avablog

Some people just are. You know the type. They’re thick skinned and resilient. They’re no-nonsense survivors. They can look at any potentially sad or scary or negative situation and see a glass half full. I’m not of that ilk. Nor am I of the ilk that sees the glass as half empty. No, I’m the type of person who wonders about the glass’s “sense of place” and the “terrain of its emotional landscape.” What can I say? I was an English major.

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It’s the weekend that wasn’t. At least if your idea of a weekend is taking it easy, kicking around downtown with a coffee and maybe taking a long stroll through the park. No. This wasn’t one of those.

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I’m having some difficulties arranging ‘Net access at my mom’s place, where we’ll be staying for the next month or so.  This should make for an interesting social experiment if I can’t get something figured out, and fast.

One of my favorite movies EVER is Alien. I love everything about it. I’m also a moderate fan of most of the sequels, but there’s a scene in the first sequel, Aliens, in which they introduce the power loader. When I first saw this machine, I told myself that I must live long enough to see this technology come to be.

So imagine the needle dancing on my geek-meter early this afternoon when I saw this rolling around in the street in front of my house:

All right, it’s not quite the power loader, but it was really cool the way this guy worked the hydraulic levers to lift the pod off the truck and manipulate it up into the driveway. There are more pictures in my flickr stream.

We couldn’t get the pod as far up into the drive as I’d’ve liked because of a nearby tree, but it’s not blocking the sidewalk, so I think we’re going to be all right.  Tomorrow, the furniture goes in.

They’ll always remind me of this little house on College Street, I think. The place where we first moved in together–where we celebrated our wedding and brought Ava to life. The place where we yelled and cried and laughed together. It has a big old maple tree in the front yard that fills our living room windows with watery green sunlight in the summertime. And the small backyard offers up a riot of peony blossoms each spring–white, raspberry red, and the palest of pinks. I’d cut them by the armfuls and shake the ants off in our kitchen sink, saturating the house with the delicate scent of spring, mixed with the sun-drenched smell of our warm wood floors.

They’re Laura’s peonies, actually, but I like to think of them as her gift to me. Her connection to this house. Her life, still blooming forth somehow.

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Aren’t they all misc. items? Anyway….

My mom’s presently wending her way up the Mississippi on a five-week bike trip from NOLA to Lake Itasca. It’s her second time riding the length of the river, only this time she’s going uphill. God love ‘er. The upshot is that Leah and I get to stay at her house for a month while work’s being done on our new house. Beats holing up in a motel for that time.

We’re moving out this weekend. I’ve lined up the assistance of a couple friends/drinking buddies to help haul “the big stuff” into our Pod storage unit. I can’t believe it looks like the weather is going to cooperate. Did I just jinx myself? Probably.

Ava received a reprimand at daycare yesterday for continuing to put rocks in her mouth after being told six times to stop. The workers asked us to talk to her, in what is undoubtedly the first of many teacher-requested sit downs we’ll have with our daughter over the next 15 years. The way things are shaping up now, Ava’s going to provide ample payback for every misdeed Leah and I committed in our own childhoods. I’m still trying to convince myself that her displays of “spirit” are merely signs of her intelligence. Crikey, she’s going to be one smart cookie when she grows up!

You have to be pretty oblivious not to be bowled over now and again by the plain old biology of this whole child-rearing thing. It’s easy to get caught up with all the financial and school and medical stuff (which is really all financial stuff, actually), but sometimes I’m caught off guard by the simple evidence of Ava’s life.

Take breathing. A lot of the time we sit around in amazement at all the physical things Ava does and all the funny, grown-up things she says. It’s easy to be amazed by those things and to wonder at how this funny little bundle of energy and attitude ever came to be.

Ava and I were lying in bed together the other night after she’d come in with us at about 11:30, and as I lay there drifting off again, I was taken aback by the simple sound of Ava’s gentle breathing. I couldn’t even see her, but the little, undeniable inhaling and exhaling was a revelation.  More than anything I’d seen or heard Ava do in the last couple months, that sound distilled all my thoughts and feelings about my daughter and caused me to catch my breath there in the dark next to her.  It was a wonderful moment, in the very best sense of the word.

Really.

I never cease to be amazed by the number and variation of ways people find to off themselves, particularly kids. The odds against something like this have got to be millions to one. Also, do you keep scissors on top of your fridge?

Girl Dies Falling From Chair With Scissors

POSTED: 9:53 am CDT May 13, 2007

VERONA BEACH, N.Y. — Police in Verona Beach, N.Y., say a six-year-old died while reaching for scissors on top of a refrigerator when she fell from a chair and the blades stabbed her in the neck.The girl apparently wanted the scissors to cut off gum that was stuck in her hair.Police said she was standing on a wheeled, office-style chair when it moved and she lost her balance Friday night. She was pronounced dead at a hospital.The girl’s parents and her younger brother were in the house about 25 miles northeast of Syracuse, but no one saw the girl fall.

It’s going to be quite a weekend.  Leah’s whole family is in town to watch Ava while Leah and I pack.

I’m cooking three chickens tomorrow for dinner.  I’ll smoke two with apple wood and throw the third one on the grill with some “five star” bbq sauce I picked up last week.  Rachel has requested sweet potatoes, so I’ll do some of those, too.  And Kevin, bless his big ol’ heart, walked through the door with a 12 pack of New Glarus beer this evening.  Good times….

I hate being jealous.  It doesn’t happen that often, really (I have a pretty darn nice life, after all), but sometimes I see something that just steams my clams.  And sometimes I see it repeatedly, and I try to ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist, lest I collapse into a big quivering pile of green goo.  But I’m ready to give in to my base instincts and admit that I wish I’d taken all these pictures.

The kicker isn’t just that nearly every one of these shots is technically striking.  No, the real bee in my bonnet is that Gemma, the subject in most of the pictures, is such a perfect model.  She’s so full of wonder and life and light.  And she has brown eyes, just like my own little girl.  I feel like I’m not doing justice to Ava with my little Canon P&S, but then I can’t afford a closet full of Nikon, Hasselblad, and Contax gear.  Were it only so….

UPDATE:  The bank accepted the check for deposit without any hassle.  I love my bank.

Life isn’t fair. It just isn’t. I recently found out that my dear friend and college roommate, M, has advanced-stage breast cancer, for which there is no cure. She was newly pregnant with her first child when she was first diagnosed last year, and she had to terminate the pregnancy to begin an aggressive round of chemo and an experimental stem-cell transplant at NIH. That seemed to have worked, and this spring, she accepted a job offer (ironically, she’s a brilliant and promising young oncologist) in Oregon, and was ready to house hunt when she found out that the cancer had returned, and–as she wrote to me recently–“the beast is moving quickly now.” Her news haunts me and has made it seem like a very dark week, despite the sunlight and spring flowers.

The only light has been my family–and especially Ava. She is so dear and so maddening and so funny and so frustrating, all at once. She’s so many things rolled into one right now, as she exists in this strange twilight between infancy and childhood. Mark and I have been so irked by her bad sleep patterns, which bring her into our bed every single night at 11:30 or so. And we’ve been baffled by her new, seemingly irrational fears of things like bird poop and flies. And her obsession with cutting paper.

But I never want to forget those things. I don’t want to forget her sweet sleeping face, so close to mine, with her night breath in my nose and her fingers twined in my hair. I don’t want to forget her endearing way of reassuring herself: “The grackle won’t come back and poop again, right, Mom? The grackle’s sleeping now. He won’t come back.” I don’t want to forget the way she cuts tiny paper triangles with her Hello Kitty scissors, leaving a snowstorm of white scraps on the floors of our house. I don’t want to forget the way she needs me, the way she yields to me when she is tired or afraid, pressing her whole body into mine, as I rub her back and soothe her.

How can another human being fill me up this much? And why have I been given the chance to experience this pure joy–while my friend M never will?

I get asked relatively frequently about buying a digital camera.  There are a lot to choose from, and they all have dozens of options, some of which are better or cooler than other cameras in the same class.  My mantra has always been, “Canon, Canon, Canon.”  I love the color out of these cameras, and the build quality on all the Canons I’ve seen has been outstanding.

Which is not to say there aren’t things to recommend cameras from other makers, but for hands-on reviews of those models, you’re better off listening to someone like Walt Mossberg, who has a post today about how to buy a digital camera.

I almost hate to write about the evenings we spend at Simone’s Plain and Simple. It’s nearly impossible to relate even the smallest detail of our meals there without coming off like a braggart, but there’s hardly anything I can do about it; there’s always at least one dish in any of her offerings that is unbearably good. This time, that dish was the rhubarb pie.

The recipe — at least as much as I could gather — is similar to this one, save the strawberry preserves. Simone claimed that the version she made was a very French one, and I’m in no position to argue. The cardamom and orange really made the rhubarb flavor pop, and I savored every ounce of the butter in that exquisite lattice crust.

For the record, the main dish was lamb, which was served with gravy, Dijon mustard, and horseradish. It was fantastic.  There was also fresh bread, a cheese tray, and salad.  If you’re interested, Simone is already full up for July and has a couple dates left in August. September is still pretty open. Leah and I are going to try to get a group together in September for one of Simone’s pizza dinners, which are arguably her specialty.

I hear that a lot these days. I’ll run into someone, usually at work, who hasn’t seen Ava in a while, or who knows I have a child but isn’t quite sure what sex it is or how old it is, who asks. And these days I say, “Two and a half.” The reply, almost invariably, is something along the lines of, “Aw, that’s such a great age.”

And it is. Ava has a full-fledged personality going on now. She’s a gal who knows what she wants, when she wants it. We can go back and forth with her for minutes on end about why she can’t have G.G.’s chocolate chip cookies for dinner, and by God, sometimes she almost wins the argument. So, it’s a fun age, even if the age is characterized by obstinacy.

Truth is (and any parent will tell you this), all ages are great ages. I look back over all the pictures I’ve taken of Ava since September 17th, 2004, and every one I see reminds me of a great age. Por ejemplo:

How can this not be indicative of a great age? As a special treat to those unregistered users out there, I’m posting this image outside the password-protected area of the blog; it’s not going to be a habit. So if you haven’t registered, make it so!

when you close your eyes and see an image of a nice, greasy cheeseburger floating in front of you?  Methinks these carrots and hummus aren’t cutting it today.  Thank God it’s pizza night.

Leah and I order pizza from three different places:  Pagliai’s, Wig and Pen East, and Happy Joe’s.  The only thing we ever get from HJ is their taco pie, which is one of Leah’s old favorites (she was a candy striper at the Decorah store back in the day).  Pagliai’s is one of my old favorites; I lived two doors down from their place for 11 years during college and beyond.  Even before then, I was eating their pizza fairly regularly.  Wig and Pen East is a new branch of an old pub located on the Iowa City/Coralville border (really:  If you walk from the dining area to the restroom, you’ve just crossed city lines).  They have an amazing Chicago-style pizza that is always baked to perfection.  What’s more, they always know me on the phone, because I’m the only person who ever orders pepperoncini.  Leah, of course, doesn’t care for the pizza at Wig and Pen East, so it’s a rare treat for me.  We had HJ taco last week, so I’m fairly certain we’re going to end up with Pagliai’s tonight.  Leah will get green olive, black olive, and mushroom, and I’ll probably get anchovy, onion, and mushroom (two pizzas; I can’t tolerate half-and-half).

Why, oh why doesn’t Hardee’s deliver?

Yesterday morning at work I read a story in The Wall Street Journal about a little girl named Penelope who is fighting what will likely be a fatal cancer.

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When I went to search my blog for mention of this sandwich, I noticed that I’ve deleted my search bar.  Note to self:  Reinstate search bar.

Fortunately, the tastiness of this sandwich can bear many mentions.  It’s served by a restaurant here in town called Devotay, and their menu describes the dish thusly:

Wildlife Lakes  Elk Pastrami— with organic mozzarella, red onion  and fresh greens on a croissant

This isn’t a big meal.  At all.  But it’s an experience.  A lot has to do with the texture of the super-flaky croissant against the tender pastrami and crunchy red onion.  And speaking of red onion, its flavor joined with the fresh mozzarella is sublime.  Ordinarily I’m agnostic on vegetarianism.  I can understand and even appreciate why people engage in it.  But when I bite into this sandwich, I weep for those whose philosophical and dietary restrictions prevent them from ever sampling this gorgeous treat.

I spent a couple minutes packing up some books today, one of which turned out to be my high school yearbook. It was hidden at the back of a bookcase, sitting sideways behind the more palatable reading material. “Why don’t you get rid of that?” Leah asked. That wouldn’t actually pain me too greatly, but in this day and age, you never know when you’re going to want to dig up a yearbook to remind yourself what the latest starlet/junkie/serial killer was like back in 1989. To whit:

That’s right, not one, but two students wielding firearms on the front cover. The cover! And there’s even the extra bonus of a gagged hostage. And a black trench coat. That’s one of the arts “faculty” there fourth in from the right with the “oy vey” pose (he and I almost came to blows one day in the hall outside his classroom, but I never pulled a gat on him). And over there on the far left? The principal. This is ten years before Columbine. We always were cutting edge.

I just got back from a show at our local theater that was absolutely awesome.  Area piano guru and Steinway artist Dan Knight performed a review of Bill Evans tunes.  Dan played only one original tune, but he’s a hell of an artist in his own right.

And did I mention that Dan played our wedding in 2003?  He performed with a quartet that included vocalist (and our friend) Betsy Hickock.  What better way to hear such fantastic musicians that with your new bride in a room full of your family and friends?

If you get a chance to hear Dan play, take it.