Sweet Home Marietta

If my almost month-long hiatus from blogging is any indication, I’ve been suffering from extreme writer’s block.  Coupled, honestly, with the fact that my life is pretty boring.

You see, there were only a handful of things keeping me from going crazy busy, and they’re all over now.

Like bowling.  We gave it our best shot, but Los Bolicheros just couldn’t squeak out first place.  (Or second or third or fourth or fifth place.)  In the fall, we finished sixth (read: last), which was a surprise to no one.  We were in last place from the get-go.  But we started the spring semester with a bang, which made it all the more painful when it took the entire season (14 weeks) to complete our epic fall from grace.  We started in first, and ended (again) in last.  But we had a good time, and we even made the leader board!

And it wasn’t just me.  Javi had a Season High Score, too!

Final season stats: Average = 157.  High score = 217.  And I bowled 4 games over 200.  And the best part?  It gave me a reason to leave the house on Tuesdays and interact with other human beings.

Sadly, Spanish class is over, too.  Javi no me dejó escribir sobre ello, pero en realidad, él fue mi profesor en el otoño. Tomé otra clase esta primavera, y aunque es claro que mi español no es perfecto, estoy feliz de decir que me considero relativamente competente en español ahora.  Por desgracia, no planeo tomar más clases (demasiada historia y literatura y análisis – lucho con estas cosas en inglés), pero espero que Javi y yo hablaremos español en casa para que no pierda todo lo que he aprendido este año.

Click here for a translation.

Pass/fail my ass…valedictorian or bust!

Teaching is over, too.  This spring I taught 3 sections of a leadership class.  Developing facilitation skills through discussions of controversial issues, moral dilemmas, and current events in a civil and meaningful way.  We talked about everything from gun control to doping in professional sports to whether or not torture is ever justified.  And for the most part, students seemed to get something out of the class, which was nice.  I don’t know if I’ll teach again in the fall, but it was definitely a good experience.

So now that the classes I was taking and the classes I was teaching are over, gone, too, are my reasons to leave the house on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.  It’s non-stop excitement up in here, y’all.

But summer is just around the corner and I have a lot of things in the works.  Stay tuned!

Last week, we inexplicably had 3 days of 85° degree weather.  It seemed like Marietta had gone straight from winter to summer, with the students wearing parkas and beanies one day to flip-flops and tank tops the next.  And even though I’m a big fan of spring, I will gladly take the heat and humidity over April snowstorms any day.  It definitely seemed that summer, rather than spring, had sprung.  

But luckily, temperatures have cooled down a bit.  The sun is shining, the bees are buzzing, and my allergies are making me want to claw out my eyes.  Ah, the joys of springtime.  Molly and I went on a great walk around the neighborhood today, and there were bursts of color everywhere.

And now that the weather is nicer, I’m hoping to come out of hibernation and explore the area some more.  Which hopefully means more adventures (and blog posts!).  Stay tuned.

This weekend finally brought some warmer weather, and I am cautiously optimistic that this could potentially mean that spring has actually sprung.  Fingers crossed.

And rather than my usual spring cleaning closet-clean-out extravaganza (which I did last summer in preparation for the move), I decided to give my car some much needed TLC.

I bought it used in 2004, and that could potentially be the last time the inside was cleaned.  (Okay, okay…that was the last time it was cleaned.)  But, I take much better care of the outside, making sure to get it washed at least once every two years.  I mean, the rain does such a good job already, right?  Who’s with me?

Anyway, between 9 years of dirt and 4 years of dog, it was definitely time.  So I drove 2 blocks to a friend’s house, and I picked up her wet-vac.

Arielle in her best Price is Right pose.

I had my work cut out for me.  The pictures are much more forgiving, but the back seat was covered in a thick layer of Molly that seemed impenetrable.  The only saving grace is that her undercoat sort-of matches the car interior.

Yuck.

Double yuck.

Even more yuck.

But, the wet-vac worked miracles.  Two hours later, things were looking much better.

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But my OCD didn’t let me stop there.  Next stop?  Car wash.

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And then?  Oil change.  (No pictures of that.  The guys at the garage didn’t seem so keen on a photo shoot.)  And finally, I ended up at Walmart, buying all sorts of things I didn’t need.

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I gave the inside of the car a serious wipe-down, and I scrubbed the hell out of my nasty headlights.

Before…

…and after. Amazing!

So now I basically have a new car*, which is awesome.  One that Molly is only allowed in if either a) double-bagged in trash bags with air holes poked in them or b) shaved completely hairless.  And now that I have all sorts of cleaning supplies, I’ll definitely make sure to give the car a good cleaning again…sometime in or around spring 2022.

*A new car, except that the A/C doesn’t work, my oil pan gasket is cracked, I need power steering and brake fluid, the front motor mount needs to be replaced, and the rear brakes are on their way out.  Oh yeah, and my windshield is cracked.  So, like I said…basically new.  (Don’t worry, mom, those are all cosmetic issues.  Tee-hee?)

Well, it only took 243 days (sadly, that’s not an exaggeration), but I’m FINALLY fully credentialed in Ohio.

It’s a small victory, but still.  I’ll take it.

And now the real challenge begins.  Anyone want to give me a job?

On a scale from 1 to Practicing Jew, I’d give myself a 2 or 3.  I’ve been to temple a handful of times in the past 20 years (once a few months ago for my cousin’s Bat Mitzvah, and once several years ago when Mannix was shopping for new religions), but I strongly support receiving Hanukkah presents (and sometimes even remember to light the candles!) and I always seek out opportunities to eat copious amounts of Jewish food.

Molly’s first Hanukkah, circa 2010

When I lived in the Bay Area, this meant always accepting an invitation to my friend Andy’s parents’ house, whether for their annual Hanukkah party or a Passover Seder.  But since Andy’s parents’ house is a 38-hour, 2,572 mile drive (which I did consider making), I decided instead to be a good Jewish boy and host a Passover Seder of my very own!

According to some really cursory internet research, here are some interesting facts:

• There are 149,000 Jews living in Ohio.
• 129,000 of them live in Columbus, Cincinnati, and Cleveland.
• Out of the 20,000 remaining Jews in the entire state of Ohio, 19,800 of them live in 26 of the state’s larger cities.
• If you’re following along with the math, this leaves 200 Jews spread out among the state’s remaining 288 cities and towns.

That’s less than 1 Jewish person per town!  Which basically makes me the town Rabbi in Marietta.

But back to Passover.  (For those who are asking themselves, “What’s Passover?” Click here.)

First, I set the Seder table.

Oooh…pretty.

Please notice the bottles of the world’s most delicious wine: Manischewitz.

There was even an actual Seder plate. I’m for reals!

Then, I invited some guests.

Their first Seder!

Double date.  Jamie, Molly looks much more into it than you do.

And then we sat down for an incredibly religious service.

Exhibit A: The existence of matzah and the use of Hagaddahs.  In Hebrew, “concise” means “very long and involved.”

Exhibit B: More solemn praying.

And if that’s not enough evidence, try to tell me that you’ve seen a Passover Seder more religious than this.

Matzo ball soup

Gifilte fish: Hot dogs of the sea!

Clockwise, from the blue bowl: roasted veggies (thanks, Jamie!), potatoes and carrots, brisket, bitter herbs (horseradish), and potato kugel.  YUM

Lemon bars (they looked much better in person)

Chocolate and caramel covered matzah

And by the end, my true mission was complete.

Satisfied customers. I’m pretty sure they’re all going to convert.

Just like Molly.

Just kidding.  That wasn’t my mission.  This was.

A fridge full of leftovers.  Dayenu!

And there you have it, folks.  Our first Passover Seder was a success.  As for next year, I’ve already started planning the menu.

(I am only a 2 or 3 on the scale, after all…)

A few months ago, I wrote about the tragic demise of Bob, my favorite plant and evergreen companion of 12 years.  After an accidental night-out on the town, Bob was pretty much a goner.

Bob (as he lives in my heart)

Bob (after his unfortunate night out, Dec 2012)

Bob (or what’s left of him, March 2013)

Sure, all of Bob’s leaves dried up and fell off.  Sure, he’s just a shell of his former self.  But I’m not one to give up hope, so I’ve been watering Bob for the past few months anyway.

And behold…it’s a miracle!

New growth!

Down, but not out!

Hope springs eternal!

Looks like poor Bob wasn’t dead after all!  One might even say that he was in a…wait for it…vegetative state!  (Did you catch that?  Vegetative state!  Get it?)

I can’t think of a better way to commemorate the equinox and the first day of spring than the second coming of Bob!  So this weekend, he’s in for a treat…a makeover, if you will.  A trim, new soil, and perhaps even a new pot.  It’s the least I can do for nearly killing him, I guess.  Here’s to spring, new beginnings, and hopefully 12 more years together.

Long live Bob!  Happy spring, y’all!

We’ve been in Marietta more than 6 months now, and I think it’s safe to say that the honeymoon is over.  You might have noticed a dearth of blog posts lately; it’s not that I’ve been slacking or super busy, it’s just that nothing noteworthy has been going on.  I’m still taking a Spanish class (puedo hablar y escribir mucho mejor ahora, muchas gracias), going bowling every Tuesday night (I’ve become quite good, actually…I bowled a 211 a few weeks ago!*), bringing Molly to the dog park (now that hunting season is over), and trying to stay warm in my battery-operated heated slippers (the key word being trying).  But the assorted festivals, day trips, and general ridiculousness has tapered off.  I’ve settled into a relatively boring routine that doesn’t make for interesting blogging.  But when things do come up, you’ll definitely be the first to know…promise.

*Proof.

This past week was Spring Break, and while Javi went on a work-related trip to Argentina and Brazil, I headed to DC and the suburbs to visit friends and family.  And although small-town life in Marietta has its charms (I can walk everywhere!  I get the entire YMCA pool to myself!  My rent for a giant house is 1/3 of what I paid for a 1-bedroom in Oakland!), and suburbia is nice, too (Target and Trader Joe’s and strip malls, oh my!), I think that I’ve solidified the fact that I’m a big city guy at heart.  I was only in DC for a few days, but I absolutely loved everything about it.  Diversity in every sense of the word.  Seemingly endless options and opportunity at every turn.  The hustle and bustle.  It’s ironic, because I tend to be more of a homebody, but having all of this at my fingertips is not only convenient, but it’s reassuring, too.

Back when I was applying to Teach for America twelve years ago (where did the time go?!), they asked me to rank the different sites I would be willing to go if I got in to the program.  And for some reason, having an opportunity to live for 2 years in places that I would most likely never live otherwise was fascinating to me.  So, my original “highly preferred” list was places like the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, the Mississippi Delta, South Louisiana, and rural North Carolina.  But on the day of my interview, just before I submitted my paperwork, I had a mini-freak out and changed my list to the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Chicago (and the rest is history, obvi).  So this is how I choose to frame my time in Marietta…the small-town Teach for America experience that I never had.  And because I know that Marietta is not a forever thing, the big city guy in me is going to make the most of it and enjoy it while we’re here.  (Side note to the Ohio Department of Education: I think my enjoyment would be magnified one-hundred-fold if I could actually get back into a classroom.  7.5 months of waiting for my credentials to transfer seems a little extreme, no?).

Oh, and I also want to give a belated 1-year happy birthday shout-out to Sweet Home Marietta…and the readers who have encouraged me to keep writing along the way.  This small-town big city guy thanks you for your support!

Last Sunday, Molly and I went hiking with some friends on the Maryland side of Great Falls, which is a multi-state park operated by the National Park Service that is divided by the Potomac River.

Virginia is on the left, Maryland on the right.

As you can see, it’s very pretty.  It was also 65° and sunny, which, although moderately chilly for my CA readers, was basically the temperature of the sun coming from Marietta.  It was glorious.

Anyway, we spent the first few miles walking on a very flat fire road of sorts to get to the falls themselves.  And when we got there, Molly was super sad to see that she wasn’t allowed.  You know, because Molly can read.  Just in case, they even had a ranger stationed at the turn-off to make sure dogs sat this one out.

But we took turns dog-sitting Molly so everyone else got a chance to check out the view.

Not too bad for a 20 minute drive from DC.

And you can see why they don’t allow dogs.

Doggie paddle is difficult in whitewater currents.

My turn dog-sitting.

On the way back from the falls, we decided to take a different trail.  You know, to spice things up.  The Billy Goat Trail.  And billy goats are cute, right?  Maybe.  But the Billy Goat Trail was certainly not named after their cuteness, but rather for their coordination and ability to climb and hold their balance in the most precarious places.  Which would normally be fine; I’m always up for some bouldering on a hike.  But not when I’m hiking with Molly.

Very pretty, but very inappropriate for dogs.

The problem was that we figured the trail would level out and head back toward solid ground, but it never did.  And by the time we realized this, it was too late.

What I wish I had read about the trail beforehand from the brochure: “The Billy Goat Trail is extremely strenuous and involves a lot of rock scrambling and the need for good balance.  The trail follows the cliff along the river.  With its difficult terrain, scrambling over angled rocks, boulders and climbing is required, and the 1.75 mile hike takes most visitors 2-3 hours to complete.  Dogs are not permitted.”

But I didn’t have a brochure when we started the trail.  I did, however, get one from the ranger who was chastising me about Molly 30 minutes into the hike.

Ranger Rick (probably not his real name): You can’t hike this trail with your dog.
Me: Um, okay.
RR: Didn’t you see the “No Dogs Allowed” sign?
Me: There was no “No Dogs Allowed” sign.
RR: Yeah, it gets stolen a lot.  But you can’t have your dog on the trail.  See?  It says so in this brochure.
Me: I see that, but what am I supposed to do now?
RR: Well, you could go back, or you could keep going.
Me: Um, okay.
RR: People have died on this trail.  It’s really not safe for dogs.

Although it doesn’t sound like it, Ranger Rick was actually very nice.  Completely unhelpful, but nice.  After warning me that we would most certainly plummet to our deaths regardless of which way we went, he bode us farewell.  We decided to keep going, because Molly had actually been doing quite well up to that point.  And then we got to the 40-foot steep traverse.

Um, yeah.

According to the map, there was an “emergency exit” right after the traverse.  We figured that if we could just get Molly to the top, we’d be able to cut back over to the flat path we had taken earlier.

I’ll spare you the details.  Although gusts of wind that move the curtains in our house nearly send her into a catatonic state, Molly was in remarkably good spirits.  She tried to climb as much as she could.  And there was some lifting.  And some clawing.  And some bleeding (from where she scratched me when she realized that she was 30 feet up and not in control).  But we made it to the top safely, and the emergency exit allowed us to cut back over to the flat part.  Oh yeah, and avoid plummeting to our deaths.

Fortunately, I don’t think any of us realized how unsafe for Molly it actually was at the time.  But looking back, we were really lucky that nothing bad happened.  I mean, WTF National Park Service!?  I know your funding is bad…but replace the sign.  No dogs allowed!

For the past several years (ever since I got my iPhone, really), I’ve been a huge fan of podcasts.

This American Life, in particular, is one of my favorites.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, TAL is a weekly public radio program hosted by Ira Glass.  (Rather than listen to it on the radio, I download it as a weekly podcast.)  It is primarily a journalistic non-fiction program that usually divides its hour between three or four stories, interviews, essays, memoirs, or short fiction around a different theme each week.

And since Molly and I were heading to Washington, D.C. for Spring Break, I thought that an excellent way to pass the time on the drive would be to compile a dozen or so old episodes that I hadn’t heard.  So I took to Facebook and asked my friends for suggestions.  And they poured in!  By the time we left, Molly and I had 18 episodes queued up, one of which was the most recent episode, “No Coincidence, No Story.”  Basically, TAL asked listeners to send them their best coincidence stories, and they built the show around the best of the 1,300 submissions that came in.

But now I need to back up a bit.  Almost a year ago, I wrote a post about bumping into a friend of mine (whose name is Sara, which becomes more important later) in Berkeley, CA and how random it was to see her.  I’ve never been a real believer in the power or significance of coincidences…basically, it just makes sense that every once in a while, there will be a sequence of events in your life that, although accidental, seems to have been planned or arranged.

So it was with skepticism that I listened to “No Coincidence, No Story” at the beginning of my drive.  It was entertaining, and there were definitely some bizarre stories, but I don’t think it changed my mind that the older you get and the more life experiences you have, you’re just increasing your chances for strange coincidences.  There’s got to be some math or statistics at play here…right?

Anyway, I was a few more episodes in (probably about three hours into my drive) when I heard a car horn honking like a lunatic in the car next to me on the freeway.  I looked over, and it was 4 of my students from the college!  Random, right?  What a coincidence!  Especially since I had just listened to the TAL episode about coincidences!  But it seemed relatively explainable, since it was Friday afternoon and Spring Break had just started.  There aren’t too many roads out of Marietta, and most students were high-tailing it out of town for the week.  No significance there…just a shared desire for civilization!  Sure it was weird, but I didn’t think too much of it as I continued on my drive.

By the time I got to DC, I had pretty much forgotten about it already.  I was trying to navigate through downtown because I was driving to the hotel of a friend from Oregon who was in town for a conference.  When I was only blocks away, my Garmin told me to enter a roundabout and take the fourth exit.  I accidentally took the third, and I got all discombobulated as it repeated, “Recalculating. Recalculating,” over and over again.  So, I decided to double park for 30 seconds until the new directions were available.  However, I  had accidentally stopped partially in a crosswalk, and the woman crossing the street started to say something to me.  Until we locked eyes.  And I realized that it was my good friend Sara from high school (different Sara than my run-in in Berkeley).  Sara, who I had plans to spend the day with two days later.  Sara, who was walking from work to dinner at a friend’s house.  Sara, who had recommended some episodes of This American Life to me on Facebook (not the one on coincidences; that would have just been too weird).   Sara, one of 5 people I knew in DC out of its 600,000+ residents.

Running into Sara in Berkeley was definitely a coincidence.  But running into my other friend Sara in DC (Same name! Same spelling!) after seeing a car-full of my students three hours outside of Marietta after having listened to a radio show about coincidences?  That seems like something more significant.  I have no idea what it means…but I’m not going to fight it anymore.  I’m a believer.

Yesterday, Molly and I were racking our brains for a wild, wonderful activity to do together.  “We could go hiking,” I offered.  “A-woo-woo-woo!,” she replied, which roughly translates to, “That sounds great, but is it wild and wonderful enough?”  I scratched my head.  “Well, we could go hiking in ‘wild, wonderful’ West Virginia,” I added.  “A-woo-woo-woo!,” she said.  So it was settled.  We hopped in the car and headed to Mountwood Park.

Wild, Wonderful

Mountwood Park is only about 30 minutes away, and it offers up over 50 miles of hiking trails.  It was nice, but it was cold.  That’s probably why we were the only ones hiking, which was a nice change from the last hike we did with 6,000 other people.  I just wish that I had remembered gloves.  Anyway, here are some highlights.

No one else as far as the eye could see.

Everything’s prettier with a dusting of snow.

Sometimes you just need to sit and rest.

Especially after discovering the West Virginia equivalent of Machu Picchu.

There was even a pretty lake.  I’ll bet this place is great in the summertime.

Molly rolls her eyes and flashes her “Girl, please!” look.  “Moderate?  That sh*t is more like beginner.”

We’re both looking forward to warmer weather so we can head back and explore some more.  It’s just like Molly always says, “A-woo-woo-woo!”  I’m sure you understand.