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As alluded to in the previous post, we at the komplexify home have rebuilt our deck.

Our old deck was more or less servicable, if ugly: the previous owners had, for reasons utterly beyond me, decided that staining the deck to bring out the natural colors and grain of the wood used to build it would be too showy, so they instead chose to paint the entire thing a flat shade of brown that almost exactly matches dog poo.

However, in the age of an increasingly ambulatory Ladybug, the deck has become more of a concern.  For example, the previous owners constructed the deck with nails rather than wood screws, which meant that the support slats were loose 30%, the haildrails were loose 70%, and stray nail-heads popped out of the floorboards to stub your toe 100% of the time.  In addition, the support slats themselves were just close enough to allow the Ladybug to completely throw herself through them, a design flaw she attempted to exploit almost every time she stepped out on it.

So we decided to use our stimulus check to build a better deck.  In the process, we were actually able to boost the local economy too, by hiring a pair of middle-school-math-computer-teacher-slash-carpenters, J and G, to do it for us.  I was somewhat comforted by the idea that the guys who would build my deck could also probably cite the Euclidean constructions used in the process.

The first step was to tear down the old deck. J and G, armed with only a hammer and an electric saw, managed to easily reduce our deck to a pile of ugly firewood in only two hours, a feat of laid-back destruction that I found vaguely disconcerting.  Apparently, our old deck was held together less with crappy nails than with stale piss and vinegar.  Here it’s going…

… going…

… Gone.

Over the next three days, J and G built a new floor, a new staircase, and finally a new guard-rail, a feat made even more remarkable by the fact that it rained almost continuously on them the entire time.  

Our new deck is made out of gorgeous redwood, held sturdy with wood screws, and impossible for the Ladybug to pass through without changing her quantum structure beforehand.  In addition, J and G also built the railing with “gap” at the bottom running along the entire perimeter, to allow snow to be removed from the deck by simply pushing it off the edgerather than hefting it over railing.  Even more clever, they also topped the railing with a four-inch wide handrail, which according to J is the perfect size to safely hold your beer cozy as you relax on a summer afternoon. Those guys thought of everything.

Anyway, behold my fabulous new deck:

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.

Dear Ladybug,

Happy Easter, or as you pronounce it, Happy birthday to me!

Yes, on Wednesday you turned two years old. Usually I try to write these within a day of your monthly birthdate, but this week has been a little different, in that you’re convinced that every day of it has been your birthday. Each morning you wake up and, convinced that it’s your birthday, demand to be sung Happy Birthday, served cake and ice cream, and pampered with presents. It’s like living with a little Hilton sister. It started on Monday, when the first of what would be several boxes of gifts started arriving from your grandparents. Initially confused by it, your mom and I explained that it contained presents for you from your Nana and Papa for your birthday. We then foolishly let you open one before going to bed.

The very next day you awoke, announced “Happy birthday” to yourself, and proceeded to sneak into the living room and open up all your other presents. That might have been the end of it, except that another box arrived on Tuesday for you… and then they threw you a party at daycare on Wednesday… and then another box arrived for you on Thursday… and so on. Indeed, here on Easter Sunday, you are 100% convinced that the entire Black Hills region spent the day hiding plastic colored eggs filled with toys and candy expressly for you to find for your birthday.* Only two years old, and you already have a God complex.

* On a related note, tonight we went to the Olive Garden for Easter dinner. Near the end of the meal, in some far off corner of the restaurant came the sounds of a song that was remarkably similar to (but not copyright infringingly so) to “Happy Birthday to You” sung by the wait staff. At that moement you realized that they had made a horrible mistake, singing the song for the wrong person, as it was most universally evident that it was your birthday for the seventh consecutive time this week. Hence, every subsequent time our waiter came to the table, we would helpfully announce “Happy birthday Ah-na! Happy birthday Ah-na! Ice cream?” in an adorably desperate attempt to rectify the situation.

And, yes, you eventually got them to sing for you and get your ice cream too, so all was right in the world.

Apparently convinced that your mother and I are incapable of meeting your entertainment needs, over the course of this week your various grandmothers have equipped you with movies, music, medical toys, gardening toys, a new car, a jet pack, and a pony. Couple that with all the Easter festivities and candy, and you mother decided that this month you weren’t getting a birthday party, lest your ego swell to unhealthy proportions. (Given that you’ve already identified the festivities intended for the arisen Messiah with yourself, I’d contend she’s a bit too late.) Since you actually had two birthday parties last year, there’s a nice zero-sum finality to this.

So, what’s happened in the three-quarters of this month that wasn’t your birthday?

Well, for starters, you are now completely potty trained. In what I can only describe as the easiest transition in the history of the known Universe, you are a lean, mean, peeing machine. Gone are the Elmo and Pohh diapers; in their place it’s Disney Princess panties. You are particularly enamored with Cinderella, and I often catch you humming “Cinderella dressed in yellow” as you sit on the potty staring at your britches. I should remark that you’ve gone well past the impending-disaster phase, wherein you would announce your intent to leak (”Daddy, tinkle!“), giving me but precious few seconds to whisk you to your Elmo-seated throne before you commenced leaking. No, now when you make your announcement, you lazily stroll to the potty, hoist yourself up, grab a magazine to read while you do your business, and then unsubtly recommend “Bye-bye Daddy” to give you a little privacy. Next month I suspect you’ll be in there doing Sudoko.

You’ve also moved up in the world at daycare. You are now in the 4-to-4-year-old room. For you, the transition was easy: you finally get to go to the back room (which has always, inexplicably fascinated you), and you now have access to the playground equipment when you play. Perhaps the only downside is that you don’t have Miss Iris as a teacher anymore, which means you are stuck all day with whatever dorky hairstyle I decorate you with in the morning. Sorry, pumpkin.

We’ve also taken to reading stories each night as an established habit. Each night around 8:30, once you’ve been properly bathed and pajamaed, you announce “Booooook” while simultaneously pantomiming the opening of a book. (Yay ASL!) We then march into your room and grab a short stack of books to read for the evening. While the choices vary from night to night, some of your current favorites include:

• The “Spot book,” also called Where’s Spot?, which I’ve written about before. Most nights I read it for you, but some nights I ask you to read it to me, which is delightful. The entire book in Ladybuglish goes like this: “Naughty Spot. Dinner time. Ah ah be? No… No… No… No… Yay!” promptly follwed by “Again?“
• The “Mess book,” also called Love you forever, about a son and a mother with serious separation anxiety and no qualms about breaking and entering. You take great pains to point out all aspects of the messes that the little boy in the story makes, I think mostly describe your room as relatively clean by comparison.
• The “Kiss book,” also called Counting kisses, about a cranky baby being repeatedly kissed before bedtime. You enjoy announcing the various body parts as the story counts down. This almost always goes hand in hand with the “Hug book” (or Mommy hugs), in which the aforemention baby is repeatedly hugged by her mommy.

But let’s get a little perspective here… over the course of the year you’ve gone from a silent, toothless, baby to a chatty, toothy, girl. Let’s take a look at some then-and-now comparisons to see how you’ve grown. And quit making that face, it’ll be fun.

Then: soulful eyes, button nose, pouty lips, and indescrible beauty. Now: soulful eyes, button nose, pouty lips, and indscribable beauty. Okay, not everything changes.

You still like to help me with chores around the house. Not only are you pretty proficient at unloading the dishwasher, you have now learned how to load it with soap and turn it on by yourself as well. You’ve also taken to “vacuuming” the house with your opocorn-popper, usually side-by-side with as I vacuum too. I don’t know how long this little domestic goddess phase will last (although perhaps it exlains your innate fascination with Cinderella), but by golly am I gonna milk it this year. Next week, I plan to teach you to scrub the toilet.

While you still love to be naked, it’s only from the ankles up. Now that you can (more or less) get your shoes on by yourself, you love to walk around the house, proudly wearing your boots or your new, house-only tennis shoes (what you call your pretty shoes)… and nothing else.

On one hand, oh how things change. one year ago, you had nary a tooth in your head, just a goofy gummy smile. Now at 2 years old, you’ve got a mouth full of big, goofily crooked, chomping teeth. On the other hand, you’re as big a dork as ever.

You still love to play outside at the park, although you are now tall enough to play on just about everything — the slides, the bouncers, the playground equipment, you name it. One nice change — at least for my cardiac condition — is that you are now less prone to throw yourself headfirst off on every slide you find yourself on. Then again, you’re now more willing to climb up on any piece of jagged metal and brittle plastic masquerading as playground equipment, which I think might be worse. If you’re wondering where all that grey hair on my head came from, I’d suggest Robbinsdale Park.

You still love to swing, and you still can’t do it by yourself. Given that the swings are probably the only thing that you haven’t yet mastered to a degree that you could inflict irreparable brain damage on yourself by screwing around upon it, the swings are definitely my favorite toy at the park. Any park.

You are still very much a bath baby. You like to splash and float and scrub yourself down with washcloths and plastic ladybugs.

After a bath, you still like to relax a bit. If anything, you’ve gotten better at being lazy! Go, skills!

One year ago — just twelve short months — you were my little baby. Now, you are my fiesty, silly, wonderful little girl.

Yes, you may be growing up quick… but don’t you forget that no matter how old you are, mybaby you’ll always be. I love you, Ladybug.

– Ba ba

Photo album

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

Dear Ladybug,

Yesterday you turned twenty-three months old. Though you are only a month away from the Terrible Twos, and you are thankfully still more of dork than a demon; more of a goof than a gremlin. Your mother has foolishly uttered aloud her hope that you’ll stay your sweet self all through the next year, which can only mean she jinxed it all beyond hope. Oh well.

It’s been a bit of a rough month for our family. Papa K passed away at the end of January, and although I don’t quite think you understand what that means exactly, you do have some sense that it’s a sad thing. I haven’t quite figured out how to explain it to you, and thankfully you haven’t pushed the issue too much, because whenever I try, I start to get teary eyed, and you just say “Sad” and give me a hug. Yeah, I am sad, little Ladybug, but that helps so much.

And I need to say Thank you to you too, little girl. Your Nana asked me to give the eulogy, and while I practiced it and practiced it to make sure I could read through it without falling apart too much, none of it mattered… at the service, I didn’t get past the first paragraph before I got choked up. And then you, sitting in the front pew with Mommy and your Nana and your aunts and uncle, saw you daddy being ad, and so you ran up to the front of the chapel to stay with me. And I picked you up, and you gave me a hug… and then you stayed there, in my arms, as I read through the rest of the eulogy. Whenever it got too hard to read, I just looked at you, and you smiled or giggled or hugged me back, and that gave me the oomph I needed to continue. I know I wouldn’t have gotten through that without you up there helping me, little Ladybug, and so once again, Thank you.

Sigh.

Of course, the purposes of these newsletters is not to dwell on sadness, but to celebrate your new experiences, and this month has kept you busy doing new things. For example, this month we took you sledding for the first time. Well, not sledding in the classic sense of putting on a sled and throwing off a snow-covered inclined plane in the futile hope that you’ll steer yourself away from trees or rocks or other children — we’ll get to that next winter, when you’ve got Terrible Twos aggression to work out. No, I mean “sledding” in the sense that you sat in a sled, and I dragged you all around Rapid City in some feeble bipedal Iditarod. You enjoyed it for a while (in the sense that you put up with sitting on a plastic tray in near-freezing cold while you mother demanded that you smile for picture after picture) until I spun around a corner a wee bit too fast and flung you belly-up into the snow.

On a related note, you also learned how to make snow angels this month, albeit unexpectedly.

You also played your first game of bowling this month. You went bowling with me and Mommy and Nana and Aunt Kellie at the Suncoast in Vegas at a sixty-four lane bowling alley, notable for being slightly less smoky than the casino floor itself. At first you thought bowling was the greatest thing since slice pineapples: they gave you new shoes — new shoes! — and a giant florescent orange ball to play with. Then we put in front of a magical machine that periodicaly spit up hot pink and neon green bowling balls. And then, then, we explained the basic rules of the game: throw the bll at the pins and knock ‘em over! That’s right — the whole point of the game was to smash stuff down. Awesome.

In theory, that is. In practice, your little muscles could only impart so much force to your bowling ball, so that the ball would roll down the lane at a speed slightly slower than plate techtonics; indeed, the only reason the pins ever fell down was not because of the force with which the bowling ball struck them, but rather from pure exhaustion as they waited. After the first few frames, you decided that one turn was good enough, and so Mommy would step up to take your second turn and pick up the spare; by about the seventh frame, you couldn’t even be bothered to carry the ball to the lane, and would instead just fling the ball in its general direction right from your seat. In fact, when all was said and done, the bit about bowling that you liked the most was the fact that mommy let you eat french fries while you played, and that made it all worth it.

Of course, the biggest devlopment this month: you’re potty-trained! Well, pretty close to it, at any rate. Your mommy took the task upon herself while I was gone in Las Vegas, and I have to admit that she’s been pretty successful. She owes this success to primarily two reasons. First, she bought you a Elmo potty seat that sits on top of the regular potty. One plus is that it frees you up from having to go in your little potty seat, a thing to which, paradoxicallty, you’ve bonded so strongly that you cannot bring yourself to desicrate it. Another plus is that it has Elmo all over it, a fact that delights you to know and end which, even more paradoxically that the potty seat, encourages you to climb upon and pee over. (On a related note, I’m already putting aside some money for your eventual schizophrenia counselling.)

Of course, the real secret is that your mother bribed you. With candy. Everytime you went, your mom would give you an M&M or another candy. This worked well as motivation initially, but you very quickly figured out how to work it to your advantage: one morning you announced “Mama, tinkle!” Your mom took you to the potty and you squeezed out a couple of drops before promptly announcing “All done! Candy?” So mom gave you a piece of candy, which you greedily scarfed down before announcing “Mama, tinkle!” and repeating the entire process again, extorting your mom out of a small bad of M&Ms before she decided to change the candy policy. Now you only get immediate candy for a poop; other bathroom trips merely add candy to your after-dinner stockpile. Of course, this shouldn’t actually affect your scam, but thankfully your need for immediate gratification outweighs your ability for cold, calculated candy extortion.

That’s my girl: a sledding, bowling, tinkling little thing who knows how to cheer up her daddy. I sure love you, little Ladybug.

– Ba ba

Photo album

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

I’ve returned from a weekend excursion to one sibling of the Twin Cities, namely Minneapolis, doncha know?

I was there to attend the Collaboration for the Advancement of College Teaching and Learning, a conference all about how to effectively teach students born into the “Age of Internet,” and so my contribution was a presentation with my colleague J on using mathematical software to present mathematics using visual intuition and empirical hypothesis-testing, rather than the static memorization of new rules, but mainly it was a chance to show off some of my cool Maple programs, like one that allows students to render a movable tangent line:

or another that allows students to watch Taylor polynomials synamically converge to the function they’re approximating:

The ten or so folks who attended seemed very interested in the ideas we presented, and almost all of them stayed a half-hour after the conclusion of the talk to experiment some more with them, which was karmically rewarding for me.  Even better, the Vice President of Komplexify U was also in attendance, and got to see me make said presentation and see dais post-presentation congregation, which (given that I am going up for tenure next year) I hope will be financially rewarding as well.

The conference itself was held in one of the convention-hall areas of a towering Hilton.  The Hilton itself was pretty nondescript, but it is worth mentioning that the Collaboration conference was the same weekend as a Society for the Culturally Awkward (or SCA) group, which meant that when I wasn’t at a pedagogy seminar I was watching pimply-faced guys and gals in corsets and knightly body armor bady singing karaoke renditions of disco songs, which is a spectacle I would highly recommend to others.

I did not, however, stay at the Hilton, but rather at the hotel across the street, the Sofitel.  If a hotel can be built around a theme, then for the Sofitel that theme would be sixties Paris; if a hotel can be built around a single word, then for the Sofitel that word would be swanky.  There’s psychedelic paintings on the walls, oblong glass tables at which to sit, and artistically arranged (though probably non-OSHA compliant) exposed wiring in the elevators.  One wall of the foyer undulates like a sine curve, with leather loveseats nestled away into its nooks and niches adorned with scented candles and plaques with words like Magnifique or Couture or Pomme de terre in overly ornate cursive fonts.  The foyer itself consists of a vast open rectangular space in which four massive circular chandeliers dangle in scene that can best be descibed as “just moments before massive structural failure:”

I didn’t do much on Friday after the collaboration, owing to the fact that the outdoor temperature was hovering just slightly below absolute zero, but on Saturday, J and I headed downtown to catch a play at the Guthrie.  The play was Peer Gynt, a reinterpretation of a Norwegian faolk story that involved businessmen in cardiac distress, human-troll interspecies breeding, hallucinatory voyages through the desert and the ocean, and the melting of people into tin coins before it got really strange.  It was enjoyable, if a little bizarre.

The Guthrie itself is a remarkable building.  Its bright blue exterior is a strange contrast of circular arches and rectangular blocks, do that the entire structure appears to be built entirely out of overzsized Legos blocks.  Inside, the Guthrie has more twists and turns than the building in that Relativity Escher print.  There is the “forever bridge,” a sort of cantlevered archway that gives to the person standing at its far end the vertigo-inducing impression of being dangled precariously two blocks away from the theatre building itself.  There are a pair of escalators that appear to throb and pulse with light.  There is are bathrooms with no sinks, per se, but stacks of irregularly-placed planes of metal that direct (in unneccesarily Rube-Goldbergian fashion) water from a faucet to the general vicity of your hands.  There is the Dowling Theatre on the ninth floor, a massive gallery of empty space flanked on all sides by yellow-tinted windows that give the entire world a nostalgic sepia-tinged glow, as if you’d stepped out of reality and into an antique photograph.  The Guthrie is cool.

After the play, J and I strolled through downtown Minneapolis to get something to eat.  The city has this ingenious thing called the “City Walk,” which I can best describe as a human sized version of a hamster tube like this…

…except this one is the size of a major city.  Seriously, it’s this elevated, enclosed walkway that meanders back and forth throughout most of downtown Minneapolis.  It cuts its way through the interior of office buildings and commercial centers, department stores and parking garages, occasionally dropping a little tube of stairs down to terra firma should you wish to walk the mean streets.  On the one hand, its a bit like walkinh through a never-ending subway station: poorly ventilated, stuffy, and frequently smelling of urine.  On the other hand, it’s a neat way to walk through Minneapolis at night and see the city without freezing off your junk.

Anyhoo, I took some pictures over at Flickr if you’re interested.