No Time Or Reason

I don't know-- or really care to know-- who came up with the idea that we should revert to Daylight Savings Time during the winter but I can assure you of this: They don't have to be up at an early hour of the day. Just when it was getting to where I could walk the dog without a flashlight they go and push the clock ahead an hour. Just when the winter doldrums were starting to lift by shedding a little light on the morning, they go and shove us all back in the closet of night.

Tomorrow is going to be a busy day with a full schedule-- if I ever get out of bed. At the moment the clock on the screen says 7:02. The clock in my head says, "No way." I guess if there's any really good news it's the slight uptick in the economy: There are going to be a lot more coffee sales in the next week! And, too, I just magically evaporated a hour of my on-call weekend.

Still, I'd rather being struggling with all of this some time in May, not in the dead of winter. I'm still in hibernation mode, for crying out loud!

Eat At Your Own Risk

Here's the kind of story to make you feel better about even the worst dinner you've ever served. Here's a story to make you feel better about even the worst evening's entertainment to which you've ever played host: Noma,"the world's best restaurant" has been cited by authorities in Denmark after 67 of their diners came down with a norovirus after eating there.  And the place has only twelve seats! No way you've ever screwed up that bad. It just goes to show you good hygiene is priceless. And, too, just because it's exclusive doesn't mean it's good.

If I ever have the time, money, energy, and opportunity to open a restaurant it's going to be a personal little space like Noma. But my restaurant will feature mostly breakfast foods-- traditional home cooked comfort food I know how to reliably create like pancakes, waffles, french toast, eggs, with a burger and a few sandwiches thrown in for my daughter who, to this day, doesn't have much of an appetite for traditional breakfast fare. And, for those special occasions, an occasional kugel or Blintz casserole thrown in for good measure, providing I can import my friend Carol for a weekend.

Whatever my restaurant ends up serving, just to be safe, I'm going to call it Noro. That way no one can say I didn't warn 'em.

Coming Home

I expect I'll be happy tomorrow morning. I expect I'll wake up tomorrow and my daughter's bedroom door will be shut. She'll probably sleep until 10 and I sure don't care. I expect all will go as planned and Kels will be back on the mainland, tucked in bed, ready to face the real world once again, safely returned from the land of sunshine, beaches, and rum.

It doesn't matter if they're 11 or twenty-one, when they're away you always have it in your head. There is always that little night light burning in the corner of your mind, a distraction, an alert that something is missing, something's not quite whole, not quite right.

I'm not a worrier by nature. I tend to believe and expect safety and happy endings. Nonetheless, I look forward to that little light being turned off first thing in the morning.

Safe travels, sweetie.

Time For A Study Break

Watch the glare!

It's spring break time down at the University. Timeout in the middle of a really tough term, a really critical term, and just a month or two before a big pre-professional exam. It's time to call "time - out!"

So it's off to Puerto Rico for my daughter and her roommate. No problem. I don't have any problem with my attractive blue-eyed blond-haired fair-skinned daughter hanging out a few hundred miles off-shore in the Caribbean with her roommate. I mean what kind of trouble can a couple of good looking American dolls get into spending a week in the hot sun, at the rum capitol of the world, in a high crime territory, where the drinking age is 18?

Fortunately I don't have to worry: They said they just wanted to go somewhere warm to study for the week.

Hmmm. The books must be just out of view

Bad Genes

To the trash!

“Doctor, what’s wrong with my child?”  I‘m not saying it but I was thinking it as I walked out to the kitchen and saw a beautiful coconut cake sitting forlorn. It sat on the counter only half eaten after three whole days in our home. “Ev. Would you like a piece of cake?” “No thank you.” No cake. No cookies. An occasional piece of candy. He wants grapes. Or Cuties.

It’s almost as if he wants to mock me, my sweet tooth, and mouth full of amalgam that stand as testament to a lifetime committed to eating sweets. He mocks me and leaves me to ingest all those empty calories without the help of my son. My god! How am I ever going to achieve appropriate male bonding with this kid if we can't sit at a counter or table and indulge in desserts??

I do have hope. I’m thinking about letting the university do some gene research on the kid. In light of the growing concern with obesity, perhaps Ev holds the genetic key to not eating sweets. If he does, though, it’s sure as hell recessive in me.

In the meantime, I'm throwing the damn thing out. It's doing nothing but changing my contour and it's no fun getting fat alone.

Silk Purse

Frosty the Yoga Man

Rolling into March it seems it would be nice if we could see a Crocus or Daffodil or two crack the soil around here. No such luck. The soil around here remains frozen. To add insult to injury we got dumped on with 3 or 4 inches of white stuff last week.

At a time when half the state is gone looking for a lounge chair by the pool somewhere warm, and the other half is here wishing they were looking for a lounge chair by the pool somewhere warm, it's hard to get too cheery about snowfall. We're pretty much ready for springtime showers and daffodils.

In spite of the winter blues, my neighbor gets the community morale award. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there-- and just to prove the point he is, in fact, a State Farm guy. And so, when the snow fell and the schools closed and people stood around their kitchens with coffee cups in hand looking out the windows in quiet resignation to the fact it is still very much winter in these parts-- his family went out and built a snowman. Not your corn-cob pipe, button nose, and two eyes made out of coal variety either. No, the neighbors built a yoga man. I haven't seen it on the news or in the paper but I wouldn't be surprised. Cars are doing u-turns in front of our house as they do a double take, roll down their window, and snap a photo.

It may be small consolation, but we certainly couldn't enjoy such sculptural humor with daffodils poking up all over the place. Maybe next week, er month, for the daffodils.

Kinderwerk

My son came home from Kindergarten early yesterday. Parent - Teacher conferences. So I asked, "what did you get done this morning?" Ev responded, words, numbers, morning meeting, snack… Wait: What?? Morning what??  "Morning meeting."

Turns out morning meeting is that time when you look at the weather for today, review your agenda, do the calendar. "The pledge?" "No. That's before it."

Nice. 5 year olds having morning meeting. My kid is smart. He likes books and reading and it turns out he is reading at a second grade level. But morning meetings? It's like we need to have our kids groomed and ready for employment by the time they hit their double digits.

Three things:

First, I always keep in mind that the most social, economic, and technical growth this country has so far accomplished has come out of the very unsophisticated and politically incorrect era of reading, writing, and arithmetic. School was for kids. Teachers were for teaching. Meetings were for grown-ups.

Second, the schools have their hands full in much the same way store-based retailers face the competition from Amazon and other web-based suppliers: Electronic learning via iPad, iTouch, Leap Frog, and the like, absolutely blasts this generation of kids through the basics at warp speed.

Finally, the most important tool, the one that can either make a teacher appear a smashing success or a noodle-headed disaster does not require batteries or an electrical outlet. It does not need to be used in the classroom, it is fully portable and can be used anywhere, it costs the school district nothing, and it is available nights and weekends. It's the parents.

Looking at page after page of evaluation during parent-teacher conference the other afternoon, I felt sorry for the teacher and unsettled about the schools. The volume of testing and evaluations performed to create a quantitative measure of learning is unreal. And, unfortunately, in this era of cost accounting and outcomes based valuation, the testing is needed to justify maintaining taxpayer support for education. With as many children coming from homes with no functioning give-a-damn apparatus, it seems the evaluations should include a modifier for parental involvement.

Let's have a meeting about that. In the meantime, we'll just have to wait and see what comes of this era in education: Great accomplishments, great test scores, or the great meeting society?