Category: Things

I bought this pair on sale at the REI in Houston. I still have them now, so you can imagine how little use they got over the past ten years.

Last week, I started using them to walk around the neighborhood.

Then I realized I’d never gone off-road with these shoes. So I took a three-hour stroll in the hills behind my house.

The first thing I realized was that I was landing too hard on my heels instead of the ball of my foot. I had adjusted properly for the pavement, but the rocky texture of the trail needed an even lighter touch.

Over the past two years, we’ve spent most of my time at home barefoot. I’ve never been a fan of shoes and I always took them off when I could. In Berkeley, I would walk around town barefoot (youthful craziness), but it’s been a long time since I’ve walked around without padding.

The coolest thing about not having padding in my toe shoe was that it pushed me to go off-trail to look for softer ground. That lead to some interesting landscapes and a sketchy moment when I suddenly realized the top of the ridge was a sheer drop at the other side – while a bee was chasing me along!

But it all worked out OK. I have a slight bit of soreness under my feet but otherwise enjoyed the experience.

These shoes are a keeper. I’m not sure I’d pay full retail to purchase another pair, but after my current pair of Crocs wears out, these toe shoes will become my regular going-out slipper. In other words, they aren’t going to make it to twenty years.

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The Sunday after writing that draft, I went on a walk around the neighborhood. It was a busy day so I only planned a quick jaunt around the subdivision. However, my feet had an itch wanting to go off-road. So I obliged, spending a couple of hours off-trail, going up and then down a couple of arroyos. It was glorious.

It was fun to have an object on my body demand that it be used the way it was intended to be used (as a sword thirsty for blood). We make our tools, and sometimes they make us.

The pandemic landed in America at the same moment that my in-law’s tenants gave up their lease.

After a couple of coworkers called in sick in mid-Februrary, I went into exile to minimize the chance of exposing the parents and children to this mysterious disease.

My wife bought an air mattress and hand pump, packed up some groceries, and I was a single man again.

The air mattress lasted about half a year. Kids ruined it by jumping up and down on it. However, the pump (which cost more than the air mattress) has paid off handsomely.

It turns out that when you buy a tool, you’ll find other uses for it.

They used it to blow air on each other’s faces. They played around with the detachable flexible tube that came with the pump, using it like a telescope. I used it to pump up the yoga ball.

And then we got a packet of balloons for my daughter’s birthday.

With the germophobia induced by the pandemic, we quickly realized this was the perfect way to inflate balloons.

Because it was so easy to inflate them, it was also no big deal to deflate them.

For a couple of weeks, the boy would watch me inflate a balloon and then release it, laughing as it bounced off the ceilings and walls, sputtering around the room.

This pump is about eighteen inches tall, a perfect height for children. So the boy has been able to operate it as well.

As implied by the “Double Quick” name, this thing pushes air on both the up and down strokes. It’s endlessly amusing to watch him strain with this thing.

As middle-class parents in a wealthy nation, we purchase many toys that get land with a thud. These wasted expenditures purchases are lottery tickets for amusing our children.

Then life intervenes and a worldwide pandemic forces you to buy the perfect toy that you didn’t even know was a toy.

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We pulled out the pump after storing it for a few months. His face brightened up immediately, and he went right back to inflating and deflating balloons. Some toys are just real, and we’re lucky when we find them.

We bought a fish-shaped, hand-powered bubble machine. It’s an orange piece of garbage with a green hand crank. By avoiding another battery-operated toy, we learned why everyone else uses electricity.

After trying to make the contraption work, we dug up an old bubble wand. As always, blowing bubbles worked perfectly.

It is easy to chase the next new toy, but the old ones are quite sufficient. We just need to remember to play with them.

Then again, this incident highlighted the differences between our two kids.

The girl happily chased and popped the bubbles. The boy insisted on taking the stick and blowing his own bubbles.

For $15, it was a total waste of money and a great bargain for the memories of a balmy summer night.

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It’s been a year since I wrote this post, and we never got it to work. Last week, the kids broke the handle of the crank. I guess this is the official demise of this ill-fated toy. Rest in peace.

We have a toy bird. Talk to it while pressing a button and it repeats what you said, a couple pitches higher.

Unfortunately, the kids leave the darn thing on all day and we’re constantly changing its batteries.

Our boy thinks that is part of the fun. He loves to pull out the screw driver and pop the two batteries into the bird. He knows which one should be pointing positive up and that the other positive goes down.

Yesterday, he decided to put them both in, positive up. Then both positive down.

He looked at me with a glimmer in his eye. He found it hilarious and laughed and laughed.

Finally he put them in correctly, still chuckling at this hilarious joke.

The summer before my thesis semester, I visited a friend in Pittsburg who was just starting graduate school. As two students, the sleeping accommodation in his spartan apartment was a green foam camping pad on the hardwood floors.

No problem, I had spent most of my undergraduate career sleeping on the concrete floors of Wurster Hall because I was a bit insane ’bout that studio life.

This thin inflatable foam pad was a revelation. You’d bottom out if you rolled on to your side, but it was as comfortable as a normal mattress when I stayed on my back.

A couple years later, we tried camping as a hobby and bought a couple of these pads for ourselves. The camping kick only lasted a few months, but we’ve kept them around for the past decade. At $60 a piece, this was a significant purchase in the middle of the Great Recession and they held nostalgic significance.

One can thank COVID for their return to prominence. After reading Guts, our daughter wanted to have a slumber party. With no real options, we held a family slumber party in the spare bedroom. She enjoyed it so much that we repeated it every weekend for a couple months, sleeping on these thin air mattresses every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night.

The world has changed a bit from those days as a grad student, but occasionally I catch glimpses that self in the moment.

Now it’s the four of us, navigating a suddenly claustrophobic world.