Gutenberg vs. Bezos, Part II

Like Dorothy wearing her ruby slippers in Oz, I've had the power with me all along.  I ran into a friend who showed me how to use an e-reader app (Nook, Kindle, iBooks, etc.) on my iPad without the glowing white screen that I fear will cause my eyes to fail someday in my old age.

"You switch it so the background is black and the words are white," she said.  "It is great.  My Nook crashed so now I just use the Nook app on my iPad."  Brilliant.  I tried it with Pride and Prejudice, and it works.

So I don't need a Kindle since I already own an iPad.  The earth will thank me for not adding yet another digital device to my family's swelling arsenal.  Will I use this new found power for good, not evil?

Before I discuss that, I asked my friend how I could separate my Kindle books from my son's.  John registered the Boy's Kindle under my Amazon account. 

"So you don't want him perusing your copy of Fifty Shades of Orange?"

Exactly.  No.  Wait.  I was thinking more about Gone Girl, a psychological thriller.  (Am I the only middle age woman on the planet who hasn't read anything in Fifty Shades?)  She said to get him his own Amazon account so I can keep my reading private.

"You know it takes place in Seattle," she said.  Interesting.  I'd love for Mr. Orange to run into Bernadette.  That would be awesome.

Which begs another question: Is Fifty Shades success due to the e-reader?  Was this a book that people can discreetly download and read while reading the bus or in their living room and no one can see what it is?  I think so.  Like the internet exploded the porn industry, ditto to Fifty Shades and the Kindle.

Back to using my iPad e-reader for good and not evil.  I'll have to think of it in the same terms of my use of iTunes.  With iTunes, I am buying and enjoying music that I otherwise wouldn't have.  Even if it ends up being small change, it is money that the artist might not otherwise have gotten.  So I rationalize:  these are books that I otherwise might not get from the library or a bookstore.  I will still love the library and my neighborhood bookstores, and my bookshelves will thank me.

I just downloaded Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn from iBooks for $8.99.  It looks like Steven Jobs won this round.

Gutenberg vs. Bezos

My birthday is tomorrow, which makes today the last day I am closer to 40 than I am to 50.  This morning, my husband asked me what I wanted for my birthday.  I had thought of getting a Liberty puzzle,* which I so love, or a Kindle.**  The new batch of Liberty puzzles have not yet arrived at Card Kingdom,*** so I will have wait for that.

I am vexed about making this leap into the next technology for books.  The Boy got a Kindle for his birthday, and Daughter has a Nook from Barnes & Noble.  I have several friends who were early adopters of the Kindle, and they love it.  I am worried that I will contribute to the demise of the printed word, and subsequently, the demise of libraries and bookstores.

I love bookstores and libraries.  I like looking at the tables with new releases with beautiful covers and the branch favorites bookshelf at the library.  I like the handwritten reviews on notecards written by the staff at the shops.  In the case of the U Bookstore kids section, reviews are written by kids, including one by my daughter.

The Boy has a Paperwhite, which is easy on the eyes.   I have the Kindle app on my iPad, but I don't find it comfortable to read for a long period of time on the glowing screen.  As I am getting older, I am starting to take things like eye strain more seriously.

(Sidebar:  Can someone in the tech world please make a computer/word processor with this technology like Paperwhite so I can type without have to look at a glowing screen all day?  I can get another device to watch Netflix or check FB.  Or would I be the only person to buy this?)

Back to the question:  Should I get a Kindle?  Someone did a study somewhere that showed that people who read on e-reading devices read more than people who don't.  I can see why.  I have a list of several books I have been wanting to read, and I could download them in a matter of minutes with an e-reader.  Instead, I order them from the Seattle Public Library.  Some other study showed that SPL is one of the most used libraries in the country.  The downside of these bragging rights is that I was 900 or something to get David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell.  My friend in Park Ridge, Illinois walked into her library and picked it up off the shelf weeks after it came out.  I thought we could discuss the book, but by time I got it six months later, she forgot what it was about.  A group of friends recommended Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.  I am number 92.  I was going to reserve Where'd You Go, Bernadette from the library.  I decided to buy it when I was 1,007th in line.  My patience has its limits.

I could buy books like Gone Girl, I suppose.  I have bought lots of books, and favorite bookstore are the Ravenna Third Place and University Bookstore.  I have three problems with buying books.

1. They cost a decent amount of money, given how much I read.  The library is a very reasonable option, even if I have to wait.
2. I am running out of room in my house to store books I've bought.  
3. I have so many books and I don't know what I own.  When I lived in Chicago, I bought a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  I bought a copy when I lived in St. Louis.  I didn't figure this out until I moved to Seattle and found two copies while I was unpacking.  I recently gave one copy away, and now can't find the second one.  Argh.  (First World Problem, I know.)

Here is a picture of the four stacks of books next to my bed.  They are next to my bed because I like to read before I go sleep and when I wake up.

I also love the little post-it-note page flags and bookmarks.

I started with one stack, then somehow ended up with four when I ran out of space on my bookshelves.  I feel like an archeologist digging through these stacks.  That anthology on Alzheimer's buried beneath four books, so that must have been purchased in March 2014.

While a Kindle would mean I would be able to escape my bed if there were a fire in my house, I worry I might go crazy with clicks and drop $30 a week on books.  I told John this, and he asked if I drink in bars every week.

No.

"Some people drop $30 a week in bars.  Buying books online probably costs the same and has to be healthier."

True.

I say this as I listen to "Bizarre Love Triangle" by New Order which I purchased on iTunes.  I know iTunes and downloading MP3s hurt record shops.  But I rarely shopped in music stores before they became extinct.  My iTunes purchases are gravy for the music industry as this is music that otherwise would not have purchased.  While I feel sad music stores are extinct, I do not feel as I contributed to their demise.

So I am torn.  To summarize: I am too cheap to buy lots of books, yet waiting six months or more to read the latest Malcolm Gladwell gets old.  If I do decide to splurge and buy books, I have no place to put them.  If I get an e-reader, I feel like I might make bookstores and libraries obsolete, which would be bad.

My budget could handle buying ebooks, considering I don't drinks Appletini's or some other fancy cocktails at bars.  Yet, I feel like if I were get an e-reader I am changing the world.  Should I enter the new world?  Did people vex when Gutenberg made his Bible?  Did they shun it, and only read Bibles written by scribes?  I kind of doubt it.  My kids have e-readers now, and this is their world.  Should it be mine?

_______________
* I am not shilling for Liberty puzzles.  I just like them a lot.
** Not shilling for Kindle, either.
*** Ditto.  Birthdays bring out the consumer in me.  Oy.

Amish Vacation

Last night, I attended a lecture with Dave Eggers and Maria Semple at Seattle's Town Hall.  Listening to two accomplished writers discuss their work was great way to spend an evening, especially as the proceeds from the event support 826 Seattle, a non-profit writing and tutoring center for kids.  Maria wrote one of my favorite books, Where'd you Go, Bernadette.  I read Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ages ago and I take a look at his literary journal, McSweeney's, every once in a while.  I haven't read any of his newer stuff, but apparently his new book, The Circle, is a dystopian novel about technology and the internet taking over our lives.

This week is also the first week back at school after Spring Break, and many of my friends took trips out of town.  This got me thinking, and I merged the dystopian theme of The Circle in with vacations.  What if we could take a week vacation or a longer sabbatical with the Amish?  I don't mean to romanticize, glorify or criticize their religion.  Rather, this could be a way Americans could take a break from their cell phones, computers, processed foods and big box store shopping mentality and live a non-connected life where we are closer to the means of production of the things we need.  We could learn to kill and pluck the chicken we intend to eat for dinner.  We would live without indoor plumbing.  We would ride horses instead of driving cars.  We could learn to sew our own clothes, make shoes and maybe even raise a barn.  Perhaps we could learn woodworking with handmade tools.  I would love to learn to quilt.  We'd have to create our own entertainment, perhaps through song and dance.  Most importantly, we'd have to talk to each other.

I am not sure how this would benefit the Amish.  They would deal with people going through video game withdrawal and whatnot, which would not be pleasant.  I am not sure how they function in the modern economy.  Could they accept money from unplugged-tourism?  They sell furniture.  They might be able to profit from sharing the experience of eating organic food and no screen time.

There are a few things that could make this potentially difficult.  I am not sure how the Amish approach modern medicine.  I am allergic to horses and hay, and living on a farm without Zyrtec would be miserable.  What about people who have conditions like diabetes who need medicine to stay alive?  Could they make exceptions for insulin?  What about books?  I could understand not bringing an e-reader, but what about a paperback?  I don't know enough about the Amish to know the answers.

Would we be able to survive?  Would we need training before hand, like mountain climbers and marathon runners prepare before their endeavors?  We could have cultural guides help us prep, and we could scale down our internet use and salt intake before the trip so we don't go into culture or food shock.

And what would we gain?  Removing ourselves from our current culture and entering another one gives us fresh eyes to look at home.  When I was in high school, I stayed with a family in Caen, France for three weeks.  While the language, food and currency were all different, I also saw a different way of life, shifitng from suburban to urban.  The family lived in an apartment in the city while I lived in the suburbs in a house with a backyard.  My dad drove me to school.  The kids in France hopped on a city bus or walked to where they needed to go.  There were no cafes or shops within walking distance of my home.  Instead of going to the one-stop grocery store, my french mom went to the bakery, the butcher, the vegetable guy, and a prepared foods guy to buy dinner.  While I liked my home in Columbus, Ohio, this trip changed my perception of how people could live.  I didn't know any other life besides the suburbs. When I graduated from college, I found an apartment in the city.  I didn't own a car and took a bus or a train everywhere I needed to go.  I walked to the grocery store.  We might reevaluate our connected lives, and we might seek a better understanding of how things in our world are made.

And now we live in a connected world via the internet, but we are less connected with how things are made.  Maybe we need to step away from it all before Eggers' futuristic dystopian society becomes a reality.

Sidelines or the Back of the Pack?

Over the past thirteen years, I've spend a fair amount of time watching my kids exercise while I am on the sidelines.  I often thought of the fabulous shape I'd be in if I exercised while they were, but sadly, I rarely did.

Given that I am often a spectator, when I get the chance to participate, I do.  While under no circumstances would I join the Boy on the soccer pitch, there are other activities where I don't want to sit and watch the rest of my family have fun.  And yet, my participation is becoming more challenging as everyone gets older.  The kids are becoming more capable and more courageous, and I worry if I am in good enough shape to keep up.  The kids are becoming exponentially more athletic, whereas my improvement curve is fairly flat.  I also worry about injury.

My mom told me once when I was young never to marry a man who likes to watch sports on television.  My dad will occasionally watch a game, but he is not the type to plug into whatever game is on, knowing nothing about squash or caring about Northwest Missouri State's basketball team.  So I took her advice, which seemed wise at the time.  My husband doesn't watch much television at all, which is fine with me.  The downside is that my anti-couch potato husband refuses to sit still.

My adrenaline junkie husband encourages the kids to try new things, mostly because he wants to try them, too.  Last summer, we went to Whistler.  We went zip lining, downhill mountain biking and white water rafting.  (When I suggested canoeing or trail biking, I got raised eyebrows for a reply, suggesting those activities were for wimps.)  I got a little nervous about all of these things, but sucked it up and was a good soldier.  Ironically, the worst part was the Grouse Grind, a hike up a mountain outside of Vancouver, B.C..  I thought it would be fine given it did not require a helmet, a harness, elbow pads, a pre-activity safety lecture, and/or an insurance waiver.  The night before our ill-fated hike, we went to a very nice restaurant.  The waiter was in his mid-thirties and looked relatively fit.  British Columbia is an outdoorsy kind of place, and it seems that many people ski, hike, bike or participate in some other kind of outdoor activity.  This waiter seemed to fit the profile, so I asked him about the Grouse Grind.

"There is no way I would do that again.  I did it once and I almost died."

Great.

So, we did the Grouse Grind the next day because my anti-couch potato, adrenaline junkie husband insisted.  I was feeling a mix of curious and nervous, but figured I would take it slow.  I was mostly worried that my knees would give out midway or I'd have a stroke, and then I'd be stuck.  The Grouse Grind is one-way uphill trip.  The path is narrow and heavily trafficked.  Once you are on, you can't go back down.  Once you make it to the top, you have to take a gondola down.

So we get to the Grouse Grind, and you can see from this picture who is excited to do this and who couldn't care less.

I stopped to take a picture at the beginning of the hike and they were gone.  I didn't see them until about halfway up.  I ran out of water, and I called Jack and asked him to wait for me.

I was left in the dust out of the gate on the Grouse Grind.

"But I don't know where you are.  How can I wait?"  Grrrr.  You aren't suppose to leave your hiking companions.

The next line was even better.  "I had to keep up with the Boy."  Nice.  Even though it was true, it was not cool that he blamed it on the Boy.

"Where is my daughter?" I asked.

"I don't know," he replied.  Strike three.

I will have this conversation forever recorded in my mind and will use it in case I ever need to call a divorce attorney.  "Your husband left you in the dust on the Grouse Grind, lost your daughter and blamed it on your son?  Excellent.  Tell me what you want..."

I was pissed.  I asked him for the car keys and seriously considered leaving him in Canada and driving back to Seattle when I got to the bottom.  But I didn't.  I was just super mad.  For twenty four hours until Jack conceded he was wrong.  Why was I so mad?  This was supposed to be a family vacation, which means it was for everyone in the family, not just the super athletic.  It also became very apparent that I was now the weak link, the slow poke.  Me, the one who created this family, was now forgotten and shuffled to the back of the line.

Eight months later, we were back in Canada, this time skiing at Whistler.  I am a fairly mediocre skier, but I enjoy it and am content skiing blues and greens at a slow pace.  I am not a big fan of skiing too fast or out of control as I don't want to get hurt.  I've see five year olds crash and then bounce up like nothing happened.  I don't think I'll be that lucky.  We have twenty some odd steps to get up to my house from the street.  A broken leg, sprained ankle or twisted knee would mean spending a few weeks at the Silver Cloud Inn down the street while my family did all of their own cooking and laundry for a few weeks.  Plus, I was to ski another day.

That wee tiny green dot on the left side of the slope is Jack.  The kids are already probably already at the bottom waiting for us.

So I have to decide: would I rather be in the game, in the slow zone, and the worst player on team McGuire, or would I rather be on the bench?  While I am skiing the blues and greens, my family will ski the black runs on the same lift.  They will occasionally venture off to steeper runs, while I stay in my comfort zone.  They were off on the Whistler Bowl, some crazy steep run, while I was having a mocha at the lodge.  Which is fine with me.  I know my limitations, but that isn't going to keep me out of the game.

It also helps that Jack is joining me at the back of the pack, left in the dust by the kids when it comes to skiing.  Already, they are both better than us, and there is no way for us to reasonably catch up.  He knows this.  "There will soon come a day when they will have to do the steep stuff by themselves," he said, tired and a little scared after the Whistler Bowl.

I'll welcome him to join me for a mocha.

Me on the Dave Murray downhill run, skiing back to Creekside.  Jack documented me on a black run.  Yes, we both have the same color ski jackets.   For the record, I got mine first.

April -- The Month of Contrasts

I've been offline for a few days.  We went skiing in Whistler for the first part of Spring Break.  Here are two scenes from my yard yesterday:

And today it rained almost all day.  We took the kids to the Pacific Science Center to see the new Spy exhibit.  (Very cool.)   Jack made a nice steak dinner with mushrooms, asparagus, mashed potatoes and spinach salad.  As we were finishing dinner, I looked up and saw this out the window.  I screamed when I saw the big flash of color.  We all rushed outside to get a look.  "This is payback for all of the rain this spring," Jack said.  My daughter grabbed her phone and mine and was taking pictures with two phones at the same time.

While we were looking at the rainbows, Fox made it to the dining room table and grabbed the last bit of my steak.  I am not sure how our little Houdini did it.  The chairs were pushed in, but obviously not enough.  He didn't touch the mushrooms or asparagus or potatoes.  Just the steak.  The Boy witnessed Fox's crime.  I offered him (Fox, not the Boy) the last sip of my wine to wash it down, but he refused.

"The Bitch is Back" by Sandra Tsing Loh, and Days of Clarity

I have been digging around The Atlantic website and came across an old but wonderful article, "The Bitch is Back" but Sandra Tsing Loh.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-bitch-is-back/308642/?single_page=true

Considering this article is a review of a book about menopause,  The Wisdom of Menopause: Creating Physical and Emotional Health During the Change by Christine Northrup, M.D., I was surprised I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe.   The main idea is that estrogen makes women uber nurturing, and menopause is just returning to normal.  It was something that I had suspected all along, and I am glad to see that my assumption has some basis in reality.

Here is a great passage from Northrup:

A woman once told me that when her mother was approaching the age of menopause, her father sat the whole family down and said, “Kids, your mother may be going through some changes now, and I want you to be prepared. Your Uncle Ralph told me that when your Aunt Carol went through the change, she threw a leg of lamb right out the window!” Although this story fits beautifully into the stereotype of the “crazy” menopausal woman, it should not be overlooked that throwing the leg of lamb out the window may have been Aunt Carol’s outward expression of the process going on within her soul: the reclaiming of self. Perhaps it was her way of saying how tired she was of waiting on her family, of signaling to them that she was past the cook/chauffeur/dishwasher stage of life. For many women, if not most, part of this reclamation process includes getting in touch with anger and, perhaps, blowing up at loved ones for the first time.

"Woo-woo! Duck, Uncle Ralph! Go, Aunt Carol!" says Tsing Loh.  "IT’s INTRIGUING TO ponder this suggested reversal of what has traditionally been thought to be the woman’s hormonal cloud. A sudden influx of hormones is not what causes 50-year-old Aunt Carol to throw the leg of lamb out the window. Improperly balanced hormones were probably the culprit. Fertility’s amped-up reproductive hormones helped Aunt Carol 30 years ago to begin her mysterious automatic weekly ritual of roasting lamb just so and laying out 12 settings of silverware with an OCD-like attention to detail while cheerfully washing and folding and ironing the family laundry. No normal person would do that—look at the rest of the family: they are reading the paper and lazing about like rational, sensible people. And now that Aunt Carol’s hormonal cloud is finally wearing off, it’s not a tragedy, or an abnormality, or her going crazy—it just means she can rejoin the rest of the human race: she can be the same selfish, non-nurturing, non-bonding type of person everyone else is. (And so what if get-well casseroles won’t get baked, PTAs will collapse, and in-laws will go for decades without being sent a single greeting card? Paging Aunt Carol! The old Aunt Carol!)"

Thank you, Northrup and Tsing Loh!  John and I were reading this and reflecting on my moments of rage in the past few months.  He could see the correlation between my hormonal condition and my mood.

"But you had good reason to be angry," he conceded.  "You weren't just flying off the handle."  Yes, these hormones make me a docile sheep for 27 days a month.  One day, typically called PMS, was actually my day of clarity, the day when the fog cleared.  The bullshit in my life became apparent, as did my ability to call it.  

I think I might be looking forward to "the change," even if no one in my family is.

Indiana Jones

I came home from a long PTA meeting tonight to see my family sitting on the couch watching Indian Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.   It is not available on Netflix, so we got it from the library. I remember the first time I saw it.  I was probably twelve or so, wondering why Harrison Ford got a big movie instead of Mark Hamill.  I didn't get why Hans Solo was a big deal.

I love the opening scene when Indiana Jones is looking for the treasure in the cave and he get chased by the giant stone ball.  The theme music starts to play, and I thought it was the most thrilling scene I had ever seen.

Do Over! Wishing My Kids had a More Adventurous and Free-Range Childhood

I'd like to start over being a parent.

Yep.

I don't want to start over with midnight feedings and lack of sleep and breastfeeding, or chasing toddlers around all day.  Egads.  I never want to do that again, thanks.  I'd like to start over from when my kids were five, maybe six.

I just read "Hey! Parents, Leave Those Kids Alone" by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic (April 2014).

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/

She features a playground in Wales called "The Land."  It looks like a junkyard where kids play with fire.  Literally.  Check out the video in the article.  My daughter, the future lawyer, asked, "Is this place insured?"

Back in the 1970s when I was growing up, kids had more freedom to explore and take risks than kids do today.  We didn't have quite as much freedom as the kids in the video, but we had significantly more than my kids.  One parent interviewed for the article estimated that his child was probably unsupervised for maybe 10 minutes in his child's first ten years of life.  My kids are probably more in the two hour range of total time unsupervised before age 10.  And I am not talking about the countless times they were in the backyard and I was in the house cooking dinner, a shout away from helping them in case of disaster.  

How many minutes were you unsupervised before you were ten?  I can't count that high.  It would add up to days or weeks, or maybe even months.  I was dropped off at the community center for dance classes on Saturday morning and given a quarter to call when it was time for my parents to pick me up in the afternoon.  I had three classes over the course of six hours.  When I wasn't in class, I would roam around the community center with the other girls.  My parents gave me $2 in coins and I ate tons of crap out of the vending machine.  My favorite candy bar was the Whatchamacallit.  When I was in second grade, I was riding my bike around the neighborhood.  I saw groups of boys playing unorganized baseball in the school parking lot.  After school, kids would walk around the neighborhood and find someone to play with.  My brother and I roamed the Disney World campus alone when I was in seventh grade and he was in fifth.  We were gone for hours, riding a boat from Fort Wilderness and then catching the monorail at the Contemporary Hotel.  I was a full fledged babysitter when I was 12.  I earned enough money to pay for a field trip to France in middle school.  Twice.  

How is this constant supervision good for kids?  Does it help them develop into strong, independent and resilient adults?  Probably not.  According to the article, Millennials have greater rates of depression, narcissism and a lack of empathy, and more college kids are taking psychiatric medication.  Kids' test scores on the Torrence Tests of Creative Thinking have declined across the past decade.

I need a minute to get over my depression.  I'll be back.

So what do kids need?  According to the article, Ellen Sandseter, an early education professor, says kids "have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement; this doesn't mean that what they do has to actually be dangerous, only that the feel they are taking great risk.  That scares them, but then they overcome the fear." (p. 80, April 2014.)  She says there are six types of risky play.  

1. Exploring Heights.  Let kids climb trees.  Daughter is taking rock climbing classes.
2. Handling Dangerous Tools.  Thank you, UW Summer Day Camp, for teaching the Boy how to use a hot glue gun.  And John taught the Boy to wax the skis today.
3. Being Near Dangerous Elements.  This means large bodies of water, like an ocean, or near fire.
4. Rough-and-Tumble Play.  I totally fail at letting my kids do this.
5. Speed.  Cycling and Skiing at speeds that feel too fast.  This one is done.  Check.
6. Exploring on one's own.  I let the kids walk the dog around the neighborhood.  Once, Daughter wore her slinky Halloween costume down to UW.  I found out where she went when I checked my phone's "Map My Walk" app.  This was before she had her own phone. 

I started thinking about point 3 and fire.  When I was a kid, we used to go camping almost every weekend in the summer.  Every camping trip, we had a fire.  While my parents were setting up the site, my brother and I would look for kindling.  Once everything was set up, my parents got firewood and my mom started the fire.  On a YMCA Indian Princess campout when I was six, I put a hot marshmallow roasting stick near my mouth.  I had a blister on my upper lip for a week.  I still have a tiny scar.

And not all of the efforts to keep kids safe have been horrible.  My husband is a pediatrician who frequently witnesses freakish accidents that can happen to kids, and as a result, he tends to be pretty strict when it comes to safety.  Seat belts and car seats have protected kids much better than when I was kid.   I remember going to the library as a kid.  My mom or some other mom would pack six or seven kids in a car, two in the front seat and four or five in the back, squashed on top of each other and sitting on each others laps, no one wearing a seat belt.  One drunk guy running a red light could have sent us all flying.

As I read this list, I begin to wonder.  Sometimes it is hard to be the trail-blazer letting your kids back into the woods by themselves, when no other parent is letting their kid do the same.  Perhaps I am more fearful of Lord of the Flies type behavior where the kids hurt each other than I am of them getting lost or hassled by a stranger.  While I certainly wish my kids were a little more free-range, maybe I am not as lame as I think I am. I should write about my adrenaline junkie husband and our trip to Whistler last summer.  Zip lining across the Fitzsimmons Creek at some ungodly height on a line that was more than a mile long was one of our adventures.  Mountain biking down a real mountain, where you had to gear up with a motorcycle type helmet with stormtrooper gear.  White water rafting.  And climbing the Grouse Grind.  All of these activities came with multi-page safety disclosures and release agreements.  I have to admit I would have been happier biking along a trail or canoeing.  Oh well.  I suppose that is why there are fathers.  Thanks, Jack, for keeping the kids on the edge.

Full squish mountain biking

But I did get them a dog.  I should get some points for that.  

Fox and his Doughnut

Those last two posts were kind of heavy.  Eh.  Here are two pictures of Fox playing with a toy to lighten things up around here.

You can also see my carpet which so badly needs to be replaced.

Broken Brothers

I have several friends with challenging brothers.  These strong, funny, intelligent women have brothers whose lives are remarkably different from theirs.  The women's lives involve children and homework and mortgages.  The brothers' are marked with addiction and/or mental illness.  My own brother has a similar set of challenges, and his life has gone in the opposite direction of mine.  I also know people with sisters with demons, and this could apply to them, too.

When I was in seventh grade, my social studies teacher, Mr. Philips, told us that siblings are the most important people in our lives.  They will know you longer than a spouse, and they will likely outlive your parents.  I believed him, and in spite of my brother's mental illness, I still think it is true.  Yet, it is hard to watch the people who were primary witnesses to your childhood and beyond fade away, implode, explode or otherwise self-destruct.  A friend of mine wrote me the other day:

I'm sorry for both of us, and our broken brothers.

We remember the little boy he once was.  Before there were cracks, when he was whole.  Before there were signs that he would be different.  I remember my brother when he was blond.  The white locks only lasted for the first few years of his life, and he had light brown hair before kindergarten.  We remember trains and legos and running races in the backyard.  One summer, my brother and I collected grasshoppers and put them in shampoo bottles for the day.  We made a "Grasshopper Circus" for these angular creatures with our Playskool toys, and let them free at dusk.

Guilt is a big theme with me and my friends, and for a variety of reasons.  Some wish we could have done more to stop the self-destruction.  Some wish we could have intervened before the crash.  Others are tired, exhausted and afraid.  With that comes a different kind of guilt: I wish I could do more, but I can't.  I need to protect myself and my family from getting caught in the downward spiral.   

To my dear friends, I wish you peace.  We can look for solutions, we have have our regrets and guilt, and we can try to hide.  We don't know where those roads will lead.  Sometimes they lead to tragedy and all we can do is grieve.  Each of these brothers are different, but the suffering, frustration and powerlessness we feel is similar.  Sometimes, the best comfort we find is knowing you aren't alone, that we aren't the only one with a broken brother.

Forty-Five

Next month, I turn forty-five and it scares the crap out of me.  Why does an age that ends in five cause me such angst?  Thirty was good, and forty was fine.  I didn't have a big party for either, which was cool with me.  Eighteen was big because I was going off to college within months.  Twenty-one was fun, too.  The actual birthday part was not.  I spent the evening working on MMSS (Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences) homework with my good friend H.  A few days later, we went to the Green Mill, a famous jazz bar where Al Capone used to hang out, to celebrate with a few other friends.  That was fun.  I should have spent more of my twenties in music clubs, especially since I lived in Chicago where jazz and blues bars were everywhere.  I digress.  I am avoiding the topic and googling places I should have gone before I had kids.

Jack turned 45 last month, and I already feel like I am forty-five, rounding myself up to his age.  Forty-five seems like the summer solstice of life.  After the solstice, the days get shorter, letting us know winter is on the way. We never know when we are going to die, but according to life expectancy charts, forty-five is past the standard midpoint.

I have two good friends who are coming up on fifty next year.  I think of them as being "my age."  I can't get my head around that I have friends who are so close to that milestone, even though I have friends at all kinds of ages, including one who is 92.  A few years ago, I was making the rounds on the 40th Birthday Party Circuit.  Fifty?  Oh dear.    

Maybe part of this angst is seeing my parents retired.  I have twenty more years to work.  I can't retire if I am not working.  I have been out of the paid workforce for fourteen years, and I really do not want to start looking for a job when I am fifty.  By then I will have been out of the paid workforce for nineteen years.  I'll be a fossil.

Some of my angst about my age has to do with working, some of it doesn't.  I am trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up, except I have been grown up for more than half of my life already.  I listen to my daughter talk about what she wants to be, and it changes every day.  This morning at breakfast, she wanted to be a lawyer who sues people.  Perhaps I should say "sues companies."  She thought it would be really cool to be on the Apple legal team that sued Samsung for copying the iPhone.  (Where did I go wrong? I am glad she is ambitious, but suing people?  Really?)  She has the luxury of changing her mind before lunch, which sometimes happens.

The Boy, on the other hand, worries that at the age of ten he isn't "doing" anything, as if he should have a slate of patents, cured cancer or being running his own company by now.   Or maybe his ambitions aren't so lofty.  Perhaps he just wants to accomplish something, even if it's small.  Maybe he wants to build something cool that someone could use, like a chair or tree house, or paint the walls of his bedroom.

I am going through the same thing they are, except to the power of forty-five.  I was drilling through LinkedIn the other day, tracking old bosses I used to work for.  I am sure they are happy, but they are doing the same thing they were 15 to 20 years ago when I worked for them, and they had been in the field for at least a decade when I knew them.  I admire their tenacity and stick-to-itiveness, but in my nine years of paid employment, I had three to four different jobs.  Granted, they all required the same clothes (suits with pantyhose and pumps), and the changes weren't hugely significant.  It is not like I went from ballet dance to teacher to surgeon.  My changes were small, but changes nonetheless.  I've been equally busy in my volunteer and mothering life, too.

It's not that I am looking back with regret.  I liked working and I am happy I stayed home with my kids.  But fourteen years is a long time.  The Boy starts middle school next year, my daughter high school.  Is it time for me to change, too?

Thief!

Yesterday, I wrote about my sweet, small dog.  I even had an adorable picture of him standing on a dining room chair under the table.

That was before he became a thief.

Yesterday, I bought the kids croissants from a local bakery for an afternoon snack.  These are not the grocery store/Costco things that try to pass as croissant.  These are the some of the best croissants in a two mile radius of my home.  They are soft and buttery inside, and have a delicious crust on the outside.  (Dear Bakery Nouveau, How about opening a NE Seattle shop?  Thanks, Lauren)

The Boy had eaten half of his croissant, and then left the table.  All of the chairs were tucked in so Fox could not climb up and grab food.  In January, Fox stole the Boy's ham sandwich when the Boy left his chair out.  Since then, Fox has learned a new trick.  He stands on a chair, and sticks his head up in the three inch gap between the table and the curve of the back of the chair.  I didn't think he could get anything off the table, but he did yesterday.  I heard his dog tags jingle, but he wouldn't come when I called.  I went into the dining room to see a yellow Ikea plate on the floor.  That's odd, I thought.  The kids don't toss plates on the floor.  I walked into the living room to see Fox snarfing down what was left of the Boy's croissant.  When he saw me, he ran with his booty under the couch.  When I tried to get him from under the couch, he growled at me.  Clearly, I am not the Alpha when he has to choose between the pack and croissant.

Fox checking out what's on the table while his people are away.

I should mention that Fox has been on a diet.  We took him to the vet a few weeks ago and he has to lose two pounds, which is a lot when you weigh only ten.  We are now giving him half as much food as he used to get.  On the one hand, I feel sorry that he is getting less.  On the other, he should look back at those gravy days and be thankful they once were.

Since the diet began, Fox is constantly hungry and his food seeking behavior is higher than usual.  A few weeks ago he stole food right from under my daughter's nose.  My daughter had Fox on her lap at the end of dinner.  When she turned her head to talk to her father, Fox snatched her chicken pita from her plate.  My daughter said that years from now when our family gets together, we will talk about Fox's food stealing escapades.

My little burglar got me thinking -- what if he were to steal valuable things, like silverware?  Wouldn't that be a great plot to an anti-Disney movie?  "Lap dog turns into world's greatest jewel thief, taking precious gems from unsuspecting old ladies."  He could snuggle up to them, and as they fell asleep, he could take their necklaces, bracelets and earrings.  He could take their sterling place settings.  I am not sure how the movie would end.  Would the thief dog go to jail, or would he change his ways and become a Robin Hood dog, stealing from the rich to give to the poor?  Maybe they wouldn't solve his crimes because they would never suspect a dog.  Maybe he would take the money and retire someplace warm without extradition laws.  He would sit on the beach with his restored diet while his glamorous owner drank cocktails.  I might vote for the last option.

Fox's internal thoughts: *Get away from me! It's mine!* He growls and shakes butt at lady who is yelling.