Anniversary Dinner

We'd always wanted to try out Charley's Crab House which sits downtown on the river's edge, but a quick check of the on-line reviews revealed that the quality has gone down over the past year or so. In fact, rumor has it that the manager left, and he took some of the best employees with him, to start another little seafood restaurant called "Leo's".

So we went to Leo's instead.

The seafood was wonderful. We started out with some interesting appetizers, one of which was escargot (tee hee!); then Cheryl had some yummy whitefish & crab, while I just had to go for the King Salmon. For dessert, it was chocolate for Cheryl, and raspberries & ice cream for me.

Oh, my tummy hurt when we were done!

Afterward, we took a walk to work off some of the food, and wandered into a downtown dance party, ranging from Big Band to 50's classics to Jazz standards to Michael Jackson's Thriller to Pink. We were far too stuffed to dance, but we enjoyed watching all the high school and college folks getting their exercise.

Then we meandered down by the river, enjoying the sound of the rapids, before heading back home to see if the house was still standing.

(It was.)

Down but not Defeated ... Yet

Sorry for the delay. My laptop decided to accept the latest Microsoft Vista upgrade, and never recovered.

All restorative efforts failed.

Work is currently underway to move up to the Windows 7 Release Candidate, although preliminary results were not favorable (3 crashes in 1 day so far). I'm also putting in an Ubuntu (Linux) dual-boot capability.

Pictures to follow. Soon.

Seventeen Years On

In a little over a week, we will have been married for seventeen years. We've been here in Michigan for five of those seventeen years, hard as it is to believe. Five years of snow, growing kids, serious lack of traffic, and little-town experiences.

With all the changes in our lives over the past seventeen years, it's nice to have a few solid, stable things to hang on to.

Like vacuum cleaners.

It's one of the first things a young couple buys together when they're creating a new home, something that signals a commitment to keep things together, keep it clean, keep it presentable. You don't spend serious money on something like a vacuum cleaner if you don't plan on making it last. You know you're in it for the long haul, because you know you're going to be dragging the little red plastic canister out of the closet nearly every weekend to make the place livable.

Eventually, it dies. It's plastic and metal. It wears out. It cracks. It fades. It shorts out. You replace what you can as things break, but at some point, you just say, "Enough". And head back to Sears.


Yeah, we could've gone out and bought one of those fancy two thousand dollar jobs that pull every little dust speck from underneath the floorboards - and do your taxes, too - but we're the type of people who like to reward good service with our loyalty.

Kenmore. It's served us well for nearly seventeen years. We plan on using it for another seventeen. Or twenty. Or whatever.

Happy Anniversary, old Kenmore. You done good.



Welcome to the family, new Kenmore. Live long and prosper.

Indulgence

It was forty years ago last month that Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I don't remember if I saw it or not. I was only six years old. The space missions didn't mean much to me until years later, when SkyLab was in orbit, and people were talking about how we'd be able to live and work in space in my own lifetime. Maybe even colonize the Moon. Or Mars. Or both.

We all know how far that went.

So it is with a strange sense of bittersweet obsession that I ordered a set of DVDs from Amazon, including the "From the Earth to the Moon" set, which we already own on VHS but wore out from watching so much; "The Right Stuff", which is a movie I've never actually watched from beginning to end; "In the Shadow of the Moon", which contains interviews of several of the surviving astronauts; and "Magnificent Desolation", which is the IMAX movie that came out a couple years ago and promised to give viewers an impression of what it is like to actually walk on the moon.

The space obsession thing is one of the areas of indulgence in my life. I read the books, I watch the videos, I wonder what ever happened to my dreams of being an astronaut. Oh, yeah. I found out too late that getting into aviation and avionics and computer design is not the proper method for getting into space. NASA likes to hire people with Masters or Doctorates, and I have absolutely no desire to go back to school. Can't stand tests. Lectures bore me to tears. Research papers aren't bad. But why go to all that effort and expense when one can get all this free information on the web?

When I'm finally to old to get out of my recliner, I'll still be watching my space videos. If the nice nurses in the rest home will indulge me.

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I'm a rotten parent. I let my kids play video games, even though the games have absolutely no redeeming social value. At least, it doesn't appear that they have any redeeming social value. Except that the girls like to play them together. This particular game, Territory Wars, is apparently quite fun, but I don't understand how it works. They march around in this 2-D world doing weird things, and they have characters, and these characters interact with each other, but you can also play it "off-line".

They laugh a lot, though. They don't take it too seriously, and it doesn't stop them from going back upstairs when they're done and playing other non-computer games together.

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I had a free hour tonight, so figured to get some shelves hung in the garage. Simple plan. Take an 8-foot 2x4 and cut it into two equal parts using my favorite saw, then attach the boards onto the wall of the garage so as to have something to hang the shelf brackets on. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention and grabbed a short board first, so instead of ending up with two 48" boards, I had one 48" board and one 32" board. Which wasn't in the plan. So I had to go grab another board. Luckily, I found a 64" board that could be trimmed to 48" instead of using up another 96" board (hey! these things are going for $2.35 per board around here!).

The toughest part is always getting the board leveled up while attaching it to the wall. I pre-drill the holes and put the screws in half-way, then put the board up against the wall with the level sitting on top, holding it as best I can, then tighten down two of the screws on either end of the board. Mounted both the boards to be the same position as the shelving that already existed, then put the brackets on and leveled those out as well. Got the boards laid up, then Cheryl started stacking some of the extra boxes and things so we could make a bit more room for the cars and bikes.

Maybe tomorrow I'll find the time to put up some more.

Gourmet Dinner

Cheryl found a recipe for a gourmet dinner which we just had to try. Fancy eggs on toast, with ricotta cheese topping. Delicious! The kids loved it. I was sad because there was nothing left for my lunch the next day.

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As part of the Summer Education Experience, the kids went to the Gardens armed with their sketch pads and cameras, ready to capture the views either on paper or on digital flash.

I was able to join them for lunch, just long enough to eat and snap a couple photos of my own.

Aren't they cute?

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The boys and I are doing a little handyman education this summer. We don't spend an incredible amount of time each night working on it. I've found that keeping our sessions short keeps their interest sparked and avoids the parental frustration of teen-aged attention deficit disorder.

I had tossed this workbench together a couple years ago, just to have a place to stack things on (and under) in the garage. It was mainly composed of scrap 2x4s, with some leftover 1x4 whose original purpose is long forgotten.

Their first task was to take the workbench apart and then re-assemble it. I gave them a quick talk about how to mark the wood so they could remember how it is supposed to be put back together, then let 'em at it. They did OK for a first time. Only got two boards out of place.

Then it was time for a little critical thinking. Literally. I asked them to analyze the workbench and figure out what was wrong with it. How could it be improved. How it rated insofar as stability and usefulness is concerned.

And they sketched up some improvements.

Interesting ideas. Cross-pieces for stabilization. Wheels for mobility. Pull-out drawers for usefulness. Looks good to me! So the rest of the project is going to be incorporating their ideas.

First up was a bit of stabilization. I'd slapped 2x4s on the sides near the bottom to keep the legs from folding up under pressure. But connecting the cross-pieces to those braces wasn't going to be easy, considering they were mounted sideways, with the 1.5-inch edge up. It would be necessary to switch the bracing so that the 4-inch side was facing up.

So the boys took a scrap 2x4 and trimmed it to size, then screwed it into place. Looks great!

Had a little bit of trouble on the backside, since the drill kept bumping into the rear board. But Adam persevered.

That was all we had time for tonight. Tomorrow we'll cut the cross-pieces and see how stable it becomes.

Driving Me Crazy

We took Adam out this evening after dinner for a bit of driving practice. He starts Driver Education next week.

It's odd sitting in the passenger seat while he drives. There's no sense of panic or impending doom, just a slight bit of irritation when he accidentally hits the accelerator instead of the brake, or pulls his turns a bit wide. But we don't make a big deal about it.

(Naturally, we're practicing in a big, empty parking lot.)

Back in Virginia, Driver Education was part of the school curriculum, and it was one of our regularly scheduled classes. This is not the case out in Michigan, where most kids go to a driving school. Personally, I prefer it as part of the high school experience. As an extracurricular activity, there is no guarantee that your friends won't be there to share the experience. In school, you know as a matter of fact that your best friends will be making fun of your bad driving mistakes all year long.

Especially if you happen to crunch a few cones.

I don't remember much of Driver Ed, other than the trailers where they had the driving simulators. Instead of desks, we sat in two columns of fake cars and "drove" while watching projected scenes of a front windshield. We were judged on our ability to turn the wheel or press the brake at the appropriate time to avoid crashing into something. Totally crude by today's computerized standards, but very awesome in 1979.

My parents took me out driving, too. I especially remember being out with Mom, marvelling at how calm she was in the face of my admittedly "risky" driving habits. She was either keeping her eyes closed, or practicing an intense type of meditation which kept her blood pressure low and even.

I'm trying to do the same with Adam, letting him pick up the skills by practicing at his own pace, and letting him have the room to make a few mistakes now and then. The worst part is trying to keep from blasting him with lots of advice all at once, which completely overloads the brain circuits. Brakes - steering - accelerator - mirrors - rules of the road: it's hard to keep everything straight at the beginning. But he'll get it eventually. And it might even help him handle the multi-tasking he's going to need later on.

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Cheryl got me this really cool wheeled scrap-booking luggage case to hold all my Sunday School supplies. Now I have a place to put all my crayons, colored pencils, notebooks, paper, glue, and idea books! And it's so much easier to carry!

So for our first 'case' project, I picked out a nice little pop-up card for the kids to make, based on Matthew 17:1-13 (The Transfiguration).



(This is Mary's.)

This is the kind of life I'd really like - laying about the furniture, shedding fur everywhere I go, coughing up hairballs, having a staff of caretakers to tend to my every whim. Life would be wonderful as a cat!



Except for the short life span, the inability to grasp things (due to those missing opposable thumbs), trips to the veterinarian, barking dogs next door, and occasional fleas.

And the food really doesn't look that appetizing. There's the wet stuff out of a can, which looks like nothing more than tunafish. And the dry stuff, which looks like little brown pellets of sawdust. And there's no opportunity to drink sodas or eat ice cream (although there is an occasional bowl of milk from someone's breakfast).

And we won't go into the details of the "bathroom" arrangements.



But there's something about spending the afternoon on the back deck in the bright sunlight, looking out over the backyard and watching the birds and squirrels scampering on the bird-feeders, knowing at any moment a fun little game of Big Game Hunter could commence, that makes it all worthwhile.

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James is heading off to music camp in a week or so, and since he is going to be learning how to play the bass guitar, it seemed appropriate to purchase one. So he and Dad trooped down to the store the other night and bought a bass starter kit (basic guitar and amp).

While they were there, they also purchased the rest of the items necessary to complete the drum kit. Then James' friend, Nathan, came over and helped set it up.



So now we have all the stuff we need to have our first garage band - rhythm, lead and bass guitar, plus drumkit!

Now we just need some kids who are willing to sing...

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Meanwhile, in the girls' room ...



Mary has lots of nice posters over her bed: kitties and fairies and ponies and mermaids, the kinds of things that are cute and safe and warm and fuzzy.



Deborah seems to prefer landscapes which she has colored herself, and I'm hoping this phase lasts a good, long time, because she's growing up so quickly, and getting so tall now, that she will soon be entering that part of her life where the boy-obsession gene kicks in, and her wall might end up covered over with glamor shots of all the young teen heartthrobs. In that case, we're going to have to move her into a padded cell so as to avoid infecting her sister.