avablog

As I drove home from dodgeball last night (we won two of the five games against a team that had no girls), I started thinking about giant animals. Sharks in particular.

When I was in elementary school I loved sharks and dinosaurs. More than anything else about them, I was impressed by their size. I marvelled at pictures in which a silhouette of a Brontosaurus was shown standing next to a man. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see an animal that big out walking around?

Sharks were almost as cool as dinosaurs. The first time I ever saw a show on Whale Sharks, my dad took me to the back yard and measured out the length of a full-grown specimen against our house. I wished I could see one and swim with it in the ocean like the people I’d seen on TV.

My dad used to do a lot of sculpting and always had big blocks of molding clay sitting around. In minutes he could whip up a gorgeous model of a dinosaur or shark as my brother and I looked on in amazement. When I was in kindergarten, my dad helped me make a Tyrannosaurus Rex model that I took to class for a project. It was by far the coolest project. Unfortunately, the AC wasn’t so great in the temporary building where our class was, so the T Rex had to be moved to the library before it melted. It had toothpicks for teeth!

Another year, when I was a bit older, my brother and I helped my dad make Great White Shark costumes for Halloween. Those were really cool. And they were so big we had to be really careful walking around in them so we wouldn’t break off the tails. I have to ask my dad if he still has pictures of those somewhere. We kept the costumes around all winter. Then, in the spring, we took them out to the local reservoir and took some pictures of them on the beach. What a hoot.

My dad loved Halloween. Still does. When I was probably seven or eight, he helped us make dinosaur costumes out of paper mache and cardboard. I was a Pterodactyl, and Scott was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. My costume had cool hindged wings that I could flap by pulling down on two pieces of wood onto which we’d fastened some dyed fabric (there was always lots of fabric, dye, cardboard, paint, and hot glue at our house). Scott and I actually won a costume competition that year; as I recall, the prize was a big bag full of candy. SCORE! It was right around the time Star Wars had come out, so every Tom, Dick, and Anakin was walking around with a light sabre and a Darth Vader mask. No one ever saw us coming!

I hope I can manage to get Ava interested in stuff like this. She’s big into babies right now. Everything is “baby?” this and “baby?” that. We have a great room in the basement that would make a perfect workshop. If nothing else, maybe I could make some cool costumes for myself down there. I have to go pick up a hot glue gun.

Just started watching it at 7:30 CST. Some random musings:

Geena Davis is a big woman.

I’ve never watched more than 10 straight minutes of this House M.D. show, and this guy is winning a Golden Globe?

Pamela Anderson looks like she’s smuggling tortoises in a Hefty bag. Terrible dress.

I like Steve Carrell’s acceptance speech. I wonder who wrote it.

What is with Tim Robbins’ hair? Is there a Monkees movie that I don’t know about?

Keira Knightly is an attractive woman, but there’s something wrong with her mouth. It’s true.

Reese, your cuteness is killing me.

Teri, what happened to you?

Take that, Desperate Housewives! Mary-Louise is not sending Chris Rock a holiday card next year.

Harrison, lose the beard.

Does anyone do disheveled like Johnny Depp does disheveled? I think not.

Penelope: There are sexy accents, and then there’s yours. It sounds like you’re chewing gravel, for chrissakes. Why couldn’t you have been born in France? WHY?!

All right, we changed channels for a second. Dog the bounty hunter is a fool. And his wife? Sheesh….

Joaquin: Lighten up; they like you.

Renee: Eat a sandwich.

Aside: Randy Quaid is underrated.

I’m sitting here watching Law & Order.  Yes, yes.  Whatever.

Anyway, there’s a woman in tonight’s episode who looked vaguely familiar to me.  Sure enough, I’d seen her before.

Her hair looks a lot better now.

I walked to work this morning, since Fridays are the days Leah stays home with Ava, and those two are usually still dressing and getting breakfast by the time I have to head out the door.

For all its bluster and low, gray clouds, the morning was warmer than one might expect for the middle of January in Iowa. The students are still off on winter break, so there’s not much traffic on the roads. The university lifers straggle in a couple minutes late to their jobs at the college of business or the administrative offices on the pentacrest. They’ll read e-mail for a couple hours before taking an early lunch to run errands downtown and maybe even have a beer with their burger at Micky’s or The Airliner.

My route this morning took me past the Dey House, which is home to The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. They’re putting a fancy addition on the old residence to upgrade the program’s external physical image. I like the design. It’s particularly cool when viewed from the river walk at the bottom of the bluff on which Dey House sits. That view will be gone once the leaves come on in the summer; in fact the addition will be all but invisible unless it’s viewed from the parking lot to the south of the building.

As I started down the stairs that run to the bottom of the bluff, I noticed a flailing bunch of white pages stuck under a small hedge. “WORKSHOP” was written in robotic caps across the top of the first page.

Now, you have to be a pretty uninterested beast to be able to walk past a bunch of classwork from Writers’ Workshop students and not at least take a quick look at it. I’m an interested beast. I grabbed up the papers, brushed a little dried mud from them, and continued on to work.

It turns out the instructor for this undergrad creative writing class was a teaching assistant named Luke Sykora. You can see a sample of his poetry here. The three pieces comprising my soiled packet all read more like nonfiction to me, which is a genre close to my heart. They were pretty good short works, coming from freshmen. Still, I doubt any of them would end up actually gaining entry to the Workshop.

The whole episode reminded me of two things. The first was my own workshop experience in the nonfiction program, which from week to week turned from exhilarating to maddening to tremendously intimidating. It was a fantastic time. I see from the program’s Web site that a couple of people I studied with there have gone on to publish books. I should check them out.

I was also reminded of how much I love finding writing. Private notes are especially great. Shopping lists. Post Its with even one or two words on them. These little mental emissions scattered over the ground on wet, muddy pages and clumped up in the branches of bushes. Forgotten or lost by their authors, the words become tantalizing pieces of evidence of these different lives going back and forth and crisscrossing without notice.

In the nonfiction program we always took great care with the workshop pieces. Now and then a professor would admonish us to make sure we didn’t leave anyone else’s writing sitting around unattended; our stuff often dealt with very personal material that we’d never share with anyone outside the classroom. It strikes me as one of the most important differences between the fiction and nonfiction endeavors. Not to say fiction is inherently disposable. But these nonfiction essays often seemed more like confessions. We’d write things to see if we were brave or crazy enough to put on the page thoughts and ideas that we weren’t sure we could ever utter in even our softest whispering voice. So we held on to each other’s writing and guarded it like it was our own, not because we knew secrets, but because we’d become invested in each other’s lives.

So I wonder who dropped these pages I found this morning. Was it one of the three students whose work is included? Was it the grad TA? I could picture him emptying out a box of papers at the end of the semester in the dumpster near the Dey House parking lot and being surprised by a sudden breeze that picked up some papers and tossed them away toward the bluff. Chase them down or let them go? I mean, it’s only fiction….

Leah’s a big fan of taco pizza. It’s all right. I never really ate it at all before I met her, though I knew it existed. Now, we get one every couple weeks or so when our schedules don’t allow a home-cooked meal.

Happy Joe’s is an interesting chain, at least insofar as they’ve really pushed the envelope on unusual pizza toppings. I was browsing their menu online today (don’t ask), and some of their pies sound like they were created by a frustrated pizza chef who fled Italy for Mexico via Hamburg. Witness the “Matador,” with its refried beans, taco-seasoned beef, sausage, onions, and your choice of jalapeno peppers or mild chile peppers. Served with Spicey Joe’s taco sauce. Or the “Spaghetti Joe,” a monstrosity topped with spaghetti egg noodles, garlic-herb butter, Italian spaghetti sauce with beef, smothered with 100% real mozzarella, provolone, and cheddar cheeses on a pan crust. And of course there’s the relatively tame “Happy Joe’s Special,” with canadian bacon and sauerkraut. “Sounds unusual, tastes great!”

Shudder.

The thing I like best about ordering from our local Happy Joe’s is the service we get. During our most recent order, the young fellow who talked to Leah on the phone simply hung up on her after she told him what we wanted and gave him our address and phone number. How happy is that?

A car pulled up in front of the house not 15 minutes later, and out hopped our delivery guy. I was thrilled to see it was my favorite one, whose sullen, angry face is turned perpetually to the ground. No doubt he’s the same guy Leah talked to on the phone. When he got to the door I explained that our check wasn’t even ready, and that he was welcome to step inside.

“No.”

That was it. Just, “No.” Leah dashed off the check, and I handed it to the driver. He turned on his heels and practically ran back to his car without a word.

The pizza was passable. Barely. It was no Pagliai’s with sausage, anchovy, and onion, but it was a pizza, and for that we were both thankful. Some entrepreneur with a car and some free time on his or her hands could make a killing in this town doing nothing more than offering a delivery service for Pagliai’s.

Kevin’s home sick with strep today, so I thought I’d give him something to read while he sips his Edel Pils and browses the ‘Net. Get well soon, dude! (And save me an Edel Pils!)

A while back he asked me to take some pictures of this house that’s being renovated across the street from us. A local…”landowner”…has been working on the place since last August. On second thought, “landowner” really isn’t descriptive enough. Let’s try “slumlord.” Better? Mmm. Yes.

When we moved in to our house, there was a nice open lot across the street. Next to the lot was a nice-looking two-story yellow house owned by the slumlord. The college kids who rented the house would often have huge parties in the lot and play wiffle ball late into the summer night. During the week the lot’s thick grass would blink and glow with hundreds of fireflies as soon as the sun began to set.

Then one day last summer some men showed up with measuring tapes and spray paint and started marking out property lines. Before long an excavator was delivered that dug out a huge hole that would eventually be filled with a foundation. A slab was poured for a new garage. Finally, we learned that the slumlord was going to move an existing home onto the new foundation. If this had been happening in any other neighborhood but mine, I’d have been thrilled at the prospect of seeing a whole house coming down the road on a flatbed. But since the plan was to create another rental property right outside our front door, I wasn’t excited at all.

Turns out the house was coming from a property that sits adjacent to the slumlord’s residence. The slumlord decided he wanted a nice open lot full of green grass and fireflies next to his house, so he uprooted the hovel next door, transplanted it to our block, and prepared it for rental. Yippee.

The renovation work, as evidenced by the pictures here, is ongoing. You might attribute the slow pace to the fact that it’s winter now in Iowa. Or you might conclude that a ragtag group of 70-year-old recovering alcoholics can only work so fast, after all. But I hate to point fingers. Suffice to say it’s going to be a while before this place is habitable. Well, habitable for anyone save the worker who’s staying in the house until it’s completed, that is. I suspect we may see this place burned to the ground in the dead of night as the result of an unattended cigarette before we ever see any siding on it.

None of which is to say I don’t think the house has a lot of potential. It’s cute, though it is a bit small. I’m eager to see what they do with the siding, which could really make or break the project. It’ll be nice to have the neighbors’ cars off the street and into garages for a change, particularly with as congested as our street gets when school is in session around here. And if there’s any justice at all in this crazy, mixed-up world, a nice family will rent the place at last.

I was perusing my Webalizer logs today and saw seven referrals from someplace called IowaBlogs.net this month.

I looked them up and see they’re a kind of clearing house for Iowa-related blogs (well, they call themselves a “hub” of Iowa blogs). Or at least for blogs that originate in Iowa or mention Iowa or have any kind of contact to Iowa at all. I’m sure I don’t know how I got on there, and looking at their list of blogs, I saw only one other one I recognized. Might have something to do with my Technorati listing, might be a link from another blog.

In any case, someone must be checking out that site if it’s throwing referrals my way. I’ll have to go through their list and see if I can find anything interesting. One thing’s for sure: A lot of people use blogspot. Whew!

I really dislike shopping for cosmetics. When Leah adds an item of makeup to my shopping list, it’s pretty much assured that I’m going to screw it up somehow. When I go shopping, I’m used to buying items with simple, typically one- or two-word identifiers: “Soap;” “Bread;” “Extension Cord;” “Lightbulb.” So when I see a detailed description of some fancy eyeliner or mascara or shampoo, my eyes begin to glaze over.

My latest blunder involved a tube of Maybelline Extra Black “Thick & Healthy” mascara. I got everything right but the “waterproof” part, so the tube is just sitting at home, still in its packaging. In my defense, the tube I bought was hanging with about 40 other tubes that looked exactly the same save for a couple words differentiating one product from another. And those words were in smaller type. I swear.

I was looking at this sad, neglected package of mascara when I was at home today at noon. There’s an asterisk after the “Thick & Healthy” part of the name. I looked around for the note and found it at the bottom of the cardboard backing: “* Healthy-looking” That’s so like makeup.

Last night we had our first dodgeball game. I play on a team with some people from work and some of their friends and spouses. It was fun to let loose some aggression in a controlled environment.

We did OK. The play format is five games in an hour, though last night we ran long, so the last game was a 7-minute period. The team with the most members left on the court at the 7 minute mark won. We managed to get all their members out before the end of the period, so we won the game and the match for the night.

I would’ve had more fun if I hadn’t been battling this really sore neck for the past couple days. I’m not sure what’s causing it, but I suspect it has something to do with sleeping on my side. If I sleep on my back, I snore (loudly, I’m told), and Leah wakes me up and tells me to roll onto my side (actually, I never really wake up; I just follow her bidding in a half-daze).

Fortunately the pain didn’t keep me from throwing pretty well last night. I suspect we’re going to have our collective ass handed to us next week by a huge team of drunken frat boys. C’est la vie. They were entering the gym as we were leaving last night, and it seemed like there were 30 of them (six players are allowed on the floor at a time). There didn’t appear to be any females on the team, though there were a couple vacant-looking girls straggling along behind them clutching cameras. Paparazzi, I guess.

I got my first real hug from Ava today. Just this evening, in fact. Thirty minutes ago. And then she gave me two more before she went off to bed.

I think up until tonight she was giving what she thought were hugs. I’d pick her up and give her a squeeze, and she’d drape her arms around my neck and maybe give a little pat on the back. It was awesome, especially the little pat. If she never hugged any better than that, I sure wouldn’t complain.

But this evening — out of nowhere — she squeezed me back. She stretched her arms from shoulder to shoulder and laid a big ol’ bear hug on me. I wouldn’t have guessed she had it in her tiny frame. I even got a little kiss on the cheek, too.

Man. Amazing. The best hug ever.

Drug addiction has always been a mystery to me, mainly because I could never wrap my head around the idea that a person can’t find any better sensation than what they’d get out of a line or a pipe or a pill.

Which is not to say I don’t understand having a moment of weakness or emotional trauma.

The fact is that I’m lucky to have Ava in my life.  She trips all my neurological triggers.  The other day Ava was taking a nap, and I felt like I couldn’t wait for her to wake up.  She almost never sleeps for more than 90 minutes in the early afternoon, but it seemed like I was forgetting what she even looked like.  I missed her smile and her voice and the sound of her little feet pattering around the dining room.  I needed a hit.  And when she finally woke up and I went and picked her up out of her crib and held her in my arms, I didn’t have a trouble in the world.

Happy 100, Ava.

There is absolutely no way in the world to ever get used to stories like this.  It was bad enough before I was a father, but now…the thought of something like this befalling my wife and daughter is bone chilling.  You hear about these homicide detectives with  30 years in who’re able to chomp on warm pastries at even the most gruesome crime scenes, but I don’t know if I buy it.

Here today, gone tomorrow.  What kind of dark, dessicated, crippled heart is it that enables a man to bludgeon a  four-year-old girl with a hammer and then cut her throat with a box cutter?

Looking at this family photo just breaks my heart.  So much light and beauty and promise needlessly — brutally — destroyed.  I’m immensely curious to see what this perp looks like.

Mike Evangelist is writing a book about his time at Apple.  I mean, it’s just too close to Mac Evangelist.  I ain’t going to fault the guy his marketing skills.

He has a good piece in the Guardian today about the behind-the-scenes preparation for a MacWorld keynote event.  Since I’m waist deep in MWSF hype by now, I figured I’d throw some more fuel on the fire.

Leah and I have been getting a big kick out of the local dustup over NBC’s new show The Book of Daniel.

The other night we took a couple minutes to watch a roundtable sponsored by our NBC affiliate in Waterloo that brought together area clergymen to watch an episode of the program and comment.  The responses were fairly typical, ending up mostly as, “you shouldn’t portray Jesus like that.”

Really.  When you have supposed Christians running around claiming that stroke and coma are signs of Divine wrath over the division “God’s land,” well, the television portrayal of some Episcopalian priest cruising around in his car with Jesus is the least of The Son’s image problems.

Via BoingBoing:

A group of researchers have used a functional MRI to map out the parts of the brain that respond to brand identity, showing how Pavlovian conditioning generates response to a brand-mark.

If you’re like me, you’ve spent at least a couple minutes considering why logos like the Nike Swoosh or the Coke can become so memorable. Turns out you have about as much chance beating an urge to buy new tennies as you do not eating that nice plump hot dog smothered in chili and sharp cheddar. Who’s to blame? Are we merely unwitting slaves to these crafty marketers? How can they know so well what’s going to push our buttons? These guys think they’ve figured it all out.

I just remembered a very disturbing episode from our otherwise-splendid New Year’s Eve celebration.

At 11 we tuned in to the  New Year’s Rockin’ Eve celebration just in time to see the fancy ball drop for NYC’s new year.  I was surprised to see Dick Clark sitting behind his usual table somewhere over the crowds in Time Square.  I was even more surprised to hear the garbled, slurred speech coming from Dick’s mouth as he tried to count down the seconds to the big event.  Dick Clark had a stroke?  I hadn’t heard.  It’s sad news, but it was great to see him back at work.

What wasn’t so great was when the camera panned around to Dick making out with…God help me, is that Diane Sawyer?  Dick’s wife?  Some anonymous blond pulled off the street?  Whoever it was, she received a face sucking the likes of which I had not seen since watching C.H.U.D. on Cinemax over at Janina Fouts’ house in 1984.  I don’t know if it was the bracing midnight air of Times Square, the romance of New York City at night, or the free booze, but something got into Dick.  It’s safe to say we were all taken aback just a bit by Dick’s fumbling, widemouthed, vomit-inducing PDA, even though it only lasted a couple seconds before the good soul in the control room cut to confetti showering down on the hoi polloi.  At least I know one guy who had a New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.

Parents have all sorts of aspirations for their kids. As far as Leah and I are concerned, our daughter is a genius. Ava’s aunt and grandparents concur.

But it’s too early to even guess as to what kinds of aptitudes our little girl might have. I hope she’s good at everything I’m terrible at. Math. Science. History.

And I also hope she’s good at being who she is. Or at least of finding out who she is. I was thinking it would be cool if she became a drummer in a rock band. Maybe not the most famous band in the world, but a band that gets a lot of respect for its artistry and musicianship.  She wouldn’t be fabulously wealthy, but she’d be comfortable and happy.

I dunno.  It’s an ongoing mental exercise.  I only hope I manage to keep from screwing her up too badly before she finds her way.

For the past three years Leah and I have had our families to the house for a big dinner and celebration on New Year’s Eve. It’s pot luck, and I usually do the main course. This year Rachel suggested a French theme, which turned out fantastically well (if I do say so myself).

Without further ado, the dishes:

We started with Georgie’s French onion soup. It was so rich and delicate; I was surprised she’d used red onions, it came out so mild. Breaking through that asiago-smothered crostini to get to the broth filled with tender strips of onion was a perfect start to this meal.

Next up was a delicious green salad featuring pears and cheese, which was prepared by my mother. Along with it we had stuffed tomatoes and mushrooms from Kevin and Rachel. The tomatoes, in particular, were a pleasant surprise, as late December is not a time I normally associate with a tasty, ripe tomato. I made cassoulet (Cook’s Illustrated recipe from January 00, via Marcia). What a great dish to make on a day when you have a house full of family. Chicken thighs, boneless pork roast, bacon, kielbasa, and tomatoes simmered slowly and then baked before serving. Golly. The flavors were unreal. The Mark West pinot didn’t hurt matters any (if you’re in I.C., go get some at John’s. Wally’s selling it at $7.99 while supplies last).

For dessert Kevin crafted a mousse au chocolat that is, to date, the absolute chocolatiest thing I’ve ever tasted. I had some port I’d been saving from last year’s dinner, and it made an exquisite accompaniment to the mousse.

Finally, my brother came through with a lime-basil sorbet. It didn’t set up quite in time for the end of the meal, so we enjoyed some spoonfuls while we sipped champagne at midnight. Simply unique and fabulously flavorful.

It’s amazing how good a meal like that can make you feel, especially when you share it with family. We’d barely finished cleaning up before we were brainstorming ideas for next year’s theme. Mexican, Spanish, and Greek came up. I’ve been mulling over the idea of a “trailer park” theme, an oft-neglected culinary niche chock full of simple, satisfying, inexpensive dishes. I’m open to other suggestions…

I’ve let the last couple MacWorlds slip by without too much notice. I really haven’t been in the market for any new kit, and I didn’t have the time to play with it even if I did somehow manage to shop for it.

But I’m pretty excited about this month’s show, mostly because of the rumors of a new, Intel-based, possibly even widescreen iBook (dubbed the “IBook”). Alas, my 900MHz G3 is still running like a champ, albeit after having its daughterboard replaced in the last year. And I did pick up a Mini not too long ago, so I don’t need anything. My mom, on the other hand, does need a replacement for her iBook, which died a couple weeks ago. She’s been using mine during the day while I’m at work to get her e-mailing done, which has been a good temporary solution. My hope is that Apple does in fact announce new iBooks next Tuesday, and that those new iBooks are shipping the day of the announcement.

Heaven help me, I do love opening up a box containing shiny new Apple hardware. When I opened my Mini, I swore I caught a faint aroma of Cupertino when I first pulled back the box top. Or was it Taiwan…?

So all y’all recall the conversation I was having with my friend about Christmas letters, yes?  Well, I did receive hers in the mail right before the holidays hit.  As expected, it included a picture of her with her new husband.  Very cute.  The letter itself was a page and a half, single-spaced, pretty small type.  I.e., kinda long.

When I finished the letter I had an epiphany.  As you may have heard before, there really are only two kinds of people in the world.  No, not the haves and the have nots.  Not the glass-half-empties and the glass-half-fulls.  Nope.  The two kinds of people in the world are those who enjoy reading holiday letters written from the perspective of the pet housecat and those who don’t enjoy reading holiday letters written from the perspective of the pet housecat.

I won’t spoil the suspense and let you know where I come down on the issue.  For a while I considered scanning the letter and posting it here for everyone to enjoy, but it occurred to me that the letter’s feline author has no legal standing, and I didn’t want to be responsible for exploiting a defenseless animal.