The Measure of a Week

By most counts, it’s been a pretty good week. It was the third week without my wife home and I managed to keep the kids fed, get them educated, and send them out in public with mostly clean clothes on. Don’t ask about regular bathing…for any of us. Do dirty kids nullify clean bed sheets? And through it all everybody has remained relatively sane…sanity is, after all, completely relative. It has helped a lot that I have friends who have taken my kids for a few hours or loaned me theirs. With their help, this is what I managed to do this week:

A Book

I’ve managed to finish the introduction to a book I am editing on South Carolina archaeology. I don’t have a good title for it yet, so any suggestions are welcome. Now this book has been a long time in the works and has been held up by some colleagues who have had a difficult time turning in a paper. I may miss deadlines, but this book has been my nightmare for four years now. Not living up to deadlines in a contract with the press is bad enough, but I had members of a fund raising board breathing down my neck too. They have promised extra money to pay for a set of color photos to go into the book—something the press wouldn’t do because it would be too expensive and they would never be able to sell the book for enough to recover the costs. Understandably, they want to get this thing out because they want to use it as a fund raising tool.

Mercifully, some authors dropped out and others came through…and now the content is all there and my introduction is done. I think it is finally ready to hand in to the press for review. It might go in before Thanksgiving or I might take the holiday to fidget with the manuscript one more time. Either way, turning it in will get a big, heavy, smelly, tiresome, old monkey off my back.

Now on to those other papers, proposals, and reports…

Manta Rays and the Moon

On top of that exciting development, I managed to help my kids prepare presentations for their schooling this week. My daughter had to do a short presentation on manta rays, which means I had to learn a lot about manta rays this week. Did you know that the word manta comes from the Spanish word for blanket or cloak? I guess manta rays kind of look like blankets moving through the water and some traps used to catch them looked like blankets, too. Did you know baby manta rays are called pups and they are born alive? The eggs hatch inside mom. How about this, each manta ray has its own unique color pattern on their ventral sides—you can tell them apart if you spend enough time with them. And since they don’t have stingers on their trails, like sting rays, they won’t do a Steve Irwin number on you.

Meanwhile, my first-grader son had to make a model of the moon. We spent two nights making huge messes constructing the paper mache moon—flour and water slurry all over the table, the floor, shoes, clothes, and, of yeah, and the moon, too. I’ve done the balloon method of making something like this and it’s never worked out for me, so we started with a wad of newspaper. I now see why people go for the balloon. While under construction the moon would not dry---I assume because the gob of paper under the layer of paper mache absorbed lots of water. I tried putting the moon on a heater vent, but it got so hot in the house my daughter and I had to put our bathing suits on. Then I tried sticking it in front of a fan, but it never dried. I finally had to put the moon in the oven to get it to dry. Wrap your head around that one…I had the moon in my oven. The other reason to use the balloon method? Our finished product weighs as much as the real moon and can now be used as a bowling ball or doorstop.

On day three of the moon construction project, we painted. I showed my son how the moon looked smooth from a distance, but was really covered with craters when you got up close. We recreated the craters by dipping marker lids, a pill bottle, and the rim of a small glass in paint and making circles on the moon’s surface. I was pretty proud of our moon until I saw the models the other kids made when I dropped my son off at school. Those first-graders have some pretty talented parents.

Back on the Bike

With all that good intellectual stuff, I still had time to get some exercise. It was 80 degrees for most of the week and I actually had two days where I got an hour or two without my kids. I did what any other rational person would do. I rode my bike. (OK, I did some writing, too…oh and some laundry.) In fact, since last Thursday, I’ve actually ridden a total of 33 miles. Now last year at this time I would have done all of that in one, shorter ride. It took me three rides and 2 hours and 20 minutes over the course of a week to do it.  Still, considering where I’ve been for the last couple of months I’d say that is respectable. I’m even happier with the fact that the ride I took yesterday covered a little over 15 miles—longer than any ride I’ve done since June. I made up the route as I went along and it turned out to be a bad one through industrial areas, busy streets, and even on dirt roads. Still it was good to spend some time letting the stink blow off. Besides being good for my mental health, making it 15 miles tells me I am starting to build my stamina and strength back up.

That is a good start to getting ready for some long, spring rides. Too bad my training build up is going to be interrupted by the brutal South Carolina winter. If I’m going to keep going, I’ll have to get some long pants and gloves…and just plan to ride through it.

Next week is Thanksgiving and I’m taking the family circus on the road to my parents’ house. That means I don’t have to worry about feeding or educating my kids, and that will be a nice break. On the other hand I will have to drive 5 hours, and chop potatoes and celery. It also means I’ll have to maintain the illusion that I am a responsible parent by devoting more time and energy to keeping my kids clean and well behaved. On second thought, it might be easier to stay home and hit Ryan’s Thanksgiving food bar. It’s not good, but there’s a lot of it and I won’t have to help cook it. And I’ll bet the turnover in food is so high on Thanksgiving that the danger is pretty low that we will get food poisoning or find someone’s e coli contribution to the holiday festivities.

Happy Valley No More

They call it Happy Valley—State College, Pennsylvania where Penn State is located. I spent 8 years of my life there and earned two degrees from the school. I understand why it is called Happy Valley. State College is a small town in central Pennsylvania that just happens to be the home of the state’s largest public university. It is called Happy Valley because it is a small town and a nice town. Outside of the seasonal migration of students and the madness of football games, not a lot happens in Happy Valley—at least not much that is really bad. That kind of Mayberry thing may sound like it only exists on TV, but I grew up in a smaller town in northern Pennsylvania where nothing really bad ever happened…so Happy Valley didn’t seem that strange or unreal to me when I showed up as a fresh-faced 17-year old two weeks out of high school.

It has remained Happy Valley long after such places really shouldn’t, and maybe don’t, exist anymore because the school and the town worked very hard to keep it that way. It is a nice town, a good place to raise your kids, and a decent place to send your kids to school. Like Penn State itself it is solid and low-key, not flashy and loud.

For 46 years this identity has been reflected and perpetuated by Joe Paterno and the Penn State football team. Integrity, hard work, and the team were always emphasized over splash and glitz and individual success. The faithful always believed that it was this approach—Paterno’s integrity—that had kept the school and its players out of any real big trouble over the years. When I showed up, I bought into that identity because it matched my own upbringing and values. It reinforced what I was raised to believe—you could work hard, do things right and succeed in spite of yourself.

I am completely heartbroken about what is going on, and has gone on, in Happy Valley. When I first learned, I was shocked—shocked because it seems pretty clear that Sandusky is a sexual predator who has been allowed to run loose for decades. Once I got over the shock and horror, I went into full denial mode—not denying what Sandusky has been accused of doing, but that Joe Paterno could possibly have done anything but the right thing. How could he? After all, he had proven his integrity for 46 years. Literally hundreds of young men could testify to the fact that Joe lived what he preached and preached what he lived.

As I digest the news that continues to break, I am slowly accepting that Paterno appears complicit. I really want to learn that Joe tried to stop all this, that he did all he could but was thwarted by the university. I can live with the fact that Joe has to retire because of this as long as he can show us he tried to do the right thing. I want to believe he did. Then again, I wanted to believe OJ, too. I want to believe in the complete goodness of some people even when I know that no one is completely good.

Right now my denial is giving way to acceptance and a sense of betrayal and loss. I am that little boy whose idol has been shown to be a monster…or at least human like the rest of us. In this case, what I idolized or really idealized, romanticized, mythicized (Yeah, it’s a word. Go look it up) was a place, an experience, and what I thought I learned from it all. The name Happy Valley only captures part of it. Yes, it was Happy Valley. It was a little town in central Pennsylvania dominated by a major university. It was a small place that felt small and safe and good. There were people there who lived their lives doing what was right even if it was unpopular. Now I am left with an adult realization…one that I already knew but reserved for places other than Happy Valley. There is no place that is entirely small and safe and good and no people are entirely good.

But really, I am not the little boy that I or anybody else should be worried about. There are a group of boys and young men who have to live with a horrible burden; a burden forced on them by someone who took advantage of a good and safe place. Their loss of innocence, not ours, is what should make every Penn Stater feel ashamed.

What are we saving time for?

Daylight Saving Time ended this morning at 2am. When that happens, it creates a distortion in the time-space continuum. How do I know? Well, I slept until 9am but got up at 8am. How else do you explain that? I got an extra hour of sleep without actually sleeping in. That invokes the age-old question: If a clock changes in the forest and no one sees it, does time really pass?

Did I really sleep an hour longer? Yes, I did, and I can prove it. Some of the clocks in my house don’t change automatically…so this morning, before I dutifully changed all the  clocks, there was proof that it used to be 9am and only changed because the government decided we should set the clocks back to what they were before we set them forward in the spring.

That begs a simple question. Why are we doing this? You know, not all countries around the world do this. Hell, not all states in our country do this—Hawaii and most of Arizona opt out. As an interesting aside, the Navajo Nation—located in part within Arizona— does observe Daylight Savings Time.  (What do you get when you combine Indian Time and Daylight Saving Time? It’s still Indian Time.) Actually most of Asia, Africa, and South America don’t save time and neither does the northern two-thirds of Australia. Really most of the world does not play this silly game.

Whose idea was this anyway? Well, Benjamin Franklin is often credited with coming up with the idea way back in 1784…really a time before people were worried about standardized time keeping. Franklin was living in France and wrote a satirical letter (imagine that) imploring Parisians to get up earlier in the summer to take advantage of the early light. He argued they would save money on candles. Remember this is our “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” guy. He proposed taxing shutters, ringing church bells, and firing cannons to get people up earlier. I love Franklin, but this seems like a stretch to say that he was calling for Daylight Saving Time. Must Americans take credit for everything…especially things of questionable benefit?

Really, no one worried about standardizing time over large areas until those large areas were connected by transport…and the great liberator of men, commerce. That happened in lots of places after the middle of the 19^th century. So it isn’t surprising that people didn’t start talking about saving daylight until near the turn of the 20^th century. The guy who first cooked this all up was an amateur entomologist in New Zealand—George Vernon Hudson. His day job forced him to do his bug hunting on the side and the amount of time he had to do that during the week varied with the seasons. So he wrote some papers (1895-1898) and did some lobbying…to no avail. Independently a well-to-do Englishman William Willett came up with the same idea in 1905. It seems he was an avid outdoorsman and golfer who was peeved that he had to cut his afternoon golf rounds short in the summer—probably made it impossible to have proper tea.

Surprisingly, none of this caught on until World War I when Germany adopted Summer Time in 1916 as a way of rationing coal that was in short supply because of the war effort. The US jumped on the bandwagon in 1918, after we joined the war. It didn’t really stick in the US, except during war time, until 1966. Since then it has been extended twice (1987 and 2007). Guess who lobbied hard for those extensions? Clorox (parent company of Kingsford charcoal) and 7-Eleven were heavily involved in 1987 and the Sporting Good Manufacturing Association and the National Association of Convenience Stores took the lead in 2007. Does that give you some idea of why we really do this?

The impetus in World War I and II was to conserve energy resources for the war effort. Following Franklin’s original prompting many argued that Daylight Saving Time would save money in energy costs. It turns out that it really hasn’t. In fact, you can find studies suggesting it actually costs a lot of money from things like decreased worker productivity, scheduling inefficiencies, public health problems, and the like. What seems to be clear is that certain industries—leisure, sports, and convenience stores—make boatloads of money because of Daylight Saving Time. It’s equally clear that other parts of the economy derive no benefit at all. The agricultural lobby has opposed it since day one.

So why do we spring forward and fall back? Is it to save energy costs, improve public health, reduce violent crime? If the data are to be believed, the answer is no. Is it so we are less depressed during the shortened days of winter? That may be the saving grace of the whole idea on an individual level, but it doesn’t seem to be why politicians to support it. We do it because powerful lobbies—ones with money to be made—have convinced politicians that they could make us believe we need to do it to save money. Funny thing, but it seems to be designed to do just the opposite. It’s really designed to get me to spend more money on golf balls, light beer, and EZ lite charcoal.

All hail the mighty dollar for it shall make us rich, equal, and free.

One step on the road to a century

Out Hopkins Way

 Today I went on my first serious bike ride since endocarditis ended my cycling back in June. I remember that ride well because it felt so bad. I didn’t know at the time I had a serious infection, I only knew that I kept getting fevers and feeling terrible…often right after riding my bike. On that ride, I couldn’t even make it 30 miles. I cut the ride short and came home really struggling. It was one of those rides where you feel so bad coming home that when you get home you don’t want to see your bike or think about riding again for a long time. I did manage one more ride after that one—a short 12 miler—but that was really the end of cycling for me for 2011.

I’ve rattled on endlessly about suffering through 3 weeks of constant fevers, a week in the hospital and then eventually heart valve repair surgery. So I won’t get too far into that again. Today I am 6 weeks out of surgery. I’m still working on building stamina and I’ve got this respiratory thing that keeps me coughing and won’t go away. Otherwise, I am getting better.

Today both my kids went to play at a friend’s house for the afternoon and evening leaving me with the first free several hours I’ve had in a couple of weeks. I asked my daughter what I should do with my time and she said, “Oh, go on a bike ride, work on a paper, watch some football.” She knows me only too well. As soon as I got home from dropping them off, I got my gear out, pumped up my tires and loaded everything in our van. I figured if I was going to go on a ride (likely a short one), it might as well be a good one. I had decided to leave the mean streets of Shandon for another day and head out to the area where I usually ride. It is out of town and rural enough that there isn’t a lot of traffic and I can see deer and fields and trees with leaves falling off. I usually ride from my house out to this area, but I knew I couldn’t do that today. It was a little wasteful, but I drove 15 minutes to Congaree National Park where I started my ride.

I got there and got kitted up. Since it was 60 degrees, I had the luxury of riding in my just shorts (one good reason to live in South Carolina). I was hoping to go somewhere between 5 and 10 miles, but really just wanted to stay on my bike for a good 40 minutes no matter how far or fast I went. Not surprisingly, even little hills were hard and riding into the wind and uphill was even tougher. I’ll tell you, though; when I got the wind behind me it really felt great to fly down the road with the sun shining and the leaves falling. I figured my legs would be my limiting factor and they were. My breathing wasn’t a problem despite the respiratory thing and my new heart valve pounded away madly. As often happens to me, my legs really don’t start feeling good until I get 8 or so miles in them. That happened today, but the problem was they felt warmed up at that point but were completely out of gas to go.

I rode a respectable 10 miles on m 40 minute ride. I didn’t flop over on the side of the road, didn’t ride off into the ditch, and didn’t have to stop. Without really trying to ride a pace I ended up riding what is my default pace—about 15 mph. I was surprised by that because I figured my legs would be so out of shape that I would have to go pretty slowly. Of course, speed is not what I need right now. I need to build conditioning in my legs and the rest of my body. I made a good start today and what I need to keep doing is logging time on the bike. I’d really like to do that century I meant to do last May this coming May. I’ve got a long hill to climb, but as Clem told me…just ride through it.

In other exciting me-centric news, my sense of taste is returning to normal. You know how I can tell? That cheap-ass coffee I’ve been buying at the grocery store is becoming undrinkable. Since my surgery, everything has tasted bad—mostly salty. I’d sort of given up on anything tasting right. In celebration, I grilled a steak and made a baked potato for dinner tonight…and it tasted the way it should…greasy, buttery, fatty manfood goodness!

One last bit of good news, McRib is back! Sadly only for a limited time. You'd think there'd be enough pig snouts and butt holes for an endless supply of McRibs, but then again people need their scrapple, too.

The Scarecrow Affair

Ah, the idyllic picture of American Halloween fun. A porch decorated for Halloween, complete with a family of scarecrows. My kids and I made these, using our clothes, a few days before Halloween and had them all set up for the big night. Despite Halloween’s reputation as a night of both treating and tricking, our scarecrows survived the night without incident. Then this morning I awoke to find this…

A massacre…on my front porch…just outside my living room…my sanctuary where I watch Billy the Exterminator with my kids. When something like this happens, you run through a familiar set of emotions. At first I was stunned and puzzled. How could this have happened? Was it the wind? It was windy last night. As I studied the crime scene and sifted through the evidence, my puzzlement turned to outrage. The little boy’s legs were pinned between the chair and table and couldn’t have been blown all the way across the porch. 

The little girl’s shoes were off her feet—the wind couldn’t do that. Her torso was laid out too carefully. My shirt was untucked, my gloves pulled off, and my head sitting in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the house. 

The wind couldn’t have done any of this!

All the evidence pointed to one disturbing conclusion. Someone massacred our scarecrow family. They were dismembered and scattered in sick and twisted ways by someone with no regard for stuffed dummies and holiday decorations. 

As this realization sunk in, my outrage turned to a desire for revenge, vigilantism. My mind raced as I pictured a handful of mangy teenagers romping on my porch, tearing up our scarecrows. How could I catch them? How could I get revenge? Could I be charged with something if one of those mangy teens was crushed under a log deadfall trap on my front porch, caught red-handed massacring my scarecrows again? Maybe I should get a motion detecting porch light…and blow gun.

Later when my daughter woke up, I asked her a few questions. You know, just doing my job and ruling out other suspects…besides mangy teens. I asked if she, her brother, and their two friends had noticed if the scarecrows had been knocked over when they were rampaging throughout the house and yard last night (my kids and friends). At first my daughter, rather haltingly, said no. On a hunch, I pressed her further. She eventually admitted that she took one of the heads off to show her friends. I pressed her further and she also admitted that she took her scarecrow apart. Then she sang like a canary. She squealed on her brother, saying he had torn his scarecrow to pieces. Later I questioned him, alone. I used the oldest trick in the book and told him his sister rolled over on him…and he too sang like a canary. He told me how she had started the carnage and he joined in after.

Once I recovered from the shock that my own children, and not mangy teens, had committed this shocking act I realized I had been a little too quick to doubt the safety of Shandon and the character of my fellow Shandonistas…or at least their mangy teenage progeny.

When Santa's sleigh goes out on my lawn in a few weeks, you can bet they'll be a Santa cam on him day and night!