Do the Yak

No school this past Wednesday (Valentine's Day) – the first snow day of the year. Though it was really more of a Slush Day. See, it was frigidly cold for weeks before this storm, then about 33 degrees for a day while it precipitated, then frigid again, so we were left with about half a foot of solid ice with footprints and snowplow chunks frozen into visually interesting though ankle-breaking sidewalk sculptures, coated with a durable polyurethane shell of solid ice and a lovely dusting of powder from the last half-hour of the storm when it got colder again. All the salt in the world will not budge this crap until it gets above freezing again, if ever. We finally get snow and the result is a giant construction site where a cinder-block building was recently demolished. Calgonite, take me away – to Palm Beach Gardens, where I can sit outside without risking my breath-taking beauty and future concert pianist career with tissue-destroying frostbite on face and fingers. And I can breat...

Status report -- Weather: Still sucks (hasn't been above about 27 degrees for a couple of weeks). Work: Busy with numerous projects. I'm very slowly teaching myself how to make an image map using CSS. Don't everyone jump up at once. Kids: Very good. Becky is slowly learning to whine less, with the help of stickers at school (for not throwing a tantrum at pick-up time even though she's been there for more than nine hours) and plenty of encouraging shouting from her parents. Sarah lost her homework folder with two incomplete things in it, then found it again, then last night finished her written narrative on "How to Build a Snowperson" plus two weekly homework packets, which I feel VERY good about, almost as though I myself had done them and got to put two stickers next to my name on the homework chart. Pathetic. She will never learn to be unconventional with me, the parent who excels at figuring out the expectations (even when imperfectly explained on the assig...

Like many casual football fans, I tune into the Super Bowl mostly for the commercials (though I would have had a team to really root for if the Colts hadn't beaten the Patriots two weeks ago). Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, you can see the current crop as well as a few standouts from previous years. My favorite for 2007 is the sad automotive robot . It was one of the few ads that didn't remix the usual ingredients of animals, celebrities, female sex bombs and/or kids. This Coke commercial was pretty creative too. There were several commercials this year that pumped up the idiotic-violence quotient, and of course what's football without some powerful manly machismo, especially if you can throw in some homophobia? I read somewhere that Snickers has already pulled this ad because of the protests. But hey, it could have been worse. The ad features a graphic at the end promoting the web site afterthekiss.com, where you initially could view and vote on several alternative en...

One of my favorite bloggers, Mimi Smartypants , recently wrote with great panache about a some poets I'd never heard of. She said, "Both of these guys can, at their best, write perfect, amazing lines that crash around in my head like a moose on Ecstasy – that furry, that large, that happy and antlered." I was an English major so read a bunch of poetry in high school and college, though nothing more modern than William Carlos Williams and Philip Larkin, I forget. Unfortunately the professor who taught modern poetry had early Alzheimer's and assigned us to read John Crowe Ransom's "Piazza Piece" about six times in a row. perhaps as a result, I like Shakespearean sonnets, Romantic and Victorian poetry but not much beyond that, preferring (to my chagrin) the Dead White Men school when it comes to poetry. BUT... I'm always hoping to expand my horizons, so when Mimi mentioned these two guys, I immediately checked them out. The first guy, August Kleinzah...

A couple of weeks ago on a typically drab winter Saturday, we decided to have some Wholesome Family Fun, so we went to experience SteveSongs . The venue is sort of a community resource/support center for families with very young children called WarmLines . Thus the average age of audience members at this bitchin' concert, not counting parents, was somewhere around two or maybe three, tops. So there I was in another Parenthood Moment, sitting on a blanket on the floor with dozens of noisy tots and the poor man's Raffi holding forth on stage. It was one of those times when the Talking Heads lyric drifted into mind: "Well... how did I get here?" The feeling of unreality intensified as I watched some parents really GROOVIN' on the sounds this dude was layin' down. Note the woman in pink shakin' it in front of the stage with her toddler in a beautiful moment of intergenerational bonding through music, mankind's great common denominator: Yes, that's an a...

It's cold. I hate that. Maintenance workers have been in my office three or four times to make the heating register blow warm air rather than a chilly breeze, but nothing they do seesm to last. But now I have a space heater in here, so I clsoe my door almost all the way and scurry out of my office only for the most basic human necessities (plus the odd meeting here and there). We tried the space heater in the kitchen, which is really freezing – not enough heating registers and too little insulation), but it kept tripping the circuit breaker. QUALITY. It's getting old as well as cold. I'm getting psyched to move into the Forever House. In the meantime, let us contemplate some good reasons to go to confession . And cling to the fact that we leave for Florida in exactly three weeks.

One of Sarah's first-grade classmates earlier this year was a boy named AJ in a recumbent wheelchair. We didn't know what was wrong with him but he seemed pretty immobile and unresponsive, so I assumed he had severe cerebral palsy or some such thing. He had a personal assistant who wheeled him in each morning and helped in the classroom. Another parent in Sarah's class organized a schedule where families could take turns bringing dinners to his house, since his mom was taking care of AJ alone – more than a full-time job – and she had two other young kids. So I made a pan of lasagna and Sarah and I brought it over (right around the corner from our house) between Christmas and New Year's. The mom seemed tired. I could glimpse AJ through the hall lying on a couch with some kind of machine to help him breathe. In calling to confirm arrangements, the mother who organized the dinners said that AJ wouldn't be coming back to school after the holidays. Yesterday, the school...