Dad's on the Couch Archive

9/06/06

School. Sigh.

I would be hard pressed indeed, as would most anyone I presume, to think of any time of year that is as bittersweet as are the closing days of summer. The days are getting shorter, the sun is setting noticeably farther south, and the night air brings a chill not felt since spring. The heady days of rough and tumble fun at the beach are now behind us just as surely as a last campfire somewhere slowly burning down.

Good Lord, what a load of sappy nonsense. Campfires indeed. Anyway, bottom line is that the lads are back in school, and despite my mildly conflicted feelings about losing the freedom that summer brings, I know it's best for everybody to be done with it. Sure, it's tough to get back into the grind of our over-scheduled lives, but at this point the lads and I have had about as much fun as we can stand.

The boys have played through every video game we have, and I've gotten tired of being beaten at Call of Duty 2. We've read books, done puzzles and watched every Marx Brothers movie I managed capture and burn from TCM. There have been trips to kid museums, science museums and aquariums. We've done day trips here and weekend trips there and we've been pruned up in the town pool more times than I care to remember. We've played tennis. We've played kickball/football/Frisbee in the back yard. We've played basketball in the driveway. We've fished, bowled, and been to the local skate park. We even fit in some minor league ball (Go Jackals!), a trip to the U.S. Open and went whitewater rafting. In the end I was, simply put, pooped.

So it was with a renewed spring in my step that I took the lads to Target last week and collected a shopping cart full of pencils, markers, notebooks and all the related educational tools that will, apparently, make them smarter. I was actually a little surprised by how well the boys adjusted to the news that summer was over and that the fourth and sixth grades, respectively, were upon them. After all, I guess there's only so many times that they can whip me at Halo2 before they're ready for a new challenge, even if it is (sigh) ...school.

6/08/06

Spot The Bork! (What's a Bork?)

We have just recently, as I’ve previously mentioned, spent a great week in Florida visiting friends and doing Disney while staying at the Nick Suites hotel. So then, am I going to go on about all the fun and exiting things we did? No, of course not silly, but I would feel remiss if I didn’t share a new activity that the boys and I invented that I think may have a practical and positive impact on society in that it helps ward off boredom: it’s a little game we call Spot The Bork.
It’s simple enough, really; we were sitting around waiting for our flight at LaGuardia on Saturday afternoon whilst I was engaged in my usual pre-flight ritual of downing Dramamines and rather a lot of scotch. (Afraid of flying? Goodness no; if the plane goes down there’s not a thing I can do about it; no, it’s that I’m motion-sickness-boy and flying makes me feel crummy. In fact, it used to be that by the time I got off a plane I felt worse than David Gest after a long weekend with Liza… but no longer! Hooray for the yummy modern medical miracle that is scotch and Dramamine!)
Anyhoo, as we were sitting there the older lad piped up: “Psst, hey dad, look, a bork!”
And sure enough, he had sighted a particularly nerdy bork wandering along the skyway, so we decided to award the lad one point; and so it was that Spot The Bork was born. The rules are simple enough, each participant gets one point per sighting, and each sighting has to be confirmed by at least one of the other players. By the end of the trip I was in firm control of first place with eight points, followed by a respectable six for the older lad and one for the younger lad. We really should consider fabulous prizes.
So, should you find yourself and your brood sitting around cooling your heels somewhere this summer, fear boredom no more! Go on, Spot A Bork!

5/27/06

Usually, my preferred method of posting here involves a bit of thematic noodling around before I get around to spelling out what I’m actually trying to say, but today I’m running a little short of time. So here it is: today we’re jetting off to the Sunshine State to visit friends and then, of course, Disney.

It occurred to me this week that our trip is nothing less than a pop-culture pilgrimage; and then I got to musing just how powerful the notions of pilgrimage in particular, and journey in general, are. Really, human experience is, if nothing else, all about movement, expressed both as travel away in exploration, and travel back home in pilgrimage.

So anyway, as much as I’d like to noodle around with these mythic themes today, I’ll just leave this link to Wikipedia’s entry on pilgrimage. Go on, nose around a little, it’s fascinating stuff, and I’ll bet you get lost in there.

Have a great week!