Little kid brains are amazing things – they soak up everything like a sponge, and somehow, it is ALL still in there. About a week ago, somehow Mer and I got talking about a character from children’s books that we both loved – Ramona from books by Beverly Cleary. I LOVED Ramona when I was little. I read all the Ramona books and other books by Cleary, probably several times. I was telling Meredith that I still remembered how Ramona loved to step on sidewalk cracks because she had learned “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” She was a great character. Mer owns the Ramona books and dug them out, so I read Ramona the Pest over the last few days. It is still a great book. Cleary gets into the head of a five-year old girl and pulls it off wonderfully. She manages a few barbs at parents along the way (“The two mothers were so busy talking about their children needing to learn responsibility they paid no attention to the argument [the children were having]”). It is a very fun and well-written book. What absolutely amazed me was how much of the book was still in my head. I remembered many of the illustrations – a bunny with a ribbon around its neck, Ramona making her Qs look like cats (with whiskers and ears), Ramona riding her tricycle with a wheel off so she could ride a two-wheeler, and more. I also remembered parts of the story – most notably I remembered how Ramona gets stuck in thick mud the first day she wears her shiny new boots. Absolutely amazing – I have not read these books in THIRTY years!

How is it that I could read every book I could lay my hands on and remember large chunks of them (don’t get me started on The Great Brain and Encyclopedia Brown – I’m STILL upset that there was an Encyclopedia Brown story that could not be solved within the story – Brown solves the mystery by watching a drinking fountain for someone who was thirsty from eating lox, but we don’t find this out until the solution. Humph!), but I find learning much harder now and I can’t remember where I put my keys? I know the brain stops growing and all that, but it is still amazing how much of my brain is storing stuff from twenty or even thirty years ago.

  Mer and I were invited to go to our friend’s house for New Year’s Eve. Our friend is the CVCA Latin teacher, and she is know affectionately as “Dubbs” (her name has several “w”s in it). Dubbs and her husband, Nate, are fun people who like games and have always had good food, so we were quite pleased to accept their invitation. Dubbs and Nate also invited the greater Ombudsman clan, so it was a festive gathering.

Nate cooked – he works for Schwans, so he had some of their food, and he added spices and sauces. There were two different kinds of meatballs, pulled pork, shrimp scampi, chips, soda, and a chocolate cake. Once again, I was the paragon of self control, and I did not eat the pans. I was especially effective with the chocolate cake, of which I consumed 1/4 all by myself (somehow I got it into my head that there were two cakes, so I did not realize I was being greedy until after I served myself). The food was all help-yourself and casual. We ate and laughed while the little Ombudsmen played with their toys and some of Dubbs’ extensive Star Wars stuff.

Nate introduced me to his X-Box 360 that he got for Christmas. He showed me a version of PacMan on steroids – the maze keeps changing as you eat things. I played it for five minutes, and I did okay. Nate then showed me a game where you navigate a marble around a maze, and I liked that quite a bit. I’m not saying I did very well at the tougher levels, but I enjoyed it.

I brought along the Wii, and so I hooked it up. It was enjoyed for much of the evening. Ombudsman and his daughter squared off in boxing and in bowling, and I’ll assume that Ombudsman let his daughter win as part of building her self-esteem (especially in bowling, Ombudsman could not get any breaks – he kept getting splits). It was entertaining watching people play the Wii – one of the reasons I like the Wii as a party game is that you can laugh at the people playing as they jump around.

Ombudsman and clan had to leave about 10:00 (the little ones were getting tired). It was fun to get to see them. Dubbs, Nate, Mer and I then broke out the board games. We played Apples to Apples, which Mer won. I think Apples to Apples is probably designed for six or more people, but it was still entertaining to play it with four – the company was merry.

We then moved on to the old stand-by, guys vs. girls in Cranium. Nate and I jumped out into a quick lead, but got bogged down on Creative Cat, where we got stuck sculpting “drawing,” and drawing “pregnant woman” and “police woman.” Dubbs and Mer came storming back, but the comeback was worth it to see Mer trying to hum The Cars’ “My Best Freind’s Girlfriend” and to see Dubbs imitating Mae West. The girls won, but it was still fun.

Somewhere in there, we decided to watch the ball drop. Dubbs does not have cable, so we watched the Times Square celebration on the Spanish channel. We did not even realize the ball had essentially dropped until they showed it on camera for the last second. Surreal, but par for the evening. We continued the game after the short interruption.

So, wild partiers that we are, we stayed at Dubbs’ and Nate’s house until after 1:00, and I did not get to bed until about 1:30. I really cannot tell you the last time I was up at 1:30 actually doing something.

Keep an eye on those Latin teachers – they are wild.

Last Thursday, Mer and I threw another party (we’re just social folks); this time, we invited the CVCA Ceili Club (the CVCA Irish dancing club) over for a movie and some dancing.

We had a good turnout: 10 students, one parent, and our friend (and CVCA Latin teacher) Dubbs. We (once again) had way too much food – I made pizzas and calzones, and the students brought sodas, chips, cookies, and even a vegetable plate (I even had some carrots!). We munched and socialized for about 45 minutes, and then we got settled in to watch a movie.

I wanted to get an Irish film, but ideally it should be PG, and it should still be interesting. I found a website that listed some Irish films, and I settled on The Secret of Roan Inish. It turned out to be a good pick (at least from my point of view) – it dealt with the western Irish islands, small-time fishing life, and Irish legends about seals (selchies), and it even had a smattering of Irish Gaelic in it. The brief shot from behind of a small but very naked boy caused some mirth from the assembly, but I think it went over well. If you haven’t seen Secret, I recommend it.

We then came to the dancing part of the evening. Our house has a 10’x20′ sunroom out back that is still without any furniture. It is tiled and enclosed, so it seemed a good place to dance. Granted, it is not well insulated, but I kept the sliding-glass door open to the sunroom all day in hopes of warming it up. Turns out that did not work very well, but it was still probably in the low 50s when we went out there to dance. Since ceili dancing is an active passtime, I figured we would soon be happy for the cooler temperatures.

I was certainly right about being glad for the cooler temperatures! With 12 of us dancing, we were soon very comfortable. The windows fogged up, but that was okay since it was dark out. That was when one of the kids fell. The floor was getting slick – the moisture we were putting into the air was condensing on the still-cold tile floor. If any of you have ever walked on wet ceramic tile, you know it can be very slick. Still, the student in question was fine, and we kept dancing. We danced for about an hour and fifteen minutes when the same student slipped and fell again (Mer and I had narrowly avoided slipping several times), and it was getting close to 10:30 at night and parents were picking up their children, so I decided that we had had enough dancing. And the student that fell let me know the next day that he was fine.

So, all in all, it was a very fine evening. The next time I hold a ceili out in the sunroom, it needs to be warmer! Maybe in the spring….

I’m happy to report that I have managed to get to profession level (a score of greater than 1000 – in my case, 1044) in Wii tennis. I’m now pro in golf and tennis, and I keep flirting with pro in baseball, with a score generally in the 900s.

I’m usually not much into New Year’s resolutions; I try to take care of things that are important to me as I need to. However, since the start of December, I have put on about eight pounds – those pounds need to come off in the next four weeks or so! I need to make sure that the treadmill and I are on good terms.

Last Wednesday, Mer and I were happy to get together and visit with our good friend Julie. Julie went to CVCA with Meredith (back in the day), and later worked there. Julie is a ton of fun to hang around (she is funny and energetic and bright), so Mer and I hung out with Julie a lot. Until Julie was rude enough to take a job in California! She is in her third school year there now, and we miss her. So, it is always much fun to get back together. Julie was in for the Christmas break, and she was able to squeeze us in her schedule for an evening.

We did not do anything too spectacular – we went to Friday’s (where I ate too much) and then came back to the house and hung out and talked until sometime around midnight. We talked largely about school (especially English classes, since Mer and Julie are both English teachers). It should be sad that we were all talking about work, but we still laughed much of the time, and we talked about literature (especially Huck Finn, one of my favorite books) at length, so it was not so dry as it might seem.

Julie is doing well, and she looks happy and healthy. We’d love for her to come back, but that does not seem to be in the cards, which is okay since Julie is happy.

I generally don’t notice getting older – the few aches I have I write off to exercising too hard. The one place I really notice the passage of time is in leaving friends. Mer and I have moved away from friends and family or had friends move away from us, and that is hard. It is difficult to stay in close contact with friends when you (or they) move away. There are people we miss very much in Maine and in Chicago, and there are CVCA and other Ohio friends who have moved away, and we miss them. That is (for me) one of the hardest things about getting older – life moves you on and away from people.

That can be hard on a twenty-year-old!

At any rate, I’m delighted that Julie made the effort to catch up with us again.

Last Tuesday was Christmas, and this was the first year in ten years that we decided to stay home (not travel) for Christmas. We thought we would have a mellow Christmas, and while our Christmas break has been much fun, it has not been mellow!

Shannon playfully coined a term in response to a blog post – “spiritual static electricity.” The idea tries to describe the spiritual benefit of hanging around people who are living spiritually mature and beneficial lives, and picking up some of their habits. I got to experience some spiritual static electricity on Christmas day.

A couple in our church has a restaurant in Alliance called Burger Hut. This was the fourth year that they decided to serve a turkey dinner to the needy on Christmas day. Meredith insisted on signing us up to help out – I was hesitant because I selfishly wanted a mellow Christmas day (plus I was not sure what our local relatives and friends would want to do on Christmas day). So, on Christmas morning, we took the trip to Alliance to serve up food for hungry folks. Meredith was being spiritually electrical (if I may put it that way), and the couple that owns the restaurant were being electrical as well. It was very very good for me to be around them all on Christmas morning. I did not do anything too important that morning – I did dishes to keep dishes available for food to be warmed and served. We were there for about two-and-a-half hours, and it was good for me to be reminded that Christmas is not just about gifts and trees and pretty music. Jesus was very concerned with the poor, and it was a great way to celebrate Christmas helping the poor in a very small way.

We served about 400 dinners, and we heard a church down the road served about 450 dinners and ran out of food. That is almost 1000 dinners for one small city – Alliance has about 23,000 people. That is serving food to over four percent of the population! That was eye-opening; the need was great enough that two small churches served food to four percent of the population. I knew Alliance had some poor areas, but how many poor people are there in just that one town? According to the census (via Wikipedia), almost 13% of the families and 18% of the population live below the poverty line (with a staggering 26% of the under-18 population living under the poverty line). I don’t have any answer for the poverty of the town, but it was good to be around people who were trying to help in a small way.

We then went to our old neighborhood (I guess it’s still our neighborhood since we still own the house there) to visit with the George clan. The George clan are close family friends, and almost everyone was there – the Georges, three of their four children (and spouses), and nine of their twelve grandchildren. Add me and Mer and our Aunt Mary, and it was quite a full house! We had a good time visiting and eating. I got to flip through a 1930s yearbook that was the graduation yearbook for Grandpa George (who passed away a few years ago). It was fun to see how yearbooks have stayed the same (class photos and clubs and sports) and how they have changed (the informal language has changed – we’re still informal in yearbooks, but the language has changed).

We played a few games (I stayed away from Dutch Blitz, a game I dislike but Mer enjoys), and we got to see a short video that was made from digital pictures from one of the George grandchildren (who is about 8). It was fun to see the constant activity of kids running around and playing together (with occational drama of tears or arguments) – seven of the nine grandchildren that were in the house are ten years old or younger.

We left the George house in the evening, having eaten too much, and we came home and opened gifts from friends and relatives. The home, food, gifts, family and freinds are all wonderful, and need to not be taken for granted. That is one of the many benefits to static electricity!

Last Saturday (Christmas week has been too busy for blogging!), Mer and I got to go to Actors’ Summit to see their production of Dylan Thomas‘ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. A Child’s Christmas in Wales is a dramatized version of a short story that Thomas wrote. The play uses much of the language of the story as an adult Thomas narrating the play, and then intersperses the narration with Thomas becoming a child in the action of the play. It is very effective. The actor playing Thomas was able to pull off both the adult Thomas and the child Thomas, largely by body language. It did not seem odd to see a full-grown man running around with his best friends and getting excited over gifts from relatives, because the actor was the child Thomas. Very well done.

The play is not deep, but it excels at creating the atmosphere of a simple yet warm Christmas in Wales. Seeing the perspective of Christmas from the child Thomas’ perspective is a perfect way to get into the mood of the Christmas season – childlike wonder, family stories, snow, relatives, food, family traditions, and more. Mixing the adult Thomas’ prose into the play adds lyrical beauty to the play. Every year, Actors’ Summit puts on a Christmas play, so I have seen four or five different Christmas plays, and this was by far my favorite. It was sentimental without being schmaltzy, and warm without being cheesy.

Last Saturday (wow! A week ago now!), Mer and I got to go see our friends Zach and Londa get married. Mer and I love weddings anyway, but this was a great wedding. It was full of CVCA people (Zach works at CVCA), so we knew a ton of people. The ceremony was very nice (including a CVCA student playing concert harp as prelude music), and there were two receptions – one for CVCA people with finger foods, and then the formal dinner reception (there were too many CVCA folk to invite them all to a formal reception). But the best part was seeing Zach and Londa get married. They are wonderful people. Zach may be the most earnest person I have ever met – when he says “God bless you” he really really means it. Zach has a million stories, usually with himself as the butt of the jokes. Londa is always smiling, and she is gracious. I’ve helped Zach move a couple of times, and Londa always made sure everyone felt appreciated (and well fed!).

A great moment at the wedding itself was the first kiss. Zach and Londa both work with youth, and they wanted to model purity in a relationship, so they made the decision to not even kiss until they were married. No pressure! Their first kiss was in front of about 500 people. The minister was funny – just before telling Zach he could kiss Londa, she said the usual thing when asking people to raise their hands to accept Jesus – “with every head bowed and every eye closed….” That got a good laugh, and not one bowed head.

Mer and I are also excited because Zach just moved to an apartment about a half mile away from where we live. It will be great having a young and fun couple so close to hang out with. For me personally, I want to hang out with Zach because he is so sincere. I’d love to have some of his faith rub off on me!

Welcome to the neighborhood, Mr. and Mrs. Churchill!

Thursday night I threw a Founding Fools reunion/party. All of the original Fools showed up, except one who was working at school two hours away. Some of the Founding Fools I had not seen in over two years, so it was great to see them. I made pizza and calzones, including the brilliant move of forgetting to put cheese in two of the four calzones that I made. I claimed that it was out of consideration of lactose-intolerant people, but really I was just an absent-minded dork. The Fools themselves brought chips, dessert, and lots and lots of sodas. We certainly had plenty to eat. Mer always accuses me of assuming that everyone eats like we do, and she is right – there was only the equivalent of three pieces of pizza per person, but there were still leftovers for us! Yum!

We had general chatting and eating until everyone showed up, and then I put in the movie o’ the evening – The Gods Must Be Crazy. Mer had introduced me to the film years ago, and it seemed like a good film to show the Fools. I did give the same disclaimer that Mer gave me – you have to give Gods a chance, since it starts kind of slowly. The Fools seemed to enjoy it very much. Not too bad for a movie made before any of them were born!

I ran over to school quickly to get my list o’ games, and we provided to have a good hour of improv. One of the fun things about these parties is that doing improv is for our amusement. We have no audience – it is doing improv just to have fun, and fun we had! The Founding Fools still have it – there were some fantastic moments of heightening and a fantastic “yes, and” where a Fool agreed that he very much wanted an elephant trainer. Some highlights of a very funny evening:
– Ranting and raving about college food
– A wife giving her husband an elephant and an elephant trainer as a present
– The superhero Perfect-Teeth Girl getting the “special floss” from Floss Girl
– A location-vocation-means of death that had Mer on the moon filling in craters while being attacked by plants
– Various advice on how to tell your kids about Santa
– Listening in on answering machine messages about being snowed in (including many messages from Aunt Tillie!)
– A paperback scene where one of the Fools ended up with tetanus
– A blind line scene where a Fool was being sold cheap hair care products

We wound the evening up with a little Wii action. I got smoked by a Fool who is also a tennis player. I guess I have more work to do.

It was a fun evening, and I even managed to stay up until midnight! Great fun!