Silver Case

Luke returned from ten days in Malaysia and went to bed before I got home monday night. On tuesday morning I opened my eyes in bed to this sight:

The other astonishing thing is that his phonics lessons, which he’s been taking for maybe six months, have suddenly begun paying off. He is reading Clifford books and sounding out everything himself. He is clearly immensely proud that he can now read and wants to show his chops to anyone whole will sit down to “Clifford Flies a Jet” etc. It’s pretty funny.

Hanging out for lunch on Tuesday

REALLY enjoying his summer vacation

Luke was first to wear my special sodium-flare notch-filter brazing lenses. After Ling gets back from her Wolves’ Lunch today, I’ll bike to the shop, build my fork, and try out these brazing goggles. They are meant to notch-filter the sodium-wavelength flare of melting/burning flux, so that I can see the underlying metal’s temperature better.

The character on the cake is ’swampfire’

Class cupcakes

Tomorrow is his last day of school, too, I think. Kindegarden starts in August.

Straits Dispatch held its annual Bring Your Child to the Sweatshop day today. It was a comparatively cool day, I only sweated through three tee-shirts. If I ever can do this permanently full time, I must move into a fully-airconditioned workshop.

But Luke enjoyed himself. He kept wanting to do things around the floor. He was quite keen to do sanding of the bike frame I’m working on. I was pleased to let him, as I had spent the previous three hours polishing the brazes.

Luke is getting on famously with them. Especially with Grandma.

Last night had a big, loud dinner at Buko Nero.

Now we’re getting ready for the Turkey/Trapeze party. The turkey better be good, because the Trapeze is going to be called on account of relentless rain.

Luke on his tiny purple mountain bike. Ling on the titanium Brompton bicycle I bought in London. Me on my Favorit fixed-gear (vvv de olx). We rode round the neighborhood, down to the river, and then a long uphill climb back for Luke. He ditched his shirt during the climb, finished with plenty of energy, and then buzzed my tire at-speed, flipping himself over in the process. haha Can’t wait to get the Gyrowheel for him so that he can go two-wheel.

I bailed out of the office at six tonight and went to Luke’s 6:30 Parent/Teachers meeting. The school wanted to run through the routine with parents and tell us how things have been going. Of course everything is fine. She said Luke is adapting well and (typically) not eating his fruit. I warned the teacher that Luke is a charismatic bullshit artist and had convinced his previous teachers that he had a younger sister in Myanamar and a brother in Bangkok.

Hanging up on the wall of his classroom was all of the students’ self-portrait drawings. I saw fourteen typical kiddie-drawings — tiny ears on giant heads, fuschia pink crayon spots for cheeks, unfathomably baroque anatomy drawings, etc. Then I saw Luke’s. Alas I forgot my handphone in the car, so I could not take a picture, but the best way I could describe it would be as a cross between The Misfits logo and Calvin.

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One of the other things on display was each student’s “Writing Journal.” Luke’s was a swirling mass of crayon scribbles. It perfectly captured his mood, “I don’t like writing or drawing. I want to play with the fireman costumes.” [There's photo evidence to back this up anyway]

During the session the teacher encouraged all the parents to “please write a message for your child in the journal!” Parents became very excited about this. I watched several of them writing long epistles in crayon, drawing elaborate pictures, etc. I’m doubtful any of the children will find it as moving as the parents did.

During the teacher’s presentation I realized what to write and nearly choked myself trying not to laugh till the end of the talk.

Dear Luke:

I am very proud of you. FNORD.

From Dad.

I suppose it’s too much to expect that Auntie Siti the teacher’s aide or Ms. Kathie will be trained to spot this metasyntactic variable.

But it will be good for Luke.

…the interjection “fnord” is given hypnotic power over the unenlightened. Under the Illuminati program, children in grade school are taught to be unable to consciously see the word “fnord”. For the rest of their lives, every appearance of the word subconsciously generates a feeling of uneasiness and confusion, and prevents rational consideration of the subject. This results in a perpetual low-grade state of fear in the populace. This in turn perpetuates the need for Government, because without fear, people don’t need Government.

Gripped Like his Grandmother!

After a lot of crying when we dropped him at school, we then waited anxiously till 1330 for school to end.

Teacher told Ling afterward that he quit crying a few minutes and was fine for rest of the day.

It still feels rough dumping him off like that and we miss the ‘daily snippet’ of photos from his day.

Bur overall things seem ok. Afterwards he and Ling visited one of our friend’s new kid.

Its 1:30am.

Luke is due at school today at 8am.

Am almost certain we’ll have one set of tears come 8:01 and I’m guessing Luke cries too. I’ll have to get Ling an early morning consolation coffee after we drop him off.

If I had told her 18 months ago that she’d be sad the day she sends Little Bugger off to school, she would have laughed in my face! haha

Wednesday is his first day of class. Today they get oriented in batches of four. Luke is settling right in.

Today we took Luke to SAS (Singapore American School) Open House. He got his school uniform (white!?!?!?! wtf?!?), saw the entire building, and met his teacher, Ms. Kathy.

The entire complex house 3,600 students from nursery school (pre-pre-kindergarden [Luke is in Pre-Kindergarden]) up to 12th Grade. It’s massive. Looks as big as a community college. We picked up the uniforms first (apparently no part of my $25,000/year tuition payments go toward his 200$ worth of white (what were they thinking?!) uniforms.) which was on the far, senior side of the school. Luke seemed a bit daunted after a while and not exactly comfortable in the “big school”.

But when we went to the ECC (Early Childhood Center?) wing, where all his classes will be, he immediately brightened up and ran all over the place and clearly felt at home. For all intents he’ll be in this SHU for his whole kindergarden phase. His teacher told us they occasionally take “field trips” to other parts of the complex, but generally they’re here in a quite-nice facility.

Ms. Kathy is friends with Luke’s current teachers and counsellors, so it feels like a good handover. We’re quite pleased with the place. It is only about ten minutes drive for us. Serendipity. We had not even considered sending him to this school when we originally bought the house.

White uniforms for 4yo children?

Tonight Ling and I are going out to celebrate our arbitrarily-defined 11th anniversary. Time going too fast. My little guy is already going to school!

Hard to beleive, but Luke is starting “big boys’ school” next week already. He’s going to the equivalent of Pre-Kindergarden at the Singapore American School. Since I can recall (vaguely) Kindergarden, it’s a bit freaky to me that he is growing up so suddenly.

Luke Trampolining from michael slater on Vimeo.

Working hard or hardly working, Luke???

I spent a few hours at the Rebound Centre today working on frame prep. We reamed out and faced the head tube and the seat tube. Brazing warps the tubes, so with a very precise reamer, we scrape it back to round. I did bunch of filet filing and took the rest of the lot home to polish up and tape the S&S couplings. Next week Sulaiman will sandblast, primer, and paint the rest of the frame. The fork is already painted, but not top-coated.

My big problem now is finding rims for my bike. I need high quality, 32-spoke, 20″ rims preferably about 26mm wide. Bike shops haven’t had them here and the BMX specialist only had 36 and 42-spoke wheels (way overkill). Ugh. I need them quick. I may need to airlift them from the USA.

When I came home I used my dremel tool to cheat and polish up the s&s couplings. Luke saw and wanted to join in. So we played with the dremel tool and afterwards he decided he wanted to drill (his favorite craft).

Luke and Mona then went on to play chase and tug-of-war until they were both absolutely exhausted.

Driving, biking and bickering Saturday

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Riding his bike and driving his car.

Ling has been debating about renovating her childhood piano and bringing it to our house.  It’s specifically built for tropical atmosphere (high heat, high humidity, and bugs).  I think it’s degraded regardless and might need some repairs.

Anyway, it made me think about what would be a good instrument to provide for Luke.

My theory is that I should find an instrument which you can almost immediately start making in-key music with.  Having to lay down a heavy base of memorizing scales and finger patterns in order to play in-key and make tonal music is too daunting.  (At least it was for me)  Why can’t the instrument, as a default, play in some sort of key?  I think it would be much more compelling to learn an instrument if you can actually quickly create some nice sounds from it, rather than having this huge investment before you stop sounding like shit. If the music bug bites, then you can invest the effort in the hard work of proper musicianship.

Problem is, I have no idea what instrument fits that bill.  (Mom will probably suggest an auto-zither; Megan will suggest the Pan-flute)  Guitars are too hard for a tiny little man’s hands.  I was thinking maybe it would be some sort of simplified keyboard.  But I have not got any clever ideas. When I look online, all I see is people trying to shoe-horn little kids into playing violin from young. Zzzzz.

Any ideas?

(As I sit here typing, I’m listening to Modern Jazz Quartet — it’s suprising how cool a Xylophone can sound)