Category: Life

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.

So I’m minding my own business in the shower, trying in vain again to scrub the slime of softened water off, when I’m confronted by a demon.

Fructis the Soul-Renderer, Flayer of the Weak, Builder of Bodies

I mean, seriously, who brands their froo-froo shampoo with a made-up Latin derivation that brings to mind not so much the scents of watermelon and lingonberries but the rising chant of monks in horror films featuring demons and/or William Shatner and the eventual mauling of a poor, innocent teenager.

Triple nutrition? That means Fructis must feast on the hearts of three virgins.

No, this is not my shampoo. It belongs to my beautiful wife. I use the more manly Suave. It’s not manly because its name implies being smooth and confident; it’s more manly because it costs less than a dollar a bottle.

This morning, I told my wife I was going to make my toilet.

Sometimes, I make my beautiful wife gape, and today was one such time. “What?” she asked.

She’d never heard the expression before, but that’s because she doesn’t read early 20th century detective novels. Did I get that expression from Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen? I forget.

But make one’s toilet does not refer to building a commode nor even to installing a commode and tank. Instead, it refers to shaving, washing up, and brushing one’s teeth in the morning.

Even my own generation doesn’t understand me. Truly, I am a man out of time.

The strangest things strike me and make me a tad maudlin. Which, comes to think of it, would make an excellent name for a character in a book about a young man given everything who feels melancholy about it.

Tonight, I prepped a play bath for my children and dolloped a bit of Mr. Bubble into the running water, and I realized or futuremembered that some day, they won’t want toys in the bathtub or a dash of Mr. Bubble to add zing to the near-cleansing experience. I’ve already gamed it out: the older boy will one day decide Mr. Bubble is for babies, much like he decided at one point that Sesame Street is for babies, and that will be that. Perhaps the younger will hold out hope for another dash of the Mr. Bubble at some point, but he’ll follow his older brother’s lead, and he’ll stop asking for toys in the bathtub and for bubbles.

Eventually, the toys will get cleaned up and donated to a church sale or some such collection, but the last bottle of Mr. Bubble will just migrate to the rear of the cabinet. Periodically, I’ll clean and rearrange the contents of the cabinet, but I won’t want to dispose of half a bottle of Mr. Bubble. Eventually, I’ll say I’m saving it for the grandchildren, but I’ll not really know if I’m to have my line continue or if I’ll live to see it.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that one of the most saddening things I saw when I was carrion-crawling around the turn of the century, visiting estate sales to find books or games to list on eBay for a couple bucks, was containers of consumables marked a quarter. You never like to think this can of WD-40 that you’re tossing into your cart at Lowe’s as an afterthought might outlast you, but someday, one will.

No, I’m just Tad today because it’s not the complete recognition of mortality flashing before my eyes, but the fleeting recognition, again, that these days that I often find maddening or dull or somehow otherwise not lived entirely fully will pass and I will miss moments of them with great acuteness.

Or at least I’m planning very carefully to do so.

Note to self: stop buying the economy-sized bottles of Mr. Bubble.

From time to time, I like to step away from my desk and run the vacuum cleaner over the floors as a break (sorry, ladies, I’m taken!).

During the course of many, many such excursions, I have sometimes heard the little tickticktick of a tiny Lego or action figure’s blaster sucked into the maw of the beast, and I’ve thought about what a horrible father I am: I felt no remorse in permanently cleaning the children’s toys in this fashion.

Now, I don’t go hunting to deprive my children of the prefabricated implements of their imagination. I can remember how it would have made me feel to know my parents did that. Well, I can imagine it; my sainted mother was not that diligent in housekeeping.

So I do look over their rooms in before I mechanically groom the pile of the carpeting, but I don’t take extraordinary measures when I hear what I know is a dispensable, soon-to-be-unmissed bit of plastic.

But today was a different story.

I was vacuuming the lower level, which is not a toy-rich haven of childhood delight. When they come down, they get out board games, though, and build little narratives with the Life cars and Scooby Doo Mystery Game ghost tokens. We make them pick up, and we straighten in addition to that. But today, as I hit that dark corner by the game shelves, I heard a TICKTICKTICK, and I remembered I meant to pick up that Scrabble tile.

You’d better believe I unseamed that vacuum bag from nave to chops to retrieve a Scrabble tile. Which, by the time I got to it, looked like a little lion with all the cat hair on it. I cleaned it up, of course, which means it is the cleanest Scrabble tile we own right now.

But now I have a greater secret to hide from the children: Not only does Daddy sometimes unrepentantly vacuum up their toys without retrieving them from the garbage, Daddy will gut the dirt sack to get his toys back.

Oh, right, like I’m the only one who sometimes tries to enumerate the Four Musketeers from memory and suddenly lapse into Greek Fates.

D’Artagnan, Aramis, Porthos, Clotho….oh, blast!

Back in the late 1990s, I volunteered with a local theatre company whose productions were in a Methodist church in the city of St. Louis. The church itself was a sprawling, multi-story castle that had a kitchen, a couple of chapels, a gymnasium, offices, strangely spaced bathrooms, and vast storage spaces. There were often a couple of different groups having functions there, so it was not uncommon to run into strangers in the kitchen washing dishes or something. And the minister mentioned that he’d had a problem with homeless people unlocking doors while the front door was open so they could come in and sleep there.

So I got to thinking about a novel about a young man in the mid-twenties crisis who meets a man who has, unknown the the church, moved into just such a church and lives on the premises gratis through some trickery and even receives some mail under the name John Methodis. I was going to title it The Gospel of John Methodis and study how this older fellow went off the grid and why that appealed to the boy in transition from the immediate post-collegescence to growing up–or not.

I didn’t get too far into writing that because it seems a bit thin of a plot to hang a whole novel on and the incidents within the book never materialized or connected themselves. Also, I’m lazy and have managed only two novels out of a couple dozen novel ideas.

Somewhere I must have read the story of Chheng Guan Lim, who for several years in the 1950s did just that.

The world is far crazier than my imagination.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

So I pulled into the car wash to get the road treatment rinsed from my vehicle (this winter in Springfield has been about 2″ of snow and 6″ of road treatments to melt the snow before the sun did, which it failed to do).

And as I’m rolling and before the door behind me closes completely, I see a bird fly in. And they perch on the equipment:

He did not give my vehicle any extra polish, but that would be a very ill omen indeed.

Now that I’ve got steady freelance work again, we’re officially Dual Income, Two Kids, Animals.

Oh, no.

We’re DITKAs.