Silver Case

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)

Today Luke got behind the wheel of my car and took it for some parking lot rally driving.

√   Hummingbirds weave their hanging next in the bougainvilla bushes planted int the fences of neighboring houses.   Asked Luke what the nests were today.  His answer?  “Bird Hives”

√   Luke was hanging out in the attic with me this afternoon. He went back downstairs to fetch something.  I heard THUMP of him slipping on the stairs.

Then  I heard THUMP THUMP

Then a krunk

THUNK THUNK BUNK

It was a long time

Then THUNKABUMP

Then I’m thinking, “Wow!”

I looked down the steps and the little man is face down, head first, splayed superman-style down the stairs!  I picked him up and he was suitably scared and alarmed.  Fifteen minutes of goo-gooin and he was good.  I think he sprained his wrist or hand a bit, so he was delighted to have his hand wrapped in a “splint” made of some old t-shirt material in my cabinet.

He’s fine now though.  Even dragged all the visitors (Mama Kang, Aunty Nini, Ee, Ah-Ma) all to the stairs where he tried to reenact his heroic fall. He sat on the steps and then would lean face forward down.  Little drama king….

Don’t know what his problem was, but it took thirty minutes of cajoling before Luke submitted to a haircut at Barber Minami today. Innumerable candies, a gelato from Haato, and finally a bumboat ride down Clark Quay. This will not become a habit.

Luke having a dance.

There was one very happy little boy who was so excited he kept moving too fast for the camera.

Megan bought him perhaps the best 3d/foldout book I’ve ever seen — a totally amazing railroad book that features trams, tunnels, all manners of trains, and a complete station.  Luke and I spent two hours this afternoon playing with it.  Once he gets familiar with it, I am looking forward to the more high-brow Children’s Book of Art. He loves to pore over pages and discuss them, and this is a perfect book for that.

In the meantime, I steal away to read my Last Meals cookbook. So far no chef has included Pork Birds in his Final Menu.

Our gentle maid is continually horrified by the stuff I allow Luke to do. Play with sewing pins, use the food processor to make juice, sit with me at the sewing machine, cut threads, climb on the small patio roof, etc. But Ling and I are in agreement that we’ll let him do all this stuff that doesn’t have mortal or disfiguring dangers.

If (when) he pokes himself with a sewing needle, then I guess he’ll learn the things are sharp, and be more careful.

He’s not running the food processor by himself, but supervised, he learns to follow the steps: orange in, close lid, press start, press stop, next orange, until he doesn’t even need cues anymore.

Beating apart the old dried Christmas tree with a 15′ long bamboo pool? Now he starts getting a sense of massive levers and how his tiny little movements make the end of the pole move much longer. He can already manage to get one around the cramped corner of the house. And of course it makes him stronger.

And on and on with things like that. I think they’re all helpful to his development.

That’s why I was interested to see this presentation, “Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kid Do.” It basically saying the same thing.

I spent $30 to upgrade to QuickTime Pro in order to rotate these movies. It works inside Quicktime Player, but Youtube appears to ignore the “rotate me” attribute. grrrr.

does it get centered now?

Found a terrific playset for Luke on eBay today and I’m trying to win the auction now. It’s a set of boy’s carpentry tools. As described, “Including 2 planers and a mini hatchet, 2 carving tools , 2 clamps, mini mitre box and saw, a square , a mallet, and a scribe, plus the box with neat tray and part of the colorful original label.”

Boy’s Carpentry Set

When is the last decade where an acceptable tool for a young boy is a “mini hatchet?” hahahaha

“Beat my friends”

punctuated by furious laughter.

Little fellow has had a cold and runny nose for a while now.  After we played all weekend, Sunday night he got a fever, so Ling took him to Doctor Y. Y. Yip this morning (Luke know refers to him as ‘Yip’ in his new found voice. The ‘Yip’ comes out sounding like Luke was a coyote pup). He gave him some oral antibiotics and some runny nose medicine.

He was ok during the day, but late afternoon his fever returned, which makes him feel and act horrible.  I hurried home at 6:30 because we were supposed to go pickup the new maid, Maltida-from-Burma.  I came home to a crying kid and a crying mom. She’d been trying to get him to take his medicine for thirty minutes and was at wit’s end.  I tried my hand too… cajoling, threatening, bribing, bluffing, disguising, outwaiting, debating with Luke to absolutely no avail. He absolutely refused the viscous antibiotics. He normally doesn’t refuse anything except pink panadol, but he felt like shit and was particularly resistant.

After nearly an hour of this, Luke was terrorized and Ling was worn out so I said enough.  I paged Dr. Yip and he called the A&E ward at Gleneagles and gave the nurse orders for an antibiotic jab. uh oh.

While we were there, the effects of the fever suppository (administered by a grimacing father) kicked in, and little boy, up two hours past his bed time, started feeling good again. Delighted he was up in the dark, he was having a grand time in the hospital lobby.  When his turn came we brought him in and sat down on the exam table.  I think he new something was up because suddenly he looked pensive.

Poor little fellow. We all held him while a fourth nurse gave him his jab in his little thigh.  He was shrieking and carrying on, but after it was over, I pointed out, “see, it’s all done.”

He almost immediately stopped crying and then one of the aunties came by and offered him a packet of crackers. He eagerly opened them up and started eating.  After they put on the bandage, he thanked and said good-bye to all the nurses and orderlies.  Goofy little guy.

I think the jab is going to leave his leg sore.  Anyway, as soon as we got home he immediately went to his maternal grandmother to show off his sore leg and circular bandage.

In our analysis, he cried for 20 seconds in the hospital, as opposed to crying for an hour over the oral antibiotics.  So I don’t know how much a threat, “if you don’t eat your medicine, we’ll take you to the hospital for a shot” is going to be.

By Ling’s calculus, it’s a great plan — three day’s of shots is the full regime, as opposed to a week of oral meds.  It’s considerably less grief all-in-all.

Quick update.

Luke and Ling got back from Perth this afternoon.  Don’t know whether it’s an illusion or not, but Luke looks bigger. I’ve only seen him a few hours total in the last ten days.  One thing is for certain, however, and that is he’s trying to talk much much more.  Lots of long extended babbling repeats of things we say.  Matt comes over next month and I’m guessing by then he will be making some serious noise.

Okonomiyaki is sometimes called Japanese pizza. Tonight we had both Okonomiyaki and italian pizza.  I used the end of the pizza dough from the other day (I didn’t achieve as fluffy a crust as I wanted. I think because I blind-baked the crust in the middle of the oven, not on the bottom element) and used up left over batters from a kimchi okonomiyaki and a seafood okonomiyaki.  I bought several liters of sake, some umeshu, and two cases of Japanese beer for the party sunday. Still to arrange is the sashimi and spare okonomiyaki parts.

My green coffee beans are ready for collection tomorrow. Looking forward to playing with my iRoast 2 roaster.  I used some mocha java recently and it made decent espresso, bit darker than sumatran stuff I’ve been using.

Downloaded several Bruce Sterling and William Gibson books onto my n73 today. It appears that MobiReader only will read its own books purchased from its store. Death Penalty.  QReader appears to read .txt (but not .rtf) and refuses to read .pdfs, so I need to convert the rtf and pdfs to text before copying them over.

Still bumbling along with Japanese.  I’ve been having my teacher come over and give me private lessons instead of the class. I fell behind when I was travelling, so am racing to catch up. Actually I’m not even racing. The class is a giant grammar-cram and I don’t get a chance to practice my speaking. With a tutor, I can practice and work over stuff a lot more, so I am happy with that arrangement.

And I think that is about it.

Ling reports that Luke has ceased allowing others to bully him.  Today before class he was playing with a toy.  Another boy came and tried to pull it away from him. Luke pulled it back, but the other boy prevailed and wrested it free.  Responding,  Luke forgot the toy and went straight in for a bodily assault on the boy.  Luke was extremely mad when Ling interupted his attempted battery and she resports that he was sore at everyone for the next thirty minutes. hahaha

Playing at the construction site

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

It was all me and Luke today. I woke up (sort of late) and Luke was already dressed and fed. I tossed him in my car and left Ling at home to finish renovating his room. First stop, a haircut for him at バーバー ミナミ (Barber Minami) a Japanese men’s barber. He sat on my lap while the lady cut his hair. He always sits very still and looks very serious while it happens.

Afterward it was to Meidi-ya where I bought him a cone of mango gelato and bought myself many liters of sake and umeshu for our Temaki/Okonomiyaki party.

Finally we took a side-detour to pick up my green single-origin beans from Spinelli’s, but they weren’t delivered yet. Will have to wait till next week for them.

Spent some time chasing him around the house (he acts like a lunatic) and then we left to go drive around neighborhoods looking for a place to buy a house. Let him cool his heels at a giant playground and then came home for the balance of the day.

He is really nuts and 100%. I don’t know how Ling manages to do this day-in-day-out.

Have  been nursing a terrible hangover all day.  The only solution is to drink lots of water, but for some reason water tastes really, really bad to me when I’ve got a hangover, so it’s quite a vicious cycle.  I tried to sneak around the problem by making an ice drink (it’s really hot here today).  I was sort of lazy, sort of stupid.  I peeled the hide off of three oranges and two grapefruits and liquidified them with my hand-blender, pith and all, and then mixed that broth with a big bucket of shaved ice.   It was absolutely horrendous, there was a peel-like bitterness that I could not escape.  I tried to add sugar and all that resulted was a bad drink that tasted like peel + undissolved table sugar.  Then I poured ‘passion fruit’ syrup from my aborted Hurricanes at the Crayfish Boil.  That also just added more to the sweet note, but the bitter/peel note was undiminished.  Ling liked it, but I poured mine down the drain.

Ling was telling me about their visit to one of our friends who has a 1yo girl.  While they played Luke hit her on the head with a toy hammer, so she cried.  He didn’t really know how to respond (this often happens when he does things impulsively [he is 21 months after all]) and sort of stood there sheepishly, distressed by Alissa crying and wondering what Ling and Alissa’s mom would do.  The poor little guy doesn’t have a lot of tools in his emotional response toolbox, so he used that one that normally gets the best response from us:  he started tap dancing and making a hopeful smile.

There are a pile of Japanese restaurants at Robertson Quay. We went there tonight and ate a restaurant (forgot the name) that serves “Taiwanese Food in Japanese Style.”  Best dishes were a crab/bamboo/vegetable omelette.  Their gyoza was ok, though not teriffic.  Had Dan Dan Mein which was pretty darn good.  Ordered a taiwanese spring onion omelette which I thought was horrible (like an old, tough, oily prata) but for some reason Ling LOVED it.   Briefly, i guess I’m not making this sound like such a great restaurant, but we actually did enjoy it and would go back.

Popped next door to ‘The Chocolate Factory’ and had a cake and a coffee.  The chocolate candy room had some really beautiful candies on display.  The place was really busy though (9pm on  a Saturday night) and the French  chocolatier looked… umm…. prickly, so we figured we’d come back some other day to pick over the chocolate selection.

Tomorrow I am doing a test-run of okonomiyaki recipes.  Didn’t realize that the batter-binder uses not only flour, but a starchy stick Chinese yam.  I’ve found a lot of good recipes and guides, so I think i have a fighting chance of making some on-spec okonomiyaki.

What else?  Still hovering around 76.8kg.  I didn’t go light the last few days (yakitori last night) and haven’t been running, plus I fell behind on my Japanese.  Doing some catch-up tuition with なおこせんせい　(my teacher, Naoko) and my membership at the hote health club next door start imminently, so i can swim at lunch time.
A bunch of travel coming up.  Hong Kong and Dubai the final weekend of this month.  Japan in mid-April i think.  Next weekend hosting a small party to finish off the last of our three frozen hokkaido tarabakani king crabs. That will be bittersweet.  The Okonomiyaki party is mid-April.  Around April 30th will probably host a deep-friend turkey as three of us have birthdays on April 29 or 30.

Living off Toby’s Estate beans I brought back from Sydney.  The Espresso Rico is their best espresso blend by far.  I spilled some of a ristretto yesterday, and it was almost black as lacquer. Really good, chocolaty stuff, perfect for milk-based espresso drinks.  I need to get some green beans to play with in my iRoast2 after I use up my current stock of beans.

Luke can watch the tiny flash movie that plays on the side of the lego website over and over and over.  In fact this morning he woke up, ran into my room, and climbed up on my chair and demanded to see it.

He’s starting to figure out that it works on my laptop, too, not just my desktop.

His favorite part is the little man squeaking “jump!” during the rapunzel-like segment of the movie. He laughs every single time it happens.

Get out of my way

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Luke wanted to paint. Mona wanted to participate. Luke got annoyed.

Luke is a funny little boy. This week he started his Chinese nursery school. He’s all of nineteen months old, but wow, he gets very mad at the teachers and Ling for calling him by his Chinese name, Xun Qi. His comprehension skills are blossoming wildly, so he actually does pick up what they are saying to him. They ask him “where is your nose?” in Chinese, and sometimes he’ll answer, other times he’ll be quite irritated and refuse to answer, or only answer grudgingly.

The other strange thing about him is his deep empathy. If anyone pretends to cry or be in pain he will burst into tears. This week in school the theme is shoyi or ‘veterinarian’ (pardon my pinyin, Roger). So every day the teachers (mainland Chinese) act out stories for the students. Yesterday the little baby monkey disobeyed his mom, jumped around the house, and hurt his tail, so he had to go to the vet. Xun Qi bursts into tears. Today the baby piggies distracted the tiger by giving him lots of sweets till he got a toothache. Xun Qi began wailing when the the teacher playing the tiger acted like she was in pain. Clearly no other kids in the class do this (he’s among or is the youngest in the class). Sensitive little guy. He seems happiest when he is hugging the the dogs or cuddling his stuffed snowman.