Finn is sitting next to me on the couch playing Roblox on her shiny new iPad Mini. This is a gigantic upgrade from her grotty 4-year-old Kindle Fire, which used to be my old Fire. She’s getting into playing games with her friends online, and while this is making Jen and I very nervous, we’re also not going to completely lock her social life in the basement. She had a friend over on Wednesday who has a new iPhone X—yes, you read that right—and they tried to play Roblox together. Finn’s Kindle kept crashing and needing restarts, and Jen texted me and told me she was getting frustrated.
I’ve been bumping up against the limitations of the Kindle since we set it up for her; Amazon funnels parents into a paid model for parental oversight on your kid’s device, which I was too cheap for. I disabled a lot of the functionality and made it so that she couldn’t do any in-app purchases or browse the web, and that seemed to work OK for what she was doing. But the unit is old, and slow, and the battery is weak, and it was two-year-old technology four years ago, which means there were games within Roblox that wouldn’t run properly, and that app isn’t supported very well on Android from what I can tell. And all the kids are playing Fortnite, which it won’t run at all.
Her laptop actually turned out to be harder to manage. I set up a very strict internet whitelist to start with: Baltimore County Public Schools, PBS Kids, dictionary.com, National Geographic, and about four other sites of the same quality. But because any and all of the pages BCPS serves pulls scripts and content from other domains, all of these have to be whitelisted—over, and over, and over again. I had to make a second account for her with no firewall so she could do research online, and monitor what she was looking at.
Bless her heart, our daughter doesn’t have tantrums or whine or act like a baby about shit like this, but Jen is great at staying tuned to her frequencies and knows when things feel wrong. We decided that she should be able to reach out and play with her friends online without feeling embarrassed by her gear. There are a lot of seismic social shifts happening right now, and we want to make sure we’re not holding her back, while also not pushing her too far forward.
So we had a family talk over dinner, and after setting some ground rules we all came to a decision.
Jen and I weighed the options of different devices first; any phone is out of the question, as she’s not going to have one of those for several years—I don’t care what all of the crazy alarmist parents around us say, she doesn’t need to get in touch with me during recess in the fourth grade. I considered buying a new iPhone and giving her my old one with cell service disabled (it’s a 6, and beginning to show its age, but still functional), but there are a couple of modern games that won’t play on it. I considered an iPod Touch, but I figure she’d lose that pretty quickly. I looked at all of the models of iPad and finally settled on the Mini for its size, capacity, and price. It sits comfortably in the middle of each segment, and I figure it’s got enough room to expand into a schoolwork device as she gets into middle school. It’s big enough that it’s easy to see and hard to lose. But it’s also smaller than a full-size iPad.
I had to do a little sleuthing to figure out how to set it up for her correctly; at first I logged in with my account but quickly realized I’d have to undo that after I set her up with a Family Sharing account. She’s now got a subaccount keyed to her age, and she’s not able to purchase apps without her iPad sending me a confirmation alert. It’s set up with three hours max of screen time between 7AM and 9PM, and I’ve gotten pretty granular with the other settings. (I’m hesitating with the whitelist so I’ve set it to Block Adult Content, and we’ll see how that works).
Overall, I’m impressed with how Apple has thought some of this stuff through; out of the box it has a lot of the features I wanted without having to pay extra for—that’s part of the premium price, I suppose. The real test will be how she butts up against the parental controls I’ve set up, and if we have to modify any of them. But for now, she’s over the moon, and already talking about what case she’s going to buy for it.
As mentioned before, I took Friday off to drive Jen’s Dad up to Pennsylvania to have his driver’s license renewed, and the trip went as well as a daylong drive to the DMV could have gone. I was on the road early, we got through the northbound Baltimore traffic with little difficulty, and were sitting in the waiting area of the York PennDOT licensing center by 12:30. It should be noted that the caliber of humanity at the Maryland DMV is equal to that of the Pennsylvania DMV—it all resembles a methadone clinic. Two hours after arriving we walked out with a shiny new license and celebrated with a trip to the Cracker Barrel. Then, the ride home: I pulled into our driveway at about 8:30PM.
We were invited to be a part of our niece and nephew’s baptism this weekend, which was a great honor for Jen and I as the pseudo-godparents. The Catholics don’t want heathens in this role so we will pinch-hit when the Father, Son and Holy Ghost aren’t looking (which we’d be doing anyways). First up was Bear’s birthday on Saturday, where we gathered with a bunch of other parents and watched the kids play in a giant bouncy castle in their backyard. Thank god that was on Saturday, because Sunday just rained on and off all day.
Because I couldn’t be outside, I putzed around the house and cleaned the basement up a bit. I’m on the verge of a major cleanout and a trip to Goodwill sometime this week, and I’ve got a pile of stuff up in the hallway all ready to go. The tools are mostly organized but I’m not happy with how they’re all separated, so I’ll have to rethink that whole situation later. I also started piecing in components of Dad’s old surround system into our A/V setup, which is a revelation in technology for this house. I brought his HDMI-switching amplifier home and installed it, as well as a center channel speaker, and ran some speaker wire up the pole so that all the wiring is hidden. We watched Game of Thrones last night and could actually hear what people were saying!
Brian has been asking if we’ve used the shower yet since the day he left, so we finally gathered together and tried it out before the birthday party on Saturday. The verdict: it’s lovely. The river stones feel wonderful on my feet, and the shower itself is modern and warm. There’s a big difference standing in there vs. standing in the cast iron tub in the main bathroom; the cold seeps in under the tub and makes your feet chilly. This is a wonderful, modern new addition to our house and I’m energized to get more progress made in there. The next things to deal with are:
- The electrical: I’ve got my neighbor tentatively scheduled to drop by sometime this week to hook up the floor and some of the switches;
- The closet door: a new prehung door in the style we want will be about $500 plus delivery, so I’ve got to sit tight until the war chest refills to get that ordered.
- A toilet: there’s nothing stopping us from buying and installing one at this point.
- Cabinets: this is the BIG thing that we’ve got to save and plan for.
This is leg 4 of Friday’s journey from Baltimore to Lexington Park to York, PA, to Lexington Park, and then back to Baltimore. At about 0:18 you can see where I took this shot.
I returned from New York with more than just cameras. My father had a collection of tools from over the years that could fill several garages. We spent some time winnowing down the collection when he and my mother downsized from the lake house, and I filled a U-Haul with all kinds of stuff. Still, when they filled the moving truck later that year I’m certain 1/3 of it was toolboxes filled with mismatched sockets. I’ve now got those sockets, and while I’m not complaining, it’s going to take some time to organize them.
Because most of them originated out of repossessed vehicles, they aren’t complete sets—they are a mishmash of the best of the loose sockets picked up after 10+ years in the business: SK, Snap-On, Thorsen, Craftsman, Proto, Matco, Utica, and a couple of of lesser singles stamped only TAIWAN or JAPAN. There are multiple driver sizes: 1/4″, 3/8″ and 1/2″ all to be collected and organized. There are multiple drivers, as well, and several breaker bars. There are handfuls of screwdrivers, which is a windfall, because now I can stock the garage toolbox with decent tools as well as the basement. I now have at least 5 pairs of vise-grips, an entire set of nut drivers, multiple pairs of regular and needle nose pliers, another fistful of open-ended wrenches in SAE and metric sizes, about 10 utility knives (this is a Good Thing because utility knives always disappear whenever you need them) and SO MANY other odd one-off bits and bobs, I don’t have room for them all in my toolchests.
The sockets will go out into the garage to supplement the ones I’ve got out there already, and the wrenches will come inside to bolster the ones I’ve got in the basement. I’m splitting the screwdrivers and knives and pliers between locations. The ultimate goal is to avoid having to run to the basement for something when I’m working in the garage, and vice versa.
Meanwhile, I’ve had to reorganize the garage again to fit the old fridge, which is now on the back wall where two of our old kitchen cabinets once hung. The garage was at full capacity before the fridge went in, but now it’s overfilled. I’ve started culling stuff that’s been sitting in there for months/years and moving things around but it’s not going to get any bigger in there. It’s to the point where I’m considering buying one of those premade sheds they sell at Home Depot to stuff Scout parts or lawn tools in. Or I’ll just Freecycle the fucking fridge.
The basement has also slowly filled with stuff over time; the amount of empty floor space has diminished to the point where it’s hard to walk down there without tripping. I’ve got a list of stuff that’s going to be donated to Goodwill that I’ve got to start assembling, and there are several piles of lumber that need to be relocated.
I was able to finally make a couple of dump runs to get rid of the foam insulation from the greenhouse, which had been stacked behind the garage collecting pollen, and two bags of old UV plastic from the walls. While I was out, 50mph winds brought on by this odd weather system we’re dealing with shook several of the retaining bars off the greenhouse, allowing the plastic to flap open in places. This is odd behavior, something I never had to deal with before, and I’m a little stumped as to the cause and solution. I think it’s because the foam is gone and there’s less structural rigidity, which means the plastic can billow open and shut much easier now. The only remedy I can see is putting the clips back in and securing them with some sheet metal screws—something that makes me nervous. If this continues I’ll have to spring for some polycarbonate panels in the fall and set up a rigid wall where the foam used to be.
This is the pantry in my Mom’s basement at about 9:30 this morning and again at about 11. My Mom, sister and I went through all the stuff on these shelves and filled the back of my brother-in-law’s pickup with expired canned goods, pasta and flour. My father had apparently spent the last fifteen years either preparing for the End Times or unable to prevent himself from resisting a good sale. He’d filled four steel trashcans with flour, pasta, rice, and beans, and we had to go through it all and get it cleaned out.
After lunch we started in on the tools and worked our way around the back side of the basement. By the end of the day, we’d dropped off a pile of stuff at the goodwill and built a huge pile of stuff to be sold on Craigslist. There is a ton more to be done down there, but having the first part done is a great feeling.
As noted in the Scout blog, I spent Saturday over the river at Brian’s house, but I wanted to get home and cleaned up because Finn was at a sleepover that evening and Jen and I could enjoy a date night together. Initially we were a little worried about the sleepover but when we found out it would be somewhere between ten and eighteen girls we knew she’d have someone to hang with (everything is extremely cliquish and temporary right now). Jen and I had a couple of drinks downtown and caught up on a lot of the past week together, which was just what we both needed.
Sunday I was a little hung over (my new hard and fast rule has to be one whiskey-based drink per night and no more) but after some breakfast, coffee, and a trip to Target I was feeling better. The girls came home and immediately went down for a nap—Finn only had four hours of sleep—and I ran out to Lowe’s for dirt and mulch. While I was there I picked up six tomato plants, and when I got home I offloaded the dirt and mulch and got the bins ready for planting. There’s one cherry plant, a roma, two heirloom beefsteak plants and two reds. I’d like to find a couple of Oaxacas and four more cherry plants to fill things out, but there’s still time.
When that was done I set up a rain barrel on the garage to start collecting water and cleaned up the area behind the greenhouse. The second barrel platform needs to be replaced but I didn’t want to run a circular saw under the bedroom window and wake the girls, so I started rebagging leaves and cleaning up the back side of the house. By dinnertime I was tired but had made good progress straightening things up; I’ve got a major dump run to make with all of the castoff foam insulation from the greenhouse and two bags of plastic, and we’re going to cover the front curb with about thirty bags of leaves next week.
Looking over our overstuffed garage, I’ve been puzzling over where to put the old fridge, but looking things over I think I’ve got a plan. If I move two of the old kitchen cabinets to a space over the workbench I can clear a spot out along the back wall to fit it, but I’ve also got to move some Scout parts around and reorganize things.
This week is going to be nuts. Today I’m running into DC to do a runthrough of the event we’re holding on Wednesday, and then I run back to teach tonight at 4. Tuesday I’m on a train to New York City, and Wednesday I’m at the Ford Foundation in the morning to shoot video of Christiana Figueres, then over to Hudson Yards to shoot photos of the event that evening. We don’t have a full slide deck set up yet but I’ve had a friend working on the video presentation to make things look good. I still have to get a contract signed and officially hire a pro photographer to get the key event moments (at the recommendation of my fellow director, who allayed a lot of my anxiety over that responsibility).
Thursday I’m on a train back home and I’ll probably do a little work when I get in. And then I’m headed up to Mom’s house to start going through Dad’s stuff in the basement, organizing and hauling things out of there. That will be a long but productive weekend, I think, and then it’s back to the grind on Monday.
I bought Jen a Fitbit of her own on Friday, and she’s been wearing it all weekend. I think it took a little time to get used to (it’s not as comfortable as a regular watch, but once you’re used to it, it’s not bad) but I think she’s keen on knowing what her sleep patterns are as well as some of the other features. As watches go they are super handy and as much as I like wearing regular watches I’ve noticed that I’m wearing my Fitbit more, just so I can see what my exercise levels are. If I’m to believe the numbers it’s giving me, my Saturday/Sunday steps are more than double my weekday steps, and my overall numbers are much higher—last Sunday I climbed 65 floors when I was installing the greenhouse plastic. I do think it’s a bit confused, because it thinks I climbed 109 floors this Saturday which I know is not true.
We took Finley out to get a long-overdue haircut on Saturday, which makes a huge difference. I really prefer her with a bob. It suits her face, and her hair looks healthy again. More importantly, I think she likes it as much as we do.
After the haircut we drove down to the LP City to go to pick up Jen’s father and take him to the Hollywood VFW Spring Dinner, featuring St. Mary’s stuffed ham, fried oysters, beans, and potatoes. It’s been a few years since we’ve been down there, and even more since we’ve been to the Hollywood dinner, but it was worth every delicious bite. I think Jen and I emptied one entire heating tray of oysters on our own.
I haven’t set a date to go up and begin cleaning out my parents’ basement yet, but I did find that LensRentals is offering all of the gear I’d need to properly digitize the family slides: the 40mm macro lens, slide digitizing kit, and a Nikon D500 would all be $288 for a 7 day rental as opposed to buying the digitizing kit for $150 and renting the rest. The D500 is seven years newer and has a higher resolution (if I wanted to be anal I’d go with a full-frame body, but whatever) which should be enough to get us the results we want.
That’s the shower tile as it stands today. Brian is coming back to finish the area down to the floor and around the bench, and then he’s going to grout the walls. Then he’ll lay the floor in and grout that. We have a rough quote on the glass door, which is not cheap, but it will highlight the interior of the shower perfectly as you walk in the door.
Jen and I spent another weekend almost completely consumed by grading student work. We did get out here and there but it wasn’t at all what I hoped we’d be doing, for the second week in a row. We’ve been trying to line up things for Finn to do while we’re busy but it’s hard to stay focused when there are kids running around—who inevitably come to us to help them find something to do.
I’m at the point where I’m doing twice as much work to teach than I did my first semester; as we’ve gotten more involved in refining the rubric and syllabus and have striven to offer constructive, helpful feedback (going so far as to add a third project into my syllabus to give students an earlier idea of how they’re doing) the workload has quadrupled. Jen and I are conscientious about how we grade our work, so we double-check each other’s grading and notes, which adds more time to the process. And Finn sits idly by, bored out of her mind. Saturday was a mixture of rain and sunshine, and even though it was cold and damp we should have been outside hiking somewhere, not stuck inside.
I turned to Jen Sunday night and told her I’m thinking about quitting teaching. Finn’s life is flashing past me, and I’m not spending enough time with her right now. It’s breaking my heart.
One thing we did do as a family is go to see a matinee of How to Train Your Dragon 3. The three of us have been hooked on the series since Finn was old enough to appreciate it, and it was one of the many things we shared with the Morrises (I can’t hear the phrase “DEPLOY THE YAK” and not think of Rob and Zachary). The final movie in the series was good. It hit all of the main plot points and character beats as a good movie should; there were callbacks to the original movie that old-school fans appreciated, it definitely hit us in the emotional core (my family is pretty heavily invested in these characters, after two movies and three TV series) and it wrapped things up in a solid way that felt right.
But it was lacking the careful pace of the first movie, which took time to slowly show us the wonder of the relationship between a boy and his dragon, and how that in turn affected his relationships, as an outsider, with his community and his father. The first movie (I rewatched a bit of it last night as I cleaned up my desk) moved slower, took time to develop the stakes, and also let us breathe. It showed us how wonderful the world it created was, asked us to notice the details, and gave us time to appreciate them. I felt like the new movie was following a producer’s note that simply read, “MORE DRAGONS”. There was so much going on in every frame that it felt hard to keep up with what was happening. The only time I really felt like it was slow enough to let me appreciate the story was at the very end, and if I hadn’t been so familiar with the characters from my previous experience I wouldn’t have cared half as much.
The IPWhatever is kegged and carbed, and I tapped it on Saturday afternoon. In terms of taste, it’s pretty nondescript. Even after I’d dry-hopped it for much longer than I’d intended, the flavor is still pretty bland. But it’s got a hell of a kick–I never did a final gravity reading on it (because, after I’d fucked it up, what’s the point?) but it definitely hits me when I finish a pint of it. And that’s good timing, too, because the grapefruit IPA is just about kicked.
Our neighbors on the right side, who have been in the house as long as we’ve lived here, recently moved to an assisted living community and put their house up on the market. We were in New York when they held the open house, so we didn’t get to walk through it, but we told a bunch of friends and our brother and sister to check it out. Having walked through the downstairs a few times I didn’t see any huge problems, but everybody we know said it was more work than they were willing to take on. As it turned out there was a bidding war on the first day and it’s going to settlement this Friday. Apparently the buyers have kids a little younger than Finley, and they’ve had several people come by to look at the place, who we can only guess are contractors. I hope they’re normal and we can get along with them.
I haven’t have a whole lot of time to write toward the end of this week, so I’ll place some oldies here for fun.
Yesterday the family gathered back in Aurora for my father’s service, at the church across the street from their old house (that was weird). My sister, mother and I all got up and said a few words about my Dad. Here’s what I wrote:
I spent a lot of time this week going through our family pictures for the viewing, and I was struck by how different and how healthy my Dad looked twenty, or even ten years ago.
A lot of us might think of him as the hunched over guy with the hoses and oxygen machine. For some of us, that’s the only Bill we knew. But it wasn’t always like that.
I hope you were able to look at some of those pictures and remember the guy I do: the tall, V-necked, farmer-tanned Bill, who never ran out of energy and always seemed to be moving.
He was the guy who stuck a camper on the back of a flatbed truck and drove the family across the country during the month of August. You might think this was no big deal, but: This truck was a manual and had no air conditioning. It’s a miracle my Mom stayed married to him.
He was the guy who taught Renie and I how to hang drywall, shingle a roof, pour concrete, chop firewood, grow a garden, and pick locks.
Even though we were the ones sanding, picking up the shingles and throwing them in the truck, mixing the concrete, hauling the firewood, and weeding the garden at 7 in the morning.
He was a generation behind most of my friends’ parents so he wasn’t a hippie. he was kind of a square. I didn’t learn how to relate emotionally from him. If I had a problem with my friends or got my feelings hurt, I talked to my Mom. But I did want to be better at that stuff than he was for my daughter, and that might have been the most valuable lesson he taught me.
As I got older, I started relating to him on a different level. He was surprised, but he rolled with it, to his credit. Old dogs can learn, in their own way, on their own time.
So in your mind, try to replace the guy with the tanks and the stoop with the tall, farmer tanned guy in the floppy yellow hat and beard. Thank you all for coming.
