Alex would not be described as an outdoorsman. He lands squarely in the home-body category and this includes even staying inside his home. This became a conversation point at a family dinner. We were telling Alex he needed to get out more. Get some exercise. Get some sun. When the sun topic came up, the following exchange took place.
MARTY
You should sit outside everyday for fifteen ...
let me first say that i grew up a steelers fan. let me next say i'm still a steelers fan. let me add that i've never rooted against the steelers or ever doubted their ability to win a game. all that said i think the vastly superior steelers are going to lose the super bowl to the just burgeoning cardinals.
here's the deal.
three years ago the head coach of the steelers announced his retirement. rumored and favored to take the spot was the steelers offensive coordinator, a man named ken whisenhunt. whisenhunt had been with the steelers for five years and was responsible for the offense which had just won them the super bowl the year before. when it came time to name a successor to bill cowher, for reasons never made public, the steelers decided to go with someone other than whisenhunt. whisenhunt immediately quit and went on to become the head coach of the arizona cardinals.
now the cardinals suck. the cardinals have always sucked. and they surely sucked when whisenhunt took over. yet, just four games into the job, his former team, the undefeated steelers strolled into the arizona desert only to get their ass handed to them by a one and two team now managed by their former offensive coordinator.
whisenhunt doesn't like pittsburgh. whisenhunt has something to prove. whisenhunt has a fire in his belly that is burning hotter than anyone else at the table. guys like that don't sleep and people who don't sleep are hard to beat. i wish you luck pittsburgh but i also hope you appropriately watch your ass because someone is seriously out to chew it up and eat it twice.
update: i'm aware this story is being glossed over and whisenhunt is saying he holds no angst towards the pittsburgh organization. i'd buy a dell computer before i'd buy that story.
When I worked at the university, one of their benefits was free tuition for your children. When I left the university in 2016 to start my company (and when Bella was a high school junior), I walked away from a million-dollar tuition benefit. In fact, the benefit was so valuable, there is an employment syndrome there called the golden handcuffs. This happens when someone no longer likes their job b...
One of the first things I do each day is make note of what happened the day before.
Each year, there are always a few stand-out days. This year that day was May 4th, 2021. Here is my daily re-cap from that day.
this was anthony's first day back to school in over a year. he has to go in for end-of-term testing and they won't/can't let kids do that from home. i could tell anthony...
For as long as I can remember, I've been telling Anthony there are two things he should try–debate and wrestling. Debate because he has an unreasonably able mind and wit. Wrestling because when young he spent as much time climbing trees as he did walking the earth. As a result, Anthony sports a collection of striated muscles that would be the envy of even the most committed gym-rat. After every ...
Marty turned 50 last year. Her main gift was passports for the entire family. I know that to your average person, that seems like a pretty lame present, but those who know Marty realize it is spot-on. First, she has been talking about getting passports for the kids (and renewing our own) for many years. Second, this has never happened because of the hassle and the expense.
I was in my home-office talking with Marty when the phone rang. It showed bookpimp's name as the caller. I hit the button to answer it on speaker so he and marty could chat as well.
TROY
Hello Michael Engelbrecht.
BOOKPIMP
Hello Troy DeArmitt.
TROY
Hey, don't say anything incriminating because my girl's here.
Bella didn't want to go to college. Like at all. Instead, she wanted to volunteer at a Nepalese orphanage slash womens' shelter. Do you know how hard it is to convince your child, or anyone, to not give their energy and support to people that desperately need your child's, or anyone's, energy and support? For me, it makes my top twenty list. But I did argue against my child going and helping these...
I had a dream. In it, I was playing hide and seek with a little girl. I have the sense she was a grandchild. She had a frilly dress and thick pigtails both of which flowed behind her when she ran. Her melodic giggle bounced off the walls and brought life to the whole house. I was hiding behind a french door in the nest (where Marty and I sleep). I heard the small voice running from room to room, c...
Do you know what makes a spectacular calamity at 6:45 in the morning? A 96-year-old, 6-gallon wall mounted toilet falling off the wall and pulling the water supply line with it.
After almost a century of handling this home's business, and I mean all of its business as we are a single-bathroom home, it took little more than the steam from the equally ancient shower Aleo had just turned on to have the final bolts let loose of its grip on the subway tile and come crashing atop the seat (which also broke in spectacular fashion).
While we were saddened to lose this storied part of our home, Marty and I are thankful for the opportunity to install our replacement toilet ourselves (with encouragement and help from a co-worker of Marty's--super-Kyle). While we love our new toilet (and that WE installed it), the home's original will be missed, but not forgotten. This remembrance will be assisted by a photo collage hanging over our toilet of Marty, Bella, Alex, and Anthony all using it (not at the same time). This picture-set usually elicits a few questions from guests in our home, which I will take a moment to answer here.
Why do you have pictures of everyone in your family using the toilet?
Because Marty would not let me decoupage our bathroom walls with pictures of bathrooms from around the world, which is something I have thanks to my Everyman Photo Contest. Fact is, once the Everyman took off and I had tens of thousands of photos to choose from, I had a vision of collaging our entire house with pictures of each part of the house. Meaning, our stairwell would be a collage of staircases. Our bedroom would have been a collection of bedrooms. And our bathroom, logically, would have people using the bathroom from all over the world. When Marty blocked that, emphatically so, our compromise was having pictures of the people that use our bathroom, using our bathroom. Though Marty would probably challenge the use of the term "compromise" in this situation.
Why do you even have pictures of your family on the toilet?
Because I take pictures of people doing everything. For Example.
Why isn't there a picture of you, Troy, included?
Because it is only a four-picture frame so mine wouldn't fit ;-) The real answer is there used to be, but the frame fell and was damaged and just never got put back up. But that picture does exist.
Couldn't you have thought of a more subtle and elegant way to honor the toilet? Probably.
Out of nowhere, Bella asked if I would walk a marathon with her. Now this was not an organized event. It was just a leave your house and walk 26 random miles event. Without giving it a whole lot of thought, I said sure. Honestly, a large part of me didn't really expect it to happen so it felt like one of the safer shows of support I had ever given one of my children.
Then a few weeks later Bella started asking if this day might work for our marathon-walk. Oh. Uhh. Yeah. Sure.
Then the day before the day, Bella told me that Anthony (age 13) would be joining us. His participation may have surprised me more than the fact that this walk seemed to be happening.
And when the day came, Bella and Anthony were out of bed and lacing up shoes and Marty was loading up the Camelback. Within the hour we were out the door and logging our first mile.
I originally considered mapping a walk but realized there was little point to that. We just needed to walk. It didn't really matter where we went. We each had a tracker. Bella used her phone. I used my vivofit 2 (wearable pedometer), and I gave anthony my bike computer (which works for walking as well). We are fortunate that we have all sorts of beautiful cityscape and neighborhoods and one of the largest city parks in America surrounding our home so we just sort of wended our way around our community.
I spent the first part of the walk trying to understand Anthony's interest in this. It didn't take me long to find my answer. In my mind I understood that this would be an all-day march. I learned neither Bella or Anthony fully did the math on it. After the first hour, we saw a neat little bench and decided to take a quick break. Then we stumbled upon this adorable public garden and decided to sit in there for a bit and enjoy the view. Then an hour after that, we came upon a park and took another break. When Anthony looked at our distance and saw that two hours' effort bought us five miles, the unasked question was asked--So, just how long is this going to take?
After I broke the news he confessed that he thought we would be done by noon. Feeling sympathetic for this miscalculation I designed a route that would take us by home at the midway point for lunch and bathroom breaks. In addition to being kind to our bladders, I thought this provided Anthony an easy out for the second leg given he misunderstood what he signed up for (though I never told him that is why I took us back home). After we ate and rested for a bit, Bella and I (and Leta) started prepping to head back out and when we met in the foyer, Anthony was there too. I expressed surprise that he was going back out. He said he had come this far, he might as well finish it. Proud, proud, proud.
During the walk, Bella made these phone updates after every mile. I didn't fully understand what was happening with them and I thought it might get annoying. But it proved to be a nice way to tick the miles off and show our progress. When she shared the finished product with me, I thought it was super cool. Anytime I re-watch it, I'm totally transported back to the day and I have all sorts of memories surrounding the short clips. Fun, fun stuff.
This happened in June of 2020. Bella and I have since talked about doing another marathon walk. Anytime the subject has been raised, Anthony has always raised a hand to say that once was enough for him. Though, just a few nights ago at dinner, he might have been heard to say that he would be open to doing a half-marathon. So, perhaps in another six months, he might be good for the full-boat again. And next time, I think we might get Marta to join us.
We have been fostering dogs for a few years now. This was how Bella tricked us into kinda having dogs. But it turned out to be a pretty nice setup. We got the experience of having dogs, we got to help out some dogs in need and be part of them finding permanent homes, and we got breaks from dogs when we needed them. Leta came to us when we were on one of our fostering breaks. The rescue we work with called and asked if we could help them out as the local operations got overrun by a situation that unexpectedly brought in over forty dogs at once. Leta had just had surgery and needed a quiet place to recover. We are this rescue's go-to "quiet" place.
When we first got her, she acted more like a deer than a dog. This was for a couple of reasons. First, she looked a lot like a miniature deer. Second, the situation she came from had some semi-feral qualities so she wasn't accustomed to a proper home situation. This meant when we let her out, she would look for quiet hidden places and essentially bed-down like a young deer. She was super uncertain about people but took to other animals quite well. Whatever her story, she was a unique animal for us (most of ours were puppy-mill recoveries). And her quiet and gentle ways had Bella pretty done for, pretty quickly.
We got her just before the 2019 holidays and adopted her on Bella's 19th birthday (in March). This coincided with the covid spool-up so in that regard it could not have been more perfectly timed. We slowly gained her trust and she is now a comfortable member of the family. The greatest evidence of this is she even likes Marty and more telling is, Marty even likes her.
Before Marty leaves the house she usually stops by to let me know. Lots of times I'm at my desk working (as she will be leaving for work). When I spin in my chair, sometimes she looks like she does in the above picture because she knows I am going to react to what I see.
The above two photos, from a 2018 ski trip, were taken moments apart. And when I say moments, I'm talking like less than a 180 seconds from one to the other. I imagine Anfer and I were laughing from trying to match Baya and Aleo's runway stares.
Question is which side of the table would you rather be sitting on (or looking at)?
...
PART 5 - There's a system for that. (In case you missed part 4, it is here)
Is it possible to get through the holiday season in a calm and sedate manner? This has always been sold as a time to be with family and relaxing by a fire, but for many it is a harried exercise wher...
PART 4 - What to get the person who has everything. (In case you missed part 3, it is here)
We all know someone we might describe in this way. And it happens for a couple of reasons. Sometimes, if there is something they want, they just buy it the moment they want it. Then ...
PART 3 - What makes the perfect gift? (In case you missed part 2, it is here)
The logical continuation of this conversation is how did it come to this? How does something like shopping on the bed come into existence? When I give it a few minutes thought, I can see how this might happen. Fa...
When young, in the weeks before Christmas, after getting home from school, I would walk to the tree and scan the gift-landscape for any new additions. When found, my eyes would zero in on the tag. If it read something other than TROY, I'd give it a scowl and move on. If the festive label had the magic four letters, I'd pull it from the disarray and ha...
The above picture was taken on the first day that all three of our kids were back to school, virtually, of course. Our tradition has been to take individual photos with each child on the first day of a new school y...
It turns out Marty's apprehension about starting a new semester online was wrong—it turned out far worse than she imagined. While many teachers did lots of preparation for day one, everyone knew there would be bumps. Some you could predict. Others you could not. Marty's institution got double-hit by a decision made the previous year before the word co...
When it was decided that the Fall term would be entirely virtual, Marty began her preparation. After a few days of thought, she made a worrisome discovery. Closing out that Spring term was as successful as it was because she knew her students, and they knew her. Given the seven months of in-class time she had with her kids, she knew who could...
Marty was running into lots of setbacks and few solutions in the early going of online teaching. Then she finally caught her first break. Many might predict the person to come to her rescue would be her husband. He has worked in the technology industry for twenty-five years, ran an online photo competition for fifteen years, and taught a uni...
Before properly starting the story about Marty's experience of teaching through a pandemic, I need to address a few administrative matters.
I'm not sure if you have ever personally taught in a formal setting or not. I believe that to be a hard-prerequisite to having a qualified opinion about the art of teaching. For me, I "taught" for four y...
Many people wondered over the decades why I NEVER used proper capitalization when I wrote. The answer is to save time. I can type faster without having to mess with the shift key. Further, I never thought the capitalization merited the extra keystrokes in the type of writing I did. If I ever wrote a book, I would use proper capitalization because I think it would aid in the readability of it. But with the short, silly things I do here, I never thought it mattered enough to be bothered with.
Some have noticed I've started using proper capitalization this week, and are again wondering why. Curiously the answer is the same, to save time. Now the places where I write for this site auto-capitalize everything. I know it is possible to go and mess with settings, but I write and edit things in various places. The way tech runs these days, it has become more effortful to craft everything in lowercase than to just let nature run its grammatically-correct course.
So, in summary, I used to not capitalize things to save time. Now I capitalize things to save time. I know. Confusing. But as Gale Snoats told H.I. McDunnough in Raising Arizona, "This can go hard or easy H.I." That was no lie in 87 and it is no lie now.
I have a standard tennis workout I do when hitting against a practice wall. I will hit fifty forehands, followed by fifty backhands, followed by a hundred mixed single-bounce balls. That's a set. Then I do some pushups and squats and a few other equally dull things in between. I try to do six sets per session, so it is a routine I've become pretty competent at over the last few years.
I was in the middle of one of these workouts and hitting forehands. I found a nice groove and was striking the ball cleanly, which meant each return came right back to me so I could just pivot, prep and swing again. I had hit maybe twenty straight as an older guy, who looked to be in his late sixties or early seventies, came shuffling by on his way to a neighboring court. As he passed, he said, "It looks like you are either really beating that guy or he is really taking it to you. I can't tell which." He then gave a boyish smirk and continued his foot-scraping gait past me to meet his buddies.
