High Plains Panhandler

Candid Camera

I've been bopping around different cities for work this past week and a half, which I usually try not to do (or when I do, I try to make out-of-town trips quick, just overnights here and there). But this time a project that was supposed to last a few hours ended up lasting four days, and that's hard to explain to the kids over the phone from a lonely hotel room with slab-flat pillows and an ice machine right beside the door.

This time I thought we'd try to do some video between me on my Powerbook and everyone at home. So last night I headed over to the Atlanta Bread Company restaurant for dinner because I saw on an earlier trip it had wireless internet access (I had this in my hotel too, but dialing in from the restaurant would be a nifty trick for the kids). I called up home and suddenly there they were, Suzanne and the kids, all huddled around the camera waving at me. I expanded the video so it took up my entire screen, and then I wandered around the restaurant, camera firmly attached to the top of the laptop, and showed everybody where I was.

Of course the big excitement came when I pointed the camera at the dessert counter. I could hear the kids shout "Ohhh! Ahhhh!" like they were watching fireworks. Then I showed some of the people in the restaurant, and they were all awfully friendly, waving to the kids, the kids waving back.

It's pretty neat, these internets. I can sit in a restaurant, eating a sandwich, and some people in a booth behind me can wave at my kids, and that wave travels from my camera to my laptop and then mysteriously goes from me to Amarillo and back again.

It's WonkaVision without the risk of shrinking.

Although I'm sure the kids would have liked a cookie if I could have sent it to them.

Concentration

The other night we were playing I Spy Concentration, which is a variation of the good old game of Concentration that most people play with a deck of cards. This version uses the official I Spy deck of cards. The difference is that the cards you match up aren't exactly alike. For instance, a card might have a plastic chair on it. It's partner card will have a shadow of a chair. This is supposed to make you concentrate harder and make you a better person. Strangely, I think it does just that.

We were all huddled around the array of cards in the family room when Alex (who is a computer brainiac at Concentration - you wouldn't believe a four-year-old would do so well) got another of his many matches. He jumped up, did a little dance, and then, in a fit of exclamation, threw two random words together to express his joy. He shouted:

"Eat panties!"

At this, we stopped and all looked at him. He looked back at all of us, stopping mid-dance, eyes wide.

"What did you say?" I asked.

"Um," he said. "Peanut banana?"

"I don't think that was it."

"Lion jelly?"

And then he shrugged and starting running around our little circle, laughing and laughing, cataloging that little phrase to use later on at a more convenient place.

CES 2005

Every year in January I seem to find myself in Las Vegas enjoying the company of 130,000 gadget groupies at the Consumer Electronics Show, acronymically known as CES. This year I flew in early that morning and left late at night, which left no time for my regular Vegas routine of looking for new magic tricks at cheesy and cramped magic stores.

It's easy to break down the exhibitors at CES into three distinct groups: companies with no money (these are the ones with the little cubicle booths), companies with truck loads of money (these are the ones with booths the size of stadiums filled with glitzy plastic metal shiny things), and companies from dark alleys in China (these usually have names such as Happy Good Times TV Company, Big Time Smile, and Super Disco Flavor Enjoyment). Many of the Big Money Big Booth companies have all sorts of skimpily dressed woman telling people what to buy. These people are known, in the trade show vernacular, as Booth Babes.

There was one booth, however, that stood out from the throngs of this year's CES Booth Babe festival. I guess they were selling small mp3 players (much like everybody else at the show), but to really show that you that their player was the best, they had it strapped to the arm of a guy walking on a treadmill. He had nothing else on except for a pair of skimpy shorts, and he was one of those muscle guys, the kind who hang out at the gym all day staring at themselves in the wall of mirrors as they lift weights.

He had a vacant look, much like the one I get after walking around in Las Vegas for a day. A crowd, mainly of Chinese businessmen (you could tell where they were from by the tags around their necks), surrounded him, videotape whirling and digital cameras flashing. What a strange site, this over-made, bizarre little man who was listening to who knows what on his little music player while a group of gabbing Chinese looked on.

I realized then that he must go home at night for a dinner of something high protein, one of those muscle shakes maybe, and then he goes to the gym and lifts a Volkswagen's worth of iron. Then he goes back home and, with his head buried in his pillow, he cries because he knows that in the morning he'll be back on that treadmill, walking and walking and walking but never really getting anywhere.

Austin Writers' Guild

The Austin Cahills, a clan of six who live in a beautiful part of Texas, have started a weblog that you can find here.

Kate, Claire, Meg, and Scott are the main culprits and authors of the weblog (although my brother-in-law Jim has made an appearance as well). When we were in Houston, I stumbled across Kate, Claire, Meg and my other niece Shannon watching TV in The Media Room, which is a spooky cave set off from the rest of the house by it singular ability of blocking out all light. I walked into the room, and there they all were, splayed out on the sofa and floor, watching something painfully sugary on the Disney Channel. Kate and Claire gave me a look that, translated into English, meant: "What are you doing here?" And then I knew, suddenly, that they had become teenagers, and I, an uncle with card tricks and wretched jokes had become a stereotype. So I did what any self-respecting adult would do: I fished out my TV-B-Gone and tried to secretly turn off the TV. I had no luck, though, because their teenage mental powers of sarcasm and contempt forced me from the room before I could get a good aim with the remote.

Thanks for starting your stories, you guys. We'll be reading!

2004 Christmas wrap-up

Even though it sounded risky, what with the Gulf Coast of Texas getting a dusting of snow and Brownsville getting enough for someone there to sell a snowball on eBay for $20,000, we ventured forth from our windy confines in Amarillo for a week of post-Christmas fun in muggy and traffic-filled Houston.

This year we had to take our dog because there was no one around to watch her for us and we were afraid of how the weather would turn while she waited outside. She's not a particularly easy traveler, though, especially in cars. I learned this a long time ago when she was a puppy and barfed a day's worth of warm and soupy puppy chow on my lap during one two hour car ride. This time we would be driving for 10 hours, and a mini-van filled with the aroma of last night's doggie dinner didn't appeal to us, so we did the only thing we could: we doped her up.

That, and the DVD player, made for an uneventful trip south. We made it in plenty of time for the day-after-Christmas family present opening ceremony, a bacchanalia (to steal a description from the movie A Christmas Story) of gifts, wrapping, and surprise (and, alas, disappointment expressed by my brother-in-law Dan's bewilderment as he opened my bizarre presents of Xena: Warrior Princess season seven and Highlander season four DVD sets. I still cannot explain these except to say they sounded funny at the time).

I did have several adventures with one of Suzanne's stocking stuffers. It's a small $15 remote control called TV-B-Gone, and it does one simple job amazingly well: it turns off televisions. The first time I tried it was at my brother-in-law's house, where I palmed it in my right hand and secretly started turning off televisions left and right. This was, of course, very irritating to everyone watching TV, but it was very funny to those not watching. The best part was that I didn't get the blame (at least, not at the beginning). I came clean the next day and, fearing for my life, I tried to stop my obsessive TV disruption after a little while to avoid the wrath of football fans throughout the house.

This didn't stop me, however, from trying out this wonder remote at restaurants. The next day at the Cheesecake Factory I had a good shot of the TV over the bar, which was blaring some nonsense for everyone to enjoy. With great stealth and a little nervousness I aimed the TV-B-Gone from knee level at the TV, and suddenly - bop! - it was off. Silence followed. Golden, sweet, merciful silence. It took the bartender 20 minutes or so to turn the TV back on. It took me two seconds to turn it back off. After the second time, the four guys at the bar all stood around the TV, staring at the black screen and talking among themselves. They turned it back on, and I gave it a minute and then turned it back off. Now this time the kitchen guys came out and, long with the bar guys, they all stood there, scratching their heads and stomachs, rapping the TV on the side, unplugging and plugging the cord, and in general having a technical pow-wow over their TV's mysterious and sudden betrayal.

I have since commandeered Suzanne's TV-B-Gone. It's for the sake of humanity, you see. I do it for the children.

Back to the topic at hand. We had a very nice time. The weather was fiendishly short-sleeve warm, which was nice but odd for the last week of December. We had some nice walks at the many parks around the Woodlands (where there seems to be a park per person). These walks usually consisted of Alex and our nephew Joseph using ant-like strength to wield extraordinarily large sticks and, eventually, whack each other in the head.

On day my mother-in-law and father-in-law were deluded . . . ah, I mean gracious enough to watch our three kids and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's three kids while the four of us went for a nice lunch. Without the miracle of Scooby Doo, this experiment in babysitting could possibly have ended in tragedy (involving, no doubt, crayons, expensive ceramic figurines, and nasal cavities), but everything went smoothly. We met at a french restaurant that had, unfortunately, no televisions that I could turn off, had a lovely meal, and then decided to go shopping. To clarify: the vote for this fun activity was tied two to two. That meant my brother-in-law, Mark, and I lost, but we were happy to go along and look at a variety of exciting products including, in no particular order, bird feeders, gardening tools, and spatulas. My brother-in-law Mark came up with the brilliant notion of us heading off in the direction of The Sharper Image to look at manly things involving batteries, so we split off at an intersection and left Suzanne and Karen, my sister-in-law, alone to have great loads of fun and excitement without us. Once we were safe at The Shaper Image (a store that carries all sorts of odd and utterly useless expensive gadgets and neck massagers that have the terrible dark power of vibrating your eyes completely out of their sockets), Mark showed off his brilliance: he headed for the massage chairs, took a seat, leaned all the way back, and set the little remote on the chair's arm for full-body massage.

So there we were, sitting in two over-priced massage chairs (which we learned came in different material to match your decor), while space-aged rollers pushed up and down our backs until our spines cracked like carrots, and the agitator cycle shook our bones until our bodies had the consistency of jelly. This was truly the way to shop for after-Christmas sales.

Besides TV-B-Gone and the massage chairs, a few of my favorite Houston 2004 adventures included: observing the strange and wondrous ability of my nephew Sean to listen to his iPod mini in one ear while continuing a perfectly reasonable conversation and play cards, all at the same time; playing gigantic plastic chess at the Woodlands Children's Museum and crushing all foes as long as they were under 10 years old (Suzanne later put me in my place by refusing to believe in en passant and playing a series of brilliant rook/queen combo moves. Later that night, when no one could hear me, I wept over my loss); listening to Karen play a fantastic piece on the piano; observing a very bored man change his cell phone wallpaper during The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, eating a wonderful dinner on New Year's Eve, and measuring my foot against a cross-legged statue of Ronald McDonald in Dallas and finding out we have the exact same shoe size.

And now for a kid's perspective on our trip:

Alex: "I liked seeing the lights and watching the movie of the Polar Express. I think that's all."

Megan: "I liked going to get with all my cousins and playing with them. I liked going to the park also." (What she fails to mention here is that he truly favorite part of all of Christmas -- which happened in Amarillo and not Houston -- was that she finally lost her other front tooth. Let me rephrase that. She yanked out her other front tooth. Megan had already lost one front tooth and she was desperate to lose the other. On Christmas Eve she was at the point of tears because all she really wanted to do was sing "All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth." So she turned that tooth and twisted that tooth and yanked that tooth until it came out in a blood-spurting gush. She was so happy, so very happy, that she completely forgot to ever sing her song.)

Colleen: "My favorite part of going to Houston was making a party up in Andrew and Kathleen's secret room. I also enjoyed going to the bookstore, and I really liked going to their Luby's because our Luby's in Amarillo got torn down."

And that, dear readers, was the end of 2004, and in front of us, looming large and cold (so far), is 2005, already full of adventures and mysteries, full of tickles and laughs, full of Friday pizzas and Tuesday broccoli.

I can't wait.