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One of my friends just returned from two weeks in Germany, a trip taken officially under the auspices of a week-long mathematical conference, but unofficially to drink fantastic beer served glasses roughly the size of a Volkswagon.

Cause and effect

“Those Germans sure have a racket,” she commented on her return.

“How so?” I asked.

“Well, you can buy beer everywhere there — in taverns, in restaurants, in malls, at church, you name it.  Excellent beer in giant glasses.  And cheap, too.”

“How is that a racket?” I asked, thinking that such a description universally applied to the concept heaven might cause one to re-evaluate one’s stance on atheism.

She smiled wryly. “Because in Germany, you have to pay to use the toilet.”

1 Bild = 1 Eintausend-Worter

She also sent me a picture of the sign for a German lingerie shop that translates surprisingly well.

Today you turned twenty-seven months old.

It’s been a busy month, which you started off by getting sick, coming home from daycare one day with your tongue covered in tiny little blisters.  We took you to the doctor, who quickly diagnosed you with Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease.  Oh crap, I thought, isn’t that what they put down cows for?  And the answer, according to the doctor who clearly possessed the ability to read my thoughts, was “No — you’re confusing the name with Hoof and Mouth Disease and the treatment with Mad Cow Disease.”  Which was a relief, because I really didn’t want to pack you up and send you down to the slaughterhouse.

It turns out really isn’t any treatment for HFMD (which caused little bumps to form on, appropriately enough, your hands, feet and mouth) except to let it run its course.  However, HFMD like appendicitis does have one sweet doctor-approved perk: lots and lots of ice cream, since it’s one of the few foods not likely to irritate an enflamed tongue.  I think this one revelation — namely, that doctors can actually force mommy to give you desserts to eat — has changed your outlook on the medical profession entirely.  In months past, you were so terrified of the doctor that you’d quietly whimper every time we drove by the hospital; now when we pass by, you announce (like clockwork) “Tongue hurts!  Go to the doctor.  I neeeeed ice cream.”

“Need” is a new word in your vocabulary, one whose inclusion and inflection is due entirely to your mother.  Whenever you would request assistance, you would ask “I help?” and indicate the task for which help was desired.  “No,” your mother would correct, “you neeeeed help,” greatly enunciating the word to emphasize its use. ”I neeeeed help,” you would pitch-perfectly repeat.  This exchanged occured so often that you have not only learned the appropriate used of the work “need,” but you have kept the ridiculoulsy inflected pronunciation of it as well —  “I neeeeed milk.”  “I neeeeeeed shoes.”  “I neeeeeeeeeed candy”  — so that now when you talk, you sound just like the Stroke Guy from The Simpsons.  Well, at least you’ve got a future in voice acting.

Another word that you’ve added is “Look,” as in “Look Daddy! Look Daddy! Look!” while you demand that I stare at, say, a tiny scuff on your sneakers for the eight-hundredth time today.  You are no longer content to simply point out noteworthy sites anymore; you require visual confirmation from any and all family members assembled in your presense.  In recent days I have toyed with you by repeatedly looking in deliberately wrong directions… or rather, I thought I was going to toy with you.  Whenever I do this, you roll your eyes like an exasperated school marm, march on over, grab my noggin, and forcibly turn it so that it’s damn well looking in the right direction. You are definitely your mother’s daughter.

You also become much more aware of your surroundings this month.  Anytime I take you out in the car, you feel compelled to describe every location with which you are familiar.  In fact, you’ve combined this new ability with your infaturation with the word “look” to form a peculiar version of the “I Spy” game, so that a typical car ride with you to, say, the video store will be accompanied by you excitedly chirping away in the backseat saying…

You: Look daddy! Look! Daddy’s drink!  Ah-na’s Sprite!

Me: Yes… that’s the store where we get our sodas, but we don’t nee—

You: Look daddy! Look! Doctors! Butt hurts.  Need candy.

Me: Yes… that’s the hospital, but you don’t need cand—

You: Look daddy! Look! Windy ice cream!

Me: Yes… that’s Wendy’s, where we get Frostys, but you don’t nee—-

You: Look daddy! Look! Pancake store!

Me: Yes… that’s Perkins, but we don’t need to eat any panca—

You: Look daddy! Look! Mama’s work! Go see Mama?

Me: Yes… that is mommy’s work, but she’s at home right no—

You: Look daddy! Look! Chicken stars! Apple sause! Park! Shoes off! Ice cream too!

Me: Yes… that’s Burger King, but we’re not going to the playgrou—

You: Look daddy! Look! “Cheese” movie! Movie store!

Me: Yes… that’s the movie store, but we’re not…  oh, wait.  Yes we are…

…except with the added excitement of my swerving over lanes of traffic as I crane my neck to “Look daddy! Look!” at every last motherlovin’ sight on the trip.  You’ve turned from an adorable little passenger into a codependent little GPS device.

This month also marked several firsts.  For example, it was the first time your Nana B (your mommy’s mommy) came to visit.  Her visit coincided with the rainiest two weeks South Dakota has seen in almost a decade, so unfortunately she didn’t get to see many of the tourist attractions in the Black Hills.  Then again, the Nana B wasn’t in town to sight-see or even converse with your parents… she was there to see you!  To your nana, you are a princess, and she even bought you the regalia to prove it.  Yes, your grandmother managed in fifteen days to spoil you so rotten we now hang air-fresheners around your neck to make your company even marginally tolerable.

Still, the Nana B and you (and by extension, me, since someone needs to wrangle you in from time to time) did get to out into the Black Hills for some fun too.  For example, we had your first pony ride this month.  We managed to stop by an attraction called “Old MacDonald’s Farm” in between two raging thunderstorms, so you got to feed baby goats (which, being smaller than you, you liked), baby cows (which, being larger than you, you didn’t), watch a pig race (sooooo-ey!),  and listen to a never-ending rendition of Old MacDonald’s Farm played in perpetuity over the farm’s loudspeakers, which for you added an air of childlike wonderment and for me added an air of Guantanamo Bay. 

The pony ride consisted of you circumnavigating a small gazebo on ponyback a few times, and was an interesting experience. I would lift you up to place you on the pony, whereupon you would freeze in panic, latching onto me like a leech and shouting “No way! No way!”  Your grandmother would then pry you from my chest with her umbrella and deposit you in wide-eyed terror onto the saddle.  You would then go round and round on the little horse, staring intently at the saddle as if to will it to stop moving.  When the ride came to an end, you would frantically ask to get down, whereupon you would promptly look up at me, grab another ride ticket, and ask “Again? Again?“  I sense great things for you at Six Flags in the future.

You also had your first train ride.  You’ve been asking about trains ever since a billboard showing children climbing all over Thomas the Tank Engine was erected on the drive to work.  “Look daddy!  Happy face choo-choo” you observed the first day, and then promptly added “I go on choo-choo too?”  I had let you ride the little “mini-trains” at Old MacDonald’s Farm and Storybook Island — little tractors pulling hollowed out barrels on wheels — and you could easily blow a twenty riding on the little choo-choo all day long.  It turned out that the billboard was advertising that Thomas — yes, the Thomas — was coming to town, so your mom and I thought it would be fun to let you ride a real train.

So one weekend we announced “Do you want to ride with Thomas the Tank Engine?” whereupon the only way to express your glee was to explode into confetti and party-streamers.  So we drove to Hill City, a trip for which you passed the time by asking “Ride Tod-das? Ride Tod-das? Ride Tod-das choo-choo?” nonstop for its entire duration.  When we arrived, we bought tickets and waited for Thomas to return to the station, a wait for which you passed the time by asking “Ride Tod-das? Ride Tod-das? Ride Tod-das choo-choo?” nonstop for its entire duration.  When Thomas eventually arrived, we boarded a train car and waited for Thomas to pull out of the station, a process through which you asked “Tod-das go? Tod-das go? Tod-das choo-choo go now?” nonstop for its entire duration.  Finally, Thomas pulled out of the station, and for a few moments you were silent as you watched the landscape drift lazily by the window and listened to the rhythmic clickity-clack of the train over the tracks… and then spent the rest of the ride announcing “All done?  Go home now?” nonstop for its thirty-minuite duration.

It is only because your mother loves you very very much that she stopped me from mailing you to the island of Sodor as a “gift” to Sir Toppam Hat.

This month you also visted Mount Rushmore for the first time, which we’d been informed was a requirement of your South Dakota citizenship.  We actually went right after your train ride with Thomas, since it was just down the road a ways and had an enclosed cafeteria (it was, of course, raining again).  After a quick hot dog lunch, the clouds parted, and for a few moments, we were able to walk out onto the plaza and look at the majestic visages of the past presidents.  And dare I say it, you seemed impressed by the grandeur of it all.

So impressed, in fact, that immediately after that trip, you began pointing out images of Mount Rushmore whenever you saw them, and given the state in which you reside, that happens frequently.  “Look daddy! Mush-more! Mush-more! MUSH-MORE!“  Indeed, within days you were actually pleading to back to Mount Rushmore again: “Please, daddy, go Mush-more? In the car?  Please, daddy?”  Your mother and I were so impressed by the profound impact that the Mount Rushmore had on you that we again took you to see it, this time for the nighttime lighting ceremony.  We arrived at the plaza looking onto the monument, and I held you up to look on the glory of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln: 

And you, suddenly realizing where you were, giggled with unabashed glee… and promptly pointed to the cafeteria.  “Eat hot dogs again?”

That’s when it occured to me that the only lasting memory you took away from the Mount Rushmore experience was cafeteria hot dogs.  Somewhere as you giggle over tubes of processed animal innards, Gutzam Borglum is crying.

But I, little Ladybug, am not, because you continue to make me happier and happier each month as I watch the lovely little lady you’re becoming.  Smooches, baby girl.

– Ba ba

Photo album

See more pictures from your twenty-seventh month of existence over at Flickr.

This weekend was the 23rd Annual Volksmarch, a 10K hike up to the surface of the Crazy Horse Nonument in Custer, South Dakota.  The Crazy Horse monument is a bit like Mount Rushmore, except that whereas the latter consists of four sixty-foot-tall faces of past presidents, the former consists of one ninety-foot tall face of a Lakota warrior.  More to the point, Crazy Horse is an active work-in-progress, and the eventual completed sculture will depict the entire body of the warrior riding is horse, his arm outstretched to the horizon.  Normally, the public is only allowed to view the monument — or rather, its right-side profile — at a distance from the visitor’s center, like so:

Once a year, however, the monument is open to the public, who are permitted to hike out to it, up to the face and even out on the rock shelf that will eventually be the outstretched arm.  Here are some stories from this year’s hike.

Regret

I have never regretted choosing to specialize in CR analysis in mathematics, except possibly for the half hour I spent  trying to untangle my fricking MP3 player’s earbuds, when I wished I’d studied knot theory instead.

Centennial man

During the third like of the hike, the steep ascent into the blast zone, I bumped into B, a retired middle-school teacher I knew.  We paused, partly to exchange salutations and updates about our families, but mostly because each of us was looking for any excuse to stop and catch our breath.

“This is kinda cool,” B said.  “I’ve never done the Volksmarch before.”

I agreed. “Yeah, I like it.  I went two years ago and thought it was awesome.  It’s something else when you finally get up there and you can stand by the giant face and get a sense of just how massive this thing is going to be.”

B nodded his head. “Yep.  In another hundred years when this thing gets finished, folks like you and me probably won’t get to walk out to it anymore.”

“Actually,” I added gravely, “in another hundred years when this thing gets finished, folks like you and me probably will be dead.”

Pick a winner

Arriving to the top of Crazy Horse is an awe-inspiring experience.  To stand upon his outstretched arm and gaze upon the stern face of the Lakota warrior, etched almost one hundred feet into the sky above, fills you with a tempest of emotions.  Standing a mere spec, a mote of dirt, compared to sculpture, you feel tiny and insignificant in a universe of unbelievable size and expanse.  Seeing the sheer grandiose scope of the project, you are amazed at the audacity of vision of the sculptor.  It is simultaneously frightening and encouraging.

It is no surprise, then, that the only way most people seem to cope with the maelstrom of emotions they feel upon seeing the face of Crazy Horse is to have a friend photograph them pretending to pick his nose.

Bittersweet

Atop the arm of Crazy Horse, you are treated to a spectacular view of the valley around you.  You can see the hikers below, winding their way along the grueling six mile serpentine trail that leads from the visitors center, through the valley, and eventually up the left side of the sculpture. From that vantage point, you can also see a second, completely flat and utterly short, straight trail that leads right up to the monument that would have made the previous hike orders of magnitude easier.  Bastards.

Sod

On the way home, I drove through Custer State Park, just because.  The previous day, we took the Queen B’s mother-in-law to Mount Rushmore, followed by a drive through the Black Hills.  We told her stories about herds of deer and buffalo, antelope and wild donkeys that you see along the trip… and then, of course, we managed to see nothing along the way. 

Oh well. Finagle’s Law.

So of course when I went home, I saw buffalo and deer and antelope and even beavers along the way.  I took lots of pictures to prove to my mother-in-law that such animals existed in the Hills, but unfortunately all my pictures were eaten by a apir of donkeys that jumped me on the way home.

Oh well.  Finagle’s Law.

Epilogue

You can look at more pictures from this years hike over at flickr.

Dear Ladybug,

Today you turn twenty-six months old, and you couldn’t be happier about it:

Yeah, believe it or not, that is your happy face. Or rather, it’s the face you invariably make when we ask you to look “happy.” You somehow picked up this particular visage trying to master the art of smiling, and it got such a reaction from the Queen B and I on first seeing it that you quickly added it to your repertoire of facial expressions. Unfortunately, now it’s damn near impossible to get you to smile for the camera without making it, which means that in most pictures you now look less Chinese than Klingon. jIH parmaq SoH vav! DaH nob jIH yuch joq SoH Hegh!!

And you kiss your mommy with that mouth? 

I jest.  While you haven’t actually learned Klingon yet, you are becoming ever more conversant in English.  You chitter and chatter to yourself and anyone in earshot continuously.  More often than not, I have no clue what you’re saying: not only to you speak a mile a minute, but when you get really excited, you tend to shorten all not-entirely-essential words to a single vowel-phoneme, so that you sound something like “Oo ah ee aye aye oo ah more candy please Daddy?”

As your vocabulary grows ever larger, however, I find you tend to gravitate towards a few choice collection of phrases.  Currently, your favorite is “Mine,” or other forms of the first-person possessive.  Apparently your time in daycare has taught you all about proprietary claims, and so now you make them everywhere: ”My books.”  “My chicken stars.” “My shoes.”  In fact, when you are feeling particularly ornery (or Messianic, I can’t tell which), you start demanding ownership over ever more abstract entities: “My park.” “My sun.” “My essence of transcendental thought.”  Well, you haven’t said that last one yet, but we’re getting there.

Most of the time this is a frustrating irritation, since you usually only choose to assert possession of some object exactly one second after I announce said object needs to be put away.  “Mine!” you cry, and grab it so tight you actually fuse to it at an atomic level.  The one exception, however, is when it’s time for bed: we brush our teeth, read a story or two, turn out the light, put you into the crib, and cover you with blankets, at which point you announce “My daddy!” and grab a hold of my arm like a pig-tailed leech, refusing to let go until I tickle you silly enough to relinquish your grip.

Another frequent character in your cast of comebacks is “Shesh,” which is the word “yes” puntuated at both ends with a healthy dose of lateral lisping.  Having a “yes-no” conversation with you is a bit like listening to Sid the Sloth from Ice Age, except that I don’t secretly hate you for being John Leguizamo in real life.  At first your mom and I thought this trait was cute and we’d imitate your adorable “yes” with a comically sloppy and exaggerated “jsheesssh!” of our own, except that you would then imitate our imitation, yielding a slobbery “jshsheessshhhshsh” that would leave the area within a three-foot radius about you covered in Ladybug spit and parental regret. 

The flip-side of “shesh” of course, is “No way!“.   “No way!” is your emphatic form of “No,” to be used when mommy and daddy are just to thick in the head to get it the first time.  “Ladybug, do you want to put on your shoes?” “No.” “Kid, we need to put on your shoes to go outside.” “No way!”

In fact, “No way!” is almost always accompanied by “Go ‘way!,” so much so that I viewed these phrases less as a rhyming couplet and more as a single exclamation, albeit one with a significant gluttoral pause in the middle.  The pairing of these two phrases is a direct result of the following string of consequences, which plays out almost daily like a verbal Rube Goldberg device: 

1. We request something of you, such as eating your vegetables at dinnertime or putting on your pajamas at bedtime or panicked instructions to step away from the ledge, etc.  This leads to…
2. You cry “No way!” and attempt a break-neck escape from the clutches of both your parents and any semblence of reason.  This leads to…
3.  We chase after you to save you, or punish you, or (in many cases) both, and in that order.  This leads to…
4. You look back, see us following and yell “Go ‘way!” before sprinting even faster in the direction in which you are not looking.  This leads to…
5. You run smack into some blunt object and end up concussed.

In hindsight, it might be that last bulleted item that explains why you have yet to learn anything from this repeated little misadventure.

Mouthing off and panicked running are not the only forms of activity you get anymore, either: this month you’ve also mastered jumping.  I was wondering if you’d ever get the hang of it.  For months I’ve been watching you try.  You would lift one leg off the floor, only to be sabotaged by the other leg still anchored to the earth.  You would bend both knees, and hunker down, but could not figure out how to spring them back up again.  You could lift your arms high into sky, only to be disappointed time and time again that of you did not follow suit.  However, in a testiment to either your ferocious tenacity or your pig-headed stubborness (and given your repeated cries of “My jumping!  Mine!,” I suspect the latter), you were one day able to sequence all the moves together and jump jump jump! 

In fact, it is safe to say that jumping has superceded walking as your favorite form of locomotion, and you spend most days bounding around the house like a kangaroo, which given your continued adoration of The Wiggles, is perhaps not inappropriate.  Indeed, any time that you are not jumping from room to room you are singing and dancing to some Wiggles song.  You can, for example, perform from memory the entire “Monkey Dance, “Hot Potato,” and ”D.O.R.O.T.H.Y.” songs, and you’re also mastering the “Romp-pomp-a-stomp.”  So while the far future may jold a job as a Wiggly Dancer for you, the immediate future has you dancing at the corner for quarters.

Actually, any time that you are not jumping and not singing and dancing to a Wiggles song, you are actively asking to sing and dance to a Wiggles song.  Now I am a pretty good dad about appeasing your Wiggle-addiction – I watch the TV show with you and I watch the DVDs with you and I listen to the CDs with you — but some days (particularly thosed days during which I have already sat through the TV show and your DVDs and your CDs) I just don’t care, an apathy that works you up into a frenzy of panicked Wiggle-withdrawal.  To that end, this month I bought you a Shaker, a little MP3 player with an external speaker and a single on/off button, onto which I downloaded every Wiggles song you own.  One would have thought you died and gone to heaven: you now carry your Shaker on a tether wrapped around your neck, happily singing and dancing all day long.

If there is any downside to your Shaker, it’s that you don’t pronounce its name very well.  You still mix up your t’s and k’s an awful lot, which means that you tend to call your MP3 player a rather a dirty name.  And, predictably, if I attempt to correct you, the response is always the same:

“No way!  It’s my Shitter!  My Shitter!  Now go ‘way!”

I still can’t believe you kiss your daddy with that mouth… but I’m sure glad you do, little girl.

I love you, Ladybug.
–Ba ba

Photo album

See more pictures from your twenty-sixth month of existence over at Flickr.

Today is the last day of class… or rather, it would have been had not the annual “Freak Spring Blizzard” chosen today to unlease its frozen fury upon us.   The powers-that-be actually cancelled classes, and in an unusual move for Komplexify U, did so early enough in the morning to let faculty know.  (Are there komplexify fans on the Board of Regents?  I can only hope so, particularly as the time to go up for tenure draws nearer.)  In fact, a little later on the powers-that-be actually shut down the campus when the blizzard became more fierce, and a little later yet the police shut down the city — well, at least 2-wheel drive vehicles from being out in it.  So, serious snow today.

I ain’t a fan of snow days.

They screw up my syllabus and students are inexplicably difficult to get back on task when we do reconvene for class.  But on the last day of class?  I had fascinating and compelling “story arcs” to tie up the many threads in my classes (Calculus II, Advanced and Basic), as well as to forshadow future connections (Complex analysis, Differential equations, and Multivariable calculus).  It’s like a 18-season TV show that gets cancelled before its final episode, and my final episode would’ve rocked (a la Newhart) rather than sucked (a la St. Elsewhere).  In both classes, I was going to reveal the pan-ultimate seccret to calculus, which is th–

Now you get to suffer too.

I just ain’t a fan of snow days. 

Here are some before-and-after pictures to provide further reasons as to why I ain’t a fan of snow days.   First off, our backyard.  Before…

… and after.

You might notice that the little tree in the backyard is leaning at a rather unhappy angle.  Every year one mof my trees takes a nasty hit for the annual freak storm, and this time it was it was this guy.

Next, my street.  Before…

…and after.

You might notice that given the high winds of the blizzard, the snow fall was not uniform.  You can see grass in the lower right-hand corner (so, no snow), and well as a three foot deep “ride” of snow that made a large, parabolic arc through my front year before ending at my front door.

So, finally, my front door.  Before (ish)…

and after…

It took some serious snow-shoveling to clear out the two feet of snow pushing against our front and back doors.

On a related note, the Ladybug ain’t a big fan of snow days either.