Category: Cathy

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Child Protective Services – Don’t read this

Juggling with EvanJuggling with Amy
Juggling with SarahJuggling with Sarah
Cathy on topJuggling with Noah

Here’s some additional information about the rolla bolla from my comment on Cathy’s flickr set:

I now get to tell a story which may or may not add a little bit of a technical appreciation for what’s happening in this picture. My rolla bolla freaks other jugglers out. Mine is completely homemade. It uses a 4 inch diameter thick pvc pipe. The board itself happens to be exactly the same length as a shelf in a homemade bookcase I built for my dorm room in college because it is one the shelves which happen to be precisely 19 inches in length. Most jugglers are more accustomed to using rolla bollas closer to 3 feet long. For instance, Dube’s is 29 inches (btw, there’s your spec).

Juggling is all about physics. This is center of gravity trick. The longer the board, the greater the center of gravity. In essence, if you drew a line from the ground up to the top of your head (or the head fo the person on your shoulders) that divided your torso symmetrically and simply made sure that line never passed over your foot, you would never fall down. Since my board is so short, there is very little room for error. One way to cheat the physics is to use a larger diameter piece of pvc but frankly the 5 inch pvc tends to flatten a little taking away from the visual effect (in addition to simply being disproportionate to the other equipment and plain ugly).

Regarding the pvc when making a homemade rolla bolla. I learned the hardway that the pvc pipe should be the same width as the board (or slightly larger). If it is smaller you create a third degree of freedom and you might as well be doing this trick on top of a ball.

Don’t use those stupid stoppers on the bottom of your board! If you look at the Dube rolla bolla you will see that the underside of the board has stops at each end. This prevents the board from flying at high velocity to your left or right severely hurting people. Instead the board stops and you go flying at high velocity to the left or right breaking yourself and the people standing beside you. When we were first learning this trick. My brother fell off the board and sent it flying into a filing cabinet. 3 days later we were still trying to open the drawer. Without the stoppers you can safely take the board to the very edge without falling. I mean the very edge being exactly at the halfway point on the pvc pipe. Instead of the stoppers, control your board.

You can break things with a rolla bolla! These things may include: glass, bones, teeth, spines, and metal cabinets. When learning to stand on a rolla bolla do these things:

  1. Get a partner! Have the partner stand behind you with their arms underneath your armpits but not touching you. When you fall, they will spot you and keep you from breaking yourself
  2. Make sure your feet are at the edges of the board.
  3. Wear shoes!
  4. Practice daily in short spurts
  5. Start with the board touching the ground on one side and about one third of the board on the pipe. Starting by jumping up to a horizontally balanced board is cool and fun but an advanced trick that will land a beginner on their hind side.

The rolla bolla will increase your balance, develop your abs and back, and tighten your buttocks.

Warnings!

  1. Don’t let people stand to your left or right. I cannot emphasize this enough.
  2. If you fall…er…when you fall, think of yourself as being on a skate board or inline skate. Protect your wrists! Better to belly flop on concrete than to impact your wrist, elbows and knees

I will happily get together with anyone that wants help learning the rolla bolla.

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My Wife: Guest Blogger/Bad Parent

My wife is a guest blogger at Scholastic Parents and a bad parent. Share your thoughts with her.

Read all her Scholastic Parents guest posts. Jump in and feel free to comment on each topic.

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Twitter Size Does(n’t) Matter

Twitter ranking and stat programs come and go. In Knoxville I’m not even on the charts but in Knoxville, TN I’m ranked #11 (falling fast! Was 5th not long ago.). It’s all non-sense. Twitter’s value has nothing to do with how large someone’s arbitrary algorithm chooses to inflate your ego. Twitter’s value comes from how you choose to use it. So why am I jealous that my wife’s e-penis is almost twice the size (26.35cm) of mine (14.32cm)?

Warning! Clicking through to e-penis is going to show a cartoonish picture of a man’s thang.

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I was asleep but NOOooo! She wanted a damned blanket…

Stress wears on the body as well as the mind. This week I peaked. And I crashed. Promises of staying up late with my wife for adult..um..conversation were broken. Just before my head hit the pillow, blackness engulfed me. I never felt the pillow. It was as if a blackhole sucked my total being from my body. Perhaps the HLC finally became operational and the world ended.

Our bed is Disneyesque. I don’t mean that it is a canopy bed with glorious antique wood bedposts extending to the ceiling nor a frilly thing with more pillows than bed space. Our bed more resembles Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or Bedknobs and Broomsticks only we don’t fly ours that often. Typically I hit the sack first as Cathy finishes cleaning the upstairs and readying the children’s backpacks and clothing for morning. One or two hundred pound German Shepherds join me. Cathy comes to bed shortly after the dogs and complains that she has no where to put her feet. She wrestles the covers and nudges dogs hoping they roll over onto me which often they do. Having large dogs sleep on your legs is like having a stack of electric quilts and a boat anchor holding you in bed only without the electricity or the boat. It certainly does not encourage getting out of bed, rolling over, or doing anything conjugal. Next the cat wanders into the bed room. Both dogs stretch their necks pondering a chase but inevitability decide chasing the cat is not worth losing their valuable real estate on the bed. The cat then jumps onto the bed typically settling on top of my head ala Davy Crockett’s coon skin cap. Sometime between midnight and 2:30am, Evan sleepwalks into the bedroom, climbs over his mother, and cuddles up between the two of us. Later Amy comes into the room, shoves a dog more to the center of the bed, takes one of my two pillows, moves to the corner of the bed beneath Cathy’s feet, pulls the hospital corner out and gets under the covers between one dog, and Cathy’s feet. Flipping over, stretching legs, or working cramps out are out of the question.

Last night, that was our bed and I was dead to the world. For all I knew, I was alone. Until the shriek! The dogs and children had managed to short sheet us and it was cold! Cathy whined, no, almost screamed, "Give me a sheet!" I mutter under my breath and pretend to be asleep assuming a grown adult can get her own damned sheet. "AhhhahHHH! Get me a blanket!" she cried. For better or for worse. In sickness or health. For richer or poorer… Where the hell did it say anything about waking me from the deepest, best sleep of my life to walk to her side of the bed and cover her with a blanket?! I glowered at her; she writhed, whimpered, and cried and I caved but not without letting my displeasure be known. I rose with a grumble, squealed as my feet missed my slippers and landed on the cold concrete floor, muttered as I stomped to the chest of drawers on her side of the bed, cursed under my breath as I recovered a blanket, and said loving words as I covered her noting that I was still short sheeted and exposed to the basement chill. I returned to my side of the bed, pulled a dog over me, and blacked out.

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Pulling a tooth

I feel like a failed parent when my children suffer a health issue. We are a remarkably fortunate family when it comes to health. We see very little sickness. Granted, we have a bug going through the house right now but it really is not terrible. Everyone is taking turns so only one person has it at a time.

Evan has a tooth that grayed a while back. We took him to the dentist and everything was assessed as fine. The tooth whitened and seemed fine then died. We attempted to extract it at the dentist but the twilight drugs made Evan too loopy and uncooperative. A surgery was scheduled but the anesthesiologist flipped out when she saw his older brother is diagnosed with Von Willebrand disease (which the doctor thinks is a misdiagnosis) and canceled the surgery until Evan had blood work. Why this wasn’t noticed on his paperwork the month prior to the first surgery attempt is beyond me.

His second surgery attempt was scheduled for March 19th but we got a call yesterday that an opening had come available. "Don’t give him anything to eat or drink after midnight. Your appointment is at noon." Huh?! That’s a long time for a 3.5 year old to go without food. In a different phone call, clear liquids were okay’d until 9am. Cathy and Evan will be off to the hospital shortly. I will remain home with a feverish Amy and working on programming and talking to bureaucrats on the phone. I hope all goes well. These things worry me so much.

Update: Surgery canceled. In the same post I talked about be blessed with decent health, I get to say my child has pneumonia.
Update 2:08pm: Apparently he had pneumonia and is at the end of recovery so they are proceeding with the surgery. Lungs still rattley.
Update 3:30pm: Evan out of surgery and in recovery.

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Snow Day!

The Weather

Yesterday started off beautiful and almost spring like but the forecast said we were at the high for the day and the children were just getting off to school. As the high schooler left in a t-shirt and no jacket I suggested that she was making a mistake.

Our routine

Cathy and I have a routine that makes having 5 children in 5 schools work without anyone losing their sanity. I’m a morning person and Cathy is a night owl. So I get the duty of waking the children, making sure they are ready for school, and seeing them off. Sometimes this cuts into my morning productivity so at night when Cathy is getting the children bathed and ready for bed, I am often downstairs typing on my computer in the evening. I drive the children in the mornings; Cathy picks them up in the afternoons. I cook the dinners; Cathy does the dishes and laundry and lays out the children’s stuff for the next day. (Yes, the children help and have chores..to listen to the children, they have so many more chores than their friends…)

The Drive In

Yesterday, I took Evan to pre-school. As we drove, Spring turned to rain. Rain became mixed with snow. Evan arrived at school 18 minutes late (9:18). I left noting that Weigel’s had gas at $1.629 per gallon. I was on fumes but thought I’d buy at Sam’s. I forgot and drove right past it because by now the mix of snow and rain had turned completely into large, fluffy snowflakes. It was beautiful!

The Cancellations

At 11:00am, the pre-school calls to say that Knox County Schools is considering canceling and wants to get a jump on it. Cathy is caught off guard having only downed half her daily dose of caffeine so I’m off to pickup Evan. [Update: I am reminded that Cathy couldn’t drive because Evan hid her driver’s license..which we just found today.] I test the road in front of our house and it is already slick. I achieve a 15 foot slide with ease. Noting that I need gas badly, I pull into Weigel’s. The gas has rocketed to $1.779/gallon! I put just a little in and decide to fill up at Sam’s. We are out of milk so I look like a snow panicer as I go in for a gallon. The tertiary roads are a bit scary and the secondary roads are slushy (that’ll become ice!). The primary roads are fairly clear. While picking up Evan, Knox County Schools officially cancels at 12:30 (an hour away) so Cathy and I debate pulling Sarah out early.

Bearden High School Clusterduck

I drive to the high school and the line is already long. The elementary school calls to say some buses cannot get the children and they are asking all parents to come pickup the kids. As I sit in line pointing uphill on Gallaher View Road, the slush compresses and turns to ice under my tires. Each time we nudge forward, my wheels try to spin and slide. The high school makes a royal mistake and instead of having their duty officer directing traffic, he is inside directing parents into the office. See, since school isn’t officially canceled for another 40 minutes, parents still have to walk into the school and check out their children who are on the break of becoming adults. The duty officer and a couple of others should have been directing traffic and someone with a clipboard and a radio should have been letting parents sign their children out from the cars ala drive-thru. They could have done the paperwork as the cars entered the parking lot and radio’d the office to send the child out. That would have prevented road rage, dangerous situations and sped the process along. As it was I ended up parking on the grass and walking into the school to find that the line for the office was about 20 minutes long. At this point, the students would be dismissed in about the same time. Evan has played in the snow in front of the school, shoes wet, socks wet, and pants soaked to the knees. He and I give up on the high school and start driving to the elementary school. Traffic at the high school has backed up onto Kingston Pike and is now interfering with the normal flow of traffic.

Rocky Hill Elementary

Cars are backing up traffic on Morrell Road as they try to either turn into the bus lane or go against traffic to turn into the carpool lane. Why don’t these parents just drive to Northshore and turn left at the CVS? The line is lengthy but no more so than a normal carpool line. You can tell the parents who never drive their children because they keep hopping out of their car to look up the road trying to figure out what is taking so long. The road behind the school has a 90° turn. Snow melt from the tires has covered that corner and traffic has me stop in the turn. When traffic begins to move, the van doesn’t. Oops. After some gentle encouragement, I am moving again but I worry about the cars behind me bouncing off one another as they try to navigate that turn.

Teenage Drivers in the Snow

Sarah calls for the pickup plan while I wait in the elementary school line. I had told her to walk to Downtown West so that I wouldn’t have to fight the high school traffic mess. She and her mother adjust the plan to have her walk to the mall. Sarah gets her boyfriend to drive her to the mall; his father is following behind. She asks if the boyfriend can driver her home. Both his father (whose parents live in our neighborhood) and I firmly say, “NO!” My neighborhood is a bit like an Alpine slide in the winter and is the last to see any road clearing equipment from the city or county. I agree to letting the father, a Philadelphia native, drive her home. Evan is miserable from his cold, wet wait in the car. I drive Amy and Evan home. Sarah arrives a couple of minutes later.

Bearden Middle School

The middle school buses cannot run until all the elementary school students have been bused home. I debate picking Noah up. One phone call later I learn he is already on a bus en route so I take some pictures of the jolly children and dogs enjoying the snow, then I retreat to the basement to do some programming. Telecommuters don’t get snow days.

Conclusion

Knox County Schools made the right choice to wait and see what would happen with the weather. They made a poor choice by not anticipating the rush of parents to the school when it got out that they were debating canceling schools. The schools need the equivalent of an evacuation plan for handling heavy traffic when closures happen. The plan should include traffic direction, separate entrances and exits to the school to avoid congestion, allowing children to use cell phones, and keeping parents in their cars rather than having them exit and go to the office. Here’s how the high school should have worked: The Gallaher Road entrance becomes exit only with a patrol car directing traffic to the south entrance of the school. The Kingston Pike entrance becomes an exit only. This forces all traffic to the Gleason Road entrance with the possibility of congesting traffic on Gleason but takes advantage of being able to create a much longer line of cars on school property in a single file rather than having any merging. Traffic direction has the line of cars S through the ROTC parking lot to maximize the number of cars off the city roads and on the school property. Traffic direction has cars go north beside the stadium, left past the bandroom, north beside the western side of the building, right in front of the school and then immediately left out to Kingston Pike or Gallaher View Road. Students should be allowed to contact their parents by cell phone or text message. If a student says, "my parents are waiting in line" they are dismissed on their honor to the office (not out of school) rather than waiting for contact from the parent to bring them down. Students contacted by cell or called over the intercom convene in the common area until their ride pulls up out front. A parent volunteer, teacher, officer, or other school staff with a radio in hand and a signout clipboard will be positioned far enough down the line to be able to call children out of class such that when the car gets to the front of the school, the student is already there. IDs are checked at the car, signatures taken at the car, and the loadout goes like clockwork. I was in the car for three hours trying to pickup children from schools and I only went to 3 of the 5 schools my children attend. The children really enjoyed the snow! And today is another snow day!

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Blood pressure update

The doc took me off my old blood pressure medicine (Linsinopril) which made me cough incessantly and switched me to a new medicine (Verapamil SA) with the side affects of swollen ankles and constipation. I think that makes me pregnant.

Btw, suggesting to your wife that she quit shaving her legs doesn’t get the expected result of "oh thank God! I hated doing that and only did it for you anyway my love! Now my legs will be warm in the winter! Hurray!" In reality, it’s a far different reaction.