I have read that true voyage is return but I what is arriving home when you have never been there and do not know anything? If you have been on the road for so long and are tired of driving,it is pretty sweet. We drove all the way from Tahoe to San Jose via the Golden Gate bridge. We got awesome mileage -52 MPG going 82 miles per hour. We shed 5000 or so feet of altitude in 40 miles . We had to rush because the GPS
said that we would get there 20 minutes before the picnic at the kids' school; sadll
Y the GPS forgot that humans need to eat and use the potty, so we arrived just after the thlend of the picnic. That probably was to the best for the kids as their teachers were STOL l so they could see the classrooms and teachers and not have to deal with the other kiss. Please pardon any bizarre typos. what my. Son calls this hotel but is our new home lacks wifi so I am writing this on my cell phone. More later when we know more.

Posted by Chris at 2:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We crossed over into California at about 6 pm to much yelling, outside voice screaming, honking, high fiving and whooping. And at least for me, much relief that driving is almost done (he wrote as he prepared to take up residence in California). We ate dinner at a very family friendly little restaurant on Lake Tahoe and then my beloved life partner and I, in a pattern that dates back to our undergrad days together, decided to halt our plan to drive late and "get up early and finish it in the morning."

I am actually writing this the next morning, in the tub as I attempt to make myself presentable enough to meet for the first time the parents, teachers and students in the kids new school at a picnic today.

We drove through Utah which really is a lovely place in the northern bits - absoluetly stunning mountains surrounding green valleys with picture perfect rocky rivers. As we left the stripy cliffs, we had to say good bye to the easy access to the layers of rocks that we've enjoyed ever since the Rockies stuck up out of the plain at Denver. As we drove north through Utah, the rates of erosion and plant life visibly increased making the mountains more like the eastern mountains, more round and covered in dirt or rubble and plants.

We stopped at the Salt Lake in the midst of some of the very little rain we've seen so far. I did go out and get some of the water and we all verified that it is indeed a salty lake. We hopped back in the car and drove through these amazing salt flats. They were very impressively odd plains with no signs of living things except for a bunch of elaborately arranged beer bottles spelling out various messages and signs on the side of the road. We gathered a small tupperware of the salt. We drove by a Morton salt factory with huge piles of salt sitting outside, uncovered, in the rain; but there was so much salt it didn't much dissolve and wash away.

We got to Nevada as our impatience started to reach epic levels. My son had to be more or less co-erced into the car after each stop, as he trustingly but futilely used words to tell us that he did not want to get into the car again. My sentiments exactly. Still, he and my daughter both spent several hours napping.

I'm not a good rider on really curvy high mountainous roads, and at some point my beloved life partner was approaching a slow moving truck in the passing lane, and I started in with my hand waving and twitching. She said, "I guess I should slow down" and I was able to quip, "Or I could assume the crash position." We laughed for several minutes at that one, giddy or mad with the anticipated finishing of this great transition between our old life and our new life in California.

It has been feeling like this drive is an appropriate transition - big enough to sever our daily bonds to life in Takoma Park, long enough to explain bodily to each of us why things will be different on the West Coast, and uncomfortable enough to make it easy to find things we like in the new living quarters. A Prius is a bit small to live in for so many hours (when we have to get back in, I mutter to myself, "Initiate Folding Procedure" as I fold my stiff limbs back into the twisted shape they need to fit) but it did only cost us about $300 in gas. And we have seen how interestingly varied this continent is. And we are definietly the four Austin-Lanes now - no home but the shifting platforms we provide one another. Hua!

The reality of that isn't so grand of course - we are at that point of giddiness where pretty much each fart or burp is discussed. When we get into the car, not only is the 3 year old protesting, and the limbs are protesting, the nose protests as well. Whew, this car needs airing out. And of course, we are all cranky enough that it's clear that our new life so close at hand has not left the problems of our old life behind; I can act out my pettiness, stubbornness and inflexibility in the mountains with little humidity and no mosquitoes.

Well, off for what looks like a fairly undramatic drive across California and then our grand entrance accross the Golden Gate bridge (a dramatic florish my beloved life partner has generously allowed me) and then down to Almaden valley to our new lives, filled with all of our old stuff carried along.

Posted by Chris at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i can't get the link because I am writing this on my daughter's One Laptop Per Child computer which I haven't figured out cut and paste on. We drove from a ski resort on US 40 near Boulder just west of the Continental Divide to Price, Utah.

I got up at my normal early hour for zazen, bath and coffee, except it turned out that the coffee maker in this ski resort was deluxe and had a strength knob which was turned to ultra weak, so the coffee was looking a bit weak but drinking the whole pot turned out to have enough caffeine. The hotel we drove to in the dark was in the middle of beautiful but lowish mountains, but near very tall mountains. There is a beetle that is killing all of the pine trees, so the pine tree covered mountains are a strange sort of color, half green and half brown. The family watched Mrs. Doubtfire and then got on the road. I talked my beloved life partner into going back up to the continental divide that we drove over in the dark. However, after driving over it, we decided to go back to I 70 and go that way, and cross the continental divide in a much more dramatic spot with snow that the kids walked down to and played in and a sign to get a photo of them that mirrored the photo of me as a 4 year old at the continental divide. We then sped on by Vail and various other ski places and went through a fabulous canyon. As we got closer to Utah. we got a very heavy rainstorm and gave up on getting back onto 40 and visiting Dinosaur, Colorado settling instead for what turned out to be awesome mesas and cliffs in Utah. The layers of rock are so obvious, and the mountains are all different colors with the layers at different angles.

We ate lunch at a very child-friendly place called the hard rock cafe; we walked around a stream and bought cowboy boots for the kids. They are pretty cute, and my son has no shoes that he likes and fit him. We had dinner at a great restaurant in Price. Very family friendly.

We have prepped the kids that tomorrow will be a super long drive day, probably 12 hours of actual drive time, 700 miles or so. We are going to get out and touch the Salt Lake and then touch Lake Tahoe, and then try to arrive in Sacramento for our final night in a hotel; then we'll cross over the Golden Gate Bridge as our grand entry into the Bay Area and then show up at the First Day of School Picnic at the little school our kids will share.

Posted by Chris at 12:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We had a shorter day but we got to see some fellow Takoma Park expats that have moved to Colorado.

We made it out of the great plains and into the Rocky Mountains. We didn't really see many rocks anywhere until wham, over the horizon we could see the edge of the Rockies. Of course, by that time we were on a 5000 foot plateau. Our friends said that we'd probably feel the altitude. I think our current altitude is about 10000 feet. We unfortunately, and despite several planning conversations about it, drove over the continental divide in the pitch dark. I think that means that it's all down hill from here.

The Prius is turns out drains the battery totally while going up hill.

We have only 1200 miles or so to go to San Jose. We keep alternating plans to take it easy and not worry about when we get there and to freak out and make sure we aren't late for our daughter's first school picnic no matter what the suffering. Actually, my beloved life partner and I keep having arguments about this, but in fact we are arguing about two things that we can't even achieve - we have been giving up the drive well before even reaching the distance that the relaxed fun pace plan would ask us to reach. And we aren't relaxed by the time that we give up.

I'm exhausted, and I can't even remember the high lights from this morning.

--Chris

Posted by Chris at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whew, Kansas is a very wide state. People always write about how flat it is, but driving at least, the thing that struck us was how big it is. We still are 53 miles from the western end. It is flat, but flatness is not what I thought it would be. It doesn't mean that it's totally flat like a coastal plain in NC or even the valley bottoms in Silicon Valley. It means that the tiny little hills get smaller and farther apart as you go west. They still have slopes, so that you are likely to be driving up or down, but you'll take 3.5 miles to go down a vertical drop that you'd make walking to school in Maryland, and then another 3.5 miles to go back up the same small height. What that means is that when you crest that 100 foot hill the first time, you can see over seven miles of gently sloping hill. It's just less vertical. And as we get farther west, the areas that are flat like a coastal plain do seem to be growing. But that just means you can see each little hill even from miles away. Heck, you can see people's mail boxes sticking up above the horizon.

We passed a wind farm, and I have to say all four of us found it inspirational and beautiful; you could see these arms moving so gracefully and slowly, yet with a lot of momentum. It makes me think of the idea of American can-do, and left me with a pleased feeling that the world my children will inherit won't be a total disaster. My son was actually asleep, so he didn't get to comment, but my daughter seemed pretty impressed (she glanced up from her activity for more than 1 second).

I did see one outcropping of rock (aside from the ceaseless blasted hills destroyed to make way for the interstate) near Fort Riley, there was about 5 miles of boulders and rock-walls. But mostly there will low hills, shallow valleys, and streams and rivers with not a boulder to see.

We seem to have fallen into a good routine where I get up first, relax for a while, and then they get up and we get going for a few hours, then stop a few times for bathroom, more coffee, some sort of lunch-like experience, and then move into nap time, where my beloved life partner and son sleep, my daughter listens to books on tape and I drive. Then after the naps comes tea time which tends to mean McDonald's, plastic toys, more coffee, and some sort of ice cream or milk shake. Then we keep switch drivers and I perform intensive care on the dyad (reading stories to my daughter while simultaneously playing dinosaurs with my son and keeping their conflicts non-violent) until the end of day melt-down forces a stop. This latter period also has the odd bits of peace when I can read some more. My morning peaceful reading is the Hofstadter and the bits and pieces I get during the day are the sci-fi Banks.

We had to say good bye this morning to my Missouri family, and my son again exhibited his full dislike for saying goodbye, refusing to meet my uncle's eyes and then enthusiastically waving as we drove off. An hour or so later, he was asking when we'd see "that boy," his older cousin who shares a first name with him.

We also had a number of talks about our "house" and where is was and where is California and so on.

Fortunately, tonight's motel has a very nice hot tub, where one can stretch ones legs and forget the strain caused by trying to explain the massive changes going on to some one with a relative experience of time that seems to be 10 times different than my experience (in other words, I'm 40 and he's almost four, so I assume that each minute for him is like 10 minutes for me, and each 10 hour day in the car is like 100 hours of driving, thankfully broken up by that nap).

Despite the relaxation, the hot tubs have brought up an interesting parenting dilemma. My kids have always been allowed by me to go into the hot tub, despite the occasional signs warning against young children. We don't stay in the hot water endlessly, and when they are smaller they hop out after a few minutes, as though they are able to regulate their own sense of being too hot. But the second night, there was a staff person there to insist that no kids could go into the hot tub; so I didn't go in either, but we had to talk about why we couldn't go into that hot tub, and the next night had to talk about why we would go into the next hot tub, and in fact I just answered my daughter's question "Can we go into the hot tub" with "It depends on if there is someone there to keep us out." I'm not really happy with that explanation, but I can't argue myself into deprived the kids of something they enjoy and are perfectly safe doing, when I can tell that these signs about kids are put their by the lawyers because of some fears of what some unobservant parents will do. But then again, it's not obvious how to distinguish situations like that and situations like when we are hiking on the cliffs near the Potomac and it really is important not to go near the edge. My daughter was very pleased to go and check and then report that in fact no one was watching but then she was unhappy that I wanted to spend so much time soaking and not enough time playing drama games in the normal but cold pool.

We had some funny issues with the car GPS today: it kept getting confused and asking us to go in great loops or to go hundreds of miles out of the way. If we kept going with our google maps based plan, eventually it gave up on its random things, but the "Miles to go to destination" kept getting bumped upwards by hundreds of miles. For most of the day we thought we had over 2,000 miles left, but really we are merely 1,500 miles away from San Jose. Well, I write merely in a sarcastic fashion, but it means we are more than 1/2 of the way through.

Good night.

--Chris

Posted by Chris at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ahh, the sweet milk of human kindness flows richly here in Missouri. Just sitting around swapping stories about our lives with my Dad's family is restorative. We had a day with no highway driving, just visiting with my father's brother and his family. We slept late (or had a nice quiet morning of zazen, coffee and a bath), visited the lovely Jasper County Courthouse, had a bit of a tantrum in the sandwich store on the square, went through two antique/new again stores yelling "Wow, they have a ....." and touching it, then moving on and yelling, "Wow, they have a ...." and touching that. My son seemed as thrilled by the really old metal sausage makers and iron hooks and other farm tools as by the old-school metal Tonka trucks. After much talk about how we could only buy small things because we are short on space, he and his sister found some tiny cute things that one hopes will be good for several hours of play. Rather than nap time, we had 2 second cousins come over for play; that was pretty fun until exhaustion made the play more about telling on each other and my son angrily yelling at the older cousin. The younger cousin is 11 months and at that peak of charmingness where he's not walking yet but can reach everything and stops to smile at any nearby adults every few minutes.

You'll note I primarily was shadowing the 3 year old. The 8 year probably had a different take on being the only girl among 4 cousins, although she's had a dog to play with and spoil.

We went out to a excellent Chinese buffet, but the three year old had one of his mega meltdowns leading to a short car ride and what I hoped would be the beginning of a long nights sleep and turned out to just be the beginning of a short nap.

I finally found the first book I read on the trip, Frank Herbert's White Plague. It's a sort of grisly book - a biogeneticist has his wife and children killed by a bomb and goes mad and then makes a plague that kills all the women in the countries that were involved in the bomb that hurt his family. Fortunately, he goes sane and helps solve the plague and indeed it turns out he's discovered enough about the human genome/cell that everyone who survives the plague and it's associated descent into savagery will live 5,000 years. I hadn't planned on rereading it, but picked it up during the book package phase. The perils of moving for me.

Today we are hoping to make good milleage; my daughter's school starts with a picnic on Tuesday and classroom on Wednesday. We are hoping to make it in time, although my beloved life partner and I are having trouble forging a concensus plan on how to do that without a completely inhumane car ride that also misses the chance to see some of the amazing and quirky things we drive by. She wants to turn on the DVD player and just drive, and I'm trying to have a slower pace and then end up with one really long day down from the mountains into CA. We'll see what new synthesis arises from our never easy dialectic.

Today is supposed to be very flat. I understand (from the excellent book "Earth" by David Brin") that you can't find any rocks in Kansas except for meteorites. It's just dust/soil blown down from the rockies and covering the underlying rocks enourmously. We'll see that too!

From now until the Bay area, I'll be seeing things and places I've never seen before. As C.S. Lewis writes, "Onwards and Upwards!"

Posted by Chris at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's today's route

We drove from southern Indiana, stopping in the town of New Harmony for breakfast at the Main Deli. One of my best friends grew up here, and so of course given this chance to drive to all of these new places, we stopped by to see the town. Oddly enough, the people there really tended to look like my friend. And the food was excellent. Then off through southern Illinois, where the difference between travelling back in the day and with a GPS and cell phone became obvious, as I hadn't picked up on the fact that we were going to be driving in Illinois at all until the moment that we drove up the ramp on a gorgeous old steel bridge saying "Welcome to Illinois!" on it. We also were suprised to discover that Illinois is very very flat and has oil fields. We kept driving by these things that looked exactly like oil pumps that you see in the movies, but I kept spinning these theories about how they were water pumps for irrigation or something when we drove by a "Oil Field and Oil Equipment" store in one of the small towns.

We made it to St. Louis by 2 pm, with a plan to stay till 4 pm, and had a great time looking at the very impressive monument for the Gateway to the West. It turns out that the Gateway to the West was this 1880s era bridge that had 2 train tracks (so there was no turn taking for East to West and West to East trains) and a highway without a toll. The Arch was built around 1950 to celebrate what was already history. But it's a beautiful object, and larger than the Washington monument. My beloved life partner and I say that they had horse carriages and decided that if the kids asked for a ride, we'd say, "Well, hmm, ok, I guess we can do that," but not bring up the prospect. My daughter asked and we parents were able to implement our plan. One of the few things that's going smoothly. We couldn't even get lunch in St. Louis as easily as it seems like that would be possible. I had to suspend being vegetarian in favor of being adequately nourished, and truth be told I enjoy the ham and cheese sandwiches even when I do thank the pig for its life.

My morning again started with a pleasant mix of zazen, coffee and a bath.

Missouri turns out to be a happpening state; it is more developed and more trafficky than we've seen since leaving Mary land. It also is quite a lot hillier than Illinois or Indiana. We are now on the edge of the Ozarks, and it's quite steep rolling hills.

We arrived tonight at my aunt and uncle's house in the town that my father and grandmother grew up in, and which I've been to many times before, so for the first time since Hagerstown I'm somewhere I've been before. We aren't going to drive at all tomorrow and will visit with cousins tomorrow night and then get off Friday morning for the remaining 22 hundred miles.

Posted by Chris at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whew. We didn't leave Charleston until about 3 pm - the amount of stuff we had in the car was too much for my beloved life partner who sorted through every single thing and mailed off about 4 boxes to San Jose directly. Add to this that we (well, my co-parent and my kids) didn't wake until about 9:30 am, and you have trouble. Toss in a spousal spat or two, and well, we just pulled into a Motel 8 at 10:30 pm. The little boy had just fallen asleep, having successfully resisted a nap for seven hours of driving; this person normally being one who only naps when he falls asleep in the car. But not this stimulating yet boring car with a sister to pull hair with ("With" being correct - despite being scolded about every 35 minutes this hair pulling seems to have been developed into some sort of consensual game).

I woke up at 7 am myself, and procured a cup of coffee, a bath and 25 minutes of zazen before the madding crowd joined me.

You can definitely tell that we are out of Maryland; we stopped at a gas station/quick mart in Kentucky, and not only was it in the midst of stunning rolling hills with greener than green grass full of the most majestic horses, standing around the gas station were about 6 guys in cowboy hats and cowboy boots shooting the breeze. The interstate keeps having cuts through the mountains/hills where you can see the varied layers of rock very well; the sandstone just washes away but there is this grayer rock (slate?) that causes big piles of gravel and then very hard white rock that seems to cast of the odd giant bolder but is otherwise not eroding that much.

I've finished my first book of the trip, and am now alternating between "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter and Ian Banks space opera called "The Algebraist." The Hofstadter is very interesting to me, as Gödel, Escher, Bach was the first book that I read that really changed my life in an intellectual way. I am a Strange Loop is a further exposition of how the notion of "I" is really an illusion that arises from our ways of thinking; where GEB used math, art and music as illustrative domains for his theories about thinking, "I am a Strange Loop" uses his own life, his biography, as the domain. So for a fanboy of Hofstadter like myself, it's great (I went to a lecture once and had him autograph my copy of GEB). The Banks book, like all of his that I've read, is very well written, with great technology and hope for the future, with a bit too much love for weaponry, if you know what I mean.

The kids are being pretty good except for the hair pulling and fighting naps. We swam for about 2 hours this morning during the great sorting which I'm sure helped. I only read one story aloud, from Isaac B. Singer's "Stories for Children." I'm not sure what they are doing back there, but my daughter continues to prefer not to journal and not to have access to the DVD player. They seem to alternate talking games where they are talking to legos or dolls or whatever, separately, and then interacting with one another, which seems to involve rapidly alternating laughter, bossiness, politeness and screaming (sometimes happily, sometimes not).

Our goal tomorrow is Carthage MO, some 428 miles away, 6 1/2 hours of driving according to google maps. Should be possible, but it'll put us at about 12 hours in the car, for some reason.

Here's today's route:

--Chris

Posted by Chris at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finally, we've left our old county and indeed our old state. We ate lunch at a wonderful (in taste and kindness to children) store in Cumberland, which is a lovely valley in Western Maryland, called Queen City Creamery. Later on, we drove on on Interstate 79, which I've never heard of before. Tonight, we are staying in Charleston, West Virginia, another lovely valley in the East Coast mountains. The kids were very glad that all four of us are present. My daughter, the 8 year old, is so pleased that she hasn't insisted on watching any movies on the portable DVD player we bought for the trip. I have a rule that she has to write 8 sentences in a journal about our trip (actually, she can write any sentences she wants, but all the sentences she's come up so far are about the trip) before we turn on the DVD player. So far she has preferred to just keep drawing or reading comic books to writing her journal. We did a journal a few years ago when we visited Austin, TX, and she wrote the funniest, most interesting journal that I can't wait for her to break through and write again, but it might not happen. On my side, I have lots more days of boredom in the car. On her side, she has apparently inherited my immense stubbornness. I just asked my beloved life partner if I have an immense stubbornness, and she gave an eloquent roll of the eyes and attributed to me an "intractable obstinacy." I have some idea of what she is talking about, but I label that thing in me something like "a passion for defending that which needs defending." Of such divergent perspectives around a shared known reality are long term relationships built.

Our son got a nap today, and both of the kids managed to tolerate our "Local restaurants rather than McDonalds" philosophy for this trip. I'm vegetarian, and our previous rule of "No McDonalds except for road trips" was rapidly morphed by my skilled negotiating offspring into "Only McDonalds on road trips"; it is not possible to maintain a healthy human body on the vegetarian food available at McDonalds; our last road trip we had some really fun experiences with local diners, and it turned out that our kids don't like the food at McDonalds, they just want the toys. So I now am one of the pathetic wretches that buys coffee and fries and "Two Toddler Toys", paying out $10 for what cost McD's $2. But today, our messed up schedules meant we never had time to go to McDs.

But today it was beautiful. We are on roads we've never traveled on, and seeing mountains that are a bit steeper than the Maryland mountains we've camped on. The kids have started asking if we are in California yet, not quite realizing the horror that the existence of a list of 12 states has in store for us.

Again, I must beg pardon for being so incoherent. If I get 10 hours of sleep tonight, I'll finally have caught up from missing the entire night last week. Hopefully the soreness of the 200 some boxes and the dozen or so cuts from the tape gun will also disappear as I return to normality, this new normality of our family with out a fixed abode, with only one another to make all this newness something fun rather than threatening.

We have been listening to "The Witches" by the brilliant Roald Dahl; a scary but fun story about a boy who stops the witches but is turned into a mouse. I haven't yet had to/gotten to read any of the books I brought for the purpose.

The Prius is very small: we had to use 3 carts to bring our luggage up toniight, and each person has so much stuff at their feet that we can't move our feet around. This day was only the first serious day of driving. I can't imagine that the car will feel more spacious in a week. We are going along with the car GPS rather than Google maps: the moment to moment whining outweighs any optimal routing algorithms.

Good night,

--Chris

Posted by Chris at 9:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And we are only three people in a Prius. My beloved life partner has been unable to tear herself away from our former home and the task of moving stuff to the attic and making it welcome to the people moving in next week.

We have had 4 distinct plans this week for handling this; on Monday and Tuesday, the kids and I were going to drive to St. Louis starting Wednesday and meet her at the airport; on Wednesday and Thursday, we were going to rapidly finish this part of the move and then all drive out together on Friday. On Friday and Saturday morning, the kids and I were going to drive out and meet her on Monday or so. Saturday morning and today, she has been going through the process of readying the house and herself as fast as possible, and we have been calling every so often to see if we could leave soon. So today we are actually staying in a hotel about 1.5 miles from our old home. I've refused to return to Takoma Park, so last night we stayed in a hotel in Derwood or someplace and tonight we are staying in the hotel in the "Silver Sprung" development - reachable on the 5th floor of the Wayne Street garage. We even ate dinner at Austin Grill. It's been a bit difficult to explain to the kids: "We are leaving our house, but the four of us Austin-Lanes are our home, HUA!" "We are leaving our house and mother, but we'll see her soon." "We aren't leaving just yet, but tomorrow we are all four leaving together, isn't that great!" "We aren't leaving tonight, but tomorrow morning, and we'll meet Mommy at the airport, now go say goodbye to ----- for the last time again." "OK, Mommy will be here after we watch Horton Hears the Who and I blog for a while." The lats being our current status.

Ahh, life. Who could anticipate it.

--Chris

Posted by Chris at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We actually left the house finally, and made it to a hotel 16 miles away from our former home. We might have made more progress, but there was a lot to bid farewell to, from the Savory and the current folks working there, to a little boy that my son has been friends with since birth, to a favorite hide-out that my son found last year. We went to Fair Day's Trade, a store for fair trade toys and had my two kids pick out fun stuff for the drive. We visit this store a lot, as the store owner's son and my son are friends, so my kids hear "No, we can't buy anything here today" many many times, so they enjoyed picking out thing after thing and hearing "Yes." (I don't even bother with "Did you bring your money?" in this instance, as they can't afford fair trade items yet. They can't really afford new stuff, just Value Village things, and the odd extravagence at Now and Then.

Our final goodbye was to my grade school friend (and his burgeoning family) with whom I initially moved to this area. Having thus now thoroughly said farewell, we are on the road with a light heart. The very warm waters of the pool at this hotel have helped ease the transition, and frankly I think the kids are relieved to be finally doing what we've prepped them on for so long. While to me the 6 or so weeks that I've been pursuing the job to which I now drive my family have been quite a short time to change things, to then this week has been "OK, today we are moving and leaving our friends and schools and house!" "Oh wait, we haven't packed enough, we will leave tomorrow." "Ok, tonight we are leaving." "Oh, well, maybe tomorrow, here let's say goodbye to these friends again."

Not very excellent for the kids, but completely honest haplessness on our parts. Who let us be in charge of helpless human beings? At times like this, it still sort of shocks me, as it did that very first night when my daughter's fluid filled lungs caused her to wheeze a bit and us new parents to panic a bit.

It's nice to just be driving, even if not so far yet. We have to average 300 or so miles a day. I finally compared the various routes, and seeing our friends and fun spots along the way seems to add about 300 miles to our trip, which is just 10%. Our current next destination is New Harmony, Indiana, the site of an early commune and the birth place of one of our daughter's god-parents, and a mere 716 miles from here. Give or take. (It's interesting because Google maps and our Prius GPS seem to have different ideas about the best route; while I'd tend to guess that the Google computers would have better answers, the car is there nagging at us constantly when we turn off of its favored path. My own ability to pick a route seems to be happily atrophying.

Our trip today was so short that there weren't any really funny parenting moments in the car. Good night everyone.

--Chris

Posted by Chris at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ahh, another day of saying good bye, encouraging my son to hug someone goodbye, and then not leaving! At this point (and please, if I said goodbye to you today, do not read this as a personal thing, but as my own fatigue), I am ready to be done with goodbye and ready for the open road ahead.

After getting the blue cubes dismissed at around 5:30 pm, we lacked the energy and will to leave, so we sorted out places to sleep (we are renting out our house semi-furnished, so while there's no beds, there is a very old fold out couch with metal bars and a few other padded surfaces to sleep on) and went to Austin Grill for our standard non-Takoma Park celebratory dinner (we'd said good bye to Mark's and Savory already). I actually had a margarita despite having been awake at that point for 36 hours (thanks to Savory, our local coffee shop, for those 6 excellent double mochas). And sadly, we have one more task - we are renting our house out semi-furnished, but we have to remove all our detritus that wasn't even worth moving (or was too fragile to risk moving) up to the attic or for stuff that can be risked with water or mold into the basement. I think after I collapsed and the kids collapsed, my beloved life partner stayed up somehow and sorted the house into "stuff that we should try to squeeze into the Prius" and "stuff to be crammed into the attic." At least there were lines of masking tape at waist height and neatly arranged piles of stuff here and there.

I have high hopes that Day 3 will see us actually leave, especially as I finally got the official paperwork for the new job yesterday, or at least a fascimile of it. That was quite a fun thing - we were packing, signing up for schools, etc., and still hadn't gotten the formal offer letter. I knew the people in the new company, and they would reassure me from time to time, and I tried hard not to be a Washington, DC, bureaucratic type and insist on the paperwork before committing to anything, but I was very relieved to get the fax. Especially since the real driver on the schedule is that I remember very well how excellent it is to change to a new school after school has started, and we did not want the kids to have to do that.

Posted by Chris at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am working on a longer post explaining WTF but the short version is that I am ending my career as a stay at home parent, and ending my status as the primary caregiver in order that my beloved life partner can enjoy the effervescence of childhood a bit while we still have it, and I am resuming my career as a computer programmer (masssively scalable systems being my speciality). I haven't been blogging as handing off the primary care-giver reins to a different person is, while indeed full of amusing anecdotes and opportunities for perfecting oneself, not easy to write about without giving offense and searching for a job is, while possibly of interest to other stay at homes, not something that I wanted to share with prospective employers. (And yes, the people that ended up hiring me had read this blog).

But that's just background - we are moving to California, and we are doing it in a Prius (well, moving ourselves and the stuff we just can't live without for 3 weeks; the rest is in blue cubes). So what a natural blogging opportunity. At least on the East Coast, the sort of middle of the road (not too nice, not too icky, just right) hotels we patronize tend to have wifi. So I'm expecting to be able to convey the amusing horrors of 3100 miles in a tiny tiny car with four people on a daily basis for the 12 or so days it takes us. But, we missed the first day of driving altogether.

It just took longer to pack and sort our stuff, and having ended our month of tearful goodbyes to our neighbors and my fellow parenting friends with a rousing finale of goodbyes, after telling people we were leaving at 3, and goodbye and so on, they'd walk back by our house later in the day (with it's four not-so-giant self-pack blue cubes and us wrestling with boxes, bikes, and our ambivalence about moving) and comment on how much moving appears to suck.

So the first day of traveling in a Prius ended up with the kids sleeping at a neighbors (the beds having been packed away first thing in the morning), and my wife and I staying up late late late as we tried to meet the 8 am deadline for picking up the giant blue cubes. I actually had no sleep, although I did treat myself to a 3 am donut/coffee run/sci-fi break and a 30 minute soak in the tub. And we did (on day 2) end up with fully loaded cubes wishing we'd ordered one more cube, having finished the loading minutes before they were picked up.

I am pleased to report that something about the last four years has made it easier for me to give things away. I discarded about 60% of my clothes rather than packing them. For at least the last four years, I've had a system of putting clean clothes from the wash onto the right edge of the closet, so sorting my clothes by how long it's been since I've worn them rather than by color or kind of clothes. So, as I sorted them, I knew if I hadn't worn them in years. And off to the store for others to use. And even the boxes of magazines that I was sorting in the same boxes in which the magazines had been moved to this house, I was able to recycle more easily than four years ago, when we moved here.

Of course, the fact that we are moving to a much smaller space and that I insisted to my beloved life partner that it was important to my personhood that I have my science fiction collection and my collection of computers and networking crud, I was prepared to minimize my space demands elsewhere as much as possible. I still ended up with about 3 boxes of Scientific American, Science News, and Linux Journals that I really want to skim before recycling or handing off for reuse.

There's so much stuff. All that camping gear, so not light on the land today. And we are trying not to have the kids associate moving with losing all their stuff, so we initially promised that all the toys would move with us (and indeed, the giant bin of stuffed animals proved to be a source of padding/stuffing that was often just the right size and shape for those odd spaces needed to make a well-packed cube. However, we had to inform them that we ran out of space and that some of the "sorting piles" would not be making it to California. These are giant baskets full of toy pieces that we fill during the occasionally pre-company panic and then only slowly empty out (as this takes the most labor intensive process: pick up a piece of wood or plastic, recognize what puzzle/toy/game it came from and either replace it or start the pile for that puzzle/toy/game; repeat 10,000 times). So we gave the kids two small boxes and said to put anything that they'd want from these giant sorting piles. Oddly enough, given how much they protest when we float the idea of just giving these piles to the thrift store, they didn't even fill up the two small boxes. And when then complain about missing toys at the other end, the parental story is clear: it must have been in the sorting pile. And most of the toys did make it.

Whew. Being tired makes me disinhibited. Sorry this is so rambling.

Here's the google map of our projected path:

Posted by Chris at 7:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For some reason I, a parent of a second grader, was talking to a parent of a kindergartner about our morning routine. I can' remember now if I was bragging about how we are now late less than 5% of the times (and so no longer get letters from the otherwise excellent principal about the importance of being on time) or if I was just commiserating about the odd fact of how difficult it can be to get a handful of small humans to a place at the same time every day.

But I was all "So then we eat, and then at 8:30 stop eating, and brush teeth and hair, and if she's not ready to walk out the door by 8:40 then we won't be watching TV later that day," and I had to stop for a digression about despite my daughter's reasonably self-driven mornings, I have to intervene to make sure that socks are chosen and really actually chosen early on, not at shoe time. "Screw up the socks, and it can cost you 10 minutes; there might not be the right sort of socks for the chosen clothes or shoes; maybe the drier needs to be emptied of socks, any sort of disaster can intervene."

At this point, one of the true master parents of the hill-side, Jenn Ash-Maher, spoke up to tell this story. Jen has three children, and soon after a close friend of hers had her third baby, she called up to ask about how it is possible to manage three children. Jen's answer was "Put Socks on Early."

Posted by Chris at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My small town has a bad reputation in the county as being fairly whiny.

This reputation is sort of deserved. Let me pick an example that is safe for me to hold up to laughter, as I've personally uttered all the words on both sides of the controversy. It's not about the specific reality, it's all about how the ideals of a better world are being betrayed by some hypothetical action. Clearly, for many issues, you can betray a world free of hatred and full of natural goodness no matter what you do.

There is a lovely hillside next to my daughter's school. We parents sit on the hillside and watch as the kids form their own society and experience a bit of self-directed behavior (which is very rare inside the school walls).

This being a forested bit of land, there's a tendency to have giant pieces of tree lieing about. The kids being descended from forest dwelling primates have a tendency to pick up the sticks and start whirling them about most happily.

So 1/2 the parents are all "Oh, jeez, don't they know about bullying in schools? The violence of these big boys, they are scaring the little kids, I can't believe this is going on in Takoma Park!" Then on the days when people start to get the kids to limit the stick whirling, the other half of the parents are all, "Oh, jeez, don't they know about the loss of freedom that our kids suffer from in this over worried society? We need more nature and running and why do people have to be so freaking worried about every little thing? Do we account for the cost of never risking a bit of ourselves when we rule out anything that might break a bone? "

Both sides agree that some stick swinging is a bit much and that some stick swinging is fine, and that people do need to wander about in nature more than they tend do in our strange society, and that gangs of bullies picking on girls and small boys shouldn't be a permanent feature. Ahh, but it is so much fun to throw our stones next to the stick swinging children.

Posted by Chris at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've had lots of caterpillars to interact with, and it's been a lesson in life and death. My son is at the age where he loves playing with bugs, but is only starting to conceptualize the difference between a dandelion tuft blowing about on the wind and an animal insect that is self moving. So he plays happily with the bugs, and occasionally they get smushed, most often by accident but sometimes out of curiosity. A few nights ago he and a friend were bringing one into show to my beloved life partner, when the caterpillar fell and alas was trod upon by the friend. Quite visibly smushed, to my son's great upset.

So last night, as we're coming in to get dinner going, he had brought a caterpillar in the house. As the adults were toodling around getting dinner ready, all of a sudden, I heard a very painful yowl go up from the kids, perhaps two yowls. It wasn't just run of the mill outrage over one sibling slight or another, the anguish sounded worth my moving from the kitchen. When I got there, my very upset daughter was holding the caterpillar and my son was wailing that she had stolen his caterpillar. It turns out he had 1/2 crushed the larva, and she was yelling that he was going to kill it. I said that it was a caterpillar that he had brought into the house. She said that it needed to go back to nature and that he was going to kill it. This sending of dead life back to nature has been a big theme between she I and for years, but I had to confess that her brother was just learning about bugs and their being alive and dying and so on, and that it was just part of being a small human that some bugs do get killed. She furiously gave it back to him and was so horrified at what I said that she retreated to her room for a good long time. My son was meanwhile yelling that he hadn't killed it and he wouldn't kill it and why wasn't it moving! After she left, I said that she'd been afraid that he'd kill it and that if it wasn't moving, perhaps it was already dead. He put it with great gentleness and concern on the ledge under the window, and I said that it might not be moving because it was scared that we were going to eat it or because it was hurt. We had a brief discussion about whether my son could eat the caterpillar (where I wasn't really sure about that; on the one hand, yuck, on the other hand, I'm sure our ancestors would have eaten some caterpillars, on the other hand, we just had aerial spraying to kill the caterpillars). So we let it alone on the ledge for a while, and it uncurled a tad and then appeared to die, which my son seemed to accept. When my daughter recovered from my apparent casual acceptance of the hecatomb of insect deaths perpetrated merely by young humans, she opened the window and returned the dead bug to nature.

So I thought it was over, with this interesting intersection of concern and inexperience and my own muddled thinking tossed in as well (at some point I had told my daughter that when she was 3, she'd killed a number of bugs as wells, which came out a bit meanly).

The next morning, now 24 hours after the spraying, my daughter and I were walking to school and she noticed a lot of dead caterpillars. I confessed that it was probably due to the spraying that the helicopters had done yesterday (oddly for some reason not attributing it to the nature of big humans) and that a lot of caterpillars had died. So we had a long talk about this spraying and killing. We had hiked last summer on the Appalachian Trail where gypsy moths had denuded a lot of trees that were very palpably dying, and while the moths where so thick in the air that you couldn't avoid them landing on you. So I explained that the spraying was to protect the trees from this one type of caterpillar. She asked the obvious follow-up question about other sorts of caterpillars, and I had to confess that many fine local caterpillars died as well.

In these beautiful spring days, in the midst of such bounteous scents and breezes and growth, death is not absent.

Posted by Chris at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Each spring I expect to be ecstatically happy, as the tedium of days inside give way to the wonders of a new spring. However, it seems each year that I just barely make it through the winter, and emerge, pale, irritated and desperate into the long awaited spring days, curiously out of sync with the explosion of life around us. I thought I'd be frolicking, but instead I'm irritable and aware of my own pent up neediness rather than embracing the external moment. I want to sip coffee and chat with adults at the park, not run around and remind my son of how we cooperate and share and use our words. I want to sit and watch him tire himself out, not run with him, or worse yet, fling him in the air in his much beloved rough housing. So our interaction is far from graceful, me (complaining, I mean talking, as rapidly as social custom allows to my fellow adults, and receiving gratifying stories of winter's exhaustion in exchange) ignoring him until he finds some way to make himself unignorable (grabbing the leg and pulling, yelling, getting into a fight, he knows the drill). Then I dash off and play (in the dazzling sunlight, which warms despite my self-pity) for a bit. Then he and a companion find the fun in looking at ants for a while, and I slip back to ask about a pregnancy or tell about a plumber or whatever.

At least we, like the bean plants my son planted at school, are rapidly transforming from our tired winter selves into tan, confident and fun parents again, with sleepy outdoorsy children replacing the irritated, cooped up indoor children of the last few months. (At least my kids get tan; I'm apparently in some radical fringe group that doesn't worry about the sun that much until high summer or until outings that are longer than 4 hours; I feel a bit of a base tan is good protection for the July days, and have never insisted on hats except for myself).

Thank God, I find myself gradually getting caught up on that apparent need of mine to talk to adults, as I get tanner and my son remembers the outdoor playing protocols, and rediscovers the great joy of finding new sticks, rocks and spiders (and continues to explore why we can collect sticks and rocks but not spiders). The tension gradually drains out of the days as the strength returns to our limbs, and we make ready for the great mulberry feast that nature is preparing for us.

See you outside; if I'm staring down with a frown, keep yelling until I glance up and smile a hello.

Posted by Chris at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After my last bragging post, I've been thinking about the issue of changing the world a lot with courage.

I'd like to point out that Rosa Parks, having prepared herself and being a part of a community seeking to change the law, took advantage of a quotidian moment to resist a blatant and pervasive injustice in such a way that the sympathy of all the world was swung to her cause. She was prepared, and she had friends.

But more relevant than that, I have to say women's work is not respected in this society. For millenia, women themselves were disrespected as part and parcel of the disrespect for women's work. In this country at this time, forty years into the current wave of feminism, we have the possibility for women to be respected but only as long as they don't perform women's work.

And yet, as it has been for millenia, women's work is in fact important, and worth doing. Leaving aside, as I must, the most miraculous bearing of children, I say that the careful rearing of children and of tending to the hearth is the core of our civilization. And yet the women's movement continually is forced by the patriarchal structures to accept a dilemma between careers and children. It takes time to notice that this choice is only a choice for women alone if one accepts sexism. When we assume that the care of children is of importance to all persons, and persons of all genders, then many of the dilemmas of the mommy track and the mommy wars are seen as false dilemmas, merely examples of sexism in its current phase. I've lost track of how many NPR call in shows I've heard where people talk about the trade offs between having kids first and then having careers or establishing a career first, then pausing a bit, and having kids, and then trying to resume their careers. It is rare to hear a call for fathers to demand more flexibility and time from their workplaces. I know that not everyone even has that choice, but even in my very well educated, rich and powerful neighborhood, it's not common to hear child-care treated as the joint and mutual responsibility of the responsible adults. On the radio, I haven't heard people pointing out that when men lawyers demand time off for their kids, the women will have an easier time making partner (or whatever the specific translation is). And this is true despite the rise of stay at home dads as a conscious subgroup of parents, and despite the fathers around me being vastly more active and involved than I recall from my suburban youth in the 70s.

So those of us laboring in the trenches of diapers, tantrums, the teaching and learning of language, of negotiation, of the world's causes and effects, and of the utility of calmness and kindness, are in an unusual situation. Things are undoubtedly changing. Every one certainly gives lip service to the importance of kids. But at the time, we are raising kids and are not respected as workers. People say, "oh, that must be nice" and then five minutes later "what do you do with all your time?" People constantly say of a person spending their time and attention on child-rearing ("child-care" as the phrase goes) that they are not working. Fie on that.

So, after congratulating myself for being a man and rearing these fascinating but unruly kids up, I realized that I need to beg congratulations for all my fellow workers in the fields, playgrounds, and grocery stores. Anyone who is working hard to raise kids well is stating the importance of women's work; and as that work is valued more, the genders will become more equal in the wider world of paid work, and our society will become more peaceful and more able to care for all life.

Change a diaper and change the world. It'll be particularly useful for men as a group to embody this truth, but everyone currently rearing children is shaping a better future for our entire society, and they benefit from societal recognition of the utmost importance of their labor.

Thanks everyone, for populating my future and my children's future with kind and intelligent people instead of dumb mean people.

Posted by Chris at 7:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My daughter was recently studying about Rosa Parks at her school. I've always found the sort of courage which Rosa Parks epitomized to be the highest form of courage; the one form to which all people can aspire, and which if even 10% of us mustered the world would continue to transform in marvelous ways. However, I was taken aback at a question she asked me. She asked, "Dad, do you do any work like Rosa Parks, getting bad laws changed?"

My answer wavered between lameness and non-lameness, but I was ready with my answer, and explained how the part of the world I am trying to change is that women and men should be free to do whatever work that they are best at, and that for that to happen, more fathers need to be doing the work of raising their children. We've had conversations about how in the past, men had to do certain jobs because of being men and women had to do certain jobs because of being women, instead of each person having the full scope of human action open to them. In a way, I've been waiting for someone to ask me this question for years.

It was my son's question that really made me laugh. A few days later we were talking about him missing his mother, who was at work (which we've visited a few times, so he knows the building). He said, "Dad, when you worked in that building, where was that?" My daughter and I started telling him about the AOL buildings, and she told him about going to "boring" meetings there. So then he asked, "when you worked at that building, where did you wash the dishes?" He's heard the story of how I worked at a building similar to what mom does now, and he clearly has learned that a large part of my labor is washing dishes.

So after I finished laughing, I figured that my answer to my daughter was indeed true enough. We went on to a have a good conversation about cafeterias and how I wasn't allowed to wash dishes at AOL, but that I "did stuff on computers."

Posted by Chris at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My daughter had been rather indifferent about riding bikes for a while. She had a glamorous two-wheeler bought by my mother for a few years, but has been rather steadfast about not having the training wheels taken off (since a brief attempt last summer). However, recently a neighborhood kid who is younger has mastered the two-wheeler herself, so it became urgent to be rid of the training wheels.

Unfortunately, both of us were fairly nervous about this transition. I didn't really learn how to bike without training wheels until I was eight or so, and I'm not someone that bikes currently (basically out of fear that I'd be killed within a year of biking in DC traffic). I actually asked my working beloved life partner to do the task of helping our daughter with the bike riding, but the neighbor kept riding her bike around and the urgency required us to take action. I also have had times when my daughter was nervous and I've gotten a bit exasperated or nit-picky ("Look, if you just pedal harder, you'll have an easier time of keeping your balance." This is a perfectly true statement, and it often has the effect of pissing my daughter off enough to give up the bike riding altogether for that day).

Continue reading "Bike riding for nervous parents" »

Posted by Chris at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)