WittmannWorld

Father-daughter date

2012-03-11T14:40:00.000-04:00

Sofia and Laura were off at a gymnastics meet - Sofia won, for the first time this season! woo hoo! Annalena had spent the night at a friend's house, and we had time to kill until the mid-afternoon. WE did something we do 2 or 3 times a year: we headed to the UMaine Museum of Art.

We negotiated beforehand, would we play MY game or HER game?! My game consists of posing like people in the paintings, figuring out little tiny pieces of the painting like brush strokes, or and just diving in and LOOKING REALLY HARD, no matter what you see. (This is a lot like my research: what do you notice? can you make sense of it? can you copy it?) Her game consists of getting the museum's "scavenger hunt" sheet, with 10 tiny images from the paintings they are showing, and finding all the paintings. Both ask that you look really closely, but I often find her game means you seek something independent of the art - you're just looking for the sake of finding, not seeing. She often says that my game gets boring - haven't we looked at this painting ENOUGH?! I'm bored.

We ended up doing both, as she pointed out at the end.

Here's one where she talked about the Roman bridges and I talked about reverse-centaurs and we talked about Roman columns and such.

I tried copying some art, just goofing off (This was something I learned to do 20 years ago on a trip to Spain - acting out statues and art is a really dorky fun thing to do, in case you've never done it). The golden circle in the top shot is in close-up in the second shot.

Annalena got into the game, trying to figure out what was going on. In this painting, a horse rides a person, and the skyscrapers hang upside-down...

But throughout the whole thing, she did try to keep track of the artwork for her scavenger hunt.

On the way out, she talked to me about texture and some activities they'd done at art camp the previous summer. What really caught my attention was her remembering that they photographed things of different textures, trying to capture the differences in another medium. I loved that idea.

We had lunch at the Sea Dog, her request. Sat by a window looking out on the river, and I giggled my head off at her silly pronouncements.

Warm spell

2012-03-09T16:53:00.000-05:00

In honor of the snow that melted away almost in its entirety in just one day, here are photos of Sofia and Annalena waiting for the bus. The Kendall house has the tiniest of hills next to its porch, and the kids spent the little bit of time they had sledding down the hill. Obviously, they loved it.

Today the snow was gone...

With this winter, what else?

2012-03-05T08:03:00.000-05:00

What else would one expect from this winter, seemingly so mild and snow-less, than that the first snow day for the kids would happen in late February and that we have light powder snow on the ground on March 5th. Sure made shoveling the drive easy.

People want to know

2012-03-03T12:01:00.000-05:00

Why is this stack of post-it notes tied to a tree? I do not know. Do they need to be rescued?

Enigmatically beautiful music

2012-03-02T13:25:00.000-05:00

Remix culture is a wonderful thing, with mash-ups and everything else. One fabulous moment of weirdness in music happened a few years ago - 9 beet stretch. Leif Inge took the 9th symphony by Beethoven, ran it through a signal processor, and created a 24 hour version of the piece. Everything just roars along. There is no sense of time. For a while, he was streaming the audio online. I mailed him, asking for copies for my radio show - he mailed me CDs with the mp3 files on them. (These sentences would have made no sense 15 years ago. I love that.)

Well, next thing you know, another guy puts out some software to do this himself. Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch (if you're on a Mac, here) lets you do what Leif Inge did, using any mp3 file in your library.

I've learned that skittery songs with lots of beats and high pace actually sound great, once you muck about a bit. Right now, I'm listening to a beat-heavy Radiohead song, and it's all ambient sounds and shifting sands. Later, I might get to an 18 hour long version of Music for 18 Musicians (joke name: Music for 18 Hours). No, I don't listen to it all at once. You dive in and spend time in some segment. It's wonderful background music.

Because right now I'm working on a paper. And I'm enjoying music, again. I've been under water too long. Finding back to enigmatically beautiful music is a sign that I'm doing a little bit better than before.

Back to my paper, now.

How far she's come

2012-02-28T13:05:00.001-05:00

Here's what Annalena has to say about how her skiing has improved:

For those who want help with what she wrote:

When I was three years old,
my parents wanted me to ski
so badly so I learned to. I was
always complaining and making
my parents cary me. My
sister, Sofia was trying to
make it look easy so that I
would do it but still I
wouldn't do it. Now I am a
great skier! I can ski greens
and blues and even some

blacks

I love the single word on the back page. The picture is pretty awesome, too...

The girls ski the black diamonds

2012-02-28T13:00:00.001-05:00

A long while back, we made the decision to become a family that skis. The first time we took the girls skiing was in Austria, and since then, we've tried to go several times a year. Frankly, it's nice to have a job that allows us enough play money to pay the horrendous ski resort prices. We look for every deal we can, meaning we try to ski on the various "Maine Days" where they charge less, and so on.

This year, we are using Sofia's "Winter Kids Pass" for all it's worth. With this pass, she gets free tickets 2 times a year at every resort in Maine. It's great for us, because we also get to ski in places we don't usually go to. Sugarloaf is typically too pricey, but when one kid is free, we'll go. Saddleback is our usual mountain (smaller, less crowded, but great fun for and with the girls), and we've been there a few times, as well. We did our annual ski weekend with the Davids/Rofes family a few weeks back.

The adults all greedily shoved the kids into ski lessons so that we could get a part of the day to ski alone. Well, one of the girls (not ours) whacked herself really bad in a fall before the ski lesson could begin, so she and Xenia headed to the hospital to get checked out. Yuck. That left our family, Bill, and Sylvia.

The three girls proceeded to take what Annalena called the "most boringest lesson EVER," and Sofia shouted at us in frustration about how "all we did was TURNS. TURNS TURNS TURNS. It was BOOOOORING." She was really mad.

Except, it worked. Ever since then, her turns have been lovely. Shifting her weight better, better control, no longer flying down the mountain recklessly. Here she is, on one of the hardest slopes on the mountain:

Lovely view, ain't it?

Last weekend, making more use of the Winter pass, we headed further west than we usually do, and ended up at Mt. Abram and Sunday River. There was snow falling on Saturday morning, so the view was spectacular as we were driving off.

Mt. Abram was not well groomed, and there were 8 inches of lovely new snow. After the t-bar incident to get the blood flowing (walking up a t-bar after you fall out, not fun...), the day only got better. By the end, the girls were better than the adults in heading through a developing mogul field, big piles of heavy snow that our long skis couldn't navigate as well as theirs. That was their first double black diamond, thank you very much.

The next day, the weather was stellar, though windy, and the views from Sunday River were amazing. First, the obligatory family photos, one in the morning...

and one in the afternoon...

We explored a bunch of the mountain, got lucky with the wind hold on two of them, and had a ball. The photos below are mostly from the entrance to "Right Stuff," which was a perfect slope for the girls. Oh, they could turn turn turn to their hearts' content. They only played rocket a few times, going for pure speed and fun, and nobody had a major wipeout.

Amazing views, aren't they? I know, it's mostly the same one over and over, but hey, it was gorgeous. Other areas were better, but I forgot to photograph.

School assignments

2012-02-24T13:06:00.002-05:00

Last night, I was helping Sofia read about one of the many Euler formulas (this one is about faces, vertices, and edges of polygons). Not so interesting to post about. I mean, I love it, but it doesn't get to the "adorable" level that often is reason enough for posting something online. Like this, from Annalena. about a cream-colored lop-eared bunny (if you can't read the text at this size, click on the image to get a larger version):

Now, for comparison's sake, I ask that you read Annalena's best friend's writing assignment... We can all spend some time thinking about whether they had a writing prompt or whether they helped each other write essentially the exact same entry.

Every week, Lena also has to do some vocabulary and spelling. I love the pictures she comes up with to illustrate her words.

at last, a radio show

2012-02-23T23:35:00.000-05:00

I have been DJing in one form or another, with at most a year's gap (mostly while living in Austria) since 1989. I remember the first promo that I made, as an audition for my first show down at WXDU in Durham, using the Camper van Beethoven version of Pictures of Matchstick Men. I remember the Wax Trax label and its pink vinyl, and the record with the parallel grooves for the 2 songs, and the one where you played from the inside out - yes, I DJed with RECORDS. Gasp! I remember learning the hardware of each turntable, spinning back from the first sound, 1/4 turn plus 1", and learning to time transitions so that you beat-matched from a cold start, one song flowing right into the next. Then there was the transition to CDs, and I haven't played off anything but my laptop in years by now. I did free jazz shows, I played hardcore techno and house, I spent years as the international music DJ at WMUC in Maryland and later at WMEB here in Maine. I've played songs composed to last 24 hours, and I've played a full show of songs no longer than 1 minute each (way more exhausting than one could imagine). I've been behind the soundboard for sporting events, I've helped live shows get on the air, I was part of a Yo La Tengo interview, but not the Sonic Youth interview back in the day. I love DJing and the mindset of exploring music...

For several years, I've been focused on what you might call modern classical, meaning contemporary composed orchestral or chamber ensemble music. I've played my fair share of operas (mostly Philip Glass and Robert Ashley). Lately, I've drifted into what you might call the world of drones, huge majestic soundscapes in which seemingly nothing happens, but there's a constant change in the undertone or a development in some aspect of the music. I've found the various netlabels, where you can get music for free, and curators like Marc Weidenbaum at disquiet.com commission music from friends and colleagues.

Today, for the first time in what feels like ages, I was able to do my radio show again. I haven't done many in the past 1 1/2 years, since my big work project got underway. What with my regular teaching load, my teaching overload, plus my weekly evenings of professional development activities with teachers; what with my regular research activities of working with between 4 and 8 students on their projects; what with my service and administrative work within my project; what with my conference travel or visits to other institutions; I just haven't had the time to go on the air. I've missed it.

Today I was finally on the air again. The show was a blast. I created the playlist with a theme in mind: repetition. I wanted to explore the different ways in which repetition was used in music. There were all sorts of things I did for this:

playing versions of the same song many times (the Hymn from The Sinking of the Titanic, by Gavin Bryars). Each version is different, even though the melody repeats endlessly into the depths of a murky sound.
pieces in which the previous piece is repeated quietly underneath the present piece (14 consecutive poems from the 73 poems written by Kenneth Goldsmith with music composed by Joan La Barbara). Each new verse is sung with the previous verse sung quietly underneath. It's an audio version of the visual poetry.
dada-ish nonsense poetry, including Charles Amirkhanian's "Dreams Freud Dreamed" (including the great line, "dreams freud dreamed freud dreamed," and more convoluted self-referential things like it) and Ernst Jandl's "schtzngrmm" (which I first read as a poem while in Austria as a 16 year old)
Alvin Lucier's "Sitting in a Room," one of the great pieces of process art, and a hilarious drunken spoof of it by C. Reider, who runs the vuzh netlabel (in each case, a description of what is going to happen is repeated, though modified by the surroundings of the performer, until the original words are obliterated by their interaction with the surroundings).
Classic phase music, in this case Steve Reich's "Piano Phase," performed by Anders Russo and Marc Mellits
Classic additive structure music, in this case Philip Glass's "Music with Changing Parts," which is harsh, noisy, addictive, and sounds like total punk noise when you turn it up loud and slow down your rate of listening
tape loops, in which a snippet of sound is just repeated over and over (in this case, one of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops). The great thing here was that the loop "falls apart" as metallic bits of the tape flaked off while he was recording the tape loop. Eventually, the tape breaks. By that point, you're listening to an artifact of the original sound, nearly nothing left of the lovely melody which started things.
a wordplay song by Onophon, from Austria, who combine Mut (courage) and Zu (closed) and repeat it in different orders, creating, among other things, the word Zumutung (imposition). It's silly wordplay, and a fun song.

Looking through that list, the Basinski, Reider, and Lucier elements have structure in common (the surroundings change the loop), the Reich and Glass were of the same period, there was a good bit of poetry involved, and the repetitions of Bryars's Hymn were me doing what the music was doing, in a way. I had a ball. It was easily my best show in 2 years.

Why do I care? Because I love using my ears like that and exploring structure like that. I love exploring different versions of the same structural pattern. I love taking one idea and seeing it in different forms.

From that perspective, my radio show is my work and is my life, as a whole. I am pretty passionate, in general, but explore my passion in only a few areas. Those things I love, I want to explore in all their richness. Today's radio show, for 2 hours, allowed me to do that. It's a small moment, I doubt I'll be as good next week, but goddamn, today it felt good.

Family Adventure Girls, again

2012-02-18T17:24:00.002-05:00

A few months back, the girls were part of a weekend program called Adventure Girls, and Sofia was even interviewed on TV for it...

Annalena did the robots activity on the UMaine campus, of course with her buddy McKayla there, as well. I think they were (as usual), goofing off and having fun. These photos come courtesy of Christine - thanks!

While this was going on, Sofia was at a gymnastics meet... wish I'd had photos of that, too.

Conference space

2012-02-09T16:49:00.002-05:00

Part of my job takes me across the country about twice a year. I have tried to avoid my winter meetings because, well, they are small, and most of my conference friends aren't there. Yes, I go to conferences in equal part to do the work one does while attending a conference AND to see my old friends. Some of these people I've known for over 15 years. We've seen each other get married, have kids, lose parents, lose spouses, lose their marriages... it's pretty intense, late at night when the filters are down, to be open and honest with people you don't see that often, but regularly enough that the contact sustains the friendship.

So, I was in California. It looked like this:

but while I was taking that morning photo, Laura and the girls were out on the ski slopes again, experiencing this:

That's one hell of a contrast.

Though I was in the pavement hell that is that style of California (airport next to rail tracks next to hotel next to convention center, surrounded by all of 5 or so places to go eat), I did manage to enjoy most of the meals. The Indian buffet was tasty the first few times, but you can only eat so much Indian food at a restaurant before feeling you've gained 10 pounds. Then, there was the sushi night. Six of us went out and ate absurd amounts of all-you-can-eat sushi. Which was actually pretty good! Here are two of the 20-ish plates we got. (I don't know the number of trays of sushi or rolls we got, but I do know the number of orders we made, and it's embarrassingly large.)

I tried to take photos of people at the conference, since it's nice to know what we look like now, and makes me wish I'd taken photos of everyone 10 or 15 years ago when our hair was less grey, our bodies were slimmer, and we had fewer wrinkles on our faces. I won't post them, because most are out of focus from the indoor lighting and involve people that most of you reading this blog don't know...

There goes my lucrative soccer career

2012-01-30T22:38:00.001-05:00

Well, it had to happen. Playing a pretty successful game against a pretty good squad, I got injured. My thumb bent backward some distance further than it is supposed to. It didn't even hurt - until later, when the endorphins began to wear off. Sigh.

The guy who shot the ball on goal when this happened is a really really nice guy, plus he's the software developer of WriteRoom and TaskPaper and a few other nifty, text-based programs in the Mac and iOS world. We'd just spent the game chatting about his newest product, still in alpha, and whether or not I would be a tester of it. But on the field, well, he tries to score, I try to stop it, and now I have this:

The photos are from that night in ER - first evidence. I spent a few hours there, waiting for them to diagnose and see if it required immediate surgery or anything. The answer is no. Now I'm waiting for the swelling to go down, and to see if the pain is gone in7 to 10 days. If not, off I go to have it looked at in more detail.

How do I feel about this? Well, part of me just says "sigh."And another part of me says "dammit." I mean, really, I LIKE playing soccer. But for the next 6 months, I'm not even going to try.

Oh. And I can't pick up and twirl the girls in the air anymore. I've been doing that for 10 years. But to do it, they hold onto my thumb. Not anymore. Not for a long while. Dammit.

Brownies doing yoga

2012-01-24T13:30:00.003-05:00

Annalena was part of a group of girls that did some yoga as part of Brownies. Do people usually grin like that when they do yoga?

(this picture stolen from Christine's blogpost...)

UPDATE: I screwed this up. I thought it was Adventure Girls, but it was actually Brownies. Original post has been changed...

Another day of skiing

2012-01-22T22:30:00.002-05:00

Just because it wasn't enough on MLK, we went again only a weekend later. It's January and February, our ski season...

On the lift, with bugeyed kids surrounding mom...

Look! I exist! Some nice guy took a picture for us.

What is the English word for this kind of snow on the trees? It's not from snowmaking. It's just layers upon layers of "Reif" (is that how you spell it in German? I don't even know).

The day ended with drinks up at Bullwinkle's on the slopes. That's the peak in the background. And cocoa and beer in the foreground.

Ski day with Opa!

2012-01-16T22:21:00.000-05:00

How often do we get the chance to ski with Opa?! He came up to see one of Sofia's gymnastics meets, then we spent a quiet Sunday here because the temperatures on the mountain were too cold, and on MLK we headed up to Sugarloaf. As usual, some photos:

The ski was fabulous in the morning - just a gorgeous blue. Here we are in helmets, even Opa! Yes, you're right, it is much warmer than a hat.

I took as much video of the skiing as I could. A few years ago, Opa gave us digitized home video which includes me skiing in Italy as a 7 year old. Well, I wanted footage I could share with the kids later on, too. I have a great camera on my phone (this still surprises me), so why not use it? Rather than dump video online, here are a few stills of us on an almost empty mountain...

Opa skis as elegant as ever...

The rare snow

2012-01-13T16:11:00.001-05:00

Hey. It actually snowed. Not much, you know, but something. This morning's bus stop view...

Morning things

2012-01-09T15:51:00.000-05:00

It's rare that we all have lunches ready in the morning. Laura eats at home on her half days of work, twice a week. I sometimes buy lunch at work or eat a bowl of the dried split pea soup that I have stashed in my office. One or both of the girls buys lunch on a given day. But, on days when we do all have lunch from home, there is a moment when the lunchboxes are lined up by the back door.

They're kinda dirty and beat up, but so what.

A day on the coast

2012-01-07T22:01:00.001-05:00

Some neighbors have moved to the coast, and they invited us down for a lovely afternoon. We'd been there in the summer, swimming in the cold ocean waters on a 95 degree day. This time, it was grey and cold and the wind was blowing - it felt more like a cold November day than a January day, but that has been our winter, frankly.

Some photos:

I love the shed in the background on this one:

The shore here is right down the hill from A&B's house - the white house on the edge has just the most amazing porch and view. Plus, there's a gazebo. We had fun inventing stories about the B&B neither of us wants to own, the weddings on the lawn, the beer served from the gazebo...

Here's the view from A&B's house, looking down on a secondary structure they own, a "party house," with a single big room.

On the inside, mucking about, we found old newspapers. From 1944. Look at the headlines - Churchill and the pope, a list of casualties. On another page, a hilarious ad.

Other people's birthdays...

2012-01-06T23:08:00.000-05:00

Annalena spent the night (during the school week! oh my!) at a friend's house as part of a birthday party. You can read the whole story over here, and I'll just steal a few photos from that blog for those of you who want to see Annalena with one of her best friends...

Now THAT is some happiness.

When I saw Lena this morning at the bus stop, she ran up to me waving waving and shouting ... at Ginny, who was behind me. Hi kid. I missed you. How have you been? Remember your Papa? No?

Laughing. She was so incredibly happy, and the photos show it. Yay.

Bulges and tilt shifts in my own head

2012-01-04T20:55:00.000-05:00

I got new glasses this morning, my first foray into bifocals. I have been wearing them all day and it's been mostly okay. I mean, disconcerting, for various reasons, but okay.

Then, at dinner, surfaces around me began to BULGE OUTWARD depending on how I moved my head. I got really tired, suddenly. I'd had a bit of that at noon, but now it was really strong. Oi.

Let me back up. The bifocals don't have the strongest variation in them. They are progressive lenses, which means that the regions in the lens are with different diopters and they slide between scales. So, for me to see something in focus at a distance, I look out the top of my lens, and to see things closer up I have different places on the glass where I have to see.

This is a serious challenge for me. I utterly favor my left eye when looking at things. To help get my right eye involved, I have prism in my right lens to bend the light in my right eye and ease the effort needed for my right eye to focus on the same point as my left eye sees. In addition, I have astigmatism in both eyes. It's all kind of messed up.

Now, with the bifocals, it seems that two things have happened. First, I could always find a place that would allow both eyes to focus. Sometimes, it's a tiny little region. If I try to look peripherally at a thing, it goes out of focus. I can do it even as I type - I look at the words I'm writing, I turn my head so that the magical part of the lens I'm using rotates away, and the words go out of focus.

Second I have used both eyes all day long. Even with my old glasses with prism, there was so much effort in focusing near and far, I would get tired, I'd stop using my right eye at some point. Today, even at the end of the day, I feel like I'm using my right eye. It's pretty amazing.

So, combine these two things. With both eyes in play, I see the world in three dimensions. (Those of you who see this all the time - consider yourself lucky. It's really neat. When it happens to me, it's a shock, every single time. Things go deep and have volume. Wow. It is incredibly cool.) And, with only narrow ranges of solid angle in which to see things in focus, the 3D world keeps shifting, as if parts of it are being tilt shifted.

Worse than that, when I tilt my head, the surfaces of the world around me shift. This is the bulging thing I mentioned earlier. Holy shit, what's going on?!?! That was my first reaction. I was tilting my head, and the counter underneath each eye was moving in and out of 3D, coming closer or going further away depending on the tilt. Now, my brain knows nothing is moving, but the table was bulging, as if balloons were pushing out from the center. WTF?! Things at angles to each other move, depending on how I move. This isn't regular 3D movement, this is angles changing, planes of surfaces moving - and for each eye, they move differently. AGH!

Here's one way of thinking about it. Take your hands stretched flat, and put them parallel to the floor in front of you. Bring them together - elbows staying at your side - until the pointing fingers meet. Now, imagine them moving up and down as you turn your head side to side - they aren't, but they look like it. One hand can even look like you tilted it, compared to the other, like it's no longer parallel to the floor. Oh, good lord, this is so confusing.

Thank god this only happens to things close to me. And only if I tilt my head. I have had VERY GOOD POSTURE today, to avoid this effect. It's utterly disconcerting. Driving was fine - that's distance viewing out of the top of the glasses. But sitting at a table? Typing this up? Not so good.

But, I wanted to write it up on the first day of experiencing it. Everyone tells me that it will take 2 weeks to get over this. I'm sure I'll be fine, in the end. Until then, the world bulges as I move through it, things tilt shift, and I can't see things the way I'm used to. And I did this voluntarily, to avoid it being worse when the reading prescription needs even more correction? Wow. I can't imagine what it's like for a situation with stronger glasses than mine.

Lazy lazy week

2011-12-31T17:00:00.001-05:00

We were supposed to ski, and the lack of snow kept us from it. We had cancelled the reservations at the hotel before Sofia sprained her ankle. She couldn't really walk well, so that would have kept us from skiing, too. And then, the day we would have been on the slopes, the lousy weather got lousier, and the wind was strong enough to create wind holds on the lifts we would have been trying to ride. So there. No skiing.

Some people in this house are going a bit bananas about this.

Our quiet vacation time has been incredibly restorative for us all, regardless of going bananas. Some examples:

We've slept in. I know that seems normal in a vacation, but it took me a while to learn how to go to sleep, and how to stay asleep. It's been a lousy semester in terms of work and stress and staying up late and learning that it takes me 90 minutes from leaving a screen in order to get to bed. Ah, to sleep. It's been good.
The new coffee grinder (thank you, Mary!) is working out really really well. I've been making a prodigious amount of espresso and cappuccino every morning. Yum. That, plus waffles, pancakes, and other decadent meals. My diet has to improve starting soon, but enjoying vacation has definitely been worth it.
The girls have had sleepovers (either here or at another person's house) and playdates with friends. We didn't really see Sofia for a 30 hour period, for example.
We've read a ton of books, watched more movies than we expected to, and played online a bunch.
We went out to lunch and did a family swim afternoon at the indoor pool up at the university.

Okay, so we didn't go ski. But it sure was nice to get lazy to the point of boredom.

I'd write more, but I'm going to go read, now. That, or I'll take my iPad away from the girls. They can play sudoku somewhere else, dammit. I have a "good" (i.e.: pulp fiction) ebook I'm reading right now... My turn.

Some more Boston photos

2011-12-27T23:15:00.000-05:00

Forgot to post these just now, and I like them, so here they are, without further commentary:

Christmas in Boston

2011-12-27T23:04:00.000-05:00

After our Christmas Eve in Bangor, we had a relaxing morning with Santa filling our stockings, we ate a lazy breakfast, we Skyped with Maggie and Molly in Spain, and then we drove to Boston. Ute, David, and Julian were there, and Opa was waiting for us.

The first order of business was a fabulous meal around the dining table - the cousins were getting along splendidly...

...and the adults were, too.

We sang songs, we chatted away, and there were more gifts to be opened. A grand old time, and very nice to have it with Opa.

On Monday, we went for a walk. Sofia was still nursing her sprained ankle, so she was on the slower end (for a change). Ute and Opa were practicing for their Broadway debut...

...and then discussing the issues of timing and whether they would ever make it big.

I spent a long time thinking about Abbi - we didn't talk about her much, but I know that she was on everybody's mind, based on the conversations we did have.

As usual, having the cousins get together had its ups and downs (Sofia and Julian do have similar personalities at times), but then Julian got a stomach bug and conked out on the couch for a while. Poor kid. All three kids were pretty much buried in their books, the hexbug racetrack, and the crafty things they were doing, which kept them mostly in the basement rather than up where the adults were. The adults were doing their usual chattering away, which was nice. I like David and Ute, and I really don't see enough of David. It was good hanging out with them, but Ute was exhausted in her own way, as well. It was a definite transition away from the social world of the previous few weeks (parties, work events in the evening, etc.) and into the lazy stay-at-home week we've had in Bangor since returning from Boston...

Bored and curious don't mix well

2011-12-27T22:37:00.000-05:00

Last Friday, some friends who are off to Scotland on a Fulbright hosted an open house, and we went there. It was one of the last social evenings of a December filled with them - it's amazing how much I like the people we know here in Maine, and how much the rich network of friendships plays out across the multiple events we end up attending. The conversations start at one party, continue across the next, and are followed up with a "whatever happened about..." a few weeks later. I love it.

The kids were bored. I mean, there were other kids there, but the older ones have hit the teen years, and there were a few girlfriends and boyfriends floating about - that's a bit old for our kids. The younger kids were in the basement drawing and doing crafty things, but that was, after a while, too young for our kids. So they were stuck. Bored.

At the end of the evening, Annalena walked up to Laura, saying her nose hurt. She had no reason why, it just hurt. As we were walking home, Laura asked "did you put anything in your nose?" and the answer was "I don't think so." Ahem. That would be sevenyearoldspeak for "yes." WHAT did you put in your nose?! A carrot.

A CARROT?!?

We talked to various people about this. We got advice. We were all ready to go to the ER. But, if you can't see the thing in the nose, they can't do anything, either. And, the entrance via the nostril is a tighter passage than the exit via the esophagus, so once it's inside, the way anything comes out is via the throat. A whole carrot?!? How the hell do you get a carrot up your nose?!? We had no idea how large this object was. We were grossed out.

Trauma ensued. I thought I saw something (in retrospect, I was right - it didn't look like a whole carrot because it wasn't, but I didn't know that at the time). I tried to get to it with my needle-nose pliers. Whoops. Bloody nose. Then, on the recommendation of the ER nurse over the phone as well as the pharmacist, we tried to flush the sinuses with saline. Oh, the wailing and horribleness as 10 ml of saline went into her nose. That was awful. Stay calm, stay calm: you can either laugh or you can cry, and crying won't help, right? So then, we waited, and took the advice of the ER nurse: it might take 2 or 3 weeks until some yucky discharge happened. Oi.

Within 2 days, Annalena said her nose felt much better. After the trauma we'd enacted on it, I'm surprised it was normal that quickly. We assumed the carrot had been flushed down, and that was that.

All of this is prelude to the following photos. We were down in Boston (blog post coming soon) and taking family photos. Opa was behind the camera and we were goofing off. I was tickling Annalena and making dumb faces. She started laughing so hard that she had to wipe her nose. The rest is there for you to see.

Turns out the carrot piece was much smaller than we thought. I loooove the girls' expressions in that last photo.

We think this entire incident is something approaching hilarious, sorry if it's grossed you out.

Brief moments from Christmas

2011-12-25T21:14:00.000-05:00

The Christmas tree with both lights and candles...

Just after we'd finished singing our songs

Annalena, with an ornament of her at a younger age right before her

Concentrate concentrate on opening

I think they're happy

Dinner followed, with the spread reaching the length of the table.

Some examples:

Adults got a mushroom soup with madeira, holy cow is it good

fresh Italian bread from Massimo's downtown, thick crust, soft center

Good salami, pickles, tomatos, salmon, melon, and prosciutto

Deviled eggs

Potato salad - needed more salt, then it was divine

Green beans with balsamic vinaigrette sauce

And our annual family photo...

Previous family photos from 2010 and 2009. Laura's shawl seems to change each year...

Christmas Eve walk

2011-12-24T14:05:00.000-05:00

There's a tradition I once had (hi, Thomas...) of taking a long walk in the woods on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. With the temperatures in the teens, Laura took a walk, and then I went out. By the time I made it to the stream, the sun was far enough along its path to no longer light it.

Click on the map below to see the path I walked, in case you care (data are from runkeeper):

The usual data screwup happened in the little while, which is why my pace seems so oddly fast. You can see spikes in the pace when I stopped to take photos (marked by grey pegs on the map, by the way). Here are some of the photos:

The whole while, I had Music for 18 Musicians playing in my ears. Lovely, gorgeous, shimmering music, slow evolution through the chords, perfect for a crisp sunny winter walk.

Finally, some white

2011-12-24T10:42:00.000-05:00

Ahhhh, finally. Snow. This is how it should be. It's Maine, what's with the warmth?! December was very warm, but yesterday morning there was finally snow. Sure, it was right around the freezing point, so lots of it came down as wet slush rather than crisp snow. Fine, it's still white on the ground, and it helps the day be a bit brighter. Here are some photos from when it wasn't bright, yet:

The last one is a nearby house, where the guy who lives there tries to compete in having the most decorated house in Bangor. The photo doesn't contain the music playing when you walk past. Crazy.

For us, we're enjoying a day of relative calm and quiet. Tonight, the Christkind comes with some special presents, and all the family presents are already laid out under the tree. Tomorrow morning, Santa will fill the stockings. All we have today is to prepare our traditional dinner and make sure the house is clean. Maybe a long walk on frozen roads (I thought of jogging, but not on icy roads with temperatures under 20). Lots of calm and reading before the insanity of present-opening is upon us tonight.

Maybe later, I'll write more about my thinking about Christmas as a time of lights. I've been thinking about Hanukkah, Advent, trees, and all the things I thought about last year, too. Solstice celebrations, a time to be with friends (oh, our social life has been a bit out of control), and a chance to enter into the darkest time of the year through celebration.

Next up: January, in which the lack of snow keeps us from skiing, which has been our saving activity to keep away the winter depressions. Hopefully the cold and the snow will conspire to keep snow on the ground for cross country skiing, and allow the resorts to cover the slopes. December, the time of social activity. January and February, ski season. Let's go!

Bowling!

2011-12-20T22:46:00.002-05:00

Our friend Justin had his birthday, and Megan organized a bowling party at the local bowling alley. Now, the girls and I really like bowling. And, not too long ago, we were at the same bowling alley for Justin and Megan's son's birthday party.

The routine is always the same at birthday parties, be they for adults or kids. The kids start out bowling like crazy, and the adults have no chance to take part. Then, they get bored, and food gets served. They head to the arcade area in back, and the adults ignore them and we all bowl.

Here's some footage from when the kids were bowling:

Here we are later on, as adults:

(if the video is too small, click on the YouTube logo in each video to go to the YouTube website, and then use the full screen button to see it larger. It's worth it, especially for Annalena's facial expressions.)

I should point out how HARD bowling like this is. The tiny balls give you little control, and the pins are really thin. So, there are a lot of sarcastic "WOO!!! I got ONE!!!" moments.

We had a ball. I gotta say, it's the first time I had sushi at a bowling alley. Topped off with pizza. And cheap beer. Rock on.

The Base

2011-12-20T09:31:00.000-05:00

My cousin has a really great band - The Base. They're a power rock trio, of sorts - they do a bunch of softer things, and their guitarist/singer is a great songwriter. His pronunciation in English is even pretty good, something that otherwise irritates the hell out of me when I'm listening to Austrian bands singing in English. I don't know what the hell the lyrics are about, most of the time - kind of the norm for rock songs, I guess. The bassist lays down a thick line, Karl plays rock. solid. precise. drums. It's a great band.

Also, they're on YouTube. Here's one of my favorite songs by them, "Not My Dog," performed live at the Burgtheater.

At 1.29 you can see some close-ups of Karl drumming (again at 4.444). At 3.15, the accordion driven rave-up starts. It's a fun song.

Here's the video for Buffalo People (again, I have to ask what the hell the lyrics are about):

Their most recent song is much softer, barely contains any sound but the guitar arpeggios until near the end, while the video is actually weirdly menacing - why Santa walking slowly? what's going on here?

And the video from their most recent album brings it back to that guitar sound from Not My Dog.

That's Karl, at 2.45, drinking a beer. Hi, cousin.

Anyway, there you go. My fanpage.

One last thing. When I saw them live in 2009 in Klagenfurt, they put on a great, tight show, even though the place was nearly empty because the promoters hadn't actually, you know, PROMOTED. The band played hard, which was great. That's not the interesting part. No no, the interesting part of that show is that it's the night that a deer rack fell on my goddamn head - OW! As we got to the club, I walked through a door just at the moment that a huge deer rack (we're talking many, many points) fell off the wall and stabbed me hard. I only bled a little.

A piano recital

2011-12-19T21:34:00.001-05:00

I won't post the video of the performances, but a group photo taken at the end of this Sunday's recital will allow you to see Sofia after her performance. Enjoy.

I need a haircut

2011-12-19T11:36:00.001-05:00

For those who have forgotten what I look like, some evidence.

Maybe I don't need a haircut so much as I need to comb my hair.

Advent singing

2011-12-19T11:34:00.000-05:00

Every Sunday, the family gathers together to sing songs, drink cocoa or wine, eat some cookies. Each week, we light one more candle. We left out last week, and Annalena requested that we not light both candles, hence we only had 3 lit on our Advent wreath.

The songs were the usual - Annalena chiming in loudly to Kling Glöckchen Klingelingeling, me trying harmonies to the various pieces to which I can hear the harmony in my head (and then can figure out how to sing what I hear), Laura being the bedrock of the melody, Sofia concentrating on her delivery and learning to sing a little louder, all of us ending on Stille Nacht.

when the cold makes it through the walls

2011-12-19T11:31:00.000-05:00

For a brief spell, we have had the bitter cold that comes with winter. Frankly, after the abnormal warmth of the fall, it's a pleasure to feel the bite of the cold while walking to the bus stop. Then again, the heat has to work harder.

We're enjoying our pellet stove. It works by using air from outside to feed the flame - there's a tube sucking in air from outside, and a vent back out, as well. So, outside air gets pulled into the house, right? Outside air was very very cold last night. Very VERY cold.

Meaning, it was cold enough to freeze the condensation on the pipe. Yes, this icy frost is only feet away from the flame of the stove. Kinda cool. (Took the photo just before going to bed.)

Occasional running

2011-12-17T11:58:00.000-05:00

Using my iPhone, I can keep track of my running via the GPS and the timer and all. I'm signed up for a site that lets me keep track of it all. Here's a link to today's run. http://runkeeper.com/user/350301816/activity/63109415You can poke around the site and see that I barely exercise. Outside of soccer, I don't move my body much. 2011 has not been good to my body. Maybe in 2012 I can gain some control of my life again. Less teaching, more time with my students, more time for my body.

Morning snow

2011-12-08T11:16:00.000-05:00

Read Christine's blogpost, if you want to see the origin of these photos...

This morning, snow was falling in lovely, thick, wet chunks. It was barely cold enough to snow, and only about 2 inches came down before it all started melting again. I had to take the cat to the vet, which meant that I didn't accompany the girls to the bus stop. But, Christine documented the events as the four kids made a snow man. Thanks, Christine!

Other people's photos

2011-12-07T12:50:00.000-05:00

I do love good photography, and the end-of-year photo lists are always a good way to look back on the year. Here is one example from Buzzfeed. What stands out to me:

Tsunami, hurricane, windstorm, and devastation photos - natural events we can't control and could perhaps prepare for differently.

Pepper spray photos - how interesting (church lady voice...) that the protest movements from the left against a capitalist system in need of reform are accompanied by police in riot gear using pepper spray on peaceful protestors. (I am waiting for the movie based on image 25....)

Politics photos of a different story - there's a call for change, Ugandan water cannons, change due to the Arab Spring, and also the end of don't ask, don't tell. Oh, and the last photo, that soldier is a woman.

I ignore the celebrity photos, but I do think Steve Jobs changed the world we live in...

We take our parades seriously

2011-12-03T23:05:00.001-05:00

This town takes its parades seriously. On Veteran's Day, there's a big deal. On July 4, it's a big deal. And at Christmas, it's a really big deal, too.

Annalena had been invited to march with her Brownie troop, but she had also done an overnighter at the children's museum the night before (with something like 90 girls in Girl Scouts). She was too tired to be lining up at 3.30 and walking from 4.30 to 5 pm. We went to watch, instead.

People take their floats pretty seriously, I guess. It was also about the only thing you could photograph in the dark.

I do like the airplane flying over the reindeer. Blue Angels, perhaps, doing a flyover? This was the float for the airport, which was once a SAC base and is now a refueling station...

Here are my attempts at capturing the view. The first is lit locally, the second is underlit but perhaps gives you a sense of what happens past Bagel Central and the Rock Art shop. I dunno, pretty hard to tell much. Hundreds of people were out, just in our area, and thousands more heading up Main Street.

Wish list: A

2011-12-02T23:15:00.000-05:00

Transcribed (with commentary)

1. Spacaly rock (Sparkly, because r's don't seem to exist after a's)
2. Playmobeal
3. legose
4. mashmelo shooter (I love how the little Maine girl leaves out the r after a, once again)
5. Hexbugs
6. sled
7. schleish figure (she meant schleich, the little faerie and knight and monster and dragon and princess figurines - obviously, she does NOT want monsters and dragons, she wants horses and unicorns!)
8. race track (see #5)
9. cool Jurnl (kept the r, left out the a)
10. Maze books
11. Wizard of Oz (she has been getting these read to her by Mommy and Mima...)

Halloween photos

2011-12-01T12:08:00.000-05:00

More photos from Christine's blog...

Annalena went as Laura Ingalls and MacKayla went as Mary. Ginny was an Indian. Yes, they're all reading the Little House series...

Brownie Girl...

2011-12-01T11:59:00.002-05:00

I got these two pictures off of Christine's blog, thanks Christine!

Lena sure does seem to be involved in that pledge of allegiance in that first photo.

It's catching

2011-11-27T19:27:00.001-05:00

Damn you, Edvard Munch.

Returning from Boston

2011-11-27T19:27:00.000-05:00

This morning, we met up with the Gochbergs who all were in town in order to celebrate (one day late) Abuela's birthday. Woo hoo - donuts and coffee and good conversation and dorking out about our iPhones and all that. Gotta love it. I wish Emma and Maggie could have been there, as well as Rich, the cousins, that J guy, that V woman, and that other J guy (I think it's J... Reed wouldn't help me remember).

This evening, our dinner was a totally tasty set of Nürnberger sausages together with a baked mix of green beans, sliced turnips, and sliced potatoes. That, and Löwensenf, for me. Taaasty. And my sinuses are doing much, much better, now, thank you very much for asking.

Thanksgiving in Boston

2011-11-27T19:18:00.000-05:00

After the snow delayed us on Wednesday of last week, we drove down on Thursday morning - the snow was just gorgeous. I always love how it looks when it's still clean...

Our Thanksgiving meal was yummy - the mood was good, there was lots of laughter, and of course lots of food.

At various times either before dinner or after, there was photo viewing and story telling and also braiding of hair. Mommy was not always happy...

Friday morning, we left the house to get a tour of the Northeastern campus - the highlight for Sofia was the statue of Cy Young at the location where Boston won its first world series...

After Opa headed back home, we all headed to a Shawarma place by campus for a yummy meal and then wandered down Huntington past a few upscale malls to Newbury Street - shoppen, nit einkaufen, nur shoppen... The girls played on bannisters while The Great Boot Search continued, and were treated to soft serve for their patience.

Saturday, we took a nice long walk around the Lincoln reservoir and ended up at the De Cordoba museum. We goofed off in the sculpture garden for a while before heading home for lunch...

At some point during the weekend, I don't know when, I was doing multiplication games with the girls. Lena was figuring out the commutative property, that 4x5 and 5x4 give you the same number (really?!? how cool, because having 5 groups of 4 and 4 groups of 5 really doesn't seem like the same thing at all!).

There are more stories to tell (goodbye, Onkel Klaus...) but I won't write about them, here.

Snowfall

2011-11-23T19:54:00.000-05:00

Today, we got around 10 to 12 inches of snow - it's so much, who cares about the exact number of inches? We were supposed to be driving to Boston, but I couldn't get to the tire place to have winter tires put on. The drive this morning was harrowing, sliding my way around on a few inches of meal-y snow. I hit a few snow banks, slid across the road a few times, got pushed by several friendly people, made several ridiculously illegal U-turns to get the direction I needed to go, and finally made it back home. It was terrifying, and I needed to be alone for a solid hour before I was ready to talk to anyone again.

I didn't leave the house again until the sun had gone down. Here are some photos after the snowfall was done. Here's the accumulation on the picnic table outside the kitchen...

and here is the view to a neighbor's house, with the roads already plowed.

(wondering about all the photos on the blog? I'm telling you, the iPhone 4S camera is way great to have along all the time. I love this.)

Radio station history

2011-11-22T23:03:00.000-05:00

I've been DJing since 1989, starting at WXDU in Durham, moving to WMUC in College Park, and now with WMEB in Orono. It's been a pretty fun 22 years, I've obsessed about more genres than are worth mentioning, and I'm going strong again this year.

I was at the Maryland station in the 90s when this concert happened:

Elliott Smith: “New” song from 1997 WMUC session unearthed

I remember the Third Rail Radio (named after the DC Metro...). What I love is the convoluted story at the end - how the minidisc recording was found, how a song was played, a playlist posted online, an inquiry made, and a song was found.

I would like you to my old WMUC music pages (from when I was the world music librarian) but it's truly painful to share that. And the earlier era, when I was first enamored of the avante garde and minimalism, well, I won't go there, either. I do wish I could get my hands on the Pauline Oliveros albums we had. All this time, and I still hear parts of Horse Sings from Cloud in my head... Scratchy vinyl is way different from some YouTube play...

Being thankful

2011-11-22T08:59:00.002-05:00

Dear Mom and Dad,

I am very grateful that
you are taking care of me.
I thankful for many things
you do. I am happy that
I have food and a cozy home.
Every day you teach me
new things. I would be happy
to do some thing you might
like. How can I do that?
I could help with laundry
or make my bed or even take
out the trash. But then there are
things like paining a picture
for you or playing a game
with you like Granny's
House (A bored game) or sleeping
queens (A card game). I enjoy
having the best parents in the world

Your daughter,
Annalena

Wrong association, I guess.

2011-11-21T23:26:00.000-05:00

Wait. I thought we lived in the WV of New England, not the Bronx.

Oh, well.

2-0

2011-11-21T22:57:00.000-05:00

I do love playing soccer. This time around, the injured Jason showed up with a video camera and took footage of a lot of the game. I hope he got something from the two (was it more?) times that I was leaping, hurtling, rolling, blocking, and generally successfully protecting the goal. Score was 3-1. I am more sore this game than last week, though. Some really hard balls to the arm and shoulder - that, or I think I got kicked in some melee, because my shoulder and forearm are pretty sore. Some pretty bad collisions in there. If I get footage, I'll pass it along.

In other news, my workday involved spending time with graduate students (talking about teachers' knowledge of student ideas as well as the unexpectedly interesting concept of momentum current), reading a chapter of a book by Carl Rogers, teaching two classes, and trying to manage my email. You know. Work life.

And during the carpool with Sofia and Karpie (Erika Karp does not go by her first name...), I listened to the usual chatter of the 10 year old girl crowd. I keep my trap shut. I learn a lot.

A social weekend

2011-11-20T19:48:00.000-05:00

Friday night was Artwalk in downtown - this is where artists spread out around the various businesses and galleries, there's cheese and drinks served, perhaps somebody buys something, and the downtown fills up with folks wandering from place to place. They do a few of these every year. We were going to go, but got bogged down at Michelle's for a while...

We made it out, anyway, both to some of the galleries and to the art museum itself. I loved finding a Diebenkorn, Frankenthaler, excellent Picasso, and Käthe Kollwitz at our little local museum. I love the curator's choices...

We were pretty tired after this, and Laura had no urge to go out. But, we'd been invited to Martin and Lesa's for Friday night pizza. Not that I hadn't gorged already at Bill and Xenia's...

Justin passed on the good news of his department's tenure decision, Sunny and Megan took off to get Sunny's son from the airport, and it was a very mellow end to a hectic, hilarious social extravaganza.

Saturday morning was spent getting the house ready for the progressive dinner stop that would arrive later that night. Laura was going to make the soup in the afternoon, while I got the dining room ready.

For the afternoon, Laura prepared the soup and I went to see the Metropolitan Opera's HD broadcast of Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha. It was incredible. Maybe I'll write about it more in another entry. There were strong connections between the music, the story from Gandhi's time in the early 1900s in South Africa, and the contemporary Occupy movement...

I got home, Laura and I rushed out the door, and walked over to Megan and Justin's. About an hour later, we wandered from the Wolffs (blue cheese toast, endive with sour cream filling) to our place (carrot ginger soup), on to Liam and Susan's (beet salad, mushroom on filo dough), from there to Martin and Lesa's (osso buco and a pork dish), and finally to Sunny and Chris's (pineapple and ice cream). DELICIOUS food, delightful conversation. Here's our house - as usual, not everyone is photographed in their best light. Sorry, guys.

This morning was calmer, but... we headed to Surry. Brunch with Mary. Laura and I walked the shore path down to the water - the first time I've done so in 13 years, honestly. Only the second time I've ever done it. I love the sky on a day like today...

Will worked on the trail over the summer. Laura found some sunglasses on the path. I doubt he'd have worn them. Lena immediately laid claim. That girl loves sunglasses, even when they're ridiculous looking aviator goggles...

After 5 different major social events in a single weekend, it's nice to have a quiet night tonight.

Sparkles the School Teacher

2011-11-17T11:52:00.001-05:00

Sparkles has been teaching class - it seems that a tape dispenser helps define you as the teacher.

Off on the wall, there are class art projects. We have a poster with shapes (and Sparkles named all of them for me). We have self-portraits (everyone seems to be a fairy, and used Barbie stickers for their self-portraits). And we are starting to think about Christmas trees, because there are a bunch of them in the art wall. (These are all taped to the bedspread - probably too hard to see in the photo.)

Prprla (Yes, Purple-ah, the purple bunny) has been joined in class by Stillwater the panda bear (who goes by Thomas - and is likely the first BOY animal ever to enter the playworld), a cat whose name I forget, and a snake, whose name I have also forgotten. They are doing class reading right now.

Prprla lives in a house right next to school. There's a bed, a table with a tablecloth, a stove off on the side where chicken is cooking, and a closet that has a bunch of her important things. There are ponies and gloves in the bins in back, in case anyone needs them.

I am feeling none of these things

2011-11-17T11:17:00.000-05:00

Except maybe the first one.

From PhD comics

Now THAT is a math problem

2011-11-16T15:04:00.002-05:00

Sofia is part of a math team, where her 5th grade class is competing in the 6th grade competition because she's in the GT classes at her school. Yesterday, I came home, and she had scored a 5 out of 5 on her math meet questions. Awesome!!

One question she was asked, in particular, was thoroughly challenging to work out. Most problems of hers I can look at and solve by the time I've taken a few breaths. Not this one. It is copyrighted, so I probably shouldn't put it up here. I'll change it around a little bit, though, so that it's not quite exactly the same.

Imagine you have the numbers XYY+XYY+XYY=ABCA. Each letter is a unique and different number, and the number X is even. What number is ABCA?

Dude. That's brutal. That's just an incredible test of number manipulation. I love it. It's exactly the kind of math game that Sofia and I have been playing for a while, taken about 100 steps further. She solved it in about 5 or 6 minutes, she said. I'll let you spend some time thinking about how you'd solve it, and perhaps put her answer in the comments... because she told me how she did it, and it's slick, how she thought about it.

Yes. I am a totally proud Papa. Duh.

A new team

2011-11-15T10:57:00.004-05:00

I have become a passionate soccer player since I first stumbled onto the field over a year ago. I've been playing with the men's over-30 league since I started, with a team called Phoenix. We finally, after several quarters, we finally won the tournament. Woo hoo, we finally beat the Misfits! Finally! (Did I mention?)

Scheduling issues meant that I was unable to continue with the men's league on Sunday nights. I was pretty sad to leave the team, because we've gotten to know each other on the field, I can read their habits and respond to them, and we've become a really strong team. I really like them.

But, a new team came up, on a different night, and I switched to the co-ed league on Monday nights. This new team is made up of people from the big project that I've been working on for over a year. By now, there are faculty, graduate students, university project staff, teachers, and school administrators. It's truly fabulous to work across all these scales and social classes.

I have learned a few things about myself through this project. First off, I really like working with teachers. They are hilarious, engaged, curious, creative, and driven. If it's not obvious, I care about them a lot. And, working with them has come to define a lot of how I see myself, professionally.

When our project director was being hired, we got to chatting about playing soccer, and I told her about my team. We laughed up the idea of creating a team with members from the MainePSP, our grant. Well, she got hired, and along the way went and organized us into a team.

Last night, we played our first game. I was in goal, and had a GREAT time. I was frantic, crazy, intense, and all those things I've written about before. And I was happy to be part of this community. The photo shows the full team: a teacher, a project director, a resource coordinator and his wife, three graduate students, and a faculty member (me!). This isn't abstract, this idea of community. We really do like each other. I can't wait for next week. Maybe we'll stay undefeated...

Gotta love the goggles, eh?

Adventure girls!

2011-11-13T16:30:00.000-05:00

Sofia and Annalena are doing this thing called Adventure Girls, where they get to see cool things women are doing, professionally, and get to think about different kinds of career options. Last month, Laura took them to the air traffic control at the airport. This time, I got to go with them as they headed to NESCom and got a tour of the radio station (WHSN), TV studios, and a bunch more.

There was a TV reporter there, and you can watch the footage here. Here are some of my photos:

Sofia and the others learning about the TV studio (I saw all the lighting above and thought of David)

Ellie and Sofia while they are getting interviewed for WABI:

Annalena and Sofia waiting their turn to be interviewed, at the end of the afternoon.

During the interview, Annalena revealed that her favorite thing to do, when she's not in school, is read. Proof from this morning found here (she's just getting into comics...):

Running with the new phone (and its camera)

2011-11-13T16:25:00.000-05:00

So, I finally broke down and got the machine I've been wanting ever since I gave up my old Newton. The iPhone really is amazing, but I won't blabber about it here.

It's great to have a high quality camera along when I'm out and about. I recently went jogging. Here's the view at the Kenduskeag Stream park, just past the highway. The leaves, the bare trees, the rushing water. This is what the world looks like around here. For now. The snow will come soon enough.

In case of emergency

2011-11-13T16:21:00.000-05:00

In case someone doesn't know what door to use, feel free to print this sign and use it.
(Courtesy of Sofia, on the day of her tea party.)

Annalena writes to a veteran

2011-11-13T16:18:00.002-05:00

Annalena got a class assignment to write a letter to a veteran. This was her letter.

Her spelling is mostly past the stage of phonetic lettering, but there's still a bit there. I'm sad to see that old whole word spelling go (I love it dearly) but happy to see the level at which she can write and tell a story and pull the pieces together.

Returning to telling the news

2011-11-13T16:13:00.000-05:00

This blog has been moribund since last spring. A few events happened to lead me in that direction. First, I felt like I went past my comfort zone in talking publicly - every posting is public, and I like sharing certain things, but sometimes I wonder how much to share. I thought a pause would be appropriate. Second, as Sofia has gotten older, I feel less ready to share the details of her life. I mean, she's 10, and she deserves a sense of privacy when her future boyfriends start reading this blog and finding photos of her in public. I think it's okay to tell goofy stories about a smaller kid, but someone who is starting to turn into something more than that, well, she deserves her privacy. Finally, and more pragmatically, there was simply too little time to tell all the good stories that happened.

So. You, the reader of this blog, won't hear about scuba diving in Puerto Rico, trips to Boston and North Carolina, the best July we've ever had in Maine (we might go back and post some of hose hiking and swimming photos, though), and the way this school year has been rolling along in a fabulous fashion. You won't read about Laura's Maine Humanities Council grant work and the successful weekend she had with her ESL students. You won't hear more about our ongoing deepening into our social world here in Maine, either. Not yet. Maybe going into the future, but not from the past 6 or 7 months.

It's probably no lie to say that things are going as well as they've ever gone in our family. The kids are a riot at ages 7 and 10, home and family life is going great, the work world is engaging and often too much, and we're having a great time. The blog is going to restart slowly, and we'll see what comes of it. I know I say that every few months. But, hey, let's try it again...

A trip to Colorado

2011-11-04T23:59:00.002-04:00

I've got some wonderful colleagues in Colorado, some of whom I've known for as long as I've been involved in physics education research. They invited me to come out to Boulder for a week, partially to attend the national workshop for their Learning Assistants program, partially to give a presentation on some of my work (I chose to talk about things Jeff is doing, really great stuff), and partially to just spend time with them all. The trip was pretty awesome.

Two photos showcase the way things went. I got there on Saturday, Valerie was hosting a huge fish fest, and I talked shop with people all day long. The next day, I went hiking with Scott and Melissa. Here's the view of Mt Audobon (the peak on the right), a big old panorama shot. The lake was frozen solid.

The talk went well, the conversations were all wonderful, the workshop was really valuable, and the last night involved three different groups all ending up at the same restaurant. Folks from Florida, from Seattle, from Maine, from Boulder... well, the Boulder folks talked us into heading to a bar with a mechanical bull. What the hell, once a few others had gone, I said I'd try, too.

At a local birthday party

2011-10-22T17:00:00.007-04:00

Food looks kind of tasty

I dunno. Am I enjoying this more than Oscar?

(Thanks for the photos, Sunny.)

Birthday season snowstorms?!?

2011-04-01T13:57:00.000-04:00

Seriously? Are we really going to have snow like this on Laura's birthday? This is what my car looked like after only 2 hours in the parking lot at school. We're expecting 10 to 14 inches in a 24 hour period. My car was clear when I parked.

Crazy, that's what it is. Crazy.

Yesterday was Sofia's 10th birthday, today is Laura's 40th, and in 2 weeks we have Annalena's 7th. It's fun to look back and think about when Sofia was turning the age Annalena is turning now.

We're having a snow day, obviously. Schools are shut. Lena has a friend over; Sofia is with a friend. Maggie is in town, but she's studying for an exam. Things are quiet. Laura doesn't know what's happening later tonight. I'm home from work even though a job candidate is in town - the roads were just too dangerous for me to stay around for too long. It's all good.

Some photos from the past few days:

Laura and Maggie being goofs:

Sofia and Annalena yesterday morning at the present opening/cake eating breakfast:

The Saturday night of Sofia's slumber party, as they were opening presents:

The Sunday morning of the slumber party as they ate waffles with whipped cream and strawberries and OF COURSE some awesome maple syrup.

Except that there's just a LOT of snow, too damn much snow for April.

Meta-post

2011-02-15T22:58:00.002-05:00

Two new entries, backdated to when the events happened.

Grrrrrrrrls

Skiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Yes, I was on a stupid title theme for these.

Foooooooood

2011-02-13T19:52:00.003-05:00

Last night we had 4 couples together for some "adult grilled cheese," and this morning 5 couples were together for a quiet brunch. We, uh, were quiet, uh, because we were up late last night. I'll stick with that story.

All photos in this post are from Sunny's blog, by the way. (Update, Monday morning, with new photos provided by Sunny... thanks!)

As usual, Sunny had the camera along. Here she is, sitting with Lesa.

The evening started with fabulous drinks provided by Martin.

Then we moved on to the soup stage - two soups Laura had made. One was tomato, one was lentil. Both were incredibly yummy.

Martin baked bread...

While Megan...

...prepared a huge load of vegetables and meat and cheese, going so far as to label each...

There was also meat, oh baby oh baby.

We created our masterpieces

or stood around watching others do so.

The sandwiches went on the griddles

after which point talking stopped for a while, until (perhaps several) plates were eaten.

We were quite happy.

An aside about transportation last night: Hey, guess what! Bangor has cabs! You don't have to worry about who drives home that night, and it costs nearly nothing! Much safer, and more relaxed. /aside

This morning, heading to the brunch, photos were also mostly not taken (Sunny was hosting and busy, and Megan did take some photos but nothing that I can get my hands on yet). Here I am, goofing off with Roger, drinking water from champagne flutes...

Grrrrrrrrls

2011-02-12T15:59:00.001-05:00

Ah, yes, Valentine's day. The Father-Daughter dance. A chance for all 5 to 12 year old girls to go to a dance with dad. This is a Big Deal in our town, for whatever historical reason, and in our circle one is pretty much assumed to be going. So I went.

The girls are not that interested in pretty dresses (compared to some of the girls who show up like little lolitas), but they got all dressed up and curled their hair and were very very happy. Our family being what it is, Sofia asked for something new... but got it from a thrift store. Hell yes.

Dinner was our traditional dinner - going to the Panda Garden, them ordering beef and broccoli after spring rolls, me ordering wonton soup and then some wacky dish I never otherwise get. The conversation was nice and fun, we chattered away.

The dance was its usual chaos. Older girls (say, ages 9 to 12) are on the dance floor with dad (or each other), younger girls (say, 5 to 8) are either dancing with dad or in the side hallways running sprints (no, I'm not kidding), and a batch of dads who have been abandoned by their daughters are spread around the tables, chatting with each other. There's one drug station (sorry, sugar water and desserts). The music is a mix of pop music from the radio and ballads that allow for slow dances.

Me, I spent my time dancing with Annalena, hanging out with Bill and Justin and Lee, and wondering on occasion what the hell had happened to Sofia. Bill and I griped about the university and laughed about our girls' energy levels. Justin wasn't around long because Ruby didn't want to be in the dance area - they ended up in the running hallways. Lee was only around for a bit, though I think Lucy had abandoned him early on. I never did see Sofia (supposedly, she was dancing up front at various times, but mostly, she seems to have been doing social networking, rushing from place to place). Annalena wanted to hang around with Ginny, who was dancing with Jeff and Ellie...

We got home around 9. Laura had been off at Xenia's, watching a movie with Xenia and Mindy. They seem to have had a mellow evening.

The next morning, Laura was at a gymnastics parents meeting and I was supposed to get the girls to clean up, practice piano, and other "chore" level things around the house. I did not do this. Instead, I was sent out of their space - first I went biking in the basement and on the nordic track upstairs. Then, I was told I could not enter their rooms. Then the living room. And it did not involve cleaning up. Finally, I was allowed to sit down.

They had prepared a little restaurant for me, and my youngest was my dinner date, while my oldest was the waitress. And the chef. And business owner. They had set the table in the warmest area of the house. They had cut up paper to make money. They had a menu.

Sofia took orders and brought us our drinks, and later our lunch.

Annalena and I chatted. It was pretty funny - she looked at me and said, as I had first sat down, "so, what did you do today?" It was the question Laura always asks at dinner time. Hilarious.

We ordered our food, Sofia went off to make it. We did math (adding up our bills). We talked about what it means to tip someone. We chattered about her pretty dress. We talked about her stuffed bunny, Prpla. We just, you know, carried on. It lasted until nearly 1 pm. Fabulous. And the food was pretty tasty, too.

We never did get to the cleaning up. Sorry, Laura! At 1.30, Sofia headed off to a birthday party at Great Skates (yes, she's entered the age of skating parties). Laura and Lena ran to do errands. I got sucked into a book (it had been a long week; I needed a break; Will's gift of Cryptonomicon is just as funny the 3rd time through). Then I ran some errands (new clothes, a memory card for my phone, checking out phones for Laura...). Later than night we had the grilled cheese party, which is, of course, a different post...

Skiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

2011-02-06T23:59:00.030-05:00

Our winter weekends invariably involve snow and hurling ourselves down the mountain. The snow has been good this year, but bad weather over new years and the several trips to Boston altered that schedule. For the first February weekend, we made it to the mountain for the weekend, doing our annual ski trip with Bill and Xenia and their girls.

Much like our MLK ski day at Saddleback, the weather on Saturday was beautiful and the skiing pretty grand. There was new snow from a few days before, among other things. The girls were incredibly good. Sofia was patient with the hasty Silvia, Annalena and Leila chased after everyone, and the adults lazily mozied down the blue slopes.

After dropping the kids off in the afternoon for their ski lessons (read: babysitting so the parents can ski alone), the 4 adults headed off to the black diamonds.

Xenia complained about her skis and her bindings were too loose, Laura and I had issues with our edges, and Bill skied too fast for our tastes. But the sum total was pretty grand.

We tried out one of the ungroomed trails, totally rocky at the start and kind of annoying, but then this lovely thick snow to carve through. I loved it, and felt like I could get my skis to do whatever I wanted them to do. Laura did not like it at all. Xenia lost a ski, again. So it was a mixed bag.

Toward the end of the day (after we picked the girls up from their lessons), we did a run down the WHOLE MOUNTAIN, from all the way at the top to all the way at the bottom. This involved the little "terrain park" in which my boot broke around my feet, 2 years ago. This time around, I was able to take a photo of Sofia catching some air.

We stayed the night in a hotel, ate bar food in the attached restaurant, and stayed up watching a bad movie on TV. During the night, it snowed and a thunderstorm (??!) rolled in. Several inches of new snow fell.

And the weather conditions STUNK for further skiing. The problem was that the wind never let up. They weren't opening the upper lifts, and it was Maine Day (half price tickets). The place was swamped. The lines were long. The skiing sucked. Nobody was happy. So we turned in our tickets after only 3 runs and got vouchers for another day. So we'll be heading back.

A bit more about the weekend

2011-02-02T21:49:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, the three kids left Boston, scattering back to our families. We left early because snow was looming - and guess what? the one who lives closest took the longest getting home. Yesterday was 12 hours of sitting and waiting for busses or riding very slowly on the highway north, solely because I missed the 10 am bus by FOUR MINUTES. Dammit. But it did give me a time to relax and think about the weekend.

Spending a few days with my father meant that we were able to just talk, without interruption, as long as we wanted, basically. Sitting around the kitchen table - how often does that happen with us, ever? We could make the silly sibling comments about ourselves, each other, jobs, lives, family, things that are safe to say with people you've known (in my case!) since birth.

There were sad moments throughout, and at the end of one, I tried to change the subject to a bike trip taken long ago, Thanksgiving of 1989. That weekend gets talked about a lot for good reasons - it was a crazy bike trip, 60 miles on the eastern shore, from Oxford via some route to a ferry to the towns of St Michael and Wittmann - one n only - and back to Oxford, 60 miles with 5 inches of snow on the ground, head wind in each direction, and me not in shape for it, so saddle sore I was nearly unable to pedal. Classic overextension with my dad. Also, we ate a ludicrous amount of food (I was 19, and he has no excuse!), but I lost weight that weekend. It was a looooong bike ride. But that's not the reason I brought it up. Instead, I talked about how that weekend was the first wher I felt like an adult with him. He had just done some leadership training and busted out the Myers Briggs test on me - I still remember my scores.

And that's how the funny stories started - us doing a day of appreciation for my father, on his birthday. No grandkids, no spouses, a ridiculous set of in-jokes that make NO SENSE even to us. (Why, WHY does my sister have "chicken legs," and must my brother and I still chase her around to grab onto her legs and look up at her longingly?!)

Other silly moments during the family days:

1. Everyone unpacking ipods or cell phones and reading on the screen (see today's Doonesbury...), texting or whatever. My dad looks at us like we're idiots, picks up his flip phone ("archaic" in that it was the norm 5 years ago) and says "I can do this, too!!" and starts to swipe and tap on the screen like a madman. Smirk.

2. More fart jokes (see earlier post...), but now meta jokes about the jokes, with running gag lines that had NOTHING to do with the actual jokes. I should say that we were raised on surreal humor: "What's the difference between a bird? ..... Both legs are the same length. Especially the right one." Yes, that's the whole joke. The German language puns I can't translate, but here's one: Das Nashorn und das Trockenhorn, sie gingen durch die Wüste. Das Nashorn stolperte, das Trockenhorn sagte "Na, siehst'e!"

3. Ridiculous stories about my dad foisting insanely dangerous activities on us, like the time he took Thomas and me canoeing for the first time. He took us out in this windy day, huge waves, we had no life vests, we wore too many clothes, we got blown around like mad, it was STUPID to be out on the water. Yes, typical dad moment. We teased him about this. But, I also brought up how it had a specific impact on me. On my first date with Laura, we spent several hours looking at the stars at the same boat landing, picked in part because I could find there. And, the fact I'd boated (even just once!) led to me boating with Laura, and look by now we own a kayak and a canoe, plus paddle all the time at the camp. So there!

I'm not saying the days were easy. There were incredibly hard moments, but I shall keep those private.

When they happened, we would get him laughing or being silly, we would make stupid jokes, carry on as three kids who love him dearly, act like the loving ridiculous family we are, and ...

that's how the days went.

The big event I haven't described is the service that was organized by her fellow teachers. It was exactly what such a service should be.

We went to a house in a nice neighborhood of Lexington and found a big crowd of teachers and counselors and all. There was food and drink, and lots of talk about Abbi. It was wonderful. I heard all sorts of amazing stories about Abbi's impact on teachers' and students' lives. Kids from the high school (her last cohort) wrote emails or called up or came to the school to say goodbye. They set up a space in the office for kids to come together to talk about her. It was incredible to hear this outpouring of love for her as a counselor to her students. She and a few other teachers established a girls group. She helped teachers implement a new math (I think) curriculum. They just praised her up and down. The eulogy Michael gave, full of great stories, showed the rich society that Abbi lived in. Ute and I stood together - she grabbed my hand (okay, I found hers first, but she grabbed mine), and then she leaned into my shoulder as we listened. One teacher came to find me to tell me, in all seriousness, that she regretted not working with Abbi this academic year - she had looked forward all last year to having Abbi as the counselor for the new 6th graders. What a statement, a teacher spending a year waiting for a colleague. Wonderful. It was overpowering to hear these testaments to Abbi's strength. These folks had organized visits, food, trips to the doctor (during the summer), all sorts of things for her - it's fabulous.

Talking to the teachers reminded me of the impact Abbi had on me and the project I'm now involved in at the university. While working out the grant ideas and figuring out how to weave them into a coherent story, I talked to Abbi a few times. I floated ideas past her - she knows middle school teachers, after all. She vetted my thinking, strengthening some ideas, loving others, discouraging many -- and encouraged me to go for it. It had a huge impact on me - a woman who was a 2nd grade teacher in SF in the late 60s, lived in London in the 70s and 80s, became a PhD psychologist in the 90s in Boston, and became a counselor in 98 or 99. This woman KNEW what it means to change fields, careers. To have her encourage me to move into the MSP grant was powerful. It was a kind of loving mentoring typical of a parent.

I won't go into detail about other stories, nor will I go into detail about the fabulous friends he has who support him in Boston during this time. For a long time, we had no idea if he had a social support structure, and it's clear that he does. I'm glad.

The weekend began with incredible sadness, and ended in my case with incredible boredom while trapped in snow travel. But in between, with all the highs and lows, it helped me be at peace with Abbi's passing. I hope it helped my father, as well, if only in some small way.

Inheritance

2011-01-31T08:57:00.000-05:00

Here is a test. Whose hair is whose?

It being 2011, and all the siblings being in their 40s and one father turning 75, it is time to make a comparison. See if YOU can guess whose hair is whose. No solution shall be given.

Honestly, we three siblings agree: we are happy to have inherited his hair genes. We like our thick heads of hair. We really do.

Happy birthday, Vati...

A bit of silliness

2011-01-30T23:05:00.001-05:00

Today, Laura and the girls left, Julie left, and suddenly an amazing event happened. There were only (gasp) three siblings, and one father. When was the last time we had this social group? No spouses? No grandkids? We had to figure it out at one point, and didn't come to an answer. Was it 1992, in Vienna? the 80s? But when in the 80s? Honestly, looking over the years, I wonder if we've EVER had this social arrangement.

After Thomas returned from the airport after dropping off Julie, we immediately headed off to Prospect Hill. There's a back story to this, which I'll quote from what I said at the wedding in 2002:

My father is a good German type: one exercises as a family, one does things together, and the pater familias is a familiar concept. He says, we do. Most of the time. My sister, Ute, her future husband, David, Laura, and I were down in Boston at my dad's, one Sunday morning. We had just met Abbi. They were making pancakes in the kitchen as we sat at the dining table. He says, from the kitchen, that after breakfast he wants to go for a walk. Like a good family does on a Sunday morning, right? But Ute and I look at each other, and we don't want to. We want to sit on our ass and drink coffee... I tell her, "you say it, you're older!" and she says "no, YOU say it!" and we frantically whisper at each other while our spouses laugh, until eventually she does.

You could HEAR his shoulders slump. The energy in the room changed. Oh, we knew, we just knew that he wasn't happy. Then, a voice, a quiet, reasonable, perfectly calm voice rises up, and says, "Now, now, dear. We're practicing flexibility!"

Anyone knowing him would know what she got away with, anyone knowing her would know how that tone of voice permeates the way she lives - reasonable, meta, aware, on, ironic, chiding, loving. But, see, that's not where the story ended. And out came my father, out of the kitchen, holding his spoon, wearing his apron (making pancakes from scratch with her recipe), grinning like a fool. No words. Grinning. Then he walked back into the kitchen.

Where did he want to take a walk this afternoon? Prospect Hill. And all three of us leapt at the chance to go.

The walk started on ice and snow (there's a lot in New England this year...). At the start, I reminded him of the Practicing Flexibility story (which I'd referred to in my eulogy, as well), and he actually smiled (!!!) and said "oh, I'm FULLY flexible these days."

That felt so good to hear...

Eventually, the road turned into a single track packed snow, about the width of a kid's toboggan. We made it to the top of the first hill, chatting away, having a good time. First group photo:

From the first hill, we walked to the second - slipping and sliding at times, but just feeling GOOD to be out in the air, to be together, to be sharing in this space. Second group photo:

It is perhaps a non-trivial feat to get the bereaved to act silly, and we succeeded. Yes, that's right, for all the awful photos he takes of us while we're eating meals (did you see any photos from the dinner after the funeral? that's right, you did not), we occasionally catch him in a crazy mood, too. This is actually a pretty classic silly face, and we laughed hard for lots of the walk. Hell yeah.

Here are two more photos of the walk, just because it's nice to know what the snow was like. For all that the walking seems normal, if you stumbled off the walked-on track, you fell roughly 3 feet into snow. Thomas, in everyday shoes, was supposedly worse off, but Ute, in boots, managed to get snow in them. Sheesh.

After the walk, he played us two pieces by Liszt - memories of not just Abbi's funeral, but his mother's as well. Slowly, we headed toward an early dinner.

Dinner was a meal that Laura had cooked for him last week, when she came to visit him and Abbi a week before her death: plain and simple, rice and beans. He made fresh salsa, I made the guacamole and the beans and rice, it's really about the simplest meal you could imagine, and we devoured it.

For hours, we sat around the dinner table, laughing and carrying on and telling ridiculous stories (why ARE fart jokes so hilarious? even Ute laughed!). He asked me to read a John Lithgow book he'd given Abbi, Mahalia Mouse Goes to College. She was his Mouse. There were tears. And then we returned to laughter. And then most everyone went to bed early.

It's good to be together as family.

Funeral and family

2011-01-30T22:31:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, we held the funeral service for Grandma Abbi. It was amazing to see the outpouring of attention and love for Abbi from her colleagues - we family members were distraught in our own personal ways, but her friends in her school were equally distraught, of course. This wasn't easy on any of us.

How does one write about it? To share is to be too open, to hide is to be too closed. Here are a few details, I guess.

Rather than an open casket - something none of us wanted - there were photos of Abbi instead. They helped me - you've seen some of them in a previous post. Here's my father, arranging them.

As devastated as he is, it is also something special to be watching him this weekend - his emotions, their power, the love of the community around him, the honesty with which he speaks to those calling him. It is powerful.

We arrived at 3.20, for the 4 pm service. The girls were fabulous all day long - yes, they admitted later, it was kind of boring to be there this whole time, and they didn't really know what to do with all the emotion around them. Laura and I traded off doing parenting duties - here's Annalena up front, working on her activity book...

...and Sofia in back, trying in vain to write something or draw something to distract her.

During the service, I sat up front with the siblings and my father, while Laura and the girls sat one row back with Julie. The minister who married my father and Abbi spoke, and it was lovely. She was right: Abbi was radiant that day. Someone from Abbi's school spoke, and it was an emotional story full of love and grief and consolation. Her school loved her, her colleagues loved her. Amazing. Then Thomas spoke - I'm sure he remembers as little of it as I do, because I spoke next.

I'd written something but hadn't practiced it. So I had a few notes in front of me, things to remember. I decided to skip a few stories and focus on others, and in the end, I must have said something okay. I don't remember. I choked up a few times. Once, I lost all feeling in my legs from the waist down. Looking at people, looking at a room full of grieving people, what was I doing there, what right did I have to speak in front of all of them? But I did my best, and it seemed to be okay, and then the minister spoke again (what a lovely woman...) and then the service was over.

Deep. Breath. Many deep breaths.

The best part after the service was over was that the kids were there. Honestly, I had thought it might happen, but hadn't realized how much I would need them. Lena came to hug me. And she held me for a loooong long time. Oh. my. god. that felt good. That felt good enough that I lifter her over a bank of chairs and plopped her in my lap (I was a row ahead of her, after all), and I held her and held her and held her until I was ready to burst. Her timing was impeccable: Papa, can I get up? Yes, honey, yes you can. And when she did, she chirped off in a little dance, and I looked at the UU minister and said "and THAT is why she is here," and began crying again. But it felt different, this time.

Afterward, we went to Dalya's, the place where we'd celebrated his 70th birthday, 5 years ago. (This was before the blog. Laura and I still refer to it as the best meal we've had in America, ever.) It was family and friends and the nurse who had been with him for the last 10 days - a fabulous Jamaican woman that roasted me about my lack of reggae awareness (me! a college radio DJ! who claims to know about music! what you THINKin, no no no...). The mood was at times somber, but the expected moment happened: laughter. Again, the food was fabulous. But the company was better. In that moment of need, that moment of grief, family and friends and food brought us back to normal.

Ruth Abigail Maxton

2011-01-30T21:49:00.001-05:00

This is the first of a few emails about the past few days. Here, to share, is the obituary that was published in the Boston Globe Sunday morning. I've added a few more photos of Abbi, pictures shared during her funeral service on Saturday.

Ruth Abigail "Abbi" Maxton, Born July 24, 1947 in St. Louis, died January 27, 2011 at home in Belmont of a serious, fast growing cancer of the brain.

Her father, David Maxton, was a presbyterian minister in several places in Illinois with her mother Ila Maxton, and together they were a very happy family. Abbi went to high school in Sterling Il, then to Northwestern University, from where she graduated with a BS degree in Speech, to California State University with an MA in Special Education, on to London University (UK) with an MA in Educational Psychology, ending her education at Boston University with an Ed.D. in Counseling Psychology. She held responsible positions at the American School in London (UK), in medical clinics in Boston, and had her own psychology practice, specializing in the psychological health of adolescents. At her death she was a greatly loved and respected guidance counselor at W. Diamond Middle School in Lexington.

Abbi was happily married to Horst R. Wittmann, a PhD and administrator at Northeastern University. Horst has three children who adopted Abbi as one of the best step mothers in the world: Ute Wittmann Pair and her husband David and grandson Julian from Durham NC , Thomas Wittmann and his wife Julie and grandchildren Sara, Annika and Nick from Seattle WA , Michael Wittmann and his wife Laura and grandchildren Sofia and Annalena from Bangor, ME.

A Private funeral service was held. In lieu of flowers, a fund will be established for a memorial for Abbi at the Wm.Diamond Middle School. Information will be forthcoming.

(This picture is just fabulous. I love love love this picture.)

Another snow day in Bangor

2011-01-21T13:23:00.000-05:00

I am at home, reviewing papers and trying to work on a paper I'm writing, I'm also just taking care of business, and it's quiet here. Except for the pellet stove. The girls are at a friend's house. We are getting slammed by snow.

Here's some minor evidence...

That's our picnic table under 2 storms' worth of snow - but snow is falling hard right now, and who knows how much we'll end up with.

Time to go shovel so that Laura can get in the driveway. She's been driving up from Boston in this mess. Poor her.

Everyone knows cancer

2011-01-18T20:49:00.000-05:00

Some blog posts are harder to write than others. I don't know why I keep quiet - it's not like there isn't a wealth of experience in my past, people I have known and loved who went through this same space. Ben's mother, Kathi's dad, Lydia's mom, Liesl's mom, more recently Laura's dad, Rachel's mom, now Ben's dad, and others, too. Everyone knows cancer. Why is it so hard to write about Abbi dying?

We have known for a long time that it was unlikely things would improve. The first batch of radiation helped. The chemo that followed worked on the body, but not on the brain. The tumor in the hip caused immense pain. The vertebrae that seems to have been first hit in the body was not going to heal. Amazingly, the tumors in the lung never got worse. And then another brain tumor came, and solutions were more and more rare, until there were none.

For the past month, she has been leaving us. A month ago, we were in Boston and saw her there. There was hope the next operation would help. Even then, I did not write clearly about it. It's been a private thing within the family, and those few friends that we lean on.

It's not that I wouldn't lean on others, it's that I don't know how.

When we talk about it in some setting where it's unavoidable (like when asking for information on how to miss a few work days - who will cover classes, etc), people are incredibly nice. (Thank you.) And, invariably, there's a story of someone in the family. We talk to some, and it's about their 7 year old nephew. We talk to others, and it's about this uncle or that aunt, this or that sibling (mostly, the relationship depends on the age of the speaker).

What I learn is that everyone knows cancer. Everyone knows the sick wasting away of it, the slow loss of function, the aching pain of slow grieving.

Do the details matter? Does it help to share? It's private, of course, but everyone knows cancer. Everyone knows the details if they are hinted at - the morphine conversations, the increasing inability to move, the slow loss of self and the memory of some last conversation, recognized days later as such. It's a constant past tense, or focused here-now, being in the moment with ever more hardcore insistence as the past gathers losses to it and the future contains only more.

I look back at photos we took not in innocence, but when things were still better. The care and worry are written on their faces, already. We spoke in code about it, or not at all (the text reveals nothing, which reveals something). Since then, I've only hinted.

Everyone knows cancer.

I know I can't make it better for my father - she has been the best thing to happen in his life since I was an adult (I was too selfish and unaware to know anything before then). I know I can't make it better for the girls - she is a deeply beloved grandmother and they the children she never had. And I can't really make it better for Laura and me, either. Everyone knows cancer - there is no making-it-better. There is here and now, there is hope of her pain passing quickly, and there is our sadness flowing more slowly as the turmoil settles, until we find our peace again.

It is hard to write this blog post, making the private public, but it is also something I should talk about more. Everyone knows cancer, but too few talk about it. We grieve alone, too often. I'd rather not.

A perfect day of skiing

2011-01-17T21:17:00.001-05:00

How does one describe what feels like the best day of skiing our family has ever had? I could start with the negatives - the temperature was 0 at the bottom of the lift, colder at the top, and I mean Fahrenheit. Annalena did a somersault, as did Sofia at one point. I got yanked by a T-bar lift so bad that I flew over backwards, landed on Annalena, and possibly pulled a muscle in my calf. But why talk about the negatives?! Wipe all that away, forget about it, let's move on to what matters...

We had the perfect family day of skiing. Laura and I got home from Martin and Lesa's at about 1 am last night (see previous post). The alarm went off at 5.17. We were on the road, eating cream cheese bagels and slurping hot coffee at 6.06. We were at the mountain before 9. It was -7. We were worried.

But nothing went wrong. The weather remained cold, but there was no wind. All day, not a cloud in the sky. Amazing.

I have found that the combination of ice cold blue sky, harsh white new snow, and deep green from the evergreens, is my heartstring soulspeaking color combination of Maine. Not the camp in the summer, which I photograph incessantly. Not the various flowers. No, it's blue/white/green that leaps straight into my heart.

All day, wrapped in layers and layers of clothes, we managed the lift rides with songs and silly laughter. It's cold sitting still up there! But I made up a million songs with riDICulous rhymes in them. We inverted words on signs we saw and made up dumb acronyms (they are on a kick of reading digital clocks backwards and upside down, to get words out of them, so that 9:37 is LEG, and so on). I found out all about Ella's birthday party on Saturday, and what Sofia is reading and the country whose map she is inventing (the capital is called Duback, pronounced Due-Back, and I asked if it had a lot of libraries).

And the slopes, the skiing! My god, their first day of the season, and they were so good! Once they got their balance adjusted and figured out where the edges were on the skis, they never looked back. We scooted down the mountain with parents as sweep, kids leading the way nearly the whole time. Sofia never needed assistance; Lena fell a lot early on, and then learned her balance again, and then was AMAZING all day long. A 6 year old keeping up with a 9 year old?! God damn. We were teasing her that she needed to get on a ski team. She BLUSHED! It was hilarious.

We had our usual 3 runs, each between 1 and 1 1/2 hours long. It's hard work to be out there at 0 to 10 below, you know? Just surviving, much less spinning down the mountain, having fun with the kids, having fun with myself (slow skiing is a lesson in patience and skills training), and goofing off with Laura. But it worked. We were on all 4 lifts, did one run from the very top to the very bottom of the mountain (that's 2000' of elevation, not so bad on the east coast)), found new trails we'd never been on and really loved, and enjoyed the hell out of ourselves.

That was, quite obviously, why it was our best skiing day ever. The girls have the skills and strength to have fun, all day long. Where they "hold us back," we adults just roll with it and have fun with what it is rather than what we wish it to be. (I've become a better skier by having to go really slowly while Annalena snowplows her way down a mountain, and now that she doesn't, I have less need to go tearing down a mountain.) Laura is much better and more at peace with the differences in her and my skiing styles. We know each other's rhythms, knowing when to call the "last run," for example. (We used to ski until we got tired, but that means you get sloppy. Now, we announce that the 3rd-to-last run will actually BE the last run - as much fun as we're having, let's end things on a high note, shall we?) (Having broken a leg at age 4 and a wrist at age 16 while on a "last run," I have strong feelings about avoiding injuries that could have been avoided by stopping sooner.)

After it was all done, we sat at the lodge, having drinks and a basket of fries. Treats to end the day. Laura was all ready to just leap into the car, and I had to talk her out of it. Come on: spoil the mood so quickly?! No no. We had to enjoy it. So, we sat at the window, looked down at the lakes below us, and enjoyed.

As we did finally drive away, we had 2 funny moments.

1. The first was loading the car. Coats wide open. Bare hands holding ski poles and skis. Temperature: -3. Fingers hurt pretty quickly, even when it's "normal" to be in cold like that.

2. driving down to the main road to get us back to Farmington, the sun was just setting as we reached Rangely lake. Oh my, that was beautiful. Photos wouldn't do it justice, and words certainly won't, either.

Champagne!

2011-01-17T20:55:00.001-05:00

Last night, Martin invited us and several other couples over for a late dinner, the concept being that we were doing taste tests of several kinds of champagne. (All photos in this post are courtesy of Sunny, from whose blog they are stolen.)

These are some fine champagnes, folks. The comparison was between the 2000 and 2002 Perrier-Jouet, the 2002 Perrier Jouet and Dom Perignon, and later on between a white and rose Moët. Fab-u-LOUS. (I liked the 2002 Dom and 2000 Perrier-Jouet best, in case anyone cares.)

Here's Martin talking to Sunny while the lobster cakes were sizzling:

and you can see him in the background carefully pouring a half glass of champagne - LEFT HAND is the Dom, LEFT hand, folks!

The dishes were in large part from a book on appetizers, a gift from Susan and Liam, who were there to enjoy the results.

The chicken satay was f%^&ing divine, the peanut sauce too tasty for words.

The consistency of the parmesan polenta was just right, but the mushrooms on top were better.

The gravlax were on sprouts from the garden, plus a tasty sauce. Since these came early in the evening (meaning, around 9 pm) and I hadn't had dinner, I ate a lot of them. Yummy. Then again, even after I'd eaten these pictured tidbits and more that aren't in photos, I still had a good number of raw oysters from the shell. I haven't had those since 2002.

Who else was there, besides us, Martin and Lesa, and the above pictured Sunny? Chris, Susan, Liam, and Laura didn't make it into the photo shoot, but here are Sunny and Megan, Megan, and Justin.

Oh, yes. There was one last part of the evening. Here I am pouring a reposado while Chris pours an añejo. (These are tequilas - every beverage of the night came with a tasting comparison involved.)

The reposado was absolutely incredible, right up there with what Jason served back in DC when we first learned about real and good tequila. But the añejo was better. Wow. Speechless.

The evening was a total hit, we had a ball, and we love having a small and growing-tighter group of foodies with whom we can enjoy good times. We seem to get together about once every 2 or 3 months, it seems. There was the progressive dinner which started at our house and ended at Megan and Justin's. There was a dinner, back in the summer, also at Megan and Justin's (Laura was doing a Girl Scout thing so it was just Annalena and me). In between, we've run into each other at places like the downtown festival for New Years, where a batch of us ended were boogieing down to Queen City playing a kind of 80s pop punk to kick of the New Years Eve events. And now this. I love making these new friends, and that's where I'll end this post.

Going political for a second

2011-01-11T13:14:00.000-05:00

The events in Arizona make me sick. As others have commented, how would the world be reacting if the dude's name were Mohamed and the assassination attempt was on a Republican? But no, he's white, she's Democratic, and so we're told to tone down the blame game. I call bullshit. No.

Screw you: Republicans and their hypocrite defenders don't get to have it both ways. Others have said it better than I can:

For as long as I can remember, I have heard conservatives blaming everything that is wrong in the universe, from violent crime to declining test scores to teen pregnancy to rude children to declining patriotism to probably athlete's foot . . . upon Dr. Spock, Hollywood liberals, the abolition of prayer in school, Bill Clinton, the "liberal 1960s," the teaching of evolution — in other words, upon symbols, rhetoric, cultural norms, and the values expressed by political and media leaders. Yet from the moment when someone gets a gun in their hands, apparently, society ceases to have any influence whatsoever on the outcome and individual responsibility takes hold 100%. Something is driving the tripling of death threats against congressmen (and the concomitant rise in threats against Federal judges and other villains of the right, from Forest Service rangers to climate scientists) and it isn't the sunspot cycle. - By Stephen Budiansky

(The whole post is worth reading. Click on the name for more.)

To those who defend Sarah Palin, enjoy Rush Limbaugh, defended Bush no matter how much you learned about torture, and believe Fox's falseness: Screw you. You are part of the problem. You help create the climate that nurtures the ones pulling the triggers (the ones flying into IRS buildings, etc.). If you can't take the responsibility of voting against someone, turning the dial, changing the channel, you have no influence in the world. The least you can do is cry about it when you find that you do.

A soccer player

2011-01-09T23:22:00.002-05:00

A few months ago, I began playing soccer in a local indoor over-30 league. I hadn't played since I broke my wrist in goal as a 16 year old, but I started back up in goal, and really enjoyed it, and have stuck to it since the beginning of the school year. I have turned into a viable, certifiably crazy, attack the ball kind of goalie. I dive, I leap, I do things I would never have dreamed of doing 6 months ago. I am in the thick of it. I LOVE it.

I love the feeling of reflexes firing and my body living underneath me, without my conscious will. I love the sense of arms and knees and legs moving without choice - just lunging to positions to deflect balls or get in position. I have no idea how I do it - I just have arms and knees and hips and whatever else arrive in time. I seriously have no idea how my body moves. It's instinct, and such a pleasure to experience.

I love the feeling of deep thinking, the pushing of possibilities, the cutting of angles (the geometry of a ball's path to a goal I can't see behind me), the way certain players kick to certain corners (probabilities and past behavior). By now I know their patterns, which foot they use, which angle they like, how likely they are to hit true, and all the rest. I know these guys and their habits, and can defend accordingly. Anything to lower the probabilities.

I love having to attack. When a guy is moving toward the goal, I have to move toward him (it cuts the solid angle of goal available to him). I have to move INTO the hard kick. It's the hardest step of all - to leap forward, to lay down sideways, to roll on the as much as you can).

I love learning the little things - KEEP YOUR FEET TOGETHER so they can't kick between them, DO NOT FUCKING JUMP! because if I jump to get at a ball, I am already catching something that will go over the goal (which is my head height, basically). For all that I have to be aggressive and powerful and attack, for all that I have to lunge and dive and push, I have to stop myself. Wildly involved yet constrained.

I love that I have to read a ball in air and sometimes ... stop. It's going wide. Don't make the effort. This involves me knowing where I am, where the ball is traveling, and where the goal is behind me. I can't see it. I have to know exactly where I am on the field. I love that. It's geography! Ha ha.

I love the mindlessness of defense. I love diving into a crowd - that ball is fucking MINE, you asshole, get out of my way! I love the move I made today where I defended the ball and couldn't get to get the cross pass that invariably happens. It happened, and my hand tapped the ball enough to slow it down. There was an attacker moving toward the ball to smash it into the goal (it was within 5 feet of the line) and I dove right at the ball. With only my arms, I grabbed onto it, and he kicked HARD right underneath my arm - I held the ball so hard, he crashed and rolled over. HA! FUCK YEAH! At other times, I've crashed through a crowd. I'm the goalie. I own the box. If I'm going for the ball, I win. You lose. Move. (All of this comes to me after I find myself in a melee. I often have no idea what I got myself into until it's over.)

I love the camaraderie. When the opposite team pats me on the shoulder and says "good game, keep - awesome stop on..." and then conveys the shot they were SURE would go in, and I stopped. Or, when I have a lousy game, they still encourage me. And my own team, the confidence they have in me, the way they accept me, the strengths they find in me. And the guys behind me, watching my game, commenting on it - mostly I don't hear them because I'm so focused on my team and our calls to each other all game long, but sometimes I hear praise from behind. It's great.

I love the on-field shouting. I'm always talking, I'm constantly shouting encouragement from behind. Good feet! when someone blocks a ball meant for me. Great pass! for an attempt at a goal. Excellent run! Carry! Turn! Man on! Heel! for a backwards pass where the passer has to trust that the yell means someone is there to get the ball. Or, sometimes I have to talk the aggressive and easily angered ones on the team down - Brian and Benny both going all angry about something not going right. Come on, man, focus on the moment, defend goalside (stay between your man and the goal), and wait for opportunity. Don't rush - just play!

I love the playfulness of it. It's just a game. It's just so goddamn fun to play. So what if we lose (we lost both our games today in hard fashion but excellent play). We had goddamn fun. I love that. I totally love how FUN this game is.

An author

2011-01-09T16:32:00.000-05:00

While talking about how great my kids are, why not gush about the other one, too. Right?

Here is Annalena's retelling of the story of the Three Little Pigs. You'll have to click on the images to read some of the text.

A champion

2011-01-09T16:24:00.000-05:00

I try really hard not to be too much of a Proud Papa about my daughters. I mean, it's obvious I have a blast with them and what they do, but I really don't want to trumpet their accomplishments too high.

Pshaw. Today, that's different. Sofia kicked some ass in her very first gymnastics meet. She got the highest score of all the level 4 kids, and pretty much the highest of the whole meet (since Level 5 is scored harder, it's not really a fair comparison, though). Dude!

Here she is on the podium, having won the overall score for her level and age group (10-12, which she's in because she turns 10 before May). She got top scores in the vault and beam, scored really high in bars, and had a solid floor routine where none of the coaches could figure out why her score wasn't higher. Whatever. She kicked ass. Here are some photos taken from video of the meet:

1. Preparing for the roundoff back handspring (what I jokingly call the backwards upward fish, to irritate her...)

2. and in the middle of it - sadly, the light was so low that the image quality is really lousy, but yes, she is in the middle of flipping backwards at a really high speed.

3. The coach is in the way, but here she is, doing a pike in the middle of her vault. She only mastered this move in the past 3 practices. To win the competition is really cool.

4. In the middle of the bar routine, they have to swing a leg to the side and lift up one hand and get it out of the way - she's in the middle of that move right here, so her whole body is held only by the one hand.

5. The beam competition came at the end. Here, she's jumping (and what, her hips are 3 or 4 feet above the bar? and she's 7 or 8 from the ground?). She pretty much won this competition because she never fell off the beam, and completed her routine JUST in time. Beautiful dismount, too

The easiest way to remove a Christmas Tree

2011-01-05T21:16:00.002-05:00

... Is to throw it out the window.

Last year, Laura thought I was nuts to suggest it. This year, she asked if I was ready to do it. That's how great it was to have no needles through the house, no scratched door frames, no hassle.

So, one tarp on ground. One tree removed from stand. One tree laid down. Then rolled up tight - go ahead, lie down on it, to make the roll even tighter. Then up in the air. Do not forget to open the window. Or raise the screen. And with one mighty, and hilarious heave - OUT THE WINDOW WOOOOO HOOOO!!!

There were, once again, remarkably few needles to clean up. Rock on.

And then it was Christmas

2010-12-26T23:59:00.001-05:00

Annalena wrote her letter to Santa kind of late this year - Sofia made sure the spelling was right, underneath. I love love this kind of spelling, my god. I also like that she told us she was a gooh gril this year. Awesome.

Sofia sang in a concert at her school - she never once cracked a smile. Most of the boys remembered to wear their ties - Sofia kind of forgot to dress up nice, as did I. I love the kid in suspenders and stiff collar, straight out of a bank photo from 1934. If you know who her friends are, you can see Gabe, Joe, Naomi, and Ellie in this photo, too.

Events on Christmas eve were kind of the normal events. I barely made it upstairs, after one last clean-up, before the gongs rang downstairs. For whatever reason (ahem), they rang for a very very long time this year. This meant that we were poised to go downstairs, all 4 of us, and the ringing wouldn't stop. So Sofia shouted "WE'RE COMING DOWNSTAIRS!! WE'RE COMING DOWNSTAIRS!!!!" so that, um, the Christkind would stop ringing the gong. Which, um, is right by the stairwell. I guess she didn't want to see Christkind.

And then the sounds stopped, and we rushed downstairs. Here are photos of what we saw, with and without flash...

Yes, we light candles on our tree. There's a fire extinguisher in the room, in case something goes wrong for the Christkind...

There was, of course, much joy in toy-opening land, as the girls attacked the presents on the floor and the parents spent their lazy time on the sofa, being handed something every few rounds that the girls opened something. As usual, with a huge family, there was a lot of stuff. Very neat - to those who sent us gifts, thank you! If we haven't sent you thank you notes, we will try to do so ... soon.

Afterward, and before the food spilled on us during dinner, we took our yearly Christmas photo. We're never all dressed up at the same time, after all, so it's nice to get this kind of shot...

You can compare that photo to last year's photo, if you wish...

All big presents were opened on Christmas Eve, but Christmas morning meant that Santa had arrived to put things in our stocking. Oddly enough, this year, the kids didn't notice that there was insulation rammed up into the chimney. Last year, we had to take it down. Ahem. There was great joy at all the goofy gifts we got. Mmmmm, chocolate.

Later that evening, Molly arrived. Shockingly, and for the first time in years during one of her December visits, there was no delay, no snow storm, no canceled plane, or anything. Wonderful.

On the day after Christmas (Stefanitag, for the Austrian readers), the girls finally got to present their play. They had worked on this play since roughly September. The "little girls" (Gabby, Ginny, Annalena) had come up with the idea of the 3 dancing princesses whose mother is under a spell and won't let them dance - they use some wicked dance mojo to convince her, and then everyone dances! and lives happily ever after.

The play was performed at the Keeblers house. They dished up mulled wine and cookies as the girls got ready - here, Molly and Michelle show off their parallel fashion sense...

...and here are the three dancing princesses, waiting for the show to go on.

Isabella was the maid (no speaking part, but very important role in catching Ellie, the mom who kept fainting when all sorts of spells were cast on her). Sofia, who never likes to act in these things, was the director/autocrat/announcer who spent most of her time behind the curtain you see in the picture above. That was the backstage.

The audience was arrayed in chairs along a long wall - here are the Hunts, whom we've never really photographed. We don't spend time with them like we used to in the year before and after our Salzburg trip - the large Friday family dinners faded out, sadly. It's good to see them when we do see them, though.

And with that, our Christmas day events were done.

Building up to Christmas

2010-12-22T23:59:00.000-05:00

I have always been annoyed at this idea of putting Christmas trees up after Thanksgiving, and immediately taking them down after Christmas, perhaps even on Christmas day. When I was growing up, the tree came on Christmas eve, and stayed at least until Jan 6, if not longer. It's always been weird to me that people would throw out their trees right at the start of the 12 days of Christmas, and I'm definitely not religious, but dude, it made no sense.

Then I stopped thinking about it.

Then I lived in Austria for a year and experienced the December Adventmarkt again.

And now I get it: people putting up all the lights on their houses are doing the same thing as Austrians do when they have their Adventmarkt and all the other well-lit events of December. The trees that come up in November and early December aren't Christmas trees, they're Advent trees. All those bright lights are just like the bright lights anywhere else - they exist to remove the gloom as we head toward the solstice. They combat the dark. (Now, if only Bangor would create an open-air downtown market, like in Salzburg, with all the tchotchkes, sausage stands, and punch, that would be fab-u-lous!)

Anyway, I made peace with something I'd always found odd. Now, it's all about Advent. And I can stop thinking about it again.

Our advent happened every weekend, starting in late November and going through all four. There was the one in Boston (see previous post), and the others were in Bangor. Here are the girls (and Laura) on two different Sundays - count the candles to get the date...

Our boom-bust cycle of snow, melt, and rain led to some good times outside - but I have no idea why Annalena was crawling in the snow, as if she was a baby. She came in shortly after, complaining about wet gloves. Well, DUH.

The girls also went wacky crazy and dressed up like hippie pirates with bad fashion taste. I have no idea how many layers they were in by the time they were done, but it was definitely tasteless and hilarious...

A December weekend in Boston

2010-12-19T23:59:00.019-05:00

We returned to Boston in mid December, with a chance to celebrate Christmas a little early with the Bostonians, and just plain visit. It was nice to go down again, so soon after having been there at Thanksgiving.

Abbi was doing fabulously well, compared to the previous visit. She had more energy, was able to move more, and we were even able to do an excursion to Concord to see the Old North Bridge. This involved all of us jamming into the Mazda5, wheelchair in the back, and trundling along, telling stories straight out of Absurdistan. There must have been 4 different conversations going on at once, in 2 different languages, sometimes involving history lessons (in 2 languages) to Sofia in the wayback, sometimes involving parents or grandparents talking (at times in 2 languages) across the generations... crazy. But fun.

When we got to Concord, the girls had a bit of energy...

...while others in the group had less. It was warm for us Mainers, but still barely above freezing. So, while the rest of us got to walk and run and giggle and goof off, Abbi got cold, of course.

We took the opportunity to take a group photo (as usual, click on photos to get the larger version), and headed on home.

A very nice part of the weekend was to celebrate Advent together. Our family does this every year, with the kids just LOVing the cookies and hot chocolate or (if they're lucky) "kid champagne" they get to taste. This time around, we adults got the champagne (since it was also a belated birthday celebration for me).

Advent involves lighting candles, telling stories, eating cookies, drinking nice wine, and (most of all) singing songs. These are the songs I grew up with, and we mostly stick to the German ones. I don't know the English ones, but we have notes and text for those (swiped from some evening when we were caroling around our neighborhood - sorry, Phoebe, about that booklet that's been missing since 2005!).

We sang our songs, chatted away, drank our champagne, and had a lovely time. My dad and I talked away about my huge new grant (continuing a great conversation started over Thanskgiving, in which he'd given me incredibly valuable and meaningful advice about projects this size), we all chatted away about health issues and the most recent scans and upcoming treatments, and we had a good time.

The ride home was totally mundane and boring, especially compared to the last drive home from Boston...

Whacking things

2010-12-05T13:20:00.002-05:00

Bowling!!!!! Another Maine element of life is the existence of candle-pin bowling. It's way harder and more interesting than regular bowling (ten-pin...). Basically, the balls are tiny, the pins are straight, and it's hard enough that you get three bowls per round.

It's awesome. Everyone sucks, and the point is to have a good time.

Last week, coming back from Boston in a snow squall that kept us driving at 30 mph, we needed a freaking break from all the stress. Next thing you know, we're at the Brewer Lanes, a pitcher of beer being shared among the 7 adults, a pitcher of Sprite among the 8 kids, bumpers in the lanes, and the kids going bananas for a while. Then the parents stepped in. We had a ball. The kids left asking for more. No problem!

Last night, Laura was singing with her choir in Blue Hill, so we went up to Old Town to check out those lanes. The only lousy photo I could get (on my cell phone) is basically not worthy of being shared, but what the hell, here it is.

Sofia was all into doing well, partially because they've been doing candlepin bowling in gym class. (How cool is that?!) Annalena wasn't at all interested in bowling any normal way. She did a potty shot (that's the basketball name for it, I have no idea what it's called in bowling - two handed, wide legged stance, launched from between the legs). The whole time the ball would roll down the lane, she'd try to juice it, dancing this way and that way, wishing it to go where it wasn't going.

Turns out that Annalena kicked ass in this fashion, while Sofia and I mostly muddled along.

After 2 strings (that's 10 boxes, each of us bowling 3 times per frame), we'd had a few spares, we'd figured out that Lena likes to bowl with the green balls and would hoard them, we'd learned that Sofia and I didn't care about the color, and we'd practiced doing lots of addition. This was an issue for Annalena because she's not used to doing math in German. Yes, 56 +7 is like 56+4+3, so that's 60+3, okay! but when you say that in German it's "3 and 60," and she kept wanting to write the 3 first. Ah, well, I won the first string, Annalena killed us in the second string (even with a Sofia wild attempt at catching up), and we were done. A couple of goof-off bowls (backwards without looking! left handed! thank god for bumpers!) and we headed back home.

The drive to the bowling alley and back was with the early 80s CD I'd made, about a year ago. GoGo's, Blondie, Wall of Voodoo, Clash, Psychedelic Furs, They Might Be Giants, Echo and the Bunnymen, and more. They dance and goof off and sing along every now and then. Annalena loved loved LOVED the song Particle Man. "Person Man, person man, hit in the head with a frying pan, lives his life in a garbage can, person man." Absurd lyrics, and her reaction is consistent with the peals of laughter that come when she watches the coyote and road runner Looney Tunes videos. Huh.

Two ton workout

2010-12-05T13:00:00.000-05:00

For those not living in Maine, it might be a surprise to realize how much home heating oil gets burned in a season. We moved into a house with no real insulation, and have replaced windows, insulated some walls, insulated the attic, and sprayed foam onto the basement foundation, all in the hope of keeping some of the heat inside. Good lord, it doesn't work. Last year, we moved to a pellet stove. It's great at building up a really nice warm living room. (Oma said it was the first time in Maine where she hadn't been cold - perhaps she should visit in the summer?) The rest of the house isn't as warm, but that's fine. The kitchen is heated by cooking, and we like to sleep in a cooler upstairs. Our oil use is down to maintenance heating, plus warming up the whole house during the morning. Otherwise, it's set at 60. The pellets do the rest.

Of course, you need to burn pellets to get heat. And pellets come in 40 pound bags, 50 of them to a pallet, making 1 ton. We ordered 4 tons this year. We've burned about 2/3 of a ton already. And 2 more tons got delivered today. Our neighbor Sean, The Pellet King (though he's quitting the business, it seems), just brought them.

So, that's my lunchtime workout. Moving 2 tons of pellets into the garage. You can now see the 3 1/3 tons we have left, basically. Sure does lead to a nice toasty downstairs...

Family non-sequiters

2010-11-28T13:08:00.000-05:00

Just now, Sofia was reading a map during lunch (placemats with maps, courtesy of Oma). She blurts out "Uzbekistan!"

Annalena answered "I don't know."

Turns out, none of us knows who Becky Stan is.

This reminded Laura of the time I had a conference and talked about flying to Miami. Sofia was very very small and asked, "Is there a Mama-ami?"

Thanksgiving in Boston

2010-11-27T23:42:00.042-05:00

It's been difficult to know what to write about our family trip to Boston for Thanksgiving, because the visit was such an emotional one for all of us. Abbi is ill with cancer, and the visit was our first since we had seen her on our way to Austria in July. We had missed her and were incredibly happy to see her again.

We had seen her just after her radiation treatment, and during the fall she'd been doing chemotherapy. Due to pain in her body, she was regularly medicated while we were there, and this made for off-and-on conversations. Sometimes, she was crystal clear and present, fully aware, and all the way there.

Sometimes, she was medicated and quiet, or in pain and removed from the conversation. It was hard at times, and we were full of empathy and sympathy for her and my father. The girls adore her, and though we'd spent a lot of time talking to them about Abbi's illness, it was still difficult for them to adjust and no longer have a favorite play companion (and story reader and attentive listener and doting presence) be her former self.

Quietly, in the background, Laura and I had a lot of conversations with Opa on all the details, and, in particular, on how he's been doing during this whole time.

Thanksgiving dinner was served at the higher kitchen table, with Opa regularly whacking his head as he got up during the dinner.

The girls dressed up, of course, while the rest of us stayed comfortable.

The ride home included a harrowing snowstorm that was probably 1 mile wide, but the exact width of the highway. The last 45 minutes of driving took 1 1/2 hours under white-out conditions. Kind of scary. And that night, we went bowling with friends. Yay.

Update on the blog

2010-11-25T16:03:00.000-05:00

I'm still working my way through the summer, so here are links to new posts which have been backdated to be on the right day.

Summer swim tour: Kärnten Part 2 - just an average set of days in our trip, lakes and all

Sandra's Hochzeit - the events - what a great, great party

Family photos at Sandra's wedding... - wanna know my relatives? here you go.

Slow goodbye to Austria - meals with friends and hilarious train rides

Annalena's Summer Trip - a journey as described by a 6 year old

Family Movie Night

2010-11-23T20:43:00.000-05:00

Laura pointed out that the last two full length movies we watched were... kids' movies. Tonight, the whole family parked itself down for some impromptu movie time - Netflix streaming over the Roku is totally great. We watched Monsters, Inc., and it was nearly too much for Annalena. But most of the time, we were laughing our heads off - and now, as Lena is getting ready for bed, she just asked "Mommy? Is there a second Monsters, Inc.?" No, Laura yells back. "Awwwww."

It was a hit.

(the previous movie was just Laura and me, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Loved that one, too.)

Photo from the progressive dinner on Saturday.

2010-11-20T21:06:00.000-05:00

Photo from the progressive dinner on Saturday.

(hey, it worked! This was sent from my my phone, long after the dinner. We had a progressive dinner on Saturday, and here's a photo of several folks crammed on the sofa drinking mango martinis from frosted glasses. LOVED the dinner, had the greatest time. Next up, we're deciding between a champagne tasting or candlepin bowling. It's not a question of one or the other, it's a question of in what order...)

Oma comes to visit

2010-11-16T21:39:00.001-05:00

It's been incredibly long since we've seen Oma - we'd planned to spend time together this summer, but she had passport issues, and so she couldn't attend the wedding. (Oh. that's right. I haven't finished posting photos and stories from the summer. Oops.)

So Oma was here, and it was a great and mellow visit. Lots of talking. She made all the usual food - stuffed peppers in such masses that I have 8 more lunches frozen in the basement freezer, gulasch in such masses that we had another dinner out of it, plus a few more lunches, and so on.

She had a great time goofing off with the girls...

One thing to point out is that she looks, um, like she used to. With the diabetes and the changes to the diet and the new exercise regimen, she's suddenly returned to the figure she had when I was a kid. It's pretty amazing to see - it's also a bit weird to write about. But seriously, it's great.

Though mostly we were lazy around the house (Laura was gone at a conference 1 1/2 days, I was busy with work), we did only a few excursions. One was to the bog walk, where we've taken her before. I love it there, especially out in the middle area, the acid bog area where nothing tall can grow.

The visit was much, much too short. Sigh.

What Bangor looks like

2010-11-03T22:19:00.000-04:00

Those who don't live here might be curious as to what this place looks like. We've fallen for the downtown - it's so very different from what it was when we moved here. There are shops, people, places to go eat, things to do. Here are a few photos that might show off a bit of the flavor of a small downtown in New England.

This is the building in which Annalena has her ballet. Yes, it's about the Greyhound, and The Tavern is a bar (bottom left) that I have never felt the need to enter.

Downtown and Main Street from two different sides of the street:

The UU where we used to go:

and the Peace and Justice Center, in a cool old building...

Houses are often called Bangor Boxes, which is what ours basically is. Here's an example photographed while driving (yes, yes, I know, I shouldn't have, but I did):

And then there's some record keeping of the kind of fall that we had:

Halloween events

2010-10-31T19:24:00.001-04:00

It is Halloween, the day of LOOT, but also a day of other events. As I write, the girls are eating some of their 4 allowed pieces of the evening. I suspect I've had more, waiting by the door. I do love my Reese's cups and Twix bars.

Here's a photo from a few days back, as the girls and their friends were doing their play practice. We don't know what the play is about, but it obviously involves dressing up.

On Friday, Lena's high school had its annual Halloween parade down to a retirement home. Laura's friend Michelle loaned her hat and glasses.

For today, the outfits were of a blue sparkle faerie and a pirate that constantly says ARRRRR when the camera comes close.

Of course, we got SNOW this morning. Sheesh. Here's our snowman pumpkin. When he was made last night at the annual Adam Pumpkin Carving Party, we did not think snow was coming. The joke is funnier now...

During the afternoon, waiting for the events to transpire, the girls performed a piano recital for me. Laura was at choir practice...

After going out tonight, in temperatures in the mid to high 30s - COLD!! - they came back in to divvy up the loot.

It was a nice day. Very nice. And they seem really happy right now.

Dear family and friends,

2010-10-31T09:35:00.001-04:00

We have snow falling on Halloween morning. Do you?

Your Michael

Sorta Austrian, mostly not

2010-10-30T20:48:00.002-04:00

We're heading to a Halloween party in just a moment...

Icky Bob

2010-10-30T13:51:00.000-04:00

This afternoon, the girls are heading to a puppet show about Sleepy Hollow and the legend of the Headless Horseman. Sofia only knows the version from the Sisters Grimm (in which some characters are the sheriff, for example). Annalena, on the other hand, knows the full story. Except, well, her story telling makes no distinction between plot, funny moments, what happened in class when the teacher read them the story, and whatever tangent she happens to be on right now.

I love it.

I also loved that she consistently talked about Ichabob Crane. It really did sound like Icky Bob for a while.

It's been 21 years...

2010-10-13T08:08:00.000-04:00

This picture recently came my way, and for those who can't see it in other ways (say, on Facebook...), here's a view of what I looked like in high school. Senior year, we think.

In talking about the photo, one person wrote

Remember when Michael and somebody else jumped out the window in Booker's class and came back in the building to the classroom door while he was standing there talking to a visitor?

Actually, I had not, but now I do recall that Mr. Booker got really mad at me about it, except he couldn't stop laughing. My cohort in crime was Lance Rozear. Later that year, Lance, Kathi, and I bought Mr. Booker a thrift store recliner chair for his classroom, so that he would be more comfortable while telling us his fabulous stories about growing up in North Carolina...

A weekend in Vermont

2010-10-13T08:03:00.001-04:00

This past weekend, with days off due to Columbus Day (which the university calls Fall Break), we headed out to finally visit Will in Vermont. He's only lived there how long? It was time.

We loved the town. Here are some photos from our hike and bike rides, none of the incredibly appealing downtown of Burlington nor any of Will, and the stories will come later...

A poem that matches the age

2010-10-05T21:13:00.000-04:00

This is a poem by Linda Pastan, something I came across in some of my reading.

To A Daughter Leaving Home

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

Annalena and Sofia are each growing independent in their own way. It's beautiful. And I feel wistful about their baby selves which I loved so much, their toddler meanderings, their preschool curiosities. They change, they grow, they become more beautifully themselves every day. At the same time that I love them growing, this poem speaks realms about the endings involved.

How our media changes

2010-09-27T19:20:00.001-04:00

We have joined a semi-modern age. Our tv remains ancient. The old one, inherited from Laura's grandfather, unceremoniously died a sudden death. Jeff, a neighbor helping us upgrade the house, was suddenly moving and sold us TWO identical old CRT TVs at only $25 to replace it. Nice! So that's the TV situation.

What the kids are watching, now that's modern. We got an old Roku unit off eBay. Hooked it up. Signed up for Netflix again. And now, we have kids' TV streaming. No ads. No worries about what they'll watch and what's being shown when. We get what we want, when we want it. Very cool.

I know folks who canceled cable because of their roku (hi, Brian). I can totally understand. It's very slick. Plus, we can listen to Pandora radio stations on our stereo, too. It changes how we interact with media. Like I said, very cool.

Triathlon update

2010-09-26T13:58:00.001-04:00

Well, Sofia was in the second heat, swam as fastest girl, and ended up finishing the race in 20:53. Cool!

We'll post photos and video when we are back at the laptop...