Category: Life

We’re fostering three cats all of a sudden, and it’s been a while (seven or eight years, probably) since we’ve had young, jumping cats.

Which means we have to (as we’ve been reminded) jumping-cat-proof our house.

Which is just the opposite of child-proofing your house. Wherein you take dangerous and breakable things from low places and put them in high places.

Instead, we have to take the knick-knacks and bric-a-brac that we’ve come to display atop our bookshelves (which are the main type of furniture we own) and shove them back to the wall so that a cat won’t try to pass behind them. Also, I might have to move my row of paperbacks from the top of the to-read shelves in my office that seem to be falling like snowflakes every night.

On the plus side, gentle reader, you might be in line for another decade’s worth of cat pictures if our past fostering habits prove prologue.

Tree-climbing gains popularity as a full-body, outdoor workout:

Tree-climbing is emerging as a recreational sport, similar to rock climbing.

Local instructor Guy Mott says tree-climbing builds muscles and can lead to improved fitness and weight loss.

“If you engage in a tree climb, it is a full-body workout. It is much more interactive and therapeutic to be outside as opposed to a gym,” said Mott. “It helps people to gain an appreciation for nature.”

Not only is it reliving, albeit in a limited fashion, one of the joys of childhood, but it’s experiencing it in a way that we did not as children but that we’ve forced onto them. Namely, it’s highly ritualized, highly supervised, taught in the right fashion, and with a bunch of safety equipment. It’s regression for the scaredy-cat set.

Juxtaposed, another headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today: Worker for tree removal company dies on the job.

Really.

Well, the more people in trees, the fewer people hogging the pec fly machine at the gym, so to each his own when it’s not the pec fly machine at the gym, I guess.

Well, I obviously don’t have a schultüte now. Well, I guess it’s not obvious to those of you on the Internet who are not actively rifling through my boxes of personal mementos.

What is a schultüte? Let’s have a real-life former German explain it:

Since about the beginning of the 19th century, German school kids get a Schultüte on the first day of first grade. It’s a big cone made out of heavy paper, decorations on the outside and tied shut at the top with a bow.

. . . .

The Schultüte is filled with candy and small items useful for school (like colored pencils or erasers). They’re usually purchased commercially, but some families make them from scratch. The Schultüte is an extremely common thing in Germany, but I don’t think any other culture has the same custom.

Well, mine wasn’t a real schultüte, because I wasn’t in Germany and I wasn’t going into first grade.

But when I started (half-day) kindergarten at Douglas Road Elementary School way back in the day, Mrs. Noisworth had prepared a smaller rendition of that thing for us. I remember the paper cone filled with candy, trinkets, and a penny wrapped in aluminum foil.

I hadn’t remembered that for a long time until Marko triggered the memory. Good to know it’s still in there.

The manufacturer recommends this product for fifteen-year-olds and up.

Do you see a normal fifteen-year-old riding on one of these?

Me, either.

Listen, if you say a dog with rabies is rabid (and you pronounce the A sound differently in each for some strange reason)….

I can dang well say that a woman with babies is babid.

Ten Brands That Will Disappear in 2014.

It’s not 100% a match, but I do own JC Penney and Martha Stewart Omnimedia.

Why, if you only swapped in some AMD and maybe some Research in Motion, for Mitsubishi and Volvo, and it would look very close indeed.

(Link seen, in a roundabout fashion, on the Ace of Spades HQ Overnight Thread.)

I saw the strangest cloud blowing over Nogglestead on Tuesday night:

Click to embiggen. It’s a thin cloud that stretched pretty much from horizon to horizon below the other cloud cover.

I’ve never seen anything like that. But it’s been three years of that same feeling of wonder since I moved to the country.

This actually happened to a friend:

On Sunday evening, we attended a gospel concert by a group from a college in New York, a group that includes my children’s babysitter from when they were babies and toddlers. We agreed to host her and another group member overnight, which meant that we were treated to a dinner at the hosting church. My children, at the prompting of their father, traveled through the gym to get the members of the choir to autograph their programs, and they eventually cajoled the tour bus driver to sign as well.

As a reward, after the dinner, the bus driver let them sit in the bus driver seat and honk the bus horn. Now, this is a full touring bus, not a school bus. The sort of vehicle where you have to start the engine to get the horn to work. A truck horn kind of horn.

The older boy sat in the seat and tootled the horn, at least as much as one tootles and industrial-grade noisemaker that blasts out a 100 decibel chord.

The younger boy, freshly five (which means he can be tried as an adult for noise violations, I understand) hopped into the seat and played that truck horn like a percussion instrument, beating out a tempo not unlike the one a choir member had tapped out on a conga drum during the concert.

And how he grinned. Beamed. He thought that was the highlight of his young life, and he might be right.

The bus driver joked about the neighbors calling the police, and we dispersed to treat the young ladies in our charge to an Andy’s Frozen Custard and a night’s sleep.

The next morning, we discovered the neighbors called the police.

But the memory of that grin–of course we didn’t take pictures or film it, that’s evidence and requires a degree of foresight we lack. But I will never forget that smile of pure joy in simple loudness and power to make that loudness that the boy shone. Even though he probably will.

It’s worth whatever fines the driver has to pay or years taken out of his life in prison.

What a cool story for my friend to relate. Would someone look up the statute of limitations on noise violations for him?

A little word game we play involves guessing words based on the starting letter and clues.

At least, until I asked:

What starts with M and has five letters in it? Continue reading “How To Keep Your Newly Literate Child Guessing For Days” →

Today’s lesson in the Swedish language: Ogooglebar means unGoogleable; that is, something you cannot find on the Internet using a search engine.

Or maybe not.

I’m not really sure how useful the word really is given that most things are, in fact, discoverable on the Internet.

And, yes, I am a little behind on my Wall Street Journal reading, but I’m almost caught up. At which time I can begin blogging about the hot stock tips from last year’s Forbes.

Back in 2011, I mentioned I was starting to dress up a bit (Going Grant). I still am, although I got away from it for a while, but how does one fit a smart phone into blue jeans? I have no idea.

At any rate, here’s a bit about Why Cary Grant is Mandatory for the Manosphere, which talks about how you should act like Cary Grant (not just dress like him).

Quite so.

(Link via Ed Driscoll, whose Silicon Graffiti videos you should also watch and emulate.)

I humbly and somewhat numbly present Mary Lou Retton advertising adult diapers:

Bonus old man points if you look at a woman in a Depend ad and think, “She’s still kinda cute.”

I’d submit this to the Other McCain’s Rule 5 round-up for the week, but I have to much low-level respect for the unsuspecting Internet.

Some days, I whistle that an awful lot.

Also, I don’t want to make you feel old, old man, but that song’s right near a quarter century old now.

Come on, you guys know I read Forbes Life and WSJ Magazine for more than Christopher Buckley. I need to know what the people on the coasts who think they should rule over the uneducated mobs in the middle of the country are wearing. Apparently, this season, it’s shiny yellow pants.

You know what makes it even better? They’re $400 yellow pants.

Friends, this is how I will know I have entered a mid-life crisis, where I worry about my own mortality and want to steep myself in the trappings of youth and blow up a happy marriage to pursue duck-faced models in New York City: the first indicator is when I look at pants in some bizarre fashion-fashioned color and think, “I need to get a pair of those.”

(Reminder: Last season, it was purple pants.)

You’re sort of asking for it when you teach a child how to say, “ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ,” aren’t you?

So the six-year-old asked me “What is bric-a-brac?”

Every eager to help expand his vocabulary, I explained it was a small collection of knick-knacks or figurines/statues used for decoration. We have some bric-a-brac on our mantle (although some of it’s too large to be real bric-a-brac, which I think should have a federally mandated maximum height and volume).

Once the concept started to look clear in his eyes, I helpfully added that bric-a-brac differs from baccarat, a card game, and Bacharach, an American composer, piano player, and singer.

I hope this wasn’t for some sort of test now that I’ve confused him.

You know, New Year’s Resolutions don’t tend to work out. I mean, the holiday is based on the turn of a calendar, an arbitrary cut-off of the revolution of the planet around the sun that comes in the middle of the deepest, darkest season winter. To suddenly decide you’re going to change some element of yourself that you want to improve in the midst of the longest nights of the year seems a little, well, doomed to failure.

Which makes me wonder why Easter’s resolutions or equinox resolutions haven’t taken their place.

Look outside: Things are brightening, the skies smell sweeter, the grass is beginning to grow where the clover hasn’t choked it out (your mileage may vary). The very season of annual renascence and its attendant festivals marks an optimistic turn, a bit of change that might make the adherence to said resolutions and personal improvements more likely. By golly, if the flowers can bloom, I can lose this ten pounds of winter wait and hit the gym more often.

At least, that’s what I’m telling myself as I make my New Q2’s Resolutions.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Mr. Hill.