Why we like trees

My in-laws received a fundraising letter disguised as a survey on trees and why people like them. So I started asking the people around me: why do you like trees, specifically, what are the top one or two reasons to have trees in a neighborhood, in the places you live and work and shop?

"Trees attract wildlife, lots of little critters live in and around trees." -a math teacher from Maryland

"Trees are a connection to the natural world, and a reminder that we are part of that world." -a naturalist from Oregon

"Trees provide shade." -a minister from California

"Trees help manage water." -a parent from California

"I like trees because they save the earth." -a mediator from Maryland

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: banana and toast
lunch: thai chicken soup
dinner: quesadillas

Happy grandmas

My grandmother lost her faculties of memory, reason, and recognition, over a long slow decade long slide of Alzheimer's. She was, for the most part, cheerfully demented. Towards the end, in the year or two before she lost the power of speech, her disease was tinged with bouts of panic and worry, about losing the baby or having friends over for dinner and not having anything to serve them. But for many years, when I would visit, long after she recognized me as a continuous being from previous visits let alone as her grandchild, she was, for many years of that slide, happy that this young stranger had come to chat with her. Before that, when it wasn't exactly obvious she couldn't track details of the conversation, she quite readily covered up for it by asking for little reminders, by changing the subject, by introducing her own observations or anecdotes, sometimes related to the topic at hand, sometimes not. Her short term memory faded far sooner than her long term, and conversations, by necessity, often centered around her recalling times past, as far back as her childhood.

I imagine her world, through this last stage of her life, as a mansion with the lights dimming. To someone else, this might have been frightening, a time for shadows to flicker to life malevolently stealing her memories, her intellect, but to her I believe it was a peaceful evening's twilight. She had a lifetime of training of forcing herself into social situations where she was not entirely comfortable and making herself pleasant and witty, and, the family's theory goes, that training, that disposition, when faced with a loss of memory, reacted in kind, assuming that the people around her meant well, that even if she didn't know how it was happening, her household was being maintained and all was going just fine.

I don't know enough about her, life and I can't recall her before her disease clearly enough, to say how accurate that assessment of her personality and her place in society really is. Nor do I know enough about Alzheimer's to know if personality and social and intellectual training early in life has an effect on the course of the disease, or if my linking of her self as and adult and her self in second childhood is anything less than wishful thinking. But in my magical thinking, I take from the story of the end of her life that I should train myself to see the best in the world around me. That I should force myself to rise above the vast irrational fears that are particularly incumbent on a parent. That I should decide to smile. That I should seek out kind and wise people in my life and look to them for guidance and solace, and avoid those who make me nervous, or angry, or frustrated.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: crepes!
lunch: crepes!
dinner: quiche! and thai chicken soup, sort of

Consumption is the least of it

I've become taken with the zero-waste household. My own household is nowhere near that standard, and the few stabs in lowering our consumption and the creation of waste (recycling without fully researching what can and cannot be recycled, a compost bin that gets around a quarter of the kitchen scraps, competing with the garbage disposal and the trash can for whichever is most convenient in a given moment) are halfhearted at best. So my sense of moral superiority and self worth as a result of green living is more than a little tinged by my understanding of the minimal impact of my minimal actions.

And I have flown in excess of 20,000 miles this year. So it's not like my carbon footprint (what a lovely phrase that is) is in good shape.

There's a whole slew of carbon footprint calculators on the web. Set for US consumers, even if you eliminate all consumption, you still get a carbon footprint 2.5 times larger than the global average. If you don't fly at all, don't own a car, eat nothing (not just organic/local, literally nothing), buy no services or electricity or clothes or electronics, live in a house with zero square feet, just living in this country, supporting and being supported by its infrastructure, your carbon footprint is 2.5 times larger than the global average. Or some other number: the different calculators give different numbers.

A zero-waste household isn't the goal. A zero-waste civilization is the goal. And lowering the waste of a single household is morally superior, perhaps, but by itself ineffective compared to other ways of decreasing resource use (and maybe increasing resource efficiency at the same time). You could get involved in politics, on the retail or national level, with your time, money, and attention. You could organize your neighbors, and fellow church members, and PTA members, and choir members, communicate your best intentions and follow through with them. Zero-waste household the blog may be more effective at resource conservation than zero-waste household the household. Changes in the blog-reading audience are tough to measure, and the blog is much more effective for being the story of a real household. The other zero-waste households out there, though, the ones who don't blog, don't talk about their homes and their choices, don't try to convince others and to create, through government and education as well as their personal market choices, systemic changes for resource management, aren't doing half as much as they could for this thing that takes quite a bit of forethought and follow through.

Yesterday's flight destination: DC with the grandparents

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: french toast
lunch: salami and cheese and crackers
dinner: carbonara lite

Teapot miniature I

On a silver dome submerged form tiny bubbles, dissolved air being forced out. Layers of hot water slide across cool, mixing the two and diffracting light passing through the distinct densities. New bubbles form, this time of water vapor, forming and releasing. Surrounded by not quite boiling water they cool and shrink as they rise, leaving an effervescence to pop and fizz at the surface. The water warms nearly to a boil and each vapor bubble formed grows grand and irregular until the whole pot shivers and shakes as heat pours into it through the coil hidden beneath the dome from far distant coal and gas. The thermocouple pops, the connection is broken, the surrounding air warms, a bit of steam escapes the spout, and the roaring boil subsides. Time for tea.

Yesterday's run destination: Princeton and Santa Monica

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: quesadilla and PB&J
dinner: chickpeas and peppers

Those crazy kids

Hastings High School was more into Academic Challenge (i.e. quiz bowl) and Math Team than Science Olympiad, but we competed in that too, halfheartedly, once or twice. I tried to identify rocks and minerals. Others took tests on psychology or did tangram puzzles. We built a suboptimal mousetrap-powered car that only went a few feet, and watched while elegant, spindly cars built on vinyl record wheels slowly and inexorably moved forward the requisite ten yards, then stopped in exactly the right spot.

It was disorienting to be in someone else's high school, surrounded by hundreds of techy kids and hanging out with some of the best math/science students/friends of HHS and yet feel totally alienated and embarrassed, cut off by anonymity and lassoed by nervous ineptitude into watching the proceedings as if a spectator.

Contrast with my euphoria on the six hour bus ride to Penn State, playing frisbee on the quads, running through the rain to see Johnny Mnemonic at the commercial strip at the bottom of campus, and reasoning through the various tests of the Atlantic Regional Mathmatics League national championships along with the Westchester team. It's not that the questions put to us were easier at ARML, or that I got many right, quite the opposite, but that was entirely expected. The way the entire system was phrased, as math so over our heads that any engagement was success, took the pressure off, and left me (us?) free to enjoy the weekend. Not that that led to actually meeting any of the thousands of mathletes from across half the country here either.

Yesterday's run destination: it's raining.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and english muffin and tea
lunch: potato soup
dinner: fish tacos!
assorted bonus holiday cooking over the past few days: blueberry tart, oatmeal currant cookies, sugared nuts, popovers, cream puffs

It hardly ever rains in LA

We are in the middle of a once-a-decade weather system dumping day after day of rain on Los Angeles. It is familiar and a little comforting, particularly now, three or four days into it, when the other drivers seem to have remembered how to drive in the rain (turn on your lights, buddy, and try breaking a little earlier).

Tweets from the Disney Concert Hall

Looks like another grey morning in sunny Los Angeles. Is that rain? Thank god my steel is stainless.
about 23 hours ago via Twitterific


Another day, another thousand cars to swallow. Today's going to be an early lunch and prob skip dinner. I could really go for some Japanese.
about 23 hours ago via Twitterific


Hey, that tickles! I feel a song coming on, from somewhere, somewhere within me. 
about 22 hours ago via Twitterific


I can sing! Hooyah I'm on fire! Watch me go, bumbabumbabumbumbum. From my head down to my toes let the music get you going!
about 20 hours ago via Twitterific


Whoo. Need a little break. See you in 20.
about 20 hours ago via Twitterific


Another song coming on. We will rock you. Boy. Dorothy Chandler, you are going down. @musiccenterla
about 20 hours ago via Twitterific


Feel a little sick, like I'm going to throw up. Bleh.
about 19 hours ago via Twitterific


Whoop. There goes lunch. 
about 19 hours ago via Twitterific


I am so pretty. I am so interesting. Complex, really. And my neighbors are SOOO dumb. South parking lot, I will own you. Own you.
about 18 hours ago via web


Everyone's gone home, byebye.
about 8 hours ago via Twitterific


Some sketchy folks around this neighborhood, know what I'm saying?
about 8 hours ago via Twitterific


So bored
about 8 hours ago via Twitterific


Hey, wanna see my organ? It's HUGE. A little crooked, maybe, but everyone tells me it is awesome.
about 8 hours ago via web

The best thing in the world

Miriam has taken to reading her board books to herself. She'll go into the bedroom, pull a book off her shelf, and sit composedly and start reading, turning the pages, looking carefully at all the pictures, pointing out animals she knows or counting flowers. She just read Hug, by Jez Alborough, which is nearly wordless, a journey of a little monkey looking for a hug, and his mother, and finding various animal mother-baby pairs along the way. She turned the pages, pointed at the pictures, and murmured something like "mam." Then she put down the book, and ran over to me, arms outstretched, for a big, big hug.

Yesterday's run destination: Washington Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Life
lunch: more chili
dinner: attempted new chickpea and veggies dish, blech
bonus: Alice Waters' recipe for oatmeal currant cookies

Open to suggestion

Minor among the reasons I am not a doctor (though the idea of becoming one has occasionally dogged me for quite a while now) is fear of learning about various diseases and imagining that I have the symptoms of something new and gruesome after every class. This morning's Intro Psych podcast got into mental disorders, focusing on depression and bipolar disorder, and at first it was just like listening to previous lectures about language acquisition or the evolutionary underpinnings of sexual attraction, and perhaps it was just the seriousness of the topic, or of the guest lecturer, but after a while I started ticking off the various DSM-listed symptoms of depression and thinking, "I've never actually experienced these, but I can imagine it." It was a little eerie, not just thinking about being manic or depressive, but seeing myself as open to the suggestion, made only by my own imagination, that I could become so.

It made me wonder how open to suggestion I really am, of my environment, of the ideas I read and talk about, of chance passings on the street and serious conversation with friends and family. The lecture on psychological disorders followed a few on social psychology and the impact that interacting with other people, and thinking about what other people are thinking about you, has on a psyche. I feel more unmoored than usual these past few months with the various and substantial changes of locale, employment, social setting, and the newly balanced relationship with those closest to me that comes of those changes, more open to new ideas and to changes in how I present myself to and think about the world around me. I have had a few similar seemingly important periods scattered through my past in which I have felt conscious of an ability to change who I am and particularly who I am to others, most notably the first couple weeks of my freshman year of college, but those pivot points in my personal development have all felt like unalloyed growth.

This one seems a little more ambiguous, perhaps because I was quite satisfied with who I was before this move and this change, and very much rooted in stable relationship to others. To change now affects not only me but those I love and who love me. Perhaps because the transition has been unexpectedly difficult and drawn out, taking advantage of the reshuffling of moving to effect a leap of personal growth is more frightening than previous changes.

I feel more confident in my ability to care for and sustain the world around me, but also more fragile and shallowly rooted than ever before. Maybe it is moving across the country. Maybe it is switching from full time office work to full time childcare. Maybe it is turning 30. Maybe it is whatever epiphenomenon generated all those other changes. (The inevitable passage of time?) Maybe my knowledge of the complexities of the world has raced ahead of my ability to understand it, to manipulate it. Manipulate isn't the right word. To make it anew.

There is a greek word, techne, that I'm trying to dredge out of my once encyclopedic knowledge of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Wrapped up in its meaning is that to understand something is to be able to make it, or unmake it, that merely having knowledge of a thing, true deep knowledge of it, is identical to being able to create and control it. That was certainly true for the 15 year old me reading and rereading that book. I think the 30 year old me is starting to separate knowledge from understanding, creation from control. It is a more awesome world I inhabit now, and I am but a speck upon its surface.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: miniwheats
lunch: peanut butter and jelly, and chocolate cake
dinner: roast chicken and cheesy potatoes

Charitable giving

A few recent references to charitable giving, in no particular order:

One of the LA NPR affiliates, more local than most, is in the midst of a pledge drive. For a $100 pledge, you can get a complete archive of the WikiLeaks leaked documents, and do your part to ensure they remain available to all

The how-to book on non-profit fundraising Becca got me out from the library says special events are a lot of work. Not surprising. It suggests that if a supporter offers his manse, or country club, or yacht, for a fundraiser, thinking long and hard before accepting. If you think you have the extra volunteer support to run it, why aren't they already employed in other fundraising activities? If you don't, just imagine how much staff time it will take to organize.

Guidestar keeps sending me update emails. I've tried to unsubscribe, but it just doesn't take.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: miniwheats
lunch: cheesy potato
dinner: pasta and meat sauce

Artist workshop

In Aaron Kramer's workshop, there are two birdcages, holding a total of four songbirds. One of the cages was purchased, one he made. There is a central worktable, on wheels, with a few leftover tin can hand cranked sculptures, a hummingbird, a pair of flowers, and a wooden bowl full of small boats cut out of mid-century wooden bowls. Next to the door is a thick bundle of steel wire of various thicknesses leaning against a band saw next to a work table with various shapes of metal in the process of being formed. There are, in different parts of the workshop, two rows of clamps, neatly attached to the edge of a shelf or table. Everything is clean of dust, rust, and grime. A MIG welding machine dominates the right half of the metalworking bench, red and black with a coil of shining wire visible inside. From the ceiling hangs huge wooden strips, in curves and circles, each piece a few sheets of veneer laminated and strengthened, waiting to be shipped, assembled, and installed as a vast mobile in a hotel lobby half a continent away. On a shelf there is a collection of old tin tops next to a drill press. Every edge of the room, a converted garage with soaring ceiling, is covered in shelves, or tables, or bird cages, but there is enough room to bring in a crowd of retirees on a tour, if not to have them sit down anywhere. A few sculptures, balls of woven steel strung with beads, hang from a rafter, like the birdcages but stronger looking.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and toast
lunch: beans and rice
dinner: lentil soup

Tax me already

I think of myself as affluent (though apparently my household income is solidly middle class). I know quite a few affluent people, and a few really wealthy ones. We need to be taxed more.

There are major problems in this country that can be solved by time and attention and money. There are enormous problems in the world, problems of human suffering, of lost habitat and environment and culture, of violence and disease and death, that can be solved by time and attention and money. There are problems that cannot be solved by those things, too. There are inspiring things, beautiful things, important long-term numinous things that can be accomplished by time and attention and money, like symphonies and space exploration and farm fresh tomatoes.

Liberal democratic government has been the greatest tool for the diminishment of problems and the creation of beautiful inspiring important things since the invention of capitalism. It needs money to run. It does a better job of deciding where that money (and time and attention) should go than anything else, particularly when it is dealing with issues that face whole systems, like climate change, disease eradication, or full employment.

I am not suffering at my middle class income. The people I know who earn $250,000 or more are not suffering at their upper class incomes, except perhaps in loss of personal time and attention to family. People pushed out of underfunded homeless shelters are suffering. People dying of dysentery are suffering. People denied kidney transplants are suffering. I am willing to forego some portion of my material wealth to try to help some people in need. I am willing to live on less, less space, less travel, less health care and smooth roads even, to help launch humanity into space, to discover how brains and quarks and coral reefs work. I would hope that those with even more than I have would be willing to do so as well, would welcome their opportunity to contribute.

Yesterday's run destination: around the block

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: blueberry muffin
lunch: leftover pasta and meat sauce
dinner: carnitas burrito from Taco Plus

Cold toes

A salient and memorable point in the Intro Psych lecture on memory is on the creation of false memories, particularly around cherished or significant moments, like one's wedding or the morning of September 11, 2001. For memories that get replayed or talked about, the discussed memory can take the place of the actual lived experience, so that spouses sometimes swap memories of things that they saw at their wedding, even if only one of them actually experienced, the contents of that memory, so that both "remember" the experience as if it is their own. This can be used by tricky researchers to suggest or implant memories, and perhaps by others for more nefarious purposes. And it can lead people who revisit memories to make up stuff that never really happened, with implications for situations in which accurate memory has external implications, like in the witness box. 

With that caveat, my toes are cold again. Every few years, in a writing mood in a wintry season, I find myself staring out into space and enjoying the expertise of my fingers against the keyboard and the chill in my toes beneath the desk. The first time is in high school and the desk is to the right of the fireplace, under a window, and the computer is large and beige and I need, slumped into the big black chair as I am, to look up when I want to focus my eyes and see the words my fingers have typed magically by themselves. There's plastic on the window and a tree outside, a lamp arching over me to the right and the house is dark and quiet, everyone has gone to sleep.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:

breakfast: cereal

lunch: bulgogi and bibimbap from Kobawoo

No one told me there'd be mountains

Los Angeles is known for its traffic, for its glitz and its weather, for its beaches and shopping and wealth and poverty. No one told me if it didn't have those things, it would be known for its fantastic mountains. Driving along the highway, I turn a corner and there in the distance, though I have the AC on, is a magnificent snowcapped peak. Coming back from San Pedro over a rise and suddenly seeing that downtown LA, which seems so big and substantial from within its canyon streets, is dwarfed by the San Gabriel Range behind it, a dozen times taller, leaving the skyscrapers to look like a toy Oz on a plain of gridded streets. Flying in, watching over these mountains to the north, mountains to the east, mountains to the south, and the sea beyond, I love the vastness of this landscape, on which even the enormous effort and vitality that is the greater Los Angeles metropolitan statistical region (15,000,000 people and growing) is just a film on the surface of a deep, still pond.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola
lunch: leftover chili
dinner: latkes, zahtar chicken, and cauliflower, later brownies

Finding the edges of things

Having never taken Psychology in college I am in the midst of listening to the podcast of Yale's Intro Psych course. It is expectedly fascinating and ripe for discussion. One theme that's come up twice now is the brain's excellent ability to pick out the edges of things. To distinguish between words even when there is no measurable gap between the last phoneme of one word and the first phoneme of the next. To separate a visual perception into distinct objects amid a jumble of colors, brightnesses, and depths that any landscape presents. In both cases, the brain can be fooled by clever psychologists, visual illusions being the best known.

This gets me thinking about great acuity in finding the edges of all sorts of other things besides spoken language and visual stimuli, and about how and when that edge finding ability can be confused. What is the edge between my emotional involvement in my marriage and my spouses? Where is the edge between the set of strangers who are members of "my tribe" (think Brooklyn or Somerville, not Kikuyu or Lao) and those who are not, one to be trusted the other to be feared? How do I instantly sort the dangers of modern life the street into real and figmentary? What's the edge of reasonable caution? What's the edge between frugality and wastefulness? Finding edges seems wrapped up in sorting, about putting some concept or stimulus in one category and its neighbor in another category. I have absorbed from many a popular science article or documentary that some huge proportion of my brain is devoted to visual processing. Can I, do I, tap into that to make distinctions in other categories of thought?

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: last of the granola
lunch: turkey noodle soup
dinner: Ezra's chickpeas with spinach and peppers

Living on a wage

Santa Monica has a pretty typical living wage ordinance. Yay. All businesses receiving contracts from the city must provide a living wage of at least $11.50 (2004 dollars) to their staff. This vaguely controversial concept was put in place after a much more unique living wage ordinance was proposed, passed, and repealed in 2000-2002 that, for a brief time, required all major businesses in downtown Santa Monica, specifically the big hotels on and near the beach, to offer a living wage, and encouraged those businesses to offer health care as well. The hotels rebelled, and funded a $400,000 campaign to repeal via a referendum proposition, which passed, barely. This applies to the documented workforce only, of course.

I can't decide whether to be proud of my more-liberal-than-the-neighborhood city or saddened that the  business interests (boo hiss big business) succeeded at overturning the more expansive law. Certainly I wouldn't want to try to live on the $8.00/hour California minimum wage, not anywhere on the Westside, not anywhere in LA, not anywhere in the US, really. But $11.50 doesn't sound much better, either. Incremental wage increases can make a real difference in lifestyle, like the difference between renting a garage and sleeping on a cot and renting a room in a house with a bed. Other policy changes can make real differences too, like increased access to health clinics, schools, and parks. Those seem like slightly harder problems to solve, particularly for a small, compact, wealthy town like Santa Monica that is far too expensive to live in on $11.50 an hour.

Yesterday's run destination: I ran a 5K! 21:04 in the Santa Monica Turkey Trot

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: croissant quarters
lunch: turkey noodle soup
dinner: turkey pot pie and cheesy mashed potatoes

Easy solutions

Easy solution to shrinking your carbon footprint: fly less

Easy solution to balancing your household budget: move to a smaller place

Easy solution to eating a healthier diet: cook for yourself

Easy solution to keeping your house clean: Roomba?

Wonders around every corner

Uncharitably, Dorothy Parker described Los Angeles as "seventy-two suburbs in search of a city." Today's mini-adventure makes me think seventy-two little communities isn't necessarily such a bad thing. Just on the other side of the 405, a few blocks from the park with the fantastic accessible Aidan's Place playground, lies Little Persia. LA has a lot of Little [Country or City], including Little Ethiopia, Little Tokyo, Little Armenia, and even more -towns, (Chinatown, Filipino Town, Thai Town, etc.) by far the biggest of which is Koreatown, which is more a district than a consolidated ethnic enclave.

Little Persia has bookstores, restaurants, travel agencies, rug dealers, music lessons, video stores, health clinics, ice cream shops, saffron, Sadaf brand spices and chick peas and pickles and rose water, detailed flyers hung up all in Farsi except for the words "Bally's Hotel," Mercedes on the street, sunglasses as hairbands, "Salaam" as greeting, young people on cell phones, old people in the aisles, well lit storefronts and dim but inviting dining rooms behind partially drawn curtains, babies, people smiling at babies, chatter, and a matter of fact everyday bustle. We had the white rose ice cream, which was sticky and delicious, but declined to pour a shot of sour cherry syrup over it.

Yesterday's run destination: around the country club

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: hummus sandwich
dinner: Thanksgiving

Once I won the Turkey Trot. Twice, really.

Once upon a time Maia and Jon decided to run in the Turkey Trot. They were friends and neighbors and teammates on the Cross Country team and also liked math and science class. Even though the standard Cross Country course, and the only races they had ever run were five kilometers and the Turkey Trot was ten kilometers, they thought if they went slowly and stuck together, they would make it. And they did. Up hills and down hills around the school and past Jon's house as the course went its way around the town. Upon finishing, in about an hour, and walking around a bit downtown, they plopped into the Community Center's multipurpose room seats to hear the top times and see who won the turkey. Jon was surprised, and pleased, to be called up to accept the trophy for the first place finish for the Men's under 15 age category. Maia was surprised, and pleased, to be called up to accept the trophy for the first place finish for the Women's under 15 age category. Then, when no second or third place winners were called, they figured it out.

The next year, the same thing happened, but with around 18 fewer minutes of running.

Yesterday's run destination: up the hill

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: lentils on pasta
dinner: pizza!

Bullish on the future, today

Today I am bullish on the future, even the future of Los Angeles. I am not worried about water. There is plenty of water. Only one fifth of Southern California's water goes to domestic use, the rest goes to agriculture, and California agribusiness pays around 1/100th what residential customers think it's worth. LA doesn't have water problems. The Imperial Valley has water problems. I walked to the library today, past supermarkets and bus lines, parks and apartment buildings (and also past traffic and SUVs, McMansions and streets empty of pedestrians), and found my little city of Santa Monica to be planned, compact, exquisitely well cared for. Gasoline prices may rise with the rise of India and China, even without declining oil supplies, but Santa Monica will adjust, with its mix of businesses, dense residential living, constant draws like the beach and the weather and the proximity of LA. And there's light rail coming shortly, and a subway down the line. This corner of this sprawling metropolis will do just fine.

Yesterday's run destination: Berkeley and Olympic

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: salsa cheddar omlette
lunch: yet more potatoes
dinner: lentil soup

Bathtime is fun time

Miriam usually gets a bath in the evening, signaling the beginning of the bedtime process. She has a big bag of bath toys, the five small cups with lids, the two large cups, the five milk bottles, the watering can, turtle friend, whale-y, the two fish, and pink squirter. The bath gets quite full and when I'm interested in playing we have a bit of fun pouring water from one cup, lining all the animals up on the edge of the bath, and other games. Bath time's end, or at least the end of the playing phase of the bath, happens when Miriam stands up and starts gesturing towards the towels. Sometimes we do some actual washing afterwards, usually not.

Tonight was a little different. I didn't empty the toy bag into the tub but just pulled out one of the large cups. Miriam looked smaller than usual, even with her long legs stretched out. For 10 minutes she made her own fun. She splashed. She drew with beads of water on the side of the tub. She looked at the warping of the water as she moved her hands below. She knelt and crawled and put her mouth just above the surface of the water. She picked bits of lint from between her toes and tried to grasp them as they floated through the water. I watched, wordlessly, as she tried her regular quick and confident full hand grab, only to see the fluff float away. After a few tries she slowed down, switched to a pincer grip familiar from last year, and, to my mild surprise, grabbed the fluff. Then it was stuck on her finger, clearly a wrong place for it, and that started off another round of splashing.

Yesterday's run destination: Franklin and Pennsylvania

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: cheesy mashed potatoes
dinner: salami sandwich

Running to stay still

Murry baby not quite hurt or in pain or needing much of anything but something and can't use her words or perhaps know what it is she wants drives daddy to distraction and helplessness of trying to help or entertain or calm because those murrs aren't crying but they aren't happy either.

Yesterday's menu:
Queasiness uber alles. Some juice and a bit of toast.

Communicating processes

One minor theme running through the field of science communication has been the challenges and really creative ways people come up with to understand processes. Biology particularly is full of them. Cells growing and dividing, DNA replicating, populations at every level increasing and decreasing. I remember learning about them in HS Bio through sequences of little illustrations, prose descriptions, and the occasional video that looked like a VHS version of a filmstrip.

These days, there are lots of options. Computer simulation videos, models you can move and manipulate, dance, role-playing games ("You have been selected against. Would you like to play again?"). They're not cheap, they're easy to do poorly, and the whole lesson can devolve into playing with the models rather than using them to understand the process at hand, but when it works, it leaves a great understanding of how the various parts of a system interact with each other and change over time.

Yesterday's run destination: around the country club

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Cinnamon Toast Crunch
lunch: ice cream sandwich
dinner: week old lasagna, which may have made me sick

All I really want is a ball

For a year or two I got involved with MIT's Toy Product Design class, a mechanical engineering introduction to product design and development. There were great inspiring lectures, lovingly crafted and obsessively presented, with music, in-class activities, costumes, prizes, comic timing, and a good deal of information about how to brainstorm, alone and in groups, how to communicate ideas, refine them, to design useful not just possible objects, draw them, prototype them, and build them. I was a mentor to the undergraduate students and learning as I went. The students came up with lots and lots of fantastic ideas, some complicatedly impractical, and created great, if not universally playable, prototypes for each of the checkpoints that took the place of tests, midterms, and finals. They, we, were asked to be curious, creative, open to each other's ideas, to place themselves in the the shoes of the potential purchaser, both the kid looking for a fun toy and the parent who controls what toys will be purchased.

But as I move farther from the joyful we-can-invent-anything energy of that university setting and learn a bit more about how children actually play from some extensive firsthand experience, I think the whole exercise, while a great training in industrial design, is besides the point for what kids actually want. My inner child, informed by watching kids on the playground, in the nursery, at the beach, and in the church community, just wants a ball. I want a nice, big, solid, bouncy ball, to roll and sit on and bounce and throw and come up with little games to play with. If I can't have that, a cardboard box would be ok.

Yesterday's run destination: Janna's house

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: crepes
lunch: nosh around the leftovers
dinner: linguine and meatballs

Farmers Market of the people

I've been trained on a 21st century New England farmers market model. A good market has 10 or 15 vendors selling fruits and vegetables, meat, bread, jams, eggs, maybe a few stalls with handicrafts. The food is local, dirty, as cheap as the supermarket and cheaper when different crops are at their peak. It is fresh, ripe, delicious. Signs are handcrafted. Staff are young and idealistic, sometimes dirty from farming. They got up early to pack and leave the farm to come to the market, 5 miles away, or 45. Some stalls are organic, or if not, the farmer can tell me what they do or do not use on the fields, why they are basically organic but haven't applied for the designation because their fields are small or oblong and too close to a non-organic operation next door or about something called Integrated Pest Management which sounds satisfyingly science-y and earthy. The foods change with the season, from peas through kale to tomatoes and squash. They inspire looking up and reinventing historic recipes, eating with the seasons, figuring out what exactly, if anything, can be done with kohlrabi.

Santa Monica isn't like that. The food looks great, tastes great, comes is great variety, subspecies of plums and citrus and cucumbers that I've never heard of before. But it is a business venture first and foremost. The staff under the tents are employees of the farm, and in most cases don't work on the farm. Some have never visited the farm. Farm in California tends to mean an agribusiness-scale operation, dozens or hundreds of acres, migrant labor, monied landholding interests, and always always irrigation with federally and state subsidized water. The staff have information about its location, and maybe its farming practices, but are more focused on the person next to me actually trying to buy something than chatting overly much. Some are young and cheerful and idealistic, at least until their next audition. Many are just working their job. The food is around the same price as the supermarket and there's a sinking feeling these are the same avocados as find their way into groceries across the country. Every week there are tomatoes, oranges, greens of all sorts, beans, celery, onions, pecans, peaches, sprouts, carrots, jujubes, dates, olives, persian, english, and japanese cucumbers, and tomatoes, lots and lots of varieties of tomatoes. There is a big Saturday market, and a big Wednesday market, and within a few miles there are markets on Thursdays and Sundays. The food comes from the far reaches of Los Angeles County, from Ventura, peaches from the desert and apples from San Diego. There is a minor scandal running through the LA Times about surreptitious reselling of commodity wholesale produce. The markets are packed, successful, profitable, filled with cheerful Santa Monicans seeing each other, passing by tourists goggling over the beauty of the food, generally ignoring the couple homeless beggars and buskers camped out in the central plaza of a market that spills out onto six blocks of traffic-free streets. Like so much of Southern California, it feels more transactional than relational, as if that's how people want it.

Yesterday's walk destination: Hillside Woods

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: spikey biscuits
lunch: bagel and lox
dinner: turkey and gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry bread, green beans, salad, superb chocolate cookies, pie, fruit salad, ice cream, coffee

Bumper sticker of the week

Becca and I joke around about putting a whiteboard bumper sticker on our car. Whenever a bumper sticker-type slogan pops into our heads, it would go on the car, but only until the next slogan. This started two cars ago but we never actually sullied our (not exactly ) pristine vehicles with anything more rambunctious than a Simmons College window decal. Early bumper sticker concepts stuck to established routes, along the lines of Visualize Whirled Peas or Soy Latina y Voto, but by this point we are baroque and self-referential in our selections of phrases from the print media and conversations that permeate home life here among the Bijurs. This week's bumper sticker: "You're either a cutie patootie or a big lame-o"

Yesterday's run destination: ?

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola with bananas
lunch: lentils and rice
dinner: ratatouille, chicken kebab, popovers, greens salad, lemon-ginger-basil fizz

Four favorite museum memories

For a year or two my mom brought me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art most Saturdays. Considering we spent a few dozen hours in the museum I came back to it as a teenager then an adult surprised at how much of the museum was new, never before seen. Those Saturday morning visits had a particular route: as fast as possible through Egypt to the Temple of Dendur, then upstairs and off to European Painting and Sculpture. I would always stand in front of the two Cot paintings, of the child couple on the swing and of them as teenagers running from a storm. I remember realizing at some point that their feet were in the wrong place, too close, and they were going to bump into each other on their next step.

When I was seven or so we went to the American Museum of Natural History and to the gems and minerals hall. Set into the edge of a raised carpeted area, with access from two or three levels for different sized people to access it was a polished touchable giant geode, flat across with deep colors and shine. I slid down it like a playground.

At Mass MOCA in farthest northeast rural Massachusetts Becca and I entered an installation of 1,000,000 pieces of paper, a vast hangar of a space in that repurposed post-industrial museum. Over the course of the exhibit, a few months, the paper steadily fell to form a snowy layer to shuffle through, lay down, make piles, throw paper fights. I liked it at the time, good among many good artworks seen that day, but Becca has remembered it to me every few months or years since then and each time it is mentioned it gets cooler and more important.

Yakima doesn't have much to recommend it. Its a rural county capitol, spread out too much to have much of a city center, crosscut with grain silos and railway spurs, uneasily increasingly hispanic. The Yakima Art Museum was a delightfully tiny and substantial institution. A little old lady took our money, then turned out to be the curator/director/proprietor's mother, helping out for the day. He brought us into collections storage when I told him I worked with Native American Art collections and showed us drawer after drawer of Paiute pottery and arrowheads. Then we wandered off back among the galleries and admired the stagecoaches and neon sign collection.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:

breakfast: banana nutella crepes

lunch: leftover quesadilla

dinner: gourmet homemade hamburgers and Kenji's ersatz McDonalds fries

The longer now

One of my favorite ideas (though one I don't do too much about except use as a guide for selecting reading material) is the concept of the Long Now, in part as espoused by the Long Now Foundation and its adherents. A long now viewpoint thinks in centuries or even millennia rather than months and years. I'm not quite up to working towards plans that have more than a millennium as their due date, as the foundation does, but I have been talking a bit in recent weeks about hundred year plans.

One of the founding myths of the Long Now is a story of New College, Oxford. When, sometime in the 20th century, the giant oak beams running across the New College dining hall, had rotted and needed to be replaced, no sufficient wood could at first be found. The Forester of the college, manager of the college's forests when asked if any appropriate trees were available, gladly volunteered up trees that had been planted when the college had been formed, in the 14th century. New oak seedlings were planted for the next time the roof needs to be replaced, a few hundred years from now. (of course, the story isn't quite as simple as that, but it's good enough for myth)

The biggest endeavor I can be a part of that will have a positive effect 100 years from now is the raising of responsible, able, happy children. In my own decisions and use of resources, choosing where and how to live, what to consume, what to work towards, I contribute to a society that leaves to the next generation a social fabric, environment, and knowledge of the universe, but the biggest impact is the creation and forming of the people who will inhabit that generation, and their interests and abilities to form the generation after them. That said, the decisions I (we?) make now, leave a built environment and a natural environment, that is of our own design, or at least responsibility. Which, when I think too much about it, makes moving to the semi-desert of Southern California seem a little irresponsible. When I try to imagine LA in 2100, I see more apocalypses, droughts, abandoned sagebrush dusty empty streets stretching out for hundreds of miles, than I did from quiet, wintry New England. Though I can think about the prayer/lecture I heard from Andy Lipkis of Treepeople at Rosh Hashanah and of the power and sustainability of the trees that covered the region (not in forest, but among the savannahs, in groves, and in the canyons) before development and about his line on how trees and people need about the same amount of water, so that where you have trees you can have people, and calm down a little about the fragility of civilization in this semidesert. It's not a desert. It's semi. Like lots of interesting, civilized places around the world.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: donuts
lunch: burritos
dinner: grilled cheese and paired beers party

Voting with children

Yesterday was the culmination of Miriam's first election season.It felt different from previous elections to me. There are so many changes in my life right now (new state, new city, new friends, new job, new parental status) that it is quite hard to tease out causes, but I think a big one is the little one playing with her legos over yonder.

I felt underinformed in a more substantial way that most previous elections, going back at least to voting in college when I had almost know idea of what was going on in local politics. I'm about 60% of the way to being a political junkie and feel pretty well informed on national issues and candidates (though ask me to name what Waxman, who happens to be my Congressional representative is known for and I would say "um...maybe financial reform?" and would be wrong, sez google, he's best known right now for a Climate Change bill) but I had next to know idea about who to vote for in the Santa Monica city council or school board races. I don't even really know what the issues to vote over are.

Having only been here a few months I can cut myself some slack for not being totally up on local issues, but I've also been here a few months and am a little surprised that I'm not totally up on local issues. Which I attribute to watching and worrying over and loving the ever so active bundle of joy who fills my days and my nights with her cries, giggles, and wanderings.

Yesterday's run destination: around the block

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eli breakfast sandwich, omlettes
lunch: chicken and mashed potatoes
dinner: pasta salad

Plays well with others

I try not to find gender differences among babies and toddlers. I start with desiring non-gender specific clothing and haircuts. I try, when faced with a toddler who is obviously dressed as a boy or a girl, to picture them with their opposite gender, as a reminder that I unconsciously treat little boys and little girls differently. I am not read up on child psychology to know about real cognitive differences between male and female at, say, age 18 months, but I know enough about the science of gender differences to think of difference as merely the distance between the centerpoints of two normal distributions of traits, not as a guarantee that all girls are more [whatever] than all boys. I have deep expert knowledge of the psychology and physical abilities
of only an extremely small sample size of baby girls, and none of baby boys, and I am told by such unbiased sources as grandparents, friends of the family, and professional colleagues, that said baby girl is exceptional, which is to say non-representative of anyone but herself. So my broader observations of the reality or fiction-imposed-by-gendered-adults of gender differences among toddlers are a bit skewed.

Yesterday's run destination: trick or treat!

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: banana smoothie and cookies
lunch: souplantation
dinner: quesadillas

Spires and Sanctuaries, character development

Spires and Sanctuaries, a non-demoninational role-playing game
When creating a new Member, pick an age, gender, race, educational attainment, income level, and religious background. Members start with 25 experience points to distribute across Church Member Qualities (CMQs): organizational skill, religious fervor, pastoral care and concern, musical ability, generosity, teaching ability. Members gain general experience points by participating in regular Church Activities and specialized experience points by participating in Special Activities. For example, taking the "Spiritual Journeys" Special Activity gains two religious fervor points and one general point to be assigned by the Member.

Spires and Sanctuaries is a game that encourages collaboration, and many types of Church Activities require multiple Members with strong skills (high CMQs) in various areas to operate. A "Non-demoninational Winter Holidays Pageant" requires a number of Members with strong organizational skill, 1-3 Members will extremely high musical ability quotients, one Member with a high musical ability and teaching ability quotient and a large number of Members with at least 10 generosity points.

The game master, or Minister, can award bonus points at any time to Members who make creative or kind contributions to an Activity. Members are expected to act during an Activity in character with their point levels, i.e., a Member with low organizational skill and high generosity shouldn't be capable of organizing a successful Fundraising Campaign without assistance. The Minister can take a Member aside for "counseling" at any time to help keep Members in character.

Yesterday's run destination: estate sale at 24th and Alta

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola
brunch: banana smoothie
lunch: ?
dinner: french fries and korean beef taco

Where's your nose?

I'm not exactly sure why playing "Where's your nose?" is so much fun, for both me and my daughter. But it is. "Where's your belly button?" isn't bad, either.

Yesterday's run destination: Yahoo Center

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola
lunch: grilled cheese
dinner: beans and spinach
bonus: popovers at bedtime!

A lovely visit to the California Heritage Museum

I like historic houses. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a sucker for them, but having worked as a historic house tour guide, they have a special place in my heart. My thanks, and my sympathies, go out to the docents and staff who run historic house tours, as they answer questions, go into their canned spiels, when they can remember the details, show people their favorite chairs, or wainscotting, or whathaveyou, mix up dates, names, locations, and generally make history come alive, not least for having lived through some of it, in some older docents' cases, a whole lot of it. As I recall, a typical historic house has at some point been studied, renovated, and decorated according to a finely tuned sense of history, under the direction of a curator or professor with a specialization in a relevant period of American history. The house opens to the public, the curator or professor's colleagues come in for the opening ceremonies, ooh and ahh over a pair of 17th century cast iron andirons or ask after where she found a woodworker to reconstruct the molding, and generally show off their own knowledge of the period the house has been decorated to. Then all the experts go back to where ever they came from and the place opens to the public. Signage has not been installed. Docents have been given, at most, a quick tour by the expert and an idiosyncratically filled three ring binder of photocopies of photocopies of study photos taken of objects that may or may not have been placed in the house, or as it is now known, in the exhibit. From this information, and whatever they can find by googling "historic house [enter period here] [enter region here]", the docents, volunteers, interns, and (under)experienced and  (under)paid staff create a haze of facts, stories, myths, and garbled half-remembered oft repeated research to foist on the occasional visitor. It turns out it is possible to play a game of Telephone by one's self, as conjectures are repeated until believed and delivered as facts and facts morph, get rearranged, and shimmy to fit the interpreter's preferred story. For the rare visitor that asks a question and is given anything more than a off-the-top-of-my-head guess answer, the interpreter may go back to that three ring binder. Or google it.

Yesterday's run destination: cloverleaf around the intersection of Yale and Arizona

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola and banana
lunch: cheesy mashed potatoes
dinner: pesto pasta and bean salad

Roast Chicken for two

I don't roast whole chickens anymore, having discovered the joys of supermarket rotisserie chicken, which is great served as is, as a source of cooked meat for other dishes (chili, salad, etc.) and for the cleanest, easiest chicken stock ever (since most of the fat has rendered out during roasting, the remaining bones and skin make great tasting stock without the need of defatting). For the most part, the whole birds I can get in the market are way too big for the cooking-for-two-and-a-half that I'm used to. But I do like working my own flavors into chicken dishes and have compromised by roasting whole chicken breasts. Sort of. Mostly. My current recipe is as follows:

Roast Chicken Breast
1 whole bone-in chicken breast, 1-2 lbs.
a few sprigs of fresh herb, such as parsley, oregano, marjoram
1 t. olive oil or butter
1 medium onion
1/2 lemon, cut along the long axis
salt

Preheat oven to 375. Preheat small ovenproof frying pan on stove with oil or butter. Rinse and pat dry the chicken. Stick the herb under the skin, having opened a pocket between skin and meat with your fingers or a chopstick. Fry chicken skin side down over medium-high heat for 3-5 minutes or until nicely browned. While browning, chop the onion. Remove chicken and in rendered chicken fat and oil/butter soften onion. Salt to taste. Place lemon half in the middle of the pan, on top of the onion, and place chicken, rib side down, over the lemon. Bake 15-20 minutes or until juices run clear.

The onion base will come out rich and caramelized and is delicious as is over potatoes or rice, or can be used as the base for gravy.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: biscuits from our neighbors
lunch: leftover salad, crepes
dinner: cheesy potato, hot dogs, frozen peas, yum

Family Journal

Here are some of the words Miriam (age 16 months) knows how to say(and English translations):
cook (cookie)
fwa (fly, as in, the toy bird flies)
bye-o (bye)
haai (hi)
hhhhaaw (cat)
oouff (dog)
ba (bird) (ball) (bath) (bed)
dak dak dak dak (duck)
tee (tree)

She nods politely when asked if she has gone to the park, whether she has or not. She points to the "yellow circle" in the book, can match shapes to put square shaped pegs in square shaped holes, turns puzzle pieces (the kind where there's one piece per animal) to fit, blows into a whistle, murrs when she wants something, celebrates accomplishing a task with a high pitched "hrmm!" noise for "all done" that Julia Child might say if she lost the power of the spoken word, claps, but not rhythmically. She likes putting the shoes away, cookies, smiling when others are smiling, finding her belly button, Sophie cat, pointing, reading in her reading corner, and lining up her two dozen odd small plastic animals on their feet. She does not like when her parents leave, even for a moment, getting diaper changed, sometimes, going down the slide sitting up (but on her belly is increasingly fun), flying in airplanes, getting vitamins, or when too many new people are around. She (sometimes) understands that only some her small plastic animals can fly, the ones with wings, even the penguins. Once she lined up all of the quadrupeds separate from the other animals. I was so proud, my heart exploded a little bit.

Yesterday's run destination: the supermarket

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: ceral
lunch: chicken marbella, orzo salad, spinach salad, cherry walnut brownies
dinner: leftovers from lunch

Sleep like a fire

Sometimes getting the baby to sleep is like kindling a fire. After collecting all of the tools, setting the mise en place so that everything I might need is at hand, I try to cajol a gentle flame from the lightest of kindling. Watching carefully, seeing what direction things might go, ready to bounce around to the other side, listening, watching, breathing with her breath. Then once it is started, an added watchfulness, wariness, as if this newfound thing might snuff out at any moment and I'm back to square one. Until, truly caught and solidly set, I can breathe my own breath, sit back, take pride in a thing well done, and move on.

Yesterday's run destination: sprint around the block

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs
lunch: japanese curry
dinner: chili

Solid mud

Out on the trails in Topanga State Park, those ridiculously well maintained trails of wide cuts, switchbacks, signposts at every junction, we had a nice hike this morning before the rains came. Stayed up on the ridges, surrounded by green green shrubs and chaparral soaking up the last three weeks of early rains. The trail was dry, yellow orange mud resolidified around raw and broken rocks, shaped up in ridges and bumps, smoothed and temporary, formed until the next heavy rain.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: currant scones
lunch: hotdogs and hamburgers
dinner: pulled pork and greens at Sarah's. And walnut fudge

SMPL I love you

I am a big fan of libraries. I am, in fact, a trained library scientist, though not a practicing librarian. The Santa Monica Public Library does lots of things right and one big thing wrong. The main branch is large and beautiful, with a sculpted courtyard complete with cafe, that wondrous Southern California indoor-outdoor blending, a substantial collection, friendly, pro-active staff, constant events, immaculate facility, a plan with good flow, and a nice big kids area (I'm biased). The branch libraries are modest in size but solid in their own collections, services, and programming.

What it doesn't have is interlibrary loan privileges. With anyone. Not with the LA Public Library. Not even with the County of Los Angeles Public Library system. Only among the four branches of the Santa Monica Public Library. Which is why today we're off to Marina Del Rey and exploring the wider world of LA County library services. Bye bye, Santa Monica!

Yesterday's run destination: around the block

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cheese and basil omlettes
lunch: veggie japanese curry
dinner: homemade chicken pupusas

Still moving, a few months later

After two and a half months, I find that Santa Monica is just fine. Some parts are really quite lovely and at times its only problem is that its not Boston. The difficulties of moving are still somehow lingering (I spent a fruitless hour today on hold with Verizon trying to settle a misbilling issue from getting our phone service set up). And there are definite advantages: running the mostly empty streets in the mornings with Miriam bouncing in her stroller and humming happily along, our local duck pond and playground, hearing half a dozen different languages in the park, the ocean, the ocean, the ocean, some of the tastiest, most fruit-like tomatoes I've ever had in the farmers market this week, mountains in the distance, palm trees overhead, walking to the donut shop, warm days and cool nights, week after week. We've just come out of two and a half weeks of broken schedule, with travel and visitors and off hour work, and the last day or two has been lovely to get back into a daily routine, particularly for Miriam.

Yesterday's run destination: CVS, then Albertsons

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Cinnamon Toast Crunch
lunch: goddess sandwich from Bay Cities Italian Deli
dinner: pizza and a movie! The Social Network was pretty good

Fearing TV, like an addiction

I don't own a TV, haven't for years. No cable, no On Demand, no broadcast. I have had screens around for playing movies, for a while an ancient TV that got no reception except the DVD player and lately I've taken to watching DVDs on a laptop in bed.When I'm somewhere with a TV, a hotel room, staying with friends or family, I love to watch, and feel dirty afterwards. I am aggressively anti-TV in my own home because I fear watching it, enjoying it, losing parts of my life to being sucked into this thing that I'll hardly remember anything the next day about except the product placements.

It does keep me out of the loop. I smile and nod when conversation turns to some popular show, or even worse, some clever commercial. I've never seen the commercials people are talking about. I've tried to calculate how much an advertiser values my time and attention, dividing the cost of broadcasting a commercial by the number of people watching it, fudging for valuing certain demographics over others, etc. It comes out to an extremely low number, a few dollars per hour at most. They don't actually value my time very highly, though even a dollar an hour (what the television station is earning off my watching) is a good deal more expensive form of entertainment than reading a library book(occasional fines=many hours of reading). Cheaper than reading a magazine($5=2 hours). More expensive than taking a walk(what expenses?). Cheaper than driving around for fun, far cheaper(50 cents a mile, generously, 20 miles an hour=$10/hour). Cheaper than going out for coffee. Etc.

TV, that sense of mindless sitting and watching, the addictive "let's see what's on next" when it almost certainly no is better or memorable or satisfying than what I've just watched, has been creeping back into my life through Hulu.  But I am saved, by my utter lack of free time. Thank you baby!

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: frosted mini wheats
lunch: leftover pasta and sandwiches
dinner: potato leek soup, roast chicken

We have a set of little plastic animals, from alligator to zebra with stops at leopard, monkey, nuthatch, okapi, and penguin. Becca brought a bunch to go in Miriam's toy kit for the plane rides to and from Dallas for this past weekend's wedding. Miriam bangs them together, stands them up very neatly in a line, and watches while I make the giraffe gallop across the back of the seats and the koala climb up and down her arm and the iguana waddle along the tray table.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Hyatt Summerfield Suites' cranberry muffins
lunch: bean burrito from DFW
dinner: chicken enchiladas at Casa Escobar

Cool quiet morning

From my front porch, I can see that the birch grove is just starting to turn to its golden hues, catching the reflected light off the fields, not too many leaves have fallen. My grandson comes up from his room and sits down on the stoop, eating honeyed toast made of bread his mother baked yesterday. The door closes gently behind him, quieting the murmur of voices down there. I take a deep breath, hoping to enjoy it, cough a bit, then a bit more, and hunch my shoulders and shudder until the Calm hits me and I can unkink my muscles and look out again at the grove, and the fields, and the town beyond. Ethan, for a boy of eight, is listening hard but staying silent. He moves as if to stomp his feet and push off, stays on the stoop, shifts his legs, leans over, picks at a splinter from the board.
The sun beats down, even at eight, but there's a good westerly today and it won't be getting too hot. I breathe in, not as deeply, and listen for my daughter inside, humming to herself as she always does. Always a tune, something, some fragment or symphony or tribute. I set my chair rocking and let it take me, back and forth. Ethan's tapping on the stair, idly, but in time to his distant mother's song, sharing with her the backdrop of their world where ever he goes.
It's won't last. He's eight now, but next year he'll be nine, and the year after that ten, just like that, and one day he won't come out of his room with her song in his heart but will just stay down there, like his sister did, day after day, talking to her friends, ignoring her family, alone and together in that cave of lights and voices she accreted around herself down there only coming out for meals and then whatever was quickest, easiest to make and get back there and even then a halo of their lives around her head never letting go not even for an instant of laughs together and songs together that we could hardly hear and just watch her go back into her room, her cave. He sits out here on the porch with me and I don't even have to ask him to look with his eyes and feel with his hands the sun on the fields and the leaves and the breeze and the pits in these wooden steps worn of decades of tracking the grit of the street into our house.

This glass of water

On the table beside me sits a glass of water. I got it out of the tap. It has some air bubbles in it, not nearly as much as the faucet in our apartment in Boston, but tastes a good deal more mineral. The city of Santa Monica used to pump its water from the aquifer beneath the Los Angeles basin, but MBTE dumped in the 80s and 90s rose in such concentrations in the ground water as to make it unsafe to drink by 1996. Now Santa Monica's water comes from the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies most of the water to Southern California.

It's not exactly clear where this particular glass comes from. The two most likely sources each start off hundreds of miles away. The older of the two systems draws water out of the Colorado River at Lake Mead, the enormous artificial lake in Nevada produced by the Hoover Dam. From there, and using the hydroelectric power of that dam, it is pumped up and out of one aquifer, across Nevada and California, across deserts and farmland (the latter only a hundred years ago simply more of the former), and into a series of smaller reservoirs maintained by Los Angeles' various water agencies. More likely even than Colorado River water is water from the Feather River. Starting from the Oroville Dam, 70 miles north of Sacramento, my glass of water on the side table ran down one river and backwards up another river bed, reaching sea level around San Francisco Bay but kept separate from those brackish waters. It is pumped across hundreds of miles of deserts and farmland (see previously parenthetical note) and over entire mountain chains. Most of the water goes into agriculture, but about 20% remains in the system by the time it gets to the San Fernando Valley and enters the Metropolitan Water District for use by city dwellers, like me. This massive movement of water does not enjoy the same hydroelectric energy source and moving water around California consumes 10-15% of all energy used by the state, primarily in the form of burning coal.

Today's run destination: Virginia Ave. Park

Today's menu:
breakfast: donut and milk tea
lunch: sesame noodles
dinner: pork baked ziti and greens salad

Gregg Fleishman's cut out lamps, furniture, and, oh yeah, a working car

After visiting the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which was fantastic but hilariously baby inappropriate no matter how friendly the staff were, Miriam and I wandered the lovely Culver City downtown area, stumbling into Gregg Fleishman's studio/gallery.

Having worked, and occasionally dumpster dived, at MIT for five years, I am pretty well attuned to computational design and like it an awful lot. Computational design is the art of applying computational techniques to design problems like designing a chair, or a street grid plan. There were folks in the building I worked in who were heavily into this stuff, using computer controlled routers, laser cutters, and waterjets to cut materials to assemble into sculptures, models, furniture, and a house built without nails or glue cut out of sheet of plywood with dovetailed joints. I could tell when they had a new project going up when the loading dock started to fill with the remains of 4x8 sheets of plywood after big irregular shapes were magically cut out of the center.

Gregg's stuff is very much in this vein, and he works at all of these scales. There's a do-it-yourself kit of flexible plastic tiles to make tetrahedrons and spiked buckyballs and whatever you want to make out of regular triangles, squares, pentagons, and hexagons. There are the surprisingly pliant plywood chairs of curved zigzags and interlocked pieces. And this weekend, he's displaying his two passenger plywood electric car at the Santa Monica Alt Car Expo. Much awesomeness. Miriam liked sitting on the chairs and hording the pentagons.

Things I can hear from where I sit and type

Rumble rumble
with a breath in and a breath out even though machines don't breath silly goes the dishwasher pushing forward and coming back and again
someone in a car that costs more than some houses gunning it up Santa Monica Blvd
footsteps of bare feet on hardwood floors pat pat pat
murmur murmur next door neighbor in a medium low male voice
now the dishwasher knocks, every couple pulses
pawsteps on hardwood floors pittat pittat pittat

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and toast
lunch: leftover chickpeas and spinach
dinner: chili

Storytime at the library

A few imprecise observations about storytime at the Santa Monica branch libraries gussied up in inappropriately accurate looking statistics:

The ratio of parents to nannies at the Montana Ave Branch (median house price in a half mile radius: $1.7M): 1:2
The ratio of dads to moms/nannies at the Fairview Branch (nearby business: Street Sports Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu): 4:19
Average age attending the Babies Time session at all libraries, advertised for 0-23 months: 17 months
Median MSRP for strollers seen at Montana Branch: $450
Downtown branch: $175
Most common brands: Bugaboo, City Jogger (note: strollers made by the City Jogger company are not intended for jogging on city streets or sidewalks), Graco, cheap no-name Chinese umbrella stroller sold at Babies R Us
Most common shoes: Robies
Median length of hair: for girls: 6 inches
For boys: 4.7 inches
Percentage of girls with hair shorter than 1 inch due to "hair-not-yet-grown-in": 17
Percentage of boys: 17
Most common snack: cheerios
Proportion of parent/nannies sitting on the floor to sitting in chairs: 1:7

Yesterday's run destination: 26th St

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola
lunch: leftover jonalicious pasta
dinner: Ezra's chickpeas and peppers dish

Science, science everywhere

I'm doing a bit of professional work this week and so have science outreach on the brain. Specifically, I'm helping to manage an online discussion about science festivals that has an A-list of science festival organizers from around the country and a smattering from around the world. Since there are only a dozen odd full size city-scale science festivals in the US, almost all started in the last five years and most in the last two years, the difference between the A-list and everyone else is not so much.

It's nice to use my professional brain and it has gotten me thinking not just about science festivals, those city-wide parties celebrating science with carnivals, lectures, discussions, fairs, and whathaveyou, but about the best science outreach I've been a part of or known of. I love museums. I love going to museums and working in museums and watching people marvel at a micrograph of a fly's eye or walk around a scale model of the solar system embedded in the pavement. I shudder sometimes at the limited reach of such things, the few hundred thousand people (at most) who are going to engage with a given exhibit and then only for a few minutes, once, in their lives. I have great faith in the power of the momentary transcendent experience, the wow factor, the fleeting sense of understanding the universe more than you did a second ago and seeing great vistas of understanding along the road ahead. I believe these moments come most frequently in the company of others, as science is best done in community, of your classmates or teachers or parents or friends. Meeting a hero, be they astronaut or grad student (some of my biggest heroes are grad students. Or they were at some point.), inspires.

I think that momentary transcendent experience is a time when people change what they believe, how they think of themselves and their world, and can inspire entire careers in science. That is, when it is backed up by daily access to information and encouragement at school and at home (for kids) and in conversation at home and at work (for adults).

I am conflicted on it, as I am about most big questions I come across professionally. The informal science education world I've worked in for the past five years in many cases is mostly focused on reaching a lot of people for a short amount of time, a few dozen hours at most, and in many cases just a few minutes. You can't learn much in that amount of time. I haven't engaged the other side yet, the formal science education world in classrooms, the people who reach only a few people at a time but have enough contact to create in them something whole and huge. Yet.

Yesterday's run destination: CVS

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: veggie fried rice
dinner: church potluck

Let Miriam be Miriam

I like playing with legos. Always have. Loved my job at MIT in part because it gave me access to a huge collection of legos. I even got to buy legos, hundreds of dollars of kits at a time, with the Institute's money.

I like playing with Miriam's duplo legos. We've only had them a week but I've gotten down on the floor sorting, stacking, building, taking apart, putting together, every day sometimes twice a day. I "help" her play with them, pulling them apart or turning her wrist to match up studs to hollows. I say the names of the colors and count blocks and make piles and we have fun together.

Luckily, I'm also an absentminded father who likes to read his webcomics and the newspaper while I keep a sort of loose eye on the baby on the other side of the living room. For in her quiet play, she has on her own and with a few cries of frustration mastered the taking apart of two connected blocks and the turning of wrists to match stud to hollow. I didn't think she could. And sometimes she can't. These toys have caused more frustration than most anything else she plays with.

She sticks to the 2x2s and only to stacking them into tall thin towers. She will put down a block that doesn't fit right in her right hand on the floor and turn it until she can grab it in the way she knows has a chance of matching the stack in her left hand. But it works and the stack grows and she sits there quietly surprising me. Gooooo baby!

Yesterday's run destination: around the overlook on Mullholland Highway above the Stone Canyon Reservoir

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Yom Kippur fast
lunch: Yom Kippur fast
dinner: rib eye, corn, greens salad, and kugel and it might not have been kosher but it was tasty

When you stop wanting the marshmallow and enter nirvana

There is a classic psych experiment done by Walter Mischel starting in the late 1960s, that asked little kids, three and four years old, to sit in a room with a marshmallow and not eat it. If they could avoid eating it for the allotted time, on the order of 20 minutes, they would be given two, count 'em, two marshmallows. Some could, some couldn't. The kids in the original study have been tracked and those who could earn more, stay married longer, take fewer drugs, etc., all things you would associate with being able to delay gratification. For a while Mischel and subsequent researchers thought the delayed gratification trait was inherent, genetic, developmental, whatever, but eventually shifted to believe it can be taught. Those kids who, at this early age, whether in school, by their parents, or on their own, had learned coping mechanisms for delaying gratification, were able to pass the test, so to speak. Some hid from the marshmallow. Some ignored it. Some stared at it and talked to it. Different kids had different strategies.

On the walk from the driveway to the door of our apartment building, Miriam and I pass a gravel lawn, a large expanse for overflow parking surrounding the avocado tree. It is a litter box for neighborhood raccoons and cats and I don't like her to play in the rocks. She likes to walk more and more and I usually let her walk from the car to the house on her own, particularly if I am carrying something. As we passed today, she stopped at the edge of the gravel and looked at it, bent her knees a little bit and froze. After a moment she shook her head no and grunted, very slightly, as if she had heard me say "No Miriam, the rocks are not for touching," and she was nodding sympathetically, as she is apt to do when told No. Then she straightened up, kept walking, and didn't look back.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: totally plain omelet
lunch: pasta with bacon and chickpeas
dinner: roast chicken and pasta

MILK at the Zimmer

I sometimes struggle to make friends, preferring in a flowing social setting to sit on the sides and watch, with a buddy to kibbitz with if possible but more often without. I recognized and despised this in myself at middle school dances and would force myself to do something, anything, to get off the wall and out onto the dance floor. My best gambit with myself was playing hopscotch among the baubles of light bouncing off the school's disco ball. And occasionally it even turned into dancing with someone else.

The struggle and the gambits continue. I made myself business cards, just personal contact info, to hand out to parents met on the playground and at library storytime. I've even found a few dance partners.

One new friend invited Miriam and me to a meetup of M.I.L.K. LA at the Zimmer Children's Museum this week. She is too young for at least half of the exhibits of a typical children's museum but we found plenty to play with, if not always in the intended fashions. In the treehouse (just three low steps off the ground) there was a foot switch activated video embedded into the platform. She really liked the foot switch and never noticed the video. As did other kids of a variety of ages. The little metallic tinkle of the switch, its cover painted to blend with the planking, an unexpected movement underfoot captured just about everyone's attention.

And they had a magnetic wall (magnetic paint is AWESOME) mural and oversized animal and plant parts magnets to mix and match. And a strangely warm water table with some flow and boats and ducks and anchors and paddles and have I told you that one of the best parts of being a parent is getting to play with toys in the guise of "helping" and "facilitating learning and good play habits?" I'm not sure it is up there with giggly smile hug, but it is great. Also they had an airplane you could go in and turn the rudders and hit switches and levers and Miriam surprised me with her immediate understanding of the steering wheel.

Yet they only get 30-40,000 visitors a year. I don't quite understand why LA doesn't seem to visit children's museums, and as a result seems to have very few. There have been hints here and there of a marketplace of for-profit indoor gyms and playspaces, with and without classes, which might be where all those kids are going.

Yesterday's hike destination: Temescal Gateway Park canyon trail to the waterfall

Yestserday's menu:
breakfast:cereal?
lunch: Bay Cities Italian Deli salami sandwich with the works
snack: chocolate croissant and passionfruit smoothie
dinner: pasta leftovers

Now I dream of driving..in LA

Driving south, south along the coast. The fog covers the ocean and only the waves at the shore are visible from the highway. We turn right and start winding up into the hills, past homes raised on concrete platforms jutting from the hillside. One has an observatory tower, another three levels of terraced deck, each with its own complete set of patio furniture. The empty concrete platform across the way reminds us of the precarious nature of our dwelling: fire more than earthquake. As we pull into the cul-de-sac, a chalk drawing on the driveway becomes visible: shana tova, happy new year. If the fog lifts soon, we will see the dolphins pass by. -guest post by supersecret very famous really guest blogger

A theater for food; parenting be all; SoCal's back in business

A few items from radio and newspapers this weekend:

In the past few weeks LA has had a sort of out of town theater space for food: a restaurant in which a new team of chefs takes over every few nights, puts on their show, and gets some feedback in anticipation of maybe opening a new restaurant, in LA or elsewhere. It's called Test Kitchen, here's a radio piece about them.

The NYT Magazine front essay is about a reconfiguration of Maslow's hierarchy of needs that puts parenting and finding a mate at the top, based on what sounds like a very shallow understanding of evolutionary biology.

Among the macro things I have learned about Southern California is its recent history of economic decline following the end of the Cold War and the demobilization of a big chunk of military procurement spending. One area that's on the rebound post-9/11: unmanned airplanes. Spy planes and bombers, made right here in SoCal.

Yesterday's run destination: Centinela

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon honey toast
lunch: four quarters of dining hall goodness: shredded carrot, corn nibblets, rice, and chick peas
dinner: four quarters redux

Who doesn't love legos?

I love lego. I love the feel of the bricks, their sharpness and precision. I love the colors, the sound and feel of snapping them together, lining two up then pushing them into place. I love games and patterns I made up when I was six and half remember coming back to me as I put a few pieces together. I love the lifelong connection to these blocks, so that picking up a lego piece can bring back layers of memory of the various people I have been at different ages.

In today's trawl of garage sales I picked up a few buckets of Duplo, which are nominally for Miriam but really will be for all of us to play with. As Becca pointed out, what she really wants is to play with us, so toys that she enjoys but I don't care for come second to something we can both get behind. Same goes for books and, I suppose down the line, Pixar movies.

Yesterday's run destination: DK's donuts

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: donuts
lunch: tuna bean spread and donut
dinner: overcooked mahi mahi, ratatouille, boiled potatoes

Ups and downs of stay at home parenthood

A friend called and asked how I was doing as a stay at home dad. I told her it was up and down, like anything. When it is up, I have a joyful giggly ball of fire hugging me and I get to go to the beach and duck pond every day. When it is down, I apply for jobs.

Yesterday's run destination: around the block

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cake
lunch: PB&J
dinner: ratatouille and tuna bean spread

OMG what a tasty dinner I made myself

Following the exploration of yet another farmers market, I set to making dinner with a big bag of summer veggies which screamed to me ratatouille. Following Mark Bittman's simplest ever recipe (chop and layer selected veggies from among eggplant, zucchini, onions of many colors, peppers, tomatoes, herbs, drizzle with olive oil and salt, bake for an hour) I had a full tray of food filling the house with heavy smells WHILE STILL WATCHING THE BABY.

Then we needed cheese for a planned cheesy garlic bread (re Yorkside), and something to do for an early evening activity to get us out of the house so off to the supermarket we went. Weekly circular in hand I overstuffed the compartment below the megastroller with canned goods on sale, including some tuna which inspired an improved dish over aforementioned planned cheesy garlic bread (at least in sophistication if not in overall tastiness, in that nothing comes before cheesy garlic bread from Yorkside) of a bean-tuna spread on toast. The final spread was an uncooked blend of chick peas, tuna, artichoke hearts, capers, and lemon, and would have been improved by some garlic and perhaps a little cumin and/or paprika but as is was exceedingly tasty on oiled broiled baguette.

Yesterday's run destination: up to Centinela

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cake!
lunch: potatoes and chicken leftovers
dinner: ramen. mmm ramen.

Through the chaparral to the stream below

With a college friend's family, we went on a hike for Labor Day. I like the idea of a restful, active, enjoyable  Labor Day in which activities are engaged yet no money changes hands, no labor is for me done on this day of rest for the working class (Go Samuel Gompers!). We drove up into the hills above Santa Monica and parked along a city street of hedges on one side and concrete piles holding a house 30 feet above the other, building into the slope. A birthday boy of 65, his two daughters, a son-in-law, a friend, and the Bijurs. Miriam went on my back in a framed backpack that looks old enough to have held my younger brother in his baby days.

Down the road and past a gate and up a road avoiding mountain bikers in their skin tight performance fabric patterned and logoed clothes. Cliff and slope to one side and around the curve the canyon to the left opens up and out and down and behind our left shoulders a glimpse then a view of the fogged in seashore a few miles away. Up the road then off it and down a trail that once was a road down to a private camp in the valley now long since abandoned and the chaparral, wild fennel and mint and dry dry sumac and manzanita and scrub oak that looks like no oak tree found on a street called Oak Street in a town in upstate New York or outside Ann Arbor. There are still bits of asphalt but mostly the trail was a stiff dirt path with bushes close enough on either side to scratch at our clothes. Down into the canyon and the scrub trees became larger and broader and we needed to duck beneath branches and around overgrowth. Going under a branch with 20 pounds of cheerful squirmyness on my back called for the use of muscles and balance more closely associate with yoga than hiking. It took a village to get us around some obstacles, lifting branches, holding out supports, spotting routes.

At the end of it, water, real flowing cold natural beautiful water in the midst of the hot dry hills of Southern California. A stream, not just a trickle, down the middle of the canyon and our destination, after the leaning aging deserted stables and other outbuildings of the former camp, a tall thin waterfall with a giant rock for sitting on and contemplating at the bottom and a fern lined pool at the top, deeply shaded and musical.

Then back up, a quicker route and more sure with the terrain and down the road and up the road and a few minutes in the car and we were back in the grid of Santa Monica and ready for a drink and a meal and a scrub to get poison oak oils off the ankles of those of us foolish enough to wear shorts.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Branch Library

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs
lunch: pasta leftovers
dinner: provencal-y chicken and boiled potatoes