Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Monday, April 28, 2008 Shopping for the Apocalypse Trash sent me to the wholesaler near my office the other day to "stock up on staples." First of all, let me tell you about this wholesale outlet. It's highly convenient to my workplace -- almost literally next door, although the fact that we're talking about multi-acre property lots makes walking there a nonstarter. However, it sits at the top of a hill, which means that as soon as you get out of your car you're lashed by frozen winds that have arrived unobstructed from the Arctic Circle. Even in July. The kind of wind that makes you stump along the pavement, stoop-shouldered, with your hood up whether you're wearing one or not, hissing to yourself, "We hates it, preciouss, yes we does." Also, it was raining uphill. But once inside, I had a mission. Trash has gotten word that food prices will be going up sharply in the near future, so I was instructed to prepare. "Am I shopping for a recession or for a nuclear holocaust?" I asked, seeking clarification. Trash didn't know what that meant, but when she asked me to just get non-perishables, I took her at her word and assumed that I was to prepare for a scenario in which we had no utilities and were besieged by CHUDs. So I stalked the non-refrigerated food aisles, loading up my cart with large quantities of anything austere that we can store indefinitely in our basement (the garage is out, thanks to that little fucker Squirrel Goodnut). A giant box of crackers. Cans of tuna by the dozen (albacore, naturally; the end of the world is no excuse to bail on the dolphins). Canned soup by the dozen. A brace of giant peanut butter jugs. A 25-pound bag of rice, to go with the other one. Enough spaghetti to line up the noodles halfway to Venus. Beef jerky, which we never buy except at gas stations during road trips. Even -- shudder -- canned turkey. Which, if we ever actually eat it, we'll know we are very hungry. I also considered getting some bulk cat food for Phantom and Exie, but they need a certain kind and we'll need them to be healthy when disaster strikes. Otherwise they won't be very nutritious when it comes time to eat them. I'm kidding, obviously, but it's kind of weird, the mindset you get into when shopping for stuff like this. You imagine the circumstances under which you'll actually be eating this crap, and the next thing you know you want to go up to the people browsing the plasma TVs, grab them by the shoulders, and scream into their faces, "Don't you see? It doesn't matter! We're all going to DIIIIIIEEEEE!" That didn't keep me from refraining from buying the bulk brand-name cereal , of course. The off-brand stuff in the giant bags at the regular grocery store is probably still cheaper on a per-ounce basis, and I still have time to comparison-shop before the thousand years of darkness descend upon the land. But after spending less than two hundred dollars, I felt pretty good about the stash of goods I had accumulated. I look forward to a romantic evening of cooking it on the camp stove by the fading illumination of a four-cell Maglite. Now when the desperate, gun-toting gangs of marauders come knocking, I'll have something to hand over to them. Plus it put the return trek across the parking lot into a little perspective. For about ten seconds, that is, and then I was just cold and pissed. Stupid CHUDs. posted by M. Giant 4:02 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:I think about that same apocalyptic crap whenever I shop at S@m's Club, plus I worry about whether my 3-year-old could get into the food if her father and I were killed and she were left to fend for herself (one too many news stories about toddlers who survived the massacre of their family and then had to live on ketchup). Then once I'm home there's the dilemma of whether to store those food items on the bottom shelves, where she can reach them in case I'm dead, or on the top shelf so she doesn't tear into it and eat herself into a food coma while I'm still alive.
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CHUDs! Walking in Soho hasn't been the same since I rewatched that movie a few months ago.
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Am I the only one who, upon reading the first line of this entry thought, "gee, I wonder why they need so many staples? Are they putting a lot of fliers together or something?"
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Hey, I was just writing about planning for the impending apocalypse the other day! I'm not yet at the stock-up-on-food-women-and-children-first
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No, Shawna, not just you. I was wondering why anyone needed to go to a warehouse to get staples. Dude, each small box has thousands of the things!
By I may be wrong, but the word "staples" gave me the impression of foodstuffs that are nessisary for living.
By Thursday, April 24, 2008 Cars and Questions After several hundred viewings of Cars, I thought I'd come up with all the questions that could be asked about it. But this post from Monty made me realize I was wrong. Thanks Monty, for giving me an excuse to write about an untimely subject that's been kicking around in my head for the last year. Now I can share my other questions: How much experimentation and screen testing did Pixar do with the cars' windshield-based eyes, in terms of distance apart and size, to arrive at the coefficient value of both guaranteed to provide maximum cuteness? I bet it was a lot. Somewhere in Emeryville there's a Mac whose trash folder is stuffed with discarded versions of Lightning McQueen looking like everyone from South Park characters to Brandy. Why do the cars all have side and back windows if they can only see out their windshields? And how fucking terrifying would it be if they had a 360-degree field of vision like you do in a real car? Remember that moment in the big tiebreaker race where McQueen catches up to Chick Hicks in reverse using his new mirrors? It would have been a completely different movie if we saw two humongous blue irises peering through the back window while his windshield went zombie-white. I'm just saying. What's inside a Cars car? Seats and a dashboard and a steering wheel? Or gooey, squinchy brains and guts, like the interior of a new-school Cylon Raider? Unfortunately, Sarge the army jeep keeps his canvas roof buttoned up tight so we never find out. And it's not like there are any motorcycles zooming around. Also, the bit where Minnie and Van lock their doors is funny, until you think about the fact that it means that up to this point in the movie, they've been driving around in a state that will allow any old vehicle to roll up to them, open a passenger door, and spill their prefrontal lobes and hypothalami right out onto the pavement. Of course, opening that door would require opposable thumbs, which of course none of the cars have. We've always been told that opposable thumbs are what allowed our species to rise from the primordial slime and ultimately build our towering civilization. But apparently prehensile tires and windshield wipers would have worked just as well. Early on, McQueen is disgusted to be passed on the highway by a van with a mattress tied to its roof. Okay, by this time we've already established that this in a parallel universe with no humans in it, so who the fuck's going to be sleeping on that mattress, anyway? The cars of Cars inhabit a world where representations of car parts are everywhere. McQueen competes for the Piston Cup, a trophy shaped like a car's piston. Radiator Springs is in Ornament Valley, an area marked by giant rock formations shaped like hood ornaments and radiator caps. Sally dreams of reopening the Wheel Well Hotel, a classy overnight spot for cars with a façade shaped like, obviously, a wheel well. It's all cool to us, but if you were a car, wouldn't you find this a little macabre? Jeff Gordon doesn't race for the Aorta Cup. A valley full of rock formations shaped like giant noses would creep everyone out, with or without a town nestled among them called Sweat Gland Springs. And can you imagine a high-end hotel calling itself the Shoulder Joint, let alone going out of its way to look like one? Finally, where do new cars come from in this universe? Mack uses the quasi-religious expression "Thank the manufacturer" at one point, which suggests some kind of celestial assembly line. But then there's a shot of two little baby cars at the big race, which implies sexual reproduction (as does McQueen's attraction to Sally). At least they're late-model cars; otherwise I'd have to call bullshit on the whole enterprise. But then many of the other characters are late-model cars as well. McQueen, for instance, can't be more than a few years old, which fits with his level of emotional maturity but not his successful career as a professional athlete. And I'm not even going to get into the question of how a van and a sedan like the Rusteeze guys could be brothers. I’m just hoping Cars 2 answers some of these questions. And yes, I know, I'm sure a lot of this is addressed in the DVD commentary, but M. Small hates those. "Turn off the talking!" he demands, and it's not like I'm going to sit through this movie again without him. posted by M. Giant 8:00 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:
OMG that's too funny, and next time Liam watches it, I'm going to be all freaked out by wondering what is inside the cars!
By As the mother of a Cars-obsessed son, I have had many of these same questions. I think we've watched it a few too many times.
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Hey, M.Giant! I finally got my Blogger issues addressed.
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Having JUST returned from Disney where they have BOTH Lightening McQueen AND Mater ... I can assure you that inside the vehicles they have ... Ah ... I forgot to look?
By Oh thank god. I thought a lot of these same things. The movie really annoys me. I think I am going to have to put cars on hiatus for a while. My son has watched it so many times that he spouts out chunks of dialogue while playing. Yesterday it was, "I don't need a map, I've got GPS" from Minnie and Van. Urgghh! Also, when it's on, he doesn't even watch it anymore, he just talks along with it and plays with his cars. Its too much.
By I read somewhere that the animators had difficulty with the cars, because they had to project emotional expressions with mostly the face.
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I'm not sure they can only see out their windshields, because then how would they use the rearview mirrors?
By Monday, April 21, 2008 Closing Night M. Small's last show was this evening. One of the things that has always amazed us about M. Small's day care is that the day care lady periodically helps the kids put on "shows," right there in her living room. Since the oldest member of any given cast is never more than four years old and change, you can imagine that they tend to be rather chaotic affairs. M. Small's first performance was when he was about six months old, and his "part" in the day care Easter show was to sit in his Excersaucer and stare around gormlessly while the other kids sort of sang a few songs and the day care lady put different hats on him. As he's gotten older, the demands placed on him by the scripts of these shows have grown appropriately more complex. Soon he was expected to stand up on his own, and then even join in on the singing. Eventually Trash and I started being able to figure out what songs would be in the show based on what M. Small was singing around the house in the weeks leading up to them. But that never stopped us from being amazed by the elaborate costumes she comes up with. For the last Christmas show, she literally had him dressed up like an excavator. The problem is that for the last few shows, things haven't gone all that well. The kids rehearse for weeks or months, the DCL slaves away at the costumes, and then, come the evening that all the grandparents and parents are packed into the living room on toddler chairs, one of the kids starts freaking out and the spooked vibe spreads among the kids like panic through a herd of cattle, and the next thing you know, everyone's crying and frustrated and the show's over. Alas, for a couple of times there, the kid who freaked out was ours. I've got a couple of videos where I'm panning back and forth between the actual show and a wailing M. Small trying to climb into his mom's lap. This show actually got all the way to the end, however. In addition to M. Small, the DCL is also responsible for K, a four-year-old girl; J, a three-year-old a few months younger than M. Small, and Baby-O, a baby. So putting together a performance of The Wizard of Oz required some creative casting. I wish I could figure out how to put up video, because what I shot was nothing less than a sweded version of the 1939 classic. K. opened with a truncated solo of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." DCL dropped a toy house on a witch doll. Baby O was rolled out in M. Small's old Excersaucer, Glinda the Good Witch recast as a crippled Bond villain waving a homemade wand around while DCL recited her lines for her. K. walked around some yellow blocks arranged on the floor. J. came out and with much coaching, managed to sort of say "I wish I had a brain. Mommy it's raining!" before K. took the stick representing his pole off his back. M. Small came out, not crying but grinning shyly, sporting a silver snowsuit and an aluminum hat. He was supposed to say, "Oil…can" through frozen lips, but instead he came over and quietly hugged me in an egregious violation of both the fourth wall and his character's alleged lack of a heart, not that I'm complaining about either one. Things kind of got a little confused after that -- the toy witch was pulled out again and then hidden away with a plaintive "I'm melting!," M. Small and J. were presented with symbolic pins (as was the stuffed toy playing the part of the lion), K. wobbled her feet, and there was no place like home. I'm glad that M. Small finally had a good show after all this time. Today was actually K.'s last day at this day care; she's four now, so she's moving on. That means M. Small is finally the oldest kid there. It doesn't seem so long ago that he was literally the baby of the group, and now he's two weeks away from starting Montessori. I don't think they have shows there. Anyway, like I said, I just wish I had a way to put up some video from our camcorder right now, instead of knowing that I'm either going to have to go out and buy some kind of adapter or cram that mini-casette into the floppy drive and hope for the best. I never thought I'd regret not having to record the show in fifteen-second snippets on my cell phone, but here we are. posted by M. Giant 8:30 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:Don't fret! They put on an excellent show every year for the 6 years my kid was in a Montessori school.
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Your DCL sounds pretty awesome. Being able to manage that many kids at one time is challenging enough; but working with them to put on a show periodically is amazing.
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The preschoolers at my 3-year-old's Montessori school had two songs to sing at a recent school function. Did. Not. Happen. Bad audio, plus a few kids having access to the microphone and using it to broadcast the words "butt" and "fart," which were met with hysterics. (Yes, I was probably the only parent laughing.)
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LOL! That show sounds awesome!
By Your DCL sounds just a wee bit nuts to me. But, you know, in a good way. Nuts can be a good thing when it comes to dealing with groups of very small children.
By Thought of this post after I just spent three hours last night at my child's Montessori elementary school Shakespeare Festival. First graders reading Sonnets. Second Graders doing Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet for the older crowd. Don't worry, you will have lots and lots of programs! Lots of Drama!
By Friday, April 18, 2008 School's In Friday was M. Small's first day of school. Okay, not really. He was only there for a couple of hours. And it was Montessori school, not kindergarten or grad school. But we thought it would be wise for use to make a gradual transition, to minimize the shock. Plus it might be easier on him as well. You know all the clichés about the mom walking the kid, in his Sunday best, to the bus stop or the school's front door early in the morning and having a tearful separation. Well, that wasn't exactly how it happened. While I was at work, Trash took M. Small out for breakfast, and then brought him by the Montessori school he'll be starting next month, just for a two-hour visit. "So what are you going to be doing?" I asked Trash. "Are you going to be, like, doing activities with the kids, or just sort of watching from the sidelines?" "I don't know," Trash said nervously. She figured she'd leave that up to the teachers, and to M. Small. "Well, either way, you're going to get pretty bored in two hours," I warned. And that was the last time I talked to her before she got to the school. When they arrived, Trash brought him in, where he quickly joined the circle of twelve or thirteen kids sitting on the floor and singing songs. He felt a little off-balance because they weren't songs he knew -- nothing from the Cars soundtrack or Amy Winehouse, as much as M. Small loves singing the "noooo, noooo, no" part of "Rehab." So the singing went on for a minute or so. He remained a bit shy, until he noticed a rocket picture on the wall. "Do you like rockets?" the boy next to him asked. "Oh, sure," M. Small said. "We can color pictures of rockets," the boy informed him. "Okay!" M. Small said happily. "Well, goodbye," the teacher said to Trash. "You totally got the bum's rush!" I said to Trash when she told me this from her car as she drove away, five minutes after she and M. Small had walked into the place. She told me about all the well-behaved other kids listening and doing exactly what they were told and being good, and we fretted about M. Small, with his high energy and low tolerance for structure, being a chaotic influence or having an accident or having some kind of social anxiety attack and freaking the hell out or just peeing his pants. But when Trash picked him up a couple hours later, he was fine, and happy, and looking forward to his next session. There had been a time-out imposed during his visit, but not on him. And even the staff was hoping to see him again soon. So there we are. He wasn't traumatized at all by spending two hours with strangers. It was an unqualified success. He's growing up, in other words. Shit. posted by M. Giant 9:10 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:
Reminds me of my Mom's story of my first day at school. It was also a 2 hour getting to know you session. Aparently, when she picked me up at school to take me how I started to cry and spent the entire way home crying, "Mommy please don't make me go, please let me go back, please let me go back!"
By Aww. Somehow, I'm not surprised. Congratulations on a great kid, you guys.
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First of all, having read for some years now of M. Small's social abilities, none of his responses to Montessori surprises me. That strikes me as the sort of atmosphere that was MADE for a boy such as yours.
By Wow. Yeah. How can this be happening already?
By I must say, if you're going to be heartbroken by M. Small's social facility and general awesomeness, you're going to be sad a lot. In many ways, it's really your own fault. I say buck up -- he could still become a bitter misanthrope someday. Fingers crossed!
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My son started riding the bus by himself at 2.5 (he's autistic and was in special ed preschool). It broke my heart putting my tiny little boy on that big bus, but he loved it. He didn't mind riding a strange bus to a school he had visited only a few times to hang out all afternoon with total strangers. Nope. It was all way too cool to him.
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Yeah, I had a hard time letting go when my boys started going to preschool. Up until that point, I could get a daily report from the babysitter or my husband, or whoever was taking care of them that day. And then all of a sudden, you have to rely on the kids to tell you what happened in their day at school. Four-year olds aren't the most expressive when you ask them "How was your day?" and "What did you do?" We had to get very specific in the questions we were asking them, and even then they weren't giving up much. I remeber asking my younger son who he sat next to at circle time, and he replied "Nobody." He went on to concoct a whole story about Nobody. Nobody is a boy in his class who likes to play chase at recess, etc. etc. While we loved the creative expression, we did't get any closer as to what actually went on in school that day....
By With the state of the economy, everyone's geting creative with ways to save money, so I thought i'd share a tip with you. When the long afternoon at the office is stretching out and lunch seems like a long time ago, I'm often tempted to hit the vending machine. Expensive and unhealthy, and ultimately unsatifying. So what I do instead is floss. That way, instead of a small, expensive snack, I get a whole bunch of tiny free snacks. I understand it's better for my teeth, too. The only trick is remembering not to floss right after eating so you have something to enjoy later on. I know you're so grateful for this tip that you want to kiss me, but try to refrain. posted by M. Giant 9:01 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:Yum. I am the luckiest woman on earth.
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If you REALLY want to have some productive flossing, eat something with shredded coconut earlier in the day.
By Tuesday, April 15, 2008 Lend Me an Ear Trash is pretty much deaf in her left ear, so she went to the doctor to see about fixing it. This deafness isn't one of those things that just start happening when you get to the age where warranties start expiring. She was in her mid-twenties when a previously asymptomatic ear infection caused her left drum to burst, right out of nowhere. She had a couple of surgeries at the time, but the damage was too extensive and the attempts to patch it never took. But now that she's a mom, she doesn't like not being able to hear M. Small in the middle of the night if she's sleeping on her good ear. And my congenital low-talker tendencies don't seem to be going away any time soon. Besides, it's 2008. We live in the future!. So Trash decided to go in and see if any advances have been made in the field of auropercussiplasty (a word I just made up. Who's going to stop me? It's the future!) in the last decade. She went to the top ENT specialist at our large clinic a couple of weeks ago, not really expecting anything, but taking the clinic's current motto, "It never hurts to ask," at its word. Well, apparently, the top ENT specialist at our large clinic never signed off on that motto, because she spent the entire appointment acting like Trash was wasting her time. She wouldn't even look at Trash's medical records until Trash agreed to make an appointment to get checked out for a hearing aid. Now, Trash has never been interested in a hearing aid. In addition to her not wanting to deal with what a pain in the ass they are, her left-ear deafness is most severe with low frequencies, or in the presence of wind or background noise, all circumstances under which hearing aids are notoriously unhelpful. Maybe a subwoofer implant might help, but until somebody invents one, she's kind of out of luck. Still, the specialist was calling the shots, and had already marked Trash's file "non-compliant" for the heinous crime of not going to a hearing-aid person before now, so what could Trash do but agree to go to the audiology department? She figured she'd jump through the mad doctor's hoop and get sent back so she could proceed. That audiology appointment was today at 3:30. The specialist had written 3:20 down on the reminder card, but that's a minor quibble; it's probably SOP to make "non-compliants" try to get there ten minutes early just so they'll arrive on time. The audiologist had already seen Trash before her appointment with the specialist, and was pretty surprised to see her again, especially in regard to a hearing aid exam. He even showed her the note he'd made on her file: "Not a hearing aid candidate." Trash agreed with him, but told him what I just told you: she was only here to make the specialist happy. Fortunately, the audiologist was proactive enough to tell her that insurance doesn't pay for hearing aids if you have a fully functioning ear. In fact, insurance wasn't even going to pay for the appointment she was having right now. So by this point, Trash is understandably steamed at the specialist. I mean, we could have afforded it, but is she also doing this to people who can't? And it's not like we suspect the specialist is getting kickbacks from hearing aid companies, because that's not allowed. Anyway, the nice audiologist is like, "Let's go get your copayment back," and that's what they do, and he takes the appointment off the books entirely. Thank God for the audiologist. But now what's Trash supposed to do? She can't go to any of the other ENT specialists at our clinic for a second opinion, because their boss is -- you guessed it -- the same one who blew her off to begin with. She could go out of network, but that's kind of expensive for something her gut tells her is likely to be futile anyway. So, you know, we're not in Sicko territory here, but if anyone has any suggestions for dealing with power-mad yet lazy specialists, or has read anything exciting in a recent issue of The New England Journal of Auropercussiplasty, or is aware of a technique for spontaneously growing back one's eardrum, give a holler. Just make it a loud holler, and directed to the listener's right ear. Note: Apparently the actual word for the procedure is "tympanoplasty," which is only about two-thirds as fun as my word, and the goal is to repair a hole in the eardrum. Have at it! posted by M. Giant 5:06 PM 13 comments 13 Comments:
Well, I don't enough from the ENT standpoint, but if repair is not possible for whatever reason, has anyone mentioned to her a bone conduction implant? Check it out:
By My mom had single-sided deafness for years also and was starting to have neck problems from 20+ years of always turning her head to hear out of her good ear. She just recently had the surgery to get a baha implant (http://www.umm.edu/otolaryngology/baha.htm), which picks up sound from the bad ear side and transmits it to the good ear side, so she hears everything out of the good ear, but her brain can interpret the distances (brains are good like that). Anyway, she loves it. And, although her insurance doesn't cover hearing aids, it does cover hearing devices (yeah, I don't know why there's a distinction), and this qualifies as device. If Trash is really serious about it (it does require a surgery), it might be worth looking into.
By Trash could send a nicely-worded fax to her regular doctor, copying the specialist, the hospital system the specialist works for, and her insurance company. I did this when the sonogram people seriously effed up an appointment while I was pregnant. At that appointment, I was "number five". At the next appointment (after the fax), I was "Miss Cora," and treated very, very nicely. Doctors who care do not put up with shit from doctors who don't, once they know about it.
By If you don't mind being on a waiting list for a year, and paying higher taxes, you could always move to Canada. I don't even really know what copayment means, and M.Small never has to learn either! We'd be happy to have you, and we have libraries and TV shows to write about here too so employment wouldn't be a problem. Good luck with the hearing thing, eh?
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Why can't you go to another ENT in the practice? The original ENT may not even know about it. And in fact, if this is her MO, Trash will certainly not be the first patient to switch.
By My sister is deaf in one ear from a severe ear infection when she was a baby. Last year she had surgery to patch the hole in the eardrum with a piece of her jaw muscle. She was in a lot of pain for several weeks afterward and her hearing has not improved one iota. The doctors offered to redo the surgery, but said it was even less likely to be effective than the first attempt.
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Cora said "Doctors who care do not put up with shit from doctors who don't, once they know about it," and that was exactly right.
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There is only one direction to go with this and it's what everybody hates to do. When the specialist enters the room state that you need to have a talk first. Politely lay out your concerns. Make sure your concerns are factual and not emotional. Meaning that you can state that you feel that by not reading the medical records the doc may have put Trash at risk. By not reading the reports Trash was subjected to another invasive procedure that could have increased risk.
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Just to echo. When I felt like my son's pediatrician wasn't taking my concerns seriously enough, I wrote out everything in very detailed form and faxed it to their office. They came around real quick. Maybe before getting others involved, but a step above having a conversation just with this one doctor, would be to put down on paper basically everything you just said here, and fax it to the office specifically for this doctor. Sometimes just stating facts & symptoms like these in black and white makes an enormous difference. Making it look all official with dates and references to other doctor visits also helps.
By May I suggest that you also go to ratemds.com and give an honest review. It's important that everyone know about this.
By I am also deaf in my left ear. A hearing aid will not help me, and I refuse to have invasive skill surgery for a cochlear or other aid that, in my particular case, will probably not make a difference (so I'm told). Know what I did? I've learned ASL. I've met all kinds of people who sign and get along great. True, it doesn't help hearing M.Small in the middle of the night. But if you teach him ASL, studies show that his own literacy development will move at a faster rate than through just spoken English alone. Just a thought.
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From an immediate "fix" standpoint, you all could get a baby monitor that either lights up or vibrates the bed. Deaf parents use them--and, on an aside, my dad doesn't wear his hearing aids when he sleeps, nor does any other D/deaf parent I know.
By Mayo Clinic. Is that an option for you? They have great ENTs and they're not-for-profit. Their motto is "the needs of the patient come first."
By Monday, April 14, 2008 Breaking news: it looks like they're going to be putting American Idol winners on postage stamps. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the prerequisites of being immortalized on a postage stamp the subject's...let's say, need for immortlization? Put more bluntly, I thought you had to be dead. I'm not saying that this is necessarily a deal-breaker, as far as I'm concerned. As long as Kelly Clarkson flees the country immediately, that is. posted by M. Giant 11:31 AM 6 comments 6 Comments:nah, you only have to be dead to be on moolah!
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I had the same thought last year, when a Christmas card arrived in our mailbox bearing a legal postage stamp featuring the smiling faces of our friends' two kids. I was all "EEK!" and wondering if I'd gone a bit Sixth Sense, 'til I spoke to the senders a day or two later and found out that anyone can put their mugs on a stamp if they are willing to pay for it.
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Me again - just read my comment above (somehow I can never be bothered to preview my comment, I'm all about blithely hitting "publish" without proofreading) and the phrase "licking his stamp" suddenly struck me as vaguely off color, in a nudge, nudge, wink, wink sort of way. Which it wasn't intended to be, I swear. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who would be willing to, ahem, lick his stamp but I am definitely not one of them. (Which isn't to say that I haven't paid $.99 for a couple of his songs for my iPod...)
By I think it's because these aren't real stamps. I mean, okay, you can put them on an envelope and get your letter to the place, but these are through some novelty website, not through the USPS. USPS stamps demand death.
By Oh yes, anyone can be on a stamp. I know that becasue my parents gave me a set of stamps with my own picture on them. Now really, who would send out mail with their own picture on a stamp. I use them only to pay bills and then I feel I have to drop them in a mailbox at work so my local mail deliverer doesn't think I'm a raging egomaniac.
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Who could forget these vanity stamps?
By Saturday, April 12, 2008 Rocketeer I think I'm unofficially a fully qualified skydiver after today. Yesterday, Trash took M. Small to the hobby store and let him pick out a couple of toy rockets. One of them is an inflatable Saturn V, the kind of thing a nerd might win at the State Fair for his online girlfriend. The other was an actual Estes® model rocket, the kind with a pop-out nose cone and little plastic parachute and a space for a little cylindrical rocket "engine," which is actually little more than a thick cardboard tube filled with solid propellant. You ignite the contents of one of those things and it sends the model rocket into the air with a hiss instead of a roar, but you wouldn't want to mistake one for a cigar. I didn't even know they made these any more, but here's my three-year-old, playing with something I don't think I've seen since the early eighties, during that brief lacuna between the Atari 2600 and the Apple IIe. I was never into model rockets that much myself; my entire collection consisted of the tiniest, cheapest rocket you could buy, which was a clear plastic tube barely larger than an engine, topped by a balsa wood nose cone. Model rockets have different kinds of "recovery systems." M. Small's, as mentioned before, has a "parachute" system. Smaller, lighter rockets simply have a "streamer" system. Mine had a "you paid ninety-seven cents for this piece of shit, so consider it your money's worth if it doesn't self-immolate on the launch pad" system. I don't think that thing ever left my room, let alone the ground. But I knew kids who were way into them. Everyone did. Back then, every time some classmate's junior high brother and their dad showed up in the field behind the grade school with a launcher and a fleet of high-velocity toys, the whole class had to troop out to the field and watch them zoom straight up into the air for a half hour. It's kind of cool, for the first couple of launches. Fortunately, misfires were fairly common, and useful for breaking up the monotony. I don't think M. Small realizes that it's possible to rig his new toy up with an Estes® engine, a few bits of Estes® brand wadding, set it up on an approved Estes® launcher system complete with Estes® blast deflector, and send it dozens of feet into the air above the park. He did, however, realize that the nose cone came off, and expected us to keep putting it back in. I duct-taped it on for a while last night, but he quickly got bored with that and took the tape right back off again. And then today, he found the parachute, and wanted me to attach that to the little rubber band that connects the nose cone to the fuselage (the "snock cord," according to the instructions, and how was I not previously aware of that gaping hole in my vocabulary before today?). So I obligingly looped the chute's "shroud lines" (there's another one) around the snock cord; "spiked" (that's three), folded, and rolled the chute as described in the documentation; and packed it into the fuselage. Whereupon M. Small would pull it out again and ask me to pack it in again. Repeat until one's long-forgotten interest in model rocketry returns with a vengeance, at least to the extent that it makes one want to jerry-rig a multi-stage system that'll send the damn thing into the asteroid belt. By the end of the day, that parachute had been deployed by him and repacked by me so many times that I feel ready to go up into a plane and jump out of it alone, strapped to a chute that I packed myself. It's win-win, really. Either my skills transfer and I accomplish something amazing, or they don't and I never have to pack that damn toy parachute again. posted by M. Giant 9:15 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, April 09, 2008 Parking Today was a big day for M. Small. It was the first time he's gotten to go to the park in our neighborhood for almost six months. We couldn't make it before then due to various scheduling conflicts and also the fact that the park has been buried under a foot of snow for most of that time. Things have changed since the last time we were there. We don't have to hover as much, even in the section of the park with the bigger equipment and the bigger kids (not that there were any said kids there this evening). He can climb a lot higher by himself. He decided to dig to China ("tell them ni hao when you get there," I said) and didn't give up after three minutes (it was more like ten, and I hope nobody breaks an ankle in the shaft he sunk). The community center has these semicircular and circular openings in the outside brick walls, and he's big enough to climb into them by himself now:  But the biggest difference was something entirely different. I don't know how many poopy diapers we've changed on those splintery park benches (we generally avoid using the picnic tables, at least the eating surface), but today he wasn't wearing one. And when he heard nature's call, he relayed the message to us. Marvelous! Yes, he's been potty-trained for months, but he's never been potty-trained at the park before. Behold the novelty. I dashed with him over to the community center's exterior bathroom door. Locked. Well, perhaps this wasn't going to be the momentous occasion I thought, or at least not in the way I'd been hoping. Fortunately, the community center was open and we could get into the inside bathroom. We made it in time, and I even managed to put toilet paper on the horseshoe seat before helping him up on it. He asked why I did that, and in explaining, I took the first step in instilling in him an irrational neurosis that has sustained me in public bathrooms for decades. I'm not the only one that does that, right? Oh, and I refuse to learn how to "hover." Refuse. posted by M. Giant 7:47 PM 14 comments 14 Comments:
The only one who does that? Please! Tell me that you do at least a double layer...
By But do you flush with your foot so you don't have to touch that nasty handle?
By I always flush with my foot, but sometimes it's a high reach, especially in heels. Then I have to wonder just how traumatized I would be if I toppled over and fell on the filthy floor, instead of just having to wash my hand after touching the handle....
By Oh, Nancy, I once had a friend who was flushing with her foot...and her sandal fell INTO the toliet. Unflushed. That was quite a moment for her.
By
Y'all realize your kitchen sink, and maybe even your computer keyboard, harbors a wider range of more deadly bacteria, right?
By Just want to say thanks for not letting him just pee on the nearest tree like a lot of little boys do. I understand there is an occasional desperate need for a newly potty-trained child to pee in the great outdoors, but not as a general rule of life. Maybe this is because I have a daughter so it's a little more tricky to just use a tree. I have to always run around a look for a bathroom so I think the parents of little boys should have to do the same thing. Maybe it's the penis envy talking, but I do appreciate a boy who uses a toilet, not a tree.
By
@ febrifuge: Yeah, I get that. I watched the Mythbusters ep on the topic, even.
By On the other hand, hovering does give those thigh muscles a good workout....
By I never knew that was called "hovering;" I thought it was just something all moms taught their daughters to do. Like always wearing a bra and staying away from guys who call themselves "Spike."
By
Okay, you know what? I'm a girl and a biologist to boot and I HATE ALL YOU HOVERING HO-BAGS! Why? Because, to a man (woman), your aim BLOWS GOATS. So now, instead of having a hard plastic thing to sit on that, by virtue of being hard plastic and room temperature, has practically NOTHING (and certainly nothing you probably haven't been exposed to by eating, or worse, RUBBING YOUR EYES during the day) I have to pee hovering over a hard plastic seat SOAKED IN YOUR MOIST, GERMY URINE. Which DOES harbor gross things. Gah. Annoyance. Just suck it up and sit, you weenies.
By
Adrienne, if you're a biologist, you should know that urine is sterile unless you have a urinary tract infection. (I hope you can tell I'm teasing you and not trying to be snippy.) It's not the germs in urine that gross me out to sit in it, it's the fact that it's a biological waste product and sitting in it is just plain nasty to contemplate.
By
Ahh, but urine is only sterile so long as there is no UTI and the urine is still inside the bladder. There are the e. coli, the staph. aureus and whatnot resident on the, ahem, outside of the urinary tract in men and women, on the way out. And then there's whatever might be floating around in the air.
By Also, aside from hovering being neurotic and messy, it also makes you more suseptible to UTIs. Something about how clenching your muscles prevents your bladder from emptying all the way. So, for your health and well as for the sake of the next person in the stall, please just sit down.
By I'm glad you all explained yourselves. I was still reading "hover" the way M.Giant used it at the start of the post, as in "helicopter parent," and I wondered why he so vehemently refused to do it. I am enlightened.
By Sunday, April 06, 2008 Two weeks ago, on Easter, a cousin of mine on my mom's side went to the doctor with a severe headache. This afternoon he was taken off life support. It was cancer, in his brain and elsewhere. I can't even say "long story short," because it's not that long of a story to begin with. I don't get this. I don't get how this happens to a seemingly healthy 46-year-old man, a husband and father of two sons ages 16 and 22 with no risk factors that I know of. I've known people who've died in sudden accidents, and people who have succumbed to long illnesses (including a third-grade classmate), and a kid in my high school who pulled his parents' car into the garage late one spring and left the engine running. Those were all hard, obviously, but I'm having trouble getting my mind around this one. I've always thought of death coming in two forms: slow, and sudden. Sudden, you don't have time to be concerned about anything. It happens, and you're done. Excused from the table, and don't worry about the dishes. Whereas over the long term, you might have months or years to get stuff taken care of. This in-between area where my cousin fell is one I've never given much thought to until now. His dad, my uncle, told my mom that my cousing didn't suffer and he was at peace, and I hope that's true. You should have seen that guy tell a story, though. I remember one family gathering many years ago in particular at my aunt's house, with him and his older brother holding court in the kitchen. My mom comes from a big family, so there were enough aunts, uncles, and cousins that the huge room was packed. These are not quiet people, but my cousins had that room in the palm of their hands. I'd love to have that kind of storytelling ability. I don't even think I'm going to be able to make it to the funeral. He lived in the far corner of Kansas, so far that I could drive to Kansas City from here and still be less than halfway there. It's roughly equidistant from Wichita and Amarillo, so flying to either city would be an imperfect solution. And with work the way it is right now, if the service happens during the week it's all moot anyway. So I don't know. I don't have a point or a punchline or anything snappy to leave you with here. I’m just sad and a little freaked out. You'd think that after recapping the last season of Six Feet Under I'd be used to the idea of death being capricious and unpredictable, but it was also my job to be glib about that. Not feeling so glib right now. If you could just send good thoughts and prayers to the family of Russell Call, I'd appreciate it. That's pretty much what I'm doing. posted by M. Giant 9:09 PM 12 comments 12 Comments:Sorry to hear this news. The whole family will be in my prayers.
By
So sorry to hear your news. He and his family will be in my prayers.
By
I'm so sorry to hear this. You're right; this is the kind of situation that freaks me out the most.
By I'm so sorry. You and all of Russell's friends and relatives are in my prayers. May Russell's name be a blessing.
By
I'm so sorry for your loss.
By
I'm so sorry about your cousin's death. Certain types of brain tumors can be incredibly aggressive, but they're rare enough that most people don't know someone who's died of one. Consulting a doctor about severe new headaches is always a good idea, but it doesn't sound like earlier diagnosis would have made much difference. Life is never more horribly unfair than when it comes to cancer.
By I'm so sorry for your loss, M. Giant. Your family is in my thoughts.
By So sorry to hear this. Very scary. Very sad.
By
// If you could just send good thoughts and prayers to the family of Russell Call, I'd appreciate it. //
By Thoughts and prayers for all of you are on the way. So very very sorry for your loss.
By
I'm so sorry about the loss of your cousin, M. Giant. Your family and Russell's will be in my thoughts.
By I'm so sorry for your loss. Keeping everyone in my thoughts & prayers. - JeniMull
By Thursday, April 03, 2008 We Come In Peace M. Small's in one of his phases. These phases of his are always unpredictable, always near-monomaniacal in nature, and almost always have their genesis in some point months before. For instance, he had almost no interest in Cars the first time we popped it in the player the November before last, but when he happened to spot Lightning McQueen in the opening Oscar montage the following February he had to start watching the movie rightnow. And there's been no going back, as you can see by his bedroom, wardrobe, and toy collection. I've considered conducting a Lightning McQueen census in the house, but it's just too daunting. It's been similar recently, with his interest in aliens. I can trace this one pretty comprehensively. When we saw "Lifted" (a Pixar short about a botched alien abduction) in the theater before Ratatouille last summer, he had no unearthly idea what was going on (let alone why his dad was laughing like a loon). But then the DVD came out, and he insisted on watching "Rocket," as he called it, several times in a row and quizzing us about it until it made some kind of sense to him. At some point, he made the connection between those aliens and the ones on the framed animation cel we bought years ago in New Mexico, now hanging on our bedroom wall. And that's just been fermenting in his head for months, apparently. The process has been kickstarted by watching every Wall-E trailer we can download for him, but I think the coup de grace came earlier this week. He gets a magazine called National Geographic: Kids. When my sisters and I were young we got an earlier incarnation of this called National Geographic World that looked like an actual magazine for humans instead of a Chuck E. Cheese brochure and had articles instead of photo spreads and engaged in zero shilling of the latest kids' movies and did not need to get off of my lawn in any way. But the other day I reached for his latest NG:K because he wanted me to read him something during dinner and I didn't feel like getting up for a book and what should be on page 24 but a substance-free article about what may or may not be going on near Nevada's Nellis AFB, a.k.a. Groom Lake, a.k.a. Area 51. World would have filled that space with one-third of a substantive and thought-provoking piece about New Zealand's endangered kakapo and told you to like it, but all of World's editors are dead now so there you go. So I'm fairly sure that until now, M. Small understood that aliens are mostly pretend, at least in the way that most of us encounter them in our day-to-day lives. But now, having seen actual, literal, dead-tree proof of their existence in the form of a crappy composite illustration of flying saucers saucing* around over I-15, he's decided that aliens are real and are coming to our house. Like, today or tomorrow. He's really looking forward to their visit, too, and has outlined the formal itinerary for us in great detail, complete with fully vetted first-contact protocols. We will all shake hands, and there will be kisses and squeezes, and we will give the aliens crackers (here's hoping they don't hail from the planet Zesta). Then he'll get to see the inside of the flying saucer and possibly even drive it, being very careful not to press the "Crash" button, at least not while over our house. And then we'll all play with blocks and have juice. The details vary from one recitation to the next, but the general outline remains the same. My favorite part is the refreshing exclusion from the proceedings of NASA, Homeland Security, MiB, the CDC, the INS, MUFON, and armed forces of any kind. It's hard to say how much of this phase of his is a result of feeling cheated at not actually getting to hang out with Santa and the Easter Bunny during their recent visits, and how much is an outgrowth from how much he's been learning about NASA in day care lately. Which is a lot. The other day he educated Trash and me about rocket stages and Gemini capsules and boosters and external fuel tanks and how fuel mixtures are "combined under pressure and SPLFFSHSHHH!." Trash, however, is pretty sure she knows who to blame: me. But how do you tell a three-year-old there are no aliens? Especially when you're not a hundred percent sure yourself? I am, however, ninety-nine point nine bar percent sure they're not coming to our house. * His verb, not mine. posted by M. Giant 8:15 PM 11 comments 11 Comments:Of course flying saucers would be "saucing" around. That's why they're called saucers. The small one chooses his verbs quite rationally.
By
Sometimes I love how your life and mine are the same. Of course you have to substitute tornadoes for snow and ponies for aliens, but still.
By
How much worse would the obsession get if you let him watch ET and he saw how an earlier group of Earth Kids hung out with an alien?
By Re: Lightning McQueen census: I am sitting in our bedroom (NOT the kids', NOT the playroom) and can see three McQueens and one Mr. The King. If I were to list all the racetracks--miniature and giant, books, pictures, stickers, coloring books... I think we have personally financed Wall-E. Bet we won't get royalties, though.
By When will he be old enough to watch "Apollo 13" with? 'Cuz I want a piece of that action. I plan to build a kick-ass home theater almost for that film alone.
By
We too have made the same transition, in honor of my love of NG World, I bought NG Kids for my boys. And yes, it is NOTHING in comparison. My sister and I would race to the mailbox to see who could figure out the 9 clooooose up photos on the last page. And I TOO remember the article on the fake Japanese food. I was around 10, and we were going to Hawaii, and I insisted we do a tour of all the "fake food windows" thanks to NG World.
By
I totally remember NG World. Although, I remember it from Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego being sung by Rockapella (the greatest acapella singing group PBS ever saw) and shilled by Lyn Thigpen (RIP).
By
Do you think he would like the book 'Aliens love Underpants'? I think he might!
By
He is so smart! but WHAT THE HELL KIND OF DAY CARE teaches kids about COMBINING FUEL MIXTURES UNDER PRESSURE?
By
One, I absolutely love how M. Small so logically sorts out our language. Flying saucers will also sauce around in my lexicon, evermore.
By
Man in the Moon (Simon Bartram) would be a good book for M. Small, I think. Bob works on the moon. Every morning he bicycles to his rocket, and goes to the moon.
By 
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