Went to a Birthday Party

My son Daniel turned twelve last week. We had my twelve-year-old self over for some cake. He was glad to come. February, 1982, was a cold month, even as February goes in Chicagoland. He was half a head shorter than Daniel and his gap-toothed smile didn’t have as big of a gap as Daniel’s did. Otherwise, they looked a lot alike. They were both skinny with long straight hair. They looked like a pair of blond Q-Tips, dressed in similar T-shirts, jeans and sneakers.

Daniel was excited. “Welcome to the future!” he exclaimed. Twelve-year-old Bob looked around the living room. It didn’t look much different than the one he’d left at home in 1982 except for the colors (or lack thereof). Daniel ushered him up the stairs to his room.

“I like your television. It’s flat,” said Bob. Daniel laughed.

“That’s not my television. That’s my computer,” he said. “I don’t have a TV in my room.”

“That’s the opposite of me,” replied Bob. “I have a TV in my room, but the computer is in the den.” Daniel sat down and turned it on. They watched the status line cycle under the Windows XP logo.

“It’s kind of slow,” said Bob after a few moments. “My TRS-80 turns on immediately.” Suddenly, the screen turned a sickly shade of blue with strings of command code. Daniel sighed and turned it off.

“It crashed,” he said. “I hate when it does that.”

“I know what you mean,” said twelve-year-old Bob. “Sometimes I’ll be loading a program and I’ll get the C-star error up in the top corner of the screen. That means there’s something wrong with the cassette.”

“Cassette?” asked Daniel. “I thought you used those for music.”

“I have a bunch of music cassettes,” said Bob. “But I also have them for the computer.”

Daniel nodded. “That’s like our CD’s,” he said. He showed twelve-year-old Bob a silvery disc. Bob was impressed it was played with a laser.

“That’s more like it,” he said with a smile. “Very Star Trek.”

“You watch that too?” asked Daniel. “I like that show. Do you have Doctor Who in 1982?”

“Sure,” said twelve-year-old Bob. “Every Sunday night. Is it still on the air? What regeneration is he on now?”

“Eleventh,” said Daniel.

“Wow.”

Meka called them to come downstairs. We were expecting twelve-year-old Meka, but apparently it was too hard for her to get from Michigan in 1987. It wasn’t like she could ride her bike. Twelve-year-old Bob sat down with Daniel at the kitchen table, enormous slabs of cake on their plates. They talked about rockets they had launched and movies they had made.

“We used a web cam to make my Penguinzilla movie last year,” said Daniel.

“What’s ‘web’ mean?”

Daniel explained the Internet. Twelve-year-old Bob nodded. “We have Bulletin Board Systems,” he said. “My friend Greg got a modem for his computer. Last year I sent an e-mail to NASA to get information on the Space Shuttle program.”

“That’s cool,” said Daniel. “We don’t have the Space Shuttle anymore.” He glanced over at forty-one-year-old Bob accusingly, adding, “And I’m not allowed to have e-mail yet.”

They ate cake until their mouths were coated in blue and yellow from the thick buttercream frosting. After some pop (orange Jarritos and Coca Cola from a glass bottle), they sat together on the couch in the family room. Daniel showed off his new XBOX 360. Twelve-year-old Bob complained there were too many buttons on the controller.

“You know how many buttons David’s Atari has?” he asked. “One. That’s easy to remember.” I could commiserate. Twelve-year-old Bob pressed “B” instead of “A” and watched in dismay as his avatar on the screen stumbled blithely into some fatal situation. Daniel played a bit more and then shut the game off. The sun was setting. It was getting time to go.

“How’d you like the future?” asked Daniel.

Twelve-year-old Bob looked around and nodded a few times. Daniel echoed the move. “It’s not what I expected exactly,” he said. “Did you know the world was supposed to end in a month?” asked Bob. “All the planets are going to be on one side of the sun in March and it’s supposed to cause big earthquakes.”

“A guy said that the world was going to end back in May, but it turned out he made a mistake,” said Daniel. “I think it’s supposed to happen in October now.”

“Do you really believe that?” asked Bob. Daniel shook his head.

“No, but there are terrorists nowadays,” said Daniel. “And global warming.”

“We worry about nuclear war,” said Bob. “Someone presses a button and we’re all gone in a flash of light.”

There was a moment of silence.

“But I’m not worried about it now,” said twelve-year-old Bob. “I’m glad you invited me.”

Daniel opened the front door and held it open for him.

“Maybe you can come back when I turn thirteen,” he said. “Assuming the world doesn’t end in 2012 like the Mayans predicted.”

“I think it will be fine,” said twelve-year-old Bob. “If you want to make sure, invite your thirteen-year-old son along next year. We’ll all have a blast.”

White Castle Word Problem

We were all heading home from the western suburbs. It was after eight and while we were hungry, we weren’t really hungry. White Castle and their “fun sized” hamburgers seemed like the perfect choice. Unlike most fast food places, White Castle burgers aren’t wrapped in waxed paper, but are housed in small open-ended cardboard boxes. To cash in on the fortune cookie trend, White Castle prints pithy sayings on the bottoms of the boxes. Some have wise sayings, others have amusing riddles. Daniel grabbed the box out of my hand as I slid my third hamburger onto my five inch paper plate.

“If you stacked all the White Castle hamburgers sold, they would stretch to the moon and back with plenty left over for lunch,” he read aloud. “Is that true?” Meka shook her head. I wiped the corner of my mouth off with a napkin and pulled out a pen to do some quick calculations. A White Castle hamburger (typically known as a “slider”) is a square patty about two inches wide. It’s wider than it is tall, so that’s why I used that measurement.

“Fudging your data?” said Meka, our resident scientist. “Your results are going to be suspect at best –” I bought her silence with a pair of jalapeno cheeseburgers and got to work. With my standard slider measurement, there were 6 sliders to a foot and it would take 31,680 sliders to stretch a mile. While that’s a lot of burgers, I worked at Burger King when I was in high school. We would typically sell a thousand Whoppers a day; thirty thousand sliders didn’t seem like all that many in the grand scheme of things.

But the moon is pretty far away. Even at the so-called “supermoon” approach back in March, it was still 221,565 miles from Earth. I started writing across the narrow edge of the napkin, but had to switch to the other side and redo my math across the long edge instead; the numbers got big pretty quickly. I came up with 14,038,358,400 sliders required to reach the moon and back.

“You forgot the ones for lunch,” said Daniel.

Oops. I came up with 14,038,358,404 sliders.
Fourteen billion is a lot of sliders, but was it an impossible number? According to the vintage poster hanging above the booth, White Castle sold 50 million hamburgers in 1941. At that rate, White Castle wouldn’t reach the moon until the summer of 2061.

“You’re just assuming one long string of hamburgers,” said Meka. “For something that tall, you’d need more of a pyramid structure in order to get the necessary strength –” I slid my box of fries across the table and she withdrew her protest.

Back in the olden days, White Castle’s motto was “Buy ‘em by the Sack”. Nowadays, you can pick up hamburgers by the case or even the crate. It took White Castle forty years to sell their first billion hamburgers, but only seven years to sell their second billion. If their sales stayed at 1968 levels, White Castle burgers would have reached the moon by now, but would have barely begun the journey back.

I felt it was a reasonable assumption their business has continued to grow since the sixties. The two White Castles I visit most frequently were built since I was born. And you don’t have to go to White Castle to get sliders anymore. Frozen White Castle hamburgers are available in the freezer section at Wal Mart (and if you stacked all the Wal Marts from here to the moon… well, that’s another story). I figured their sales had to average 96% better year-over-year since 1968 in order to get the slider trail all the way back to terra firma. White Castle is a privately owned company. I couldn’t find any hard data on their website. However, they did mention building a plant in 1992 that could make 200,000 hamburgers a day. That would have added 51% to their annual burger production capabilities, or more than 43,000 slider miles since the day it opened.

While my final numbers were incomplete, I felt I could say with some confidence to Daniel that – yes, if you stacked all the White Castle hamburgers sold, it was possible they would reach the moon and back.

“Nope, you’re wrong,” said Daniel.

“I’m wrong?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a trick question,” said Daniel with a laugh. “If you stacked all the hamburgers sold, it wouldn’t be a tall pile at all. They’ve all been eaten!”

“He has a point, you know,” said Meka. I gave her the last half of my shake before she could say “I told you so” and threw out my napkin in the trash.

The Elvis Alternative

It was the end of January.  I had just come to Ann Arbor to ask Meka to marry me.  We were sitting at one of our frequent haunts; pop in hand and waiting for appetizers.  Meka was all smiles and kept admiring “the rock” on her finger.

“What kind of wedding should we have?” asked Meka.  I wanted something small and simple, informal and fun.  I said I wanted a “hippie wedding”; to be barefoot in a meadow, maybe take our vows by a stream.  Meka was on the same wavelength.  She thought it would be nice to get married with a few friends and close family in her parents’ backyard.  After the ceremony, we’d have a cook out on their deck.  We had the whole thing figured out by the time our entrees arrived.

This sense of accomplishment lasted about a day, until we told our respective parents.  Wedding invitations – we were instructed – were based upon social obligations.  They had been attending weddings for years; we had to reply in kind with invitations of our own.  Meka called me at work that week and said her mom had a list of 100 people to invite.  I laughed… until my mom handed me another list of 100.  The backyard idea was out.  I was threatened under pain of death to wear something nice at my own wedding.  Shoes were mandatory.

Meka drove into town that weekend and we went out to dinner.  We sat shell-shocked in the booth waiting for our food.  There was a lot more to wedding planning than we realized.  One of Meka’s co-workers asked when we were getting married.  When Meka replied June, she asked what year.  I remembered setting up one of my first database projects to help out a friend of mine at work.  We had to come up with a table arrangement for her reception.  She was planning on several hundred guests, all of whom apparently disliked one another.

“I’m beginning to understand why people cry at weddings,” said Meka quietly.  The whole thing was beginning to spiral out of our control.  We discussed what was really important about getting married and decided almost everything – frankly – didn’t matter.  We decided if someone had an idea, we’d put them in charge of it.

“What if it still gets out of control?” asked Meka.

“Easy,” I replied.  “We elope to Vegas and get married by Elvis.”

It turned out delegation was the key.  Meka’s mom and her aunts had a great time planning the details.  My mom worked on getting wedding pictures.  Every so often, things would still get crazy.  The invite list went through about six hundred revisions.  Someone would remember someone needed to be invited (“though I’m sure they won’t come”).  Meka and I would sit back, smile and nod, look at each other and think “Elvis”.

In the end, we didn’t have the wedding we originally envisioned, but it was remarkably similar in spirit.  I wasn’t barefoot, but I wasn’t in a tuxedo either.  We split the difference and I bought a suit.  We didn’t get married in her parents’ yard, but we did get married outside next to the Fox River.  We didn’t have a cook out, but we arranged a nice dinner for everyone that did not include rubbery chicken.  And while we weren’t forced to elope to escape the craziness, five years later we flew out to Vegas to renew our vows under guidance from “The King”.

Tinth Anniversary

It was our tenth anniversary and I wanted to make it a day Meka wouldn’t soon forget.  I knew people celebrated their diamond anniversary after sixty years.  I was pretty sure the fiftieth anniversary was symbolized by gold.  I looked up ten years on the Internet and found out the traditional gift is tin.

I didn’t want Meka to miss a minute of our special day.  I woke her up early with breakfast in bed.  The tray was a bit beat up; they haven’t made TV trays out of tin since I was a kid.  I found one on eBay in reasonably good condition.  Meka held it tight in her lap so the left leg wouldn’t give way.  She passed on the canned fruit cocktail I had poured out.  It was in heavy syrup (and when they say heavy, they mean heavy; it was essentially fruit flavored gravy).  I guess she didn’t care much for the guava nectar either.  It was imported from Mexico and the only kind of juice I could find in an actual tin can.  Most beverages are in aluminum cans these days.  Meka got up to brush her teeth.  I heard her gasp.

“I probably should have mentioned the new toothpaste,” I said through the closed door.  “Crest Pro Health uses stannous fluoride instead of sodium fluoride.”

“What happened to the lights?” she asked.  I had forgotten about that.  I put in brand new fluorescent tubes.  They have a tin based powder inside.  It’s what gives them that special kind of light that accentuates all the detail on people’s faces.  She got dressed and followed me downstairs.  I had picked up one of those special magnets made of tin and niobium they sell through the scientific catalogues.  I had stuck it to the fridge, but I couldn’t seem to pull it loose.  Well, she’d find that later.  I had plenty of gifts.  I handed her an envelope.  Meka opened it slowly.

“Stock?” she asked.  She pulled out the certificate and looked at the attached print-out.  “What’s Temple-Inland?”  I explained they were a company out of Texas.  They specialized in making cardboard boxes and building materials.  The housing bust had hurt their business.  They had closed some plants and let a lot of people go.

“I thought it was symbolic of us,” I said.

“Moving from ‘buy’ to ‘neutral’?”  I laughed and pointed to the Dow Jones ticker initials: T-I-N.

“Get it?”  She got it.  Meka smiled when I handed her a small present.  She opened it up and looked surprised to find it was Altoids.

“You think I have bad breath?”

“Of course not,” I lied.  “They come in a tin.”  She nodded.

“I was kind of hoping for something… you know…”  I knew what she wanted.  Over the years, I’ve tried to shower Meka with jewelry.  Unfortunately, it’s been more of a thin drizzle.  She was excited I had something for her to wear while we were out.  She closed her eyes and I placed the tinfoil crown on her head.  I got the idea from Lone Star Steakhouse.  They make you one special when it’s your birthday.  The tin is impervious to rusting by water.  I told her it would last a long, long time.

“We’ll see about that,” Meka replied.

We jumped in the car and drove downtown.  A number of buildings in Belvidere date back to the late 19^th century.  The town was a transit hub and one of the biggest makers of tin toys.  Meka wanted to stop and take a look at the antique stores and maybe have some ice cream, but I kept her moving.  Eleven stores still have their original hammered tin ceilings.  I wanted to make sure she didn’t miss a single one.  After that, we drove down to Byron to look at the nuclear power plant.  Maybe I seemed a little too excited when I explained a tin based alloy coats the fuel rods.  Even though it was our anniversary, the guard at the gate wouldn’t let us in.  It was still a nice drive; about an hour there and an hour back.  I explained they use a lot of tin alloys in manufacturing processes, including making beer and pharmaceuticals.

“Did you get me any pharmaceuticals for our anniversary?”  I laughed and shook my head.  “I don’t suppose you bought me any beer,” she asked.

“They haven’t made beer in tin cans in a long time,” I replied.  “Besides, you wouldn’t want to start drinking so early, would you?”  Meka didn’t say anything; I think she was admiring the view.  We got home as the sun was setting.  I put on the movie I ordered from Netflix.  Believe me, it wasn’t easy locating an industrial film on the Peruvian Mining Industry.  It was in black and white, but the sound was pretty decent, considering it was produced in 1937.  They probably used tin ribbon microphones in the studio.  It was a very educational hour and a half.  I got up and gave her first choice for dinner.

“We have Beefaroni and Spam,” I said.  I heated up the tins and handed her a dish and silverware from an old Boy Scout camping kit.  We sat on the couch and ate slowly while watching The Wizard of Oz on BluRay.  Meka seemed pretty engrossed in the movie.  I slowly leaned over, put my arm around her shoulder and whispered in her ear.

“Oil can.”

Meka screamed and acted like she was trying to stab me in the chest.  The knife was made of tin and just bent on my shirt.  I thought it was a pretty good joke and had a good laugh.  Meka apparently laughed so hard, it made her cry.

Chalk One Up to Experience

The old saying is true.  You do learn something new everyday.

Meka and I were watching The Daily Show one night.  As part of the opening segment, Jon Stewart cut into a video clip and said, “Yeeeeeeesss???”  Everyone laughed in the audience.  Meka and I chuckled at home on the couch.

“Where is that from?” she asked.  I don’t think she really expected an answer, but I had one.  I like to listen to old-time radio programs.  They air them on NewsRadio 78 at midnight.  Unlike a lot of the broadcasts, The Jack Benny Show is still pretty funny.  It doesn’t rely so much on topical humor or ethnic humor more cringe-inducing than funny to modern audiences.  Jack Benny created one of the first “sitcom families”.  It consisted of Jack and the regular cast along with a number of frequent minor characters, including a put-upon sales clerk that seemed to work at every store Benny visited.

“Gale Gordon,” I answered.  “The ‘yeeeeeeesss???’ character started on The Jack Benny Show and was played by Gale Gordon.”

I happened to be looking up something totally unrelated to Gale Gordon, Jack Benny or Jon Stewart on the Internet the other day.  I stumbled upon a mention of Frank Nelson, who of course played that put-upon sales clerk on The Jack Benny Show –

Wait a minute…

A couple of hours of research later and I realized I had made a mistake.  It was Frank Nelson who had the recurring role on The Jack Benny Show.  Frank Nelson was the one who moved to television and did voice work, playing the same put-upon sales clerk on The Flintstones and The Jetsons.  Comedians continue to pay homage to Nelson’s character.  There’s a recurring “Yes Guy” on The Simpsons and – of course – Jon Stewart does a mean Frank Nelson impression.

Gale Gordon did work on radio.  He was part of a couple of classic “sitcom families”.  He played the put-upon Mayor LaTrivia on the Fibber McGee and Molly program before becoming Lucille Ball’s husband on radio before I Love Lucy started on television.  Later on he worked with Lucy again, playing her boss Mr. Mooney on The Lucy Show.  He would frequently growl, “Mrs. Carmichaelllllll???”, but he never said “yeeeeeeesss???”

I explained all of this to Meka in the interests of keeping the record straight.  I didn’t want her to spread a mistruth about who originated the “yeeeeeeesss???” character.  It turned out I didn’t have to worry about that.  Like I mentioned, the old saying is true: you learn something new everyday.  However, often times it is not exactly Earth-shattering in importance and you may find that no one else cares.

I guess I learned two things that day.

Braking Away

I had been telling Daniel we would go on a bike ride “soon” for a couple of weeks.  Daniel would usually remember my promise when torrential rain was pouring down.  However, the clouds finally parted over the weekend.  Meka was out with a friend and we were out of Diet Pepsi.  I told Daniel to get dressed.  We would take a trip to the gas station.  The round trip is less than three miles.  I took my bike down off the wall in the garage and Daniel opened the door.  Waves of heat and humidity poured in.  I hadn’t planned on that.  I also didn’t plan on having a bent brake caliper.  My back tire hummed as the one of the pads rubbed against the rim.

Daniel wanted to show me the “secret way” to the gas station.  He had discovered it when he made an unauthorized visit a couple of months ago.  First, we had to ride past all the other things he had discovered.  There was a house succumbed to foreclosure; the grass growing two feet high in the yard.  We passed the Farm and Fleet.  Through a gap in the houses near the end of the subdivision, we could see some light industrial buildings in the distance (his words, not mine; Daniel is a big fan of Sim City).

The problem was none of these sights were anywhere near the gas station.  I turned us around and we pedaled a more direct route to the Road Ranger.  The sweat was dripping down from hair into my eyes, making it hard for me to see.  The last quarter mile was a steep incline where the road rises from the pit dug by the developers up to the natural level of the land.  I half rode, half dragged my bicycle with its whining back wheel up to the parking lot of the gas station.

I bought a pop for each of us.  Daniel had some money burning a hole in his pocket.  He spent his cash on a bag of candy ranging from sour to super-sour.  The Road Ranger has a wide sidewalk to nowhere on the side of the building; perfect for parking and sitting in the grass.  After forty-four ounces of pop and a few minutes rest, I was ready to head home.  Daniel took the lead again and led me down a “short cut” he remembered from his travels.  I should have known better…

An hour later we stumbled into the house and collapsed on the couch.  I was hot, tired and we still didn’t have anything to drink at home.  Luckily, Meka got back only a few minutes after we did and she had picked me up a Diet Pepsi when she stopped to get gas.

Daniel Cooks Dinner

I don’t know – specifically – what kind of day Meka had in the lab.  All I know is that she came home and was sound asleep by 4:45.  I finished up work (as much as I ever finish up work) and picked Daniel up around six.  We had a chicken thawing in the refrigerator.  Meka has a great recipe for it on the grill. I threw the football with Daniel until the shadows covered most of the backyard.  It was almost 8:00 by then and neither the chicken nor Meka had moved.  Even if I cooked the chicken myself, we would have had dinner sometime after the Tonight Show.  I had only eaten five or six points all day and Daniel was hinting at a snack.  I told him to take a look in the chest freezer in the pantry and find a TV dinner he liked.

Daniel doesn’t get many choices when we go grocery shopping, but he does get to pick out a few TV dinners from the freezer section.  I keep a bunch of them in reserve in case of emergencies (like being hungry and wanting to eat within ten minutes).  Daniel loves Meka’s chicken, so it was no surprise he came back with the fried chicken meal from the freezer.  He was all set to cook the dinner, box and all.  I told him to read the instructions.

“Slit the plastic over the chicken and potatoes,” he read.  “What does ‘slit’ mean?”

“It means make a cut in the plastic wrap,” I said.  I took a steak knife from the wood block on the counter and handed it to Daniel.  He got his whittling badge in Cub Scouts a couple of months ago; I figured he could handle making a slit.  With all the sensitivity of a fine neurosurgeon, Daniel delicately cut through the plastic with the tip of the knife and slowly (too slowly for my grumbling stomach) made an incision across the tray.

“Microwave for three minutes,” he continued.  Daniel placed the tray in the microwave, careful to center it on the glass plate.  He pressed the “3” key and hit START.  The microwave blinked for a moment then stopped.  I explained that he had to type it in minutes and seconds.  Daniel got fancy; he knew sixty times three is one eighty and typed that instead.  The microwave hummed to life and he watched as the tray slowly rotated around.  Every so often, he’d give me an update.

“The plastic is shaking!”

“There are bubbles on the chicken!”

“The corn is bubbling too!”

At the three minute mark, we took the tray out carefully and pulled back the plastic over the mashed potatoes.  Daniel stirred them for about five minutes and we set the dinner back in the microwave.

“Microwave for another 1½ to 2½ minutes,” Daniel read from the box.  “How are we supposed to know?”

“Let’s cook it for the minute and a half,” I replied.  “If it’s not done, we can always keep cooking it.”  Daniel typed in the numbers on the keypad.  He even figured out it should read “1:30” without explanation.  When it went off, I pressed the button to open the door, but Daniel stopped me.

“We need to let it set for two minutes, Dad,” he said.  So we set the kitchen timer and waited exactly two minutes.  Daniel pulled off the plastic and carried the tray to the table.  I poured him a glass of milk and found him a fork to go with the spoon we used to stir the potatoes.  Daniel dug in, closing his eyes and smiling at the first bite.

“Mmm!” he said.  “You just can’t beat home cooking!”

In Case of Tornado

We had our first tornado scare of the spring a couple of days ago.  In Belvidere, when we hear the sirens go off, we don’t mess around.  A tornado tore through town back in 1967.  We didn’t live in Belvidere then (none of us were born yet), but – if we had – the path of the tornado would have taken it down our street.  Last January, a tornado dropped out the sky north of us and wiped out the apple orchard we frequent for our Halloween needs.  I was upstairs in my office when I heard the sirens come to life.  I didn’t waste any time.  Daniel was already in the basement.  He had been watching television in the family room and had the shortest distance to cover.  I was pleased to see he hadn’t stopped to collect any toys or stuffed animals.

I was surprised to be in second place.  Normally, I open my office door and Meka is already down at the foot of the stairs in the foyer, calling for me.  When I heard the screaming and the clucking, I knew why she was bringing up the rear.  Meka staggered down the stairs with Pepper tucked under one arm, flapping wildly.  One hand was trying to hold the claws of Pepper’s feet down and the other was trying to hold her beak.

“I’m trying to save your life, you stupid bird!” she said, setting the ruffled parrot on the cement.  Pepper waddled towards the throw rug like E.T. and inspected the underside of the old blue couch.  When we came up with our tornado plan, I have to admit I only thought of the human beings in the household.  That may be selfish; on the other hand, our species is the one paying the mortgage.  We had about twenty minutes to kill while we waited for the signal all-clear.  Meka and I decided that – next tornado – we would have a pet plan.

I’m afraid that in the event of a tornado, the fish will be the first to go.  We only have a small aquarium, but ten gallons of water would be too much to try and lug down the basement stairs.  Besides, we only have the two fish left.  They hide from us all the time; it’s almost like having an empty fish tank as it is.  If they can’t be bothered to show up for us to admire, I don’t have too many qualms not showing up to rescue them.  Our first priority is Hamstersaurus Rex.  He will jump into his ball in a moment’s notice.  Even if Meka has to grab him in her hand, he’s a pretty tame hamster and doesn’t bite.

This brings us to the rental parrots.  Akane doesn’t like to be touched and doesn’t like to leave her cage.  Meka has a better rapport with Pepper (at least she did until the tornado watch).  Still, she was nursing a parrot-induced cut on her hand.  Next time, we plan to just open the cages on the way down to shelter.  We always open a window to equalize the pressure. Meka and I decided both Pepper and Akane – though tame – would probably be smart enough to fly away in the event of a real tornado.  In fact, we liked our idea so much; we may just keep the cages open by the window all the time from now on.

Treasure Hunt

So, Daniel was actually cleaning his room.  This doesn’t happen too often.  Meka finds it’s easier to clean it up herself than coerce Daniel into putting things away where they need to go.  As for me, I feel slightly hypocritical getting after Daniel about his room when I need a snow shovel to deal with the paperwork in my office.  Still, it would be nice to walk into his room in the dark and kiss him goodnight without risking a tetanus shot.  I was supervising Daniel, which meant controlling my urge to scream watching Daniel wrestle with putting the books away in his bookshelf at something slightly slower than a glacial pace.  Finally, an hour (and about three books) into the mission, I suggested he take all the books off his top shelf and arrange them on his bed by size.  He would have room to sort them out that way.

“Then, you can work on the next shelf and then the next shelf.”  Daniel looked surprised.

“That’s breaking it in steps,” he told me.  “This isn’t math!”

“No, but you can do lots of things in steps,” I said.  “You bake a cake in steps, you build your tracks in steps…”

“You follow a treasure map in steps,” suggested Daniel.  I nodded.  “This isn’t a treasure map either.”

“You never know,” I said.  Daniel looked skeptical, but grudgingly got going on his books.  After a bit, I heard a cry of surprise.

“My Yu-Gi-Oh cards!” he exclaimed.  “I thought they were lost forever!”  Apparently, they had fallen behind a stack of books.  I noticed Daniel had shifted gears and was working with a bit more gusto.  Through the afternoon, he recovered a number of items thought to be gone for good.  He located several rare Lego parts he had been looking for.  He found one of his favorite Hot Wheels cars wedged in a corner.  At dinner time, Daniel came down and handed me a strip of cardboard with a picture of SpongeBob SquarePants on it.

“I made you this Valentine’s Day card, but then I lost it,” said Daniel.  “Here you go.”  It was six weeks late, but better late than never.

Bad Examples

We’ve been parrot-sitting Pepper and Akane for about six months now and it’s been an eye-opening experience for all of us… or – to be more accurate – an ear-shattering one.  Every day when we get home, we are greeted by a cacophony of beeping and whistling and screeching nonsense.  Despite this, I came home one afternoon and there was Daniel at the kitchen table, engrossed in the Parrot Supply Catalog.  Akane clucks if he gets too near and Pepper hisses and screams when he approaches.  I figured he was scanning the pages, looking for parrot-sized gags.  To my surprise, he said he was looking for his own parrot.

“So, you want a parrot like Pepper?  I asked.  “In your room with you?”  He shook his head.  “Akane?”

“Not exactly,” he said.

It reminded me of the old commercial: there’s Hertz and then there’s “not exactly”.  Daniel described me his specs for the perfect parrot.  It wouldn’t spit seeds out and make a big mess.  It wouldn’t poop on the floor.  Daniel’s parrot would like everybody and not bite.

“And it has to be quiet,” he finished, giving Akane a look as she did her falcon impression over and over from the family room.  I wished him luck on his endeavor and headed upstairs.  Meka was in her room.  It took me a minute to get her attention.  Pepper was perched on top of the cage and screaming something that sounded like “kumquat” over and over and Meka was wearing ear plugs.  I told her Daniel was downstairs parrot shopping and described what he was looking for.

“That’s easy,” she said.  “All we need to do is buy him another stuffed animal.”   She laughed (so did Pepper, by the way).  “Or maybe a Norwegian Blue like Monty Python.”

On the Road to a Reaction

Meka’s well into her second semester at NIU.  She is majoring in chemistry and has three labs a week.  I think I’m still married, I just don’t see my wife all that often.  I suppose that’s why our infrequent encounters stick in my memory and I try to pay attention to what she’s talking about.

We went out to Taco Bell late one evening.  It was the only place still open and Meka still had hours left to go on writing up her lab report.  I asked her what the issue was.  Apparently, they had conducted an experiment a number of times.  This is standard operating procedure; you run an experiment many times to smooth out any discrepancies using statistical correction.  However, what made this lab different was it wasn’t the end result that was important, but rather what was happening in the middle of the reactions.

“We know what the end result is,” she explained.  “But there are many theories as to the intermediate steps of the reaction.”  I asked her which theory was the correct one and she said no one knew for sure.  In fact, the act of measuring can affect the end results, so it was unlikely they would ever know exactly what was happening and when.

I thought that was a real departure from the high school chemistry I took.  Back then, the experiments were straightforward enough that you knew something had gone wrong if you got a messy answer.  However, what Meka was dealing with in college chemistry was more like the real world, where A doesn’t always lead to B and then to C.  Theoretical perfection has to give way to practical reality.  She was learning how to run experiments that focus on the journey as well as the destination.  Ultimately, I think this will make her a fine chemist… assuming the next sleepless year and a half don’t drive her crazy.

Internet – 1, Imagination – 0

When I was a kid, we had to go to the library or look things up in an encyclopedia.  These days, I let my mind wander through Wikipedia and other sites online.  I find I learn something new every day.  Whether I actually want to learn it is another story.  When it comes to romance, I don’t even like to kiss and tell.  However, I can safely say that I’m pretty straightforward when it comes to sexuality.  I don’t seem to have much interest in the way of fetishes; I’ve never had the need to have Meka dress up in a costume, hit me with a sandwich or call me rude names.

Still, Meka and I are nothing if not creative.  One night, we decided to look up the most bizarre sexual practices we could think of.  We assumed that not only did someone somewhere get off on it, but there was probably an entire website devoted to its practice.  We weren’t disappointed.  Interested in having sex with insects?  You can dress your loved one up like a sexy ladybug or bumblebee for about fifty dollars.  My contribution was a colostomy bag fetish.  While we never found a site directly addressing that, we did locate a site featuring general stoma fetish (those extra holes people have following certain surgical procedures).

That led us to the cutters.  There are people who enjoy cutting people or cutting themselves in a sexual manner.  While the photographs were… interesting, what got us was the cutter porno movie.  The scene opened in a poorly lit room with a table that was supposed to be an OR.  A tired looking woman lay down and talked to the doctor standing above her.  As with all pornography, the acting was wooden at best.  Random music played in the background.  After a few moments, she closed her eyes and the doctor began to perform “surgery” with one of those fake knives you can pick up at a joke shop around Halloween.  The doctor got excited behind his surgical mask and the woman tossed and turned in badly acted ecstasy.  The climax was when he fumbled around underneath her and pulled out a piece of raw meat, an “organ” supposedly removed from her body.

“Oh!  Doctor!” she moaned breathlessly.

I remember both our mouths hanging open; every so often one of us would emit a tiny glubbing noise.  When it was all done, I felt like I really needed to take a shower.  The Neil Diamond Storytellers sketch from Saturday Night Live came to mind.  I guess that reinforced my fetish involving women who wear a wedding ring that matches mine that also share a love for laughing at the most inappropriate things on the Internet.