Busking at the Christmas markets

The red-haired girl and a friend went out busking today, he with his saxophone and she with her clarinet.

Although they’re schoolmates and so see each other every day, they’d not had much time to practise their Christmas songs.  He lives far away south across the Elbe river, and they’re both busy kids.

But they did have time for a couple of sessions before hitting the Christmas markets.

She went out last year with another friend who also plays the clarinet, and that time I watched them both very closely the whole time.  But this year we left the two of them to practise at our place, catching up with them after we’d come back from having lunch down in the harbour.

They’d been playing for about a half-hour by the time we’d stopped by to watch and say hello.  First thing she told us was how a woman had just come up to them and told them to stop because they sounded awful!

I thought that was pretty mean, but the red-haird girl was smiling broadly.  She didn’t care.  They were out there in the crowds playing away, and coins were dropping into her clarinet case.  I added a couple.

“We’re heading downtown if the weather stays nice,” she chirped.

I hadn’t counted on them venturing so far away, and felt a free-range kids moment coming on.

“Uh… really?” I said.  ”All the way downtown?”

“Sure!”

“OK, but watch out for yourselves,” I said.  ”Not everyone down there is going to be friendly.”

“It’s OK,” her friend said. “I’m pretty athletic.  If anyone tries anything, I’ll run after them.”

As wife K and I left them to play some more, I told her of my anxiety, just letting them go all the way downtown midst the crowded madness of Saturday pre-Christmas shopping.

“Just remind me a couple of times that everything’s going to be OK,” I said.

Then I added that I didn’t want to be lurking around the corner all the time, they’re close to 15 and mature for their ages and could take care of themselves, I didn’t want to be like some sort of helicopter parent because that’s not the way I am.  But it felt very strange to just start walking away and let them go.

“They’ll be OK,” K said.  ”And don’t forget. We’ve got to give them roots, but also let them have wings.”

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Are we raising our kids to be wimps?

The incoherent ramblings of a clearly disturbed individual aside, most parents would agree that defending a decision which resulted in sending a seven-year-old would-be airplane pilot plunging to her death is pretty stupid.

On the other hand, we don’t want our kids to grow up to be wimps, afraid to take risks, push themselves, put themselves in a little danger to see if they can come out of it OK.

See that cliff? The little red-haired girl climbed it as part of a five-day Extreme Adventures camp we booked her into before leaving on holiday in Canada.

It’s a good thing she had that day of rock climbing, one day where with good instruction and the right gear, she was tested to do her best in a risky situation.

Because the other four days of this camp were anything but Extreme Adventures.

On day one, the kids walked about 2km to the Squamish Adventure Centre, played some games, and watched a movie.

Day Two was for mountain biking, though it really wasn’t. They had them riding along crushed gravel trails.

Whoa.

Day Three was for wakeboarding, a sport like water skiing. They spent most of the day getting to a lake 50km away to bob about in a boat as each kid took turns pulling the one single wetsuit on and off, and then trying to wakeboard.

The last day they took them to a lake for swimming. Swimming! Not exactly Extreme Adventure, but at least it involves getting a little wet.

Ah, but before swimming in the lake, they had to put on life jackets.

What??? I know about lawyers and liability, but life jackets to go swimming?

I clearly remember having checked the box beside FISH on the form which asked Does Your Child Swim Like

a Rock

a Dog

a Fish

And if she swims like a FISH, she doesn’t need a bloody LIFE JACKET!

She’d been in a day camp with them before, so I knew the first few minutes of Day One I’d be filling out release forms. But this time? They handed me such a stack of papers to sign, paragraphs to initial and have witnessed to fully absolve the District of Squamish of any and all liability should harm come to my child, it took nearly 20 minutes to get through it.

“It’s because there are private companies teaching the rock climbing and the wakeboarding,” they said. “It’s for their protection.”

But even after virtually telling them they could dangle my kid by the ankles from a cliff before dropping her head-first into a bear pit and I wouldn’t sue – couldn’t sue, because I’d signed that right away – I still went away happy, eagerly anticipating great tales of Extreme Adventure.

Instead she got one good day of rock-climbing and four days of pissing around, topped off by five hours on the final day sitting on the beach for five hours because she refused – and rightly so – to swim with a life jacket.

Not that she minded pissing around. At the end of the five days there was an evaluation form to fill out, and she was generally positive about the atmosphere at the camp, the counsellor and the other kids, so what the hell.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that if this is the benchmark for what passes for adventure in a child’s life these days, we’re telling them it’s OK to be overly cautious in life, it’s OK to coast along without taking risks, it’s OK to be afraid of getting yourself in a little danger.

Life jackets.

I would start in on how hrrrmmmmfff when I was a kid before mountain biking, wakeboarding or bloody factor 45 sunblock was even heard of we’d tear out the back door without so much as a bottle of water, scamper up through the forest to find paths up through the rocks to the lake to go swimming and the only life vest was sitting miles away at the bottom of somebody’s boat under lock and key because who even bothered to wear one at all anyway?

Ah well. Even adults wear helmets skiing these days. Now that’s wimpy.

Talking with an 11-year-old about insurance fraud

We finally broke down and bought the little red-haired girl a new bicycle last week. Summer’s already here and besides, pretty soon I’m going to have to drop the little.

We’d been holding off because it’s just so difficult to find a decent bike for a growing kid in Germany. You either find junk at the bottom end of the scale – expensive junk to boot – or top-flight bikes that will get ripped off the moment you leave it outside, which she is forced to do because there is no other place to lock them up where we live.

Then at one shop where we’d finally found one that was right for her, I told the guy that we wanted a really good lock, mentioning also that I’d had parts ripped off from my own bike after leaving it outside for only one night.

No problem, he said. If you’re worrried about security, you can get a complete insurance package for only eight euros a month. It includes replacement for theft and new parts if they’re stolen or the bike vandalised. Even if she has a fall, they’ll fix it for her.

So I signed up for the deal, thinking that it’s cheap at twice the price if I don’t have to worry about replacing a stolen bike a week after buying it.

After explaining to her that the insurance only works if she locks the bike around a bike stand or pole so that it can’t be carried away, she asked me:

How does the insurance work? What if you had two kids who needed bikes, but only enough money for one? Couldn’t you just hide the bike and tell the insurance company that the bike was stolen? Then you’d get another one for the other kid for free.

Sure, you could do that. I’m sure there are people who have done that. Would you like to be one of them?

No.

Well, I’m glad to hear that. Did you know there are people who try to get out of working by pretending they’re sick, saying things like their back hurts all the time, or that they can’t get out of bed?

No…

They get to go on disability pension, which means they get money every month without having to work anymore, even though they’re not sick. But there’s a catch. The insurance companies have people who check up on them. If they see them carrying around a pair of skis, riding their bikes, whatever, they get cut off their money, they don’t get to go back to their old jobs… they end up with nothing.

Oh…

Trying my best not to sound preachy, but probably failing because I’m doing all the talking, I add:

It just makes more sense to be honest and tell people the truth. That way, you don’t have to remember what you said to anybody, because it will always be the same thing.  You won’t always have to be looking over your shoulder, either.

Learning English the Calvin and Hobbes way

I never get any peace and quiet anymore between the time the little red-haired girl goes to bed and her falling asleep, but I don’t mind at all.

“Daaa-deee,” she’ll call from her bedroom five minutes after bedding down. “What does philanthropic mean?”

So I get up out of my chair and go in to tell her.

“Well, philanthropic is being nice to other people, but in a way that benefits everybody. Like you donate a lot of money to support a hospital for sick children, or for buying space for young artists to work in. That’s being philanthropic. It has two root words in one – philo- meaning love of, and anthropos- meaning human being.

Forfeiture

Epiphany

Sophisticated

Pandemonium

Euphoric

Voyeurism

Subjugate

Co-dependent dysfunctionality

I’ve always spoken English with her, but she’s only 11, been taking English in her German high school for all of eight months, and I’ve never used such vocabulary in my conversations with her, so where does it come from?

Calvin and Hobbes. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, 1400 pages spread over three volumes in a boxed set covering 10 years’ worth of colour and black-and-white comics.

She’d already dog-eared the two Calvin compilations I’d given her, books from my younger days when I too was a fan of the little guy with the big ideas and his imaginary tiger. She bought another one herself a few months ago, but after also reading through that one several times  over, went on a hunt for more. After discovering the three-volume set up for auction on eBay, she snapped it up, using her own allowance and birthday money.

I know she’ll probably not retain half of the new words she comes across this way, but that’s not important right now.   Expat parents are always trying to make sure their native language gets passed on to their kids in the face of the constant bombardment of the majority language and culture they swim in.

If she’s found something in English she not only loves to read but can’t seem to get enough of, my job is that much easier.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

This site may harm your computer

Waiting for a flight at Hamburg airport early last week I sat down at an internet terminal and was about to drop a coin in before the nice man sitting next to me said, “take mine, I have to go and there are about 25 minutes left on it.”

I thanked him warmly and sat down in his place, immediately typing lettershometoyou into Google to see if I could find Adsense ads on my blog. You’ve probably heard that they’re out there, lurking on every wordpress.com blog. It’s the price you pay for free hosting, and no amount of whining is going to get wordpress to take them off short of your paying them to do so.

Problem is, if you’re logged in to wordpress.com you never get to see them.

So every once in a while I slip into the skin of Joe Regular Blog Lurker to try to find out how Google is making an even greater mess of my blog. Do they stick ads for jock itch powder next to posts about my mother-in-law? Blurbs for psychiatrists next to write-ups about psychos? Tart up my skiing posts with pitches for helmets and handbaskets and other crap I have no use for?

The list of hits Google chucked up had me scrambling for my camera. Not for what they said, but for the public terminal’s net-nanny warning label:

At first I thought they were referring to my blog. After all, even if there are no trojans waiting to ambush the unsuspecting visitor, there is a ton of stuff here people might find harmful. Fake news, accounts of deception and outright lies, denunciations of crap, transcripts of discussions with an underage female child concerning condoms, naked girls in newspapers, death and more death. I don’t know why I haven’t already been hauled before a judge as a menace to society.

Then I realised the warning was all about WordPress.com. How could it not be? The link is to wordpress, not lettershometoyou, which only appears in the description.

Maybe it was just a forewarning, because a few days later I and millions of other unsuspecting WordPress.com bloggers logged on to find our blogging universe turned inside out without so much as a ‘”hey guys, guess what? Big changes coming up tomorrow at 4pm Pacific Daylight Saving Time.”

Did someone at WP central hit publish instead of save by mistake before turning out the lights for the weekend?

I’m sure after a few months this will all die down and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about, but in the meantime wordpress.com probably is harmful to your computer. Judging by the number of pissed-off entries on the forums, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a youtube video posted of someone throwing a laptop out the window frisbee-style in frustration. I don’t care what it looks like, merely uploading an image, for example, has become a mind-numbing chore, a multi-stepped process where once a couple of clicks sufficed.

This in an upgrade? Sure the savvy bloggers using wp.org had a go at it for a while, but given the huge drop in skill level between those bloggers and duffers like me using wp.com, didn’t they think to test it on a few hundred of us wp.com users who’d never seen it before? They could have run a little sneak-preview contest, choosing a hundred or so bloggers to run it through it paces for a month just to iron the kinks out.

Hell, maybe they did test it out on no-brain bloggers like me, I don’t know, but the way it was released reminds me of the time I bought a new desktop from Dell a few years back. The monitor was a new flat-screen model from the Korean firm LG, back when flat screen meant the surface was flat. The rest looked like an old-style monitor.

Anyway, the first one they sent didn’t work, so I sent it back.

The second one arrived three days later. It didn’t work properly either, so I sent it back, too.

The third one arrived a few days after that, and it didn’t work either.

So I phoned up Dell to complain – not for the first time – and asked them why they couldn’t ship me a monitor that worked. Their response? We can’t test the monitors as they come in, we just ship them along.

Fair enough, I said, but can’t they at least have someone switch it on at the factory? Twist a knob? Tweak a button?

Nööö, too expensive. It’s cheaper to ship them halfway around the world and have the consumer do the testing.

Happy blogging.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

So close, so far apart

My daughter and her Oma spend a lot of quiet time together. I love it that they get along so well and always seem to have something to talk about, even during those times when there’s not much to say or left to do but play checkers for awhile.

But as much as I love to stop and look at the two of them in their calm togetherness, I can’t help thinking that by the very nature of our family, one part of her childhood will always be hopelessly one-sided.

Her German Oma lives only a couple of hours down the Autobahn and comes to visit us regularly, but her Canadian grandmother lives nine time zones and a long, expensive flight away. My mother is turning 85, still fit and active, still drives a car, goes out with friends and takes short trips, but understandably no longer feels up to the exhausting flight to Europe from the west coast of Canada all by herself. She’s made the trek three times in the 10 years we’ve been living in Hamburg, and we’ve flown there four, but now it’s all up to us.

I’d like to be able to offer my daughter what I feel is the best for her, and that includes regular contact with her grandmother. But by the very nature of having a family where grandparents live on opposite sides of the world, on this I fear we are always going to come up short. In contrast to the close, comfortable relationship she has with her Oma, her contact with her Grandma will always be like getting to know one another all over again. She’ll still be the red-haired girl, but each time she’ll have grown and changed into a new version of herself. Depending on mood, the effects of jet lag and any other combination of factors, there’s no guarantee the two of them will ever be able to settle into each other’s company, and after our time’s up and it’s time to go, that’ll be it until the next time.

We’re headed to Canada this year, not just because we want to, but because it really has been too long since she last saw her grandmother. It’s going to be a great trip: a week in Canada, then a wander down the coast of Oregon and California to Los Angeles. There we will stay with a friend of ours, before flying home from LA.

I really don’t know when the next time will be. And in the back of my mind, I’m always wondering: is this time going to be the last?

© 2008 lettershometoyou

A bristly visitor

What’s the difference between a Porsche and a porcupine?

With a porcupine, the prick’s on the outside.

We don’t have porcupines in Germany, but we do have hedgehogs.

Cute little buggers.

Yesterday after school the little red-haired girl buzzes downstairs and I push the button to let her in. I wait. And wait. Five minutes later, she’s still not up, so I go down to see what’s what.

There she is, still outside, crouched over a six-inch, oval-shaped ball of quills.

“It’s not moving,” she says. “I think it’s sick. Or dead.”

“I doubt if it’s dead,” I tell her. “They roll up into a ball to protect themselves when they feel they’re in danger. Look at how well they blend in to the background. Walking by here, you’d hardly notice it among the dried leaves.”

I get down close to it, give it a nudge.

“Ouch!”

Those quills are as sharp as needles.

“I think I saw him move,” she says.

Covering my hands with my fleece jacket, I pick hum up gently.

“Are we going to bring it home? If he’s sick, I can take him to the vet.”

“Where would we put him at home?” I ask. “Besides, his home is out here.”

“But we can’t just leave him by the building here. There are people walking around.”

We decide to take him a few yards away over a small knoll, down the other side away from the walkway and out of sight of passersby.

This morning, he was gone.

Damn, I’m a sucker for a pretty face.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Murder, she messaged

I’m a collector of tales of how human beings do nasty things to one another, but I missed this story completely. Passing it along in case you did too.

A man is to go on trial in Buffalo, New York today, charged in connection with the killing of a colleague in a love triangle that raises serious questions about how we conduct ourselves over the Internet. It’s one of the most bizarre stories I’ve heard in a while. Though it apparently has been out there for nearly a year, I only caught wind of it on a recent BBC Podcast. (scroll down to get the audio)

Forty-eight-year-old factory worker Thomas Montgomery, married with two teenage kids, went to a website two years ago and started to pretend he was someone he wasn’t.

He became an 18-year-old Marine. Taller, stronger, fitter, richer, more well-endowed. A perfect catch for 17-year-old blonde student Jessi, who fell in love with him almost before their first IM chat came to an end.

Soon the middle-aged man and the teenage girl were spending several hours a day online, professing love via instant messaging and getting horny. He sent her pictures of a man who fit his description. She sent him panties and trinkets. He proposed marriage. She accepted.

Then the man’s wife found out. She contacted Jessi and told her who the man she thought she was in love with really was.

Jessi, suspicious that the wife might actually be a jealous teenage rival, found another man online to check out the story for her. Brian, a 22-year-old who worked part-time with Thomas, confirmed what the older man’s wife had told her.

And then, Jessi and Brian also started an online love affair.

You’d think Jessi would have cut off contact with her older and fraudulent friend, but no. They stayed in touch, and sure enough, Thomas caught wind of her relationship with the younger man. In a jealous rage, Thomas shot Brian to death one day after work.

Bear in mind that Thomas had never met this young woman in person.

Police soon had Thomas as a prime suspect, and located Jessi in West Virginia. Local police went to her house, but when they knocked, it was her mother who came to the door.

Jessi was away at school, she said, and wouldn’t be back for weeks. No, she wouldn’t give details.

But soon the mother was forced to admit the truth: She was Jessi. The 17-year-old sweetheart infatuated with the 18-year-old marine was in fact a 45-year-old housewife in a fake relationship with a 48-year-old factory worker. In another sick twist that makes you wonder where the woman’s head is, she had used her 18-year-old daughter’s real name and sent him actual photos of her.

Thomas confessed to the shooting, but before sentencing in late-August changed his plea, saying he wanted to go to trial because he claims his lawyer gave him false information in hammering out a plea bargain.

Beyond the lurid details and chatroom transcripts you can find in this excellent Wired story, what interests me is how often we come across examples of how the Internet renders possible what a decade ago would have been almost inconceivable. Contacting old friends and lovers via Facebook, for example.

Second Life, anyone?

Perhaps it’s a cautionary tale.

Live in the here and now. Cherish your loved ones. Be real.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

PS: Sockpuppetry has a long tradition. This recent article looks at a few high-profile examples and shows how you can spot and thwart them.

How uncool am I? Let me count the ways.

OK, full disclosure right off the bat: this is a direct rip-off from inspired by Alex Beam’s column in today’s International Herald Tribune, that NY Times of Europe newsthingy some say won’t be around in a few years because it’s made of paper, and paper is just so…uncool.

As I was reading his column I thought: separated at birth or joined at the demographic? Because my good Mr. Beam, we could be brothers.

How uncool am I? Let me count the ways.

1. Until a few months ago, I used to think Bluetooth was a disease and BluRay a sea creature.

2. A blackberry belongs in a bucket.

3. A treo is a misspelling.

4. I don’t own an iPhone, but I do have an iPod Mini. The blue one Borat says is for girls.

5. My organiser is made of paper. I input with a pen.

6. My cell phone is nearly as old as my 10-year-old kid, who calls me Daddy, not Ian.

7. Text messages are a pain in the ass.

8. Skype is for people who can’t find their phone.

9. MySpace should come with a health warning.

10. My profile on Facebook is set to: Block the World

11. Our TV is square, and bulges out the back. We don’t have a TiVo, a Slingbox, Pay TV, Satellite or Video on demand.

12. I’ve never downloaded music or movies.

13. The last CD I bought was in 2004.

14. If I want to watch a movie or listen to new music, I take it out of the library or go to the local video rental shop.

15. I’ve never seen The Sopranos.

16. I don’t own a car.

17. I get around everywhere by bicycle.

18. I don’t have a tattoo. I have no piercings.

19. I like living in Germany.

20. I think expatriates who bitch about life here should vote with their feet.

© 2007 lettershometoyou
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