b.rox

I just wanted to take a quick minute to salute my parents. They just finished another week of volunteer work, helping to rebuild New Orleans. As per usual they stayed at Camp Restore and kept busy, but I did manage to visit with them a couple times. This time they brought some friends with them [...]

Who Dat ABC by Editor B

http://www.flickr.com/photos/justanuptowngirl/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
This just in from my father:

With all the fun you’re having pre-game, I want to share a little game I played with my cousins, Allen and Francie when I was in my early teens in Wisconsin. One of us would enter the Grainary where another would be in the attic making [...]

I’m still trying to catch up to the present.
We celebrated Xy’s birthday last Tuesday. Since she was feeling sick and I was run ragged it was a pretty lame birthday, but of course she’s used to such disappointments, as are all children of late December. I tried to recontextualize the Escape as Xy’s birthday present, [...]

I spent the last week recovering from my family reunion. We have one every five years, and this was the tenth such event. The family is spread around the country pretty well (except for the northeast) so we have been rotating the location ever since my grandmother sold the farm. This time we were in [...]

Friday night my daughter stabbed me in the eye. Not intentionally — she was just waving her arm around. Her little finger somehow got past my glasses, and her nail sliced right across my cornea. When she realized I was in pain she gave me a kiss. Very sweet.
It was pretty painful, but I thought [...]

The results of last week’s venous blood test came back Friday, indicating our daughter now has 6.6 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. That’s a bit of welcome good news, since it’s a significant reduction from the 13 or 14 indicated by her preliminary screenings three months ago.
Had to stretch a bit, but there’s [...]

Holy frijoles, my dad is 75 years old today. What kind of gift could I possibly give the man who gave me half his genes? It will come as no surprise that I decided to make him a mix.

This is a bunch of music that was either recorded in 1934, composed or published in that [...]

Here is a mix we listen to in our house when someone passes on.

We listened to this last night after getting news that Xy’s grandmother Pauline had finally slipped away after a protracted struggle.
My notes indicate Pauline appeared only in a single episode of our TV show, namely “A Day in the Life,” ROX #63.

Unfortunately [...]

Apropos of nothing at all, here’s a mix of songs my parents taught me.

Mostly these are songs I remember hearing my father sing while he did dishes or what have you. I think of my parents as pre-rock’n’roll but that’s not exactly true. You’ll hear some early rock hits here as well as the [...]

Here’s a li’l art rock mix in honor of the fun we had over the weekend.

I took Persephone to City Park Saturday morning, and we had a ball walking around the Big Lake. (Thanks to the Trust for Public Land for the recent improvements.) After that we visited the New Orleans Museum of Art, which [...]

We switched daycares today. Herewith, a mix of some classic New School hip-hop.

(Funny how the New School sounds old yet still fresh at the same time. Most of these tracks came out over twenty years ago.)
Anyway, it’s not that we were exactly dissatisfied with the old daycare. In fact, we felt a lot of love [...]

Here’s a mix of twenty-one tracks to inspire and uplift, occasionally veering into the cornball but mostly keeping it real, including music by Oneida, Ella Fitzgerald and Desmond Dekker.

When I look back over the last few years, there’s sure plenty to get down about: floods, murder, war, personal hardships aplenty for my family and friends. [...]

Dear Persephone,
Since I see you every day I sometimes don’t notice the incremental changes. You still just look so tiny to me, and even after carrying you for blocks, you still seem so light. But I know you’re growing, because you can now open the top drawers in the kitchen, which you couldn’t do a [...]

Two weeks ago I took our daughter in for a second opinion screening to check her blood lead level. I can’t believe it took two weeks to get the results back, but I just got them: BLLs > 14 µg/dL. That’s one microgram higher than her initial screening. That is not what we wanted to [...]

Last night for the first time ever we left our daughter with a babysitter and had a fun night out on the town.
Actually it was a double date. We went over to Sue and Steve’s house just as the babysitter Althea arrived. (Not to be confused with my former co-worker, this Althea has done a [...]

I’m still holding out some hope that we are panicking unnecessarily. We are waiting results of a second fingerstick test which the girl got on Friday. Then we will have another number to look at. If it is higher than her first screening, there will be much moaning and gnashing of teeth. If it’s lower, [...]

I’d like to take a moment to salute all the teachers of the world who work so hard for our children. You rock!
Today is the first day of classes at Xy’s new school.

I took her traditional “first day” photo as she left the house. Not easy holding a toddler in one arm.
As I noted last [...]

We got the results of our lead test from last Friday. Check out the complete report (PDF) for all the gory details, but I am going to try to summarize them in plain English.
They didn’t find any lead hazards inside the house, but they did find some on the perimeter, in two spots.
1) The threshold [...]