Never Negotiate with a (Future) Lawyer

I wrote this in my journal on August 5th.  Not quite retro enough for my other blog, but i thought it was worth sharing here...

Funny exchange between Emily & Caroline just now.  They both have summer reading assignments -- Caroline gets Hamilton's Mythology & All Quiet on the Western Front, while Emily has to read a dozen titles -- and they are both lagging with just 10 days to go.   So, after dinner (Julie made yummy fajitas with home-made salsa and sangria), as they made their way upstairs, Caroline proposed a deal.  They would have a contest to see who finished their booklists first.  Emily immediately protested "no fair, i have to read 12 books & you've only got one."

Caroline countered “yes, but it’s like 300 pages”

“Let me see it”

“Look how thick it is.  300 thick pages.”

“Thick pages make it easier, not harder.”

 

You’d think the 15-year-old would have the clear advantage in this negotiation, but Emily’s stubbornness & cleverness hold up to Caroline’s experience & sweetness.  Caroline offers the terms – “if you finish first… [her pause is not for effect; she’s making this up on the fly.] you get to sleep in my room for a week.  No, a month.  And i’ll give you $20, no $10.”

“No, you said $20!”

Ten

Fifteen

Ten

Eleven

 

Stalemate.  Emily’s not buying it.  Caroline doesn’t want to lose a hooked fish, even if it’s her sister, so she searches for an alternative.  “Ok, how about you sleep in my room for a week & $15”

‘How ‘bout a week & $20?”

“Grrrrr!”

 

The teen-ager re-tacts.  “Ok, what do i get if i win?”  I chime in, “you get to sleep in Emily’s room.”  I get the teenage eyeroll.  And the 3rd-graders chuckle.  Emily ponders.  “You get to read my books.”

A laughing “no” from Caroline.  “I know… you don’t bother me with my friends for a month.”

Apparently, this seals the deal & both retreat to their room to get a head-start on the other.  

 

It’s humbling to learn that you are, at best, the 2nd best negotiator in the family.

 

Postscript: Emily surged ahead in the first few days, and everyone said that she would win easily, and that Caroline made a bad deal (it somehow ended up back at the original terms of a month & $20).  So Emily told Caroline that she would stop reading for a few days to let her catch up.  Caroline's tortoise then beat Emily's hare, which was probably best for all involved.

Jackson Gets Bold

Last night, Jackson had his school friend Haley over for playtime and dinner.  This is his special friend, a girl, if you catch my drift.  So, we're eating dinner, and Julie is telling me this story about some funny things that Emily said about not wanting to have a baby when she grows up ("I'll just get one at that place" - she means an orphanage).  And how she doesn't want to live by herself, and that she'll just live with Jackson. 

And Jackson pipes up, now live at the dinner table, that Emily will have to sleep in her own bed in her own room, because Haley & he would be sleeping in the same bed.  Everyone giggles, and no one is sure what to say next, stealing quick glances at the girl to see if she's gonna bawl or punch him or what.  But she is giggling herself.

Somebody says something about getting married, and i josh well, you better be married.  Jackson says that the person he wants to marry will be... and he pauses, and i'm expecting some adjective describing the type of girl he wants to marry, like funny or must love video games, but instead he closes his sentence with a pronoun... you, as he gestures toward his friend.  She giggles again, "ha ha, you said you wanted to marry me."

Julie may remember more details, or better details, but it was a pretty funny episode.

Left Handers Day

I missed Left Handers Day yesterday, August 13th.  But maybe that's because i was doing whatever i do to make more money that you poor righties.  You can't argue with science, especially statistics. 

That 2nd link reminds me of one of my many poorly-conceived and crafted science fair projects in high school.  One year, sophomore or junior, i posited the thesis that lefties were more intelligent than righties, and "proved" it by using the PSAT scores of the sophomores & juniors in my high school.  I got permission from the school to give everyone taking the PSAT a survey about their handedness preferences.  As i anticipated, we southpaws came out on top.  What i didn't understand, and no one helped me understand, was the concept of sample size, and why the average score of the 5 lefties (if that) that took my survey might be skewed by one outlier score.  Say, by that of the author.

They also didn't help me understand my senior year when i just copied a computer program out of a magazine.  It searched for prime numbers.  I didn't pretend it was my own or anything; i just thought it was cool.  My unoriginality didn't bother the judges.  They slapped a ribbon on my board and sent me to regionals, where the big city judges stuck me off on a side-wing, so the real projects, like "The Mathematics of Snowflakes" or "Microbial Antagonism" or "Study of sterility in plant hybrids (F1 and F2)".  I mean, F1 and F2; how can i compete with that?

Nowadays, the search for prime numbers is big business.  Maybe i could resurrect that old program and search for the first 10-million-digit prime number, and snag that $100,000 prize.  Maybe they'd even throw in a cool decoration for my basement.  But i'm guessing my Dell Dimension couldn't handle the bandwith, since the crew that found the last prime number (over 9 million digits long) cobbled together over 700 computers.

The Ron Clark Story

Last night, we watched The Ron Clark Story, a made-for-TV movie on TNT.  Ron Clark is a schoolteacher most famous for his book The Essential 55.  He has taught poor rural kids here in NC, and in Harlem, NY.  I love these kind of stories, and it's one we've seen before, probably most well done with Stand & Deliver, with Edward James Olmos & Lou Diamond Phillips.  Also similar to another (different) Mr. Clark film in Lean on Me, with Morgan Freeman.

I so admire teachers like Clark who go into the rough environments, not least because i know it's something i could never do.  And i don't take it for granted, to have a very contrasting educational experience, both in my own childhood and today with my own kids. 

We had open house at Calvary tonight, and the contrast couldn't be more stark.  A huge church auditorium full of parents.  Even more significant, perhaps, was that both Moms & Dads were there in roughly equal force.  Instead of a Ron Clark having to trudge the streets of Harlem to find caustic or indifferent or downright missing parents of his students, Calvary has hives of WASPs (NTTAWWT) swarming to the teachers right in their classrooms. 

Do come in, it's so nice to have your child, please put the big pile of supplies in your child's locker, and don't forget to sign up for all the field trips and classroom parties.

More Pix of David

Three more photos from David's birthday. As you can see from the 3rd one, i embellished a bit in my last entry about the messy cake. Artistic license and all that.

Link to photos

David Turns One

David celebrated his first birthday yesterday. All the grandparents sent wonderful gifts, and David enjoyed ripping off the paper and stomping (with his siblings) on the bubble wrap. He's a grabby-hands motorboat of a boy, with the lightning-quick movements of a defensive-minded basketball guard, and so he stuck his hand at the single candle of his small round birthday cake before we could blink. No burn, fortunately, just a little wax and a quizzical look on his face.

We (which means everyone but me) let David fist his piece of cake. And everyone (but me) giggled as he naturally smeared it all over his face trying to eat it. Not that i'm a stone-hearted schoolmeister or anything, just that such a spectacle is the province of the red-necked, in my book. And so the only things missing were birthday gifts of lottery scratch-offs and middle-of-the-day longnecks.

But i digress. This day was about our youngest child, not as young as he once was, growing up. He's quite a guy. Nearby you'll find a photo of him, taken yesterday on his birthday. Happy Birthday, son!

Splurging on Freedom

After my successful gallbladder surgery, i slowly began testing the waters in the (once-angry) sea that is my digestive system.  After that first week of recovery, and nibbles here and there, i decided to give it a whirl.  We had lunch at Time To Eat, a burger joint in Clemmons.  I splurged with the cheeseburger, onion rings, and a milkshake.  Let's shoot the moon!

My hard-working pancreas passed with flying colors.  No pain, nothing.  I guess this medicine stuff really does work.

Since then, i've had to make up for lost time, and catch up on all the ice cream i've missed.  Eating a bowl almost every day.  That was the thing i missed the most these past several months.  I don't care about the still-evil french fries; i'm over those piles of grease.  But i gots to have me some cookies & cream, or chocolate chip cookie dough (note to one manufacturer:  it's supposed to be blobs of the dough of chocolate chip cookies - so to speak - not blobs of non-descript cookie dough within chocolate chip ice cream; there's a difference; don't screw it up!) or anything with caramel in it.

Dangerously enough, our bathroom scale picked this key moment to die on us, so i don't know how much catching up i've really done.  My nadir weight, which actually came a few days AFTER the surgery, was 166.  I hit that one morning, and only one morning.  Probably in the mid-170s, but everything still fits like Josh Baskin at the end of Big or like David Byrne of the Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense.

Were i really to muse right here, i'd ponder the metaphor of expanded freedom, and our tendency to make unwise choices with such freedom.  Or how sometimes we need to be saved from ourselves, to be, as Leslie Phillips once sang, "free from no borders".  My diet has no borders any longer.  And while i wouldn't go back to the days of pain and trepidation, i do miss the discipline that came with it.  Now, that discipline must come from within, or at least from a place that pulls us toward life.

Movie Review: Hoodwinked

Hoodwinked is a computer animated film, wrapped around the childhood tale of Little Red Riding Hood.  The added plot, pretty thin and a weak rip-off of the anti-big-box-retailer sentiment, is that a recipe bandit is stealing all the recipes from the little shops in the forest.  And so when the wolf is caught at granny’s house, with a tied-up granny in the closet, he appears to be the prime suspect because granny is known as the primo goodie-baker in the whole forest, and one of the few remaining to have so-far escaped the wiles of the bandit.

 

One delight of the movie is that it shows that same timeframe/scenes from the different perspectives of Red, the Wolf, Granny, and some other characters.  What seems to be isn’t always that way, and the film handles this with a good deal of wit and cleverness.  There are enjoyable, interesting side characters, such as Japeth the Goat (played by the son of Bill Gaither), who claims to have been cursed by a mountain witch so that he has to sing everything he says.  Or Nicky Flippers, the cerebral frog detective voiced by David Ogden Stiers.

 

I also enjoyed the chock-full pop culture references that only the grown-ups would catch.  The entire Wolf character (hilariously voiced by Patrick Warburton, best known as Puddy on Seinfeld) is a complete riff on Chevy Chase’s Fletch.  There are references to Star Wars, The Matrix, and i’m sure plenty of other things i missed.

 

So Hoodwinked is a nice combo of fun & giggles for the kids, and also enjoyable for their parents.  While the bandit mystery isn’t all that hard to solve (even my kids figured it out), you should find plenty to make this a worthwhile rental.

Day Trip: Black Mountain

Last week, i picked up a magazine about day trips in North Carolina.  Yesterday, we decided to take off and do one of the suggested trips, to visit the small mountain town of Black Mountain (note: site was down as of this writing, so keep trying).  What a cool little town!

Black Mountain is about 2 hours from Winston-Salem, right on interstate 40 this side of Asheville.  Its "downtown" is full of quaint, quirky shops.  Our first stop was the Acoustic Corner, where David (not our David, of course) educated us on the nuances of banjos, dobros and mandolins.  Then, there was map store, the gourmet chocolate shop, antique stores galore, a household gadgets place called the Common Housefly (don't ask me why).  There, the kids immediately smelled the coffee aroma, and i showed them the bins of beans.  Jackson had apparently never seen coffee beans before, and he asked why they made coffee out of bugs.

After lunch at My Father's Pizza, where we sat on the streetside deck, in the rain alternating between drizzle & downpour, we strolled up & down Cherry Street.  The Seven Sisters Gallery.  Ice cream cones at the soda shop.  The Ivy Corner antiques (Emily: "I know why they call it the Ivy Corner... because it has ivy and it's on the corner of the street.").  Bone-a-Fide, a bakery for dogs.  Yes, dogs.  The Black Mountain Iron Works.  Garrou Pottery.  And ending with the Town Hardware &General Store, which was full of old-timey things.  Oh, and the amazing used book store, a special treat for bibliophiles & antiquarians.

We spent the most time in Song of the Wood, learning how to play the hammer dulcimer, the lap dulcimer, and other mountain instruments.  We bought a Bowed Psaltery.  I hope to post a picture soon of Emily playing it.  She picked it up almost immediately, easily figuring out how to translate the tunes she knows on the piano.  I have to play it backwards/upside down, but i've got it, too.  Maybe next time, we'll get a starter hammer dulcimer, or maybe a mandolin.

Back from Hosptial

Can't write much, but wanted to let everyone know that i'm back from the hosptial after my laproscopic gall bladder removal surgery yesterday.  Not in too much pain, just an annoying wavering pain in my right shoulder muscle.  The docs say it's from releasing gas (CO2 from the surgery, not intestinal gas), but i'm not sure anymore.  Seems the gas bubbles would have been worked out by now.  Anyhow, keep it treated with a hand-held massager and a heating pad.  All in all, that's not too bad.

I remember absolutely nothing about the surgery.  Kudos to the needle-doctors.  Though the writer in me would really like to have had a conscious experience to tell about.  The last thing i remember was being asked what color cap i wanted (though i had to be reminded afterwards about even that much), and how i warned the nurses that they better pick the right color (Duke blue, not Carolina blue).  Shades of Reagan and his quip:  "I hope you're all Republicans."  After the cap caper, my next memory was of the rough jostle transferring me off the surgery gurney to the post-op recovery bed.