up and at 'em

the babe, before school last week.

i think it was some time last week — or maybe the middle of this? — that the babe finally got the hang of crawling out bed instead of waiting/calling/crying to be carried out as she had been when she had a crib. after three years of high walls, i suppose there was some getting used to.

she'd always been a slow starter, wanting to be held for a long few minutes or ten until she was awake enough to be engaged by her brother or her surroundings. until that moment, she'd be pretty clingy and cranky and wanting to be left alone.

now she emerges from her room, sleepy, not as cranky — i suppose from getting up on her own terms — but still some days wanting to be held. such a baby still.

lessons from disappointment

nut. corrosion. nuts.

in the aggregate, for all the time and effort and money put into it, yesterday was a waste.

from after breakfast until just before supper, i'd been working on repairing a bathroom fixture and when it was all over, i had to concede we needed to replace the whole damn thing.

we'd broken the lovely porcelain cross knob on our faucet long ago and, with the kids gone for a few days, i epoxied the pieces together in what appeared a very strong bond.

while i could have been satisfied with just screwing it in and being done with it, i got ambitious and decided to change a washer to stop what had become a steady drip.

the nut that held the cartridge in place was so stuck and corroded at its base that i began to doubt it was even a separate piece of the fixture. it took a lot of scraping, penetrating oil and tapping with a small hammer to finally jigger it loose.

faucet cartridge kit. from china via gresham's.

i found a plumbing supply place — via the yellow pages, no less — out on the west side that sold aftermarket replacements since the model had long been discontinued. i got a whole kit — two sets of washers, springs, faucet cartridges and nuts — for ten bucks.

i was pumped. all that effort was going to pay off.

after initially trying to just replace the nut, i used the whole assembly — the brass valve in the cartridge had been replace by plastic, so i was leery — and everything looked great.

i replaced the knob and opened the valve leading to the faucet and water came gushing out. oops. forgot to close the faucet. oops. it's stuck. must have put it in backwards. (plus, the positioning in the knob shows the breaks in the porcelain.)

disassemble. reverse cartridge. reassemble. reattach knob. valve on. water gushes. back to square one. i do this about twice more before determining i neglected to ensure the holes in the cartridge aligned to an "off" position, but not before breaking the porcelain knob. the epoxy held, but i created a new break.

then i just want a working faucet. i reassemble everything sans knob and the faucet works. but it still drips. i know when i'm licked. i began looking for a new faucet.

so as much as i wanted to keep the original look and feel of the bath with the lighting and plumbing fixtures, i'm going to have to live with the disappointment that i couldn't make it happen. such is life.

but while i'd say the whole endeavor was a waste, i learned:

• the strength of epoxy glue
• the old time-life do-it-yourself home repair and improvement book series may be the best investment i made back in the 1980s (i don't want to think about if i'd begun investing in mutual funds back in 1986 as my late uncle celio recommended)
• the utility of "liquid wrench" penetrating oil on corroded nuts
• the importance of scraping off said corrosion in the application of oil and tapping the hell out of the nut and jimmying it around with the wrench to loosen it (ie, don't be afraid to apply some force to stuck things)
• that the yellow page are relevant if for no other reason than that if a company has gone to the expense of buying a costly ad in the phone book, they must have some permanence or at least a long-standing establishment and can be trusted
• there's an old-fashioned plumbing supply shop on the west side, gresham's, in a no-frills quonset hut that will be the first place i'll go to instead of lowe's for materials and expertise
• when to give up

three breaks became four.

i'm sure the part about replacing the washer could have been done by an expert in about an hour or two, if for no other reason than s/he'd have no doubt that the nut was meant to come off and would have started right away on loosening it.

i was so worried that somehow it was all of a piece and that i was going to break something — and that i'd imagined replacing a washer about 10 years ago — that i lost about three hours simply from ignorance and doubt.

as much as i'd like to try my hand at replacing a faucet with a new one, the matter of sealing and caulking and and finding parts and pipefitting in the hands of a man who has doubts about his abilities should be enough to dissuade me from the idea.

(now if i had a whole weekend without the kids around, i'd probably be more open to a trial-and-error approach. but the luxury of time is something i just don't have at the moment.)

i'm contracting this one out. as i often say, convenience has a price — and cost. and so does pride.

end of week 1 of the purge

funny how one event begets another until the thing you'd been putting off for years is suddenly set into the slogging slow motion of beginning to get done. 

the great spring cleaning purge of 2015 had its origins in a 4-day staycation to get the junk room cleaned out into a master bedroom, but didn't really get moving until the city's annual junk day curbside pickup. 

we managed to ditch an old grill and my mattress and boxsprings, among the bigger items. it seemed like a lot brought out at the last minute — we'd forgotten about it until our neighbor reminded us the night before —but they were just big and bulky. 

but it was a start. 

then suddenly the dryer wouldn't start. and the basement was a wreck. how the hell were going to get a new dryer — and, sure, why not a washer before the old one breaks down, too — past all that clutter?

so i started moving stuff and throwing things away. beginning on the three-day labor day weekend, i gathered about six bags of trash and one of recycling. i gave a number of usable items to charity — a clothes hamper, a few rugs, a lamp and a kids potty and baby tub.

it seems like a lot, but there's still more. more bags to be sorted and more furniture to be given away. but it's a start.

call to the center

dampened spirit.

cleaning out the basement uncovered a stash of books that were ruined by a leaky pipe.

among them were some fictional works — my copy of jd salinger's "catcher in the rye," neil gaiman's "good omens," glenn savan's "white castle" and somerset maugham's "up the villa."

while i had a great attachment to "catcher in the rye." loved "good omens" and had a sentimental tie to "white palace," i was most bummed by the loss of these classic works on the spiritual life, especially therese liseux's "story of a soul."

these were a part of the "finding" of the path i was supposed to be on, finding the source of the vague calling that i'd been hearing all my life.

my favorite and dearest books are in a warm, safe place in the house — basil pennington's "call to the center," among them — but this stack here were of the pile that i wished to return to when i had the time to return to them and read all the way through.

my faith journey being what it is right now as a husband and father, i'm doing a lot more petitioning than listening, as my contemplative prayer led me to. but, again, Lord willing, i'll have the opportunity to return to my visits and continue to grow in the spirit.

letting go

0922 7 may 2013

in trying to find an image to go with an older post, i found a bunch of shots taken two years ago of the children and was taken with what a baby the boy still was at age 3.

taken in contrast of what a "together" child his sister is at the same age with what i have euphemistically called the "challenge" of him as a toddler at 2 and 3 and what we put each other through, i can only call those anxious times our "lost years."

on top of dealing with the behavioral antics of "the terrible twos" that we'd heard so much about in addition to his just being a boy, we were wrestling in the dark with aspects of his physiology that we'd never dreamed of.

we had no idea that co-mingled with the vagaries associated with his growth and development was his physical reaction to gluten and especially dye — specifically "natural" annatto — that i'll say complicated matters exponentially.

credit his mama who discovered as she researched her own ailments the effect that diet could have on his behavior, which was profound. in hindsight, i can see that it lowered his threshold for frustration, further reduced his fleeting toddler focus and made his fits and tantrums more mercurial, manic,  and much more wild and violent.

needless to say, our initial reaction to this, as parents who were not going to raise a willful child, was to assert ourselves as the boss physically with spankings, time-outs and vinegar spritzes to the mouth. we employed positive reinforcements, like "tickets" that could be gained or lost depending on behavior and reward stickers applied to calendars to chart for him good days. we turned his doorknob inside out so as to confine him to his room and took away toys. after initial successes, all eventually ended with mixed results.

1052 17 april 2013

so while these were troubled times, they also helped us to better appreciate the good days, when he was just a sweet, inquisitive little boy, like the one you see here. watching the relatively harmless mischief and benign bouts of temper of his sister now, i wonder how many more pleasant days we were robbed of as a result of our ignorance of what the food we served was doing to him.

the heartbreaking thing was oftentimes in his own assessments of why he lost privileges, his 3-year-old self would say, "because i had fits." he was smart and self-aware enough to know regret.

we were only then coming to learn that none of us — he nor we — knew why he was doing what he was doing. (one of the most pitiable things i ever heard him cry was, "i want to be good! i want to be good!" even as we carried him to his room or restrained him as he flailed and screamed.)

which brings us to here. Lord knows we wish he'd listen better and focus on the tasks at hand, but these are the laments of just about any parent of a 5-year-old boy. by and large, i could probably say i couldn't be happier with him. i'm enjoying this little boy.

i'd started this post to articulate that while i regretted the missed chance at a more pleasant toddlerhood, i shouldn't waste time on it and focus on the present — which is something i've only spent the past 20 years trying to learn.

and the rest, looking at the pictures of my children and mourning the passage of time is, well, a waste of time in itself, and there's nothing i can do to stop it. as i've been learning over and over, "... luke, let go," "let go and let God," "let it go."

thank you, Lord, for getting us this far.

speaking of milestones

the boy got up and was put in the shower around 6:30 this morning. must have slipped out of his nighttime pull-ups.

what we've been taking for granted for more than a few months now has been both the babies sleeping through the night.

it doesn't seem that long ago the boy was getting up at 5 or even 4 in the morning wanting to start his day. and the baby was crying two and three times a night to go to the potty.

question now becomes when are they going to want to start sleeping in? (especially as kindergarten and public school begins in the fall.)

i once read somewhere that age 5 is when children cease being cute. i first found that an abrupt and cranky cut-off — how could one not find these tiny moppets endearing until, maybe, age 7 or 8?

well, now that our boy is well into his five-ness, i suddenly appreciate the point. while his core remains sweet and funny and smart, he has added obnoxious and loud — sometimes screechingly so — to his oeuvre. i get it now.

just part of the process, right? audible sigh. slowly, but surely, they're becoming people.

slipping away

last day at preschool together.

as much as i love this picture of the little munchkins from the baby's last day of preschool yesterday, the one i wish i had was of the two walking to the car in the rain.

he stood a head taller than her, hood up, looking down, holding her hand as they made their way, step-by-step, on the paving stones leading to the car, both of them so small still.

it was the last time they'd be attending the same school for the next two years. i can only imagine, the good Lord willing, how tall they'll be the next time and what they'll be like.

as their personalities develop and the inevitable rivalries arise, he remains the apple of her eye and she his charge and cohort. wherever their roads may lead, they'll always be, as a friend described his own children, thick as thieves.

i didn't grow weepy as i watched the boy's graduation program later that evening. they sang a few valedictory songs touching on the end of school and their years together and the anticipation of kindergarten. the lyrics were sweet, cheerful and, i suppose luckily, not poignant and melancholy-tinged as i'd anticipated. (as evidenced here, i can do that on my own, right?)

student and teacher.

watching the slide show covering the year past, however, kris and i were both struck by how his face had changed. photos from him taken in the fall showed a roundness in his cheeks that still spoke to his waning toddlerhood at age 4. "he still looks like a baby," i said to her. now his face is more angular and long. he's lengthening into a stringbean now.

looking at the silhouettes created by his teacher of the kids in her class as decoration, i was pleased that i could recognize the shape of his head. i guess we always will, even as it imperceptibly changes day by day.

"if i could save time in a bottle," the immortal jim croce once posited in song, has pretty much become the raison d'etre for this blog, grabbing moments and painting them as fast as i can before they fade.

i'm never going to catch them all. but i hope this helps to jog memories and chart the milestones, big and small. me, the hoarder of time.

two years in

surviving example of baby screen grab.

after reading a washington post piece on ideas for weeding out abuse on the twitters, i realized that, after owning a smartphone for two years now, my ability to take screen captures of whatever i was seeing on my phone came from my then-1-year-old daughter.

as an indulgent dad, i let my babies hold and play with my phones. i remember a lot of slobber from the boy's teething on an old "candy bar"-style nokia. 

with the iphone, though, i figured the slide-locking feature for the control panel would be enough to keep the baby girl from messing too badly with it. (it wasn't — either for her or her brother, as an entire take of notes was deleted by someone's tiny fingers.)

meantime, though, the device featured enough buttons and switches for her to push and toggle to keep her occupied and, apparently, to press in combinations i never bothered to read about in the owner's manual. 

i began to notice screen grabs of my phone display mysteriously appearing in my photo album but had no idea how they got there. 

it wasn't until i'd retrieve the phone from the baby immediately after she'd play with it that i'd notice a photo fading from its display that i began getting a clue that she was the one taking the screen grabs. i just didn't know how. 

i can't say how many weeks or months passed before i realized what combination of buttons i myself was accidentally pushing to similarly make screen captures, but i'll have to credit my little toddler for showing me it could be done. 

howl

capitol street, friday evening.

settling in for bed after a pleasant hour or so downtown after the babies' swimming lessons. kris and i had a craving for ice cream and figured it would be nice to surprise to the kids after class.

it was a lovely, warm late spring evening and the ice cream at ellen's was tasty as usual. afterward, we took a little walk around the block to see the new wine bar up the street, named, oddly enough, "the block."

they'd rolled down a smart, black and white striped canvas awning over their outdoor dining area, which gave diners a chance to enjoy the pleasant weather and be seen.

the whole street was busy with young and not so young professional types having a night out. a number of restaurants on capitol and quarrier offer the outdoor dining option and it gives the area a casual, cosmopolitan air. it was nice to have a chance to soak it in.

obviously, as a white collar family, this was very appealing to us — premium ice cream shops, fancy bar, pizza and gourmet restaurants, book stores that house cafes, wine bars and art galleries all speak to our middle class interests.

this kind of vital city center would seem to be the kind of thing that would attract a smart, energized populace looking for amenities in a laid-back, semi-urban setting. i like to think we live in a good small town on the rise.

so it puzzles me on this night before our city election why a faction of malcontents would want to change a leadership to something called "new blood" or "a new direction."

i can't imagine, in a town with a modern minor league ball park, a symphony orchestra, two newspapers and a totally revamped convention center in the pipe, along with efforts to improve lifestyles through pedestrian and bicycle initiatives and a popular arts festival, what "direction" these folks want this town to go in. away from all this?

i'm not sure if their desire isn't for a change as much as a desire to hurry things up. i have yet to hear an articulation of what, exactly, they would do to improve the progress of this city that isn't already being done. nebulous things, like policies of sensitivity, are nice, but, really, aren't they just icing and not cake? why don't we finish making the cake and let the rest take care of itself?

this is not new york or austin or providence. this is appalachia. rough-hewn, insular, big-hearted, conservative appalachia. we are working to translate its peculiar charms into a unique selling proposition to improve our economy and way of life.

bellyaching that it doesn't fit their narrow vision of what they believe will work well for everyone without desire for compromise or cooperation isn't really much of a platform or a plan. it is sound and fury and a self-serving intolerance and not much more.

i wish our mayor and council incumbents well tomorrow.

avatar

starfighter flex.

btw, at some point last month, the boy created an avatar of himself to participate in the star wars adventures he makes with his lego sets. he even narrates himself in the third person into the scenes. "... is helping han solo find his blaster," and the like. it's kind of funny.

the skids are greased

starting to register, in more than one way.

so we're sitting at mom and dad's, noticing the boy has been quietly playing with his cousin's lego sets for a couple of hours and discussing the big summer vacation and its proximity to the start of school.

mom remarked that once kids enter the school system, their growth seems to start speeding up and there's no stopping it. a former colleague noted the same thing when i marveled at how quickly his eldest son had grown when i recalled how the boy was still in the womb when his daddy found a new job.

here's when their childhood years begin slipping away from you. seems like just last year i was folding newborn clothes before the boy was born and now he's ready to get slingshot into real boyhood.

endor treehouses.

on the drive back from beckley, the boy busied himself the whole drive back with the imaginary exploits of the space robot he created out of the toy building set he got with his kids meal. there was narration and dialogue about some attack or plot or sci fi malevolence that seemed to perfectly sync his apparently vivid imagination with his seemingly non-stop mouth. 

this kind of play is what i'd been waiting for since he was old enough to kind of converse. i wasn't sure if he had it in him, given the opportunities he passed up with a couple of action figures i gave him on our thanksgiving trip last year. 

i guess, as his preschool teacher told us, the hormones and growth kick in about this time. so all the pieces had to come together organically, and the expected result doesn't just happen when toys are introduced. 

by leaps and bounds he now grows. here's where the wheels and wings are attached to his little boy life and it begins taxiing onto the runway to fly away from us. 

mother's day

two kids meals, a no. 9 and no. 1 combo.

eating a some drive-thru wendy's on the road today probably best encapsulated a typical day in mama's life.

all the french fries and drinks were up front with us, so every time a child wanted a swig of milk or a fry, s/he would interrupt whatever efforts mama was making to feed herself. (this mama did while also maintaining me a steady supply of fries as i drove with one hand and took bites of burger with the other.)

meantime,  she was also constantly craning her neck and throwing out her back to ensure our finicky daughter was doing more than just eating the bun of her burger sandwich or the fries or filling up on milk. 

the boy and i finished our meals and the boy was playing with the kids meal prize building toy. the girl, lollygagging as usual, was the last to come close to finishing, but still wanted a) her post-breakfast nut bar snack; then 2) the last bit of her milk; before finally d) her kids meal toy. 

kris would no sooner fulfill one request before the child begin her next, "mommy, may i please have ..." bang, bang, bang. 

and all this was compressed into about the 15 minutes it took to leave the harper road exit to pass the pax toll plaza and hit the curvy stretch of turnpike. 

it's never done, a mother's work. she attacks it with smarts, humor and love, my wife does. i love you, mama.

guinness float on

the guinness float.

the first time i heard of this concoction, i thought it was ridiculous foodie nonsense. how could you pair such a strong flavor as guinness stout with something as delicate as vanilla ice cream. i tucked it away in my mental folder of odd foods, certain i'd never have the desire for such a strange brew.

then, a few weeks ago, as the end of a long week was winding down, i wanted a reward for myself — a heavy beer, no, ice cream. and then this popped into my head. the deep hint of coffee paired with ice cream enticed me.

i looked up a recipe and picked the one from the lady i'd like to party with, rachael ray, over the one from the more staid martha stewart. while it seemed simple, i chose to punt on the whipped cream.

next morning, while running errands with the baby, i picked up the ingredients, along with chocolate ice cream for the kids. (we were a week or so past st. paddy's, so the refrigerated shelves were well-stocked.)

the time to finally sate my craving hit later that afternoon when a desire for sweet and alcohol came together.

long story short, it wasn't as good as i'd hoped at first sip. but there was something there. by the end of the pint, i knew it was a keeper. those last sips with the melty ice cream and the rich beer were grown-up and heavenly, kicking up a notch the guinness' strong creamy flavor. the trick, i decided, was to let the ice cream warm a bit so that it melts a little more and marries with the stout.

had my second one since then tonight. and yeah, i'm picking up another 4-pack soon.

fml

Friday's edition of @charleywest #journalism pic.twitter.com/pCopr4ArOe

— P Maramba (@DailyMailPhilip) May 8, 2015

with problems ranging from tearing newsprint and mechanical failure to a crippling snowstorm and a goddam underground cable fire, we seem to be able to catch absolutely no breaks this year. none.

shopgirl

quickly — mama walked in on the baby looking at a kohl's sunday circular; she had turned to the girls clothing page. "i want this ... and this." just those two particular outfits. so ... a sense of fashion at age 3. apparently here's a sensibility that's nature, not nurture. 

saturday

an apparent moment of clarity.

only thing that would have made today better would have been a visit to the ice cream shop and stopping by my friend cheryl's place for free comic book day.

mis-timed a soccer match this morning that was actually set for noon, which led to an astonishingly loopy boy who actually scored a goal for his opponent on a breakaway. 

(he'd spent all morning playing in sandbox after playing on playground, so most times that would be a full day. he had nothing left in the tank by the time the game rolled around. if he'd had his wits about him and wasn't acting like an unfocused fool, we'd have gotten comic books and ice cream.)

i forgot to spray the house for ants but did get to mow the lawn. also got about three loads of laundry done, which is a good laundry day. so i'm pretty pooped. 

little things make the epic

cast of "avengers: age of ultron."

in the process of helping get out friday's comic book movie-themed lifestyles feature page, i read an "avengers: age of ultron" movie review that i hoped would be kind to the latest marvel/disney studio epic mostly so as to justify all the real estate we devoted to it.

lucky for me, it was.

as a good review should, it provided some idea of story and characters without giving things away — "spoilers," as they're now known in the common parlance. but it also gave me things to look for in the movie that were among its finer points.

the upshot of the best part of the film was summed up in the print headline: "flawless cast makes killer 'ultron' work." so i paid special attention to the acting. not the special effects or battle sequences, but the relationships and tensions between and within characters.

while i was admittedly left dazzled and dizzied by the lightning-fast action pieces, it was the portions carried on by simple dialogue and airy, genuine interaction that lent the characters enough depth to make you care — and worry — about them. (and knowing a spoiler which was let slip by a work colleague only heightened the anxiety.)

where the first "avengers" movie tidily introduced the group before chugging its way to a climactic slugfest, this hurricane of a film proves to be less the product of bombastic blast as a vast collection of breaths and sighs in imbuing its team members with heart.