The Crooked and the Straight

My sister teaches at a private boarding school called La Lumiere somewhere in the middle of Indiana. The school is in a small town called Laporte where, as Rachael likes to say, “there are two streets, some antique shops, and some bars.” It’s true. I’ve been there. I’ve seen the antique shops and the intersection. Well, technically, the school is in an unincorporated part of the county that Laporte is also in, and so Laporte is merely the closest city and thus takes on the responsibility of delivering mail. When I say unincorporated, I mean it. The school’s property (some few hundreds acres of it) border, on one side, a hunting ground. The new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, is a La Lumiere graduate, interestingly enough. I have it on good authority that he was only appointed to the Court because Dick Cheney once shot his father in the face with a shotgun. (There, I got my Lettermanesque zinger in there. Moving on…)

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A work in progress:

The Baby Event Horizon

(Cousins: if you didn't get my email announcement, please let me know.)

[Update: For the confused, link.]

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A few years ago, my Uncle Rob and his friend Jim decided they were going to learn how to make wine. Their first year didn't turn out so good, so they decided to ignore it and make wine for the first time again the next year. I had the rare honor of trying some of the wine from their first first year--it was labeled, variously, "good", "bad", and "ugly"--and I support their decision.

They found their wine legs quickly, though, and by their third year, they entered nine of their wines into an annual contest by the Vintners of Northeast Ohio (VINO, of course). The contest confers eighteen awards each year, and my uncle and his friend took home six of them.

Needless to say, the time was ripe for further expansion. They sucked my father into their production this year, and shortly after Christmas my cousin Mike and I were roped in to help with the wine racking process.

Wine racking involves transferring wines from one container to another during the fermentation process, filtering out any sediment that might have precipitated out, and performing various voodoo wining rituals to adjust the hue and flavor of the varieties. I managed to snap a few pictures during the process, before I was overcome from all of the vitally important wine tasting, and had to go lie down.

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Things my sister said at dinner tonight:

• "No, they were legitimate friends--not rugby players."
• "Do you think they sell plastic lizards at K-Mart?"
• "Someone pay attention to me!"

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My sister: "You're being an ass."

Me: "Oh yeah? Well, you're being a pretentious atonal nightmare."

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• Are those space pants you’re wearing? Because I want to take a rocket to Uranus.
• Are you wearing shoes? Because I’d like to have sex with you.
• Do you have a kid? Because you’d totally be a MILF.
• <After walking up to a woman and making a show of looking at the tag on her shirt> Just what I thought: cotton-poly blend. Want to screw?

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My first set of piuctures from my cousin Brian and Jenny's wedding is up. Here are some highlights:

Trying to get all my cousins to pose for a picture is like herding cats.

Once again, I am attacked with heavy things that hurt.

Somehow, I wound up with lots of pictures of my cousin Jef.

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I am one of seven cousins. We all grew up together around Cleveland, and we're all still very close. We are now all older than our parents were when they started having kids. Currently, we range in age from 23 to 34; our parents were all about the age of 23 when they were married and producing offspring.

Needless to say, there is some level of interest (some might say consternation) amongst the aunts and uncles in our little clan about when us "kids"--as we are still called--will start producing some grandchildren. While in Alaska, my cousins Mike and Allison and I--the eldest children in our respective families, and the most left-handed--decided to do something about this situation. Now, of course, we couldn't directly influence things, especially not in the ten days we vacationed together (no getting any funny ideas).

Instead, we settled on indirectly influencing our collective reproductive schedule with a scheme that would make Adam Smith proud: we decided to provide an economic incentive for someone in our family to have a baby. Together, we conspired to design a betting pool for guessing who will have the first three grandkids and when they will be born. The pool will run for 10 years. (We're in no hurry.)

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It's official: my sister is an English teacher. Congratulations, Rach! I'm very proud of you!

I'd write more on the subject, but I'm afraid that Ms. Bork would whip out her red pen and mark me off for excessive, unnecessary, and redundant verbosity.

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