Hermit Crab Festival starts today!

Today is opening day of the first annual Hermit Crab Festival.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Words of wisdom

Was glancing through "Tales of Beedle the Bard" and came across this bit of wisdom from Professor Dumbledore: "Truth is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution." And I think, hmmm, maybe he’s onto something there.

I have read six of the seven books in the Harry Potter series. My wife and son are gone for a long weekend while the calendar turns. Seems like a good time to curl up with the last one.

I also will (finally!) be getting more Ian Hunter songs onto my iPod. I have been wanting to put “Ships” on for the longest time, but that song is not available via iTunes. One of my Christmas presents was a record player that has the ability to record music from vinyl onto a CD. My new Macbook Pro (yes, the one machined out of a solid block of aluminum and the fancy touch pad) does a quick rip and the music is iPod ready.

This is will be a slow process, as one has to play the entire LP. Although I really like the unit I was given, I have to manually separate the tracks. So the remote has been permanently affixed to my hip for the past few hours. Since getting home this evening, I’ve recorded Roger Daltrey’s “Ride a Rock Horse”; Ian Hunter’s “You’re never alone with a schizophrenic” (Ships!); Arlo Guthrie’s “Amigo”; "Misfits" by the Kinks, and Gordon Lightfoot’s “Endless Wire”. Nazareth's "Hair of the Dog" is going on now. Do you see a pattern? No? Good, neither do I.

OK - my last one for the night is John Mellencamp's "Scarecrow". It was recorded in the mid 1980's - in a period when depressed crop prices drove a lot of farmers (particularly in the Midwest) out of business. In addition to the title song, which gives me shivers every time I hear "ninety-eight crosses...", this line from "You've got to stand for something" has resonated with me tonight: "We've got to start respectin' this world/Or it's gonna turn around and bite off our face". This was written more than twenty years ago. Why do I feel like Rip Van Winkle?

An eleven year old's sense of humor

My son and I went to play basketball today, but first we had to purchase a pump to blow up the ball. After the store, we got in the car and he took the pump in the front seat with him. With a big smile on his face, he placed the end of the hose in his crotch, laughed and said “Time to pump it up!”.

Just one of the small joys of being the parent of an 11 year old with an active imagination...

Who do you snuggle up to at night?

My wife had a hard time sleeping the other night because it was so cold in our bedroom. When she mentioned that the next morning, I started teasing her with “well, all you had to do is roll over and find the warm body”. Just to demonstrate, I had her lay where she was sleeping and then roll over towards my side of the bed. Yep – all it took was just one roll – from her right side to her back and then onto her left side – and there she was, laying next to where I was.

Funny, but sad. That the notion of snuggling up to a warm body in bed on a cold night is a foreign concept to her.

I used to feel as if there was physical barrier between us in bed. Not so much anymore. But there is still this sense of distance. A sense that, apparently, is shared by both of us.

Speaking in tongues

One ongoing issue between my wife and I is verbal communication. There is often a discordance between the intent of a verbal statement, what is actually verbalized, and what is understood by the speaker.

Here is one example: Yesterday, I came back into my office and found the message light blinking on my phone. I listened to the message. It was about our son's choir concert last night.

This is an accurate transcription of the main part of her message.

..” just want to talk to you about tonight and the possibility of going taking (our son) out (long pause) before he gets home (pause) cause you know think the possibility that things go badly”...

It was not clear to me exactly what she wanted to talk to me about except that it had something to do with our son and his choir concert. I had several possibilities. One was her taking our son out to eat after school before the concert. Another was concern about the weather – the “things going badly” phrase.

I called her back, said that I had listened to her message and paused, expecting her to expand on what she wanted to talk about.

Miscommunication ensued. She was under the impression that she had mentioned going/taking our son out to dinner after the choir concert. However, my initial conversation gambit had to do with trying to figure out what she was talking about - which was NOT about either of the possibilities that I had in mind. Within a minute, it was clear that we were not on the same page, so to speak. Rather than stepping back to figure out what page each of us was on, she immediately went into a diatribe about how my hearing is deteriorating and how this was too difficult...

With some effort, we finally figured out that she and our son had had a conversation about going out to a nice restaurant after the choir performance and this was the intended topic of her phone message. I said this was fine with me, so we went on to talk about the clothes he was going to where and about a friend of his from ice hockey coming over on tonight before ending the conversation.

She was sure that she had mentioned going out to dinner after the choir concert in her message, so afterward we hung up, I played back the message and listened carefully to it and transcribed it as accurately as possible.

Simply because I am very tired of the orthogonal conversations that we tend to have, I emailed her my transcription and pointed out why I was confused as to the meaning of her phone message.

Yes, this is getting too difficult...

(UPDATE 12/30/08 - no response from her about the emailed transcription of the phone message. Not that I seriously thought I would get one - but that is another story).