Blowing & Drifting

New month, new posting URL!

Today, at several different moments, Vivi said some new words - or the sounds that are almost words.

Wandering around with a stray shoe, she tried to give it to me. I said, "Honey, I don't want your shoe. Can you put it back by the other shoes?" She looked up at me, the lightbulb almost visible behind her eyes, shouted, "Back!" and then toddled over to drop the shoe next to its partner. Later, looking at a coloring book, she held it up to me and said, "Eeee-mo!" Sure enough, Elmo was on the cover. And finally, on the ride home from the playground, she said, over and over, in that great just-practicing way, "Daaaa-dee. Daaaa-dee. Daaaa-dee. Daaaa-dee." I'm Dada no more!

Coming upstairs a minute ago, I thought the bedroom light was on. It was, of course, just the moon, nearly full in a cloudless sky. The trees, rocks, and bird bath in the backyard are all glowing in the silver-yellow light.

Buzzing around as we packed up for a "family walk" downtown, Julia overheard Shannon and I say that Julia could share a scone and a string cheese. She did not hear us say that she'd share the cheese with Vivi, the scone with me. And but so, she came downstairs to find me quickly eating a string cheese as I packed up their water and some other stuff - stuffing myself as parents have to do when there's literally no time all morning to eat a regular meal. She watched me, silent and imploring, eat the first half of the stick, then made sad sounds as I popped the rest in my mouth.

"Daddy, aren't you sharing?" she asked, on the verge of tears. "Honey, no, this is my string cheese." (Honestly, does any food more instantly infantilize a person than string cheese?) "But you said you would share!!!!" and erupted in tears. Being a bit of a dim bulb, I caught on at this point, reassuring her that we were bringing another string cheese along on the walk, and that she share that one with Vivi, and a scone with me. She instantly stopped crying, of course, but then fixed me with her saddest, seriousest eyes: "Daddy, next time you eat a cheese stick, don't hurt my feelings." I felt terrible. Then she brightened and said, with masterful indirection, "Daddy, don't you think you will like a cranberry-orange scone?"

If fact, I knew I would.

It was superlatively gorgeous here today, one of those days (similar to a few others we've had lately) when it's a shame to be indoors. I managed to spend about four hours outside going with the girls to parks, walking with Julia, and working out.

The day's high point was probably taking Julia and Genevieve to a local playground. Julia busied herself with cleanup duties (misplaced sticks, rocks in the mulch, and, inexplicably, a perfectly clean but squashed-flat dental floss container) while Genevieve truly walked and played. To this point, I'd only seen her walking at home, so it was wonderful to see her stagger around the playset, even daring to cross some bridges that required better-than-usual balance. Vivi being Vivi, she got very cross with me when I wouldn't let her go headfirst down the slides or just walk off the edge of a platform. She can walk, but gravity's an unknown threat!

They're threatening a warm weekend, but it won't stick. Between noon today and right now (just about midnight), the temperature has plunged from 78 to 52 degrees. Very nice.

For a variety of reasons - starring roles in some William Gibson novels, a rising interest in energy policy and politics, the sheer insanity of the place, a fondness for news from Finland, the jaw-dropping cyberattack on Estonia last spring - I've been reading a lot of stuff about Russia lately. A friend passed along (via science fiction thinker Bruce Sterling) an article by a Russian analyst on the rise of the "siloviki" - "the network of former and current state-security officers with personal ties to the Soviet-era KGB and its successor agencies." According to the article's author, "Never in Russian or Soviet history has the political and economic influence of the security organs been as pervasive as it is now." Think about that: Putin's network of current and former agents apparently exerts more power than the Cheka in the heyday of the tsars or the NKVD at the height of Stalin's power.

A few days ago, I read this International Herald Tribune piece on the way both the European Union and Russia are brandishing "the energy weapon" as part of the EU's attempts to limit the economic influence of Russia's giant Gazprom "company" in the EU member states. It's a bona fide trade war. And then there's this essay in the Times Magazine about the new Kremlinology, guesstimating the course of Russian politics based on observation of the leadership's public activity and behavior. The new Kremlinology is especially hard because Putin is very much inclined to set his own rules - as when, a couple weeks ago, he suddenly fired his prime minister and appointed an unknown official to that post.

Amidst all this hubbub, news emerged in Finland that Boris Yeltsin had, in the cash-starved early 1990s, considered selling back to Finland the territory of Karelia, just east of Finland's current border with Russia. Finland had ceded much of "Karjala" to the Soviet Union in order to end the Winter War in 1940, giving up a tenth of its territory, its then second-biggest city, a major industrial zone, and of course a lot of national pride. The 1992 price for recovering this huge chunk of Suomi was to be a healthy $15 billion then (or about $19 billion now).  According to Helsingin Sanomat, "None of these plans got beyond the paper stage. The leadership of a country that was on the verge of disintegration decided that selling parts of Russia to Western countries would be too dangerous an experiment."

Alas, Finland might not have been able to accept the offer, even if it had been extended. As observers have pointed out, the county was in dire economic straits at the time, and the cost of absorbing Karjala would have been staggering - on a par, in relative terms, with the cost of unifying the two Germanies. Pekka Hakala at the Helsingin Sanomat: "The multi-billion-dollar Karelia Purchase would soon have been seen alongside all the belt-tightening and cuts being urged upon the public sector and set against the bread-lines that had recently appeared at Finnish Salvation Army citadels."Yeah, sure, we got Karelia, but it cost us the Welfare State" would have been a familiar jibe, whether or not it was strictly true.

In that wonderful gap between coming home and having dinner, the girls and I usually play upstairs. Today, Vivi just tooled around in her hat, brandishing books, cooking at the toy stove, and doing other baby stuff. Julia, on the other hand, played hospital with me, which entailed her laying in bed, trying to look ill. "Daddy, come and take care of me. You must take care of me, because I am very sick. My hair hurts! My eyes hurt! My teeth and ears hurt! Give me some medicine!" I pretended to give her a shot, and put her leg in a "cast" (one of my old socks with the foot cut off). It may not seem like cutting-edge medicine, but it cured her. Tomorrow, maybe we can play Black Death!

Julia seems to be doing better and better with the home-to-preschool transition on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Most "school days," I've been able to talk with her on the phone after she gets home, and she's already gotten in the habit of saying (verbatim), "Hi, Daddy. Preschool was good. I was a little sad when Mama left, but everything turned out okay." Words to live by.

Sunday, I went with Julia on a short tour of the organic farm outside Northfield where she and Shannon had gone tomato-picking the other week. I was hesitant to go, since it meant giving up a whole afternoon with Genevieve, whom I see for a maximum of three hours every weekday.

But happily, Julia made it worthwhile by being hilarious and interested in almost the entire event. Whenever the tour got boring (discussions of recipes for Swiss chard), she stage-whispered something to me: "Where are all their animals? Why is there so much dirt? What smells like sauce?" (This question came while we walked down a row of basil - a key ingredient, of course in pasta sauce.) And most importantly, "Can I drive the tractor?" Turns out, she could.

Following on Shannon's post about some of Julia's charming utterances, and looking forward to Vivi starting her own very soon (she can't just say "Dada" forever, can she?), I will finally link to this Defective Yeti post about his son's willingness to name anything at all:

Killer stuff. Julia's not nearly so inventive in this respect. For months (a year?) now, she has replied to most questions to which she does not know the answer by quietly saying, "Yes." It's rather confounding, frankly. At least nowadays she's starting to say, "I don't know!" when she really doesn't know.

The upside of a beautiful autumn day marked by gorgeous blue skies, endless sunshine, a brisk breeze, temperatures in that 65° sweet spot, a ton of things going on in town, and good-natured girls? You can spend almost every moment of it outside, or inside doing fun stuff.

The downside? The day's myriad activities leave you too tired to blog.

I came home today to discover that Genevieve could walk wherever she wanted at a pretty good clip. Yesterday, she was still staggering short distances and then either grabbing ahold of something or falling down. Just in the two hours between getting home and seeing her off to bed, she must have walked six or eight feet at least a half-dozen times. As fun as it is for me to watch her toddle around, though, it's awful hard to figure out how she feels about it. She keeps all her feelings hidden away inside, you know?

And as if that weren't enough accomplishment for one day, Viver also decided that today, she'd start actually using the sidewalk chalk, and stop trying to eat it. So both girls spent some time out back, drawin'.

When I got home, late, this afternoon, I found a note on the door telling me that Julia and Genevieve wanted to go outside right away. (The note was necessary because if Juliaa has any option at all, she'll usually choose anything other than going outside: speed and certainty is of the essence!)

So sixty seconds later, we three were in the backyard, clambering all over our illicit Little Tikes playset. While I helped Genevieve go up and down the slide, Julia practiced climbing up and over the side of the toy. This didn't come easy, and she nearly tipped the whole set over a few times before figuring out where to plant her feet and shift her weight just so.

Somehow, these two activities merged into a game in which the Monkey Princess climbed into the toy and tried to go down the slide, which was guarded by the Baby Dragon who, though fearsome, managed to zoom up and out of the way every time the Monkey Princess came through. Both girls were laughing and shrieking and genearlly carrying on with great delight. When, after about twenty minutes of this enjoyable nonsense, we headed in for dinner, Julia chuckled the whole way, saying to herself, "Daddy, that sure was a funny game!"

There's not much to say on the macro level about this sixth anniversary of 9/11: we're not safer, bin Laden is on the loose, we're trapped in Iraq.

So I'll go micro for a minute. This morning, as I left for work at about 8 a.m. (9 a.m. Eastern time: just about the time of the attacks), I saw one of my neighbors outside, walking her dog. I waved; she didn't wave back, and in fact looked rather stricken. I didn't mind too much, given that this is the sixth anniversary of the death of her son, Tom Burnett, Jr., aboard United Flight 93 - the plane brought down when a group of passengers, including Burnett, apparently attacked the hijackers. I didn't see Mr. Burnett, Sr., today. I can't imagine what a day like today must to to you when your connection to the attacks is so direct.

(Update: Not ten minutes after posting this, Tom Burnett, Sr., was on the KARE-11 news from Minneapolis, talking about his opposition to the proposed memorial to Flight 93, which was blogged here.)

Apart from the World Cup cross-country ski racing circuit, there are a few other big races that I am excited to follow each year, such as the 90km (56 mile) Vasaloppet in Sweden and the 70km (43.5 mile) Marcialonga in Italy. Besides being fantastically long, both events attract thousands of competitors who run the gamut from "tourers" who just plod along hours to citizen racers who go pretty damn fast for a very long time all the way up to elite racers who zoom along faster than marathon runners. (The men's winner of last year's Marcialonga finished in 2:07:17 - taking just 142 seconds more than the current men's marathon world record to cover 17.3 more miles.)

And but so, I was excited to see that two of my favorite skiers, Frode Estil and Hilde Pedersen of Norway, are going to race in the Marcialonga in January. 43 years old, Pedersen sometimes forms a relay team with her twin 19-year-old daughters, but she won the Marcialonga in 2007 and must already stand as the favorite. Estil has never won one of the marathons, but he did take a gold and a silver in the world championship 50km races in 2005 and 2007, so he knows how to ski long distances. What's more, he's now training intensively for the ultra-long races. Winning the Marcialonga would be a huge accomplishment - and a great tune-up for a run at the Vasaloppet in March.

Almost all of my runs and skis, many of our family walks, and quite a few drives take me down Creek Lane, just around the corner from our place. The street is unremarkable except maybe for the large size of some of the houses and for the high number of kids who are seemingly always outside playing. I don't even know if these kids live in any of the houses on the street, but they do lend the street an air of permanent carnival. They sit for literally hours in a fishing boat on its trailer, pretending to cast lines into the street. They zoom on their garish BMX bikes up and down the sidewalks. They stage "olympics" that involve running and rollerblade races. They stalk, weeping, across the street after a mom yells at them for picking on each other. They make incredibly elaborate chalk drawings that spill down one driveway along the sidewalks in either direction. They ask me where I got my rollerskis, and then try to ride their bikes faster than I'm going. (So far I've won one and lost one.) They play the same simple roll on a shiny blue snare drum on some unfortunate's lawn. They leave two dirty socks on opposite sides of a driveway, and forget them for days.

It's not quite googling yourself, but occasionally I search for "Tossavanlahti," a village in the lake country of central Finland. The name literally means something like "Tossava Bay," and it bears a strong resemblance to my paternal family's original Finnish name, Tossavainen.

Today, my search turned up a picture of "Tossavanlahti Excursion Harbour," a boat landing near the village at the northern end of Vuomanonlahti or "Vouma[no?] Bay," which is itself an arm of Nilakka, a fairly large lake. The little online description for the spot reads, in part, "Beware of rocks on the shore side. A barbecue place, toilets." That goes double for you! And ain't the "harbour" grand?

Shannon already put up a wonderful post about Julia's first day of preschool, an event which was long anticipated, quick to pass, and now over. Good lord, isn't that kid cute? Be sure to see my comment to Shannon's post, which (I think) adds some context.

Little could, really, compare to this milestone, but the day had some other interesting bits, too. After visiting some friends, Genevieve started saying "Papa," which is what the friends' kids call their dad. She wasn't really calling me by that name, but she said it with the smallest, roundest angel voice and a big grin...

As I mentioned yesterday, I facilitated a discussion group on the College's common reading, and had a good time. The kids were all freakishly smart and well-spoken. We're in good hands. Unless they all flunk out after spending fall term tweaking their Facebook pages.

And finally, I went running in the Arb in the dark tonight, with only my little Petzl headlamp (the one that I was wearing when I fell into Lake Superior, almost exactly six years ago) to light the way. It was strange and exhilarating to run continually toward a small pool of light about six feet in front of me, hearing little sounds off in the blackness on either side, occasionally seeing something with yellow eyes dart this way or that, and ducking once when a bat flew right at my lamp, but having no real sense of how fast or far I was going. I neither fell into the river nor got lost, so it was a pretty good time.

Today, the first year students arrived, lending campus an underpopulated but overactive air. I'm "facilitating" one of the common reading discussion groups tomorrow, along with a rising senior, so I'm soon to actually meet some of the best and brightest. (The college chose Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains as the common reading this year.)

For the past few days, Shannon and I have been debating whether those first days of freshman year were fun or dreadful. She's advocating the latter position, more or less; I'm staking out the former. All the new, interesting people to meet! Living away from home! Taking fascinating courses! Choosing a major! The prospect of meeting girls who didn't prefer hockey players! (Ahem.) But, rushing to the car after a late meeting this afternoon, I did pass several small groups of freshmen doing those horrifying "icebreaker" activities, including the awful one where everyone first stands in a circle, then crouches simultaneously so they wind up sitting on the knees of the person behind. Automagically, the circle supports itself, and everyone is made a little bit lamer than they were already. I suppose that's the point.

Two little snippets of Genevieve's life:

1. At the park on Monday, I put Genevieve down in front of the tunnel, and she climbed right though it, grinning the whole way (and only once pausing to nibble on some rocks). Her sister was much less intrepid.

2. Genevieve loves cheerios, but she loves the cheerios box even more, on account of the pictures of a bear, a kid, tomatoes, and other stuff on the back. This morning she actually started to cry when I wouldn't let her hold the box with her sticky, peach-juicy hands. After getting cleaned up, she played with the box for an almost disturbingly long time.

Now, that was a busy day, featuring early wake-ups, Viver down for her morning nap by 8:15 a.m., a subsequent trip to the playground and Cub with Julia, a surprisingly hard 20km rollerski in the unexpectedly high heat, tons of Play-Doh'ing with both girls, and then a long and almost impossibly fun party with some fellow Northfielders ( 4(1 mother + 1 father) x 4(2 kids) = mayhem/tons of good food), a rush-rush bedtime routine after we got home, and now, thank god, a few minutes of downtime. Whee!

I went for my favorite rollerski today, a 20km (12.4 mile) out-and-back route on some country roads east of Northfield. The first and last 5km or so cover the same stretch of rolling hills, which are an easy warmup on the way out and a series of back-killing challenges on the way home, when I'm usually gassed. The hills were especially hard today, as I had not been able to roll since last weekend (losing some of that specific mix of balance and strength that only rollerskiing itself can maintain), I underestimated the heat and so neglected to bring water, and because I encountered an evil wind that reversed during my session, giving me an easterly headwind on the way out and a westerly headwind on the way in. But in the week since my last rollerski, the soybean fields have started to change from their lush green summer hue to the acid-yellow color of fall and harvest.

As with parenting, the worst workout is still better than good sessions of many other activities. And I was happy to see, as I cleaned up my workout log the other day, that since getting myself back running and rollerskiing in May, I have spent 67 hours outside under my own power, and covered just over 800km, a shade over 500 miles or about the distance from Northfield to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Not much compared to someone who runs a five miler every day without fail, but better than the, uh, 0 hours and 0 miles I'd accumulated in the nine months following Vivi's birth.

... is still better than a good day at work. Maybe.

Today was a study in contrasts. Both girls being bears all morning: Gigi out of tiredness before and after skipping her nap and maybe a bit of sore gums, Julia out of plain toddlerishness (begging to go for a "run" around the block, then standing still on the sidewalk for minutes at a time).

Things dramatically improving after a walk in the late-summer sun, big lunches, and good naps. I knew Julia was going to have a much better afternoon when, just before her nap, she started pretending to be the Cat in the Hat. She's never the book, but she knows the character from the logo on the side of some other Dr. Seuss books we own, and extrapolates from there. Settling in to my lap for her pre-nap story, she told me that unlike Julia, who had gotten a haircut the day before, Cat in the Hat had had a "furcut, right here, under my crazy hat."

Though still not her usual effervescent self, Gigi was fine after a nap, several sippy-cups full of water, and amazing quantities of food. She spent her afternoon trying to climb up on very tall things (she hoists herself on to the sofa now, even though the cushions are nose-high, by getting both arms on the seat and then swinging one foot all the way up, too), reading books, kissing her sister, and posing for photos that Julia took with our camera. 

Julia actually took quite a few pictures, many of which show me looking impaired but several of which are rather nice shots! I've put them up in her own Flickr set.