Category Archives: Children

Call me Ducky

The Nipper has the Best Ideas Ever Invented. He said, last night on the way to rehearsal, “you know what would be cool, would be if they made a Call of Duty ™ game that’s age-appropriate for kids and they called it Call of Ducky. And you’d play this duck having adventures all over in [...]

Unbelievable

Something ridiculous happened today. Before I get to that, though, I’m’a set some ground rules, because this is the kind of discussion that gets out of hand really, really fast. 1) I’m not interested in any anti-religion comments. What follows did not happen because people believe in God. This isn’t a discussion about belief versus [...]

New Math

“Takoda and Wesley are collecting shells on the beach in identical pails. Takoda estimates she has filled 7/12 of her pail. Wesley estimates he has filled 4/10 of his pail. Suppose the children combine their shells. Will one pail be full? Explain.” — from Math Makes Sense 7 published by Pearson Education. Before we tackle this [...]

Head Like a Hole

First, I’d like you to go to Netflix and watch a documentary called “Head Games”. It’s about brain damage due to contact sport. It talks about concussions in football, hockey, and boxing. And entertainment wrestling (not greco-roman wrestling). It’s an incredibly interesting and well-done documentary. One of the really good question it raises is why [...]

I’d go out on the ocean

The manager of our restaurant is close personal friends with Joe Paopao, the Throwin’ Samoan. He used to come home at lunch bruised and battered from running patterns for him in the street. Our manager drawls his vowels, and flattens them, like the peaks of things threaten him. He lives on the west coast, where [...]

Full Stop

The Nipper is learning punctuation. They were studying periods, exclamation points, and question marks in class. He told us they have hand signals for each one (they clap for an exclamation point, raise their eyebrows and touch their chins for a question mark, and they hold their hands out in front of them, palms facing [...]

Eighty Men Died Trying to End That Spree

It seems like the only time we really have is time that’s under pressure from five different directions. We were at the rink Thursday, Friday, twice on Saturday, and yesterday. We’ll be at the rink again tonight, tomorrow night, Friday, and Sunday nights. It’s the nearing-the-end-of-the-regular-season crunch to get all our games in. And then [...]

Just an earthbound misfit

Just a wee preview, then. No long-winded stories about Canadian pilots. No jibber-jabber about aeroplanes. Just this: The skellington of the Nieuport 17, covered in tissue paper, shrunk and strengthened. Tomorrow is Painting Day.

Taking an Aeroplane Across the World

I have been peeling glue from my fingers for a week. This, too, is strangely cathartic. Insert long-winded, slightly purple prose about shedding the old skin and leaving troubles behind, blah-blah-blah. In reality, there are little fingerprint flakes all over my favourite spot on the chesterfield. Don’t tell His Nibs. The Captain and I cut [...]

I don’t need no arms around me

It occurred to me that in putting together this aeroplane methodically, piece by piece, painstakingly gluing one tiny piece of balsa wood to the next, that this has become my therapy. It wasn’t a huge revelation. I didn’t fly through the streets of the greater metropolitan valley centre area shouting that I’d discovered the next [...]