Life Lessons

Here is my son, on his 9th birthday, putting on his Oakland Raiders Darren McFadden jersey.  He loves that jersey with all of his heart. 
Some may think it's silly to allow a child to invest that much time and energy into an NFL team (or any professional sports team for that matter) with their bad attitudes, insane salaries and giant egos, but the way I see it, you are only little once.  And I kind of think that a life without passion gets pretty boring.  I'll take the sports obsession over girls any day. 
Fast forward to tonight.  He'll be turning 12 this week.  I think that this jersey has easily been worn over 100 times in the last three years.  McFadden is the leading rusher in the NFL as of this week.  The Raiders are competitive this year.  KJ is so proud to wear it.
We had a softball game and he was playing football with his buddies while his dad and I played.  He took the jersey off because he didn't want it to get dirty.  He folded it up and put it in the dugout.  When it was time to go home, the jersey had disappeared.  Yes, out of our own dugout.  He is crushed.
My gut reaction was the be really upset with KJ for not taking better care of his stuff.  He had been waving it over his head and celebrating/bragging about McFadden's rushing yards.  I am a HUGE believer in personal responsibility, and all of this could have easily been avoided if he had just kept the stupid jersey on.  Or put it in the car.  He could have prevented this from happening.
But then I started thinking that I am placing all of the blame in him, the victim.  Sure, he could have kept the jersey on and he'd still have it.  But how sad is it that he couldn't trust that the darn thing wouldn't have disappeared right out of our dugout?
I hope hope hope that there was some misunderstanding and that it's going to show up in someone's bag.  But if it doesn't, you had better believe that he'll never be so naive and trusting again.
And that kind of breaks my heart.

Ten Lessons Learned on Vacation

The top 10 lessons learned on our recent family trip to Chicago, told in my long-winded, rambling style.
1. Sometimes it is worth it to just suck it up and buy the family membership. These times include when it is cold, rainy and the line to get into Shedd Aquarium is so long that the volunteers have to continuously re-route it to keep it off of The Field Museum’s walkways, because it would seem that there’s no love lost between those two establishments. Yes, pay the extra $35 (it’s tax-deductible after all) and wait for 45 minutes in the rain rather than 2 hours.

2. The time for teaching your kid a life-lesson is not on an insanely windy April day when you’ll be sitting in the top row at Wrigley Field, in the shade. That, “Fine, don’t wear your sweatshirt if you think you know best,” will end up costing you $49 for a Cubs blanket because you don’t want your kid to die of hypothermia. It might even cost you $132 for two new sweatshirts if you aren’t careful.

3. A bottle of Visine and a toothbrush will cost you $10 at the corner 7-Eleven. This is closely related to “don’t forget the goggles because hotel pool water is brutal on the eyes.”
4. An empty bar and grille presents the perfect opportunity for teaching your kids proper billiards etiquette.

5. Yes, in fact, they can get more people on that elevator. Just when you think it’s full, they’ll ask you to place backpacks and purses on the floor between your feet and step back. And, no, Mr. Claustrophobic Tourist, the next elevator to the top of the Willis Tower isn’t going to be any less crowded. At least you are only packed in like sardines for just over a minute as you fly to the top of the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.

6. Never, ever underestimate the gall of 20-somethings under the influence. Really, I enjoyed watching you and your girlfriend stand there and soulfully grope each other for 10 minutes (even when you couldn’t quite focus on one-another’s eyes.) But I would have rather watched the game. So, when J asked you to sit down and you got all huffy about it, I wasn’t amused. Nor was I amused when you and your buddies started smoking pot. But hey, you were super-cool.
7. Easter Sunday is a great day for visiting the Field Museum. No lines. Good Friday is not such a good time for visiting Shedd Aquarium. See lesson #1.
8. It never hurts to triple check games times. As of Thursday night, it was a 1:05 game. Double-checked Saturday morning at 11:15: Oh, now game time is 12:05? Holy crap! Good thing the subway was just a couple of blocks away.
9. It’s everyone’s birthday at the Rainforest Café! We were there for an hour, and I would guess that there were at least 8 “birthdays” during that time, when the servers came out with the fiery volcano cake (which is not free, by the way.)

10. Remember what appeals to your kids if you are going to drag them all over the place: Man-eating lions? YES! Ancient American civilizations and the fossil record, not so much.

The Definition of Excitement at My House

One day last week, we came home to find that one of JJ's computers had crashed. It was dead. It just made a fun clicking noise when we tried to turn it on. Now, for most families this would be a serious issue, but I am married to King of the Nerds. (He knows I call him that. He was the Scholastic Bowl Team Captain in High School. His degree is in computer science. He embraces his nerdom, as do I.)
After JJ took the computer apart, and discovered that it was completely dead, not "mostly dead," he kind of got excited. He hopped online and ordered a new hard drive and some external storage. Woot! This is serious fun for us (read: him.) He was a little sad when it was supposed to take a whole week to get here. But, it got here sooner than that and totally made his day.
Here it is, in all its glory. This is the external storage unit that will save all of my pictures and music library if (and when) my laptop goes down.


Kind of anti-clamatic, huh? I was expecting something massive, with lots of blinking lights and whirring and whooshing sounds. We affectionately refer to it as "The Toaster." JJ says things like, "The toaster is up and running" or "The toaster is working hard." I smile and nod. I understand getting all excited about things that no one else really cares about (like pens.)
As one last-ditch effort to save some data off of the old hard drive, JJ tried freezing it. Have you ever had a hard drive in your freezer? I hadn't either until this weekend. He did warn me that it was there so I wasn't too confused when I opened the freezer door. Sadly, the effort didn't work, and we lost about a month's worth of data. Lesson learned: Back up more often. And it never hurts to have a "toaster."

Now I get it

You know that whole "rule" about removing batteries from devices that you don't plan to use for a long time?
Yeah. I get it now.
My sister and nephew were coming for a visit. I needed to clean up the guest/storage/oh-crap-there's-someone-coming-over-and-I-need-to-hide-my-mess room.
I picked up our trusty old radio, the one that's covered in drywall dust and has seen us through many a home-improvement project. The one that's so old, it doesn't have an ipod dock. And I found all kinds of white powdery crystal-ish stuff all over the hardwood floor.

Yep. It was battery acid. Not one, not two, but three of the batteries (that have been in there since the dawn of time) leaked.




















This one was so bad that is was misshapen and felt noticeably lighter. (On a side note, the science teacher in me wants to say, "Had noticeably less mass, but I decided that would be way to nerdy and weird. )










Mild fascination aside, I was pleased that the only damage to the hard wood floor was this small, dark spot. It will never be noticed amid the green and purple scuff marks from when this was my son's room and Buzz Lightyear had many an adventure.
And please, don't let this happen to you. Don't put batteries in a radio for a tailgate party and then forget about them for, ummm, let's say, three years.