It's a Dog's Life

One of the things about moving to the country is that you're hard-pressed to find a reason not to get a dog at some point. It was tough enough avoiding dog ownership when we lived in a big house in Brooklyn. The cats saved me; while they lived, no dog would cross our threshold. One by one, three of them died off. Then, just as our last cat was on his last legs, Shirra got a call from her friend Merry announcing that a dog was available should we want it.

I had last owned a dog when I was three. I should say that my mother owned the dog and that my father tolerated his existence for a few years. When the dog developed urinary tract problems, as many pugs do, we had to send him away to a dog farm, or so my mother told me*. I have no actual memories of Poochie, who departed only a few months after my brother arrived, but apparently I loved him, and photos of that time support the notion that he was cute. But after Poochie disappeared, we owned a succession of wonderful cats, and I grew to admire them on many levels. For the most part, our family's cats have been loving, healthy, and easy to care for.

Why make your life harder by taking in a dog when cats seem so much simpler? I have always looked at dogs much as I look at the belief in a higher power, which is to say: Needlessly complicated and often quite unpleasant.

This brings to mind something I've come to believe about presidential elections. Like many people, I was thrilled that the country could elect a person of color. It won't be long before we elect a woman, and if Palin is elected, then it won't be much longer before we elect an intelligent woman. Next on the list might be a Jew or someone of Asian descent, and perhaps we'll even have a homosexual president in my lifetime, should I live long enough. But we won't elect an atheist until hell has frozen over. As for a president who doesn't love dogs? Hell will have to thaw again first. I have to face facts: This country loves dogs. And I'm living in dog country.

Shirra grew up with a wonderful dog that her family adored, and over the years she petitioned, gently, to add a dog to our home. When we -- and our cats -- lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn, this made little sense and the discussions were short-lived. But the move to New Paltz and the aging state of our last cat allowed the talks to resume. I tried to sound reasonable while deflecting the idea of getting a dog, but that reasonability is what worked against me in the end. Had I simply put my fingers in my ears and repeated, "I hate dogs," then this would have been a closed case.

Jack is a good-looking dog, and even my distaste for his kind does not prevent me from admitting it. He's an Australian Shepherd, a misnomer since the breed actually originates in the US, and compared with his breed, he's exceptionally quiet and well-behaved, lending further proof that he's not Australian.

The kids and Shirra fell in love with him right away, and I did my best to join the love-fest. But having a dog is like arranging a threesome: It will never go exactly as you'd planned and someone is bound to be disappointed. I took him for walks and eventually took him for unicycle rides on our road. He seemed to love the exercise, and I was having a good time, but before long, Merry informed us that Jack would be better off walking than jogging. It was something to do with his delicate tummy.

Had Jack joined us as a puppy, I might have been swayed. I would have memories of him cuddling adorably with the kids or hopping adorably around the house. I would have seen him scamper adorably around the garden while I washed my car, and he would have been adorable as he shook the water off himself after falling, adorably, into the bucket of suds. Instead, we inherited a middle aged dog who needs several medications a day in order to combat his intestinal problems. It's the marital equivalent of missing the honeymoon and skipping right to the part where you're too lazy to leave the room if you have to pass gas. Come to mention it, Jack has reached that point, too.

Part of my reluctance, all of these years, was the idea that owning a dog means walking a dog, which in turn means cleaning up after a dog. New York City sidewalks are repulsive enough as it is, but back in my childhood, my natural aversion to dogs was only reinforced by the many times I had to clean my shoes after stepping in one of the many poops that seemed to leap at my loafers or sneak beneath my sneakers.

When I was a kid, there was an odd woman who lived in my building named Fran Lee. During her 60s, she became an outspoken opponent of dog poop. Apparently she became so obsessed with poop that she collected bags of it. Then one day, at a meeting in my building, she made her point by bringing out a bag of poop, and I'm not sure what happened next, but I do know that she was evicted from the building.

According to my mother, Lee actually dumped some poop on a table in front of a woman who disagreed with her. In the end, however, Lee was able to bring about changes that led to the pooper scooper law. Finally, people were forced to clean up after their dogs. I've never actually heard of someone getting a ticket for failure to scoop a poop, but the law has been hugely effective in cleaning up city sidewalks. No such law governs my back yard, however. We have a fenced-in area outside the back porch, but I won't step foot out there. It's messy enough in good weather, but in winter, the snow and ice get covered in brown and yellow spots that turn our yard into my -- and Fran Lee's -- vision of hell.

One day, our unhealthy dog will be nothing more than a complicated memory, but we'll always have our $2,000 fence and some really fertile grass that it encloses.

3-D Word Hunt of February 6, 2011

Will Shortz has put out another of my favorite puzzles in this week's NY Times Magazine (p. 44). The object is to find as many linked 5-letter words as you can. You can reuse letters in a single word, but you can't double a letter. For example, in the example this week (at left), you can spell DARER or DARED but not ADDER.

Shortz writes that in this puzzle, you're doing well to find 20 and very well to find 25. 30 is excellent, and he claims that there are 42 in total, of which 11 are pretty obscure*.

On my own, I found these:

ANGER, ANGLE, AMEND

BINGE, BINGO, BINIT*

CAMEL

DARED, DARER

EARED, EMEND*, ENDED, ENDER

GNATS

LEMAN*

MANGE, MANGO, MATIN*

PARED, PARER, PARLE*

RARED, RARER, REDED*, REGNA*

SCAMP, SCATS, STAMP, STAND, STANE*, STANG*, STATS, STING

TANGO, TINEA*, TINGE, TITAN

I used a word-search program to find these additional words:

ANEAR*, ANELE*, MANAT, PARAE*, RADAR

That comes to 42. I think that my 13 starred words are pretty obscure, so either he and I differ on what's 'obscure' or our lists vary from each other.

Now, in the past, Shortz and I have disagreed on the total, and I've been more right than wrong. Because he uses Merriam-Webster 11 and I'm using the list of acceptable Scrabble words (which mainly derive from MW11), we sometimes have differing lists, but he's always left off a few.

Stuck in NYC: The storm of February 2011

I've been stuck in Manhattan for the past two nights because road conditions have been too snowy or too dangerous for me to make the trips between NYC and NP.

Monday was the first night of this storm. While Manhattan only got a sprinkling of white stuff, New Paltz got over a foot of powdery snow, and I needed to be in downtown NYC by noon on Tuesday, so I stayed at my mom's. The snow in New Paltz stopped, and there was a pause for a few hours while Shirra dug her car out from under what had fallen, but then Phase Two of the storm hit last night, dumping several inches of ice on the roads, making the trip home too dangerous to risk. And as it happened, I needed to be in NYC by 1pm anyway, so it made sense to stay in Manhattan once again.

I did manage to see some movies and to hang out with my mother for a few days, and that was nice. I saw "127 Hours," which was riveting and even better than expected, and then last night my mom and I went to "The Fighter." The movie was especially touching for her because her father, gentle soul that he was, loved prizefighting (and wrestling). After the film, she told me about Grandpa Sam taking her to see Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, a famous Jewish boxer from the 1930s and 40s.

Unicycling in the Snow

I've been putting on weight, and watching what I eat hasn't helped (mainly because I've been watching myself eat a lot of late snacks). I decided to start exercising again.

For years, when we lived in Manhattan and even more after we moved to Brooklyn, I used to unicycle many miles a week. At the maximum, when I was living in Prospect Park South in Brooklyn and working out of my mom's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I rode 27 miles a day at least three (and usually ) fou

r days a week. But when we moved to New Paltz, my riding diminished initially to 4 miles a day and then, about a year ago, to almost zero. Almost unthinkably, there are days when I don't ride even one block.

In 2007, I signed up for a unicycle race across Nova Scotia, and after months of training, my pals and I rode about 170-180 miles each over a span of 5 days in the summer of '08. A few months after my return (and after recovering from various aches and pains including tendinitis in two different spots), I rode 89 miles on a September day, but I didn't ride a lot after that because a few months earlier, I'd bought my Smart Car. It's so small that I never have to search for parking spaces more than a block or two from my work, which means I can get out of the car and walk rather than ride.

A few weeks ago, this lack of action and increase in snacking brought about a scary sight on my scale: 185. When I turned 40, I decided to monitor my food really carefully and, aided by light exercise, I was able to drop from a high of 197 to about 165. I never want to see 190 again, and I'd really like to dip back under 170. With that in mind, I took to the trail. I rode our rode up and down our snowy road five times this morning and then, this afternoon, another three times. I thought it was about a half-mile each way, but according to an app that measures distance, it weighed in about about a third of a mile. All told, I rode about 6 miles today.

I'm going to keep this up as long as I can and see how it all goes.

New Paltz Restaurants: Suruchi

One of our favorite places to eat in New Paltz is Suruchi. I love the 'booths' (not really visible on the left side of the photo) . You tuck your shoes under your seats and sit cross-legged around a large table. The menu offers meat, vegetarian, and vegan choices in mild, medium, and high levels of spiciness. The appetizers, breads, and dinners are delicious, and they're so filling that we never fail to return home with enough for several lunches over the following days.

Tonight we ordered garlic naan to accompany our papadam, and Maeve ate white rice with various sauces. Emmett had a delicious entree I'd never tried before. I can't recall the name of it; I'm not a food critic, after all, and not much of a reporter. I had vegetable curry and Shirra had chicken curry, and Fiona, who's braces make it hard for her to eat certain foods, did quite well with a salad and some mulligatawny soup. We finished with some deserts that sounded a bit better than they tasted. One was a sort of mango ice cream that was overly frozen and barely thawed even as we tried the other, a type of fried dough ball that might have been tastier if it weren't bathed in some type of odd sauce. Maeve and I finished with a mango lasse, a smoothie that is one of our favorite drinks on earth.

The restaurant is currently open just Friday thru Sunday; we've gone there a few times when it's been closed, and they shut down for a few months over the winter. I'm glad they've reopened.

Snow Like Crème Brûlée

Today I cracked.

I would never have called shoveling 'fun,' but there was something about it that I always got a kick out of. People growing up in New York City rarely get a chance to shovel, and in the first four winters here in New Paltz, I always welcomed a chance to suit up in my tallest boots and hit the great outdoors to shovel for awhile. Sometimes I had to finish up the work of the plow man, sometimes I felt like making a luge run for the kids' sleds. Once in a while, I just felt like shoveling some snow. There was even one afternoon where I got started trying to dig out the driveway and found myself shoveling for so long that Shirra phoned to make sure I hadn't had a heart attack. I'd made it as past our driveway, past the playground, around the bend, past our neighbor's house, past the bridge, and nearly to the layby about a quarter mile away.

But this year, we've been hit hard. The timing of the first blizzard was perfect: The day after Christmas. Though we got over two feet of snow, it was light and fluffy stuff that was perfect for sledding at first and perfect for snowballs and forts a few days later. We visited my mom during the immediate aftermath of the storm, and when we found a parking spot on day one of our stay, I had to shovel for a minute before we were nestled safely next to the sidewalk, but the shoveling just added to the adventure. When it turned out that the City did its worst job ever in snow removal over the next few days, I ended up having to shovel the car out of a full-body cast thanks to the suddenly overzealous plowmen of the Sanitation Department... but that just made for a better story, too. My love of shoveling was as yet undiminished.

But that was back in late December. Then it snowed again a week later. This time, my students were back in school and I was back in business, and this meant driving into the City with a shovel in the back of my car. That shovel got plenty of use two weeks later, when the City's snow started to melt and then to freeze, creating sooty mounds of black ice, snow, and sludge. Luckily I was often able to do a bit of shoveling to get into a spot one day and then have the same spot waiting for me the next day: the advantage of having a Smart Car. At this point, I'd have still called myself a happy shoveler. At home, I didn't mind grabbing one of our many shovels -- whichever seemed best suited for the job at hand -- and going at it for five or ten minutes.

It wasn't until two days ago that I met some shoveling that I really didn't enjoy. I was in Manhattan, and I had found a smallish spot that only a Smart Car or a very aggressive Mini Cooper could possibly fit into. I prepared to back into the spot, but before putting the car into reverse, I figured I'd better shovel up some of the frozen clumps of ice that had taken up residence in my future parking spot. It so happened that it was raining softly at the time. As a result of the drizzle and the warmish temperature, there were wide rivers of cold water rushing westward towards drains that were already blocked by snow. The shoveling was hard going, and I was out of breath when I had finally managed to get most of the frozen grey stuff out of the street and into the sidewalk tree-planter next to the car. This last bit gave me some satisfaction as it clearly pissed off a doorman who could have chosen to help clear the street in front of his own building but who decided instead to make angry faces at my from inside his warm, dry lobby. At this point, sore and tired, I would have put myself squarely in the 'undecided' group if a pollster had happened to ask my opinions on shoveling.


Then yesterday, Shirra asked me to clear a path from our driveway to the propane tank near the house. While the distance was no greater than thirty feet long and two feet wide, the snow had turned our lawn into a huge crème brûlée. I tried various shovels, but in the end, I realized that I needed to choose the proper technique, too. In order to combat snow of this nature -- frozen on top and powdery beneath -- I needed to crack the top layer of ice and then scoop up the soft powder underneath. This turned each square foot of snow into a two-part job and essentially doubled the required work. My 60 square feet of snow became a 120-square-foot task, and that soon turned into a 500-square-foot burden when Shirra reminded me that I also needed to shovel a path from our road to the cottage.

Several Advils and some hot packs later, I've finally decided that the romance of shoveling is behind me. I just don't dig it anymore.

Generator!

We have a generator! It wasn't as easy as buying a generator.

1. Purchase generator.
This isn't as easy a step as it sounds. How much power did we need? What's a good model? Do we want it to be gas- or diesel- or propane-powered, or is there another option? So this took us back to step zero.
0. Speak to electrician.
We got the name of an excellent electrician, and he came over to consult with us. Based on his recommendations, we went to the nearby Lowe's and got an 8000-watt, gasoline-powered model that holds enough gallons of fuel to last us a long time. It turns out that a propane-powered one would have been just fine, but John the Electric recommended the gas one because it's so easy to refuel in case the propane runs out.
2. Have someone hook up the generator.
I'd come to expect that you could just buy a generator and hook it up to your house somehow. Nope. John the Electric had to install a panel inside our house. Then he had to connect the generator to a small box that he installed on the outside of the house. The interior panel was set up to allow us to have the generator power different parts of the house, at our discretion.
3. Decisions, decisions.
This was the easy part: decide what to power in the event of an outage. We opted for the kitchen/dining area as well as the living room. The panel gave us a total of six fuses to control, but unfortunately, our well-water pump requires two of them (it's a 220 volt appliance, rather than the usual 110). Happily, because the entire living room is hooked up to one fuse, we can watch TV, check the internet, run our stove and fridge, and have on most of the downstairs lights. We can flush toilets and run the dishwasher. It's not that we'd be doing all of those things in the event of a blackout (I'm sure we could get by without the dishwasher), but it's nice to know that, should we lose power, we can still take a pizza pocket out of the freezer and heat it up in the microwave.

We just had our first snowstorm of the 2010-2011 winter, but no one lost power because the stuff that fell was as powdery as sugar. You couldn't make a snowball with it, let alone pull down any power lines with the stuff. But maybe we'll have a chance to test the generator in a few months. I'm not looking forward to it, but at least we'll be more prepared than last year!

Girlyman: Awesome. Generator: Ordered. Chicks: Gone

Forgive me readers, it's been 5 months since my last confession.

They've been pretty busy. Fiona started high school, Emmett started middle school, and Maeve started to read. The weather has changed seasons twice, or more often than that, if you include a few bizarre weeks in October.

GIRLYMAN
Planning for Girlyman's arrival and concert was a small-scale version of preparing for a wedding. You do a lot of shopping and organizing, you hope for good weather, and you breathe a sigh of relief when it isn't canceled at the last minute. Everything came off wonderfully.

The band stayed chez Stone for 3 nights. This required beds, and that required a trip to Ikea. When we discovered after the first trip that one of the beds wouldn't fit up the stairs, this necessitated Trip 2. Pillowcases and little sundries called for Trip 3. One of the advantages to commuting from NP to NYC is that I can head over to Ikea any weekday, never having to worry about going out of my way or hitting lots of traffic (or shoppers), but three trips in one week was still a bit trying. In the end, however, we made a great place for them to stay. The only important thing we couldn't get in advance was a shower curtain rod to fit in our oddly-shaped bathroom; it has two sloping ceilings. I thought that a trip to Lowe's with a photo of the bathroom would do the trick, but the salesman I spoke with said that the best I could do on short notice was to MacGyver something out of existing parts in their store. So the band did their best to keep the bathroom from getting soaked during their showers, and it all worked out fine. The rod's on order.

The concert was a hoot. The band warmed up (literally -- the sun was right in their faces until just before the show started) and then went on from 7:15 till 8:30. They played a great set that featured many (most!) of our favorite songs. One funny moment was during Doris's "Bird on the Wire" when she sang "There goes that damn bird" just as a huge heron flew overhead in wide circles. They dedicated a song to Jillian and Fiona, since they were indirectly responsible for bringing the concert together; it was Jillian who first played a Girlyman song for Fiona, who first played it for me. Before and after the concert, the group hobnobbed with our few guests and enjoyed food from our new grill (and the used one we'd just bought at a yard sale). After the show, we also ended up with many bottles of beer and hard lemonade, most of which is still around since neither of us likes beer.

One of the lovely things about the concert was that they performed right from the porch that we'd just had built a few months before. It was a lovely setting for a show.

GENERATOR (and BASEMENT)
After the ice storm that knocked out our power lines (taking our heat, water, and phones), we decided we needed a generator, but since the weather was fine and our funds weren't, this decision had to wait... until this week. Having finally saved enough to afford a nice outdoor battery, we headed over to that Lowe's again. The generator weighs in at over 300 pounds, so we're having it delivered next week, at which point our electrician will hook it up to a power grid. It's a gas-powered model, which saves on start-up costs and is quite easy to maintain. We're not happy about having to buy a generator, but it's money spent towards peace of mind, and it will probably come in handy a few times during its life.

Of course, with the generator comes the electrical panel that you want to connect the generator to. And with that panel comes the electrician. We found a great guy in the area who is also going to help us make the basement more useful by putting in a few outlets down there (currently there are only two!) so that we can move the laundry machines down there and make better use of that space. Right now the basement is sort of an insane storage area that must be navigated carefully, but in a few months, we're hoping to have a ping pong table, two sewing machines, and the treadmill all set up in there.

CHICKS
We quickly gave up on the chicken-rearing idea after we saw just how much work (and cost) these little birds were amounting to. We managed to get a chicken coop nearly for free, but then we'd also have to put up some fencing, and that could end up being pretty costly. Having your own eggs is rarely economical, it turns out -- I read somewhere that the typical store-bought organic-farm egg is about 50 cents while the typical home-grown egg is about $2.50 or so. And we really don't eat that many eggs. So with little ado, we gave the chicks to the folks we got the coop from -- a good trade. For pets, we still have the dog Jack, the two cats, and three of the guinea pigs. RIP Ambrose -- our beloved hedgehog -- who died just a day or two after the Girlyman show.

My Arthroscopy

This past June, I went back to my doctors in Kingston for the zillionth time since my knee first start acting up last October. OK, maybe it was only 8 visits, but it was over a long enough period that we weren't seeing any lasting improvements. If I took things really easy, my right knee was fine. But as soon as I did any moderate exertion -- running a few feet, unicycling a few blocks, and so on -- it started hurting again. Sometimes the pain came instantly, often followed by noticeable swelling, and sometimes the symptoms showed up the next day. The doctors admitted that I wasn't healing and finally ordered an MRI.

These days, many doctors are quick to order tests and surgeries; after all, they pay a lot better than office visits. But my docs are pretty conservative -- almost annoyingly so. And I wasn't in great pain for the most part, so we all played it safe and waited. But when the MRI came back positive for a tear of my medial meniscus, I was scheduled for surgery just days away. I wound up opting for a slightly later date because I was concerned that the operation would have put me out of commission for too long while I was still working with students in NYC. I chose July 8.

Shirra drove me to the hospital in Kingston (just across from the doctors' office) on the morning of the 8th and came back for me that afternoon at 2. In the meantime, a nurse shaved the area around my knee and chatted about the difficulties of working in that particular hospital, which isn't unionized. By 10am I was wheeled to a sort of waiting area near the nurses' station, and 20 boring minutes later, an anesthesiologist explained that he was going to give me a mild sedative.

The next thing I knew, I was back in my room with my leg covered in both gauze and, underneath, three small bandages. Apparently I don't drink enough alcohol to put up any fight when it comes to anesthesiology (this according to a woman calling from the hospital who informed me that, in her experience, the drinkers tend to do better than the teetotalers when it comes to post-op nausea). Back home, I was woozy and struggled mightily just to read a few words in a book. I eventually chose to attack a Sunday Times crossword puzzle. I would read a question and then fall back to sleep while coming up with the answer. When I awoke moments later, I'd pen in the word, look at another clue, and fall back to sleep. This went on for hours.

I had rehab scheduled for the following morning, a Friday, and by the next Monday I was off my crutches, doctor's orders. The doc also took out my stitches and showed me cool pictures of the inside of my knee. I didn't even have a limp, and within another week, I was back on my unicycle. It's amazing how fast a person can recover from arthroscopic surgery.

Now if I can just get my left knee into shape....

A Fuck for a Dollar

I love being able to find lyrics on the internet at a moment's notice. It used to be that you had to own the liner notes, which meant buying the album, and I remember being disappointed whenever I'd get a new record and the sleeve was blank. How were we to know what Queen was singing in Bohemian Rhapsody?

Later, we all found that most CDs had the lyrics printed inside the cover of the disk, but then came the days of Napster and, eventually, iTunes. Gone were the days of liner notes, records, or even disks, and gone, therefore, were the printed lyrics. How were we supposed to know what Whitney Houston was singing in "I Will Always Love You"? So I was thrilled to learn that there are plenty of websites devoted to distributing lyrics (for free!) -- tho many of them contain errors, as I have noted in a previous blog entry.

Last month I was listening to some of my daughter's favorite tunes by a group called My Chemical Romance. In "Mama," an antiwar ditty, I couldn't make out some of the words, so I looked them up. I came across an F-bomb that I hadn't recalled hearing in all the times I'd heard the song:

"But there's shit that I've done with this fuck of a gun. / You would cry out your eyes all along."

I listened to the tune on my iPhone. The word was definitely missing; in its place was a lengthy pause. I mentioned this to Fiona, and we both agreed about how annoying it is that we'd accidentally downloaded the expurgated version. A few days later, while we listened to the song as I drove her to school, I noticed that this time, the 'fuck' was loud and clear.

Me: "You paid the extra dollar so that you could hear the word 'fuck' in the song?"
Fi: "Yeah."
Me: "Good for you, Fiona. I would have done the same thing."

I love the fact that she just had to have the correct version. It wasn't that she needed to hear the word. We are totally open about language in our house. It's that she couldn't bear having a version of the song that the artist hadn't intended.

Sometimes, a 'fuck' is worth a dollar.

Mini-Update

1. We still don't have a generator.

2. After this afternoon, we won't have chicks (or chickens) either. We decided to hold off for a year, so we're giving the adolescent birds to a friend. We didn't quite realize all of the start-up costs involved in having chickens. Even after we got the free coop, there was still a lot of fencing and other material to purchase and set up. I think we just saved ourselves hundreds of dollars and man-hours in costs and labor.

3. Girlyman is coming to play chez Stone in late June. Woo hoo!

How Much Do I Love Girlyman?

Girlyman is a folk-pop group hailing from Atlanta. I first came across their tight, three-part harmonies thanks to my 14yo Fiona. The group has been around for nearly a decade, but we missed them all the years they were performing in Manhattan and Brooklyn (where they had their 2nd and 3rd shows, ever). We missed them even when they performed in New Paltz three years ago at Unison. Darn. I think part of my love for them is the way it connects me to my a capella days at Vassar (1985-8) and Columbia (1990-5). Those were some good times.

But now I'm catching up, with a vengeance.

I've played and re-played some of the songs several dozen times in the past ten days, as this iTunes chart (from my iPhone) shows.

I have a crush on them. I checked out their website, read their blog, and have followed them on facebook and twitter. I've read articles about and watched them interviewed in Slate.

So ... I decided that we need to do our best to support them. I offered to host them at a show here in New Paltz during one of their off days. Amazingly, they accepted!

More details to follow.

Chicks Dig Ticks

We've had a lot of ticks lately. Just last week, Emmett and I were playing catch for a half hour or so. When we finished, Emmett noticed a tick on his leg, which he brushed off. A few minutes later, however, he spotted another. We caught that one before it had bitten him and looked him over for more. In the next 15 minutes, we found another two on various parts of his body, and luckily, each of them was easily removed. In the car on the way to the mall, Emmett found the fifth tick on his leg. We stopped the car and got it off him in time. I decided to check one last place as a joke, and sure enough, there was one under the fold of his shirt collar.

The next day, we were brazen enough to play catch again before heading into Manhattan for a bat mitzvah party. En route to the City, Emmett needed me to pull over once again; there was a tick just under his ear, and this one was burrowing into his skin. I managed to get it just in time.

With this in mind, Shirra was able to convince me that we needed more pets: Chickens. Apparently, they devour ticks aplenty. Even if they don't deliver, at least we'll get some eggs in the bargain.

Right now, they're just a few weeks old and living in a storage container under a heat lamp in our bathroom. In a month or so, they'll be clucking around the back yard, cleaning up our tick problem, or so Shirra says.

Generator?

Power finally came back to us this past Tuesday, just a few hours shy of a full week in the cold and dark. I sent the kids back home yesterday afternoon and joined everyone the same evening. The house was warm and was in surprisingly good shape considering that Shirra couldn't wash a dish or sock or do any normal cleaning for most of the time she was there.

The big question now, of course, is whether to shell out the $3000 necessary to buy and install the kind of generator we'd need in case of another emergency. We've had outages in the past, lasting no more than a day, but even if we get hit again, we could get by if we didn't have the pets. It's not like we're trying to improve our property value -- Shirra and I plan to move out of that house in a box. It's a question of whether we need to shell out big time for another major storm event.

My hunch is that we'll be getting a generator as soon as we can afford it. Maybe over time it will pay for itself in food not wasted and nerves not frayed.

How NOT to Move to New Paltz

We learned, the hard way, that a generator is definitely worth shelling out $2,000 for -- just in case. That 'case' happened this past Wednesday, and it isn't over yet.

TUESDAY, 2/23/10

On Tuesday, Shirra and I looked at the forecast for that evening and decided that I should stay over in Manhattan after tutoring. I've done this only a few times before, and I hate not seeing her and the kids, but with our road already covered in some snow, slush, and ice, the impending downfall would make our road nearly impassible, and the driving conditions were already getting dangerous. I stayed at my mom's apartment in Manhattan.

I left the New Paltz Fire Department this past December, but I still get the pages on my cel phone when a call comes in. Tuesday night, I saw these text messages

11:31 pm: 22 ROCKY HILL RD. TREE AND WIRES, POWER OUTAGE IN AREA.
11:48 pm: 1 BONTICOU VIEW. FIRE ON THE POWER LINES.

Both of these addresses are quite close to our house, but Shirra told me that we still had power. I went to bed nervously.

12:49 am: 30 N. MANHEIM. WIRES DOWN.
1:43 am: 120 N. OHIOVILLE RD. WIRES DOWN.
2:04 am: 30 N. MANHEIM. WIRES ACROSS ROADWAY.
8:19 AM: 225 S. OHIOVILLE RD. WIRE IN DRIVEWAY.

By then, the house had already lost power. I spoke with Shirra early that Wednesday, and she guessed that we'd lost power before 6:30. We haven't had it restored since.

WEDNESDAY, 2/24/10

Naturally we assumed Central Hudson, the Con Edison of Ulster County and its environs, would quickly be on the scene. After all, it's snowed plenty in the past, and the longest power outage we've endured was no more than half a day. The kids' schools were closed, so they hung out at home, watching DVDs on the computer with whatever power it still had and going about life pretty normally. But the forecast for Wednesday night was even worse than the previous night's. Again, it made sense for me to stay in Manhattan. I spoke with the kids a few times during the day and kept an eye on NOAA, an excellent website for weather forecasts. Things were not exactly looking up, but at least we'd heard that Central Hudson was supposed to restore our power by Thursday afternoon. That would mean we'd be without power for about 36 hours, but Shirra made sure we had plenty of water in the basement and food in the pantry. Meanwhile she walked Jack, our dog, in the backyard.

THURSDAY, 2/25/10

Central Hudson's forecast for our power restoration changed three times this day. First it was pushed back to 8 pm, but later it was bumped up to 1 pm. When those times came and went, Shirra checked the site again and found that our power outage was no longer listed in their computer. She took care of that, and we hoped for the best.

I had to make a big decision, and I took a gamble that didn't pay off. I drove home Thursday evening, leaving Manhattan at 7 pm. I didn't arrive in New Paltz till 10, having driven in the worst conditions I've ever put myself thru for such a lengthy ride. When I made it to our road, I figured I'd leave the Smart Car at the bottom of the private road in the area we call the lollipop. But then I thought that I might even make it the nearly half mile from there to our house. I gamely plowed on, making it nearly to the top of our driveway before backing the car to the bottom and leaving it there.

My reason for heading home in such hostile weather was that I'd done my sister-in-law a favor by keeping her car for two weeks while she visited China. I had to get the car back to her by Friday, so my plan was to take her car back the following day, when the weather forecast called for clear skies. This plan nearly worked.

Unfortunately, these texts came in:

11:12 pm: DUBOIS RD. TREE ON WIRES BURNING
4:08 am: NURSING HOME. ODOR OF NATURAL GAS IN THE STRUCTURE. UNABLE TO EVACUATE
... These were followed by a car accident and a flooded basement. These last three meant that the fire department would be pulled in too many directions at once.

In addition to the texts, a good deal of snow came in, too. Here is what Manhattan cars looked like on Friday morning.

FRIDAY, 2/26/10

I phoned AJ, our plow guy, and he was happy to oblige us by plowing our road that morning. I didn't have to be in Manhattan till 2 pm, but I figured an early start might be a good idea just in case the roads were poor. By 9 am, he was on the scene. By 9:10, he was stuck. His truck, not heavy enough for the work and not equipped with tire chains, had slipped off the road partially. He'd have to be towed. I decided the only way for me to make it into NYC was to schlepp to Route 32 and to hitch a ride to the bus station on Main Street. I had 45 minutes to catch my bus. I made a little sign, packed a few things for the day and for possibly another night, and waded thru snow and slush for a few minutes until I came out on the big road. It was clear that the conditions were fine. If only I'd left the Smart Car in the lollipop! Instead, I started walking toward the Village with my little sign for all to see. Just a few cars later, I was seated beside a lovely older woman who often takes the bus into Manhattan for her work. We chatted amiably, and by 10:30 I had my round-trip ticket.

I decided to walk across the street to check on the condition of our Odyssey. Shirra's car had been damaged when she drove over a boulder on our road after the snow, some time Wednesday morning. She managed to get the car picked up by Triple-A, and it's resided ever since at the Citgo Gas Station and Garage, waiting for the expensive part to arrive (scheduled for this coming Tuesday). I looked at the underbelly of the car, examining the damage, and suddenly realized that I needed to deposit a few checks at the bank before heading to The City. I hitched another ride for the quarter-mile uphill to the bank, and a few minutes later I ran back to the bus, arriving in plenty of time. By 12:30, I was at Port Authority, Manhattan, and a few minutes later, I was in my mom's apartment once more.

Chances of our power getting restored were further diminished as more texts came in.

3:14 am. 43 S. OHIOVILLE RD. TREE AND WIRES DOWN.
5:40 am. 217 N. PUTT RD. TREE AND WIRES.
7:55 am. 182 N. PUTT RD. WIRES DOWN IN FRONT OF RESIDENCE.
12:36 pm. 217 N. PUTT RD. WIRE DOWN.

As the day wore on, Shirra and I had to make some decisions about the kids and pets. Luckily, the kids were pretty easy. Shirra put them on a bus to Manhattan, and at 6:30 that evening, I picked them up after seeing a few students during the day.

The pets proved much trickier. We currently have 3 cages housing 5 pets (including Ambrose, our hedgehog, who was nearly left for dead after he curled into a hibernatory ball to try to keep himself warm). Then there's the dog. Unlike the two cats, he needs a good deal of attention and couldn't be left with friends or at the vet's. Shirra elected to stay in the house with the pets rather than to scramble to find them different homes. It didn't help that the towing of AJ's truck damaged our road a bit, because between the excess unplowed snow and the poor condition of the road, Shirra was unable to get our remaining cars over to Route 32. Essentially she was trapped.

As if this wasn't bad enough in a house with the interior temperature plunging into the 40s, we also depend on an electric pump for our well water. Luckily ours is a propane stove, so it works as long as you have a match to replace the pilot light. This meant that Shirra had to boil snow in order to have water with which to flush the toilets, give liquid to the pets, and, of course, make her tea. She also made use of the snow outside for some of her other needs. This woman is her own reality tv show.

Without the kids to worry about, Shirra could get a few different things done. She managed to trudge thru waist-high white stuff in order to visit our closest neighbors. Tho they're only a tenth of a mile away, they've had power the entire time, leading me to suspect that the outage was caused somewhere in the lines near the lollipop of our road. Shirra had her first shower in days, but her ordeal was far from over since our neighbors have also been relying on AJ for their plowing. As a result, they were trapped, too. So in order for Shirra to put the kids onto the bus that afternoon, she and the kids had to slog thru all the snow and slush until they could catch the cab Shirra had called. The driver took them to the station and then dropped Shirra back home, where she trudged the half-mile home once more. Central Hudson updates were inconsistent and inconclusive.

SATURDAY, 2/27/10

Somehow the hits keep coming:

8:52 am. 70 S. OHIOVILLE RD. WIRE IN DRIVEWAY.
3 pm. 212 PLUTARCH RD. TREE ON WIRES BURNING.

Shirra phoned Central Hudson and heard that we might be getting power restored by late this evening. That time has come and gone. It's still possible that we'll have power, light, water, and heat by morning or at least by afternoon, but I'm not counting on it, and the forecast is calling for a bit more precipitation over the next few days.

In the meantime, I've been living as a virtual single dad in Manhattan. I took the kids to see The Flying Karamazov Brothers in Greenwich Village Saturday afternoon, and we walked two miles up to Times Square afterward in order to check out the disappointing prices of the big Toys R Us store there. Our trek wasn't a total loss, however, as it took us past Madison Square Garden, where Emmett discovered that Fiona's favorite band is playing this Friday. An hour later, we have tickets for her and Shirra. I've also begun planning for various scenarios. Basically, until the power is restored, the kids are living with me and my mom. The kids are getting a great taste of NYC life. We've taken subways, buses, and cabs, walked miles of downtown streets, and done a bit of shopping and restaurant hopping. And I've gotten to spend more time on my own with them that at any other point in our lives. I wouldn't ask for a storm like this again, but I'm glad that some good has come out of it.

SUNDAY, 2/28/10

2:33 pm. 436. N. OHIOVILLE RD. TREE LIMB ON THE WIRES

Luckily that's the only further problem with wires since Saturday, but it gives an idea of what Central Hudson is up against. Early on, they reported having over 150,000 homes without power. By Sunday, that number was below 40,000. Not surprisingly, small roads like ours, where the outage only affects a few homes, are way down the hierarchy of importance, so I wasn't holding my breath when Shirra announced that the most recent forecast was for service to be restored by 10:30 Monday night. This peccable timing meant that I couldn't put the kids on the bus today because if the power was not restored, we wouldn't know about it until it was too late. It's not like the kids couldn't survive another chilly day in New Paltz; rather, the problem is that Shirra isn't ready to take them back if power doesn't come back on. There isn't a clean fork or plate in the house, we're low on food, and she's still boiling snow for water -- she's not in a position to welcome back the hordes. With this in mind, we decided that I'd homeschool the kids on Monday and continue until the force is actually with us.

Having made these decisions with Shirra, I was happy to take the kids around the City some more. We went to the Natural History Museum, where Fiona and Emmett spent some time exploring together while Maeve and I took in the Hall of Biodiversity. Her favorite fish was the Queen Triggerfish, as much for its fascinating colors as for its awesome name.

After an hour at the museum, we ran back to my mom's for a quick bite before all of us walked over to the Green Flea flea market. That's where I met Diego Paz a few years ago, the man who has sold me most of my currency collection since 2003. I bought a Philippines 1-Peso note from 1912. My mom pointed out some attractive diorama-type constructions, one of which showed a small scene of a sewing room, so I picked that up for a certain wife who was at that moment living in Starbucks, New Paltz in order to stay warm and to charge the computer. At 3:15 we cabbed it over to Shirra's folks on the East Side, where we spent the next two hours playing games and eating Chinese food for an early dinner. That night I brought them down for a few minutes to the lobby of my mom's building, which was host to a party celebrating the building's 80th anniversary as a structure. They left early, but I hung out for till nearly 10 pm, hobnobbing with neighbors in a way that few of us get to do in the nearly anonymous city of New York. I put the kids to bed a bit on the late side and made sure to get a decent night's sleep in anticipation of our first day of homeschooling.


MONDAY, 3/1/10

The end of the month came and went, leaving us in the dark. The only good news from home was that the text messages stopped buzzing in.

Homeschooling three children varying in age by 8 years isn't as challenging as some might think, tho it helps that I've taught all three ages in schools and privately for nearly two decades. We had fun. I gave the big kids some reading and math passages from age-level materials that I have while Maeve and I worked on handwriting. I gave all of the kids their own composition books, and we had fun working separately in my mom's dining room.

Later, I took Emmett and Maeve to the playroom in my mom's building, where they spent over an hour playing nicely together. Meanwhile, our good friend Dave Altman ("Uncle Dave") took Fiona to the Apple Store nearby to see about a minor computer glitch with her laptop. By 3 pm, the kids were all back up at my mom's, and Fiona ended up taking the little guys to the playground across the street for an hour or so. I saw my students and the kids mostly kept to themselves, tho the first girl I saw was happy to show the kids the dissected owl pellet that she'd brought from school.

We had a homemade dinner with Grandma, and the kids talked with Shirra while I got them ready for bed. The big moment was fast approaching: Would Central Hudson manage to get the power back to us by the appointed hour, 10:30. At 10:34, Shirra phoned me, unable to check her emotions. I commiserated with her as much as I could, given that she is spending yet another night in the dark and cold and I'm living the life in Manhattan. We confirmed our decision to keep the kids in NYC until the power has been restored in NP, and Shirra later that she'd spoken once more with someone at CH who told her that they're still on the case and that all of their remaining jobs are little ones like ours. We have nothing against the power company, which has done everything it can to ameliorate the situation, including having an operator on hand 24 hours a day to speak with customers even while crews work thru the night to repair downed lines and busted transformer boxes. The latest estimate is for late Wednesday night, but I have a feeling that Shirra could end up seeing the Muse concert on Friday before the juice is flowing thru our wires again.