Ted, Ted, Ted

Of course I don’t think any such thing — standard schmandard, that’s what I say — but this quiz sure did peg me. I am from exactly those two places (among others) and I did say “pop” until I moved to New York, where nobody knows that that means.

I couldn’t help observing, though, that it’s very likely that if I were African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American or anything else besides the whitest of white bread, this would be completely useless to me. I wonder about that.

We threw a party for Lilly’s birthday a week after her actual birthday. All the aunts and uncles and cousins came over. The best present was a tablet on which you paint in water and it shows up like black ink, but disappears when the water dries. Her grandfather showed her how to hold the brush and write her name.

I met the software architect for this cool Web 2.0 company at a staff party for one of the schools Mary works at. I’m thinking this could be a very useful tool for settling some of the burning questions that keep me awake nights, such as:

Well that was interesting. I was just at Lilly’s kindergarten class for a song-and-snack to mark her birthday. When I walked into the classroom, an African-American boy named Durrell took one look at my gig bag and said, “That’s a five-string.” A five-string what, I asked him. “I don’t know. A five-string.”

After the songs and my little shtick about Africans inventing the banjo and bringing it this land (lifted from this site and translated into 5-year-old), this kid let on that he knows someone who plays one of these in his neighborhood, which is the housing project across the street from the school. I was doubly impressed: this is not a kid who talks a lot to strange white men, plus I had no idea I was going to run into a (potentially) Black banjo player around this ever-whitening town. I was already stoked about getting involved in this school, but this is better luck than I’d expected. I hope I get to meet this person eventually, if he exists. It’s a commonplace in the old-time music world that Black banjo players are all around, we’re just conditioned not to notice them. I know the second part of that is true; I just hope the first part is too.

Laura has been uploading her own fiction to the Artemis Fowl fan site at fangathering.com. Take a look. There’s more on the way. She writes it out longhand and then types it in, editing as she goes. I like the level of detail that goes into her scene descriptions, and her dialogue can be kind of snappy.

Lilly calls him “my uncle Peter.” He has certainly become accomplished at the uncle-ly arts, chief among them that of making mere dads look kind of stodgy and lame by comparison. Right, thanks for the clothes, dad. Now uncle Peter, he gave me this cool set of knitted finger puppets that will encourage my creativity and stimulate my intellectual growth. Bye, gotta go play now.

Also for Lilly’s birthday, we saw “Flushed Away,” the animated movie made by Dreamworks with the Wallace and Gromit people. Its one I’ve-never-seen-anything-like-that moment was when one of the evil henchfrogs delivers a live message from his evil toad boss by strapping on a video cell phone so the boss’s face is in front of the henchman’s, and the minion then lets the boss talk and mimes the boss’s body language. I don’t know why this is so funny, but it was worth the price of the ticket right there.

On the way back to Guatemala City from San Marcos, we stopped at the spectacular Lago Atitlan for lunch and a bit of scenery-viewing. From there we took the old road to Antigua, the one that was replaced by the Pan-American highway in the 1960s. It was slower, but more rewarding, the way those things so often are. We got to Antigua in time to wander around for a couple of hours, and spent the night in a very nice hotel for cheap. The flight back the next day was as routine as the flight down had been eventful.

More imagery from Guatemala. This is a fabulous little cascade that you pretty much have to hack your own trail to, in a back corner of a coffee plantation. It’s always suprising to find a place like this without so much as a snack stand to exploit it.