Where Did I Go Wrong?

Tuffy started her junior year at UW today. She's an English major.

Nothing wrong with being an English major. Some of my best friends were English majors. I just never expected my daughter would be one.

Looking back, I guess I should've seen it coming. She has always been a relentlessly verbal child. She had rules of grammar, even for made-up words. Instead of 'forget', for example, she used to say 'getfor.' But if it happened in the past, she would say 'gotfor.' Perhaps I should've realized it was a bad sign for a toddler to conjugate made-up verbs.

Instead, I was encouraged when she referred to a pair of objects as 'two ones.' I thought it reflected a sound understanding of basic mathematical concepts. And she always did fine in math and science -- at least as well as I ever did.

So where did I go wrong?

We always spent family vacations outdoors; camping, hiking, birdwatching. We bred and showed dogs, and more recently worked with retired racing greyhounds. How could she not grow up to be a little naturalist? A mini-me?

I held out hope last quarter when she took a comparative psychology class from David Barash. Animal behavior is fascinating, and if Barash teaches anywhere near as well as he writes, it should be a great class. How could she not be sucked in?

She liked the class. She did fine. She's still an English major.

It's not the prospect of dire job prospects that concerns me. A zoology degree doesn't buy you much, either. I spent the majority of my working life as a tech writer. She'll find something to do. That's not the problem.

It's just that whole nature-nurture thing. The idea that a child is a blank slate.

Nope. No blank slate here. Some behavior must be hard-wired. My daughter is an English major.

It could be worse, I suppose. She could be majoring in psychology. Or philosophy. Or she could be dealing drugs. Or voting Republican.

I'll deal.

Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head

As weird MS symptoms go, I was thinking this one had to take the cake. It almost felt like... a drop of water on my face. But it's the middle of the night, and I'm lying in bed. How crazy is that? Maybe I dreamed it.

In the morning, there was a smallish puddle of water on the windowsill above my head. OK, so I didn't imagine it. And it had rained that night. But it wasn't windy, and even if it had been, the window is under a broad eave. The outside of the window -- a brand-new window, by the way -- was dry. There's no water anywhere else. Why was there water on the windowsill?

The next night it rained again, and yes, we did indeed have a leak in the roof. It was dripping right through our brand-new sheetrock ceiling, onto the head of the bed. Scarecrow set out buckets to catch the worst of the drips, and moved the bed away from the drainage. We went back to sleep as best we could, listening to water plink into buckets.

In the morning he went up in the attic to find our roof perforated by a tree branch about 18 inches long, maybe 2 inches in diameter. Yeah, that would do it.

Now we remember that some weeks earlier we had been sitting around the house one afternoon when we heard/felt a huge WHUMP!!, like maybe a large tree branch landed on the roof. This happens from time to time. We have a row of black cottonwoods along one side of our house, and they drop stuff. The trade-off for this known risk to the roof is that they provide very effective and inexpensive air-conditioning during those rare spells of hot Seattle summer weather. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

When Scarecrow checked it out he didn't see anything on the roof, but there was a really really really big branch in the front yard. Maybe it just clipped a corner, made a lot of noise but didn't do any damage? We figured we'd dodged a bullet. A limb that size could have caused some serious grief.

Turns out we did dodge a bullet -- a limb that size would've taken out our roof -- but we weren't entirely unscathed. The thing that actually made the noise was a much smaller branch that punched a hole right through the roof, into the attic, where you couldn't really see it from the outside. You wouldn't notice until it started to rain.

Scarecrow cobbled together a patch, and one of the guys who worked on our house during our remodeling project came by and patched his patch. It must've worked. This was a couple of weeks ago, and it hasn't rained since.

Busted!

I wasn't trying to keep this blog secret, exactly. I mean, it's a blog, fer Chrissake. This is the Internet. How secret can it be?

Yet, in some respects, blogging feels very private. I guess I self-censor more than I would in a private journal, but when I'm writing a blog post I don't really think about anybody reading it. It's very odd, since for so many years in my day job the first thing I had to decide was who I was writing for. Now I guess I'm writing for me, although I don't know why I would want to do that. I put things in this blog that I wouldn't want people who know me to know. But since this is a blog, and this is the Internet, people I don't even know might read it. Somehow, that's OK.

I was a little disconcerted, the other day, to find Scarecrow reading this blog. I never told him about it, though I didn't make any particular attempt to hide it, either. It's not that I didn't want him to read it. There's nothing in it he doesn't already know, nothing I wouldn't want him to know (I went back and checked), and I didn't say anything bad about him (I checked that, too). I just didn't think he'd find anything of interest. I guess I was hoping to spare him having to listen to some of this stuff in person. It's OK. It just feels a little weird. Now, when I'm writing a blog post, I'm aware that someone might read it. Weird.

While I'm vaguely on the subject of family news, Tuffy came home from the gym a few days ago with a hematoma auris, more commonly known as cauliflower ear. Eewk. When she was wrestling in junior high and high school she always wore ear guards, but apparently for mixed martial arts it's not the done thing. So she had it drained, and she has to wear a very awkward pressure bandage around her head for the next nine days in the hope the perichondrium will reestablish a connection with the underlying cartilage. And it hurts.

I have not asked whether she plans to wear ear guards from here on out, because sure enough, if I do, she won't. Her birthday was last month, but they don't stop being teenagers on the day they turn 20.

Our Weekend Project

Last weekend, Scarecrow and Tuffy finally emptied out the self-storage space we've been renting during the remodel-that-wouldn't-die, and moved everything that was in it back into the house. That's one more expense we won't have every month, and I'm ecstatic about that.

Of course, since we've managed to get along without this stuff for almost a year, you've got to wonder how bad we really need it. And if we don't really need it, wouldn't it have made more sense to get rid of it before we paid to store it for a year? Yeah, well, OK, next time for sure.

In order to clear out the storage shed, we took a perfectly usable, newly remodeled office and turned it into an indoor garage.
This is not actually a picture of the mess we've made of the new office. It's actually an unretouched picture of my dad's garage. In fact, it's an unretouched picture of part of my dad's garage, although the whole thing looks pretty much like this. As does our office. (I would like to believe the disease that causes this condition has no heritable component, but I fear it does.)

Our project for this weekend is to start going through all this stuff and either put it away, or throw it away. If there's no place to put it, it's out of here. This time, I really mean it. We need to at least start with a place that doesn't look like a landfill.

Fortunately or not, we have enough experience with our slovenly habits to realize that the office, once it's in use, won't look whole lot better than it does now. Even the threat of an avalanche of papers and books roaring out of the office and engulfing the rest of the house probably won't motivate us to become tidy people. And on our disability budget, the only cleaning that will get done will be the cleaning we do ourselves.

Good thing we've got doors.

The Runaway Blog

I have a rather embarrassing question to put to you long-time bloggers: Does your blog ever run away with you?

Is it just me? Sometimes I start a blog post with a particular, if vague, topic in mind, and without realizing it wind up running off at the pencil about something entirely else; or wind up making an entirely different point than the one I set out to make. That supposes, of course, that I set out to make a point, which I frequently do not. Sometimes I get to the end of the post before I realize I did, in fact, have a point to make. Of course, there are times I intend to make a point but don't quite manage it. That happens a lot, but that's something else. This is like a horse that gets the bit in his teeth. You're going to go where he takes you, and there's not a darn thing you can do about it.

There are times when I'm partway through a blog post and realize I've changed my mind, or I've talked myself out of what I thought I was going to say. Or I suddenly figure out something I didn't understand, when I may not even have realized I didn't understand it. I admit it's not usually an insight into the inner workings of the universe -- more like what I'd have to call a Blinding Flash of the Obvious -- but an "aha" moment, however minor.

I'm new to this blogging stuff. I spent most of my working life earning a living by writing, but sitting down to write about whatever I want is a totally new adventure for me. It takes me unexpected places. I tell people I don't know things about myself I didn't even know I knew. It's kind of scary.

Is that why so many people do this?