Constructing Christmas. OR: Where the %%$^& is the little brown fencepost?

"Maybe we should just put it together now, and have them out under the tree for her when she wakes up tomorrow morning."  I suggested to my wife after we put my daughter to bed on Christmas eve, as I looked at the box that contained the Playmobil Wildlife Play Station

Fiona had received the Playmobil Animal Nursery  the weekend before as an early christmas present from a family member,  and the insanity of IT'S assembly was still fresh in my head.

"No, she won't have as many to open then."  My wife answered.
"She loves opening them."

And she does.  And more specifically to the story, she did.   She loved opening everything Christmas morning.
What little kid doesn't?

The problem is, we ended up spending 10 minutes opening presents, and AT LEAST two hours putting them together.

The box states that the set comes with a bazillion pieces, and that sounds pretty impressive.   And it truly IS impressive, but not QUITE as cool as it sounds.

Because when  you open it, you  find out that the worlds smallest flashlight is two pieces; the worlds smallest jar is two pieces; every VEGETABLE is two pieces; a tree is at least five pieces, the little straps for the binoculars and camera are each their own piece, and the structure itself... yikes.
And yikes again.

It came with a sheet of stickers, so you could label the small pieces if you wanted, to make them look more "real".
Wonder if each sticker counted as a piece?


And while the end result is sturdy and looks great, was it really necessary to make the product so that every little piece of the structure is... a separate piece?

the instructions might as well have read:

"Here's a wall, the wall has space for a window and a door.   We could have made it so that the window and the door are framed already,  but... no.  Those are separate pieces.
So here's the wall with holes, now insert the frames into the holes, now insert the window into the window frame into the window hole, and NOW the door into the door frame into the door hole...."

And the packaging of the bazillion separate pieces left a bit to be desired, too.

"Honey, do you know which of the eight bags of randomly thrown together pieces holds that small dark brown fence post?  I can't finish the railing without it! No, not the bigger, lighter brown one, I already found IT - it was in the bag with the zebra, the rifle, one of the tree pieces, two of the carrot tops and the cage padlock...."

All while your child's standing there, with two cheetah cubs in her hand, asking you if she can play with it yet.

"Not yet, darlin'.   I have to snap the cot into the side wall into the front wall into the floor...."

Can I put the monkey in the cage?  The monkey really needs to go in the cage!

"Well as soon as I put the four pieces of cage together, and then attach it to the underside of the floor of the stilt house, and then connect the house to the top of the floor ...."

And the pieces don't just snap together.  Nope.  That would be crazy.

Instead, they provide you with bags of little, tiny connectors of various colors, and a little tool designed only to insert the connectors into their respective holes on each piece so that you can in turn connect that piece to another piece....  And of COURSE each color connector's specific to various pieces, because having all connections being the same size is, well.. just plain silly, I guess.

And yikes again.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter, as she loves the toys, and has played with them a lot over the last  couple of days.  

How life changes

Even though I’ve been at it now for awhile, I still find myself marveling at how my life’s changed in the last few years, due mostly to the arrival and continued presence of my daughter.

Today, it was a trip to Target on my lunch hour.
A few last minute Christmas baking items, mostly. But there were a couple of other things. After all the baking goods were in the cart,  I found myself looking at wrapping paper, because presents from Santa cannot be wrapped with same paper as presents from mom and dad.
Duh!
 And I’m looking at all of this wrapping paper, trying to think about what kind of paper the elves would use to wrap presents.
 Probably not the CARS2 paper, doubtful they’d use Toy Story or Tinkerbell themed paper… Would they use paper that said “Ho Ho Ho” on it?
Blue wrapping paper? Would they even CONSIDER using blue paper?

WHAT IF I PICK THE WRONG PAPER AND END UP RUINING SANTA CLAUS FOR MY DAUGHTER????
 This is a serious dilemma, my friends. And I laughed aloud at myself for spending so much time on it, startling the two older ladies who were standing nearby, conversing in polish, probably about what kind of wrapping paper they use at the North Pole.

 I went with a pattern that’s reminiscent of a candy cane, by the way. Red and white strips, mostly, with a little thread of green mixed in.

On the heels of the wrapping paper conundrum, I found myself looking at shoes for little girls. Right up until the mother of the little girl started screaming for security, and reaching for the can of leftover pepper spray she had in her purse, forgotten there since she finished up her shopping at 5:30am on Black Friday….

 Sorry, I drifted off there… Where was I?
 Oh! Shoes for little girls!

 See, Fiona has a light blue and white dress that we’re hoping makes it through Christmas. It's made it through a couple of holiday functions already, and..we're hopeful.
However, there was an incident yesterday, which forced us to dispose of her silver, sparkly shoes that went with that dress.
"But you can’t have a Christmas dress without the appropriate shoes!" some of you are saying.
I know, or more accurately, I've been told.

So I was standing in the little girl shoe aisle, looking for a pair of sparkly silver shoes in size 10, to ensure proper accessorizing on the part of my four year old daughter.
And I found just the pair, and spent several more minutes going through all the rows of boxes, trying unsuccessfully to find them in size 10.

Without exaggeration, I spent less time shopping for the last fishing pole I purchased.

 Yesterday, it was an off-handed comment I overheard a mom say, as my daughter told Santa what was on her Christmas list.
 Earlier in the morning, my wife relayed a story to me, about friends of ours shopping for or with their four year daughter. If I have the story right, she wanted, or had picked out, a car related toy of some kind.
 She was pretty excited about it.
 And the woman at the check out voiced surprise at it, surely she didn’t want the car related toy.
 (Inferred – that’s for boys.)
 And we were indignant on their behalf.

Fast forward a bit, we were at Brunch with Santa, at the Brookfield Zoo, a “My, how life changes" moment in and of itself.
Fiona’s telling Santa that she wants a drum for Christmas.
The woman standing next to me, likely not knowing I was Fiona’s dad, exclaims: “A drum? The little girl wants a drum?!?!?” And I was ready to throw down, right in front of Santa. I was gonna give this complete stranger a lecture about NOT being ignorant and forcing outdated gender expectations on your…. Blah blah blah blah. I didn’t, of course. Santa was watching.
 And a few moments later, my daughter got sick and hastened our exit.

 But oh, how life changes...

Spring Forward, Fall Back - Part 2

Daylight savings, after not meaning much at all to you for the first 18 years of your life, can become more of an issue, real or imagined, around the time you dip your toe into the murky stream of adulthood.

You’ve a bit more control of your own life and schedule, and the twice a year clock manipulation becomes part of that.

Of course, when you’re 18, and away from home for the first time, it takes the form of:

A) Dude! We fall back this weekend!
B) Uh, we tend to fall every weekend.

A) I said “fall back” not fall down.
B) Oh. So what’s the big deal?

A) An extra hour of partying!
B) Yeah, like we party to some kind of schedule…

End of discussion.

So it SOUNDS like a big, cool deal, but in reality – it amounts to nothing.
This does not, however, keep 1000’s of youth from using it as an excuse to throw a party, every fall.
Cuz a THEME for a party makes it just a bit more fun, for some reason, than a party thrown for no stated reason.

A couple years later, you’re old enough to go to bars. Then, and perhaps ONLY then, does falling back actually become an issue of note.

See, because the bars really DO demand you party on some kind of schedule, and 1am becoming your 2nd midnight of the evening means an extra hour of bar time.
Finally, FINALLY falling back MEANS… something.
Sort of.

IF you decide to go out that night.

Sidenote: I worked in a bar for awhile, after college. Falling back meant listening to an extra hour of drunk karoake performances, while getting in an extra hour of total immersion in clouds of cigarette smoke. Oh, and an extra $6, before taxes.
Jivin’.

But once you settle down in a life a bit, falling back and springing forward goes back to meaning… nothing, when you get right down to it.
At least, nothing after you’ve changed your smoke alarm batteries and corrected the time on all the clocks in your house, that is.

Unless you have kids.

Then it’s a topic of conversation amongst parents, how to handle the time change, should you start adjusting bedtimes for the big one hour of sleep a few days in advance, or not?
I’m guilty of this too, even though, when you get right down to it –

IT’S ONE FREAKIN’ HOUR.

And the extra time you feel you’re getting in the morning, you’re going to want to give back by 7pm that evening, when you realize it’s not actually the little nipper’s bedtime anymore, even though it really, REALLY feels like it should be, to you.


Really? It’s only 7:05? REALLY????
Damn.

And a couple mornings later, everything’s shifted back to the clock schedule you were used to before last Sunday morning, and life moves on, unchanged.

So to sum up: Thanks, New Zealand Bug Boy, for… a whole lot of not much.


The “likes to use his imagination” part of me wishes for more.

Springing forward should mean that it’s 2am all the sudden, and there’s a gap in your life that you can’t fill in.
Whatever you’re talking about at 1am… well forget about it, it’s 2am now, and your life moved an hour forward without you.

Perhaps best illustrated in some edgy indy movie where a dozen people’s lives intersect in that missing hour, and we spend the entire movie piecing it together.

“How’d I end up in Jail with half my goatee shaved off, wearing a clown outfit? Last thing I remember it was a few minutes before 1am, and…. Uh oh.”

Meanwhile, across town, a clown wakes up naked in his car, with a woman’s bowling ball next to him on the passenger seat…


Falling back should have some youthful rom-com / coming of age feel to it.

An extra hour to win the girl, fix the problem, fall in love with your spouse all over again, come to some life decisions…whatever. You wake up the next morning somehow better and more self actualized for the extra hour you were given, optimistic about the future and the person sitting across from you drinking diner coffee.
An upbeat but unmemorable modern rock song begins to play as the camera pans out of the diner, showing a fresh, clean day starting, before it fades to black and credits roll.

Not realistic, probably. Hard to pull off in real life, year after year.

Except for maybe the diner coffee.

Spring Forward, Fall Back - do the hokey pokey and you shake it all about...

So, it happened.

This past Sunday morning, early.
All the Sudden, with little fanfare, the earth reversed it’s rotation, and we all went back in time one hour.

What’s that? The earth didn’t actually reverse it’s rotation? It’s just an arbitrary executive decision that decrees we move our clocks backwards once a year, and then forward six months later?
(Or should that be …our clocks forward once a year, and then backwards six months later? Chicken, or egg?)

Seriously? What’s next, mis-matched sock day every Wednesday, for the entire free world? No meat on Fridays depending on ones’ religious affiliation?

Oh, wait. We already did the no meat thing….The only good that came of THAT was the invention of the Fish Fry.


Decided to spend two minutes researching the origin and logic of DST.

Kinda interesting, actually.


(DST) is the practice of temporarily advancing clocks during the summertime so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn.[7] Modern DST was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson.[8] Many countries have used it since then; details vary by location and change occasionally.
The practice has been both praised and criticized.[7] Adding daylight to afternoons benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours,[9] but causes problems for farming, evening entertainment and other occupations tied to the sun.[10][


George Vernon Hudson was a shift worker in New Zealand, and liked collecting bugs after work, so figured if there was more daylight hours AFTER he got off – more bug collecting!

And in the time before electricity, you could save a lot on candles and coal if you didn’t waste any sunlight by, say, sleeping or other frivolous activity.

Anyhow, it's kind of a big deal, every year. Set those clocks forward, change that smoke alarm battery, set those clocks back, change that smoke alarm battery....

Sidenote - my smoke alarm batteries last YEARS. Just sayin'...

(Another sidenote – when they DO start to fail, it’s always at 3am. When we wake up because of some irritating beeping noise that we then have to track down, so we can remove the battery, and hope to remember to install a new one, whenever we get around to buying some…..)

I've been thinking about it the last little bit, and have to say - whatever.

As a child, it had little meaning to me. We weren't allowed to watch TV on sunday mornings, not there was anything on in the days of pre-cable anyhow. Not like we were at risk of missing our favorite show at 8am on a Sunday morning…

Springing forward meant that you noticed the folks who forgot to do so, when they walked into church 45 minutes after services began.
Nothing else really to it.
You woke up, you ate breakfast, you spent the day, you went to bed - remarkably similar to every other sunday.

Falling backward - same thing, only no parade of the embarrassed at mass.

As a teenager - really, same deal. Maybe you felt a bit more rushed on sunday morning, when we sprang forward. falling backward had no consequences.


It became a bigger deal (good or bad), or in some cases a handy excuse, at the onset of adulthood.

More on that next time, as this is very long already, and I fear I’ve already lost half of you…..

Three passports, a couple of visas, I don’t even know my real name...

So, I’ve been traveling a bit, on business. Not unusual for people to do this, but I’ve traveled more on business in the last 8 days, then I did in 5 years at my previous job.

And, should anyone from my work stumble across this, I want to state for the record that I AM grateful for the opportunity.

I’m a numbers guy, so, here are some numbers

In the last eight days, not counting the two days I was home between trips, I have:

Set foot in three states and two provinces. And set foot in two more, on one of the afternoons I was actually in town.

- Slept (very) poorly in one state and two different provinces
- Coincidentally, made hotel room coffee, tasted it, and then promptly discarded it, in one state and two different provinces
- Ate dinner in 2 states and two provinces. And ate well, thank you very much.
- Crossed the international border 4 times in 24 hours.
- Ate five hotel breakfasts. Complimentary breakfasts… not good as a rule. But probably won’t kill you.
- Missed three lunches altogether because of flight schedules
- Watched aprox. 6 hours of Canadian news on TV.
(I love Canadian news channels. They’re so much… quieter and calm than US news channels. And they assume you are relatively intelligent and knowledgeable. Crazy.)
- Attended 2.5 days of meetings (when you add ‘em all together); one plant tour; and got to drive a golf cart around a grain port located on the St. Lawrence River.
- Missed 3 nights of reading to my daughter, and two nights of walking my dog.
(I didn’t actually MISS the dogwalks…)
- Been to the gym exactly 0 times.
- Drank three different, very good beers, brewed in two different provinces, and Pennsylvania. (Yay, Yeungling!)
- Ridden in four hired cars, four taxi cabs and two rental cars.
- Made countless hours of polite conversation with folks I don’t know all that well.

So, those are the numbers, and I’ve friends who travel for business a lot, and they would not be impressed with these numbers. But I am. And I’m exhausted.

Let’s add the human element, the uniquely me voice to the numbers, in attempt to flesh out the tale a bit.

As you drive east out of Ogdensburg, NY, just past the Lowes, you see a road sign. It lets you know that you can turn left, to enter Canada, or go straight, to go to… a psychiatric hospital.
I’m not making this up.
We, logically, turned left.
At the Canadian Customs booth, the agent asked us why we were crossing into Canada today.
“Duh, because we didn’t want to go to the psych hospital. I think that would be obvious, officer Doo-Right!”

I didn’t actually say this to him. They don’t have much sense of humor, customs and border patrol agents. And honestly, I wouldn’t want them to.

Driving east on the 401, right after hotel breakfast #2, I saw, in the tall grass by the side of the highway, a donkey. I’ve seen deer before, fox, coyote, turkeys, woodchucks… this was my first donkey.
Coincidentally, there was a truck with a livestock trailer parked on the shoulder, and a number of harried looking individuals in the tall grass behind the donkey, and not gaining very fast.

I walked into the restaurant where we were all to meet for dinner the first night, and realized that I had eaten in this very restaurant, almost exactly seven years earlier, when in the 1000 Islands area on vacation. Pub food has given way to upscale Italian. By the end of that evening, the guy who was running the place was giving us all lessons on different ways to decoratively fold napkins.

1000 Island region – love it! Read my previous blog post for more about it.

Want fun? Have 9 Americans walk into a tiny, very expensive French restaurant in PQ, just over the river from Ottawa, ON, at the end of a long road trip, and have them decide to unwind, with many glasses of wine, beer, and apple cider martinis. If you’re lucky, you’ll have your back to the wall, and your face to the room, and you can watch snooty French people shoot little snooty French daggers out of their eyes at the backs of the increasingly loud people sitting across the table from you.
Hi, bon jour! We’re leaving your country tomorrow. Lighten up.” He says, followed up by an outrageous French accented laugh.

I walked around the nation’s capital after my conference ended today. Never been in DC before. My coworkers had the capital building and the white house all mixed together in their heads. They don’t tolerate dissenters much, and just about had ME convinced I was wrong, until I came across the map sign showing all the points of interest. Including of course the White House, which was blocks away from the “You are here” arrow in the map.
Check AND mate.

And now I’m home, unpacked, and eagerly awaiting the return of my wife and daughter from some pre-school function. My dog gave me 60 seconds of unbridled excitement upon seeing me, then quickly went back to eating her food, and laying on my couch.

My daughter will walk in the door soon, get really, touchingly excited to see me, and then start searching for the white plastic bag that signifies that daddy brought her home a “surprise.” Soon after, I will have the dog drag me around outside for a few blocks, come back, and fall into bed……
Cus it’s a work day tomorrow, and a boy needs his sleep.

One Foot Square and One Live Tree

Spent the last few days in Canada and New York, bouncing back and forth across the border on business.

I spent almost the entire time within a mile or two of the border, along the St. Lawrence Seaway, in the 1000 Island region.

I had the pleasure of spending a little time here in the past, on a vacation, and remember being dazzled by the beauty of the area. It ranks very high on my “If I didn’t have to work for a living I’d live here” list.

This go ‘round, my Canadian counterpart was nice enough to give me a bit of background information on the region.

For a piece of land to qualify as an island, in the 1000 Island region, the following criteria must be met.

1. It must be above water, 365 days a year. 366 days a year during leap years.
(This is specified, should the piece of land think it’s going to be able to submerge itself for one day during a leap year, due to some governmental loophole. Nope.)

2. It must be at least one foot square
3. It must have one live tree

Something about these very simple, likely very old guidelines, really tickled me.

One square foot and one tree…. Awesome.

And as we drove back and forth along the Promenade Heritage Parkway (look at a map, people!), I had to laugh as I saw many tiny lumps of land sticking out of the river, with one very small tree on each. No wonder they claim nearly 1800 islands in total.
Got a pontoon boat, a shovel, and a greenhouse nearby? Let’s go make 12 more islands today…

I want that job. I want to be the government employee who’s responsible for motoring up and down the river, counting islands. A tape measure and a boat is all I’d need. Stop, measure, make sure the tree’s still alive… Check, check and… off we go.

“How was work today, sweetie?”
“I…love...my…job…so…much…..” he answers, holding up the bag of fresh walleye, caught while trolling between the islands he had to measure that day.

You can’t be too careful, because trees do die, and ground erodes. All the sudden, your private island residence… isn’t.

“Tree’s looking a bit sickly, and the guy who counts islands is due to drop by tomorrow. Shit! We’ve some planting to do RIGHT NOW.” And off you go in your boat, in rain and 40 degree weather, to the mainland, where you get in your car and drive to whatever greenhouse may be open on a sunday, to buy whatever tree's available...

A house and a boat house and a tree and the nearest neighbor’s 500 yards of river away from you. AND A great view no matter what window you look out.
Sounds like heaven.

As long as you keep that tree alive.

Purloined sirloin

The man’s doorbell rang while he and his family were eating dinner last night.

His dog barked, of course.
The man answered the door.

He sees a younger guy, probably late 20's, in a t-shirt, shorts and boots, standing in his front yard, about 8 feet back from the front steps, staring at the lawn.

He looked up when the man came to the door, but made no effort to come back up the stairs.

The man stood there and waited, staring at his visitor, making no effort to open the door.
He already knew he didn’t want to talk to the gentleman standing in his yard.

Finally, after confirming that his dog was secured, he opened the door.

The visitor made no effort to come back up the stairs, so the man had to practically yell to converse with his visitor.

“You rang my doorbell?”

And without introducing himself, the visitor jumped right in with..

"I, uh… I work for a distribution company in the loop and... Uh.... You like meat?"
"Do I like meat??"

"You know, do a lot of grilling, stuff like that?"

WTF???

"No." The man answered honestly.

"C'mon, you cook up steaks, burgers?"

"No, we're vegetarians."
(Actually 2/3 accurate, the man’s wife and daughter are vegetarians)

"Oh, bullshit!!! your nose is growing!"

REALLY??? Good sales technique there, sparky. You must have taken classes.

"No bullshit."

“What about seafood, fish and shrimp?”

The man thought about all the times he’d ask his wife if he could buy a BB gun, and she said no…

“You’re actually interrupting my dinner. We’re having beans and rice and vegetables.”

"Seriously?"


The man looked up and down the block, saw a white delivery van parked two doors down on the street, It was obvious that the gentleman on his lawn, the one not making eye contact and behaving in an aggressive manner, was going door to door, trying to sell (assumedly) stolen meat.

The man wished he had a sprinkler system, with a remote starter.
Or a dog he trusted to NOT run off.

He had always wanted to be able to say “Release the Hounds!” like Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons, and then… actually have hounds released. Maybe someday…

"Seroiusly.” The man answered, showing great restraint.

“And it's getting cold."

"Fair enough."

And the man shut the door on him, and went back to his now cold dinner.

Should he have called the police? Behaved less civilly toward the goofball in his front yard? He wasn't sure.

But he was pretty sure he didn't want to buy meat out of the back of some random guy's van....