Tag Archives: Ann

Holiday Interlude

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Another Christmas and New Year’s Day have come and gone. A mostly pleasant time. Here’s Christmas morning.

Christmas Day 2015The girls opened their presents and ate their chocolate, and proceeded to spend the day with electronic entertainment, and some reading as well. That’s what I did too. The dog didn’t care a whit about Christmas, as far as we could tell. Just another day of eating and smelling and barking and lying around, ignoring strictly human notions. That’s probably just as well.

On the morning of the 28th, sleet came pouring out of the sky. Unfortunately I’d made dentist appointments for the girls for in the early afternoon that day, so that meant a harrowing drive on slick roads, but we made it unscathed.

By the next morning, the streets were clear, but my driveway wasn’t. The covering had a high ice content, meaning a lot of effort to remove, even though it wasn’t particularly thick ice. Just what are we creatures of the tropics doing this close to one of the poles?

Rocket Girl, Second Launch

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Ann was in her school district’s Rocket Club again this year, involving the after-school construction of a rocket one day a week for a few months. The mass launch — one rocket at a time, not quite as quick as a Stalin’s organ — was on Monday afternoon during school. Afterward, Ann brought the rocket, which she called “Gemini,” home.

Ann, June 8, 2015The rocket lost a fin at some point in the flight, or when it hit the ground. The dog photobombed the picture.

Liftoff! The rockets were lined up on top of a saw horse and shot off one after the other.

Gemini Launch, June 8, 2015This was Ann’s second school-project rocket. The day was partly cloudy and warm, with some wind. Later in the afternoon it rained, but the launches were done by then.

The World’s Most Accurate Watch

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During a recent conversation with Ann, something I said suggested absolute uselessness to her, and she came up with the following: “That would be about as useful as a watch that only said NOW.”

That would be useless for telling time, I agreed. But guaranteed to be the most accurate watch ever made.

During the same conversation I also introduced “useful as screen doors on a submarine” to her. Someone has to pass down the wisdom of previous generations to the rising one, after all.

Phil Plait at the Cernan Center

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On Saturday evening, we – all of us but Lilly, who had other things to do – went to the Cernan Earth & Space Center to see “Bad Astronomy,” a show mostly narrated by Phil Plait. It pretty much encapsulated what he has to say: there’s a lot of bad astronomy in movies, astrology is nonsense, of course men went to the Moon, and so on.

Ann Feb 10, 2015Not much new for me, though Ann probably got something out of it. In fact, she said she did, but also that she already knew there’s no sound in space. Not many movies or TV shows set in space bother with that, usually for sensible dramatic reasons – imagine the Enterprise passing by without that swoosh — though I can think of a few exceptions: 2001, Firefly.

Plait also mentioned in passing, without naming it, that there’s a place on the Moon where the Sun (almost) always shines. Never heard of that before, and it intrigued me. He must have been talking about the Peak of Eternal Light, which besides sounding like a cult, is an actual place near the south pole of the Moon.

We also got Ann a shirt from the small gift shop (which has no postcards): a map of the constellations.

Tannenbaum ’14

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We acquired a Christmas tree on Friday, but the thing wasn’t fully decorated until this afternoon, when Ann and some friends put on some icicles.

Christmas Tree, Dec 15, 2014Earlier, I put on the lights, and then Lilly and Ann hung some of the other decorations. Along with the icicles, I crowned it with a star (it should be last, but close enough). Unconsciously, my children more-or-less follow my rules of Christmas tree decor, which I detailed more than 10 years ago (but which I clearly learned from my family decades earlier).

… lights first, ornaments next, icicles after that (tinsel to some people, those who also call it “trimming” the tree). The last item is the Star of Bethlehem, which goes on top.

Other guidelines, if you happen to be me, and want to decorate your tree:

* Space the lights and ornaments evenly, but not uniformly or systematically. That is, unless you have a very young child, as we do; in that case, fewer and tougher ornaments go near the bottom, and fewer lights down there too. [That last sentence doesn’t apply any more.]

* Decorate the back, the bottom and the interior of the branches, not only the front or visible sides.

* Be eclectic with ornaments, but no commercial logos or too-silly ornaments, unless your child made them.

For us, that last one means you’ll find on our tree: balls, santas, angels, stars, bells, birds, elves, snowmen, toy instruments, strings of beads, ribbons, even an eggplant ornament. They’re made of glass, plastic, cloth, paper, wood and ceramic. Lots of colors, more cool than hot. Some are old and beat up, some relatively expensive, some downright cheap, some bought at department stores, or discount stores, or garage sale, or acquired for free as gifts.

Eventually, the tree looked like this.

Christmas Tree, Dec 15, 2014It looks better than the ’73 tree, but maybe that’s just the magic of digital photography.

Mercy Otis Warren

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Heavy rains last night. Didn’t hear a drop of it. Guess I was too busy with weird dreams. This morning I noticed the soaking. The yard’s really lush so far this summer.

It’s summer, never mind the solstice. Rising summer. The mosquitoes are out, but not quite in force. No fireflies yet, but I’ve seen a dragonfly or two.

Ann and her class did their class presentation this morning, which I attended, called “I Am the Nation.” Each student dressed up as, and recited a short report they’d written about a figure from the American Revolution. I’m only mentioning this because I actually learned something from Ann’s choice: namely who Mercy Otis Warren was.

If I’d heard of her, I’d forgotten about her. Or maybe I missed her entirely; Revolutionary history, while interesting, hasn’t ever been a special period of fascination for me. She did a number of things, but mainly seems to be remembered as a polemicist of the Revolution, and afterward, an historian of it. Needless to say, though it’s pointed out a lot, those were unusual occupations for a woman of the time.

More about her is here. If ever I’m in Barnstable, Mass., I’ll go see her statue, and her brother’s too. James Otis was also a patriot and polemicist, and had the distinction of being killed by lightning one day in 1783.

Other than Warren, I’d heard of the rest of the notables the children eulogized, even Deborah Sampson and Phyllis Wheatley, whom I first encountered years ago in San Antonio, when one of the school districts there wanted to re-name a high school in her honor, and not everyone was on board with that idea.

Though I’ve cited three women examples, most of the characters were in fact men. The usual suspects, too: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Paul Revere, Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale, et al.

All well and good, but I hankered a bit for some more unusual names. Such as Francis Marion (the Swamp Fox), Baron von Steuben, Nathanael Greene or, besides military men, Roger Sherman (he of the Connecticut Compromise), or Robert Morris and Haym Soloman  (financiers of the Revolution). And throw in a couple of loyalists, just to show what’s what, such as William Franklin, Ben’s son and governor of New Jersey, or the interesting footnote character William Augustus Bowles. 

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.

Launch

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The launch zone yesterday for the flight of Payton, Ann’s rocket, and dozens of other student-built, one-foot rockets was a fenced off area in one of Schaumburg’s larger parks. The rocket launch pads were set in a long row of beams mounted on saw horses.

The students, as pictured above, stood somewhat closer to the launch site. Each rocket was announced by name and creator, and then pfssssst! they went skyward one at a time, most reaching a few hundred feet.

There goes Payton. Instead of parachutes, streamers emerged when the nosecone separated. That meant the rockets tended to come more-or-less straight down, rather than drifting off onto a nearby highway or forest preserve or the roof of a house.

During the launches that included Ann’s school, there was only one that didn’t go far. It hissed and wobbled and popped its streamer not long after launch. I felt a little sorry for that kid. He built the Charlie Brown rocket.

Rocket Girl

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Clear, warm, summerish day today, with light winds. A perfect day for launching a rocket she called “Payton.” One she built.

Ann is seen here holding the thing, which, like most good rockets, has a detachable nosecone. It measures about 12 inches, has three fins, and is yellow. Before we painted it that color, I toyed with the idea of painting it like a V-2, even though it doesn’t otherwise look much like the German weapon (to start with, the V-2 had four fins). But that seemed like too much trouble for a joke no one would get.

Earlier this year, Quincy Adams Wagstaff Elementary inaugurated its rocket club – actually, the entire school district seems to be in on it – and to my mild surprise, Ann joined. For an hour every Thursday, she stayed with the club after school to work on a rocket (though it came home for painting last week). Everyone did his or her own, with the promise of a launch for each in the spring. And so it came to pass on May 14, 2013. More about that tomorrow.

Tinkertoys Across the Decades

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Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, and Legos – the big three among building toys, as far as my younger self was concerned. I thought about that recently when Ann latched on to the two tubes of Tinkertoys that we have around the house. At some point long after I quit using them, the tubes migrated from my mother’s house to mine, maybe in anticipation that one of my children would use them. Until the other day, no.

The tubes interest me now more than the toys themselves.

I think my grandparents bought that taller tube for my aunt in the late ’30s – it has her name on it (I saw her last month; maybe I should offer to return them, since isn’t 80 the beginning of second childhood?). In any case, it says Tinkertoy, the Wonder Builder, a product of The Toy Tinkers Inc., Evanston, Ill. I didn’t know Tinkertoys were from Evanston originally.

The design of the longer tube clearly carries a 1929 copyright, but the image, especially of the boy, harkens back somewhat further. Maybe the artist was middle-aged and recalling his boyhood.

My mother probably bought the shorter tube for me ca. 1970, though it’s possible my grandmother got it for me. Note that it doesn’t promise constructions as intricate as the earlier tube. It still has a retail price sticker on it: Winn’s, 77 cents. Winn’s was a dime store near our home in San Antonio that was there until the age of dime stores was over.

Surprisingly little is available on line about Tinkertoy history, at least on casual inspection – there are suspiciously many hits with verbage the same as other sites. Did the inventors of Tinkertoys really hire midgets to play with sets in department store windows in the early days of selling the toys? That’s a repeated story, and I’d like to think it’s true.