Long Shrift

a series of lies involving tomatoes

My wife is normally very successful with gardening, but had a recent failure with a cherry tomato plant. It had been struggling, and apparently lost the urge to go on about a week ago. We had gotten a handful of edible tomatoes from it, but by last weekend, all that was left were a couple dozen marble-sized green tomatoes.

She had meant to cut the tomato plant back, but the weekend got away from us. Quinn picked all the remaining tomatoes and put them in a small bucket, which he carried around the rest of the day. He had tried eating a couple, with the expected outcome. We were wondering how to separate him from the bucket.

My solution was to tell him that the tomatoes needed to ripen. If we put the bucket in the pantry, we'd have ripe tomatoes in time for dinner the next day. Of course, a trip to the grocery store would be needed to circumvent the laws of time and space.

My wife's solution was more elaborate. If he brought up the tomatoes the next day, we would tell him that we had given some of the tomatoes to a hungry squirrel which had come to the back door while Quinn was sleeping. If Quinn attachment to the tomatoes persisted, we would slowly give away more of the tomatoes to the aforementioned begging squirrel.

(If, in fact, a squirrel had come knocking on the back door, the outcome would have been very different. There would have been a fair amount of screaming on my wife's part, a frenzied search for the golf club that I keep on hand for home defense situations, then a fair amount of screaming on my part, followed by a trip to the emergency department for rabies tests.)

Monday passed without incident, and we figured the story was over. But this evening, while my wife was working late, Quinn started asking about the tomatoes again. I showed him what was left in the bucket, and he was inconsolable. I told him the squirrel story; Quinn listened intently, and seemed empathetic to the squirrel's plight, but at the end of the story, he still wanted the rest of the tomatoes. I dug deep for some solid parenting skills, and sat him down in front of the TV so I could ponder my next move.

I called my wife, who asked to speak to Quinn. Again, Quinn listened intently, and then handed the phone back to me and went back to watching TV. My wife had explained to him that it was a hungry baby squirrel, an important detail that was key to Quinn's internalization of the rodent's plight. During dinner, Quinn kept the bucket within arm's reach, but when he finished dinner he left it on the table.

I'm not sure if this is the best approach; I'm not sure if we'll ever really know. If he ends up a serial arsonist, maybe that's a sign that mistakes were made. But at the moment, I need to go throw some tomatoes in the garbage.

this sounds awfully familiar

The other day, Quinn laid some pillows on the floor of the living room, and was repeatedly pulling himself off the sofa and falling on them. I found myself saying, "Hey - this isn't a playground."

I could almost hear my parents snickering.

primarily about the money

A number of states are moving up the dates for their 2008 primaries; when the dust settles, about 20 states will likely set the date as February 5. Michigan is considering January 15; New Hampshire might end up scheduling its primary for early January, or even December. Iowa's laws require its primary be at least eight days before any other primary, so I expect they'll end up having their run-off a week ago.

A cynic might say that the states are simply trying to capture the nation's attention - and a ton of advertising revenue - by drawing political candidates like moths to a flame. Ken Rudin, NPR's political editor (interviewed on NPR's Political Junkie) puts a more positive spin on it: states want to be sure that they're relevant when it comes to picking candidates. They want political candidates to canvass their state, meet their people, get to understand their concerns - and this exposure will help the residents to decide on a candidate. Either way, this will be a nightmare for political candidates, who can't be everywhere. There have been suggestions that the primary process (like the rest of the election process) be overhauled, perhaps by setting states up in a rotation that will give every state a chance to be at the top of the heap.

I have a few fundamental issues with all of this.

You could debate that the pathetic turnout for presidential primaries is a representative sample of the voting population. I'd argue that's like saying polling station volunteers are a representative sample of the voting population, but I'd have to back that up with, oh, research, statistics, and common sense.

I don't understand why it matters if a candidate has visited your home state five times, ten times or fifty times. If that's your deciding factor, then maybe - and I can't believe I'd use this phrase - maybe Ann Coulter is right for a change. In this era of instantaneous, global communication, does it matter if you can make out your neighborhood Wendy's in the background of a candidate's stump speech?

What is really disappointing is that no state has legislated that their primary must be dead last. That state would have the fewest campaign commercials in the nation. I'd move there.

monitor

We are in the midst of potty-training our child. (As an aside, I understand that 'potty learning' is the correct term. Feh.) He often uses potty time as a delaying tactic at bedtime. He'll make a pit stop before bed, but twenty minutes after we put him in his crib, we can hear him over the baby monitor: "I need to go potty." Then we head upstairs and we get to watch him poop - or better yet, pretend to poop - for another fifteen minutes or so.

So he's learned that he need only speak in a normal tone of voice, and we appear in his room. At some point, he'll figure out that the baby monitor makes this possible. So we got to thinking... what if we hide the monitor? Could we deceive him into thinking that we somehow have a magical ability to know what he's up to, even when he's in his room? That could be very useful.

And there's no telling how long this might last. I picture him in his teens, telling his friends he'll have to pass on the beer and head home. They'll call him out for being lame, and he'll respond: "You don't get it - my folks will just know."

without sympathy

Went to lunch with a couple of consultants who've done some work for our company. One of them mentioned that he had hurt his little toe, and it had been so swollen and tender that he had been unable to wear a shoe on that foot for almost three weeks.

I told him that I would have been a little more sympathetic if (a) he hadn't hurt his toe while reaching for something on his friend's boat, and (b) if he hadn't bemoaned the effect this had had on his golf game.

I mean, no one was sympathetic when I talked about my vacation nightmare - you know, when I had to stay there a couple of extra days, got stuck on some puddle-jumper for the flight back, and spilled a drink on my new clothes.

family vacation, August 2007

Just got back from a week's vacation in Door County, Wisconsin with the in-laws - four children under the age of 3 shepherded by eight adults. The days have already started to run together in my mind, but I'll try to capture the essence of the vacation with few anecdotal glimpses.

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On the way up here, we passed a wind turbine. My wife looked up at it and remarked, "I could totally be a wind farmer."

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A week without decent Internet access was painful. I knew that I wouldn't get much work done while I was there anyway, but I still felt obliged to check in once or twice a day just to make sure the planet hadn't stopped revolving in my absence. Checking in was a mild annoyance; having to unpack and set up a laptop was a nuisance; working over 24 Kbps dialup was excruciating. As a co-worker put it, it's like living in 1991, except that I don't have a Compuserve email address.

A typical day started out with everyone slowly emerging from bedrooms and accumulating in the living room of the rented house. We spent the next few hours debating showers and going out for breakfast. We'd come up with a morning event, followed by early afternoon naps (for the adults, if not the kids), then the afternoon event, dinner, story time, and putting the kids to bed. After that, the adults would drink and talk, baby monitors a constant buzz in the background.

The conversations led down some strange paths. If ready Internet access would have been available, we would have been able to instantly answer numerous questions:

• Which is bigger, the humpback or the blue whale? (The blue.)
• Was Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, in Crowded House or the Housemartins? (The latter.)
• Why haven't we put any money into a Roth IRA? (I thought the IRA had essentially ceased to exist. Oh - I mean, well, there are a few disadvantages to Roth IRA's. Unfortunately, it's not because we make too much money to be eligible.)
• Why do I use Wikipedia for most of my references? (I'm lazy.)
• In Silence of the Lambs, the song that Buffalo Bill dances to is, apparently, "Goodbye Horses" by Q. Lazzarus, not a Gene Loves Jezebel song.
• What were the lyrics for the 'Dick in a Box' short from Saturday Night Live? (And yes, Justin Timberlake may be one of the funniest hosts of SNL ever, after Alec Baldwin.)

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The owner of the house called not long after we checked in. She warned that the septic tank alarm - indicating that the tank was nearly full - would likely go off soon. We lived in fear that a nocturnal pit stop would set off the alarm, waking everyone in the house.

Fortunately, the alarm went off the next afternoon. According to the directions the owner had left, all we had to do was to call a local company, who would arrive within 24 hours to empty the septic tank. In the meantime, though, we were advised that the tank was approximately 500 gallons from being full, which left a lot of awkward, unanswered questions. We decided to go with the practice of "If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down." I offered to pee in the woods, but all the motion-sensor lights around the house made this a tricky prospect.

The truck arrived early the next day, and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. I can't speak for everyone else, but I imagine there was a fair release of air from other quarters as well.

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We had driven by the place, Lena's, several times, and wondered if it might be any good. Early evening on Tuesday and we realized there were no other cars in the parking lot. We decided to roll the dice; little did we realize how odd the next couple of hours would be.

Inside, there was a long bar, a large room with a stage, and a side room with a pool table. The man at the bar seemed surprised when we walked in. We were surprised to find that there was no one else in the place. The bartender, who was alone, encouraged us to grab a table; he'd get us some drinks and see to our food orders, but then he had to leave for ten minutes to pick up his son from football practice. We wondered where the food was going to come from, considering that there was no one in the kitchen, but he said he'd order the food from 'the other restaurant.' He showed us how to adjust the volume for the jukebox and said we could help ourselves to whatever we wanted from behind the bar, and then he left.

We thought about leaving, but how could we? We had already gone through the trouble of extricating three children from car seats, after all. But we couldn't leave now - we had to ride this one out. Even if the food was bad, I reckoned, we'd still have an interesting story to tell.

So we played the jukebox, helped ourselves to a few beers, and looked around. The dining room had a small stage; a large TV stood in front of black curtains emblazoned with the name "NORMAN" in bright red, crudely done lettering. An incomplete chess set waited on a nearby table. In front of the TV the stage was littered with kid's movies: Shrek, Cars, Over the Hedge. We put in Finding Nemo and waited for the bartender to return.

A young woman showed up with a couple of grocery bags - our orders. She passed out the food and asked if we needed anything else. The story, we told her. What the heck is the story with this place?

Turns out the bartender owns another restaurant up the street, which is where our food came from. He was trying to get this place off the ground. When we told her that we had been given the run of the place, she just shrugged.

Eventually the bartender came back and expanded on the story, saying that the owner of Lena's just wanted someone to keep the place open so as to keep the liquor license alive. Turns out the original Lena had passed away seven or eight years previous, and the place had seen several failed bars. As we finished up, we couldn't help thinking that there was at least one more in the near future. But as we were preparing to leave, several people came in, all of whom seemed to know the bartender guy. Maybe the place will make a go of it... but I doubt it.

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Earlier that week, we had eaten at Shipwrecked, another place up the street. We had been there before, and as before, I had been left wondering why. The service was fair, the menu mediocre, and the food was poor. If you just wanted to sit outside and have a couple of beers and maybe an appetizer, it's not a bad choice - if you actually want a decent meal, move on.

But the most annoying thing were all the flies, which were everywhere, despite the closed doors. I referred to the place as the Flyspecked; my brother-in-law thought that the 'p' in Shipwrecked should be changed to a 't'. Along those same lines, we christened Lena's as Problena's.

climbing the walls

We were watching Supernanny the other day. To my untrained eye, this is one of those shows that is always the same: the kids are out of control because the parents are idiots. Other examples include What Not to Wear (the crap you wear actually wouldn't look good on anyone) and anything in the genre of Designed to Sell / Sell This House / You Should Seriously Consider Arson (get rid of all your crap).

I digress.

Anyway, the parents on Supernanny just couldn't seem to work together as a team, so they are forced to go rock climbing together (on an indoor climbing wall). As they struggled to the top, helping each other find footholds, my wife and I realize that we probably wouldn't have done very well with this particular exercise.

"We would've looked at that and said, 'Oh, I don't think so,'" my wife says.

"Yeah, I can see it happening," I reply. "We would have looked at one another and said 'Wanna go get some cheese fries?'"

Harry and the iPod

I made the mistake of getting an iPod and the final Harry Potter book the same week. In retrospect, that really wasn't wise.

I was at Target on a Sunday, two days after The Deathly Hallows came out. It hadn't even occurred to me to purchase the book so soon, but there it was. In fact, there were a lot of them - over a hundred, sitting on a display, and not a single child in a wizard costume to be seen. (More importantly, no adults in wizard costumes.) I called my wife to ask if I should get a copy, but looking back, I'm not sure why; we had both read all the previous books, so it was just a matter of time before we bought it anyway. I think I needed some reassurance that I wouldn't look like a complete dork when I put the book in front of the cashier. I didn't need to call; the presence of the book probably had no measurable effect on my dorkiness, since that had long been firmly established.

Meanwhile, I had been thinking about ordering an mp3 player. I have a gut reaction to all things Apple ("gee, that's cute, now run along so I can do some work"), so I shopped around. It was pathetic: every review I could find gushed about iPods. I kept searching, and finally found a promising review for an mp3 player from a company called iRiver. 20 GB, decent display, fairly intuitive controls. The model was from early 2005, and I had to hunt around for a while, finally locating a refurbished one on Amazon. $100 and it was mine.

Disappointment. It was in like-new condition, but it was like finding an unopened box with an 8-track inside. It worked fine, and syncing a folder of mp3's to the player was pretty easy... once I figured out how to actually start the sync process. But the main controller, which resembled a flattened mushroom, was clumsy. The monochrome display was small but adequate. It had the ability to play back many different types of audio files, not just mp3's. And it even had a built-in recorder, which could be handy if I was overly paranoid. In short, state of the art for mp3 players... if the iPod didn't exist.

But any equipment has to be considered in context. I wanted an mp3 player for use in the backyard when friends come over. Something that would hold a ton of music and shuffle through it all would also look much less square than a pile of CD's. We're also going on vacation next week, and I figured it would be nice to have there, and for the 3-hour drive. That's it, really. I don't listen to music at work because I'm in a cubicle, and I'm constantly being interrupted or dragged away from my desk. My commute to work is about 10 minutes. The only working out I do is steadying our toddler on the toilet.

The real test is whether my slightly technophobic wife can figure it out. I handed her the iRiver with no explanation of how it worked, and she was frustrated within about two minutes. Perhaps this would have been ideal for a less enlightened man: if she can't figure it out, then that means that control of the device would be mine. I could lie and tell her that I couldn't locate "Delta Dawn," and swear that I had actually put that song on the player. But such acts have consequences.

I put the iRiver back in the box and starting pondering which iPod I wanted. An 8GB Nano probably would have sufficed, but for the same price I could get a 30 GB iPod, with a color screen and the ability to store photos and movies (like I need to watch a movie at half the size of an index card?). I picked it up at Target the next day, as well as a radio transmitter so I could use it in my car.

Since then, I've gone through most of my CD's, and now I've got about 1,000 songs on the iPod... which is about 1/7 of its capacity. (As a couple of co-workers helpfully suggested, that leaves plenty of room for porn, but there's that whole half-an-index-card issue to contend with there, too.) I've gotten obsessive about getting rid of duplicates and making sure the songs are correctly cataloged in the iTunes directory (for example, when it throws any best-of CD in the 'Compilations' folder). I have not, however, gone out an purchased an iPod sock.

Forgive us if we're stating the obvious, but here's how it works: Just slide your iPod into the sock to keep it safe and warm. Slide it out to dock or change playlists. It's as easy as... putting on a pair of socks.

No, forgive me for stating the obvious, but it's half an effing tube sock. I suppose I could make my own; the only problem would be finding the little Apple logo, but I could use one of the grapes or Leaf.

As for Harry... reading this last book was like a bad weekend camping trip. Friday night you realize it's not as fun as you remember, it rains all day Saturday, and you wake up Sunday to find a bear sniffing around your tent. I think Rowling had a good story to tell, but she's not a great storyteller. When my son's a bit older, I'll encourage him to read the series. I might withhold each successive book for about 18 months, just so he can live the adventure the way his parents did.