Odd day... we were out in St. Charles last night until two a.m. playing Apples to Apples with BJ, Beth, and Erica - cause that's how the "middle aged" roll (are we yet?). We were at a work party last week playing Balderdash and Jes killed my whole department (I think Balderdash is more fun than a2a). Eventually, as common experience wains, adults(insert grain of salt here) are forced into playing inane games to facilitate the social - and they're sort of fun I guess. At our last party everyone was into the Wii. I guess what bothers me is that the board games remind me of everything I once hated about the yuppie that I've become.

It was BJ's 35th birthday yesterday and his sister Brit gave him a BBQ. It was also BJ's brother-in-law Aaron's birthday - he bought himself a 2002 Harley Davidson. Love it! I am going to have to get our Suzuki tuned up so I can start taking it to work as an offset for rising gas prices. Jason called the other day and he wanted me to be about to turn thirty four, but I couldn't help him as I was born in seventy-three. He wanted BJ, he, and myself to be staggered over a three year period for some odd reason.

Anyway, we got home at three a.m. and then I was up at five with Elliot, letting Jes sleep, only to go back to bed at eleven and then we were off to Illinois at two for family time there. Elliot enjoyed the swapping as both of us fed him lunch - no wonder he's growing so fast.

I am starting to feel like it is summer already. This is not good given how much work I have to do. This is good, as spring is in the air.

Someone, I know not who, was internet stalking me via Spokeo. Because turn-about-is fair-play, I signed up for the Spokeo service, not really knowing what it was, and accidentally ended up getting updates on everyone I have email addresses for, sorry about that. It's an odd service. It raids your email contacts folders and then informs you of anyone you know doing anything anywhere on social networking pages on the web. This is the theory anyway. So now I will get an email when former students who emailed me late papers update their Myspace pages... yeah, I need to delete some old emails. If nothing else this is prompting me to clean out my inbox.

Some people that I know (Jen) believe that the internet was a-made for this sort of thing - if you're like that then Spokeo is for you. I am both fascinated and freaked out by this dimension of the web - the many skeletons looking back from their respective closets. And yet I blog...

Mama mama many worlds I've known since I first left home.

star quilt & crinkle book

star quilt & crinkle book
Originally uploaded by jescope

The current favorite toy is the crinkle book - it's one of the few toys that he can manipulate without dropping; something that obviously makes him extra happy.

Baby Journal:

Today is rice cereal day. In an effort to increase the duration of his overnight slumber we mixed rice cereal in with his evening bottle. We had to experiment a bit, as the rice-formula mixture didn't fit through the first bottle we tried. The third bottle seemed to work fine, and he gulped down 8oz of formula. Jes put him down in the crib and came out to note the time: 11:00. "We'll see when he wakes up," she said. At 11:01 he woke up and started fussing.

Hmmm.

Not the increase in duration we were hoping for.

Hmmm… do you want to come over and play pool? Reflections on absent and otherwise occupied friends.

I’ve been thinking lately about how I spend my free time – my former roommate and friend Paul called from Appalachia to check in on how parenthood was going. He and his wife have a young daughter Amelia who is just a little older than Elliot and who is very into The Wiggles. I fear The Wiggles, but Paul assures me that if Elliot likes to dance as much as his daddy does (did) then he is sure to love wiggling to The Wiggles. I used to go dancing every weekend – not recently, but back in college. Often was the night when I and Paul’s future wife would dance on the lip of the stage at Toons. Paul is a specialist in cancer identification, on Valentine’s Day he sent me an image of a Basel cell in the shape of a heart.

I was at the store today shopping with Elliot, while Jes was off blowing glass, to buy ingredients for a frozen soufflé that I am serving for guests Wednesday night, we’re having a couple from my work over. I needed a pound of dried apricots and could only find them in six ounce bags. I had to call my friend BJ to confirm how many ounces are in a pound as my package options were six, twelve, or eighteen ounces – none of which added up to sixteen without going over (just like the hotdog buns, never what you need). BJ is an attorney in Springfield – with who I would often bar hop in college before dancing with Paul’s future wife at Toons. It’s fundamentally silly to call your attorney regarding issues of weights and measures; still, he did confirm the math with an air of authority and double checked himself on the web.

I have several other friend/attorneys. Jason is in Kansas City where he runs his own law firm – it used to be mostly bankruptcy, but I think that is changing. His former employer now works for him. I wrote Jason’s wedding for him a few years ago and ended up filling in as a last minute groomsman. Jason and I have been friends since Adam Davis’ History of the English Language class where we coauthored a paper on the Indo European common root of mucus, mucilage, and some other mu word I can’t recall. We had quite a few margaritas during the authoring of said paper. Margarita is not etymologically linked to the proto phoneme “mu”, though “folk” associations persist among drinking linguists. Jason has a young daughter Triton Emily, who will one day introduce Elliot to numerous challenging behaviors.

Jed is an internet properties attorney out in San Francisco. I’m not exactly whether he is an authority on “property” as in semantic/digital space or “property” as in aspects, but I assume he works in the ownership of brands, domain names, and things of that nature. He says he spends most of his time teaching other lawyers how to handle the internet related dimensions of their cases. Jed’s mother was a founder of Mother Earth News who sold out/went corporate under Disney and married a man a smidge older than Jed – who is an Alex P. Keeton type. Man in three piece suit to contrast with mom’s one hitter. Jed has no children, but his ex girlfriend did tattoo his name onto her foot, which is offspring of a certain kind.

Tyler fights crime locally, with an office in the Grand Arts district. He also has taken over his firm from the man who hired him. We see him occasionally, but as he has twin daughters who are only a little older than Elliot, he has his hands full. I got pulled over a few months back for expired plates, I had no current insurance card (though I was covered) and I had run a red light. Tyler made the trifecta vanish with only a very slight flutter from my check book. I still owe him a drink on that one, but neither of us has the time. Once upon a time we had a semi-regular card game going, but it’s been years now since we’ve had a cards night.


There are several other “lawyer boys” who make up a ring of friends who I rarely get to see of late. Ah well, such is life.

The odd starts and stops of a life “on break”:

My spring break vacations started Friday. I don’t think we are going to manage to go anywhere. I have lots of work to get caught up on – because after a full day of teaching you have another half day of grading ahead of you. Ah well, I have thirty-seven teaching days until my seniors graduate, and then I have that two month vacation (summers have lost a month somewhere along the way – May 28- Aug. 7).

I had a bad day Friday, as the kids were more than ready to be gone. It seemed ill advised to start a new topic before the break, so I made the mistake of showing a film in my last two classes that the kids had no interest in. I created a situation where I had to monitor/discipline bored children, where the effective thing to have done would have been to simply teach the next lesson – break be damned. Live and learn.

Jes taught today at Third Degree this afternoon and E was having a “don’t put me down” day, so I am not off to any kind of start on my break workload. Bastian is still having some issues related to his vestibular short circuit – the occasional middle of the night “accident”. I got up at four a.m. to clean up a digestive mess and I just stayed up as that time is close to the regular start of my day. I grabbed the latest New Yorker and went up to Uncle Bill’s for a crack of dawn steak and eggs spring break breakfast. Jes called at 6:30 wondering where I’d gone. I came home and took E. so she could sleep in. Later, we hit some estate sales with Vanessa. No major purchases to report.

Neither Jes nor I feel very well. Jes might have a spring cold and I am detoxing stress. I took a nap after Jes got home from teaching and I dreamed that our house was being invaded by my students – apt image. They’ll remain in my knotted muscles until well into this break.

It’s now “late” Saturday night and we are both on laptops, listening to NPR. I read through the list of topics on – stuff white people like – and currently embody much of their satire. The graduate school essay (#81) was particularly funny to me as I just taught both Lacan and Zizek to my A.P. kids. I am burnt out – good thing I have nine days off.

I am missing the energy and financial wherewithal that used to propel me out into the night on a night like this. Alas, I’m in a different phase of life. I need gas in my car and diapers on my kid more than I need to celebrate St. Pat’s. I also will need to go to bed long before the night gets hopping. Speaking of which … g’night.

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P3050378
Originally uploaded by jescope

Fathers and sons - it's a good life.

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P3050354
Originally uploaded by jescope

Priceless

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P3040350
Originally uploaded by jescope

View to the east - across living room, cat, and front porch

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P3040351
Originally uploaded by jescope

View to the south from our dining room - taken on that fourth snow day.

Jes, “Are you writing one of those long blogs that no one will read because it’s not broken up into digestible bits?”

Karl, “Yes, it gets especially sketchy near the end, but it doesn’t matter because no one will get that far.”

Blonk, blonk, blonk. I am feeling very blonked, though I am not sure exactly what that means. It’s Sunday and I am procrastinating the work of the work week that follows me around all weekend, every weekend, and never seems to get done because there is always more at the end than when I started.

I did read the forty pages in One Hundred Years of Solitude this morning that I assigned to my A.P. kids on Friday – but that’s not work, that’s pleasure. I am working right now if you consider the fact that I am musing on how to present and contextualize those first forty pages. I’m wondering if the book isn’t perhaps too challenging even for the A.P. kids. It’s tricky to know just how high to set the bar with these students and Marquez is a high pitch in any strike zone. That’s something about teaching that frequently bugs/appeals to teachers – you’re always at work crafting and re-crafting your approach; you are never not at work.

Baby E awoke at five, or four depending on your interpretation of daylight savings implementation, so he and I watched PBS and tinkered with the guest room electronics (I bought a VCR for ten bucks at an estate sale yesterday to use as a makeshift cable box for the upstairs TV) until the stores were open so we could do a Lowe’s, Schnucks, Starbucks run. Mom needed to sleep until noon and I needed coffee to function, some sour cream for Brad’s St. Pat’s/birthday party later, and some picture wire to hang a fine art print we won in a silent auction last night; we’d been wanting something to hang over the fireplace and were resisting the conventional mirror.

A potential relation through marriage on the Illinois side of Jes’ family (her step mother’s stepsister’s future daughter-in-law’s kid sister) has a recurring cancer that spreads tumors throughout her body and she is radically underinsured. We went to a fundraiser for her at Polish Hall in Madison, Illinois – a hard place to find even with a Google Map. She’s a sweet kid and was able to participate by picking numbers for the winners of several 50/50 pots and other door prizes.

There was a band, beer, fried chicken aplenty and in our group we all won the items that we bid on. Jes got the print, I got a magazine rack with a stuffed monkey in it (you can imagine my interest – a home for the New Yorker and a monkey!), Sue bought the glasswork that Jes had donated for the auction (I think it matched a piece she already has), Kris got an Italian dinner gift basket that we were going to bid on until he warned us off, and a good time was had by all. I hope they raised a lot of money; but, given what we all know about healthcare, I’m sure it was just a proverbial drop in the bucket.

Jes' Illinois family is a lot like my extended tribe in Wisconsin – our Wisconsin Tissue Mill is their Granite City Steel. The union, the bars, the odd shift rotations, retooling the multigenerational homesteads, a complex dating scene (I understate), tattoos, trucks, and motorcycles all form a world that is equally comforting and alien to me.

I started work in a kitchen at fourteen because it was a cultural value to do so. Despite the fact that my father was a professor, education was always placed below “honest” physical work in a hierarchy of values. Via Luther’s discourses on the perils of “madam reason”, my father has an active disdain for enlightenment thinking as the enemy of religious faith – this from a man who is fluent in Latin and Greek; it’s a reasonable paradox (pun intended).

So, I still find it odd not to have a more physical job outside of my intellectual one, as balancing the two was the art of my life from fourteen to twenty-eight. I still take the occasional bar tending job to reconnect with what I really think of as work. I also feel guilty, as though my pretense to intellectual labor is built on a sinkhole that could open at any minute.

For my family, literature and philosophy is not as evident in value as an engineering degree would have been. As I struggle to make my disciplines relevant to my students, I at times touch the place where I struggle with their value to myself – beyond an analytical or communicative skill set for the hypothetical workplace - in teaching the appreciation of a novel, a fine art print, a piece of classical music or jazz, aren’t I simply dabbling in cross class aesthetics that confuse the hobbies of the upper with the “morality” of the middle, and the (at times) worthy disdain of the lower? Well, the Buddha went for the middle path, so why not the rest of us.

Last night was one of those fall asleep into front of the TV nights. You wouldn’t think I’d be so wiped out with two days off in the middle of the week. Teaching is hard work. I’ve been asking myself lately how many years I can do this, getting up between four and five in the morning – it’s certainly not going to be thirty.

We took Sebastian into the vet for a follow up on Friday. The vet is happy with his recovery, he’s come further faster than she expected. She’s put him on steroids to help with his appetite and to support his improved stability. She seems to think he’ll eventually lose the head tilt. He’s able to get up and down the back steps by himself; it’s not pretty, but he can do it. He’s also put some weight back on – he’s back up to the forty-six pounds he had on him when we first took him in. His normal weight is fifty pounds, so he’s got a few to gain back yet.

I am off to browse estate sales. Ciao.

Snow day number five!!!!! Jes was teasing me that the Shel Silverstein poem “Sick” about Peggy Ann McKay and her desire to go out and play should have been about teachers rather than students. We are going out for coffee to an actual coffee house and then later we will go see Arlo Guthrie in Illinois. What a cool day!!

A factor in my student's ADD seems to be their play.

Snow day number four. There were only three built into the schedule, so we’ll have to make this one up (unless the governor gives us a special pardon). They waited to call it until I was showered, dressed, and heading for the door – but that’s better than calling it when I’m already on the road.

Kate Chopin references Fredric Chopin frequently in The Awakening so I checked out several CDs from the library for my students to get the ambiance of the novel. After a nice breakfast I get to listen to Chopin, watch the snow fall, and grade some papers. Life could be worse. Our living room has a huge window looking out into the front yard and up the street to the east, our dinning room has a similar window facing south, so with the curtains open we have nice panoramic views of bundled neighbors scraping their cars amid the swirling snow.

Last night Elliot started to actually play with the toys that ring his mega saucer – previously he’d been content to simply sit among them and admire daddy’s demonstrations of their core concepts – spin the wheel, honk the horn, chew the teething ring, etc.

Bastian is slowly recovering. I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the disorder and it seems like three weeks is the average recovery arc. Yesterday he ate some sandwich meat – his first food since Friday – and managed the back stairs once by himself. He’s still very shaky on his legs and has this odd head tilt that may be permanent. It’s not a stroke but it sure feels like that’s what he’s had. Still, he seems in good spirits and is very happy to see us whenever we return from our various journeys in the world (to buy him more sandwich meat – he won’t eat dry or canned food). He hasn’t barked once since this started – which again makes it feel stroke-like.

Every few hours one of us carries him down the back steps into the yard. The cat wants him to play, and he can’t. It’s all very sad to watch. But we’re hopeful that he’ll make a 90% recovery. Ah well, off to putter.

In other health news – Melissa is recovering from septicemia. We went and saw her is the hospital Friday and they did a PICC line insertion while we were there (Peripherally Inserted Central venous Catheter) – that would be a drug line entering in her arm and proceeding through an artery into her heart (eek). She’s like a cyborg now with these jacks in her arm that attach to a drug pump. She has to spend the next two weeks on intravenously delivered antibiotics, but she doesn’t have to be in the hospital for the treatment. Mexican Train night at Melissa’s!

We have spent a fair amount of time in hospitals of late: first with Beth’s appendix, next came Bonnie’s broken hip, Melissa’s septicemia, and finally Sebastian’s vestibular condition. Mira told us the other night that we need to work on the health of our cadre (I guess coterie would be the more accurate term).

Sebastian is a little better today. He still can’t really walk very well, but last night he made it to the kitchen on his own for a drink of water, and this morning he was able to stagger around the yard a bit to smell his favorite places. I have to carry him in and out as the stairs are quite impossible. I said stroke-like yesterday and the metaphor is apt because his balance is only going to get better as his brain learns to interpret the new faulty data that it is getting via the corrupted nerve. Like a stroke patient, he has to relearn how to walk, to see, to judge distance.

He’s on anti-nausea drugs because for him the world is spinning. Yesterday he got the drug as an injection, but he spit the pill version out five times this morning – even the peanut butter trick didn’t work – so I guess I’ll try again later. The web page on this disease recorded that people often mistakenly put animals down with this illness because the symptoms are so sudden and extreme - when he tries to walk he looks like one of those darted animals on the safari shows - but that is a tragic mistake as most dogs will make a full recovery in a few weeks.