not-so-sticky

The last time I recall playing a board game was the last time we lost electricity. I think it was Payday ? There's something about a storm that brings all of the family out of their corners and into one room together. Without anything digital. While Seth is far past any childhood fear of storms, the thought of being de-digitalized makes him tremble. The storm didn't blow in until after dinner. And so even Seth, who rarely leaves the sanctuary of his bedroom after the dinner hour, made his way downstairs to wait for the storm. There's nothing like a good storm to bring a family together. We could hear the thunder in the distance but no one seemed impressed by it. It was clearly too dark for 6:30. There was a wind picking up so I thought I'd take the plants off the porch. I thought twice after I opened the door and caught glimpse of the sky. I rather it be my dahlias (which appear to be duds anyway) than me. My obsessive compulsive nature led me to The Weather Channel . I...

It's been a really long time since I've had a lecture from my dear old dad. But tonight he had it stuck in his head that I needed to go to college and get my degree (which I already have). My father used to lecture me a lot as a kid, particularly in the car. And he knew every single back road in Columbia County so I heard a lot of them... We often went for a car ride for no reason other than to ride around. More often than not, playing the car radio was not permitted. Looking backwards, I suspect now that he found it distracting, although as a teenager, I would have sworn it was an act of control! Sometimes he would reminisce about how different things had looked when he was a kid, how the strip mall had once been farmland, how unfamiliar it could still seem. Other times, we said nothing at all, and drove on in the silence. Interrupting our shared silence, he would hum the beginning bars of Don McClean's  Starry, Starry Night   which at the time I didn't recognize as an...

When my father came to live with me, I wasn't prepared for the fact that he wasn't quite the same person that I thought of in my head when I thought of my 'Dad'. It was obvious that he wasn't well enough to live on in his own; he would sometimes call me over and over again. Sometimes he would relay what was on every channel as he clicked through with the remote control. He thought this very funny, actually. Since he was an hour and a half away, most of my knowledge of his actions were second-hand. Even though Dad called me a lot on the phone, he was abstracted from my immediate reality. Because of this, in many ways, I thought of him still as my dear old Dad, just as he always had been. Ready to offer advice. Someone I didn't want to let down. Someone who would always tell me the right thing to do, even if I didn't realize it at the time... Dad came to live with us a couple of weeks after Liam was born. Probably not the best time for turnover, but practical...

Kyrce often entertains me during the commute to work with stories of her WoW adventures. Recently, she's become a 'guild leader' and most of our dialogues have been about the previous night's WoW raids with her online comrades. This is endlessly fascinating to me on so many levels. First of all, it seems like an awful lot of project management work, just trying to organize a guild to the point where you can plan a raid. I need my down time to be down time. Secondly, it's such a weird paradigm shift; my own mother's generation did needlepoint, talked soap operas and sold Tupperware. Though I could be guilty of stereo-typing... I don't recall my Mom doing much else? Actually, she didn't even sell Tupperware; she was just a consumer of it. Now Moms are playing WoW. Grandpas are playing WoW. Kyrce even knows of an adult father and son team. And of course, kids play WoW so Seth thinks Kyrce is just awesome. They speak the same nerdy language. Game speak. Gam...