Embedded Files
Summerstay Christmas anecdotes 2015
Daniel is 3 inches taller than Lesli at 5'9". (He was 5'5" last year, so it's been an adjustment. -Lesli) He turned 13 in October. He decided to leave the charter school and attends the regular public school now. I invented a way to help computers make guesses when they don't actually know the answer, and gave talks about it in Florida, Lyon, France, and at Google. Lesli would like to add the following quote by Sartre: "Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.” -Doug
Togetherness
Daniel- Mommy, can you do something with me?
Lesli- Yes, you can help me find my book, so I can read it. Alone.
[Daniel is playing with an extendible antenna]
Lesli- Will you stop fiddling with that?!
Daniel- This thing is a pump. The more it goes up and down, the madder she gets.
Lesli- Get your bum in bed!
Daniel- My bum is in bed, in spirit. I like to think that each of my body parts has a spirit of its own.
Celestial Gifts
Lesli- I got myself a little moon rock for Christmas.
Daniel- Doesn't that cost a lot?!
Lesli- So what you’re saying is there is a website where you can pay money and pretend you're renaming a star?
Doug- Yes.
Lesli- What would be the point of that if you're not actually renaming a star?
Doug- A romantic gesture.
Lesli- (laughs)
Doug- So what you're saying is you want me to take that back and give you something else for Christmas?
Fighting, Online…
Doug- People are getting in big arguments about the color of this dress online. I mean, actual fistfights. People are getting beaten white and gold.
[Daniel came in while I was looking at Facebook.]
Daniel- Has the dislike button come yet?
Lesli- No. Why are you excited about that? It's going to be terrible.
Daniel- I know. I wanted to watch the internet descend into chaos.
[On Facebook] Lesli [to Doug]- For us, this would be your laptop . . .
(Education continued)
Daniel- This book says that Pilgrim’s Progress was written by John Bunyan.
Doug- That's right.
Daniel- Isn't he a giant man with a big blue ox?
Daniel's choir- ‘A million years ago, the first voice rose up in song...’
Doug- I don't think there’s scientific consensus on whether Homo Habilis was even capable of controlled vocalizations.
Daniel- My History teacher made me mad today. I had a hundred percent on the test but he took off points because I did it in pen.
Doug- What do you need an eraser for if you don't make any mistakes?
Daniel [about online quiz Lesli took while Doug and Daniel were watching]- You did terrible at it.
Lesli- ‘Terribly.’ You can't even use your adverbs correctly, so don't act superior.
Lesli- They don't teach him grammar at this school. Grammar is very important to me. Can you please teach him grammar at home?
Doug- Yes, I'll do a terrificly job of it.
Daniel [to Lesli]- Did you ever notice that Bill Nye the science guy looks a lot like Lincoln when he had no beard?
[and he found these pictures to illustrate his point]
[Doug replied with this comic]
Doug- Why did you look up the letter 'A' on Wikipedia?
Daniel- It was the first thing that came to my mind to look up.
Doug- Ah. You're telling me your mind is organized alphabetically?
Doug [peeks at the CD album notes Daniel is reading aloud]- Not necromantic, neoromantic.
Daniel- Huh. Suddenly Holst is a lot less interesting.
Daniel wrote this essay arguing against homework at the end of last year and I thought he did a pretty good job on it. He was pretty frustrated with all the homework by that point. -Doug
Housekeeping
Daniel [looking for eggs in the overfull closet]- Is this a clarinet?
Doug [assisting]- I think I found the Ark of the Covenant.
Doug- When people look at Daniel's room or the garage, we act shocked and say, ‘Whoever did this must have been looking for the package.’
…And Offline
Doug [to Daniel]- When I was a kid, passive-aggressive was the only kind of aggressive we had. We had to passive-aggressive to school uphill both ways through the snow.
Lesli- Stop teaching Daniel to argue semantics whenever I say something.
Doug- I have coworkers who study semantics. Nothing bugs them more than when people say ‘you're just arguing semantics.’
Daniel- what's semantics?
Doug- It's the study of meaning.
Lesli- No it's not. It's the study of the meaning of words.
Doug- Well, words, signs, symbols. Images, maybe.
Lesli- No, it didn't mean those things until people like your coworkers started calling it that.
Doug- Semantics literally means ‘signs.’
Lesli- you are a sign.
Doug- And now we're literally arguing semantics.
Lesli- No we're not.
[Lesli hits Doug playfully]
[Daniel hits Lesli playfully]
Lesli- Don’t hit me. It hurts . . . I mean, more than other people.
Doug- She means because it’s connected to her brain. Whenever she hits other people, it barely hurts at all.
Brain Fog
Sean- I have trouble thinking.
Lesli- So do I.
Sean- You say that, but you're really sharp, actually.
Lesli- No, I'm not. I really do have trouble. I go up and down.
Sean- No, you don't.
Daniel- Yes, she does. You don't live with her.
Lesli- Daniel, tell Doug... I mean, Doug, tell Daniel...oh never mind.
Doug- You have word finding difficulties like King Arthur had Grail finding difficulties.
Lesli- What do you mean?
Doug- I mean your words aren't just lost, they've been kidnapped and raised by strangers in the wilderness for the last 30 years.
Doug- What have you been watching?
Daniel- Psych.
Doug [notices it's paused on 42 seconds]- Looks like you haven't gotten very far in the last half hour.
Daniel- Mommy's been taking her pills all this time.
Doug [points to overturned exercise bike]- I guess she needed to.
Daniel- Are we gonna watch Psych now?
Lesli- Why are you so impatient?
Daniel- Because Psych is my role model for how to act when I'm an adult.
Lesli- Okay. No more watching Psych for you.
Video Games
Daniel- Playing Lego Star Wars with all the extras turned on is weird. It's like you're the silhouette of a man with a mustache sliding around on an ice rink.
Doug- I have no idea what that metaphor means.
Daniel- No, that's not a metaphor, that's what actually happens.
[Daniel and cousin Elena rushing through the house to get to the computer]
Elena- There's an angry mob and the city is on fire!
Hipsters
Doug- The first one to publish an idea gets all the scientist points. It’s basically like being a hipster.
Doug- I knew about this earthlike exoplanet 3 months before everyone else! Isn't that cool? [They posted all the data returned from the Kepler telescope online and I did a very specific search through the data to find potential Earthlike worlds.]
Daniel- You get +1 hipster points.
Doug- I liked that picture of you climbing the side of a building when you were 16, Lesli.
Daniel- You did parkour?
Lesli- There was no such thing as ‘parkour.’ I just climbed all four sides of the building to see if I could do it without touching the ground. I wasn't following some parkour fad.
Doug- So you're saying you were a parkour hipster.
Lesli- No, I wasn't a ‘parkour’ anything. I climbed building facades before anyone else thought of doing it.
Doug – ‘I was into parkour before it was a thing.’ That's the most parkour hipster thing you could say.
Food
Lesli [to Daniel, asking about week he spent with Doug’s parents in Utah]- Did you even eat there, because I wasn't there to make you eat?
Daniel- I ate an apple.
[Lesli read the Twilight books this fall]
Doug- I like that candle. It smells like... cinnamon buns. Cinnamon, vanilla... The only good smells are food smells.
Lesli- No, the best smell for a candle is peppermint.
Doug- That's a food!
Lesli- So that's the kind of perfume I should wear? Food odors?
Doug- Yes. Absolutely.
Lesli- Then we can be like Edward and Bella!
Daniel- Today's health quiz had ten nutrition tips. The assignment was to choose two and say how you can apply them in your life. They were all ways to reduce fat, like drink non-fat milk. [Daniel's doctor has prescribed him butter, ice cream, and if possible, pure lard. He is 90 pounds and 5' 9”.]
Daniel- You know what the best part about having braces is? It's that you can eat something and then still be enjoying it minutes later.
Education
Daniel- I have to read My Brother Sam Is Dead for school.
Lesli- I have to warn you-- his brother Sam dies. Sorry.
Daniel- Wow, I never could have guessed.
Daniel [referring to stupid Facebook posts]- Do you think those are real?
Doug- I think so. After all, half of the country has below average intelligence.
Daniel- What?! Poppy, that answer gave me no information at all. That's the definition of average.
Daniel’s Cousins, Alexandra (6) & Elena (8)
[guest post contributed by Lesli’s brother Sean]
Alexandra- I'm getting angrier and angrier! (as she kicks the back of her dad's seat)
John [her father]- Yeah. Likewise. :(
Alexandra- I'm pretty sure that if I knew what ‘likewise’ meant, I would be really upset right now!
(Sean starts chuckling from the back seat of the van. Kathryn joins from the front. John grins silently to avoid upsetting the ‘apple cart’ any more than it was :)
Kathryn to Alexandra- This is your great-aunt Ann. This is my Mom's older sister.
Alexandra- This is your Mom's older sister?
Kathryn- Yes.
Alexandra- And she's not dead yet?
[as they are getting in the car to leave our house the evening after a visit most of the day]
Alexandra- When can we go back to your house?
Lesli- Whenever you want. I mean, whenever your Mom says you can.
Alexandra- Mom, can we go back to their house today?
Elena [asking about mice that our cats have killed]- What do you do with them when you find them? Cook them?
Names
[Lesli’s been fighting to keep the Scientology-backed drug rehab Narconon from building in our neighborhood.]
Daniel- Narconon is stupid. It follows a fake religion. And it has a name that sounds like an evil company in a superhero book. That's literally the first thing I thought of when I heard it.
Lesli- This [used] water bottle says ‘Daniels’ but I thought we could make it say ‘Daniel S.’ and he could take it on campouts. It is pink, though.
Doug- It's purple!
Lesli- Purplish-pink.
Doug- It's for a boy. It's purple.
Serious
Daniel- Do animals feel pain like we do?
Lesli- I don't think quite the same way as we do, but they do feel pain.
Daniel- I heard that dogs feel pain the same way we do.
Lesli- Maybe they feel pain more like we do, but probably not quite the same.
Daniel- If I was designing the way things are, then instead of having pain, then your eyes would see red.
[Daniel kept asking excitedly if we had any beech trees in our yard.
I showed him one small sapling.]
Lesli- So what was it about the beech tree?
Daniel- Well, when beech trees get about that tall [pointing to our 80 ft. tulip poplar], they get these massive branches that spread out. So I figure, in about 60 years, it'll be the perfect treehouse tree.
Daniel- Mommy, I think this generation of your family is cursed.
Silly
Doug- You need to declare that you are no longer a sock atheist.
Daniel- I am no longer a sock atheist. I am officially converted to sock religion.
Lesli [describing the proportions of Doug’s torso]- Look at the shape of his trunk—see how it’s larger than when he was younger?
Daniel- What are you talking about? He has a nose like a normal person.
Daniel- Is the driving age lower in any other countries? I'm especially thinking of Germany.
Lesli- You think they have no laws in Germany?
Daniel- Well, they have no speed limit, why would they stop there?
Primary leader [to hyperactive 8 yr old in Doug’s primary class who was acting up]- Don't you want to be like Jesus?
Boy [quietly to Doug]- But I don't know how to be like Jesus. I don't know how to fly!
Lesli- Daniel, play your piece twice through, both hands. You’re supposed to practice 20 minutes.
Daniel- That wastes my day. Have you ever heard the saying, ‘Seize the Day?’
Doug- You don’t want to give the day a seizure. It’s not good to have a day that’s epileptic. Now go play your piano.
Lesli [handing camera to Sean at event]- Could you take some pictures for me while I go to the bathroom?
Sean- I really don't think I should follow you in there.
Genevieve- Sean, I have a question.
Sean [holding Genevieve’s infant nephew]- Short version—it's not my baby.
Doug- I broke another rake. [the fourth this year] They're just not built for people with my strength.
Doug- Why don't Google's self-driving cars have windows? Because they run on Android.
Lesli- Is this article really by Chuck Norris? I didn't realize he was still a real person.
Doug- Are you saying he somehow passed from legend into myth, ascended beyond this plane, and passed beyond through a roundhouse kick to reality?
Insights
Doug- I'm a few inches taller than is generally considered polite.
Doug- On the way to work yesterday I had to brake for a deer to cross the road. And right behind it on the road there were two rabbits and a squirrel. I half expected them all to break into a Disney song.
Daniel- As far as I can tell the only difference between cosplay and dressing up is that cosplay is for adults.
Doug- The first thing I thought of when I got up this morning, which my subconscious had clearly been working on all night, was that if you play the intro from the Inspector Gadget theme song it segues perfectly into the primary song ‘I like to look for Penny, whenever I see Brain...’ [I like to for rainbows whenever I see rain]
Daniel- I took tons of photos at the Eagle Scout project. Partly because I'm related to Mommy, and partly because I didn't want to do much work.
Lesli- That's because you're related to Poppy.
Daniel- There's enough pencils and pens inside this couch to support a moderately-sized writers' guild.
Doug- I planned to procrastinate today but other stuff kept getting in the way.
-end-
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