Category Archives: Family

Fifteen Days, Seven States, Nearly 3,000 Miles, and the Blue Hole

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Our drive to San Antonio and back started on the morning of July 12 and ended a few hours ago. I actually remembered to set to trip meter as we were leaving, so I know that between backing out of the driveway and returning to it, the car had been driven 2,952 miles and change. Except for when my brother Jay used the car in San Antonio, I drove all those miles. Ann was in the back seat almost all of the time.

Our route southward wasn’t as direct as it could have been, passing from metro Chicago to Des Moines to St. Joseph, Mo., the first day; to Hutchinson, Kan., by way of Topeka the second; and Dallas by way of Wichita and Oklahoma City on the third. After some days in Dallas, travel resumed: to San Antonio via the most direct route, which turned out to be a mistake (more about which later).

Our return northward was more straightforward: San Antonio to Dallas to Lebanon, Mo., and then home, three days’ driving spread out over four days, with a jag into extreme northwestern Arkansas. More about that later as well.

We were caught in two storms so intense that we waited them out beside the road. I saw two suitcases broken open, and their contents spread on the road, on two different Interstates. I’m pretty sure I saw a guy pulled over on the shoulder of yet another Interstate, changing his pants outside his car. We listened to a lot of radio. As hard as corporate interests try, terrestrial radio isn’t quite homogenized.

When I wasn’t driving, I was working (that’s the self-employed life). Or visiting with family members and friends: my mother, two brothers, two nephews and one’s wife, my aunt, first cousin and his family, two friends from high school. Or eating. Some chains, of course, but I did my best to support independent eateries in places like Wichita, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Mt. Olive, Ill.

Besides all that, we squeezed in visits to three museums, the outside of two capitols (closed, unfortunately), a mall, an enormous bookstore, a couple of wooden bridges, and a cemetery with an historic figure buried in it. I also watched a number of early episodes of Treme, an addictively good show.

And I saw the Blue Hole.

Blue Hole, SA, July 2014

I lived within 10 minutes’ drive of the Blue Hole for more than a decade, and every time I visited San Antonio after that for 35 years, I was equally close. Yet I never saw it before this visit. All I can say is, it was about time.

Winter Strikes Back: Sorry!

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Here on our small patch of North American earth, we have a few hardy flowers, some buds, and a little green in the grass, along with a few bugs. Saturday proved to be as warm as advertised (70s F.), cloudy sometimes, sunny at other times. Yuriko and I took a pleasant walk at the Spring Valley Nature Preserve.

On Sunday, the warm air held the promise of rain all day, but it held off long enough to allow me to replace a dodgy hinge on our wooden gate and do other things around the back yard, such as pick up the wintertime debris that collects here and there. Lilly and I sat around on the deck for a while, and I could feel the air cooling down. In the span of about half an hour, we lost 10 degrees.

Today, cold and snow. So cold that it stuck, as of the early evening.

On Saturday evening, Ann wanted to play a board game. She plays more video games than any other kind of game, so I thought it was a good idea to oblige her. We don’t have that many games, though, and decided that Monopoly and Risk would involve more time than we wanted to commit. So we played Sorry! Lilly and a friend of hers played, too. Not the most engaging board game in the world, but it has its moments.

BoardGameGeek (“gaming unplugged since 2000”) mentions a Sorry! alternate that sounds interesting: “Sorry! can be made more of a strategic game (and more appealing to adults) by dealing five cards to each player at the start of the game and allowing the player to choose which card he/she will play each turn. In this version, at the end of each turn, a new card is drawn from the deck to replace the card that was played, so that each player is always working from five cards.”

Someday I need to teach Ann and Lilly the rudiments of Risk. Maybe they’ll never play it, but maybe they will. Once or twice a year in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I played Risk with some of my high school friends, and I have fond memories of the games. Eventually, we got to know each other’s strategic thinking pretty well, such as the fact that one of us (and he knows who he is) inevitably took the offense. That is, attack! Outnumbered? Attack! Surrounded? Attack! Just do it! Sometimes it worked out for him, usually not.

Dog 1, Oompa-Loompah 0

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This is a good year to post WWI images, for obvious reasons. I’m not taken with its headline — how much or little Europe has changed hardly seems the point — but this collection of images is worth a look.

Also, here’s a recent dog picture, taken by Ann. Why? Because it’s been a whole year since she arrived at our house. She’s so completely a part of the family it’s hard to remember what the house was like before she came.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAShe’s still a healthy young(ish) dog with an appetite for doggish activities, such as chewing things. Recently I found this figure on the floor.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA A toy Oompa-Loompa. I think it was a promotion from when Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a new movie. Anyway, our hound clearly did some fang-work on it. From this side, mere flesh wounds. Turn it over, and you see this.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI don’t think any future Toy Story movie is going to depict anything quite like this. Or this.

There’s Snow on Them Thar Suburban Lawns

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The only reason I’m using a “them thar” headline today is because one of my editors – again – removed one of my headlines with a “There’s X in Them Thar Y.”  Sure, it’s a hoary old cliché, but it’s got an honorable pedigree, at least if its association with the antebellum gold rush in Dahlonega, Georgia, is true. It’s been removed from my articles more than once. Here, no one can remove it but me, no matter how silly it is.

Anyway, we woke up to snow this morning, the day of the equinox. (“First day of spring,” they say on TV and the radio. Oh, really?) It was a light coating, and by 10 a.m. had already started to melt, except in the shadows, and by afternoon most of it was long gone. So it wasn’t the serious snow of the days of the polar vortexes. Still, the weekend is forecast to be plenty winter-like.

I got a scanner in 2000 when I bought my first iMac, since it was thrown in with that machine for only $10. I scanned a lot of things for a number of years. Including items I have no idea why I thought they were worth scanning. Such as:

LaMasRicaI have an interest in package art — my roommate and I maintained a “Package Art Gallery” in a closet in our dorm during my junior year in college — but I don’t know that this one is all that interesting. (My favorite from the Package Art Gallery was a muffin mix that promised the muffins would be “the most very blueberry anythings you ever ate.” We hung items, with thumbtacks, for verbiage as much as design.)

A few child-produced items are in the scan collection.

LillyPaintFeb02One of Lilly’s, according to the label, dating from 2002. And of course there are scans of the kids themselves, such as this one from some years ago, which may be among the last pictures I took with a film camera.

Lilly-AnnFinally, a few scanned items from nature. The Acorn, for instance.

AcornWhich somehow reminds me of this 7-baht Thai postage stamp.

AcorncapI assume that’s the king of Thailand. I’m not sure that I got the stamp in Thailand — 7 baht seems like a small denomination  — so maybe it came with a grab-bag of cheap stamps I bought once.

March Enters Like a Dirty Snowball

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March arrived with more snow. Only three or four new inches, enough to whiten up the ugly grey mounts near the streets, but not enough to impede anyone’s forward motion. I thought about taking a picture from my back door, but what’s the point? It still looks exactly like this.

If it still looks like that around April 1, or especially May 1, we’d do well to worry that another Year Without a Summer is in the offing. But no really large volcanoes anywhere have blown recently, so it doesn’t seem likely.

Lilly got another one of these in the mail on Saturday.

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I don’t want to put them on my car bumper, so they go on the refrigerator.

Good Eats

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Over the weekend, some of Lilly’s friends came over for a while, and she made dinner for them and her family as well.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAmong other things, a savory concoction of Italian sausage – both spicy and mild – along with onions, bell peppers, and I forget what else.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAToo bad this blog doesn’t have a smell feature. I guarantee you’d want some of this right now.

Ann at 11

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“Did I make this much noise when I turned 11?” Lilly asked on Friday evening, soon after Ann’s 11th birthday get-together and sleepover got under way.

“Yes, you did,” I answered. That was the year she and her friends talked about calling the spectre of Bloody Mary, but didn’t get around to trying.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAEleven times around the Sun for Ann. Still a child, but edging away from it. There were no efforts to call out Bloody Mary at Ann’s event. I wasn’t expected any. But there was a lot of electronic game-play and standard-issue giggling. Pizza and cake were served.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOn Saturday evening, we watched Moneyball on DVD. Or at least Ann and I did; Yuriko was too tired for it, and Lilly was out with friends. I’d heard it was good, and it was. I didn’t know the history of the 2002 Oakland As, so the arc of the story – if not the substance of it – was new to me. I’m glad it wasn’t an underdog-goes-all-the-way story. Instead, it was an underdog-has-a-better-season-than-expected story. Using math.

I didn’t realize that Philip Seymour Hoffman was even in that movie until I read one of his obits this morning. He played the obstreperous manager Art Howe. While watching that character I thought, he looks familiar. But I couldn’t place him. I guess that’s the mark of a fine character actor. He can disappear into his character.

That Old Shitamachi Spirit

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When I hear of something like the Tokyo Skytree, I react with a completely irrational thought: how could they wait to build it until it’s inconvenient for me to see it?

Tokyo Skytree Dec 2013During Yuriko and Ann’s recent trip to Japan, they visited the Skytree, which is now the tallest structure in Japan, and the tallest TV/radio tower on Earth, completed only in 2012 and coming in at more than 2,000 feet. The Skytree itself is a broadcast tower and tourist attraction, but it’s also part of a mixed-use development that includes office space, convention and meeting facilities, a theater, parking garages and more. The Tobu Railroad and a consortium of broadcasters developed it.

The tower also gives Japanese web site designers a chance to describe the place in English: “The ‘town with a tower’ promises a lifestyle that is not uniform. The facilities are developed with the aim of producing a community brand transmitting new local values to the world by generously introducing facilities and functions that will manifest the charm of the shitamachi spirit and produce a synergy effect.

“Note: Shitamachi means traditional old town area with Edo atmosphere.”

The observation deck’s got quite a view, my wife and daughter tell me. And what do you see?

Tokyo, Dec 2013A slice of the vastness of greater Tokyo.

Tannenbaum ’13

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I’ve turned most of the tree decorating over to the next generation. I did put the tree in the stand and string on the lights, though. Lilly and Ann didn’t quite get all of the ornaments on the first or second day, but they’re mostly done.

Christmas Tree 2013Icicles will go on tonight, and a star on top. I put on the star.

This is the first time the tree’s been in the lower level of the house, for various reasons. One is to complement the new walls and floor. The dog showed some interest in the smell of the thing, for a while, but the novelty wore off, and she hasn’t destroyed any of the ornaments yet.

Turn 16, Eat Fish

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Back again around December 1. There are things to do and things to eat between now and then. This year we might not bother with a separate Thanksgiving dessert, because a fair amount of Lilly’s birthday cake is still around. I can’t resist a half sheet when the time comes, so it always takes a while to get through it all.

As for the main ingredients of the feast — or really, just a large meal, since it won’t be boisterous enough to rise to the level of a feast — it’ll be some variety of large bird. It will not be expertly prepared raw fish. We had that for Lilly’s birthday meal.

I’m pretty sure that isn’t what I ate when I turned 16. But those were slightly different times.