Leaves

The other day Max and I were walking Kodiak and we got to talking about how much fun it was to jump into big piles of leaves, lamenting the fact that we did not have our big tree any more. Passing under a shedding maple tree, inspiration apparently struck as Max suddenly cried, “Stuff your pockets!” and I felt little kid fingers tickling my butt as he jammed leaves into my back pocket. He came back to the house with his arms full of leaves and twigs and dumped them onto our front yard. I took out the rakes and we scrounged more leaves from our neighbor’s yard to get some more material for our project. It wasn’t exactly like the old days, but it was better than nothing. So of course it rained overnight and now I have a sodden pile of leaves that don’t even belong to me.

When I was a kid, we had a big back yard, nearly an acre, big enough for a pint size baseball or football field, so that's what we used it for. My friends and I dug a big hole at the very back of the yard for a fort and laid plywood over it for a roof. We furnished it with leaves, of course. Nice dry crunchy comfy leaves. Until the weather changed and the monsoons struck. Then it turned into a smushy slimy mess.

Is there a life lesson here? Perhaps it is simply that some good ideas work great until it rains and the crunch goes right out of them.

Happy Sweetest Day!

Happy Sweetest Day to all you benighted folks on the east coast who don’t celebrate this particular artificially created marketing holiday. Supposedly, back in the 20’s, candy companies got together and declared the third Saturday in October to be Sweetest Day. Fortunately, the card companies also benefit. It’s a big deal around the southern Great Lakes region. I had never heard of it until I came out to Ohio in 1968.

We finally staged our “Exciting Careers in the 21st Century” event on Friday and Saturday this week. Friday was a smashing success with probably 500 to 600 high school students and their teachers attending. We had 61 exhibitors who came to talk about careers in technology: employers, non-profits and CSU faculty members came out to talk about their fields. We had door prizes for the kids all during the day, eventually awarding 14 iPods to some lucky students.

One of the most popular spots was our Wii bowling competition. We set up three of the virtual reality game boxes and ran a tournament. The prizes were some cheesy trophies, but the kids didn’t care—they were still excited to win.

We were very pleased, since we had never held this sort of event before and weren’t sure what to expect. All the kids were polite, respectful and asked good questions of our exhibitors. The grownups were extremely impressed and I’m sure heartened by what they saw in our future tech careerists.

Saturday was pretty dead, though. We know not to try it again on a weekend. In theory, motivated parents were supposed to bring their equally motivated children down for the day. There were several hundred students on campus for an admissions Visit Day, but after admissions was done with them, they were too tired to return to our extravangza.

This week Max and I went for a walk with Kodiak for a few blocks after work. Max insisted on holding the leash all by himself and he does very well. He remarked that if Kodiak were a younger dog, he would be pulling him around. As it is, Kodiak is pretty sedate. Max stuffed a plastic bag in his pocket because he knows I have one in mine to clean up after the dog. He wound up filling his with pine cones instead. We played a trick on Nana, telling her it was a present from Kodiak. We visited for a while with some people down the street who have an elaborate Halloween display in front of their house. The owner turned on one of the displays that has hands moving as if out of the ground. Max watched it intently for a minute and declared, “There are robotic pumps in there that make the hands move.” He wasn’t particularly creeped out by the moving hands, just curious about how they worked.

It might sound like a cliché, but my heart is never so light as when I am outside alone with Max, with no one to tell us what we can and can’t do. Sure I watch out to keep him safe, but he’s a good boy and listens when you tell him where he can and cannot go. We can laugh and roll around in the grass and look for shapes in the clouds. At least for now. Later things will change, but for now, we’re perfectly content.

My Summer Reading List

Due to popular demand (well, OK. One person did inquire) I am publishing my Summer 2007 reading list. I only managed 25 this year, largely due to the demands on my time. That darn New Yorker is relentless. It comes every week, whether you’re ready or not. I must be ten issues behind. Between that and PC World and Discover magazine, it’s a wonder I got any real books read at all. So here you go:

1.The Time Traveler’s Wife by Alice Neffennegger. Absolutely wonderful.
2. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. I’ve never quite forgiven his slam against Cleveland in another book.
3. The Promised Land by Robert B. Parker
4. Gone by Jonathan Kellerman
5. Panic by Jeff Abbott
6. Terrorist by John Updike. My favorite author, though he is fading lately. Still a good story.
7. Blue Screen by Robert B. Parker
8. Next by Michael Crichton
9. The Cheaters Guide to Baseball by Derek Zumsteg. How to steal signs, fix the basepaths, throw a spitball and much more. Just in time for the World Serious.
10. Blowback by Brad Thor.
11. How Doctors Think by Jerome Groupman. Wouldn’t you know it? Another New Yorker writer. Still, it’s a great book to read before you see your doctor again.
12. The Headmaster’s Wife by Jake Haddam
13. Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett. I had to see what it was all about. Now I don’t remember.
14. Mary Mary by James Patterson. OK if you like Patterson
15. Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins. I still like Robbins’ stories. Very funny.
16. When the World was Young by Tony Romano
17. Dropping the Ball by Dave Winfield. Good ideas about how Major League Baseball should be run.
18. The Big Girls by Susanna Moore. Prison psychiatry.
19. Digging to America by Anne Tyler. Couldn’t help it—had to read another Anne Tyler.
20. The 10th Circle by Jodi Piccoult. Odd book with graphic novel pages in each chapter. Drawings were too dark and confusing to see any detail, though.
21. Nature Girl by Carl Hiassen. Gotta love Hiassen.
22. Do’s and Don’ts Around the World by Gladson Nwanna. Nifty things you never knew.
23. Mater by Rita Mae Brown. Great story, and no talking animals.
24. One Mississippi by Mark Childress. Very good story about a family from Indiana growing up in in that benighted state.
25. Freakonomics by Stephen Leavitt. How economic incentives really work. How Row v. Wade lowered crime twenty years later. All kinds of stuff like that.

Baseball been bery bery good to me

It has been so warm here these past few days—in the high 80’s—very unlike October. We have been running the air conditioning since Thursday. No wonder those bugs showed up at the ball field. If you listened to the New York stations, it looked like the bugs only landed on Yankees and not Indians. Our hitters and pitchers and fielders all had to deal with the same thing. If you read the New York Times, of course it's all Yankees. You had to go to the Taipei Times to get a sympathetic story.



My son in Georgia and I “watched” the game “together” for a while on the phone. He had a six second delay because of DirecTV, so when something would happen I would react and then six seconds later, he would react. Then I realized I could bet him on the next pitch and see it before he did. He didn’t fall for it, though. Ann and I used to watch the Indians and White Sox games “together” too, when she lived in Chicago.

Today is Family Fun Day up at church. Kathy and I are going up for all the action. Last year we had Max with us and he thoroughly enjoyed himself, even winning a raffle prize. We used to have a big parish picnic in July, but attendance fell off over the years and squabbling between different parish groups finally killed it. Now we have Family Fun Day.

When I was growing up, we had four and five priests at our parish and one of the associates always did the homily, but if you saw the pastor get up to speak, you knew he was going to talk about money. This was the weekend for the financial report for our parish. Since our pastor is still in the hospital, we heard different members of the Parish Council deliver the bad news. It seems we run six thousand dollars in the red every week. They have been covering the shortfall by dipping into savings and using investment income. We owe the diocese over $600,000 in “assessments” that must be paid over the next year. (The diocese takes 13% of the collections as assessments for their own expenses.) Years ago, our pastor at the time somehow managed to get the bishop to forgive a similar amount, but those days are long gone. There are ways to generate more income, so they are encouraging everyone to help out.


Remember “Calvinball”—the game that Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes” created, where he changes the rules to suit himself? Max has a version himself that he was playing in the driveway here this week. It involved a soccer ball, a soft football and sidewalk chalk markings that only he understood. Needless to say, Shane and I “lost” and Max “won” every time.

Work is getting busier and busier. Kathy says I spend too much time helping other people with their work so I wind up not finishing mine. She may be right, (but don’t tell her that). Friday was the last day for the guy who has been taking care of our web site, so now it falls to me to do it. I’m really pleased, though, because it’s something I always wanted to do anyway. He also handled all the emails coming to the office address, so I’ll be doing that too. He was a good guy who was always willing to do whatever you needed done and he didn’t give you a lot of grief about it either, so I’ll miss him.