Catching up

I’ve missed more than half a week, and that after only 8 days.  But I’m not going to let it get me down.  There’s plenty to talk about, and I’ve got a few drafts.

One thing about Fridays is that they’re inevitably two different days in one.  Friday nights are weekend time, and Friday days are gotta-get-stuff-done-before-the-week’s-over time.  If you treat Friday night like it’s a regular night, you’re in danger of losing your mind.  Even if you have to get up early for something, Saturday is a break in the routine.  Much has already been written about Sabbaths, and how the Jews have always had their rest period start the night before; I’m merely arguing here that they know what they’re talking about.

Friday last I went straight from work to date night.  And Friday morning I dropped off Dar early at school for her new Actors Gymnasium class.  So there was not much time for posting anything.  More on date night in another post; while we’re on the subject of my attempt to keep this up every day, I’d like to plug fotomattic.com, which I have probably mentioned but bears re-mentioning:

My friend takes a picture every day and then writes clever captions for them and then puts them up on the web.  Sometimes he takes more than one a day (but that’s what flickr is for).  The main thing I’m pointing out here is that he sometimes doesn’t get around to posting them every day, but he catches up.

One of the terrific things about the near-infinite flexibility of this here newfangled medium is the vast historical record that gets automatically maintained.  Every photo he takes is stamped with the time/date it was taken, even if he doesn’t pull it out of his camera for a whole week.  If he uses his phone, it’s probably even automatically stamped with the location it was taken.  And when someone publishes something on the Interwebs, it’s pretty much here to stay (Hi, great-grandkids!).

Anyway, I hope all of you have by now gotten your heads around RSS and RSS readers, which give you fingertip access to an archive of all kinds of stuff you want to read.  It’s like stashing your unread newspapers & magazines under the bed, so you’ve got options for whenever you can’t sleep–except your bed is anywhere there’s a computer, and you never run out of room under there, and it’s all pretty much instantly sortable/findable instead of piled up randomly.  So, in the interest of spreading the internet love, and of telling you all a little more about where I spend my Interweb time, I’m putting in a sidebar called “People & Places”.  Please use these links to add to your RSS reader as you see fit.

Thank you, Miss Janice

Margo’s in Pre-K this year instead of ‘regular’ preschool, and she’s already growing up a lot.  Miss Janice, whom Margo pretty much actively feared at one time, appears to be a true teacher.  (And that’s not to say that Miss Donna isn’t, but her job description as the lady in charge of Creative Play doesn’t include much in the way of structuring of the children’s day.)

Anyway, Miss Janice is really teaching them stuff — about having a routine, about memorizing things, about being a member of a group…a little bit about what it’s like to be in a school setting.  Margo’s been reading for almost a year now, but ‘reading’ and ‘ready for kindergarten’ are not the same thing.  After she finishes with Miss Janice — or rather, after Miss Janice is finished with her — she’ll be ready for anything.

Not quite micro enough

If you’re like me, you recently took a long break from posting and used Twitter to scratch the itch in the mean time, and you discovered that every so often you had something really great to say that turned out to be just a bit longer than 140 characters, and you caught yourself getting a little frustrated that there wasn’t a better place to write those things…

Except there is, of course. When that something is more than a passing thought or a quick shout-out, it belongs on a microblog. So now that I’m back on here at the anysized blog, I’ve created a new category for posts that are ‘not quite micro enough’ for microblogging. I call it “141+”.

Here’s one:

Took a somewhat long walk with the dogs & the boy tonight and noticed some things:   Beagle may never reach a state of contentment; leans hard into every step as if she can’t feel the leash holding her back.  Boy is about to reach full intelligibility and works hard to repeat at full volume anything I don’t quite understand.  Chicago weather is apparently reaching around October and tapping November on the shoulder.  Papa is reaching the end of his daily allotment of wakefulness.

Lucas Enrique Anderson

Here’s something I forgot to tell everyone a coulpe of weeks ago: Rique’s adoption is finally final in the final jurisdiction that has any significance for him — the state of Illinois. With our type of international adoption, this processing by the state is optional; his citizenship was altered from “Guatemala” to “U.S.” when we went through immigration with him in the Dallas airport, and his official legal status as our dependent son was also cemented at DFW. However, going through the “re-adoption” process, as it is called, at the state level gives us two advantages (other than the distinct pleasures of spending half a day in the Daley Center and paying a bunch of legal fees).

First, we get an official birth certificate in English. Since birth certificates are not a federal concern, Immigration doesn’t have a process for doing anything with Rique’s original birth certificate other than approving it. Since it’s handy to have a birth certificate in English rather than carrying around the original and a notarized translation whenever he needs proof of his age, we now have an Illinois “Certificate of Foreign Birth”.

Second, as part of the process of registering him with the state, we had the opportunity to change his first and/or middle name. His surname was changed from Padilla to Anderson as part of the Immigration process in Guatemala City, and his Guatemalan passport, which was only valid for the brief period when his name was Anderson but his citizenship was still Guatemalan, lists him as “Jorge Enrique Anderson”. But changes to first/middle names are state-level matters; so, now that the State of Illinois has gotten its hands on the case, we asked them to change his first name to Lucas.

(Lucas shows up in both Emily’s ancestry and mine as a surname, originating in Scotland on her mother’s side and in the Netherlands on my mother’s side. When Rique gets old enough to pay attention to names a little more, he may want to be called Luke or Lucas, or Enrique or Ricky or Henry or Hank for that matter. If he studies in France someday, he may want to go by Luc Henri. After all, Dar has three versions of her name in common use on a daily basis — Dar, Dorothy, and Tea –, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she becomes D.J. for a while in high school.)

So anyway, the next step is to go back to the feds and fill out the appropriate paperwork with Immigration and Social Security to let them know about the name change…and notify places like the pediatrician’s office…and THEN I think we’re done.

Snug ‘em while they’re little

The two-year-old comes down the stairs at 7:20 am, just moments after you’ve saved your last edit and are ready to shut down the computer, and he’s still a little groggy and slightly frustrated at being ignored by his older sisters. He’s mumbling something as he comes over to the couch, and when you lift him up onto your lap, crowding the still-open laptop, you realize he’s saying “Nuggo, Daddy, nuggo?”

Snuggle, Daddy? Anytime.

Did I mention we went to Disney World?

A week ago, we were in Orlando. It was pretty great. My parents came along (and provided the time-share lodging for all of us); one or both of them routinely offered to take Rique while the rest of us went on rides that were unsuitable for two-year-olds. I don’t think he had any sense he was missing out.

I’m working on a longer piece about Disney World, and Disney in general, but here’s one tidbit we picked up on this trip that I keep mulling over: the park employs 70,000 people. Yeah, a lot of those are probably hotel employees, but still…

So what about you? How does that number grab you? Do you see it as yet another indication of the bloated excessivism of The Most Excessive Place On Earth? Or does it almost seem like a relief to learn that they have the nation’s largest single-location payroll, as if your head wants to say to your heart, “See, of course it’s expensive; they’ve got more people working there than any other single-site employer in the country. Now lighten up and let yourself enjoy the fruits of their labors!”

A fish story (prologue)

Today was Washington Elementary’s Fall Festival. I am not ready to think in terms of jack o’lanterns just yet, but I understand that Halloween effectively begins about two or three weekends after Labor Day.

If you’ve been to a festival like this, you’ve noticed kids winning goldfish. The fish-winning game today was throwing a ping-pong ball into a pyramid of cups; for couple of tickets, contestants got to try until they succeeded.

It should not surprise anyone that the girls each won a fish. They are named Ella and Emma, and they are pictured on my Facebook page. We’re not sure where their bowl should be placed, since window ledges are prone to chills and the kitchen table is too vulnerable to attacks by a beagle or a toddler. Stay tuned to find out how long they last.

Chicagobamalympics

I just want to get this out there before the announcement comes through and we find out if the next 7 years become one giant payola scandal, construction project, and/or traffic jam. (OK, I mean an even gianter one.)

Yesterday on Facebook someone was making the case that Chicago must be getting the Olympics, because Oprah and the Obamas wouldn’t go all the way to Copenhagen if there was even the slightest chance they’d come home empty-handed. This is not necessarily an inherently conservative or anti-Obama argument, in my opinion, although it’s probably more popular on the right than on the left. But I find this a fascinating idea, because of all that it implies about certain presumptions of presumptions of power. This is normally the kind of conspiracy-theory-esque logic that lefties and/or populists embrace in critiques of the typical symbols of U.S. hegemony: Big Oil, the Pentagon, Wall Street, and so on. And there’s no way to argue against it in either case.

(For the record, I have no faith in the IOC’s impartiality, and I don’t see the Olympics as a pure celebration of shiny happy Sport that will unite all 6 billion of us once and for all. It’s an odd combination of marketing, sport, merchandising, tourism, bioengineering, broadcasting, doping, hero worship, nationalism, and global advertising, and there’s obviously nothing else quite like it. There’s also plenty to like about it, in my opinion. It’s easy to imagine a world where we didn’t have a ginormous summer sports festival in a different metropolis every four years, and that world might easily be more boring, less athletic, and less internationally friendly. It would probably have more money to spend on other things that need to get done (AIDS research, for example, or nuclear watchdogging, or tsunami warning systems), but maybe not.)

So what do you think? Is Big Oprah’s personal investment in the Chicago 2016 effort sufficient proof that the whole thing is fixed?

Onescore and fifteen

I’m turning 35 on Thursday, and I’m taking this opportunity to jump back into posting here.  For now, no excuses & no explanations (I’ll catch up with all that later); however, I will offer a general apology to those of you out there in Radioland who have been dying to know what we’ve been doing this past summer over at my house.  (For almost-up-to-the-minute updates, you’re welcome to follow @hatboy via Twitter, which is either the Savior of Democracy or the End of Discourse, depending on whom you ask.  And I think you can also subscribe via regular ol’ RSS.  And there’s also Facebook, if that’s more your style.)

I’ll come back to all this in future posts, I’m sure.  But this is my birthday post, so I’m “giving myself permission”, as I learned to say in graduate school, to stick to a single topic.  So for Thursday, I have three birthday-related items for you:

1. If you read this, send me an email from your most active email address that gives me at least your birthday (year optional) and any part of your contact info that may have changed recently.  I will put these on my calendar.  I like to try to remember people on their birthdays, in one form or another; I can’t guarantee that it will be an email greeting or Facebook shout-out, but I’d like to know your birthday nonetheless.

   Plus, I recently got a new cell phone and completely screwed up my address books trying to sync them.

2. According to Psalm 90, believed to have originated with Moses, “The days of our years are threescore years and ten [fourscore if we’re particularly strong]”.  As I understand it, anthropologists believe that the average life expectancy 3000-4000 years ago was a lot less than that, counting infant mortality rates, but I suspect that the human body aged and decayed at approximately the same speed it does today.  If you’re a middle-class nonsmoker who wears a seat belt and lives in a stable and/or wealthy democracy, you can probably make it to 80 or 90, no matter how strong you are.  But I’d prefer not to take for granted the extra 10-20 years that we get for being rich, so I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of reaching the halfway point of my earthly quota.  “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” and all that.

   This bothers me far more because of all the time I’ve wasted than because of the nearness of death.

   But that’s me.  What about you?  When you consider your life expectancy, are you thinking more of what’s left of it or what’s gone from it?

3. I think a fun game to play on someone’s birthday is to ask about particularly memorable birthdays or birthday traditions that they’ve had in the past.  (You can take this and run with it the next time you’re out to lunch with for a co-worker’s birthday, by the way.)So, I’ll start:  I remember a great surprise party at Café Ba-Ba-Ree-Ba (some of you may remember this), a young fellow with the initials S.B. pushing my 10-year-old face into my own cake, and having my future bride come visit me in Atlanta for my 21^st.

   Anybody else having a birthday today?  What do you remember?

See you tomorrow.  I promise.

Quotes of the Year (so far)

[Yet another in a series of posts I started long before I finished...]

There’s been an awful lot here lately about the girls, especially in the QOTD category.  When I’m at home and the girls are around (as they usually are), Rique doesn’t get a word in edgewise very often.  This may contribute to his default volume setting, which is very high.

The words he does say are often a little sloppy in the consonants; this means that, while our first two children were on the advanced side of the curve with their vocabulary and pronunciation, we are now getting to know what it’s like when a child has certain tonal grunts that are instantly intelligible to the immediate family but completely opaque to everyone else.

In any case, it’ll be some time before he gets a real QOTD entry on here.  But he is making great progress in the area of self-expression (and also in the area of fork usage, but that’s another story for another post).  And after an action-packed three-day weekend, I’ve got a bunch of his words fresh in my head, so I’d like to try to publish some of his current pronunciation accomplishments here…

Emily will probably laugh at me when she sees that I’ve missed this one or that one, since she gets a lot more alone time with him than I do, but I’m going to publish this anyway.  I can always do another installment later.  In the mean time, here’s a partial list of words Rique says (not counting things he will repeat in order to receive food, or if he happens to be in performance mode) in his first 9 months or so in the U.S.:

Na-na-na = Narnia (This was his first intelligible word in English, sorta)

Ah-boo = Up, please

Mah = Más/More

Ley-ley = Leche (milk)

Car = Car  (There isn’t a really clear word for ‘train’, but he’s trying.  Also, there is definitely some “ch-ch-ch-oo-oo”-ing going on once in a while.)

Car = Dar

Cargo = Margo

DADDY! = Daddy (Or Mommy, or other adult…but usually Daddy.  Volume and repetition increase if I’m walking in the door after work.)

Eee = Eat

Re-ey? = Ready?  (This may also mean, “Are you going to ask me if I’m ready?”)

Ya-yaii? = You all right?  (Often accompanied by head-tilt and attempted eye contact.  To be repeated, at a comically high volume, after each and every cough, sneeze, throat-clearing, etc. by anyone within earshot.)

Dallat = Chocolate

Bye-bye = Bye-bye (Also, “I notice someone is putting on shoes or a coat, opening a door, etc.; you may take your leave of me.”)

Beagle = Beagle (This is what we call Moxie when we’re shouting at her.  cf Bill Cosby)

Pee-pee = Pee-pee (This may refer to anything having to do with pottying, be it past, present, future, or imagined.)

Oh, and there’s one more:

No!