Tag Charlotte

That Sounds About Right

Back in the summer of 2010, we made a little weekend getaway to South Deerfield, Massachusetts to visit the Yankee Candle factory store and see Old Deerfield. As things turned out, the visit to the historic village got washed out by rain, but we did spend an afternoon at the candle store, and one of the highlights of that was when Bridget had a wax casting made of her hand (as you can see above).

After Bridget was done, Charlotte wanted to give it a try, too, but as soon as she stuck her hand in the molten wax she had a change of heart. We tried to convince her it was okay and that she should go through with it, but I guess we must have left a lasting impression on the guy running the activity, because I read this post at the funny Not Always Right.com blog the other day, and it sounds SO MUCH like my charming wife that it HAS to be about us.

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Reviving The Undead

Through the magic of Netflix, Charlotte has recently discovered those sitcom evergreens of my childhood, “The Munsters” and “The Addams Family”. Growing up in the 1970s, I mostly missed the afternoon kid’s TV blight of animated advertising like GI Joe, He-Man, and Transformers and instead spent my afterschool hours watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and re-runs of 1960s sitcoms. Forty years later, the animated advertising is still there, sorry to say, but the chestnuts of television comedy aren’t — they’ve been relegated to night-time cable channels like TV Land, where people my age continue to watch them. The cultural disconnect is huge because the shared vocabulary of knowledge of our shared past is lost. I know much much more about life and pop culture of the generation ahead of me because I spent hours watching their leftovers. Charlotte has very little reference to life in the 1970s or 80s and no tie at all to those older times. So I was more than a little bit pleased that not only did she watch those two shows, she *loved* them. She devoured both series, watching every single episode of both of them over the period of the last couple of weeks.

Meanwhile…with Christmas on the way, we’ve been trying to find a “big” gift item for her, but frankly have been left cold by the idea of buying another electronic gadget or pointlessly excessive toy. Every time we have a purge of unwanted/broken/outgrown stuff around here, it feels like we would have been just as well served to make a pile of dollar bills and light them on fire for the warmth. Then, last weekend, as I was scouring Boston.com looking for things we could do for amusement on Sunday, I noticed that the Broadway adaptation of “The Addams Family” is coming to Boston in February. As is usually the case with recent Broadway shows that tour, the tickets aren’t cheap, but as soon as I saw that I knew it would be the perfect “big” Christmas gift. We all love to go to live performances, Charlotte has never seen a real Broadway show, it will be a big night out for all of us, and, I hope, an evening to remember. Plus, the timing of having it be “The Addams Family” is just perfect. The only downside will be having to wait seven or eight weeks to actually go.

So, while all that is going on, the scuttlebutt from Hollywood is that the guy who wrote and produced the show “Pushing Daisies” a couple of seasons ago has been given the greenlight by NBC to do a “reboot” of “The Munsters”. Of course, there has to be a modern twist, so the advance word is that the show will be an “edgy” one-hour drama, no doubt to cash in on the popularity of the fairy-tale drama “Once Upon A Time” and the slightly more horror-tinged “Grimm”. Which is too bad, because it means the whole thing will be a complete and utter failure; if it even makes it out of pilot season, it will die a horrible death after two episodes in prime time, because everyone LOVES the goofy antics of Herman and Grandpa, and will be completely put off by some gothic monster story. The reason there even IS a Broadway musical version of “The Addams Family” is because the several Hollywood film versions of it stuck very very close to the cherished shtick of the sitcom. “The Munsters” rebooted should embrace Fred Gwynne’s mincing Herman and Al Lewis’s New York-inflected Grandpa and find a way to make that work for an audience that loves nothing better than to reconnect with well-loved characters. Next thing you know, there’ll be a reboot of “Gilligan’s Island” that tries to be like “Lost”. I think Mary Elizabeth Williams’ take on it is probably the wisest: stop with all the remakes and find an original idea already.

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One More For Charlotte’s Christmas List

It’s a Paul Frank air filter. We’ve already bought virtually everything at Target that has Julius the monkey on it.

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Well That Takes Care Of Christmas Shopping For Charlotte

Why, yes, that is a recirculating ketchup fountain. Thank you for noticing.

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Cursive’s Not Dead

This Morning News post argues that cursive is dead, that it wasn’t really all that great to begin with, and who could make those crazy capital Gs and Zs anyway. It’s kind of an interesting piece from a historical perspective, explaining how handwriting standardized in the 19th century, competing almost from the beginning with writing machines like typewriters and other mechanical processes. Cursive has hung in there anyway for 150 years, and even though the author, Graham Beck, obviously falls on the “get rid of it” side of the aisle, I can say from firsthand experience that it ain’t dead yet. While 44 states have adopted the Common Core Standards which get rid of the requirement to teach cursive in favor of keyboarding, in our local school system it is still going strong right alongside keyboarding. Charlotte began learning cursive in second grade, and was *required* to use it for almost all of her homework and classwork in third grade. In Charlotte’s own personal case, learning cursive was a great boon to her. She has a problem with her fine-motor pincer grip, and her printed handwriting was terrible; cursive let her write more fluidly, which made it easier for her to grasp the writing implement. Her handwriting improved from illegible to reasonable, and when she was allowed to return to printing, even her printing had improved. I am not the least bit sorry that she learned cursive, even if she spends the bulk of her life keyboarding.

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Rapturous

What with all the hubbub of The (Secret) Rapture and such over the weekend, I neglected to make mention of Charlotte’s 10th birthday, which was Saturday. Here she is wearing her costume for this year’s dance recital, which also happened to be on her birthday.

The music begins for our long, slow dance of goodbye, and even though the steps right now are barely even visible, I feel them as we move through our days. If I hold your hand too tightly sometimes, Charlotte, it is only because I can sense the space between yours and mine now, and I know we will have to let go sooner than either of us realizes. Spin with me around the world once again, before my feet are too heavy to go on and yours are too light to stop. Though my stumbles are so many, I hope they will not hold you down.

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It’s The Final Countdown

As I have mentioned before, these guys are pretty sure that May 21 is the beginning of the end of the world. It also happens to be my daughter Charlotte’s 10th birthday. Strictly coincidence, I am sure.

So, with only 30 days and a few hours until such a momentous occasion, I have added that countdown timer, which will appear right up until the very moment Zombie Jesus makes his appearance to take all the believers with him to his Magical Zombie Fun Park, leaving the rest of us to have a little birthday cake and ice cream with the kid.

Amusingly enough, today yesterday is the date in the movie “Terminator” that Skynet, the robotic security system, becomes self-aware and begins to destroy humanity, which is referred to as “Judgement Day”.

Now, for your listening pleasure, here is the immortal hair-band Europe live in concert with their timeless hit, “The Final Countdown”:

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Moobs Mangina

A couple of weekends ago, the three of us were out together running errands, and Charlotte offered up the bit of information that a kid in her class whose last name is Mangino has already been tagged by all the other 9-year-old boys as “Mangina”. And once we stopped howling with laughter, Bridget and I agreed that this poor kid is probably going to be stuck with that moniker until he is at least out of college. You certainly wouldn’t choose that as your nickname, but the stickiest nicknames are usually the ones that other people come up with, not the ones you like. I do have to say, though, that it speaks volumes to the trickle-down effect of modern day scatology that fourth graders include “mangina” in their operational vocabulary. The only nickname other kids ever gave me in school was “FAG!”, so it just goes to show that sometimes 9-year-old boys aren’t the best judges of things except how to emotionally damage other 9-year-old boys.

I guess I didn’t make things any better when I interjected about “moobs” and did a little impromptu bit about the kid being called “Moobs Mangina”. This prompted an entirely new conversation wherein I had to explain moobs to Charlotte, and several minutes of debate about the relative size of my own man-boobs. In the end, I was outvoted 2-1 that my moobs are actually more like itty-bitty-boy-titties than proper man-boobs. The above chart seems to bear that out.

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O Tannenbaum

This is Charlotte’s Christmas tree. Last year, the three of us decided that buying a real Christmas tree every year was pointless and wasteful — you lay out a big wad of cash for a tree that sits in your house for three weeks or so, makes a huge mess, creates an insane fire hazard, and then throw it away. It’s such a symbol of Thoughtless America that I can’t even begin to joke about it. I had to lobby a little bit to get the wimmins to come around to my thinking, but in the end it was a genuine consensus. So we spent a somewhat frustrating Saturday afternoon last December shopping for artificial trees.

Along the way, we bumped into the reality that buying one of the really good, natural-looking trees was considerably more expensive than we were able to spend on that particular weekend. The discount retailers of this country, however, had already thought of that and have fake Christmas trees at almost every price point. However, as the price goes down, so does the aesthetic quality, and it seemed like every one we looked at presented something objectionable to one of us.

Now, it’s important to remember that I, personally, do not like Christmas in the first place, and would just as soon not have anything to do with it at all, but I have had to STFU and go along with everybody else for the sake of domestic harmony. So I went into the experience with a willingness to go as low-end as possible, and even made suggestions about how we might conceive of an alternative Christmas tree that was more in keeping with our iconoclastic approach. As we kept bumping into these unhappy truths about the desirability of cheap-ass fake trees, eventually the Wife And Child began to warm up to these entreaties as well, and we wound up at the closest Wal-Mart. There we found this white tree, as fake as fake can be, complete with already-strung lights. It was the floor demo and the only one left, so we paid maybe a whopping $30. In addition to its inestimable and literal white-trash charm, it had the advantage of disassembling easily into three parts that fold up and fit in a large storage box, so the likelihood of causing a quarrel when it was time to set it up was greatly minimized. Most importantly, Charlotte thought it looked cool, and her satisfaction outweighed whatever remaining resistance Bridget had.

Once we got it home, put together, and decorated, it actually looked very festive. And it really does fit our little family’s somewhat off-kilter approach to the Horrible Holiday better than some dying piece of shrubbery ripped from its roots and left to desiccate and die. Because so many people around here begin decorating for Christmas sometime in mid-August, Charlotte had been pestering about setting up the tree even before Thanksgiving, but we try to adhere to the “No Christmas Stuff Before December 1″ rule. This past weekend it was finally within that parameter, so I hauled the box out of the basement and we put it together and decorated in about half an hour. It looks just as good as it did last year, though we added some extra lights and a star this year.

This morning I came across this Treehugger.com post about a lady in Scotland who has been using the same little artificial Christmas tree for 82 years. Here’s a picture of her with it:

I don’t know if Charlotte will hang on to her Wal-Mart clearance special for the rest of her life or not. My family had an artificial Christmas tree that we used every year from the time I was just about Charlotte’s age until just a few years ago. Not every tradition has to be traditional, after all.

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Invasion Of The Stink Bugs

First it was flies, then it was moths, followed by their inchworm progeny, and now we’re being overrun by stink bugs!

For the last couple of weeks, we have found stink bugs in Charlotte’s bedroom several times. As you may recall, Charlotte has an immense phobia about bugs of any sort, and the first time she saw one, she came screaming into my den to tell me that there was a termite in her room. Knowing that 1) termites are usually inside the wood, not crawling on the floor and b) that they are quite small and wouldn’t be terribly noticeable, I figured it would be some other bug, and, lo, I was right. I didn’t recognize it instantly, although my first thought was that perhaps it was one of those Asian long-horned beetles that the local forestry people are concerned about. As soon as I picked it up, though, it started to make this weird, slightly floral-but-not-in-a-good-way smell, which intensified when I crushed it (using a tissue), and I knew I had just killed a stink bug. A couple of nights later, there was another one, and then another a few days after that, and so on. I think we’ve tallied about five at this point. It’s not quite The Swarm, but they do seem to have established a regular presence. I came across this news story last night that says the stink bugs are causing quite a problem in the Mid-Atlantic states because in addition to stinking up the place, they eat crops like apples.

After squashing the first one, I learned my lesson about that and now just gently pick them up with the tissue and flush them down the toilet. They still start making that odor as soon as you touch them, but it’s not nearly as intense if you leave them intact. That linked article says exterminators recommend vacuuming them up, since presumably they won’t start releasing the odor chemical if you don’t touch them, but don’t forget to empty your vacuum if you do.

Somehow we have managed to duck the seemingly ubiquitous infestation of bedbugs that has people freaking out everywhere, but I suppose we’ll get our turn with them, too.

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