My Daughter is Colorblind, and I Could Not be More Proud!

She is 10, we (she picked it out) rented the musical Disney Cinderella (1997) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0128996/). If you have not seen this one, it is an updated version of the Cinderella story (big surprise, not!). What is (almost) a “surprise” is the way it is updated. The most obvious is that Cinderella, played by Brandy (Brandy Norwood – pop singer – http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005275/) is Black, her step mother (Bernadette Peters) is White, her two step sisters one is also Black (Natalie Desselle) and one is White (Veanne Cox), while the prince is Asian (Paolo Montalban), his parents are an interracial couple, the Queen (Whoopi Goldberg) is Black and the King (Victor Garber) is White (check out the first link see the full cast).

Now while the racial mixed families were obviously and purposely done by Disney to drive home the point that love is about the person and not about social standing or race, it was a point that was made to my daughter in the songs and the words, not by the race of the characters, at all. She missed it, totally. Now she has seen the Disney animated version of Cinderella, and she has seen the ballet and read the story with pictures and none of them ever had an African or Asian person in them. Just a few minutes into the movie, I stopped it and asked, “What do you notice about this that is different?” She could not tell me (ok, so sometimes she is not the most observant kid in the world, but still….). I tried to point out to her all the different races represented and how the families were mixed and her reaction was, “So?” I had to explain to her that this was unusual, But as we talked about it I realized that to her it was not.

In her world, in her school she has friends that are Asian, Indian, African American, Hispanic, kids from France and Russia. There are families that have White parents and adopted children who are Asian or Black, single parents and mixed marriages.

I try to see people for who they are and not their race, I think I do a good job, but I do notice and she has to really think about it to notice or have it pointed out to her. I am not sure if I have raised her well or if I have a lot to learn.

Either way I am very proud of her.

“I do not like this one so well. All he does is yell, yell, yell…” – Dr. Seuss

And I am not talking about the kids! I had dinner at my mother-in-law’s house, with a friend of her’s, my wife and kids. After the kids left the table the “adults” (yes that is in quotes for a reason…the older people) stayed at the table to talk. Well talk is the wrong word, they talked LOUD. They yelled (I do not include myself in this group of they) at each other, talking over each other’s words and just kept raising their voices. It was not an argument, but a yelling conversation. They kept saying things like “I agree with you but…” or “What I am saying is….” or “You have to understand….” and yet, they were not really agreeing, saying or understanding each other, they each just wanted to make their point and to do so they had to talk louder than the other. I left…lucky me I had to go fix the mom-in-law’s email so it gave me an escape. I have seen this before and it drives me nuts…why can’t they have a conversation? A discussion? Why does it have to be so LOUD!It stressed me out to sit and listen to people yell at one another…I don’t know what they get out of it, but for me….I just get out.

Cell Phones are the New Cigarettes

Although I have never smoked a cigarette, I remember a time when my parents and all their friends smoked and it was considered a normal even social thing to do. But over time as the negative health effects of cigarettes have been reveled, and public opinion has completely changed. Laws have been passed, restaurants and building are now “smoke free.” Someone attempting to light up in public is no longer cool, but it makes them sick, an addict, to be pitied, shunned and rushed off to a 12 step program, hypnotized, or at least offered a new pack of nicotine gum so they can politely chew their way back into the good graces of public opinion. 

It is to the point that I almost never see someone smoking anymore. So we needed a new population of people to ban from restaurants and send to the sidewalk. Fortunately, as in so many cases, technology has provided a solution, cell phones! Yes, now many restaurants are banning the use of cell phones. This got me thinking about how cell phones and cigarettes are similar.

• First off (ok not the first thing I noticed, but still a good place to start) they both start with the letter C and “cigarette” and “cell phone” both have 9 letters!
• As mentioned before, both can get you thrown out of restaurants for using them.
• They provoke strong feelings in people, both for and against their use.
• Potentially unsafe to use while driving (hot ash in the lap vs. well just not paying attention to the road as you get the latest gossip from a friend).
• There are many versions of these additive substances to appeal to a broad audience. Phones can also be MP3 players, PDA’s, cameras, personal massagers (hey they have a vibrate mode!). Tobacco can be cigarettes, cigars, pipes, chewing and snuff.
• I can keep going, but my final item is that people seem to spend endless hours discussing, comparing and arguing about the relative merits of the brand, flavor and choice of their favorite version.

So in conclusion (sounds like I am writing a fifth grade essay) that in the absence of tobacco products we have found a viable substitute for our collective/societal oral fixation. Something we can all spend way to much money on, has the appearance of improving our social interactions and yet is divisive.

 

And in the end my kids want one I tell them “no” they bum them off their friends and I have one and use it all the time. The one major difference is that I can’t tell my kids to try and watch as they choke and cough the first time. Maybe they would if I made them pay the bill.

Automotive Minor Miracle Makes My Day

I think it is kind of sad, that I can feel so good and so accomplished when such a small minor task goes right, the first time. What is the task? Well let me first say that it is automotive related and truth be told the preparation work that went in to getting ready for the task took weeks! Yes weeks. I needed a part, a simple small part, one that you can find in any auto parts store, most “big box” stores (BBS’s) and often at a gas station, although it maybe a  small miracle to find car parts at a gas station these days.

 

So day one, I have time, I have money, I have the inclination and motivation (the motivation will become clear in just a bit) to acquire the Part. Not wanting to trust to luck and the vagaries of the stocking whims of one of the BBS’s I went right to the experts, the “Mech-a” of auto parts so this could be my one and only stop to get the Part. I went in, they had a handy little computer gadget to find the exact part for my car and after a few minutes of poking the “next” button I found the information I needed (the part #) to lead me to the Part, and much to my amazement there it was, on the rack right in front of me, just what I needed at a reasonable price, I would take two! So easy so simple.

 

Not exactly, because I am a relatively honest person and if I had just stuffed the Part under my jacket I could have walked out, driven home and installed my Part and been happily motoring in moments, but alas no, I fully planned and expected to pay for my Part.

 

Unfortunately there was no one to pay. There were two people working in the store and the two customers in front of me where not having a good day. One was trying to return a part without the original box and without the original receipt wrapped in some dirty newspaper. If you asked me (and no one did, but the I knew the clerk and I were thinking the same thing) this guy bought a part, replaced the part in his car and is now trying to return the broken one. Now if I was trying to do that (again, honest person here so I wouldn’t, but that doesn’t stop me from dreaming this stuff up) I would have saved the box and the receipt and resealed the box with hot glue so it would look like it was never opened, and not augured with the 15% restocking fee). But that is not what this customer was trying and so it was taking some time, well a lot of time, since the guy with the name on his striped shirt (store clerk guy) did not want to take the part back and really it just was not going to happen, but he was making a valiant attempt to be polite about it, while the “Not so Honest Customer” kept talking, then yelling and pushing the part around the counter and demanding his money back.

 

So employee #1 was down for the count. Employee #2 was trying to help “Clueless customer” who needed a part, but was not really sure what was wrong or what part they needed and really it was for a friends car so they were not even too sure what the make, model or year was, but they were pretty sure it was blue (not that they were buying paint, since in that case at least they would be heading in the right direction).

 

I am not a patient person, when I think a task should take a few minutes I just can’t stand and wait 30 to get it done. I could tell that this drama was going to go on for quite some time. I reluctantly put my Part back on the rack and left the store, more than a bit exasperated. I had it in my hand, so close.

 

A few days later driving home from work I have a few minutes and drop into one of the BBS’s. They don’t have a lot of choices, not exactly what I want and a bit more than I want to spend, but I have it in my hand and here is a self check out so I don’t have to wait on anyone. Whooo hooo I have my part and I am heading home. I am home and still have a few minutes to install the part, all I need to do is open the package. But wait (you knew there was more to this) for this price I expected there would be two of my Part in the package (have you guessed the Part yet?), not one! Well there is no way I am paying that much for just one, so totally not worth it. The receipt and the Part go back in the bag, back in the car to go back to the BBS (where it still sits one week later).

 

Today on may home I have a stop to make, near the “Great Satan” (what my family calls one particular BBS that we really don’t like) I am here, it is here, and somewhere in side is my Part. I go in. I find the book (no little electronic gadget here), I find my make, model and year of my car and that leads me to the Part. They have it in stock, at a very reasonable price. Again self checkout and I am on my way home.

 

After dinner the small miracle happens. I take out the Part, it is the right size, there are two in the package, the packaging does not require an oxyacetylene torch to open it (it has a very nice very convenient little flap to get the Part out). I take them out, I install them and they work. A miracle. Something worked simply, easily and on the first try. I am a mechanical genius and automotive guru. I only had to go to 3 stores and take about 2 hours of time, but I can replace my windshield wipers!

 

Which is good, it is supposed to rain tomorrow, but I will be able to drive to work tomorrow, be able to see the road, and have the knowledge that small miracles do happen and sometimes not everything is a hassle.

 

- GSD 

Daddy Magic

I think my daughter learned an important lesson this week, sometimes it is better not to know. She has nightmares (so she says, but it might be attention seeking, but since I can’t peel back her skull and look into her head (ok, that’s icky!), I will have to just go with what she says). At camp this summer she made a “dream catcher,” you take a stick and bend it into a circle and then crisscross with string making a kind of web. Bad dreams are supposed to get caught in the string and let you sleep in peace. She was very excited to have this; she thought it would solve her problems. It didn’t work. One night she told me “Daddy, I think I know what the problem with my dream catcher is, the wholes are too big and the scary dreams keep getting through.”

Now I have my faults (that could be a whole long list, 1…..naw will save that for another time) but I do love my daughter and hate to see her upset (unless I am the one causing it, then it is of course justified) so I preformed some “daddy magic.” She is also one of these people who if there is one mosquito in a room of 100 people she will be the one to get bitten, over and over again. One night when she woke up from a nightmare I joked that bad dreams seem to get her like a swarm of mosquitoes, so what she needs is some “Nightmare Repellent.”

Not knowing where one can buy “Nightmare Repellent” I made some. Well I did not make the repellent, just the label. I took a can of “Canned Air” that I use for cleaning computers and made up a label that said “Nightmare Repellent – 100% Guaranteed to keep away scary dreams!” and glued it on to the can (it looked pretty good, if I do say so myself). That night I gave it to her and right before she went to sleep we sprayed some over her bed to keep the bad dreams away.

It worked, no bad dreams that night, or the next, or the next. Then the next night just after we sprayed the repellent she asks “daddy, where did you get this?” and I tell her it is daddy magic and she should not ask. But she keeps asking and pressing me for an answer, and after a while for some unknown reason I tell her, 10 minutes later she is crying to my wife, she looked behind the curtain, she bit the apple, she wanted to go back, she wanted to un-know, because now the magic was gone, it was just air and illusion.

And yet tonight we sprayed “Nightmare Repellent” over her bed, she knows it is not real but she also knows that I made it for her, it is not just air, it is air with love, and that is the daddy magic that won’t go away. She sleeps better knowing that and so do I.

Original Post Date – 09-11-2003, 10:41 PM  

GSD Getting Old?

I think I am getting old. How do I know, well the wife, 2 kids, 2 dogs (yes 2, we have a new friend, maybe I will tell you how that happened later) and a mortgage payment should have clued me in, but I just don’t feel old. So if I missed all the clues and I don’t feel old what was it, co-eds. Yes I said Co-eds. You see I work at a University and classes started this week and all of the sudden there are Co-eds everywhere, but it seems they are mostly crossing the street in front of my car. Now I bet you are thinking that I noticed that the Co-eds seemed so much younger than me, some even half my age and that is what made me feel old, well that is true but that was not it. So enough already, what was it?

There I was stuck at a crosswalk watching hundreds (and this is not much of an exaggeration) of Co-eds in shorts, skirts or skin tight pants and short or skin tight tops and my first thought was “Damn I am going to be late for work!” (Yes, there was a 2nd and 3rd thought, hey I am old but I am still a guy) What was I thinking, what was happening to me? In my younger days I would have been happy to sit there all day and watch the parade, therefore I must be getting old (or already there).

What happens now? What goes next? When I am at the beach I spend more time watching my kids play than looking for the skimpiest bikini? I can live with that, I am getting older, I am not dead.

Original Post Date – 09-03-2003, 10:05 PM

“Don’t Bother” and “Never Mind” The two things I do best!

I love it when someone at works stops me in the hallway and starts to tell me some long complicated thing that they need fixed right away and then about halfway through they stop and say “You know what, never mind” or “Don’t bother, I will just do….” I always reply “that is what I do best!” I am thinking about printing some bumper stickers that say:

“Don’t Bother” and “Never Mind” The two things I do best!

And I seem to be doing a lot of both lately. I seem to have a hard time being focused on anything that is not an immediate task to be completed. Which in some ways is working out well, since the past week at work has just been one crisis after another so I don’t really have time to sit and work on anyone thing, and when dealing with the kids at home it works out too. They have the attention span of well a 6 and 4 year old (read as very short in case you didn’t know) so I am fitting right in with their schedule.

But if things quiet down here at work and the kids grow up I am not sure what I will do, I might just have to learn to focus and change my motto to:

“Sure, happy to take care of it”

And I might even be able to say it with a straight face and not be lying.

Original Post Date – 08-25-2003, 05:02 PM

Re-Wine-d

I did it. I bought a wine fridge. One of the overly large hardware store chains was having a sale and mislabeled one of the wine fridges so I managed to walk away (well roll away with it on one of those little flat carts, thing weighs a whole lot more than I thought it would) with one that holds 30 bottles for $179 which cools my wine for $5.97 a bottle not including tax.

Once I got it home, my wife and I had a long conversation about where to put it, we have a couple of ideas, but the best is going to take some construction. In our kitchen is a small built in desk where the phone, telephone books, cookbooks, pens and note pads live (along with generations of discarded scraps of papers and bits of old bills), ideally we will move the desk part up to counter height, put the fridge under that and build in some drawers next to it. Some of this work I can do myself, some of it we may have to have done to insure that the new cabinet doors match the rest of the kitchen.

In the mean time the wine fridge is sharing space in the kitchen where the dog’s water and food bowls sit (I don’t think he minds sharing as long as they still get filled on a fairly regular schedule). After the wife and kids went to sleep I unboxed it, put it in it’s spot, cut some felt feet for it (so I can slide it around on the hardwood floors with out gouging them too badly) and plugged it in. I love the moment when you buy something new, you plug it in and it actually works, no fuses blew, no smoke come out, all it did was give that reassuring “hmmmmmmm” and it started to get cold inside, nice. I read the directions, set the temperature and went to get my stash of wine. I opened each box of wine, pulled out the bottles and racked them in the fridge, five bottles of one on one rack, three of another on the next rack and four on the rack below that.

This was not a great achievement, like bringing peace to the world, or writing a great work ofliterature, nor was it even great personal achievement (like getting the garage cleaned); all it took was a relatively short amount of time and some money. But for one moment I sat on the kitchen floor with the light on in the fridge, the glass door closed and I looked in on my little hoard of tasteful potential inebriation and felt content and satisfied, without even drinking any of it first.

Original Post Date – 08-18-2003, 02:43 PM

Wine Whine

Last Thanksgiving we went to visit my sister and her husband in Seattle and the first night we were there he opened a bottle of wine for us to sip on. I drank half of it learned what a GOOD bottle of wine tasted like. He being the generous person he is about four months latter shipped me six bottles of that very same wine that I fell in love with.

In the mean time back at home I tasted and dumped out at least a dozen bottle of wine that I had laying (well standing) around that were not great to begin with and since they had not been stored correctly (in part that standing thing, and a temperature thing and a moving thing) had all “turned” (turned in to something between water and vinegar, yeech!).

Also during that time I had started on my own to try to find some decent wine that I could enjoy and afford. My wife and I found a new favorite restaurant and they had a wine we have also come to love. I took one of the bottles home with me and then to a local wine shop to see if I could buy some directly and not have to go to the restaurant every time I wanted some. I expected that it would be a whole lot less expensive from the store than the restaurant (you see where this is going yet?).

At the store I asked if they could get me some, the looked at the bottle and said it would not be a problem so I told them I wanted six bottles. I waited and waited and waited for the phone call and about two weeks later my wine arrives. I had also found one other wine that I liked a lot so at the wine shop I grabbed six bottles of my new find and they had the six of the one I ordered, that made up one “case” so I got 10% off the price, nice. Well I was in for a bit of a surprise, because it turns out the restaurant was not marking their wine up nearly as much as I had thought (or as it turns out I happened to pick a very expensive wine shop, to shop in) and even with my 10% off I now had about $200 worth or wine. Well if I have to have $200 worth or something this was not so bad, but not what I was expecting, besides wine doesn’t go bad. Remember what I said before about all the wine I dumped?

I bring it all home and realize that, yes wine does go bad and now I had spend my wine budget for the year and if I didn’t store this wine properly a year from now I would have $200 worth of glass and cork.

Now some of you may not know this but living down south, it can get hot and we don’t have basements and to store wine you need cool, but not too cool, and some humidity so the corks don’t dry out. There is no such place in my house, unless I want to run the air conditioner and keep the house at about 50 degrees and leave a damp towel over my bottles of wine (well my dog would like it, he likes the cold).

The solution, a small wine refrigerator, they even sell them at most large hardware stores now. Now I am looking at spending $80-$400 for a fridge to protect my $200 investment. This is starting to get out of hand, I can not seem to pick one, and there are too many choices. The only measurable comparison I have been able to do so far to look at the storage price per bottle. For example the least expensive one I have found stores 16 bottles for $80, that comes out to $5 per bottle. I have also kept my eye on one that stores 30 bottles for $200 and that ends up costing $6.66 a bottle.

I can’t decide, so for right now I am just drinking them, it may just turn out that I finish them before I buy the fridge and then I won’t need it, unless my brother-in-law sends me more.

Original Post Date – 08-14-2003, 03:08 PM

Musical Beds

“Round and round we go and where you wake up nobody knows.” This seems to be a game we play some nights at my house, you go to sleep in one bed and wake up in another. Last night it went something like this:

9pm
Master bedroom (King sized bed) – me, wife, dog (sometimes on the bed and sometimes off)
Daughter’s bedroom (Full sized bed) – daughter (age 6)
Son’s bedroom (Twin sized) – son (age 4)

Later that same night (3am ish?):
My daughter wakes me up trying to get into our (me and wife, ok and dog) bed says she had an “accident” and her bed is wet. I try to move over to make room for her, but bump into wife. I nudge her to move over but she can’t because I now see that my son is asleep on the other side of her, I have no idea when that happened. My wife gets up and strips wet sheets off daughter’s bed. Daughter is now asleep in our bed. Wife goes into son’s room to sleep. I take my pillow and follow a little later when I notice she has not come back. So now:

Master bedroom – son & daughter
Son’s room – me and wife
Top of stairs – dog

Even later that night:
It is hard for two adults to fit into a single (well double, whatever) bed if all they really want to do is sleep also the dog starts barking at shadows outside and my wife now nudges me and tells me to go make him stop. I get up and go to the bonus room and threaten my dogs life, he stops barking and i lay down on the couch and go to sleep.

Master bedroom: son & daughter
Son’s room – wife
Bonus room (large sectional couch)– me and dog (on the floor next to me)

Still later that night:
My wife wakes me up, she has had a nightmare, it happens even to adults sometimes, and she doesn’t want to be alone, will I please get up and go into the guestroom with her?

Master bedroom – son & daughter
Guest room (Queen sized bed)– me and wife
Top of stairs – dog

This morning:
I wake up alone in the guest room, turns out wife still could not sleep, nightmare had something to do with the kids so she moved back in to the master bedroom at some point.

So in the end
Master bedroom – wife, son and daughter
Guest room – me and dog (now on the bed)

We joke about this as our version of “bed hopping” or “sleeping around” perhaps not as exciting as other meanings for those terms, but then again I don’t get into trouble if I get caught.

Original Post Date – 08-11-2003 at 10:08 PM