Party People

Kitten, living in the shadow of the ever approaching departure date for her 8th Grade Florida trip, is finding herself a little bored. She's managed to make it through a week of grounding (see I can be a mean dad), and exploded into her freedom by grabbing the phone and calling all her friends. Her joy was dampened a little when I placed the restriction of 20 minutes per friend.

After she had run through her entire calling tree, she found her self woefully bored, once again. So I gave her some options on thing she could occupy her time with, and finally she made her decision and moved forward with a new sense of purpose.

She spent the next couple hours alphabetizing my CD collection.

Don't tell me we don't know how to have a good time.

This is what it's all about

In the play, "Our Town" by Thorton Wilder, the main female character gets a chance to come back from the after life and visit any day in her past life she wants. She doesn't want to pick a special day, just a normal day. When she comes back to her normal day, she's awe-struck. Every thing is so vivid and beautiful that she is almost overwhelmed. But she is dismayed when she looks around and sees the people in that day, her family, aren't even noticing it. They are just going through it and not breathing deep the wonder of the gift of this simple day. When we did this show in college, it made an impression on me that I vowed to always remember, and never forget to look around and take special note of those "Our Town" moments. Today was one of those days.

In the morning, I slept in till the sun got too bright in the room and woke me up. Had a good cuddle good morning with the wife, and as much as I love them, it was a wonderful cuddle because it went on without an avalanche of kids jumping all over us. The vortex of Saturday morning cartoons held them fast in the living room.

I had to leave shortly after, though, because this weekend is my marathon writing session so I can get a script together for the play we'll be doing in about 6 weeks. I left at about 10:30 in a cool, perfect spring morning right out of the song "Pleasant Valley Sunday" by the Monkees. I went to our wonderful coffee shop in town, the only one, in a old brick building with wood floors and a used book library at the back. I tucked myself in back with the books, put on my headphones and had a relaxing, peaceful day of writing. The writing was slow but steady and I feel like the progress I made was worthwhile.

When they closed at 4:30 I came home. The kids we off with my mother-in-law watching the new animated movie "Madagascar". So the wife and I made dinner together without any chaos, while the Bear slept. We prepared an unrushed salad and cooked porkchops on the grill. As we were beginning to eat, the wife heard bear and brought him out. He sat down to dinner with us outside on the patio, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. The temperature was so perfect that you didn't even notice it, and there was no breeze. None was needed. The sun was low enough that we were in a nice light shade from the house, and breathing the air was like a wonderful side dish to our simple dinner.

After we finished and casually picked up the dishes and loaded the dishwasher, we strapped Bear into his stroller and had time for a relaxing walk around the neighborhood before the kids got home.

When the kids arrived back there were hugs and rapid fire descriptions of the movie, every one so excited that no one could finish a sentence before the other person picked it up and finished it for them. And strangely, they did this like it was scripted, no one getting mad for being cut off. Then the Lemur went to a friend's house, the wife took Kitten shopping, and Robo and I set down to the Playstation to hash out some Tetris (an old school game that I have a chance of holding my own at).

It wasn't too long into our game play (and I must admit that I was schooling him, even after spotting him 10 points), that there was a knock at the door. Robo jumped up to get it and I heard him talking to his friends. I started making adjustments to the game to set it to one player, because I was sure that he would be out the door, spending his last hour of daylight. But then he came back in and sat down.

"Who was at the door?" I asked.

"My friends."

"What did they want?"

"They asked if I could play. I told them I was spending time with my dad."

Dude.

Yep. This is a day I'd come back to in a second.

First Morning of Summer Break

Here it is. The ultimate "time out---do over" that our culture provides to the not-yet-adults. Oh, and to my brother. He's one of the smart ones that skirted that never ending march of adulthood. He's a teacher.

In a gross display of sloth, I slept in till 7:30 this morning. I know. Disgusting. I'll repent later.

I finally emerged to see the little Bear in his high chair eating cereal, bathed in the morning sunlight that filled our breakfast nook, looking out a window that had been opened to let the breeze in, counting squirrels running up and down a nearby tree.

If that's not the start to summer, I don't know what is.

Tidbits

The wife is seriously into the T.V. series Lost. When I came home tonight, she had the kids safely tucked away at their friends houses so she could take in the 2 hr special season finale. When I came home I encountered "shushes" to the point that I became convinced that she had been possessed by the spirit of a Librarian with Tourette's.

But she's seriously into the show. I have only three months now to figure out how we're going to afford Tivo in the fall.

Robo had to come home from his friends house early because he was watching Lost over there and became too upset when the little boy on the show got abducted. He has such a sensitive little spirit. (oh, um, spoiler alert. sorry.)

Meanwhile our cat hurt his leg somehow. We took him to the vet. It's not broken. They can't figure out what's wrong. The vet gave us some pain medication for him. He spent the entire evening sitting in the same spot watching the kitchen go by.

The day has arrived!

Well, today is the 2nd best day of the year for someone under 18--The Last Day of School. It is, of course, 2nd after Christmas. And the only reason it's second, I believe, is because you don't get presents. Birthdays rank a close third, but when you watch kids, it's easy to tell which ranks over which.

Here is a list of things that won't be happening in my car in the mornings now:

1. No on will yell "Shotgun!" as we're going out the car. (Actually, they've gotten pretty good about this competition. They worked out a system where a certain person would sit shotgun on certain days of the week and everyone complied. I didn't have to lift a finger.)

2. Solicitation about what CD we should listen to---or whether it should be the iPod.

3. Complaints about having to wear a seat belt.

4. Talk about car pool girl's object of affection.

5. Talk between car pool boy and Robo about who's got what better than who.

6. Talk about what went on in the lunch room yesterday.

7. Talk about what's cool lately.

8. Pleas to be dropped off closer to the building.

9. This song. (iTunes linked)

10. The "Call It" car game. This is the game where the first person to spot a cool car can "call it" which means that that is "their" car and no one else can call it. Little Bear likes this game too, except he "calls" every car he sees announcing "Call It Car!"

11. And of course---the Slug Bug game. You know, the game where you call out "Slug Bug" and punch the nearest person every time you spot a VW Beetle. But we curtailed the slugging part right away---so this became another game of "calling it".

It's been quite interesting because there has been an evolution of this game and it's gotten fairly sophisticated compared to it's original form. They've added a couple of other distinctive cars to the mix---we Cruisers the PT Punch (for PT Cruisers) and Jeeper Beepers (for Jeeps). I drew the line there because we were getting into Copper Boppers for police cars, and Van Bams for Mini vans and it would just become constant screaming.

They also went a step further because there could be multiple cars of the same model that different people were getting, so the rule was made that you have to call out the color of the one you see. They took it a step further for a short period by requiring that instead of the color of the car, you think of something that is that same color and have to call that out---so for red you would say "Slug Bug Tomato!" I was told that with those rules Leemur once called out "Jeeper Beeper Who Turned Out The Lights" for a black Jeep.

You are also not allowed to call cars that are frequently parked in certain places. Like we drive by the local Mall to school and there is always a red beetle parked in that lot that someone who works at one of the stores there must drive. No one can call out that car.

12. So I also won't be hearing disputes about who violated what Slug Bug rule with the last call out.

13. I won't hear the strutting "who's your daddy" smack talk from the person who happens to be the morning's Slug Bug champ (which is typically Robo for those keeping score. It got so he would call out and just laugh because he was schooling them so bad).

14. I also won't hear, "Bye Dad, Love you. See you tonight".

Dang. My mornings are going to be so boring now.

Getting that California Fever!

A new Meme I jumped into over at Calfornia Fever---The Interview Game. Here’s the Rules.

The Official Interview Game Rules:
1. If you want to participate, leave a comment below saying "interview me."
2. I will respond by asking you five questions - each person's will be different.
3. You will update your journal/blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

These are the questions that Marilyn gave me:

1. If training, location, family responsibilities or financial resources were not a consideration, what would your dream job be?

One word—PIXAR! Have you seen the second disk of the Finding Nemo CD? This looks like the happiest place on earth to work. I would love to do the character animation. I’m not sure of their exact title but it’s kind of like digital puppetry. You get the character that the other departments have made and you animate the performance in the computer. How it blinks, speaks, moves, reacts. And then once your performance is approved by the director, your work is sent to the rendering people to make the image detailed with light and shadow and reflection and all that.

But, heck, if pressed, I'd work in their mail room. Janitor. Whatever.

2. Is there a name that you wish now you'd given one of the kids for either a first or middle name?

If my daughter had been a boy I wanted to name her Xavier Blaze, and if my first boy had been a girl I had suggested Terra Ione (that means flower of the earth). You have to understand, I read a lot of comic books when I was young. But I still like them. They might show up as characters in something I write someday.

3. If you could own only ONE Mac/Apple product, which would it be? (Feel free to answer this one after you've picked yourself up off the floor from the heart attack you just suffered at the mere thought of having to make such a choice.)

Actually, that’s not as hard as it may seem. Being much less than wealthy, I find myself doing without quite a few Apple products, and only enjoying them by proxie in the stores and reading about them on the internet. But if it all came down to one that would be my Powerbook, without a doubt (with wireless internet, of course). If I don’t have a laptop I feel like I’ve lost a limb or something.

4. What's one of the qualities you love most about your wife?

She has a childlike wonder and playfulness that never ceases to charm me. She enjoys children’s books and films, and likes to play in the outdoors and discover all that nature has to share with a deep poetic breath.

5. What's one of the qualities you think your wife loves most about you?

Hmmmm, I don’t what to be presumptuous here. I know what I would like for her to love about me. I would love it if she would react to me like Gomez did when Morticia spoke French on the Adams family---only she would do it when I started speaking geek. She’d look deep into my eyes over a candle lit dinner and say, “Will, please tell me the specs of Apple’s G5 tower dual processor again. Please.” But that’s just not the way it is. And I’m ok with that. She tolerates my goof-ball Apple obsession and I appreciate that.

I do make her laugh. I am totally devoted to my family. I try to do stuff that’s creative and quirky and fun. I try to laugh with her a lot. Some of this might be the thing. Maybe.


OK gang---who wants to play?

Home, Sweat Home----I mean sweet. Sweet, that's what I mean.

I began something this morning that’s kind of freaking me out. I signed the papers that kicked off the short path to home ownership. Before my kids finish their summer break, I’ll have a mortgage. For the first time in my life I will own real estate. And it sort of feels like getting hit with the Grown Up stick right between the eyes.

I’ve had people congratulate me, but somehow I didn't feel like that’s what was fitting for me in this venture. Not that remorse would be more appropriate. It’s just that the first time one of my cousins said it, it took me very off guard. I had to think for a moment to finally decide that, yes, I guess most people welcome congratulations for this sort of thing. I hadn't really thought about it before that.

I’m glad I’m doing it, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it is a bit intimidating. I’ve never had the American dream of home ownership. I didn’t purposely spurn the idea. The goal of home ownership has simply never even been on my radar. Ever. It’s something you do as a necessity, but I would have been just as content to rent for the rest of my life too.

We’re currently renting the house we’re living in from my parents, and that’s the house I’ll be buying and that’s who I’ll be buying it from. At least there won't be a move in all of this. We are where we'll be. We're dealing with a known commodity. My parents are getting ready for retirement and they want to kind of purge themselves of any entanglements so when they decide it’s time, they’ll be nothing hindering them from making that change. I am glad that I’ll be helping to lift that burden. I think if anything, that’s the part of all this that I’m most eager about.

Don’t get me wrong. This house has been a blessing. It’s had it’s quirks here and there----but it has bedrooms for my kids and a yard for them to play in and it’s in a good neighborhood where we’ve really enjoyed our neighbors. I really feel like this is the place where we were meant to be right now. My parents picked the house to help us get out the situation we were living in seven years ago---living in a small two bedroom low income apartment where the kids play area was a parking lot facing the back side of a strip mall. We got along pretty good with our neighbors, but things like the fact that they kept weapons such as baseball bats handy in their apartments to protect themselves from Ex-es was a bit disconcerting. My mom and dad knew that my family needed better.

Now I've only just gotten used to not putting an apartment number down when I wrote our address and suddenly I'm going to have to remember to check the "own" box on all the forms that life brings my way. I guess that'll be more in line with the jump in age demographic that I've had to get used to. I still want to go for that 25 to 32 box.

A Mortgage. It'll take some getting used to. It sent my head spinning when I bought my car and did the math only to discover that when it was paid it off, my daughter would be able to drive it. Now a 30 year home loan. Do the math there and I finish up paying this house off about the time I’m shopping for burial plots. I don’t know if I’m ready for that. But ready or not, here it comes.

I did have a little epiphany as I was signing form after form at the bank, though. You see, I’ve moved around quite a bit since I graduated high school. About every two years or so, we’d be in a new place. So when we moved into this house, for me it was just the next place. It was very practical, but I didn’t greet it with any emotional investment at the time. It was just a new location to hold my people for the now. Who knew where tomorrow might blow us.

But as I sat there, pen poised over the next signature line, I had a moment of clarity of what this funny blue house actually is to my kids. Even though my wife and I have been all over the place, this was the only home my little people had ever really “known”. I mean Robo and Kitten had lived in that little two bedroom apartment, and a one bedroom before that----and Kitten had lived with us in student housing while I was going through school---but it’s nothing that they really remember as home, I don’t believe. They were too young. But this is the place that will imprint on them as Home with a capital ‘H’.

It made me start to wonder. Will they remember the chipped paint, leaks, broken concrete and dirty carpets? Or will they think more about the parties, the wrestling and dancing in the living room, their art on the fridge and the bookshelf filled with bedtime stories? Will they remember that I had trouble keeping up with the lawn, or that it was a perfect place to play tag, catch fireflys and have a lemon aid stand? What ever they remember, this will be it.

So I signed away. I’ve never been much for owning a building, but as a place to make and hold those kind of memories, this would be a bargain at twice the price.

My Brother Got a Blog!

My brother and his boy, the Ice Man.

I just found out that my Brother got a blog. This is very cool because for the longest time I couldn't even get my brother to read my blog. Which I really wanted him to do so he could keep up with us and stuff happening---we just don't see each other as much as we'd like, he lives 3 hours away.

If you read the comments that I get you may have noticed a commenter the other day (ranraniam) that left some input that could have been seen as being, perhaps, a little more oddly agressive than the standard comment. It was saying that maybe I should think about getting more pics of my family on the site than of my technology. Um,yeah, that was my bro. He was just giving me a good natured hard time like we're want to do. We actually get along great, I love hanging out with him.

Which makes this weekend very cool. He's driving in a couple hours and I'm meeting him at a sort of "off center point" between our two places so we can go see the new Star Wars film with out two families on Saturday. We were both big Star Wars fans (as was my wife) back in the day when we were kids---Star Wars posters all over the walls, Star Wars toys for Christmas and the John Willams soundtrack singing us to sleep each night (on vinal LP no less!).

Now it's something that we share with our kids. And I have to tell you, walking down the Star Wars toy isle at Wal-Mart I just can't believe all the cool stuff. I can't help but think, "Man, I would have walked over glass for some of this stuff when I was 12".

But it should be fun.

Check out My Bro's site over at http://ranraniam.blogspot.com/.

Parenting Moment

There comes a time when conversations need to happen between a parent and their child, to pass on essential wisdom and knowledge. This morning that moment came again for Robo. The birds and the bees is one such conversation but we've already had that conversation and he kept looking at me with eyes filled with confused amazement and asking, "why are you telling me this?" This morning, however, the conversation was reveal the great hidden concept of the long distance phone call. The fact that they cost money.

We will often send the older siblings, Robo or Kitten, off to the back yard to hang out with the little Bear, so the Bear can run off some steam. To make it seem less like a punishment, we will also allow them to have friends over to hang out with while they are making sure the Bear doesn't eat what ever he finds by turning over rocks by the flower area (a favorite pass-time of his---the turning, not the eating). Sometimes, when the friend can't come over, they will walk around with the cordless phone talking to a friend.

So I didn't think anything of Robo walking around outside talking on the phone while he was with Bear. Until I thought to ask him who he was talking to. He was talking to a friend that he met at the camp-out we had a couple weekends ago. Who lives two hours to the north---in-state long distance which as you probably know is more expensive than state to state long distance. Why couldn't he have just called Florida? Skype, where are you when we need you?

He assures me that he had no idea that when you dial extra numbers to make a call that it would be more expensive than making a call down the street. I assured him that it would, pretty much every time. And I also assured him that this was his one and only learning experience freebee. He had been talking for 20 minutes.

In the meantime, Leemur had crawled into one of the kitchen cabinets and was pushing the drawers out from behind hoping to fool someone into thinking that the house was haunted.

Mother's Day at the Zoo 2005

Inside the Desert Dome (click to see more pics)

One of my regular readers commented to me this week that I have been a little remiss in updating my blog. It's true. I shifted hours for a special project at work and it threw me off my routine a little.

Sorry Mom.

(She was the regular reader who was getting disappointed at my lack of updates if you didn't get that. What? You got it? Ok, nevermind.)

I did start a long post about our Mother's Day weekend but I got sidetracked and never finished it. I'll post it here a little later.

Until then, click on the pic above to see some other photos of our adventure at the Henry Doorly Zoo---the fabulous world class zoo we have here in Omaha. If you're ever stopping through on Interstate 80 for some reason, I highly recommend a stop to see it. If you are a zoo fan, you won't regret it, I promise. In fact, I'll wager you'd thank me for bringing this hidden national treasure to your attention.

5 photos on the 5th of 2005; Photo 1 of 5

I celebrated Year Day yesterday trying to figure out what I was going to shoot photos of for the "5 photos on the 5th of 2005" meme that I'm participating in.

I had to wait to try to find anything till after work (because I did the before work pics last month and not much has changed in that routine). Although there is still a little light at that time of the evening now, there's still not enough to get good photos outside. The boys were fading off to sleep and I didn't want to disturb them, so I looked around and scratched my head and saw----hey, Kitten is still up! I thought it might be interesting to do a photo spread on the inside of my daughter's very interesting world.

She likse to hide down there a lot and has surrounded herself with the contents of her life in a very collage type fashion. The first photo here is of an actual college she is assembling on her wall of all sorts of bits and pieces of things from her life. Posters, photos, play programs, art projects and mementos. She's very proud of her creation.

2 of 5 on the 5th

This little sign was made by the father of one of Kitten's best friends. He works for a monument company. That's right, he makes tombstones for a living. I guess he needed to practice or to test some of the equiptment or something. He did one of these for his daughter and one for Kitten out of a thin piece of headstone quality polished granite. He chose the Gandalph figure because he knew they were into Lord of the Rings.

3 of 5 on the 5th

This is the shelf on the other side of my daughters room. When Kitten was very young her step-grandma would give her dolls for Christmas. We sort of picked up the tradition and continued on with it over the years.

As you can see, she has accumlated quite a collection.

4 of 5 on the 5th

Here is a picture of the shelf at the foot of my duaghter's bed. An acumulation of various items from growing up.

I taught her to play chess when she was in Kindergarten and so got her that glass chess set one Christmas. There was one knight that just kept getting broken so she finally replaced it with the plastic figure of Aragorn that you see.

The pig trophey in the back is kind of interesting. It's third place from a pig calling contest. I don't think that when she won the trophy she had even ever been to a proper pig farm. It was kind of a spur of the moment thing when she got involved. They asked for volunteers from the audience to compete along side of the regular contestants at a local festival in our town.

I pulled into town from work that day and was driving down one of the main streets by our City Park, just in time to look over and see my little girl coming down off a flat bed truck trailer that they were using as a stage---with a trophey in her hand! It was one of the strangest, funny cute moments of my life with my daughter.

5 of 5 on the 5th

This in one of my daughter's proudest creations. She wanted me to include this. This was a character from a story she made up and that they would play when she was much younger. She used some models from pictures to make this drawing depicting the idea of what her character from "Animal Ninjas" would look like.

Happy Year Day!

Ok, so this is something else I made up, but it’s kind of fun. I’ve never been very good with math or numbers, but in recent years I’ve begun to be fascinated with little numeric anomalies that seem interesting to me.

For instance, I noted the cross-over year with my wife. A couple of years ago now was the year that the percentage of my life that I had not known my wife started to become less than the percentage that I had known her. We met when we were both 17, so now that I’ve know her for more than 17 years, the time we were living separates lives becomes a smaller and smaller portion of our existence until it begins to seem to be just a minor preparation for the part of our lives we've lived together. Seemed kind of notable to me.

And I at one point celebrated my daughters birthday by giving her a “Binary Birthday” T-shirt (and a domain name that we have since abandoned----kittenmit.net. It was a little early for her to be interested in that sort of thing to the point it would justify the expense). I called it her Binary Birthday because she was turning 11 on October 10, 2001. So, if you wrote it out in numeric date format it would be 11 on 10-10-01. Strung all together it looked like binary code: 11101001.

So then, Year Day. It’s another thing that I made up. It occurred to me at some point that there are 12 days that only occur only once every century. Those are the days where the number for the the day, month and year are all the same. And this year’s Year Day comes in May--- 05-05-05. And that’s today! Next year’s will come in June and last year’s was in April. Get it?

Then after 2012 it’s all over for another century.

So, the question is, how are you going to celebrate your Year Day? ^ __ ^

Geek Moment: Final bottle cap update

Once again, like taking down the Christmas Tree, it has ended. iTunes bottle cap season is over. Yesterday the Pepsi symbol that was the link to enter the codes in on the iTunes music store, was gone as though it had never been there at all. Curiously enough, like melting snow, it also heralded the coming of actual Spring time weather (finally!). But I suppose that’s more of a coincidence.

Finally tally on the bottlecap thing: 500 songs downloaded, 48 remaining credits to redeem, and a free iPod mini. Not too shabby for three months of digging in the trash.

That’s a hard act to follow. I wonder if they’ll run this promotion next year? Here’s hoping.

Anyway, now it’s back to my mainstay----A&W Cream Soda.

A Trip Through the Wardrobe

It's always struck me how easily "alternate realities" that we experience outside of our normalacy get so easily shuffled into a memory, like waking from a dream, when we emerge back into our daily life. When I was younger I felt a little of this when I would return from a vacation that took me far away. On Monday morning things would always just go back the same as they every were, as though those fun places were just a movie you had watched on Sunday afternoon.

But even that didn't fully prepare me for my first touch of what I call a "Wardrobe Experience". When you go on vacation, the feeling of getting lost in that other place is still a little bit there when you return. The house you come home to is so quiet, frozen in time while you were away. Nothing has been moved. As if it was waiting to be revived, to have life breathed into it again, when it's people returned. That much at least reminds you that what you had done was real---that and the exhaustion you would be recovering from for a week.

But I'm talking about something more intense. I borrowed the name from Mr. Lewis' book, "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe". If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. The world will come to know this tale in a much more ever-present sense this Christmas as it's being brought out as a motion picture using the some of the same people that brought the Lord of the Rings to life.

The story goes that four children are playing hide and seek in a strange, large old house that they are being put up in. This particular time, as they hide toward the back of an old wardrobe, they find that there seems to be no back wall. They keep walking until they emerge from a forest in a magical world, where they embark on great adventures. They live an entire life as kings and queens of this new magical kingdom. Years pass and they grow older seeming to have almost totally forgotten their former lives back in England.

But then one day, on a hunt, they travel back into the forest that they had emerged from so long ago. They are so caught up in the pursuit as they travel through this forest that they don't feel themselves being drawn back. In the end they find themselves emerging from the wardrobe again, as children, back into the spare room at the very moment they began playing that rainy day that felt so long ago. But not even a minute had passed in this world the whole time they were in the other. It is this emerging back into the unchanged world that seemed a proper metaphor for feelings I first felt so profoundly as a foreign exchange student in 1986.

I was living a dream I'd carried with me for most of my life to that point---I was living in Australia. Specifically, I was living in Brisbane, Queensland, a large city of about a million and a half people at that time. In the middle of the year, the organization I was there with, AFS, moved the students for two weeks to a environment different to their main assignment. So city kids would move to the country and country kids would come to the city, all this done in an effort to keep the foreign exchange experience as broad as possible.

When I originally went to Australia I was taken out of the only life I'd ever known and placed into a new strange land. I was only beginning to find my footing when, like a dream within a dream, I was again struggling for equilibrium in a hospitable imbalance created by this city/country exchange. I was placed into a home in a small country town that was inviting but unknown. A place where I was an outsider. But as the two weeks passed and I hung out with the young people at the local high school, I found myself fitting in and starting to make connections and put down shallow roots a little, out of a need to belong. But just as abruptly as I had arrived, my time there was done and I was taken back to my 'home'.

When I came back and walked through the sliding glass doors back into the kitchen of my host family, everyone was running back and forth with the needs of the day and I was sucked back into the hole I had left. Even though the world went on without me, I completed the picture again like a missing puzzle piece now that I was back. I found myself swept along with the current, but no one there could really realize that I wasn't the same. I was a new 'me' because of what I had experienced, different from the 'me' that had been there two weeks ago. I didn't look different or act particularly different, but there was a part of me that had changed inside in a way that I could never fully share with them. Consequently, there was a small separation that occurred there, the shakey ground falling away leaving a thin chasm which isolated me a bit from the people that I felt like I should be attached to so seamlessly.

That gap is where the Wardrobe Moment exists. For that brief period the thing that made my life richer also made me feel just a little more alone.

You can imagine how much more profound this feeling was when I returned to my hometown after being gone for a year to another country. I returned to my old room, my old friends, the old neighborhood streets. Everything was the same--except me. It was like a feeling of homesickness in reverse, longing for a 'me' that once was but was now a memory. Even though I was constantly around people, people who supported me and loved me and would do anything for me, I couldn't escape the feeling of being set apart and removed from them, even in their presence. The frustration and strangeness of this feeling and living this paradox was almost overwhelming. But I got through it. That's the only thing that can be done. Establish a new reality until the feeling fades and you're home again.

Ever since then I have gone through larger and smaller wardrobe moments. I think after a certain point, life just becomes a series of them.

This Sunday afternoon returning from camp with my son was a micro moment like that. I stood in my living room watching a bunch of the neighborhood kids watching our latest DVD, "A Series of Unfortunate Events". While the movie was playing, our kids snuck into the kitchen at my wife's prompting to make May baskets. We never seem to remember May Day until we receive the first basket on our porch from one of the more holiday conscious relations.

So while the neighborhood friends were sitting in our living room watching the movie, our kids were sneaking out the back door to put colorful bags of popcorn, M&Ms and Twizzlers on their friend's porches. I stood back and watched, thinking that this is the way things should be, but that they were so far removed from the weekend camping adventure.

It was a little different this time, though, because I had traveled with a companion. Being toghether while separated from everything else by an experience meant that we had something that just the two of us shared. Suddenly, what had once created a feeling in me that I would have given anything to bridge, gave me something that I could hide away and treasure with my boy.

It was then that I looked back into the kitchen to see my wife surrounded by the candy chaos of this holiday's creating. She was assessing the current stock to be sure we had enough to get us through the remaining bags. As I looked at her I thought, as I often have, that the two of us have traveled a road together for such a long time and over so many miles that there is no one in the world I share a connection with so completely. She is and has always been my ultimate Wardrobe companion.

The Adventure

So, here I am, standing on the other side of Destiny. I walked through the fire and am now stronger because of it. I camped for a weekend with my boy and survived. Whew.

I must admit that it probably wasn't as bad to get through as I originally feared. At given moments, I may have even admitted that I was having fun. But it's still not something that I'll be making a hobby of any time soon.

The next one is in August. That gives me 4 months to recover.

We left off on Friday at 5. After I picked up Robo from school that afternoon, we went gathering mini toiletries and sleeping bags, quickly packed, grabbed some drive through, and we were off. The camp was held at a National Guard Reserve training base about 45 minutes away. We were sleeping in empty barracks and would be having our events at different locations around the base.

The theme was space, so Friday night we started with classes on star watching. We had a gentleman that was a scouter and a hobbyist star gazer come out and talk about the heavens. Then we went outside to look through his telescope. Jupiter is very prominent in the sky right now and we were able to look at that. The telescope was not powerful enough to see the colors of the planet, it was just a large bright spot in the viewer, but you cold see several small, very faint dots beside it in a straight line. Those were the moons! That is certainly more than I have ever seen before.

When we finally got ready for bed, it was like taming ferrets to get all those kids in bed and quite for lights out. We were sleeping on military mattresses. They were lumpy and hard and I couldn't help feeling that any direction I lay the weight up my body pushing down into mattress kept my feet higher than my head. I took comfort that at least we weren't in tents and the cold, but after I couldn't help thinking, "I remember the ground being so much more comfortable".

I eventually fell asleep and had fitful dreams of a Scout troupe mishandling the release of OS X Tiger for the Mac that happened on Friday (I seriously did---I don't often dream of my computing addiction, but I did that night). As tired as I was, not being able to settle down to sleep till Midnight, I still woke up several times during the night, finally getting up at 6:30. I showered in a concrete cube and was finishing getting dressed just in time to hear the retired drill Sergeant coming through with a bullhorn to wake the little troopers.

On that Saturday, we started by going down to a lake front and having a demonstration of the bomb/dope sniffing patrol dogs that the military uses. There's nothing that stirs the hearts of young boys like a cool dog attacking someone. Robo had gone out without layering himself up against the morning chill, so eventually he and his long sleeve T-shirt came over and wanted me to wrap him up my coat. We stood there, both as much in the coat as we could be, watching the rest of the dogs like a two headed monster. He was pretty conscientious about his sweatshirt and other warm weather gear after that.

We spent the after noon learning about the physics of flight from by daughter's physics teacher, who was coincidentally also very active in scouting. We assembled and launched home-made Estes rockets, building them out of sheets of paper and cardboard. After launching 48 rockets, we moved the group down to the river where we used binoculars to see a bald eagles nest that was nearby, then after dinner it was off to the Strategic Air Command (SAC) museum.

I thought to myself, this is the part that I'm going to dig. I've always been kind of a "neck up" sort of person. I would enjoy it if this were a chess camp, or a science camp or something like that. Not all the running and jumping and hiking and battling the elements---but that's pure Robo. But now, here we were surrounded by science and history. We started all as a group watching a movie about the exploration of Mars. This was becoming my kind of camp.

Next we were split into 3 groups, and ours was taken first to the flight simulators. Every one under 4 ft rejoiced. Things took a severe right turn to being Robo's kind of camp again. These flight simulators are not your granddads PC game flight simulators. These babies are machines that raise up and, as you are watching the simulation on the screen in a cockpit, are able to spin you 360 degrees in any direction. In the spirit of father and son, Robo and I were loaded into this claustrophobic little capsule with no windows, just a giant flight sim computer projection right in front of your face. Right before our flight lady click the door shut, she mentions that Robo is in the seat with the controls that determine who is actually piloting our trip---him or me.

We are raised up and I'm having a quick heart to heart with the boy to form a pact about spinning. I don't do spinning very well, you see. Ever since an ill-fated ride at a county fair carnival when I was young where I first experienced nausea without illness, I haven’t been able to tolerate anything that spins---not even when I swing dance. My inner ear isn’t what it used to be. I don't know how those ice skaters on TV do it.

After a brief slide that tells us what the controls do as I can feel us being lifted into the air, the virtual plane takes off. We aren't in the air thirty seconds when my little Tom Cruise starts the spinning. I was introduced to a concept I hadn't given much thought to, even though it's not a terribly complex concept. It's the barrel roll loop-de-loop---meaning that you go round and round in a left to right motion while at the same time flipping head over heels.

It wasn't long before I was screaming for him to stop. I don't think he could hear me over his laughing.

I reached over and found that precious button that gives me control and hit it, exercising my authority as a parent to make executive decisions. I flattened it out the flight, thanking God for every quarter I spent on a game machine in my teens that gave me the skill to do this quickly. But the boy, knowing that control was just a playstation thumb motion away, was toying with me. He waited just long enough to see the color return to my face and he took control, laughing from his belly like I haven't seen in ages, and we were back on the brain scrambler. We went through that routine several times, me taking control, him waiting like time a punch line before taking back control. For him it seemed to get funnier every time. I was hating life more and more with every turn.

He finally gave me control when I bribed him by telling him that I would let him ride a second time alone if he stopped and he could flip as much as he wanted then. I took control and kept her steady until the ride ended. After stepping off the longest 5 minutes of my year so far, I realized what a bargain that ride was. It was $5 for each of us to ride but I rationalized the cost by thinking how the $5 for Robo was to ride which he seemed to enjoy. My $5 I attributed to paying them to let me off the ride after 5 minutes----the fools, I would have paid so much more.

I bought a 7up type drink from the soda machines to try to settle my poor stomach and Robo got in line again. When it was his turn I couldn't even watch his ride as he turned the machine into some kind of psychotic blender. I shook my head at the thought that I had sired a crazy man.

When the ride finally ended and they opened the hatch, I was sure I was going to terrified shell of my child, victim of his own lunacy. But instead it opened to a beaming face, and in true Robo form, the spinning actually seemed to agree with him---his hair look great.

We finished the rest of the museum tour looking at the traveling exhibit dealing with the Mars missions, and then through the antique aircraft section, none of which I enjoyed as much I would have liked. I was too busy trying to remain standing, the only thing going through head was “I can do this, I can make it through this. Each minute brought me closer to bed so I could sleep this awful feeling off.

I'll tell you what, though, when we got back to the barracks and every one got in bed, it was a whole lot quieter than the night before. The value of sleep sold itself after that day of running around in the wind.

I was up the next morning again before the megaphone came through and we were onto the packing up.

When cleaning up the barracks and mess hall and other area's we had used, something strange happened. Something deep inside of me was touched off and I found a part of me that buried under years of higher education and job hunting. This place in me that had learned to keep and take pride in a sharp campsite; to leave a place in better condition than I found it; and to rally other younger members to launch off with the same purpose as a team. We rounded up the scouts and worked shoulder to shoulder cleaning and packing up like a well oiled machine. I stood there and felt a glimmer of purpose dancing behind my eyes. There is value to this after all---we're shaping character and building leaders. I felt that maybe I was standing a little taller.

Luckily, I was completely surrounded by things that plug in to the wall less than two hours later. The feeling passed before the DVD tray had fully loaded the movie I would be finally finishing for the next couple hours.

I have too much respect for progress to throw all this technology out the window just like that. You have to honor the sacrifice of your predecessors, you know.