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For some reason, my brother decided to let the girls work on his hair and buzz his beard with electric trimmers.

(Yes, more summer hijinks on the Oregon coast.)

Aside from Zelda accidentally removing too much of one of Ian’s sideburns, he came out of the experiment remarkably unscathed.

The girls, of course, had a delightful time.

In fact, Zelda was having so much fun, she didn’t want to relinquish the electric buzz cutters and got into a minor skirmish with Ian over who had a right to their possession. I’m happy to report that Ian came out on top and Zelda was not allowed to create any additional hair havoc.

I just fell back in love with the United States of America, and not for the reasons you might think. It was thanks to some amazing, hard-working, and dedicated city Mayors that I had the pleasure of getting to know this last week.

You see, my jetlagged, broken-backed, congested self just wrapped up an amazing and affirming professional experience as a part of the The Mayor’s Institute on City Design. For three days, we (a panel of architects, designers, planners, and real estate professionals) were locked in a room together with 8 mayors to discuss their cities and address their issues and concerns about their home towns.

I was energized by these leaders — they are willing to act as lightning rods on tough land-use issues that might be unpopular in the short term, but could improve their communities for decades to come.

This country was built on the backs of public service such as theirs — they generally make little money while often serving “part-time,” when in reality, they work full-time for their constituents. My interactions with these mayors showed me, in a tangible way, that livable places are the result of good governance, which is the result of ordinary people working hard and caring for their neighbors and families.

Kudos!

We just joined the group of people at Infinite Summer, devoting ourselves to reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest over the summer — about 75 pages a week. That meant a purchase at the Amazon store, downloads to the Kindles, and we were ready.

This book is giving us the opportunity to run the Kindle through its paces. The first thing I have LOVED is the built-in dictionary. DFW likes to use a lot of archaic and unusual words (concupiscence, festschrift, and deliquesce, to name three), so the Kindle dictionary has been a boon. Although, there have been a few words that we’ve had to look up online:

Kekulean Knot: which is how he described a tie, and is a reference to the scientist who discovered the structure of benzene and how he came upon his inspiration.

Incunabular: which means “extant copies of books produced in the earliest stages (before 1501) of printing from movable type.”

Infinite Jest also features a really long set of endnotes that you must read along with the book. Happily, the Kindle makes this easy; we can bip back and forth between the two seamlessly. It is pretty cool how it takes you exactly to the endnote specified and exactly back to where you were in the text. There is one problem though — last night, I wanted to go to bed, but was stuck in a 14-page endnote, and the Kindle wouldn’t let me go back to my spot in the book until I came to the termination point of the endnote. I grudgingly finished it so I could bookmark my page in the main book and get some rest!

And lastly, since we are doing this with each other, and as a part of the larger community, we have been taking notes on the Kindle as we’re reading so we can discuss items of interest together at a later date. After you are through gagging, you will be happy to know the thumb typing on the Qwerty keyboard is fine as long as you don’t want to write a thesis.

What do we think of the book so far? It’s complicated and intriguing…but we’ve only just begun. It is fair to say that we are enjoying it so far.

We’re going to be heading back to the US during what is winter vacation south of the equator. We’ll be leaving in a little over a month, which has gotten us all thinking about a few of our favorite things back in the US:

1. Tillamook County Fair and the Pig and Ford races. (Each of the contestants has to complete three laps around a horse racetrack in an old Ford Model T, which they have to start with a hand crank, all while holding one of three different pigs. They have to stop and start the car each lap to get a new pig.)
2. Not ironing freaking uniform skirts and shirts every day (that one was mine).
3. Portland Farmers Markets at the height of the growing season, super yummilicious.
4. Berry picking on Sauvie Island
5. Mooching off, I mean visiting, family and friends.
6. Trip to Vegas, sans kids, in a luxury suite (we may not even leave the room to play poker…yah, right).
7. Using a dishwasher!!
8. Blissful quiet on the Oregon Coast. (You can see the stars and fall asleep to the sound of the ocean at night.)
9. Being able to eat at a formal restaurant before 8:30 pm.
10. Making Rice Krispies Treats (courtesy of the Zs).

The American Dream seems to have escalated into a race to amass as much square footage of housing as possible. It has been interesting for us to reverse that trend lately in the years when our peers are typically moving to larger homes as their families grow.

Our house in Portland was not spectacularly large. It was built in 1929 and was about 1,600 SF above grade with a 700 SF basement that we turned into an industrial-looking art/TV/office space. We also had a small one-car garage that was filled with gardening crap. When we sold the house in the summer of 2007, we had a humongous moving sale.

The rule: if it couldn’t be stored in our 1,800 SF rental condo then we couldn’t keep it. We did a lot of paring down.

When we moved out of the 1,800 SF unit in Portland, prior to our departure for Argentina, we secured a storage space in the US and tried to keep only those things that we couldn’t live without. (It shall be interesting to see how we feel about said stuff upon our return.)

In Argentina, we moved through several larger living spaces until we finally downsized to a 1,000 SF apartment, where we are living now, in a location we love. Observations:

• In general, since we have less space, we can’t accumulate and store as many things. On a positive note, we’ve learned to make due with fewer possessions — minimal kitchen implements, a lot fewer clothes, not as many shoes, a paltry assortment of toys and games…
• As a family, we can clean this apartment (I don’t mean straighten, I’m talking mopping, bathtub scrubbing, sheet changing, etc.) in about two hours. Couldn’t say that about the house.
• No yard work, which is both a blessing and a curse.
• Noise can be a bit of an issue. The kids have really had to work on acknowledging that they need to be quiet and respectful if someone is napping or on the telephone.
• There aren’t a lot of places to escape if people (as in other family members) are driving you crazy.
• The girls share a room and get along most of the time. Zoe still lobbies to have her own space when we get back to the States though. In general, I think the older child wants autonomy, but the younger sibling is happy to share.
• I would rather have space taken from bedrooms and bathrooms and put into the living/dining/kitchen. A well designed bathroom layout, even if small, beats an empty cavernous bathroom that seems the norm in the US now. Truly, it has been enormously pleasing to spend time in spaces that are thoughtfully laid out to function, even in very tight confines. A huge contrast to a lot of condos I’ve seen in the US.

We now feel that we could live quite happily with a lot less square footage when we return to the States. It will be interesting to look at housing through our downsized lens!

(Pictured above is the dining room from what now seems a behemoth of a house that we sold in 2007.)

If you follow my writing, you know that I’m a fan of weird analogies. Unfortunately, they require an explanation, so here we go…

January. Tom and I cannot wax poetic enough about our love of January. Before we had children, we thought it was a horrible month. Cold, wet, rainy, snowy, dark at 4:30 pm — positively depression-inducing. Once we had children though, we saw the primer month of the year through a whole new lens.

First, getting dark at 4:30 pm is a Godsend when you are trying to get your kids to bed. Since little ones have no concept of time, you can just shrug and say, “it’s time for bed” because it’s dark. Without a working knowledge of the clock, they just toddle off compliantly at 6:00 or 6:30 pm. Love that.

Second, January is like hitting the RESET button on a video game, only the game in question is our chaotic life. Usually by the end of the year we are a wreck due to Thanksgiving, parties, employees, Christmas, birthdays (there are a thousand in my family late in the year), anniversaries, etc. Then comes the respite of winter break, we get things under control, we rest and take time just for us. Then voila, everything is new again in January. A clean slate.

Mondays. Now, for you folks who don’t have kids, you may think this sounds anal, but your life as a parent completely revolves around The Schedule. If you get off The Schedule, then everyone is crabby, no one is well fed, everyone is tired…you get the picture.

Here in Argentina, our schedule is packed with homeschool, tennis lessons, regular school, horseback riding, birthday parties, sleepovers, socializing, sight seeing, exploring, blah blah blah. I think you can guess what is the only day that is relatively activity free? Monday!

Wonderful Monday, workout Monday, cook dinner Monday, write Monday, plan Monday, Quicken Monday, real homeschool (not some half-assed attempt) Monday, get the kids to bed on time Monday!!!

And that, my dear readers, is why Monday is the January of weekdays.

I have been bewitched by the Chicago World’s Fair ever since reading Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. (They painted nearly every building white, hence the name.)

Did you know that the Pledge of Allegiance (sans mention of God) was written to celebrate the dedication day of the fair because “Francis J. Bellamy thought it would be a fine thing if on that day all of the schoolchildren of America, in unison, offered something to their nation.”

I discovered that the first Ferris Wheel was constructed for the Chicago event as an answer to the Eiffel Tower, which was the hit and lasting legacy of the previous world exposition in Paris. A call was put out to American engineers to “out Eiffel Eiffel,” only nothing was forthcoming until George Ferris conceived of his ride. The first Ferris Wheel “was a complex assemblage of 100,000 parts that ranged in size from small bolts to the giant axle, which at the time was the largest one-piece casting of steel ever made.” The ride was completed after the fair started, but was a huge success. Each car could carry about 60 people and they rode to a height nearly as tall as the highest skyscraper in Chicago at the time.

Who knew that fair administrators turned down Buffalo Bill’s act because they thought it wasn’t a good fit? Mr. Bill (really Col. William Cody) thumbed his nose at them and bought his own parcel of land adjacent to the official fairgrounds and performed his Wild West show and became a very rich man in the process.

Political machinations led to delays, which meant that construction on the 600 acre site did not commence until just sixteen months prior to Dedication Day. How they managed to pull off essentially building an entire city from scratch in less than a year-and-a-half, I have no idea. Keep in mind, there were over 200 classically designed structures, many of them among the largest buildings in the world.

Below you will find photos of the following: 1) recreations of the Pinta, Santa Maria, and Nina that were sailed from Spain to be present at the fair, which was also called the World’s Columbian Exposition in honor of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the good old US of A. 2) One of the Westinghouse alternating current generators that powered the fair. 3) The first ever Ferris Wheel!

One would think that this picture really says it all, unfortunately though, it doesn’t.

This morning, on a crisp fall day, Tom and I repaired to the balcony so that I could cut his hair. He gathered together the accoutrement and out we went. Because it was so cold, I didn’t want the house to get too chilly, so I closed the sliding glass door behind me. In the next millisecond, I realized that said door is self locking, which meant that in my fit of efficiency to keep the house warm, I had trapped us on the balcony.

After a momentary freak out, Tom hopelessly tried the other half of the sliding glass door…and it opened. (I can’t even begin to explain what a catastrophe it would have been to be trapped on a fifth-floor balcony with no phone right before it was time to pick up the girls from school.) The wrong side of the door is not self locking — who knew?

Then came the ill-fated haircut.

As Tom’s hair has started thinning, he has shifted to trimmer haircuts, which I don’t like because I’m sort of absentminded and I always worry I’m going to screw up. There aren’t many mistakes with scissors that can’t be fixed, not so with trimmers.

Anyhow, in the aftermath of almost being trapped on the balcony, I spaced and didn’t put the guard on the trimmers and instead, just plunged the straight trimmer into the back of Tom’s hair, cutting the weird swath you can see above. Immediately after plowing my row, I realized my mistake, but things were irretrievably ruined.

To try and recover, I had to mow his hair at the lowest setting so the contrast with the swath would not be as stark. Of course, as I was completing this hair-removal process, the trimmers died. We weren’t sure how to proceed next.

I decided we should move inside and we could attempt to use the trimmers while they were plugged into their recharging base, which worked about half of the time and resulted in a somewhat uneven cut for the rest of Tom’s hair.

Sadly, after giving him as much of a jarhead look as I could, the contrast with the swath was still pretty stark, so I had to use scissors to blur the edges a bit, which is why Tom’s swath looks rather mangy (we both decided that was better).

I’m sure you are trying to figure out why he remains married to me after all of these years? We can all but wonder!

Whenever I talk about my time in junior/senior high school, attended on the Oregon coast, my husband and I realize that we had very different experiences growing up! The rural/urban divide can be seen as follows:

The Hack. Tom is incredulous that the hack, as we called it, was commonly utilized as a behavior modification tool at Neah-Kah-Nie Jr./Sr. High School until the mid 1980s. Thankfully, I didn’t experience this discipline technique first hand, but I do remember there being two paddles, both wooden with holes, that resided in the junior high and senior high principal’s offices. At the time, none of us really thought much of it, but friends who come from urban school districts always fall out of their chair when they hear of spankings in the school.

Sitting on Ice. Some student council hero had the bright idea to make each class president sit on a block of ice during a homecoming week assembly. The president who made it the longest would garner the most points for their class. I, unfortunately, was a class president for this event and we (I and my three other colleagues) sat on the ice, in shorts, for ages. It quickly became clear that no one was going to get off in front of the whole student body and be labeled the wimp who couldn’t deal with a little cold. After half the assembly had passed, and long since having any feeling in our asses, I negotiated a solution where we all rose off the ice simultaneously and split the points evenly.

When we went down to the locker room to change and warm our bootys under the hot showers, we were all greeted by the searing pain of huge blisters and ice burns from this little competition. We crawled into the back of the principal’s truck and were taken to the emergency room. The school administrators were very worried about a lawsuit. “If she’s dumb enough to sit on a block of ice for that long…” well, you can figure out the rest of my mother’s response!

Slave Day. When I was in junior high, they had a very politically incorrect fundraiser at the school called slave day. The point was to raise money by having buyers bid on a person, securing the right to be in charge of them for the following school day. I allowed myself to be auctioned at the behest of my friends on the student council, but only after I negotiated the right to refuse to wear diapers for whomever bought me. Unfortunately, my imagination was much too limited.

You see, I was a bit of a terror in junior high (I was nice, but I was uber squirrelly) and I hadn’t really thought ahead to the fact that a teacher might seek revenge by purchasing the right to haze me for a day. In fact, three teachers pooled their funds and did buy me — the gym teacher, the Spanish teacher, and the social studies teacher. Talk about sinking feelings and pits in the middle of the stomach.

I tried to avoid my tormentors by hiding out in the girls locker room when I arrived at school for my day of servitude. Unfortunately, they were ready for me, stationed at the exits to greet me when I ducked out after the bell rang. They dressed me in Coach’s shorts, an “I’m with stupid” t-shirt that had been in the boy’s locker room forever, a pair of Coach’s huge cowboy boots, and if memory serves, a set of rainbow suspenders. I had to wear a pacifier around my neck and whenever they asked me what flavor it was, I had to suck on it and tell them. I also wore this big decorative sombrero, around which they made me do a hat dance in the cafeteria at lunch time. They made me scrub some of the locker room floor with a toothbrush, I had to act out a donkey for a vocabulary word in social studies, complete with braying…the list goes on and on.

Please keep in mind that this rollicking good day of fun also happened to coincide with picture day for teams and clubs. During photos, I would hunch down in the back, trying to hide my t-shirt and hat head.

Needless to say, Tom doesn’t have any such stories from his suburban upbringing in New Jersey…he doesn’t know what he was missing!

Today, I turned 43, can you believe it? Since I have absolutely nothing profound to say, I thought I would share my birthday gifts from the girls that they worked on after they got home from school.

Zoe made the T. Rex origami head that she taped into a card so it popped up with a piece of candy in its mouth! (She wanted to make me the entire dinosaur out of paper, but it was just too advanced — Tom said the video to make the beast was crazy difficult.) Zelda made me a flower. Her card too had a candy offering (and they didn’t even try to pass off the candy they don’t like).

Rapacious dinosaur and a flower…Zoe and Zelda in a nutshell.

In an attempt to make Tom feel better about the fact that he didn’t make any of my gifts, Zelda noted, in his favor, that he did wrap his purchased presents with care, which she felt had to count for something! (By the way, Tom’s largesse was as thoughtful as usual — he’s so great at the gift thaang.)

All in all, I’m happy to report that the start of my forty-third year was lovely, quiet, and fulfilling.