It's been a long time

since our last gastrointestinal festival. Two kids have hurled so far. 4 yo Caroline started soon after supper with piles of very well-chewed spaghetti and 6 yo John just blew something across the living room carpet at 12:30am. I can't tell what it used to be (except for the stuff that looks like dry cat food but surely not) so I'm not sure what set him off. My current suspect is the chocolate cake we served for 12 yo Christopher's birthday after supper.

Update: Poor John has been going off about every 2 hours and so far it's just him and Caroline. When I was a kid I just felt tired after an all-nighter; now at 42, I feel drunk.

Inferno; or, prophecy fulfilled

I bought John Ciardi's translation of Dante's Inferno back in my college daze in the mid '80s, picturing the day far in the future when my kids would roam and graze among our groaning bookcases.

I just spotted 10-year-old Sarah reading aloud from Ciardi's Inferno, feeling the language with her lips and tongue as she listens to it. Life is good.

Ideas!

Tonight after supper, 10-year-old Sarah and I designed an exploration mission to Jupiter that would involve hundreds or thousands of tiny weather balloons fitted out with cameras and instruments to report data back to a few orbiting satellites, which would send the data back to Earth.

Then we fleshed out a story idea involving Girl Scouts on Mars - third-generation Martian girls whose grandparents had been among the first settlers of Mars later this century. The story might involve a trip to Earth, like current-day American scout trips to Europe.

I love being a Daddy :-)

Badge seminar

Here's 11-year-old Christopher's story of his first Boy Scout badge seminar.

Me and Mommy left Small Town on Saturday. It was October 25th, the day after Ghost Train in Monticello. When we reached the county seat, I got to ride in a German car for the first time; A black BMW! We soon got to Champaign. After a while, me and my new friend Terran headed to Space Exploration. The badge counseler, whose last name was Washburn, showed us a video of the Eagle landing on the Moon in '69!

Next, we designed our own unmanned missions and bases. I can't remember, but I think someone's base looked like a staircase!

My unmanned mission had an unmanned spacecraft called Rhea. Over Saturn, Rhea would launch a probe to collect samples frome the gas giant's rings. The probe was hexagon-shaped and had retractable landing struts, a grabber, and a shovel. When finished, the probe would return to Rhea, which would head back for Earth.

My base was named after the Dodge Stratus, which, as a coincidence, was the same model as the car Mr. Washburn drove! It showed the USS Enterprise docked near a building. Various droids were wandering around the base. An alien vessel based on a ship from a game John's played called Star Wings was battling the USS Federation.

Next, we built model rockets, with some difficulty. Then we went outside. Mr. Washburn set up a launch pad for the rockets. My first attempt was unsuccesfull, with the rocket making some smoke, but not going up. Then came the funny part. The nosecone popped off, activating the recovery system! Kind of like that last rocket failure in The Right Stuff. [see below. -Daddy] Terran had trouble too. His rocket didn't even smoke. We waited for a few minutes, but nothing happened. When my turn came again, the results were disastrous. My rocket took off. For a moment, I thought I'd get as good a landing as my SE class-mate Joshua. But only for a moment. When the pop-off came, the Wicked Streak promptly blew up! I was humiliated at first, but soon joined in the laughter. During the search for rocket pieces, I touched what I thought was the engine, but it turned to be a mushroom. Thinking it might be a poisonous one, I whizzed inside and washed my hands. The engine cap is still missing! That's the second thing I've lost at Boy Scouts. The first was a stocking cap at Ghost Train. Me and Terran were waiting for lunch later. At last, Mr. Crawford and Cole came from golf class. Cole got some stuff from a vehicle, a truck apparently, and shortly arrived. After a delicous lunch, I went to coin collecting. I was the only one in Troop 490 who didn't go to art. After the seminar, I had coins from Japan, Germany, Holland, Sweden, and Ireland. Bye.

Days With My Father

A website by Phillip Toledano recording his father's last days, or perhaps years.

These photographs are a record of my father, and of our relationship, for whatever days we have left together.

Findlians in the news

From the July 18, 1969, Findlay Enterprise:

- Mr. and Mrs. Roy Bass [Mom's half-brother] of Tulsa, Oklahoma have returned to their home after spending a 10-day visit with Mrs. Alva Bass [Grandma] while his father [Grandpa] was in the hospital. [I've seen pictures from that hospital stay - I think it was surgery for skin cancer on his temples.]

- Mr. and Mrs. Bob Owens and son, Don, of Bloomington, Indiana, were recent visitors of Mr. and Mrs. Charles White [Mom and Dad] and Billy [That's me. I don't remember that visit at all. Don Owens was a police officer in Bloomington, Indiana, and was killed in the line of duty six years later.]

The business to be in

The Great Flood of 2008 and its aftermath are officially behind us: the plumbing & heating contractor came by this morning with the bill for all the work he did for us in the basement this week - new furnace, new water heater, new thermostat - so I just wrote a check in the amount of 2.7 of my paychecks. Ouch.

Decline and fall?

Three posts from Glenn Reynolds today made me think of ancient Rome's decline.

By the way, we're back home now and online after a small tornado, downed trees and power lines in our yard, floods, trips to the emergency room, drowned basement appliances, no hot water or air conditioning, and an extended motel stay waiting for a/c and hot water. All fixed now - infrastructure is in good hands in Small Town, Illinois.

Letter sentences

Our latest word game: sentences made up only of words that are letter names.

O G J I C Y U R N A B T P

"Oh gee, Jay, I see why you are in a bee teepee."

The doctor's autograph

Looks like my wife Lisa, a die-hard Olympics fan, will need a new knee soon. Ten years as a catcher in softball and a few years in collegiate vollyball are finally taking their toll. So we're getting things ready for a few months' recuperation this summer - we just got a twin bed from some friends and set it up in the room next to the downstairs bathroom, since she won't be walking far for a while.

Meanwhile, remember Debi Thomas? She won a bronze medal in figure skating in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary while a freshman at Stanford. Nowadays she's now an orthopedic surgeon doing hip and knee replacements at our main medical provider, Carle Clinic in Urbana IL. Here's her website: docdebithomas.com.

Let's take the kids to the big city

Scott Bilik linked to this Washington Post article on rich big-city folks having lots of kids; it seems that having a large family is some indicator of wealth and privilege since kids are so expensive. I guess we need to take our 5 on a trip to New York to display our vast wealth and status (heh).

Matthew at Creative Minority Report has a good take on the article.

Calling all self-neutered nancy boys

Contra this (here's the original artsy-craftsy post), nothing says 'manly' like multiple diaper bags riding in a van full of kids. In fact, what they say is exactly this: "I still have mine, I know how to use them and they clank when I walk - unlike you pathetic vasectomized cowards who faint at the first whiff of baby shit."

Er, pardon me; I have a hell of a cold, I feel like crap and I'm a tad cranky tonight.

Vexillological Mathematica

One of our kids is a budding vexillologist and he greatly enjoys things like this flag page I made with Mathematica. When you move your mouse over a flag the country's name will pop up in a moment, which makes it nice for flag quizzes. Here's how I did it:

Export["/home/billw/flags.html",
  TableForm[Partition[
    Tooltip[Framed[CountryData[#, "Flag"]], CountryData[#, "Name"]]& /@ CountryData[],
    5, 5, 1, " "]]]

That was cold

The kids noticed last night that the warm air from our gas furnace in the basement suddenly smelled hot, then it smelled disturbingly hot, as if things were going south in a real hurry. I killed it at the thermostat & went downstairs to cut the main power to the furnace and found water swirling around it - most of the county is flooded and yesterday's thunderstorm/sleet/blizzard/&c was the last straw. Water was coming in steadily through the ancient brick wall on the north side of the basement and heading straight down the old coaling area towards the furnace.

The websites I found said you should have a gas furnace checked by a technician after flooding, so I got in line with the local contractor and tried to work in the 54F downstairs library shivering in two flannel shirts, a jacket and sweat pants. Fortunately we have a separate heating & power system upstairs so the kids spent most of the day up there staying warm.

The contractor came by about 5 this evening - since 6:30 last night he's done nothing but climb down into flooded basements and check furnaces & hot water heaters. Some families lost the computer card that controls the furnace, one had a fire; we were mighty lucky - nothing was damaged, so now it's blasting blessed heat again.

Norman A. Love, 1923-2008

Lisa's grandfather died Thursday morning; obituaries here and here. In 1944-45 he was a cook in Patton's 3rd Army in its drive across France to knock the uppity Krauts on the head yet again, and in later years he was beloved among his grandchildren for his delicious breakfast cooking.

Battleship in the mail

Unsolicited commercial plug: I just received the usual post-Christmas-shopping feedback form from Leaps and Bounds, which was the only place I could find on the net that carried large toy battleships. We bought the USS New Jersey with an improbable array of toy jets and helicopters, and the kids were very pleased. I'd shop there again.

Threading the ice storms

We made it back to Illinois behind one ice storm and ahead of the next.

First snow

There's a very light dusting on parts of our brick sidewalks and the edges of the streets this morning, but that was enough for the kids to burst out in joy - "happy first snow day!" they cried just now. You can barely see it in the last 3 frames here:

Finally, a lead-free toy from China

There wasn't enough room for lead with all the asbestos they put in it.

Emergency paper snowflake website

What to do when the kids need to make paper snowflakes.

HillaryCare in Illinois

We have excellent but danged expensive insurance through Wolfram Research, so we investigated Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's "KidCare rebate" program. If you're approved, you get a monthly check from Governor Rod to help cover the cost of insurance premiums.

Nice, eh? Not so much. We don't make the $X.00 per month required to have our kids covered by the rebate program, and we don't make the $X.00 + $300.00 per month required to cover all of us.

Yes, we're too poor to receive help with our insurance premiums. It then became obvious what the governor is up to. Poor people like us shouldn't have medical insurance at all - we should be vassals of the all-powerful Democrats who run Illinois like a plantation and we should receive all care and treatment through them. The high thresholds for rebates are an incentive to leave insurance and enter the state system, which we can't bring ourselves to trust with our special-needs children.

A point to remember in the upcoming presidential campaign season: Illinois' health program is a testbed for HillaryCare's socialized medicine.

Cheap scratching area

Once in a while I consider buying a scratching post for the cats, but I'm glad I haven't. Harry has been using a stray piece of cardboard on the floor and it seems to be providing the same service as a scratching post (shedding the outer layers of his claws), for absolutely free. It makes a bit of a mess when he rips a piece off, but with 5 kids running around it's not even noticeable :-)

Casey doesn't need it since some sadist had her front claws amputated as a kitten, which has led her to develop her own kitty-fu fighting style: she lays on her side and strikes with her back claws.

Speaking of fighting styles, we haven't seen any Rumsfeld goodness in a while:

• Rumsfeld fighting techniques
• the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld

I miss the old guy.

A date!

Lisa's parents sent us off on a date last night while they stayed home and watched the kids. It was kinda strange at the Champaign Olive Garden - no one screamed, I didn't see any poop, no one walked on chairs or fought over sippy cups. A couple of cell phones rang, of course, but that's not as offensive as dirty diapers. Almost, but not quite.

We thoroughly enjoyed food we didn't have to cook and we polished off a whole damn bottle of the house blush, whatever it was - started with a 'P', then hit Toys-R-Us and Barnes & Noble for Christmas shopping. We got a shopping cart at the toy store but, realizing we could do it online without all this tedious walking and picking through prostitot clothes, we just bought a set of stacking cups for Caroline's Christmas.

At the bookstore Lisa checked out the kids' and education sections while I settled down with B16's Jesus of Nazareth. The introduction to that book is not the thing to read after a big meal. We finally bought some nicely printed and bound copies of Heidi, Swiss Family Robinson and something else for readaloud times, and a book about <something> for <a certain 9-year-old who might read this blog.>

Internet challenge

This afternoon I challenged our 10-year-old train expert and master googler Christopher to find (in 2 minutes) a picture taken at the completion of the transcontinental railway at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. In 90 seconds he had found an entire website devoted to the area: the Golden Spike National Historical Site (complete with the old photos I was thinking of). Here's a history text written by National Park historians Robert M. Utley and Francis A. Ketterson, Jr.

Off to the store

I confess... I don't drink my Guinness all that often, so I've found another use for it: surpassingly beautiful Irish-Italian roast beef. I went to start a roast for supper tonight and found that I'd used the last of my Guinness and Maker's Mark in the last batch. Off to the store. Something a bit cheaper than Maker's Mark will do, I think.

Curley on fatherhood

Mr Curley over at Bethune Catholic has started an occasional series of posts on fatherhood; today's is very good. Here's the excerpt that struck me:

I am sure some of us are quick to praise. My Dad was. I knew when he was proud of me - and so did everyone around. If he met someone he knew while we were grocery shopping, (yes, my Dad did the grocery shopping - I think it had to do with loving his wife a lot) he made a point to tell that person how proud he was of me or whichever of his children were with him. We always knew Dad would notice our goodness.

I tell them at lot at home that I'm proud of them, but I'd never thought of doing it in public - letting them see me telling other people that I'm proud of them. Might have to do that, too.

Galaxie Twelve

Coutesy of a local freecycler, Sarah now has a blue Smith-Corona Galaxie Twelve (which it's an old-fashioned manual typewriter!) - google it.

Dang!

The Mahomet Public Library was giving away books today. I'm resting my back between hauls into the house; counting the children's books there's somewhere around seventy. First up for me: A Canticle for Leibowitz!

Rawhide!

We just heard 2-year-old Caroline singing Rawhide:

lo-lee lo-lee lo-lee (rollin' rollin' rollin')
lo-lee lo-lee lo-lee Yehigh
Yah! Yehigh.

Encyclopedist detection kit

To determine whether any of your kids are natural-born encyclopedists, install Mediawiki and turn them loose. This morning Sarah asked whether we could have a wikipedia about our family, a "Whitopedia". Knowing it would be fairly easy with Ubuntu, I said yes and spent a few minutes here and there running through the steps between other tasks. Now it's set up and Sarah and Christopher are both clacking away writing initial biographical entries on their computers (old castaways that handle Ubuntu just fine).

I set up mediawiki on my heavy-duty high-horsepower work computer and poked holes in its firewall for theirs. They can get to it by using my computer's name as a web address: http://ubuntu-home/wiki.

For googlers, that's MediaWiki 1.11.0 running under Ubuntu 7.04.

Sehnsucht

TSO suggested in an email that sehnsucht was the word I was looking for yesterday. The Germans come through again in the word department - here's an essay on CS Lewis, joy and sehnsucht.

Treppenwitz, schadenfreude, sehnsecht - soemtimes I wish I'd learned German.

Today's trek

Lotsa driving today. When Lisa returns from her physical therapy appointment, Sarah and I will head out across the wide flat prairie to Rantoul to make some deposits and open her first savings account. Then west over the northern reaches of the Sangamon River to the county clerk's office in downtown Decatur to get a copy of my birth certificate, which will be used on the north side of town to get a replacement Social Security card. Then Sam's Club for a few cheap bulk items and Aldi's for some other cheap stuff, then home.

Meanwhile I'll leave a large Mathematica program running at home, hoping that it will finally work. Programmers are professional optimists - "Surely it'll work this time!"

Also, I set up Haloscan comments and left a couple of test comments on the Rush in Manchester post, but the comment count is still zero. Grr.

Later. That was a long day! There were a few screwups along the way, either because we left in a rush without thinking through every detail or because I'm getting old and foggy.

There were two highlights of the trip. First was a visit to our old apartment in Rantoul (1100 Falcon Drive, Apt. 6). We lived there "in the Rantoul days", as the kids say: from July 1998, two months before Sarah was born, til January 2004 when she was about 5-1/2. She was deeply moved as she recalled how she and her brothers played in the back yard and under the tree in the front, and as we left she took some mementos: a wildflower from the yard, a stick and a brown autumnal leaf from the old tree out front, and in a last-minute impulse in the front yard she bent down and picked some blades of grass. She has a good heart.

On our way out of town we passed the Papa John's pizza joint from which we ordered many a meal in the Rantoul days. I promised her we'd look for one in Decatur and there it was on Route 51 - the second highlight of the trip! After a successful visit to the county clerk and Sam's (the SS office was already closed, the slackers) we stopped at Papa John's and ordered our old usuals. Their warm aroma filling the car brought back even more happy memories from the Rantoul days.

For the word mavens: is there a word for that quiet happy/sad reflection on personal history that hits when you visit "the old homestead" or somesuch?

Note to self: Aldi's margarine is about half the price per unit of Sam's.

It's what's for breakfast

When I make our usual huge batch of oatmeal for breakfast I like to add stuff to it: maple syrup, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, peanut butter, jelly, whatever's handy. I can't figure out why I never thought of applesauce. Today I think I'll do applesauce, cinnamon, butter, brown sugar and maple syrup - mapple-cinnamon oatmeal.

Yellow-rumped warbler

Christoper spotted a Yellow-Rumped Warbler, probably a myrtle-form male, this morning on the A/C unit on the north side of the house. It was a subfusc little thing til we saw its flash of yellow.

The secret, revealed

I have a lot of fun refining my tomato sauce recipe, and I've recently found a simple trick that moves it another step toward "world-class" status: let the diced tomatoes cook down to bring out their vegetably sweetness.

Dice these:

• 1/2 an onion
• 3 or 4 baby carrots, or maybe half a regular carrot
• a celery stalk
• a couple of top-to-bottom strips of a green pepper

and simmer in oil til they're soft.

Add a teaspoon of minced garlic and a can of diced tomatoes, cover the saucepan and let it simmer and bubble over low-to-medium heat for an hour or so. Keep an eye on the moisture and add bay-leaf tea as needed to keep everything hydrated. Add herbs, spices and a very little bit of sugar a few minutes before serving.

How to bake a whole chicken

Lisa's in Indiana this weekend helping her Mom recover from a knee replacement. While she's there she's feasting on baked beans and cornbread (the food I hate most) and the kids and I will have baked chicken (the food she hates most). I'll need to refer to this webpage: How to Bake Chicken.

It really works!

After a recent last-minute crazed cleaning session in advance of a guest's arrival, we instituted the "after-meal cleanup": when the last person walks out of the dining room at the end of each meal I call out "After-meal cleanup!" and we spend a couple of minutes restoring the family room and the library to guest-ready condition. I'm utterly astounded at the effectiveness of this - we've maintained the family room this way for a week and just today we achieved guest-readiness in the library. After a week or so of keeping both at the ready, we'll add another room.

Too busy to blog

I've had about half an hour of work time so far today - I sit down at the computer, think a thought, and poof, it's gone: someone falls off a pile of pillows on a bed (?!), someone wakes up screaming, someone who should know better comes downstairs with an apology and a load of poop, &c., &c.

Reason number 355468453 to homeschool

Award-winning books as required reading. The big national children's book awards are typically awarded to oppressive poorly-written crap that's completely inappropriate for children. Naturally, that's what government educators like to assign to kids. In our family they start with the usual toddler's books, move on through the decent pabulum of the Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, then on to history, well-written fiction and encyclopedias.

Nine-year-old Sarah is a wikipedia maven. She's reading about chess at the moment after spending the morning with bears, cats and kittens.

Mmm... more lead, please!

Yet another recall of toys contaminated with lead. Here's the official CPSC notice.

Off to Curtis Orchard

John didn't remember ever visiting Curtis Orchard in Champaign (which he has visited many times as a toddler) so we added that to our stops yesterday. First a speech therapy appointment with Doctor Anna, then we plotted a new secret back-route to Sam's Club - a route that takes us under the interstate twice! - then a quick stop at Aldi's & on to the orchard. John's a lot of fun to travel with - full of questions, observations and good humor.

Big Kid day

Today at luch we decreed that on this day, Monday, October 1, 2007, 5-year-old John White is a Big Kid. And there was much rejoicing: no naps required and bedtime moved from 8:30 to 9:30 with full "stay up in bed as late as you like as long as you're reading" rights.

Poor man's noise canceling

I saw this video and did it meself to preserve my sanity while working at home. So... random lyric snippets (oh boy, you say...)

First up, a live performance by the Wolfe Tones:

Come out ye Black and Tans
come out and fight me like a man
show your wife how you won medals out in Flanders
tell her how the IRA made you run like hell away
from the green and lovely lanes in Killeshandra.

Sorry, folks

A certain knock on the door for the second time in two weeks:

• Her: <opening spiel>
• Me, spying the Awake! pamphlet with her Bible: "Jehovah's Witnesses? We're Catholic; we're not interested. Thanks for coming by." Deliver quickly with a friendly smile, then close door.

If time weren't such a luxury around here I could have them in and we could hash stuff out.

Yet another Chinese toy recall

Here is yesterday's press release from the Consumer Product Safety Commission - this time it's more Chinese-made Thomas the Tank Engine toys with lead paint:

• All-Black Cargo Car from the Brendam Fishing Dock Set
• Toad vehicle with brake lever
• Olive Green Sodor Cargo Box from the Deluxe Cranky the Crane Set
• All-Green Maple Tree Top and Green Signal Base Accessories from the Conductor's Figure 8 Sets.

Another attack

I knew there was a reason I disliked that slimy little bugger Spongebob Squarepants - he's yet another anti-father propagandist. Via five feet of fury.

Mozart with our meals

I spent money like a gazillionaire back in my Rich Young Bachelor days. Sometimes I even spent it well. I bought some Mozart cds back then but never really gave the crazy German bugger a chance til Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope and we all heard about his devotion to Mozart.

I found online reviews that bashed Mozart's miscellaneous dances - apparently the things were churned out factory-like - but the reviewers were so damn snotty I figured I'd start with the dances. They're delightful! They're not busy making big ponderous statements; they're not dazzling technical works - they're dances! What better accompaniment to a joyful meal with the family? And, unlike the local NPR classical music station, they don't pause at the top of the hour to report the latest enemy propaganda.

Cola Chicken

Mom visited Saturday and brought a batch of this BBQ sauce and some chicken breasts. We dumped it all in the crockput and it made a great supper. She emailed the recipe later that night:

COLA CHICKEN

12 oz. Cola
1/2 cup Catsup
1/2 cup Bar-B-Q sauce (I used Bulls-eye) original -make sure it has Hickory smoke flavor
1/2 tsp. worchestershire
1 small chopped onion
1/2 chopped green pepper

MIX WELL
Place 4 chicken breasts on top (in skillet) cover and cook 2-1/2 to 3
hours.  Spoon sauce over chicken occassionally.  Or cook in crock pot.

She added the last bit to the recipe after our crockpot version was so successful.

Nine!

Sarah turned 9 today! She spent most of the day writing a story (in emacs :-) about our visit to Indiana last week and drawing studies of faces. Our birthday traditions include a custom menu for the day and a scavenger hunt through the house for presents in the evening; Sarah's menu for today was French toast & sausage for breakfast, grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and spaghetti for supper. She also requested a "Tunnel of Fudge" cake from the Pillsbury cookbook and chocolate ice cream. Death by chocolate after supper!