Studio Plus One

So we finally gave up the bedroom to the Boy:

...and placed the bed into the nook originally planned for the crib:

(The easel was also moved into the room...and the chair was moved around in this room as well.)

This has effectively changed our place into a studio-plus-one apartment.

After we got back from our long trip to New York, we started leaving Cass alone after he went to bed and began sleeping on our foldout sofa bed. I likened it to sleeping on a sheet draped over monkey bars.

The glorious result was that the Boy started sleeping through the night. For the first time ever. All hail leaving the room alone.

I finally convinced Corrie that moving Cass's crib to the nursery nook and expecting him to sleep through the night at this time was unrealistic---due to our loud street and our own needs as working adults---and that right now it would be better if we were able to sleep on our (quite nice) bed out front.

So, like all parents, we adjust...

Things My New Phone has Said to Me

I went swimming with my old phone, then went on a long trip with no connections (pretty cool), and have since procured a new phone. It was prety cheap when we signed on for another two years, as we've found a company, Credo Mobile, that supports progressive causes.

Anyway, this new phone turns out to be one of THE new phones, the Samsung Galaxy S8. It's pretty damn fancy.

It has a thumb print recognition to unlock, if I so desire. But it also has a retina scan unlock option.

My phone has a retina can unlock option. Ohhh kaaay.

Sometimes it seems to have a brain of its own, and it has said some strange things to me.

After having it for a few days I noticed a little message. I swiped to read it. It said:

"It looks like you go to bed at 21:59. Would you like to check your alarm for tomorrow?"

Now, going to be before ten pm would be awesome, but frankly it's unrealistic at this (and likely any future) point in my life. Why would my phone think my it could tell my bedtime? Is that when I stopped using it the first few nights?

The second thing has happened a few times and makes me laugh each time. My phone has suggested multiple times:

"Change your phone number for security sake?"

WHY WOULD I WANT TO CHANGE MY PHONE NUMBER? Only five people call me, and I need them to have my phone number!

So weird.

So goes the fancy new tech shit in the world.

Five Generations on the Corkboard

The Cabin of my memory is a wooden box built on plot of reclaimed wilderness on the edge of the national forest. It's i the vicinity of Mt. Lassen, the southern most volcano in the Cascade range. Three hours away from Sacramento, it was a usual haunt of my childhood.

Now that we have a kid, we've been more proactive about considering making trips there, trying to make it a priority among our other adventures with the Boy.

He climbed the stairs; he got to see how we feed Charlie, the name we've given to generations of blue jays that eat peanuts off of the deck's balcony's railing; he was strapped on for a hike through the meadow (now a wetland) and off into the adjoining forest.

The smells smells are the same; the sounds are the same.

We went into the national park, Mount Lassen Volcanic National, and did a spectacular hike (Cass was again strapped on in the Ergo carrier). The pictures are amazing. They're also currently buried on Corrie's lappy and will hang there for a minute.

Inside there's a corkboard where folks are asked to put pictures from visits over the years. We had the Fuji Instax with us, which is basically a Polaroid camera, and took a few and added even less to the corkboard.

It was in that moment that I realized that there were five generation of people enjoying the Cabin on that corkboard.

There were plenty of black and white pictures, some from 1962 that showed my Nana, my great-grandmother Theresa Pedrotti (nee Alamano). Nana was born in Italy in 1904 and grew up in California's Bay Area.

Also pictured in black and white were her daughter, Mary, with her family: husband Tom, two daughters Kathy and Peggy, and son Tommy. Kathy's my mom, who goes by Kate now.

In color are photos are my brother and I, and the two of us with our cousins Mike and Liz, and two with me and Cass.

From Theresa to Mary, to Kate, to Pat and on to Cass, we have five generations spread over almost sixty years, shown on that family history corkboard.

The Narrative Breaks Down

After being home for exactly a week, we were leaving again. Friday we had swim class for the Boy, then finishing packing, cleaning out the fridge and getting the cat's zone prepped, making dinner and leaving. That was the plan.

It all went off without a hitch, except that I went swimming with Cass with my phone in the pocket of my board shorts and didn't notice until I got out after a half an hour. Whoops.

Maybe I didn't use enough rice, or wait enough hours, but it was lost.

That's been both a blessing and an annoyance. Being disconnected has been pretty sweet, but not being able to easily take pictures or look things up has been lame. I'm also a bit of an inveterate Simpsons Tapped Out junkie, but having finished their latest mini update with a week to spare gave me confidence that by the time we got new phones (Corrie's phone has needed to be replaced for far longer than mine, just not fully incapacitated), I wouldn't have missed too much.

I'd wanted to put pictures into these pieces about going to the Cabin, but I may not get to it: I'd have to fish through Corrie's massive collection of huge files from her Nikon dSLR, and I don't have the energy right now.

I have other things I need to to be working on, so these may be few.

The trip to New York was something planned for a while and spoken about with many people in my life who are not related to me. The trip to Sacramento and the Cabin was for me, for Cass and Corrie; it was time spent with loved ones and trying to share/create the feelings and memories that I had as a boy like the one we just created.

Without a phone to document certain things, and with the desire to create memories for a thirteen-month old (which is more about smells, sounds, and feelings than concrete experiences) more than to exploit an adventure for literary creation's sake, the narrative of this adventure has broken down in my memory.

Why a quick trip to Alameda seems more vivid and fresh in the memory banks than five days spent in the vicinity to Mt. Lassen, the Cascade's southernmost volcano, is beyond me. Must be a trick of proximity and novelty versus familiarity and nostalgia.

We got the Decemberween picture taken for my mom; saw Jules's new place in the mountains; watched the bats emerge at dusk; introduced the Boy to the Cabin; taught him how to feed Charlie; took him to Mill Creek, then Lassen Volcanic Park, then the Mill Creek Falls hike; got to introduce him to his Great-great-auntie Erm and GG-Uncle Rich; learned about and stayed on Alameda; and then drove the whole way back, because it had just been too long.

Seeing Uncle Dan and Tia 'Pita is awesome and too short, as usual.

Getting to see Grandma Kate thrice in a month's time was very cool.

Hanging out with Uncle Norm and Auntie Holly and their boys, Norman and Simon, expanding Cass's world with cousins, that's what it's all about.

So later on today, maybe tomorrow, I might get some more details up here with pictures, but I'm not sure. This trip has germinated a seed of thoughts in my imagination that's spreading in two directions, maybe even three.

I picked up a book at the Cabin that's written in a style like mine, Shelley Jackson's Half Life; I picked up Islands in the Stream, Hemingway's posthumous novel, from an indie bookstore in Alameda; and I had an epiphany about travelling, its effect on humanity, and how it all could be tied together with anecdotal philosophy (what I call whatever this is---"literary blogging"). Part of me wants to work on this "treatise" and part wants to return to my novel.

Part of me is laughing and yelling at the rest to get ready for work to resume, to be really well prepared. And then I remember that a union conference is this weekend in DTLA and runs late each day.

The fun never ends, the adventure goes on unabated, and the only time I can get over here is when a nap is on or sleep is happening.

I would never change it, of course.

Having Returned Yet Again

We've returned from another ten day trip. That makes twenty days out of twenty-seven, or three weeks out of four on the road.

On the east coast we stayed in houses (and a hotel) and drove on highways and parkways and the beautiful Taconic.

During this last trip, up the belly of California, through the capital city, and off into the wilderness, I paid a little more attention to the highways, as these held more meaning for a California native who'd been driving for years.

I collected those same highway signs and put them into a graphic as a means of describing our trip in terms of original sightings of particular freeways. Depending on one's acumen with California's system of freeways and state routes, one could probably map out our entire trip, from Long Beach to Sac to Penn Valley to Chester to Sonoma to Oakland to Gilroy and back to Long Beach:

Details should be following soon-ish. The Cabin was phenomenal.

Pacific Voyages

We got around to watching "Moana" since returning from the east coast. It fit in nicely with a BBC production on Netflix we'd been watching earlier this summer, a Benedict Cumberbatch-narrated collection about the South Pacific.

We both really enjoyed Moana: it's beautiful and fun and paced well, it seems like the culmination of the Disney heroine archetype, and the songs are still stuck in my head, especially "Your Welcome" and "Shiny." (ESPECIALLY "Shiny".)

It helps that I'm a sucker for early human migration---reading about it, thinking about it, writing scenes of it into a novel I'm working on, and getting to watch it fictionalized in Disney animated feature.

[[Digression: between Zootopia and Moana (and maybe even Tangled and Frozen), doesn't it seem like Disney has taken over from Pixar on making the best animated features?]]

Here's a graphic from the migratory patters of those Austronesians over the years:

The South Pacific BBC series had some very cool from-space footage that really captured the true vastness and emptiness of the region, the part of the planet that holds one-quarter of all the water on earth.

A documentary that I put into our Netflix Instacue was called "Losing Sight of Shore", and once I read the description again the other day, I thought, well now, this is fitting.

It's shot in a reality-style (not generally a fan), but that's because it's shot by the four women of the Doris, the members of the Coxless Crew, as they rowed from San Francisco to Australia.

Let me put that in all caps, as it seems ludicrous on the face of it: THEY ROWED FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO HAWAI'I TO SAMOA AND ONTO AUSTRALIA.

They were trying to raise money for breast cancer research and the like, and their documentary kept talking about they m being the first set of four ladies to make the trip, as in there were a few groups that have made the rowing trek before.

To get a sense of their voyage, here's how their trip started: after taking on water in their battery hold, by day 11 they had to turn back for California, but they'd only gone maybe 30 miles out to sea. It took six days to get to Santa Barbara, seal up their batteries, and then it was really on. 17 days at sea, and they'd really just begun.

Two ladies would row for two hours while the other two either napped or did chores that had to be done. Then they'd switch. Two hours on, two off, every day of every week while they slowly headed west and south. They'd planned for 155 days, and it took 257.

In other words, it took three months, and then some more, longer than they'd planned.

Row for two hours, off for two. On, off. For over 8 months.

I made a joke while watching these chicks, their hands blistered and skin chapped while I was comfortable on the couch, and Corrie said something like, "Like you could row from here to Hawai'i."

I snorted. "Honey, I'd be hardpressed to row from one side of Rainbow Lagoon to the other and back."

Rainbow Lagoon is a manmade pond at the Hyatt downtown, and starts behind the bridge I'm standing on to take this picture, but not far behind. It curves of somewhat:

The watery road to Hawai'i it certainly is not.

The documentary is crazy, and you feel for the girls on the days when their average milage dips into the -9.5 range. That's what makes the good 50 mile days all the sweeter.

The BBC documentaries that are not the David Attenborough versions are okay if not great, but listening to Cumberbatch butcher the word "penguin" ("peng-in" and my favorite, "peng-weng") is worth it.

Of the three, Moana is probably the best. They sail more than row.

New York Trip Epilogue

How can you epilogue a portion of your life? How can you epilogue an essence or a feeling you're trying to impart to your kid?

That's the New York City part...

It was so great and wonderful to see everybody, family and friends, and to expand the Boy's world and have him meet so many new family members.

In one sense it was a rousing success: Cassius was a natural traveler, a flirt, and a hungry boy.

In another: is it possible to pass on an urban aesthetic?

Aren't we doing that anyway?

Also: it's an honor to be a part of the team that's seeing my grandfather to his many final resting places.