Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: August 2009
So far, so good
My son has logged three days of high school, not counting the orientation day (wherein they played Simon Says and sang ‘several dumb songs’). He seems to be assimilating back into the mainstream with little sturm or drang. Well, maybe a little drang. Maybe lots of drang with Theology, since introspection isn’t Jake’s bag, and introspection is what it’s all about.
He has some sort of project involving four photos of himself and a paragraph explaining “how the journey of his life is like an adventure.” We picked four out of all the photos I’ve posted to the blog. Not this one,
which is one of my favorites.
I picked him up today after I was done in the OR. My patient scared the shit out of me as I was leaving: his pulse oximeter bottomed out. Due to his pigmentation, his nail beds looked blue, which didn’t help my worries. But then he started moving, which dead people don’t do, and when I readjusted the pulse ox, the numbers came up nicely. Effin machines.
Anyway, when I picked him up, he was talking to a girl who was a head taller than he was. I resisted the urge to tell him, “Yeah Jake YOU ROCK baby!” I’m trying not to be an embarrassment to my son. I really am! I can still remember how uncomfortable I was after my first date, when my dad asked if we had “gone parking.” I’d never heard that expression. The explanation, that was the embarrassing part.
Tomorrow is Back to School Night. Guess it’s more of a Back to School Night for us than it is for a lot of other folks there.
D.
Cookies ‘n contests
Kate has a contest, too. And just like Kris’s contest, which I hawked yesterday, she’s trying to bribe us with candy. Kate’s throwing in her new book and a $25 Barnes and Noble gift certificate, too. When I get pubbed, I’m going to send cookies.
Molasses cookies.
I’m grateful to Vons and Albertson’s that they no longer carry molasses cookies. Store-bought molasses cookies never were the shiznit, you know? Dry, chewy without being crispy, lean on flavor. A molasses cookie should be bold, full-bodied, complex. Spicy as a ginger snap, only edible.
So when my son got a yen for molasses cookies, I did what any real man would do. I googled “molasses cookies recipe” and picked the first one that sounded reasonable.
This recipe from About.com’s Southern Food section isn’t quite the shiznit, but it comes close; and if you read to the end, you’ll hear how we improved on an already good thing.
Overcompensate much?
My wife insists I blog this.
Zorc appears at around 1:01.
Zorc’s penis appears at around 1:20. Shooting fireballs.
There are antibiotics for that, you know.
D.
Gray skies
First, the blue sky news: Kris Starr has a contest. Promo, baby, promo! And a chance to get a cavity search*, too.
I drove down to San Pedro today to pick up school clothes for my son. That’s a little over two hours in one direction, barring traffic, but it’s L.A., so you can’t bar traffic. Got stuck in the thick of it on the 405 South, and again on the 405 North on the drive home. But the worst bit was the Grapevine, where I crawled at 2-4 mph for 30 or 40 minutes, thanks to a brush fire on the shoulder. That was painful.
Speaking of painful: did you know there’s a Ronald Reagan Freeway now? The Freeway Formerly Known as 118. It astonishes me how many things are named after that criminal.
Smog today: dense. Reminded me of my childhood. Must have been better up here in Bako, since my trainer worked the crap out of me and my lungs weren’t aching afterward (the way they used to when I was a kid. I thought it was a side effect of exercise). If you looked directly overhead, you could see some blue, but elsewhere, just a gray haze. I suspect visibility was under three miles. Yes, I can remember worse, but I grew up in the pre-catalytic converter era. Back then, pine trees would only grow so high. They would hit this invisible ceiling, and the top of the tree would look smooshed, as if the Jolly Green Giant had pressed each one down like Play-Doh.
I drove down by myself. No need to subject Karen to such a long drive, and Jake had schoolwork to worry about. Karen took his measurements and sent me on my grumpy** way. And now Jake is well accoutered to look like all the other Catholic High School kids 🙂
L.A. is like no place on Earth. (No place on Earth I’ve ever been to, that is.) This is where I grew up, this is my brain’s default idea of a city, but it’s still amazingly big. It took two or three minutes to drive from one end of Crescent City to the other, ten to fifteen to do the same in Santa Rosa. San Antonio was a little bigger: it used to take us about an hour to get from our home in Boerne to some of the cooler stores at the southwest end of town. Bakersfield? Maybe 20, 25 minutes tops to cover its full breadth. L.A. has no clear starting or stopping point, but one could easily spend several days driving the named freeways of Los Angeles . . . yeah, just the freeways.
This place is too big. The government needs to break it up into a bunch of Baby Bells. You could put Compton somewhere east of Bakersfield, Rancho Palos Verdes in the corn fields of Iowa. Hollywood gets to stay in Hollywood. Keep a few beaches down there, but not too many; I’m sure a lot of midwesterners would like to learn to surf.
Just a thought.
D.
*By your dentist, that is. Oh, go check it out, you’ll see what I mean.
**I really don’t understand why some guys like to drive.
This goes to . . . well, you know.
Even funnier with Legos.
The Catholic school’s not putting up any fuss over placing Jake in math analysis. He’ll have to perform well, of course, but we have no doubts about that.
Can’t tell you how refreshing it is to have administrators and teachers who are willing to work with us.
D.
P.S.: I would have gotten thrown out of Catholic High School. They have this little rule in the Code of Conduct forbidding public displays of affection 🙂
Catholic school it is.
Jake creamed the entrance exam. Said that the toughest thing about it was the time constraint: 298 questions in 3 hours. But he still managed to answer at least 293 of the questions.
Jake said the test was Easy. Disturbingly easy.
At one point, the other kid taking the test asked Jake, “What’s perpendicular?” Jake stared at the kid and pressed on. He said to me afterwards (and this really cracks me up): “How does someone get to 9th grade and not know geometry?”
Okay, so I’m bragging. So sue me.
No place in town to buy the uniforms. I gather most parents have already gotten stuff mail-ordered weeks ago. Perhaps we’ll have to make a trip down to LA to go to the uniform store this weekend. Meantime, we shlepped down to the mall tonight for a white polo shirt and khakis so that Jake wouldn’t look too much out of place tomorrow. (Tomorrow’s the orientation, Friday is the first day of school.)
Next to the best thing about creaming the entrance exam: no interview! We don’t have to worry about the dreaded “What is the role of faith in your life?” question! We won’t have to fret about the impression Jake would make while explaining lynchings in Mafiascum! (As in the response to the question, “What do you do for fun?”)
But the best thing about going to the Catholic school: we can tell the public school system to blow it out their Board of Education!
D.
crazy tired
My trainer is vicious.
This one thing she made me do tonight? She had me do pushups on the stability ball (that’s that huge ball, looks like an elementary school kickball on ‘roids), such that my thighs are supported on the ball. Fair enough, but while I’m doing ’em, she’s rocking the ball, moving it back and forth, side to side beneath me — all to improve balance. The pushups are the easy part.
Ever hear of a Bosu? Sort of a half-dome thing. You can stand on it with the flat side up or down, hence the acronym, Both Sides Utilized. Flat side up is the more difficult of the two.
Try touching your toes while standing on the Bosu flat side up. Try reaching down with a weighted bar in your hands, or with one of those heavy medicine balls.
I never would have thought training required so much balance. She’s a great believer in core strength, my trainer. We’ve hardly done any weights at all.
I touched my toes today! (You know, the hard way, by bending over and doing it.) So the question now becomes: what am I training for?
One of these days I should give movie reviews: movies that are great to watch while doing aerobics.
For example,
Rocky with Sylvester Stallone. Five Burly Biceps. I hate Stallone as much as the next guy, but hot DAMN this is a good movie to work out to. I think I stayed on that damned elliptical trainer more than 90 minutes, just to find out how the movie would end.
You mean I have to watch the sequel now?
Or,
Something’s Gotta Give with Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, and Keanu Reeves. One puny biceps. The plot, per IMDB: “A swinger on the cusp of being a senior citizen with a taste for young women falls in love with an accomplished woman closer to his age.” I’m sorry, but Jack? You ain’t on the cusp of senior citizenry. You a full citizen, pal.
Or maybe they were referring to Keanu?
Anyway, I’m not sure what’s more of a turn-off: the idea of metrosexual Keanu consorting with on-the-cusp Keaton, or the idea of Jack Nicholson consorting with anyone. This movie sucked the life right out of me.
Yeah, I could go on . . .
D.
You can spend all you like on toys . . .
But sometimes the old favorites reign supreme.
You know. Like paper bags.
D.
Back to school . . . but which one?
If things go as we expect/hope them to go in the next week, our little heathen son may soon be a freshman at the local Catholic preparatory school.
Here’s how it played out. The “best high school in town” continues to be a pain in the ass. As you know from the previous post, they now want Jake to take another Algebra II test (excuse me — they’ll allow him to take another test. They’re doing us the big favor) but now he has to score a 90 to pass on to Math Analysis/Trig. We were given one of their textbooks, but yesterday, I asked for a second one — that way, Karen can prep for the next day’s work while Jake is doing today’s work.
They refused. Only one book per student, we were told. “We’re giving out textbooks next week, so we can’t spare another.”
I don’t believe that for a second. Either they’re being sticklers for rules (there is, indeed, a district policy of “one student, one book”) or they’re being dicks. And if it’s the former explanation, they’re still being dicks.
We’re tired of their attitude. They regard themselves as the best school in town, and their comments suggest we should feel privileged that our son can go to their school. We, of course, being parents of an only child, and a bright one at that, tend to take the opposite view. They should be bending over backwards to satisfy Jake’s needs.
I called the District’s office and spoke to a woman who confirmed my worst fears. The schools are allowed free rein in determining student placement. We can fight it out at the District level, but guess what, there are other schools in town.
We thought it best to skip the local Full Quiver Academy, and only briefly considered another Dominionist school. Sorry, but if our kid’s gonna go to a nonsecular school, it had better be one that’s cool with Charles Darwin and an Earth that’s older than 6,000 years.
I called the Catholic high school, talked to someone in administration, and felt very good about things afterward. I don’t know how much flack they’ll give us if we insist on our son taking Math Analysis/Trig, but hey, the snooty public high school is always another option. Anyway, Jake will have to take an entrance exam this Tuesday, and he’ll have an interview (with us present) some time this upcoming week. Friday is the first day of school.
If he becomes a student there, he’ll have to wear the school uniform.
Should be interesting. I keep worrying how Jake should respond if asked, “What is the role of faith in your life?” I wonder if, “I consider that an intensely personal part of my life, one I would rather not talk about with strangers” would wash?
In other news: my weight is down to 173.5, about 8 lbs down from my post-Nut Creek weight. Woot! Funny what diet and exercise will do.
D.
Of asspulls and diaboli
So the local high school is making our son jump through hoops in order to be placed in junior level math (math analysis – trigonometry) as a freshman. Score 86 or better on this test, they tell him. Then it’s score 80 or better on this test. Sorry, you got a 78, which is close but no cigar. But we’ll let you re-take the test . . . but now you have to score a 90 or better!
From the website TV Tropes, this “score 90 or better” business is known as an asspull:
An Ass Pull is a moment when the writers pull something out of thin air in a less-than-graceful narrative development, violating the Law Of Conservation Of Detail by dropping a plot-critical detail in the middle, or near the end of their narrative without Foreshadowing or dropping a Chekhov’s Gun earlier on. [Hyperlinked text back at the TV Tropes website.]
And what the Principal pulled with his “score 90 or better” bit was a special type of asspull, the feared Diabolus Ex Machina:
Enter: Diabolus Ex Machina, the Evil Twin of Deus Ex Machina — a last-second twist designed to ensure, if not a Downer Ending, then certainly an extension in the villain’s favor. Drop a bridge on the hero’s girlfriend, Shoot The Shaggy Dog, and whip up a good pot of Deus Angst Machina with a side-order of Outer Limits- or Twilight Zone Twist. Do whatever it takes, as long as you make absolutely sure that everyone goes home depressed. [Once again, hyperlinked text back at the TV Tropes website.]
Needless to say, things are gloomy at Chez Walnut. Oh, my friends, it’s a crapsack world.
D.