Category: stories

By my calculations 27 seconds is very nearly exactly 1% of my commute every morning.

This morning that 27 seconds was a make-it-or-break-it 1%. Well maybe it isn’t as black and white as all that but I was certainly lucky that it wasn’t a break-it 1%.

The roads were bare (mostly) last night. The snow fell to the tune of 2 inches early in the morning. I thought I knew my limits. I thought I could control my car.

I thought wrong.As I approached the steepest part of the incline, leading to the main artery outside of Talbot’s neighborhood, I lost traction.

I pumped the breaks
__no good.
I caught traction
__overall confidence in my abilities soared, reaching all time highs.
I lost it again, this time for good
__overall confidence in my abilities crashed and burned, big time.

As the seconds expanded exponentially into minutes* I slid interminably through the stop sign, I thought about releasing the brakes and just turning with the road. Not sure if I ever did. If I did it didn’t work.

Whew, no cars coming in the near lane. (still sliding, approaching minute 18)
__ Whoa, that is a mighty large vehicle approaching in the far lane
__ OK, that mighty large vehicle is slightly smaller than a train
__ and is in fact a bus.

Minute 24. I come to a rest broadside against the lane of previously observed onrushing bus.
Minute 25. I consider just waiting it out, quickly reconsider and…
Minute 26. I throw it into reverse and amazingly, having much tractiones on the flat, well traveled artery, back “around the corner” facing the wrong way in the near lane.
Minute 27. The bus and his blue Volvo wingman pass my previously held position. All in a days work.

I am happy because
__ bus drivers tend not to over-drive conditions and
__ I was not 1% longer taking out the garbage this morning
__ I didn’t get to add PT (or any other more personal bits) to my ‘things I have broken’ category.

* This expansion of time during moments like these is utterly explainable. It is the balancing, conservation-of-energy-like, effect in direct opposition to ‘time flies when you are having fun‘. This was definitely not fun and therefore 27 seconds takes much much longer.

So this was a pretty bad one eh?

I have power now, we were out for about 22 hours and in that time we found out the following.
Our house gets cold pretty quickly, by the 20 hour mark we were down to 55F. We normally keep the house between 68-70F.
Despite the gas powered hot water heater, we didn’t have it. I will have to figure out why that is in the coming days.
Despite the gas fireplace in the basement, we couldn’t use it. It has an electric component (and a pilot light too?) that didn’t allow it to start. I will figure that one out soon as well.
Our neighborhood is down about 6-8 trees. The neighbors lost a 40-50 foot spruce at the 20 foot level. Impressive that it just snapped right in half and landed in their driveway. No discernible damage.

I haven’t looked at my roof closely yet, suppose I should, to see if any shingles are missing. Seems okay.

We did get some water coming into Abby’s playhouse early on Thursday night, I think it was from the rain pounding against the front door and being driven between the door jamb and the floor. Not sure if I am going to figure that one out soon.

Oh yeah, and our regular wood burning fireplace sucks more heat out of the house than it gives off, by a lot. We could feel the air rushing past our faces sucking out the fireplace. And the flu level is open all the way or closed all the way, I can’t meter it’s flow to try and get just the smoke but not the rest of the house.

You can see the tree we built our treehouse in when we were kids here on the rentonkayaker blog here. It didn’t make it this year.
RentonKayaker was almost RentonKayakless on this day.

I hope you have all weathered this event well and have just good stories, rather than bad news.
—–
UPDATE: I fixed the broken link on RentonKayaker blog above.

If you ever feel like dropping off the planet for about four days, do I have the package for you.

The Package
It starts quickly with a flash weight-loss program, you can have your choice of one end or two. It WILL be one or the other, or both.

Rinse and repeat for 8 hours.

Follow that up with 6 hours of fever and chills with an occasional foray into the challenges of the first 8 hours followed closely by 36 hours of headache and energy levels on par with finally delivering your first child.

The Experience
4AM Thursday, Angela woke me up

I need you to stay home from work today.

I did, and saw her disappear, camouflaged against the white and green striped sheets all day. As it turns out I was staring down the barrel of a loaded bear rifle because at approximately exactly 8:22 AM Fri morning my weight loss program began.

I came through losing only three pounds in 12 hours. Angela lost eight pounds in about 8 hours.
Then late Friday night, 14 short hours after I waltzed into town, and just over 36 hours since Angela’s grand entrance, Abby uttered the words we had been waiting with dread.

Momma? My tummy doesn’t feel so good.

The viral jihad was on.

Those fateful words preceded a virtual all-nighter with a very sick little 4 year old, two beaten down 34 year olds, and one happy 6 month old to have everybody awake all the time when she wanted milk.

The Deal
HooWah. If you ever want to drop off the planet for four days, and don’t have the money for a bender to Hawaii, have I got the all inclusive, family-of-four, whale of a deal, virus for you.

We’ve all heard the saying ‘Children are natural scientists.’
They look at, touch, taste, hear, and generally inspect EVERYTHING from toilet seats to pine needles every day until something happens somewhere along the way that drubs the curiosity right out of them. Either that or they become scientists. I think the awareness of the need for science education in schools is generally high and typically the US is very pragmatic about the requirement. “We will be technologically behind the curve without a strong scientific base!” is probably a plank in every political stump speech from here to there. The execution on that goal may be anecdotally or even systemically questioned every step of the way but most people and institutions with clout think science is important.

How many people think philosophy is important?
How many people know what philosophy is? I have encountered many people who think philosophers, at worst, do/did a lot of mind bending drugs or, at best, do/did very little of anything related to actual coursework in college. Part of the problem is their perception and part of the problem is “in college”.
Let me talk about this in my own way by asking another question:

Have you ever heard a child say ‘Why?’ ?

“Why is the sky blue?” is the type of question that previous generations worried about but I would claim that the aforementioned science education in this country (and others) make that question relatively easy to answer (or at least approximate) for many people. With the explosion of the information age, it is even easier to look up.

What about these questions?:
“Why is it wrong?”
“Why do I perceive the sky as blue?”
“Why do you like that painting?”

If you have never heard a child ask those questions before then you probably haven’t been poked with “Why?” long enough to answer the poor little struggling philosopher with “Because I said so” leaving them in a dry riverbed facing the mind’s equivalent of a flash flood. Children want to learn why, they CAN’T WAIT to learn why. The connections they are making and the inputs they are processing are happening with the urgency of so much water.

So What?
What if we could arm the next generation with the tools to investigate why things are unethical? or pretty? or hierarchical? or blue? Don’t lose focus here, I am not talking about “Why the sky is blue” I am talking about “Why BLUE is blue?”.
I am not trying to be profound or patronizing, just descriptive. That is philosophy. Trying to understand what really exists, trying to understand what it means to be wrong or right, trying to understand what it means to be pretty or ugly, and how we can even really ever “know” any of that. And lastly, even if I purport to recognize what is there, if it is wrong, and when it is ugly how can I communicate it to another person so they too might understand why?

It is different from science, it is different from rhetoric (politics), and less understood but unequivocally true it is different from theology. Those all have their place in varying degrees and locations but no politician is claiming that “We will be behind the curve of UNDERSTANDING without a strong base in philosophy!” They don’t say that because they fail to actually understand philosophy and they don’t have to tools to wonder about figuring it out. That and the more pragmatic reason (from a politicians perspective), because most of us in the world still answer “Because I said so”. I have done it too.

We should start educating our children in philosophy now and not wait for college or self discovery so our children can have a meaningful discussion with our grand-children about why blue is blue. This isn’t trivial and if you consider this trite or if you think what I claim doesn’t have value then my rhetoric stinks, not philosophy.

The Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children is run by philosophers for the last 10 years from the University of Washington and among other things the organization includes a recommended reading list for children of all ages to introduce philosophy and critical thinking skills.

Everyone is behind the curve without philosophers just the same as everyone is behind the curve without scientists.

And I don’t mean her name…
I mean, as many of you know, she is about as detail oriented as they come and she notices everything and lets you know when it is different.

Consistency is huge with children, as everyone knows, and children are entirely too observant and when you are a child like Abigail whose very life seems to depend on honoring the tradition of say…something that happened once…in a movie…during the credits! you tend to make it clear to The Variable (that is me) when any one thing is out of place.

Exhibit A:
About two weeks ago the smoke detector in Abby’s room needed a new battery at 7AM. Boy that chirping was obnoxious. So I got out of bed and removed the offensive little critter…to the KITCHEN.

About 2 hours later when Abby stirred I was anxious to consider the possibility that she may sleep right through till noon. I can dream. Instead she stirred a bit, rolled over slightly and then BOLTED upright in bed. Presently she turned and in a barely quiet “whisper” said

DADDY!
What?
There is something missing!
What?!
There is something missing!
What are you talking about?
Something is always on my ceiling, it is round, and it is right over there. But it’s gone!

This thing is not the only thing on her ceiling and it is at the other end of the room.
She got her smoke detector back that night and I will take the Pepsi challenge with Abby, 10 mattresses, and a pea ANYTIME.

The other day Abby and I were headed to return/rent some movies and we were alone on Old Benson with 3 dashing crows and an adult Bald Eagle flying the same direction as us.

The eagle swooped down and picked up a rodent/squirrel from the road and carried it to about 30ft where it evaded the three crows and our Camry. We drove about 150ft as fast as an eagle flies, fully laden with rodent, directly below the focus of attention. Very cool indeed.

Right about then I was really loving the sunroof.
Reminded me of a night about 25 years ago when we tracked some sort of an owl in the Volvo. Monya and BopOp may be able to elaborate.

A couple of nights ago Angela heard a “noise” that woke her from a deep sleep. Terrified, she did what every good horror film sacrificial character does…she went to look around the house. She tells me that she did have the 9 and the 1 already dialed with her trigger finger poised over the 1 for that final desperate moment before the “noise” gets her and sucks her into Freddies Dreamland or whatever.
I am teasing but she hears so many noises that I am beginning to ignore her warnings (where possible). One of three things usually happens.

1) She smacks me awake with a sharp elbow in the temple and an unintelligible string of whisper-yelled instructions that I couldn’t possibly interpret without clarification since the first half of it came while I was SLEEPING. So in my adrenaline enhanced confusion I “snap awake” and yell at the top of my still snoring lungs

WHAT!?

alerting any potential intruder to the precise location of her only friend in such a situation. Me. So in the worst case I am the first to go and in all other cases I am the first one back to sleep.
Or…2) She doesn’t say anything, looks around the house on her own in a cold sweat, with her trigger finger poised as above and only tells me about it the next morning. In this case, I am only alerted to the presence of the intruder by either the police or said intruder breaking in my door which will pretty much lead to the same response as above.

WHAT!?

and I “snap awake” blah blah blah. I am still the first one back to sleep. It has, to date, turned out to be me getting to sleep first.
Or…3) We both hear the noise…WHAT!?…we both listen tensely, hearts beating the comforter off the bed, potential Intruder and maker-of-noise doesn’t show his/her face, there is not any more unusual noise, it turns out to be nothing, and I am STILL the first one back to sleep.

I probably would have been eaten by a Sabre-toothed Tiger by now if I lived in the stone age. Even an old, slow, dumb, arthritic, injured one.
Okay, so the other night she wakes up, does #2 (from above), and I only find out 2 days later that there is a record of a very loud noise. That is she ACTUALLY heard something. It was the 5 x 3 foot tempered glass panel that fell out of a section of the railing on our deck twisting the bottom channel nearly out of its moorings.
I figured it was the heavy wind combined with the fact that they didn’t appear to be installed correctly. So I carry the sheet of glass to a flat spot in the backyard and resolve to contact the former owner for some knowledge transfer. Amazingly, the encounter with the concrete and rocks did nothing to shatter it’s integrity.
Then today I casually glanced outside while brewing some hot liquid refreshment and see a noticeably non-refreshing sight. ANOTHER twisted bottom channel and missing section of glass. This time however it wasn’t lucky enough to hit the ground to test it’s temperament and remained hanging for dear life by the twisted channel. Another horizontal flat spot is it’s home tonight.

They were all newly installed before we took ownership of Talbot and it seems the cork shims on the bottom were either installed wrong or compressed too much too soon or whatever. I am eager to hear back from the previous owner about who may have installed these stage diving panels.