Monday Morning 7:00 AM
I step out the door to work, it’s 12 degrees.
There is snow and ice on the ground.
The first day of winter was still 6 days away.
What ever happened to that global warming I hear so much about? I could use a bit of that about now!
A couple of weeks ago I was finally inspired by a friend I had met at the unschooling conference we attended back in September. Rob and his family live in northern Illinois. I was impressed that he had taken the time to learn Yu-Gi-Oh to play with his youngest son. He spent several hours of the conference in the game room with the kids playing.
The kid and the wife had both bought decks of the World of Warcraft trading card game a while back and they had played on occasion. The boy was asking more and more to play of late. So, before he left for his Dad’s for Thanksgiving, I told him that when he got back he could teach me how to play and I even volunteered to take him to a weekly game night at a mall store in south county.
So, this past weekend I sat down and started learning. If you haven’t read one, the instruction manual that comes with these starter decks, isn’t worth didley squat. The thing is horribly ambiguous and expects you to know all about the rules of these games before you sit down to play. We fumbled our way through a couple of games over the weekend with minimal arguments over our interpretations of the rules.
Last night was the big night of playing out at the store. Due to the holiday and lack of space, a lot of people didn’t show up, so there was only 1 other person there. He was a pretty nice guy who helped us out a lot learning the rules better, giving us pointers on “building a deck”, and some etiquette along the way. We had a lot of fun being out together and learning. I’m glad I got the nerve to just do it and spend some more time with him. Thanks Rob.
Last Thursday evening we were out and about in the county and swung into a Barnes & Noble bookstore. On the way out, I noticed a pile of books titled Weird Missouri: Your Travel Guide to Missouri’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets (Weird)
I picked up a copy and flipped to the table of contents. There was a special section on cemeteries. Flipping to the page, I found the short 2 paragraphs about my home town of 632 people.
The little cometary at the edge of town is known locally for it’s glowing tombstones. You drive by on a clear night and see a few of the tombstones sort of flash as you pass them. Of course, if you get out and stand still they actually stay on and appear to glow. It’s that way on a clear moonless night as well. That’s about as far as the book goes. The whole story, of course, always comes with a legend. As ours goes, the original glowing tombstone was that of a woman who had lost her husband in the Civil War. She was not convinced her husband had died and waited up every night on the porch with a lantern, hoping for him to come home. She still stays up at nights with her lantern even now waiting for him.
Aren’t legends fun? While I’m not aware of any detailed investigation into the cause of the glowing tombstones, I’ve always assumed there is some sort of phosphorescent material in the rock that picks up sunlight during the day and shines it back out at night. Regardless, it was still fun to see a blurb about my tiny little hometown in a book at a major book store.
Swimming is something that was never easy for me. For starters, I had tubes in my ears at an early age and was forced to wear wax in my ears anytime we went swimming (which was normally to the lake and not to a pool). So, I instantly hated it and chose to not go as often as I could get away with it. It wasn’t until I was 20 years old that I finally decided that I should really learn how to swim. I took lessons from the local red cross when I was home from college that summer. It wasn’t as hard as I had always worried it would be and now I can officially not drown when I’m at the pool. Sure, I can do the basics, but not much beyond that.
The rest of my family, on the other hand, are fish. My wife was actually on her high school swim team and my son has always had the drive to spend hours every day at the pool if he has the chance. We decided this year to look into local swim clubs and see what we could find for his age. We found the Saint Louis Spirit Swimming team that meets just over at Webster University and signed him up for tryouts. He breezed through with little trouble and got placed in the last tier learning group so he can work on his form with the last couple of strokes.
Now, I’ve been to the pool to play around with the kid on vacation, but I didn’t get he experience of going to the pool with him 3-4 days a week during the summer like my wife did. I’ve now been to swim team practices the last 2 Saturdays. I have to say I’m truly amazed. No, he’s not the fastest kid in the pool, but man does he have some stamina. The first practice I went to I pointed out a board at the end of the pool that was for the 100 mile club. “You gonna get your name on that board someday?” I asked. He just stared at me with this look like “are you kidding me?” I convinced him that he probably swims further in practice than he realizes, so he asked us to keep track of how far he swims. The wife has been keeping track of laps of different swims for the week since then. This past Saturday he swam a full 0.9 miles in the hour and a half of practice. Oh, and that was further than on Thursday which was further than on Tuesday. We are already up to over 3 miles in just 4 practices. I’m sure he’ll breeze past the 5 mile mark by the end of this week as well.
Isn’t it amazing what you can do when you take things one small step at a time? As the old saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
As I type this, the wife is at home with a small group of kids teaching them how to make ice cream. We tried it out last night to make sure everything worked and so she would be more familiar with the process to help. It was really quite simple. They are making small amounts to cut down on the time and just make some samples. I think they are getting together next month or something to try and make strawberry flavors as well.
So, for a simple, family fun time why not try to make some on your own.
We mixed those together and put them in a small zipper bag. We then placed that in a larger zipper bag and filled the larger bag with 2 Cups of ice and 1/4 Cup of Rock Salt. A lot of shaking and in only 10 minutes we had a nice little bit of vanilla ice cream.
The wife found this on the PBS site for the show Fetch. Check it out, there are lots of cool things to do with the kids there.
So, how did you spend your 4th of July? Me, I went to bed early in anticipation of my 6:42 AM tee time on Saturday morning. Unfortunately, I was kept awake until the wee hours of the morning by neighbors who don’t realize that fireworks are illegal in the city of St. Louis. Sure, as a kid I enjoyed my share of fireworks being in a rural town. But my enjoyment stopped during daylight hours of stuffing firecrackers in anthills. We’d always somehow end up with a bunch of bottle rockets and I’d shoot them off to be done with them, but they are kind of boring.
For my money, I prefer to go and watch the pros do what they do. Even more so now that we live in a city. The density of housing is such that I don’t feel comfortable shooting flaming paper and explosives into the air. But, hey, that’s just me. Obviously my neighbors do not share the same view point!
Lucky for me, there was an excellent fireworks display at Sublette Park on Saturday (sponsored by the Southwest Garden Neighborhood). It was really quite a nice display. The park was filled with families when we got there a little after 8 that evening. The playground was packed full of kids and ours promptly disappeared into the crowd of others. He returned when it was getting closer to dark and the fireworks.
The best part of all, it took only 5 minutes to get there and find a place, and less than 10 minutes to walk back to the car and drive home!
We had a fun field trip earlier this week as part of a local homeschool group. The plan was to start off in the morning at Fort De Chartres in Illinois and then take the ferry across the river to St. Genevieve for the afternoon.
I printed out some directions from Google to the Fort realizing they were different than what we were given. Our directions were shorter, but also got us off the highway for a nice view of the country side. It was really beautiful too. The trip through the hills and trees with all kinds of birds was pretty cool. Then we opened out into the lowlands and farms. There were a couple of blue herons wading in the receding flood waters of the fields. It was a beautiful day as well. At least, until we were about a mile from the fort and our last road was under water! Oh well, back to the regular route, good thing we left in plenty of time.
The fort was pretty cool. It’s from the 18th century and has been partially rebuilt on the old foundation. Only 1 building on the site was still orignal and intact, the rest has been “removed” for other uses over the years by local residents in pieces as the flood waters aided in deterioration. Neat place to stop and visit for an hour or two like we did.
We had some lunch in the picnic area there and then had originally planned to take the ferry across the river. Of course, with all the rain this year, the river was too high and we were forced to drive down to Chester and back around.
We made it over to St. Gen. around two and stopped in the visitors center. We had arranged for a tour of the Bolduc House. There were plans to see more, but with the extra driving our schedule wasn’t quite going to work for that. I was very impressed with the detail the tour guides covered the construction of the houses. The details of the mortise & tenon joints, the vertical log construction, the wrap around porches to control sun, the opposing windows & doors for breezes, and even the dirt back yard as a fire break from the cooking kitchen.
We did get a chance to walk around the town some before dinner. There wasn’t much going on for a weekday afternoon in a tourist town so that was pretty bland. We did get a chance to stop by and sample some wines and bring a couple of bottles home with us.
It was a fun trip and a beautiful day for it. I think we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 60-70 kids & adults total (including a rented school bus full). It’s always fun to go on field trips with homeschool groups like this. It’s good to watch 16-18 year olds who are comfortable being around adults and much younger kids. They are always very helpful with keeping the younger ones in order and letting them know when it’s time to be quite and listen, and when it’s okay to be wild and noisy.
I’m in the midst of getting ready to teach a class on building your own birdhouse. It’s part of the homeschooling co-op we are in here. The parents all offer classes once a semester and it gives a wide variety of offerings for our son to learn lots of stuff we wouldn’t necessarily have time to learn ourselves. I know I had fun at the candle making class we went to in February.
It’ll be a fun time with just a few other kids this Saturday. I’m busy cutting all the pieces so that we have pre-made “kits” to assemble with hammers and glue (all kids are required to bring their own hammer and safety glasses).
My only problem so far is that my miter saw crapped out last night. I’m not ready to buy a new one as the one I want is too expensive to buy right now and I don’t want to buy or rent something in the interim. So, tonight it’ll be finishing up the cutting by making do with the table saw. Still, it shouldn’t be too bad.
I had planned on trying to get all this cutting done over the weekend, but it was just too cold to be working on them outside, there is still no power in the garage, and I didn’t want the noise and dust in the basement.
Anyway, hopefully everything gets done tonight and all will go well this weekend!
My wife and I share our Google Calendars. It’s a great way for us to keep track of what’s going on and who’s doing what. It’s especially valuable with only 1 car. Because we can only be one place at a time, it’s nice to see quickly if there is something going on without having to make someone wait and talk with the wife to find out.
This morning, when I got into work, I checked the calendar to see what is going on today and through the weekend (I’m off work tomorrow, yeah!). The wife had “Incredible Kid Day” listed for today. I had no clue what that was, so I asked. She sent me a link to Camp Fire USA’s Absolutely Incredible Kid Day. It’s a day set aside every year to write a letter to your kids about how wonderful they are. There’s even special stationary you can download to write your letter on.
So, with that kind of motivation, I thought I would share mine with you and maybe encourage you to do the same.
Dear eight-year old (as you were called at baseball practice last night),
Though I may get irritated sometimes by your noises, I’m usually irritated by something else besides you before you even start. I still can’t imagine a better guy to spend time with. Whether it’s tickling you on the floor to hear you laugh, playing catch out in the yard or just having a helper when I’m doing work around the house and yard, you give me the energy to keep life fun.
So, keep smiling, keep laughing and keep Dad moving and active. I look forward to another year of hanging out and watching you learn more every day. I hope I can provide a good example for you over the year and help you learn all kinds of cool stuff. Besides, you teach me how to enjoy life, so it’s only fair that I repay you!
Love,
Dad
My family has discovered a way to help beautify our city. The biggest help here is having a little boy around the house. Anyone who has one knows about little boys and their fascination with sticks. Take them for a walk around the block and see how many they bring back home if you let them.
That’s where it all begins with us. We send him out to get a nice little pile of sticks. We then send him out back with the loppers to cut said sticks into smaller pieces (hint: little boys think this is pretty cool too).
Next comes another key part. We’ve got a small outdoor chimnea. It’s like a little outdoor fireplace. A little left over newspapers and a handful of our cut up sticks and we now have a small fire going that will generally burn out completely in just a little over 20 minutes.
What do you do with a small, contained fire in your back yard for 20 minutes? Well, as you might have guessed from the title, you make S’Mores! We grab the barbecue skewers to toast some marshmallows and hook those up with the chocolate and graham crackers and we’re all set. It’s a great treat to have on a cool spring evening or any time of the year it’s not raining or wet.
Plus, you’re helping to keep your neighborhood free from fallen branches without having to overfill the yard waste dumpster. So, next time you are out shopping and you see one of those cute little outdoor fire pits, think how much cleaner you could help our city be with one of those!
