Ted, Ted, Ted

The difference between Matt Gonzalez and me is that Matt isn’t too lazy to document exactly why the Obama thing is such a scam. I just take it for granted, but Matt magnanimously takes on the burden of proof.

One’s blog is supposed to be all about whining about the details of one’s personal life, so here you go: I’ve been playing soccer at noon once a week with some of my co-workers, and while a good soccer game is about as much fun as a boring hockey game, that’s still a pretty fair reading on the fun scale, and we have a good soft field that’s easy on the knees, so I’ve stuck with it for about a year now. When I was growing up there were no sport seasons like we have here; it was all soccer, all year round. Soccer was it. I was horrible at it, and as a result I adopted early on the persona of the horrible-at-all-sports geeky kid. Having been thus permanently emotionally scarred, I assumed returning to this most boring yet demanding of all games after almost 30 years would be a chore, something I’d have to psych myself up for, like running or going to the gym. (I did go to a gym once, for about six months right before Laura was born, with the idea of pumping up my upper body for those kid-carrying stresses, but that’s the only time I’ve ever achieved the requisite motivation to do anything like that. All those muscles are, needless to say, long gone, except for those vaguely pyramidal ones at the base of the neck that make me look a little more bullet-headed than I actually feel. Those are probably kept strong by the constant looking up from the computer screen to blink in the glare of day.) But soccer turns out to be a blast. I even bought a cheap pair of cleats, my first ever, to help me stop quicker. (Starting faster, at my speed, is a losing proposition, so I didn’t even count that into the equation.)

So three weeks ago in the middle of a soccer game, I got a feeling like someone had thrown a rock and hit me in the back of the lower leg. Turned out I had pulled one of those muscles that only reveal their central importance to your life when you hurt them. The calf muscle, when it goes out, does so abruptly, with a sensation that reminds you of a rubber band breaking. Your legs go out from under you, and you fall down and roll picturesquely across the lawn until your momentum dissipates. I had to have my friend Ian drive me home after the game because I couldn’t work the gas pedal. (Which was pretty interesting in itself, as Ian hadn’t driven a manual transmission for over a decade. My bullet-head muscles got a nice workout.)

Ice, elevation, etc. You don’t spend a lot of time sitting around when you have two active kids, but I tried to maximize that time. I skipped the next week’s soccer game and swam some laps instead. Yesterday I felt pretty good, so I wrapped the leg, hydrated myself to a comical degree, stretched, warmed up slowly, stretched, took a double dose of Ibuprofen, and stretched. I had a great game, the injured muscle feeling great, until, about halfway through the hour, the identical muscle in the other leg went pop. I did about three yards on the ground, a new personal best. The older injury is even better today — the game seems to have worked it out just enough. So I’m only limping on one side, not both.

This is a picture of me drawn by Seneca, who is in third grade. I really don’t look this good in real life.

Here’s the web site for Starr King school that I put together using Wordpress last month. It’s going public this weekend at the school district enrollment fair. It came to a surprisingly small effort, compared with what it used to take to make a decent-looking web site. Wordpress takes care of a whole lot of the hard work for you, and Dreamhost (which I’m also using for this humble site) does some pretty fine hosting, especially their one-click install script, which puts up some fairly daunting applications (like Wordpress, Subversion, PHP) almost automatically.

Near the elephant farm we met a tour group of women from the Sree Narayana College, which is in Kerala. They were singing and clapping to pass the time. We joined in as best we could.

I got six clips of this before my battery burned out, of which this one is the silliest. You can see the rest here.

Tonight I went with my colleague Kavitha and her two kids (boy 11, girl 5) to the giant Rasi’s sari shop. Kavitha really knew her way around the fabrics, which helped make my benighted choices a little less benighted, I hope. I dropped somewhat more than I should have but got away with some amazing stuff, some colors that I have only seen in dreams. Sometimes when we are wrapping a present for a kid’s birthday party Lilly will decide that she likes it and we must keep it, and only a lengthy negotiation gets the thing finally into the wrapping. I’m sure the same thing will happen with me when it’s time to give these things away for Christmas. They are spectacular.

Last Friday we flew to Bangalore, where a driver was waiting to take us to a resort in the high coffee country at the other end of a 200-mile dirt track. On Saturday we hiked around, saw elephants, sampled the local nightlife. On the way back to Bangalore the following day, we got lost in some of the most beautiful farmland I have ever seen and I found myself wondering how bad it would be if we missed our return flight, really.

The high point of the trip, for me, was a chance encounter with a tour group from a women’s college in Kerala. They were sitting under a tree singing and clapping and carrying on, and they graciously let us catch some of it on video, which I’ll post here as soon as I figure out how.

Garrison on Salon.com: “Twenty-four people packed into the dining room for my 64th birthday dinner and made a steady dull roar from the salad course right on through the cake and coffee, and I hardly got a word in edgewise. People kept inquiring if I was having fun, which is irritating. The answer is no. I don’t want to be 64. I want to be 43. But that’s life. Life is one disappointment after another. Jesus said the meek would inherit the earth, but so far all we’ve gotten is Minnesota and North Dakota.”

I am 43 now, and I can attest that it’s pretty good.

On Thursday we took an easy (for some people, maybe, not for me) two-mile hike from Emerald Bay up to Eagle Lake. Here’s that, plus the remainder of the pics I came home with.
(Click the picture to see the rest of them.)

With all the nice calls and emails from my sisters and brother on my birthday, you would never guess how fiercely we fought when we were growing up. I like how easily we can talk to each other now, more like old friends than like people whose top preoccupation for ten or 15 years was to bother and vex and generally thwart each other in every way we could think of. It makes me despair a little less about Laura and Lilly’s constant sniping. I have to admit they don’t really seem to put the same vigor and dedication into their fighting that we did. They’ll probably end up just fine with each other. Now if I could just figure out a reliable way to tune it out until that happens.

Hear, hear! “I do not find anywhere in the Bible where it states that PK’s are to be perfect and without sin and yet many people take such a position about children of preachers.” An impassioned defense of the only oppressed minority I can claim membership in, unless you count Norwegian-Americans.

Had my wisdom teeth taken out Friday afternoon, all four of them. I feel like an idiot, letting the dental vultures talk me into this when I’ve made it this long without the slightest trouble. But I happen to have full dental coverage right now, and there’s no way to tell how long that will last, and there’s always the chance that the dentist is right and something terrible will happen if this lucrative (for the dentist) procedure is not performed right now. Experience teaches that bad dental stuff always happens when you don’t have insurance to pay for it. So I let them incapacitate the lower half of my head and root around in there for about an hour. Afterward, remembering how much fun it was getting caught on a weekend with insufficient painkillers after a root-canal party a few years ago (we spent half a night in an emergency room waiting for a doctor to take 30 seconds for a second prescription), I made the dentist prescribe 50 percent more Vicodin than he thought necessary. That stuff works pretty well, but I found that good old Ibuprofen is just as effective, and comes without the nasty reputation. I think I’ll give the leftover Vicodin back. I don’t need to be any stoneder than I usually am.

CAUCASIAN AMERICANS: BASIC SKILLS WORKBOOK is reviewed on this lively website about Native American literature. It apparently helps children develop empathy for this often-misunderstood ethnic group. There is also this capable assault on that mawkish “Chief Seattle” iconography.