Reading to him helped me rediscover my love of performing, and of story.

Singing with him helped me rediscover my love of song, and music as a thing made.

In those moments we were deeply together, sharing experience richly, across the three decades that persistently endeavor to separate us.

In those moments I was me, not any of the formal presentations of myself. And that freedom drew us together, hand in hand. Two people, ageless, sharing a love of tune and tale and, more often than not, a certain level of silliness.

When he finds himself mired in those tough questions of how to repay the things our parents did for us, I hope he remembers this.

And knows we’re all good.

Turns out that this hospital is really quite wonderful. The staff have been splendid and caring, she has a very nice room to herself, and they have treated me as a real part of the process and not just a mildly annoying guy in the way.

So, really wonderful. Except that the guest wireless doesn’t seem to reach her room. It’s great in the lobby. It’s great here in this family room. But her hospital room appears to eat radio signals, as neither wifi or cell seem to penetrate that space reliably.

As a result I suggested that we buy a film or similar for the iPad to help make up for the Netflix shortfall, and came here to the family room to download Thor as a bit of distracting popcorn.

And it was $20.

Which gave me pause.

Which in turn really made me annoyed with myself.

So far today I’ve spent that much on meals. We’ll certainly spend that much on gas back and forth for this procedure. It’s a fraction of our minuscule share of the huge bill this will rack up. (We are very grateful for the University’s excellent health care plan.) Or we could compare this to the cost of Thomas’s tuition at Hampshire. Or my soda pop habit at the office. Or money I lose under the bed.

JOCP!!! What was I thinking? Why did I even remotely care? If this film gives her even an hour of distracted relief from the mending and tearing going on in her leg it’s totally worth it! And, I’m quite sure it will do more than that.

I realize that there’s a lot of privilege assumed in this, and that there are people for whom that $20 would be a genuine concern. (& way too many for whom an operation like this would be out of reach.)

But that’s not us.

And I just spend the best $20 I’m likely to spend in a very long time.

This blast from the past was taken in the mid-70’s and features a much younger (but no less geeky) yours truly, his squirt of a sister, and our dad.

Me

• Just turned 50
• Just celebrated 24 wonderful years of marriage to a woman I couldn’t have dreamed of meeting when this was taken
• Have a 19-year-old son, making him quite a few years older than me in the picture
• Work in computing (not much of a surprise to someone who knew me then)
• Teach for a living (probably a lot less obvious when this was taken)
• Have more than a little gray hair to document the years in between :-)

Misty

• About to turn 46
• Turned out to be the actual outdoorsperson in the family (we were a little slow to figure that out – gender stereotypes weigh heavy in the world)
• After traveling through an undergraduate degree in music history, got a PhD in biology and now teaches animal behavior and conservation at UW Oshkosh
• Is biking this summer (with her awesome dog in a trailer behind her!) from Ann Arbor, MI, to Ithaca, NY (I consider biking the 15 minutes across the Mississippi into downtown Minneapolis without dying an accomplishment)
• Also turned out to be a teacher for a living, and an exceptional one at that (I suspect our mother has something to do with that)
• Got to do field work in cool places like the Galapagos and Turkey (yeah, I have biologist envy)
• Also has more than a little gray hair to document the years in between :-)

Dad

• About to turn 83
• After living for decades in Wichita Falls, TX (where Misty and I essentially spent our whole lives before going away to college), moved to Houston for roughly a decade
• Then retired to NW Arkansas, where our folks still live an incredibly active life
• Got really involved in the NW Arkansas jazz scene and knows all the celebs
• Rediscovered (with Mom) his love for bridge, and they get invited to play with some pretty serious heavy hitters which is super cool
• Joined with a submariner veterans group in NW Arkansas and has become a lot more connected to his experience on subs during the Korean War
• Fishes as much as circumstances allow, but physically managing the boat and the truck and the gear, etc., etc., is proving tougher. Luckily he’s got friends that help a lot.
• Has beaten cancer twice, but it hasn’t been easy and those battles have definitely left their marks

The crazy thing, though, is how much this old picture resonates with now. My sister and I have changed a ton, but my Dad still looks a lot like that. Thomas, Dad, and I went trout fishing on the White River in Arkansas last week, and it was pretty much just like I remember events like this picture. A few weeks before that, he and Misty went fishing in Lake Michigan near Green Bay. While we were in Arkansas, he and I took the recycling to the recycling center. He came with me to the car place while they looked at a rattle. We went to a picnic hosted by his submariners group. We listened to live jazz over a Sunday brunch. A lot of the details have changed, but the broad brushstrokes are still very recognizable; it’s definitely our strange, happy family.

Since she’s not in the picture, I end up pretty much ignoring my wonderful mother in this, which isn’t really cool. She just turned 75 and totally rocks, and is the rock of the family in so, so many ways. I suspect that while we were fishing she was back at the camper, bravely enduring the “great outdoors” when she would have much been somewhere with indoor plumbing :-). Love you Mom!

…a commodity has value and a gift does not. A gift has worth. – Lewis Hyde

Tomorrow (24 June) marks the 24th anniversary of our marriage!

There are so many things I’m grateful for, and no way to enumerate them or document them here, so I’ll settle for an example.

Among her many “strangely inventive” artistic talents, Sue makes books. Wonderful, handmade books, where she cuts and folds all the paper, sews together the signatures, builds the cover, and glues it all together. Some of these are displayed in galleries, while others (such as the one pictured here) are notebooks or journals filled with blank pages inviting us to share our thoughts in word or sketch.

For the past several years, Sue has made such journals as high school graduation gifts for our and, more substantially, Tom’s friends in that year’s graduating class. As he moves on to college, the numbers are beginning to contract, but over the years she’s made many dozens of these books, often for people we didn’t actually know terribly well. That’s a lot of work, constructing by hand an object whose future is far from certain. She is, after all, making blank books, in an age where the future of books is at best unclear, an age where most are far more likely to send a text message or post on a blog [I’M LOOKING AT ME!] than to write a letter or keep a journal on paper.

Thus these are, in the true sense that Hyde means in the opening quote, gifts. As handcrafted pieces of art, they have clear worth, but their value (and how they are valued by the recipients) is quite uncertain.

Yet she keeps making them. In a flurry of activity every May between the end of the University school year and the high school graduation she cuts and folds and glues and frets. She picks out different papers to use as covers, and has Tom give her feedback on which covers would make the most sense for which graduate. She increases the worth of the world (if not its value) through these gifts, each of which is in fact a multiple gift. It is obviously a gift to the graduate, but this effort is also a gift to our son, and a thank-you to the families of these students who have been important to him.

And, to the point of all this, these are also a gift to me. For while each of these books is made by her and is officially a gift from Thomas, her work enriches us all and the glow it casts as it goes out into the world reflects back on our whole family even if it was her hands that did all the sewing.

So I say “Thank You”, for this and the untold gifts large and small that she has shared with me. It has been a truly splendid 24 years together, and I look forward to many more decades to come!

With all my love,

     – Nic

Proving you really care about someone is an achievement that takes effort everyday. Chocolate and flowers on a single day won’t do.

All that said, I figured it wouldn’t be amiss to let my family know how fabulous they are, a non-commercial sort of way of course :-).

The photo up top is from 9 years ago while we were living in the UK during our first sabbatical; Tom was 7 at the time, and Susan hadn’t yet cut off most of her hair. The strip below is from our second UK sabbatical 7 years later; now he’s taller than her and looking suspiciously like a young man instead of a little boy. Both give a sense of how fun it is to live with these two — there’s no question that I’m a lucky, lucky man.

It was interesting to see how few photos I have of the two of them together outside of the sabbaticals. Those two years are documented in excruciating detail, while our day-to-day here in Morris is much more sparsely recorded. There are moments, like when Tom’s on stage, where I take a billion photos, but I end up with very few photos of the two of them together.

I think this helps illustrate the value of these years we’ve had away from home. There’s something about stepping out of your “normal” life, leaving most of your stuff behind, and making a life (even if for just a year) in a new place. It shaves off a lot of the distractions and, for us at least, meant we spent more and different time together. Some of that is in the form of being tourists together (which is where these photos come from), but it’s also in the form of walking together because we didn’t own a car, and being together because the apartment was too small for us to easily be apart.

(And I realize that having this sort of opportunity just oozes privilege; most people don’t have the flexibility or resources to do this sort of thing once, let alone twice. I’m lucky in many, many ways.)

Happy Valentine’s Day to Sue and Tom!

Because it was late and I was in a hurry, I ended up just uploading the whole set (over several attempts), but marked them as private so people wouldn’t end up seeing two copies of that first group of images, figuring I’d sort things out in the morning.

The morning came, and it turned out that I really didn’t have a workable plan. All the pictures were on Flickr, but there was no good (i.e., automated) way to figure out which were the duplicates. If I could identify them, then deleting the duplicates and making the rest visible would be easy, but I didn’t have a clue how to find the duplicates using Flickr’s tools.

Sigh.

This would, however, be pretty straight forward in a script if I had all the data I needed, and this is where Flickr redeemed itself. They have a very rich API for accessing (and modifying) photos and their associated information (like tags), so if I could figure out how to use that I’d be golden. I’d poked a little with some Ruby Flickr libraries in the past, but none of them ever seemed very complete and they were always struggling to stay on top of Flickr’s changes and extensions to the API. A little searching this time, however, turned up Flickraw, which uses some really nifty Ruby metaprogramming to essentially build the Ruby part of the API “on the fly”, ensuring that it will be complete and up-to-date all automagically!

It turns out that Flickraw was indeed powerful, flexible, and easy to use. After authenticating (following the example on the Flickraw web site), I was able to use it to pull down a list of all the photos from “The boys next door”

my_owner_id = "68457656@N00"
play_title = "The boys next door"
my_stream = flickr.photos.search(
              :user_id => my_owner_id, 
              :text => play_title, 
              :per_page => 500)

I then split that list into the initial set of publicly visible photos, and the photos I’d uploaded after things got screwy and kept private (i.e., visible only to me):

public_photos = my_stream.find_all {|photo| photo.ispublic == 1}
private_photos = my_stream.find_all {|photo| photo.ispublic == 0}

My next task was to determine which of the private photos were duplicates of one of the public photos people were already looking at. All I really needed was the list of duplicates, but I decided to create lists of both the duplicates and the non-duplicates. I had to compare titles here because the Flickr IDs would be different; as far as Flickr knew they were all different photos. Happily, I had named them in a way that they each had a unique title, so if two photos had the same title, I knew they were the same shot uploaded twice.

dups = []
non_dups = []
private_photos.each do |photo|
  public_duplicate = public_photos.find { |pub| photo.title == pub.title }
  if public_duplicate
    dups.push(photo)
  else
    non_dups.push(photo)
  end
end

At this point, I could apply tags to all the photos in the two groups, and all the rest of the fiddling could be done through Flickr’s web tools:

non_dups.each do |photo|
  flickr.photos.addTags(:photo_id => photo.id, 
                        :tags => "to_keep")
end

dups.each do |photo|
  flickr.photos.addTags(:photo_id => photo.id, 
                        :tags => "to_delete")
end

I could have actually done everything with the Ruby script (delete the duplicates, change the remaining images to publicly visible, and add them to the appropriate set), but wanted to do that via Flickr so I could see what was happening as I went. And once the tags were in place, the work in Flickr was quite straightforward. The result: A set of 339 images that contains all the photos I uploaded, with no duplicates, all accomplished without deleting any of the original uploads.

Big thanks to Maël Clérambault, the author of Flickraw, for his excellent little library, and thanks to Flickr for providing this very nice set of API calls. (Now go fix Flickr Uploadr, damnit!)

As for the play – I just heard that they took second at today’s sub-sections competiton, which means they move on to sections next week, and Tom got a star performance award! Congratulations all!

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but we happen to have a nice 80Gb iPod Classic (pictured above) that died over the summer with the telltale clicking sound of a stuck head. So I tried out Matt’s trick & whacked quite firmly (& quite loudly) multiple times on an old wooden chest and voilà – it came back to life! We thought we’d be travelling without the benefit of our huge shared pile of music, but it’s worked beautifully for many hours (all the way down to Arkansas & back).

Huzzah! Big thanks to Matt for the suggestion – banging on hardware beats the heck out of having to buy a new iPod. Again, I was only willing to risk this because this puppy was well past warranty, and there was no chance of repairing it. Obviously beating the tar out of electronics is something one should think carefully about and do with some care; your mileage definitely may vary.

16 years ago today, we were in Abbot Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis introducing a red, wrinkled little lizard boy to the world.

He was healthy but small (3 pounds, 12 ounces), and his size landed him in the neo-natal ICU for several weeks. We spent his first Chrismas in that NICU. Another family spent that day together behind a screen at the end of the room, saying goodbye to the last of a set of triplets. It was the only time we saw that child outside of its incubator, and the only time we saw the family hold it.

That day still shines bright, like my eyes when I think of it.

On my dresser is a photo of Tom at Thanksgiving when he’s two or three, eyes wide like his smile. To be honest, I don’t really remember the that kid. Those years have largely slipped away, turning into photos in an album.

No doubt more will join them.

But there’s so much I do remember. Places we’ve been. Things we’ve done. Pieces of who he is, assembling.

Reading together. Dr. Seuss. Haroun & the Sea of Stories. Early Harry Potter. Inkheart. Plenty of room between the trees.

Realizing that he’d somehow learned to read when no one was watching. (Still not sure how that happened.)

Realizing that reading out loud at night was just too slow. One of the first steps towards inevitable independence.

Walking together in our sabbatical year in Birmingham, talking about religion, and how eyes work. He was six or seven.

Writing songs and performing together. “Fat fly”, “Crab grass”, “Taco Man”. Open Mic. The Mutant Variety Show.

His wonderful attitude during the long series of rabies shots after The Bat Incident.

Our time in Italy. Gelato & pizza. Learning to spot annunciation paintings from a mile away. Deciding he’d seen about all the churches he needed for quite a while.

The family trip to Alaska. Climbing the hills around Polychrome Pass in Denali National Park; the wind cutting past us as we gazed out over that awesome valley. Celebrating Mac & Mutti’s 50th anniversary in Seward. His laughter, and grumpiness, and goofiness.

The way he made friends and settled in so quickly during both our sabbaticals in the UK. And the long hours on Facebook keeping up with his friends back home.

Our time in Spain. Going out for breakfast together in the morning. A wonderful day together in Madrid. “Guernica”. The “Black Paintings” of Goya. A day he planned.

Walking to school together talking about stuff, large and small. Waving at folks driving by.

Listening to music together. Discussing lyrics, and beats, and color. That high kid voice in our promo spots for the radio station, and the much lower voice I hear when listening to this year’s solo radio shows.

The many, many play performances. And band. And choir. And pretty much any opportunity to be on a stage.

6th in the State in Poetry Out Loud last year, and last year’s amazing One Act.

Dying your hair cool colors.

And so, so much more.

Today he’s sixteen.

He writes lines I would be proud to call my own.

He’s taller than his mother (but not yet taller than me).

He sings bass (or tenor – it all depends on the context).

He shaves, if not very often.

His room is a mess, but so is my office, so I’d best not throw stones.

He’s getting recruiting material from colleges, another sign that he won’t live in this house forever.

He’s old enough to drive, but not to go to the Doomtree blowout (and it’s not clear which he’d choose if it came down to it).

He cares. About the world. About others. About Making Things Better.

He’s our son, and a joy to have in our lives.

Happy birthday, Thomas. It’s been a fun and exciting 16 years, and we’re all looking forward to many more!

Our last trip was a fine week with my parents in Arkansas, where we had much cooler weather than one might expect for this time of year. We even had one really nice, gentle rain, which was an excellent excuse to stay inside and read. Or sit out in the rain if you’re a ceramic frog :-).

Those keeping track at home will note that noon-2pm interacts oddly with our family radio shows on KUMM on Sunday mornings (Sub-Evil from 10am-noon, WeatherGrrrl & I from noon-2pm). Sub-Evil’s show should survive largely intact, but our show may get cut off towards the end.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but even hip radio DJs sometimes have parenting responsibilities :-).