The NFL playoffs are here already, and I find that I am still wearing my Phillies cap.
Normally by now I have moved on to my Eagles hat. It's warmer, for one thing, and when there is a foot of snow on the ground, the air temperatures are hovering in the teens and the wind chill would make you seriously consider moving somewhere warmer except that all of those places are just way too red on the political map (what is it with conservatives? don't they own coats?), warmer hats are good things.
You can always add clothing. There is only so much they let you take off.
I also tend to follow the Eagles a bit more closely than the Phillies, and given a choice between watching a football game or a baseball game on television, I'm definitely there for the football. It's different in person - baseball is a great game when you're there, since so much of what goes on is what isn't quite happening and you don't get that on television - but the last professional football game I went to featured a kicker with half a foot who retired sometime during the Ford Administration. He was the best player the Eagles had, too, which explains their win total that year.
I did get to some games when I was in high school, mostly because I had friends in the band and we would hang out. Once I got drafted into an "alternative band" that some of the more creative dissidents in my high school dreamed up - they gave me a triangle and told me to stay in time - but I couldn't tell you who won, even though it was our Big Rival and we got time off from school for victories.
I never did make it to a game when I was in college despite the fact that we were league champions in three of my four years there as well as the fifth year when I lived off campus. The games started at 1pm. Who's up that early on a Saturday in college?
I switched over to the Phillies cap last year when they made their playoff run, and after they won it all I kept wearing the hat for a couple of weeks until it felt sort of band-wagon-ish and I took it off. But this year I actually followed them all season, as much as I ever did - I knew who most of the players were and could tell you where the team stood in the standings with tolerable accuracy - so I felt a certain ownership. I had a right to wear the hat.
Plus, they lost in the Series this year and somehow I find that comforting. It conforms to my worldview much better than winning it all, and if anything it makes me want to wear the hat more than when they won.
I'm also the only person in Wisconsin with a Phillies cap, as far as I know, so it makes it easy for Kim and the girls to find me in a crowd. So there are practical benefits, too.
I suppose I should switch over to the Eagles hat now that the playoffs have started, especially since they open against the True Team Of Evil down in Dallas. Time to show support for them, too.
I'm probably overthinking this, though.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Wiped Out
It’s sad the sound that data makes when it is lost. All those wee little screams.
Last month I got a new computer, my fourth since I entered the electronic age in 1989. They have all been Macs, though to my knowledge I have not gotten appreciably cooler because of it. You just can’t trust commercials.
My old Mac was still chugging faithfully along, though by IRS standards it had been fully amortized twice over and then some – it was seven years old and there were just things I could no longer do on it, so it was time for a change. And since Apple was having a sale over Thanksgiving weekend, I figured this was the chance! I could get one just like Kim’s. Except they don’t make those anymore. They have Upgraded their offerings, and instead of merely Huge, now they come in Monstrous.
It came to the house on a flatbed truck with its own mule train to get it from there onto my desk, which, fortunately, consists of a steel door laid out across two steel file cabinets. It took up most of the room, blocking out the window that I never use and looming over the chair. It was awesome in its glory. Sleek. Shiny. Powerful. Fast.
And given to fits, flickers, and blackouts. Honestly, it was like having an electric wino in the house.
After a number of phone calls to the helpful folks at Apple, they decided that it would be easier simply to replace it than try to walk me through any meaningful attempt to fix it – a judgment which, given my computer skills, probably demonstrates why Apple is the savvy, successful company it has once again become. In the time it would have taken me to figure out what they were trying to tell me to do they could probably have sent out an undercover squad of midget repairmen to sneak into my house and replace every individual piece of the computer, one at a time, with a different and slightly shinier piece, and midget repairmen don’t work cheap.
Midgets are hard to repair.
So this morning I boxed it up and sent it on its way. But before that I figured I should wipe the hard drive of all of my personal data. We’ve done the identity-theft routine once here in our house and I figured there was no need to do that again. So the Apple guy told me how to do that. He gave me detailed instructions for every step of the process except one: what to do with the sixteen hours it would take for it all to happen.
Sixteen hours? Seriously? Yes, yes indeed. I guess if you want it erased right, you have to do it the long way. Who knew I had that much information?
It was very hard to click on the “erase” button. I’m a historian by training and inclination, and preserving things is what I do. Even with backups, even knowing that – at least in theory – I can restore it all from the Time Machine drive, it was just unnatural to deliberately tell the computer to get rid of all that information.
I guess I’ll never be a spy.
Last month I got a new computer, my fourth since I entered the electronic age in 1989. They have all been Macs, though to my knowledge I have not gotten appreciably cooler because of it. You just can’t trust commercials.
My old Mac was still chugging faithfully along, though by IRS standards it had been fully amortized twice over and then some – it was seven years old and there were just things I could no longer do on it, so it was time for a change. And since Apple was having a sale over Thanksgiving weekend, I figured this was the chance! I could get one just like Kim’s. Except they don’t make those anymore. They have Upgraded their offerings, and instead of merely Huge, now they come in Monstrous.
It came to the house on a flatbed truck with its own mule train to get it from there onto my desk, which, fortunately, consists of a steel door laid out across two steel file cabinets. It took up most of the room, blocking out the window that I never use and looming over the chair. It was awesome in its glory. Sleek. Shiny. Powerful. Fast.
And given to fits, flickers, and blackouts. Honestly, it was like having an electric wino in the house.
After a number of phone calls to the helpful folks at Apple, they decided that it would be easier simply to replace it than try to walk me through any meaningful attempt to fix it – a judgment which, given my computer skills, probably demonstrates why Apple is the savvy, successful company it has once again become. In the time it would have taken me to figure out what they were trying to tell me to do they could probably have sent out an undercover squad of midget repairmen to sneak into my house and replace every individual piece of the computer, one at a time, with a different and slightly shinier piece, and midget repairmen don’t work cheap.
Midgets are hard to repair.
So this morning I boxed it up and sent it on its way. But before that I figured I should wipe the hard drive of all of my personal data. We’ve done the identity-theft routine once here in our house and I figured there was no need to do that again. So the Apple guy told me how to do that. He gave me detailed instructions for every step of the process except one: what to do with the sixteen hours it would take for it all to happen.
Sixteen hours? Seriously? Yes, yes indeed. I guess if you want it erased right, you have to do it the long way. Who knew I had that much information?
It was very hard to click on the “erase” button. I’m a historian by training and inclination, and preserving things is what I do. Even with backups, even knowing that – at least in theory – I can restore it all from the Time Machine drive, it was just unnatural to deliberately tell the computer to get rid of all that information.
I guess I’ll never be a spy.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
A Christmas Story, Part IV: The Road Home
We took the long way home from Chattanooga.
We went down in a rush, with Christmas Eve looming over us as a deadline, but the way home had no such pressing engagements to worry about. In fact, we decided to take not two days for the trip but three.
Time is a coin best spent. Squirreling it way never really works.
So on the Monday after Christmas we piled everything back into the car - a neat trick, since the volume of gifts received slightly exceeded the volume of gifts given in terms of airspace consumed and stuffing one more wafer-thin bag into the Mr. Creosote of our car was a rather life-threatening task - and headed north to Nashville, where my cousin Paula lives with her husband Randall and their little girl, Annelise.
Paula lives in a subdivision that was clearly built by someone with a Crocodile Dundee obsession, as all of the street names were imported directly from Down Under, along with what were no doubt copious quantities of Foster's. Try to imagine a cross between an Australian and Southern accent sometime - go ahead, try it. Now you know why the war on drugs can never be won.
But it is a nice area, full of neatly kept houses. We arrived in the midafternoon, and quickly set about making ourselves at home.
Tabitha found Annelise's blocks and made a scale floor plan of Uncle Bob and Aunt Linda's house.
And I was made Grand Vizier of Creation.
Believe me when I say that things will be different from now on. Not necessarily better. But certainly different.
Almost everyone (I stayed behind, since among other things that meant they could all fit into Paula's car) piled on over to Clyde's Slides for some bouncing around. Clyde apparently had the brilliant idea of taking an aircraft-hangar sized building and filling it with all of the inflatable slides and bouncies that you normally have to wait for the County Fair to play on, and keeping it open all year long. I hope he is a very rich man right now, because that was just pure brilliance on a stick.
The next morning we (well, "me" - as noted, stuffing things into cars is my job) piled everything back into the car once again and headed off for Springfield, Illinois.
Why Springfield?
Because that's where the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum is, that's why.
Abraham Lincoln was - with the possible exception of George Washington - the single greatest President we have ever had in this country. He was also far and away the must humane. Washington was not someone contemporaries ever felt comfortable around; Lincoln was. And nobody has ever come near him for sheer simple eloquence. Read his Second Inaugural Address sometime, or the Gettysburg Address (both of which combined take less than ten minutes to speak out loud) if you really want to understand what it means to be an American and what it meant to be alive during the tragedy - not accident, not catastrophe, not disaster: tragedy - of the Civil War.
So Kim and I were both immensely pleased that the girls wanted to go to this museum, and we were willing to go several hours out of our way to make that happen. You have to encourage this when it comes up, really.
Plus, we got to stay at a hotel and hotels, as both Tabitha and Lauren know very well, have pools. There is nothing better than a hotel pool, as far as they are concerned.
We checked out early the next morning and headed off to see the Lincoln House, which is right there in the middle of town. We got there just as it opened, so there was no line, and the tour guide took us and a few others through.
We got to see the REAL Lincoln bedroom.
They've even preserved most of the neighborhood, so you can come out and look up and down the street and see pretty much what Lincoln saw as he left his home. I read a lot of history and I tell a lot of it in my classes, but there is nothing like being there.
After a brief but gloriously acquisitive trip through the gift shop at the National Park Service visitor center for the Lincoln House we set off on foot for the Lincoln Museum, several blocks away.
If you've never been there, well, you should go.
You go in and there is a nice plaza with a model of the Lincoln family that you can take your picture next to.
It's to scale.
They don't like you taking pictures through the rest of the place, but the exhibits are all first-rate and very clever in how they get their points across - they make good use of lighting, temperature and geography in order to create moods, and they have an astonishing array of Lincoln memorabilia on display. They have his hat. They have the gloves he had in his pocket the night he was assassinated. They also have on display the one example of a joke he wrote down in his own hand.
Lauren loved the fact that it was a fart joke.
There were also movies, one of which featured storms and battles with physical effects tied to motors underneath your seat, and the other of which had holograms and ghosts. Tabitha was especially intrigued by these.
There was another gloriously acquisitive trip through their gift shop, and then we headed home. Once again it was snowing, but we made it home safely.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
We went down in a rush, with Christmas Eve looming over us as a deadline, but the way home had no such pressing engagements to worry about. In fact, we decided to take not two days for the trip but three.
Time is a coin best spent. Squirreling it way never really works.
So on the Monday after Christmas we piled everything back into the car - a neat trick, since the volume of gifts received slightly exceeded the volume of gifts given in terms of airspace consumed and stuffing one more wafer-thin bag into the Mr. Creosote of our car was a rather life-threatening task - and headed north to Nashville, where my cousin Paula lives with her husband Randall and their little girl, Annelise.
Paula lives in a subdivision that was clearly built by someone with a Crocodile Dundee obsession, as all of the street names were imported directly from Down Under, along with what were no doubt copious quantities of Foster's. Try to imagine a cross between an Australian and Southern accent sometime - go ahead, try it. Now you know why the war on drugs can never be won.
But it is a nice area, full of neatly kept houses. We arrived in the midafternoon, and quickly set about making ourselves at home.
Tabitha found Annelise's blocks and made a scale floor plan of Uncle Bob and Aunt Linda's house.
And I was made Grand Vizier of Creation.
Believe me when I say that things will be different from now on. Not necessarily better. But certainly different.
Almost everyone (I stayed behind, since among other things that meant they could all fit into Paula's car) piled on over to Clyde's Slides for some bouncing around. Clyde apparently had the brilliant idea of taking an aircraft-hangar sized building and filling it with all of the inflatable slides and bouncies that you normally have to wait for the County Fair to play on, and keeping it open all year long. I hope he is a very rich man right now, because that was just pure brilliance on a stick.
The next morning we (well, "me" - as noted, stuffing things into cars is my job) piled everything back into the car once again and headed off for Springfield, Illinois.
Why Springfield?
Because that's where the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum is, that's why.
Abraham Lincoln was - with the possible exception of George Washington - the single greatest President we have ever had in this country. He was also far and away the must humane. Washington was not someone contemporaries ever felt comfortable around; Lincoln was. And nobody has ever come near him for sheer simple eloquence. Read his Second Inaugural Address sometime, or the Gettysburg Address (both of which combined take less than ten minutes to speak out loud) if you really want to understand what it means to be an American and what it meant to be alive during the tragedy - not accident, not catastrophe, not disaster: tragedy - of the Civil War.
So Kim and I were both immensely pleased that the girls wanted to go to this museum, and we were willing to go several hours out of our way to make that happen. You have to encourage this when it comes up, really.
Plus, we got to stay at a hotel and hotels, as both Tabitha and Lauren know very well, have pools. There is nothing better than a hotel pool, as far as they are concerned.
We checked out early the next morning and headed off to see the Lincoln House, which is right there in the middle of town. We got there just as it opened, so there was no line, and the tour guide took us and a few others through.
We got to see the REAL Lincoln bedroom.
They've even preserved most of the neighborhood, so you can come out and look up and down the street and see pretty much what Lincoln saw as he left his home. I read a lot of history and I tell a lot of it in my classes, but there is nothing like being there.
After a brief but gloriously acquisitive trip through the gift shop at the National Park Service visitor center for the Lincoln House we set off on foot for the Lincoln Museum, several blocks away.
If you've never been there, well, you should go.
You go in and there is a nice plaza with a model of the Lincoln family that you can take your picture next to.
It's to scale.
They don't like you taking pictures through the rest of the place, but the exhibits are all first-rate and very clever in how they get their points across - they make good use of lighting, temperature and geography in order to create moods, and they have an astonishing array of Lincoln memorabilia on display. They have his hat. They have the gloves he had in his pocket the night he was assassinated. They also have on display the one example of a joke he wrote down in his own hand.
Lauren loved the fact that it was a fart joke.
There were also movies, one of which featured storms and battles with physical effects tied to motors underneath your seat, and the other of which had holograms and ghosts. Tabitha was especially intrigued by these.
There was another gloriously acquisitive trip through their gift shop, and then we headed home. Once again it was snowing, but we made it home safely.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
A Christmas Story, Part III: Christmas Day and Beyond
Don't mess with Santa - dude's got better intelligence than the CIA, though after the debacles of the last administration that might not be saying much. Apparently finding four kids who had left their homes in Wisconsin and New York to wake up Christmas morning in Tennessee was something well within his powers, however.
We have got to get this guy on the payroll in Washington.
Christmas morning came bright and warm in Chattanooga, and for the first Christmas ever the girls were up before we were. This was probably because a) the girls went to bed at normal time but we were up late, and b) they were sleeping in the same room as their NYC cousins, whose schedule is shifted rather earlier than Tabitha and Lauren's schedule.
But if you can't wake up early on Christmas morning, when can you?
There was a great pile of loot waiting downstairs, and a good time was had by all - some by opening gifts, and others by watching the opening of gifts. And since there were four kids, this meant that there were all sort of opportunities for borrowing and playing with and generally sharing.
Some of the most popular things were toys that would not have been out of place when I was their age - a Rock-em-Sock-em Robot game that got a lot of rocks and socks all morning, and a pair of balsa-wood gliders that spent the rest of the weekend randomly sailing around populated areas and gradually growing less airworthy through the repeated application of scotch-tape for repairs. Eventually it was like throwing a baseball, but somewhere under there was still a glider and so the fun never quite ended.
We spent the remainder of our time in Chattanooga hanging out with family and finding new ways to keep ourselves entertained. Can't go wrong either way, really.
The day after Christmas, having all been soundly thrashed by four-year-old Sara in the Wii version of the game, we decided to go bowling for real.
Now, I hear you laughing out there - but you know, bowling is a great way to hang out and be entertained, particularly when the ball-to-person weight ratio approaches unity. Plus, when you have that many giant balls around, the puns fly fast and thick and you have to appreciate the inventiveness required for such things when there are small children around. It's an art, really it is.
And when all else fails, you've got sufficient downtime between turns to come up with new games.
We went to see the new Disney movie, The Princess and the Frog. Of course we did. It had small talking animals in it - how could we not? And you know, it was pretty good - it had great animation, a decent story, and enough New Orleans music to justify the cost of admission on that ground alone.
One of the Uncles Chris - the tall one - also taught us how to play 31, so now we have a new card game to add to our repertoire. It is the perfect card game - it's fast, easy to learn, complicated enough to be interesting and mindless enough to allow drinking and socializing. What more could you want? We played several times, and I think I broke even since I won a round and that more or less covered my losses.
On our last night in Chattanooga we gathered together for Birthday Cake! Mostly this was for Tabitha, but I got to piggy-back onto that action too. The only problem with that was that it increased the total candle volume to "conflagration" status, me being considerably older than Tabitha.
But with all the hot air this teacher can blow, extinguishing the blaze was not a problem. I knew those lesson plans would come in handy some day.
The cake was also an effective way to coerce the various children into a group picture. There was much milling around and unproductive shooing until Kim announced "All kids who want cake, gather for a picture!"
And like magic, there it was.
We have got to get this guy on the payroll in Washington.
Christmas morning came bright and warm in Chattanooga, and for the first Christmas ever the girls were up before we were. This was probably because a) the girls went to bed at normal time but we were up late, and b) they were sleeping in the same room as their NYC cousins, whose schedule is shifted rather earlier than Tabitha and Lauren's schedule.
But if you can't wake up early on Christmas morning, when can you?
There was a great pile of loot waiting downstairs, and a good time was had by all - some by opening gifts, and others by watching the opening of gifts. And since there were four kids, this meant that there were all sort of opportunities for borrowing and playing with and generally sharing.
Some of the most popular things were toys that would not have been out of place when I was their age - a Rock-em-Sock-em Robot game that got a lot of rocks and socks all morning, and a pair of balsa-wood gliders that spent the rest of the weekend randomly sailing around populated areas and gradually growing less airworthy through the repeated application of scotch-tape for repairs. Eventually it was like throwing a baseball, but somewhere under there was still a glider and so the fun never quite ended.
We spent the remainder of our time in Chattanooga hanging out with family and finding new ways to keep ourselves entertained. Can't go wrong either way, really.
Well, maybe you can.
The day after Christmas, having all been soundly thrashed by four-year-old Sara in the Wii version of the game, we decided to go bowling for real.
Now, I hear you laughing out there - but you know, bowling is a great way to hang out and be entertained, particularly when the ball-to-person weight ratio approaches unity. Plus, when you have that many giant balls around, the puns fly fast and thick and you have to appreciate the inventiveness required for such things when there are small children around. It's an art, really it is.
And when all else fails, you've got sufficient downtime between turns to come up with new games.
We went to see the new Disney movie, The Princess and the Frog. Of course we did. It had small talking animals in it - how could we not? And you know, it was pretty good - it had great animation, a decent story, and enough New Orleans music to justify the cost of admission on that ground alone.
One of the Uncles Chris - the tall one - also taught us how to play 31, so now we have a new card game to add to our repertoire. It is the perfect card game - it's fast, easy to learn, complicated enough to be interesting and mindless enough to allow drinking and socializing. What more could you want? We played several times, and I think I broke even since I won a round and that more or less covered my losses.
On our last night in Chattanooga we gathered together for Birthday Cake! Mostly this was for Tabitha, but I got to piggy-back onto that action too. The only problem with that was that it increased the total candle volume to "conflagration" status, me being considerably older than Tabitha.
But with all the hot air this teacher can blow, extinguishing the blaze was not a problem. I knew those lesson plans would come in handy some day.
The cake was also an effective way to coerce the various children into a group picture. There was much milling around and unproductive shooing until Kim announced "All kids who want cake, gather for a picture!"
And like magic, there it was.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
A Christmas Story, Part II: Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve is always the big holiday on my side of the family. Oh, sure, there is also Christmas Day, but that is mostly eating. It's like Thanksgiving, with gifts. But Christmas Eve? That's where the action is.
We slept in that morning at Brian and Elizabeth's, since there is nothing for taking all of your energy out of you like driving through multiple states in a single day. Multiple midwestern states, mind you - not New England states, which flit by like potato chips, one after the other, without you really noticing, nor western states that have to be taken in small bites. No, midwestern states you can do in a single bound, but they take some recovery time.
But not too much recovery time! For it was, as noted, Christmas Eve! So we loaded up the cars with freshly wrapped presents, freshly scrubbed people, and whatever else we could load them up with, and headed off to my aunt and uncle's house.
They live in a nice new house on a horseshoe-shaped road that is maybe fifty yards long if you measure along the outside of the horseshoe. It's cozy. In order to get to this road, you have to leave the state. Seriously - you drive down the two-lane highway outside of the subdivision until you see the sign that says "Welcome to Georgia!" You'll recognize it when you see it - it has the big peach on it, like everything else in Georgia that doesn't have a Confederate battle flag. Just past the sign you turn into the subdivision, go past the (usually unmanned) guard post, and turn right toward their house. And at that point you see another sign that welcomes you back to Tennessee.
The various cousins had a grand time with this.
My cousin and his partner - "the Uncles Chris," as we refer to them - were in charge of the dinner this year, and they did a nice job of it. It was the usual odd number of kinds of seafood, though not just the usual kinds - a little variety and freshness into the menu. I was even convinced to try the ravioli with the lobster sauce, and it was good. So perhaps there is hope for me yet.
The kids all spent the time running around excitedly, which was nice to see. We've all moved up a generation now, and it is fun to see them playing like we used to do. Tabitha and Lauren got hold of a slinky, for instance, and were making it do sine waves across the living room while their toddler cousin Annelise ran through them. The New York cousins, Josh and Sara, got in shortly before dinnertime, and the excitement (and volume) increased markedly at that point.
It's just not Christmas if it's quiet.
Eventually we could hold the little ones off no longer, and it was time for presents! Tabitha has long since reached the age where she could read well enough to distribute presents, and now Lauren and Josh have largely caught up to that point - and Sara was not to be denied, not when everyone else in her generation except Annelise was in on it - so there was a lot of amiable confusion when it came to the gift giving, but eventually it was all sorted out and everyone had a nice pile of loot in front of them.
The piles are rather smaller than they used to be for those of us in my generation, as we have been playing the Cousins Gift Swap game for a few years now. It's a fun game of skill, luck, cutthroat trades, and kitsch, and we have a good time.
It was the Year of the Snuggie in our family, apparently. On the urging of my two offspring, I somehow ended up with a pair of blue snuggies that had been wrapped by different cousins for the game. We managed to keep them unopened until we got home - we were in Tennessee, for crying out loud, and it was warm enough to our Wisconsin blood that we did not even bother with coats while we were there - but no further: they were unwrapped and in use even before I got the entire car unpacked once we had landed back home. So it worked out, I suppose. My goal in these exchanges is to come away with something relatively small and conceivably useful, and by that standard I would have to count it as a success.
And then it was back to Elizabeth and Brian's house, where we bribed Santa's reindeer with food in order to have them find us so far from home. Those reindeer - they're suckers for a good snack.
We slept in that morning at Brian and Elizabeth's, since there is nothing for taking all of your energy out of you like driving through multiple states in a single day. Multiple midwestern states, mind you - not New England states, which flit by like potato chips, one after the other, without you really noticing, nor western states that have to be taken in small bites. No, midwestern states you can do in a single bound, but they take some recovery time.
Elizabeth and Brian, our sleepover hosts
But not too much recovery time! For it was, as noted, Christmas Eve! So we loaded up the cars with freshly wrapped presents, freshly scrubbed people, and whatever else we could load them up with, and headed off to my aunt and uncle's house.
They live in a nice new house on a horseshoe-shaped road that is maybe fifty yards long if you measure along the outside of the horseshoe. It's cozy. In order to get to this road, you have to leave the state. Seriously - you drive down the two-lane highway outside of the subdivision until you see the sign that says "Welcome to Georgia!" You'll recognize it when you see it - it has the big peach on it, like everything else in Georgia that doesn't have a Confederate battle flag. Just past the sign you turn into the subdivision, go past the (usually unmanned) guard post, and turn right toward their house. And at that point you see another sign that welcomes you back to Tennessee.
The various cousins had a grand time with this.
My cousin and his partner - "the Uncles Chris," as we refer to them - were in charge of the dinner this year, and they did a nice job of it. It was the usual odd number of kinds of seafood, though not just the usual kinds - a little variety and freshness into the menu. I was even convinced to try the ravioli with the lobster sauce, and it was good. So perhaps there is hope for me yet.
The kids all spent the time running around excitedly, which was nice to see. We've all moved up a generation now, and it is fun to see them playing like we used to do. Tabitha and Lauren got hold of a slinky, for instance, and were making it do sine waves across the living room while their toddler cousin Annelise ran through them. The New York cousins, Josh and Sara, got in shortly before dinnertime, and the excitement (and volume) increased markedly at that point.
It's just not Christmas if it's quiet.
Eventually we could hold the little ones off no longer, and it was time for presents! Tabitha has long since reached the age where she could read well enough to distribute presents, and now Lauren and Josh have largely caught up to that point - and Sara was not to be denied, not when everyone else in her generation except Annelise was in on it - so there was a lot of amiable confusion when it came to the gift giving, but eventually it was all sorted out and everyone had a nice pile of loot in front of them.
The piles are rather smaller than they used to be for those of us in my generation, as we have been playing the Cousins Gift Swap game for a few years now. It's a fun game of skill, luck, cutthroat trades, and kitsch, and we have a good time.
And then it was back to Elizabeth and Brian's house, where we bribed Santa's reindeer with food in order to have them find us so far from home. Those reindeer - they're suckers for a good snack.
Friday, January 1, 2010
A Christmas Story, Part I: The Ride Down South
All roads lead to Peoria. And then they lead away.
We drove down to Chattanooga for Christmas this year, the first time my side of the family has gathered south of the Mason-Dixon Line for Christmas since, well, ever. My Uncle Bob and Aunt Linda had just moved into their new house a few months ago and since they had never once in their married lives celebrated the holiday in their own home - alternating between Philadelphia and, on Linda's side, Nebraska - they wanted to have us all come there.
Well, when you put it that way, how could we say no?
So arrangements were made, cars brought up to vacation trim, school calendars scrutinized, bags packed, and the family made ready to gather from the four corners of the US, or at least from the Northeast Corridor and the upper Midwest.
We have never packed light in our house. And with two growing children, a packrat and a wife whose motto is "It could be useful," packing light is no longer even a goal. Throw in the fact that it was Christmas, with all of the gifts and paraphernalia attendant upon such a holiday, and we had more baggage than a medieval trading caravan. Silk Road, here we come!
I am the Baggage Loader around here. It is my job to figure out how to fit it all into the car and still have room for the people. Like George Carlin and his refrigerator, I decide what stays and what goes. It's not much power, but I'll take it.
Fortunately, loading cars is one of my talents. I once fit an entire dorm room - including the refrigerator and stereo system, back when stereo systems did not slip easily into your shirt pocket - into a 1979 Mercury. If I could do that, then certainly I could fit a week's vacation into a station wagon, couldn't I?
Well, yes, it turned out. It's just a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, really. Don't ask me to retrieve anything - Kim made the mistake of leaving her book in her bag when I was packing, and it was just easier for her to go get another book - but for packing a lot of stuff into a little area, I am The Man.
All hail me.
We set off fairly early on the 23rd, into the teeth of what weather forecasters call "snow showers," which for those of you not familiar with the term is the preferred jargon phrase for "not enough snow to provide an excuse for staying home but too much to drive at normal speeds." But we were headed south, so it fairly quickly turned into rain. And rain can be driven through at normal speeds.
Some observations from the drive:
First, Tabitha and Lauren are the world's best travelers. We set them up with a book full of DVDs and their movie player, a bag full of actual books as well as paper, pencils and assorted activities, their DS players, and a pair of binoculars. We were on the road for about 12.5 hours, including stops, and they did a marvelous job.
Second, what is it about the South and churches? We have churches up in the North too, but few if any have 40'-tall white aluminum crosses looming over them. Such things dotted our route like standing stones. I'm sure they were meant to inspire awe or something like that, but all I could think of was the scene from Shrek, where the ogre stares up at Lord Farquaad's castle, turns to the donkey and says "Think he's compensating for something?"
This sort of thing continued once we got to Chattanooga, too. The churches in that part of Tennessee are uniformly huge, prosperous and shiny - several that we passed had separate entrances for children, which I thought was a bit much really, though that might have been because the church I grew up in had about ten kids in it and such an entrance would have been overkill. They were quite the sight, these churches.
Our favorite church sight, though, was one we saw on the way from one place to another down there. The church had a parking lot right next to the street, and they had erected signs there to let you know where to turn, if that was where you were going. The name of the church was in tiny little letters on the bottom, though, so from any distance all you saw was a sign that said "CHRIST -->" . Whoa, nelly! In person, no less!
The oddest thing we saw on this topic was on our way over from Elizabeth and Brian's house (where we were staying) to Bob and Linda's on Christmas Eve, where we passed a man dressed in a white robe dragging a 9'-long cross behind him along the road. Brian and I sort of looked at each other when we saw this. "Isn't the whole point of the season that somebody else has already done that?" we asked each other. Oh well.
Third, nutritional rules are always suspended on long drives. When the best thing you can hope for is a roadside meal of fast food, there is no real point to worrying about it. Nutrition can resume at your destination. So we hit the road with a dietician's nightmare of salt, sugar, fat and carbs, all neatly packed in a bag along with some clementines for appearances' sake, and we lived like kings all the way down.
Come to think of it, medieval kings were also round, short-lived and gout-stricken. Maybe they traveled a lot too.
Fourth, if it's not churches, it's fireworks. Tennessee has more fireworks stands per mile of interstate highway than can possibly be healthy. They all feature a smiling antebellum white man in a white suit on their logos, and they all promise to have the lowest prices of any other such establishment, even those in Alabama, which must be the benchmark in cheap fireworks once you get outside of China. The highlight is a stand not far north of Chattanooga that, because of the way the road bends, looks like it sits smack in the middle of the highway, and as you drive up to it you get this odd feeling like you're going to be driving right through the checkout lanes. Maybe they just throw stuff into the trunk as you drive by and debit you at highway speeds the way Illinois does with tolls now.
We finally found our way to Elizabeth and Brian's house around 10pm EST. They have a wonderful house that is far neater than we could ever get our house to be again even with a crack squad of combat housecleaners and weapons-grade solvents, and we were glad to be there.
More Christmas to follow!
We drove down to Chattanooga for Christmas this year, the first time my side of the family has gathered south of the Mason-Dixon Line for Christmas since, well, ever. My Uncle Bob and Aunt Linda had just moved into their new house a few months ago and since they had never once in their married lives celebrated the holiday in their own home - alternating between Philadelphia and, on Linda's side, Nebraska - they wanted to have us all come there.
Well, when you put it that way, how could we say no?
So arrangements were made, cars brought up to vacation trim, school calendars scrutinized, bags packed, and the family made ready to gather from the four corners of the US, or at least from the Northeast Corridor and the upper Midwest.
We have never packed light in our house. And with two growing children, a packrat and a wife whose motto is "It could be useful," packing light is no longer even a goal. Throw in the fact that it was Christmas, with all of the gifts and paraphernalia attendant upon such a holiday, and we had more baggage than a medieval trading caravan. Silk Road, here we come!
I am the Baggage Loader around here. It is my job to figure out how to fit it all into the car and still have room for the people. Like George Carlin and his refrigerator, I decide what stays and what goes. It's not much power, but I'll take it.
Fortunately, loading cars is one of my talents. I once fit an entire dorm room - including the refrigerator and stereo system, back when stereo systems did not slip easily into your shirt pocket - into a 1979 Mercury. If I could do that, then certainly I could fit a week's vacation into a station wagon, couldn't I?
Well, yes, it turned out. It's just a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, really. Don't ask me to retrieve anything - Kim made the mistake of leaving her book in her bag when I was packing, and it was just easier for her to go get another book - but for packing a lot of stuff into a little area, I am The Man.
All hail me.
We set off fairly early on the 23rd, into the teeth of what weather forecasters call "snow showers," which for those of you not familiar with the term is the preferred jargon phrase for "not enough snow to provide an excuse for staying home but too much to drive at normal speeds." But we were headed south, so it fairly quickly turned into rain. And rain can be driven through at normal speeds.
Some observations from the drive:
First, Tabitha and Lauren are the world's best travelers. We set them up with a book full of DVDs and their movie player, a bag full of actual books as well as paper, pencils and assorted activities, their DS players, and a pair of binoculars. We were on the road for about 12.5 hours, including stops, and they did a marvelous job.
Second, what is it about the South and churches? We have churches up in the North too, but few if any have 40'-tall white aluminum crosses looming over them. Such things dotted our route like standing stones. I'm sure they were meant to inspire awe or something like that, but all I could think of was the scene from Shrek, where the ogre stares up at Lord Farquaad's castle, turns to the donkey and says "Think he's compensating for something?"
This sort of thing continued once we got to Chattanooga, too. The churches in that part of Tennessee are uniformly huge, prosperous and shiny - several that we passed had separate entrances for children, which I thought was a bit much really, though that might have been because the church I grew up in had about ten kids in it and such an entrance would have been overkill. They were quite the sight, these churches.
Our favorite church sight, though, was one we saw on the way from one place to another down there. The church had a parking lot right next to the street, and they had erected signs there to let you know where to turn, if that was where you were going. The name of the church was in tiny little letters on the bottom, though, so from any distance all you saw was a sign that said "CHRIST -->" . Whoa, nelly! In person, no less!
The oddest thing we saw on this topic was on our way over from Elizabeth and Brian's house (where we were staying) to Bob and Linda's on Christmas Eve, where we passed a man dressed in a white robe dragging a 9'-long cross behind him along the road. Brian and I sort of looked at each other when we saw this. "Isn't the whole point of the season that somebody else has already done that?" we asked each other. Oh well.
Third, nutritional rules are always suspended on long drives. When the best thing you can hope for is a roadside meal of fast food, there is no real point to worrying about it. Nutrition can resume at your destination. So we hit the road with a dietician's nightmare of salt, sugar, fat and carbs, all neatly packed in a bag along with some clementines for appearances' sake, and we lived like kings all the way down.
Come to think of it, medieval kings were also round, short-lived and gout-stricken. Maybe they traveled a lot too.
Fourth, if it's not churches, it's fireworks. Tennessee has more fireworks stands per mile of interstate highway than can possibly be healthy. They all feature a smiling antebellum white man in a white suit on their logos, and they all promise to have the lowest prices of any other such establishment, even those in Alabama, which must be the benchmark in cheap fireworks once you get outside of China. The highlight is a stand not far north of Chattanooga that, because of the way the road bends, looks like it sits smack in the middle of the highway, and as you drive up to it you get this odd feeling like you're going to be driving right through the checkout lanes. Maybe they just throw stuff into the trunk as you drive by and debit you at highway speeds the way Illinois does with tolls now.
We finally found our way to Elizabeth and Brian's house around 10pm EST. They have a wonderful house that is far neater than we could ever get our house to be again even with a crack squad of combat housecleaners and weapons-grade solvents, and we were glad to be there.
More Christmas to follow!
Welcoming in the New Year
It's a brand new decade, and the house smells like cheese.
We had a quiet New Year's Eve last night, in keeping with our recent traditions. Our friends Dan, Theresa and Grace came over, and while the kids tore around the house doing the sorts of things that kids do, the grown-ups played cards and consumed food and drink.
Win all around, I say.
The evening started with a small family cake-fest for Tabitha, to celebrate her newly-acquired double-digit status. Kim and Tabitha made the cake - a deep chocolate with homemade butter cream icing - and we had cake and ice cream for dinner, because it's New Year's Eve and Tabitha's birthday and sometimes you get to do things like that.
And then it was fiesta time!
This year we decided to have fondues, because they are easy to make and easy to eat and we're all about the easy. Theresa made the cheese fondue and brought over an entire tray of goodies for dipping. I made the chocolate/orange/brandy fondue with an entirely different group of goodies for dipping. Plus there were chips of many kinds, chocolates, salsas from the local Mexican grocery store (green this time - sometimes I wish I could remember all that Spanish I sat through in 8th grade, if only to ask what variation of salsa we're getting this time), and a wide assortment of adult beverages. It would have served two teenaged boys quite nicely, but was far more than four adults and three kids could possibly consume.
Leftovers!
Except that you cannot have leftover fondue. You just can't. Not that you can eat it all at once, but whatever you don't eat you have to bury in a landfill or it evolves and tries to have you evicted from your own house. We've done that, thank you, and the legal bills are prohibitive. So we eat, drink, and are merry, and the rest of it goes out the door.
We played many rounds of cards. We played 31, which is a game we learned in Chattanooga from one of the Uncles Chris (more on Christmas to follow in future posts...). The girls got Theresa and Dan to play Uno for a while. And then Kim brought out the Mille Bornes for the adults to play.
Sweet dancing monkeys on a stick, but that game has a lot of rules.
We played several hands, not one of which would have been sanctioned by any Mille Bornes governing body, but we had a good time.
When the ball dropped in NYC we had the television on and the pots and pans out. There was due cacophony, and then we settled in for another hour of cards and random child activities before it was actually midnight here in the nation's tender midsection. We fired up the television for another round of ball-dropping (they helpfully rerun it every hour for those of us behind the times), but two minutes before midnight our cable had one of its periodic blackouts that it really must start going to meetings about, so we were left on our own as to when the new year started.
We have a lot of clocks in our house. But as the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is, but a man with two is never sure. None of our clocks have the same time on them. So we pulled out our cell phones, on the theory that they synchronize with the time on the cell tower and therefore are more likely to be correct than anything we have here, and we counted down that way.
There followed a parade.
And then it was time to fold up our tents and call it a decade.
Happy New Year, folks. May your roads rise up to greet you.
We had a quiet New Year's Eve last night, in keeping with our recent traditions. Our friends Dan, Theresa and Grace came over, and while the kids tore around the house doing the sorts of things that kids do, the grown-ups played cards and consumed food and drink.
Win all around, I say.
The evening started with a small family cake-fest for Tabitha, to celebrate her newly-acquired double-digit status. Kim and Tabitha made the cake - a deep chocolate with homemade butter cream icing - and we had cake and ice cream for dinner, because it's New Year's Eve and Tabitha's birthday and sometimes you get to do things like that.
And then it was fiesta time!
This year we decided to have fondues, because they are easy to make and easy to eat and we're all about the easy. Theresa made the cheese fondue and brought over an entire tray of goodies for dipping. I made the chocolate/orange/brandy fondue with an entirely different group of goodies for dipping. Plus there were chips of many kinds, chocolates, salsas from the local Mexican grocery store (green this time - sometimes I wish I could remember all that Spanish I sat through in 8th grade, if only to ask what variation of salsa we're getting this time), and a wide assortment of adult beverages. It would have served two teenaged boys quite nicely, but was far more than four adults and three kids could possibly consume.
Leftovers!
Except that you cannot have leftover fondue. You just can't. Not that you can eat it all at once, but whatever you don't eat you have to bury in a landfill or it evolves and tries to have you evicted from your own house. We've done that, thank you, and the legal bills are prohibitive. So we eat, drink, and are merry, and the rest of it goes out the door.
We played many rounds of cards. We played 31, which is a game we learned in Chattanooga from one of the Uncles Chris (more on Christmas to follow in future posts...). The girls got Theresa and Dan to play Uno for a while. And then Kim brought out the Mille Bornes for the adults to play.
Sweet dancing monkeys on a stick, but that game has a lot of rules.
We played several hands, not one of which would have been sanctioned by any Mille Bornes governing body, but we had a good time.
When the ball dropped in NYC we had the television on and the pots and pans out. There was due cacophony, and then we settled in for another hour of cards and random child activities before it was actually midnight here in the nation's tender midsection. We fired up the television for another round of ball-dropping (they helpfully rerun it every hour for those of us behind the times), but two minutes before midnight our cable had one of its periodic blackouts that it really must start going to meetings about, so we were left on our own as to when the new year started.
We have a lot of clocks in our house. But as the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is, but a man with two is never sure. None of our clocks have the same time on them. So we pulled out our cell phones, on the theory that they synchronize with the time on the cell tower and therefore are more likely to be correct than anything we have here, and we counted down that way.
There followed a parade.
And then it was time to fold up our tents and call it a decade.
Happy New Year, folks. May your roads rise up to greet you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)