The Diary of A Simple Man

It was a lovely day. Teri and Sebastian woke me up for breakfast and gave me beautiful cards. My parents and my sister and her husband came down from Boston for a cook-out. We had a downpour (with lightning and thunder) after I lit the coals, but I dragged the grill under some thick leaf cover. The weather was strange, with the sun bursting out several times in the middle of the storm. But it stopped raining completely in time for me to cook.

I wish every Father's Day could be like today!

It was such a busy weekend - and, overall, a good one. On Thursday, as I mentioned at the time, Teri and I picked up new phones - smartphones, the only Android phones AT&T offers. They're Motorola Backflips. We're still trying to decide if we like them.

They require a data plan, which will cost more. But we finally moved the phones into my name, which will give us a 19% discount. It won't erase the increase, but it will substantially reduce it. I just wish we'd made the switch eight years ago. We'd have saved thousands!
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We ate, got home, I read to Sebastian and again had to resort to singing, and after he fell asleep I started writing this. And now I'm going to bed!

But I will say this: I want to DO things on the weekends. Have some fun. Get out of the same old rut. And this weekend felt like a really good start.

On Friday night Sebastian and I went to see a movie (Cars) at Wee Folk, his day care/summer camp. It was an outdoor showing, on the front lawn. The bugs ate us up alive, but it was a LOT of fun. We lay on a blanket under the stars, had three bags of popcorn, and stayed up very late! Later in the evening, he got cold so I ran back to the car and grabbed a sleeping bag to cover us. It helped keep the bugs off, too. We really need to do things like this more often!

Saturday all three of us went to the CumberlandFest. He loved the Tilt-A-Whirl, and rode it five or six times. We were ripped off by the guy running the Dragon Coaster; he took the tickets, and then after a half-hearted try said that Sebastian wouldn't fit in the car. No refunds of tickets; he claimed it wasn't possible. Sleazy crook!

We had lunch there, though, and it was good. I had a small but decent meat pie, and then we all tried pulled pork from a truck called Wes'. It was the second-best pulled pork I've had, I'd say, and that's saying something. They have a restaurant in Providence, and we'll certainly try it soon.

Sunday was relatively quiet. I slept really late - I needed the sleep terribly - and apart from a little shopping, we took it easy. And now I must get some more sleep!

PS - notes for future entries: WoW issues, Narnia books, Narnia TV series DVD (MST3K style).

Let's see...Teri and Sebastian picked me up on Friday, and we stopped at L.L. Bean. We spent more than I'd planned. We got a reasonably-priced backpack for him, and got it monogrammed with his initials for an additional $6; Teri hated the style Sebastian picked, and I have to admit that it's fairly awful. But he needs to be able to make his own choices and his own mistakes at least some of the time.

We also bought sneakers for him. And when I saw that I could get a good pair of sneakers for myself for $54...well, that's about as good a price as you'll find outside of Wal-Mart or Payless. And those ultra-cheap sneakers fall apart incredibly quickly. These sneakers have the L.L. Bean guarantee.
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Lastly, we stopped at a DVD store. I wanted to see - just to see - how much season 2 of Saturday Night Live cost. I assume it would be $60-$70, the same as season 1. And that was the original marked price. But it was on sale, marked down to $24.95. So were season 3 and season 4. I went a little crazy, so I bought season 2 and season 3. I'm looking forward to seeing some of those classic Franken and Davis sketches, among other things.

And now I should get some sleep. Whew! It's late!

We went to Mr. Doughboy today. It was weird. Shabby and run-down, but it was also very much like stepping through a portal into the 1950s. We had fun!

Teri and Sebastian liked the food. I thought it was only okay. There was a really cool little train, but it was broken and looked like it will never be fixed. Sebastian rode on a go-kart and loved it. Of course it wasn't his first time, but it had been at least six months since his last time.

He begged for another ride, but we told him we'd come back some time soon. It's really remarkably close to us; less than a twenty-minute drive from our house. I never dreamed there was a go-kart place so near!

I got a moderate sunburn while there, incidentally. My head is all red and hot-feeling.

Sebastian and I survived the Cub Scout Chuckwagon event on Saturday.

We got up at around 5:30 AM, and hit the road at around 6:30. It took us about 45 minutes to get to the Feinstein camp where the event was being held. The directions were clear, but we were taking several twisty small roads in a relatively rural part of RI. We didn't have any problem until the very last turn; the sign for that road was blank!
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I was really hoping to sleep late the next day; it was a cool, cloudy but not-too-humid late-spring morning, and with the window and ceiling fans going, the sheets felt unbelievably good against my skin. But Teri had to go to work, and Sebastian needed to be looked after, so I got myself up and on my feet. All in all, Sunday was relatively quiet and peaceful. Not a bad way to end the weekend.

I almost forgot: I barbecued two weeks ago. Sebastian saw me getting ready to make burgers, and asked if he could make three little burgers himself: his first. I got him a pair of disposable food-prep gloves, and gave him three small balls of meat. He made them into little hamburgers.

Of course I couldn't let him grill them himself - he understood - but I cooked them for him. One of them changed shape oddly on the grill as it cooked, ending up as a perfect little Valentine's heart.

It was a busy weekend.

Saturday

Sebastian and I were participating in the district Pinewood Derby race on Saturday. We'd been told it started at 8:30 AM, so that's when Teri dropped us off (it was being held at the local high school). Teri was volunteering at the animal shelter that day, so she couldn't come.

Moments after she drove away we discovered that 8:30 was when the people who were RUNNING it were supposed to be there. Registration for his group didn't start until 10 AM, and the races themselves didn't start until noon! Teri picked us up and we went home for an hour.

The races...well, let me say this: EVERYONE CHEATS AT THE PINEWOOD DERBY. Except us, that us. You should see the glittering, polished, utterly perfect cars that kids bring in; cars which were obviously made either by their fathers (assuming that their fathers are master carpenters) or by professional racing-car design firms. It's obscene. The kids are supposed to do all the work themselves, and instead I think most of those kids - particularly the winners - not only never did any work on their cars themselves, they never even got to touch them. Some, I think, never even SAW "their" cars before the meet!
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We also read a lot of Doctor Dolittle In The Moon this weekend. Not only did I read it at bedtime, but I read it in the car for several hours (cumulatively, not several hours in one session; our longest session was probably an hour, on the ride up to Boston). He's enjoying it very much.

We unexpectedly went to a maple sugaring demonstration on Sunday. It was surprisingly close, less than a half-hour drive from home. The area was rural and surprisingly beautiful; we had a lot of fun.

It was a last-minute thing. Teri's mother had Sebastian, and had decided to take him there; we decided to join them. I didn't even remember to take the camera.

That was a pity, because there was a lot that I'd like to have photographed. We saw a video about maple sugaring that had some interesting information; I was surprised to hear that maple sugar is made only in the USA and Canada. It was also interesting that there was a time when maple sugar was a major rival to cane sugar, and was considered the more "moral" choice because sugarcane was harvested by slaves.

We went for a walk with a tour group, found a maple tree, and tapped it. Unfortunately no sap was forthcoming; you need below-freezing temperatures at night and warm days to get a high sap output. But they had some sap already harvested, and Sebastian carried a bucket of sap to the sugarhouse. There they were boiling down the sap to make syrup, and they showed the kids how the native Americans had made maple syrup and candy.

Then came the free samples. :D

I'd never heard of maple tea. It's not a tea at all, but rather maple sap that has been boiled down somewhat, but not enough to become syrup. It was delicious. The maple cream was pretty good (to be honest, I've had better), and the maple candy was sweet and crunchy. There were also maple cookies, and they were SO good that I got the recipe. :D

We had a lot of fun. I got some photos and video on my cellphone, but I need to work out a way to be able to download them via USB. I am NOT going to pay to send them over the phone - the cost for that is insane!

It was an interesting one.

On Saturday we had to get up on the early side, because there was a Cub Scout event at the local high school: a Belt Loop Bonanza, in which each kid took four one-hour classes and will receive a belt loop award for each one. It wasn't just Sebastian's troop, either; there were hundreds of Cub Scouts there with their parents, from lots of Massachusetts and Rhode Island troops.

It felt weird to be in a high school. I haven't been in one in ages...it must have been twenty-six years! It was also strange because we had to bring our lunches and eat in the school cafeteria. I don't know...the whole experience was odd, but fun.

Sebastian took a great Wildlife Conservation course that was taught by a women who works at Roger Williams Zoo, an introduction to chess (we played a game together, since he didn't have another kid to play against - he did surprisingly well), and then had lunch. After that he took a course in marbles, and finally a course in Geology that was taught by a guy who really knew his stuff - he seemed like the kind of teacher you really wouldn't want to piss off, but he was very authoritative.

Sebastian was quite good throughout all of the classes. I noticed that some kids, though, were just awful. They wouldn't stop talking, wouldn't pay attention, or constantly interrupted the teachers with pointless statements ("I like jello!") or long comments about the topic which were usually completely wrong. In some cases their parents tried to shush them, but hardly ever effectively. Those kids had real issues, I would say.

Sebastian did get a bit rambunctious at the end, after the classes were over; there was a closing ceremony where he basically ran around and didn't listen to me, but it was over quickly. Then Teri picked us up and we all went up to my parents' place in Brookline to celebrate a belated Christmas. I should explain: we alternate Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family and Teri's each year, and this year we spent Christmas with Teri's family. So we spend a belated Christmas with my family later. We were worried, though, because the weather report said that we'd be getting a bad storm that night. As always, no two reports agreed on when the storm would start or how much snow would fall. It could be anywhere from 4 PM to midnight, and the volume could be anywhere from six to ten inches.

I brought up a yellow bundt cake that I'd baked late the night before, not thinking of the get-together but just for the hell of it. We had roast beef, twice-baked potatoes, gravy, and Yorkshire pudding...I have to tell you, I love Yorkshire pudding with gravy. I only get it about once a year, when my mother makes it, and I really need to learn how to make it myself.

We left at about 8 PM. The snow was starting to come down. It was pretty mild in Brookline, but as we approached the I95/Route 1 crossover, it was getting pretty thick and scary. So Teri decided to stick to Route 1. It's a slower route, less dangerous but big enough to get good coverage from snowplows. It was a long, slow, somewhat scary ride home, because when we left Route 1 we were on some relatively unplowed and quiet back roads. But we made it home safely, woke Sebastian up, and put him to bed. It took a lot of reading to put him to sleep again; at least three chapters of The Black Stallion.

Sunday Teri woke me up and asked me to show her how to start the new snowblower. I got up (slowly), got dressed, and went out to get it. Our shed doors were frozen shut, but with some hard work I managed to get them open. The snowblower started up right away with no trouble, and I used it to clear the five or six inches of snow from our back walk, driveway, and front sidewalk. It only took about ten minutes or so. What a wonderful convenience!

Sunday was a relatively quiet day for us. We did some grocery shopping. Sebastian had been scheduled for a birthday party for a girl in his class, but it was postponed due to the weather. Teri and Sebastian played their DS's quite a bit, and I played them when they took breaks. I also spent a lot of time reading Larry Niven's Footfall, a good large SF invasion book of the massive disaster variety. Not top-notch Niven, but very good.

In the evening, Sebastian took a shower. A little later, we discovered that he'd shut the bathroom door behind him...and somehow, the bolt had engaged. This was a real problem, not least because I discovered this when I needed to use the bathroom.

It was also a mystery. How on earth had the bolt been thrown? It's an old door and a very simple mechanism. There's a latch for the door, and a light bolt that you can throw. Unfortunately, this meant that we were in trouble. There was no key and no keyhole. The hinges were on the other side of the door. The lone bathroom window couldn't be opened from outside, and breaking it would be both dangerous and expensive. Even if I unscrewed and dismounted the door handle, there would be no hole large enough to allow us to do anything at all. I tried using magnets to jiggle the bolt, but didn't have a magnet strong enough to do anything through the thickness of the door. I was able to slide a piece of cardboard between the door and the frame, but all I could do was locate the bolt; I couldn't open it, because there was no way to apply left-to-right pressure of any sort. The doorframe pretty much blocked me from any action. I tried lots of jiggling, but that didn't help at all.

So I threw my body against the bathroom door a couple of times, and on the second time I bashed the door open. We were lucky; the damage was relatively slight. The bolt and latch were badly bent (I neglected to fasten the latch open while bashing the door - to be honest, I was pretty pissed off by that point - I really needed to get in there). A very small splinter of wood was knocked off part of the door. But I was able to bend the latch and bolt back enough to make them work smoothly again, and the door itself doesn't look all that much worse.

Still, Sebastian has been strictly instructed never to close the bathroom door behind him again. I still can't figure out how the bolt got thrown - it's completely inaccessible from outside the bathroom!