Summer Thoughts

Happy families are all alike. Kids at sleep away camp. Wife by the pool at a hip hotel. And I am left by myself to consume liters of Mexican martinis and Topo Chicos and be be condemned to watch hours of World Cup.

Evan went to camp because his friend James-The-Gamer was going. And he will have a good time though he is the most close minded dude since Antonin Scalia. Vivian, whatever her stated motive may be, has agreed to spend three weeks surrounded by perfect strangers and without air-conditioning only because her crush is also at this camp. Here is a photograph from the camp's website this afternoon with the two of them. Considering that he wouldn't look at her when we ran into them on Sunday, she's doing OK. With her mother's single minded determination and other not-so-good decision-making genes roaring through her blood, what are we going to to with her in a couple of years, by about when the boys' hormones catch up with her's.

Jo and I are living the B.K (Before Kids) dream life. My back is seriously fucked up so I'm sleeping on the couch. And we are going out for dinner and a movie every night. Just like 2005. Last night we streamed Dead Pool on Amazon and then went to a theater to see Dead Pool 2. I had to imagine my grandmother naked to stop laughing because my back hurt so bad and laughing made my ass hurt. Before that Jo went and cut her hair short. I love whatever Jo does with her hair but she looks really hot with it like this.

While the kids are away my wife and I get to talk. Like normal people having normal conversations. Today, after the England - Belgium game, I went to say hello to her at the swimming pool at South Congress hotel. Instead of telling the kids to pick up their mess, we chatted. Is this what empty nesters look forward to? In which case I better get my thrills while I can.

Justice Kennedy retired today. The country is pretty much fucked for a couple of decades during which time laws and their interpretation will favor white male non-educated Christian fanatics. For a couple of centuries this used to be their country. It's their last gasp. The pendulum will swing back. I'll still take America over anyplace else.

Happy Campers

So I'm a little behind on my blog. Technology glitches.

Two days ago, on a nice and breezy but still hot as sweaty balls Sunday afternoon we dropped the kids off at Camp Champions for two or three weeks (they get to decide if they want out after two). Before that we started the morning off with a sweet breakfast of baked goods at Upper Crust and even sweeter hugs from their friends.

If you have been reading / listening to too much news and you need a little picking up, look at the picture of Ava and Vivian hugging. It's so amazingly honest. It's cute as a box full of kittens. And it's the future.

After drop-off at the Camp, Jo and I stopped by home to pick up alcohol, and then Central Market for a nice watermelon and finally to a pool party at Evan's Magellan class mate's home. It turns out that parents celebrate not having their kids around by acting like kids!

After that party we met yet another group of recently liberated parents at the Draught House, and we stumbled home at midnight and didn't have to pay a sitter!

In the weeks leading up to Camp, we were worried about the kids. Vivian played it cool and acted like it was nothing. Evan, who is already pretty physical and hyper, cranked both up - till it was non-stop hugging while talking and / or bouncing off the wall.

At drop-off, Vivian was slightly more subdued and even agreed to hug me good bye. Evan waved across from the field, yelled "tell Mom bye", and was gone.

Three weeks of peace. Not having to repeat one thousand times a day:

"Pick that up"
"Don't touch her"
"Did you smack him?"
"Hurry up"
"You need shoes"
"Put your iPad down"
"Eat that"
"No headphones"
"No TV in the morning"
"Stop singing at the dining table"
"For the last time, turn off your lights and go to sleep"

Jo - do we even remember to talk without saying those things?

Recruiter

A dozen of Evan's Cub Scout troop mates are graduating out of Cubs at the end of this school year. So we got Evan and a couple of his friends to show up one morning at school in their Cub shirts and pitch to kids in a about ten classes over the course of the day to replenish the pack.

Evan and the other boys did a terrific job. A sufficient number of boys and girls went back home and told their parents that they wanted to join Cub Scouts at the start of the coming year. Yes - you heard right. The Boys Scouts is no longer the Boy Scouts. They are admitting girls.

Vivian wished it would have happened before she got to middle school. She's attended a couple of Evan's camps with him and me and has a good number of friends in the Scouts. She tried Girl Scouts for a year back in second grade but gave up. Too much crafts and STEM and too little fun, she said. And most importantly, her crush was a Cub.

Faster

JoEllen's last of three birthday cakes was the one she shared with Nicolle on Nicolle's birthday at a party at her house.

The next morning, we took our customary stroll on Canyon Lake dam, along with donuts from Sweeties and the usual bad jokes from the children - "Grandma, do you want to go on a dam walk?".

Evan was frisky and in the first few minutes he challenged me to two races, which he lost. He's gotten a fat head about how he is really fast because his soccer coach has told him that, and it's the reason he gets to play center forward. But it's mostly in his head and I can catch up with him in a dozen steps and beat him in another ten.

Vivian has been running too - at school every day, with a mile run for time every Friday. She runs faster than all the girls in her class and most of the boys.

When Evan challenged me to a third race that morning, Vivian asked if she could join. Jo called it out and we started running. We both dropped Evan in the first twenty yards. He sat back down on the faded tarmac of the dam and complained to Jo and grandma that he was tired because of the previous races (his excuses are even faster than his legs).

Vivian and I kept sprinting. I was running flat out as fast as I could and I was just keeping even with her. She looked over at me and smiled. Soon I felt myself running out of steam. I had to slow down, thinking she would too. But she waved at me and kept running - probably even gaining speed. I stopped, breathing heavily. She kept going. When I finally caught up with her, she wasn't even panting.

So my eleven year old girl can outrun me now. I have entered a new era as a parent.

Soccer

Evan joined a competitive soccer league in the Spring. It's his first team-playing foray into soccer, after having being exposed to the game by coach Pala at Magellan. He ended up in a team with two classmates from Magellan and seven strangers. By the end of the season they were a bunch of fun loving floss-dancing friends. They played their first full scale tournament in which they didn't do great. But Evan is learning to play center forward and most importantly, he loves the game.

Back in early spring when Evan and I would kick the ball around in the back yard, he'd almost never score a goal on my flower pot. With Coach Stephen's training, he's got much better. I suspect by next year he'll be running circles around me.

We will spend a few days this month watching World Cup matches. Evan will miss the last part of the group play and everything after that because he'll be at Camp Champions. And I plan on squeezing in the finals at a bar somewhere in Salerno, though the crowd may be less than excited because the Azzuri stunningly didn't qualify for the World Cup this time around.

Camping

In a pre-birthday celebration Jo and Jen went to Todos Santos for a weekend and Evan, Vivian and I went to Evan's Boy Scouts campout. Or I should say, a campout consisting of mostly boy scouts and their parents and an occasional girl sibling. That's the family tent behind Evan and James.

And that's Jo enjoying a nice drink in Baja. 

These kids have been together for a few years. About a dozen are Vivian's friends from their days at Magellan. Many like Vivian herself are at other schools already. As primary school draws to an end for them, some will continue to middle school at Magellan but even more will end up elsewhere. It's been a good group of kids and parents to have known and hopefully Vivian will continue to stay in touch with some of them. But as the semester draws to an end, there's that end-of-an-era feeling in the air. 

Jo's Birthday

Jo is almost an adult. She celebrated a milestone birthday this year. I had imagined a blowout party in my head. But Jo has a simple question when you tell her you are inviting someone to something, anything. "Why?" Coming from the why-not school, I have found it difficult to formulate a suitable non-trivial answer. So I froze and didn't plan much of anything in the end.

The evening before, on the way back from Vivian's school, we stopped at the florist and Vivian selected a bunch of white peonies and very light pink roses. On the morning of the birthday, we sang happy birthday while Jo blew out the candles on an eggless chocolate cake that we ate for breakfast.

Jo took the kids to school while I took a cooler with fixings for mimosas for when Jo and her friends would be at the gym. Here's a photo Jen posted on Instagram that morning.

After the gym, Jo's Grace Garden friends met her for a mani-pedi and I joined them for lunch. And that was it. Then I left to pick Evan up from school and take him to his soccer practice before the weekend's tournament scheduled to start the next evening.

We met back at home for a quick dinner and left for Vivian's volleyball game. They played a better team with bigger girls and won! Which was also Jo's only gift for her big birthday. Yep.

The next evening, rain forced the start of Evan's soccer tournament to Saturday - so we got a sitter and took Jen and Travis out to dinner to kinda-sorta celebrate Jo's birthday.

Happy birthday, my dear. I'm sorry. Next year I am going to do better. It might not have the cachet of a nice roundish number, but hey, it's a prime number! 

Laundry Woes

When you have kids, you (mostly Jo) do a lot of laundry. Vivian is just beginning to do her own. Evan is still a one way dirty laundry generating machine. This spring our 14 year old washer bit it and Jo's reliable repair guy said we should get a new one. Being a stacking system, we soon realized that short of a DIY solution, we would have to replace the perfectly good drier too.

The last time around we had bought the appliances from McNair's - a local non-chain place up the street from us. Since then, they have disappeared. So we went to the one and only, the venerable Sears.

Sears was a shit show. I used to do *all* my non-grocery shopping at the Hancock Center Sears when it was on a UT shuttle bus ride up the street from me. It was like a candy store - a set of Craftsman wrenches with a life time warranty, a pair of Tiger Asics (cheaper than Nike's) or acid washed Levis 501 button fly jeans. Or a set of new tires for my Ford Fairmont. Now, over three decades later, the Sears store resembled a mall in cold war East Berlin. It had bars on the doors, looked seriously dated to almost be retro, had half empty shelves, and most importantly, there were no shoppers.

Someone sold us what we needed. The earliest delivery/install date was several days out, so we waited and kept doing fifty dollar laundries at a place that washes and folds your clothes for you. Then the Sears guys didn't show up during the delivery window. Lots of calling to reschedule and then more waiting.

Finally the day arrived. The two guys wrestled the appliances in and sped through the installation. They said ours was the second in a schedule of nineteen delivery/installs they had for that day. They expected to only get to about fifteen of them if they rushed through them all. .

For about a month and a half we had smiling faces and clean smelling clothes.

Then there was a burning smell and the new dryer quit - the one that was the replacement for a perfectly fine dryer that we had to ditch. Took us a week to get a Sears repair guy back in. He said the main motor had died, and ordered a new one. He scheduled a return trip another week out. And Jo started carting baskets full of wet laundry to Karen's dryer next door. Or we draped them around the dining table.

In the old days the repair guy would have reached into his truck and pulled out the replacement part. Or driven off and returned with a new motor a few hours later. But this time the motor arrived at our doorstep by mail several days later. Then we waited for the return of our repair man. At breakfast, the kids would ask "How many more days till he's back" in the same way normally reserved for major holidays.

Alas, a week later our dreams were struck down when the repair man apparently called in sick on the day of our service call. Instead of a replacement guy or working us into his schedule when he returned, Sears informed us that we'd effectively be treated as a brand new service call. Back to the end of the line. Another ten days of wet laundry to Karen's. Jo gets increasingly sullen. I am looking up youtube videos on installing a new dryer motor. I bring out some tools and pry off the top of the dryer. Jo warns me that I would mess up the warranty and talks me off the ledge.

Then this different repair guy walks in and says "A motor this young never burns out. But we'll replace it anyway". He does and nothing happens. He grumbles. I contemplate fire bombing the house before Jo comes back home. A few seconds later, before I can commit to it, the repair guy notices that he hadn't plugged in the dryer. He plugs it in. It works and he quietly leaves, slightly red faced. I praise the lord while putting the explosives away.

Years from now, Vivian and Evan will read this and wonder about the primitive practice of going to a store to buy something. Why would you do that when Jeff is always just a click away.

Speaking of Jeff, I heard this joke today from Arjun:

Jeff to Echo: "Buy three avocados at Whole Foods"
Echo: "I do not understand avocados. Buying Whole Foods"