Family Photos

Lest there be any doubt who the family chronicler, photographer, documentor, etc

 is... Look at this sampling of photo albums that Irene has put together. (Also, guess who took the notes that enabled the previous post?)

It is an irony that many Moms everywhere can relate to that, guess what, who do you think is the least represented in the contents of these albums?

Today I want to acknowledge that the star of the show is not in the shot, but behind the camera!

Family Time

Wednesday was the 167th day since the pandemic got to our corner of the world and we were all sent home to finish last school year remotely.  Yesterday, the school year started for teachers (prepping for a remote start for this year).  Proud to say the four of us had an uninterrupted streak of family evening activities. We took turns choosing a game or a movie and all four of us came together (usually right after dinner) to do something together every single day:

We watched:

April and the Extraordinary World

Avatar

Avengers (2012)

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Baby Songs - ABC, 123, Colors & Shapes

Becoming

All 5 episodes of Asian Americans (PBS)

Bulletproof Monk

Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Captain America: The Winter Solder (2014)

All 6 episodes of Connected

Earth: Making of a Planet

Hamilton (Disney plus - two times!)

Hugo

In Search of Beethoven 

Julie & Julia

Just Mercy

Linsanity

3 episodes of Little House on the Prairie

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Newsies

6 episodes of Night on Earth

9 episodes of Our Planet

Penguins

Radioactive

Romeo and Juliet presented by Chicago Shakespeare Theater

Stand and Deliver

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Star Trek: Generations (1994)

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

10 episodes of Star Trek: Picard

2 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Wars I

Star Wars II

Star Wars II

Star Wars IV

Star Wars V

Star Wars VI

The Giver

6 episodes of The Letter to the King

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

The Muppet Movie

The Peanut Butter Falcon

Thor (2011)

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Thor: The Dark World (2013)

We played: 

7 Wonders x12

Amobae wars

Blokus x9

Catan x2

Catan with Cities & Knights x 2

Star Trek Catan x 2

Chinese Checkers x 2

Codenames x2

Evolution x4

Forbidden Desert x3

Forbidden Island x3

Moonstar x3

Pandemic x7

Parcheesi

Peptide x2

Qwirkle x5

Risk

Subatomic

Ticket to Ride x8

Uno

Upwords x3

We did the following Zoom 'events':

-The Big Virtual Quiz Thing hosted by the Museum of Science

-Virtual Trivia Night hosted by Wayland Public Library

-Isabelle & Sebastien's Virtual Concert for the Extended Family

-Lucky 8 (8/8 at 8 PM) Virtual Kuo Family Reunion in Lieu of Crabbing Weekend

It's that time of year again...

 ...when you go "What?  Where did the summer go?"

It seemed I had infinite time to get all my projects done, but now that there is only a day or two left, I seem to have hardly made a dent in my list!

So this morning, I did get myself to strike one long-standing item off my list:  The mold on the north side of the house has been increasingly bothering me (and simply increasing) for years now.  If you look carefully, you can see the damage I did with a power washer a few years ago.  Turns out, there's no safe way to deal with our fragile cedar siding except a dilute bleach solution and elbow grease.  Here is a before and after picture from this morning:

Now, do I just push the rest of The List out into 2021??  Probably...

deCordova Sculpture Garden

Embarrassed to say I had never looked closely at the iconic twin hearts before. Complex our internal emotional landscape is, indeed.

As we walked up to another famous sculpture, I said "Calculus". Irene had to explain that nerdy observation to the kids. (Yes, I know this is the back of the sculpture...)

As I walked up to this one, I thought "hmmm... Every reclining woman on a divan could just be reduced to a pile of carbon..." Turns out, the artist did have a feminist theme:

Finally, I will close with a photo of my own artistic take on a non-art piece. I call it "Man's triumph over nature":

Oak Trees of the Mind

In the center of our backyard, there is a beautiful oak tree:

It must be over 75 feet tall and close to 200 years old.  It was here before the house, before the aqueduct, and long before me.  Although I know it is there and I love to look at it, it is always looming near the house whether I am consciously aware of it or not.  A strong, silent sentinel informing what the very concept of our home is.  This tree doesn't even know I'm here, looking up at it, admiring it.  This tree doesn't know its effect on me or on our home.

In my subconscious there are archetypes, primal feelings, memories, gestalts, mental schemas of all kinds.  I don't always focus on them nor am I even aware of all of them,  but they are always looming over my life - informing my very concept of who I am. 

Old cars, parking lots, and values

I told a story to the family today at dinner and none of them had heard it before.  That is so rare I decided to blog it.

 

 

 

So Meme and Grandpa have always lived below their means.  They just were never into material things.  When I was a teenager, Grandpa was still driving the same Volkswagen Beetle (“Bug”) that he had when they got married back in 1969.  That thing was so old, the hot Alabama sun had peeled the dark blue paint right off the top of the car.  Grandpa, being a physicist, decided to repaint his roof white so the Sun wouldn’t damage the paint.  So, he drove around in those days in this old, dark blue VW Bug with a big blotch of white paint right on the top.  It looked like a giant bird had just pooped on the car.

 

Now the other thing you must know about Grandpa to understand this story is that he hated to look for parking spaces.  He judged people if they spent time hunting for a ‘good’ spot.  If he calculated they spent more time hunting for a spot than it would take them to walk across the parking lot from an obviously empty section at the far end of the parking lot, he figured there was something mentally wrong with them.  He also taught me to take my foot off the gas as soon as you could see the next light was red.  Why waste gas if you were just going to come to a stop anyway?  But I digress.

 

So, in the early 80’s, Grandpa was working as an engineer at Brown Engineering. I think he was working on the optics for spy satellites as part of Reagan “Star Wars” program or something – it was classified.  He wasn’t happy with the program in general but he was well qualified for the specialist work the company needed.  Now, the only other folks at work that parked at the far side of the parking lot were those with super fancy cars.  They didn’t want to chance anyone opening a door into their car and putting a dent into it.  So, on the far side of the lot there were Lamborghini’s, new BMW’s, and Grandpa’s ancient VW Bug with a giant bird poop on the top.  

 

Although Grandpa never said it, I imagine the secretary in the front office kinda flirted with the handsome Allan Rideout.  What I do know is that he told me she would tease him about driving such a run-down car.  Rather than explain all his values and lack of need to participate in the conspicuous consumption culture, he would just joke around about needing a raise.

 

Now, this secretary probably had no idea of what Grandpa’s job entailed – he’s a very down-to-Earth guy and she probably had no clue how specialized his skill set was.  So she would tease him and they would joke around about his needing a raise.  She probably earned minimum wage herself.  Back in those days, folks got paid with a physical check every two weeks which you picked up on your way home at the front secretary’s desk. 

 

Since she felt they had a good relationship and they were always joking around about his needed a raise, one time she peeked at his check as she handed it to him (“let’s see if they finally got you that raise…”).  When she saw how much he was making, she was just struck speechless.  In her world it would make no sense for someone making that engineering money to drive around an old beat up car.  It just didn’t make any sense.  Nothing made sense to her anymore.  I imagine her mind imploding as Grandpa laughed while grabbing the check out of her hand and hiking all the way across the lot to his VW Bug amidst the BMW’s and Lamborghini’s…

 

 

Getting into Teaching

Recently, I was reminiscing with friends about how I got into teaching.  Although my mother is a career language teacher, it never occurred to me as a possible profession until I was 31 or so.

In the waning days of my stint as a wine importer in Georgia (2001-2002), I was having trouble making rent on the tiny warehouse for the wine I wasn't selling.  My mom was working for the Dekalb County School District at the time and told me that the district was so large, they had need of subs everyday, commitment-free.  Just get qualified and dial a 1-800 number the morning you wanted to go in and you'd make somewhere around $100 for the day.  Perfect for me - if I didn't have any sales calls or just needed the dough, I could call in the morning of and get a gig somewhere in the county.

To become qualified you had to submit some paperwork, undergo a background check and attend a couple of supervised visits to some area classrooms.  So I walked to the local elementary school and they sent me to a few different classrooms.  One very friendly kindergarten teacher asked me if I wanted to read to the kiddos.  I said sure and the excitement and friendliness of the kids as they circled around was overwhelming.  They asked me lots of questions and came right into my space and it was a moving, surprisingly personal experience.  The teacher said part of it was that there were so few male teachers at the elementary schools that we get to be rock stars to those kids.  

The next day I went to the local high school and they sent me to all their upper level classes to show off to an outsider.  I was sitting in the back of an AP Chem class and really digging the vibe when, at one point, a smart kid asked a tough question about batteries and the teachers totally messed it up.  I was shocked sitting in the back of the room and considered saying something, but wisely kept my mouth shut.

Over the course of subbing for the next few months off and on, I eliminated all middle school jobs after a couple of traumatic experiences.  Then, one day, I was just place-holding at an area high school for a sick chemistry teacher who had left some worksheets for her classes.  Usually, the kids knew these sub assignments were jokes and didn't work too hard on them.  But when her AP Chem class came in, those kids actually worked hard on their assignment.  I was endeared by them and started working on the sheet too, just for fun.  (my own high school AP Chem class was, I always tell my students, my gateway drug to Physics)

There was clearly this one kid that all the others thought was the smartest and they kept coming to him to get help and he gladly helped them out and explained things pretty well.  He was seated near me so I could follow what we was doing pretty closely.  At one point he had to admit he didn't know how to do number six ("Sorry, I didn't understand that one when she was explaining it either.")  I saw an opportunity and I discretely went up to him and said that maybe I could help him out and I talked him through how I thought about those type of problems.  The look he gave me!  He was so surprised that a sub could do these problems and then he said "You just explained that better than my regular teacher! How'd you do that?" and he happily worked out the problem and began to explain it to the other kids. 

Now, I'm 31 at the time and have had many different types of jobs by then and was well positioned to realize that the kind of personal validation I had just received is not something you get very often at work.  I remembered how much I enjoyed being a Teaching Assistant in grad school and how much I enjoyed being in school myself and the classroom environment in general.  Since I knew I was moving to the Boston area to join Irene up in MA, that spring I registered on some kind of online platform for MA teacher jobs and sent my resume to a couple of metro west high schools.  I only got one call and it was from the retiring department head (who was a physics teacher) in Swampscott, MA.  He basically asked me if I was for real, applying for a teaching job from GA with no experience except for importing wine.  So I told him I was moving to the area to get married and, yessir, was serious about trying my hand at teaching.  He was intrigued and said "Well, I don't know if I'd give you the job, but I sure like to meet you."  So I interviewed with him the next time I was up visiting Irene.  I charmed him and his principal so hard, they offered me the job! Although I assumed there simply must not have been another qualified candidate, much later I was told that I actually did beat out a highly qualified candidate. 

The rest, as they say, is history.

Some Easy Reading

Hey - What are these cool kids reading?  Looks so interesting, right?

Well well well - my new book for Barron's finally came out!  Unlike my previous work for them, this is not a test prep book so I had a lot more freedom to cast physics in my own way.  Although I decided my trademark sarcastic style would not play well in this series, I did manage to frame a lot of ideas in my own idiosyncratic way (Forces before kinematics, unifying the conservation laws under Noether's Theorem, mashing together all the waves (mechanical, sound, and light) to emphasize their similarities rather than their differences, etc.).

https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Easy-Way-Barrons/dp/1438012632