The Case of the Missing Hat

Tabitha has her hat back.

A while ago she came into the possession of a knitted set of hat and mittens, and she has loved them ever since. She especially loves the hat, since it has pompoms top and bottom that she can pull on to get the hat off, put it on, and generally just pull on for the sake of pulling on. These pompoms are so special that the cat hasn't eaten them yet. Yeah, they're that cool. It's a dream hat, all the way around.


This hat and mitten set is her default cold weather gear, and when they get wet and have to sit in front of the heater vent all day because she forgot to take them out of her backpack when she got home from school so she can't wear them to school the next day, well, in that situation the world just has bones. Big bones, right in the air, that get caught in her throat and make everything just sad and grey and lifeless.

Don't you hate when that happens?

So you can imagine the consternation here at the family mansion when it was discovered that sometime Friday, the hat went AWOL. She had it at school for the Third Grade Musical. She had it at the McDonalds for our celebration. She did not have it at home.

We searched the car. We searched her backpack. We searched all of the usual places that lost winter gear slinks off to, but no luck. I even called the McDonalds, and was told by some junior manager that nobody had turned anything in - why, he was staring at the lost and found box even as he spoke, and it was empty.

As was Tabitha's world.

Lesson: do not trust the word of junior managers, for they are lazy and deceitful even in cases involving children, for which they should be covered in molasses and locked in a tanning booth with nothing to do but develop a thin, flaky crust and think about how much they itch.

Not that I have strong opinions about this sort of thing.

I stopped by the McDonalds on Monday on the off chance that Mr. Junior Manager was lying, and I spoke with the cashier - you know, someone who does actual work - and he instantly retrieved the hat from where it had been since Friday.

So Tabitha is now happy, and the world no longer has bones. We like those days.

Update 2/25/09 4:24pm

I am hanging out with Lauren.


[Lauren wanted you to know this, and typed it herself.]

On Watching the President's Speech

I actually watched the President speak last night.

It has been more than a decade since I voluntarily watched a US President give a speech. Clinton just got repetitive toward the end, particularly as the Republicans got so entangled in useless mudslinging (what do I care what he did in his spare time? That's Hilary's problem, not mine) that he could do nothing but address or avoid those issues, and as for the last guy, well, I'm not a great fan of being lied to. George W. Bush's relationship to reality was so strained that I didn't trust him to tell me the time, let alone lay out plans for my country.

All I can say is that I am really glad to have a President who is not actively harmful, for a change. I have no idea of Obama's ideas will work or not, but I am not afraid for my children the way I was during the Bush regime.

I was also impressed with the fact that Obama didn't really try to hide anything. He came right out with the basic problem we've had for the last thirty years - we want it all and we don't want to pay for it. There has been way too much emphasis on tax cuts and not enough on paying for the services we use - services like the military (good to see Obama's going to put the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan back on the accounting books, so we might actually get some handle on just how far into debt the Bush regime has driven our children), like education, like infrastructure, like social programs, and so on. If we want services, we should pay taxes to support them. If we don't want to pay taxes, we should cut out the services. We have a responsibility to ourselves, our children and our nation to behave like grown-ups. The agenda set by our leaders since 1980 has ignored this responsibility.

And we have let them get away with it. Worse, many of us have actively abetted it.

There was a time when you knew where the parties stood regarding taxing and spending. Democrats wanted to tax and spend - to provide services, and raise the taxes to pay for them. Republicans wanted to not tax and not spend - to get the government out of the service industry and lower taxes accordingly. You could argue over which one of these positions was better for the country, but they were both responsible, grown-up positions to hold.

I have no idea where the Democrats stand on this issue today and I rather suspect that they don't either, but the Republican view since 1980 has been crystal clear: not tax, but spend like a drunken sailor.

Oh, I could put all kinds of statistics in here - my personal favorite being the graph of the national debt as a percentage of GDP, which declined steadily under both Democrats and Republicans from WWII to 1980, rose dramatically under Reagan and Bush the Elder, began to decline again under Clinton, and then shot up astronomically under Bush Lite - but the bottom line is this: Republicans no longer have any moral right to speak about fiscal responsibility.

I will reserve my judgment as to whether Democrats do or not.

But the next time I hear a "conservative Republican" complaining about how much debt the current stimulus package will get us into - the package that is being put into place in order to try to address the economic collapse caused by a decade of "conservative Republican" economic non-policy - I am going to get a big bag, fill it with one shiny agate marble for every $100 that the "conservative Republican" Bush administration added to the national debt, and drop it on their hypocritical little noggin.

Because it would make me feel good, that's why.

It was a good speech, and - unlike the drumbeat of irresponsible commentary emitted by the lunatic right - I wish all success to Obama. He's the only President we've got.

The Code of the Snowblower

Winter is back.

The nice springtime temperatures that we enjoyed only so recently disappeared almost as soon as the words I wrote about them hit the internet, and it became February In Wisconsin once again. Now it is, after all, February in Wisconsin, so there is a certain amount of appropriateness to that. But it's been a long winter, and not even the girls are interested in having it hang around anymore.

And then it snowed Friday night. Five more inches of winter, stacked up on our driveway, demanding to be removed.

The Brotherhood of the Snowblower rides again.

I didn't own a snowblower until I moved to Wisconsin. I married into one, just as I married into a cat and a lifelong commitment to IKEA - it was a package deal. When we lived in our apartment, the snowblower was sort of an extra. I was younger and my back was stronger. Our driveway was just big enough for one car, and the sidewalk was narrow - it could all be handled with shovels. But with the house and its acres of driveway, I have come to appreciate the virtues of the snowblower. And understand the Code that goes with it.

The Brotherhood of the Snowblower has certain rules.

For one thing, there are time constraints. One does not haul out the snowblower before 7am on school days or 9am on weekends, or after 8pm, without risking the Wrath of the Neighbors. This you do not want to do, because of the sidewalk issue.

The sidewalk issue is one of those agile little dancing maneuvers that guys go through when they want to be nice but not too nice - kind of like the annual ritual one does when buying Christmas presents at the office. You want to get something that says, "I like working with you," or at least, "You don't make my life any more miserable than it already is because I'm working here, and I appreciate that." You don't want to get anything that says anything more than that, though, such as "Let's socialize outside of the office!" or "Let's see what interesting things we can photocopy after hours!" It's a fine line.

The sidewalk issue works like that. You want to be nice to your neighbors, and the City requires sidewalks to be clear after a certain amount of time, so if you're out there with the snowblower, you can just keep going down the block and get your neighbor's sidewalks as well. If you like your neighbor, that is, and if the snow is not too, too deep - there is a certain calculus of effort that goes into it, and if you have just a shovel you are excused from this entirely. When you do this snowblowing, your neighbor is thereby obligated to perform the same service for you, if the opportunity arises. Unless prior arrangements are made, it is considered bad form to make a point of always being the first one out there and getting your neighbor's walk all the time, as this creates an intolerable social-debt burden on the neighbor.

Also, you don't want to do more than his sidewalk, as this starts edging you into "photocopy" territory.

Snowblowers are also easily communalized in the event of large storms or mechanical failure. It is bad neighborliness to refuse the use of one's snowblower to a neighbor, even one you don't like much, if your own snowblowing is done. Like borrowing someone's car, though, the snowblower should be returned with a full tank of gas even if it didn't have one when you got it.

Turning your snowblower into a virility substitute is considered juvenile. That's what automobiles are for. Just get the snow off the walk, thank you.

Snow should be kept on your own property if possible, or in the street. Piling it up on your neighbor's property is okay if you get permission. If a new neighbor moves in, the old permissions still apply unless otherwise negotiated.

You never knew this stuff was so complicated. What do people in milder climates do with all the time they don't spend learning these rules?

Another Opening, Another Show

The big third grade musical was held today, down at Not Bad President Elementary, and it was a hit.

These things are always crowded, which is a good sign since it means that the families think it's worthwhile to spend their time watching their kids perform. You have to worry about a school where these shows get no audience. But the gym at NBPE is always stuffed to the gills with eager family members, most of them seated on the folding chairs in the middle of the room, but more than a few of them standing in Photographer's Row in the back. If I could have gotten the video camera to work, I'd have been there myself. It's nice to have this kind of audience show up, even if it does mean having to hire a Sherpa and a dogsled to get from where you parked to the school. Sherpas have to eat too, I guess.

Not that I couldn't also use the exercise.

Kim and I arrived separately, me having spent the day pounding my head against the requirements of On-Line U and Kim spending her day at Home Campus here in town. I got there first, staked out some seats, and went to collect Lauren from kindergarten - because you know that if Tabitha is performing, Lauren wants to see.

And Tabitha was indeed performing. She was one of the many narrators, and had been practicing her lines for months. All of the third graders had been doing that - the exuberant singing that filled our basement during Tabitha's birthday party last month was most of the score of today's performance, although this time we got to see the gestures that went along with it.

The kids filed in, the principal said a few inaudible words of welcome, and the show started! There was dancing, there was singing, and there was - of course - narration. Narration of the highest order.

Between Tabitha and Lauren, we pretty much have the market cornered on Narration.

She did a very good job up there, despite later protestations of fear and dislike - she marched up, said her lines clearly (and only her lines - earlier there was some concern that since she had memorized the lines of the other narrator in her pair she would say them too, but this Did Not Occur) and got back into place without knocking anyone down - a trick when the risers are that closely packed.


We all went out to McDonald's for pie afterward. There is no celebration like pie, even if it isn't much like pie at all.

Good work, Tabby. We're proud of you.

Got You On My Mind

Today would have been my grandparents' 70th wedding anniversary.

I'm not entirely sure why I remember this fact. We generally don't celebrate anniversaries much in my family, not even our own. February 18th was almost always a quiet day. The only one of my grandparents' anniversaries that I remember doing anything for, even so much as sending a card, was their 50th.

And my, wasn't that a shindig - a giant party at one of their favorite restaurants, complete with scores of people I was told I was related to. I'd never met most of them before, to my knowledge, and I haven't seen any of them since, but we had a grand time anyway.

As the oldest grandchild, I was drafted to be The Escort for my cousin Paula, who fit quite well into Nana's wedding dress. Keith told me about this on the drive over. "Didn't anyone tell you?" he asked. Well, no, as a matter of fact, nobody did. Oh well. Good thing my role - as with that of any groom at a real wedding - was simply to stand relatively straight and try not to do anything to distract people from the lady in white.


There were a lot of pictures taken that day - a LOT of pictures, even by my inflated standards - but my favorite was one someone snapped of Nana and Pop Pop at about the moment Paula and I emerged. It's not a great picture by most standards - dark and a bit too full of people to have any real focus. Nana has her head turned, looking at Pop. Pop just looks starstruck, lost in memory.


I really love that picture.

They were married for 61 years. Tabitha and Lauren know them as characters in stories, faces in photographs, but I remember them as my grandparents.

Happy Anniversary, Nana and Pop.

Wheels, wheels, wheels.

I am just astonished at how much I drive.

This year I really don't have to go anywhere, which is a shift from where I was twelve months ago. Back then, I was teaching at Far Away Campus, which was - as advertised - far away. It was a 93-mile commute each way, which meant that I was driving nearly 600 miles per week just to get to work and back, never mind all the other stuff you have to do in a town that has no appreciable public transportation system. I was at the gas station three times a week. They knew me there, and we'd sort of grunt at each other in fellowship. It was 5:45am when I walked in, usually, and that was about all we could manage. But it was a routine, and those are nice.

Now that I'm not doing that drive anymore, my driving has decreased. As it should. But even so - I now teach at the campus where Kim teaches, a mere seven miles from home, and I only do that twice a week. My other jobs either require me to go back to that campus, or work from home.

Yet I put over 200 miles a week on my car.

I don't really see how to change that. The girls have to get to and from school, and for long and complicated reasons involving my former status as a Fully Employed Person, the school they're in is not walkable from here. Food has to be purchased from the grocery store. And so on. It's not like I'm taking long Sunday drives about the countryside. The countryside is grey these days, and has never really been all that much of an attraction anyway. Now if it had used book stores, then that would be different. But all it has is nature, and even for nature buffs it can't be all that interesting at highway speeds.

It's a quandary.