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I’m writing this about 20 minutes before Will and I have to leave for the airport to go back to Detroit while sitting on the patio of my parents’ condo, and it occurs to me that this is pretty much the first time on this trip where it’s been even remotely warm enough to sit outside for any amount of time.  Jeesh.

Will was off school this week and because I’m teaching online (and thus a little more flexible in my whereabouts) and because we didn’t spend as much time with my parents at Christmas as we probably should have, Will and I came down here for a few days.  Annette, unfortunately, still was teaching/working, and (even more unfortunate) watching over a kinda sick dog.

It’s been a pleasant enough visit. The highlight clearly was Mardi Gras, which was a much bigger deal down here in Southern Alabama than I thought.  We didn’t make it into Mobile for the big parades, which was a shame since they claim to be “the original” Mardi Gras (take that, copy-cat New Orleans!), but the local parade through Gulf Shores was a lot of fun. Here’s a link to some picts; here’s my favorite chunks of video, me catching one of the things commonly thrown from the floats, moon pies:

Will and I also spent a very cool afternoon climbing around the battleship USS Alabama and the submarine USS Drum while my parents stayed back and read.  At first, I thought my parents were being party-poopers, but once I got on board, I understood:  it was a lot of fun, but the chutes and ladders and tiny doors mean it’s a little like climbing around in the tubes at Chuck E. Cheese.

And we saw an old fort, and we were at a thing where they shot off an old canon… wow, very military themed, I guess.  I “ran”/walked one day on the beach, which was pretty good exercise albeit kind of cold.

All in all, a nice enough visit, though I don’t know if I’ll be back anytime soon.  My parents are talking about going someplace different next year, and to be honest, I have a hard time making seeing me and Annette making our own vacation kind of trip here. But the moon pies are good.

This was on Saturday:

A lot of family life and energy around the house lately has involved Will’s participation in the Greenhills Middle School production of “The Revenge of the Space Pandas, or, Binky Rudich and the Two-Speed Clock.”

Here’s a link to a Flickr set of a few pictures and videos.

Now, I’m not going to critique the actual performance/production, because my son was in it (basically as an extra, though he did have one scene as “cameraman”) and hey, it was a middle school play! It was both cute and a bit “rough,” with some very charming and entertaining moments.  But of course it was wonderful, at least from my point of view.  Still, the play itself– wow that was weird.

It’s a David Mamet play he wrote in the late 1970s.  Binky (along with his friend Vivian and his sheep Bob) invents/discovers a “two-speed clock” that somehow allows the trio to travel to a different planet or dimension called Crestview which is ruled by George Topax and which is populated with Crestviewians and Space Pandas.  Topax wants to take and keep (and kill?) Bob the sheep because he wants a sweater.  Hijinks ensue.

Now, on the plus-side, there are funny and absurd moments, and some moments of that staccato Mamet dialog.  No f-bombs or other vulgarities obviously, but there were moments where you do have some of the kind of rhythms of language you see in other Mamet work.  But what’s the deal with the Space Pandas?  What’s the relationship between them and the Crestviewians?  And couldn’t they just, you know, sheer Bob and give the Topax guy a sweater?  And so forth.

Like I said, weird weird weird.

But like I also said, the Greenhills folks did a fine job of it.  Originally, Will wanted a bigger part, but to be honest, I’m not sure he would have had the energy for it.  He’s been pretty pooped this week, and his was a small part.  And he’s not crazy about the make-up.  But there will be some production next year, and we’ll see what he decides to do then.

I haven’t had time/desire/etc. to post one of my usual “new school year resolutions,” and to be honest, I don’t have any new resolutions this year.  It’d be nice if I could actually manage to do some of the resolutions from last year. But I will mention two things that are kind of resolution-like that are not really school related (though they are not completely unrelated either) that might be worth working harder at this year.

First, there’s “Why your kids have such terrible handwriting and what to do about it,” which was posted to the WPA-L mailing list last week.  Basically, it’s an article from Slate.com about the author, Emily Yoffe, and her eighth grade daughter both working through Nan Jay Barchowsky’s Fix it Write, a lesson plan/process for improving your handwriting– and Yoffe’s article is also about some various histories and issues of handwriting, too.  Somewhat on impulse, I just decided to order this, and I’m hoping I can convince Will to give these lessons a try along with me.  I have and have always had horrific handwriting, something I’ve learned to live with and also to blame on my left-handedness.  But Will also has pretty bad handwriting, and he’s still at a place (in seventh grade) where a) bad handwriting can actually make a difference on things like essay tests and such, and b) where he could still do something about it.  In any event, Will and I (or at least me) will try our hand at this during the school year.  So to speak.

Second, there’s the news I learned via Facebook today about Eddie Izzard running through the UK (actually, it turns out he finished on September 14th), about the equivalent of 43 marathons in 51 days.  As this BBC News article suggests, he started with almost no training, he’s pretty injured, and what he is doing is quite ill-advised.  At the same time, he has made quite a bit of progress in his seven week.  He started “running” a marathon distance is 10 hours (which, of course, isn’t really running at all– that’s walking a marathon, still an impressive enough feat as far as I’m concerned), and at the end, he was finishing his running in five hours.  By the way, there is a seven part video diary series of this on YouTube here.

Now, I’m not going to do what he’s doing for all sorts of obvious reasons, and I don’t really see myself training for a marathon.  But I took up “running” earlier in the year, “ran” in the Dexter-Ann Arbor 5 K this past spring, and have tried to keep “running” two or so miles three days a week.  (And I should point out that I am extremely slow. I say “running” to mean that if you saw me, you would say “well, that’s not walking, so I guess it’s okay to call it ‘running,’ sort of.”)  I’ve actually kind of come to enjoy it, and while I was originally planning on keeping my goals here modest, there’s something about seeing Izzard, who clearly has lost a lot of weight and is in much better shape at the end of this fund raising stunt than he was at the beginning, that wants me to extend my goals.  So I dunno; maybe a 10K?  Maybe a half-marathon at the Dexter-Ann Arbor run this year?

The fam took a mini road-trip to Columbus, Ohio Friday and Saturday mainly to see The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, Bone, and the Changing Face of Comics. I personally am not a particularly big fan of Bone and/or Jeff Smith, but the complete Bone is one of Will’s favorite books, Annette is teaching it this spring in a class, and I generally like comics, though I think I like them more in theory– that is, what they mean in terms of visual rhetoric, teaching with images and words, etc.– than I do as a fan. Though the movie made me think that Bone might be something I ought to give another chance.

One of the highlights for all us was Will getting his complete Bone signed:

Smith was super-duper nice to everyone waiting to get stuff signed, and he chatted a bit with Will, noting that his copy of the 1300+ page well-worn book had obviously been read.

The movie itself was pretty good/kind of so-so, mainly because it was essentially a Jeff Smith love-fest/puff-piece. But I thought it was interesting in a lot of different ways. Smith had an extensive background in making animated television commercials, and that definitely had a major influence on his approach to comics and Bone in particular. Bone began as a self-published comic, and I suppose it still is self-published in the sense that Smith and his wife (and his wife seemed to be the real business brains behind the scenes) still run what appears to be a pretty lucrative operation.

What I didn’t realize before this movie was that lots of the independent/underground comics sold in places like Vault of Midnight in Ann Arbor are self-published, though obviously not on the scale of Bone. Which made me wonder why this hasn’t worked in conventional “words in a row” publishing; I mean, self-publishing a novel or a collection of short stories or poems is pretty much a good way to not be taken seriously, and while I know that’s changing a bit with some web sites, you’re still not likely to see a lot of self-published books even in locally-owned and independent book stores.

I suppose the same is true with academic writing and publishing.

Some of the difference seems to be in the materiality of the comic and the collecting fetish. There were many geeky 30 to 50 year old men waiting in line with Will to get signatures from Jeff Smith, only they were holding stacks of the individual issues of Bone or other Smith comics. In the movie, Smith and some of the other featured comic writers (including Scott McCloud, BTW) spoke a couple times about the physicality and “object-ness” of comics in a way that just isn’t the same with words-in-a-row books, IMO. Interestingly though, one of the ways that Bone caught on and one of the main ways comics continue to be promoted was/is the Internet.

As for Columbus proper: we didn’t get to see much, unfortunately. We had so-so Ohio “Mexican” food in a place in the Short North area, which looked like it would have been a fun place to hang out but which probably involved more “adult” entertainment (e.g., bars and stuff) than might have been fitting for Will. He did have fun in the hotel room though:

And now it’s back to a “working holiday:” stuff around the house today, commenting/grading on papers tomorrow.

Last week, Annette and I took some time on a Tuesday to go to Blocks Stand and Nursery to buy a wide variety of plants for cheap, including everything now in the square foot veggie garden seen here– except the peas, which Will and I planted from seed a few weeks before. I suppose if I was a “real gardener,” I’d grow everything from seeds, and I’d preferably start growing seedlings in about February under some light in my basement. But since I’m not a “real gardener,” I buy fairly large plants ready to go into the ground for that impressive, “wow he must be a real gardener” look.

Will and I did most of the planting together on Saturday last weekend. Will simultaneously complained about the work and diligently planted things, as if he was unsure if he was supposed to think that gardening “sucked” or was fun. We had some cold weather that could have been a freeze, but nothing so bad as to damage the crops. And at this point, I think weather-wise we are in the clear. I think.

As you can see from the picture (if you click on it, you can seem more or less a map of what’s here), we’ve got lots of tomatoes, zucchini, and yellow squash. For whatever reason, we don’t seem to get that much zucchini or yellow squash from the CSA farm where we get a share of produce, and tomatoes you grow in your yard are always the best. I’m attempting to grow the zukes and squash “up” with the help of tomato cages; we’ll see how that goes.

I also mixed up Mel’s mix for flower pots, hanging baskets, and window boxes too. I’ll be curious to see how that works out because I think it is basically a somewhat better deal than buying potting mix at a place like Home Depot, and it is more satisfying to make your own, too.

I thought my sushi-loving son would get a kick out of this:

Via boing-boing. As they point out on that site, the fun is watching the people in the sushi bar restaurant notice that someone put a camera on the conveyor-belt that goes around the place.

Here’s Will all dressed up for dress-up day at Greenhills. This was actually apparently the first of several dress-up days. I completely applaud the idea of making the kids present themselves nicely once in a while, though it did represent some shopping challenges for us. Happily, Will and I snagged the jacket, which was probably unnecessary (most of the boys just had nice shirts and ties) for $10.

It’s quite the adventure moving on to a new grade, a new school, a new system. We’re all getting up an hour or more earlier. Yesterday, Will was at his first drum lesson. Today after school, he’s going to tennis practice. And then tonight, it’s soccer practice. Oh yeah, Annette and I still have work too.

I took this video of a hippo swimming in the “Hippoquarium” at the Toledo Zoo:

Two “fun facts” about both this and my previous animal video of the turtle on the golf course: first, I shot both with my Canon PowerShot SD 850 IS. I’ve been very pleased with this camera– I’d recommend it to anyone. Second, I tried to upload these videos to YouTube and I ran into errors with both of them. They’re just .mov files that opened right up in QuickTime and that uploaded in a matter of minutes to Flickr. I don’t know what the deal is.