Much as a beltway around a large city often serves to starkly demarcate good neighborhoods from bad ones, in my little slice of the universe, I view rain as a similar divider. Said simpler, on a nice day anybody and everybody can walk outside. But throw in some ominous clouds and a sprinkle or two, and only the havenots are out and about.

You guessed it, today was rainy. The normal population of the Wednesday library group is around 20 children and their grown-ups. When it started today there were seven; two more trickled in before the program finished. In all fairness, the walk to the library wasn’t that bad, just a light drizzle. However, it was coming down nice and steady by the time Alexei and I left the library at noon. He was pretty happy inside his plastic bubble. All the water and cars zooming by must have been pretty interesting (especially with snack in hand).

Before I faced rain as a dad with a stroller, I had the pleasure of experiencing it in several other situations. Not to be moronic or anything (of course I’ve “experienced” rain…I don’t live in a desert), but on the backdrop of my upbringing in suburbia, rain was usually something that could be avoided. Yes, there was the few seconds in between the car and home, but that doesn’t count in my book.

I graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2007. It took me longer than most of my high-school peers to get through undergraduateville (in fact, a few of them already had doctorates by the time I gradumacated). Anyhow, way back when I entered UMD, parking was even more limited than what it is now. As a commuting freshman, my parking spot was not what you would call very good. After a 40+ minute drive to school in the morning, I had a brisk 20-minute walk to get to class. Under good conditions, I really enjoyed it. Walking in from Lot 4 to the main part of campus could be relaxing — to pass through cow country every morning was definitely one way to start the day. Coming back around to our topic: when it rained, it poured. Twenty minutes of slogging through a torrential sheet does wonders for your clothes. Sitting in said clothes for hours at a time does something else. There was some small condolence to be found in sharing varying degrees of soakedness with the others in class with me. By the time one class had finished, we’d all have dried out a little bit only to be soaked the moment we stepped outdoors to go to the next one. Walking on the sidewalk near streets was especially treacherous. I got pretty good at avoiding the splash zone (quite handy with a stroller). To close out my rambling thoughts on walking in the rain at UMD, I’d like to share a guilty pleasure. As a driver, I loved to splash pedestrians real good! Maybe I should have been more compassionate, as I was in their shoes more often then not. I wasn’t, though, and deliberately went out of my way to soak people whenever possible. Mua-ha-ha!

Sandwiched in between my eight years at UMD, I lived in Russia for a year. As part of the self-discovery bit, I wanted to get out into the world and fend for myself. Teaching English, I soon discovered, was probably the easiest way for me to make a living outside the US. The only question was where. Showing my great geographical prowess, I narrowed down my options by trying to find a really cold location, as cold weather and I get along well together. On a map, I found a small sliver of Russia, disconnected from the main landmass. I knew nobody there, and it shared a latitude with Alaska. Alaska is cold, so by association, Kaliningrad must be also.

Kaliningrad, the Seattle of Russia. Obviously, I slept through a bit of geography. Instead of perpetual snow, I found rain, rain, and more rain. In fact, there was probably a month or two when I didn’t see the sun once. As an economically strapped student teacher, I never had the luxury of driving during that year. Most of the time I took public transportation. Living in a rainy city, waiting at [uncovered] bus stops, and being long walks to/from said bus stops left a sopping Troy on more than one occasion.

As I think back on these repeated walks in the rain, I really don’t have any bad memories. In fact, a certain feeling of nostalgia more accurately captures my mood. I enjoy being dry as much as the next guy, but perhaps walking in the rain does a body good. If I had had a car or some other way to avoid the rain, I’m sure I would have. And yet I’m glad that I didn’t. For without the rain, and more specifically, me being in it, I wouldn’t have these memories.

Alexei is at the age now where he can stomp on puddles by himself. He’s not real good at it by grown-up standards, but he has a ball nonetheless. I was there to see his expression the first time he made a splash. I enjoy seeing him try to jump up and down (still hasn’t got the hang of that yet). And, I’m looking forward to him someday appreciating the inconvenient rain, like I do now.

Rain, rain, go away.
Come again ano….

I DON’T think so! Let’s go out and play!

This came through my email account two weeks ago Monday:

Atholton SDA Church Email Notice — February 9, 2009

Jackie Gair, a long-time Atholton member, passed away on Monday morning.

The viewing will be held at the Fleck Funeral Home, 7601 Sandy Spring Road, Laurel, MD this Thursday, February 12, from 12:30 - 1:30 PM. Following this, there will be a graveside service for family and close friends at George Washington Cemetery on Riggs Road in Adelphi, MD. There will be no memorial/funeral service at the Atholton Church.

Please continue to remember the family in prayer during this difficult time.

Thus ends a life.

Now is as good a time as any to finish one of the many blog posts languishing in draft status: link coming when I actually finish it.

Yesterday on the way home from circle time at the library, Alexei and I stopped at a bridge to throw some sticks into the water. We stood there for a good long while and I was mesmerized by the ripples our small sticks made in the stream. Mesmerized is probably the wrong word; fascination is more along the lines of what I felt. Something so simple and natural, but inherently beautiful.

Here is an excerpt from a book I’m in the process of re-reading now.

In karate there is an image that’s used to define the position of perfect readiness: “mind like water.” Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriate to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact.

— David Allen

Relevance? Mrs. Gair’s passing is not all that different from Alexei throwing a stick into Sligo Creek. How Mrs. Gair’s life intertwined in that of others seems to parallel how my son’s small stick made a mark on the water. Both were present for a time, changed things around them, and then faded into memory. No doubt Mrs. Gair’s ripples will long be felt by the world through her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so-on.

Jacquelyn J. Gair

Farewell, neighbor. Until one day we meet again where the silver ripples lap on heaven’s shore, goodbye.

I’ve been an early bloomer throughout my life. For Christmas in the fifth grade, my dad gave me an electric razor. Naturally, I didn’t know how to use it properly and wound up giving myself the razor burn of my life on the first shave. Technology hasn’t been much different. When friends or family want advice on some new gadget, they ask me. Now, with this whole social networking thing, I’m happy to report that I am the slow guy in town.

In Russian schools, people go through their entire primary schooling experience with one set of classmates, assuming their family doesn’t move. The Russian word for your section of a grade is odnoklassniki. Odnoklassniki.ru was launched in 2006 and has quickly become the de facto social site in the Russian-speaking world. Anastasia has been on it for awhile, but with her mom here visiting us, she has had a little extra time to spend chatting with her girlhood friends. The thought crossed my mind that maybe I should enter the English and Russian social networks at the same time, so I asked my wife what she thought. The answer was a big fat no on both accounts. I decided to go along with her halfway. As of yet, I’m not on odnoklassniki.

Yesterday, I finally joined the masses, according to my brother, and got a Facebook account. Technically, I’ve had one for over a year, but never visited it or anything. Part of the reason I haven’t wanted to get into the MySpace or Facebook phenomena is that it seems like it would waste a lot of time. Besides, I like owning whatever it is that I do. With this site, for example, I can make a backup of everything and be assured it is reasonably safe. With Facebook, Google, or anything else in the cloud, I don’t know for sure. Chances are that things are backed up much more regularly and better than I would, but still there is this nagging deal of ownership in the back of my mind.

My Facebook strategy: one account for work, one for personal stuff. I realize at the outset that it is impossible to segregate one’s life like that, but I’m going to try. (Generally speaking, I’m actually in the majority by having two logins.) When I want to kick back and do some facebook-stalking on my old friends, I don’t necessarily want to see my work associates’ shameless self-promotion of their wares. To (hopefully ) decrease the time investment, I’m not going to ask anybody to be my friend, but wait and see how long it takes for people to notice me.

Twitter. I like the idea, but need to get my personal prose back up to par. For that, I much prefer the blog format. However, a few weeks back I opened up an account for my son and future daughter. I figure once Mommy heads back to work, it will be nice for her to keep tabs on what we’re doing. As Alexei starts talking, it will hopefully become something he looks forward to doing…some form of early literacy, I suppose you could say.

The upper limit of friends I would ever have ten years down the road is what my brother Trevor has now. As of this writing, he has 700. I am not he, and likely have fewer real friends than that, but that’s beside the point. Realistically, I’d guess that by the beginning of summer I’ll have somewhere in the range of 100-200 ‘friends.’

At the end of Day One, I had eight friend requests. In addition to that, I asked the two brothers that hadn’t noticed me yet to grant me friend status to boost my visibility. I’m waiting to see how long it will take my father to notice me; I’ll give him to the end of the week. A few months ago he got Facebook and quickly became a junkie. My mom got a surprise from some friends when they asked her if everything was okay between my father and her. She had no idea what they were talking about…it turns out that my dad listed himself as ‘in a relationship’ because my mother isn’t on Facebook for him to say he’s married to her.

Probably nobody cares (I know I don’t…); here is my friend tally:

• Day 1: +8
• Day 2: +10
• Day 3: +8
• Day 4: +7
• Day 5: +2
• Day 6: +3
• Day 7: +2
• Week 1: 46
• Day 8: +3
• Day 9: +2
• Day 10: +1
• Day 11: +1
• Day 12: +2
• Day 13: +0
• Day 14: +0
• Week 2 = 55
• Month 1 = 60
• Month 2 = 69
• Month 3 = 77
• Month 6 = 96
• Year 1 =137

Note: I’ll be updating this post periodically over the course of the next year.

Edit: It turns out I was wrong about how long it took my dad to notice me. It was one week and one day.

Edit: And there you have it…the final tally is 137. That many people asked me to be their friend over the past year. Although if I count the number of people on my business facebook account, that number jumps to 152.

I just watched this three times in the last ten minutes. It gets funnier with each viewing. Maybe I should go do some work now…

If the three grand price tag was dropped by about two grand, the over ten pound heft was reduced, and the primary screen’s size was halved, I might be in the market. Then again, I don’t think anybody would take their boots off for that.

A few days ago a magazine for the neighbors a block up from us was accidentally left in our mailbox. I know nothing about the palette magazine, but the editorial on the back cover had a nice new year’s resolution list for the artist in all of us. Without any permission from columnist Diane Santarella, I give you her list:

1. Learn each month about one artist whom I am not familiar with.
2. Learn each month about one artist that I think I don’t like (opinion subject to change).
3. Listen to a style of music that I am unfamiliar with.
4. Become familiar with people who are “masters” in their field (other than art) and try to understand what qualities set them apart from their peers.
5. Figure out how to take a professional, print-ready digital photo of my artwork. (This may require recruiting some help. Try bribing an expert with food and paintings.)
6. Contact three new galeries about their submission requirements, and send them portfolios.
7. Schedule my studio time into my day planner as a regular appointment.
8. Take a friend to a museum and listen without comment or judgment to their observations.
9. Read a magazine about some sport or hobby that I have absolutely no interest or experience in and try to find the passion in, say, stamp collecting or fly-tying. (I’m not that fanatical and obsessive about art, am I?)
10. Read enough poetry to have a favorite poet (to start: Rilke, Oliver, Neruda, Stand, Angelou, Rumi).
11. Memorize a poem.

It seems to me that with a little bit of modification, these steps to betterment would work for any interest a person might have. The final sentence of the article really ties it all together quite nicely:

Take all this new mojo into the studio and paint like never before!

This afternoon Anastasia and I put a rough budget and calendar outline together for the new year. She has already written down her new years resolutions; now the ball is in my court. Maybe I’ll steal a few of the above in some way, shape, or form. The lovely thing about resolutions is that they are meant to be broken!

Women are amazing creatures, ain’t they?

The first day of this new year found me needing to work a little bit. While Anastasia and some of our friends were playing games in the afternoon, I was clicking away on my console in the room next door. Despite my best effort, I wasn’t ready to go ice skating with everybody at seven.

After much cajoling, I convinced the wifey to go ice skating without Alexei and me. The stipulations were that we show up to watch them skate for a little bit, I could not totally ignore Alexei while working, I could only work for 10 more minutes when we came home, I would not wake up really early the following morning, and, here’s the kicker, that I watch a movie with her after Alexei was in bed. Not too bad, huh?

The ice skating was fun. Now the rink was a bit ghetto, but not too shabby for the $4 price tag including rental. With Alexei nicely nestled down, we started to decide what to watch. She wanted to watch an episode of Mad Men. I was OK with that, but she originally said she wanted a movie. We discovered one we hadn’t seen yet — Definitely, Maybe.

For ten minutes or so I think she was into the movie. Then as the main character started reliving his romantic past life, she tuned out. I think it was more because of all the innuendos and inferences that needed to be made for it to be funny. Background knowledge is an amazing thing in other words.

As we sat there, finally she closed her eyes (after her head had been on a pillow for maybe ten minutes). I asked if she wanted to go to bed, and off we trundled…50 minutes into the movie.

I played the role of good husband and didn’t say a word, but inside I was cracking up. A few hours earlier that evening, I was the tired one who didn’t want to watch a movie. At gunpoint, practically, I had agreed to watch one with my wife. And here we were, stopping early because she fell asleep!

I returned from Russia one week earlier than Anastasia and Alexei. This sucked on a number of fronts (I missed his first birthday, she had to travel from way over there to way over here all by her lonesome, etc). At the same time, I did get some things done while living as a bachelor that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do.

My plane got back Saturday evening, so by the time Tuesday rolled around, it was high time to get some food in the house. The crowning accomplishment of my spree at Giant was undoubtedly the discounted day old bakery stuff. But that isn’t all that interesting. Oatmeal, on the other hand, is.

When Anastasia makes oatmeal, she does it “right". That is, she dumps some flakes from a huge Captain whoever jar into a bowl and prepares it. I, being myself, find this way too much work and therefore settled on the instant oatmeal route. Instead of forking over extra for the real Quaker, I settled on Giant brand instant oatmeal.

It took this long, but finally the two boxes of offbrand instant gunk is gone. Very tasty, I must say. Like the old days, the back of each packet has a question/answer. Without any further ado, here are some of my favorites (and not so favorites). The question is followed immediately by the answer, so click through and enjoy!

Oatmeal sits in your gut for a very long time

Question 2	Question 3	Question 4
Question 5	Question 6	Question 7
Question 8	Question 9	Question 10
Question 11	Question 12	Question 13
Question 14	Question 15	Question 16

Note: As of now, I haven’t made lightbox work reliably in non-WebKit browsers. This means that if nothing happens when you click on the images above, it is my fault. Trust me that some are funny, but most are a waste of time. Look on the bright side, I’ve just saved you some wasted time by having a broken website!

I don’t frequently remember what I dream about. Saturday morning was the exception. The wife and I were walking down Tanager Lane in Columbia, MD. As we passed by a house that my granddad built and lived in, a helicopter passed overhead. Nothing out of the ordinary…yet. The helicopter just flew by us, but then circled back. After taking another glance at us, it passed for a second time. Then, without warning, it veered hard in our direction and came down for a landing. We took off running. And at that crucial moment, I woke up in a cold sweat.

Heart pounding furiously, I laid in bed and tried to go back to sleep. That wasn’t working very well, so I got up to visit the toilet. Finished with my duties, I headed over to my workstation just because it was 4am and there was nothing better to do. It had been a couple weeks since I did a complete backup of my main machine. As I prepared to hook up my drobo to run the backup, I noticed that there had been an 18 second power outage a couple hours earlier. Everything seemed to be working fine still and then the power meter started blinking, indicating that it was running on battery.

Strange, the power going out again? I peered out all the windows and none of the neighbors had power either. Deciding to test things out a little bit, I fired open a web browser. It worked. My apartment is without power, but I am able to get online via my wireless network router connected to a cable modem without a problem. (If you didn’t get the idea already, a UPS is a handy thing to have.) I got the phone number for Pepco and called in to report the power outage. They were already aware of the situation and said the problem should be fixed by 5am.

At this point I should’ve shut things down and trundled off to bed. But I was curious as to how long my CyberPower UPS would last. So I did some housecleaning on my laptop. Now, I could have made it last a lot longer if I had turned off my external monitor and shut down one of my computers earlier, but even with them I had power for over half an hour. Not too shabby, eh?

Moral of the story: When an Apache is after you, make sure to have your UPS fully charged and ready for action.

I just googled Becca Lilly to see if it has one “L” or two for the son’s post. The top hit was this Washington Post mini-series about the last year or so of her life. I didn’t read through the whole thing, but a good chunk of it. Having to go through something like that, as a parent or a child, is outside the realm of what I can imagine. But as I read the article, I was trying to imagine the Lillys I’ve interacted with. It gave me a new-found not respect, but something like that, for them. (The Lilly’s live kiddy-corner across the street from us. For those of you who didn’t click on the above link, one of their daughters died several years ago after a nasty battle with brain cancer. The nearest children’s park to where we live is named after her.)

Granted, my interactions have been limited: Today, Alexei and I saw Sarah, the youngest child (a high school senior), walking their dog Lady on our way to the park. Occasionally I see Joe in front of his house or visiting with our landlady Joan downstairs. Lady spends the afternoon with Penny, the landlady’s dog regularly. During the summer I stopped by their house and helped Maureen to get all their computers online wirelessly. Come to think of it, I was supposed to go back and help them again, but got real busy and still haven’t found the time.

You know what? Through all of those interactions, I treated them just like normal people. Now that I know a bit more of the inside scoop and what they’ve been through, they are still people, but elevated. For Pete’s sake, they just held the 12th annual Becca’s Run at the beginning of the month. There are many unknowns if I ever found myself in their shoes, but I can tell you one thing for sure, I wouldn’t be having a 5k run every year. That takes some real chutzpa.

In the words of Randy Travis:

Your heroes will help you find good in yourself
Your friends won’t forsake you for somebody else.
They’ll both stand beside you thru thick and thru thin
And that’s how it goes with heroes and friends.

So, that’s on one side of our apartment….now onto the more racier side. Close your eyes and imagine with me for a moment. A red sheer curtain. Low lighting. A first floor bedroom. Non-ugly high school girl. It’s dark outside. Et cetera.

I don’t consider myself a peeping tom, but sometimes things do cross one’s vision….and sometimes one’s wife’s vision notices things crossing your vision and suddenly your vision doesn’t work so well any more.

Like us, the “racier neighbors” rent. It is a mother with her daughter. It seems like they moved in at the beginning of the summer. It just so happened that Anastasia, Alexei, and I went to the National Zoo on Father’s Day and bumped into them there. From all I can tell, they’re perfectly normal people. A single mom with a teenaged daughter can appear rough around the edges and yet be totally grounded.

In summary, I have two neighbors. One is a hero, the other a harlot. The thing I find quite interesting about this post is that if my neighborly vantage point were different, if I knew them more than transiently, I may have been able to paint totally opposite pictures. Is that bad? Good? Does it matter?

For now my feeling is that everybody has things they wish others didn’t know. If suddenly the curtain were opened and everybody knew these sequestered secrets or if industrial strength cardboard permanently covered all window openings to keep the punks out, the person I know would remain the same. My opinion of them may likely change, but they will most likely not.

Read one way, it seems like I’m saying that other people only exist as the reflection I see of them — a very nice and ego-centric view of the universe. Yet when I get up in the morning and ready myself for the day, I’m not really looking at myself, just a reflection in the mirror. Maybe it works the same way in life. That is, as I go about my business others see reflections of the real me. The cumulative image produced by all these reflections is what actually defines me. In other words, I am not who I think I am, but who others see.

This is obviously much more convoluted than I set out to be. My neighbors are cool people. You should come and visit them sometime. Don’t forget your binoculars!