Keeping busy, with mixed results

I have nothing in particular going on this week. I mean, in and of itself. But it's hard to sit around and have a normal week when you know that the upcoming month is going to be anything but. My brain wants to gallop around in circles, but I've been doing a pretty good job so far of keeping cool. We'll see what the score is by Thursday.

What else? On Saturday evening I volunteered - volunteered, mind you - to accompany my sister and nephews on a trip to Chuck E. Cheese's for a birthday party. The party was for one of the twins' school friends, but predictably the other two boys didn't much like the thought of their brother going to the rat's lair without them. I hadn't set foot in a Chuck E. Cheese's since maybe 1990, so I figured, what the heck? It might be fun!

Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha HA. If by "fun," you mean "a waking nightmare," then yeah. Sure, it was a blast.

I beg of you - never go to Chuck E. Cheese's on a Saturday night. Just don't do it. Or, if possible, at any other time. The parking lot was full at 6:00 p.m. There was a big sweaty ball of humanity crowded into the entryway and spilling out onto the sidewalk waiting to get inside. The place was at capacity. Once the birthday party had secured us passage through the door, I spotted the world's most frightening salad bar. Think about the general cleanliness of any buffet, first of all. And then think about all the people smooshed into Chuck E's on any given day. And all of the unsupervised little kids running amok. And just the fact that the salad bar is located about ten feet from the entryway, for maximum traffic. Gaaaah.

Past the salad bar, we entered the teeming belly of Chuck E. Cheese. Half the games were broken, and half of the rest were out of tickets. I played a few games of skee ball, constantly defending my tickets from grabby little children. (I gave my tickets to my own grabby nephews. Though I did use a few myself on a high-quality magnetic tic tac toe game. Because you can't possibly just use a pencil and paper for tic tac toe!) At one point I passed my sister, shepherding two of the boys with a look on her face of vaguely glazed horror that I recognized immediately. "It's a like a whole new level of hell," she murmured with a touch of awe. Indeed it was.

I swear Chuck E. Cheese's wasn't this horrible when I was a little kid. It seemed like they didn't have nearly as many fun rides anymore, either. Sure, I know there must have been a reason my mom never wanted to go there, but it couldn't have been this bad. Anybody back me up here?

Notes taken

In the past I've written about both of my grandfathers here. Recently I made a delightful discovery in the front hall of my parents' house: an old school copy of Silas Marner that belonged to my dad's father. This had apparently come to us when my grandpa passed away, but I'd never seen it before. When I expressed excitement over the discovery, my mom told me she also had an old junior high school math book that had belonged to her father. Where was she hiding it all these years? I don't know, but she dug it out and I found myself in possession of both volumes. Given my love of history, especially where it concerns people and places I know, I was as pleased as Kanye West in a room full of mirrors.

The books are special to me because they contain little glimpses of what my grandfathers were like as teenagers. Notes in the margins, jokes scrawled across the pages, doodles. Silas contains much more in the way of notes than the math book, but the math book is cool in its own right. I may feature it in a future entry just to highlight all the interesting things one can learn from old math books. Things that have nothing to do with math. Like this:

I had no idea how many bushels of potatoes were harvested in Wisconsin in 1919! Until now.

Here are some detail photos from the books. Some more are on flickr.

Grandpa Bob's copy of Junior High School Mathematics.


If he used it in 1929, he would have been twelve. Impossibly young, to me. This is the same grandpa who didn't finish high school, yet wound up building telescopes and tutoring kids in calculus - so it seems fitting that of all his old schoolbooks, a math book is the one he kept. (I hope he actually spelled his name RoBert all the time back then, too. Extra points if he ever pronounced it ro-bair.)


I wonder who Diane was...


Inside the back cover. Huh? Whistler's Mother. Old times. "Huh" indeed.


Silas Marner - my grandpa Jack used it in 1935, his senior year of high school


Jack in his 1935 senior picture - in the middle, wearing a vest


Inside the front covers


The "yea man" just kills me. And what's on page 150, you ask?


There you go. He wasn't the best speller, was he? He had the same handwriting his whole life, though. I'd recognize it anywhere.


Not I!

Frozen moments

A few months ago, my mom purchased a nifty new device. This device can scan negatives and slides, digitizing them and transforming them into color photos. It seemed like a magical box of wonder when I heard the description, and it is - sort of. The quality of the output depends a whole lot on the quality of the negatives, and there's no way to adjust anything before scanning - any editing of exposure and color adjustment needs to be done after the file has been digitized. It's actually quite time consuming to get a decent finished product from an old negative.

But. There's nothing quite like scanning some mystery negatives from the bottom of an old shoebox and seeing a scene from the past pop up on your screen. Even if the quality is kind of sucky, what gets me in these old photos are the background details. I am fascinated by background details. They're things that are most likely to have been forgotten, or never consciously noticed at all. Certain ornaments on a Christmas tree. How the furniture was arranged. The dishes and appliances on the counters in the kitchen. Beyond just digitizing old negatives and photos, scanning them into the computer in high resolution allows them to be viewed much larger than the typical 3x5 snapshots that populate our old photo albums, revealing a whole new dimension of background detail. I could get lost in these photos. Here are a few from old holiday negatives:

My mom helping my oldest sister decorate the Christmas tree in 1969. Oh my God, my mom was four years younger than I am now in that picture.


With toys. I love the stuff in the back of this picture. It was taken at my parents' first apartment, but I remember that hideous puke-looking rug, so they must have brought it with them. I also remember that stereo, which may still be down the Basement o' Wonders. Classy floral arrangement, too.


A year or so later. I wish the colors were better, because that dress is adorable. Hey, how much do you think the TV weighed?

The other thing this device can do, as I mentioned above, is scan slides. This might not be as useful to most people as the scanning of negatives, but most people didn't have my maternal grandfather taking photos when they were growing up. Grandpa, as I have noted in the past, loved both photography and technology. This combination of traits was perhaps less common back then than it is today, with new tech gadgets in constant demand. Grandpa had a camera that took 3D photos. These photos had to be sent off to another city to be developed, where they were put on ViewMaster-style slides and shipped back. To look at them, you needed another special device - pretty much a really expensive ViewMaster. Except instead of showing Return of the Jedi or Thriller slides, like my red plastic one did, it showed the photos you had just taken in startling, lifelike 3D detail. It took me a long time to realize that everyone's family didn't have these. Grandpa also typed the exact date on every slide, bless him. That's so something I would be crazy enough to do.

With the new device, for the first time, I'm able to digitize these photos. As amazing as it is to have them as 3D slides, it's also somewhat restrictive. You need the ViewMasters in order to look at them in any meaningful way, and can't easily share them with others. Scanning them robs the slides of their three-dimensionality, of course, but the quality of the resulting files - at least, some of them - is breathtaking. They haven't degraded the way old negatives and photographs have. The slides have some exposure issues, which unfortunately I'm not sure how to fix on the scanning end of things. But when the composition of a shot is just right for scanning, wow. Some examples follow. Thanks, Grandpa.

My sister on Nana and Grandpa's porch, 1974. The colors in this shot may have turned out the best of any of the scanned slides.


My sisters on a car, ca. 1975. Love the outfits.


Me on Nana's couch with a racket, 1983.


In the corner of Nana's kitchen. Look at the wallpaper long enough and you'll go insane!

Kids these days

This is the exact jacket my eleven-year-old nephew requested of my mom for Christmas:


My favorite thing, I think, is that it's a woman's jacket. That kid is awesome. A couple of years ago he wanted a purple ninja mask, too. (My mom isn't buying the jacket, in case you were wondering.)

Happy Memorial Day

Mice in heaven

Last Thursday was the opening night of the Wisconsin Film Festival. I saw Chalk with some friends, and really enjoyed it. It's a mostly-improvised mockumentary centering around high school teachers. A Q&A with the filmmakers followed - apparently the film has been making the festival rounds for the past year or so, but it's opening in eight cities in May. If it comes to a city near you, it's worth checking out.

I saw three of my nephews for Sunday dinner today. An actual conversation I had with one of the recently-four-year-old twins:

"I climbed on the side of the chair, and Grandma saw me! She won't let me climb behind the TV, either. But if she's in the kitchen, she can't see me!"

(I tell him there are too many wires behind the TV.)

"Yeah, but I could go back there anyway! You know what? There's a mouse trap under our TV at home. I touched it."

(I ask what would happen if it snapped shut on his finger. Note - I don't actually think it's that kind of mouse trap.)

"But I wouldn't get hurt, because I saw Tom and Jerry and a mouse trap snapped shut on Tom's tail and he didn't get hurt!"

(I point out that he is a cartoon and not a kid.)

"Yes, but I still touched it. I would hide behind the TV here, and I might get stuck in the wires, and then Grandma would get mad and she wouldn't pull me out. I would have to stay there forever, and I wouldn't get to eat lunch here ever again. I wouldn't get to eat any pickles, and I wanted a lot of pickles."

(I suggest they might toss him some food behind the TV.)

"But Grandma wouldn't be able to see me! Except for my foot. My foot would be sticking out, and she would see it. And I would find a mouse trap, and it would shut on my hand, and then the mice would run up my finger like this. A mouse would run into my ear! I would have mice in my ears and in my head. And then the mice would be everywhere. Mice eat everything. They would eat all the walls of the house and we would have to sleep outside in a tent. And then they would eat us and we would all die, and Great Grandpa would meet us and take us up to heaven."

(I inquire as to whether there would be mice in heaven.)

"No! I mean, yes, and we would eat the mice in heaven! We would eat them up and that would make us come back to life. And then we would go back to our house. And then the bad dragon from Shrek would throw bombs at our house and blow us up! Shrek the Third is a funny movie, and we're going to see it this summer. We will see it at the movie theater, on a giant screen! We will be big too!"

(He picks up a framed photo he brought from home, of himself and his brothers as babies in front of the Christmas tree.)

"I'm making a story. I'm making a story, and here's how it's going to end. All of us babies were in a movie, on the giant screen like Shrek, and then we fell out of the screen and here we are in the frame, and that's the end! No, and then at the top of this Christmas tree are words that say THE END and they will light up like a star, and that's the end! And then the names come on the screen."

Kids are awesome.

Junior songsmith

My five-year-old nephew, inspired by some new kids band on Nickelodeon, has begun to write his own songs. So far he has written two:

Up, Down (Come In The Tree With Me) [paratheses mine]
When I Hide, I Cry

That second one sounds a little emo to me. Anyway, I'm trying to get him to write down the lyrics - because oh, there are lyrics - so that I can torture him with them when he's sixteen.

Update: My nephew has informed me that When I Hide, I Cry is a Spongebob "cover." Ha! The treehouse song, however, is all him.

Grandpa tales

I opened Blogger tonight intending to make a post, and then just wound up staring at the screen blankly for a few minutes. I wanted to write something, but I had nothing to write. Undaunted, I decided to write something anyway. So here is a story about my grandpa. I used to spend a lot of time over at my maternal grandparents' house when I was little. When my parents took a trip to Las Vegas when I was in kindergarten, my older sisters stayed at home but I stayed with Nana and Grandpa. One afternoon Grandpa and I were down the basement in his workshop - a place I loved dearly. I had grabbed a pencil and sheet of neatly cut paper from the supply at the table, because I wanted to draw my parents a welcome home cartoon. I decided that the cartoon would depict a mother yelling at her son because his dog had pooped on the living room carpet. I'm not quite sure why this was supposed to welcome my parents home from Vegas, but anyway. I drew the picture, and it came time for the cartoon speech bubbles. For this I needed Grandpa's assistance. I wanted no spelling errors. "Grandpa?" I asked. "How do you spell 'poop'?"

Grandpa didn't miss a beat. "S-H-I-T," he replied. Not being completely naive, I started giggling. Grandpa started laughing too. I think the cartoon ended up saying something like "The damn dog's shit on the carpet again!" and my mom thought it was hilarious. This tale from my formative years probably explains a lot, actually.

More perils of Chelle

About a year ago, I linked to "Chelle and the Bull", a story I wrote about my cousin when I was four. I recently decided to put that story and its sequels on a website for posterity and easy sharing. "Chelle and the Bull" was the third story of four in the ... series ... and on this site I've included that as well as the first two stories:

Perils of Chelle

Click on the links at the top to read "Chelle and the Car" and "Chelle and the Lawnmower", in addition to "Chelle and the Bull". I'll put the last tale up sometime soon.

This is a song and a lesson

I visited twins 3 and 4 today, and I can totally tell them apart now. Yay! Also, I was right about which twin was which in the photos. Logan is indeed the one seducing the camera with his eyes. What's new with them? They're chubby. They make adorable noises and flail at things in an attempt to grab them. They like to stare up at ceiling fans. And they spit up a lot. Hooray for babies!

The subject of this entry is a quote from my 5-year-old nephew. He was in the car listening to The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and remarked out of nowhere, "This is a song and a lesson." Indeed it is, child. Indeed it is. The Rolling Stones: fonts of eternal wisdom.

Want to know something sad? I'm excited about autumn and Halloween and Thanksgiving now, but I'm also starting to look forward to Christmas. Seriously, how pathetic is that? It's barely October. I blame it on the fact that I was so sick over the latter part of December last year that I couldn't really enjoy the holiday. This year, as long as the Christmas season doesn't involve any fainting or CT scans, I'm thinking it will be an improvement. Hoping. That's not setting up some sort of cosmic jinx, is it? I mean ... Christmas this year is going to suck. Yeah.

Jenny Lewis at the Pabst on Tuesday.

Sears photo studio

I just received a link to the Sears baby photos my sister and brother-in-law had taken last week. Since I never came through with Baptism photos, I shall post some of them.

The embarrassing thing is, I still am not 100% sure which twin is which. As you can see from the photos, I don't really think they're identical - it's just that they do look an awful lot alike. I can tell within the group of photos which babies are which .. I'm just not positive which one is Lo and which one is No. I need to visit them this weekend. I will learn!







You can still see the birthmarks on their foreheads. That second one of them together, and the last photo, are my favorites. Especially the last one. I think that's Logan, and it looks like he's trying out pickup lines.

Did you know...

...that instead of CNN or whatever, the Southwest Terminal at Midway shows Days of Our Lives from 1:00-2:00 p.m.? I did not know that, but now I do, because I am sitting in the Southwest Terminal at Midway, and Days of Our Lives is on.

Sunday was No and Lo's Baptism. It was nice. Sean's brother was whispering comments to his girlfriend at approximately 10-year-old humor level - no, scratch that, my nephew is 10 and he was much better behaved - but that was easy enough to ignore. Especially since I had to concentrate on keeping Noah safe from the devil. I don't have any pictures right now (damn you, non-digital camera!) but perhaps I'll have one to share eventually. Because those are some seriously cute babies.

I'm headed to LA for business and then fun, which is why I'm at the airport. Uyen has dangled the tantalizing prospect of Korean BBQ in front of me, and perhaps a night at Largo if the stars align.

Godparents 101

Tonight I had to go to a Baptism class at church, in preparation for the weighty responsibility of becoming Noah's godmother on Sunday. The class was honestly more interesting and useful than I had expected. It was set up almost boot camp style, with the priest turning to each of us unexpectedly and shouting things like "You find out your godson has been skipping CCD. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?" The best part was the pop quiz/obstacle course at the end of the class, where each of us had to run through the classroom protecting a plastic baby doll as Father Ken (dressed as the devil) tried to capture its soul and damn it to an eternity in hell.

Just kidding. Actually the class was run by a very nice elderly man from the parish, who told stories about being born again from above and giving children the gift of eternal life, and read from the scriptures in Greek. Then we watched a 15-minute film from the early 80's called "Baptizing Your Baby", featuring many people with horrible hair, narrated and presided over by a super gay priest. Then we went home.

Birthday summer

Between the end of June and the middle of August, three of my closest friends, both of my parents, and four of my nephews have birthdays. It's rough! Saturday marked the end of the birthday season for another year, with my nephew Nate's fifth birthday party. My sister threw the pirate-themed fête in her backyard, complete with a treasure hunt, eye patches, bags of loot, a treasure chest pinata, and pirate cake. The only incongrous element was a giant Scooby Doo moon bounce, though predictably the children didn't mind the breach of theme in the slightest. All in all it was a fun afternoon. My mom also managed to round up all seven of her grandchildren for a photo, which was actually quite a feat.

Speaking of the children of my sisters, my niece starts middle school in a couple of weeks. How did that happen? I basically know her as a child, but I'm looking forward to getting to know her better as an actual person. (You know what I mean.) I haven't had much opportunity, since I typically see her only briefly every couple of months. I need to find out if she has an email address.

Pennsylvania

Lindsey moved to Pittsburgh this weekend. She stopped over on her way, which was fun. Another good friend of ours has been in Philly searching for an apartment for the past week; she starts her new job there in September. Lindsey starts med school orientation tomorrow. It seems so random that two of my best friends from high school will now both be living in Pennsylvania. Both of them seem vaguely surprised by their new state of residency as well. It wasn't like they both had this long-standing dream of living in PA. It's just kind of what happened. Well, more places to visit for me.

I saw the newer twin nephews this weekend - they are seven weeks old now. Not having seen them for over a month, I wouldn't have known them. They also look even more alike now than they did when they were newborns, which seems kind of weird to me. Lo is heavier, which is the main way to tell them apart now, but if No suddenly catches up they may never know who is who again. Okay, well, I may never know who is who again. Their ten-year-old brother also amused me by frantically gaining the attention of a bunch of adults in the room and then announcing, "I have a question or comment!" before going on with whatever he had to say. It was obviously the slightly askew application of some rule of etiquette he'd picked up, which is kind of charming, but it was hard not to crack up. Ah, children. I don't really want any of you right now, but you are fun to visit.

Finally, if you had to pick a commercial for which the actors therein loathe themselves the absolute most when they see it on TV - like, "Oh my God I want to kill myself" type self-loathing ... what would it be? I used to think maybe the Dr. Scholls "gellin'" commercials would win, but lately I've been thinking otherwise. Those Pepto Bismol commercials - including the new "hip hop" version - where the people have to do a little Dance o' Symptoms to the tune of the jingle, clutching at their asses when they sing "diarrhea!" ... I don't think anything can beat that. Seriously. I can't even imagine.

Lists

I don't think I've made a good old fashioned list post in a long time. So, without further ado, here are some lists:

Mnemonics, Memory Devices, or Other School-Learned Phrases That Will Be in My Brain Forever:

• kingdom phylum class order family genus species
  
• y = mx + b
  
• first, outside, inside, last
  
• Mary's very eager mother just sat until night passed (Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto)
  
• Every good boy does fine (EGBDF)
  
• Roy G. Biv (red orange yellow green blue indigo violet)
  
• Gee, Scott has nice cuffed pants (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama)

Most Recent Stream-of-Consciousness Subjects I Looked Up on Wikipedia:

• diphtheria
  
• Laura Ingalls Wilder
  
• Thomas Pynchon
  
• Gravity's Rainbow
  
• Ten Commandments
  
• YHWH
  
• county seat
  
• Consenza
  
• Calabria
  
• urine
  
• Edmonton, Alberta
  
• white-collar
  
• The Magnificent Ambersons

Things My Nephew Wanted For His 10th Birthday Last Weekend:

• Spongebob Legos
  
• gold necklace
  
• purple satin Ninja mask

Old New York and D.C.

As promised, this is the first of a few posts featuring some wonderful old photographs I found recently. At the same time I found my maternal grandfather's daily planners, I also came across this collection of tiny (1.5 x 3) photos stuck between the pages of an old photo album. They were taken by a friend of my grandpa's, a man named Chuck Arlosky. My mom doesn't remember how my grandpa and Chuck knew each other, but she does recall that he was a cartographer, and that he didn't live nearby. The man you see in some of the photos is Chuck, and the woman is his wife. On the back of the photos, which are gloriously labeled, he refers to her as "Stretch," but my mom thinks her name was Nikki.

I wish I knew more about Chuck the Cartographer, because his photos are fantastic. As far as I can tell they were taken in the early to mid-1940's, and I suspect it may have been during World War II based on the Times Building's rolling headline in one of the photos. It was a joy to scan these photographs and blow them up, to see the details that weren't apparent in the yellowing pages of the album. Click on any of them for a large version. All of the captions were provided by Chuck himself, unless otherwise noted.


Entrance to the Congressional Library


Chuck in Central Park


Chuck didn't label this one, but based on another he did label, I think it's the RCA Building


From a Fifth Avenue bus top


The capitol at night


Central Park from the top of Radio City - look closely and you'll see Stretch

The 8th Day

Lo & No had their Bris today. Ow. I had to work, so I wasn't there for the actual event. Word is they cried a little bit, and then went to sleep. Sounds like a reasonable reaction to me.

There's an A&E special featuring Johnny Depp on right now. He is a beautiful man. In college we had a Johnny Depp party at someone's house, watching movies and eating such movie-themed foods as grapes (get it?) and special Hershey miniatures I made featuring little Johnny Depp themed wrappers. Good times. I think we need to have another one of those. I haven't even seen the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

Low-key weekend ahead, gearing up for some fun midweek and then activities for the next couple of weekends. (There will be Canada!) Also, tomorrow I get my glasses! I'm excited. One of the most shocking and somewhat shameful experiences I've had in awhile was trying on Judy's glasses in San Diego back in February, on a whim, and literally gasping at the detail I could see. I'd suspected for some time that I could use a prescription for distance vision, but that was the clearest (ha ha) evidence. And now, at long last, they are in. So if you see me driving, or at any meetings or concerts (what are the odds of that?) from now on, then you'll get to meet my glasses. Anybody have a hipster scarf I can borrow? Do hipsters wear scarves even when it's 90 degrees? I should probably know this.

Please tell my brother

And now, the twins. I am extremely pleased to report that both Noah and Logan (eating his brother at left) are at home. I met each of them over the weekend, and I can't wait to see them again outside the hospital - in Logan's case, outside of a very dim NICU where we weren't even allowed to hold him. (Blah blah not the mother or father blah blah blah.)

My other sister (mother of my other twin nephews) has sent a nightly batch of photos, some of which you see before you. At the risk of sounding like a bad aunt, I'll admit I had to call and verify which twin was which. But my hunches were correct! For reference purposes, I have determined that Noah has chubbier cheeks despite weighing less, and the bridge of his nose is flatter than Logan's. These are pictures of each when they came home from their respective hospitals. Logan is just chilling in his fly blue lion outfit, but look closely at Noah down below. He's pretending to be innocently asleep in his carrier, sure ... and then you realize he's flipping you off. That's my boy.

Good morning! Good morning!

This morning, I officially acquired two new small nephews. Logan was born at 7:24 a.m., 7 pounds and 2 ounces. Noah was born at 7:25 a.m., 6 pounds and 8 ounces. Pretty good sizes for twins born two weeks early. Logan is apparently having some minor respiratory issues, so they are going to transfer him to the neonatal unit in West Allis. I'm not sure if I'll get to see him or not this weekend - maybe I could stop there? I know it's supposedly nothing too serious, but I can't help being somewhat concerned. I myself was transferred to Milwaukee shortly after I was born, though, so I should know the drill by now. Maybe I can give Logan some pointers.