Free Range

Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

Dooce turned me on to this amazing fan video of a song called Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear. Wow. Just Wow.

The BBC outfitted a 13-year-old Scottish boy with a Walkman for a week — an antique — and had him write his observations on portable music technology. The best paragraph (for old folks):

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Via MamaPop.

Yes, I bought the champagne solely for the romantic pink packaging. I’m looking forward to enjoying it tonight with my sweetheart. It’s chilling now, while he works and I handle the decidedly unromantic job of taking care of the kids all day. Hopefully the bubbly will taste as good as it looks. I think I’m going to need it.

Making sugar from sugar cane. Rounding up hogs. Making clothes out of flour sacks. These are some of the skills that helped my father’s family through the Great Depression on their ranch in TX. One of my favorite things to do is ask him about those days, and hear about how self-reliant the family was, back in the day. Not to be a gloom-and-doomer, but it’s struck me that there are a few skills I’d like to polish (or pick up) so I can feel more confident in advance of the coming depression/end of oil/global food crisis, etc.

1. Growing organic food.
   
2. Animal husbandry.
   
3. Baking bread. (Been working on this one lately.)
   
4. Sewing.
   
5. Knitting. (Or maybe I should leave this one to my husband.)
   
6. Making cheese.
   
7. Canning.
   
8. Salting meat.
   

Any other ideas?

Update: Another thing to keep in mind… “Cooking on a Budget” suggestions from Simply Recipes.

UPDATE: To add to the list — butchery!

UPDATE: More on keeping old skills alive from Simple Mom.

This is awesome (and truly awful) all at the same time.

We applied for (and got) a mortgage in California in 2005, and can attest to the mortgage broker’s modus operandi. The guy we worked with didn’t even present a “normal” 30-year fixed mortgage to us as an option — until we insisted upon it. Every loan he originally suggested had some crazy loophole. Most involved a gigantic balloon payment or interest-rate change a few years into the life of the loan, and he always said, “oh, you won’t ever have to really deal with that. You can refinance in a few years, when your home will surely have increased in value,” this being N. California, and all…. Of course, we needed a Jumbo loan, given that all of the crazy lending practices had allowed people to buy homes for much higher prices than they would have been able to, otherwise — allowing prices to climb.

The above PPT shows how our experience was typical, and just part of a vast, intricate web of craziness that got the economy where we are today.

– Via Continuous Beta

Mystery fruit

Originally uploaded by Pamela PC

Immature pumpkin? Or super-thick zucchini? We planted a bunch of stuff at once (see here) and lost track of what was what. Any ideas?

UPDATE: Turns out it is a pumpkin. Here’s hoping our little pumpkin plant keeps producing through October, so we can do the jack o’lantern thing.

By now, a day before my due date, I’ve scoured the Internet for birth stories — stories of water breaking, of castor-oil-taking, of mad rushes to the hospital, of C-sections. I’m looking for clues of what to expect. Nine months ago, we started down the inexorable path to the baby’s birth. As the clock counted down, my tummy grew bigger, I began to feel movement, and I experienced a host of other symptoms. Now I’ve reached the last few days, and I look for portents of how it will end. What will this boy’s birth story be?

I know how it was with Callum. I never went into labor, having been induced the day before my due date after experiencing nothing resembling contractions. It was a Saturday. They started the Pitocin at around 8 a.m. and, after some serious pain, an epidural and a brief low-heart-rate scare, vacuum extracted him out at around 1 p.m. I was almost surprised he was actually with us, so focused had I been on the birth. What an amazing experience.

But what will the beginning look like for #2? Will I go into labor, as these on-and-off contractions I’ve been experiencing would seem to indicate? If so, will it be in the middle of the night? Early in the morning? Mid-day, as I sit here on maternity leave watching the TiVo-ed LOST season finale? Will I ride by myself over the Brooklyn Bridge to the Manhattan hospital on the subway, experiencing mild but regular contractions? Will Michael drive me in our car? Will I be overtaken, alone, by major contractions and have to call a car service while Michael is at work?

I’m not set to see my doctor again until next Thursday — several days past d-day. By that time, the discussion at the doctor’s office will probably be around induction, as I know the doctor’s office doesn’t think we should go as long as, or further than, 41 weeks, as they say the risk of problems grows greater then. By that time, no matter how serious my commitment to a natural process, I will probably be ready for a little help, perhaps in the form of Pitocin. I’ve already tried the spicy food. Not yet the castor oil.

But for now, I try to relax and wonder, every morning, will today be the day? Is this squirming little creature ready to join us on this blue-skies first day of June? What story will I be telling, here, a few days from now? What story will I be telling the little one, years down the line, on his birthday? I’m desperately looking forward to finding out.

We’re standing on the edge of a whole new family reality, ready to emerge on the other side as a foursome, rather than a threesome. For now, though, things are pretty normal — well, as normal as they can be with a nearly-three-year-old and a nine-months-pregnant woman in the house.

Bloated and enormous as I feel, I’m aware things haven’t changed so tremendously yet. These are the last days when I can refer to Callum as my favorite boy in the whole wide world. I can still cuddle him with my attention undivided. We can still make our family plans without packing #1 size diapers and breaking out the Baby Bjorn.

This weekend, we had some very special moments as a family. Last night, after peeking outside, Michael declared he’d seen fireflies, so we rushed to get Callum into his pyjamas so we could wander into the back yard and take a look. Callum’s eyes were wide and excited. He’d heard about this phenomenon known as a firefly, and Mommy and Daddy were about to introduce him to some. Alas, once we got outside, none of the creatures could be spotted, but, in those moments, we fully experienced the anticipation of introducing our son to some of the wonders of this life. That’s what makes parenting worthwhile. (Well, that, and the cuddles.)

Though the fireflies never materialized, we did have some family “firsts” this weekend. We fillled up the baby wading pool in the back yard for the first time, and some of Callum’s bath toys migrated outside. I even put on my maternity bathing suit and plopped down myself, the new vantage point allowing me to discover a purple and yellow iris hiding behind the weeds.

We also went to the park on Monday and took in one of those legendary NYC experiences — kids running through spraying water fountains set up to cool them off. When we arrived at the park, the stroller ride had lulled Callum to sleep, so we sat on a bench and parked him in the shade, watching him closely for signs of awakening. Once he opened his eyes (we’d started calling his name at the first sign of stirring), his first words were, “the water is on!”

Callum took a little while to warm up to the idea of getting wet, but he was perfectly happy to kick his soccer ball under the streams and insist that Daddy go get it. It was a great opportunity for Michael to take Callum’s hand and nudge him along. After some initial hesitation, they rushed through the spray together, kicking the ball exuberantly. After a while, Callum grew quite comfortable, and Michael started to shiver with cold. Ah, the sacrifices he’s made for being a dad.

Yes, it’s just been another weekend of joy, and incessant “why?”s. I think we’re now ready for #2 to come along, whenever he’s ready.

My colleague Bill Brazell turned me on to this amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning piece from the Washington Post. It starts with a very simple premise — what would happen if a world-class violinist posed as a street musician in the D.C. Metro? — and manages to explore profound questions of beauty and priorities. The bit that got me emotional was a section about how children and their parents reacted to Joshua Bell’s impromptu underground performance:

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She’s got his hand.

“I had a time crunch,” recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. “I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement.”

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video. He’s the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

“There was a musician,” Parker says, “and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time.”

So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan’s and Bell’s, cutting off her son’s line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

“Evan is very smart!”

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

It makes me think about all of our walks with Callum, and his dogged insistence that we dawdle over one thing or another — a crack in the sidewalk, a puddle, a stick, a stranger — rather than proceed to our destination. Here’s hoping I’m aware enough to really look and listen — and dawdle — when he’s alerting me to the presence of beauty.

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P.S. Here’s a video (w/audio) of the performance.