Auld Lang Syne

It's a good day to share old pictures. here are some compiled from my life by my Dad - rest his soul.

A Chair for an Architect

Mary or David needs to make this!

Winter Wonderland

We had a beautiful snowfall that started at about 11:30 on Christmas morning and continued into the next morning. This was the first measurable snowfall on Christmas in Winston-Salem since 1969. Whoopie! We went out and romped around in it. We pretended to do an errand by walking down to the (closed) post office.
Now there's shepherd's pie in the crock pot thanks to a recipe from Kevin Frack's mother, via Beth.

Merry Christmas, Y'all!

Here's a couple of gifts to all my friends and family to add some spirit and cheer to your Christmas Eve!

• A Gospel Song from Steve Martin
• Ding! Fries are Done!
• A Tommy Blaze Christmas

Paula and I just ate leftovers from our dinner last night with Mary and David. Those guys were great to drop by and share a little American time and stories of adventures in Shanghai with us. Then we watched Horton Hears a Who from Dr. Seuss. Merry Christmas to all!

Fairy Tales

I read stories out loud to Paula in the evening. Our most recent genre is fairy tales. Right now we are reading Grimm's Fairy Tales, unabridged. There are many familiar stories like "Seven at One Stroke". Since I was raised without a TV I probably recognize more than my share. The original Grimm's anthology contains 211 fairy tales so it will take us several months to read them all. Some of the tales seem to have little more than entertainment value on the surface.

But these tales are closer to the spinal material of good character than much of what passes for entertainment today.

Paula and I laughed our asses off for two days over a fairy tale called "The Giant and the Tailor". It was less than two pages long and seemed to say that giants can get scared, too. When the giant meets the tailor for the first time he quips, "What do you want, you little fly's leg?" And when the tailor starts to brag the giant grumbles into his beard, "The knave can do much more than bake apples!"

All this brings me to the point. There is clearly such a thing as reading the wrong things. This is one of the key themes of "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" by C.S. Lewis. As "Dawn Treader" readers know, Eustace is unreliable because one of his biggest problems is that he "has read all the wrong books."

Having raised kids, I have a lot of respect for people who see value in those young lessons. But tellingly, most people (who don't know Jack) think of C.S.Lewis as a writer of children's books. As a teacher of literature at Oxford and then Cambridge, Lewis wrote many influential scholarly works and was quite prolific. Amazon still lists 160 titles by him, many of them deeply philosophical - including the few children's books that he wrote. Yet most of us belie our ignorance of a great modern era philosopher by assuming that he's only a writer of children's books.

Here is some of the more measured of the blazing rhetoric that is rabidly circulating right now regarding labeling people. In particular, these articles highlight the naivete when the criticism is patently incorrect.

• This Wall Street Journal Column on Sarah Palin's Reading List
  
• He doesn't Know Jack

Reading inspires imagination and thoughtfulness. I prefer to be thoughtful about others and reserve judgement of those who read. We are what we read - even more than we are what we eat.

Family Adventures

We had a nice, lazy weekend punctuated in the middle by the traditional family Christmas dinner with Paula's Dad's (John Paul "Hunk" Collins) family on Saturday evening. Liddy is the matriarch and travels the world with her youthful husband Charles Whedbee. Liddy is Hunk's little sister and the only surviving sibling of three boys and four girls. She tears up a little if you talk about that. Liddy has four kids from an earlier marriage to another man named Charles Davidson who's dead now. Charles Whedbee refers to himself stoically as "Number 2".
The family is prolific with lots of great people about whom I always wish I knew more. There are four kids -

• Martha is married to John Cooper who's a manufacturing engineer and travels a lot.
  
• Lynne married Prabhakar Pendse. We are headed to India with them in March.
  
• Wayne Davidson is married to Cindy - a school teacher.
  
• and Jeff is married to Deedee.
  

Martha and John have three kids, Michael, Kate and Lindsay. Kate lives in Portland with her husband Jeff Kern. We've been telling Kate that she can only buy her lunch from the Dump Truck. Lindsay (newly wed in October) lives in Savannah where she's starting a boutique with the support of her lawyer husband Patrick LeMaster.
Between Lynne and Prabhakar, there are at least 6 kids. Lynne's daughter Kelly got married to Greg Capobianco in Wilmington last New Year's Eve. Brandon Crockett is working for Disney down in Florida and couldn't make it this year. You guys have met one of Prabhakar's daughters.
Wayne and Cindy's daughter Nancy is a Wake Forest student and has spend some time in Russia working with an orphanage. I wish she were able to meet William, Fujiko, Masha and Sayaka but their path's never coincided.
And Jeff has two kids, Chris and Bailey. Bailey is 11 and really looks up to all the more mature women who are her cousins and great role models.
All-in-all, it's great to hang around and share tales with that crowd. Paula and I can hold our own with adventure stories but we wish we could show off our own kids. You guys would all love each others' company, enthusiasm, and spirit of adventure.

The Salesman

So Can I sign you up for 20 cases of Legos?
Hat tip KA-CHING!

Grating Sexism

It grates on me that male pronouns are the default in English, so that "he" means "he or she" if gender is undetermined. The Spanish language is similarly sexist, but the Spanish are batty enough to do something about it:

In Spanish, there are many nouns which end in a "o" if referring to a male, and "a" if referring to a female. For example: chico/chica (child), maestro/maestra (teacher), hijo/hija (son/daughter). The nouns are pluralized with an "s". So a group of boys is "chicos"; and a group of girls is "chicas". In a mixed group, the male version is always used. So when we are talking about 99 girls and 1 boy, it's "chicos".

To combat this insidious oppression, Spaniards have begun to write "chic@s." Now if only auto-correct would stop turning it into an email address. How to pronounce it is anybody's guess.

Unabashedly snipped from Moonbattery

So Far...

Christmas Glitterati

The house is covered in glitter.

Paula and I broke down and got our first Christmas tree. We were a little nervous getting started but once under way, the process took on a life of its own. We went down to the corner of Peter's Creek Parkway and Academy Street where - it seems - a little family has always sold trees. We got a 7' North Carolina Fraser Fir for $40 and stood it up in the corner by the balcony door. We had to move a bunch of furniture and plants to make room for it without crowding. Since we have no accumulation of little tree goodies, we decided to go natural. So its cranberries, pop corn and candy canes for us. Of course, we had to have lights in all colors so now our tree shows off to the 4th Street Filling Station outside the window.

We decided to make some of our own ornaments so we stopped by WalMart and got pine cones, glue and glitter. This is apparently something not done too much by those with little kids. The modern glitter is nothing like what I've ever seen before. It flows like mercury in little brilliant drifts while in the container. But once out, it becomes like wind-driven snow-ghosts across the road behind a fast-moving truck. We got our pine cones decorated. But there will be twinkling glitter around the entire condo for the next 12 or 13 years, I think.

What do you think?

Ah, to dream the impossible dream...

Paula and I are sitting here on a bright, snowy morning in Winston-Salem perusing the Emirates airline web-site and capriciously cogitating about far-away lands, Arabian Nights and further eastward to India. We want to include you as we dream, plan, scheme and - ultimately - travel to far-away places. We may even include some random ruminations about day-to-day life here in the condo. Put up with the chaff and you may find a thing-or-two of enjoyment or even inspiration.

We're headed to India from March 20th through April 22nd, 2011. certainly not enough time to see an entire sub-continent but hey, there's only so much life to be allocated in the three-score-and-ten we're allotted.

Thanks to Paula and to Lynn and Prabaker Pendse - our fellow travelers - we've got most of the itinerary planned and funded. The current decision is how long to stay in Dubai on our way. You might ask, "Why Dubai?" After conferring with one of our most respected associates who frequently commutes back-and-forth to India, we decided that Emirates - though slightly more expensive - is a significantly more luxurious way to travel with more leg-room and a better appreciation for good service. So why not stay an extra night in Dubai since we are stopping over there anyway. We'll make arrangements with the Emirates travel service desk to get a guide for two days and a night in one of the most architecturally dramatic cities in the world. Perhaps we'll send a spiritual greeting out to Matt Samet from the top of the Burj Al Arab.

Itinerary to be shared sometime in one of the next several posts.