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  • Toddler Teleology

    Okay, as I keep trying to tell you, I’m a smart guy, right? And what’s more, I appear to have signed some kind of contract before birth so that, just like Sherlock Holmes, I would agree to be abysmally stupid in some things (I cannot find my way out of a paper bag), in order to be good at others (I remember almost everything I learned in middle-school science classes.) How’s that for a tradeoff? WHICH WAY TO THE MALL AGAIN.

    One of the things that I had been looking forward to is that, when I had a kid, and they pestered me with lots of questions, I would actually be able to answer them all. “Daddy, why’s the sky blue?” No problem — I can begin with the properties of a photon as both a wave and a particle, work up to the varying wavelengths of visible light in the electromagnetic spectrum, how we interpret those as color, and then talk about how air scatters particular wavelengths BLAH BLAH BLAH but at least I’d, you know, know it. “Daddy, what makes an air conditioner work?” “Well, young whippersnapper, let’s make a piston out of a two-liter bottle and DERIVE BOYLE’S LAW, shall we? DEAR ACADEMY: YOU MAY SEND THE FATHER OF THE YEAR AWARD TO THE FOLLOWING ADDRESS.

    Arrogant, smug fool. My child has absolutely no intention of asking questions like that. All the preparation I had done in middle school science (and later, as a schoolteacher, albeit one on movie sets) was to be able to answer cosmological questions. And then the work I did in college and grad school was all epistemological.

    My daughter, clever little minx, is blinding me with teleology:

    • “Daddy, why is Freddy the Frog a toy?”
    • “Daddy, why the Farmer in the Dell?”
    • “Daddy, why is not a shoe?”

    Now, you can try to make a kids’ explanation of Boyle’s law (“well, honey, when you squish things together, they heat up!”), but try to make an explanation of Husserl!? (“well, honey, you see, the world can be divided into the things as they actually are, the cogitatum, and the representation of that thing in our perceptions, which is itself a predicate of thought…”) (“Well, sweetie-pie, Heidegger says that we enframe the object of Freddy, understanding it as a standing-reserve of play…”) THAT IS BULLSHIT. It’s one thing to salt your dialogue with words you picked out of Continental philosophy, with extra jerk points earned for leaving them in Latin or German. It is another to actually make sense. So I finally asked her:

    “I don’t know, sweetie. Why is Freddy the Frog a toy?”
    “Because he’s not a real frog.”

    I was just philosophically OWNED by a two-year-old. Sheesh, I should have been a damn Buddhist.

  • Garden Post Two: The Diggening

    Okay, this is where the rubber meets the road: we have just 17 days until Harlan Holmes, Gardening Bodhisattva and Cruel Taskmaster, holds his first spring gardening class. By that time, we will need to have: dug some beds in the back yard. constructed a seedling rack (complete with lights), purchased a bunch of seeds (lettuce, onions, shallots, parsley, kale, and celery), and be ready with some half-flats to GROW US SOME PLANTSES.

    Actually, the “bed-digging” part isn’t crucial, but it was so warm this weekend that we got inspired. So I rented a tiller from Home Depot, and Kate and I got to work:

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    As you maybe can see if you click on the Flickr pictures, the tiller just kind of eggbeats the top couple of inches of soil. Well, it did slice up the turf, which saved us having to compost a big pile of turves for the next six months, so on the whole I’m glad I rented it. BUT NOBODY BETTER WARN US ABOUT WEED SEEDS IN THE TURF we know about that already, and decided that a meatball garden that actually, you know, exists is better than a perfect one in our heads.

    Then Kate went through and actually DUG the edges, making a nice, clean “Shallots go HERE, grass stays over HERE” line. The garden is four squares, each five feet on a side, for a total of 100 square feet. The soil amendment recommendations we got from the Penn State Ag lab are in 100sf units, so that makes the shopping easy, and I now have several bags lined up to dump in when we re-dig the beds later. I’d list the chemicals, but that would give a misleading impression of knowing what I’m doing. Penn State says a half-pound of THAT STUFF.

    I don’t want to be a sanctimonious “Oh, the joys of gardening” blogger, since I’m already insufferable enough. Fortunately, it’s easy: 80% of gardening, like 80% of parenting, pretty much just makes you feel like an incompetent fool, especially when you step on the rake. The other 20% makes you feel happy and productive, though, and it’s a good antidote when you’re visiting a family member in the hospital, and the news is sad and scary.

    Okay, promise to future dinner guests: I WILL NOT TELL YOU WHAT KIND OF LETTUCE YOU ARE EATING UNLESS YOU ASK. But then, all bets are off.

  • Just in case a monster truck tries to run over my DPNs

    I brought my knitting project (gauge swatch for Michelle Stern’s baby’s sweater) to Nicole and Dave’s excellent New Years’ Party last weekend (we celebrate New Years at exactly 9PM with a secretly prepared videotape of the ball drop. The kids have an excellent time, since for them New Years is really just a Pavlovian mechanism: Shiny ball! Numbers counted loudly! Blow party horns and SCREAM!!! Exhausted sleep. And we actually ARE celebrating the moment of the new year, we just happen to be celebrating it for our fine neighbors to the east in the Azore Islands. Dave and Nicole, I salute you.

    I knew that Kate’s friends would be bringing their husbands, so I just threw my knitting in, you know, whatever was handy. No big deal, it’s not like I’m overcompensating…

    TRUCKZILLA, NOOOO!!!

    Yeah, that’s right, I put my yarn in a milspec, waterproof, and monster-truck-resistant Pelican 1200 case. In Hazard Orange. With a Firefly ACR/4F SOLAS distress strobe epoxied to it (“Warning! Per US Code, distress signal to be used only in case of emergency. Fine or imprisonment for unauthorized activation.”) You know, just the sort of thing that a fellow has lying around the house to carry his knitting in. I’m not overcompensating or anything. Really. Do I sound defensive? I’m not defensive.

    I’d show you the case that I carry my My Pretty Pony collection around in, but it requires a full environmental protection suit in order to approach within camera distance.

  • “You can’t stop progress, Mister DeWeese!” “BOOOOOO!”

    Kate, Lydia, and I were sitting on the floor of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives yesterday, jammed in among a hundred other new representatives’ family members waiting for the swearing-in ceremony. This, apparently is supposed to go very smoothly: the new legislators take an oath, the new speaker is elected, and everyone goes for coffee.

    Our first clue that things were going to go differently was when a silver-haired man in suspenders walked up to the podium, leaned w-a-a-a-y into the microphone, and in a “now-let’s-just-see-here-folks” Atticus Finch voice, asked for a half-hour caucus. Muttering from around the room.

    What happened over the next few hours was a really awesome legislative coup, in which the incumbent Republican speaker, John Perzel, had the carpet yanked out from under him despite convincing three Democrats to split from their party and promise to vote for him, a minority party member, to back him for Speaker.

    There was shouting, there were veiled intimations made with smiling faces, and we were sitting six feet from the Republican speaker’s podium, so we got to hear how Perzel was parroting things said by his aide. As DeWeese was negotiating with the Chief Clerk to see whether or not Perzel would be entitled to second his own nomination (essentially, giving him the chance to make a stump speech), his aid whispered “you can’t stop progress”, and Perzel then repeated this sententiously into the microphone, and then all the Democrats on the other side of the floor booed and threw beer bottles at him. Well, figuratively. That was the audio clip that ended up on all the radio reports of the day.

    So it was AWESOME, even though I had to leave with Lydia halfway through the proceedings to find a bathroom for her; we got to use the members’ bathroom, which is just what you’d expect: half shoe-shine joint, half off-track betting facility, half turkish spa, filled with burly attendants in red V-necked sweaters. Barb got sworn in, escorted the new Speaker (Denny O’Brien) to the podium, and then we were off to shake hands.

    Favorite part of the day: we arrived with only SECONDS to go before the doors closed to the ceremony, and so we were whisked through the back halls of the House by Barb’s legislative assistant Kendall: running through curved subterranean hallways, kicking pages off of elevators, taking the shortcut through the governor’s lobby, and finally squeaking in JUST as the door was closing (well, just after it closed; Kendall yanked it open at the last second and endured a stern lecture from the bailiff, nodding contritely and waving us past with the hand hidden behind her back. Kendall, you rock.)

    Then, back home to visit Bob, who (and this is the reason I haven’t been blogging lately; how do you say this?) is in Chester County Hospital with a carcinoma in his pelvis. He’s been in a lot of pain the past few weeks, mostly physical, but also mental, as the diagnoses have been flying thick and fast (“hell, it’s just an infection!” “Dear lord, get the priest in here AND HURRY!”), and right now, he’s hooked up to an epidural and going through a two-week course of radiation. Matt is taking care of Bob’s business right now, driving all over the county installing and servicing high-tech water filtration systems, and Lydia, Kate, and I have been making regular visits to the surgical wing.

    Bob puts Ferris Bueller to shame, and his room has been filled day and night with motorcycle buddies and other well-wishers. We’re really hoping that something that grew this fast will respond quickly to treatment; after five or six more radiation sessions, we’ll know something.

    So it’s been a roller-coaster, as you can imagine. Thank goodness Barb got confirmed (her contentious recount process ended up giving her four new votes), because now her health insurance is, apparently, the best you can get. Keep him in your thoughts!

  • Future shock

    I had a moment of pure, Neal Stephenson style future shock last night, and I want to try to tell you about it.

    First of all, you probably know that I commute between West Chester, PA and New York City every day, five days a week. I get on a train at 6:11 AM, and I step off the train at 6:18PM. For two and a half hours each way, five hours a day, I sit in an Amtrak seat with my nose buried in a laptop, wrapped in a digital bubble.

    My laptop has a Verizon card, so I get reasonably fast internet the whole way. I wear a set of two-ear Bluethooth headphones that talk both to my computer and my phone: I know that the phone is ringing because iTunes mutes itself. The landline phone in my office is forwarded to my SkypeIn number, so if someone calls my extension, a notification pops up on my computer screen (which runs both OS X and Windows XP simultaneously) letting me know about it and asking if I want to take the call. I can take cameraphone pictures, upload them to Flickr, and maybe get picked up by national news media — all without ever having to be in any particular place. I am a Samurai Warrior of Dweeb.

    I do not say this to be boastful — first of all, this would be like boasting that you’re REALLY into stamp collecting or salamanders; even though I’m proud of the way I’ve managed to work out my commute, really all I’ve done is assemble tools other people have made into a coherent system. Second, there’s a lot of drawbacks to this lifestyle. For one thing, since Amtrak changed my departing train schedule from 6:30 to 6:11, there’s no time to go to the gym in the morning anymore. Second, while other dads can leave for work twenty minutes late and get to work twenty minutes late, if I leave for work twenty minutes late, I arrive THREE HOURS late, which means I’m not flexible at all. Third, I’m not sure that spending so much time jacked in to my little electronic envelope, on a moving train, completely separated from the, you know, constraints of physical location, is a good thing. Let me tell you about this moment yesterday.

    My train runs from Harrisburg, through Lancaster (and Amish country), into Philadelphia, and up to New York. I live about ten miles from where Amish country starts, and there are often Amish commuters on the train, coming in to the markets in Philly. So often I’m sitting across the aisle from an Amish fellow with a Prince Valiant haircut, raucous hat head, and a big white beard. We’re pretty much doing the same thing — traveling a long way to or from work — and so our working lives are really similar in many ways. Plus, you know, we wear the same pants (Amish broadfall pants have a hammer pocket in the thigh that’s perfect for cellphones.)

    Last night, there was a big family group, laughing and talking, and one of the regulars comes back holding his four-year old son up by the armpits, and the boy is wearing the conductor’s brimmed hat, and he looks like a miniature Amtrak conductor because of his neat black clothes and hat, and everyone laughs, and one of the women doing needlepoint holds up a little Razr cameraphone to take a picture, and I suddenly realize that it’s not a Razr cameraphone at all but a little plastic mirror so the boy can see himself, and I remember that OF COURSE an Amish family isn’t going to be using a cameraphone, and I realize that even though we’re in the same place, doing the same thing, and we’re all separated from reality in one way (taking the train a long way on a regular basis kind of messes with your concept of distance), but we’re completely different in another way.

    The part that made me dizzy was remembering the lines that included us (we’re all road warriors) and the lines that separated us (I use Electronic Everything, they use Electronic Nothing), and realizing that those lines are really hard to see, sometimes. Especially because the Amish don’t hate technology; they just don’t want to be dependent. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised at all to find that this group DID, in fact, have a Razr cameraphone, but were just very intentional in the use of it. The part that shocked me was re-realizing that a group of folks that I had a LOT in common with were actually very VERY different from me, in both small and large ways. Which you might think is silly (they’re all wearing very distinctive clothes, duh!), but when you start commuting so far every day, you get funny ideas about where things are.

    For example: earlier yesterday morning, when I got off the train, there was a glass-enclosed panel truck parked outside Penn station, with a ton of sand, palm trees, and three bikini models inside. It was intended to be a thousand cubic feet of Mexico Summertime Beach on the truck, in the middle of a gray rainy day, and it was a nice hack, but it totally set me up for feeling fragmented. “Oh look, a little piece of Mexico, teleported to Penn Station!” was the point of the truck. “Sure, you can commute a hundred miles to work. Look, these models instantaneously commuted TWO THOUSAND MILES to frolic on seventh avenue!” (Yes, I’m perfectly aware that they came from all of three blocks away, and probably had strong Greek accents or whatever.)

    To make things even more difficult, I’ve been re-reading The Diamond Age, an a Sony Reader, for heaven’s sake, which means that I’m reading a book-that-is-not-a-book about a book-that-is-not-a-book, and I’m starting to get all crosseyed with the futuristicness of it. Physical space not important! Cultural boundaries disappearing, then suddenly reappearing! I think it’s either time to get a mohawk and spring for the neurosite cybernetic implant, or take a hard look at exactly, and in which ways, I want to make “divorcing myself from the constraints of reality” a big part of my day.

    I’m still sticking with the Amish pants, though. Broadfall pants 4 ever!

  • Some things that make me good at my job also make me an asshole.

    And that’s okay with me. I’m not talking about the “JETSON! WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING!?” asshole, I’m talking about the insufferable know-it-all asshole: “Of course, the switch to ActionScript 3 will be complete once Flash 9 penetration has reached 80%”, I’ll say to a room full of people, mere moments after I’ve completed a conference call in which an Adobe representative has explained to me that the switch to ActionScript 3 will be complete once Flash 9 penetration has reached 80%. Of course, this is a Good Thing for a consultant, and as long as I’m just learning fast, it’s okay if I present it as if it were the most clear, obvious truth that I’ve known all my life.

    For a person, though (not a consultant), there’s a special psychological name for this kind of behavior. It’s called “being an asshole.” So I try to keep a lid on it in real life, especially if you’re married to someone who sees right through you (O lucky man, for whom all stratagems are laid bare!)

    Anyhow, let me go back to a comment I made earlier about a twelve-yarn Alice Starmore intarsia sweater. Have I picked up the terms “intarsia”, and “Alice Starmore?” Yes, I have. Do I know what they are? Sure; intarsia is that thing where you make pictures with lots of different colors of yarn by SELLING YOUR SOUL TO THE DARK LORD, and Alice Starmore IS that dark prince, to whom hundreds of dollars are sacrificed on eBay. But that’s all; repeating those words is the smell of knowledge, not the knowledge itself.

    Now, as for the actual, you know, learning to knit part, so I can make a sweater for my friend Michelle’s baby, due on December 15*, I think my feelings can be best summed up by my good friend and naval officer Archibald Haddock:

    Seriously, this stuff is HARD. Disassembling a carburetor is easy compared to knitting; the pieces are all made of metal, and they just kind of sit there, and if you don’t know what you’re doing you can just stare at the pictures in the shop manual for a long time, then move at a snail’s pace. Programming a computer is easy compared to knitting, because if something isn’t working, you just rip out half the code and see if it works now, and you just keep doing that until you find the problem, and then you work backwards from there. Finding the love of your life is easier than knitting, because you’re just doing your thing and then one day OH MY GOD WHO IS THAT? and then it’s just a question of agonizing for four hours over a breezy five-line email, etc. and attempting to sweep her off her feet with your very best dumb jokes. (Fortunately, luck has a lot to do with that.)

    I won’t say that raising a child is easier than knitting, but it’s kind of right up there. After all, with a child, you’re supposed to be the boss. With knitting, the YARN is the boss. AND YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL IT WANTS. Well, yes you do. IT WANTS YOU TO SUFFER.

    So I’m about ten rows into a four-inch stockinette swatch, and after every row I have to stand up, clench and unclench my fists, and give the yarn the Double Deuce. And then I hand it to Kate, and she rapidly repairs my mistakes and hands it back to me, and I head Once More Into the Breach. But first, I ask her to explain again to me which way the needles are supposed to point.

    Holy, holy shit, ladies. Holy shit. I salute you.

    * The baby is due on December 15, not the sweater. Plan B is “a nice hat”, which I’m considering very seriously right now. Hey, it takes a big man to know his limitations. BUT I AM NOT A BIG MAN.

  • Hurrah, Barb wins!

    Barb Wins!!!

    Yaaaaay! The Inquirer’s blogger on the scene just reported that the count of absentee ballots was finally completed — and that put Barb 23 votes in the lead. Since there are less than 23 contested ballots, that means that she’s reporting to Harrisburg at 10AM on Monday. It also means that Democrats now control the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Here’s some more from the Inquirer.

    There will likely be some teasing of Shannon Royer, who has been setting up his office in Harrisburg and had gone as far as ordering stationery, all before the ballots were counted. I don’t blame him; of course he would have tried to make a bid for legitimacy, but it will be embarassing now that he has to box up his letterhead and go back home.

    Only a total jerk would kick the man while he’s down.

  • Real knitters don’t have trouble getting off the block, do they?

    So I’m all ready to go on this baby sweater project, but I have:

    1. no pattern
    2. no needles
    3. no yarn

    I know Kate will probably hook me up with the needles, though I’d prefer to buy my own so I don’t have to worry about bending them with my feverish grasp. And actually, I seem to vaguely remember the pattern that she and I picked. It was sort of…. sweater-shaped, with two long thingies coming out the sides, into which the baby’s arms are inserted. And a bit of a hole at the top, through which the baby’s head is passed. Devilishly clever.

    Anyhow, I have seen Kate finish a ten-month-project, and use the SAME SENTENCE to announce it complete and begin the next one: “yay, that’s done, it’ll give me time to start the next…” So the fact that I have announced a sweater project but do not yet possess the materials marks me as an utter n00b.

    To hide my cluelessness, perhaps I will just push through the swinging batwing doors at Wool Gathering and announce in a loud voice “Give me a thousand yards of your finest yarn! And give me the same amount of your second finest, so that I can knit a bag to take your finest yarn home in!” That should cover my tracks.

  • Gardening! Motorcycles! Knitting! Baphomet!

    I’ve been really busy at work, Lydia is getting adjusted to her new play school, and I’ve totally fallen off the wagon with my “getting ready for the Portland Marathon” program, because now my Amtrak train leaves Exton at 6:11 AM, and that doesn’t really leave any time for working out before I have to get on the train. At least I’ll try to get back on the “don’t eat large amounts of food” part of the program; luckily for me, my sister broke her ankle while training, and so I have a little bit of leeway to catch up to her now. Phew! Thank goodness for that aggravating and painful injury. I owe you one, sis!

    Honey, why do the beans spell Baphomet?
    Kate and I marked out and staked down some planters’ paper mulch in the back yard. Which, now that there’s four five-foot by five-foot squares of black paper staked down on the grass, I will switch to calling “the garden.” Next, we put two inches of compost on all four squares. By spring, this will have killed the turf, and all we’ll have to do is dig (goes the theory). We have exactly 100 square feet of garden, which makes the math fairly easy in determining that we need approximately EIGHT THOUSAND POUNDS of compost. Actually, it’s two-thirds of a cubic yard, or 666 pounds of manure. I have to be careful; if you carefully spread 666 pounds of shit in the right pattern, Very Bad Things probably happen. Fortunately, our garden is not laid out in a pentacle.

    2006 Turkey Pro National
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    Bob hosted the 21st annual running of the Turkey Pro National motorcycle rally yesterday. My sidecar rig has developed electrical problems, so I drove up with Kate, Barb, and Lydia in a silver Honda accord. Kate knitted me a pair of incredibly awesome red cabled socks to wear under my big ol’ Red Wing motorcycle boots, too, so it was especially disappointing to not ride the sidecar — on an old, black, and greasy bike, with new, handmade, blazing red scratchy socks, I would have been approaching a new level of “I’m coming over to eat your caviar and kick your ass” Cossack cool. Oh well.

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    We arrived after the slow race had been run, and even after the trophy presentation (nuts!), but I still took a bunch of pictures, which you can see here. Or to read the full skinny on the Turkey Pro, you can read my 2001 writeup here. This has got to be the most mellow, diverse, and welcoming rally ever — when you mention that your bike isn’t running, murmurs of sympathy ripple through the crowd, and various people go and fetch North America’s pre-eminent experts on exactly your problem. They stand there with their hands in their pockets, listening attentively to exactly how the headlight relay makes that funny “BRRnnnn click” sound, and then they give you their motorcycle-garage card WITH ALL THE CORPORATE INFO CROSSED OUT to make it clear that this one is a personal favor, and they suggest some next steps to help. I swear to God, with this kind of support network, we could all be rocket scientists or neurosurgeons. Of course, most of the people there are rocket scientists or neurosurgeons, come to think of it.

    I’m knitting a damn sweater!
    My friend Michelle Stern is due in just a few weeks, and I have sworn a dark and bloody oath that I will knit a baby sweater for the new arrival. I have never knit before. But, as the husband of a badass knitter, I should know something about knitting besides just parroting the lingo. Plus (and more importantly), it’s going to be an awesome sweater for an awesome baby of a really good friend. So I’ve been checking the Alice Starmore patterns for a nice tiny aran in a twelve-color intarsia HA HA HA THAT WAS A KNITTING JOKE. SEE? NOW I’M A KNIT BLOGGER! I will be sure to post my progress.