Therafy this

2013 was a pretty heavy-duty therapy year. Most recently, I've been doing a kind of therapy called physical therapy, which purports to fix bits of your body. In the past when I've done this, I referred to physical therapy as the kind of therapy where when it's done you actually feel better. I suppose that this is true for those of a certain age, but by the time you reach my semi-advanced state, there is never any assurance that I will ever feel better. Something always hurts- you just deal with it and discuss things like "managing the discomfort."

This is kind of discouraging. I like to be physical and active, and having to think about how you reach or bend or lift or sit, it takes some of the fun out of things. I don't mind the physical therapy itself, though some of it is suspiciously like someone giving you tasks to complete, which is not sufficiently different from being married and having kids to go out of the way for.

This time through I'm dealing with shoulder pain. It's particularly annoying because it's in my right shoulder and it makes writing on a whiteboard tricky and occasionally painful if I'm not careful. I put off doing the PT (as we in the know call it) because you can't just go and get it. You need a prescription, which means you need to see a doctor, which means you need to get x-rays (at a minimum). I put it off for weeks. But I finally got around to it and now twice a week I meet up with this nice woman who stretches and prods at me, then dispatches me to the gym to do exercises.

I haven't asked her yet if she's just making things up at this point- at first there were sheets of paper with diagrams, but now she just tells me to do things. It's kind of amazing how many different shoulder exercises you can make up. Things to push, pull, lift, wobble, stretch, and just plain old hold. Eighteen different things (really) to do with my shoulder, all in the name of managing my discomfort.

When does it end? Who knows? When I asked my internist about why my shoulders hurt, he said "because you didn't die when you were 40," which isn't terribly helpful. In the past, its gone on for months. Hopefully not this time through. I'm kind of overly therafied, or therafried as we in the know call it.

It's been a complicated last few weeks. Having gone though a lot with our poor departed pup, we flew down to Miami on Thursday evening, having removed whatever guilt we might have had about going on vacation immediately after putting our dog to sleep. In face, despite its Monty Pythonesque overtones, it seemed the perfect thing to do. Especially when the song playing on the radio as we left the vet was "I Wanna Be Sedated" (really truly).

We had made this reservation weeks ago, when it felt like we just needed to get away, since any travel around winter break seemed unpromising. We had no idea at the time the Art Basel, one of the largest modern art shows in the world, was going on at the same time. Fortunately, we planned to stay on Key Biscayne, miles from the well-known and feared craziness. This turned out to be a particularly fortuitous choice. The hotel here is very nice and we'd been here before, so were able to slip into a familiar routine with a minimum of fuss.

The weather was fantastic- high of around 80 degrees, no humidity, and a light breeze. Perfect for lying around all day, which is what we did.

After somewhat guiltily thinking to myself, this has been great, but another day would be really nice, I checked in online and got boarding passes and headed out to the beach for a last hour or so. As I swung by the bar, I saw the Eagles game on TV, and saw Megatron get up with a face mask full of snow. I checked in on our flight status to found that, lo and behold, it had been cancelled. Not only that, but the Monday flights, even Miami to Philly via Seattle, were sold out.

So as it turned out, we got 2 extra days in Miami, and thanks to a snow day and a late opening, I only missed two classes. The only downside was spending at total of 6 hours on hold waiting to rebook my flight. Not an exaggeration, though not 6 consecutive. It was 4 calls, 1 hour, an hour and 40 minutes, 2 hours and 20 minutes, and finally another hour. But it worked out fine, great in fact.

That being said, let me just note here that dealing with Miami airport is an absolute horror show. My advice is to never, ever rent a car at that airport, even if it costs twice as much to rent one wherever you are staying. We got to the airport 2 hours prior to the flight, a flight where we were booked first class and therefore had the priority security line, and still just barely made it to the gate in time, after dealing with the various modes of transport and sheer distance in getting from the rental car return to the gate. Ugh.

But home we got, and now it's time to move on to post-dog (for the moment- we are definitely getting another one) life.

Good dog, Greta

Yesterday we put Greta, our sweet 15 year and 4 month-old Pembroke Welsh Corgi to sleep. Permanently, I mean. She had been doing little except sleep for the past few weeks, but recently she had stopped eating and reached levels of nonarousal that I'd not seen since my junior year of college, when my roommate, for reasons unknown to both of us, did not leave his bed for the final 2 1/2 weeks of the school year, assuring himself of a year apart for that particular academic institution.

We'd brought her home from the hospital the previous night, after she'd spent two days there on intravenous antibiotics and fluids. This on the chance that her decline was the result of an infection and not an irreversible reduction in kidney function. We knew it was a slim chance at best, and once it was clear that she wasn't getting better, we decided to bring her home, keep her as comfortable as possible, and bring her into the vet the next morning with the assumption that, unless the vet suggested otherwise, we would not be bringing her home again.

While home, Greta, never the most tech-savvy of us, had her first experience video chatting with her big sisters, who did all the talking. It was nice for them to have the chance to say goodbye to a friend who'd always been part of the family.

Our vet, who knew Greta for her entire life, was sanguine about things when we brought her in. He estimated her kidney function at 5-10% and said that old dogs simply do not recover from this. And this was an almost spectacularly old dog. It seemed like she'd go on forever, but none of us do, I suppose, including those of us who are small and cute and furry.

The vet said something that struck me, though it was just kind of an aside, that a dog's life is compressed. I'd read something recently about how a person's view of what constitutes a complete life lacks any perspective on the beginning and end of their own lives, and so if they are to gain that kind of understanding that they would need to look elsewhere. I didn't see Greta's birth, but I've seen puppies born before, and she was only a few weeks old when she came home with us. Greta had a good life. She survived a weird, if kind, breeder, was healthy and happy for almost her entire existence, and when it was time, which she signaled us by ceasing to eat, we were able to help her end it peacefully and painlessly.

The euphemism "put to sleep" is not completely euphemistic, as it turns out. The end is brought on by what is essentially an overdose of sleeping pills- phenobarbital to be exact. In a marvelous bit of truth in advertising, the medication used is called Euthanal. It's hard to argue with that, and none of us did.

We chose not to stay and watch, so we also bid her goodbye and then left, very sad. I think I'll miss her most in the mornings, when she was usually the only one up aside from me. And it'll probably take some time for me to get used to answering the doorbell by myself. She was a gentle and friendly companion, smart and dumb and cute and soft and silly. And in what I consider to be the ultimate compliment, she was a good dog.

To Infitity and beyond

We got a new coffee grinder yesterday. My wife like to make espresso at home and our old grinder will not grind the coffee fine enough to do that. So the new one showed up, and much to my delight, it's called the Capresso Infinity Conical Burr Grinder. This is an impressive word mashup, and though I'm not sure where to put the emphasis in the name, I'm intrigued by the whole infinite aspect of it.

Does that mean that it can grind the beans infinitely small? What would that even look like? Would I be able to see it when I spill it on the floor. Do I need infinitely smaller holes in the brewer to keep the grounds from seeping through into the coffee? I'm dubious, because the grind selector merely twists to allow you to select from "Coarse" to "Very Fine." With a name like Infinity, it would seem like you ought to be able keep turning it in either direction for as long as you wanted, forever even.

I decided to look in the instructions for clues, but as usual, none were to be found. I gotta say, not even the warnings we very dire or (therefore) interesting. It seems like the less dangerous the product, the more drastic the warnings. Maybe because to do dangerous things with something that's not inherently hazardous requires more energy and creativity and with as a result be more potentially catastrophic.

Vet's Day

I spent Sunday night at the University of Pennsylvania. Crash course in Linear Algebra? Dance Performance at Annenberg? Hoops at the Palestra? Trying to pick up sorority girls on Locust Walk? Nope, none of the above. I spent 2 1/2 hours Sunday night, or more accurately Monday morning, at the Veterinary Hospital emergency room, with our ancient Welsh Corgi, Greta.

Dogs are like kids, I suppose. They seldom get sick at say, 10AM on a Tuesday. Nope, shortly before midnight on Sunday, the dog starts upchucking (I must say, I had a pleasingly large choice or words I could have inserted there) dinner, trembling, and looking like she'd prefer to continue the upchucking but no longer had any chuck to up.

It being that time of night, we (me and Ronnie, not me and Greta) had to debate whether or not to take her in to the hospital, but ultimately thought we wouldn't be able to go to bed with her in that condition, so we carried her to the car and drove her down to West Philadelphia. I used to room with a vet student, back in the day, so I know where it is.

We weren't the only ones in the ER, but there were curiously only people there. A nurse came out quickly and took Greta away, I suppose to do triage on her. She said they'd examine her and then the vet would speak to us. We then sat and waited for quite a while, watching, and I am not making this up, Vanilla Ice Goes Amish. It was pretty heartwarming, watching the washed up but good with construction materials former rapper bond with his Amish friends, at one point hustling one of them into wagering and losing his buggy. It's basically a construction makeover show, with a sidelight of the buggy guy pimping out Vanilla Ice's new ride.

As we drifted through this, the nurse came out with a box of (living) cat, which she gave to a woman waiting. Then she came back out holding a small dog, which a waiting couple embraced and then left, crying (the people, not the dog) on their way out.

Eventually it was our turn. The on-call vet went through her whole spiel, recommending that we leave Greta there overnight for observation and then full physical in the morning. her estimate of cost, $2000. As a friend once noted, you can get several new dogs for that. We said we though we'd like to take her home and bring her to her regular vet in the morning, and she said, "Of course, that will be fine." So if that's fine, what's with the keep her overnight for observation thing? Is that some sort of fundraising technique?

So we went home, pushing 3:30 AM at this point. As it turned out, she was fine; she just needs to take antacids. And we thought things would be easier as empty nesters.

Old White Men in Suits and the Unfortunate Suckiness of Things

Discussing different groups of frightening people with my students the other day, I came to the conclusion that Old White Men in Suits were the scariest of all. Unless you are one of those, just ask yourself, do old white men in suits have your best interests at heart? I mean ever?

Unfortunately, I realized that I'd herded most politicians and especially Republican politicians into a neat little group. And even more unfortunately, these people have an inordinate amount of control over our lives, and they certainly do not have our best interests at heart.

The current sad state of publicly owned and run things was set in motion by white man in suit in sheep's clothing Ronald Reagan, who famously stated the government isn't the solution, government is the problem. I agree that the government is nothing but trouble in some instances, but it can be extremely helpful in others (Social Security, Medicare, roads, etc.) and to lump it all together in the "bad" pile is flat out wrong. It has also started a push by these men for a whole bunch of things that have made our lives worse.

It's hard to settle on one example, but to pick one that's easy to oversimplify for narrative purposes, let's talk about the Post Office. The Post Office has never been a shining beacon of high performance anyway, but for the last couple of decades it's being slowly starved to death. Here's how it works:

1. Politicians, again, this is particularly Republicans, though some Democrats go along, state that the Post Office, being part of the government, is bad.

2. Because the goal of Republicans is to prove that government can't do anything right, rather than invest money in trying to improve the Post Office, they begin to drain it of money, because who can support funding something that's "bad?"

3. Every year, the Post Office asks for a certain amount of money, including a chunk to improve their facilities and operations. The congressmen in charge of this sort of thing, who get lots of campaign contributions from companies that compete with the Post Office for business, like UPS and FedEx, rather than go along or suggest further improvements, set a funding level maybe close to but somewhat below the minimum level necessary to keep the Post Office healthy and solvent.

4. The Post Office, whose operations are constrained by these congressmen as well (for example, can't raise prices, have to deliver junk mail on Saturday, and do other things that lose money), have no choice but to limit the quality of service they deliver. Shorter hours, few people at the service window, anything they can control to cut costs.

5. Service gradually gets worse, and they continue to lose money. The congressional funders say "We can't be giving full support to an organization that can't balance it's budget," ignoring the fact that they set up the budget parameters in a way that guaranteed failure. So they cut the budget more, and so on. The Post Office continues to decline, to this day.

There are plenty of other examples of this- Amtrak, public schools, public transit, roads and bridges, municipal services like sanitation. The hope for these people is that these government services simply shrink up and die. It's systematic, and they've been working at it for years and are very good at it. So they've won the battle for the past 25 years. But the war isn't over yet.

We still have the opportunity to throw these guys out on the street and elect people who are committed to having the government do the part of its job that's to the direct benefit of the population at large, rather than the big money campaign contributors. It's going to be a long fight, but it's worth it for anyone not satisfied with the current suckiness of things.

Bully for you

Before I seriously discuss this, how awesome is it that the guy's name is Incognito? Honestly, I don't follow football that closely, and for at least a week I thought they were concealing someone's name.

Anyway, we seem to be entering the "he said, she said" phase of this, where Martin's side is contrasted to Incognito's side. With all due respect to those weighing the conflicting statements, calling this stupid is an insult to stupid people. Asking Incognito if he was really bullying Martin is like asking the head of Aryan Nation if he's a racist. "Of course not," he's say, "I'm just standing up for the people of my own race." Or something like that. Nobody admits to being a racist or to being a bully for one (or both) of 2 reasons- either because even the aforementioned stupid people know that admitting to being a racist or bully is a bad move, and/or because they don't realize that they are.

Does anyone really think the bully every has a genuine understanding of the feelings of the person he or she is bullying? Or is even attempting to gain and understanding? It's antithetical to the whole bully mentality. You can't take the other people's feelings into account and act like that, unless you're a sociopath, which from my angle doesn't make it look any better from Incognito's perspective. If someone is beating the crap out of someone else (and I mean physically or otherwise), who do you ask if it hurts? The aggressor or the victim? Which one of those two will have a better idea?

As I've noted here before, football is a simple and brutish game. I'm not suggesting that all football players are dumb brutes, but it's not a sport that excludes dumb brutes either. That's fine, but you don't put those guys even unofficially in charge, as it seems Incognito was with the 'phins.

Thumbs up for Gravity

We decided to go to the movies on Saturday night. We like movies a lot and used to go often. It's something we got out of the habit of doing when the kids were little and it requires a bit of redirection to get us back and going again.

So we were discussing with some friends maybe going to see Gravity, which we'd originally talked about seeing in Imax. But now we were left with choices of regular movie theaters, which led to a discussion about seeing it in 3D. My friend was saying that he really wanted to see it in 3D, to which I found it necessary to reply, "You know it's not actually 3D, dude."

I'd never seen a 3D movie before. I'd seen people with the stupid glasses, but it just seemed like a gimmick to me. I should say though, that for Gravity, it was very effective. I knew there was lots of explosions and space debris, and I was kind of dreading the prospect of having virtual space junk flying at my head for 2 hours. But it really wasn't like that at all. It was very nuanced and save for one gratuitous moment near the end, it was a complement to the storytelling in an effective way.

The movie itself was great. Totally gripping from beginning to end. I know there have been complaints about how unrealistic it was. Oh my God! A movie with unrealistic stuff going on? Who'd have imagined such at thing!

Sims Brain

Speaking issues, let me touch on the topic of ADD for a moment, before I feel the need to quickly move on to something else.

I've always subscribed to the SIMS theory of humanity. And I say that by virtue of having never actually played The Sims, so if I'm wrong about the details here try to ignore that aspect of it. My understanding is that when you make a person in the Sims, you have 100 points or percent worth of stuff to bestow upon your creation. You can choose to give them superior intelligence, nicer looks, better personality, and maybe some other stuff. But it all has to add up to 100. No person gets more than 100 points of attributes.

In the real world, of course there are some people who get 105 or 110, (or 95 or 90, but we won't talk about them), but for the most part, most of us have more of some things and less of others. You rarely will meet someone with looks, brains, and sparkling personality.

OK, trying to get back on track here. I think that many of the people I deal with in and around the school suffer from ADDOD, of Attention Deficit Disorder Obsession Disorder. What I mean by that is that a certain person may have been diagnosed with ADD and therefore needs some sort of accommodation to get their schoolwork done.

Because I always follow the rules, I always do that for students. But for the most part I think it's hooey. I daresay that most of us could find a competent psychologist who can truthfully diagnose us with some level of ADD, because none of us have perfect attention. Shoot, I wouldn't even want that. I have enough trouble acting human- the last thing I need is a greater ability to shut out the world and focus on something singular. Focus is a human construct that is not necessarily genetically programmed into us. It's to the human consciousness what newspapers are to the distribution of information. It's a phase. It may be a phase that never completely goes away, but it's not an inherent condition that has always and will always be with us.

Yes, of course you need to focus well enough to complete tasks, but what do you mean by enough and what do you mean by complete? I'm not a big fan of putting labels on people or assigning them to groups to be treated in a certain way. All of us have some level of ADD and all of us learn how to cope. The best thing we can do for our kids is to teach them to do this based on our experience and empathy. Medication can help sometimes too, but unless you want to be on meds the rest of your life, you'll need to learn to do without.

Now back to whatever I was doing before.

Issues with issues

As a teacher, I get to hear a lot about every student's individual characteristics. In some cases, I hear about their issues. I know that there are students with issues, but at least in our school the whole thing is in danger of being devalues.

I'll set aside kids saying things like "I had a couple of issues with the homework." I usually reply incredulously to those statements, but the kids don't seem to understand the absurdity of what they're saying. I just want to say "You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means," though Mandy Patinkin does it so much better.

Epiphany

I've notice that when I don't write anything this blog never gets updated. Gotta do something about that.

A grand time

It was Grandparents' day at school on Friday. I'd have to say that for the couple of hours that they were around that they completely dominated the goings on.

I had the pleasure of the company of around 10 of these people in my class on Friday. It's an interesting scene. More grandparents than students. Honestly, I was just relieved that for one more year, I was not (or at least I don't think I was) older than the grandparents.

Given the audience, I thought it best to present what you might called a metalessson, where I spent almost as much time talking about what we doing and why we were doing as we spent actually doing anything. This was fine with the kids, as they got to show off what they know and how easily they mastered new things. And it gave the grandparents a chance to get involved in the proceedings.

One of the grandparents was a mathematician, which I, of course, am not. There's nothing wrong with mathematicians, of course, but put one in a middle school math class is putting a cat among the pigeons. They simply can't help but show off. Some of the students came to the board to work problems and he went up with his granddaughter and helped her. He also felt the urge to amplify things from time to time. I hadn't really noticed, but it became evident that this was beginning to grate on the other grandparents. Had I been paying attention, I would have tried to spur this on, of course, because what could be more fun than a little grandspat action? See 'em mix it up a bit? But all we got were some longwinded explanations of things followed by clipped rejoinders saying the same thing in a short, clear phrase.

All in all, a grandparent visit looks like fun. I look forward to having the opportunity to disrupt my grandkids' class some day.

Seasonality

In general, I'm in favor of fall. It seems the appropriate way to follow up summer. It's mid-October now, which is the best of times and the worst of times. Worst, because it becomes nearly impossible to avoid pumpkin-flavored stuff. Clearly there are people who look forward to the time of year when pumpkin is ubiquitous. For that I blame Starbucks and their insidious Pumpkin Spice Lattes, but don't count me among the pumkiphiles. Best, because it's the one time of year to use my favorite superlative, spooktacular. This year, I think I will expand that seasonal usage to include spooktacles, spooktator, and, of course idle spookulation.

I teach in a Jewish school, where mention of Halloween is discouraged, but it's hard to avoid it when you're out and about. It's apparently the second biggest holiday after Christmas in terms of its economic impact. I'm sure it's a big deal for candy makers and for Chinese manufacturers of costumes and plastic buckets shaped like pumpkins. And if you think Chinese workers who make high-end athletic attire are well treated, just imagine how good things are for the costume and novelty workers.

Today is October 12, which those in my generation know as the actual day when Columbus didn't discover America, as opposed to Monday, which is the day when we celebrate his not discovering America by our not being able to go to the bank.

I'm also in the midst of my seasonal change in exercise programs, which in the past has essentially been a transition from riding my bike 5-6 times a week for over 100 miles to nothing. I am going to try hard not to let that happen this year, but haven't decided yet whether to get a lot of heavyweight riding gear (and snow tires, maybe with tire chains!) or find something to do inside. The thing is, though, that inside here in cold weather is a place to drink red wine and sit by the fire, not pretend to ride on an exercise bike. But getting out of shape? That would be unspookable.

What did I learn today?

Today I learned that, at least from the perspective of a flight attendant, my cup is not merely a cup, but a "service item." I wonder what that makes me. Am I a service item too? They're serving me, supposedly. Or is there another bit of jargon to refer to customers? I once asked my dentist if they had funny names for the dental instruments when they were in dental school, but he refused to answer. I'm guess this would be the same kind of thing.

There's been more than enough written about air travel, so I don't really want to do more than acknowledge what a truly odd experience it is. Where else can you buy a bottle of water, walk 30 feet or so, then walk back towards the place where you bought it but have to surrender it before you can return to the shop? But that's what happens if you buy it beyond security, walk outside of security and then walk back in. 'Nuff said.

What did you say?

I think I wrote recently about how happy I was with work, and it occurred to me later that part of what I loved about my job was that I had the opportunity to work with people who genuinely try to find the best in people. And they make a real effort at it. As with many other things, the key lies in listening.

I know that I've gone on about this before, but listening is the worst-taught, least appreciated of all the essential life skills. Are you a good listener? Here's a quick test. When you're having a conversation and the other person is talking, are you thinking about what you're going to say next? If you are, you're not completely listening. To see it happen in others, tell them about a vacation you took someplace you know they've been. See if they can keep from talking about when they were there.

Real listening requires momentarily clearing your mind and being focused solely on what the other person is saying. You can reinforce this by using what are known as active listening techniques. This involves playing back to another person what they said, as in, "I think I heard you say ____," followed either "am I right?" Or another question. In the psychotherapy version of this, the other person is supposed to thank you for listening.

This is a great think in a therapy session, but on the cumbersome side for more typical, "wanna go to Wawa?" kinds of conversation, so I suggest saving it for more intense topics. But the principle of listening always applies. It's amazing what you can learn about someone else when you're paying attention to them.

It comes in really handy as a teacher. I recently asked a question to a class and the kid who got called on clearly knew in some sense what the answer was, but was unable to articulate it in a coherent way. I can hazard a guess that this inability is a handicap to this student's ability to succeed. So what I really need to teach them is not how does one graph a quadratic equation, but how do they understand the process in a way that makes sense. Because again, and this is just a hunch, an inability to articulate something correlates to an inability to demonstrate mastery. 

So based on a two minute interchange where I said practically nothing, I now know where to focus my effort with this student. It doesn't mean I'll succeed, but at least I'll know what I'm trying to succeed at. For me, this is exhilarating and is another big part of why I love my job.

Third day in Miami

By our third day, we’d fallen into a very pleasant pattern. I get up 8-ish, put on a bathing suit, bring the banana I took from yesterday’s breakfast buffet downstairs to add to the cup of coffee that the very nice hostesses at the restaurant give me as a down payment on my breakfast, consume said banana and coffee, and then go for a swim.

Normally I’d be renting a bike and going for a long ride somewhere, but here I’ve decided that taking advantage of the opportunity that I have to do some distance swimming in the ocean each morning is not something to be missed. So I do a nice long swim, today something slightly less than half a mile. After that, I reserve my chair and umbrella, then go back up to the room to rouse Ronnie, after which we have breakfast and head to the beach.

The beach is not at all a Miami kind of scene. It’s very sedate, more like a Caribbean or Bermuda kind of resort than South Beach. Some couples and some families, usually with little kids (since school has started, it’s mostly a preschool set). It’s relatively small, with soft sand and gentle waves. It’s very pleasant.

We stay there until around 2-something, at which point we get out of the sun and have lunch in an alcove on the shady side of the hotel. Things vary after that. Tonight we went back to Miami Beach and saw Rush at the theater on Lincoln Rd. No, not the unbearable band Rush, the movie. The movie was fun and afterwards we paused for a bit to watch the Global Citizen concert, which one of my kids was attending, on my phone. I should just note here that Stevie Wonder is a god.

Then we went in search of dinner, which unfortunately both required a wait and sucked, but what can you do. It’s still great to be out somewhere busy at 11- many of the stores, even chain stores, were still open and the mix of families with kids of all ages, bunches of teenagers, and couples like us strolling the street was pleasing.

Even though it was after 11 on a Saturday night, the clubby area of South Beach was dead, so we abandoned plans to just be part of that scene and went back to the hotel.

Let me say a bit about Miami and the trip. First of all, although I like the international/Spanish flavor of the place, it would be nice if I could walk in someplace and talk to someone for whom English is their first language. It’s been kind of rare on this trip, and I wouldn’t care as long as people understood me, but a lot of them don’t. It’s frustrating.

Second, do not, under any circumstance, buy a Ford Taurus. We rented one of these puppies, and though the color of ours was a fetching cross between green and smoky gray, it’s one of the worst cars I can remember driving in recent memory. In particular, the right rear blind spot is immense to the point of being dangerous. It made changing lanes an exercise in terror on a regular basis. It’s also inconvenient to turn the wipers on. You need to twist the left-side wand almost halfway around to get a fast wipe, far from ideal in a rain when someone going the in the other direction floods your windshield. And the turn signal lever is inexplicable. After 4 days I still can’t get it to do what I want, and I’m really good at figuring out how to work things. The button to open the trunk is on the passenger side of the console, the gas gauge doesn’t register that you’ve put gas in the car for 10 or 15 minutes after you’ve done so, and the automatic windows make it nearly impossible to open the driver’s side window a small amount. And this particular one stunk of cigar smoke every time we got in.

Aside from those little things, and the looming disaster area that is Miami airport, it’s great.

Second day in Miami

Second day began pretty much like the first, except today instead of walking to get coffee, I'd found out how to get free coffee in the lobby, so I drank that and then instead of walking or trying to rent a bicycle, I went for a swim. Normally, if there are bicycles available I'm on one, and if there aren't I'm out on a walk. But here, I have the unusual option of going for a swim in the open water. And this isn't cold lake water with a gooey bottom- this is the beach and salty water.

I'm not sure why there are no waves here; we seem to be facing straight east out into the Atlantic, but I'm not complaining. I love to body surf, but I rarely have the opportunity to go out into calm salt water and swim for a distance without fighting surf. This morning I did exactly that- I went out to the beach and swam about 1/3 mile in the ocean. It was fun. Very salty, but fun. I saw lots of fish, and got to experience swimming with and against a current (and I'll tell you, those math word problems are right, it is slower swimming against the current). So at this point it's to hell with the bike. I can ride at home anytime.

After my swim, we went and had breakfast. Unlike most hotels, this one is too fancy schmancy for a coffee shop, so you can get (and pay for) a cup of coffee in a bar or go to the main restaurant. I should note that, next to making you pay for internet access, not providing morning coffee is the second most annoying thing a hotel can do. But if you promise the host at the restaurant that you will come back later for breakfast, they will give you a cup of coffee to take out.

Breakfast in the main restaurant can be had indoors or out. They are vastly different experiences. Indoor is sedate and like eating anywhere else. Outside is like a nature show. You have at least 4 different kinds of birds and a couple of large lizards competing for leftovers. Of course, being birds and lizards, they spend almost as time time trying to drive each other off as they do eating. and then back to the beach. Our favorite thing was watching the birds at the sweetener basket. They never touched the Equal, or whatever is in the blue packets, but would pick up any pink Sweet 'n Low packets sitting on the counter, drop them in the basket, pick up a sugar packet, and fly away.

It was nicer out today than yesterday, and I stayed out in the sun a bit too long as a result. No biggie. At this point, I have an intense biker tan, which is like a farmer tan without the manure and with very tanned knees. So parts of my body are extremely tan and pretty resistant to the sun. The other parts aren't pasty, but they're definitely and obviously much lighter. If I can keep from burning my feet, though, I think I'm ahead of the game.

This hotel is full of employees around, saying hi, how are you today. I'm never sure how to respond to this stuff. Do I just say 'hi' and skulk away, or do I strike up a conversation by responding in kind. That would have to potential to make it take forever to get anywhere. It's complicated by the fact that while most of the people who work here can speak English, few of them understand it. They can ask you all kinds of basic questions, but if you answer in any kind of unexpected way, they're completely lost. That's not good news for me. I really don't know any Spanish at all.

After lunch, which we ate outside in spite of an occasional puff of cigar smoke from a nearby group, we hung in the room for a while until it was time to go into Coconut Grove for dinner. Coconut Grove is a little enclave about 20 minutes south of Miami proper, and so is about the same distance from us as Miami Beach. It's a cute mix of funky and mainstream, with a 3 story mall of sorts right smack in the middle. There's a movie theater there, so we went and watched a nice little movie called Enough Said by a writer director, Nicole Holofcener, we had met at a beach resort 20 years ago and who has put out several excellent movies over the years.

After an enjoyable movie, we ate at a place called Green Street Cafe, which is not on Green Street, but who's keeping track of that kind of thing anyway? Food was good,  though they had too many fans and it was very windy. But all in all it was an excellent day.

First day (plus) in Miami

After our marathon voyage here, it was nice to take it easy. We ate at a funky little place in a strip mall, right near the Winn-Dixie (I keep wanting to say Piggly Wiggly, but I don't think they have those here). Then back to the room and to bed early.

The next morning was bright and hot and I went for a short walk to get a cup of coffee. Key Biscayne is very close to Miami, but it's kind of out in the ocean and isolated too. There's about a half mile-long set of strip malls on one side of the street, mixed in with a couple of parks. The other side of the street is mostly apartment buildings with a couple of hotels mixed in. That's it. The rest of the island is a state park with beaches and tennis and whatever kinds of park stuff.

My walk keeps me in the shade for the most part. The hotel driveway is very long- it's about twice as far to the road as it is to the nearest strip mall once I'm out there. I look for someplace open and find a small bakery, where I get coffee. I sit in the shade and drink the coffee. The hotel has coffeemakers in the room but they're noisy and Ronnie was still asleep, and they don't make very good coffee, truth be told.

After returning to the hotel (this is the kind of nice place where they have a table full of water bottles and towels and sunscreen outside for the joggers) I went up to the room and the we had breakfast.

What else could we do at that point but go to the beach? It was hot and sunny and really quite pleasant for a while, in a way that would be awful at home but which is much more bearable when there's a large body of water in front of you. We had an umbrella and a flag to raise if we wanted drinks and I had a Grey Goose Frozen Lemonade, one of those things I would never do if I wasn't on vacation. It was good, though the problem with frozen drinks is that you can't nurse them, at least not when its 90 degrees out. I'm guessing that the drink is served frozen for a reason and did not want to tempt fate by letting it thaw.

Eventually, despite occasional dips in whatever body of water we're facing (they all kind of look alike, don't they?), we got hot, so we went back inside. After that, we had lunch and tried to get some coffee at Starbucks, but were foiled by a power surge that had knocked out the espresso machines. So we went back to the hotel and I swam a bit and did a short workout. When we figured the thunderstorms and the horrendous rush hour traffic had cleared, we headed into South Beach for dinner.

We didn't really want to do the whole South Beach scene, but Ronnie had been to a restaurant on Lincoln Road (which is a pedestrian mall for a few blocks) that she thought I'd like, so we went there. I like Lincoln Rd. It's a promenade in the best sense of the word. People just walking around, happy to be there- families, people with dogs, young couples, all strolling, eating, whatever. One of the things I really like about Miami is that it's almost like being in a foreign country. English is clearly not the first language for a significant portion of the populace, and it's occasionally hard to make yourself understood. But as both a cause and effect of this, it's an international destination for Spanish-speakers. Most seem to be from South America. It gives a real multicultural flavor and I'm sure that's why it's such a cultural hotbed.

Dinner was very tasty and afterward we promenaded back and forth, the maitre d's on the street trying to tempt you into their restaurants with "How are you this evening?" to which I'd reply, "Full." It was all in all a very nice vacation day.

SImple, but not easy

This has been one of the most convoluted travel days I've ever had, especially considering that all we were doing was flying nonstop from Philadelphia to Miami. It started as we approached the airport. The northbound direction of I-95 comes right up alongside the airport, yet for some reason the exit swings out and all the way across the expressway and back southbound to join the exit from southbound to the airport. Probably 2 miles of driving. Then we checked the bag and went to park. Somehow, this took us out of the airport and back all the way around again, finally leaving us at the parking area for our terminal.

There we were met by one of the Parking Authority employees who used to work in the cashier lanes before they realized that people with credit cards (i.e., everyone who flies) don't need a cashier to pay for parking. So they loiter by the entrances to the lots, helping people push the button to get a ticket. This time, he tells us that lots A, B, C, and D are all full and we'd have to park in the E/F. Lot. This is not ideal for a flight from terminal A.

But we manage to park the car and head into the terminal, only to get herded into the massive Terminal E security line. Once through there, we needed only to walk the entire length of the airport to get to the gate. It's only about a half a mile, but that's a long way to walk indoors. All told, it took almost an hour from our original arrival at the airport.

Made the plane though and the flight was fine. And then we go to Miami airport.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise; Miami airport, at least in its current incarnation, is an absolute disaster from a traveler's perspective. The walk from the gate to baggage claim took at least 15 minutes- so long that I was sure we'd gone around in a big circle. But no, it was just a big, curvy terminal. Terminal D in Miami has 60 gates. That's as many as Philadelphia Airport terminal B, C, D and E combined, to give you a sense of the scale, and there's lots of room for shops padded in there.

Baggage claim itself was routine, but then the real journey began, as we sought out the rental car. I had made sure to rent from an "in-terminal" company so I wouldn't have to endure a 10 minute shuttle bus ride like I did last time we were here. So we search for and eventually find the signs pointing to rental cars. These signs look nothing like the other airport signs. They're not overhead and official-looking, they're purple with yellow type and look like something advertising Chili's.

I don't even remember what we did next. Took an escalator up, I think, which brought us to sign point to the left for MIA Mover to rental cars. This leads us to a moving sidewalk, then another, then another, then another, then another, then another, then another, then a left turn and over a bridge, then another moving sidewalk and another. Since we've been on moving things the whole time, we assumed we were doing the MIA Mover. But no. This 15 minute walk took us to a train. We then waited and took a train to the rental car building, which is huge and cavernous and contains about a dozen car rental companies.

But where were the cars? Finally we saw a sign pointing to Rental Car Pickup. Actually, there were 2 signs, pointing in opposite directions. Whew, that was just one pointing to an elevator and one toward an escalator. We get to the car, finally, over an hour since our plane landed. And keep in mind that nothing has gone wrong in any way. We followed the plan the designers had in mind.

But is this really the right way to set things up? Is that what they had in mind when they designed this almost shockingly dumb and downright unfriendly way of arranging things? Isn't someone in charge of making sure the initial experience in Miami is a positive one? If that was your job, sir or madam, you have failed.

It also seemed like an ordeal getting to the hotel, though that again was a reasonably short ride. Pouring rain and traffic and lots of route changes will give you that feeling, I guess. Finally we got here, and of course our room is all the way at the end of the hallway. Actually the end of a corridor off the end of the hallway. The room is very nice. From landing to in the room, including a 20 minute drive, two hours and five minutes. Maybe we'll keep it simple tomorrow.

School Days

We've been back at school working since September 2, and as of this afternoon, we have completed our first seven day cycle of classes. We have a half day tomorrow, and then off for a few more days, and then school really gets going. Except that I have to take Friday off to go to my own kid's school event. Whatever.

I'm completely grateful for even this little bit of school, considering what happened last year. At this time last year I was in 24/7 agony with shingles, which hung on until early in 2013. In ways, the year before was even more difficulty, when I was dealing with some very difficult and traumatic family issues that made each day a struggle. So when they ask me what are my goals for this school year, it's a singular. It's normalcy.

Of course, normalcy can be hard to come by in a place like this, because it is incorrigibly chaotic. Today, for example, the school was giving out iPads to the students. In order to receive their iPads, students had to sign a form accepting responsibility, etc, etc., which we handed out to alphabetically grouped mobs of students. There were so many people simultaneously asking for the forms that I literally forgot the names of students that I'd known for several years. Very embarrassing.

Then, in spite of having been told yesterday that the iPad Deployment, or iPD as we called it, would take the entire period, so I gave homework due the following day. It was announced after most of the students had their devices, that they should go to class. As in my class. Which I had not planned.

By the time I got to the classroom most of the students were charging their iPads and/or updating their operating systems. We started working, and after about 15 minutes, that nobody should be updating operating systems at that time because it would overwhelm the network. Well duh. Maybe should have thought about that, I dunno, yesterday? We had an ensuing conversation in class about how despite the veneer of organization, that there really wasn't any. I responded that this was one of the things I liked so much about working at this place. The kids all found that funny, but it's true. I don't like structure and I don't mind chaos. It plays to my strengths.

It struck me as I left school today how happy I was being there. I've always enjoyed my job, but this year it's really been nothing but fun. And hard work, of course, but it leaves me feeling good at the end of the day. Except then on the way home I yelled at a 12 year-old boy I didn't know. He came flying out of a side street though a stop sign without even looking and I just barely was able to swerve out of the way. I pulled the car over to block him, got out and did my best to scare him. Don't really think I succeeded, but I did my best.

Tomorrow I'm off for a long weekend in Miami. Check back for updates.

Not random notes because they're all by me

I was talking with some relatives the other day (just mentioning it because that's kind of unusual for me) and our generation's need for reading glasses came up. We were noting how much we preferred dealing with things that we could read without the glasses. I had been in a hotel the previous night and was taking a shower, during which I reached for the toiletries (I guess that's what they're called- my first thought was condiments, but I don't think that's right) and realized I couldn't read the labels. There were 4 bottles, once of which was bound to be shampoo, but which one? Putting conditioner or body wash or even mouthwash on by mistake wouldn't have been disastrous, but skin moisturizer would have been annoying to have to wash out and would smell for hours. I went for the orangey one, which turned out to be correct, but can us boomers have some larger type, please?

As usual, I've been riding my bike around a lot. One of the things I like is that I go on roads where I'd never be otherwise, either to make up new routes or to avoid traffic, bad pavement, and other dangers and annoyances. So today I took Ardmore Avenue across Haverford Rd. and immediately saw a road called Golfview Drive to the left. I turned in immediately, because aside from liking he punny name, I thought it would be pleasant to view some golf. I know there's a course there. I think they may have had some kind of golf contest or whatever they call it earlier this year. Anyway, I'm not a golf fan, but thought it would be a pleasant thing to view.

What a disappointment! I can tell you that there is no place riding along Golfview Drive were you can view golf. What you can view is a bunch of house that can view golf from their backyards, but even that was only one side of the street. I felt gypped, but there's nothing I can do except warn future generations about making the same mistake. I must note that it was a very pleasant road to ride on and view things other than golf.

On the same ride, I was riding along next to a stream when I started to see detour signs for Manoa Rd. I was planning to travel on Manoa Rd., so I noticed. I made my usual turns and realized I was on a very unusual detour, because the detour is Manoa Rd. I've never seen a road be its own detour before. I wonder how they came on that. I took my usual route and the detour both and went on my merry way.

Random good deeds

I just had this weird thing happen. I buy prepared food at this place called The Coopermarket near my house. Next door is this little boutique that I've never seen anyone go in and out of except for the owner. They'd been closed to a while for renovations, but apparently reopened recently.

I was walking out of Coopermarket and past the boutique and I hear a pounding on the window. I look over and some woman is motioning me inside. I go to the door and she asks me if I could help her. She tells me I look like someone who is good with mechanical things. This isn't really true. I'm mediocre with mechanical things, though I can usually manage in a pinch.

In any event, she shows me this little TV set with a built-in VHS player, with a little beige box attached to a rabbit-ear antenna with a wire on one side and the TV on the other. She says she can't get the TV to get any kind of picture. She keeps pushing buttons on the little beige box, which is branded something like Zimcor. That thing is supposed to give her a picture but it didn't appear to be doing anything. So I played around with it a little and she starts telling me about how it used to work. "You'd just push the buttons and it would change channels. The TV stayed on 3 or 4, but now I can't get it to go to 4, and all I can get is channel 29, which is in Spanish (emphasis hers)"

This was not useful information, so I stopped her for a second and said "I worked in cable TV for 20 years and I've never seen anything like this Zimcor thing." She says, "You don't know what it is?" And I reply, "Ma'am, you don't even know what this is and it's your thing. Nobody knows what one of these is."

But I decided to look at the back, because that's what us repair types do (and I really did used to do this kind of thing as a job), and I noticed a DC input. So I tell her it looks like it ought to be plugged in. This seems vaguely familiar so she hands me a basket full of obsolete electronics and cords. I root around until I find a promising-looking cord, plug it into the back of the Zimcor, and incredibly, the TV picture pops on. I tried not to look too surprised and she looked absolutely thrilled. I think she was happy with getting the TV to work, but I think what gave her the most pleasure was her wisdom in choosing me of all people to come in and help.

Nothing but crickets

It's the time of year when crickets begin to invade my house. I don't think enough about the intellectual capacity crickets to think that they're really planning on going inside someone's house, I just think they're looking for someplace warm andthey  feel warmth coming from the house and hang out nearby. Then they just hop right in when we open the door.

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, the only thing I knew about crickets were from Pinocchio. I think there are crickets even in Brooklyn, and I know that was chirping stuff outside during the summer, but I never really thought about what they were or the possibility of them coming into the house. And in Disney's Pinocchio, the cricket was dapper charming helpful little fellow.

Then one day, for some reason, I read the original Pinocchio. It was written by some Italian guy, I don't think it was da Vinci or Verdi, but it was some famous Italian guy I think. In the book, Jimmy Cricket is a scold. He's always trying to tell Pinocchio what to do and Pinocchio eventually gets frustrated with him and eventually squashes him with a shoe. Now that I have crickets in meeting my house, this seems like a much better outcome than what happens in the movie. Not that I know what happens to the cricket in the movie anyway. I can't even remember what happens to Pinocchio once he turns into a real boy. It can't be anything really good. He's basically an orphan, with some little old puppetmaker guy who'll probably be dead in 18 months as his stepdad. He has no skills or education or actual family. I guess that's okay as an outcome for a puppet, but it wouldn't be my first choice. It would be ironic if he ended up being a puppetmaker though, don't you think? "Oh yeah, I used to be just like you."

What the hell happened here?

I couldn't decide whether to come to the Phillies game tonight. They're playing San Diego, a team that probably has fewer players I've heard of than any team in baseball. Their cleanup hitter is named Jesus Guzman. No, I don't know who he is either, but he has 60 hits so far this year, which is only 60 more than me. And the Phillies are playing a team primarily made up of minor leaguers getting a tryouts, purportedly against major league competition. I have my doubts about that tonight. The guy currently batting is playing his first ever major league game.

Also arguing against attendance is the fact that it's 90 degrees out and muggy, and I'm tired from my first two days of work. But there are two things pulling me here. 

The first is why the hell would anyone come to this game? Really. Why? So that's intriguing. But I'd have to say that the biggest motivator for me to come is summer assignments. Not my summer assignments, mind you. I did everything I was supposed to this summer. No, it's students' summer assignments. I'm supposed to grade them, apparently. Summer assignments are packets of practice math problems we give the kids to remind them of what they were supposed to have learned the previous year.

In the abstract, I like summer assignments. The only problem with them is that now that the students finished them, I'm supposed to grade them. To be clear, I have no objection to grading papers. It's pretty easy to grade math papers, compared to English or History essays. The problem is that they're (relatively) long and they come in right at the beginning of the year, before I've gotten into any kind of school rhythm. To put it more succinctly, it messes with my mojo. So I come to the game as a particularly effective way of procrastinating grading.

In the past, to be perfectly honest, I've not taken the grading of summer assignments to be a sacred duty, and I'll even admit to not grading some of them. Okay, most of them. The kids don't mind, because as long as they did the papers, their ungradedness is not their fault and so I give them full credit. This year, however, I'm really grading them. 

I'm not sure why this is. I can blame my new office mate, a teacher in her first year at the school and understandably anxious to impress. She started grading hers as soon as she'd finished her first class. I'll have more to say about her later, but I can't really blame her. I don't need to look good compared to her, which is a good thing. But her industriousness inspires me to some extent, plus I've come off two horrendous school years and am trying to make a sort of fresh start. I've tried to organize my stuff, with a small, but noticeable degree of success, and I'm trying to be more together.

But really, when it comes right down to it, I owe it to the students. The ones who worked hard deserve the credit more than the ones who blew it off, and I want to give them that. I'm always inclined to mistrust any signs of industriousness on my part. I am unabashedly lazy, but who knows maybe, as I approach my 58th birthday, I'm finally growing out of it. Man, I hope not.

On the hopeful side, note that I am blogging about grading summer assignments rather than actually grading them.

New school year (updated 1:40)

There are not a lot of things that make me nervous at my advanced age, but the first day of school is one of them. Whether I'm meeting all of my students for the first time or reconnecting with most of them, everything is new and different and unexpected. I know, it seems weird that teaching AP Calculus for the third time can feel completely different, but it is.

Honestly, this nervousness is the reason that even after doing this for 10 years(!) now, I don't find anything about it boring. The interaction between students and material is never the same from one day to the next. We all keep growing, but the kids especially change radically not only from year to year, but from month to month.

This year is especially nerve-wracking because we merged with another school, bringing in a much larger student body and faculty. This means a certain level of chaos, and I love chaos in a supposedly structured environment. We will see how it goes. I've augmented the chaos by preparing only minimally.

I'll update this as the day goes on, so check back. We're only up to the opening assembly.

I'm 3 classes in right now. Most of the day has been filled with my favorite pair of questions- where am I and what am I doing? I don't know the kids, I don't know where my rooms are, and I don't always know where to start. But I'm muddling through. More later.

Moving in, day 2

Sunday got off to an interesting start, because when I went out for my morning walk, I encountered the moving-in line for my daughter's dormitory. It was long, but it seemed fairly routine, until the real action got going. My younger daughter is going to a music school, and so the first question you ask someone after their name is what's your instrument. So Jeanne, from Macungie, Pennsylvania and her son whose name escapes me, who plays the drums, was sitting in a folding chair, waiting for her husband Dan return from parking the car. Her son appeared and asked her to come up with to the room with him. She asked if I minded watching the stuff until then return.

I said sure and sat down in the chair. About 30 seconds later the sky opened up and rain began pouring down in buckets. Thunder, lightning all at stuff. Someone from the college came running around with tarps, which I put over the kid's stuff. A few minutes later, a very perplexed Dan came back to find nobody he knew and some strange man sitting in his folding chair. We had a friendly conversation while we kept ourselves dry and tried to keep the kid's things covered with the tarp. The rain was pouring down and people were scrambling around, but everything seemed to be going okay until someone pulled the fire alarm. Ha ha ha. Everybody then comes pouring out of the dorm into the pouring rain. Lots of pouring everywhere. Then the firetrucks showed up.

At this point, I had no particular purpose to be there but I didn't want to leave the covered area where I was standing. Eventually it was all clear and people went back into the dorm and continued loading up and soon the rain stopped. I took a lap through the Public Garden and went back to my room with stories to tell.

Our own move was more routine, although there was some rain in the middle of it. The order of affairs was for our daughter to go get her room key, then get in line to move her stuff up to the room. She went off to find the KeyMaster, while Ronnie and I got in line for the freight elevator. We were staying in a hotel that was less than two blocks from the school, so it seemed ridiculous to bring the car around, but the key to that working was to get a hotel luggage cart. Considering that the hotel was very full between school move-in, the Red Sox, and the impending Boston Tatoo Convention, it took some serious skulking around the lobby to find a recently abandoned cart but eventually I did.

After a trip to the parking lot to load up and a rather harrowing trip down a ramp among cars into a traffic jam, I trundled the thing over to the school, luggage dripping off both sides until I got some unexpected help from a very energetic guy. I asked him why he appeared so fresh and full of pep, and he told me that he had hired two people to help them move his kids stuff into the dorm, and it was the best hundred dollars ever spent. So he was more than happy to help move my cart little bit.

I got in there just as my wife had become first in line for the elevator, so in and up we went with all our stuff. The dorm room itself was almost shockingly nice, with carpet and a separate bathroom. There were bunk beds, but just the top bunks, with dresser and desk underneath. This seems a very efficient arrangement, as long as you don't mind working a bed over your head. There's enough room to set up some musical equipment, but the college does not allow practicing/playing in dorm rooms. That's a good idea, I think, considering that everyone in the dorm plays something. It would be fun to have an Everyone-In-The-Dorm-Practice-At-The-Same-Time Day, but I'm not holding my breath. There are practice rooms on every floor.

For a little while, I participated in the unpacking, but eventually first returned the luggage cart to the hotel and then camped out in the hallway with roommate-dad, where we discovered that we have had pretty much the same career path. Very coincidental and strange.

Eventually, we said goodbye and let her get oriented. We decided to stay on for an extra day, which turned out to be a mixed-at-best decision. This required changing hotels. If you want to see the review of the second hotel, see here.  By the time we finished all of this, we were pretty exhausted, so we ordered takeout from Legal Seafood and called it a night.

One move too many, part 1

Over the summer, we realized that our two kids need to be dropped at college. On consecutive days. The original plan was to rent two vans, drive them to New York, drop one kid and one van in New York, and then move onto Boston. This seems like a good plan, until we found out one kid really wanted to be in Boston at 6 PM. This would have required leaving Philadelphia really really early. We absolutely did not want to do this, so my wife and one van and kid went straight to Boston while New York.

Getting the vans was fun. You can't drive to the rental car place to get a van, so on Friday night my daughter dropped me to get van #1 and on Saturday morning I took public transit to the airport to get van #2, starting with riding my bike to the train station at 7AM.

Amazingly, the New York drop off went pretty smoothly. I pulled right up to the school on Broadway,  where I was told by a very serious security guard that I could only park there for around 20 minutes. In past years, I would have made a fuss about how nobody was there and why would I have to move, but since my incident over the summer, my spider sense told me that this would be a waste of time. The good news was that they gave us a parking permit and asked me to fill in the time of arrival. I was strategic about my choice.

The only difficult part of this process was the sheer tininess of her room, which required moving pieces around like in one of those 15 numbers in 16 boxes puzzles. But we finally fit everything in with surprising ease. Maybe that's because we forgot to bring stuff (like her office chair), but that's a quibble.

Then it was time to drop off the car. First, I had to put gas in the minivan or endure the $9.29 per gallon refill charge. This required a visit to the Shell station on 96th St. It's a normal-looking gas station, but who do you think is buying gas at 96th and First? Yep, it's cab drivers. Lots of them. I had to circle the pumps trying to decide whether there was a protocol or every car for itself. Quick analysis showed that the protocol was in fact every car for itself. I wormed my way up to the pump, filled up and was on my way, having only been honked by 5 different cabs in the process.

I've rented cars in central cities a bunch of times, but the Budget rental place was one of the best. Three narrow driveways side-by-side face the street, the 3rd, the one with the steep ramp up, was the drop off. The ramp leads to a dimly lit space, where I stood by myself until some guy told me it was okay to go downstairs to the office, which was between driveways 1 and 2.

After successfully completing the drop off, I grabbed a cab and went to Penn Station, just in time to grab lunch (it was 3:45 at this point) and scramble onto a train to Boston. Its a pleasant enough ride, if a bit long. Or at least it seems long except compared to the Boston van, which took 7 hours to go 250 miles. I got in around 9:30 a mere 14 1/2 hours after I started. End of part 1.

While the gettin's good

The last day on Martha's Vineyard was spent waiting to go home. I hate leaving late in the day, because there are fewer options in case things go wrong. And this was a busy Sunday in peak season, and there was uncertainty as to when the Obama's were leaving, since the approach of the president sends the airport into a complete seizure. The last thing we needed was to have a bunch of sun-baked politicos making us miss our connection in Boston.

As I noted in a prior entry, most of the flights to the Vineyard are on Cape Air and their little 10-seaters. Sometimes, this allows a pretty cursory security check, but not when you're going onto Tarmac that the President might trod upon. The MVY airport has what one might call modest space for departing passengers. The existing terminal is a palace compared to the quonset hut that served when we first began going there 20 years ago. The terminal is quite roomy, but the space is poorly distributed in that about 40% of it is devoted to rental cars and baggage claim, a room in which I have never seen more than a dozen people. Another 40% goes to the ticket counters, which is probably about right. Only 10% goes to in-terminal passenger waiting, 5% to security and 5% to gateside waiting.

What this means is that after you've cleared security there is no bathroom, though there is, according to the TSA guy, a dark, smelly, full-of-bugs portapotty outside. There is a tent outside and enough space for around 50 people to congregate, but you can't go there until an airline employee lets everyone go outside right before you actually get on the plane. This is made clear by the very official signs at the gate.

The scrawl in the upper left corner says "Not TSA," so only airline employees, not the guys running the x-ray machine, who have never been spotted in that room. I'm not sure what the symbols in the lower right corners are. In other contexts, I would assume that they were smiley faces, but this is a secure area we're talking about.

Note also that not only do all flights leave from Gate 1, but that there has clearly been a major problem with boarding passes saying otherwise, causing someone to underline two words once and another 3 times. I've never seen Gates 2 or 3. Gate 4 is an actual regular gate in the fence outside by the parking lot. Our boarding passes were savvy enough to not have any gate listed, since as we all know, all flights leave from Gate 1.

Our flight, or our section of the flight anyway, got delayed by almost an hour, chewing up most of our layover, especially since you need to leave the Cape Air terminal and then re-clear security at the US Airways terminal, but we made it to our connecting flight just in time. One of our three bags made it. The other two showed up midday on Monday.

Still at the Vineyard

There's a song called "The Summer Place" by Fountains of Wayne that I like- any song that starts with the lyric "She's been afraid of the Cuisinart since 1977" can't be all bad. The song recounts the ups and downs of the family summer home and ends with the bittersweet line, "The injuries fade but the memories last a lifetime."

I understand this song. It's the morning of our second full day here and my fight or flight reflex is in full gear. I'm not much of a fighter, so I'm trying to flee in some fashion.

I'm not really sure why I feel this way. Nothing bad has happened and I don't anticipate anything awful on the horizon, aside from dinner for twenty tonight, and that can be ameliorated somewhat with the proper application of adult beverages. And yet when I went out for my bike ride this morning, it took nearly 20 miles for my head to clear. I am, I think as much as anyone else, comfortable in my own skin, but not today.

I think there are people my age who are able to be around large family gatherings with no baggage, but I'm not one of them. Blame it on my not being able to articulate what felt bad or on my burying whatever was bothering me instead of dealing with it, but after nearly 40 years of coming here, there's just too much accumulated muck for me to take a step without my foot getting stuck in it.

That being said, it's been quite beautiful here. I went to the beach yesterday and lay out in the full sun from 11AM until 2PM, just the way dermatologists tell to. And of course, because I diligently used sunscreen, most of my skin is fine except for oddly-shaped blobs and patches where I guess I applied less than the circumstances call for.

The biking has been fantastic, in part because the Obamas are down the road and all the traffic is blocked off from the other side of the island. Said roadblock is the main topic of conversation around here, because if there's one thing rich vacationers hate, it's detours. You'd think that having to detour and drive an extra 15 minutes would simply provide a little local color to one's vacation, but no, it's a nightmare.

So we leave tomorrow. Hopefully the Obama's are leaving earlier in the day, because if there's one thing I hate it's having to wait to check in for a flight behind the president. It's just a nightmare.

To the Vineyard!

I'm in Martha's Vineyard now, hanging out at the family house. This is about as mixed as bags get as far as having a good time. The beach is pretty and there's a nice pool and stuff, but having this many people around and being related to nearly all of them is not the most relaxing thing for me.

Getting here is its own thing. There's no direct service from Philly, so you have to change planes somewhere and get over here on something called Cape Air. Cape Air is a regional carrier that has a bunch of little planes that they fly around Cape Cod in the summer and Florida during the winter.

The planes they fly are these little 10-seaters, with the pilot being one of the 10. Someone gets to sit next to the pilot and look at all the instruments. This is really flying. If you get on a major airline plane, you might as well be on a bus. Youre pretty much completely removed from the whole airplaneness of it. When you're flying Cape Air, you feel every wind current and you see absolutely everything, out both sides of the plane and out the front window as well. You feel uncomfortably close to everything that's going on. 

Adding to the spirit of fun this trip was a series of operational issues, as they call them. The staff is Boston appeared to be a half dozen college students working summer jobs. They have several flat screen monitors that display nothing except the airline name and an offer for discount tickets. They called a bunch of people to the podium and told them that their flight to Nantucket was canceled and that they were getting what they called a party bus (pronounced patty bus in the local accent) to take them to the ferry.

Then, it was time for our flight. There were two sections, numbered 1 and 2. For some reason, the second section got called first, then our section. You board these planes by going down a staircase and huddling at the bottom until they let you out onto the Tarmac to walk to the plane. We get called, check in, and go downstairs, then outside, then someone calls and says they weren't supposed to take us outside yet. We go back inside and wait for 10 minutes or so. Then someone comes downstairs and tells me and my family that the 3 of us have to go back upstairs. We do, and 2 other people go down to take our place. 

They had miscounted how many people were getting on the plane. This is hard to do when there are only 9 of us. Then it took them a while to figure out that to have one fewer passenger, that they needed to take a party of 3 off and replace them (us) with a party of 2. Then we joined another group for what I guess was the secret third section. Downstairs we went, then outside and then to the plane. We get there and there was no pilot. I guessnit really was a secret section. So we stand outside the plane while we wait for the pilot to show up, inspect the plane, then invite us in. 

So a half hour after we originally boarded, we were finally on a plane. At least the flight itself was routine. I hope things go more smoothly dealing with my extended family, but I'm not confident about that. More to come.

What are those two dots called?

You know how sometimes you see the two dots over an o? What do you think that's called (and I use the singular because the two dots are a unit. There is never just one dot)? It turns out that it's called 2 things. If it's over one vowel it's an umlaut, which itself sounds like an appetizer, and it changes the way the vowel is pronounced. If it's over a double vowel, it's a diaeresis, which looks like a medical condition, is pronounced, according to the New Yorker, "die heiresses," and gives an idea of which vowel has emphasis or if they are to be said as a diphthong, which itself sounds like, oh never mind.

For me, I'm going to use it as an umlaut, to accent the word boring, or böring as I will now call it. It should be pronounced as if there's a double o, like booring.

Why am I doing this? Because I've decided I hate the word, or at least the way it's overused. People have begun to attach the adjective böring to describe anything that isn't as exciting and attention-grabbing as, say, a new text message or Snapchat. Books are böring, classes are böring, hanging out and relaxing is böring.

Here's my thesis: Anything can be termed böring if you pay it insufficient attention and refuse to look past whatever immediate gratification it can bring. And on the flip side, anything can be interesting if you really pay attention and think about it. Böring is not an intrinsic characteristic of anything- it's a frame of mind, dependent totally on the person.

You know this is true; how else could, for example, two people go to a museum and one describe it as fantastic and another as böring? It's the same stuff. How can it be both? It's a bunch of art or science or whatever, and it only gathers adjectives when people attach them.

This problem is particularly prevalent among adolescents. My kids used to sit at their computers and phones and converse by Facebook or text how böred they were. And I used to say- "Of course you're böred, you're sitting around looking at a screen instead of actually doing something." Whoever you're "chatting" with? Go see them! Walk, take the bus, something! Get up! Go do something!

I know this somehow our fault as baby boomer parents, because everything is, but I'm sorry, get over it.  I am proud to say that I am never böred. I can always find something or someone worthy of my attention, and if you're actually thinking about something, that's engagement, not böredom. Give it a try. Think, "I am going to look for something interesting in everything I see and interact with today. I will not dismiss anything, either because of my first impression, or even worse, because of what someone else said."

And if someone tells you that a class, teacher, book, place or whatever is böring, then tell them no, that the greater likelihood is that you're böring.

Fault lines in Cape May

Cape May concluded itself reasonably well. As tends to happy on family vacae, we were fairly sick of each other by the end of it, or more accurately the kids had kind of had enough of the parents. This brought an end to the sitdown dinners and the beginning of takeout. Fortunately, there's no shortage of that in Cape May, be it from a sandwich shop or a pub.


I grew up in a household influenced by Tom Lehrer. This included an admonition that he gives on one of his albums, where in describing a movie where all the characters bemoan their inability to communicate says, "if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is shut up."

However, I can say with virtual certainty that having a family workshop on communication skills is a good idea. Nobody is a good at this as they would like to be. One thing you have to know as a parent, however, is that your kids are going to be mad. About something. This also fits my contention that every parent screws up their kid. That's one of the joys of parenthood. You may not do it on purpose, you probably don't do it on purpose but you still do it and then you sit and watch what happens next.

So if you are like me and have done some bit of therapy over the years, you spent some time convincing yourself that the mistakes you've made are not your fault. And that you shouldn't feel bad. That's what individual therapy does. Family work is an opportunity to find out that it was your fault, and that you have to live with the consequences. I find this somehow comforting.

The other thing I found equal parts disturbing and freeing is that the psychological profession has so expanded its definition of the word abuse (which now means doing pretty much anything that makes someone else feel bad, or maybe even less-than-good) that any parent, or in fact, any human being who has ever interacted with another human being, is guilty of abuse. Based on what I said last paragraph, this is both your fault and not your fault, depending on who you ask.

So where does that leave us? For me, somewhere other than Cape May. Next weekend, it'll be time to go visit my parents at their vacation house in Martha's Vineyard, where we can resume our past communication practices. What a relief!

Cape May blogging

Hanging out in Cape May this weekend- all four of us. I haven't been in Cape May in a really really long time. When I was in biz school around 1980, one of my housemates knew people (a couple of teachers from George School, I believe) had bought this run down old hotel called the Chalfonte and were fixing it up on the cheap by trading room and board for student labor. So a few of us came down here at least twice, spent our days sanding and stripping and painting, and were given lunch and dinner and free evenings to just hang out. I remember it being hard work and great fun. Apparently, they still do this.

This time, we wanted to be in a "nice place," so we chose something called the Ocean Club Hotel. It looks lovely on the website, and I wouldn't say that the site is totally deceptive. It's just an overstatement. This is a funny mix between a big beach motel and a nice hotel. You walk into the very nice lobby if you enter from the front. If however, you are arriving by car, you walk in through the back door, which brings you into the hotel on a concrete ramp, leading to a painted cement floor and hallway that, while inside, looks suspiciously as if it were originally exposed to the elements.

I don't really know much about the history of this place, but I would guess that it was originally a large motel that is trying to transform itself into a nice hotel. The attempt seems sincere and is not just putting a glossy face on things. The people who work here are professional and helpful. They are, however, stuck with the bones of motel.

We are on the 6th floor, in what is affectionately referred to as "The Penthouse Suite." If simply being on the top floor makes something a penthouse, so be it, but there's nothing special about either the floor itself or the rooms. Don't get me wrong. The rooms are decent sized and pleasant, with balconies that either directly or indirectly face the ocean. But they're bland and dull and the hallway was clearly originally outside.

I could go on and nitpick everything, but I'll leave that for my Tripadvisor review. The main problem, or perhaps the elephant in the suite, is the elevator situation. There are about 20 rooms on each of 6 floors, and there is exactly one slow 6-8 passenger elevator. Let's just say it's not adequate. I've heard from people who work in the hotel that they will be putting in a second elevator over the winter. That means it would take only slightly longer to wait for that elevator than for the existing one. Having a room on the top floor suddenly becomes much less attractive when it takes 5 minutes to get there or back.

More to come.

Weight, what?

Anyone who knows me or has spent any time talking about me knows that I'm obsessed with my weight. I talk about almost nothing but. How may ounces I've gained or lost, recounting every calorie consumed or burned.

Okay, that paragraph may be totally false, but this summer, I have begun focusing intently on my weight. Yes, I know, I'm spending far too much time around adolescent girls and now I'm acting like one. Honestly, though, I've known enough people with eating issues that I take the matter very seriously. What happened, though, is that last spring I hit 180 pounds and a little bit beyond for the first time. I'm not quite 5'8" and that's a lot of pounds. At the same time, I got a call from my doctor saying my cholesterol was over 200, which I guess is the dividing line between okay and not. I checked and looked at how you lower your cholesterol and I was already doing everything you're supposed to do, except for losing weight.

So I set off to lose. But nobody's interested in how I'm losing the weight, not even me. What's interestinger is the effect it's had on my behavior. It started innocently enough, with a scale in the bathroom. I would check it each morning to get as clean a read as possible. So I could see my weight bounce up and down, day to day, but with a definite trendline downwards.

Eventually, I lost 12 pounds, down to 169. Then, unfortunately, I got sick, and there was a two-week period where I ate almost nothing, and my weight dropped close to 160. My clothes all stopped fitting and I felt awful, so my doctor told me I had to gain that last part back. So I did and settled back into the low 170's.

Wow, that's even more boring than the other stuff I'd edited out because it was too dull. Back to the behavioral. Any nutritionist will tell you that you should weight yourself no more than 3 times a week, because it just bounces around and you can get obsessive about it. But I decided it would be interesting to see what the difference was between when I went to bed and when I woke up. It's more than one would think. For me at least, 2 to 3 pounds.

Where did it go? What happens to weight you lose anyway? The law of Conservation of Mass says that mass can be neither created or destroyed. But that's in a closed system, and anything that breathes, eats and excretes is not at all a closed system. So I guess the answer is it goes out. Was it all just from breathing out moisture? Or is something more sinister at work?

Of course, one thing leads to another, and over time, I took to weighing myself at every opportunity. It's not like I'm sneaking off upstairs to secretly weight in. But if I'm in the neighborhood of the scale, I'm on it. I now know that my weight is consistently lowest at around 6 PM, right before dinner. Right after a long bike ride is good too, but a few gulps of Gatorade wipes that out. There are all kinds of other creative times to weigh yourself as well. You can learn a lot about your bodily functions if you want to, but fortunately, my curiosity on that score is limited.

Going to the city

I spent Wednesday evening in the city. What city? New York, of course. What other city is there? Even when I lived in Brooklyn, Manhattan was "the city." You never called it Manhattan.

I arrived by train and walked up to the theater district. I would be remiss if I did not mention how interesting it was trying to walk away from Penn Station at 5:05. It's a bit like swimming against the tide, except sweatier and smellier and more likely to get stepped on. But I found a good non-Starbucks coffee shop to hang out and watch the humidity settle on the passersby.

Part of the fun is enjoying the calm I feel as a native in the midst of absolute chaos. I wouldn't call what was happening around Penn Station as chaos; it's quite deliberate and purposeful and insistent. 42nd Street, on the other hand, is genuine chaos. People looking up, down, left, right, behind and forward, stopping suddenly, lining up for this and that. Milling around Madame Tussaud's and Ripley, conveniently located next door to one another. I know exactly where I am and where I'm going and can saunter along toward my destined dinner with my father.

I had realized at some point that I hadn't spent any time with my father in a while. There are many reasons for that, not the least of which is that he lives 150 miles away. But on this occasion we both made the effort to get together.

After the show, I had nearly an hour before my train, so I walked around Times Square. As someone who grew up using the place mostly as somewhere to change subway lines, it took me a long time to see the attraction of it as a tourist destination. Not anymore. At 10:30 on a Wednesday night it was jammed with people walking around, eating, drinking, looking at the giant video screens, having their picture taken with various cartoon characters (lots of Spider-Mans, all wearing backpacks for some reason).

At one point, I walked through a plaza in time to see a policeman holding a guy bent over a squad car, and noticed first that lots of people were taking pictures, second, that the policeman was looking at the camera, and finally, that he then let that guy walk away and then bent another guy over the car and repeated the process. You know, Paris may be the City of Light, and there may be Disney stores all over but you can't get this anywhere but the city.