isoglossia

The typical “we’re back” post, Mk. II
Just four months have passed since I wrote the end-of-vacation post that marked our return from the states. At that time we thought it would be a good long spell before we were back in America, but as it turned out that vacation trip was just the beginning. Since August, we have become FAR more familiar with Logan Airport than one could reasonably wish. That awful place has been the only constant in our travels back and forth, which have also involved Ljubljana’s Brnik, Ronchi in Trieste, Venice Marco Polo, Munich (which is named after Hayden or Schubert or some such, and which when Googled turns up some stomach churning results), Paris-Charles de Gaulle (um, ugh), and JFK (let sweet release come swiftly).

In there somewhere, Magda also managed to make the time for a family visit, adding Warsaw’s Okęcie (now renamed Fryderyk Chopin) to the list. As this year comes to a close, let’s just say we’re tired of airports no matter which composer, statesman, or noodle-importing traveller they’re named after, and our wish for 2006 is to avoid them entirely. That’s all we’ll say about our latest trip, other than to add for anyone who came here accidentally by Googling “travel with baby”, avoid Delta at all costs. One baby bassinet for the entire coach class AND no free drinks on international flights is not a good combination, and we are praying for Delta to collapse under the weight of its own suckiness, a standard for shitty service which only began with those factors listed above. Die, Delta, DIE!

Jagers In De Sneeuw, minus jagers
We spent a lot of time on our visit explaining how it never snows in the precise location where we live, and then returned to find the landscape postively Brueghelesque. The elder. This will be my fifth winter here, and in that time I’ve almost never seen snow fall in town, and never seen it stay for more than a few hours. I am all in favor of snow for skiing on, but the scraping, shovelling, slipping on, not so much. Still, a few inches lasting a few days is a nice rare sight:

But as I type this list heavy rain is falling on the no-longer-pretty snow, and the morons are blowing off their own and their children’s fingers with annoying ordnance, in the traditional observation of the new year’s arrival.

The year in review, as expected
Before our unplanned departure for the U.S. I had begun putting together some notes for the stomach-churningly predictable “year in review” list that every nitwit feels compelled to put together as the calendar turns. (Note: if you have not felt this urge, this does not guarantee that you are not a nitwit). Beyond watching our son grow, 2005 was a dramatically uneventful year for us in an essentially good way, so there wouldn’t be much to list. For example, I can’t think of any new music, films, or books that particularly impressed me this year, but then again, you tend not to get your socks blown off by media when you are spending an entire year covered with vomit (not your own). For those not entirely absorbed with their own progeny, 2005 seems to have been a poster child Bad Year. Particularly for politicians and the youth they send to die, not to mention for the collaterally damaged. Then with the abrupt and shockingly personal bad way the year ended for my family, the mood to make much of this list has evaporated, but I’ll forge ahead anyway, if for no other reason than to insert a tiny measure of content into a web page that has been slim on it during these last few difficult months.

Media-wise, by far the most interesting, pervasive, and time-wasting -consuming material has come to us down the high-speed teat at which we suckle addictively. The other main source of entertainment has been in personal communication. Sometimes there’s a combination of the two:

• Unreasonable request of the year:
  “Honey, can you play with Adam so I can cook your supper?”
• Analogy of the year:
  “I love Flickr like a crack whore loves, well, crack.”
• Unnecessary offer of the year:
  “Honey, ‘enlarge your penis by up to 10 centimeters.’ It’s a spam!”
• False economy of the year:
  “Well, if bloody L.L. Bean are shipping the snowsuit in ‘azalea’, we’ll just have to have a girl.”
• Neologism of the year:
  No clear winner.
• Relationship counseling site of the year:
  Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (also a novel).
• Collocation of the year:
  “…the spawn of Manhattan’s most prolific and rigorous douche hatcheries…” (via Elsa).
• Short Slovenian Apicultural poem of the year, English Language Category:
  I can give you a bee
  for free
• Revisionism of the year, Children’s Literature Category:
  Richard Scarry for grown-ups (via Mimi Smartypants).
• High-technology abuse of the year:
  Using FoxyVoice to read Bad News Hughes’s holiday mayhem entries to us in robotic monotone, find Sarah Connor.
• Low-technology abuse of the year:
  Using clothespins to make Adam into a porcupine.



• Questionable parenting practice of the year:
  See above.

Go, already, 2005. Let 2006 commence!

So, Adam,

Lately you may have noticed us saying quite a bit, “I can remember when you were this big,” where ‘this’ is indicated by thumb and forefinger held one angstrom unit apart. One year ago today you were a bit bigger than that, but only a little bit.

Because this forum was called into being a few months into your life, weeks after the last of the slime had subsided, I’ve put up this picture, taken one year ago this evening in the Šempeter-pri-Gorici hospital’s maternity ward. And here are you and me a few days later:

Say “happy birthday” to your mother, Adam. In your first instance of great timing, you managed to arrive just in time to be her second birthday present (the first being a Harpic Ready-Brush), at the same time rendering your Polish grandmother giddy with glee at being correct in predicting your birthday. In fact, she had phoned us up just moments before your mother’s water broke to tell us it was about to do so, and so your arrival a few hours later seemed like rigid obedience, always a welcome quality in a new Polish grandson. Your mother was annoyed that you were so compliant in making her mother right yet again, but by now I think she’s forgiven you.

Here’s you on your first Christmas, getting the best present of all: a nice, clean, fresh, dry diaper. Maybe this year, with all of your North American family, you’ll do a little better. Or do without! Yesterday, on your very first try, you peed in your little potty. The raw talent…

Speaking of family and grandparents, Adam, I am so glad that you agreed to travel with us to Maine in August, and to meet your American grandfather there. Again with the impeccable timing. He held on long enough to meet your newest cousin a few weeks ago, but could not quite make it to your first birthday. I’m happy that you met him, but sorry that you will never have the chance to know him. I will have to tell you all about him once this lump is gone from my throat and the strange salty ocular discharge subsides. And if you will someday shut up for one damn minute.

On the topic of shutting up, and ‘damn’, your first birthday puts you on the very verge of those two developmental milestones of walking and talking. You can almost do each, and even both simultaneously. The speech part has us watching our own language, and we are taking extreme measures to sanitize it so that you don’t suddenly turn into a tiny little pottymouth. It’s something of a Catch-22, however, because we mostly only want to curse because of you and the things you do. Okay, and occasionally when we take the stainless steel gimlet-corner of the stove-hood in the temple when reaching for the olive oil. Not entirely your fault, that one. So for each time when our inner longing begs to shout out the F-bomb or denigrate your lineage, we have decided to substitute ‘Malkovich‘ for the expletive, for reasons that should be obvious. So a ‘normal’ conversation between your long-suffering mother and me might run something like this:

Mother: Will you take this blud—Malkovichy baby from my knees while I make his fuu—Malkoviching supper?
Father: Come here, you little bas—Malkovich [baby opens rubbish bin, rummages, eats].
Mother: MALKOVICH!
Father: What’s he having for supper, other than trash?
Mother: The little Malkovich won’t eat anything anymore, so he’s getting Malkoviching hrenovke again.
Father: [Slams head into stainless steel stove-hood corner] MALKOVICH MALKOVICH!

We don’t think this should cause any problems in your language acquisition.

You’ve developed some new interests and hobbies lately. Most of them involve opening and closing things, inserting your head, removing, tasting, and either replacing or destroying the contents, and repeating. It all began with the clothes washer, as mentioned last month, and now encompasses all the drawers, doors, and wee dark spots in the house. We have taken most of the sharp-edged, highly toxic, or fragile items out of these drawers and cabinets and replaced them with decoys. Notice I say ‘most’ and ‘highly’, just to keep you guessing! We have also invested, no exaggeration, 11,000 SIT in baby-defeating countermeasures, such as cabinet and fridge latches, high-tech doorstops and pinch-mitigating devices, but someone has not had time to install nearly all of them because someone else is just a little too much of a spazzer 100% of the time. We look forward to watching you grow into new and richer hobbies, though the time-honored one depicted here, in your first few days of life, is unlikely to fall out of vogue:

Happy Birthday, Adam, and Happy Birthday, Magda. It seems incredible, quite literally, that it’s been a year already. So much has changed in that time. In a few days it will be time to travel again, back to New England to remember and honor your grandfather. I know that this will be a stretch for you, since you can’t remember the existence of gravity, and you honor little beyond the Teletubbies and grissini, but it’s important for me that you be there. One day you’ll know why.

Due to a family considerations, posts to this site are temporarily suspended.

We’ve been using Skype lately. We installed it and played around with it several months ago, but it never really went anywhere. Now they’ve made some improvements and we’re very impressed. If you have a broadband connection you can use VOIP (voice-over-internet protocol) to replicate phone service anywhere. But free. In the past this worked only if your friend was also running Skype on a broadband computer, but now they’ve expanded it so that for a very small amount of money you can dial in to any telephone, including mobiles, and for another modest fee you can get a number your friends can dial that rings your computer (or phone) or takes voice mail. Dial-into numbers are available in 11 countries, and your caller pays only their regular rate to that number. So, for example, we got a New Hampshire number that rings in Slovenia.

It was through this modern magic that over the weekend I was able to hear an old friend give the following restaurant review:

“But this pizza was a commitment…it wasn’t good from a social standpoint…but I’d like to revisit that pizza, knowing what I was getting into…”

Based on this I can recommend Skype, not to mention whatever Boston pizza joint he was rambling on about.

Will Chrissie be found guilty of Den’s murder? Will Sam be extradited to serve her time for accessory to that murder? What about Billy and the Honey-Trap bint: will they get it on? And where is the lazy illiterate guy’s kid getting all the cash from? For the answers to these and other questions, you’ll have to go somewhere else, because I have completely given up on “Eastenderji”.

I’m not sure exactly when or how I first got sucked into this BBC soap about glottal-stop-talking losers and gangsters, but now I’ve been sucked out of it. It airs during Adam’s bath time, and I’ve been recording it to watch after he goes to bed, but recently the interesting threads have petered out and, really, I’ve got better things to do with that half-hour every day.

Take, for example, this:

Language, auspicious, charming, like a creeper,
whose minds does it not win over?

(sūkta — traditional Sanskrit maxim)

I’ve been reading this book on historical sociolinguistics for over a month now, and I’m still only up to Sanskrit? This is because, although I made quite a bit of headway (on, for example, the Assyrian question), while Magda and Adam were away, now the routine is back to normal and what with the millstone that was Eastenders around my neck, I was managing on average two-and-a-half pages nightly before settling like a mud hut in monsoon season into a puddle of my own drool.

Not that it’s boring or anything. I mean, Sanskrit! It wins my mind over in, like, six minutes, after which I am snoring “like an old whale”. I mean, according to reports. Which I have quoted directly.

I last mentioned “Eastenders” here. I last wrote about Sanskrit never.