My brief fling with Judo

This could be considered a continuation of my first post about another way my father has influenced my life. I could definitely make a theme out of that, but probably not the entire 25 items.

Let's start with the highlight of my judo career: some time around 1992 I competed in the judo junior nationals (one of three such tournaments -- the usa judo governance was confused, and for all I know still is) as a green belt and won my first match with an arm lock.

I was probably the only green belt in the tournament; most competitors were black belts, or at least brown. But I was an accidental tournament goer; Grant was planning to go, but in our last practice before the tournament, I threw him with taio toshi. He tried to avoid landing on his back, but broke his collarbone instead. Oops. Since we already had the plane ticket, I got to go instead.

That was as far as my judo career went, and it's really more of a testament to how obscure judo is in the USA than how good I was. I spent a lot more time on table tennis, and later raquetball, but I was never close to being able to win a match at a national event in those sports. (I did once beat one of the guys in this video in a mini-game to 7.)

I stopped practicing judo after leaving New Jersey. Grant and Christine kept playing recreationally. Telitha and David were more serious. Both trained in Japan with the best; Telitha was on the US national team (i.e., the best in the country in her weight class) and played in international tournaments including the Pan Am games. (The USA judo jacket I have comes from her time on the team -- they gave her one several sizes too large.) David repeatedly placed in the top 3 in national tournaments but never quite made the national team.

Dad never got on the mat himself, citing (with some justification) bad knees, but after years watching his kids fight feels himself fully qualified to second-guess international referree calls. I think he's actually reffed some local tournaments himself.

All this from a little ad Dad saw years ago in the paper: "free judo lessons at Princeton University." Free was always a good word; and we were trying to cut expenses at the time, dropping piano lessons. (A sacrifice I was elated to make.) A black belt -- and PhD -- named Mike Pontecorvo started a club for kids on Saturdays. Pretty soon I, and then Grant and David, who took to judo like a duck to water, were practicing with the university students. "He's like a puppy pit bull; he won't give up!" one of the students remarked, as David tried with all his 70-lb might to take his leg out from under him.

Love notes

(Rachel would like me to point out that he _has_ written me "I love you notes" before, and this one was occasioned by me telling him that it was time to put the drawings away as sacrament meeting at church drew to a close. Classic Matthew overreaction.)

Love notes
Originally uploaded by jbellis

A brave, foolish woman

A brave, foolish woman
Originally uploaded by jbellis

Meet our church ward's new primary president. I wonder if she knows
what she's getting into.

A girl with a plan

Melissa was impressed by Matthew's school PE night, especially the dancing. (4 of the 6 presentations, one per grade level, could be fairly categorized as "dances.") Melissa stood on our bench and bounced along with the music. She was disappointed when there were no more dances.

Melissa dressed herself this morning -- in a princess outfit. Then she put on her coat and came to me. "I go to Maffew's teacher and be in a show. I dance a princess dance. And all the boys will dance with me. And Maffew will watch with you on the bench."

I hope she isn't too mad when she realizes this isn't going to happen no matter how much she begs.

"See these slippers? I need to dance with somebody. A boy. Girls dance with boys. Girls wear dresses to dance." (Actually, none of the girls last night did, but hey.)

I will dance with her. Maybe that will be adequate.

Sometimes the iPhone camera just isn't enough

Sometimes the iPhone camera just isn't enough
Originally uploaded by jbellis

Matthew square dancing.

Tech support hell

This is my Macbook Pro, seen from the back.  See all the cables connecting the LCD to the rest of the machine?  Yeah.  Those aren't supposed to be out in the open like that.

I spent 90 minutes (!) on the phone with Apple this morning reporting this and a couple minor issues to Apple.  You'd think "My machine is falling apart" would elicit a quick response of, "Okay, send it in and we'll fix it."  But no.  We had to jump through all sorts of hoops first.

I think this guy was new, because when I've had to send Rachel's first-generation Macbook in for much smaller problems it was a piece of cake.

Tech support he'll
Originally uploaded by jbellis

Learning the wrong lesson

Everyone remarked on Melissa's much, much shorter hair at church today.  She was happy to explain: "I cut my hair!  Mommy took me to the beauty parlor!"
Couldn't have gone better, from her point of view.

A reply to Chris

Chris wrote,

my companion Elder Kemmerer has a lot of problems with confidence and learning the language I've been trying to help him but he is such a dark cloud and freaking depressing to work with somtimes

I knew a missionary like that, in my last area.  My companion Ricky Olita and I were split up and both given a "greenie" to train.  I got Jeremy Anderson, who was later my brother David's zone leader.  Elder Olita got the short end of the stick with a bad-attitude American whose name I've forgotten.  He moped and dragged everywhere, sullen and begrudgingly.
Elder Olita was possibly the most dangerous man I have met.  He was apparently from a pretty rough part of Mindanao; I don't know if the stories he told about his mom taking out a contract on the men who killed his father were true, but I did get to see his proficiency with fists (via boxing gloves), throwing knives, and nunchucks first hand.  Not a guy to mess with.  When Elder Olita was pissed, he would be quiet, but there was a dark tension in him until the strain grew too great and he exploded.
An intelligent man would have realized that there were better people to take out attitude on than Elder Olita.  Lazy Boy failed this particular IQ test.
The tension built for maybe ten days.  Elder Olita poured out his troubles to me over lunch a few times.  Elder Olita had had a dim view of me as a companion before he got Lazy Boy, but now I shone by comparison.  (Yes, there's a long story there.  Another time.)
Things came to a head one morning when the three companionships in the house left together to begin proselyting.  Elder Olita was last to exit.  He checked his pockets but he didn't have the house key.  He asked Lazy Boy for it.  Lazy Boy took it out of his pocket and threw it overhand at Elder Olita.  Not to him, at him.  Elder Olita jumped at Lazy Boy with death in his eyes, but was intercepted by Elders Greenwood and Anderson.
They had a nice long talk with President Watts after that.  I think Lazy Boy lasted another month.  But not two.
Rachel: "You don't hear this kind of story at the MTC [missionary training center]."
Me: "It's like my mom told me years ago: if the church weren't true, the missionaries would have killed it off long ago."

Room cleaning, week 4

I think Melissa is getting the hang of this.  She only spent all of Saturday morning "cleaning," and did it right away when I announced I was going to the park in 15 minutes and anyone with a clean room was welcome to come.  There were no tantrums.
Matthew had about ten minutes of cleaning to do.  He got it done in time for the park but not in time for break dancing.  He was predictably mad about that.  Maybe next week.  (We went out to dinner after gymnastics practice Friday, and I saw an "urban dance studio" near the restaurant and stopped in.)
Melissa may actually be better about cleaning her room than Matthew now, both in terms of keeping it semi-sanitary and in terms of drama for the weekly hose-out.  She's easily more stubborn than her brother so I am surprised by this development.
Me: "Maybe we need to move more of Matthew's stuff into the common area."
Rachel: "What we need is to throw more stuff away.  Tops.  Unsharpened pencils.  Pieces of robots and legos and medals and odd coins and marbles.  Where do you put stuff like that?"

Life as a series of French classes

My friend Tim tagged me for a "25 random things about me" meme on Facebook.  I don't spend much time on facebook, so if I wrote up a list there it would probably be the first thing people saw about me for the next year or two and I don't know if I want that.  Besides, it gave me so many good ideas to write about that I want to write more about one or two at a time.  And finally, I owe Brian a letter this week, but I couldn't think of anything to write (Rachel always sends him the weekly SP), so this is for you, Brian.  Thanks, Tim!

(Uncharacteristically, perhaps, any errors or hyperbole in this post are accidental.  I'm sure my family will chime in with corrections.  We are nothing if not pedantic.)

I grew up with a father who wished he lived in a French-speaking country.  I don't remember him ever coming out and saying that but I'm pretty sure it's true.  I remember that by first grade he'd taught me a few words -- pamplemousse is the only one I remember from that era, before we moved to New Jersey -- but he didn't really dig in with a vengeance until Christine was born when I was 11.  He decided that he would speak only French to Christine, a resolution he kept until her adolescent anguish over being "different" got him to stop.  Although it was too late for the rest of us to pick up French purely by osmosis -- Telitha, the next youngest, was already six -- he instituted French Mornings so the rest of us could get some practice too.

This is how stubborn my father is: not only did he speak French to us every morning, he insisted that we reply in kind.  "En Français!" he would say, if we used English with him.  Often he would first have to tell us how to say it en Français first, but he was patient.  The rest of us, however, were not, and mostly spoke to each other in English.

Fifth grade was my first experience with public school foreign language education.  I don't remember the teacher's name.  I do remember tests about passé composé and other parts of speech.  If it weren't for Dad I would have quit right then: you don't learn a foreign language by memorizing grammatical rules, as proven by the millions of Americans with as much as 8 years trying.  Nor is it any fun.  But you can test it, and there's a certain kind of command-and-control personality that, having learned the wrong lessons from the success of the assembly line, insists that measuring (and optimizing for) a bad metric is better than measuring none.  This is flat-out wrong, both in software engineering and in education.

So what I really remember from fifth grade French class is an unctuous boy named Chad teaching me that "trojan" was another name for "condom," and "rubber" denoted a small one.  Ah, public education: reducing culture to the lowest common denominator, and not even completely accurately at that.

I also remember the teacher having us choose French names to address each other by in class.  Most of us took French analogues of our American names -- I chose Jean; William chose Guillaume, and so forth.  But the more flamboyant personalities chose wildly different names.

Sixth grade I was home schooled.  Then I convinced my parents to let me go back to public school for good, because it was so much easier.

For seventh and eighth grades I had Mme. Pinelli.  She spoke both English and French with a heavy accent, which from her surname I assumed was Italian.  More grammar drills.

Mme. Pinelli wanted us to assert, "Je sais!" [I know] when we raised our hands to answer a question.  I reported this to Dad, who pointed out that "Je le sais" was more correct.  There is enough of my father in me that I couldn't stand to knowingly practice the wrong form, so I marked myself by saying it differently than my peers every time.  I don't think the teacher appreciated being implicitly corrected, either, although I was not dumb enough to actually tell anyone else they were saying it wrong.

As a high school freshman I almost got into the advanced French class on the strength of actually being able to make myself understood in French, to a point.  But less than a week into class, the bureaucracy noticed, and I was sent to M. Gendaszek's freshman class, while the senior I had been sitting next to stayed, despite being unable even to pronounce the advanced teacher's name.  Not that I am bitter. (He pronounced Poncin roughly the same as "poisson," much to M. Poncin's dismay.  But I'm sure he knew his grammar.)

I have no strong memories at all of M. Gendaszek's class.

I really enjoyed sophmore and junior years with M. Poncin.  (This is a difficult name for Americans because its phonemes are not found in English -- it's pronounced like the French words pont and sein, if that helps.)  He was a native of Lyon, and had a delightful French accent.  He was a rebel who actually wanted to teach his students some French, so while he went through the motions of testing grammar and so forth, he spent most of his classes trying to get us to practice his language.

On Fridays, M. Poncin would show us an episode of French in Action, or as he called it, Mireille et Robert.  (Still possibly the best French tutorials ever produced.  My father meticulously recorded them on VHS when they aired on PBS one year; they are very expensive to buy officially -- they target schools, not individuals -- but you can watch them online for free now.)  I remember M. Poncin remarking that he was always amused by how fascinating high school boys found Mireille: not only was the actress who played her pretty, she did not wear a bra.

I've forgotten the name of my last French instructor, in college.  He had a terrible American accent (sensing a pattern?) but he genuinely loved French language and culture.  He spent a year in Paris scraping out a living as a street guitarist.  I still wish I'd done something cool like that.  Sometimes I think that it is not too late, but three kids requires a pretty huge activation energy.

So there's #1 for your list, Tim: 10 years ago, I spoke pretty good French.  The next 24 should be shorter.  If not, I'm sure Brian won't complain.

Drivers Ed

Drivers Ed
Originally uploaded by jbellis

Our church is next to a minor intersection. When Isaac gets bored of all his toys (which happens faster and faster), we go sit in the shade of the big tree on the corner and watch the cars go by.

Isaac likes being outside. He likes the breeze, and he likes the
constant motion of this particular scene.

Child development

Isaac is not very good at letting go of things yet, but he has very definite opinions about when he is bored of a toy. So he will shake his arm violently until the object of his displeasure comes loose. Then he will look at me reproachfully, as if to say, "I meant a GOOD toy."

The chaise-lounge was insufficiently pink

The chaise-lounge was insufficiently pink
Originally uploaded by jbellis

Melissa sprang into action.

Ow

Not the worst injury I've had, but the dumbest.  (And I seem to have a lot of dumb ones.)
Coming down with a cold tonight.  Throat has that "I'm going to be sore tomorrow" itch.  Feeling a little crummy.  So I accept Rachel's offer of a heated rice sock.
Lean back into the couch with the rice sock at the back of my neck.  Ahhh.  Shoot the stuffing out of some insects in Savage Moon.  (I've realized that I've become a casual gamer.  There's too many interruptions to play games that you can't pick up and drop in bite size pieces.  Never thought it would happen to me...)
Twenty minutes later when I came out of my game zone, my neck hurt.  Not an achy hurt but a specific, localized hurt.  Rachel looked at it: I'd gotten a blister, and popped it, from too much heat while concentrating on the game.
Yes, video games really are that distracting.  Good ones, at least.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

The past few weeks our happy Pumpkin has been teething. He'd do pretty well during the day, but for some reason evenings and nights are especially tough, with lots of nighttime waking and crying. Ordinarily when he wakes at night he makes cooing sounds and rustles around a bit. I feed him, change him and he settles back down to sleep fairly easily. All bets are off when teething though...

Last night his second tooth poked through and he went to sleep without fuss. When I woke up it was gray outside, and I heard his muffled crying downstairs. Jonathan awoke before I did and took Isaac downstairs with him figuring that I'd already fed him all through the night.

Except I hadn't.

Isaac slept for 7 hours straight last night! I couldn't believe it. He was one very hungry baby boy! After eating he grinned, played, and cooed. He has never slept for more than 3.5 hours at a time (at most) so I was feeling very refreshed, like whole new woman in fact. Wow! I can't remember the last time I slept through the night, not since sometime in the third trimester... I've spent up to ten hours in bed and still felt exhausted in the morning, but 6 straight hours of sleep were fantastic! It's the first time in a while that I woke up feeling really rested.

Not getting my hopes up, but I wouldn't mind at all if this became a trend. :)

Hygiene

Hygiene
Originally uploaded by jbellis

Matthew is showering on his own, with mostly good results. Tonight, though, Rachel noticed residual shampoo in his hair. This was the result. I was impressed -- that took some upper-body strength!

(I was otherwise occupied -- washing poop off Melissa's fingers. She's supposed to wait for her parents to wipe the poops, but only infrequently observes that rule.)
(Rachel would like the record to show that Matthew was not naked.)

Sigh...

While I bathed Isaac, Melissa was busy.

There was a big ball of hair in the toy wagon and scissors in her room. We went to the beauty parlor, but they aren't miracle workers. Considering what she had to work with, it's much better.

the front

and the back

That's my kid, the kind of funny looking one. I know it's just hair, but I'm a little sad about it. Sigh.

How to tell when it's no longer an employees' market

How to tell when it's no longer an employees' market
Originally uploaded by jbellis

The free snack closet isn't is replenished for weeks, and then one of
these appears instead.

Teething

About a week and a half ago Jonathan noticed something sharp when Isaac gnawed on his finger. Isaac's first tooth had popped up. Looking in his mouth today I can see another tooth ready to emerge anytime. This is not surprising since he is constantly chewing on things. Now you'll have to excuse me while I hunt down another teether for our son to clamp down on, he's bored of the blue one...

Whew! So glad it was a dream....

Last summer I borrowed fine violin from a dear former teacher of mine so I could play at Grandpa's funeral. Thank goodness it did not end up like my dream!

So I borrow the expensive violin and placed it up on the top self of a bookcase. Since I intend to practice in a few minutes the violin is not in its case. Matthew's coloring books are also on the top shelf and he asks if he can color. "Sure, Matthew. Just wait a minute and I'll go get them for you." Matthew decides not to wait. He pulls a chair over to the bookcase and reaches up up on his tiptoes. I come into the room just as the violin teeters on the shelf. "Wait! Don't do anything!" "Mom! I can fix it!" he says and stretches up to push the violin back on the shelf. He misses and it falls crashing to the tile floor, splintering into pieces.

Ohhhh! How could I explain this to Mr. Jasinski? He trusted me!

Glad I woke up.