Mo brought home this cool piece of modern art from school. The artist formerly known as Frau Lobster laid claim to it. I'm in touch with a professional art thief seeing if I can't arrange a heist.
It was too windy to fly rockets this evening, so I got out the kites. Well, one of them: I seem to have lost the cross-rod to my seven footer.
Anyway, I got the airfoil out to the end of its line, about 200 feet I think. And got to thinking of the other spool I have, with another 200 feet or so. There was plenty of wind to hold up the weight of a plastic spool, so I hooked the eye of the second spool onto the frame of the first spool and let her spin out.
Four hundred feet away, I can hardly see my kite. And I realize, there's just something wrong with me: I can't enjoy the kite at the end of its line, I have to double up, even when that makes the kite less impressive to see. And if I'd had a third spool...
Meanwhile, when Mo wasn't defacing the parking lot, she was getting serious altitude on the swings. Over my head altitude. And I had to wonder, where does she get this craving for altitude?
Anyway, getting back to whatever is the matter with me: I don't really have the attention span for kites. Rockets fit my temperament much better that way. I say this because I don't really know how this happened.
I lost my grip on the spool. Not like the wind pried it out of my claws, more like I just dropped it. And it took off.
It caught on the fence almost long enough to get me to think I'd catch up to it.
Then it was off across the clover.
So it was my turn to clear the fence and move west, fast. No way I can run fifteen miles an hour, which was about the average wind speed this evening. But the spindle kept hanging up on bunches of clover, and after a chase of only a hundred yards or so (by which point I was dying), I managed to retrieve the line.
And yeah, my heel spur is thanking me for it. I'm going to ice it down as soon as I'm done ranting here.
Oh, and whatever is wrong with me, at least I'm not the kind of idiot who puts graffiti like this one the kid's play equipment at the park.
First order of business was to secure some sidewalk chalk. A bucket of the stuff.
Stuff-Mart, turns out, is stocking Crayola buckets for three-something. Deal, game on.
Em had begged off of this expedition on the basis that it was the American Idol finale. I almost forced her to come anyway, because it's stupid to sit in front of a TV on an evening this nice when you haven't been together as a family in a week. But then I recalled how my Dad's overreaching efforts to control my media consumption had driven that consumption.
As in, Balance Time. A lot of the things you fight with your parents about growing up, you eventually realize they were right. But Balance Time was just stupid. The theory was that KISS and AC/DC were corrupting my morals and addling my brain. To counteract the poison, for every hour I listened to music of my choosing, I was required to listen to an hour of KUDL, an easy listening station even my Dad, if he was honest, would have had to admit was both dull and annoying.
If I wasn't going to kiss Ozzy's ring before, Balance Time cinched it.
As terrible as American Idol is, I can't afford to have Em worship it out of sheer contrariness.
For the record, my problem with American Idol is they have these people doing covers, and not even covers of their own choosing. A legit act would have its own material. The contest would be open (as the music industry actually is) to different combinations of instruments, different sorts of singers, and the band that has chemistry. Ozzy's first two solo albums are not great because he's a versatile lounge-type singer. They're great because in Randy Rhodes, he stumbled on maybe the best guitarist for that genre ever. Or, to take a different example, where would the Pogues fit in the American Idol scheme of things? Mighty Mighty Bosstones? Dicky might make the out-takes audition show.
Sorry, Idol fans, but I liked the show better when it was called The Gong Show. We'll be right back with more STUFF!
Digression. I know, it's an illness with me.
Me and Mo got our sidewalk chalk and I asked her what park she wanted to take our weird little act to. Veteran's Park? The park by the Catholic church (I don't know the name of this park)? Go out to the school?
'Purple,' she said. And I knew what she meant. The park by the Catholic church, with it's purple and yellow playground equipment.
I still need to learn the name of that park.
As I was setting up, I heard some kids who live in the duplex nearest this park say, 'The Rocket Guy is here.'
I get a lot more launches in when there are honyocks dying to chase down my recoveries. The down side, a little girl bringing back Tony G. crushed him when she was crawling under a fence by putting her weight on the hand that held him. She didn't know, but that put him into retirement.
And then there's kids wanting to push the button. I'm happy to share up to a point, but the kids seem to outnumber even a theoretical number of launches.
Still, it's cool. And I wonder if I could ever get back to a point where I'd run just for the sheer hell of it. Where it'd take more effort to not run.
Mo had fun, too. Pushed the button once. Spent most of her time trying to deface the entire park with chalk. And some time seeing if she could achieve escape velocity on the swings.
Okay, I have a really choice freelance client that goes way, way back. Its a bi-monthly magazine I've laid out for something like a dozen years now. It's steady, they pay their bills, it promotes something I really love, and I get a great deal of creative freedom.
A great deal. I didn't always have. A couple of editors back, I had one who insisted on certain things being mind-blowingly mundane. He was a great guy, and a joy to work with on many levels, but he could be beyond square when it came to creating visual interest.
And, in all fairness, at 38, I'm young for this magazine's readership, so he was probably right.
The current regime, though, gives me the freest hand I've ever had. And while my lack of talent has held things in check, I think the magazine looks better, on the whole, for it.
Thing is, when I design stuff, the best I can do, normally, is come up with something I'm not totally embarrassed by. Once in a blue moon I actually have an idea I like, but probably less than once a year. Not just this magazine, I'm talking 40-60 hours a week of full time design work.
At any rate, in this latest issue, I had uncharacteristically large amounts of space to play with. And a dearth of good photos. Get a good hi-res photo for a feature article and some space, you can let the photographer do the work. Full page and double-truck photos make great opening spreads.
For this, though, I was stuck. And I've been feeling a tad grungy lately. Artistically, not hygienically.
So I grabbed a bit of stock art and threw it together with a little Old Negro Wisdom and came up with an opening spread I truly loved. It wasn't as colorful as this, the spread was black and white, so I had to grayscale everything. This muted the effect, but I was still, generally, pleased with myself.
Then I get the email from my editor with notes on the proof. These notes generally are txpos that need fixing or other missed details.
"I don't really like the flower theme...Looks 'queerish,' my son said, and that's that."
I'd have hoped the son, who's younger than me, would at least bail me out. I wanted to make a case for my layout, but somehow 'You should have seen it in color, that was really gay' didn't seem to be the way to storm the ramparts.
So I guess I'll save this design for an article about a woman. Because when women are gay, that's just hot, right?
Okay, I was more under the weather than I wanted to admit. Gastrointestinal stuff, you don't want to know the details. Really. When you can't get the toilet lid up before the puke comes, things get ugly. And despite repeated doses of Imodium, I kept asking myself, 'What did I eat that was thin and green?'
More than enough said. Way more, but I'm only doing my duty for the Department of Too Much Information.
Anyway, my freelance weekend was slow coughing up the raw material, and I finally felt almost well, so I took the rockets out for a walk.
Flags lay against their poles. There was so little wind it was stuffy out. Perfect rocket launching weather.
Of course, the weather is smarter than to let me fly like that. So after I'd flown a couple, the wind came up to the point where kite flying was possible.
And I met the kite equivalent of me. Except he doesn't have a couple rockets in his car in case the wind dies out.
For real, this guy had a minivan full of kites. I asked where he buys his kites, because last time I asked that I found my second kite at a buck a foot at a coat outlet. His answer: he makes them.
Anyway, I flew hot. Stubby and Mr. Creosote on E9s. I even had an E30 bought for Floyd I considered flying Mr. Creosote on given the dead wind situation. But the wind situation changed.
The wind died, then picked up, then changed when I launched Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, and I was certain I'd lost out to trees and power lines but she hit the ground and was recovered by two Indian (red dot, I'm pretty sure, not feather) girls who wanted to know 'Can I try it next?'
But before the wind change, I flew Thor's Candycane on a D10 Apogee Medalist motor. This is a rocket that barely throws out the laundry before impact on a C6 black powder motor. And with the 18mm mount, that motor is the max if you stick with black powder. But in composites, there's the D10 and the D21 (I've ordered the latter but not yet flown it) with roughly three times the thrust of a 'C'.
The meadow is huge, but I used the tree line to guide me, and went here I thought Thor's Candycane went down. This is a rocket I built when I was sick of losing rockets. Ridiculously big and heavy.
The grass was tall, but not that tall. The rocket stands over three feet tall. It came down on a 24" parachute, and that at least should be catching some wind. So I look on the other side of the tree line thinking maybe it had drifted further than I thought. There's a Frisbee golf course hole on the other side of the trees, but no Thor's Candycane.
This had to be the World Record for Bermuda Triangulation.
I visited the area three times, spreading out wider each time, but no dice. Even the kite fanatic tried to find my lost rocket, heading right where I thought it landed.
Thor's Candycane has been on a lot of missions, and I had wondered before this flight if I ought to retire him.
He's a fan favorite. With his last-minute deployments, his silly spiral paint job, the smiley face worn into that paint job... How the hell was I supposed to explain to my kids that I lost Thor's Candycane?
I've lost, what, twenty or more rockets, most of them with these stickers begging for their return. With my phone number, email address, the domain of this blog, and often with reward money promised. Me, if I find someone's property, and it's clear that it's return is desired, I'm going to try and get their shit back to them.
It's not like these are iPods or something like that. I seriously doubt the finders of my lost fleet are a bunch of rocket enthusiasts who don't make the call because they just gotta fly that bird themselves. And a lost rocket is not like a used condom, something an owner couldn't possibly want back.
A neighbor returned part of Big Bird when it finally came down from the tree it landed in, but he's a friend and would have probably found me anyway. But not counting that, this is the first time the phone has ever jingled to bring a rocket home.
But to my shock and awe, when I get home and find a message on my answering machine from a dude named Brandon who had found a rocket of mine. When I called back and told him I'd just gotten home from Shawnee Mission Park and that I'd been sick about losing that rocket in particular, he said, 'You were out there today?'
I estimated that I'd launched that model at about 1:00 or 1:30, and the silence on the other end, I think, may have translated to, That's about when I was playing through there... I don't know if he picked it up before my first foray over the hill to recovery it or not. The message on my answering machine was at 3:15, and I'm not sure he didn't call from his cell when he found it. Maybe if I'd listed my cell number on the decal (which I think I'll start doing), I'd have had my happy reunion right there in the meadow.
And in 20/20 hindsight, I can imagine that Thor's Candycane, with battle scars from fifty-ish flights, could have appeared something that had lain at the edge of the tree line for days or weeks instead of minutes.
We met at a gas station near Oak Park Mall and I couldn't remember whether I'd put a reward on the sticker on Thor's Candycane or not (turns out I'd put a $10 reward on it), but I forced a $20 bill on the guy because I was so relieved to get the rocket back.
Part of me feels like I shouldn't be impressed that someone would make that call, but I probably have more sentimental attachment to this one than any of the rest of the fleet. Frisbee golfers, they're good people.
On the flip side of this human kindness, I'd rolled down my windows when I parked to keep the solar gain under control, and I'm pretty sure the Amy Winehouse CD on the front seat I was aiming to return to the library got boosted.
I have my big freelance project still to accomplish this weekend, so I'll pay for this little outing to be sure.
I've decided to quit using Blogger's video upload feature. It's convenient, compared to posting to YouTube and then embedding the YouTube code, but they shrink the picture too far. I can live with 400 pixels wide, that's the width of my text column and consistent with my photos. It's not great for seeing detail: rockets are small and move fast, but as I say, I can live with 400. Vimeo gives you a ton of control over this part, and they'll let you do 500MB a month for free.
I have plenty of hosting myself, I just haven't figured out how to get my movies post-ready as far as being converted to flash files. I'll work on that. Ideally, I'd get it where when you click on the video, it opens in a new window and plays at 960 pixels wide or better. Editing the videos, that seems like a size that's still doable for streaming and gets, obviously a ton more detail conveyed. Actually, you can full-screen the Vimeo stuff, but it lacks resolution...
Since I was too sick to go see Hayseed Dixie last night, I'm using them for soundtrack. Too bad I don't have them performing 'Reunited' by Peaches & Herb. A little out of their milieu, I guess, though it would be about as hilarious as their rendition of the Sex Pistol's 'Holidays in the Sun.' And as jarring as their hillbillification of Spinal Tap's 'Big Bottom.'
I was feeling a bit punked out Wednesday. Nothing to be alarmed about, you know, just a tad off.
Then, Wednesday night, Mo got up at 2:30 in the morning, and I couldn't get her back to sleep. I didn't drug her at 2:30 because I thought I'd gotten her back down. But at 3:30 when I got up again, and saw evidence that she'd been up for most of the past hour, I realized she'd only fooled me long enough to get me to go back to sleep.
At this point, I feared that Benadryl would backfire with her being impossible to wake in time for school Thursday. So I rode the storm out. I'd make her come to my bed hoping a snuggle would make sleep come, and she'd play with the air coming from my CPAP, and pull on my ear lobes and put my hand in her armpit and say 'Tickle,' and then she'd flop around and hop, leave the room.
It was a long night.
So when I was drag-ass on Thursday, I figured it was just fatigue. I was planning to go to Hayseed Dixie at Knuckleheads this evening, so maybe denial was also part of the equation. I can't get sick: one of my favorite acts to catch live is performing on the rare Friday I don't have the girls.
You just haven't partied until you've heard War Pigs played on banjos 'n mandolins 'n such. Not to mention the groupie factor: gotta love them Hayseed Dixie Chicks.
But anyway, Thursday night in bed I wake up with the chills. And needing to find the throne immediately. I turned on the space heater in the bathroom while I took care of the first order of business, then took some aspirin and Imodium and bundled up in a hoodie and sweats, piled on more comforters and went back to bed.
When I woke, I felt better, if not perfect. So I went to work.
And on the drive in, I got the chills again. I'm cranking the car's heater all the way in and shivering. Took some Advil once at work, and tried to hold it together. It's been slow at the office the past couple weeks, and I was pretty well caught up. There's a design project I'd really like to tackle, but it's not time critical and I really wasn't focused enough to attempt anything on that front.
So after two and a half hours, I threw it in. In fifteen months at this job, my first sick day, and not even a full day. If I'd been covered up with work, I'd have toughed it out, I'm sure. I don't have any sense that way. I'm the guy who only missed a week of work for a heart attack. When I wanted to go back to work, the VP of operations was like, 'I'm gonna need to hear from your doctor that this is okay...'
But looking for something to do is bad by itself, and working sick sucks, I couldn't conceive why I'd look for something to do while sick.
Driving home, I was sweating, the Ibuprofen apparently breaking the fever. I felt moderately better, but the thought of going home was oppressive. Laundry that's behind. Dishes that are behind. Vacuuming (and unclogging the vacuum), sweeping and mopping. The yard needs mowed.
I could have come home and sat in front of cable TV, but that seemed even more depressing than the housework, my plantar fasciitis in my left foot was inexplicably throbbing away on top of it all. I was about pain free yesterday, go figure.
So I found an escape: I went to a movie. I don't go often because it's expensive, but it turns out if you show up in the morning on a weekday, the first showing is only $4.50. And the high school dropouts staffing the joint don't mind if you bring in an outside soda.
I saw Iron Man.
I'm not a comic book guy, but I've always felt I ought to be. A lot of my friends are. And I tend to really enjoy movies adapted from comics. The Batman movies have been pretty solid if not excellent. See also Spiderman. Hulk sucked hard, but I saw a preview for an Ed Norton Hulk flick that looks promising while waiting to see Iron Man.
I knew nothing about the comic. Less than the nothing I know of Batman or Spiderman, so I can't attest to the faithfulness of the film to the original. Except that all the comic readers I know keep telling me Iron Man is really faithful to the comic.
I do know I want me one of those suits. And that Jeff Bridges continues to impress me. How The Dude from the Big Lebowsky can be an evil captain of industry...and this is the dude from Fearless!
Plus, Robert Downey Junior has a way better body than I do despite being five years my senior and having forgotten more about substance abuse than I'm likely ever to know. I don't know if he's juicing or what, but I think I'd take human growth hormone shots, with all their risks, if it meant I'd have a better body at 43 than I did at 23.
I also know I'd eat Gwyneth Paltrow's poop. But I guess I knew that back around Shakespeare In Love. And she's only like three years younger than me, so you can't even bust me for the age-inappropriate crush.
It was a fun movie. Not great, but one that was definitely better on the big screen than it could ever be on a TV at home. The theater's aggressive air conditioning helped me with the fever sweat factor. It's a long film, over two hours. As an escape, it was worth four and a half bucks.
Jeff Foxworthy made the comment, upon hearing of Larry The Cable Guy's acquisition of a coyote skin coat (you tied the tails together in lieu of buttons) with the comment that you don't want to give a redneck money.
See also me and a day with nothing I really have to do.
To start, I was a half hour late for church. And I didn't even have two honyocks to get ready. I don't really mean to blame the girls for our chronic tardiness because it's all my fault if you count genetics. Like me, they can both spread donning socks into a twenty minute ritual. Or go back to get something, and return an implausibly long time later without what they went back for.
It was far too windy for rockets, so I contented myself with kites. Saw a couple of people flying dual line kites. The first airfoil I flew, the first kite I really had fun with, was a dual line kite, and I'd attributed it's ease of flight with the extra control of dual lines.
Now I know the magic was the airfoil. These dual line kites crashed like crazy, got knots in their lines, etc. The people were having fun, though, and I asked where you could get such a kite.
Last time I asked this, it was when I learned I could get my gorgeous seven foot crayon kite for a buck-a-foot at Burlington Coat Factory. This time the answer was, 'England.'
The soccer ball the Dad of this family was working should have clued me in that they were not Americans. They were, however, maybe the happiest family I've ever seen, genuinely enjoying the kites and the soccer ball and just being alive and together on a hillside in a park.
Anyway, as I'm flying my kites (and rapidly getting bored because while I enjoy a kite, it's not like flying rockets), I notice some mayhem down the hill.
From a distance I could make out that it was SCA type period costumes, foam broadswords, and I thought, That's a scene Dave would make.
I shouldn't use that name, though. I remember back in high school, when I was a fixture at his house, he wanted to legally change his name to Coyote. But it wasn't until I saw an article in the Pitch profiling another foam swordsman describing one of his opponents as 'a man who legally changed his name to Coyote' who claimed his 'heath suffered' when he went without sword fighting that I knew he'd done it.
So I wandered down the hill, and while I didn't find Dave, I mean Coyote, I did find someone else who knows him.
Someone else who, like me, has an autistic child. That's how I knew him.
Oh, and on the way down the hill I spotted a nice BT-60 nose cone and the remnants of a parachute hanging from the power lines. It's a nice long one, I think the one Estes uses for Der Red Max.
Also, while I was flying kites, I stumbled on the ruins of an Estes Gnome that had lost its nose cone. No identifying information, and it'd been out int he elements long enough the tail cone and launch lug assembly came off with no effort. I'll use the plastic parts to build something BT-5ish.
He explained that, no, they hadn't recruited much from whatever circuit Coyote is in (he told me but I forget). I asked if this was SCA and he said, no, it was ______ (I forget, again). He explained that it was similar, but more fantasy oriented, i.e. they had just slain a demon.
On a whim I asked about a girlfriend I remember from high school who was into SCA pretty heavily last I heard, but no dice.
On my way back I spotted the power-line ruined remains of a once mighty rocket. I'd love to have gotten just that nose cone down. I'd already found, walking my kites, the remains of an Estes Gnome, the fin can and guide ring of which I'll build into another rocket If, like my lost rockets, it'd had any identifying marks, I'd have returned it to its rightful owner.
Oh, and I'm legal now. I've launched with the club at SMP, but when out on my own, I was utterly lawless. Part of me wanted to rebel, say, 'Why do I need a permit to engage in lawful recreation in a city park?' But part of me knew I was one sweep away from paying a fine for not being up front about my ballistic intentions.
So I got the permit, which turns out to be impossibly simple and easy to get.
Finally, what am I to do with free time but get an oil change in my car? And while I was at it, I picked up a few bottles of club soda.
I drink the Wal-Mart house brand club soda quite a bit. It's like Perrier, bubbly and minerally, but it's only 50¢ a liter. Since I have a hard time making myself drink plain water, it's a good way to stay hydrated. But they won't stock it aggressively enough, so I pester them with special orders. Seven cases this time, which should hold me for a month or two.
Since the custody agreement stipulates that Mother's Day is always Mom's and Father's Day is always mine, we did Mother's Day with my Mom on Saturday. Worked out, too, because my Bro could go on Sunday to his frau's mother.
We did Oklahoma Joe's barbecue. It's been much ballyhooed, and I have to say it's justified ballyhoo.
KC is a barbecue town if it is anything. We have choices on the smoked meat scene like no place else I know. Arthur Bryant, Gates, Zarda, KC Masterpiece, and so on. I used to have a job that sent me to St. Louis every month, and when I searched for barbecue there, the best I could find was a so-called "Memphis' Best" that was, to be kind, mediocre.
I once compared the NYNEX yellow pages with KC's, and came to the conclusion that while New York might boast eight or ten times our population, and an embarrassment of ethnic cuisine from around the glob, if you're after barbecue, you won't heart NY.
I was uncharacteristically in the mood for ribs. Normally, I'm all about burnt ends, though that was not on the menu. Ribs are a lot of work, and I've had the experience, more than once, of ordering a full slab of ribs, the most expensive thing on the menu at most smokehouses, and genuinely still been hungry when I finished.
So I also ordered a pulled pork sandwich.
But these ribs, it's a good thing we shared around the table. They were maybe the meatiest ribs I've ever seen.
And all the meat was thoroughly infused with hardcore smokiness. In a barbecue-centric town, Oklahoma Joe's manages to stand out.
They also have a barbecue store hooked onto the joint, where you can spend well over a thousand bucks on a smoker for your home use. It's brilliant cross-marketing: feed someone world class smoked meat and then dangle the tools of the trade in front of them until spending several hundred dollars seems like the frugal move.
After, we headed to Aunt Jeane's for some stellar gelato.
Oh, and we also tortured my Mom's cat, who used to always flee company, but at sixteen years old, he's decided to stand his ground. Turns out he can still be playful.
When I was in high school, it seemed like my peers all had more disposable income than I had. Come to think of it, they still seem to, twenty years later.
But anyway, when I was a junior in high school, I got my Dad's hand-me-down '74 Impala to drive. It had been my Grandma's car, and when she died, my Mom's car. When she bought a new car somewhere in my junior high years, my Dad bought it off her (they were divorced by this point). Then, when my Dad bought a different jalopy, I got the Impala.
And I got $20 a week from my Mom for gas money. Unlike today, when that would barely fund a trip to the gas station and back, this was actually a pretty liberal gas allowance. At 79¢ a gallon, with me living, technically, in walking distance from school and work, even an old V8 got me way more places than I really needed to go. In fact, I'm pretty sure I eeked some smokes, sodas, movie tickets and cheeseburgers out of this stipend.
And I had a part time job teaching guitar lessons at a music store that paid me $24 an hour. I didn't have a lot of students, but that was insanely better money than the usual sort of high school job pays. Some of that went into savings for college, but really I probably had more money to just blow in on stuff when I was seventeen than I do now. Not to mention more free time, since I earned in one or two short afternoons what some of my friends worked practically full time at Godfather's and Taco Hell to make.
I know, youth is wasted on the young. I'm glad I got my share of it at least.
But I had friends who, when they were going out, could simply hit the cookie jar and grab a ten-spot or even a twenty, no questions asked. I'm certain there were limits placed on the cookie jar, but they were invisible to me since I wasn't there when the limits had been set. It just looked like they had unlimited resources.
Other friends couldn't leave the house without being offered money by their parents. 'I'm going out, Mom,' triggered, 'Do you need any money?' Again, I'm sure there were limits, but at the time, it didn't appear so.
Anyway, the only reason I bring this up, one time I was talking to my Mom, back in these halcyon high school days, and I made a comment that she never just gave me money to spend without any accounting for how it was spent.
'Oh, that hurts,' she said. I was seventeen, which is to say pathologically narcissistic, and really couldn't see how she could be hurt by the fact that I didn't even register the $80 a month I got like clockwork, no questions asked, even though I had an income and could legitimately have been expected to fund the car I didn't technically need out of my own cash flow. A car she paid the insurance premiums on. And the car tags.
Why do I bring up this moment of incomprehensible adolescent ingratitude on the eve of Mother's Day? With Zoo pictures, no less?
Because last night over dinner, Em told me I don't take her anywhere.
I didn't even bring up the recent vacation, the Cosmosphere, the Salt Mine Museum, the Garden of Eden, Grass Roots Folk Art Center, World's Biggest Ball of Twine, because I couldn't get past my shock that all the places I've taken her to on weekend outings could just evaporate from her conscious mind like that.
The Nelson? Kemper Museum? Moon Marble, the Plaza, Santa-Cali-Gon, Johnson County Fair, Maple Leaf Festival, Roots Festival, Kansas Speedway, Liberty Memorial, Kaleidoscope, Wonderscope, Union Station, HMS Beagle, KATY trail, B-Bop, Shawnee Mission Park (for trails, tower-climbing, rocket launches and kite flying), the Zoo...?
I mean, seriously, I have my flaws on the Daddy front. Big ones, some of them, but not taking my kids anywhere isn't one of them.
When the divorce first got underway, I'd become a distant father who honestly didn't know what to do with his kids on a weekend. Days alone with my kids terrified me. If not terrifying to them, they certainly viewed them with a healthy suspicion.
But the worst thing I could do was just sit at home and let the stress mount up. So we went out. Sometimes just mall walking. I started scoping out the free things, like the Nelson and Moon Marble. Then the cheap things. Occasionally, the not so cheap things like the Zoo.
And I found myself having fun, too. To the point where I take my kids to do things not just because it looks fun for them, but because it looks fun for me, too.
But Em, particularly, has gotten to where she likes to resist the efforts. She asks if she can stay home, she attempts a refusal to go in to a place, she gets bitchy and tries to make everyone miserable. And she gets busted for these things. She doesn't have a license to be a brooding teenager yet.
So after a comment like that, that I don't take her anywhere, the chances she's going to succeed in begging off a Zoo excursion are right up there with the chance of Bigfoot and Jimmy Hoffa coming to my house for breakfast.
Both girls pretended not to want to do the Zoo. Last time we'd been was a little over a year ago. Mo had a seizure practically upon entry, so that visit doesn't really count.
But I'd been thinking about the Zoo for weeks. Offered it a couple of times, and met refusal and resistance. I finally decided that, damnit, we're going. The cool weather, I knew from experience, would mean the animals would do more than lay there and silently complain about the heat.
Warthogs walking around instead of laying in the mud. Hippos walking on land instead of hiding in the water. Big cats laying around because they don't need to impress you no matter how nice the weather is.
I've been nursing some plantar fasciitis in my left foot for a few weeks, and the rest, ice, and an expensive pair of running shoes had seemed to get the issue under control. Still a pang here and there, but for the most part, what had been a crippling pain had receded. Instead of it hurting just to sit with the weight of my leg in the shoe, I could walk without discomfort.
But by the time we had finished Africa and were waiting for the tram to take us up the hill, I was feeling it. My foot throbbed, in fact.
Maybe if I can get it healed up for real, the shoes will do their job. If not, I guess I'm in for the custom orthotics. My parents both needed them by the time they were my age, so I guess if it comes to that, I come by it honestly.
Em's initial resistance melted away after just a couple of animals. Before I knew it, she was leading the way, jumping around and imitating animals we'd seen.
I debated at the gate about buying a membership. I can take the girls three times for about the price of the membership. The question was whether we'd really go four or five times. Without the membership to make us go, definitely not. Maybe having the membership to push me into taking them there would be a good idea, but I opted for the single admission.
Another thing: I guess I'd file this as 'close enough for government work.' But check out the sign explaining the cash-only register at the concession stand we ate lunch at. Personally, I'm not certain how anyone could except a credit card if they wanted to...
But next time Em tells me I don't take her anywhere, I'm going to have to tell her that's a big pile of stinking elephant shit.
