Crushing Krisis

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The Great Solstice Baked LEGO Diary Disaster of 2022

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Gather ’round, readers, for a tale of unfortunate diary explosions, precarious Wellington roads, and one very ill-advised decision to put a LEGO set in the oven that nearly ruined Solstice.

For the record: Do not put your LEGO set in the oven. If you take nothing else away from this story of disaster and triumph, please take to heart this single important lesson. Do. Not. Bake. Lego.

Believe me.

Little did these poor, innocent elves know what Solstice would have in store for them.

Picture it: It’s the morning of Summer Solstice. There are a pile of presents under a tree acting as symbol of multiple different holidays. We’ve just finished having a delightful breakfast of gingerbread muffins and have opened all of the windows because it is the hottest day of the season so far.

(December holidays can be very confusing in the Southern Hemisphere for a Philly kid used to wishing for a White Christmas, which is why we have leaned into celebrating the change in seasons like Pagans with a Saturnalia festival spanning from Solstice to Christmas.)

(Yes, we also celebrate Winter Solstice.)

It was an ideal holiday morning. The kid had just opened her first gift, which was LEGO’s special 2022 free holiday gift set: a diorama of a pair of elves in snowy landscape.

We picked it as the first present not only because she loves LEGO, but because it was part of our Saturnalian theme. No, not human sacrifice. You see, because I am an obsessive dungeon master who can only celebrate things like Bachelorette Parties if I turn them into day-long, city-spanning alternate realty games, I can’t just put presents under a tree with normal “To / From” labels on them.

No. That takes the mystery out of things.

Instead, our Solstice gift-giving is a double-blind process. Every time anyone in the family wraps a present, they reserve a random number for that gift on a shared spreadsheet. Then, starting on Solstice and continuing through Boxing Day, we periodically reveal gift numbers to each other and it is the kid’s job to play Holiday Elf and find said numbered gift in the ever-decreasing spread of presents and deliver it to its intended recipient

The LEGO was a commemoration of her official role of Holiday Elf. It was the kickoff gift to our whole holiday festival.

And that’s where things started to go wrong.

The kid had dumped her LEGO into the middle of the floor to begin working on bag #1. I had made myself a peppermint milk in my home sippy-cup, because I am disaster-prone and cannot be trusted with an open container even in my own home.

(As will become evident in a moment.)

I attempted to hopscotch through the splayed-out LEGO to take a seat closer to the tree so I could watch the assembly process. During my incredibly graceful leaping, my grip on my sippy-cup slipped upward towards the lid. Unbeknownst to me, I hadn’t lined up the lid with the threads of the cup, so the connection between the two was tenuous at best. The combination of holding the cup by the lid and my hopscotching sent a half a liter of peppermint milk plummeting to the ground, where it struck DIRECTLY in the middle of the brand new LEGO kit like a minty dairy bomb and spread to cover the entire carpeted path to the tree.

This sent various family members springing into action. Well, the kid mostly sprung into whinging, which was totally justified based on me dunking her entire first gift as if it was a holiday Oreo.

(That joke wouldn’t work for a New Zealand audience, because they don’t dunk their cookies in milk here, but that’s a whole other post entirely.)

I bustled across the house to find supplies to begin the long process of making sure our carpet wouldn’t smell like spoilt milk for eternity. Meanwhile, E and the kid attended to scooping all of the milky LEGO into a fine strainer to whisked away to be rinsed off in the kitchen sink.

By the time I was done with my extensive soaking up, soaping, soaking up again, and-dehumidifying process there was no resumed LEGO-ing but the kitchen was suspiciously quiet. I poked my head in.

“Are the LEGO still drying?” I asked

“Yep,” E replied.

“Cool. It’ll probably take a while for the water to drain out of all the little nooks and crannies.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I put the LEGO in the oven.” [Read more…] about The Great Solstice Baked LEGO Diary Disaster of 2022

feeling heated

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I’ve always been constitutionally incapable of dealing with heat.

My mother was the opposite. You’ve never met anyone more eager to bake in the sun on a sandy beach than this woman. She would wake me up before 7am when we were vacationing at the Jersey shore to let me know she was headed down to the beach, already equipped with her chair and her book.

(I would spent the day reading in the cool confines of the hotel room, punctuated by occasional trips to the pool.)

Memories of being hot as a child are on my brain because our central air conditioning is mysteriously on the fritz at the moment. It turns on and works mightily for anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes, and then its double-breaker in the basement trips with an audible CLACK. The first few times it happened I simply reset the breaker, but breakers trip for a reason and continually flouting that reason with manual intervention seemed unwise.

We’ve kept EV6 and I entertained and cool throughout this week with a combination of car trips, mall walking, and cold showers. It’s the nights that are getting to me. Like a video game character who cannot recover hit points while he’s poisoned, I don’t actually seem to derive any sort of restorative qualities from sleep when I’m feeling too hot. We are now on day five (the repairman is due tomorrow) and I am starting to feel delirious.

It reminds me of childhood nights spent at my paternal grandmother’s house, which was equipped with fans and a single air conditioner suspended above the kitchen door which I saw turned on only once in my life.  On those hot nights I would sprawl in the middle of a couch or bed, arms outstretched to find the hidden cool spot on the top sheet or beneath a pillow as I counted the slow seconds until morning. [Read more…] about feeling heated

Spring Thing: Out on a Limb at the Morris Arboretum

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One of the most amazing things about spending the past year at home full-time with EV6 has been making so many memories.

I don’t just mean that in the glib way of, “every day together is a new memory,” although that’s certainly true.

It seems that I began my time off right on the bounds of the period of time where EV6’s long-term recall really kicked in. She has a few fleeting recollections of events prior to last April, especially ones where she’s seen many photos to reinforce them.

Yet, starting around the time I began to take trial days off from work, her recall is incredible – crisp and complete, even for adventures I didn’t capture in photos and have since all-but forgotten.

One example is Morris Arboretum. This was one of the first big new things we did together last spring in a special team-up adventure with our friend Miss Jess. At the time, EV6 was a bit too young to appreciate the rose garden and abstract structures. What stuck with her was their “Out on a Limb” setting, where you can climb from tree to tree like a bird or a monkey on a series of platforms and nets.

EV6 has brought it up from time to time in the past year, but when Spring hit us in full bloom in the past few weeks it suddenly became the only special trip she’d request!

Finally, our free day lined up with beautiful weather, and so when I woke up EV6 on Wednesday morning I announced, “It’s time to go back to the Arboretum!”

Obviously, Out on a Limb was the first thing we bolted for when we arrived. EV6 was a bit tentative on the nets last year, but this year she was like a spider crawling on a web! We spent nearly an hour clambering around, pretending to be animals, and making friends before we continued to other experiences.

Another big draw for kids at Morris is the Garden Railway, a small-scale village with a network of intersecting train tracks criss-crossing it. It doesn’t open officially until Memorial Day, but we lucked into the staff performing a check-up on some of the trains so we got to see them in action.

I’m not one for watching miniaturized trains circulate on a track, but the incredibly manicured greenery along its path is just as much as a draw. Together, they lend the feeling of peering into some sort of enchanted tiny world.

We’ve grown to be massive fans of Longwood Gardens in the past year, so it’s hard not to compare that with every garden or hike adventure. Morris Arboretum isn’t as sprawling as Longwood, or filled with as many cultivated gardens and flowers. However, there is the sense of being inside of nature at Morris, rather than just walking past it on a path or seeing it on display.

While I still say a Longwood Garden membership is the best deal for the least-crowded attraction, it’s a real commitment to drive there. If you want to stay more local and be surrounded by just as much greenery, Morris Arboretum is a wonderful substitute.

Spring Thing: s’mores in the yard!

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Last night Lindsay and J gave me the night off from cooking my elaborate bi-weekly desserts and substituted making s’mores!S'Mores In The Yard

It was EV6’s first time roasting marshmallows over a fire, made all the more amusing by the fact that L&J’s fire pit is actually EV6’s Nana’s old, unused fire pit, given to her by E & I as a  birthday present early in our relationship, which was later upcycled by L&J after Nana abandoned it in the process of downsizing to a smaller abode!

Did you follow all of that?

Personally, I’m not really a fan of anything sticky nor made of chocolate, so I was more on marshmallow roasting duty than anything else … which I completely failed by setting our marshmallow on fire.

I shook it furiously to try to put out the flames while Girl Scout Lindsay admonished from over my shoulder, “Never shake the marshmallow! Give that to me!”

It’s good that I have people like this in my life, because honestly without them it’s likely that calamity would befall me every time I set foot outside into nature.

Spring Thing: Hip-Hop For Parents (and other adult beginners)

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Last night I went to an actual dance class for the first time.

Not Zumba. Not step-aerobics. A dance class in Philly for parents, adult beginners,  and other gawky human beings with necks like storks.

I’ve always loved to dance, ever since my mother would hold impromptu dance parties in our living room to records like Rufus and Chaka Khan and CeCe Peniston’s “Finally.” I lived for weddings and school dances, where I had an excuse to show those skills off on a real dance floor.

For whatever reason, it never occurred to either of us that I ought to take an actual dance class. While I’ve gone mashed-potato for mashed-potato with my mother for years, it isn’t quite the same thing as learning choreography.

In the ensuing years I’ve taken a lot of gym classes with dance elements, but they’re always more work-out than dance steps. I had one fantastic Zumba instructor who did the bare minimum of Zumba and then plugged in tons of great pop and hip hop into the rest of the class and pretty much treated it like we were training to be in music videos. I was sorely disappointed to find that wasn’t the norm in other classes.

Ever since then, whenever I meet new people doing any kind of fitness-related thing, I always ask them, “Have you ever been to a real hip hop dance class for adults who have never danced before? Like, I want to get as close to Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 as I possibly can.” [Read more…] about Spring Thing: Hip-Hop For Parents (and other adult beginners)