avablog

But not for long.

Chicago, in retrospect, was a bit exhausting.  It’s not the kind of place you go for a little R&R.  Fortunately, we’re following Chicago with an honest-to-goodness relaxing trip to N. Minnesota this week, starting Thursday.  We’ll be gone until the 13th.

In other news, BABIES EVERYWHERE!  In the past week, one of our friends had a little girl, and two different couples we know have announced new pregnancies, one for the first time.  It’s kind of wild to be in the middle of so much procreation, but it’s cool.

I find myself not really capable of providing any worthwhile advice to the couple who’s having a baby for the first time (not that they need it or would solicit it of me in any case).  It’s an odd feeling to have lived the experience of raising a child every single hour of every day for almost three years and to still feel like you don’t have the first clue what you’re doing.

What a day.  We headed down to Navy Pier this morning to take Ava to the Chicago Children’s Museum.  What a zoo.  Congestion aside, it’s a nice museum.  The mark of excellence for these kinds of places is the quality of the arts stuff they have on site, and this one had really nice arts stuff.

After that, Leah and Ava rode the most expensive carousel in the world.  I don’t even think Ava had that much fun.  She was getting zombie tired by the end of it, and we came back to get Ava down for a nap while I did my afternoon sessions.  Turns out Ava never napped, which made dinner a real gamble.  She did all right, amazingly, and now we’re back at the room getting ready to hit the hay.

I have to say, big cities are OK, but they’re…bereft, somehow.  Maybe it’s just modern big cities; I’m sure Rome is different.  But I’m ready to head home.  Ten days in the middle of nowhere on Lake Superior is sure going to be a change from walking 10 blocks over nothing but concrete to get to a mediocre meal.  Kids and haute cuisine don’t mix.

Shot from our hotel room:

It’s nice enough, I suppose. Small. We’re right over the river, so Ava’s enjoying the seagulls.
Today were my pre-conference workshops; tomorrow things start in earnest. We’re off to dinner with an old friend here in a few minutes, though I’m not sure where. I’ll let you know.

UPDATE: I hate loose ends. We ate at Grand Lux Cafe. OK, but nothing to write home about. Like Biaggi’s, only bigger.

There have been a lot of flies in our house lately. Ava derives great pleasure from following them from room to room, screaming at me to “Get them!” But she turns tail and runs as soon as one heads her way. Until last evening.

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On Saturday I smoked five pork shoulder roasts for a picnic we had yesterday at City Park. Before I started, I tried to remind myself: “Take before and after pics of the roasts.” Well, I got neither. A before shot would’ve been cool, because I had those roasts packed as tightly as could be on the smoker. But an after shot would’ve revealed little more than an image of five black lumps. You’ll have to take my word that the meat turned out great. My friend Kim made her killer BBQ sauce, and there was homemade slaw, German potato salad, citrus couscous salad, iced sun tea, pasta salad, and pecan bars for dessert. It was like a little slice of food heaven.

I sure do enjoy that smoker. Not only is it nearly idiot-proof, but the meat that comes off the thing is mighty savory. It’s also fun to just sit around in the shade and watch the smoke rolling off the smoker’s lid into the sky. I think I might have some loin roast left in the freezer…maybe I’ll fire that up before the summer’s out. I can think of at least one reader of this blog whom I owe some food, and what says “thanks” better than smoked pork? Besides, I guess, smoked pork arranged to spell out “thanks.”

We have little two-step footstools that Ava uses to reach the sink and get into bed.  Just now, I asked her to get onto her bed so I could put some sunscreen on her, and as she climbed, she said, pointing at her stool, “I call these ‘upstairs,’ because I get up with them.”

I took a stroll downtown at noon to see the sights and grab some lunch.  Along the way, I ran across a raised flower bed positively teeming with large, angry-looking wasps.  Leah and I had seen one of these bugs flying around the front stoop at home the other day, and it sure looked menacing.  Like, if you got stung by one of these suckers, it’d hurt 10X worse than being stung by a regular wasp.

As luck would have it, I bumped into a colleague shortly after passing the wasps who told me they’re colloquially called cicada killers.  Google and Wikipedia came to the rescue, as they have so many times.

While they may be frightfully large,[1] female Cicada killer wasps are not aggressive and rarely sting unless they are grasped roughly, stepped upon with bare feet, or caught in clothing, etc. Males aggressively defend their perching areas on nesting sites against rival males but they have no sting. Although they appear to attack anything which moves near their territories, male cicada killers are actually investigating anything which might be a female cicada killer ready to mate. Such close inspection appears to many people to be an attack, but the wasps rarely even land on people. If handled roughly females will sting, and males will jab with a sharp spine on the tip of their abdomen. Both sexes appear to be well equipped to bite, as they have large jaws; however, they are unable to grasp human skin and cannot bite. They are non-aggressive towards humans and fly away when swatted at, instead of attacking. Cicada killers exert a natural control on cicada populations and thus may directly benefit the deciduous trees upon which cicadas feed.

I was driving home from Decorah last Saturday morning and had just come through Cedar Rapids when I saw a small billboard that read, “God is Pro-life. Are you?”

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A friend of ours recently described Ava as gregarious.  It’s accurate.  She gets it from her mother, who has a well-documented habit of never being the one to end a conversation.

I tend to be more reserved, so Leah and I make good bookends in that way.  Leah constantly makes apologies for my brusque behavior in social situations, and I quietly cringe at the personal details of our life that she blithely spills to every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the street.

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Now that the dust has settled from the move, it’s time to sit down and get our finances in order.

You should see the look on Leah’s face when I say the word “budget.”  It’s like she’s just found out she has 45 seconds to buy everything she ever wanted.  I contend there’s nothing wrong with a little fiscal responsibility.  I try to convince her it’ll be a character building exercise.

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Ava doesn’t like rain or thunder. When we picked her up from daycare yesterday, she was huddled on the floor next to her friends with a blanket draped over her shoulders.  She wore the blanket all the way home.

But she loves jumping in puddles after the rain. So, it’s a great opportunity for a lesson about accepting something we don’t like in order to get something we do like.

Leah was generous enough to let me come back early from Decorah this past weekend to participate in the annual Tour de Brew, which is put on by Millstream Brewing Company. The weather was gorgeous this year. A bit breezy, but it beats the 97 degrees we had last year. I think a good time was had by all.

The organizers I spoke with said the TdB doubled in size again this year, and I believe it. They were already rationing beer at the first stop, but I didn’t hear anyone complaining. It was all worth it once we got to the brewery and enjoyed the free bratwurst. The first year I did this ride, there were probably around 70 riders, maybe fewer. They figure they had more than 300 signed up for this year’s ride.

The ride is only 30 miles long, unless you decide to turn around and bike home, too. I was ready to call it a day by the time we got to Amana, and my brother and I were lucky enough to hitch a ride home with Cabel and Lisa (there are pictures of them in the ’07 TdB set in my flickr stream).

We missed my b-i-l Kevin this year, but maybe we can get the date on the calendar early enough next year that he can join us.

We’re driving up to Decorah this afternoon for a little getaway at Leah’s parents’ house.  Rachel and Kevin will also be in town, as Rachel is throwing a big birthday bash for a good friend.  Ava’s already looking forward to swimming, the coffee shop, making cookies with G.G., and looking at all the animals down at the county fair.

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(Over)heard this morning, as I was getting the bike out of the garage and Ava was waiting for me on the stairs leading down from the kitchen:

“Darn it!  I got another bug bite.  Those little smageetos* really got me.”

*We’ve tried a couple times to correct her pronunciation of mosquito, but she’ll have none of it.  And if you’re ever lucky enough to hear how cute she is when she says it, you’d think we were crazy for the effort.

Our dear Ava has another ear infection. In the middle of summer! Blasted kid. Leah’s patting herself on the back for recognizing the signs at an even earlier stage than she did last time Ava came down sick.

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I don’t ever really talk with other parents about how they resolve issues like whether their kids will grow up eating juicy hamburgers or dry hamburgers.

I made turkey burgers last week (and again last night, because all I can think to do on a 95-degree day is stand over a hot grill), and Leah informed me as we sat down to eat that the burgers were too moist.  I was a bit confused.  I’d never heard of anyone looking askance at a nice, juicy burger, but here was Leah, claiming she likes her burgers “dry.”

I started thinking about all the hardships that lie ahead for Ava is she chooses a life of dry burgers.  All of the nasty looks she’ll get at restaurants and cookouts as she grows up, the snickering behind her back at school at “that girl who doesn’t like juicy burgers.”  My chest tightens at the thought of how she’ll be ostracized.

But there’s still hope for Ava.  After all, the lure of a juicy burger is a difficult thing to deny.  I’ll work on her.

I’m going to carry the following text with me on a note card from now on to hand to people who ask what it is I do during the day:

Mean, median, 5% trimmed mean, standard error, variance, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, range, interquartile range, skewness and kurtosis and their standard errors, confidence interval for the mean (and specified confidence level), percentiles, Huber’s M-estimator, Andrews’ wave estimator, Hampel’s redescending M-estimator, Tukey’s biweight estimator, the five largest and five smallest values, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic with a Lilliefors significance level for testing normality, and the Shapiro-Wilk statistic. Boxplots, stem-and-leaf plots, histograms, normality plots, and spread-versus-level plots with Levene tests and transformations.

Talk about tools of the trade.  Sheesh.  I spend 50% of my day learning and the other 50% applying what I’ve learned.  Rinse.  Repeat.

I was sitting on our front porch yesterday morning before going to work, and there were two police cars at the curb down the street from our house.  It didn’t appear there was any action going on, and when I got to work, I e-mailed a neighbor to see if he knew anything.  He didn’t, but he’d seen the cars, too (they were right in front of his house), so he shot off an e-mail to another neighbor and learned that a man had broken into their house Wednesday night and passed out on their living room floor.  The homeowners didn’t hear a thing over the AC.  Neither did their dog.  Or, maybe the dog did hear something but was too afraid to do anything.  We always assume dogs will save the day in these situations, but I’m sure there are plenty of scared pups out there.   This was a yellow lab, after all.

My favorite detail of this crime is that the house at issue is the only one in the neighborhood with a tall, solid wood fence around the yard.  And it’s a small yard.  This guy would’ve been much better off picking pretty much any other house in the neighborhood.  Heck, he could’ve crossed the street and slept unmolested on our porch swing.  Better yet, he could’ve walked two blocks west and slept in his very own bed!  Fella must’ve been pretty tanked to have gotten so mixed up.

We had a nice day with friends. Spent a couple hours at the local pool with Ava as she hopped around in the shallow end, then went over to a neighbor’s place to lounge by their (inflatable) pool. Then off to another neighbor’s for dinner and sparklers. They had a nice chalk mural waiting for us when we arrived.

Also, a funny anecdote from yesterday. Ava’s friend Mac came over with his mom Sarah. Ava was eager to show Mac the “quacker” she’d gotten from her Gramary. It’s just a little set of plastic duck lips that make a loud quacking noise when you blow through them. Anyway, Ava brought it out and started quacking away. Sarah started calling her “duck lips.” She quacked and quacked, and before long, Mac wanted his turn.

We convinced Ava to pass off the quacker, and Mac took it up. He started quacking and smiling and laughing, and Ava laughed along. Out of the blue, Ava exclaimed, “Go, dick lips!” Sarah and I looked at each other right before Ava yelled it again. Mac just kept quacking and smiling, and Ava laughed and laughed. I’m only glad the two of them didn’t know why Sarah and I were laughing so hard.

I thought it would be cute to take Ava to her first movie last Friday evening.  Pixar’s latest, Ratatouille, is out, and it looked really good.

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