GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • Push Tricycle, Radio Flyer

    This is not the tricycle we grew up with. It can function as a self propelled vehicle, but it comes with a handle in the back for an adult to push and steer this monstrosity. The seat has side bars to keep the child contained in the cockpit, a drink holder in the front, an operable shade canopy, and a small storage container in the trunk. The foot petals are geared so that stubborn little feet can’t stop forward movement. This model has hard rubber wheels, but I’ve seen a version with inflated tires.

    The thing looks as kludgy as it sounds, especially if you get one with the plastic that has been aged in the desert sun. We bought ours from a family who was moving back to England.

    However, this contraption has been brilliant for getting the boy to fall sleep, pushing him in loops around and around the house. Sometimes it will happen in a few magical minutes. Often I’ll get more than thirty minutes to practice walking mindfulness meditation.

    Recently, he’s decided that he prefers riding an old office chair, where he can sit proudly on his throne as he heads towards slumberland. But fear not, his older sister will occasionally squeeze herself into the tricycle and zip a few rounds around the kitchen.

    I’m impressed with Radio Flyer. They have crafted a nostalgia brand, but they aren’t afraid to throw random things out into the world. These new era artifacts can be quite ugly, especially given wholehearted embrace of plastic.

    But if the kids dig it, how much of an argument do I have?

  • Nerf versus O-Ball

    The kids were fighting over the Nerf ball. The girl and I had been batting around the little orange ball, which made it became an object of desire for both of them, even after we had moved on to riding the red wagon around the backyard.

    As any parent would do in this time of high stress, I found a colorful O-ball and convinced them trade balls every time we passed the outdoor sink. They acquiesced and we had peace (more or less) for the remainder of their wagon ride, even though they both thought that the orange Nerf ball was obviously more desirable.

    I often wonder what the gods must think of us humans and our squabbles. In the moment, the dumbest shit is always the most important issue ever, often becoming deadly serious when adults are involved. Maybe the evolutionary role of religion in societies was to make us think “as-if” we were the higher deity and get us to rise beyond our momentary passions.

    However, it seems to have been only partially successful. Religion may have made individuals a little better, but we’re now stuck with conflicts between large groups of humans, each with the conviction they have a supernatural power on their side.

    It’s too bad that these tribes aren’t willing to settle for trading colorful balls every few minutes.

  • Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami, 1991

    After finding his voice in A Wild Sheep Chase, it seems that Murakami decided to explore all the genres at once. The book is fantasy and sci fi, with the mood of a hard boiled mystery and a little horror as well.

    The hard boiled protagonist works well for Murakami’s typically semi-apathetic first person characters, as does the side plots of a few ladies whose attention he’s captured. However, Murakami is a bit subversive, taking an outsider’s view of the tropes of these styles, jumping in and out of the contrived silliness with bemused detachment.

    In reading these works in sequential order, I’m wondering if I’m falling into an end of the world fallacy, rationalizing the author’s product as predestined in light of their past works. I had that feeling when I was doing my graduate thesis. It felt that all my previous projects was culminating in this specific thesis. But even under the stress of the deadline, I was still was keenly aware it might be my mind post-rationalizing my decisions as they were being made.

    However, given Murakami’s exploration of multiple genres – and the title of the novel – I feel it is fair to indulge in this fallacy while considering this book.

    Ultimately, it’s a fine novel, one where the cloth holds together, but the threads are never woven too tightly, as would be expected from a Murakami novel. The romances linger deliciously in their usual fashion and he indulges occasionally in his typically delightful wordplay of metaphors upon metaphors.

    As his fourth novel, this was a fine senior thesis for his budding career as an author.

  • Radio Flyer Pathfinder Wagon and Furby Boom!

    These two toys were purchased in quite different fashions. The wagon was bought brand new, online. The Furby was discovered while waiting in line at the Goodwill, on a half-off Saturday.

    Both have been sporadic hits.

    In Vegas the heat can be unbearable, so the wagon is left unused for months until the kids suddenly decide it is fun to be pulled along, bringing the it back into rotation. In this time of pandemic, it has also been the closest they will be getting to an amusement park ride.

    The Furby plows through four batteries at a time and wears out its welcome for adults equally as quick. Even though the kids have always enjoyed it, it too is only played sporadically due to a lack of willingness by the big people. However, I must admit it is beyond cute to watch our toddlery mimic the quirky Furby language.

    The joy of thrifting is the hunt; a joy that is unhindered by options. This Furby is covered in a grid of black, pink, and cyan triangles. Not completely horrific, but it was the only choice, so this purchase was free of angst. (In retrospect, my wife and I would have debated this $1.50 spend if we had realized how many batteries this little thing would consume.)

    On the other hand, the wagon purchase has always been tinged with a bit of regret. Soon after purchasing this wagon, we saw a collapsible canvas wagon which could be easily stored, unlike this hunk of plastic. After half of decade of pulling children around in molded seats, I think the ergonomics of this Radio Flyer has proven its worth, but for a time we were certain the $70 was not optimally spent.

    Even so, we have used both of these quite a bit, more than most of our other purchases. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to guess what toy will catch their fancy until you open up the wallet and bring the thing home.

  • Cheese Cracker, 08 August 2020

    I’ve been playing around with making crackers as a healthier alternative to all the other awesome snacks that are out in the market trying to addict me to their engineered flavors.

    After initial some attempts over the past couple weeks, I sat down and converted Mark Bittman’s recipe to grams. Using his numbers and experimented with a batch and I think I’ve finally come with a good ratio – 1:2:7:0.2

    10g cheese
    20g water
    70g all purpose flour (generic target organic brand)
    2g salt

    The result was a nice dry dough that I could run through the pasta roller (I ran it to thinness 6 out of 8). The pasta roller saved me a ton of time over rolling by hand and resulted in consistent, even bakes in the toaster oven.

    By using the pasta roller, I unintentionally recreated the “water crackers” that I used to enjoy at art openings. So as a bonus I understand the origin of their name, since I had never realized that water and cream crackers were an oppositional pair.

    For further experiments, I’d like to come up with an alternate version using sourdough starter, since these crackers did come out a little flat. I’d also like to try my hand at cream crackers, using milk instead of water.

    However, the biggest thing is finding simple ratio for a dough that works in the pasta roller, because I now have a good home base for future experiments.

  • Drummer Hoff, Barbara and Ed Emberley, 1967

    Drummer Hoff fired it off.

    And so we’re introduced to the motley crew that will construct and fire the “Sultan”.

    The art is stiffly whimsical in a stained glass style that is makes one nostalgic of the 60’s.

    The text is rhythmical, based on a march.

    The names are alliterative, each man and their rank.

    The cannon is creates a big explosion, and nature returns to reclaim what’s hers.

    This ending is both definitive and ambiguous.

    Was it fired but once? What happened to all the characters we met?

    Looking at the publication date, it foretold our hubris as we were stumbling into Vietnam.

    Is it subtly subversive against the military industrial complex? Highlighting the wasted efforts of men and capital?

    Or is it doubly subversive, inducing children to march to the war beat while assuaging its mildly pacifistic parents?

    All we know is that the birds win in the end. But at what price?

  • A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami, 1982

    Murakami makes the slightly absurd seem perfectly normal. This was already apparent from his first two novels. The great step forward in this third book is he modulates the flow of the narrative.

    The first couple books created a uniform effect by being very flat. The Wild Sheep Chase stays within the general contours mood of its predecessors, but he adds dynamics to the mix. He doesn’t resort to anything extreme, but feeling undulates throughout the story. He’s now included a (restrained) climax.

    Speaking of climaxes, these three novels are full of failed romances. Some that just leave you with a lingering longing, others just tragic. The girl with four fingers, the twins, and the girl with ears. The french major, the cafe girl, the ex-wife.

    It’s odd to think that Mr. Murakami married young and has been happily married this entire time. His writing is so personal, it makes you think he himself is the protagonist. However this factoid of his biography reminds you of the fundamental disconnect between the author and the reader.

    You might feel a closeness to the writer, but it’s just an artifice. It’s a novel…it’s all artifice! Murakami’s gift is making all that wacky ass shit seem perfectly normal.

    And yet (like a sheep that infects your soul) it’s so true, it can’t be unreal.

  • Bread, 28 July 2020

    After trying a really high hydration bread that went well enough but not spectacularly, I came back to my standard 75 hydration. I wanted to use up some oil/water from a jar of marinated artichokes and some cheap flour that my father-in-law bought.

    350g all purpose flour (Gold Medal)
    50g buckwheat flour
    100g starter
    225g water
    75g marinated artichoke water

    The dough was a bit slow in rising, so I took it outside, and it quickly exploded such that I was on the verge of overproofing it. Then I overbaked it, which is why it came out a bit dark.

    I pulled it out of the oven at 10pm. Just in time for a late snack – a couple slices with butter, and one more with olive oil and salt.

    Even with the cheap flour and the mismanaged process, it was an amazing tasting loaf fresh out of the oven.

    I know that my lackadaisical approach may be resulting in a ceiling to limit how great my bread might become, however the floor for these loaves are so high that I’ll take the tradeoff. This was not a spectacular loaf, but these three slices were better than anything I’ve ever bought from a store.

    Baking bread can be an adventure, you just have to be ready to enjoy the journey.

  • Assorted Balls, soft

    Over the past few months, my daughter has really gotten into reading Peanuts. Charlie Brown’s escapades on the pitcher’s mound dovetailed nicely with the the Nerf ball and bat we gave her last Christmas and the fact we’ve been trapped at home during the pandemic.

    We gathered all the soft balls in the house and started using it for batting practice in the backyard.

    Starting from the bottom corner:

    • Orange ball, foam. This is the Nerf ball that came with the bat. She has decided this is her favorite ball of them all.
    • Blue and green globe, squishy. A stress-ball with a NV Health Link logo, so I believe it we must have picked it up during some sort of local fair in the last few years when the ACA was being rolled out.
    • Blue ball, squishy. This ancient stress-ball has a smiley face on it. We have no idea where it came from.
    • Tennis ball, fuzzy. My in-laws had a couple ancient tennis balls in their garage when we moved to Vegas seven years ago. This thing might be old enough to drink.
    • Orange ball, dimpled. We bought our boy a set of rubber balls when he started teething a couple years ago.
    • Lime ball, striated. This is part of that rubber ball set. It feels a little hard inside the house, but it softens up quite a bit when you go outside on a warm day.
    • Hacky sack, red. We picked this up at Kappa Toys, while waiting to join the Women’s March in January, 2017. Last year, I met the owner of the store, when we were putting our house up for rent. She and her husband were very nice
    • Yellow Ball, corona-y. Part of the rubber ball set. We thought he might like to chew on these toys, but no, he only enjoyed putting contraband into his mouth.
    • Sucker Ball, fluorescent. I picked this up off the side of the road along with a weighted jump rope. It works, we’ve had a ridiculous amount of fun throwing it at our dresser, and our closet doors (which are mirrors)
    • Magenta Ball, dimpled. I’m running out of things to say about this rubber ball set.
    • Red ball, dimpled. There is a sixth ball in the rubber ball set, but we have no idea where it’s been lost. I think it was light blue.
    • Purple ball, bouncy. We were given this up at a Microsoft Surface event where our daughter made a little video. It has has a cloth cover but has a bit of bounce to it with some dense rubbery filler.
    • Stress ball, baseball-y. This ball has logos of the College of Southern Nevada and the 51’s (a local minor league team now named the Aviators).
    • O-ball, holey. When our daughter was a toddler, I wanted something to play catch with her. There was an option with rattles, but we chose the simple version. The rainbow colors make for a cool photo when thrown in the air.
    • Container, translucent white. This came home with our boy from the hospital. If I remember correctly, he got his first bath in this tub, which is almost inconceivable two years later.
    • Shopping Cart, Minnie. This was another roadside pickup, in downtown Las Vegas. It was on the way to the house, as I was doing some last fixes before putting it up to rent.
    • Pavers, CMU. My in-laws decided to pave over a significant portion of their backyard which had been covered with river rocks. I disagreed with the idea and still think it was a horrifically ugly mistake. However, it has dramatically increased the amount of playable surface area for the kids, and during this time of COIVD, it has become a walking track for my father-in-law since they are hesitant to even leave the property. It’s a good reminder to take one’s own advice too seriously.

  • WordPress, 2003-Present and Stacey-2009-2020

    By the end of the 2000’s, it had become clear that the web is an ephemeral place. I was spending a lot of time on Boardgamegeek, and I didn’t want my sporadic deep thoughts to suddenly disappear due to someone else’s bad business decisions.

    I had also gotten into reading webcomics and thought I’d try to make some myself. I didn’t have delusions of grandeur, but it seemed like a worthy hobby.

    And it was just time. The web had been in our world for just over a decade and I wanted my own little niche on this place (the short lived geocities site didn’t count).

    So I started this blog.

    It was going to be a odd-concept web comic, pairing random drawings and poetry. I hoped this project would force me to draw more and finally get a grasp on poetry. That endeavor didn’t last long.

    But now I had my own little foothold on the internet.

    Along with this WordPress blog, I also created an online portfolio using Stacey, a light content management system with a simple clean look.

    My first job after graduate school was for a small firm. It was a great experience but was not a career position. Even though an online portfolio is not required for architects, I thought it would be helpful as a calling card when I started the next job search. I didn’t need anything fancy, just a simple stable place to highlight some past work for prospective employers.

    Stacey was easy to set up, but it wasn’t completely intuitive. So I needed to re-figure out the system every couple years that I wanted to update the portfolio. Meanwhile WordPress continued to upgrade and make itself easier to use. My sporadic forays into learning css became unnecessary as WordPress themes got better and more responsive.

    Last year, my Stacey portfolio started to glitch. Recent PHP upgrades were creating error messages in the header of the portfolio site. It was still operational, but the end was in sight.

    Last month, my daughter was taking an online art class and wanted to share her work, so I gave her a blog on her own subdomain. In setting up her blog, I upgraded all my subdomains to PHP 7.3.

    This finally nerfed the old portfolio.

    So I migrated the portfolio, and now I have three WordPress installations under my care. WordPress isn’t idiot proof and takes a little effort to maintain, but it’s free and hosting is cheap. Hard to complain about a product that costs nothing, has enough momentum to keep updating, and isn’t completely under the thumb of some mega-corporation.

    But before I fully settle into this new WordPress-centric reality, I want to thank Mr. Kolber for his little portfolio. I’m not sure if anyone checked out my site, but the presence of my online portfolio made me feel more confident whenever I went out on the hunt.

    Stacey made me look good on the world wide web for more than a decade.

    Le roi est mort, vive le roi!