One Dad's Life

What I Would Do if I Was Off for the Summer

My kids are now out of school. On an extended vacation. My wife is a SAHM.  They all look forward to "summer vacation" and a change in the usual schedule.

This drives me completely crazy, as I still have the same monotonous schedule.  Every. Single. Day.

Work.  Work. Work.

So, rather than dreaming of what I could do if I won millions of dollars, because let's face it, that just isn't going to happen statistically until I've been hit by lightening 5 or 6 times and then it really doesn't seem worth it - I am now going to dream about what I would do if I was the one on summer vacation instead of the rest of my family.  So, for the purposes of this post, let's pretend they all have school or work, and I have...nothing.

Here we go:

1. Each day between 11:00AM and noon : Mario Kart Wii tournament with 11 of my closest friends from around the world.
2. Start out every day by asking the rest of the family, "Hey, do you want to go do (X) today?  Oh, wait, that's right, you have to go to work!"
3. Build an entire miniature village out of toothpicks on the dining room table.
4. Electrify the toothpick village.
5. Lay in the grass in the back yard with a Pina Colada and see if it is actually possible to see the grass grow.
6. Complain that since I stopped working, the weekends hold no real significance to me anymore.
7. Find out what that guy is doing that runs around my neighborhood approximately 23 hours out of every day.
8. Build a life-size replica of Stonehenge in my backyard entirely out of bicycle brand playing cards.
9. Write two blog posts each day!
10. Call my wife on her cell phone and then claim I forgot why I called.  Repeat.  (Hi Dianne!)
11. Learn to play the entire Led Zeppelin catalog on the autoharp.
12. Learn how to blow bubbles with bubblegum.
13. Start a pirate radio station in my basement.
14. Get back to reading "War and Peace."
15. Sleep in.  Ask family to set alarm for 10:30 when they get up because I don't want to oversleep!
16. Find out through application of the scientific method how many latex helium balloons it take to lift me and my reclining lawn chair above the houses in my neighborhood.
17. Catch up on Sesame Street.
18. Go to Disney World.
19. Make a hat out of tin-foil and convince visitors to the St. Louis Arch that the Arch is transmitting control signals to their brain.  Tell them that only if they wear a hat like mine can they hope to resist the evil influence!
20. Squeeze the Charmin.
21. Get a price check on everything in the dollar store.
22. Shave my eyebrows and ask everyone if they notice anything different about me.
23. Call pizza delivery place, just to talk.
24. Watch "The Price is Right" everyday.
25. Be first in line for the next Nintendo game platform.

The Art of Rebecca - part 1 (just a hunch)

If you have been reading this blog for long, you know that my family tends towards the artistic side of life...you know, if you have to pick "sides" in life, of course.

We are involved in music ranging from classical, to show-tunes, to rock.  For example: my wife and both of our girls are into acting, singing and dancing, we can all draw well in our own styles, and we all like photography. (We just got a shiny new Nikon D60 dSLR, too!  It is awesome!)  We also plant our gardens in such a way that from a plane, they appear to be large copies of Renaissance masterpieces, but that another story.

In yesterday's post, I showed our 6-year face painting, and doing a good job of it.  Today, I will showcase some work of my older daughter.  Rebecca has developed her own style of characters and artwork that I suppose is a form of cartooning.  She developed her style very early in life, during first grade, and has basically been tweaking it ever since.  She is an excellent illustrator and illustrated her first two books at ages 8 and 9.  Someday, I will showcase them here, but right now I'm too concerned with protecting copyrights and avoiding Internet thieves.  These books should seriously be published, and someday we'll get our act together and pursue this.

Rebecca is also working on illustrations for a local author's book.  She's twelve and amazingly talented at this work. She throws pictures away that "were just not right" that I have dug back out of the trash! The photo at left is of her doing a "for fun" drawing the way all the best artists do it - direct with ball-point pen while laying on the floor!  No guide pencil drawing or anything!  Now here is one of those parenting dilemmas:  Do we push her to work on her art, perhaps using it as a source of income for her (what a summer job!), a way to pay for school, or other "practical use?"  Do we just let her draw for fun and not push her at all?  Do we risk the possibility that she gets tired of it and never fully develops her talent? How do you handle a young talent like this?  She could easily make a career of illustrating - not saying any artistic career is easy, I am just indicating that she has the ability to make a career of illustrating.  It's a tough call.

Yesterday,  I found a stack of homework papers she had brought home from school.  One of the items caught my eye.  She had to create a product and advertising and labels for this product.  Her idea was somewhat humorous but also showed some potential for a career I hadn't thought of - advertising.

Check this out:

Although the poor little mango shouting out "Eat Me!" is a bit on the morbid side (and almost caused me to write another "I'm Worried about the Kids" post), the whole concept of "If one doesn't quench your thirst, buy 2" is completely brilliant!  I may be speaking from a slightly biased position as her father, but in my opinion, a more brilliant sales/marketing slogan has not appeared on this earth since Johnson & Johnson developed the whole idea of "rinse and repeat." 

Think about it, if a shampoo company can convince you to use twice as much shampoo without making you think that if you have to repeat, is this product actually any good? - then a campaign that basically tells you to drink twice as much of the Maxed Out Mangoes than you need is genius!  Buy two!

 

Future Artist?

A wordless Wednesday post (due to lack of time management on my part!)

From the archives: My daughter Rachel, at age 6, doing face-painting (on my wife) at this spring's Easter Egg hunt at our church.  She wasn't copying any drawings, she knew just how to make the bunny face on her own.  In this picture, she is adding buck-bunny teeth!

Uh oh ... What's That Smell?

A week or so ago, STL Homeboy wrote this post  (hint, when I write "this post" and it shows up underlined, or a different color in your browser, this means you can click it to see what I'm talking about!) about "Phantom Poop" smell.  In his case, he was talking about that smell that lingers in your house when you have a baby in diapers.  You eventually get used to it, or you go around all day looking for where the poop smell is coming from.  In his case, he was also talking about a guest coming over and realizing that the baby was RIPE, when he was attributing the smell to phantom poop smell.

As a nearly completely off-topic comment, I happen to know how to completely eliminate the whole "phantom poop" smell...NO DIAPER PAIL.   Yep, you change baby, and then throw the poopy diaper away outside.   I could write a book.

Anyway, my kids are well past that whole pooping in the pants stage, by quite a lot.  I'd like to say they are completely past the peeing in the pantsstage, as they are 6 and 12, but a recent car incident which I only vaguely agreed I wouldn't talk about proves me premature in this statement.  In fact, it's really not fair that I can't talk about because that's what bloggers do!  In particular, silly bloggers like myself do this.  Hmmmm.

Well, the problem is that we have 3 pets - 2 cats and a dog - that are increasingly NOT WELL BEHAVED, if you know what I mean.  So the other day, I kept smelling the phantom pet poop smell.  It was fairly faint, and since I didn't see anything in the usual spots, I attributed to some kind of mental disorder I may have.  I continued with the tasks at hand, but the smell still lingered.   I finally went to do a little work on my computer in my office.  The smell was stronger now, much stronger.  It was this time that my dim brain finally thought to check my shoes.

OH MY GOSH!!!!

Nearly a third of my tennis shoe was covered in dog poop, neatly packed in place with seed pods from the yard, that had blown down in a thunderstorm.  Clearly, I had stepped in the, um, substance back in my yard, and did a bit of walking around in the yard afterwards to encase the poop on my shoe in all these protective seed pods.  Perhaps this is why the smell was faint at first.

Then I realized that it had been quite a while since I had been outside.  I started trying to recreate the path I had traveled once back in the house.  In my mind, it looked like one of those  Family Circus cartoons  where Bill Keane draws the crazy zig-zagging path the kids went on.  I had stopped in the kitchen to get an ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper, I had played the piano, I had used the facilities, I sat on the edge of my bed looking out the window at our new hummingbird feeder, I had been downstairs, upstairs, the kids room, my wife's office,  I had been everywhere.  I would have to clean everywhere!

I carefully hopped out to the porch to take my shoes off.  Gently, ever so gently, I removed my shoes.  Unfortunately, I'm basically an uncoordinated klutz, because just as I was removed the poop covered shoe,  I jerked my foot, or the shoe or something.  A chunk of the poop detached itself from the shoe, and beautifully, and slowly, ever so slowly (or maybe my mind switched into that slow motion mode, because I don't think poop can slowly do what it was doing), the poop arched up in the air, tracing a parabolic pattern in the cool spring air.

Fortunately, I resisted the urge to continue following the poop during its ascent.  This was good, because as humans look up, for some bizarre reason their mouths open like turkeys in the rain.  The possibilities were horrific.   I, however, did the next worse thing.  I ducked.

You can guess what happened next.  The little poop chunk smashed directly on my head and broke apart into dozens of tinier poop pieces.  Now I would have to be cleaned everywhere.

Maybe going to work each day is better than this sort of event...NAH...what am I thinking?

Now on Twitter

Due to serious strong-arming by the other local bloggers, I'm now on twitter.

If you want to participate in my mental madness in 140 characters or less, go to http://twitter.com/onedadslife. 

May God help us all.

Memorial Day

I think that over time, Memorial Day has turned into a celebration just due to the fact that it currently is forced to fall on a Monday, thus creating a three-day weekend. No work for many people, yeah!   Unfortunately, the original intent and meaning is lost on many.  I'm going to take a one day break from the usual silliness of this website, to talk briefly about this important day. 

Memorial day originally started, according to some accounts, when recently freed slaves in the Charleston area entered a southern prison camp, and re-interred the many Union soldiers that had been buried there in a mass grave.  They buried these soldiers in individual, marked graves and built a fence around the cemetery, honoring the soldiers that had bought their freedom with their lives.  It was 1865 and these slaves had just been freed the month before!  Can you imagine the personal risk they took to honor these soldiers?

Three years later,on May 30th, 1868, these former slaves returned, and decorated the graves with flowers and laurels.  The date became known as "Decoration Day", the original name for Memorial Day.  To this day, the National Cemeteries have their graves decorated for this occasion.   In St. Louis, the boy scouts play a major role in this task.  

The US government created this network of national cemeteries, originally to bury the many American Civil War dead.  Nearly 3% of the population died either fighting or as collateral damage during this horrific war.  That was over a million people.  Near my house is one of these National Cemeteries, Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery.  Jefferson Barracks itself was named after Thomas Jefferson, who had died the year before it was formed.  Jefferson Barracks started in 1826 as the country's first "infantry school of practice."   The first soldier buried there was in 1827.   In 1866, the cemetery became part of the US network of National Cemeteries and contains many civil war dead.

Memorial day has since been expanded to be a day honoring those who have died in any military service for our country, including the original confederate soldiers.  I encourage everyone in the United States reading this, to make this history part of whatever celebration you are participating in today.  If possible, make a brief stop at any of the National Cemeteries, either today, or over the next week.  I will be doing the same.

Photo info:  I made this print in 1991 - many years before all this digital stuff made such things easy...and cheap.  The picture is actually two individual pictures, shot on 35mm film with a Minolta SRT-201 camera.  One picture is of the cemetery at Jefferson Barracks, and the other is of a large rock that was behind my apartment.  Master Slide, in Webster Groves, took each 35mm negative and created a 4x5 inter-negative from each photo.  They then sandwiched both of these negatives together to create the final print.  I'm sure all together it cost me a fortune!  It is also matted and framed and hanging in my living room. I apologize for the "softness" of the scan.  I was afraid to remove the photo from the mat, so it was not directly on the surface of the scanner, and thus a bit out of focus.  The original is sharp and a bit brighter!

"I'm Sorry"

A weakness I have, other than a raving addiction to Diet Dr. Pepper, is that I have a certain lack of sympathy for all the various random annoyances that people encounter in the average day.  Let me give you a totally made up scenario to illustrate:

wife (The beautiful Dianne!):Sweet froggy toes, this is the third time I've tried to iron my hair straight that I just poofed up with the hair dryer. I keep getting interrupted (usually this means Rachel is bugging her)!  I'm starting to get really MAD!  (Dianne doesn't really say things like "sweet froggy toes", but it would be funny if she did, you know, for maybe a day.  Then it would get old.)

Gregg:  I'm sorry. (I say this, but it is really because I don't know what else to say.  Then I drag Rachel away from Dianne and scold her for being such a pest!)

Dianne: It's not your fault! (Awwww, she noticed! Isn't that sweet?)

Gregg: (thinking to myself) I know it's not my fault, but I'm paying for it here!

So you see, I'm not too good at this sympathy thing.  So now, fast forward from the imaginary situation above to a real event this past Wednesday.   Dianne and the girls are on a little trip to visit family.   As they were nearing their destination, our GPS guided Dianne on a route she had never been on, so she was really watching out for where exactly she was and the road was rapidly narrowing down to a less major road, there were wooden bridges and stuff and Dianne was getting frustrated and felt lost and then THE RACHEL (see how this frequently starts?) begins to have a coughing fit.  When she does this, she makes no attempt whatsoever to try and stop the coughing fit, and Dianne tells her to try and stop coughing or she is going to throw up.   Well, you can already see where this unfortunate story is going. 

Rachel threw up.

Rebecca (older daughter) then begins basically screaming in the car because, well, barf was everywhere.  Rebecca is kind of prissy when it comes to getting a little messy, so barf is WAY outside her tolerance level.  As Dianne is trying to deal with the barf and screaming while speeding down this unknown road, a Kansas highway patrol guy pulls out from behind a billboard like in the Jetsons (or maybe it was trees or something, but I like the billboard image) and pulls Dianne over.

Apparently, this cop was either oblivious to the commotion going on in the back of the car, because Rachel started another coughing fit, probably thought she was headed for jail (this is a story for another post...no actual heading to jail incident has ever happened, though, I swear), and Dianne was trying to simultaneously assure her she was not going to jail and to PLEASE STOP COUGHING OR YOU WILL THROW UP AGAIN, and the cop still insisted that he write Dianne a ticket because after all she was in fact exceeding the posted speed limit and fair was fair!  (You really should try to read that intentionally run-on sentence in one breath.  It helps set the stage!) 

So, Dianne finally continued on her way after all of this - and a $115 speeding ticket.  Naturally, she decided to give me a call.

Gregg's Phone: (vibrate, vibrate)

Gregg: (answering phone) Hello?

Dianne: (with a somewhat stressed sounding voice) So, how is it going?

Gregg: (picking up on the stress sound and not wanting to sound excited because the work day was coming to an end and I was going to be going home to a quiet house to do some cooking for a barbeque on Thursday and maybe play some guitar hero - which I never got to - and scan some more CDs for the iPod, and get some paperwork done while listening to really loud music which turned out to be "Alice in Chains" but couldn't say all this to Dianne because she was sounding stressed):  OK.  How are you? (dangerous question, but I was 300 miles away!)

So, Dianne relates the whole story that I told you above.  So now, check this out, not wanting to sound artificially sympathetic as that is one of my weaknesses other than the Diet Dr. Pepper thing, DID NOT SAY "I'm sorry" like I usually do.   Yeah, Gregg!

Instead, I think I might have laughed.   This is probably not much of an improvement, but I swear to you that almost all that was going through my mind was "how can I write about this?!?  This is a great story!"  This is what blogging every single week day does to you.  YOU NEED CONSTANT MATERIAL. 

So anyway, I'm working on the whole unmeant sympathy "I'm sorry" thing.  It's a work in progress, though.

So, if this post was too long and drawn out to get to that point, well, "I'm sorry." (couldn't resist)

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Bonus Quote of the Day (aren't you lucky?)

"Friends are like butt cheeks.  Sometime some (poop) gets stuck between them, but they always stay together."   -as related to me by my daughter over the phone last night, while my wife hysterically laughed in the background with her "I'm watching America's Funniest Home Videos" laugh.  Also, my daughter used a word that wasn't exactly "poop" but also wasn't exactly what you think it was, either.  But this is a family friendly website! So I changed it to "poop."

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Fake Twitter attempt #4 (oh my gosh, is this really three posts in one?  Yes it is, I'm having a Memorial Day sale, blogland!)

"Listening to Korn. Really loud.  It rocks."

Pretend Twitter on a Blog

"I just watered my new annuals in the rain.  With a hose.  By hand.  You know, just to make sure."

Author's note:  This is an attempt to try out Twitter without actually trying out Twitter.  So far the experiment may have failed.  I still don't get it.  I  am actually afraid to try it for real because I might like it and then I won't be able to joke about it.  Plus, I'd end up spending all day writing stuff like the above.  Which I really did do, by the way.

The normal daily post is below.  Please read it so I can feel complete as a blogger.  Thanks!

If You Had Infinite Time...

If you are like me, Dad or not, you have a big mental list of projects that you'd love to be able to work on, but just don't seem to have the time.   I have some projects that seem to require infinite time.  For example, given infinite time, I'd like to take an entire run-down block in the city and rehab it, opening up a bunch of old-time street level shops, housing, etc.   Well, this dream may take infinite money, too.

Then I've had projects that on the surface would seem to take infinite time, but that can be done one little chunk at a time.  I'm working on one of those right now.  I'm "ripping" my CDs to be able to put them on an iPod.   I have a lot of CDs.  However, by setting up my work-flow with iTunes, I'm able to just pop a CD in the drive, without even switching to iTunes on my computer and in seconds go back to whatever task I was doing.

Using this method, over three weeks I've now ripped 3800 songs, and created 24 GB of audio files.  In case you are curious, this puts me just into the "F" section of our rock CDs.  I haven't done classical, jazz, praise and worship, or musicals, yet.  There is a long way to go, but it is do-able, one CD at a time.  I know, because I also have all of our music in a giant music database, CDs, vinyl and all.

The next "infinite time" project I'd love to be able to do is to scan all my old photos.  Well, find and then scan them...perhaps from the negatives.  I'd have writing material for YEARS going through those!  Even more, I'd like to be able to scan all the old photos that my parents have of my childhood.  This would be an enormous task, but maybe I'll tackle this after the iPod is done.  In a way, I've actually started! 

I've scanned, let's see, ONE photo so far.  You can find it here.

For some reason, though, doing my infinite time tasks one little step at a time seem to only work on appealingprojects.  I have so far been unable to apply it effectively to going through old papers and stuff in my office.  Perhaps that's harder because of the distinct lack of appeal, but also because there is so much to be done before it is obvious that you are making progress.  With the other infinite time projects I've mentioned, I am building something up that is tangible and can be seen, like an increasing database size, or you can see the stack of CDs and albums that you have completed.  This is positive reinforcement.  The office doesn't really have that opportunity.  Perhaps I have to figure out a way to make the progress obvious to keep my interest.

Now, that whole city block thing has other challenges, money and big chunks of time being two of them.  No actual knowledge on what to do is another little problem.  I could buy that block one building at a time though....hmmmm.

So what are your infinite time projects, and how do you approach them?

Graduation!

Yesterday was a landmark day for my youngest daughter, Rachel.  She graduated from Kindergarten!  The school she attends has grades K-8 in one building, so it is neat that they make a big deal out of this graduation.  This is the first year she spent at the school her older sister was in at the same time.

It is also the school I went to as a child. I remember thinking, as a Kindergarten student, that the kids in the other grades were SO HUGE.  Surely, I would be nearly an adult by the time I was in 1st grade!

Rachel was extremely excited about the day.  She mentioned to my wife, Dianne, that all day she kept crying, but didn't understand why because she was so happy!  I think she was just overwhelmed with many conflicting emotions.  Rachel loves her teacher...so much so that if her teacher was ever not at school, Rachel would end up in the nurse's office complaining of a stomach-ache.  The nurse actually made the connection between her teacher not being in school, and Rachel showing up in her office.  At the same time, Rachel is so proud to be going into 1st grade.  When we mentioned later last night that now she was a 1st grader, she just beamed.

Rachel has made a tremendous amount of progress in many areas this year, most notably in behavior and maturity.  She was always getting into trouble and not listening in preschool, but this year in Kindergarten, she never once "was out of the beehive."  The "beehive" was a beehive that was on a bulletin board with little bees inside.  Each student had a bee.  If you misbehaved, your bee progressively got farther out of the hive until you were in the principal's office.  Rachel's bee never once moved.   If you know Rachel, you know that this was a tremendous accomplishment for her.

The graduation ceremony was brief, but very nice.  The Kindergarten classes processed into the gymnasium of the school singing a song, All for Him.   We were sitting in the very back of the gymnasium in the bleachers, which makes it easier to see the stage - though impossible to get any pictures.  My parents sat near the front, so I'm hoping (hint, hint) to get the files from my Dad's camera!  I was proud to see that as Rachel was walking in, she was belting out the song.  In fact, all the kids were singing their hearts out...and in time and on pitch!  This is a talented class, I tell you.

The kids stood the entire program on bleachers that had been setup on the stage.  Thinking of that fact alone, it is good the program was relatively short.  They were amazingly well behaved and stood still with almost no fidgeting.  I was astounded by this - Rachel doesn't even sleep without constant movement!

There was a short introduction by the principal, and then the kids began a program that alternated some Bible passages, and then a related song.  The kids sang very very well.  In fact, they were amazing on all their songs.  All together, I think they sang about 4 songs. 

This lasted 15 or 20 minutes, and then they began handing out all the diplomas.  As each child received their diploma, they walked to the back of the gym and sat down, waiting for their classmates.  Again, they were very well behaved.  What had gotten into these kids?

Afterwards, there was a reception with cookies and punch.  Additionally, the principal's wife had made cookies that looked like EACH KID.  What an amazing amount of work to do.  They were very cute.

With my kids, any special event they participate in somehow automatically means that they require ice cream afterwards.  So we took our kids to a local Dairy Queen, along with my parents, and one of Rachel's classmates and her parents.  Rachel and her friend split some kind of giant chocolate/fudge mess that was guaranteed to be all over them.  They did not dissappoint, and I took the obligatory messy child picture, though the mess in person looked much worse!

This was a bittersweet day for me and my wife.  This is another childhood milestone that we will not see again until we have grandchildren, as this is our youngest - and last - child.  Tempus fugit.

Still, life is good.

Photo Info:

1. All smiles. Getting ready to process in for graduation.
2. Rachel and her teacher, whom she LOVES.
3. On stage and singing like pros.
4. Dairy Queen.  L-R: My oldest daughter Rebecca, Rachel's classmate, Rachel. And chocolate!