Christmas At Our House

It snowed on Christmas Eve here.

It should always do that, to remind us how beautiful the world could be if we would let it.

We spent the day finishing up all of the things that we probably should have finished weeks ago if we were the sort of people who planned ahead for that sort of thing, which clearly we are not. This is why, for example, I found myself at the post office at 11am mailing off our Christmas cards. Not that this is the latest we’ve ever done that, mind you – one year we sent them out for St. Patrick’s Day, for example. It’s just how we roll.

I also spent a fair amount of the day at the grocery store, picking up one last minute item after another. It was cheery, in an odd sort of way.

When I was younger Christmas Eve was always the big holiday – Christmas Day was sort of an afterthought, a big dinner with family and friends – and it had clear demarcations. At some point in the afternoon we’d pack everything up into the car and head over to my grandparents’ house, all of five miles away, and then the holiday was officially underway. But since we stay home for that these days, it sort of slides from prep to celebration unnoticed, which I find somewhat odd.

But we had a good time anyway.

Dinner was the traditional “odd number of kinds of fish” that one ought to have as an Italian-descended household. My grandmother always made seven kinds, which is a tradition that those of us in later generations have found somewhat excessive and have scaled back. “You know,” says my dad, “one is also an odd number.” But we have settled on three, since it provides some variety and seems festive in a way that one would not. We have linguini with clam sauce, popcorn shrimp and crabcakes, because they work for us and that’s what holidays are about.

We also drag out the wedding china, even just the four of us. We don’t get to use it much, really, and sometimes you just have to throw it on the table and make it work. It is a poverty to be fortunate enough have nice things and then never use them.

The same rationale applied to the Snoopy glasses that we used as well. Might as well make the whole table cheery. And yes, they go with the china just fine.

After dinner we raced over to the church for Christmas Eve service, which was a nice time. They’re always so surprised to see us there that it makes me feel special.

And then it was home for present opening by Skype with my side of the family in Philadelphia. Skype is just the most wonderful invention ever. We live in the future, yes we do.

Santa arrived right on schedule the next morning.

This was a Wisconsin year for the holidays, and for any number of complex reasons we ended up hosting Christmas Day at our house for the first time. Our guest list kept getting shorter by the hour until finally there were only nine of us around the table, but we had a grand time.

Holidays are for family and friends, and we are lucky that those groups overlap.

Kim’s parents came over, along with her brother Randall and our nephew Brody and niece Marin. The little ones motored around the way small kids do, while the adults talked the way they do and our girls alternated between them the way bigger kids do. It was that sort of day, and a wonderful sort of day it was.

Oh, and we may never eat again. Just saying.

Skating Along

One of the benefits to living in Wisconsin is that we have real winters.

It snows here, for one thing. And we know how to deal with it. I saw on the news this week that Heathrow International Airport – Britain’s biggest and one of the busiest in all of Europe – was shut down for nearly a week because they got 14 centimeters of snow. It took me a little bit to work that out, but here in the colonies we call that “five inches,” more or less, and not even the Girl Scouts cancel their meetings for that.

It also gets cold. Really cold. Like wake up in the morning and the thermometer has no numbers, just pictures of sad brass monkeys cold. It was ten below zero (Fahrenheit, for those of you reading this in the waiting areas of Heathrow, not Celsius) one morning last week here in what was, technically, still autumn.

You people in Canada can stop composing your responses now – I fully understand that you consider that to be picnic weather and laugh at Wisconsin for being a land of tropical wimps. That is why you have not been invaded since the War of 1812 – nobody wants to get into a fight with people who think that way.

Either way, the great thing about cold is that there is ice. And where there is ice, there can be ice-skating.

Here in Our Little Town they actually have an outdoor skating rink down by the river – who knew?

And better? There is a little warming house there that not only has ice skates that you can use for free, but also will sell you hot cocoa for 50 cents a cup.

How did I not know this before?

So this afternoon, as the first day of Christmas vacation (I can call it that – I’m not on the school district’s payroll and thus cannot get sued) ground on interminably, I ended taking the girls and their friend Grace over for some outdoor skating while Kim continued the Christmas preparations.

It was made of pure awesome, with little bits of crunchy awesome bits poured over the top.

And we had cocoa too. Of course we did.

One More Set of Feet

Somehow we have managed to acquire a new rodent.

At least this one is only temporary.

A friend of ours is going out of town for a while over semester break, so we agreed that we would watch her guinea pig, a black and white thing named Barney. Lauren insists on calling it Mr. Barns. I have a tendency to call it Barnaby. I don’t know what Tabitha calls it, but I’m fairly sure the cats call it Dinner. Or at least they would like to.

We collected Barney last night and brought him home with us, secure in a cage roughly the size of Rhode Island. I’m not really sure what we’re going to do with this cage on Saturday, when there will be fifteen people here for Christmas, but “One Crisis At A Time,” that’s one of my many mottoes. We stuck it in front of the television for now.

The girls have been thoroughly excited about this whole thing despite the fact that Barnaby doesn’t seem to want to have anything to do with them or us or really anything other than his safe little enclosed area at one end of his cage. So far he’s taking it slow.

And I can understand that. If I were the equivalent of a mobile pot roast in a house full of cats, I’d take it slow too.

The cats have not made it easy for poor old Mr. Barns. They have, in fact, set up shop just outside of his cage. Watching, watching, always watching, waiting for that one mistake and then – WHAM! – they crash beak-first into the wire separating the inside of the cage from the outside, look at us pathetically and complain loudly about our interference with the laws of nature, as if these cats would know anything about the laws of nature.

Meanwhile Barnaby is going bald.

With any luck the blanket that we have been covering his cage with at night will help.  The last thing we need is to give the poor thing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  I don't know how that disease would present in a rodent, but my guess is that it would involve gnawing and I'd prefer to keep that to a minimum.

He goes back home sometime around the 30th, after which we anticipate a slow returning of feline and juvenile heartrates back down to something approaching normal.

The hamsters, it must be said, are jealous.

Hippo Bird Day Two Ewe

I am now officially old. Lauren tells me so.

Of course, Lauren has been telling me that since she learned how to speak, so this should come as no great surprise to me. And, by her reckoning, I am old – older than the winds, older than the seas, older than the ground she walks on. A veritable catalog of ancientness come to life – or somehow miraculously preserved in some quasi-scientific state of limbo – solely to remind her to clear the table after breakfast.

We all serve our functions in the universe.

I don’t feel any different, really, but I have discovered a few things about my world as I turn 45.

1. More and more parties involve less and less motion. When I was younger, this motion was provided by me and my friends. Recently, most of that motion has been provided by small children. But kids grow up and we grow sedate and that’s not a bad thing in my view.

2. The concept of a 401k no longer confuses me as much as it did, though it does invoke a deep and abiding sense of impending doom, much as one gets in the passenger seat of a car sliding on an icy highway. Hit something soft, that’s the goal.

3. I am now officially too old to worry about what other people think of me. I was never very good at this, even when I was younger, but I no longer feel any need to defend or explain it.

4. Similarly, my need to put up with people seems to be deteriorating. Oh, there is rarely call to be uncivil, though I can do that too when required. Mostly it’s just the realization that I have no particular need or obligation to have people in my life who don’t serve any positive purpose by being there. This has been a liberating discovery.

5. On the other hand, those people who do serve a positive purpose I value more and more. There are not as many people in the world like that as I once thought there were.

6. Cookies for breakfast? Sure. Once in a while.

7. I am now at a point where the age gap between myself and the Hot Young Thing on television will never be anything less than creepy, no matter how much older she gets. This goes double given the amount of Disney Channel that my daughters watch. Fortunately, this is even more hypothetical now than it was when I was single.

8. My ability to absorb technology – never great to begin with – seems to have come to its natural limit. This may not be a function of age so much as personality. But I am happy to blame age anyway.

9. “Because it will make me happy and cause no harm” is all I need to justify doing something. Grand causes I leave to others.

10. I have reached the point where if I want something I’ll probably just go out and get it, which means that people really don’t need to buy me presents anymore. Don’t get me wrong – I’m always happy to get presents, whenever they should appear. But they’re happy extras now, and unexpected.

You’re never too old to make discoveries.

A Rare and Pleasant Victory

At long last, I find that I have won a round against my technology.

We finally settled on a new provider for our cell phone service, after all that rigamarole a couple of months ago about finding a new one. Kim went first, as befit her status as the person who actually understood what was going on. She bought one of their phones, paid up for a plan, and spent a month comparing how the new phone did against her old one. When the difference proved in service proved to be minimal, she switched over her old number to the new phone.

I made the jump a month later, with considerable tutelage and a fair amount of Drambuie.

The new system seems to be working fine. I can make calls in most of the places I used to be able to make calls in and a few of the ones I couldn’t before – it pretty much balances out. And instead of paying a monthly fee for the privilege of rolling over about 600 minutes every month, I pay one fee for a year’s worth of minutes, most of which I will only have to roll over at the end of twelve months. Or maybe they expire. I don’t know.

I do know that my old company sent me a final bill for 21 cents. I called them up about that and the service tech and I had a good laugh about it.

I checked tonight, by the way, and after two months of service and at a rate of 20 cents/minute for calls, my account has declined by almost $13. I think I’m good.

The one problem that I couldn’t solve when I made this switch was text messaging.

I do not text. I do not read texts. I do not wish to be texted, learn how to text, or be part of a society in which texting is considered a normal way to contact people. I think people should stop texting and learn how to write. And yet trying to get a plan that does not include this service is harder than planning a North Korean vacation.

I particularly resent the fact that I have to pay for other people’s texts to me.

Until today.

For you see, I discovered tonight that our new provider allows you to disable incoming text messages. One little toggle in my settings, and – other than the ones that the provider itself sends, which are apparently inescapable – nobody can send me any more text messages! And, knowing that, I no longer even have to bother with the ones I do receive, since I know who is sending them and do not wish to hear from them in this fashion anyway.

I like this.

Dave 1, Technology 0.

Now if I can just figure out dying piece of electronica is plaintively beeping at me every two minutes as I type this, perhaps I’ll score another victory tonight. And then won’t I be insufferable.

Higher Math

I started out as a math major.

People who know me as a historian – someone who tells stories and hasn’t even attempted to balance his checkbook since before the millennium – often find this difficult to believe. I don’t really fit the standard model for a mathematician, which of course I am not, at least not these days.

But there was a time when I thought I might be one.

I blame this on my calculus teacher my senior year of high school, Mr. Stauffer. I was a student at one level or another for nearly thirty years of my life, and Mr. Stauffer was far and away the best teacher I ever had. A thin man, probably not much older then than I am now, with a bushy mustache and a sad sort of smile, he was the only person I ever met who could describe an equation as beautiful and get you to believe it.

When I stand in front of a classroom, it is Mr. Stauffer that I am trying to be.

He had a genuine passion for his subject, one that had apparently come to him later in life than his academic degree – he was a physicist by training, as I recall – and one that was obvious to us. He titled his lectures. He would pursue an idea through most of a class before stopping, declaring that it was utterly wrong, showing us why, and moving us back toward the right answer. He once spent half an hour defending the music of Rachmaninoff – which most of us were not familiar with and therefore did not realize needed defending – not because it was germane but simply because he felt it needed to be said. And he was utterly unable to scale his graphs properly, which more than once – as class was drawing to a close and he realized he would not have the time to redraw the thing – led him to climb up onto his desk chair and continue the graph right up the wall, all the while reassuring us that he would write us notes for our next class if we would only stay and listen.

We were all in the same class after his - all he had to do was call ahead. And really – when your teacher is standing on a chair drawing on the wall, are you going to leave? We were transfixed.

There’s a picture of him doing that in my junior year yearbook. I tried to tell this story to my daughters the other day, and they didn’t believe me until I showed them the picture.

He had a fairly mischievous sense of humor, too. One day in the middle of a lecture he noticed that some students in his previous class had surreptitiously written two equations for the next day’s exam in tiny writing on the side blackboard. Rather than erase them, he simply walked over and altered them. “If they don’t catch on,” he said, “that’s their fault.”

Really, the best way to sum up the response he got from us is to note the fact that he refused to sign our yearbooks until the day of our final exam. There were 15 students in that Calc BC class, no four of whom liked each other, and on the day of our final exam there were 15 yearbooks stacked up on his desk, waiting for him to sign.

What else could I do but follow that example?

It turned out that my following would come as a teacher, not as a mathematician.

I got to college and signed up for second-year calculus, since I – as almost everyone in Mr. Stauffer’s class – had tested out of freshman calculus. It was a giant lecture class, taught by a genial sort of fellow who got us through the year intact but not really inspired.

Well, I thought, perhaps it’s just the straightforward unimaginativeness of the course that is weighing me down. Perhaps I need something more challenging.

And thus it was that on my first day of class, sophomore year, I found myself in a class called “Abstract Linear Algebra,” which was the more theoretical version of the class that most people who survived second-year calculus took. This was the “math major” class, as opposed to the “engineer” class, and thus I figured it was the one for me.

This turned out not to be true.

I walked into class on that first day to find myself in the company of seven hyper-geeks. I was – by far – the hippest, coolest dude in that classroom, and if that doesn’t scare the hell out of you nothing will. It certainly gave me a rather sinking feeling about the whole enterprise. I have never had any illusions about being any of those things, not even when I was young and cared, and to find myself as the resident expert on them was distinctly uncomfortable.

So there we sat, radiating nerdhood at each other. Waiting.

About five minutes after the class was supposed to have started, the professor bustled in, found his way to the lectern in the front of the room, and began to lecture.

He never gave us a syllabus.

He never assigned us a textbook.

He never even told us his name. I made it through a month in that class and didn’t find out the man’s name until I saw his picture on the bulletin board in the Math Department office the day I went to drop the class. For this reason, I suspect, when I can no longer recall the names of most of my undergraduate professors, his name I still know.

Eventually several things occurred to me.

First, that not only did I have no idea what was going on in that classroom, but also I didn’t care. At some point in higher math they drop the numbers and all you get are letters, most of them Greek, arranged in long thin strings bisected by equal signs or short fat grids with brackets around them, and this just struck me as a thoroughly abusive way to spend time.

Second, that most of the other students in that classroom could not be so described. In fact, they seemed to be very excited about it all, jumping in with alternative solutions to homework that I had come to regard as Escher-esque in its distortions of reality.

And third, that I didn’t have to do this if I didn’t want to.

So I stopped.

I eventually found my way to history and I stayed with it when I discovered that I enjoyed reading history even when I was not being tested on the material – that it was something I had a passion for, just for its own sake.

And that, really, was Mr. Stauffer’s lesson.

The reason he was such a great teacher was not because of the subject he was in, but because of what he brought to that subject. He loved what he was doing, and he could get us to see that and share in that.

For that, I almost became a mathematician.

For that, I did become a historian.

For that, I am a teacher.

Faces of Lauren

We spent a while looking through this year’s collection of photographs, trying to find a good one for our Christmas card. It took a while but eventually one recommended itself, and now we have a pile of them sitting on my desk waiting to get mailed out.

Don’t hold your breath.

One of the things that made the selection process so difficult is the fact that Lauren spends so much time making the kinds of faces at the camera that you get kind of annoyed with at the time but then secretly go back and look at and laugh until your sides hurt.

We think she’s got a career in vaudeville.

So here is a retrospective of some of the choicer moments from this year. Some of them have been here on this blog before, but the cumulative weight of the photos makes the repetition worth it.

Word of advice – put that beverage down now unless you want to spend the next few days cleaning off your keyboard. You’ve been warned.

 

 

 

Go get 'em, kid.