proper birthday has to start with a proper birthday breakfast and a phone call from Babcia. For E, this meant an omelette for breakfast. Never mind that this was only the second time he's ever had an omelet, a proper omelette, but he fell in love with it earlier this week, on Mother's Day, and decided that it was his favorite breakfast of all time. Making omelets though is a time-consuming task, so although I layered the sauteed onions, sauteed peppers, and bacon bits very carefully for the Boy, the rest of us got it all mixed up in scrambled eggs.

"I could have it that way, I guess," he confessed. "It's the same thing, just all mixed up."

The phone call from Babcia was a little less fluid. E is reticent to speak Polish, so although he understands everything Babcia says, he usually responds in English then turns to K, expecting a translation. Today Babcia tried to help him out, tried to ease his anxiety. She asked him simple questions like, "Are the flowers blooming?" or "What color are the flowers?" Yet he was still reluctant to speak Polish.

School today for him was relatively simple. At first, he wanted yesterday to complete as much of today's work in addition to yesterday's work as possible. But yesterday in the afternoon he decided that was not the best plan after all. He was ready for some free time. This meant of course that he had all the work for today to complete.

At the beginning of this quarantine, a day's worth of work was just that: a day's worth of work. The amount was greater than it is now, to be sure, but he fussed incessantly how about the frustrations he was feeling, about the difficulty of the math problems, about the length of the readings. We are half expecting such antics today, interspersed with cries of, "But it's my birthday. Why do I have to work on my birthday?" However, he plowed through his work with relative ease, making it through math, which was subtracting three-digit numbers from three-digit numbers, each problem requiring regrouping and then word problems, in less than fifteen minutes. He wrote two more chapters of his frog/toad book and was done.

In the afternoon, we headed back down to the spot where we'd caught and inadvertently killed a minnow yesterday. I thought perhaps we might have a repeat, feared it in some ways -- who wants to just go around killing little fish? Yet E was keen to try again. We did try again, and caught three fish. Two of them made it back to the water fine.

One of them -- well, we didn't quite hook him in the mouth but somehow hooked him through his body. He was already bleeding when we pulled him out of the water.

While we were down there, L came to the balcony and yelled across the yard, "You guys need to come back! Now!" At first, I was afraid that something had happened to Papa. Of late he's been spending afternoons on the deck wallowing in nostalgia by exploring songs he hasn't heard in decades, all thanks to Spotify.

Instead, we all got a pleasant surprise:

E's best friend's mother drove him by our house to wish the Boy happy birthday.

As for our celebration, we played a trick on him that Nana and Papa played on me a couple of times: give him something that's relatively worthless without the other item. Like a cable to hook up a laptop to something suggesting that it might work with an old laptop, then giving a new one as a surprise (a la Nana and Papa).

We gave him a tablet case and screen protector. He'd been asking for a tablet for some time, and we thought we'd see what would happen if he got only the empty shell. "You can keep and maybe you'll get a tablet next year," I suggested. "Oh, that's great," he said very calmly -- not really upset, not really thrilled.

Then, when he opened Papa's present, lo and behold -- an Amazon Fire, just for him.

Finally, there was the cake. L began working on the cake yesterday and decided to add to it today. A two-tiered cake, each with two layers.

The slices were impressive to say the least. K and I split one: she took the top tier, and I worked on the bottom one. The Girl is getting the flavors down -- she's still not thrilled with the presentation, though.

"Patience and practice," K said to her. Though perhaps not quite so much practice while we're all locked down.

Previous Years

Happy Mess Day

Second Time Around

Third Party

Celebration Day

Birthday

Fifth Birthday Party

Sports and Ice Cream

Seventh Birthday

Day 59: Morning Work Hooks the Companion

Wednesday 13 May 2020 | 0 Comments

Morning Work

Since I didn’t have much to do for school this morning, I took over the first part of E’s homeschooling adventure. Our first task: to write the first chapter or two of his book about frogs and toads. Six chapters will constitute the final product:

Introduction
Toads
Frogs
Similarities
Differences
Dedication

As we read, I saw the difficulties and frustrations lying ahead: when it would come time to write the book, he might fuss, “Now we’ll have to go back through the text again. We have to read it again!!” So I taught him a little trick as we read that I use with my students.

“As you’re re-reading, highlight facts you might want to rewrite in your own writing. Then put a number beside it to indicate which chapter you’ll use it in. When it comes time to write, then, you’ll just have to look at all the numbers for the chapter you happen to be working on.”

There are two reasons for this: first, it will help him with his writing later. That’s the most obvious way it assists him. Less obvious but more importantly, it helps him develop skills as a critical, analytic reader. My own students often have difficulty reading because they’re not reading for a particular reason. Giving kids a purpose as they read gives them a goal and a metric to measure comprehension and success.

As we read, E grew more confident about the whole process; as he began writing the first chapters, he realized the sense behind it all. That might lead to a little less fussing as he continues to work on the piece.

Hook

Mr. F, our neighbor, is a keen fisherman. He’s got a boat, countless rods and reels, and multiple tackle boxes filled with endless lures and hooks. Heading out to the lake regularly, he often comes home with enough fish for his family and some neighbors: he’s given us many, many pounds of fish over the year. He’s the type of fisherman that, as regards fishing equipment, if he doesn’t have it, it probably doesn’t exist.

The Boy often goes over to help Mr. F. He’s something of a third grandfather to E, which makes him really like a second grandfather since Dziadek passed before E was a year old and E knows him only from pictures.

When E and I discovered in the creek that runs behind our house a couple of pools that are deep enough for larger minnows -- some looking to be three or more inches long, maybe even four inches long -- I commented that they’re almost big enough actually to use a hook and bait. Recalling the little minnows we caught in Lake Jocassee with just a line, a hook, and some bread, I suggested that we could use a bamboo cane and make a real, old-fashioned playin’-hooky-to-go-fishin’ cane fishing pole.

After we were both done with school, we headed down, saw and net in hand. “I still want to try to net some minnow,” he explained. We found an adequately small cane and cut it after a bit of unsuccessfully netting attempts.

“Now we just need the line and a hook,” the Boy said as we headed back, adding as a sad afterthought, “but we don’t have any.”

“Why not ask Mr. F?” I suggested.

“Oh yeah!”

Then the real question as far as I was concerned: with Mr. F not out, he would have to go knock on the neighbors’ door, and I decided it was something he was going to have to do by himself. Would he do it?

“Just go knock on their door,” I said after he protested that Mr. F wasn’t outside at that moment.

“What if Mrs. P answers the door?”

“Just tell her that you have a favor to ask of Mr. F.”

He paused in thought. “Okay.”

When he came back, the Girl had joined us and was snooping about to figure out what was up. I explained. “Oh.” No protests about how awfully cruel it would be to catch a minnow with a hook. “With a hook!? Jabbed in its mouth?!” I could just hear her indignantly and incredulously asking.

When the Boy headed down for some fishing, I suggested that L might want to go with him. “Don’t let her talk you into letting her have the first turn because she will try to bamboozle you,” I warned.

He headed down by himself, though. I thought for a while that I should go with him at least to memorialize the moment photographically. Then I thought better of it: he needs some independence, and since he didn’t even ask me (with the explanation of being scared or worried about this or that) to go with him, I stayed behind.

He came back up a few minutes later, a scowl on his face as he stomped up the hill.

“Guess what?” he began, not waiting for a response. “I had one or two good tries and then the hook got stuck. When I tried to pull it out, the hook came off!” He plopped in a chair. “Now I can’t fish at all today!”

“Sounds like we might need to go get our own hooks,” I suggested.

More incredulity: “At the store?!” E is the most worried about cornavirus in our family. I think he’s convinced, despite our efforts to explain everything, that one can just get it, that it just lurks in the air waiting for unsuspecting victims.

In the end, we didn't have to go get more hooks: the Boy remembered he had one small hook still on his fishing pole, so we cut it off and tied it onto the cane pole. We took some bread from a dinner roll we had, rolled it back into dough, and put it on the hook.

Soon enough, we had a minnow.

But our catch-and-release plan was thwarted by the difficulty of removing a hook from such a small fish. In the end, something terribly traumatic happened to the poor fish as we were removing the hook, and it went belly up immediately upon release.

The Companion

Clover has become a companion dog. She doesn’t wander around, looking to find what she can get into. She doesn’t sneak off to try to get on the couch. She doesn’t (always) go off searching for a toy. She plops down next to someone and just relaxes. When we’re outside and L is, for instance, in our fort reading and Papa is on the deck listening to music (he’s become a real Spotify fiend), the pup moves from person to person, spending a little time by my side, a little time by Papa’s side, and a little time with L.

Another sign that she’s no longer a puppy.

Then she goes over to the fence just to antagonize the neighbors’ dog, so many not so much...

Day 55: The Swing, the Dog House, and the Bench

Saturday 09 May 2020 | 0 Comments

I don't know how it inevitably happens, but projects with me just seem to swell completely out of proportion from my original estimates. Sometimes it's simply that my estimates are wrong. No, that's most of the time. I tend to underestimate the time required because I tend to overestimate my skills. Today, though, my estimation of the time required to make K's Mother's Day present was just about dead on. True, it took me longer in the end, but that's because I decided to pull out the router and round over every edge. Why? Because I have a router and quite honestly don't have that many opportunities to use it.

I also decided as I was working to countersink all the screws and go back with wood filler and hide them all. That added a bit of additional time. But the raw building itself took just about as long as I anticipated.

What got me off track was not the time it took to make the bench but rather the time it took to gather the needed materials. The wood was the real trick.

I went to Lowe's expecting to be back fairly quickly. All I needed was a bit of additional chain for the swing, a few hooks to connect the swing to the chain, and some 2x4s for the framing of the swing. The chain took quite some time -- probably more than twenty minutes -- because I pressed the "Press here for assistance" button and no one came for what seemed like an eternity.

Finally, I was ready to pick up the lumber and haul it back to the in-store sawing station to have them cut the 96" studs down to 48" pieces that would fit in K's Rogue. The first trick was to find a lumber cart. I finally gave up looking for one, went to the cashier, paid for the hardware, took it out to the car, and returned with a lumber cart from the parking lot. I loaded my six 2x4s and headed to the cut station. Where I found a sign that read, "Saw not functioning."

I felt like I was in the film Nie Lubię Poniedzialku except that I was in Greenville not Warsaw and it was Saturday not Sunday.

I just left the cart there with the lumber on it. It was a somewhat crummy thing to do -- I could have at least taken the lumber back.

After dropping off the hardware at the house (because it was on the way), I headed to Home Depot. The saw there was completely functional. The studs I picked out, though, were not 96" but only 93". So when I told the shop assistant to cut them at 48", adding "I just need them in half-size pieces," he did just that: he put one end of the board on 48" and cut. And the resulting pieces were of a significantly different length. That's when I measured and saw they weren't 96". I could have checked. I didn't. I just sighed.

While all of this was going on, the Boy alternated between helping me and helping the Girl, who was painting the dog house and the bench.

In the evening, we watched Nie Lubię Poniedzialku. We've been trying to expose the kids to some of the classics, and we decided it was time for Poniedzialku. I love that film. It's probably my second-favorite Polish film, right behind Miś. The story, such as it is, is charming: we all laugh at the horrid Monday everyone is having even though none of their trials rise above irritation. There's no shadow of any real tragedy -- just the annoyance of plans going awry.

What I really love about the film, though, is the views of the Warsaw of the early 1970s. Just a quarter of a century after the Second World War, much of the city is still under construction, and what has been completed has the look of 60s communist architecture that was still prevalent in Warsaw when I arrived in 1996.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M2386VX0Po

Papa decided he'd watch the film with us. "There are no subtitles," we warned him, but he wasn't fazed. We explained critical dialogue, but most of it really didn't require a whole lot of explaining.

The Boy disagreed. "I don't get any of the funny parts, even when you explain them," he fussed.

Perhaps he'll find the next one we've planned a little more enjoyable: the classic Sami Swoi. We found it on Netflix DVDs, which means it will have subtitles. "Kargul, podejdź no do płota!"

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