I might record The View. I love to watch stupid people saying stupid things, and The View looks like a great place for that. E.g.:
WHOOPI GOLDBERG: Is the world flat?
SHERRI SHEPHERD: Is the world flat? (laughter)
GOLDBERG: Yes.
SHEPHERD: …I Don’t know.
GOLDBERG: What do you think?
SHEPHERD: I… I never thought about it, Whoopi. Is the world flat? I never thought about it.
BARBARA WALTERS: You’ve never thought about whether the world was round or flat?
SHEPHERD: I tell you what I’ve thought about. How I’m going to feed my child–
WALTERS: Well you can do both.
SHEPERD: …how I’m going to take care of my family. The world, is the world flat has never entered into, like that has not been an important thing to me.
ELIZABETH HASSELBECK: You’ll teach your son, Jeffery, right?
SHEPHERD: If my son, Jeffery, asks me ‘is the world flat,’ I guess I would go…
JOY BEHAR: You know, didn’t some person already work this question out? I mean, why are we doing this again? (laughter, applause)
Joy doesn’t seem to grasp that the reason people find this show interesting at all is because the hosts are so clueless. You’re doing it again, Joy, because of RATINGS! Let Sherri stuff her foot as far in her mouth as she possibly can. Everyone slows down for a car wreck.
I love this shot of Ava opening up her new doll house on Monday morning.
It’s like she can hardly believe what she’s looking at. This morning, as we were getting ready to leave, she was in her room playing with the doll house. It’s interesting to watch Ava set her imagination to work moving the little dolls and pieces of furniture around. Sometimes, when she gets really occupied like this, I get right up next to her and just watch her play. It’s like sneaking up on a butterfly sitting on a flower to try to get a picture, only more rewarding.
I originally thought that I would be able to get away with just posting a couple pictures of the pizza we had at Simone’s Plain and Simple on Saturday evening, but since I’m still reliving the meal in my mind this morning, I figure that’s a sign that I ought to provide a bit more detail to you, my faithful readers.
Some of you might be familiar with the life and work of John Hodgman. If you’re not, I encourage you to seek out his teachings and live by them. As for myself, I plan to acquaint Ava with the six oaths of the virtuous child just as soon as she’s able to understand what an oath is. Or virtue, for that matter. They are:
Today shall not be wasted. I shall rise before the sun so that I may then watch my family as they slumber, with intent, waiting eyes.
I shall honor my mother today, and I shall tell father he is powerful.
Today I shall be clean. I shall not touch my teeth, knowing that the oils of my skin shall cause them to disintegrate. I shall instead hone them, with a good steel, twice after prayers.
I shall be a faithful child, and I shall ever make science my enemy. Also, eels.
At day, I shall perform my chores and duties happily. And if I see an eel, I shall kill it.
At night, I shall dream of more labor, and in my sleep I shall smile with sharpened teeth, knowing that today has not been wasted.
I hope I got those cut points right. It’s difficult to tell from the audio book. I’ll have to check my hard copy, if I can find it.
I don’t really have any idea what our family members are getting Ava for her birthday. We’re getting her plenty of gifts, actually, and she’s not in need of anything other than clothes and cash for her college fund. But I’m going to go out on a limb right now and predict that her favorite present this year will be this:
Our friend Mara made it for Ava at Leah’s request (I think it was at Leah’s request; I don’t know how it actually came about). Can you believe how cute this thing is? Mara is one of those people who rolls out of bed in the morning and just starts making cool stuff. It’s like she can’t stop doing creative things. She’s a graphic designer for our local food Co-op, and I’ve always loved all their advertising. She has a great sense of humor, which I think really comes through in work like this. She and our pal Jen are best buds (birds of a feather, and all that), and the two of them belong to a knitting collective that turns out some seriously awesome stuff. I wish I had only a tenth the creativity of either one of them.
You may recognize the poncho above as a small copy of the totally sweet one Jen made for Ava this spring.
I can’t wait to get a picture of Ava wearing her poncho while she holds her new kitten. Thank God it’s poncho weather these days!
“They say” 24 ounces of coffee daily (everything in moderation) is good for you, so I’ve been trying to have a cup most days. As you loyal readers probably know, Leah tries to get to the coffee shop every day before work and on the weekend, too, but that gets expensive (skinny decaf latte, one pump of vanilla). The alternative — free work coffee — has been a pretty unsavory option. Until today.
Clearly, the voices advocating for a change from the light brown fluid we’d been calling coffee for years have been heard. This morning, the coffee centers on each floor feature two new dark roasts and a feedback sheet asking for opinions. I hope this means they’re actually going to choose one of these new brews as the house joe. The one I’m tasting actually looks like coffee when you pour it from the pot, and the flavor is nice and roasty. I’m no coffeehound like my brother-in-law Kevin, but I can sure as shootin’ tell the diff between this stuff and our old coffee. Just as fall is settling in, too. Nice nice.
If it seems like you are listening to music more but enjoying it less, some people in the recording industry say they know why. They blame that iPod that you can’t live without, along with all the compressed MP3 music files you’ve loaded on it.
I’m having a difficult time wrapping my head around the idea of listening to more music but enjoying it less. Why would I do more of an activity that I wasn’t enjoying? Besides that, I think this thesis is flawed. Since receiving my first iPod, I’ve listened to way, way more music than I did pre-iPod. I make fairly high-quality rips of my songs, but they are compressed. For most stuff, I don’t know the difference. Does it make me undiscriminating? Probably. I have a friend who makes lossless rips of all his CDs and stores them on a big, fat hard drive. A couple big, fat hard drives, actually. He has golden ears. I don’t see the point in lossless rips, especially if you’re keeping the CDs around.
The article quoted above goes on to say that sound engineers lament that compressed audio files are becoming the de facto reference for the music they produce. Seems a bit extreme to me. I’m sure there are sounds that don’t translate well between the studio and the MP3 (or, heck, even the CD), but to gear an entire recording effort to the MP3 as the final output is silly. Maybe for 50 Cent or Avril, but surely Classical recordings will continue to strive to maintain the integrity of the original recording regardless of potential listening formats. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.
I forgot to mention that our weekend activities included our usual trip downtown to the farmer’s market and the coffeehouse. If we ever manage to get Ava there during the work week, there’s not usually time for a book, but we typically do some reading on the weekend.
The book she’s looking at here is something about a little tiger who tells all sorts of fantastic tales about his parents and the place where he used to live on the other side of the jungle. Then his parents show up and make him apologize for exaggerating, or something. There’s a moral in there somewhere.
Which reminds me, lately I’ve been telling Ava my own fantastic stories to distract her when she’s in a mood or when she’s getting ready for bed. She’ll say, “Daddy, tell me a long tale.” And we’ll say, “You mean a tall tale?” “Yes, that.” So I make up a story about some weird person I saw at Hy Vee or something, and she sits there and waits to hear the funny or outlandish parts.
What a nice weekend. Not only was the weather great, but we got to spend time with our cool friends and drink wine on two separate occasions.
On Saturday evening, we attended a wine tasting held at Mara and Rockne’s house, which is only a couple blocks from ours. It was tasty and informative. Sunday afternoon we drove out to Wallace Winery to meet Jody and Bill for a couple bottles of the good stuff and to taste some of the winery’s other offerings. I’d been meaning to get out to Wallace, and chatting with Jody and Bill made the trip even nicer. She used to be a producer for Jerry Springer…oh, the stories she can tell.
Gramary was back from her trip to CO, so she and Ava got to spend time together on Sunday.
An update on Ava’s sleeping: She’s doing a great job. The sitter got her down with no fuss at all on Saturday night (full disclosure: the sitter works at Ava’s daycare and has just as much experience putting Ava to sleep as we do). Last night, Ava pretty much just rolled over and went right to bed after we read to her. It’s great to see her able to handle herself like this, but there’s also a little tinge of sadness at seeing her grow up. I suppose I’d better get used to it.
Ava and I were messing around today when I was doing some calibration (etc.) on the home stereo. Turns out Ava loves her air guitar, as evidenced by:
I think Ava gets this from her Grandma Georgie. I’ll try to get some video of the two of them together in a hellacious guitar duel to the death when G.G. is in town for Ava’s birthday this coming weekend.
Soundtrack: Corrosion of Conformity, “Heal My Wounds”
It’s official. Ava’s first airline trip will happen in January when we travel with the entire Klevar clan to Mexico for a week. The last time we were there, Leah was three months pregnant with Ava. Here’s what she looked like:
She’s on the right.
Leah’s convinced Ava’s going to have a good time playing on the beach. I hope she’s right. Whatever happens, I am not climbing to the top of Kukulcan temple this time. That sucker’s a lot taller than it looks!
Leah and I have somewhat different parenting styles, though I think we each do a pretty good job of acquiescing from time to time when one of us seems particularly vehement about a particular issue.
Which brings me to this piece in the Journal today. Gosh, it’s good. The author has four boys, bless him, so he writes from a position I can only imagine. And I imagine it’s hard. I suppose Leah and I fall mostly into the “constrained view” camp, though Leah will undoubtedly take issue with some of the disciplinary themes contained therein. Por ejemplo:
My wife and I therefore forbid our children to use the word “fair.” Parents still in the thrall of the unconstrained worldview are prone to manipulation by their kids, who like little human-rights lawyers insist on fairness as an imperative. [] In our house things are much simpler: That last piece of cake had to be divided somehow, and in this imperfect world your brother got the extra frosting. Deal with it.
Another plum:
Many parents in the unconstrained camp adhere to Rousseau’s sentiment: “Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains.” They not only fail to punish bad behavior but snarl at anyone who rebukes their precious darlings. In our house we have reversed Rousseau’s theory: You are born in bondage and should be darn grateful for the free room and board. Besides, if you want to talk about restrictions on liberty you can take it up with your mother, who hasn’t had an uninterrupted trip to the bathroom since 2001.
I have absolutely no problem setting boundaries for Ava and then vigorously enforcing those boundaries. We’re in a difficult stage with her right now; it’s a time when she really needs to learn that everything isn’t always going to go her way, and that when it doesn’t, sobbing with her face buried in the couch (or worse, hitting or pinching her parents) isn’t going to make things better.
Nobody who’s stood between a toddler and the last cookie should still harbor a belief in the inherent virtue of mankind.
Sometimes, when Ava is overly tired and just past her limit, it seems like she’ll be irredeemable. I think, “Wow, what kind of monster are we raising here, anyway?” Then, ten minutes later, she’s laughing and splashing in the tub while Leah pretends to be scared of the sharks swimming in the water. It’s difficult, never having raised a child before, to be mindful of how much gentle direction and support Ava needs right now. I don’t always do such a good job of this, but Leah’s got my back.
Pronunciation: ‘fe-“brI(-&)l also ‘fE-
Function: adjective
Etymology: Medieval Latin febrilis, from Latin febris fever
: marked or caused by fever
From Joe Morgenstern’s review of “3:10 to Yuma” in today’s WSJ:
And one can debate the ambiguities of the ending — which substantially resembles the original — but the febrile and semicoherent action climax that precedes it leaves logic in the dust.
Would I have gone for “febrile” in describing an action sequence in a Western film? I dunno. It’s certainly a word that can remove the writing from its subject. In the case above, using “feverish” and “semicoherent” adjacent to each other probably would’ve been a bit much. Given the tenor of Joe’s overall review, which posits that this remake is an overblown rendition of the subtler original, febrile probably does exactly what he wants it to.
Try to work febrile into conversation today, and let me know if you pull it off.
Overall, I’m happy to be a lefty. It’s just that sometimes I feel like I have that many more annoyances during the day than my right-handed friends. Little things, is all, but then a snake bite is little, isn’t it?
This comes to mind today because I have this coffee mug at work emblazoned with “Research King” in big black letters (won at a conference), but only on the right side of the mug (the right side when the mug is oriented with its handle towards me). Upshot: When I carry it in my left hand, which is the hand I’m comfortable carrying coffee mugs in, the words aren’t visible to anyone but me. Everyone else sees a plain white mug, completely unaware of the extent of my greatness.
I could carry the mug in my right hand, but I feel off balance when I do that. I’ve been silently taking out my frustration on the mug’s designer, but that’s a hollow satisfaction. I don’t drink that much coffee anyway.
Ava’s looking more like a righty every day. I’m going to do my best not to hold it against her.
Back then, I was never late. I hated being late. I believed that showing up anything but on time showed disrespect, and I was especially mortified to have flubbed up on such a rare occasion as a first date. But, there I was. I’d gone to the wrong theater, you see, and as I finally got to the top of the escalator at the correct location and saw you standing there outside the ticket booth, alone, I knew I’d be starting this romance down a point.
We saw “Beloved,” the movie based on the book we’d both read and liked. It wasn’t so good. By the end of it, as I recall, you’d managed to make me feel not so bad for keeping you waiting. Little did you know it would be the first in a long line of disappointments.
As I write this, I have the anniversary card my father sent us today sitting on the table next to me. It’s addressed to “Leah and Mark Palmberg.” He’s an old dog, and even after four years, you’re still a new trick. Thank you for abiding him. And me. And know that I was late that day only because my mind was flush and confused with the excitement of being with you, a feeling I still get from time to time. Maybe not as viscerally as on that first date, but more deeply now, more thoroughly.
I’m late all the time now. Almost every day, at least once. It still bothers me, as you know, but I’m learning to embrace my tardiness. My canine constitution is not yet so inflexible as my dad’s (though you’re convinced I’m destined to be his eventual replacement). Sometimes I think you make us late on purpose as payback for my transgression those nine years ago, and I smile when I think back to the look on your face when I finally made my appearance. I’m still down that point, after a wedding and a little girl and everything else we’ve shared. Maybe I always will be. But I’m fine with it. There’s no one else to whom I’d rather owe that debt.
OK, maybe CNN lost it long ago, and I just haven’t been paying attention. But I was paying attention this morning, when they published this little tidbit on their front page re: Pavarotti’s death:
Pavarotti died today, prompting one reader to cry on her way to work.
What, exactly, is it supposed to convey to me that some CNN reader cried when she heard of Pavarotti’s death? And is it meaningful that she cried on her way to work? Should I be more stricken by this news now that I know someone out there was brought to tears by it? Maybe it was Pavarotti’s sister? How do I know? If I want this kind of “reporting,” I’ll read Perez Hilton. Sheesh, it’s not like someone shot Kennedy.
EDIT: This headline from FARK.com is exactly why that site has it all over CNN. I love this:
Fred Thompson (R – USA Network) officially enters the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Plans to solve America’s problems in 1 hour once a week every Friday
I bet that line has never been used before when a blogger switches themes. I’m a font of creative verse.
If you’re reading this, you’re looking at a new theme here at avablog. Leah alerted me to the fact that the “old” theme I was using wasn’t rendering on IE<7. It’s the company default, and there’s no way to change it without IT intervention, which is a PITA. I was going to leave it as is, but I got another heads up today from a friend who pointed out the theme’s funkiness on old IE versions. Never let it be said I’m unresponsive to the public. I hope this theme isn’t too onerous. I’m not a big fan of the three-column layout, but this one doesn’t grate too badly. At least it’ll let me center images in the posts.
And, yes, that banner image is a crop from one of Ava’s watercolors. I love to watch her paint; I’ll have to get a video of it sometime soon.
Sorry again for the schizoid theming! Please hang in there.
