LBJs

*For those of you who've been waiting with bated breath, the Atkins Diet seems to work on me. In the first week, I lost six pounds. So far the best thing about it has been that it's fairly easy to stick to. For me, at least, it's much easier to forbid myself certain foods than to hold myself to a certain amount of food; for one thing, I don't have to measure, write down, or keep track of anything. And man, it's nice to have regular access to cheese.

*The Atkins breakfast is still something of an issue for me; I don't much like eggs (except in omelets), and turkey bacon is losing something of its novelty. For me, breakfast has always been a meal of almost pure carbohydrates--a bowl of cereal, or a bagel, or a chicken biscuit from Hardees' or Bojangles if I was on the road. The main appeal of such carb-heavy breakfasts is their simplicity--you can prepare them for consumption without having to have a cup of coffee first. These days I'm drinking a cup (no milk, no sugar--sometimes a little sweetener) first thing so that I can wake up enough to figure out how to cook the actual food.

*By the way, that phrase "bated breath" is one that I'll often see rendered incorrectly in my students' papers--they often go for "baited breath." I try to tell my students that "bated" relates to "abate"--you're holding your breath, or stopping it. You can't bait your breath unless you're breathing on something in hopes of luring it into a trap. Or unless you're eating night crawlers.

*Good news on the book front: not only have the good reviews kept coming, but I got a nice write-up and photo in the Fredericksburg (VA) Free Lance-Star last Sunday. As a result of all the good press, Paul Dry Books is going to a third printing. Since this is ordinarily a sign of best-sellerdom, I must point out that best-sellerdom isn't the reason here: it's just steady sales of the first two printings, which were not large ones. The third printing is the same size as the second, and like the second, it's exclusively trade paperback. But they do add up over time, happily. (And if you want a hardback copy, make your move quickly--so far, only about 1000 exist, and I don't know if any more will be printed.)

*I'm listening to Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust right now, remembering when they were poised to conquer the U.S.A. back in 1988. (My god, it's been fifteen years...) "Beds Are Burning," the big hit, still rocks along beautifully, as does "The Dead Heart." I still like "Warakurna," too, though a few of the tunes ("Put Down That Weapon," "Sell My Soul") strike me as filler. I'm a little surprised that their American career didn't go better; the follow-up to D&D, Blue Sky Mining, seemed to sell fairly well at the outset. Perhaps they simply didn't have an interest in sustaining their reputation outside Australia, where as far as I know they still rule the airwaves. They're not the only Aussie band to approach stardom here without quite achieving it. At about the same time Midnight Oil was getting heavy MTV play, the Church, INXS and Crowded House were drawing plenty of attention themselves. Heck, even a few years earlier, I would have bet on the Church to make it big--I still think "Just For You," from The Blurred Crusade, is one of the universe's few Perfect Pop Songs. But something held them all back. Distance? Bias? Cultural hegemony? Your guess is as good as mine.

*On Monday I worked out at the gym, lifting weights and walking a couple of miles on the treadmill. On Tuesday I went for a bike ride--about 19 miles, a bit longer than I would have liked for my first day back on the biki in six months. On Wednesday and Thursday I worked the Cub Scout day camp, which involved much standing, walking, swimming, and trudging uphill. And today, my Achilles tendons are giving me some rather strongly worded messages to the effect that they should stay put. You got it, boys.

*I'm happy to report that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has finally arrived at the Cashwell/Dalton house. First into the breach was Thing One, who plowed through all 870 pages in about fourteen hours--in other words, in about as long as it would take me to read 870 pages. (Actually, it would probably take me closer to fifteen; suffice it to say that I'm not worried about his ability to get through the material in high school.) Kelly picked it up next and is blazing through. Thing Two has also cracked it open; I foresee a battle royal when the two of them want to read it at the same time. Me, I'm standing on the perimeter of the field like a hyena, waiting for the bigger predators to eat their fill.
9:37 AM

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Interesting. I've been gone for a couple of days, helping out with Thing Two's day camp & overnight stay (which, I should point out, were directly responsible for the sudden heat wave in the mid-Atlantic states). In the interim, Blogger.com has done an update, so the page I'm now seeing is totally unfamiliar. Here's hoping I can figure out how to make this work. But of course, if you're reading this, I must have done so, right?

Camps are always an odd blend of the routine and the exhilarating, but they teach you things you don't learn elsewhere. I went to YMCA day camp when I was in the second or third grade and learned some things that I would never have learned otherwise: that you could make a good-sized rocket ship out of chicken wire and papier mache, that I enjoyed performing in front of a group, that tie-dying looked cool but wasn't that easy to do, and that I was a hopeless incompetent when it came to braiding a lanyard. I also learned how much fun Capture the Flag can be, and got good and familiar with swimming in lakes.

In 1972 and '73, I went to Camp Gwynn Valley, an overnight camp in the Smoky Mountains near Brevard, NC, and there was much more learning to do. I took my first real hiking trip that first year--two nights and three days near Shining Rock, with two counselors, Frog and Marion, and about ten boys. We passed bald-top mountains, saw deer bounding almost within arm's reach, and were entertained by the names on the map; I've certainly never forgotten the vaguely threatening and thickly forested Dog Loser Knob. That night we learned how important it is to store foodstuffs off the ground, as we were visited by just about every mammal in western North Carolina; Frog dubbed our campsite "Varmint Holler," "'cause the varmints are makin' us holler."

On the second day we hit rain and lots of it--we were actually walking through a cloud. I'm sure the distance wasn't that great, but it seemed like we were walking a marathon at the time. And carrying packs along, at that. When we finally stopped, in a high meadow between two peaks, we discovered how hard it is to set up camp in the rain. By the time the tents were up, we were all nearly mutinous with hunger, but getting a fire going was a whole new challenge. Since the campsite was after all a field, fuel options were limited. There were occasional birches, most of them dead, and Frog and Marion spent roughly forty-five minutes attempting to coax wet birchbark into flame. Then we got to work boiling water in order to prepare each camper's dinner, which took probably another half-hour. Shivering and miserable, I was finally handed what remains one of the two or three best meals of my entire life: a steaming-hot bowl of Lipton's Instant Beef Stroganoff.

Life at the camp itself was also instructive. Aside from the basic education in self-reliance that being away from one's parents provides, I learned how to ride a horse, did some copper enameling, played string bass in a junkyard band (my first public musical performance), fished for bream and bass with balls of bread (though at the time I didn't appreciate the alliteration), and had one less pleasant life lesson: for the first time I had people throw an ethnic slur at me with intent to harm.

"Hebe" was the term, used by a group of girls from another cabin and one boy from my own cabin that I had thought of as a particularly good friend--he was actually the harmonica player in our junkyard band. Somewhat to my surprise, I burst into tears and stormed back to my bunk.

I'm still a little surprised. In the preceding eleven years, I'd been teased for everything from my name to my love of books, so it now seems a little odd that I'd be so sensitive to name-calling about my Jewish heritage, something that I'd always celebrated. In fact, in fourth grade, my crowd had gleefully nicknamed its members according to ethnic background--I was "Jew-Baby," Mark, who was Asian-American, became "Chi-Baby," etc. But at camp I learned that not everyone celebrates the differences in background that make America so vital and interesting--and that the multicolored, pan-cultural neighborhood of Morrie Turner's "Wee Pals" comic strip was sadly nowhere near where I was living. It was a shock, and I cried, and I wanted someone to comfort me, but I had to deal with it myself.

And yesterday, as I watched my son and his friends haphazardly fishing for bluegills (using worms, not balls of bread), I overheard one of them cheerfully teasing him. Usually he's teased about his advanced and highly original vocabulary, or about his his height, since he's one of the shortest kids in his class (largely because he's one of the youngest). This time his friend, in a playful tone, was teasing him about his Jewish background. His friend called my son "Hitler."

And I chose not to say anything. I'm going to be wondering about that choice for a long time.
7:12 AM

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Well, they've finally done it.

After four years of peace and quiet, four years of feeding birds without interruption, four years of dodging the bullet that pierces every birder's flesh eventually, they've done it:

The squirrels have come.

Since we moved here in the summer of 1999, my main feeder has hung in our backyard, about seven feet up and ten feet away from the trunk of our weeping cherry tree. I hung it using a short chain (which looped over the branch) and some discarded nylon hay-baling cord that I found at the old farmhouse just before we moved. The combination of lateral distance from the trunk, vertical distance from the branch, and perhaps a dose of dumb luck (or dumb squirrels) kept the feeder safe from rodent invasion for years. Instead, I was treated to an uninterrupted stream of cardinals, chipping sparrows, downy woodpeckers, mourning doves, indigo buntings, white-breasted nuthatches, goldfinches, white-throated sparrows, house finches, slate-colored juncos, black-capped chickadees, and even red-bellied woodpeckers. But no squirrels.

Oh, sure, they lived in the tree, and they cheerfully cleaned up the seed that the birds kicked or let fall to the ground, but they never bothered the feeder itself. But then, about a week ago, I saw something I'd never seen before: a squirrel squatting on the bottom rim of the feeder, greedily snarfing down everything it could reach. I ran out to the deck and scared it off, but I had a bad feeling about it--the dam hadn't given way yet, but there was certainly a big crack in it.

And from there it was only a matter of time. Every few hours, I'd discover a squirrel on the feeder, often with a few henchmen lurking underneath, waiting for spillage; the only question was how I might stop them. The first thing to establish was how they were getting access--were they jumping? Climbing? Parachuting? I had a pretty good idea from the increasingly frayed nylon cord that supported the feeder: signs of squirrel clawing, I was willing to bet. Eventually I saw one shimmying delicately down the chain to the cord, and that sent me off to the tool box.

If there's one thing an experienced birder knows, it's that squirrel-proof feeders usually aren't. Squirrels are just too creative, too acrobatic, too relentless to be discouraged by baffles, wires, or anything other than active human intervention, usually involving firearms. Nonetheless, I wasn't letting this pass without at least token resistance on my part. In my house are a number of tools, and some useful materials from which I felt sure I could construct a squirrel baffle; mine was constructed from vinyl, twelve inches in diameter, with a center spindle hole approximately 1/4" across.

OK, it was an old copy of Paul McCartney & Wings' Red Rose Speedway. A few years back, I had grabbed it off a pile of albums that a colleague was throwing out; because of the artsy-but-irritating 1970s habit of putting absolutely no information about songs on the cover (a gatefold cover at that), I had been under the mistaken impression that it contained "Helen Wheels," one of the half-dozen or so post-Beatles songs of Paul's that I actually like. (Others include "Band on the Run," "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey," "Live and Let Die," and "Ballroom Dancing.") Unfortunately, as I later found out, the only familiar song on the album was "My Love," which is one of the far-more-than-a-dozen post-Beatles songs of Paul's that I find saccharine and annoying. (Others include "Let 'Em In," "Bluebird," "Ebony and Ivory," and "The Girl Is Mine.") In short, I had found the perfect album to turn into a squirrel baffle.

Alas, it was not the perfect squirrel baffle. Oh, sure, I saw it send one hungry young rodent on a one-way trip into empty space, but even in the process, the squirrel's claws did more damage to the nylon cord. If the baffle couldn't protect the cord from further damage, I knew the whole shooting match would be coming down before long.

And this morning, as I gazed out my back door, I was proven right: the chain still lay across the branch, and strands of nylon still dangled from the ends of the chain, but the feeder lay helpless on the ground, its bottom rim popped off from the impact. Three squirrels were hunched around it, nibbling at their ill-gotten gains.

They scattered as soon as I came through the door to retrieve the remains of my fallen comrade in the bird-feeding wars. I poured the remaining seed out, hoping the ground-feeding birds would at least get one more meal out of the feeder, and sadly returned to the house.

It is a black, black day.
8:58 AM

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LBJs

*Thing One spent last night at a scouting overnight--the first night it hasn't poured in weeks, I think--and managed to win oodles of prizes in the various games the boys played. Thing Two starts his scout day camp tomorrow, with Kelly chaperoning Monday and yrs. truly chaperoning Wednesday & Thursday (with an overnight stay on Thursday). I'm anticipating sunburn and mosquito bites, but with any luck we'll have some kind of fun.

*The Atlantic Coast Conference continues to irk me by pursuing expansion to thirteen teams, even in the face of political machinations, lawsuits, and more bad publicity than I can ever recall the league generating. Frankly, I think the current nine-member conference is too big, as it necessitates a useless 8th-seed-vs.-9th-seed "play-in" game at the ACC Tournament every March, with the winner getting to face the top seed in a state of exhaustion from the night before. Obviously, my outlook is entirely basketball-centric. I don't mind ACC football one bit, but I frankly don't think the sport has any business dictating to the other sports; on the gridiron, Florida State is the only school that's a perennial contender, and Duke is the biggest joke in Division 1A football. I also worry that the league is foolishly pursuing football programs that raise red flags in both ethical (Miami) and academic (Virginia Tech) arenas; it seems like a Hurricane or two is in the headlines every year for drug use, assault, or some form of larceny, while the Hokies' on-the-field success under Frank Beamer has been accompanied by a disturbingly low graduation rate. So far the best thing about the entire story has been that UNC Chancellor James Moeser has been resolute in opposing the proposed expansion to twelve (or even thirteen) schools. Unfortunately, my pride in my alma mater is somewhat dimmed by the fact that the ACC Commissioner, Jim Swofford, is also a UNC grad--and a former Tar Heel football player. This may explain a lot.

*It's actually sunny outside. Damn--what are we supposed to do when it's like this? I forget...

*Kel and I are in one of our periodic cleaning modes. (Yes, they do happen, thankyouverymuch.) In our house, of course, any cleaning must begin with books, which occupy the majority of the house's space. We weeded some books through a clever psychological trick: instead of going along the shelves and pulling the ones we didn't like that much, we went along pulling everything we didn't want to keep. There's a subtle difference. Both Kelly and I thoroughly enjoyed David Remnick's biography of Muhammad Ali, King of the World, but we decided we didn't need to keep it in the house, especially when we could give it to the library or keep it in my classroom for my students' independent reading sessions. We've got a lot more work to do, but hey, it's a start.

*I also weeded out about 40-50% of the old spiral notebooks I used in college. I'd kept some around because they had notes about classroom theory and management that I thought might be helpful; now that I'm entering my 13th year of full-time teaching, however, I decided that I know enough about what I'm doing to let them go. I did keep all the ones with my notes from my various Dungeons & Dragons games over the years, plus the ones in which I'd written stories, lyrics, poems, etc. And there's no way I'm going to throw out the ones from my creative writing classes. A plus: I discovered the roughs of several stories & books I'd thought long lost, so I may be able to make something useful out of them.

*I've been taking this week off, basically, in order to start on the diet (weigh-in is Tuesday; we'll see how things have gone) and recover from the touring. I haven't done a damn thing in terms of writing, publicity, or anything book-related at all. It's been great. (Well, actually, I have been checking in on my Amazon and B&N.com rankings, but that's it, I swear.) Tomorrow morning, though, I have to get cracking on my next project. What will it be? Good question.

*The GameCube is an occasional distraction to me, which is one reason I've limited myself to learning only a few games: The Simpsons' Road Rage, SSX Tricky, and Animal Crossing. I haven't played the first two in a long while, but I still have an iron in the fire on Animal Crossing, which is essentially a kiddie version of the Sims: you move to a town & buy a little house. You earn money and things by gathering fruit, catching fish, digging up fossils, or running errands for your neighbors, a collection of brightly-colored anthropomorphised bears, cats, apes, sheep, rabbits, frogs, birds, and other miscellaneous critters. (All vertebrates so far, though an octopus is rumored to exist.) I've paid off my house and put 750,000 in the bank (would that real life debts played out this easily...), but I'm still trying to accomplish one thing: to catch a fish of every species and win the Golden Angler award. There are 40 species in all, and they appear in the town's bodies of water according to season, location, weather, and time of day. I've now caught 37 of them. The last three are rare and appear in very specific situations: the arapaima arrives in July, the jellyfish appears only during the first two weeks of August, and the elusive coelacanth can be caught only at night when it's raining. (Ironically, on most nights when I've been playing, it's been raining in real life, but not in the game.) I'm patiently waiting for the calendar to turn over, hoping and praying I can wrap this up over the next six weeks--I need my life back.

*On the way home from our most recent trip to NC, our Taurus wagon went over the 100,000 mile mark. We were a bit surprised to realize that there are six digits on our odometer; instead of having all the dials go to zero, we had the five dials on the right go to zero while the one on the left turned slowly to one. I was a bit disappointed, but I'm looking on the bright side: clearly the manufacturers expect this car to go over a million miles...

*The household has a new addition: Emma, our new goldfish, purchased by Thing Two in order to keep his other fish company. Earl, the original fish, did get something out of the deal besides companionship: a new ten-gallon tank and rainbow-colored underwater mountain/castle thing in which to lurk. Kelly has done some reading up on the subject and reports that the typical goldfish bowl, such as the one in which Earl previously resided, "is basically a torture chamber." The new one's certainly cleaner, at least, and that's how we'll try to keep it.

*If the 5th season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer doesn't come out on DVD soon, Kelly's going to lose her mind. We've now seen everything up to the end of season 4, thanks to the generosity of friends who are giving us their VHS tapes as the discs come out, but Kel's jonesing for some new episodes. And I don't think I'll be able to distract her with Strong Bad E-Mails much longer...

*Oh, what are Strong Bad E-Mails? Well... there's no point in even attempting to explain. Pay a visit to www.homestarrunner.com and meet the characters if you like. Or if you prefer, just click here and let Strong Bad teach you how to draw a dragon. You won't regret it. He makes drawing FUN!!
10:23 AM

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