The Other Chain

So a week ago the family went off for Mother's Day festivities, our choice of which might seem odd to some. (We did the dinner-out thing the night before, because we are neither crazy nor fools, and didn't want to fight the crowds of those who are one or both.)

What we did was see a movie. A big Hollywood blockbuster movie, which you may have heard of, about a group of misfits guarding a galaxy, the sequel to a similar movie about the same people. We did this at 11:15 in the morning, so the price was at the level my '80s-born heart still thinks is the right price for a movie, and that price made me and The Wife happy.

(The Wife avoided that original movie when my sons & I went to see it in the theater, because she thought it would be too boyish, and then did not believe us when we told her she would really like it. She subsequently watched it on TV and had to admit that once again, as usual, I was right in all things.)

That movie features really prominently a song called "The Chain." That song was rolling around in my head for several days, along with several others from aforesaid movie.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

On shuffle in my car, a couple of days ago, this other song called "The Chain" came up in the rotation. It's more my style to begin with -- I never completely get into songs about happiness and success and things like that -- and the juxtaposition amused me more than it should have.

So here's Ingrid Michaelson with another tale of bad love -- about a girl, a boy, some promises, and something locked up tight:

Send My Boy to Europe!

My younger son, Nick, has been taking German in school; he just finished his second year a couple of weeks ago. (That's him off to the left, in case that wasn't clear. Imagine that he's telling you the below, if it helps the verisimilitude.)

A group loosely affiliated with that German program and it's teacher -- though not in any way officially associated with the school, as they told us five times at the big meeting -- is planning a trip to Germany and Italy next summer. (Italy being thrown in to keep it from being too dour, I suppose, or getting some more crowd-pleasers.)

Nick wants to go on this trip -- he intends to conquer the world eventually [1], and so he needs to get to see it.

And the amazing thing is that you can help pay for this!

Oh, sure, you don't have to -- but you know it will be fun, and give you the warm fuzzies in the depths of your heart when you do. And have any other vague Internet acquaintances begged you for money this week?

If you do feel inclined to throw a few shekels towards my son, please use this convenient button-like button to do so, and know that you have my undying thanks. (And that you will be among the elite when he does conquer the world -- so you've got that going for you.)

[1] Probably with a giant robot, though I haven't given up hope on a Palpatine-style plot to get everyone else to fight.

Family by Ian Frazier

Everyone's family is full of stories, both the ones that are told proudly and the ones that are whispered at best. Most of those only stick around for a generation or two, though -- stories from "Great-Great Grandpa Joe who fought at Bull Run" are sketchy and mythologized, unlike the detailed stories of people who are still around to correct mistakes.

The flourishing of self-publishing over the last decade or so has brought a lot of those stories into print, if not into the marketplace, as a thousand family elders write down their memories in hopes that the grandkids will actually read them. (Spoiler: they mostly don't read them.) In fact, just today my own two sons opened big boxes from my father, with bound histories of Wheelers going back several generations...and I expect they'll spend about as much time digging into those books as I have with the copies already cluttering up the top of my closet. (I'm not proud about this, but I have to admit the truth.)

So there's a lot of family histories out there -- a few relatively professional, from local historical societies about prominent families; an even fewer completely professional, about political dynasties and similarly major folks; and a whole lot of enthusiastic amateurs mostly writing up their own lives or the stories they heard when younger. But even the most bland, seemingly unliterary genre has surprising roots -- and so I finally come to Family, from the longtime New Yorker writer Ian Frazier.

Frazier researched Family through the early '90s -- he never precisely says so, but it's clear he was inspired to do after cleaning up the possessions of his parents, who died in 1987 and '88 -- and it was published in 1994. In retrospect, that's the last moment for a book purely like this one, based on shoe-leather research and physical documents and visiting real locations. A few years later, there would be Ancestry.com and a hundred other tools, but Frazier was at the tail end of the pure era of country clerks and giant ledgers of baptismal records. A book like Family could be researched the same way now, but that would be an affectation -- doing it more slowly and tediously and (probably) badly, just to show it can still be done. Frazier was instead just working with the tools he had, as well as he could.

He begins his story roughly a hundred years back, at the dawn of the twentieth century. [1]At that point, almost all of his great-grandparents were alive and married and raising families, aged forty or fifty-something and settled. Luckily for Frazier, they were all in Ohio or Indiana -- Family is able to have a relatively tight geographical focus, and to talk about small-town Ohio almost as much as it's about the Fraziers and Wickhams and Hurshes and Bachmans that lived in those places. Frazier had spent long years as a New Yorker writer by this point, and clearly its mania for provable detail and deep research had marked him -- Family has sixteen pages of notes to explain how he knows the things he tells us about, and where the super-diligent reader could go look up much of it himself.

From there, he moves backward through the 19th century quickly, sketching what some of his ancestors were doing some of the time, and pausing for a longer look at their lives during the Civil War. (He notes that four-year span is the most extensively chronicled of any of his ancestor's lives, a bright hot moment that illuminated everything afterward.) He doesn't follow any of them back to their pre-North American lives; he's making Family the story of the lives of his people on this continent, and not the story of the places they came from or the things they fled. (It's a very American book, in that way, all about building businesses and connections and marriages and towns and raising children -- all of the standard mythology of the ever-advancing frontier.)

The back half of Family slowly sweeps forward through the twentieth century, telling the stories of how Frazier's grandparents grew up and met and married, and how they had children who did the same, and then about his own childhood and life as he works his way right up to the then-present day. The details are the point, of course, but I don't need to include the details here -- you each have similar stories and anecdotes from your won family, and you'll see something of yourselves and your lives if you ever decide to read Family yourself.

Note that this book is not called A Family or My Family or The Frazier Family -- it's just Family, the story of one group of related people, mostly in Ohio, over the past two hundred years that is also the story of Americans in general and of the lives we've all lived over that span. Frazier does keep it both specific and general, by telling real stories that we can all relate to because we know people like that, in our own families or looking back into history. It's not quite a social history of the USA, because it's too particular for that. But it aims in that direction, and paints an engrossing picture of who we've been and how we've lived over two centuries.



[1] January 1, 1901, because he can count.

What a Pile of Books Demanding to Be Reviewed Looks Like

My plan to reduce the stack of read but unreviewed books by reviewing one a day has fallen sadly afoul of events -- and the particular "event" in this case was the fact that Thing 2 (my younger son, now 11) and I have been playing a lot of Lego Indiana Jones 2 the last week or so.

(It's not new, but all of the Lego games - except for Harry Potter, which has over-complicated game mechanics -- are so much fun that it's great just to pick them up and run around smashing things and jumping your little man around randomly; they're the kind of games that make you happy just to look at on the shelf and even more so to pull them back down and play.)

In other, unrelated news, my iPod Touch has been acting up for the past couple of weeks, and finally succumbed to the Ubiquitous White Screen of Death over the last few days. Even the so-called "genius bar" -- I've been a user of Apple products for a long time now, and I greatly preferred it when they were scrappy underdogs and not arrogant SOBs -- was no help, and so I ended up having to get a new one earlier today.

So far, it doesn't seem all that different -- it supposedly has the super neat-o keen-o "retina display" and a faster processor, but it basically seems like the same device to me. Except. This new one has a camera in it, a cheap crappy phone-style camera, so I can now take cheap crappy pictures of random things when I remember to. And so, this afternoon, instead of actually writing a review for one (or more!) of the books in that big stack, I played some more Lego Indiana Jones 2 with my son, took a picture of the stack of books, and wrote the above.

I'm not proud, mind you.

This Year's Playlist for Thing One's Birthday Trip

Every year since at least 2008, we've gone to Great Wolf Lodge -- this one, out in the Poconos near New York and Philly -- for Thing One's birthday, to swim and do family stuff for a couple of days in lieu of a big party with other kids. (Because what fourteen-year-olds -- and ten/eleven-year-olds before them -- really want is a big kid birthday party thrown for them by their parents!)

I've also created a playlist and burned it to a CD for each of those years, and I thought I'd been sharing some of those playlists (I also do 'em for the big summer trip to Hershey Park, and other occasions) here. This may not precisely be true, but, if I do it now, it can always start a tradition.

It also lets me play with Amazon widgets, which is always fun. And, this time around, only one of the songs on the "Great Wolf 2012" playlist -- "Blood Red Blood" by The Ettes, which should be at #3 of 23 on this one -- was unavailable for widgetizing. So here's most of what we were listening to in the car on the way back home earlier today:

Hiatus

Right now -- through the miracle of scheduled posting -- I am in the air with my family, on our way to a location I keep telling the boys I'm not going to tell them is Walt Disney World.

For the past three years of November vacations, I worked ahead, and had reviews and other posts scheduled to pop up the entire time I was away. This year, I'm busier at work, busier with trying to rebuild my basement, and just discombobulated from having my computer set up on the dining room table. This means that there's nothing in the hopper, and Antick Musings is about to go dark for about a week.

I trust you'll all be able to survive this horrible calamity, and I'll see you all on the other side.

(Oh, there will be a truncated "Reviewing the Mail" on Monday, and there's the slightest possibility that I'll blog something from vacation, but that's about it.)

Parenting: Harder Once You Actually Do It

I was a much quirkier parent before I had kids. The Wife and I had all sorts of schemes and plans for the kids we thought we'd eventually have, and none of them actually happened. It turns out that when you're chasing around an actual screaming toddler, all of the amusing plans you made five years before aren't as funny.

Our big punishment was going to be making the kids Amish. Bad behavior? "You're Amish for the week, kid! No electricity, and no rides in the car." We never quite committed to actually buying a full set of shaming clothes for the prospective children -- though we vacationed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania pretty much every year, so it would have been easy to pick up a bonnet and calico dress -- but we were sure that we'd be turning off their electricity and sending them to school on one of those '30s-style apple-carton scooters whenever necessary.

That never happened, of course. And we never bought the house we really wanted, the one with a flyspeck island attached to the back yard, in the lake community where my mother lived. We loved the idea of sending kids to the island when they were bad, though -- "Go to your island!", we'd yell, and, if we were feeling particularly smug at the time, we'd imagine a drawbridge that we could pull up after the little hellions were safely across the water. No matter that the tiny stretch of water was small enough for even a shaky kindergartner to jump; it was the thought that counted: we knew we'd want to be able to exile our children when necessary.

But no: we were stuck with time-outs and stern talkings-to and the full panoply of deadly dull punishments that everyone else uses. The Wife still has Thing One go sit on the stairs when he gets particularly unruly, and he's thirteen now -- I bet we'll never manage to turn either of them Amish, even for a day.

Even their names didn't work out right. Long before we actually really planned to have kids, we planned a huge brood with "fun" names. The girls would be Roberta, Wilhelmina, and Thomasina -- called Rob, Bill, and Tom, of course -- and the boys would be Vivian, Leslie, and Evelyn. Sure, they'd probably get in a lot of fights and come home in tears from school more often than not, but a bad childhood is practically required for success later in life, right? I wanted to be one of those kooky families, like the ones in minor '70s YA novels, where the father is an absent-minded but brilliant something-or-other who smokes a pipe, while the mother is a swirling ball of energy that never quite gets anything done right. But it turned out that living like that was not just a lot of work, it also required being actually fictional.

Eventually, we settled down and started picking real names. And we focused on girls' names, because that's what parents do. We found it a lot easier to pick names for girls than boys -- our first-choice girl name actually fissioned into two names, because we liked the middle name so much. OK, we also had some family names, and those always have to be shoveled into the middle, so they can't do too much damage.

Neither of those names saw the light of day. If I remember right, they're still secret -- only The Wife and I know them. That seems silly now, but I'm certainly not revealing what Thingette 1 and Thingette 2 would have been called without an official sign-off from She Who Must Be Obeyed. We did manage to come up with one boys' name that we really liked -- with the same initials as mine, a touch that still makes me feel smug even now -- and smacked Thing 1 with that when he came along.

Thing 2, on the other hand, was named very late in the process -- we were vaguely fighting between Jack (The Wife's preference) and Graham (mine), when his eventual real name snuck in as a compromise candidate at the last minute. We only really decided on it the moment he was born, when I said "Look! It's <Thing 2>!" and that made it stick. (Making important decisions when your wife is under powerful sedatives, tied down to an operating table, and has several medical personnel elbows-deep in her abdomen is, I discovered, an excellent route to getting your way. Though I probably should have held out for Graham.)

You know, Thing 1 is a teenager now, and he's acting up like one. Maybe Amishness is just what he needs -- now where did I put that straw-hat and suspender catalog?

Reason Why My Wife Is Awesome of the Day

So I'm down in Florida for my company's big Sales Conference -- lots of meetings, over the entire week. And tonight is the big Welcome Dinner, which is universally called "the Prom" by my colleagues, since it's the only time we get dressed up the whole week. (And it used to be vastly more dressy, I've heard, back before my time.)

So I call my wife during a break between meetings today, and tell her my schedule: meetings straight until 4:15, and then running back to my hotel (I got bumped from the HQ hotel this year)to change and get ready for "the Prom."

Her reply?

"Well,just don't get her pregnant."

Please, Sir, Buy Some Popcorn From a Poor Orphan Boy

Well, not an orphan boy -- it's my younger son, generally called Thing 2 here -- but he is selling popcorn, and it would be swell if any popcorn-lovers among you would buy some from him.

I may need to back up slightly to explain.

You see, in the world of fundraisers for youth organizations, there was once the great Treaty of Snack Foods. The Girl Scouts (and their associated Brownie gurkhas) claimed all of the territories of Cookie, and the Boys, magnanimously, agreed to limit their operations to the delightful land of Popcorn. [1] From that point forward, each organization -- assured of a consistent flow of funding to support camping, hiking and similar character-building activities -- was able to remain at peace with its great sibling, working separately but in tandem to provide unhealthy, but exceptionally tasty, munchables to their local communities.

And so, once a year, the forces of male Scoutdom -- both Boy and Cub -- set forth into their neighborhoods, wearing their crispest uniform shirts, and blink their doe-like eyes at any adults they encounter, asking, imploringly, "Would you like to buy some popcorn to support Cub Scouts?"

It is that time once again; Thing 2 has already been on two customer-hunting expeditions, and I have at my side a supplementary order form to post at my place of work. But this is the 21st century! Everything is -- as it must be -- online. And so Scouts can cajole popcorn orders from people far away from themselves, through the power of...a website!

If you are so benighted as to have no Cub Scouts near you -- or so popcorn-crazed that your local provider can't fill your needs -- and you're willing to pay the frankly quite high prices for these goods [2], then, please, click on this link, and help my son achieve his dream: winning a marshmallow-shooting crossbow for his very own.

Again, just click here, and type in the secret cub-scout number 7894409 on the upper right, where it says "You are supporting no one." -- because aren't you ashamed of yourself, supporting no one like that? -- and help a boy achieve his dream of high-powered soft ordinance.

Remember, you must enter that secret cub-scout number -- 7894409 -- or you will be supporting some other child (whom I'm sure is quite nice, but not nearly as deserving as my son), or, even worse, supporting no one.

And, really, is that what you want to be known for in life: supporting no one? Surely not?



[1] The Sea Scouts occasionally claim dominion over potato-based snack foods, but this is disputed; the Boys have traditionally claimed all of the salty treats as their own.

[2] This is fundraising popcorn; the point is to contribute money to a good cause, not to maximize your caloric intake for the lowest cost.

Small Victories

Thing 1 just came over to my side of the basement to tell me that he just got 99% on Guitar Hero playing "Holiday in Cambodia."

I'm sure I have been this proud of him in the past, and I will be again, but it sure feels like a peak right now.

Rock on, son, rock on.
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Listening to: Dead Kennedys - Holiday In Cambodia
via FoxyTunes

High Drama!

My son Thing 2 -- the nine-year-old -- got a call from a girl this evening! (And this on top of Thing 1 telling us, for the last three weekends running, that a female friend of his from middle school is going to come over to play games together sometime Sunday afternoon. That hasn't happened yet, but my boys are definitely growing up, and I'm not sure if I'm ready for it.)

Thing 2's friend wanted to play on Club Penguin with him, so I had to help him log in and find the right server -- how weird is it that even MUDs for pre-teens have "meet me on my server" issues? -- and then I left him alone, lying on the bed, phone up to one ear and my laptop in front of him.

Sometime later, when I went to gently remind him he needed a shower before bed, he was a flight of stairs away, crying. As he put it, he was "typing in random letters" and "accidentally" sent a bad word, which got him banned from Club Penguin. I calmed him down, told him I'd see what I could do to fix it, and sent him to the showers. (It turned out that the "banning" is only for 24 hours.)

It's nice to know that kids never change, isn't it?

Thing 1's Sense of Humor at Age 5

A cold is befuddling my brain, so I'm not going to attempt anything new tonight. Instead, I dug this piece out of the archives of the Straight Dope Message Board, where I used to spend a lot of time in the early aughts. I wrote the following about the child I now call "Thing 1" back in July of 2003, in a thread about how none of our very young children could tell a joke to save their lives:

My five-year-old son likes to tell me a joke every night at bedtime. Now, he's been doing this for about six months now, so, without any new jokes coming into the rotation, so you'd think we'd both be bored with it, right?

Ah, but you didn't count on the power of joke mutation! The L'il Swoggler (LS for short) started off with the usual "Why did the chicken cross the road?" -- an old standby, always popular. But, whenever I give him an answer, his punchline changes. As with everybody else's kids, it doesn't make much sense, but it changes.

These days, it goes something like this:

LS: Daddy, why did the cow cross the road?
GBH: I don't know, why?
LS: To get to the cow-cow!
GBH: Well, goodnight sweetie. Sleep tight.
LS: Wait, Daddy! What about the second joke?
GBH: OK.
LS: Why did the cow cross the road?
GBH: Because it was tired?
LS: No, silly -- to get to the mauw-mauw!

He gets the timing of a punchline -- he sells it the right way, and all that -- but he doesn't seem to have realized that a punchline is supposed to do things like make sense or even contain recognizable words.

And he goes to kindergarten in a month and a half -- who knows what that will do to his sense of humor...
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Listening to: Tom Waits - Lucinda / Ain't Goin' Down To The Well [Live]
via FoxyTunes

The Hornswoggler Family Hershey Park Leader Board

The family spent the front half of the week at Hershey Park, which I suppose is our favorite theme park (since we go there more than anywhere else). We had a lot of fun, got very tired, and only suffered slightly from the sun and crowds.

Most importantly, Hershey has eleven roller coasters, and my two sons -- Thing 1, eleven years old and about 5'4", and Thing 2, eight years old and a little shy of five feet -- were all tall enough to go on all of the thrill rides there.

And so the final tally was:

• Thing 2, with a perfect 11 rollercoasters
• (tie) Thing 1, with 10 (missing the newest, most "extreme" coaster, Fahrenheit, since he did it last year)
• (tie) G.B.H. himself, with 10 (missing the Roller Soaker, a lousy "water roller coaster" with huge lines and minimal thrills)
• The Wife, who was enticed to go on one coaster, and regretted it the rest of the day

By next year, the boys may not need me at all. And I'm not sure if I'll be looking forward to that, or regretting it.

Vacation Notes

Right at this very moment, I am on vacation. And I had been hoping that said vacation would mean that I'd have time to catch up on the posts I wanted to make here (reviewing 8 books and covering 2 movies) and for ComicMix (7 books that should turn into 4-6 reviews). Sadly, it looks like that won't be the case; I'm busy.

Yesterday was the big Cub Scout camp-out and picnic, so I had to drag my two sons (the elder of whom has graduated from Cub Scouts and has no intention of becoming a Boy Scout, but he's stuck) out into the woods for an afternoon of barbecue, hearty outdoor games, and repeated questions of when it would be over. Eventually, The Wife arrived for the sleepover portion of the event -- I'll be damned if I'm sleeping in the woods on purpose as long as I have a perfectly good roof and bed -- and stayed there with the still dewey-eyed and camp-happy younger son, Thing 2.

Thing 1 and I decamped to my mother's house for a dinner with my brother -- visiting from Oregon for the weekend -- and then finally got home about nine. I then watched about two-thirds of Watchmen (how am I liking it so far? Well, the fact that I could stop in the middle should be a clue) and then went to bed.

Today Thing 1 and I ran back up to the campsite, fresh bagels in hand, to help with pack-out. We brought everything home, spread it all out to dry in the yard, and had a short pause before I took the two boys back to my mother's for another meal with my brother (so Thing 2 could get some uncle time in). And then, around 3:30, I drove said brother to JFK for his flight back to Portland. Coming back, I got caught in a nasty, hail-filled downpour -- and also ended up going twenty or thirty miles out of my way, trying a different way back from the airport -- and finally got back here around 7:30.

So I've already lost two days that I could have been blogging, or lazing on a couch, or something.

Tomorrow we head off to Hershey Park, land of rollercoasters and chocolate-coded rides, which will eat up another two and a half days. More activities are planned for the back half of the week...and then next Monday will see me, bright and early, on a hotel function room floor in a Wiley booth at the awe-inspiring American Accounting Association show. Luckily, it's in New York this year, so I can do it from home, but it's still going to be a tough week to come back.

And then I'm off to Worldcon that weekend. (And the week after Worldcon is the company's thrice-yearly Sales Meeting -- luckily, this is one of the ones in New Jersey.)

It's beginning to look like I have the vacation at the wrong end of the month.

Anyway, I still do hope to catch up on all that typing stuff this week, but I'm less clear on when I'll have time to do it. Content may be light here for a week or three, and my reviews at ComicMix may become less dependable again. But, as always, We'll See what really happens.

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Listening to: Talking Heads - Life During Wartime
via FoxyTunes

One Man's Relationship to His Cat

There is a cat living in the same house as I do, and her name is Marbles. Now, she's not my cat, since I never wanted a cat and don't particularly like this one. But I have young children, and so a fur-bearing domestic animal eventually became part of the picture; I've kept it to one cat, and I intend to keep it that way.

Marbles, in my mind, belongs to my two sons. But they don't feed her, or change her litter, or even play with her very much -- she's just there, running around the house at random, in much the same way that they do. They do claim to love her.

On the other hand, I don't claim to love her, or even like her. In fact, I tell her quite often that I don't like her, but -- cats having a brain the size of a walnut and only a very limited capacity for understanding human speech -- that doesn't seem to have had any effect on her behavior.

Maybe she's more motivated by actions than words, though -- I am the one who feeds her nearly all of the time. No one else ever seems to notice that her food bowl is empty, or that she needs water. And I am the one who, every night, places the auxiliary food and water bowls in the basement and then entices her downstairs with greenies.

But, again, I don't like her, or give her any affection. And that recently brought me to a realization.

I am my cat's Wire Mother.

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Listening to: Bess Rogers - Travel Back
via FoxyTunes

Sentences I Never Thought I'd Hear Myself Say

"{Thing 1}, don't just stand naked in the hallway scratching your butt!"

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Now playing: The Breeders - Don't Call Home
via FoxyTunes

More Birthday Fun

I've been sitting on these two pictures since sometime Sunday; they were taken at Thing 1's first birthday party, the previous night at my mother's house.

The first photo shows myself (sporting a very severe haircut from that very morning) and Thing 1 demonstrating the ancient art of the nerdfight.

And then the second one shows Thing 1 passing on this wisdom to his younger brother, Thing 2.

Of such events are memories made.

(By the way, my usually too-hot-to-keep-his-shirt-on older son is wearing a hoodie in these pictures because, as he says, it makes him "look cool." Junior High is looming large ahead of us...)

My Weird Weekend

I'm writing this from a hotel room high in the Ritz-Carlton Sarasota, a room that came complete with a balcony from which I can see the water (without even stretching around a corner). Yesterday I was running about with Thing 2 while The Wife and Thing 1 roughed it in the woods; it's been an eventful few days.

Perhaps I should back up and take this straight through.

Friday was an only slightly frenzied day at work, given that it was the last working day before Sales Meeting. (Which every other publisher calls Sales Conference; Wiley doesn't do anything just because everyone else does.) There are two possibilities for why I wasn't run ragged. Either, as I hope, I got what I needed to do early, and my line of books isn't big and flashy and trade-y to begin with. Or -- and this is what I'm pretty sure isn't the case, since I've rechecked the schedule of meetings a dozen times over the last week -- I've forgotten something of massive importance. Well, we'll see.

We also had a department lunch out for a colleague who's going to be going on maternity leave soon, which was the usual fun. (It's a nice group to begin with, and who doesn't like gala luncheons?) Partway through, I realized that I was the only one of the bunch who already has kids, which made me feel old.

Then I had to hit my comics shop, which is no longer "local" in any sense, but I can't quite give it up. (Midtown Comics by the Port Authority -- if there was a comparable store anywhere reasonable in Jersey, I'd switch in a minute, but there isn't.) And going to the comics shop generally means taking a bus back out into Jersey, and...I've been spoiled by trains now. I take the train every day, and it has absolutely spoiled me.

See, on a train you go smoothly, usually through interesting scenery (either through bits of nature or the backs of industrial areas, both of which have stuff to look at and think about if you feel like it), with a more comfortable ride, with more space, and all by yourself on the track. On a bus, you're stuck on the road with ten thousand idiots riding one to a SUV, in a herky-jerky stop-and-go motion, and crammed up against someone who doesn't like you either.

Once you go to a train, you just can't go back. It's like being cast out of Eden. I have the knowledge of good and evil now...

Eventually, I got home, grabbed dinner, and drove by the house -- I thought I was going to Thing 2's baseball game -- and stopped, because my mother-in-law's car was there. She was watching my younger son, and hadn't taken him to the game because my wife had been all morose about the weather and talked her out of it.

(The Wife had headed off, during the day, to a Cub Scout Weebelo campout for Thing 1, after waiting for the guys to deliver and install our new washing machine -- which I needed to do laundry so I could go on this trip. My family for the last three days has been like an intricate meshing of gears, where any misstep would cause calamity.)

So mother-in-law went home, and Thing 2 and I settled into our boy-dad time together. We stayed up late (late for him, at least) playing videogames, and then I put him to bed.

Yesterday, he slept late, so I did, too. (Until 8! That's late for me these days.) I let him have a lazy couple of videogame hours -- why not? -- and then set off on our errands. First was a birthday party at a horse ranch fifteen minutes up the road -- I never cease to be amazed at how rural it gets so quickly when I head north from where I live; it's rod-and-gun country almost immediately -- which was cold and damp and foggy but not actually raining. (And that was very good, since real rain would have sent us all to move the festivities into the barn. It's not a cute picturesque red barn, either, but a real, modern, concrete working barn full of horse stalls and other indications that horses frequent that vicinity.) The kids got to go on a hayride and ride ponies, but what they liked best, inevitably, was running up the hillside above the party area, where there was a huge exposed rock that they could play around on.

After that, Thing 2 and I went off for the possibly even more important festivities: Free Comic Book Day! (I've had to miss it once or twice in recent years, due to the Nebula Awards, so I guess there's one bright point to losing my skiffy job.) We went to Joker's Child in Fair Lawn, a decent (if very superhero-focused) shop that I only seem to make it to once a year for FCBD. But I actually spent some money, so that should be OK.

One of the things I bought -- Franklin Richards: Collected Chaos Digest -- was for the boys, and it was a great thing to get, since Thing 2 read it in the car during our next leg of the drive, read it while I was getting a haircut (I desperately needed one), and read it while I was buying some new clothes for Sales Meeting (yes, it's officially casual dress, but I'd prefer clothes that don't make me look like a bum while I'm trying to convince them of the merits of Wiley GAAP 2009). So I don't want to hear anybody complaining about how Franklin Richards is just a Calvin & Hobbes rip-off -- which, by the way, Thing 2 has been also reading a lot of lately, though he still likes Garfield best (what can you do? he's seven) -- when it can keep an antsy boy's attention like that for more than an hour. Sumerak and Eliopolus, I salute you.

Then we collapsed in exhaustion at my mother's house for our weekly dinner -- well, I wanted to collapse, but we ended up playing a complicated tag game with a Chinese Yo-yo, so we kept busy. Then we finally went home, and, as we were thinking about bed, The Wife and Thing 2 came home, having given up on a second night in the woods after the first one was just Too Damn Cold. So there was a flurry of laundry and showers -- me doing their laundry, to get the campfire smell and we-really-hope-not-bugs out of everything; them showering to warm up -- and then off to bed. Even The Wife collapsed early, since she hadn't slept the night before.

Then this morning was more laundry, more packing, trying to work on some ComicMix reviews (without much luck, though I hope there will be one tomorrow), and then running off to the airport. I have learned to park in the big structure right by the terminals instead of the "economy" lots out in Upper Lower Slobbovia, which made the whole process much nicer. I also managed to only have carry-ons this time, which somewhat mitigated the fact that I was in the back-row window seat, and hence almost precisely the last person off the plane.

I rode to the Ritz-Carlton in one of the designated Wiley cars with someone much more important in the company than I am, and made some light chatter on the way. Then I was overawed by the hotel, which is really too fancy for someone like me. But I'll take it.

Tomorrow is a light day, so I might get out into the city of Sarasota to poke around -- I've been in Florida many times, but never over on this coast. And then Tuesday is wall-to-wall meetings, with a somewhat saner schedule on Wednesday and Thursday.

So, if I'm posting long things this week, it's because I'm spending too damn much time up in my room, instead of enjoying a fancy hotel down in the sub-tropics. I hope not to.

A Busy Weekend

I'm backed up on reviews again -- I've got three things half-written for here, and another one not even started, plus three more not even half-written for ComicMix, and three more not started -- because I had the kind of weekend that kept me away from the computer. (I usually get in some solid hours on a Sunday to bash these things into shape.)

Yesterday was both my sons' Cub Scout Pack's annual Soapbox Derby and the day we were supposed to go away to Great Wolf Lodge in lieu of a birthday party for my older son, Thing 1. (It was his choice; he wanted to go to GWL instead of the kid party, so that's what we did.) We were secretly hoping it would rain heavily early, so the Soapbox would be pushed back to its rain date and we could head out early, but that didn't happen.

So the Soapbox -- in which the scouts race in various dad-built cars with very crude steering down a hill towards the local First Aid Squad Building -- went on. The Wife was in charge of the refreshments stand, but mostly ended up wrangling cars for the races, and I went from a "catcher" (down at the end of the course, to help the cars stop) to a "loader" (dragging cars over to the starting area, getting the kids in and secured, and shoving them up the starting ramps). It was a fun day, with more physical activity than I'm used to, and all the boys had a good time. And as soon as it was done, we were off.

I might have mentioned Great Wolf before -- it's essentially an indoor waterpark with a hotel wrapped around it. The room rates are steep, but the rooms are very nice and large, you get free admission to the waterpark, and they don't mind outside food as much as they say they do (as long as you are discreet). So we had a cooler full of stuff in the room, and a large "towel bag" with lots of food under the towels, which helped us avoid spending a fortune on food there.

Officially, you can check in at 4, and check-out the next day is at 11. But the water park is open 9-9, and you can often get into your room early. Even if you get there before your room is ready, they'll hold bags and you can go to the water park. Similar, on check-out day, all you need to do is take your stuff from your room to your car. So a one-night stay could be two full days in the water park, if you want to and plan it right.

(We didn't plan it right, because of the Soapbox Derby, but the original scheme was to get there Sunday at about noon and leave Monday at 3 or 4 -- as it was, we got there at 5 on Sunday and left at 6 on Monday.)

And then the rain we'd hoped for yesterday hit today, in buckets, as we were driving home. So we got home later than expected, exhausted and waterlogged. So that's why there's nothing substantial here for the last couple of days...maybe later in the week?

My Son Does Not Appreciate Me

Tonight, at bedtime, as I was on my way out Thing 2's door -- we'd done the book-reading, and teeth-brushing, and pyjama-putting-on, and writing-about-the-book-in-his-school-notebook, so he had about twenty minutes to play before his real bedtime -- I remembered to feed his fish.

And, as I fed the fish (the one survivor of three or four we got a couple of months ago), I asked the boy if we'd remembered to name that fish. He said no; the fish didn't have a name.

So I said, "How about Mr. Von Dingle-Dangle-Dungle-son?" (Which I thought was quite good on the the spur of the moment.)

He gave me a pitying look and said something about not wanting a silly name.

Well, that put me in my place, so I just went downstairs.