Island Poetry

My children made up a poem at the dinner table this evening:

Spam is nice
It's good with rice
So have a slice!
You'll want it twice.

At first I could not see the point of Spam. I knew that people around here liked it, but why should I pay three dollars for twelve ounces of chopped and processed who knows what? For seven months I lived in Hawaii without tasting Spam. I didn't buy it. I didn't cook it.

And then a friend of ours bought us a can of it. Since it was free, I didn't say no. I sliced it and fried it up and served it with rice for dinner.

The kids ate the Spam. And then they were too full to eat anything else.

So now I see what Spam's about. A little goes a long, long ways. That twelve ounce can for three dollars is all the meat I need for seven people.

And it will keep on the shelf too.

I think I'm going to have to buy more Spam.

What to Do with a Degree in Physics

I used to want to be a nuclear physicist. But that's a field that's hard to get into if you ever take leave from the academic world, and I jumped ship to raise my family about fifteen years ago.

Here's what I do instead:

I made this video at the request of my alma mater's society of physics students. They contacted all alumni with a request for a 30 second film that shows what we are doing with our degree now.

I've always wanted to be in a documentary film.

Exasperation

If you have a teenage daughter, you know what this word can sound like:

"MOTHER!"

I hadn't told her she couldn't stay out past eleven with her friends. I hadn't told her to do the dishes two nights in a row. I hadn't even borrowed her favorite earrings without asking.

"What? What did I do wrong?" I asked.

"Bwah! Nothing!" she flapped her hands in frustration at the last page of my unfinished manuscript. "It's just you ended on a cliff-hanger AGAIN! And there are no more pages left for me to read! YOU NEED TO FINISH THIS BOOK!"

That's the kind of teenage-girl exasperation I truly appreciate.

Complete Sentences

The kindergarten teacher said I should have my son practice speaking to me in complete sentences. So I asked him to tell me what he wanted on his toast, in a complete sentence.

"Mom, I would like some strawberry jam period."

Christmas Eve in the Islands

On Christmas Eve we hit the beach. I worked hard to finish all the wrapping and preparation the day before so that we could spend Christmas Eve relaxing in the sand and surf. Sand castles and snowmen, snorkeling and swimming, I hope it becomes a new family tradition.

One nice thing about walking to the beach, a lot of our new neighbors were there too. It was fun to wish friends a Merry Christmas as they headed out for spear fishing or came back from walking their dog or boogie-boarding. When some of our friends saw our sandcastle they told us they'd seen people making sand snowmen further up the beach.

What a great idea!

The last thing we did before we left was to pile up a huge mound of sand, then shape him into our Hawaiian snowman. Sticks and kukui nuts littered the beach after last week's storms, so there was plenty of material for buttons, eyes, and arms. We found a pair of goggles that had washed up and put them on top of his head.

Along with us, he wishes you a Mele Kalikimaka and a happy new year.

Now It Can Be Christmas

Last Thursday night, one of my new friends and I decided to host a caroling party together. We'd meet at her house, go around the block, and end up at my place for cookies and cocoa.

So I began inviting people. Whoever likes to sing, I said. The more the merrier. I invited friends I passed on the street. I invited the entire church choir. I invited my next-door neighbor. I came from Nevada, you see, where people are too busy for caroling. Where I had to invite twelve people to get four.

This huge mob showed up at my friend's house. My meager stack of twenty carol books were not enough to go around. But as we finished singing through our first carol my friend turned around from the piano, beaming at us, and said, "Now it can be Christmas! That sound in my house made it Christmas."

We took the show on the road. Light rain sprinkled down on us as we strolled. In my opinion, Christmas music sounds best when sung on front porches in the dark. I loved the bright smiles on the faces of our neighbors as I stood with a crowd of singers at my back, leading "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "Oh, Holy Night," "Deck the Halls," and a host of other favorites.

By the time we trooped back to my place I hardly had any voice left. There must have been thirty children sitting on the floor, waiting for the cocoa to heat up. My house was full of people, my table full of cookies, the air full of the sounds of talking and of children taking turns playing their Christmas music on the piano. I kept busy serving drinks and mopping spills, too delighted by it all for anything to go wrong.

As the last guests walked away I smiled to see wayward slippers and a forgotten umbrella gracing my front porch. That meant we'd had people over. I looked forward to seeing them again when they came back to get their missing things.

I've had my caroling party. Now it can be Christmas.

Rebecca Reviews: Tron Legacy

There was something about the original Tron. It had an amazing alternate world I wanted to visit. It had characters I loved: Tron the noble gladiator, Flynn the laid-back wise-cracking computer genius, and Ram the friendly, faithful actuarial program. Sure, the story was crazy and a little confusing, but there was a sense of fun that carried it through. My family watches it over and over and never seems to get tired of it (though now that we have the DVD my boys usually skip that boring stuff at the beginning and go straight to the light cycles).

As for Tron Legacy, I think watching it once was enough.

The digital dystopia of this new Tron has a gritty, black-and-white feel to it. I missed the eye-popping color of the old grid. And no, I don't want to visit. There were some new ideas in the film, but merely taking light cycles and disk battles to three dimensions doesn't count for originality points on my score sheet. I was disappointed that I didn't connect to the characters as much as I had hoped: Sam, the orphaned loser, Flynn the spaced-out guru who has been chilling in his own digital world for too many centuries while hiding out from his evil twin Clu, and Quorra the artificially intelligent warrior princess. They didn't move me. As for Clu, he had neither the dramatic flair of Sark or the all-powerful presence of the MCP. And I just couldn't see my old pal Flynn turning into a megalomaniac perfectionist, dude. Where did that come from?

What I missed most was the sense of fun. It came through now and then with a clever line of dialog, but mostly the film took itself too seriously. And the ending let me down. At the end of the old Tron movie we free the system and Flynn gets to prove he wrote "Space Paranoids." In the new Tron movie, well, I won't spoil it for you, but don't expect fireworks and a big parade.

Still, I don't feel like I wasted my seven dollars and fifty cents. It was interesting to see where they took the story. And planes with jet walls? That's cool.

So go watch it once, if only to see what they do with Sleeping Beauty's castle in the opening titles.