Les Bonnes Choses

My mom and dad came to visit this American Thanksgiving weekend. Mom has been down since Monday morning, and my dad arrived Thursday evening. They left about an hour ago, and I am now pausing to reflect on the holiday visit.

We visited the Chicago Botanical Gardens on Friday, which marked the opening of the Wonderland Express model train exhibit. Both of my uncles Dave would have been really impressed by the G-scale model train setup:

Those buildings? They're models of Chicago area landmarks made of plant bits: twigs, seeds, shells, leaves, bark, etc.

Yesterday we went to the Field Museum of natural history. Jude is into Dinosaurs, so it seemed like a guaranteed home run. There is a large T.Rex skeleton on the main level, and that was a hit, but by the time we got to the dinosaur exhibit, Mssr. Jude had quite enough of the place. We lingered briefly after that to see the Egyptian exhibit. Entering the exhibit through a mockup of a pyramid catacomb, the curator's attention to detail lead to disappointment: they had apparently went to great lengths to recreate an actual pyramid visit. As we know, with the exception of Tutankhamen's famous crypt, nearly every pyramid was raided by thieves (usually the same people hired to construct the tomb). Thus, at every turn we would reach a dead end with a sign saying something like, "This is where golden urns filled with dried fruits would have been stored for the dead's voyage to the afterlife. Unfortunately grave robbers have long since emptied the room...". I'm not even sure that anyone from the museum ever visited Egypt. I've never been to Egypt, but apparently already have most of what I would need to put on my own Egyptian tomb exhibit.

I've managed to steal away a moment or two this Thanksgiving (part deux, as we already celebrated the Canadian edition back in October). On top of the usual bustle (I've decided to use bustle instead of busyness because the latter doesn't seem like it's really a word, and it seldom gets to go out for a night on the town without hustle), it's been difficult for me to blog because I brought my laptop in for warranty service on Tuesday, 6 days before the warranty is set to run out. That has left me without my usual computer. Sure, I could use Macho Me, the Mac Mini that we use as a media server (primarily to watch episodes of Glee on Hulu, these days), but the 720 line resolution on the television is irritating.*

This lead me to go to the Best Buy (also known colloquially as stalker buy around here -- I believe this is explained in a previous post, and I will link to it if I can ever remember where the hell it is; the story is comedic in its bizarreness ) yesterday to pick up a wireless network card for my desktop, sitting idle these last three months so that I can continue to bring you the thought-provoking editorials you have come to expect from me.** Unfortunately, "works out of the box" means different things to different people, so I spent yesterday evening frustrated with the fact that the rules of English grammar do not apply to hardware troubleshooting, and that being wireless-less did not make me wired. The only thing that assuaged me was the triumph that I felt when I confirmed that I had unlocked the cell phone that came with my contract with Rogers. When I canceled my service with Rogers, the friendly customer service representative reminded me that I got to keep the phone, like it was some kind of asset. She omitted the part that the phone is useless with any provider other than Rogers unless you managed to get it unlocked. Well, screw you, Rogers. It may have taken me the better part of last weekend to unlock it myself (rather than pay a shifty person at Pacific Mall), but I'm now using my phone with T-Mobile. So if you get a call from Rudy Renteria, that's just me, digging into my prepaid minutes. The Caller ID database is apparently a little behind in the updates.

*Given the holiday, perhaps I should give thanks that I have 720 progressive scan lines (1080 interlaced). I know there are some out there that have no scan lines, and that is really unfortunate, because they're missing a really good season of Glee.

**I have learned from Amy that my recent period of infrequent updates has lead her to stop checking for new posts, so perhaps nobody has any expectations of me anymore.

One of my facebook buddies recently posted a link to a story about a family who, fed up with the life-draining* homework treadmill, have negotiated a homework-free grade school experience for their kids. If that's what grade school is going to be like for my kids, I can see why our current hosts have taken the home-schooling route. Among friends and family, I have access to many, many teachers, so I would be interested to find out what that's all about. It certainly wasn't like that when I was growing up. I don't remember ever having homework. Or, more accurately, I can remember not having homework because I recall spending Labour Day each year wondering whether this would be the year that I'll have homework (for the record, I also wondered each June whether I would be passing that year because I apparently had no idea how the system worked, nor of my place in it).

(Also, for the record, it didn't occur to me until well after grade school that there was really nothing that obliged me to write out lines as punishment when the class misbehaved. However, I do wish that I was precocious enough to have instead spent that time writing out mini-essays on the injustice of the punishment.)

(I also should have not skipped out of school on the day that we were taught the correct use of parentheses).

Jude's still a couple years off from going to school, and we don't yet know what sort of school system we will find him in. Perhaps we'll negotiate something similar with his teachers should it come to that point. He's already interested in reading and math, so I'm not worried about his ability to do well in school. But that first day of grade school is going to come really quickly -- especially if we stay in our neighbourhood much longer: Jude was standing at the end of our driveway as I went in to bring a suitcase out to the car. While I was inside, a school bus stopped at the end of the driveway to pick him up for school. Fortunately, Jude had both the good sense to not get on, and was articulate enough to explain to the bus driver that it wasn't his bus. They apparently take "no child left behind" very seriously in Illinois.

*Apologies for the link. It was a trap.

When one finds themself uprooted and building a new circle of friends, one is quite vulnerable. There are some things one might not be comfortable revealing about themself to strangers for fear of being labelled abnormal and ostracized. It is inevitable, then, that one has to keep some aspects of themself secret from those around them -- at least until they have earned one's trust.

That's how I feel now.

Before our circle of friends started to diffuse (this is common among academics and profesionals, I imagine), we regularly enjoyed all sorts of games: physical games (dodgeball), card games, board games, and if I go back far enough, RPGs. When we moved, I left most of my nerdiest gear in a box in London. Two things that did come with us, however, were our set of Settlers of Catan variants, and a Cranium variant called Pop 5. Pop 5 is the sort of game that can be easily brought to any old party (we brought it to Lori and Mark's NYE party this year where it seemed to go over well enough). Settlers of Catan, however, requires between 3 and 6 thick-skinned people (the game may involve screwing over your friends).

So as our games collect dust in our living room, we are left with the problem of sifting through the people that we meet to find people with whom we could share our hobby. At the birthday party for one of Jude's classmates, I asked one friendly set of parents flat-out whether they played board games, and if they had ever heard of the game. Engineering a conversation so that you can ask about Settlers of Catan is awkward. And for the number of people I may have to ask, it's also time-consuming. One approach I have taken involves using a gaming cant to try to discover other like-minded individuals. For example, I could point to the tile floor in a public washroom and say something like, "Hey man, look at all those hexes. I wonder where I'm going to put my first settlement," and see who responds with that sly knowing smile. I have found, however, that this doesn't go over well in the men's room. It went even worse in the ladies room.

I had been refraining from posting anything lately for fear of making anyone feel bad about themselves after reading about my fabulous life. But alas, the amazing All-Clad brushed stainless steel 4-quart saucepan that I finally selected from Williams-Sonoma for my birthday gift from my family is probably more than outweighed by the fact that my motorcycle ended up being a writeoff, despite that the damage was basically limited to broken plastic. Stupid plastic. Sportbikes look cool and I think are more my style, but all that plastic is damn fussy. Still, I think I made the correct choice in doing everything I could to keep my bike upright rather than wiping out on the road. My bike would have been in better shape, but at the expense of my right leg. As it happened, the worst injury I sustained out of the whole thing are the welts from the fabric bandage that I applied to my shin -- yep, it looks like I'm still allergic.

There was a brief moment just a few days back that my life nonetheless seemed like a dream. I don't mean to disappoint those of you interested in metaphor (even the cliched kind), but I mean this quite literally. The local community (and I mean really local) is centered around the park behind our house.

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There is a long-standing tradition whereby one of our neighbours puts up a large screen just in front of an earthen mound in the middle of the park and shows a movie. In previous years, this has happened on Labor Day weekend. For whatever reason, this year's Movie in the Park feature was delayed until last Sunday, when he produced the showing of the original Ghostbusters movie. The movie ran between 7 and 9 pm but, because of the time of year, and because we are at the Eastern edge of the Central timezone, it may as well have been midnight. We eventually managed to convince Jude to go out to the park by telling him about the marshmallow man, and were able to catch the last third of the movie. Jude wasn't especially interested in the movie itself, so we entertained him on the swings and the teedee-todder and watched the film from a short distance. It was as I was gliding back and forth on a playground swingset in an eerily lit park in the middle of an oddly warm November evening that I found myself unable to shake the feeling that I was in the middle of a remarkably lucid dream from which I could not wake. If only there were a midget in the park, then I could have been completely flummoxed.

I feel compelled to apologize for my week-long absence. I promise I haven't been sitting idly by in some deliberate attempt to provoke a riot of anticipation -- mostly because, deep down, I know that what I have to say isn't really that important. However, there may have been a few people out there with, say, H1N1, and with nothing to do other than read my blog or else read old Marmaduke comics. It is for their sakes that I am truly sorry.

In the last week, I have been scrambling to piece together enough of a really long project to determine whether I could submit a poster for a conference in Montreal next spring. As if that weren't enough, I have also been trying to problem solve for a local motorcycle shop tasked with repairing my motorcycle. There are slight but nonetheless very real differences between the US and Canadian models of my motorcycle, and Kawasaki doesn't make it easy for US dealers to obtain parts for Canadian models, and, for whatever reason, I had to solve their distribution chain problem.

I didn't mention that I smashed motorcycle into a tree, did I? Yeah, that happened to me too. I live in a neighbourhood with alot of really old trees. It's like a deciduous forest with sidewalks. This being fall, all these trees are shedding their leaves. This being Chicago, it seems to rain almost every night. When the road is covered with slimy wet leaves, you might as well be driving on banana peels. I was completely aware of this hazard, and yet still managed to have my tire slip out from under me as I turned off of my street, sending me careening into a large tree just at a neighbour's curbside. I was irritated at the damage done to my motorcycle, but walked away otherwise uninjured. That's right, I drove a motorcycle into a fifty-year-old tree, and was irritated. I told you I was hardcore. You had best keep that in mind before you get all up in my grill.

Update: federal laws governing how news is reported require me to note that the collision with the tree was at about the speed of a brisk walk, making my lack of injuries actually rather unsurprising.