My So Called Life

What sound can’t you handle?

/ Shane / 6 Comments

You know how sometimes there is a sound that just gets to you? The obvious example is nails on a chalkboard, but honestly that doesn’t really bother me all that much. We were discussing this over the weekend and it turns out that there are certain sounds that you can’t handle, but everybody’s sounds are different.

For Ron, it was the sound of a knife cutting on a wooden cutting board. For my mom, it was cutting cardboard with scissors. Sara can’t handle the sound of chalk writing on anything, or even touching chalk for that matter (“it’s just so dry!”). She has the same problem with the sound of someone writing with a pencil. As for me, it’s the sound of nails on the felty fabric on the inside of the roof of your car.

So at least mine is something normal and everybody else has totally bizarre reactions.

Ugh, man I tell you, it makes me shudder just to write it down. I can’t even picture the roof of the car in my head without a reaction. Even weirder then the fact that everybody has some strange sound that affects them, apparently hearing the sound affects everybody differently.

For Ron, it gets him right in the back of his shoulders. Mom gets little shivers on her arms. Sara gets goose bumps (even just talking about it – she demonstrated). Mine makes my back teeth feel funny.

It’s hilarious how everybody can talk about their own hang-ups and reactions very seriously, but everybody else’s sounds ridiculous.

So what is your sound? And how does it affect you?

Our little bus rider

/ Shane / 1 Comment

The other day we noticed a giant praying mantis clinging to the side of the car, maybe 5 inches long. I don’t know where he came from, I don’t remember seeing any praying mantises around the building. I tried to shoo him away with my coffee mug, but he just climbed onto the back window. I figured he would take off when we started driving, but he didn’t. He clung to the back window the entire way to drop Oliver off at day care.

Hey, can I get a ride?

Since he was right where the kids could see him, he was a big topic of conversation. We decided that perhaps he was a passenger on the “1-daddy-2 bus”, which is the route which serves daycare, Evie’s school, and my work (I happen to be the driver on said route). Evie had me announce the stops to him, in case he wanted to get off. I usually announce the stops inside the car, but she had me repeat it on the outside also (“This is the 1-daddy-2 bus. Next stop, school.”)

The main theories were that he was either, A) commuting to work on the bus, B) coming home from a night by our house, or C) moving, because as Evie put it, “bugs don’t have any furniture”.

I assumed he would leave while we were stopped at daycare, but he was still there when we got back (Evie ran ahead to check). I decided to leave him, figuring he’d blow off when we got on the highway. At his point we decided perhaps he was going to Evie’s school because it, “sounded like a nice place to live.”

By the time we got on the highway, we were pretty invested in the little guy. We had invented a little history for him: what he was up to, what kind of life he leads. Therefore, it was very disturbing when, rather than just letting go and flying away, he attempted to hang on for dear life. It looked very painful, and I fully expected it to kill him. His head was snapping around, his legs were twisted, and he tried to open his wings for stability which were quickly flipped inside out. It was awful. Here was our little buddy, dying painfully before our eyes.

“Pull over daddy and let him climb back on!” shouted Evie, quite distraught. I couldn’t blame her, I was thinking the same thing. Unfortunately, there’s not really a good place to pull over there. “I’m going over to the slow lane to drive as slow as I can!” I shouted back. That was all our buddy needed. Even through the rear-view mirror, I could see the look of resolve in his eyes. Slowly but surely he put got one leg at a time back onto the window. He straightened his wings. Then, just as the inspirational music began to swell, he fought the wind, using his front claws to pull himself over to the side where the wind wasn’t as bad, and hunkering down close to the car so he couldn’t be thrown off.

It was as inspirational a struggle as I’ve ever seen from a movie. Excuse us if there was a little bit of cheering, and/or cars being run off the road, since I was busy watching the mantis instead of the traffic.

Finally we pulled up in front of school and I asked Evie if she wanted to hold him in her hand and show him to her teachers. She was very excited about this. The mantis, on the other hand, was not. Perhaps a little grumpy from the rough ride, every time I tried to pick him up, he would launch himself at me, snapping and attacking with those signature claws. After a few tries, I managed to convince him to climb onto Evie’s lunch box.

She was triumphantly carrying the lunchbox into the school yard, when the mantis suddenly leaped off and flew away to hide in the garden. In order to prevent Evie from being disappointed that she didn’t get to show everybody the mantis, I said, “Hey, I guess he did want to get off at this stop!” Right away her grin was back, and she ran to tell her teachers about how we had brought a friend with us to live in the garden.

There has been a lot of speculation about our little buddy since then. We haven’t seen him, but as Evie points out, he’s good at hiding because he “smells like a leaf”.

We’ve also begun to wonder if the 1-daddy-2 bus is the only form of public transportation he uses. Perhaps he arrived at our house via the train? Who knows where he originated from?

In any case, he provided us with a little magic on what is normally a pretty dull task.

Applesauce, 2011

/ Shane / 3 Comments

One of our family traditions is picking apples for homemade applesauce. This is something I’ve done since I was a kid, and one thing that I’m really excited to share with my own kids. Usually we do it in Indiana, but we were having trouble finding a way to fit it in. However, one of Evie’s new classmates’ families was looking for some picking partners, which was fortuitous for us: we got to meet some people from Evie’s new school, and we got to pick some apples!

I was kind of bummed that Sara couldn’t go with us, since by definition it’s a family thing. Nevertheless, it was a pretty nice day. Evie, Oliver and I had a great time at the orchard, followed by a picnic lunch and some time at a playground.

We went to the More Than Delicious orchard, which was pretty far from us, but would be a stone’s throw if you lived in the North West suburbs. It was better than I anticipated; bigger, with more varieties than I expected (or were advertised!), and not at all busy (although we were there early on a Friday morning). Apples are a lot more expensive in Chicago than in Indiana. They were charging $50 a bushel, when they’re only $26 a bushel back home. However, they did have “wind-fallen” apples, which are basically just a random assortment of whatever they picked up off the ground, for half price. This particular orchard doesn’t spray much, so there are some bug holes, etc., but for applesauce the wind-fallen ones were perfect. Even with the half-price apples though, we’re still producing applesauce at about the same price we could buy it from the store (and this is assuming our time is worthless!). So it’s definitely for the experience, not to save money!

But the experience is nothing to scoff at. And, as expected, Evie and Oliver loved eating the apples!

I think they ate 3 apiece at the orchard, but when we got home we couldn’t keep Oliver out of them. He even climbed up a chair and onto the table to find them! He liked to take one bite of each and then put them back.

Both Evie and Oliver were pretty keen to help with the applesauce. Evie was actually a big helper all day, both with the actual apples (she cleaned almost all of them by herself), and also with just staying occupied and letting Sara and I get the work done.

It’s a big job and we expected it to take all day. We got started as soon as possible after breakfast, but things were actually going quite smoothly. I guess we weren’t really expecting that both of us would be able to work on it. It still ended up taking 6 hours total, but a lot of that is at the end when you’re just waiting for the jars to process. In fact, it was so leisurely, Sara ended up baking muffins!

At the end of the day, we ended up canning 15 quarts, with another almost full jar in the fridge. Last year we had in the neighborhood of 22 jars, and it only lasted us until spring, even with trying to make it last as long as possible! So we could probably use more, however, now that we can mark this tradition off the list, maybe we’ll just end up supplementing from the store. On the other hand, nothing tastes quite as good as homemade!

 

DALMAC 2011

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Last weekend, my brother-in-law Ben took a leisurely bike ride through the beautiful Michigan countryside with a couple of friends. Okay, so the ride might have been a 4 day, 330 mile death march, the countryside might have stretched from Lansing to Mackinaw City, and the “couple of friends” might have been a couple hundred of his closest buddies, but that’s DALMAC for you.

Baggage waiting to go on the truck

We were along as a private “SAG” vehicle, an acronym which apparently means many things to many people, but the most logical definition I’ve seen is “Support And Gear”. It also may refer to the fact that support people like myself tend to have a little more sag around the gut than all of the super-athletic riders around us.

That was probably the weirdest part. In the morning, we would get up late, take showers, slowly take down the tents, and generally lounge around while all these people took off for brutal amounts of exercise. It made me feel like a super-slacker, especially around the tandems with 6 year old kids on the back!

“What are you up to today?”
“Oh, I thought I’d ride 90 miles on my bike, you?”
“Eh, I’ll probably go ride around in the car in a couple of hours or so, if I feel up to it.”

Examining the day’s route

The “race” (it’s not so much a race as an endurance trial) started on Thursday. We had planned to come up on Saturday, but we decided to meet up late Friday night instead. This proved interesting, because it meant setting up our new tent for the first time in the middle of the night. It is vastly more complicated than our old tent!

Saturday morning brought rain and bad luck for Ben in the form of 3 blown tires, including one that popped going around a corner that caused him to lay out the bike. It turns out there was a stone poked through the tire which was repeatedly popping the tubes.

Still, he only had a little road rash on his knee and only missed a few miles, and the rest of the day went better.

There’s the culprit!

Evie was most excited about seeing, “The Wall”. The wall is about 2 miles of uphill road, followed by about 500 feet of SUPER uphill road, all of this at the end of a 90 mile day. Lots of the cyclists find alternate routes to avoid the Wall, but some intrepid cyclists go for it.

It was fun standing in the group at the top of the hill cheering wildly for any rider who managed to make it to the top. We had a sign for Ben and Evie busted out her “Go Ben Go!” cheer, which morphed into her “Go Bikers Go!” chant, that became her trademark for the rest of the trip. I think she made a lot of bikers happy, and who knows? Maybe even gave them the encouragement to finish.

Cheering Ben at the top of “The Wall”

After this, we chanted for bikers at all the stops. Even Oliver got in on the act, chanting, “Go go go!” whenever he saw a biker (and since then, whenever he sees anybody on a bike, or even a picture of someone riding a bike).

“Here comes another one!”

We spent our nights in the middle of a tent city set up on the lawns of various high schools, and our days getting lost in the Northern Michigan hinterlands. It was beautiful driving on back roads through rural areas and small towns. Camping in the tent city was fun too, although sharing bathrooms and locker room/open-style showers with a hundred other guys left a little to be desired!

One of the best parts of the trip was something that happened by accident. We had missed a turn at some point, and then realized we were on the same route as the bikers. We didn’t want to create a dangerous situation, so we turned off at the next road. It was fine for about a mile or so, and then it abruptly ended into a little dirt trail with a sign saying it was a “seasonal road” which was not maintained in the winter. Calling this goat path a road was extremely optimistic; it was basically two sandy tracks winding through the back woods. There were a couple of times when we thought for sure we were going to get stuck in the sand and nobody would ever hear from us gain. It was awesome. (And strangely, I had my best cell phone reception of the day!) The funniest part was when we got to a sharp bend in the path and there was a regular street sign, as if we were really at the corner of two streets, and not the only people for miles!

Finally we made our way to the finish line in Mackinaw City.

“Stop Ben Stop!”

It really was a fun trip. Even though we weren’t participating in the race per say, we still felt like we were a part of something larger. It was neat to see all the different people all participating in this fun, community atmosphere. And even the camping was fun, since we normally just stay at one site for the entire time rather than tearing down and setting up every day. This sounds like a pain, but it really wasn’t bad since we didn’t have much to do during the day, and we couldn’t have a fire, so we planned really simple meals or ate out. It rained two nights, but we didn’t get very wet (although Anna did have to dry some sheets under the hand dryer in the bathroom for us one morning!)

The race ended on Sunday, so we stayed at a regular campsite that night and drove all the way back on Monday. Monday was a pretty rough day, since it was pretty cold overnight and when we were packing up in the morning, and then we had a series of traffic and construction delays, as well as some long breaks from the car. Rather than getting home in time for supper, we ended up getting home around 10 p.m., which made it a 12 hour day. In fact, I’m kind of surprised the kids weren’t in a worse mood! Maybe all those long breaks really were the way to go.

So that’s it! Congratulations Ben (and Phil)! No matter what happens to you in life, nobody can take away the time you rode your bike across the state of Michigan. And I already heard some talk about next year…

Hail, the conquering heroes!

Now that’s what I call recycling

/ Shane / Leave a comment

It’s hard to get rid of used tires. They’re bulky, they stick around forever, they can be toxic, and you definitely, definitely shouldn’t make aquatic reefs out of them. But how about sculptures?

These things honestly look pretty cool, and the fact that tires seem to live forever would actually be a benefit here. Plus the sort of nasty appearance of these creatures serves as commentary about the nature of consumerism and disposal of this junk. It just wouldn’t seem right to sculpt something nice and happy out of used tires.

Link via Sylvain.