Growth and limitation

Eleven-month-old Daniel, who’d been taking five or six steps at a time, casually walked across the living room two nights ago. He’s learned to climb up our staircases (but not down them). He’s grown tall enough for his head to be whacked by the refrigerator door. Today I caught him playing with the dials on our gas stove.

Samuel received his first YouTube lesson in adding and subtracting. He grinned and squealed and waved his arms. Fireworks of possibility exploded in my brain. Should I buy Samuel an abacus so that he can practice calculating like the Japanese? (Should I buy myself an abacus?) Should I teach Samuel about truth tables? Propositional logic? Quantification? He’d probably get a kick out of seeing “∀” and “∃.”

I’m not even sure I could teach logic to adults. I’ve never tried.

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I spent a couple of hours at the whiteboard with Samuel. He can’t add yet. He won’t even count all the dots unless I do so along with him. He does like to yell out the numbers and the operations, but he gets the sums wrong.

“Five plus three equals FOURTEEN!”

No, son.

He is bitterly disappointed. Not because he’s got the sum wrong – I doubt he understands what it is to get a sum wrong (and he never has minded factual correction as such) – but because he really wants the last term to be fourteen. He is an enthusiastic laissez-faire combinatorialist. If South Africa vs. Mexico is a valid possibility, and if there’s another possibility which is South Africa vs. Finland, and if South Africa vs. North Korea is possible … then surely five plus three equals fourteen is perfectly kosher, perfectly respectable (worth celebrating, even), no matter that dot-counting can establish that five plus three actually (therefore, possibly; therefore, necessarily) equals eight.

I believe this is his first brush with theoretical, as opposed to practical, impossibility. It is baffling to him.

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Philomena Cunk (Cunk on Earth) is coming to Netflix.

All in a day’s screen time

Samuel and Daniel have been watching domino-toppling and marble-racing videos, among others. After a couple months of escalating wildness, this is what my YouTube account has suggested we view:

“Hamster Escapes Pool Ball Traps for Pets in Real Life in Hamster Stories #2”:

Bizarrest cinema I’ve encountered in a while. Part rat maze, part funhouse, part video game, part fifties horror movie. Samuel loves it. Loves – present tense; as I type, the channel is streaming live.

The video goes on forever. This is what people do now, Karin says. This is how they spend their time: making and watching stuff like this.

I admire the video (I think?). Certainly, I admire the craftsmanship. I do feel sorry for the hamsters. I guess that in a perfect world, living, breathing creatures would be spared such an ordeal. But “sometimes you have to break a few eggs,” the makers of The Adventures of Milo and Otis must have told themselves every day they were filming. It’s more compelling that real hamsters are being filmed: just as it’s more compelling that, in Fitzcarraldo, the actors (well, the extras) really dragged the steamboat over a hill; that De Niro really gained weight for Raging Bull; etc., etc.

This video is what Karin & I put on after we watched the quiet, reflective Ruby in Paradise. Samuel begged for YouTube all through that movie. Now he is getting his wish.

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We spent half the day in Karin’s mom’s house because an exterminator was treating ours. We’ll go back to Karin’s mom’s house tomorrow. Scott, her husband, is getting baptized.

When we were driving home on SR 23, we passed a truck with two large, flowing, half-Union/half-Confederate flags. We must have gawked too hard. The driver gave us a dirty look. Half a city later, when we turned into our street, we saw him right behind us. He kept on going. He probably wasn’t deliberately following us, but I felt better when we got off the main road: his causes wouldn’t have been welcomed in our neighborhood.

A weekend diary

Friday evening

IU South Bend’s new school term is due to begin next week. I’ll welcome this change. I’ve gotten tired of staying at home.

Today I was in job training at IU for nearly seven hours, and it felt downright refreshing (though I’d dreaded it).

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Saturday morning

The high temperature today is 15°F. That is, 15 on the plus-side. It no longer feels unbearable to leave the house.

Saturday afternoon

Having left the house for two minutes, I retract what I previously wrote. The temperature is lousy. Also, I’m perturbed by how very long and sharp the icicles are that dangle, like Swords of Damocles, from the awnings of our housing complex.

Karin has come home from her job (she works half of each Saturday) and gone straight to bed, sick.

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Saturday evening

Karin slept all afternoon. Then she felt slightly better. We performed some errands and now Karin is doing the bookkeeping for our church (she’s the treasurer). I’m watching an NFL playoff game.

The kitties are little sweeties. Jasper lets me pick him up and carry him around the house. He sits on my lap while I watch the game.

Are you very manly? I ask Jasper.

Chirp, chirp, he says.

Earlier this afternoon, Ziva lay in bed with me. She insisted that I hold up my left forearm, and then she burrowed herself into its crook.

The kitties have found my stash of groomsman neckties. They drag them around the house.

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Sunday, early hours

I’m reading Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer. Karin continues to work on the bookkeeping. For background noise, she plays a TV show called Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., whose characters are from the “universe” of the Marvel comics.

Which universe is that? I ask. Ironman’s universe?

Yes, says Karin.

And ScarJo’s?

Sure.

And Harry Potter’s?

No, says Karin. You pip.

Melting

Most definitely not snowed in; but the last two nights, walking has been perilous due to the ice. There are too few English terms for the different slicknesses I’ve encountered.

Today, though, we’ve had lightning flashes and thick rain. The snow mounds — formerly tall as houses, hard as marble — are greatly reduced.

(Will corpses be revealed, I wonder?)

If we’re lucky, the water won’t refreeze; the air will remain warm until the fluid has all trickled away. Meanwhile our yard is a slushy swamp, impassable in canvas shoes.

The male Sabby has sent me this beautiful thing.

The female has been nagging at me to continue applying, belatedly, for health insurance:

two Facebook messages;
one text message;
one email;
one e-card;
one postcard.

It’s so touching, I almost hate to do it.