Letters to London

Something new

2010-04-04T19:10:00.001-07:00

First off, if you were a loyal LtL reader and wondered what happened, I stopped posting here and started putting London's pictures on my Picasa page. On one hand, this means I usually get more pictures posted a lot more quickly, so it's better for keeping the extended family and friends up to date. On the other hand, the captions on the Picasa page are not as long or thoughtful as the posts here, and some people miss that. So I might start posting here from time to time again.

Anyway, here's your post, and this one requires a little explanation.

This past year I've worked as the technical advisor on a series of kids' dinosaur books called Dinosaur Wars. They pit all kinds of dinosaurs against each other, not just those who lived in the same places or at the same times. This is all explained in the first half of each book, which also goes through the real adaptations that each dinosaur had that suited its lifestyle.

The second half of each book is the battle, a no-holds-barred fight to the death between whatever animals are on the cover, whether it would make any sense for them to fight or not. The first page of the battle always has the headline, "PAIN" When my complimentary copies of the books arrived, I read them all to London, using my best professional wrestling announcer voice, and he loves them to this day.

A couple of nights ago, Vicki spied on London in his room. He had set Baby Tiger and Simba, the Baby Lion, on the edge of his bed, brought in his little blue chair from the living room, and was reading them a couple of Dinosaur Wars books.

As he turned each page, London would hold up the book to show the baby cats what was going on, and then slam the book down on his lap and yell, "PAIN!"

When London figured out that Vicki was watching, he told her that she could take two pictures--but that was it. He also told her what he was doing: reading his baby cats some "dinosaur Bible stories".

The rest of the portraits

2009-03-09T11:23:00.001-07:00

Well, here we are, only about a month late. Sorry if this is the first time you're seeing most of these. Family members: we own the copyright on all of these, so there is no problem with having prints made wherever you like.

My favorite is the hat picture, which I thought had a classic feel. I punched it up a bit with software:

London has been keeping us in stitches lately with his words.

He has been very curious about speeder bumps.

The following exchange was unsolicited and apropos of nothing:
London: When someone's head pops off it goes KABOOM!
Me: Yeah?
London: Yeah, and then you can't talk anymore.

Back in December he and I were playing a game, in which we'd taking turns asking, "What do a two and three make?" "Twenty-three", and so on. After we'd done high numbers for a while I switched things up and asked, "What do a one and an eight make?" He said, "One-ty eight!"

He came home from school one day with some kind of pigment all over his pants.
Me: Did you color on your pants?
London: Unh-uh.
Me: Did you get color on your pants?
London: Uh-huh!

We were eating something and he broke it in half and showed me both halves.
London: That's two halfs.
Me: Two halves?
London (exasperated): NO, two HAFFS, not two haves!

We were driving to preschool one morning.
London: What's under the road?
Me: Rocks.
London: Rocks?
Me: Yeah, it's pretty much rocks all the way down.
London: All the way down?
Me: Well, the world is made out of rocks.
London: The world is made out of rocks?
Me: Yeah, you know, underneath everything. The world is a big ball of rock. But it has other stuff on the outside, like water, and air, and trees, and plants, and animals--
London: --and toy stores!

We have two new additions here at Casa Wedel, both goldfish. Pictured above is Fred the Shubunkin. We also have Jennifer the Comet. The big aquarium also has a Mystery Snail, which London named Sly. When he found a smaller snail in the little aquarium, he named it Sly, too. I call them Sly the First and Sly the Second. He calls them First the Sly and Second the Sly.

Here and there

2009-01-25T22:01:00.001-08:00

I was doing pretty good about getting pictures up at Christmas and then I kinda pooped out. Still tons of cool pictures to show from the Wedel half of Christmas, which I WILL get to.

In the meantime, London has been having much fun playing with his new Lego trucks.

I used my Christmas money from Terry and Carla to buy a spotting scope, and my Christmas money from Mom and Dad to put up a bird feeder in the back yard (thank you cards will come someday!). I have not gotten any non-fuzzy bird pictures but I did snag our local squirrel from about 30 feet out.

Today I flew to South Dakota, where I'll be filming for a dinosaur documentary for the next couple of days. On the drive to the Super 8 Motel in Hill City we went past Reptile Gardens--that ought to bring back some old vacation memories!

I've owned a digital camera for 6 years now, so I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner to take some pictures of the gorgeous Southwest scenery that Californians fly over every time we go anywhere.

For you geology geeks out there, check out the laser-straight fault line cutting through the mountains in the above picture.

London has been keeping us in stitches with his words. About the only TV show we watch as a family is America's Funniest Videos, which London calls "the funny doggy show". If there is a particularly good video that makes him laugh, he will say "again" and we will use the jump back button on the remote to show him again.

The other night there was a commercial for the Miss America pageant. London said, "Those girls have not any pants on!" After the commercial was over, he said, "I wanna see the girls with not any pants on again." Sorry, dude, not this time.

London has been talking about "smooks". We don't know what smooks are and he can't tell us. Apparently sometimes they are good guys and sometimes they are scary guys. By trial and error drawing we discovered that smooks look like ghosts, of the white-sheet-draped-over-little-kid variety.

I have a ton more funny sayings written on the pad by the fridge, but that's in sunny SoCal and I'm in the Hill City Super 8, so you'll just have to be patient. It's 2 degrees out there tonight, but tomorrow the temperature should soar up to 5 or 6!

London feeds geese!

2008-12-24T15:51:00.001-08:00

Today Mimi and Papa took London to a little lake near the library to feed the ducks and geese. We took some stale Cheerios and old bread, and London had a ball feeding all the birds.

London and Mimi and Papa were mobbed by dozens and dozens of hungry, honking waterfowl.

As we started to run low on munchies, most of the birds departed for greener pastures: the two guys in the background who showed up with some food of their own.

Our holdouts were a mob of big fat geese, who came after London and Mimi for the last breadcrumbs. One of them bit Mimi's finger, but fortunately Mimi had a glove on so it didn't hurt. They backed London up right against the tree, but as we were driving away I asked London what his favorite bird was and he said, "The one that chased me!"

London ran all the way around the lake. I walked, and took pictures.

London has been plagued by croup since he was a baby. He had a respiratory evaluation this summer and we learned that he has a narrow windpipe. Every night before bed he gets 9 minutes of steroid aerosol through a nebulizer mask. His mask is shaped like a fish, so he calls it doing his "fish face". Vicki and I use it as time to read him books before bedtime, and so does Papa.

Presents for London--and a big one for Daddy

2008-12-22T19:54:00.000-08:00

On Saturday morning we had a little Christmas celebration in Claremont. We read the Christmas story, sang the only two carols London knows ("We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and "Jingle Bells"), and opened the gifts that the three of us had gotten for each other. London passed out the packages.

His first Christmas presents were a Transformer and a package of five little die-cast jet planes. He brought the little jets on the plane when we flew to Oklahoma City that afternoon.

Yesterday we went to church with Mimi, Papa, Aunt Sarah, Uncle Dan, and "my cousins Abby and Caty". As in, "Do you think that my cousins Abby and Caty will wait for us?" and "I want to go with my cousins Abby and Caty!"

Then we went back to Mimi's and Papa's house, where London's Great-Grandma Onie and Great-Grandpa Bud celebrated Christmas with us. If I tried to list all the stuff London got, I'd probably crash the internet. His biggest present was this Thomas the Tank Engine toy laptop, but his favorite in time invested in play is a battery-powered Thomas train that he has been chasing across one floor or another for most of the past 24 hours.

Last night London went to spend the night with "my cousins Abby and Caty" in Glenpool. It was only his second night away from both Vicki and me. He handled it like a champ; honestly, he played so hard with his cousins that I don't think he had time to miss us very much. We had time to miss him, though.

Since Vicki and I had the today off from parenting, we drove down to Norman, met Todd and Anna Ruth for lunch, and then went to the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. The entrance gallery to the Hall of Ancient Life is under renovation and set to reopen in March. We went to see the reconstructed head and neck of Sauroposeidon--all 39 feet of it--which was mounted the first week of December. Most of it is still behind the barriers, but also above the barriers, so you can get some idea of what it will look like when the gallery reopens:

This is something that I've been dreaming of seeing for more than a decade, so it was a pretty great day.

Stay tuned--lots more Christmas to come!

Christmas in Claremont

2008-12-22T19:44:00.001-08:00

Last week London made Christmas sugar cookies for the program at his preschool. We don't have a rolling pin, so we flattened the dough under a piece of wax paper. Worked just fine.

At the Christmas program he and his classmates made bracelets...

...wore reindeer hats...

...and ate pizza.

Then, as the light of the setting sun painted the snow-clad slopes of Mount Baldy...

...he slept, and dreamed of Christmas morning.

London at church

2008-12-14T15:02:00.000-08:00

The fountain outside our parish hall. There are goldfish in the pool and we always stop and look every Sunday. London looked very sharp today in a dress shirt from Mimi.

Christmas season

2008-12-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

Although London loves his new Legos, he still likes to build with his Duplo blocks. The other day he told me he was building a castle. When he was done I told him it was a very nice castle, but he said, "It's not a castle. It's a church!"

We have two weekly rituals. One is Friday Night Fish Stick Picnic. The other is watching America's Funniest Videos on Sunday nights, or as London calls it, "the funny doggy show." It always makes London laugh out loud.

London normally speaks without a noticeable accent, but somehow he figured out how to do a Southuhn drawl. Out of the blue a few months ago he started folding himself in half and saying, "Yuh see mah bahttum?" There is no predicting when this is going to happen, and sometimes he goes weeks without doing it. So it's always a surprise, and never follows what's been going on, which makes it funnier. We usually crack up and say, "Yes, we see your bottom, Silly Man!" Which makes him fold in half again and shout, "YUH SEE MAH BAHTTUM!?" This usually goes for a few cycles until we're all helpless with laughter.

Last weekend we set up our Nativity. It's the first we've ever had.

We've been reading about the first Christmas for London's bedtime Bible story. He knows the story by heart and he thinks it's very sweet that baby Jesus was born in a manger.

Last night we set up our Christmas tree. Mom and Dad sent a box of ornaments from when I was a kid. London had fun hanging bulbs.

This is maybe my favorite picture of Vicki and London, certainly my favorite since London was a newborn. Merry Christmas to you all!

Old bones and new words

2008-12-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

I spent the two weeks before Thanksgiving in Germany, looking at dinosaurs. Here I am with the skull of Brachiosaurus...it may have been one of the most graceful and majestic of all God's creatures, but it had a face not even a mother could love.

Mike Taylor was there, too. Here we are sporting our super-awesome orange dinosaur t-shirts and goofing off with a fiberglass cast of an Apatosaurus thighbone. This was in Bonn, where we attended a workshop on the biology of long-necked sauropod dinosaurs.

The highlight of the trip was working in the Humbolt Museum in Berlin. Here I am up on a ladder looking at their Brachiosaurus. They have almost the entire skeleton in real bone, and most of the real bones are up in the mount, except for the neck and back vertebrae which are too heavy and too fragile to put up so high. Those are replaced with fiberglass casts, and the real bones are safe down in the basement. The same company that mounted this beast is putting up the Sauroposeidon neck and head at the museum in Norman...can't wait to see that.

But I know you are just drumming your fingers until I get to some London pix, so I won't punish you any further.

Today London and I visited the Raymond Alf Museum here in Claremont. The Alf Museum is unique in all the world as the only accredited museum run by a high school. It is on the campus of the Webb school, which is a residential school just up the hill. The museum has more kid-friendly exhibits and activities than many larger museums, including the best stocked table of real fossils for touching that I've ever seen. London had a blast. Here he is with the hind leg of Camarasaurus, which is actually not very big as sauropods go. Look at the size of the foot, that'll be important in a minute.

Here's London with Centrosaurus, one of the horned dinosaurs. There are dozens of species of these and even I have a hard time keeping them all straight. Triceratops, Pentaceratops, Anchiceratops, Arrhinoceratops, Montanaceratops...London just calls them all "ceratops dinosaurs".

Here's London in the hind footprint of a really big sauropod. This track is from north Texas, from the same formation as Sauroposeidon, and it's about the right size to be Sauroposeidon, so...who knows. Compare the size of this foot to the one London is standing next to in the photo above. Scary, huh?

LONDON'S WORDS

Lots of new stuff this time...

The other day London and Mumpa were out walking and London saw a patapillar. Another bug that he saw was a tweedle beetle, which he knows from Dr. Suess's Fox in Socks.

They also saw a stretch limo and London shouted, "Look, Momma! It's a weiner car!"

London has tried soda but he doesn't like it. I think the fizz freaks him out. And I've basically given up soft drinks in favor of tea, so the only person London sees ordering soda is Mumpa. This has given him some strange ideas. The other day we were walking into Target, just him and me, and he asked, "Why do girls like soda?" That was a tricky one to answer. A couple of days later he told Vicki, "When I turn into a girl, I will like soda." It reminded me of when Ryan was London's age; he would tell stories that began, "When I was big and you were little..."

He's also learned just enough about some things to be safe but not enough to be socially acceptable. Vicki and London were at the mall and London pointed at a man and his two friends and shouted, "He is a stranger! Those two men are strangers!"

London knows the words 'foot' and 'feet' but usually we call them 'fooses' just to be goofy. When I am putting his socks on I will say, "Give me a little foose," and he'll stick out a foot. Then I ask for "another little foose" to get the other foot. The other day, though, when I said that he said, "It's not a little foose. It's a big foose." I put my foot up next to his and said, "Now that's a big foose. So what is yours?" He said, "It's a little big foose."

Ryan and Courtney sent a lightsaber for London's fourth birthday. Since he already has Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber, this new one is "Obi Wan's Kenobi's wight saber."

London loves building with his Duplo and Lego blocks. "I maded it," he says.

London gained the ability to use the toilet before he got the inclination. To motivate him Vicki and I 'race' him to the potty; these are races we deliberately let him win. Even now if he is reluctant go (say, just before we leave for a long car ride) we can con him into going by saying, "I'm gonna win!" and dashing toward the bathroom. That will get him to instantly stop whatever he is doing and run to get there first. He doesn't know the word 'beat' yet, so after he wins he says, "I winned! I winned you, Daddy!" Once in a while, though, one of us accidentally wins a race we didn't even know was going on, just in the course of going to the bathroom. When we come out we get an accusing look. "You doed it before me!"

The story of "Yuh see mah bahttum?" will have to be told another time. Also in upcoming posts: pictures from Grandma and Grandpa's visit, and London setting up our nativity and decorating the Christmas tree. Stay tuned!

Trick or Treat!

2008-11-02T09:08:00.001-08:00

For Halloween London was Anakin Skywalker, in his Clone Wars getup. Or, as London says, "AN-akin SKY-wolker!"

At first he was a little nervous about being in costume, but when he got to preschool and saw all of his friends dressed up, he was excited. At school he got to go trick-or-treating around the shopping center next to the preschool.

Vicki and I dressed up, too--there was a costume contest at work. Vicki went as a convict, with some really excellent and authentic-looking tatoo sleeves. I didn't even know they made such things.

I went as a vampire. The main hangup with the fangs is that they keep you from closing your mouth, so drool is a constant concern. Still, I had a good time chasing London around. When I went to pick him up from preschool, all of the other kids wanted to be chased, too, so I obliged them for a few minutes.

We had plans to hang out with some friends Friday night, but Vicki wasn't feeling well. I took London to the mall instead. Lots of shops were giving out candy to trick-or-treaters. London got about a million "Aww, that's so CUTE!"s. We spent Halloween money from Grandpa and Grandma on a Happy Meal and some Star Wars Galactic Heroes, which are stubbly action figures for the little folks.

London was pretty thrilled to get a toy Anakin dressed the same as he was. He calls them his "Star Wars buddies".

All in all, it was our best Halloween yet. Next up: London's fourth birthday, in just a week and a half!

Happy Halloween!

2008-10-30T20:45:00.000-07:00

Tonight, just in time for Halloween, we made our Jack O'Lanterns. We started by drawing faces on baby pumpkins with a Sharpie.

Then London was ready for the big time. The pink spot on his left hand is a stamp that he got at preschool for being a good boy.

Pumpkin guts are always yucky!

The finished product. Happy Halloween!

Life in Claremont; birthday and Christmas coming up

2008-10-26T10:45:00.001-07:00

Whew. Been a while. Friday was our last day of teaching. Monday we give our final, and then we're done teaching for the year. We'll still have committee work and lectures to prepare for next year, but we can finally get around to setting up our labs and getting back to research and writing. It's been a marathon. Every day we've been in lab all morning, lecture all afternoon, and usually up studying for 2-3 hours after we put London to bed at night. Hence the absolute lack of new pictures here since we first moved in.

From the end of the driveway--or any other place in town with an unobstructed view to the north--the San Gabriel mountains are BAM! right there in your face. I took London up into the mountains a couple of weekends ago, to the Forest Service visitor center. We looked at the taxidermy exhibits inside and walked around the grounds, which include reproductions of Indian dwellings and mining camps, and a cool little pond with a waterfall.

London was very interested in the little tiny minnows that swarmed in the pond.

Our Friday fish stick picnics are a tradition--we haven't missed a Friday night since we moved in, although a couple of the 'picnics' have been inside when the weather was bad or we were feeling lazy.

There are lots of things that London is keen to by himself, and going to the bathroom is one of them. "No, I do it! You don't come in!" All he needs help with these days is wiping his heinie and turning on the water to wash his hands. His natural inclination to count extends to everything: "Daddy, I made seven stinks!"

Elmo is still his "baby sister" and goes with him everywhere. He has also decided that Cookie Monster is Elmo's father and his (London's) son. Don't ask me how that genealogy works out.

He still sleeps like a little baby, with his feet tucked up under his bum.

Here are some more of London's words:

The other day he was going through the alphabet and raising one finger for each letter. When he got to J he was out of fingers, and he exclaimed, "I have J fingers!"

At preschool he learned how to trace his hand, and I showed him how to turn his hand tracing into a picture of a turkey. He drew a good turkey, but after it was done he drew a long line angled up out of the turkey's back. I asked him what it was. "This is the fing it shoots with."

The week before last I was in Cleveland for the annual meeting of Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. London asked when I was going to come back from "Keefland."

London has always taken a long time to rouse after a good sleep. Ever since he was a brand new baby Vicki and I have joked that he is like a little caveman thawing out of the ice. When we come to wake him on our early weekday mornings, he buries his face in his pillow and mumble/whines, "I'm still fawing out."

I taught London about Dutch rubs the other night. The next day he said to me, "Bend down. I want to give you a rubber dub."

On Friday evenings I usually haul out the telescope and show London Jupiter and its moons and some of the brighter deep-sky objects. His favorite is the Double Cluster in Perseus (shown above--not my photo!), which looks like a double handful of diamonds scattered on black velvet (or blue silk in our case, thanks to the horrible light pollution here in LA county). This Friday night London hopped up on my lap, put his eye up to the eyepiece, and started counting stars. He got to "firty-nine", which is as high as he can count right now. Vicki and I almost cried.

--------------------------

London will be four on November 13, and Christmas is coming up, too. I thought it would be a good idea to let you know what he needs and what he doesn't.

Here are some things he doesn't need, because we already have far more of them than he can use (although if you already have some put away for him, of course we will be grateful):

- toy trains

- toy dinosaurs

- stuffed animals

- story books

And here are things he likes but doesn't have, or doesn't have enough of:

- paper for drawing, preferably bound into books so it doesn't end up all over the house. Doesn't have to be fancy, the cheapest paper pads will do.

- nonfiction books. Our favorites, and his too, are the DK Eyewitness books, which are sturdy full-color hardbacks with tons of photos of all kinds of real objects and vehicles. They have titles like Space, Pirates, Knights & Castles, and (inevitably) Dinosaurs, and they're in every bookstore on the planet (and Amazon, too, of course). We read them at the library and he doesn't have a single one, so the field is wide open.

- Legos. In the past month he has stared building like crazy with his Duplo blocks, but he's ready for Legos. The big tubs of general bricks would probably be best, and they are reasonably cheap in department stores. And we're not worried about duplicates, because you can never have too many Legos.

- Star Wars. London is a huge Star Wars fan, and the only Star Wars toys he has are his lightsaber, an Anakin Skywalker action figure, and one of my old spaceships. He'd go nuts for one of the life-sized blaster pistols or any of the ships, vehicles, or action figures, small or large, whatever. About the only thing that is probably beyond him right now are the Star Wars Transformers. Oh, speaking of which:

- Transformers. London loves 'em. He can't work the full-sized ones that actually transform yet, but there are small action-figure versions that don't transform, and versions from the new animated series that have very simple transformations.

- Tonka trucks. All of London's trucks are either soft baby versions that he's outgrown, or Hot Wheels size. A good-sized sturdy fire truck would be especially appreciated.

- Similarly, all his planes and rockets are Hot Wheels scale. A plastic plane or rocket (or both) that was big enough to put a little tiny man inside (like one of his 1-inch tall astronauts) would be wonderful.

- toy tools. Ho man, London loves these. He had two hammers but they were both goofy soft ones for babies and we haven't gotten them out here (the fate of many of the toys from Merced that he's outgrown). Right now he has a plastic wrench and that's it.

Thank you all, sincerely, for keeping him supplied with things to play with. That said, we are overrun with toys. If you are trying to decide between several small things and one bigger thing, please get the one bigger thing. He'll enjoy it a lot more, and it will keep us from getting cluttered right out of the house.

Arrival in Claremont

2008-09-07T15:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to what you might call unscrupulous business practices, we beat the movers down to Claremont by a day and a half. All the crud you see here is stuff I brought down in the car. This was our first morning in Claremont. London is eating little white donuts and drinking apple juice by the fireplace.

Face and hands smeared with powdered sugar, soles of feet filthy from running around barefoot: does it get any better than this?

Mumpa and Tiny parked in the shade to watch the movers.

London has a little plastic cell phone that he likes to talk on. He'll be playing happily by himself and then we'll hear him talking on his phone, usually recounting whatever we've been doing that day.

Friday night we had a driveway picnic of fish sticks and tater tots. I set up the telescope so we could get a gander at the moon, and the moons of Jupiter.

The good camera was still packed, but the cheapie did okay.

Here are some of London's recent words:

Start swallowin' that neck! - We have been reading a book called Grandma and the Pirates, in which a little girl and her grandma are kidnapped by a gang of dull-witted pirates and hilarity ensues. At one point the little girl and her grandma try to escape by stealing one of the rowboats. The pirate captain declares, "It's not nice to steal!", to which the little girl quite rightly replies, "You steal all the time! You stole me and my grandma!" The pirate captain barks back, "She's my grandma now! Start swabbin' that deck!" The first time I heard London yelling "Start swallowin' that neck!" at some of his toys, I couldn't for the life of my figure out what he was talking about. So I asked him, and he told me it was "about pirates", and eventually I figured out that "Start swallowin' that neck!" was his approximation of "Start swabbin' that deck!", probably because I forgot to explain to him what 'swabbing' and 'deck' mean.

We have fire!? - At our first dinner in Bradford, when the waitress lit the candle at our table.

A double-decker bus has two sides with chairs--and upside with chairs, and a downside with chairs. - Explained to me on the street in Bradford.

San Fran Skisco - How London says San Francisco.

I haffa poop, cuz I'll be right back, and don't come with me. - He's very independent now.

Minga don't BE hot! - The other night Vicki was carrying London's pudding (minga) when she went back into the kitchen to get him a spoon. He thought she was taking it to the microwave, hence the shouted warning.

We had a lot of fun teasing the Taylors about their accents, and getting teased about ours. The only time it led to a misunderstanding was when London was throwing balls in the garden (back yard) and he lost one in some tall grass. He was looking around for it and Mike said, 'It's in the grawss." London said, "Grawss?", and I explained that 'grawss' is English for 'grass'.

Exterminate!

2008-08-25T21:46:00.001-07:00

This one has a little backstory on it, in more ways than one. The thing in the chair is a pretty good approximation of a Dalek, a sort of miniature tank villain that is completely familiar if you've ever watched Doctor Who, and probably utterly unknown if you haven't. The main functions of Daleks are to wheel around grating "Exterminate! Exterminate!" in a high-pitched robot voice while bedeviling the good Doctor and trying to take over the universe. Naturally the Taylors are all Doctor Who fans and Mike and Fiona built this cardboard and plastic Dalek for the boys at some point in the distant past. Which in the photo above is being operated by Daniel, to the amazement and possible consternation of London.

When London and I got to Oakleigh Farm House, the Dalek was sitting in a corner of the laundry room, much like the Dalek in Henry van Statten's underground bunker in the episode "Dalek" from the new but inaccurately named BBC Doctor Who Series 1 (with Christopher Eccleston as the 9th Doctor).

Now I need to take a minute and explain two of the Basic Facts of the Universe. I think it is pretty well universally known and agreed that (No. 1) Moms Are Not Into Fire. (No. 2) But Dads Are. And building piles of things to burn and then burning them--playing with fire, in other words--is therefore one of the secret bonding rituals between fathers and sons.

Now I am going to tell you why Fiona Taylor is a serious contender for the title of Coolest Mom Ever. When I went into the washroom for the first time, she apologized for the state of the Dalek and said that maybe the time had come to put it out in the back yard (well, okay, she said "garden"--I'm translating from British to English for the benefit of my American readers) and let the boys beat it to pieces with their lightsabers. I jokingly said, "Or you could burn it." Which was obviously a joke because of Basic Fact of the Universe No. 1 (see above). But Fiona's immediate, reflexive reaction was to blurt out, "COOL!!", at which point I suffered a minor stroke (fortunately it was a 24-hour stroke and I walked it off).

On our last morning in Ruardean the sun came out and it was Dalek burnin' time, which really ought to be one of the standard holidays if you ask me. In the photo above Fiona is setting up the video camera, the boys are hiding in the shed because, inevitably, it had started to rain just a little, and Mike is doing absolutely nothing. In his defense, his parental role of Fire Bringer had been usurped, so there wasn't much else to do.

About the chair. Originally the Dalek fire was going to be in the garden (back yard), but it was too windy, so Fiona moved the execution ground to the driveway, which is sheltered by the same stone fence that guarded King Eustace the Little-Known during his escape from the Seige of Tewkesbishopsford-Upon-Blatherpuddingcester in the late early middle ages. Okay, I made that last part up, but it seems like the kind of thing you should say about an old stone wall in England, and I don't know that it's not true. Anyway, the Taylors didn't want to char their driveway rocks so they put the Dalek up on an old garden (back yard) chair that was no longer safe to sit on. This turned out to be ironic, for reasons that will be revealed later.

And away she goes! The Dalek burned like the battlements of Braemar Castle during the Jacobite Uprising of 1689 (okay, that one is true).

Not only did the Dalek burn most satisfactorily, so did the chair. First it melted into a deformed shambles, and then into a burning puddle of goo that closely resembled flaming pancake batter and spread out over several square feet. Which I am certain made a much larger and more unsightly mess of the driveway than a few char marks and ashes would have done. But the point, for all you new parents and parents-to-be, is that the Taylors were cool enough to build their boys a Dalek, and then burn it for them.

Because this fire was at least partly for London's benefit, the Taylors christened it The Great Fire of London, which I thought was pretty great. Whose day are you going to make with a giant smoky carcinogenic driveway fire of a popular science fiction villain?

Tragically right after I took the last photo, above, my camera battery died and I had no working replacements. So ends the blaga (blog saga) of our English adventures. This week we're moving down to SoCal and next week we start our new jobs, so don't be surprised if the next update is some time in coming.

Out of time's abyss

2008-08-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

The day we got back to Ruardean from Bradford, Fiona took all of the Taylor and Wedel boys--save Mike--to Goodrich Castle. It's about 900 years old, and one of a series of fortifications along the border of England and Wales. The last major construction on the castle was in the late 1200s and early 1300s. It was held by both sides alternatively in the English Civil War in the 1600s. The final military action here was a seige in 1645-1646, which ended when the corner of the castle shown above was battered down by a huge mortar named "Roaring Meg", which still exists and is on exhibit at the castle.

It is worth remembering that the castle's half-millennium of valuable military service ended only 25 years after the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Buildings that old are all over England. Even the Taylor residence, Oakleigh Farm House, has parts that are about 300 years old. Which means that their house is older than my country.

Here's the view over the moat to the drawbridge. In the closeup you can see two small boys. The one in front is Jonno, bravely leading the way. Right behind him, with the blue lightsaber, is London. At this point they were about 150 yards ahead of the rest of us. About the time that we walked up to the drawbridge Jonno shouted hello from the parapet. At which point Fiona asked me if London was with Jonno, and I had to truthfully reply, "I don't know, but I intend to find out."

Fortunately the castle has been unobtrusively child-proofed, without spoiling the whole ruined-medieval-fortification vibe. Here's London on the same parapet from which Jonno had shouted hello. In the background is Roaring Meg, her immensely fat barrel covered with a blue tarp, in front of the same wall her shells battered down more than 360 years ago.

The boys prepared for their castle visit by gathering up all the lightsabers in the house. Here London and Danny pose in front of the entrance to the dungeon, which was unfortunately flooded before our visit, and even more unfortunately flooded during our visit. More about that in a minute.

Almost completely off-topic, the Hasbro expanding-blade lightsabers are great. I'd never picked one up because I figured that the only useful thing one could do with a toy lightsaber is whack it against other people and other lightsabers (which is true) and that no toy-with-moving-parts could withstand that treatment for more than one afternoon (which is false). The Taylor boys have evidently been whacking theirs about for two years, and all are still in good working order. They're dead cheap, too--I picked up a pair for London and me at Wal-Mart today for $7.96 apiece, which has to be one of the all-time great deals. Ignore the deluxe "Force Action" models in the long flower-boxes that go for $20 and require batteries--you want the electronics-free "Basic Lightsaber" in the cardboard bin on the lowest shelf, with the blade and button exposed so you can try it out in the store. Go nuts . . .

. . . and may the Force be with you.

The boys were enacting legendary battles all over that castle, which probably hasn't seen so many people running about with swords in centuries.

Believe it or not, this was my first visit to a real moat-and-parapet castle (not counting the fortress in Albarracin and tower in Teruel, I suppose). We climbed up to the top of the tower to get a look at the surrounding countryside--that's where I took the photo at the top of the post. It was pretty strange to know that between 400 and 900 years ago generations of soldiers had stood up there and watched for invading armies, or waited to be rescued from seiges. Especially since the whole region has been at peace for centuries. It would be like having forts on the border between Oklahoma and Texas (which is not a bad idea, by the way), or rather, it would be like that if Oklahoma and Texas were a thousand years old. I think it is a healthy reminder that people will stand in our ruins a thousand years from now, and wonder about our lives, and what kind of world we left them.

My time at Goodrich Castle was divided, between immense piles of cold stone laid in place centuries ago during times of war, conquest, seige, and famine, and tiny packages of warmth and laughter that never stopped moving, who are blessed to grow up in times and places of peace and plenty. It's a lot to hold in your head, and your heart.

Right after I took that last photo we went down to the moat for a walk around the castle, and the skies opened up and just dumped torrents of rain on us. I had on a hat and a long-sleeved shirt while everyone else had slickers, but it made no difference in the end. After a circuit of the castle we were all thoroughly drenched, and the rain didn't let up during the quarter-mile slog to the car. Danny announced that despite his slicker, the only part of him that wasn't completely waterlogged was a small area of his underwear, which I think was true for everyone (certainly for me), although I didn't take a poll.

Naturally, as soon as we got into the parking lot the rain stopped as if someone had flicked a switch, and the sun came out. Ha ha, England. I'm onto your deceitful ways!

Also naturally, halfway around the moat London ran up to me with rain sheeting down his smiling face and said, "Daddy, we had a good time at the castle!" Mind you, this is the same kid who howls like a dying cat if a drop of water gets in his eyes in the tub. Sheesh!

A weekend in Bradford

2008-08-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

For the middle weekend of our English vacation, London and I joined Vicki in Bradford, where her short course was held. I suppose for Brits it is probably just a bog-standard English city, but for us it was pretty marvelous. Here's a view into the city center, which is a pedestrian area with loads of little shops in old buildings. The one on the left that looks like a church is the city's old wool exchange, which at one time handled about a quarter of all the wool produced in Britain. Today it is a bookstore, with an acupuncturist in one corner lot and a Starbucks upstairs (a Starbucks? I'm about to have a heart attack from not surprise!).

Most of the city center is still intact, but a big area between our hotel and the city cathedral has been bulldozed to make a big steel-and-glass shopping mall. Boring! But right now there is no steel-and-glass anything, just a big muddy pit full of earthmoving equipment. That was just fine with London.

On our first night in town we went to a little Italian place called Giuseppe's. You may be able to just make out London's walrus tusks (made from drinking straws) in this photo.

Here's a better shot. When London says 'walrus' it comes out 'ralrus'. So Vicki and I tease him about being a walrus just so we can hear him say, "I'm not a ralrus! I'm a big boy!" Except that sometimes, he is a ralrus. Such are the ways of three-year-olds.

London thought that running around Bradford was about the third-greatest thing ever (playing with his grandparents and the Taylor boys are in first and second, obviously).

He never ceases to be surprised that he can't catch pigeons. He'll chase them and chase them and then run up to us and breathlessly confess that he couldn't catch one. I'm inclined to let him keep trying. Darn pigeons--they need a little exercise.

London is also an avid motorist.

It rained at least a little every day, but you get used to it. Actually, if you're coming from hundred-teens, drought, and wildfires, you may relish it. I did. London is impervious to moisture-related discomfort, unless it's bathtime. Funny how that works.

He is also game to try any frozen treat that promises to make a sticky mess of his face. Usually late in the game he will cross some invisible threshold and suddenly decide he's had enough--but, of course, we are never allowed to suggest such a thing; the decision must be made by London, and by him alone.

On Sunday it was sunny so I took London to a garden exhibition in front of the city hall. He loved the fountains and the flowers and most of all the space to run.

London never got tired of shouting "Double-decker!" whenever he saw a double-decker bus, so of course we heard this about 15,000 times on the trip. It's cool. I don't really get tired of them either. They're part of the landscape that lets you know that you are Not In Kansas Anymore.

For as much time as London spends airborne, it's not easy to capture him that way on camera. He's pretty fearless about jumping off of things.

This is how I will remember London and Bradford: a happy boy throwing himself headlong down the paved spaces between ancient soaring buildings, always certain that he'll catch the next pigeon.

A boy, a bus, bees, butterflies, bones, Bradford

2008-08-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was another sunny day in Ruardean. Fiona and the boys are visiting Mike's mum, so London and Mike and I had the run of the place. London loves little buses, and he enjoyed pushing himself around the back patio.

The neighbors' cat came over to get her belly scratched.

It was pretty idyllic, sitting on warm flagstones in the sun, petting a happy cat, watching butterflies and listening to the drone of bees, with the scent of flowers in the air.

The other night Mike cooked some lamb joints and made stew. We've been cleaning up the bones, by boiling, bleaching, and degreasing in soapy water. By yesterday afternoon they were done degreasing and ready to be dried, so I took advantage of the sun.

These are pretty clean, but bones is bones, and the kitty could smell what marrow is left. I watched her puzzle over the bones for a long time.

She made a big mess of my neat pile, but it was worth it to watch her try to figure out what to do with each one.

Pretty soon she was back to London for a good tummy rub.

Whether we're in Oklahoma, California, or England, the results of London's adventures are always the same.

Ruardean is near the border of England and Wales. This is the view to the west from the back garden. The land falls off in a series of hills and dales, each slightly hazier than the last. There are ruined castles along the Welsh border, defensive positions from before the realms of Britain were united. We're going to try to investigate one next week.

Today we left Ruardean to travel to Bradford and meet Vicki. London was thrilled about riding on Big People trains. And now we're here, so I'm going to stop ignoring my wife and sign off. More to come soon!

London, England. England, London.

2008-08-13T06:49:00.001-07:00

We're in England! Teaching done, grades submitted, and off to the UK for a couple of weeks of vacation.

Vicki is up in Bradford taking an anthropology short course and hanging out with all kinds of cool people, some of whom are even alive. London and I are staying with Mike and Fiona Taylor and their boys Daniel (10), Matthew (8), and Jonno (for Jonathan; almost 6), in their big house in the little village of Ruardean, in the west of England near Wales. You've heard about how supposedly the English countryside is charming and the villages are quaint and even more charming. It's all true.

On Monday, Fiona took us to a miniature railroad near here, with real working steam locomotives. Here are (from l. to r.) Jonno, London, Matthew, and Fiona on the train. Mike and Daniel stayed at the house.

Jonno, the little scamp, dodged out of this picture.

But not this one.

It has rained here at least a little every day. Mike has apologized profusely for this, which is very funny, first because it's not remotely his fault, and second because we're escaping a couple of months of drought, wildfires, and 100+ temperatures in the Central Valley of California. Rain and 60s are just fine with me, thanks. But it hasn't rained all the time. In fact, yesterday it was nice and sunny for most of the afternoon, so the boys got in some quality time in the Taylor's immense back yard (or 'garden' as they say here). Here Daniel (l.) and Matthew fly kites from atop the trampoline.

Daniel is also highly skilled with Jedi lightsaber, and has taken London as his Padawan learner.

The cabin in the background is just that, a cabin (or 'summer house') which is a great place to sit on a sunny day and watch boys, and (I hear) camp out with them.

The house in the background here is the Taylor's. Not that I expect your eyes to be drawn there first.

Ah, that's more like it.

This weekend London and I are off to Bradford to meet Vicki. Stay tuned for more pictures soon!

A long overdue trip to the zoo

2008-07-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

London's been starting his days sharing cereal with Mumpa on the couch.

Sometimes he makes a playnest in the laundry room, with Elmo, some snacks, and his favorite toys.

After living in Merced for 13 months, and on just about the last weekend day that I could have (before we move), I finally took London to the Merced Zoo today.

It's not a big zoo, but it's nicely laid out, clean, and well-maintained. We went in the morning, when it wasn't too hot, and all of the animals were out. London liked the deer.

He was a little more nervous around the swans.

We also saw a coyote...

A couple of bobcats...

Some emus...

Some goofy raccoons...

A big momma bear...

And her playful baby.

My favorites were the cougars, which I never gotten such a good look at in my life. They were up roaming around, huge and gorgeous.

London's favorites were the goats. At first he was a little nervous. But they sold cups of feed for a quarter, and pretty soon...

...he was feeding the goats...

...and laughing when their tongues tickled his hands.

Lots of little kids had spilled feed where the little goats couldn't reach, and London spent a few minutes picking up the extra feed and giving it to the babies.

There were a couple of greedy billy goats that would butt the babies out of the way, and it was my job to feed them just enough to keep them distracted so London could feed the little ones.

We went through three cups of feed, plus the equivalent of another cup that London picked up. He loved the little goats.

I feel like a moron for not taking him sooner.

It's a microcosm of our year here in Merced: lots of good stuff not done because I was too busy. Too busy teaching, too busy trying to get some research done, too busy working my butt off for an institution that is happy to treat lecturers as wage slaves and ignore the possibility that any of us might want something better or more permanent.

Vicki and I will both be even busier teaching at Western, at least until the end of October. But we'll be less busy overall, because we know that our teaching duties for this academic year end on Halloween. So we don't have to try to juggle teaching, research, writing, and committee work. For September and October we can just teach, and let everything else slide. That's not just acceptable, it's expected. We have the rest of the year to do all that other stuff.

And something I'll be doing, both during and after the teaching block, is spending more time with my family. Taking more walks, playing more games, reading more books, getting more sleep, and stressing a lot less.

One more month, and then we're outta here.

I can't wait.

We're back

2008-07-13T17:32:00.000-07:00

Hoo boy, it's been awhile again. Still posting stuff from our trip to Oklahoma in late May and early June.

The big excitement was the wedding of Uncle Ryan and Aunt Courtney. Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures of them, but here's the world's proudest grandpa with a flower girl and a ring bearer.

We had a little time after the wedding to relax in Norman with Uncle Todd, Aunt Becca, and Cousin Anna Ruth.

We went to the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman. Here's London with an Apatosaurus thighbone.

The museum had a traveling exhibit about "SuperCroc", a giant crocodile from Africa.

London loved the big bronze mammoth in the museum rotunda.

But what he talks about the most is playing with his grandparents (all four of them).

More of London's words:

tefascope - stethoscope

A Land About For Time - The Land Before Time

More to come soon...

Trains, thunderheads, and tractors

2008-06-04T23:36:00.000-07:00

Tuesday was my birthday. We took London to the Oklahoma State Railroad Museum in Enid.

Here he is in the driver's seat of the monster steam locomotive shown in the previous picture, which together with its tender weighs 290 tons.

London likes little trains, too.

And train whistles, like this one he is pulling with some help from Grandpa.

The railroad museum is one of Enid's best kept secrets. I grew up near Enid and have been going there for one reason or another for three decades, and I never knew it existed until this past year.

Here's the big locomotive again.

That same evening a thunderstorm moved through and we got a little rain. Here is a view to the west from my parents' house, just before the rain started to fall. You can see a curtain of rain falling on the horizon.

And here's the same view right after the storm passed, with some cool mammatus clouds on the bottom of the cloud deck.

Today we worked a lot in the yard. Here Grandpa is giving London and Grandma a ride in the wagon.

It wasn't all fun and games, though. London helped load cut wood.

He loves helping his grandparents.

He even helped Grandpa drive the logs to the woodpile.

Stay tuned for more pictures soon.

Water baby

2008-05-31T21:39:00.001-07:00

In terms of fun per dollar, inflatable pools are probably the best deal on the planet. London and I had a lot of fun with ours in Merced last summer, and both sets of grandparents have one. Papa set this one up in the backyard on Thursday, when London's great-grandparents Bud and Oni, Aunt Sarah, and cousins Abby and Caty came for a visit.

Abby and Caty would run and jump into the pool. By the way, am I a great photographer or what? This shot of Abby in midair ought to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Caty also got some serious air-time.

Tiny Man didn't have quite enough oomph for air travel, though. Instead he would run up to the pool, throw a leg over the rim, and plunge in with whatever momentum he had left. He didn't care that it wasn't actually a jump, and neither did the rest of us.

The kids played like this for literally hours.

Here's London piling in again...

...and going back for more. Makes me feel like a kid again.

We got another great London word today. London was watching Stuart Little for the first time, which has a villianous falcon named simply Falcon. London had never tried to say "falcon" before, and it came out "Funkin'."

Any of us: You mean Falcon?
London: It's Funkin'!

London at Mimi's and Papa's

2008-05-31T21:34:00.001-07:00

We usually go visit Mimi at her work when we are in town. I took the camera this time--most of the photos we have of Mimi and London are of them in their jammies. Here London is explaining his cars to Mimi.

Papa has been helping London learn to ride a bike. It was fun for me to run along taking these pictures--I remember doing the same thing when Papa taught London's cousin Abby to ride a bike 6 or 7 years ago.

London thought it was pretty cool. He likes being a big boy, and he doesn't like the idea that there are things he can't do yet.

But at the end of the day he will still curl up in my arms for some 'nuggling. For me, that's the best of both worlds.

We're here

2008-05-28T10:11:00.001-07:00

We finally got into OKC about midnight last night, and Mimi picked us up and brought us home. On our last night here at Christmas, London's Buzz Lightyear fell down behind the bed and none of us discovered that it was gone until we had gotten back to California. So last night London and Buzz were reunited.

London was a saint on both flights. He's such a good little man.

I keep thinking of more of his words. Here is one of our favorite bits, which is replayed pretty frequently:

London (being held when he doesn't want to be): I want to get down.
Me (lowering him toward the floor headfirst): You want to get upside down?
London: NO! I want to get upside-UP down!

A special time

2008-05-20T01:07:00.000-07:00

Whoa! Maybe not that special. I'm talking about my baby brother Ryan's impending wedding, three Saturdays from now, to Miss Courtney Hurst, who is:

- a good sport, considering that London's first inclination is to treat grown-ups as furniture;

- not a bad engineer when it comes to improbably tall block structures (in the background you can see Ryan struggling to read Jester Hats for Fun and Profit);

- good at multitasking, like she is here with her niece and nephew. She's also an all-around good person, which makes her attraction to my obviously troubled brother kinda mystifying. At least she's getting him off the market.

All these pictures are from last Christmas. Like I said, I'm bad at this. At least you're getting some now; the pictures from Christmas 2006 still haven't made it.

Courtney has a big black lab named, er, Cerberus or Megatron or something. I haven't met him, but apparently he is seven feet tall at the shoulder and snorts flames. Courtney's family was so impressed with Ryan that they got him a black lab of his own, a girl puppy he named Valentine.

Wyan wuvs Vawentine and gets vewy angwy if she gets dwessed up in cwoes. In this picture he's glaring at Courtney, from whose tender clutches he's just 'liberated' Val. Don't poke the bear!

Oh, all right, I suppose I've picked on the poor kid enough. Here's a slightly better picture of him. That unsightly mess on the floor next to him is his Uncle Ryan.

But who am I kidding? This isn't Letters to Lovesick Fools, it's Letters to London. So here's some Londony goodness. First in a hat at Mimi and Papa's house...

...then in some antlers at Grandma and Grandpa's. Sorry, grandparents, your pictures with London will have to wait until next time.

More of London's words

About a story: You tell it to me.

Pointing to an unfamiliar dinosaur: I don't know he.

After finding a feather on our walk last night: It's a weaf.
Me: It looks like a leaf, but I think it's a feather.
London: We can take the feaver home and put it in a cup of water for Momma! (which we frequently do with flowers)

Happy Mothers' Day

2008-05-11T11:45:00.001-07:00

Click on the picture to see it on the full screen. Happy Mothers' Day! We love you.

London goes FAST!!

2008-05-10T23:00:00.000-07:00

Tiny likes looking through all kinds of gadgets. This is the dissecting microscope in Vicki's lab. He's looking at a key for a car we don't even own anymore that we found in our pile of spares. Even though these pictures are only a couple of weeks old, they look ancient now that he's had another haircut.

It was nice this evening so we went outside, and I grilled hamburgers for dinner. Vicki's back is not fixed, not by a long shot, but it's feeling enough better than she can walk without a cane most of the time, and she can hold London more. That's a blessing.

Vicki has lost 24 pounds since January 1. Which is pretty darn good considering she hasn't been able to exercise at all until the past couple of weeks.

We have a long sloping driveway, but the sidewalk is level. If you send down a Hot Wheels car from the top of the driveway it will pick up some speed, but between the bumps and the level (and the fact that most of our Hot Wheels are having alignment problems) they always come to a stop on the sidewalk instead of in the street. We roll nickels down the driveway, too. They're wide and heavy enough to roll really well, and they're big and shiny enough that we can find them again if they veer into the grass. That was actually London's idea, he has some pennies and nickels in his piggybank and he brought some outside and discovered that they could roll.

Here's Tiny with some telescopes. The big black one was my first telescope. I got it last fall with some of my prize money from Spain. The little red one is 13 years old. I found it on Craigslist (community-based classifieds online) and Vicki got it for me for Valentine's Day so I'd have a "baby telescope" to share with London. The skeletal one on the tripod is a compact travel telescope that I built. The struts and rings break down, and it packs up into a space about the size of a big coffee mug (the struts go in the tripod bag). The little table we picked up for free off the sidewalk about a month after we moved in; one of our neighbors was just throwing it out. The legs were a little wobbly, but they just needed to be tightened. Now we use it for all kinds of stuff, but most often as a base for the baby telescope. Saturn is high and bright right now, and often in the evenings I set up a telescope out on the driveway while Tiny plays with his cars. It's a good way to meet the neighbors--everybody loves to look through a telescope, and I've gotten to give a lot of people their first look in the last month.

You can see in the picture that London is wearing a Speed Racer t-shirt. We have been watching the commercials for the Speed Racer movie for about a month, and I told him I would take him when it came out. We went today. It was the first movie he's seen in a theater. We got popcorn and hotdogs and had a great time.

London has discovered that it is possible to make statements that are at odds with reality--to fib, in other words. He doesn't do it very often, and when he does it is always to get out of something he doesn't want to do. So far his most outlandish claim is that, "vegetables make my feet hurt." Sorry, kid. You'll have to do better than that!

London plays

2008-04-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

These speak for themselves, so I'm going to sign off and see you next week.

Camping

2008-04-14T10:04:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I took my ecology class camping in Yosemite. Here's the view down Yosemite Valley. Half Dome is down-valley on the left, and Bridal Veil Falls is right over my shoulder. The last time I'd been camping was in Big Bend in January of 2007; past time to get out there and do it again.

Not one of my more flattering pictures, but it's the only one of me and the valley. Ho hum.

Last night I set up my tent in the back yard, and London and I camped out. He was pretty excited.

Here he is with his little Thomas lantern and his bean bag fish, which is his new favorite snuggly thing.

We had a great time. It was cool but not cold, and we stayed toasty warm under a big down comforter. It was a clear night and the quarter moon shone down on us through the window in the top of the tent. It was the first time I'd ever slept in the tent without the rain fly on; every other time there has either been too much dust or too much frost to camp without it. I read Tiny stories by the light of his lantern until he fell asleep, and then read myself to sleep too.

I couldn't face dragging all that stuff back in after only one night, so we're going to camp out again tonight.

More Londony goodness

2008-04-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

Aww yeah.

Mom gets some London snugglin' too.

The gentleman enjoys his bawth.

I have no idea what is going on here. Mom's bedrooms slippers, for one.

Dang it feels good to be a gangsta.

We save paper towel tubes for London. Mom calls them "doot-da-da-doos", because you can hold them like trumpets and sing, "Doot-da-da-doo!" They also make good telescopes. London pretends to be a pirate. "I'm wookin' for sarks!" he says. Sometimes I use my best pirate voice and say, "Yargh, mateys! We'll take their beans and dangle 'em from the spanker sail!" and London just dies laughing. "Say it again, Daddy!" Who can resist?

Happy birthday to my mom, who turns a good-sized number Thursday. I'm not saying what it is, but it's evenly divisible by both 10 and 15. We love you and miss you!

London's Easter egg hunt

2008-04-03T20:37:00.000-07:00

Here's the brave egg-hunter, Triceratops basket in hand, being filmed for posterity by his adoring mother.

And he's off!

Tracking the elusive eggs into the wildest corners of the back yard...

Unloading the first haul back at base camp...

Fearlessly pushing on to the finish...

Feasting on the spoils of the hunt...

And finally, enjoying the choicest of morsels back at the hunting lodge. Truly, no egg or bunny is safe when this mighty warrior is on the prowl!

On his own, but not alone

2008-03-15T21:51:00.000-07:00

Here's London in a dogpile. Above his head is Sadie Dog, a birthday present from Lauren and Sydney Zephro. Sadie Dog is named for Sarah Ginn's dog, Sadie. Next to him is Elmo Dog. Between Elmo Dog and Sadie Dog is Baby Dinosaur Dog. And in London's arms is Sock Dog. Sock Dog was invented when we were traveling and didn't have any of his regular dogs for him to snuggle to sleep. Vicki's idea, and a good one. He likes Sock Dog so much that he sleeps with it even when he's back in the pound, as he is here. He's tucked up against the don't-fall-out-of-bed pillow; his own pillow at the top of the bed, unused as usual, is covered with his Fire Truck Binkit, one of the survivors of his babyhood.

When I see him curled up like this, it reminds me of the first time I saw him at all, curled up the same way on the ultrasound screen, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. And it reminds me of how he would curl up when he was brand new, and I could put the crown of his head against my bicep and still have to curl my hand up to cradle his bum and little froggy legs.

We watch the eclipse

2008-03-15T16:21:00.001-07:00

Once when I was a kid Mom and Dad and my brothers and I sat out in lawn chairs until midnight or maybe later to watch a total eclipse of the moon. We only did it once, but it's always stuck in my mind as Reason #4,769,341 why My Parents Are Awesome (that's actually a pretty high rank, considering how many museums, zoos, turtles, cats, chickens, rockets, hikes, skinned knees, dirt clod fights, movies, puzzles, trips to the bookstore, vacations, homeworks, fairs, kolaches, and giant pans of lasagna went into our upbringing).

The night of February 20 there was a total eclipse of the moon. It started at 5:45 and ended a little after 9:00. I watched it from the back porch with London, and Vicki came out a few times to look, too. The "baby telescope" was a Valentine's present from Vicki. London loves it and is very possessive about it, but we talked about it and decided to share.

Eclipses happen when the Earth, moon, and sun all line up. Like we've been off doing our own thing for a while and then everything comes back into alignment, and the same thing happens that happened so long before, whether that's the eclipse itself, or a family outside watching it. But it's not the same eclipse. And it's not the same family.

It is weird to play the same games with London that I played with Ryan when he was this age. It is even weirder to share with London the same experiences that my parents shared with me. The 'circle of life' is just an overused cliche when you're young. Then you start coming back to the places you haven't been for a lifetime, and you realize that you're on that circle, going around like everyone else. Everyone who lives long enough experiences it, and probably no two in quite the same way.

I'll tell you what it makes me feel. Like I have a lot to live up to. It's my turn now, and I can't let London down, just like my parents never let me down. And like I need to sit down with them the next time I see them, give them a hug, tell them that I don't see the whole picture yet but I'm beginning to understand, how it works, what it takes, how I can see now that my whole life is built on the sacrifices they made. And I need to look them in the eyes and tell them that I won't let them down, that I'll do everything that I can for London the way they did everything they could for me and my brothers.

Family is often described as the ties that bind. The first thing that comes to mind, at least when you're young, is chains. It's not fair, but there it is. Then later on you realize that people are bound together for another reason. The ties aren't like chains, they're like safety ropes when you're climbing. They're there to help pull you up the parts you aren't strong enough to climb yourself, and to catch you when you stumble. And those ties are made of love, which starts out as fragile as a snowflake and matures into something stronger than granite.

I love you, Mom and Dad. I don't see the whole picture, but I'm starting to get it. I won't let you down.

I'm bad at this

2008-03-15T16:07:00.000-07:00

The blogging, I mean. Putting up pictures. I haven't since Thanksgiving. Bad Dad!

So I'm not going to try to put up tons of pictures at a time, or write anything profound. I'm going to aim for the much more realistic goal of one photo per week. Here's this week's picture: Tiny Man in his Train, playing with his fire station.

Sometimes he has trouble with two different vowel sounds close together. He says "airplane" just fine but "airport" comes out as "oarport". He can identify several planets on sight. He recognizes Jupiter by its stripes, Saturn by its rings, Mars because it's red, and Earth by the blue and white. In his words, it's "Earf, the planet that we walk on." So Earf isn't a problem vowel-wise, but this past week he learned the word "earthmover" which comes out "oofmover".

The other night Vicki tripped and fell. She's okay now, but it made her cry. London came over and said, "Momma, you're not in trouble".

Another night he asked me to sing "the merry song". So I started singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas", which is his favorite Christmas song. But he cut me off and said, "No, the one with the boat." Then I knew he meant "Row, Row, Row Your Boat". So I sang it, and when I got to the end, "Life is but a dream," he just died laughing, and then said, "Daddy, you're not supposed to say 'butt'".

Stay tuned for another photo next week...I hope.

Look to the heavens

2007-11-25T10:17:00.001-08:00

It just occurred to me that some of you might not have seen the comet. Comet 17/P Holmes is normally very dim but in late October it flared up to naked-eye visibility. It is still visible with the naked eye, but it is much better in even the smallest and cheapest binoculars, where it shows up as a huge patch of fuzz. (Believe me, my binoculars are both small and cheap.) And it's not hard to find--takes about 30 seconds even if you don't know any constellations at all. Here's a comet-finding guide I put together.

In related news, I've been taking pictures of the moon through my telescope. The best ones are posted on my Flickr page.

Well, this is Letters to London, not Letters From Space, so here's your value added. I found this in a folder full of fossil pictures. This was a while ago--we were in Berkeley, London was still using a bottle, and he was quite a bit smaller than he is now. I noticed at the park yesterday that my tiny tiger has suddenly turned into a long-legged lanky little boy. He just looks short because his pants are so wide! More pix to come soon...

Fall photo roundup

2007-11-24T13:55:00.000-08:00

I just realized that there are quite a few good photos from this fall that I haven't posted yet. Here we are with the hanging skeleton in Vicki's office.

Vicki was interviewed by the local TV news back in September. We were staying in a hotel before flying back to Oklahoma, and the cable was out in our room, so we had to go down to the lobby and watch on the little TV at the front desk. It was pretty cool--London was definitely amazed to see "Mumpa" on TV.

This must be from our Santa Cruz trip, because that was the first and last time that those two rockets have been seen together. It is amazing how much London looks like Vicki's brother Matt sometimes.

That house on the corner is the first house on our street. Right across from our street they are building a shopping center. London and I often take walks down there to look at the tractors and play in the piles of sand and dirt outside the fence. About two weeks ago this tractor was sitting outside the fence, too, so we got a good look at it. London was thrilled.

Lots of new words and sayings to report. Things are counted up in numbers of ones. So if he sees two birds, he says, "There's two ones, Momma!"

Any more inclusive group is "some". The other day we were eating breakfast and out of the blue he says to me, "I don't like some alligators, Daddy." This means, of course, that he doesn't like any alligators. Later I was telling Vicki about it and when I quoted, "I don't like some alligators," London piped up with, "I don't like some alligators too!"

Sometimes they get combined: "There's some two flies."

Daddy: "Did you have some pizza?"
London: "I do had some pizza."
"I ate some P Q cons." (croutons)

London always calls other kids "children". Only it comes out "chirdelen".

Be- is still the all-purpose prefix for directions:
"Someone went be-under us." (from on top of a bridge)

"It went be-past me." (about a ball rolling past)

He is the great joy of our lives. Which reminds me, our friends Brian and Ilsa had a little boy at the beginning of October. His name is Gustav, or "Gus" for short, and he is a cute tiny man. I got to meet him a couple of weeks ago.

How are they ever so small? It confounds me to this day. Where did my tiny baby go?

Parenthood is the coolest.

Life is pretty darn good

2007-10-12T16:27:00.001-07:00

Took this on the way to Santa Cruz last weekend.

Here's Tiny eating some grapes in a train he built himself.

He's been a bit verbally contrary lately. If I say that we're going to rescue someone or something--say, rescue Mommy with dinner, or rescue one of his lost cars down at the bridge--he says, I don't wanna go on a res-cue.

If we say that we're going to a restaurant, he gets really worked up and shouts:

It's not a rest-nont. It's a HUGE ONE!!

London is growing up

2007-09-29T18:39:00.000-07:00

When Todd and I were kids we spent a lot of time with my cousins, who lived on a farm in southwest Kansas. We did farm work most days and spent our downtime engaging in serious goofing off, of the kind that can only happen when four boys have the run of a huge farm complete with a pond, a barn with a hayloft, several outbuildings, an immense yard, a million trees, and corn fields on all sides.

One of our favorite indoor activities was to set up some track for our Hot Wheels cars. Michael and Stanley (our cousins) had about 20 feet of orange track that snapped together in various lengths. We would clamp one end of the track to the tallest shelf we could reach and make a sort of ski-jump style ramp, which could send a Hot Wheels car flying clear across the room. Honestly, I'm not even sure what else you would want to do with the track; surely making huge jump ramps is the only worthwhile application.

The other day I was at Target with Tiny and I found that the folks at Hot Wheels evidently agree. This ski-jump style ramp setup goes over the top of a door and can easily send a car 15-20 feet, depending on the angle of the ramp. The first time we set it up we left it up for almost two weeks. We usually go out of the garage so we hardly ever use the front door, and when we did open it the ramp just moved with the door.

The real kicker is that the whole setup cost ten bucks. Man, talk about your great deals.

London has been doing more for himself lately, like trying to take his shirt off. He's almost got the idea. And he definitely has a cool shirt.

The other day we were playing in his bedroom and he grabbed a book, hopped up in this chair, and said that he was going to read to Daddy. Vicki came to find us while he was reading to me so I had her get the camera and slide it across the floor to me. It was pretty darn sweet. London had one of his picture books and he was pointing to each of the pictures and telling me what it was. We've got a two-year-old who like fruits and vegetables and wants to read to us, so I guess we're doing something right.

Time for some news on London's words:

I wanna be footbare yike Daddy.

Take off my sandal so I can be foot. BARE!

(After trying Vicki's bran cereal, points at a spoonful of his Cinnamon Toast Crunch)
This cereal? Is good!

London (with stacking boxes): Box!
Miss Bevelry (actually Miss Beverly, his daycare provider): Oh, that's wonderful.
London (assertively): Let's play with it!

Pry-rets (pirates)

Sun is closed. (after the sun goes down at night)

Sock is broken. (when one of his socks is coming off)

Car is upside down. (after seeing that I had backed one of our cars into the garage)

It's a Thomas about movie.

My sherdouls (shoulders, scrambled)

mushed ash (moustache)

fumb (thumb)

sumping (something)

Get a piece of cheese and pour some crackers on it. (We realized that London only saw more than one kind of food being combined when we pour milk on his cereal. So for him, pouring one thing on another isn't just one kind of combining food, it's the only kind.)

Did you remember about space?

It went befront of me. (about a Hot Wheels car)

Whammler (whammer)

Those are turtles. Those are Uncle Ryan's turtles!

rest-naunt (restaurant)

tor-da-duss (tortoise)

I'll fly away

2007-09-29T18:37:00.001-07:00

Vicki's little brother, Matt Cooper, died in his sleep a few weeks ago, at the age of 29.

It still catches me by surprise when I remember it. Matt was one of my best friends and although my head knows that he no longer here, my heart is having a hard time accepting it. It is especially hard because London looks so much like Matt did when he was little. Matt and London didn't have a huge amount of time together, but they both enjoyed what time they did have. Matt taught London to say, "BOWMP-BOWMP -- chicka-chicka -- Oooooh Yeeeeaaaah!" and London still runs around saying it and asking about Uncle Matt.

What can I tell him? It's not like I understand it myself. Matt is in the arms of God but I still have to get through the rest of this life without him.

Godspeed, my brother. I will see you again.

London in Oklahoma, Part 2: Casa Cooper

2007-08-19T11:30:00.001-07:00

For the second half of our Oklahoma vacation we stayed with London's Mimi and Papa. Mimi had a birthday while we were there, and London got in on some birthday cake.

Naturally where there are grandparents there is going to some spoiling of the little man. London picked up a couple of new trains on this trip, Iron Burt and Iron 'Arry. I am always amazed at the number of locomotives that the Island of Sodor supports, and even more amazed at how many of them have twins. A more cynical person might suspect that some of the characters were introduced purely in the quest for filthy lucre.

Nah!

London also got an engineer's cap. Here he's chatting with Papa about his new trains.

London got to see all three of his great-grandparents this trip, too: Grandma Onie and Grandpa Bud (Mimi's parents), and Grandma Cooper (Papa's mom). Here London is helping Grandma Onie with something--or possibly unhelping. Sometimes it's a fine line. You can also see that, no matter how many other engines arrive, Thomas is never far off.

London relaxes on the sofa with Grandpa Bud. I remembered to take the camera this time, but I didn't get any pictures of Grandma Cooper.

London also got some University of Oklahoma duds. Casa Cooper is a house divided; Papa is an OSU alum and Mimi went to OU for part of her education. A similar situation holds at the Wedel homestead: Todd and I went to OU and Ryan went to OSU. Normally we all get along pretty well, but Todd and I were scandalized when Mom and Dad hung a huge orange OSU sign on the front porch for a few years. I don't know if it's still up or not. I didn't notice it on this trip but it's possible that my brain simply blocked out the offending item.

The best thing that London said on the trip to Oklahoma has a bit of a backstory. London was a little confused about what San Diego refers to. When we got to town we went to the conference hotel, and London kept saying, "San Diego!" He thought that the hotel itself was San Diego. So we'd be at the zoo or one of the museums and he'd say, "I want to go back to San Diego." (Or if it was the train museum, he'd say, "I don't want to go back to San Diego.") We thought it was pretty funny but we didn't give it any thought after we came home.

Then on our last day in Oklahoma Mimi was driving us to the airport on Meridian in Oklahoma City. We were going past hotel row and London saw a big hotel with wrap-around external balconies like the conferenc hotel we'd stayed in, and he pointed and shouted, "There's San Diego!"

Special Feature: the thousand (retarded) faces of Uncle Ryan

2007-08-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

This blog is supposed to be about London, but as I was going through the pictures from this trip I realized that I had an inordinate number that showed Ryan looking . . . goofy. I think that's partly because he is goofy, and partly because you'd have to go to Hogzilla to find a bigger ham. Here he is looking dapper and quite mentally challenged in Anna Ruth's hat. Note that although it belongs to a 13-month-old baby, the hat almost fits on my brother's curiously tiny head.

I can't decide if Ryan is yawning here, or simply longing to dine on human brains.

Like me, Ryan has nothing but love for the sauropods. He just expresses his differently.

An homage to Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. This picture makes me laugh out loud every time I look at it. It's the expression on his face. Man, that's priceless.

I found this at the bottom of an old box of magazines. A nostalgic memento of yesteryear, for sure.

P.S. That last one is probably slightly funnier if you know that Courtney was prom queen at Oklahoma State.

London in Oklahoma, Part 1: Casa Wedel

2007-08-11T12:30:00.002-07:00

We just got back from a 10-day vacation to Oklahoma. London's Mimi and Papa (Vicki's parents) live in Oklahoma City, and London's Grandma and Grandpa (my folks) live in the country about 20 miles outside of Enid. This time we remembered the cameras and we got a lot of pix, so I'm splitting them up. This post is just stuff from the first half of the trip. Pix from Mimi and Papa's will go up later (hopefully not too much later...).

It is usually no more expensive to stay at a part-sleep-fly hotel than it is to park the car for however long we're going to be gone anyway, so we often stay overnight before we fly. Here's London in the hotel in Fresno the night before we left. We got a Thomas the Tank Engine sticker kit a few months ago, and it came in a little plastic case with a latch and a handle. We call it London's suitcase, and it's just the right size to hold six pieces of track and about 10 vehicles. He can set it up anywhere we go, and we can tear it down and pack it up in about two minutes flat. Very handy.

London helps Grandpa and Grandma fill up a little pool. Mom and Dad live on an acre out in the country, surrounded by wheat fields and pasture. We moved out there when I was about nine years old. The main house is a two-story farmhouse that was built around 1900, but irritatingly I didn't get any good pictures of it. The trailer in the background belonged to my grandparents, who moved from Nebraska to stay with us when I was in my early teens. Both of them have passed on, but it was really great to have them close while we did. Off to the right is the carport that Dad built to protect the Wedel fleet. There are also three sheds on the property, and about 30 big trees (elms and cottonwoods).

It was just about the perfect place to grow up. The buildings and trees give plenty of places to hide and allow for some good strategy when you're trying to sneak up on your brothers. It's far away from everything--the nearest neighbors are about half a mile away to the west, and the second nearest are a mile away to the east. So you could go outside and raise hell without worrying about bothering anyone, which is very handy when you're a teenager. And the place is crazy with wildlife--lizards, turtles, snakes, rabbits, raccoons, opossums, armadillos, coyotes, deer, the occasional bat, and even bobcats and mountain lions. A couple of years ago Mom was coming home from a walk and a mountain lion padded across the road just a few dozen yards in front of her. Then it sat in the ditch at watched her for a while before it slinked away. Mom said it was the most scared she'd ever been.

On this visit I was taking out some table scraps when a bobcat chased a cottontail out of the field behind the house. They ran across the backyard, around the trailer, and back into the field. I saw the whole thing from the fence--they passed within 20 feet of me on both passes. Pretty cool.

The other awesome thing about the ancestral manse is that there is a creek about a quarter of a mile away, and the farmers who own the pasture it flows through have always been pretty relaxed about us getting in there and exploring as long as we steer clear of their cows. No, I've never been cow-tipping. I was always way more interested in catching turtles and picking up bones. We often go down to the creek on walks and throw rocks in the water. Here London is getting in on the action.

From the age of five on we always had pet turtles, but that's a story for another day. I really wanted to catch a turtle to show London, and chelonian fate smiled on us last Friday. I was coming back from Enid with my brothers after catching a movie and we found two box turtles crossing the road. Both Western box turtles, Terrapene ornata ornata, both female, both full grown and apparently healthy. One of them had a small chunk out of the back end of its shell (an old wound and completely healed), but it's not uncommon to find turtles that have survived much more serious injuries, like broken shells or missing limbs. They are incredibly tough animals. I love 'em. Anyway, we laid an old tire on its side to make a temporary pen, filled up the inside with water to give the turtles a cool, shady place to rest, and fed them some watermelon rinds. We only kept them for a couple of days, and turned them loose right where we caught them. London thought they were pretty cool, and the turtles certainly seemed to be happy--the melon rinds were pretty well chewed by the time I tossed them.

Todd, Becca, and Anna Ruth joined us Thursday evening. Anna Ruth is growing so fast. Except for one day this spring when we were passing through on our way home from a job interview, we hadn't seen her since Christmas.

She was a little nervous around me, but on Saturday she finally settled down and let me hold her for a few minutes. Yeah, I get it, I'm scary-looking, har-dee-har.

Ryan also came up Thursday evening, and on Friday he was joined by his fiancee, Courtney Hearst. They just got engaged a couple of weeks ago. London loves them both, of course, but he doesn't always love the camera.

It's best if he doesn't even know he's on camera.

Here are Todd and Becca with the little ones. Neither of the babies looks too happy here, but that's just bad timing. They were both smiling and laughing most of the time.

On Saturday evening Ryan and Courtney drove us down to Hennessey to meet Vicki's dad. There is a Sinclair station there with a rockin' sauropod out front, so of course we had a photo op.

We had a wonderful time. I just wish it could have lasted longer. I find that the longer we are away, the more I miss Oklahoma. Naturally we are hoping for the best here in Merced, but I hope someday our path can take us closer to what I will always think of as home.

London in San Diego

2007-08-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago Vicki attended the annual meeting of the International Association for Identification in San Diego. She gave a workshop to train other forensic scientists in her method of determining the season in which someone died from their teeth.

Sounds crazy, right? But every year you are alive, you lay down a band of cementum around your teeth, like rings on a tree. And the part of the band laid down in the winter is dark and the part laid down in the summer is light. So by counting the number of bands and looking at the thickness of the outer band, you can tell roughly how old someone was when they died (roughly because you may not know exactly how old they were when a particular tooth came in), and by looking at the color and thickness of the outermost band, you can tell with a high degree of confidence what season of the year they died in. This is a handy way to cut down the number of possibilities if you are trying to match a dead body to missing persons reports.

People have been doing this with animals for decades, but Vicki was the first person to ever think of determining season at death from teeth in humans. You can read her abstracts about it here; her first paper on it is in press at the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

Anyway, she brought London and me along for a family vacation. We honeymooned in San Diego 11 years ago but we hadn't been back since.

Right after we got to our hotel we had to get some calories in the kid. Here he is chowing down on his favorite food: "Cheeseburger!"

While Vicki was setting things up for her workshop London and I went to the zoo. We got there right when they opened. All the animals were out and about but the humans weren't, which is easily the best way to visit the zoo. Here London has a close encounter with a "hangatang".

We also saw a lazy bear.

This tortoise was also pretty relaxed--and, as you can tell from the angle of the photo, pretty close to the fence. Almost all the animals that we saw were right up at the front of their enclosures. Just in terms of the critters, it was probably my best zoo visit ever.

And of course it was even better because I got to watch my little man see some things for the first time, like these elephants. When we first walked up they were only about 10 feet from the fence, so London was looking as much up as out to see them. One of them exhaled loudly through its trunk and London jumped back and held my leg. He was really spellbound. Took a while for him to relax enough to get this picture.

I was a complete idiot and ran off to San Diego without the digital camera or the camcorder. So all of our photos from that vacation were taken with our digital cameras. Fortunately I traded in my old busted joint a few weeks ago and my new Moto Razr ($20 at Circuit City, can ya believe it?) has a megapixel camera. Not a substitute for even our cheap digital camera, but a lot better than nothing.

We were headed out of the zoo when we saw these goldfish, and London asked me to take a picture of them. So here you go--the first photo on this blog taken with London as the director.

The next day Vicki was actually giving her workshop, and London and I went to the Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park. They layouts are immense--the largest ones are probably 70 feet long and 20 feet wide. And they aren't just made-up piles of train stuff. Most of the layouts are based on specific stretches of California rail line, and modeled from aerial photos and topographic maps. I think I was almost as impressed as London.

Downstairs there is a model village with several toy train lines. Here London is pushing a button to makes one of the trains run. Needless to say, that button got pushed more than once.

The next day we all went to the San Diego Museum of Man. Here are Vicki and London with some other primates.

We went to Seaport Village for some shopping, too. Here are the lights of my life in front of the aircraft carrier Midway, which is now a floating museum. The Midway was launched in 1945 and retired in 1992, making it the longest-serving aircraft carrier in history.

Here's our favorite London saying from the trip. The freeway onramps and offramps we used to get to and from the hotel were really tightly cranked, so even at moderate speeds inertia made us lean in our seats. London didn't like this at all, and he would yell, "Don't make me fast, Daddy!"

To Yosemite and beyond!

2007-07-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

Saturday mornings are lovely. Yesterday we had a lazy backyard day.

It's official, we have the cutest boy in the world.

Today we went up to Yosemite. We had a nice picnic lunch.

After lunch London and I went for a stroll in the woods.

London thinks baby trees are funny.

He didn't want to approach this hollow tree? "Why," I asked, "what do you think is in there?"

London: "Winnie-the-Pooh!"

We've been reading Pooh stories every night before bed.

There is a pioneer village near the south entrance of the park. If the sun looks extra bright, it was. Hot, too: over a hundred. Not what we expected in the mountains!

Right now, bridges and tunnels are tops in London's world. Because he knows them from Thomas and His Friends, of course.

Some of London's recent sayings:

hoo hight

Too tight. I am actually too late on this one, he finally learned to say his T's so now it is "too tight".

I gon't know

mogorcycle

Okay, I guess he still has trouble with some T's. And some D's.

andimals

boccolri [bock-ull-ree]

R's tend to get misplaced, and sometimes D's that snuck out of other words turn up in strange places.

Thomas DDV

Thomas DVDVD

On trips we take Thomas DVDs and show them on our laptops. Tiny still has a hard time with 'DVD'.

"That snake say!"

If you make an animals noise, London will say, "That [x] say!"

"Wake up to the water, Daddy!"

Sometimes I pinch my nose and lay down in the swimming pool to get fully immersed. London grabs my shoulders and tries to pull me up. "Wake up to the water!"

Finally, on the heels of "I eat moke!" we now have, "I want a bite of your juice."

Summer living

2007-06-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

Can it really be two months since the last update? So much has happened. This is the last picture we took of London in Berkeley, taking a nap on the futon.

I filed my dissertation on May 17 and graduated on May 18. Here I am with my labmates Jackie Moustakas and Andrew Lee, who also graduated. (The reason my robe is black instead of blue is that I got a rental; I didn't care, what matters is that the darn diss. is gone forever.)

Mom and Dad came out for graduation and we went to the Western Air Museum in Oakland. They loved it, and London always has a good time there.

We moved to Merced at the end of May, and June 3 was my birthday. We had a picnic in the city park and rode the train.

Naturally that's about as good as it gets in London's world.

That night London and Mumpa sang me happy birthday.

Last night we went out for our 11th anniversary and afterwards we went to Target to get some stuff for the house. This little pool was twenty bucks. London helped me fill it.

Thomas got a bath.

After he got his hands wet London went over to this tree and wiped his hands on the leaves and said "towel". I couldn't tell if he meant he was using the tree as a towel, or just pretending that three was a towel. He picks imaginary grapes out of trees all the time, and we sit on the grass and eat them.

This gives you some idea of the size of our back yard. Also at Target we got a one dollar plastic boat. London remembered it and had to go get it to put in the pool.

The back yard from the other side. It's pretty grotesque how much space we have, and how little we're paying for it. Lawn care is included in our rent. Merced charges everyone the same flat rate for water, no matter how much you use, so I don't even feel bad about all that nice green grass. As long as we're getting nailed for it, we might as well get to enjoy it. (Everyone else in the neighborhood waters a lot more than we do--kinda disgusting actually.)

In goes the boat!

In go the boys!

Best twenty bucks I ever spent.

And now here we are, settling into our new home, but some things stay the same no matter where we go.

London tells it like it is

2007-04-07T15:17:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the looooong wait between posts. Between traveling for job interviews and working on the dissertation, I've barely had time to breathe lately.

The best part of my day is at 5:00 when I get London from daycare and we go for a walk "round da block". We usually head outside and once we're on the sidewalk I say, "Okay, London, where are we going?" He leads me all over the neighborhood. Lately his favorite route is to go down to the library, read a book about trains, go outside and play on some decorative rocks (these are low, round, and surrounded by gravel, so it's much less dangerous than it sounds), then go to the park.

At the park London is completely fascinated by the "waterbridge". He likes walking over bridges. He likes watching the water. He likes it all so much that he usually cries when it's time to leave. I bribe him with the promise of playing trains when we get home. "Play trains, Daddy! Daddy, play trains!"

Along the way we pick "bendywions" (dandelions) and blow their seeds away. For the first week or so of bendywion season, London kept getting the head too close to his mouth and he'd get his tongue all covered with dandelion seeds. Since then, he's more cautious about blowing, and often just waves the dandelion back and forth in the air to dislodge the seeds. It's great fun.

Here are more of London's words:

London says goodbye to everything. "Bye bye house. See. Next time. House."

"Bye bye bus. See. Later. Bus."

Sometimes when we are out on our walks we see "amimals". One day at the park I showed him a slug on a leaf and now he is completely fascinated by "swugs". A trip to the park is just not complete unless we find at least one "swug" to look at. Fortunately, that's not hard in Northern California in the spring.

Milk comes out more like "moke". And London hasn't learned the word 'drink' yet. So if you ask him when he's drinking milk, he'll say, "I eat. Moke!"

Also, "I eat. Sippycup. Appajuice."

If you fix London's train tracks, he always thanks you. "Daddy fix train. Thank you, Daddy." The other day our friend Patrick came over to babysit. One of the first things he did was sit down and start putting London's train tracks back together. London hadn't caught his name, but he knew that Patrick was a man, so he said, "Man fix train. Thank you, man."

London goes to the ZOOB!

2007-02-18T23:32:00.000-08:00

Today we took London to the Oakland Zoo. He loved it.

First stop: the giraffes. I think they're my favorite zoo animals. You can see one of the zookeepers feeding them here.

This sneaky guy got caught reaching into the cookie jar.

They don't look particularly comfortable sitting down.

I've always been mad for turtles. When I was little, my favorite zoo animal was the giant tortoise. This guy here is from Aldabra, in the Indian Ocean, not the Galapagos Islands, which are in the Pacific. A passing zookeeper told us that he is more than 100 years old. There's a pretty good chance that this tortoise hatched out of his egg before the Wright brothers made their first powered flight (1903). Definitely before the Model T (1908), before Teddy Roosevelt left the White House (1909), and before the first of my grandparents was born (1911). That's pretty darn old.

Some of the tortoises stayed inside. London saw them, too.

He and his momma rode a big fake tortoise.

He even played tortoise himself.

We saw an alligator laying on the grass right by the fence.

The zoo had a big kid's play area, with big lawns, picnic tables, cute critters like lemurs and otters, and stuff to play on.

We didn't see everything at the zoo. After a couple of hours of roaming around, it was time to find some lunch and a nap for Tiny Man. Also, we blew off a few critters so London could have a ride on the zoo train. The only ones I regret are the elephants and what London calls the "zebrabras". But it was still a great day.

Thomas is EVERYWHERE!

2007-02-17T10:22:00.000-08:00

Thomas th e Tank is the fourth member of our family right now. We ran into him last night at one of our favorite bookstores.

-Vicki

Winter in Berkeley-

2007-02-17T10:16:00.000-08:00

We are enjoying some non-rainy decidedly non-winter weather here in Berkeley. London and I went on a walkabout Friday and I tried to capture some of the natural beauty - especially my child.
--Vicki

London's Big Achievement!

2007-02-17T10:11:00.000-08:00

London went peepee in his big boy potty on Thursday all by himself. He was enjoying some naked time before his bath, and I asked him if he needed to go peepee. He just ran into the bathroom and did it. So we celebrated with a family happy dance. And playing in the bath tub. That's always a favorite.
-Vicki

More of London's words

2007-02-06T23:47:00.001-08:00

AARRRGGGHHH!!!

Sorry I haven't gotten any of the Christmas pictures posted. I am neck deep in the dissertation, and it's not going to get any better for about two months.

Still, I figured I owed you an explanation. And as long as I'm here, London has been saying the coolest stuff lately.

a-nom-us tractor

Mom (my mom) and I took London on a walk one afternoon at Christmas time. London was totally fascinated with Dad's tractor lawnmower. He wanted to go sit on it every afternoon. Mom and I were trying to head him to the road and he kept saying, "Tractor, tractor." I kept saying, "I promise we'll go see the tractor when we get back." Eventually he came with us, but he kept saying, "A-nom-us tractor. A-nom-us tractor." It took us a while, but we figured out that "a-nom-us tractor" was his best shot at "I promise tractor".

Gamma yock

On the same walk. "Gamma yock" is "Grandma rock". It means, roughly, "I found this rock for you, Grandma. Please take it."

Pace-farter

This one started up over Christmas and it's still going strong. "Pace-farter" is London's best attempt at "pacifier".

I yike. Froot.

Two things about London's speech. He speaks most naturally in two syllable chunks. So longer speeches have distinct pauses, which I'm translating here as full stops. Also, he has trouble with Ls and Rs. Hence e-yock-et (rocket), yock (rock), and yike (like). And of course Yundin (London).

Yook! Car cominin'!

"Yook!" We hear that a lot. London tends to double the -ing at the end of words. "Car cominin'." "I payinin'."

Daddy! Pay tains!

Daddy! Play trains! In London's defense, he mostly says this when I'm not playing trains. Although sometimes I am on the floor, at the train track, with a train in my hand, and he thinks I'm just not playing hard enough. What a taskmaster!

I. Farrr-ted.

Don't know who taught him this one. Possibly his cousins. All we know is that one day he started saying, "I. Farrr-ted." Or, "Daddy. Farrr-ted." Or even (don't tell her I said this), "Momma. Farrr-ted."

Bye-bye. Moon.

We go for walks every day. Either a short walk around the block when he gets home from daycare, or a walk to the park on the weekends. Whenever we walk away from anything, London says bye-bye. Doesn't matter if it's a person, an animal, a tree, or what. He's mad for airplanes, and when they get far enough across the sky that they're about to go out of sight, he says, "Bye-bye. Airpane." The best thing is when the moon is out in the day. London will point and shout, "Moon!" We'll look at the moon for a minute. Then he'll say, "Bye-bye. Moon," and we'll keep walking. I guess he expects the moon to go away, like everything else does when you walk away from it. But then half a block later..."Moon!"

No. Dadda. Yundin.

The other night we were driving to the grocery store and London kept saying, "No. Dadda. Yundin." Which struck us as odd, because he's quite the daddy's boy and he has always called me "Daddy", not "Dadda" (when he first started it was Dad-Deeee!!). The next day we got the full story. One of the girls at his daycare had been playing house and kept calling London "Dadda". London didn't like it, and eventually he told her firmly, "No. Dadda. Yundin!"

Strawbabies

The other night Vicki cut up some strawbabies for desert. This is just about the cutest thing ever.

Back-belly

What London calls his back.

Milk juice

Anything that you drink out of a sippy cup is come kind of juice. Currently, there are three kinds: milk juice, water juice, and juice juice. "Juice" was his first word, back in the day.

I yuv you. No much.

"I love you so much." Hard to hear without getting tears in your eyes.

To the Desert and Back: Thoughts on Time, Space, and Life

2007-01-12T18:05:00.000-08:00

I had the good fortune to spend the first week and a half of the year looking for fossils in Big Bend. Here's a little bit about what it's like to live in the desert.

First, we walk. From flat desert - sandy, gravelly soil, sparsely populated with mesquite, creosote, prickly pear, laria (like yucca on stilts), and angular cobbles of basalt - into the Late Cretaceous clays, banded gray and red. These are hell to walk on. When wet, they have the consistency of peanut butter, and you are soon dragging five pounds on each boot. With moisture, the clay expands like some radioactive horror in a 1950's sci-fi movie. Chunks of it in streambeds blossom cancerously like mutant cauliflower. Entire hillsides bubble up into an unholy confection we call popcorn.

When wet, the popcorn is slicker than snot on a glass door handle, and impossible to climb. As the moisture evaporates, the popcorn attains its eponymous texture, like a giant stale cake. With each step, your feet punch through a dry crust and sink into the soft labyrinth underneath, maybe only an inch or two, maybe twice that. Over the yards and miles, it takes its toll. Especially when you're climbing, which you often are. From the desert floor the popcorn hills at the rim of the basin look tame enough, lined up in neat receding rows like ships in a marina. Up close you find yourself lost in a fractal landscape of endless meandering gullies and washes. You don't have to go in very far before slogging up over the ridge into the next wash is more appealing than walking out of one wash and back up another. Also, if there is any breeze it will be blowing only on the ridges, not in the washes.

In January, with the last sips of last week's rain still cooking out of the ground, the air is not as fantastically dry as it is in Utah or Nevada in July, but it is still plenty dry. Lips crack and noses bleed. The sunlight doesn't help. I know, intellectually, that this is the same yellow main sequence star that shines on Oklahoma and California, but out here it seems like a different beast: closer, hotter, more penetrating, more indifferent to comfort or the continuance of life.

But - there are dinosaurs. Where the popcorn hills hit the desert floor they sit on broad fans of flat white sediment. Most of these fans are freckled with pebbles. Depending on location, these may be chunks of basalt, little blobs of sandstone--or fossils.

If you wanted sheer volume, you could sit down and fill a pail with chunks of bone in no time. You would be limited only by the speed with which you could pick it up. But you wouldn't learn much from your bucket of bones. These shattered chunks could be pieces of turtles or crocs or dinosaurs of every shape and size. We have no way of knowing which, so we pass them over without further thought, except perhaps to wonder at the apparent lunacy of ignoring or discarding actual fossils.

The bone shards so serve one important purpose, and that is to help us identify productive hills. Any place that has bone shards will also have real treasures, i.e., things we can identify: teeth, scales, scutes, armor, claws, horn cores, and even pieces of eggshell, from fish, amphibians, turtles, lizards, crocs, mammals, and dinosaurs. In general, this Cretaceous bric-a-brac is too small to be spotted or identified from more than one or two feet away. So we crawl across the clay pans on hands and knees, and sometimes on our stomachs, picking up a thousand pieces of rock and bone and saving from that perhaps fifty identifiable fossils. The good bits go in vials or ziplocs or little wads of toilet paper, and we keep crawling.

After a few days of sore knees and elbows, cracked fingers, painfully dry nostrils, slightly sunburned retinas and broiled skin, with a bag full of a billion or so turtle frags and perhaps only half a billion croc chunks, you may begin to doubt your sanity both locally - Am I crazy to be out here? - and globally - Am I going crazy, period?

Then you find something good. Real good. Amazing. A real live dinosaur tooth, so shiny and perfect it could have fallen out yesterday. Basking in the sure cool knowledge that you - you - are the first person to lay eyes on this gem after its tremendous voyage through time and rock, that this discovery for science and mankind, be it ever so petite, is yours and yours alone, you turn giddy. Suddenly all the privations of desert life seem like a small, or at least a reasonable, price to pay. For a while afterward, everything carries a little leftover charge and even the turtle frags seem exciting.

We also found a few big bones, and by we I mean they because that day I was off helping Bill and Mary Clark collect desert ants. But I was back the next day to help jacket and haul the big bones. The hardships and rewards of big bone paleontology are different from those of micropaleo but equal in magnitude (to me at least): sore arms from hours of hammer and chisel work, lots of sitting and laying in awkward positions in cramped holes on uncomfortable surfaces, hands, arms, and clothes crusted with moisture-leaching plaster, all set against the methodical, satisfying transformation of a real live dinosaur bone from a lump in the ground to a plaster-encased bullet of pure science, forged from thought, effort, and time.

Usually we had the last hour of each day off to go explore. Richard Peltier, a lanky young geologist from Sacramento, was my partner on these little expeditions. Officially we were looking for more fossil localities, and we did look, and we found a couple.

Privately, I just wanted to see some desert. I have always been drawn to open spaces, silence, human companionship measured out by the shot glass rather than the swimming pool, and to seeing what lies over the next hill. For me the desert is the perfect marriage of desire and object, and landscape that is clearly (often painfully) indifferent to my presence and well-being but that nevertheless seems to fit me, body and soul. I do not excel in speed, strength, or coordination. My eyesight is so-so even with glasses and my hearing is not great. About the only physical activity I excel at is not quitting. Fortunately the only thing the desert really demands is perseverance. I can do that.

So Richard and I would usually choose the tallest thing nearby that was attainable given our time constraints, trudge to the top, and spend a little while taking pictures, having a snack, and drinking in the vista. The march back was more leisurely, with plenty of diversions to interesting rocks or plants or whatever. The desert is only desolate in the broad view. Up close it is just about jam-packed with marvels to delight the eye, hand, and mind:

bleached remains of land snails and millipedes...

hills capped with slowly shattering sandstone...

animal tracks...

burrows...

fossil oysters...

petrified wood...

weird rocks...

coal-dark layers of lignified clay...

mysterious scat...

bizarre plants...

exotic critters...

odd landforms...

Hanging over it all is a silence so vast and absolute that it would seem like an abomination to break it, were it not so swiftly mended.

I am sitting on top of a mountain--well, a foothill, really, though it felt like a mountain to my legs. My butt is perched on a block of basalt, remnant of an ancient lava flow that covered this whole area from horizon to horizon. My feet are in sandstone, layed down by a river near an ocean that swarmed with reptiles the size of SUVs. At the limit of my vision are a few miniscule figures on the distant popcorn, remote from me in distance, elevation, personal and geologic time, and inclination: the other members of the team, who have chosen to spend their free hour on the flats. All save Richard, who has the gift of speaking concisely and engagingly and also of knowing when not to. United by our mutual reliance and the shared experience of the climb, separated by twenty feet and an unenforced but mutually agreeable silence, we are together but alone with our thoughts.

I love this place. I love the space and light and distance. I love the daytime heat and nighttime cold (29 degrees when I crawled out of my iced over tent this morning), the dryness and difficult terrain and hostile vegetation, both for their own sakes and because they keep away most everyone else. Big Bend is far from anywhere, tucked into a corner of the nation, distant from any major airport or interstate highway. There are no drive-thru tourists here. The handful of people we have encountered in the park's 800,000 acres were also drawn here not because it is easy but because it is hard.

One under-appreciated side effect of technological advance is that it gives us new metaphors to crystallize previously elusive thoughts. The gleam in NASA's eye is the orbital skyhook or space elevator, a cable of industrial diamond and buckytubes that would stretch from ground to orbit and allow us to haul stuff up to space like a fisherman reeling in a bass.

I love the desert, but this voyage in time and space has carried me far away from Vicki and London. The knowledge that they are so far away drags at me, not like an anchor, but like a skyhook. Not down, but up. My hearts strains against the sinews that hold it in my chest, struggling to burst into the air and hurl me across the long hours and miles to my family, to the people to whom I belong. I ache for the emptiness around me, so recently attained and so soon to be lost, and for the emptiness in my arms at breakfast and bedtime, which has now lasted for half of forever and will not end, it seems, until the other half has run out.

Time flows on at its same old pace. With no options and nothing better to do, I savor this two-edged ache. It ties me to the earth, to the passage of time, to the continuity of the human race, in which I am now embedded, having both ancestors and offspring.

To want a child and not be able to have one is a terrible sentence. Vicki and I languished in that prison for a long time. Then, when hope had almost run out, we found out that we were pregnant at last, and after all.

A few years ago a friend got married and did not want to fly on her honeymoon. I asked her why not. She said that after a long string of misfortunes and years of struggle on slight resources and slighter hope, everything had turned around: a good job, a clean safe solid house, child off to college on an unexpected scholarship, and finally, a good man, intense but unhurried courtship, a ring, and a wedding--after all that, after such an unimaginable run of good fortune, she was afraid that God was about to drop the other shoe.

That's how you feel the morning you find out that you are finally going to have a baby. All debts squared, all prayers answered, you have nothing more to ask and just want to get away clean. But you can't. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, now you lay awake worrying about miscarriage, birth defects, extra chromosomes, missing pieces...once more you are deep in the red at the Cosmic Bank of Karma and Heavenly Blessings. Then the baby comes out okay and you worry about SIDS, drops, falls, stairs, chairs, cars, etc., etc., each threat in its season, and it never ends. Through it all you do the only things you can: watch and pray and hope.

And then one day, shockingly, you realize that this is how your parents felt, and feel, about you. This is the beginning of wisdom.

I am 31. Half of you are wondering how a 31-year-old can have anything interesting to say yet, and the other half are marveling that I can still string words together in such an advanced state of decrepitude. Hold on, though, I'm getting to that. Up to the age of 29, I felt like I was 18, or perhaps 22. My outer circumstances changed somewhat during my 20s, but basically by their end I felt like the same 20-year-old I'd always been (hadn't I?), just a little older. I was outside the flow of time. No really, of course. Better to say that I was not cognizant of the flow of time. Time passed, stuff happened, but the time and the stuff slid over my mind like cold water over a smooth rock.

Now, though, my clock is ticking. No more coasting, no more loafing. I can't help but be aware of it, this little clock, object and focus of my life, with his smiles and rolling over and crawling and walking and even, just this week, saying "I yuv you" (--ouch, it hurts even to write, this cocktail of pride and pain). I am embedded in the flow of time, in the chain of life. He is my anchor to the earth and my skyhook to the heavens, my sundial and time machine and crystal ball, my student and my teacher, my playmate, my temple, my homeland, my home.

I hope that as the years carry us together and apart and together again that I will have the wisdom and the strength to walk before him when needs me, beside him when he'll let me, and above all to let him run ahead as often as I can--to find the golden mean between holding him close and letting him go.

Being a parent is a long exercise in being pulled apart, in carrying your heart outside your body, in knowing that things are going to hurt and doing them anyway. It is the most courageous, demanding, terrifying, fulfilling, necessary, and noble thing in life. It is life. And I am thankful for it--for him--every day.

------

Photos with Rich or Vanessa in the filename were taken by Richard Peltier and Vanessa Meredith. Thanks, guys. Loads of Christmas pictures coming soon.

Little things

2006-12-10T14:13:00.000-08:00

I've got plenty to say, but this is finals week and I haven't found the time to say it right.

So in the meantime, just enjoy these pictures of Tiny Tiger.

Impossible

2006-12-02T00:09:00.000-08:00

More of London's words

2006-12-01T23:43:00.000-08:00

doot - dude

He chops off the second 'd' so short that it comes out like a 't'. He loves saying it, too.

minga - pudding

No clear explanation for this one. It just is what it is.

zahnya - lasagna

A lot of words get their first syllable chopped off, or they get an article added even if they don't need one. So often 'car' is 'a-gar' and 'sky' is 'a-guy'.

Incidentally, we can get London to eat all kinds of stuff if we just lie about what it is. Anything with tomato sauce is presented as "lasagna". Thin-sliced sausage and pepperoni are "bacon". Black beans are "raisins". So far, it's working.

GAAAANG!! - dang

A couple of weeks ago I was watching American's Funniest Videos and something ridiculous happened and I said, "Dang!" London immediately yelled, "GAAAAANG!" So I've been saying "dang" once in a while just to hear him say "GAAAAANG!"

hoot tain - fruit train

The Thomas the Tank Engine playset that London got for his birthday has a flatbed railroad car with a box of fruit that stays attached with a magnet. London always says 'fruit' as 'hoot' and 'train' as 'tain', but it's more than doubly funny when he combines them. He also has a tendency to misplace the hoot tain and then walk around the house saying, "Hoot tain? Hoot tain?"

boose - caboose

He also lost the caboose the other day. It was gone for about 24 hours before we found it behind some furniture in the living room. He had been seriously worried. "Boose? Boooose??"

We start a lot of mornings having cereal together. It's pretty great. Cereal comes out "ceweal", which is so cute it almost gives me a heart attack.

But now it's late and it's time for me to put my little man to bed. See you all in the future!

London's lashes

2006-11-25T16:00:00.000-08:00

So far, all of the parents I've talked to share a common sentiment. We all think that our baby is the world's most beautiful, and we feel sorry for other parents and their obviously inferior babies. We are all relieved to know that the other parents think their babies are beautiful--the little beggars shouldn't get shorted on parental love just because they're weird-lookin' puffy-faced bug-eyed monsters--but we're all sure that all the other parents are wrong. Of course they think their babies are beautiful. Their addled-parent hormones won't let them think anything else--and it's a good thing, too. But they're wrong. Each of us secretly knows: my baby is the most beautiful baby ever ever ever!

Of course, in our case all of the other parents really are wrong. Sorry, guys, we love ya and yer babies, but it's time for total truth here: London is, by any objective standard, the most beautiful little boy in the entire history of the world (girl babies, you still have a crown to fight for). Case in point: in addition to a full head of golden locks and great big eyes that are outer-space-nebula blue, he has incredibly long lashes. He comes by them honestly--the next time you see Vicki, check out her lashes. They're astounding. Me, I didn't even have lashes for the first three months of my life, which caused Mom some consternation until they grew in. In fact, London seems to have cherry-picked the best features from the Wedel and Cooper phenotypes and combined them into some kind of baby Adonis.

We can live with that.

Don't fence me in -

2006-11-14T15:51:00.000-08:00

As apartment dwellers in a big city, we often go to local parks in search of sunshine and wide open space. London loves to run and he lights up like a lightbulb when we talk him on a walk. Most of the times we put his shoes on him, to go to church or daycare or the grocery store, his first question is "Walk?" The next three pictures are some of my favorites from a recent picnic at Cesar Chavez Park and Totland.

Matt and I have been making up songs since London was born. I thought I'd share some of our musical talents with you now. Sing the following lyrics to the tune of "Oh when the saints go marching in." It is the tune we sing sometimes when London doesn't want to cooperate and we decide to celebrate his independent spirit.

Don't fence me in
Don't fence me in
Don't fence me in
Don't fence me in
Don't make me eat
When I'm not hungry
Don't fence me in
Don't tell me what to do

vs. 2
Don't make me sleep
When I'm not tired

vs. 3
Don't make me sit down
When I want to run wild

- V.

London's last trip to Oklahoma -

2006-11-14T15:31:00.000-08:00

In September, London and I took a trip to Oklahoma while Matt was on a research trip to New York. We were spoiled rotten by grandparents, aunts and uncles, and family friends. While we were in Okc, London got to take a nap on Papa's lap and make bead jewelry with Mimi. He also learned a new game, "uggie, uggie," on his Papa's lap. The rules of the game dictate that the adult should give London jiggly hugs while he sings "uggie, uggie" until he is tired or bored. It's fun to watch him share hugs and kisses.

London got to play with his cousins Abby, age 6, and Caty, age 4. Abby and Caty are true Cooper girls - they bossed London around! When he tried to take too many crayons at one time or tried to leave the coloring table to go color elsewhere, they reigned him in.

John and Norma, aka Grandpa and Grandma, live out in the country and London got to go "outside" several times a day. He got to ride on a tractor, play in the dirt, and get chased by his uncles. John and Norma escorted us to the airport. Here's our goodbye picture. -V

London is 2

2006-11-13T23:55:00.000-08:00

Today was London's second birthday.

Unfortunately, between now and Thanksgiving I have exams to grade, termpapers to grade, a little man to watch while Vicki is gone to a conference later this week, and, if at all possible, a dissertation chapter to finish. Oh, and I'm sick. So the whole story will have to wait. Sorry to be a whiner. Here are some pictures to tide you over.

London puts on one of Vicki's sun-blocking hat thingies (the word escapes me) upside down and calls it his "gasses".

The full saga of London and Thomas the Tank Engine will probably require a couple of posts to get through. Suffice it to say, London loves "Tah-muss".

Not the most inclusive picture from London's party on Saturday, but the most inclusive picture that actually included London. Full details to come. Stay tuned.

P.S. Sun-blocking hat thingies: visors. Duh!

London's first trick-or-treat

2006-10-31T21:27:00.000-08:00

London was going to be a dinosaur. His Gamma got him an awesome dino costume, but it kinda freaked him out. He's always had a hard time with people that don't look like people. C-3PO makes him run screaming. So the dino costume didn't last. We'll give it another go next year.

For a backup costume, we put one of our pirate blouses on him and turned him into a ghost (albeit one with a blue hood). He loved it. Vicki used safety pins to fix the length and the sleeves and he was off and running. It didn't take him long to figure out that he needed to pick up his hem when was going up stairs or crossing uneven ground, and he didn't fall down once.

Vicki went as a geisha...

...and I was a knight.

At the first couple of houses, Tiny wasn't sure what he was supposed to do. But he got pretty good about taking one piece of candy and putting it in his basket. We took turns going to the door with him. I went with him to the first house, which was a good thing. Vicki was crying because I punched her in the neck.

NO! She was crying because London is getting so big. It is hard to believe that your little tiny baby, the one you used to cradle in the crook of one arm, is still a baby when he's hitching up his ghost costume to go get some candy.

The Triceratops basket also came from Gamma. It was supposed to be for hunting Easter eggs, but it worked just fine as a trick-or-treat basket.

London made us both laugh a lot. He looked like he stepped out of the Charlie Brown Halloween special. And for some reason on the way home he hopped out of his little car and started running. Except for holding our hands or being carried at crosswalks, he ran for four blocks straight. If you've never seen it, a little tiny man running full tilt down the sidewalk dressed as a ghost is pretty darn funny. Then he cried when we carried him inside.

But he cheered up pretty fast once we got inside and he got to eat some nem-a-nems.

We've been home for all of three hours and I'm already looking forward to doing it again.

London's words; a trip to the garden; passages

2006-10-25T22:33:00.000-07:00

One thing I want to get down right now, before time moves on and I lose it, is the way London pronounces certain words. I am getting as many of these on video as I can, because simply transcribing them is impossible. He uses vowels and consonants that are not part of English as she is spoke. I first noticed this when London starting saying 'cookie'. The word he says is a recognizeable stand-in for 'cookie' and it means the same thing, but it's devilishly hard to pronounce. The best way I can try to convey it is 'tdookdtee'. It's not t, d, and k sounds one after each other. It's all three of them at once. Same thing with 'Ernie', from Seseame Street. He can't make a great 'r' sound yet, so it come out like... Well. First start with an 'oo' sound as in 'book'. Then use that sound to begin a word that you might write out as 'oowrnee'. That's the best I can do. See what I mean about this being hard? But it is so cute. We never talk baby talk to him and we never encourage him to pronounce words any other way than the right way. Still, I will be sad on the day when he says 'cookie' with no extra sounds.

Here's a short list of my current favorites:

abber-gobber (helicopter)

die-doe-door or die-do-sore (dinosaur)

a-wess'sew-wess (Allosaurus)

neeemel (nipple)

show-werr (shoulder)

ee-ock'eet (rocket)

Tah-buss (Thomas [the Tank Engine])

London knows Allosaurus from his garishly illustrated Alphabet of Dinosaurs. I decided to start telling him some of the real names of the dinosaurs, just to see if he'd pick any of them up. As you've probably figured out, his Alphabet of Dinosaurs starts with Allosaurus (I would have gone with the larger, meaner, cooler, native-to-Oklahoma Acrocanthosaurus, but it wasn't up to me). He's a real trooper. If he can't say the whole word, he'll say what he can. For two weeks, Allosaurus was 'at-wess'. But when I came home from the paleontology meeting he was saying 'a-wess'sew-wess'. Right now all dinosaurs are divided four tribes:

The original 'a-wess'sew-wess';

sauropods, which to him are 'ong-necks';

horned dinosaurs, which are 'seh-wa-tops';

and everything else, which are now 'die-doe-doors'. He's pretty much given up on 'guh'. Fortunately I have some 'guhs' caught on video, so although the guhs are linguistically extinct we have some nice museum specimens.

Vicki taught him nipple (neeemel) while I was away, because he had discovered his nipples and clearly wanted to know what they were. Incidentally, my brother Ryan didn't know that those things on guys were nipples until he was three or four. We were sitting outside shirtless in the summertime and somehow I happened to refer to nipples as nipples. Ryan lectured me as if I was slightly stupid, "Matt, only girls have nipples." I told him no, guys had nipples, too, and if he didn't believe me he could go ask Mom. He went into the house, and a couple of minutes later he came out, shaking his head in adorable disbelief.

True story.

-----------------------------

We're having a real Indian summer here in Berkeley, with temperatures getting up into the low 80s during the day and staying in shirtsleeve numbers pretty much around the clock. We've been taking advantage of this by getting London out for a walk every evening after he gets home from daycare. It's something that we've been doing almost every day since we moved in, but I suppose we will have to cut back soon when the rainy season kicks in for real. There is a school garden a couple of blocks from the house that is open to the public after school hours, and London LOVES to go there; that's 'loves' as in 'literally cries and throws a fit when it's time to leave, no matter how dark it's gotten'.

London also loves the Cookie Monster backpack that Gammah and Gammah got him. Those would be my parents; Vicki's parents are Mimi and Papa. And no, I didn't misspell them, I wrote them the way he says them. He usually wears Cookie Monster from right after supper until bathtime and bedtime. Thanks, Gammah and Gammah.

One of London's favorite activites is finding rocks and bringing them to me to hold. The ones he hands to me are later released back into their natural environment after he loses interest, but sometimes he carries a rock or two all the way home. We have a small collection outside the door of our apartment.

London is very self-possessed. He will glady follow directions from Vicki or me while we are on our way to the garden or the park, but once he is loose there he wants to go on his own and have us follow. And when we get home, he will let us know whether he wants juice or milk, and then he will flop on whatever patch of floor he wants and rehydrate. In the evenings, he spends part of his time playing with us or bringing us books to read, but he also usually spends at least an hour playing by himself.

We have some new nighttime rituals. His Cookie Monster backpack, Elmo doll, and Cookie Monster hand puppet all get put to bed (night-night) on one throw pillow, and sometimes his two biggest die-doe-doors get put down on another and covered up with a towel or blanket. He started doing this spontaneously when I was out of town.

And then he crawls up on the couch and puts himself to sleep. If he runs out of milk or juice along the way, he lets me know that he needs more, and then he just...drifts off. As soon as he's out for good, I carry him to his crib. Often Vicki and I sneak into his room later to watch him sleep. If you're a parent, you know what that's about. If not, I hope you get to find out.

------------------------------

The last photo (below) just may be my favorite picture of London of all time. It was not planned at all; it is one of those things that just happened. We were all in the garden, standing under a lattice that supports some kiwis. (Thanks to some confusion a few weeks ago about just what I was pointing to, he still thinks that the kiwis are called 'the sun'.) London suddenly got bored and took off, as toddlers are wont to do. As he walked through the arch of vines I snapped the picture; like Rosenthal on Iwo Jima I just happened to hit the button at the right time.

The picture encapsulates a lot of what is going on in our lives right now. London is developing so fast. We've been saying for months that there's not much baby left, and every day it is a little bit truer. But we are growing with him. Every day we see the world fresh, for the first time, through the eyes of a toddler. I find that I am more aware of everything that goes on around me, because of him. When we go to the park, I am aware of every kite, every boat, every airplane that passes overhead, every bird, every tree, every rock, and every stick. He sees commonalities that would never occur to me, expresses interests that have been dormant in me since I was a child, and shares his findings, his toys, and his love with an openness that strikes me to my core. I love him beyond the capacity for thoughts to encompass or words to express.

Time is pulling him away from me, slowly but inevitably, like drifting continents. And that, as they say (but rarely mean), is Life.

A young man is like a falcon. When you remove the hood and untie the jesses, he leaps from your arm and launches himself into the sky. You look at him dwindling, so proud and so free, and you wonder if he'll ever return to you.

-- Michael Swanwick, "A Changeling Returns"

Missing person

2006-09-30T17:40:00.000-07:00

I would love to be able to say that I don't take London for granted. But I do. When you have the luxury of seeing someone you love every day, it is too easy to forget that it is a luxury and start treating it as business as usual. I don't know if it's inevitable, but it's at least hard to avoid.

I am not taking him for granted right now. Right now I am on the train from New Haven to New York. The trip has been a smashing success. I have measured, sketched, and photographed literally hundreds of specimens. I have made new friends and seen some of the world's great sights. And I am very fortunate to get to be a paleontologist.

The best thing about paleontology, though, is that it is sufficiently diverting that while I am doing it I am able to forget for a while that I am away from London. Now the work is all done. I got through everything on my list and many, many other things besides. In my laptop and my notebook I have a pirates' hoard of shiny golden data, enough to keep me busy for a very long time. And I still have a day and a half before I get to see my little man.

I ache for him. When I think about him, which is about every five minutes, it feels like somebody punched me right in the chest. It hurts to breathe. Last night I met London and Vicki at the airport, and I picked him up and he gave me a kiss and then rested his head on my shoulder. It felt like.... Well, it didn't feel like anything else. That's my entire point. There's no simile or metaphor that can tell you what it's like to hold your child again after you've been away. There is literally nothing like it in the world. Everything else might as well be made out of cardboard.

Unfortunately, it was also a dream. I woke up alone in my hotel room in New Haven, and now as I sit here on the train writing this, I am tapping my feet and drumming my fingers and running laps around my head, anything to burn the time and kill the pain and bring London back into my arms, and me into his.

(And then I remember that Mom and Dad have been surviving this for 31 years, for up to six months at a time, and I have the same thing to look forward to. Whoever first said, "Life is too short," must have been a parent.)

So in lieu of holding my boy, I'm posting a boatload of pictures, many from our San Jose trip. Enjoy.

London is obsessed with brushing his teeth. He's crazy about hygiene!

Right after we checked into our hotel in San Jose, London disappeared. The door was locked, so I knew he couldn't have gotten far. I found him hiding between the bed and the wall, using a crayon to color on whatever that thing is.

It was much less cute when we found that he colored on the wall, the mirror, and toilet lid. But that was later, and you never know that something is wrong until you've tried it, do you?

London loves showing his belly. At least three times when we've been in restaurants, he's gone up to little girls that he liked and showed them his belly. It is even cuter than it sounds.

Gotta make sure it's there now and then.

Now that he goes to sleep on his own, I don't get to do this very much. I miss it.

I like this picture because you can see what tired him out: fire trucks, rockets, and books. And yeah, you can wear yourself out reading if you're a toddler, or if you're reading to a toddler.

We finally got some fish for the aquarium. London is mesmerized.

London at Happy Hollow

2006-09-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we took London to Happy Hollow Zoo and Park in San Jose. He got to pet a miniature horse, a cow, a donkey, and goats. There were lemurs and cockroaches, and a huge snake. But London was most concerned with the putt putt cars. He drove a firetruck to the Beach Boys and LOVED it. Alison and Gwyn from Santa Cruz were there for the fun.

Hope all is well with you and yours-
Vicki

Sundown and sunup

2006-09-09T00:15:00.000-07:00

London's playdate

2006-09-08T23:36:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago Alan stopped by with his little girl, Gemma. Alan and Sophie have been friends of ours for years. They were trying to get pregnant at the same time we were, and had similar difficulties. We went off to London and came back with a souvenir, and a few months later Alan and Sophie went to Africa and their luck turned around, too. Then Jarrod and Lynn went to Texas and got pregnant. We concluded that if you're having trouble getting knocked up, you gotta get outta town.

Anyway, there's nothing London likes better than playing with other kids. It was great to watch Gemma and London having fun together and sharing toys. It was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed cute overload.

Tiny talks

2006-08-24T19:15:00.000-07:00

A little bit on London's words.

"Doggy" started out as "guggy" and has moved to "goggy".

He's not good at making 's' and 'th' noises, and some terminal consonants disappear. "Mouth" is just "mou", and "boat" is "bo". "Sky" is not "sky" but "a-ky". "Truck" is "guck".

He says "night-night" and "bye-bye" perfectly. If you ask him if he made the stink, he sometimes says "poo!" If you offer him a "piece of cheese" he says "pee-a-chee". "Banana", not surprisingly, is "nana". "Flower" is "ow-a".

"Elephant" is still "elepoe" and "dinosaur" is still "Guh!"

If you ask him a direct question, he usually says "no". "No", of course, means "yes" and "maybe" but never actually "no"--at least not yet.

"Eh-mo" and "jooosssss!!" are still his favorite and most used words. Sometimes he will play a game with us. He'll point at something that is not juice and say "Jooosss!" We'll say, "Not juice." "Jooosss!" "Not juice!" and so on until both sides are laughing.

If he sees a picture of a baby, or if he sees himself in the mirror, he says, "baby". That's my favorite.

Rockets for Dad--and one for London, too

2006-08-23T00:36:00.000-07:00

This post is for my dad. When I was a kid, I was in 4-H. I learned all kinds of stuff in 4-H. Some of those things, like public speaking and basic photography, are central to the stuff I do now. Others, like horticulture and raising chickens, are on hold until we get to someplace with a yard (and tolerant neighbors). But those are all things I did through 4-H. They're not the reason I was in 4-H.

I was in 4-H for rockets.

I got my first rocket, an Estes Harpoon, when I was nine, the same year I got my first pocket knife. At the time Dad was running Wedel Oil Company in Hillsdale, Oklahoma, and the Wedel boys spent many an enjoyable afternoon listening to the old-timers who would come into the filling station to loaf. Dad had a couch and a couple of chairs out, and these old guys would sit around and tell stories forever. Some of them had been in World War II. One guy talked about being in Borneo and how he killed cobras by picking them up by the tail and cracking them like a whip to break their necks. I have always been grateful for those times. I feel like I got in on a little slice of American history that is all but gone, and by that I mean both the guys themselves, and the fact that they would come down to the station just to loaf. The next time you're in a small town and you see a bunch of old farts sitting around talking, grab a table nearby and just listen. Trust me.

But I digress. The actual gas station building had been built around the same time that man discovered fire. Dad has a compulsive need to improve buildings, and he took one quarter of the station and built walls and shelves and turned it into a multipurpose room. It had a door that I can't ever remember seeing closed, and a big open window onto the rest of the station, so you weren't really isolated in there. But it was our space, not customer space, and it was nice to have someplace to keep our stuff. Over the years that room served as an office, a playroom, and--crucially--a rocket factory.

The model rockets I knew as a kid had cardboard body tubes, balsa fins, and plastic nose cones, and they went together with care, patience, and generous helpings of Elmer's glue. When I started making them I was pretty short on the first two ingredients, and Dad helped. Heck, he probably did most of the work, but however we divvied up the labor, it felt pretty equitable to a 9-year-old. Harpoon had missile stylings and decals and would fly to about 500 feet. Dad built a launch system out of wire, alligator clips, and a doorbell buzzer. We would drive the pickup just a few hundred feet from the house to a grassy patch of unused land, hook up the launcher to the pickup battery, and launch rockets. It was the best thing ever.

Other rockets followed. My second was an Estes Magician, which flew to over 1000 feet on a D motor. Dad and I launched it in a pasture on a calm day. It may have been calm on the ground, but there was some serious wind blowing at 1000 feet, and after the rocket popped its parachute we chased it for more than a quarter mile. I did a science fair project on model rockets, comparing the performance of rockets with square, unsanded fins to those with fins that had been sanded into an airfoil shape and sealed with wood sealant. The sanded-and-sealed rockets flew twice as high as the rough ones. I tracked them with a homemade alititude tracker made from a protractor.

In 4-H, the rockets not only had to fly, they had to look spiffy, too. They were to be entered in the county fair and judged on appearance. So we spent a lot of time building them and putting on paint and decals. My cousin Michael introduced me to another school of rocketry, in which you built the thing in the morning, launched it in the afternoon whether the glue was dry or not, and painted it when and if it came back. I don't know that we ever permanently lost a rocket. Michael's Scout disappeared on us, but Michael found it floating in Uncle Robert's farm pond a while later. The next summer we taped up its ejection port, launched it at night, and watched it explode. It was awesome.

Hands down, our favorite rocket was the Estes Geo Sat LV. It was a scale model of a satellite launcher, loosely based on the Titan family, with a clear plastic payload section that contained a little satellite. It looked rad, and when it took off.... The Geo Sat was more than two feet tall, which was not enormous but still much bigger than any other rocket in Wedel experience. We were used to the Harpoon and Magician and Wizard, which just sorta vanished off the launch pad when you pressed the ignition button. Geo Sat lifted off slowly and majestically, with lots of fire and smoke and noise. It felt like launching a real rocket.

Incidentally, all of these rockets are still in existence, propped against an usused wall in the upstairs bedroom that was mine and then my brother Todd's. I imagine that the rubber band shock cords and plastic parachutes could stand to be replaced after 15-20 years of inactivity, but the rockets are flyable. In fact, maybe we'll dust them off this Christmas and let them go.

All of this came back to me about a month ago, when another grad student in my department sent out an announcement about a rocket launch at the park. I had blown my Christmas money on a few kits but I hadn't built any of them, so I dug them out of the closet and got to work on my first rockets in about 15 years. I was guided by the engineering spirit of Dad, who would help me get fins and decals on straight so the rockets would look great and fly straight, and that of Michael, who just wanted to put something in the air as fast as possible. So I built rockets derived from both philosophies.

For Dad: the Thunderhawk, a space fighter of my own design, painstaking thought out, constructed, painted, and detailed over the course of a month. The body tubes and nose cone came from Estes kits, but almost everything else I whipped up from scratch. She flies loud, low, and slow on D motors. No quarter-mile hikes with this one! She came down within a few yards of the pad every time.

For Michael: the Turd Burd, another MJW original, constructed in two days out of paper towel and toilet paper tubes, cardboard from a cereal box, duct tape, glue, with a plastic pod from a drugstore toy machine serving as a nose cone. Also slow and fairly low on C motors, with a straight boost and an easy recovery every time. She comes down on two crepe paper streamers. I figured if that wasn't enough to keep her from getting damaged, who cares? But she's as rugged as she looks.

I also had a couple of paper rockets and a flying saucer made from Hefty Serve 'N Store plastic plates, the kind that snap together at the edges. I had to put in a picture of the thing on the launch pad so you'd believe me. There was an aerospace engineer at the launch and she was equally flabbergasted by my willingness to fly such an unlikely thing and by its exceptionally straight and stable boosts. All of my rockets flew straight, especially the ugly ones, and they all came back in one piece (except for the Turd Burd, which was designed to come back in two pieces). More importantly, they made me happy.

Dad, you'd love 'em all. The Thunderhawk and the Turd Burd both fly like the Geo Sat used to, slow and noisy with lots of smoke. But for the slowest, noisiest, smokiest liftoffs ever, the flying saucer has to be seen to be believed. Witness:

London came along and had a great time, thanks to the diligent baby-chasing of our friends Alan and Sophie, Joel, and Jann and Gene. My head was literally in the clouds and I only got one good photo of the little man, but as baby/rocket photos go, it's a doozy.

Being plagued with some unfathomable excess of kindness, Jann volunteered to give London his lunch. Meanwhile, Joel was prepping the Turd Burd for its second flight, Gene was doing his time in the recovery team, chasing rockets that drifted into the bushes on their way down, and I was running around taking pictures. After Joel launched the Turd Burd, Gene picked it up and was running it back to the launch area when he passed right behind Jann and London. I yelled for him to stop running and hold up the rocket, and there you go.

Gene and I made out pretty well that day. There were two awards given, for highest or longest flight and for best design. Gene's Bandit had flown to the limit of vision on an A or B motor. He launched it on a C (twice the power of a B, four times that of an A) and we never saw it again. Those with sharper eyes than mine swear that it flew into a cloud. He was not visibly put out by the loss, and why not? Sending a little thing that you built yourself into a cloud is pretty cool. And that flight netted him the prize for highest or longest flight, since for all any of us knew, his rocket was still up there somewhere. (I'm not just being flowery here--at those alititudes a rocket could drift for hours on its parachute. Remember the Magician!). I got the prize for best design, not for any one rocket but for the whole fleet. Gene's prize was an insulating water bottle jacket in the shape of a rocket, and mine was a little soft-sided cooler, also rocket-shaped.

It is an especially useful prize. For one thing, we have a little cooler like this already that we use to carry London's bottles of milk and juice, but it's ugly. Also, London likes to play with anything that has a zipper he can work, especially soft-sided bottle coolers. Finally, I'd been wondering about some kind of rocket toy for London, but hadn't come up with anything. So I got a prize, the family got a useful device, and London got a toy.

If you're curious, the rest of the photos from the launch are available here.

Dad, thanks for all the help with rockets over the years. The next time you're out here, I'm going to start repaying my debt. We're going to launch some rockets.

Another day at the park

2006-08-11T23:31:00.000-07:00

We are living in park central. Live Oak Park is about three blocks east of the house, MLK Park is two blocks over and two blocks down, Ohlone Park is about six blocks away in the other direction, and Cesar Chavez Park is a short drive away. We started taking London to Cesar Chavez just about every day while Ryan was here, and we're still going about every other day.

Witness the natural splendor of the Port-a-Potties!

Go, er, north, young men.

Usually when London does this, he's trying to get his pacifier into your mouth. I clam up until he gets bored and goes on to something else, but Vicki lets him do it. This is one of the few realms in which she has a higher gross-out tolerance level than I do.

For the most part, London wanders around on his own mysterious errands. We always make sure to chase him around every few minutes, just in case he wants more attention, but he usually doesn't. I suppose after being stuck in a small apartment with boring people who only occasionally roll around on the floor or give him access to mess-making substances like pudding, an hour of personal freedom on an essentially infinite field of grass is very soothing.

This is one of my favorite pictures of London with another person, because you can see that both London and Ryan are laughing. Ryan's visit was filled with moments like this.

A day at the park

2006-08-11T23:20:00.000-07:00

There is a vast park out by the Berkeley Marina, called Cesar Chavez Park. It's a good place to fly kites, and a great place to run the energy out of a toddler.

When Vicki and I first visited the Bay Area in the late 90s, one of our souvenirs was an airfoil-type nylon kite that folds up and goes in a little bag. I dusted it off and, with Ryan's help, sent it up a few hundred feet. London thought it was pretty cool.

I had to tell you about the kite first, because if I just showed this picture you'd think I was some kind of a pervert lurking in the trees. I got tired of flying the kite so I tied it off on this pine tree.

London and Mommy. The gizmo laying on the grass in front of them is a Sky Blaster. It is a plastic rocket with foam fins and a foam nose, a built-in whistle, and a built-in slingshot band. It flies to well over 100 feet on a good pull, and it costs 5 bucks. Mine is several months old, has been chewed on by a dog, and has had the band broken and retied, and it still works fine.

Of course, the most fun you can have at the park is being chased by your uncle, who scoops you up for some tickles when he catches you.

Just out of the frame of this picture Vicki and I are doing a happy dance because our little man had a great time, got plenty of exercise, and is now blissfully asleep.

Oakland Air Museum, Part 3

2006-08-08T03:23:00.000-07:00

It took us a couple of hours to see the indoor exhibits and tour the flying boat. That left about a dozen planes to see outside, including this MiG 15. Planes of this make flew against American jets in Korea and Vietnam.

Here I am looking dashing as I prepare to zoom off into the wild blue yonder. Behind me is a Navy A-3 Skywarrior.

And here is a much smaller attack aircraft, an A-4 Skyhawk. The Navy used these planes extensively in Vietnam. Today their place has been taken by F/A-18 Hornets.

Here's an AIM-7 Sparrow radar-guided missile. This missile was originally developed in the 1950s, and it was the sharp point of the sword for American warplanes until the AIM-20 AMRAAM came into service in 1991. Between the ages of 12 and 16 I built a zillion model airplanes, and I painted a lot of Sparrows, so it was cool to see one in the flesh.

While Ryan and I were running around taking pictures, London and Vicki were taking it easy in some old airliner seats. Somehow we missed getting any photos of the F-14 (if you're not a plane buff, that's the good guys' plane from Top Gun).

And here's one for the road. Grandparents, we didn't intentionally keep you away from the air museum. I only remembered that there was a air museum in Oakland on Friday. We'll take you the next time you're out. You'll love it.

Oakland Air Museum, Part 2

2006-08-08T03:03:00.000-07:00

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones takes a flying boat across the Pacific (the image above is a still from the movie). That plane is a Short Solent Mark III flying boat, one of three left in the world, and it lives at the Western Aerospace Museum in Oakland. You can see more photos, plans, and news clips of the plane here. On Sundays, the folks at the museum give guided tours of the plane. So we went.

Here's Ryan standing in front of the plane. In normal operation, the plane takes off and lands on the water, and it has no landing gear. Wheels can be bolted on when the plane needs to be moved on land for service or storage.

The Solent flying boat was built by the British in the 1930s. It was used to move VIPs and gold between England and South Africa, by way of the Mediterranean, the Blue Nile, and the White Nile. During WWII, most were converted into sub-hunters, with machine guns in the nose and tail and bomb racks under the wings. After the war, several were once more used for passenger service, but they were rapidly edged out by jetliners.

This plane has no more secrets from us. We went everywhere inside that a person could fit, and into a few areas where no sane person would probably go.

The seats are all original. They are roomier than most seats on modern jetliners. Vicki is in the last row on the upper deck. Behind her is the bulkhead that separates the passenger compartment from the tail of the plane. On the other side of the bulkhead is the secret compartment used for carrying gold. Behind that are a couple of tubes for dropping flares. When the crew spotted a German or Japanese submarine, they would drop flares to mark the target for warplanes.

London found the appointments to his liking. You can see a couple of metal bumps on the wall between the windows. Those are air conditioning vents, genuine 1930s vintage. The plane also has a full galley, a bar, a powder room for the ladies, and a small library. It is also surprisingly spacious. I'd take it over a 737 any day.

Oakland Air Museum, Part 1

2006-08-08T02:42:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, we went to the Western Aerospace Museum out by the Oakland airport. They have all kinds of cool stuff, including excellent displays on aviation pioneers in Oakland and the rest of the Bay Area, naval aviation, and women aviators. The folks at the museum are very friendly and laid back. They have some tables under an awning outside, and they let us bring in our cooler to have sandwiches and sodas for lunch. Not many museums are so visitor-friendly.

Mainly, the museum has loads and loads of planes, from a 1911 Wright biplane through personal and passenger planes from the first half of the 20th century to kit planes and naval fighters from recent decades. London's favorite was this Bede kitplane. The engine is behind the cockpit and drives a pusher propeller at the back of the plane. If the lines seem familiar, it may be because the Bud Light Jet, billed as the 'world's smallest jet', is the same airframe with a tiny jet engine instead of a prop. James Bond used the same plane as a getaway vehicle in the movie Octopussy.

London and Uncle Ryan

2006-08-06T21:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, first a bit about London, since you got nothing in the previous post. He is talking a lot. He really took off about a week ago. "Juice", "Mama", "Dada", "Elmo", and "uh-oh" are his mainstays, but he'll try anything. "Elephant" is "ele-poe". Dinosaur is still "Guh!"

My youngest brother, Ryan, is out for a visit. He and London are having a great time together. Ryan's gotten in on some real baby care already--changing diapers, feeding the little man, bathtime, reading books. It's like having a live-in babysitter. And, as you can see, I've got no complaints.

The no frills London update

2006-08-06T21:29:00.000-07:00

More of London being cute. He had his first watermelon the other day. It was a big hit. Beyond that, the pictures speak for themselves. More to come very soon.

London vs. dinosaurs

2006-07-23T15:18:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I'll be accused of brainwashing if I tell you that London loves dinosaurs. But ask yourself this: what kid doesn't love dinosaurs? Every kid goes through a dinosaur phase. Some phases last longer than others. Mine happens to be in its 29th year, but my point stands. This is perfectly normal (for him, and for me).

Aaaaanyway, it all started when I put up the tyrannosaur bust that Vicki got me for Christmas. Well, she didn't really mean to get it for me for Christmas. She ordered something smaller and much less imposing, but the company send this instead. I'm not complaining.

I wanted to put it up in the entryway, so the first thing you would see on entering Casa Wedel was a tyrannosaur about to bite your face off. But Vicki said no. The only place she would let me put it up was over the aquarium. I put it up one day a couple of weeks ago while London was in daycare.

When he came home, he noticed immediately. I mean, it ain't hard, the thing is pretty awesome. London ran over, stood underneath it, pointed up, and said "Guh! Guuuuh!"

The second thing he did was run to his toybox and pull out the little plush T-rex I picked up for him at the Field Museum (on the right in the next picture down). One smart cookie, my little 20-month-old is.

So then I realized that London needed a big plastic dinosaur. Heck, every kid does. So I started canvassing the local toy stores, looking for your basic five dollar plastic tyrannosaur. We've all seen about a zillion of them. They're always on the bottom shelf, near the rubber snakes and the jars of bubbles and the travel games.

I couldn't find one anywhere. Finally I went to this toystore right down the street from the house and struck gold: a foot-tall scaly green red-eyed prehistoric monster, for $7.95.

Of course London immediately understood that this dinosaur was the same sort of thing as the big one that hangs on the wall. At first, he was a little leery of it. He'd sneak out and touch it with one finger, as if it might bite him. But I showed him that he could knock it down with a swipe of his hand, and pretty soon he was wrestling it into submission. Now if he's playing and I say "Bad dinosaur!" he'll give it a slap and knock it over and laugh and laugh.

Finally, no post is complete without a shot of London crashed out at the end of the day.