A Big Complaint

Last Friday Leila and Nyssa lost their day care teacher Sara B. She'd been with Nyssa during her time in the Ducks and had been Leila's teacher (because Katy and I demanded it!) for all of Leila's time at Childserve. More than the parental, we really appreciate her care and concern for our children. We really like Sara (and her chubby to be Justin). She's smart and funny and really meant to be a teacher. She takes her job and her kids development seriously. We like all of the teachers that Nyssa and Leila have had, they all seem energetic and seem to understand that their jobs are to be sweet and comforting and keep the kids safe. Sara just goes beyond that. She (and a couple others) make it seem like our kids are the most special ones out there. Not more special than others, but most special.
I've been meaning to sit down and hash out my thanks to her. I have this constant urge to give advice, and the immediate response to turn that switch off. So as much as I want to thank Sara I want to tell her what to do. Or what to keep doing. Don't get tired, don't let people get to you. I think she is great because she thinks she is making a difference, and she does. She really gave Nyssa a nice place to grow. Nyssa would be doing everything she's doing now, however she made it easy. So we are going to miss her, and we can't wait to see what she does in the future. Thanks Sara. Good luck.

No Complaints

Our camera is crapping out, but on it, somewhere, is the best video to date. I'll get the beauty off sometime, but for now here are some photos:

OK. Well, I have some complaints. But their large and their minor. First complaint, why do I have to get her dressed everyday?
Her pj's are cuter than most of her regular clothes.
Although, now that its getting summery and she's wearing little skirts and tank tops its getting pretty effing cute.


BB Leila is so sweet and funny. All of you out there that have never met her are really missing out. No blame. But she loves to sit and giggle and smile and, now, wave and play patty-cake, and kick her tiny little edible feet. She is so much fun. Until about 1am.

The Big Noodle is really a sweet snuggely nice girl. She is not perfect, and is entering into a kinda bratty phase...I always thought that the terrible two's was a 2 month thing, or maybe a 6 months thing and would start, take up, the first part of the two's...Now, I realize the Two's are a on again off again phase. You never know when it is going to start?
But The Big Noodle does so many things that are kind and sweet and thoughtful.




Like Nyssa really loves her sister. She very occasionally gets a little rough, but she shares, she kisses, she hugs. And whenever Leila does something new or different Nyssa is right there to celebrate it.

That's about it for me and talking. I should probably be telling you specific stories but...

Bold as Love

I bought a new CD Monday. Actually I bought 2, but have really only listened to one.
Because I want to listen to it over and over!

Let me start over.

What happens when you are in love, and then fall in love again. Or not again, but deeper, further, farther off the cliff?

The cause is probably always easy to identify. Your baby smiles. Your 2 year old drones, "dumb, dumb dumb" on her drive to school because she likes the sound of it. Your dog kisses you more softly than you can imagine. Your wife trustingly lets you rub her belly.

You get the picture...but what happens is harder to say.

Let me start at the beginning.

3 maybe 4 years ago I was shopping late into the Christmas season, I needed a present for Katy badly, and had no ideas. I was in a borders in Tucson, AZ. waundering through their CD's and I saw a blurb from Nick Lowe on a CD.

“Discerning music lovers have long known that Watkins is not only an artist and entertainer of the very top drawer but also, bafflingly, an all too well-kept secret. Being so individual his style is hard to define -– I would file him as the missing link between Paulo Conte and Howling Wolf.”- Nick Lowe

Who knew if the CD was any good? But desperate, I decided if it was good enough for Nick Lowe it was good enough for Katy. That record was Geraint Watkins, "Dial W for Watkins." And as it turned out, it is just about the perfect record. Soulful and sweet, it carries you along with its words, its rich vocals, its wonderful music.

Watkins, apparently is a longtime session musician, longtime member of the cajun band Balham Alligators. And most of his records are out of print, including his one other solo record, Bold as Love

So I have been waiting for years for his next record. It came out in October of '08. In Brittain.
I have checked and checked, but it was never released here, never on I-tunes (which I kind of hate), Until I checked again on Monday. Here's the line-up.

Easy to Say "Bon temps Rouler" --Easily my new favorite song.
Champion -- Smooth and sweet (see below).
Unto You -- a haunting warning, ancient, like a response to Vincent Price
Fools Like Me -- a late age Nick Lowe type song...wonderful and reflective
Chagrin -- Storm weather and windy seas... guitar, violin and accordion. He makes you sway
My Love -- This song sounds very much like a song I know and I can't place it. Moody Blues? comes to mind but without the flights of fancy. Vocal Harmonies, easy pop, twang guitar...It will drive me crazy until I figure it out.
Bourgeoise -- As frenchy as the title.
History -- Drum Machine, Swaying Organ, overdubbed vocals...Part strangers in the night...part Barry White. a masterful song.
Jenni -- Lost love with a low gravel. With Geraints organ taking center stage.
Heart of the City -- an odd re-mixing that grows on me.
Catch On -- Another Nick Lowe type song. Adult love. Adult because you've recognized your mistakes, not overcome them. They are what engulf you and only by singing can you be set free.
At Last -- A dance number waiting for a Fred Astaire. My heart was wrapped in clover the night I looked at you.

Unfortuenetly, because i-tunes sucks, I have no idea who plays on the songs, nor even who wrote them. I know "Heart of the City" is a Nick Lowe standard, but Geraints version is very different.

Lets not focus on the negatives. Here is a sample of what he can do:
champion

I was ready to write a pithy little review of the record when I found this video and my stomach dropped out from in me. There is always the fear when buy a new record that it will pale in comparison to what you know. This record is both similar and distinct from "Dial W." It is both similar and distinct from things you've heard before. Here is his Myspace page if you want to listen to more songs, and see more video...http://www.myspace.com/geraintwatkins

But really go buy the damm records...even if that is something you never do...because both "Dial W" and "In a Bad Mood" reward me everytime I listen to them. Do i have to wait 4 more years for something else new? I can't do it.

Spring Cleaning

This is not to say that the refrigerator is empty.
This is not to say it has been defrosted and wiped clean.
This is not to say you should think about eating
the spinach siting in that yellow bag.
I saved it for you. It is too juicy, too wet.

Strange things have been happening around here now. We are getting healthy!
We are having Nana over for the weekend!
but lets look at some crafty pictures and we'll talk as we go...


For "sports" day this year Nyssa and I took a late night trip to the mall to try and find some Cubs Schwagg. It was hard to find any...so we settled for a cute Mexico soccer shirt and an overlarge Cubs hat, which is really funny, but not pictured.

Leila is outfitted in hand me down onsey and pink Cub hat. We start young and we plan hard!






Here we see Beans resting under the beaver pelt I trapped for her in February. It is 80 degree's, but we like to keep her warm.
The hat is made from 100% strawberry skin, with reupohlstered root creating the leaf top.
At this point, this is the Leile that you get. she sits, she stares. She may smile coyly.
And we love her.




What just gets my gaul is how these two hardly ever intereact. You dress them alike. You sit them next to eachother. And this is what I get?
silent, sullen, slince!
disapointing.









The heavy breathing here, is mine...I'm so proud.



Don't feel bad for her here, apparently she banged her head durring the spin cycle. But her ears have never been so clean.

Things are Happening Around Here

We had a big sick weekend around here. And contrary to what I yelled at someone, I don't have the flu...so maybe the stupid flu shot did work. Sorry. But not really.
But the short of it is I am sitting home with a sleeping sick baby. Who also has not kissed any pigs.
So we should be OK.
But the big part of the weekend was not sickness. It was this...



She can wave. And she loves to do it. Here is a one of her with her big sister. A big sister that really loves to play with her.

Only About Her

I don't have the photo archive to really do this right...and after her comment on my post below, she deserves to have it done right....but here are a bunch of photo's and video's starring my lovely and talented sister, Laura Ciccantell, who did go to great lengths to visit Katy and Nyssa and Leila and I with her daughter, Katie, about a month ago. I would note, in response to her comment, that she was not mentioned in the prior presentation, because it was things I'd done, not things done to me.
Here are pictures and video's of her visit.
The drive was long, but I mean could you not drop my child?














This has nothing to do with Laura, but look at how cute Nyssa is.


Here is a cute one of Laura and Nyssa reading.



Our Camera is breaking so we don't have a ton of photos of their visit. In fact we apparently didn't take a single photo of Katie with her cousins. Which is ridiculous.
But we really loved that they came to visit. We had lots of fun, painted great pottery and Nyssa really loved her cousin and aunty.

Other visiters are always welcome. Just so long as you are nosey and pushy. and are willing to make out with our dogs.

About Me...Only

Most of the people who visit this site are nosy and always asking, "So what are you doing?"
And I try my best not to answer, and to leave the room as quickly as possible. Yesterday I was forced to answer that question for credit. Here is how I did it. If you pay close attention you will know everything I've done.

Here's the Presentation

I don't ever talk in public, but when I do, I find it difficult to only talk for 15 minutes. But for Steve Pett, I'll try to do anything. So here we go with my presentation (read slide, pointing out the simplest most basic things, like my name.) I have a lot of field experience. I like to say that I've doctored more dissertations than Gregory House.














I've woken up at 3:00am to chase after birds in Arizona.














I've run away from cows outside of Flagstaff, AZ.














I've sexed Muskies in Shoepack Lake, MN.














I've chased butterflys in CRP in Minnesota. Of all my dissertation doctoring, only my wife mentioned me, "and Gordon Reeder assisted with all portions of the project." Which is nice.














I've even fleeced Monsanto of a couple of thousand dollars looking for birds in 3 cropping systems.














So when I started into this MFA I figured I would do something equally exciting, like searching for the Elusive Javelina of Story County.














But then...Something happened. And I no longer was all that interested in sleeping on the ground in far off counties.














In fact, I decided to become an entirely different person.














But I still wanted to do something I've never done before. I decided to work in an office, where I would see the same people everyday. And if you look closely, you'll see her. [which is funny because, I switched tenses, AND, she was sitting in the audience.]














Happily, I got a chance to intern for Practical Farmers of Iowa. And then I bassically read this slide. Ending with PFI has an active and vibrant membership.














For a non-profit its size PFI does a tremendous amount of work. From program areas in Niche Pork, Grazing, Youth and the Next Generation, horticulture and Field Crops...to sponsering over 30 Field days each year with more than 1900 people attending in 2008 alone...to conducting On-Farm research and Demonstration projects with 40 families doing research in 2008

PFI functions as a clearing house of information. At a field day last week the host said, "I went to school for a long time to learn about farming and Agriculture, but everything I know about farming I learned from PFI."

At its core Practical Farmers is a networking system that brings farmers and non-farmers together to talk about sustainable, healthy, fiscally sound agriculture.



Which brings me to what I do for them. Besides constantly changing computers and complaining about how slow the one I'm working on is...I've signed on to help update and maintain their website. Which will look different in the coming weeks. I maintain their calendar of events, update the list serve, call the media to make sure they've received press releases, and help coordinate a couple of field days.














Until recently the largest portion of my job has been taking old PDF documents and converting them to searchable HTML pages. So that This...














Becomes this...
Which is maybe not that dramatic, but it lead to a discussion of how PFI can better utilize the internet as the best tool to expand your information base.














I've even started a PFIblog, which will be on-line soon.














And in a sort of culmination of my ISUCOMM career, utilizing techniques I learned in Stephen F. Pett's class and taught to many a 105 student, PFI allowed me to desigin their Annual Report.














Can you believe that I used to teach this?
But Lets get serious for a moment...














I find that my life is cyclical, I guess, but cyclical with a square wheel. There are times where I am apathetic, feeling like there is nothing going on but the news, (and all the news is, is video of a 1978 buffalo snow storm) and I wonder if I am ever going to learn anything again. Other times I'm just doing my thing, going along like a popsong or a mini-van. Sure I'm doing stuff, making movements...but it never occurs to me to think what it means. And then there are times in my life when I feel challenged, where I feel like everything I encounter is a re-constructor of my framework, an interesting, vital, unusual nugget that demands attention. These are my PFI days.
Finally, the other opportunity PFI has afforded me is work on their quarterly newsletter. Even giving me my own column. What I'll read is this issues essay, which you'll observe is a intro and a conclusion with a gaping hole in between. Thanks.

Seashells and Balloons

Spring sprung, the red-winged blackbirds are back. I saw my first one on the fence row along the high way, but I didn’t see the arm bar, so I wasn’t positive. Red-winged blackbirds are like chicken pox, rarely do you see just one. Just when I began to doubt myself because I had not seen another bird in 2 or 3 miles, I saw the clear flash of red topping yellow, and then a hundred yards on I saw a bird full out, sitting on a barren tree branch. By the next morning almost every fence post and lupin stalk held a blackbird, it was as though they were a sheet shaken out to dry and I was watching them settle down all over Iowa. Pregnancy is like that, absent for ages it appears as though magically, overnight, brown grass turning green. In my household pregnancy was like the dark spec on your eye that you can only see if you are not looking straight on. After “trying” for 4 or 5 years, we got busy and stressed and looked away, and all of the sudden got pregnant. And pregnant again, and our family grew from a boy and a girl to a husband and wife, 2 daughters, and 2 girl dogs. Even my fleas are women.

As I was driving into Ames this morning, the sky to the east was just beginning to show red. 2 geese rose slowly out of the shadowed tree line. In the dark the birds seemed spectral, pre-historic. The tree’s lining I-35, pretended to boarder a wetlands, and I thought again about what it means to say Iowa. What Iowa might have been and what it might become. The geese flew slowly into the wind as I sped towards Ames. I was left staring over my windshield with empty eyes, the Willa Cather dream of sitting atop a horse, flowers blooming from horizon to horizon, impossible. Unseen, but I knew they were there, new wind turbines rotated and blinked in the Eastern sky. Hurriedly I tipped my saber towards them.

In Walker Percy’s great book The Moviegoer the main character is a sort of angst ridden stock broker who conceives of the possibility of a search. What he doesn’t know is if 99% of the world is wrong and he’s on to something, or if everyone else is clued in and he is clueless. The first time I saw Iowa, I was 17 and driving between Iowa City and the Davenport (this is possible because I drove from Dubuque to Iowa City in a fog and ice storm so thick that I couldn’t even see the black top), I had hair past my nipples and a belly button 1/5^th the size it is now. I drove my fathers Toyota Corolla, a car that would eventually take me from Massachusetts to Oregon, and Georgia to Arizona, an irregular square of what life is like with trees and/or without water. At 17 my impression of Iowa was that it could be beautiful but it wasn’t. It didn’t have the charismatic mega-landscapes of oceans and mountains and canyons that people faun over. It wasn’t dotted with 10,000 precious little lakes or 60 story sky scrapers. What it did have was space, perspective, and opportunity, that seemed to have failed in its quest.

The red-winged blackbirds have been home for a couple of weeks now, their call of konk-a-riiii, is as constant as a cicada’s chirp, and I can almost not wait for them to group up in August and bugger off south. But I stop myself from wishing because to banish the blackbirds would be like loving an infant fresh from the birth canal and then despising it when it cried.

“Its not ceptable, Leila” My daughter who is 2.5 likes to say to her baby sister. I cringe because it’s what I say to her when I get angry. Having children is like watching yourself in a funhouse mirror, they reflect only the images that make you seem ridiculous. Iowa is a mirror too, and after living in Roland for 8 years I am starting to be able to pick out the real pieces and not just the distorted ones. Although it is easy to point out its stereotyped dysfunctions—the endless miles of corn and bean fields, or, 6 months out of the year dirt and stubble, the main streets with boarded up businesses, the stupid ice storms and ceaseless wind,—that is what people think of Iowa, it goes on and on without end and yet is somehow vacant. To stop there is to assume that the crying child never shuts up, or the frustrated father is a cruel parent. those are easy assumptions that get in the way of compassion and understanding.

Removal, is an 18^th century idea that by representing Native Americans as a lost, fragile, retreating, doomed, spectral race, we could pay lip service to their importance while allowing them to slip away. After all it is not us that is allowing their genocide, its pre-ordained. It occurs to me that the small town, the family farm, the diverse farm, is suffering a similar fate of removal. Find me a politician, a doctor, a lawyer, a tow truck driver that wants to get rid of the family or the family farm? Where is the real-estate developer who argues farmland is unimportant? No one will admit to throwing out the 200 acre farm, they will merely bemoan that family farms are slipping away.

Do you know what we do with things that are slipping away? We put them in zoo’s, preserves, children’s books and on reservations. We draw fences around them and move on. We are the stories we tell, and as with all stories, what are the facts? Native Americans didn’t vanish, and neither have small farms or sustainable ideas, cows still lie with turkeys, chickens still mix with goats. You just gotta look for them. Our job, PFI’s job, is to make that looking easy, like Eva Gabor.

Now I'd like to introduce one of my favorite people.

3/27/09

Video's

I meant to upload these a couple of weeks ago and now they are kinda out of date. We've got a bunch more on our camera now that are amazingly enough already out of date too.

Here is the 1st chapter from our upcoming parenting video.


This is my attempt at high art. It is a snapshot into the heart of our home.



Here is video of Leila's first meal. She's moved onto Sweet Potatos now. Soon it'll be apples and squash too. She's such a big girl!



Nyssa excells in a thousand ways. Here, she excels at jumping like a 15 month old. "I never thought it would happen to me."


This is a nice example of how sweet Nyssa is.

Eat after viewing

We got these pictures from our friend Andrea, whose daughter Josie is the cute blond in each of the pictures. Josie and Nyssa are friends from Childserve and undertook the 6 week intensive Tumblebug training regimen together. The first photo is an old CIA device called circle of death.
The girls laughed at it like candy.










Here Nyssa fails her Russian agility training










Constant Vigilance. Josie is a world champion stare contestant. Nyssa simply lacks the discipline. Not for long.










Heads down soldiers!










This might look convivial, but seconds later Josie broke Nyssa'a pinkie in 17 places. Nyssa never let out a peep.










Here Nyssa escorts Josie onto the gym-mat of death. Soft landing indeed.










The class's final examination covered paramilitary high altitude training. Right after this picture was taken the girls were forced to free-fall from the top of Ames's city hall.












Please, for our daughters safety, these photo's must be eaten after viewing.