Category: Life in Practice

So we went out to dinner tonight because I had a hankering for tacos, and in the restaurant there was a guy making balloon animals for tips. You can guess what the chances of us leaving the restaurant without a balloon for Alex was. So the guy comes over, sees my Fordham cap, and asks me where Fordham is and what I studied. When I mentioned philosophy, he said that he was studying philosophy out in Pittsburgh, and when I said I had a grad degree, he said he was interested in that as well – and then he asked me if I had published anything. I haven’t, in part because I’ve focused on the education/teaching stuff and in part because there’s a voice in the back of my head saying that my philosophical writing voice just isn’t quite right. My papers never really bowled anyone over during my grad work, and I just couldn’t seem to make it click.

When I got home and checked my e-mail, there was a message from a political science professor whose seminar I took last spring. He was sending me a Word file with comments on my term paper, and as I went through there were a number of little style goofs or bad antecedents or what have you. But at the end there was a comment that the paper was unusually well-written or words to that effect. And this was not the first time a poli sci professor had praised my writing.

All of this has me wondering if I didn’t pick the wrong discipline – that my brain somehow works more smoothly in a political theory direction than a straight-theoretical line. Or it could just be down to individual professors’ preferences. Something to think about as I move forward, anyway.

I went to an activity day at Alex’s preschool on Wednesday and brought my camera to take some pictures of her with her classmates. The four and five year olds would come up to me and ask me to take their pictures – and then they would reach out to turn the camera around and ask “Can I see the picture?” When I tried to explain that I needed to get the film developed, they just looked at me like I was speaking gibberish. (On the other hand, I got a huge hug and a ‘Daddy! Daddy! I’m so glad you’re here!’ so, y’know, that day rocked.)

When Earl and I started sending electronic correspondence to one another, we would talk about Star Trek or whatever creative writing projects we were working on. Now we discuss our lawn mowers.

Yep. I’m gettin’ old. Now you kids get off my lawn.

Spent the day clearing out the garage for the primary tomorrow. If we didn’t host the elections in our district, I don’t know when we’d ever get around to it. Gotta say I’ll be happy when this election’s over and we can start trying to figure out what it all means. And maybe I can get a week or two away from the robo calls.

I’ll update this post tomorrow with some numbers on how many folks in our district voted.

OK, so remember all those plants we put out front last Saturday? Today’s Saturday was spent ripping them all out and putting new ones in. Hooray!

At least part of the blame goes to the fact that the night we planted those flowers, we had a huge wind storm that actually broke at least one plant in half. Some might go to the fact that we skipped a day of watering in there during the week while my brain was in Blue Book Land. I’m also not sure the plants we bought from Lowe’s were of the highest quality. Today we went to a local nursery, and I’m telling you, those plants looked a heck of a lot healthier.

Now let’s see how they look a week from now.

I’m glad to see that Fort Dix apparently employs the same security protocols as my college in the Bronx did:

Fort Dix has heavily guarded checkpoints with serpentine courses leading to guardhouses, gates and metal pop-up strips to stop the traffic.

The post has an X-ray machine that sees through trucks, and it checks the military credentials of the top commanders and police officials.

But it allows pizza delivery drivers with temporary vehicle passes to enter after basic local background checks – at least for now.

Although come to think of it, at Fordham we didn’t even bother with the vehicle passes. You had a pizza box or a brown bag filled with Chinese food, you were good to go.

Spent most of today on some long-delayed gardening-type projects in the front of our house. We have a very small dirt hill next to our front walk/front steps, and a very thin strip of dirt between our driveway and the neighbor’s driveway. Last year we had our retaining wall replaced with a new brick wall, and we were very happy with the results. But we never got around to actually doing anything to the small dirt areas inside the wall. So today we went out and bought some garden soil and some flowers and set out to try and neaten things up. We still want to get some small garden stones for some of the areas, rather than plant there.

I truly have no idea how people with larger houses maintain large lawns and gardens. I appreciate the aesthetic appeal, but it is such a time sink. Then again, several years ago my brother was talking about the type of house he’d one day like to have, and mentioned that he probably had different goals than me. “I mean, not everyone needs a lot of land. What’s Dave gonna do with land, anyway?” There was absolutely no malice there, just a recognition that, yeah, Dave isn’t much of an outdoors type.

Still, it was nice to add some color to the front of the house. Now let’s set the clock running and see how long it’ll take for the neighborhood rabbits to come and make off with the flowers. If it weren’t for them, I probably would’ve just set up an herb garden and been done with it.

There’s no real point to this post, just waffles…shaped like keyboards, but I think they’re pretty cool.

Made on a waffle iron composed of re-purposed typewriter parts, this is recycling at its most delicious. Pass the organic maple syrup and locally grown CSA berries, please.

As I was sitting here trying to think of a topic to blog about that won’t fry my exam-week-addled brain, I’ve been keeping tabs on the Giants-Phillies game in San Francisco via Major League Baseball’s site. Now, watching a game over an Internet play-tracking system can’t give you the excitement of watching a play unfold. But it’s amazing how much data you have at your disposal – you can see what the whole lineup has been doing. Every pitch’s location and result is tracked. Charts for each batter’s previous at-bats are right there. It’s pretty cool.

Pat Burrell flying out to end the inning with men on first and second stinks on the TV or on the Internet, though.

‘Cause our five year old, she’s always up to semantics.

We have a rule that Alex can only watch a certain number of shows a day, whether that’s on TV, On Demand through digital cable, DVDs, or other sources. And it must be said, she normally does a very good job of following this rule. But we have been engaged in a long-running dispute in which she thinks she has found an exception. The Nick Jr. website includes streaming versions of some episodes of their series, along with other video clips. These are are identified with a “Videos” button on the website. So I have had the following conversation roughly nine million times:

Master Bedroom. ALEX is seated at the desk, watching Nick Jr. on the computer monitor. Enter DAD.

DAD: OK, Alex, that’s your last show of the day.
ALEX: Daddy, it’s not a shooooow. It’s. A. Video!

Sounds like she’s already qualified to head out to L.A. and start denying residuals to actors.