A Visit to Wisconsin

My parents made it safely back home today, with no interesting stories to tell about their drive. This is good. Travel is not one of those things you want to be interesting until you arrive.

It was good to have them out here in Baja Canada. We ran them pretty hard, and everyone seemed to have a good time.

The day after the County Fair we headed up to Devil's Lake, which is a place of Great Natural Beauty to the point where even I am not completely oblivious to the fact. It is a big, heaping baseball bat o' beauty upside the head is what it is. It's where the glaciers stopped, and when they melted they simply dropped all the boulders straight down. So the whole thing ended up being a deep lake surrounded by hills made of house-sized rocks. It's really quite lovely. Plus the girls got to splash about for some time, and that is all to the good.


We spent the first part of Sunday at the Dancing Horses show.

If you've never seen the Dancing Horses, they're kind of hard to explain. They are at one of those odd touristy sort of zoo-like farms, the kind that have everything from camels to baby goats. You can see the bird show, or adopt a kitten, or ride around in the big wagon, but the main attraction is the horses.

These are some well-trained horses, let me tell you. Not that I would know, really - my knowledge of horses is limited to observations like, "My, but that's one big animal," which makes me about as much an expert on horses as I am on Namibian poetry - but they certainly did some impressive things.

You go inside to the arena - a small earthen circle surrounded by a couple of rows of seats - and for about an hour a squadron of light cavalry led by women in costumes runs routines for you, complete with all kinds of music and lights. Some of these routines apparently take years of training to get across to the horses - they're kind of like college students that way. Kim and the girls had seen this before, earlier this summer, when the Girl Scouts organized an expedition. It says something that Tabitha and Lauren were just vibrating waiting to see them again. After the show you can go up and pet the horses, if that's your sort of thing.


So if you ever come to southern Wisconsin, be sure to go see the Dancing Horses. Not saying. Just saying.

That afternoon Kim's parents came down and the girls had ALL FOUR GRANDPARENTS in one place! At one time! Can there be anything more exciting for a child? I think not. There was good food, good company, and a good time had by all. I hope that Tabitha and Lauren do as well in the in-law department as Kim and I did.

Next time, though, we're moving the big umbrella further away from the back steps, as the distance between the top of the railing and the bottom of the umbrella is just a bit too close, really.


On their last night here we went down to the local minor league baseball team, a place we are visiting more often these days. And what's not to like? The stadium seats about twelve people, so you can get right up close to the action. There are contests in between innings, often involving small children trying to navigate large objects around obstacles. The food is good and you can eat pretty well without taking out a second mortgage. And somewhere in there they play baseball. Granted, not quite Major League caliber baseball - somebody really out to enlighten our team as to the concept of a "cutoff man" - but baseball nonetheless.

It turned out to be a good game, too.

Our Local Heroes jumped out to an early lead only to lose it an inning or two later. But they hung on, and in the bottom of the eighth they got it back and won. Not bad for a team sitting in last place in their league, with a winning percentage some 200 points beneath the team they just beat. We've seen these guys win twice this season, which is twice more than we saw all of last year and a significant fraction of this year's total. Apparently our luck has turned. I ought to be playing the lottery more, I suppose.

One of the neat things about minor league games is that they are colorful. We've been sitting out by third base these last few games, and thus we have struck up an acquaintance with Kaptain K, whose main purpose in life seems to be to keep track of the strike-outs tossed by the home team's pitchers and commemorate them with laminated sheets of paper with giant K's printed on them that he velcroes onto the railing after each strike-out. It matters if the K is backwards, apparently - that means a called third strike, as opposed to a swinging third strike. Or perhaps that is the other way around. My head for baseball statistics pretty much peters out after you get past batting averages and won/loss records, and even batting averages can get pretty slippery once you get down to the details of what counts and what doesn't. I've been following baseball off and on since the mid-1970s, and even now I have no idea what a "slugging percentage" is other than that one is better off with more of it than less.

Kaptain K is a generous sort, and he let Tabitha slap up the final K to end the game. She even got to keep the K.


A good night.

A Farewell to Ed

Ed bit the dust this week.

Kim and I got married over a Thanksgiving weekend and even now I still regard the Saturday after Thanksgiving as our anniversary, regardless of the actual date. It's a whole lot easier that way, and we're always off the day before so it works out pretty well if we want to go away. We had a pile of events planned for that weekend in addition to the wedding itself. The last of them was a Sunday brunch for everyone to gather one last time at our apartment and eat bagels.

Mmmmm. Bagels.

One of the cars making the trek from the hotel to our apartment that morning had my Uncle Ed and Aunt Rita in it, along with my brother and future sister-in-law. I have heard several different versions of this story over the years, but this is the one I remember.

Somewhere along the way they drove by a stuffed tiger, sitting out on the curb for the trashmen to come by the next day and haul it away. And by "stuffed tiger" I mean "mountain of artificial fur filled with the entire styrofoam output of New Jersey." Uncle Ed immediately pulled over to the side of the road and looked expectantly at my brother. "I can't get out," he said. "I'm driving." Keith thought about that for a moment - in describing this moment later his exact words to me were, "Well I'm not flying home with Rita" - and bailed out of the car. He grabbed the tiger and managed to stuff most of it into the trunk where it stayed long enough to reach our apartment. When they arrived, they dragged the tiger upstairs and presented it as if it were a prize-winning artwork.

Naturally, we had to name it Ed.

Newlyweds under the watchful eye of Ed.

That night, after most people had left for their various destinations, we gathered together all who had yet to leave at the nearby Appleby's for dinner, where I finally got to hear most of the story. Uncle Ed seemed very pleased at the way it turned out. Aunt Rita - an elegant woman - sat quietly listening to the story get told over and over. Eventually, when Kim made some comment about not knowing quite what we were going to do with this thing, Rita only shook her head and said, "Just put it out by the curb and wait for some other moron to come by and pick it up."

They've been married fifty years, now.

Ed eventually became one of the family. Kim patched him back up and we let him have the north side of our apartment. We'd decorate him for holidays. We'd pose him for pictures, one of which became our Christmas card one year. We'd use him as furniture. We brought him with us when we moved into our house. And when the girls came along, we let them play with him. Ed spent most of the last decade as a sliding board, actually.

But the ravages of time spare nobody, not even stuffed tigers. Battered, torn and largely ignored, he was consigned to the garage last month for disposal.

And then Kim needed a vast amount of styrofoam beads for a project down at Home Campus, and she knew just where to get them. It was a quick surgery, and now Ed is known as "Flat Tire" around here.

It's been a good ride, Ed.

A Day at the Fair

The County Fair was in town! And so were my parents! What else could we do but introduce them to each other?


My parents made the long drive out from Philadelphia last week, and it was good to see them. The girls are getting bigger every day and there is just never enough grandparent time, really. Kim's parents are not all that far away by midwestern standards, so that is good, but my parents only get to see Tabitha and Lauren once or twice a year.

I've always found that a bit odd, really. When I was Tabitha's age I had three grandparents still living. Two were all of five miles away, and the other lived with us. They were a part of our everyday lives. But we're scattered to the winds now, and we do the best we can. We drive east, we drive north, and the respective grandparents make the opposite treks, and we keep the family humming.

Thursday was actually a pretty rainy day here in Our Little Town. It looked as if it were clearing a bit at lunchtime, though, so we packed up and trooped over to the fairgrounds in the hope that things would be dry.

That would be a no.

It was a light rain, though - more of a heavy drizzle than anything else - and the fair kept going despite it. You could check out the vendors and exhibitors in the rain. You could listen to the music in the rain - there was a disturbingly good Johnny Cash imitator on stage when we came in. You could check out the animal barns in the rain. You could also go on the rides in the rain, and since it was Wristband Day, when one fee gets you all the rides you can handle, the girls did just that.

They went on the Yo-Yo, which was the one with the swings that spin you around at treetop height. They went on the Tilt-a-Whirl. They went on the carousel, the giant slide, and the ferris wheel. They went on the bumper cars. There was not a ride left unridden, let me tell you.


And eventually the rain stopped.

Toward nightfall us old folks got tired, but Kim volunteered to stay at the fair with the girls as they wrung every last bit of value out of those wristbands, leaving them mere dried-up husks of paper that fell off like year-old leis at the end of the night.

Fairs are really for the young, and Tabitha and Lauren are getting old enough to be young now.

It was a good time.

Piece of Quiet

It was a quiet weekend here at Chez Us.

I went in for some minor surgery on Friday - the outpatient kind, where they bring you in, have their way with you, and then send you home in a drug-induced haze so you can sleep it off. And three cheers for drug-induced hazes, I say. "Better living through chemistry" - that is my motto.

Well, it's one of them.

There's also "Never ask what you really don't want to know." Sometimes I fall back on "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." Occasionally I am more in an "It's not my fault you're stupid" kind of mood, or "Once you know what the magician knows, it isn't magic anymore." Really, there are just mottoes for every occasion around here. I am sure that someday my children will just roll their eyes whenever I open my mouth, even if it is just to sneeze. Because you never know when some pearl of wisdom will come slipping out, bounce across the floor and get caught in the gears of everyday life, making them smoke and judder to a halt until the sad clown appears downstage right and says something completely unrelated that we are all supposed to nod sagely at - much like the original motto, in fact, which is how life completes one of its many circles.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Drug-induced hazes. Gotta love 'em.

We felt it would probably be best if the girls spent the weekend up with their grandparents rather than bouncing around me, so off they went.

It was kind of eerie, actually.

Not for the girls - no, despite some initial separation anxiety they had a wonderful time once they got there. Playing Uno, going to see Ice Age 3, and eating Cheezy Poofs for two and a half straight days will do that. That sounds pretty good to me, actually. Somewhere I am sure there is a bag of Cheezy Poofs as big as my car, just waiting for me to dive in and eat my way clear to the other side. This might just be a case of the post-drug-induced-haze munchies, though. You can't tell what's real until you start chewing.

I'll add that last bit to my stock of mottoes.

No, mostly it was just quiet here.

On the one hand, this is what I needed - a couple of days to sit around and not do anything more strenuous than eat General Tso Chicken (extra spicy - as in "No, no, no, not the 'midwestern spicy' that this description normally covers. Extra! Spicy! If the aluminum tray is not beginning to melt, please add more peppers") and watch movies with Kim. And we did just that. I can highly recommend The Hangover, though it is not something you should take your children to until they are thirty.

On the other hand, though, it is surprising how silent the house seems without the girls running around. There are times when I wish for this quiet, but whenever I get it I am always sort of bummed about it.

I am in for some sad, sad days when they go off to college.

Today, I Am A Man (of a certain age)

On Monday I officially became a middle-aged man.

Not that this was any real surprise. I blew by 40 a few years ago now, and strictly on an actuarial basis it is not difficult to do the math and discover that I am either at or past the halfway point in my time on this planet. More generally, I have also developed an aversion to most forms of popular culture these days and the limits of my technological expertise are at least a decade old. At some point I expect to begin caring about the lawn, and when that happens I hope someone will sedate me and cart me away.

So middle-agedness has been creeping up on me, slowly but surely, for some time now.

I don't really mind this. It beats the alternative, for one thing. Plus, I was never cool even when I was young enough to care, so my not being so now is not all that much of a hardship. I have friends who are mourning this new uncool status, but I've had all my life to get used to it. It's a less stressful way to live, really. Probably greener, too, so I may well have backed into being cutting edge there. Stranger things have happened.

No, two things happened on Monday.

First, I got a haircut.

Now this in itself is not all that surprising. I manage to do this on a semi-annual basis these days, sometimes more often than that even. There are no actual barbers in Our Little Town anymore - no guys named Tony who will cut your hair, as opposed to guys named Serge who want to design it - so I usually head over to the Big Chain HairCuttery and tell whoever calls my name to make it the same, only shorter.

When I was a kid, my grandfather - whose name actually was Tony - cut all of his grandchildren's hair down in the basement of his home. I think this was something he had gotten into back when he worked for the Navy and figured out that he could cut his co-workers' hair for less than the barbershop charged and bring home some extra coin for his family. We'd go on down there and he'd wrap us in a sheet and start clipping away, and when he was done he'd give us a quarter. It still surprises me, somehow, that the flow of money is reversed these days.

I am a lot balder in photographs than I am in the mirror, I think. I can look at myself in the mirror and not think I look all that different, hair-wise, than I did in my 20s, but photographs for some reason tend to highlight the thinning. This does not particularly bother me, on the scale of crises - not for me the five strands of hair desperately trying to cover a highly polished dome, or the hair parted just above the ear that lives in deathly fear of strong breezes. I may not age gracefully, but I do plan on aging openly. I will simply have to invest in hats. Or sunscreen. Or just stay inside. It doesn't bother me, but it does puzzle me - I still don't understand why photographs highlight this in a way mirrors don't. Probably physics or something. Beware of science.

But the Big Chain HairCuttery person did a particularly efficient job this time, and there I was, staring at the reflection in the mirror and it struck me that even without the magic of photography, there was a lot more open real estate than I was used to seeing.

I'm growing taller than my hair.

After this, I went over to the doctor's office for my physical. And it was about time, really, since the last primary care physician I had has been gone so long that none of the nurses remember his name anymore. I think he was blonde.

So there I sat in the doctor's office, answering all of the usual questions - no, I don't smoke; no, I'm not allergic to any medications that I know of; yes, I am well aware that I need to lose some weight and stop eating like a graduate student; and so on. It was all going along quite well.

And then they figured out I needed a tetanus shot.

I hate needles. I hate them with a passion that has nothing to do with rational thought or legitimate cost-benefit analysis. Really, I know they don't hurt all that much, and they provide medical benefits. But still. I've had teeth filled without Novocain rather than get the shots. I don't do that anymore - eventually the cost-benefit analysis muscles do kick in - but there you go.

The problem with tetanus shots is that they hurt for just days and days. It's a good thing I didn't go into middle-innings relief pitching, or I'd really be in trouble.

If this were all that happened, it would not have been the Middle-Aged Milestone that it was. You men out there past your 40th birthday, you know exactly what is coming next, don't you? Things are going along swimmingly, you're thinking you'll get out with only minimal medical care being practiced upon you, and then out comes The Glove.

I understand the necessity of this procedure, but it is not something I care to discuss other than to say that Now, I Am A Middle-Aged Man.

Milestones are okay, although they do hurt when you smack into them.

And Then There Were Two Again

We are back up to our full complement of hamsters.

Last night as I was drifting in and out of sleep, trying to stay in but continually falling back out as is my wont these days, I heard Mithra meowing at us in a stranger-than-usual sort of way. I spent a few minutes lazily trying to incorporate this into whatever dream I was having at the time, but it never quite worked out.

And then it hit me: Cat. Meowing. Hunter. Prey. Oh, sweet dancing monkeys on a stick, that can only mean Hamster.

This math made more sense at midnight, really it did.

Plus, it was correct.

I got up and flipped on the hall light and Mithra took off downstairs. Oh no you don't, I thought, and I pelted down the stairs after her. Sure enough, at the bottom of the steps she dropped her mouthful of snack and waited for me.

Good evening, Vee! Or Hammy! Or whoever!

I scooped up the hamster - rather bedraggled after a week hiding out like some Allied flier behind Nazi lines - and deposited it in her cage, much to the annoyance of the other hamster who had gotten rather used to having the place Just So and was not looking forward to a roommate mucking up the place again.

Well, deal with it, rodent - your partner is back.

They seem to have made up, though. All day long they have groomed and played and now you really can't tell which one is which anymore since all the Bedraggle is gone.

Welcome back, Vee! Or Hammy! Or whoever!

Separate Lives

Today was the Girl Scouts softball tournament.

Tabitha's Green Eagles did not make it to the final round, for a number of reasons. For one thing, they played both of their qualifying games on a prairie restoration project that sloped down from home plate at approximately thirty degrees. They had to track the ball by following the waves in the grass as they rippled away into the distance. For another, they actually rotated their players as the rules suggested, rather than keep the best ones in the most important positions all game. On the one hand, you get annoyed at teams that don't follow the rules. On the other hand, you have to ask yourself if tangling with such morons is really worth the time and trouble.

Short answer: no.

So the Green Eagles had a grand time and left with happy memories. We'll take that.

Lauren's Hot Pink team had an exhibition game today, though. Well, all of the t-ball teams did. Whoever showed up was divided into two big teams, and we played two innings of coach-pitch ball that was even less coordinated than usual since the girls had not played together in this configuration before.

Not that you could tell, really.

The thing about softball at this level, I've decided, is that there really are two completely separate games going on and the only thing they have in common is the mere physical coincidence of playing on the same diamond.

There is the batting team, which tries to hit the ball and run around the bases. And there is the fielding team, which tries to retrieve the ball and throw it to someone on or near a base. Neither of these teams pays the other any attention, really. The batters hit the ball and run. They stop on all the bases. Eventually they come home. There isn't any room in that scenario for anything the fielding team does. And aside from putting the ball into play, the batters don't really impinge on the consciousness of the fielders either. They retrieve the ball and throw it, and their job is done.

Eventually the two sides switch.

Next year, we introduce the infield fly rule.