Declining Summer

I saw peewee football players in the park the other day instead of baseball players. Sometimes I still see baseball players, but footballers are part of the transition, a hint of fall even before it cools down much. Actually, it's already cooled down a fair amount from the highs of June and July. August is less like August this year than the previous two months were. Go figure.

Also, Ann starts school tomorrow. It will be the 10th time a child of mine has started a school year by walking the short distance from our house to her elementary school. The custom is for all the kids to meet on the blacktop part of the playground, with each teacher there holding up a sign with her name on it (or delegating the task to an early-arriving kid). Many parents are there, too, some even taking pictures.

I think Ann will ask both of us to walk with her, which might be the last time, even though there are two more first days of school to come for her at this school after tomorrow. I'm pretty sure Lilly didn't want to be seen with us in fifth and sixth grades.

Two more first days provided, of course, the world doesn't end in December. Earlier this summer, I had to re-assure Ann that nothing special along those lines is going to happen, since she was fretting for a few moments about it.

End of July Notes

I saw some Olympic diving out of the corner of my eye last night and wandered over to the TV for a look. Svelte lads in ridiculously tiny suits -- wait, there are two of them jumping at the same time. Since when has that been an Olympic event? Shows you what I know: since 2000.

Somehow or other, I'd never seen synchronized diving before. Actually, I know how that happened. I didn't watch much of either 2000 or '04 Games and simply missed the contests in '08, when my viewing was less-than-fanatical.

A credit card offer came in the mail today. Nothing unusual about that -- based on the continuous stream of offers, you'd think there had been no painful recession recently. It was a Disney-themed card issued by a too-big-to-fail bank. But not just any Disney theme: a mockup of the card attached to the letter features the Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey in full-magic mode. On the back of the card is Mickey and a couple of the broomstick servants he created.

I thought about that. He's one of the iconic Mickeys, of course. But he's also the one who inadvertently creates a catastrophe instead of the useful servant he imagined he was getting. It started small, but got out of hand. You know, something like a credit card can.

The toys of the moment for Ann are her Monster High dolls. They're Mattel creations, released only a couple of years ago now, and the conceit is that they're teen offspring of famed public domain monsters -- Frankenstein's, Dracula, the Werewolf, the Mummy, et al. Lately Ann has been creating derivative characters on paper based on monsters not mentioned in the series featuring the dolls. Sometimes she asks me for input.

So far, we've come up with the children of the Bogeyman, the Devil, Godzilla, the Loch Ness Monster, a Bug-Eyed Martian, a Roc, the "Seaweed Monster" and -- my favorite -- the daughter of Them. As in monster ants, the kind featured in Them. That was her idea.

She's also been taking pictures of her Monster High dolls.

In black & white, for some reason.

Eventful Early June

For me, work consumed a lot of the last day of May 2012, a Thursday. It was just as well that the day felt like the last day of March. It was cold and rainy. The week before was warm and, mostly, so was the week after. But May 31 was Winter's own reminder that he'll be back soon enough. It takes more than climate change to flummox the old man. Lilly and Ann came home from one of their last days of the year and, so quietly I hardly noticed, sacked out in the living room, Lilly on the couch, Ann on a sleeping bag next to the couch. It isn't something I see too often.

On June 2, I drove with Lilly to Woodstock, Ill., where we saw Al Stewart in concert at the Woodstock Opera House. We also had time to wander around Woodstock town square, and found the plaque commemorating a moment in Groundhod Day when Bill Murray stepped in a cold puddle.

On June 4, Lilly "graduated" from 8th grade. Had a ceremony not too different from a high school or college graduation, which we attended. It brought back fond memories of my "graduation" from 8th grade. The bell rang, and that was that.

The very next day, though I had a mountain of work to deal with, I joined my family and three of Lilly's friends in an excursion to the grounds of the Adler Planetarium on the shores of Lake Michigan. From there we saw the Transit of Venus.

Springtime Misc.

Recently I interviewed a fellow at Pure Industrial Real Estate Trust, a company whose portfolio is made up of industrial buildings in Canada (I'm using the commercial real estate definition of "industrial," mainly warehouses and distribution centers). The company's acronym is PIRET. I didn't think anything of it until he told me that its symbol on the Toronto Stock Exchange is AAR.UN.  You know, ARR like a PIRET says, he told me. I got a kick out of that.

I pull up Google News every day and see more stories about the election, mostly horse-race coverage. Do I want to read this? No. The election is six months from now. I know who's running. I might take a passing interest when the Republicans fill their VP position, but other than that, this mess can wait till October.

Lilly and I saw some cool cloud-to-cloud lightning this evening, off to the east, where it must have been raining. She hadn't been aware that lightning could do such a thing. I told her that it could; a meteorological teaching moment. Ball lightning didn't come up, though.

Ann did her state report recently: writing, making a cube with pictures and drawings on it, and doing an oral report with props. She picked Texas as her subject. I was able to supply her with a number of props: postcards of various Texas spots, a plastic bluebonnet, a bag of Fritos, a 21 X 34-inch Texas flag that I hang in my office. She said a classmate held it up while she did her report.

But there was more. She wanted some Texas songs. She'd read that "Texas Our Texas" was the state song, so she wanted that on tape to play the class. I didn't tell her how seldom I'd heard it growing up, or the fact that a lot of people — a lot of Texans — think "The Eyes of Texas" is the state song. She wanted two others, and asked me for suggestions, which is a recipe for me suggesting something unusual.

Which I did. I suggested "Galveston," which I hadn't heard in some years. Not really about Texas, though part of the theme, and she took to it, maybe because she'd read about the city in one of her books. It's an example of song that's melodically peppy yet lyrically poignant. Not nearly as many people know the follow-up song, "Dear John, From Galveston," in which the narrator is so upset after receiving the title letter that he takes out an entire nest of Germans or Red Chinese or Viet Cong single-handedly in a berserk fit. Not to worry, he only lost a couple of fingers and some hearing in one ear, and lived out his days quietly as a family man in Houston — he married another girl — working as an appliance, and later car, salesman.

The other song I suggested was "Across the Alley From the Alamo," which doesn't have all that much Texas in it either, except for the essential ingredient of the Alamo, added for euphonious purposes. We played all three songs on YouTube, taping them on one of the tape-using microcassette-recorders I quit using a few years ago in favor of a digital recorder, and she played them for her class. Lo-fi, but passable. If that doesn't count as fair use for educational purposes, I don't know what would. It isn't likely that any of the other kids had ever heard those songs, and maybe the teacher was unfamiliar with them too.

Missing Haiku

"Judges Hiroaki Sato and John Stevenson have completed their work," a letter we received today said. "We now know the names of the finalists in the 2012 Student Haiku Contest. Entries were up nearly 50% from last year... From among these English-language entries, the judge selected 45 finalists in the four divisions."

The divisions were by grade. Annoyingly, the letter doesn't say the number of English-language entries, but it does say that 102 finalists were selected from those who wrote 800 Japanese-language entries. But anyway, "the poems will go on exhibition at the United Nations International School later in the school year.

"The following are the finalists selected from your school... Ann Stribling, Grade 3, Tyler Jovanovich, Grade 1."

The kicker is that, in an unusual lapse, we didn't keep a copy of Ann's English-language entry, and she can't remember how it goes, or I'd put it here. Ah, well. As far as I can tell, the prizes for winning, and for being a finalist for that matter, include only honor and glory, or, as the letter puts it: "special recognition during [an] Awards Assembly to be held at UNIS starting at 10 a.m., June 9, 2012."

But I Think They'll Remember HAL

"Is this Planet of the Apes?"

"This is weird, Daddy."

"I don't get this movie."

"This music is creepy."

"Wait, what planet is he on?"

Recently I decided it was time for my nth viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's been a number of years since the last time. So I rented a disk and watched it yesterday evening. I didn't ask any of the rest of my family to watch it with me.

But they hung around in the living room anyway, mostly doing other things with their electronic gizmos, but apparently with one eye on the seemingly incomprehensible doings on the screen. Lilly and Ann provided the comments above as the movie progressed.

Ann at Nine

As long as she lives in Northern climes, Ann will always pass her birthday in the pit of winter. This year, at least, the pit isn't so deep. We got a dusting of snow last night, but in the slightly above freezing temps today, most of that disappeared.

We opted for chocolate cake this year. It's been a while.

The cake came undecorated from the industrial bakeries of a warehouse store, but Ann soon fixed that with pink sugar pearls, which spell "Happy BD," but mostly she just scattered them on top. Add a candle 9 and the cake was ready.

A couple of Ann's friends spent the night on the living room floor, giggling and making other noise well into the night. They're shown here after opening presents.

One present was a Monster High doll -- Ann had two already -- which are also pictured above. Monster High is a television show that I tried to sit through once, but I couldn't make it. I hear that it's popular among little girls, and who knows, maybe unmarried men in their 20s, some of whom have unaccountable tastes in entertainment.

Pointing Out the Pointers

Early last week, Ann asked me to go outside with her and point out some stars. She'd been studying the sky in school. It was one of the clear but cold nights just before we actually got snow around here, but I was only too happy to oblige. The sky's not very dark in the suburbs, but dark enough for me to show her some basic items, including the way that the easy-to-identify Big Dipper and Cassiopeia appear to circle the North Star tightly.

After we went inside, she said down and drew this. Not for school, just because she wanted to.

Spot-on, except for the minor detail that the Pointers actually refer to Dubhe (α) and Merak (β) at the edge of the Big Dipper's bowl, not Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper itself. I showed her that when you draw a line from Merak to Dubhe and beyond, it will point to Polaris (without bothering with the stars' formal names; I never can remember which is which, anyway). It's unlikely that she'll ever forget how to find the North Star.

This evening the sky was layered with high thin clouds, but when I went out to the garage I could still see a thin-crescent setting Moon (new moon was yesterday), a bright Venus above that, and a less bright but still visible Jupiter high in the southern sky. I went inside and asked the girls to come look at the sky. Lilly didn't want to, citing the cold (only about freezing), but Ann went. The Moon, she said, looked like a smiley face.

Winterlude

Sure enough, we had a "snow event" today. Not a dramatic blizzard, just a steady snowfall starting at about 9 a.m. and continuing lightly even now. It's adding up, but not enough to impede ground travel that much. I ducked outside for a moment at about 3 p.m. for the customary first-snow snapshot. This was the view from the back door, looking roughly southwest.

We're ready for it. Ann was ready for it weeks ago, often sporting the cap she got for Christmas.

Basic Trash-Can Policy

Near freezing temps expected for tomorrow, and maybe a little snow. We shall see.

"Why are you going slow?" Ann asked me not from the back seat long ago, as I was backing out of the driveway. Usually it's a time for proceeding slowly, but at that moment I also didn't want to hit my full trash cans, which I leave next to the curb, near where the driveway means the street.

"I don't want to hit the trash cans," I told her.

"Oh. So it's your policy not to run over the trash cans."

Where did she pick up that turn of phrase? But yes, I had to agree that it's my policy not to run over my own trash cans.

Teeth & Bones

There will come a time when I see very little children's TV programming, maybe none if I play my cards right. Even now I don't see all that much, but enough to be amazed occasionally at some toy or other I'd never heard of. Such as Dr. Drill & Fill, a Play-Doh-based toy that simulates dentistry. That's a real toy? People really buy that for their children, even those who haven't expressed a desire to grow up and practice dentistry?

Maybe there's a market for this toy among the most demented kids, who like to re-enact scenes like this.

Ann brought home some mouse bones today. This was unexpected. She told me that the bones were created when an owl swallowed a mouse whole, digesting the good-and-soft parts, but later bringing the bones and fur up again. I'm not sure exactly where the school got these bones and pellets -- I like to imagine that the process involves a friendly farmer who owns a large barn staffed with hungry owls, and who cleans the residue and brings it to Ann's school for science class.

Ann's share is in a small clear-plastic Solo cup with a lid. Honestly, the pellets aren't that much to look at -- like fuzzballs that a vacuum picks up. But the bones are interesting. She picked them out of the cup and showed them to me: a skull, a jaw bone, some leg bones. "It's interesting and particular," she said.

Item From the Past: Lilly's First Jack o' Lantern

We got around to creating a jack o' lantern this evening. Ann drew a design on the pumpkin, then I carved the top off. I insisted that she remove most of the pumpkin seeds and slimy orange entrails. I'm tired of that task, and I also wanted a visceral Halloween memory for her. Then I cut some more holes.

I would put it outside tonight with a candle, but it's an intensely windy and wet night out there, so it can go out on Halloween itself.

Lilly said that she wanted to help with this year's carving, but when the time came, she didn't bother. When Lilly was just a few weeks short of her first birthday in 1998, I took a picture of her examining a curious orange orb.

Later, I put the jack o' lantern on our front porch.

Later still, squirrels -- or very small minions of Beelzebub -- feasted on it, making it more frightful.

Burn!

The main event for us at the recent fire department open house were the room burns. I'll bet a lot of other people at the event felt the same way. Firefighters set up two three-sided "rooms" built of plywood and furnished with (no doubt) donated items. One room had an automatic sprinkler system installed. But I didn't take any pictures of that one, since the efficient dowsing of a room fire isn't nearly as photogenic as an out-of-control fire.

So without further ado, up goes the unprotected room. It burned for about three minutes.

The demonstration also completely demolished the dangerous Hollywood myth that you can see what you're doing in a burning building without special equipment. A pair of firemen in full turnout gear and SCBAs (self-contained breathing apparatuses) then put the raging fire out in about two minutes.

Ann left the open house with some public safety tchotchkes.

Her favorite was a police backscratcher, pictured here.

Rollover Test Dummies in Action

This is National Fire Prevention Week, per presidential proclamation, as the week including October 9 has been since the Coolidge administration, though President Wilson inked a National Fire Prevention Day proclamation in 1920. But fire's serious business, so it soon got a whole week.

Driving by a local fire station recently, I spotted "Open House" on its marquis. The hours indicated right then. I had to see that, so I turned around. Ann was the only other person with me at that moment, and she whined about the prospect of not getting home for a while, but eventually she decided to humor her dad. Later, she admitted that she'd had a great time.

"Don't say I told you so," she said. So I didn't. But I'd known she would like it, and I had told her so.

State and local police were participating in the open house too. Before the fire department did its demonstration, more about which later, we saw this device in action.

It resembles a state police truck and simulates rollover accidents. The passenger cabin rotates, as if on a spit. Dummy passengers without seatbelts spill out and suffer gross bodily harm or death. Dummies with belts stay put.

It's a fine demonstration that only dummies don't wear seatbelts.

Thursday Scraps

Windy night out there. Not a dark and stormy night, particularly, just dark and windy enough to knock more leaves off the trees, along with small branches. Green's still the majority foliage, but yellow and brown are expanding aggressively. The tree across the street from my front yard -- which I see daily from my window, here at the word mill -- has gone flush yellow in a matter of days.

The other day Ann said that she participated in a school assembly about bullying. I think this is something that pedagogues have cooked up recently, since I don't remember Lilly attending such an event five or so years ago, but then again that's the kind of thing I forget. Anyway, it was all I could do not to say something along the lines of, "You mean an assembly to help bullies improve their techniques?"

Mocking aside, I doubt that such well-intentioned anti-bullying assemblies have much effect, at least on bullies. Who among the kids will think, "Ah, I've been such a bully. Think I'll turn over a new leaf." Who considers himself a bully?

On the other hand, I remember a low-intensity bully in elementary school, a strapping fellow named David who wasn't consistently a jerk but who had his ugly moments. One day in the fourth or fifth grade, he said -- using that exact phrase above -- "I'm turning over a new leaf. I'm going to be nice." And he did it. A pretty rare transformation, now that I think about it. But I don't think his inspiration was a school assembly.

I watched part of The Big Chill on TV the other day, first time I'd seen it since I caught it at a dollar (two-dollar?) second-run theater in Memphis in late 1983. Before watching it this week, I vaguely remembered thinking it was an entertaining ensemble movie that had been lacquered with an irritating and Hollywood-contrived social message pandering to the vanities of people born right after World War II. After seeing it again, I still agree with my 1983 assessment.

Maybe I should see The Return of the Secaucus 7 again. I don't remember much about it either, except that it was an entertaining ensemble movie without much of an irritating social message, or characters who were ridiculously successful in their mid-30s.

I also saw Secretariat recently. It's a well-made, feel-good horse movie, and a good example of Disney craftsmanship. The movie also reminded me of Secretariat's intense fame in 1973. Like a lot of people without much previous interest in thoroughbred racing, I watched him on television as he won the Belmont and thus the Triple Crown. The movie encourages you to cheer for Secretariat and his plucky owner, of course, but I felt a little bad for Sham, the horse Secretariat famously bested. Clearly a great three-year-old, but one completely overshadowed by an even better horse.

Yuriko's birthday was earlier this month. She didn't want a cake, but custard-and-fruit creations from a bakery in Arlington Heights.

Boy, were they good.

The Wit & Wisdom of Foghorn Leghorn

A chill enveloped northern Illinois today. Mild compared to the arctic waves inevitably coming in future months, but still a sizable drop compared with Sunday or Monday. Winter's in his dressing room, getting ready for his big show.

A virus has blown through as well -- only through our house, as far as I'm concerned. Ann stayed home today with a mid-level cold. Treatment: bed rest, fluids, cartoons. I was feeling it too, but maybe my more experienced immune system held it off better. I sneezed and blew my nose from time to time, but I still filed the stories I need to file.

I also watched a few cartoons with her. One was "Strangled Eggs," a late (1961) Foghorn Leghorn vehicle. Been a while since I've seen any of those. During my major cartoon-watching years, Foghorn Leghorn was a Warner-stable favorite of mine. He still is. I can appreciate him better now, in fact. Such lines as these (from "Strangled Eggs") would have meant little to me at Ann's age:

"Bare, I say, bare as a cooch dancer's midriff."

(Said as he looks at his empty cupboard. I had to look up that old slang.)

"I got, I say, I got this boy as fidgety as a bubble dancer with a slow leak."

(More burlesque. What don't we know about Foghorn Leghorn?)

"My pappy used to say, 'Shoemaker, stick to your last.' And this is my last!"

(Said as he failed to get what he wanted, right at the end of the cartoon.)

How Places Get to Be Iconic

I flatter myself that I don't make a lot of impulse buys, but there's only so much accuracy in that notion. Recently I came home with Landmarks, a set of A+ brand flash cards. Only $1 at a certain big box retailer, which is a steep discount off the list price of $2.95 -- a sum I wouldn't have paid. The sense that you're getting a deal is an important factor in impulse purchases.

Still, I'm out a dollar, so what did I get for it? Thirty-six flash cards picturing famed places around the world. Distributed by Dalmatian Press of Franklin, Tenn. (a suburb of Nashville) but -- I love the precision of the label, right on the box -- "Printed in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China."

Each card features a picture on one side with no description. The other side has the name of the place and a canned description. Wherever it was printed, I assume that Dalmatian Press created the deck, so American landmarks are heavily represented: 11 of the 36 are fully within the United States, with one more, Niagara Falls, being shared with Canada. Nine are in Europe, six are in Asia, and three are in Africa, and I'm counting the Suez Canal as Africa. Three are also in South America, if you count the Moai of Easter Island, and I do. Two are in Australia and one is in Mexico -- count that as North America.

How many did I recognize without looking? The places are so iconic that it wasn't that hard. I suppose that repeated exposure is the real secret of achieving iconic status (or clichéd status, take your pick). Anyway, there were only two that I couldn't name: Kuwait City Towers, because -- what's it doing on this list? Also, Diamond Head on Oahu, because I'd never seen it from that particular angle. It looks like it could be any number of islands in a warm climate. I didn't recognize the Suez Canal immediately, but was able to guess correctly. Likewise with a card with shot of Kilimanjaro.

I've seen 20 of the 36 sites in person, probably because it's weighed so heavily in favor of U.S. sites -- I've been to all of them. I could have taken the pictures myself except for that oddball shot of Diamond Head.

But the cards aren't really for my edification. I showed them one at a time to Ann, then Lilly. They showed age-appropriate familiarity. Ann didn't know many names, except for the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. She said she recognized more by sight than that, however, such as the Alamo, Mount Rushmore, the Gateway Arch, the White House, Big Ben and the Pyramids of Giza. Except for the Alamo and the Gateway Arch, which she has seen within the last few years, I figure she's seen the others on cartoons or other TV shows.

Lilly knew more places, both recognition and by name, though I didn't keep count. Yet for a fair number of them, the cards were clearly an introduction to the place for her -- the likes of Angkor Wat, Ayers Rock, Christ the Redeemer in Rio, the Dome of the Rock, Hoover Dam, Kilimanjaro, Machu Picchu, the Moai, Petra, St. Basil's, St. Peter's and the Sydney Opera House.

I could go on about this, such as wondering where some of the omitted iconic places are (Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City, the French Quarter of New Orleans, the Grand Coulee Dam, the Panama Canal, Angel Falls, the Brandenburg Gate, the Arc de Triomphe, Pompeii, the strange manmade islands of Dubai, Graceland, etc., etc.) but I have work to do. Still, for all the food for thought we got, I'd say my dollar was well spent.

Unstructured Summer Days

No organized activities for my children this summer, except for the sporadic times I dropped Ann off at a park district games-and-swimming program that ran from early June until last week. It involved low fees and no commitment, so barely counted as organized. But the girls are entertaining themselves. Too much Wii, maybe, but that's just the opinion of someone whose most recent video game interests were Space Wars, Space Invaders, Galaxian, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.

Other activities have surfaced for them as the summer goes on. Yesterday Ann took a sudden interest in buoyancy, filling up a large metal bowl with water and testing objects to see if they would float. When her search for new objects brought her into my office, I suggested she take notes of what floated and what didn't. So she did, on a single post-it note. I have it in front of me now.

Floats: an aluminum-foil boat, a rubber ball, six peanuts in their shells wrapped in plastic wrap, Lego pieces, pencils and some other small plastic items. Does Not Float: all coins tested, even aluminum ones, a Spongebob plastic figure, a plastic ring, a rubber ring, two metal rings, a paper clip and something that I can't decipher that looks like "small moron," though I don't think that's the correct reading.

Lately Lilly has been using cake mixes to make various cakes, topped with icing she makes from recipes she finds on the Internet, along with improvisation. She's been making some good stuff, too. One of her icings included sugar, confectioners sugar, butter, cocoa powder and Mexican chocolate -- that last one was added to the recipe, I think -- and boy was it good. She's promising other forays into cooking in the coming days, such as fried chicken for dinner using a select assortment of seasonings in the batter. I expect that'll be tasty as well.

Santa in June

"Daddy, is Santa Claus real? Or do parents give presents and say it was Santa Claus?"

That came out of the blue today, at least as far as I was concerned, but maybe Ann had heard something about the subject on TV.

"What do you think?" I asked, switching to Jesuit mode.

"I think it's the parents."

"You're right. You're old enough to know that now."

That was pretty much it. No fuss about the movement of Santa Claus from literal to figurative. Lilly had been much the same way, except she waited until right after Christmas one year to ask, probably in case the jolly old elf turned out to be real after all.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Last night saw the beginning of an all-night downpour, which was the vanguard of cool air. Today would have been a fine day in April.

In my five decades, I've been able to collect minor bits of wisdom to pass along to later generations. Such as today, when I was making something for Ann to eat. She looked at the box and said, "It looks better on the box."

"Yes, that's just advertising," I answered. "It always looks better on the box. But the food itself always tastes better than the box."