Copious Free Time

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I took Sarah bowling today. In the second game, I seemed to find my groove with a strike that became a double. Did I dare hope for a Turkey? I got a third strike in a row, answering the question in the positive. Then I got a fourth consecutive strike. The monitor informed me that this was a "4-Bagger," a term I hadn't even had the occasion to wonder about before. If I had some friends here, they'd soon see how casually I'd be able to drop the word into unrelated conversations.
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So. On some Friday of last month, we got everything (plus some) into the Element and rolled on down the driveway toward vacation. We had lunch in a small town off the highway (on a route we were taking for the first time, designed to avoid the endless construction on our old route) in what was probably the only sit-down restaurant in town. A door or two away they were renovating the long-closed town movie theater, gearing up to show non-first-run movies. By suppertime we were at the home of Cathy's mom, sister, and niece, where we stayed for three days.

I went out and walked around the neighborhood each morning, aided by small maps I'd made for my iPod (thanks, Google Maps!) so I wouldn't get lost. The weather was pretty warm. I carried my small water bottle and a fan, just in case. I took pictures here and there, including a house where a bird and a squirrel were posed so picturesquely on the faux well that I first thought they were decorative elements. After the first morning, I carried my camera along.

Cathy's brother Sean was there with his daughters. Sean's birthday is close enough to Cathy's that a joint party was held for both, with cake and candles. Since it was the big 50 for Sean, someone had the idea of using a Roman numeral (though not a Roman candle) for the number. Sean declared that it wasn't a number, but an L for Loser. I sympathized quietly. Sean's daughter Taylor is now 15 or 16 and has a web page called GiveMeFashionNow that seems to be getting pretty respectable amounts of traffic.

We pressed on to Philadelphia, with vaguely educational intent. We took Sarah to the Franklin Institute, which was (per Cathy's careful planning) in walking distance from our hotel. They have a bicycle on a wire two floors above the main hall, and I paid three or four dollars to ride on it. You can't turn it around, so you are pedaling in reverse half the time. I should have looked down more, and gotten my money's worth. Next we took the purple trolley-style bus to the Please Touch museum, catching a ride as it was heading away from it and going through town to the far end of the route, then coming back. The museum is in a building built for a world's fair, and there's a rather large diorama of the whole fair in the basement that's fun to look at. There were lots of things to try there, and it didn't seem like any of it was out of order, even. Sarah enjoyed herself and kept busy. We ate well there, at Indian and Chinese restaurants, as well as the Reading Market.

Then it was off to DC, with Cathy still driving (I don't remember driving at all on the trip) and me riding shotgun with the camera, playing the alphabet game with signs as we went while Sarah played Nintendo or watched DVDs in the back. We got in on Thursday, and on Friday I got to start seeing people. First it was two fellow posters from the Comics Curmudgeon, who I met for the first time over lunch at the Museum of the American Indian (which I recommend — the food court, anyway). That evening, we drove down to Baltimore and had supper with Steve and Elaine Stiles. Steve spoke of his eventual retirement, and we talked up our part of New York as a great place to move to. We'll see if he buys it.

On Saturday, geckoman journeyed up from Hampton, VA, to accompany us through the National Zoo, where we got to gawk at pandas. They mostly eat, but at least they're good to watch while they do it. They're living cartoon characters, needing only appropriate background music to complete the picture. The zoo also has orangutan tramways: towers connected by cables that let the orangs travel between two or three locations. (Tip: Don't stand underneath!) We spent time in the small mammal and reptile houses, with Geck's observations making everything twice as entertaining. Then we all hit the pool again. The water was a good temperature, easy to get used to. Seemed to be salt water, too. I forgot my goggles somewhere there, but they could stand replacing anyway.

Sunday was the day we drove back. I went through the alphabet backwards and forwards a bunch of times, and then we were home again. The cat still recognized us. We unpacked and decompressed.

Then, the next weekend, we were off again.

Culture Camp is an annual event of the FCC (Families of Chinese Children) here, where everybody drives down to Lake Keuka and stays on the campus of Keuka College for workshops, crafts, meals, s'mores, and lots of running around and shouting. This year, Sarah wanted her friend Lulu to come with us, so we were a foursome. Sarah and Lulu had a room of their own, connected to ours by the bathroom.

I tried the piano in our residence hall, and found that the upper notes were in a different key from the lower ones. The piano in the student center, however, was basically okay with only a few notes in a different dimension. I had come prepared for this, and got out my tuning hammer and electronic tuner and touched up the lower octaves. The bottom G on the bass clef was missing both strings — not much I could do about that. Each time I played a piece, I looked at the music and asked msyelf if that G was crucial. Sometimes it was, and I played another piece instead.

I had also come prepared for the foosball tables, which had no foosballs. When Sarah and I went to play mini golf in NJ, I noticed that the shop the course was in sold the balls, and I bought some. As a result, Sarah and Lulu were able to play when nobody else could (except if they played with Sarah and Lulu). They were happy to stop playing with a rolled up wad of paper.

Saturday night (the thing went from Friday to Sunday lunch), we were treated to a super fireworks display. Literally, we were treated. It had nothing to do with the camp. We were just in the right place at the right time. We stayed around until lunch on Sunday and headed home. The drive wasn't terribly long, even with Sarah in the car.
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Cathy's at a convention for five days. Sarah and I got her to her plane and then drove around Rochester a bit (I need to see if Google Street View will show me that little place with the columns out front) and then hurried over to the pediatrician for her appointment, arriving exactly on time. After we did what we'd come for, I asked about an issue near to Sarah's heart — can she dispense of the booster seat in the car? We got an affirmative and went for it. Sarah happy.

Then we went to thrift shop row where I looked for an electric clock to replace the one I've had for about 35 years (30 of them without the glass crystal, which broke early on). It started making noises that presaged a breakdown, and I retired it against the hope it might be fixable if I don't let it go until the windings in the motor melt down. All I could find were the typical, noisy modern wall clocks with their AA battery and ticking sound. I don't mind having one upstairs or in the bathroom, but I wouldn't care to have one four feet from my chair all day. I did see some VCRs, and since the Magnavox recently went down (taking with it a lovely jog shuttle — two, counting the one on the remote — that gave me fine control in looking at cartoons frame by frame), followed shortly after by the no-name VCR that used to be in the bedroom that I brought in here to replace the Magnavox, I decided to take a chance on one of them, shelling out $10 for it.

Home again, where we learned that Cathy's flight had been cancelled. By the time we knew that, she called and said she had taken two other flights and arrived safely. We had some lunch, then Sarah went out and played a while, and then we went to the Y, where I caught up on my exercises. After that we looked for non-ticking clocks at Target, Best Buy, Staples, Sears, the Bon Ton, and Macy's. So we gave up and headed for the food court, but I saw clocks on the wall of a jewelry store, including a Seiko whose second hand sweeps silently around a rather elegant face that actually complements my glass-and-metal computer desk.

Then we finally ate. Johnny Rocket has nice strawberry malteds and chili cheese dog sliders. Sarah had an egg salad sandwich with side salad. I put a nickel in the jukebox and we ate at the counter. We headed home and tried to remold Sarah's mouth guard. No luck. We'll look for a new one.

So tomorrow it'll be Soccer first. Then we might go to the sushi event at Wegman's, first stopping off to refill the gas tank and (a special treat for Sarah) drive through a car wash if it's not rainy. I finked out on my stretches this evening (also missed my normal walk, but I think we made it up at the mall) to get the VCR set up, and it has a jog shuttle on the unit and though there's no wheel on the remote, it does have frame-by-frame control. Seems to work, and it was a pretty advanced model for its time. If it doesn't eat tapes, it's golden.

Night, all.
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I finished straightening out my iPod/iTunes, having gone through about 18000 tracks. It's good to be finished.

I discovered the Auburn Trail, or rediscovered it. It was the Auburn Line until about 90 years ago, and now it's a walking trail, interrupted only by the Erie Canal and some homeowners who blockade the path with piles of branches and brush in an attempt to annex this public thoroughfare to their back yard. Now I understand that the big ol' piling in the middle of the canal where Knickerbocker comes out was the railroad bridge. I walked on another part of this same trail just over two years ago when we moved here and were living briefly in an apartment. All in all, it's 24 miles long, or 42, or something like that. I'm already forgetting the stuff I've looked up about it. Because it's late.

Sarah finished school today. My schedule will now shift to a later stratum of time for the summer. But I'm still tired, and I skipped my stretches today just to get through LJ. Also missed the nap I usually take, and probably some other stuff. I gave two quotes on potential jobs today. It'd be nice if one of them would work out. It's good to earn some money.

I spent some time talking to a technician from Sony about why the Reader software opens on my computer but then doesn't open a window or in any other way make itself useful. The Reader they sent me to replace my other one seems to have the right sort of battery life, anyway.

Say, I was going to post about this separately, but I'll just toss it out and then go brush my teeth and lie down for a few hours. WFMU is going to present a bunch of Firesign Theatre Radio Hours. They have an informative post about that right here. With some audio clips (music only, as far as I've found so far). Note the links to streaming shows: two of them are up so far. I put a link to that in my toolbar where I'll see it when I'm awake.

Speaking of music, here's a link from bOINGbOING to some Jay Ward music cues. I have a bunch of these on my iPod, having carefully transcribed them from VHS tapes of the show. Great stuff.

I reposted a handful of links to Fischerkösen animated ads (dating as far back as the 1930s in Germany). This 2006 comment from Making Light has links. I hope they're still good.

Right. I'm off now.
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Yesterday, Sarah wanted cheesy eggs and bacon again. I had her gather ingredients while I finished unloading and loading the dishwasher -- it's so much better to cook in a clean kitchen -- and things started as usual. This time, she wanted to crack eggs. Just one, she said, but I had her crack two of the three (I'd already broken the first one). Then she started the scrambling. I had her start the microwave with the bacon in it as she had me finishing the scrambling, and then I had her put cheese on the plates for the eggs to go on top. Just one egg for me this time, as I'm getting no thinner.

When it was all done with, she ended up only eating one egg as well. That's life.

This morning, I was doing boring old morning stuff when I was informed that Sarah had made bacon and eggs already, with Cathy standing by. A little firmer than I make them, but perfectly acceptable and tasty eggs. Sarah is learning to cook.

In other news, back when we were still in Virginia, I told Cathy I had decided my midlife crisis car would be a Honda Element. Three days ago, we closed on a red 2006 Element that I might call Mao. Sarah, who has been an Element fan since she learned of my interest, likes it because it's kind of like a van and it has great back seat legroom. It's the first car we've had with Automatic. I guess I can deal with that. It has four-wheel drive for those weather emergency days. My god, I have an SUV. Now I have to be saintly in my driving conduct to try and counteract the bad rep all those other drivers have given us SUV drivers.

I've also had a busy week designing a web page for the Friends of the Library here, working on a couple of books, and participating in the "Art Ambassador" program at Sarah's school. This was the Faith Ringgold unit. The next one will be Winsor McCay: my unit.

And now I will head for bed.
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My window here opens out at ground level, and through the slats I could see an animal's legs on the porch. A cat perhaps? I went back to getting Sarah ready for school and the bus. Snow on the ground this morning. Must remember to get my car out of the garage so Cathy can park there when she comes in from Boston this afternoon. As usual, Sarah was outside first. "Dad! Matty's here."

Matty was the dog next door, friendly enough but still puppy-rambunctions. Sarah encountered her a couple of times a day when coming or going to Zach's house. Our back yards join at the property line under the utility wires, and our front doors are 2/3 of a mile apart by car. Sarah said she scratched her one time, probably from trying to jump up -- sometimes she was too friendly.

This morning, she was polite but skittish. She came when I called her, and she was willing to come with me to the back yard, but making eye contact and then looking at where I wanted her to go (a trick that had worked to perfection once in Virginia when a neighbor dog had escaped their wooden fence) didn't get me anywhere.

I went in to get my phone. "Don't let her go in the house!" Sarah cautioned, but Matty didn't seem inclined to follow me in anyway. Frances was on the stairs, as usual, rubbing her sides on the rails and angling for some pets. I came out with the phone and called over. Their number was the most recent on my list. I'd used it a day or two ago when Sarah had kicked off a boot that proceeded to hit Zach in the face.

"Hello?" Zach's mom sounded sleepy. Perhaps she'd worked late at the ER last night.

"This is Kip. Matty's over here. I tried to get her to go back, but she's just hanging around here."

Deb thought about it. "The battery in the invisible fence thing might be low. She probably doesn't want to cross it. You could take her collar off." I wasn't keen on that, because Matty was acting pretty nervous. "I'll come over there and get her in a couple of minutes." I said I'd stay with her until then.

Sarah petted Matty. "She likes getting pets on her tummy," she told me.

"She should lie on the porch instead of on the cold snow," I said.

"She likes to be a snow dog." Sarah explained. "Where's that dumb bus?" I suggested that the snow might be slowing it down, though it was a pretty light snow. A minute later, it showed up. "Don't let her get on the bus!" she said. She petted Matty one last time and then dashed to me for a kiss before going down the driveway to stand ten feet away from the arriving bus. Sonali ran across our yard to get on with her (Sarah's friend from two houses away tended to make the bus just in time, more or less). I tried to get Matty to follow me to the back again, but she opted to stay by the corner of the house and watch as I whistled. This time I saw something I hadn't noticed before -- a small pile of what seemed like they could be deer droppings. I saw that the sleeve over one of Sarah's tiny apple tree seedlings had fallen partway and straightened it back up. Then I could see Deb coming over, and then she started calling to Matty.

"Matty! Silly dog. What are you doing over here?"

"She might have followed a deer. I just saw a pile of droppings -- it's a miracle nobody stepped in it." Everybody had walked within a foot of the footprint-sized pile. If there were any hoof prints in the snow, we'd wiped them out. Deb removed the electronic collar so it wouldn't keep Matty from entering her yard, and escorted her back to her own side.

"Oh yeah, she's a lot more comfortable now," said Deb as Matty went into full happy mode. "Thanks for calling us!"

I thought about poor Matty as I went in. A deer, perhaps, lured her across the invisible fence, but nothing could lure her back across the electronic barrier, so she picked our front porch as a sort of haven. It was lucky for her (maybe she smelled us here) that she'd found friends. A fence works both ways.
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Finally, I'm back on stage. Not since "Company" in 2003 have I trod the boards, and I have missed it something fierce. In 2003, we went to China and became parents, which made me too busy to do anything. In 2005, things were under control enough that Cathy said I could try out for "The Music Man" at CNU... but then she was in the process of changing jobs, and I couldn't be sure of being at every rehearsal, so I reluctantly bowed out. Up through 2008, I was trying without success in Massachusetts. In 2007, I at least managed to audition a time or two, but couldn't crack any of the groups.

In 2008, we came here to western NY, and for a year or more, I never knew about any auditions. By the time I found out about a given show, it was a couple of weeks from taking the stage. (Now I find out that at least one of them could have still used a chorus body at that late date -- live and/or learn.)

Finally, it all came together for me, and I got the coveted part of Chorus Member in Pittsford Musicals' "Carousel," including a brief talking part at the very end. It's so great to be hanging around theaters, hobnobbing with my fellow thespians, and of course, being up on a stage with people looking at me. Hopefully, it'll be on to bigger and better things (for me -- the show itself is fairly big and it's going great).

We're halfway through the run. Two performances on Saturday and a matinee on Sunday down, a Friday night and two more Saturday shows to go. Sarah came to the Sunday matinee, and bless her heart, she seems to have been fairly attentive to all three hours of it. I showed her to as many of my fellow theater folks as I could afterward, and then we went to the chili party, which was pretty conveniently close to home.

Aspects of daily life continue. Sarah had a tooth hurting her and we took her to the dentist where she screamed in the chair while they tried to pull it quickly so they could go home. We're changing dentists next year, and I hope next year comes soon. The tooth was infected, so it was all probably quite painful for her, even with anesthesia. Yesterday she and I got new watches. Her old one got left outside, so she is paying for 2/3 of the cost of the new one. My old one no longer lights up at night (despite putting in a new cell), and after a couple of years of that, I decided to replace it as well.

I got all the leaves out of the front yard. Remembering that raking while I had a slight cold last year gave me pneumonia for my birthday, I got the blower out and let electricity do the heavy lifting. I think it's the first time in ten years I've used the thing, but results were satisfactory. It was even kind of fun.

Exercise has taken a back seat to the show, but I'm getting back on track with the daily walk (between one and two miles) and the stretches from the physical therapy I've been taking to try and mitigate some of the side effects of still being alive.

Also, I have been getting a fairly steady stream of inquiries about my professional services, some of which have resulted in paying work. That said, I should probably be doing that instead of this, but I wanted to catch up a little. Cathy's finishing a term paper for her class. She's not in love with what she did, but it should get her by. Sarah is done with sports for a while, but she's taking Tae Kwon Do (influenced, perhaps, by the impressive Shaolin Warriors we saw at the college). Her spelling is good at school, and though she doesn't study her Chinese vocabulary enough, she still does fairly well in class. We throw a tennis ball back and forth in the morning while we wait for her bus. The other day she gave me a cut-out heart she'd colored and written "Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you" on it. The spelling was erratic, but darn, what a sweetie.
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In Massachusetts, we would have hundreds, because families in Springfield would drive to West Springfield, and ours was the first street they got to.

Here in New York, they all seem to be local. Indeed, in at least half the groups of kids we ran into, there'd be somebody who went to school with Sarah, and they'd either say hi to each other or I'd hear them tell each other "It's Sarah!"

We got off to an inauspicious start. Sarah was supposed to go out with Zach from across our back yard, trick-or-treating over on his street, but for some reason that fell through. Alternate plans were made with Jay and Julia. Then an hour before time, Julia's mom called and said that she (Julia) wasn't feeling well, so I called over and arranged for Sarah to go out with Max and Gaby. A half hour later, Gaby's mom called and said that Gaby was having a meltdown over the issue of wearing an insufficiently warm costume on a cold, wet, windy night and might not get to go out at all.

At a bit after six, Sarah and I started out. I had her put on a jacket over her werewolf suit. She found the mask to be hot. I felt a light sprinkle and grabbed an umbrella from the car. The first house we went to was right across the street, and Mark's grandkids were just starting out with their parents. We latched on.

The rain threatened one more time while we were out, but it never really hit. Sarah was warm enough in her costume that she not only had me carry the mask most of the time, she also had me hold her coat from about halfway in. We covered the two blocks bounded by Round Trail on our side of Stuyvesant, walking about a mile (just under) in total. We ran into Julia. When we got to Max & Gaby's house, they were out. Not terribly surprising, considering the stakes: FREE CANDY.

I was curious about what the Chinese family on Vantage would be doing. They had moved in recently, and they don't seem to speak English. They were giving out dried fruit. At my prompting, Sarah thanked them in Chinese, and I added my own thanks to that. Once our group was away from the house, most of them decided they didn't like the fruit. Sarah gave me a piece, and it was something between a prune and a dried apricot. Not bad, but different.

Sarah's plastic pumpkin filled up and she emptied it into the canvas bag I'd brought for the purpose. Cathy said there were fewer kids out this year, so we have a serious surplus of treat material.

All in all, a fairly successful year.
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I meant to mention that I felt a tad silly taking pictures of Sarah getting on the bus for her first day, but did it anyway.

Later that day, I was going somewhere and at every bus stop I saw, there was a dad with a video camera, half-following the progeny as they boarded and watching the bus depart until it was out of sight. Now I just feel like I'm behind the times, Daddy-o.
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We took Sarah to see PONYO, along with her friend Lulu and Lulu's friend Si-Chen, who is visiting from China. They sat in back, glued to their Nintendo DS sets, squealing in unison through a networked game of Mario Cart. I watched the ebb and flow of the rain and Cathy watched the road. They wouldn't have looked up if Ponyo had ridden past us on a fish. When one of them said "Stop hitting me!", she meant in the game. Why, back in my day, we really hit each other. With rocks. And mud.

At the theater, I noticed that the sign for the show said that our 1:05 showing was at 1:50. We hunkered in for a bit of a wait. I wandered over to the game room, followed by the girls, who amused themselves at the games without actually spending any money. Sarah wanted to try the claw, the maze, the shooter, the race, and the vending machine with the fake teeth. Around 1:20, I judged it was time to give her four quarters and see what she went for. She went straight for the teeth. At 1:25, Cathy noticed that the tickets actually said 1:05.

We dashed to Auditorium 13, where I hoped we'd missed no more than five minutes or so, and enjoyed the movie, whose characters acted with subtle honesty, showing their thoughts and feelings in real expressions. It was like a rebuke to Disney product -- nobody wore a standard "I AM HAPPY!" or "I AM SAD!" expression, or stopped and sang "I am sad because of this and that, la la la." I expect that Disney executives looked at it and decided that they need to do a CGI comedy about a farting fish.

Afterward, Cathy spoke politely to the theater manager about the incorrectly stated time. The manager gave us five free passes, having just spoken to someone else on the phone about the issue. Someone who wasn't polite at all.

We exited the theater into a beautiful, windy day and drove home, with the girls in the back seat shouting over the same music and the same sound effects. I kept an eye out for deer, seeing none.
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